Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire (56 page)

“What I’d like to show you is not a big system at all,” Kiet assured her. “Seven Tigs, no more.”

“Why does it need to be VR?”

Kiet smiled. “It just does. I’d take you there in person, but it’s a long way out, and we’ve no time. VR is easier. You need to see it to believe.”

He rummaged in a kit bag, and found a booster unit and a cord. Sandy accepted it, and inserted the cord. A small unit like this was no conceivable threat; it lacked processing power, even if GIs of this lower designation did have some VR system that could overwhelm her, which she doubted. Kiet inserted also.

It clicked, and the construct appeared before her. Sandy accessed. It didn’t look all that large, as Kiet had said. Newfound VR compatibilities kicked in, and . . .

. . . she stood in a vast chamber. It was natural, smooth hewn yellow rock. Local Pantala sandstone, she supposed. There had been oceans on Pantala once, long ago. Now, only the sandstone and limestone remained. The curving walls made a perfect sphere, as though carved by some laser geometry. Except that the chamber’s perfect sides were broken by natural fissures, like any cave system, breaking the curves with crevasses, and rough slices.

In the middle, enormous, was a statue. It was a hand, carved of rock, at least ten meters tall. Its fingertip nearly touched the cavern’s ceiling, frozen in some evocative pose, like the hand gestures of classical Indian dance. Sandy wondered what this hand might signify. And why it looked like no human hand at all.

“Looks odd, doesn’t it?” said Kiet. Sandy looked at him. As she did so, the construct blurred, then resolved with a new layer of additions—sleeping bags, equipment crates, tents, cooking supplies. A camp, settled upon the sandy floor. Fissures leading from the chamber made huge corridors, sand ploughed by many recent footsteps. Sunlight fell through several fissures that exposed the chamber to the ceiling, making stripes of bright and dark.

“This is your camp?” Sandy asked.

“Yes,” said Kiet. “These caves go a long way.”

“How far from Droze?”

“Can’t say, sorry. We agreed not to tell anyone not in the group. As military we had access to some survey maps left behind by Fleet before they left. Stuff Fleet never shared with the corporations.”

Sandy frowned. “The corporations have mining operations all over Pantala. Surely they’ve surveyed the whole thing?”

“Actually no,” said Kiet, walking slowly around the giant stone hand, gazing upward. “The corporations found their major mineral deposits and that was enough for them. They’ve everything they need right there, more than they could mine in hundreds of years. Fleet controlled all space lanes, did a lot of the corporations’ surveying work for them. And this landscape, it’s just so metallic, there are zones here in some weather where your basic compass won’t work, the coms are all static, and radar surveys just return a big mass of blobs. Lots of magnetic interference.”

“So Fleet kept these caves a secret,” said Sandy. Beams of sunlight through the overhead crevasses crept slowly along one wall, making brilliant yellow where they struck. “Why?”

“Oh, there are other caves like this,” Kiet admitted. “The corporations found a few of those. Fleet just kept the best charts, and from those charts we were able to find a few telltales that led us here. One of the caves the corporations will have a real hard time finding.”

Sandy nodded, looking up at the hand. Elongated, and so slim it looked like it might have an extra knuckle in there somewhere. She wondered what the sculptor was trying to say.

“So who carved this?” she asked.

“No idea. Long dead. Look at this.” Kiet pointed upward. Sunlight reached a carved fingertip. The fingertip was inset with reflectors of some kind, maybe fibreoptics, inlaid through the stone. Beams of light refracted in all directions, spearing the chamber with golden rays.

“Wow,” said Sandy. The effect was extraordinary. “I’ve never seen that before.” Long dead, Kiet said. But Pantala had only been settled for 120 years. Long dead? “How long dead?”

“We dated the molecular residue left by the tools used to carve it,” said Kiet. “It makes some telltale residues from friction with the rock that degrade at a steady rate. It’s nearly as reliable as carbon dating. Our results say nearly two thousand years.”

Sandy stared. No. It could only mean one thing, but there were some truths a brain just struggled to immediately accept, no matter how obvious.

“That’s just after the fall of the Roman Empire,” she whispered. “Humans were fourteen hundred years from powered flight, let alone FTL space travel.”

“Yeah,” Kiet agreed, with a lower-des GI’s laconic acceptance of amazing things.

“And that’s not some kind of avant-garde version of a human hand, is it?”

“Not unless they were visiting us and taking samples,” said Kiet. “But look, it’s so precise. Artistic realism, I think.”

Sandy put her hands in her hair and gazed up at the blazing fingertip. She wanted to laugh, but the impulse was lost. It had been common speculation for ages—synthetic biology of the kind that created herself was
so
advanced. Yes, it had sprung out of a field of League technology that had been evolving before the League had even officially declared itself a separate entity, but there’d been a number of huge leaps in understanding that a lot of very smart people, Federation and League, who were not directly involved in the field, had struggled to understand.

Of course, speculating that the technology had actually received a kickstart from elsewhere was sacrilege with the League, who preached faith in human comprehension and rationality, and scorned such talk as superstitious anti-progress. When the first micro-circuits had been developed in the 20th century, they’d said, some unsophisticated fools who didn’t understand basic science or engineering had presumed that it must be aliens, that human beings couldn’t possibly have thought up these things by themselves. And to transpose that argument onto the 26th century, and to propose that human science alone was insufficient to allow for the mapping of human brain function onto synthetic systems to allow for the replication of human sentience on pseudo-biological materials that were not organic, but behaved just like they were, only different . . .

Well. The riddle answered itself, when you looked at it like that. Confronted with this.

“Research labs,” she breathed. “This is why you found research labs on Pantala, isn’t it?”

Kiet nodded. “Chancelry were the primary sponsor of the first New Torah expeditions anyway,” he reminded her. “On the condition of first crack at commercial rights.”

Sandy gasped, recalling that information. Chancelry Corporation hadn’t just exploited Pantala’s resources, they’d settled them. They’d mounted the first expeditions, and made the first footprints on these sands. The first human footprints. “Talee,” she said. “They came here and found Talee settlements.”

And this before her, self-evidently, was a Talee hand. Reaching toward the sunlight, and dispensing warm glow to all surrounding.

“Presumably they found stuff more high tech than just a statue?” she asked, circling to view from another angle.

Kiet shrugged. “No one knows. I don’t know that even most of Chancelry knows, just the top few executives. But what we do know is Chancelry came here first, made a few small outposts, and stayed for a while. 120 years ago.”

“But there was no viable reason to stay here,” Sandy breathed, recalling FSA intel files on New Torahn history. “It’s hard to live here, so settlements aren’t self-sustaining without some core economic resource, and the only resources are for heavy mining, for which you need to export because there’s no domestic population base. And exports are so damn expensive from here because of the distances, it’s only the war that made arms exports viable. So why else would they stay? And why would Chancelry start getting rich around that time?”

It all fit. Exploratory ventures like Chancelry Corporation had hoped to find systems worth settling. Pantala wasn’t. But on it, they’d found something far more valuable than real estate.

“But they never expanded into actual production,” Sandy wondered aloud. It felt incredibly odd, to be discussing the secrets of her own origin in this location, with another GI. Perhaps like some people felt travelling to holy places. A strange sense of belonging, and of things in the higher cosmic order clicking into place.

“No but they get intellectual property,” Kiet reminded her. “That’s the real money. Chancelry wasn’t a very big corporation when they came out here, just an exploratory venture put together by some speculators back League-side. If they hadn’t found something in the Torah Systems, they might have gone bust.”

“So they licence their IP and get a royalty,” said Sandy. “Assuming they found some kind of lab. A high tech settlement. Hell, maybe they just found data records. That could have taken a while to put together. What little I do know of the Talee from the FSA is that they’re plenty more advanced than us. And that they’ve got a bunch of settlements on the far edge of League space which were apparently abandoned.”

“In Fleet we called them ‘no-see-ums,’” said Kiet. “After those no-see-um bugs. We’d get some radio traffic every now and then, spacers would report it, say it was the spookiest thing to be on the bridge, get traffic maybe a few hours old, but the Talee themselves had gone, or were lying silent somewhere once they saw us jump in. Not real sociable.”

“Yeah, I remember.” Her old friend Captain Teig had told her once of an encounter far closer than that, where the damn thing kept following her right across one system, just on the edge of range, like some shadow that vanished every time you turned to look. Longest three days of her life, Teig had said. Not the worst, and possibly the most exciting, but definitely the longest. “No reported hostilities, though.”

“Yeah. Unless you believe the stories.”

Sandy didn’t. They sounded too much like old fashioned human xenophobia to her. Talee just weren’t as enthusiastic about alien contact as many humans were. She knew from FSA reports that many in the League were quite disappointed that the Talee wouldn’t talk to them, the enlightened League, and were worried their alien neighbours would make a terrible mistake and talk to the Federation barbarians instead, and share things. That kind of human politics made Sandy think the Talee had been damn smart to avoid humans from the beginning, lest one side think they were hostile because they talked to the other. And that humans might be damn smart to avoid talking to the Talee, for similar reasons.

“So Chancelry find some Talee technology,” she repeated, determined to piece this together. “Maybe just a database. Salvage it, translate it and report it, because they have to under exploration law. League government sees this as national significance, classifies it to within an inch of its life, puts its own labs onto it, comes out with . . . what? Let’s say synthetic neuro-science. The neuron replication breakout, across the sigma barrier. That’s always been the suspicion—that was one technological leap too far for even League ingenuity.”

Kiet nodded, arms folded, watching her. As though wondering where she’d go with it.

“They use it to replicate human brains in synthetic form,” Sandy continued. “That makes GIs. Chancelry aren’t big enough to go into full production, and League government won’t allow a monopoly anyway, so that’s where the licencing system starts, with Thurtel Corp, Tirvukal Engineering and Zhijue Inc. Those were always the big players. And, damn,” she said, as another thought occurred to her, “that would explain why League government were always so involved from the beginning, when usually they’re so free market about everything, and how no single corporation ever got credit, it was always suspiciously well spread. They must have made it that way, to avoid monopolies and retain central control.”

“Above my pay grade,” Kiet remarked. “But go on.”

“Hobby of mine,” said Sandy. Sunlight moved across the carved Talee fingertip and the spectrum of beamed light changed, from yellows to reds and violets. GI origin history. Ari had called it GI theology theory, which Sandy hadn’t found helpful. “So Chancelry give up sole rights, but get a big royalty payment . . . only that doesn’t work, because ongoing royalties will get the financial watchdogs asking questions of what they’re for, so maybe a big lump sum, plus promises of big future government contracts. Which is why Chancelry is one of the League’s favorite corporations when the war begins, wins lots of big weapons contracts.”

“Starships,” Kiet agreed. “Trying to build new ones right here.”

“But this is just the local arm of Chancelry Corporation,” said Sandy, frowning. “Chancelry became a League-wide conglomerate, arms in every system. Torah Chancelry was the one that started the deal, but after expansion it was just another branch. And after the crash its own parent company cut it loose, like they all did. Damn, that must have been a decision.”

Because this was where Chancelry had started. The other corporations had followed once the war began, as Chancelry landed huge weapons contracts and starship facilities based on the incredible mineral wealth of the systems, and League government had insisted that Chancelry share, if only to keep up appearances. They’d set up their operations in parallel to Chancelry, cooperating with them mostly, competing occasionally, serving huge government orders for starships, flyers, tanks, robotics, microsystems, everything League needed to win the war.

But Chancelry was born here. This was where Chancelry’s core intellectual property resided, and damn sure they weren’t about to share that with the other corporations. It was well known they had small bases in various places around Pantala, places it hadn’t always made sense for them to be, if they were only interested in mining. Surely they’d surveyed the entire world, and all the Torah systems, whatever Kiet said, just to keep other corporations from discovering variations of what they’d discovered.

Unless they’d somehow known their source was the only source. And Kiet was right. Chancelry had been small when they’d first discovered it, with no capabilities to survey that much space. If the first thing they’d done was tell League government what they’d found, League would have sent Fleet to do the surveying, like Kiet said. And however big Chancelry got, and however many ships and other capabilities they acquired, no one pushed Fleet around, not even the League mega-corps. In that, League and Federation were alike. Fleet would have retained that responsibility, even if it meant threatening Chancelry at the point of a gun. National importance. National security. The government will take it from here, we’ll tell you what we think you need to know and no more. She knew Chancelry and League government had had their share of strains before, during and after the war, but this put it all in a whole new light.