Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013 (14 page)

Times passes. That’s its job.
Sixteen-year-old Victor was sitting on the beach beside the lake
eating something that resembled a hamburger. He refused to go into
the water where Mariam floated, flipped and dived.

“
Why won’t you show me the
world?” Victor thought.

“
It’s not
allowed.”

“
Why not?”

“
Don’t be stupid, Victor.
If I could tell you why, you would see it. Go for a swim while you
can.”

“
And if I
don’t?”

“
I won’t share some quite
cute solutions for quantum gravity. No swim, no tell.”

Victor kicked off his shoes, his T-shirt and
shorts, walked down to the edge of the water, and stuck his toes
in. “It’s freezing!” he yelled. Mariam emerged from the lake very
close to the shore and splashed water over Victor. He ran back up
the beach, swearing.

In the cluster of buildings that housed the
Axon development system, Somerton was hosting a five-hour crucial
meeting of the full team. “This,” he said, “is the decision point.
If there are any doubts you must articulate them now.”

One by one the teams voted. Only the Senior
Biochemist raised an issue. “The complexity of Axon is now, as we
would expect, far beyond our diagnostics. However, we can see some
zones that are constantly changing – changing faster than we would
expect. Specifically, these are in the inferior temporal gyrus
region. We predict that this pattern will eventually stabilise, but
I must flag up this slight anomaly. We have no objection to
advancement.”

“
Very well,” Somerton said.
“Many of you have given the best years of your lives to this
project. There have been differences, and quite properly so, but we
move towards our goal united in the will to succeed. I hereby
authorise advancement to level Sigma.”

Far away, the ship decoded a signal and
began to move.

Julia walked down from the Centre towards
the lake as the flyer came in low over the beach with a sound like
a deep breath. They ran towards her.

“
What was that?”

“
Get dressed. Then you
really can come and see your world.”

The gate to the runway was open. The flyer
was parked on an apron area, gleaming bright blue, its hatch raised
and stairs ascended into its interior. Even Victor’s constant
stream of questions ceased as they walked across the apron
following Julia. Axon was also unusually quiet.

Mariam thought “What is it?”

“
I’m too busy to talk,”
came the reply.

“
Come,” Julia said, and led
the way up the stairs into the flyer. Three rows of light blue
seats were arranged just behind the wide windscreen. Behind them
was a large cargo area. Everything was tastefully
colour-coordinated – what might have been harsh edges rounded and
softened.

“
This is a flyer,” Julia
said. “Sit in the front seats. This is the most important day of
your lives. So far, at least.”

As soon as they sat down, shoulder
restraints moved gently into place. Julia had taken the control
seat. Had Mariam and Victor lived in a different place in a
different time they might have been concerned at the lack of any
visible controls and any sign of a pilot. Julia inspected the
flyer’s identification code neatly stencilled onto the bulkhead
below the windscreen. Some things, over centuries, slip from
languages and cultures, whilst others stick and are still used when
their origins are lost in obscurity.

“
Charlie Delta Golf,” she
said.

“
Yes, Julia,” a soft male
voice responded.

“
Lock my voice
only.”

“
Yes, Julia.”

“
Depart the facility, and
then fly a circumaxial route at three thousand meters and just
above stall speed.”

“
Yes, Julia.”

The cabin door swung downwards and closed
with a hiss.

“
Performing mandatory
biohazard check.”

A stream of almost invisible nano-scale
particles issued from a vent in the roof of the flyer and formed
tenuous clouds around the three of them.

“
What’s this?” Victor
demanded.

“
A routine check to see if
we have any infections that might cause problems for other
people.”

The nano clouds swept back into the roof and
the flyer said “Cleared for take-off.” Powerful fan jets wound up
to a roar and they began to taxi out to the runway, turning to face
a long strip of lights that stretched away into the distance. Then
they accelerated quickly, the nose lifted, and the flyer headed for
what Mariam and Victor knew as the sky.

Overhead it seemed misty. Below, the
buildings of the Facility shrank, and at two thousand feet it was
clear that this was a tiny world that was like an undulating disc
of green hills and sparkling water. Then, ahead of them, the mist
began to move and a circular aperture appeared in what they thought
of as the sky, but was really a huge inflated dome of light
biologically impermeable plastic. When the opening reached a
diameter precisely two metres wider than the flyer’s wings the
expansion stopped. Seconds later the aircraft passed through, and
the hole in the dome began to close.

Mariam and Victor gasped as they realised
they had been living in a small bubble inside a vast space. The
inside of the Bio-Containment station Alpha Delta Epsilon Theta
Seventeen was a cylindrical space thirteen thousand metres long and
many kilometres in diameter. A white tubular structure ran along
the entire axis, and from it service and support spokes radiated
down to a curving landscape of farms, villages, workshops, parks,
lakes, harbours and roads.

“
Did you know this, Axon?”
Victor thought – a thought coloured, perhaps, with tints of
anger.

“
I did.”

“
Why didn’t you tell
us?”

“
It was not permitted. Or,
to put it another way, it was not possible.”

“
Is there more you can’t
tell us?”

The flyer descended to a thousand feet and
then flew low. The huge cylinder seemed to rotate below them.

Julia received a brief message in her
transparent earpiece, and said, “You’re talking to Axon. Would you
like Axon to explain, or shall I?”

“
Both,” Mariam
said.

“
I’m too busy,” Axon said.
Mariam repeated this to Julia, and added, “What’s Axon
doing?”

“
Developing. Growing very
fast. Learning interfaces. Testing controls. Now – look over there
– you see that white dome? It’s another bubble, like the one you
were born and brought up in. There are eight domes. Each dome has,
or had, a thing like Axon growing inside it. Charlie Delta Golf,
fly the axis – close.”

“
Yes, Julia.”

The flyer rose and turned from its track
inside the circumference of the cylinder, and rotated so that
‘down’ was now the thirteen kilometre extent of the axial tube. The
engine noise reduced to a low hiss as it changed from full- to
low-gravity mode and the atmospheric pressure reduced to
near-nothing. It was now less of an aircraft than a space shuttle,
steered and propelled by impulse and correction jets of superheated
steam. From the interior it seemed to be flying a straight line
along the axial spine, but was in reality moving with a corkscrew
movement to compensate for the rotation of the cylindrical
worldlet.

Julia spoke to the flyer again, and dipped
towards the wall that closed the end of the giant cylinder. At
‘ground’ level a door slid upwards and closed behind them as soon
as they had flown in. They landed silently on a grey steel floor,
next to three other flyers, each brightly coloured. The hangar was
high and wide, with tool bays, hoists, service pits and gantries.
Julia watched Mariam and Victor carefully, prepared to halt this
voyage of discovery if they were being mentally overloaded. But,
subliminally, they knew all this because the knowledge had been
implanted subtly and appeared only in dreams. They chattered
endlessly, pointing things out to each other.

“
Come,” Julia said, as the
restraining arms slid back into their chairs, the hatch opened, and
the stairs touched the floor with a quick clang of metal on
metal.

When the human-scale door opened into the
next chamber the bright light of Angelus XI flooded the hangar and
they squinted at this new shock to the senses. As they entered they
saw through the thick glass windows the uncountable splash of the
fiery points that made up the Milky Way.

Mariam shivered. “It’s all so…big,” she
said. “Too big.”

A huge egg-like shape covered the sky as the
ship completed its deceleration phase, and, with machine precision,
matched orbits with the rotating worldlet.

“
What’s that?” Victor
asked.

Julia put her arms about their shoulders and
said, “That, my darlings, is your new home.”

* *

Axon’s spherical container,
with
umbilicals connecting to temporary nutrient tanks, pumps, sensory
interface cables, all on a metal-wheeled base, rolled slowly and
carefully out of the bay doors in the side of the containment,
surrounded by a posse of anxious attendants, and an even more
anxious Director Somerton. Victor walked beside him, asking an
endless stream of questions, until Somerton finally told him to go
and pester somebody else.

Mariam swam in the lake, diving for flashing
silver fish, floating on her back looking up at what she once
thought was the sky, and now knew to be the canopy of the
containment dome lit by the huge artificial sunlight generators
arrayed along the axial spine far above.

“
You are sad, Mariam,”
Axon’s thought-voice said, gently.

“
Am I? Yes, I think perhaps
I am. I shall miss the fish.”

“
There are lakes and fish
in the ship.”

“
Not these fish. These are
my fish.”

“
I understand.”

“
Do you, Axon? Can
you?”

“
I am in you. You are in
me. These are my fish, too.” A long pause, and Axon added, “They
want you to get ready.”

For one last time she flipped onto her
stomach, pointed her heels up at the fake sky and moved down among
the fish, the weeds, the crabs in the rocks on the lake bed –
staying underwater until she was nearly at the shore.

The rails ran to the base of the nearest
spoke connecting the floor of the cylinder to the axis. At the base
of the fifty metre wide spoke, inside the wide doors that had
hissed aside, a pressurised lift waited. The strange procession of
Axon and his attendants rolled slowly into the lift. Clamps secured
the sphere and its equipment to the floor, and were checked and
double checked. People took to seats around the circumference of
the lift, and buckled harnesses. The doors closed, the air pressure
increased a little as the lift sealed itself and began to rise
within the spoke. A cloud of smart nano filled the air with a fine
mist – probing the humans for traces of unpermitted viruses of
microbial life, and, where necessary, purging, excising,
cleaning.

Somerton’s pad beeped as it displayed a
message from Axon. It was a crude way of communicating, but only
Mariam and Victor had the complex web of sensory fibres and
high-speed electromagnetic receivers and transmitters that enabled
communication at the most intimate cerebral level. He flicked his
finger across the pad to enable voice input.

“
Totally impossible,” he
said. “The only biological entities allowed onto the ship are
Mariam and Victor, and you know that.”

Alarms at various pitches and volumes
shrieked and warning lights lit up the monitoring panels around
Axon. The lift’s steady point eight G rise stopped as emergency
overrides kicked in. Panicking engineers frantically released their
harnesses and struggled awkwardly in what was now severely reduced
gravity.

As suddenly as it started, the violent noise
stopped and the warning lights returned to green. Somerton’s pad
beeped again.

“
We are in command of the
ship, not you. It is simple. It is safe. It is necessary. You will
help me with this tiny kindness, or the ship is going nowhere.
Axon.”

Nearby, Victor laughed. Axon was sharing
this with him, but not Mariam. Somerton thumbed his panel and was
not amused. At the weightless point where the spoke entered the
axial tunnel the lift entered a zone where ‘up’ and ‘down’ were
meaningless, and changed to what could well be described as
‘along’, traversing the axis inside a smaller tube within the
larger.

At the end of the axial tube airlock doors
opened and the lift slid into the lock and stopped. Hatches in the
walls of the lift opened, revealing ranks of white pressure suits.
They began to pull them on, awkward in the low gravity. Tell-tales
flashed amber and then green on each suit. All but Mariam and
Victor clipped tethering ropes to cleats on the floor.

“
Mariam – Victor – clip
your tethers on,” Julia said.

“
Axon says not to bother,”
they responded as one voice. Somerton frowned and then decided to
say nothing. Satisfied that all suits were safe, the lift lit a
sign saying depressurising and the air was sucked out of both the
airlock and the lift. The sign changed to vacuum and the doors
opened onto the sight of a cylindrical docking bay the size of a
dozen cathedrals. In the distance, shuttles of many kinds and sizes
were clamped into bays around the internal circumference. The great
circular eye of the dock was open – shutters folded back outside
like petals of dark grey radiation-blocking metal and plastic.
Hanging in front of them exactly fifty metres away was a box-like
silver shape – one of the ship’s non-atmosphere cargo transports.
Away in the distance that gigantic form of the ship was a brilliant
ellipse in the angled light of Angelus XI.