Time Past (32 page)

How had An Serat kept a balance between the Tor elements and the rest of the
Farseer
’s opsys, that is, how did he stop the Tor elements taking over the rest? Did the aliveness I sensed in
Farseer
come from the Invidi structure or from whatever he had taken from the Tor? If it was the former, I might be able to incorporate information from
Farseer
into storage in Jocasta to investigate later. From building Jocasta, I knew as much about Tor engineering as any other human in the Confederacy, as much as any other Nine Worlds member, probably.

But it was too risky. We’d only had one emergency with Tor technology, in which energy bolts from the gray ship had almost led to a ring-wide atmospheric containment failure during the blockade. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t the Tor elements of the opsys that had malfunctioned, but I’d always been suspicious of how the energy bolts had sought out and damaged the one system that, if it failed, would have immediate catastrophic consequences.

I picked up the sensor gauge and tried to roll the kinks out of my shoulders. Get on with the job, Halley, don’t sit staring into space.

“I’m trying to find information about the propulsion system. If I know where the gate is, I can see how it connects with the drive. But at the moment this mapping of the system seems like it’s going to take hours. And we don’t have too many.”

But I couldn’t go ahead without mapping. “I’ll keep checking and as soon as I’ve got enough information, I’ll begin an interior examination.” I went back to patting the walls of the cabin. Like someone looking for a secret passage in a spooky house, in one of those old vids Grace used to watch. At the end of the secret passage the characters would find hidden treasure.

My hidden treasure was the jump drive in
Farseer.
My only break in twenty years spent working with and studying the jump drive. A chance to finally understand.

Understanding the jump drive will do so many things for humans and the rest of the Nine. It will open up the rest of the Confederacy worlds to us. Imagine being able to go anywhere on the jump network we liked. Before the Seouras blockade I’d been a Four Worlds supporter, in particular an Invidi supporter. Now, while I still believed they wouldn’t deliberately harm us, I also knew they put their own interests ahead of ours, as An Barik did when he let Jocasta be blockaded simply because he didn’t want to disturb
Calypso
’s arrival. Definitely, humans and the rest of the Nine need access to the jump drive.

It can’t bring Will back.

The thought popped into my mind and stuck with all the adhesiveness of Seouras slime.

I found I was sobbing into my knees, rocking against the console-covered wall. The physical pain of contact with
Farseer
was nothing compared to this.

How long am I going to be haunted by the thought of Will’s death? The memory keeps sneaking back, hitting me when I don’t expect it, dropping me without warning into the abyss of loss. If only... here we go again. If only I hadn’t entered that damn competition. But I knew we’d win—a century’s head start is fairly conclusive. If only I hadn’t taken Will along. Why didn’t Grace put her foot down and forbid it? Usually she was so protective.

Because she trusted you.

I felt sick.
Farseer
’s golden light seemed too warm, the walls of the cabin too close. Damn An Serat for sending us back there. Damn myself for deciding my present on Jocasta was more important than my present in the out-town.

How did he do it? I clutched at the thought because it wasn’t part of that guilt. How had An Serat sent
Calypso
to Jocasta? How did we get to Earth from Jocasta and back again? How could a jump point exist off the network?

The handcoms made minute whirring sounds as they processed
Farseer
’s information. Surely the answer was in there.

Leaving aside the question of why
Calypso
’s jump had a shorter correspondence than
Calypso II
or Murdoch’s ship, we could assume that An Serat was involved in possibly creating new jump points off the network. When I used
Calypso
’s jump drive in
Calypso II,
the flatspace engines reacted in exactly the same way as they did with a normal jump drive. So I felt safe in assuming that whatever Serat did, it wasn’t with
Calypso.

All of this supported the theory that the Invidi are able to create or open jump points at will, and not necessarily from Central—An Serat was on Earth at the time.

Opinion among the Nine is divided into two main camps on the nature of the jump drive. The first holds that the jump points are engineered wormhole mouths and that there is no such thing as a “drive”—what we call jump drive engines couldn’t possibly process the energy needed to manipulate the mouths. The “drive” is just a way for the Invidi to track all registered ships that approach a jump point. At a signal from the drive, the Invidi open the jump points from Central.

This doesn’t explain how the Invidi have less than perfect control of the Central network—the K’Cher and their subsidiaries use the jumps for shady business all the time. And where does the energy to open the points come from?

The second opinion says that the jump points are like bubbles in spacetime that are inflated to allow passage “through.” The jump drive is necessary to propel the ship in a certain way (nobody can explain exactly how) to pop through the bubble. This explanation seems to give the Invidi godlike powers and doesn’t really explain how they keep the network together.

I’d never bothered too much about which theory was more likely, because I thought that when I knew how it works, I’d know why. But the off-network jump points between Earth and Jocasta supported the latter theory. The “bubbles” are supposed to be there, waiting to be activated. Maybe the Invidi have always had this ability, but don’t use it by mutual consent. You’d run into a lot of causality problems without the fixed jump network.

I sat up straight, let my knees go, and wiped my eyes with the back of my sleeve. That fits. If Serat went against the consensus of the other Invidi by opening a jump point off the network, they’d be mad at him. If he’d also been experimenting with Tor technology... I ran my hand along the warm, almost organic surface of
Farseer
’s deck.

Maybe it was the same thing. Tor technology—new jump point—
Farseer.
Maybe An Serat had used it to open new jump points off the network.

No, wait. I held my head in frustration. An Serat didn’t use
Farseer,
we did. The off-network jump point was there in December 2022 because that’s when I arrived from Jocasta. How could it be there before Serat had a chance to open it? Unless he opened it from the other end... no, that’s the jump point where
Calypso
appeared.

My head throbbed. I’d go and talk to Murdoch, get an update on the Bendarl situation. See Lorna, ask her what my legal status is. And talk to Eleanor about getting rid of this headache. By then it might be possible to look inside
Farseer
and find some answers.

Twenty-four

M
urdoch listened calmly to my excited talk of bubbles and Tor technology. The banks of monitors behind his chair cast a bluish glow on the top of his head and turned the shoulders of his olive-green uniform turquoise.

“So what you’re saying is that we can’t rely on that link you’ve got with the ship to provide accurate information.” He poured a cup of tea from the bottle beside his desk and passed it over the mess to me.

“Yes, and getting enough information on the ship to begin investigating it is taking time.” I looked for a place to put the cup among the handcoms, data crystals, and stacks of plastocopy.

“Drink it,” he suggested. “It’s been five hours since breakfast.” I stared at him. Five hours? I’d spent so long with
Farseer.
“ConFleet?” “Holding position. Nothing’s come back through the jump.” The tea was hot and sweet and did a lot to relieve my headache. “How long will you need to get an idea of how it works?” he said. I nearly laughed. For nearly a century we’d been trying to get an idea of how the jump drive works. “I’ll take as much time as I can get. A lifetime mightn’t be enough.”

“Don’t think we can manage that long.” He had that worried line between his brows again. He rummaged below the desk and pushed a wrapped ration bar across the desk at me as well. “Eat that. You look like you need it.”

I unwrapped the bar and chewed its sweet crumbs. “What have you been doing?” He shifted in his chair. “Getting back up to speed on what’s been going on here while I was on leave.”

I didn’t think that was the whole story. He was looking at me as if trying to decide something. When I came into the office he’d jumped and placed the handcom he’d been reading obviously out of reach on the far side of the desk.

“And?”

He sighed and passed that particular handcom to me.

The screen scrolled slowly down what looked like a diary entry. The initial date said 12 March 2076, Mars City. The first human colony on Mars. The screen’s first paragraphs concerned impressions of an official function to celebrate the colony’s foundation in 2050. It was obviously a personal record of somebody involved with colony administration. Then it continued:

Father went home right after the ceremony, like he always does. He says it’s because he prefers to watch the balloons from our place with the girls, but I remember he told me he doesn’t like ceremonies. I said, thinking it was modesty, that someone who’d been involved with the colony since the beginning deserved to be honored. He replied, “It never mattered to her what I achieved.” Until then, I never realized how strongly my grandmother’s presence still haunted him. I knew Father was still young when she took her own life and the colony hadn’t yet begun. Father said she never got over my uncle’s death. I can’t forgive her for leaving him, and us. It makes me all the more determined to treat my daughters with equal love and affection.

Below the entry, the database code and brief description: William Russ Chenin, Assistant, Dome Technical Division.

The name was familiar. In the years before the Confederacy was founded, William Chenin helped design the improved habitat containment that replaced the first unwieldy Mars domes. The team’s work was required reading for engineering students.

“That’s Vince’s son,” said Murdoch. “Vince managed to work himself through apprenticeships, then tech school. He ended up on Mars.” He paused. “Grace killed herself twelve years after Will died.”

I stared at the hard brown carpet. A wave of guilt and grief choked me into silence. Nothing to say. How could there be anything to say? Will and Grace had both been dead for nearly a century.

I knew that. I knew Vince was dead, too. And Levin, curse him. But it was as much of a shock as if a policeman had come to the tent in the out-town and told me they’d died that morning.

If the Invidi were able to open jump points anywhere off the network, it meant that in a sense Will alive existed right there in front of me beside Will dead. Not before or after, but beside each other, equally accessible. All our moments, superimposed upon each other but separate. How did the Invidi bear this? No wonder they needed order.

“I’m going to see Jago.” I stood up after a long pause. “Have you considered,” Murdoch said, “that maybe this is one you can’t win?” He stood up too, hitched one hip onto the desk. Tucked his hands under his elbows as if he’d rather be doing something else with them.

I turned in the doorway. “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m always trying to win?”

He laughed, although without humor. “Aren’t you? Isn’t that part of this whole preoccupation with the jump drive? Sure, you want to know how it works. But there are other fascinating bits of hardware in the universe. You can’t stand them having it and not us.”

I opened my mouth, shut it again. I’ve never denied that.

“I don’t like it either,” he kept on. “But I know I can’t fight them in that particular arena. Last time you were lucky and you got us into another arena—that’s the neutrality. Let’s keep the fight there, eh? Then we might all have a chance of coming out of this ahead.”

“You’re saying let them take
Farseer,
forget about the jump drive and how An Serat used us to bring the Invidi to Earth and whatever other games he’s playing that we don’t understand? Go back as if it never happened?” My voice rose in disbelief.

“Yes.” He leaned forward, quite serious. “Because it’s not getting us anywhere. It’s becoming a liability. And if you don’t see that, that’s a bigger liability.”

I felt as if he’d switched off the gravity beneath me.

“Not only that, for Chrissakes. Don’t you see that it’s a bloody deal safer
not
to know anything about that ship? If we say, hell, sorry about pinching it but we don’t know how it works, then they might let us go back to our old lives. Or not, I dunno. But personally, I’d rather not have ConFleet decide we need help forgetting.”

“You think they’d wipe our memories?”

He shook his head doubtfully. “I hope not.”

I can’t let that stand in the way of finding out the truth, I wanted to say, but then, it wasn’t just me, was it? Murdoch was involved. He’d sacrificed his job and risked his life to come and get me in the past, whether it was all part of an Invidi plan or not. ConFleet Security might even conclude Sasaki knew, too. And Eleanor Jago.

Maybe we can’t win, at that.

I took the uplift to Alpha without noticing anything around me. Murdoch’s words had stung. Partly because we’d slept together last night, and somewhere at the back of my mind was the unreasonable expectation that we’d cease to disagree from now on. Mostly because he’d never said anything like it before. During the occupation he’d disagreed with some of my decisions, but went along with them nevertheless. Even when calling me “obsessive.” But now we had no protocols, no procedure to follow or rank to hide behind.

Of course I’m obsessive. All good engineers are obsessive. It’s how we get the patience to keep trying different solutions when the first few hundred tries fail.