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Fayez spread his hands as if he were presenting her with the whole world. “Geology is about studying natural patterns. Nothing here’s natural. The whole planet was machined. The lithium ore you people are mining? No natural processes exist that would make it as pure as what you’re pulling out of the ground. It can’t happen. So apparently, whatever built the gates also had something around here somewhere that concentrated lithium in this one spot.”
“If you’re into industrial remediation. Which I’m not. And the southern plains? You know how much they vary? They don’t. The underlying plate is literally as flat as a pane of glass. Somewhere about fifty klicks south of here, there’s some kind of tectonic Zamboni machine about which I am qualified to say absolutely nothing. Those tunnel complexes? Yeah, they’re some kind of old planetary transport system. And yet here I am—”
A young woman came to get her. Elvi had seen her before, but didn’t know her name. It seemed wrong that they could have spent almost two years traveling out here together, and Elvi still didn’t know her. It should mean something about populations and how they mixed. And how they didn’t.
The timestamp was five hours ago. Somewhere out near the ring gates, the radio signals had passed each other, waves of electromagnetism passing through the void with human meanings coded into them. The distance it had taken a year and a half to travel in person, the message had managed in five hours. Five hours, and still too goddamn slow.
“Later,” Amos said, “when you’re wishing we had this stuff, I am going to be merciless in my mockery. And then we’ll die.”
Something about the idea of humans traveling fifty thousand light-years and then building houses using ten-thousand-year-old technology put a smile on Holden’s face. Humans were very strange creatures, but sometimes they were also charming.
One thing he’d said was Once is never. Twice is always.
For some, he was the symbol of the triumph of the single ship over governments and corporations. For others, he was an agent of chaos who started wars and threatened stability in the name of ideological purity.
From the perspective of the local environment, we’re bubbles of water, ions, and high-energy molecules. We’re not exactly the flavor that’s around here, but it’s only a matter of time before something figures out a way to exploit those.”
They walked along the dusty street together in companionable silence for a while. Amos finally said, “Weird planet. Walking in open air at night with no moon is breaking my head.” “I hear you. My brain keeps trying to find Orion and the Big Dipper. What’s weirder is that I keep finding them.” “That ain’t them,” Amos said. “Oh, I know. But it’s like my eyes are forcing those patterns on stars that aren’t really lined up the right way to make them.”
“You want a shadow, you got to have light and something to get in its way.”
“Are you asking me to use your brain to make these monkeys stop killing each other over rare dirt?”
Your pals Avasarala and Johnson have handed you the bloody knife and you think it’s because they trust you.” “You know what I hate about you?” “My hat?” “That too,” Holden said. “But mostly it’s that I hate everything you say, but you’re not always wrong.” Miller nodded and stared up at the night sky. “The frontier always outpaces the law,” Holden said.
Miller laughed. “You think somebody built those towers and structures and then just left? This whole planet is a murder scene. An empty apartment with warm food on the table and all the clothes still in the closets. This is some Croatoan shit.”
“The people who vanished here? Not dumbass Europeans in way over their heads. The things that lived here modified planets like we remodel a kitchen. They had a defense network in orbit that could have vaporized Ceres if it wandered too close.”
“And the moral high ground is a lovely place,” Marwick said, as if he were agreeing. “It won’t stop a missile, though. It won’t alter the trajectory of a gauss round. What our mutual friend does planetside has consequences that go a long way out from here. And there are those among us, myself included, who’d like to go home one day.”
“No research protocol survives contact with the subject population,” he said. “That’s not just this. It’s everything.”
When he spoke again, his voice had sobered. “Do you think that thing was a machine? Or was that an animal?” “I don’t think that’s a distinction they would have made.” “You mean the designers? Who the hell knows how they would have seen anything?” “Oh, we can say some things,” Elvi said. “What they cared about was in what they designed. And still is, in a way. We know that they respected the power of self-replicators and knew how to harness it.”
They sent out bridge builders to use those basic biological replicators, whatever their form. They can take a biosphere and turn it into a massively networked factory. It’s probably how they spread. Target the places that can be hijacked into making the things that let you get there. Also, they really built structures to last. They seem to have taken the long view on galactic colonizing.”
“You go, and when they let the ship leave, you go to Ceres and become a doctor and have a fantastic life.” “Why?” Because the people here see your death as a tool for winning a public opinion battle. Because I’ve lost all the children I ever plan to lose. Because I can’t have you see me when they finally arrest me. “Because I love you, baby,” he said instead. “And I want you to go be amazing.”
“They won’t go,” Basia said. “People already bled for this land. Died for it. We’re willing to kill each other to stay here, we’ll sure as hell stay and fight whatever else wants us gone.” “Providing there’s anyone left,” Amos said. “Well, sure,” Basia agreed. “Providing that.”
“Why would you act directly against RCE? Aren’t you supposed to be mediators? Neutral? Why take any action at all when you can stay out of it?” Her smile had depth and complexity. Basia had the feeling she’d heard a more profound question than the one he’d meant to ask. “Choosing to stand by while people kill each other is also an action,” she said. “We don’t do that here.”
four topics: New Terra, James Holden, contract security, and European league football.
Yep. Football transcends the Earth.
LOS BLANCOS DEFEAT BAYERN 1–0. Havelock raised his eyebrows and put the highlights reel in his viewing queue.
Seemingly, Real Madrid is still dominating in the UCL.
Given the time it will take a UN and RCE group to be assembled and make the journey to Medina Station, we predict that the situation on New Terra will be evolving without immediate physical involvement from in-system players for the foreseeable future, and the greater question of how traffic through the gates will be regulated will be a source of high-level tension and probable military action in the coming months and years.”
Human brains needed an answer, even if they had to make up something they knew was bullshit.
“Because real monsters don’t go away when you close your eyes. Because you need to know what happened here just as bad as I do.”
“If this isn’t important, I will rip your throat open and piss down your lungs.”
Elvi couldn’t say if they were curious or apprehensive or just wanting something to think about that wasn’t the conflict between RCE and the squatters. Between us and them. Or maybe they were seeing it as an omen. The burning eye looking down on them all, judging them and preparing for war. She’d heard a folktale like that once, but she didn’t remember where.
“You can’t blame yourself for what happened,” Basia started. “No,” Alex said, a deep frown cutting into his forehead. “A person can fail the people they love just by being who they are. I’m who I am, and it wasn’t what my wife wanted me to be, and somethin’ had to break. You decided to do what you did down on that planet, and it put you up here with me instead of with your family.”
Alex leaned forward, grabbing Basia’s hands in his own. “It’s still on you. I will never live down not being the person my wife needed after she spent twenty years waitin’ for me. I can never make that right. Don’t go feelin’ sorry for yourself. You fucked up. You failed the people you love. They’re payin’ the price for it right now and you demean them every second you don’t own that shit.”
One of my teachers back in school always used to say that contagion was the one absolute proof of community. People could pretend there weren’t drug users and prostitutes and unvaccinated children all they wanted, but when the plague came through, all that mattered was who was actually breathing your air.”
“That’s at 50X,” Alex said. “Space is too big,” Basia replied. “It’s been said. And this is just the space in low orbit around one planet. Breaks the head a bit to think about.” “I try not to.” “Wise man.”
“The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster,” she said. It was a truism of ecological biologists, and she said it the way a religious person might pray. To make sense of what she saw. To comfort herself. To give the world some sense of purpose or meaning. Species rose in an environment, and that environment changed. It was the nature of the universe, as true here as it had been on Earth.
“Your security people helping the Belters,” he said. “I guess nothing brings people together like a disaster.”
In the dimness and the wreckage, it was hard to tell which of them were squatters and which were RCE. Even Belters and Earthers were hard to differentiate now. Elvi didn’t know if that was an artifact of the darkness or if some deeper part of her brain was changing her perceptions, making anything human into something like her. Minds could be tricky that way.
“Let them go,” she said. “They’re professionals. They can take care of this. We… people like us…” “We’re past us and them at this point. We’re just people in a bad place,” Fayez said.
that James Holden had been killed on the station, and a doppelgänger put in his place.
Conspiracy theorists seem to endure, even in the far far future.
“Are you and Holden secretly alien spies that blew up the planet as part of a Belter conspiracy to distract the media?”
“It’s not that bad. Conspiracy theories come up whenever people feel like the universe is too random. Absurd. If it’s all an enemy plot, at least there’s someone calling the shots.”
there was something in the images. A barely visible line that passed through the cloud of smoke and debris where it had died. Something had shot the shuttle down. His first thought was the Barbapiccola. His second was the Rocinante. He pulled up the orbital tracking, trying to find how the enemy ships had taken action, but the only thing that intersected the line at the moment when the shuttle died was one of New Terra’s dozen tiny moons…
“Our creepy friend said there was a defense grid,” Holden said. “Their power station blew up, so the old defenses are in lockdown.”
“But you’re part of this! All this, this protomolecule masters bullshit. If you can’t control it, who can?” “There’s an answer to that, but you won’t like it.” “Nobody,” Holden said. “You’re telling me nobody.” “The thing that’s turning all this crap on? It just does stuff. If the Rocinante arms and fires a torpedo at someone, what are the odds a wrench in her machine shop can bring the torpedo back? That’s who you’re talking to.”
It was less fun being the chosen one and prophet when the gods were violent and capricious and their spokesman was insane and powerless.
“The blind studying the blind,” Fayez said. “It’s like graduate school all over again.
Basia wanted nothing more than to take his boy by the hand, tell him it was all right to be scared. That bravery was being scared and doing it anyway.
Basia had come to view power as a precious and irreplaceable resource. Not something he’d ever needed to do in the age of readily available fusion. It gave everything a sense of permanence it hadn’t had before. No do-overs. No we’ll-get-it-right-next-time.
Fityani hypothesis.
“I’d still have come,” she said. “All this? And you’d still have come?” “I wouldn’t have known about this. This wouldn’t have happened yet. I’d know I was taking a risk. I did know. Of course I’d get on that ship.” “What if you knew it was going to be like this? What if you could look into some crystal ball and see us here, the way it’s all happened?” “If we could do that, we’d never explore anything,” she said.
Even with all of them packed into the ruins together like refugees so close they could hear each other snore, it made the universe seem very empty. And frightening.
