Justina Robson - Natural History

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NATURAL HISTORY

JUSTINA ROBSON

PAN BOOKS

In the far future, humanity has engineered itself into new forms capable of spaceflight, the terraforming of

planets, and the exploration of the deepest oceans. Evolution has reached a new zenith, and it seems

there is no environment we cannot conquer. But when intersteller voager meets apiece of alien technology

in a head on collision, the results go to show that the synthesis of the human race and its own technology

is not the first or the most advanced of its kind in the galaxy.

Also by Justina Robson

SILVER SCREEN

MAPPA MUNDI

First published 2003 by Macmillan

First published in paperback 2004 by Pan Books an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road,

London Nl 9RR

Basingstoke and Oxford

Associated companies throughout the world www.panmacmillan.com

The right of Justina Robson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the

‘American Pie’

Words & Music by Don McLean

International Copyright Secured.

transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the

prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication

may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset by Intype London Ltd

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham pic, Chatham, Kent

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or

otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is

published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

CHAPTER: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33

For fun, and for my friends - you know who you are

1. Isol and the Engine

Day’s end: 5433.

Base beacon delay: 3 years, 351 days.

Speed: approaches 0.265 lights.

Fixed Stars Estimate Navigational Error: 0.0134.

Direction: Barnard’s Star, holding.

Immediate Region: infestation of scattered micro-meteors within density spectrum 0.001 to

0.032/m3. Bhupal halo configuration suggests ancient significant explosion. Expansion

suggests incident congruent with Earth geotime 246 BC: Archimedes works on his

principles, Buddhism spreading over India, Punic Wars in full swing.

Crystals of water present; saturation density per cubic metre 4 x 10-6; also frozen nitrogen,

hydrogen and oxygen; also carbon in the form of complex organic molecules within outer

shells of iron and non-Earth-like fullerenes. Iron ores and silicates predominate. Free gases

remain as negligible traces within immediate region.

Damage sustained: catastrophic puncturing of primary skin, significant punctures of

secondary skin. Heavy particle absorption decreased to 45%. Radiation count falling by 6

rads/minute. Essential gas loss at 32%.

Condition: critical.

A long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me smile …

Voyager Lonestar Isol was holed like a Swiss cheese, peppered with tiny wounds like a bird caught in a

blast of shot. Much more of this and her Mites would fail, her immune system become stagnant from too

high a demand, her fuel absorption become disproportionate to the fuel available ahead of her.

And I knew that if I had my chance

Isol continued to hurtle through the scouring degradation of the meteor field, still in shock at its sudden

appearance in her path. The constant bombardment, which had felt like a rough sanding at first, was now

razing her. She hurt, she bled, but her colossal inertia drove her into the grit with the force of a missile, so

that pieces only micrometres in diameter pierced straight through her at whatever vector she struck them.

Even when she’d seen it, it had been far too late to turn. She’d had a warning of exactly 1.6108 seconds

and, if she cared to love her numbers, by then it was a whole Golden Ratio too late - an entire Fibonacci

crisis of suicidal beauty, fuck it. And in another few seconds it would be over, one way or another.

Did you write the book of love?

She’d had only two femtoseconds to realize that no diversion she could make was going to steer her

clear of the ring of crap that had suddenly manifested itself. This shit hadn’t appeared in her awareness

until the last moment, due to a lack of light in this star-forsaken region. That, combined with a lack of

expectation in her mind and her overconfidence in her own ultra-high-resolution optics and the data from

the fixed solar scanners back home. No telescope had reported any big dusts, so she’d assumed there

weren’t any. Isol could process memories at fifty times the speed of an Unevolved human and have it feel

like real time; but she couldn’t think of what to do when she saw the problem, and by then it had been

too late. Two femtoseconds wasn’t even enough for the brain to make the first connection towards

starting a gasp - if you had lungs.

A long, long time ago, when she was little, she’d danced in a field of poppies listening to ‘American Pie’,

not understanding a single word, around her the world as wide as a blue sky could stretch. The track had

lasted half a second in those days, played as fast as she could comprehend it at the time - thinking she

was some kind of genius as she dashed through one era of music after another. ‘American Pie’ and its

mystery had lasted time enough for one sharp intake of breath.

These days she could play her music at far greater speeds without losing any nuance; Earth’s entire

repertoire took only two years to listen to, end to end - more than enough time to find favourites and

make lists and endless recombinations of accompaniment to the cacophony of the universal radio.

Now she played it slower than that, one line for every second. It seemed important as never before to

understand it, reviewing and discarding all the billions of databased papers already written on its lyrics in

order to find her own unique take on its perfect capture of the ineffable. She wanted to hear it so loud

that the sound of her own death wouldn’t eclipse it.

Do you have faith in God above?

She saw the curve of her future suddenly start to veer into the cubic… the quartic… heading into its

visible limit. It was too late, and it had been too late since the first day of her life when, as an extra-solar

explorer, she’d been set on a track for speed and silence and the infinite depths of an ocean beyond all

vastness. Even a Forged life is so short and this place is so very big. How could you stand to be late?

Do you believe in rock and roll ?

A rock - much bigger than the rest - smashed through her right sailfin, punching a hole in it more than half

a metre across. Numbness began to creep into her side. From the edges of the wound hydrocarbons and

silicates bled out into a whitening tail behind her.

Suddenly, as if the lump had left a secret decoder in its violent passage, Isol understood the song, even

the line about the levee, although she didn’t know what a levee was. (Her insentient memory supplied

some kind of ditch full of water runoff from green fields and a river, sodden with rain to bursting point.) It

told her the song was about the death of Buddy Holly and the crash of his plane. But she knew it was for

her, because she was the plane and the passenger and the song and the words, and the father, son and

holy ghost were out beyond the light horizon.

Can music save your mortal soul?

At last she was in the clear, beyond the cloud of infinitesimal stones. But her body was failing. The

damaged sailfin wouldn’t eat any more, wouldn’t feel the soft breath of the solar winds or the hard blast

of her reactor output. The drop in radiation made her feel a cold foreboding that was more than a

physical chill. She didn’t need to create the graph to know the game was done.

Slowing, she maintained course along the thread of light towards Barnard’s Star. Everything about her

ached with regret and fury at her hot-headedness. Now she would drift until she died, for there were no

stars close enough to supply sufficient energy to solve her shortfall. Barnard’s Star was to have been the

first of many stops. She hadn’t even got to first base.

I was a lonely teenage broncin‘ buck with a pink carnation and a pickup truck…

If only she’d seen it sooner. Then she might have had the time to make plans rather than simply seeing the

stark promise of a detour and its deceleration. She might have had time to think, to slow down, to turn.

But although her brain was made for the task, her eyes simply weren’t up to the job. Not that those who

had made her could have known that - they’d never tested any prototypes in the field, for there could be

no prototypes, only people; when you made someone you tried to give them the best possible shot,

surely, didn’t you? Being among the first, she should have expected a few flaws, perhaps. But her head

was made for speed and the silent heaven. She was perfect for this. Almost.

The day the music died…

Furious, she looked back at the debris field. All but invisible until you were right on it - positioned, as it

was, far from stars and their planetary systems, far from the light of nebulae-scatter with nothing to cast

its shadow upon, nothing at this range to reveal its proximity against the backdrop of glitter and dust,

where worlds larger than the sun made a pinprick on her lenses no larger than an atom’s width. But with

a second glance she saw that this was no comet-and-rock incident. The signatures of the elements, the

shapes of the pieces… this huge mess wasn’t a cosmic accident of two bits of dumb mass colliding. It

was an explosion with a centre and among its remains were fragments of complex organic material.

That strange flavour of burning that now seemed so flat on her tongues: this was carbonization. The little

pieces had been alive, and the huge lump that had taken away her only chance of survival with a single

blow was a block of highly refined metals of non-natural type that had liquefied and congealed within

moments - a bit of technology that was now a lump of heat-processed slag.

For a second her astonishment outweighed her terror.

This whole savage cloud had once been somebody.

Bye-bye, Miss American Pie…

This person had been undergoing their violent expansion for over a thousand years. Such a short time in

cosmic terms, less than a moment. Not even a gasp.

Isol turned away from her horrible intimacy with it -with them. Horror and disgust mingled with elation

and made her feel sick. And here she was, dead as well, fulfilling her mission goal and her life’s dream in

one move.

First contact.

She laughed at the irony, deep in her core chamber where the superhot reactions of nuclear fission

juddered and the unequal slams of free electrons let the elements do her sobbing for her. Eventually the

reaction would eat her up if she let it run hard. Switch it off, and she could freeze solid instead.

So Isol makes the fundamental inherited goal of all explorers - contact - and in doing so is

murdered accidentally by the long-dead native before introductions can be made: she often thought

of herself in the third person. It was a way of looking at her insignificance. Now that seemed ludicrous,

verging on the insane, as though she’d been writing her own story in a book: engineering it towards the

triumph and victory of a happy ending with such determination that she hadn’t noticed when the plot went

wrong. What a way to live.

She kept on laughing, drifting away from the field on her single, one-shot trajectory, wondering if she

should tell Earth about this or keep it to herself as the final word on a life that could never have had any

other purpose, although it might have had another outcome.

Mental note to Creators (you boz-eyed shitbags): beware of roadkill.

The pain from the sailfin began to ache and bite as she withdrew support from it. Cold stiffened it and

froze its thin, tattered panes. She cut the circulation at her shoulder and kept her song on replay, humming

along, eyes closed as she watched her deceleration to 0.25 lights. She felt very tired suddenly. The

rebellion in her against the Earthbound ancestors, which had previously been a burning vision strong

enough to fuel her through anything, exhausted itself - so much so that she longed for a sight of the planet

now, blue and green and white, afloat on its prosaic round.

Her daily-link notes came in, relayed by beacons she had left behind her, their hominid-centric news

mere years out of date. She deleted them.

I met a girl who sang the blues…

And then you get slammed by some other luckless schmuck’s corpse and you realize - what?

That a piece of you is a little girl: picture her, a pink ballet dress replete with tutu and a very silly feather

boa so long that it drags behind her and catches on the flowers in the field, long brown hair, a faintly, no,

a very spoiled expression leading to a severe pout that looks utterly ridiculous. Where are the ruby

slippers; three clicks to home? Why didn’t I get those instead of this stupid dress?

That you’re not invincible.

Dear God, the banality of all of this! A billion biographies have said as much on a lot less. Is there nothing

about you which stands out and above all of that glibly mortal hyperbole, that came this far and saw so

little?

The last train for the coast…

She switched the music off. Ahead of her lay her extinction, at a point not too far beyond the theoretical

navigational marker she’d been going to hit - a virtual crossroads where the imaginary connecting lines

between four ‘fixed’ distant galaxies intersected. Her first milestone.

But looking at it again…

Something floated in the empty space there.

At first she thought it was simply a fault in her optics, or a reflection of one of the shattered motes behind

her. But even after considerable reboots and calculations it remained out there, exactly placed on the

axial crossroads, as close as she could measure.

Isol braked without hesitation this time. Anything seemed better than flinging herself headlong into

nothing, even if it was only another long-dead rock.

The sailfin snapped off her abruptly. It tumbled away to one side and began to outpace her gently. In

another few million years it might come within the grip of a star and burn up.

Venting and catastrophic skin repair were still consuming most of her available power. Even though it

was already certain, her spirits sank as she felt the losses and the internal shrinkage they caused, the

last-ditch warning systems they tripped.

For 1 x 1012 oscillations of the radiation in the caesium spectrum within her atomic clock Isol marked time

as she was forced to close down part of her reactor, cooling, ebbing. She was aware of a sluggishness in

herself, exhaustion, soreness from the wounds, and nausea from the build-up of repair by-products in her

system. As she waited to get close enough to this new rock, she listened to the changing patterns of the

light of distant stars. Their falling tones told her of her decline. She slept a lot, and sometimes couldn’t tell

if she were sleeping or awake except that, if anything happened meanwhile, she must have been asleep.

In her sleep she returned to a place not unlike the Dreamtime where she’d grown up, before she had a

body. In her youth she’d done the common things for a Forge-born in virtuo: assumed many shapes,

experienced the world through a range of senses, and visited places which her adult life would never

subsequently have allowed her to see. One in particular, the sea-depths of Earth’s ocean, she’d loved

above all, no doubt because it resembled the space she was designed to inhabit.

As an octopus, her head ballooning, her limbs soft but strong, she explored the coast of Australia. As a

shark she patrolled the Barrier Reef and saw the silhouettes of divers there above her, shadows from

another world. As a plesiosaur in an ocean from another time she floated in the semi-darkness of tropical

waters filled with algae, watching for squid, nothing in her head that would pass for thought, only the

leviathan impulses of hunger and the awareness of water cold and water warm against her skin. But it

was as a soft-bodied jelly that she went beyond the reach of the light and drifted down into the deepest

trenches where sulphur fumaroles vented their spleen and created small, hot pockets of rising water rich

with bacteria that existed nowhere else on Earth. There she knew herself home.

Here life was small and scarce. Tube worms, colourless, mouthless, lipless, eyeless, opened their

digestive chambers and allowed specialized bacteria to feed on the rich minerals, absorbing their output in

return. A few metres from the fumaroles’ empire the rock of the sea floor stretched out, a backyard of

silty death.

There were no worms here to plough fields rich with the sediments from above. Here Isol sat, silent and

still, and examined a bone here and there, a piece of a thing, a tooth or the minute cogs of a long-lost

watch. In this wilderness the blind forms of tiny scavengers, the relatives of prawn and crayfish, picked

slowly and transferred morsels with robotic care into their untasting jaws. At these depths and pressures

no bony fishes could endure. Nothing with a backbone, nothing that kept its strength on the inside.

In her dying dreams Isol found herself down there again. From miles above her the distant conversation

of whales and the occasional trace of a heavy engine boomed faintly, their echoes butting against the blunt

silence of her mind; the futile stammers of winter ghosts. The vibrations shivered her entire body with their

undecipherable information. She identified things by touch. She burnt herself by trying to feel how hot the

tip of a fumarole tower was; and again when she strayed too close to a crack in the floor where oozing

tubules of fresh lava were emerging, snub-nosed and crinkly, into the icy blackness - snorting

sausage-shaped chargers straight from the bowels of hell. Hell’s shit. She was surprised to survive the

encounter.

The bitter cold revived her. She brushed against something settled long ago into the ocean bed. It was

bulkier than the usual detritus here; this was obvious from its resistance to her insensible blunder, and

from the size of its surface. It tasted of metal, was coated with rust and dead barnacles, buckled out of its

original shape by the weight of the water. She extended polyps and the trailing lines that were her hands,

feeling its structure, identifying - after a moment of bewilderment - the crooked but unmistakable

components of an internal combustion…

… engine?

She woke up saying this word. Her core temperature had dropped fifteen degrees in the last hour. The

reactor was barely ticking over. Her drift had taken her within two hundred thousand kilometres of the

crossroads. All the radiation her fansails were capturing was needed just to keep her alive. Most of her

Mites were already dead.

Isol opened the containment around her reactor core, ignoring the pain and the bleat of warnings, and

used it to warm herself. Organic and cellular damage was now the least of her worries when compared

with keeping her mind alive a few minutes more. She tried to see what the lump of matter ahead of her

was but, although it was clearer, it appeared greyish and featureless. Intense magnification showed no

detail; it emitted nothing, and only reflected light in a desultory fashion. The revelation of its drabness

depressed her, and she looked away to the coldly merry twinkle of stars she’d never know.

She thought she would compose a letter, just so they would know what had happened to her, but then

she couldn’t think who to address it to, and resorting to Dear Sirs seemed ridiculous. She calculated that

her drift would see her eventually miss her intended destination by a narrow margin: Barnard’s Star

would have shifted out of her vector by the time she got there. Perhaps, she thought, like whoever had

finished her off, she would get to become the piece of junk that sank another ship, someone travelling at

several kilolights maybe, not seeing her as they stormed up the fast lanes… But then, at those speeds,

who knew what would happen? Of such things she could only dream.

Isol hadn’t wanted to be born, but now she definitely didn’t want this. No poetic niceties about being as

one with the stellar masses was consolation. Fuck them all for giving her such terrible eyes, and fuck the

Monkeys for giving her a head full of their own silly risk-admiring strategies and what else they’d

considered (in their wisdom as social and gravity-bound apes) that you needed for a life lived utterly

alone in space. If she hadn’t been stuck in their evolutionary tree she would have avoided this. A machine

would have calculated the odds and taken the tour dispassionately, not counted the extra years of the

journey as important. Wouldn’t it?

Oh come on, she said to herself. A billion animals a day die like this. In the past millions of people

have vanished uncounted, all their great plans undone and no one to know or forget. What’s so

special about you?

But there was a huge difference between dying some day and dying today, and her anger failed her. Isol

couldn’t weep, but she imagined the girl in the field, her face buried in her hands, the poppy petals against

her face, so fragile and tender, red as human blood or industrial diesel. Isol wanted to live so badly that it

didn’t seem possible she could die.

The grey object left its bearings and moved towards her.

Startled, Isol watched its approach. She slowed again, bleeding energy, and it matched its approach

speed with hers. She used the last of her reversing thrust to halt and the artefact came to rest when there

were only a few metres between them. It was not as large as she had first thought; really almost a match

for her own size, a small thing. She could see it very clearly now: it was quartz -silicon dioxide - but so

fractured and pitted on the surface that it was utterly dulled. It had no visible means of propulsion.

She considered that this might be the same thing that had seen off that other bozo out here, but that didn’t

much interest her because one death now seemed as undesirable as another, and as unimportant. Freeze

or be blown to smithereens - who cared?

The inert chunk, having moved this far, now sat idle. It looked a little bit like it might once have had a

shape resembling some manufactured object, but had since become so battered by its long existence that

it had given up on outward appearances altogether.

Isol broadcast a few mathematical constants to it on all channels in a vague gesture towards her extensive

and never-used First Contact protocol, but the waves she transmitted variously penetrated and

rebounded without result. The more she looked and kept on looking, the more the object seemed as

though it might have been the product of technological advancement, although there was no real reason to

think so except for its purposeful move. Here and there she kept noticing things about it: a hidden colour,

a shape suggestive of a turbine blade or the edge of a fansail, the minute atom-shadows that might be

created by field-generator patterners, their fundamental structures reflecting like the deeply buried facets

of a flawed diamond.

The quartz block sat calm and unruffled by her lack of intelligence. Isol reached out with a blind desire

for any kind of experience as her senses failed, seeing her spindly black arm stretching with the feeble

movement of invalidity, poisoned in its blood. Her fingers opened and she touched the object’s surface -

expecting the savage cold of three degrees Kelvin, but finding that it had no noticeable temperature at all:

that is, it was as warm as her. At that same instant she registered the radiation of its heat.

She snatched her hand back. A moment ago it had radiated nothing. Or had this been there before, but

she’d been too numbed to notice? After a moment she tried again.

It felt rough, its edges undefined and brittle. But there was a shape to it that was not an accidental one.

Her exploration took many hours. From second to second the block changed not at all. In spite of this

she noticed regular new features of it every few minutes. She starved as her metabolism ground down to

the last of its resources in its fatal foraging for sustenance. It began to digest her, starting with her

extremities. The open reactor fizzed and made her feel sick with the onset of its decline. She went

through a time where she wasn’t sure what was real and what was the fantasy of her own internal

breakdown. Circuitry that she’d thought must be part of her heart, where her emotions were processed,

began to melt. Meanwhile the object took on a shape in her hands, even though it was a clay that she

hadn’t the skill or the imagination to mould into the thing it became.

Eventually she woke and stared, bleary and nauseous, at her creation.

No human being had ever seen an object like this before, but that didn’t prevent her from knowing

exactly what it was. Never mind that she didn’t grasp what half its internal structures were, nor the logic

that underlay their design. Never mind that making it required a complete understanding of M-Theory,

which she didn’t possess - and nor did any other humans or their descendants. She understood that this

engine was capable of transmitting her from one point in space-time to any other, without travelling

through any of the points in between.

A jump engine? Fuck the impossible mass equations of FTL. This was instant karma. It was a replicator,

a giant immune injection, a factory for perfecting genetic and material design. Shove this in the back seat

and in no time at all she could return to Earth, or continue her travels -made whole, made strong, made

better than ever.

The only thing that bothered her was how she knew what it was, since none of these concepts had ever

occurred to her before. Oh, and the fact that it was still made entirely of immobile, uninteresting silicon

dioxide, a material singularly unsuited to any such functions.

Meanwhile her life ebbed away from her, and her will to question ran down with the slowing stutter of a

coin spinning to fatal instability on its edge.

The engine-thing did nothing. It waited with her. She could take it up or leave it there. Perhaps it would

fold back on itself and become an untouched block again, waiting for the next interstellar rover to appear.

Perhaps her friend back there, stretched across ten billion kilometres, had mistakenly wished for

something bad. Perhaps, this was her final dream, like Pincher Martin, and she was already in the last

throes of being dead.

Well, what the hell…

She closed down her old reactor and distended her abdomen to expel it, pointing it vaguely in the

direction of a nameless green star. Here’s to your well-laid plans. It hurt abysmally. Her flesh tore. In

her mind’s eye she saw panting, heaving animals, attempting to give birth. Sweat poured from them, but

Isol chilled quickly with the exposure of her internal spaces to the surrounding temperature and she

became stupid and clumsy with cold.

Taking in the new engine hurt less, and wasn’t as tricky as she’d thought. It obediently slid up into her

cavity and settled in the old space, a perfect fit. With senses dulled by the poison in her blood she felt it

nestle there and burrow threads into her flesh and metal, brushing only a few pressure sensors, the odd

temperature-sensitive cell. A curious new child. She didn’t feel afraid. There was a Tightness to this that

was almost fulfilling in its simplicity: accept or die.

Isol blinked - a flash in and out of consciousness -and glimpsed her universe as the surface tension on the

welling brim of a peculiar toroid undergoing constant expansion. Its inner volumes occupied seven

dimensions simultaneously and each in turn exerted its effects on her ordinary four, wrapping them around

itself like Christmas paper. Constrained by the fragile realspace-realtime surfaces, imaginary time ranged

over immeasurable expanses of other dimensional regions. The whole Seven-D was outside realtime and

realspace, but extended for the lifetime of its gigantic sister-surfaces. It touched her, through the medium

of the engine, and she felt herself the still point at the heart of all things, the vanishing moment of the final

breath, the source of the first inhalation. It was vaster than her ocean, smaller than the pinpoint of a single

photon strike, and crossing it would take no moment at all.

Dizzied by the vision, sick with the rebellion of her mind at its demands, she longed for the safety of

home.

Beneath her lay a brilliant orange sun, radiant with savage heat, and a planet both blue and grey, with

white water-clouds and two moons. The place had a name she could not articulate, which meant Origin

and Identity in an inextricable tangle.

Isol looked around for the Earth. It was so far away she could not find the measure for its distance.

The engine told her that the measure was Nothing.

Isol felt the breath of madness move in her. She hung still, over an unnamed ocean, and looked down at

its soft gleaming reflection of the old star’s light. Her fear was too big to be felt or understood. She knew

her fear was there, but it had now undergone a critical fission and her circuits were blasted, and although

nobody was there but herself, and nobody occupied the spaces between her and the Earth, she was not

alone.

Beneath her the alien world turned slowly, beckoning her with the cloud-curled finger of a hurricane. She

saw coastlines beaten by a salty sea, and where the spray smashed itself high on the rocks she saw

ancient and unnatural structures clutching themselves to the stone with limpet tenacity. Nothing moved

there.

She shut off her eyes. Her ears received nothing but the insensible blurt and chatter of natural radio.

Isol, said the engine, voiceless. We were once like you.

2. Isol and Corvax

Corvax who was once a Roc, Handslicer class, and who was now just Corvax with a body gone weak

from misuse and the addition of layer on layer of MekTek experiments, was aware of the approach of

the guests before his laboratory sensors informed him of their arrival. He felt a shiver along the roots of

his feathers, where tendrils of the latest batch of semi-sentient Tek were triggered by the movement of

shadows on the surface of his asteroid home. What alchemy he’d used to manufacture such sensitivity

belonged to him alone, as far as he knew. He’d have liked to have gone to see the respectable

Earthbound technicians about his own programming and his developing skills, telling them that he

dreamed his machines into shape, but they’d have had a hard time believing that. Then again, they didn’t

possess the imagination or the versions of Uluru that he was running. No Forged wanted to share their

secrets with the Unevolved any more, and MekTek was principally an Unevolved product - the brute

cybernetics of machine and AI spliced to their feeble bodies and brains to enhance capacities too

eco-precious to have been butchered together like a Forged mind. And too small to cope with a Forged

consciousness.

Not that he was bitter about his lot, except for moments like this when he tried to hurry and found himself

creaking along through the command gestures that summoned his holographic tool kits into life around

him. He scanned the local geo-chaos and saw the silky amoeboid shape of the Ironhorse weaving

nervously between the spinning clumps of rock on its final approach. It hadn’t picked up any tails.

Probably he should be grateful for that, although there was an itching just under his skin that was nothing

to do with MekTek and everything to do with this latest line of mumbo-jumbo the Ironhorse had been

explaining to him for the last hour.

Extraterrestrial life, the Timespan-class had insisted, was proven. An extra-solar Earthlike world had

been its home. There were oceans, yes, and there was land, and structures made by - appendages - and

there was fantastic technology beyond the dreams of blah-blah-blah… Corvax had stopped paying

attention somewhere around then and gone to check out the library Who’s Who on this madman. But the

guide informed him that Ironhorse Timespan Tatresi had been made incarnate ten years ago, after an

Uluru-upbringing of impeccable standards within Corvax’s own beloved mother-father, the Forge

Pangenesis Tupac. Tatresi plied the lanes from Mercury to Pluto as a fairly impressive kind of bulk

carrier who also ferried passengers and specialized in fragile cargo with strict environmental requirements.

He was a member of the Independence Party and leader of the Solar Transport Workers Union.

This was news that made Corvax twitchy, and he was already permanently twitchy from fending off the

attentions of the Gaiasol Police and the local pirates, both keen to investigate his capabilities further. So

far a nice dance of bribery, wheeler-dealing and sheer bad temper had seen him survive ten years out

here in the Belt, doing good works on Uluru-programming and charitable acts of transformational

surgery, but visits from virtual celebrities holding out giant lollipops with the words Wealth, Fame, Power

on them were an entirely new thing to him. He didn’t like the smell of it.

Nonetheless, he exchanged approach protocols with Tatresi and let him try his skill at navigating the final

descent by himself. Corvax had AIs that were capable of handling almost any complication caused by the

spiralling gigatonnes of stone that sheltered the laboratory from unwanted attention. They could ease the

passage of a terrified passenger lifter, or ensure that nosy busybodies were made into asteroid sandwich,

but he enjoyed the spectacle of seeing something as big and vain as the Time-span negotiating this

potentially fatal dance. Give him his due, Corvax grudgingly admitted, Tatresi had balls - if he had nothing

else. He’d let him have five minutes for that.

With the dexterity of a much smaller vessel, the leviathan twitched himself aside from the path of a hurtling

chunk, brushed a clump of debris away from his forward sensors and matched his direction and rotation

to a fixed point above the docking bay. He was saying something about the Voyager, Isol, and her

fabulous journey, which to Corvax sounded not unlike a drug-fuelled fantasy - in fact, he thought he

remembered experiencing one of those about seven years or so ago when doing Uluru on a mix of

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NATURALHISTORYJUSTINAROBSONPANBOOKSInthefarfuture,humanityhasengineereditselfintonewformscapableofspaceflight,theterraformingofplanets,andtheexplorationofthedeepestoceans.Evolutionhasreachedanewzenith,anditseemsthereisnoenvironmentwecannotconquer.Butwheninterstellervoagermeetsapieceofalientechnology...

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Justina Robson - Natural History

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