Charles Sheffield - Aftermath 2 - Star Fire

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1

From the private diary

of Oliver Guest.

Entry date: June 25, 2053

When you have died once, you become most reluctant to do so again.

I had been watching the man since early afternoon, ever since my Alert system

detected his presence five and a half miles to the south. He came on foot,

much closer to the sea edge than I would ever go. On his back he wore a light

knapsack, and in his right hand he held what looked like a solid walking stick.

Ten steps to his left the three-hundred-foot cliff dropped sheer to the crawling

waters of the Atlantic.

He was in no hurry, pausing from time to time to turn and stare seaward. He

might be a solitary and contemplative hiker, wandering the wild west coast of

Ireland from Donegal Bay to Tory Sound, admiring the scenery and enjoying

his own company. He might; but that hope vanished when at the point of

closest approach to the castle he made a sharp right turn and headed straight

for it.

I studied him under maximum magnification as he came nearer. He was of

middle height and medium build. A strong west wind blew his long hair over

his forehead, and that, together with the dark beard and moustache, hid most

of his features. There was, surely, nothing about him to make me nervous.

Wasn't it reasonable that a walker might ask for a drink of water, or even

inquire about accommodation for the night?

It was long years of caution and a determination never again to be captured

that speeded my pulse and tingled along my spine.

Above all, do no harm.

Therefore, assume that the man is an innocent stranger, and he will come and

go peacefully.

He ignored the scullery entrance, closest to his direction of approach. Instead

he walked around the building to the leeward side and found the solid oak

door of the main entrance. I am sensitive to loud noises, and I had covered the

massive iron door knocker with felt. The triple knock was soft and muffled, as

though he knew he was observed and had no need of a loud announcement of

his presence.

I opened the door and confirmed my first impressions. Outside the threshold

stood a stranger, a man of uncertain age and nondescript clothing, long-haired

and full-bearded, four or five inches shorter than me. He was not smiling, but

there was an expectant look in his brown eyes.

"Good afternoon," I said. "Can I help you?"

"I don't know about that." He raised dark eyebrows and took a step closer. "But I

sure as hell hope so, Doc. Because if you can't, I'm beat to say who can."

The voice and West Virginia accent provided the link, far more strongly than the

casual "Doc." It had been twenty-seven years, but I knew who he was-and I

knew that he knew me. My instincts shouted, "Kill him!" but instincts are highly

unreliable. Moreover, I lack a talent for unpremeditated murder.

Instead I said, "Seth Parsigian. Would you like to come in?"

I did not offer my hand. He nodded, grinned-l would have recognized that smile,

after much longer than twenty-seven years-and stepped through into the

hallway of gray slate. He stared around him.

"I wondered if you'd recognize me," he said. "Where are the kids?"

"They are away in Sligo, and they will be gone for two days. Furthermore, I

cannot believe that you are unaware of that fact."

He winked. "Could be. Not very smart of me, eh? Coming here alone, nobody

else around. Might be dangerous. But I don't think it will be. You an' me, we got

too much to offer each other."

That short exchange told me several things. He knew about my darlings, and I

must assume that he had possessed the information for some time. And he

could not be the only one with knowledge of my whereabouts. Seth Parsigian

merited several unpleasant adjectives, but stupid was not one of them. His

best insurance was that I would realize others knew where he was and would

pursue me implacably if he failed to return. He was also telling me, very clearly,

that the reason for his presence was not to recapture the infamous child

murderer Dr. Oliver Guest, and return him to the blind cave of centuries of

judicial sleep. He was here because he needed something from me.

Otranto Castle is, as castles go, of mean proportions. The short entrance

hallway leads to the long dining room, and off to one side of it lies my private

study. "Come in," I said, and led the way there. "Come in and sit down."

As I poured whiskey and put the pitcher of peat water beside it, I studied my

visitor. My first thought, that he was here because the telomod therapy was

failing, did not bear up under examination. Seth Parsigian appeared no older

now than when I had last seen him, over a quarter of a century ago. If anything,

he was healthier.

But if it were not the telomods, what could I possibly have to offer that might

guarantee my continued freedom and safety?

He was examining me as closely as I scrutinized him.

"Looking good." He raised his glass. "Here's to the Oliver Guest telomod

protocol. Been taking it yourself, haven't you?"

It was not a question that required an answer. I also appeared no older than at

our last meeting. The mystery was that everyone did not employ the protocol.

The teratomorphic potential, I suppose, frightened many. Speaking for myself,

it interests me little what I may resemble at my death.

"How did you know that I was still alive?" I asked.

"I was pretty sure you weren't killed in the fire. The body we found had dentures.

But I didn't have evidence that you weren't dead an' rotting until eleven years

ago."

A most comforting statement. He had known of my existence for eleven full

years, and I was still a free man.

"How did you learn that I was living, and where I could be found?"

"Oh, through the kids," he said casually. So much for all my precautions. "I

figured you'd find a hiding place an' lie low for as long as you could stand, but

eventually you'd not be able to resist. You'd get around to cloning 'em. I knew

that if you did it one at a time, I'd never find you. But you did all eighteen too

close together. I had a long-term screen on the data net for that type of

anomaly, and it popped right up with the first six."

"Starting eleven years ago."

"Right." Seth picked up on my unasked question. "So why haven't I turned you

in? You can answer that as well as I can."

"Because I am a specialist in telomod therapy, and if I were to be placed again

into long-term judicial sleep, you would have no access to my knowledge."

I knew what Seth apparently did not. Although a pioneer-hubris tempts me to

say the pioneer-in the techniques of telomod therapy, I left that field many years

ago. I have since gone on to new researches, and others have developed

protocols less risky and more routine than mine.

"A bit of that, at first." Seth, disdaining peat water, refilled his glass with neat

whiskey. "But it's really a lot simpler. Try again, an' let's put it the other way

round. Why should I turn you in?" I considered. With Seth Parsigian there was

no need for pretense. "Because I am Oliver Guest, a murderer and monster.

Because I killed eighteen teenage children. Because I was sentenced after

due process in a court of law to spend six centuries in judicial sleep, and most

of that sentence has yet to be served."

"Not my department. Justice wants you, let Justice find you. If they can't, screw

'em. I told you, it's simpler than you think." He leaned forward. "I get you locked

up an1 iced down, you're gone. History. No way you can ever help me. But I

leave you free, you owe me-big-time. If I need help, you can give it to me. An' I'm

telling you, Doc, I need help now."

I had been living in western Ireland for twenty-seven years, far from the

scientific mainstream. True, I had indulged my own interests and followed

progress in related fields through the web, but that did not add up to an ability

to serve Seth Parsigian's needs.

However, it would be unwise to suggest that. Instead I said, "I'll be glad to help

you. But how?"

"First, you can answer a couple of questions. I'm pretty sure I know the

answers, but let's get 'em out of the way. You were a world expert on

cloning-don't go modest on me an' deny it. Did you ever clone yourself?"

The idea was so ludicrous that in spite of my internal tensions I snorted with

laughter. "Clone myself? Certainly not. Do you think the world is ready for a

second Oliver Guest?"

"Not ready for the first one, if you ask me. But I wanted to be sure. You see, I

knew you were living here and had been for ages, so cloning was a natural

thought."

Not to me. But before I could comment he went on. "All right, tell me this. How

much do you know about Sky City and the shield? And have you ever been out

there?"

More easy questions, although disquieting ones because of their possible

implications. We were moving to an area of expertise where my chances of

helping Seth Parsigian were negligibly small. "I know very little about Sky City,

and even less about the space shield. Far less, I suspect, than the average

interested ten-year-old. I have never been into space, and furthermore I never

intend to go there."

"Don't be too sure on that last one. How much have you heard about the deaths

in Sky City over the past six months?"

"I have heard not one word. Don't deaths happen all the time during space

construction work?"

"Not these deaths. Twelve of 'em. All teenagers. All girls. All beauties. Your

personal specialty, an' you've not heard a word? Jeez." Seth stood up and

walked through to stare at the dining hall, with its long, solid oak table that we

used only when all my darlings were home. "I hope you got some way of

feeding me tonight, Doc, because we gotta talk about those deaths on Sky City,

an' we gotta figure out what's goin' on out there. An' I can tell you, from a

standing start that might take us quite a while."

interlude 1

interlude: Sniffer, Model A.

The Sniffer had been built to serve a single purpose, but in their eagerness to achieve that

goal its human creators had overengineered their product. They had intended no more

than a robust machine, a versatile and long-lived sensing mechanism able to protect itself

in the interstellar environment. Instead they had built an entity that inhabited the hazy

boundary between sentience and nonsentience.

Certainly Sniffer-A lacked emotion and a true sense of its own place in the universe.

Equally certainly it was self-aware, knowing of and concerned with the protection of its

multiple parts. And certainly the Sniffer knew its own history, even if that history

consisted only of the catalog of experiences since the probe was launched from Earth

orbit.

The internal clock placed pointers at the key events:

The origin, before which there was nothing, not even the markers of time itself.

A few thousand seconds after the origin marked the moment of first acceleration. The

Sniffer measured the Doppler frequency shift of Earth's beacon signal and approved it.

As planned, the increase in speed was a uniform ten meters per second squared.

One and a half million seconds after first acceleration, Sniffer-A came to the end of the

heliosphere, the great bubble of gas controlled by Sol's influence. The Sniffer was more

than eleven billion kilometers from the Sun, twice as far out as the orbit of Pluto. The

event came a little sooner than predicted. The Sniffer added that information to the data

stream sent back to Earth and hurtled on its way, still adding to its speed.

Two million seconds after first acceleration, the mirror-matter engine ran out of fuel. The

Sniffer had reached the end of acceleration and the beginning of coast phase. Terminal

velocity was measured as almost twenty thousand kilometers a second, matching the

mission profile to better than one part in a million.

Nothing built by humans had ever traveled so fast. The Sniffer registered small reductions

in its speed as the fading gravity field of the distant Sun slowed its progress. The

deceleration was in the flight profile, and it called for no remedial action.

The Sniffer checked that the guide star of Alpha Centauri lay directly ahead. Then it

banked down into power-conserving mode, with the internal clock speed slowed by a

factor of four million. Almost dormant, the spidery structure glided through the void

between the stars. The main functions of the mission still lay far in the future.

At four hundred and eighty million seconds, almost fifteen years after launch, the incident

particle flux rose above a preset threshold. The Sniffer activated all sensors and began a

fine profiling of the medium through which it was now moving. At once it found

differences from the projected situation.

The supercooled central brain of Sniffer-A had no circuits that might be described as

worriers, but it was built to register, record, and transmit anomalies. The great bow wave

of charged particles generated by the Alpha Centauri supernova had been reached ahead

of time. Also, the particle mixture was grossly different from that in the mission profile.

The Sniffer began its comparisons. The particle flux was more energetic than anticipated,

but that was consistent with a greater overall velocity and early arrival. A more

significant oddity lay in the unexpected abundance of nuclei heavier than the protons of

bare hydrogen. Everything was too plentiful, from deuterium-too weakly bound to have

survived the fires of the supernova-to uranium. Odder yet, the data suggested patterns

within the particles, as though the ions were somehow maintaining their exact relative

separations over large distances.

Sniffer-A's analytical powers were confined to a comparison between the observations

and the predictions loaded into it before launch. It contained no physical models or

programs to perform correlations, and it lacked the concept of a structure that ions or

other units might follow as they moved through space.

The data went to the communications channels, for return to Earth and to entities with

the power to speculate. The Sniffer flew on. In another year, thirty million seconds on

the steady internal clock, the main wave had passed. The flux of particles steadily became

less.

The reduction was consistent with the onboard math models. Sniffer-A's closest

equivalent to human contentment came when observations matched a preloaded profile.

The Sniffer's activity level gradually decreased.

One more year, and the power levels were down to preencounter values. Sniffer-A

cruised quietly on.

It would coast for another half a century. Then it would rouse itself for one final frantic

spell of recording and transmission before plunging to its immolation in the turbulent

supernova remnant of Alpha Centauri.

2

If you average seven meetings a day and there is a fifty-fifty chance that any given

meeting will be a stinker, then about one day in every four months all your meetings will

be stinkers.

President Celine Tanaka reviewed her list of appointments and decided that today was

the day. In five meetings through mid-afternoon, all held outside the White House, she

had heard nothing but bad news, complaints, attempted money grabs, and self-serving

excuses.

In space, the mirror-matter thrustors on one whole segment of the shield were below par.

But instead of correcting the problem, the manufacturer's and integrator's representatives

were busy pointing fingers at each other. In other space activities, half a dozen

congressional groups were pushing to have another Sniffer built and launched. Celine

detected a distinct whiff of pork barrel. She made a note: Check position and status of

Sniffers. A dozen of the high-acceleration probes were already racing to sample the

particle wave front on its way from Alpha Centauri. How would another one help?

More likely, lobbyists for the Sniffers' manufacturer were behind the political moves.

The game never ended. If Sol were guaranteed to go nova tomorrow, today she would

hear from lobbyists for sunscreen.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Cabinet officer in charge of energy allocation did not

seem to know the differences between fossil fuel, nuclear, and solar power plants, or be

able to estimate the country's base load capacity of each. The head of the United States

census had just informed Celine that "sampling errors" were responsible for the obvious

and grotesque inaccuracies in the population count of the West Coast states. The chief of

health services offered no explanation for the rise in the infant mortality rate in the rural

South, except to suggest "unusual weather." They didn't know it yet, but all three men

were out of a job. Incompetence was something you might be able to tolerate in easy

times. These were not easy times. There had been no easy times in the twenty-seven

years since Alpha Centauri improbably went supernova.

The good news was that Celine had only two more meetings on her schedule. Returning

to the White House through the overcast heat of a July afternoon, she reflected on the

bad news: that her two final encounters were likely to be the worst of all. She went

straight to the Oval Office, sat down in her specially designed orthopedic chair, and told

the autocom: "All right, send Mr. Glover in."

The armored door slid silently open and Milton Glover marched into the office. He stood

before her and inclined his head. "Ma'am."

He was a great one for offering every respect due to the presidency. His inner feelings

were another matter. "Sit down, Milton. It's good to see you."

The smile he gave her was that of a man without a care in the world. He remained

standing and took a long look around the sparsely decorated office. His eyes lingered on

the side table with its vase of Oceanus roses. He nodded appreciatively and sat down.

"I've been here many times over many years, Madam President. And I must say, I've

never known this place to look so good."

Beneath the compliment lay the second message: Presidents come and Presidents go. I

was here long before your time, ma'am, and I'll be here long after you leave.

Milton Glover was of medium height and build, with blond hair, a fair moustache, and

innocent eyes of pale blue. He was in his late seventies, but the telomod treatment gave

him the appearance and bearing of a man in his forties. He laughed loudly, frequently, and

in Celine's opinion wholly insincerely. He was also not nearly so smart as he thought he

was.

"Thank you, Milton." Take all compliments at face value. "How can I help you?"

She had learned the quickest way to bring a meeting to the point. Nothing could be more

polite than the simple question "How can I help you?" but it cut through all flowery

courtesies. Of course, it was based on a cynical assumption: No one requested a meeting

with the President who didn't want something. So far that premise had seldom been

wrong.

"I won't take much of your time, Madam President." Glover spread his hands wide. "For

myself, I want absolutely nothing. I am here on behalf of a group of concerned citizens."

"How can I help them}"

"The Trust In Government coalition is unhappy with this nation's most recent policy

statements and budget proposals. It is not too strong to say that many of them- of

us-feel betrayed."

"How so?" Advice from her political mentor: Let the visitor do the talking.

Glover pulled an envelope from an inside pocket. "Last year, an unprecedented thirty

percent of our national resources went to the global protection project. That was already

far more than can be justified. Now we see from this-your budget, signed with your own

hand -that you propose to increase our contribution to the

World Protection Federation to almost thirty-four percent. More than a third of the

country's expenditures will vanish into space."

"Where it will be used to protect our citizens. All our citizens-including the members of

the Trust In Government coalition."

Celine could see nothing remotely humorous in her statement, but Glover laughed

heartily. "Madam President, you know as well as I do that there are less expensive ways

of protecting our people. Particularly when you recognize that the bulk of the funds you

are proposing to give away is drawn from the members of the TIG coalition. And our

members will not be the primary beneficiaries of such gross expenditures."

Their meeting was being recorded. Milton Glover knew it. His statement was as close as

he would come to what he really meant: Lots of foreigners don't contribute a dime, so

screw 'em. Why should my friends and I build a space shield to protect a bunch of gooks?

And why pay here at home, either, to save no-hope welfare trash and idlers who don't pull

their weight?

TIG. Trust In Government. An old political principle, to give your organization a name

that's the opposite of what you mean. As Vice President Auden Travis had said to

Celine, "TIG doesn't really stand for Trust In Government. It stands for Troglodytes In

the Ground. They want to dig holes to hide away from the particle storm, and to hell

with everybody who has to stay outside."

Celine agreed with Travis, but Milton Glover and his friends controlled too much wealth

and had too much influence to be ignored. They insisted that the mockery of language

was with the World Protection Federation. WPF, their literature said, stood for Wasters,

Paupers, and Foreigners.

"Milton, you give me credit for power I don't have.

Even if I wanted to, I couldn't pull us out of the WPF. Remember, this country started the

organization."

"Yes. Twenty-seven years ago, when you were still an astronaut. I know it was nothing

to do with you. I don't even blame President Steinmetz." He saw her expression. Saul

Steinmetz had brought her into politics, and he was her idol. Hale and hearty, though long

retired, he was rich and powerful enough to be a TIG member. In fact, he was the one

who had first warned Celine that the TIG consisted of a bunch of self-serving hogs.

Glover knew that Celine and Steinmetz were friends. He hurried on. "Old Saul did what

seemed right at the time, starting a global effort to make the space shield. But now it

looks dumber and dumber. The project is way behind schedule." (How did he know that?

It was supposed to be secret information.) "A shield that's only half built when the

particle storm hits is like a paper umbrella in a thunderstorm. Worse than nothing,

because you don't know you have to run for cover."

"Milton, this year's budget is signed and sealed. I ask again, how can I help you?"

"I'll tell you, Madam President. It's something simple, and something you have the

authority to do. The Nevada federal properties have been deserted and ignored for more

than a quarter of a century. You could make them available for leasing by private

interests."

Celine had been expecting another plea for reduced international support by the United

States. Glover's request threw her completely. He was right; the Alpha Centauri

supernova and the resulting population dip had emptied the Nevada federal lands. She

Charles Sheffield - Aftermath 2 - Star Fire

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