Hearthspace, p.10
Hearthspace, page 10
‘… But,’ Nusma said, ignoring that, ‘wherever we came from, you can tell from blood samples and genetic material and such that humans came from a single source, here in Hearthspace. You can’t easily tell where that source is as a location in space, as we’ve spread so widely, but we’re confident about that date convergence. We tested that with samples from our own people. And we tested your people also, Ulla. It’s confirmed – at least, I suppose it is. We have common ancestors. All of us, my people, yours. Going back more than a thousand years. A divergence from then on …’
‘Wow.’ Ulla, despite the circumstances, found herself grinning. ‘Sorry. I just like learning stuff.’ She was getting giddy, she thought. And not thinking clearly. Sympathy for Nusma, her blinded enemy … Seduction by information.
Nusma said, ‘That’s when humans arrived in this place, this Hearthspace, and spread out from – somewhere. A single point of origin. Wherever it was. We think we know when, from oral legends and the like, but we don’t know where.’ He glanced at Ulla. ‘I should say this is all theoretical, and halfway to a state secret. Or unorthodox at least. Some in the Sabre Hierarchy don’t like the idea of the shallowness of our origin – they’d sooner we had been here for eternity, so the place is ours. A recent origin, and no deep biological roots – the data somehow invalidates us.’
‘Invalidates you? The great Hierarchy?’
Nusma shrugged, looking troubled. ‘I wouldn’t pass it along. It’s dangerous stuff. But you’re evidently intelligent, slave or not—’
‘I haven’t always been a slave.’ Another risky remark, Ulla …
‘Noted. And if your ancestry in this place is as old as mine, then what right do I have to restrict your curiosity? Let alone enslave you …’ He ran down, and glanced around. ‘It’s good science, bad – politics. I think they’re beginning the descent, out of high orbit … We probably shouldn’t be having this conversation.’
Ulla nodded. ‘Never happened … Thank you.’
‘Come on, let’s get to the lander.’
13
When the slaver was in flight, Ulla soon discovered, the ship’s planetary lander was docked against the main hull, just below the bolt-head toroid structure.
The lander turned out to be a small, multi-crew aircraft with stubby wings, disposable, lightweight propellant tanks, fat rocket engines – and wheels, for surface exploration.
When Ulla boarded, a quick count revealed a dozen seats, though only six passengers were making the descent to this Mars world, including Captain Erbas as pilot.
As they clambered in, all wearing smart-fitting pressure suits, Ashe glanced around, leaned back, and touched his helmet to Ulla’s. They turned off their comms, but when he spoke his words were intelligible, transmitted through the structures of their helmets.
‘Thanks for getting me on board this thing,’ Ashe muttered. ‘I thought, a couple of days ago, I was going to be executed – or mutilated again, which could be worse.’
‘What was your crime?’
‘I looked at a guard the wrong way. The commodore talked them out of it. She’s quite an asset.’
Ulla rubbed his arm, through the suit. ‘We just have to find a way.’
He frowned. ‘A way to do what?’
‘To survive for now, and beat these people … ultimately.’
‘Oh, I think I’m being called.’
She glanced up, and saw he was right. Captain Erbas had turned around and was gesturing with gloved hand for the doctor to come forward.
Clumsily, Borge made his way forward.
The rest followed, so that Erbas and Pulet were sitting up front – with Erbas piloting the craft – behind them Nusma and Borge, the latter to be able to brief Pulet, and Ulla and Ashe behind them.
And with a sharp jolt, the lander dropped away from the lightsail ship.
For one second, as they fell, Ulla thought she was going to hurl. Happily, she didn’t.
She tried to focus on matters in hand.
Protector Pulet checked his restraints, glanced back at Borge, and then pointed ahead at the looming world.
‘Well, Doctor, there’s your patient. I’m told you know more about Mars-type planets than anybody else aboard.’
‘It’s just a hobby—’
‘So maybe you could talk us down – analyse the landscapes from the high atmosphere, down to the ground? Guide us.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
With a kind of comical menace, Pulet slapped him on the arm, gloved hand on pressure suit. ‘I know you will.’
Borge visibly took deep breaths, calmed, and leaned forward.
So far the trajectory had been a glide, the craft dumping velocity through friction with the air. Now the lander’s impulse engines fired, the craft banked, opening up a wide view of the landscape below.
Ulla saw craters. Strings of them.
‘Very well,’ Borge said, leaning into the windows to see better.
Admirably calm, Ulla thought.
‘So far as I can tell, from the data you showed me, Protector, and what I see now, this is indeed a typical sample of the class of planets we call “Mars-like”. And we think we inherited that name from the first humans to come to the Hearthspace.
‘This planet and its siblings will have been formed in the same – umm, nursery – as any nearby Earth clones, coalescing out of a swarm of asteroids and comets and other rubble, all of it shaped by the gravity field of the Hearth itself.
‘And how close you are to the central fire determines what kind of planet you become.
‘Earths lose a lot of volatiles – water especially – in the process, leaving you with a rocky world with a skim of water. By contrast the big giants further out, in the cool, can hang on to a much larger mix of volatiles. A “Mercury” is too close to the central star; all its volatiles are boiled off, water, ammonia … You’re left with a rocky core – which is still useful for mining and such.’
Erbas and Pulet exchanged grins.
‘We know,’ Pulet said.
‘But,’ the doctor said, ‘a “Mars” is far enough out to be wet, volatiles-rich – volatiles including water – but much smaller than an “Earth”, maybe as little as ten per cent the mass. Just an accident of the chaos, the bombardment that all planets emerge from.
‘Still, as it cooled, paradoxically, this planet must have collected plenty of water – mostly from bombardments by comets.
Big masses of residual ice. Being smaller, a Mars cooled faster than a comparable Earth, its surface solidified faster, trapping much of the water bequeathed by that heavy early ice bombardment – and, with its lower gravity, the subsequent rocky bombardment wasn’t so ferocious as on an Earth, where much of the primeval water was splashed off.
‘Here masses of water were trapped in the upper layers of rocks. How much depends on how far it was from the Hearth when it formed, but a Mars could be warm and wet earlier than a comparable Earth. The point is, it may be that a young Mars would be a better cradle for an origin of life than a young Earth. Warm and wet, earlier. And so when the asteroid bombardment continued after that—’
‘Let me guess,’ Pulet said. ‘We have studied these ideas too. Yes, our scientists likewise argue that Mars types may make better cradles for life than Earth types.’
‘Yes. And later, the lighter gravity would help, given an event that might blast some kind of spore between the worlds … The right kind of comet impact, maybe.’
‘Oh, indeed,’ Pulet said. ‘So life may have originated earlier in Mars-type worlds, and then spread to Earth worlds … This is one of my particular study areas, the genesis of life, the spread of that life – panspermia. Maybe it happened that way even back where humanity originally evolved.’
Erbas said, ‘I’m taking us down. Let’s have a look for ourselves.’
As the descent began, Pulet began a slow clap. ‘Well, this is what our primary mission is for me. The science. The slaving is mere commerce – though I do intend that this pioneering mission will lay the foundation for a flow of slaves and goods, even foodstuffs, pouring back to the Hierarchy worlds.’
Words which chilled Ulla.
She caught Borge’s eye, when he glanced back at her. She knew what he was thinking. How can these people be so – split? Science and slaughter, ruination, side by side …
Meanwhile Pulet called, ‘Remind me – what is the next port of call, Erbas? After this?’
The captain called over, ‘An inhabited Venus, was your order, sir. Another experiment to view.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Pulet laughed. ‘Fat farmers floating in clouds! Can it be true? What a spectacle! Ah, but what we see today …’ The protector waved his arm. ‘… Imagine it! All over the Hearthspace, there could be many, many such instantiations of life, seeds spreading out from those origin points, whole domains of similar but unique life forms spreading, and interacting … You would have, not a single biosphere, a kind of higher-dimensional biosphere combining all these instantiations. Imagine the complexity, the richness of it all!’
‘Plus us,’ Ulla said. ‘Humans. And we don’t fit in.’
Pulet met her gaze. ‘Precisely. But we do have each other. Here we are with our different backgrounds, positions – and yet you see what I see, clearly. And you have the courage to say it. Ah! I am so glad I acquired you, Commander Breen.’
Ulla kept her peace.
‘Well,’ Pulet said. ‘How long is our next journey … ?’
Erbas checked a log entry. ‘Another twenty days, I’m afraid, about fifty astronomical units to the nearest Venus …’
‘Ha! Is that all? Compared to the Hierarchy, this space is so cramped, isn’t it? A few days here, a few months there … A cultivated Venus, though? Not something you see every day, is it? Not unique, of course. There they have a sky planted with wheat, I’m told.’
Captain Erbas played along. ‘Stalks of wheat in rows, all waiting for the beheading. Yes! I wonder if the stalks anticipate the rumble of the harvesting machines, as they go down by the score … Ha! Amusing thought, Captain. Well. Let’s finish up here – a couple of landings, samples of the geology, the biology, if we find any here. And then home.
‘What fun!’
14
After the party retreated to the slave-ship, to Ulla it seemed a long jaunt to the next spectacle.
She tried to focus on the people around her – especially on the slaves, and especially those survivors among her erstwhile crewmates. Her responsibility, after all, given her relatively healthy place in the sick culture of a slave-ship.
And so she made rounds of the slave deck, three or four times a ship’s standard day, passing from one of her enslaved crew members to another, always accompanied by one of the ship’s ten taciturn guards.
(… A standard day as imposed by the Hierarchy, their captors, but surprisingly close in duration to the Alliance standard definition. Another legacy of their shared origins, she supposed …)
She quickly learned where her crew were usually to be found.
This apparently empty floor had its own invisible walls, invisible but real enough, she soon learned. A social structure too. There were places where people huddled together, sometimes around a strong leader type, male or female, sometimes not. Territory, on a bare floor.
In the first few days it had been hard for the survivors of the 45 to find places in this invisible factory cum township, and they had tended to clump together around one or two tough characters. With these nodes of solidarity, after a few skirmishes with the established denizens, and as they were put to work by instructions from the guards, the newcomers had been grudgingly accepted, and the patrolling guards seemed to be watchful of that.
Thus an equilibrium, Ulla had thought, slowly, almost wordlessly emerging.
The previous enslaved kept themselves to themselves. Scraps of gossip crossed the social barriers, though, she learned. The ‘previous’ – as the 45 crew called them – spoke a language that did sound as if had a common root with her crew’s, Ulla thought. But simplified, a pidgin, easy to learn, easy to share. A language that had evolved to be an easy bridge for people of diverse origins… Even though, Ulla thought, these peoples’ ancestors must have been separated from those of the Alliance by a millennium. She wondered how they had lived, what their worlds were like …
In general the previously enslaved were dull, flat, hostile, though, and kept their distance from the newcomers. Coming together only when common tasks had to be performed. None of the 45 crew had been able to extract the story of the veterans’ own indenture. How they had been taken, where from.
Anyhow, such matters could be studied, as things were more or less peaceful, just now.
And Ulla was pleased at an eventual easing of tension at least between herself and her old shipmates – a tension that came, obviously, from the favour she had been shown by Pulet from the beginning of the hijack. It helped that in fact Ulla had been the first to have suffered the mutilation of one or more ‘sense’ organs. But that only went so far.
You say you can’t taste anything? Well, boo hoo …
You’re probably lying anyhow …
And the tension had only grown as the long days wore on.
Until it came to a head.
It had begun when one of her old crewmates led her to a splash of vomit on the floor, and told her she ought to lap it up, if she really had lost her sense of taste.
In front of an audience.
All this under the mocking gaze of a guard.
She’d recoiled at first. Maybe she couldn’t taste anything anymore, but she could smell the damn stuff before her. And there was always the risk of infection.
But she spooned it up with her fingers, and took it in her mouth, and tried to ignore the stink of it – which, to her, felt like she was tasting after all, and maybe the classic senses weren’t so clearly delineated one from the other.
Anyhow she did it. She ate the stuff.
And so she had passed another test, unfair and illogical as it seemed.
But when she had next reported to the bridge, she had been admonished for the residual stink of her breath. ‘Once more on my bridge in that state,’ Captain Erbas thundered at her, ‘and I’ll cut off your other damn senses one at a time myself …’
Such was her life. A grim routine.
An endless balancing act.
But she always remembered it was worse for her crewmates down in the slave hold, their featureless, empty lives in a featureless, empty space. In her way she did try to alleviate their lot, whenever she got the chance, however small.
For sure it was better than being dead already, as were Captain Frith and too many of his crew.
She wasn’t put through anything like the vomit-devouring incident again. And her life regained interest when twenty-or-so flight days were up, and she was summoned to the bridge to see where they had got to this time.
15
On the bridge, a cramped compartment in the head of the boltship, Protector Pulet, Captain Erbas, a few other officers, carefully monitored their instruments – as did Lieutenant Nusma, still officially assigned to monitor Ulla. A slave stood by.
All the window guards, heavy-duty grilles, had been removed for the duration, it seemed, for a better view.
As Ulla walked in, Commodore Mott was there too.
Mott gave her – a look. Ulla had no other word, in her head, than that. A look. Not a piercing glare, not even the signalling of an overt question, not so much as a cocked eyebrow. But Ulla knew that implied question, and expected it:
How are our crewmates?
And Ulla gave her a similar look back, and hoped her own message was clear. All well. Or no worse.
‘There’s something you need to see,’ Mott murmured. ‘Later. After all this.’ She pointed at the cleaned window.
All this in a heartbeat, as Ulla walked past her.
Ulla did not dare glance around the room, but she was sure that some of the Sabre Hierarchy officers caught the subtle communication. Certainly the guard. But no remark was made.
And for now, framed by the window – a new planet.
This world was brilliant in the light of the Hearth. A smooth, bright ball, with only the slightest tracery of texture, wrapped around that sphere, in the … clouds? And other features, fragmentary – darker flecks, floating in those clouds, set out in what looked tantalisingly regular patterns …
Despite the situation, Ulla was entranced. This was her own very first visit to a Venus.
Pulet made a beckoning gesture.
‘Go on, child. What do you make of this world?’
‘I …’ Fear and wonder warred in her head.
‘Well, that’s a Venus,’ Mott said. ‘Venus 7, to be precise … The doctor could tell you more … Like an Earth, but marginally closer to the Hearth, so hotter. But unlike Earth, with a vastly larger lode of volatiles – air, water. Volatiles that could make deep oceans – but it’s too hot. Too much air. You have a crushingly thick layer of atmosphere, of carbon dioxide and water vapour and nitrogen … It’s an air of toxic steam.’
The protector nodded encouragingly. ‘An “Earth” as it might have been if closer to the heat. Very well. And any Earth may have looked like this once, in the heat of its formation, but does not look like that now.’ He tapped a screen. ‘Not here,’ he said again. ‘And a quite different world has evolved. With those primordial characteristics still intact. You can see it. After evidently being spared such devastating collisions, with much of its primordial atmosphere lingering, a world smothering under those heat-trapping clouds of water and carbon dioxide, of high, hurricane-strength winds. But people came here to live anyhow. The ground is too hot for survival, all that carbon dioxide – but in the cool of the highest clouds, there is light and water and nitrogen and carbon dioxide, the staples of bacterial life, of plant growth. Farms floating in the sky, that feed other worlds of cities and machines …’
Captain Erbas was getting visibly irritated by this conversation.
