The Transhuman Comedy

Beta Comae Berenices had risen, but that only made conditions worse, Gib thought. Under the yellow sunlight, vapor steamed out of the open holes in the ice, cloaking the surface in a thick fog. Outcroppings of magnetite thrust jaggedly out of the pack ice and spoofed the scanner on Gib's airscout with false leads. Every kilometer, Unité observation towers stood on three spindly legs, but the sensors running around the circumeference of each tower's circular top deck had been designed for warmer planets and gave unreliable data.

Even if the impediments magically disappeared, the odds were high (p = 0.91, the airscout's Bayesian system guessed) the artifact had impacted too hard and smashed against a magnetite pillar or plunged through the pack ice into the sea below. This was a fool's errand. Gib slowed the airscout and left it hovering while his mouth contorted and he shook his head at the futility of the search. He turned the stick and upped the throttle to head for home.

"Monsieur Pauli asks that you continue the search," the airscout said in its cheery alto voice. "He will continue to pay you 125% of expenses, plus time spent."

Gib hovered again. M. Pauli knew the odds were against finding the artifact, but if he were willing to spend more money--

--The artifact must be worth a lot.

"I'll be glad to keep searching," Gib said. He pushed the airscout forward at low speed and tasked every spare cpu cycle on stripping magnetite ghosts from the scanner data.

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The sky above the city was empty this morning. All the spacers at liberty and slumming bobos slept late after their debaucheries the night before. L.X. throttled down the thrusters on the runabout and levelled off above the city. The rooftops, slabbed and angled like the offcuts at a giant's stoneworks, stood like an archipelago in a sea of morning haze. The haze and smooth surfaces veiled the inner workings of the city, where crimes against nature could be indulged in the flesh and, for an added price, the chirurgical vats and neuroanatomical programmers could strip those crimes' evidence from body and mind. OKIN tolerated the free port, aware of the needs satisfied therein and confident its gates and scanners could contain the city's excesses and preserve the narrow-minded serenity of the realm beyond.

L.X. patted the black leather messenger bag on the seat beside him, sipped hot green tea, and dove to meet those waiting for him.

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Tof pressed his nose against the ship's window. Outside lay a rock-strewn desert out of ancient Arizona or Alpha Centauri IV. "Isn't it neat?"

Gerber banked the shuttle. They flew low, below the tops of the natural spires of khaki basalt rising above the plain a few hundred meters apart. Flying between them left his augmented reflexes unchallenged. "It's a marginally habitable moon."

"But Grand-Orb is so close! You can see its clouds and count its rings!"

Gerber sighed. "It's a ringed gas giant. The galaxy is full of them. This trip is just a milk run. It's the antisense of wonder."

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"Papa, Papa," Luc said from within the tall flechettegrass. "Come see!"

Irritated, Henri turned away from the virtual press officer of the pro-Unité rebels. The sere yellow grass thinned out and he felt heavier as he returned to full verity. Across the living room, Luc stood at the picture window, his fingertips resting on the plasma pane, his posture showing him raptly watching something in the tunnel. Probably a maintenance robot, 1200 meters away on the far side.

"Papa, come see!"

The boy was too young for his brain to be nanolinked with the Communité Télépathique de l'Unité, so Henri could not send a ganger across the room to his son. He could let a concierge guide his body over while his attention remained in virtual, but the boy was old enough to see through that. Tell the boy no, he thought, but then he remembered As the Unité is to its people, so should parents be to their children. He heeded the CTU's wisdom and crossed the room.

"The worldship is giving birth to triplets!"

What did he mean? Then Henri saw the childish logic. The drydocks lay many kilometers to the left, past twists and turns, somewhere deep in the worldship's core; the tunnel was a birth canal and its blast doors a dilated cervix. If three ships came down the tunnel, they must be small ones, tenders or light patrol craft. Henri rested his hand on the boy's shoulder and looked up.

Gooseflesh stippled his neck and cheeks. The three ships were Oleastri-class cruisers, saucers half the width of the tunnel, bristling with weapons and sensor arrays. The conversion drives were throttled almost to zero, glowing dull red instead of white hot, with conduction and convection impossible through the tunnel's hard vacuum; even so, Henri squinted and the plasma shimmered when the ships passed. Luc yiped and pulled his fingertips away, but his gaze remained rapt. "They're so big!"

"Yes, son."

"What kind of people are in them?"

Henri sensed the crews through the CTU. Nodes of thought pulsed within and between the ships. "All the sorts of people of the Unité. Verities, uploads, cyborgs, robots, ais."

Luc's head turned to the right after the last cruiser. "Where are they going?"

"I don't know." In his mind's eye, Henri saw only stock images of space battles and support operations for ground forces. "But I know they will defend us from the Tiánquán Republic."

They stood in silence for a moment. Pride in the Unité welled in Henri's chest, perhaps an odd thing to feel looking onto the empty tunnel. The plasma pane deexcited, but what had set it off? A power surge? He'd have to call maintenance again.

Luc looked up. "Papa, what did you think of the triplets?"

Triplets? What was the boy imagining? Well, he wasn't even linked with the CTU. Let him enjoy his imagination while he could. "I liked them very much."

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Lini halted her steed and drank from her water tube. Four Archeaopteryx wheeled overhead, but obviously in a courtship flight. They hadn't found the missing pilgrim. A wasted hour in the midday rays of Beta Comae Berenices. Ride around Swift Hill and then back to the settlement--

Cols lifted its sleek blue head and peered beady-eyed to the right. Its nostrils snuffled the air and it made a caw-caw-caw-cawwwk sound deep in its throat.

Lini turned her head. "Boy, what do you see?" Her gaze roved the hard packed sand with colors swirled like a marble cake. Her gray plastic baroquehelmet swept a magnetic field through her occipital lobe and subtracted out the heat shimmer. A rippling black shape lay eight hundred meters away on the next slope and she realized the black ripple was the pilgrim's robe in the breeze. The pilgrim lay motionless, face up, on a stratum of sand red-brown like dried blood.

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