Year's Best Scifi 7 Part 22

Sadly, Justin realized that the plotters had been right. Had he not been oblivious to the conspiracy going on around him, Alicia might be alive today. He could tell himself that he'd only been a naive and overachieving twenty-five-year-old on that night, but his conscience was not buying it.

He couldn't bring his friend back, but he could avenge her. And he would....

9.

What was now the L-5 habitat had once been an Earth-orbit-crossing, arguably Earth-threatening, nickel-iron asteroid. It had been tracked for eighteen years before s.p.a.ce-mining techniques had advanced sufficiently to make it commercially exploitable.

In 2024, Solar Metals, Ltd, obtained the mining concession for the asteroid. The worldlet was permanently and safely parked at the L-5 point-which was as close to Earth as the UN would agree to aim such a ma.s.sive object-in 2028. By 2036, the once-solid asteroid was a warren of played-out mining shafts.

In 2040, Solar Metals leased the husk of the asteroid to Interplanetary Resorts. Extraction techniques were turned to hollowing out the asteroid; the mining tunnels amounted to a good head start while also providing ready access to most of the interior. The asteroid was reduced to a more-or-less twenty-meter cylindrical sh.e.l.l balanced around its long axis and spun up to simulate a tenth of a gravity on its inner surface. The asteroid had just opened for business as a training facility for would-be Belters and as an extreme resort.

Using the facility in its second capacity, Dr. al-Fraghani was in an abandoned shaft playing at being a colonist when Justin arrived. She met him soon thereafter in the habitat's observation room, which the resort's management had discreetly cleared of all other guests but her aide. The a.s.sistant excused himself to leave Justin and the S-G completely alone.

After introductions and a modic.u.m of small talk, al-Fraghani said, "Your mother suggested that I hear you out about something important. She is one of the few people whose advice I always consider seriously. What is on your mind?"

The observation lounge's spartan, lightweight furniture seemed somehow at odds with the stunning celestial display visible through its clear dome. Beyond the dome, a crescent Earth, a gibbous moon, and countless stars spun by each minute. The smartgla.s.s window eclipsed the sun on the same rotational schedule.

From his flight bag Justin removed a high-end commercial bug detector. "If you don't mind, I'd like to do a sweep first."

"My aide has done that already, with equipment you wouldn't be able to buy. Now what is so secret?"

He took a deep breath. "I have reason to believe that Interplanetary s.p.a.ce Industries has found a way to circ.u.mvent the Protocol on Interstellar Technology Commerce."

Her only answer was an arched eyebrow.

So he summarized the evidence that ISI, impersonating a Europa-based civilization, had ordered proscribed Centaur nanotech technology and paid with equally banned-for-export fusion technology.

She listened intently, whispering occasional comments to her PDA. When he had finished speaking, she settled back gingerly onto a chair-it was easy in the slight gravity of the habitat to bounce. "I understand the concern: that 'Europans' will obtain the nanotech information before the Centaurs could get a recall message from us. We can try to prosecute ISI, not that that's a very satisfying response. Can we prevent Europa base from receiving the signal?"

"I don't see how. The receiver is directional, so we can't jam the signal from anywhere that's not outsystem from Jupiter and close to a line between Jupiter and Alpha Centauri. The only transmitter anywhere near that position is the one I think will be used to keep Earth from hearing the signal.

"We have to a.s.sume that the interplanetary communications gear at Europa base is controlled by the conspirators. A radioed appeal for help to anyone on-base that the ICU or UNASA would trust would likely be intercepted and not delivered.

"We can't send in the 'cavalry' fast enough to matter: at maximum acceleration it would take Earth two months to get a s.h.i.+p there, and the nanotech message will likely have been received by then. I'm sorry,"

Justin concluded, "but we don't appear to have good options."

"You don't paint a pretty picture. I know this idea is draconian, and would inconvenience people whomust mostly be innocent, but what about sending military police to enforce a quarantine of everyone on Europa? They would be empowered to impound all computers and data storage on the base."

Justin shook his head. "We'd never be sure we'd found all copies of the data. Remember, a standard one-terabyte archival cartridge is about a cubic centimeter. Copies of the Centaur message could easily be hidden outside the base, and we can hardly search that whole moon. Also, the nanotech information is so valuable that the conspirators could pay enormous bribes to any troops sent to enforce a theoretical embargo.

"In any event, I expect that the information will have been radioed from Europa long before a s.h.i.+p could get there to establish a quarantine. The plotters could retransmit the ET message to a Belter habitat or to a s.h.i.+p in s.p.a.ce and we'd be none the wiser."

"So you can suggest no way to keep ISI from obtaining this knowledge." It was a summary statement, not a question. Falling silent, al-Fraghani stared out of the dome. At long last, she added, "I appreciate the warning, although it isn't clear yet what advantage that warning provides. This will take some thought."

"We've known for a long time that the Centaurs have nanotech, and the ICU consciously decided not to trade for that knowledge. Were records kept of those deliberations?"

The Secretary-General nodded.

"Those notes will name the countries and industries most opposed to the introduction of advanced nanotech. That should give the ICU a pretty good idea of whom to warn now. I suspect it's a long list."

10.

Nanotechnology: the capability to build and control artifacts that are measured in, or have the ability to manipulate matter at, molecular dimensions. To accomplish macroscopically useful results, practical nanotech requires ma.s.sive numbers of devices. It is generally thought that ma.s.s production of nanotech devices would be accomplished via self-replication.

Of the known intelligent species, only the Centaurs claim to have mastered nanotech. The ICU has opted not to import this capability, fearing that a mature nanotechnology could render whole industries obsolete in a short time. While indigenous research on nanotech is legal, and is being actively pursued, progress has been limited.

-Internetopedia

Hollywood Cemetery sits on a hill overlooking the James River, at the point where a ma.s.sive jumble of rocks ended navigability. The cemetery was the final resting place of three presidents, if one included Jefferson Davis-and here in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, people did. To the dismay of cemetery officials, the grounds had long been a popular rendezvous for students from the nearby campus of Virginia Commonwealth University, without much respect for the posted visiting hours.

Justin and Barbara were in no way a.s.sociated with VCU, and they did not seek nighttime solitude for the same reason as the earnest young couple that was out of sight but not always out of earshot. The xenotechnomist and his friend sat leaning against the trunk of an ancient oak tree, not far from the iron-fenced enclosure of President Monroe's crypt, the inky blackness of the James spread out before them. Justin had simply found this to be a quiet place for thinking. A new, bright idea was called for: the best and brightest minds at the ICU had been unable to devise any way to counter ISI reception of the antic.i.p.ated Centaur transmission.

Or more likely, judging by a rushed call from his mother, the now-in-progress transmission. Ten hours earlier, the suspicious object that the Russian s.p.a.ce forces had first spotted had changed trajectories.

Several course corrections to remain on the Earth-to-Alpha Centauri line of sight had already been observed by military radars.

There were also the barest suggestions of a signal in the suspected frequency band. Dad, who wasonce more consulting for the ICU, felt that the ISI s.p.a.cecraft simply intercepted too small a sample of the Centaur signal to calculate an entirely accurate cancellation value. The countersignal was effective enough, however, that-had the ICU not known exactly what to look for-nothing would have been detected. The weakened and mostly canceled signal that remained was entirely unintelligible.

Stars glittered overhead in the crystalline air of Indian summer. One of the near-Earth orbiting habitats arced across the sky. The Moon beckoned.

ISI had, of course, denied knowledge of any unauthorized extrasolar transmissions. They were quick to point out that Solar Services ran the Europa base both when the supposed message had been sent to Alpha Centauri and now. And neither Solar Services nor government agencies seemed able to establish radio communications with Europa. Might the base's big dish be pointing elsewhere?

The limitless sky demanded Justin's attention. By profession he was sympathetic to change. Humanity had survived first contact and the Lalande Implosion, and then thrived. ISI's actions were unconscionable-and he would yet see the appropriate people punished for Alicia's death-but humanity would, once the disruptions had been recovered from, benefit enormously from Centaur nanotech.

Like the fusion technology for which it was being traded, nanotech had turned out to be an enormously complex technical challenge. Earth had needed more than seventy years to advance from the H-bomb to a commercial fusion power plant; human nanotech, after sixty years of lab research, was still forecast to be decades away from practical applications.

How would the new technology be used first? He imagined cell-sized cholesterol disa.s.semblers scuttling around the human circulatory system. He mused about swarms of tiny machines digesting meteors directly into pure-metal ingots and steel I-beams. For whatever reason, neither application held his attention. Then, the Lalande Implosion freshly in his thoughts, and under a starry sky, the Oort Cloud came to mind.

Mankind had yet to visit the Oort Cloud, a vast region beyond Pluto, more for a lack of motivation than any inherent difficulty. Where as the asteroid belt was full of stony and metallic bodies, the cloud was made up of great s...o...b..a.l.l.s of CHON: various compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. CHON was the stuff of life, freeze-dried primordial soup, but the remoteness of the cloud had made its vast resources too expensive to exploit. Until now.

Self-replicating nanotech would be the ideal mechanism for converting those s...o...b..a.l.l.s to petrochemicals. Mounting an expedition to the Oort Cloud, locating suitable planetesimals, and nudging them to Earth ... all of that would take time. Still, a single large CHON body could be converted into petroleum on the scale of the now played-out Saudi oil fields. OPEC could be facing a rerun of the Lalande Implosion for its residual market in chemical feedstocks.

Another near-Earth habitat arced overhead. A shooting star followed. Justin's mind's eye began to visualize planetesimals and how easily they could be guided to the inner Solar System. Use a small fraction of the body itself for reaction ma.s.s, with a Leo fuel cell to provide initial power. It wasn't as if their orbits were that stable ... gravitational perturbations, whether from the planets or pa.s.sing unseen interstellar objects, often sent planetesimals plunging sunward. When that happened, the objects were called comets.

He pondered aloud. After a while, Barbara interrupted. "Of all of the applications for nanotech, this one seems the least imminent. How long will it take to catch a wannabe comet and do something useful with it? Why are you obsessing on that?"

"Good question." Something about comets had to be significant, had to be bugging his subconscious.

What?

Comet-watching. NASA and the European s.p.a.ce Agency, before consolidation with their national and regional equivalents into UNASA, had had several comet-chasing missions.

He was both relieved and chagrined to find that even here in the depths of a cemetery his PDA had wireless net access. In deference to the necking couple downhill from them, Justin plugged in an earpiece.

"Query: comet-related s.p.a.ce probes," he whispered.

A few exchanges between man, digital a.s.sistant, and the net, and Justin knew what his subconscious had been yammering about. The last of the comet chasers, the Shoemaker probe, had been conceived ofby NASA in 2009, had gone under contract in 2015, and was finally launched 2023. Its glory days were over by 2030, but with two low-budget mission extensions it had continued in limited use until only three years earlier. UNASA's decision to put Shoemaker into a low-energy safe mode had been purely financial.

"Display current position of Shoemaker relative to Earth, Sun, and Alpha Centauri. Superimpose an Alpha Centauri-to-Sol radio beam." An image filled the PDA's tiny screen. "Max brightness and contrast."

Wow. Shoemaker was out beyond Pluto, but still well within the forecast beam from the Centaurs.

The probe was nowhere near the conspirators' jamming beam.

The mission profile had been base-lined in 2010. The s.p.a.cecraft's design had been heavily constrained by the need to receive signals across the solar system from that era's comparatively low-powered transmitters. He retrieved an Interaetopedia image of the probe and whistled. Shoemaker's body and instruments were dwarfed by the probe's parabolic antenna. The caption explained that the antenna was unfurled after launch, like a very large umbrella.

"A very good question, Barb."

Did Shoemaker have the sensitivity to receive the Centaur signal? Could it be reactivated?

It seemed impossible to keep the secrets of Centaur nanotech from ISI... but perhaps there was a way to keep that information from becoming the conspirators' monopoly.

"And I think Shoemaker is the answer."

Epilogue.

"...According to a spokesman for the Boston police, more arrests are antic.i.p.ated. In other news, "3-V off," said Justin. The electronics complied. He turned to Barbara Briggs, seated on the sofa across the room from his armchair. "Not that an arrest will bring back Alicia, but that report does my heart good."

"Me, too. Have you heard how high up ISI's management chain they expect to get?"

"Ex-management. Yesterday the Board of Directors voted in a new CEO, who is already cleaning house. According to usually informed sources," by which he meant the Secretary-General of the ICU, "the FBI and Interpol are now heavily involved. We can credit their encouragement for the sudden interest of the Boston police in investigating your sister's death as possibly something other than a traffic accident. The federal and UK cases for violating ICU protocols will take longer to prepare, but I hear there will be indictments for that, too.

"So, to finally answer your question, I wouldn't want to be Mr. LaPointe right now."

"I miss her, a lot." His guest went to gaze out of his apartment window. "What a d.a.m.ned shame."

Justin stood beside Barbara, a comforting arm around her shoulders. "What a d.a.m.ned shame, indeed."

The Earth spun beneath the s.p.a.ce station, the terminator a racing wall of blackness. City lights sparkled across the night side of the planet. Much closer to the observation window, s.p.a.cecraft ranging from planetary shuttles to deep-s.p.a.ce tugs to free-flying microgravity factories to individual workers'

vacuum suits sailed in and out of sight.

"It's a view I never tire of," said the Secretary-General of the ICU.

Justin nodded, wondering whether her summons had been in response to his e-mail. al-Fraghani's aide hadn't explained.

"That," and the S-G's gesture encompa.s.sed the vista spread before them, both earthly and s.p.a.ce-based, "is what the ICU is here to protect. What ISI did, what you intervened in response to, put it all at risk. The worst possible outcome would have been the introduction of mature Centaur nanotech in the guise of an ISI monopoly. The industrial free-for-all we will now have instead, using the Centaur message as relayed by Shoemaker, is preferable only by comparison. It's still a nightmare."

The xenotechnomist remained silent. Still admiring the view, al-Fraghani removed a piece of paper from a pocket. "I'll give you this, Justin.

You don't think small thoughts."

Unfolded, he recognized the paper as a hardcopy of his e-mail. "Big problems call for big solutions."

"How ironic that the original manifestation of the big problem is nano-scaled."

She wasn't going to come out and ask, so Justin plunged ahead. "As outlined in my proposal, we have a problem that demands fixing: ICU no longer has a monopoly on interstellar transmitters. ISI has shown that. Other megacorps could be building more transmitters as we speak. The 'we are not human' gambit that ISI came up with could work again. The next time, we might not stumble upon the jammer."

"When we met, you had an equally interesting problem, but no solution." The Secretary-General gently waved his note. "This mentions that you have something to propose."

It irked him as a matter of principle that the best way he'd found to express this concept was an a.n.a.logy. "Do you ever buy things over the net?"

"Of course ... oh. Oh." She'd seen the dilemma. "So how can ET know which technology orders to honor?"

Justin patted his PDA. "The same way an e-tailer knows which orders to fill. Cryptography.

Forgery-proof digital signatures. Public/private key technology.

"In short, we need to send basic e-commerce technology to the Leos, Centaurs, and Aquarians immediately. They need to know how to recognize which transmissions to ignore."

"A reasonable solution, but why did you emphasize 'immediately'?"

Engine ignition of a nearby shuttle caught his attention. After watching the s.p.a.cecraft recede from sight, he answered. "We're in a race. If there is another megacorp out there with a transmitter, and it has this idea first, it could teach the ETs to honor only their requests. Or to always reply using encrypted messages that only it can decode."