The meeting was breaking up, thank goodness. Remilla and Taj herded the immigration men out of the room, leaving Rachel and Pav alone. “Tough, huh?”
He smiled. “Among the many things we don’t have at home . . . bureaucracies and paperwork.”
“Give us time.”
“Well, here on Earth, it’s only going to get more difficult,” Pav said. “We’ll be in the news, we’ll have this media agent, then . . .”
He yawned.
“Are you as tired as I am?” Rachel said. Pav didn’t need to answer; it was on his face. “Let’s be old folks at home for the moment,” she said, using a phrase her father loved, describing family nights. “Soup for Yahvi, then bed.”
“Tomorrow, the world,” Pav murmured.
QUESTION: Rachel, you have spoken about the challenges of simply surviving for twenty years in a habitat created by aliens using their technology—
RACHEL: First of all, the habitat was designed and built to accommodate humans.
QUESTION: How?
RACHEL: Ask the Architects.
QUESTION: Then back to my—
RACHEL: The same Architects equipped us with two things . . . one was the proteus, which is a 3-D printer evolved by a few thousand years. It’s a device that can replicate or fabricate just about anything, from food to tools to electronic equipment and even chemicals.
QUESTION: Sounds like magic.
RACHEL: Or just technology that’s far more advanced than ours. What would Ben Franklin have thought of a computer? We also needed one other thing to make the proteus work, and that was Substance K, which is essentially nanotech goo. Almost everything in Keanu was made of it. After living there for twenty years and eating food derived from it, I’m probably made of Substance K.
INTERVIEW AT YELAHANKA,
APRIL 14, 2040
XAVIER
Xavier Toutant was not part of the big negotiations. It was not his thing, though during the prelaunch preparations he had been quite amused to hear Rachel and Pav and Harley Drake and the others talking about rights deals and money, since not one of the HBs had dealt with the subject since the day they were scooped off Earth in 2019.
Maybe that showed how shortsighted they all were, or possibly they had evolved past such mundane concerns.
At the moment, however, Xavier Toutant was consumed by his job, his mission, which was cargo.
The crew had only taken basic travel gear off Adventure—clothes, a little food, toiletries. Everything else that might have been interesting or useful remained aboard the spacecraft, including their own Keanu-built Slates and 3-D printing gear, but most important of all . . . a ton of goo.
Which was what Xavier had been calling it since the day he’d arrived on Keanu as a nineteen-year-old junior fry cook and failed pot dealer. The Bangalores came up with several names for it—NanoTech Slurry, Building Block, and mostly Substance K—but it was still the raw material that, they had discovered, filled whatever part of the interior of Keanu that wasn’t good old rock. There were even pipes that allowed Keanu’s control system to pump huge gobs of the stuff from one place to another.
The HBs had never learned how to make more of it. Keanu had vats and pools where it was obvious that goo was “grown” from raw materials that you would find in space (water being number one). They had built their own “pipeline” to transfer goo from these pockets back to the human habitat. Maintaining and redirecting that line was one of the most time-consuming jobs in the whole habitat.
Because the things you could do with the goo were . . . anything. Feed it into your proteus, then imprint it with assembly data, and you could make it into a metal machine or a composite structure or a cow or a bowl of gumbo—bowl and gumbo, which seriously impressed Xavier the cook.
In the past, goo had been used to make actual human beings. They didn’t live long, but that wasn’t the fault of the goo.
But it was what made life on Keanu possible. (All the habitats started out as giant empty chambers with a layer of goo that could be “rearranged” into soil, plants, buildings, and then some of the items already mentioned. Built to suit: Humans got an Earth-like habitat, Sentries got an aquatic one, Skyphoi got whatever the fuck they lived in, and so on.)
Adventure had several tanks of goo stored on the lower deck of the vehicle, right below the control module they had lived in for four days. It was Xavier’s job to make sure it was still there.
And to figure out how to transfer it, store it, and make it useful.
Because—and this was the real reason Xavier ducked out of the media agent auction—the goo and the “magic” 3-D proteus printing were going to fund the mission, not the crew’s “personal stories.”
Xavier was happy to spend his time making that a reality. His other goals here on Earth were minimal. All he’d left behind was his momma, and she was close to death the day he was scooped up in 2019. His first mission, once he was able to use a computer, or whatever they called it these days, was to find out when she’d died and where she was buried.
Taj, who in Xavier’s mind was turning out to be a good guy, and Wing Commander Kaushal, perhaps a bit less good, offered up a cargo truck, willing hands, and a weapons bunker after Xavier told them, “I’ll need secure storage for whatever I take off Adventure.”
“For how long?” Kaushal said.
“On the order of two weeks.” The figure was anywhere between two days and infinity, so two weeks seemed a good compromise.
Did Xavier need refrigeration or temperature control? No. Were there special handling needs? Well, yes—he may have suggested that there was a chance of a dangerous radiation leak.
Which made Wing Commander Kaushal unhappy. “What were you thinking, bringing radioactives to my base?” The look he shot at Taj said, pretty clearly, I’m not doing this—!
But Xavier and Pav had war-gamed this argument. “Do you have depleted uranium cannon shells?” he said.
Kaushal stared back. “I can’t answer that.”
“Fine,” Xavier said, “let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that you might have a case around here somewhere. One case of those shells emits more radioactivity than our entire two tons in a year.”
This seemed to mollify Kaushal. It was the absolute truth without being the whole truth: The goo emitted no radiation at all.
But Xavier wanted Kaushal and his team to think it did. It would keep prying hands and eyes away.
He was introduced to Chief Warrant Officer Singh, a man of forty so dark and fat he could have been Xavier’s twin. The man’s grim, businesslike manner gave no hint of brotherly affection, however. It was clear he regarded Xavier with suspicion.
Singh’s team included four others in descending seniority and age: a sergeant, a corporal, and two leading aircraftsmen. The latter two were probably twenty years old.
There was another warrant officer, Pandya, who was Singh’s opposite in almost every way: ten years younger, fifty kilos lighter, relaxed and often smiling.
He deferred to Singh perfectly, which confirmed Xavier’s hunch that he was the representative of the Indian intelligence services.
Xavier had two trucks and the cherry picker at his disposal—quite a fleet for a guy who had never owned a car and hadn’t driven in two decades. They headed to the landing site directly after breakfast on the second day, Xavier jammed into the first truck cab with Singh and a driver. Two heavyweights in that small, crammed space, and no air-conditioning. It was the longest half kilometer Xavier had ever ridden.