Serjeant Bull sighed lugubriously. The gill slits in his neck vented slightly as he exhaled: “I believe you. Millions wouldn’t. However, Professor Alizond, there is the matter of your wallet contents. And of your oddly configured second soul. If you wouldn’t mind explaining again?”
I tried not to roll my eyes. “I am of a modestly wealthy lineage, and I am embarked on a course of travel and study that was expected to take decades of travel time and multiple interstellar transmissions to complete. Don’t you think it would be rash of me to have set off on such a journey without a substantial amount of money on my person, much of it in long-term currency units that could be converted along the way to pay for my later transmission sectors? And as for my highly suspicious second chip, you are aware that my scholarly pilgrimage is a sabbatical activity, and when I am not sitting in a police interview room or traveling between universities, I am a researcher employed by a bank? As such, I am from time to time entrusted with custody of extremely confidential information—material that must be held as closely as my own soul. I should also like to note that banking is a relatively safe occupation: I am not in any significant physical danger from day to day. A single running backup of my soul-state is plenty under those circumstances.”
“A banker.” He tapped the tabletop, making an annotation in a script I was unable to recognize. “Can you discuss your job? Not any specific confidences, but in general outline?”
“In general outline? Hmm. Banking, you must understand, is primarily concerned with managing and avoiding risk. Most people think it’s about debt, but debt is merely the starting point. If you wish to borrow money from a banker, the banker will want to know, first and foremost, whether you are likely to repay them. The profit from a loan must be offset against the risk of default or nonpayment: Only by making more loans that repay a profit than loans that end in default can a bank remain in business in the long term, unless it is a currency-issuing bank, in which case . . . but I digress. I do not work in the part of the bank that analyzes the risk posed by individuals. I am a scholar: I research the history of financial frauds, in order that my employers may develop procedures to guard against them. We have inherited a financial system thousands of years old, covering hundreds of star systems. The variety and range of scams and swindles and rackets and cons is endless, and different methods go in and out of fashion.” I managed to summon up a tight-lipped smile: “My job is to invent mechanisms that prevent financial crime.”
Sergeant Bull tapped the tabletop again. “So you say.” His expression was morose. Three times round the block over two days, and we were back where we’d started. “So you say . . .” He paused. “Let me ask you a hypothetical question. Suppose—this is a question, not a promise—I were to arrange to release you without charge tomorrow, and with a temporary visitor’s visa. What would you do?”
“Why”—I leaned back in the uncomfortably hard chair I had been provided with—“I’d look for Ana. To the best of my abilities, anyway, to see if she’s left any sign of where she might have gone. Obviously, you and your colleagues have been searching for her for some time, but there’s always a chance that as a sib descended from the same archetype, I might have some insight into her actions. Assuming that her disappearance was voluntary, of course.”
“And if you found nothing?”
I had a strong sense that this hypothetical was not very hypothetical at alclass="underline" “I came to Dojima System to study with her. I can’t move on without being sure that she’s”—the skeuomorphic swallow reflex kicked in: Saying dead was difficult—“before I continue on my pilgrimage. But if she’s disappeared without sign, eventually I’ll have to, have to . . .”
He nodded. Was that sympathy in his expression? Or just the understanding of a police officer evaluating a suspect and finding her behavior to be consistent with that of a grieving relative rather than a possible perpetrator?
“I understand,” he said. Then: “I’ll see what I can do.” He rose to leave. “Wait here.”
I waited. And waited. And then—
Along time ago—2686 years and fifty-three days in sidereal time, not accounting for relativistic effects—the starship Atlantis spread her vast and tenuous sail and her backers switched on the propulsion beams that would boost her up to cruise speed for a four-century flight.
Atlantis’s destination was a hitherto-unvisited M-class red-dwarf star. Painstaking observation had detected a pair of wet gas giant planets with numerous moons, and at least two debris belts: not a first-rank example of prime real estate but good enough to justify the gamble. Four out of five starships usually survived to make starfalclass="underline" 80 percent of the colonies they established took root eventually. Atlantis stood a better-than-usual chance of flourishing, for it had barely a parsec to travel, and its target was a compact system with plenty of sunlit asteroids to take root on—a type of system for which the colonization protocols were well understood.
Let me walk you through the history of Atlantis colony.
First, the construction and launch. Seventy years to organize and plan, to train the crew, build the vessel and its launch-support structures. Finally, it spreads its sail, and the giant beam stations in low solar orbit light up, blasting terawatts of power at it. Power that, received, can be focused on the billion tons of water ice and hydrogen slush that the ship carries for reaction mass. The starship accelerates slowly, initially at not much more than a hundredth of a gee; and it gets less power from the beam as the distance from the launch station increases. But it keeps accelerating for years, then decades, lightening as it expends reaction mass and gathering pace as it spirals out of the star system of its birth. After two years, it is speeding outward at stellar-escape velocity. At ten years, nothing from the inner star system stands a chance of catching up with it. When the launch beams shut down a century into the voyage, the starship is most of a light-year from home, racing into the interstellar gulf at three thousand kilometers per second: and it has discarded all but a fiftieth of its launch mass.
Many hazards can destroy a starship in flight. The environment it flies through is intensely hostile; at 1 percent of light speed, the ship’s momentum effectively turns the cold hydrogen and helium atoms of the interstellar medium into hard radiation. A grain of ice with a mass of milligrams packs the impact energy of tons of high explosive. Other threats can kill a ship in flight: In one memorable incident, a starship flew through the radiation jet of a distant gamma-ray burster: Secondary activation effects reduced its crew to much the same condition as Lady Cybelle.
The Atlantis, however, survives its interstellar crossing. Thirty years out from its destination, the crew reassembles and configures its fusion reactors, and deploys the fast flyby probes that will race through the star system, mapping and exploring ahead of their arrival. For the last decades of the voyage, the starship brakes hard, burning its remaining fuel mass at a prodigious rate. The crew studies candidate asteroids with care, finally reaching a consensus on the target to make first landing on. When the year of arrival comes, the Atlantis that enters orbit is barely a shadow of the billion-ton behemoth that set out to cross the gulf. Two thousand bodies and ten times that number of archived souls ride a skeletal payload framework, less than ten thousand tons remaining, as it arrives at the fifty-kilometer carbonaceous rock that will become Atlantis Beacon.