There were certain obstacles, of course.
“So, what are you going to do, now you’re fabulously, unimaginably rich?” asked Ana.
“I’m going to—” I stopped. “You know, I’ve never spent much time thinking about what I would do if I became fabulously, unimaginably rich. Apart from not following Mother’s example, of course. That much is obvious.” My sister nodded soberly.
“You could give it back to her,” Ana proposed. I stared at her, trying to determine whether she was serious or not.
“She’d still want to punish me. For plotting behind her back, if nothing else: for retrieving a fortune she had thought forever lost, without her permission. For withholding your share. For Andrea. And what good would it do, anyway? Even if I were able to buy my way out of the debt of honor she doubtless believes I owe her in the currency denominated by her own identity, she will always view us merely as extensions of her will—treacherous, unreliable fingerlings, to be used and discarded at her convenience.”
“Well, then.” Ana’s smile was a fey thing, angles and shadows in the twilit office. “I ask again: What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to—” Again, I stalled. The possibilities were both limitless and suffocating. I tried again. “It’s slow money. It’s good for all debts. It’s good for lives. I’ve got so much I could buy a starship, build an interstellar colony, set myself up as a monarch—”
“Why would you want to do that?”
I shook my head, felt the invisible fingers of the water tugging on my braided hair. “You ask the most awkward questions, sis!”
“Not really.” She tilted her head to study me from a different angle. “Consider the origins of money: Money is what we create to pay off debts, no? Slow money is created to pay off a very specific type of debt—the debt incurred by the colonization of new star systems. It’s a debt so huge that there’s not much we can do with it other than shuffle it around to paper over the cracks when we exchange information of value across interstellar distances. Use it as a store of value? It’s too slow for anything other than underwriting asset-backed instruments, medium money. You can comfortably while away the rest of your life expectancy in luxury using a ten-thousandth of what you now hold, Krina. You can even continue as a mendicant scholar, writing your fascinating papers about the history of fraud. But the slow money will still be there. Convert it to fast money and you’d drown under the weight of it. You couldn’t spend it fast enough: You couldn’t even give it away in pieces. Your fortune, Krina, can only realistically be depleted by founding a new solar system or two. And unless you choose to do that, it’s going to hang over you for the rest of your life, dwarfing anything else you do.”
“Is that why you’re throwing your share away?” I asked.
Ana could have chosen to take offense at my characterization of her actions, but she just nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Only I’m not throwing it away. The People know what to do with it. There is a plan: We’re less than three light-years away from a not-yet-claimed M-class dwarf star that hosts a promising water giant. Tidally locked, of course, and a nuisance to reach orbit from, but it has more than six times the habitable volume of Shin-Tethys. We think it should be habitable with only minimal upgrade patches to our ’cytes and techné. With my share added to the people’s resources, there will be barely any foundational debt; we plan to establish a world completely free of money, a world populated by new teuthidian humanity, with a society based on consensus, not debt, and respect for collective autonomy, not competitive commerce. A world where the word ‘free’ will not be needed because nothing will cost anything and everything will be attainable!” Her skin shone with the pearly luster of her enthusiasm for the radiant future of the communist squid-nation: “I’m going to bring about the Jubilee! For the squid-folk, anyway.”
“I think you’ve taken leave of your senses,” I said. “But if you’re trying to thumb your nose at Sondra, I can’t think of a better way to do it.”
“You’re welcome to join us if you want. You’d be very welcome.”
“But I don’t want to found a colony!” I struggled to understand my own visceral conviction that this would be the wrong course of action to choose for my future.
“Tough. When you have a slow dollar, you hold a fortune. When you have a million slow dollars, the fortune holds you. You need to move soon, or Sondra will attempt to take her loss—whether it was ever truly a loss or not—out of your skin. But even if you succeed in evading her, you’re going to have to work out what you mean to do with the rest of your life sooner or later. Otherwise, the Atlantis Carnet will ride you like a bad dream.”
“Thanks, sis.” I put my most heartfelt sarcastic emphasis behind the words. “Do you have any other suggestions?”
“No, but I’ve got a request. Message for Rudi: Tell him I still think of him fondly, and everything is going according to plan . . .”
* * *
It is a well-understood truism that interstellar warfare is impossible.
Starships are prohibitively expensive. They cost millions of slow dollars, with a construction time measured in decades and a flight duration in centuries. In view of which inconvenient fact, it’s almost impossible to imagine how an aggressor might recoup the cost of a warship’s construction. Nor is it easy to conceal such a project: Starships are big, expensive prestige projects—if anyone built such a vehicle and launched it toward an already-inhabited solar system, the locals would have centuries to prepare a warm reception for it. There is no sensible way to profit by invasion and conquest: Interstellar commerce travels by light, in the form of information, rather than as physical commodities. By any rational reckoning, money spent on a warship would be better invested on a colony project targeting an uninhabited star system; and in any event, it takes so long to build a starship that any temporary insanity motivating such a gesture would evaporate long before the battleship could be built and launched.
Unfortunately, nobody told my mother.
Cold Vengeance
In a darkened, half-frozen vault aboard a hulk drifting between the stars, something stirred.
(Darkness, cold, and dust.)
For most of two millennia, the Vengeance had drifted in chilly isolation, systems mothballed, its surviving skeleton crew so deep in slowtime that it amounted to suspended animation.
Let me sketch you a plan of the Vengeance:
The front of the roughly cylindrical ship is a flat disk of beryllium armor that was originally nearly thirty centimeters thick; it’s pitted and eroded to half that depth, the result of many centuries of exposure to the dust and gas of the interstellar medium. Sheltering behind it, active radar and phased-array installations to detect and vaporize incoming dust grains.
Behind the forward shield and sensors, a bulky series of fuel tanks and mothballed machines surround the central service and command core. Off to one side, the interstellar communicators—telescopes and laser transmitters—lie shielded by the fuel tanks, slaved to a beacon station now just a fractional arc second off-center from the star toward which the Vengeance is drifting. Behind them wait the cold, quiescent, fusion reactors needed for deceleration and maneuvering on arrival; and then more fuel tanks.