"It will be," Gregg said, "if Piet has his way-and if we start bringing back enough chips from the outworlds to make the price more attractive than paying sailors to do the work."
"What we should be doing," I said bitterly, "is setting up large-scale microchip production ourselves."
Gregg looked at me. "Perhaps," he said. "But that's a long-term proposition. For now it's cheaper to use the stockpiles-and the operating factories, there are some-on the outworlds. And it's important that men return to the stars, too, Piet thinks."
In a normal starship installation, there was a three-man console for each band of attitude jets-up to six bands in a particularly large vessel. The crewmen fired the jets on command to change the ship's heading and attitude, while the main thrusters, plasma motors, supplied power for propulsion.
On the Porcelain, a separate artificial intelligence controlled the jets. The AI's direction was both faster and more subtle than that of even the best-trained crew-but spacers are conservative men, those who survive, and they tend to confuse purpose-built attitude AIs with attitude control through the main navigational unit.
The latter could be rough because the equipment wasn't configured for the purpose. Even so, I believed machine control was better nine times out of ten than anything humans could manage.
"You do know something about electronics, then," Gregg said, though he wasn't looking at me when he spoke.
"Do people often lie to you?" I snapped.
"Not often, no," the bigger man agreed, unperturbed.
"Usually there's an officer to command each control bank," Gregg continued mildly. "Here, I'm just to keep the crew from being bothered by-gentlemen who feel a need to give orders. Lightbody, Jeude, Dole."
The sailors looked up as Gregg called their names.
"Dole's our bosun," Gregg said. "These three have been with Piet since before I met him, when he had a little intrasystem trader. He put them on the controls because they can be trusted not to get in the way of the electronics."
Jeude, a baby-faced man (and he certainly wasn't very old to begin with), wore a blue-and-white striped stocking cap. He doffed it in an ironic salute.
"Boys, meet Mister Jeremy Moore," Gregg went on. "I think you'll find him a resourceful gentleman."
"A friend of yours, Mister Gregg?" Jeude asked.
Gregg snorted. Instead of answering the question, he said, "Do you have any friends, Moore?"
"A few women, I suppose," I said. "Not like he means, no."
My guts no longer roiled, but they'd knotted themselves tightly in my lower abdomen. I focused my eyes on the viewscreen above the navigational console. Half the field was bright with stars, two of which were circled with blue overlays. A three-quarter view of Venus, opalescent with the dense, bubbling atmosphere, filled the rest of the screen.
"That's a very high resolution unit," I said aloud. "I'm amazed at the clarity."
"Piet doesn't skimp on the tools he needs," Gregg said. "It's a perfect view of the hell that wraps the world that bore us, that's certainly true."
He paused, staring at the lustrous, lethal surface of gas. "Does your family have records from the Collapse, Moore?" he asked.
"No," I said, "no. My grandfather sold the factory ninety years ago and moved to Ishtar City. If there were any records, they were lost then."
"My family does," Gregg said. "The histories say it was the atmosphere that protected Venus during the Revolt, you know. Outworld raiders knew that our defenses wouldn't stop them, but they couldn't escape our winds. The Hadley Cells take control from any unfamiliar pilot and fling his ship as apt as not into the ground. The raiders learned to hit softer targets that only men protected."
"Isn't it true, then?" I said, responding to the bitterness in Gregg's voice. "That's how I'd already heard it."
"Oh, the atmosphere saved us from the rebels, that much was true," Gregg said. "But when the histories go on, 'Many died because off-planet trade was disrupted. .' That's not the same as reading your own ancestors' chronicle of those days. Venus produced twenty percent of its own food before the Collapse. Afterwards, well, the food supply couldn't expand that fast, so the population dropped. Since the distribution system was disrupted also, the drop was closer to nine in ten than eight in ten."
"We're past that now," I said. "That was a thousand years ago. A thousand Earth years."
A third spark in a blue highlight snapped into place on the star chart. "The Kinsolving," said Dole, ostensibly to the sailors to either side of him at the console. "And about fucking time."
Lightbody sniffed.
Piet Ricimer raised a handset and began speaking into it, his eyes fixed on a separate navigational tank beneath the viewscreen.
"Bet they just now got around to turning on their locator beacon," Jeude said. "Though they'll claim it was equipment failure."
"Right," said Gregg, his eyes so fixedly on the pearly orb of Venus that they drew my gaze with them. "At Eryx, that's the family seat, there was a pilot hydroponics farm. They figured what the yield would support and drew lots for those who could enter the section of the factory where the farm was."
Gregg's face lost all expression. "The others. ." he continued. "Some of the others tried to break into the farm and get their share of the food. My ancestor's younger brother led a team of volunteers that held off the mob as long as they could. When they were out of ammunition, they checked the door seals and then blew the roof of their own tunnel open to the surface. That's what the atmosphere of Venus means to me."
"It was worse on Earth," I said. "When the centralized production plants were disrupted, only one person in a thousand survived. There were billions of people on Earth before the Revolt, but they almost all died."
Gregg rubbed his face hard with both hands, as if he were massaging life back into his features. He looked at me and smiled. "As you say, a thousand years," he said. "But in all that time, the Greggs of Eryx have always named the second son Stephen. In memory of the brother who didn't leave descendants."
"That was the past," I said. "There's enough in the future to worry about."
"You'll get along well with Piet," Gregg said. His voice was half-mocking, but only half. "You're right, of course. I shouldn't think about the past the way I do."
It occurred to me that Gregg wasn't only referring to the early history of Eryx Hold.
The bisected viewscreen above Ricimer shivered into three parts, each the face of a ship's captain: Blakey of the Mizpah; Winter of the Kinsolving; and Moschelitz, the bovine man who oversaw Absalom 231's six crewmen and automated systems.
Blakey's features had a glassy, simplified sheen which I diagnosed as a result of the Mizpah's transmission being static-laden to the point of unintelligibility. The AI controlling the Porcelain's first-rate electronics processed both the audio and visual portions of the signal into a false clarity. The image of Blakey's black-mustached face was in effect the icon of a virtual reality.
Ricimer raised the handset again. Guillermo switched a setting on the control console. The Molt's wrists couldn't rotate, but each limb had two more offset joints than a human's, permitting the alien the same range of movement.
"Gentlemen," Ricimer said. "Fellow venturers. You're all brave men, or you wouldn't have joined me, and all God-fearing and patriots or I wouldn't have chosen you."
The general commander's words boomed through the tannoy in the ceiling above the attitude-control console; muted echoes rustled through the open hatchways to compartments farther aft. No doubt the transmission was being piped through the other vessels as well, though I wondered whether anybody aboard the Mizpah would be able to understand the words over the static.