sixties, where people are kept busy doing their old jobs.
Fully half of the new worlds were variants on the same theme, the only difference being in the level of limitations imposed on their biononics. There were even some deactivated portals now; those that had been used to establish the Restart worlds. There were no biononics on such planets, nor even the memory of them. The new inhabitants had their memories wiped, awakening on arrival to the belief they had travelled there in hibernation sleep on an old slower-than-light colony ship that left Earth in the nineteen forties. They remained free to carry on their lives as though the intervening years had never happened.
I believe it was our greatest defeat that so many of us were unable to adjust naturally to our new circumstances, where every thought is a treasure to be incubated. It was a failure of will, of self-confidence, which prevented so many from taking that next psychological step. The adjustment necessary was nothing like the re- education courses which used to mark our race’s waves of scientific progress; an adaptation which could be achieved by simply going back to school and learning new skills. To thrive today you had to change your attitude and look at life from a wholly new perspective. How sad that for all its triumphs, the superb society we had constructed and systematically laboured to improve for two thousand years was unable to provide that inspiration for everyone at the end.
But as I’d been told so many times, we now had the time to learn, and this new phase of our existence had only just begun. On the Earth below, nearly a third of the older adults spent their time daysleeping. Instead of the falsehood of enforced technological limitation on colony worlds, they immersed themselves in perfectly activated memories of the old days, trading such recollections amongst themselves for those blissful times spent in a simpler world. The vast majority, so they said, relished the days of childhood or first romances set in the age of horse- drawn carriages and sailing ships.
Maybe one day they would tire of their borrowed times and wake from their unreality to look around anew at what we have achieved. For out there on the other worlds, the ones defying any restriction, there was much to be proud of. Fiume, where the gas giants were being dismantled to build a vast shell around the star, with an inner surface capable of supporting life. Milligan, whose colonists were experimenting with truly giant wormholes which they hoped could reach other galaxies. Oranses, home to the original sinners, condemned by the Vatican for their project of introducing communal sentience to every living thing on their planet, every worm, insect, and stalk of grass, thus creating Gaia in all her majesty. All this glorious playground was our heritage, a gift from the youth of today to their sulking, inward-looking parents.
My flyer soared out of the traffic stream just before we passed over the rim of Tangsham portal. I directed it round the toroid of exotic matter to the station on the other side. The molecular curtain over the hangar complex entrance parted to let us through, and we alighted on one of the reception platforms. Charles Winter Hutchenson, the station chief, came out to meet me. The Hutchensons are one of our partners in Tangsham, a settlement which is endeavouring to transform people into star-voyagers, a species of immense biomechanical constructs that will spend eternity exploring space. Placing a human mind into the core of such a vessel is simple enough, but its psychology must undergo considerable adaptation to be comfortable with such a body. Yet as I saw on my approach to the portal, there was no shortage of people wishing to join the quest. The solid planets in the Tangsham star system were ringed with construction stations, fed by rivers of matter extracted from asteroids and gas giants. Energy converter nodules had been emplaced deep within the star itself to power such colossal industrial endeavour. It was a place of hard science; there was little of nature’s beauty to be found there.
‘Pleasure to welcome you on board,’ Charles Winter Hutchenson said warmly. ‘I didn’t know elder representatives concerned themselves with incidents like this.’
‘I have several motives,’ I confessed. ‘I met Carter Osborne Kenyon a long time ago. Attending to him now is the least I can do. And he is one of the senior nuclear engineers on the project, he’s entitled to the best service we can provide. Is he back yet?’
‘Yes. He arrived about an hour ago. I halted the transshipment as you asked.’
‘Fine. My cybershadow will take care of the official casework for us. But I’d like to assess the requirements in person first.’
‘Okay. This way.’ He led me over to a cathedral-sized cargo hall where the stasis chamber was being kept. It was a translucent grey cylinder suspended between two black glass slabs. The outline of a prone human figure was just visible inside.
My cybershadow meshed me with the chamber’s control AI, and I instructed it to give me a status review. Carter Osborne Kenyon wasn’t in a good condition. There had been an accident on one of Tangsham’s construction stations; even with our technological prowess, machinery isn’t flawless. Some power relays had surged, plasma temperature had doubled, there had been a blow-out. Metal was vaporized as the errant plasma jet cut its way through several sheets of decking. Loose panels had swung about, one of them catching Carter a severe blow. The left side of his body had been badly damaged. Worse than that, the edge of the metal had cracked his skull open, pulping the brain tissue inside. It would have been fatal in an earlier age. He was certainly clinically dead before he hit the ground. But the emergency systems had responded efficiently. His body had immediately been sealed in stasis, and microdrones had swept the area, gathering up every cell that had splashed across the floor and nearby walls. The cells were subsequently put in stasis with him.
We had all the component parts, they just had to be reassembled properly. His genome would be read, and each damaged cell repaired, identified, then replaced in its correct location. It could be done on Tangsham, but they would have to commit considerable resources to it. While Earth, with its vast elderly population, retained the greatest level of medical expertise among all of the settled worlds, and subsequently devoted the highest percentage of resources to the field. That concentration of knowledge also meant our software and techniques remained far ahead of everyone else. Carter’s best chance for a full reanimation and recovery was with us.
‘The damage is within our accepted revival limits,’ I told Charles Winter Hutchenson. ‘I’ll authorize the procedure and take him back with me to the institute clinic.’
The station chief seemed glad that the disruption to his routine was being dealt with so propitiously. He instructed the cargo hall’s gravity field to refocus, and the stasis chamber bobbed up into the air, then slid away to my flyer’s hold.
I left the portal, and guided the flyer directly to the Raleigh institute. It wasn’t just the physical cell structure of Carter’s brain which the medical technicians would repair, his memories too would have to be re-established. That was the part of him I was most interested in salvaging. It was as close to time travel as I would ever get.
With the sensorium integration routines developed for the daysleepers I would be able to drop right into his world. I would be there, observing, listening, and tasting, right from the very first time he met Justin Ascham Raleigh during that initial freshers week, until the night of the murder. And unlike him, I wouldn’t view those moments through sentiment — I’d be scouring every second for anomalies, hints of out-of-character behaviour, the misplaced nuance of a single word.
There were three and a half solid years to reconnoitre. I wasn’t just examining the time they were in each other’s presence. Anything that was said and done during that time could prove crucially relevant. Even his dreams might provide a clue.
It would take a while. There were so many resources I had to supervise and negotiate over, I couldn’t schedule much current time to the case; maybe an hour a week. But I’d waited this long now. Time was no longer a relevant factor.
SIX
ETA CARINAE AD 2038
The deepflight ship eased out of the wormhole portal and twisted smoothly to align itself on the habitat disc. Two light-years away, Eta Carinae had inflated across half of the universe. Its blue-white ejecta lobes were webbed with sharp scarlet lines as the outer plasma envelope slowly radiated away their incredible original temperature. The entire edifice was engulfed in a glowing crimson corona that bristled with spiky gas jets slowly dissipating out
