Slabscape : Reset Page 13

  ‘Why not? If it really is the same as this Slab, you already know everything about your own defences. You must know your own weak points.’

  ‘Our defences are designed specifically to withstand anything we can dream up,’ said Richard. ‘And even if we could get through the outer defences, the Slab walls are fifty kilometre-thick Natalite. The hardest substance known to man. It is virtually impenetrable.’

  ‘Natalite?’ asked Louie. His central screen filled with information about aggregated diamond nanorods.

  ‘Of course, we are only making assumptions at the moment,’ said Erik, ‘but they are fair assumptions, and they lead us to contemplate a wide range of disturbing possibilities.’

  ‘If the Rellies find out about this they will have a field day,’ called out someone from the back. ‘This is exactly the sort of blocks they’ve been going on about for years.’

  Louie looked at Erik. ‘Rellies?’ he said with a raised eyebrow.

  Erik explained; ‘Rellies is the popular name for members of the Church of Relativity. They are believers in the absolute lightspeed barrier and frequent protesters and portenders of doom onSlab. The fact that our acceleration is tending toward zero as we approach C has helped to calm the SlabWide panic they were attempting to whip up, but that hasn’t stopped some of them from arguing that something of significant mass could be travelling away from our point of origin with sufficient speed so that our velocity relative to theirs could be greater than C.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Their mantra is that everything is relative,’ said Richard. ‘Say we’re moving away from Earth at a speed that’s approaching the speed of light and Earth sends out another ship in the opposite direction that accelerates at a similar rate to us, then at some point, we will be travelling faster than the speed of light, relative to that other ship.’ Sis was drawing neat blue diagrams on his central screen to illustrate the intern’s description.

  ‘So?’ Louie had spent enough time around egg-heads to know when he was being bullshitted. It seemed there were a number of interns arguing about this same point on his left screen.

  ‘Look, we’re not saying it’s true, but we are running out of explanations. One thing we know for sure is that we are looking at a Slab that seems to be from our future. A future that indicates something cataclysmic has happened to Slab. Something that wiped out all living things inside it.’

  ‘So if we’re travelling faster than light, which is not possible, relative to a spaceship that’s travelling away from us . . . ’ said Louie, slowly, tying to make himself understand. He could see a barrage of mathematical equations on the right hand screen that meant nothing at all to him. ‘What happens to the other ship, the one we’re moving away from? It’s travelling faster than light relative to us too, isn’t it? And that’s not possible either.’

  ‘No it isn’t.’

  ‘So it could have a doppelganger in front of it too?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Erik, looking miserable.

  ‘And, seeing as how we have now gotten very close to the speed of light, almost anything that’s travelling away from us at an even moderately decent speed like, say, a planet in fast orbit, or a galaxy moving away from us at high speed, could be experiencing the same effect?’

  ‘Potentially.’

  ‘But that could be happening all over the universe, couldn’t it?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘So it’s like we’ve broken some really fucking important law of the Universe or something?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Erik, looking seriously upset. And that, thought Louie, for a president who wasn’t exactly celebrated for his levity, was very upset indeed.

  ‘And that’s why we’re all dead – in the future?’

  Louie looked around him. The chatter on his screens had petered out to a virtual silence. Someone had put in a query about self-stasis options on the right screen. The centre screen was flashing the words Not possible in large blue letters.

  ‘So,’ said Louie carefully, ‘why exactly are you telling me all this?’

  Marilyn cleared her throat.

  fourteen

  ‘He’s a manipulative, cunning, cheating wind-farmer and I wouldn’t trust him with the key to a song.’

  ‘So how come he got to be president, then? Surely no-one would vote for him if they knew what he was really like?’

  Kiki gave Dielle a withering look. They were having a late breakfast outside a café in UpTown DownTown Seacombe SideUp. Dielle had come to meet Kiki, who was between meetings. They sat overlooking a dozen bustling platforms and suspended walkways linked by impossibly long and slender bridges.

  ‘Well, first of all, that’s precisely why people would vote for him,’ she said. ‘Those are some pretty useful qualities for any president. Always have been. But in any case, he wasn’t elected. We abandoned democracy as a failed experiment shortly after leaving Earth’s jurisdiction. He won the presidency in the leadership lottery.’ Dielle raised his eyebrows. ‘The theory goes,’ continued Kiki, ‘that anyone is capable of being president, so anyone can be, except the people who really want to be, because the last person who should be given a position of power is someone who tries to convince people they should have it.’

  Dielle poured himself a second cup of coffee. ‘You’re losing me,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a basic premise of the Initial Design: The people that want to, should be the last ones allowed to. It’s the nearest we get onSlab to an official political philosophy. We pick our presidents at random and they get to be president for a maximum of ten cycles and anyone can quit any time they like if they don’t like the job. It can happen to anyone – only it’s happened to Pleewo three times in succession.’

  ‘Three? He’s been picked at random three times from over thirty million people?’

  ‘Well, not everyone’s eligible, because of age or mental acuity and so on. Many people opt out, too. There are currently,’ she paused for a fraction of a second, ‘almost twenty-four million possible contenders for the job and every single one of them knows there is no way Pleewo could possibly have won the lottery three times in a row. The odds against it are astronomicubed but no-one can figure out how he did it. It’s generally acknowledged that if he’s clever enough and well connected enough to have got away with rigging it at least twice, then he’s probably an ideal person to be president anyway, so no-one’s complaining too much, or at least not too loudly. He’s still not to be trusted though, pretty much by definition really.’

  ‘He seemed to know you pretty well.’

  ‘Our paths have crossed before,’ said Kiki darkly. ‘It’s a small Slab.’

  It didn’t seem very small to Dielle. The previous night’s party had given him a hint of just how varied life onSlab could be. Almost everyone he’d met had either delighted or confused him - sometimes both.

  The first thing he’d found out, after they’d left Charlie’s private rooms, was that all of the presidential public areas were designed around the interface, the gravity plane which separated one side of Slab from the other. This was done, ostensibly, to ensure complete presidential neutrality between the two sides of Slab civilisation. SlabCitizens took the whole UpSide/SideUp thing very seriously. Some lived their entire lives refusing to travel to the opposite side or have anything to do with the people that lived there. Dielle couldn’t see the point and had spent the evening happily bouncing from one floor to another, talking to anyone he liked and generally having a very good time.

  The main entertainment of the evening had taken place in an auditorium shaped like the inside of a gigantic scallop shell with two opposing stages at the hinge. Dielle and Kiki had sat with the rest of the Siders in comfortable reclining chairs, looking up at the Uppies looking up at them while the dancers from the pre-bar smooze performed an intricate aerial ballet suspended on the interface between the audiences.

  Kiki returned to the dressing rooms to change clothes twice during the night, the first time speci
fically for dancing, the second for lounging around looking attractive and sparkly. Most people changed clothes or accessories more than once but Dielle was happy with his red outfit and even happier with the number of women eager to leave their impression on various parts of it. He’d been quite a hit.

  He’d detected something different about Kiki’s attitude but couldn’t tell whether she was jealous of all the female attention he had been getting, or was concerned about how he was dealing with his celebrity status. He decided to find out.

  ‘You know,’ he said casually, ‘I think a couple of those women last night wanted to sex me.’

  ‘You think?’ said Kiki, distracted.

  ‘Yeah, a couple of times I felt like I was being hunted. And when everyone started shouting Happy NewCyke, and that dancer kissed me, there was some serious tongue action going on.’

  She turned her attention to him and looked him steady in the eyes. ‘You didn’t seem to mind too much.’

  ‘Well, I was flattered of course,’ he said defensively. ‘It was fun, but I have to say I’m feeling a little uncomfortable about it all. I have conflicting desires that I can’t reconcile. I don’t know how to describe it really.’ Dielle knew he had to get some insights into these personal interaction issues pretty soon or he was going to get into trouble. He needed a guide.

  Kiki was his guide, but she was also his agent and he loved her. He hoped she loved him too. Somehow that made it even more complicated.

  ‘It’s called guilt, darling,’ she said, smiling. ‘You are experiencing a very, very old feeling; one that’s been dicing with our heads since we came down from the trees. It’s caused by the inner conflict between what you really want to do and what your conscience thinks you should do. It’s one of the main reasons we’re all here.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, it’s commonly accepted that this struggle, which goes on inside all of us, is really a struggle between our physical, animalistic heritage – the part that is more than nine tenths the same as a common ape – and the non-physical, alien consciousness which infects us and has a completely different set of values and principals that we usually call ‘morals’. Our human side wants to do something but the annoying bloody conscience in our head tells us we shouldn’t. Animals don’t feel guilt – they don’t have the concept. That’s because they aren’t infected. Or it’s possible they are, but their aliens can’t fight hard enough to override the basic animal instincts of the host. They need to interface with our more highly evolved frontal lobes to do that.’

  ‘And humans are evolved enough for these aliens to manipulate us but not enough to overcome our animal instincts entirely?’ asked Dielle.

  ‘If you’re thinking that it’s all a bit unlikely, I’d agree with you.’ Kiki was looking serious. ‘One theory says that they stumbled upon Earth a couple of hundred thousand years ago when humans were nothing more than upright-walking apes and spotted them as potential future carriers. They seeded a few individuals and fed us little bits of useful information – like how to make fire, build language, form social groups, kill people from other social groups and so on. They’ve been dicing with our heads ever since. It explains a lot.’

  ‘You sound unhappy,’ said Dielle, ‘but surely it’s what got us to here? Wouldn’t we still be banging rocks together without them?’

  ‘It’s not that. It’s more about the human condition. We struggle and fight with ourselves for most of our lives. We stop ourselves from having what we want and then pretend we don’t. If we give in to our animal sides, it causes us pain but if we don’t, we feel frustrated, inhuman and disconnected. We fight each other over stuff we don’t even understand. We have soul mates who we long for and a feeling of emptiness inside us caused by the alien conscious energy’s separation from the rest of its collective. It drives some of us half mad. We’ve got an absolute right to complain about it.’

  Dielle had never seen Kiki looking so dark. He wanted to lighten things up.

  ‘So I feel an inner conflict because my inherited man ape wants to frolic naked with as many lady apes as possible and my consciousness is telling me I should behave with more integrity towards you? Have you got some form of side deal with my alien?’

  ‘Maybe my alien has, I wouldn’t know.’

  Dielle looked her in the eyes, wondering what Kiki had just admitted to.

  ‘Do you know why all those women wanted to bed you? Can you imagine?’

  ‘Well, I kind of assumed they’d seen me on a sume and liked what they saw and, well, you know . . . ’

  Kiki smiled at him and reached over to stroke his face. ‘You really have no idea, do you?’ she said gently. ‘You are such an innocent that it’s a shame to tell you, but you’ll find out soon enough anyway, if not from me, then from someone else.’

  ‘Tell me what?’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to ask Sis about something called human evolution gender disparity when you have some spare time, but basically it’s all about women being more highly evolved than men, what we did about it when it was discovered, and the fact that you are a primitive.’

  ‘More evolved?’

  ‘Sis will give you all the details, but it’s a numbers thing: usual breeding ages of the two sexes, younger females, older males and hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Basically, the female part of the genetic line has a lot more generations in it than the male line – thousands of years more. We’re more evolved.’

  ‘And what happened when it was discovered?’ Dielle thought this all sounded highly questionable, but he didn’t have enough information to argue about it. Yet.

  ‘Well, the first thing was they passed a law stipulating compulsory human breeding between young men and older women. That was a fun time, and no-one really complained about it, especially the older women. But it was futile, it would have taken tens of thousands of generations to redress the balance. Then the geneticists got very angry about it. At least the male geneticists did. They came up with a way to accelerate male-side gene evolution. Seeing as how they’d seriously diced everything up with the stop-gene fiasco, and no-one could breed without them, the future of the human race was in their hands anyway. So they did whatever they do and they say it’s worked but the result is that onSlab men are a lot more evolved than men were in your day. They’re more, well, like us women, I suppose.’

  Dielle was starting to get the picture. ‘So when people refer to me as a primitive, they mean my genes were formed before all this evolution re-balancing went on?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s why the women want to have sex with me? Because I’m less evolved than the men here?’

  ‘Well, that and the share in the royalties they’ll earn through the subsequent sumecasts.’

  ‘They’ll make money by having sex with me?’

  ‘Well of course! You’re a star.’ She paused to pour herself more orange juice. ‘It’s just that I don’t like any of the deals they’re offering at the moment.’

  ‘You’re negotiating royalty deals with women who want to go to bed with me?’

  ‘Naturally dear, I’m your agent, who else would . . . ’

  ‘Well you’re right about one thing,’ said Dielle, getting up and knocking his chair over in the process. It auto-righted. ‘You must all be a lot more bloody evolved than I am because I don’t understand a single word of this!’ But, he thought, I know a man who almost definitely will.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re getting so upset about it, dear,’ said Kiki, startled. ‘It’s great for your popularity ratings. If you’re confused, why don’t you ask Sis for more information?’

  ‘I’m going for an old-fashioned walk,’ he said, making for a bridge. ‘It’s the type of thing we primitives do – walk around aimlessly. I might even go find a tree to swing from.’

  ‘Well, enjoy yourself, dear,’ said Kiki cheerfully. ‘I’ll catch up with you later. There’s a skimmer meeting I’d like to take you to.’

&
nbsp; ‘Whatever,’ he said grumpily and walked off. He’d caught that slightly vacant look in Kiki’s eyes and felt sure she was negotiating a deal even as she waved him goodbye. He realised, with a rueful smile, that even knocking over his chair and storming off was probably going to titillate the sumers. He was going to have to get some impartial advice about all this blocks, he thought.

  [[##]] An ugly feeling violated his mind like a flash-back of a foul taste.

  {[What was that?]}

  [[ASOL interrupt. Pollution control]]

  {[~?]}

  [[You are emoting negative energy over the unscreened public band]]

  {[~~?]}

  [[Humans and most higher order mammals are capable of communicating over a wide range of empathic frequencies. You are currently scatter-casting anger and confusion in a public place contrary to current morality version 1039:85Rev1.02 and all previous versions for the last 954.23 cykes.]]

  {[I'm pissed off! Are you telling me I'm not allowed to be angry?]}

  [[You are allowed to be angry, it is simply contrary to accepted Slab behaviour to pollute your local environment with negative emotions which could infect co-proximal SlabCitizens]]

  {[And what are you going to do to stop me?]} There are few things more likely to increase the pissed-offness of someone who is already seriously pissed off than to suggest that they should stop being pissed off.

  [[##]]

  {[Urgh! OK, OK. What do you want me to do about it?]}

  [[Recommend either lightening up or narrowing your emotional radiation to the appropriate frequencies]]

  {[And how the hell do I do that?]}

  Suddenly he knew. He didn't get less angry, but he was now able to focus his anger in a more constructive and socially acceptable way.

  {[OK. Sorry. Thanks for letting me know]} That explained why everyone he'd met so far seemed to be so well mannered, he thought, and wondered again about how much he still had to learn about the way this place worked.