“Whatever you need,” Duarte said. “But as long as we’re alone, please don’t call me ‘High Consul.’ Winston’s fine.” Duarte’s voice had grown mushy, and Paolo could tell the sedatives were taking effect. “I want us all working together.”
“We are working together. But a body needs a brain. Leadership, yes?” Paolo replied. He let the IV bag empty, used the line to draw a small sample of Duarte’s blood and put it in the metal briefcase, and quietly went about the process of doing a full body scan. The treatment had begun growing a small number of new organs in Duarte’s body that had been designed by the best experimental physiologists on the planet and implemented using lessons taught by the eternal protomolecule bloom. But there were still so many things that might go wrong, and tracking the development of the changes in Duarte was the most important aspect of Paolo’s job. Despite Duarte’s warmth and the genuine friendship he showed, if anything happened to the Laconian ruler, he would be executed shortly thereafter. Tying Paolo’s safety to his own was how Duarte could guarantee the scientist’s best efforts on his behalf. They both understood this, and there was no ill will attached. Paolo’s death wouldn’t be punishment, exactly. Just a clear disincentive to letting his patient die.
As relationships went, it was probably the most honest one Paolo had ever had.
“You know, Winston, that this is going to be a very long process. There may be imbalances small enough that they don’t appear for years. Decades.”
“Centuries,” he said, nodding. “It’s imperfect, I know. But we do what we have to do. And, no, old friend. I’m sorry, but I haven’t reconsidered.”
Paolo wondered if the ability to read minds was yet another unexpected side effect of the treatment. If so … well, that would be interesting. “I wasn’t suggesting that—”
“That you should undergo the treatment too?” Duarte said. “Of course you were. And you should suggest it. Make the best argument you can. I don’t believe you’ll change my mind, but I’d like it very much if you did.”
Paolo looked at his hands, avoiding Duarte’s eyes. Defiance would have been easier for him. The melancholy in the man’s voice was disturbing in a way he found hard to understand.
“The ironic thing?” Duarte said. “I’ve always rejected the great-man idea. The belief that human history was formed by singular individuals instead of broad social forces? Romantic, but …” He waved a hand vaguely, like he was stirring fog. “Demographic trends. Economic cycles. Technological progress. All much more powerful predictors than any one person. And yet here I am. I would take you with me if I could, you know. It’s not my choice. It’s history’s.”
“History should reconsider,” Paolo said.
Duarte chuckled. “The difference between zero and one is miraculous. But it’s as miraculous as it ever will be. Make it two. Three. A hundred. It becomes just another oligarchy. A permanent engine of inequality that will breed the wars we’re trying to end.”
Paolo made a small sound that could have been mistaken for agreement.
“The best governments in history have been kings and emperors,” Duarte said. “The worst ones too. A philosopher-king can manage great things in his lifetime. And his grandchildren can squander it.”
Duarte grunted as Paolo pulled the hypodermic port out of his arm. He didn’t need to place a bandage over the wound. The hole closed up before a drop of blood could escape. It didn’t even scab.
“If you want to create a lasting, stable social order,” Duarte said, “only one person can ever be immortal.”
Chapter One: Drummer
The habitation ring of the transfer station at Lagrange-5 was three times the diameter of the one Drummer had lived in on Tycho, half a lifetime ago. TSL-5 had a small city’s worth of offices with the same fake-marble walls and soft, full-spectrum lighting as the one they’d given her, the same crash-couch beds and water showers as her quarters there. The air had a constant smell of terpene compounds, as if the station were the largest chrysanthemum in the universe. The dome in the center of the station had berths for hundreds of ships and warehouses that seemed so numerous and deep that filling them would leave Earth as empty as a squeezed-out bulb. All those berths and warehouses were at rest now, but starting tomorrow, that would change. TSL-5 was about to be open for business, and even as tired as she was, as annoyed as she felt at having to haul herself halfway across the system for what was ultimately a ribbon-cutting ceremony, there was also an excitement to it. After three decades of struggle, Mother Earth was open for business.
The planet glowed on her wall screen, whorls of high white clouds and glimpses of the still-greenish sea beneath it. The terminator crept across, pulling a blanket of darkness and city lights behind it. The ships of the Earth-Mars Coalition Navy floated around it, dots of darkness swimming on the high sea of air. Drummer had never gone down that well, and now by the terms of the treaty she’d signed on the union’s behalf, she never would. Fine with her. Her knees bothered her sometimes as it was. But as an objet d’art, Terra was hard to beat. Humanity had done its level best to kick the shit out of the slowly spinning egg. Overpopulation, exploitation, atmospheric and oceanic imbalance, and then three military-level meteor strikes, any one of which would have fucked up the dinosaurs. And here it still was, like a soldier. Scarred, broken, reimagined, rebuilt, and remade.
Time was supposed to heal all wounds. To Drummer, that was just a nice way of saying that if she waited long enough, none of the things that seemed important to her would turn out to matter. Or at least not the way she’d thought they did.
Time, plus the combined expertise of a Martian terraforming project staggering under the loss of its mandate, the ruthless administration of Earth’s political sector, and the huge market of thirteen-hundred-odd worlds all in need of biological substrates to grow food that people could actually eat had hauled Earth, slow and staggering, up to functional again.
Her system chirped, a polite little pop like someone snapping bamboo. Her private secretary’s voice followed like a drink of whiskey.
“Madam President?”
“Give me a minute, Vaughn,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am. But Secretary-General Li would like to speak with you before the ceremony.”
“The Earth-Mars Coalition can wait until after cocktails. I’m not opening this station by jumping every time the EMC clears their throat. Bad precedent.”
“Copy that. I’ll handle it.”
The system made the little woody tock that meant she had her privacy again. She leaned back in her chair, looked over at the images set into the wall behind her desk. All the previous Transport Union presidents before her: Michio Pa, then Tjon, Walker, Sanjrani, and her own thin, stern face looking back at her from the end. She hated that picture. It made her look like she’d just eaten something sour. The first version of it looked like something off a singles forum. At least this one was dignified.
For most of the Transport Union’s members, this image was all they’d ever see of her. Thirteen hundred worlds, and within a decade most if not all of them would have their own versions of the TSL-5. Hand-off stations that marked the bubble of void where the planet’s sphere of control ended and the union’s began. Anything that the colonies needed from humanity’s first home or from each other went up the gravity wells. That was the inner’s problem. Moving it from one system to another belonged to the Belt. Old terms. Inners. Belters. They stuck because language held on to things that way, even when the reality around them had shifted.
The Earth-Mars Coalition had been the center of humanity once—the innermost of the inners. Now it was an important spoke on the wheel whose hub was Medina Station. Where the weird alien sphere sat in the middle of the not-space that linked all the ring gates. Where her civilian quarters were when she wasn’t on the void cities. Where Saba was, when he wasn’t on his ship or with her. Medina Station was home.
Except that even for her, the blue-black disk of Earth on her screen was home too. Maybe that wouldn’t always be true. There were kids old enough to vote now who’d never known what it meant to have only one sun. She didn’t know what Earth or Mars or Sol would be to them. Maybe this atavistic melancholy just behind her breastbone would die with her generation.
Or maybe she was tired and cranky and needed a nap.
The bamboo broke again. “Ma’am?”
“I’m on my way.”
“Yes, ma’am. But we have a priority message from traffic control on Medina.”
Drummer leaned forward, her hands flat against the cool of the desk. Shit. Shit shit shit. “Did we lose another one?”
“No, ma’am. No lost ships.”
She felt the dread loosen its grip a little. Not all the way. “What, then?”
“They’re reporting an unscheduled transit. A freighter, but it didn’t have a transponder.”
“Seriously?” she said. “Did they think we wouldn’t notice it?”