Read Online 21st Century Science Fiction by D B Hartwell - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: D B Hartwell
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some kind of decision. “That’s where it’s at.”
“Meat—” Joe, no biogeek, rolled the unfamiliar word around his mouth irritably. “I used to be a software dude before I burned, Rats. You’ll have to ’splain the jargon ’fore using it.”
“You ever wondered how those farms get to Jupiter?” Wendy probed.
“Well.” Joe shook his head. “They, like, grow stage trees? Rocket logs? An’ then they est-ee-vate and you are fucked if they do it next door ’cause when those trees go up they toast about a hundred hectares?”
“Very good,” Wendy said heavily. She picked up her mug in both hands and gnawed on the rim, edgily glancing around as if hunting for police gnats. “Let’s you and me take a hike.”
Pausing at the bar for Ole Brenda to refill her mug, Wendy led Joe out past Spiffy Buerke—throwback in green wellingtons and Barbour jacket—and her latest femme, out into what had once been a car park and was now a tattered waste-ground out back behind the pub. It was dark, and no residual light pollution stained the sky: the Milky Way was visible overhead, along with the pea-size red cloud of orbitals that had gradually swallowed Jupiter over the past few years. “You wired?” asked Wendy.
“No, why?”
She pulled out a fist-size box and pushed a button on the side of it, waited for a light on its side to blink green, and nodded. “Fuckin’ polis bugs.”
“Isn’t that a—?”
“Ask me no questions, an’ I’ll tell you no fibs.” Wendy grinned.
“Uh-huh.” Joe took a deep breath: he’d guessed Wendy had some dodgy connections, and this—a portable local jammer—was proof: any police bugs within two or three meters would be blind and dumb, unable to relay their chat to the keyword-trawling subsentient coppers whose job it was to prevent conspiracy-to-commit offenses before they happened. It was a relic of the Internet Age, when enthusiastic legislators had accidentally demolished the right of free speech in public by demanding keyword monitoring of everything within range of a network terminal—not realizing that in another few decades ‘network terminals’ would be self-replicating ’bots the size of fleas and about as common as dirt. (The Net itself had collapsed shortly thereafter, under the weight of self-replicating viral libel lawsuits, but the legacy of public surveillance remained.) “Okay. Tell me about metal, meta—”
“Metabolism.” Wendy began walking toward the field behind the pub. “And stage trees. Stage trees started out as science fiction, like? Some guy called Niven—anyway. What you do is, you take a pine tree and you hack it. The xylem vessels running up the heartwood, usually they just lignify and die, in a normal tree. Stage trees go one better, and before the cells die, they
nitrate
the cellulose in their walls. Takes one fuckin’ crazy bunch of hacked ’zymes to do it, right? And lots of energy, more energy than trees’d normally have to waste. Anyways, by the time the tree’s dead, it’s like ninety percent nitrocellulose, plus built-in stiffeners and baffles and microstructures. It’s not, like, straight explosive—it detonates cell by cell, and
some
of the xylem tubes are, eh, well, the farm grows custom-hacked fungal hyphae with a depolarizing membrane nicked from human axons down them to trigger the reaction. It’s about efficient as ’at old-time Ariane or Atlas rocket. Not very, but enough.”
“Uh.” Joe blinked. “That meant to mean something to me?”
“Oh ’eck, Joe.” Wendy shook her head. “Think I’d bend your ear if it wasn’t?”
“Okay.” He nodded, seriously. “What can I do?”
“Well.” Wendy stopped and stared at the sky. High above them, a belt of faint light sparkled with a multitude of tiny pinpricks; a deep green wagon train making its orbital transfer window, self-sufficient posthuman Lamarckian colonists, space-adapted, embarking on the long, slow transfer to Jupiter.
“Well?” He
“Meat—” Joe, no biogeek, rolled the unfamiliar word around his mouth irritably. “I used to be a software dude before I burned, Rats. You’ll have to ’splain the jargon ’fore using it.”
“You ever wondered how those farms get to Jupiter?” Wendy probed.
“Well.” Joe shook his head. “They, like, grow stage trees? Rocket logs? An’ then they est-ee-vate and you are fucked if they do it next door ’cause when those trees go up they toast about a hundred hectares?”
“Very good,” Wendy said heavily. She picked up her mug in both hands and gnawed on the rim, edgily glancing around as if hunting for police gnats. “Let’s you and me take a hike.”
Pausing at the bar for Ole Brenda to refill her mug, Wendy led Joe out past Spiffy Buerke—throwback in green wellingtons and Barbour jacket—and her latest femme, out into what had once been a car park and was now a tattered waste-ground out back behind the pub. It was dark, and no residual light pollution stained the sky: the Milky Way was visible overhead, along with the pea-size red cloud of orbitals that had gradually swallowed Jupiter over the past few years. “You wired?” asked Wendy.
“No, why?”
She pulled out a fist-size box and pushed a button on the side of it, waited for a light on its side to blink green, and nodded. “Fuckin’ polis bugs.”
“Isn’t that a—?”
“Ask me no questions, an’ I’ll tell you no fibs.” Wendy grinned.
“Uh-huh.” Joe took a deep breath: he’d guessed Wendy had some dodgy connections, and this—a portable local jammer—was proof: any police bugs within two or three meters would be blind and dumb, unable to relay their chat to the keyword-trawling subsentient coppers whose job it was to prevent conspiracy-to-commit offenses before they happened. It was a relic of the Internet Age, when enthusiastic legislators had accidentally demolished the right of free speech in public by demanding keyword monitoring of everything within range of a network terminal—not realizing that in another few decades ‘network terminals’ would be self-replicating ’bots the size of fleas and about as common as dirt. (The Net itself had collapsed shortly thereafter, under the weight of self-replicating viral libel lawsuits, but the legacy of public surveillance remained.) “Okay. Tell me about metal, meta—”
“Metabolism.” Wendy began walking toward the field behind the pub. “And stage trees. Stage trees started out as science fiction, like? Some guy called Niven—anyway. What you do is, you take a pine tree and you hack it. The xylem vessels running up the heartwood, usually they just lignify and die, in a normal tree. Stage trees go one better, and before the cells die, they
nitrate
the cellulose in their walls. Takes one fuckin’ crazy bunch of hacked ’zymes to do it, right? And lots of energy, more energy than trees’d normally have to waste. Anyways, by the time the tree’s dead, it’s like ninety percent nitrocellulose, plus built-in stiffeners and baffles and microstructures. It’s not, like, straight explosive—it detonates cell by cell, and
some
of the xylem tubes are, eh, well, the farm grows custom-hacked fungal hyphae with a depolarizing membrane nicked from human axons down them to trigger the reaction. It’s about efficient as ’at old-time Ariane or Atlas rocket. Not very, but enough.”
“Uh.” Joe blinked. “That meant to mean something to me?”
“Oh ’eck, Joe.” Wendy shook her head. “Think I’d bend your ear if it wasn’t?”
“Okay.” He nodded, seriously. “What can I do?”
“Well.” Wendy stopped and stared at the sky. High above them, a belt of faint light sparkled with a multitude of tiny pinpricks; a deep green wagon train making its orbital transfer window, self-sufficient posthuman Lamarckian colonists, space-adapted, embarking on the long, slow transfer to Jupiter.
“Well?” He
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