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Authors: Nancy Kress
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passengers thought he was an important crime figure. Well, let them.
The key conversational pastime wasn’t personal, anyway. In the first-class dining room, in the common rooms, in the gym, the game was “Guess Where General Stefanak has hidden the Protector Artifact.” This game went on in several languages. It was a safe way to discuss General Stefanak even if there were government spies around; Stefanak himself proclaimed often that the Protector Artifact, activated at “setting prime eleven,” was the savior of the Solar System. It protected “each and every one of our precious habitations from the kind of planet-destroying attack that the enemy used to fry the helpless planet of Viridian.” The mixture of pompous rhetoric and street slang was pure Stefanak.
The artifact, discovered two years earlier, had been decoded by the brilliant, missing scientist Dr. Thomas Capelo. None of the gossipers aboard the Cascade of Stars understood the first thing about the physics that Capelo had worked out, or why the physics mattered. But everyone knew what the artifact’s seven settings could do. Thanks to the media, even schoolchildren could recite the litany:
Setting prime one: a directed-beam destabilizer of all atoms with an atomic number higher than seventy-five. (Never mind that to human math “one” was not a prime; humans had not built the artifact.)
Setting prime two: a shield against settings one and three.
Setting prime three: a spherical destabilizing wave affecting all atoms with an atomic number higher than seventy-five.
Setting prime five: a shield to protect a whole planet against the artifact.
Setting prime seven: a wave to destroy a whole planet by destabilizing all atoms with an atomic number higher than fifty.
Setting prime eleven: a shield to protect an entire star system.
Setting prime thirteen: a wave to destroy an entire star system, turning civilizations into radioactive waste.
Now this Protector Artifact had been hidden somewhere in the Solar System by General Stefanak, its location known to no more than a dozen people.
“I’ll bet it’s in the Belt,” said a woman, dazzlingly genemod beautiful, at the English-speaking dinner table. “Has to be. The largest number of floating bodies to hide it in.”
“No,” said a young man with a beard barbered into an amazing shape Kaufman had never seen before. Ah, the civilian young. “Too much traffic in the Belt. Settlements, trade, miners. No, it’s hidden underground on a major planet. Maybe even Mars … that way Stefanak can keep a closer eye on it.”
“What’s to keep an eye on?” lazily said an older woman wearing huge antique emeralds. “It’s automatic, isn’t it? Set the thing at ‘eleven’ and it protects the whole Solar System. It isn’t like you have to reset it, or get it serviced.”
The young man said, “No, but you do have to keep it protected from those fucking antiwar groups. Those bastards would probably just as soon turn it over to the enemy.”
“Oh, I don’t believe that,” said another man, not as well-dressed as the others, who looked at the young man disapprovingly.
The teenage girl traveling with the beautiful woman said, “Why keep it in the Solar System at all? As long as the Fallers believe it’s here, the Protector Artifact is doing its job. They won’t bring theirs here to attack. Meanwhile, we could take ours to their system and wipe them out.”
Her mother said impatiently, “Alva, you don’t know what you’re talking about. If you bring our artifact to their system and set it off, and theirs is protecting their system, it will destroy the whole of spacetime. Dr. Thomas Capelo proved that. Honestly, I don’t know what you learn in school!”
“Not that,” the girl said hotly, “because it’s not true. Both artifacts have to be set to destroy a whole system, at setting prime thirteen. Maybe you should study things more carefully.”
The shabbily dressed man intervened to
The key conversational pastime wasn’t personal, anyway. In the first-class dining room, in the common rooms, in the gym, the game was “Guess Where General Stefanak has hidden the Protector Artifact.” This game went on in several languages. It was a safe way to discuss General Stefanak even if there were government spies around; Stefanak himself proclaimed often that the Protector Artifact, activated at “setting prime eleven,” was the savior of the Solar System. It protected “each and every one of our precious habitations from the kind of planet-destroying attack that the enemy used to fry the helpless planet of Viridian.” The mixture of pompous rhetoric and street slang was pure Stefanak.
The artifact, discovered two years earlier, had been decoded by the brilliant, missing scientist Dr. Thomas Capelo. None of the gossipers aboard the Cascade of Stars understood the first thing about the physics that Capelo had worked out, or why the physics mattered. But everyone knew what the artifact’s seven settings could do. Thanks to the media, even schoolchildren could recite the litany:
Setting prime one: a directed-beam destabilizer of all atoms with an atomic number higher than seventy-five. (Never mind that to human math “one” was not a prime; humans had not built the artifact.)
Setting prime two: a shield against settings one and three.
Setting prime three: a spherical destabilizing wave affecting all atoms with an atomic number higher than seventy-five.
Setting prime five: a shield to protect a whole planet against the artifact.
Setting prime seven: a wave to destroy a whole planet by destabilizing all atoms with an atomic number higher than fifty.
Setting prime eleven: a shield to protect an entire star system.
Setting prime thirteen: a wave to destroy an entire star system, turning civilizations into radioactive waste.
Now this Protector Artifact had been hidden somewhere in the Solar System by General Stefanak, its location known to no more than a dozen people.
“I’ll bet it’s in the Belt,” said a woman, dazzlingly genemod beautiful, at the English-speaking dinner table. “Has to be. The largest number of floating bodies to hide it in.”
“No,” said a young man with a beard barbered into an amazing shape Kaufman had never seen before. Ah, the civilian young. “Too much traffic in the Belt. Settlements, trade, miners. No, it’s hidden underground on a major planet. Maybe even Mars … that way Stefanak can keep a closer eye on it.”
“What’s to keep an eye on?” lazily said an older woman wearing huge antique emeralds. “It’s automatic, isn’t it? Set the thing at ‘eleven’ and it protects the whole Solar System. It isn’t like you have to reset it, or get it serviced.”
The young man said, “No, but you do have to keep it protected from those fucking antiwar groups. Those bastards would probably just as soon turn it over to the enemy.”
“Oh, I don’t believe that,” said another man, not as well-dressed as the others, who looked at the young man disapprovingly.
The teenage girl traveling with the beautiful woman said, “Why keep it in the Solar System at all? As long as the Fallers believe it’s here, the Protector Artifact is doing its job. They won’t bring theirs here to attack. Meanwhile, we could take ours to their system and wipe them out.”
Her mother said impatiently, “Alva, you don’t know what you’re talking about. If you bring our artifact to their system and set it off, and theirs is protecting their system, it will destroy the whole of spacetime. Dr. Thomas Capelo proved that. Honestly, I don’t know what you learn in school!”
“Not that,” the girl said hotly, “because it’s not true. Both artifacts have to be set to destroy a whole system, at setting prime thirteen. Maybe you should study things more carefully.”
The shabbily dressed man intervened to
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