A Study in Starlight—Chapter Nine
Continuing this serialised novel, in which Holmes and Watson find themselves very far indeed from Victorian/Edwardian London.
Part Two
Trevallan (Eight Years Later)
Being further Reminiscences of John Watson, M.D.,
with interpolations by Commander Mary Syrtis Mall’stang
Watson
The shower cubicle was a snug fit for two, especially when one of them is two metres tall with limbs in proportion, but we’d learned how to make it work. Sometimes it was the prelude to other things, but in the mornings, especially on work-days, it was just a pleasant way to start the day together. And it’s never possible to scrub your own back as well as a partner can do it.
This was exactly what I was doing when Mary suddenly cocked her head and went very still. I knew the signs: she was receiving a message. I lifted my hands away and she looked apologetically over her shoulder before stepping out of the cubicle.
I heard Mary say, “Yem, headshot only.” She grabbed a towel, hastily ran it over her face and scalp before a minidrone purred in from the living room. I could still only hear her end of the dialogue, but the drone was projecting an image of the caller. I recognised the face and scalp, heavily marked with swirling tattoos recalling her Māori heritage: Mary’s deputy Erenora, Eri for short.
“I was in the shower,” said Mary. “Go on, what’s so urgent?”
I heard nothing, but her posture told me the call was serious news—whether good or bad I could not discern. Then she said, “Fairsure… Nen, maxly. Keep that comm station covered every minim… Yem, flashquick.”
She ended the call and turned back to face me, her long ebon body still beaded with water. I made myself focus on her face. “Trouble?”
“Prob’ly not trouble, ‘xactly,” said she. “Fact, if it’s what it looks like, more likely vrai happydays.”
“So what does it look like?”
“They got a ping from the outer system. Long way out, minimo thirty AU, but, well, you can surmise.”
“Are you thinking what I suspect you’re thinking?”
She grinned. “How’m I s’posed to know what you suspect?”
“Have they replied?”
“Nen, waitin’ on me. Signal lag at thirty AU’s four hours, one way. A few more minims’ll make scant diff. Still, I better scurry.”
“At least get some kahvi to take with you.”
“I’ll grab some on the Tube.”
The spensed kahvi in the Tube-cars was vile stuff, and Mary was particular about her drinks. She’d take one sip, belatedly recall how ghastly it was, and dispose of the rest. I sighed, stepped out of the shower, grabbed another towel. “I’ll make something you’ll actually drink, while you get dressed.”
She looked for one second as if she might protest, then shrugged—very distracting—and said, “Sterling.” She tossed her towel in the vague direction of the rail, which unfurled an arm and plucked it out of the air, then turned and walked naked from the room.
Eight years on, I still wasn’t quite so casual about my own nudity; I wrapped my towel firmly about my waist before making my own exit. “Mrs Hudson?”
This was very much a private joke. Among all my acquaintance, only Robin Francis was really equipped to appreciate it. Many people, perhaps most, had their own nick-names or aliases for their household sub-system. With Mary’s agreement, I’d given ours the name of our old Baker Street landlady, almost as soon as I’d grasped what a sub-system was. I’d thought it would make the place feel a bit more like home. Perhaps it did. Eight years on, I hardly needed such trivial props but, then again, why change it?
“Yes, John?” said the system immediately. (The real Mrs Hudson would never have called me John… but there never was a real Mrs Hudson.)
“Kahvi-maker on, please.” Mary’s told me a hundred times I don’t need to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to what is really no more than a set of sub-routines hosted in some minuscule recess of the QuasI’s labyrinthine systems. After eight years, I understood perfectly. Even the highest, most integrated, manifestations of the QuasI don’t feel emotions, or not in any way that’s comparable to human feelings. If you ask, it will tell you so itself. On the other hand, it did no harm and I could see no compelling reason to break the habit, unlike others I’d had to shed.
A light came on in the kitchen, a compact space, little more than an alcove but as well-equipped as any professional chef’s station. I reached it in three strides and stood, dripping gently on the floor, as I waited for the water to finish heating.
The kahvi-grounds were compiled, of course; the development of surface agriculture still prioritised food crops. But the quality of compiled goods depends on the quality of the original from which the instruction-set is derived. Someone had made sure that one such instruction-set was for a fine espresso blend. Italian, naturalmente. (Why, then, did we use the Finnish word, kahvi? As I had recently learned, the Finns had historically been Earth’s keenest coffee-drinkers.)
As the kahvi dribbled aromatically into Mary’s insulmug, I reflected on the quality of compiled goods. Some words of Mary’s, from very early in our acquaintance, recalled themselves: “We’re all compiled here.”
At that moment she herself arrived at my side, clad in her workaday jumpsuit, the cobalt blue of the Space Service. I’d never thought it the most flattering of garments, but there was one saving grace: it was what she’d been wearing the very first time I’d seen her.
“Thanks maxly, amor,” said she as I handed her the mug. “Sorry, mega-draggy missin’ brek.”
“Can’t be helped.”
She gave me a peck on the cheek. “I’ll make it up, soony. But now I vraily gotta scurry.”
“Let me know when you hear from the Fast Ship,” I said to her back.
“If it is the Fast Ship,” she replied over her shoulder as the door swished open.
I’d learned a lot in eight years about the realities of space travel. I’d had to.
I had, after all, grown up in a time when a leading author, M. Jules Verne, could seriously propose that the best way to reach the Moon would be to fire a capsule, containing three men, from an enormous cannon. In a later novel he envisaged a portion of the Earth’s surface being detached in a glancing impact by a comet, on which a number of people survive, their habitat so little disrupted that they do not immediately even realise what has occurred. It made me think that, even if I had studied the astronomical science of the Victorian era, I might not have been much further advanced than I had been as someone who’d barely grasped that the Earth orbited the Sun and not the other way around.
I’d learned, for instance, that the colossal velocity which allowed the original seedship to bridge from Earth to Trevallan in just over fifty years was attained only by sustained acceleration over a period of many months, with an equally long deceleration time at the end of the journey. This had been accomplished by a combination of fusion drives, gravitational ‘slingshot’ manoeuvres, and the use of solar sails. (Of these three, even with extensive quizzing of my Agent, I half-understood slingshots, had a vague grasp of solar sails, and ‘grokked’ fusion not at all. I could no doubt have done more, in eight years, but my mind had mostly been filled with anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, and ancillary disciplines for which the 19th century had not even a name.)
The ‘ping’ Mary had mentioned—not a message in itself but the announcement that there is one—came from a distance of at least thirty AU: thirty Astronomical Units; a yardstick, I’d noticed, rooted in Earth’s solar system. The planet Trevallan orbited at a mean distance of 1.7AU.
Thirty AU—approximately the radius of the orbit of Neptune—is an easier number to conjure with than its equivalent in miles or kilometres (the metric figure, should anyone care, is 4,497 million).
The original seedship had crossed 24 lightyears—about 1.5 million AU—in 51 years. At around 81 AU per day, this had briefly suggested to me that it could cover a mere 30 AU in around nine hours; however, that seedship took months to reach that speed, months more to decelerate again.
The science behind the Fast Ship had been described to me as a sort of ‘by-pass’ or ‘short-cut’. Vessels equipped with the so-called Tangent Drive could traverse lightyears in a matter of days, if not hours, which might imply that a mere 30 AU would scarcely take more than the blink of an eye.
Not so: the Tangent Drive was unsafe in the deeper reaches of a gravity well—another phrase I had learned in the past few years. Each planet had its own gravity well, but each was also embedded within the vastly deeper gravity well of the star. Somewhere out there, beyond that 30 AU mark, was the point at which the Tangent Drive became unreliable, and even ships had to revert to slower forms of propulsion, now called ‘Newtonian’ drives.
I could exculpate myself for struggling to grasp concepts that had been unknown to even the greatest minds of the Victorian era. However, finding that Newton’s laws of motion also gave me trouble; that was chastening. They had, after all, been formulated two hundred years (to the year) before the publication of A Study in Scarlet.
In all this my teacher had usually been, not Mary herself, but Eri. She seemed to grasp intuitively when I needed a lesson related back to concepts familiar to a Victorian. Discussing Newton’s First Law, for example, she’d said, “An object in motion will continue with constant velocity unless it’s acted on by a force… but a railway train, a steam train, will soon slow down if there’s no power going to its driving wheels.”
“Yes,” I’d said, seizing on the familiar, “The fireman has to keep fuelling the boiler more or less constantly.”
We’d had a brief digression onto why and when steam had been supplanted by other forms of motive power, why I’d said ‘fireman‘, when there were perfectly good non-gendered words like ‘stoker’. However, Eri quickly returned us to the main topic. “What slows the train, then?” With not too much prompting, I’d been able to suggest that friction between wheels and rails was the main culprit, with air resistance being of secondary importance.
“But in vacuum,” said she, “There’s no friction and no air resistance, so once you accelerate a ship to a certain velocity it can continue along that trajectory indefinitely, just coasting. In space, acceleration and deceleration are really all that matter. Inertia takes care of the bit in between.”
Even those like Eri, who understood space flight far better than I ever would, were still unclear about many finer points of this new Tangent Drive. Updates from Earth were eagerly awaited and highly prized but—as well as being twenty-four years out of date—never contained enough information to satisfy anyone. Bandwidth constraint, they said.
As far as they did understand it, and as far as I could follow their explanations, a vessel travelling in so-called ’T-space’ would in effect be travelling at many times the speed of light, but self-evidently it could not continue at ‘superluminal’ velocity on egress into ’N-space’. (Self-evidently to Eri and others; I took it on trust.) This begged the question: how much momentum would it carry? Did it emerge stationary, with respect to the local frame of reference, or did it carry some finite velocity? (Phrases like ‘with respect to’ and ‘frame of reference’ liberally peppered the discourse.)
The ‘ping’ had included brief details of the ship’s trajectory—enabling Mary’s crew to better target their return signal. Clearly it had not been stationary at that moment, and I gathered that the inference was that it was heading inward at high speed, and presumably decelerating. However, until we received a reply to our first signal, or further updates from the incoming ship, we would not know for sure. For that reply we would have to wait a full eight hours. Only then might we get some idea of how soon the ship would actually arrive.
For now, there was nothing to do but dry off, get dressed, make my own kahvi and spense myself a bowl of cereal. The meat-heavy cooked breakfasts I had typically enjoyed in Baker Street were no more than memories—memories of a life that had never truly been. I wondered now if I would even enjoy the taste of devilled kidneys—even supposing that the compilers had the requisite information to produce offal. I wondered, too, if they had ‘recipes’ for livestock at all. All the agriculture established so far on the surface—the mainland, as everyone called it—was devoted to vegetables: roots, cereals, fruit. Any ‘meat’ or ‘dairy’ products that we ate were compiled, and I had come to understand that many people would have fierce ethical objections to the slaughter of real animals for meat.
Such musings occupied me as I made my way to work. The clinic—upgraded from a mere ‘medbay’ since my presence had doubled the complement of doctors—was just two stops away on the Tube, but whenever time permitted my habit was to walk. I’d found that the best way to ensure that I took regular exercise was to integrate it into my daily routine. Between that, and a predominantly vegetarian diet, I felt fitter, and was certainly several kilograms lighter, than I had been on Incarnation eight years previously.
My colleague, Dahab Merhawi, greeted me cheerily, and we chatted for a few minutes, dissecting the news, slim as it still was. Then she said, “All yours, John.” She was heading to the docking-hub on her way to a stint on the surface. We had discussed several times the need for a doctor permanently based on the maninland, which was a more hazardous environment than the Orbiter, but both of us had partners whose work kept them here in orbit. “I suppose it’s too much to hope the Fast Ship’ll bring us another doctor?” said she as she checked her bags.
“Your guess may be better than mine. But, as Mary might say, it’s nil but surmise yet.”
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