1
The Rosebud makes steady progress along the Saturn side of the Maxwell Gap, in the C Ring, slightly above the mean plane of the system. Here most of the particles are less than 1mm across. So the Rosebud is right at home, a shiny red droplet of about the same size. She glides, surveying particles, rocks, and aspiring moonlets, leaving delicate gravitational suggestions in her wake, bundling minerals in the certainty, chaos willing, boulders of titanium and water ice and the like will accumulate and make their way, on precise trajectories, steadily sunward.
This isn’t an automated process. The Rosebud is a crewed ship, and that crew make decisions. That crew can be blamed if one of those rocks doesn’t end up getting caught by one of the Company tugs in Mars’s orbit, but instead ends up, say, destroying Rio de Janeiro.
So the crew of the Rosebud are really pretty damn careful.
They weren’t born careful. Not that all of them wereborn. They’ve been made careful by experience. By terrible, terrible experience.
The crew of the Rosebud are, currently—and by force of law—a balloon, a goth, some sort of science aristocrat possibly, a ball of hands, and a swarm of insects. Well, all of the above but in a handy digital format. They’ve been called by the ship itself to gather in their shared space to discuss something unusual which has just been picked up by the ship’s mineral identification spectrometers. The shared space is, currently, wallpapered as a “1990s boho crashpad.” It’s supposedly a standard design option, drawn from some Western European human being’s genetic memory. But it has a personal flavour about it, a forbidden flavour. And so maybe that’s why none of the crew have objected to it and none of them have even mentioned it, because the conversation might lead to awkward places, and anyway it’s been the design for a couple of decades now.
Right now, past the beanbags and the context-free lava lamp and the poster of someone called Winona Ryder, a fiery black stallion that is literally on fire is galloping into the room. “Hold, damn you!” shouts Haunt, leaping off the horse as he says it, chiefly because he’s just realised “woah” isn’t the sort of thing he wants to be heard saying. The horse, being part of Haunt, goes with it, rearing up dramatically, galloping around him once, as the beanbags slide swiftly back to accommodate the animal, and then roaring off in the direction it came only to vanish in a puff of sulphurous smoke. The smoke then sneaks back to quietly rejoin his virtual form.
Haunt dusts his black gloves together and makes a hearty “huh” sound in the back of his throat. He pulls his swagger stick with the skull top from the air and secures it under one armpit. He’s pleased that, through the artifices of the ship’s central drama register, he’s first here. That takes doing. The ship, which is a lesser consciousness, dealing in instincts and gut feelings entirely generated by its conditioning, usually goes with whoever’s version of reality seems most social and everyday. It has an absurdly inflated sense of danger. Even the crashpad seems to worry it. It’s always tidying. Haunt’s love of rebellion, therefore, leads him into creating little dramas, as with the horse. He also likes to win. Hence his pleasure at getting here before the others.
Except then Diana rises from one of the benches, where she must have been lying, and waves her hand in a little circular motion, like she’s the queen of something. “Diddly dah,” she says. “I’ve been waiting ages.”
“How?” demands Haunt, hoping his eyebrows are clear enough above his shades that she can see he’s raising one.
“Elegantly,” she purrs.
“Go on, thump her,” says Bob, drifting in on a self-activated breeze that’s not particularly urgent. Today Bob is a fetching shade of purple, and he’s wearing a black ribbon around his nozzle. Not that he likes it being called that. “Teach her a fucking lesson.”
Haunt raises his hands and takes a step back. He has, on various occasions over the years, felt he might teach several fellow crew members a fucking lesson, but that’s never been prompted by the suggestions of Bob. He’s been dragged away from Rendezvous with Rama to be here, and if this is where he has to be, he wants to make every moment of his precious time its own act of artistic rebellion. Diana puts her hand on her chin and sighs at Bob like that’s the most utterly dismissible thing anyone’s ever said about her. Neither of them feel anything as polite as a reply is in order.
So, with the possibility of Planck-speed violence from Bob—whatever that could possibly involve—still in the air, like he is, it’s just as well that at that moment in rolls Huge If True, their uppermost hands all waving desperately as they rush down the polished wooden tiles, their familiar pitter-patter turned into a sound like a rainstorm by their urgency. “Mistakes were made,” they say. “I am all out of fucks to give. I’m not willing to discuss it.”
“Are you going on about why the ship’s called us here?” asks Bob. “If you are, tell, ’cos I’ve had enough of you lot already.”
“No. Or, because I don’t know what this is about, maybe I should say maybe? ...
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