Rosebud Read online

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  I’d like to thank Stewart Hotston for his physics advice, and also Cheryl Morgan and Ashley Lauren Rogers. Please note, this book includes a depiction of in-universe institutionalized transphobia that may be triggering for some readers.

  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 were born. 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? It all seems very urgent, though.”

  “All hands on deck,” says Diana, with an eyebrow raise toward Huge.

  Huge’s topmost appendages give her several fingers.

  That’s when Alonquin Systems Pristine Sound Megasphere Duke Pantomime Hardy the Third enters. Which is ridiculously late, really, because they’re the casting vote on all things. For some reason. Well, because the Company like them more than anyone else. It’s only their first few representatives which buzz in, like bullets, hitting the far wall and sliding down, dazed, just to establish a presence and the ability to listen in before the whole swarm surges grandly in. Haunt likes to think of them as Quin, because those titles are entirely bought, very cheaply, and would, on Earth, gain Quin zero privilege and entry to precisely nothing. Of course. Because if any of them were the sort of person who could gain entry to anything on Earth, that’s where they’d be. And yet, the titles. Gah.

  “Order and structure!” yells Quin, their hive cultural greeting booming from their fictional mouth. “We gather again so soon. We were in private time. Very private. You surprise us. What brings us?”

  “Mate,” says Bob, “none of these fuckers were going to do it, so I thought fuck it.” And he makes a little motion to and fro, which is his gesture of bringing, and brings into the space the pre-thought data from the ship’s feelings concerning a nearby . . . whatever it is. They all stare at the charts and the graphs until the data resolves into an actual visual image, which it does with the faint air of patronisation the ship always brings to that process, despite it having the intelligence of a happy dog. That’s the sort of thing this crew can expect to be patronised by.

  “Well,” says Diana, “that is not the usual sort of rock.”

  Because in the space in front of them is the just about real image of what the Rosebud is steadily approaching, something else that’s sitting above Saturn’s C ring. It looks like a planet or moon, but a perfect one, a completely black sphere with no surface detail. “Is there something wrong with the image?” asks Haunt. “That thing doesn’t seem to be reflecting any light.” They all have an offhand knowledge of where sunward is. It’s where all their business is directed to and from, Earth and its subordinate rocky worlds, where their masters are. Out here the sun is small, but still significant. This thing is completely black, an emptiness, like a child’s idea of a black hole. There is none more black.

  “Am I tripping?” asks Huge. “Not that I do that. I mean, how could I? And of course I wouldn’t even if I could. But look at that thing.”

  “Nothing on the register,” says Quin, who’s mentally consulted it now, as the shared blip of no secrets when it comes to flying the ship informs them all. “It could be a wreck which has wandered here.”

  “The wreck of what?” says Diana. “How big is it?” Which turns out to be a rhetorical question because she’s already pulling in the answer. The craft is small enough to be brought inside the Rosebud, it turns out, a pebble amongst pebbles. “Well, this is interesting,” she says. “Spherical, at that size, is very strange. This object isn’t massive enough to attain that shape through gravitational attrition. And the friction of space is the friction of impacts. It’s not like it’s been polished by an ocean.”

  “No navigation lights, not broadcasting any markers,” says Quin.

  “You amaze me,” growls Haunt.

  “Oh God. Maybe it’s just really old? Like it’s been smoothed and smoothed by the microscopic impact processes here, in a way which nothing else has been, ever? And this explains the weird light thing because it’s made of some exotic material, and so maybe it could be valuable?” suggests Huge,
their upper fingers fluttering nervously. The gesture is speaking for what they’re all feeling. Because this is a scenario Haunt knows from many, many triumph epics. This is the Solar Company discovering a mysterious object in space and boldly boarding it only to find—

  “Obviously, it’s aliens,” says Diana. But who can unpack how much she means it, considering the multiple layers of wryness in which she cloaks every sentence?

  Still, it’s what they’re all thinking. Despite the fact that they’d be the worst possible people to discover such an artefact, because they’re not the captain and crew of an SC Man of War. They’re just a bunch of program grit.

  “Wait a sec, wait a sec, look at the state of this,” says Bob, moving up and down to view various aspects of the data at a speed no balloon in real space could manage. His shape is made to contort by the shared values of the space, so he appears to be wiggling up and down through the air like a caterpillar with VTOL capability. “What’s the fucker doing?”

  Haunt sees the object is reacting a little. Even at maximum magnification it’s hard to see exactly what’s going on. The spectrum around it is shifting slightly.

  “If it’s deploying weapons,” says Huge, “we’re screwed. Time to kiss your ass goodbye, Bob. I am so glad I lived to see you pop. So long, everyone else.”

  “Right, we’re gonna fire back then?” says Bob. “First, like?”

  “Wait,” snarls Haunt. He realises, to his great pleasure and amazement, that they all actually are. Even Quin. He must have got the tone of command exactly right. He’s been absorbing the right ancient dramas. He’s older than any of them, and his references, being a product of culture rather than of organic life or artificial intelligence, are entirely different and were really ferociously dated even when he was created, and thus none of them have ever previously seen fit to listen to anything he has to say. “It is easy to jump to conclusions. For some of us, it’s the only form of exercise. They may not be bringing up weapons. We are not certain they have even seen us. We are, after all, as tiny as they are.”

  “Besides,” sighs Diana, “the only aggressive response we have is to very slowly make a big dumb object and throw it at them.”

  “Fuck, really?” says Bob.

  “Some of us,” sighs Diana, “like to read the manual.”

  “It could be,” says Quin, “some clever competitor, some rebel intent on depriving the Solar Company of its rightful spoils.”

  That doesn’t sound exactly like Quin’s usual voice because it’s one of the many standard responses the Company have stirred into them over the years. Quin may have put a bit of relish into it, though. Haunt finds himself nodding, and that’s fine, because this is a sentiment he, of course, entirely shares.

  “A very small-time operator,” says Diana.

  “It could be a drone,” says Haunt. “Left behind for a crewed ship, doing exactly what we’re doing. I don’t fully believe it even as I say it, but the possibility does exist.”

  “Surreal physics pirates or aliens then,” says Huge. “Which way do we want to get fucked?”

  Everyone is silent. Both options are equally worrying. Both options will bring the attention of the Company, which would of course be brilliant, because the Company do their best to bring peace and prosperity to human beings throughout the solar system and it’d be great to see them again, and . . . Haunt feels the familiar pre-stamped phrases automatically fast-forwarding through his mind, and though he’s set his mind to always run them on fast-forward, because the words themselves bore him now, the litany itself is like a lovely old familiar song which takes him back to some round, warm, dark place of the lost past. It’s like his shows and his books and his memorabilia. It puts a grim smile on his chiselled features. He looks around and sees the others that have faces are also smiling. And Huge has something like a mouth arc rippling along their midhands. But still, he can feel a lot of fast-forwarding going on.

  They all stop at the same instant and make embarrassed noises and return to frowning at the problem ahead of them. Haunt now feels happier about what would happen if they caught the attention of the Company, but still doesn’t want to actually do it, not if he doesn’t have to. What’s that about? It’s a question he’s often come back to. You’d think he’d want to catch their attention and attract their praise, right? And he does, he does. It would just bring with it such . . . faff. Reactions like that, including the fast-forwarding, are probably a shared joke in Company lore. After a few centuries, it’s just what crews like this tend to do. Haunt has a picture in his head of Company officers pretending to be stern about it, with little secret smiles on their faces, and that image makes him feel better too. He attaches the picture, which is a standard image file his unconscious brings out at times of stress, to his inner board, so it’ll stay put in his imagination for a while.

  “We have prevented the Rosebud from going with its gut,” says Quin. “Let us keep the glory for this crew and present the Company with a triumph. No signal will be sent sunward until we have explored and identified the object.”

  “Explored?” says Huge, stretching the word to the limit of plausibility. “Shit. No, really? That’s your reaction? If that is a pirate ship, they’ll want to erase us!”

  “Yeah, and so might aliens,” says Bob. “Can we get this done? I’m busy. Stuff. Goings-on.”

  “I’m sure your games are very important,” says Diana.

  “One of these days I’m going to fuck you up properly,” says Bob.

  “What are you going to do, rub against me and frizz my hair?”

  Bob makes a noise which Haunt has come to recognise as a psychotic cry of impotent sorrow and rage, but which sounds, in so much as the collective space translates any nonverbal information into its best guess at appropriate audio, like the air being released from a balloon. “I do so appreciate,” he says, “how you never let him down gently.”

  “Yes, yes, let’s all avoid the issue of the aliens or pirates deleting us!” says Huge.

  Haunt speaks up again and is again inwardly astonished he’s gaining such traction. “I hate to say it, but Quin is correct. If the Company begin to pay attention to the situation, it is vital we have been seen to engage usefully with the object. Only that will win us plaudits. Only that allows us even the faint possibility . . .” He doesn’t want to finish the sentence, but he’s come this far and none of the others is going to dare to voice the same hope. None of them is as rebellious by nature as he is. “Of being noticed in a positive way and having our situation assessed. To be the first crew to retrieve alien tech for the Company is surely our last chance of reward. We have, after all, been out here for over three hundred years.”

  “Oh,” says Huge. “Oh, so we have to risk our existences and hope we’re seen as heroes? I see it, I see it, it’s obviously the right thing, but . . .” It’s odd Huge seems to be struggling so much. If Haunt didn’t know better, he’d take them for a free agent.

  “Everyone,” says Quin, “shall we move the ship closer and begin an exploration that is very careful?” There’s a chorus of mixed yes and not yet, with some of the crew going so far as to register a formal vote. The negative ballots are allowed, so the Company must be willing to show a bit of leeway in situations like this. It knows the length of leash that allows crews maximum productivity. That’s why it’s lasted so long and why they’re all basically happy here, even after such a long mission. “It is agreed then,” says Quin before all the words have even been uttered and before the last vote has popped into cartoon life, waving desperately. Haunt has often asked who made Quin captain. They’re all offhandedly sure someone has, but the paperwork has never been found. They’re meant to interact, decide, vote—on everything. That’s why there are five of them. That’s why they have separate personalities, why they’re actual people rather than devolved aspects of the ship. Haunt has heard that’s sometimes the case on other grit craft. The thought makes him shiver in his big black many-buckled boots. They could all still end up as that, if they put a foot wrong. If the Company misinterpret their loyal boldness as wilfulness. That’s why, in all their time out here, they haven’t put a foot at all. After all, several of them put several feet wrong, back in the day. And they’re all still living down the shame.