Even with waking to nurse, I slept far more easily than usual that night. I was too exhausted to worry at my problems and too relieved to be back in my own bed, my wife curled next to me with her familiar scent like an aura of comfort. Even so, I woke with a headache. My mesh helpfully informed me that my neurophysiology was even more out of whack than usual. I double-checked the lactation safety tags on a painkiller, and then checked again before taking it.
“Everyone in the world’s downstairs, aren’t they?” I asked Carol.
“Have been all week.”
Which meant I wouldn’t be able to talk about anything serious with Dinar and Athëo until we had time to ourselves, probably not till evening. The disadvantages of using our own home as a diplomatic base occurred to me. On the other hand, the heady sweetness of French toast was starting to waft from below. Dinar did have the most delicious ways of coping with stress.
Redbug and Elegy confronted us over breakfast, ignoring the two plains-folk engaged in a deep discussion of film history with the Ghats-Narmada emissary in the dining room. I’d have vastly preferred to join them, or barring that enjoy my French toast in peace, if the two tech experts hadn’t swung into the archway. Dinar finished spooning strawberry preserves onto my toast, and turned to face them.
“Letting the corporations send reps at all is one thing,” said Redbug. “But going out there was supposed to keep their involvement under control. What the hell happened?”
My face felt hot. I was going to have to argue on Asterion’s behalf so many times, and sound like I meant it. “Is it really so harmful, having them out here where we can keep an eye on them? Whatever they did to the network, they did it from their aislands.”
Elegy glared—not at me but at Dinar. “Here they have access to hardware. And we don’t know their capabilities as well as we thought we did. We keep finding malware in places we thought we’d cleaned out, areas where our network code doesn’t match the documentation. It’s like one of those funguses that takes over insects, grows into their nervous system or something, and kills them from the inside out.”
“Cordyceps,” said Redbug. “Like it’s trying to take over the dandelion network’s form and break it more thoroughly the second time around, in tiny little increments that we can just barely detect until it all crumbles at once. If it hadn’t shut everything down so dramatically the first time, I’m not sure we’d even notice until it was too late. It might be too late already. Dinar, what the hell did you do?”
Dinar flinched and glared fiercely back. “You think I did this? What, because I take gigs?”
I got between them. I might not be able to be honest, but at least I could keep people from sticking Dinar with the blame. “It wasn’t her fault. I supported it more than she did—and it was the best we could manage. We almost lost the site to Zealand.”
“At least we’d keep some space between the corporations and the Chesapeake, then,” said Redbug. “I saw your arguments, but I assumed the corporate shill was pushing it behind the scenes.”
“Everyone thinks so,” said Dinar. “Don’t think I haven’t checked my weights this morning. It’s a hell of a thing, having your rep shifted by arguments that you didn’t make. Our algorithms aren’t supposed to let that happen; what the hell are you doing?”
Redbug ignored her question. “My point is, we have to assume that the more sensors we get on the antenna, the more vulnerable we’ll be to whatever Asterion builds into it, or the infrastructure around it. What happens when people who care about the planet are stuck in the shallows in these negotiations? Without stable code for the networks, without being able to count on our algorithms, the whole governance structure that we use to protect our world dries up. How are we supposed to negotiate for the future of the planet without the thing that makes us a coherent entity, that lets us know what the planet needs?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Normally we’d open threads to solve this stuff—and I could see that such threads were in fact open, but they were taking an awfully long time to resolve. “What change are you recommending? Because keeping Asterion away from the antenna wouldn’t actually have healed the network.”
“It would’ve given us more time to fix it,” said Elegy. “It would’ve been even better to hold off on building the antenna till we had this under control. If Asterion wants interstellar trade so badly, that might’ve been enough incentive to make them back off their network attacks.”
I shook my head. “The Ringers would’ve just used the Zealand site. The antenna was going up one way or another, and we need it where we keep some control.”
Redbug glowered. “Someone’s going to drill that oil, so it should be us, huh? We might as well hand this thing over to the corporations; you’ve basically done it already.”
“There’s one thing we can do,” Elegy said to them.
“I know.” They made a mocking half-bow to Dinar. “Thank you for your hospitality when we needed headquarters in a hurry. Now it’s time for us to move our debugging setup somewhere more stable.”
Dinar smiled, eyes narrow, but I caught the sheen of tears held in check. “You do that.”
Despite the programming experts clearing out, the house was still too crowded for a family conversation even if anyone could’ve pried Dinar from the kitchen. The constant stream of finicky, spice-rich dishes flowing into the dining room, punctuated by the rhythmic slap of dough, suggested how foolhardy that would be. It took me over an hour to notice that neither Cytosine nor Rhamnetin was among the crowd. I asked around and learned that they were already at the antenna site.
“We should go,” I told Carol.
Dori enjoyed the train ride, peering out the window and at our fellow passengers with equal eagerness. Raven had slept in or we’d have brought them too, to see their friends and add an extra layer of authority to our presence. If we pick up nothing else from the Ringers, I like that part.
By the Potomac the bluebells had started blooming, and some early celandine. But the old parking lot was still a relative wasteland. Blackberry roots ate at the edges, and dandelions and moss cracked the expanse: a bare start at terraforming a moonscape of black tarmac.
Humans and Ringers clustered in the middle of that moonscape. We made our way out, rolling our share-bikes with Dori still in the sidecar. She giggled at every jolt, and Carol started singing, “Bump, bump, bump” until we had to leave the bikes at the crowd’s edge. The witnesses spread around an empty area about thirty feet across, where Rhamnetin’s brothers had cleared the rubble and were setting down a pattern of tiny black and silver cubes.
Eliza Mendez waved at us, and we joined her while I tucked Dori into my sling. “They’re laying the seed foundation,” she said. “We’re about to see some high-level nanotechnology at work—better than anything humans have managed so far, at least.”
Belatedly, I checked the ecological impact report, which the Solar Flare’s specialists had completed in our absence. “Oh, wow—it really does have a carbon drawdown effect. We could take advantage of that.”
Eliza stuffed her hands in her pockets. “You’re not the first person to pounce on that—unfortunately it’s not as much as you might guess. The antenna will use about two tons of atmospheric carbon total along with other local elements and some materials they brought along. Astatine—apparently this falls under their engineering specialty—says that if you try to speed up the process, it gets harder to control where the builders grab the carbon from.”
“That’d be a problem.” I looked around the lot, made some calculations. “Crap, we’d do better by planting this place with pine trees.”
“Right,” said Eliza. “Plus the trees would create new habitat and mitigate erosion, not to mention that they’re sturdier in the aggregate than a structure that might not make it through hurricane season.”
“Every little bit helps,” said Carol. “We could use this technology for emergency housing, circuit repair on solar panels, any task where we struggle to move construction footprints across the cherry tree threshold.” That was the point where a process had a positive effect on the surrounding environment, fitting into its ecology as well as the sakura trees scattered around Washington. “The difference might not be dramatic, but it’d push in the right direction.”
Eliza nodded. “A butterfly flaps its wings and maybe the next hurricane season has one less hurricane. It’s a good point.” She added the idea to a thread about Ringer tech, and Carol and I added our votes.
The foundation grew, block by block. The pattern echoed the ornate curlicues of Victorian ironwork, or a summoning circle from one of last night’s movies, full of occult symbols in unknown alphabets. A scan picked up various metallic compounds, but no hint of how the thing worked. I stepped forward to take a closer look, and found myself next to Cytosine.
“Fascinating, aren’t they?” she asked. “I’ve always loved watching builders. Do you want to touch one?”
“Yes! Are they safe?” A silly question, since the Ringers were handling them directly. Of course some humans dribble mercury between their fingers given half a chance. “Will you be offended if I hand Dori over to Carol first?”
“Of course not. Although—I could hold her, if you want.” Understandably, she sounded tentative. We rubbed each other the wrong way so often—was this a peace offering, or a dominance challenge? I glanced at Carol, who shrugged, and wished I had time to check with Rhamnetin.
“Okay. But only if I can hold yours later.”
Cytosine chittered laughter. “They may pinch a bit, but you’re welcome to.” So I’d played that right.
Tentative myself, I unwrapped Dori. Cytosine rolled back, making a lap, and nudged Diamond and Chlorophyll until they made room. Long, slender limbs cradled my child against chitinous skin. She waved her hands, grabbing the limbs that held her. Cytosine’s kids stroked her hair gently.
“Hello, baby,” said Chlorophyll, and Cytosine said something in her own language. One of the other plains-folk offered me a pair of cubes. I could have held half a dozen in my palm with room to spare. They felt touchscreen-slick and warm against my skin. Heat wavered off them on my scans, and I could catch hints of some internal circulation generating that heat. The network whispered through my vision, histories of our own failed attempts at molecular engineering, and all the fears and ethical arguments that had been raised around that never-reached possibility.
Cytosine had suggested harder limits than those guessed by our old philosophers, but even within those restrictions the cubes could as easily become weapons—or accidental disasters—as well-controlled tools. Across the circle of observers, Jace watched the proceedings with a thin-lipped smile, and Brend and Tiffany talked with animated hands. I thought of cordyceps mushrooms digesting caterpillars, of rivers eaten from the inside out.
“How do you make sure these are used safely?” I asked Cytosine. “Or do you? Do Ringers ever fight each other—at scale, I mean?” I thrilled at the thought that a species could outgrow war, and at the same time was terrified to think that they’d managed it. More than the Dyson sphere or the nanoengineering, that would set them far ahead of humanity.
Cytosine shifted and wrapped limbs around all three kids to steady them. “We try to avoid it—wars are far more dangerous in space than on a planet. There’s no margin for that kind of resource waste, and it’s usually easier to find new resources than to take them from where they’re protected. We’re not short of land, or any of the things that go along with it. Under those circumstances, ideas and passions are the main things that drive violence. We’re far from perfectly peaceful, but there are several billion observers ready to get in the way of burgeoning conflict.” She shuffled again, and eyes swiveled to track the construction work. “Those observers particularly discourage molecular weaponry. It’s far too dangerous; we lost two whole habitats early on to a fight over architectural design.”
I shivered. “I hope you’ll discourage it here, too.” And of course, I realized, this must be the “peaceful” technology they’d used to dismantle their gas giants. My chill grew glacial as I considered some fanatic deciding to force our relocation by taking Earth apart for construction material.
“I think you have the imagination common to all sapients,” Cytosine said. “You want to mark all the dangers before you examine the value. I promise these blocks are pre-programmed carefully; they won’t do anything other than build an antenna out of atmospheric carbon.”
I hefted the little cubes, feeling their weight. The black ones were so dark that I could barely see the corners; the silver swirled in a slow moiré. “I trust you on these ones. It’s the technology’s potential that worries me.”
“All postindustrial technologies are potential extinction events in waiting. It’s why we spread out.”
Then the Ringers trumpeted a shout of pleasure or triumph, and stepped back outside the bounds of the summoning diagram. Tree-folk grasped limbs with plains-folk, and their speech turned rhythmic, voices offset like a campfire round. Another ritual, like Rhamnetin’s morning prayer.
Within the summoning pattern, the blocks began to ripple as if someone had thrown a stone into a pond. But instead of dying away the ripples continued, and over long minutes I could see a second layer, then a third, growing upward. The antenna reached, slowly, for the stars.