080: ACACIA

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We set ourselves up at one of the nearby picnic tables. We still have a couple of hours before everyone crowds in for lunch, and from the table it’s easy to see if anyone comes close, so we should have some privacy.

I tap my fingers against each other, wishing I’d brought a coffee or something. Something to fiddle with. “Do you know why my books became so popular?” I begin.

“Of course. Everyone knows that. Your books crested a new wave of public consciousness, released just as humanity started looking towards the stars. With the invention of Kleiner Array Spectroscopy, the ability to see distant worlds similar to ours and really dream about a future on them, and then the start of the Javelin Program… of course the Javelin Program would pull your theories into the spotlight.”

I shake my head. “The Javelin Program is peripherally responsible, in a way, but that’s not why. There’s a hundred pop sociology book authors that they could’ve gone with. My name started getting spoken in the same circles as the Program because my books were already popular, and it’s not because they were any better than similar books. It was because of Shia. I assume you heard about her movement?”

“She was one of the more prominent Restrictionists, yes? The two of you had several public debates on the matter.”

“Exactly. There’s hundreds of sociologists writing books about their pet theories out there and thousands of tiny social movements, but we came with family drama. The dryad university professor – ”

“That word isn’t – ”

“I’m allowed to say it, you’re not; the dryad university professor telling humanity to go out and explore the stars, and the well-spoken environmentalist telling everyone to stay home; siblings at odds. We each made the other easy to market, made people feel like they needed to have a position, and that meant reading or listening to both of us. But the thing is, that’s all marketing nonsense. I fucking hated it, and so did she, because the truth is… we didn’t disagree. There was no fundamental conflict between our two positions.

“The Restrictionists weren’t anti-expansionist, they were expansion-cautious. Shia’s point was always that humans crashing into new ecosystems caused disaster. Mass extinctions of the local wildlife, almost universally, and if there were already humans living in the area, mass extinctions of them, too. Human expansion is universally violent; the only time it isn’t violent is when there’s nothing at the destination to kill. And even then, the colonisation of Mars and Luna can hardly be said to be… clean. Shia’s point was never ‘we should all stay home forever’, it was ‘we should have an action plan for if we meet anyone else’. And, this is the part everyone found hard to accept, ‘anyone else we meet on their territory should take priority’. If we show up at Hylara and find there’s bacteria living deep under the ice in some frozen ocean, then according to the Restrictionists, the correct course of action is to never land. We can always make more humans, but we can’t make another independently evolved alien biosphere. Shia’s point was that it was far too dangerous for humans to wantonly smear themselves across the galaxy before we were ready to make those kinds of commitments.

“And mine… well, I never said that expansion was good, or an admirable goal. I said it was inevitable. That it’s natural, a part of what humans do. But there are plenty of natural things that people and societies do that we recognise as undesirable and work to control; there’s no reason that one can’t acknowledge the existence of the Exodus Phenomenon and recognise that humans have a responsibility not to destroy everything we touch in a wave of expansionism. In fact, one must accept the Exodus Phenomenon in order to see the necessity of controlling and curtailing it. The logical conclusion, after seeing both of our viewpoints, is that humans are going to expand so we should start working now to make sure we do so responsibly.

“But logical conclusions agreed on by all parties don’t sell books or fund movements. And they don’t get eyes on the interviews or interest in the universities or feet at demonstrations. Two siblings disagreeing on the future of humanity do that, so obviously, when people are editing the press conferences or choosing questions for interviews or moderating a debate, that’s the part they focus on. And we… we probably could have taken more control of the narrative, honestly. But we needed those eyeballs, too. I had books to sell, and my publicity agent knew what he was doing, and I took his advice. Shia needed passion and attention on the problems she was raising. When the Javelin Program was announced, well, obviously people wanted to hear what we thought of it – I’d just released my third book by then, easily my worst one, but because of the Javelin Program it tripled the sales of the other two combined. When Fir got a job working on the Program, of course people tried to get kem involved in the drama too, but ke was too smart for that. Or at least too focused on engineering and utterly uninterested in social matters, which amounts to the same thing.

“I didn’t receive death threats until after the Javelin Program was announced. That’s when our theoretical banter suddenly became a very real issue, and I never had anything to do with the Program officially, but, well, you know how it is. Obvious parallels were drawn, I got asked about the Program a lot in interviews and they essentially used me as free publicity. And it’s much easier to threaten a random university professor than a bunch of rich guys who hang out in rich places and have security guards. The first credible death threat I got was shortly after coming back from Luna, when somebody tried to smuggle a gun into a talk I was giving. That gave all of us a pretty big scare, and after that my publisher started hiring personal security for me when I was outside Arborea. We kept my schedule quiet when I wasn’t working, so nobody knew when I’d be home, but I was never in that much danger – it was very rare that anyone would try anything, and when they did, it was half-hearted and they were bad at it.

“Shia was getting similar problems. Much worse ones, actually; all of the Restrictionist leaders were. If I was the bastard with no care for the distant rocks that we were going to scatter humanity on, the Restrictionists were the backwards species traitors who wanted humanity to be trapped on Earth until we eventually went extinct. People got angry about it, really angry.

“At one point, she was ready to retire, you know? Ready to just quit the organisation and stay home in Arborea. Our cluster would’ve been delighted; having so many children spend so much time abroad was hard on them. Arboreans, once we come home from our coming-of-age exile, don’t usually tend to move around quite this much. But I talked her into continuing. She believed passionately in what she was doing, and I.” I look down at the table, unable to meet Sands’ eyes. “My fourth book had just been released.

“We had a debate scheduled for one month after the book release. We were planning on driving to the event together. We were on the Capricorn Plateau, and we were staying in separate hotels because Shia loved the view from high up on the space elevator and I fucking hated it, but we were supposed to meet up at the base and travel to the event, and honestly, I don’t think she’d have been there at all if it wasn’t on the Plateau. I think she half-agreed because it was a good excuse to see the space elevator again.” I can’t help but smile a little to myself. “Anyway, the morning of the debate, my security team said they’d received a credible threat and they were sending me on a later transport, which wasn’t unusual because my security guys were always very overcautious. I asked about Shia and they said that they’d informed her security too, and she was the actual target, and I figured… I mean, she has security, they knew what they were doing, there was no need for me to get further involved. I could’ve… I could’ve contacted her and offered her space on my new transport, but it’d been so rotting hard to get her to come at all, and there was always some security threat that my guys thought was ‘credible’, and if I’d contacted her I knew she’d just pull out of the debate altogether. So, um. I got ready, and I just got on the transport my guys had arranged. And waited for her at the venue.”

“And this was the day of the Mason attack,” Sands says, his voice carefully neutral.

“Yeah. Another transport just drove straight into hers, at an angle that could only be intentional. Shia, her driver, and half of her security team died instantly. The other driver wasn’t found at the scene. Later, she was identified as Ariadne Mason, another prominent member of the Restrictionist Movement, who’d apparently killed Shia in an attempt to martyr her in a kind of false flag operation; she’d known that Shia was leaving the movement and wanted to make more use of her image. But that’s bullshit. I knew Ariadne; she and Shia were friends, and she wasn’t some cold-hearted killer, especially not such a stupid one to pull a dumb stunt like that. It was obviously a fucking cover up, I figured. Someone important had killed my sister, and now they were covering it up and discrediting the Restrictionist movement at the same time.”

“And that’s when you broke into the Javelin Program headquarters.”

“Yeah. I went for the bastard who’d killed my sister. I’m honestly surprised I didn’t end up in jail; still not sure what strings my publisher had to pull there.”

“So you think it was a cover-up. That the Restrictionist Movement was too much of a risk to the Javelin Program, so they silenced Acacia and Ariadne and discredited the whole movement in a single blow.”

I shrug. “Maybe? I mean, I thought that at the time. But it’s not like the Restrictionists were ever a risk to the program; the kinds of people who’d volunteer for something like this weren’t going to be dissuaded by Restrictionists. And even if they were a threat, this all happened way too late in the proceedings to really be useful.”

“So you don’t think it was them?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care any more. Maybe the Javelin guys did it to discredit the Restrictionists. Maybe Ariadne did it, and I didn’t know her as well as I thought I did. Maybe some random extremist did it, and they took advantage of them to frame Ariadne and discredit the movement because they might as well. Does it matter? Everyone involved is dead except me. The point is, she was there because I put her there. And this isn’t some silly ‘oh I told my grandma to get on a spaceship and then it crashed so I killed her’ kind of thing – I knew she was at risk. I knew there was a credible threat. And I didn’t tell her. Because I wanted to sell more copies of my book. And then… then I went home, and…” I rub my eyes on the heel of my hand.

“And your family blamed you,” Sands says, a hint of something in his voice. Anger? Maybe. He was so mistrustful of the killers in our crew, and I’d just confessed to killing my sister.

“No,” I say. “No, they didn’t. I told my mother everything and she just… she just hugged me. I couldn’t make them understand. They should’ve exiled me! Acacia was dead, and they wouldn’t even get rid of the one responsible; didn’t they love her? Did she really mean that little to everyone? We just had the funeral, and we cried together, and everyone was so nice. They even let me help butcher her for the funeral. They shouldn’t have let me lay a hand on her ever again; they should’ve cursed my bones at the node tree and told me never to come back. But they didn’t do anything. Even Fir, who was always so blunt with kes thoughts, just… it was like none of them could understand, like they all just had this blind spot, just refused to believe I could be guilty of something like that. And every second I was with them, it was like I was spitting on her memory, like I was taking advantage of them. Making them love me instead of her, when they should have been furious.”

“Or perhaps they concluded that the person guilty of the crime was the one who hit her with a car, and not someone who just wasn’t omniscient?”

“More than one person can be guilty of a crime,” I snap. “Anyway, not long after the funeral I woke up and I realised that I wasn’t supposed to be there. That wasn’t my world any more, it wasn’t my life, I had other places to be. I was halfway to the nearest registry office before I even recognised the mania, even though I’d written four whole books about it. I signed up for the Javelin Program and they actually accepted me, which was about the dumbest choice anyone could make since I’d threatened their CEO with a knife and said I hoped all their ships fell out of the sky less than three weeks ago, but apparently their colonist vetting process is just really awful because here I am.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you.”

“Don’t be sorry for me. Be sorry for the people I got killed. Or, don’t, I guess, since it was probably over a century ago by now. Anyway. That story was kind of a downer, so. What are you doing here? I know you got inspired by my books or whatever to become an engineer on the program, but there’s a difference between deciding to design the engines for a colony ship and deciding to actually get on it.”

“Oh. That’s easy. I was offered a truly ridiculous amount of money.”

I blink, surprised. “Money.”

“Yes.”

“To uproot your entire life and travel beyond the reach of the rest of humanity.”

“Yes.”

“Where your money won’t mean anything.”

“Ah, sorry, I should have specified. I mean I was offered money for the Sands family. We had quite a few debts.”

“Why would somebody offer your family a huge amount of money to ensure they’d never see you again? Wouldn’t it be easier to hire an assassin?”

“Perhaps, but that’s not… I mean, it’s a little more complicated than that.” He stares off into space for a few seconds, then nods decisively. “Alright.” He leans forward across the table, and locks eyes with me. “I can’t be completely certain, based on the scant information we have translated, but… I strongly suspect that I’m here because of people like Captain Kinoshita.”

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