The Void Princess 9: Love and Money

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“We call them Maxwell crystals,” Flora says. “They’re… chemically quite complicated. How much do you know about thermodynamics?”

“Um,” I say. “I’m not a scientist.”

Flora nods. “Well, there’s a pretty solid guiding principle in thermodynamics that says, quite simply, that change has a tendency to be one-way. It’s called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If you put hot and cold things next to each other, the heat evens out. If you mix two similar liquids, they stay mixed. Things, on the whole, average out over time, and since usable energy is energy harnessed as things change, energy that’s useful to us decreases over time, becoming heat mostly and leaving things at the bottom of gravity wells. This state of things being averaged out is called ‘entropy’. Entropy increases over time.”

I nod patiently. I know what entropy is. I’m not that mechanically incompetent.

“What some people don’t realise is that entropy isn’t a thing, and the Second Law isn’t a force. It’s just a measure of probability. If there’s more heat in one area than another, then sheer probability states that heat is going to move to the colder area faster than to the hotter area. Thus, they even out; no external force required. It’s like evolution; you tell a kid about evolution for the first time and they’ll assume that there’s some kind of new force they’ve never heard of pushing change, but there isn’t; evolution is very simple cause-and-effect. Random changes that support their own proliferation tend to proliferate; random changes that work against their own proliferation tend not to. Basic probability. The Second Law and entropy work the same way. There’s nothing resisting the gain of ‘order’ and loss of ‘entropy’ beyond the sheer improbability of it. All of the molecules of oxygen in this room could gather in one corner and all the carbon dioxide in another, through sheer motion, just as surely as they could gather in their current configuration, but the number of configurations in which the air is considered ‘mixed’ by us so outweigh the number of configurations in which it’s considered ‘separated’ that the chances of that happening are negligible. Thus, over time, everywhere, things become more mixed. Just through blind laws of averages. Nothing else.

“A long, long time ago, back before our ancestors ever left Earth, a scientist named James Maxwell highlighted this with a thought experiment. She pointed out that one could theoretically violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics with an appropriate filter. If you took a container of tepid water and put a membrane in the middle that only let high-velocity molecules in one direction and only let low-velocity molecules in the other, then over time, you’d end up with hot water on one side and cold water on the other, an increase in order and reduction of entropy. This upset a lot of her contemporaries, who liked to think of their rules as firm and inviolate and didn’t like to think of such things as mere conditional probability.”

“But we do do things like that,” I point out. “We have refrigerators. And don’t cells in the body pass molecules into higher-concentrate areas all the time?” It’s been a while since I’ve taken a biology class.

Xiana nods. “Active transport, yes. But the key difference is, your cells use energy to do that. Energy that ultimately comes from breaking down chemical bonds, where energy from sunlight was stored; energy that, after you use it, becomes essentially useless heat. That active transport is one step on the path from coherent sunlight to incoherent heat, via your body. The process of active transport decreases local entropy slightly by increasing total entropy elsewhere. Same with a refrigerator; you can create a small temperature difference by using energy previously stored in batteries, and turning it to more entropic heat. And you charge the batteries and bring their entropy back down again by increasing it elsewhere to generate the energy. The system as a whole gains entropy. Maxwell hypothesised a filter wherein the nature of the material could block or allow such things without the consumption of further energy. Something humanity has never been able to find.”

“Until now,” Ereniv says.

Flora nods. “Until now.” She picks up the crystal and dunks the flat base in her tea.

Someone turns out the lights, but I can still see tolerably well; the crystal glows, each of its flat sides sending out beams of blue light that pattern the team’s faces in bars of light and shadow. Things glow when they get warm, of course; that’s basic physics. It’s how black body radiation works. It’s how ancient lightbulbs used to work. But not like this. You can’t just dunk a crystal in tea and get instant visible light.

“This grew in Venus’ atmosphere?” I ask. “In this heat?”

“Presumably. This team was put together because telescopes were picking up weird luminosity from Venus’ atmosphere. They assumed something magnetic, but instead they got these.”

Weird luminosity. Something new, unexpected. The crystals are new. What changed, to let them grow?

“They pick up heat energy above 49.29 degrees celsius and radiate it.”

“So they heat up and emit at an unusually low – ”

“No. They don’t passively heat up and glow.” Flora takes the crystal out of the tea. The beams of light swing wildly on the walls as she moves it to show me the bottom.

The bottom isn’t glowing. I could’ve sworn that the crystal was semitransparent, but the bottom doesn’t glow.

“It’s directional,” I breathe.

“Oh, forget just directional,” someone else (Kiorli, physicist) says. “It’s also coherent.”

“Coherent? You mean… like a laser? That kind of coherent?”

“Yep. Coherent like a laser. A single, clean, beautiful sine wave.”

“That’s not how glowing works.”

“You’re fucking right that’s not how glowing works.”

Seconds after removing the crystal from the tea, it stops glowing. It started far too fast for it to have heated up. It stopped far too fast for it to have cooled down. There’s physics that I don’t understand happening here; heat – not the heat of the crystal, the heat of what its base touches – translating to highly ordered light.

And I’m already thinking about dragons. About heat buildup in space. About taking a little dragon like Laika and gluing a bunch of these to his heat sinks and solving the problem forever, with no limitations, no need to eject coolant. Just get rid of the problem with a beam of light. About how big you could make dragons, how far they could travel, how many problems this solves.

About cities and their atmospheric shields, those power-drinking, heat-generating atmospheric shields. How much more efficiently could one collect solar power if one’s own heat wastage could be reclaimed by these things? Stick them on the heatsink and refocus them on the solar panel; solar panels and wires are not one hundred per cent efficient, so you would get all of it, but that they lose, they lose as heat, and that heat is fed right back into the crystals…

“You’re thinking about heat dispersal, aren’t you,” Ereniv says.

“And power generation.”

“Think bigger. Think about heat transfer. Two objects in space, same temperature. You want one hot and one cooler? Stick a crystal on one and aim the beam at the other. You want the other one hot instead? Remove the crystal, stick one on the other one. No energy lost except for physically adding or removing the crystals. Cooling and heating, at least in temperatures above fifty degrees, are a solved problem. Below that, well, we’ve used refrigeration units to pump to heat sinks for centuries; now we don’t have to worry about those heat sinks. This thing wil revolutionise more industries than we can count.”

“And when we found it,” Flora said, sipping her tea which was no longer steaming, “that’s when everything went wrong.”

It’s not hard to guess how. It’s a story as old as time. “Which corporation was involved?”

“Sunrith. From Daedalus.”

Daedelus, where Ilya works. That’s no surprise. The vast majority of corporations that partner with halfkind interests operate out of Daedelus; that’s what Daedelus is for. It’s his second most important job, right after keeping us off Earth and out of halfkind politics so we don’t contaminate their cultures.

“And Sunrith…”

“Told us that mission parameters had changed, yeah. They wanted us to study this thing, figure out what we could about it, get them a head start on its manufacture and use. If we could figure out how to grow the stuff, everyone on the team would be set for life. Most of us were more interested in the science, but it all works out the same – suddenly this project wasn’t just ‘nobody really cares’ secret, it was properly secret. We needed a dragon to do what Valentina couldn’t, and that meant calling our dragon engineer down, and the whole thing became pretty chaotic juggling the activity down here and maintaining staff on Yuri up there.”

“That was Lyllania. And she built Laika to harvest and analyse the crystals.”

“Yep. He can survive indefinitely in Venus’ environment, in theory. Although no insulation is perfect; operation time is dependent on human tolerance, like usual. A Princess can survive in him out there for… oh, maybe twelve to fourteen hours. That’s the main reason we couldn’t use Valentina; a Princess in her has about five hours, which simply isn’t long enough to do anything useful.”

That explains Laika’s more scientific features. It doesn’t explain the anti-custody features, but it explains something. “And he was programmed to not be able to say anything about this place?”

Ereniv looks puzzled. “No, his mind was copyflashed from Valentina’s root. He doesn’t have any unusual security protocols and I didn’t hardcode any secrecy into him. What would be the point? He wasn’t supposed to leave the planet until the rest of us did.”

“He was incapable of telling me anything about this place. He couldn’t even tell me that we were going to Venus. Might Lyllania have done that?”

“I don’t know why she would, and I doubt she’d know how. She built the body; the mind was my job. She had no expertise in dragon minds beyond the practical aptitude for being a princess, so far as I know.”

Thel told me, Laika says, flashing me an extremely sparse copy of a soul surface. Thel, AI psychologist, based on Daedelus, works for Sunrith. I try to remember if I know a Thel, and draw a blank.

“Do you guys know anyone called Thel?” I ask, to a general shaking of heads. Well, if she wasn’t out here, then it was pretty unlikely that she could bind Laika to secrecy out here.

When did she tell you? I ask Laika.

On Minotaur. After you left. She came and asked me what happened. I didn’t remember. She told me to keep the project secret forever. I asked to see you and you came back. I brought you here.

She’d seen Laika while I was on Daedelus with Ilya. The engineer had said they were getting an AI psychologist in. Why did she want you to keep this place a secret?

Through the soul bleed, I can feel Laika shuffling uncomfortably. She asked me what happened. I didn’t remember. She asked lots of questions and I answered what I could. She talked to somebody quiet, on subsoul transmission, she didn’t know that Lyllania had taught me to hear. The person on the other end said to wait. Said that the research team was probably dead and if it became known that their research team had hit disaster and died on Venus then it would be very bad for the company. Said that they should pretend they had never gone to Venus and instead start building a properly equipped team ready for the crystals and potential problems and pretend it was the first team. If there were bodies and a base left to find when they got here then they could pretend not to know them. She made me keep it secret. Then they were going to take me to Talos.

Oh. Oh, starlight. Laika. Laika, who carried the corpse of his princess and fled straight for her home, the only concept of a home he had outside of his planet of birth, too crazed with memory corruption and too feral to think of a closer port. Laika, going for help for his friends trapped on Venus. And I’d pulled him in, too incoherent to explain the problem, and left, and the moment he was coherent enough to talk to a specialist (and probably still too incoherent to talk to anyone else), that specialist was ordered to leave his friends to die and silenced him on the matter. He couldn’t call for help, he couldn’t explain the problem, he couldn’t do anything but wait, immobilised, for his transfer to Talos, where they could’ve stuck him off somewhere isolated or had specialists dig into his soul to remove what dangerous memories and motivations they could (they’re not supposed to do that, except in the most severe and unrecoverable of cases, but if the specialist herself declares him such a case…) while all the people he had known and loved in his life died on Venus, unnoticed.

Of course he’d immediately abducted the only person to show him love in over a year and dragged her out here to solve the problem. What else was he going to do?

Oh, Laika. I’m not sure what feeling I’m sending him exactly, but it’s being sent back in equal measure. I have the urge to walk back out into the den and pat his nose.

I don’t, though. There are still important things to learn in here. “Were you aware,” I ask the research team, “that Laika has false manual override controls?”

“What do you mean, false controls?” Xiana asks.

“I mean that the manual overrides don’t work. Or at least, that Laika can override them They’re built that way. There are real manual overrides, but they’re hidden.” I glance around at all the faces. “I guess none of you knew that.”

“Why?” Flora asks.

“Excellent question. Only one person fits comfortably inside him, so it’s impractical as an anti-hijacking measure. Similarly, I doubt that Lyllania was worried about theft, goven the location – I assume you all trusted each other, and even if someone did steal and manually pilot him, where would you even go?”

“You couldn’t manually pilot him out of here,” Ereniv says. “No human’s good enough to fly a dragon through the high atmosphere Venus winds on manual override, you’d get pulverised in the cockpit. And if you stayed on the planet, you’re on the twelve hour clock before overheating. There’s no reason to build in anti-theft anything.”

“Not while on Venus,” I agree. “But this mission was going to end eventually, yes?” I sip my tea. “He can also slip standard dragon restraints, as a built-in feature. Again, he looks restrained, but he can shrug right out of them. It’s how he abducted me. I doubt that that has a practical use down here.”

“It doesn’t.”

“And he has secret cargo compartments, and secret fuel reserve compartments that he can dump straight into his thrusters if his fuel’s been drained.”

Flora narrows her eyes. “You’re saying that Lyllania’s a corporate spy. She was here to steal the crystal find from Sunrith.”

“Impossible,” Ereniv says. “There’s simply no way that Lyllania had any idea there was anything here that could be stolen. We were sent to find out why something was glowing and refracting off the upper atmosphere. Expecting it to be something that could be stolen just doesn’t make sense, and if some other corporation knew about it already, they wouldn’t send a corporate spy, they would’ve sent a mission first.”

“Not a spy.” Flora nods. “An opportunist. She built Laika after we got here, after we found the crystals. She didn’t trust Sunrith to look after us. Wanted to make sure we could bring something ourselves.”

Ereniv snorts. “Was she wrong? They left us to die.”

“She wasn’t wrong,” Flora agrees quietly. “The question is, do we still have to worry about them now?”

“I don’t think so,” I say. “When Laika abducted me, law enforcement were on our tail immediately, and I talked his way out of it. Sunrith didn’t try to get involved or make any trouble, to my knowledge; didn’t try to stop the new partnership or confiscate Laika. And I have no reason to think they followed us out here; they would’ve intercepted us easily if they really tried. If Thel believes that Laika couldn’t hear her subsoul conversation, which is reasonable as that’s something Laika shouldn’t be able to do, then she has no reason to believe that we’re any kind of a problem for her even if Sunrith did bother to track us and realise where we were heading. From their point of view, the most PR damage we can cause them is exactly the same PR damage that sending their own rescue party would’ve caused – the knowledge that a Venus mission fucked up. They don’t know that Laika knows they were going to leave you to die.”

“They would almost certainly assume that we’re already dead,” Xiana says. “We’ve had to do a lot of unconventional engineering with this new crystal to stay alive. Getting the light intensity right in the greenhouses in order to grow enough food was a nigh impossible project.”

“You have greenhouses?”

“Almost this entire base is a greenhouse. Humans use a lot of calories.”

“They’re probably not that concerned about Laika bringing you out here to see our corpses,” Ereniv says, “and they probably assume – likely correctly, given all current evidence – that you wouldn’t get off the planet successfully anyway. But they will be concerned if you do get off the planet with samples of the Maxwell crystals. They’ll be worried that you might sell them to somebody else.” She has a brief conversation with Laika that I can feel through the soul bleed but not understand, then nods to herself. “Laika explained about Yuri dying here and that it was almost impossible to get off the planet. So it makes sense that they wouldn’t stop you.”

“It does?” I ask.

“Laika couldn’t tell anyone what was going on. He too you out here, an you didn’t know enough to tell anyone else. There’s two outcomes – most likely, Laika and you die here, and the Laika thing is a self-solving problem. Less likely, you get back out with samples of the crystal. They know from Laika how risky leaving the planet is, though they presumably have no more of an idea why that is than we do. Sending another mission is a massive risk fro them. If you return, they can simply have someone meet you at the frontier and offer you an absurd amount of money for whatever samples you grabbed, and go build artificial environments to study them in. Either way, leaving you alone is neutral at worst, a benefit at best.”

“Except for the awkward part where you’re all still alive and we all now know they were going to leave you to die.”

Ereniv smiles. “Yeah. That’s going to be a fun surprise for them. If we get off the planet alive.”

“We have a long-range transmitter currently in orbit around the planet,” I say. “Electromagnetic tech. Like the first astronauts used.”

The whole room perks up.

“Can’t get much information in an electromagnetic signal,” Flora says. “But you sure as shadow can get a distress call out on it. How long range? Can it reach civilisation?”

“Easily. I’ve been receiving messages on it for the whole journey. If Laika and I can get back up there, we can send a distress call. We also have about a year’s worth of food for one person packed into Laika; you’re all clearly a bit calorie-deficient, so that should help bolster supplies. We’ll leave that down here, so if we don’t make it out – ”

“No, take it with you,” Xiana says. “If Laika’s right, no other help is coming. If you and Laika don’t make it, our supplies are irrelevant; they’re just prolonging the inevitable. Take your supplies, get up there, and activate the signal; that way, if there’s something wrong with the transmitter and you can’t get a signal out, you can head straight for frontier space to get help yourselves. If you leave supplies down here you’d have to come back to get them; an unnecessary risk. That’s my opinion, anyway.”

“Yes,” Flora says. “We should do that. In fact, once you’ve transmitted the message, you should go for help anyway. Just in case there’s a problem. There’s no reason to come back down and put yourself and Laika in danger down here.”

I frown at that. “You need Laika back down here. You can’t go outside without him. What if you need something from outside?”

“We have managed so far.”

“We’ve lost enough people,” Xiana says. She reaches over the table to take my hands. “At least get Laika out safe.”

They’re right, of course. The best thing that Laika and I can do is get them help; putting ourselves at more risk by coming back isn’t all that useful. Besides, I don’t want to die down here. I’ve always assumed that I’ll die in a dragon, but I’d rather it be in actual colonised space. And also not yet. I’m barely out of my forties, for starlight’s sake; I have a good century or so before dying in some stupid dragon-related stunt is heroic instead of tragic.

“I’ll do my best,” I smile, “but I’m not the one who’s hard to convince.”

I try to stay out of their resulting argument with Laika. I take a tour of the extensive greenhouse instead while his obstinance and resentment burns in the back of my brain.

They have tea plants. So I guess that explains why they still have tea. Nice.

It takes a while. But eventually, I’m climbing back into the little cockpit that’s been my home for oh so long and settling back into a sensory world that actually makes sense, while Laika says his goodbyes to everyone as if they’re never going to see each other again. I hope that’s not true.

I open myself to his soul properly again, and it feels like getting all my limbs back. (This soul bleed is going to be a real bitch to recover from, but that’s Future Shana’s problem, if she lives that long.) We head out of the dome and up the volcano a little ways, putting a nice bit of distance between us and the science team.

You’re giving us a lot of launch space, I observe.

High gravity, long distance, he points out. Will need the impulse rockets. It’s not safe to be close to the base when firing them.

You have impulse rockets?!

Of course. It’s high gravity.

They’re not on your blueprints!

He doesn’t credit that with any more response than a deliberate, meaningful silence. Which, good point. There’s a lot of things that aren’t on Laika’s blueprints.

We point Laika’s head up, to the tumultuous sky above. To safety, to freedom, to that transmitter that we can use to call for help. I keep my soul quiet so as not to distract him while he calculates our exit path, leaps up, and fires the impulse rockets in a loud clap of pressure.

And that’s when everything goes to absolute shit.

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