Chapter Five

Marcia was lost among the crowd stampeding from the shuttle. She was in constant motion, and if she slowed or stopped she might well have been swept along by her fellow passengers anyway. The bay doors were large, but people still squeezed around the edges to force themselves out and onto the platform proper. After four months locked away in the passenger shuttle, she could understand why everyone was eager to leave it behind. On top of that anticipation was an anxiety that only comes with stepping into something truly unknown. From this point on, absolutely anything could happen, and if anyone had lied or would be changing their mind it could spell the end for them all. It was very much the feeling one receives on the cusp of a blind date. Only the dating candidates were fourfold, and if anything went wrong they could all end up dead.

But – no. As she finally separated from the crush she saw smiling faces greet their party from the great white doors. There were four doors, each emblazoned with an engraving of the Earth taken from a different angle, and a single word. One read “Garden”. Another read “Carmen”. The third read “Edo”. She and her fellow passengers headed for the fourth door. Various attendants greeted them there and took their luggage, offered them maps and schedules, trying to not overload them with information, although there was no other quantity of information with which to be loaded. Marcia entered the back of the queue going through the door and into the station proper, only briefly glancing up to see the name she would now have to understand as her home: “Herald.”

The naming had been contentious, like most other aspects of establishing the Parliament over the last five years. Each of the member states bristled a little at the thought of applying a new name to their home planet, a planet they had all called “Earth” for most of their respective histories. A solid, dependable name until now, it had on occasion reminded Marcia that life was not the miracle the Palace and the cathedrals made it out to be. Their existence, from the lowliest messenger to the King himself, was all born of nothing but Earth. Except now there were four of them, and they couldn’t all go on calling themselves the same thing; they needed a way to differentiate. At the same time, nobody felt comfortable leaving behind such an ancient name, one of the few linguistic roots they all shared. The compromise was a codename. The Service came up with some guidelines – two syllables, nothing too grand, ideally something that translates well into each major culture represented in the Parliament. Each Earth chose their own names as one of the first major acts post-unity. The King had decreed it in a private meeting to all inner circle members, almost one year after that strange night with the probe. They were now Earth: Herald, at least when conversing with their parallel neighbours.

It was Earth: Edo, however, who had suggested the interplanetary Parliament in the first place. Their sales pitches were so persuasive as to be occasionally daunting, but their negotiating skill meant that they could not only obfuscate the truth when necessary, but also highlight it and hold it up when it happened to help their position. The logic (as they explained it) was simple – their corporations were always looking for new markets, and countless ones could be available on three new Earths. Someone would need to act as a regulator to those markets, or the enterprise would collapse immediately. Who better than a group of officials from each of the planets to engage with the democratic process directly? After some reading up on ‘democracy’, Marcia had been all too happy to volunteer.

The other Earths had their own reasons for joining, but Earth: Garden had been the holdout for the longest. Little was known about them – certainly little enough that Marcia, as an officer handling communication between the planets, had reason to be nervous of their true intentions. They were a secretive group, prone to lapsing into silence for days or weeks at a time as they fought some sort of global war on their planet. Their country (or bloc of countries – nobody knew for certain) was called Novus Ordo Seculorum, and they had multiple opponents, though next to nothing was known about them. The Novus people were the ones who had managed to control the void on their side, and it was possible that Marcia’s people might never hear from the other factions. So the name Earth: Garden was chosen by NOS leaders, and there was nobody to say differently.

This period of intense change had perhaps left the King more malleable to certain persuasive arguments, as he shortly agreed to contribute to this Parliament. Earth: Carmen took little time to jump on the bandwagon too, and they were more than happy to offer their advanced technology to make it a reality. Marcia had to admit that while each planet had contributed to the project, none of it would have happened without Carmen’s spacecraft, void-suitable materials, orbital theory, life support, or any number of other miracles they had produced out of nowhere. It was a gift, they said, but she and King Aenos 5 knew better. All that remained was to see what they wanted in return.

Finally, she reached the front of the queue. A beaming Service member held out a paper bag. “Good morning! Welcome to Audacity! Can I take your name?”

Marcia concentrated hard on the words, trying to parse the question. The Service member was speaking Gaean, the language constructed by each planet’s foremost linguists to facilitate communication. She had had a lot of difficulty learning it in the beginning, but after a six-month lockdown in which the King had decreed only Gaean be spoken inside their quarters, she had picked it up. She spoke it better than she could listen to it, however, and it didn’t help that she was, right now, possibly speaking to the first alien she had ever met.

They looked human, of course, but there was a good chance that the man standing in front of her was born on a completely different planet. Her Earth had provided most of the infrastructure for the Service as well as most of its staff (which included not only those who could formalise the laws passed by the Parliament and enforce them back home, but also the maintenance staff and other key roles to make life aboard Audacity possible). But she knew that for the member introductions, the first of many pre-planned greeting stages, Service members from different worlds had been posted to each gate to begin the acclimation process right away. Marcia liked to think she could tell the difference just from looking, but in truth, they were all human. Whatever differences they had didn’t extend so far back as to affect their physiology.

Once she could figure out the question she gave her name, and the Service member found her on a list and tapped her name twice. She saw it flash green before disappearing from the list altogether. Her instinct would have been to sweep past, this man’s role having been fulfilled, but something made her want to talk to him more. “Is it, er, is it all going well today?” she asked.

He nodded. “Smooth sailing so far. Garden folks aren’t due in for another half-hour so we should be able to see them arrive in the void before long.”

“Good. Where do I go now?”

The Service member pointed at the paper bag she was now clutching on to. “You’ve been assigned a meeting point along with a portion of your other delegates. From there someone will take you into the debate chamber, and the Speaker will give his welcome address. You have a great day.”

When he saw her brow furrow after he stopped talking, he must have realised she wasn’t understanding him. He pointed again. “Booklet. Meeting room. After, chamber.” Marcia smiled, thanked him, and swiftly moved on.

She was well acquainted with the layout of the Audacity – she had helped design parts of it, although she wasn’t an architect by trade. When she pulled out her welcome booklet, a sticker on the front told her that she was part of Introductory Group C, which would be meeting in Conference Room Alpha. She might have been able to get there on her own if the corridors were clear, but she was alarmed to see that the teeming masses that had left the Herald shuttle were only a portion of the sea of people back-and-forthing through the station’s tight passages. Consulting her map, she tried to navigate a path through the horde.

The station was designed as a series of concentric circles that shrank both inward and upward (for the officially designated definition of ‘upward’). The resulting effect from the outside was like the skeleton of a cone, five layers high and several more deep. The shuttle doors were on layer four, near the bottom of the structure. This layer was reserved for shipping cargo and (on the inner segments of the layer) the storerooms. Layers two and three belonged to the Service, including dormitories, kitchens, and offices for the deskbound half of the organisation. Layer one held the technical matter – communication equipment and the life-support systems to keep the whole station afloat. Only that layer had a personnel restriction, but the expectation was that the delegates (whose mission the entire structure was intended to support) would have little reason to leave layer five.

The largest layer at the base of the cone consisted of four concentric circles which bulged at equidistant intervals to allow for larger living spaces. Those living spaces connected around the edges, and straight corridors allowed access to the wheel’s centre. That was Marcia’s destination – the second ring in layer five, home to a variety of conference rooms, lecture theatres, offices, and recreational spaces of all shapes and sizes. Because nobody could predict exactly how the delegates might come to use these spaces, the greatest architects on all four Earths eventually took a kitchen-sink approach, offering any kind of meeting room they could think of. It was anticipated that some of them would fall into disuse further down the line, but structural changes weren’t planned for another five years, by which time Audacity would be in its fourth parliamentary term. Nobody could predict what the station might look like then. If it lasted that long.

Marcia took a reassuringly smooth elevator to the fifth layer, then walked the marginally-less-bustling corridors until she found Conference Room Alpha. Through the frosted glass in the door she saw three figures already waiting. She took a breath – this was the opportunity to make a first impression on her colleagues, the spark to a working relationship that had the potential to last for years.

But as she opened the door, the first face she saw was not a new one. Lars Ariti shifted in his chair as he saw her enter, and she sighed. Of all the conference rooms in all the universes, she thought to herself. The room was relatively snug despite its designation, seating only twelve around a sleek conference table. The carpet was soft and inviting, while the walls were wood-panelled. All this work was deliberate, and something she had championed – she rejected the space-age aesthetic that Edo’s people had initially proposed, all chrome and metal pieces. Her goal was that after enough time being in a room like this, one might forget that one was trapped in the middle of an endless void.

Lars looked as nervous as she felt, but that wasn’t unusual for him. She could only imagine the small talk the two strangers would have had to endure. Looking them over, she found that she could guess at their Earth of origin pretty clearly. The sharp black suits they both wore looked stiflingly formal to her eyes, and the total lack of colour would, on her own planet, have implied a lack of status. But she remembered from her briefing that on Earth: Edo this was considered timeless and fashionable, the clean design connoting success in business. Turning her gaze from Lars, she smiled as they stood to greet her.

“Hi! Kei Morishita, great to meet you.” She shook the woman’s hand and maintained eye contact. Kei was a little taller than her and held her posture like a noblewoman, though she hadn’t proffered a title. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lars visibly struggle with the question of whether to stand too.

“Lady Marcia Kouris,” she replied. “I see you’ve already met my colleague, Scion Ariti.” Lars looked up at her like a rabbit in the headlights.

“Sure, we’ve been chatting a little,” Kei said. “Mostly about your King, he sounds like an interesting guy.”

She was going to have to get used to people imposing that sort of value judgment onto the King, so Marcia resisted the urge to correct Kei and instead turned to the man by her side. He was larger in frame than his fellow Edoer (Edoan? Demonyms were low on the long list of things to eventually establish), and had a short grey beard that was incongruous with his jet-black hair. “Isidor Zhukov, esquire,” he boomed as he reached out his hand. “Call me Isi. It was Marsha, was it?”

“Marcia,” she corrected, enunciating the softer sound.

“Marseeya,” he attempted. It was close enough that she nodded, and he looked satisfied. They both spoke Gaean with an easy familiarity; she wondered how they had practiced. “I’m not a foreign-languages kind of guy – let me tell you, before the brainiacs got together and showed me the Gaean plans, I was having real doubts about coming up here.” He talked as though it were a weekend golf trip, not eighteen months of his life in deep space.

“I know what you mean,” she agreed, taking a seat around the glass table. “It was good of the Carmen delegation to organise the language blueprint – they’ve done a lot to make this all possible. Maybe more than their fair share, eh?” She meant it lightly, but used the comment to gauge the reactions of those on the other side of the table. Luckily, Isi Zhukov didn’t seem to be an especially subtle man.

“Very true, Marcia. We owe them a great deal – though, I can’t help but worry about it.”

“Worry?” she enquired, affecting concern. She spotted Kei, leaning back away from Isi’s eyeline, sizing her up. She looked as though she didn’t buy Marcia’s game for a second, but she wasn’t annoyed or suspicious – more like approving.

“Sure,” Isi said. “Way I was raised, you don’t take something for nothing. I don’t know how they do things over there, they seem like charitable folks, but as far as I can see I’m already on the back foot.”

Marcia was about to agree when Lars leaned in. “I think they really are as charitable as you say. Do you know about their Surplus project? Remarkable stuff, really.” The Edoers watched Lars, and he eventually realised they were waiting for him to continue, because he said “They’re, well, they’re essentially trying to automate the production of every good, or, or every service you can imagine, so that anyone can have anything for free! Isn’t that exciting?

Isi and Kei didn’t look as excited as Lars, and Marcia realised she would probably have to start distancing herself from him if she was going to make waves on Audacity. None of them had time to respond, however, before the door opened again.

The man that entered wore the badge of the Service, but even without it his obvious youth would have marked him as such. He was clean-shaven and had the same broad smile as the man Marcia talked to at the shuttle doors. She wondered if they had been told to smile like that around all the delegates – she had to admit that it put her at ease to see someone who knew what they were doing.

“Hello everyone,” he greeted the room to a chorus of “hi”s and “how are ya”s. “Just checking in, making sure everyone’s where they’re supposed to be.” He counted the heads in the room and his face twisted a little. “Seems not. Okay, let me do a quick roll call.”

Isi rolled his eyes at Marcia, who gave an indulgent smile in return. She understood his look – while the delegates weren’t technically the bosses of the Service, they all anticipated a certain status while aboard the Audacity, and right now they were being treated more like unruly schoolchildren. As the young man called their names, they each responded with a raised hand or a muted “yes”. Three names were called to silence, one of which caught Marcia’s ear. Sai was one of only a few mononymous delegates aboard the station, and as far as she knew, that could only designate one of Carmen’s machines. Ever since hearing about that world’s advances in artificial intelligence she’d been eager to meet one, and had been even more amazed to hear that they were eligible for the position of delegate. She’d rather assumed that if she met any aboard the station it would be in the Service, administering the parliamentary procedures and such. But it seemed that instead they would be making the laws alongside the humans.

When the young Service member reached the end of his list, Lars raised his hand.

“Sorry,” he began. Marcia cringed automatically. “You didn’t call my name. Am I not on the list?”

Marcia briefly entertained the idea that His Glory had taken her advice and revoked Lars’ credentials, and he would be on the first shuttle home. It would be a strange move, but far from the most dramatic thing a King has ever decreed – in her historical research, Marcia learned that Herald was the only planet to have landed on the moon before discovering South America, something that only struck her as unusual once she realised it wasn’t how everyone else had done it. But the truth was more prosaic, as the Service member checked his logs and told Lars he was supposed to be in Discussion Room Alpha.

“That’s not this?” he asked bemusedly, turning to the three sat at the table. Marcia shook her head, partly to confirm his question and partly out of despair. “Oh, hell,” he muttered to himself, gathering his own paper bag and heading out. He stopped at the door and said “It was very nice to meet-“ but as he raised his hand in farewell he dropped his bag, spilling briefing materials and stationery over the floor. He tried to pick it up while keeping the door open, but it closed on him as he sighed. Eventually, he was gone, the Service member leading him to his meeting point.

Kei, Isi, and Marcia looked at each other in amusement.

“Nice guy,” said Kei.

“Sure, sure,” said Isi. “Not what I expected from Herald, I’ll admit. You know him well, Marcia?”

She was tempted to lie, but she pushed that away – it would only get her in trouble in the long run. “Well, yes. We were married.”

Kei’s eyes widened. “Really? As in, past tense?”

“As in, bad blood?” Isi added, shameless in his hunger for gossip.

“Not as such. We’re divorced, yes, but it was amiable enough. We both realised the mistake we’d made.” Here she was, spilling the guts of her romantic history to what was technically an alien. In any other context she might have been more tight-lipped, but there didn’t seem to be a point. Kei nodded, while Isi gave a short laugh and wagged his finger.

“I had a feeling,” he said. “The way you looked at him when he came in, I thought, there’s some history there. Not a million years would I have guessed divorce, though!”

“But to be…oh, god, to be stuck up here with him…” Kei mused. “That’s got to be…”

“The shuttle was bad enough,” Marcia confirmed. “We had only been married two years, and we broke up two days before the King chose us as delegates.”

Kei shook her head, while Isi smiled wider. “Timing couldn’t be worse, huh?” he said.

“No. It couldn’t.”

Isi must have seen her expression frost over, because he apologised quickly. “I’m sorry, Marcia, you probably don’t want to dredge this all up on day one, right?”

“I’m just here to get the job done,” she replied. “Speaking of which, if you want to get a head-start I have a few questions for your faction.”

The Edoers obliged, and the three of them spent the next half hour trading questions about their world’s cultures. Marcia was surprised to learn that what she thought of as contract law on her world was, in fact, the only law on Edo. Most of the most fundamental laws (against theft, murder, and so on) were forbidden by a contract that parents sign on behalf of their children, to one of nine “megacorporations” that handled enforcement. At age fourteen (and every fourteen years thereafter) the contract came up for renewal, and absolutely everyone renewed.

“What’s the difference between the corporations?” she asked.

“Not much,” Kei said. “It used to be that one corporation would treat issues of theft more seriously than another, but they’ve more or less converged now. It’s said that if you have a Mezener Sons contract, you’re about twice as hard to prosecute. But they’re expensive to get.”

Marcia could not get her head around this idea of variable justice. “And that works?”

“More or less. We thought it did, anyway.”

For their part, the Edoers wanted to know about Herald’s legislative priorities – what they wanted to see passed first, and where they might find common ground. Marcia told them that the King would be handling the bulk of that work as their prime delegate.

“Prime delegate? Do we have one of those?” Isi asked Kei, who shook her head.

“I don’t think so, we’re all on equal footing,” Kei said. “Sounds like the King is taking charge of your delegation.”

Marcia thought this was obvious, but Isi laughed. “So you’re just going to do whatever he wants?”

“Not exactly, no,” she bristled, “but there’s something to be said for planetary unity, don’t you agree?”

The Edoers conceded that they did, and before long were sharing stories of their worlds again. Before too long the glass door opened again and two more figures entered. One was a man with long brown hair tied behind his back who looked like he had just stepped out of bed. One of his eyes was a startling purple, while the other was a more conventional blue. Marcia remembered that most Earth: Carmen residents had augmented their bodies in some way or another and concluded that this must be an example. What she could not guess at, however, was how the figure who walked behind him had come to be. They were about the height of a human, with a vaguely recognisable form – two arms, two legs, a torso, and a head. But the head was an oblong with rounded corners, an entirely flat surface facing them with an animated pattern of spinning circles. The arms were partly glass, with diodes and components Marcia could only guess at visible inside. The hands had no fingers, instead ending in a substance that reminded her of strawberry jelly. And they moved with an inhuman gait, though she would be hard-pressed to identify what was so odd about it.

She stood, as did Kei and Isi, to greet the newcomers. The man rubbed his eyes as he greeted them – it seemed like he really had only just woken up – and introduced himself as Dr. Cristian Muñoz, Head Researcher at the Office of Causation and Continuation. Then the robot spoke.

“sai. very nice to meet you all; i hope my appearance doesn’t cause any alarm.” Their voice was undeniably synthetic, but the flow of Gaean was as natural as any human she’d met. Of course an AI would have no trouble picking up a new language.

“Not at all!” Marcia gushed, trying to overcompensate for any look of horror that might have crossed her face. “Really lovely to meet you both – I’ve been looking forward to meeting an AI for years now.”

“Well…” Cristian started, taking the seat Lars had left vacant by her side, “Sai here isn’t technically an AI.”

“Really?” she said.

“no,” Sai said, just before she could realise she should have directed her question to them instead of to Cristian. “i have an ai, just like you have a brain. but the whole of me is called a machine. that includes ai, mechanics, memory, everything. as i was just about to explain.” The patterns on Sai’s face shifted toward Dr. Muñoz, and Marcia found that even without a facial expression she could understand that Sai was mildly annoyed. She wondered whether the two of them didn’t get on, and then she wondered if it was possible for machines to be married on Carmen. She almost asked Sai before stopping herself – they had only just come in, and she had to imagine it would be fairly exhausting having to regularly explain your existence to those who didn’t understand. She had reading material that probably covered it, and Service members she could call on. Instead, she introduced herself and the two Edoers, and made further small talk. It wasn’t long before they were interrupted, but she found that she was already getting over her initial shock, and she liked Sai rather more than Cristian, who she sensed was a little conceited.

The source of the next interruption was yet another Service member entering the room and taking a headcount. When she was satisfied, she asked them all to gather their belongings and follow her.

“Are we not waiting for one more?” Marcia asked.

“Yeah, the last guy said there would be six of us,” Isi chipped in.

The Service member nodded. “Small delay with the Garden ships. They’ll be joining us shortly.”

The room erupted. “What kind of delay?”, Marcia asked, but it was lost in the shouts of similar questions from the other delegates.

“Will they be long?”

“Has something gone wrong?”

“do we need to be worried?”

“Please, please!” the Service member said, keeping her cool while trying to raise her voice over the others. “It’s absolutely nothing to worry about. They seem to have mixed up their communication protocols, that’s all. They’re waiting in the docking station, and we’re going to take them straight to the chamber. That’s also where I need to take you now, so please…” she gestured to the door.

Marcia, feeling guilty about joining in the panic, was the first up and out. The rest of Introductory Group C followed suit, Isi murmuring about typical Garden behaviour (he clearly had some experience dealing with them remotely too) while the Carmen delegates both seemed to lapse into deep thought. Marcia noticed that Isi and Kei’s qualms about Carmen’s perceived generosity had faded entirely from conversation by the time Sai and Cristian had arrived.

As they walked through the corridors towards the central circle of the fifth layer, Marcia stepped up next to the Service member leading the way. “When you say the Garden folks are waiting in the docking station, are they out of their ships yet?”

“I haven’t been told,” she replied, looking Marcia in the eye. “But I think they’re still in there, for now.”

“So this could be a while?”

“Honestly,” she said, raising her hands, “No clue. I’m supposed to be on the legal side of the Service, but it’s all-hands at the moment.”

They walked together for a while longer, while other groups of delegates emerged from doors along the corridor. Crossroads appeared at regular intervals along the journey – while the group maintained its straight line towards the centre, Marcia could see yet more delegates down those corridors too, dozens of them moving in a pack much like her own. Everyone was converging on the centre of the station – the chamber.

The grand oak doors and curved wall at the end of the corridor signalled the importance of that which lay beyond. The debate chamber was one of the rooms Marcia had had a direct influence over, and it was the one place where every delegate would be expected to spend time most days. In this chamber every official action regarding the Audacity parliament would be taken, from the introduction of bills to final voting. It needed to be suitable for inaugurations, proclamations, and (presumably) heated discussions. All the Earths agreed that the foundation of this project would be passionate debate, and that the ideals of Audacity would rest on this room. Looking around with pride, Marcia thought she had fit the brief quite well.

The debating chamber was entirely circular, with four equidistant entrances arranged to meet the corridors. On the walls between three of the doors there were sets of tiered seating, enough to fit the fifty delegates from each Earth. The seats were comfortable but not soft, so as to discourage delegates from falling asleep (Marcia recalled that this was apparently a problem in Earth: Edo’s boardrooms). The other half of the chamber was dominated by three chairs – one for the Speaker, one for a representative from the Constitutional Court, and, raised higher above the others and accessible from a staircase in the back, the seat of the President of Audacity, who had yet to be elected. Those sitting in the raised seats would not be far below the President’s level, but from floor level looking up it was an intimidating sight. This too was by design – those who wished to address the Parliament would do so from the empty space in the centre of the room, which had enough room to allow them to roam and turn, facing the delegates or the President as necessary. On all sides the upper walls were carved with a map projection of the planet that charted the whole of the Earth, incorporating cartographic techniques and geographic variations from every planet and wrapping around the length of the chamber. Further above still, the oak transitioned into soft black plastic whose geometric shapes formed a spiky irregular domed roof. The shapes were partly aesthetic and partly practical, allowing anyone speaking from the centre the acoustic strength to reach all sides of the room.

The only interruption to the geometrics of the roof were halfway up the dome, behind the President’s chair, where a circular window offered a proper view into the void outside the chamber. The violet light that spilled from the edges of the window was artificial, but helped draw the eye to the stars dimly visible through the other side, slightly curved against the fisheye window. When he had seen the plans, Lars had asked whose universe the stars’ light was coming from. Marcia had explained that since the station was slowly rotating through the many dimensions all at once, the stars would be from every universe. This wondrous and baffling truth was marred slightly by the sensory reality, which was that the view was mostly empty and black.

Pushed forward gently by the crowds now swarming the chamber, she took her place in the delegate seating reserved for Herald (the temporary signs indicating as such would soon be removed – once acquainted with the space, delegates would be free to sit wherever they wanted) and watched her new colleagues do the same. King Aenos 5 was already here, front and centre of the Herald section, and Marcia

Soon, it seemed like everyone but the Garden delegation was seated. For another ten minutes the buzz died down, as a nervousness took hold. When they finally arrived, the nervousness took a new shape. Their delegates were all present and correct, but as they marched into the chamber it was clear to Marcia that they intended to make this difficult. Their leaders were in full military dress, while the other delegates all wore a sort of black and blue uniform and an aggressively neutral expression. They moved through the doors in doubles, taking steps in sync as though they were the many legs of one large beast. Unlike the cordial introductions Marcia had had with the other delegates, there was barely a sense of humanity in this display. Nobody spoke, and the silence reigned even after they had all taken their seats. They kept their eyes front, while Marcia and every other delegate couldn’t help but boggle. She wondered what they were thinking. Weapons were of course banned on the station, but had they really come expecting a fight?

The silence was more than a little tense, and when the chamber doors slammed open again Marcia saw a few delegates jump in their seats. The man that strode through them was tall and stocky with slicked-back hair and a little stubble. He wore a suit and carried himself with an easy authority as he ascended the stairs to the President’s chair. Without realising it, Marcia found herself leaning in. Now the delegates had assembled, it was time for the Speaker to make his welcome address.