CHAPTER ONE

THE DEEP BLACK

From The First Century: A History of The New Worlds:

Thus, by the last decade of the 20th century, all of the elements of these great changes were in place. On the one hand, the three pillars of the New Worlds, nanotechnology, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence were sufficiently advanced that the terms were in wide usage in the scientific and technical communities and the synergy between them was coming to be recognized. On the other hand the basic elements of the Old Order were taking on the new energies which would soon bring them together with such force: All three branches of "The People of the Book" had developed tough, experienced cadres of fundamentalist radicals, virtual reality was singing its siren song to those who were not drawn to the religious revival, the great multinational corporations and government bureaucracies were dissolving at an accelerated pace and the so-called "environmental movement" had taken the turn toward conservatism that made it the catalyst for the cataclysm to follow. During the first decade of the 21st century, all that was left was the working of chance and chaos to bring the two great movements into opposition with each other, and in doing so, to define each of the combatants in contrast to their opponent.

This little rock didn't have a name; just a catalog designation: 2098.23. From the nice vantage point he had picked out, Stan had been thinking about a name for quite some time . He had placed himself so that the rock lay directly between him and the sun, about 500 meters away. Quite a cloud of very fine particles were kicked up during this part of the operation. This chaotic element of the process bothered his engineering sense and it was a subject of constant debate among the rock wranglers on the Net. But there was also fairly uniform agreement that the dust cloud had its aesthetic value. The hard-edged little asteroids that were the wranglers' stock in trade had a fairly uniform character; lumpy dark masses with little personality when viewed from most angles. The clouds of particles gave them a completely new character, much more interesting to watch.

When the nanobots were boring the main motor anchors, they spewed out dust, which slowly grew into a faint halo around the rocks. Slip behind the rock while this was going on and you saw some neat lighting effects as the fine little dust particles reflected and refracted the sunlight. Because the nanobots worked each tiny dust particle in nearly identical ways, the particles had a relatively uniform shape. As the nanobots dug in, the dust particles were ejected from the bore holes in waves of very similar patterns, depending on the consistency of the rock. Millions of the microscopic flakes would emerge in similar orientations. Thus the halo growing around the rock would develop fascinating polarization effects.

Sometimes Stan would spend hours, gently bumping his translational controller every half hour or so, watching the sunlight shift and change as it passed through the polarizing cloud. Every once in a while the size and orientation of the more or less uniformly sculpted dust motes would create a cascade of breathtaking color, reflecting beautiful pure sheets of light. Right now, though, the cloud was a uniform white, marked only by places where its thickness varied due to the nature of the rock that the nanobots had eaten away in their task. Stan knew he had a while before the sequencer would move on to the next stage of the operation, so he turned his attention elsewhere.

He had been awake for a couple of hours. As he had most mornings for the last twelve years, he'd gone through his regular morning ritual, working out in the KEROUAC's little autogym, cleaning up and scanning the morning newsburst from Ceres' Channel 23. Now he pulled his breakfast out of the kitchen and floated back to the bridge at the front of the hab module. Looking out through the sweep of the big transparency that formed the front of the bridge, he grunted to himself in disappointment: Still no pretty colors.

Time to check the mail. Stan reconfigured his visual cortex, adjusting to blend input from his eyes as a ghostly image superimposed over input from the ship's systems. He continued to eat his oatmeal as he began to work through his mailbox. A menu of the mailbox's contents began streaming before his eyes as it passed through the little transmitter and the other processors implanted in his skull.

There were a few pure text messages, which he shunted to the bottom of the pile. The first message that then came up was from Kerry Denhome, his friend on Mars who kept him up to date on their shared interest in the jazz revival then current in the nightclub scene they used to frequent. Kerry's dark head appeared before him and she began to speak: "Hey, good lookin'!" she said in her high-pitched voice that always reminded Stan of a slightly loony piccolo. "We were at La Bastille last night. John Sterner's trio was playing and, man, were they great!" she went on. "They were doing some Miles Davis I thought you'd dig. So I snagged a copy of the second set. Its attached. I recommend it. Oh, yeah, it's two-fifty. Hope you're not too lonely out their in the wild black yonder ... Well, you never write, you never call. Don't be such a drag, you old fart. Let me know when you'll be swinging in this way. Gotta go!"

Kerry's face disappeared and the icon of an old phonograph record spun in the corner of his view, blinking to indicate he could choose to buy the recording Kerry had included. Stan was a very physical person and used a lot of kinesthenic interface tools. He stuck his spoon into the half-empty oatmeal container and gestured with his right hand to buy the recording and send it to his music library.

There were two more short full-sense messages from friends. Ollie Porter brought him up to date on the meeting of their rock wrangler's syndicate. Ollie had chaired the meeting on Ceres the day before. The grin that had stayed on Stan's face after Kerry's message was slowly replaced by a grimace. Porter was always trying to get Stan more involved in the details of the syndicates management. Stan often resisted by simply not returning his messages.

As Ollie droned on about the market for asteroids of different types and sizes, facilities contracts with various shipyards and the other details of their business, Stan's mind drifted. These many years now he had cherished his isolation as a solitary rock wrangler. But he did get lonely; sometimes very lonely. When he was working far away from any of the settled worlds, the time delay for transmissions made interactive communication impossible. This was one of those times. For seven months now he had stayed in touch with the rest of the world only in this way, through mail communications of various kinds.

He had had a partner on two trips, a pure synthetic named Heironymous Obscura. Stan had always thought that such a silly name, the sort of tag that many synthetics would give themselves in their youth, especially ones who came from the outer System, where the synthetics made up a much larger part of the population. Heiro, as his friends called him, had been only thirty years old or so when he had approached Stan about signing on to the KEROUAC. It had been an easy decision for Stan at the time. He had just finished a very long trip and had felt he had to have company if he was going to go out again. Heiro had been enthusiastic; to Stan he obviously had a slightly over-romantic notion of what the life of a rock wrangler was like.

Things had been good at first. Heiro had installed himself into the ship in a way that Stan hardly noticed, stowing himself aboard the KEROUAC in a way he admired for its simplicity and elegance. Heiro's presence aboard the little ship hadn't ever been obtrusive to Stan. He had brought aboard a huge library of materials relating to his great interest at that time, historical modeling, especially of the twentieth century. During the long arcs between rocks, Heiro would spend days immersed in his research, not initiating communication with Stan at all.

Then, when the KEROUAC would begin an approach to a new rock, Heiro would become intensely interested in the process, taking turns watching the creation and programming of the nanobots, eventually trying his hand at designing process sequences under Stan's supervision. He had been an able student. Stan had enjoyed teaching him the wrangler's art, showing him how to pick the best methods for de-spinning a rock, for placing the little vernier motors, especially the crucial first few on a rock with a lot of angular momentum. Then Heiro would watch silently for hours as Stan would deftly oversee the precise determination of the rock's mass, the detail survey of its treasure trove of raw materials, the design of the components that had to be tailored for each specific rock and its transit.

Heiro had also proved able at the business side of the operation, very soon offering good insight into the futures markets that drove the rock trade. Naturally, he could personally process much greater amounts of information than Stan could. Heiro soon learned to merge his mind into the KEROUAC's market models and the data that came in from their syndicate about the slight price moves in the materials markets of the worlds inward and outward. He quickly learned that eventually the wrangler had to make up his mind about a sale, because he had to commit to the amount of energy that would be pumped into the rock to sling it to market. Stan had enjoyed the discussions they had had about this decision-making process, and shared the little thrill of making a sale and then working to get the rock kicked out of its orbit to hit the market where it had been purchased in time to meet the contract.

The second trip had been almost a vacation for Stan. Heiro had learned well on their first trip together and handled most of the work on the second trip by himself. Stan had even thought about offering Heiro a charter to take the KEROUAC out on his own for a third trip. But as they had approached Ceres at the end, Heiro had announced that he would not be making the next trip: Unknown to Stan, Heiro had gotten a good contract to sell his first big production, a full-sense documentary about the Second World War. Heiro explained that he simply wouldn't have time to devote to wrangling and that he had to make a choice. Stan understood, and they parted on good terms. It had been with considerable sadness, though, that he had helped Heiro disengage himself from the KEROUAC in the big shipyard at Ceres. They stayed in touch and Stan had enjoyed sensing Fulcrum of the 20th Century, the title Heiro had given to his magnum opus, when it had been released just four months ago. Heiro has sent him a free copy of it over the laser along with a long text letter. Stan had sent him a short reply complimenting him on the documentary, and had promised to stay in touch.

Now, he slowly came back from his reverie about Heiro as the mailbox blinked at him, telling him that Ollie's message had ended. He glanced at the clock and noticed he'd been drifting for some minutes. He swept his hand out and sent Ollie's message to his business files and went on with his mail.

Stan looked at the last video message. His brother had sent a message about the affairs of the family's ice cache. Grover was thirty years older than Stan and spent very little time as a natural person any more. Grover had begun to transfer more and more of his personality into his box, which he kept on Titan. He spent a lot of his time involved in the family's business and in System politics, tracking the many complicated relationships the family had with the various syndicates the Turners had joined over the 120 years or so since the First Migration. Grover took the Turner family's reputation as early pioneers seriously.

Stan listened absently to Grover's message. Grover wanted Stan's votes on a number of business issues. When the message ended, his visual field was full of icons for the votes. He would have to deal with this, but not now. After he set the rock's motor, he thought. He closed up the agenda Grover had enclosed and saved the sense message. He would have to listen to the whole thing in more detail later. Later.

Before he turned to the text messages, Stan checked in on his rock. He superimposed the job sequencer summary as he looked out the window, finishing his breakfast as he checked up on the work in progress. The nanos would be finished with the kick motor anchor holes in another twenty minutes. He could see the cloud of dust particles was growing more slowly now. He reached out and bumped the translational controller, starting the KEROUAC on a slow approach to his little prize. The nav system automatically flashed a summary of his trajectory into a corner of his visual field as he did so, which he flushed right away. Stan was a natural pilot and usually performed these kinds of maneuvers strictly by the seat of his pants.

He turned his attention to the job sequencer. The slowly streaming text and graphics told him that the KEROUAC was preparing the kick motor for setting. He opened a full-image window in the center of his visual field to glance at the outside of the ship. Stan shifted through the various available views, pausing at the image of the main working complex at the middle of the ship. There would be two kick motors left after this one was placed. The spider-like ship's manipulator had scuttled down to the working complex, a series of irregular bulges on the ship's spine, half way down the vessel between the spherical hab module and the ship's engines and fuel tanks at the far end. Four arms were working to unfasten the main stowage members that held the kick motor he had previously selected for this rock. It would be unfastened by the time he trimmed the ship alongside the anchor point on the rock.

Stan replaced the contents of that window with a view from the supervisor at the motor attachment site. He swivelled its video head around and zoomed back. The scene from the surface of the rock was just right. Cuttings streamed out of the openings of two of the six bore holes. The supervisor was sitting right in the middle of the six holes, so he panned around, seeing the hexagonal pattern. Nanobots were already moving out of the bore holes in sufficient numbers that they were visible as six silvery threads converging on the supervisor. Stan called up the supervisor's status summary and saw that it was taking up the nanobots and deactivating them. He superimposed the master job sequencer and saw that he was right on schedule: The kick motor would be fixed in place and ready to fire two hours before the trajectory window even opened. This was good. He'd be able to shave off a little reaction mass to be left with the kick motor, maybe stretching his trip to include two more rocks.

He turned to the text messages, reconfiguring his vision again. There were more than usual, the majority of them dealing with business. There had been some pretty big price moves on carbonaceous asteroids in the last two days in the Martian market. The rock he was working now was already committed to a futures contract at Ceres, so it didn't matter for now. But the moves in the Martian market could effect his plans for the rest of his trip. He needed some analysis of this, so Stan skimmed through the commercial communications and then shunted a number of them to knowbots in the KEROUAC's network. These would chew through the numbers and make some first-order analysis he could look at later in the day, while the motor was setting.

He finally got down to the personal text messages just as the KEROUAC was pulling up along side the motor attachment site on the rock. He paused the mail routine and opened his vision to the full natural light poring onto his retinas. The rock now filled the view through the main window of the bridge. Stan strapped himself into the skipper's seat and he reached out and tweaked the translational controller, cutting the ship's closing speed to a few centimeters per second. He could see the hexagonal pattern of the kick motor attachment site, and the supervisor unit coming to rest outside of the ring of holes. Then he opened a window in his eyes to watch the main manipulator at the center of the ship. The manipulator held the kick motor away from the ship's main spar. In a few seconds it let go with its powerful gripping feet, kicking itself free from the ship. Stan watched as it spun on its flywheels, steadied itself, and then squirted slowly down the length of the KEROUAC toward the rock.

Soon the manipulator slid into view out the main front window. It spun again and, at the last instant stopped. It held the kick motor a meter above the rock's surface, with the motor's spidery attachment members outstretched. Invisible from this distance, the manipulator made fine adjustments to the motors' position as the rock's weak gravitational field began to pull the assembly "down." Finally, it was satisfied that the anchor points were lined up and, firing its verniers, it stabbed the kick motor into the holes that had been drilled into the rock.

Stan exhaled. This was always a little tricky. Sometimes it took two or three tries to get things just right, but this time the motor went in smoothly. He opened a data window in his vision and gesturing silently with his hands, skipped down to a high level of detail in the display and reviewed the stream of data coming up to the KEROUAC from the units on the rock. The manipulator was nudging the motor down more firmly into the holes while the supervisor approached to check the fit at close range. He watched as the supervisor confirmed that each of the six anchors had sunk into the rock deep enough to come into contact with the nanobots that had been left behind in the bottom of the anchor holes. Now they worked directly on the rock and the metal of the anchors, weaving molecular bonds that would hold the motor firmly to the rock. He watched as the manipulator disconnected from the kick motor and began to maneuver back to its cradle on the KEROUAC. At the same time, the supervisor began scuttling away, moving forward to the other end of the rock. Within the hour it would have dropped the radio unit there. It would then be ready to rejoin the ship, its job finished.

Stan pushed the KEROUAC away and began translating the ship along the length of the rock to rendezvous with the supervisor when it was done with its work. He absently tweaked the ship's jets to steer it around the rock, watching as the sun slid out from behind the little horizon it made. The big window darkened automatically, instantly adjusting to the light streaming in from in front of the ship. As the ship moved over the surface of the rock, Stan turned to his mailbox to finish opening the last messages.

By the time he had steadied the vessel at the "top" of the rock, he was down to the last unopened message. He checked the job manager and scanned various views of the ship, going through the checklist for readying the vessel to move away from the rock and monitor its initial boost to market. As he finished this up, the supervisor kicked away from the rock toward the manipulator, which reached out for it.

He turned his attention away from the stowage of the supervisor, which was going smoothly, and flipped open the last mail message. As its "envelope" appeared before him he inhaled sharply. It stated simply: "TO: Stan Turner; FROM: Pinnacle." There was no indication of its contents or, strangely any address for its origin in the Net. He opened the letter. It contained only a single word: "DIAMOND."

This would be the end of Stan Turner's peaceful life as a rock wrangler.