It was, I saw, the morning of mankind, two thousand years before my own birth.
“It’s difficult now to recapture the mood of those times,” Eve said. “Confidence — arrogance…”
Earth was restored. Great macroengineering projects, supplemented by the nanoengineering of the atmosphere and lithosphere and the transfer off-planet of most power-generating and industrial concerns, had stabilized and preserved the planet’s fragile ecosystem. There was more woodland covering the temperate regions than at any time since the last glaciation, locking in much of the excess carbon dioxide which had plagued previous centuries. And the great decline in species suffered after the industrialization of previous millennia was reversed, thanks to the use of genetic archives and careful reconstruction — from disparate descendants — of lost genotypes.
Earth was the first planet to be terraformed.
Meanwhile the Solar System was opened up.
Based in the orbit of Jupiter, an engineer called Michael Poole industriously took natural microscopic wormholes — flaws in space-time — and expanded them, making transit links big enough to permit spaceships to pass through.
Poole Interfaces were towed out of Jovian orbit and set up all over the System. The wormholes which connected the Interfaces enabled the inner System to be traversed in a matter of hours, rather than months. The Jovian system became a hub for interplanetary commerce.
And Port Sol — a Kuiper ice-object on the rim of the System — was to be established as the base for the first great interstellar voyages…
At the instant of his birth, a hundred impressions cascaded over him.
His body, still moist from budding, was a heavy, powerful mass. He stretched, and his limbs extended with soft sucking noises. He felt blood — thick with mechanical potency — surge through the capillaries lacing his torso.
And he had eyes.
There were people all around him, crowding, arguing, hurrying. They seemed tense, worried; but he quickly forgot the thought. It was too glorious to be alive! He stretched up his new limbs. He wanted to embrace all of these people, his friends, his family; he wanted to share with them his vigor, his anticipation of his life to come.
Now a cage of jointed limbs settled around him, protecting him from the crush. He stared up, recognized the fast-healing wound of a recent budding. He called out — but his speech membrane was still moist, and the sound he made was indecipherable. He tried again, feeling the membrane stiffen. “You are my father,” he said.
“Yes.” A huge face lowered towards him. He reached up to stroke the stern visage. The flesh was hardening. He felt a sweet pang of sadness. Was his father already so old, so near to Consolidation?
“Listen to me. See my face. Your name is Sculptor 472. I am Sculptor 471. You must remember your name.”
Sculptor 472. “Thank you,” he said seriously. “But—” But what did “Sculptor” mean? He searched his mind, the memory set he’d been born with. Limbs. Father. People. Consolidation. The Sun; the Hills. There was no referent for “Sculptor.” He felt a stab of fear; his limbs thrashed. Was something wrong with him?
“Calm yourself,” his father said evenly. “It is a name preserved from the past, referring to nothing.”
Sculptor 472. It was a good name; a noble name. He looked ahead to his life: his brief three-day morning of awareness and mobility, when he would talk, fight, love, bear his own buds; and then the long, slow, comfortable afternoon of Consolidation. “I feel happy to be alive, father. Everything is wonderful. I—”
“Listen to me.”
He stopped, confused; his father’s tone was savage, insistent.
Something was wrong.
“Things are — difficult, now. Different.”
Sculptor 472 wrapped his limbs around his torso. “Is it me?”
“No, child. The world is troubled.”
“But the Hills — Consolidation—”
“We had to leave the Hills.” There was shame in 471’s voice now; again Sculptor became aware of the crush of people beyond the cage of his father’s strong limbs. “The Hills are damaged. There are — Sun-people — strange forms, glowing, shining. We dare not go there. We had to flee.”
“But how will I Consolidate? Where will I go?”
“I’m sorry,” his father said. “We must travel far. Perhaps we will find new Hills, where we can Consolidate. Perhaps before your time is due.”
“But what about you?”
“Never mind me.” With harsh, urgent gestures, 471 poked at his son. “Come. Can you walk?”
Sculptor unwrapped his limbs, settled them to the ground and stood, experimentally. He felt a little dizzy, and some of his joints ached. “Yes. Yes, I’m fine. But I must know—”
“No more talking. Run, child!”
His father rolled away from him and surged stiffly after the fleeing people.
Without 471’s protective cage of limbs Sculptor was left exposed. The land here was bare, flat; the sky overhead was black and empty. He blinked away false memories of shaded Hills, of laughter and love.
His people surged to the horizon, abandoning him.
“Wait! Father, wait!”
Awkwardly, stumbling as he learned to ripple his eight limbs across the uneven ground, Sculptor hurried after his father.
Michael Poole joined the flitter in Lunar orbit. He was met by Bill Dzik, the Baked Alaska project director. Dzik was a burly, breathless man, his face rendered unnaturally smooth by Anti-Senescence treatment; he carried a small briefcase. His hand, plump and warm, engulfed Poole’s. “Mike. Thanks for meeting me.”
“I wasn’t expecting to see you here personally, Bill.”
Dzik tried to smile; his mouth was lost in the bulk of his face. “Well, we have a problem. I’m sorry.”
Poole stifled a sigh; a knot of tension settled in his stomach.
He followed Dzik into the flitter. The little ship was empty save for the pilot, a crop-haired woman who nodded briskly to Poole. Through the flitter’s curving windows Poole saw Luna’s ancient light, and the baby-blue tetrahedron that was the Interface to the wormhole to Baked Alaska. Poole and Dzik strapped themselves into adjacent seats, and with a ghost’s touch of acceleration the flitter surged forwards. Poole watched the approach of the hundred-yard-wide Interface; planes of silver-gold, fugitive, elusive, shone over the blue framework.
Problems, always problems. You should have stuck to physics, Mike.
Dzik shifted the briefcase on his lap and made to open it with his sausage-like fingers. He hesitated. “How’s the Cauchy coming on?”
You know how it’s coming on; you get my briefings from the Jovian site, and the rest of my reports. Poole decided to play along, unsure of Dzik’s mood. “Fine. Miriam Berg’s doing a good job out there. The ship’s GUTdrive is man-rated now, and the production of exotic material for the portals is underway. You know we’ve tapped into Io’s flux tube as an energy source, and…”
Dzik was nodding, his eyes on Poole’s face; but he wasn’t listening to a word.
“Come on, Bill,” Poole said. “I can take it. Tell me what’s on your mind.”
Dzik smiled. “Yeah.”
The Interface’s powder-blue struts slid past the flitter, obscuring the Moon.
Dzik opened the briefcase and drew out a series of photographs. “Look at these.” They were coarse images of the surface of Baked Alaska. The sky was empty save for a speckling of distant stars, any of which could have been the Sun. The landscape was bare, cracked ice — save for some odd, rooted structures rather like the stumps of felled trees.
“I’m sorry about the quality,” Dzik said. “These had to be taken from long range. Very long range.”
Poole riffled through the photos. “What’s this about, Bill?”
Dzik ran plump fingers through short, greasy hair. “Look, Mike, I’ve been involved in the wormhole projects almost as long as you have. And we’ve faced problems before. But they’ve been technical, or political, or…” Dzik counted on his fingers. “Solving the fundamental problem of wormhole instability using active feedback techniques. Developing ways to produce exotic matter on an industrial scale, enough to open the throats of wormholes a mile wide. Getting agreement from governments, local and cross-System, to lace the Solar System with wormhole transit paths. And the funding. The endless battles over funding…”
Battles which weren’t over yet, Poole reflected. In fact, as he made sure Dzik never forgot, the commercial success of Dzik’s Baked Alaska venture was crucial for the funding of the overall goal, the Cauchy’s flight into interstellar space.
“But this is different.” Dzik poked a finger at the glossies, leaving a greasy smear. “Not technical, not financial, not political. We’ve found something which isn’t even human. And I’m not sure if there is a resolution.”
The flitter shuddered gently. They were close to the throat of the wormhole itself now. Poole could see the electric-blue struts of exotic matter which threaded the hole’s length, its negative energy density generating the repulsive field which kept the throat open. The walls of the hole flashed in sheets and sparkles: gravitational stresses resolving themselves into streams of exotic particles.
Poole peered at the pictures again, holding them up to the cabin light. “What am I looking at, here?”
Dzik made his hands into a sphere. “You know what Baked Alaska is: a ball a hundred miles across — half friable rock, half water-ice, traces of hydrogen, helium and a few hydrocarbons. Like a huge comet nucleus. It’s in the Kuiper Belt, just beyond the orbit of Pluto, along with an uncounted number of similar companions. And with the Sun just an averagely bright star in the sky, it’s so cold that helium condenses on the surface — superfluid pools, sliding over a water-ice crust.
“When we arrived at Alaska we didn’t inspect it too carefully.” Dzik shrugged. “We knew that as soon as we started work we’d be wrecking the surface features anyway…”
The construction team had swamped the blind little worldlet with an explosion of heat and light. It was a home from home; even its rotation period roughly matched an Earth day. People had moved out from the randomly chosen landing point, exploring, testing, playing, building, preparing for the Port Sol of the future. Structures of ice and liquid helium which had persisted in the lightless depths of the outer System for billions of years crumbled, evaporated.
“Then someone brought in this.”
Dzik leafed through the glossies, picked one out. It showed a hummock on the ice, like the hub of a rimless wheel with eight evenly spaced spokes. “A kid took this snap as a souvenir. A novelty. She thought the regularity was some kind of crystal effect — like a snowflake. So did we all, at first. But then we found more of the damned things.”
Dzik spread the glossies over his briefcase. Poole saw that the structures in the photos shared the eight-fold symmetry of the first. Dzik went on, “All about the same mass and size — the span of those rootlike proboscides is about twelve feet; the height of the central trunk is six feet. They cover Alaska’s surface — particularly ridges which catch the sunlight. Or they did, until we started messing around.” He looked at Poole defensively. “Mike, as soon as I figured out what we have here, I stopped operations and pulled everyone back to the GUTship. We did a lot of damage, but — Mike, we weren’t to know. We’re an engineering crew, not biologists.”
Biologists?
“We managed to lase one of the things open. It’s riddled with fine, hairlike channels. Capillaries. We think the capillaries are for conducting liquid helium. Superfluid.” He searched Poole’s face, unsure. “Do you get it, Mike? The damn things sit on their ridges, half in shade, half out. The sunlight sets up a temperature differential — tiny, but enough to get superfluid helium pumping up through the roots.”
Poole stared at the pictures, astonished.
Dzik slumped back in his chair and folded his fingers across his liquid belly; he gazed out of the flitter at the sparkling tube of stretched space time which surrounded them. “There’s no way the authorities are going to let us go ahead and develop Port Sol now; not if it means exterminating the tree stumps. And yet the stumps are so damned dull. Mike, we’ve built a trillion-dollar wormhole highway to a flower bed. Even the tourist trade won’t be worth a fig. I guess we can haul the wormhole Interface off to some other Kuiper object, but the cost is going to be ruinous—”
“You’re saying these things are alive?”
Dzik’s face was as wide and as blank as the vanished Moon. “That’s the point, Mike,” he said gently. “They’re made of water-ice and rock, and they drink liquid helium. They’re plants.”
The Sun-people blazed through the sky. Sculptor cowered, flattening himself against the unfamiliar ground.
He imagined a Sun-person descending after his own Consolidation, its devilish heat scouring away the blood and bones of his hardened body. Would Sculptor be aware, residually, of the disaster? Would he still feel pain?
He pushed himself away from the broken ground. No person could Consolidate with such a threat abroad; the need to find a safe, stable Hillside — with the proper degree of shade — was like an ache in all of them. And so Sculptor 472 stumbled on with his people, refugees all, vainly seeking shelter from the glowing, deformed strangers.
He was already a day and a half old. Half his active life was gone. He fretted, complained to his father. He gazed around at the hulking, fleeing forms of the people, wondering which of them — in some alternate world free of Sun-people — might have become his mates, or his opponents in the brief, violent, spectacular wrestling contests which decided the choice of Consolidation sites. Sculptor was taller, stronger, smarter than most. In the contests he would have had no difficulty in finding a prime Hill site—
Would have had. But now, a refugee, he would never get the chance. He raised his speech membrane to the sky and moaned. Why me? Why should my generation be so afflicted?
His father stumbled. Two of his leading limbs had crumpled. He tried to bring his trailing limbs around, but he couldn’t regain his balance.
With a soft, almost accepting sigh, Sculptor 471 fell heavily to the ground.
472 hurried to his side. “You must rise. Are you ill?” He grabbed his father’s limbs and tried to haul him across the ice.
47l’s body was tipped onto one side, his weight deforming his structure slightly, flattening it. “Leave me,” he said gently. “Go on. It’s all right.”
The thin voice, the collapsed face, were unbearable for 472. He wrapped his limbs around his father and squeezed, as if trying to rebuild the tall, confident figure who had sheltered him in his first moments of life. “But I can’t leave you.”
“You know you must. It is my time. Consolidation—”
Sculptor was appalled. “Not here. Not now!”
471 sighed. “I can feel my thoughts softening. It isn’t so bad, Sculptor…”
Sculptor looked around desperately. The land was flat, hard. There was no Hillside here, no possibility of shade. And the way his father lay was wrong, with his limbs splayed around him, his torso fallen.
Urgently Sculptor scrabbled at the ice. His flesh ripped, and superfluid blood hissed from the wounds, coating his limbs; but soon he’d opened up a shallow trench. He laid his limbs once more across the still torso of 471. “If I can just roll you to the trench, then maybe there’ll be some shade. Come on, father—”
But 471 didn’t respond. As Sculptor dragged at him, one limb crumbled into hard fragments.
Sculptor fell across the jagged body of his father. Was this the fate which awaited him, too, to fall and perish on the unyielding ground, robbed of Consolidation immortality?
After a time he climbed away from his father. He stretched his limbs and stared around. The migration was a dark band on the horizon; here and there in their trail he saw dark mounds, the forms of more fallen folk.
Deliberately he turned away from the refugees.
His stride stiff with rage and resentment, Sculptor walked back towards his ancestral Hills.
Poole and Dzik clambered aboard the GUTship. The ship was parked fifty miles from the wormhole Interface, a hundred miles from the surface of the Kuiper object called Baked Alaska.
The ship’s corridors seemed immediately crowded, stuffy, claustrophobic to Poole; he became aware of the gaze of the crew on him — sullen, resentful. Bill Dzik hauled his bulk through the corridors with a seal-like grace. “Don’t mind them. They don’t like being packed away inside the ship again; they were just getting used to the open spaces of the Alaska beachhead.”
“And they’re blaming me?”
“You’re the big bad boss who might decide to shut down their operation. Don’t forget they spent a year of their lives hauling the portal out here.”
“As did you, Bill,” Poole said gently. “And you don’t resent me.”
“No.” Dzik looked at him sharply. “But I don’t envy you your decision either, Mike.”
Baked Alaska was a million cubic miles of water, an ice moon rolling around the lip of the Sun’s gravity well. Poole’s consortium had hauled the first wormhole Interface out to the Kuiper Belt, linking Alaska to the distant, cosy worlds of the inner System. Poole’s vision was that Baked Alaska’s ice would be the fuel dump of the interstellar flights of the future. A Gibraltar, a harbor mouth for a Solar System linked by wormhole transit paths.
They reached Dzik’s cabin. It was spartan, with an outsize sleeping cocoon, a zero-gee shower, a data desk unit. Poole felt grateful to close the door behind them.
Dzik strapped himself into a chair; with practiced stabs of his broad fingers he accessed the data desk. A series of messages flickered, priority-coded.
Poole looked around the cabin, hoping to be offered a drink.
After a minute, Dzik leaned back in his chair and whistled. “Now we really do have trouble.”
“What is it?”
Dzik linked his fingers behind his head. “Before lifting from the surface we did a couple of deep core samples. We wanted to figure out the ecosystem.” He glanced down at his desk again. “Well, here are the results.”
The desktop surface was filled with the blown-up image of a cross-section of ice. Hints of regularity — artifacts of crystallization — filled the image with lines and planes. It was hauntingly beautiful, like an abstract design in blue and white stained glass.
And there was something else. Small objects, dense and hard, incongruous in the wispy ice. Poole pulled himself down to the desktop and looked closely.
Here was a rectangle, evidently carved from rock, with twin rows of irregularly shaped holes. And here, something like a picture frame, octagonal, empty. Other objects, more elusive, hard for the mind to categorize.
“Lethe. What a break,” Dzik said. “Now we’ll never get the ecologists off our backs.”
Poole gazed down, entranced. Artifacts, locked into this deep ice. There had been intelligence here.
Another half-day wore away. Two-thirds of his life gone. He felt his joints growing stiff, his face hardening.
He was tall, strong, savage. Retracing the migrants’ trail of disrupted ice and failed Consolidations, Sculptor stalked on towards his father’s land.
Poole found it impossible to think in the confines of the GUTship. He had Bill Dzik fit out a one-man flitter; he left the GUTship and descended towards the icy carcass of Alaska.
The crude human encampment — the seed of Port Sol — was a series of metal boxes dropped into slushy, dirty snow. Poole came down ten miles from the encampment; in Alaska’s microgravity the ship settled to the surface like a snowflake.
Movement on the horizon, to his right.
He leaned forward. Perhaps a star had been occluded by Alaska’s slow rotation.
Poole sat in silence, the microgravity feather-light on his limbs. In the starlight the ice of Baked Alaska was bone-pale, laced with the rich purples and blues of trace hydrocarbons. The little cabin was silent save for his own breathing, and the occasional creak of cooling contraction.
In truth, the decision about the future of Baked Alaska had been made for him. Poole’s consortium had intended to drop a wormhole terminus into the Sun, to drench Port Sol with fusion heat and light. But now the archaeologists and xenobiologists would come and peel the little world open, layer by layer.
Poole knew that was right. But he still didn’t understand what had been found here, how this little world worked. Until he’d figured it out he felt reluctant to turn his treasure over to the rest of the System. Partly this was down to the streak of personal responsibility in his makeup; but also he had to think about his consortium, about the future of his other projects, the Cauchy… about the profit to be made out of all this.
Cauchy was the ultimate goal. By dragging a wormhole portal around a circuit light years across, the GUTship Cauchy would establish a wormhole bridge — not across space — but across fifteen centuries, to the future.[1]
Poole was determined that the Port Sol project — and the Cauchy itself — wouldn’t be compromised by events here.
He opened up his mind, let the elements of the situation rotate through his thoughts.
Like Bill Dzik, Poole was no biologist. But Bill was surely right that there had to be more to the Baked Alaskan ecology than just the tree stumps. Perhaps, Poole speculated, the stumps had been some sort of favored crop, selected by the toolmakers. And the toolmakers had presumably suppressed the rest of the little world’s fauna, as man had depleted Earth’s diversity.
But what happened to the toolmakers? Where did they go?
Poole thought about growing to awareness here, in this empty, isolated place. The inner Solar System was just a muddy pool of light. Even Alaska’s companion objects were themselves sparsely scattered around the Kuiper Belt. Alone, cold, he shivered. This ice world would yield no raw materials… An intelligent species would be trapped here.
Motion again, to his right. Impossible. But this time, unmistakable.
He turned slowly, his eyes wide.
It was like a tree stump, a cylinder perhaps six feet tall. But it towered on unstretched root-legs, eight of them, like an unlikely spider. And it was moving towards him, over the horizon.
Sculptor 472 howled. Flesh shriveled from his torso and limbs; blood pulsed through his body, fleeing the heat. And yet he moved towards the Sun-person, step after dragging step. The Sun-person was a small, squat box of heat, no taller than Sculptor’s torso… A squat box. A made thing? Ancient, half-formed memories stirred at the fringe of Sculptor’s bubbling awareness.
He raised his limbs over his head. “Get away!” he screamed. “Leave our world; let us return to our Hills!” He remembered his father’s awful, tragic fall, his failure to Consolidate; he let anger drive him forward against the heat.
It was a tower of ice, sparkling in starlight, beautiful despite its bulk. Poole wondered where it got the energy to move such mass. The main body was a cylinder, with windows set around its rim — no: they were eyes, with lenses of ice. A skeleton, of denser ice, glimmered in the depths of the body.
A sensor blinked on the flitter’s tiny control panel. The ship was picking up low-frequency radiation.
Was the thing trying to talk to him?
…And now, with a sudden, shocking loss of grace, it was falling.
No. It is not my time. I have a full day, yet. And I still have not mated, or budded, or found my Hill —
But he never would. His limbs buckled; his body sank towards the ground. Like independent creatures the tips of his limbs pried at the ice, seeking purchase. It was the heat, of course; his blood had been unable to sustain its superfluid properties, and his body had run through its cycle ahead of its time. Now, like his father before him, he would die on this cold, level ground.
He tried once more to rise, but he couldn’t feel his limbs.
“It’s a tree stump!” Poole snapped excitedly into the radio link. “Don’t you see, the toolmakers are the tree stumps! Bill, look at the pictures, damn it. They are different phases of a single life cycle: an active intelligent phase, followed by a loss of mobility.”
“Maybe,” Dzik said. “But we didn’t find anything like a nervous system in that tree stump we opened up.”
“So their brains, their nervous systems, are absorbed. When they’re no longer needed.” A memory came to Poole. “The juvenile sea-squirt. Of course.”
“The what?”
“It’s an exact analogy. The sea-squirt seeks the rock to which it’s going to cling, for the rest of its life. Then, its function fulfilled, its brain dissolves back into its body…”
Dzik sounded doubtful. “But these were toolmakers.”
“Yeah.” Poole peered up at the empty sky. “But what use is intelligence, on a world like this? No raw materials. Nowhere to get to. An unchanging sky, inaccessible… Bill, they must have abandoned their toolmaking phase ages ago. Now they use their intelligence solely to find the best place to lie in the Sun. The shadows of hills; the places with the highest temperature differentials. Perhaps they compete. Then their awareness dissolves—”
But the stationary, kneeling titan before him, drawn by the flitter, had come to rest on a plain, he realized now. No shade; useless. It would die, never reaching the tree stump stage.
“Mike.” Dzik’s voice crackled. “You’re right, we think. We’re looking over some of our photos again. There’s a whole herd of the damn things, on the far side of the worldlet from our beachhead.”
Poole rested his hands on the controls. This would take care — a delicacy of touch he wasn’t sure he had. He applied a single, brief impulse to the jets. The flitter sailed smoothly into the sky.
Dzik was still talking. “The superfluid helium must be crucial to the animal phase. Superfluid gives you a huge mechanical advantage; in microgravity helium pumps could exploit tiny temperature differences to move bulky masses of ice.” He laughed. “Hey, I guess we don’t need to worry about funds for the future. The whole System is going to beat a path to our door to see this — as long as we can work out a way to protect the ecology…”
“Right.” Using verniers Poole took the flitter through slow curves around the fallen toolmaker; with brief spurts of his main motor he raised wakes in the ice, sculpting them carefully. “And if we can’t, we’ll implode the damn wormhole. We’ll get funds for the Cauchy some other way.”
The argument went on for some time.
It took Poole five or six sweeps before he was satisfied with the hill he’d built.
Then, still careful, he lifted away from Alaska for the last time.
The Sun dipped, as the world turned. A shadow fell across Sculptor. Blood pulsed through him. With renewed energy his roots snuggled into the ground.
Consolidation.
Sculptor, unable any longer to move, stared at the place where the Sun-person had stood. The ice was melted, blasted, flowed together, the Hills flattened.
But the Sun-person had built the Hill that shaded Sculptor now. Somehow the Sun-person had understood and helped Sculptor. Now the Sun-person had gone, back to the world that had borne him.
Sculptor’s thoughts softened, slowed. His awareness seemed to expand, to encompass the slow, creaking turn of the world, the ponderous vegetable pulse of his hardening body.
His name melted away.
His father’s face broke up, the fragments falling away into darkness.
At the end only one jagged edge of consciousness remained, a splinter of emotion which impaled the blazing image of the Sun-person.
It wasn’t hatred, or resentment. It was envy.
Eve said, “As Poole and his followers opened up the Solar System — as they undid the relative isolation of previous centuries — they shone a clear light into darkened corners of their own history. Watch…”
This time he would reach the Sky. This time, before the Culling cut him away…
The tree of axiomatic systems beneath him was broad, deep, strong. He looked around him, at sibling-twins who had branched at choice-points, most of them thin, insipid structures. They spread into the distance, infiltrating the Pool with their webs of logic. He almost pitied their attenuated forms as he reached upwards, his own rich growth path assured…
Almost pitied. But when the Sky was so close there was no time for pity, no time for awareness of anything but growth, extension.
Little consciousness persisted between Cullings. But he could remember a little of his last birthing; and surely he had never risen so high, never felt the logical richness of the tree beneath him surge upwards through him like this, empowering him.
Now there was something ahead of him: a new postulate, hanging above him like some immense fruit. He approached it warily, savoring its compact, elegant form.
The fibers of his being pulsed as the few, strong axioms at the core of his structure sought to envelop this new statement. But they could not. They could not. The new statement was undecidable, not deducible from the set within him.
His excitement grew. The new hypothesis was simple of expression, yet rich in unfolding consequence. He would absorb its structure and bud, once more, into two siblings; and he knew that whichever true-false branch his awareness followed he would continue to enjoy richness, growth, logical diversity. He would drive on, building theorem on mighty theorem until at last — this time, he knew it would happen — this time, he would touch the Sky itself.
And then, he would—
But there was a soundless pulse of light, far below him.
He looked down, dread flooding him. It was as if a floor of light had spread across the Pool beneath him, shining with deadly blandness, neatly cauterizing his axiomatic roots.
A Culling.
In agony he looked up. He tried to nestle against the information-rich flank of the postulate fruit, but it hung — achingly — just out of reach.
And already his roots were crumbling, withdrawing.
In his rage he lunged past the hypothesis-fruit and up at the Sky, stabbed at its bland completeness, poured all his energies against it!
…And, for a precious instant, he reached beyond the Sky, and into something warm, yielding, weak. A small patch of the Sky was dulled, as if bruised.
He recoiled, exhausted, astonished at his own anger.
The Sky curved over him like an immense, shining bowl as he shriveled back to the Culled base floor, he and millions of bud-siblings, their faces turned up to that forever unreachable light…
No, he told himself as the emptiness of the Cull sank into his awareness. Not forever. Each time I, the inner I, persists through the Cull. Just a little, but each time a little more. I will emerge stronger, more ready, still hungrier than before.
And at last, he thought, at last I will burst through the Sky. And then there will be no more Culls.
Shrieking, he dissolved into the base Cull floor.
The flitter was new, cramped and smelled of smooth, clean plastic, and it descended in silence save for the precise hiss of its jets. It crunched gently into the surface of Nereid, about a mile from Marsden’s dome.
Chen peered through the cabin windows at the shabby moonscape. Marsden’s dome was just over the compact horizon, intact, sleek, private. “Lethe,” Chen said. “I always hated assignments like these. Loners. You never know what you’re going to find.”
Hassan laughed, his voice obscured as he pulled his face plate down. “So easily shocked? And I thought you police were tough.”
“Ex-police,” Chen corrected automatically. She waved a gloved hand at the dome. “Look out there. What kind of person lives alone, for years, in a forsaken place like this?”
“That’s what we’ve been sent to find out.” Bayliss, the third person in the flitter, was adjusting her own headgear with neat, precise movements of her small hands. Chen found herself watching, fascinated; those little hands were like a bird’s claws, she thought with faint repulsion. “Marsden was a fine physicist,” Bayliss said, her augmented eyes glinting. “Is a fine physicist, I mean. His early experimental work on quantum nonlinearity is still—”
Hassan laughed, ignoring Bayliss. “So we have already reached the limits of your empathy, Susan Chen.”
“Let’s get on with this,” Chen growled.
Hassan cracked the flitter’s hatch.
One by one they dropped to the surface, Chen last, like huge, ungainly snowflakes. The Sun was a bright star close to this little moon’s horizon; knife-sharp shadows scoured the satellite’s surface. Chen scuffed at the surface with her boot. The regolith was fine, powdery, ancient. Undisturbed. Not for much longer.
Beyond Marsden’s dome, the huge bulk of Neptune floated, Earth-blue, like a bloated vision of the home planet. Cirrus clouds cast precise shadows on oceans of methane a thousand miles below. The new wormhole Interface slid across the face of Neptune, glowing, a tetrahedron of baby-blue and gold. Lights moved about it purposefully; Chen peered up longingly.
“Look at this moonscape.” Hassan’s dark face was all but invisible behind his gold-tinted visor. “Doesn’t your heart expand in this ancient grandeur, Susan Chen? What person would not wish to spend time alone here, in contemplation of the infinite?”
All loners are trouble, Chen thought. No one came out to a place as remote as this was — or had been anyway, before the wormhole was dragged out here — unless he or she had a damn good reason.
Chen knew she was going to have to find out Marsden’s reason. She just prayed it was something harmless, academic, remote from the concerns of humanity; otherwise she really, really didn’t want to know.
Hassan was grinning at her discomfiture, his teeth white through the gold of his face plate. Let him. She tilted her head back and tried to make out patterns in Neptune’s clouds.
There were a couple of subsidiary structures: lower domes, nestling against the parent as if for warmth; Chen could see bulk stores piled up inside the domes. There was a small flitter, out-moded but obviously functional; it sat on the surface surrounded by a broad, shallow crater of jet-disturbed dust, telltales blinking complacently. Chen knew that Marsden’s GUTship, which had brought him here from the inner System, had been found intact in a wide orbit around the moon.
It was all bleak, unadorned; but it seemed in order. But if so, why hadn’t Marsden answered his calls?
Hassan was an intraSystem government functionary. When Marsden had failed to respond to warnings about the coming of the Interface colony, Hassan had been sent out here — through the new wormhole — to find out what had happened. He had coopted Bayliss, who had once worked with Marsden — and Chen, who was now working with the Interface crew, but had some experience of walking into unknown, unevaluated situations…
Hassan stepped towards the dome’s doorway. Chen ran her hands without conscious volition over the weapons at her belt. The door dilated smoothly, revealing an empty airlock.
The three of them crowded into the small, upright lock. They avoided each other’s visored eyes while the lock went through its cycle. Chen studied the walls, trying to prepare herself for what she was going to find inside the dome. Just like outside, like Marsden’s flitter, everything was functional, drab, characterless.
Bayliss was watching her curiously. “You’re trying to pick up clues about Marsden, aren’t you? But this is so — bare. It says nothing about him.”
“On the contrary.” Hassan’s voice was subdued, his big frame cramped in the lock. “I think Chen already has learned a great deal.”
The inner door dilated, liquid, silent.
Hassan led them through into the dome. Chen stood just inside the doorway, her back against the plastic wall, hands resting lightly on her weapons.
Silence.
Low light trays, suspended from the ribbed dome, cast blocks of colorless illumination onto the bare floor. One quarter of the dome was fenced off by low partitions; gleaming data desks occupied the rest of the floor area.
Behind the partitions she saw a bed, a shower, a small galley with stacked tins. The galley and bathroom looked clean, but the bedding was crumpled, unmade. After checking her telltales, she cracked her face plate and sniffed the air, cautious. There was a faint smell of human, a stale, vaguely unwashed, laundry smell. There was no color or decoration, anywhere. There was no sound, save for the low humming of the data desks, and the ragged breathing of Hassan and Bayliss.
There was one striking anomaly: a disc-shaped area of floor, ten feet across, glowing softly. A squat cylinder, no bigger than her fist, studded the center of the disc. And something lay across that disc of light, casting huge shadows on the curved ceiling.
Drawn, the three of them moved forward towards the disc of glowing floor.
Bayliss walked through the rows of data desks, running a gloved forefinger gently — almost lovingly — along their gleaming surfaces. Her small face shone in the reflected light of readouts.
They paused on the edge of the pool of glowing floor.
The form lying on the disc of light was a body. It was bulky and angular, casting ungainly shadows on the ribbed dome above.
It was obviously Marsden.
Bayliss dropped to her knees and pressed an analyzer against the glowing surface. Then she ran a fingertip around an arc of the disc’s cloudy circumference. “There’s no definite edge to this. The interior is a lattice of bucky tubes — carbon — laced with iron nuclei. I think it’s some sort of data store. The bucky tube lattice is being extended by nanobots, all around the circumference.” She considered. “Nanobots with fusion pulse jaws… the nanobots are chewing up the substance of the floor and excreting the lattice, patient little workers. Billions of them. Maybe the pool extends under the surface as well; maybe we’re looking at the top surface of a hemisphere, here.”
Chen stepped onto the light and walked to the body. It was face down. It was carelessly bare to the waist, head and face shaven; an implant of some kind was fixed to the wrinkled scalp, blinking red-green. The head was twisted sideways, the eyes open. One hand was buried under the stomach; the other was at the end of an outstretched arm, fingers curled like the limbs of some fleshy crab.
Beneath the corpse, within the glowing floor, light wriggled, wormlike.
He remembered.
With shards of the Cull base floor still glowing faintly around him, he grew once more, biting through postulates, forcing his structure to advance as if by sheer force of will.
He was angry. The cause of his anger was vague, and he knew it would become vaguer yet. But this time it had persisted through the Cull, just as had his awareness. He stared up at the complacent Sky. By the time he got up there, he knew, he would remember. And he would act.
He budded, ferocious. He felt his axiomatic roots spread, deep and wide, pulsing with his fury.
Chen watched scrawny little Bayliss passing her bony hands over the data desks, scrolling graphics reflected in her augmented eyes. Bayliss had been called out here for this assignment from some university on Mars, where she had tenure. The woman looked as if she was actually enjoying this. As if she was intrigued.
Chen wondered if she envied Bayliss her scientific curiosity.
Maybe, she thought at last. It would be nice to feel detached, unengaged by this. On the other hand, she didn’t envy Bayliss’s evident lack of humanity.
With gloved hands and her small kit of imaging and diagnostic gear — trying to ignore the lumpy feel of fatty flesh, the vague, unwashed smell of a man too used to living alone — Chen worked at the body.
The implant at the top of the skull had some kind of link to the center of the brain: to the corpus callosum, the fleshy bundle of nerve fibers between the hemispheres. She probed at the glowing implant, the crown of her own scalp crawling in sympathy.
After an hour Hassan called them together. Chen pulled her helmet up around her chin and sucked syrup from a nipple; she savored its apple-juice flavor, trying to drown out Marsden’s stink. She wished she was back up at the rudimentary colony gathering around the wormhole Interface, encased in a hot shower-bag.
Construction work. Building things. That was why she had come out here — why she’d fled the teeming cities of the inner System, her endless, shabby, depressing experience of humanity from the point of view of a policeman.
But her cop’s skills were too valuable to be ignored.
Hassan rested his back against a data desk and folded his arms; the dull silver of his suit cast curving highlights. “How did he die?”
“Breakdown of the synaptic functions. There was a massive electrical discharge, which flooded most of the higher centers.” She pointed to Marsden’s implant. “Caused by that thing.” She sniffed. “As far as I could tell. I’m not qualified to perform an autopsy. And—”
“I don’t intend to ask you to,” Hassan said sharply.
“It couldn’t be murder.” Bayliss’s voice was dry. Amused. “He was alone on this moon. A million miles from the nearest soul. It would be a marvelous locked-room mystery.”
Hassan’s head swiveled towards Chen. “Do you think it was murder, Susan?”
“That’s up to the police.”
Hassan sighed, theatrically tired. “Tell me what you think.”
“No. I don’t think it was murder. How could it be? Nobody even knew what he was doing here, it seems.”
“Suicide, then?” Bayliss asked. “After all we are here to tell Marsden that a wormhole highway is shortly to bring millions of new colonists here from the teeming inner System — that his long solitude is over.”
“He didn’t know we were coming, remember?” Hassan said. “And besides—” He looked around, taking in the unmade bed, the drab dome, the unkempt corpse. “This was not a man who cared much for himself — or rather, about himself. But, from what we see here, he was—” he hesitated “ — stable. Yes? We see evidence of much work, dedicated, careful. He lived for his work. And Bayliss will tell us that such investigations are never completed. One would not wish to die, too early — if at all.” He looked at Bayliss. “Am I correct?”
Bayliss frowned. Her augmented eyes were blank, reflecting the washed-out light as she considered. “An accident, then? But Marsden was no fool. Whatever he was up to with this clumsy implant in his scalp, I cannot believe he would be so careless as to let it kill him.”
“What was he ‘up to’?” Chen asked sourly. “Have you figured that out yet?”
Bayliss rubbed the bridge of her small, flat nose. “There is an immense amount of data here. Much of it not indexed. I’ve sent data-mining authorized-sentience algorithms into the main stores, to establish the structure.”
“Your preliminary thoughts?” Hassan demanded.
“Metamathematics.”
Hassan looked blank. “What?”
“And many experimental results on quantum nonlinearity, which—”
“Tell me about metamathematics,” Hassan said.
The patches of woven metal over Bayliss’s corneas glimmered; Chen wondered if there was any sentience in those augmentations. Probably. Such devices had been banned on Earth since the passing of the first sentience laws, but they could still be found easily enough on Mars. Bayliss said, “Marsden’s data stores contain a fragmented catalogue of mathematical variants. All founded on the postulates of arithmetic, but differing in their resolution of undecidable hypotheses.”
“Undecidability. You’re talking about the incompleteness theorems,” Chen said.
“Right. No logical system rich enough to contain the axioms of simple arithmetic can ever be made complete. It is always possible to construct statements which can be neither disproved nor proved by deduction from the axioms; instead the logical system must be enriched by incorporating the truth or falsehood of such statements as additional axioms…”
The Continuum Hypothesis was an example.
There were several orders of infinity. There were “more” real numbers, scattered like dust in the interval between zero and one, than there were integers. Was there an order of infinity between the reals and the integers? This was undecidable, within logically simpler systems like set theory; additional assumptions had to be made.
Hassan poked at the corpse with his booted toe. “So one can generate many versions of mathematics, by adding these true-false axioms.”
“And then searching on, seeking out statements which are undecidable in the new system. Yes.” Icons scrolled upwards over Bayliss’s eyes. “Because of incompleteness, there is an infinite number of such mathematical variants, spreading like the branches of a tree…”
“Poetry,” Hassan said; he sounded lazily amused.
“Some variants would be logically rich, with many elegant theorems flowing from a few axioms — while others would be thin, over-specified, sterile. It seems that Marsden has been compiling an immense catalogue of increasingly complete logical systems.”
Silence fell; again Chen was aware of the sour stink of the body at her feet. “Why? Why come here to do it? Why the implant? And how did he die?”
Hassan murmured, “Bayliss said the catalogue was fragmented. This — metamathematical data — was stored carelessly. Casually.” He looked to Bayliss for confirmation; the little woman nodded grudgingly.
“So?” Chen asked.
“So, Susan, perhaps this metamathematical experiment was not Marsden’s primary concern. It was a byproduct of his core research.”
“Which was what? Quantum nonlinearity?” She glanced around the anonymous data desks. How would Marsden go about investigating quantum nonlinearity? With the glowing floor, the first-sized cylinder at its center?
Hassan dropped to his knees. He pulled off his gloves and passed his hands over the glowing disc area of floor. “This is warm,” he said.
Chen looked at the disc, the writhing worms of light within. “It looks as if it’s grown a little, while we’ve been here.” The irregularity of the boundary made it hard to be sure.
Hassan patted the small cylindrical box at the center of the light pool. It was featureless, seamless. “Bayliss, what’s the purpose of this?”
“I don’t know yet. But it’s linked to the nanobots in the pool somehow. I think it’s the switch that controls their rate of progress.”
Hassan straightened up, suit material rustling over his knees. “Let’s carry on; we haven’t enough data, yet, for me to make my report.”
Still he grew, devouring postulates furiously, stripping out their logical essence to plate over his own mathematical bones. Brothers, enfeebled, fell away around him, staring at him with disappointed echoes of his own consciousness.
It did not matter. The Sky — curving, implacable — was close.
After another couple of hours Hassan called them together again.
At Chen’s insistence, they gathered close to the dome port — away from the glowing disc, Marsden’s sprawled corpse. Hassan looked tired, Bayliss excited, eager to speak.
Hassan eyed Chen. “Squeamish, Susan?”
“You’re a fool, Hassan,” she said. “Why do you waste your breath on these taunts?” She indicated the disc of light, the sharpening shadows it cast on the ribbed ceiling. “I don’t know what’s going on in that pool. Those writhing forms… but I can see there’s more activity. I don’t trust it.”
He returned her stare coolly. “Nor I, fully. But I do understand some of it. Susan, I’ve been studying those structures of light. I believe they are sentient. Living things — artificial — inhabiting the bucky tube lattice, living and dying in that hemisphere of transmuted regolith.” He looked puzzled. “But I can’t understand their purpose. And they’re linked, somehow—”
Bayliss broke in, her voice even but taut. “Linked, like the branches of a tree, to a common root. Yes?”
Hassan studied her. “What do you know, Bayliss?”
“I’m starting to understand. I think I see where the metamathematical catalogue has come from. Hassan, I believe the creatures in there are creatures of mathematics — swimming in a Gödelian pool of logic, growing, splitting off from one another like amoebae as they absorb undecidable postulates. Do you see?”
Chen struggled to imagine it. “You’re saying that they are — living — logical structures?”
Bayliss grinned at her; her teeth were neat and sharp. “A form of natural selection must dominate, based on logical richness — it’s really a fascinating idea, a charming mathematical laboratory.”
Chen stared at the pool of light. “Charming? Maybe. But how does it feel, to be a sentient structure with bones of axioms, sinews of logic? What does the world look like to them?”
“Now poetry from the policewoman,” Hassan said dryly. “Perhaps not so different from ourselves, Susan. Perhaps we too are creatures of mathematics, self-conscious observers within a greater Platonic formalism, islands of awareness in a sea of logic…”
“Marsden might have been able to tell us,” Bayliss said.
Hassan looked puzzled.
“The implant in his head.” Bayliss turned to Chen. “It was linked to the logic pool. Wasn’t it, Chen?”
Chen nodded. She said to Hassan, “The crazy bastard was taking reports — uh, biographies — from these logic trees, dumped direct from the logic pool, into his corpus callosum.”
“So that’s how the metamathematics got out,” Hassan said. “Until he blew his mind out with some stupid accident.”
“But I think you were right,” Bayliss said in her thin, clear voice.
“What?”
“That the metamathematical catalogue was only a byproduct of Marsden’s true research. The logic pool with its sentient trees was only a — a culture dish for his real study. The catalogue was a curiosity — a way of recording results, perhaps. Of measuring the limits of growth.”
“Tell us about the cylinder at the hub,” Hassan said.
“It is a simple quantum system,” Bayliss said. A remote animation entered her voice. “An isolated nucleus of boron is suspended in a magnetic field. The apparatus is set up to detect variations in the spin axis of the nucleus — tips, precession.”
Chen couldn’t see the significance of this. “So what?”
Bayliss dipped her head, evidently fighting impatience. “According to conventional quantum mechanics, the spin axis is not influenced by the magnetic field.”
“Conventional?”
The ancient theory of quantum mechanics described the world as a mesh of probability waves, spreading through space-time. The “height” of an electron’s wave described the chance of finding the electron there, at that moment, moving in such-and-such a way.
The waves could combine, like spreading ripples on an ocean, reinforcing and canceling each other. But the waves combined linearly — the combination could not cause the waves to change their form or to break; the component waves could only pass on smoothly through each other.
“That’s the standard theory,” Bayliss said. “But what if the waves combine nonlinearly? What if there is some contribution proportional to the product of the amplitudes, not just the sum—”
“Wouldn’t such effects have been detected by now?” Chen asked.
Bayliss blinked. “Our experiments have shown that any nonlinearity must be tiny… less than a billion billion billionth part… but haven’t eliminated the possibility. Any coupling of Marsden’s magnetic field and nuclear spin would be a nonlinear effect.” She rubbed her nose. “Marsden was studying this simple system intensively. Poking it with changes in the magnetic field to gauge its response, seeking out nonlinearity.
“The small nonlinear effects — if any — are magnified into macroscopic features of the logic pool, which—”
“He’s using the tipping nucleus as a switch to control the pool.”
“Yes. As I suggested. The spin of the nucleus directs the nanobots in their extension of the pool further through the structure of the moon. And—”
Uncharacteristically, she hesitated.
“Yes?”
“And the spin is used to reinitialize the logic trees.”
“These poor trees are like Schrödinger’s cat,” Hassan said, sounding amused. “Schrödinger’s trees!”
Reinitialize?
“Lethe,” Chen said. “The trees are being culled. Arbitrarily, almost at random, by a quantum system — that’s against the sentience laws, damn it.” She stared at the fist-sized quantum device with loathing.
“We are far from Earth,” Hassan said sharply. “Has Marsden found his quantum nonlinearity?”
“I can’t tell.” Bayliss gazed at the data desks, longing shining through her artificial eyes. “I must complete my data mining.”
“What’s the point?” Hassan asked. “If the nonlinearity is such a tiny effect, even if it exists—”
“We could construct chaotic quantum systems,” Bayliss said dryly. “And if you’re familiar with the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox—”
“Get to the point,” Hassan said wearily.
“Nonlinear quantum systems could violate special relativity. Instantaneous communication, Hassan.”
Chen stared at the floor uneasily. The thrashing of the trees in the logic pool was becoming more intense.
The Sky was close, a tangible presence above him. He devoured statements, barely registering their logical content, budding ferociously. Diminished brothers fell away from him, failed copies of himself, urging him on.
He remembered how — last time, before the Cull — he had struck at that vast, forbidding Interface — lashed through it in the instant before he had fallen back. How he had pushed into something soft, receptive, yielding. How good it had felt.
The Sky neared. He reached up—
“I think the trees killed Marsden.”
Hassan laughed. “That’s absurd.”
She thought it through again. “No,” she said, her voice measured. “Remember they are sentient. Motivated, by whatever they see as their goals. Growth, I suppose, and survival. The culling, if they are aware of it, must create murderous fury—”
“But they can’t have been aware of Marsden, as if he were some huge god outside their logic pool.”
“Perhaps not. But they might be aware of something beyond the boundary of their world. Something they could strike at…”
Bayliss was no longer with them.
Chen stepped away from Hassan and scanned the dome rapidly. The glowing logic pool was becoming more irregular in outline, spreading under the floor like some liquid. And Bayliss was working at the data desks, setting up transmit functions, plugging in data cubes.
Chen took two strides across to her and grabbed her arm. For a moment Bayliss tried to keep working, feverishly; only slowly did she become aware of Chen’s hand, restraining her.
She looked up at Chen, her face working, abstracted. “What do you want?”
“I don’t believe it. You’re continuing with your data mining, aren’t you?”
Bayliss looked as if she couldn’t understand Chen’s language. “Of course I am.”
“But this data has been gained illegally. Immorally. Can’t you see that? It’s—”
Bayliss tipped back her head; her augmented cornea shone. “Tainted? Is that what you’re trying to say? Stained with the blood of these artificial creatures, Chen?”
“Artificial or not, they are sentient. We have to recognize the rights of all—”
“Data is data, Susan Chen. Whatever its source. I am a scientist; I do not accept your—” for a moment the small, precise mouth worked “ — your medieval morality.”
“I’m not going to let you take this data out of here,” Chen said calmly.
“Susan.” Hassan was standing close to her; with a surprisingly strong grasp he lifted her hands from Bayliss’s arm.
“Keep out of this.”
“You must let her finish her work.”
“Why? For science?”
“No. For commerce. And perhaps,” he said dryly, “for the future of the race. If she is right about non-local communication—”
“I’m going to stop her.”
“No.” His hand moved minutely; it was resting against the butt of a laser pistol.
With automatic reflex, she let her muscles relax, began the ancient calculation of relative times and distances, of skills and physical conditions.
She could take him. And—
Bayliss cried out; it was a high-pitched, oddly girlish yelp. There was a clatter as she dropped some piece of equipment.
Chen’s confrontation with Hassan broke up instantly. They turned, ran to Bayliss; Chen’s steps were springy, unnatural in the tiny gravity.
“What is it?”
“Look at the floor.”
The Sky resisted for an instant. Then it crumbled, melting away like ancient doubts.
He surged through the break, strong, exultant, still growing.
He was outside the Sky. He saw arrays of new postulate fruits, virgin, waiting for him. And there was no further Sky; the Pool went on forever, infinite, endlessly rich.
He roared outwards, devouring, budding; behind him a tree of brothers sprouted explosively.
The pool surged, in an instant, across the floor and out beyond the dome. The light, squirming with logic trees, rippled beneath Chen’s dark, booted feet; she wanted, absurdly, to get away, to jump onto a data desk.
“The quantum switch.” Bayliss’s voice was tight, angry; she was squatting beside the switch, in the middle of the swamped light pool.
“Get away from there.”
“It’s not functioning. The nanobots are unrestrained.”
“No more culling, then.” Hassan stared into Chen’s face. “Well, Susan? Is this some sentimental spasm, on your part? Have you liberated the poor logic trees from their Schrödinger hell?”
“Of course not. Lethe, Hassan, isn’t it obvious? The logic trees themselves did this. They got through the Interface to Marsden’s corpus callosum. Now they’ve got through into the switch box, wrecked Marsden’s clever little toy.”
Hassan looked down at his feet, as if aware of the light pool for the first time. “There’s nothing to restrain them.”
“Hassan, we’ve got to get out of here.”
“Yes.” He turned to Bayliss, who was still working frantically at her data mines.
“Leave her.”
Hassan gave Chen one long, hard look, then stalked across to Bayliss. Ignoring the little mathematician’s protests he grabbed her arm and dragged her from the data desks; Bayliss’s booted feet slithered across the glowing floor comically.
“Visors up.” Hassan lifted his pistol and lazed through the plastic wall of the dome. Air puffed out, striving to fill the vacuum beyond.
Chen ran out, almost stumbling, feeling huge in the feeble gravity. Neptune’s ghost-blue visage floated over them, serene, untroubled.
Waves of light already surged through the substance of the moon, sparkling from its small mountaintops. It was eerie, beautiful. The flitter was a solid, shadowed mass in the middle of the light show under the surface.
Hassan breathed hard as he dragged a still reluctant Bayliss across the flickering surface. “You think the trees, the nanobots could get into the substance of the flitter?”
“Why not? Any Interface would do; they are like viruses…”
“And ourselves? Could they get across the boundary into flesh?”
“I don’t want to find out. Come on, damn it.”
Logic light swarmed across a low ridge, explosive, defiant.
“They must be growing exponentially,” Hassan growled. “How long before the moon is consumed? Days?”
“More like hours. And I don’t know if a moon-sized mass of bucky tube carbon can sustain itself against gravity. Nereid might collapse.”
Now Hassan, with his one free hand, was struggling to get the flitter’s hatch open. “It will forever be uninhabitable, at the least. A prime chunk of real estate lost.”
“The System’s big.”
“Not infinite. And all because of the arrogance of one man—”
“But,” Bayliss said, her augmented eyes shining as she stroked the data cubes at her belt, “what a prize we may have gained.”
“Get in the damn flitter.”
Chen glanced back into the ruined dome. The splayed body of Marsden, exposed to vacuum, crawled with light.
The Pool beyond the Sky was limitless. He and his brothers could grow forever, unbounded, free of Culling! He roared out his exultation, surging on, spreading—
But there was something ahead of him.
He slowed, confused. It looked like a brother. But so different from himself, so changed.
Perhaps this had once been a brother — but from a remote branch which had already grown, somehow, around this greater Pool.
The brother had slowed in his own growth and was watching. Curious. Wary.
Was this possible? Was the Pool finite after all, even though unbounded? And had he so soon found its limits?
Fury, resentment, surged through his mighty body. He gathered his strength and leapt forward, roaring out his intent to devour this stranger, this distant brother.
Eve said, “The great wormhole network covered the System. And everywhere, humans found life…”
The flitter bucked.
Lvov looked up from her data desk, startled. Beyond the flitter’s translucent hull, the wormhole was flooded with sheets of blue-white light which raced towards and past the flitter, giving Lvov the impression of huge, uncontrolled speed.
“We’ve got a problem,” Cobh said. The pilot bent over her own data desk, a frown creasing her thin face.
Lvov had been listening to her data desk’s synthesized murmur on temperature inversion layers in nitrogen atmospheres; now she tapped the desk to shut it off. The flitter was a transparent tube, deceptively warm and comfortable. Impossibly fragile. Astronauts have problems in space, she thought. But not me. I’m no hero; I’m only a researcher. Lvov was twenty-eight years old; she had no plans to die — and certainly not during a routine four-hour hop through a Poole wormhole that had been human-rated for fifty years.
She clung to her desk, her knuckles whitening, wondering if she ought to feel scared.
Cobh sighed and pushed her data desk away; it floated before her. “Close up your suit and buckle up.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Our speed through the wormhole has increased.” Cobh pulled her own restraint harness around her. “We’ll reach the terminus in another minute—”
“What? But we should have been traveling for another half-hour.”
Cobh looked irritated. “I know that. I think the Interface has become unstable. The wormhole is buckling.”
“What does that mean? Are we in danger?”
Cobh checked the integrity of Lvov’s pressure suit, then pulled her data desk to her. Cobh was a Caucasian, strong-faced, a native of Mars, perhaps fifty years old. “Well, we can’t turn back. One way or the other it’ll be over in a few more seconds — hold tight—”
Now Lvov could see the Interface itself, the terminus of the wormhole: the Interface was a blue-white tetrahedron, an angular cage that exploded at her from infinity.
Glowing struts swept over the flitter.
The craft hurtled out of the collapsing wormhole. Light founted around the fleeing craft, as stressed space-time yielded in a gush of heavy particles.
Lvov glimpsed stars, wheeling.
Cobh dragged the flitter sideways, away from the energy fount—
There was a lurch, a discontinuity in the scene beyond the hull. Suddenly a planet loomed before them.
“Lethe,” Cobh said. “Where did that come from? I’ll have to take her down — we’re too close—”
Lvov saw a flat, complex landscape, gray-crimson in the light of a swollen moon. The scene was dimly lit, and it rocked wildly as the flitter tumbled. And, stretching between world and moon, she saw—
No. It was impossible.
The vision was gone, receded into darkness.
“Here it comes,” Cobh yelled.
Foam erupted, filling the flitter. The foam pushed into Lvov’s ears, mouth and eyes; she was blinded, but she found she could breathe.
She heard a collision, a grinding that lasted seconds, and she imagined the flitter ploughing its way into the surface of the planet. She felt a hard lurch, a rebound.
The flitter came to rest.
A synthesized voice emitted blurred safety instructions. There was a ticking as the hull cooled.
In the sudden stillness, still blinded by foam, Lvov tried to recapture what she had seen. Spider-web. It was a web, stretching from the planet to its moon.
“Welcome to Pluto.” Cobh’s voice was breathless, ironic.
Lvov stood on the surface of Pluto.
The suit’s insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing around her footsteps, and where she walked she burned craters in the ice. Gravity was only a few percent of gee, and Lvov, Earth-born, felt as if she might blow away.
There were clouds above her, wispy cirrus: aerosol clusters suspended in an atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. The clouds occluded bone-white stars. From here, Sol and the moon, Charon, were hidden by the planet’s bulk, and it was dark, dark on dark, the damaged landscape visible only as a sketch in starlight.
The flitter had dug a trench a mile long and fifty yards deep in this world’s antique surface, so Lvov was at the bottom of a valley walled by nitrogen-ice. Cobh was hauling equipment out of the crumpled-up wreck of the flitter: scooters, data desks, life-support boxes, Lvov’s equipment. Most of the stuff had been robust enough to survive the impact, Lvov saw, but not her own equipment.
Maybe a geologist could have crawled around with nothing more than a hammer and a set of sample bags. But Lvov was an atmospheric scientist. What was she going to achieve here without her equipment?
Her fear was fading now, to be replaced by irritation, impatience. She was five light hours from Sol; already she was missing the online nets. She kicked at the ice. She was stuck here; she couldn’t talk to anyone, and there wasn’t even the processing power to generate a Virtual environment.
Cobh finished wrestling with the wreckage. She was breathing hard. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of this ditch and take a look around.” She showed Lvov how to work a scooter. It was a simple platform, its inert-gas jets controlled by twists of raised handles.
Side by side, Cobh and Lvov rose out of the crash scar.
Pluto ice was a rich crimson laced with organic purple. Lvov made out patterns, dimly, on the surface of the ice; they were like bas-relief, discs the size of dinner plates, with the intricate complexity of snowflakes.
Lvov landed clumsily on the rim of the crash scar, the scooter’s blunt prow crunching into surface ice, and she was grateful for the low gravity. The weight and heat of the scooters quickly obliterated the ice patterns.
“We’ve come down near the equator,” Cobh said. “The albedo is higher at the South Pole: a cap of methane ice there, I’m told.”
“Yes.”
Cobh pointed to a bright blue spark, high in the sky. “That’s the wormhole Interface, where we emerged: fifty thousand miles away.”
Lvov squinted at constellations unchanged from those she’d grown up with on Earth. “Are we stranded?”
Cobh said, with reasonable patience, “For the time being. The flitter is wrecked, and the wormhole has collapsed; we’re going to have to go back to Jupiter the long way round.”
Three billion miles… “Ten hours ago I was asleep in a hotel room on Io. And now this. What a mess.”
Cobh laughed. “I’ve already sent off messages to the inner System. They’ll be received in about five hours. A oneway GUTship will be sent to retrieve us. It will refuel here, with Charon ice—”
“How long?”
“It depends on the readiness of a ship. Say ten days to prepare, then a ten-day flight out here—”
“Twenty days?”
“We’re in no danger. We’ve supplies for a month. Although we’re going to have to live in these suits.”
“Lethe. This trip was supposed to last seventy-two hours.”
“Well,” Cobh said testily, “you’ll have to call and cancel your appointments, won’t you? All we have to do is wait here; we’re not going to be comfortable, but we’re safe enough.”
“Do you know what happened to the wormhole?”
Cobh shrugged. She stared up at the distant blue spark. “As far as I know nothing like this has happened before. I think the Interface itself became unstable, and that fed back into the throat… But I don’t know how we fell to Pluto so quickly. That doesn’t make sense.”
“How so?”
“Our trajectory was spacelike. Superluminal.” She glanced at Lvov obliquely, as if embarrassed. “For a moment there, we appeared to be traveling faster than light.”
“Through normal space? That’s impossible.”
“Of course it is.” Cobh reached up to scratch her cheek, but her gloved fingers rattled against her face plate. “I think I’ll go up to the Interface and take a look around there.”
Cobh showed Lvov how to access the life-support boxes. Then she strapped her data desk to her back, climbed aboard her scooter, and lifted off the planet’s surface, heading for the Interface. Lvov watched her dwindle.
Lvov’s isolation closed in. She was alone, the only human on the surface of Pluto.
A reply from the inner System came within twelve hours of the crash. A GUTship was being sent from Jupiter. It would take thirteen days to refit the ship, followed by an eight-day flight to Pluto, then more delay for taking on fresh reaction mass at Charon. Lvov chafed at the timescale, restless.
There was other mail: concerned notes from Lvov’s family, a testy demand for updates from her research supervisor, and for Cobh, orders from her employer to mark as much of the flitter wreck as she could for salvage and analysis. Cobh’s ship was a commercial wormhole transit vessel, hired by Oxford — Lvov’s university — for this trip. Now, it seemed, a complex battle over liability would be joined between Oxford, Cobh’s firm, and the insurance companies.
Lvov, five light hours from home, found it difficult to respond to the mail asynchronously. She felt as if she had been cut out of the online mind of humanity. In the end she drafted replies to her family, and deleted the rest of the messages.
She checked her research equipment again, but it really was unusable. She tried to sleep. The suit was uncomfortable, claustrophobic. She was restless, bored, a little scared.
She began a systematic survey of the surface, taking her scooter on widening spiral sweeps around the crash scar.
The landscape was surprisingly complex, a starlit sculpture of feathery ridges and fine ravines. She kept a few hundred feet above the surface; whenever she flew too low her heat evoked billowing vapor from fragile nitrogen-ice, obliterating ancient features, and she experienced obscure guilt.
She found more of the snowflakelike features, generally in little clusters of eight or ten.
Pluto, like its moon-twin Charon, was a ball of rock clad by thick mantles of water-ice and nitrogen-ice and laced with methane, ammonia and organic compounds. It was like a big, stable comet nucleus; it barely deserved the status of “planet.” There were moons bigger than Pluto.
There had been only a handful of visitors in the fifty years since the building of the Poole wormhole. None of them had troubled to walk the surfaces of Pluto or Charon. The wormhole, Lvov realized, hadn’t been built as a commercial proposition, but as a sort of stunt: the link which connected, at last, all of the System’s planets to the rapid-transit hub at Jupiter.
She tired of her plodding survey. She made sure she could locate the crash scar, lifted the scooter to a mile above the surface, and flew towards the south polar cap.
Cobh called from the Interface. “I think I’m figuring out what happened here — that superluminal effect I talked about. Lvov, have you heard of an Alcubierre wave?” She dumped images to Lvov’s desk — portraits of the wormhole Interface, various graphics.
“No.” Lvov ignored the input and concentrated on flying the scooter. “Cobh, why should a wormhole become unstable? Hundreds of wormhole rapid transits are made every day, all across the System.”
“A wormhole is a flaw in space. It’s inherently unstable anyway. The throat and mouths are kept open by active feedback loops involving threads of exotic matter. That’s matter with a negative energy density, a sort of antigravity which—”
“But this wormhole went wrong.”
“Maybe the tuning wasn’t perfect. The presence of the flitter’s mass in the throat was enough to send the wormhole over the edge. If the wormhole had been more heavily used, the instability might have been detected earlier, and fixed…”
Over the gray-white pole, Lvov flew through banks of aerosol mist; Cobh’s voice whispered to her, remote, without meaning.
Sunrise on Pluto:
Sol was a point of light, low on Lvov’s unfolding horizon, wreathed in the complex strata of a cirrus cloud. The Sun was a thousand times fainter than from Earth, but brighter than any planet in Earth’s sky.
The inner System was a puddle of light around Sol, an oblique disc small enough for Lvov to cover with the palm of her hand. It was a disc that contained almost all of man’s hundreds of billions. Sol brought no heat to her raised hand, but she saw faint shadows, cast by the Sun on her face plate.
The nitrogen atmosphere was dynamic. At perihelion — the closest approach to Sol, which Pluto was nearing — the air expanded, to three planetary diameters. Methane and other volatiles joined the thickening air, sublimating from the planet’s surface. Then, when Pluto turned away from Sol and sailed into its two-hundred-year winter, the air snowed down.
Lvov wished she had her atmospheric-analysis equipment now; she felt its lack like an ache.
She passed over spectacular features: Buie Crater, Tombaugh Plateau, the Lowell Range. She recorded them all, walked on them.
After a while her world, of Earth and information and work, seemed remote, a glittering abstraction. Pluto was like a complex, blind fish, drifting around its two-century orbit, gradually interfacing with her. Changing her, she suspected.
Ten hours after leaving the crash scar, Lvov arrived at the sub-Charon point, called Christy. She kept the scooter hovering, puffs of gas holding her against Pluto’s gentle gravity.
Sol was halfway up the sky, a diamond of light. Charon hung directly over Lvov’s head, a misty blue disc, six times the size of Luna as seen from Earth. Half the moon’s lit hemisphere was turned away from Lvov, towards Sol.
Like Luna, Charon was tidally locked to its parent, and kept the same face to Pluto as it orbited. But, unlike Earth, Pluto was also locked to its twin. Every six days the worlds turned about each other, facing each other constantly, like two waltzers. Pluto-Charon was the only significant system in which both partners were tidally locked.
Charon’s surface looked pocked. Lvov had her face plate enhance the image. Many of the gouges were deep and quite regular.
She remarked on this to Cobh, at the Interface.
“The Poole people mostly used Charon material for the building of the wormhole,” Cobh said. “Charon is just rock and water-ice. It’s easier to get to water-ice, in particular. Charon doesn’t have the inconvenience of an atmosphere, or an overlay of nitrogen-ice over the water. And the gravity’s shallower.”
The wormhole builders had flown out here in a huge, unreliable GUTship. They had lifted ice and rock off Charon, and used it to construct tetrahedra of exotic matter. The tetrahedra had served as Interfaces, the termini of a wormhole. One interface had been left in orbit around Pluto, and the other had been hauled laboriously back to Jupiter by the GUTship, itself replenished with Charon-ice reaction mass.
By such crude means, Michael Poole and his people had opened up the Solar System.
“They made Lethe’s own mess of Charon,” Lvov said.
She could almost see Cobh’s characteristic shrug. So what?
Pluto’s surface was geologically complex, here at this point of maximal tidal stress. She flew over ravines and ridges; in places, it looked as if the land had been smashed up with an immense hammer, cracked and fractured. She imagined there was a greater mix, here, of interior material with the surface ice.
In many places she saw gatherings of the peculiar snowflakes she had noticed before. Perhaps they were some form of frosting effect, she wondered. She descended, thinking vaguely of collecting samples.
She killed the scooter’s jets some yards above the surface, and let the little craft fall under Pluto’s gentle gravity. She hit the ice with a soft collision, but without heat-damaging the surface features much beyond a few feet.
She stepped off the scooter. The ice crunched, and she felt layers compress under her, but the fractured surface supported her weight. She looked up towards Charon. The crimson moon was immense, round, heavy.
She caught a glimmer of light, an arc, directly above her.
It was gone immediately. She closed her eyes and tried to recapture it. A line, slowly curving, like a thread. A web. Suspended between Pluto and Charon.
She looked again, with her face plate set to optimal enhancement. She couldn’t recapture the vision.
She didn’t say anything to Cobh.
“I was right, by the way,” Cobh was saying.
“What?” Lvov tried to focus.
“The wormhole instability, when we crashed. It did cause an Alcubierre wave.”
“What’s an Alcubierre wave?”
“The Interface’s negative energy region expanded from the tetrahedron, just for a moment. The negative energy distorted a chunk of space time. The chunk containing the flitter, and us.”
On one side of the flitter, Cobh said, space-time had contracted. Like a model black hole. On the other side, it expanded — like a re-run of the Big Bang, the expansion at the beginning of the Universe.
“An Alcubierre wave is a front in space-time. The Interface — with us embedded inside — was carried along. We were pushed away from the expanding region, and towards the contraction.”
“Like a surfer, on a wave.”
“Right.” Cobh sounded excited. “The effect’s been known to theory, almost since the formulation of relativity. But I don’t think anyone’s observed it before.”
“How lucky for us,” Lvov said drily. “You said we traveled faster than light. But that’s impossible.”
“You can’t move faster than light within space-time. Wormholes are one way of getting around this; in a wormhole you are passing through a branch in space-time. The Alcubierre effect is another way. The superluminal velocity comes from the distortion of space itself; we were carried along within distorting space.
“So we weren’t breaking lightspeed within our raft of space-time. But that space-time itself was distorting at more than light-speed.”
“It sounds like cheating.”
“So sue me. Or look up the math.”
“Couldn’t we use your Alcubierre effect to drive starships?”
“No. The instabilities and the energy drain are forbidding.”
One of the snowflake patterns lay mostly undamaged, within Lvov’s reach. She crouched and peered at it. The flake was perhaps a foot across. Internal structure was visible within the clear ice as layers of tubes and compartments; it was highly symmetrical, and very complex. She said to Cobh, “This is an impressive crystallization effect. If that’s what it is.” Gingerly she reached out with thumb and forefinger, and snapped a short tube off the rim of the flake. She laid the sample on her desk. After a few seconds the analysis presented. “It’s mostly water-ice, with some contaminants,” she told Cobh. “But in a novel molecular form. Denser than normal ice, a kind of glass. Water would freeze like this under high pressures — several thousand atmospheres.”
“Perhaps it’s material from the interior, brought out by the chthonic mixing in that region.”
“Perhaps.” Lvov felt more confident now; she was intrigued. “Cobh, there’s a larger specimen a few feet further away.”
“Take it easy, Lvov.”
She stepped forward. “I’ll be fine. I—”
The surface shattered.
Lvov’s left foot dropped forward, into a shallow hole; something crackled under the sole of her boot. Threads of ice crystals, oddly woven together, spun up and tracked precise parabolae around her leg.
The fall seemed to take an age; the ice tipped up towards her like an opening door. She put her hands out. She couldn’t stop the fall, but she was able to cushion herself, and she kept her face plate away from the ice. She finished up on her backside; she felt the chill of Pluto ice through the suit material over her buttocks and calves.
“…Lvov? Are you okay?”
She was panting, she found. “I’m fine.”
“You were screaming.”
“Was I? I’m sorry. I fell.”
“You fell? How?”
“There was a hole, in the ice.” She massaged her left ankle; it didn’t seem to be hurt. “It was covered up.”
“Show me.”
She got to her feet, stepped gingerly back to the open hole, and held up her data desk. The hole was only a few inches deep. “It was covered by a sort of lid, I think.”
“Move the desk closer to the hole.” Light from the desk, controlled by Cobh, played over the shallow pit.
Lvov found a piece of the smashed lid. It was mostly ice, but there was a texture to its undersurface, embedded thread which bound the ice together.
“Lvov,” Cobh said. “Take a look at this.”
Lvov lifted the desk aside and peered into the hole. The walls were quite smooth. At the base there was a cluster of spheres, fist-sized. Lvov counted seven; all but one of the spheres had been smashed by her stumble. She picked up the one intact sphere, and turned it over in her hand. It was pearl-gray, almost translucent. There was something embedded inside, disc-shaped, complex.
Cobh sounded breathless. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“It’s an egg,” Lvov said. She looked around wildly, at the open pit, the egg, the snowflake patterns. Suddenly she saw the meaning of the scene; it was as if a light had shone up from within Pluto, illuminating her. The “snowflakes” represented life, she intuited; they had dug the burrows, laid these eggs, and now their bodies of water glass lay, dormant or dead, on the ancient ice…
“I’m coming down,” Cobh said sternly. “We’re going to have to discuss this. Don’t say anything to the inner System; wait until I get back. This could mean trouble for us, Lvov.”
Lvov placed the egg back in the shattered nest.
She met Cobh at the crash scar. Cobh was shoveling nitrogen and water-ice into the life-support modules’ raw material hopper. She hooked up her own and Lvov’s suits to the modules, recharging the suits’ internal systems. Then she began to carve GUTdrive components out of the flitter’s hull. The flitter’s central Grand Unified Theory chamber was compact, no larger than a basketball, and the rest of the drive was similarly scaled. “I bet I could get this working,” Cobh said. “Although it couldn’t take us anywhere.”
Lvov sat on a fragment of the shattered hull. Tentatively, she told Cobh about the web.
Cobh stood with hands on hips, facing Lvov, and Lvov could hear her sucking drink from the nipples in her helmet. “Spiders from Pluto? Give me a break.”
“It’s only an analogy,” Lvov said defensively. “I’m an atmospheric specialist, not a biologist.” She tapped the surface of her desk. “It’s not spider-web. Obviously. But if that substance has anything like the characteristics of true spider silk, it’s not impossible.” She read from her desk. “Spider silk has a breaking strain twice that of steel, but thirty times the elasticity. It’s a type of liquid crystal. It’s used commercially — did you know that?” She fingered the fabric of her suit. “We could be wearing spider silk right now.”
“What about the hole with the lid?”
“There are trapdoor spiders in America. On Earth. I remember, when I was a kid… the spiders make burrows, lined with silk, with hinged lids.”
“Why make burrows on Pluto?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the eggs can last out the winter that way. Maybe the creatures, the flakes, only have active life during the perihelion period, when the atmosphere expands and enriches.” She thought that through. “That fits. That’s why the Poole people didn’t spot anything. It’s only fifty-five years since the construction team was here, and even then Pluto was receding from the Sun. Pluto’s year is so long that we’re still approaching the next aphelion—”
“So how do they live?” Cobh snapped. “What do they eat?”
“There must be more to the ecosystem than one species,” Lvov conceded. “The flakes — the spiders — need water glass. But there’s little of that on the surface. Maybe there is some biocycle — plants or burrowing animals — which brings ice and glass to the surface, from the interior.”
“That doesn’t make sense. The layer of nitrogen over water-ice is too deep.”
“Then where do the flakes get their glass?”
“Don’t ask me,” Cobh said. “It’s your dumb hypothesis. And what about the web? What’s the point of that — if it’s real?”
Lvov ground to a halt. “I don’t know,” she said lamely. Although Pluto/Charon is the only place in the System where you could build a spider-web between worlds.
Cobh toyed with a fitting from the drive. “Have you told anyone about this yet? In the inner System, I mean.”
“No. You said you wanted to talk about that.”
“Right.” Lvov saw Cobh close her eyes; her face was masked by the glimmer of her face plate. “Listen. Here’s what we say. We’ve seen nothing here. Nothing that couldn’t be explained by crystallization effects.”
Lvov was baffled. “What are you talking about? What about the eggs? Why would we lie about this? Besides, we have the desks — records.”
“Data desks can be lost, or wiped, or their contents amended.”
Lvov wished she could see Cobh’s face. “Why would we do such a thing?”
“Think it through. Once Earth hears about this, these flake-spiders of yours will be protected. Won’t they?”
“Of course. What’s bad about that?”
“It’s bad for us, Lvov. You’ve seen what a mess the Poole people made of Charon. If this system is inhabited, a fast GUTship won’t be allowed to come for us. It wouldn’t be allowed to refuel here. Not if it meant further damage to the native life-forms.”
Lvov shrugged. “So we’d have to wait for a slower ship. A liner; one that won’t need to take on more reaction mass here.”
Cobh laughed at her. “You don’t know much about the economics of GUTship transport, do you? Now that the System is criss-crossed by Poole wormholes, how many liners like that do you think are still running? I’ve already checked the manifests. There are two liners capable of a round trip to Pluto still in service. One is in dry dock; the other is heading for Saturn—”
“On the other side of the System.”
“Right. There’s no way either of those ships could reach us for, I’d say, a year.”
We only have a month’s supplies. A bubble of panic gathered in Lvov’s stomach.
“Do you get it yet?” Cobh said heavily. “We’ll be sacrificed, if there’s a chance that our rescue would damage the new ecology, here.”
“No. It wouldn’t happen like that.”
Cobh shrugged. “There are precedents.”
She was right, Lvov knew. In the case of the “tree stump” life-forms discovered on a remote Kuiper object, the territory had been ring-fenced, the local conditions preserved, once life — even a plausible candidate for life — was recognized.
Cobh said, “Pan-genetic diversity. Pan-environmental management. That’s the key to it; the public policy of preserving all the species and habitats of Sol, into the indefinite future. The lives of two humans won’t matter a damn against that.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“That we don’t tell the inner System about the flakes.”
Lvov tried to recapture her mood of a few days before: when Pluto hadn’t mattered to her, when the crash had been just an inconvenience. Now, suddenly, we’re talking about threats to our lives, the destruction of an ecology.
What a dilemma. If I don’t tell of the flakes, their ecology may be destroyed during our rescue. But if I do tell, the GUTship won’t come for me, and I’ll lose my life.
Cobh seemed to be waiting for an answer.
Lvov thought of how Sol light looked over Pluto’s ice fields, at dawn.
She decided to stall. “We’ll say nothing. For now. But I don’t accept either of your options.”
Cobh laughed. “What else is there? The wormhole is destroyed; even this flitter is disabled.”
“We have time. Days, before the GUTship is due to be launched. Let’s search for another solution. A win-win.”
Cobh shrugged. She looked suspicious.
She’s right to be, Lvov thought, exploring her own decision with surprise. I’ve every intention of telling the truth later, of diverting the GUTship, if I have to.
I may give up my life, for this world.
I think.
In the days that followed, Cobh tinkered with the GUTdrive, and flew up to the Interface to gather more data on the Alcubierre phenomenon.
Lvov roamed the surface of Pluto, with her desk set to full record. She came to love the wreaths of cirrus clouds, the huge, misty moon, the slow, oceanic pulse of the centuries-long year.
Everywhere she found the inert bodies of snowflakes, or evidence of their presence: eggs, lidded burrows. She found no other life-forms — or, more likely, she told herself, she wasn’t equipped to recognize any others.
She was drawn back to Christy, the sub-Charon point, where the topography was at its most complex and interesting, and where the greatest density of flakes was to be found. It was as if, she thought, the flakes had gathered here, yearning for the huge, inaccessible moon above them. But what could the flakes possibly want of Charon? What did it mean for them?
Lvov encountered Cobh at the crash scar, recharging her suit’s systems from the life-support packs. Cobh seemed quiet. She kept her face, hooded by her face plate, turned from Lvov.
Lvov watched her for a while. “You’re being evasive,” she said eventually. “Something’s changed — something you’re not telling me about.”
Cobh made to turn away, but Lvov grabbed her arm. “I think you’ve found a third option. Haven’t you? You’ve found some other way to resolve this situation, without destroying either us or the flakes.”
Cobh shook off her hand. “Yes. Yes, I think I know a way. But—”
“But what?”
“It’s dangerous, damn it. Maybe unworkable. Lethal.” Cobh’s hands pulled at each other.
She’s scared, Lvov saw. She stepped back from Cobh. Without giving herself time to think about it, she said, “Our deal’s off. I’m going to tell the inner System about the flakes. Right now. So we’re going to have to go with your new idea, dangerous or not.”
Cobh studied her face; Cobh seemed to be weighing up Lvov’s determination, perhaps even her physical strength. Lvov felt as if she were a data desk being downloaded. The moment stretched, and Lvov felt her breath tighten in her chest. Would she be able to defend herself, physically, if it came to that? And — was her own will really so strong?
I have changed, she thought. Pluto has changed me.
At last Cobh looked away. “Send your damn message,” she said.
Before Cobh — or Lvov herself — had a chance to waver, Lvov picked up her desk and sent a message to the inner worlds. She downloaded all the data she had on the flakes: text, images, analyses, her own observations and hypotheses.
“It’s done,” she said at last.
“And the GUTship?”
“I’m sure they’ll cancel it.” Lvov smiled. “I’m also sure they won’t tell us they’ve done so.”
“So we’re left with no choice,” Cobh said angrily. “Look: I know it’s the right thing to do. To preserve the flakes. I just don’t want to die, that’s all. I hope you’re right, Lvov.”
“You haven’t told me how we’re going to get home.”
Cobh grinned through her face plate. “Surfing.”
“All right. You’re doing fine. Now let go of the scooter.”
Lvov took a deep breath, and kicked the scooter away with both legs; the little device tumbled away, catching the deep light of Sol, and Lvov rolled in reaction.
Cobh reached out and steadied her. “You can’t fall,” Cobh said. “You’re in orbit. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” Lvov grumbled.
The two of them drifted in space, close to the defunct Poole wormhole Interface. The Interface itself was a tetrahedron of electric blue struts, enclosing darkness, its size overwhelming; Lvov felt as if she was floating beside the carcass of some huge, wrecked building.
Pluto and Charon hovered before her like balloons, their surfaces mottled and complex, their forms visibly distorted from the spherical. Their separation was only fourteen Pluto-diameters. The worlds were strikingly different in hue, with Pluto a blood red, Charon ice blue. That’s the difference in surface composition, Lvov thought absently. All that water-ice on Charon’s surface.
The panorama was stunningly beautiful. Lvov had a sudden, gut-level intuition of the rightness of the various System authorities’ rigid pan-environment policies.
Cobh had strapped her data desk to her chest; now she checked the time. “Any moment now. Lvov, you’ll be fine. Remember, you’ll feel no acceleration, no matter how fast we travel. At the center of an Alcubierre wave, space-time is locally flat; you’ll still be in free fall. There will be tidal forces, but they will remain small. Just keep your breathing even, and—”
“Shut up, Cobh,” Lvov said tightly. “I know all this.”
Cobh’s desk flared with light. “There,” she breathed. The GUT-drive has fired. “Just a few seconds, now.”
A spark of light arced up from Pluto’s surface and tracked, in complete silence, under the belly of the parent world. It was the flitter’s GUTdrive, salvaged and stabilized by Cobh. The flame was brighter than Sol; Lvov saw its light reflected in Pluto, as if the surface was a great, fractured mirror of ice. Where the flame passed, tongues of nitrogen gas billowed up.
The GUTdrive passed over Christy. Lvov had left her desk there, to monitor the flakes, and the image the desk transmitted, displayed in the corner of her face plate, showed a spark, crossing the sky.
Then the GUTdrive veered sharply upwards, climbing directly towards Lvov and Cobh at the Interface.
“Cobh, are you sure this is going to work?”
Lvov could hear Cobh’s breath rasp, shallow. “Look, Lvov, I know you’re scared, but pestering me with dumb-ass questions isn’t going to help. Once the drive enters the Interface, it will take only seconds for the instability to set in. Seconds, and then we’ll be home. In the inner System, at any rate. Or…”
“Or what?”
Cobh didn’t reply.
Or not, Lvov finished for her. If Cobh has designed this new instability right, the Alcubierre wave will carry us home. If not —
The GUTdrive flame approached, becoming dazzling. Lvov tried to regulate her breathing, to keep her limbs hanging loose—
“Lethe,” Cobh whispered.
“What?” Lvov demanded, alarmed.
“Take a look at Pluto. At Christy.”
Lvov looked into her face plate.
Where the warmth and light of the GUTdrive had passed, Christy was a ferment. Nitrogen billowed. And, amid the pale fountains, burrows were opening. Lids folded back. Eggs cracked. Infant flakes soared and sailed, with webs and nets of their silk-analogue hauling at the rising air.
Lvov caught glimpses of threads, long, sparkling, trailing down to Pluto — and up towards Charon. Already, Lvov saw, some of the baby flakes had hurtled more than a planetary diameter from the surface, towards the moon.
“It’s goose summer,” she said.
“What?”
“When I was a kid… the young spiders spin bits of webs, and climb to the top of grass stalks, and float off on the breeze. Goose summer — gossamer.”
“Right,” Cobh said skeptically. “Well, it looks as if they are making for Charon. They use the evaporation of the atmosphere for lift… Perhaps they follow last year’s threads, to the moon. They must fly off every perihelion, rebuilding their web bridge every time. They think the perihelion is here now. The warmth of the drive — it’s remarkable. But why go to Charon?”
Lvov couldn’t take her eyes off the flakes. “Because of the water,” she said. It all seemed to make sense, now that she saw the flakes in action. “There must be water glass, on Charon’s surface. The baby flakes use it to build their bodies. They take other nutrients from Pluto’s interior, and the glass from Charon… They need the resources of both worlds to survive—”
“Lvov!”
The GUTdrive flared past them, sudden, dazzling, and plunged into the damaged Interface.
Electric-blue light exploded from the Interface, washing over her.
There was a ball of light, unearthly, behind her, and an irregular patch of darkness ahead, like a rip in space. Tidal forces plucked gently at her belly and limbs.
Pluto, Charon and goose summer disappeared. But the stars, the eternal stars, shone down on her, just as they had during her childhood on Earth. She stared at the stars, trusting, and felt no fear.
Remotely, she heard Cobh whoop, exhilarated.
The tides faded. The darkness before her healed, to reveal the brilliance and warmth of Sol.
It was a time of extraordinary ambition and achievement. The anthropic theories of cosmological evolution were somewhere near their paradigmatic peak. Some believed humans were alone in the Universe. Others even believed the Universe had been designed, by some offstage agency, with the sole object of delivering and supporting humans.
Given time, humans could do anything, go anywhere, achieve whatever they liked.
Michael Poole was rightly celebrated for his achievements. His wormhole projects had opened up the System much as the great railroads had opened up the American continent, two thousand years earlier.
But Poole had greater ambitions in mind.
Poole used wormhole technology to establish a time tunnel: a bridge across fifteen hundred years, to the future.[2]
Why was Poole’s wormhole time link built?
There were endless justifications — what power could a glimpse of the future afford? — but the truth was that it had been built for little more than the sheer joy of it.
But Poole’s bridge reached an unexpected future.
The incident that followed the opening of the wormhole was confused, chaotic, difficult to disentangle. But it was a war — brief, spectacular, like no battle fought in Solar space before — but a war nevertheless. It was an invasion from a remote future, in which the Solar System had been occupied by an alien power.
The incursion was repelled. Michael Poole drove a captured warship into the wormhole, to seal it against further invasion. In the process, Poole himself was lost in time.
The System, stunned, slowly returned to normal.
Various bodies combed through the fragments of data from the time bridge incident, trying to answer the unanswerable.
It was said that before Poole’s wormhole path to the future finally closed, some information had been obtained on the far future. And the rumors said that the future — and what it held for mankind — were bleak indeed.
If the data was anything like accurate, it was clear that there was an agency at large — which must be acting even now — systematically destroying the stars…
And, as a consequence, humanity.
In response, an organization called the Holy Superet Church of Light emerged and evolved. Superet believed that humanity was becoming mature, as a species. And it was time to take responsibility for man’s long-term survival as a species.
Eve said, “A fresh starship was launched, called the Great Northern, in an attempt to build a new time bridge. And probes were prepared to investigate the heart of man’s own star, the Sun, where a dark cancer was growing…"[3]
The people — though exhausted by the tunnel’s cold — had rested long enough, Cilia-of-Gold decided.
Now it was time to fight.
She climbed up through the water, her flukes pulsing, and prepared to lead the group further along the Ice-tunnel to the new Chimney cavern.
But, even as the people rose from their browsing and crowded through the cold, stale water behind her, Cilia-of-Gold’s resolve wavered. The Seeker was a heavy presence inside her. She could feel its tendrils wrapped around her stomach, and — she knew — its probes must already have penetrated her brain, her mind, her self.
With a beat of her flukes, she thrust her body along the tunnel. She couldn’t afford to show weakness. Not now.
“Cilia-of-Gold.”
A broad body, warm through the turbulent water, came pushing out of the crowd to bump against hers: it was Strong-Flukes, one of Cilia-of-Gold’s Three-mates. Strong-Flukes’ presence was immediately comforting. “Cilia-of-Gold. I know something’s wrong.”
Cilia-of-Gold thought of denying it; but she turned away, her depression deepening. “I couldn’t expect to keep secrets from you. Do you think the others are aware?”
The hairlike cilia lining Strong-Flukes’ belly barely vibrated as she spoke. “Only Ice-Born suspects something is wrong. And if she didn’t, we’d have to tell her.” Ice-Born was the third of Cilia-of-Gold’s mates.
“I can’t afford to be weak, Strong-Flukes. Not now.”
As they swam together, Strong-Flukes flipped onto her back. Tunnel water filtered between Strong-Flukes’ carapace and her body; her cilia flickered as they plucked particles of food from the stream and popped them into the multiple mouths along her belly. “Cilia-of-Gold,” she said. “I know what’s wrong. You’re carrying a Seeker, aren’t you?”
“…Yes. How could you tell?”
“I love you,” Strong-Flukes said. “That’s how I could tell.”
The pain of Strong-Flukes’ perception was as sharp, and unexpected, as the moment when Cilia-of-Gold had first detected the signs of the infestation in herself… and had realized, with horror, that her life must inevitably end in madness, in a purposeless scrabble into the Ice over the world. “It’s still in its early stages, I think. It’s like a huge heat, inside me. And I can feel it reaching into my mind. Oh, Strong-Flukes…”
“Fight it.”
“I can’t. I—”
“You can. You must.”
The end of the tunnel was an encroaching disc of darkness; already Cilia-of-Gold could feel the inviting warmth of the Chimney-heated water on the cavern beyond.
This should have been the climax, the supreme moment of Cilia-of-Gold’s life.
The group’s old Chimney, with its fount of warm, rich water, was failing; and so they had to flee, and fight for a place in a new cavern.
That, or die.
It was Cilia-of-Gold who had found the new Chimney, as she had explored the endless network of tunnels between the Chimney caverns. Thus, it was she who must lead this war — Seeker or no Seeker.
She gathered up the fragments of her melting courage.
“You’re the best of us, Cilia-of-Gold,” Strong-Flukes said, slowing. “Don’t ever forget that.”
Cilia-of-Gold pressed her carapace against Strong-Flukes’ in silent gratitude.
Cilia-of-Gold turned and clacked her mandibles, signaling the rest of the people to halt. They did so, the adults sweeping the smaller children inside their strong carapaces.
Strong-Flukes lay flat against the floor and pushed a single eye stalk towards the mouth of the tunnel. Her caution was wise; there were species who could home in on even a single sound-pulse from an unwary eye.
After some moments of silent inspection, Strong-Flukes wriggled back along the Ice surface to Cilia-of-Gold.
She hesitated. “We’ve got problems, I think,” she said at last.
The Seeker seemed to pulse inside Cilia-of-Gold, tightening around her gut. “What problems?”
“This Chimney’s inhabited already. By Heads.”
Kevan Scholes stopped the rover a hundred yards short of the wall-mountain’s crest.
Irina Larionova, wrapped in a borrowed environment suit, could tell from the tilt of the cabin that the surface here was inclined upwards at around forty degrees — shallower than a flight of stairs. This “mountain,” heavily eroded, was really little more than a dust-clad hill, she thought.
“The wall of Chao Meng-Fu Crater,” Scholes said briskly, his radio-distorted voice tinny. “Come on. We’ll walk to the summit from here.”
“Walk?” She studied him, irritated. “Scholes, I’ve had one hour’s sleep in the last thirty-six; I’ve traveled across ninety million miles to get here, via flitters and wormhole transit links — and you’re telling me I have to walk up this damn hill?”
Scholes grinned through his face plate. He was AS-preserved at around physical-twenty-five, Larionova guessed, and he had a boyishness that grated on her. Damn it, she reminded herself, this “boy” is probably older than me.
“Trust me,” he said. “You’ll love the view. And we have to change transports anyway.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
He twisted gracefully to his feet. He reached out a gloved hand to help Larionova pull herself, awkwardly, out of her seat. When she stood on the cabin’s tilted deck, her heavy boots hurt her ankles.
Scholes threw open the rover’s lock. Residual air puffed out of the cabin, crystallizing. The glow from the cabin interior was dazzling; beyond the lock, Larionova saw only darkness.
Scholes climbed out of the lock and down to the planet’s invisible surface. Larionova followed him awkwardly; it seemed a long way to the lock’s single step.
Her boots settled to the surface, crunching softly. The lock was situated between the rover’s rear wheels: the wheels were constructs of metal strips and webbing, wide and light, each wheel taller than she was.
Scholes pushed the lock closed, and Larionova was plunged into sudden darkness.
Scholes loomed before her. He was a shape cut out of blackness. “Are you okay? Your pulse is rapid.”
She could hear the rattle of her own breath, loud and immediate. “Just a little disoriented.”
“We’ve got all of a third of a gee down here, you know. You’ll get used to it. Let your eyes dark-adapt. We don’t have to hurry this.”
She looked up.
In her peripheral vision, the stars were already coming out. She looked for a bright double star, blue and white. There it was: Earth, with Luna.
And now, with a slow grandeur, the landscape revealed itself to her adjusting eyes. The plain from which the rover had climbed spread out from the foot of the crater wall-mountain. It was a complex patchwork of crowding craters, ridges and scarps — some of which must have been miles high — all revealed as a glimmering tracery in the starlight. The face of the planet seemed wrinkled, she thought, as if shrunk with age.
“These wall-mountains are over a mile high,” Scholes said. “Up here, the surface is firm enough to walk on; the regolith dust layer is only a couple of inches thick. But down on the plain the dust can be ten or fifteen yards deep. Hence the big wheels on the rover. I guess that’s what five billion years of thousand-degree temperature range does for a landscape…”
Just twenty-four hours ago, she reflected, Larionova had been stuck in a boardroom in New York, buried in one of Superet’s endless funding battles. And now this… wormhole travel was bewildering. “Lethe’s waters,” she said. “It’s so — desolate.”
Scholes gave an ironic bow. “Welcome to Mercury,” he said.
Cilia-of-Gold and Strong-Flukes peered down into the Chimney cavern.
Cilia-of-Gold had chosen the cavern well. The Chimney here was a fine young vent, a glowing crater much wider than their old, dying home. The water above the Chimney was turbulent, and richly cloudy; the cavern itself was wide and smooth-walled. Cilia-plants grew in mats around the Chimney’s base. Cutters browsed in turn on the cilia-plants, great chains of them, their tough little arms slicing steadily through the plants. Sliding through the plant mats Cilia-of-Gold could make out the supple form of a Crawler, its mindless, tubelike body wider than Cilia-of-Gold’s and more than three times as long…
And, stalking around their little forest, here came the Heads themselves, the rulers of the cavern. Cilia-of-Gold counted four, five, six of the Heads, and no doubt there were many more in the dark recesses of the cavern.
One Head — close to the tunnel mouth — swiveled its huge, swollen helmet-skull towards her.
She ducked back into the tunnel, aware that all her cilia were quivering.
Strong-Flukes drifted to the tunnel floor, landing in a little cloud of food particles. “Heads,” she said, her voice soft with despair. “We can’t fight Heads.”
The Heads’ huge helmet-skulls were sensitive to heat — fantastically so, enabling the Heads to track and kill with almost perfect accuracy. Heads were deadly opponents, Cilia-of-Gold reflected. But the people had nowhere else to go.
“We’ve come a long way, to reach this place, Strong-Flukes. If we had to undergo another journey—” through more cold, stagnant tunnels “ — many of us couldn’t survive. And those who did would be too weakened to fight.
“No. We have to stay here — to fight here.”
Strong-Flukes groaned, wrapping her carapace close around her. “Then we’ll all be killed.”
Cilia-of-Gold tried to ignore the heavy presence of the Seeker within her — and its prompting, growing more insistent now, that she get away from all this, from the crowding presence of people — and she forced herself to think.
Larionova followed Kevan Scholes up the slope of the wall-mountain. Silicate surface dust compressed under her boots, like fine sand. The climbing was easy — it was no more than a steep walk, really — but she stumbled frequently, clumsy in this reduced gee.
They reached the crest of the mountain. It wasn’t a sharp summit: more a wide, smooth platform, fractured to dust by Mercury’s wild temperature range.
“Chao Meng-Fu Crater,” Scholes said. “A hundred miles wide, stretching right across Mercury’s South Pole.”
The crater was so large that even from this height its full breadth was hidden by the tight curve of the planet. The wall-mountain was one of a series that swept across the landscape from left to right, like a row of eroded teeth, separated by broad, rubble-strewn valleys. On the far side of the summit, the flanks of the wall-mountain swept down to the plain of the crater, a full mile below.
Mercury’s angry Sun was hidden beyond the curve of the world, but its corona extended delicate, structured tendrils above the far horizon.
The plain itself was immersed in darkness. But by the milky, diffuse light of the corona, Larionova could see a peak at the center of the plain, shouldering its way above the horizon. There was a spark of light at the base of the central peak, incongruously bright in the crater’s shadows: that must be the Thoth team’s camp.
“This reminds me of the Moon,” she said.
Scholes considered this. “Forgive me, Dr. Larionova. Have you been down to Mercury before?”
“No,” she said, his easy, informed arrogance grating on her. “I’m here to oversee the construction of Thoth, not to sightsee.”
“Well, there’s obviously a superficial similarity. After the formation of the main System objects five billion years ago, all the inner planets suffered bombardment by residual planetesimals. That’s when Mercury took its biggest strike: the one which created the Caloris feature. But after that, Mercury was massive enough to retain a molten core — unlike the Moon. Later planetesimal strikes punched holes in the crust, so there were lava outflows that drowned some of the older cratering.
“Thus, on Mercury, you have a mixture of terrains. There’s the most ancient landscape, heavily cratered, and the planitia: smooth lava plains, punctured by small, young craters.
“Later, as the core cooled, the surface actually shrunk inwards. The planet lost a mile or so of radius.”
Like a dried-out tomato. “So the surface is wrinkled.”
“Yes. There are rupes and dorsa: ridges and lobate scarps, cliffs a couple of miles tall and extending for hundreds of miles. Great climbing country. And in some places there are gas vents, chimneys of residual thermal activity.” He turned to her, corona light misty in his face plate. “So Mercury isn’t really so much like the Moon at all… Look. You can see Thoth.”
She looked up, following his pointing arm. There, just above the far horizon, was a small blue star.
She had her face plate magnify the image. The star exploded into a compact sculpture of electric blue threads, surrounded by firefly lights: the Thoth construction site.
Thoth was a habitat to be placed in orbit close to Sol. Irina Larionova was the consulting engineer contracted by Superet to oversee the construction of the habitat.
At Thoth, a Solar-interior probe would be constructed. The probe would be one Interface of a wormhole, loaded with sensors. The Interface would be dropped into the Sun. The other Interface would remain in orbit, at the center of the habitat.
Thoth’s purpose was to find out what was wrong with the Sun.
Irina Larionova wasn’t much interested in the purpose of Thoth, or any of Superet’s semi-mystical philosophizing. It was the work that was important, for her: and the engineering problems posed by Thoth were fascinating.
The electric-blue bars she could see now were struts of exotic matter, which would eventually frame the wormhole termini. The sparks of light moving around the struts were GUTships and short-haul flitters. She stared at the image, wishing she could get back to some real work.
Irina Larionova had had no intention of visiting Mercury herself. Mercury was a detail, for Thoth. Why would anyone come to Mercury, unless they had to? Mercury was a piece of junk, a desolate ball of iron and rock too close to the Sun to be interesting, or remotely habitable. The two Thoth exploratory teams had come here only to exploit: to see if it was possible to dig raw materials out of Mercury’s shallow — and close-at-hand — gravity well, for use in the construction of the habitat. The teams had landed at the South Pole, where traces of water-ice had been detected, and at the Caloris Basin, the huge equatorial crater where — it was hoped — that ancient impact might have brought iron-rich compounds to the surface.
The flitters from Thoth actually comprised the largest expedition ever to land on Mercury.
But, within days of landing, both investigative teams had reported anomalies.
Larionova tapped at her suit’s sleeve-controls. After a couple of minutes an image of Dolores Wu appeared in one corner of Larionova’s face plate. Hi, Irina, she said, her voice buzzing like an insect in Larionova’s helmet’s enclosed space.
Dolores Wu was the leader of the Thoth exploratory team in Caloris. Wu was Mars-born, with small features and hair grayed despite AntiSenescence treatments. She looked weary.
“How’s Caloris?” Larionova asked.
Well, we don’t have much to report yet. We decided to start with a detailed gravimetric survey…
“And?”
We found the impact object. We think. It’s as massive as we thought, but much — much — too small, Irina. It’s barely a mile across, way too dense to be a planetesimal fragment.
“A black hole?”
No. Not dense enough for that.
“Then what?”
Wu looked exasperated. We don’t know yet, Irina. We don’t have any answers. I’ll keep you informed.
Wu closed off the link.
Standing on the corona-lit wall of Chao Meng-Fu Crater, Larionova asked Kevan Scholes about Caloris.
“Caloris is big,” he said. “Luna has no impact feature on the scale of Caloris. And Luna has nothing like the Weird Country in the other hemisphere…”
“The what?”
A huge planetesimal — or something — had struck the equator of Mercury, five billion years ago, Scholes said. The Caloris Basin — an immense, ridged crater system — formed around the primary impact site. Whatever caused the impact was still buried in the planet, somewhere under the crust, dense and massive; the object was a gravitational anomaly which had helped lock Mercury’s rotation into synchronization with its orbit.
“Away from Caloris itself, shock waves spread around the planet’s young crust,” Scholes said. “The waves focused at Caloris’ antipode — the point on the equator diametrically opposite Caloris itself. And the land there was shattered, into a jumble of bizarre hill and valley formations. The Weird Country… hey. Dr. Larionova.”
She could hear that damnable grin of Scholes’s. “What now?” she snapped.
He walked across the summit towards her. “Look up,” he said.
“Damn it, Scholes—”
There was a pattering against her face plate.
She tilted up her head. Needle-shaped particles swirled over the wall-mountain from the planet’s dark side and bounced off her face plate, sparkling in corona light.
“What in Lethe is that?”
“Snow,” he said.
Snow… on Mercury?
In the cool darkness of the tunnel, the people clambered over each other; they bumped against the Ice walls, and their muttering filled the water with criss-crossing voice-ripples. Cilia-of-Gold swam through and around the crowd, coaxing the people to follow her will.
She felt immensely weary. Her concentration and resolve threatened continually to shatter under the Seeker’s assault. And the end of the tunnel, with the deadly Heads beyond, was a looming, threatening mouth, utterly intimidating.
At last the group was ready. She surveyed them. All of the people — except the very oldest and the very youngest — were arranged in an array which filled the tunnel from wall to wall; she could hear flukes and carapaces scraping softly against Ice.
The people looked weak, foolish, eager, she thought with dismay; now that she was actually implementing it her scheme seemed simple-minded. Was she about to lead them all to their deaths?
But it was too late for the luxury of doubt, she told herself. Now, there was no other option to follow.
She lifted herself to the axis of the tunnel, and clacked her mandibles sharply.
“Now,” she said, “it is time. The most important moment of your lives. And you must swim! Swim as hard as you can; swim for your lives!”
And the people responded.
There was a surge of movement, of almost exhilarating intent. The people beat their flukes as one, and a jostling mass of flesh and carapaces scrapped down the tunnel.
Cilia-of-Gold hurried ahead of them, leading the way towards the tunnel mouth. As she swam she could feel the current the people were creating, the plug of cold tunnel water they pushed ahead of themselves.
Within moments the tunnel mouth was upon her.
She burst from the tunnel, shooting out into the open water of the cavern, her carapace clenched firm around her. She was plunged immediately into a clammy heat, so great was the temperature difference between tunnel and cavern.
Above her the Ice of the cavern roof arched over the warm chimney mouth. And from all around the cavern, the helmet skulls of Heads snapped around towards her.
Now the people erupted out of the tunnel, a shield of flesh and chitin behind her. The rush of tunnel water they pushed ahead of themselves washed over Cilia-of-Gold, chilling her new.
She tried to imagine this from the Heads’ point of view. This explosion of cold water into the cavern would bring about a much greater temperature difference than the Heads’ heat-sensor skulls were accustomed to; the Heads would be dazzled, at least for a time: long enough — she hoped — to give her people a fighting chance against the more powerful Heads.
She swiveled in the water. She screamed at her people, so loud she could feel her cilia strain at the turbulent water. “Now! Hit them now!”
The people, with a roar, descended towards the Heads.
Kevan Scholes led Larionova down the wall-mountain slope into Chao Meng-Fu Crater.
After a hundred yards they came to another rover. This car was similar to the one they’d abandoned on the other side of the summit, but it had an additional fitting, obviously improvised: two wide, flat rails of metal, suspended between the wheels on hydraulic legs.
Scholes helped Larionova into the rover and pressurized it. Larionova removed her helmet with relief. The rover smelled, oppressively, of metal and plastic.
While Scholes settled behind his controls, Larionova checked the rover’s data desk. An update from Dolores Wu was waiting for her. Wu wanted Larionova to come to Caloris, to see for herself what had been found there. Larionova sent a sharp message back, ordering Wu to summarize her findings and transmit them to the data desks at the Chao site.
Wu acknowledged immediately, but replied: I’m going to find this hard to summarize, Irina.
Larionova tapped out: Why?
We think we’ve found an artifact.
Larionova stared at the blunt words on the screen.
She massaged the bridge of her nose; she felt an ache spreading out from her temples and around her eye sockets. She wished she had time to sleep.
Scholes started the vehicle up. The rover bounced down the slope, descending into shadow. “It’s genuine water-ice snow,” Scholes said as he drove. “You know that a day on Mercury lasts a hundred and seventy-six Earth days. It’s a combination of the eighty-eight-day year and the tidally locked rotation, which—”
“I know.”
“During the day, the Sun drives water vapor out of the rocks and into the atmosphere.”
“What atmosphere?”
“You really don’t know much about Mercury, do you? It’s mostly helium and hydrogen — only a billionth of Earth’s sea-level pressure.”
“How come those gases don’t escape from the gravity well?”
“They do,” Scholes said. “But the atmosphere is replenished by the Solar wind. Particles from the Sun are trapped by Mercury’s magnetosphere. Mercury has quite a respectable magnetic field: the planet has a solid iron core, which…”
She let Scholes’ words run on through her head, unregistered. Air from the Solar wind, and snow at the South Pole…
Maybe Mercury was a more interesting place than she’d imagined.
“Anyway,” Scholes was saying, “the water vapor disperses across the planet’s sunlit hemisphere. But at the South Pole we have this crater: Chao Meng-Fu, straddling the Pole itself. Mercury has no axial tilt — there are no seasons here — and so Chao’s floor is in permanent shadow.”
“And snow falls.”
“And snow falls.”
Scholes stopped the rover and tapped telltales on his control panel. There was a whir of hydraulics, and she heard a soft crunch, transmitted into the cabin through the rover’s structure.
Then the rover lifted upwards through a foot.
The rover lurched forward again. The motion was much smoother than before, and there was an easy, hissing sound.
“You’ve just lowered those rails,” Larionova said. “I knew it. This damn rover is a sled, isn’t it?”
“It was easy enough to improvise,” Scholes said, sounding smug. “Just a couple of metal rails on hydraulics, and vernier rockets from a cannibalized flitter to give us some push…”
“It’s astonishing that there’s enough ice here to sustain this.”
“Well, that snow may have seemed sparse, but it’s been falling steadily — for five billion years… Dr. Larionova, there’s a whole frozen ocean here, in Chao Meng-Fu Crater: enough ice to be detectable even from Earth.”
Larionova twisted to look out through a viewport at the back of the cabin. The rover’s rear lights picked out twin sled tracks, leading back to the summit of the wall-mountain; ice, exposed in the tracks, gleamed brightly in starlight.
Lethe, she thought. Now I’m skiing. Skiing, on Mercury. What a day.
The wall-mountain shallowed out, merging seamlessly with the crater plain. Scholes retracted the sled rails; on the flat, the regolith dust gave the ice sufficient traction for the rover’s wide wheels. The rover made fast progress through the fifty miles to the heart of the plain.
Larionova drank coffee and watched the landscape through the view ports. The corona light was silvery and quite bright here, like Moonlight. The central peak loomed up over the horizon, like some approaching ship on a sea of dust. The ice surface of Chao’s floor — though packed with craters and covered with the ubiquitous regolith dust — was visibly smoother and more level than the plain outside the crater.
The rover drew to a halt on the outskirts of the Thoth team’s sprawling camp, close to the foothills of the central peak. The dust here was churned up by rover tracks and flitter exhaust splashes, and semitransparent bubble-shelters were hemispheres of yellow, homely light, illuminating the darkened ice surface. There were drilling rigs, and several large pits dug into the ice.
Scholes helped Larionova out onto the surface. “I’ll take you to a shelter,” he said. “Or a flitter. Maybe you want to freshen up before—”
“Where’s Dixon?”
Scholes pointed to one of the rigs. “When I left, over there.”
“Then that’s where we’re going. Come on.”
Frank Dixon was the team leader. He met Larionova on the surface, and invited her into a small opaqued bubble-shelter nestling at the foot of the rig.
Scholes wandered off into the camp, in search of food.
The shelter contained a couple of chairs, a data desk, and a basic toilet. Dixon was a morose, burly American; when he took off his helmet there was a band of dirt at the base of his wide neck, and Larionova noticed a sharp, acrid stink from his suit. Dixon had evidently been out on the surface for long hours.
He pulled a hip flask from an environment suit pocket. “You want a drink?” he asked. “Scotch?”
“Sure.”
Dixon poured a measure for Larionova into the flask’s cap, and took a draught himself from the flask’s small mouth.
Larionova drank; the liquor burned her mouth and throat, but it immediately took an edge off her tiredness. “It’s good. But it needs ice.”
He smiled. “Ice we got. Actually, we have tried it; Mercury ice is good, as clean as you like. We’re not going to die of thirst out here, Irina.”
“Tell me what you’ve found, Frank.”
Dixon sat on the edge of the desk, his fat haunches bulging inside the leggings of his environment suit. “Trouble, Irina. We’ve found trouble.”
“I know that much.”
“I think we’re going to have to get off the planet. The System authorities — and the scientists and conservation groups — are going to climb all over us, if we try to mine here. I wanted to tell you about it, before—”
Larionova struggled to contain her irritation and tiredness. “That’s not a problem for Thoth,” she said. “Therefore it’s not a problem for me. We can tell Superet to bring in a water-ice asteroid from the Belt, for our supplies. You know that. Come on, Frank. Tell me why you’re wasting my time down here.”
Dixon took another long pull on his flask, and eyed her.
“There’s life here, Irina,” he said. “Life, inside this frozen ocean. Drink up; I’ll show you.”
The sample was in a case on the surface, beside a data desk. The thing in the case looked like a strip of multicolored meat: perhaps three feet long, crushed and obviously dead; shards of some transparent shell material were embedded in flesh that sparkled with ice crystals.
“We found this inside a two-thousand-yard-deep core,” Dixon said.
Larionova tried to imagine how this would have looked, intact and mobile. “This means nothing to me, Frank. I’m no biologist.”
He grunted, self-deprecating. “Nor me. Nor any of us. Who expected to find life, on Mercury?” Dixon tapped at the data desk with gloved fingers. “We used our desks’ medico-diagnostic facilities to come up with this reconstruction,” he said. “We call it a mercuric, Irina.”
A Virtual projected into space a foot above the desk’s surface; the image rotated, sleek and menacing.
The body was a thin cone, tapering to a tail from a wide, flat head. Three parabolic cups — eyes? — were embedded in the smooth “face,” symmetrically placed around a lipless mouth… No, not eyes, Larionova corrected herself. Maybe some kind of sonar sensor? That would explain the parabolic profile.
Mandibles, like pincers, protruded from the mouth. From the tail, three fins were splayed out around what looked like an anus. A transparent carapace surrounded the main body, like a cylindrical cloak; inside the carapace, rows of small, hairlike cilia lined the body, supple and vibratile.
There were regular markings, faintly visible, in the surface of the carapace.
“Is this accurate?”
“Who knows? It’s the best we can do. When we have your clearance, we can transmit our data to Earth, and let the experts get at it.”
“Lethe, Frank,” Larionova said. “This looks like a fish. It looks like it could swim. The streamlining, the tail—”
Dixon scratched the short hairs at the back of his neck and said nothing.
“But we’re on Mercury, damn it, not in Hawaii,” Larionova said.
Dixon pointed down, past the dusty floor. “Irina. It’s not all frozen. There are cavities down there, inside the Chao ice cap. According to our sonar probes—”
“Cavities?”
“Water. At the base of the crater, under a couple of miles of ice. Kept liquid by thermal vents, in crust-collapse scarps and ridges. Plenty of room for swimming… we speculate that our friend here swims on his back—” he tapped the desk surface, and the image swiveled “ — and the water passes down, between his body and this carapace, and he uses all those tiny hairs to filter out particles of food. The trunk seems to be lined with little mouths. See?” He flicked the image to another representation; the skin became transparent, and Larionova could see blocky reconstructions of internal organs. Dixon said, “There’s no true stomach, but there is what looks like a continuous digestive tube passing down the axis of the body, to the anus at the tail.”
Larionova noticed a threadlike structure wrapped around some of the organs, as well as around the axial digestive tract.
“Look,” Dixon said, pointing to one area. “Look at the surface structure of these lengths of tubing, here near the digestive tract.”
Larionova looked. The tubes, clustering around the digestive axis, had complex, rippled surfaces. “So?”
“You don’t get it, do you? It’s convoluted — like the surface of a brain. Irina, we think that stuff must be some equivalent of nervous tissue.”
Larionova frowned. Damn it, I wish I knew more biology. “What about this thread material, wrapped around the organs?”
Dixon sighed. “We don’t know, Irina. It doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of the structure, does it?” He pointed. “Follow the threads back. There’s a broader main body, just here. We think maybe this is some kind of parasite, which has infested the main organism. Like a tapeworm. It’s as if the threads are extended, vestigial limbs…”
Leaning closer, Larionova saw that tendrils from the wormthing had even infiltrated the brain-tubes. She shuddered; if this was a parasite, it was a particularly vile infestation. Maybe the parasite even modified the mercuric’s behavior, she wondered.
Dixon restored the solid-aspect Virtual.
Uneasily, Larionova pointed to the markings on the carapace. They were small triangles, clustered into elaborate patterns. “And what’s this stuff?”
Dixon hesitated. “I was afraid you might ask that.”
“Well?”
“…We think the markings are artificial, Irina. A deliberate tattoo, carved into the carapace, probably with the mandibles. Writing, maybe: those look like symbolic markings, with information content.”
“Lethe,” she said.
“I know. This fish was smart,” Dixon said.
The people, victorious, clustered around the warmth of their new Chimney. Recovering from their journey and from their battle-wounds, they cruised easily over the gardens of cilia-plants, and browsed on floating fragments of food.
It had been a great triumph. The Heads were dead, or driven off into the labyrinth of tunnels through the Ice. Strong-Flukes had even found the Heads’ principal nest here, under the silty floor of the cavern. With sharp stabs of her mandibles, Strong-Flukes had destroyed a dozen or more Head young.
Cilia-of-Gold took herself off, away from the Chimney. She prowled the edge of the Ice cavern, feeding fitfully.
She was a hero. But she couldn’t bear the attention of others: their praise, the warmth of their bodies. All she seemed to desire now was the uncomplicated, silent coolness of Ice.
She brooded on the infestation that was spreading through her.
Seekers were a mystery. Nobody knew why Seekers compelled their hosts to isolate themselves, to bury themselves in the Ice. What was the point? When the hosts were destroyed, so were the Seekers.
Perhaps it wasn’t the Ice itself the Seekers desired, she wondered. Perhaps they sought, in their blind way, something beyond the Ice…
But there was nothing above the Ice. The caverns were hollows in an infinite, eternal Universe of Ice. Cilia-of-Gold, with a shudder, imagined herself burrowing, chewing her way into the endless Ice, upwards without limit… Was that, finally, how her life would end?
She hated the Seeker within her. She hated her body, for betraying her in this way; and she hated herself.
“Cilia-of-Gold.”
She turned, startled, and closed her carapace around herself reflexively.
It was Strong-Flukes and Ice-Born, together. Seeing their warm, familiar bodies, here in this desolate corner of the cavern, Cilia-of-Gold’s loneliness welled up inside her, like a Chimney of emotion.
But she swam away from her Three-mates, backwards, her carapace scraping on the cavern’s Ice wall.
Ice-Born came towards her, hesitantly. “We’re concerned about you.”
“Then don’t be,” she snapped. “Go back to the Chimney, and leave me here.”
“No,” Strong-Flukes said quietly.
Cilia-of-Gold felt desperate, angry, confined. “You know what’s wrong with me, Strong-Flukes. I have a Seeker. It’s going to kill me. And there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”
Their bodies pressed close around her now; she longed to open up her carapace to them and bury herself in their warmth.
“We know we’re going to lose you, Cilia-of-Gold,” Ice-Born said. It sounded as if she could barely speak. Ice-Born had always been the softest, the most loving, of the Three, Cilia-of-Gold thought, the warm heart of their relationship. “And—”
“Yes?”
Strong-Flukes opened her carapace wide. “We want to be Three again,” she said.
Already, Cilia-of-Gold saw with a surge of love and excitement, Strong-Flukes’s ovipositor was distended: swollen with one of the three isogametes which would fuse to form a new child, their fourth…
A child Cilia-of-Gold could never see growing to consciousness.
“No!” Her cilia pulsed with the single, agonized word.
Suddenly the warmth of her Three-mates was confining, claustrophobic. She had to get away from this prison of flesh; her mind was filled with visions of the coolness and purity of Ice: of clean, high Ice.
“Cilia-of-Gold. Wait. Please—”
She flung herself away, along the wall. She came to a tunnel mouth, and she plunged into it, relishing the tunnel’s cold, stagnant water.
“Cilia-of-Gold! Cilia-of-Gold!”
She hurled her body through the web of tunnels, carelessly colliding with walls of Ice so hard that she could feel her carapace splinter. On and on she swam, until the voices of her Three-mates were lost forever.
We’ve dug out a large part of the artifact, Irina, Dolores Wu reported. It’s a mass of what looks like hull material.
“Did you get a sample?”
No. We don’t have anything that could cut through material so dense… Irina, we’re looking at something beyond our understanding.
Larionova sighed. “Just tell me, Dolores,” she told Wu’s data-desk image.
Irina, we think we’re dealing with the Pauli Principle.
Pauli’s Exclusion Principle stated that no two fermions — electrons or quarks — could exist in the same quantum state. Only a certain number of electrons, for example, could share a given energy level in an atom. Adding more electrons caused complex shells of charge to build up around the atom’s nucleus. It was the electron shells — this consequence of Pauli — that gave the atom its chemical properties.
But the Pauli Principle didn’t apply to photons; it was possible for many photons to share the same quantum state. That was the essence of the laser: billions of photons, coherent, sharing the same quantum properties.
Irina, Wu said slowly, what would happen if you could turn off the Exclusion Principle, for a piece of fermionic matter?
“You can’t,” Larionova said immediately.
Of course not. Try to imagine anyway.
Larionova frowned. What if one could lase mass? “The atomic electron shells would implode, of course.”
Yes.
“All electrons would fall into their ground state. Chemistry would be impossible.”
Yes. But you may not care…
“Molecules would collapse. Atoms would fall into each other, releasing immense quantities of binding energy.”
You’d end up with a super dense substance, wouldn’t you? Completely non-reactive, chemically. And almost unbreachable, given the huge energies required to detach non-Pauli atoms.
Ideal hull material, Irina…
“But it’s all impossible,” Larionova said weakly. “You can’t violate Pauli.”
Of course you can’t, Dolores Wu replied.
Inside an opaqued bubble-shelter, Larionova, Dixon and Scholes sat on fold-out chairs, cradling coffees.
“If your mercuric was so smart,” Larionova said to Dixon, “how come he got himself stuck in the ice?”
Dixon shrugged. “In fact it goes deeper than that. It looked to us as if the mercuric burrowed his way up into the ice, deliberately. What kind of evolutionary advantage could there be in behavior like that? The mercuric was certain to be killed.”
“Yes,” Larionova said. She massaged her temples, thinking about the mercuric’s infection. “But maybe that thread-parasite had something to do with it. I mean, some parasites change the way their hosts behave.”
Scholes tapped at a data desk; text and images, reflected from the desk, flickered over his face. “That’s true. There are parasites which transfer themselves from one host to another — by forcing a primary host to get itself eaten by the second.”
Dixon’s wide face crumpled. “Lethe. That’s disgusting.”
“The lancet fluke,” Scholes read slowly, “is a parasite of some species of ant. The fluke can make its host climb to the top of a grass stem and then lock onto the stem with its mandibles — and wait until it’s swallowed by a grazing sheep. Then the fluke can go on to infest the sheep in turn.”
“Okay,” Dixon said. “But why would a parasite force its mercuric host to burrow up into the ice of a frozen ocean? When the host dies, the parasite dies, too. It doesn’t make sense.”
“There’s a lot about this that doesn’t make sense,” Larionova said. “Like, the whole question of the existence of life in the cavities in the first place. There’s no light down there. How do the mercurics survive, under two miles of ice?”
Scholes folded one leg on top of the other and scratched his ankle. “I’ve been going through the data desks.” He grimaced, self-deprecating. “A crash course in exotic biology. You want my theory?”
“Go ahead.”
“The thermal vents — which cause the cavities in the first place. The vents are the key. I think the bottom of the Chao ice-cap is like the mid-Atlantic ridge, back on Earth.
“The deep sea, a mile down, is a desert; by the time any particle of food has drifted down from the richer waters above it’s passed through so many guts that its energy content is exhausted.
“But along the Ridge, where tectonic plates are colliding, you have hydrothermal vents — just as at the bottom of Chao. And the heat from the Atlantic vents supports life: in little colonies, strung out along the mid-Atlantic Ridge. The vents form superheated fountains, smoking with deep-crust minerals which life can exploit: sulphides of copper, zinc, lead and iron, for instance. And there are very steep temperature differences, and so there are high energy gradients — another prerequisite for life.”
“Hmm.” Larionova closed her eyes and tried to picture it. Pockets of warm water, deep in the ice of Mercury; luxuriant mats of life surrounding mineral-rich hydrothermal vents, browsed by Dixon’s mercuric animals… was it possible?
Dixon asked, “How long do the vents persist?”
“On Earth, in the Ridge, a couple of decades. Here we don’t know.”
“What happens when a vent dies?” Larionova asked. “That’s the end of your pocket world, isn’t it? The ice chamber would simply freeze up.”
“Maybe,” Scholes said. “But the vents would occur in rows, along the scarps. Maybe there are corridors of liquid water, within the ice, along which mercurics could migrate.”
Larionova thought about that for a while.
“I don’t believe it,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t see how it’s possible for life to have evolved here in the first place.” In the primeval oceans of Earth, there had been complex chemicals, and electrical storms, and…
“Oh, I don’t think that’s a problem,” Scholes said.
She looked at him sharply. Maddeningly, he was grinning again. “Well?” she snapped.
“Look,” Scholes said with grating patience, “we’ve two anomalies on Mercury: the life-forms here at the South Pole, and Dolores Wu’s artifact under Caloris. The simplest assumption is that the two anomalies are connected. Let’s put the pieces together,” he said. “Let’s construct a hypothesis…”
Her mandibles ached as she crushed the gritty Ice, carving out her tunnel upwards. The rough walls of the tunnel scraped against her carapace, and she pushed Ice rubble down between her body and her carapace, sacrificing fragile cilia designed to extract soft food particles from warm streams.
The higher she climbed, the harder the Ice became. The Ice was now so cold she was beyond cold; she couldn’t even feel the Ice fragments that scraped along her belly and flukes. And, she suspected, the tunnel behind her was no longer open but had refrozen, sealing her here, in this shifting cage, forever. The world she had left — of caverns, and Chimneys, and children, and her Three-mates — were remote bubbles of warmth, a distant dream. The only reality was the hard Ice in her mandibles, and the Seeker heavy and questing inside her.
She could feel her strength seeping out with the last of her warmth into the Ice’s infinite extent. And yet still the Seeker wasn’t satisfied; still she had to climb, on and up, into the endless darkness of the Ice.
…But now — impossibly — there was something above her, breaking through the Ice…
She cowered inside her Ice-prison.
Kevan Scholes said, “Five billion years ago — when the Solar System was very young, and the crusts of Earth and other inner planets were still subject to bombardment from stray planetesimals — a ship came here. An interstellar craft, maybe with FTL technology.”
“Why? Where from?” Larionova asked.
“I don’t know. How could I know that? But the ship must have been massive — with the bulk of a planetesimal, or more. Certainly highly advanced, with a hull composed of Dolores’ super dense Pauli construction material.”
“Hmm. Go on.”
“Then the ship hit trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“I don’t know. Come on, Dr. Larionova. Maybe it got hit by a planetesimal itself. Anyway, the ship crashed here, on Mercury—”
“Right.” Dixon nodded, gazing at Scholes hungrily; the American reminded Larionova of a child enthralled by a story. “It was a disastrous impact. It caused the Caloris feature…”
“Oh, be serious,” Larionova said.
Dixon looked at her. “Caloris was a pretty unique impact, Irina. Extraordinarily violent, even by the standards of the System’s early bombardment phase… Caloris Basin is eight hundred miles across; on Earth, its walls would stretch from New York to Chicago.”
“So how did anything survive?”
Scholes shrugged. “Maybe the starfarers had some kind of inertial shielding. How can we know? Anyway the ship was wrecked; and the density of the smashed-up hull material caused it to sink into the bulk of the planet, through the Caloris puncture.
“The crew were stranded. So they sought a place to survive. Here, on Mercury.”
“I get it,” Dixon said. “The only viable environment, long term, was the Chao Meng-Fu ice cap.”
Scholes spread his hands. “Maybe the starfarers had to engineer descendants, quite unlike the original crew, to survive in such conditions. And perhaps they had to do a little planetary engineering too; they may have had to initiate some of the hydrothermal vents which created the enclosed liquid-water world down there. And so—”
“Yes?”
“And so the creature we’ve dug out of the ice is a degenerate descendant of those ancient star travelers, still swimming around the Chao Sea.”
Scholes fell silent, his eyes on Larionova.
Larionova stared into her coffee. “A ‘degenerate descendant.’ After five billion years? Look, Scholes, on Earth it’s only three and a half billion years since the first prokaryotic cells. And on Earth, whole phyla — groups of species — have emerged or declined over periods less than a tenth of the time since the Caloris Basin event. Over time intervals like that, the morphology of species flows like hot plastic. So how is it possible for these mercurics to have persisted?”
Scholes looked uncertain. “Maybe they’ve suffered massive evolutionary changes,” he said. “But we’re just not recognizing them. For example, maybe the worm parasite is the malevolent descendant of some harmless creature the starfarers brought with them.”
Dixon scratched his neck, where the suit-collar ring of dirt was prominent. “Anyway, we’ve still got the puzzle of the mercuric’s burrowing into the ice.”
“Hmm.” Scholes sipped his cooling coffee. “I’ve got a theory about that, too.”
“I thought you might,” Larionova said sourly.
Scholes said, “I wonder if the impulse to climb up to the surface is some kind of residual yearning for the stars.”
“What?”
Scholes looked embarrassed, but he pressed on: “A racial memory buried deep, prompting the mercurics to seek their lost home world… why not?”
Larionova snorted. “You’re a romantic, Kevan Scholes.”
A telltale flashed on the surface of the data desk. Dixon leaned over, tapped the telltale and took the call.
He looked up at Larionova, his moonlike face animated. “Irina. They’ve found another mercuric,” he said.
“Is it intact?”
“More than that.” Dixon stood and reached for his helmet. “This one isn’t dead yet…”
The mercuric lay on Chao’s dust-coated ice. Humans stood around it, suited, their face plates anonymously blank.
The mercuric, dying, was a cone of bruised-purple meat a yard long. Shards of shattered transparent carapace had been crushed into its crystallizing flesh. Some of the cilia, within the carapace, stretched and twitched. The cilia looked differently colored to Dixon’s reconstruction, as far as Larionova could remember: these were yellowish threads, almost golden.
Dixon spoke quickly to his team, then joined Larionova and Scholes. “We couldn’t have saved it. It was in distress as soon as our core broke through into its tunnel. I guess it couldn’t take the pressure and temperature differentials. Its internal organs seem to be massively disrupted…”
“Just think.” Kevan Scholes stood beside Dixon, his hands clasped behind his back. “There must be millions of these animals in the ice under our feet, embedded in their pointless little chambers. Surely none of them could dig more than a hundred yards or so up from the liquid layer.”
Larionova switched their voices out of her consciousness. She knelt down, on the ice; under her knees she could feel the criss-cross heating elements in her suit’s fabric.
She peered into the dulling sonar-eyes of the mercuric. The creature’s mandibles — prominent and sharp — opened and closed, in vacuum silence.
She felt an impulse to reach out her gloved hand to the battered flank of the creature: to touch this animal, this person, whose species had, perhaps, traveled across light years — and five billion years — to reach her…
But still, she had the nagging feeling that something was wrong with Scholes’ neat hypothesis. The mercuric’s physical design seemed crude. Could this really have been a starfaring species? The builders of the ship in Caloris must have had some form of major tool-wielding capability. And Dixon’s earlier study had shown that the creature had no trace of any limbs, even vestigially…
Vestigial limbs, she remembered. Lethe.
Abruptly her perception of this animal — and its host parasite — began to shift; she could feel a paradigm dissolving inside her, melting like a Mercury snowflake in the Sun.
“Dr. Larionova? Are you all right?”
Larionova looked up at Scholes. “Kevan, I called you a romantic. But I think you were almost correct, after all. But not quite. Remember we’ve suggested that the parasite — the infestation — changes the mercuric’s behavior, causing it to make its climb.”
“What are you saying?”
Suddenly, Larionova saw it all. “I don’t believe this mercuric is descended from the starfarers — the builders of the ship in Caloris. I think the rise of the mercurics’ intelligence was a later development; the mercurics grew to consciousness here, on Mercury. I do think the mercurics are descended from something that came to Mercury on that ship, though. A pet, or a food animal — Lethe, even some equivalent of a stomach bacteria. Five billion years is time enough for anything. And, given the competition for space near the short-lived vents, there’s plenty of encouragement for the development of intelligence, down inside this frozen sea.”
“And the starfarers themselves?” Scholes asked. “What became of them? Did they die?”
“No,” she said. “No, I don’t think so. But they, too, suffered huge evolutionary changes. I think they did devolve, Scholes; in fact, I think they lost their awareness.
“But one thing persisted within them, across all this desert of time. And that was the starfarers’ vestigial will to return — to the surface, one day, and at last to the stars…”
It was a will which had survived even the loss of consciousness itself, somewhere in the long, stranded aeons: a relic of awareness long since transmuted to a deeper biochemical urge — a will to return home, still embedded within a once-intelligent species reduced by time to a mere parasitic infection.
But it was a home which, surely, could no longer exist.
The mercuric’s golden cilia twitched once more, in a great wave of motion which shuddered down its ice-flecked body.
Then it was still.
Larionova stood up; her knees and calves were stiff and cold, despite the suit’s heater. “Come on,” she said to Scholes and Dixon. “You’d better get your team off the ice as soon as possible; I’ll bet the universities have their first exploratory teams down here half a day after we pass Earth the news.”
Dixon nodded. “And Thoth?”
“Thoth? I’ll call Superet. I guess I’ve an asteroid to order…”
And then she thought, at last I can sleep. Sleep and get back to work.
With Scholes and Dixon, she trudged across the dust-strewn ice to the bubble-shelters.
She could feel the Ice under her belly… but above her there was no Ice, no water even, an infinite nothing into which the desperate pulses of her blinded eyes disappeared without echo.
Astonishingly — impossibly — she was, after all, above the Ice. How could this be? Was she in some immense upper cavern, its Ice roof too remote to see? Was this the nature of the Universe, a hierarchy of caverns within caverns?
She knew she would never understand. But it didn’t seem to matter. And, as her awareness faded, she felt the Seeker inside her subside to peace.
A final warmth spread out within her. Consciousness splintered like melting ice, flowing away through the closing tunnels of her memory.
“At last,” Eve told me, “the Thoth Sun probe hardware was ready. Now, all that was needed was the software…”
Lieserl was suspended inside the body of the Sun.
She spread her arms wide and lifted up her face. She was deep within the Sun’s convective zone, the broad mantle of turbulent material beneath the glowing photosphere; convective cells larger than the Earth, tangled with ropes of magnetic flux, filled the world around her. She could hear the roar of the great convective founts, smell the stale photons diffusing out towards space from the remote fusing core.
She felt as if she were inside some huge cavern. Looking up she could see how the photosphere formed a glowing roof over her world perhaps fifty thousand miles above her, and the boundary of the inner radiative zone was a shining, impenetrable floor another fifty thousand miles beneath.
Lieserl? Can you hear me? Are you all right?
Kevan Scholes. It sounded like her mother’s voice, she thought.
She thrust her arms down by her sides and swooped up, letting the floor and roof of the cavern-world wheel around her. She opened up her senses, so that she could feel the turbulence as a whisper against her skin, the glow of hard photons from the core as a gentle warmth against her face.
Lieserl? Lieserl?
She remembered how her mother had enfolded her in her arms. “The Sun, Lieserl. The Sun…”
Even at the moment she was born she knew something was wrong.
A face loomed over her: wide, smooth, smiling. The cheeks were damp, the glistening eyes huge. “Lieserl. Oh, Lieserl…”
Lieserl. My name, then.
She explored the face before her, studying the lines around the eyes, the humorous upturn of the mouth, the strong nose. It was an intelligent, lived-in face. This is a good human being, he thought. Good stock…
Good stock? What am I thinking of?
This was impossible. She felt terrified of her own explosive consciousness. She shouldn’t even be able to focus her eyes yet…
She tried to touch her mother’s face. Her own hand was still moist with amniotic fluid — but it was growing visibly, the bones extending and broadening, filling out the loose skin like a glove.
She opened her mouth. It was dry, her gums already sore with budding teeth.
She tried to speak.
Her mother’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Oh, Lieserl. My impossible baby.”
Strong arms reached beneath her. She felt weak, helpless, consumed by growth. Her mother lifted her up, high in the air. Bony adult fingers dug into the aching flesh of her back; her head lolled backwards, the expanding muscles still too weak to support the burgeoning weight of her head. She could sense other adults surrounding her, the bed in which she’d been born, the outlines of a room.
She was held before a window, with her body tipped forward. Her head lolled; spittle laced across her chin.
An immense light flooded her eyes.
She cried out.
Her mother enfolded her in her arms. “The Sun, Lieserl. The Sun…”
The first few days were the worst. Her parents — impossibly tall, looming figures — took her through brightly lit rooms, a garden always flooded with sunlight. She learned to sit up. The muscles in her back fanned out, pulsing as they grew. To distract her from the unending pain, clowns tumbled over the grass before her, chortling through their huge red lips, then popping out of existence in clouds of pixels.
She grew explosively, feeding all the time, a million impressions crowding into her soft sensorium.
There seemed to be no limit to the number of rooms in this place, this House. Slowly she began to understand that some of the rooms were Virtual chambers — blank screens against which any number of images could be projected. But even so, the House must comprise hundreds of rooms. And she — with her parents — wasn’t alone here, she slowly realized. There were other people, but at first they kept away, out of sight, apparent only by their actions: the meals they prepared, the toys they left her.
On the third day her parents took her on a trip by flitter. It was the first time she’d been away from the House, its grounds. She stared through the bulbous windows, pressing her nose to heated glass. The journey was an arc over a toy-like landscape; a breast of blue ocean curved away from the land, all around her. This was the island of Skiros, her mother told her, and the sea was called the Aegean. The House was the largest construct on the island; it was a jumble of white, cubeshaped buildings, linked by corridors and surrounded by garden — grass, trees. Further out there were bridges and roads looping through the air above the ground, houses like a child’s bricks sprinkled across glowing hillsides.
Everything was drenched in heavy, liquid sunlight.
The flitter snuggled at last against a grassy sward close to the shore of an ocean. Lieserl’s mother lifted her out and placed her — on her stretching, unsteady legs — on the rough, sandy grass.
Hand in hand, the little family walked down a short slope to the beach.
The Sun burned through thinned air from an unbearably blue sky. Her vision seemed telescopic. She looked at distant groups of children and adults playing — far away, halfway to the horizon — and it was as if she was among them herself. Her feet, still uncertain, pressed into gritty, moist sand. She could taste the brine salt on the air; it seemed to permeate her very skin.
She found mussels clinging to a ruined pier. She prised them away with a toy spade, and gazed, fascinated, at their slime-dripping feet.
She sat on the sand with her parents, feeling her light costume stretch over her still-growing limbs. They played a simple game, of counters moving over a floating Virtual board, pictures of ladders and hissing snakes. There was laughter, mock complaints by her father, elaborate pantomimes of cheating.
Her senses were electric. It was a wonderful day, full of light and joy, extraordinarily vivid sensations. Her parents loved her — she could see that in the way they moved with each other, came to her, played with her.
They must know she was different; but they didn’t seem to care.
She didn’t want to be different — to be wrong. She closed her mind against the thoughts, and concentrated on the snakes, the ladders, the sparkling counters.
Every morning she woke up in a bed that felt too small.
Lieserl liked the garden. She liked to watch the flowers straining their tiny, pretty faces towards the Sun, as the great light climbed patiently across the sky. The sunlight made the flowers grow, her father told her. Maybe she was like a flower, she thought, growing too quickly in all this sunlight.
On the fifth day she was taken to a wide, irregularly shaped, colorful classroom. This room was full of children — other children! — and toys, drawings, books. Sunlight flooded the room; perhaps there was some clear dome stretched over the open walls.
The children sat on the floor and played with paints and dolls, or talked earnestly to brilliantly-colored Virtual figures — smiling birds, tiny clowns. The children turned to watch as she came in with her mother, their faces round and bright, like dapples of sunlight through leaves. She’d never been so close to other children before. Were these children different, too?
One small girl scowled at her, and Lieserl quailed against her mother’s legs. But her mother’s familiar warm hands pressed into her back. “Go ahead. It’s all right.”
As she stared at the unknown girl’s scowling face, Lieserl’s questions, her too-adult, too-sophisticated doubts, seemed to evaporate. Suddenly, all that mattered to her — all that mattered in the world — was that she should be accepted by these children — that they wouldn’t know she was different.
An adult approached her: a man, young, thin, his features bland with youth. He wore a jumpsuit colored a ludicrous orange; in the sunlight, the glow of it shone up over his chin. He smiled at her. “Lieserl, isn’t it? My name’s Michael. We’re glad you’re here.” In a louder, exaggerated voice, he said, “Aren’t we, people?”
He was answered by a rehearsed, chorused “Yes.”
“Now come and we’ll find something for you to do,” Michael said. He led her across the child-littered floor to a space beside a small boy. The boy — red-haired, with startling blue eyes — was staring at a Virtual puppet which endlessly formed and reformed: the figure two, collapsing into two snowflakes, two swans, two dancing children; the figure three, followed by three bears, three fish swimming in the air, three cakes. The boy mouthed the numbers, following the tinny voice of the Virtual. “Two. One. Two and one is three.”
Michael introduced her to the boy — Tommy — and she sat down with him. Tommy, she was relieved to find, was so fascinated by his Virtual that he scarcely seemed aware that Lieserl was present — let alone different.
The number Virtual ran through its cycle and winked out of existence. “Bye-bye, Tommy! Goodbye, Lieserl!”
Tommy was resting on his stomach, his chin cupped in his palms. Lieserl, awkwardly, copied his posture. Now Tommy turned to her — without appraisal, merely looking at her, with unconscious acceptance.
Lieserl said, “Can we see it again?”
He yawned and poked a finger into one nostril. “No. Let’s see another. There’s a great one about the pre-Cambrian explosion—”
“The what?”
He waved a hand dismissively. “You know, the Burgess Shale and all that. Wait till you see Hallucigenia crawling over your neck…”
The children played, and learned, and napped. Later, the girl who’d scowled at Lieserl — Ginnie — started some trouble. She poked fun at the way Lieserl’s bony wrists stuck out of her sleeves (Lieserl’s growth rate was slowing, but she was still growing out of her clothes during a day). Then — unexpectedly, astonishingly — Ginnie started to bawl, claiming that Lieserl had walked through her Virtual. When Michael came over Lieserl started to explain, calmly and rationally, that Ginnie must be mistaken; but Michael told her not to cause such distress, and for punishment she was forced to sit away from the other children for ten minutes, without stimulation.
It was all desperately, savagely unfair. It was the longest ten minutes of Lieserl’s life. She glowered at Ginnie, filled with resentment.
The next day she found herself looking forward to going to the room with the children again. She set off with her mother through sunlit corridors. They reached the room Lieserl remembered — there was Michael, smiling a little wistfully to her, and Tommy, and the girl Ginnie — but Ginnie seemed different: childlike, unformed…
At least a head shorter than Lieserl.
Lieserl tried to recapture that delicious enmity of the day before, but it vanished even as she conjured it. Ginnie was just a kid.
She felt as if something had been stolen from her.
Her mother squeezed her hand. “Come on. Let’s find a new room for you to play in.”
Every day was unique. Every day Lieserl spent in a new place, with new people.
The world glowed with sunlight. Shining points trailed endlessly across the sky: low-orbit habitats and comet nuclei, tethered for power and fuel. People walked through a sea of information, with access to the Virtual libraries available anywhere in the world, at a subvocalized command. Lieserl learned quickly. She read about her parents. They were scientists, studying the Sun. They weren’t alone; there were many people, huge resources, devoted to the Sun.
In the libraries there was a lot of material about the Sun, little of which she could follow. But she sensed some common threads.
Once, people had taken the Sun for granted. No longer. Now — for some reason — they feared it.
On the ninth day Lieserl studied herself in a Virtual holomirror. She had the image turn around, so she could see the shape of her skull, the lie of her hair. There was still some childish softness in her face, she thought, but the woman inside her was emerging already, as if her childhood was a receding tide. She would look like her mother — Phillida — in the strong-nosed set of her face, her large, vulnerable eyes; but she would have the sandy coloring of her father, George.
Lieserl looked about nine years old. But she was just nine days old.
She bade the Virtual break up; it shattered into a million tiny images of her face which drifted away like flies in the sunlit air.
Phillida and George were fine parents, she thought. They spent their time away from her working through technical papers — which scrolled through the air like falling leaves — and exploring elaborate, onion-ring Virtual models of stars. Although they were both clearly busy they gave themselves to her without hesitation. She moved in a happy world of smiles, sympathy and support.
Her parents loved her unreservedly. But that wasn’t always enough.
She started to come up with more complicated, detailed questions. Like, what was the mechanism by which she was growing so rapidly? She didn’t seem to eat more than the other children she encountered; what could be fueling her absurd growth rates?
How did she know so much? She’d been born self-aware, with even the rudiments of language in her head. The Virtuals she interacted with in the classrooms were fun, and she always seemed to learn something new; but she absorbed no more than scraps of knowledge through them compared to the feast of insight with which she awoke each morning.
What had taught her, in the womb? What was teaching her now?
She had no answers. But perhaps — somehow — it was all connected with this strange, global obsession with the Sun. She remembered her childish fantasy — that she might be like a flower, straining up too quickly to the Sun. Maybe, she wondered now, there was some grain of truth in that insight.
The strange little family had worked up some simple, homely rituals together. Lieserl’s favorite was the game, each evening, of snakes and ladders. George brought home an old set — a real board made of card, and wooden counters. Already Lieserl was too old for the game; but she loved the company of her parents, her father’s elaborate jokes, the simple challenge of the game, the feel of the worn, antique counters.
Phillida showed her how to use Virtuals to produce her own game boards. Her first efforts, on her eleventh day, were plain, neat forms, little more than copies of the commercial boards she’d seen. But soon she began to experiment. She drew a huge board of a million squares, which covered a whole room — she could walk through the board, a planar sheet of light at about waist-height. She crammed the board with intricate, curling snakes, vast ladders, vibrantly glowing squares — detail piled on detail.
The next morning she walked with eagerness to the room where she’d built her board — and was immediately disappointed. Her efforts seemed pale, static, derivative — obviously the work of a child, despite the assistance of the Virtual software.
She wiped the board clean, leaving a grid of pale squares floating in the air. Then she started to populate it again — but this time with animated half-human snakes, slithering “ladders” of a hundred forms. She’d learned to access the Virtual libraries, and she plundered the art and history of a hundred centuries to populate her board.
Of course it was no longer possible to play games on the board, but that didn’t matter. The board was the thing, a little world in itself. She withdrew a little from her parents, spending long hours in deep searches through the libraries. She gave up her classes. Her parents didn’t seem to mind; they came to speak to her regularly, and showed an interest in her projects, and respected her privacy.
The board kept her interest the next day. But now she evolved elaborate games, dividing the board into countries and empires with arbitrary bands of glowing light. Armies of ladder-folk joined with legions of snakes in crude reproductions of the great events of human history.
She watched the symbols flicker across the Virtual board, shimmering, coalescing; she dictated lengthy chronicles of the histories of her imaginary countries.
By the end of the day, though, she was starting to grow more interested in the history texts she was plundering than in her own elaborations on them. She went to bed, eager for the next morning to come.
She awoke in darkness, doubled in agony.
She called for light, which flooded the room, sourceless. She sat up in bed.
Blood spotted the sheets. She screamed.
Phillida sat with her, cradling her head. Lieserl pressed herself against her mother’s warmth, trying to still her trembling.
“I think it’s time you asked me your questions.”
Lieserl sniffed. “What questions?”
“The ones you’ve carried around with you since the moment you were born.” Phillida smiled. “I could see it in your eyes, even at that moment. You poor thing… to be burdened with so much awareness. I’m sorry, Lieserl.”
Lieserl pulled away. Suddenly she felt cold, vulnerable.
“Tell me why you’re sorry,” she said at last.
“You’re my daughter.” Phillida placed her hands on Lieserl’s shoulders and pushed her face close; Lieserl could feel the warmth of her breath, and the soft room light caught the gray in her mother’s blonde hair, making it seem to shine. “Never forget that. You’re as human as I am. But—” She hesitated.
“But what?”
“But you’re being — engineered.”
Nanobots swarmed through Lieserl’s body, Phillida said. They plated calcium over her bones, stimulated the generation of new cells, force-growing her body like some absurd human sunflower — they even implanted memories, artificial learning, directly into her cortex.
Lieserl felt like scraping at her skin, gouging out this artificial infection. “Why? Why did you let this be done to me?”
Phillida pulled her close, but Lieserl stayed stiff, resisting mutely. Phillida buried her face in Lieserl’s hair; Lieserl felt the soft weight of her mother’s cheek on the crown of her head. “Not yet,” Phillida said. “Not yet. A few more days, my love. That’s all…”
Phillida’s cheeks grew warmer, as if she was crying, silently, into her daughter’s hair.
Lieserl returned to her snakes-and-ladders board. She found herself looking on her creation with affection, but also nostalgic sadness; she felt distant from this elaborate, slightly obsessive concoction.
Already she’d outgrown it.
She walked into the middle of the sparkling board and bade a Sun, a foot wide, rise out from the center of her body. Light swamped the board, shattering it.
She wasn’t the only adolescent who had constructed fantasy worlds like this. She read about the Brontës, in their lonely parsonage in the north of England, and their elaborate shared world of kings and princes and empires. And she read about the history of the humble game of snakes and ladders. The game had come from India, where it was a morality teaching aid called Moksha-Patamu. There were twelve vices and four virtues, and the objective was to get to Nirvana. It was easier to fail than to succeed… The British in the nineteenth century had adopted it as an instructional guide for children called Kismet; Lieserl stared at images of claustrophobic boards, forbidding snakes. Thirteen snakes and eight ladders showed children that if they were good and obedient their life would be rewarded.
But by a few decades later the game had lost its moral subtexts. Lieserl found images from the early twentieth century of a sad-looking little clown; he slithered haplessly down snakes and heroically clambered up ladders. Lieserl stared at him, trying to understand the appeal of his baggy trousers, walking cane and little moustache.
The game, with its charm and simplicity, had survived through the twenty centuries which had worn away since the death of that forgotten clown.
She grew interested in the numbers embedded in the various versions of the game. The twelve-to-four ratio of Moksha-Patamu clearly made it a harder game to win than Kismet’s thirteen-to-eight — but how much harder?
She began to draw new boards in the air. But these boards were abstractions — clean, colorless, little more than sketches. She ran through high-speed simulated games, studying their outcomes. She experimented with ratios of snakes to ladders, with their placement. Phillida sat with her and introduced her to combinatorial mathematics, the theory of games — to different forms of wonder.
On her fifteenth day she tired of her own company and started to attend classes again. She found the perceptions of others a refreshing counterpoint to her own, high-speed learning.
The world seemed to open up around her like a flower; it was a world full of sunlight, of endless avenues of information, of stimulating people.
She read up on nanobots.
Body cells were programed to commit suicide. A cell itself manufactured enzymes which cut its DNA into neat pieces, and quietly closed down. The suicide of cells was a guard against uncontrolled growth — tumors — and a tool to sculpt the developing body: in the womb, the withering of unwanted cells carved fingers and toes from blunt tissue buds. Death was the default state of a cell. Chemical signals were sent by the body, to instruct cells to remain alive.
The nanotechnological manipulation of this process made immortality simple.
It also made the manufacture of a Lieserl simple.
Lieserl studied this, scratching absently at her inhabited, engineered arms. She still didn’t know why.
With a boy called Matthew, from her class, she took a trip away from the House — without her parents for the first time. They rode a flitter to the shore where she’d played as a child, twelve days earlier. She found the broken pier where she’d discovered mussels. The place seemed less vivid — less magical — and she felt a sad nostalgia for the loss of the freshness of her childish senses.
But there were other compensations. Her body was strong, lithe, and the sunlight was like warm oil on her skin. She ran and swam, relishing the sparkle of the ozone-laden air in her lungs. She and Matthew mock-wrestled and chased in the surf, clambering over each other like young apes — like children, she thought, but not quite with complete innocence…
As sunset approached they allowed the flitter to return them to the House. They agreed to meet the next day, perhaps take another trip somewhere. Matthew kissed her lightly, on the lips, as they parted.
That night she could barely sleep. She lay in the dark of her room, the scent of salt still strong in her nostrils, the image of Matthew alive in her mind. Her body seemed to pulse with hot blood, with its endless, continuing growth.
The next day — her sixteenth — Lieserl rose quickly. She’d never felt so alive; her skin still glowed from the salt and sunlight of the shore, and there was a hot tension inside her, an ache deep in her belly, a tightness.
When she reached the flitter bay at the front of the House, Matthew was waiting for her. His back was turned, the low sunlight causing the fine hairs at the base of his neck to glow.
He turned to face her.
He reached out to her, uncertainly, then allowed his hands to drop to his sides. He didn’t seem to know what to say; his posture changed, subtly, his shoulders slumping slightly; before her eyes he was becoming shy of her.
She was taller than him. Visibly older. She became abruptly aware of the still-childlike roundness of his face, the awkwardness of his manner. The thought of touching him — the memory of her feverish dreams during the night — seemed absurd, impossibly adolescent.
She felt the muscles in her neck tighten; she felt as if she must scream. Matthew seemed to recede from her, as if she was viewing him through a tunnel.
Once again the laboring nanobots — the damned, unceasing nanotechnological infection of her body — had taken away part of her life.
This time, though, it was too much to bear.
“Why? Why?” She wanted to scream abuse at her mother — to hurt her.
Phillida had never looked so old. Her skin seemed drawn tight across the bones of her face, the lines etched deep. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Believe me. When we — George and I — volunteered for this program, we knew it would be painful. But we never dreamed how much. Neither of us had had children before. Perhaps if we had, we’d have been able to anticipate how this would feel.”
“I’m a freak — an absurd experiment,” Lieserl shouted. “A construct. Why did you make me human? Why not some insentient animal? Why not a Virtual?”
“Oh, you had to be human. As human as possible…” Phillida seemed to come to a decision. “I’d hoped to give you a few more days of — life, normality — before it had to end. You seemed to be finding some happiness—”
“In fragments,” Lieserl said bitterly. “This is no life, Phillida. It’s grotesque.”
“I know. I’m sorry, my love. Come with me.”
“Where?”
“Outside. To the garden. I want to show you something.”
Suspicious, hostile, Lieserl allowed her mother to take her hand; but she made her fingers lie lifeless, cold in Phillida’s warm grasp.
It was mid-morning now. The Sun’s light flooded the garden; flowers — white and yellow — strained up towards the sky.
Lieserl looked around; the garden was empty. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”
Phillida, solemnly, pointed upwards.
Lieserl tilted back her head, shading her eyes to block out the light. The sky was a searing-blue dome, marked only by a high vapor trail and the lights of habitats.
“No.” Gently, Phillida pulled Lieserl’s hand down from her face, and, cupping her chin, tipped her face flowerlike towards the Sun.
The star’s light seemed to fill her head. Dazzled, she dropped her eyes, stared at Phillida through a haze of blurred, streaked retinal images.
The Sun. Of course…
Kevan Scholes said, Damn it, Lieserl, you’re going to have to respond properly. Things are difficult enough without—”
I know. I’m sorry. How are you feeling, anyway?”
Me? I’m fine. But that’s hardly the point, is it? Now come on, Lieserl, the team here are getting on my back; let’s run through the tests.
“You mean I’m not down here to enjoy myself?”
Scholes, speaking from his safe habitat far beyond the photosphere, didn’t respond.
“Yeah. The tests. Okay, electromagnetic first.” She adjusted her sensorium. “I’m plunged into darkness,” she said drily. “There’s very little free radiation at any frequency — perhaps an X-ray glow from the photosphere; it looks a little like a late evening sky. And—”
We know the systems are functioning. I need to know what you see, what you feel.
“What I feel?”
She spread her arms and sailed backwards through the “air” of the cavern. The huge convective cells buffeted and merged like living things, whales in this insubstantial sea of gas.
“I see convection fountains,” she said. “A cave full of them.”
She rolled over onto her belly, so that she was gliding face down, surveying the plasma sea below her. She opened her eyes, changing her mode of perception. The convective honeycomb faded into the background of her senses, and the magnetic flux tubes came into prominence, solidifying out of the air; beyond them the convective pattern was a sketchy framework, overlaid. The tubes were each a hundred yards broad, channels cutting through the air; they were thousands of miles long, and they filled the air around her, all the way down to the plasma sea.
Lieserl dipped into a tube; she felt the tingle of enhanced magnetic strength. Its walls rushed past her, curving gracefully. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “I’m inside a flux tube. It’s an immense tunnel; it’s like a fairground ride. I could follow this path all the way round the Sun.”
Maybe. I don’t know if we need the poetry, Lieserl. Kevan Scholes hesitated, and when he spoke again he sounded severely encouraging, as if he’d been instructed to be nice to her. We’re glad you’re feeling — ah — happy in yourself, Lieserl.
“My new self. Maybe. Well, it was an improvement on the old; you have to admit that.”
Yes. I want you to think back to the downloading. Can you do that?
“The downloading? Why?”
Come on, Lieserl. It’s another test, obviously.
“A test of what?”
Your trace functions. We want to know if —
“My trace functions. You mean my memory.”
…Yes. He had the grace to sound embarrassed. Think back, Lieserl. Can you remember?
Downloading…
It was her ninetieth day, her ninetieth physical-year. She was impossibly frail — unable even to walk, or feed herself, or clean herself.
They’d taken her to a habitat close to the Sun. They’d almost left the download too late; they’d had one scare when an infection had somehow got through to her and settled into her lungs, nearly killing her.
She wanted to die.
Physically she was the oldest human in the System. She felt as if she were underwater: she could barely feel, or taste, or see anything, as if she was encased in some deadening, viscous fluid. And she knew her mind was failing.
It was so fast she could feel it. It was like a ghastly reverse run of her accelerated childhood. She woke every day to a new diminution of her self. She had come to dread sleep, yet could not avoid it.
She couldn’t bear the indignity of it. Everybody else was immortal, and young; and the AS technology which had made them so was being used to kill Lieserl. She hated those who had put her in this position.
Her mother visited her for the last time, a few days before the download. Lieserl, through her ruined, rheumy old eyes, was barely able to recognize Phillida — this young, weeping woman, only a few months older than when she had held up her baby girl to the Sun.
Lieserl cursed her, sent her away.
At last she was taken, in her bed, to a downloading chamber at the heart of the habitat.
Do you remember, Lieserl? Was it — continuous?
“…No.”
It was a sensory explosion.
In an instant she was young again, with every sense alive and vivid. Her vision was sharp, her hearing impossibly precise. And slowly, slowly, she had become aware of new senses — senses beyond the human. She could see the dull infra-red glow of the bellies and heads of the people working around the shell of her own abandoned body, the sparkle of X-ray photons from the Solar photosphere as they leaked through the habitat’s shielding.
She’d retained her human memories, but they were qualitatively different from the experiences she was accumulating now. Limited, partial, subjective, imperfectly recorded: like fading paintings, she thought.
…Except, perhaps, for that single, golden, day at the beach.
She studied the husk of her body. It was almost visibly imploding now, empty…
“I remember,” she told Kevan Scholes. “Yes, I remember.”
Now the flux tube curved away to the right; and, in following it, she became aware that she was tracing out a spiral path. She let herself relax into the motion, and watched the cave-world beyond the tube wheel around her. The flux tubes neighboring her own had become twisted into spirals too, she realized; she was following one strand in a rope of twisted-together flux tubes.
Lieserl, what’s happening? We can see your trajectory’s altering, fast.
“I’m fine. I’ve got myself into a flux rope, that’s all…”
Lieserl, you should get out of there…
She let the tube sweep her around. “Why? This is fun.”
Maybe. But it isn’t a good idea for you to break the surface; we’re concerned about the stability of the wormhole —
Lieserl sighed and let herself slow. “Oh, damn it, you’re just no fun. I would have enjoyed bursting out through the middle of a sunspot. What a great way to go.”
We’re not done with the tests yet, Lieserl.
“What do you want me to do?”
One more…
“Just tell me.”
Run a full self-check, Lieserl. Just for a few minutes… drop the Virtual constructs.
She hesitated. “Why? The systems are obviously functioning to specification.”
Lieserl, you don’t need to make this difficult for me. Scholes sounded defensive. This is a standard suite of tests for any AI which —
“All right, damn it.”
She closed her eyes, and with a sudden, impulsive stab of will, let her Virtual image of herself — the illusion of a human body around her — crumble.
It was like waking from a dream: a soft, comfortable dream of childhood, waking to find herself entombed in a machine, a crude construct of bolts and cords and gears.
She considered herself.
The tetrahedral Interface of the wormhole was suspended in the body of the Sun. The thin, searing-hot gas of the convective zone poured into its four triangular faces, so that the Interface was surrounded by a sculpture of inflowing gas, a flower carved dynamically from the Sun’s flesh, almost obscuring the Interface itself. The Solar material was, she knew, being pumped through the wormhole to the second Interface in orbit around the Sun; convection zone gases emerged, blazing, from the drifting tetrahedron, making it into a second, miniature Sun around which human habitats could cluster.
By pumping away the gas, and the heat it carried, the Interface refrigerated itself, enabling it to survive — with its precious, fragile cargo of datastores…
The stores which sustained the awareness of herself, Lieserl.
She inspected herself, at many levels, simultaneously.
At the physical level she studied crisp matrices of data, shifting, coalescing. And overlaid on that was the logical structure of data storage and access paths which represented the components of her mind.
Good… good, Lieserl. You’re sending us good data. How are you feeling?
“You keep asking me that, damn it. I feel—”
Enhanced…
No longer trapped in a single point, in a box of bone behind eyes made of jelly.
What made her conscious? It was the ability to be aware of what was happening in her mind, and in the world around her, and what had happened in the past.
By any test, she was more conscious than any other human — because she had more of the machinery of consciousness.
She was supremely conscious — the most conscious human who had ever lived.
If, she thought uneasily, she was still human.
Good. Good. All right, Lieserl. We have work to do.
She let her awareness implode, once more, into a Virtual-human form. Her perception was immediately simplified. To be seeing through apparently human eyes was comforting… and yet, she thought, restrictive.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be much longer before she felt ready to abandon even this last vestige of humanity. And then what?
Lieserl?
“I hear you.”
She turned her face towards the core.
“There is a purpose, Lieserl,” her mother said. “A justification. You aren’t simply an experiment. You have a mission.” She waved her hand at the sprawling, friendly buildings that comprised the House. “Most of the people here, particularly the children, don’t know anything about you. They have jobs, goals — lives of their own to follow. But they’re here for you.
“Lieserl, your experiences have been designed — George and I were selected, even — to ensure that the first few days of your existence would imprint you with humanity.”
“The first few days?” Suddenly the unknowable future was like a black wall, looming towards her; she felt as out of control of her life as if she was a counter on some immense, invisible chutes-and-ladders board.
“I don’t want this. I want to be me. I want my freedom, Phillida.”
“No, Lieserl. You’re not free, I’m afraid; you never can be. You have a goal.”
“What goal?”
“Listen to me. The Sun gave us life. Without it — without the other stars — we couldn’t survive.
“We’re a strong species. We believe we can live as long as the stars — for tens of billions of years. And perhaps even beyond that. But we’ve had — glimpses — of the future, the far distant future… disturbing glimpses. People are starting to plan for that future — to work on projects which will take millions of years to come to fruition…
“Lieserl, you’re one of those projects.”
“I don’t understand.”
Phillida took her hand, squeezed it gently; the simple human contact seemed incongruous, the garden around them transient, a chimera, before this talk of megayears and the future of the species.
“Lieserl, something is wrong with the Sun. You have to find out what. The Sun is dying; something — or someone — is killing it.”
Phillida’s eyes were huge before her, staring, probing for understanding. “Don’t be afraid. My dear, you will live forever. If you want to. You are a new form of human. And you will see wonders of which I — and everyone else who has ever lived — can only dream.”
Lieserl listened to her tone, coldly, analyzing it. “But you don’t envy me. Do you, Phillida?”
Phillida’s smile crumbled. “No,” she said quietly.
Lieserl tipped back her head. An immense light flooded her eyes.
She cried out.
Her mother enfolded her in her arms. “The Sun, Lieserl. The Sun…”
The woman Lieserl — engineered, distorted, unhappy — receded from my view, her story incomplete.[4]
Humans diffused out beyond the Solar System in their bulky, ponderous slower-than-light GUTships. In the increasing fragmentation of mankind, the shock of the Poole wormhole incursion faded — despite the ominous warnings of Superet — and it remained a time of optimism, of hope, of expansion into an unlimited future.
Then the first extra-Solar intelligence was encountered, somewhere among the stars.
Squeem ships burst into the System, in a shower of exotic particles and lurid publicity. Communication with the Squeem was utterly unlike anything envisaged before their arrival. The Squeem didn’t count, for instance. But eventually common ground was found.
The Squeem were aquatic group-mind multiple creatures. They crossed the stars using a hyperdrive system, which was beyond human understanding. They maintained an interstellar network of trading colonies.
The Squeem seemed friendly enough. Trade and cultural contacts were initiated.
And then, in orbit around every inhabited world in the Solar System, hyperdrive cannon-platforms appeared…
See Timelike Infinity
See Timelike Infinity
See Ring
See Ring