by Watts, Peter
I call up the latest findings on my way to bed, and the answer hasn’t changed: not much. The damn thing’s already full of holes.
Comets, asteroids, the usual protoplanetary junk careens through this system as it does through every other. Infra picks up diffuse pockets of slow outgassing here and there around the perimeter, where the soft vaporous vacuum of the interior bleeds into the harder stuff outside. Even if we were going to tear through the dead center of the thinking part, I can’t imagine this vast creature feeling so much as a pinprick. At the speed we’re going we’d be through and gone far too fast to overcome even the feeble inertia of a millimeter membrane.
And yet. Stop. Stop. Stop.
It’s not us, of course. It’s what we’re building. The birth of a gate is a violent, painful thing, a spacetime rape that puts out almost as much gamma and X as a microquasar. Any meat within the white zone turns to ash in an instant, shielded or not. It’s why we never slow down to take pictures.
One of the reasons, anyway.
We can’t stop, of course. Even changing course isn’t an option except by the barest increments. Eri soars like an eagle between the stars but she steers like a pig on the short haul; tweak our heading by even a tenth of a degree and you’ve got some serious damage at twenty percent lightspeed. Half a degree would tear us apart: the ship might torque onto the new heading but the collapsed mass in her belly would keep right on going, rip through all this surrounding superstructure without even feeling it.
Even tame singularities get set in their ways. They do not take well to change.
* * *
We resurrect again, and the Island has changed its tune.
It gave up asking us to stop stop stop the moment our laser hit its leading edge. Now it’s saying something else entirely: dark hyphens flow across its skin, arrows of pigment converging towards some offstage focus like spokes pointing towards the hub of a wheel. The bullseye itself is offstage and implicit, far removed from 428’s bright backdrop, but it’s easy enough to extrapolate to the point of convergence six lightsecs to starboard.
There’s something else, too: a shadow, roughly circular, moving along one of the spokes like a bead running along a string. It too migrates to starboard, falls off the edge of the Island’s makeshift display, is endlessly reborn at the same initial coordinates to repeat its journey.
Those coordinates: exactly where our current trajectory will punch through the membrane in another four months. A squinting God would be able to see the gnats and girders of ongoing construction on the other side, the great piecemeal torus of the Hawking Hoop already taking shape.
The message is so obvious that even Dix sees it. “Wants us to move the gate…” and there is something like confusion in his voice. “But how’s it know we’re building one?”
“The vons punctured it en route,” the chimp points out. “It could have sensed that. It has photopigments. It can probably see.”
“Probably sees better than we do,” I say. Even something as simple as a pinhole camera gets hi-res fast if you stipple a bunch of them across thirty million square kilometers.
But Dix scrunches his face, unconvinced. “So sees a bunch of vons bumping around. Loose parts—not that much even assembled yet. How’s it know we’re building something hot?”
Because it is very, very, smart, you stupid child. Is it so hard to believe that this, this — organism seems far too limiting a word— can just imagine how those half-built pieces fit together, glance at our sticks and stones and see exactly where this is going?
“Maybe’s not the first gate it’s seen,” Dix suggests. “Think there’s maybe another gate out here?”
I shake my head. “We’d have seen the lensing artefacts by now.”
“You ever run into anyone before?”
“No.” We have always been alone, through all these epochs.
We have only ever run away.
And then always from our own children.
I crunch some numbers. “Hundred eighty two days to insemination. If we move now we’ve only got to tweak our bearing by a few mikes to redirect to the new coordinates. Well within the green. Angles get dicey the longer we wait, of course.”
“We can’t do that,” the chimp says. “We would miss the gate by two million kilometers.”
“Move the gate. Move the whole damn site. Move the refineries, move the factories, move the damn rocks. A couple hundred meters a second would be more than fast enough if we send the order now. We don’t even have to suspend construction, we can keep building on the fly.”
“Every one of those vectors widens the nested confidence limits of the build. It would increase the risk of error beyond allowable margins, for no payoff.”
“And what about the fact that there’s an intelligent being in our path?”
“I’m already allowing for the potential presence of intelligent alien life.”
“Okay, first off, there’s nothing potential about it. It’s right fucking there. And on our current heading we run the damn thing over.”
“We’re staying clear of all planetary bodies in Goldilocks orbits.
We’ve seen no local evidence of spacefaring technology. The current location of the build meets all conservation criteria.”
“That’s because the people who drew up your criteria never anticipated a live Dyson sphere!” But I’m wasting my breath, and I know it. The chimp can run its equations a million times but if there’s nowhere to put the variable, what can it do?
There was a time, back before things turned ugly, when we had clearance to reprogram those parameters. Before we discovered that one of the things the admins had anticipated was mutiny.
I try another tack. “Consider the threat potential.”
“There’s no evidence of any.”
“Look at the synapse estimate! That thing’s got orders of mag more processing power than the whole civilization that sent us out here. You think something can be that smart, live that long, without learning how to defend itself? We’re assuming it’s asking us to move the gate. What if that’s not a request? What if it’s just giving us the chance to back off before it takes matters into its own hands?”
“Doesn’t have hands,” Dix says from the other side of the tank, and he’s not even being flippant. He’s just being so stupid I want to bash his face in.
I try to keep my voice level. “Maybe it doesn’t need any.”
“What could it do, blink us to death? No weapons. Doesn’t even control the whole membrane. Signal propagation’s too slow.”
“We don’t know. That’s my point. We haven’t even tried to find out. We’re a goddamn road crew; our onsite presence is a bunch of construction vons press-ganged into scientific research. We can figure out some basic physical parameters but we don’t know how this thing thinks, what kind of natural defenses it might have—”
“What do you need to find out?” the chimp asks, the very voice of calm reason.
We can’t find out! I want to scream. We’re stuck with what we’ve got! By the time the onsite vons could build what we need we’re already past the point of no return! You stupid fucking machine, we’re on track to kill a being smarter than all of human history and you can’t even be bothered to move our highway to the vacant lot next door?
But of course if I say that, the Island’s chances of survival go from low to zero. So I grasp at the only straw that remains: maybe the data we’ve got in hand is enough. If acquisition is off the table, maybe analysis will do.
“I need time,” I say.
“Of course,” the chimp tells me. “Take all the time you need.”
The chimp is not content to kill this creature. The chimp has to spit on it as well.
Under the pretense of assisting in my research it tries to deconstruct the island, break it apart and force it to conform to grubby earthbound precedents. It tells me about earthly bacteria that thrived at 1.5 million rads and laughed at hard vacuum. It shows me pictures of unkillable l
ittle tardigrades that could curl up and snooze on the edge of absolute zero, felt equally at home in deep ocean trenches and deeper space. Given time, opportunity, a boot off the planet, who knows how far those cute little invertebrates might have gone? Might they have survived the very death of the homeworld, clung together, grown somehow colonial?
What utter bullshit.
I learn what I can. I study the alchemy by which photosynthesis transforms light and gas and electrons into living tissue. I learn the physics of the solar wind that blows the bubble taut, calculate lower metabolic limits for a lifeform that filters organics from the ether. I marvel at the speed of this creature’s thoughts: almost as fast as Eri flies, orders of mag faster than any mammalian nerve impulse. Some kind of organic superconductor perhaps, something that passes chilled electrons almost resistance-free out here in the freezing void.
I acquaint myself with phenotypic plasticity and sloppy fitness, that fortuitous evolutionary soft-focus that lets species exist in alien environments and express novel traits they never needed at home. Perhaps this is how a lifeform with no natural enemies could acquire teeth and claws and the willingness to use them. The Island’s life hinges on its ability to kill us; I have to find something that makes it a threat.
But all I uncover is a growing suspicion that I am doomed to fail — for violence, I begin to see, is a planetary phenomenon.
Planets are the abusive parents of evolution. Their very surfaces promote warfare, concentrate resources into dense defensible patches that can be fought over. Gravity forces you to squander energy on vascular systems and skeletal support, stand endless watch against an endless sadistic campaign to squash you flat.
Take one wrong step, off a perch too high, and all your pricey architecture shatters in an instant. And even if you beat those odds, cobble together some lumbering armored chassis to withstand the slow crawl onto land— how long before the world draws in some asteroid or comet to crash down from the heavens and reset your clock to zero? Is it any wonder we grew up believing life was a struggle, that zero-sum was God’s own law and the future belonged to those who crushed the competition?
The rules are so different out here. Most of space is tranquil: no diel or seasonal cycles, no ice ages or global tropics, no wild pendulum swings between hot and cold, calm and tempestuous.
Life’s precursors abound: on comets, clinging to asteroids, suffusing nebulae a hundred lightyears across. Molecular clouds glow with organic chemistry and life-giving radiation. Their vast dusty wings grow warm with infrared, filter out the hard stuff, give rise to stellar nurseries that only some stunted refugee from the bottom of a gravity well could ever call lethal.
Darwin’s an abstraction here, an irrelevant curiosity. This Island puts the lie to everything we were ever told about the machinery of life. Sun-powered, perfectly adapted, immortal, it won no struggle for survival: where are the predators, the competitors, the parasites? All of life around 428 is one vast continuum, one grand act of symbiosis. Nature here is not red in tooth and claw. Nature, out here, is the helping hand.
Lacking the capacity for violence, the Island has outlasted worlds. Unencumbered by technology, it has out-thought civilizations. It is intelligent beyond our measure, and—
—and it is benign. It must be. I grow more certain of that with each passing hour. How can it even conceive of an enemy?
I think of the things I called it, before I knew better. Meat balloon. Cyst. Looking back, those words verge on blasphemy. I will not use them again.
Besides, there’s another word that would fit better, if the chimp has its way: Roadkill. And the longer I look, the more I fear that that hateful machine is right.
If the Island can defend itself, I sure as shit can’t see how.
* * *
“Eriophora’s impossible, you know. Violates the laws of physics.”
We’re in one of the social alcoves off the ventral notochord, taking a break from the library. I have decided to start again from first principles. Dix eyes me with an understandable mix of confusion and mistrust; my claim is almost too stupid to deny.
“It’s true,” I assure him. “Takes way too much energy to accelerate a ship with Eri’s mass, especially at relativistic speeds. You’d need the energy output of a whole sun. People figured if we made it to the stars at all, we’d have to do it ships maybe the size of your thumb. Crew them with virtual personalities downloaded onto chips.”
That’s too nonsensical even for Dix. “Wrong. Don’t have mass, can’t fall towards anything. Eri wouldn’t even work if it was that small.”
“But suppose you can’t displace any of that mass. No wormholes, no Higgs conduits, nothing to throw your gravitational field in the direction of travel. Your center of mass just sits there in, well, the center of your mass.”
A spastic Dixian head-shake. “Do have those things!”
“Sure we do. But for the longest time, we didn’t know it.”
His foot taps an agitated tattoo on the deck.
“It’s the history of the species,” I explain. “We think we’ve worked everything out, we think we’ve solved all the mysteries and then someone finds some niggling little data point that doesn’t fit the paradigm. Every time we try to paper over the crack it gets bigger, and before you know it our whole worldview unravels. It’s happened time and again. One day mass is a constraint; the next it’s a requirement. The things we think we know— they change, Dix. And we have to change with them.”
“But—”
“The chimp can’t change. The rules it’s following are ten billion years old and it’s got no fucking imagination and really that’s not anyone’s fault, that’s just people who didn’t know how else to keep the mission stable across deep time. They wanted to keep us on-track so they built something that couldn’t go off it; but they also knew that things change, and that’s why we’re out here, Dix. To deal with things the chimp can’t.”
“The alien,” Dix says.
“The alien.”
“Chimp deals with it just fine.”
“How? By killing it?”
“Not our fault it’s in the way. It’s no threat—”
“I don’t care whether it’s a threat or not! It’s alive, and it’s intelligent, and killing it just to expand some alien empire—”
“Human empire. Our empire.” Suddenly Dix’s hands have stopped twitching. Suddenly he stands still as stone.
I snort. “What do you know about humans?”
“Am one.”
“You’re a fucking trilobite. You ever see what comes out of those gates once they’re online?”
“Mostly nothing.” He pauses, thinking back. “Couple of— ships once, maybe.”
“Well, I’ve seen a lot more than that, and believe me, if those things were ever human it was a passing phase.”
“But—”
“Dix—” I take a deep breath, try to get back on message. “Look, it’s not your fault. You’ve been getting all your info from a moron stuck on a rail. But we’re not doing this for Humanity, we’re not doing it for Earth. Earth is gone, don’t you understand that? The sun scorched it black a billion years after we left. Whatever we’re working for, it— it won’t even talk to us.”
“Yeah? Then why do this? Why not just, just quit?”
He really doesn’t know.
“We tried,” I say.
“And?”
“And your chimp shut off our life support.”
For once, he has nothing to say.
“It’s a machine, Dix. Why can’t you get that? It’s programmed. It can’t change.”
“We’re machines, just built from different things. We change.”
“Yeah? Last time I checked, you were sucking so hard on that thing’s tit you couldn’t even kill your cortical link.”
“How I learn. No reason to change.”
“How about acting like a damn human once in a while? How about developing a little rapport with the folks who might ha
ve to save your miserable life next time you go EVA? That enough of a reason for you? Because I don’t mind telling you, right now I don’t trust you as far as I could throw the tac tank. I don’t even know for sure who I’m talking to right now.”
“Not my fault.” For the first time I see something outside the usual gamut of fear, confusion, and simpleminded computation playing across his face. “That’s you, that’s all of you. You talk – sideways. Think sideways. You all do, and it hurts.” Something hardens in his face. “Didn’t even need you online for this,” he growls. “Didn’t want you. Could have managed the whole build myself, told Chimp I could do it—”
“But the chimp thought you should wake me up anyway, and you always roll over for the chimp, don’t you? Because the chimp always knows best, the chimp’s your boss, the chimp’s your fucking god. Which is why I have to get out of bed to nursemaid some idiot savant who can’t even answer a hail without being led by the nose.” Something clicks in the back of my mind but I’m on a roll. “You want a real role model? You want something to look up to? Forget the chimp. Forget the mission. Look out the forward scope, why don’t you? Look at what your precious chimp wants to run over because it happens to be in the way. That thing is better than any of us. It’s smarter, it’s peaceful, it doesn’t wish us any harm at—”
“How can you know that? Can’t know that!”
“No, you can’t know that, because you’re fucking stunted. Any normal caveman would see it in a second, but you—”
“That’s crazy,” Dix hisses at me. “You’re crazy. You’re bad.”
“I’m bad!” Some distant part of me hears the giddy squeak in my voice, the borderline hysteria.
“For the mission.” Dix turns his back and stalks away.
My hands are hurting. I look down, surprized: my fists are clenched so tightly that my nails cut into the flesh of my palms. It takes a real effort to open them again.
I almost remember how this feels. I used to feel this way all the time. Way back when everything mattered; before passion faded to ritual, before rage cooled to disdain. Before Sunday Ahzmundin, eternity’s warrior, settled for heaping insults on stunted children.
