by Neil Clarke
“Until now.”
“Until now,” he agreed, looking down, looking frightened by the knowledge he had decided to convey. “I should have told you sooner.”
“But you didn’t want to risk interrupting work on the obelisk?”
“You said you didn’t want to hear anything.” He shrugged. “I took you at your word.”
“Nate, will you just say it?”
“You have a granddaughter, Susannah.”
She replayed these words in her head, once, twice. They didn’t make sense.
“DNA tests make it certain,” he explained. “She was born six months after her father’s death.”
“No.” Susannah did not dare believe it. It was too dangerous to believe. “They both died. That was confirmed by the survivors. They posted the IDs of all the dead.”
“Your daughter-in-law lived long enough to give birth.”
Susannah’s chest squeezed tight. “I don’t understand. Are you saying the child is still alive?”
“Yes.”
Anger rose hot, up out of the past. “And how long have you known? How long have you kept this from me?”
“Two months. I’m sorry, but …”
But we had our priorities. The tombstone. The Martian folly.
She stared at the floor, too stunned to be happy, or maybe she’d forgotten how. “You should have told me.”
“I know.”
“And I … I shouldn’t have walled myself off from the world. I’m sorry.”
“There’s more,” he said cautiously, as if worried how much more she could take.
“What else?” she snapped, suddenly sure this was just another game played by the master torturer, to draw the pain out. “Are you going to tell me that my granddaughter is sickly? Dying? Or that she’s a mad woman, perhaps?”
“No,” he said meekly. “Nothing like that. She’s healthy, and she has a healthy two-year-old daughter.” He got up, put an age-marked hand on the door knob. “I’ve sent you her contact information. If you need an assistant to help you build the habitat, let me know.”
He was a friend, and she tried to comfort him. “Nate, I’m sorry. If there was a choice—”
“There isn’t. That’s the way it’s turned out. You will tear down the obelisk, and this woman, Tory Eastman, will live another year, maybe two. Then the equipment will break and she will die and we won’t be able to rebuild the tower. We’ll pass on, and the rest of the world will follow—”
“We can’t know that, Nate. Not for sure.”
He shook his head. “This all looks like hope, but it’s a trick. It’s fate cheating us, forcing us to fold our hand, level our pride, and go out meekly. And there’s no choice in it, because it’s the right thing to do.”
He opened the door. For a few seconds, wind gusted in, until he closed it again. She heard his clogs crossing the porch and a minute later she heard the crunch of tires on the gravel road.
You have a granddaughter. One who grew up without her parents, in a quarantine zone, with no real hope for the future and yet she was healthy, with a daughter already two years old.
And then there was Tory Eastman of Mars, who had left a dying colony and driven an impossible distance past doubt and despair, because she knew you have to do everything you can, until you can’t do anymore.
Susannah had forgotten that, somewhere in the dark years.
She sat for a time in the stillness, in a quiet so deep she could hear the beating of her heart.
This all looks like hope.
Indeed it did and she well knew that hope could be a duplicitous gift from the master torturer, one that opened the door to despair.
“But it doesn’t have to be that way,” she whispered to the empty room. “I’m not done. Not yet.”
Gregory Benford is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. In 2007 he won the Asimov Award for science writing. His fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape. He has published forty-two books, mostly novels.
SHADOWS OF ETERNITY
Gregory Benford
When on some gilded cloud or flower
My gazing soul would gaze an houre,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity.
—Henry Vaughn, The Retreate, 1690
Falling in. She can feel somehow the gossamer sailcraft’s long nose-dive into the red star’s grav potential, as if her own body were there, plunging arrow-quick, dozens of light years away.
Her pod hummed, using her entire body to convey connections through its induced neural web. Sheets of sensation washed over her skin, bathed in a shower of penetrating responses, all coming from intricate flurries of her nervous system—the burr and tang of temperature, particle plasma flux, spectral flickers, kinesthetic glides and swivels, sharp images of the unending dark, lit by a smoldering dot of a sun.
These merged with her own in-board subsystems, coupled with highbit-rate feeds the Artilects had already processed and smoothed from the sailcraft’s decades of laser-beamed signals back to Earthside.
She went to fast-forward and the sailcraft plunged, its magnetic brakes on full. Down the potential well it flew in star-sprinkled dark. It heard no electromagnetics bearing patterns, from radio through to optical. Yet Earthside knew from a few pixels that one world here held an atmosphere out of equilibrium, clear signs of life that used oxygen and methane. So: life, perhaps minds, but no technology that spoke in waves. This L-dwarf star was of the commonplace majority, perhaps 75% or more of those stars in the disk, fully half of the total stellar mass in the Galaxy.
The craft chose its own path, looping intricately through repeated grav-wraps around three gas giants in the outer system, losing delta-Vs all the while. Now it had lost enough of its interstellar velocity to rummage among the inner worlds—one cold and gaunt, then the prize, long known from Earthside ‘scopes: a superEarth.
The sailcraft folded in its mag-web brake and deployed ‘scopes as it swanned into a high orbit around the cloudy world, 1.63 Earth masses. Its burgundy star glowered down on cloud decks thick as pancakes in the morning.
Rachel licked her lips. Here was the tasty truth, a world for the unwrapping. Smart and sure, the white metal bird blew itself into full plumage. Its inflatable beryllium sails shone in ruddy daylight, hollow-body banners just tens of nanometers thick, the body swelled by low-pressure hydrogen. These it used to steer into lower orbit, scanning the orbit space for satellites—and finding none.
The overseer Artilect inserted—correlates with the spectral strength of water, with strong water absorption lines as seen in clear-atmosphere planets, with the weakest features suggesting clouds and hazes—and she cut it off.
Now the main show: a self-guided human artifact plunging into a fresh solar system, embodying her: a hairless biped, so noble in reason, so infinite in faculties, heir to all creation—and an animal trapped in a box, really, just lying in a pod and sensing inputs that had flown on wings of electromagnetic song across the light years.
This world she dubbed, to herself, Windworn. For such it was. A thick atmosphere ripe with oxygen, smothered in good ol’ nitrogen, yet beset with methane, too—clearly a world-air out of chemical balance. Good!—life.
Pearly cloud decks prevented much down-seeing. The Artilect aboard the craft had elected to deploy its one great immersion resource: the balloon.
The smart aero package fell away on its own braking wings and soon enough, slammed through the cottony clouds, its brake shell burning away— and into a realm of thick, filmy air. Blithe spirit, bird thou never wert—blazing through alien skies as a buzzing firework.
The balloon popped into a white teardrop, lighter than this sluggish air and with its heater able to stay buoyant. Ten kilometers below the land opened, solemn dark green and cloud
-shrouded.
The first clear glimpse below was of big smooth whitecap ocean waves that crashed like armies against the rearing snow-white mountains guarding the continents. I should have called it Rawworld, she thought.
Below the balloon she watched alien vistas unfurl—big broad brown rivers, lakes, crags. The vegetation was gray and black, not green. Just as the astrobio people had said: around small red stars, plants needed to harvest all the ruddy glow. So they evolved to take in all the spectrum, with little to fear from the small slice of ultraviolet, since it was weak.
She watched the land and air carefully as the balloon skated tens of kilometers above, its cameras panning to take it all in. She did a close-up of the data feed, saw small birds flapping below—and roads.
She froze the image. Small dots that might be vehicles. Yes—she watched them crawl along. They went to—caves. Entrances to large hills that had slits of windows in their slopes, rank upon rank of them, orderly, horizontal … all the way to the summit.
Hills upon hills, marching to the distant horizon. Hills of grassland, hills of rumpled brown rectangular stone, hills with great clefts sharpening their edges. Artificial hills.
Hailstones rattled on the balloon. Microphones recorded long shrills, the trembling of tin in sheets, snapping steel strands. Harsh, brittle rings. Distant bellows, perhaps from the barrel-chested six-footed ambulating creatures far below in their herds of many. Once the hail cleared, the balloon could see things the size of houses burrowing into moist soil, after something. Yawning herbivore throngs looked up at the balloon, showing great rows of rounded molars. Forests, animals, birds—all moved before the surging winds.
The balloon acoustic microphones caught a huge manta ray-like thing conning Fwap fwap fwap fwap across the roiling sky, somehow navigating through. She thought, Crazy thing, looks like it escaped from a cartoon on video, with its long lazy strokes and manic grin that she saw was a scissor smile sporting long teeth … on a bird.
Then—black.
END OF CRAFT REPORT # 3069
a flat statement told her.
An interstellar spacecraft moving at a hundred kilometers per second does not have accidents; accidents have it. The craft turns into a blur of tumbling fragments inside a second.
She let herself drift up from the immersed state—slowly, letting the alien landscapes seep from her mind. It was over. She knew going in that the mission had snapped off, never heard from again. The balloon, its gossamer thin carbon nanotube and graphene covered in conductive metal skin, the super-lightweight rectenna—all gone. Something had blocked their transmissions—accident, intervention? No one knew. The mission report ended in a blank wall.
But she had needed to feel it. She knew full well this encounter lived only in thick bricks of data, info-dense and rigid. The lived experience was real, just turned into 0s and 1s, bringing across light years their stuttering enlightenments to the SETI Library. Still, it mattered as an abrupt lesson in how hard interstellar exploration through sailcraft was, and how sudden the deaths of such adventurers.
When she climbed from the pod she ached all over, stretched, wheezed. Yet she had done no true exercise, except in her mind.
She was late for her appointment, but she paused to look up through the crystal dome at good ol’ Earth, a multicolored crescent marble in the Lunar sky.
All but the last few centuries of human history had played out there. Throughout that history men and women had filled in the dark unknowns with imagination. So expeditions crossed oceans and high vacuum until new lands came into view—in just a few thousand years. Go back that far and you would see Sumerian ziggurats whose star maps cartooned the sky with imagined constellations and traced destinies through star-based prognostications. Someday a robotic follow-up probe might fall again toward the red star she had just seen, to become the Schliemann of this alien Troy.
That might happen; there were so many stars to reach out and see, and more candidates by the day. Now she could swim by other strange distant worlds and feel them, fed by slabs of data—and still sense the great dark unknowns. Which was her job.
The Prefect raised an eyebrow, pursed his leathery lips. “I gather you are behind in your summations.”
A flat fact. “I am, yes. I have been taking a careful review of some expedition records.”
“You are a Trainee, not a Librarian. Nor, if you continue this way, much hope of becoming one. Best to shape your skills to the essentials.”
“I think I can better fathom records if I see the planetary explorations in direct sensing.”
His face soured more, lips turned down, his frown a ladder of creases. Legendarily, he favored the scowl over the smile. She had to change the dynamic here.
She stood. “My, you have a window.” She had never seen one in a Lunar office.
“I like to have some perspective.”
Outside was the sweep of the plaza, pearly in the Earthshine. “A view, yes, I can see—”
“I like some separation from the rest of all this. Also the glass is a constant temptation.” “To … what?”
“Throw something through it. Usually a student. Sometimes a Trainee, such as you.”
“Ah, I—”
“Fly-in recordings will not reward mere poking around. They have been studied in great detail and can yield nothing more. Especially this red dwarf you just sensed.”
“I am not just reviewing—”
“No, you are taking up pod time with full-sense flyby data.” “It was odd, how it suddenly cut off—”
“Many expeditions simply died, yes—accident, equipment failure. Those were the early days, full of verve, over a century ago. Ignore them. I want to see more of your time spent in the hard work. Take up third level Messages and work with the Artilects to advance our understanding. Remember, these are not linear languages at Level Three.”
“I, I will try.”
“And do not use the pods to simply joyride on old explorations.” He turned toward the view and she realized her appointment was over. At least she didn’t have to exit through the window.
Quick!—a world in a few passing hours. Then to sum it up in the brittle frame of linear sentences, the frail girders of mere flat words:
A ruddy world with lesser grav. One huge sprawl of a continent, plus lesser land mass in the other hemisphere, of humped and dirty rockrimmed mountains. Skies the color of crisp sand. Spiky mountains cut into curiously precise pie slices by iodine rivers that flowed to the continental center, making a vast somber bay of jade waters.
Go closer, lower: giant caterpillars stretched in trees as tall as mountains. The low grav here made for monsters.
Forested slopes in close-up were mushroom trees of violent orange. Huge blue birds with wings like parachutes, bills shaped like Death’s sickle, feathers like flapping palm fronds. A plain of plants evoking erect oak leaves. Smaller growths resembling inside-out umbrellas.
Rain turning to snowflakes at high noon on the equator. Rain like drops of blood in the rocky highlands. Mists glowing like white fire in the valleys. Chasms radiating in mountain ranges like fractures in frosted windowpanes. Winding rivers in the fevered tropics, shapely as women’s torsos or slim violins. Icecaps featuring swollen growths like blue berets. Storms that solidified like hurled hammerheads across tropical isles. Clouds drifting like pregnant purple cows. Wind-blasted rockwork in curious curved forms, like frozen music. Lurching beasts all angles and ribs, grazing across mustard grasslands.
The sailcraft played out its fat helium balloons, which went roving roving roving until they ran out of lift. These captured close-up the many odd beasts, eyed landscapes for buildings, assayed the sweep of land for betraying rectangles—signs of intelligence, or else of obsessive animals who knew Euclid in their souls.
Grazers aplenty swept by under the balloon’s down-looking eyes, plus carnivores, big and furred and fanged. The craft saw big floater insects, too, with steering wings and armor plates and strange inexplicabl
e leggy bits like antennae. These creatures eyed the balloon uneasily, braying roars into the acoustic balloon ears. Some angular beasts gazed upward warily, as if the balloon were a new foe in their air. They bristled, blared and thrust up narrow snouts that ended in the blunt truth of mouths like a pair of pliers. Some, in a narrow canyon lined with goat-like shambling monoliths, shot lances at the balloon eye, which fell far short. Still, perhaps a compliment of sorts.
And again: roads. Towns tucked under ample tree canopies. No electromagnetic emissions beyond the faint and local. Cities under regular humps of hills. Ships dotted the inland sea, white and slender. Yet this advanced society had only a weak signature in the radio, microwaves, and in the other bands, no signals at all.
Then the pod went silent, done. Another failed expedition.
She lingered a while in the quiet. Biting her lip, she wondered if silence was not the true state of the universe, now that the ancestral acoustics of the big bang had faded into scratch-marks in the microwave sky. Silence: far more noble than humanity’s squeaks.
This world had been a treat, really. She took planetary records at random, not really knowing what she was seeking. Most worlds in the habitable zone were of a sameness. Solemn planets sleeping in the silence of ice and stone. Seaworlds awash in dark purple waters betraying no life, only its eventual prospect. Baked plains of ancient lava, unblessed by seas or even ponds, a likely match for a collision with a wandering waterworld, should orbital dynamics ever bring one from further out: a Newtonian miracle awaiting. Black volcanic corkscrews spiraling up to the atmospheric roof of planets still in process, getting baked to oblivion. Vast planets of crawling slime. Oceans lapping against barren shores. Plankton mats the size of continents.
To find a mature, thriving biosphere was a blessing. She savored them in the sensory auditorium of her snug pod.
She began to favor the dwarf suns and their narrow habitable zones. Such stars lived long, as old as the galaxy’s ten billion years, yet scarcely a fraction along their stable lifespans. So, too, their worlds had millions of millennia to work their slow, gravid marvels. She studied them whenever she could manage the time, outside her own work and research at the Interstellar Library. These labors, she felt, were perhaps foolish but also a proud thing to do, as a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust.
