Worlds Enough & Time

by Dan Simmons

  “Yes,” said Saigyō. “Much like Old Earth’s sun. We estimate that it became unstable on the main sequence hydrogen burning stage about three and one half standard million years ago and then expanded to its red giant phase and swallowed any planets that had been in system.”

  “How many AU’s out does the giant extend?” asked Res Sandre, the other green.

  “Approximately one point-three,” said the AI.

  “And no outer planets?” asked Kem Loi. Violets in the Helix were dedicated to complex structures, chess, the love of the more complex aspects of human relationships, and astronomy. “It would seem that there would be some gas giants or rocky worlds left if it only expanded a bit beyond what would have been Old Earth’s or Hyperion’s orbit.”

  “Maybe the outer worlds were very small planetoids driven away by the constant outgassing of heavy particles,” said Patek Georg, the red-band pragmatist.

  “Perhaps no worlds formed here,” said Den Soa, the white-band diplomat. Her voice was sad. “At least in that case no life was destroyed when the sun went red giant.”

  “Saigyō,” said Dem Lia, “why are we decelerating in toward this white star? May we see the specs on it, please?”

  Images, trajectories, and data columns appeared over the table.

  “What is that?” said the older yellow-band woman named Oam Rai.

  “An Ouster forest ring,” said Jon Mikail Dem Alem. “All this way. All these years. And some ancient Ouster Hegira seedship beat us to it.”

  “Beat us to what?” asked Res Sandre, the other green. “There are no planets in this system are there, Saigyō?”

  “No, ma’am,” said the AI.

  “Were you thinking of restocking on their forest ring?” said Dem Lia. The plan had been to avoid any Aenean, Pax, or Ouster worlds or strongholds found along their long voyage away from human space.

  “This orbital forest ring is exceptionally bountiful,” said Saigyō the AI, “but our real reason for awakening you and beginning the in-system deceleration is that someone living on or near the ring is transmitting a distress signal on an early Hegemony code band. It is very weak, but we have been picking it up for two hundred and twenty-eight light-years.”

  This gave them all pause. The Helix had been launched some eighty years after the Aenean Shared Moment, that pivotal event in human history which had marked the beginning of a new era for most of the human race. Previous to the Shared Moment, the Church-manipulated Pax society had ruled human space for the past three hundred years. These Ousters would have missed all of Pax history and probably most of the thousand years of Hegemony history that preceded the Pax. Added to that, the Helix’s time-debt added more than four hundred years of travel. If these Ousters had been part of the original Hegira from Old Earth or from the Old Neighborhood Systems in the earliest days of the Hegemony, they may well have been out of touch with the rest of the human race for fifteen hundred standard years or more.

  “Interesting,” said Peter Delen Dem Tae, whose blue-band training included profound immersion in psychology and anthropology.

  “Saigyō, play the distress signal, please,” said Dem Lia.

  There came a series of static hisses, pops, and whistles with what might have been two words electronically filtered out. The accent was early Hegemony Web English.

  “What does it say?” said Dem Lia. “I can’t quite make it out.”

  “Help us,” said Saigyō. The AI’s voice was tinted with an Asian accent and usually sounded slightly amused, but his tone was flat and serious now.

  The nine around the table looked at one another again in silence. Their goal had been to leave human and posthuman Aenean space far behind them, allowing their people, the Amoiete Spectrum Helix culture, to pursue their own goals, to find their own destiny free of Aenean intervention. But Ousters were just another branch of human stock, attempting to determine their own evolutionary path by adapting to space, their Templar allies traveling with them, using their genetic secrets to grow orbital forest rings and even spherical startrees completely surrounding their suns.

  “How many Ousters do you estimate live on the orbital forest ring?” asked Den Soa, who with her white training would probably be their diplomat if and when they made contact.

  “Seven hundred million on the thirty-degree arc we can resolve on this side of the sun,” said the AI. “If they have migrated to all or most of the ring, obviously we can estimate a population of several billion.”

  “Any sign of Akerataeli or the zeplins?” asked Patek Georg. All of the great forest rings and startreespheres had been collaborative efforts with these two alien races which had joined forces with the Ousters and Templars during the Fall of the Hegemony.

  “None,” said Saigyō. “But you might notice this remote view of the ring itself in the center window. We are still sixty-three AU out from the ring…this is amplified ten thousand times.”

  They all turned to look at the front window where the forest ring seemed only thousands of kilometers away, its green leaves and yellow and brown branches and braided main trunk curving away out of sight, the G8 star blazing beyond.

  “It looks wrong” said Dem Lia.

  “This is the anomaly that added to the urgency of the distress signal and decided us to bring you out of deep sleep,” said Saigyō, his voice sounding slightly bemused again. “This orbital forest ring is not of Ouster or Templar bioconstruction.”

  Doctor Samel Ria Kem Ali, whistled softly. “An alien-built forest ring. But with human-descended Ousters living on it.”

  “And there is something else we have found since entering the system,” said Saigyō. Suddenly the left window was filled with a view of a machine—a spacecraft—so huge and ungainly that it almost defied description. An image of the Helix was superimposed at the bottom of the screen to give scale. The Helix was a kilometer long. The base of this other spacecraft was at least a thousand times as long. The monster was huge and broad, bulbous and ugly, carbon black and insectoidal, bearing the worst features of both organic evolution and industrial manufacture. Centered in the front of it was what appeared to be a steel-toothed maw, a rough opening lined with a seemingly endless series of mandibles and shredding blades and razor sharp rotors.

  “It looks like God’s razor,” said Patek Georg Dem Mio, the cool irony undercut slightly by a just-perceptible quaver in his voice.

  “God’s razor my ass,” said Jon Mikail Dem Alem softly. As an ebony, life support was one of his specialties and he had grown up tending the huge farms on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. “That’s a threshing machine from hell.”

  “Where is it?” Dem Lia started to ask, but already Saigyō had thrown the plot on the holo showing their deceleration trajectory in toward the forest ring. The obscene machine-ship was coming in from above the ecliptic, was some twenty-eight AU ahead of them, was decelerating rapidly but not nearly as aggressively as the Helix, and was headed directly for the Ouster forest ring. The trajectory plot was clear—at its current rate of deceleration, the machine would directly intercept the ring in nine standard days.

  “This may be the cause of their distress signal,” the other green, Res Sandre, said dryly.

  “If it were coming at me or my world, I’d scream so loudly that you’d hear me two hundred and twenty-eight light-years away without a radio,” said the young white-band, Den Soa.

  “If we started picking up this weak signal some two hundred twenty-eight light-years ago,” said Patek Georg. “It means that either that thing has been decelerating in-system very slowly, or…”

  “It’s been here before,” said Dem Lia. She ordered the AI to opaque the windows and to dismiss itself from their company. “Shall we assign roles, duties, priorities, and make initial decisions?” she said softly.

  The other eight around the table nodded soberly.

  TO a stranger, to someone outside the Spectrum Helix culture, the next five minutes would have been very hard to follow. Total consensus was reached within t
he first two minutes, but only a small part of the discussion was through talk. The combination of hand gestures, body language, shorthand phrases, and silent nods that had evolved through four centuries of a culture determined to make decisions through consensus worked well here. These people’s parents and grandparents knew the necessity of command structure and discipline—half a million of their people had died in the short but nasty war with the Pax remnant on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, and then another hundred thousand when the fleeing Pax vandals came looting through their system some thirty years later. But they were determined to elect command through consensus and thereafter make as many decisions as possible through the same means.

  In the first two minutes, assignments were settled and the subtleties around the duties dealt with.

  Dem Lia was to be in command. Her single vote could override consensus when necessary. The other green, Res Sandre, preferred to monitor propulsion and engineering, working with the reticent AI named Basho to use this time out of Hawking space to good advantage in taking stock.

  The red-band male, Patek Georg, to no one’s surprise accepted the position of chief security officer—both for the ship’s formidable defenses and during any contact with the Ousters. Only Dem Lia could override his decisions on use of ship weaponry.

  The young white-band woman, Den Soa, was to be in charge of communications and diplomacy, but she requested Peter Delen Dem Tae and he agreed to share the responsibility with her. Peter’s training in psychology had included theoretical exobiopsychology.

  Dr. Sam would monitor the health of everyone aboard and study the evolutionary biology of the Ousters and Templars if it came to contact.

  Their ebony-band male, Jon Mikail Dem Alem, assumed command of life support—both in reviewing and controlling systems in the Helix along with the appropriate AI, but also arranging for necessary environments if they met with the Ousters aboard ship.

  Oam Rai, the oldest of the nine and the ship’s chess master, agreed to coordinate general ship systems and to be Dem Lia’s principal advisor as events unfolded.

  Kem Loi, the astronomer, accepted responsibility for all long-range sensing, but was obviously eager to use her spare time to study the binary system. “Did anyone notice what old friend our white star ahead resembles?” she asked.

  “Tau Ceti,” said Res Sandre without hesitation.

  Kem Loi nodded. “And we saw the anomaly in the placing of the forest ring.”

  Everyone had. The Ousters preferred G2-type stars where they could grow their orbital forests at about one AU from the sun. This ring circled its star at only 0.36AU.

  “Almost the same distance as Tau Ceti Center from its sun,” mused Patek Georg. TC2, as it had been known for more than a thousand years, had once been the central world and capital of the Hegemony. Then it had become a backwater world under the Pax until a Church cardinal on that world attempted a coup against the beleaguered pope during the final days of the Pax. Most of the rebuilt cities had been leveled then. When the Helix had left human space eighty years after that war, the Aeneans were repopulating and repopularizing the ancient capital, rebuilding beautiful, classical structures on broad estates and essentially turning the lance-lashed ruins into an Arcadia. For Aeneans.

  Assignments given and accepted, the group discussed the option of awakening their immediate family members from cryogenic sleep. Since Spectrum Helix families consisted of triune marriages—either one male and two females or vice versa—and since most had children aboard, this was a complicated subject. Jon Mikail discussed the life support considerations—which were minor—but everyone agreed that it would complicate decision making with family awake only as passengers. It was agreed to leave them in deep sleep, with the one exception of Den Soa’s husband and wife. The young white-band diplomat admitted that she would feel insecure without her two loved ones with her, and the group allowed this exception to their decision with the gentle suggestion that the reawakened mates would stay off the command deck unless there was compelling reason for them to be there. Den Soa agreed at once. Saigyō was summoned and immediately began the awakening of Den Soa’s bond pair. They had no children.

  Then the most central issue was discussed.

  “Are we actually going to decelerate to this ring and involve ourselves in these Ousters’ problems?” asked Patek Georg. “Assuming that their distress signal is still relevant.”

  “They’re still broadcasting on the old bandwidths,” said Den Soa, who had jacksensed into the ship’s communications systems. The young woman with blond hair looked at something in her virtual vision. “And that monster machine is still headed their way.”

  “But we have to remember,” said the red-band male, “that our goal was to avoid contact with possibly troublesome human outposts on our way out of known space.”

  Res Sandre, the green now in charge of engineering, smiled. “I believe that we made that general plan about avoiding Pax or Ouster or Aenean elements without considering that we would meet up with humans—or former humans—some eight thousand light-years outside the known sphere of human space.”

  “It could still mean trouble for everyone,” said Patek Georg.

  They all understood the real meaning of the red-band security chief’s statement. Reds in the Spectrum Helix devoted themselves to physical courage, political convictions, and passion for art, but they also were deeply trained in compassion for other living things. The other eight understood that when he said the contact might mean trouble for “everyone,” he meant not only the 684,291 sleeping souls aboard the ship, but also the Ousters and Templars themselves. These orphans of Old Earth, this band of self-evolving human stock, had been beyond history and the human pall for at least a millennium perhaps much longer. Even the briefest contact could cause problems for the Ouster culture as well.

  “We’re going to go in and see if we can help…and replenish fresh provisions at the same time if that’s possible,” said Dem Lia, her tone friendly but final. “Saigyō, at our greatest deceleration figure consistent with not stressing the internal containment fields, how long will it take us to a rendezvous point about five thousand klicks from the forest ring?”

  “Thirty-seven hours,” said the AI.

  “Which gets us there seven days and a bit before that ugly machine,” said Oam Rai.

  “Hell,” said Dr. Sam, “that machine could be something the Ousters built to ferry themselves through the heliosphere shock fields to the red giant system. A sort of ugly trolly.”

  “I don’t think so,” said young Den Soa, missing the older man’s irony.

  “Well, the Ousters have noticed us,” said Patek Georg, who was jacksensed into his system’s nexus. “Saigyō, bring up the windows again, please. Same magnification as before.”

  Suddenly the room was filled with starlight and sunlight and the reflected light from the braided orbital forest ring that looked like nothing so much as Jack and the Giant’s beanstalk, curving out of sight around the bright white star. Only now something else had been added to the picture.

  “This is real time?” whispered Dem Lia.

  “Yes,” said Saigyō. “The Ousters have obviously been watching our fusion tail as we’ve entered the system. Now they’re coming out to greet us.”

  Thousands—tens of thousands—of fluttering bands of light had left the forest ring and were moving like brilliant fireflies or radiant gossamers away from the braid of huge leaves, bark, and atmosphere. The thousands of motes of light were headed out-system, toward the Helix.

  “Could you please amplify that image a bit more?” said Dem Lia.

  She had been speaking to Saigyō, but it was Kem Loi, who was already wired into the ship’s optic net, who acted.

  Butterflies of light. Wings a hundred, two hundred, five hundred kilometers across catching the solar wind and riding the magnetic-field lines pouring out of the small, bright star. But not just tens of thousands of winged angels or demons of light, hundreds of thousands. At the very m
inimum, hundreds of thousands.

  “Let’s hope they’re friendly,” said Patek Georg.

  “Let’s hope we can still communicate with them,” whispered young Den Soa. “I mean…they could have forced their own evolution any direction in the last fifteen hundred years.”

  Dem Lia set her hand softly on the table, but hard enough to be heard. “I suggest that we quit speculating and hoping for the moment and get ready for this rendezvous in…” She paused.

  “Twenty-seven hours eight minutes if the Ousters continue sailing out-system to meet us,” said Saigyō on cue.

  “Res Sandre,” Dem Lia said softly, “why don’t you and your propulsion AI begin work now on making sure that our last bit of deceleration is mild enough that it isn’t go to fry a few tens of thousands of these Ousters coming to greet us. That would be a bad overture to diplomatic contact.”

  “If they are coming out with hostile intent,” said Patek Georg, “the fusion drive would be one of the most potent weapons against…”

  Dem Lia interrupted. Her voice was soft but brooked no argument. “No discussion of war with this Ouster civilization until their motives become clear. Patek, you can review all ship defensive systems, but let us have no further group discussion of offensive action until you and I talk about it privately.”

  Patek Georg bowed his head.

  “Are there any other questions or comments?” asked Dem Lia. There were none.

  The nine people rose from the table and went about their business.

  A largely sleepless twenty-four-plus hours later, Dem Lia stood alone and god-sized in the white star’s sytem, the G8 blazing away only a few yards from her shoulder, the braided world tree so close that she could have reached out and touched it, wrapped her god-sized hand around it, while at the level of her chest the hundreds of thousands of shimmering wings of light converged on the Helix, whose deceleration fusion tail had dwindled to nothing. Dem Lia stood on nothing, her feet planted steadily on black space, the alien forest ring roughly at her beltline, the stars a huge sphere of constellations and foggy galactic scatterings far above, around, and beyond her.