by Paul McAuley
That summer, he had come home for the vacation and as usual was helping out at the café, shopping in the markets with his mother in the morning, waiting tables in the afternoon, sitting at the reception counter of the little motel in the evening, studying his texts and making sketches for the project that would occupy most of his third year: a station for the maglev railway that would cross Africa from north to south, once the dozen countries involved could ever agree on the construction contracts.
Like his parents, Afel had little time for the visit of the Outer diva. It was good for business, the motel was fully booked by visitors who’d come for the concert – four of the guests had come all the way from France, two more from Greater Brazil – but it was a fleeting attraction, according to Afel’s father. He liked to employ a statistic he’d found in the cloud when customers at the café talked about the diva’s visit. Less than one per cent of those born in the three hundred years after the Russian, Gagarin, had first orbited the Earth, had ever gone into space, temporarily or permanently. Earth would always be more important than anything up there, he said.
So the day that the diva arrived in town was much like any other. George and his sister, Penda, had been chosen by their school to be part of the official reception, and they had put on their school uniforms and gone off to the little airport to greet the diva’s flitter, but otherwise it was business at usual. There was the breakfast rush, and then, after the trucks that had parked overnight pulled away and visitors had taken taxis into town, Afel went to the market with his mother and helped her unload the fresh produce and begin preparations for the lunch crowd.
Usually, the window in the café showed sports – football, wrestling, camelracing – but that evening customers asked to watch the live broadcast of the concert. Over in the motel, where Afel was working, several truck drivers had set up a window outside one of the rooms and were drinking beer and smoking kif and watching the griot, Etienne Diabaté, and his band play an old, old song about how everyone’s work, from fisherman to teacher, contributed to the wealth of the country.
One of the drivers, Souleye Coulibaly, was a regular customer. A big, friendly woman who liked to tease Afel, asking him to multiply large numbers, or find their square root, or guess how many pumpkin seeds she was holding in her hand. Now she called to him, telling him to forget his texts for just one hour and come and watch a little history.
In the window, Etienne Diabaté was introducing the diva. She was tall and thin and pale, dressed in a severelycut white suit, the black bands and struts of the exoframe that allowed her to walk in gravity eight times stronger than the gravity of her home world, Callisto, wrapped around her torso and limbs. She bowed gracefully, and she and Etienne Diabaté began to sing a love song about a young man and a young woman from opposite side of the river.
‘She isn’t bad,’ Souleye said.
‘Imagine making love to her,’ one of the others said. ‘You could show no passion, or you’d break all her bones.’
‘Or boil her icy blood with your hot kisses,’ someone else said.
They asked Afel to fetch beer, and when he came back the diva was singing one of her songs. Or he supposed it was a song: she was chanting in English over a medley of electronic squawks and random percussion and a fluctuating bass drone. Something about someone walking over a plain towards mountains, seeing a garden on ice . . . . It was very long, and seemed to describe everything the walker saw. Once or twice the diva broke into song, crooning the same line over and over with increasing urgency, and then she’d resume her chant. It went on and on. The drivers gossiped and joked; Afel went back inside to his studies. When he came out for a break an hour later, Etienne Diabaté and the diva were singing together again, short verses, in French and then in English, about the similarities between deserts of rock and deserts of ice, the hard work of making homes in each.
Souleye caught Afel’s gaze and said, ‘Well, it was different, anyway. How about another round, kid?’
Customers at the tables on the café’s veranda were chatting noisily, as they always did, and the window inside had been switched back to sports, and out on the highway trucks strung with constellations of little lights blew past in the hot African night, on their way to the new frontier.
Prometheus Warps the F Ring
An ancient philosopher from Earth once suggested that humanity’s defining characteristic was that it could not resist stamping its footprints into pristine unspoiled ground. There was no good reason, for instance, why anyone would want to live on Prometheus, the shepherd moon that orbited just inside the narrow, twisted rope of Saturn’s F Ring, the outermost discrete segment of the gas giant's glorious ring system. Prometheus was a lumpy, irregular cylinder of dirty water ice about a hundred and thirtyfive kilometres long and sixty to eighty kilometres across. Porous, lightly scarred by impact craters, blanketed by drifts of bright ice dust stolen from the F Ring, it possessed no useful resources, and its chaotic orbit meant that it was difficult to reach. Even so, a crew of gardeners stabilised one of its shallow valleys with a muscular mat of fullerene strands and tented it with diamond composite, and quickened a homeostatic microgravity ecology of spinweed, air kelp, and hypertrophied bryophytes. A famous poet lived there for a year; two different but equally shortlived tribes of utopianists briefly colonised it; it became a way station for the occupying force at the height of the True Empire; much later, an ascetic hermit took up residence, and captured the restless fluctuations of the F Ring in an everchanging symphony.
At its closest approach, Prometheus’s gravity warped the F Ring’s icy material into waves and streamers, ploughing temporary dark channels into the strand of icy shards and dust that spiralled around the central core. The F Ring’s other shepherd moon, Pandora, also perturbed the ring as it orbited the outer edge, and hundreds of snowball moonlets swung around the ring too, passing through its inner core whenever their orbits were perturbed by Prometheus and creating temporary jets that extended for hundreds kilometres. The ring shivered and shook, plucked by gravity and ponderously slow impacts.
The hermit injected several million selfreplicating probes into the ring, wrapped in photosynthetic sheaths and equipped with detectors that emitted signals that fluctuated in response to minute changes in velocity and trajectory. A chamber in the tented garden on Prometheus translated the sum of millions of oscillating signals into sounds analogous to those generated by Tibetan Singing Bowls; some ten years after the hermit died, a rare visitor to the tiny shepherd moon discovered her desiccated corpse there, her music still humming and chiming in the luminous air.
The socalled Eternal Symphony of the F Ring was briefly famous. Pilgrims came to Prometheus from all over the Solar System to float in the chamber and submerge themselves in the oscillating drone of the ring, the deceptive cadences and eerie glissades of the warps created by Prometheus’s orbit, the rumbling percussion of colliding moonlets and the chiming clatter of the resultant jets. There was a brief fashion for apoapsis parties in which afficionados gathered to bathe in the atonal and violent passages created when Prometheus passed close to the F Ring, but like all fashions this soon faded. A century after the hermit’s death, hardly anyone visited Prometheus anymore, and the mirror feeds of the Eternal Symphony on various moons of Saturn, on Earth and Mars, in various cities of the Belt, were either disconnected or languished in forgotten corners of libraries.
Perhaps it would be rediscovered one day; or perhaps all trace of it would vanish from humanity’s collective memory. It did not matter. The symphony played on regardless. The probes manufactured new copies to replace those lost to time and chance; the semisentient chamber repaired and renewed itself; Prometheus and Pandora and the snowball moonlets pursued their endless, endlessly changing dance around the F Ring, and the ring’s rope of icy fragments poured around Saturn, as it had long before the distant ancestors of humanity took their first steps across the African plains, as it would long after the unknowably distant descendants of humanit
y had forgotten all about their first home.
The New Neighbours
Here they come! Here they come! Here come our new neighbours! They’re so close now that if you went outside and stood on the shell of our garden, you would be able to see them without enhancement: six sparks of fusion flame, six ships killing their velocity as they make their final approach to our home. Our new neighbours, come to visit in quaint old ships, lumpy cylinders equipped with socalled antiproton ‘fastfusion’ drives. And as their ships approach our home, our ships approach theirs, which is also nakedeye visible: a faint fleck about twentyeight degrees antispinward of Jupiter’s cold brilliant star.
There are more than ten thousand gardens and habitats like ours, constructed from stuff mined from rocks and comets. There are more than a million and a half rocks with a diameter of more than a kilometre, and about one per cent of them are permanently inhabited. That’s a lot of cities and settlements, yes, but the Belt is a big place, a toroidal volume of 6 x10 to the power of 24 cubic kilometres. On average, rocks and gardens are about a million kilometres from their nearest neighbour, and most of their nearest neighbours are either barren or are not much more than pebbles or boulders, too small to ever be colonised.
But everything in the Belt is moving in different orbits around the sun, at different speeds. Everything is constantly changing its position relative to everything. And whenever a garden or an inhabited rock crosses our sky close enough to reach with minimal expenditure of reaction mass, we like to visit our new neighbours. It doesn’t happen very often – after all, this is the first conjunction since you were born – and that’s why it’s important, and exciting.
It’s an old place, our new neighbours’ home, an old way station constructed by Earth’s European Union four centuries ago. It looks like a sea creature from Earth – a sea urchin. You see? At the heart of that cluster of spikes, pointing in all directions, is a small stony rock. The spikes are cylindrical habitats, what they call skyscrapers, on Earth. They are linked by a web of cableways and tubes, and those lights in their casings, they’re windows. Inside the spikes, the skyscrapers, are divided into hundreds of rooms.
I know. It is a strange way to live. We’d find those skyscrapers cramped, congested and claustrophobic. And yes, I know, our new neighbours look strange, too: small, compact, goldenfurred. But we must look strange to them – long and skinny, mostly bald, mostly paleskinned – and they’ll find our garden strange and unsettling, too. Imagine being used to living in a crowded maze of little spaces, little rooms, and finding yourself inside a spherical room twenty kilometres across, with a layered shell of foamed diamondfullerene composite and water, and all green inside, raft forests and airkelp clouds and secondary spheres two or three hundred metres across arrayed around a little central sea and lit by chandelier clusters. They’ll think our lovely bubble fragile and overwhelmingly empty, and they’ll lack the ability to swoop and glide through its airy volumes; they’ll cling to the towns strung along the struts.
We’ll have to be kind and patient, even though we have so much to show them, so much to celebrate, so much to talk about, and so little time.
Yes, of course we’ve already talked to them. We already know a lot about them. They’re very eager to talk about their work, even though we don’t understand much of it. The geometries of manifolds; theoretical work on wormholes, those fabulously impossible dreams of rapidtransit systems between worlds and stars. They are posthuman and scrupulously rational, with minds as hard and spiky as their home; we’re dreamers, gardeners, experts in the malleable possibilities of the socalled soft sciences. But there’s much we have in common. We’re all from the same stock, human and posthuman. And it’s good to be reminded of how much we have in common with people who seem utterly unlike us.
Everyone agrees this is a Golden Age, four hundred years of peace and prosperity, four hundred years since the last big war, when certain powers from Earth attempted to impose their authority on the cities and settlements of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Oh, I know there’s conflict. This is a golden age, but it isn’t a utopia. It’s vital, everevolving, struggling in a thousand different directions towards a thousand different ideals. There are plenty of arguments and disagreements in our great and variegated human family, and sometimes disagreement flares into brief conflict, and there are civil wars, too, one family toppling another, scions fighting parents, the rising generation struggling to escape to influence of its elders.
But there aren’t any big conflicts, and in the past four centuries no single ideology has attempted to use violence to stamp its imprint on history. Trade is one of the big reasons for peace. And so are visits like this. Visits from new, temporary neighbours. They send visitors to us; we send visitors to them. Yes, I’ve heard that a few cynics call it an exchange of hostages, but it’s really a cultural meiosis.
Here they come, swinging down the sun’s gravity well in their funny old ships! There will be scientific and philosophical talkfests, poetry olympics, concerts, and games of all kinds. There will be commerce and romance and intrigue – even espionage, a game with rules and penalties thousands of years old. Information will be exchanged; new ideas may be born from fusion of our different traditions; techniques considered trivial by one party may kickstart a cultural or industrial revolution in the other. Who knows what will happen? We will dance with our new neighbours, and when we separate we will begin to discover how we have been changed. Here they come!
Monoliths
There were three of them in on it at the start. Juny Parrish and her partner, Moss, were engineers working on the Mare Imbrium section of the translunar railway; their friend Ringo Takashi was designing a mural for the big interchange station at Archimedes City. They were all from Paris, Dione, had helped to rebuild the city after the Quiet War, and had worked on the railway that girdled Mimas. The railway across the nearside southern hemisphere of Earth’s Moon was a much bigger project, but in many ways easier. With the exception of Montes Taurus, the terrain was mostly rolling lava plains, with few large craters or rilles. The big machines that fabricated the pylons and track rolled on at a steady three kilometres per day with few snags, so Juny and Moss were able to commute between the railhead and Archimedes City fairly regularly.
One night, over dinner, Ringo told them about a fabulous threehundredyearold movie he was mining for his mural, a vast panorama blending dozens of paleospaceflight representations of the exploration of the Solar System. He showed them a clips of apemen clustered around a vertical slab, and people in weird silvery spacesuits examining an identical slab in a pit dug into the lunar surface, said he was working on something that would merge the two.
‘A wherewecamefrom, wherearewegoing kind of thing. I might make it the centerpiece.’
Moss was interested in the slabs. ‘Where is the one on the Moon supposed to be?’
‘Tycho,’ Ringo said. ‘The movie is very strange: an attempt at realistic futurism mixed with bugeyed transcendentalism. Aliens uplifting the ancestors of humanity, astronauts triggering an alarm on the Moon, proving that humanity has left the cradle, and nonsense involving wormholes and a kind of posthuman transformation.’
‘I know these people working on wormhole theory,’ Moss said. ‘A posthuman clade in the Belt. You should show them this.’
Juny said, ‘Are they really trying to make wormholes?’
‘Of course not. You know posthumans. All theory and no application.’
Moss was fiddling with the second clip, freezing the moment when one of the astronauts reached out to the black surface of the slab.
‘It would be interesting to actually make one of these things,’ he said. ‘You could even plant it in Tycho.’
That was how it began.
At first, they talked about casting a slab of black lucite and incorporating it into Ringo’s mural, playing the two clips superimposed on each other in its depths. Ringo soon dismissed this as a cheap and obvious trick, but the idea didn’t quite g
o away. Why not make a slab, a monolith as it was called in the movie, and plant it somewhere? Bury it, Juny suggested, with clues pointing towards it, and make a piece of action art or secret theatre involving unwitting treasure hunters that would imitate the lunar scene in the movie, complete with a radio pulse aimed at Jupiter. Or better yet, Moss and Ringo said, aim the pulse at some star where the aliens might come from . . . .
It became a game they played over several dinners. Evolving and refining it, until they were all agreed that they had something worth doing. Juny and Moss organised the design and construction of the monolith in a print factory run by a friend of theirs. A black slab with dimensions in the ratio of 1:4:9, the square of the first three integers, 3.35 metres tall. Its faces smooth and black and nonreflective, incorporating a system that converted sunlight to electrical power, stored in capacitors that at a touch anywhere on the surface discharged in a radio squeal shaped by internal waveguides.
The fabrication of the monolith was straightforward: the three of them spent far more time discussing how to erect it, and where. They quickly eliminated Tycho Crater and anywhere on the nearside, because there were too many installations and satellites and spacecraft that could be disrupted by a powerful radio signal. They talked about sites elsewhere in the Solar System, but eventually settled on the farside of the Moon, atop the rimwall of a small crater inside Mendeleev Crater, a spot near a popular hiking trail.
After much argument, they settled on an enigmatic unmodulated radio signal rather than some kind of encrypted message, and decided that it should be aimed at the core of the galaxy. Moss, with the stubborn literalism that was sometimes endearing, sometimes frustrating, said that no alien civilization would ever be found there because the central black hole violently affected the whole region; Juny and Ringo pointed out that they weren’t aiming it at actual aliens, and besides, there were a good number of nearer stars in the same direction. It was a trivial hack to make the wave guide directional, and to delay transmission of the signal when the galactic core was below the horizon. Moss incorporated a safety routine, too, so that the signal would also be delayed if the monolith detected any spacecraft or satellites in the path of the radio beam.
