The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  4,692 years after arriving in outer space, Genitrix found what she had been designed to work with: numerous complete strands of genetic material. The complex molecules turned up embedded in pebbles of carboniferous chondrite, whose exteriors had been fused to glassy shells by intense heat.

  Remarkable that anything should have lived in this hostile vacuum, she said to herself as she activated the programs that would thoroughly analyze the specimens. Where she came from, matter embodied rich and diversified forms and energy radiated strongly everywhere, not just among a scattering of stars. Here in the void, only a few kinds of matter formed, most of it simple hydrogen gas that had condensed from the primal energy of the Big Bang. Reverberations of that energy continued, thinly scattered and dim. The little light available came from grains of stars cooking heavy elements from hydrogen.

  *

  Balancing distance against the disappearing stars,

  space opens in all directions,

  and all directions are the same

  emptiness, the same darkness carrying the wavering stars.

  *

  Poetry expressed an ancillary program that Genitrix utilized to supplement her more empirical observations. She sang quatrains of astonishment as she completed the analysis of the genetic molecules she had found, and as she saw how delicate and sensitive the carriers of these molecular programs had been.

  *

  Plucked whole from the stride of oblivion,

  you spirals of ascension

  shall climb again into flesh—

  and your black silence shall unwind into light.

  *

  Genitrix reviewed her analysis and studied the necessary requirements for revitalizing these helical strands of life. Their environment would have to be precise for them to exist at all, and she surveyed the materials at hand. The chondrites had been found in a massive cloud of hydrogen tainted with heavy materials cast off by stars that had exploded in the vicinity. Now that Genitrix knew the needs of her future children, she could initiate the gravitational sequence that would pull together the exact amount of mass to shape an energy source and a world suitable for this particular lifeform.

  The tiered, angular superstructure of Genitrix’s body separated from the launcher and broke apart into fifteen whirling triangles. The spinning shapes scattered through the giant cloud. When the pieces came to rest, they began to rotate faster, and the cosmic dust around them whirred into fifteen separate vortexes.

  Time now could be measured in units derived from the environmental patterns imprinted in the genetic material—diurnal units she called days, nearly four hundred of which composed a year.

  For the next three centuries, Genitrix drew together the voluminous gas clouds, compacting them into cyclones of infalling matter. Lightning flared in the maelstroms, and shapes began to appear out of the stormy swirlings. Shadoworlds, visible in the darkness as fits of electric fire, lit up the gases condensing in Genitrix’s gravity net.

  Geometrodynamics guided this stage of world-building. Using the immense potential difference that she had earned on her journey up from a denser gravity shell, Genitrix molded space itself. She dented space where she wanted worlds and smoothed it out where she wanted distance, allowing constraints inherent in the genetic material she had found to guide her.

  After the shadoworlds began to solidify, compressed by Genitrix’s powerful energies, the seven-stroke cycle that would garner the gravitational impetus to return Gai’s system to the range poised to begin. But only Gai could initiate that. Genitrix focused on the sleepod and started Gai’s waking sequence.

  The first sight that met Gai’s rousing consciousness astonished her with the vista of the shadoworlds Genitrix had created. Gai stretched out the stiffness of her long sleep and gazed with satisfaction at the panorama of shadow-clustered globes. The shapes reminded her of the zōtl spheres that had begun her horror. They hung majestically in space, gray against black, lit faintly by the heat of their compressed material.

  Genitrix’s dulcet voice came over the speakers, a whisper in the sleepod:

  *

  “The fixities of gravity toil

  among lumping weals of space—

  and worlds are born,

  chalices of lifeforms to come.”

  *

  “Chalices,” Gai groaned, twisting with the ache of her unused body. “I prefer to think of them as deathtraps.”

  “For now, Gai, they are simply chalices, as yet lifeless and therefore hardly traps for anything but the galactic dust pulled in by their gravity. The zōtl would find no lure in these.”

  “Not yet. But you have found the lure?”

  “Of course, Gai. I would not have begun the geometrodynamics otherwise. The lifeform I’ve discovered, the zōtl will find most appealing.”

  The Rimstalkers’ machine minds traditionally lacked flexibility, and only the latest generation manifested intelligence equal to their creators.

  Genitrix’s penchant for poetry realized a Rimstalker attempt to infuse their machine minds with more adaptive programs. Until the zōtl invasions, there had been no need for creative machine minds. In this new field, Gai had been trained to forebear the limits of the machine minds she would have to work with on this mission.

  “Shall we begin the gravity amplifier?” Genitrix asked. “I woke you as soon as this became possible. As you remember, the seven-stroke cycle will take ...”

  “About seven thousand years—of local time. A weekend on the range. I know, I know.” Gai flexed her muscles. She wanted to stand up, but there was little room in the pod for that. She would have to wait until the gravity-amplifying program began before she could relegate the energy necessary to activate her Form. For now, she had the same body she had on the range, only vastly larger. She seemed the same size to herself, only because everything around her had expanded, too.

  “What are the specifics on the fossils you’ve found?” Gai asked.

  “Bipedal, warm-blooded, social creatures, once lived on a planet orbiting a yellow star in the third stellar arm of this galaxy. The star exploded about two billion local years ago.”

  “That long ago?”

  “Oh, yes. Though that hardly matters. In this virtual vacuum, time is almost irrelevant. The galaxy this debris came from has rotated eight times since the planet was destroyed by nova. Six thousand other nearby stars have also gone nova since then, and their effluent is mixed in with the dust clouds I’ve used to shape these worlds.”

  “So many worlds—” Gai commented, counting fifteen infrared spheres in the darkness.

  “Yes. This lifeform evolved on one planet, billions of years ago. But the geometrodynamic requirements that we must meet to collapse us back home call for many worlds. Fifteen major planets, to be precise. Of course, thousands of planetesimals will crystallize about the nodes of our gravity net, but those, for the most part, shall remain lifeless.”

  “For the most part?”

  “Well, this lifeform I’ve found is not the only one. There are many other interesting and related species I want to study, species that may be symbiotically necessary for the lifeform we desire. Also, several planets that orbited the nova star sustained life. The other lifeforms existed in the gaseous strata of methane and ammonia worlds. I thought that once the program got going I’d research some of these minor lifeforms as well. They never attained the sapience necessary to make them zōtl bait, but we may learn a thing or two about the nature of life in the vacuum.”

  “Let’s concentrate on our primary objective, okay?”

  “Certainly, Gai. I didn’t mean to imply that my extraneous research would in any way hamper our mission.”

  Gai let her gaze linger on the black spheres. Genitrix would appreciate the poetic justice of the shadoworlds’ similarity to the zōtl spheres. Yet, she said nothing. That pain rooted too deeply for her to share with a machine. She punched in the starting command for the gravity amplifier.

  Immediately, the shadoworld
s breathed brighter, pulsing a dull infrared as the gravity net that held them spinning in their places went taut. Too imperceptible to see at once, the planets had begun to dance. They would circle each other, following space lanes that Genitrix contoured for them in the fabric of spacetime.

  Aching from her prolonged stillness, Gai determined to free herself from the sleepod. “Are we ready to get me out of this cocoon?”

  “Your Form is coming from the storage hold now. You can unstrap and prepare to depart the launcher.”

  Through the view-screen, Gai watched a hulking shape disengage from the back of the launcher and topple into position above the sleeppod. From the outside it looked like an oversized suit of armor, strapped with shining plates reflecting the pinpoint stars. That would be her new home for the next seven thousand years.

  Gai unbuckled herself and squeezed out of the launch seat, smiting her head on the ceiling bulwark. “Dammit.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is the Form ready?”

  “In place. Airlock secure. Lifesystems fully functional. You may enter when ready.”

  Gai took a last glance around the cabin. It seemed just days ago she had been training for this flight, cramming all the routines and emergency procedures necessary to earn the right to sit in that seat. Now that knowledge was used up, like the launcher. She had won her way into outer space.

  The flint of pride she felt sharpened her desire to get on with her mission and kill zōtl.

  She reached for a fingerpad on the wall and typed the command to open the airlock. With a tremulous sigh, the portal before her circled open, and she faced the inside of the Form.

  Grayblue light suffused from within. No instrument panels or monitors awaited, just the quiet light that would sustain her. All control devices patched directly into her brain. She stepped into the soft glare, and the airlock huffed closed behind.

  The Form embraced her as intimately as her own body. It became her body now. She had morphed into a denizen of outer space. Until the gravity net built up enough power to drive her home, she would have to live by the laws of outer space.

  She had been trained for this; even so, all her training could not prepare her for the profoundly abject experience of the void. She gawked at surrounding immensities of black clouds: the emberglow of the shadoworlds and hard points of starlight squeezed through the darkness.

  Panicky loneliness swelled. “Genitrix!”

  “I’m here, Gai. You have successfully merged with your Form. You are free of the launcher now. Shall we practice moving about?”

  “In a moment. I’m still getting used to floating naked in space.” It felt that way, as though she wore nothing at all. The cold of space did not touch her, only the ticklish sensation of warmth from the shadoworlds. She could feel radiation as well as see it. All her senses fit snugly in place. By concentrating, she heard electrons whistling as they passed through the dust clouds. And she could taste her own wonder, a taste like menthol, opening all the hollows in her head, chilling them with sensations. I am alive in outer space!

  She swung about, and her effort sent her flying through a tattering of cosmic dust and over the pole of a red-glowing planet.

  “Careful,” Genitrix warned. “Very little energy produces big results in a vacuum.”

  Gai stared at the launcher, dwindling in the distance, a sleek complex of planes and angles against the amorphous mistings of space. Already it began to break up, separate parts bound for destinations discordant and remote throughout the planetary system. She willed herself back toward it, and it grew closer. To keep from colliding with it, she had to arc sharply. Her erratic flight swept her past the launcher and up out of the roiling clouds into an abyssal gulf of nothing.

  Aprubtly, the galaxy swung into view. The dead lifeforms that Genitrix had found turned up in a cloud of rubble that had drifted out of that stellar vortex and now diffused into space about twenty thousand light years above the plane of the galaxy.

  Stars in glittering dunes filled the sky.

  “It’s immense,” Gai breathed.

  “Indeed. Well over seventy thousand light years across. Inside there, in that cornucopia of stars, the lifeforms I’ll be rebuilding first lived. There is the true mother.

  *

  “Hanging garden of misty lights,

  vast orchard of stars,

  wheel of fire,

  silver vortex ...”

  *

  “Enough poetry,” Gai commanded. “Show me the creatures that once lived here. Show me what you will reproduce.”

  “There are no whole specimens of this being in the debris I’ve found. I suspect there are nothing more than molecular traces left of any of that world’s lifeforms. The bowshock of the nova shattered the planet and vaporized much of it, wiping out all artifacts. Until we actually recreate the environment where this creature lived and then regrow it, I can only extrapolate what it may have looked like from the genetic material at hand. Here’s my best approximation.”

  The center of Gai’s field of vision shimmered, and pixels of chrome light patched together an image. The shape that appeared had two legs, two arms, and a face with two green eyes. Shown naked, a gleaming black-skinned creature with red streaks that jagged under its eye sockets and down the sides of its face, the biped displayed flame-shaped irises and glossy reptile flesh. Orange throat frills fluttered under its chin and horn stubs crested the cope of its head.

  *

  Lod and Saor

  At her signal, Gai’s launch vehicle completed its final disassembly. The booster, still glowing bluewhite with electron fire, broke away from the central sleepod and drifted to the perimeter of the black clouds. Lightning jagged where it came to rest, and the dust towers glowed green as thunderheads.

  The nose of the launcher, hackled with antennas, sailed to the opposite side of the nebula and disappeared in the dark. Only the sleepod remained. It soared through the molecular clouds and finally settled into the fog of a protoplanet. The sleepod was designed for hibernating. Gai had already decided not to use it but to sleep in the Form, a few hours every day. Outer space was too weird, the zōtl too dangerous, for her to spend any extended time unconscious.

  She planned to supervise every step of the mission, and she worked hard accustoming herself to the constraints and abilities of the Form. After maneuvering among the nebulous planets for a while, she became adept at getting around with the same precision she had enjoyed in her own body on her own world.

  Gai felt ready to activate the two other machine intelligences necessary for the zōtl trap. Genitrix served as the central machine mind directing the formation of the worlds. She knew the environmental requirements for each of the regenerating lifeforms, and the patterns that she established determined the gravity, chemical composition, and temperature of the planets. Parts of herself had become the cores of the planets, monitoring all activity on the worlds, and perpetually storing the gravitational resonance of the masses shuttling about each other. When the time came to leave, it would be Genitrix who would pull the launcher back together again and release the energy to return them home.

  Until then, two other machine intelligences would implement and manage the zōtl trap: the actual guidance system, located in the ship’s nose, and the energy source in the booster. Gai activated them simultaneously, and the whole tumult of gas clouds and smoky planets lit up with spokes of radiant gold. The beauty of the sunshot mists and fiery streamers raveling among the planets stunned her. Transfixed, she watched the booster flare into a tiny star.

  Lod released the energy stored in its magravity cells. The exact composition of the radiation, wavelengths and frequencies of photons and neutrinos, had been programmed by Genitrix but Lod, the machine intelligence in the booster, regulated the light. At this specified rate, Lod contained sufficient stored power to radiate longer than the lifespan of the universe. The magravity coils had so much power that if Lod’s energy radiated all at once, th
e entire galaxy suspended before them would rip apart.

  To minimize the possibility of such a catastrophe, a redundancy had been designed into the system: Saor, the machine intelligence in the nosecone opposite Lod. Invisible against the darkness of space, Saor maintained a blackbody responsible for absorbing data from the surroundings, maintaining the precise orbits of the planets and the myriad planetoids, and keeping a vigilant watch for zōtl. Also, Saor observed Lod and reported all inconsistencies to Genitrix and Gai. Lod had similar programming requiring him to watch Saor assiduously, for if the black body went awry, the entire complex would collapse in an instant to a nuclear fireball.

  Together, Lod and Saor provided the guiding poles of the planetary complex. The tension between the two machines maintained the geometrodynamics that shaped the matrix embedding the new worlds. The intricate and powerful gravitational field vibrating between them encased the planets and shielded them from harsh cosmic rays.

  The energy field between Lod and Saor had an additional effect that surprised Gai even though her training had prepared her for it: The energetic power field enabled her to move around outside the Form. In fact, when Lod and Saor first activated, the sudden step-up of energy kicked Gai out of the Form, and she found herself floating apparently bodiless among fire-colored clouds.

  Gai’s real body, the physical shape she had on the range, remained in the Form, where it would have to stay throughout the mission or she would die—but her awareness could now extend itself outside the Form, and, riding the energy streaming between Lod and Saor, her awareness could extend anywhere in the system. In her training, she had been taught that this was possible because of the enormous energy differential between her range-body and the coldness of space. Her brain waves possessed a magnitude of power so much higher than surrounding space that the wavepatterns of her brain easily entrained nearby force fields. She experienced this as floating disembodied among invisible lines of force.

  Experimenting with this exhilarating effect, Gai soon realized that her projected brain waves actually shaped field particles around her into a plasma. Simply by using her thoughts, she could manipulate the plasma into almost any shape she could imagine. She imagined herself, and, with some effort, she gelled the plasma into the contours of her physical form, adding a little extra height and a refinement of her features to suit her self-image.