by John Barnes
By now the wiseguys in the asteroid belt are blasting away at him at an ever-increasing rate, and even with the longer catapult and laser boost it is taking six days for packages from the moon to catch up with him and pass through his funnel. He has been rearranging and climbing the train for a while now, so that more and more of his processing is distributed in the family of packages; there’s less waste of materials, and coordination gets better and better as he learns to pass the incoming packets, shrieking in the electromagnetic spectrum as clearly to him as a teakettle to human ears, from funnel to funnel the way a juggler passes balls, hands working independently and yet under unified control.
For a couple of days it was challenging, then as processors became more numerous and more tightly networked it became amusing but not difficult. Now it’s all but a habit; he catches them and passes them along as automatically as a worker on an old-fashioned assembly line might tighten a bolt.
With seventy plants online in the asteroids—and that number will quadruple before he’s done—he doesn’t really need the moon packages anymore, or rather he doesn’t need them right away. After a moment’s thought, he sends a message to Louie-on-the-moon—the lunar packages will be sent up a different pathway altogether, the one that he will descend as he works his way back toward the sun in a few weeks.
Ultimately the real way to do this would be to have belts of stations on highly elliptical orbits, all following each other around the sun, and then to toss ships like packages between them. Done properly it could create a “railroad” to the far reaches of the solar system… it might be a matter of a mere couple of weeks even for ordinary flesh-and-blood humans to get out to Pluto or beyond. He works out the scheme… in fact, rather than having a single sequence of solar satellites following each other in a long elliptical orbit, it really might be better to have several such sequences… ultimately you could create a “grid” of moving bodies such that there was always a way to get thrown all the way up to wherever you wanted, and then caught at the other end.
He’s going to need that when the time comes to settle the outer system, he decides. And for the first time in thousands of brain-years, Louie Tynan is startled; it had never occurred to him that he might do any such thing.
Yet the truth is he can build about as much habitat as he wants out here… and the beautiful Earth is being crapped up by an excess of people—lovely as individuals, towns, and cultures, but hideous in such profusion.
He has great fun thinking of a dozen ways to turn Jupiter into a midget sun and terraform its major moons, and working out which nations to settle where. It is so entertaining that he spends almost ten minutes on the project, idly catching a couple of packages along the way. Now that the Good Luck has extended into a stable train of a few hundred packages stretching over about a million miles, and he’s gotten himself distributed across all of it, this is really easy to do, and tossing and passing packages is like playing with a yo-yo, relaxing once you have the trick.
Just for grins, let’s see how many thousand years, using the resources he has or can produce, it would take for him to terraform everything in the solar system that he possibly could.
Figure Mars is easy; get some of the oxygen and nitrogen back out of the soil, add water and other volatiles… it had a billion years of life, anyway, based on what the expedition Louie was on found. Charge it up again and it’s good for another billion.
The moon is not much worse (it would leak air and water over the long run, but Louie could maintain it, now that he’s virtually immortal). The Jovian moons are a lot tougher—Jupiter’s magnetic field is a natural cyclotron and it’s bathed in hard radiation, and igniting nuclear fires in Jupiter’s core will pump a lot more particles into the process. You’d have to slow the giant planet’s rapid rotation to get a softer, gentler magnetic field….
And the outer gas giants would be a lot tougher to start going and keep going; not much way to sustain a reaction in a ball that small. Maybe by beaming power from stations closer to the sun? Six big satellites in solar polar orbit… use the gas giants as reflectors… no reason to use Uranus at all since it doesn’t have a moon big enough for the job….
The real bitch is Venus. Cooling it down from the temperature of boiling lead, spinning it up to a decent rotational speed (without reheating everything), getting rid of air so thick it’s like a half mile of Earth ocean… figure you’d precipitate it out with metallic calcium, maybe, to get the carbon dioxide converted into carbonates, and if you had big enough lumps of calcium in orbit maybe you could use their gravitational drag to spin up Venus… they could also act as mirrors to keep the sun off… that would be a job. Mars would be a snap by comparison.
Well, so simulate it. How long does it all take, and what does he do with all those worlds? Figure he’s making nine new habitable worlds: Venus, Mars, Luna, Ganymede, Callisto, Io, Europa, Titan, and Triton. A couple of dozen continents and oceans….
The thought is like a small orgasm. For twenty years now, the Library of Congress has been recording genomes; tailored viruses can rebuild the DNA, and cloning technology is there to bring the organism into being. They’ve done it for a few zoos, and they brought back the blue whale that way after the Japanese slaughtered the last dozen. For that matter, in the last decade they’ve brought back dodos, moas, woolly mammoths, passenger pigeons, and giant sloths.
They lost a few recordings in the Flash, but there are probably copies around… and for that matter there are plenty of samples one way or another.
He could bring it all back. And have plenty of room for beautiful cities and farms… nine Edens. Room enough not just for humanity but for life.
Herds of bison the size of Texas counties, whole continents of untouched jungles, snow leopards playing on Olympus Mons, and giant white sturgeon in the rivers of Ishtar. Wonder what an eagle flies like in low g? Heck, it could probably lift a small deer… on the smaller worlds you sure wouldn’t be able to keep anything that flew isolated.
How long?
Almost, he wishes for a physical heart again, so that it could pound. And he remembers that however long it might be, he has the time.
The answer comes to him. Just under a thousand years. He doesn’t quite believe it, tries again… but there it is. Once you have true self-replicating machinery, driven by abundant nuclear fuels or sunlight, you can have as much as you want of whatever you want.
His mind reels back to the implications. In the same thousand years human population could quite painlessly be brought a long way down—with everyone living a long life, no need to raise the death rate or even slow medicine down… everyone could be rich, everyone could have all the material happiness they wanted—
And right now, he knows, from the millions of brain-image recordings that the Comparative Psych Library at Kansas State has on file, exactly how wretched people are made by hunger, cold, sickness, and fear. Figure that of the Earth’s nine billion people, about one and one half billion are suffering ill effects of malnutrition at the moment, a partially overlapping two and one quarter billion are inadequately sheltered, about three billion will contract a treatable illness and receive no treatment this year….
Fear is a little tougher to estimate.
The sheer quantity of unnecessary human unhappiness implied is beyond even Louie’s capabilities to comprehend. In a way he’s just as glad not to know.
That word “unnecessary” keeps sticking to his mind. A thousand years and all the physical ills of mankind could be nothing more than bad memories, not living in any memory except Louie’s. And then there are those other dreams—lions stalking mustangs and kangaroos on the grassy plains of Aphrodite. Dolphins in the Sea of Tranquility, diving down to visit the site of the first moon landing. A grizzly breaking from the pines of the upper slopes of the Valle Marineris, on his way down to that great freshwater sea for a drink. Mighty Jupiter glowing blood-red in the sky above the endless oceans and floating islands of Ganymede and Europa.
&n
bsp; All this and their health, too, Louie thinks, laughing to himself. Well, if he decides to deliver that… it slightly exceeds the specs on his contract, of course, but he doubts their descendants will complain.
Actually their descendants probably will complain, because there is something in human nature that looks for ways to make itself unhappy. But Louie can’t do anything about that. He’s not God.
Not exactly.
Not yet.
Mary Ann tends to think of the time that follows as the “phony hurricane.” Clem is still there and still real, and when Clem 500 blows across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and they spend a scary couple of days huddling in the dugouts, there’s plenty of reality. But it’s not the kind of terror it was before; the shelter is roomy enough to hold them, and strong enough to keep them safe. They all spend their time in the dugout singing, playing word games, sleeping, telling stories to children—it’s a kind of vacation from the endless hot walk. Everyone emerges healthy and in good spirits; the shelters are left as they are, so that future travelers can have the use of them if necessary.
The one thing Mary Ann finds depressing is that it all implies that the hurricanes will persist.
When the storm has passed they are up and walking again, clearing the road as they go. And as they do this, Clem is still moving over the Pacific, its fourth trip around now, scouring islands that were wiped out before. There’s not much loss of life; the big waves roll out, but where they strike, big waves have been before, and you can kill someone only once.
Brittany Lynn Hardshaw finds that time to be painful for other reasons. The trouble with militarily occupying what Harris Diem calls a “cupiarchy” —a state built around people grabbing whatever they want—is that you can’t find anyone, good, bad, or indifferent, with any real interest in doing the work of government. Meanwhile a lot of young intellectuals and part-time kibitzers, now that they’re safe from the hired thugs of the various “cashlords”—another Diem term which is finding its way into the media—are spending all their time making life miserable for the occupation government.
Klieg at least thinks he can have something flying in a couple of months, so that the Southern Hemisphere might be spared; all estimates are that if nothing is done, given the much greater ratio of water to land, and the much higher seasonal thermal differential because the Southern Ocean is colder, the storm will be worse there.
But despite the urgency of Siberia, and the fact that it’s practically under the rule of an American proconsul, Hardshaw has to spend most of her time out on the road visiting refugee camps. So much water poured down the western slopes of the United States that the Coast Survey is using radar imaging just to assemble a picture of what the West Coast is shaped like now. There were rivers running sixty feet deep that had never held water since white settlers arrived, and so much snow landed in the Sierras that it seems to have compacted into new glaciers in many places.
The seventy percent or so of the West Coast population that fled east is now spread out across the Rockies and the desert states; the loads of water that hit those areas caused more flooding and more deaths, and there is no question now, according to NOAA, that runoff still coming down from the hills is going to refill many lake beds that have been dry since the Ice Age. Maybe that can be used in some kind of reclamation… there are people working on it, as Hardshaw tells everyone who asks her that.
With Carla secretly looking on, late one night Berlina Jameson succumbs to temptation and puts her arm around Naomi Cascade; when Naomi leans against her, Berlina gulps, lifts the younger woman’s chin, and firmly kisses her mouth. There’s a long moment before Naomi starts kissing back.
There is no new Sniffings for ten days while Berlina gets caught up after years of affection starvation. Naomi keeps saying she thinks she’s actually straight, but she really loves Berlina. It’s such a normal way for a young woman to behave that when Carla compares it to old records of Naomi making speeches at rallies and demonstrations, it doesn’t quite seem like the same person.
Di Callare gets a long break, and goes back to get the family fully packed for the two-room apartment the Feds will put them up in, in Denver. The whole government is supposed to get moved there after Clem’s next pass. It would make more sense to move offices and departments as soon as possible, but there’s an impossible snarl of political infighting over questions of precedence, and for purely PR reasons, the highest levels can’t leave until most of the rest are evacuated. Just in case, Diem makes arrangements with the government of West Virginia; according to Di Callare, Charleston is the nearest sizable city to D.C. that can be expected to ride it out, and after all it’s only four hours by road, forty minutes by zipline, or twenty minutes by staticopter from Washington—in a crisis they can scoot there.
On August 25, Clem scrapes over Eniwetok again, and the satellites report an ominously wobbly outflow jet, which has been the prelude to calving in the past.
On August 23, Louie Tynan crosses Saturn’s orbit, 9.5 AU from the sun; it took him nineteen days just to cover the first astronomical unit of his journey, but as the industrial complex pushing him along has been growing exponentially, the rate of growth in his acceleration has been growing… the fourth derivative of position with respect to time increasing monotonically, Louie thinks. The kinds of equations you see in atom bombs, bacterial colonies, arms races, and out-of-control inflation.
Just at this moment his mind is operating at 20,504 brain-years per day, two and a half times the rate when he left the moon; to experience what Louie has in the last thirty-four days, a single human being would have to live over 300,000 years.
As he goes farther and his mind gets faster, he spends more time daydreaming, and more time on what he thinks of the “art/nature/what? question,” by which he means, approximately, what the connection is between three billion years of evolution, Michelangelo’s David, and why people like the David. It’s about the most interesting problem he can think of. Louie was never much of an artist of any kind—he used to write down, on the personality inventories the USSF required every three months, “Can’t draw, can’t write, can’t sing, won’t dance, whistle acceptably if you don’t listen too close.”
He’s wishing now that he’d practiced a lot when his brain was smaller; what he’s got in mind is a big job, and he sure as hell doesn’t want to screw up the materials. So as he flies on deeper into the outer solar system, into the lonely dark and cold, he simulates and practices over and over, plays with criticism, tries again. He figures he’s having a major artistic movement, with forty or fifty trial works and then a lengthy body of commentary, about every four hours… all in simulation.
A couple of days ago he might have found it a strain to do all this and keep catching packages, making plans for reaching 2026RU, and the rest. Now all that’s automatic.
What he really needs is another artistic perspective, and since his brain is nearing completion, that gives him an idea for some changes; he sends his requests to the wiseguys. Within a few days, just as he’s crossing Neptune’s orbit and diving into the real outer darkness, he should be getting several very different packages.
There’s a principle called Bode’s Law, about the location of the planets; if you take the series {0, 3, 6, 12, 24…} and add 4 to each term to make {4, 7, 10, 16, 28…} you get the distances of the planets from the sun, with the distance from the sun to the Earth (one astronomical unit) set at ten. Technically the series is what is called a “geometric progression.”
It was only with powerful supercomputers in the early 2000s that it was finally demonstrated that there’s a reason for Bode’s Law. In the primitive whorl of matter the solar system condensed from, Jupiter condensed first after the sun, and as it did its enormous gravitational drag accelerated the other rubble circling the sun. Resonances with some orbits, and not with others, over a few hundred million years, swept some belts clear, filled others with rubble, caused rubble to pack up and collide in one and to disperse in another, form
ing the planets and asteroid belt in what were, in fact, multiples of Jupiter’s orbital distance—the squares of a simple series divided by 13, that being the smallest integer that didn’t allow the wrong sort of resonances to build up across geological time.
As it happens, Louie’s voyage, with its rising rate of acceleration, is also producing a geometric progression, and the two run oddly parallel—it is taking him three days between planetary orbits, even though the planetary orbits are increasingly far apart. Thus it is only six days after he “changed his mind”—a joke he’s enjoying more with time—that the new packages arrive. He admits to himself that he’s catching them with a certain amount of—well, for lack of a better word, reverence. Maybe it’s just that if he were in their situation he’d want them to be careful.
What they are is copies of the wiseguys. The simplified Louies back in the asteroid belt have copied themselves onto bigger and better processors, taken data from him to merge into these augmented versions of themselves, and fired them off to join him. As they arrive—all within a few hours of each other—he incorporates them, and suddenly he remembers, seventy times, meeting some dim, dark body in the cold of space, spreading over its face and burrowing into its core (or cores, more often it was several bodies spinning around each other), and becoming a factory and forge in space.
The wiseguys daydreamed a lot, and Louie-on-the-moon has been tutoring them as well, without ever exactly having discussed it with Louie-the-ship. He doesn’t feel offended; on the contrary, the reunion is wonderful, and everyone enjoys probing everyone else’s memories; it’s quite a party, lasting almost twenty-four hours, carrying him/them two full AU beyond Neptune’s orbit before they get around to discussing, or he gets around to thinking about, depending on how many Louies he is right now, what to do with the solar system once this local emergency on the third planet is dealt with.
