by John Barnes
It’s really only in the last hour of the reunion that thought drifts back from conversation to monologue. Louie feels unified again, but lonely.
He’s had to further distribute himself across more processors in a longer train, and it’s now almost ten light-seconds from one end to the other of him; it feels different, a little, but more like having a richer subconscious and deeper emotions than a limitation. He wonders what it would be like to be distributed clear across the solar system. If he created linking processor stations in solar orbits, a few light-seconds apart all the way from inside Mercury’s orbit to outside Neptune’s….
Well, no doubt he will find out someday. He’ll need a lot of processors anyway, to control the network of boosting stations he’s already planning… thousands of Louies, all at the “train stations to space”—fun to think about the chess league and debate clubs they could have. It does get kind of lonely out here.
It’s an aphorism in statistics that to set an all-time record one must be exceptional, but one must also be in the right place at the right time. Franklin Roosevelt was a brilliant campaigner but he faced only one first-rate opponent. Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali were great fighters but they fought a lot of bums. Babe Ruth was a great hitter but he had a more elastic ball, shorter outfield fences, and worse pitching to contend with; Hank Aaron had expansion clubs to bat against.
Thus the champion taker of human life, Clem 650, is one of the biggest daughters, but it’s also in the right place at the right time. There was never any hope of evacuating Japan, and even with replicating machinery the Japanese did not have time to get big enough seawalls into place. Clem 650 loops to the north and east of Honshu, and storms down through a dense corridor of human beings for whom nothing can be done. All by itself, it takes half a billion lives in nine days.
On August 26, it comes ashore near Yokohama, and the next day, though the Japanese are refusing to answer questions, radar shows no buildings standing in Tokyo.
Clem 650 tears south, flinging the Inner Sea far inland on Honshu and Kyushu, sending a funneled storm surge over to batter the coast of China, and down into the Formosa Strait.
The storm surge that piles up into the Formosa Strait, between the island of Formosa and the mainland, is funneled and channeled into a stream strong enough to slice off the port cities from Quanzhou to Zhanjiang—including Hong Kong and Macau—like water from a fire hose cutting into a snowbank. The video out of China is hideous—mobs of people climbing over collapsed piles of bodies in the streets, desperately trying to get out of the low coastal cities.
Later, when Clem 650’s remnants drift across China, leaving tornadoes and thunderstorms in their wake, the storms catch millions of refugees in the open. On September 4, Clem 650 heads inland for the last time, eventually to fling a great load of wet warm air up the side of the Tibetan Plateau, whence it will return as severe flooding on the Mekong, Red, and Hongshui.
With record-keeping in collapse, the Army broken down to small units, and millions of people no longer traceable, the central government of China begins to lose its grip south and east of the Yuan River; within a week, various Army commanders have set themselves up as warlords in all but name, an impossible-for-outsiders-to-understand multisided civil war is breaking out, and several tactical nukes have been fired. If you count disease, flood, and war victims, Clem 650 claims nearer a billion than a half billion victims.
When Louie Tynan is a day beyond Neptune, he begins to reverse the flow of the train. He’s at 36 Au, clipping along at almost five AU per day—fast enough to get from the sun to the Earth in a long afternoon, fast enough to cover the distance from Earth to Jupiter, which took the early probes years and even the Good Luck a month, in a single day. It’s time to start slowing down.
By now he no longer needs processing units or any other working component, just mass and momentum, so what arrives from the wiseguys now is just big slabs of iron. To slow down as they overtake him, he accelerates the iron bars through the train, adding momentum to them as they shoot through the funnels. Momentum is conserved—so as the iron bars are sped up and hurled out of the solar system, fast enough to reach Alpha Centauri in a bare 14,000 years, had they been headed that way, the momentum they carry away with them is lost to the ship, and Good Luck begins to slow down.
It will take a week at 2 g’s to slow down for the rendezvous with 2026RU; in that time the ship will climb clear out to 56 AU from the sun, almost doubling the distance already covered but doing it in less than one-fifth the time. It’s going to be a great ride, and it’s a good thing that he doesn’t care much anymore about being the fastest man alive, because though he’s certainly fast, he isn’t alive. Not exactly.
Out here, radio from Earth is reaching him four hours after it’s sent, which means that a response from Carla is always to something he said eight hours ago, and his brain has become so massively parallel that this corresponds, if it were a single human brain thinking as fast as it could, to 5,021 years of ordinary mental life.
Not that he’d actually choose to experience it that way. He’s more like two hundred people having twenty-five and a little extra years of telepathic mental life.
He tries hard to comprehend what happened with Clem 650, but it eludes him. He says, Each of them was as individual as I, as Carla, as my parents, as anyone I know; there were poets and mechanics, doctors and bums, drunks and lovers and saints and everything. Children died screaming for their parents, parents for their children, some in silence, some after long hours, some instantly. So many bodies… they will be finding deposits of them on the South China Sea floor a thousand years from now.
His mind stretches that far, but it hurts, and there is work to do.
By now, if he were still seeing with naked human eyes, he would see the sun as a very bright star, with no discernible disk; but Louie sees the whole electromagnetic spectrum through array receptors scattered along the two-million-mile train of the Good Luck plus packages and auxiliaries. He can still see individual asteroids, and for that matter he can make out the continents of Earth, and Clem itself, if he wants to. There’s just not much reason to look that way.
He figured when he got out here that his old nature would assert itself and he’d at least think a little wistfully about just taking off for the stars, even though he would never leave Earth in the lurch that way. Maybe the optimization has done something to him?
No, it’s just that there is so much time. He will eventually get around to going to Alpha Centauri. He may very well settle the galaxy with copies of himself. Immortals can afford patience; every pleasure he is capable of, he will have more times than an ordinary person could count in a lifetime, if that’s what Louie wants to do. Hell, if he wants to be flesh again, he can regrow a body and download some part of himself into that sometime—he has his genome recorded.
The drive to see what’s over the next hill is in part the fear that one may never know, that if one doesn’t go over the hill today, one may never get farther than the village graveyard.
He enjoys the week of deceleration. The 2 g’s is really just an average—deceleration actually happens only during that brief instant when the iron bars, weighing a bit over eighty tons each, come shrieking into his funnel and he gives them a hard push along. The iron bars pass through in a tiny fraction of a second, for they have been kicked along by laser boosts back at their launch points that boil off ninety percent of their original mass and leave this eighty-ton remnant moving at eight AU per day (or just over thirty million miles per hour). As they pass through, Louie speeds them up, and that slows him. During that brief fraction of a second, Good Luck undergoes about 1,000 g’s of acceleration, and Louie is taking one of those jolts every couple of minutes.
Imagine that you are somehow on a freeway on a skateboard moving at fifty miles per hour; this is the equivalent of decelerating by pushing, with a long pole, against the trunks of the cars passing you. Even with all his processing capacity and speed, Louie finds it
an interesting and challenging piece of work, better than flying under bridges used to be, like being a javelin catcher for a whole regiment of javelin-throwers. The Good Luck is processing just over 400 iron bars daily, and as she slows down the numbers rise.
A good thing too, because as she slows down, the iron bars are moving faster and faster relative to Good Luck, so that there is less and less time to push against them, and positioning gets trickier. Every so often there’s a “wild throw” that he has to let just go on by, unable to move far enough and fast enough laterally to intercept it. Whenever that happens, he transmits the equivalent of a catcall back at whichever wiseguy threw it; the solar system echoes with radio chatter, cheerful razzing between the wiseguys, like a good tight infield.
At least it looks like there’s going to be some time. After dropping its murderous daughter, Clem swings back into the upper reaches of the North Pacific, and then appears to stall out and zigzag, wobbling north to south and occasionally looping. From August 28, its closest approach to Japan, until September 6, when it rakes over the dead bones of Hawaii again, Clem sends out gigantic and dangerous waves, fascinates meteorologists, has as few as one and as many as eight outflow jets—but destroys very little, partly because it is where it has been before. Louie watches this from far out, hours later by radio, and breathes a slight sigh of relief—he will have that much more time.
On September 6, 56.23 astronomical units from the sun (though his route there was a long arc of almost 70 AU), Louie Tynan brings the main body of Good Luck into orbit around 2026RU. He is now just over thirty-six times farther out from the sun than he went on the First Mars Expedition, and that had been the record. He’s breaking a lot of records now that he’s dead.
As had been confirmed by a couple of impact probes he had sent on ahead, 2026RU is a cometoid, a ball of ice, about 790 miles across, with a rock and iron core about 80 miles in diameter and many large embedded nodes of chondrite, methane, ammonia, and nitrogen ice, and various rocks and metals.
It’s the kind of snowball Louie used as a kid when matters got serious—rocks and bits of iron, surrounded by hard ice, surrounded by frozen fluff.
The first couple of hundred packages have already taken up their orbits or descended to the surface, and the first robots are now crawling out on the icy surface or burrowing deep toward the stone and metal core. Within four hours, the first loads of metal are coming up to the surface to feed the hungry fabricating plants; it’s going to take a week, and Louie intends to be busy.
September 9 is a Saturday and things are going so well that Louie kids himself that he ought to get the day off, as hard as he’s been working. Clem is still stomping on the dead bones of Hawaii, sending storm surges crashing through Oahu so frequently that all evidence of Honolulu vanishes down to bare lines of foundations, with everything else washed out to sea. But there is no one there to be harmed, nothing to be damaged that isn’t already rendered worthless.
Meanwhile, out here in the darkness, the replicators, robots, and automated plants have been running flat out, after two days of feverish selfduplication, and much of the core is chewed up and re-extruded into a forest of pipes, towers, supports, girders. 2026RU is going to be the strongest comet ever built. But then, not many comets have ever had to boost at 3 or 4 g’s, and the final approach to Earth is going to require at least that much.
Originally Louie had planned to start spinning off the “ice Frisbees” and then-by climbing back down a rising column of more iron bars—to beat the Frisbees back home to direct them in. If he didn’t get there, well, Louie-on-the-moon could undoubtedly deal with it instead. But that was before Global Riot Two and his decision to kill his flesh so that he could get here in time; now anything he takes back will have to boost at the acceleration he’s using.
This led him to decide to take the whole comet back with him, or the whole comet minus a lot of stuff he’s going to throw off the back. It adds a day to the process, getting the giant engines and the fusion reactors to drive them built, threading steel through the ice and re-freezing the pathways onto the structural members, but when he’s done he’s days, not months, from Earth.
When he’s finished, the next day, the iceball has a forest of twelve-mile-high towers on one side, and most of the rest of the surface is covered with radiators, immense plates under which he circulates the fluids that will cool the 100 fusion chambers at the base of the towers.
He’s going to throw away about forty percent of the mass of 2026RU, and a great deal of Good Luck in the balance. Since he needs the water ice for when he gets to Earth, and the other volatiles are useful as refrigerants and working fluids, he’s going to throw away what he doesn’t need—most of the iron core is still there even after he’s woven everything he needed out of it, and he doesn’t really need anything from Good Luck except its processors, robots, and energy systems.
He wonders what Goddard, Von Braun, Verne, or Heinlein would have thought about a spaceship made out of ice that used iron plasma as a propellant. Probably they’d have approved of anything that was a spaceship.
Time to initiate boost draws closer, and though he’s ready enough, he’s curiously not eager to get started. It might be a while before he gets out here in person… but time means so little to him….
It’s not curiosity, even—he’s leaving relays behind here, and a couple of the wiseguys have dispatched several probes on long orbits that are going out to about 1,200 AU, boosting off and on to get there within a few years, so if there’s anything interesting out there he’ll get a look at it soon enough.
It seems silly to pay attention to this feeling, but after all he’s vastly more complicated mentally than he used to be. He probes his memories, the many memories inherited from the wiseguys, all the psychoanalytic literature. It seems strange that he still remembers emotions or that he still has them.
Maybe it’s different now that he’s all assembled on 2026RU, so that the time lags aren’t there and he doesn’t have radio lag as an artificial “glandular” system? No, if anything, the feelings are as strong as ever with effectively no lag; hysteresis alone suffices.
When he probes far enough, he realizes what the matter is. Among the first batch of general junk to be vaporized and blasted out of the engines is what remains of his body. He’s already recovered all the water and a variety of other complex organics, but there was still a sizable chunk, a kind of little desiccated mummy of himself, that he had stacked with other junk.
He looks at it now; it looks like a little, wrinkled prune of himself, not even close to what he looked like. But there was a time… he finds himself thinking that just maybe he is going to miss having a body more than he thought he would.
Oh, well, Earth needed saving, terrestrial life needs a terraformed solar system, and anyway he’s enjoyed too much about this voyage to wish it hadn’t happened. Still, it’s a little too much, emotionally, to just throw out his body with some galley leavings and old bolts. It takes him only a few moments to get some spare instrument access covers and weld them together into a casket, and to put the body in that.
He makes it the first shot; an He-3 pellet is laserfused below it, the expanding plasma is squashed, elongated, accelerated within the central tower, another laser heats the plasma that whirls up the tube—and his body leaves the solar system as a miles-long wisp of stripped ions moving at close to light speed. A few of those ions will undoubtedly fall down into some sun or other; mostly, they will gradually reacquire electrons, lose energy in their rare collisions, and become atoms drifting through the galaxy.
It seems like a good way to go. And now that he feels better, he begins to heave iron in with a will. He has places to go.
He plans a fast drop in, much faster than can be achieved with the sun’s gravity alone. Then he will whip around the sun, taking the heat inside Mercury’s orbit, orbiting retrograde (opposite the direction the planets go) in order to pop out and use the gravity of Mercury to slow him first, then anothe
r braking swing by Venus… from here to Earth in about three weeks, all told. It’s another leap in human abilities—along with the all-but-over-night industrialization of the solar system, and for that matter the fact that Louie himself is currently running on a bit over two thirds of the computing capacity in the solar system, with Louie-on-the-moon making more all the time….
It’s not the world it used to be… and that’s okay, he’s not the Louie he was. And he’s got more to say about what this new world will be like than he did about the old one.
The fusion engines are blazing now, the many tons of iron vaporized every second leaving the hundred towers—fifty times as high as the World Trade Center—as great white-hot plumes at near light speed. If there were naked eyes to see it, the plasma trail extends one hundred thousand miles out, but whoever had those naked eyes had better not be standing on the surface—2026RU is boosting at an acceleration that is more than high enough to overcome its own gravity; if you stood on the side with the towers, you would fall off; if you stood on the other side, you would sink into the snow. The robot treaded tractors, busy laying in mirroring and insulation, still occasionally jam into place, even with their very broad, flat treads.
By the time he recrosses Neptune’s orbit on September 19—the “real” boundary of the solar system, since Pluto and Charon are pretty clearly captured cometoids, like 2026RU but much larger—there’re all kinds of jammed junk sunk in the ice, and he’s been strongly reminded that amorphous water ice, like plate glass and some rocks, is really a very slowflowing fluid—under the 2.3 g’s he’s been running, 2026RU has dribbled slowly like an ice-cream cone on a warm day, forcing him to shore up the thrust towers and do a lot of re-engineering as lines and internal struts break and warp. At least, as the iron core slowly sinks through the ice, it gets closer to the engines and to the spare-parts manufacturing operations he runs from engine waste heat.
