Bethlehem and Others: Collected Stories

by Peter Watts

  System dynamics, now. Lagrange points. Nothing on this side, anyway, even though there are at least three planetary bodies in—whoa, those orbits—

  Our orbit . . .

  By the time I join him in the flesh he’s motionless, staring into the tac tank. A bright dimensionless point floats in the center of that display: Eriophora. The ice giant looms dark and massive to port, the red one—orders of magnitude larger—seethes in the distance behind. (If I stepped outside I’d see an incandescent barrier stretching across half the universe, with the barest hint of a curve on the horizon; tac reduces it to a cherry globe floating in an aquarium.) A million bits of detritus, from planets to pebbles, careen through the neighborhood. We’re not even relativistic and still the Chimp hasn’t had time to tag them all.

  None of those tags make sense anyway. We’re aeons from the nearest earthly constellation; every alphabet, every astronomical convention has been exhausted by the stars we’ve passed in the meantime. Maybe the Chimp invented his own taxonomy while we were sleeping, some arcane gibberish of hex and ASCII that makes sense to him and him alone. A hobby, perhaps, although he’s supposed to be too stupid for anything like that.

  I slept through most of that scenery. I’ve been awake for barely a hundred builds; my mythological reservoir is nowhere near exhausted. I have my own names for these monsters.

  The cold giant is Thule. The hot one is Surtr.

  Hakim ignores my arrival. He moves sliders back and forth: trajectories extrude from bodies in motion, predict the future according to Newton. Eventually all those threads converge and he rewinds time, reverses entropy, reassembles the shattered teacup and sets it running again. He does it three times as I watch. The result never changes.

  He turns, his face bloodless. “We’re going to hit. We’re going to ram straight into the fucking thing.”

  I swallow and nod.

  “That’s how it starts,” I tell him.

  • • •

  WE’RE GOING TO HIT. We’re aiming to hit, we’re going to let the lesser monster devour us before the greater one devours it. We’ll lower Eriophora by her own bootstraps, sink through roiling bands of hydrogen and helium and a thousand exotic hydrocarbons, down to whatever residual deep-space chill Thule’s been hoarding since—who knows? Maybe almost as long as we’ve been in flight.

  It won’t last, of course. The planet’s been warming ever since it started its long fall from the long dark. Its bones will survive the passage through the stellar envelope easily enough: five hours in and out, give or take. Its atmosphere won’t be so lucky, though. Every step of the way Surtr’s going to be stripping it down like a child licking an ice cream cone.

  We’ll make it through by balancing in the ever-shrinking sweet spot between a red-hot sky and the pressure cooker at Thule’s core. The numbers say it’ll work.

  Hakim should know this already. He would have awakened knowing if not for that idiotic uprising of theirs. But they chose to blind themselves instead, burn out their links, cut themselves off from the very heart of the mission. So now I have to explain things. I have to show things. All that instantaneous insight we once shared, gone: one ancient fit of pique and I have to use words, scribble out diagrams, etch out painstaking codes and tokens while the clock runs down. I’d hoped that maybe, after all these red-shifted millennia, they might have reconsidered; but the look in Hakim’s eyes leaves no doubt. As far as he’s concerned it all happened yesterday.

  I do my best. I keep the conversation strictly professional, focus on the story so far: a build, aborted. Chaos and inertia, imminent annihilation, the insane counterintuitive necessity of passing through a star instead of going around it. “What are we doing here?” Hakim asks once I’ve finished.

  “It looked like a perfect spot.” I gesture at the tank. “From a distance. Chimp even sent out the vons, but—” I shrug. “The closer we got, the worse it turned out to be.”

  He stares at me without speaking, so I add context: “Far as we can tell something big came through a few hundred thousand years back, knocked everything haywire. None of the planetary masses are even on the ecliptic any more. We can’t find anything orbiting with an eccentricity of less than point six, there’s a shitload of rogues zipping around in the halo—but by the time those numbers came back, we were already committed. So now we just buckle down through the heavy traffic, steal a gravity-assist, get back on the road.”

  He shakes his head. “What are we doing here?”

  Oh, that’s what he means. I tap an interface, timelapse the red giant. It jerks in the tank like a fibrillating heart. “Turns out it’s an irregular variable. One complication too many, right?” Not that we’ll be able thread the needle any better than the Chimp can (although of course Hakim’s going to try, in these few hours left to him). But the mission has parameters. The Chimp has his algorithms. Too many unexpected variables and he wakes up the meat. That’s what we’re here for, after all.

  That’s all we’re here for.

  One more time, Hakim asks: “What are we doing here?”

  Oh.

  “You’re the numbers guy,” I say after a moment. “One of ’em, anyway.” Out of how many thousand, stored down in the crypt?

  Doesn’t matter. They probably all know about me by now.

  “Guess it was just your rotation,” I add.

  He nods. “And you? You a numbers guy too, now?”

  “We come back in pairs,” I say softly. “You know that.”

  “So it just happened to be your rotation as well.”

  “Look—”

  “Nothing to do with your Chimp wanting its own personal sock-puppet on hand to keep an eye on things.”

  “Fuck, Hakim, what do you want me to say?” I spread my hands. “That he might want someone on deck who won’t try to pull the plug the first chance they get? You think that’s unreasonable, given what happened?” But he doesn’t even know what happened, not first-hand. Hakim wasn’t up when the mutiny went down; someone obviously told him, down through the epochs. Christ knows how much of what he heard is truth, lies, legend.

  A few million years go by and suddenly I’m the bogeyman.

  • • •

  WE FALL TOWARDS ICE. Ice falls towards fire. Both spill through the link and spread across the back of my skull in glorious terrifying first-person. Orders of magnitude aren’t empty abstractions in here: they’re life-size, you feel them in your gut. Surtr may be small to a textbook—at seven million kilometers across, it’s barely big enough to get into the giant’s club—but that doesn’t mean shit when you meet it face to face. That’s not a star out there: that’s the scorching edge of all creation, that’s heat-death incarnate. Its breath stinks of left-over lithium from the worlds it’s already devoured. And the dark blemish marching across its face isn’t just a planet. It’s a melting hellscape twice the size of Uranus, it’s frozen methane and liquid hydrogen and a core hot and heavy enough to bake diamonds. Already it’s coming apart before my eyes, any moons long since lost, the tattered remnants of a ring system shredding around it like a rotting halo. Storms boil across its face; aurorae flicker madly at both poles. A supercyclone pinwheels at the center of the dark side, fed by turbulent streamers fleeing from light into shadow. Its stares back at me like the eye of a blind god.

  Meanwhile, Hakim pushes balls around inside an aquarium.

  He’s been at it for hours: a bright blue marble here, a sullen red basketball over there, threads of tinsel looping through time and trajectory like the webbing of some crazed spacefaring spider. Maybe pull our center of mass to starboard, start gentle then ramp up to max? Break some rocks on the way, suffer some structural damage but nothing the drones won’t be able to patch up in time for the next build.

  No?

  Maybe cut smooth and fast into full reverse. Eri’s not built for it but if we keep the vectors dead along the centerline, no turn no torque just a straight linear one-eighty back out the way we came—

  But no
.

  If only we hadn’t already fallen so far down the well. If only we hadn’t slowed down to open the trunk, all these N-bodies wouldn’t have been able to get such a grip on us. But now we’re only fast, not fast enough; we’re big but still too small.

  Now, the only way out is through.

  Hakim’s not an idiot. He knows the rules as well as I do. He keeps trying, though. He’d rather rewrite the laws of physics than trust himself to the enemy. We’ll be deaf and blind in there, after all; the convulsions of Thule’s disintegrating atmosphere will fog our sight at short range, the roar of Surtr’s magnetic field will deafen us in the long. There’ll be no way of telling where we are, nothing but the Chimp’s math to tell us where we should be.

  Hakim doesn’t see the world like I do. He doesn’t like having to take things on faith.

  Now he’s getting desperate, blasting chunks off his toy asteroid in an attempt to reduce its momentum. He hasn’t yet considered how that might impact our radiation shielding once we get back up to speed. He’s still stuck on whether we can scavenge enough in-system debris to patch the holes on our way out.

  “It won’t work,” I tell him, though I’m wandering deep in the catacombs half a kilometer from his location. (I’m not spying because he knows I’m watching. Of course he knows.)

  “Won’t it now.”

  “Not enough mass along the escape trajectory, even if the vons could grab it all and get it back in time.”

  “We don’t know how much mass is out there. Haven’t plotted it all yet.”

  He’s being deliberately obtuse, but I go along with it; at least we’re talking. “Come on. You don’t need to plot every piece of gravel to get a mass distribution. It won’t work. Check with the Chimp if you don’t believe me. He’ll tell you.”

  “It just has told me,” he says.

  I stop walking. I force myself to take a slow breath.

  “I’m linked, Hakim. Not possessed. It’s just an interface.”

  “It’s a corpus callosum.”

  “I’m just as autonomous as you are.”

  “Define I.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Minds are holograms. Split one in half, you get two. Stitch two together, you get one. Maybe you were human back before your upgrade. Right now you’ve got about as much standalone soul as my parietal lobe.”

  I look back along the vaulted corridor (I suppose the cathedral architecture might just be coincidence), where the dead sleep stacked on all sides.

  They’re much better company like this.

  “If that’s true,” I ask them all, “then how did you ever get free?”

  Hakim doesn’t speak for a moment.

  “The day you figure that out,” he says, “is the day we lose the war.”

  • • •

  IT’S NOT A WAR. It’s a fucking tantrum. They tried to derail the mission and the Chimp stopped them. Simple as that, and perfectly predictable. That’s why the engineers made the Chimp so minimalist in the first place, why the mission isn’t run by some transcendent AI with an eight-dimensional IQ: so that things will stay predictable. If my fellow meat sacks couldn’t see it coming, they’re more stupid than the thing they’re fighting.

  Hakim knows that on some level, of course. He just refuses to believe it: that he and his buddies got outsmarted by something with half his synapse count. The Chimp. The idiot savant, the artificial stupidity. The number-cruncher explicitly designed to be so dim that even with half the lifespan of a universe to play around in, it could never develop its own agenda.

  They just can’t believe it beat them in a fair fight.

  That’s why they need me. I let them tell each other that it cheated. No way that glorified finger-counter would’ve won if I hadn’t betrayed my own kind.

  This is the nature of my betrayal; I stepped in to save their lives. Not that their lives were really in danger, of course, no matter what they say. It was just a strategy. That was predictable too.

  I’m sure the Chimp would have turned the air back on before things went too far.

  • • •

  THULE’S GRADUATED FROM WORLD to wall while I wasn’t looking: a dark churning expanse of thunderheads and planet-shredding tornadoes. There’s no sign of Surtr lurking behind, not so much as a faint glow on the horizon. We huddle in the shadow of the lesser giant and it’s almost as though the greater one has simply gone away.

  We’re technically in the atmosphere now, a mountain wallowing high above the clouds with its nose to the stars. You could draw a line from the hot hydrogen slush of Thule’s core through the cold small singularity of our own, straight out through the gaping conical maw at our bow. Hakim does just that, in the tac tank. Maybe it makes him feel a little more in control.

  Eriophora sticks out her tongue.

  You can only see it in X-ray or Hawking, maybe the slightest nimbus of gamma radiation if you tune the sensors just right. A tiny bridge opens at the back of Eri’s mouth: a hole in spacetime reaching back to the hole in our heart. Our center of mass smears a little off-center, seeks some elastic equilibrium between those points. The Chimp nudges the far point farther and our center follows in its wake. The asteroid tugs upward, falling after itself; Thule pulls us back. We hang balanced in the sky while the wormhole’s tip edges past the crust, past that abraded mouth of blue-sanded basalt, out past the forward sensor hoop.

  We’ve never stretched ourselves so thin before. Usually there’s no need; with lightyears and epochs to play in, even the slowest fall brings us up to speed in plenty of time. We can’t go past twenty percent lightspeed anyway, not without getting cooked by the blueshift. Usually Eri keeps her tongue in her mouth.

  Not this time. This time we’re just another one of Hakim’s holiday ornaments, dangling from a thread in a hurricane. According to the Chimp, that thread should hold. There are error bars, though, and not a lot of empirical observation to hang them on. The database on singularities nested inside asteroids nested inside incinerating ice giants is pretty heavy on the handwaving.

  And that’s just the problem within the problem. Atmospheric docking with a world falling at two hundred kilometers a second is downright trivial next to predicting Thule’s course inside the star: the drag inflicted by a millionth of a red-hot gram per cubic centimeter, stellar winds and thermohaline mixing, the deep magnetic torque of fossil helium. It’s tough enough figuring out what “inside” even means when the gradient from vacuum to degenerate matter blurs across three million kilometers. Depending on your definition we might already be in the damn thing.

  Hakim turns to me as the Chimp lowers us toward the storm. “Maybe we should wake them up.”

  “Who?”

  “Sunday. Ishmael. All of them.”

  “You know how many thousands of us are stacked up down there?” I know. Hakim might guess but this traitor knows right down to the last soul, without checking.

  Not that any of them would pat me on the back for that.

  “What for?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “It’s all theory. You know that. We could all be dead in a day.”

  “You want to bring them back so they can be awake when they die?”

  “So they can—I don’t know. Write a poem. Grow a sculpture. Shit, one or two of them might even be willing to make their peace with you before the end.”

  “Say we wake them up and we’re not all dead in day. You’ve just pushed our life support three orders of mag past spec.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Then we put everyone back down again. So it spikes the CO2. Nothing the forest won’t be able to clear in a few centuries.”

  I can barely hear the tremor in his voice.

  He’s scared. That’s what this is. He’s scared, and he doesn’t want to die alone. And I don’t count.

  I suppose it’s a start.

  “Come on. At the very least it’ll be a hell of a solstice party.”

  “Ask the Chimp,” I suggest.

  His face goes har
d. I keep mine blank.

  I’m pretty sure he wasn’t serious anyway.

  • • •

  THE DEPTHS OF THE TROPOSPHERE. The heart of the storm. Cliffs of water and ammonia billow across our path: airborne oceans shattered down to droplets, to crystals. They crash into our mountain at the speed of sound, freeze solid or cascade into space depending on the mood. Lightning flashes everywhere, stamps my brain stem with half-glimpsed afterimages: demon faces, and great clawed hands with too many fingers.

  Somehow the deck stays solid beneath my feet, unmoved even by the death throes of a world. I can’t entirely suppress my own incredulity; even anchored by two million tonnes of basalt and a black hole, it seems impossible that we’re not being tossed around like a mote in a wind tunnel.

  I squash the feed and the carnage vanishes, leaving nothing behind but bots and bulkheads and a ribbon of transparent quartz looking down onto the factory floor. I kill some time watching the assembly lines boot up in there, watching maintenance drones gestate in the vacuum past the viewport. Even best-case there’s going to be damage. Cameras blinded by needles of supersonic ice or sheets of boiling acid. The whiskers of long-range antennae, drooping in the heat. Depending on the breaks it could take an army to repair the damage after we complete our passage. I take some comfort from the sight of the Chimp’s troops assembling themselves.

  For an instant I think I hear a faint shriek down some far-off corridor: a breach, a decompression? No alarms, though. Probably just one of the roaches skidding around a bend in the corridor, looking for a recharge.

  I’m not imagining the beeping in my head, though: Hakim, calling down from the bridge. “You need to be up here,” he says when I open the channel.

  “I’m on the other side of the—”

  “Please,” he says, and forks me a live feed: one of the bow clusters, pointing at the sky.

  A feature has emerged from the featureless overcast: a bright dimple on the dark sky, like a finger poking down through the roof of the world. It’s invisible in visible light, hidden by torrents of ammonia and hydrocarbon hurricanes: but it shimmers in infrared like a rippling ember.