Adam Roberts - Stone(2002)

by Anonymous Author

  The mechanism by which the Gravity Trench existed – its provenance, history – the exact reason for its break in the middle – all these things remain mysterious. But what was known is that its intense gravitational gradient was not a mass phenomenon. Rather than operating by accretion, as mass did, to create gravity, the Trench was formed by the minute but concerted application of strong atomic force.

  So, I took a stone. Yes, like you. I took several, plucked them from their millennial orbit around the gas giant. They were simple fragments of rock, parts – probably – of a moon torn apart by collision, or perhaps ground to pieces by the tidal forces of some much larger body. Now all that remained of that ancient body was a swarm of miniscule rocks, pebbles, stones. Very much like you. Some were the size of my hand; some of my head. I took a dozen. One, two, three; larger ones; four, five, six; smaller; seven to twelve no bigger than a thumb's end.

  The holographic Tag-matteo smiled, and smiled.

  We – I – wrapped each of these stones about with a filament web; and fitted each one with a tiny processing unit. Then we threw them – one after the other – propelled them away and towards the planet Colar. Their units accelerated them very rapidly, to a significant fraction of light speed; and they hurried into their programmed orbits about the planet. So far there was nothing noticeable about them; they were just more tiny torn-up pieces of old worlds, just more dust specks in the messy environment of space. When they arrived at Colar their units had slowed them again, and they were nothing but slow moving pebbles, stones like you.

  Did you wonder why I chose you to be my confessor?

  The six smallest took up positions, random-looking but carefully programmed, close to the six orbital platforms of this busy world. The remainder adopted planetary orbits of various vectors, swooping round and about the big belly of Colar, from the night-side to the bright sunlight on the day-side and round again. Swinging round and about in forty minutes.

  The processing units knew what to do. I was already resetting my Zhip-pack, already applying my foam (messily, but it is hard to do by oneself). I had done what I came to do, and now I was starting back; machines vented my little chamber and I was in vacuum again, starting the journey back towards Agifo3acca's ship. I had left the system before anything began to happen. To happen . . .

  This is what happened. The units attached to each rock, nothing more than motes upon stones, triggered the action. The filament network, webbing the surface, initiated an implosion based on strong-force, that instantly collapsed the matter of the pebbles into a mathematical point with a brief effective gravitational pull that scaled up towards the infinite. This effect was not as long lasting as the Trench (which has lasted for tens of millennia – maybe much longer). But, then again, it didn't have to last very long.

  Six of these newly created black points, these intense gravitational dots, were nestling against the outside of the six orbital platforms. Each of these platforms – millions of tonnes of metal and plastic and organic matter – collapsed instantly, was crushed and drawn into the notional points. Everybody upon them died straight away.

  The other six stones were in a balanced orbit, each one mirrored by another on the exact antipodean point. At the same instant that the orbitals were destroyed these slightly larger pieces of rock vanished into notional points of infinite gravity. Because they had been orbiting at a certain velocity, their lateral speed and the co-presence of a mirroring point of intense gravity on the far side prevented them from tumbling straight into the planet's core. Had they existed for long enough, of course, this is precisely what would have happened; they would have followed a rapidly spiralling-in trajectory and ended up coalescing into a six-into-zero notional point at the exact centre of the world. But they did not exist for enough time. According to the calculations provided by the hologram of Tag-matteo, they lasted a little under twenty-one minutes – a figure that depended on the intake of matter. It is the 'real' gravitational effect of actual matter that interrupts the quasi-gravitational effect of concerted strong-force, you see. Once these six points had drawn in enough matter – just as the other six stones, that swallowed the orbitals whole – they broke down and dissipated.

  For twenty-one minutes, then, these six points of intense gravity swung around and about the planet Colar, starting to curve inwards a little but not existing for long enough to do more than lose a few tens of kilometres of orbital height. They swung around and about, half an orbit, and they sucked. With what amounted to an infinite force they sucked at the envelope of air that surrounded the world. They drew the atmosphere of Colar entirely away, into themselves, into nothingness. They sucked until all the air of that world had gone.

  DotTech is a wonderful tool; it can preserve life under many circumstances. It can even preserve life in the absence of oxygen for a certain time. But it cannot do so indefinitely. Human life needs air to live. Much of the population of the world, I suppose, was hurled into the sky, torn to tatters by the unprecedented, apocalyptic, world-ending winds that my little stones caused. They died sooner. Others, perhaps indoors, perhaps underground, died later; preserved in a coma-state by the dotTech as long as it was able to do so.

  Everybody died. Which is exactly what I had been employed to bring about, of course. Dear stone, I did it.

  2nd

  Dear Stone,

  I did not think about what I had set in place as I flew back to Agifo3acca's ship. In the peculiar trance of faster-than-light travel I didn't think about very much. Or, no, that is not right: I was thinking about how the whole thing had come together. Off and on, at intervals ever since I had been taken out of the jailstar, I had wondered how on earth I was going to be able to murder sixty million dotTech-protected human beings. The various ways I thought of were all flawed, impossible, useless. Then, guided by my AI, I had found a way; it was a way that utilised a lifetime's research into the Trench. I thought, in my blurred, dreamy way, that it was a strange coincidence that the ship which had assisted me after the breakout, and which had been waiting for me when I arrived in that part of space, had also been involved in a lifetime's research into the Trench. That was what I was thinking.

  I was also thinking, with a certain satisfaction, that if my AI's promises were worth anything, I was about to be given the answers. I had paid a heavy enough price for the knowledge; or the people of Colar, the sixty million people of Colar, had paid a heavy price. I felt I deserved the answer, at least.

  How was it for them? I have wondered that, sometimes, since I arrived here, with you, dear stone. You see this mark here? This is where I broke the skin, and the rib, over my heart; I used you as a club, do you see: I struck at myself. But I only hurt my chest and my hand. Even without dotTech it is hard to hurt yourself. The will goes out of your arm – do you see – when the pain gets above a certain level. There is only scar tissue there now.

  The people here (hello doctor!) have provided me with information about Colar, of course. To begin with I did not consult this, because I thought it would upset me. I was right, of course; it did upset me. But after a while boredom prevailed upon me. I accessed the information, and discovered a great deal about Colar. It was a mostly pastoral world, dear stone; given over to the cultivation of a hundred different grasses and bamboos. The population were pastoral-romantics, and most of them slept outside under the stars. Why not? The climate was moderate, the spin and angle of the planet had been adjusted to iron out the severity of winter and the population adopted dotTech enhancements so as not to feel the cold. They kept flocks of lions and tigers; adapted beasts from the mythical past, with their killing-teeth and wounding-claws removed. Colarians kept huge flocks of these humble, puzzled beasts. Their shepherds sang and wrote poetry. A gentle people. There were cities, of course, because cities are natural to humankind. But they were grass-covered places, with an animal grazing on every roof and much of the architecture made of bamboo. A fragile template. Was that why this world was chosen as a target? The infrastructure
was fragile, howsoever tough the people. Although, of course, there were also many stone houses, and many caverns dug from the mountains, and all the variety and diversity of human existence.

  How was it for them?

  I imagine different groups, or individuals, each time I think about it. Now, as I speak to you dear stone, I think of a group of three. They are covered in a light woolly fur, which (I think) was a common adaptation against the elements. This one is piping a tune on a lengthy tube of carved bamboo. It is how they control the goat-dogs – shaggy horned animals that herd together the shambling toothless predators. That one, here, a tall and bulky male, blows a tune of his own composition down the bamboo flute. The goat-dogs mew and creak out their calls, and hurry around, butting a few straggler lions on the haunches to get them into place. Pull out the view a little: here you can see the whole green space, a forty-hundred-hectare green field, grassy and undulating. Up here, along to the top of this hill, a variety of bamboo has grown into a hollow tree twenty metres tall and two metres in diameter. The top of this plant is a mass of cream-coloured feathery leaves; inside has been adapted as a living space.

  From the top you can see the landscape all around; the hills sloping and rising as subtle as the contours of a human body; the green of the fields, the blue of the sky. This single cloud, here, in the zenith. There it is.

  And there would have been no warning; no screaming in the sky, nothing to see. The great wind would have leapt up from nowhere. Click, like a switch, and a stone like you, my dear one, collapses to a mathematical point, and all the air in the world starts stampeding and tearing and rushing upwards, away. The three shepherds barely have time to register what is going on. They are already airborne, sucked up with the vanishing atmosphere. But the bullying air is ripping back and forth, compelled by the sheer force of the gravity to vector and squeeze into a point no bigger than a dot. No bigger than a dot and in fact, truth be told, infinitely smaller. So the shepherd has one thought; not even a thought, it is only the fragment of a thought, there is hardly time for even that to register. It is "Where is my pipe?' – for the wind has snatched that away and crushed it to dust, and so it does with the human being, it squashes and pulls him in a fraction of a second into a sneeze of red, and then there is nothing. Every cell of their being is whisked away and upwards by the wind that marks the end of their world.

  Or somebody else: somebody in the cellar of their city house. They are down there because there is something down there they want – a bottle of embre, perhaps. She turns her woolly head, because she hears the enormous noise of the wind above. She starts to stumble up the stairs because she wants to know what is going on. But the house above has collapsed in the whirlwind, and rubble blocks the way; just as the earthquake tips her and hurls her down. She lands on her head and snaps her neck, but that is not so grave, because her dotTech immediately sets about trying to resuscitate her: isolates her brain from trauma and as quickly as it can reknits the fibres of her spinal cord and neck bones. She opens her eyes again, and sees the pile of rubble blocking her way. But she can't breathe. There is nothing to breathe. The dotTech does what it can, but she cannot last long. For an hour she is given consciousness (the dotTech knows its limits; it is smart but it cannot solve the larger problem. But perhaps she can, so it grants her the space to try and do so). But when it is apparent that she is failing, that her body is collapsing, the dotTech puts her back into coma. And it is in this state, fifty or a hundred hours later, that she dies.

  Or somebody else: there are four or five major mountain chains on this world, and they are riddled throughout with caverns and dwellings. Many people are in these when the winds start; some torn from the doorways and cave-mouths, others ping-ponged about the corridors by the burly, rushing evacuation of air. Some manage to close doors, to trap a roomful of precious air inside. They are the lucky ones. But what can they do? Outside their door the world has been freeze-dried, its surface now as airless as its long-dead moon. People will come, but nobody can come in time. There are six of them in this small space; they will use up the air. When the seriousness of their situation becomes apparent to them they make a concerted decision; they request their dotTech to put them into a coma, to conserve the air. And so they all lie down, and so all of them perish a hundred or two hundred hours later.

  Afterwards I came by the following statistics (I'll explain how in a little while); there were 61,765,002 human beings alive on Colar the second before the strong-force webs were activated on my little orbiting stones. Then 52,798,650 died at once, or within a few minutes, mostly in the tempest of atmospheric turbulence my devices caused. The difference was 8,966,352. Of those, 8,966,304 died during a period of time between one hour and three hundred hours, trapped in rooms and cellars, some (amazingly) even outside, but not swept up by the gales. They all, though, died eventually. Forty-eight survived the immediate catastrophe. Forty-one of these were in a single elevator car, travelling up from the surface at the time. They were lucky. Two other elevator cars were travelling at the same time; one was close to docking and was simply drawn into the black-hole point that consumed its orbital; another was close to the surface, and was smashed to shreds by the winds. This single car was in an exact position, where the would-be-fatal attraction of the collapsed orbital was offset by the tremendous sideswipe of atmospheric turbulence. It shuddered and was ejected into space, hurtling in a trajectory that bent sharply around the newly created black-hole point of its target orbital and away. The people inside, provided with two thousand hours of air under normal conditions as well as food and drink, dropped into voluntary coma and were eventually picked up by a special t'T ambulance craft months later. There were another seven survivors; and these were the most remarkable stories of all. Six of them had been deep in Colar's seas, wearing breathing equipment and protective costumes. There had been thousands of such recreational divers swimming through the oceans and seas of Colar at the time of the catastrophe, but they had all died when the seas boiled away and were sucked after the vanishing atmosphere. These lucky six were all deep enough, and in such positions so as to be trapped by the undersea rock formations around them, to avoid being tugged up into the air. There they stayed, comatised inside their suits until the first t'T rescuers arrived on the scene. The single other survivor had been an archaeology obsessive. He had been building an archaic sublight spaceship in his basement, and had been inside it when the catastrophe happened. He had sealed his hatch and stayed inside, hibernating (for the dotTech helped him do this) for months until the rescuers arrived. The fact that they were comatose, which is to say deathlike, meant that the presence of these seven did not violate the terms of my commission.

  All seven of these individuals requested immediate removal from the dead world. There was a certain amount of discussion, amongst the t'T, as to whether a new atmosphere should be fabricated for the planet. But it was decided, influenced partly by the few survivors, that it was more fitting to leave Colar an airless tomb; to leave the bodies that remained in situ, and to abandon the world. There were plenty of other worlds in t'T space to be colonised.

  Of course, my employers knew that this is what the t'T would decide to do with the world. They knew the t'T.

  My employers. I have used this phrase several times throughout my narrative, dear stone. In fact it is rather misleading. As I discovered.

  I was travelling back, oblivious to all that had happened -except that in my imagination I knew something like this was bound to be the state of affairs. I was still travelling back to Agifo3acca's spaceship when the t'T first became aware of what had happened on Colar. There were not many visitors to this world, but a few people came, and found no orbitals waiting to collect them. None of them carried the chips to build their own ships, so they had no option but to travel back whence they came. Something was wrong; and teams of t'T started arriving.

  It was a mystery. There was no clue as to what catastrophe had destroyed the world. My stones, collapsed into gr
avitationally intense points, had themselves dissipated with the influx of matter. An hour after they had been activated, they had simply ceased to be.

  I sound almost proud of myself, don't I, my dear stone? Well, it was a complex problem, a series of technical difficulties that I overcame (with a little help) to a very satisfactory degree. Wouldn't you say?

  In the Library

  1st

  So, dear Stone,

  I was back in Agifo3acca's hangar, being washed clean of foam. For a while I simply lay there. I felt that the solvent was doing more than washing my outside clean; I felt that it was somehow cleansing me inside as well – I mean, rendering me metaphorically clean.

  He provided me with food and drink, and left me alone. I draped the smart fabric around myself, fiddled with its button to make it into a sort of poncho. I sat, ate, drank. The strangest thing. I felt a renewed intensity, a pure pleasure, in doing these simple things because I knew that so many people had been blotted out. They would never eat again, and that somehow added savour to my food.

  Then I slept; and woke feeling a little more usual, a little less transcendentally pure. I wandered for a while through the corridors of Agifo3acca's ship, until I chanced upon him in his prayer room.

  'I would ask you,' he said, as he rose slowly to his feet from his position of genuflection to his fraction-God, 'not to disturb me in here.'

  'My job is completed,' I said. 'I have done the thing my employers – our,' I added, pointedly, 'employers – required.'

  Agifo3acca angled his head. It seemed to say 'Good'.

  I looked at him. 'Have you heard?'

  'Heard what?' But his mock ignorance did not fool me.

  I smiled at him. 'Surely you are pleased that my mission has been accomplished. That it has been a success.'