“Kepler, are you coming?”
Zhenyi was standing on the platform, waving. She had on a different dress, a qipao, high-collared and close-fitting. It suited her facial features wonderfully. One day he’d have to ask her if she was born that way. Or would that be rude? Constructing a body according to your own design had long ago stopped being considered decadent.
“I’m coming,” he said, standing up and walking up the steps.
“This way.”
Zhenyi led him into the interior of the house. It was strange. The house consisted of two bedrooms and the combined living room and kitchen. Shouldn’t Zhenyi have some kind of tech room?
His ex-girlfriend came to a stop in the middle of the house, in the hallway that joined the rooms. She crouched down and placed her hands on the floor. Then a round hatch sprang open in front of her.
“An airlock,” said Kepler.
“Not quite,” replied Zhenyi.
Kepler walked up to the edge. Below him was a dark hole about a meter and a half across. Not again! He stepped back and folded his arms.
“You can either jump or use the ladder, whatever you prefer,” said Zhenyi.
He craned his head forward. There was something like a ladder attached to the side of the shaft. It didn’t look particularly stable, but here he weighed almost nothing.
“The ladder was actually only intended for climbing back up,” explained Zhenyi.
Oh yeah, that was another problem. The long shaft he had descended through didn’t appear to have a ladder.
“How do we actually get back up to the surface?” he asked. “Not that I don’t like it here, but we won’t be able to save the world from down here, will we?”
“Don’t worry, that’s taken care of. But now get in.”
Kepler sighed and jumped. He floated down slowly. It was so dark he couldn’t really tell how fast or deep he sank. So he got a shock when his feet touched the bottom. Zhenyi should be arriving soon too. He could smell her perfume—she had to be close. That reassured him immensely.
“And now?” he asked.
A small culvert opened next to him, about as high as he was. A faint light came from the room beyond it. It was enough to enable him to see Zhenyi, who was feeling her way along the wall on the other side of the shaft. Another opening appeared.
“It takes a little getting used to,” said Zhenyi. “But I beg your understanding. You have to take your clothes off.”
“Umm, what?”
“Get undressed!”
“I... Okay. And you?”
“I’ll undress too. But you’d better not look.”
“I’m a gentleman,” he said. “But what’s the point of this?”
“You’ll see soon enough. Go to the opening.”
Kepler took three steps forward. To do so he had to walk past Zhenyi. Her back was beautiful. It took quite an effort not to look further to the right.
Then he stood at the opening. He instinctively held on to it with his hands so as not to flee. It was disgusting. In front of him lay a tiny room, barely large enough for him to fit into. It was lit with a reddish light. Tubes the width of a finger protruded from the walls, ceiling, and floor, and turned and writhed in the low gravity. They looked like huge earthworms with only one segment. And they were moist. A stringy liquid dripped from their ends.
Kepler shook his head. He couldn’t do it. He took a step back and his backside bumped into something warm. He cried out in fright.
“It’s only me. I didn’t know how to explain it to you,” said Zhenyi.
He didn’t turn around. Panic gripped his throat, but he wouldn’t look at her. He was a gentleman. The thought calmed him, so he held it fast. The image of the slimy worms disappeared into a distant recess of his consciousness.
“You’re not offering me to them as food?” he asked. “Are they going to drip digestive juices on me and then slurp me up?”
Zhenyi’s laugh rang out like a bell. He liked that laugh.
“What a perverted imagination you have! No, Kepler, it’s for communication. What you’re looking at are the Herbae’s roots. These transmit their thoughts around the whole planet. They can also sense our thoughts if we let them make contact. And they can share their ideas with you. You wanted to know how I speak to them.”
“I admit, I’d imagined it a bit differently. Are our conceptual realities even compatible? They live in a completely different world!”
“We now have a good understanding. You’ll see if you get into the chamber. But that took a lot of work. It’s true, their world has nothing in common with ours. The Herbae basically are the planet. They don’t think as individuals, and they don’t distinguish between the vegetation and soil. It’s all one. Because of that, they’ve never had the need to colonize other planets. That would be something like you having the idea of colonizing me. It wouldn’t make sense.”
Kepler grinned.
“Yes, all right. You know what I mean.”
He nodded.
“So, are you going to get into the chamber?” asked Zhenyi.
“I... I think it’s enough you just telling me about it.”
She shoved him gently in the chest. He had to force himself not to look down, but to look into her face.
“You old coward, you haven’t changed a bit,” she said.
That touched a nerve. Hadn’t he just jumped down the shaft? But she was right.
“I can’t tell you everything,” said Zhenyi. “The simulations I’ve made... you need to see them. It’s important.”
“You can have the Herbae compute simulations?”
“Yes. They have an excellent understanding of mathematics. I would even suggest they know more about it than we do, but my limited understanding can’t comprehend it all. And the computational capacity of the network under the surface is enormous.”
“Crazy. I expect we could learn a lot from them. Even just the fact that we’ve found another species after so long!”
“And yet someone deleted the location of the system from the database,” said Zhenyi.
She wiped her forehead. It was very warm down here.
“You need to look at the simulation. I think someone has something against the Herbae,” said Zhenyi.
“Please, can’t you just explain the results to me?” Kepler pleaded. He was much more disturbed by the slimy worms than the size of the chamber. He imagined them creeping into all his orifices. He shivered.
“Do it for me,” said Zhenyi. “Afterwards you’ll get a kiss.”
Now she was trying that tactic. Man, Kepler, don’t fall for this cheap ploy, he thought. But the idea was attractive. They could go back to how they used to be. Not back when they constantly fought, but before that, the happy times.
Kepler wrestled mentally with himself. They were talking about saving an intelligent species, and he was thinking about a kiss. How low could he actually sink?
“Promise?” he asked.
Zhenyi looked at him sternly.
“You know me,” she said.
It was true. She always kept promises if she could. So, there was only one risk—the worms would slurp him up. Or maybe contact with an alien civilization was too immense for his small, male brain to cope with, and he’d be insane when he emerged from the chamber.
Then that was how it would be. He turned around, went to the opening, and let himself sink into the chamber.
He didn’t fall down. Something held him from behind and brought him into a comfortable position. He didn’t want to think about what was holding him. But then he could no longer suppress the thought, because the worms were enveloping him. Slimy threads slid across his belly, his back, between his legs, wrapping themselves around his arms and legs.
Kepler could still move. That was a relief. The Herbae’s roots—because they weren’t worms, they were roots, he had to keep reminding himself—were astonishingly gentle with him. How would it have happened on Zhenyi’s first contact, when the roots didn’t yet k
now the human body? How would the Herbae know how tightly they could wind around a human throat if they had never known the concept of a lung? But maybe they could sense if Zhenyi was uncomfortable, just like they sensed his approach.
He was glad he’d climbed into the chamber. It was the only way he’d really be able to grasp the problem he had to solve. No, wanted to solve. He had invested so much time in the journey that it had slowly become his own problem, not just the Herbae’s or his ex-girlfriend’s. No one messes with Kepler.
Something pulled him from his thoughts. It wasn’t a physical pull. He had to lift himself up, but simultaneously leave his body where it was. It was an impossible task, but he managed it. He drifted. His surroundings changed. It quickly became dark. Stars appeared. He was floating in space, still naked.
Kepler looked around. There was no mistaking it—above him pulsed the heart of the Milky Way, the black hole Sagittarius A*. Earlier, it had been quite modest compared to many neighboring galaxies. But then came the grand unification—first the Magellanic Clouds and then Andromeda had merged with the Milky Way, progressing into a giant elliptical galaxy. Their hearts had united into a truly admirable specimen that no longer needed to hide.
“Watch out. I’m starting the simulation,” said Zhenyi.
He looked around but he was alone in space. Individual stars were now being extinguished in the region surrounding Sagittarius A*. The black hole ate them and grew. Then whole star clusters followed. They too disappeared into the greedy, black, endlessly deep gullet. Sagittarius A* grew and grew. The architects and their assistants had parked hundreds, thousands, millions of star systems in its vicinity, as planned by the Rescue Project, and provided them with the right impetus to plunge one after another into the greedy gullet that guaranteed their end in this reality. The plan enacted by the Convention worked. But why was Zhenyi showing him this? They couldn’t be at the end yet.
And then Kepler understood what frightened his ex-girlfriend. Sagittarius A* became so powerful that it sought out more food on its own. It dragged in the construction site of the gigantic sphere that was later supposed to suck up its energy. It expanded further than ever predicted by any researcher. It emptied the inner regions of the Milky Way and swelled and swelled and swelled.
A black hole didn’t burst when it overate. When it was full, it didn’t have the option of spitting out excess matter. But it could release energy in other ways. A powerful, all-destroying flash of light sped through the core of the Milky Way and right out to the galaxy’s star halo. What took seconds for Kepler would actually take over three hundred kilocycles. But the message was clear. Systems that weren’t far enough away from Sagittarius A* would be obliterated by the light-speed energy pulse.
The result was a powerful quasar in the center of the Milky Way that would provide humanity with an almost endless source of energy. But this planet here would be ripped apart in the process. The unknown system lay too close to the core of the galaxy. The Herbae would die. They had to stop it.
“Thank you for looking at that,” said Zhenyi.
Her voice faded away. The roots withdrew. He was standing on his own two feet again. Kepler exited the chamber and met Zhenyi. Her skin glistened with slime. He probably didn’t look any different. His ex-girlfriend stood in front of him. She took his head in her hands and kissed him. It was heavenly.
Afterward he felt a bit unsteady and had to lean on the wall of the shaft. Where were his clothes? It was so gloomy down here that it took a while for him to find them.
“I don’t know how you’re feeling,” said Zhenyi, “but I always need to take a shower after a session like that.”
“Good idea,” he said.
He had so many questions! Which should he ask first? Are we showering together? No, he already knew the answer to that.
“Your simulation shows that the Convention’s calculations are wrong. It’s monstrous,” he observed.
“Correct. Either the Convention is lying to everyone, or they’ve also been deceived.”
“We have to show them your findings.”
“That’s on the list, Johannes. But are you clear about what that means?”
Kepler groaned. It wouldn’t be easy, not at all. “They’ll have to scrub the project,” he said, “at least the way it’s currently planned.”
“But then the energy of the quasar won’t be enough to keep humanity alive for long. The whole project will come under scrutiny,” said Zhenyi. “The Convention won’t accept that.”
“But if we show them that our greatest dream has finally come true? We’re no longer alone in the universe! The Herbae aren’t like us, but they’re intelligent. We can communicate with them.”
“But we would have to die long before they do,” said Zhenyi.
“Not if humanity moves onto a single planet,” answered Kepler.
“You want to tell our ten thousand brothers and sisters that they should return to a kind of second Earth from their own private star systems, to live as farmers?”
“No one would have to be a farmer. We still have the nanofabricators.”
“I’m afraid most people wouldn’t accept that, Johannes.”
“The alternative is dying out prematurely.”
“No, the alternative is letting the Herbae die for us,” Zhenyi countered.
Kepler was sweating. The situation really seemed hopeless, because he knew Zhenyi was right. It was a romantic idea for humanity to settle on a single planet again, but most people wouldn’t see it that way. And whether it would even work was also doubtful—last time they tried they were still mortal, and yet they still managed to ruin Terra. Humanity had re-formed into smaller groups. They weren’t made for living in large societies. They weren’t grass stems, they were individuals, and this characteristic had become even more entrenched in the last few billion years.
Cycle ZB3.1, unknown system
“Are you coming?”
Kepler turned around again. It had been a brief visit. He would like to have examined the black hole in the core of the planet, but Zhenyi was worried they might run out of time. She waved him over. She was sitting at the controls of a machine consisting of two seats and four large rotors.
He walked across the grass for the last time, and the stems attentively retreated. What he was seeing wasn’t the Herbae. The stems were hardly more than the fine hairs on his skin, which also moved when touched. The life form he had been lucky enough to get to know was the planet itself. He still couldn’t fully comprehend it. He of all people. The second human to make contact with this alien intelligence.
No, that wasn’t true. This system hadn’t been deleted from the database for no reason. Someone must have been here before him. Before Zhenyi. Someone who had kept the knowledge to themselves, and even gone to considerable lengths to make sure it stayed that way. This person must have an interest in ensuring the Rescue Project proceeded exactly as planned. Basically every human was under suspicion. The Convention might even be in on it. But to simply allow an alien civilization, the greatest dream of humanity, to die—not every human would knowingly do that.
The Curies would. Their visit to K2-288Bb was still vivid in his memory. The way they had asked after Zhenyi was more than just curiosity. Where might they be now? Were they on the way to the Convention, or even to Sagittarius A*, to set their plan in motion?
“Johannes? Are you there?”
“Sorry, I was lost in thought.”
He sat down on the seat behind Zhenyi. “Ready,” he said.
She pushed forward a lever to the right of her seat. The four propellers above him revved up to full speed and they were already flying.
“Wow, this is great,” he said.
“Yes, ancient concept, but perfect for these conditions. We only need to go up, and we have atmosphere everywhere.”
He leaned back and closed his eyes. Then something occurred to him. “If you want me to take over from you...” he said.
Zhenyi laughed.
“Do you want to get out mid-flight?”
He looked down. The gravity was still low, but further up it would become more challenging to switch places. “I just wanted to give you the option,” he said.
“Thanks, but you can use the next six hours to rest,” said Zhenyi. “I can also switch the copter over to autopilot. It’s straight up all the way.”
They reached the surface in twilight. Kepler was baffled. He had so far only seen the planet in daylight or darkness. But of course, here at the pole they were in the transition zone.
A stiff breeze was blowing in the daylight zone. Cold wind flowed across the surface in one direction, warm air in the other direction higher up. That was how the day and night sides mutually cooled and warmed each other. The copter wasn’t very well suited to these conditions, so Zhenyi landed it as quickly as possible.
They had agreed to fly on together in the ship in which he had arrived. That pleased Kepler. It meant he’d be able to spend a few virtual centuries with Zhenyi. Virtual, because they would both experience the time on board a lot faster. But it should still be a few weeks, as their destination was the core of the galaxy where the Convention resided.
“Away team to butler, please come in,” said Kepler into the small radio button on his shirt.
The butler replied instantly. “Away team? Have you brought someone with you? The white rabbit, perhaps?”
“I found Zhenyi.”
“Oh, what an extraordinary pleasure. It will be my honor to serve you both on board.”
“Thank you, Puppy, but don’t overdo it,” said Zhenyi.
The Death of the Universe: Hard Science Fiction (Big Rip Book 1) Page 12