by Greg Egan
One cycling image on the wall rehearsed the launch in slow motion, showing the crest of electromagnetic energy coursing down the barrel, field lines bunched tightly like a strange coiled spring. A changing electric field induced a magnetic field; a changing magnetic field induced an electric field. In free space such a change would spread at the speed of light – would be light, of some frequency or other – but the tailored geometry and currents of the barrel kept the wave reined in, always in step with the seed, devoted to the task of urging this precious cargo forward.
“If this screws up,” Qing observed forlornly, “we’ll be the laughing stock of the century.”
“You don’t think Beijing’s prepared for a cover-up?” Ikat joked.
“Some jealous fucker would catch us out,” Qing replied. “I’ll bet every dish on Earth is tuned to the seed’s resonant frequency. If they get no echo, we’ll all be building toilet blocks in Aksai Chin.”
It was 11.58 in Tonga, Tokelau and Procellarum. Ikat took Qing’s hand and squeezed it. “Relax,” she said. “The worst you’ll come to is building synchrotrons for eccentric billionaires in Kowloon.”
Qing said, “You’re cutting off my circulation.”
The room fell silent; a synthetic voice from the control room counted down the seconds. Ikat felt light-headed. The six test firings had worked, but who knew what damage they’d done, what stresses they’d caused, what structures they’d weakened? Lots of people, actually; the barrel was packed with instrumentation to measure exactly those things, and the answers were all very reassuring. Still—
“Minus three. Minus two. Minus one.”
A schematic of the launch gun flashed green, followed by a slow-motion reconstruction of the field patterns so flawless it was indistinguishable from the simulations. A new window opened, showing tracking echoes. The seed was moving away from the moon at sixty thousand kilometers per second, precisely along the expected trajectory. There was nothing more required of it: no second stage to fire, no course change, no reconfiguration. Now that it had been set in motion, all it had to do was coast on its momentum; it couldn’t suddenly veer sideways, crashing and burning like some failed chemical rocket launched from the ground. Even if collisions or system failures over the coming decades wiped out some of the pellets, the seed as a whole could function with as little as a quarter of the original number. Unless the whole thing had been a fraud or a mass hallucination, there was now absolutely nothing that could pull the rug out from under this triumph; in three milliseconds, their success had become complete and irrevocable. At least for a century, until the seed reached its destination.
People were cheering; Ikat joined them, but her own cry came out as a tension-relieving sob. Qing put an arm around her shoulders. “We did it,” he whispered. “We’ve conquered the world.”
Not the stars? Not the galaxy? She laughed, but she didn’t begrudge him this vanity. The fireworks to come in Sydney might be more spectacular, and the dying hawks burning up over Washington might bring their own sense of closure, but this felt like an opening out, an act of release, a joyful shout across the light years.
Food and drink were wheeled out; the party began. In twenty minutes, the seed was farther from the sun than Mars. In a day, it would be farther than Pluto; in ten days, farther than Pioneer 10. In six months, the Orchid Seed would have put more distance behind it than all of the targeted interstellar missions that had preceded it.
Ikat remembered to call her father once midnight came to Beijing.
“Happy New Year,” she greeted him.
“Congratulations,” he replied. “Will you come and visit me once you get your Earth legs, or will you be too busy signing autographs?”
Fake biochemical signals kept the Procellarans’ bones and muscles strong; it would only take a day or two to acclimatize her nervous system to the old dynamics again. “Of course I’ll visit you.”
“You did a good job,” he said. “I’m proud of you.”
His praise made her uncomfortable. She wanted to express her gratitude to him – he’d done much more to help her than providing the accident of her birthplace – but she was afraid of sounding like a giddy movie star accepting an award.
As the party wound on and midnight skimmed the globe, the speechwriters of the world’s leaders competed to heap praise upon Beijing’s achievement. Ikat didn’t care that it had all been done for the glory of a fading empire; it was more than a gesture of status and power.
Only one thing seemed bittersweet, as she contemplated the decades to come. She was twenty-eight years old, and there was every chance that these three years, these three milliseconds, would turn out to have been the pinnacle of her life.
2
The caller was persistent, Ikat gave him that. He refused to leave a message or engage with her assistant; he refused to explain his business to anyone but Ikat herself, in a realtime dialogue.
From her balcony she looked out across the treetops, listening to the birds and insects of the Mekong valley, and wondered if she wanted to be dragged back into the swirling currents of the world. The caller, whose name was Vikram Ali, had probably tracked her down in the hope of extracting a comment from her about the imminent arrival of signals from the Orchid Flower. That might have been an egotistical assumption, were it not for the fact that she’d heard of no other participant in the launch publishing anything on the matter, so it was clear that the barrel would have to be scraped. The project’s most famous names were all dead or acorporeal – and the acorporeals were apparently Satisfied, rendering them even less interested in such worldly matters than an aging flesh-bound recluse like Ikat.
She pondered her wishes and responsibilities. Most people now viewed the Orchid Seed as a curiosity, a sociological time capsule. Within decades of its launch, a new generation of telescopes had imaged and analyzed its destination with such detail and clarity that the mission had come to seem redundant. All five planets in the Prosperity system appeared lifeless, and although there were astrophysical and geochemical subtleties that in situ measurements might yet reveal, with high-resolution maps of Duty splashed across the web, interest in the slightly better view that would arrive after a very long delay began to dwindle.
What was there for Ikat to say on the matter? Should she plead for the project to be taken seriously, as more than a quaint nationalist stunt from a bygone era? Maybe the top brass weren’t Satisfied; maybe they were just embarrassed. The possibility annoyed her. No one who’d been sincere in their work on the Orchid Seed should be ashamed of what they’d done.
Ikat returned Vikram Ali’s call. He responded immediately, and after the briefest of pleasantries came to the point.
“I represent Khamoush Holdings,” he said. “Some time ago, we acquired various assets and obligations of the URC government, including a contractual relationship with you.”
“I see.” Ikat struggled to remember what she might have signed that could possibly be relevant a hundred and twenty years later. Had she promised to do media if asked? Her assistant had verified Khamoush Holding’s bona fides, but all it knew about the Procellarum contract was that Ikat’s copy had been lost in 2145, when an anarchist worm had scrambled three per cent of the planet’s digital records.
“The opportunity has arisen for us to exploit one of our assets,” Ali continued, “but we are contractually obliged to offer you the option of participating in the relevant activity.”
Ikat blinked. Option? Khamoush had bought some form of media rights, obviously, but would there be a clause saying they had to run down the ranks of the Orchid Seed team, offering each participant a chance to play spokesperson?
“Am I obliged to help you, or not?” she asked.
Now it was Ali’s turn to be surprised. “Obliged? Certainly not! We’re not slave holders!” He looked downright offended.
Ikat said, “Could we get the whole thing over in a day or two?”
Ali pondered this question deeply for a couple of seconds. �
��You don’t have the contract, do you?”
“I chose a bad archive,” Ikat confessed.
“So you have no idea what I’m talking about?”
“You want me to give interviews about the Orchid Seed, don’t you?” Ikat said.
“Ultimately, yes,” Ali replied, “but that’s neither here nor there for now. I want to ask you if you’re interested in traveling to Duty, taking a look around, and coming back.”
#
In the lobby of the hotel in Mumbai, Ikat learned that someone else had accepted the offer from Khamoush Holdings.
“I thought you’d be rich and Satisfied by now,” she told Qing.
He smiled. “Mildly rich. Never satisfied.”
They walked together to the office of Magic Beans Inc, Ikat holding her umbrella over both of them against the monsoon rain.
“My children think I’m insane,” Qing confessed.
“Mine too. But then, I told them that if they kept arguing, I’d make it a one-way journey.” Ikat laughed. “Really, they ought to be grateful. No filial obligations for forty years straight. It’s hard to imagine a greater gift.”
In the Magic Beans office, Ali showed them two robots, more or less identical to the ones the Orchid Flower, he hoped, would already have built on the surface of Duty. The original mission planners had never intended such a thing, but when Khamoush had acquired the assets they had begun the relevant R&D immediately. Forty years ago they had transmitted the blueprints for these robots, in a message that would have arrived not long after the Orchid Seed touched down. Now that confirmation of the Flower’s success in its basic mission had reached Earth, in a matter of months they would learn whether the nanomachines had also been able to scavenge the necessary materials to construct these welcoming receptacles.
“We’re the only volunteers?” Qing asked, gazing at his prospective doppelgänger with uneasy fascination. “I would have thought one of the acorporeals would have jumped at the chance.”
“Perhaps if we’d asked them early enough,” Ali replied. “But once you’re immersed in that culture, forty years must seem a very long time to be out of touch.”
Ikat was curious about the financial benefits Khamoush were hoping for; they turned out to revolve largely around a promotional deal with a manufacturer of prosthetic bodies. Although the designs the company sold were wildly different from these robots – even their Extreme Durability models were far more cozily organic – any link with the first interstellar explorers trudging across rugged landscapes on a distant, lifeless world carried enough resonance to be worth paying for.
Back in the hotel they sat in Qing’s room, talking about the old times and speculating about the motives and fates of all their higher-ranked colleagues who’d turned down this opportunity. Perhaps, Ikat suggested, some of them simply had no wish to become acorporeal. Crossing over to software didn’t preclude you from continuing to inhabit a prosthetic body back on Earth, but once you changed substrate the twin lures of virtual experience and self-modification were strong. “That would be ironic,” she mused. “To decline to engage with the physical universe in this way, for fear of ultimately losing touch with it.”
Qing said, “I plan to keep my body frozen, and have my new self wired back into it when I return, synapse by synapse.”
Ikat smiled. “I thought you said mildly rich.” That would be orders of magnitude more costly than her own plan: frozen body, prosthetic brain.
“They caught us at just the right stage in life,” Qing said. “Still interested in reality, but not still doting on every new great-great-grandchild. Not yet acorporeal, but old enough that we already feel as if we’ve been on another planet for forty years.”
Ikat said, “I’m amazed that they honored our contracts, though. A good lawyer could have let them hand-pick their travelers.” The relevant clause had simply been a vague offer of preferential access to spin-off employment opportunities.
“Why shouldn’t they want us?” Qing demanded, feigning indignation. “We’re seasoned astronauts, aren’t we? We’ve already proved we could live together in Procellarum for three years, without driving each other crazy. Three months – with a whole planet to stretch our legs on – shouldn’t be beyond us.”
Later that week, to Ikat’s amazement, their psychological assessments proved Qing’s point; their basic personality profiles really hadn’t changed since the Procellarum days. Careers, marriages, children, had left their marks, but if anything they were both more resilient.
They stayed in Mumbai, rehearsing in the robot bodies using telepresence links, and studying the data coming back from the Orchid Flower.
When confirmation arrived that the Flower really had built the robots Khamoush Holdings had requested, Ikat sent messages directly to her children and grandchildren, and then left it to them to pass the news further down the generations. Her parents were dead, and her children were tetchy centenarians; she loved them, but she did not feel like gathering them around her for a tearful bon voyage. The chances were they’d all still be here when she returned.
She and Qing spent a morning doing media, answering a minute but representative fraction of the questions submitted by interested news subscribers. Then Ikat’s body was frozen, and her brain was removed, microtomed, and scanned. At her request, her software was not formally woken on Earth prior to her departure; routine tests confirmed its functionality in a series of dreamlike scenarios which left no permanent memories.
Then the algorithm that described her was optimized, compressed, encoded into a series of laser pulses, and beamed across twenty light years, straight on to the petals of the Orchid Flower.
3
Ikat woke standing on a brown, pebbled plain beneath a pale, salmon-colored sky. Prosperity A had just risen; its companion, ten billion kilometers away, was visible but no competition, scarcely brighter than Venus from Earth.
Qing was beside her, and behind him was the Flower: the communications link and factory that the Orchid Seed had built. Products of the factory included hundreds of small rovers, which had dispersed to explore the planet’s surface, and dozens of solar-powered gliders, which provided aerial views and aided with communications.
Qing said, “Punch me, make it real.”
Ikat obliged with a gentle thump on his forearm. Their telepresence rehearsals had included virtual backdrops just like the Flower’s actual surroundings, but they had not had full tactile feedback. The action punctured Ikat’s own dreamy sense of déjà vu; they really had stepped out of the simulation into the thing itself.
They had the Flower brief them about its latest discoveries; they had been twenty years behind when they’d left Earth, and insentient beams of light for twenty more. The Flower had pieced together more details of Duty’s geological history; with plate tectonics but no liquid water, the planet’s surface was older than Earth’s but not as ancient as the moon’s.
Ikat felt a twinge of superfluousness; if the telescope images hadn’t quite made the Orchid Flower redundant, there was precious little left for her and Qing. They were not here to play geologists, though; they were here to be here. Any science they did would be a kind of recreation, like an informed tourist’s appreciation of some well-studied natural wonder back on Earth.
Qing started laughing. “Twenty fucking light years! Do you know how long that would take to walk? They should have tried harder to make us afraid.” Ikat reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. She felt a little existential vertigo herself, but she did not believe they faced any great risk. The forty lost years were a fait accompli, but she was reconciled to that.
“What’s the worst that can happen?” she said. “If something goes wrong, they’ll just wake your body back on Earth, with no changes at all.”
Qing nodded slowly. “But you had your brain diced, didn’t you?”
“You know me, I’m a cheapskate.” Non-destructive scanning was more expensive, and Khamoush weren’t paying for everything. “But they can still
load the backup file into a prosthesis.”
“Assuming it’s not eaten by an anarchist worm.”
“I arranged to have a physical copy put into a vault.”
“Ah, but what about the nihilist nanoware?”
“Then you and I will be the only survivors.”
Their bodies had no need for shelter from the elements, but the Flower had built them a simple hut for sanity’s sake. As they inspected the spartan rooms together, Qing seemed to grow calm; as he’d said back on Earth, anything had to be easier than the conditions they’d faced on the moon. Food would have been too complex an indulgence, and Ikat had declined the software to grant her convincing hallucinations of five-course banquets every night.
Once they’d familiarized themselves with everything in the base camp, and done a few scripted Armstrong moments for the cameras to satisfy the promotional deal, they spent the morning hiking across the rock-strewn plain. There was a line of purplish mountains in the distance, almost lost in haze, but Ikat declined to ask the Flower for detailed aerial imagery. They could explore for themselves, find things for themselves. The longing to be some kind of irreplaceable pioneer, to be the first pair of eyes and hands, the first scrutinizing intelligence, was impossible to extinguish completely, but they could find a way to satisfy it without self-delusion or charade.
Her fusion-powered body needed no rest, but at noon she stopped walking and sat cross-legged on the ground.
Qing joined her. She looked around at the barren rocks, the delicate sky, the far horizon. “Twenty light years?” she said. “I’m glad I came.”