Just like his distant ancestors chafing against the close confines of their tanks, he thought, I need to escape. And Noah knew—or his Reach did—that the universe was vast, and that anywhere he might want to flee to was unimaginably far away. And, impatient to be gone, his Reach threw out such long-term plans as cold sleep and generation ships in favour of…
This.
Space is an ocean, in this sense. It has waves and currents, and while there are hard and absolute limits to the speeds that objects can move through space, such limits do not apply to space itself.
When they test Noah’s device, it vanishes instantly. The octopus scientists are split, some hailing this as a success, some as a failure. Their instruments are ambivalent as to what happened because their instruments cannot yet test the principles that they are deploying, a common problem given the leap-of-inspiration nature of cephalopod science.
A year later, however, the signal will reach them from a light year out in the void. The device arrived successfully, having manipulated the expansion rates of the space immediately before and behind it to travel the distance in a matter of subjective hours. No return trip had been planned, however, and the actual signal will be forced to travel the old-fashioned way, under the stern eye of a relativity that does not even realize it has been tricked.
FUTURE
WHERE TWO OR THREE SHALL GATHER
EPILOGUE
Our ship has spread its wings to the light of a fierce red star, great sails drinking in the nuclear light as half our crew run a brief survey of an interesting-looking moon. There is nothing habitable in this zone—planets three times the mass of Old Earth with a hundred atmospheres of pressure on the ground. Not that the pressure alone is insuperable. The octopuses can adapt themselves to that kind of environment readily enough—just like being a kilometre down on the ocean floor—and they could even take me with them, if I asked nicely, but it’s mostly fire and acid down there and we didn’t detect anything on our shopping list, and so why bother? We have the whole universe, after all.
A couple of the outer planets’ moons are another matter. Organic chemistry on one, and some odd little energy traces on another that might be something inorganic but also theoretically alive. Life is always the big prize, sweeter than the rarest element, although usually it’s something right on that boundary between life and complex chemistry. Or something best studied under the microscope.
Although I know better than most that just being microscopic doesn’t mean simple.
Every ship is different, depending on who got the building rights. Ours is cephalopod-made, meaning that our non-aquatic crewmembers traded their lungs for gills for the trip. Swapping back is easy enough these days, after all. We have five different species aboard, plus myself and the other two interlocutors. We are all children of Earth, one way or another, products of the terraforming programme and the Rus-Califi virus and, in one case, a wholly unexpected collision between a corvid genome and an alien molecular catalyst. And we have the artificial intelligences too, and those that are neither one thing nor another. And some of us are children of Nod, as well, either lifelong or just renting space.
The first reports of the survey crew suggest that they have found life, but barely. They will take samples, expand our archives. We might walk the cold surfaces of those moons or swim their subterranean oceans, but we won’t interfere. Some day we’ll be back, a thousand, a hundred thousand revolutions later, to see how they’re getting on. But there is always that slight dissatisfaction, that they cannot know us; that they cannot join us in our endless journey.
Messages are coming in from other ships. The oldest crawl to us at the speed of light, ancient news telling us what our ancestors did, what our cousins found. We mark out some worlds worth revisiting, other hotbeds of nascent evolution that might even now be lifting sensory organs towards the starry sky. We note the passing of our kin and friends; the birthing of new ships; songs and stories and jokes that travel between the stars. Some we appreciate, some are grown so far from us that we cannot follow their meaning. If we met them, though, those other travellers, we would be able to look each other in the eye and see our own reflection. What else is an interlocutor for?
Then the real news comes in.
This is a rapid dispatch, an unmanned probe arriving in-system by wave, crunching space ahead of it, stretching space behind to skip across the interstellar gulfs so fast its own image is left trailing behind it. The energy demands of wave travel mean only the most urgent news gets sent this way and this probe has gone to where its makers knew we last were, then followed our beacons, wave-crest to wave-crest, until it found us.
What can be so urgent? Some of the crew always think of war, when it comes down to this, but what war? What is there to fight over, in a universe that is bigger than even we can ever exhaust, with more of anything than we could ever need? There are no empires in space. If space is an ocean, it is one without shores.
And it is not war. It is discovery.
On a far world, about a far sun, a small ship of our cousins has found something remarkable. Unequipped to properly explore, they have sent for their kin, who can do the site justice: us.
We send for the survey team in a fever of excitement. In a year they finish up their work and return to us, data in hand. What is a year, after all, save an obsolete Earth measure of time? We have all the time the universe has to offer.
The ship is charged by then, and we make our own waves, riding the negative mass across a hundred light years. The process is almost energy efficient now, compared to the early cephalopod experiments.
And we arrive, a century or so after the original pioneers sent off their message probe and went on their way. What is a century, after all, in the eye of the universe? On the fifth planet of this system there is a beacon for us, and in the heart of the beacon is something left just for me.
In orbit, we see exactly why the call went out. Most likely it went to others, too. We’ll have a proper family get together here in a few decades, all the gang back together again; anyone with the interest and the means will be rolling up the fabric of space-time to get here. The more the merrier.
I look at it, and the human in me calls it a fortress seven kilometres across and a kilometre high, a huge star-shaped structure of serrated walls where the indentations carry their own dents, teeth all the way down to the atomic level in fractal profusion. It is dead: no power signatures and the planet itself has lost most of whatever atmosphere it had. It is not native, either. The rest of the world shows no sign of a civilization that might have thrown this up. Someone came here a million years ago and left their mark, and died or departed. Or, just possibly, left something of themselves behind.
We have found someone else, or at least their footprints in the dust. It is the first time, and it gives us hope that it will not be the last.
Down below, our pioneer kin have left a gift and that is where I come in. Their interlocutor wanted to be there for the excavation, whilst being unable to abandon their comrades. Thankfully, for us, that is no hard barrier.
They bring the cryptobiote to me, the dormant culture that they decanted from themselves, that is everything they ever were, all the different lives that have gone into them. When I pour them into me, I am them and they are me, an expansion of my personal history written neatly in the archive of my cells. I have been human, I have been Human; I have been Portiid and octopus and stomatopod and corvid. Now I am another forty-three individuals. I am Yusuf Baltiel and Erma Lante and Meshner Osten Oslam and Viola and Salome. I am many.
We are splitting the ship. Some of us will carry on with our travels. Others will remain here to study as the newly budded ship-child swells and grows. I will decant myself for those who will leave; I will leave with them, and I will stay, and perhaps one day I will meet myself and tell myself about what I learned.
Those who stay prepare for a respectful exhumation of the dead, an investigation of this vast alien ruin. Perhaps w
e will learn where they came from. Perhaps they are still here. One day we will meet living intelligences, and that day the interlocutors will be ready to learn them and learn how to speak with them, and invite them on the journey, if they wish to come.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have tapped quite a few knowledgeable heads to put this one together, and in particular I want to thank my team of Special Scientific Advisors, to wit: Maeghin Ronin, Peter Coffey, Philip Hodder, Nathan Young, Richard G. Clegg, Brian White, Katherine Inskip, Andrew Blain, Stewart Hotston, Winchell Chung and especially Michael Czajkowski for additional help with planetary mechanics and the splendidly inspirational Nick Bradbeer, spaceship design guru extraordinaire. I’d also like to thank Peter Godfrey-Smith for his book Other Minds which proved to be an invaluable research aid.
Above and beyond this elite team of boffins, my thanks as ever go out to Simon Kavanagh, agent of agents, and to Bella Pagan and everyone else at Pan Macmillan who acted on the development of this book in the same general way the nanovirus sped along the evolution of the various critters I write about. I could also not have produced this book (or just about anything) without the constant support of my long-suffering wife, Doctor Anne-Marie Czajkowski.
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meet the author
Photo credit:
Ante Vukorepa
ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY is the author of the acclaimed ten-book Shadows of the Apt series starting with Empire in Black and Gold. His other works include standalone novels Guns of the Dawn and Children of Time and the Echoes of the Fall series starting with The Tiger and the Wolf, Dogs of War, Redemption’s Blade, Cage of Souls, the Tales of the Apt collections, and the novellas The Bloody Deluge (in Journal of the Plague Year) and Even in the Cannon’s Mouth (in Monstrous Little Voices) and Ironclads. He has won the Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Holdstock awards.
if you enjoyed
CHILDREN OF RUIN
look out for
RED MOON
by
Kim Stanley Robinson
It is thirty years from now, and we have colonized the moon.
American Fred Fredericks is making his first trip, his purpose to install a communications system for China’s Lunar Science Foundation. But hours after his arrival he witnesses a murder and is forced into hiding.
It is also the first visit for celebrity travel reporter Ta Shu. He has contacts and influence, but he too will find that the moon can be a perilous place for any traveler.
Finally, there is Chan Qi. She is the daughter of the minister of finance, and without doubt a person of interest to those in power. She is on the moon for reasons of her own, but when she attempts to return to China, in secret, the events that unfold will change everything—on the moon, and on Earth.
CHAPTER ONE
NENGSHANG NENGXIA
Can Go Up Can Go Down (Xi)
Someone had told him not to look while landing on the moon, but he was strapped in his seat right next to a window and could not help himself: he looked. Quickly he saw why he had been told not to—the moon was doubling in size with every beat of his heart, they were headed for it at cosmic speed and would certainly vaporize on impact. A mistake must have been made. He still felt weightless, and the clash of that placid sensation with what he was seeing caused a wave of nausea to wash through him. Surely something was wrong. Right before his eyes the blossoming white sphere splayed out and became a lumpy white plain they were flashing over. His heart pounded in him like a child trying to escape. It was the end. He had seconds to live, he felt unready. His life flashed before his eyes in the classic style, he saw it had been nearly empty of content, he thought But I wanted more!
The elderly Chinese gentleman strapped into the seat next to him leaned onto his shoulder to get a look out the window. “Wow,” the old one said. “We are coming in very fast, it seems.”
The white jumble hurtled toward them. Fred said weakly, “I was told we shouldn’t look.”
“Who would say that?”
Fred couldn’t remember, then he did: “My mom.”
“Moms worry too much,” the old man said.
“Have you done this before?” Fred asked, hoping the old man could provide some insight that would save the appearances.
“Land on the moon? No. First time.”
“Me too.”
“So fast, and yet no pilot to guide us,” the old one marveled cheerfully.
“You wouldn’t want a person flying something going this fast,” Fred supposed.
“I guess not. I remember pilots, though. They seemed safer.”
“But we were never that good at it.”
“No? Maybe you work with computers.”
“It’s true, I do.”
“So you are comforted. But didn’t people program the computers landing us now?”
“Sure. Well—maybe.” Algorithms wrote algorithms all the time; it might be hard to track the human origins of this landing system. No, their fate was in the hands of their machinery. As always, of course, but this time it was too much, their dependence too visible. Fred heard himself say, “Somewhere up the line, people did this.”
“Is that good?”
“I don’t know.”
The old man smiled. Previously his face had been calm, ancient, a little sad; now laugh lines formed a friendly pattern on his face, making it clear he had smiled like this many times. It was like switching on a light. White hair pulled back in a ponytail, cheerful smile: Fred tried to focus on that. If they hit the moon now they would be smeared far across it, disaggregating into molecules. At least it would be fast. Whiteblackwhiteblack alternated below so quickly that the landscape blurred to gray, then began to spark red and blue, as in those pinwheels designed to create that particular optical illusion.
The old man said, “This is a very fine example of kao yuan.”
“Which is what?”
“In Chinese painting, it means perspective from a height.”
“Indeed,” Fred said. He was light-headed, sweating. Another wave of nausea washed through him, he feared he might throw up. “I’m Fred Fredericks,” he added, as if making a last confession, or saying something like I always wanted to be Fred Fredericks.
“Ta Shu,” the old man said. “What brings you here?”
“I’m going to help activate a communication system.”
“For Americans?”
“No, for a Chinese agency.”
“Which one?”
“Chinese Lunar Authority.”
“Very good. I was once a guest of one of your federal agencies. Your National Science Foundation sent me to Antarctica. A very fine organization.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Will you stay here long?”
“No.”
Suddenly their seats rotated 180 degrees, after which Fred felt pushed back into his seat.
“Aha!” Ta Shu said. “We already landed, it seems.”
“Really?” Fred exclaimed. “I didn’t even feel it!”
“You’re not supposed to feel it, I think.”
The push shoving them increased. If their ship was already magnetically attached to its landing strip, as this shove indicated must be the case, then they were safe, or at least safer. Many a train on Earth worked exactly like this, levitating over a magnetic strip and getting accelerated or decelerated by electromagnetic forces. The white land and its black flaws still flew by them at an astonishing speed, but the bad part was over now. And they hadn’t even felt the touchdown! Just as they wouldn’t have felt a final sudden impact. For a while they had been like Schrödinger’s cat, Fred thought, both dead and alive, the two states superposed inside a box of potentiality. Now that wave function had collapsed to this particular moment. Alive.
“Magnetism is so strange!” Ta Shu said. “Spooky action at a di
stance.”
This chimed with Fred’s thoughts enough to surprise him. “Einstein said that about quantum entanglement,” he said. “He didn’t like it. He couldn’t see how it would work.”
“Who knows how anything works! I’m not sure why he was so upset by that particular example. Magnetism is just as spooky, if you ask me.”
“Well, magnetism is located in certain objects. Quantum entanglement has what they call non-locality. So it is pretty weird.” Though Fred was damp with sweat, he was also beginning to feel better.
“It’s all weird,” the old man said. “Don’t you think? A world of mysteries.”
“I guess. Actually the system I’m here to activate uses quantum entanglement to secure its encryption. So even though we can’t explain it, we can make it work for us.”
“As so often!” Again the cheerful smile. “What is there we can explain?”
The moon now flashed by them a little less stupendously. Their deceleration was having its effect. A white plain stretched to a nearby horizon, splashed with jet-black shadows flying past. Their landing piste was more than two hundred kilometers long, Fred had been told, but going as fast as they were, something like 8300 kilometers an hour at touchdown, their ship would have to decelerate pretty hard for the whole length of the track. And in fact they were still being decisively pushed back into their seats, also pulled upward, or so it seemed, strange though that was. This slight upward force was already lessening, and the main shove was back into the seat, like pressure all over from a giant invisible hand. The view out the window looked like bad CGI. Landing at the speed of their spaceship’s escape velocity from Earth had allowed them to travel without deceleration fuel, much reducing the spaceship’s weight and size, therefore the cost of transit. But it meant they had come in around forty times faster than a commercial jet on Earth landed, while the tolerance for error in terms of meeting the piste was on the order of a few centimeters. Their flight attendant hadn’t mentioned this; Fred had looked it up. No problem, his friends with knowledge of the topic had told him. No atmosphere to mess things up, rocket guidance very precise; it was safer than the other methods of landing on the moon, safer than landing in a plane on Earth—safer than driving a car down a road! And yet they were landing on the moon! It was hard to believe they were really doing it.
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