Worlds Enough & Time

by Dan Simmons

“But instead of just a Sol-type system, this is a binary system with a red giant and a G-type star and…” I went on to explain the brilliant idea of an orbital forest filled with space-dwelling indigenies adapted to hard vacuum, capable of extending magnetic butterfly wings hundreds of kilometers across, of capturing the solar wind and of braving the magnetosphere shockwaves of space like birds in a hurricane, of a giant, programmed eating machine that came once every so many years in a huge elliptical orbit, from the red giant to the G-star and back again, chewing away at the space-dwelling butterflies’ orbital forest. I explained how the “problem” of the story could be the butterfly creatures’ offer to the Voyager crew—in exchange for just blasting the eating machine with one of their photon torpedoes—of using their nano-machinery to adapt the crew members to deep space, to get them out of their spam-in-a-can existence and into the freedom of flying between the worlds like migrating doves. Some of the crew members would have to want that freedom and Captain Whatshername would draw an Alamo-ish line-in-the-sand to decide who would stay, who would fly…

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” interrupted the producer gently. “I have a question.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What exactly is a binary system?”

  Well, shit.

  In the end, their rejection of my pitch centered not so much on astronomical details, but on their anxiety about the cgi budget of that episode. When I pointed out that the astral butterflies wouldn’t be that expensive—blobs against the usual planetary digital imagery, they reminded me that once these butterflies visited the ship, they’d have to be…well… alien. Star Trek’s view of aliens was human actors with big brows or wrinkly noses or big-corded necks or all of the above. I wanted these huge, insectoid things.

  We parted amicably.

  I admit that I was relieved. I had never seen this little seed particle of an idea as a Star Trek episode. Besides, if I’d been hired to write the damned thing, I would have tried to have the vast majority of the crew desert to become butterflies, with Captain Mrs. Columbo staying behind with her hands on her hips and a few of the top regulars trekking on alone in their Spam can, while the liberated crew flew barrel rolls around the tin-and-plastic-and-carpet spaceship on its way out of the binary system.

  Cut to some months later when Robert Silverberg contacted me about writing a long piece for his proposed anthology. Far Horizons. Bob saw the new book as a follow-up to his bestselling anthology, Legends, in which fantasy authors returned to their favorite fantasy universes to give us original tales. He was inviting SF authors of forest-killing mega-epics to reprise their settings and among the other writers contributing would be Ursula K. Le Guin returning to her Ekumen universe, Joe Haldeman dealing with his Forever War again, Scott Card unearthing Ender, David Brin doing his Wonderbra thing with his Uplift Universe, Fred Pohl heecheeing us again, and so forth. I don’t have many rules governing my career choices, but not turning down opportunities to insert myself in a pantheon of gods is one of them. I said yes.

  Actually, the hard part was summarizing the million or so words of the “Hyperion Cantos” in the “1,000 words or fewer” demanded of the synopsis before my story. The story, of course, was “Orphans of the Helix” and returned my space butterflies, my fallen angels of hard vacuum, to just where they had started—as the mutated human Ousters of the four Hyperion books.

  And the story was accepted. And it was published. And it was good. (Except for the fact that they printed my name as “David Simmons” in the author profiles at the back of the paperback edition, despite my regular whines and whimpers and milquetoast protests to the publishers—who, it turns out, are my editors and publishers at HarperCollins. Perhaps they—and Bob—are trying to tell me something.)

  So that’s it. That’s the story of…

  No, wait. I forgot the most important part.

  How “Orphans of the Helix” made me miss the Ninth Annual Lincoln Street Water Fight.

  Well, sometime after Far Horizons came out, Charles Brown of Locus called to inform me that “Orphans” had won the annual Locus Readers Award for Best Novelette. I’ve won more than a few of these Readers Poll Awards and I admit that they’re very important to me… I mean, with the award comes another year’s free subscription to Locus and my goal has been to receive the magazine forever and never pay for it. (A goal I would have realized up to this date, I should point out, were it not for Locus’s small-minded policy of granting only one year’s free subscription even if the author wins Readers Poll Awards in more than one category that year.)

  So Charles informs me that I’m a winner at about the same time that I’m invited to attend the convention in Hawaii—Westercon 53 in Honolulu, July 1–4, 2000—and I accepted the invitation (a rarity for me, I attend very few SF conventions for reasons of schedules and deadlines.)

  “You what?” said my wife Karen. “You’re going to be gone on the Fourth?”

  My daughter Jane put it more succinctly—“Dad, have you lost your mind?”

  You see, we live in a neat old neighborhood in a not-terribly-large town along the Front Range of Colorado, near Boulder, and some years ago, in 1992, Jane and I had—on the spur of the moment—photocopied a cartoon invitation and invited everyone on our block of Lincoln Street to show up at high noon on Independence Day, in the middle of the street, with water balloons or squirt guns or hoses or buckets or whatever, to participate in the Lincoln Street Water Fight. “Be there or be dry!” read our invitation. About twenty-five people showed up that first year and we had a ball—throwing water balloons and dousing our friends and neighbors for at least an hour before collapsing from exhaustion.

  By 2000, the Lincoln Street Water Fight had grown to include about 75 people. Neighbors canceled travel plans so as not to miss THE WATER FIGHT. Both the east side of Lincoln and the (boo-hisss) west side brought in friends and relatives as ringers to improve their chances during THE WATER FIGHT. Participants included three-year-olds and eighty-three-year-olds. At the stroke of noon on the Fourth, several thousand water balloons (yes, we build and use catapults) are launched and untold gallons of water fill the air as we unleash high-pressure hoses and throw from buckets the size of gondolas. No one wants to miss THE WATER FIGHT.

  And the local event has evolved further since 1992. After the water fight, everyone dries off and wanders down to the local school yard—Central School, where I taught sixth grade for eleven years—and we have a long, fun softball game in the playground, again toddlers to senior citizens participating, while a city band plays Sousa marches in Thompson Park across the street. Later in the afternoon, the neighbors and friends gather for a barbecue, rotating which backyard or front porch will host it. About nine P.M., people wander off—many of us to the nearby golf course—to watch the fireworks display in the fairgrounds just down the hill.

  “You’re really going to miss the water fight?” asked Karen.

  I’d promised to attend the convention. And attend I did. I enjoyed being in Hawaii. I enjoyed the panels and discussions with fans and fellow pros. I enjoyed the conversations with my editors and publisher at HarperCollins who were in attendance. (“The name’s Dan,” I said more than a few times, “not David …” To no avail.) I enjoyed hanging around with Charlie and the Locus people. I enjoyed receiving the award.

  But I flew back to the mainland on the Fourth, catching only the hint of a few remaining fireworks just visible over the port wing late, while flying out of San Francisco, arriving at DIA around midnight and driving home in the dark, my mood as dark as the midnight, knowing what I would find when I woke up the next morning—waterlogged yards, buckets and squirt guns still on the front porch, swimsuits and T-shirts still drying on the shower rod, soggy sneakers on the side steps, a few tiny fragments of 10,000 burst water balloons in the grass where they had been missed during the post-fight cleanup, and our Pembroke Welsh Corgi, Fergie, lying exhausted and water bloated (she tries to drink from every hose during the fight), that July Fifth grin of p
ost-party satisfaction on her face.

  I hope you like “Orphans of the Helix.” I enjoyed returning to the Hyperion universe to see what had happened to some of the distant Ousters and the Amoiete Spectrum Helix people. I hope you enjoy this post-Hyperion glimpse of them. I confess that I have some other Hyperion-universe short fiction in mind for the future. But on the off chance that any win any awards that would be handed out on the Fourth of July—well, include me out.

  In the summer of 2001, not long before I wrote this introduction, we had the Tenth and Best Lincoln Street Water Fight ever. Everyone was there. No one was dry. Later that afternoon, we played softball for hours—no one kept track of the score—while the band played in the park. The barbecue was fun. The fireworks were the best ever.

  You see, as one gets older, one has to decide on priorities. And I have. Literature and travel and fame and accolades are important, but not worth missing the Lincoln Street Water Fight.

  Not by a long shot.

  ORPHANS OF THE HELIX

  THE great spinship translated down from Hawking space into the red and white double light of a close binary. While the 684,300 people of the Amoiete Spectrum Helix dreamed on in deep cryogenic sleep, the five AI’s in charge of the ship conferred. They had encountered an unusual phenomenon and while four of the five had agreed it important enough to bring the huge spinship out of C-plus Hawking space, there was a lively debate—continuing for several microseconds—about what to do next.

  The spinship itself looked beautiful in the distant light of the two stars, white and red light bathing its kilometer-long skin, the starlight flashing on the three thousand environmental deep-sleep pods, the groups of thirty pods on each of the one hundred spin hubs spinning past so quickly that the swing arms were like the blur of great, overlapping fan blades, while the three thousand pods themselves appeared to be a single, flashing gem blazing with red and white light. The Aeneans had adapted the ship so that the hubs of the spinwheels along the long, central shaft of the ship were slanted—the first thirty spin arms angled back, the second hub angling its longer thirty pod arms forward, so that the deep-sleep pods themselves passed between each other with only microseconds of separation, coalescing into a solid blur that made the ship under full spin resemble exactly what its name implied—Helix. An observer watching from some hundreds of kilometers away would see what looked to be a rotating human double DNA helix catching the light from the paired suns.

  All five of the AI’s decided that it would be best to call in the spin pods. First the great hubs changed their orientation until the gleaming helix became a series of three thousand slowing carbon-carbon spin arms, each with an ovoid pod visible at its tip through the slowing blur of speed. Then the pod arms stopped and retracted against the long ship, each deep-sleep pod fitting into a concave nesting cusp in the hull like an egg being set carefully into a container.

  The Helix, no longer resembling its name so much now so as a long, slender arrow with command centers at the bulbous, triangular head, and the Hawking drive and larger fusion engines bulking at the stern, morphed eight layers of covering over the nested spin arms and pods. All of the AI’s voted to decelerate toward the G8 white star under a conservative four hundred gravities and to extend the containment field to Class 20. There was no visible threat in either system of the binary, but the red giant in the more distant system was—as it should be—expelling vast amounts of dust and stellar debris. The AI who took the greatest pride in its navigational skills and caution warned that the entry trajectory toward the G8 star should steer very clear of the L1 Roche lobe point because of the massive heliosphere shock waves there, and all five AI’s began charting a deceleration course into the G8 system that would avoid the worst of the heliosphere turmoil. The radiation shock waves there could be dealt with easily using even a Class 3 containment field, but with 684,300 human souls aboard and under their care, none of the AI’s would take the slightest chance.

  Their next decision was unanimous and inevitable. Given the reason for the deviation and deceleration into the G8 system, they would have to awaken humans. Saigyō, AI in charge of personnel lists, duty rosters, psychology profiles, and who had made it its business to meet and know each of the 684,300 men, women, and children, took several seconds to review the list before deciding on the nine people to awaken.

  DEM Lia awoke with none of the dull hangover feel of the old-fashioned cryogenic fugue units. She felt rested and fit as she sat up in her deep-sleep crèche, the unit arm offering her the traditional glass of orange juice.

  “Emergency?” she said, her voice no more thick or dull than it would have been after a good night’s sleep.

  “Nothing threatening the ship or the mission,” said Saigyō, the AI. “An anomaly of interest. An old radio transmission from a system which may be a possible source of resupply. There are no problems whatsoever with ship function or life support. Everyone is well. The ship is no danger.”

  “How far are we from the last system we checked?” said Dem Lia, finishing her orange juice and donning her shipsuit with its emerald green stripe on the left arm and turban. Her people had traditionally worn desert robes, each robe the color of the Amoiete Spectrum that the different families had chosen to honor, but robes were impractical for spinship travel where zero-g was a frequent environment.

  “Six thousand three hundred light-years,” said Saigyō.

  Dem Lia stopped herself from blinking. “How many years since last awakening?” she said softly. “How many years total voyage ship time? How many years total voyage time debt?”

  “Nine ship years and one hundred two time debt years since last awakening,” said Saigyō. “Total voyage ship time, thirty-six years. Total voyage time debt relative to human space, four hundred and one years, three months, one week, five days.”

  Dem Lia rubbed her cheek. “How many of us are you awakening?”

  “Nine”

  Dem Lia nodded, quit wasting time chatting with the AI, glanced around only once at the two-hundred-some sealed sarcophagi where her family and friends continued sleeping, and took the main shipline people mover to the command deck where the other eight would be gathering.

  THE Aeneans had followed the Amoiete Spectrum Helix people’s request to construct the command deck like the bridge of an ancient torchship or some Old Earth, pre-Hegira seagoing vessel. The deck was oriented one direction to down and Dem Lia was pleased to notice on the ride to the command deck that the ship’s containment field held at a steady one-g. The bridge itself was about twenty-five meters across and held command-nexus stations for the various specialists, as well as a central table—round, of course—where the awakened were gathering, sipping coffee and making the usual soft jokes about cryogenic deep-sleep dreams. All around the great hemisphere of the command deck, broad windows opened onto space: Dem Lia stood a minute looking at the strange arrangement of the stars, the view back along the seemingly infinite length of the Helix itself where heavy filters dimmed the brilliance of the fusion flame tail that now reached back eight kilometers toward their destination—and the binary system itself, one small white star and one red giant, both clearly visible. The windows were not actual windows, of course; their holo pickups could be changed and zoomed or opaqued in an instant, but for now the illusion was perfect.

  Dem Lia turned her attention to the eight people at the table. She had met all of them during the two years of ship training with the Aeneans, but knew none of these individuals well. All had been in the select group of fewer than a thousand chosen for possible awakening during transit. She checked their color-band stripes as they made introductions over coffee.

  Four men, five women. One of the other women was also an emerald green, which meant that Dem Lia did not know if command would fall to her or the younger woman. Of course, consensus would determine that at any rate, but since the emerald green band of the Amoiete Spectrum Helix poem and society stood for resonance with nature, ability to command, comfort with techno
logy, and the preservation of endangered life-forms—and all 684,300 of the Amoiete refugees could be considered endangered life-forms this far from human space—it was assumed that in unusual awakenings the greens would be voted into overall command.

  In addition to the other green, a young, redheaded woman named Res Sandre, there was a red-band male, Patek Georg Dem Mio, a young, white-band female named Den Soa whom Dem Lia knew from the diplomacy simulations, an ebony-band male named Jon Mikail Dem Alem, an older yellow-band woman named Oam Rai whom Dem Lia remembered as having excelled at ship system’s operations, a white-haired blue-band male named Peter Delen Dem Tae whose primary training would be in psychology, an attractive female violet-band—almost surely chosen for astronomy—named Kem Loi, and an orange male—their medic whom Dem Lia had spoken to on several occasions—Samel Ria Kem Ali, known to everyone as Dr. Sam.

  After introductions there was a silence. The group looked out the windows at the binary system, the G8 white star almost lost in the glare of the Helix’s formidable fusion tail.

  Finally the red, Patek Georg, said, “All right, ship. Explain.”

  Saigyō’s calm voice came over the omnipresent speakers. “We were nearing time to begin a search for Earthlike worlds when sensors and astronomy became interested in this system.”

  “A binary system?” said Kem Loi, the violet. “Certainly not in the red giant system?” The Amoiete Spectrum Helix people had been very specific about the world they wanted their ship to find for them—G2 sun, Earthlike world at least a 9 on the old Solmev Scale, blue oceans, pleasant temperatures—paradise in other words. They had tens of thousands of light-years and thousands of years to hunt. They fully expected to find it.

  “There are no worlds left in the red giant system,” agreed Saigyō the AI affably enough. “We estimate that the system was a G2 yellow-white dwarf star…”

  “Sol,” muttered Peter Delen, the blue, sitting at Dem Lia’s right.