Worlds Enough & Time

by Dan Simmons

  Once settled in their chairs, the Ousters seemed to be studying their five Spectrum Helix counterparts—Dem Lia, Den Soa, Patek Georg, the psychologist Peter Delen Dem Tae, and Ces Ambre, an attractive woman with short white hair, her hands now folded neatly on her lap. The former teacher had insisted in dressing in her full robe and cowl of blue, but a few tabs of stiktite sewn at strategic places kept the garment from billowing at each movement or ballooning up off the floor.

  The Ouster delegation was an interesting assortment of types. On the left, in the most elaborately constructed low-g chair, was a true space-adapted Ouster. Introduced as Far Rider, he was almost four meters tall—making Dem Lia feel even shorter than she was, the Spectrum Helix people always having been generally short and stocky, not through centuries on high-g planets, just because of the genetics of their founders—and the space-adapted Ouster looked far from human in many other ways. Arms and legs were mere long, spidery attachments to the thin torso. The man’s fingers must have be twenty centimeters long. Every square centimeter of his body—appearing almost naked under the skintight sweat-coolant, compression layer—was covered with a self-generated forcefield, actually an enhancement of the usual human body aura, which kept him alive in hard vacuum. The ridges above and beneath his shoulders were permanent arrays for extending his forcefield wings to catch the solar wind and magnetic fields. Far Rider’s face had been genetically altered far from basic human stock: the eyes were black slits behind bulbous, nictitating membranes; he had no ears but a gridwork on the side of his head suggested the radio receiver; his mouth was the narrowest of slits, lipless—he communicated through radio transmitting glands in his neck.

  The Spectrum Helix delegation had been aware of this Ouster adaptation and each was wearing a subtle hearplug, which in addition to picking up Far Rider’s radio transmissions, allowed them to communicate with their AI’s on a secure tightband.

  The second Ouster was partially adapted to space, but clearly more human. Three meters tall, he was thin and spidery, but the permanent field of forcefield ectoplasmic skin was missing, his eyes and face were thin and boldly structured, he had no hair—and he spoke early Web English with very little accent. He was introduced as Chief Branchman and historian Keel Redt, and it was obvious that he was the chosen speaker for the group, if not its actual leader.

  To the Chief Branchman’s left was a Templar—a young woman with the hairless skull, fine bone structure, vaguely Asian features, and large eyes common to Templars everywhere—wearing the traditional brown robe and hood. She introduced herself as the True Voice of the Tree Reta Kasteen and her voice was soft and strangely musical.

  When the Spectrum Helix contingent had introduced themselves, Dem Lia noticed the two Ousters and the Templar spending a few extra seconds staring at Ces Ambre, who smiled back pleasantly.

  “How is it that you have come so far in such a ship?” asked Chief Branchman Keel Redt.

  Dem Lia explained their decision to start a new colony of the Amoiete Spectrum Helix far from Aenean and human space. There was the inevitable question about the origins of the Amoiete Spectrum Helix culture and Dem Lia told the story as succinctly as possible.

  “So if I understand you correctly,” said True Voice of the Tree Reta Kesteen, the Templar, “your entire social structure is based upon an opera—a work of entertainment—that was performed only once, more than six hundred standard years ago.”

  “Not the entire social structure,” Den Soa responded to her Templar counterpart. “Cultures grow and adapt themselves to changing conditions and imperatives, of course. But the basic philosophical bedrock and structure of our culture was contained in that one performance by the philosopher-composer-poet-holistic artist, Halpul Amoiete.”

  “And what did this…poet…think of a society being built around his single multimedia opera?” asked the Chief Branchman.

  It was a delicate question, but Dem Lia just smiled and said, “We’ll never know. Citizen Amoiete died in a mountain climbing accident just a month after the opera was performed. The first Spectrum Helix communities did not appear for another twenty standard years.”

  “Do you worship this man?” asked Chief Branchman Keel Redt.

  Ces Ambre answered, “No. None of the Spectrum Helix people have ever deified Halpul Amoiete, even though we have taken his name as part of our society’s. We do, however, respect and try to live up to the values and goals for human potential which he communicated in his art through that single, extraordinary Spectrum Helix performance.”

  The Chief Branchman nodded as if satisfied.

  Saigyō’s soft voice whispered in Dem Lia’s ear. “They are broadcasting both visual and audio on a very tight coherant band which is being picked up by the Ousters outside and being rebroadcast to the forest ring.”

  Dem Lia looked at the three sitting across from her, finally resting her gaze on Far Rider, the completely space-adapted Ouster. His human eyes were essentially invisible behind the gogglelike, polarized, and nictitating membranes that made him look almost insectoid. Saigyō had tracked Dem Lia’s gaze and his voice whispered in her ear again. “Yes. He is the one broadcasting.”

  Dem Lia steepled her fingers and touched her lips, better to conceal the subvocalizing. “You’ve tapped into their tightbeam?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Saigyō. “Very primitive. They’re broadcasting just the video and audio of this meeting, no data subchannels or return broadcasts from either the Ousters near us or from the forest ring.”

  Dem Lia nodded ever so slightly. Since the Helix was also carrying out complete holocoverage of this meeting, including infrared study, magnetic resonance analysis of brain function, and a dozen other hidden but intrusive observations, she could hardly blame the Ousters for recording the meeting. Suddenly her cheeks reddened. Infrared. Tightbeam physical scans. Remote neuro-MRI. Certainly the fully space-adapted Ouster could see these probes—the man, if man he still was, lived in an environment where he could see the solar wind, sense the magnetic-field lines, and follow individual ions and even cosmic rays as they flowed over and under and through him in hard vacuum. Dem Lia subvocalized, “Shut down all of our solarium sensors except the holocameras.”

  Saigyō’s silence was his assent.

  Dem Lia noticed Far Rider suddenly blinking as if someone had shut off blazing lights that had been shining in his eyes. The Ouster then looked at Dem Lia and nodded slightly. The strange gap of a mouth, sealed away from the world by the layer of forcefield and clear ectodermal skin plasma, twitched in what the Spectrum woman thought might be a smile.

  It was the young Templar, Reta Kasteen, who had been speaking. “…so you see we passed through what was becoming the Worldweb and left human space about the time the Hegemony was establishing itself. We had departed the Centauri system some time after the original Hegira had ended. Periodically, our seedship would drop into real space—the Templars joined us from God’s Grove on our way out—so we had fatline news and occasional firsthand information of what the interstellar Worldweb society was becoming. We continued outbound.”

  “Why so far?” asked Patek Georg.

  The Chief Branchman answered, “Quite simply, the ship malfunctioned. It kept us in deep cryogenic fugue for centuries while its programming ignored potential systems for an orbital worldtree. Eventually, as the ship realized its mistake—twelve hundred of us had already died in fugue crèches never designed for such a lengthy voyage—the ship panicked and began dropping out of Hawking space at every system, finding the usual assortment of stars that could not support our Templar-grown tree ring or that would have been deadly to Ousters. We know from the ship’s records that it almost settled us in a binary system consisting of a black hole which was gorging on its close red giant neighbor.”

  “The accretion disk would have been pretty to watch,” said Den Soa with a weak smile.

  The Chief Branchman showed his own thin-lipped smile. “Yes, in the weeks or months we would have had before
it killed us. Instead, working on the last of its reasoning power, the ship made one more jump and found the perfect solution—this double system, with the white star heliosphere we Ousters could thrive in, and a tree ring already constructed.”

  “How long ago was that?” asked Dem Lia.

  “Twelve hundred and thirty-some standard years,” broadcast Far Rider.

  The Templar woman leaned forward and continued the story. “The first thing we discovered was that this forest ring had nothing to do with the biogenetics we had developed on God’s Grove to build our own beautiful, secret startrees. This DNA was so alien in its alignment and function that to tamper with it might have killed the entire forest ring.”

  “You could have started your own forest ring growing in and around the alien one,” said Ces Ambre. “Or attempted a startree sphere as other Ousters have done.”

  The True Voice of the Tree Reta Kasteen nodded. “We had just begun attempting that—and diversifying the protogene growth centers just a few hundred kilometers from where we had parked the seedship in the leaves and branches of the alien ring, when…” She paused as if searching for the right words.

  “The Destroyer came,” broadcast Far Rider.

  “The Destroyer being the ship we observe approaching your ring now?” asked Patek Georg.

  “Same ship,” broadcast Far Rider. The two syllables seemed to have been spat out.

  “Same monster from hell,” added the Chief Branchman.

  “It destroyed your seedship,” said Dem Lia, confirming why the Ousters seemed to have no metal and why there was no Templar-grown forest ring braiding this alien one.

  Far Rider shook his head. “It devoured the seedship, along with more than twenty-eight thousand kilometers of the tree ring itself—every leaf, fruit, oxygen pod, water tendril—even our protogene growth centers.”

  “There were far fewer purely space-adapted Ousters in those days,” said Reta Kasteen. “The adapted ones attempted to save the others, but many thousands died on that first visit of the Destroyer…the Devourer…the Machine. We obviously have many names for it.”

  “Ship from hell,” said the Chief Branchman, and Dem Lia realized that he was almost certainly speaking literally, as if a religion had grown up based upon hating this machine.

  “How often does it come?” asked Den Soa.

  “Every fifty-seven years,” said the Templar. “Exactly.”

  “From the red giant system?” said Den Soa.

  “Yes,” broadcast Far Rider. “From the hell star.”

  “If you know its trajectory,” said Dem Lia, “can’t you know far ahead of time the sections of your forest ring it will…devastate, devour? Couldn’t you just not colonize, or at the very least evacuate, those areas? After all, most of the tree ring has to be unpopulated…the ring’s surface area has to be equal to more than half a million Old Earths or Hyperions.”

  Chief Branchman Keel Redt showed his thin smile again. “About now—some seven or eight standard days out—the Destroyer, for all its mass, not only completes its deceleration cycle, but carries out complicated maneuvers that will take it to some populated part of the ring. Always a populated area. A hundred and four years ago, its final trajectory took it to a massing of O2 pods where more than twenty million of our non-fully-space-adapted Ousters had made their homes, complete with travel tubes, bridges, towers, city-sized platforms, and artificially grown life-support pods that had been under slow construction for more than six hundred standard years.”

  “All destroyed,” said True Voice of the Tree Reta Kasteen with sorrow in her voice. “Devoured. Harvested.”

  “Was there much loss of life?” asked Dem Lia, her voice quiet.

  Far Rider shook his head and broadcast, “Millions of fully space-adapted Ousters rallied to evacuate the oxygen-breathers. Fewer than a hundred died.”

  “Have you tried to communicate with the…machine?” asked Peter Delen Dem Tae.

  “For centuries,” said Reta Kasteen, her voice shaking with emotion. “We’ve used radio, tightbeam, maser, the few holo transmitters we still have, Far Rider’s people have even used their wingfields—by the thousands—to flash messages in simple, mathematical code.”

  The five Amoiete Spectrum Helix people waited.

  “Nothing,” said the Chief Branchman in a flat voice. “It comes, it chooses its populated section of the ring, and it devours. We have never had a reply.”

  “We believe that it is completely automated and very ancient,” said Reta Kasteen. “Perhaps millions of years old. Still operating on programming developed when the alien ring was built. It harvests these huge sections of the ring, limbs, branches, tubules with millions of gallons of tree-ring manufactured water…then returns to the red star system and, after a pause, returns our way again.”

  “We used to believe that there was a world left in that red giant system,” broadcast Far Rider. “A planet which remains permanently hidden from us on the far side of that evil sun. A world which built this ring as its food source, probably before their G2 sun went giant, and which continues to harvest in spite of the misery it causes us. No longer. There is no such planet. We now believe that the Destroyer acts alone, out of ancient, blind programming, harvesting sections of the ring and destroying our settlements for no reason. Whatever or whoever lived in the red giant system has long since fled.”

  Dem Lia wished that Kem Loi, their astronomer was there. She knew that she was on the command deck watching. “We saw no planets during our approach to this binary system,” said the green-banded commander. “It seems highly unlikely that any world that could support life would have survived the transition of the G2 star to the red giant.”

  “Nonetheless, the Destroyer passes very close to that terrible red star on each of its voyages,” said the Ouster Chief Branchman. “Perhaps some sort of artificial environment remains—a space habitat—hollowed-out asteroids. An environment which requires this plant ring for its inhabitants to survive. But it does not excuse the carnage.”

  “If they had the ability to build this machine, they could have simpy fled their system when the G2 sun went critical,” mused Patek Georg. The red band looked at Far Rider. “Have you tried to destroy the machine?”

  The lipless smile beneath the ectofield twitched lizard-wide on Far Rider’s strange face. “Many times. Scores of thousands of true Ousters have died. The machine has an energy defense that lances us to ashe at approximately one hundred thousand klicks.”

  “That could be a simple meteor defense,” said Dem Lia.

  Far Rider’s smile broadened so that it was very terrible. “If so, it suffices as a very efficient killing device. My father died in the last attack attempt.”

  “Have you tried traveling to the red giant system?” asked Peter Delen.

  “We have no spacecraft left,” answered the Templar.

  “On your own solar wings then?” asked Peter, obviously doing the math in his head on the time such a round trip would take. Years—decades at solar sailing velocities—but well within an Ouster’s life span.

  Far Rider moved his hand with its elongated fingers in a horizontal chop. “The heliosphere turbulance is too great. Yet we have tried hundreds of times—expeditions upon which scores depart and none or only a few return. My brother died on such an attempt six of your standard years ago.”

  “And Far Rider himself was terribly hurt,” said Reta Kasteen softly. “Sixty-eight of the best deep spacers left—two returned. It took all of what remains of our medical science to save Far Rider’s life, and that meant two years in recovery pod nutrient for him.”

  Dem Lia cleared her throat. “What do you want us to do?”

  The two Ousters and the Templar leaned forward. Chief Branchman Keel Redt spoke for all of them. “If, as you believe, as we have become convinced, that there is no inhabited world left in the red giant system, kill the destroyer now. Annihilate the harvesting machine. Save us from this mindless, obsolete, and endless scourge. We
will reward you as handsomely as we can—foods, fruits, as much water as you need for your voyage, advanced genetic techniques, our knowledge of nearby systems, anything.”

  The Spectrum Helix people glanced at one another. Finally Dem Lia said, “If you are comfortable here, four of us would like to excuse ourselves for a short time to discuss this. Ces Ambre would be delighted to stay with you and talk if you so wish.”

  The Chief Branchman made a gesture with both long arms and huge hands. “We are completely comfortable. And we are more than delighted to have this chance to talk to the venerable M. Ambre—the woman who saw the husband of Aenea.”

  Dem Lia noticed that the young Templar, Reta Kasteen, looked visibly thrilled at the prospect.

  “And then you will bring us your decision, yes?” radioed Far Rider, his waxy body, huge eyeshields, and alien physiology giving Dem Lia a slight chill. This was a creature that fed on light, tapped enough energy to deploy electromagnetic solar wings hundreds of kilometers wide, recycled his own air, waste, and water, and lived in an environment of absolute cold, heat, radiation, and hard vacuum. Humankind had come a long way from the early hominids in Africa on Old Earth.

  And if we say no, thought Dem Lia, three-hundred-thousand-some angry space-adapted Ousters just like him might descend on our spinship like the angry Hawaiians venting their wrath on Captain James Cook when he caught them pulling the nails from the hull of his ship. The good captain ended up not only being killed horribly, but having his body eviscerated, burned, and boiled into small chunks. As soon as she thought this, Dem Lia knew better. These Ousters would not attack the Helix. All of her intuition told her that. And if they do, she thought, our weaponry will vaporize the lot of them in two point six seconds. She felt guilty and slightly nauseated at her own thoughts as she made her farewells and took the lift down to the command deck with the other three.

  “YOU saw him,” said True Voice of the Tree Reta Kasteen a little breathlessly. “Aenea’s husband?”