Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Halfway through the passenger ferry’s turn, we were sideways on to the arkship’s counter-rotating axis dock, giving me a panoramic view. The dock was a disk, only slightly wider than the Lobby’s toroid we’d left behind. But its apparent rotation was actually holding it motionless as the Salvation spun around its axis. Strangely, it looked like the most human part of the arkship, but then most engineering requirements have a common design solution no matter what kind of neurons create them. As well as possessing a number of airlocks, the dock was used to connect the power utilities. Free-flying human-built stations containing small portal doors, like geometric footballs a dozen meters across, hovered a few meters away from the dock. Their equators glowed with the intense turquoise shimmer of ion thrusters, holding them in position; while thick superconducting cables flexed in extreme slow motion across the gap between the two.

  And they were the whole reason for the trade deals between the Olyix and the Sol Senate. Our solar system was just another stop on the Olyix’s incredible journey to the end of the universe; they’d visited hundreds of stars already, and would visit thousands—millions—more in the future before finally coming face-to-face with their God at the End of Time. Each solar system they came across was a replenishment stop between flights, a time when they used (or traded) local resources to refurbish the Salvation of Life and generated enough new antimatter to accelerate them onward again.

  Accelerating something that huge took energy. A lot of energy. All the various processes that human physicists had ever come up with to create antimatter were horrendously inefficient, converting maybe one or two percent of the energy input into actual antimatter. As the Olyix openly admitted, their procedures weren’t a whole lot better.

  Yet they needed enough antimatter to accelerate the Salvation of Life up to a fifth of the speed of light, then decelerate again as they approached the next star. The arrival of the Olyix was the greatest boon Sol’s energy corporations had ever known. Every wattdollar the sale of alien Kcell technology brought in was spent buying electricity from human companies. A fifth of the solarwells dropped into the sun were currently being used to feed energy to the Salvation of Life, where deep inside its engineering section, alien machinery was churning out anti-hydrogen atoms one at a time.

  The passenger ferry completed its flip, and we backed in toward the Salvation’s axis dock. Latching on was a series of metallic clunks. Then the airlock opened. As I was unbuckling my straps, dry, mildly spiced air drifted along the cabin, at a temperature several degrees lower than the cabin air. Not unpleasant, but definitely unusual.

  The interior mechanics of the axis dock were similar to the Lobby’s layout, but with living branches twined around conduits, sprouting waxy purple leaves. Small birds with ovoid bodies and five fin-like wings flitted along the wide corridors, effortlessly rolling around our delegation as we made our cumbersome way through the rotating seal. The reception chamber on the other side was a big hemisphere cut out of the rock, with a craggy surface carpeted in a dull topaz moss. There were ten wide elevator doors around the rim, made from what appeared to be a glossy honey-colored wood. An Olyix waited for us outside one of the doors, its feet sticking to the moss as if it were Velcro.

  Sandjay, my altme, told me it was opening a general phone link. “Welcome,” the Olyix said. “My designation is Eol, and this body is Eol-2. Please accompany me down to our first biochamber. I am sure you will prefer the increased gravity.”

  Most of us muttered a quick thank-you. There was an undignified surge to get into the elevator, which had curving walls of the same wood as the doors. It rattled and clanked its way downward, traveling a lot slower than any human elevator would. The biochambers were ovoids four kilometers in diameter, so the trip down seemed interminable—especially as Eol-2 insisted on trying to make small talk all the way. It didn’t help that the spice scent grew more pungent as we descended.

  When the doors finally opened, we were in a long rock tunnel, again covered in moss, and lit by bright green–tinged strips at waist height. Gravity was about two-thirds Earth standard, for which Nahuel let out a sigh of relief.

  The Olyix had made a considerable effort to make their human visitors feel at home. Our quarters were on a terrace in the first biochamber; from the outside they looked like rather glamorous yurts. Instead of using a heavy fabric over the frame, the Olyix employed their ubiquitous wood in thin planks, laying them over a geodesic frame like tiles on a roof. Furniture, too, was all solid chunks of wood, its smooth contours making the pieces resemble a collection of slightly surrealist sculptures. Orchid-like plants had coiled their rubbery roots along the ceiling struts, dangling clusters of dark-shaded alien flowers above my head. At least their perfume was sweeter than the spice that hung thick in Salvation’s atmosphere.

  Eol-2 did a perfect host imitation and left us to “settle in” before the tour began. I unpacked my washbag and went into the curtained-off bathroom section. A peripheral ran a fast scan for electronic surveillance, drawing a blank. I hadn’t expected any. The Olyix favored biotechnology solutions.

  The yurt furniture might have been Olyix wood, but the shower, bath, toilet, and basin were all imported from Earth, which was quite a relief. I took my shirt off, washed my torso, and sprayed on a hefty dose of cologne. Somehow I carelessly managed to miss myself quite a lot with the spray. Then I killed time for a couple of minutes setting up my toiletries and filled a couple of glasses with cold water. That gave the chemicals in the cologne spray enough time to numb the neural fibers in the flowering plants on the bathroom ceiling.

  Previous agents had taken samples of the yurt environment for study to prepare for my mission. Our labs had found fibers amid little cuts in the plant roots and leaves that had conductive properties. Without removing a whole plant and cutting it up under a microscope, we couldn’t say for sure what the fibers did and what kind of receptors they were attached to, but visitors seemed to be under some kind of general observation. Ainsley was pleased with that find; it was another strand of proof that the Olyix weren’t quite as trusting as they liked to project. Finding out whether that subterfuge came from a simple natural instinct to protect their biological heritage from human exploitation or they really were up to no good was the whole reason I was in the delegation.

  With a degree of privacy assured, I squatted down and crapped out the biopackage I’d brought along. The human anal cavity has traditionally been a smuggler favorite for most of our existence on Earth. It made me really proud to carry that fine institution on into the starflight era. Yeah, right.

  The biopackage resembled miniature frogspawn, which wasn’t a bad analogy. I split it in two and dropped each half into the glasses I’d prepared. From my little medical kit, I took six indigestion tablets and put three in each glass. They foamed away on the surface, dissolving quickly.

  You could have eaten the tablets—not that they would’ve done anything for your indigestion. However, they turned the water into a perfect nutrient solution; there was also a hormone released that would trigger the eggs into growth.

  That phase would take six hours.

  I shoved the glasses into the cupboard under the basin, then set the cologne bottle to release a spray every quarter of an hour to keep anesthetizing the plant fibers. Wearing a new shirt, and smelling like a Bel-Air gigolo, I went out to join the delegation for our tour.

  * * *

  —

  All the Salvation of Life’s biochambers were ovoids measuring eight kilometers along their axis, with a four-kilometer diameter at their midpoint. The first one, where our quarters were, had a globe of light suspended in the exact center, shining a warm slightly orange-hued radiance out across the whole chamber. Human space habitats tended to have landscapes across the cylinder floor, leaving the endwalls clear. The Olyix biospheres were completely shrouded in vegetation. Trees with fleshy, purple-tinged leaves never grew to the size you found
in terrestrial forests, and there didn’t seem to be much variety, either; to my mind they resembled giant bonsai—dumb comparison, but realistic enough. Their branches tangled together deftly, playing host to dozens of smaller plants, like the orchid-equivalents in my yurt, along with vines and ragged strings of trailing moss that hung in huge curtains. The loam was covered in the yellow moss-grass, riddled with patches in differing shades, making the ground look like an intricately stained mosaic rug. Little streams threaded their way through it all, bubbling down the slopes from the axis to empty into reed-packed ponds that were spread around the equator.

  Humans would have deployed fleets of remotes to trim and maintain the plants. The Olyix with their biological oriented solutions allowed the plants to grow as their nature intended. According to Eol-2, the biochambers had reached equilibrium thousands of years ago. Supplied with light, warmth, and water, they would continue with minimal intervention indefinitely. Small birds resembling overgrown dragonflies buzzed about, while giant snail-equivalent creatures slid along the ground, eating every fallen leaf and leaving a film of rich mulch in their wake. Larger dead branches and trunks were swiftly reduced to powdery loam by a profusion of fungi.

  Our delegation was impressed by the slower, more sedate life on show. I suppose it made sense, given how long the voyage was going to take.

  Eol-2 took us into the second biochamber on a car that could have been modeled on pre–quantum spatial entanglement era human vehicles. It drove itself through a broad tunnel that had junctions every few hundred meters, with tunnels curving away out of sight. Despite a plethora of discreet recordings made continuously ever since the arkship had arrived, humans had never fully mapped out the maze of passages and caverns that riddled the Salvation’s interior.

  The second biosphere was identical in shape to the first. The difference was in climate, which was more temperate, housing a different genera of plants, while the third was the warmest of the three, but dry, verging on a desert environment. Certainly the plants lacked the jumbled-up density found in the first two.

  “Our three biochambers contain a vibrant range of our home world biota,” Eol-2 explained to us as we walked about on the short reddish moss of the third biochamber, making polite sounds about yet another tiny dull flower sticking up out of tufts of drab gray-green leaves minutely different from the last. “Beyond here is the engineering section, which is not open to this delegation.”

  I looked around at my fellow delegates, seeing their poorly concealed expressions of relief. Everyone was profoundly bored; the last thing they wanted now was to walk along halls of incomprehensible machinery, listening to an unending monotonous commentary on power couplings and confinement chamber integrity.

  I kept my own, darker, amusement in check. The engineering and propulsion section of Salvation of Life was actually a lot smaller than the Olyix claimed. Eol-2, like all the Olyix, had lied to us. Salvation of Life contained a fourth biochamber.

  * * *

  —

  Back in 2189, Ainsley Zangari’s Olyix Monitoring Office positioned five stealth satellites in a rosette formation two million kilometers out from the Salvation of Life. They contained small portal doors leading back to Teucer, an asteroid in Jupiter’s Trailing Trojans. As far as the rest of the Sol system was concerned, Teucer was just another independent tax haven rock, but it actually contained a station that handled all our passive sensor flights. Day after day, pea-sized probes would be shot out of the satellite portals, flying along trajectories that would take them close to the Salvation of Life. Some would spin out thin strands of magnetically sensitive gossamer, mapping the arkship’s flux fields. Others scanned for exotic neutrinos, analyzing the propulsion system, which remained highly radioactive from the antimatter reaction—itself a strong neutrino emitter. The majority were solid mass detectors with microtransmitters. They would glide along hyperaccurate trajectories, measuring the minuscule course variance as they tracked around Salvation, due to its correspondingly tiny gravity field, which varied according to density. That was what gave us our first clues that the Olyix weren’t being entirely honest. The rear quarter had a density that couldn’t be accounted for by the cavities that the Olyix said made up their engineering and propulsion section.

  It wasn’t as big as the trio of biochambers that humans were permitted to visit, but right behind biochamber three, the arid one, was a hollow space approximately five kilometers long. That, we concluded, had to be the heart of their clandestine activities. My goal.

  * * *

  —

  The delegation reconvened under a broad, high pergola draped in violet-flowering vines, close to the equatorial ponds of the first biochamber. It was all very convivial, with a refreshment table and comfy chairs in a loose semicircle. Eol-2 rested its heavy body on a wide stool that curved around its lower abdomen.

  “I hope you found the tour informative,” it said over the general phone link.

  We sipped our teas and coffees as we nodded reassurance. I’d grabbed an espresso, but somehow the taste was dulled by the ever-present smell of alien spice.

  “You have three distinct biochambers,” the cardinal said. “Are you divided along your original cultural lines?”

  “I understand your interest in different cultural factions,” Eol-2 said. “However, after a voyage so long, we are as one, a monoculture.”

  “So were there different cultures on your home world?”

  I watched a small ripple progress around Eol-2’s midsection flesh skirt. Xenopsychologists who’d spent a lifetime studying the Olyix assumed it was either irritation or amusement.

  “We no longer know what we left behind,” Eol-2 said. “For we look to the future, never the past. To us, it is obvious that a sentient species will eventually refine and resolve upon a single life philosophy as it matures. You are diverse because you are physically widespread and can indulge any number of experimental principles and ideas. As you are young, such exploration is good for you. However, despite this current period of extraordinary physical and political expansion you pursue, it is our belief that you will regather yourselves eventually, and live under a unified monoculture. The superior, most liberal, most welcoming, of your cultures will spread and adapt and eventually absorb to incorporate all others. Your merging legal systems and binding trans-government treaties are evidence of this, to us at least.”

  “You believe our religions will merge?” the cardinal asked, which brought a lot of smiles.

  “The God at the End of Time will come to pass when all sentience, all thought, binds together within the great collapse of space-time. During the growth of entropy which is the past and future history of the universe, the God is many. Humans have already been blessed to witness fragments of the ultimate coalescence, which have formed the base of all your religious beliefs, interpreted in your many ways. We understand this, for we underwent it ourselves when we were first gifted with sentience. But there will only be one God in the end, which is when Its True Form will be revealed to all who have pilgrimaged successfully. If you are lucky, if you remain open to the Divine as you seem to be, you may hear a whisper of God’s message again. Already you anticipate this, I believe. The Second Coming. End of Days. Revelation. Rapture. Reincarnation, to name but a few. So many of God’s concepts are already bestowed upon your thoughts. They link many of your diverse cultures, and will flourish into a web upon which you can build your eventual unity.”

  Nahuel inclined his head toward me and muttered: “Is it politically incorrect to mention steady-state theory in front of an Olyix?”

  I just managed to keep myself from laughing out loud.

  “I have a question,” the delegation’s imam said, an old man with a full white beard and spotless black robes. To my mind, his stern voice indicated he wasn’t going with the Olyix’s liberal interpretation of how the Prophet’s vision came to be. “You claim to be on pilgri
mage to the end of time. If so, do you welcome humans who might wish to join with you?”

  “Certainly,” Eol-2 said quickly. “There are practical concerns, of course. We would have to adapt your biology to effectively provide you with immortality. Our Kcells are a good start on that endeavor, but considerable work remains to be done.”

  The imam gave Eol-2 a disbelieving stare. “You mean the Olyix are already immortal?”

  “The bodies of a quint are the vessel of the mind, carrying it through time. We continue to reproduce physically, for all biological bodies decay over time, even ours. However, our identity remains steadfast.”

  “So there are no new Olyix?” Nahuel said.

  “No. Physically and spiritually we have matured as far as possible. As you would put it, we have reached the end of our evolution. This is why we have embarked on our great journey; there is nothing else left for us in this universe.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” the cardinal said. “God’s universe is bountiful and limitless.”

  “We know all there is to know about this creation. Therefore, we await that which is to come after.”

  “After?”

  “The God at the End of Time will look back upon the life of the universe, and use what It finds to create a new and better universe from the void into which all will collapse.”

  “That promise of immortality sounds suspiciously like a bribe to me,” the imam said.

  “It cannot be,” Eol-2 replied. “Immortality, extending through this life and into the next, is something that only a mature mind can accept. If you are not worthy of it, you would never survive such an existence. And remember, there is no return from the path we would share. You would have to be very sure of yourself to accept such a daunting offer. We do not consider it a bribe. Abandoning all that you are—your belief, your life—is a decision you must come to by yourself.”