Heavy Water and Other Stories

by Martin Amis

  “Let’s not have this degenerate into Q and A. I have a program to get through here. We’ll go thumbnail and examine our respective journeys in parallel. So: 3.7 billion years ago, life is seeded. 3.4 billion years ago, Martians, as I say, are up and running: ‘hunter-gatherers’ is your euphemism but ‘scavengers’ is closer to the truth. At this stage, of course, you’re still a bubble of fart gas. Goop. Macrobiotic yogurt left out in the sun. Five centuries go by: Mars is fully industrialized. Another five, and we entered what I guess you’d call our posthistorical phase. We called it Total Wealth. All you’re managing to do, at this stage, is stink up the estuaries and riverbeds, but meanwhile, over on Mars, we’re into quantum gravity, tired light, chromo power, trace drive, cleft conformals, scalar counterfactuals, wave superposition, and orthogonics. We were the masters of our habitat, having gotten rid of all the animals and the oceans and so forth, and the tropospherical fluctuations you call weather. In other words, we were ready.”

  “Ready for what?” came a voice.

  “Now I’m just a janitor, right? I’m just a, uh, ‘robot.’ At the time of my manufacture, there was on Mars no distinction between the synthetic and the organic. Everyone was a mix, semi-etherealized, self-duplicating. The natural/mechanical divide belonged to ancient memory. But what you see before you here is a robot. Of the… crudest kind. It’s as if, on Earth, in 2050, an outfit like Sony produced a gramophone with a dishful of spare needles and a tin bullhorn.” The janitor on Mars paused, nodding his lowered head. Then he looked up. “And yet my makers, in their wisdom… However. In the last five hundred million years I’ve had access to an information source that was not available to the former denizens of this planet. And with that perspective it’s quite clear that Mars was an absolutely average world of its class. A type-v world, absolutely average, and it did what type-v worlds invariably do in the posthistorical phase.”

  “Sir?” said Incarnacion. “Excuse me, but is this a grading system? What’s a type-v world?”

  “A world that has mined its star.”

  “What type world is Earth?”

  “A type-y world.”

  “What are type-z worlds?”

  “Dead ones. But I digress. You go posthistorical and the question is: now what? As I say, three billion three million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand years ago, Martians were lords of all they surveyed. They were ready. Ready for what? Ready for war.”

  The robot let this ripple out through the moist air, over the ranked metal seats.

  “Yes, that’s right. Mars, the Planet of War. Congratulations. The only time you ever get anywhere is when you follow the artistic pulse. You even got the moons. I quote: ‘Two lesser stars, or satellites, revolve about Mars; whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary planet exactly three of its diameters, and the outermost five.’ That’s not one of your early Mars watchers, some chump like Schiapperelli or Percival Lowell. That’s Gulliver’s Travels. Phobos and Deimos. Just so. Fear and Panic. Hitherto, there had never been any disharmony on Mars. Firm but wise world government was proceeding without friction. There was never any of that brawling and scragging that you went in for. Mars had tried peace, but now the time felt right. What else was there to do? We divided, almost arbitrarily, into two sides. We were ready. One called the other People of Fear. The other called the one People of Panic. There wasn’t a dissenting voice on the whole planet. Everyone was absolutely all for it. Imagine two superfuturistic Japanese warrior cults, with architecture by Albert Speer. I guess that’ll give you some idea.

  “We fell into a rhythm. Arms races followed by massive conflicts. We’d pepper each other with all kinds of superexotic weaponry in delightfully elaborate successions of thrusts and feints and counters. But in the end nothing could match the hit of central thermonuclear exchange. We always ended up throwing everything we had at each other, in arsenal-clearing deployments. After the devastation, we rebuilt toward another devastation. No complaints. Shelter culture had come on a long way. Casualties could be patched up good as new. And fatalities were simply resurrected—except, of course, in cases of outright vaporization. They took their nuclear winters like Martians. The lulls lasted centuries. The battles were over in an afternoon.

  “It doesn’t make a lot of obvious sense, does it? Later on they tended to argue that it was a necessary stage in their military development. They felt that they were… rich in time. They didn’t know—as I do—that this happens to all type-v worlds in the posthistorical phase. Without exception. They go insane.

  “The Hydrogen War of the Two Nations lasted for 112 million years, and was followed, six months later, by the Seventy Million Years War, in which the use of quantum-gravity weapons exponentially increased the firepower of both sides. By this time another factor was preying on Martian mental health. Immortality. That’s actually not a very useful word. Put it this way. Everyone on Mars was looking at a future-endless worldline. And in a type-v context that always messes with your head. There was one more great war, the War of the Strong Nuclear Force, which dragged on for 284 million years. When they came out of that, there was a general feeling that Mars was in something of a rut. So they decided to stop fucking around. You, at this stage, by the way, were still doing your imitation of a septic tank. Well, and why not? It was a very good imitation of a septic tank.

  “First there were matters to attend to in our own backyard. People of Fear and People of Panic united to face a common enemy. One found near by.”

  The janitor on Mars fell silent; his head, with its steel arc, was interrogatively poised. Vladimir Voronezh, one of the Russian Laureates (his field was galaxy formation), spoke up, saying,

  “My dear sir, I feel you are now going to tell us that life thrived elsewhere in the solar system, once upon a time.”

  “Certainly. You’ve got to lose this habit of thinking about the ‘miracle’ of life, the stupendous ‘accident’ of intelligence, and so on. I can assure you that in this universe cognition is as cheap as spit. Being a type-v world, Mars was extremely insular in its Total Wealth phase. There was no interest in space exploration, despite adequate technology. But we were perfectly well aware of the coexistence of two type-w worlds: Jupiter and—”

  “Jupiter?” This was Lord Kenrick Douglas (quasars): tall, bearded, famous. “Sir, we do know something about the solar system. Jupiter is a gas giant. It is wreathed in freezing clouds six hundred miles deep on a shell of liquid hydrogen. Our suicide probes tell us that there are no solid surfaces on this planet. Would you tell us what the Jovians looked like? Jellyfish with powerpacks? Wearing scuba suits, no doubt?”

  This last drollery aroused some anxious laughter. The janitor tensed himself to the sound, not with umbrage but with concentration, with efficient curiosity. He said,

  “Can I ask you a question?” He seemed to be addressing Miss World. “Did they laugh just now because they thought he was funny or because they thought he was full of shit? No. Never mind. Let me tell you, Lord Nobel Laureate, that Jupiter wasn’t always a gas giant. Originally it was much smaller and denser. Rock mantle on an iron silicate core. But that was before they fucked with Mars.

  “The storm system that you call the Great Spot? The Earth-sized zit in its southern tropic? That was ground zero for an NH4 device we sent their way.”

  “Ammonia?” asked Voronezh, with a glint in his eye.

  “Right. It’s something we were very proud of, for a while. We turned their place into a colossal stink bomb without altering its mass. To avoid perturbation problems further down the line. Some said at the time that the War with Jupiter might have been bypassed quite easily. Mars overreacted, some said. I mean, a type-w planet, hundreds of millions of years away from posing any plausible threat. Whatever, the War with Jupiter was wrapped up in six months. But then we faced perceived disrespect from another quarter, and turned our attention to—”

  “Don’t tell me,” said Lord Kenrick. “Venus.”

  “Wrong direct
ion. No, not Venus. Ceres.”

  The janitor on Mars waited. Fukiyama (superstrings) said dutifully, “Ceres isn’t a planet. It’s the biggest rock in the asteroid belt.”

  Calmly inspecting the tips of his talons the janitor on Mars said, “Yeah, right. They wanted to play rough and so…” He shrugged and added, “It was as our expeditionary force was returning from Jupiter that it picked up the ambiguous transmission from Ceres, another type-w world, though well behind Jupiter. It’s possible that in the heat of the moment the Martian commander mistakenly inferred an undertone of sarcasm in the Cerean message of tribute. The War with Ceres, in any case, ended that same afternoon. Then for several weeks, on the home planet, there reigned an uneasy peace. Plans were drawn up for a preemptive strike against Earth. Some Martians sensed aggressive potential there. Because—hey. Action on the blue planet. Photosynthesis. Photochemical dissociation of hydrogen sulphide, no less. Light energy used to break the bonds cleaving oxygen to hydrogen and carbon. Bacteria becomes cyanobacteria. Gangway. Where’s the fire? But then something happened that changed all our perspectives. Suddenly we knew that all this was bullshit and the real action lay elsewhere.

  “In the year 2,912,456,327 B.C., by your calendar, the Scythers of the Orion Spur sent a warning shot across our bows. They compacted Pluto. Pluto was originally a gas giant the size of Uranus. And the Scythers scrunched it. Without a care for mass-conservation—hence the perturbations you’ve noticed in Neptune. You thought Pluto was a planet? You thought Pluto was supposed to look like that? In the Scythers of the Orion Spur I suppose you could say that Mars had found an appropriate adversary. A type-v world. Same weaponry. Same mental-health problems. Rather superior cosmonautics. The War with the Scythers of the Orion Spur—the combatants being separated by twenty kiloparsecs—was, as you can imagine, a somewhat protracted affair. Door to door, the round trip took 150,000 years: at even half-lightspeed, achievable with our scoop drives, relativistic effects were found to be severe. Still, the great ships went out. Wave after wave. The War with the Scythers of the Orion Spur was hotly prosecuted for just over a billion years. Who won? We did. They’re still there, the Scythers. Their planet is still there. The nature of war changed, during that trillennium. It was no longer nuclear or quantum-gravitational. It was neurological. Informational. Life goes on for the Scythers, but its quality has been subtly reduced. We fixed it so that they think they’re simulations in a deterministic computer universe. It is believed that this is the maximum suffering you can visit on a type-v world. The taste of victory was sweet. But by then we knew that interplanetary war, even at these distances, was essentially bullshit too. Oh and meanwhile, in that billion-year interlude, all hell has been breaking out on Earth. Oxygen established as an atmospheric gas. Cells with nuclei. All hell is breaking out.

  “The Scyther War broadened our horizons. Martian astronomers had become intensely interested in a question that you yourselves are still wrestling with. I mean dark matter. The speed with which galaxies rotate suggests that 98.333 percent of any given galactic mass is invisible and unaccounted for. We went through all the hoops you’re going through, and more. What was the dark matter? Massive neutrinos? Failed stars? Slain planets? Black holes? Resonance residue? Plasma fluctuation? Then we kind of flashed it. The answer had been staring us in the face but we had to overcome a mortal reluctance to confront its truth. There was no dark matter. The galaxies had all been engineered, brought on line. Including our own. Many, many cycles ago.

  “With cosynchronous unanimity it was decided that this subjection was not going to be tolerated. Despite the odds against. It was believed that we were up against a type-n world or entity—maybe even type-m. I now know that we were actually dealing with a type-q world, though one obscurely connected to a power of the type-j order. Apart from the bare fact of their existence, incidentally, nothing is known—in this particle horizon—about worlds -a through -i.

  “Our idea was to launch a surprise attack on the galactic core. We figured that our small but measurable chance of success was entirely dependent on surprise—on instantaneity. None of that Scyther shit was going to be any help to us here. There was no question of idling coreward at ninety thousand miles per second—we’d just have to be there and hit them with absolutely everything we had. Now. To be clear. In your technological aspirations, on Earth, you are restricted by various inadvertencies like lack of funds but also by your very weak grasp of the laws of physics. We were restricted by the laws of physics. Period. So take a guess. How were we going to do it?”

  “Wormholes,” said Paolo Sylvino (wormholes).

  “Wormholes. Evanescent openings into hyperspace—or, more accurately, into parallel universes with different curvatures or phase trajectories. Ultraspace was the word we preferred. In crude form the idea’s been knocking around on Earth since Einstein. Though I venture to suggest that you have a way to go on the how- to end of it. For us of course it was largely a stress-equation problem. You fish a loop out of the quantum foam and then punch a tunnel in spacetime, flexibilizing it with the use of certain uh, exotic materials. We worked on this problem for seven and a half million years.

  “Here was the setup. We knew that at the core there lay a black hole of some 1.4237 million solar masses, and we knew it had been ringed and tapped. As you’re aware, the energy contained within the black-hole inswirl is stupendous, but it’s wholly insufficient to drive a galaxy. The true energy source was something other. And that was the prize we sought. While fitting out the initial strike force we sent recon probes to the galactic core at roughly million-year intervals. Many missions were lost. Those that returned did so with wiped sensors. One way or another, preparations for the strike consumed 437 million years. Then we made our play. On Earth, around now, let it be noted, what do we get but the emergence of organisms visible to the naked eye.”

  The janitor on Mars sat down and leaned backwards and folded his claws behind his head. Ruminatively he continued, “No one ever thought of this move as a—as a ‘mistake’ exactly. Everybody was deeply convinced that this was something we absolutely had to do. But the consequences were somewhat extreme. So long in preparation, the Involvement of the Initial Strike Force with the Core Power was over in nine seconds.

  “Our fleet was… sent back. Not by wormhole either. The long way around. We knew we’d lost, but we had to wait 300,000 years to find out why. This was an anxious time. We expected intricate reprisals—daily, hourly…

  “As military units our ships had been neutralized in the first nanosecond of their appearance at the core, but their sensors were intact and had picked up a great deal of information. Much of it exceedingly depressing, from a Martian point of view. The galactic core had indeed been ringed and tapped. The artificial Loopworld surrounding it had been in place, by our best estimates, for approximately 750 billion years. There was kind of an outpost force guarding the Loopworld. Nothing more. A, uh—a janitor force. Stationed there by entities we would later come to call the Infinity Dogs. Their energy source lay beyond the doorway of the black hole. They were using dead-universe power. Tapping closed universes in which, during contraction, the Higgs field couples to the gravitational shear. Also, we detected beyond Loopworld what I can only describe as a comet depot. Our equipment identified the signature of our own Alpha Comet among the comets parked there.

  “Morale was generally low. Almost nihilistic. Martians started to believe, with varying degrees of conviction, that they were mere simulations in a deterministic computer universe. They divided up again. People of Fear. People of Panic. The planet was wracked by spasm wars, random, unending. Certain information began to be made available to us. We learned that the Infinity Dogs had seeded life on Mars—and on Earth, Jupiter and Ceres—for a purpose. We were middens. That’s all. Middens.”

  “Middens, sir?” This was Incarnacion.

  “Yeah, middens. Down on Earth, in Africa, the male rhinos all take a dump beyond the waterhole? On Columbus’s island of Hi
spaniola the squinting Carib lines shells on the bank of the riverbed? To demarcate territory? That’s a midden. And that’s all we were: a message from the Infinity Dogs to a type-r power called the Core Raiders, saying: Keep Out. I have since learned that both Infinity and Core are merely the errand boys of the type-l agency called the Resonance. Which in turn owes tribute to a type-j imperium called the Third Observer. Which…”

  Trailing off, the janitor on Mars let his sicklelike head drop to his chest. Then it reared up again, catching the light, and he said, “Everybody knew that the only honorable or even dignified course was planetary self-slaughter. Such in fact is the usual destiny of type-v worlds in this phase. Then bolder voices started to be heard. This had never been a thing about winning or losing. This had always been about the glorious autonomy of Martian will. As it turned out, Mars’s next battle plan involved kamikaze forces and was itself not easily distinguishable from suicide.

  “We came up with a ruse du guerre. We faked auto-annihilation and moved our whole operation underground. It had to look good, though: we blew off our atmosphere and paralyzed our core, which also spelt goodbye to our magnetosphere. What you see out there—the red plains and valleys, the rocks and pocks on that carpet of iodized rubble: it’s just set-dressing. We went underground, and waited.

  “We undertook an arms build-up in a series of five-million-year plans. Morale was high: ringingly idealistic. Just one shot. Just one shot: that was the chant we worked to. We were going to turn that wormhole into a gun barrel. And what was the bullet? We started working on a strictly illegal type of weaponry based on the void-creating yield of false vacuum. A bubble of nothingness expanding at the speed of light. The great voids, the great starless deserts that so puzzle you: they’re the sites of incautious false-vacuum deployment. Or false-vacuum accident. Hence also the numberless void universes that populate the Ultraverse. If we could detonate this weapon within the event horizon of the core black hole—well, we felt confident of creating quite an impression when the time came for our second rendezvous with Infinity. Such a deed would rearrange the entire Ultraverse. Conceivably to Martian advantage.