by Ewing, Al
“I already have. Species designate #7C.”
“And the ones Munn’s become obsessed with? The ones he stares at all day and most of the night?”
“The triple-horned things?” Unwen thought for a moment. “#3C. The C classes them as reptile. They were the second reptile species we saw, admittedly, after the flying one, but... well, the triple horns. These things should have at least a little poetry in them, Maya.” He chuckled. “If we do restart civilisation over again, one thing I’ll be pressing for is including poets in the crew of every ship. Just in case something like this happens again.”
Maya looked at him for a moment. “You’re in favour of rebuilding, now?”
“Not to the extent you are. Everything doesn’t have to be exactly the same. I never did understand your obsession with that...” He shrugged. “But what else is there to do? We have to fill our endless time with something, just to avoid going mad. So let’s build our own little world here. Why not?”
Maya looked at him in silence. Unwen sighed, leant back, and scratched his chin. “All right... how would it work? We want a nice, large, growing population to rule over. There’s not enough genetic material between us to repopulate ourselves... so we take, say, a thousand of the mammals – assuming we can find that many without leaving the perimeter and being picked off. Mutate or evolve them, whichever terminology we’re using, until they’re sentient creatures. Educate them as best we can to a basic level. Feed them with the ship’s synthesisers at first – I don’t know where they’ll sleep, mind you. And of course, we’ll be hoping against hope that the food synthesisers won’t burn out from overuse until we’ve taught them farming... and teaching them how to farm without being picked off by the reptiles will be difficult in the extreme, but I’m sure...”
“Enough.” Maya shot Unwen an irritated glance. “Too many problems, Unwen.”
Unwen reached into his field, lowering its density slightly so that he sank deeper into it. He closed his eyes, and Maya had the maddening urge to stand up and command the room to switch off all the fields, to watch him crash down onto the floor. “All right,” she said, “if the main problem is the reptiles, what would it take to kill one? Say, the #7C.”
“The fang-beast. Nothing we’ve got, unfortunately.” Unwen frowned. “Theoretically, we could possibly kill one by projecting a field into its brain or heart, if we got close enough... yes, that would work. We could cannibalise the furniture fields – if that one you’re sitting on were to suddenly appear in one of the monster’s ventricles, say, or the folds of its brain, that would be very fatal indeed.” Unwen stroked his chin, suddenly looking more awake and alert. “Soran could probably jury-rig something – a portable projector. It’d mean losing some of our furniture, obviously, but we could craft new surfaces from solid matter, wood or stone... we have time. If we could do that, our biggest problem then would be getting close enough...”
Maya nodded. “Without being eaten.”
“Quite. Even if you managed to kill a #7C – or a #1C, or any of the other dangerous creatures out there – it would probably tear you apart before it realised it was dead. Besides, you’re the only one of us with anything close to the training for this kind of thing. The rest of us would die off very fast.” Unwen stared up at the ceiling for a moment. “And none of us are qualified to program an AI that could... Ah, yes.” He laughed. “I think I’m starting to see. We’re back to the mammals again.”
“We are?”
“Oh, yes. We need creatures to take this hypothetical device of Soran’s – which we will mass-produce – and kill the lizards with it. Some of the larger mammals, too, the dangerous-looking ones. Semi-sentient creatures to kill and die on our behalf. Of course, more often than not, they’ll be dying rather than killing. But so long as we can retrieve the field generators, that’s fine.” He looked at her for a moment, gauging her reaction.
Maya nodded, her eyes not leaving his. “They’re only mammals.”
“They’re only mammals.” He chuckled. “And we need to stop them turning the devices on us, of course. So Soran and I will have to create more devices, to implant in their heads, to kill them if they try anything. These killing implants would also be activated if they refuse an order... such as the order to die for our benefit.” He kept looking at Maya, waiting for her to snap, to dismiss the whole scenario.
She only nodded.
“An army of slaves...” He enunciated the words carefully, marvelling at them, trying to hide his excitement at the prospect. Surely Maya wouldn’t agree to this –
But she nodded again, without changing her expression, and Unwen had to consciously hide his astonishment. He’d actually managed to manipulate her into letting him do it.
Or perhaps she was manipulating him. Or both at once. Ah, selfsearch, he thought, how mysterious life is without you.
After she left, he lay back on his field with his eyes closed, lost in thought.
He thought about the gigantic reptile that had come at them. The #7C, the fang-beast. He thought about the mammals, and how they had watched him through the perimeter-field.
He thought about how they would remember him, in their legends.
“NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT.” Soran’s voice was firm. “I can’t possibly allow it.”
The sun was setting, and the four of them were again sat around the feeding-tray as it floated an inch above the grass. This time it was loaded with a mixture of long green sticks, round yellow discs, and clear fluid-sacs of lightly flavoured water – the food-synthesiser followed a rhythm of its own in response to the dietary needs of the crew, and what it provided was rarely questioned. Unwen picked one of the yellow discs up, nibbling around the edge as he studied Soran closely. “The moral issue?”
Soran hesitated, seeming startled by the question. “Yes, yes,” he said, a little too quickly. “It’s morally unconscionable, it goes against hundreds of thousands of years of moral development by our species...”
Unwen smiled. “What’s the real reason?”
Soran flushed red, and scowled. “It’s simply too dangerous. The sheer amount of power we’d be draining out of the xokronite...” He shook his head firmly. “Creating just one of these hominids of yours would be risky. To compound that risk by creating an army of them is... well, it’s insanity. Utter madness.”
Maya picked up one of the clear sacs and bit into it. “What are the risks, Soran? What happens if we draw too much power too quickly?”
Soran shrugged. “In layman’s terms? Well, the xokronite would become fundamentally unstable. What happens after that would be extremely difficult to predict. That’s why it’s so dangerous – there’s no real telling what would happen.”
“Well, can you narrow it down, at least?”
“The xokronite could stabilise on its own once we lower the rate of energy transfer. That’s certainly possible. If it doesn’t, our safety equipment – the containment cylinder, the energy dampeners – would presumably kick in, cooling it, draining off excess radiation, and so forth. That might be enough to forcibly stabilise it.” He rubbed his fingertips lightly against the stubble on his scalp. “But that is the best-case scenario. We could, on the other hand, initiate a fatal chain reaction in the xokronite – making it more and more unstable, until...”
Maya frowned. “Boom?”
“No, no. If only!” He shook his head, almost amused at the notion. “The containment cylinder can deal with an explosion – any explosion. You could let off a supernova in there and the outside of it wouldn’t even feel warm to the touch. The end would come not with a boom, Maya, but with... well, with a whimper.” He chuckled. “The xokronite would, in a case of catastrophic instability, degrade into something else entirely. Results vary as to what, depending on the original method of synthesis, but the best outcome I can think of in that scenario would be the chunk we have in our possession ending up as a lump of kronium-442. Which would supply a thousandth of the power required by the ship – perhaps enough to
provide starvation rations from the food-synthesiser, if we could get it working under those conditions, but certainly not enough to power the perimeter-field.”
There was a pause as all four of the crew took the information in. Maya found herself glancing at the perimeter-field, as if the mention of it might cause it to falter, or magically summon one of Unwen’s #7Cs to attack it with tooth and claw. Munn, she noticed, hadn’t taken his eyes off it once during the entire conversation.
After a moment, Soran resumed.
“The worst case scenario, of course, would be no power at all – no, no, I’m lying. There are far worse possibilities. When you’re dealing with a substance that facilitates the transfer of energy through time, you have to open yourself to hypotheses that seem utterly outlandish – even divorced from known physics. We could all of us end up smeared across time like so much...” He stopped himself. “I shouldn’t worry you with hypotheticals. The most likely danger here is losing the one power source we have – and if we lose the xokronite, we lose everything, what few comforts we have, and very likely our lives. It’s simply not worth the risk.”
Unwen scowled. “And we don’t have any reserves?”
Soran smiled ruefully. “The storage batteries were irreparably damaged in the crash, I’m afraid. If we lost the xokronite, we’d have... perhaps three minutes of power? Enough time to evacuate the ship before the doors stopped working, I suppose. And even if they were in full working order, we’d never be able to top them up again – the end result would be the same. No power, no us.”
Unwen nodded curtly and looked away.
“Soran...” Maya paused for a moment, choosing her words. “What is it about this... process... that drains the most power? In layman’s terms.”
“Oh, everything. You’re talking about mutating living tissue – no, rewriting it – to bring it into line with some future descendant, millions of years ahead on the evolutionary tree. Now, the temporal rewrite – that’s not too difficult. Copying a genetic map from a future descendant is what would really give us trouble...”
“Oh?” Maya was conscious of Unwen’s eyes on her, but the biologist said nothing, waiting for her next move. Meanwhile, Soran rattled on, warming to the theme.
“Oh, yes. The problem here is that you want a particular descendant to map from. If we were just barrelling down the highway of genetics, grabbing what we found at a certain point here, or there – well, Unwen and I had no problems doing that before. Reaching deeper into the future shouldn’t provoke a more significant power drain, but of course, the deeper you go, the less likely you are to find what you want...” He bit down on one of the yellow discs, considering. “We ourselves shared a common ancestor with hundreds of other species in the distant past of Habitat One – isn’t that right, Unwen?”
“Thousands. Millions.” Unwen shrugged. “Go back far enough, and you’ll find a brother in the nester crouching in the walls of your domicell, eating scraps.”
“Not that we’ll ever see a nester again. Good riddance, too. Nasty things!” Soran scowled. “And this is where we start to have our power problem. You’re looking for something specific – which, by the way, is at least six months of hard work for me and Unwen, since we two are the ones who have to tell the ship’s brain what to look for in a language it might begin to understand –”
Unwen smiled sarcastically and opened his mouth to speak – to say something about Soran’s real motivations at last coming to light – but a look from Maya made him close it again. Now was not the time.
“– and it’s that search that will consume the additional energy. A task that will take almost every nanoprocessor the ship’s brain has, working in parallel, searching through the millions of different possible species of mammal that might evolve over millions of years... an incredible energy drain.” Soran shook his head firmly. “It would be easier to program in a genetic map from scratch –”
“Except programming genetic code from scratch requires a genetic library and programming software, which we do not have.” Unwen scowled.
Soran ignored him. “And having taken this dreadful risk, we then do it over again, and again, and again, a hundred times – and when those hundred slaves die clearing the jungle of monsters, another hundred times, and another hundred after that. Even if we get lucky the first time – the first thousand times, the first thousand thousand – eventually, our number will come up, the xokronite will be corrupted and we’ll be finished. The answer is no, Maya. I’m not helping you burn through our only energy resources for the sake of your obsession. Or Unwen’s.”
Silence descended on the group. Maya bit into another of the clear sacs, washing down what was in her mouth. Eventually, she spoke.
“Strictly speaking, it’s only the first one that’s the risk. Isn’t it?”
Soran narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Once we create that first hominid, we’ll have the genetic map to create more, won’t we?”
“Well –” Soran stuttered, looking uncomfortable. Maya didn’t let him finish.
“Once we have that, these other thousand thousand slave-mammals you’re so worried about will cost us practically no power at all. We’ll probably be able to churn them out as easily as Unwen made his thumb-thing yesterday. Right?”
“Well... I suppose...”
“Just the one gamble, then. That’s what you’re worried about. You know what I think, Soran?” Her voice grew a hard edge. “I think you’re trying to turn a small possibility of trouble into certain doom because you’d be happier doing nothing – spending the rest of eternity pottering about inside this field – and to hell with the rest of us.”
Soran glanced at Munn for support, but he was quietly picking at a yellow disc, looking lost, his face ashen. He’d barely spoken since the #7C attacked the field the day before. Seeing no help there, Soran opened his mouth to defend himself, to try and convince Maya of the possible dangers, but –
– the earth shook.
Soran’s mouth closed. Munn turned pale, looking as if he might be sick.
And again. Unwen stiffened, watching the mammals scampering and skittering away into the undergrowth and the trees. He heard Munn choke back a sob.
The fang-beast had returned.
This time, it did not attack the perimeter-field, or bellow its rage. It only stared at the four of them, through cold, reptilian eyes. The trickle of saliva from its jaws was a promise.
“We have to kill it.” Munn whispered, his voice hoarse and cracked. “Whatever it takes. We have to kill it.”
Maya nodded, turning to Soran.
“I think you’re outvoted.”
“THINK OF IT like this. We might be taking a small risk – once – but we’ve got no other options. Munn’s already gone crazy in this bubble, and we’ll all join him soon enough unless we put ourselves towards accomplishing something.”
“Oh, shut up,” Soran muttered, looking over at Maya petulantly. He’d tried to stop this from happening many times, refusing to work on the project, delaying things as much as possible, but he was a weak man at heart, and the pressure from the other three had been too much. Now his fingers gently tapped and danced over the display field, making the final connections.
The Power Room hummed, the blue stone inside the central pillar glowing and crackling with added power, and Unwen held one of the mammals in place inside a larger containment field – big enough to hold whatever it might become.
The experiment was ready to begin.
“Where is Munn?”
“Outside, staring at his three-horned beasts. Or at the jungle line, waiting for our regular visit from the big #7C. I’m sure he’ll be overjoyed to meet our new friend, especially if we can train him to use this.” Maya hefted the portable field generator, a squat metal box with two handles, a dial on each to be operated by the thumb – a primitive thing, slapped together by Soran in the little spare time he’d had in between programming the ship’s brain over the
past few months.
Unwen smiled, crouching to look the small beast in the eye. “We’ll have to fit him with something to keep him obedient first. And then teach him what’s expected of him. It’ll be a slow process, but I have a feeling we might be ready to bag our first #7C in three to six months, depending on how quickly ‘our new friend’ picks up the basics, like eating synthesised food and disposing of his waste.” He reached out, running a hand over the field, and the creature skittered back, nervous and unsure. Unwen liked that. “Next year, we’ll know more about how to teach them, how to equip them. The year after that, we’ll make some real progress. A mass cull. Farmland. Perhaps a solid-matter wall to keep the smaller predators out. I predict that within twenty years – perhaps even ten – the bubble will be a thing of the past.”
Soran shot Unwen a look. “Perhaps sooner yet.”
“Now, now, Soran. Let’s not be defeatist.” Unwen stood, taking a step back. “How long do you think it will take?”
“A minute. Less. If anything, I’ll be trying to slow the process down.”
Unwen looked at Maya, who nodded. “All right, Soren. Let’s begin.”
Soran hesitated, as if considering a last attempt to make the others see reason – then he brushed his fingertips over the control field, and the stone trapped inside the cylinder hummed into life. Within the containment field, the creature began to squeal, paws scrabbling against nothing, the blue glow invading its flesh.
“It’ll work quickly,” Soran murmured. “The power flow is a little higher than we expected... in fact...” His voice trailed off, and then his fingers began to move, jabbing at the field.
“What is it?” Unwen murmured, watching the animal jerk and twist in the field. The muscle groups were shifting, growing in size, the spine warping, legs elongating – but it seemed to be happening spasmodically, without rhyme or reason, as if some parts of the beast were evolving faster or slower than others. And all the time, the stone in the cylinder was glowing brighter, ever brighter. “Soran?”