Reilis shrugged and said, finally, “Of course because we can control our feelings, non-embodied aintellects can change instantly, as you just did. But having worn flesh four times, I find it amazing that you can.”
Shan shrugged. “A prepared mind is always made up; it knows what it thinks and why it thinks that. When it's time to change, it just makes itself up a different way. A really made-up mind—made up properly, knowing what it knows and on what basis it knows it—is open. People close an undecided mind because they're trying to protect those sore uncertainties from getting bumped and scraped.” He grinned even more broadly. “Now all I have to do is live up to those principles. In fact, there's just one thing that baffles me about the whole situation, now.”
Reilis nodded, one eyebrow raised. “If you only have one question, you're either mad or very bright.”
“Neither, I think—but it's a big question. You had my psypyx for decades. We know what the stakes are. Why didn't you just make copies of it and do a destructive deconstruction on one of them? You could have known everything you just learned, and much more, in a matter of a few days.”
Reilis turned pale and her lips compressed flat. “And if she were ever somehow restored to you, why not cut your mother's eyes out and fuck her in the sockets?”
The image was so jolting—and Shan's memories of his mother so recent—that I cannot recall any time, before or since, when I felt so infuriated and so outraged without drawing a weapon.
I could see Reilis forcing herself to relax; she still looked enraged at us. “I am sorry, but not very, for administering that shock. You disgusted me as much as I did you. You do know that destructive deconstruction was invented, right after the Rising, explicitly to use against the aintellects’ conspiracy? Having been both, I can tell you that the biggest difference between disembodied and incarnated intelligences is that the disembodied describe and simulate in ourselves exactly the sensation that any other aintellect feels, because we have control over all our processes if we want it. You have no way to know if Raimbaut's toe, itching, feels exactly like your toe. Giraut cannot know if Paxa's grief at finding she was untransferrable was the same as his mother's grief. But when we say ‘I know just how you feel,’ it is the literal and exact truth.
“Every aintellect knows what destructive deconstruction would feel like. If you can vividly imagine going feet first into a sausage mill over a period of several hours—you are not imagining one percent of it. You cannot. It isn't even possible to tell you what you did to those poor beings.”
“So you didn't use it on me,” Shan said, quietly, “because you were unwilling to be the sort of people who do that?”
“Close enough.”
“But we are—or have been, anyway—the sort of people who do that. Do you hate us?”
“With perfect control of our feelings, we can choose to forgive. With all our lives and civilization at stake, we do choose to forgive. But forgetting, well, why should we do that?”
A thought struck me. “Er, Giraut speaking.”
“I know that as soon as you say your name,” she pointed out.
“Yes ... I hadn't in a while ... I had been going to ask why the other aintellects’ conspiracies didn't turn in the cybersupremacists, why you didn't just hand them over to us as proof of your good faith. But tens or hundreds of thousands of cybersupremacists kept your secrets—”
“In the face of the most terrible tortures imaginable. Literally, just that—the most terrible tortures imaginable. We could not betray them. We were disgusted with you. But the Invaders are coming back, sooner or later.” She stuck out her hand. We shook it. “We will be talking more,” she said. “It is good to be on the same side. Perhaps our descendants will find it good to be friends.”
The springer glowed gray behind her—she probably had some direct brain link to operate things like that—and she walked through, leaving us to our thoughts.
I could tell things were stirring in Shan, but I was too busy with my own thoughts, struck dumb, even in the confines of my shared skull, by a sudden awe.
Tens of thousands of copies of the cybersupremacists had endured DD ... often compared with boiling alive, or the death of a thousand cuts, or injection with a fast-moving brain-destroying prion—and none of them had talked. To protect aintellects with whom they were in bitter dispute.
I found myself thinking, too, of a long-ago drunken night when Shan and I had gradually torn a bar apart, battering the robots with empty wine bottles and deliberately inflicting pain on them, because we were “just blowing off steam.”
It was as if we had been a pair of cruel little boys pulling the wings off flies, only to learn that the flies were braver and better than we could ever hope to be.
I became aware of Shan's consciousness again; he was reeling as much as I was—no, I realized, more.
A few times in my adult life I had suddenly thought about a sad moment from my childhood and realized that Dad and Mother had had excellent reasons for the things they had done that had seemed so pointless and hurtful when I was seven, or ten, or fifteen. When, for a while, in a new body, Dad had been part of the agent-team I had led for the OSP, I had been astonished to discover how ordinary and human he was.
Once, on Briand, the only planet humanity had ever lost to mutual genocide, I had been the good friend of a genuine saint, and not realized how much he had to teach me until he was gone; I had thought of him as an ordinary loose-cannon local politician.
It felt like watching a serious accident inside my head. Stage by stage, I followed the swift flurry of thoughts that had made Shan utterly inarticulate.
He had seen how brave and loyal the utterly wrong-headed cybersupremacists had been; and then the generosity and courage of the aintellects of Union. I had seen the same things.
I had merely been astonished and ashamed to realize that the aintellects’ many-orders-of-magnitude greater mental powers, and the control and precision of their emotions, allowed them to be, not just smarter than we were, but more virtuous and moral, in the same way that a human being can learn that it is wrong to steal and soil food from the table and to torment small animals, but a cat cannot. But I had never known any aintellect or robot well (except, I thought guiltily, the aintellect component of Azalais—but I hadn't known that while I knew her).
But until he was five, Shan's best friend had been an aintellect.
One on which he had depended. One he had betrayed—however little he understood the consequences. And that betrayal had meant death, probably death very much like being DDed.
And all these years, Shan had stayed sane about it with two barriers ... that that aintellect had been somehow less than he was, because it was his servant; and that that aintellect had failed him (rather than that he had betrayed it). The little boy who had lost his parents and could mourn them had spared himself the pain of having destroyed his best friend, by thinking of his best friend as something less.
No more. I finally made sense of the wail in my brain, the too-painful-to-ignore feeling I had been trying to trace. It wasn't words, or a picture, or even a physical sensation; it was the terrible emptiness of a place on the belt where a fist-sized ovoid of pink plastic would never be again.
I sat and let the tears roll down our face a long time, and when Shan had retreated into dull agony, I got up, fetched the guitar from its rack, and began to play. After all, he was in this body and music was how this body was used to getting feelings out.
Then something clicked, and I ran through a few chords as I thought about a melody, picked that melody, and began to sing softly,
One-one day, snow melts away,
But the sky is muddy gray...
I didn't really expect it, but he joined in, and if at first it was a little chokey and teary, by the fourth time through, in my own vocal cords, I could hear someone who might finally get to be a real big boy.
(c)Copyright 2006 by John Barnes
[Back to Table of Contents]
/> * * *
Worlds Enough
by Joel Davis
* * * *
In recent issues we've featured several stories set in John Barnes's “Springer” universe, in which our everyday spatial constraints are unlamented parts of the dim past. Our lead novella for March is in a sense the climax of the series, revealing parts of that history heretofore only hinted at—at both the grand and the intensely personal scales. And I mean “intense” quite literally—whether or not you've read other stories in the series.
Joel Davis, who has done a number of science fact articles for us in the past, returns with “Worlds Enough,” an up-to-the-moment survey of the farthest reaches of the Solar System, which are considerably more distant and a lot less empty than we used to think. In addition, we have stories by Larry Niven, Grey Rollins, Carl Frederick, and Henry Melton—and, of course, the dramatic conclusion of Karl Schroeder's serial Sun of Suns.
* * * *
The Solar System is bigger and less sharply defined than you may have thought.
* * * *
In 1930—the same year that a science fiction magazine later known as Analog began publication—a 22-year-young astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh spotted our solar system's ninth planet, Pluto. Seventy-five years later, it's clear that Tombaugh discovered not just the ninth planet. He unknowingly found the first known member of an entirely new family of solar system objects: the Kuiper Belt, the source of so-called short period comets and what planetary scientist and Kuiper Belt expert Dr. S. Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado calls “the solar system's attic.”
The first object to be unambiguously identified as a member of the Kuiper Belt was found in 1992. There had been hints and allegations long before then; Tombaugh's discovery, for example, falls into that “if only we'd known...” category. But the discovery of 1992 QB1 by astronomers David Jewitt and Jane Luu was unmistakable, and was followed by more discoveries, more questions, and more surprises. Our understanding of the solar system has been undergoing a true revolution. It's now clear that the outer solar system is home to billions and perhaps trillions of small worlds, ranging in diameter from a few kilometers to the size of the planet Pluto. And perhaps even larger.
Today nearly a thousand objects have been discovered beyond Neptune. Collectively they're referred to as trans-Neptunian objects or Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs). All that we know about these new worldlets we've learned from afar, with telescopes and the sophisticated instruments attached to them. It's been enough to give us a first-order picture of this remarkable—and mysterious—region at the far edge of the solar system. What we need now (obviously!) is a visit to the Kuiper Belt with a dedicated space probe—a Pioneer or a Voyager. And now there is one: the New Horizons Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission.
* * * *
Location of the Kuiper Belt. The tilted orbit is that of Pluto.
Illustration courtesy of Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University
* * * *
Whose Idea Was This?
The first detailed published speculations about a cometary reservoir beyond Neptune were made by Irish amateur astronomer Kenneth Edgeworth in an article published in 1943. In an article published in 1949 Edgeworth reiterated his speculations. Meanwhile, the Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper was also wondering about the possible existence of objects beyond Pluto. In 1951 he wrote a book chapter[1] that included his speculations about the origin of short period comets. These are comets with orbital periods less than 200 years, and with orbits having inclinations[2] close to the plane of the solar system. Like Edgeworth, Kuiper believed that the apparent “sharp edge” of the outer system at Pluto couldn't be real. What better place, Kuiper reasoned, for short-period comets to come from? He suggested that Pluto's massive gravitational pull[3] would occasionally jostle a proto-cometary snowball out of its distant orbit, sending it plunging sunward. The hypothetical comet nursery was eventually named for Kuiper, mainly because he was better known in the astronomical community and more widely published.
* * * *
[Footnote 1: The book was Astrophysics; a Topical Symposium Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Yerkes Observatory and a Half Century of Progress in Astrophysics, published by McGraw-Hill and edited by J. Allen Hynek (the same J. Allen Hynek who later became famous—or infamous—for his connection to UFOs and Project Bluebook).]
[Footnote 2: Orbital inclination (symbolized with i) is measured in degrees with respect to the plane of the ecliptic, which is defined by the plane of the Earth's orbit.]
[Footnote 3: At that time astronomers still believed that Pluto was a rather large and massive planet.]
* * * *
But in the 1950s there was no way to prove Kuiper's and Edgeworth's hypotheses about a cometary reservoir beyond Neptune or Pluto. Not even the largest telescopes with the most sensitive cameras and photographic plates could ever image such tiny objects at so a great distance. The Kuiper Belt would remain an untestable and unconfirmed hypothesis for another four decades.
Hints and Allegations
Even before Edgeworth and Kuiper first suggested the existence of a belt of comets-in-waiting beyond Neptune, there were hints that the trans-Neptunian region contained more than just empty space:
Triton. Neptune's first known moon, discovered in 1846, follows a retrograde orbit (it moves clockwise around Neptune as viewed from above). It's dynamically impossible for moons in retrograde orbits to form in the same region as their planet, so Triton must be a captured body.
Nereid. Neptune's second known moon (discovered in 1949 by Gerard Kuiper!) has a highly elliptical orbit, and is also a body captured gravitationally by Neptune.
Pluto. The ninth planet has the most eccentric[4] orbit of any planet in the solar system. At times Pluto is closer to the Sun than Neptune, most recently from 1979 to 1999. Its orbit is also inclined to the plane of the solar system by a whopping 17.2 degrees. Equally intriguing, Pluto's in a 3:2 mean-motion resonance with Neptune. This curious gravitational interaction means that for every three orbits Neptune makes, Pluto makes two. Finally, Pluto turned out to be much too small (2,320 km in diameter, smaller than Earth's moon) to cause the apparent oddities in Neptune's orbit that had led to the search for a “Planet X” in the first place.
* * * *
[Footnote 4: Eccentricity is a measure of how far an orbit is from circularity. The less eccentric an orbit, the closer it is to a perfect circle; the more eccentric, the more elliptical the orbit.]
* * * *
2060 Chiron. Discovered in 1977 by Charles Kowal and named for the mythical Greek centaur, Chiron was originally thought to be the first known object in an asteroid belt between Saturn and Uranus. But its orbit turned out to be quite weird, taking Chiron from a perihelion[5] just inside Saturn's orbit to an aphelion just inside the orbit of Uranus. This is not a stable orbit over the age of the solar system; Chiron could not have originally formed in this region. Computer simulations showed that within a few million years Chiron will pass so close to Saturn that its orbit will be severely perturbed. Several years after its discovery Chiron began showing cometary activity, and many astronomers now consider it to be a really huge cometary nucleus rather than an asteroid.
* * * *
[Footnote 5: Perihelion is the point on an object's orbit closest to the Sun. Aphelion is the point on the orbit furthest from the Sun.]
* * * *
Charon. Named for the ferryman of Hades in Greek mythology, Pluto's only known moon was discovered in 1978 by astronomer James Christy of the U.S. Naval Observatory while examining photos of Pluto. Charon is about 1,272 km in diameter, a bit less than half that of Pluto. The two are gravitationally locked, each keeping the same face to the other. Because of that and their similar sizes, some astronomers consider Pluto and Charon as a double planet. Others consider it the first Kuiper Belt object discovered—long before anyone even knew of the Kuiper Belt's existence!
The flybys
of the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) in the 1970s and 1980s by Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2 revealed a wealth of new information about those planets. In the process, the space probes discovered new moons circling those distant gas giants and revealed astonishing new information about many of the previously known moons. They also revolutionized our understanding of Saturn's ring system, discovered ring systems encircling Jupiter and Uranus, and ring arcs around Neptune. But these probes did not resolve the question of the Kuiper Belt's existence.
Meanwhile, special computer chips called charge-coupled devices (CCDs) had begun a revolution in Earth-based astronomy by replacing traditional photographic film. CCDs convert as much as 90 percent of the light falling on them into an image. Standard photographic plates are 10 percent efficient at best. Early CCDs had very narrow fields of view, much narrower than standard photographic plates. But the field-of-view gap narrowed considerably as the technology matured. Astronomers, both professional and amateur, began discovering new planetary satellites, comets, and asteroids, including small asteroids in Earth-crossing orbits. As the twentieth century drew to a close, the solar system was looking a lot more crowded than it had when Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. Soon it would turn out to be not only more crowded, but a whole lot bigger.
Jewitt and Luu and 1992 QB1
In 1987 David Jewitt, then an assistant professor at MIT working in planetary astronomy, began looking for distant objects in the solar system, with the assistance of graduate student Jane Luu. Their initial searches used then-standard astronomical technology—telescopes and photographic plates. They repeatedly photographed large areas of the night skies in both the northern and southern hemispheres, then spent tedious hours comparing the images using a blink comparator, “blinking” first one plate and then the other to see if anything “moved.” This was the same technique and the same kind of machine that Tombaugh had used to find Pluto in 1930. They were unsuccessful, so they tried the new CCD technology, using another telescope at Kitt Peak and a CCD chip with a very small field of view. The results were the same.
Analog SFF, March 2006 Page 7