by Paul McAuley
She had altered and improved vacuum organisms designed by Avernus to capture sunlight and convert it into electrical energy. As they spread across the surface of Janus, Sri’s modified body grew ever larger. Copies of her original body were cached here and there in that great mass, each sharing the same sensory inputs, the same thoughts. They were all as alike as possible, true avatars ready to be sent out to explore the universe.
‘We will soon break out of this little moon and leave the Solar System and travel on towards Fomalhaut,’ Sri said. ‘It will take a thousand years, but we are capable of surviving voyages ten times as long. There is a ring of dust and protoplanetary debris around Fomalhaut, twice the size of our solar system. Millions of comets and planetoids and asteroids. Planets, too, but we don’t care about planets. We will fill the dust ring with copies of our clade, and some of those will move on to other systems where planets failed to form. We are the first true posthuman. A new species. The Outers were a first step, lungfish on the shore of space. We have already gone much further, and we will go further still.
‘From the point of view of the individual, evolution is cruel. For in the race to survive, all individuals perish. Most species perish. Only successful genes survive for any significant span of time. But the clade will split into a thousand or a million varieties, all different, yet all one flesh, one genome. We will fill the galaxy, in time. And we will never die.’
Alder laughed, and told his mother that he couldn’t fault her ambition.
‘You are not shocked by what I’ve told you,’ Sri said. Her ageless face floated calm and still in the avatar’s visor, like a medical specimen in a jar. ‘I’m glad. So very glad. Your acceptance means much to us.’
Alder remembered what Cash had said to him in the world above. ‘I’m your son. You made me what I am. Cut me with various talents and tweaks so that I could help you to get what you wanted. For a little while, we were a team - or so I believed. I didn’t even mind when you left me behind on Earth, because you had given me the responsibility of looking after the research facility. But in the years after the war, when you fell silent, I grew to hate and despise you. Because you had found something new, and had abandoned me for it. Because I realised that all along it was only your work that ever mattered to you. Well, I had my own work, and in time I had my own family too. You no longer had any power over me, and my hate ebbed away. But I never gave up on you. I sent you news about my family. I collected rumours about your work here on Janus, and sifted them for nuggets of truth. And now I know the truth, now I see what you’ve done, I know that I can let you go. I am amazed by it, yes. But I don’t approve of it. You were always remote from other people. Even from me, in the end. And now you’ve become a true monster. What you’ve accomplished is amazing, yes. But there’s something sad and desperate about it, because it seems to me that you’ve given up on other people. You have become a nation of one.’
‘You have your own family now. And I have mine, and it has me.’
‘When you arrive at Fomalhaut, you know, you might find other people already living there. What will you do then?’
Sri laughed. The pale children around them laughed too, a melodious but chilling carillon.
‘You are limited by old ways of thinking,’ Sri said. ‘We’re beyond that.’
‘We’ll see,’ Alder said.
He and his mother walked and talked. He told her about his family and his work on Earth. He told her about Avernus’s funeral, and the people he had met on Dione and Mimas. Sri said that she’d hoped that the old gene wizard would come back to the Saturn System before she died; they’d had so much to talk about.
‘But it was not to be,’ she said. ‘And I have discovered that it doesn’t matter. Because I know now that I am her equal. At least her equal. And we will go on, and do such things . . .’
‘Avernus has her place in history, and you have yours,’ Alder said.
He could not tell her that she was not now, nor could she ever be, Avernus’s equal. It would be too cruel. And besides, there would be no point. She would never acknowledge her faults because she was too proud, too vain. A monster of ego. As she always had been. She might live a thousand years, but she would never change. Never understand people. Like Berry, she had retreated from the world into her own fantasies. But at least Berry had Xbo Xbaine. Sri had only copies of herself.
At last they climbed a winding path to the meadow, and the cliff where the platform waited at the foot of its track.
‘We are glad you came,’ Sri said. ‘We have changed beyond your understanding, and we will continue to change. But we will never forget you.’
‘I don’t know if I will ever come here again,’ Alder said. ‘But I won’t say goodbye. We can still talk, you and I, whenever we want.’
But he knew that they wouldn’t, and he knew that she knew it too.
They made their farewells and the avatar stood still and silent amongst the crew of strange children as Alder stepped onto the platform and it rose up the cliff towards the mouth of the shaft. One flesh, one clade, one family. Dwindling below him, gone. The platform passed through the roof of the chamber and the leaves of the pressure barrier, climbing towards the black sky at the top of the shaft, where his friend was waiting.
2
Twelve years after the death of Avernus, Macy Minnot was still living on Titan, was still involved in the planoforming project. Currently, most of her time was taken up with a scheme to quicken the moon’s Hot Lakes. These occupied a string of fresh craters south of the hilly chaos of Xanadu, created by the impact of chunks of ice from the shield of the Ghost ship that had broken up while traversing the outer edge of Titan’s atmosphere during the crisis of ’31. Ice melted by the impacts had flooded the floors of the craters with ammonia-rich water. Now radiator grids powered by fission piles kept the lakes from freezing solid, and ecoengineers and gene wizards were seeding them with varieties of methanogenic bacteria and cyanobacteria, the first stage of the construction of a simple ecosystem of plankton, kelp, and several species of krill, shellfish, and crab.
When Newt came to pick her up, Macy was working with the nutrient-cycling crew at the research station beside the largest lake, Windermere Lacus. One of her assistants drove her up the steep slope, the lake stretching below, sheeted with brash ice and patched by fog smoking off leads of open water, to the landing pad where Newt’s aeroshell shuttle, painted the signature pink of his haulage company, sat like an orchid dropped in a coal cellar. Despite the string of fusion lamps in equatorial orbit and the ongoing injection of a layer of ultraviolet-absorbing chemicals high in the atmosphere to prevent formation of thiolins, the major component of the moon’s smoggy shroud, light levels at the surface of Titan were still relatively low. But the sun was clearly visible in the sky now, a tiny ruby in the dust, and so was Saturn, its crescent tipped sideways in the sky above the pale and restless fogs.
Macy and her assistant supervised the robot that unloaded pallets of insulated packages from the rolligon and slotted them inside the shuttle’s hold - all kinds of samples for her colleagues at the University of Athena, and for laboratories in a dozen research institutes and facilities on Earth. When the samples had been safely stowed, Macy climbed aboard and Newt took the shuttle straight up, punching through Titan’s sky and rendezvousing with the transit station, where Macy and Newt transferred themselves and their cargo to Elephant. They were on their way to the Sixtieth Conference on the Great Leap Up And Out, scheduled to be held in eight weeks at Athena, the Moon, but they took a roundabout route, via a comet falling towards Mars.
They had been partnered for more than thirty years. The edges of their relationship had long ago worn comfortably smooth and they had their own private shorthand and habits and accommodations that allowed them to rub along together during the voyage. Macy kept in touch with the research station at the Hot Lakes and the landscaping crew in the new city of Coleridge; Newt dealt with the snags and routine administration work generated
by his haulage company, a little fleet of ships that connected Saturn and Jupiter and Mars in a shifting triangle, with a sideline in special deliveries and exotic cargoes. So the time passed equitably enough as Elephant fell inwards, rising above the plane of the ecliptic at a shallow angle as it crossed the orbit of Jupiter and the asteroid belt, until one day Newt pulled up a view of their destination in the memo space: a faint star off to one side of the tiny red disc of Mars.
Three days later, he took command of Elephant’s navigation and drive systems and flew the last ten thousand kilometres by eye and hand. The sun was eclipsed by the spinning sunshade that minimised thermal input - a circle of faint blue light expanding towards them, the comet nucleus at its centre acquiring heft and solidity. A fleck, a seed, a boulder, a small mountain. Elephant drifting past its pitted flanks towards the ship that kept station fifty kilometres ahead of it, silhouetted small and sharp against the sunshade’s oceanic glow.
The comet was a member of the short-term Jupiter family, a dirty snowball massing some thirty-two billion tonnes, its surface coated in layers of ice flakes and carbonaceous dust as fragile as cigarette ash, its interior a loose agglomeration of pebbly planetesimal material and water ice and pockets of frozen gases. As it fell sunwards, its orbit had been perturbed by judiciously creating hotspots that vented jets of gases and dust; in eighty-three days it would intercept Mars and break up above the surface, making a significant contribution to the partial pressure of the red planet’s atmosphere, currently thirty-two millibars at datum.
Newt’s company had won the delivery contract, and Newt and Macy’s youngest son, Darwin, was in charge of the crew that micro-managed the comet’s trajectory, countering changes in its delta vee caused by irregular outgassing as the pulse of thermal energy that had warmed the comet’s surface before the sunshade had been unfolded worked its way into the interior, and pockets of carbon dioxide or methane snow explosively sublimed. There was a small blow-out under way when Elephant sidled up to Darwin’s ship, a fountain jetting out sideways from the sunward end of the comet, dissipating outward for ten thousand kilometres. Darwin was busy organising a correction to the slight spin this had imparted, so his parents didn’t meet him and the rest of the crew until supper, some six hours later.
Macy hadn’t seen her son for more than a year. It was a small but pleasurable shock to be reminded of how much he looked like his father. A pale and lanky young man with a disordered crest of black hair, bright blue eyes, and a quick, lopsided smile, about the same age, twenty-five, that Newt had been when he’d helped Macy escape from East of Eden. And like Newt all those years ago, Darwin was trying to escape from the shadow of his parents’ reputation and find his own way in the world. He’d had some spectacular rows with them in the past, but he was happy to see them now and they had a fine time exchanging gossip about his siblings and discussing plans to use comets as the raw material for an ocean habitat wrapped around a rocky asteroid. Herding and dismantling the half-dozen comets needed to supply a sufficient volume of water created all kinds of complex and knotty problems, but Darwin reckoned that with the right backing it could be done within the next decade.
‘We have enough karma to organise an initial study,’ Newt said to Macy later that evening, back on board Elephant. ‘We could give it a push, see where he takes it.’
‘And how would he feel about that, do you think?’
‘He should feel grateful, I reckon. It would be his thing - there’s no way I want to get involved with the kind of bureaucratic jungle that’s bound to grow around a project like that. But we could help him plant the seed.’
Sometimes Newt couldn’t see anything but the problem at hand. Macy said patiently, ‘What I mean is, think back to when you were Darwin’s age. How would you feel about your parents muscling in on your plans?’
‘Hell, I didn’t have any plans back then.’
‘Were you grateful every time Abbie bailed you out of trouble?’
Newt laughed. ‘Good point. But I want to find some way of helping him. Don’t you? And it could be a fantastic opportunity for the company. The start-up costs are big, but the potential is way bigger.’
‘Of course I want to help. But I don’t want to run Darwin’s life for him.’
Newt thought for a little while and said at last, ‘The kid needs to start up his own company. Then we act as subcontractors. We bring in the karma, but he’ll control everything. It’ll be up to him to make it happen. Maybe it’ll come to something, maybe not. But the kid’s smart. He’ll pull it off, I reckon, if he doesn’t get bored and go off and get into something else instead.’
They spent two days with Darwin and his crew. Macy discussed the latest panspermia theories with the exobiologist who had hitched a lift so that he could take cores from the heart of the comet. So far, he’d failed to find any traces of biological activity, but his inventory of organic molecules, deep-frozen since the formation of the Solar System, would add to the vast store of data about conditions in the primordial planetary disc. And Macy and Newt talked with Darwin about his plans for the construction of the ocean habitat, and did their best to support him without appearing to criticise or interfere. Telling themselves that if he failed, it would not be an important failure. He was young, and the Solar System was buzzing with boundless possibility. At last they said their farewells to Darwin and his crew, and Elephant powered on, hooking past Mars in a slingshot that sent her back into the plane of the ecliptic, towards the sister worlds of the Earth and the Moon.
Macy hadn’t been to one of the conferences on the Great Leap Up And Out for eighteen years - she’d dropped out of research into extrasolar planets because her work on Titan had taken over most of her time. Superficially, little seemed to have changed. The same round of intense discussions about everything from mapping extrasolar planets to the Holy Grail of faster-than-light travel; the same social dynamic, with young delegates looking to make their mark and older delegates defending their reputations. There were even a few Ghosts, keeping themselves to themselves as usual. They were generally regarded as a spent force, pariahs who had at last made peace with the great society of the Solar System but were still struggling with the long and painful process of integration.
Macy knew more than half the delegates, old friends who were a little greyer and slower than she’d last seen them, but were otherwise much the same. A few faces were missing, chief amongst them Pete Bakaleinikoff, who had hitched a ride on Pholus, a centaur planetoid that had been outfitted with mass drivers and was now heading out towards Delta Pavonis, a voyage that would take more than a thousand years. Junko and Junpei Asai were still researching Delta Pavonis’s Earth-like planet, Tierra. Using an ultra-long base telescope cloud stretched between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus, they’d refined resolution down to less than a kilometre, and were discussing their findings with Pete and the rest of Pholus’s crew - possible landing sites, places where cities could be built, climate models and vegetation maps, and much more.
So that was one very large difference. When Macy had attended her first conference, everything had been theoretical. In addition to Pholus, several other planetoids were being converted into generation starships, and Sri Hong-Owen and her clade were heading out to Fomalhaut inside a chunk cut from the regolith of Janus, still steadily accelerating eight years after departing from orbit around Saturn, travelling deep inside the cometary belt now, some seventy-five trillion kilometres from the sun.
At the end of the conference, loaded with invitations to visit every kind of research project, Macy and Newt rode out from the Moon and fell towards Earth in the ancient free-return trajectory, a slow, lazy trip of three days, the mother planet swelling ahead until at last they were in orbit a mere five hundred kilometres above the equator. Macy pointed out landmarks and mountains and rivers and cities; Newt told her that he knew they’d talked about this before they’d left, but just in case she had changed her mind he’d brought along a couple of exoskeletons: they could hi
tch a ride down on a shuttle if she wanted. Watching her carefully as she thought about it.
‘No,’ she said. ‘We have places to go, people to see. And we have to get to Hannah before her time is due. Maybe another time.’
‘It’s so close we could walk it. And I’m curious to see where you came from.’
‘Where we all came from.’
‘Not me. I was born on Titania.’
‘You won’t find anything down there you can’t find anywhere else. And there’s the crushing gravity, impossibly crowded cities, biting insects, diseases . . .’
‘And wind, and rain, and all the rest of the stuff you miss.’
‘I grew out of missing it. Let’s get on.’
They docked briefly with one of the stations hung in synchronous orbit around Earth’s equator and unloaded their cargo, and then they headed outward to one of the reefs of bubble habitats that, grown from the fugitive moonlets modified and launched by Sri Hong-Owen and her crew, orbited inside the inner edge of the main Asteroid Belt. Thin and interrupted arcs of gardens ringing the sun.
Macy and Newt’s adopted daughter, Hannah, lived in one of the largest, Pan-Ku, named for the world-sculpting Chinese demiurge, with her partner Xander Elliott and their twins, Abbie and Kit, Macy and Newt’s first grandchildren. Abbie and Kit were seven years old now, and Hannah was pregnant again, again with twins. She was carrying them the natural way, as Macy had carried Darwin, and was due to give birth in three weeks’ time, which was why Macy and Newt had come to visit.
Pan-Ku was twenty kilometres in diameter and jacketed in a lumpy skin of water-filled bubbles that helped to protect it from solar and cosmic radiation, but otherwise it was little different to the habitat that Macy and Newt and the other Free Outers had built at Nephele. Hannah and Xander’s home was a tented garden on the inner surface, with views out across the vast airy gulf where rafts bearing farms and forests, strung along the habitat’s radial spars, receded towards the loose shell of sunlamps and the infrastructure that underpinned the habitat’s lifesystem.