by Allen Steele
This time, though, it didn’t reenter the node from which it had emerged but instead shot down the track until it entered a transparent tube running across the top of Nueva Italia’s southern mountain range. Through the windows, they could see the valley spread out below them. Clouds had begun to form below the ceiling, casting shadows across grassy plains and wooded hills. No sign of habitation; the base camp was already lost to sight. Andromeda wondered if this was what Coyote had looked like to the crew of the URSS Alabama when they’d set foot on the new world for the first time.
“Funny,” Zeus said. “You’d think that, if we’re being taken to meet the danui, they’d pick a more direct route.”
Andromeda nodded. The biopod was a thousand miles long; it would take hours to cross it. No wonder she’d been told to expect a long journey. “Maybe they want us to look over the real estate.” She turned to D’Anguilo. “What do you think? Is the rest of the hexagon going to look like this part of it?”
“Maybe . . . but I sort of doubt it.” He folded his arms across his chest, assuming a professorial posture. “If what I suspect is true, and the danui adopted geospheric design principles in building Hex, then we’ll probably have a number of different environments. Desert, arctic tundra, maybe even miniature seas . . .”
“Okay, stop right there.” Andromeda held up a hand. “Tell me what you think is going on here.”
“I’m not ready to . . .”
“Oh no, you don’t.” She shook her head. “This is at least the second or third time you’ve said that you suspect something about this place, but when I’ve asked you what you meant, you’ve backed off. Quit stalling.”
D’Anguilo gave her a sidelong glance; he appeared to realize that she was serious because he shrugged as though resigning himself to the inevitable. “Very well, then, but understand that this is all still tentative. Until we meet the danui, I’m not sure how much any of this is true.”
“Understood.”
“Okay . . . we know this is a Dyson sphere, and that it’s comprised of billions of habitats, with each one probably unique to the race that inhabits it. Something of this scale and complexity not only suggests extraordinary engineering skills . . . It also suggests environmental control to a degree that we can barely imagine. If the danui hadn’t accomplished that, then there’s no way that Hex could function. It would become uninhabitable, no matter how well it was built.”
“All right, I follow you. Go on.”
“Good. Now, think about what we’ve seen so far. The solar sails and magnetic cables, and how they work together to keep Hex in proper rotation while supplying energy and shielding the biopods from cosmic radiation. The way the Montero was automatically . . . or, rather, autonomously . . . guided to this habitat, and the way that it was docked in the node. How the ceiling darkens by itself to furnish night and lightens again to provide daylight. How the tram stations operate . . . scanning us before we climb aboard, then sending a tram that has our own atmosphere, even though the race that used it last might have gills instead of lungs. Even these seats”—he patted the bench they shared, which had risen to provide a cushion for their backs—“change according to our needs. What does all that tell you?”
“That they’ve got one hell of an AI running this place,” Zeus said.
“Maybe, but think about that, too. Hex is . . . how big? One hundred eighty-six million miles in diameter? The biggest and best AI we’ve ever built would be able to control only this one habitat, and it would be a strain to do so. The danui are well ahead of us, technologically speaking, but I haven’t heard of their being capable of building AIs of such magnitude. Sorry, but I have a hard time believing in deus ex machina.”
“What?”
“Literally, the god from the machine . . . and I don’t believe that gods can be built.” D’Anguilo shook his head and went on. “No, I think they’ve developed something less . . . well, mechanistic . . . than a mere AI.” He paused. “I think Hex may be a geophysiological superintelligence.”
Andromeda blinked. “Come again?”
“A living world.” He took a deep breath. “I think Hex is alive.”
She said nothing for a moment but instead stared out the windows at the scenery rushing by. No one spoke until Zeus coughed in his fist.
“You gotta be kidding,” he muttered.
“I know it’s hard to swallow. Believe me, the first time I heard about this sort of thing, I didn’t believe it either. But the Gaia hypothesis . . . which is what this is all about . . . has been around since the late twentieth century, when it was first put forth by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. No one was able to prove or disprove it at the time because the only available test subject was Earth, and so there was no real means of comparison within its own solar system.” He shrugged. “It didn’t help that it was embraced by mystics and pseudoscientists who carried on about Goddess Earth and so forth while completely misunderstanding what Lovelock and Margulis were saying . . . that Earth itself is a living organism, capable of regulating its own environment.” A brief smile. “Besides, remember what the hjadd call this place. Tanaash—haq . . . ‘the living world.’ ”
“And you think that’s what Hex is? A living world?” Andromeda was having trouble hiding her skepticism.
Zeus gazed up at the tram’s ceiling. “Hello, Hex? Thanks for the hospitality, but we’d like to go home now . . .”
“That’s not what I mean.” D’Anguilo glared at him before turning to Andromeda again. “Hex isn’t sentient, or at least not in the way we normally define conscious self-awareness. But we’ve already seen that it’s capable of regulating its own environment . . . or environments, as the case may be . . . and the more I see of this place, the more I believe that the danui adopted something akin to biospheric principles when they designed it.”
Andromeda thought about it for a moment. “So let me get this straight. Hex is a living . . . um, organism . . . but not one that we can communicate with . . .”
“Not in the way we usually communicate, no.” D’Anguilo looked at Zeus. “You can talk to this tram all you want, but it’s not going to answer you. But it will recognize that you’re human and adjust itself to accommodate your needs.”
Zeus frowned. “Any decent comp could do that.”
“True . . . but for how many trams, all working at once? And not just trams, but also for everything else that goes into maintaining billions of habitats.” D’Anguilo nodded toward the landscape whipping past the windows. “As I said, this is beyond the capability of any AI, no matter how powerful it might be. Something more organic, more adaptive is required for that.”
Andromeda stood up. “I’m going to have to think about this. I’m not saying that you’re wrong, Tom. I’m just not sure that you’re right, either.” She walked back to where they’d left their packs. “In the meantime, we might as well settle in. I have a hunch we’ve got a long ride ahead of us.”
As it turned out, she was correct. They soon became bored with gazing out the windows, and although the benches were reasonably comfortable, they found that they needed to unroll their sleeping bags and lay them out across the floor in order to take a nap. They’d brought food with them—compressed rations, along with some apples they’d taken from the orchard near the base camp—and around midday, Zeus made lunch for them. They made small talk while they ate, wondering how much farther the tram would travel before it reached its destination.
Not long afterward, Andromeda felt the call of nature. Figuring that she’d have to find a bench to squat behind—messy and with very little privacy, but it couldn’t be helped—she ventured to the other end of the tram. She was about to kneel behind the rearmost bench when she noticed the door behind the tram’s aft cargo area.
She’d seen this door before, the first time she’d ridden the tram, but hadn’t taken the moment to see where it led. Curious, she walked toward it. The door slid open, revealing a small compartment the size of a public toilet. Inside was a
padded bench, with what appeared to be a round hatch in its center.
“No,” she whispered. “It can’t be that easy.”
But it was. When Andromeda entered the compartment, the door quietly shut behind her. And when she tentatively laid a hand upon the bench hatch, it opened like a sphincter, exposing a funnel leading into darkness. A rank odor wafted up from the hole; she hesitated before carefully sitting down on top of it, and the bench re-formed itself to match the contours of her body.
The purpose of the compartment was obvious. And as odd as it might seem, that was when she realized that D’Anguilo might be right.
It took a little more than three hours for the tram to travel the length of Nueva Italia. She had just woken up from a nap to see the vehicle rush past what appeared to be another tram station, this one positioned at the eastern end of the biopod. The tram didn’t stop, though, but hurtled through the station and entered the tunnel leading into the adjacent node. A second later, the tram made a left turn; through the windows on either side, she saw tracks appear to both the left and right of the one they were on.
She was about to say something to Zeus and D’Anguilo when, all of a sudden, another tram swept past to the left. It was headed in the opposite direction, so she barely had time to see it. Through its windows, she had the briefest glimpse of figures, bipedal yet four-armed, peering back at her. Then the other tram was gone, as quickly as it had appeared.
“Did you see that?” she asked no one in particular.
“Uh-huh.” Zeus’s voice was little more than a whisper.
“I’m just surprised that we haven’t seen this before.” D’Anguilo was trying to affect a matter-of-fact tone, but Andromeda could tell that he was just as startled as they were. “It would make sense that there would be other trams.”
Another tunnel branched off to the right, but their tram wasn’t taking it. Instead, it continued to follow the middle track; it appeared that it was making its way around the circumference of the node that it had just entered. Something about the direction it was taking seemed familiar to Andromeda; remembering what it was, she grinned.
“I think we’re on an express line,” she said. “Sort of like subways on Earth. You’ve got two local lines . . . one track going one way, another going the other . . . Between them is an express line that cuts past all the stations until the train reaches its destination, when it switches back to the local lines.”
D’Anguilo nodded. “That makes sense. I guess we had to go all the way across Nueva Italia until we were switched to the express line in this node.”
Andromeda thought about it a moment. “If that’s correct, then we should be leaving the node and entering another habitat.”
“But we haven’t left the node,” Zeus said. “Look . . . we’re still in a tunnel.”
He was right. The tram had just made another turn, this time to the right. Instead of emerging into another biopod, though, it continued to hurtle down a tunnel, with opaque walls on both sides of the track.
“Maybe you can’t see the biopods from the express line,” Andromeda said. “We’re in another habitat, but we have no way of telling which one.”
“I suppose that would make sense if you want to maintain privacy between adjacent habitats,” D’Anguilo said. “You know what they say . . . Good fences make good neighbors. And you don’t necessarily want to see what’s going on in your neighbor’s backyard.”
Andromeda settled back on her sleeping bag. “In any case, I think we’re probably going to be riding this thing for a while longer.” She crooked her elbow across her eyes. “Wake me up when we get there.”
Yet when she woke up again, several hours later, the tram was still in motion. D’Anguilo was asleep by then, but Zeus was awake. He told her that the tram had crossed another node and entered yet another tunnel. They were still on the express line, but he couldn’t tell whether the tram was still in the same habitat or if it had entered another. And the control panel was of little use to them; the map displayed only the local lines on the hexagon through which the tram was traveling, with the top row of danui digits their sole means of identifying which one it was.
That was the way things went for the next ten hours. Andromeda, D’Anguilo, and Zeus slept in shifts; when they were awake, they shared meals together, although Andromeda was careful to make sure that they preserved their food and water for as long as possible. D’Anguilo had a chess program loaded into his datapad; they took turns at playing games on its holo screen, and that was the only thing that kept them from going crazy with boredom.
Andromeda tried to contact the Montero, but received only static; apparently radio waves were unable to penetrate the tunnel walls of the express line. Staring out the windows at the darkened tunnel, she found herself wondering whether Sean and his party had yet managed to make it to Nueva Italia and what she’d say to him once they saw each other again.
She was thinking about that very thing when the tram entered another node. Another tram rushed by in the opposite direction; judging from the quick glance she had of its windows, she had the impression that it was empty. Then their tram swerved to the right, and she realized that it was beginning to decelerate.
Zeus had been asleep on the floor. He must have felt the change in velocity because his eyes opened. “Are we stopping?” he asked.
“I think so.” D’Anguilo was peering out the windows. “We’re on a local line again.”
Standing up from the bench where she’d been sitting, Andromeda hurried over to where she’d left her gear. “Get your things. I think we’re getting off here.”
The three of them barely had time to stuff their belongings back in their packs before the tram slowed down as if to enter a station. As it glided to a halt, Andromeda gazed through the windows on the tram’s right side. Although she could see the illumination of a station control panel, there was only darkness beyond. Indeed, it didn’t appear as if they’d entered a biopod; the station looked more like the one inside the node where the Montero was docked.
Andromeda quickly walked over to the control panel and examined its map. She was right; a node in the top left corner was illuminated. So they weren’t in a biopod. Yet the coordinates appeared to match the ones she’d been given. She was beginning to wonder why the tram was stopping there when the doors opened.
“We’re here.” Picking up his pack, D’Anguilo stepped through the open door. “Let’s go see . . .” His voice trailed off as he stopped outside the tram, apparently astonished by something he’d just seen.
“What are you looking at?” Hoisting her pack across her left shoulder, Andromeda hurried to follow him, with Zeus close behind. “Is this . . . ?”
Then she found herself unable to speak as well, leaving it to Zeus to say what she and D’Anguilo felt.
“Oh, my God,” he whispered.
At the edge of the platform was a transparent barrier. Beyond that, though, was . . . nothing.
No veranda. No station. No biopod. Not even a hexagon.
There was simply a vast, empty space, thousands of miles in diameter and bordered on all sides by the biopods and nodes of adjacent habitats. Beyond that distant horizon lay the tessellated sky of Hex: countless hexagons curving upward and outward, gradually diminishing in size before the farthermost disappeared within the glare of HD 76700.
If there had ever been a hexagon there, it had long since vanished.
“What the hell happened here?” Andromeda murmured.
“For some, it was the end of the world,” a voice behind her replied.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
EVEN BEFORE THE TRAM REACHED ITS DESTINATION, SEAN realized that something was wrong.
The journey took a little more than twenty hours. Although it didn’t take long to figure out that the tram was on an express line that went through hexagons without stopping, he soon lost count of how many nodes it had passed through and had no idea how many miles they had traveled. They could see little through the win
dows except tunnel walls, and the occasional tram that sped past in the opposite direction.
Sean took turns with Kyra and Sandy standing watch while the others slept. Although the benches changed shape to accommodate the human form, he found it hard to get comfortable on them. He and Kyra spread their sleeping bags out across the floor and zipped them together, which enabled them to sleep in each other’s arms while Sandy politely sat at the other end of the vehicle. They ate as little as possible, conserving their rations in case the trip took longer than expected; keeping their Corps survival training in mind, they only sipped at their water bottles.
They should have been getting closer to the hexagon where the Montero was docked, but after twelve hours it dawned on Sean that this wasn’t happening. At first, he thought it was only some sort of illusion that he was beginning to feel lighter, but when Sandy happened to mention the same thing and Kyra chimed in to say that she didn’t feel as if she weighed as much as she normally did, Sean tried an experiment. Pulling a survival knife from his pack, he held it at shoulder height, then let it drop from his fingers. It was hard to tell for certain, but it seemed as if the knife took a half second longer than normal to hit the floor. Three hours later, though, when they repeated the experiment again, they were sure: the knife was taking longer to fall.
That could mean only one thing: the tram wasn’t heading toward Nueva Italia, where the surface gravity was 1 g, but farther away from Hex’s equator, where the gravity would become incrementally less. But as to exactly where they were going, they had no clue.
There was no way to contact the Montero; apparently the express line’s tunnel walls blocked radio transmissions. Nor was there any way for them to change the tram’s direction; even if they’d known the correct coordinates for Nueva Italia, Sandy discovered that any attempts to enter new danui numbers into the control panel were futile. Once the tram was on its way, apparently it didn’t stop for anything. They had little choice but to wait for it to arrive at the destination for which it had been programmed and hope that they weren’t in trouble once they got there.