“Which wouldn’t have happened without your force of will, your imagination.”
Vashka took her time in answering. “Until it’s done, and we’re on our way home, there are more important things to think about than credit and glory.”
“Well, I’ve good news for you. My report will conclude that proceeding with the tenth draft is an acceptable risk. And you’re right. It never occurred to me to bend the facts.”
“I’m… happy,” Vashka said, as if she feared a trap in my words.
“It won’t be perfection,” I added. “It’ll be a step in that direction. But don’t delude yourself that this is the end. As soon as we’re back on Pellucid, you’ll be wishing you changed this or deleted that. It’s human nature. Or yours, anyway.”
“Then perhaps I’ll program my stasis berth so that I never wake up.”
It was a flip response, something that – had it come from anyone else – I’d have been more than willing to dismiss as bravado. But with Vashka, I was prepared to believe quite the opposite. She would easily choose death over living with the knowledge of irreversible failure.
Always and forever.
“I’d best get back inside,” I told her.
The day she first explained it to me we were in our old house, the one we bought together during our time at the academy, the one that overlooked the bay, with the ground floor patio windows flung open to salt-tang sea breezes and hazy morning sunshine. I was doing dance exercises, going through the old motions of stretching and limbering, but still listening to what she said. I’d made the mistake of only half-listening before, nodding in the right places, but from bitter experience I knew that Vashka would always catch me out.
It wasn’t that I didn’t care. But I had my area of obsession and she had hers, and it was increasingly clear that the two only slightly intersected.
“Dark energy is the killer,” she said. “Right now we hardly feel it. It’s making all the galaxies accelerate away from each other, but the effect is small enough that people argued over it for a long time before convincing themselves it was real.” Vashka was standing at the door, doing stretching exercises of her own. Whereas mine were in the service of art, hers served no higher purpose other than the toning of her body, a maintenance routine to keep the machine in working order.
I knew enough about cosmology to ask the easy questions. “The Milky Way’s just one galaxy in the Local Group. Won’t the gravitational pull of nearby galaxies always outweigh the repulsion caused by dark energy?”
Her nod was businesslike, as if this objection was no more than she’d anticipated. “That’s true enough, and most galaxies are also bound into small groups and clusters. But the gravitational pull between groups and clusters is much too weak to resist dark energy over cosmological time. At the moment we can see galaxies and galaxy clusters all the way out to the redshift horizon, but dark energy will keep pushing them over that edge. They’ll be redshifted out of our range of view. Nothing in physics can stop that, and there’s nothing we can ever do to observe them, once they’ve passed over the horizon.”
“Which won’t happen for a hundred billion years.”
“So what? That only seems like a long time if you’re not thinking cosmologically. The universe is already thirteen billion years old, and there are stars now shining that will still be burning nuclear fuel in a hundred billion years.”
“Not ours.”
“We don’t matter. What does is the message we leave to our descendants.”
She didn’t mean descendants of humanity. She meant the alien beings who would one day supplant us, in whatever remained of the galaxy that far downstream. Carriers of the flame of sentience, if that doesn’t sound insufferably pompous.
“Fine,” I said. “The dark energy pushes all those galaxies out of sight. But the local group galaxies are still bound.”
“That’s irrelevant. For a start, they can’t be used to detect the expansion of the universe, for the same reason that dark energy doesn’t disrupt them – their short range attraction predominates over long range cosmological effects. But it’s worse than that. In six or seven billion years, the local group galaxies will have merged with each other, pulled together by gravity. There’ll just be a single super-galaxy, where once there was the Milky Way, Andromeda, the Clouds of Magellan, all the other galaxies in our group. This isn’t speculation. We’ve seen galactic mergers across all epochs. We know that this is our fate, and we know that the mixing process will erase the prior histories of all the involved galaxies.”
“I accept this,” I said. “But if aliens arise in that super-galaxy, tens of billions years from now, they’ll have billions of years to consider their situation. Our technological science is a few thousand years old. Isn’t it presumptuous of us to assume that they won’t be capable of making the same discoveries, given time?”
“Physics says otherwise. There’ll be no observable galaxies, other than the one they’re inside. They may not even retain the concept of a galaxy. All they’ll see around their own island universe will be a perfect starless black. And there won’t be any easy way for them to measure the expansion of spacetime by other means. The cosmic microwave background will have been redshifted far into the radio frequency, and it’ll be a trillion times fainter than it is now. They could send out probes to gauge the effects of expansion, if it even occurred to them, but it would take billions more years for those probes to get far enough out to feel measurable effects.” Vashka paused in her work-out. “An unpalatable truth, but truth is what it is. We happen to exist inside a window, a brief moment in the universe’s history, in which intelligent creatures have the means to determine that the universe was born, that it has a finite age, that it is expanding. To not know these things is to not know the universe at all. And yet the downstreamers will be unable to determine these absolute fundamentals! That is why it is our duty, our moral imperative, to send a message from our epoch to theirs.”
“This monument you’ve been talking about.”
“I’ve submitted my ideas to the Legislation. And it’ll have to be more than a monument. We can’t leave a message on Pellucid, or any other planet orbiting a solar-type star: it’ll be incinerated when the star goes red giant. And even if that didn’t happen, the galactic merger event will play havoc with stellar dynamics. The best place would be around a star bound to the local group, but on an orbit that will take it far enough out to avoid the convulsions. A bystander. I think I might even have found a candidate.”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself, if you’ve only just submitted that proposal.”
“There’s no point counting on failure, Nysa. If I’m going to see this through to completion, I might as well start working on the details. It’s a pulsar, with a planetary companion, on a high-velocity trajectory that will take it far from the Milky Way.”
I hardly dared ask the next question. “If we were to go out there, how long would it take to get home again?”
Vashka looked out through the open patio windows, to the headland and the wide sweep of the bay. “If we left now? The fastest ship could get us home again in just under five thousand years. Four, if we could get a little closer to the speed of light. To do that, though – and to make rendezvous with such a fast moving object – we’d need a number of radical breakthroughs in engine design.” She shrugged, now that she’d delivered her lure, the hook that would sink its way into me. “Whatever happens, this house will have crumbled into the sea by then. We’ll just have to get a new one.”
“We?” I asked.
“You’d come with me, Nysa.” Vashka closed her eyes, resumed her stretching. “You know you would.”
Sculptor swung around Pebble in its endless winding orange peel. Loimaa’s gamma-ray lasers were scribing constantly. They scissored and whisked like knitting needles. From the inspection cupola we’d watch their furious industry, mesmerised as the landscape was reshaped to our latest whim. It wasn’t simply a question of ablation, boiling diamond a
way in plumes of atomised carbon. Loimaa’s methods were so skilled that she could literally move mountains – slicing chunks of diamond here, pushing them there – and then allowing their interlattice bonds to reform again. She could melt diamond and use shockwaves to compress it back to solidity in a dozen different allotropes. She was carving a world with light.
Days passed. Sculptor completed hundreds of orbits. The engines glowed a little hotter from day to day, but the thermal progression was entirely within expectations. To her credit, Captain Reusel still demanded a constant supply of updates, keeping a nervous eye on our status. The ritual was always the same. I’d tell her that nothing untoward had happened, but that I was still uncomfortable with the overstay.
“Objection duly noted,” Reusel would say. “But until we’ve something better to go on than your natural tendency toward pessimism, Nysa, then we keep cutting. You have my word that we’ll break orbit the moment things change.”
“I hope we have sufficient warning, in that case.”
“I’m sorry, Nysa. But we’re doing this for the ages. We can’t leave it as a botched job, not when there’s a chance of getting it right. No one’s going to come out here again and correct our mistakes.”
I accepted this. I might have not liked it, but I wasn’t so self-centred that I couldn’t see things from Reusel’s viewpoint. She’d been a good and kind-mannered captain and I knew she wasn’t one to make snap decisions. In her shoes, I’d probably have done exactly the same thing.
Things thawed between me and Vashka.
Now that she’d got her way, Reusel on her side, she admitted that she’d always understood my position, sympathised with my professional concern for the engines, but felt she had an equally pressing duty to fight her corner over the engravings.
I feigned understanding and forgiveness. It was almost like old times.
“I didn’t mean it to turn so bitter,” Vashka told me, the last time we slept together. “But you know how it is. We’ve both given up so much to make it here. It’s worth spilling some blood, if that’s the difference between perfection and good enough.”
“I just wish some of that blood hadn’t been mine.”
“You know I still love you.” She stroked the side of my face with a tenderness that snapped me back to our first days together on Pellucid. “Besides, it’s all water under the bridge now. We’re well into the tenth draft. It’ll be done before you know it.”
“Unless another update arrives.”
“They wouldn’t dare.” Vashka declared this with the flat certainty of a believer, not a scientist. “I’ve studied this iteration, and it really is beautifully self-consistent. There’s no scope for improvement. If they sent another draft… I’d reject it.”
I smiled, although I didn’t really believe her.
“Daring of you.”
“This one is right. I know it’s right. I know when I’m right.”
“It’s always good to have self-belief. I wish I had more of it myself. Perhaps I should have stayed a dancer.”
“As a dancer, you died a thousand years ago,” Vashka said. “Forgotten and obscure, just another middlingly talented artist on a little blue planet in the Commonwealth. As you, as Nysa the engineer, you’re still alive. Still out here. Doing something magnificent. Participating in an act of altruism that will endure across cosmological time.”
At that moment I found Captain Reusel’s choice of words springing to mind. “For the ages.”
“Precisely,” Vashka said, pulling me closer, as if everything was and always would be all right. “For the ages.”
And for a while it was right, too. Until it hit me what I needed to do.
I’d been outside, making another engine inspection. After dispensing with my suit, I travelled through Sculptor to what we still referred to as the ‘engine room’, a name that conjured an archaic, sweating furnace of boilers and pistons, but which was in fact merely a cool, calm control node, isolated far from the fearsome, transgressive physics of the engines themselves. The room was empty when I arrived, as I had expected it to be.
My hands summoned the control interfaces. They sprang into obliging solidity under my touch. My fingers danced, caressing rainbow-coloured keys and sliders. Around me, status graphics swelled for attention. To anyone not schooled in momentum-trading, these squirming, intertwining, multi-dimensional figures would have seemed as strange and unfathomable as deep-sea organisms, engaged in courtship and combat. To my eyes, they signalled chains of branching probability, tangled meshes of counter-intuitive cause and effect. Thermal-kinetic tradeoff matrices, momentum-event spinors, clustered braids of twistor-impulse covariance. Lucid to my eyes, but only just. It still took tremendous concentration to make sense of the entirety. That I could do it at all was the wonder.
Sweat prickled my skin, drying instantly in the room’s cool. A necessary wrong was still a wrong. For a moment, I quailed. Perhaps Vashka really was right, and we should see this through.
But no.
There was a mode, a faculty, to push the engines out of their stable operating regime. It was a test function, nothing more. It was meant to be used only in those rare instances when we might want reassurance that the automated safety cut-ins were functioning normally.
The mode could be misused.
I meant only to nudge the engines, to push them a little more into the danger regime. Not enough to endanger us, but enough to be able to demonstrate the glitch to Reusel, to make her think that we were better off cutting our losses now. “Look at that spike,” I might say, all plausibility and professional concern. “It’s a warning sign. I thought we could hold back the debt longer than this, but the stochastic coupling’s evidently running away from us. There was always a chance…”
“It’s understood,” she might say, with a regretful nod, trusting my professional judgement implicitly. “Prep Sculptor for immediate departure.”
I’d echo the same grave nod. “It’s a pity,” I’d say, “that Vashka’s work won’t be finished.”
“Vashka will just have to live with imperfection, like the rest of us.”
That’s not the way it happened, though.
I knew my error as soon as I’d made it. There are no simple mistakes in momentum-trading, but I’d come as close as possible to making one. A slip of inattention, a failure to consider all repercussions. We were in one stability mode, and I’d neglected to remember that the test function would, by default, assume a slightly different one. Much earlier, as part of another, entirely innocent test exercise, I had disabled the safety overrides that would have prevented this mismatch. I could have corrected matters, had I remembered, and still perpetrated my lie. But by the time I did, it was far too late to do anything about it.
Sculptor was going to die. It was going to give back to the universe all the energy it had stolen to get here. The antimomentum cores would surrender their debt in a lightless eruption of transient exotics, imparting a barely measurable kink into the local dark energy distribution. An obligation discharged.
But just as the inward collapse of a denegerate stellar core results in an outward pulse of energy and matter – a supernova – so the failure of the antimomentum cores would have a vastly more visible effect on the rest of Sculptor and its contents.
When panic hit me, it was as novel and unanticipated as the kiss from a new lover. All the exercises, all the simulations, had failed to prepare me for this moment. My routines deserted me. As much as it shames me to admit it, I had no instinct other than my immediate self-preservation.
I still had enough presence of mind to warn the crew. “Engine overload!” I shouted, pushing my voice throughout Sculptor, using emergency privilege to override any other business, even that of the captain. “Repeat, engine overload! Abandon ship! This is not a drill!”
Even as I knew it wouldn’t do any of them the slightest good.
It was different for me. I’d just come back in from outside, and I didn’t have far to go
to reach the suit I’d only recently vacated. The suit was still warm, and it welcomed me back into its armoured embrace.
Then I left.
With the suit’s thrusters on maximum power, I aimed myself at Pebble. With the criticality event in progress, Sculptor had automatically shut down its scribing operations, so I didn’t have to worry about falling into the path of the gamma-ray lasers. Not, of course, that that would have been a bad way to go. Instantaneous annihilation, as painless as non-existence. A kiss from eternity, then nothing.
But then I wouldn’t be here, thinking these thoughts, leaving this testimony.
To survive the death of Sculptor – the momentary energy pulse would exceed the neutron star’s emissions by a factor of a thousand – I’d need a lot of shielding between me and the ship. There wasn’t time to get around the other side of Pebble, to use the planet itself as cover. But there was time to reach the cavern.
I knew even then it wasn’t to save me – just buy me enough time for self-reflection. The panic didn’t care, though. All that mattered to the panic was the next five minutes.
I followed the spiralling logic-chain to its dark epicentre. With a tap of thruster controls I fell into the hole in the world’s crust. Down through the glittering, symbol-lined throat, until the shaft widened and I could finally bring the suit to rest. I aligned myself with the local vertical, and settled down to the floor, taking care that my arrival should not damage any of our finely graven inscriptions. This was our backup policy: a reiteration of the entire external statement, on a much smaller scale. If some unforeseen cosmic process scrubbed Pebble’s crust back to a blank canvas, there was still a chance that the engravings in this chamber might endure. Here, in duplicate, was Vashka’s cosmological statement. It began near the top of the cavern and wound its way around and down in gorgeous glittering intricacy. Squandering suit power, I drenched it in artificial radiance.
I had to admit that it was quite an achievement. And it would last, too. I didn’t doubt that. Whether anyone would ever find it… well, that was a different question.
Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction Page 35