by Ken MacLeod
Orro jumped up and stalked about for a moment, to the very lip of the cave and back. “Stars evolve,” he said. “From white to yellow to red, isn’t it?”
“I know of that hypothesis,” said Darvin. “The fire analogy. It’s speculative, and going from every other colour to green would knock it right on the head.”
“Not necessarily,” said Orro. “If the green represents a different evolution: life spreading from star to star.”
“Ah, the comet plants!” said Darvin. “The vacuum forests!”
Orro shrugged. “Life is adaptable.” He glared down at Darvin. “You are testing me with your scepticism. You do not feel it yourself.”
“No,” said Darvin. “I don’t.” He folded the sheets of paper between the pages of the notebook and tucked it away. “Tell me what you suspect I suspect.”
Orro squatted down again. “Isn’t it obvious? You suspect that the green tinge is caused by life, yes, but by life in some artificial environment.” He outlined a circle with his hands. “Great globes of glass, perhaps, somehow launched into space, containing complete economies of nature, plants and animals alike, and whatever intelligent inhabitants have built them. That they multiply around a sun, to the extent that eventually they filter all of its light. And that as each sun’s environs become crowded, great ships are launched across the voids between the stars, to repeat the process around another sun. Your comet is of course such a ship, decelerating into orbit around the Sun Himself. In years to come, our sky will be crowded with the green globes, and we ourselves may look forward to meeting the mighty builders of worlds, should they deign to notice such as us.”
Darvin looked sidelong at his friend with admiration. “What a delightful fancy!” he said. “No, really. And it is a possibility, I concede. But as scientists rather than writers of engineering tales, we should seek explanations in the work of nature rather than the hand of mind whenever possible. I think it’s life, certainly, and that it is spreading, but I think it may be an entirely natural process. Because if life — a hardy spore that escaped the atmosphere, perhaps — were to gain a foothold on some rock or comet in space, it could spread. As it did so it would be modified by evolution, and its own actions would modify the paths of the bodies on which it grew. A decelerating comet seems much more plausible if we imagine its outgassing to be controlled — mindlessly, it is true — by some life within.”
Orro was shaking his head. “A journey from star to star would take millions of years. We’re seeing stars changing over eights-of-eights.”
“I’m not talking about passive drifting, like spores or downy seeds on the wind. I imagine some much faster propulsion.” He swept his arms in a circle wider than the one Orro had outlined a moment earlier. “A sail of some sort.”
“Propelled by what wind?”
“Light exerts a pressure in vacuum,” said Darvin. “The Sun gives forth a fiery stream of other particles.”
“Too weak a one for star-sailing,” Orro said. “No, Darvin, we are looking at… spaceships. And artificial worlds in numbers that beggar the imagination.”
Darvin felt his knees shake. He did and did not want to believe it.
Orro took two strips of dried meat from his provisions pack, passed one to Darvin and started chewing on the other. “Here is an idea for further research. We find out the distance of each of the stars charted in the Daughters region, green or not. We can see whether the earlier green stars are closer together than the later ones. From this we can see if a spread from star to star is actually happening.”
Darvin nodded. “Obvious,” he said. “Go on.”
“And we check whether spectrographic analyses exist for any of these stars. If we were to find that they still show traces of the spectra from stars with lights of other colours than green and they match the ancient records, we’d have made our case. And then we should find out the composition of the green light itself.”
“Oh, I know what that is,” said Darvin. “Its spectra show the lines of oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen.”
Orro jumped up again. “But these are the constituents of life itself!”
“Yes,” said Darvin. “And that’s one reason why astronomers regard life around these stars as possible. That is not the surprise. The surprise, if we are right, is that we have evidence that it is spreading. Or at least,” he added, struck by an intellectual scruple, “that it is arising around more and more stars.”
“Why has more not been made of this?” Orro almost shouted. “Life around the stars would be the most significant finding of astronomy!”
Darvin thought about it, chewing on the strip. “Hmm,” he said. “I suppose because it’s all so wretched hypothetical, old chap, and so embarrassing to seem to confirm the myths of religion and the… sensationalism of the vulgar.”
He smiled at Orro and gestured at him to sit down. “Let’s eat,” he said. “And then let’s take wing, and fly over the high desert, and find some place of comfortable vantage to wait for nightfall and count the Daughters for ourselves.”
It goes all the way down, Darvin thought to himself. Out here in the pitch black of a night before either of the moons had risen, away from lights and smoke, the sky came all the way down to the ground. You could see stars blink into view as they rose above the horizon, and to the west you could watch them disappear beneath it. And in between, in the vault above, the sky was packed with stars. The whole sky shimmered with the massed twinkling in multiple colours. The Shining Path spanned the zenith. The constellations, lost in the crowd, were more difficult to identify than they were at night in Five Ravines.
The Queen dominated the ecliptic, the Warrior a distant second. Between the Shining Path and the ecliptic the Daughters shone green across the eastern sky. He had counted the fifty-eight, and wasn’t sure there weren’t more. Behind the visible green stars was a greenish haze. In the midst of them, like a ruby among emeralds, glowed the Blood-drop, known to astronomy as Stella Proxima, the Nearest Star.
Orro was staring at it. “That’s where your comet came from,” he said. “Stella Proxima.”
“If it was a spaceship,” said Darvin, “I suppose it must have done.”
“No!” said Orro. “There is no supposition about it. Can’t you see, man, that’s where the trajectory goes back to?”
“I can’t see it,” said Darvin. “I’m no mathematician. But I have no doubt you can show me it, when we get back.” He shivered. “Speaking of which.”
“The passenger cars aren’t running,” said Orro.
“What?” said Darvin, feeling stupid. “But the overnight mail—”
“Travels in what are known, technically, as mail cars,” said Orro. “So here we stay.”
“We can’t!” said Darvin, looking around. He could just about see. He could hear things.
“How are you going to get back?” jeered Orro. “Fly?”
Darvin wrapped his wings around himself. “What else can we do?”
Orro’s eyes showed their whites in the starlit dark. “You’ve never spent a night out of cover?”
“No.”
“I have,” said Orro. “Let me show you.”
He vanished into the dark. A few minutes — Darvin confirmed the time by the wheeling of the stars, but it seemed longer — he returned with a double armful of brushwood. He stacked some and set fire to it. Rising sparks replaced the stars, and the crackling of twigs muffled the distant scurries.
“We have some food left,” he said. “And water.”
“Not much water.”
Orro flourished a glass flask. “Firewater,” he said. “So called because it keeps us warm.”
Darvin joined him in a huddle over the small fire. Orro began turning a strip of dried meat above the flames. The smell became appetising.
“Where did you learn all this?” Darvin asked.
“Military training.”
“Ah,” said Darvin. He bit off a chunk of the now much more palatable meat and handed the remai
nder back. “This is a delicate question,” he said. “I hope I don’t offend.”
Orro waved the strip, munching. “Go ahead.”
“I didn’t know ironmongers’ sons had military training.”
“They don’t, generally,” said Orro. He unstoppered the firewater flask, swigged and passed it to Darvin. “But ‘scientific civil servant’ is a rank of nobility. Hence military training, from the Academy onward.”
The firewater burned in Darvin’s mouth and down his throat. “You’re a nobleman?”
“Indeed I am,” said Orro. “And a not very competent sabreur. I preened myself on being a somewhat more adequate scout.”
Darvin laughed. “I thought that to be a noble one had to own land.”
“Oh, I do,” said Orro. “I am entitled to the rent of an acre.”
“How much does that come to?”
“Nothing,” said Orro. “It’s a patch of uninhabited and barren desert.” He laughed. “Some have become rich from such fiefs. They found rock-oil.”
“So you have a chance.”
Orro shook his head. “Geologically speaking, and regretfully, no.” He threw more brush on the fire. The flask passed back and forth. Orro talked about his military training, and about his friend Holder, who had enjoyed it so much that he’d moved from the civil service to the Regnal Air Force. They had remained friends, and it was only Orro’s choice of exile that had severed the connection.
“Surely you could write to him,” said Darvin.
“I did,” said Orro. He stared into the fire and spread his hands. “Some have seen my departure as a betrayal. I don’t say he has, but he didn’t reply.”
They banked the fire and lay down beside it, wrapped in their wings. At some point in the night, when the moons had risen and crossed the sky and were sinking in the west, Darvin woke to find Orro’s wing over him. He wondered what to do, and decided to appreciate the added warmth and go back to sleep. In the morning it seemed like a dream. The two men awoke a wingspan apart, shook the dew off their fur and wings, and flew to the cable station.
“Isn’t this impressive!” Orro said.
Darvin gazed at the tangle of wires and torch-bulbs that hung from the ceiling of Orro’s laboratory like some demented festive decoration. Now that he noticed, some of the bulbs were decorative, coloured red and green. There were about eight eights of bulbs — no, more, because all of them were paired: one white or red, one green.
“Aha!” he said, as he got the point. “Now I’m impressed.”
“I thought you would be,” said Orro. “It took me five days to work out the positions of the stars, and four to wire all this up.” He pulled up a chair. “Sit here.”
He pulled down blinds at each of the windows, leaving the room as dark as the desert night. He sat down at a bank of switches, and threw one. The bulbs flashed on in a three-dimensional display of stars. Seven were green, a close cluster. Another switch, and twenty more turned green. Then there were forty-nine, and then fifty-eight. In each case the new green stars were farther from the original seven, and themselves adjacent within a ragged arc. Orro repeated the process several times, to display again and again the green spreading like a Shockwave. Through it all one small bulb, hanging at the near end of the display in front of Darvin’s nose, remained at red.
“The Nearest Star,” said Darvin. He stood up, shifted about, narrowed his eyes until he could see the green bulbs as the Daughters appeared in the night sky. “Now run it through again,” he said.
The green wave rushed at him. He almost flinched.
“Something is coming,” he breathed. He’d deduced it himself, in the patterns of light and light-years he’d constructed from the ephemiris and the catalogues, but until now he had not quite believed it.
Orro snapped the blinds back up. Light filled the room, leaving the bulbs tawdry.
“How long,” Darvin asked, “before the Nearest Star turns green? Will we see it, or our descendants?”
“I don’t think we can wait that long,” said Orro. He slid some stapled sheets of paper across the table. Darvin spun it around and looked at the title, above his name and Orro’s: A Distant, Decelerating Celestial Object; with Some Observations on the Daughters. “We must publish this,” said Orro. “Now.”
7 — Television
14 365:01:13 06:10
Have you seen the pictures have you seen the pictures have you seen the pictures???
14 365:01:13 08:12
Lights on the nightside. Nobody expected this. Nobody has any doubt what it means. Not even Grey Universal. Those sims he rattled up in minutes for volcanoes, brush fires, and — wait for it — the phosphorescence of rotting wood, are just to show he can. He just likes being contrary, and likes the attention. His Coriolis storm sims had everyone fascinated, for a while, and arguing. But he doesn’t believe his latest: I’ve asked him; he admitted it. He doesn’t even buy the other contrary hold-out minority view, that the lights are from some kind of Red Sun robot or download colonies that claim-jumped us. Nobody but nobody would be mad enough to plant colonies on a unique planet, a terrestrial with multicellular life — least of all robots. That’s what he told me. He’s as excited as everybody else.
Excited is not the word. My hands are shaking as I write this.
There are aliens down there on Destiny II.
I sat and looked at that sentence for ten minutes. I still don’t wholly believe it. I still have that particle of doubt. I still feel that I risk being very foolish. Though being as foolish as everybody else is at least not embarrassing. (No, it would be, actually, now that I come to think of it.) All right. If ever I am going to put together a team, and take the lead in setting up a habitat, I’m going to have to build a reputation for being level-headed and thoughtful, as well as of course being the wonderful personality you all know I am.
So I have given this matter some thought already, as soon as we knew about the plants and the biosphere. That was the first hole in the hull, if you’ll forgive my crudity. If there really is intelligent life down there it makes things complicated in all sorts of ways, which I’ll come to in a minute. But the fundamental shock is finding multicellular life in the first place.
Think about it. Fourteen thousand years — longer, I suppose, because even in prehistory people must have looked at the sky and seen, you know, nothing like the green haze of the Civil Worlds — of expansion into a volume hundreds of light-years across, and we’ve never found anything more advanced than bacteria or algae or slime moulds or something like lichen. Nothing but rock crust and pond scum.
OK. Now, that makes sense, makes sense in a very deep way. It’s called the principle of mediocrity. I looked it up. What it means is that multicellular life, leave alone intelligent life, is either very rare, or very nearly ubiquitous. If it were the latter, our whole sky would have been green and the galaxy would have been called the Grassy Path. And because it’s not, we know it’s almost vanishingly rare. What we have found, all the way out from the Moon, has just confirmed this, over and over and over again. The planets have spoken with one voice, and what they’ve said thousands of times over is pond scum pond scum pond scum. The silence of the sky chimes in with nobody’s home nobody’s home nobody’s home. The silence is telling us: there’s nobody else out here to talk to.
Now there is, almost certainly. But think about it. Apply the principle that there’s nothing special about us. What are the odds against the only two intelligent species in the galaxy arising independently within five hundred light-years of each other, and arriving at civilisation (city lights and electromagnetic communications) within less than twenty thousand years of each other? On the scale of the galaxy, we’re neighbours. On the scale of evolutionary time, of billions of years, we’re in the same generation, the same cohort. More: we share the same birthday, to the hour, to the minute…
This is so unlikely that something else, something quite shattering, is more probable: we aren’t the only two.
&nbs
p; It’s not just that we’re not alone. We, the humans and the aliens, are not alone. We two are not alone.
And that means, I’m afraid, that we can’t just do the colonisation thing, at least not without thinking about it very carefully. So let’s think about it very carefully.
14 365:01:13 13:45
Look, folks, lay off the hate mail, OK? I was just saying.
Television, thought Horrocks Mathematical. Like almost everyone else on the ship, he gazed transfixed at the images of the planet’s nightside, the coastlines and some of the interior spaces of its continents pricked out by light. Unlike anyone else, he jumped to a swift conclusion as to the nature of the enigmatic signals that had been troubling him for months.
Television. That was what it was.
Not the kind of television that gave him pictures in his head, but something quite other and more primitive. But the pictures in his head gave him access to and an interface with the processing power that could reconstruct that suspected source. He plunged into its depths, brushing aside all the confuted hypotheses about codes and encryption, and insisting instead on the command to turn the signal into lines: a few hundred at the most, each at most a few hundred pixels across.
The answer came back in less than a second.
Bat-like beings flew behind his eyes. He closed his eyes, but still they were there, in fuzzy black and white. The flurry settled, dark smudges whirled like snow, and an image stabilised: of one of these beings behind a desk, reading aloud from a sheaf of paper. He heard the voice in his head. Fluctuating from a chirp to a deeper, more measured pitch, it intoned a sequence of phonemes that, even across the gulfs of space and species and speech, sounded like statistics.