The Final Frontier

by Neil Clarke

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two months since my last confession. I’m going to die, and maybe I’m not entirely sane, but I think I’m in communication with an alien intelligence. I think it’s a terrible sin to pretend I’m not.” She paused. “I mean, I don’t know if it’s a sin or not, but I’m sure it’s wrong.” She paused again. “I’ve been guilty of anger, and pride, and envy, and lust. I brought the knowledge of death to an innocent world. I . . .” She felt herself drifting off again, and hastily said, “For these and all my sins, I am most heartily sorry, and beg the forgiveness of God and the absolution and . . .”

  “And what?” That gentle voice again. She was in that strange dark mental space once more, asleep but cognizant, rational but accepting any absurdity no matter how great. There were no cities, no towers, no ashes, no plains. Nothing but the negation of negation.

  When she didn’t answer the question, the voice said, “Does it have to do with your death?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m dying too.”

  “What?”

  “Half of us are gone already. The rest are shutting down. We thought we were one. You showed us we were not. We thought we were everything. You showed us the universe.”

  “So you’re just going to die?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  Thinking as quickly and surely as she ever had before in her life, Lizzie said, “Let me show you something.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  There was a brief, terse silence. Then: “Very well.”

  Summoning all her mental acuity, Lizzie thought back to that instant when she had first seen the city/entity on the fishcam. The soaring majesty of it. The slim grace. And then the colors: like dawn upon a glacial ice field: subtle, profound, riveting. She called back her emotions in that instant, and threw in how she’d felt the day she’d seen her baby brother’s birth, the raw rasp of cold air in her lungs as she stumbled to the topmost peak of her first mountain, the wonder of the Taj Mahal at sunset, the sense of wild daring when she’d first put her hand down a boy’s trousers, the prismatic crescent of atmosphere at the Earth’s rim when seen from low orbit . . . Everything she had, she threw into that image.

  “This is how you look,” she said. “This is what we’d both be losing if you were no more. If you were human, I’d rip off your clothes and do you on the floor right now. I wouldn’t care who was watching. I wouldn’t give a damn.”

  The gentle voice said, “Oh.”

  And then she was back in her suit again. She could smell her own sweat, sharp with fear. She could feel her body, the subtle aches where the harness pulled against her flesh, the way her feet, hanging free, were bloated with blood. Everything was crystalline clear and absolutely real. All that had come before seemed like a bad dream.

  “This is DogsofSETI. What a wonderful discovery you’ve made—intelligent life in our own Solar System! Why is the government trying to cover this up?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “I’m Joseph Devries. This alien monster must be destroyed immediately. We can’t afford the possibility that it’s hostile.”

  “StudPudgie07 here: What’s the dirt behind this ‘lust’ thing? Advanced minds need to know! If O’Brien isn’t going to share the details, then why’d she bring it up in the first place?”

  “Hola soy Pedro Dominguez. Como abogado, esto me parece ultrajante! Por qué NAFTASA nos oculta esta información?”

  “Alan!” Lizzie shouted. “What the fuck is going on?”

  “Script-bunnies,” Alan said. He sounded simultaneously apologetic and annoyed. “They hacked into your confession and apparently you said something . . .”

  “We’re sorry, Lizzie,” Consuelo said. “We really are. If it’s any consolation, the Archdiocese of Montreal is hopping mad. They’re talking about taking legal action.”

  “Legal action? What the hell do I care about . . . ?” She stopped.

  Without her willing it, one hand rose above her head and seized the number 10 rope.

  Don’t do that, she thought.

  The other hand went out to the side, tightened against the number 9 rope. She hadn’t willed that either. When she tried to draw her hand back, it refused to obey. Then the first hand—her right hand—moved a few inches upward and seized its rope in an iron grip. Her left hand slid a good half-foot up its rope. Inch by inch, hand over hand, she climbed up toward the balloon.

  I’ve gone mad, she thought. Her right hand was gripping the rip panel now, and the other tightly clenched rope 8. Hanging effortlessly from them, she swung her feet upward. She drew her knees against her chest and kicked.

  No!

  The fabric ruptured and she began to fall.

  A voice she could barely make out said, “Don’t panic. We’re going to bring you down.”

  All in a panic, she snatched at the 9-rope and the 4-rope. But they were limp in her hand, useless, falling at the same rate she was.

  “Be patient.”

  “I don’t want to die, goddamnit!”

  “Then don’t.”

  She was falling helplessly. It was a terrifying sensation, an endless plunge into whiteness, slowed somewhat by the tangle of ropes and balloon trailing behind her. She spread out her arms and legs like a starfish, and felt the air resistance slow her yet further. The sea rushed up at her with appalling speed. It seemed like she’d been falling forever. It was over in an instant.

  Without volition, Lizzie kicked free of balloon and harness, drew her feet together, pointed her toes, and positioned herself perpendicular to Titan’s surface. She smashed through the surface of the sea, sending enormous gouts of liquid splashing upward. It knocked the breath out of her. Red pain exploded within. She thought maybe she’d broken a few ribs.

  “You taught us so many things,” the gentle voice said. “You gave us so much.”

  “Help me!” The water was dark around her. The light was fading.

  “Multiplicity. Motion. Lies. You showed us a universe infinitely larger than the one we had known.”

  “Look. Save my life and we’ll call it even. Deal?”

  “Gratitude. Such an essential concept.”

  “Thanks. I think.”

  And then she saw the turbot swimming toward her in a burst of silver bubbles. She held out her arms and the robot fish swam into them. Her fingers closed about the handles which Consuelo had used to wrestle the device into the sea. There was a jerk, so hard that she thought for an instant that her arms would be ripped out of their sockets. Then the robofish was surging forward and upward and it was all she could do to keep her grip.

  “Oh, dear God!” Lizzie cried involuntarily.

  “We think we can bring you to shore. It will not be easy.”

  Lizzie held on for dear life. At first she wasn’t at all sure she could. But then she pulled herself forward, so that she was almost astride the speeding mechanical fish, and her confidence returned. She could do this. It wasn’t any harder than the time she’d had the flu and aced her gymnastics final on parallel bars and horse anyway. It was just a matter of grit and determination. She just had to keep her wits about her. “Listen,” she said. “If you’re really grateful . . .”

  “We are listening.”

  “We gave you all those new concepts. There must be things you know that we don’t.”

  A brief silence, the equivalent of who knew how much thought. “Some of our concepts might cause you dislocation.” A pause. “But in the long run, you will be much better off. The scars will heal. You will rebuild. The chances of your destroying yourselves are well within the limits of acceptability.”

  “Destroying ourselves?” For a second, Lizzie couldn’t breathe. It had taken hours for the city/entity to come to terms with the alien concepts she’d dumped upon it. Human beings thought and lived at a much slower rate than it did. How long would those hours translate into human time? Months? Years? Centur
ies? It had spoken of scars and rebuilding. That didn’t sound good at all.

  Then the robofish accelerated, so quickly that Lizzie almost lost her grip. The dark waters were whirling around her, and unseen flecks of frozen material were bouncing from her helmet. She laughed wildly. Suddenly she felt great!

  “Bring it on,” she said. “I’ll take everything you’ve got.”

  It was going to be one hell of a ride.

  Seth Dickinson is the author of The Traitor Baru Cormorant and its forthcoming sequel, The Monster Baru Cormorant. He studied racial bias in police shootings, wrote much of the lore for Bungie Studios’ Destiny, and helped write and design the open-source space opera Blue Planet. If he were an animal, he would be a cockatoo.

  THREE BODIES AT MITANNI

  SETH DICKINSON

  We were prepared to end the worlds we found. We were prepared to hurt each other to do it.

  I thought Jotunheim would be the nadir, the worst of all possible worlds, the closest we ever came to giving the kill order. I thought that Anyahera’s plea, and her silent solitary pain when we voted against her, two to one, would be the closest we ever came to losing her—a zero-sum choice between her conviction and the rules of our mission:

  Locate the seedship colonies, the frozen progeny scattered by a younger and more desperate Earth. Study these new humanities. And in the most extreme situations: remove existential threats to mankind.

  Jotunheim was a horror written in silicon and plasmid, a doomed atrocity. But it would never survive to be an existential threat to humanity. I’m sorry, I told Anyahera. It would be a mercy. I know. I want to end it too. But it is not our place—

  She turned away from me, and I remember thinking: it will never be worse than this. We will never come closer.

  And then we found Mitanni.

  Lachesis woke us from stable storage as we fell toward periapsis. The ship had a mind of her own, architecturally human but synthetic in derivation, wise and compassionate and beautiful but, in the end, limited to merely operational thoughts.

  She had not come so far (five worlds, five separate stars) so very fast (four hundred years of flight) by wasting mass on the organic. We left our flesh at home and rode Lachesis’s doped metallic hydrogen mainframe starward. She dreamed the three of us, Anyahera and Thienne and I, nested in the ranges of her mind. And in containing us, I think she knew us, as much as her architecture permitted.

  When she pulled me up from storage, I thought she was Anyahera, a wraith of motion and appetite, flame and butter, and I reached for her, thinking she had asked to rouse me, as conciliation.

  “We’re here, Shinobu,” Lachesis said, taking my hand. “The last seedship colony. Mitanni.”

  The pang of hurt and disappointment I felt was not an omen. “The ship?” I asked, by ritual. If we had a captain, it was me. “Any trouble during the flight?”

  “I’m fine,” Lachesis said. She filled the empty metaphor around me with bamboo panels and rice paper, the whispered suggestion of warm spring rain. Reached down to help me out of my hammock. “But something’s wrong with this one.”

  I found my slippers. “Wrong how?”

  “Not like Jotunheim. Not like anything we’ve seen on the previous colonies.” She offered me a robe, bowing fractionally. “The other two are waiting.”

  We gathered in a common space to review what we knew. Thienne smiled up from her couch, her skin and face and build all dark and precise as I remembered them from Lagos and the flesh. No volatility to Thienne; no care for the wild or theatrical. Just careful, purposeful action, like the machines and technologies she specialized in.

  And a glint of something in her smile, in the speed with which she looked back to her work. She’d found some new gristle to work at, some enigma that rewarded obsession.

  She’d voted against Anyahera’s kill request back at Jotunheim, but of course Anyahera had forgiven her. They had always been opposites, always known and loved the certainty of the space between them. It kept them safe from each other, gave room to retreat and advance.

  In the vote at Jotunheim, I’d been the contested ground between them. I’d voted with Thienne: no kill.

  “Welcome back, Shinobu,” Anyahera said. She wore a severely cut suit, double-breasted, fit for cold and business. It might have been something from her mother’s Moscow wardrobe. Her mother had hated me.

  Subjectively, I’d seen her less than an hour ago, but the power of her presence struck me with the charge of decades. I lifted a hand, suddenly unsure what to say. I’d known and loved her for years. At Jotunheim I had seen parts of her I had never loved or known at all.

  She considered me, eyes distant, icy. Her father was Maori, her mother Russian. She was only herself, but she had her mother’s eyes and her mother’s way of using them in anger. “You look . . . indecisive.”

  I wondered if she meant my robe or my body, as severe and androgynous as the cut of her suit. It was an angry thing to say, an ugly thing, beneath her. It carried the suggestion that I was unfinished. She knew how much that hurt.

  I’d wounded her at Jotunheim. Now she reached for the weapons she had left.

  “I’ve decided on this,” I said, meaning my body, hoping to disengage. But the pain of it made me offer something, conciliatory: “Would you like me some other way?”

  “Whatever you prefer. Take your time about it.” She made a notation on some invisible piece of work, a violent slash. “Wouldn’t want to do anything hasty.”

  I almost lashed out.

  Thienne glanced at me, then back to her work: an instant of apology, or warning, or reproach. “Let’s start,” she said. “We have a lot to cover.”

  I took my couch, the third point of the triangle. Anyahera looked up again. Her eyes didn’t go to Thienne, and so I knew, even before she spoke, that this was something they had already argued over.

  “The colony on Mitanni is a Duong-Watts malignant,” she said. “We have to destroy it.”

  I knew what a Duong-Watts malignant was because “Duong-Watts malignant” was a punch line, a joke, a class of human civilization that we had all gamed out in training. An edge case so theoretically improbable it might as well be irrelevant. Duong Phireak’s predictions of a universe overrun by his namesake had not, so far, panned out.

  Jotunheim was not far enough behind us, and I was not strong enough a person, to do anything but push back. “I don’t think you can know that yet,” I said. “I don’t think we have enough—”

  “Ship,” Anyahera said. “Show them.”

  Lachesis told me everything she knew, all she’d gleaned from her decades-long fall toward Mitanni, eavesdropping on the telemetry of the seedship that had brought humanity here, the radio buzz of the growing civilization, the reports of the probes she’d fired ahead.

  I saw the seedship’s arrival on what should have been a garden world, a nursery for the progeny of her vat wombs. I saw catastrophe: a barren, radioactive hell, climate erratic, oceans poisoned, atmosphere boiling into space. I watched the ship struggle and fail to make a safe place for its children, until, in the end, it gambled on an act of cruel, desperate hope: fertilizing its crew, raising them to adolescence, releasing them on the world to build something out of its own cannibalized body.

  I saw them succeed.

  Habitation domes blistering the weathered volcanic flats. Webs of tidal power stations. Thermal boreholes like suppurating wounds in the crust. Thousands of fission reactors, beating hearts of uranium and molten salt—

  Too well. Too fast. In seven hundred years of struggle on a hostile, barren world, their womb-bred population exploded up toward the billions. Their civilization webbed the globe.

  It was a boom unmatched in human history, unmatched on the other seed-ship colonies we had discovered. No Eden world had grown so fast.

  “Interesting,” I said, watching Mitanni’s projected population, industrial output, estimated technological self-catalysis, all exploding toward some undreamt-of ceili
ng. “I agree that this could be suggestive of a Duong-Watts scenario.”

  It wasn’t enough, of course. Duong-Watts malignancy was a disease of civilizations, but the statistics could offer only symptoms. That was the terror of it: the depth of the cause. The simplicity.

  “Look at what Lachesis has found.” Anyahera rose, took an insistent step forward. “Look at the way they live.”

  I spoke more wearily than I should have. “This is going to be another Jotunheim, isn’t it?”

  Her face hardened. “No. It isn’t.”

  I didn’t let her see that I understood, that the words Duong-Watts malignancy had already made me think of the relativistic weapons Lachesis carried, and the vote we would need to use them. I didn’t want her to know how angry it made me that we had to go through this again.

  One more time before we could go home. One more hard decision.

  Thienne kept her personal space too cold for me: frosted glass and carbon composite, glazed constellations of data and analysis, a transparent wall opened onto false-color nebulae and barred galactic jets. At the low end of hearing, distant voices whispered in clipped aerospace phrasing. She had come from Haiti and from New Delhi, but no trace of that twin childhood, so rich with history, had survived her journey here.

  It took me years to understand that she didn’t mean it as insulation. The cold distances were the things that moved her, clenched her throat, pimpled her skin with awe. Anyahera teased her for it, because Anyahera was a historian and a master of the human, and what awed Thienne was to glimpse her own human insignificance.

  “Is it a Duong-Watts malignant?” I asked her. “Do you think Anyahera’s right?”

  “Forget that,” she said, shaking her head. “No prejudgment. Just look at what they’ve built.”

  She walked me through what had happened to humanity on Mitanni.

  At Lagos U, before the launch, we’d gamed out scenarios for what we called socially impoverished worlds—places where a resource crisis had limited the physical and mental capital available for art and culture. Thienne had expected demand for culture to collapse along with supply as people focused on the necessities of existence. Anyahera had argued for an inelastic model, a fundamental need embedded in human consciousness.