by Neil Clarke
Jupiter? There were rumors that the US was there as well, maybe the Chinese too, robots anyway, staking a claim to all that helium. Roger didn’t put much credence in the rumors, but they might be true.
Why not wait it out at a Lagrange point? Roger thought there was nothing to wait for. The situation was terminal. As things spiraled down the maelstrom, anyplace cislunar would be at risk. Sooner or later any ship out there would be detected and destroyed. Or it might last only because civilization was shattered, with the survivors in some pit plotting to pummel the shards.
It was Alpha C because Roger Fry was a fanatic who believed that only an exit from the solar system offered humanity any hope of escaping what it had become.
She thought of Sergei, saying in his bad accent and absent grammar, which he exaggerated for effect: this is shit. You say me Alpha See is best? Absolute impossible. Is double star, no planet in habitable orbit—yes yes, whatever, minima maxima, zone of hopeful bullshit. Ghost Planet Hope. You shoot load there?
How long they had argued over this—their destination.
Gliese 581.
Impossible.
Roger, it’s a rocky planet with liquid water.
That’s three mistakes in one sentence. Something is orbiting the star, with a period of thirteen days and a mass of two Earths and some spectral lines. Rocky, water, liquid, that’s all surmise. What’s for sure is it’s twenty light-years away. Plus, the star is a flare star. It’s disqualified twice before we even get to the hope-it’s-a-planet part.
You don’t know it’s a flare star! There are no observations!
In the absence of observations, we assume it behaves like other observed stars of its class. It flares.
You have this agenda for Alpha C, you’ve invented these criteria to shoot down every other candidate!
The criteria are transparent. We’ve agreed to them. Number one: twelve light-years is our outer limit. Right there we’re down to twenty-four stars. For reasons of luminosity and stability we prefer a nonvariable G- or K-class star. Now we’re down to five. Alpha Centauri, Epsilon Eridani, 61 Cygni, Epsilon Indi, and Tau Ceti make the cut. Alpha is half the distance of the next nearest.
Bullshit, Roger. You have bug up ass for your Alpha See. Why not disqualify as double, heh? Why this not shoot-down criteria?
Because we have modeled it, and we know planet formation is possible in this system, and we have direct evidence of planets in other double systems. And because—I know.
They ended with Alpha because it was closest. Epsilon Eridani had planets for sure, but they were better off with a closer Ghost Planet Hope than a sure thing so far they couldn’t reach it. Cosmic rays would degrade the electronics, the ship, their very cells. Every year in space brought them closer to some component’s MTBF: mean time between failures.
Well, they’d known they might lose Shackleton. It was even likely. Just not so soon.
She’d been pushing away the possibility that things had gone so badly on Earth that no one was left to reply.
She remembered walking on a fire road after a conference in Berkeley—the Bay dappled sapphire and russet, thick white marine layer pushing in over the Golden Gate Bridge—talking to Roger about Fermi’s Paradox. If the universe harbors life, intelligence, why haven’t we seen evidence of it? Why are we alone? Roger favored what he called the Mean Time Between Failures argument. Technological civilizations simply fail, just as the components that make up their technology fail, sooner or later, for reasons as indivually insignificant as they are inexorable, and final. Complex systems, after a point, tend away from robustness.
Okay. Any receivers on Earth will have to find their new signal. It was going to be like SETI in reverse: she had to make the new signal maximally detectable. She could do that. She could retune the frequency to better penetrate Earth’s atmosphere. Reprogram the PLLs and antenna array, use orthogonal FSK modulation across the K- and X- bands. Increase the buffer size. And hope for the best.
Eighty-four years to go. My God, they were barely out the front door. My God, it was lonely out here.
The mission plan had been seventy-two years, with a predicted systems-failure rate of under twenty percent. The Weibull curve climbed steeply after that. At eighty-four years, systems-failure rate was over fifty percent.
What could be done to speed them? The nuclear rocket and its fuel were for deceleration and navigation at the far end. To use it here would add—she calculated—a total of 0.0002 c to their current speed. Saving them all of three months. And leaving them no means of planetfall.
They had nothing. Their cruise velocity was unalterable.
All right, that’s that, so find a line. Commit to it and move.
Cruise at this speed for longer, decelerate later and harder. That could save a few years. They’d have to run more current through the magsail, increase its drag, push its specs.
Enter the Alpha C system faster than planned, slow down harder once within it. She didn’t know how to calculate those maneuvers, but someone else would.
Her brain was racing now, wouldn’t let her sleep. She’d been up for three days. These were not her decisions to make, but she was the only one who could.
She wrote up detailed logs with the various options and calculations she’d made. At last there was no more for her to do. But a sort of nostalgia came over her. She wanted, absurdly, to check her email. Really, just to hear some voice not her own.
Nothing broadcast from Earth reached this far except for the ACK signals beamed directly to them from Shackleton. Shackleton was also an IPN node, connecting space assets to the Internet. For cover, the ACK signals it sent to Gypsy were piggybacked on bogus Internet packets. And those had all been stored by the computer.
So in her homesick curiosity, she called them out of memory, and dissected some packets that had been saved from up to a year ago. Examined their broken and scrambled content like a torn, discarded newspaper for anything they might tell her of the planet she’d never see again.
M.3,S+SDS#0U4:&ES(&%R=&EC;&4@:7,@8V]P>7)I9VAT960@, 3DY,R!B>2!4
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Weapon tensions under Islamic media policy rebels arsenals strategic counterin-surgency and to prevent Federal war law operational artillery air component to mine mountain strongholds photorecce altitudes HQ backbone Su-35 SAMs part with high maneuverability bombardments of casualty casuistry
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Hurriedly autoimmune decay derivative modern thaws in dawn’s pregnant grave shares in disgust of high frequency trading wet cities territorial earthquake poison Bayes the chairs are empty incentives to disorder without borders. Pneumonia again antibiotic resistance travels the globe with ease.
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Titter supine teratologys aim appoint to plaintive technocrat. Mankind is inwardly endocrine and afar romanic spaceflight. Mesial corinths archidiaconal or lyric satirical turtle demurral. Calorific fitment marry after sappy are inscribed upto pillwort. Idem monatomic are processed longways
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Lost, distant, desolate. The world she’d left forever, speaking its poison poetry of ruin and catastrophe and longing. Told her nothing she didn’t already know about the corrupt destiny and thwarted feeling that had drawn humankind into the maelstrom Gypsy had escaped. She stood and walked furiously the meager length of the curved corridor, stopping at each slab, regarding the sleeping forms of her crewmates, naked in translucent bodysuits, young and fit, yet broken, like her, in ways that had made this extremity feel to them all the only chance.
They gathered together for the first time on the ship after receiving Roger’s signal.
We’ll be fine. Not even Roger knows where the ship is. They won’t be able to find us before we’re gone.
It was her first time in space. From the shuttle, the ship appeared a formless clutter: layers of bomb sleds, each bearing thousands of microfusion devices, under and around them a jacket of hydrogen tanks, shields, conduits, antennas. Two white-suited figures crawled over this maze. A hijacked hydrogen depot was offloading its cargo.
Five were already aboard, retrofitting. Everything not needed for deep space had been jettisoned. Everything lacking was brought and secured. Shuttles that were supposed to be elsewhere came and went on encrypted itineraries.
One shuttle didn’t make it. They never learned why. So they were down to sixteen crew.
The ship wasn’t meant to hold so many active people. The crew area was less than a quarter of the torus, a single room narrowed to less than ten feet by the hibernation slabs lining each long wall. Dim even with all the LED bays on.
Darius opened champagne. Contraband: no one knew how alcohol might interact with the hibernation drugs.
To Andrew and Chung-Pei and Hari and Maryam. They’re with us in spirit.
Some time later the first bomb went off. The ship trembled but didn’t move. Another blast. Then another. Grudgingly the great mass budged. Like a car departing a curb, no faster at first. Fuel mass went from it and kinetic energy into it. Kinesis was gradual but unceasing. In its first few minutes it advanced less than a kilometer. In its first hour it moved two thousand kilometers. In its first day, a million kilometers. After a year, when the last bomb was expended, it would be some two thousand astronomical units from the Earth, and Gypsy would coast on at her fixed speed for decades, a dark, silent, near-dead thing.
As Sophie prepared to return to hibernation, she took stock. She walked the short interior of the quarter-torus. Less than twenty paces end to end. The black walls, the dim LED pods, the slabs of her crewmates.
Never to see her beloved mountains again. Her dear sawtooth Sierra. She thought of the blue sky, and remembered a hunk of stuff she’d seen on Roger’s desk, some odd kind of rock. It was about five inches long. You could see through it. Its edges were blurry. Against a dark background it had a bluish tinge. She took it in her hand and it was nearly weightless.
What is this?
Silica aerogel. The best insulator in the world.
Why is it blue?
Rayleigh scattering.
She knew what that meant: why the sky is blue. Billions of particles in the air scatter sunlight, shorter wavelengths scatter most, so those suffuse the sky. The shortest we can see is blue. But that was an ocean of air around the planet and this was a small rock.
You’re joking.
No, it’s true. There are billions of internal surfaces in that piece.
It’s like a piece of sky.
Yes, it is.
It was all around her now, that stuff—in the walls of the ship, keeping out the cold of space—allowing her to imagine a poetry of sky where none was.
And that was it. She’d been awake for five days. She’d fixed the datastream back to Earth. She’d written her logs. She’d reprogrammed the magsail deployment for seventy years from now, at increased current, in the event that no other steward was wakened in the meantime. She’d purged her bowels and injected the hibernation cocktail. She was back in the bodysuit, life supports connected. As she went under, she wondered why.
2.
They departed a day short of Roger Fry’s fortieth birthday. Born September 11, 2001, he was hired to a national weapons laboratory straight out of Caltech. He never did finish his doctorate. Within a year at the Lab he had designed the first breakeven fusion reaction. It had long been known that a very small amount of antimatter could trigger a burn wave in thermonuclear fuel. Roger solved how. He was twenty-four.
Soon there were net energy gains. That’s when the bomb people came in. In truth, their interest was why he was hired in the first place. Roger knew this and didn’t care. Once fusion became a going concern, it would mean unlimited clean energy. It would change the world. Bombs would have no purpose.
But it was a long haul to a commercial fusion reactor. Meanwhile, bombs were easier.
The first bombs were shaped-charge antiproton-triggered fusion bunker busters. The smallest was a kiloton-yield bomb, powerful enough to level forty or fifty city blocks; it used just a hundred grams of lithium deuteride, and less than a microgram of antimatter. It was easy to manufacture and transport and deploy. It created little radiation or electromagnetic pulse. Tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, were fabricated in orbit and moved to drop platforms called sleds. Because the minimum individual yields were within the range of conventional explosives, no nuclear treaties were violated.
Putting them in orbit did violate the Outer Space Treaty, so at first they were more politely called the Orbital Asteroid Defense Network. But when a large asteroid passed through cislunar space a few years later—with no warning, no alert, no response at all—the pretense was dropped, and the system came under the command of the US Instant Global Strike Initiative.
More and more money went into antimatter production. There were a dozen factories worldwide that produced about a gram, all told, of antiprotons a year. Some went into the first fusion power plants, which themselves produced more antiprotons. Most went into bomb triggers. There they were held in traps, isolated from normal matter, but that worked only so long. They decayed, like tritium in the older nuclear weapons, but much faster; some traps could store milligrams of antiprotons for many months at a time, and they were improving; still, bomb triggers had to be replaced often.
As a defense system it was insane, but hugely profitable. Then came the problem of where to park the profits, since there were no stable markets anywhere. The economic system most rewarded those whose created and surfed instabilities and could externalize their risks, which created greater instabilities.
Year after year Roger worked and waited, and the number of bombs grew, as did the number of countries deploying them, and the global resource wars intensified, and his fusion utopia failed to arrive. When the first commercial plants did start operating, it made no difference. Everything went on as before. Those who had the power to change things had no reason to; things had worked out pretty well for them so far.
Atmospheric CO2 shot past six hundred parts per million. The methane burden was now measured in parts per million, not parts per billon. No one outside the classified world knew the exact numbers, but the effects were everywhere. The West Antarctic ice shelf collapsed. Sea level rose three meters.
Sometime in there, Roger Fry gave up on Earth.
But not on humanity, not entirely. Something in the complex process of civilization had forced it into this place from which it now had no exit. He didn’t see this as an inevitable result of the process, but it had happened. There might have been a time when the situation was reversible. If certain decisions had been made. If resources had been treated as a commons. Back when the population of the planet was two or three billion, when there was still enough to go around, enough time to alter course, enough leisure to think things through. But it hadn’t gone that way. He didn’t much care why. The question was what to do now.
FANG TIR EOGHAIN (2081)
The ancestor of all mammals must have been a hibernator. Body temperature falls as much as 15 kelvins. A bear’s heartbeat goes down to five per minute. Blood pressure drops to thirty millimeters. In humans, these conditions would be fatal.
Relatively few genes are involved in torpor. We have located the critical ones. And we have found the protein complexes they uptake and produce. Monophosphates mostly.
Yes, I know, induced hypothermia is not torpor. But this state has the signatures of torpor. For example, there is a surfeit of MCT1 which transports ketones to the brain during fasting.
Ketosis, that’s true, we are in a sense poisoning the subject in order to achieve this state. Some ischemia and refusion damage results, but less than anticipated. Doing it more than a couple of times is sure to be fatal. But for our purposes, maybe it gets the job done.
Anyway it had better; we have nothing else.
Her da was screaming at her to get up. He wasn’t truly her father, her father had gone to the stars. That was a story she’d made up long ago; it was better than the truth.
Her thick brown legs touched the floor. Not so thick and brown as she remembered. Weak, pale, withered. She tried to stand and fell back. Try harder, cow. She fell asleep.
She’d tried so hard for so long. She’d been accepted early at university. Then her parents went afoul of the system. One day she came home to a bare apartment. All are zhonghua minzu, but it was a bad time for certain ethnics in China.
She lost her place at university. She was shunted to a polytechnic secondary in Guangzhou, where she lived with her aunt and uncle in a small apartment. It wasn’t science; it was job training in technology services. One day she overheard the uncle on the phone, bragging: he had turned her parents in, collected a bounty and a stipend.