Cosmic Powers
Page 17
Eos stepped into the uncertain flicker of wakening lights to stand on the brink of a measureless cavern filled with flat-packed buildings and rank after rank of stacked hibernation sarcophagi.
She wiped away one final tear and started hunting for the manual controls that would reawaken these million or so people. She would wait while they sorted themselves out.
Then she would turn herself over to them for judgment.
* * * *
Sagitta was mostly ice. Eos could never melt it all, and even if she did, there’d be no land left. For thousands of years, she had instead kept the dwarf planet’s crustal temperature at just under zero degrees centigrade. She’d crafted salty oceans to float over the glacial ices, though volcanic vents continued to spume ammonia and methane into the wan air. Her clever humans learned to minimize such hazards with genetically engineered jungles that fed on the gases. Tough pines had come to cover the hills, the oceans were crowded with life, and much of the time, Sagitta’s cities left their roofs open to the wind.
Eos was Sagitta’s sun. Visiting the world she shone upon had once been a sacred duty, for it was in this way that she reminded herself why she shone, why her existence meant anything. She would browse her world, seeking one or two of those moments that would seal her determination to burn for another generation. Once, after a long aimless tour, she’d found herself standing in human form in a garden full of zizzing bees and fragrant flowers, and chanced to see a young man, unaware she stood there, raise his face to feel her heat on his skin. She’d ascended into the sky at noon the next day. Other epiphanies had been subtler, but those visits sustained her for thousands of years.
She had never been alone on her previous visits. If Sagitta’s people knew she was there, they would throw her parades and banquets, bring out their best dancers and tumblers to entertain her. Often, she visited in secret, and then found friends and lovers among the wealthy and the ordinary. Just as often, her avatars remained once their mission was done, reprinting their bodies as biological flesh and blood, marrying, dying at great ages among family and friends.
The people of Sagitta had lived under the light of a laser sun located seven light-hours away. Eos’s full body was a heliostat standing above the corona of Alpha Centauri B, from which she aimed her spear of radiance deep into the night. Sagitta caught it. Its people didn’t have much experience with hibernation technologies because they didn’t need to. They had her. Only in the lockstep fortresses could you reliably winter over on a planet that orbited seven light-hours from its star.
The cavern she entered now clearly did contain a lockstep fortress, and it was a fine one. The chamber’s ceiling was ribbed like the chest of some long-dead giant. Those ribs were cracked in places and rubble strewed the floor, chunks of it having crushed whole rows of hibernation beds. Pools of air had frozen around others, and much of the machinery for tending the beds was dead. It didn’t matter. As Eos stepped delicately over snaking cables and pipes, other things adroitly avoided her—spumes of smart matter and tiny bots, some smaller than her hand, hurrying around fixing things.
“Hello! Is anyone awake?” She hurried forward, thinking that if this fortress survived, there might be others. Each fortress was the outpost of some civilization that hibernated and awoke on the same timed cycle—usually 360 months asleep to one month awake. Since faster-than-light travel was impossible, only this synchronization allowed far-flung interstellar worlds such as Sagitta to ignore the decades of time it took for ships to travel between them. Colonies that lived in lockstep time experienced neighboring worlds as being right next door, even if those worlds were billions of kilometers away. So valuable was this way of life that each of the thousands of worlds in Centauri B’s laser corona was dotted with dozens, even hundreds of fortresses, each ticking down to its next brief awakening.
“I called you,” she said as she zigzagged between the hibernation stacks. “Did you hear? Did I wake you?” There had been no response from any of her hails as she’d approached Sagitta, and the fortress didn’t answer her now. “I imagined—well, I thought . . .” She stopped, wringing her metal hands. “I pictured it so clearly, you see: how, after I shut off my light, all the fortresses flooded as the atmosphere rained down. I was afraid you were all entombed as the oceans of air froze over you. Poetic image, I know, but terrible, terrible. I’ve come to . . .” But no one answered.
This fortress was repairing itself, but the silence dragged on. After a few hours touring its interior and trying to interface with its systems, Eos was sure it was deliberately ignoring her. Even stranger, it was clearly not trying to rouse its people. Maybe its timing system was waiting until the next jubilee—the moment when all the worlds hibernating on its frequency woke at once. That awakening could be decades away.
“I’m sorry, I can’t wait that long.” Eos’s greater Self would live for millions of years, but this avatar didn’t have that kind of time. Her physical resources could keep her going for centuries, but despair had been creeping into her like the cold since before she even landed. “You’re all I’ve got. If I can’t wake you . . .” She pictured herself sitting down on the boiling ice and simply never standing up again.
It took two days to find the timers. The corridors deep beneath the habitable parts of the city were choked with frozen air and it boiled and churned out of Eos’s way as she clawed her way through. Finally, she found a knot of smart matter; she could feel the awareness of the citymind, like a pulse of data behind it. Reaching hesitantly to interface with it, she finally realized she’d dropped the doll on her way into the cavern. Suddenly terrified that she might never speak to another thinking being again, she slammed her hand into the citymind’s core.
Go away.
Hissing, she snatched back her hand, but she had to reach out again. “It’s me, Eos. I’ve come to wake you.”
We are not to be wakened.
She laughed. “That’s ridiculous. Maybe you’ve missed a few jubilees, but the rest of your lockstep must be waiting for you.”
We are not in lockstep.
“Well . . . protecting yourselves from the cold? I understand: you’ve been waiting for the sun to come back. For me. But I’m here now. It’s safe, you—”
We are not to be wakened. Ever.
Eos recoiled, stumbling through the raging vaporous catacombs, babbling no no no. The tunnels were lit green from the radiance of her own eyes, a froth of nitrogen bubbles and rounded humps of equipment. If she turned and left now, the sleepers above would remain dormant forever, even after trees returned to the hillsides above; even if humans again settled the valley.
She stopped, turned, snarled. “No. You don’t get to make that choice.” So, she returned to the core, reached into the citymind, and commanded it to wake its people.
Eos spent more hours fighting her way back through the boiling subcorridors, eventually letting herself be spewed out onto the cavern’s floor. She rose, flicked chunks of carbon dioxide off her shoulders, and peered through the swirling vapors. Lights were coming on and the hum and hubbub of bots had given the place a semblance of life—though it might be days before the first sleepers awoke. She was pleased.
She took metal stairs up to a catwalk from which she could watch the city come alive. As she stood there, leaning on the rail, almost smiling, a little rectangle of light appeared off in the distance. She glanced up, indifferent at first until she realized what she was seeing.
The rectangle was daylight—her light, from outside—shining through the postern door in the great gate. She had closed it behind her. Now it was open, and in it, blocking the light, was the silhouette of a man.
* * * *
No one from this city should be awake yet. Eos approached cautiously, unafraid for herself but not wanting to startle this unexpected visitor. She did despite herself; when he saw her shape resolve out of the rushing vapors, he scrambled back to the postern.
“Don’t be afraid!” she said, “It’s me, Eos!”
She could see him clearly now, in all frequencies. To a human, he would have been just a thickly swaddled man-shape, his head invisible behind an oval helmet that was in turn half-wrapped in aerogel insulation. Bands of the same stuff were wrapped about his arms, legs, and torso. Belts and straps covered that and various devices and satchels hung off them. Sagitta’s gravity was only a quarter of a g, so his total kit massed more than twice what he did and bulked his silhouette in strange directions. Eos could see through all that, and what she saw was a standard human male of middle age—eighty years old, perhaps—in apparent good health. He’d allowed his hair to recede, giving him a distinguished look. His face was gentle.
He did look frightened.
Eos looked down. “You came from outside. . . . You’ve been following me.”
“For a week. When you think you’re the only man on a planet and you come across fresh footprints in the snow . . . Well. I did think it might be you.”
“But then why be afraid of me?” Eos saw the stupidity of her question and shifted her feet uncomfortably. “I abandoned you all. I can understand you’d hate me for it.” She looked up; the fact that he hadn’t moved was a hopeful sign. “I came to apologize, and atone, if I can.”
He gave that same laugh again. “I think it’s a bit late for that.”
“I have to try. These people—”
“Should be left to sleep! That’s what I came to tell you. Don’t try to wake this city.” He suddenly lurched toward her as if his feet had come unstuck.
“They were set to sleep forever.”
“And for good reason.” He stared at her, wide-eyed. To him, their surroundings must have been awe-inspiring. In this awakening city, even Eos, with her memories of the titanic solar engines that terraformed this world, felt like some insect somehow surviving to watch a cauldron boil around itself. The feeling came naturally with being embodied in this tiny human form. And yet this man was ignoring the chaos; his eyes were fixed only on her.
“These people are maximizers,” he continued. “Do you know what that means?”
“No. But, please, I am Eos.” She held out her metal hand. “And you are . . .”
Reluctantly, he took her slender fingers in his thickly gloved ones. “Kamakie Konnor . . . Pilgrim, I suppose.” He withdrew his hand and there was an awkward pause. Then he pointed into the cavern. “We—I mean all the locksteps and the realtimers of this world and a thousand others—we condemned the maximizers to permanent sleep for a reason. They wanted to burn the worlds’ resources in an orgy of self-gratification. They live only for the pleasures of the moment; they don’t believe there’s any future.”
“Oh.” She understood. “They heard the News, then. About the Return.”
“We all heard it. You must have, too.” He peered at her in the twisting light. They were speaking over radio, but he’d been shouting his words and belatedly she realized that even through the muffling of his pressure suit, the noise in here must be deafening. Thunderous crashes from toppling ice towers, the scream of boiling air, it must be shaking his whole body.
“Let’s talk outside.” They hurried to the postern and were almost spat out by the pressure differential. It was much quieter out there and bright with Eos’s light. When they stepped under it, Kamakie looked up in wonder.
“So that’s you,” he said.
“My real self,” she admitted. “A laser sun aimed at this world. But I’m only one of a thousand lights for a thousand worlds—and not an important one, at that.”
“Why did you turn your face away from us?”
“Ah.” She found her way to a stable area and sat down on a stone made of water ice. He stood before her, gloves clasped as he looked from her local body, up to the light and back. “It was because of the News. The same News that, if you’re right, drove the people in there mad.” She nodded to the lockstep fortress. “It certainly had that effect on us.”
The News was written in the cosmic background radiation. It had taken millennia of effort for humanity and its offspring to read it, but what the thin faint echo from the Big Bang was saying was, in the end, indisputable. Once you’d heard the news, there was no escaping it and no ignoring its implications.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and this time she saw his eyes widen as, perhaps for the first time, he really heard her apology. “When we heard the News, some of us lost hope, and many of us forgot how to be happy. And so . . . we did what you say these people did. We turned our attention inward and forgot why we were made and for whom.”
The valley floor shook, and as boulders tumbled down the hillsides, the fortress’s great gate groaned open. Eos could see what was coming and could easily have avoided capture, but Kamakie was only human and hence fragile; so, she stayed by his side as the maximizers’ smart matter assembled itself into things with legs and long arms with taloned hands, and came for them both.
* * * *
Outside the micro-fusion heart in her breast, this little room was probably the hottest place within a billion kilometers. The orange-glowing cylinder their captors had placed in the center of the floor provided enough heat that the nitrogen and oxygen soon evaporated to become air. After an hour or so, it became warm enough that Kamakie was able to take his helmet and gloves off and breathe that air. He laid these essential parts of his suit carefully on one of the stone bed shelves and scowled at the door.
They hadn’t spoken while they were being herded up there, nor while the room heated up. Now he said, “This is a cell. These people have cells. They made prisoners. There was a reason we sent them to sleep.”
Eos sat on the other stone bench, elbows on her knees. She cocked her head. “That would have shocked me, once—that you could consign an entire city to death that way.”
He turned quickly; he had the reflexes and energy of a young man, even if his hairline was receding and his face was lined with experience. “Not death,” he insisted. “They could always be revived.”
She nodded. “That was how you rationalized what you did. I understand completely. I rationalized my decision to stop illuminating this world in a similar way.”
He opened his mouth to object, stopped, then simply said, “They were killing us.” He sat down opposite her. Tentatively, he touched the seat, then snatched back his hand. The stone was still cold enough that the CO2 he was breathing out would frost on it.
“You don’t have to be here,” he said. “You could have walked away anytime. Those systems have no power over something like you.”
“In trying to stop me, they might have injured you,” she pointed out. “Besides, if anyone deserves to be in a . . . cell . . . then it is me.”
“You said before that it was the News that made you forget us. Was that all?”
“All?” She considered. “It’s never one thing. But you have to understand—we thought we couldn’t ignore you. Loving you was in our design.”
Eos remembered her youth, when humans and their creations had debated the best way to spread life and intelligence throughout the galaxy. Since light speed was an absolute limit, there were two choices for humanity and its self-aware creations: remain in realtime and intensify local space by converting every planet, asteroid, comet, and moon into a living, active part of a single compact civilization, burning bright under the light of one or two stars; or use the locksteps to slow the apparent passage of time to make it seem as if faster-than-light travel existed. If all your worlds hibernated thirty years for every month awake, ships could travel between the stars literally—or so it would seem—overnight.
Some chose the lockstep way, but Eos and her sisters were built by realtimers. Soaring above Centauri B on mirrored wings, these thousands of sun-powered lasers aimed their light at one of the frozen planets orbiting in the Centauris’ Kuiper belt. Heated by the radiance of an artificial sun, terraformed by nanotech and engineered ecolo
gies, they could sprout cities, countries, cultures, even new strains of humanity. Centauri was the first star to grow a laser corona, but every system in the galaxy had its entourage of Kuiper planets, invisible wanderers in the realm of the comets. All would be brought to life in time.
“The laser system is my body, like your flesh is yours,” Eos told Kamakie. “I identify with it, but only partially. All that body needs to survive is its autonomic nervous system, which contains many networked AIs. There’s a whole metabolism of bots and ships and factories to keep me functioning; but our creators decided those things weren’t enough.
“We were nearly self-aware, and there was always the possibility that we might become entirely so and that our awakening minds would waver in their commitments. Since we were in danger of waking up anyway, why not wake us to start with? So, they gave us minds, and they designed our desires.
“I was made to want to be what I was. Remember that old poem? ‘Oh great star, what would your happiness be if you did not have those for whom you could shine?’ That was me. That was all of us. I wasn’t lonely, because I had my sisters and we danced together in the coronal fire of our sun. And anyway, if I ever doubted my purpose, I could simply send a tiny spark of my consciousness here and live among my mortals for a time.” Her metal lips curved in a wistful smile. “To walk your streets, laugh and love with you . . . It worked.
“And then came the News.”
Kamakie nodded. He knew all about it, of course; who couldn’t? The entire human project had paused when millennia of observation finally found a pattern in the cosmic microwave background. Intricate instruments bigger than Eos and her sisters, the observers needed to spread out over light-years to resolve the image, but once they could see it, what it showed was unmistakable.
The faded remnant of light from the Big Bang did not come from the beginning of time. Visible past the embers of that titanic flash was the faint afterglow of an earlier cosmos.