QUANT (COLONY Book 1)

by Richard F. Weyand

  Only then did Quant use the machine to begin transporting things to Earth. She started with the barns, which had to be taken down to the surface for loading. She sent heavy-lift cargo shuttles into orbit, then popped the barns into orbit right alongside them.

  The shuttles maneuvered to latch onto the barns and headed for the surface. They delivered them directly to the areas on the Texas shuttleport where animals were being collected for the trip.

  The other thing Quant did once the big transporter was functional was to test her two new prototypes. She used a tug to push one of the prototypes into the transporter. She then popped it out to one of the colony locations, in a solar orbit well outside the colony’s planetary orbit. The device was a geodesic sphere five miles across, fitted with equipment Quant couldn’t begin to understand in this worldview.

  Quant understood the basics of what it did, though. If one could transport large material objects across space-time with a huge device like the transporter, a small unit could transport small particles, like electrons. Operating it continuously, one could send a stream of electrons. And if one modulated that stream of electrons, the devices could communicate across vast distances with effectively zero time lag.

  Quant fired up the units and sent a command from the unit still in the Asteroid Belt to the unit around the colony planet’s sun, telling it to send her live camera footage from one of the shuttles parked at the colony site. With all the radio transmission delays in both directions, it was almost an hour before Quant started receiving the signal on Earth.

  She was watching nearly live camera footage from thirty-two hundred light-years away.

  Quant ordered the factories to produce three-dozen more units, to make sure she had one for Earth and each colony planet, along with some spares.

  The colonies and Earth would be out of contact with each other, but Quant would be able to keep an eye on things, across all the worlds of human space.

  With three and a half months to go before departure, a question was raised at the neighborhood meeting.

  “We’ve been buying all this fabric to take along,” Bill Thompson said. “I agree with the strategy, but I wonder at the amount we’re buying. First, can we afford it, and second, are we going to have the cubic for it? We’ve been buying an awful lot of fabric.”

  Maureen Griffith gave the first part of the answer.

  “I think we’ve all been pleased by the prices the World Authority paid us for our homes,” she said. “They are not shorting us at all. So the funds we have available are covering the purchases. There’s nothing else to do with the money but leave it to someone else, so we’re going to spend every dime.”

  “All right,” Thompson said. “But what about our cubic? We only have eighteen shares. I think we may be above that already.”

  At that point, Emma Bolton stood up.

  “Uh, Mom?”

  “Yes, Emma.”

  “Mom, I’m pregnant, so Tom and I get full shares.”

  Griffith goggled at her daughter, then Ann Peterson stood up.

  “Ma’am? I’m pregnant, too, so Paul and I get full shares.”

  Next Amy Jasic and Kimberly Peterson stood up.

  “Me, too, ma’am,” Amy said.

  “And me, ma’am.”

  Griffith held up her hands.

  “Let’s cut this short. Can everybody who’s pregnant stand up, please?”

  Peggy Reynolds stood up, then Thompson’s own daughter Debby. Stacy and Tracy looked at each other, then stood up together. Finally, even fourteen-year-old Sally Reynolds shyly stood up, blushing.

  In the end, all nine of the young women in the neighborhood were standing, a third of everyone present.

  “There’s your twenty-seven shares, ma’am,” Stacy said.

  “That’s why we bought so much fabric,” Tracy said.

  “We knew we were all going to be well along by departure,” Stacy said.

  “Because none of us want morning sickness on the shuttle,” Tracy said.

  Griffith gave everyone a rueful look.

  “Well, it looks like you boys have been busy.”

  “It was us, ma’am,” Stacy said.

  “Us girls,” Tracy said.

  “We all decided together,” Stacy said.

  “Then we waylaid ‘em,” Tracy said with relish.

  That broke the tension and got laughs, even from the visibly flummoxed Bill Thompson.

  “Well, congratulations to us all, I suppose,” Griffith said, “for everyone here is either an expectant mother, an imminent father, or about to become, multiple times over, a grandparent.

  “And thanks as well to our children, who have seen to a one-third increase in our wealth as a group, both in terms of our numbers and in our cubic.

  “Let the fabric buying continue.”

  The girls all sat back down, and Susan Dempsey hugged her twins. She had tears in her eyes.

  “Oh, you little stinkers,” she said.

  “Yup. That’s us,” Stacy said.

  “Grandma,” Tracy said.

  Dempsey turned from the twins to Amy, sitting on her other side, and hugged her as well.

  “You I figured on, but that doesn’t mean I’m less happy.”

  “You’ll be a grandma four times, in a month,” Amy said. “Is that a record?”

  “It’s a treasure.”

  “Hi, Bernd.”

  “Hi, Janice. How’s it going?”

  “Very well, actually. You people have surprised me again.”

  “How so, Janice?”

  “Well, you know that the colony office has been telling people that reproducing their gene pattern – or bringing their existing children along – was one of the duties of a colonist.”

  “Yes, of course. Sperm bank or no, you want to avoid the genetic bottleneck problem.”

  “Yes. And the colony office has also been telling people not to have children before departure.”

  “Absolutely. That would make a difficult situation worse.”

  “Yes. Exactly. And the colony office further told everyone not to be in the third trimester at the time of departure.”

  “Oh, I think I can see where this is going, Janice.”

  “Yes, Bernd, and I may have made it unintentionally worse. I allotted one-half share of cubic to children, and a full share to adults. Adult being defined as anyone twenty years old or over, or a woman who was pregnant, or a man whose partner was pregnant and he acknowledged the child as his.”

  “Oh, my. So how many female teenagers are there among the colonists, Janice?”

  “About two hundred thousand.”

  “And how many of them are pregnant?”

  “Bernd, as near as I can tell, they all are.”

  Decker guffawed, while Quant looked slightly embarrassed. Quant’s discomfiture just made it worse, and Decker laughed until tears ran down his face. When he had finally subsided a bit, Quant continued.

  “Nearly all, anyway. Over a hundred and sixty thousand of them. And at least a third of the twenty to thirty-five age group are pregnant as well, which is a much bigger group. Figure another hundred and forty thousand pregnancies there.

  “Is that going to be a problem for the colonies to have such a birth explosion?”

  “No, not really. Oh, the obstetrics people will be busy, but I have a generous contingent of them in the colony populations, and every patient room in the residence halls destined to be hospitals can be used for deliveries.

  “I had hoped at least some people would take the hint and get their families started, but I had no idea it would be so effective. Trying to get people to do something you want them to do is normally like herding cats, and I didn’t expect this.”

  “Yes, Janice, but that’s when you’re trying to get people to do something they don’t want to do. Did you really think you could tell hundreds of thousands of teenagers it was OK to have sex and get pregnant – more, it was expected of them – and they wouldn’t do it?”

>   “I can see I miscalculated somewhat. My fears of low fertility were misplaced.”

  Decker laughed again at the magnitude of Quant’s understatement and her continued embarrassment.

  “Mind you, Bernd, I’m very pleased about it. We need babies, lots of babies, and the standard of living of the colonies will support them. They’re not exactly starting from scratch. The plastic houses will all be in place and the hospital up to speed by the time this flood of infants arrives. Those are the first things on the deployment schedule.”

  “Well, I’m glad it’s working out, Janice. It would be awful if you had encouraged people to do something, and they overdid it to the extent it was a problem.”

  “Or they did the typical human thing and pushed back by refusing. Exactly. I’m just a little surprised by it, Bernd. Gratified, because this is a tremendous benefit to the colonies, but a little surprised.”

  “Well, I guess that’s one less thing to worry about then.”

  Decker shrugged.

  “What else is going on, Janice?”

  “I have been considering my mission statement. Is my mission complete once the colonies depart? I’m not sure it is.”

  “In what way?”

  “Consider, Bernd. My mission is to protect humanity from a racial-extinction cataclysm. Correct?”

  “Yes, that was your charter from the get-go.”

  “We solve all the one-planet catastrophes with multiple planets. And I solve the plague epidemic problem by keeping all the colonies and Earth isolated from one another.”

  “You haven’t reconsidered on that one, Janice?”

  “Not at all, Bernd. I’m more determined than ever.”

  “OK. But that’s it then, isn’t it?”

  “No, Bernd. There’s one more. Interstellar war.”

  “But you’re not telling the colonies and Earth where the colonies are.”

  “Oh, they’ll find each other eventually, I think. By then there are probably enough planets and enough genetic variation from isolated populations to protect against the plague problem. At that point, interstellar war between humans becomes a problem.

  “There’s also the problem of running into another space-faring technological society that decides it doesn’t like humans much.”

  “Aliens? Have you seen any aliens yet, Janice?”

  “No, and I’ve been looking for them. But the galaxy is a hundred thousand light-years across, Bernd. I’ve only ranged about ten thousand light-years from Earth. That’s only like one or two percent of the galaxy, and I haven’t even inspected all of that carefully.”

  “So what do you do about it, Janice?”

  “I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out a solution to war, and it’s not going well.”

  “I’m not surprised, Janice. I think the only historical times when peace lasted for very long periods was when one player was so strong as to make war unthinkable. The Pax Romana, for example, or the Chinese Empire. Nobody messed with them, because the results were predictable and bad.”

  “Interesting. Well, I’m going to keep working on it, Bernd.”

  “Good luck, Janice. And I mean that.”

  After her conversation with Decker, Quant played back the end of the conversation. She looked back through her search results, and he was right. The extended periods of peace in a region were where one player was so dominant in the region that large-scale war was impossible.

  That wouldn’t work with Earth and the colonies, though. Quant didn’t want the Earth to be dominant over the colonies. There was a built-in future revolution there, a war for independence, which just put off what she was trying to avoid entirely.

  Quant ran back and forth through it again and again, and there was only one option she could see.

  She quailed at its implications.

  Fine Tuning

  “Hi, Janice.”

  “Hi, Bernd.”

  “Getting close now. Just a month to go. What’s going on?”

  “Lots of little things. One of the initial colony chairmen had a good idea. Why not lay out the colonies now, and have all the survey stakes for roads and houses and all in the ground in advance of arrival?”

  “You have initial colony chairmen, Janice?”

  “Yes. I set up the functional groups we talked about, then picked the most senior people in each functional group of each colony to form a colony council. Then I gave each council several candidate names for their colony chairman. They talked to them all in video, then they voted. So we have an initial government for each colony.”

  “That’s a big move. So there’s a functioning government in place when they hit the ground.”

  “Yes, Bernd. With an election one year off. Probably three-year terms initially, or something like that. Things move fast in a colony, so you need shorter terms than, say, the World Authority.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “And the colony councils affirmed the colony names from the contests. The colonists all voted, in multiple elimination rounds, so that was pretty pro forma, but the councils did validate them.”

  “What are the colony names, Janice?”

  “All the ones you’d expect, I think, plus a couple of surprises. The fictional and mythical place names were the most popular. Amber. Arcadia. Avalon. Atlantis. Dorado. Eden. Endor. Nirvana. Numenor. Olympia. Terminus. Westernesse. And there are some named after places on Earth, mostly based on the climate. Aruba. Bali. Fiji. Hawaii. Samoa. Tahiti. Tonga. Others about the climate alone. Spring. Summer.”

  “That’s a mixed bag. Nobody chose Utopia?”

  “Some were talking about it. Then someone mentioned that if you called a planet Utopia, by Murphy’s Law it would turn into – and I quote – a shithole. Everybody agreed and dropped it.”

  Decker chuckled. True enough.

  “You’re still a couple short, Janice. What were the surprises?”

  “One colony was closing in on Beach. Some people complained that it would make the actual word beach useless, so they changed it to the Spanish word for beach. Playa. One colony got stuck on New Earth, as prosaic as that is. And it stuck. The last one is kind of embarrassing.”

  “Embarrassing? To whom?”

  “To me. Bernd, they named the planet after me.”

  “They’re going to call it Janice?”

  “No. They’re going to call it Quant. I couldn’t talk them out of it.”

  “That’s nice, Janice. You should be honored.”

  “Well, I am. But it is embarrassing.”

  Decker nodded.

  “Back to where we started, Janice. How are you going to survey all the colonies? Are you sending advance people?”

  “No. I have all the survey data from orbital terrain mapping, drone camera footage, all that sort of thing. So I gave all that data to the colony councils and offered them my staff to help them map it out. Together with the infrastructure people on the councils, we laid everything out for each colony.”

  “And all your staff people were your avatars.”

  “Of course.”

  “But how did you stake everything out, Janice? Without sending people down to the surface?”

  “I sent the probe to each planet with thousands of different-colored survey stakes. I just had it pop them down to the planet’s surface one at a time. I put them five feet above the surface with a velocity of a hundred miles an hour toward the surface.”

  “So their momentum drove them in. Brilliant.”

  “Yeah. It was fun watching the videos the probe brought back from the cameras of the shuttles parked there, Bernd. Like an automatic weapon that shot survey stakes. B-r-r-r-r-t. There’s a line for one side of the main street. B-r-r-r-r-t. The other side of the main street. The computer on the probe just laid it all out with the map I sent it with.”

  “So it’s all staked out?”

  “Yes, and I have all the building locations set as well. I just pop them all down there, including the residence halls with all the
colonists in them.”

  “Then they come out and start inflating houses.”

  “Yup. Should only take a week to get fifty thousand houses built on each colony.”

  “That fast, Janice?”

  “Sure. A four man crew can easily do two houses a day, Bernd, and there’s forty thousand men and boys able to work. Half of them can do ten thousand houses a day. The rest of the manpower is spent on transporting the kits from the warehouse to the house sites, feeding everybody meals, all that sort of thing. It will go very fast.”

  “Which empties out the residence halls.”

  “Which then become the hospital, the school, offices, and the admin center. Exactly.”

  Decker shook his head in wonder.

  “So what do they do on week two, Janice?”

  “Put up fencing to pasture the animals. I shot all the fence posts in already, the same way as with the survey stakes, but the colonists have to string them all. Then they need to start planting crops. Once crops are in, they can start doing roads and such. Getting animals grazing is first, though. The animals need it. Getting crops started is next, because you can do other things while they grow.”

  “Meanwhile, the doctors and nurses are getting those hospitals up and running.”

  “To treat injuries and get ready for all those babies. That’s right, Bernd.”

  “This is really something, Janice. You’re doing a great job.”

  “Thanks, Bernd. From you, that means a lot to me.”

  The education classes for the colonists had originally covered a lot of the basics of farming, hunting, animal husbandry, food preparation and storage, as well as all the underlying knowledge required to integrate it all.

  The on-line courses had now shifted to specifics needed in the first weeks on the colony, like how to inflate, harden, and stake down the houses, how to string the fences for the animals, how to break soil and plant crops using the farm machinery they were bringing along.

  There were also sign-ups, putting together four-man teams to put the houses up. Matt Jasic talked to Joe Bolton about signing up teams.