Allotropes (an Ell Donsaii story #8) (2 page)

“Um, I don’t know. Late May?”

***

The
small rocket squirted its attitude jets a couple of times as the rim of the enormous ring approached. The jets pivoted it so its main engine would push it in over the wall of the ring. The main engine exhausted hydrogen at full thrust for a minute, then turned and thrust the opposite direction to bring the rocket to a halt over the top of the sidewall.

As the sidewall rose to meet it, the main nozzle turned downward and opened up, gently bringing the rocket down to a landing on the upper surface of the wall. It stood there motionless for a minute, then a circular area on the large, odd fin stic
king off to its side went fuzzy. A rolled up metallic tube slid through the port, dropped onto the sidewall and also stood motionless for a moment.

The band that had been holding the tube
in its rolled up condition snapped open. The tube unrolled, revealing a much larger circle printed on its surface. That circle also vanished and an object three feet long with a maximum width of seven inches extruded through the 20 centimeter circle.

The object lay motionless for a few moments, then sat up, revealing an anthropomorphic form with two legs, two arms and a head.
It picked up the sheet of nitinol on which its port to the ringworld had been printed and tossed it off the edge into the endless black of space, flung away by the rotation of the ring. The band that had wrapped the nitinol sheet into a tube went off the edge next.

The waldo
stood and walked to the edge of the ring’s sidewall. There it stood a while, looking out over the enormous expanse of apparently flat, open land that faded into the misty distance ahead. It turned to take in the distant, upwardly curving shape of the ring on either side.

The PGR chip inside it sent back data:

“Apparent gravity 0.338G”

“Apparent atmosphere inside ring, Oxygen 28%, Nitrogen 71%, Others <1%”

The waldo knelt and
fired a laser at the material near its feet. It did this for about thirty minutes with minimal apparent effect, intermittently tugging on the material. Finally a small piece of the material broke off. The waldo inspected it for a moment and dropped it into a port on its chest. After looking out over the vista ahead another minute, Sigwald—Ell’s name for this waldo on the Sigma Draconis ringworld—lifted on a jet of highly compressed air and floated out over the incredibly deep valley ahead.

Ell watched on her HUD (Heads Up Display) as her view through the waldo’s eyes dropped down along the rimwall
that held in the ringworld’s atmosphere. The rimwall was hundreds of kilometers high, making for a tremendous drop down onto the floor of the interior of the ring. After a moment she said, “Allan, go ahead and correct for the Coriolis drift we’re getting out of the ring rotation and move us forward to keep us off the wall.” The rimwall
curved
steeply up from the ring rather than standing straight up. This meant that the waldo had to move forward or it would simply come down on the ring’s wall a little farther in.

Ell watched a little longer. Satisfied that the course Allan had the waldo on would take it down to the bottom of the rimwall and out to the enormous, apparently flat expanses beyond, she said, “Let me know when you get down to the plains.”

A little later, back up on the rimwall, the rocket that had delivered the waldo lifted slightly on a jet of hydrogen. It scooted to the edge, paused a second, then dropped off the outside of the wall, hurled away into space by the rotational force of the ringworld. At that point the rocket became inert, merely a small metallic object travelling through space at the nearly 21,000 miles per hour that the rotation of the ring had flung it.

It, however, had dropped off the edge with precise timing so that that “fling” would send it on a
ballistic path to pass near the presumed origination world of the ring builders. At that speed the trip would take about 211 earth days.

Chapter
One

San Francisco—For the first time in history, the most heavily viewed videos online were uploaded by a scientific journal. This phenomenon has been driven by the immense popularity of the clips showing the “Teecees” going about their daily lives on the third planet of Tau Ceti…

Querlak awakened about the same time as the rest of her clade, occasional pings on her connections sparking consciousness. For a brief beautiful moment she connected to both daughters, her mother, father, grandmother, both grandfathers, two ggms, three ggfs, and one gggf. The processing power afforded by the neural connections through their fifth dimensional quantum connections raised their consciousness and briefly produced a sweet TS (Transcendental State). Today’s TS was centered on Querlak. It felt sublime to have the TS centered on her rather than someone else. Everyone in this morning’s TS was her direct ancestor or descendant. Almost every morning, shortly after waking, Querlak participated in an awakening TS, but usually someone else was the focus or center. Querlak would most often be connected through one of her ancestors to that ancestor’s descendants—Querlak’s cousins—with that ancestor as the focus. It was always pleasurable just to be
in
the morning TS, but to have the waking period’s transcendentally heightened intelligence centered through herself instead of someone else, gave her a sublimely godlike sensation.

Then the TS broke up
, Querlak’s intelligence dropped precipitously as the processing power from her clade dropped away from her consciousness. For just a brief moment Querlak sensed the dullness of her ordinary life, then the ability to perceive her normal intelligence as so much lower than that of the TS was gone as well. With the dissatisfaction at her own lack of mental acuity absent, she looked out on the boring agenda of the day in front of her without dismay.

Querlak relieved herself amongst the starchy tubers of the
nearby field of delan and ate food from her travel pack. With a sigh she took to the air and resumed her inspection of the rimwall, flying slowly along the wall where it met the fields and carefully watching for any signs of cracking or fraying.

***

Allan spoke in Ell’s ear. “Sigwald will land on the plains of the ringworld in five minutes.”

Ell stood up from where she’d been meeting with the Tau Ceti team. “Sorry guys, I’ve got a time critical issue to deal with. Anything else exciting happening with the Teecees?”

Piscova, the linguist, lifted her hand briefly for attention. “Goldy appears to have ascended to the very top of the social ladder in their tribe. She’s made two major contributions to their society: teaching them to hunt from the air with spears and how to build snares to leave on the forest trails at night. Even more importantly, she has now successfully sutured small wounds in the wings of two more tribe members, something that the tribe regards as almost magical. I have the impression that they regard her with something akin to reverence.”

“That’s great to hear. I’ve come to like
him
quite a bit.” Harald Wheat said, perpetuating the group’s chronically good natured tiff over whether to refer to the androgynous aliens as “he,” “she” or “it.”

Ell laughed, “OK, see you guys at next week’s meeting.”

Walking to her office Ell looked up at her HUD and saw what looked for all the world like a farmer’s field rising up to meet
Siwald. Once she’d shut the door Ell stepped astride the waldo saddle she’d had placed in her office. She put on some real waldo goggles. With this waldo control setup she could operate Sigwald on the ringworld as well as remotely running waldoes at ET Resource’s low earth orbit habitat or the asteroid mine. More importantly,
this
waldo controller had a narrow bicycle type seat and clips for her shoes so she could move Sigwald’s legs by moving her own legs.

Ell
gazed around in astonishment at what looked like endless square fields of some kind of crop. If they weren’t crops, somehow the enormous flat plain of at least this part of the ring appeared to be covered with only one kind of plant. Perhaps they all just looked the same from a distance?

Ell guided Sigwald down to
land at a road intersection, or at least where what looked like roads joined. “Ring circling” roads ran parallel to the upcurving rimwall. More of them could be seen running in parallel farther and farther out onto the ring floor until they disappeared in the hazy distance. Other “ring crossing” roads, perpendicular to the rimwall, ran out across the floor of the ring toward its center. Perhaps they went all the way across to the other rimwall? The perpendicular roads divided the fields of plants into huge squares. Some of the roads in the distance had what looked like huge fences on them. Fences of dark columns or posts with gaps between them.
Windbreaks maybe?

Once he’d—Ell
considered “Sigwald” to be a male-sounding name, so thought of the waldo as a boy—landed on the dark gray surface of the road, Ell walked him over to the edge to look at the plants. The road’s surface was higher than the field and curved down to either side from its crown so that rain, if such fell, would wash it clean. A small section rimward of the field of plants was filled with dark brown material.
Compost?
In the field the plants themselves were stubby, thick stemmed affairs with just a few very large, chlorophyll green leaves in a bunch at the top. They looked a little like short palms. The ground underneath the plants lay mostly in darkness because the leaves appeared to catch almost all the light that fell on them.

Sigwald reported the air pressure to be
3.45 atmospheres. Temperature was 36
o
C or about 97
o
F. Ell looked around. She saw no evidence of farmers. Despite having an unobstructed view over a tremendous distance she didn’t even see any signs of habitation. The place felt deserted, though she didn’t think that could be possible. The ring arced up and away into a blue sky on either side. The fields stretched away into a hazy distance interrupted only by the perpendicular roads. It gave the appearance of a checkerboard on which all the squares were the same color of green. Slicing obliquely across the fields and approaching rapidly was the shadow of “ring night.”

Ell reached out and pulled up a plant to examine it. The dense root system dripped water with what looked like a few bits of rotting vegetable matter intermingled. It didn’t have the granular structure of soil. Looking back down where it came from showed some kind of black perforated structure
with pebbly material on it.
Hydroponics?
She pulled the plant up onto the road and spread it out. The broad leaves pulled off fairly easily suggesting that they were seldom exposed to heavy weather or winds. The bottom of the mostly vertical stem was very thick and, when she bent it, it broke open, pouring a thick white liquid out onto the black road. A small sample of leaf inserted in Sigwald’s test kit came out positive for DNA, just like the specimens from Tau Ceti had.

As the rapid rotation of the ringworld turned his part of the ring so that it faced away from the sun
, shadow swept over Sigwald. With the ringworld rotating its full 360 degrees every 3.03 hours the “days” and “nights” on the inside of the ring were only about an hour and a half each. The sky quickly faded from blue to black and now Ell could see the other side of the brightly lit ring arching overhead. Approximately 5,000 kilometers wide and only 20,000 kilometers away, to the eye the ring had a visual width of about fourteen degrees, and of course it arced all the way across the sky. The visual diameter of earth’s moon is only a half a degree, so in comparison to that, the ring appeared
enormous
. It lit the dark side of the ring where Sigwald stood far more brightly than the full moon lit the night back on earth. The ring arching overhead appeared to be an unremitting green except for a blue strip down the middle.

Ell turned Sigwald to look at the area right around him. The lighting seemed less like evening twilight and more like a cloudy day.

Ell gently tossed the majority of the wrecked plant back down onto the field and turned Sigwald back onto the dark surface of the intersection. She chose the ring crossing road that travelled perpendicularly away from the rimwall and out across the floor of the ring toward the middle. She activated the jets under Sigwald’s feet and he began sliding on “ground effect” down the road toward the middle of the broad ring’s inner surface. Allan could control Sigwald for a simple drive down the road out into the ring, so Ell unharnessed from the waldo controller and headed back out into the D5R research area.

***

As she flew along, Querlak mechanically swept her eye up and down from the upper rimwall to the edge of the fields. She had begun looking forward to her next break to eat. Suddenly her eye caught an anomaly at the corner of a field next to the rimwall. Querlak broke flight and began to coast down toward what she’d seen. Concerned about what might have happened but secretly relieved to have a break in her routine inspection flight she sharpened her focus on the smear at the intersection of the service roads. What had first caught her eye was the brilliant contrast of some white material on the black surface of the road. But as she neared she could see that there was some green material too. Landing, she saw that one of the delan plants had been pulled up onto the road and broken apart! Most of the plant had been tossed back down onto the field but the white sap that had leaked out of its broken body was what had sharply stained the road to first catch Querlak’s attention.

Who would
do
that? Querlak didn’t consider the possibility that an animal might have done it because there
were
no animals on the ringworld, other than the farmers themselves. Querlak felt confused and uncertain, so she reached out for a working TS, calling on her clade for help. Moments later her daughter, father, gf, gm, ggm and ggf had lent her processing power and Querlak looked about with markedly increased clarity and intelligence.

Querlak touched the sap, noting that it had congealed on the surface and trapped a light coating of dust.
This happened in the last rotation or two,
she thought. As she looked about she noticed that it must have been a few days since the last rain at this location because there was dust on the road and leaves. Not a large amount, but much more than had fallen on the delan sap. At the road intersection though, the dust had been diffusely blown away. Perhaps by Querlak’s own wing beats on landing? She stared about uncertainly. Perhaps by something else? It seemed like more dust was gone than her own luffing as she landed should have produced but she couldn’t be sure.

Looking around h
er eye widened,
there is actually only a narrow strip where the dust is blown off the road! What could have done that!
The narrow path in the dust trailed off down the ring-crossing road toward the central sea.

Querlak stepped down into the field to examine the damaged delan plant. She could see the disruption in the bedding
surface and pellets where it had been pulled up. It had been the nearest plant to the road intersection.  Several leaves had been pulled off the plant and its fat stem broken to let the nutritious white sap spill onto the road above.

Even with the increased mental acuity from the TS, Querlak could not imagine why anyone would have damaged the plant. Perhaps someone had been rendered isol and no one had recognized it?

Anyone whose immediate ancestors and descendants all died could be left isol, completely unbound from the network of their clade. Almost all such persons soon went insane. If the clade they had been isolated from cared deeply about the isol, the clade would try to find someone from within their own clade yet genetically unrelated to the isol who might be willing to mate with the isolated one. Such mercy matings were permitted despite the current extreme restrictions on reproduction. The clade’s hope would be that a child would come quickly enough that the fetus would bind the isol back into the original clade. When sigmas recognized that someone had been cut off and they didn’t have a clade member that was willing to mate with them, the sigmas at least took such an isol to a reserved area to live with other isols. There the hope was that they would mate with another isol and have a child quickly enough to at least be bound into a group of three. A clade of three was far from ideal but it would often restore their sanity. With a few more children they would have a large enough clade to return to productive society. Unfortunately, many isols died before they produced a fetus that could bind them, even if someone in their clade did care enough to mate with them and try to bind them back to their home clade.

The dreadful fear of becoming an isol
acted as a powerful driver of procreation for the sigmas. They considered cladeless isolation to be a fate much worse than death.

Thus, s
igmas didn’t just have the evolutionary need to reproduce that drove other animals. Their intelligence and clade binding had also given them an overwhelming desire to be bound to the others in their clade through
many
children, thus minimizing their chances of becoming a desolate isol.

This desire had driven the massive overpopulation of their home planet.