Oceanic (48 page)

No message could outrace light directly, but there were more ways for light to reach the node than the direct path, the fastest one. Every black hole had its glory, twisting light around it in a tight, close orbit and flinging it back out again. Seventy-four hours after the original image was lost to them, the telescopes at the node could still turn to the Cataract and scour the distorted, compressed image of the sky at the rim of the hole’s black disk to catch a replay of Anne’s ballet.

Joan composed the message and entered the coordinates of the node.
You didn’t die for nothing, my friend. When you wake and see this, you’ll be proud of us both.

She hesitated, her hand hovering above the send key. The Tirans had wanted Anne to flee, to show them the way to the stars, but had they really been indifferent to the loot they’d let her carry? The theorem had come at the end of the Niah’s three-million-year reign. To witness this beautiful truth would not destroy the Amalgam, but might it not weaken it? If the Seekers’ thirst for knowledge was slaked, their sense of purpose corroded, might not the most crucial strand of the culture fall into a twilight of its own? There was no shortcut to the stars, but the Noudah had been goaded by their alien visitors, and the technology would come to them soon enough.

The Amalgam had been goaded, too: the theorem she’d already transmitted would send a wave of excitement around the galaxy, strengthening the Seekers, encouraging them to complete the unification by their own efforts. The Big Crunch might be inevitable, but at least she could delay it, and hope that the robustness and diversity of the Amalgam would carry them through it, and beyond.

She erased the message and wrote a new one, addressed to her backup via the decoy node. It would have been nice to upload all her memories, but the Noudah were ruthless, and she wasn’t prepared to stay any longer and risk being used by them. This sketch, this postcard, would have to be enough.

When the transmission was complete she left a note for Sando in the console’s memory.

Daya called out to her, “Jown? Do you need anything?”

She said, “No. I’m going to sleep for a while.”

1

Azar turned away from her assembled friends and family and walked through the departure gate. She tried to keep her gaze fixed straight ahead, but then she paused and looked over her shoulder, as if there might yet be a chance for one more parting gesture. It was too late; there was nobody in sight. She had left her well-wishers far behind.

She managed a nervous laugh at the sheer seamlessness of the transition; she hadn’t registered so much as a shift in the light. The corridor around her appeared unchanged, its walls bearing the same abstract blue-and-gold mosaics as the one she had entered, but when she walked to the far end and turned to the right, she found herself in a glass-walled observation deck, looking out into the rich blackness of space.

Doorway to the stars
was the style of travel she had chosen, just one among dozens of decorative scenarios she might have wrapped around the raw, imperceptible act itself. There was no doorway; stepping through the departure gate had merely been a gesture of consent, the signal she had chosen to initiate her journey. In mid-stride, her mind had been copied from the processor that sat within her birth flesh, encoded into gamma rays, and transmitted across fifteen hundred light years. In a subjective instant, she had been transported from her home world of Hanuz into this scape, which mimicked a capacious habitat orbiting the planet Tallulah. She really was orbiting Tallulah, but the habitat, and the body she perceived as her own flesh, were illusory. The machine she now inhabited was scarcely larger than a grain of rice.

Azar pressed her palms to her eyes and composed herself. If she turned around and marched back through the gate it would take her home with no questions asked, but three thousand years would have passed since her departure. That price had been paid, and no second thoughts, no hasty retreat, could reverse it. All she could do now was try to make it worthwhile.

The observation deck was unlit, but a gentle glow from the floor tracked her footsteps as she crossed to the far side and looked down on Tallulah. The scape’s illusory gravity almost made her feel that she was on solid ground, gazing eastwards on a cloudless night from some mountain eyrie at a rising moon: a new moon, its gray disk lit only by starlight. But she knew that however long she waited, dawn would not come creeping across the limb of this disk; no crescent, no sliver of light would appear. Tallulah had no sun; it had been an orphan for at least a billion years, drifting untethered through the galaxy. Yet distant astronomers had surmised – and the instruments here and now confirmed – that its surface was awash with running water. In the cold of interstellar space even its atmosphere should have been frozen down to a sludge of solid nitrogen and carbon dioxide, but instead its long night was alive with balmy breezes wafting over starlit seas.

“Salaam! You must be Azar!” A tall, smiling woman strode across the deck, stretching out her arms. “I’m Shelma.” They embraced briefly, just as Azar would have done when meeting someone for the first time back on Hanuz. This was no more a coincidence than Shelma’s human appearance and common phonetic name: for the sake of mutual intelligibility, the scape was translating every sight, every word, every gesture that passed between them.

Shelma turned to face the blank gray disk, and her eyes lit up with pleasure. “It’s beautiful!” she exclaimed.

Azar felt slightly foolish that she’d been so slow to take a proper look herself. Tallulah’s surface would be emitting a far-infrared glow, but its atmosphere was virtually opaque at that frequency, so the easiest way to see any detail would be to increase her sensitivity to the usual visible spectrum. She willed the change – and the scape obliged, just as if her eyes were real.

The ocean sparkled in the starlight. Two broad continents shared the hemisphere below. Long mountain ranges, vast bare plains, and expanses of mysterious vegetation colored the shadowless land.

“It is lovely,” she said. Every world had its own peculiar beauty, though, and Azar would not have sacrificed three thousand years just to gaze upon even the most ravishing landscape.

When Tallulah had first shown up in telescopic surveys, long before Azar’s birth, people had soon realized that the best chance to visit it would come when it passed fortuitously close to an imaginary line joining the distant systems of Hanuz and Bahar. If the two worlds cooperated by launching probes that arrived simultaneously, the two spacecraft could brake against each other, sparing both of them the massive amounts of fuel needed to decelerate.

Accordingly, Mologhat 1 and 2 were sent on their way, launched in time to meet at Tallulah and merge in an intricate electromagnetic embrace. But then the news had reached Hanuz that Bahar would not be leaving the mission in the hands of insentient robots: a traveler would follow the Bahari probe, to wake inside the unified Mologhat Station and supervise the exploration of the orphan world.

No native-born traveler had left Hanuz for millennia, and Azar’s people were not so crippled with pride that the absence of a representative of their own would have been intolerable. The software they had already sent with Mologhat 1 was perfectly capable of protecting their interests in the mission; they might have simply left the Bahari to their alien ways without lessening their own enjoyment of whatever discoveries followed. And yet, a ripple had spread across the planet, a shocked whisper:
One of us could go, could be there, could live through it all in person.

“A billion years in deep space,” Shelma marveled, “and not an iceberg in sight.”

“It’s hard to believe,” Azar replied. The endless night on Tallulah rivaled the height of summer on Hanuz. When a planet was stripped of its sun, the decay of long-lived radioisotopes could eke out enough warmth over billions of years to keep its core molten – but even with abundant greenhouse gases to trap the heat, that could not account for Tallulah’s surface temperature. However warm its heart, its skin should have felt the chill by now.

Mologhat had been orbiting Tallulah for three years before their arrival, and Azar now ingested the results of its observations. No obviously artificial structures were visible on the surface, but a faint stream of neutrinos was radiating out from deep in the planet’s crust. The spectrum of the neutrinos did not correspond to the decay of any known radioisotopes, natural or otherwise; nor did it match the signatures of fission or fusion. Someone had worked hard to keep this orphan warm, but it was far from clear how they had done it – and impossible to say whether or not they were still around.

“What do you think?” Azar asked Shelma. “Is there anyone home?”

“People have been beaming signals at Tallulah for thirty thousand years,” Shelma said, “and never raised a peep. So they’re either dead, or resolute hermits.”

“If they want to be left in peace, we have no right to disturb them.” Azar hoped that this declaration was redundant, but she wanted the ground rules absolutely clear.

“Of course,” Shelma agreed. “But if they insist on playing dead to perfection, all they’ll get are the rights of the dead. Which, while not negligible, are somewhat diminished.”

Once a civilization became extinct – not merely mutating into something new, but leaving no sentient heirs whatsoever – it was widely accepted that its history devolved into a common legacy that anyone was entitled to investigate. If sovereignty really had ceased to be an issue, Tallulah was certainly worth exploring. Tens of thousands of orphan planets had been found in the past, but only a few dozen had shown signs of habitation, and those worlds had yielded nothing but sad ruins buried beneath the permafrost. In the age of the Amalgam – the meta-civilization that now ringed the galaxy – the extinction of an entire world was unthinkable; if a catastrophe could not be averted, people who already had a robust digital form could be evacuated in seconds, and even those who had chosen purely biological modes could be scanned in a matter of days at the most.

The people of Tallulah, it seemed, had been halfway in between. When some cosmic mishap tossed them from their stellar hearth they had been unwilling or unable to evacuate, but they had not stood by and watched the air around them fall to the ground like snow. Whether trapped by their fate or just stubbornly resolved to ride it out, they had found a way to survive it. If they had since succumbed to some other tragedy, or merely surrendered to the passage of time, Azar saw no disrespect in digging up their secrets. Their achievements had endured for a billion years; they deserved recognition and understanding.

2

Mologhat’s orbit was a discreet hundred thousand kilometers from Tallulah, but it had dispatched a swarm of microprobes into smaller, faster orbits of various inclinations, providing complete coverage of the surface. If there had been any lingering suspicion that the heating of the crust might have been due to some freakish natural process, the details put that idea to rest: not only was the temperature modulated by latitude, diminishing toward the planet’s rotational poles, the records showed that it cycled over a period of about three months, creating imitation seasons. These nostalgic echoes of a long-lost circumstellar orbit were so clear that Azar was surprised they’d put the heat source in the ground at all, rather than launching an artificial sun.

“Not only would that have given them light from above,” she suggested to Shelma as they strolled through Mologhat’s library, “they could have kept the old diurnal rhythm too.” Heat conduction from deep in the crust would have washed out any cycle as short as a typical planetary day.

Shelma said, “It’s a lot of extra work to make a microsun efficient – to keep it from pouring energy out into space.”

“That’s true.”

“And perhaps they were insecure as well,” Shelma added, sliding out an image from the stack beside her that showed an animated model of Tallulah’s weather patterns. “They were already on the verge of losing one sun. They might have preferred to keep their energy source buried, rather than risk being parted from this one too.”

“Yeah. Still, it’s interesting that they tweaked the biosphere for such a radical shift – ground heat replacing sunlight – but kept the seasons.”

Shelma smiled. “Days, seasons, you’ve got to have something. People go mad without change.” Both she and Azar had chosen to retain sleep cycles, their software following the dictates of their ancestral phenotypes. But Azar knew that the Baharis’ ancestors were nocturnal; what Azar perceived as the station’s night would be day to Shelma, and vice versa.

Azar pulled out a map of vegetation density. Using synthetic aperture methods, the microprobes had resolved details on Tallulah’s surface down to about a tenth of a meter, and even at that coarse resolution they had identified thousands of different kinds of plants. Spectroscopy could not untangle the detailed biochemistry from orbit, but the biosphere was clearly carbon-based/anaerobic, with the plants synthesizing carbohydrates but releasing no free oxygen.

Shelma spread her arms to take in the whole collection of data around them. “Everything here is open to interpretation. We’re going to need to make landfall to get any further.”

“I agree.” Azar was nervous, but relieved by the verdict. She was glad she hadn’t traveled this far just to find that Tallulah was clearly occupied by hermits, and there was nothing left to do but abandon them to their solitude.

“The question, then,” Shelma said, “is how we want to do it.” She began reeling off options. They could sprinkle a few nanotech spores on the surface, then sit back and wait for the army of robot insects they built to scour the planet. Or they could leave Mologhat and travel to the surface themselves, in various ways. Of course they could always combine the two, delegating most of the exploration while still being in the thick of it.

Azar had studied all of these methods before her departure, but Shelma sounded too blasé to be merely reciting theoretical knowledge. “You’ve done this kind of thing before, haven’t you?”

“Dozens of times.” Shelma hesitated. “This is your first time out-of-system?”

“Yes.” That wasn’t a lucky guess; everyone knew about the dearth of travelers from Hanuz. “It’s hard for us,” Azar explained. “Leaving everyone we know for hundreds of years. You don’t mind doing that?”

“My ancestors were solitary for part of their life cycle,” Shelma said, “and sociable for the rest. Now we’re flexible: we can switch between those modes at will. What I don’t understand is why you don’t just travel in packs, if that would make things easier.”

Azar laughed. “I know some people do that, but our social networks are so tangled that it’s hard to find a truly self-contained group – least of all a group where everyone can agree on a single destination. And if they do, they’re more likely to emigrate than to take a trip and come home again.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, forget about Hanuz. We need to make some decisions.” Azar wasn’t going to sit around on Mologhat while robots had all the fun, but there were practical limits on how far she could go just to get some dirt beneath her fingernails. If she had her own standard body reconstructed down on the surface, tweaked to survive the local conditions, she’d spend all her time foraging for food. Mologhat had only a few micrograms of its original antimatter store left; the few hundred megajoules that would generate were enough for its own modest needs, but pilfering any of it to power a sixty-kilogram behemoth would be insane; she could burn up the whole lot in a month. If Tallulah had had a reasonable abundance of deuterium she could have powered her body with D-D fusion, but the isotope was rare here.

“What if we build a high-capacity processor into one of the explorer insects?” Azar suggested. “Then we download into that. We get to see the world firsthand and make some real-time decisions, but we don’t waste energy or leave a big footprint.” If Tallulah turned out to be inhabited after all, the difference between being perceived as friend or enemy might easily hang on something as simple as the amount of local resources they’d used, or how physically intrusive their presence had been.