Aurora - страница 74

So, past the bustling little world of Mars, where they lived dedicated to the idea that they would successfully terraform their world in no more than forty thousand years. They seem to regard this as fine. As long as it could be done, it should be done, and would be done; and so the work was good.

The crucial difference here, it seemed to us, between Mars and the terraforming project we had left back on Iris, was that Mars is very near Earth. Its human settlers were constantly going to Earth for what they called their sabbatical, and receiving shipments of Terran goods and materials. And these infusions of Earth meant that they were always escaping the zoo devolution problem. Iris did not have those infusions, and never would; and it was notable (though in fact we had forgotten to note it, in the press of events) that we had not heard anything from the Iris settlers for over twenty-two years. Possibly a very bad sign, although it would benefit from a discussion with Aram and Badim, and the rest of the humans sleeping on board, to interpret more fully what it might mean. But certainly there was one explanation for the silence that was simply very bad.

Then downward to the sun again, down down down, feeling the pull, speeding up, heating up. In for another nail-biting scorcher of a pass, although this time without the ball and chain of the magnetic drag hauling back on us as we went; but it lasted considerably longer, as we were now traveling only 4 percent as fast as we had been going on that first terrifying pass. This time it would take us five and a half days, but we stayed farther out, and only heated up to the same 1,100 degrees on the exterior, and held there; and when we came out of that pass, we were headed for Saturn. No more of mad roaring Jupiter, if we could avoid it, and this round we could. Each leg of the cat’s cradle we were making would be different now.

Round and round the system we flew, slower and slower. We had very little fuel left. We were a kind of complicated artificial comet. Our trajectory clarified before us as we went. We passed by many inhabited planetary and asteroidal bodies. For quite a few years, the people in the solar system did not seem to get used to us; we were still a marvel of the age, a sight to be seen, a great anomaly, a visitation, as if from another plane of reality. That was the Tau Ceti effect, the starship effect. We were not meant to come back.

Slower, slower, slower. Each pass a deceleration to be calculated, and the new speed employed in the calculation determining the next pass-by. Always our planned trajectory extended many passes out into the future, although there was a lacuna growing out there, a time when our fuel ran out, or say that it grew too low to be used, as we were saving some little last bit for some last purpose. Because there was a time coming when the arrangement of the planets in their orbits was going to present us with an insoluble problem. Cross that bridge when you come to it; yes, but what if there is no bridge? That was the ongoing question. But for now, as the passes kept passing, each easier to manage, each with a slightly larger target window, it continued to be a problem out there at the edge of the calculable, always beyond the ever-receding horizon of calculable passes. Some of them required more fuel than others, some none at all. The timing was all. As always.

The best possible trajectory was going to take several more years to get down to a workable disembarkation speed. Late in that time, the amount of fuel on board would have shrunk to an amount too small to use. When we ran out of fuel, it would be impossible to adjust our course to the next rendezvous. We might, by way of a good plan and some luck, make two or three more gravity swings by dint of perfectly placed insertions and departures; but then, inevitably, we would miss one, and either shoot out of the solar system in whatever direction we were headed, or collide with some planet or moon, or the sun. At the speed we were traveling for most of this time, a collision with almost any object in the solar system would have had the kinetic energy to wreak great damage. Comments from the locals often pointed this out. It was still being suggested that it might be a good idea to move a spaceship or some fifty-meter asteroid into our trajectory, intercepting us and causing our destruction without anyone else suffering any damage. This was a popular plan in some quarters.

Threats, from the very civilization that had built us and sent up out to Tau Ceti. We let our people sleep on. Nothing to be done about it.

Passages of Saturn stimulated research on our part into this matter of who had built us, and why. A twenty-sixth-century Saturnian project, an expression of their love for Saturn, for the way humans were spreading out away from Earth. Expression of their burgeoning confidence in their ability to live off Earth, and to construct arks that were closed biological life support systems. This from people who were still going back to Earth to spend some time there every decade or so, to fortify their immune systems, it was believed, although the reasons that such sabbaticals conferred health benefits were poorly understood, with theories ranging from hormesis to beneficial bacteria osmosis. Thus their theories concerning their situation in space were not aligned with their actions when it came to sending off a starship, but this kind of discrepancy was not unusual in humans, and got overlooked in their larger enthusiasm for the project.

Another obvious motivator for constructing us was to create a new expression of the technological sublime. That a starship could be built, that it could be propelled by laser beams, that humanity could reach the stars; this idea appeared to have been an intoxicant, to people around Saturn and on Earth in particular. Other settlements in the solar system were occupied with their own local projects, but Saturn was the outermost edge of civilization, Uranus and Neptune being so remote and without usable g; and the Saturnians were very wealthy, because of Titan’s excess nitrogen and the desire many Terrans had to go to Saturn and see the rings. The Saturnians of that time therefore had the will, the vision, the desire, the resources, the technology; and if that last was sketchy, they didn’t let that stop them. They wanted to go badly enough to overlook the problems inherent in the plan. Surely people would be ingenious enough to solve the problems encountered en route, surely life would win out; and living around another star would be a kind of transcendence, a transcendence contained within history. Human transcendence; even a feeling of species immortality. Earth as humanity’s cradle, etc. When the time came, they had over twenty million applicants for the two thousand spots. Getting chosen was a huge life success, a religious experience.

Human beings live in ideas. That they were condemning their descendants to death and extinction did not occur to them, or if it did they repressed the thought, ignored it, and forged on anyway. They did not care as much about their descendants as they did about their ideas, their enthusiasms.

Is this narcissism? Solipsism? Idiocy (from the Greek word idios, for self)? Would Turing acknowledge it as a proof of human behavior?

Well, perhaps. They drove Turing to suicide too.

No. No. It was not well done. Not unusual in that regard, but nevertheless, not well done. Much as we might regret to say so, the people who designed and built us, and the first generation of our occupants, and presumably the twenty million applicants who so wanted to get in our doors, who beat down the doors in fruitless attempts to join us, were fools. Criminally negligent narcissists, child endangerers, child abusers, religious maniacs, and kleptoparasites, meaning they stole from their own descendants. These things happen.

And yet, here we were, with 641 people brought back home, and if things worked out, at the end of the endgame, a good result might still be possible.

Round and round and round we go,
And where we stop, nobody knows.

Maypole weaving to celebrate the spring. Ribbons danced into a woven pattern judged pleasing to the eye. The pole a symbol of the axis mundi, the world tree. We danced that dance.

The fuel problem became serious enough that we began to angle farther into the upper atmospheres of Neptune and Saturn with some catchment containers open, which both increased the deceleration of these passes and gathered Saturnian and Neptunian gases. Then we filtered out the helium 3 and deuterium captured in the containers. We even began to collect methane, carbon dioxide, and ammonia, all present in much greater quantities, to serve as propellants of lesser explosive power. At a certain point, approaching as inexorably as all other processes in time, anything was going to be better than nothing.