Creation node, p.16
Creation Node, page 16
That was especially distracting for Ariel Uwins and John Smith, Conservers.
Their whole lives had been dedicated to a creed of universal parsimony, of economy, of eschewing the wasteful use of any of the Solar System’s resources. And yet – so soon after their compatriots had made their extraordinary discovery at the edge of the Solar System – they had committed themselves to a six-year cruise on a luxury liner.
Because that was what the Cronus was, there was no doubt about it. And over these years of the six-year journey to Saturn, John Smith had had to spend a significant fraction of his time half-apologising for his presence on this huge bauble of a craft. Somehow the excuse that this was the only way anyone was going to get out to Planet Nine soon – and that only if a highly experimental fusion drive, to be fitted and fuelled when they got to Saturn, actually worked – didn’t wash. Not for the conscience of a Conserver.
Of course most of the passengers on this mission were working scientists and engineers and politicians, or lawyers and philosophers and journalists, and their assistants. Cosmologists and physicists keen to study the anomaly that Planet Nine had turned out to be. Astronomers hoping to find links with the peculiar, damaging quasar-like phenomenon at the heart of the Galaxy.
And, most interestingly to Smith, amid all the cosmic special effects, various experts longing to study the peculiar creature the Shadow team had discovered: the ‘human pterodactyl’, as some of the trashier media outlets described her. Biologists and biochemists, travelling to investigate her deep makeup (if it really was a ‘her’, as the Shadow crew insisted). Linguists to puzzle out her language, if she had one. Palaeontologists, to consider parallels of her peculiar avian-like descent to be found among the complex trees of life on Earth. And, yes, theologians of many faiths, eager to work out the spiritual meaning of Feathers’ arrival and existence. Religion had retreated in the dark years after the peak climate-crisis years, a global calamity that evidently had nothing to do with any god. But still the ancient faiths had never gone away – and as there were, across Earth, evidently faith-based reactions to the situation at Planet Nine, John Smith had spent some of his waking time studying the Christian Bible and other holy works.
As for the other lawyers on this mission, Smith tried to keep out of their way – but the fact was he was the Conservers’ only legal representative here. And there were plenty of legal aspects to be discussed with other groups and representatives about the situation, not least ownership of territory and intellectual property, given that it had been a Conserver vessel that had been first out to Nine to make those discoveries.
The Earth governments continued to insist that anything beyond their own world’s atmosphere was a common good – and, therefore, Earth’s to ‘protect’. Long and sometimes heated arguments over these principles were held even as the great craft had begun its years-long drift away from the sunlight – though not away from the glare of prying eyes of cameras, and plenty of media outlets were represented aboard.
But as Earth had receded and the longueurs of the voyage had cut in, many of the journalists had grown bored with filing such reports from this ark, apparently suspended as it was in deep space, and had turned their attention to the individual passengers. Even John Smith had been interviewed a few times, though it seemed that the Conservers, in person and in terms of their mission, were generally judged too dull for the news-hungry masses of Earth.
And when that first flurry of activity died down, and the scientists caught up with their literature, and the journalists began writing the novels, screenplays and game-world scenarios they had never had time for, and the crew quietly monitored the health of the enormous craft and its human cargo …
And then, tiring of work, people turned to leisure.
As best they could at any rate, given a complete lack of gravity aside for a few therapeutic centrifuges. That lack made sports and exercise problematic or challenging for the novice – as was energetic sex, Smith was told. You needed practice and tips from experts …
Soon, it seemed to Smith, the hardest-working people aboard had been the crew who ran the great globe that was the ship’s passenger section, doing their best to keep the passengers fed, watered, and exercised, if not entertained.
After a few more months, predictably enough, there had been a rash of affairs, some open, some fairly clandestine, and probably others he had seen no sign of at all.
But then, as the odd little community of the ship relaxed still more, people had started to mix a little more widely.
Smith himself struck up friendships with a group of space-elevator engineers, who had cut their teeth on the great installation at Earth, and were now heading out for a full decade’s assignment, serving as relief on the still more monumental beanstalk at Saturn. Even the youngest would return middle-aged, but financially secure for life. Other technicians were specialists, there to support the replacement of the Cronus’s fission drive with the new helium-3 engine.
And the youngest of the latter group, a dark, intense woman, mentioned she was something of a chess player. That gave Smith an excuse to haul his own handsome set out of his room and set it up in the public areas – handsome and an antique, but adapted magnetically for zero gravity. At first they played daily ‒ until Smith detected a subtle flaw in her defence strategies, and the games became one-sided.
All this socialising, this work and play, was set against a background of staterooms, lounges, halls, dining rooms and other facilities that seemed to have been designed by plundering some of the more decadent eras of the human past, from Roman-era banqueting halls to the extravagant luxury of the wealthy classes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and even the carbon-spewing techno glitter of the early twenty-first. And in particular there were quaint, deliberate echoes of the decor of the ocean liners of the early twentieth century: their staterooms and dining halls, and ballrooms where virtual orchestras played at high tea …
Through all this John Smith drifted, mostly alone.
Ariel Uwins, formerly ambassador to Earth, the only other Conserver he had knowledge of on this trip, had quickly declared herself bored and faintly disgusted by this monument to wastefulness – a monument to the resource-eating greed that had characterised much of humanity’s hegemony of the Earth, and now most other worlds as well.
And so, after a couple of months, Ariel had ducked out entirely.
Several Conserver-tech coldsleep pods had been loaded aboard the liner. This was a technology developed to maturity only after the departure of the Shadow on its decades-long mission – which otherwise, Smith reflected, would have banished the Shadow crew-person Salma to non-existence, or at least relieved her of a childhood and adolescence in a cage of a spacecraft.
Had he asked, John Smith could have used such a pod, and he had toyed with following Ariel. But, for a while anyhow – a guilty conscience, over the fate of Salma? – he had stayed out.
He did find a few refuges. There was a Mars suite he rather relished, where you could simply sit and watch as the Sun crossed a simulated pale brown sky, and the thin winds moaned softly, and lonely rover craft made their agonisingly slow way around some dry lake or other. All of this was recording or simulation, but at least authentic, and he knew that at least some of Mars had been left relatively unharmed, despite the industrialists’ rush for Martian aquifer water since the late twenty-first century.
And Cronus, drifting inert in the dark, was an ideal platform for deep-sky astronomy – even with nothing but the naked eye. Its engines had been silent since they had pushed the great ship out of Earth orbit. In fact the main engine had required only a single forty-minute burn to put the ship on a long, slow passage to Saturn. This was a ‘Hohmann trajectory’, as it was apparently known in the trade, slow but efficient in fuel consumption – about the only resource-efficient aspect of the whole mission as far as Smith was concerned – and the only way to get such large payloads to Saturn until fusion engines came on line.
And so, in the stillness, there were usually a good number of astronomers and cosmologists and other observers, professional and amateur, crowding out the various space-facing observation galleries. Smith enjoyed the astronomers’ taciturn company, and they tolerated his presence, perhaps welcomed it, recognising a Conserver’s instinctive aversion to wasteful disturbance in all things.
So they sat, amateurs and professional sky-watchers alike, mostly in silence, following the evolution of the quasar-like beacon off in Sagittarius.
As yet more months passed Smith began to explore more adventurously, away from the core of cabins and entertainment facilities.
And he began to appreciate the scale of the craft, at least from the inside.
The Cronus, never intended to land on any planet or moon, was a mighty dumbbell in form, with two vast spheres each some hundred metres in diameter. These were connected by a spine itself some hundred metres long, along which were draped radiator panels to dump waste engine heat – square kilometres of them. Roughly speaking, one of the spheres contained the habitable quarters – everywhere the passengers were allowed to roam – along with tanks of propellant for the engines, liquid methane. The second sphere, safely attached at the other end of the ship’s spine, contained the huge fission-drive engines themselves, with more propellant, and a store of lunar uranium to feed the reactor complex that powered the ship’s propulsion and other facilities.
Smith took more than one tour of these vast caverns of technology, in person in the more accessible areas, and as a virtual tourist elsewhere. So he visited the big fission reactors which, when necessary, were capable of the ten gigawatts or so which powered the propulsion engine and the ship’s inboard facilities – enough power to sustain a city of a million people. The basis of the engine’s operation was to heat a gas – all that methane – and blast it out of super-cooled nozzles, thus driving the ship forward. At launch, he learned, the ship had had an all-up weight of about fourteen hundred tonnes, of which about nine hundred tonnes had been methane propellant. By comparison the uranium supply was measured in mere kilograms.
All this surprised Smith with its apparently primitive nature – it was a design that might have been dreamed of, if not actually realised, two or three centuries earlier. But his Conserver’s soul was soothed to learn that the design had been driven by a question of available and plentiful resources. Such as uranium, of which there was plenty to be had on the Moon for the fission engines, and indeed methane, of which there were thousands of gigatonnes on Earth, in the atmosphere, or trapped in layers of ice under the oceans. Methane was in fact a ferociously potent greenhouse gas, and essentially Earth was well rid of it – as long as the heat generated by its removal was less than the methane could have captured if left alone. And, thanks to Earth’s space elevator, that could now be achieved.
Anyhow, this ‘steam rocket’, as the engineer and guide showing the passengers around affectionally called it, was good enough for the job, even for getting as far as Saturn.
But no further, as Smith knew. This ship, given its current propulsion system, able in nearly six years to reach Saturn, would take some four hundred years to get out to Planet Nine – and then would be unable to return without refuelling.
Which was why, at Saturn, this grand old boat was going to be fitted with a new engine entirely, some components of which she was carrying in her own hold. If all went well – if that huge upgrade held, if the whole cobbled-together monster didn’t blow up on the pad – she would then take a mere five more years from Saturn to Planet Nine.
John Smith lasted a full three years before he felt he had seen it all. Nothing much changed, after all, save the slow, potentially lethal brightening of the quasar beam.
Three years, during which he gloomily followed reports of the slow but relentless increase in the heating of the Earth – as of the rest of the Solar System – and news of conflicts inevitably beginning to spark.
Early flashpoints came between countries and communities who shared a common river: the Nile, the Mississippi. Desertification was increasing such places as the Sahel, and the Gobi, neighbouring the encroaching deserts – there was even deepening aridity in America’s Great Plains.
And out of such areas, heading north or south, a slow seeping of migrants was forming up, an echo of the desolate days of the late twenty-first century.
Three years, by which time he had heard the resident orchestra – modelled on that of the Titanic – run through its repertoire at least forty times.
Three years, after which he gave up, and committed to coldsleep at last, thinking of the first words Ariel would doubtless say to him on waking.
‘Told you you’d give in …’
Year 5
AD 2260
18
It was in the fifth year of their sojourn on Nine – their last year alone before Cronus was due to arrive – that Feathers began to sing.
The crew had their first serious discussion about this one evening, as Boyd and Joe slowly assembled the supper.
Feathers was sitting on the habitat floor, rather than at the table where the rest gathered – as she usually sat, with the group but a little way away from them. Sometimes, now, she sang softly. As she did tonight.
‘Here she goes again,’ said Hild. ‘Always sounds to me like a contralto imitating birdsong. Have we got any better ideas on why she sings?’
Joe just shrugged.
Feathers did have her little private habits, as they had discovered over the years – including more she had developed as she grew. And private places to retreat to, nest-like. She preened a lot, as most birds did – so Salma understood, given that she had never seen a bird in the flesh herself.
But, preening in privacy or otherwise, Feathers generally still seemed to like to hang out with the human group, and especially Salma. She knew she was different, everyone assumed, yet she clearly knew them as individuals, and responded that way.
And by now she even had her own bird-call names for them all – so Joe the comms guy had determined, by patiently recording and analysing her song.
There was plenty of linguistic content in her songs, Joe informed the group. It was evidently expressed in a complex language, but its meaning eluded him – he had no referents to begin to translate it. And it was a mystery where that language had come from. Had she been born with it?
Joe could only guess at what her names for them all might mean, in her own language. ‘Good-looking young guy,’ he would josh, pointing to himself. ‘Grumpy old guy,’ for Boyd. ‘Big sister,’ for Salma.
Meriel said she now believed that Feathers had been very immature when they had found her – not long out of the egg, but after a growth spurt.
‘So my best theory is that she was born with it,’ Meriel said. ‘The language. Why not? Our babies are born with the ability to cry, a very basic message to attract attention from their mothers and other adults. But we learn true languages pretty quickly. All of it evolved from some kind of repertoire of chimp hoots, probably.’ She glanced around, at Boyd. ‘In some cases devolved.’
‘Ouch, cheap shot from the plumber there,’ Boyd grinned back.
‘Yeah, yeah. Well, what if evolution has gone a little further in the case of Feathers? What if you could be born able to speak, able to tell your mother you want changing rather than just hollering? You might think that in a sufficiently old species, in a sufficiently tough environment for survival, that kind of facility might evolve. Based on some kind of optimally efficient coding of sounds, gestures … Although a lot of babies might have to suffer before the parents caught on.’
Joe the comms guy said, ‘Well, my analysis shows her song language is sophisticated, all right. I could bore you with stats on the complexity, the cross-correlation of internal structures, the entropy gradients … Put simply, I believe her language, as evidenced by the songs, is more sophisticated than ours, by about the same kind of ratio as our languages are more complex than those of dolphins, or whales.’
Boyd frowned. ‘I thought dolphins were pretty smart.’
‘Well, to be fair there’s a lot of gestural content, movement – like dances – with the dolphins. But they’re basically bluffing, believe me …’
Now, as Feathers continued to sing softly, her ‘voice’ somewhere between a high-pitched human tone and a gentle, trilling whistle, she sang a phrase which Boyd had tried to learn.
He whistled it back. ‘Damn. Nearly got it right that time.’
But Salma thought she could see how Feathers responded, with a kind of opening of her body towards Boyd, a slight splaying of the feathers. That was a smile, for Feathers.
Joe shook his head. ‘Let’s face it. Five years on, we’re no nearer understanding her. Not beyond the obvious – shrieks and cries when she’s alarmed or in pain, that softer trilling when she’s content. I can tell you how complex her language is in terms of the internal structure, but I can’t tell you what it means. Not without doing a lot of much more structured experiments—’
‘And since we’re here to protect her,’ Hild said firmly, ‘that ain’t going to happen any time soon. When the Cronus gets here in a few years’ time, maybe their experts will be able to analyse it—’
‘Without stressing her,’ Salma said.
‘We know, kid,’ Boyd said now, grinning, rubbing her back gently. ‘We all feel the same under our gruff exteriors. She’s family. We’ll take care of her.’
‘Boyd, I’ve been advised not to kiss you without a course of jabs.’
He guffawed, and pulled back. ‘Back to my gruff exterior.’
‘Still, though,’ Zaimu said thoughtfully, ‘before Earth takes over, I wish we could get further with our own hypotheses about Feathers’ existence, and why she is here at all. I don’t think I ever bought the idea that she’s here to deliver some kind of message. I mean, not literally, not some sermon she’s somehow memorised, or maybe has coded into her neural architecture somehow.’
