The thousand earths, p.23
The Thousand Earths, page 23
He was immersed in a cloud of steam that dug into his every pore.
‘Mine! All mine!’
When he was cleansed, checked over, injected, fed and watered, he made his way to the ship’s bridge.
Where he found two old people gazing out at a sky littered with stars.
The bridge was darkened, the better to see the view. Hackett was aware that his reflexes were off, his vision adaptation probably sluggish too. So he made his way cautiously to the left-hand seat of the row of three chairs under the thick transparent canopy – the left seat, traditionally the commander’s seat, one relic of his own cultural background that he had simply refused to give up.
He glanced over at his companions, both strapped in, both with loose blankets over their legs – and both sipping from cups through straws. Icsoba, sitting in the centre seat, looked like a child between two adults.
They barely looked back. Even on this latest waking from another decade-long sleep. No surprises, after all. Nothing to report; nothing to say that the instruments couldn’t tell him. They had long since given up asking how each other felt.
A panel opened in the compartment in front of Hackett, and out slid a tray with a cup and straw for him. Some kind of medicated glop. He sipped it, paying it no attention, while peering ahead.
At a star field, where the Solar System used to be – hopefully, anyhow.
He immediately picked out one brilliant star, straight ahead, with a litter of lesser stars around it. In the background, extraordinary clouds, thick banks of gas and dust, glowing orange, green, yellow, lit up by more stars within, clouds that towered and sprawled. These were clouds of star stuff, he knew, hydrogen rich with heavy elements, elements themselves created by the lives and deaths of previous generations of long-gone stars.
Star-birth clouds dumped over the Solar System, a gift of the galactic collision, and where once eight planets had orbited, new generations of stars were being hatched as he watched.
And, if this was the Solar System, that one brilliant star had to be humanity’s Sun. Familiar looking, but maybe that was wishful thinking.
‘So,’ he said to his companions, breaking the ice, ‘sleep well?’
‘Drink your drink,’ Icsoba said, her voice husky.
He checked various monitors, getting the readings he expected. ‘We’re down to one per cent of lightspeed. Thereabouts. Which means what we see is a true image, more or less …’
At velocities close to lightspeed, the view of the star fields around the ship had been heavily distorted. At first there was Doppler shift, so stars ahead looked bluer than natural, and stars behind redder. Faster still the stars’ apparent positions had shifted across the dome of the sky, as the ship had run into the starlight – like running into falling raindrops in a storm. At the most extreme speeds their view of the whole universe had been distorted into a kind of dully glowing patch straight ahead, in a dome of darkness.
All that was gone now. What he saw out the window was more or less what would be seen by a stationary observer. The question was: was he seeing what was he supposed to be seeing?
Their token target for their five-billion-year mission had been an object half that distance away in light-years: what had been known in Hackett’s day as the Perseus Galaxy Cluster. The travel-elapsed time aboard the ship, there and back, highly compressed thanks to relativistic effects, had been estimated as a hundred and sixty-four years.
Well, they had reached Perseus, and spent a decade surveying it. It was, it seemed, one of the most massive objects in the visible universe, with thousands of galaxies so noisy and energetic that the very gas in which the structure was immersed was itself at a temperature of millions of degrees, the whole mess glowing bright in the infra-red spectrum …
They had gathered data that whole generations of astronomers would once have devoured. Now he wondered if anybody still alive in this remote age would even look at it.
But the view on the way back had grabbed their attention much more tightly than the spectacle of the Perseus cluster ever had. For, here and now, right before them, the home Galaxy itself was colliding with Andromeda. It was an event that was utterly dwarfed by the huge energetics of the Perseus cluster, but the Galaxy was home. And there was nothing in the universe more significant for the three humans in their lonely boat.
First priority, though, had been the issue of finding their way back home. For everything was changing.
A star like the Sun swam around the Galaxy’s core once every quarter of a billion years – so that the Sun and a swarm of its neighbouring stars had completed twenty Galactic circuits during Hackett’s journey – or would have, if not for the collision.
And this collision was a thing of mists and invisible forces. Hackett knew that the chance of individual stars impacting was minuscule. But as the two spiral structures interwove, their ancient, intricate geographies of belts of stars and lanes of dust were thrown into chaos, with stars scattered and spiral arms broken up. And just to complicate the picture further, as clouds of dust and gas were perturbed, scattered or compressed, there were star-making events that had looked, from Hackett’s quick-time perspective, like sudden detonations.
So during the journey, out and back, they had put together a model of the evolution of the home Galaxy, as it rotated on its own axis, and went through the collision: a model designed to track the position of the Sun, and guide them back to it through the geography of the new ‘Milkomeda’ – an ugly neologism they used that dated from Hackett’s time. Hackett knew that at their last waking Pogee had made one final check of their model results, had tweaked their trajectory one last time, and told them that at the next waking they should find home – or if not, they never would. Icsoba had already initiated a series of automated messages, by laser, microwave, radio, sent to that target in advance of their arrival …
And now, at the end of all those computations and course corrections: a star-littered sky, in which one bright star stood out.
‘Stop dragging it out. Are we home?’
Icsoba stared out, into the muddled light, then smiled at him. ‘It’s Sol. We did it. We crossed five billion light-years, and we found our way home. That is Sol.’
‘But not,’ Pogee said, ‘Sol as we knew it.’
‘That central star has the spectrum of Sol. At least, the spectrum as extrapolated across five billion years. The Sun is hotter, brighter … We expected that. Sol is twice as old as when we left.’
‘But it is Sol.’
‘It’s the Sun, yes. And we are about a thousand astronomical units out. So this must be the Oort cloud.’
In Hackett’s time, a graveyard of comet cores and dwarf planets. Now he found himself looking through a veil of stars – mostly small, red, evidently newly born from a nearby birthing cloud, forming a curtain between him and his Sun.
‘Stars as close as comets used to be,’ he murmured. ‘All born here, I suppose. You know, this reminds me of my centuries-gone childhood. Space romances, old themselves some of them, where you could fly to a dozen stars within a few days of Earth without needing a faster-than-light drive. I wish I was a spaceman, the fastest guy alive …’
The others just looked at him, as they usually did when he indulged in some such nostalgic anecdote. And especially when he sang.
He said, ‘So anyhow we go on in. Right? We found the Solar System. We pass through this – this star cloud. We head for the inner planets, and see what people have made of Earth after all this time.’
‘If Earth exists at all,’ Pogee said. ‘And if anything like humanity survives. We searched, but we haven’t yet found any sign. No signals, no technosignatures – no big habitats orbiting the Sun. Not even the wreckage of any.’
Hackett nodded. ‘It’s five billion years later. Maybe people don’t make such a racket any more? We still have over sixty days’ deceleration before we reach the inner system. Let’s get some sleep. Some decent food. Some exercise. We download our data once more to anyone who’s listening.’
‘Agreed,’ said Pogee.
‘And then we go home,’ Icsoba said softly.
So they descended into the sunlight. But they found the mark of humanity long before reaching Earth itself.
39
A few days after the identification of Sol, Icsoba called Hackett and Pogee to the bridge. ‘There is something you must see.’
By now Icsoba had learned how to operate systems like viewers herself, though Hackett was still wary of letting her anywhere near such vital systems as propulsion.
But the images Icsoba brought up now, thrown on the smart wall, were startling.
‘I was looking at the nearby stars. The babies. Just one by one, seeing if I could find anything novel. Only a few of them have planets—’
‘The stars are too close together, probably,’ Pogee said. ‘They come too close, strip off each other’s planets, or even the debris clouds where planets form—’
‘I know,’ Icsoba said, impatient. ‘I was looking anyway. And I saw this.’
A star – brilliant, misshapen, with tremendous flares pushing out of its surface, its equator. Features so huge that they didn’t change as Hackett watched. Frozen in time by their immensity in space.
And, a fine trace, a line in space above that distorted equator.
Hackett leaned forward, studied closely. ‘It’s a star with a ring around it. An artefact?’ He exulted. At last, signs of people.
‘And flares,’ Icsoba pointed out. ‘Strange ones. On the star.’
Hackett was more interested in the signs of industry.
‘Not a simple, single structure,’ Pogee said. ‘It looks more complex. Can you magnify …?’
Hackett looked closer at the enhanced imagery. ‘Right. More like a belt of – habitats? Factories drawing power from the star?’
‘I don’t think it’s factories,’ Icsoba said. ‘Or – weapons. Wait until you see the whole circumference …’
She increased the time rate. The star spun on its axis. She handled the imaging suite pretty expertly now, Hackett noted.
And on the far side of the star, energy was lancing down, evidently from the orbital structures. Some kind of beams – particles? lasers? – that were leaking visible light, and hammering into the substance of the star itself.
The structures were platforms of some kind, with installations on their upper surface. Cylindrical installations – like cannon, he thought uneasily. Like weapons. And from these cylinders emerged those glowing beams, and the areas of the star’s surface around the beams’ touchdown points boiled, lashed, frothed.
And a pull-back showed how these battered areas were the roots of the flares seen in the longer views, material gushing into space, shedding heat and light.
Pogee swore softly, a word that the translation system forbore to interpret. ‘This very young star is yet to achieve its own intrinsic stability. I suppose if you are to – meddle with a star like this – now is the time to do it, as untamed energies still rage, and are easily released, or diverted …’
Hackett frowned. ‘Meddle?’
She looked up. ‘Do you not see it? This is technology. This star is being engineered, even as it is being born.’
‘Engineered? By people?’
‘Presumably.’
Hackett found this hard to swallow. ‘What for? Are they lifting material from the star? But they’re not collecting any of it …’
‘Not that I’ve seen. Big scoopships would be obvious.’
‘Are they trying to move the star, then? Use a flare like a rocket?’
‘I don’t think it’s that either,’ Icsoba said. ‘I watched for a few hours while you slept and ate … The plumes are moved, regularly. Sometimes pointing this way, sometimes that. Granted I only saw such a move three times …’
Pogee said, ‘Not moving the star itself, then. You’d keep a steady flare at one location if you were trying to do that … Hmm. But why?’
‘Maybe they are reducing the star’s mass,’ Hackett said. ‘That’s what it looks like. They are extracting stellar matter, and discarding it. The star itself is the target.’
Pogee said, ‘I do think it’s human beings doing this. Those … factories … look like human tech to me. But – why? Why would people meddle with the stars like this?’
Icsoba said, ‘We are like children crawling across an ice cap. We see little of the wider landscape, so we understand little.’
Pogee glanced at a display. ‘Well, soon we may learn more. We just reached thirty astronomical units from the Sun – the orbit of Neptune. Another ten, eleven days and we should be at the orbit of Earth itself. Maybe then we will get some answers …’
40
Hackett plotted a sweeping route through the inner Solar System, a path that would take them past Saturn, then Mars, and finally to Earth.
They slept some more. Alerted to wakefulness to examine each object they came close enough to see.
Saturn was a ball of gas, oddly lit by the wider curtain of young stars. Only rubble was left of Saturn’s ice moons – but their dismantling had been underway even in Hackett’s own time, as the water miners started their work. Certainly by Pogee’s day. And there was no sign of the ice-fragment rings – gone, of course, even by Icsoba’s time. Saturn looked bare.
Mars was silent to their monitors. But it had an atmosphere – thin but Earthlike, nitrogen, oxygen, not like the chill carbon-dioxide layer of Hackett’s time, far thicker even than the post-industrial remnant of Icsoba’s day. … Life, then? Though lacking its two moons, the planet was surrounded by an orbital belt, clearly industrial, it seemed to Hackett – gritty habs, presumably built of metal and asteroid rock, or maybe Mars’s moons had been plundered. But the habs were relics, evidently, inert. If anybody saw the Perseus pass, there was no signal, no intercept.
But at their closest approach, Hackett saw, to his surprise, that Mars was green. It was mostly a pale, tenuous shade – and much of it seemed to follow straight-line routes, perhaps remnants of artificial water courses, relics of the long-gone industrialisation he had witnessed in Icsoba’s time – but green none the less.
And, they observed as they swept over the surface, there was plenty of surface water too. Indeed much of the northern hemisphere was flooded, they saw as they neared, a shallow ocean. And a gleam of white revealed the persistence of ice at the southern pole.
Air. Surface liquid water. Green stuff. Mars was alive. It figured. The Sun was that much brighter now; Mars was that much further out from the Sun than the Earth, so maybe now it was in the habitable zone.
But Mars in Icsoba’s time hadn’t had such resources. It had been arid, its ice caps and subsurface aquifers mined out by the busy industrialists. All that water, and air, had been put back somehow, brought in from somewhere. That had to have been done by humans. A kind of late, apologetic terraforming. And if you were going to do that, you may as well bring life back too.
At closest approach Hackett scrambled to make spectroscope readings. The green stain turned out to have the signature of Earth life. Of course it did.
So was all this life a relic of a later age, of a long vanished human colonisation? Or maybe it was nothing to do with humanity at all. Over billions of years there could have been a fresh panspermia event, with hardy bugs from Earth travelling in comet-blasted rock fragments from an overheating Earth to a warming Mars. Not impossible, though unlikely …
And, as the planet receded after closest approach, Hackett saw that a tremendous crater disfigured the southern hemisphere – huge, a planet-scale feature, like the Moon’s Mare Imbrium. It was flooded with water, as much of the planet seemed to be, and fringed by greenery.
Icsoba frowned. ‘That fresh pit. Has there been a war here?’
‘Maybe not,’ Hackett said. A memory floated into his consciousness. ‘The fall of Phobos,’ he murmured. ‘One of Mars’s moons. I think that was predicted around fifty million years after my time. Or, yes, there might have been another war.’
Pogee shrugged. ‘No sign of people?’
‘None.’
But Icsoba said, ‘I thought I saw signs of settlement. Paths cut in the green, through forest.’
Hackett checked his scans. If there had been such evidence it hadn’t been picked up by the automated systems. That wasn’t to say it didn’t exist. Perhaps there were fractal networks of pathways, created by a people who cared little for neatness or utility – or chose not to telegraph their presence to space with obviously artificial forms and structures. On the other hand, Icsoba might be trying too hard to find evidence of her own people’s descendants.
Certainly there was no message from the ground, no reply to their signals. No lights on the night side.
The rejuvenated Mars fell away.
More days passed.
They slid closer to a brighter Sun. And to Earth.
Hackett had tried to anticipate what he might find when they reached Earth.
He knew that the Sun had been heating steadily – ten per cent per billion years used to be the estimate. All because the star was running out of hydrogen fuel, down in its fusing core, on its way to a red giant stage that was yet to come.
But that steady heating would have had consequences on Earth long ago, consequences predicted even back in his own time. And, as the planet neared, those consequences seemed clear.
‘I don’t understand what I’m seeing,’ Icsoba said. ‘The world is red, like Mars used to be. There’s no ice … The sunlight?’
Pogee consulted readouts. ‘We predicted all this, Icsoba. In my time.’
‘Mine too,’ Hackett couldn’t resist putting in.
Rava went on, ‘We could model the future of the Sun, the planets, in great detail. We knew there would be many glaciations to follow yours. The last maybe two hundred and fifty million years after your time, when one last supercontinent would form.
‘But that Sun was always growing hotter and hotter. The last ice would melt, the ocean would start to evaporate, the ground temperature would rise, the seas become more saline. After a billion years the seas must have boiled away altogether, ending any life outside a spacesuit. Earth would have been like Venus, a dense, steam-laden atmosphere – and all that steam would have trapped the heat in a water vapour greenhouse, so it got hotter and hotter, until—’
