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The rock looked like a comet glowing in the thin upper air of Earth, streaking by in a perfect straight line below Greenberg. It made the cities and oceans of Earth glow like the day – it must have been a remarkable sight from down there – and asteroid light played on his own face, the ancient bones of his eye sockets.
The encounter was over in seconds. The trail of scorched air soon dissipated and dimmed, and Toutatis, its orbit subtly altered, passed on towards its next encounter. It was going to take fifty years to nudge Toutatis into its final low Earth orbit, but planning projects on that kind of time scale didn’t seem to trouble the inhabitants of Toutatis, or anybody else.
The show was over. The people of Ra-Shalom drifted away from their blue watery windows, and returned to their mysterious business within.
Greenberg had never meant to live for a thousand years. It was ridiculous. Nobody else had stuck around like this. It was just that he would have had to have chosen when to die, and that was something he had never expected to face when he grew up, and he just had no instinct for it.
Anyhow, if he let himself die, he would have missed this.
Greenberg, with a sigh, turned away from the window and went to his instrument consoles.
It was a massive asteroid, big enough to have dragged itself into a sphere, with planet-like layers of internal structure, rich in metals, rocks and volatiles. It was bathed by the light of a sun only three times as far away as from Earth.
The guardians considered carefully. It was, after all, to be the repository of all that was left of their designers’ species, until even this new young sun guttered and died.
They were machines designed to plan for billions of years. They had already nursed their fragile cargo across such deserts of time. Now, looking to the future, they must plan for evolution, even the loss of mind.
It was a good home, rich in energy and resources.
The guardians were satisfied. They closed themselves down.
Within the rock, history continued.
Scale: Exp 4
It was to be quite a day, as the last of Ra’s ore was transmuted, and Greenberg made sure the Weissmans woke him up to see it. In the event he nearly missed it, it took so long to put him together again.
Greenberg’s window was the same old tunnel through fused regolith, but the view beyond changed as he watched, the last of the grey-black old crap literally dissolving before his eyes, to be replaced by a sharp, tight blue curve of watery horizon.
Too damn sharp, he thought. He wondered if those asshole nanobugs had changed his eyes on him again while he’d slept. But even his naps lasted a century at a time, longer than he had once expected to live; they had time.
Anyhow, his new eyes showed him a blue world, the landscape softly pulsing, with Greenberg’s NASA-style space station hab module stuck stubbornly to the side under its crust of regolith, like a leech clinging to flesh. Ra was just water now, encased by some smart membrane that held the whole thing in place and collected solar energy and regulated temperature and stuff. It looked like a little clone of Earth, in fact, and Greenberg thought it was somehow appropriate that today that tired, depopulated old Earth itself was over somewhere the far side of the sun, invisible, forgotten, the last traces of man being scraped off by the returned glaciers.
Under the pulsing surface of Ra he could make out dark brown shapes, graceful and lithe: people, Weissmans, whole schools of them flipping around the interior. And now here came a child, wriggling up to the membrane, pushing its disturbingly human face up to the wall, peering out – with curiosity or indifference, he couldn’t tell which – at the stars. It broke his unreconstructed twentieth-century heart to see that little girl’s face stuck on the end of such a fat, unnatural body.
An adult came by and chivvied the kid away, into the deeper interior; Greenberg saw their sleek shapes disappear into the misty blue.
The Weissmans had been working on making their environment as simple and durable as they could. They were planning for the long haul, it seemed. So, the whole rock had been transformed into this spherical ocean, and the biosphere had been cut down to essentially two components: Weissmans, post-humans, swimming around in a population of something that was descended from blue-green algae. The algae, feeding on sunlight, were full of proteins, vitamins and essential amino acids. And the humans ate the algae, drank the water, breathing in oxygen, breathing out carbon dioxide to feed the algae.
When people died their bodies were allowed to drift down to the centre of the world, where supercritical water reactors worked to break down their residues and return their body masses to the ecosystem.
The loops were as closed as they could be. The loss that entropy dictated was made up by the energy steadily gathered by that smart membrane, and a few nanobugs embedded there. Greenberg understood that research was going on to eliminate the last few technological components of the system: maybe those supercritical water reactors could be replaced by something organic, and maybe even the surface membrane and the last nanobugs could be done away with. For instance, a few metres of water would serve as a radiation shield.
It was a kind of extreme end result, Greenberg supposed, of the technology evolution that had begun all the way back with John Glenn in his cramped little Mercury tin can, breathing in canned air for his few orbits of the home planet.
But the Weissmans were not much like John Glenn.
He didn’t know any of their names. He didn’t care to. For a long time now, longer than he cared to think, there had been hardly anybody alive who remembered him from one waking period to the next, from one of his ‘days’ to another. Hell of a thing. He preferred to talk to the machines, in fact.
Greenberg didn’t even know if the Weissmans were still human any more.
The last of the true humans, as he recognized them, had been leaving the system for millennia.
It had been necessary. For a time, as the human population grew exponentially, it looked as if even the solar system’s vast resources were in danger of depletion.
So somebody had to leave, to open up the loops once more.
There was a whole variety of ways to go, all of them based on pushing people-laden rocks out of the system. You could mount a big mass driver on the back of your rock and use its substance as reaction mass. Close to the sun, you could use its heat to just boil off volatiles. You could use a solar sail. You could use Jupiter’s powerful electromagnetic field as a greater mass driver. And so on. There was even a rumour of an anti-matter factory, out in the Kuiper Belt somewhere.
Greenberg’s favourite method was the most resolutely low-tech. Just nudge your rock out of its stable orbit, let it whip through the gravity fields of Jupiter and Saturn a few times, and you could slingshot your way out of the system for free. Of course it might take you ten thousand years to reach your destination, at Barnard’s Star or E Eradini or E Indi. But what the hell; you probably had with you more water than in the whole of the Atlantic Ocean.
Greenberg accepted the necessity of the migration. But to him it had been a drain, not just on the system’s titanic population, but on the human spirit.
The solar system had been left a drab, depopulated place. All the engineering types had gone, leaving behind the navel-gazing seals of Ra, and similar relics scattered around the system.
The Weissmans, turned in on themselves, had their own interests. They were probing into a lot of areas well beyond his expertise. Like the possibility of tapping into zero-point field energy, the energy of the vacuum itself, so dense you could – it was said – boil all the oceans of Earth itself with the energy contained in a coffee cup of empty space. Then there was the compact energy stored in topological defects, little packets of space that had gotten tangled up and folded over in the Big Bang, containing some of the monstrous primeval energies within, just waiting to be tapped and opened up …
Research and development, carried on by a community of goddamn seals, with no hands or tools. Greenberg didn’t know how they did it. It was one of the many things about the Weissmans he didn’t understand.
He did know they were trying to extend their consciousness. Mind, it seemed, was a quantum process, intimately bound to the structure of space and time. And in space, after ten thousand years free of the distortions of the muddy pond of atmosphere at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well, consciousness – the Weissmans claimed – was taking a huge evolutionary leap forward, to new realms of power and control and depth.
Maybe.
To Greenberg, it was all very well to dream of super-minds of the future, but right now, he suspected there was nobody left, for instance, who was giving thought to pushing a troublesome asteroid out of its orbit, where once the children of man had rearranged worlds almost at will.
And, Greenberg was coming to realize, that might make a big difference in the future.
He still had some of his old monitoring systems, or patiently reconstructed copies anyhow. He studied Ra’s evolving trajectory around the sun.
And, gradually, he’d learned something that had disturbed him to his core.
Near-Earth asteroids wandered in steadily from the main belt, their orbits tweaked by the gravity of Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Earth itself. They hung around for thirty megayears or so, their orbits slowly evolving. Then they would encounter one of three fates, with equal probability: they would hit Earth, or hit Venus, or be slingshot out of the system altogether.
The cratering record on Earth showed this had been going on for billions of years. The smaller the object type, the more frequent the collision. Every few thousand years, for instance, Earth would be hit by an object a hundred metres or so across, big enough to dig out a new Meteor Crater, as in Arizona, where Apollo Moonwalkers had once trained. Earth had actually suffered a few fresh strikes like that while Greenberg had been observing.
And every few tens of millions of years, a much larger body would strike.
Such an object had struck the Earth sixty-five million years ago, at Chicxulub in Mexico. It had caused the extinction of most of the species extant at that time.
It was known as the dinosaur killer.
Earth was overdue for another impact like that.
Near-Earth asteroid orbits were pretty much chaotic. It was like the weather used to be, back when he lived in a place that had weather. But as computers had gotten smarter, the path of Ra-Shalom had been pushed out, in the computer’s digital imagination, further and further. Finally it had become clear to Greenberg what Ra’s ultimate fate would be.
Ra wasn’t going to hit Venus, or be thrown out of the system to the stars. Ra was going to hit Earth.
Ra was the next dinosaur killer.
It was a long time ahead: all of a million years from now. But it worried him that right now, nobody seemed to know how to deflect this damn rock.
Whenever he got the chance, he sounded off about the dinosaur killer problem. The Weissmans told him they had plans to deal with it, when the time came. Greenberg wasn’t sure whether he believed that.
And he wasn’t sure he wanted to be around to see this chewed-up rock auger in on the surface of the planet where he was born. But he couldn’t turn his back.
Within the confines of the tiny world, civilizations fell and rose; by turns, the refugee race fell to barbarism, or dreamed of the stars. The guardians had planned for this.
But the little world was not stable. This they had not anticipated.
Its orbit was close to a resonance with that of Jupiter: it circled the sun three times in each of Jupiter’s stately years. The powerful tug of Jupiter worked on the asteroid’s trajectory, millennium after millennium.
Quite suddenly, the orbit’s ellipticity increased. The asteroid started to swing deep into the warm heart of the solar system.
There was nothing the inhabitants could do to steer their rock. Some adapted. Many died. Superstitions raged.
For the first time, the asteroid dipped within the orbit of Earth.
Scale: Exp 5
… Crossing time in unimaginable jumps, drifting between sleeping and waking, eroding towards maximum entropy like some piece of lunar rock …
He never knew, he didn’t understand, he couldn’t believe how much time had passed. A hundred thousand years? It was a joke.
But even the sky was changing.
The nearby stars, for instance: Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s Star and Sirius and Procyon and Tau Ceti, names from the science fiction of his youth. You could see the changes in the light, the stain of oxygen and carbon, chlorophyll green. Even from here you could see how humans, or post-humans anyhow, had changed the stars themselves.
And to think he used to be awed by the Vehicle Assembly Building at Canaveral.
And the expansion must be continuing, further out, inexorably. On it would go, he thought dimly, a growing mass of humanity filling up the sphere centred on Sol, chewing up stars and planets and asteroids, until the outer edge of the inhabited sphere had to move at the speed of light to keep up, and then what would happen, he wanted to know?
But none of that made a difference here, in the ancient system of Sol, the dead heart of human expansion. It was hard for him to trace the passing of the years because so little changed any more, even on the heroic timescales of his intervals of consciousness.
Conditions in a lot of the inhabited rocks had converged, in fact, so that the worlds came to resemble each other. Most of them finished up with the kind of simple, robust ecosystem that sustained Ra, even though their starting points might have been very different. It was like the way a lot of diverse habitats on Earth – forests and jungles and marshes – would, with the passage of time, converge into a peat bog, the same the world over, as if they were drawn to an attractor in some ecological phase-space.
And most of the rocks, drifting between uninhabited gravity wells, were about as interesting as peat bogs, as far as Greenberg was concerned.
Meanwhile, slowly but inexorably, life was dying back, here in the solar system. which had once hosted billions of jewel-like miniature worlds.
There were a lot of ways for a transformed asteroid to be destroyed: for instance, a chance collision with another object. Even a small impact on a fragile bubble-world like Ra could puncture it fatally. But nobody around seemed capable of pushing rocks aside any more.
But the main cause of the die-back was simple ecological failure.
An asteroid wasn’t a planet; it didn’t have the huge buffers of mass and energy that Earth had. A relatively small amount of matter circulated in each mass loop, and so the whole thing was only marginally stable, and not always self-recovering.
It had even happened here, on Ra-Shalom. Greenberg had woken once to find concentrations of the amino acid called lysine had crashed. The Weissmans were too busy on dreaming their cetacean dreams to think too much about the systems that were keeping them alive. Many died, before a new stability was reached. It drove Greenberg crazy.
But the Weissmans didn’t seem too upset. You have to think of it as apoptosis, they said to him. The cells in the hands of an archaic-form human embryo will die back in order to sculpt out tool-making fingers. Death is necessary, sometimes, so that life can progress. It is apoptosis, not necrosis …
Greenberg just couldn’t see that argument at all.
And in the meantime, Ra was still on its course to become the next dinosaur killer. The predictions just got tighter and tighter. And still, nobody seemed to be concerned about doing anything about it.
When what the Weissmans said to him made no sense at all – when they deigned to speak to him – Greenberg felt utterly isolated.
But then, all humans were alone.
Nobody had found non-terrestrial life anywhere, in the solar system or beyond, above prokaryotes: single-celled creatures without internal structures such as nuclei, mitochondria and chloroplasts. Mars was typical, it had turned out: just a handful of crude prokaryote-type bugs shivering deep in volcanic vents, waiting out an Ice Age that would never end. Only on Earth, it seemed, had life made the big, unlikely jump to eukaryotic structure, and then multi-celled organisms, and the future.
It seemed that back when he was born Earth had been one little world holding all the life there was, to all intents and purposes. And it would have stayed that way if his generation and a couple before, Americans and Russians, hadn’t risked their lives to enter space in converted ICBMs and ridiculous little capsules.
Makes you think, he reflected. The destiny of all life, forever, was in our hands. And we never knew it. Probably would have scared us to death if we had.
For if we’d failed, if we’d turned ourselves to piles of radioactive ash, there would now be no life, no mind, anywhere.
Gravitational tweaks by Earth and Venus gradually wore away the asteroid’s energy, and its orbit diminished. The process took a hundred million years.
At last, the asteroid with its fragile cargo settled into a circle, a close shadow of Earth’s orbit. Its random walk across the solar system was complete.
The inhabitants adapted. They even flourished, here in the warmer heart of the solar system.
For a time, it seemed that a long and golden afternoon lay ahead of the refugees within the rock. Once more, they forgot what lay beyond the walls of their world …
But there seemed to be something in the way.
Scale: Exp 6
We have an assignment for you.
He came swimming up from a sleep as deep as death. He wondered, in fact, if he was truly in any sense alive, between these vivid flashes of consciousness.
… And Earth, ocean-blue, swam before Ra, a fat crescent cupping a darkened ocean hemisphere, huge and beautiful, just as he’d seen it from a Shuttle cargo bay.
In his vision there was water everywhere: the skin of Earth, the droplet body of Ra-Shalom, and in his own eyes.
We have an assignment for you. A mission.
‘What are you talking about? Are you going to push this damn rock out of the way? I can’t believe you’ve let it go this far.’
This has happened before. There has been much apoptosis.
‘Hell, I know that …’
He looked up at a transformed sky.
Everywhere now, the stars were green.
There was old Rigel, for instance, one of the few stars he could name when he was a kid, down there in Orion, at the hunter’s left boot. Of course all the constellations had swum around now. But Rigel was still a blue supergiant, sixty thousand times more luminous than the sun.
