Solaris Rising (46 page)

He crouched beside her, put his hand down to the stone, touched Helen’s name again.

“I only knew her for a short time,” he said. “She had a whole life after that.”

Catherine smiled. “My grandmother...”

“Are you...? Was your mother...?”

“I don’t know.”

He thought then of the Yanth’s words, repeated later by Alain Dupré.
Our destiny is yours
. Catherine may not know for certain the details of her ancestry, but the Yanth did. They saw things differently, more deeply, Alain had said.

Finally, he thought of immortality. He could leave with Elana, and live for as long as he wanted among the stars. But there were other forms of immortality.

He reached out, put a hand tenderly on Catherine’s pregnant bulge, and almost immediately felt movement.

His destiny, his inheritance, here on Karenia.

Down by the river the party was in full swing. The spores in the drinks were clearly at least mildly intoxicating, and there was much music and laughter. People said that the Yanth were among them, but Loftus saw none as he rejoined the Dupré group.

“They are?” he said. “Where? I haven’t seen them.”

He found Elana, wrapped her in his embrace, and said, “The Yanth. You have to film the Yanth.”

She laughed, and kissed him. Then, more sombrely, said, “I’m going in the morning, remember? There’s still time for you to join me, Ed.”

He stepped back from her and shook his head. “Are you filming?” he asked.

She was, and so he took the blister pack from his pocket and popped the first pill. It tasted of nothing.

He still had time to reach the shuttle before taking the next pill and shedding his immunity.

Instead he headed down to the river, looking for the Yanth, hoping to understand how it was that they saw things differently.

Soon he would take the second pill, and then he would breathe deep. His destiny was here. The Yanth had known.

And he was all too eager to find out just what that would mean.

FOR THE AGES

ALASTAIR REYNOLDS

Alastair Reynolds was born in South Wales, studied at Newcastle and St Andrews Universities and has a Ph.D. in astronomy. After a period working in the Netherlands as an astrophysicist for the European Space Agency, he returned to Wales and is now a full time writer. His first novel,
Revelation Space
, appeared in 2000, since when he has been responsible for nine novels, two collections and several chapbooks. Alastair’s next novel is set to be
Blue Remembered Earth
, first in the Poseidon’s Children series.

It’s a terrible and beautiful thing I’ve done.

I suppose I already had it in mind, when the last uplink came in. Not that I’d come close to voicing the possibility to myself. If I’d been honest about the course I was on, I might well have requested immediate committal to stasis.

The right thing to do, in hindsight. And maybe we’d be on our way home now, back to the gratitude of a thousand worlds. Our house would have crumbled into the sea by the time we got back. But we could always have built a new one, a little further from the headland.

Let me tell you something about myself, while there’s still time. These words are being recorded. Even as I speak, my suit’s mouse-sized repair robot is engraving them onto the suit’s exterior armour. Isolated in this cavern, the suit should be buffeted against the worst excesses of cosmic ray and micro-particle damage. Whether the inscriptions will remain legible, however, or whether in some sense
you’ve already read them
, I won’t begin to speculate. There’s been enough of that already, and I’m a little burned out by it all. Deep futurity, billions of years – the ultimate futility of any action, any deed, enduring for the smallest fraction of eternity – it’s enough to shrivel the soul. Vashka could handle that kind of thing, but I’m made of less stern stuff.

I am – let’s be honest,
was
– a human being, a woman named Nysa. I was born on Pellucid, a world of the Commonwealth. After a happy childhood I had dreams of being a dancer or choreographer. In my teens, however, I showed a striking aptitude for physics. Not many people have the right mental architecture to fully understand momentum trading, but I grasped the slippery fundamentals with a quick, intuitive ease. Rapidly it was made clear to me that I had a duty, an obligation, to the Commonwealth. The encouragement to study propulsion physics was fierce, and I duly submitted.

In truth, it wasn’t a hard decision. I would have been one dancer among thousands, struggling for recognition. But as a physicist I was already a singular, bright-burning talent.

It was at the academy that I fell into Vashka’s orbit, and eventually in love. Like me, she’d been plucked from obscurity on the basis of a talent. Vashka’s brilliance lay in nothing so mundane as the mechanics of space travel, though. She was drawn to the grandest and oldest of the physical disciplines: the study of the origin, structure and destiny of our universe. This project, this entire mission – sponsored by the economies of hundreds of planets, across dozens of solar systems – was her brainchild.

I think of Vashka now, when her hate for me had reached its bitter zenith. We were in
Sculptor
’s conference room, all twelve of the vivified crew, debating the impact of the latest uplink. Through the upsweeping radiation-proof glass of the windows, the pulsar’s optical pulses strobe-lit the glittering face of Pebble five times a second. Each pulse sapped angular momentum from the pulsar’s rotation. In ten billion years, that little city-sized nugget of degenerate matter would have exhausted its capacity to pulse at all. But it would still be out here, a softly radiating neutron star. In a hundred billion years, much the same would still be true.

“It’s not a question of whether we do this,” Vashka said, looking at each of us in turn with that peculiar steely gaze of hers. “We have no choice in the matter. It’s what we were sent out here to accomplish; what the entire Commonwealth is depending on us to get done. If we turn back now, we may as well not have bothered.”

“Even allowing for this latest uplink,” Captain Reusel said carefully, “the majority of the symbol chains won’t need significant modification. There’ll be a few mistakes, a few incorrect assertions. But the overall picture won’t be drastically different.” Reusel spoke with judicial equanimity, committing herself to neither side until she’d heard all the arguments and had time to weigh them.

“If we knowingly leave errors in the Pebble engravings,” Vashka replied, “we’ll be doing more harm than if we’d never started.”

I coughed by way of interjection. “That’s an exaggeration. Our cosmological descendants – the downstream aliens, whoever they are – will be at least as smart as us, if not more so. They’ll be aware that we weren’t infallible, and they’ll be alert to mistakes. We don’t have to get this absolutely, one-hundred per cent correct. We just have to give them a shove in the right direction.”

Vashka couldn’t mask her disgust. “Or they may be so inflexible in their thinking that they tie themselves in knots trying to reconcile our errors, or decide to throw Pebble away as a lost cause. The point is we don’t have to take a chance either way. All we have to do is
get this right
, before we leave. Then we can go home with a clear conscience.”

In the run-up to the decision about the latest draft the tension had opened a cleft neither of us was willing to bridge. Vashka, rightly, saw me as the one thing standing between her and the satisfactory completion of the project. In my instinct to caution, my willingness to accept compromise over perfection, I’d shifted from ally to adversary.

We’d stopped sleeping together, restricting our interactions to acrimonious exchanges in the conference room. Beyond that, we had nothing worth saying.

“You won’t have a conscience to keep clear, if the cores go critical,” I said.

Vashka shot back a look of unbridled spite. “Now who’s exaggerating, Nysa?”

Reusel sighed. She hated bickering among her crew, and I knew ours caused her particular hurt. “Estimated time to engrave the new modifications, Loimaa?” The question was directed at the willowy senior technician in matters of planetary sculpture.

“Based on the last round of modifications,” Loimaa said, glancing down at hidden numbers, “with both grasers at maximum output… thirty thousand orbits, give or take. Around a thousand days.”

“Forget it,” I said. “That’ll take us much too far into the red. I’m already uncomfortable with the existing over-stay.”

“Home wouldn’t have uplinked the modifications if they didn’t mean us to implement them,” Vashka said.

“Home don’t have realtime data on our engine stability,” I countered. “If they did, they’d know that we can’t delay our return much longer.”

“Things are that critical?” Reusel asked, skepticism and suspicion mingling in her narrowed eyes. “If they were, I trust you’d have let me know by now…”

“Of course,” I said. “And for the moment things are nominal. We’re probably good for another hundred days. But a thousand… that’s completely out of the question.”

By accident or design,
Sculptor
’s starboard engine pod was visible through the conference room windows. I didn’t have to ask any of the others to glance at it – their attention was drawn anyway. I imagined what they were thinking. The light spilling from the radiator grids – was it hotter, whiter, than it had been a week ago, a month?

Of course. It couldn’t be otherwise, with the momentum debt we’d incurred reaching Pebble. A debt that the universe sought to claw back like a grubby-fingered pawnbroker.

It would, too: one way or the other.

“We could begin the resculpting,” Loimaa proposed, looking hesitantly at Vashka for affirmation. “Stop it the moment Nysa gave the word. It wouldn’t take more than a few days to clear up shop and begin our return home.”

“A few days might still be too much, if the instabilities begin to mount,” I said.

“Abandoning the work half-unfinished isn’t an option either,” Vashka declared. “The corrections are too complex and inter-dependent. We either implement them fully, or not at all.”

“I see your point,” Reusel said. “At the moment, the Pebble engravings embody errors, incorrect premises and false deductions. But at least there’s a degree of internal consistency, however flawed it might be. The sense of an argument, with a beginning, middle and end.”

Vashka’s nod was cautious. “That’s correct. It offends me that we might leave these errors in place, but it’s still better than tearing up half the logic chains and leaving before we’ve restored a coherent narrative.”

“Then it’s simple,” I said, trying hard not to let my satisfaction break through. “The lesser of two evils. Better to leave now, knowing we’ve left something self-consistent in place, than be forced to bail out halfway through the next draft.”

The captain was thoughtful. Her heavy-lidded eyes suggested a fight against profound weariness. “But it would be unfortunate,” she said, “to let our sponsors down, if there was a fighting chance of completing this work. Never mind the downstreamers.” Alertness snapped into her again. Her attention was on me. “Nysa: I can’t take this decision without a comprehensive overview of our engine status. I want to know how the real odds lie.” She paused. “We all accepted risks when we volunteered for this mission.
Sculptor
has brought us thousands of light years from home, thousands of years of travel from the friends and loved ones we left behind on our homeworlds.”

We nodded. We’d all heard this speech before – it was nothing we didn’t know for ourselves – but sometimes the captain felt the need to drill it into us again. As if reminding herself of what we’d already sacrificed.

“Even if we were to commence our return mission now,” she went on, “at this moment, it would be to homes, worlds, most of us won’t recognise. Yes, they’ll reward our return. Yes, they’ll do all that they can to make us feel welcome and appreciated. But it will still be a kind of death, for most of us. And we knew that before we stepped aboard.” She knitted her fingers together on the table’s mirror-black surface. “What I mean to say is, we have already taken the hardest decision, and here we are, still alive, chasing a neutron star out of the galaxy, falling further from the Commonwealth with every passing second. Any decisions we make now must be seen in that light. And I think we must be ready to shoulder further risks.”

“Then you’ve already made up your mind?” I asked, dismayed.

“No, I still want that report. But if the odds are no worse than ninety percent in our favour, we will stay. We will stay and finish Vashka’s work. And then we will go home with heads high, knowing we did not shirk this burden.”

I nodded. She would have her report. And I hoped very much that the numbers would persuade her against staying.

The neighbourhood of a pulsar, a whirling magnetic neutron star, is no place for anything as fragile as a human being. We should have sent robots, I thought, as I went out for a visual inspection in one of our ridiculously armoured suits. Robots could have completed this work and then self-destructed, instead of worrying about getting back home again. But once Vashka had implanted the idea in their minds, the collective leaders of the Commonwealth had demanded that this grand gesture, this preposterous stab at posterity, be shaped under the guidance of human minds, in close proximity. Ultimately, the Pebble structures might be the last imprint that the human species left on the cosmos. The last forensic trace that we ever existed.