Children of the Comet (22 page)

CHAPTER 30

6,000,000,005 A.D.

The Oort Cloud

The captain's name was Yung, and his ship was the
Tien Shih
—the “Celestial Arrow.” It had been launched some two hundred years after
Time's Beginning
by the Chinese Commonwealth.

Yung was a tall, dignified man who looked about seventy, though he must have been Joorn's age. He was wearing a naval uniform that hadn't changed much through the ages: a white high-necked tunic and plenty of gold braid. The captain's saloon was elegantly furnished in a style that wouldn't have been out of place on a sailing ship from the days of the China Trade, with uncomfortable high-backed armchairs of carved ebony, a straight-backed velvet couch, Chinese screens, and lots of wicker. There was even a gilt cage with a live thrush in it.

He poured tea from an antique teapot, serving Irina and Nina first and then the men. There was a painted tray with elaborate little pastries that no one had touched.

“We planted our colonies in MR 2251-178,” he was saying, “a quasar as seen from Earth at the time. Like your 3C-273, it had settled down into a proper galaxy by the time we got there. If there ever had been First Ones, as in our own Milky Way, they'd been gone for a good three and a half billion years. We seeded five of the galaxy's stars with our colonists, providing the nuclei for a galaxy-wide Commonwealth, thus discharging our obligations to our ancestors, extinct these six billion years.”

He paused to sip his tea. He might have been laboring under strong emotion, but his voice remained under firm control as he continued.

“The remaining colonists—five thousand of them—voted to remain aboard
Celestial Arrow
and return to the Milky Way, just as your own Homegoing faction did. Though I must say, without the necessity of a mutiny like Professor Karn's. Everything was done lawfully. They were under no illusions about what we'd find here, but there was every confidence that we might, in some way, resurrect the Middle Kingdom in the galaxy where it was born. I'm sure that you and your people can understand that kind of ancestral yearning, Captain.”

“Indeed we can,” Joorn said. There was a murmur of agreement from the rest of his party.

“But we can discuss all that later,” Captain Yung said. He broke into a smile. “It's an honor to meet you, Captain Gant. Your name is in all the history books, and you are a hero to all those who believed in man's destiny. Of course no one had the slightest inkling of what happened to your ship after it passed out of the Local Group, but you are an inspiration to boys like me. I became a spaceman because of you.”

Joorn ignored the transparent attempt at flattery. “You said ‘the first expedition,'” he prompted.

“Yes, there were five of them in the two centuries that separated
Time's Beginning
and
Celestial Arrow
. Nothing had been heard from them, of course. None of them would have reached its goal until long after the human race became extinct on Earth. By the time we ourselves launched, the First Ones had squeezed humans still further. They took over Alpha Centauri B and the two habitable worlds of Tau Ceti after our infant colonies there folded in despair and came home.”

“You said you investigated the Centauri worlds before you proceeded to the Oort cloud in response to our signals.”

“Yes, we left a team of archaeologists on Centauri B. They're still digging up the place, and they haven't found the slightest trace of a First Ones civilization there. It's their opinion that the First Ones became extinct some billion years after the last humans disappeared, or perhaps evolved into a nonsentient species. We were amazed to find a recognizable human subspecies, if that's what it is, here in the Oort cloud after we followed the beacons you left here. We've made our own studies in the last two years, of course. But our ethnologists will want to talk to your ethnologists.”

Irina and Andrew, Nina's new husband, spoke at the same time. “Of course!”

Nina muttered under her breath, “Torris isn't a subspecies.”

Joorn shot a warning look at her, but Yung just smiled politely and went on.

“Of course that's to be determined,
Fu Jen
Nina. But I digress. I was telling you about the five expeditions that followed yours. America and the European League jointly financed the first two before their populations balked at the expense. India managed one all on its own, and so did Brazil before it bankrupted itself. And the Islamic Federation agreed with itself long enough to send a Higgs starship off to ‘proselytize the Universe,' as they put it, though one wonders who's out there to convert other than hypothetical varieties of First Ones at various stages in their evolution. We certainly didn't find any.

“At any rate, my own country's space advocates had been champing at that particular bit for some time. We were the wealthiest country on Earth, and we hadn't had a major trump in space since we'd been the first to land on Mars back in the twenty-first century. It had been over a century since the last of the Higgs ships had been sent quasar chasing, and our poor overpopulated, impoverished world was played out. So China set out to show we could do it again. I don't know if there were any expeditions after
Celestial Arrow
. Perhaps there were. But I rather doubt it. The world would have been getting increasingly dispirited in the years after we departed, for the same reasons
Time's Beginning
and
Celestial Arrow
were sent out in the first place.”

“But we did it, didn't we?” Chu said vehemently. “Both of us. We planted our colonies, and we made it back home. The human race isn't finished yet.”

Captain Yung looked taken aback at the outburst, but he quickly recovered. “And that brings up a delicate matter,” he said. “How do we divide up man's birthright?”

“What's your proposal, Captain?” Joorn said.

Yung's eyes left Joorn and focused on an invisible wall between him and Joorn's delegation. He spoke in an impersonal voice to the wall as though it were the wall's responsibility to transmit his words.

“You can have the sun and its planets and everything up to the Kuiper Belt and its short-term comets. We'll take the Centauri worlds up to their Kuiper Belts. The intermixed Oort cloud will be the ocean we share, much as the Pacific was shared in the age of sailing ships. It shouldn't be a bone of contention between us. Now that we're part of the same multiple-star system, travel time between us will be a matter of weeks, not years.”

“You get three stars and we get one—is that it?” Joorn said.

“Two stars,” Yung said imperturbably. “Proxima's only a dying red dwarf, swinging out at a distance from the others.”

“A dying red dwarf that will take hundreds of billions of years to die out. And with a habitable planet at a distance of only forty million kilometers, right in the middle of its Goldilocks zone. In fact, there was native life there when we left six billion years ago. Was it still there when you investigated the system?”

Yung spread his hands and offered a smile. To his credit, it was not a weak smile but a forthright one.

“You have me there, Captain,” he said. “Of course we both know there was a human outpost there before the First Ones drove us out. But the planet that we're interested in is the Earthlike planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B. As a K-type sun, it escaped the fate of Sol and never will become a red giant, let alone a white dwarf. We can enjoy a comfortable existence there for the next billion years, if evolution is that kind to us. The gravity's about ten percent above Earth-normal, but that won't bother us. We Chinese are used to working hard. After all, the original settlers adapted well in only a generation or two. In the meantime, you get the Earth back.”

Chu seemed to enjoy Yung's sales pitch. He said without rancor, “The Earth's within the sun's photosphere and will be for the next few hundred thousand years.”

Yung smiled agreeably and said, “
T'ung i
.” He reverted to English for the others and said, “I know you and the captain have a deep emotional attachment to the corpse of Earth, Mr. Chu.

“Otherwise you would not have done something as insane as attempt to visit it. It should be very gratifying to you to know that it will be part of your heritage as the sun continues to shrink. And until Earth becomes habitable again, you'll have Mars, the newly habitable Jovian moons, and Jupiter itself, now that it's divested of its crushing burden of hydrogen and has transformed into a habitable planet warmed by a red giant. And ultimately by a white dwarf that will continue to shed heat for as long as the human race is likely to exist.”

Joorn gave him a grudging smile. “I give up, Captain Yung. You could sell a Maxwell's Demon to an Eskimo.”

Yung looked blank, and Chu said, “That's a mythical race that used to inhabit Earth's polar regions.”

“They weren't so mythical when I walked the earth,” Joorn said, “even though they called themselves Aleutian Separatists then and had become an exceedingly prosperous sovereign nation, thanks to their control of the Northwest Passage.” He fixed Yung with an innocent gaze. “You should read up on them, Captain Yung. They were an important factor in East-West trade in the days before the Chinese Commonwealth would have come to power.”

Yung gave as good as he got. “Ah yes, the Chukchees. They became a part of the Commonwealth some hundred years after your time, when we took control of the Arctic sea route.”

Nina broke in, her eyes flashing. “Why are we wasting time talking about irrelevant nonsense? What's going to happen to Torris and his people? They're right in the middle of
our
supposed trade route!”

Yung recovered from his shock, and after an obvious struggle to refrain from harrumphing, said, mostly to Joorn, “We'll withdraw our study teams of course. There's no need to be territorial about it now that you've returned. There are inhabited Trees all through the Oort—possibly billions of them. We'll continue our studies elsewhere in the Oort and confine our efforts to the edges of the cloud closest to the Centauri planets, as I assume you will do in the part of the Oort neighborhood closest to your own planets. Is that satisfactory?”

“More than satisfactory,” Joorn said.

“Neither of us could hope to exploit the trillions of comets in the Oort, anyway. Not for thousands or tens of thousands of years, if then. The people of the comets will fashion their own destiny as they grow and spread their culture. They're space travelers too, aren't they, aboard natural spaceships complete with superb life-support systems? And they're inevitably going to learn how to operate the Trees' natural light sails—those reflective leaves. They've already begun to do so, you know, without realizing it. We can teach them how to tweak the Trees' tropisms and turgor movements and hurry that along.”

“Wait a minute. What are you saying?”

“The Trees are intelligent. Didn't you know that?”

CHAPTER 31

They all sat stunned, unable to speak. After several seconds of silence had elapsed, Joorn found his voice.

“Would you explain that, Captain Yung?”

Yung paused a moment to consider how to answer. “What do we mean when we say ‘intelligence'?” he finally said. “Particularly plant intelligence. When we're talking about animal intelligence, we might begin by citing purposeful behavior in pursuit of an objective. A crow using a bent wire to snag a piece of meat. A chimpanzee choosing a correctly shaped twig to snare a termite. A cat using its paw to unlatch a cabinet so that it can get at the cat treats inside.” He smiled. “My cat does that.”

Andrew spoke up. “Getting closer to home, Captain, at what point can we say that some of the early hominids crossed the line between serendipitous behavior and purposeful behavior? What's the difference between
Ardipithecus ramidus
picking up a conveniently shaped branch and using it to club rabbits, and
Australopithecus garhi
, two million years later, whacking a rock with another rock to make it a better shape for cracking mussel shells?”

“Good point,” Captain Yung said. “After all, even a paramecium hunts for food. But the earliest forms of emergent life were plants, not animals, and some of them were swimmers that actively sought out their food. As we go up the evolutionary ladder, we still find hunters, but now they're stationary, like Venus flytraps, and wait for their prey, like spiders, to come to them. And incidentally, their reflexes are faster than those of spiders, though of course we can't say they're thinking in any sense of the word. But there's another form of life-and-death combat going on in the plant world, only it's in slow motion. It's in the form of growth, and this growth has its own strategies. Now the question is: What kind of self-awareness, if any, is behind these strategies?”

Nina had been listening with increasing fascination. Now she delightedly exploded, “There are people who say that plants show signs of fear when they're in danger—an animal that wants to eat them, or a person that's plucked nearby members of its species. There was even one twentieth-century writer who said that flowers screamed when you picked them.”

Yung nodded condescendingly. “It's long been noticed that when a crown rose is plucked, the roses around it seem to shrivel and close their petals to make themselves less attractive. Mimosas are a particularly good example. They react so quickly to being touched that some botanists speculated that they had actual nervous systems. Well, perhaps they do, in a way, but it's not like ours.”

“You're saying that plants can be self-aware,” Joorn prompted.

“Not only that, but that they can communicate with other members of their species and plan defense strategies together by sending chemical messages to one another through the air and groundwater.”

Nina interrupted again. “Granddaddy, isn't that exactly what you told me when we first discovered the Trees and Daddy was getting upset because I was getting more interested in biology than physics?”

Joorn smiled benignly but continued to address his remarks to Yung. “And you maintain that these Bernal trees are doing the same thing in the vacuum of space?”

“More than that. Much more. Since Torris's people arrived some two hundred thousand years ago—” He broke off and turned to Andrew. “That was your estimate, wasn't it, young man? Two hundred thousand years?”

“Yes, sir,” Andrew said.

Yung finished triumphantly. “Since then, the Trees have learned how to communicate with man.”

Gasps came from several of his listeners, but Joorn only said, “You have proof?”

“We think so. Much work remains to be done, of course. By us and by you. We've interviewed more than twenty returned Dreamers here in the last two years, beginning with Torris, and—”

“You interviewed …” Laurel choked, then stopped.

Yung put on a good imitation of being apologetic. “I know your study group has formed personal ties with Torris and Ning,
nu-shih
Laurel. We don't want to interfere. But the work is too important to worry about niceties, and you gave us a good place to start. We'll share our data and move on, as we told Captain Gant. We'll begin our own project afresh more than half a parsec from here, in a swath of the Oort uncontaminated by previous influences. You've done an exemplary job here in beginning the transformation of this aboriginal society, but our goals might not be the same as yours.”

“You were talking about proof,” Joorn said impatiently.

“Yes,” Yung said, totally composed and unhurried. “I was saying that we interviewed more than twenty returned Dreamers here. With the cooperation of the priest, Claz, of course. He made their participation mandatory—a matter of religion. One of our survey teams interviewed an equal number with the cooperation of a priest in a Tree a couple of astronomical units from here—a pair of locked Trees, actually, where the union of the two societies had already begun. Forty-odd interviews is a small sample, to be sure, but the correlations are too many to be coincidental.”

“What sort of correlations?”

“To give one example, the Tree became aware of Torris as an individual because he was the agent of its cross-pollination by another Tree. The quantity of pollen given to him by Ning was of an order of magnitude greater than would be deposited by a pollinating insect, and several orders of magnitude greater than the thinly scattered grains of pollen that might drift across inter-Oortian space. The Tree was grateful for the gift—I guess I can use the word
grateful
to describe its vegetable emotions, if there is such a thing as vegetable emotion—and stored its tagging of Torris in its memory. Consequently, it was aware of it when its benefactor was cast into space. And when
Time's Beginning
arrived and its gravitational attraction began to affect its orbit and its engine luminosity and its infrared hull radiation became another source of photosynthesis, the Tree saw causality in the two events. As you can well appreciate, these influences would be a crucial form of sensory input for a sentient Tree. And when Torris returned and the Tree began to be overrun by your investigators, the Tree's impression of some sort of causality was only reinforced.”

“Interesting, but where's the correlation?”

Yung leaned forward for emphasis. “Fully a year later, and half a parsec away, on a Tree that our survey party was reconnoitering, Dreamers started to have visions of a new kind of human, wearing spacesuits that weren't made of the familiar animal skins, darting about with thrusters emitting substances like hydrazine that they hadn't seen for two hundred thousand years.”

“The Tree's memory of Torris's forebears, when they returned from quasar chasing,” Andrew interjected.

“Yes,” Yung said. “The Dreamers' impressions of
Time's Beginning
had to be filtered through what they were capable of imagining, so their perceptions relied on the perceptions of Torris's Tree. They tended to see the ship as a sort of large, undifferentiated mass, sometimes sprouting branches. But four out of ten—the more capable Dreamers—agreed on details, and with a specificity that couldn't possibly have been mere hallucination induced by the narcotic effect of their Tree's sepals.”

“I see,” Joorn said.

“What that implies is that the Trees have a racial memory going back at least two hundred thousand years. How far back into the billions of years without man, we'll never know. But they're beginning to spread the news of man's return. Their thoughts are exceedingly slow, and their communications even slower, depending as they do on the drift of pheromones through space. But the Tree people will speed that up. And eventually, as they achieve a higher level of communication, at the speed of light, we're talking a mere two years from one end of the Oort cloud to the other.”

“And you propose to help them do it.”

“My dear friend, it's inevitable. Eventually they'll turn their Trees into actual spaceships. And then it's off to the nearest stars. Perhaps, after millions of years, even other galaxies.”

“They'd have to attach some sort of space drive to do that,” Martin said, frowning.

“But of course. Isn't that what we're talking about? I'd expect that some thousands of years from now they'll have learned how to build their own Higgs engines. And of course, by then, they'll be mining the asteroids for their raw materials—landing on planets will never be a possibility for them.”

“Neighbors who can't visit,” Chu said. “The perfect partners for your intended empire.”

Yung looked pained. “Please, Comrade Chu,
commonwealth
, not ‘empire.'”

“It's all in the wording, isn't it?”

Yung showed his annoyance and said, “Cometary man will always be beyond the control of planetary man, through sheer numbers if nothing else. At any rate, they'll be your trading partners too.”

Chu started to open his mouth, but Joorn gave him a reproving look. “A three-way trading partnership—us and the whole Oort cloud to share,” Joorn agreed. “The immense travel time to the Oort ought to keep the two principal partners from overreaching.”

Yung looked suspicious but refrained from any mention of the exploitation of the old imperial China in an era of communication by sailing ship. “We'll begin the process of withdrawal tomorrow,” he said stiffly. “I'll arrange for our people to turn over our records immediately. The Tree people won't realize what's happening, so I strongly recommend that we arrange the change of guard in a way that makes sense to them.”

Joorn stood up. “It's been a pleasure doing business with you, Captain Yung.”