The Omega Expedition (14 page)

When I asked, a whispering voice told me that there were more than a hundred different kinds of “incorruptible” organic construction materials on display, as well as inorganic crystallines.

My informant wasn’t a human voice — it was a machine whose responses were filtered through a sim of some sort — but that didn’t mean that the member of the sisterhood commissioned to monitor me had packed up her kit and gone home. My questions were still being mediated by actual listeners, even though I was getting the answers direct from the data bank.

“They were experimenting with dextrorotatory proteins in my day,” I said. “There was the stuff Damon’s father and foster mother invented as well: para-DNA, they called it. Damon told me that PicoCon had big plans for that, once he and Conrad had sold out to them. Are those the kinds of things I’m looking at?”

The mechanical voice informed me that dextrorotatory organics had become effectively obsolete once they had begun spinning off dextrorotatory viruses and nanobacteria. The artificial genomic system designed by Conrad Helier and Eveline Hywood had proved to be much more versatile, and its derivatives were still used in a wide range of nanomachines — especially gantzing systems — but more complicated genomic systems devised for use in extreme environments had proved more generally useful when reimported to Earth.

I was assured that the next generation of technologies would be even more versatile, having taken aboard key features of the natural systems evolved on the colonized worlds of Ararat and Maya.

“And I guess you can make all the gold you want from lead,” I suggested. “Everybody’s an alchemist now.”

The humorless voice told me that transmutation wasn’t routinely practiced on Earth because there was no economic imperative. So I asked where it
was
routinely practiced, and was told that Ganymede, Io, and Umbriel were the principal research and development centers.

I had to put in a prompt to get more data, but I elicited an admission that transmutation research was “controversial,” because fusion-generated transmutation was the technological basis of “macroconstruction.”

A demand for further elaboration brought the revelation that a majority of the Earthbound was currently opposed to all kinds of macroconstructional development, and that “the major outer system factions” were divided even as to the most rudimentary aspects of their various development plans.

I looked around at the fanciful buildings that surrounded my viewpoint, knowing that they could not possibly be what the voice meant by “macroconstruction.” Given that the people of Earth seemed perfectly happy to design and build new continents, and to make drastic amendments to the outlines of the existing ones, I knew that the voice had to be talking about at least one further order of magnitude.

Davida had already told me that there were a dozen microworlds in the Counter-Earth Cluster, two hundred more scattered around the orbit, and a further two hundred located in Luna’s orbit around the Earth. I figured that the voice had to be talking about building much bigger things than that, perhaps in pursuit of the visionary quest of the type-2 crusaders who wanted to build a shell around the sun so that none of its energy output would go to waste. If so, there were only two likely sources of raw material: Jupiter and Saturn.

“You can’t build new planets out of hydrogen, ammonia, and methane,” I said. “Transmuting the stuff of gas giants must be a step beyond mere alchemy.”

The voice wasn’t programmed to praise my deductive skills. It reported, with a laconic ease that the sloth-animated sims of my own era had never quite mastered, that many people resident in Earth orbit became a trifle nervous at the mere mention of “domesticated supernoval reactions.”

That seemed to me to be a nice idea, all the nicer because it was so casually oxymoronic. I probed, and the story filtered out in dribs and drabs. In the meantime, the people of the city born yet again from the ashes of the City of Angels went about their daily business, quite oblivious to the fact that they were being watched by a time-tourist from the twenty-second century.

Would they have cared if they’d known? Would anyone have stopped to wave at the camera? I’d have liked to think that someone would, but I couldn’t be sure. All but a few of them looked like ordinary human beings, but none of them were. Their thoughts, opinions, hopes, and values were probably far more different from mine than their bodies.

“There seem to be a lot of people about,” I observed, falling into a fairly relaxed conversational mode even though I knew I was talking to a machine while being dutifully over-seen by a gaggle of two-hundred-year-old prepuberal posthumans. “How was the world repopulated so rapidly after the Yellowstone eruption?”

“Two million, one hundred and thirty-three thousand, seven hundred and eighty-seven people were killed by the great North American Basalt Flow,” I was told. “The deficit was made up within thirty years. Sixty-one percent of the replacements were new births, thirty-nine percent returnees. Forty percent of the returnees came from the moon…”

“
Two million
,” I repeated incredulously. “You’re telling me that the northern half of the American continent blew up and only a few more than two million people died?”

“The margin of uncertainty applicable to the figure is approximately nought point two percent. The uncertainty is due to the difficulty in whether numerous ambiguous deaths ought to be attributed to the explosion or to other causes.”

I wasn’t concerned with abstruse matters of definition. “How did the rest of the population escape?” I asked.

“A warning of the impending eruption was broadcast. Approximately fifty percent of the victims were unable to escape the effects of the blast. Most of the remainder were caught in the open by the deluge of ash. The vast majority of people resident in North America or its satellite subcontinents were able to cocoon themselves in time to avoid serious injury.”

“And how many more died in the resultant ecocatastrophe?”

“The figure previously quoted includes all casualties directly or indirectly attributable to the event, within the limitations of the aforementioned margin of uncertainty. There were problems of supply, which meant that a few of the affected individuals had to remain cocooned for as much as a year, but most emerged within days to begin the work of restoration.”

I was impressed — but when I had thought it over, I figured that it wasn’t so very surprising. The people in the thirty-third century didn’t just have better IT and better smartsuits; they had a protective environment that was ever ready to take them in and seal them away from danger. Every city on Earth — every home on Earth — was a kind of Excelsior: a microworld combining all the most useful features of organic and inorganic technology. Posthumans were parasites on and within protective giants of their own manufacture. Even if Earth had been hit by the kind of extraterrestrial missile that had blasted away the last of the dinosaurs, all but a tiny minority of its people could have survived. Even if it were to suffer a nuclear holocaust…

On the other hand, I thought, that kind of defensive capability might make nuclear holocaust a far less unthinkable proposition than it had seemed in my day. And as for plague warfare — well, what kind of weapon was best equipped to worm its way through a protective cocoon to reach the helpless grub within?

Maybe the people of Earth were safe from most natural disasters, but that didn’t make them safe from one another.

I left Los Angeles behind in order to take a look at cities and wildernesses in Africa, Australia, Oceania, New Pacifica, Atlantis, and Siberia.

There was a great deal else that I wanted to see — but there was also a great deal that I needed to know, so I eventually abandoned the tourist trip altogether and retreated to a world of data that wasn’t quite as raw. I played the scholar more earnestly and more insistently than I’d ever done in my own time, although I knew there was far more to learn than I could cope with in a matter of hours, or months, or years.

To educate myself after so long an absence would be the work of several lifetimes. That was a sobering thought. But the likelihood seemed to be that I would have as many lifetimes as I needed. Like Adam Zimmerman, I too would be made emortal — or so I hoped. Had I dared to assume it, I would have; but I was too wary, and too fearful. I was at the mercy of a world whose mores and folkways I could not hope to understand.

It was a mental condition in which all kind of opposites were precariously combined, and I knew that I would not dare to be as glad as I wanted to be until I knew and understood a great deal more.

Ten

Alchemy and the Afterlife

A
lthough I was a stranger in the thirty-third century, I caught on fairly quickly to certain basic political issues once the principal arguments surrounding the concept of “macroconstruction” had been spelled out.

The human race would need the technics of transmutation soon enough. Fusers designed as power plants routinely turned hydrogen into helium, and could already work a few other finger exercises, but it would be necessary in the near future to make fusers of an altogether more ambitious kind: fusers that could do the kind of heavy-duty alchemy to which our modestly sized second-generation sun would never get around. All the heavy elements in the system were supernoval debris, and we would eventually need more: a
lot
more. Opinions apparently varied as to when “eventually” might be, but it wasn’t just the carriers of the old type-2 banner who wanted the project started
now
.

The prospect of manufacturing all the elements that had previously been made in the overfervent hearts of dying stars opened up a number of interesting questions. Where, for instance, was the raw material to come from? And where could the technics be safely tested? Conducting risky experiments in distant gas-giant-rich solar systems posed logistical problems, and couldn’t entirely avoid the safety issues associated with conducting them closer to home. A supposedly domesticated reaction that ran wild might be very problematic, even if it were several light-years away from the nearest substantial human settlement.

“I can see how that possibility would make people nervous,” I said, drily. “Maybe this is one technology that we can do without, for the time being — or maybe forever.”

I was told that there were others who thought a slow and steady schedule might be best, but that nobody believed that the problem could be put off indefinitely. If humankind’s descendants refused to enclose the sun that had given birth to the species they would have to enclose others instead, because they would have no alternative but to try out every possible means of defying the Afterlife.

I had to demand an explanation of that term, because it no longer meant anything that a man of the twenty-second century could have understood by it. It was explained to me, calmly and patiently, that some people preferred to call the Afterlife the Alkahest, or “the Universal Death,” while others — those with a more developed sense of irony, I supposed — were content to call it “the End of Evolution” or “Eternity’s Eve.”

Apparently, the galaxy was full of life, but it was mostly not the kind of life that existed on Earth, or the colony-worlds of Ararat —-which was known by its colonists as Tyre — and Maya. Nor was it the kind of life entertained by the so-called sludgeworlds which lurked in interstellar space. The vast bulk of the galaxy’s biomass consisted of a single all-devouring species of nanobacterium: a universal organic solvent that fed avidly upon all higher kinds of life, digesting individual organisms and entire biospheres with equal ease. It did not matter which replicator molecules they used, or how they organized their genomes; they were all grist to the implacable mill.

The Afterlife’s empire already extended three-quarters of the way from the center of the galaxy to the rim, and it was still expanding. Given time, it would conquer and possess the whole of the Milky Way, having gobbled up everything that complex organisms like us might consider “real” life.

Unless it could be stopped.

It might not arrive on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years — perhaps millions — but it
would
arrive, and there would be people of many posthuman kinds to witness its arrival. Natural attrition would probably have killed off nearly all the emortals of the fourth millennium, and nearly all their children too, but a few people alive now would surely live long enough to see the evil day.

I might live to see the evil day myself, I realized — especially if I were to take up Christine Caine’s semi-serious suggestion that I become a perpetual SusAn-borne traveler in time, waking up for a brief while at intervals millennia apart, in order to display myself as a specimen of a species long extinct and unmourned.

Even a threat that lay a million years in the future had to be taken seriously by the kinds of posthumans that lived on Earth and in its neighborhood nowadays.

People gifted with potentially eternal life had more reason to fear the kind of Afterlife they had discovered than mere mortals had ever had for fearing those they could only imagine. Their fear was, however, parent to a determination to avoid their apparent destiny. The AI mentor temporarily entrusted with my education explained, with polite meticulousness, that there were three possible strategies that an intelligent species could adopt in the face of such a threat: fight, flight, and concealment.

Obviously, the best chance of ultimate success lay in trying all three alternatives. Some of humankind’s descendant populations would try their damnedest to find a kind of real life that could devour the devourer and win the galaxy for the cause of complexity. Some would set out to cross the inter-galactic gulf, in the hope that there might be somewhere to run
to
that could remain permanently untainted by the monster. And some would build shields bigger than worlds: hopefully incorruptible spheres that would close off the states and empires of their central suns, creating havens of safety — or prisons, depending on one’s point of view.