Seeing Alex smile, she felt a surge. But then he shook his head and simply said, “No. I have no new tricks.”
“Then why are you grinning like an idiot, Lustig!” Manella roared.
Alex stood up. And though he continued smiling, his hands clenched to a slow beat. “Don’t you understand? Can’t you see what this means?” He turned left and right, staring at each person in turn, getting back only blank looks.
In frustration, he shouted. “It means we’re not guilty. We haven’t destroyed ourselves and our world!”
He pressed both hands on the table, leaning forward intensely. “You all saw what shape I was in, before. I was destroyed by this. Oh, sure, we might succeed in ejecting Beta — I give it a one in four chance now, the best odds yet.
“But what would be the point? If we produce the sort of men who’d drop something like that into the world, and not even care enough to go looking for it again? Would we deserve to go on?
“You all kept telling me, ‘Don’t take it so personally, Alex.’ You said, ‘It’s not your fault, Alex. Your singularity was harmless, not an all-devouring monster like Beta. You’re our champion against this thing!’ ”
“Champion?” His laughter was acrid. “Couldn’t any of you see how that really made me feel?”
Every other person stared. The physicist’s reserve had cracked, and underneath now lay exposed someone more human than the Alex Lustig that Teresa had seen before this. A man, she realized, who had stepped deeper into the borderlands of endurance than most ever dream of.
“I had to identify with the makers of that thing!” He went on. “So long as I knew them to be my fellow humans, I had to take responsibility. Couldn’t any of you see that?”
He had started out grinning, but now Alex shivered. June Morgan started to rise, but then suppressed the move. Teresa understood and agreed. She, too, felt an urge to do something for him, and knew the only way to help was to listen till he stopped.
Listen humbly, for she knew with sudden conviction that he was right.
“I…” Alex had to inhale to catch his breath. “I’m smiling, Pedro, because I was ashamed to be human, and now I’m not anymore. Mere death can’t take that from me now. Nothing can.
“Isn’t… isn’t that enough for anyone to smile about?”
It was George Hutton who reached him first — who drew his shaking friend into his massive arms. Then, all at once, the rest of them were there as well. And none of their former jealousies or conflicts seemed to matter anymore. They embraced each other and for a time shared the horror of their newly known danger… along with the solace of their restored hope.
PART VIII
PLANET KILLER
Space was the fabric of its existence.
A skein of superdense yarn — knitted and purled in ten dimensions — it was unravelable. A deep well — sunk into a microscopic point — it was unfathomable. Blacker than blackness, it emitted nothing, yet the tortured space around it blazed hotter than the cores of suns.
It had been born within a machine, one that had traveled far to reach this modest basin, pressed into the rippling universe-sheet by a lesser star. On arrival, the apparatus set to work crafting the assassin’s tight weave out of pure nothingness. Then, in its final death throes, the factory slowed its progeny onto a gentle circular path, skating among the star’s retinue of tiny planets.
For two revolutions, the assassin lost mass. There were atoms in space to feed its small but hungry maw, but nowhere near enough to make up for its losses… loops of superdense brightness that kept popping out to self-destruct in brilliant bursts of gamma rays. If this went on, it would evaporate entirely before doing its job.
But then it entered a shallow dip of gravity — a brief touch of acceleration — and it collided with something solid! The assassin celebrated with a blast of radiation. Thereafter, its orbit kept dipping, again and again, into high-density realms.
Atoms fell athwart its narrow mouth — little wider than an atom itself. There were still very few real collisions, but where at first it dined on picograms, soon it gobbled micrograms, then milligrams. No meal satisfied it.
Grams became kilograms…
It had not been programed to know the passage of years, nor that the feast would have to end someday, when the planet was consumed in one last, voracious gobble. Then it would sit alone again in space, and for a time the solar system would have two suns… while the essence that had once been Earth blew away in coruscating photons.
Of all this it neither knew nor cared. For the present, atoms kept pouring in. If a complex, fulgent knot in space can be called happy, then that was its condition.
After all, what else was there in the universe, but matter to eat, light to excrete, and vacuum? And what were they? Just subtly different kinds of folded space.
Space was the fabric of its existence.
Without fuss or intent, it grew.
□ Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [□ SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546]. Space Colonization Subgroup. Open discussion board.
Okay, so imagine we get past the next few rough decades and finally do what we should have back in TwenCen. Say we mine asteroids for platinum, discover the secrets of true nanotechnology, and set Von Neumann “sheep” grazing on the moon to produce boundless wealth. To listen to some of the rest of you, all our problems would then be over. The next step, star travel, and colonization of the galaxy, would be trivial.
But hold on! Even assuming we solve how to maintain long-lasting ecologies in space and get so wealthy the costs of star-flight aren’t crippling, you’ve still got the problem of time.
I mean, most hypothetical designs show likely starships creeping along at no more than ten percent of the speed of light, a whole lot slower than those sci-fi cruisers we see zipping on three-vee. At such speeds it may take five, ten generations to reach a good colony site. Meanwhile, passengers will have to maintain villages and farms and cranky, claustrophobic grandkids, all inside their hollowed-out, spinning worldlets.
What kind of social engineering will that take? Do you know how to design a closed society that’d last so long without flying apart? Oh, I think it can be done. But don’t pretend it’ll be simple!
Nor will be solving the dilemma of gene pool isolation. In the arks and zoos right now, a lot of rescued species are dying off even though the microecologies are right, simply because too few individuals were included in the original mix. For a healthy gene pool you need diversity, variety, heterozygosity.
One thing’s clear, no starship will make it carrying only one racial group. What’ll be needed, frankly, are mongrels… people who’ve bred back and forth with just about everybody and seem to enjoy it. You know… like Californians.
Besides, it’s as if they’ve been preparing themselves for it all along. Heck, picture if aliens ever landed in California. Instead of running away or even inquiring about the secrets of the universe, Californians would probably ask the BEMs if they had any new cuisine!