So I thought about it, and I came up with the perfect way to raise her awareness. I wrote her a bedtime story, a disarming blend of humor and affection, and I called it
The Book of Oogenesis
In the beginning were the gametes. And though there was sex, lo, there was no gender, and life was in balance.
And God said, "Let there be Sperm": and some seeds did shrivel in size and grow cheap to make, and they did flood the market.
And God said, "Let there be Eggs": and other seeds were afflicted by a plague of Sperm. And yea, few of them bore fruit, for Sperm brought no food for the zygote, and only the largest Eggs could make up the shortfall. And these grew yet larger in the fullness of time.
And God put the Eggs into a womb, and said, "Wait here: for thy bulk has made thee unwieldy, and Sperm must seek thee out in thy chambers. Henceforth shalt thou be fertilized internally." And it was so.
And God said to the gametes, "The fruit of thy fusion may abide in any place and take any shape. It may breathe air or water or the sulphurous muck of hydrothermal vents. But do not forget my one commandment unto you, which has not changed from the beginning of time: spread thy genes."
And thus did Sperm and Egg go into the world. And Sperm said, "I am cheap and plentiful, and if sowed abundantly I will surely fulfill God's plan. I shall forever seek out new mates and then abandon them when they are with child, for there are many wombs and little time."
But Egg said, "Lo, the burden of procreation weighs heavily upon me. I must carry flesh that is but half mine, gestate and feed it even when it leaves my chamber" (for by now many of Egg's bodies were warm of blood, and furry besides). "I can have but few children, and must devote myself to those, and protect them at every turn. And I will make Sperm help me, for he got me into this. And though he doth struggle at my side, I shall not let him stray, nor lie with my competitors."
And Sperm liked this not.
And God smiled, for Its commandment had put Sperm and Egg at war with each other, even unto the day they made themselves obsolete.
I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition— the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe—and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck.
To this day, I still don't know what went wrong.
"The glass ceiling is in you. The glass ceiling is conscience."
— Jacob Holtzbrinck, The Keys to the Planet
There were stories, before we left Earth, of a fourth wave: a fleet of deep-space dreadnoughts running silent in our wake, should the cannon fodder up front run into something nasty. Or, if the aliens were friendly, an ambassadorial frigate full of politicians and CEOs ready to elbow their way to the front of the line. Never mind that Earth had no deep-space dreadnoughts or ambassadorial spaceships; Theseus hadn't existed either, before Firefall. Nobody had told us of any such such contingent, but you never show the Big Picture to your front line. The less they know, the less they can betray.
I still don't know if the fourth wave ever existed. I never saw any evidence of one, for whatever that's worth. We might have left them floundering back at Burns-Caulfield. Or maybe they followed us all the way to Big Ben, crept just close enough to see what we were up against, and turned tail before things got ugly.
I wonder if that's what happened. I wonder if they made it back home.
I look back now, and hope not.
A giant marshmallow kicked Theseus in the side. Down swung like a pendulum. Across the drum Szpindel yelped as if scalded; in the galley, cracking a bulb of hot coffee, I nearly was.
This is it, I thought. We got too close. They're hitting back.
"What the—"
A flicker on the party line as Bates linked from the bridge. "Main drive just kicked in. We're changing course."
"To what? Where? Whose orders?"
"Mine," Sarasti said, appearing above us.
Nobody spoke. Drifting into the drum through the stern hatchway: the sound of something grinding. I pinged Theseus resource-allocation stack. Fabrication was retooling itself for the mass production of doped ceramics.
Radiation shielding. Solid stuff, bulky and primitive, not the controlled magnetic fields we usually relied on.
The Gang emerged sleepy-eyed from their tent, Sascha grumbling, "What the fuck?"
"Watch." Sarasti took hold of ConSensus and shook it.
It was a blizzard, not a briefing: gravity wells and orbital trajectories, shear-stress simulations in thunderheads of ammonium and hydrogen, stereoscopic planetscapes buried under filters ranging from gamma to radio. I saw breakpoints and saddlepoints and unstable equilibria. I saw fold catastrophes plotted in five dimensions. My augments strained to rotate the information; my meaty half-brain struggled to understand the bottom line.
Something was hiding down there, in plain sight.
Ben's accretion belt still wasn't behaving. Its delinquency wasn't obvious; Sarasti hadn't had to plot every pebble and mountain and planetesimal to find the pattern, but he'd come close. And neither he nor the conjoined intelligence he shared with the Captain had been able to explain those trajectories as the mere aftermath of some past disturbance. The dust wasn't just settling; some of it marched downhill to the beat of something that even now reached out from the cloud-tops and pulled debris from orbit.
Not all that debris seemed to hit. Ben's equatorial regions flickered constantly with the light of meteorite impacts—much fainter than the bright wakes of the skimmers, and gone in the wink of an eye—but those frequency distributions didn't quite account for all the rocks that had fallen. It was almost as though, every now and then, some piece of incoming detritus simply vanished into a parallel universe.
Or got caught by something in this one. Something that circled Ben's equator every forty hours, almost low enough to graze the atmosphere. Something that didn't show up in visible light, or infrared, or radar. Something that might have remained pure hypothesis if a skimmer hadn't burned an incandescent trail across the atmosphere behind it when Theseus happened to be watching.
Sarasti threw that one dead center: a bright contrail streaking diagonally across Ben's perpetual nightscape, stuttering partway a degree or two to the left, stuttering back just before it passed from sight. Freeze-frame showed a beam of light frozen solid, a segment snapped from its midsection and jiggled just a hair out of alignment.
A segment nine kilometers long.
"It's cloaked," Sascha said, impressed.
"Not very well." Bates emerged from the forward hatch and sailed spinward. "Pretty obvious refractory artefact." She caught stairs halfway to the deck, used the torque of spin-against-spam to flip upright and plant her feet on the steps. "Why didn't we catch that before?"
"No backlight," Szpindel suggested.
"It's not just the contrail. Look at the clouds." Sure enough, Ben's cloudy backdrop showed the same subtle dislocation. Bates stepped onto the deck and headed for the conference table. "We should've seen this earlier."
"The other probes see no such artefact," Sarasti said. "This probe approaches from a wider angle. Twenty-seven degrees."
"Wider angle to what?" Sascha said.
"To the line," Bates murmured. "Between us and them."
It was all there on tactical: Theseus fell inwards along an obvious arc, but the probes we'd dispatched hadn't dicked around with Hohmann transfers: they'd burned straight down, their courses barely bending, all within a few degrees of the theoretical line connecting Ben to Theseus.