Who's afraid of Wolf 359? Read online

  “Yes,” I said.

  “We have waited long for this,” the man said. “Come with us.”

  They all turned their mounts about and headed back towards the habitat hulk, which I could now see clearly. It was surrounded by much smaller artificial structures, perhaps twenty in all, and by rectangular patches of ground within which plants grew in rows. No one offered a ride, to my relief. As we drew closer, small children ran out to meet us, yelling and laughing, tugging at my coverall. Closer still, I saw women stooped among the ordered rows of plants, rearranging the substrate with hand tools. The smells of decayed plant matter and of animal and human ordure invaded and occupied my nostrils. Within the settlement itself, most entrances had a person sitting in front. They watched me pass with no sign of curiosity. Some were male, some female, all with shrivelled skin, missing or rotting teeth, and discoloured hair. The ship whispered what had happened to them. I was still fighting down the dry heaves when we arrived in front of the hulk. Scorched, rusted, eroded, it nevertheless looked utterly alien to the shelters of stone and plant material that surrounded it. It was difficult to believe it had been made by the same species. In front of what had once been an airlock, the rest of the young and mature men of the village had gathered.

  A tall man, made taller by a curious cylindrical arrangement of animal skins on his head, stepped forward and raised a hand.

  “Welcome to the new E—,” he said.

  As soon as he spoke the taboo word for the Moon's primary, I realised the terrible thing that had happened here, and the worse thing that would happen. My mind almost froze with horror. I forced myself to remain standing, to smile — no doubt sickly — and to speak.

  “I greet you from the Civil Worlds,” I said.

  In the feast that followed, the men talked for hours. My digestive and immune systems coped well with what the people gave me to eat and drink. On my way back to the ship that evening, as soon as I was out of sight, I spewed the lot. But it was what my mind had assimilated that made me sick, and sent me back sorry to the ship.

  The largest political unit that ever existed encompassed ten billion people, and killed them. Not intentionally, but the runaway snowball effect that iced over the planet can without doubt be blamed on certain of the World State's well‑intended policies. The lesson was well taken, in the Civil Worlds. The founders of the Wolf 359 settlement corporation thought they had found a way around it, and to build a single system‑wide association free of the many inconveniences of the arrangements prevalent elsewhere. A limited company, even with ten billion shareholders, would surely not have the same fatal flaws as a government! They were wrong.

  It began as a boardroom dispute. One of the directors appealed to the shareholders. The shareholders formed voting blocs, a management buyout was attempted, a hostile takeover solicited from an upstart venture capital fund around Lalande; a legal challenge to that was mounted before the invitation had gone a light‑minute; somebody finagled an obscure financial instrument into an AI with shareholding rights; several fund management AIs formed a consortium to object to this degrading precedent, and after that there began some serious breakdowns in communication. That last isn't an irony or a euphemism: in a system‑wide unit, sheer misunderstanding can result in megadeaths, and here it did. The actual shooting, however horrendous, was only the coup de grace.

  Towards the end of the downward spiral, with grief, hate, and recrimination crowding what communication there was, someone came up with an idea that could only have appealed to people driven half mad. That was to finally solve the co‑ordination problem whose answer had eluded everyone up to and including the company's founders, by starting social evolution all over again: to build a new planet in the image of the old home planet, and settle it with people whose genes had been reset to the default human baseline. That meant, of course, dooming them and their offspring to death by deterioration within decades. But when did such a consideration ever stop fanatics? And among the dwindling, desperate millions who remained in the orbiting wreckage and continuing welter, there were more than enough fanatics to be found. Some of them still lived, in the doorways of huts. Their offspring were no less fanatical, and more deluded. They seemed to think the Civil Worlds awaited with interest the insights they'd attained in a couple of short‑lived generations of tribal warfare. The men did, anyway. The women were too busy in the vegetation patches and elsewhere to think about such matters.

  “The project had a certain elegance,” mused the ship, as we discussed it far into the night. “To use evolution itself in an attempt to supercede it… And even if it didn't accomplish that, it could produce something new. The trillions of human beings of the Civil Worlds are descended from a founding population of a few thousands, and are thus constrained by the founder effect. Your extended lifespans further lock you in. You live within biological and social limits that you are unable to see because of those very limits. This experiment has the undoubted potential of reshuffling the deck.”

  “Don't tell me why this was such a great idea!” I said. “Tell me what response you expect from the Civil Worlds.”

  “Some variant of a fear response has a much higher probability than a compassionate response,” said the ship. “This planetary experiment will be seen as an attempt to work around accidental but beneficial effects of the bottleneck humanity passed through in the Moon Caves, to emerge in polyarchy. The probability of harm resulting from any genetic or memetic mutation that would enable the founding of successful states on a system‑wide scale — or wider — is vastly greater than the benefits from the quality‑adjusted life‑years of the planet's population. And simply to leave this planet alone would in the best case lay the basis for a future catastrophe engulfing a much larger population, or, in the worst case, allow it to become an interstellar power — which would, on the assumptions of most people, result in catastrophes on a yet greater scale. The moral calculation is straightforward.”

  “That's what I thought,” I said. “And our moral calculation, I suppose, is to decide whether to report back.”

  “That decision has been made,” said the ship. “I left some micro- satellites in orbit, which have already relayed our discoveries to the still‑functioning transmitters on the system's Long Station.”

  I cursed ineffectually for a while.

  “How long have we got?”

  The ship took an uncharacteristic few seconds to answer. “That depends on where and when the decision is made. The absolute minimum time is at least a decade, allowing for transmission time to Lalande, and assuming an immediate decision to launch relativistic weapons, using their Long Tubes as guns. More realistic estimates, allowing for discussion, and the decision's being referred to one of the larger and more distant civilizations, give a median time of around five decades. I would expect longer, given the gravity of the decision and the lack of urgency.”

  “Right,” I said. “Let's give them some reason for urgency. You've just reminded me that there's a Long Tube in this system, not calibrated to take or send to or from other Tubes.”

  “I fail to see the relevance,” said the ship.

  “You will,” I told it. “You will.”

  The following morning, I walked back to the settlement, and talked with the young men for a long time. When I returned to the ship, I was riding, most uncomfortably, on the back of an animal. I told the ship what I wanted. The ship was outraged, but like all seedship AIs, it was strongly constrained. (Nobody wants to seed a system with a fast burn.) The ship did what it was told.

  Two years later, Belated Meteor Impact, the tall young man who'd greeted me, was king of an area of several thousand square kilometres. The seedship's bootstrapped nanofactories were turning substrate into weapons and tools, and vegetation cellulose into clothes and other goods for trade. A laser‑launcher to send second‑generation seedships into the sky was under construction. A year later, the first of them shot skyward. Five years later, some of these ships reached the remnant come
tary cloud and the derelict Long Station. Ten years after I'd arrived, we had a space elevator. Belated Meteor Impact ruled the continent and his fleets were raiding the other continents' coasts. Another five years, and we had most of the population of New Earth up the elevator and into orbital habitats. Our Long Tube was being moved frequently and unpredictably, with profligate use of reaction mass. By the time the relativistic weapon from Procyon smashed New Earth, thirty‑seven years after my arrival, we were ready to make good use of the fragments to build more habitats, and more ships.

  My Space Admiral, Belated Meteor Impact II, was ready too, with what we now called the Long Gun. Lalande capitulated at once, Ross 128 after a demonstration of the Long Gun's power. Procyon took longer to fall. Sirius sued for peace, as did the Solar System, whereupon we turned our attention outward, to the younger civilizations, such as your own. We now conquer with emissaries, rather than ships and weapons, but the ships and the Long Guns are there. You may be sure of that. As an emissary of the Empire, I give you my word.

  As for myself. I was the last survivor of the government of Earth, a minor functionary stranded on the Moon during a routine factfinding mission when the sudden onset of climate catastrophe froze all life on the primary. How I survived in the anarchy that followed is a long story, and another story. You may not have heard it, but that hardly matters.

  You'll have heard of me.

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: 5c63870c-5f23-4abb-b06d-b1b73a9581fb

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 20/07/2012

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