Peter Watts. Giants
So many eons, slept away while the universe wound down around him. He’s dead to human eyes. Even the machines barely see the chemistry ticking over in those cells: an ancient molecule of hydrogen sulphide, frozen in a hemoglobin embrace; an electron shuttled sluggishly down some metabolic pathway two weeks ago. Back on Earth there used to be life deep in the rocks, halfway to the mantle; empires rose and fell in the time it took those microbes to draw breath. Next to Hakim’s, their lives blurred past in an eyeblink. (Next to all of ours. I was every bit as dead, just a week ago.)
I’m still not sure it’s a good idea, bringing him back.
Flat lines shiver in their endless march along the x-axis: molecules starting to bump against each other, core temp edging up a fraction of a fraction. A lonely spark flickers in the hypothalamus; another wriggles across the prefrontal cortex (a passing thought, millennia past its best-before, released from amber). Millivolts trickle down some random path and an eyelid twitches.
The body shudders, tries to breathe but it’s too soon: it’s still anoxic in there, pure H2S gumming up the works and shutting the machinery of life down to a whisper. The Chimp starts a nitrox flush; swarms of fireflies bloom across Pulmonary and Vascular. Hakim’s cold empty husk fills with light from the inside out: red and yellow isotherms, pulsing arteries, a trillion reawakening neurons stippling across the translucent avatar in my head. A real breath this time. Another. His fingers twitch and stutter, tap a random tattoo against the floor of his sarcophagus.
The lid slides open. His eyes, too, a moment later: they roll unfocused in their sockets, suffused in a haze of resurrection dementia. He can’t see me. He sees soft lights and vague shadows, hears the faint underwater echo of nearby machinery, but his mind is still stuck to the past and the present hasn’t sunk in yet.
A tongue dry as leather flicks into view against his upper lip. A drinking tube emerges from its burrow and nudges Hakim’s cheek. His takes it in his mouth and nurses, reflexive as a newborn.
I lean into what passes for his field of view: “Lazarus, come forth.”
It anchors him. I see sudden focus resolving in those eyes, see the past welling up behind them. I see memories and hearsay loading in the wake of my voice. Confusion evaporates; something sharper takes its place. Hakim stares up at me from the grave, his eyes hard as obsidian.
“You asshole,” he says. “I can’t believe we haven’t killed you yet.”
***
I give him space. I retreat to the forest, wander endless twilit caverns while he learns to live again. Down here I can barely see my own hand in front of my face: gray fingers, faint sapphire accents. Photophores glimmer around me like dim constellations, each tiny star lit by the glow of a trillion microbes. Photosynthesis instead of fusion. You can’t get truly lost in Eriophora—the Chimp always knows where you are—but here in the dark, there’s comfort to be had in the illusion.
Eventually, though, I have to stop stalling. I sample myriad feeds as I rise though the depths of the asteroid, find Hakim in the starboard bridge. I watch as he enters painstaking questions, processes answers, piles each new piece on top of the last in a rickety climb to insight. Lots of debris in this system, yes: more than enough material for a build. Call up the transponders and—what’s this? No in-system scaffolding, no half-constructed jump gate, no asteroid mining or factory fleet. So why—?
System dynamics, now. Lagrange points. Nothing on this side, anyway, even though there are at least three planetary bodies in—whoa, those orbits—
Our orbit...
By the time I join him in the flesh he’s motionless, staring into the tac tank. A bright dimensionless point floats in the center of that display: Eriophora. The ice giant looms dark and massive to port, the red one—orders of magnitude larger—seethes in the distance behind. (If I stepped outside I’d see an incandescent barrier stretching across half the universe, with the barest hint of a curve on the horizon; tac reduces it to a cherry globe floating in an aquarium.) A million bits of detritus, from planets to pebbles, careen through the neighborhood. We’re not even relativistic and still the Chimp hasn’t had time to tag them all.
None of those tags make sense anyway. We’re aeons from the nearest earthly constellation; every alphabet, every astronomical convention has been exhausted by the stars we’ve passed in the meantime. Maybe the Chimp invented his own taxonomy while we were sleeping, some arcane gibberish of hex and ASCII that makes sense to him and him alone. A hobby, perhaps, although he’s supposed to be too stupid for anything like that.
I slept through most of that scenery. I’ve been awake for barely a hundred builds; my mythological reservoir is nowhere near exhausted. I have my own names for these monsters.
The cold giant is Thule. The hot one is Surtr.
Hakim ignores my arrival. He moves sliders back and forth: trajectories extrude from bodies in motion, predict the future according to Newton. Eventually all those threads converge and he rewinds time, reverses entropy, reassembles the shattered teacup and sets it running again. He does it three times as I watch. The result never changes.
He turns, his face bloodless. “We’re going to hit. We’re going to ram straight into the fucking thing.”
I swallow and nod.
“That’s how it starts,” I tell him.
***
We’re going to hit. We’re aiming to hit, we’re going to let the lesser monster devour us before the greater one devours it. We’ll lower Eriophora by her own bootstraps, sink through roiling bands of hydrogen and helium and a thousand exotic hydrocarbons, down to whatever residual deep-space chill Thule’s been hoarding since—who knows? Maybe almost as long as we’ve been in flight.
It won’t last, of course. The planet’s been warming ever since it started its long fall from the long dark. Its bones will survive the passage through the stellar envelope easily enough: five hours in and out, give or take. Its atmosphere won’t be so lucky, though. Every step of the way Surtr’s going to be stripping it down like a child licking an ice cream cone.
We’ll make it through by balancing in the ever-shrinking sweet spot between a red-hot sky and the pressure cooker at Thule’s core. The numbers say it’ll work.
Hakim should know this already. He would have awakened knowing if not for that idiotic uprising of theirs. But they chose to blind themselves instead, burn out their links, cut themselves off from the very heart of the mission. So now I have to explain things. I have to show things. All that instantaneous insight we once shared, gone: one ancient fit of pique and I have to use words, scribble out diagrams, etch out painstaking codes and tokens while the clock runs down. I’d hoped that maybe, after all these red-shifted millennia, they might have reconsidered; but the look in Hakim’s eyes leaves no doubt. As far as he’s concerned it all happened yesterday.
I do my best. I keep the conversation strictly professional, focus on the story so far: a build, aborted. Chaos and inertia, imminent annihilation, the insane counterintuitive necessity of passing through a star instead of going around it. “What are we doing here?” Hakim asks once I’ve finished.
“It looked like a perfect spot.” I gesture at the tank. “From a distance. Chimp even sent out the vons, but—” I shrug. “The closer we got, the worse it turned out to be.”