Mark found Uvarov chilling. His cold, analytical view of humanity, coupled with the extraordinarily long-term perspective of his thinking, was deeply disturbing. The Superet conversion seemed only to have reinforced these trends in Uvarov’s personality.
And, Lethe, Uvarov was supposed to be a doctor.
“We should not be restrained by the primitive in us, Mark Wu,” Uvarov was saying. “We should think of the possible. And then determine what must be done to attain that… Whatever the cost.
“Your proposals for the social structure in this ship are another example of limited thinking, I fear.”
Mark frowned, his anger building. “You disapprove of my proposals?”
Uvarov’s voice, under its thick layer of Lunar accent, was mocking. “You have a draft constitution for a unified democratic structure — ”
“With deep splits of power, and local accountability. Yes. You have a problem with that? Uvarov, I’ve based my proposals on the most successful examples of closed societies we have — the early colonies on Mars, for example. We must learn from the past…”
Louise was the nominal leader of the expedition. But she wasn’t going to be a captain; no hierarchical command structure could last a thousand years. And there was no guarantee that AS treatments could sustain any individual over such a period. AS itself wasn’t that well established; the oldest living human was only around four centuries old. And who knew what cumulative effect consciousness editing would have, over centuries?
…So it could be that none of the crew alive at the launch — even Louise and Mark themselves — would survive to see the end of the trip.
But even if the last person who remembered Sol expired, Louise and her coterie had to find ways to ensure that the mission’s purpose was not lost with them.
Mark’s job was to design a society to populate the ship’s closed environment — a society stable enough to persist over ten centuries… and to maintain the ship’s core mission.
Uvarov looked skeptical. “But a simple democracy?”
Mark was surprised at the depth of his resentment at being patronized like this by Uvarov. “We have to start somewhere — with a framework the ship’s inhabitants are going to be able to use, to build on. The constitution will be malleable. It will even be possible, legally, to abandon the constitution altogether — ”
“You’re missing my point,” Uvarov said silkily. “Mark, democracy as a method of human interaction is already millennia old. And we know how easy it is to subvert any democratic process. There are endless examples of people using a democratic system as a games-theory framework of rules to achieve their own ends.
“Use your imagination. Is there truly nothing better? Have we learned nothing about ourselves in all that time?”
“Democracies don’t go to war with each other, Uvarov,” Mark said coldly. “Democracies — however imperfectly — reflect the will of the many, not the few. Or the one.
“As you’ve told me, Uvarov, we remain primitives. Maybe we’re still too primitive to trust ourselves not to operate without a democratic framework.”
Uvarov bowed his elegant, silvered head — but without conviction or agreement, as if merely conceding a debating point.
The four scooters rose smoothly past the half-finished Decks.
7
She was suspended in a bath of charged particles. It was isotropic, opaque, featureless…
She had entered a new realm of matter.
Lieserl. Lieserl! I know you can hear me; I’m monitoring the feedback loops, just listen to me. Your senses are overloaded; they are going to take time to adapt to this environment. That’s why you’re whited out. You’re not designed for this, damn it. But your processors will soon be able to interpret the neutrino flux, the temperature and density gradients, even some of the g-mode patterns, and construct a sensorium for you. You’ll be able to see again, Lieserl; just wait for the processors to cut in…
The voice continued, buzzing in her ear like some insect. It seemed irrelevant, remote. In this mush of plasma, she couldn’t even see her own body. She was suspended in isotropy and homogeneity — the same everywhere, and in every direction. It was as if this plasma sea, this radiative zone, were some immense sensory-deprivation bath arranged for her benefit.
But she wasn’t afraid. Her fear was gone now, washed away in the pearl-like light. The silence…
Damn it, Lieserl, I’m not going to lose you now! Listen to my voice. You’ve gone in there to find dark matter, not to lose your soul.
Lieserl, lost in whiteness, allowed the still, small voice to whisper into her head.
She dreamed of photinos.
Dark matter was the best candidate for aging the Sun.
Dark matter comprised all but one hundredth of the mass of the Universe; the visible matter — baryonic matter which made up stars, galaxies, people — was a frosting, a thin scattering across a dark sea.
The effects of dark matter had been obvious long before a single particle of the stuff had been detected by human physicists. The Milky Way galaxy itself was embedded in a flattened disc of dark matter, a hundred times the mass of its visible components. The stars of the Milky Way didn’t orbit its core, as they would in the absence of the dark matter; instead the galaxy turned as if it were a solid disc — the illuminated disc was like an immense toy, embedded in dark glass.
According to the Standard Model there was a knot of cold, dark matter at the heart of the Sun — perhaps at the heart of every star.
And so, Lieserl dreamed, perhaps it was dark matter, passing through fusing hydrogen like a dream of winter, which was causing the Sun to die.
Now, slowly, the isotropy bleached out of the world. There was a hint of color a pinkness, a greater warmth, its source lost in the clouds below her. At first she thought this must be some artifact of her own consciousness — an illusion concocted by her starved senses. The shading was smooth, without feature save for its gradual deepening, from the zenith of her sky to its deepest red at the nadir beneath her feet. But it remained in place around her, objectively real, even as she moved her head. It was out there, and it was sufficient to restore structure to the world — to give her a definite up and down.
She found herself sighing. She almost regretted the return of the external world; she could very quickly have grown accustomed to floating in nothingness.
Lieserl. Can you see that? What do you see?
“I see elephants playing basketball.”
Lieserl —
“I’m seeing the temperature gradient, aren’t I?”
Yes. It’s nice to have you back, girl.
The soft, cozy glow was the light of the fusion hell of the core, filtered through her babyish Virtual senses.
There was light here, she knew — or at least, there were photons: packets of X-ray energy working their way out from the core of the Sun, where they were created in billions of fusion flashes. If Lieserl could have followed the path of a single photon, she would see it move in a random, zigzag way, bouncing off charged particles as if in some subatomic game. The steps in the random walk traversed at the speed of light — were, on average, less than an inch long.
The temperature gradient in this part of the Sun was tiny. But it was real, and it was just sufficient to encourage a few of the zigzagging photons to work their way outwards to the surface, rather than inwards. But the paths were long — the average photon needed a thousand billion billion steps to reach the outer boundary of the radiative layer. The journey took ten million years — and because the photons moved at the speed of light, the paths themselves were ten million light-years long, wrapped over on themselves like immense lengths of crumpled ribbon.