But still — hearing voices? What in Lethe is going on inside my head?
“…Lots of chambers,” Louise said a little breathlessly. “They are boxes, carved out of the ice and plated over with metal and plastic. A bit cramped… There is air here, but foul; I won’t be breaking my suit seal. This was definitely a human colony, Spinner. But it’s all — neat. Tidy; abandoned in an orderly way.
“I guess they took a long time to die. They had time to clear up after themselves — to bury their dead, maybe, even, as they withdrew. I guess they went deeper as their numbers dwindled, toward the center of the world… It’s kind of dignified, don’t you think? There are no signs of panic, or conflict. I wonder how we would behave, in the same circumstance. Spinner, I’m going on now.”
Later: “I’m in a deeper layer of chambers. I think I’ve found the source of the signal.” She was silent for a while. Then, “They sure built this to last.”
“Well, they got that right.”
“I still can’t identify what’s powering it… I guess one of the ship’s GUTdrive plants on the surface. I think they used nanobots to maintain the beacon, Spinner. Maybe they adapted AS nanobots from their medical stores.” Her tone of voice changed, subtly, and Spinner imagined her smiling. “They were determined to enable this to survive. But it’s been millions of years… and the ’bots have made a few cumulative mistakes. The damn thing looks as if it’s melted, Spinner. But it’s still pumping out its signal, so we can’t criticize too much…”
“Louise,” Spinner asked slowly, “why were these people here? What were they trying to do?”
Louise thought for a while. “Spinner, I think they were trying to escape.”
This ice-world was typical of the small, subplanetary bodies which could once have been found throughout the Solar System, Louise said, shepherded into orbital clusters by the major planets.
“But,” Louise said, “the orbits of many of those little bodies were only semi-stable. Their orbits were intrinsically chaotic, you see… That means, over a long enough time period the minor bodies could move out of their stable pathways. They could even fall into the gravity wells of the major planets and be flung out of the System altogether. It’s a form of evaporation — an evaporation of worlds and moons out of stellar systems. In fact, over a long enough scale — and I’m talking tens of billions of years now — the same thing would happen to the major planets too — and to stars, which could evaporate out of their parent galaxies… If,” she went on sourly, “they had ever been given the chance.”
“So you think this little world just evaporated away from Sol, gravitationally?”
“No… not necessarily.”
Louise speculated about the closing stages of the Xeelee conflicts. She imagined mankind trapped within its home System, sliding toward the final defeat. Toward the end, even communication between the worlds might have broken down. Humanity would have been reduced to isolated pockets, cowering under the Xeelee onslaughts.
But some might have seen a way out — a way to try to escape the final investing of the System by the Xeelee.
Louise said, “Imagine this little worldlet following its semi-stable path — say, between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. It wouldn’t have taken much to push it far enough out of its orbit to bring on orbital instability. And once equilibrium was lost, the drift away from the standard orbital elements could have been quite rapid — say, within a few orbits — and the decay wouldn’t have required any further deliberate — and observable — impulses, perhaps.”
Silently, all but invisibly to anyone watching, the little world, with its precious cargo of cowering, fearful humans, had looped through its increasingly perturbed orbit, falling at last — after many orbits, perhaps covering centuries — into the gravitational field of one of the major planets.
Then, finally, the worldlet was slingshot out of the Solar System.
“If they’d got it right,” Louise said, “maybe it would have been a viable plan. If. These people were going to the stars, by the lowest-tech way you can imagine. It would have taken tens of thousands of years to get to even the nearest star — but so what? They had tens of thousands of years to play with, thanks to AS — or the equivalent they’d developed by then. And locked up in the ice of the worldlet there was probably as much water as in the whole of the Atlantic Ocean… Going to the stars in an ice moon was certainly a better chance than staying here to be creamed by the Xeelee with the rest — it was a viable way to get out of all this, all but undetectable.
“The scheme obviously attracted support. You can see the bits of ships, littering the surface… People must have fled here, quietly, from all over the collapsing System. The mission was a beacon of hope, I guess.
“But — ”
“But what?”
“But they got it wrong.
“I’m going to go deeper now, Spinner.”
“Be careful, Louise.”
There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of Louise’s shallow breath. Spinner filled her faceplate once more with cool, green leaf-light and stared into it, trying not to imagine what Louise was finding, down there inside the little tomb-world.
At length, Louise said: “Well, that’s it. I guess I’m here: the last place they occupied… the one place they couldn’t tidy up after themselves.”
Spinner stared into green emptiness. “What can you see?”
“Abandoned clothes.” Hesitation. “Dust everywhere. No bones, Spinner; no crumbling corpses… you can put your imagination away.”
After five megayears, there would only be dust, Spinner thought: a final cloud, of flakes of bone and crumbled flesh, settling slowly.
“If they left records, I can’t find them,” Louise said. She sounded as if she were trying to be unconcerned — to maintain control — but Spinner thought she could hear fragility in that level voice. “Perhaps there’s something in the electronics. But that would take years of data mining to dig out, even if we could restore the power. And we’re probably looking at technology a hundred thousand years beyond ours anyway…”
“Louise, there’s nothing you can do in there. I think you should come out.”
“…Yes. I guess you’re right, Spinner-of-Rope. We don’t have time for this.”
Spinner thought she heard relief in Louise’s tone.
The little Northern pod clambered up from the worldlet’s shallow gravity well, toward the Xeelee craft.
Louise, safe inside her life-lounge, said: “They couldn’t control the slingshot well enough. Or maybe the Xeelee interfered with their plans.
“They weren’t thrown out of the System as they’d planned, on an open-ended hyperbolic trajectory; instead they were put into this wide, and deadly, elliptical orbit — an orbit which was closed, taking them nowhere, very slowly.
“I guess they tried to stick it out. Well, they’d broken up their ships; they had no choice. Maybe if we had time for a proper archaeological study here we could work out how long they lasted. Who knows? Hundreds of thousands of years? Maybe they were hoping for rescue, for all that time, from some brave new future when humans had thrown out the Xeelee once more.
“But it was a future that never came.
“By the time they set up their beacon, their final plea for help, they must have known they were through — and that there was nobody to come to their aid.”