Spindown
by Wolf Read
You cannot step twice in the same river, for fresh waters are Pever flowing upon you.
Illustration by Wolf Read
At the time the two neutron stars were first spotted, when humanity was young, they were far apart.
Now, four hundred and thirty million years later, the dense spheroids of matter almost touched, and humanity was old.
Ashley, standing in the clear dome room that served as his bridge, looked at an airborne hologram of Felicity’s starship: a circle of spheres attached to a superconducting ring that generated a powerful magnetic field. Nearly two astronomical units ahead of Ashley, Felicity raced toward the neutron stars at near c, under the constant acceleration of a powerful mass beam that pushed against her magnetic field.
Felicity’s determination to stop the merger left a frown on his face. She’d be killed in the collision. If he had the authentic body of one of his long ago ancestors—people who had little control of their emotions—he guessed he would have balled his fists in frustration by now, or done something more dramatic. There was little he could do to prevent Felicity from succeeding, standing isolated in his own starship, Zephyr, riding on another mass beam with a vector that would take him past the two dense stars. And even if he could stop Felicity by force, he’d probably still lose his longest love, for he’d be violating her personal freedom, and he doubted their relationship would survive that emotional cataclysm.
Zephyr’s AI told him much about neutron stars during the long transit from his last stop. The tiny pair of suns, originally designated PSR B1913+16, was now called Spindown. Spindown completed almost two galactic orbits since it was first identified from ancient Earth. During Spindown’s long revolutions, as the stars radiated their last heat—residual energy from the supemovae that formed them—and dimmed to blackness, the Earth’s land masses crunched into a supercontinent, and fragmented again. Geological processes also erased most signs of the primitive civilization that had existed during Spindown’s discovery. Even the classes of plants and animals that lived during the dawn of humanity were gone, replaced by a whole new cast that emerged from the ashes of a neutron star merger two hundred and thirty-eight million years after Spindown had been detected. That violent stellar collision happened thirteen hundred light-years from the Earth, yet the planet was bathed in enough high energy cosmic rays to produce a lethal flux of muons at the surface, deep under water, and even underground, causing the largest extinction since the Permian. Now it was Spin-down’s turn for such brilliance.
“How much time have we got?” Ashley asked Zephyr as he sat down in the room’s central chair.
“She’ll hit the less massive neutron star in twenty-five minutes,” Zephyr reported.
“Felicity,” he called to the ceiling, a half-sphere of transparent composite looking out into the blackness of space, a familiar blank dark from many near light-speed voyages. Felicity refused to show her hologram. He filled in the blankness by imagining the body Felicity “wore” when they first met, back when she called herself Sage. With the mindlink, he could have made his own hologram, based on his memory of Felicity, but he respected her decision not to be seen. “Felicity,” he repeated, “you don’t need to do this.” How many times had he said those words over the hundreds of light-years they had traveled?
He sat silently as the light-speed message covered the distance between them. Even with distance dilation reducing the separation between Felicity and him to about a tenth of an AU in his reference frame, the wait seemed to last forever. Would she even respond?
“Yes, Trajan—” Felicity stumbled on one of his old names, one he discarded millions of years ago for a title randomly selected from the computer database, “Ashley. Anclaje’s only two hundred light-years away from the neutron stars. Those creatures we found when we first met, they’ve reached sentience now. There are cities growing on Medio! You saw them!”
He expected the answer. He was sure that she anticipated his reply. “It is not our purpose to interfere with the cycles of Nature.”
He quickly regretted the lecturing, and had a minute and a half to let himself feel bad as his message went out to and her reply came back.
Felicity’s reply finally arrived. “Those people have been here for just a few million years! Give them a chance!”
“They’ve had their chance, Felicity. Now they must pass on. A new generation of organisms more capable of surviving this kind of calamity will arise, and maybe live for the next hundred million.” “But they’re so beautiful, so fresh, new.”
With his hand, he brushed back his hair in frustration: he allowed the emotion, deciding that maybe it could help. It didn’t.
He stared at his palm and contemplated his recent decision to have a human body again. He’d taken many different forms during his sixty-million-year life—granted most of that time was aboard galaxyships traveling near c, so he hadn’t experienced all those years subjectively, but he’d certainly had enough time to alternate between human, robot, xenopod, what-have-you on thousands of occasions. He was human when he met Felicity for the first time, as was she. It seemed appropriate to live out what seemed like her last moments in a similar fashion.
“Yes,” Ashley finally said to her, “but change is the only constant in the universe…” He let the words trail, for he knew she knew that. Why, Felicity? Why go rogue? The answer, he finally admitted to himself, was there even when they met some fifteen million years ago, back when he called himself Trajan, and he knew Felicity as Sage…
The starship’s observation room was beginning to feel a bit stuffy to Trajan. One more look, and he’d leave, find somewhere with few people. He stepped through the energetic crowd, some of whom danced to a strange song older than a geologic epoch. He glanced out the room’s huge window, and studied three blue-white half disks hanging among the stars. They were the watery, life-bearing moons of Anclaje, a banded Jovian world given a name from a language that he’d never heard of, one that almost certainly hadn’t been used regularly since humanity’s first interstellar journeys. The mindlink had informed him that the name meant “anchorage.”
Gentle flashing out of the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he glanced to his right to see that it was the light of the moons glittering in someone’s eyes. A woman. In the dim illumination, he made out waist-length dark hair, with eyes to match, a lean figure, but with enough womanly curves to draw out his look. He’d had his share of women-friends in his long life, and wasn’t in the mood to deal with any kind of relationship at the moment, even if it ended up being a simple friendly conversation.
He turned to leave, but something about her made him hesitate. She seemed to be studying the moons, wearing a slight frown on her face, as if she were contemplating something about them that saddened her.
She glanced at him, and looked quickly away, back to the moons of Anclaje.
I’ve been spotted now, he thought. No more excuses. He walked past some swinging couples, and said, “Hello, my name’s Trajan.”
Looking up at him—he was a good quarter meter taller than she—she said, “I’m Sage.” She looked away again, at her feet. Shy.
Deciding that a little bit of humor might put her at ease, he said, “Let me guess: those moons brought you on this trip, right?”
She gave him a slight smile. Her eyes gleamed under the moonlight. “Th-that’s not a difficult deduction. It’s why we’re all here!”