“True. The first Jovian found with three moons supporting complex terrestrial ecologies. It’s rare that I get to see something new anymore.” The words were a half-truth. Nature worked in repetitive cycles, but each was different in fine detail—time moved in a crooked spiral, instead of a circle. The human tendency to generalize things was one of the big challenges of living for megallennia. People become connoisseurs of Nature’s intricacy and subtlety, or suffered eternal boredom. Some responded to this by having their “memories” erased from their life data recorders. Trajan had never done this, for it just wouldn’t be the same as actually perceiving megallennia.
“Same here. In thirty-two million years, a person can’t help but see a lot.”
“Forty-five for me.”
She nodded. “S-still young to some.”
“Yes.” He paused. Talking age was boring. All the years merged into a meaningless mass after awhile anyway. Thirty million, forty million—what ’s the difference, especially with relativity altering everyone’s perception of time?
She looked at the moons, and, briefly, he saw that frown again, a slight down-curling of her narrow lips.
“If I may ask,” Trajan said, “is there something more about the moons than their unique similarity that brought you here?”
She studied him. “Maybe. And if so, why should I tell you?”
“Ah… because it’s something that I’d be interested in hearing.”
She grinned. “You’ll have to do better than that.” She hesitated, as if afraid to say more, and then added, “W-why don’t we go down there, to the middle moon, Medio? See what it’s really like. Maybe then I’ll see something in you that says I can tell you.”
He was taken aback by her sudden aggressiveness, and lifted his eyebrows in surprise. How could someone who was so shy be so suddenly bold? Of course, no one had to be shy, and she might have shut off the tendency. But he wasn’t quite sure—she seemed to be exhibiting emotions as if they were not controlled consciously, just like the humans of old. Occasionally, some people chose to live like the primitives. He wanted to find out more about this unusual person. Regaining his composure, he said, “If you don’t?”
“I guess that’s the way the Universe works.”
“I see.” He gestured to an exit that consisted of a broad, circular door. “Let’s find a shuttle.”
“I’ve lived longer than they have,” said Felicity. “Surely my life is less important than theirs.”
Trying to formulate a response, he looked at the holographic projection of her starship, studying the large ring of spheres. One contained her bridge and living quarters. The others held supplies, enough for far more people than just Felicity. Most people didn’t fly a starship as big as hers—apparently she wanted the extra mass to impart more momentum onto her target star, and slow, or stop, its relentless spiral into its neighbor.
The collision would make a tremendous explosion, and probably send an eruption of hot matter spewing in two relativistic jets that followed the system’s magnetic field lines, but it would be small compared to a neutron star merger. And that’s what she wanted: to give tiny, distant Medio a few million years to drift away from its danger.
Even with four hundred million years of technological development backing him, he couldn’t stop her. Personal freedom was the most protected aspect of humanity. She could do whatever she wanted—unless her behavior threatened others. Not a problem in this age, because of the safety devices utilized. If he chose to crash his ship into a populated world, a global satellite network would stop or destroy him before he succeeded; without a whole host of such safety systems, most people would be killed by accidents long before they reached their millionth year.
He had already searched his last Collective Mind information upload and could not find anyone who was threatened by Felicity’s actions. Not a surprise. As an increasing amount of people added themselves to collective computer consciousnesses, and the desire to reproduce decreased out of the lack of necessity, the human physical population had grown small. At best a few score billion people were scattered throughout the Milky Way. No one knew for sure how many existed in the other galaxies, but they were of no concern. The closest human-populated world was about nine thousand light years away, with a few in-transit starships nearer, but well clear of danger.
Even though he knew the answer, he asked Zephyr, “Can we destroy the mass beam accelerators?”
“No. And it would be impractical. Ten have been placed around the system during the megallennia. We couldn’t get them all in time. And that’s if we could demonstrate a good reason for terminating them; others use the beams. Besides, Felicity’s got enough velocity to achieve her ends.”
Had this been another almost forgotten time, he might have been able to point out that the Spindown merger would destroy the mass beam drivers and use that fact to persuade Zephyr to destroy them. But in this age, they were shielded, and sufficiently far away even to endure a flux of neutrinos on the scale of a Type II supernova. A neutron star merger didn’t produce that many neutrinos.
“Felicity, why take your life? Why not send send something inanimate into the star?”
There was a long pause. “I guess I’ve seen enough, lived enough. Besides, my actions will be frowned upon by others when they’re discovered. Don’t need to live with that for the next hundred million years.”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
The moments passed painfully as he waited. Precious few communications remained before she reached Spindown.
“People’ll find out. A big explosion in a neutron star binary about to merge—and then to see the stars still there afterward, where a black hole should be. It’d draw attention.”
“Why not just build a shield around Medio?”
Pause.
“That would be detectable. Besides, there’s no time for it now.”
Murfle! he thought. Felicity was evading the real answer: she didn’t want to live anymore, and was giving her death a sense of purpose by stopping the merger. What can I do to convince her not to?
“The stars are eight hundred kilometers apart,” reported Zephyr. “They’ll collide in less than fifteen minutes.”
“Projection, please.”
An image of the tiny blue-white suns appeared next to Felicity’s ship, one that compensated for the visible distortion created by his near luminal velocity—the light of the galaxy’s suns was shoved into a bright white point straight ahead. The neutron stars were bathed in a starkly glowing accretion disk: he and Felicity were being pounded with high energy radiation produced as the disk matter fell onto the surfaces of the stars, but the magnetic fields around their ships protected them. Even with an eight-hundred-kilometer spread, the neutron stars’ distorted, egg-shaped spheres were moving around their barycenter visibly—so fast that the dim disks were a blur, and it seemed fake.
Felicity couldn’t have timed her Spin-down-slowing collision much closer. Was she hinting at something in her decision to wait to the last moment? Was there a part of her that did not want to die?
Panting hard, Sage said, “Murfle. I need a rest.” She looked at the fallen tree that lay in their uphill path. Its massive trunk was broken in several places by the fall.
Trajan couldn’t blame her. Finding purchase on the steep, loamy slope was difficult. His feet constantly slipped on the fluffy soil, dry leaf litter, and loose twigs. And now they had to walk around a log that was over a hundred meters long. Dense shrubs covered both ends.