“The Stasis isn’t about historicity,” said Yarrow. “That might be the organization’s raison d’être, but the raw truth of the matter is that the Stasis is about power. Like any organization, it lives and grows for itself, not for the task with which it is charged. The governing committee – it’s very sad. But it’s been like this as long as there’s been a Stasis.”
“We rescued you because we specifically want you – my first iteration, or as near to it as we’ve been able to get, give or take the assassination ambush in Carnegra,” said the man on the throne. “We need your help to cut us free from the dead hand of history.”
“But what—” Pierce lowered his hands to touch his belly. “My phone,” he said slowly. “It’s damaged, but you could have repaired it. It’s not there anymore, is it?”
Yarrow nodded slowly. “Can you tell me why?” she asked.
RESEEDING
A Brief Alternate History of the Universe
SLIDE 1.
Our solar system under the Stasis, first epoch.
Continents slide and drift, scurrying and scraping across the surface of the mantle. Lights flicker around the coastlines, strobing on and off in kiloyear cycles as civilizations rise and fall. In space, the swarm of orbital-momentum-transfer robots built from the bones of Ceres begin to cycle in and out, slowly pumping energy downwell to the Earth to drag it farther from the slowly brightening sun.
SLIDE 2.
Snapshot: something unusual is happening.
We zoom in on a ten-thousand-year slice, an eyeblink flicker of geological time. For millions of years beforehand, the Earth was quiet, its continents fallen dark in the wake of a huge burping hiccup of magma that flooded from the junction of the Cocos and Nazca continental plates. But now the lights are back, jewels sprinkled across the nighttime hemispheres of unfamiliar continents. Unusually, they aren’t confined to the surface – three diamond necklaces ring the planet in glory, girdling the equator in geosynchronous orbit. And floating beyond them, at the L1 Lagrange point betwixt Earth and Luna, sits the anomalous glowing maw of an unusually large timegate.
The natives appear to be restless …
SLIDE 3.
A slow slide of viewpoint out to Jupiter orbit shows that the anomaly is spreading. Already some of the smaller Jovian moons are missing; Thebe and Amalthea have vanished, and something appears to be eating Himalea. A metallic cloud of smaller objects swarms in orbit around Europa, pinpricks of light speckling their surface.
Meanwhile, the shoals of momentum-transfer bodies are thinning, their simple design replaced by numerous perversions of form and purpose. Still powered by light sails, the new vehicles carry exotic machines for harvesting energy from the solar wind and storing it as antimatter. Shuttles move among them like ants amidst an aphid farm, harvesting and storing their largesse as they swing out to Jupiter before dropping back in toward Mercury.
Some of the hundreds of metal moons that orbit Europa are glowing at infrared wavelengths, their temperature suspiciously close to three hundred degrees Kelvin. Against the planetary measure of the solar system they are tiny – little bigger than the moons of Mars. But they’re among the largest engineered structures ever built by the dreaming apes; vaster than cities and more massive than pyramids. And soon they will start to move.
SLIDE 4.
Three thousand years pass.
Earth lies dark and unpopulated once more, for humanity – as always – has gone extinct. Of the great works in Jupiter orbit few traces remain. The great ships have gone, the shipyards have long since been deorbited into the swirling chaos of the gas giant’s atmosphere, and the malformed, warped transfer bodies have been cannibalized and restored to their original purpose.
Five small moons have disappeared, and slowly healing gouges show the sites of huge mining works on Io and Europa, but by the time the Stasis reseed Earth (two-thirds of a million years hence) even the slow resurfacing of Europa’s icy caul will have obscured the signs of industry. It may be thousands of years after that before anybody notices.
SLIDE 5.
Twenty million years pass, and the galaxy slowly lights up with a glare of coherent light, waste energy from the communications traffic between the inhabited worlds.
The first generation colonies have long since guttered into senescence and extinction; so have the third and fourth generations. Of the first generation, barely one in five prospered – but that was sufficient. Those that live spawn prolifically. Planets are common, rocky terrestrial bodies far from rare, and even some of the more exotic types (water giants, tide-locked rocky giants in orbit around red dwarfs, and others) are amenable to human purpose. Where no planets are available, life is harder, prone to sudden extinction events: nobody survives the collapse of civilization aboard a space colony. But the tools and technologies of terraforming are well-known, and best practice, of a kind, develops. Many of the dwellers have adapted to their new habitats so well that they’re barely recognizable as primates anymore, or even mammals.
SLIDE 6.
Three billion years pass.
Two huge, glittering clouds of sentience fall through each other, a magnificently coordinated flypast of fleets of worlds meshing across the endless void. Shock waves thunder through the gas clouds, and millions of massive, short-lived new stars ignite and detonate like firecrackers. The starburst is indeed enormous. But for the most part, the inhabited worlds are safe: swarms of momentum-transfer robots, their numbers uncountable, work for millions of years ahead of and behind the event to direct the closest encounters. Emergent flocking rules and careful plans laid far in advance have steered colonies clear of the high-risk territories, marshaling brown dwarfs as dampers and buffers to redirect the tearaway suns – and both galaxies are talking to each other, for the expanding sphere of sentience now encompasses the entire Local Group.
Earth is no longer inhabited in this epoch; but the precious timegate remains, an oracular hub embedded in a cluster of exotic artificial worlds, conducting and orchestrating the dance of worlds.
There are now a hundred million civilizations within the expanding bubble of intelligence, each with an average population of billions. They are already within an order of magnitude of the Stasis’s ultimate population, and they are barely a thousandth of its age. The universe, it appears, has started to wake up.
SLIDE 7.
The crystal ball is clouded …
The Kindest Lies
They walked along a twisting path between walls of shrubs and creepers, and a few short trees, growing from mounds of damp-smelling soil. The path appeared to be of old sandstone, shot through with seams of a milky rock like calcite: appearances were deceptive.
“You played me like a flute,” said Pierce. He held his hands behind his back, as was his wont, keeping an arm’s reach aside from her.
“I did not!” Her denial was more in hurt than in anger. “I didn’t know about this until he, you, recruited me.” Her boot scuffed a rock leaning like a rotten tooth from the side of a herbaceous border: tiny insects scuttled from her toes, unnoticed. “I was still in training. Like you, when you were tapped for, for other things.”
They walked in silence for a minute, uphill and around a winding corner, then down a flight of steps cut into the side of a low hill.
“If this is all simply an internal adjustment, why doesn’t Internal Affairs shut everything down?” he asked. “They must know who is involved…”
“They don’t.” She shook her head. “When you call in a request for a timegate, your phone doesn’t say, ‘By the way, this iteration of Pierce is a member of the Opposition.’ All of us were compliant – once. If they catch us, they can backtrack along our history and undo the circumstances that led to our descent into dissidence; and sometimes we can catch and isolate them, put them in an environment where doubt flourishes. If they started unmaking every agent suspected of harboring disloyal thoughts, it would trigger a witch hunt that would tear Stasis apart: we’re not the kind who’d go quietly. Hence their insistence on control, alienation from family and other fixed reference points, complicity in shared atrocity. They aim to stifle disloyal thoughts before the first germination.”