Chapter 2. Drover
Milky Way Galaxy, Orion Spiral Arm, c. 68,700,000 years ago
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen die Götter selbst vergebens
(Against stupidity the Gods themselves struggle in vain.)
Friedrich Schiller—Jungfrau von Orleans
“Help me!”
The voice of Roland resounds among the mountainous stars. Merlin stirs from her brooding.
Too slow.
“Wake up, sleepyhead!” comes another cry. “What’s the matter with you?” It is Guinever, scintillating past. Merlin can only grunt in answer. She falls in behind.
Roland is a speck of brightness overwhelmed by the Drove. Some have broken loose from the main stream headed for a distant metal-rich nebula, tempted by a distraction closer to hand. It is a red dwarf in the Oort cloud of a nearby yellow sun. The red star is rank with rottenness. No wonder that some of the friskier outliers of the Drove are tempted. No wonder, either, that they drown the bleats of Roland. Pathetic though he is, Merlin thinks, one can hardly blame him.
Space rings with the calls of the Drovers, the gravitic keening of the Drove. Merlin, trying hard to concentrate, ravels space towards the melée. Guinever whips in a few of the more recreant Drove, while trying to console Roland.
“Some of us seem to have to do everything round here,” she chides. Merlin broadcasts contrition. She hopes it sounds genuine, given her preoccupation. The problem is bigger than poor Roland. Bigger than all of them.
And it can only get worse.
How can she stop them, forever, and she alone, when, right now, it will take her, and Guinever, and Roland, and whoever else they can rustle up, all their power and concentration to round up a few chancing strays?
Merlin gains on Guinever and Roland and sees that Dante and Elaine have joined the chase. But five of them are too few to corral the swarm now descending on the red dwarf, scattering comet-cloud debris like chaff.
In the end, the five Drovers can only hover, and gather, and wait, as the Drove warps the small star into nothingness, altering the gravitational balance of the space immediately around it.
There is little they can do to alter the flux of debris, now directing itself, slowly at first, towards the G-type dwarf less than two light-years away. The yellow star with that hopeful retinue of silicate-mantled planets, at least one of which has retained warmth and volatiles suitable for the emergence of life—life that must be cherished.
Guinever broadcasts anxiety and regret. Roland is shamefaced, but Guinever’s anger is spent. She knows that it’s not his fault. Dante is just numbed. He has seen this kind of thing too often, lately, to feel anything more than resignation. Only Elaine cries aloud, to no-one in particular, her howl of anguish causing barely a ripple in the void: “What’s wrong with them—and with us?”
Merlin had met the Drove Elders in an Xspace of her own choosing. They wanted her, they said, to feel comfortable. At the appointed coordinates she shimmered into being on a snowy hill-slope. Ahead of her and slightly above was a log cabin built on a platform of massive cut stones.
She was met at the door by a butler who helped her off with her ski-suit and directed her to a great salon. She made the usual vain attempt to rein the mass of long black hair from her face to better admire the view through the floor-to-ceiling picture windows running the length of the left-hand wall. At the far end of the salon, ahead of her, was an imposing fireplace. Logs crackled in the grate.
On either side, two men lounged on worn chesterfields, in the casual-but-smart way that only the truly prosperous and confident can lounge. One of the men looked old but fit, every inch the habitual skier. He rose to greet her, all senatorial smile, Argyll sweater and precisely pressed slacks. He broadcast such command that she felt herself stifling a small stir somewhere behind her ribcage. But she sensed that the real power lay with the balding man with the thick spectacles, conservative suit and dark tie: the man who did not get up, but who remained, frog-like and crumpled, in the other chesterfield.
“Merlin, it is good of you to come,” said the standing man. He offered a firm hand and she took it. She hoped her returning grasp didn’t give too much away. “I’m Solomon,” he said, “and my colleague here is Saturn.” The frog-like man smiled and nodded.
Solomon indicated a wing-backed leather chair facing the fire, between the chesterfields. He waved her to sit down, and offered her a drink.
“I took the liberty of choosing for you,” he said. “I think you need it, especially after that long walk through the snow.” She murmured a thank-you and took the glass. The brown liquid within gave off the intense odor of K-type dwarfs at the sticky end of the main sequence. She downed it in one swallow. Ease coursed through her.
“Islay,” said Solomon. “Works every time.”
“Thank you, it’s...”
“... purely medicinal, I know. I’m afraid we’ve not brought you here just to admire the view and enjoy a fine malt.”
“No, I…”
But Solomon had wandered off to regain his place on his chesterfield and, momentarily, his back was turned.
“No, Merlin, we want to ask you something. A favor.”
“Me?”
“Obviously, you.”
“But why not Guinever or Roland or Orfeo or Oliver or any of the others?” She regretted her outburst as soon as she’d made it. Solomon paused and turned, ever so slightly, to Saturn, who remained motionless.
“Let’s say that you look like the most likely prospect for—well, for what we have in mind. Now then, what’s your impression of the Drove, these days?” Merlin paused before answering and looked down at her hands, resting palms-upwards in her lap. The answer seemed so obvious that she wondered whether it was a trick question, but when she looked up, parting the curtain of hair that had fallen across her face as she thought, she saw that both men were looking at her intently, their expressions entirely sincere. Like they really wanted to know.
“It’s getting worse with every iteration,” she began. “The beasts are more and more—well—frisky. It’s all we can do to keep them on track. They are forever veering off to graze on stars or gas or whatever, sometimes parsecs off course, and they just get more defiant. Sometimes I think it’s just us, or just bad luck, or if the beasts have learned to try it on, but lately—well—it might sound impertinent, or lame, or...”
“No, go on,” reassured Solomon. “We must have no secrets here. You’re among friends, Merlin. This isn’t an inquisition.”
“Oh, well, all right, I’ll say it—that no matter how good we are, there just aren’t enough of us. I thought we were hard pressed before that—that—well, before Heloise and Beatrice left, and I remember that day well...”
“Don’t we all? Terrible.”
“But after that, when things were rough, I asked Uther and Enid what things were like when they were younger, and...”
“Your fore-parents, I believe?”
“Yes. And instead of saying that we youngsters never knew when we were born, or some such, they simply sighed and said that we had it very much harder than they ever did. Yes, that’s what they said—very much harder.”
Her words dropped into a silence relieved only by the crack of a log in the grate. At last, Solomon spoke.
“Thank you, Merlin, for being so candid,” he said. “Sad to say, though, you are absolutely right. With every age that passes our numbers dwindle, and my fear—our fear—is that we’ll reach the point when we can no longer restrain the Drove. It could be that we’ve already gone beyond that point.” The silence then was as of the chasms beyond dimensionality, before and after the Continuum, seeping in, and which, more than any other single thing, filled the minds of the Drovers with terror.
“But... what then?”
“That, my dear, is a question we all ask. All of us of a certain age, that is. But we never dare answer. You are younger, however. Bolder, perha
ps? Maybe you should like to do that for us?” All of a sudden she felt that she was a little girl again, gamboling through the voids, careless as she played on the flukes of her fore-parents' recursive forms, the responsibilities of adulthood not even a smudge on a flawless horizon.
“Well, I suppose, that if we were to go on like this, we’d just—eventually—disappear, and then... ”
“And... then?”
“The Drove would just eat, and eat, until they’d consumed… the Universe.”
“That’s correct. Well done, Merlin. It’s often very hard to voice the answer that everyone knows, but nobody wants to articulate.”
Despite the fire, she felt a chill in the air grow.
“But, Merlin,” Solomon continued, “why in all the dimensions of the Universe should it matter?” He rose and paced before the fire, his hands waving in time with his discourse.
“If, as we believe, the Drove was created as a kind of by-product of the Big Bang—a swirl of knots and eddies in space-time, if you will—why should they not just be left to get on with it? Perhaps they are part of the natural order of the Universe—agents of its death as well as products of its birth? Why should we seek to restrain them, going to such enormous efforts to steer them, to govern if not to hold back their remorselessly entropic progress, to...”
“Life,” she said.
Solomon stopped then, and turned towards her.
“Go on, Merlin. Please, go on.”
"It's just—well, it’s often occurred to me—to all of us, really—why we’re doing this at all. Steering the Drove, that is, even though we never speak of it: that there’s got to be more, hasn’t there? I mean, it’s not just about guiding the Drove. It’s about choices. Choices about where to steer the Drove, what we can allow the beasts to consume, and what we can’t. And maybe I’ve just got it, but we always keep the Drove well clear of certain main-sequence stars. Stars with planets. Planets that might engender life-forms of baryonic matter.”
Solomon looked directly at her: she met his gaze. Solomon’s next words were directed not to her, but to Saturn.
“See? I told you she was good.”
The implied subterfuge confused her. “Good? Why? What for? It’s always seemed obvious—about avoiding planets, and life—so obvious that nobody actually makes the point, it’s that obvious... isn’t it?”
“Yes, Merlin, quite right. So obvious that almost nobody actually makes the connection. You’d be surprised how few people actually do, you know. Very surprised. In fact, you’re the first in your cohort we’ve met who’s done so. But now you’ve passed that hurdle, you need to ask yourself another question. A deeper one.”
“About... life?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I guess that if we’re letting it grow, making sure that the likeliest stars are not consumed, then it’s got something to do with the Drove, to... to…”
She stopped dead. A thought flashed through her mind like an electric arc. “It’s all about finding some new life-form to take over. To herd the Drove. Or to manage it, somehow. When… well, for when we’ve all gone.”
The silence was palpable. Solomon strode over to her and crouched down before her, so that she could meet his eyes without her having to look up.
“Not to herd the Drove, Merlin. To destroy it.”
“But that’s… that’s…”
“Yes, I know,” said Solomon, “it runs against everything we live for, against everything we know. Some might even call it heresy. But it’s more than a matter of our eventual extinction. The fact is that the Drove is increasing. It’s a feature of the Universe that’s only become clear to us quite recently. Let’s just say it’s to do with the balance of dark energy and a slow, secular change in Planck’s constant. We’re not sure how, let alone why. You may not really be aware of it yet, as you can only really deal with it piecemeal, most of the time, given that it’s so spread out. It’s there, all the same, and it’s that, more than anything, that explains why you and the others are having such a tough time of it. We’ve run some projections—that’s Saturn and me, and some of the other elders. And there’ll come a time when we’ll simply be overwhelmed.”
“When? How?”
“Don’t be alarmed. It’s still long away yet, even accounting for reasonable error. But that’s no good reason for not making preparations now. Not just to continue to run the Drove, but to remove it. To remove its threat.”
“But what difference will it make, whether the Drove wins out, sooner rather than later?”
"It's a fair point. Of course it probably doesn’t matter. But we, the Elders, have conceived an objection to a victory for the Drove that comes too early. Put simply, it's aesthetic. If the Drove wins too soon, it will prevent this iteration of the Continuum reaching... how would one put it?” Solomon turned to Saturn who now made the first of what would be only two spoken contributions to the meeting. His voice, when it came, sounded lively and rounded.
“Its... ‘fullness’?”
“Thank you, Saturn, I think that puts it very well. 'Fullness'. And, that being the case, we feel we have a duty to protect nascent life from this eventual threat. And there's another question you should ask. It's the decider, if you like. And that question is this—where did we come from?”
For a short spell Merlin was nonplussed. The effect of all these cosmic revelations, dealt at such speed, was one of numbing stupefaction. But realization dawned. She came to herself, seated in a magnificent stillness.
“We came from life, from baryonic matter—from a planet.”
“Indeed, Merlin: from some proverbial warm little pond. It's easy to forget that, sometimes, now that we've been transfigured into this dimensionality, imprinted into the fabric of the Continuum. So, when you think about it, that’s a good reason for steering the Drove away from planets. One never knows from which puddle the next generation of Drovers might crawl—Drovers that might come to our aid.”
“But where, Solomon? Where was this planet of our... birth? And what were we once like?”
“Ah, Merlin, who knows? If there was ever such knowledge, it is now lost. And perhaps it is better so. After all, the planet’s star might have gone nova long since. It might even have been in a different Continuum from the one we presently inhabit. There can be no space, now—no time—for regrets. And, in any case, we must move on. Our turn has come to find a species we can raise. But with a difference. This species will not simply continue what we do, though: we must create a race of destroyers.”
“But why can’t we simply destroy them ourselves?”
Solomon turned to the drinks cabinet behind Saturns’s chesterfield, and poured three more shots of Islay. “If I might say so, that you can even conceive of such a question illustrates your maturity," he said. "It shows that you can—how would you put it, Saturn?”
“‘Think outside the box?’”
“Exactly so. So, Merlin, to answer you—again, it's largely a matter of aesthetics,” he continued, handing round the heavy tumblers—“who wants to be the first to destroy the objects of their life’s work, not to mention the work of their entire species? As I said, it’s practically a heresy. And even if you overcame that one, how would you go about committing such... such genocide? I mean, practically? The Drove are creatures of a similar order to ourselves—M-dimensional relativistic manifolds, wrinkles in space-time—but much more powerful, if only of trifling intelligence. And our task has always been to nurture, not to kill. The means for destruction must be built into this new generation of creatures, right from the beginning.
“What beats me, frankly, is how they might be destroyed without altering the fundamental connectivity—the topological order, if you will—of the Continuum itself, and perhaps destroying that, too. Throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. I'm afraid that's a circle we Elders have never quite managed to square. A problem for nimbler intellects than ours, perhaps. Cheers!”
Merlin saw, as she lowered her glas
s, that Solomon and Saturn had lowered theirs, too, and now looked at her, expectantly.
“Why me?”
Silence, for an interval that could have been moments, or millennia. She saw Solomon, and Saturn, and the rest of the room—the chesterfields, the fireplace, the winter landscape—as if they were at some great distance.
“That, Merlin, is the most interesting question of all. And one to which neither myself nor Saturn nor anyone else has any convincing, logical answer. Except to say that we just know it. It’s you. Your task. You have to find a way.”
“But where? How? How can I even begin?”
“I’m afraid we have little more idea than you do. We’ll try—of course, we’ll try—to offer us much help and support as we can,” said Solomon, “and we do have at least one clue.”
“You... do?”
“It’s here, now. All around you.”
Merlin looked up, imploringly, at Solomon. His expression was warm. Laugh-lines creased the borders of his mouth, softening the hardness of his eyes.
“It’s this Xspace, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Merlin, it is. Xspaces don’t just pop up randomly. They have to have internal coherence. To even exist, an Xspace has to have what you might call a ‘back-story’. After all, what explains these chesterfields? This rather nice rug? This entirely splendid 22-year-old scotch? The clothes we're all wearing? This house? Even the view—this… well, this planetary prospect? And, most of all, the forms we now inhabit? They are more real than just illusions, you know.
And the minds of the forms we inhabit? Such engaging clutter! All that stuff about skiing and 'warm little ponds'? Now where did all that come from?” Merlin was now quite unable to decide whether the Elder’s question was rhetorical. In any event, she was all wrung out. She decided to let him answer it himself. “From you, Merlin—from you. You might not have realized it, but you created this Xspace, and everything in it. Everything. I congratulate—we congratulate you, on your good taste. Especially the scotch.”
Merlin had broken through her local credibility barrier. All she could now do was laugh. But this did not appear to be a joke. Solomon wasn’t laughing. Neither was Saturn. Her laugh stuttered and stopped.
“But still, why?”
“Look at it this way. It’s the way we’re made. To be sure, we live most of our lives in a fairly linear way, starting at the beginning, chasing the Drove, and fading out somewhere else, later. But we can do more than that. You know this. We are connected, you and me, and Saturn here, and all your young friends, to much else that is in the Continuum. Past, present—and future. Your Xspace gives us the best clue for your search for a suitable candidate. Your quest, if you will, for life. Really, it can only be a matter of instinct.”
Solomon raised his glass. The light of a setting, yellow sun sparkled in its brown depths. “It’s just a hunch. To be honest, Merlin, it's the best we have."