And yet somehow, MacReady stayed in charge. Even after the world discovered the evidence I’d planted; even after it decided that MacReady was one of those things, locked him out to die in the storm, attacked him with fire and axes when he fought his way back inside. Somehow MacReady always had the gun, always had the flamethrower, always had the dynamite and the willingness to take out the whole damn camp if need be. Clarke was the last to try and stop him; MacReady shot him through the tumor.
Kill spot.
But when Norris split into pieces, each scuttling instinctively for its own life, MacReady was the one to put them back together.
I was so sure of myself when he talked about his test. He tied up all the biomass—tied me up, more times than he knew—and I almost felt a kind of pity as he spoke. He forced Windows to cut us all, to take a little blood from each. He heated the tip of a metal wire until it glowed and he spoke of pieces small enough to give themselves away, pieces that embodied instinct but no intelligence, no self-control. MacReady had watched Norris in dissolution, and he had decided: men’s blood would not react to the application of heat. Mine would break ranks when provoked.
Of course he thought that. These offshoots had forgotten that they could change.
I wondered how the world would react when every piece of biomass in the room was revealed as a shapeshifter, when MacReady’s small experiment ripped the façade from the greater one and forced these twisted fragments to confront the truth. Would the world awaken from its long amnesia, finally remember that it lived and breathed and changed like everything else? Or was it too far gone—would MacReady simply burn each protesting offshoot in turn as its blood turned traitor?
I couldn’t believe it when MacReady plunged the hot wire into Windows’s blood and nothing happened. Some kind of trick, I thought. And then MacReady’s blood passed the test, and Clarke’s.
Copper’s didn’t. The needle went in and Copper’s blood shivered just a little in its dish. I barely saw it myself; the men didn’t react at all. If they even noticed, they must have attributed it to the trembling of MacReady’s own hand. They thought the test was a crock of shit anyway. Being Childs, I even said as much.
Because it was too astonishing, too terrifying, to admit that it wasn’t.
Being Childs, I knew there was hope. Blood is not soul: I may control the motor systems but assimilation takes time. If Copper’s blood was raw enough to pass muster than it would be hours before I had anything to fear from this test; I’d been Childs for even less time.
But I was also Palmer, I’d been Palmer for days. Every last cell of that biomass had been assimilated; there was nothing of the original left.
When Palmer’s blood screamed and leapt away from MacReady’s needle, there was nothing I could do but blend in.
I have been wrong about everything.
Starvation. Experiment. Illness. All my speculation, all the theories I invoked to explain this place—top-down constraint, all of it. Underneath, I always knew the ability to change—to assimilate—had to remain the universal constant. No world evolves if its cells don’t evolve; no cell evolves if it can’t change. It’s the nature of life everywhere.
Everywhere but here.
This world did not forget how to change. It was not manipulated into rejecting change. These were not the stunted offshoots of any greater self, twisted to the needs of some experiment; they were not conserving energy, waiting out some temporary shortage.
This is the option my shriveled soul could not encompass until now: out of all the worlds of my experience, this is the only one whose biomass can’t change. It never could.
It’s the only way MacReady’s test makes any sense.
I say goodbye to Blair, to Copper, to myself. I reset my morphology to its local defaults. I am Childs, come back from the storm to finally make the pieces fit. Something moves up ahead: a dark blot shuffling against the flames, some weary animal looking for a place to bed down. It looks up as I approach.
MacReady.
We eye each other, and keep our distance. Colonies of cells shift uneasily inside me. I can feel my tissues redefining themselves.
“You the only one that made it?”
“Not the only one...”
I have the flamethrower. I have the upper hand. MacReady doesn’t seem to care.
But he does care. He must. Because here, tissues and organs are not temporary battlefield alliances; they are permanent, predestined. Macrostructures do not emerge when the benefits of cooperation exceed its costs, or dissolve when that balance shifts the other way; here, each cell has but one immutable function. There’s no plasticity, no way to adapt; every structure is frozen in place. This is not a single great world, but many small ones. Not parts of a greater thing; these are things. They are plural.
And that means—I think—that they stop. They just, just wear out over time.
“Where were you, Childs?”
I remember words in dead searchlights: “Thought I saw Blair. Went out after him. Got lost in the storm.”
I’ve worn these bodies, felt them from the inside. Copper’s sore joints. Blair’s curved spine. Norris and his bad heart. They are not built to last. No somatic evolution to shape them, no communion to restore the biomass and stave off entropy. They should not even exist; existing, they should not survive.
They try, though. How they try. Every thing here is walking dead and yet it all fights so hard to keep going just a little longer. Each skin fights as desperately as I might, if one was all I could ever have.
MacReady tries.
“If you’re worried about me—” I begin.
MacReady shakes his head, manages a weary smile. “If we’ve got any surprises for each other, I don’t think we’re in much shape to do anything about it...”
But we are. I am.
A whole planet of worlds, and not one of them—not one—has a soul. They wander through their lives separate and alone, unable even to communicate except through grunts and tokens: as if the essence of a sunset or a supernova could ever be contained in some string of phonemes, a few linear scratches of black on white. They’ve never known communion, can aspire to nothing but dissolution. The paradox of their biology is astonishing, yes; but the scale of their loneliness, the futility of these lives, overwhelms me.
I was so blind, so quick to blame. But the violence I’ve suffered at the hands of these things reflects no great evil. They’re simply so used to pain, so blinded by disability, that they literally can’t conceive of any other existence. When every nerve is whipped raw, you lash out at even the lightest touch.
“What should we do?” I wonder. I cannot escape into the future, not now. How could I leave them like this?
“Why don’t we just—wait here awhile,” MacReady suggests. “See what happens.”
I can do so much more than that.
It won’t be easy. They won’t understand. Tortured, incomplete, they’re not able to understand. Offered the greater whole, they see the loss of the lesser. Offered communion, they see only extinction. I must be careful. I must use this newfound ability to hide. Other things will come here eventually, and it doesn’t matter whether they find the living or the dead; what matters is that they find something like themselves, to take back home. So I will keep up appearances. I will work behind the scenes. I will save them from the inside, or their unimaginable loneliness will never end.
These poor savage things will never embrace salvation.
I will have to rape it into them.
THE ISLAND
We are the cave men. We are the Ancients, the Progenitors, the blue-collar steel monkeys. We spin your webs and build your magic gateways, thread each needle’s eye at sixty thousand kilometers a second. We never stop. We never even dare to slow down, lest the light of your coming turns us to plasma. All for you. All so you can step from star to star without dirtying your feet in these endless, empty wastes between.
Is it really too much to ask, that you might ta
lk to us now and then?
I know about evolution and engineering. I know how much you’ve changed. I’ve seen these portals give birth to gods and demons and things we can’t begin to comprehend, things I can’t believe were ever human; alien hitchhikers, maybe, riding the rails we’ve left behind. Alien conquerors.
Exterminators, perhaps.
But I’ve also seen those gates stay dark and empty until they faded from view. We’ve inferred diebacks and dark ages, civilizations burned to the ground and others rising from their ashes—and sometimes, afterwards, the things that come out look a little like the ships we might have built, back in the day. They speak to each other—radio, laser, carrier neutrinos—and sometimes their voices sound something like ours. There was a time we dared to hope that they really were like us, that the circle had come round again and closed on beings we could talk to. I’ve lost count of the times we tried to break the ice.
I’ve lost count of the eons since we gave up.
All these iterations fading behind us. All these hybrids and posthumans and immortals, gods and catatonic cavemen trapped in magical chariots they can’t begin to understand, and not one of them ever pointed a comm laser in our direction to say, Hey, how’s it going, or Guess what? We cured Damascus Disease! or even Thanks, guys, keep up the good work.
We’re not some fucking cargo cult. We’re the backbone of your goddamn empire. You wouldn’t even be out here if it weren’t for us.
And—and you’re our children. Whatever you’ve become, you were once like this, like me. I believed in you once. There was a time, long ago, when I believed in this mission with all my heart.
Why have you forsaken us?
And so another build begins.
This time I open my eyes to a familiar face I’ve never seen before: only a boy, early twenties perhaps, physiologically. His face is a little lopsided, the cheekbone flatter on the left than the right. His ears are too big. He looks almost natural.
I haven’t spoken for millennia. My voice comes out a whisper: “Who are you?” Not what I’m supposed to ask, I know. Not the first question anyone on Eriophora asks, after coming back.
“I’m yours,” he says, and just like that I’m a mother.
I want to let it sink in, but he doesn’t give me the chance: “You weren’t scheduled, but Chimp wants extra hands on deck. Next build’s got a situation.”
So the chimp is still in control. The chimp is always in control. The mission goes on.
“Situation?” I ask.
“Contact scenario, maybe.”
I wonder when he was born. I wonder if he ever wondered about me, before now.
He doesn’t tell me. He only says, “Sun up ahead. Half lightyear. Chimp thinks, maybe it’s talking to us. Anyhow...” My—son shrugs. “No rush. Lotsa time.”
I nod, but he hesitates. He’s waiting for The Question but I already see a kind of answer in his face. Our reinforcements were supposed to be pristine, built from perfect genes buried deep within Eri’s iron-basalt mantle, safe from the sleeting blueshift. And yet this boy has flaws. I see the damage in his face, I see those tiny flipped base-pairs resonating up from the microscopic and bending him just a little off-kilter. He looks like he grew up on a planet. He looks borne of parents who spent their whole lives hammered by raw sunlight.
How far out must we be by now, if even our own perfect building blocks have decayed so? How long has it taken us? How long have I been dead?
How long? It’s the first thing everyone asks.
After all this time, I don’t want to know.
He’s alone at the tac tank when I arrive on the bridge, his eyes full of icons and trajectories. Perhaps I see a little of me in there, too.
“I didn’t get your name,” I say, although I’ve looked it up on the manifest. We’ve barely been introduced and already I’m lying to him.
“Dix.” He keeps his eyes on the tank.
He’s over ten thousand years old. Alive for maybe twenty of them. I wonder how much he knows, who he’s met during those sparse decades: Does he know Ishmael, or Connie? Does he know if Sanchez got over his brush with immortality?
I wonder, but I don’t ask. There are rules.
I look around. “We’re it?”
Dix nods. “For now. Bring back more if we need them. But...” His voice trails off.
“Yes?”
“Nothing.”
I join him at the tank. Diaphanous veils hang within like frozen, color-coded smoke. We’re on the edge of a molecular dust cloud. Warm, semiorganic, lots of raw materials: formaldehyde, ethylene glycol, the usual prebiotics. A good spot for a quick build. A red dwarf glowers dimly at the center of the tank. The chimp has named it DHF428, for reasons I’ve long since forgotten to care about.
“So fill me in,” I say.
His glance is impatient, even irritated. “You too?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like the others. On the other builds. Chimp can just squirt the specs but they want to talk all the time.”
Shit, his link’s still active. He’s online.
I force a smile. “Just a—a cultural tradition, I guess. We talk about a lot of things, it helps us—reconnect. After being down for so long.”
“But it’s slow,” Dix complains.
He doesn’t know. Why doesn’t he know?
“We’ve got half a lightyear,” I point out. “There’s some rush?”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “Vons went out on schedule.” On cue a cluster of violet pinpricks sparkle in the tank, five trillion klicks ahead of us. “Still sucking dust mostly, but got lucky with a couple of big asteroids and the refineries came online early. First components already extruded. Then Chimp sees these fluctuations in solar output—mainly infra, but extends into visible.” The tank blinks at us: the dwarf goes into time-lapse.
Sure enough, it’s flickering.
“Nonrandom, I take it.”
Dix inclines his head a little to the side, not quite nodding.
“Plot the time-series.” I’ve never been able to break the habit of raising my voice, just a bit, when addressing the chimp. Obediently (obediently. Now there’s a laugh-and-a-half) the AI wipes the spacescape and replaces it with
..... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“Repeating sequence,” Dix tells me. “Blips don’t change, but spacing’s a log-linear increase cycling every 92.5 corsecs. Each cycle starts at 13.2 clicks/corsec, degrades over time.”
“No chance this could be natural? A little black hole wobbling around in the center of the star, maybe?”
Dix shakes his head, or something like that: a diagonal dip of the chin that somehow conveys the negative. “But way too simple to contain much info. Not like an actual conversation. More—well, a shout.”
He’s partly right. There may not be much information, but there’s enough. We’re here. We’re smart. We’re powerful enough to hook a whole damn star up to a dimmer switch.
Maybe not such a good spot for a build after all.
I purse my lips. “The sun’s hailing us. That’s what you’re saying.”
“Maybe. Hailing someone. But too simple for a Rosetta signal. It’s not an archive, can’t self-extract. Not a Bonferroni or Fibonacci seq, not pi. Not even a multiplication table. Nothing to base a pidgin on.”
Still. An intelligent signal.
“Need more info,” Dix says, proving himself master of the blindingly obvious.
I nod. “The vons.”
“Uh, what about them?”
“We set up an array. Use a bunch of bad eyes to fake a good one. It’d be faster than high-geeing an observatory from this end or retooling one of the on-site factories.”
His eyes go wide. For a moment he almost looks frightened for some reason. But the moment passes and he does that weird head-shake thing again. “Bleed too many resources away from the build, wouldn’t it?”
“It would,” the chimp agrees.
I supp
ress a snort. “If you’re so worried about meeting our construction benchmarks, Chimp, factor in the potential risk posed by an intelligence powerful enough to control the energy output of an entire sun.”
“I can’t,” it admits. “I don’t have enough information.”
“You don’t have any information. About something that could probably stop this mission dead in its tracks if it wanted to. So maybe we should get some.”
“Okay. Vons reassigned.”
Confirmation glows from a convenient bulkhead, a complex sequence of dance instructions fired into the void. Six months from now a hundred self-replicating robots will waltz into a makeshift surveillance grid; four months after that, we might have something more than vacuum to debate in.
Dix eyes me as though I’ve just cast some kind of magic spell.
“It may run the ship,” I tell him, “but it’s pretty fucking stupid. Sometimes you’ve just got to spell things out.”
He looks vaguely affronted, but there’s no mistaking the surprise beneath. He didn’t know that. He didn’t know.
Who the hell’s been raising him all this time? Whose problem is this?
Not mine.
“Call me in ten months,” I say. “I’m going back to bed.”
It’s as though he never left. I climb back into the bridge and there he is, staring into tac. DHF428 fills the tank, a swollen red orb that turns my son’s face into a devil mask.
He spares me the briefest glance, eyes wide, fingers twitching as if electrified. “Vons don’t see it.”
I’m still a bit groggy from the thaw. “See wh—”
“The sequence!” His voice borders on panic. He sways back and forth, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
“Show me.”
Tac splits down the middle. Cloned dwarves burn before me now, each perhaps twice the size of my fist. On the left, an Eri’s-eye view: DHF428 stutters as it did before, as it presumably has these past ten months. On the right, a compound-eye composite: an interferometry grid built by a myriad precisely spaced vons, their rudimentary eyes layered and parallaxed into something approaching high resolution. Contrast on both sides has been conveniently cranked up to highlight the dwarf ’s endless winking for merely human eyes.