Stephen Baxter - Time

In a way, a part of him wished it wasn’t so: that this had been a simple story of asteroid mines and O’Neill colonies and homesteads in space, that the extraordinary future hadn’t intruded. Simple dreams, easily fulfilled. But that had never been an option.

The future, it seemed, was turning out to be one damn thing after another.

He turned away from the canopy, and began to make his way back to the O’Neill .

When the squid made their next surprising request Malenfant and the others held a council of war on the O ‘Neill ‘s meatware deck.

Cornelius Taine, as ever, was hostile to any form of rapprochement with the squid beyond what was absolutely necessary to maintain their base on this asteroid. “So they want to leave. Good riddance. They shouldn’t be here anyhow. They weren’t in the plan.”

Emma said severely, “You mean they should be dead.”

“I mean they shouldn’t exist at all. The plan was for one squid to live long enough to bootstrap the operation here, that’s all — not this whole new enhanced species we have to contend with.

Dan Ystebo should be prosecuted for his irresponsibility—”

“You aren’t helping, Cornelius,” said Malenfant.

“Let them split off their chunk of rock and go. We don’t need

them.”

“The point is, they are asking us where they should go. Another NEO, the asteroid belt.”

Cornelius’s face worked. “That ought to remain … secure.”

Emma laughed. “Secure? Secure against what?”

Cornelius was growing angry. “We could be remembered as the ultimate suckers. Like the Native Americans who sold Manhattan for a handful of beads.”

“The asteroid belt is not Manhattan,” Malenfant said.

“No. It’s much more. Vastly more…” Cornelius started to list the resources of the Solar System: water, metals, phosphates, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, rattling through the asteroids and the ice moons of Jupiter and the atmospheres of the giant planets and the Oort Cloud. “Take water. Water is the most fundamental commodity. We think the main-belt asteroids could contribute about half the water available on Earth. And a single ice moon, say Jupiter’s Callisto, has around forty times as much water as Earth’s oceans. Even if you exclude the Oort Cloud the Solar System probably contains something like three hundred times Earth’s water — and almost all of it locked up in small, low-gravity, accessible bodies.

“The Solar System may be able to sustain — comfortably, conservatively — as many as a million times the population of the Earth.” He watched their faces. “Think about that. A million human beings, for every man, woman, and child alive now.”

Emma laughed nervously. “That’s… monstrous.”

“Because you can’t picture it. Imagine how it would be if the human race reached such numbers. How often does an authentic genius come along — an Einstein, a Beethoven, a Jesus? Once a millennium? We could cut that down to one a day”

“Imagine a million people like me,” Malenfant growled. “We could have one hell of an argument.”

“Those cephalopods are ferocious predators, and they breed damn fast. If they start propagating through the Solar System they could take it all in a few centuries.”

“If the cephalopods are better adapted,” Malenfant said easily, “and maybe they are — that’s why we chose the squid solution in the first place — then maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

“No,” Cornelius said, muscles in his cheek working. “This isn’t simple Darwinism. We created them.”

“Maybe that will turn out to be our cosmic role,” Emma said dryly. “Midwives to the master race.”

Malenfant growled, “Look, let’s keep Darwin and God out of it. Cornelius, face the facts. We don’t have a real good handle on what the squid are going to do here. They seem to be split into a number of factions. But some of them at least seem to be determined on carving off a chunk of this rock and going someplace. Population pressure is ensuring that. If we deceive them — if we try sending them off to freeze in the dark — and they survive, they aren’t going to be too pleased about it. And if we don’t give them any clear guidance…”

Emma nodded. “Then they’ll seek out the one place they know has the water they need.”

Cornelius said, “We can’t let them find Earth.”

“Then,” Malenfant pressed, “where?”

Cornelius shook his head, pressured, frustrated. “All right, damn it. Send them to the Trojan asteroids.”

Malenfant looked at him suspiciously. “Why there?”

“Because the Trojans cluster at Jupiter’s Lagrange points. By comparison, the belt asteroids are spread over an orbit wider than that of Mars. So it’s easy to travel between the Trojans. And we think they sometimes exchange places with the outer moons of Jupiter. You see? That means that access to Jupiter orbit from the Trojans — energetically speaking — is very cheap. While the asteroids themselves are rich.” Cornelius shook his head. “My God, what a Faustian bargain. We think the asteroid mass available in the Trojans is several times greater than that in the main belt itself. Not only that, they seem to be supercarbonaceous.”

“What does that mean?”

“They’re made of the same stuff as C-type asteroids and comet nuclei. Like Cruithne. But in different, more volatile-rich proportions. It was cold out there when the planets formed. Cold enough for the lighter stuff to stick.”

Malenfant frowned. “It sounds like a hell of a piece of real estate to give away.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Cornelius said. “Some of us think the Trojans might prove to be the richest resource site in the system. So surely even a species as fecund as the squid is going to take some time to consume them all. And even when they’re done they may choose to go to Jupiter and its moons rather than come back in toward the sun.”

Malenfant growled, “I see your logic. We’re giving them a big territory, enough to occupy them for centuries.”

“Time enough for us to do something about it,” Cornelius said tensely.

Malenfant looked at Emma. “What do you think?”

She shrugged. “Geopolitics are beyond me,” she said.

“This is beyond geopolitics,” Cornelius said. “We’re playing games with an opponent of unknown potential, over the future of the species.”

“We’ll tell them to aim for the Trojans,” Malenfant said, relieved the decision was made. “Cornelius, start working on trajectory information…”

It took the emigrant squid only days to build their cephalopod Mayflower.

They sent their robots to work leveling the floor of a small crater. Over the crater they built a roughly spherical cage of unprocessed asteroid nickel-iron. Then they began to manufacture the skin of the bubble ship that would take them to Jupiter’s orbit. It was simple enough: modified firefly robots crawled over the floor of the crater, spraying charged molecules onto a substrate, like spray painting a car, until a skin of the right thickness and precision of manufacture down to the molecular scale was built up.

Malenfant observed as much as he could of this. It was a manufacturing process called molecular-beam epitaxy that had been piloted on Earth decades before. But nobody had succeeded in developing it to the pitch of sophistication the squid had reached.

Malenfant was somewhat awed: it seemed to him the squid had simply identified their manufacturing problem, immediately devised a perfect technology to deal with it, and had built and applied it. It was a technology that would be worth uncounted billions to Bootstrap, in some unlikely future in which he made it back home and stayed out of jail.