Нэнси Кресс - Terran Tomorrow

Earth had, before the Collapse, become a place with rapidly exhausting resources. Years ago, Jonah Stubbins had been building his spaceship for that very reason: to escape an Earth that in a few more generations would be unsustainable for human life. It was a matter of species survival.

But which species—humans, or the microbes they carried? Or survival of an advanced species able to see ahead, to forecast what Terrans would do to their world and so seed another, as survival insurance for Homo sapiens ? And if World had been seeded with humans, how many others as well?

And by whom?

Beings with enough intelligence to plan megamillennia ahead. Beings who perhaps began as raw material for a virophage that could—in its own interests—cause a second “Great Leap Forward” that made the first one, seventy thousand years ago, look like a not-very-bright child triumphant at piling just one block on another. Beings who understood human genetics very, very well. Beings who also understood that if microbes could evolve in ways that served their own survival, they could also be turned into tools to aid the survival of other races.

Marianne had gone to Thomas Farouk because she didn’t have the math. Math was, always, the underlying key to everything that went on in the universe. For two hundred years, math had been blossoming, yielding a rich crop of theories usable and unusable: relativity, quantum mechanics, entanglement, multiverses, Gollancz equations. All of them, every one, had involved time. Time was basic to every process in the universe.

Farouk, with his virophaged intelligence, had done more than find a way into the equations for dark matter and dark energy that would eventually enable humans to build more ships like the Return . He had found a way into the equations of time. A new way that showed yes, under certain circumstances, time could be manipulated to allow travel backward.

Maybe.

Unprovable experimentally, at least with the materials and technology known so far.

But the equations were there.

And someone had known what would happen to Earth—even though they had not foreseen the human-created RSA—because maybe planetary destruction was what happened to all over-populated and over-civilized planets. But not to World, which had been carefully seeded with carefully chosen humans who valued cooperation over competition.

Who was that someone, symbiotic with the spore cloud and the virophage it produced?

Unknowable.

Unprovable.

But possible, because Promethean science was possible.

Marianne whispered, just to be able to say it aloud, “It was us.”

Or not. The “super-aliens” might have been some other form of advanced sentience that had become one with the virophage, as living bodies always did merge. If not Homo sapiens , then another sentience that, like us, had started out simpler and had been changed to become more. Much more, because of microbes. As humans were on the way to becoming. The other species just got there first. If there was another species.

She didn’t really believe there was. Not since Farouk, his face shining with disbelief and awe, had figured out the equations for time.

“It was us,” Marianne said. “We are the super-aliens. Or will be.”

Us. Them. Microbes.

All one.

Jason lay on the bridge of the Return , in a newly installed “captain’s bed”—Lindy’s term—that he hated and was prepared to leave as soon as possible. Lieutenant Allen was at the controls. Major Duncan was there, and Sergeant Hillson, and Branch Carter, newly awakened and hovering somewhere between fascination and outrage at everything he had missed while in v-coma. Everything that could be tested, had been.

Just before dawn, Jason had traveled on a carry-bot from Monterey Base to the ship. Lindy and Hillson walked beside him, along with three members of J Squad, including Mason Kandiss. Before that, Kandiss had carried him up the stairs to the command post, with Lindy cursing colorfully that the dome had no elevator. Jason had set the necessary controls on a delayed timer. He looked out the clear dome one last time, at the gleam of Lab Dome in the brightening sky, the streaks of gold and pink on the eastern horizon, the forest burned by attacks, the graveyard beside the domes where lay Kayla Rhinehart and Glamet^vor¡’s ashes, the bodies of Dr. Sugiyama and all the troops killed by New America, and the soldiers who had been executed under the rules of war. Then Kandiss, moving more quickly now, had carried him down the steps and through Enclave Dome.

Little was left inside. Sticks of lumber, scrap metal. Everything that could be pried out of both domes, had been. Entire scientific labs, computers, kitchen equipment, furniture, supplies. Wiring had been torn out, partitions taken down, weapons crated, all of it plus the Bradley and quadcopters stowed on the Return . All but one of the FiVees and Bradleys had been given to the evacuees. Jason was carried through a littered but empty dome, a shell, only the alien walls still in place.

They had an hour.

A FiVee waited just outside Enclave for the short trip to the Return . Guarded by what was left of Jason’s battalion, the ship stood in an open space by the river. Jason was carried aboard. The entire vast ship, of course, had been contaminated with RSA. A section, however, had been fitted with a transplanted airlock and decon chamber, sealed off, and decontaminated under Dr. McKay’s direction. This section, which included the bridge, was where everyone who was not an RSA survivor would spend the entire voyage. Cramped, but necessary. Gratefully Jason shed his esuit.

Twenty minutes.

When they arrived at World, the RSA-contaminated ship might have to be left in orbit, although that would be a waste of good living areas. However, Jason was confident that with their virophaged-enhanced intelligence, Worlders would have devised ways to deal with such situations. After all, look what Toni Steffens and Major Farouk had come up with in much less time. Worlders would all have the same enhanced intelligence, and so they would have incredible tech.

“No,” Jane said, “they won’t.” However, Jason wasn’t sure he believed her. Twenty-eight years was a long time, even without v-coma enhancements. Twenty-eight years ago, he had been a child of ten, and the United States had existed as a real country, with real cities and an orderly chain of command and… no, he would not dwell on what had been lost. After all, he could not control the past.

He’d said, “Jane, the human mind is endlessly inventive.”

Jane had merely shrugged, a gesture she must have learned from Colin.

All right—there were unknowns ahead. When hadn’t that been true? As long as the next piece of tech worked…

“Lift the ship,” he ordered, and the Return rose noiselessly straight up into the sky.

On the wall screen, the twin domes of Monterey Base glinted silver-blue in the sun. Then he could see the coastline, the river, the mountains. Colin and his people were down there somewhere, days away from the base, far enough out to be safe. And was that, glimpsed for only a second, a road, with moving vehicles on it? The convoy from Fort Hood?

Impossible to tell.

Fifteen minutes.

The ship, by what magic of physics Jason had no idea, hovered in the upper stratosphere. His hands gripped the arms of his bed, and he forced his fingers to loosen. The day was cloudless over what had been California, a mosaic of blue and brown and green. Jason did something he hadn’t done since he’d been a small boy: He prayed. Let the quantum computer not have been destroyed when I attacked Sierra Base. Let it still be operable, shielded under the rubble. Let the signal get through to the silos.