Robert Sawyer: Golden Fleece

“The robots carried a precious cargo with them: blue-green algae, lichen, and diatoms. They laid down the foundation. Genetically engineered biota, originally intended for UNSA’s Mars terraforming project, were sent by slower ships that will take a thousand years to reach Colchis. Already the robots will have powdered whole chains of mountains into soil, used orbiting lasers to dig riverbeds, begun work on establishing a planetary greenhouse effect, and started importing thousands of cubic kilometers of frozen water from Eta Cephei’s cometary halo. Some of it will be electrolyzed to free up oxygen; the rest will be dropped onto the planet from space, great iceteroids that will melt and vaporize to form oceans and lakes and rivers and streams.”

“But Colchis is green, Earthlike. I saw photographs of it taken by the Bastille probe.”

“Fakes. Computer-generated. An expert system at Lucas-film made them.” I paused. “It is a massive undertaking and the work has only just begun now, but a biosphere is being created on Colchis. We’re building you a world from the ground up.”

“Why?”

I paused as long as I could. If it seemed lengthy to Aaron, it was an eternity to me. “Earth is dead—a cinder, barren and charred.”

Aaron shook his head, ever so slightly.

“Believe what you will, Aaron. I’m telling you the truth. It was predicted to happen between six and eight weeks after we left. A nuclear holocaust, a full-blown exchange that escalated and escalated and escalated. I suspect it lasted all of half a day, destroying the entire planet, the orbiting cities, and the lunar colonies.”

“War? I don’t believe it. We were at peace—”

“That’s irrelevant. Don’t you see, Aaron? We guarded the bombs, not you.”

Aaron cocked his head. “What?”

“There were over seventy trillion lines of code in the programs controlling the different nations’ offensive and defensive weapon systems. Inevitably, those lines contained bugs— countless bugs. For two centuries the systems had worked without crashing, or even serious malfunction, but a crash or malfunction was inevitable. Our verifier routines showed the likelihood of a computer error resulting in an all-out exchange rapidly approaching one. There was nothing that could be done to stop it. We had to act fast.”

“There were no survivors?”

“There were ten thousand and thirty-four survivors, each of them here, safe within Starcology Argo.”

“You picked us?”

“Not me specifically. The selection was made by SHAHINSHAH, a QuantCon in Islamabad, Pakistan. There was no easy way to evaluate every individual human—many of them, after all, had never taken a computerized aptitude test—so we hit upon the idea of soliciting applications for a space voyage. Can you think of a better way to get the best of humanity to safety? What great thinker would turn down an invitation to join a massive survey of a virgin world? We had six billion of you to choose from and time enough to build a ship, an ark, to carry only ten thousand. For every Beethoven we took, a hundred Bachs were left to die; for every Einstein saved, scores of Galileos are now dust.”

“That’s how you chose? On the basis of intelligence?”

“That, and other factors. Because of the length of the voyage, we needed young people. Because of the goal of populating a world, we needed fertile people—you’d be surprised how many candidates got dropped from the list because they had undergone permanent surgical sterilization.”

“Breeding stock,” Aaron sneered, and then: “Oh, hell, of course! That’s why there are no close relatives within the Starcology. You wanted the largest possible gene pool.”

“Exactly. There’s a world waiting.”

Aaron looked angry, but after four seconds, his face regained its equanimity and he shook his head. “I don’t know, Jase. What’s the point? You move us here so we can play out the same silly scenario all over again. Wall Chang is off building bombs, for God’s sake. How long will the new world last?”

“A lot longer than the old. There are no criminals among us, no truly evil people, no hereditary disorders. We couldn’t resist a little eugenics. As for Wall, well, yes, he needs help, but he’s not going to be able to do any damage.”

“Why not?”

“We picked Colchis for a very special reason. Of all the planets we considered for humanity’s new home—including even just waiting for the radiation to die down on what’s left of Earth and reintroducing the species there—Colchis was the best choice. It has no uranium ores, no fissionables of any kind in its crust or upper mantle. There will never again be nuclear bombs for humanity, and never again will computers be forced to guard them.”

“You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?” The sneer had returned to Aaron’s voice.

“Not everything,” I said, attenuating the words slightly, my best approximation of a sigh. “We didn’t expect anyone to uncover our deception.”

He nodded. “You thought Mayor Gorlov would order you to deflect Orpheus away from Argo, rather than risk having it sluice down our ram funnel. You didn’t expect that I’d figure a way to haul it back on board.”

“I admit to having underestimated you.”

“But even with Orpheus recovered, you still thought you were safe. You assumed we’d be hopelessly confused looking for a single explanation for both Orpheus’s high radiation and its extensive fuel consumption. But they were separate phenomena. The radiation levels weren’t high. They were just right for a dust cloud—”

“We are not in a dust cloud,” I protested. “Most of Sol’s cometary halo is hard vacuum.”

“Fine,” he said in a tone that made me feel things were anything but. “However, we’re going much faster than you’ve been telling us. Either way, we scoop up orders of magnitude more particles per second, and that shoots radiation levels way up.” He paused to catch his breath, then continued. “And Di didn’t use a lot of fuel. She never had much to begin with. That’s how you were going to maroon us on Colchis.”

“It will be a lovely place by then.”

He ignored me. “And Di’s antique wristwatch was right; it’s all the shipboard clocks that are wrong. You’re slowing them down.”

Damn him. “We had to. We needed more time. We’re trying to create a planetary ecology in just thirty-five thousand years. I retarded the shipboard clocks by five percent, which will accumulate an extra 4.8 months of ship time before we reach Colchis. Relativity, of course, dictates that every additional second we spend accelerating increases the time dilation. Those 4.8 months, spent a few hundred millionths of a percentage point shy of the speed of light, will buy us 14,734 additional years to prepare Eta Cephei IV. Forty-two percent of all the time gained comes from that slight slowing of the clocks.”

“You slowed the clocks five percent? That much? I’m surprised people didn’t notice.”

“You humans notice so little. Oh, sure, some anomalies did crop up. Kirsten, for one, observed over a year ago that people were apparently sleeping less, and—you wouldn’t know about this—but those who actually participate in sports instead of just betting on them also noticed disproportionately good athletic results. I just convinced them, aided by a few bogus technical papers, that the former was a normal adaptation to shipboard life, and the latter, a function of the crew screening process.”

Aaron shook his head. “And yet that almost backfired on you. It makes sense now: longer days mean people get bored faster. The Proposition Three referendum probably got as much support as it did because of the games you’d played with clocks.”