Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

I found my slippers. “Wrong how?”

“Not like Jotunheim. Not like anything we’ve seen on the previous colonies.” She offered me a robe, bowing fractionally. “The other two are waiting.”

We gathered in a common space to review what we knew. Thienne smiled up from her couch, her skin and face and build all dark and precise as I remembered them from Lagos and the flesh. No volatility to Thienne; no care for the wild or theatrical. Just careful, purposeful action, like the machines and technologies she specialized in.

And a glint of something in her smile, in the speed with which she looked back to her work. She’d found some new gristle to work at, some enigma that rewarded obsession.

She’d voted against Anyahera’s kill request back at Jotunheim, but of course Anyahera had forgiven her. They had always been opposites, always known and loved the certainty of the space between them. It kept them safe from each other, gave room to retreat and advance.

In the vote at Jotunheim, I’d been the contested ground between them. I’d voted with Thienne: no kill .

“Welcome back, Shinobu,” Anyahera said. She wore a severely cut suit, double-breasted, fit for cold and business. It might have been something from her mother’s Moscow wardrobe. Her mother had hated me.

Subjectively, I’d seen her less than an hour ago, but the power of her presence struck me with the charge of decades. I lifted a hand, suddenly unsure what to say. I’d known and loved her for years. At Jotunheim I had seen parts of her I had never loved or known at all.

She considered me, eyes distant, icy. Her father was Maori, her mother Russian. She was only herself, but she had her mother’s eyes and her mother’s way of using them in anger. “You look… indecisive.”

I wondered if she meant my robe or my body, as severe and androgynous as the cut of her suit. It was an angry thing to say, an ugly thing, beneath her. It carried the suggestion that I was unfinished. She knew how much that hurt.

I’d wounded her at Jotunheim. Now she reached for the weapons she had left.

“I’ve decided on this,” I said, meaning my body, hoping to disengage. But the pain of it made me offer something, conciliatory: “Would you like me some other way?”

“Whatever you prefer. Take your time about it.” She made a notation on some invisible piece of work, a violent slash. “Wouldn’t want to do anything hasty.”

I almost lashed out.

Thienne glanced at me, then back to her work: an instant of apology, or warning, or reproach. “Let’s start,” she said. “We have a lot to cover.”

I took my couch, the third point of the triangle. Anyahera looked up again. Her eyes didn’t go to Thienne, and so I knew, even before she spoke, that this was something they had already argued over.

“The colony on Mitanni is a Duong-Watts malignant,” she said. “We have to destroy it.”

I knew what a Duong-Watts malignant was because “Duong-Watts malignant” was a punch line, a joke, a class of human civilization that we had all gamed out in training. An edge case so theoretically improbable it might as well be irrelevant. Duong Phireak’s predictions of a universe overrun by his namesake had not, so far, panned out.

Jotunheim was not far enough behind us, and I was not strong enough a person, to do anything but push back. “I don’t think you can know that yet,” I said. “I don’t think we have enough—”

“Ship,” Anyahera said. “Show them.”

Lachesis told me everything she knew, all she’d gleaned from her decades-long fall toward Mitanni, eavesdropping on the telemetry of the seedship that had brought humanity here, the radio buzz of the growing civilization, the reports of the probes she’d fired ahead.

I saw the seedship’s arrival on what should have been a garden world, a nursery for the progeny of her vat wombs. I saw catastrophe: a barren, radioactive hell, climate erratic, oceans poisoned, atmosphere boiling into space. I watched the ship struggle and fail to make a safe place for its children, until, in the end, it gambled on an act of cruel, desperate hope: fertilizing its crew, raising them to adolescence, releasing them on the world to build something out of its own cannibalized body.

I saw them succeed.

Habitation domes blistering the weathered volcanic flats. Webs of tidal power stations. Thermal boreholes like suppurating wounds in the crust. Thousands of fission reactors, beating hearts of uranium and molten salt—

Too well. Too fast. In seven hundred years of struggle on a hostile, barren world, their womb-bred population exploded up toward the billions. Their civilization webbed the globe.

It was a boom unmatched in human history, unmatched on the other seed-ship colonies we had discovered. No Eden world had grown so fast.

“Interesting,” I said, watching Mitanni’s projected population, industrial output, estimated technological self-catalysis, all exploding toward some undreamt-of ceiling. “I agree that this could be suggestive of a Duong-Watts scenario.”

It wasn’t enough, of course. Duong-Watts malignancy was a disease of civilizations, but the statistics could offer only symptoms. That was the terror of it: the depth of the cause. The simplicity.

“Look at what Lachesis has found.” Anyahera rose, took an insistent step forward. “Look at the way they live.”

I spoke more wearily than I should have. “This is going to be another Jotunheim, isn’t it?”

Her face hardened. “No. It isn’t.”

I didn’t let her see that I understood, that the words Duong-Watts malignancy had already made me think of the relativistic weapons Lachesis carried, and the vote we would need to use them. I didn’t want her to know how angry it made me that we had to go through this again.

One more time before we could go home. One more hard decision.

Thienne kept her personal space too cold for me: frosted glass and carbon composite, glazed constellations of data and analysis, a transparent wall opened onto false-color nebulae and barred galactic jets. At the low end of hearing, distant voices whispered in clipped aerospace phrasing. She had come from Haiti and from New Delhi, but no trace of that twin childhood, so rich with history, had survived her journey here.

It took me years to understand that she didn’t mean it as insulation. The cold distances were the things that moved her, clenched her throat, pimpled her skin with awe. Anyahera teased her for it, because Anyahera was a historian and a master of the human, and what awed Thienne was to glimpse her own human insignificance.

“Is it a Duong-Watts malignant?” I asked her. “Do you think Anyahera’s right?”

“Forget that,” she said, shaking her head. “No prejudgment. Just look at what they’ve built.”

She walked me through what had happened to humanity on Mitanni.

At Lagos U, before the launch, we’d gamed out scenarios for what we called socially impoverished worlds —places where a resource crisis had limited the physical and mental capital available for art and culture. Thienne had expected demand for culture to collapse along with supply as people focused on the necessities of existence. Anyahera had argued for an inelastic model, a fundamental need embedded in human consciousness.

There was no culture on Mitanni. No art. No social behavior beyond functional interaction in the service of industry or science.

It was an incredible divergence. Every seedship had carried Earth’s cultural norms—the consensus ideology of a liberal democratic state. Mitanni’s colonists should have inherited those norms.

Mitanni’s colonists expressed no interest in those norms. There was no oppression. No sign of unrest or discontent. No government or judicial system at all, no corporations or markets. Just an array of specialized functions to which workers assigned themselves, their numbers fed by batteries of synthetic wombs.