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

There was no entertainment, no play, no sex. No social performance of gender. No family units. Biological sex had been flattened into a population of sterile females, slender and lightly muscled. “No sense wasting calories on physical strength with exoskeletons available,” Thienne explained. “It’s a resource conservation strategy.”

“You can’t build a society like this using ordinary humans,” I said. “It wouldn’t be stable. Free riders would play havoc.”

Thienne nodded. “They’ve been rewired. I think it started with the first generation out of the seedship. They made themselves selfless so that they could survive.”

It struck me that when the civilization on Mitanni built their own seed-ships they would be able to do this again. If they could endure Mitanni, they could endure anything.

They could have the galaxy.

I was not someone who rushed to judgment. They’d told me that, during the final round of crew selection. Deliberative. Centered. Disconnected from internal affect. High emotional latency. Suited for tiebreaker role… .

I swept the imagery shut between my hands, compressing it into a point of light. Looked up at Thienne with a face that must have signaled loathing or revulsion, because she lifted her chin in warning. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t leap to conclusions.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re thinking about ant hives. I can see it.”

“Is that a bad analogy?”

“Yes!” Passion, surfacing and subsiding. “Ant hives only function because each individual derives a fitness benefit, even if they sacrifice themselves. It’s kin-selective eusociality. This is—”

“Total, selfless devotion to the state?”

“To survival.” She lifted a mosaic of images from the air: a smiling woman driving a needle into her thigh. A gang of laborers running into a fire, heedless of their own safety, to rescue vital equipment. “They’re born. They learn. They specialize, they work, sleep, eat, and eventually they volunteer to die. It’s the opposite of an insect hive. They don’t cooperate for their own individual benefit—they don’t seem to care about themselves at all. It’s pure altruism. Cognitive, not instinctive. They’re brilliant, and they all come to the same conclusion: cooperation and sacrifice.”

The image of the smiling woman with the needle did not leave me when the shifting mosaic carried her away. “Do you admire that?”

“It’s a society that could never evolve on its own. It has to be designed.” She stared into the passing images with an intensity I’d rarely seen outside of deep study or moments of love, a ferocious need to master some vexing, elusive truth. “I want to know how they did it. How do they disable social behavior without losing theory of mind? How can they remove all culture and sex and still motivate?”

“We saw plenty of ways to motivate on Jotunheim,” I said.

Maybe I was thinking of Anyahera, taking her stance by some guilty reflex, because there was nothing about my tone disconnected from internal affect .

I expected anger. Thienne surprised me. She swept the air clear of her work, came to the couch and sat beside me. Her eyes were gentle.

“I’m sorry we have to do this again,” she said. “Anyahera will forgive you.”

“Twice in a row? She thought Jotunheim was the greatest atrocity in human history. ‘A crime beyond forgiveness or repair,’ remember? And I let it stand. I walked away.”

I took Thienne’s shoulder, gripped the swell of her deltoid, the strength that had caught Anyahera’s eye two decades ago. Two decades for us—on Earth, centuries now.

Thienne stroked my cheek. “You only had two options. Walk away, or burn it all. You knew you weren’t qualified to judge an entire world.”

“But that’s why we’re here. To judge. To find out whether the price of survival ever became too high—whether what survived wasn’t human.”

She leaned in and kissed me softly. “Mankind changes,” she said. “This—what you are—” Her hands touched my face, my chest. “People used to think this was wrong. There were men and women, and nothing else, nothing more or different.”

I caught her wrists. “That’s not the same, Thienne.”

“I’m just saying: technology changes things. We change ourselves . If everyone had judged what you are as harshly as Anyahera judged Jotunheim—”

I tightened my grip. She took a breath, perhaps reading my anger as play, and that made it worse. “Jotunheim’s people are slaves,” I said. “I can be what I want. It’s not the same at all.”

“No. Of course not.” She lowered her eyes. “You’re right. That was an awful example. I’m sorry.”

“Why would you say that?” I pressed. Thienne closed herself, keeping her pains and fears within. Sometimes it took a knife to get them out. “Technology doesn’t always enable the right things. If some people had their way I would be impossible. They would have found everything but man and woman and wiped it out.”

She looked past me, to the window and the virtual starscape beyond. “We’ve come so far out,” she said. I felt her shoulders tense, bracing an invisible weight. “And there’s nothing out here. Nobody to meet us except our own seedship children. We thought we’d find someone else—at least some machine or memorial, some sign of other life. But after all this time the galaxy is still a desert. If we screw up, if we die out… what if there’s no one else to try?

“If whatever happened on Mitanni is what it takes to survive in the long run, isn’t that better than a dead cosmos?”

I didn’t know what to say to that. It made me feel suddenly and terribly alone. The way Anyahera might have felt, when we voted against her.

I kissed her. She took the distraction, answered it, turned us both away from the window and down onto the couch. “Tell me what to be,” I said, wanting to offer her something, to make a part of the Universe warm for her. This was my choice: to choose.

“Just you—” she began.

But I silenced her. “Tell me. I want to.”

“A woman,” she said, when she had breath. “A woman this time, please…”

Afterward, she spoke into the silence and the warmth, her voice absent, wondering: “They trusted the three of us to last. They thought we were the best crew for the job.” She made absent knots with my hair. “Does that ever make you wonder?”

“The two-body problem has been completely solved,” I said. “But for n=3, solutions exist for special cases.”

She laughed and pulled me closer. “You’ve got to go talk to Anyahera,” she said. “She never stays mad at me. But you…”

She trailed off, into contentment, or back into contemplation of distant, massive things.

Duong-Watts malignant , I thought to myself. I couldn’t help it: my mind went back to the world ahead of us, closing at relativistic speeds.

Mitanni’s explosive growth matched the theory of a Duong-Watts malignant. But that was just correlation. The malignancy went deeper than social trends, down to the individual, into the mechanisms of the mind.

And that was Anyahera’s domain.

“We can’t destroy them,” Thienne murmured. “We might need them.”

Even in simulation we had to sleep. Lachesis ’s topological braid computer could run the human being in full-body cellular resolution, clock us up to two subjective days a minute in an emergency, pause us for centuries—but not obviate the need for rest.

It didn’t take more than an overclocked instant. But it was enough for me to dream.

Or maybe it wasn’t my dream—just Duong Phireak’s nightmare reappropriated. I’d seen him lecture at Lagos, an instance of his self transmitted over for the night. But this time he spoke in Anyahera’s voice as she walked before me, down a blood-spattered street beneath a sky filled with alien stars.