Macrolife (16 page)

I'll die here
.

“Sam, how long have you been here today? You let your class out early, didn't you?”

He turned and saw her dark shape near the elevator pylon. She came forward and he saw a pencil behind her ear; her hair was tied up on top of her head and the look on her face was there for him.
For me, finally.

She handed him a piece of paper.

“From Alard.”

He read the words in the starlight:

 

ACCELERATING NEARER LIGHT SPEED BEFORE

STARTING EXPERIMENT. IF SUCCESSFUL

YOU MAY NOT HEAR FROM US. FAREWELL.

 

This message was also more than a year old. He looked at Janet. Her face was calm, and he knew that she was ready to have no further word in her lifetime. They might not be seen or heard from again, and that possibility was closest to death; the darkness between the stars had swallowed them.

Alard and Richard had not been content with the sublight gravitic pushers, which could have taken Asterome to any of the hundred stars within thirty light-years of the sun in reasonable earth and ship times; instead, the macroworld had elected to take the next step in mobility as soon as possible.

Sam pictured Alard's engineers working to harness the wave effects of dense masses, feeding them with vast electrical forces, as the macroworld's acceleration shortened light waves fore and lengthened those arriving aft, darkening the universe to human eyes, except for a narrow band of yellow stars circling at right angles to the course. What other distortions of space-time were being created by the contained quantities of unstable bulerite as the universe prepared to black out?

It had already happened. More than one light-year out from the sun, the drive had been cut in—perhaps throwing the macroform into far spaces, from where it could never return. He tried not to dwell on the possibility of complete disaster.

“They're brave,” Janet said, “to risk everything.”

She's let go
.

He turned and looked out beyond the superconducting power station, where the catapult had just lofted another ingot toward Jupiter, an offering to a god in exchange for energy.

Janet came and embraced him. He kissed her and she held on to him.
Farewell
, he thought, realizing that the share of glory given him would have to be enough.

 

Richard tried not to waken Margot as he got up and went out into the solarium; there he turned on the screen for a view of the distant, reddening sun. As he looked at the fading star, he knew that he had what he wanted—something other than the past to give himself to completely—and that he would have to live with the choice, make it work, because it had come to him at great cost, paid for by all humanity; he would not have the right to be unhappy. This fact, as true and deserving to be heard as it was, dragged him down, reminding him again of the past's ever-present ability to spill into the present and spoil the future.

Planetary history is one long dark age
, he thought,
an evolving slaughterhouse
. He wondered what kind of civilization, if any, would now develop in the home sunspace.

He reached out and changed the view, mentally turning his back on the dwindling darkening sun, and looked outward across the cave of stars.

After a moment, he turned from the diamond-strewn abyss and walked over to the hotel window. He pulled back the curtains and saw that daylight was young in the hollow outside. The town was going about its business as the tribeams slowly grew brighter, fed now by internal sources, not by the sun. He slid open a window and leaned out to look to his distant right, where the trolley was climbing out of the central regions, toward the mountainous ends of the world.

The most perfect example of macrolife…is the (deep space) extraterrestrial colony.

—DANDRIDGE COLE, 1961

Macrolife, as we know it, was made possible by the development of fusion power systems, gravitic technology, and the perfection of bulerite and derivative materials. The understanding of bulerite's instabilities, especially its tendency to distort space-time at subatomic quantum levels, led to the development of reasonably fast star drives which did not violate the structure of physical theory. Research into the properties of ultra-dense matter was carried out on Asterome as it left the solar system in late 2023, and in 2024. The resulting theory linked the gravitational force with the strong nuclear force, expressing the binding force inside the nucleus as being super gravitational; the experimental result was a star drive which could be cut in at near optic speeds. The discovery was eventually transmitted back to sunspace….

At Centauri in 2050, Asterome became the core foundation of the first large macrolife societal container. A second world was begun at Procyon in 2075, from materials contributed by the Asterome biosphere, and from materials mined in the Procyon system.

Design description.
These first two macroworlds grew to be three-hundred-kilometer-long ovoid shapes, with one hundred and fifty urban shells enclosing the original asteroid hollow. The meadows and towns of the inner countryside remained relatively unchanged during the thousand years of shell building. To reach the urban levels from the core was a matter of traveling down, since one's head always pointed toward the center; this arrangement dated back to the time when the asteroid required a spin to produce pseudo-gravitation through centrifugal force on the inner surface. Asterome, with two hundred shells, measured three hundred kilometers from end to end, and one hundred fifty kilometers across the middle. Gravitic elevators went up and down across the short diameters, and tubeways made the six-hundred-kilometer circuit on every tenth level. The outer level, just under the vacuum insulation layer and deflection shield blanket, was a network of engineering facilities—laboratories, observation stations, heat control and dissipation centers, small-craft docks, raw material ingestion locks, and emergency backup installations. The total land area of the one hundred fifty levels was almost 100,000,000 square miles, or twice the usable land area of earth. This area could be doubled by building one additional level between each two existing levels, which would still leave half a kilometer, or one-third of a mile, between levels—more than enough to produce the illusion of open sky, where desired. The macroworld could reproduce in a number of ways: by moving out of its outermost shell and building up the empty interior; by adding levels between levels to the practical limit; by adding outer shells.

Throughout the millennium following Asterome's departure from sunspace, Mars-Ganymede may have released as many as a dozen macroworlds into the galaxy. However, the nostalgic desire to find earthlike planets, rather than take up macrolife, persisted. It is believed that as many as fifty smaller starships were used to colonize sunspaces within a hundred light-years of earth.

Many of these colony ships were equipped with defective drives and faulty shielding systems. Historical-cultural evidence suggests that ships may have been thrown to any point in the galaxy within a thousand-light-year radius of earth….

The division of humanity into macroworlders and planet-dwellers stems from this period, and is the precondition for understanding the conflicts that followed—conflicts within the macroworlds themselves, as well as conflicts between macrolife and natural worlds….

—RICHARD BULERO ET AL.,
The History of Macrolife
, 10th ed.,
Revised and Updated, vol. 9, Sol, 3025

I recommend that we do not interfere with colony planets. We can't trust ourselves. Consider examples from earth history. The West trained, armed and supported dictatorships in Asia, Africa and South America. It would be difficult not to support authoritarian elements, out of self-interest, and because backward planets have few genuinely inner-directed individuals who have their own people's interests at heart. A society must be left to grow out of its ways; it cannot be directed from outside, lest these means toward a well-meant end damage the potential for self-determination. Violent revolutions always destroy their own ends. Take the example of India's partition. Even with a nonviolent, well-meaning leader, conflict could not be controlled; it had to run its course….

The old idea of humankind settling earthlike planets in an endless expansion is absurd; if an earthlike world does not already have its own intelligent life, then it will very likely develop such life in the future. We would be committing a form of genocide by interfering with the nursery world's course of development. Even if we were to find earthlike worlds likely to remain free of intelligent life, we are still faced with the usual objections to life on natural worlds….

Looking through history, we can easily see the dangers of power. Clearly, a good society must have recourse against itself, in the planned struggle between its institutions and public sectors, as well as through the civil action of one individual against another. A good society enlists the divided nature of man to sustain itself, producing for itself and its individual citizens a variety of avenues of appeal….

If Vico was right and the social world is certainly the work of men, then macrolife is a journey into the possible, a move that will create an endless series of differing social containers for the human imagination to inhabit….

I may be wrong, but the successful forms of macrolife will retain the capacity for self-criticism, an area of independence for the individual…. They will succeed to the degree that consensus or forced participation is avoided, to the degree that the society retains its ability to leave people alone….

—RICHARD BULERO,
Notebooks

Theories of progress have been many. There was the simplistic idea of unlimited progress; cyclical theories saying that there is nothing new under the sun. Yet it can be shown that progress does occur; but when a thing is accomplished, we are no longer as impressed by it as when it was lacking. Progress eliminates yesterday's problems, and creates today's and tomorrow's. We can be optimists as we look into the future out of what will become a historical ruin; but to the future new problems will be important. This has always been the case; the fact that old problems have been solved, especially social problems, is little cause for joy to a present whose expectations have risen. Utopias, then, are what we see looking into future possibility, possibilities which would be unlikely unless progress had already occurred. Progress occurs, make no mistake about it—utopias are real places (any person coming out of a prior condition would attest to that, at least for a while); but the solution of even the gravest problems cannot close the future to newer problems. I would not want it any other way; the relativity of progress is the source of our continuing discontent, and the necessary precondition for continuing satisfaction.

—RICHARD BULERO,
“The Relativity of Progress,” speech before the
First Session of the Projex Council, 2041

…modern man suffers from unfulfilling religious, educational, familial and work institutions. Humane institutions make people human; that is why Socrates called the laws of Athens his “parents.” Enveloping, shaping, restraining institutions free people from enslavement to anarchic passions.

—GEORGE F. WILL,
Newsweek
, October 31, 1977

The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people bitter and cruel.

—W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

The State is for Individuals, the law is for freedoms, the world is for experiment, experience, and change: these are the fundamental beliefs upon which a modern Utopia must go.

…it is certainly the fate of all Utopias to be more or less misread.

—H. G. WELLS,
A Modern Utopia
, 1905

John Bulero had waited all his life to see a natural world.

He had seen sunspaces during the gathering of raw materials, but none of them had contained an earthlike planet. He remembered the gas giants, the airless worlds of nickel, iron, and rock, naked before the tides of cosmic dust and sunstorms, worlds of ice, desert worlds, planets shattered into asteroid belts around their suns. A world with an outside surface was dangerous, even with an aura of atmosphere for protection; yet the inescapable fact was that humanity had originated on such a world.

The approach to the system had stirred something within him, quickening his anticipation into an eagerness he had never before known. The stars of Praesepe, the open cluster in Cancer, had nickered longer than usual as the macroworld had come out of jumpspace. He had never fully accepted the idea of his entire world phasing itself in and out of the wave structure of familiar space-time, appearing and disappearing like a ghostly needle stitching through the folds of a fabric; tachyon transfer sometimes produced a sense of unreality, it had been claimed, but the data were too fleeting to prove much.

Emerging from the complex spatial variability of superspace, the biosphere had become continuous at ninety-five percent of light speed, one light-year into the cluster, with velocity dropping to five percent of light within three months. The protective deflector shield had been turned off after the orbit of the system's tenth planet was crossed; deceleration was continuing until the world entered orbit in the equatorial plane of the double star, to match the position of the fifth planet at a distance of one million kilometers on its sunward side.

The doors slid open and he stepped into the drum of the vertical shuttle. He touched the control surface and thought of Margaret as the lift rushed toward the world's center.
I've put off breaking with her too long
, he told himself.
It's time to move on
.

The doors opened, releasing him on the level below the old hollow. He went down the long passage toward the lockers, thinking how unbearable his exemplar had become.
I can't stand her looking into me any more
.

He walked into the equipment room and took his wings down from the wall rack. He put them on over his bare shoulders, fastening the straps. Then he stepped onto the lift surface in the center of the room.

As he was carried upward, he wondered how many people his female exemplar had taught during her eighty years and if any of the males had been like him. A portion of the ceiling slid back and he felt gravity decrease as the platform delivered him outside.

He opened his wings in a green world, a memento of human origins, a jewel set inside the urban shells; here nature was an ally, no longer an enemy or a victim.

With a few strong strokes, he rose from the platform, beginning his climb into the vast open space. It was an easy ascent in the minimal gravity. Taking a deep breath, he pulled toward the central region, where the gravity was zero. There white clouds were allowed to gather, and only an occasional wind was permitted to disperse them when they grew too thick.

As he gained altitude, his gaze swept across the tall trees below, taking in the black ribbon of road winding its way between them to the village on the shore of Central Lake, five kilometers away. The lake trickled small streams around the inward curve of the core, feeding the land with moisture recycled for a thousand years.

 

He looked up at the town four kilometers above him. A winged couple moved across it, passing to his left high above him. He waved but they did not notice.

He stopped moving his wings and his momentum carried him into the zero-g region. He turned once to look at the whole expanse of the interior. Then he looked eight kilometers forward along the axis of the hollow to the light plate.

The giant disk stood in the narrow forwards, lighting the land with soft daylight. John waited motionlessly for what he had come to see, forgetting his resentment toward Margaret. Slowly the kilometer-wide sun plate grew dark, and stars appeared in its field of view. The yellow-white double star appeared, a main-sequence contact binary flooding the core with light. He looked at the strangeness around him. The greenery seemed to grow fresher; the air took on a bluer glow; the lake became a pool of fire, the streams arteries of something living, the trees a thick moss spotted with yellow.

He thought of his ancestral twin, Samuel Bulero, from whose banked cells he had been cloned. When Samuel had walked inside this world a thousand years ago, there had been no urban shells, only the hollow rock; there had been no gravitic control, only the crude spin. Asterome had been dependent on the solar system for its resources, unable to seek on its own. Material synthesis and duplication had been a far-off dream. Macrolife had been a child, still unable to walk.

Why had Samuel Bulero chosen to stay behind? How could he have made such a decision in the face of so much possibility, especially when there had been no earth to return to
? The questions made him even more impatient to see a livable planet. There were probably thousands of civilizations in the galaxy, thriving on worlds of air, dirt, water, and growing things, worlds with all their insides out under the stars, open to all the radiation of their parent suns, helpless before the shiftings of the planetary crusts, unable to control winds and storms; on those worlds intelligent life died by the thousands every day and would disappear when its star died.

But he wanted to test for himself what he had been taught—that macrolife was the safest and most durable way of life. Seven other worlds had been modeled after this one, seven children scattered into the galaxy to grow and differ and make others after their own kind. Each could support whatever society it chose to contain within the permanent, self-reproducing framework; each world was immortal, a hyperpersonal organism in which each individuality flowered to enrich the whole.

He floated quietly as he looked at the double star, wondering if he dared go see for himself. Margaret would probably oppose him: Rob Wheeler, his male exemplar, would probably think it was a good idea. He would have to take his chance now, while the planet was being searched for signs of a colony ship which had been lost in the cluster centuries ago; otherwise he would have to wait decades for another earthlike world. Between the search for the colony and the floating up of raw materials from the planet, he would have more than enough time to explore.

Moving a wing, he turned himself to feel the warmth of the new suns on his face. If he were living on the planet, a slight change in the radiation of these suns would alter the genes of his descendants, for better or worse. Life warred with itself on natural worlds, and the direction of evolution's war was always an adaptation to the status quo, whatever that might be at the moment.

He wondered if he would find something to do with his life. Was it true that some people took most of a century to decide? What if he never found anything? What could he ever achieve that would make him a fit exemplar? What would he be able to say to someone like himself? It wasn't so much the pressure of Margaret's prodding, but the lack of something specific; sometimes he wished that his exemplars would simply tell him what to do, instead of making endless suggestions and offering countless alternatives. Wheeler would always tell him to be patient and attentive, that in time he would discover what he wanted. Macrolife had been bought with the dedication of all those who had left the solar system. Its resources were his birthright, to be used in creative ventures.
What's wrong with me
? he asked himself. “No one will tell you what to do,” Wheeler had told him. “You'll have to figure things out for yourself, mistakes and all. That's the difference between science and faith, dogma and freedom.” Freedom was an open nothingness before him, oppressive and terrifying.

Soon he would be twenty-six earth years old—and still he was a mystery to himself, living in a larger mystery.
I'm a mistake, he thought. What was it in Samuel Bulero that they want to see in me
?

Sometimes he wished that he had been born like the more modified citizens, who seemed to have better control over their feelings, whose brain chemistry had been designed for better concentration; he wished that he could read body language as well as Margaret could. He thought of the link, and it seemed that he would never be ready for it.
I don't belong here; everyone is different from me.

He looked longingly at the yellow-white suns. Some of their light was being cut down by filters, but he could see that the stars shared atmospheres. They were joined by a river of plasma which flowed back and forth in magnetic channels, a fiery umbilical stretched across a distance of less than one diameter.

John wondered about Lea, the fifth planet. What would he have been if he had grown up there? Then with two powerful strokes of his wings, he pushed himself out of weightlessness. In a moment he was gliding forward across the world, the wind singing in his ears as he plunged closer to the huge sunscreen, drawn by the awesome splendor of the double star.