Part 13 (2/2)
She glanced down at the dead thing in her hands. ”Yes, all right.” She dropped it onto the potting bench.
”I've got something to clean up first but I'll be there in a minute.” She wiped the corner of her eye.
”Meanwhile, calculate a course for home.”
natural background Not until the s.h.i.+p scanned the quarantine zone at the edge of the Trueborn system did Mada begin to worry. In her time the zone had swarmed with the battle asteroids of the brain clans. Now the Utopianswere gone. Of course, that was to be expected after all this time. But as the s.h.i.+p re-entered the home system, dumping excess velocity into the empty dimensions, Mada felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature in the command mod.
Trueborn orbited a spectral type G3V star, which had been known to the discoverers as HR3538. Scans showed that the Green Sea had become a climax forest of deciduous hardwood. There were indeed new mountains-knife edges slicing through evergreen sheets-that had upthrust some eighty kilometers off the Fire Coast, leaving Port Henoch landlocked. A rain forest choked the plain where the city of Blair's Landing had once sprawled.
The s.h.i.+p scanned life in abundance. The seas teemed and flocks of Trueborn's flyers darkened the skies like storm clouds: kippies and bluewings and warblers and migrating stilts. Animals had retaken all three continents, lowland and upland, marsh and tundra. Mada could see the dust kicked up by the herds of herbivorous aram from low orbit. The forest echoed with the clatter of s.h.i.+ndies and the shriek of blowhards. Big hunters like kar and divil padded across the plains. There were new species as well, mostly invertebrates but also a number of lizards and something like a great, mossy rat that built mounds five meters tall.
None of the introduced species had survived: dogs or turkeys or llamas. The s.h.i.+p could find no cities, towns, buildings-not even ruins. There were neither tubeways nor roads, only the occasional animal track. The s.h.i.+p looked across the entire electromagnetic spectrum and saw nothing but the natural background.
There was n.o.body home on Trueborn. And as far as they could tell, there never had been.
”Speculate,” said Mada.
”I can't,” said the s.h.i.+p. ”There isn't enough data.”
”There's your data.” Mada could hear the anger in her voice. ”Trueborn, as it would have been had we never even existed.”
”Two-tenths of a spin is a long time, Mada.”
She shook her head. ”They ripped out the foundations, even picked up the dumps. There's nothing, nothing of us left.” Mada was gripping the command perch so hard that the knuckles of her toes were white. ”Hypothesis,” she said, ”the Utopians got tired of our troublemaking and wiped us out.
Speculate.”
”Possible, but that's contrary to their core beliefs.” Most DIs had terrible imaginations. They couldn't tell jokes, but then they couldn't commit crimes, either.
”Hypothesis: they deported the entire population, scattered us to prison colonies. Speculate.”
”Possible, but a logistical nightmare. The Utopians prize the elegant solution.”
She swiped the image of her home planet off the screen, as if to erase its unnerving impossibility.
”Hypothesis: there are no Utopians anymore because the revolution succeeded. Speculate.”
”Possible, but then where did everyone go? And why did they return the planet to its pristine state?”
She snorted in disgust. ”What if,” she tapped a finger to her forehead, ”maybe wedon't exist. What if we've skipped to another timeline? One in which the discovery of Trueborn never happened? Maybe there has been no Utopian Empire in this timeline, no Great Expansion, no s.p.a.ce Age, maybe no humancivilization at all.”
”One does not just skip to another timeline at random.” The s.h.i.+p sounded huffy at the suggestion. ”I've monitored all our dimensional reinsertions quite carefully, and I can a.s.sure you that all these events occurred in the timeline we currently occupy.”
”You're saying there's no chance?”
”If you want to write a story, why bother asking my opinion?”
Mada's laugh was brittle. ”All right then. We need more data.” For the first time since she had been stranded upwhen, she felt a tickle stir the dead weight she was carrying inside her. ”Let's start with the nearest Utopian system.”
chasing shadows The HR683 system was abandoned and all signs of human habitation had been obliterated. Mada could not be certain that everything had been restored to its pre-Expansion state because the s.h.i.+p's database on Utopian resources was spotty. HR4523 was similarly deserted. HR509, also known as Tau Ceti, was only 11.9 light-years from Earth and had been the first outpost of the Great Expansion.
Its planetary system was also devoid of intelligent life and human artifacts-with one striking exception.
Nuevo LA was spread along the sh.o.r.es of the Sterling Sea like a half-eaten picnic lunch. Something had bitten the roofs off its buildings and chewed its walls. Metal skeletons rotted on its docks, transports were melting into brown and gold stains. Once-proud boulevards crumbled in the orange light; the only traffic was windblown litter chasing shadows.
Mada was happy to survey the ruin from low orbit. A closer inspection would have spooked her. ”Was it war?”
”There may have been a war,” said the s.h.i.+p, ”but that's not what caused this. I think it's deliberate deconstruction.” In extreme magnification, the screen showed a concrete wall pockmarked with tiny holes, from which dust puffed intermittently. ”The composition of that dust is limestone, sand, and aluminum silicate. The buildings are crawling with nan.o.bots and they're eating the concrete.”
”How long has this been going on?”
”At a guess, a hundred years, but that could be off by an order of magnitude.”
”Who did this?” said Mada. ”Why? Speculate.”
”If this is the outcome of a war, then it would seem that the victors wanted to obliterate all traces of the vanquished. But it doesn't seem to have been fought over resources. I suppose we could imagine some deep ideological antagonism between the two sides that led to this, but such an extreme of cultural psychopathology seems unlikely.”
”I hope you're right.” She s.h.i.+vered. ”So they did it themselves, then? Maybe they were done with this place and wanted to leave it as they found it?”
”Possible,” said the s.h.i.+p.Mada decided that she was done with Nuevo LA, too. She would have been perversely comforted to have found her enemies in power somewhere. It would have given her an easy way to calculate her duty.
However, Mada was quite certain that what this mystery meant was that twenty thousand millennia had conquered both the revolutionand the Utopians and that she and her sibling batch had been designed in vain.
Still, she had nothing better to do with eternity than to try to find out what had become of her species.
a never-ending vacation The Atlantic Ocean was now larger than the Pacific. The Mediterranean Sea had been squeezed out of existence by the collision of Africa, Europe and Asia. North America floated free of South America and was nudging Siberia. Australia was drifting toward the equator.
The population of Earth was about what it had been in the fifteenth century CE, according to the s.h.i.+p.
Half a billion people lived on the home world and, as far as Mada could see, none of them had anything important to do. The means of production and distribution, of energy-generation and waste disposal were in the control of Dependent Intelligences like the s.h.i.+p. Despite repeated scans, the s.h.i.+p could detect no sign that any independent sentience was overseeing the system.
There were but a handful of cities, none larger than a quarter of a million inhabitants. All were scrubbed clean and kept scrupulously ordered by the DIs; they reminded Mada of databases populated with people instead of information. The majority of the population spent their bucolic lives in pretty hamlets and quaint towns overlooking lakes or oceans or mountains.
Humanity had booked a never-ending vacation.
”The brain clans could be controlling the DIs,” said Mada. ”That would make sense.”
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