Ark

91

“It was the ruins on Earth II that were the clue,” Venus said softly. “I mean, think about it. The first world we come to, the first exoplanet ever visited by humans, and we find ruins, traces of some civilization long gone. The principle of mediocrity dictates that there’s no such thing as coincidence; you must expect that what you discover is average, typical. So, find one world with ruins and you’ll find more…”

They were sitting in the cupola, Venus holding court with Holle and Grace. Venus spoke softly, and the others followed suit. Somehow, even after all these years, the subdued twilight of the cupola was a place where hushed voices seemed the right thing. And even now Venus was mean with the coffee, and Holle tried to resist asking for another cup. They huddled together, their three faces softly lit by the light of Venus’s screens, while the stars hung like lanterns outside the big windows. All three of them were around sixty or older, their hair roughly cut masses of gray, their faces lined, their bodies solid and stiff, nothing like the slim, smooth-faced girls who had boarded the Ark all those years ago. And Holle knew that she had aged most of all.

All the way from Jupiter, Venus and her slowly changing cast of trainee astronomers and physicists had studied the universe through which they traveled, from a vantage point unique in all mankind’s history. And, having sifted nearly four decades’ worth of data, Venus had come to some conclusions, and had come up with a deeper theory of life in the universe than had been possible for any earthbound astronomer.

“It’s remarkable that mankind discovered life in the universe, through the analysis of data from the planet-finder projects, just at the moment civilization was falling apart because of the flood. What a tragedy that was! But all we found was mute evidence of atmospheric changes, such as the injection of oxygen and methane, a glimpse of what looked like photosynthetic chemicals. You don’t need intelligence to produce such signatures. But it was intelligence we wanted above all to find.

“But, despite decades of listening long before the flood came, and an even more careful survey from the Ark in the years since we launched, we’ve found nothing. Heard nothing, not a squeak. I might say we’ve not just been looking for radio and optical signals but city lights and industrial gases, and evidence of more exotic objects, Dyson sphere infrared blisters, wormholes, even warp bubbles like our own.

“And yet we do see traces of their passing. Well, we think so. Even when there aren’t actual ruins, obvious traces. You recall how the Earth II system was depleted of asteroids? We’ve found other depletions, anisotropies-differences in concentrations of key materials between one side of the sky and another. Even the solar system had some odd deficiencies, for instance of neon and helium, that we couldn’t explain away with our models of planetary creation.”

Holle asked, “So what are you suggesting? That somebody came by and used up all the good stuff and moved on?”

“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. And why do we find this? Because, I think, the Galaxy is old…”

As the Galaxy formed from a vast, spinning cloud of dust and gas and ice, embedded in a greater pocket of dark matter, the first stars had congealed like frost.

“In the primordial cloud there wasn’t much of anything except hydrogen and helium, the elements that had emerged from the Big Bang. Those first stars, mostly crowded in the Galaxy’s center, were monsters. They raced through fusion chain reactions and detonated in supernovas, spewing out metals and carbon and oxygen and the other heavy elements necessary for life-at any rate, life like ours. The supernovas in turn set off a wave of starmaking in the regions outside the core, and those second stars were enriched by the products of the first.” She mimed a cage with her hands, slowly expanding. “So you have this zone of intense activity in the center of the Galaxy, and a wave of starmaking washing outwards, with metals and other heavy elements borne on the shock front. That starbirth wave finally broke over the sun’s region maybe five billion years ago, and the Earth was formed, and so were we.

“But Sol is out in the boondocks, and was born late. The Galaxy’s starmaking peak was billions of years earlier. Most stars capable of bearing planets with complex life are older than the sun, an average of two billion years older. That’s half the Earth’s lifetime-maybe four times as long as it has been since multicellular life emerged on Earth.”

Grace asked, “And you believe this is why we see no signs of intelligence?”

Venus shrugged. “We’re latecomers to the party-like the gatecrashers on the Ark. They were most likely to emerge billions of years before us. What happens to a culture after billions of years? Most likely they die out, right? Or maybe they migrate. Me, I’d head for the Galactic core. That’s where the action is, the crowded stars, the energy.” She glanced out of the windows. “The energy of starlight is thin out here, a millionth the strength of sunlight at Earth. Which is why the Ark is not equipped with solar panels. In the core you could just coast around in the starlight, lapping up all that free energy falling from the sky. It must be like a city in there, hot, crowded, dangerous. Whatever, after a billion years, they’re nothing like us, and they’re not here. ”

Grace asked, “So where does that leave us?”

“Alone,” Venus said firmly. “If we expected to come out here and join in some kind of bustling Galactic culture, it ain’t going to happen. We seem to be young, in a very old Galaxy. We’re like kids tiptoeing through a ruined mansion. Or a graveyard. ‘Go on through the lofty spaces of high heaven and bear witness, where thou ridest, that there are no gods.’ That’s Seneca- Medea. ”

Holle said, “You always were pretentious, Venus.”

Venus grinned. “Sorry.”

“I sometimes wonder why we care,” Grace said. “I mean, why would we long to find minds on other worlds? Gary Boyle used to say that we are lonely because of our evolutionary history. Our ancestors were hominids, just one species in a world full of other kinds of hominids. There are many species of dolphins and whales; they aren’t alone. But our cousins all went, we out-competed them. We’re not evolved for a world where the only minds are ours. We’re lonely but we don’t know why.”

Holle considered. “Well, if all this is so, it’s up to us not to fail. On the Ark, I mean. If Earth has gone, if Earth II fails, we may be the only receptacle of high intelligence left in the Galaxy.”

“Quite a responsibility,” Grace murmured.

“Especially as we’re dumb as shit,” Venus said. “I mean, we can’t even last a few years in this tin can without turning on each other.”

They were silent for a while, and Holle wondered grumpily again if Venus would ever get around to offering them that coffee refill. She said at length, “You know, I sometimes think we were terribly ill-equipped, the Candidates. We spent our whole lives training for this mission, but we weren’t rounded. I mean, for instance we never even read any books — no books that counted. Do you remember, Venus? I liked historicals, tales of a vanished past. You liked old science fiction about vanished futures. We never engaged with the world as it was unfolding around us, not even through fiction.”

“Nobody was writing novels about the flood,” Venus pointed out. “They were all too damn busy. More to the point, Holle, you and I never had kids, before or after we left Earth.”

Holle shrugged. “True. I sometimes think I never got over Mel. And then there was that strange business about Zane. After that, I always felt I had too much to do.”

“Yeah. As for me, my students are my children.”

“Those are excuses,” Grace said gently. “You were Candidates. You were brought up knowing it would be your duty to have children, to pass on your genes. But you didn’t. On some level you both deliberately chose not to, for whatever reason.”

“Maybe I was scared,” Holle said. “Scared to make that kind of commitment.”

“To have kids and to know you couldn’t save them.”

“Something like that.”

Venus said coolly, “I wonder if you could do the job you’re doing now, Holle, if one of your own kids was affected by your decisions. Living in your water empire.”

“I don’t know,” Holle said honestly. “I think Kelly Kenzie could have done it. She was always the best of us, wasn’t she? Before the Split she was hooking up with-with-”

“Masayo Saito.”

“Yes. She intended to have kids with him. Maybe she has by now. And if not for the Split, maybe she’d have had kids with Wilson. Either way she’d have been able to keep on functioning as a mother, I think.”

“And she’d have kept Wilson in check better.”

“Yeah. She’d have done a better job than any of us.”

“You can only do your best,” Grace said to Holle. “Kelly isn’t here; she’s long gone. All we can do is keep on until the end-”

An alarm went off, a faint buzz, one of Venus’s screens flashing red. She turned and tapped a key. “Oh, shit.”

Holle leaned forward. “What?”

“It’s a suicide note. From Zane. He says he doesn’t want to be a, let me see, ‘a useless drain on resources.’ ”

Grace shook her head. “That’s Zane 3. He’s done that before, the other alters overpower him.”

“This is signed by a committee. Jerry, Zane 2, Zane 3, somebody called Leonard and Christopher and-”

Grace unbuckled and clambered out of her couch. Venus was already opening the airlock hatch.