Terran Tomorrow

CHAPTER 26

Marianne never had gotten in to talk to Jason. He had been too occupied and too weak. “Later, please,” he’d said, and then she’d been taken up with her own good-byes to Claire, to Ryan, to Colin. After the last two, the son and grandson she might never see again, Marianne had gone straight to her berth on the Return and stayed there until liftoff. She had always hated for anyone to see her cry.

Her shared quarters, thrown up hastily of plywood and metal and used mattresses, looked eerily familiar. As a small child, Marianne had been taken on an overnight train trip to visit relatives in Chicago. That compartment, like this, had had four berths with curtains in front of them and a single chair at the end. Here, however, there were no windows, not even a wall screen. If she wanted to see Earth left behind, she would have to go to the Commons.

She didn’t want to see it. From the moment the Return had landed in California months ago, Terra had not felt like home. Cities destroyed, populations wiped out, wilderness returning… no. She had never been outside without an esuit. World would be as much home to her as Terra was now, except for the loss of Ryan and Colin.

But she would have Jason. And on World, Noah and her granddaughter Lily. Although World would be God-knows-what after twenty-eight years of infection by the virophage.

Marianne put her hand on the windowless alien wall. She pushed her grief away—and how many times in her life had she had to do just that?—and concentrated on what she’d gained. She and Farouk had combined their knowledge, his physics and her biology, into a theoretical structure with details so complex, and so beautiful, that she felt dizzy just bringing it to mind.

She knew who had created this ship. Who had brought humans from Terra to World 140,000 years ago. Who the “super-aliens” were.

She had always wondered about that initial transport of humans to World. An experiment, yes. But not a random lifting of a few thousand people who happened to roam the same geographical area. Any band of hunter-gatherers must have included a leader bellicose enough to stand off challengers, some aggressive hunters, other hunters willing to take subordinate positions, and some very yielding people at the bottom of the pecking order. Hierarchy was built into primate genes, and all carnivorous mammals had alpha and omega members of both genders.

And yet—all, or at least most, of the humans brought to World shared a genomic profile strong on tendencies toward cooperation, mildness, aversion to risk.

Somebody had chosen humans for those traits. Somebody had understood human genetics very, very well.

She had told Colin that life on Earth had always been transformed by microbes, from the first prokaryotes on. Serial endosymbiosis had, along with survival of the fittest, been evolution’s earliest tool. The virophage was an unconscious entity in itself, no more sentient than an amoeba. But over the vast oceans of geologic time, different microbes had evolved to control their hosts in ways that aided their own survival. They used more complex animals as reproduction sites, as food, as a means of being carried from a site of exhausted resources to one with fresher resources.

Earth had, before the Collapse, become a place with rapidly exhausting resources. Years ago, Jonah Stubbins had been building his spaceship for that very reason: to escape an Earth that in a few more generations would be unsustainable for human life. It was a matter of species survival.

But which species—humans, or the microbes they carried? Or survival of an advanced species able to see ahead, to forecast what Terrans would do to their world and so seed another, as survival insurance for Homo sapiens? And if World had been seeded with humans, how many others as well?

And by whom?

Beings with enough intelligence to plan megamillennia ahead. Beings who perhaps began as raw material for a virophage that could—in its own interests—cause a second “Great Leap Forward” that made the first one, seventy thousand years ago, look like a not-very-bright child triumphant at piling just one block on another. Beings who understood human genetics very, very well. Beings who also understood that if microbes could evolve in ways that served their own survival, they could also be turned into tools to aid the survival of other races.

Marianne had gone to Thomas Farouk because she didn’t have the math. Math was, always, the underlying key to everything that went on in the universe. For two hundred years, math had been blossoming, yielding a rich crop of theories usable and unusable: relativity, quantum mechanics, entanglement, multiverses, Gollancz equations. All of them, every one, had involved time. Time was basic to every process in the universe.

Farouk, with his virophaged intelligence, had done more than find a way into the equations for dark matter and dark energy that would eventually enable humans to build more ships like the Return. He had found a way into the equations of time. A new way that showed yes, under certain circumstances, time could be manipulated to allow travel backward.

Maybe.

Unprovable experimentally, at least with the materials and technology known so far.

But the equations were there.

And someone had known what would happen to Earth—even though they had not foreseen the human-created RSA—because maybe planetary destruction was what happened to all over-populated and over-civilized planets. But not to World, which had been carefully seeded with carefully chosen humans who valued cooperation over competition.

Who was that someone, symbiotic with the spore cloud and the virophage it produced?

Unknowable.

Unprovable.

But possible, because Promethean science was possible.

Marianne whispered, just to be able to say it aloud, “It was us.”

Or not. The “super-aliens” might have been some other form of advanced sentience that had become one with the virophage, as living bodies always did merge. If not Homo sapiens, then another sentience that, like us, had started out simpler and had been changed to become more. Much more, because of microbes. As humans were on the way to becoming. The other species just got there first. If there was another species.

She didn’t really believe there was. Not since Farouk, his face shining with disbelief and awe, had figured out the equations for time.

“It was us,” Marianne said. “We are the super-aliens. Or will be.”

Us. Them. Microbes.

All one.