After their first step without Elizabeth Vasta, they found themselves under a still astonishing, but familiar, sky. Still they were on Feathers’ world, it seemed.
But now under the gaudy sky of the creation node once more.
Watching Feathers tentatively exploring, Salma smiled to herself.
And under it all, hanging halfway to the sky, the drab charcoal-black ball that was Terminus, as still and enigmatic as ever. Ancient world under brand new stars. Under the light of creation. Brought together by Terminus and the powers behind him, just to impress.
‘Looks like Terminus delivered, huh?’ That was Meriel, gamely lugging kit out of the lander within which they had made this final, pancosmic journey.
There was no reply.
The others were concentrating on the unloading. After all this was to be their final destination – their final encampment.
Away from the lander a heap of gear was building up on the ground already, Salma saw, thanks to Meriel and Doria working steadily together. Habitat wall, floor and roof panels, to be assembled in due course. Dried food packets. The components of a closed-loop life-support system to be put together, activated and tuned up, at which point they could put away the ration packs for emergencies. Water tanks, full, with recycling filters already attached.
Eventually, Salma knew, and though it might take years to finish the job, they were going to dismantle the lander itself. Oh, they might save a propulsion unit or two, maybe the smaller attitude thrusters, so they could go explore more of this ball of rust and dirt Feathers called home.
But, as far as travel went, this far and no further. When they were settled, when Terminus finally abandoned them – or at least when they finally told it goodbye – this little world was going to be their home. For good.
They’d talked it through, over and over. Even so, Salma suspected some of them still had doubts.
Now Meriel called again. ‘So, Salma, did you get what you want? This dirt ball, that frozen firework display of a sky?’
‘I got what I wanted. What she wanted. Look at her.’
She meant Feathers, who was tentatively exploring, one cautious footstep at a time. Right now she was slowly making her way away from the centre of their chosen landing site, their home, as if following tracks Salma couldn’t see.
She seemed to thrill at the touch of the very dirt under her booted feet.
It is as you wished it.
Meriel looked up. ‘So it is, Terminus, buddy. I guess you did your best. Thanks …’
They had all decided they had no greater purpose than enriching Feathers’ life. At least the three humans had each other – even if in Doria’s case they had met as strangers only a few weeks back.
And the ultimate dream, Salma knew, had been somehow to deliver Feathers to her home world. Ideally, not her world as it was now – whatever ‘now’ meant – not to this relic, a world several times older than any in Salma’s home universe. Well, why couldn’t Feathers be taken back through some fancy wormhole to her world’s richer past? Just as Terminus and the entities behind him, on receiving the Hawking-radiation trigger that had activated Planet Nine, had evidently reached back into the deep past of humanity’s own Galaxy to kick off the proto-creation-node quasar, an event twenty-five thousand years deep.
But Terminus had wheeled out an excuse it had used before. Universes were not all alike; not all could be manipulated in such a way. A young cosmos like mankind’s, still awash with the fading glow of its Big Bang birth, was easily connected. But some universes – old, gnarly cosmoses like this one, apparently – resisted such violations. Somehow, in this universe, it had been possible to snatch Feathers out of her proper time and place, presumably in the deep past of this world, when it was young. But now it was impossible to return her – to her world, yes, but not her time.
None of them could see any point arguing. So the humans had decided to make the best of it.
After all, under the creation node, they had lost the past, but had gained an infinite future.
‘We can fix this world,’ Doria said now, walking up. Her face was obscured a little by a layer of grime on her faceplate, her gloves dark with it. ‘To an extent.’
Salma said, ‘You’ve been exploring.’
‘And prospecting. Figuring stuff out. One good outcome, I guess, of the anal-retentive interplanetary politics of Earth governments has been that my people on the Moon have had to find new ways. Right from the beginning we have had to learn to extract what we need to survive from what’s before us, from the most unpromising of sources – and to make a living out of it too. You might think Earth’s Moon is just a ball of rusted iron and aluminium oxides. Well, yes, but you can use sunlight power to split those oxides to get usable metals for space industry, and oxygen for a variety of purposes including life support. Point is we can do the same here. Point is, this place is Nirvana compared to Luna. For a start, just like on the Moon, with enough power you can split all this rusty dirt back into iron and oxygen—’
‘What power, though?’ Meriel asked. ‘Not geothermal. We know that this world is so old its very core is frozen solid.’
‘Not that, no. Don’t need it. We just use—’ She waved a gloved hand at the glowing sky. ‘That.’
‘The light of the creation node?’
Meriel smiled. ‘Why not? Seems ironic, I know. Even disrespectful? But it would work. It’s not as strong as sunlight on Earth, but we’ve got room to spread out some big solar panels.’
Meriel glanced at the imperturbable Terminus. ‘That would seem – fitting, somehow. To use the energy of those young stars, being born in the sky, to bring this ancient world back to life.’
Salma frowned. ‘I still don’t see it. Won’t we need a lot of heavy machinery to do all this? To shift ore and iron around, to build stuff – we don’t even have the solar panels you talked about yet. We’ll have to make them. Won’t we?’
‘We don’t have it all yet,’ Doria said. ‘But we soon will, because we have what we need to get started.’
She went over to a heap of enigmatic engineering parts, and pulled out what looked like a toy to Salma, like a model tractor with a glistening solar panel on its back, and buckets on its sides, and small manipulator arms – some very small, very fine, almost insectile.
Doria lifted this to her eye level. ‘Go forth and multiply, little buddy.’ She put the tractor on the ground, and it rolled away contentedly.
Salma watched this. ‘What’s it doing?’
‘It’s looking for virgin ground,’ Doria said.
‘What for?’
‘So it can gather in raw materials and make a copy of itself. And then those two will make two more copies, and the four will make four more copies. It’s a replicator—’
‘Ah. I’ve seen how these things work,’ Meriel said. ‘Before the mission of the Shadow – I imagine there have been many advances since. Salma, you just have to give these little guys power, and ground to chew up and extract useful materials like iron, aluminium, oxygen, a few grams at a time. Then these are all assembled into useful forms – to begin with, copies of themselves.’
Doria said, ‘I made sure I packed a few of these before we were sent off into the void. Lunar tech. The final product, you see, comes when the replicators disassemble themselves again, leaving a heap of useful components to make – anything you want.’
Salma frowned. ‘Won’t that take a long time?’
‘Not necessarily,’ Meriel said. ‘One becomes two, two becomes four … Just ten doublings gives you a thousand copies.’
‘Anyway,’ Doria said, ‘that’s the plan: to bring a dead world back to life.’ She looked around and grinned. ‘No matter how old and beat-up and worn down this place is, we can make it function again.’
Meriel nodded. ‘And I don’t think we Conservers need trouble our consciences about that. Without our intervention this world would remain – inert. Unchanging. After all, with its core frozen, all its tectonic processes ceased, there’s nothing it can do to recover any function.’
But the earlier phrase Doria had used had stuck in Salma’s mind. ‘But you said, back to life.’ She glanced over at Feathers, who was still exploring her world, one footstep at a time. ‘Just processing iron and stuff won’t really do that, will it? What about life?’
‘Well, that’s going to be harder,’ Meriel admitted.
She was speaking softly, Salma thought, maybe so that Feathers couldn’t overhear. Even though they were pretty sure that Feathers was still unable to understand human speech, beyond a few commands: Run! Stop! Don’t touch! Catch the ball! The rest was all tactile, mime, though even that was not at the level of any human sign languages, just as rich linguistically as their spoken cousins.
Meriel said now, ‘For one thing this desolate surface is pretty much barren of the basic ingredients for our kind of life – carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen.’ She glanced around again. ‘But – I’m pretty sure that if we drill deep enough we’ll find organic-chemistry material. As far as I can tell, this world once had a tectonic cycle, like most big rocky worlds. You have a liquid iron core, a thick liquid mantle of some kind of silicate rock, and in that mantle you can have convection currents, great plumes thousands of kilometres deep. And they push at the solid crust, cracking and deforming it. So, as on Earth, continents drift around, and you get subduction, where surface material gets dragged down into the deep. And by surface material I mean water, dirt, soil, the remains of living things. The relics of ancient forests, to be dug out as coal or oil or methane gas.’
Salma thought she saw it. ‘Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen. All down there, under the crust.’
Meriel glanced around at the grey stillness of this world, went to scratch her face, and seemed startled when her gloved hand hit her faceplate. ‘We’ve never studied a world like this, either inside the Solar System or outside, even in our remote studies of the exoplanets, planets of other stars. Because there was no world so old as this in our universe. But still – short of some huge impact that tore off the crust entirely, why shouldn’t that good stuff be waiting down there, stranded when the tectonic flows failed?’ She smiled. ‘It’s worth a try. But still, there’s a heck of a journey to make between digging out billion-years-old lumps of coal, and restoring a biosphere.’
She glanced over at Feathers and spoke more softly, as if, Salma thought, she might fear that Feathers would overhear.
‘For that we’re going to have to rely on Feathers herself. We have identified her equivalent of DNA. As you know, her biochemistry is like ours, not identical in the chemistry, but we think we understand the functional workings of it.’
Doria nodded. ‘What you mean is, you might be able to clone her.’
‘Well, that would be a proving step – but not a particularly ethical one, unless we can restore some kind of biosphere for her and her – twins – to run around in. But I do think that’s possible, the biosphere reconstruction, if, if, we can find some reasonably intact genetic material from some other organism. Bacterial or the equivalent will do. The bones she’s already dug up might be a start.
‘With the merest scrap of bacterial DNA, for instance, to compare with Feathers’, I could extrapolate across the gap – the gap between big and small, complex and simple, old and new. In the longer term, I could make guesses as to what might have populated the various ecological niches on this world. Or at least classes of organisms. Maybe Feathers could tell us more, even if it’s just at the level of instinct – what she recognises deep down, what she doesn’t. And if we found more traces still, more clues, the more complete the reconstruction could become.’
Salma thought that over. ‘We are all female here. We can never be mothers – unless we can find a way to make that possible for Feathers. If we can make that happen, we would be parents of a new world.’ She thought again. ‘An eternal world.’
‘We can try,’ Doria said. ‘And – hey. Look up. He’s gone …’
And when Salma turned again, she saw that Terminus had vanished.
It didn’t seem to matter.
She looked over at Feathers, as she kicked at the inert dirt.
Under the light of the young stars, Feathers was building a nest.