Nebogipfel reconstructed something of the history of Humanity, across fifty million years. Much of this picture was tentative, he warned me – an edifice of speculation, founded on the few unambiguous facts he had been able to retrieve from the Information Sea.
There had probably been several waves of star colonization by man and his descendants, said Nebogipfel. During our journey through time in the car, we had seen the launch of one generation of such ships, from the Orbital City.
‘It is not difficult to build an interstellar craft,’ he said, ‘if one is patient. I imagine your 1944 friends in the Palaeocene could have devised such a vessel a mere century or two after we left them. One would need a propulsion unit, of course – a chemical, ion or laser rocket; or perhaps a solar sail of the type we have observed. And there are strategies to use the resources of the solar system to escape from the sun. You could, for instance, swing past Jupiter, and use that planet’s bulk to hurl your star-ship in towards the sun. With a boost at perihelion, you could very easily reach solar escape velocity.’
‘And then one would be free of the solar system?’
‘At the other end a reverse of the process, the exploitation of the gravity wells of stars and planets, would be necessary, to settle into the new system. It might take ten, a hundred thousand years to complete such a journey, so great are the gulfs between the stars …’
‘A thousand centuries? But who could survive so long? What ship – the supply question alone –’
‘You miss the point,’ he said. ‘One would not send humans. The ship would be an automaton. A machine, with manipulative skills, and intelligence at least equivalent to a human’s. The task of the machine would be to exploit the resources of the destination stellar system – using planets, comets, asteroids, dust, whatever it could find – to construct a colony.’
‘Your “automatons”,’ I remarked, ‘sound rather like our friends, the Universal Constructors.’
He did not reply.
‘I can see the use of sending a machine to gather information. But other than that – what is the point? What is the meaning of a colony without humans?’
‘But such a machine could construct anything, given the resources and sufficient time,’ the Morlock said. ‘With cell synthesis and artificial womb technology, it could even construct humans, to inhabit the new colony. Do you see?’
I protested at this – for the prospect seemed unnatural and abhorrent to me – until I remembered, with reluctance, that I had once watched the ‘construction’ of a Morlock, in just such a fashion!
Nebogipfel went on, ‘But the probe’s most important task would be to construct more copies of itself. These would be fuelled up – for example, with gases mined from the stars – and sent on, to further star systems.
‘And so, slow but steady, the colonization of the Galaxy would proceed.’
‘But,’ I protested, ‘even so, it would take so much time. Ten thousand years to reach the nearest star, which is some light years away –’
‘Four.’
‘And the Galaxy itself –’
‘Is a hundred thousand light years across. It would be slow. The migration across the Galaxy would be like the expansion of gas molecules into a vacuum,’ he said. ‘At least at first. But then the colonies would begin to interact with each other. Do you see? Empires could form, straddling the stars. Other groups would oppose the empires. The diffusion would slow further … but it would proceed, inexorably. By such techniques as I have described, it would take tens of millions of years to complete the colonization of the Galaxy – but it could be done. And, since it would be impossible to recall or redirect the mechanical probes, once launched, it would be done. It must have been done by now, fifty million years after the founding of First London.’
He went on, ‘The first few generations of Constructors were, I think, built with anthropocentric constraints incorporated into their awareness. They were built to serve man. But these Constructors were not simple mechanical devices – these were conscious entities. And when they went out into the Galaxy, exploring worlds undreamed of by man and redesigning themselves, they soon passed far beyond the understanding of Humanity, and broke the constraints of their authors … The machines broke free.’
‘Great Scott,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine the military chaps of that remote Age taking to that idea very kindly.’
‘Yes. There were wars … The data is fragmented. In any event, there could be only one victor in such a conflict.’
‘And what of men? How did they take to all this?’
‘Some well, some badly.’ Nebogipfel twisted his face a little and swivelled his eyes. ‘What do you think? Humans are a diverse species, with multiple and fragmented goals – even in your day; imagine how much more diverse things became when people were spread across a hundred, a thousand star systems. The Constructors, too, rapidly fragmented. They are more unified as a species than man has ever been, by reason of their physical nature, but – because of the much greater Information pool to which they have access – their goals are far more complex and varied.’
But, through all this conflict, Nebogipfel said, the slow Conquest of the stars had proceeded.
The launching of the first star-ships, Nebogipfel said, had marked the greatest deviation we had yet witnessed from my original, unperturbed History. ‘Men – your friends, the New Humans – have changed everything about the world, even on a geological – a cosmic scale. I wonder if you can understand –’
‘What?’
‘I wonder if you understand, really, the meaning of a million years – or ten million – or fifty.’
‘Well, I ought to. I’ve traversed through such intervals, with you, on the way to the Palaeocene and back.’
‘But then we travelled through a History free of intelligence. Look – I have told you of interstellar migration. If Mind is given the chance to work on such scales –’
‘I’ve seen what can be done to the earth.’
‘More than that – more than a single planet! The patient, termite-burrowing of Mind can undermine even the fabric of the universe,’ he whispered, ‘if given enough time … Even we only had a half-million years since the plains of Africa, and we captured a sun …
‘Look at the sky,’ he said. ‘Where are the stars? There is hardly a naked star in the sky. This is 1891, or thefeabouts, remember: here can be no cosmological reason for the extinction of the stars, as compared to the sky of your own Richmond.
‘With my dark-evolved eyes, I can see a little more than you. And I tell you there is an array of dull-red pinpoints up there: it is infra-red radiation – heat.’
Then it struck me, with almost a physical force. ‘It is true,’ I said. ‘It is true … Your hypothesis of Galactic conquest. The proof of it is visible, in the sky itself! The stars must be cloaked about – almost all of them – by artificial shells, like your Morlock Sphere.’ I stared out at the empty sky. ‘Dear God, Nebogipfel; human beings – and their machines – have changed Heaven itself!’
‘It was inevitable that it would come to this, once the first Constructor was launched – do you see?
I stared into that darkened sky, oppressed by awe. It was not so much the changed nature of the sky that astonished me so, but the notion that all this – all of it, to the furthest end of the Galaxy – had been brought about by my shattering of History with the Time Machine!
‘I can see that men have gone from the earth,’ I said. ‘The climatic instability has done for us here. But somewhere –’ I waved a hand ‘– somewhere out there must be men and women, in those scattered homes!’
‘No,’ he said. ‘The Constructors see everywhere, remember; they know everything. And I have seen no evidence of men like you. Oh, here and there you may find biological creatures descended from man – but as diverse, in their way, from your form of human as I am. And would you count me a man? And the biological forms are, besides, mostly degenerated …’
‘There are no true men?’
‘There are descendants of man everywhere. But nowhere will you find a creature who is more closely related to you than – say – a whale or an elephant …’
I quoted to him what I remembered of Charles Darwin: ‘“Judging by the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity …”’
‘Darwin was right,’ Nebogipfel said gently.
That idea – that, of your type, you are alone in the Galaxy! – is hard to accept, and I fell silent, gazing up at the blanked-out stars. Was each of those great globes as densely populated as Nebogipfel’s Sphere? My fertile mind began to inhabit those immense world-buildings with the descendants of true men – with fish-men, and bird-men, men of fire and ice – and I wondered what a tale might be brought back if some immortal Gulliver were able to travel from world to world, visiting all the diverse offspring of Humanity.
‘Men may have become extinct,’ Nebogipfel said. ‘Any biological species will, on a long enough timescale, become extinct. But the Constructors cannot become extinct. Do you see that? With the Constructors, the essence of the race is not the form, biological or otherwise – it is the Information the race has gathered, and stored. And that is immortal. Once a race has committed itself to such Children, of Metal and Machines and Information, it cannot die out. Do you see that?’
I turned to the prospect of White Earth beyond our window. I saw it, all right – I saw it all, only too well!
Men had launched off these mechanical workers to the stars, to find new worlds, build colonies. I imagined that great argosy of light reaching out from an earth which had grown too small, going glittering up into the sky, smaller and smaller until the blue had swallowed them up … There were a million lost stories, I thought, of how men had come to know how to bear the strange gravitations, the attenuated and unfamiliar gases and all the stresses of space.
It was an epochal migration – it changed the nature of the cosmos – but its launch was, perhaps, a last effort, a spasm before the collapse of civilization on the Mother World. In the face of the disintegration of the atmosphere, men on earth weakened, dwindled – we had the evidence of the pathetic mirror on the moon to show us that – and, at last, died.
But then, much later, to the deserted earth, back came the colony machines man had sent out – or their descendants, the Universal Constructors, enormously sophisticated. The Constructors were descended from men, in a way – and yet they had gone far beyond the boundaries of what men could achieve; for they had discarded old Adam, and all the vestiges of brutes and reptiles that had lurked in his body and spirit.
I saw it all! The earth had been repopulated; and – not by man – but by the Mechanical Heirs of Man, who had returned, changed, from the stars.
And all of this – all of it – had propagated out of the little colony which had been founded in the Palaeocene. Hilary had foreseen something of this, I thought: the re-engineering of the cosmos had unfolded from that little, fragile huddle of twelve people, that unremarkable seed planted fifty million years deep.