It was as if a tremendous flashlight had been shone into the solar system’s darkest corners. The result was a marvelous map in space and time that would serve as the basis for exploration for decades to come—always assuming there would still be humans around after the sunstorm to take advantage of it.
But there was one major surprise.
Jupiter, the largest body in the solar system outside the sun itself, has its own set of Lagrangian points of gravitational equilibrium, just like Earth’s: three of them on the sun—Jupiter line, and two others at the so-called “Trojan points”—in Jupiter’s orbit but sixty degrees ahead of and behind the parent planet.
Unlike the three straight-line points like L1, the Trojans are points of stable equilibrium: an object placed there will tend to stick. Jupiter’s Trojans collect garbage; they are the Sargasso Seas of space. And as expected the Extirpator’s great mapping detected tens of thousands of asteroids gathered into these great sinks. The Trojans were in fact the most densely populated parts of the solar system—and more than one visionary had noted that there could be no better site to build the first starships from Earth.
But hiding in each of the twin clouds of swarming asteroids there was something more. These objects, one in each cloud, were more reflective than ice, their surfaces more geometrically perfect than any asteroid. They were spheres, engineered to a perfection beyond any human artifice, so perfectly reflective they must look like droplets of chrome.
When Bisesa Dutt heard about this, via a hurried note from Siobhan, she knew exactly what these objects must be. They were monitors, sent to watch a solar system in agony.
They were Eyes.
38: Firstborn
The long wait was ending.
Those who had watched Earth for so long had never been remotely human. But they had once been flesh and blood.
They had been born on a planet of one of the first stars of all, a roaring hydrogen-fat monster, a beacon in a universe still dark. These first ones were vigorously curious, in a young and energy-rich universe. But planets, the crucibles of life, were scarce, for the heavy elements that comprised them had yet to be manufactured in the hearts of stars. When they looked out across the depths of space, they saw nothing like themselves, no Mind to mirror their own. The Firstborn were alone.
Then the universe itself betrayed them.
The early stars blazed gloriously but died quickly. Their thin debris enriched the pooled gases of the Galaxy, and soon a new generation of long-lived stars would emerge. But to the Firstborn, left stranded between the dying proto-suns, it was a terrible abandonment.
There was an age of madness, of war and destruction. It ended in exhaustion. Saddened but wiser, the survivors began to plan for inevitability: a future of cold and dark.
The universe is full of energy. But much of it is at equilibrium. At equilibrium no energy can flow, and therefore it cannot be used for work, any more than the level waters of a pond can be used to drive a waterwheel. It is on the flow of energy out of equilibrium—the small fraction of “useful” energy, which some human scientists call “exergy”—that life depends. Thus all Earth life depends on a flow of energy from the sun, or from the planet’s core.
But as the first ones looked ahead, they saw only a slow darkening, for each generation of stars was built with increasing difficulty from the ruins of the last. At last there would come a day when there wasn’t enough fuel in the Galaxy to manufacture a single new star. Even after that it would go on, with the exhaustion of exergy in all its forms, the terrible clamp of entropy strangling the cosmos and all its processes.
The Firstborn saw that if life was to survive in the very long term—if even a single thread of awareness was to be passed to the farthest future—discipline was needed on a cosmic scale. There must be no unnecessary disturbance, no wasted energy, no ripples in the stream of time. Life: there was nothing more precious to the Firstborn. But it had to be the right kind of life. Orderly life.
Sadly, that was rare.
Everywhere, evolution drove the progression of life to ever more complex forms—which depended on an ever faster usage of the available energy flow. On Earth crustaceans and mollusks, which appeared early in life’s story, had metabolisms four or five times slower than birds or mammals, which appeared much later. It was a matter of competition; the quicker you could make use of the free energy flowing around you, the better.
And then there was intelligence. On Earth humans quickly learned to trap the animals around them, and to harness the power of streams and wind. Soon humans would dig out fossil fuels, burning up the chemical energy stored in forests and bogs over millions of sunbathed years, then they would meddle with the hearts of atoms, then they would tap the energy of the vacuum, and so on. It was as if human civilization was nothing but an exploration of ways of using up exergy faster. If this went on, humans would eventually drain a substantial proportion of the exergy reservoir of the Galaxy as a whole, before exhausting themselves or falling on each other in war. And in the process these squabbling folks would only hasten the day when the dread clamp of entropy closed around the universe.
The Firstborn had seen it all before. Which was why humans had to be stopped.
Their action taken was for the best, the noblest of intentions, for the long-term preservation of life in the universe itself. The Firstborn would even force themselves to watch; their consciences demanded no less. But as they saw it, they had no choice. They had done this many times before.
The Firstborn, children of a lifeless universe, cherished life above all else. It was as if they saw the universe as a park, and themselves as gamekeepers charged with its preservation. But gamekeepers must sometimes cull.
***************************
Part 5
39: Morning Star
0300 (London Time)
On Mars, as on the Moon and on the shield, you officially kept Houston time. But you counted the sols, the Martian days, to mark the rhythms of your life.
And on this fateful morning, as she drove across the cold Martian ground, Helena Umfraville kept one small display showing her another time, the astronomers’ universal time—Greenwich Mean Time, one hour behind the local time in London. And when that display approached two ., a little before the sunstorm was predicted to start, she slowed the Beagle to a stop, clambered through the docking port into her suit, and stepped away from the rover.
In this corner of Mars it was dawn. She was facing the rising sun. On the horizon the light gathered to a coppery brown, and the rising sun was a dusty disk, attenuated by distance. The rest of the sky was a dome of stars.
This was the usual rock-strewn desert so characteristic of the northern plains. Once again she was standing on new Martian ground, ground marked by no human footprint. But this morning Mars didn’t matter, not compared with the great spectacle to come in the sky.
On the ground there wasn’t a single light to be seen. The huddled camp around the Aurora1 landing site was already far away, beyond the cramped horizon. The crew had dug themselves a shelter in the Martian dirt that might, might, shield them from the worst of the sunstorm, whose ferocity would be diminished a little by Mars’s greater distance from the sun. Helena had to be back in the shelter soon if she hoped to live through this long sol.
But here she was, far from home, and stopped dead in the middle of nowhere. She didn’t feel she had a choice but to be here.