“Ship,” Anyahera said. “Show them.”
Lachesis told me everything she knew, all she’d gleaned from her decades-long fall toward Mitanni, eavesdropping on the telemetry of the seedship that had brought humanity here, the radio buzz of the growing civilization, the reports of the probes she’d fired ahead.
I saw the seedship’s arrival on what should have been a garden world, a nursery for the progeny of her vat wombs. I saw catastrophe: a barren, radioactive hell, climate erratic, oceans poisoned, atmosphere boiling into space. I watched the ship struggle and fail to make a safe place for its children, until, in the end, it gambled on an act of cruel, desperate hope: fertilizing its crew, raising them to adolescence, releasing them on the world to build something out of its own cannibalized body.
I saw them succeed.
Habitation domes blistering the weathered volcanic flats. Webs of tidal power stations. Thermal boreholes like suppurating wounds in the crust. Thousands of fission reactors, beating hearts of uranium and molten salt—
Too well. Too fast. In seven hundred years of struggle on a hostile, barren world, their womb-bred population exploded up toward the billions. Their civilization webbed the globe.
It was a boom unmatched in human history, unmatched on the other seed-ship colonies we had discovered. No Eden world had grown so fast.
“Interesting,” I said, watching Mitanni’s projected population, industrial output, estimated technological self-catalysis, all exploding toward some undreamt-of ceiling. “I agree that this could be suggestive of a Duong-Watts scenario.”
It wasn’t enough, of course. Duong-Watts malignancy was a disease of civilizations, but the statistics could offer only symptoms. That was the terror of it: the depth of the cause. The simplicity.
“Look at what Lachesis has found.” Anyahera rose, took an insistent step forward. “Look at the way they live.”
I spoke more wearily than I should have. “This is going to be another Jotunheim, isn’t it?”
Her face hardened. “No. It isn’t.”
I didn’t let her see that I understood, that the words Duong-Watts malignancy had already made me think of the relativistic weapons Lachesis carried, and the vote we would need to use them. I didn’t want her to know how angry it made me that we had to go through this again.
One more time before we could go home. One more hard decision.
Thienne kept her personal space too cold for me: frosted glass and carbon composite, glazed constellations of data and analysis, a transparent wall opened onto false-color nebulae and barred galactic jets. At the low end of hearing, distant voices whispered in clipped aerospace phrasing. She had come from Haiti and from New Delhi, but no trace of that twin childhood, so rich with history, had survived her journey here.
It took me years to understand that she didn’t mean it as insulation. The cold distances were the things that moved her, clenched her throat, pimpled her skin with awe. Anyahera teased her for it, because Anyahera was a historian and a master of the human, and what awed Thienne was to glimpse her own human insignificance.
“Is it a Duong-Watts malignant?” I asked her. “Do you think Anyahera’s right?”
“Forget that,” she said, shaking her head. “No prejudgment. Just look at what they’ve built.”
She walked me through what had happened to humanity on Mitanni.
At Lagos U, before the launch, we’d gamed out scenarios for what we called socially impoverished worlds—places where a resource crisis had limited the physical and mental capital available for art and culture. Thienne had expected demand for culture to collapse along with supply as people focused on the necessities of existence. Anyahera had argued for an inelastic model, a fundamental need embedded in human consciousness.
There was no culture on Mitanni. No art. No social behavior beyond functional interaction in the service of industry or science.
It was an incredible divergence. Every seedship had carried Earth’s cultural norms—the consensus ideology of a liberal democratic state. Mitanni’s colonists should have inherited those norms.
Mitanni’s colonists expressed no interest in those norms. There was no oppression. No sign of unrest or discontent. No government or judicial system at all, no corporations or markets. Just an array of specialized functions to which workers assigned themselves, their numbers fed by batteries of synthetic wombs.
There was no entertainment, no play, no sex. No social performance of gender. No family units. Biological sex had been flattened into a population of sterile females, slender and lightly muscled. “No sense wasting calories on physical strength with exoskeletons available,” Thienne explained. “It’s a resource conservation strategy.”
“You can’t build a society like this using ordinary humans,” I said. “It wouldn’t be stable. Free riders would play havoc.”
Thienne nodded. “They’ve been rewired. I think it started with the first generation out of the seedship. They made themselves selfless so that they could survive.”
It struck me that when the civilization on Mitanni built their own seed-ships they would be able to do this again. If they could endure Mitanni, they could endure anything.
They could have the galaxy.
I was not someone who rushed to judgment. They’d told me that, during the final round of crew selection. Deliberative. Centered. Disconnected from internal affect. High emotional latency. Suited for tiebreaker role… .
I swept the imagery shut between my hands, compressing it into a point of light. Looked up at Thienne with a face that must have signaled loathing or revulsion, because she lifted her chin in warning. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t leap to conclusions.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re thinking about ant hives. I can see it.”
“Is that a bad analogy?”
“Yes!” Passion, surfacing and subsiding. “Ant hives only function because each individual derives a fitness benefit, even if they sacrifice themselves. It’s kin-selective eusociality. This is—”
“Total, selfless devotion to the state?”
“To survival.” She lifted a mosaic of images from the air: a smiling woman driving a needle into her thigh. A gang of laborers running into a fire, heedless of their own safety, to rescue vital equipment. “They’re born. They learn. They specialize, they work, sleep, eat, and eventually they volunteer to die. It’s the opposite of an insect hive. They don’t cooperate for their own individual benefit—they don’t seem to care about themselves at all. It’s pure altruism. Cognitive, not instinctive. They’re brilliant, and they all come to the same conclusion: cooperation and sacrifice.”
The image of the smiling woman with the needle did not leave me when the shifting mosaic carried her away. “Do you admire that?”
“It’s a society that could never evolve on its own. It has to be designed.” She stared into the passing images with an intensity I’d rarely seen outside of deep study or moments of love, a ferocious need to master some vexing, elusive truth. “I want to know how they did it. How do they disable social behavior without losing theory of mind? How can they remove all culture and sex and still motivate?”
“We saw plenty of ways to motivate on Jotunheim,” I said.
Maybe I was thinking of Anyahera, taking her stance by some guilty reflex, because there was nothing about my tone disconnected from internal affect.
I expected anger. Thienne surprised me. She swept the air clear of her work, came to the couch and sat beside me. Her eyes were gentle.