Swallow the Sky: A Space Opera (31 page)

“I don’t understand – why
didn’t the New Earth colonists have their own copy? I’ve never even heard of
the Bi Sheng Repository. Did you know it existed?”

Carson shook his head. “No,
and neither does anyone else. This has come out of nowhere.”

Aiyana sighed. “But it
was in the module that was destroyed by the meteor strike. Perhaps it’s just as
well, at least Juro will never steal it.”

“Yeah, maybe” said Carson
and again fell silent. By now he was convinced that Sakyamuni had talked about
the Repository on the third tape, the one Juro had never let him hear. Would
the old man stop at anything to retrieve such a prize?

Aiyana decided to leave
him alone and spent the following hours preparing for the long return voyage to
New Earth. In the meantime Carson told the ship to activate the Alcubierre
Drive and jump to another location in the Orpheus system. He did not explain
why until they sat down for a meal at the galley table.

“Honey” he began, taking
her hands, “do you think you and Caelin could make a go of it? Prospecting in
the asteroid belt, I mean. Tallis could join you as well.”

“What, are you dumping
me?” she shouted.

He grinned, leant across
the table, and kissed her.

“No my darling, I’m
trying to keep you alive.” He lowered his eyes and added almost inaudibly “I’m
going to recover the Repository.”

“But it’s destroyed…”
Aiyana began to say, her voice trailing off as she realized what he meant.

“You would go to Old
Earth?” she whispered.

“Back to the solar system
at least. I wouldn’t have to get any closer than Saturn.”

“But the Melt…”

“I doubt that it ever spread
to the outer solar system, the temperature is too low. But that’s just part of
the problem.” He looked her in the eye again. “Going there is a capital
offense. It has to be – imagine if someone went there and got contaminated – the
Melt would get out.”

“So if you go and the
Commonwealth finds out they will annihilate your personality?”

Carson nodded. “Aiyana, I
know it’s a crazy risk but I can’t begin to describe what it would mean to recover
the Repository. The human race is like an orphan who knows nothing about its
parents or where it comes from. We are a unique species in the galaxy, maybe in
the whole damn universe, yet we don’t know our own story.”

“I am over eight hundred
years old” he said blinking away tears. “I’ve had a wonderful life, and now I
think I have found something worth dying for.”

Aiyana circled the table
and took him in her arms.

“And what was my life
like before I met you? No Mister Mailman, we’re doing this together.”

“How about you Tallis?”
she cried.

“What a wonderful path we are following. Let
us enter the dark secret places of the forest together.”

“Not that anyone’s
asking” said the ship, “but I’m in as well.”

That broke the tension. They
laughed, hugged, and kissed.

“There is an incredible
amount to think about” Aiyana said.

“Ain’t that the truth”
said Carson. “Job one is inventing the greatest fake provenance in the history
of antiquing. We will need a convincing story about how we found the
Repository.”

“I can’t believe we’re
going to Sol. Imagine – we’ll be the first people in eight thousand years to
see Old Earth.”

Carson smiled and
marveled at Aiyana’s spirit, but it was difficult to hide his sense of dread. Nanotech
devices reproduced at extraordinary speed – many times a second according to
the archives. How many generations was that since the destruction of the Earth?
Could the Melt have evolved, and if so what had it become?

And there was another
thing. The module holding a copy of the Repository had orbited Orpheus
undisturbed for thousands of years, only to be destroyed the moment it was
discovered. He shuddered and thought of his vision in Lilly Cathedral.

Something was coming.

Aiyana sat at the galley table dabbing her eyes. Carson,
seated opposite, reached out, squeezed her hand, and poured two glasses of
brandy. Aiyana gulped hers down and started crying again.

They had been listening
to the voices of the last human beings trapped in the solar system. Captured by
the colonists on New Earth eight thousand years ago, Carson did not know
recordings existed until he gained full access to the Archives. The
Commonwealth had decided that they were too distressing to be released to the
general public.

The basic story of the
Melt was learnt by every child. Simple nanotechnology had been in use on Earth
for over a century, but the glittering prize was a self-reproducing nanotech
device. Just as a tree grows from a tiny seed, an invisibly small nanobot
could, in theory, make enough copies of itself to build a house, a power plant,
an entire city using nothing but atoms as raw material. Unlimited wealth
beckoned.

But somewhere in the
western section of the Asian landmass – a region called Europe – an experiment
had got out of control. Instead of building a precise, controlled structure, a
nanotech device had begun endlessly reproducing itself using the atoms of
whatever material was around – its container, the laboratory, and the bodies of
the researcher workers.

Such a disaster had long been
anticipated, and all self-replicating nanobots had a failsafe that halted production
after a limited number of generations. Whether the safety mechanism had been
sidestepped or the system had somehow mutated would never be known. Regardless
of the cause the result was immediate and devastating. Within days a two kilometer-wide
area had been transformed into a seething formless sludge of furiously
reproducing nanomachines. A desperate attempt to sterilize the site was made
using a primitive explosive device called a
nuclear bomb
.

At first the drastic act
appeared to have succeeded but the explosion blasted a few surviving nanobots,
smaller than bacteria, into the stratospheric winds of the upper atmosphere. Within
weeks outbreaks were occurring around the globe. Horribly, living tissue with
its abundant atoms of nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen proved to be an ideal source
of raw material for the microscopic machines. Recklessly,
nuclear bombs
were used again, each time stopping the immediate infection while ultimately
spreading it still further.

In the final act the Melt
accelerated and began spreading across the face of the entire Earth. This was
the moment when Adhiambo Cissokho, watching from the Chu Jung Orbital Facility,
had crammed every willing human being into the Yongding and fled the system.

“That’s where the
official story ends” said Carson. “What’s rarely mentioned is the fate of the people
living off-planet. There were thousands in orbit, and small colonies on the
Moon and Mars, plus some research stations in the outer solar system.”

The orbiting sites were
the first to go. By now most of the landmass below had been transformed into a
featureless sea as the Melt, having destroyed all life, began to eat the earth
itself. Somehow spores reached up into the vacuum, possibly propelled by the
nuclear
bombs
. More explosions occurred in orbit as power systems became unstable,
scattering the nano-devices still further.

Forty-six days later the
Moon succumbed. The absence of carbon in the crust initially slowed the spread
but again the Melt adapted and within weeks Earth’s satellite was once more a
dead world.

Mars took much longer to
die. Fearful that they would share the Moon’s fate the colonists desperately
sent out messages for help. They knew it would be ten years before their radio
signals reached the Eridani system but hoped that the Yongding had returned to
the edge of the solar system and would hear their cries.

For three years they
begged for rescue, then the moment they dreaded arrived.

‘Oh God, the
observation satellites are showing something strange on Mons Olympus…”

‘The Melt is spreading
across the Tharsis plateau. Why don’t you hear us, why don’t you come?’

‘Please please save
us. There are more than three hundred people stranded here, twenty-two
children. Please don’t let us die, please…’

But, terrified that the plague
would be carried to New Earth, the Yongding never returned.

The last survivors in the
solar system were six scientists living in a research station on Callisto, the
outermost of Jupiter’s giant moons. The Melt never reached them but their
lonely outpost was not meant to be self-sustaining and finally the supplies run
out. Having witnessed the fate of the Martian colony they had no illusions
about being rescued but for five years, true to their calling, they continued
to dispatch their observations.

They sent out one last
message:

‘All the food has gone.
We are disabling the fusion reactor’s safety mechanisms and then we will trigger
it to go critical. It will be over in milliseconds. This is a matter of no
importance. Thirteen billion people have already died – what do another six
matter?’

‘The Melt appears to
have stopped in the inner planets and we pray that it never spreads beyond the
solar system. We hope with all our hearts that the people who fled in the
Yongding have survived and that the human race continues. Even so, you were
right not to return. Learn from this terrible tragedy, never let it happen
again.’

“We did learn, didn’t
we?” Aiyana said to Carson as he poured another round. “I mean the Covenant has
protected us all these years…”

“Yes honey, we learned. It’s
easy for people like Juro to sneer and say that we’ve been too cautious, but
God knows what might have happened if we’d started experimenting again. The
Melt is the ultimate anti-life, the exact opposite of a harmonious ecosystem. It’s
like an ancient disease called
cancer
but a trillion times worse.”

“Do you think the Techs kept
developing nanotechnology?”

“Yeah, I guess so” Carson
said rubbing his face. “Hopefully they learned too, at least to be incredibly cautious.
Or maybe they didn’t, and there’s another planet thousands of light years away
that’s just a big blob of nanomachines.”

He cast around for
something to take Aiyana’s mind off the recordings.

“Hey Tallis, how’s our
fake Repository?”

“
We have made excellent progress nest-mates.
Come and experience it for yourselves.”

“Great idea”

“Oh God, that’s perfect!”
Aiyana cried.

They were standing in
Tallis’s improvised workroom. In front of them was one of the empty storage
modules plucked from cometary orbit. It was so well preserved they had been
able to power it up and open it without forcing an entry. Now the interior
contained row after row of dense black arrays. As they watched twelve of
Tallis’s workers crawled up the sides and inserted another cuboid unit.

“This is what we think
the module holding the Repository was like” Carson said.

“
We found traces of the memory medium on the
inside surface of the container struck by the meteor
” Tallis explained.

“Interestingly, it’s a
nano-device.” Seeing Aiyana’s alarm Carson added “don’t worry, there’s no
self-replication involved. Tallis was able to duplicate it using standard
manufacturing techniques.”

“
It is a ferrous nanoparticle shuttle
”

“Oh that explains
everything!” Aiyana said.

Carson laughed. “Sorry,
too much jargon. The basic component is an incredibly tiny particle of iron –
no more than a few dozen atoms – that’s magnetically pushed to and fro along a
hollow carbon nanotube. It stores binary numbers: one end of the tube signifies
zero, the other end one.”

“You’re kidding!”

“I know what you mean. It’s
one of those crazy ancient machines that actually worked, like
rocket
engines
, and physically it’s extraordinarily stable; as Samuelson said, it
was built to last a billion years.”

“So when we find the real
Repository we’ll transfer the data to our fake and say we found it in orbit
around Orpheus”

“Roger that, just
practice saying it with a straight face.”

“YOU ARE ENTERING AN
ABSOLUTE EXCLUSION ZONE!”

“DO NOT APPROACH! YOUR
VESSEL WILL BE DESTROYED”

“UNDER AUTHORITY OF THE
COMMONWEALTH SECURITY CODE THE PENALTY FOR PENETRATING THE SOLAR SYSTEM IS
TOTAL PERSONALITY RECONSTRUCTION”

“I don’t think they want
us to come any closer” Aiyana said with a smile.

They had stopped for a
navigation fix half a light year from Sol. The moment the ship launched its
periscope it picked up a tsunami of warnings beamed from the monitoring
stations that surrounded the solar system.

“It’s nothing personal”
said Carson, “those messages are transmitted on an endless loop; they have no
idea we’re here. The main purpose of the outposts is not so much to prevent
people getting in, but to make damn sure nothing gets out.”

“The theoretical limit to
the spread of the Melt is the Heliopause” the ship said

A translucent raindrop
shape encompassing a schematic of the solar system materialized in the cabin,
the Sun glowing at its center.

“It’s the boundary where
the pressure from the interstellar medium matches the outward pressure of the
solar wind, so even the lightest particle can go no further.”

“We’re approaching the
leading edge” Carson said. “Thank God it exists, otherwise the Melt might have
drifted all the way to New Earth.”

“But all the time we’re
inside we could encounter a nanobot and get infected”

“Yeah, ain’t that a
lovely thought?”

“If you say so darling”
said Aiyana. “But the Melt didn’t spread beyond Mars. You said it was too cold
in the outer system.”

“So it’s thought. Nano
machines use ratchet turbines to extract energy from the random movement of
molecules
.
So lower temperatures mean less power for the little
critters.”

“I’m getting worried by
how much you know about this stuff.”

“Believe me honey, it
wasn’t easy. As long as the Covenant exists they’ll never be a manual called
‘Build
Your Own Nano Device.’
Me and the ship had to puzzle it out. I just pray we
got it right.”

“I’ve got our position”
the ship said. “We can go any time you like.”

Aiyana floated up behind
Carson, circled her arms around his waist and rested her chin on his shoulder. She
stared at the glowing image of the Heliopause.

“Next time we stop we’ll
be inside” she whispered.

“What happened to the buggy?”
Carson yelled. “It looks like it’s caught some ghastly ancient disease.”

It was twelve hours
later. The ship had announced their arrival in the solar system and everyone
was waiting for shell spin-down so that the periscope could be launched. In the
interim they had gone to the shuttle bay to see how Aiyana and Tallis had
tackled the problem of recovering the Repository without getting infected