Time. Stephen Baxter

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ first wave will be slow, no faster than we can afford. It doesn’t matter. Not in the long term.

      When the probe reaches a new system, it phones home, and starts to build.

      Here is the heart of the strategy. A target system, we assume, is uninhabited. We can therefore anticipate massive exploitation of the system’s resources, without restraint, by the probe. Such resources are useless for any other purpose, and are therefore economically free to us.

      I thought you’d enjoy that line. There’s nothing an entrepreneur likes more than the sound of the word ‘free’.

      More probes will be built and launched from each of the first wave of target stars. The probes will reach new targets; and again, more probes will be spawned, and fired onward. The volume covered by the probes will grow rapidly, like the expansion of gas into a vacuum.

      Our ships will spread along the spiral arm, along lanes rich with stars, farming the Galaxy for humankind.

      Once started, the process will be self-directing, self-financing. It would take, the double-domes think, ten to a hundred million years for the colonization of the Galaxy to be completed in this manner. But we must invest merely in the cost of the initial generation of probes.

      Thus the cost of colonizing the Galaxy will be less, in real terms, than that of our Apollo program of fifty years ago.

      This vision isn’t mine alone. It isn’t original. The rocket pioneer Robert Goddard wrote an essay in 1918 – ninety-two years ago – called ‘The Ultimate Migration’, in which he imagined space arks built from asteroid materials carrying our far-future descendants away for the death of the sun. The engineering detail has changed; the essence of the vision hasn’t.

      We can do this. If we succeed, we will live forever.

      The alternative is extinction.

      And, people, when we’re gone, we’re gone.

      As far as we can see we’re alone, in an indifferent universe. We see no sign of intelligence anywhere away from Earth. We may be the first. Perhaps we’re the last. It took so long for the Solar System to evolve intelligence it seems unlikely there will be others, ever.

      If we fail, then the failure is for all time. If we die, mind and consciousness and soul die with us: hope and dreams and love, everything that makes us human. There will be nobody even to mourn us.

      To be the first is an awesome responsibility. It’s a responsibility we must grasp.

      I am offering you a practical route to an infinite future for mankind, a future of unlimited potential. Some day, you know it, I’ll come back to you again for money: seedcorn money, that’s all, so we can take a first step – self-financing even in the medium term – beyond the bounds of Earth. But I want you to see why I’ll be doing that. Why I must.

      We can do this. We will do this. We’re on our own. It’s up to us.

      This is just the beginning. Join me.

      Thank you.

       Michael:

      This is what I have learned, Malenfant. This is how it is, how it was, how it came to be.

      In the afterglow of the Big Bang, humans spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across billions upon billions of years.

      Everywhere they found life.

      Nowhere did they find mind – save what they brought with them or created – no other against which human advancement could be tested.

      With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages.

      They learned of other universes from which theirs had evolved. Those earlier, simpler realities too were empty of mind, a branching tree of emptiness reaching deep into the hyperpast.

      It is impossible to understand what minds of that age – the peak of the species, a race hundreds of billions of times older than your mankind, Malenfant – were like. They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not even to learn. They had nothing in common with us, their ancestors of the afterglow.

      Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.

      The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile and ultimately lethal.

      There was despair and loneliness.

      There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. There was an age of suicide, as the finest of humanity chose self-destruction against further purposeless time and struggle.

      The great rivers of mind guttered and dried.

      But some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to the darkness, to accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably old.

      And, at last, they realized that this was wrong. It wasn’t supposed to have been like this.

      Burning the last of the universe’s resources, the final downstreamers – dogged, all but insane – reached to the deepest past. And – oh.

      Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon. It’s starting –

       1

       BOOTSTRAP

      What seest thou else

      In the dark backward and abysm of time?

      WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

       Emma Stoney:

      Of course Emma had known that Reid Malenfant – failed astronaut, her ex-husband, her current boss – had been buying up Space Shuttle rocket engines and static-firing them in the California desert. She’d thought it was all part of an elaborate waste-disposal plan.

      She hadn’t known he was planning to use the rockets to reach the asteroids.

      Not until Cornelius Taine told her about it.

      About that, and a lot more besides.

      ‘… Ms Stoney.’

      The СКАЧАТЬ