Blue Remembered Earth

‘And you just happened to know someone,’ Jumai said.

‘We established contact while I was on Mars,’ Eunice answered. ‘He was fascinated by the rock drawings. He said that they already encoded the entire edifice of existing physics, as well as implying the correctness of several models that were still at the preliminary stage. What was more important, though, was that the diagrams pointed to physics we hadn’t begun to probe. Quark-quark interactions that seemed forbidden, on the basis of the known gauge symmetries. Do you know much about quarks? No, obviously not, or you’d have realised that they come in three colours: blue, red and green, like cheap plastic jewels. Or that when Sunday finds me reading a copy of Finnegans Wake, there’s a reason for that.’

‘I don’t think we did too badly to get this far,’ Geoffrey said.

‘The point was, if the diagrams were right . . .’ Eunice shook her head, as if she was still experiencing the awe of that moment. ‘We could do incredible things. We could build engines powerful enough to fling a ship to Neptune in weeks. But that was just the start of it – the least dramatic breakthrough.’ She smiled again. ‘My physicist was right, too. The engine that brought you to Lionheart was the fruit of that very early research. Really, it’s just a standard VASIMR motor with a few wrinkles smoothed out. The kind of thing we’d probably have stumbled on eventually, given enough time. But this wasn’t a stumble. We saw how to make it better, and it worked. You can’t know how that made us feel. We’d proven that there was testable science in the rock diagrams. But if the least dramatic predictions gave us an engine five times faster than anything else out there, what would we be getting into when we started testing the really frightening predictions?’

‘You tell us,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Even with the scope of the equipment in Lionheart, we could only probe the margins of the new physics. But that was enough, for now. These basic experiments have already pointed to a technology so potent that it would make the engine in that ship look like a toy.’ Eunice gestured at the black mosaic. ‘We can do much better than that. For a hundred and fifty years we’ve been locked into a few hours of space around one little star. Even being able to reach Neptune in a few weeks doesn’t alter that. But now we have the means to break out of the solar system. A stardrive, if you will. If the physics is to be believed, then true interstellar travel is now within our grasp. Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s still going to take a long time. A few per cent of the speed of light, that’s what we’re looking at. Pitiful and inadequate compared to the scale of things. Horsepiss against all that cosmic immensity. Even the nearest solar system will still be hundreds of years away. But that’s hundreds, not tens of thousands!’

She was becoming increasingly animated, as if this whole speech was approaching a carefully scripted climax.

‘We already think on that kind of timescale, as a species. We’re starting to live long enough, and we’ve accepted the burden of century-long endeavours like the repairing of Earth’s climate. So it’s not completely abhorrent to think of interstellar travel in those terms. Of course, there’s a catch.’

‘There’d have to be,’ Geoffrey said, ‘or else why wouldn’t you have gone public sixty years ago?’

She nodded, with what looked to Geoffrey to be inexpressible relief and gratitude, as if her most dire fear had been that he would not understand. ‘I said it wasn’t a toy. Sixty years ago, I did not think that as a species we had the wisdom to accept these gifts. Not at the end of that century, when there were still people who not only remembered wars, but had experienced them . . . Would you have felt any more confident, in my shoes?’

Geoffrey discarded the flip answer he’d been about to give. ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Probably not.’

‘The energy implicit in the rock diagrams would have been enough to wipe us out many times over,’ Eunice said. ‘We’d dodged that bullet once, in the era of nuclear weapons. Did we have the collective smarts to dodge it a second time? I thought not – or at least had such grave doubts that I could not leave matters to chance. So I didn’t. I followed what struck me as the only rational course, under the circumstances. I decided to sleep on matters, and see what happened.’

‘You didn’t sleep,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You went into seclusion, for the next sixty-two years – or however long it was after you figured all this out. Then you died.’

‘I didn’t die,’ Eunice said. ‘I just put other arrangements in place. Lin Wei and I might have had our differences, but I’d always hoped that Ocular would find something remarkable. When Lin came to me, when she presented the evidence of the Mandala structure on Sixty-One Virginis f, a series of processes were set in irrevocable motion. For the first time, we had a clear objective: a target for interstellar exploration. It felt right that we should also have the means to reach that target, if we so chose.’

‘But you can’t decide if the time is right,’ Jumai said. ‘Maybe we’re a fraction smarter than we were a hundred years ago, but is that smart enough? You’re just an artilect. You can’t possibly make that kind of choice.’

‘I don’t have to,’ Eunice said. ‘I’ve merely passed on my responsibility. Now it’s yours.’

‘You’re not serious,’ Geoffrey said.

Eunice’s smile was not without sympathy. ‘I did warn you that I was about to place a heavy burden on you.’ She offered her hand, not for him to take, but to sweep majestically around the room. ‘All this is yours now. The experiment, the rock carvings . . . do with them as you will. If you think humanity deserves this gift, is ready for it . . . then it’s yours to disseminate. Not as a commercial property, but as freely distributed knowledge. We’re rich enough as it is, wouldn’t you say? We can afford to give this away. If we’re wise enough to deal with this as a species, then we’re wise enough to deal with it collectively.’

‘And if we don’t think we’re ready?’ Jumai asked.

‘Forget about what you’ve seen in Lionheart, or better still destroy it. You have the resources of the family at your disposal; shouldn’t be too difficult.’

‘Everyone’s seen what the engine can do,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Even if we wanted to keep this quiet, people will want to know how we did that.’

‘Have the engine,’ Eunice said dismissively. ‘Without the conceptual framework of the new physics, it’s an awfully long leap from that to the stardrive.’

‘Even that small advance changes everything,’ Jumai said. ‘Just being able to get out here in a few weeks rather than months is going to shake things up. The outer solar system isn’t going to look so far away any more.’

‘So push the frontier back a little further,’ Eunice said. ‘It’s what I always did.’ She clasped her hands. ‘Now, this may sound ungracious given that you’ve really only just arrived, but we should begin making preparations for your return journey. I was perfectly serious about not keeping you prisoner here. That wasn’t the point of this