Peter Watts
The Island
We are the cave men. We are the Ancients, the Progenitors, the blue-collar steel monkeys. We spin your webs and build your magic gateways, thread each needle's eye at sixty thousand kilometers a second. We never stop. We never even dare to slow down, lest the light of your coming turn us to plasma. All for you. All so you can step from star to star without dirtying your feet in these endless, empty wastes
Is it really too much to ask, that you might talk to us now and then?
I know about evolution and engineering. I know how much you've changed. I've seen these portals give birth to gods and demons and things we can't begin to comprehend, things I can't believe were ever human; alien hitchikers, maybe, riding the rails we've left behind. Alien conquerers.
Exterminators, perhaps.
But I've also seen those gates stay dark and empty until they faded from view. We've infered diebacks and dark ages, civilizations burned to the ground and others rising from their ashes — and sometimes, afterwards, the things that come out look a little like the ships
I've lost count of the eons since we gave up.
All these iterations fading behind us. All these hybrids and posthumans and immortals, gods and catatonic cavemen trapped in magical chariots they can't begin to understand, and not one of them ever pointed a comm laser in our direction to say
We're not some fucking cargo cult. We're the backbone of your goddamn empire. You wouldn't even be out here if it weren't for us.
And — and you're our
Why have you forsaken us?
And so another build begins.
This time I open my eyes to a familiar face I've never seen before: only a boy, early twenties perhaps, physiologically. His face is a little lopsided, the cheekbone flatter on the left than the right. His ears are too big. He looks almost
I haven't spoken for millennia. My voice comes out a whisper: «Who are you?» Not what I'm supposed to ask, I know. Not the first question
«I'm yours,» he says, and just like that I'm a mother.
I want to let it sink in, but he doesn't give me the chance: «You weren't scheduled, but Chimp wants extra hands on deck. Next build's got a situation.»
So the chimp is still in control. The chimp is always in control. The mission goes on.
«Situation?» I ask.
«Contact scenario, maybe.»
I wonder when he was born. I wonder if he ever wondered about me, before now.
He doesn't tell me. He only says, «Sun up ahead. Half lightyear. Chimp thinks, maybe it's talking to us. Anyhow…» My — son shrugs. «No rush. Lotsa time.»
I nod, but he hesitates. He's waiting for The Question but I already see a kind of answer in his face. Our reinforcements were supposed to be
How far out must we be by now, if even our own perfect building blocks have decayed so? How long has it taken us? How long have I been dead?
After all this time, I don't want to know.
He's alone at the tac tank when I arrive on the bridge, his eyes full of icons and trajectories. Perhaps I see a little of me in there, too.
«I didn't get your name,» I say, although I've looked it up on the manifest. We've barely been introduced and already I'm lying to him.
«Dix.» He keeps his eyes on the tank.
He's over ten thousand years old. Alive for maybe twenty of them. I wonder how much he knows, who he's met during those sparse decades: does he know Ishmael, or Connie? Does he know if Sanchez got over his brush with immortality?
I wonder, but I don't ask. There are rules.
I look around. «We're it?»
Dix nods. «For now. Bring back more if we need them. But…» His voice trails off.
«Yes?»
«Nothing.»
I join him at the tank. Diaphanous veils hang within like frozen, color-coded smoke. We're on the edge of a molecular dust cloud. Warm, semiorganic, lots of raw materials: formaldehyde, ethylene glycol, the usual prebiotics. A good spot for a quick build. A red dwarf glowers dimly at the center of the Tank. The chimp has named it DHF428, for reasons I've long since forgotten to care about.
«So fill me in,» I say.
His glance is impatient, even irritated. «You too?»
«What do you mean?»
«Like the others. On the other builds. Chimp can just squirt the specs but they want to
Shit, his link's still active. He's
I force a smile. «Just a — a cultural tradition, I guess. We talk about a lot of things, it helps us — reconnect. After being down for so long.»
«But it's
He doesn't know. Why doesn't he know?
«We've got half a lightyear,» I point out. «There's some rush?»
The corner of his mouth twitches. «Vons went out on schedule.» On cue a cluster of violet pinpricks sparkle in the Tank, five trillion klicks ahead of us. «Still sucking dust mostly, but got lucky with a couple of big asteroids and the refineries came online early. First components already extruded. Then Chimp sees these fluctuations in solar output — mainly infra, but extends into visible.» The tank blinks at us: the dwarf goes into time-lapse.
Sure enough, it's
«Nonrandom, I take it.»
Dix inclines his head a little to the side, not quite nodding.
«Plot the time-series.» I've never been able to break the habit of raising my voice, just a bit, when addressing the chimp. Obediently (
…………
«Repeating sequence,» Dix tells me. «Blips don't change, but spacing's a log-linear increase cycling every