26: The Smallest Possible Loop

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Through the door was a much more normally sized corridor, and in the corridor was a brennan wearing a cleaner and less worn version of the type of jumpsuit the woman wore, waiting for us. Ke smiled and gave us a little wave. “Welcome aboard the Vanguard,” ke said. “I’m Smyles.”

As each of us introduced ourselves to Smyles, ke looked into our faces carefully, like ke was memorising every detail. Ke’s warm smile didn’t change. “And you’re doing a history project? That’s great. Very exciting. Don’t mind Decker back there, she’s a bit of a grump. I’ll show you to your quarters.”

Ke led us a little way down the corridor and stopped at a red door. “Oh, first though, this.”

Behind the door was a room. There’s not really an up or down in zero-pull, but I was thinking of the walls closer to the outside of the ship as ‘down’, like they would be in a spinning ship. Thinking of it that way, there were tables and benches on the ‘floor’ and ‘ceiling’ of the room. They were bolted or welded or something in place. The benches had little straps with clips on them; I wasn’t sure why. The tables between them had little handles welded to them, probably for takehold events, and big patches of something rough and strange stuck to their tops.

“This is the mess hall,” Smyles said. “Eating and drinking happens in here. No food or drink anywhere else in the passenger area.” Ke pointed to a blue stripe on the corridor wall. The blue stripe had been down the whole corridor that I’d seen so far, but it wasn’t in the big room with the bars; I’d thought it was just decoration. “The guest area is marked with this stripe. Don’t leave areas marked like this; it’s very dangerous to wander.” Ke grinned, a little mischievously. “I did you a favour and put you right next to the mess.” Ke opened the next door, and in there was a bedroom.

It was a bit like my bedroom at home, but instead of three beds there were six. They were all made and nobody else’s stuff was in there, so I guessed that we weren’t sharing it with anyone and there’d be two spare beds. A door at the end of the room was open, showing a little bathroom.

“Call if you need anything,” Smyles said, pointing to a little button on the wall. “It’s keyed to call me. Your luggage will be here in about fifteen minutes; dinner is in the mess in three hours. There’s always water packets in there if you’re thirsty before then but don’t take them out of the mess, drink and throw them away inside.”

“Thank you,” Tima said.

“Not a problem, Tima. I hope you all enjoy your trip.”

As soon as ke left, Plia collapsed onto a bed. Or tried to, anyway. It’s really hard to collapse onto anything in zero-pull.

“I cannot believe we are pulling this off,” she said. “I thought we’d have to fight a lot harder for approval.”

“I know, right?” Hima said. “And they even let us bring a kid. That’s bonkers.” He glanced at me. “No offence.”

I shrugged. He wasn’t wrong. “What even is your project?” I asked.

“We’re just looking for some old lost files about Earth,” Plia said, waving her hand. “It’s really complicated and they probably don’t exist any more, but it’s worth looking, right?”

It was. We knew hardly anything about Earth any more. Anything that they could find would be worth it.

Not long later, a boy brought our cases. The zero pull meant he could bring them all at once in his arms, all tied together. They were very small – I’d been warned to pack only what I needed, so mine was mostly clothes. Our mass limit meant that I could have brought more, but Plia had warned me that I’d probably find things on the other ships that I wanted to take home, and I would want spare room in the mass limit for them. The grown-ups’ cases were all a little bigger than mine, but not by much – they probably just contained bigger clothes.

The boy shoved the bundle into the room so that it flew towards the far end and Hali had to catch it with a little ‘oof’. (This only sent Hali flying across the room with them, until he desperately reached out and grabbed a takehold bar.)

“Here’s ya luggage,” the boy said sullenly. “Have a nice trip.” He shut the door before anyone could thank him, or ask him any questions.

“Well,” Plia said, “he’s not getting any politer with age.”

“There were no rude hand gestures this time,” Hali gasped, winded from the bags. “Did we do something to upset him last time?”

“He would’ve seen at least a hundred groups of passengers since last time, there’s no way he would remember us. Decker and Smyles didn’t recognise us.”

“Decker had good reason to assume you idiots had never been on a zero-pull ship before because you tried to wear your necklaces aboard,” Tima pointed out. “Who does that? Loose objects are dangerous!”

“Yeah, yeah; we were a little forgetful! We were excited!” Plia said.

“That’s a good reason not to be forgetful! We need to be focused, here! We have to make the most of this opportunity!”

“Lest our hearts never be untethered,” Hali said, in a tone like it was a joke, and the others laughed. I frowned, but nobody explained what he meant.

“What do the necklaces mean?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“You and Plia have the same necklace. What do they mean?”

He took his necklace out of his pocket, careful not to give it too much chain in zero pull. “It’s the Smallest Possible Loop,” he said, pointing to the smaller of the two interlinked rings.

“Oh, don’t go giving my little sister religion, her parents will kill me,” Plia said jokingly.

I knew about religion. “You’re Hummers?”

Hali laughed. “There’s more than one religion in the fleet, kid!”

I frowned deeper. Wasn’t that what ‘religion’ meant? Being a Hummer? “I haven’t heard of any others.”

“Says the fish who’s never heard about water,” Tima said. “Have you seen those pilgrims who go on the treegrave tours over and over again? The fleet’s mission is practically a religion.”

I wanted to disagree, because that didn’t sound right, but she clearly knew more about religion than me and I didn’t want to be wrong. So instead I said, “What’s the Smallest Possible Loop?”

“I’ve been forbidden by Plia from giving you religion,” Hali said, “so I’ll only tell you if you promise not to believe me.”

“Uh… okay, fine? I promise?”

“Fantastic. The story goes that there was once a being that made a perfect universe.”

“Easy,” I said. “I definitely don’t believe that.”

He laughed. “Let me finish. The story goes that a being made a perfect universe, where everything was in balance and perfectly frictionless and ran in perfect cycles. There was no entropy, because all energy expended fell into other uses in perfect harmony, with none too chaotic to reuse. Everything was in a perfect cycle of activity, over and over again with no loss and no end and no dead, an immaculate eternity.

“And the creator admired its creation, and saw that it was tiny, insignificant, unimportant. It had built a perfect cycle that could continue eternally, and in doing so, it had built a universe with almost no lifespan at all. For time is a measure of change, and if you have a perfect cycle that lasts for, for example, one year, then you have not built something eternal; you have built a universe that lasts for one year.

“The creator had created the Smallest Possible Loop, and was disgusted and disappointed in its efforts. It tried again, building larger. It built a perpetual explosion that existed on a massive scale in a universe with different rules, where mess and loss and chaotic change were destined to creep into any system. And it watched the beautiful variety of stars and stones and gases that resulted, and this was something larger, something grander; a universe that had time and space to truly exist in. But the creator, after marvelling at this for untold aeons, found that this, too, was all much the same. One star is glorious, a hundred stars even more so; but is a thousand or a million stars really that much better than one hundred? The stars and planets were all different from each other, in the strict sense of their physical composition and their places in space, but not by enough to be particularly interesting or meaningful.

“And so the creator began to work small, creating tiny things that would respond and change and would multiply themselves into more things that could respond and change. And here it felt true delight in its creation, for life was an uncontrolled consequence in much the way as the stars themselves had been, erupting from the ongoing explosion without specific individual design. The lack of specific design made things new and unpredictable to the creator, something that could be observed and marvelled at with more than simply the pride of watching one’s own handiwork, and life was the best at this, because it grew and adapted and shaped itself around the stone on which it had been birthed in so many complex ways, exploding in new forms with new behaviours in response to every crisis.

“And the crises were many, and the creator started to worry about this thing it had made that had quickly become the brightest and most interesting part of its universe. If something were to happen to the planet it was on, or the star it orbited, or the galaxy that contained that star, then the life would be gone, and this would be a terrible thing, for the creator had come to love life more than any of its other creations. So it thought, I will make more of it, in other places, and that life will grow in new and interesting ways, and if I make many such things then the loss of some will not be so great.

“And so the creator turned to other stars, and then stopped. For the concept of creating new, different life in so many places was an exhausting one, and it found itself strangely reluctant to start. It wasn’t until it recalled its joy at the explosion of the universe, at the explosion of life across Earth, that it realised; the best creations were those in which it had as little a hand as possible, those that could surprise it by not being part of the design.

“So it made no more life. Instead, it went to the life that it had already made, and it picked out the part of it that it thought most capable, and it gave that species a yearning, a desire to explore and to understand and to spread outward. And it put life in the hands of life, and let it go and spread itself throughout the universe and fill a dead place with true beauty and create, you might say, the largest possible loop.” Hali fingered the larger circle on his pendant. “And that, of course, is who we are. And that’s our sacred duty – to love life and love ourselves, and by being true to ourselves we will fulfil our natures and fill the universe.”

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