59: The Tyranny of Distance

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We had some dense nutrient loaf (which tasted delicious and not at all like feet), then Gara took the historians off to show them some files or computer systems or something, and Old Teeth gave me another big, toothless smile. “Do you want to see something interesting, child?”

“Um. Okay?”

Flitch stowed kes repair project in a pocket and looked at us. “Oh, are we going to the map? I’ll come.”

“Yes!” Old Teeth crowed. “To the map!”

“The map?” I asked.

“You’ll love it, child!”

The three of us headed out of the mess and a little ways around the weird floorless corridor. None of the doors were labelled or signposted in any way (except our bedrooms, which somebody had helpfully marked with temporary signs reading BEDROOM, presumably so the stupid tourists with no sense of zero pull direction didn’t get confused), but Flitch and Old Teeth headed straight to the door they wanted and lead me into the most cramped corridor I’d ever been in. Not only was it so narrow that we had to go through one at a time, it wasn’t even high enough to ‘stand up’ in. If we’d been under inertial pull, we’d have to crawl. They shooed me in.

I glanced between the gleefully grinning old woman and the young brennan who wouldn’t meet my eyes, and wondered if this was a good idea.

But then, it wasn’t like I had anything else to be doing. With a shrug, I pulled myself into the corridor.

I was thankful for the month spent on Hexacorallia, because if I hadn’t been experienced in zero-pull movement then I would’ve looked like an idiot, drifting in way too fast and probably banging into the walls. I knew what I was doing, though. The other two came in behind me, and we headed down a really, really, really long corridor. There were no doors at all except for a hatch at the other end, so when I got there I figured that that was where we were going, opened it, and pushed out into a huge open space. As I opened the hatch, lights switched on, painfully bright compared to the dim glow of the rest of the ship.

Oh. This was the map.

I suspected that we were in the very middle of the ship; if not, we were in a room that should be in the middle. It was large, and hollow, and perfectly round. Dotted around the pale ceramic walls I saw more hatches like the one we’d just come out of, mounted lights, and not much else; but the walls weren’t smooth. They were etched. Groups of numbers, diagrams, blocks of writing were etched into every available bit of space in a very neat, orderly way, and as tiny as they could get it while still being readable. I myself couldn’t read much of it – it was in fleet common, or at least it was in the fleet common alphabet, but it was way too complex for me to make sense of. I could make out a few words like ‘star’ and ‘distance’ and figured, that since we were in a map, they were probably coordinates or location details of some kind.

Yes, in a map. It really felt like the etchings around us were a part of it.

The middle of the room was cut almost in half by an enormous disk of metal, a wall that reached almost end-to-end but with a couple of metres around the outside so it was easy to get to the other side. It was held in place by the same sort of thick support struts that held the outside of the ship to the rest of it, but the metal disk itself was only about as thick as a finger. It was full of holes, placed in pairs, two holes next to each other, but otherwise seemingly at random. The holes had information etched next to them.

I inspected a few of them, and started to recognise colony names. This was the map. These were the positions of the colonies.

About a fifth of the holes had metal rings through them (this, I guessed, was why they were in pairs). Most of the rings were gold, and bunched together on one side of the map; next to the patch of gold rings were a couple of smaller patches of rings in some other metal, probably aluminium or something, I couldn’t tell. The rings had large coloured ceramic beads on them, two or three to a ring, in all different colours; I didn’t want to even guess at what the beads meant.

“This is our communication map,” Flitch told me, speaking a little bit too quietly. “It’s not completely accurate to merely look at; there’s not really a way to map a three dimensional field of stars perfectly onto two dimensions, and it doesn’t help that all the stars are moving. You have to do a fair bit of math using the values recorded next to the stars on the map to get completely accurate distances, or just check the more dynamic records in the computers. But this here is the permanent record. If something happens and all digital records on the ships are erased, this is the network as of last check. If we crash into another ship or an asteroid or something, this still shows where the colonies are and important details about them. You’d basically have to fling the ship at a sun to destroy it.”

“Though you could melt the rings off with rather less effort,” Old Teeth said, “but that’s pretty unlikely.”

“What do the rings mean?” I asked.

“Do you understand what our ship does?” Flitch asked.

I nodded. “You keep fleet records and maintain contact with the colonies, and keep their records too.”

“‘Maintain contact’ is an incredibly optimistic way to phrase things, but otherwise I suppose that that’s broadly true. The rings are colonies from whom we were still receiving transmissions the last time we were in orbit.”

I stared at the map. One fifth of the colonies. All grouped together.

Whatever was killing us was on the move, and it had wiped out most of humanity already.

“Are you alright, dear?” Old Teeth asked, and I realised I was breathing too quickly. I couldn’t seem to get enough air. I closed my eyes, looked away from the map, tried to calm down.

“So,” I said, trying to sound calmer than I felt, “four fifths of the colonies are just… gone?”

“Yes,” Flitch said, sounding way too calm.

“Most of humanity is dead?!”

“Maybe!” Old Teeth said with a little grin.

“Unlikely,” Flitch corrected. “Most of humanity is out of contact. Contact between stars is not an easy thing. The near-emptiness of space helps a lot, but if you’re far enough away from something then the barriers between do add up. Simply being in orbit around a star puts at least one star between us and any given colony a good portion of the time. And distance has its own problems – no matter how well you try to direct a signal, over these kinds of distances, they do lose power. Sending a radio message between a couple of fleet ships is easy. Sending one colony-to-colony is not.”

“We have records of a few colonies failing,” Old Teeth said. “They were kind enough to broadcast their situation up until the shutdown of their communications systems. Most colonies either inform us that they’re dropping communications while the colony itself seems perfectly healthy, or they simply vanish with no warning at all and may or may not start broadcasting again later. There’s all sorts of things that can happen.”

“To four fifths of them?!”

“Not necessarily,” Flitch said. “The distant colonies are simply too far away to give a coherent, readable signal to us without investing an absurd amount of power into their broadcast systems. They broadcast to neighbouring colonies, and those colonies send the signal on. Sometimes we lose contact with a colony and it’s the channel for three or four other colonies’ signals; unless a different nearby colony is also sending those signals, we lose the whole lot. They might still be broadcasting to each other, for all we know. We’ll very likely never find out.”

I look at the map again. It’s good to know that most of the colonies might not be dead (or they might be; how would we know? How can we know if the danger following us has already gotten them in the radio dark?), but even so, that seemed…

“I had no idea our communication system was so fragile,” I said.

Flitch shrugged. “The tyranny of distance. What can ya do?”

“But we can see things so far away! The Kleiner array – ”

“There’s a difference,” Flitch said, “between reading an unoccupied planet at a distance and being able to predict that it probably has an atmosphere, and getting a stable, information-dense signal from other people. We do occasionally get very short fragments of stray signal of clearly human origin, and when that happens we log it and do our best to estimate its origin based on the direction and the frequency band, but that doesn’t tell us much except that someone somewhere out there might be transmitting to someone else. Or not; sometimes it’s a known colony’s signal that’s bounced off something and frequency shifted and we don’t find out for a decade because we received the two signals thirty years apart and nobody has the time or computing power to compare every signal we receive with every other signal in the archive. Generally, we only keep rings in the map for colonies who give a stable and regular signal. Fragmentary strays from early colonies aren’t impossible, but they’re rarely long or clear enough to be useful, and it’s generally a dangerous idea to try to assert their origin too strongly anyway.”

“It used to be a lot worse,” Old Teeth said. “Our ability to receive and archive transmissions has improved a lot, and every colony gets better broadcasting equipment than the last. Sometimes, the older colonies even bother to upgrade their systems!”

“Why doesn’t everyone upgrade their systems?” I asked. “Whenever someone discovers a better way to do things, they could tell all the colonies on the radio, and – ”

“Child, do you know how far away the previous colony is?”

“Uh…”

“It is far enough away that radio signals take nearly thirty years to reach us. Flitch right in saying that calling what we do ‘maintaining communication’ is optimistic. For one thing, we can’t transmit back while in transit; we receive signals, we don’t sent them. When the Dragonseye colony is being established, we’ll set up systems there to send signals back, but until they get that signal thirty years after we send it, the other colonies are relying on faith that we’re out here. They’re also relying on faith that each other are out there, taking signals that are decades or centuries old and sending them on out into the void once more. Colonies could be said to converse over many generations, but people from colonies do not. Even cultures, generally, do not. The ‘conversation’ is too slow to register as such. It’s a matter of perspective.

“And long-distance radio equipment is expensive to run and maintain. Every colony that receives information from others is receiving mostly a cultural curiosity; there might be some useful technological information in the broadcasts, but most of it is meaningless outside of entertainment or the interests of sociologists and historians. These are places that cannot and will not ever influence each other in any material way; all they can do is passively watch what some culture chose to send out into the void all those years ago. And sending the information is, of course, completely thankless; a colony gets nothing in return for the effort of broadcasting. Their data might become curiosities or entertainments for other distant colonies in many decades, and many decades after that there might be some sign in the return broadcasts that what they’re sending has some kind of impact, but much more likely there won’t. Colony-to-colony broadcasting does not happen on a scale that is useful or that is comprehensible as an influential or meaningful act. Colonies might broadcast out of a sense of duty to us and our mission, knowing that we of course want to know how well they’re doing, but these are places that have been cut off from the mission for decades and often for generations. Upgrading broadcasting equipment is rarely a priority. Over time, maintaining broadcasting equipment ceases to be a priority. That is the true reason why most of the network is dark – it just means that somewhere along the broadcast chain, some colony had a government change or a social movement or a resource or health crisis or one of any number of things that made shouting into the void seem less important than their other duties. Sometimes, years later, they come back. Usually, they do not.”

That can’t be right. They’re a part of the mission! Their whole structure, their whole existence, is as much a part of it as the fleet’s, and information about how they’re doing is important! Not just to people like Ella, sharing information about long-standing colonies so that we can make better colonies in the future, but to the fleet as a whole, so we can track how well we’re accomplishing the mission. They can’t just… abandon us!

Or are we abandoning them? Every colony is isolated. They can’t trade people or materials or anything with other colonies like we can with other ships. Maybe sticking to the mission isn’t their job any more; it’s not like they can further it. That’s our job. Maybe it’s like parents and children. A parent has an important duty to raise their kids to be strong and educated people who can leave good lives, but the child’s job is to just exist and live their own life and do their best. Maybe the colonies aren’t supposed to owe us anything.

I stare at that map of empty holes. Colonies that my ancestors spent their lives going to and building, colonies that were the whole purpose of their existence. Colonies that we’ll almost definitely never hear from again. We have no way of knowing whether they’re alive or dead and we never, ever will.

And if we never know, does it matter?

My job, of course, is to care about the Dragonseye colony. Building that is my mission, and the mission of every person in the fleet right now. But one day, will Dragonseye fall to the ‘tyranny of space’? Will it fall out of contact, and will our descendants look at a map like this and realise that everything that my generation worked for, everything we were, just doesn’t matter any more? That whether they live or die will never affect the fleet again?

I turn away from the map, and head back to the hatch.

“Done already?” Flitch asked.

I nodded, not looking at kem. I didn’t want to look at this map any more.

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