60: Population Instability

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I couldn’t stop thinking of the map for the rest of the day, or all night. I wasn’t sure why it bothered me so much. There were a lot of colonies; I already knew that. They were very far away and we didn’t have a whole lot of information about them; I already knew that. But I’d never really thought about why. I mean, I guess it’s obvious, when I think about it, that sending signals so far would be hard, and that the time delay made conversation impossible, so all we could really get was what they happened to send on their designated bands, but… I don’t know. The ringless dark of most of the map frightened me.

Come to think of it, we were pretty close to the edge of the map. What happened when we ran out of space on the big metal disk? Did they have to make a new Dish? Or just hollow out a bigger room in this one, somehow? I wasn’t sure what metal the map and its room were made out of, but Flitch and Old Teeth had made it sound pretty durable.

I half expected to have a dream about the map; I was in the right kind of mood for it. But if I did, I didn’t remember. I woke up late and kind of grumpy, and when I headed off to breakfast, the historians were already gone; probably tracking down their ancient file or whatever.

Old Teeth was in the mess, talking to a teenage girl I didn’t know. She wore the same sort of grey jumpsuit as everyone else, though hers looked newer than Gara’s or Old Teeth’s and didn’t have any old stains, and her hair was very long, which seemed like a terrible idea in zero pull. She’d braided it into one long braid and tied it to a belt around her waist to keep it out of the way.

“Hi!” she said brightly as I came in. “You must be Taya, right? I’m Other Haken.”

I stared. “Um. Hi!”

She cocked her head. “You thought I was going to be old and bald and have a fantastic manicure, didn’t you?”

“Haken’s not old! I assume. I don’t know kes genetics.” Anyway, she did also have a fantastic manicure.

“Haken is thirty five,” Old Teeth said. “Practically a baby.”

“Old!” Other Haken said, sticking her tongue out.

“Us old people have earned it, girl!” Old Teeth crowed. “Haken has a long way to go yet!”

“Haken is old,” Other Haken said, “and you are ancient.”

“Ooh, Ancient Teeth!” She grinned widely. She thrust a little box in my hands. “Some breakfast for you, dearie, and I hope you have a more adventurous palate than our dear delicate captain.”

“Gara is a captain?” I asked, surprised. Though come to think of it, that was pretty obvious. I mean, there should be four captains, meaning that most of the ship – ”

“Yes, our only captain,” Other Haken said before I could ask. “Old Teeth apparently gave up the position as soon as he joined and threatened to poison him if he ever tried to give it back.”

“And I’d do it, too!”

“No you wouldn’t. Then you’d have nobody to complain to you about stuff.”

“Soon, girl, you’ll be a good enough complainer that we won’t need Gara any more. You’re getting better at it every day.”

I nibbled breakfast. It was another loaf of something. Despite Old Teeth’s ominous words, it tasted completely fine. A bit spicier than I was used to, but that just made it interesting. “So you and Haken maintain the treegrave?” I asked. “That sounds like a lot of work for just the two of you.”

“Actually, the treegrave here is teeny-tiny,” Other Haken shrugged. “There’s not all that much to monitor, you know? There’s not hundreds of people asking it questions all the time so it doesn’t need that many brains. Spend most of your time just watching old transmissions, don’t you, old coot?”

This last sentence was directed at a wall, which responded. “And cleaning up after you, young brat. Leaving things out in the open isn’t ideal in a zero pull ship that’s absolutely full of delicate electronics.”

Other Haken rolled her eyes, picked up a food wrapper that she’d just let go, and scooted over to another wall to drop it into a recycling bin.

There wasn’t a whole lot to do on the Dish, and the historians were so busy I hardly saw them. There was a small gym, and the residents were fun, but I spent most of my time in a small projector room asking the treegrave to help me find things to watch. (Which it was happy to do; again, why did the Courageous system make me type search terms into a computer and find stuff myself? Letting the treegrave do it meant there was less equipment to maintain, because you didn’t need a keyboard! Maybe our treegrave was just too busy?)

“What would you like to see?” the treegrave asked me the first time I shut myself in the projector room. “I have a great deal of video from the history of your ship, not as old as what your companions are looking for but still pretty old. I also have footage from all other ships in the fleet, as well as multiple ships that have since left in fleet splits, or perhaps you would like educational or entertaining content?”

“No thanks,” I said. I could probably get most of what I wanted from that kind of thing at home. “Can I see some colonies?”

“Of course! The footage that we are currently receiving is sparse and unreliable, due to the simple nature of retrieving distant signals while the fleet is in transit, especially while so many nearby ships are decelerating. I can show you what we’re still receiving, or would you prefer archived footage received when we were in a more stable position?”

“I want to see dead colonies,” I said. “And, and also maybe colonies that stopped transmitting that you suspect might have died. I want to know what happened to them.”

There was a short pause before the treegrave answered. “Sure, I can do that,” it said, “but are you feeling okay? We can just talk, if you want.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m just interested in colony development. We have to get Dragonseye right, after all.”

“Well, alright then. Colonies I think might have died but we’re not certain… a bit of a judgement call there, but I’ll do my best. Should we start with the confirmed deaths?”

There actually weren’t that many colonies whose demise was certain, and most of them were lost in the same way. I supposed that there was a limited number of ways for a colony to fail that let them transmit their situation first. The way they died was simple resource loss – they ran out of oxygen, mostly, though sometimes it was something else. Something easily lost to space and hard to recover. There was some kind of critical problem, something exploded when it shouldn’t or some political problem erupted into violence and something important was destroyed, and critical gasses were lost to space. Most colonies recovered from this by finding more, or by hurriedly colonising a planet with oxygen reserves or something, and one even tried to turn their colony back into a long-distance spaceship and travel to a nearby star where there might be water ice, but they were never heard from again. They started genetically engineering their descendants to need less oxygen, or to live in higher pressures or temperatures where they could find it, started reducing heir population and making the most of what they had. Most of the time, they recovered.

Sometimes, they didn’t. They adapted to the new situation, and then half a century later, there was a similar loss, and a century later another. Until the remaining, small population, finally facing a disaster they couldn’t recover from, said goodbye over the radio system, and stopped transmitting.

That was the main way that colonies died. It wasn’t the only one; if the colony was very small, it could die in other ways. One colony of less than five hundred people were wiped out by some mysterious disease and they never discovered what caused it. Another one had their reproductive infrastructure destroyed by a rogue meteor impact and their genetic records wiped, leaving them with only the DNA in living colonists to work with and a time limit to get the infrastructure replaced. They requested that other colonies transmit their DNA records, but it would take sixty years to see the response, so they planned to get new equipment made and installed and work with just cloning themselves for a couple of generations until the data arrived. But they’d lost a lot of their replacement equipment in some sort of conflict, and there were a series of factory problems, and they were forced to rely on natural pregnancies which dropped their population so small over the next generation that their huge drop in manpower slowed everything down and they were wiped out by random accidents before they could get everything working again. One very small colony was, confusingly, wiped out by some kind fo suicide cult.

There was more variety in the ones that the treegrave thought were destroyed, but we couldn’t be sure. There were two kinds of ‘lost signal’ colonies, it explained; those who stopped transmitting a signal completely, and those who just transmitted noise, not actually putting anything in their transmission. The first kind were probably fine; their equipment had been destroyed and they hadn’t replaced it, or there was some error or misalignment and they hadn’t noticed because it would take so many decades for the nearest colony to let them know. The ones whose transmitters kept working and they simply stopped showing anything, well, they were likely to have problems. After all, if they’d made the choice to stop transmitting, they’d stop using power on the transmitters.

These ones, the treegrave said, probably went suddenly. Something critical exploded and the backups failed. Too many people in one place at the wrong time when something went wrong. Again, this was mostly a problem for small colonies; there weren’t too many things that could fail in a large colony that would suddenly kill everyone, and the ones that could – massive meteors and such – would give plenty of warning.

I watched for days and days, and the treegrave explained to me the different sorts of dangers faced by different sort of colonies. Large colonies were more prone to deadly resource shortages; small colonies were more prone to being endangered by industrial accidents. Violence and disease were both more common in large colonies, but more dangerous for small ones; the more people you had, the easier to respond and the more survivors to recover the colony. Colonies with high gravity, such as planetary colonies, had a massive advantage in maintaining pressure, resource acquisition (depending on the planet), and natural radiation shielding, but non-gravity colonies like the one we planned to build at the Dragonseye had the advantage in terms of easy mobility and transportation without having to drag things around at the bottom of a gravity well. Also, they tended to be better designed, because they came more naturally to the designers – us, living in a space fleet.

Small colonies like the ones we had records of being destroyed were very rare. Most colonies had thousands or tens of thousands of people before the fleet even left them, and if there were enough resources available, grew to millions or even occasionally billions of people over time. The older a colony was, the more likely it was that we’d lost contact, so the treegrave speculated that there might be colonies with tens or hundreds of billions of people far back in the dark, now invisible to us. It all depended on their ability to find and retain enough critical resources to sustain a large population, but if they could do that, larger meant more stable.

I watched and I listened, and I found no signs of anything chasing or destroying the colonies. There was no hint of anything to run from. If anything, we should be slowing down, and making sure that every colony was as well-protected against disaster as it could be.

So why did I still feel like we needed to be running?

“Whenever anybody does anything,” the treegrave told me, “there will be some failure. We have lost some colonies, it’s true. But there are many, many more out there, thriving. We have no reason to believe that most of the colonies we’ve built are having any major problems.”

“And we have no reason to believe that they aren’t,” I said. “we’ve lost contact with most of them, right?”

“Well, yes, that is true. But most of them were doing just fine when contact was lost.”

Maybe whatever I was looking for was destroying their transmission equipment, turning them into the kinds of colonies that went dark that the treegrave thought were fine? Then it could destroy them and we’d never know. No; that didn’t sound right. It was too random. If something was chasing us and doing that then, we’d lose contact with them in order, starting at one point and getting closer and closer to us. Instead, they seemed to drop off randomly, making us lose contact with not just them but l the colonies behind them whose sign they were sending to us.

Coming to the Dish was supposed to help me better understand what was going on. But I felt like I knew less now than when I started.

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