79: Plague of Locusts

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Yamin had said that he’d come back when I was eleven. He hadn’t contacted us since I’d gotten that message from him right after getting back onto the Courageous, but if he was still interested in the apprenticeship then, he was probably still interested now. As my eleventh birthday approached, he didn’t send anyone any kind of message about it, but I knew that my parents hadn’t forgotten about him. They started to get a bit clingy, and Mum checked her messages every morning.

They hadn’t asked me whether I would take the apprenticeship if he offered it. But I think we all knew I would. And we all knew they didn’t want me to – to them, I was still a little girl, and they were more suspicious and clingy about the apprenticeship than they had been about sending me all the way out across the fleet. I wasn’t sure why; takign the apprenticeship wouldn’t send me away from them. We’d still be on the same ship, living in the same house; they should be proud that I would be training for an important job. If I’d decided to become an engineer or an Administrator or something by myself, they wouldn’t be worried. They’d send me on that kind of jaunt shift with a smile. But the apprenticeship bothered them.

Maybe it was because, unlike the trip onto other ships, the apprenticeship didn’t come with an end date where everything would go back to normal.

To make them happy, I was very careful with my last two jaunt shifts before my eleventh birthday. I was getting old enough to choose my own workplaces, and I chose a shift with Security, and a shift with Farming. Neither Mum nor Dad had any experience as joint supervisors, but they both managed to get me private jaunt shifts, without any other kids, and with them supervising.

Mum was about the same at work as at home – a bit grumpy, a bit quiet, and focused on doing the job properly and keeping everyone safe. She was a bit more relaxed without having to keep an eye on any little kids who might do something dangerous or destructive, but she was still the quietest person in the three-person security office. There were a lot of cameras to watch and not many people to watch them; there didn’t need to be, with the treegrave there to bring our attention to anything important.

I spent about a week just exploring the Courageous through the cameras, jumping from public place to public place. Mum and her coworkers had fun watching me have fun. But eventually I ran out of new places to look at or interesting things to watch, and we were just a bunch of people sitting in an office in case something happened that needed human oversight. I saw a couple of minor problems there, some small thefts and an accident in a cargo bay where somebody got trapped under a heavy box that nobody on the cargo bay saw fall, but nothing that needed anybody to run out of the office yelling “security, don’t move!” while an alarm screeched in the background. Mum just took note of the thefts to report them later, and let emergency services know about the trapped guy a few seconds before his friends found him and let emergency services know themselves.

On the whole, Security wasn’t very interesting. But it did give me a lot of time to talk to my mum.

Farming involved more walking around, which was something, but biotanks aren’t very interesting, either. Then, with just a few days left on my Farming jaunt, Dad took me into work with a huge smile on his face.

“We’re doing something special today,” he told me. “We’re doing a locust cleanse.”

“A what?”

“You know how we have to periodically flush and clean biotanks and re-inoculate them with fresh nutrients?”

“Yeah?”

He lead me down a different passage than the one we usually took, the passage towards the large rooms where plants were grown. “The plant farmers have to do the same thing. This isn’t like the Arborea Celestia; we don’t make long-standing ecosystems for their own sake. Our plant farmers grow plants to a certain age to get the most efficient material production that they can, then destroy everything when production drops off and start again. It’s a process with a lot of steps, since we can’t just set everything on fire and overload the air filters. And today is my favourite step.

He lead me into a small room with a large window in the wall (yes, an inside window, like on the Stalwart), overlooking a huge room full of tall grass growing so thick that it would be hard to walk in. I don’t know much about plants, but the grass looked wilted and dying. It also had a bit of a strange shape to it, like somebody had cut all the tops off the plants, but I might be wrong about that. I didn’t know much about grass.

There was a woman in the small room. My dad exchanged a few quiet words with her, and she handed me a small transparent box.

Inside it was an insect.

“That,” dad said, “is a locust.”

It didn’t look like a butterfly. It had a long tube body and huge back legs. Its wings were folded down, sort of like a moth, but a very different shape. I stared at it, and it seemed to be staring at me.

“Our records who that on Earth, they were a big problem for farmers,” Dad explained. “Before space travel, Earth farmers used to grow things in the open atmosphere under sunlight, so it was really hard to control what animals could or couldn’t come along and eat the crops. They couldn’t just close off and carbon-flood rooms like we can. Locusts would do nothing for years and years, and then breed into huge numbers and eat entire farms bare. We, of course, can use that.” He pointed through the window.

In the farm, an alarm was blaring. Vents opened, and a thick dust poured out of them into the room.

No, not dust. Locusts.

They spread out over the grass in a thick blanket, and slowly, the grass disappeared. Bit by bit, the swarm at it down to nothing. It wasn’t as fast as a fire, but it was just as thorough, and I couldn’t help but imagine walking into that room and being covered by ravenous insects that tore away my clothes, my skin, my flesh, all the way down to the bone.

The locust in my box wiggled its mouth parts at me. I quickly handed the bod back to the woman.

They left nothing but a few shreds of shrivelled grass and a lot of insect corpses. The vents opened again, and there must have been something in there that they liked, because the survivors started to crowd around, and then inside, the vents once more. Dad patted me on the back.

“They’re not Earth rootstock, of course,” he said. “Farming has made them more efficient at what they do and easy to control; we’ve engineered a bunch of stimulus responses into them and made them eat more and better than the Earth ones would have. But it’s very neat, isn’t it? I thought, since you used to love Rubbish & recycling…”

“It is pretty neat,” I said. “Definitely better than fire, and with no wear and tear on machinery. I want to see the other steps.”

“I’ll see what we can do,” Dad said. “It’ll take them a while to cleanse all the farms; you might be done with your jaunt before they move on.”

I nodded, and kept staring out the window until Dad lead me away. The locust cleanse was some very interesting recycling. It also reminded me of a dream I’d had once, a dream about ships in an asteroid belt that wasn’t about ships in an asteroid belt.

After work that day, I booked a projection room, and didn’t care that it was so short notice that I ended up having to take a trolley partway around the ring to get to it. I looked up everything I could find about locusts. And I sat down. And I started watching videos.

I drifted off to sleep at some point.

In my dream, I stood in a view port on the Courageous. I knew that if I looked to the sides or down, I’d see straight through the walls and floor, but I didn’t dare turn my head. I could feel my gamma-ma’s hand on my shoulder, and I didn’t want to see what she would look like to me now, in my dreams. I didn’t want to see something else with a hand that felt like hers.

The view ahead was plenty interesting, anyway. Despite the brightness of the star in front of us, I could clearly see the asteroid field, clearly see the HEXes leap from asteroid to asteroid, setting up their homes and alliances, devouring it piece by piece until the infinite supply of materials became very finite and then, eventually, very limited. They weren’t little orbs with tiny engines and robot arms this time, but long, cylindrical shapes with huge powerful back legs and large solar sails that could be raised and flapped like wings. They moved organically, like bugs on a branch.

They were locusts.

“When some insects run out of food, they can hibernate until it grows back,” I said.

“Indeed they do,” Gamma-ma said.

But humans couldn’t do that, so human spaceships couldn’t do that. There were ways to freeze people, to put people in chronostasis, to temporarily reduce a population down to next to nothing and then to raise it when more materials were available; people had had to do that, sometimes. But if ninety per cent of the dream-HEXes before me did that, they’d just be leaving the asteroid belt for the other ten per cent, and there’d be nothing to wake up to. Metal and oxygen didn’t grow back like plants did. There were no farmers out there to feed them again.

Besides, this dream wasn’t actually about HEXes, or the Dragonseye. And it wasn’t actually about insects, either.

They held on, the dream-HEXes. Their population reduced to almost nothing over time as critical resources like oxygen and nitrogen, far more precious and difficult to recover than the abundant metals around them, were wasted in movement and conflict between small communities trying desperately to garner enough to live. But eventually the population was small enough, just a handful of the bigger HEXes, to work together in proper harmony for the good of keeping humanity alive around the star. They had stripped all the ice from the asteroid belt and all the surrounding planets at that point, pulled all the critical elements that they could from the solar system, invented ways to recapture as much as possible from small leaks and imperfect airlock pumping before it could disperse forever, unusable, into space. At one point, back when there had been billions upon billions of little locust HEXes, they had tried to colonise the most viable planet, and that had worked for a long time, but the planet’s atmosphere was being lost to space at a faster rate than that lost by hull leaks and HEX movement, so for the good of humanity they’d had to declare war on the planet and strip its entire atmosphere for themselves.

If any of the planets had had a more oxygen-rich atmosphere, that part probably wouldn’t have had to happen. There might have been enough oxygen for everyone, in that case, to last long enough that the gasses weren’t the problem; to last long enough to be killed by the bigger threat, the ultimate threat. The threat that eventually wiped out those last remaining HEXes that had done everything they could to hold on forever.

Eventually, the sun exploded.

Watching it explode, I realised the truth – all colonies are temporary. A colony is a rest stop, for millions or billions of years, not a place where humanity can actually thrive. It might last for billions of years, but so what? The sun would explode, and it would die, and everything that happened there after it went out of radio contact might as well have never happened. The only reason to settle in a colony was to gather resources or information that would help ships in transit; either to help the colony move again, or as a noble sacrifice to help a fleet already moving.

“They should’ve been planning to outrun that from the beginning,” I said, “instead of wasting time fighting each other. They were in a death trap from the moment the colony was established, and they had billions of years to escape.”

Billions of years felt like forever to my tiny little human brain. The arrogance of a short-lived mortal, I supposed; a bacterium that can’t perceive beyond the glass of the tank. Billions of years was not forever. Billions of years, like hundreds of years or eighty years or one, ended with death, and didn’t matter.

But even as I mentioned them working together to escape the cruel fate that the fleet had handed them, the view changed, and I was looking at… well, the starts, technically, I supposed. But not what they really looked like, any more than the Dragonseye and the asteroid belt and the HEXes had been what they really looked like. This looked more like the map on the Dish, but with little glowing stars where they merely punched holes in titanium to hang metal rings.

The stars glowed before me, and I could tell, in some nonvisual way like sometimes happens in dreams, which ones were occupied. Which ones had their own little crises going on similar to the one I’d imagined for the Dragonseye; where humans lived on planets slowly losing atmosphere, or in huge ice asteroids slowly using up their ice as the outsides evaporate into space and there was less and less to refreeze, or floated on liquid or gaseous surfaces that were slowly being lost to space. Some would eventually die of resource loss, some would live long enough to be killed by their stars; some would be killed off by some other cause, some war or accident or unaccounted-for environmental factor that they simply had the bad luck to be unable to recover from. Different stars existed for different lengths of time (the very small ones could exist for so long that there might be some still out there that were born with the universe itself), different systems had different resources available, different populations had different vulnerabilities.

But all of them would run out of fuel; either the people or the stars themselves. And the only choice was to scrape together the resources and the engines and the people to head out and find a new supply, just like the fleet had been doing since its creation.

On the map of stars before me, I watched fleets move on, I watched new systems become colonised. A bright streak of new colonies, left behind by our fleet; others, left behind by fragments that left us in fleet splits. Sometimes, the colonies themselves would set off to make new colonies on other stars, either bringing their whole population with them in desperation as their own system started to die, or they’d do it much earlier, sending a small group off with the same sort of spirit as our fleet. Most of the colonies simply died behind us, but there we were, all those little fleets, heading out and carrying the future of humanity, the only part that mattered – the only part that could survive. It was beautiful, for a moment.

Until I realised what I was looking at.

This was my Dragonseye dream, from a different perspective. Every dead colony did not leave behind an untouched star; it left behind a depleted system, one without enough critical resources to be worth visiting, if it left behind a system at all. New resources were not made by the galaxy faster than they were lost as unrecoverable atoms spread out in the vastness of space. New stars were not put in our path at the same rate at which the old ones died. The only way to survive was for our fleets, our little flocks of locusts, to keep moving forward, keep eating, and not pause for the corpses left behind us.

In the view port, I turned and looked behind us. My gamma-ma wasn’t there, but a view of devastation was; stars picked as clean as the barren, corpse-ridden farm I’d seen earlier. But everything used in that farm was recycled back into the system, to grow new plants in a new cycle. There was no way to do that for stars.

I knew what was chasing us now.

We were. We were chasing us.

I turned away from the sight, looked ahead again, to the abundant fields beyond, to the future – and felt like I’d walked into a transparent wall. Because those stars, I saw now, were not infinite, any more than billions of years was forever. The edge of the galaxy was a long, long way away, but there was an edge. And when we hit it… what then?

We’d turn. Head sideways. Split more, make more little colonies that weren’t our allies, but our competition; something else to eat up our resources faster as, like bacteria in a biotank, we devoured all available food and then killed ourselves off eating our own poisons.

Bacterial colony dead. Flush the tank. Scrub it out. Start again.

Except there was no outside inoculant, and no inoculator. This was humanity itself, and we only had one chance.

Escape the galaxy. Move onto another one. It was the only way forward, right? How long would we have to drift between those stars? How long would the fleet have to live on nothing but the resources inside its ships? Too long, right? That had to be impossible. But once upon a time, before the Courageous was built, people must have thought that moving the long distance between stars was impossible. Long before spaceships, people must have thought that moving between planets was impossible. And the time it would take us to even get to the edge of the galaxy was so, so long that it was impossible to even guess at; there were too many variables. By the time we reached it, maybe the problem would be trivial.

How long did galaxies live?

Not forever, probably. But long enough to find the next solution, and the next.

I opened my eyes. They were gritty, and hurt to open. Sitting up hurt my neck, and I couldn’t turn my head properly; I’d fallen asleep on the table in the projector room. In front of me, a video played about how locusts digested their food. I switched it off.

I knew what needed to be done, now.

I had no idea how to do it.

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