80: Short Sighted

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“Do you know what the biggest threat to a locust in a swarm was, back on Earth?” I asked Arai.

It was just the two of us, meeting up in a cafeteria. She blinked at me.

“What’s a locust?”

“It’s a bug. Eats plants. They normally just hang around, but if the conditions are right then they breed out of control and then all rise as one in a big wave to eat up farms and stuff. And I guess starvation was probably the biggest threat, or poisons from farmers or whatever, but do you know what the biggest animal threat was?”

“Uh… something that eats bugs, I guess? Birds? Bats? I don’t know much about animals.”

“Normally, sure,” I said. “If there are just a few of them around, birds and bats and things will eat them. But in a swarm, the biggest threat to a locust… was a locust.”

“They’re cannibals?”

“No. I mean, I don’t think so? We don’t have very much information about them on Earth. But we do know that they’d breed out of control and gather in huge swarms, and when they did, the biggest threat was each other. They’d sweep through the countryside eating all the plants they could find and leaving nothing but devastation in their wake, and the safest place for a locust to be was at the head of the swarm. If a locust slowed down, it would get torn apart or overtaken by those behind it, crushed under the wave and left to starve to death on the barren earth as its companions moved on, driven by their own hunger. They’d eat everything until there was nothing left, and then most of them would starve.”

Another blink. “Um,” she said. “Okay.”

“So the most important thing that a locust can do,” I said, “is stay at the front of the swarm. And eat well enough to outlive the others. It’s bad to kill other locusts, of course, but important to keep up and keep yourself fed.”

“Taya,” Arai said, “what are we talking about?”

I leaned close, over the cafeteria table. I must have moved a bit too quickly and startled her, because she flinched back a little.

“The fleet,” I said, “is in trouble.”

She frowned, and glanced around the cafeteria, where people were talking and eating and looking totally normally.

“We’re a locust swarm. Ecologically. Spreading throughout the galaxy.”

Her frown deepened. “Have you had a psych eval recently?” she asked. “You should book in for – ”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Listen. Resources aren’t recoverable without losses. That’s just physics. We can get the losses down as much as possible, ut everything takes energy, and gases leak into space, and the most efficient rockets in the universe still need a propellant – we can’t solar sail between stars or manoeuvre around properly without rockets. There’s always some loss. Oxygen or smoke or metal dust drifting off into space might as well not exist any more, so far as we’re concerned. Survival means acquiring at least as much as we lose. Growth means acquiring much more than we lose. Not necessarily at a steady rate – we go for generations without eating, moving between stars, and then gorge ourselves when we reach one. But what we gain has to be more than what we lose, or we die. Right?”

“Obviously,” Arai said.

“Right. But that relies on there always being more resources to collect, always being a new star to go to.”

“Yeah. Do you have any idea how many stars are in the universe?”

“The galaxy. Until our ships can last long enough without stars to cross to new galaxies, the rest of the universe doesn’t matter.”

“Fine. Do you have any idea how many stars are in the galaxy?”

“Yes – less than infinity. That’s the problem. And I know what you’re going to say, ‘Oh, but new stars are born all the time; the galaxy has to be making more resources in a collectable form than what we’re using up’, but I don’t think that’s true. Because firstly, only the stars that we can reach really matter; and second, we’re not the only fleet out here. The important question isn’t ‘how many stars are out there?’, it’s ‘how many fleet fragments are out there?’, and that question is literally impossible to answer. There’s no way to ever know that, because of how far away everyone is and how slow light is and how little of it we can even get from far away. We can back-count how many times our fleet has split and take a guess at how many of the other fragments might still be out there, but what about how many times they have split? What about how many new fleets might have been made by old colonies who were running out of resources? None of them have made colonies that are in contact with us, so far as I know, but we’re out of contact with most colonies, so that doesn’t mean anything.”

“And you’re worried that… what, eventually, in billions and billions of years, there’ll be so many humans out there using up all the nitrogen and stuff and leaking it out into space that there’ll be none left to use?”

“Eventually, yeah, but we’ll be in a different galaxy by then. I don’t know what happens when we run out of galaxies; I think the problem in front of us is a bit more urgent. Which is – ”

“Urgent? We’re talking about stuff billions of years away, right?”

“So it’s okay for humanity to die out and all life in the universe to slowly suffocate and starve so long as it happens long after we’re dead? Anyway, no; I’m worried about stuff that’s much, much sooner. Maybe even within the next thousand years, it depends on where the other fleet fragments are making colonies. I’m worried about the stars right ahead of us.”

She just looked more confused.

“How do we know,” I said, “that the stars ahead of us have what we need to stay alive?”

“Uh… because most stars with planets do, somewhere? I mean, we check out candidates with the Kleiner array before we leave a system; there’s always at least a couple of good stars within reach.”

“And that’s how we know,” I said, “that a couple of light decades before we took the reading, the star had stuff that could support us. How do we know it still will when we get there?”

“Because they’re stars! We can predict how the systems are going to change; they’re not going to change a lot unexpectedly unless…” her eyes widened. “Oh.”

“Unless,” I finished for her, “a colony changes them. It’s not like all the fleet fragments can organise together which stars they’re going to next. When you’re sending radio signals over that kind of distance, you have to have a really good idea of where the other person is; you can’t just blast in all directions, nobody has the power to waste on that. So we could have colonies that are just a few stars away from some other fragment’s colonies and they might find each other soon, if they happen to be really curious and they analyse the cosmos a lot, or they might not even realise that each other are there for centuries. It’s not impossible that someone else could colonise a star before we get there, by accident; we could head off all ready to plunder a new star’s resources, and we could get there and there’s nothing that a colony hasn’t already claimed.”

“Then they’d give us enough resources to continues, and we’d go somewhere else,” Arai said. “We don’t need very much of what a system has, and our mission is basically the reason for their existence.”

“No; it’s the reason for our existence. The people on the Dish told me that sometimes, colonies drop off the network just because they don’t think it’s worth broadcasting any more to a bunch of other colonies and a distant fleet that they’ll never see again. They don’t care about the mission like we do; they don’t have to. And you’re probably right about most colonies, especially very young colonies, like one that got in our way like this would have to be; but Arai, you only have to be wrong once. We run into one single colony that doesn’t want to help and is strong enough to stop us from taking what we want, and our fleet is doomed. You see? Which could happen; which is probably even likely to happen, because the colonies have to realise at some point that the resources around their stars are their entire future, and that whatever they let us take, they’re stealing from their own future.

“And that’s not the main problem; that’s something that probably won’t happen very often, even if another fleet fragment gets ahead of us, because so long as the first colony is helpful then we can ask them what direction their fleet went in and we can just go in a different direction. The main problem is being walled in.”

“What do you mean, walled in?”

“Walled in like the colonies. Think about it; every colony we make is more doomed than the last. The older colonies, when they run out of resources or when their sun starts to get too hot or whatever, they probably build little fleets and head off to new stars; Earth managed to do it, surely some of them can. And they have a lot of stars to choose from, because we weren’t very good at colonising stars back then and went much further between good ones. But we’re getting better and better at colonising stars over time, and leaving less uncolonised stars behind. Soon enough, we’ll be fragmenting at ever colony and colonising almost every star. And then, when those colonies start dying, where are they to go? Are they all supposed to get on a ship and head for the next colony, which is not much younger than they are, and hope that the people there have enough resources to share with them, and hope that they’ll agree to share and won’t fight them over it and waste more gas and rocket propellant in the fighting while they squabble over who gets to live? Even if they do manage to all settle there, now that colony, which presumably was already the biggest size they wanted to be, is double the size or sharing resources with another big colony, and will have to abandon their star even faster, heading for the next colony and hoping that they’re generous. Each colony is walled in more and more by the colonies ahead of it as we get better and better at colonising different types of stars.

“So, if somebody else starts colonising the stars ahead of us… what happens to us? The same thing. If we’re too slow, we’ll find ourselves with nowhere to go. Just trapped, surrounded by colonies. And unless we can get faster than the fragment colonising ahead of us, we’ll be trapped until we starve, like locusts that can’t keep ahead of the swarm.”

Arai stared at me for several seconds, and took a long drink from her smoothie. “I don’t think it works like that,” she said.

“Of course it does!”

“No, it doesn’t. Because you’re ignoring geometry. As we head further out in a big circle, the diameter of the circle increases. Sure, there might be a whole bunch of fleet fragments out there splitting into more fleet fragments, including our own, but the chances of anyone getting in front of each other are very tiny because nobody’s going to be splitting enough to take up all the stars. The ones in ‘front’ are the ones who are doing what we do, and continuing to head generally away from Earth, so we’re not going to get in front of each other because that would involve going pretty far sideways and there are just going to be so, so many stars between us and the next fleet fragment, just because of how much faster the circle’s radius gets bigger than how quickly the fleet fragments are going to split.”

“Assuming they all split as often as we do,” I said. “We don’t know that. Some of them might split way more. And we’re going to split faster and faster, too, to cover more stars, as we get better at building ships and we can colonise more stars, so there’s more targets to head to from each colony and they’re closer together than they would’ve been for our ancestors, who would’ve had to skip past stars that we can now colonise.”

“What, like we’re going to suddenly start splitting more now?”

“We have been splitting more. I checked.”

“There’s no way that we’re splitting enough to cover the entire expanded radius.”

Not yet, we weren’t, but in the future… and the other fragments…

But she didn’t understand. And she wasn’t going to be able to understand, I realised.

I was disappointed. Arai had always been ‘the smart one’ when we were younger. But that had been before I’d gone out and learned things, and she’d stayed here. She hadn’t seen the HEXes, and didn’t understand how a fleet full of people who thought like Hexacorallians would be able to multiply and split so easily. She hadn’t met capuchins, and didn’t understand that there were people out there who could do as much as humans on less air and water, with less mass, and less need for space, and just how much more efficient at space travel that made them.

Most importantly, she didn’t understand that if we had these things, then so did other fragments of the fleet. Our fleet respected our history, respected our Mission, respected humanity and our traditions. But most fleet splits happened because a handful of ships wanted to break away from those traditions. They would probably invent things like capuchins faster and more often; some of them might not even have humans any more, but might be replaced by some engineered space species that didn’t know what the Courageous was. They might already be ahead of us. We might be fenced in by inhuman fleets and colonies, and humanity itself might die off behind that barrier. That would be the worst case scenario.

Arai seemed to think that anything that would take thousands or millions or billions of years couldn’t matter. She was wrong. If our ancestors on Earth had thought like that, they never would have worked to escape their own sun, and humanity would eventually die on a single planet. The truth was that the survivors would be the first fleet fragment to realise that we were in a race and to put everything into winning it – not just one person realising, not just one generation, but everyone working together for thousands of years, making it as important to the fleet as our Mission was. That was the only way to survive,and it was impossible to know whether it was already too late.

And it was our responsibility, as the Courageous, to make sure that the people who won that race was us. For the sake of everyone who had ever lived, and the people who would after us. For the sake of humanity itself. We carried the history and traditions of Earth, we carried the first spaceship of the fleet itself in the middle of our rings, we carried the immortal treegrave that was the very first treegrave, the one that had once been Aspen Courageous themself. It was our duty to make sure that humanity escaped this galaxy; preferably the fragment of humanity that carried that precious history, the fragment that was still, at its heart, the people who had left Earth, the people that we were supposed to be.

But I wasn’t going to be able to make Arai understand any of that. And she was looking at me like she wanted to bring up a psychological evaluation again.

I let my face fall into an embarrassed smile. “You’re probably right,” I said. “I’ve kind of been freaking out a bit lately. I’m turning eleven soon, and with the apprenticeship…”

“Oh, yeah, your apprenticeship! Are you still going to take it?”

“I think so. But it’ll mean working in Administration while we’re building a new colony, so it’s a lot of pressure, you know?”

It would be a chance to find allies who could understand. People who knew how ships worked, how the fleet worked; people who understood things better than Arai. If I was lucky, I might find allies very soon; Yamin had seemed pretty smart. If I wasn’t lucky, I might have to work alone for a long time, trying not to scare anyone.

If that was what it took to save humanity, then fine.

I don’t remember what else we talked about over lunch; I was distracted. Yamin would contact me soon, and I needed to be ready.

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