102: At War With Eternity

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“I’m talking about the extinction of humanity,” I said. “The eventual extinction of life itself!”

“In billions or trillions of years! Do you have any idea how long a star lives? Our galaxy will be clashing with another galaxy before the stars of our colonies start giving out.”

“Not in the direction we’re heading,” I mumbled, as if that was somehow relevant. “The timescale doesn’t matter. These things will happen. We can’t pretend that they won’t just because we won’t be there to see them. Besides, the loss of critical gases will kill most colonies before their stars are an issue, most likely.”

“Stars die, but new stars are born. And with them, new life materials. If you want to look that far in the future, then colony survivors will eventually have to move to new stars, but – ”

“It’s not just a matter of volume, but placement. New stars aren’t all going to magically grow in accessible places. New stars are born from the waste materials of dead stars, not conveniently placed near colonies by some kindly overseer. Even if they were, there’s no way that most colonies are going to live long enough to see them. Without the ability to coordinate, populations will grow to their maximum comfortable capacity without consideration for each other, and will lose a star’s resources faster than a new star will gather them, and die.”

“And being dead, they’ll leave behind new stars that they never got a chance to colonise for the descendants of other colonies to claim. That’s the beauty of our mission – the continuation of life is not dependent on the survival of the people of any given planet, any given colony, any given fleet. We’re too varied, too numerous, too spread out to die, for as long as there’s an active, moving universe to keep living in.” Kes eyes were joyous. Like this was a good thing.

“We’re going to get trapped,” I pointed out. “If anybody gets ahead of us, we’re going to get trapped, and the first ship of the fleet, the heart of humanity, will have nowhere further to go. We’ll be trapped at a star, if not stranded in open space, and eventually die.”

“You think that that will kill the Courageous? I very much doubt it.”

“What, you think that if we get trapped behind colonies, every single one of them will be generous and give us what we need to somehow catch up with a fleet fragment that’s already moving faster than us? Those fleet fragments didn’t really respect us when they left, or they would never have split from us; I bet half the colonies made by other fragments don’t even know who we are! Even assuming that catching up with their creators and getting ahead again would be possible – ”

“You’re probably right about that, but that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that everything you’re panicking about assumes that the Courageous will still exist, as a version of the Courageous that we would recognise if at all, long enough for any of those things to be likely. And I really don’t think that that’s the case. Given the vastness of space and the likelihood of any other fragment passing in front of us an managing to colonise just about every single star ahead of us before we get there… I mean, you’re right in that it’s literally impossible to calculate the odds on that, but we’re looking at millennia, right? Life at a star is billions of years unless people are deliberately venting critical gases to space or setting up at extremely short-lived stars. There’s simply no way that this ship will last that long.”

“And if you’re wrong about the ship dying of ‘old age’?”

“Then I’m wrong, for now. But accidents happen, major re-engineering happens, changes in culture happen. Maybe some disaster destroys the centre of the ship and we lose everything the First Crew took into space. Maybe some technological breakthrough means that the whole ship has to be re-engineered into something we wouldn’t recognise as the Courageous, and over the next few centuries, everything that we were becomes muddied and lost in the records of a people who live very differently. Maybe the people will change; maybe there’ll be a major cultural shift and we’ll stop restricting ourselves to primarily Earth genes and our descendants will be an entirely different people than us.”

“You seem very calm about all that, compared to how worried you were last time we spoke about this.”

“Of course I’m worried about this ship dying around us right now, especially if it’s preventable. But we can’t pretend that it’s going to exist forever.”

“So you don’t object to the Courageous dying at all. You just don’t want to be here when it happens. Isn’t that somewhat selfish?”

“They’re different scenarios. I’m looking out for a specific, probably preventable problem. You’re declaring war on eternity. They’re not the same thing.”

“Yes, they are! You’re the one who’s into how our own minds and perspectives haven’t necessarily evolve to properly ascertain reality, and that causes problems with understanding the universe; this is one of those problems. The universe of our descendants a thousand or a million or a billion years from now is as real as the universe is now. They deserve to live. They deserve the best future that we can secure them.”

“And how should we secure that future, exactly?”

“By being aware of the danger. I’m not worried about losing the ship to internal problems; we’ve been, by definition, the most stable ship in existence so far. We were the first, and we’re still here, and I’m confident that we can remain here indefinitely. But we do need to start taking into consideration the external threat of colonies and other fleet fragments. We need to focus on moving as quickly as possible. Obviously, the Mission of building colonies an spreading life throughout the universe is important,” I lied, “but we can’t do that if we don’t exist. We don’t have to build a colony at every star; we can focus on speed, on direction, on efficiency. We can sometimes go to stars in the best direction that might not support a colony, just to restock supplies, to keep going.”

“The right direction? What is the right direction?”

“Ahead of everyone else. So, towards the edge of the galaxy. And by the time we get there, we need to be able to cross over into the next galaxy, before anyone else can.”

“And then?”

“Well… then we’ll be in a galaxy of free, unclaimed stars. If we get there first.”

“Okay, but by your logic, the threat is the existence of other fleet fragments that we can’t control or coordinate with, right? And controlling or coordinating with them is physically impossible. Moving to the next galaxy first doesn’t solve the problem, because they’re going to reach the edge of the galaxy too, and also make the jump. What do you intend to do? Try to keep everyone else out? Set up a defensive perimeter of colonies and new fleet fragments? Because once you’ve fragmented the fleet to set up that perimeter, you’ve created new competition again; you’ve recreate dthe problem you were running from. So you can’t do that, right? This strategy of yours involves never fragmenting the fleet again, and also outrunning the other fragments and somehow keeping them out of the next galaxy.”

“We don’t have to keep them out,” I said. “We just have to keep ahead of them. Maybe we could keep some of them out by building a line of colonies at every viable star, making the distance they’d have to travel without resupply longer, but – ”

“But we’re hypothesising a future in which we, and presumably other fleet fragments, have figured out how to cover the distance between galaxies; notably, to a galaxy that’s not currently heading towards ours. How thick would the layer of colonised stars have to be to deprive them of resources long enough to matter? If they can hop galaxies, they can go straight on past a thin border of claimed stars. How much time would it take to build that border? How much time would each colony need to exist to secure enough resources at their star that a visiting fleet couldn’t simply take what they wanted from an unpopulated planet or asteroid belt and move on? You could not possibly bank on having a big enough lead on other fleet fragments to make securing a border viable. More than that, while they’d be slower than fragmenting the fleet in the galaxy, colonies are competition, too; on the timescale you’re worried about, where resource loss and then star death are serious problems, the obvious way for colonies to survive is to build ships and colonise new stars themselves. You’re still outrunning a wave of new colonies even if other fleet fragments aren’t a problem. The new galaxy keeps filling up, and you have to keep running.

“And what happens when you run out of new galaxy? What happens if you do everything right, make no new fleet fragments and no new colonies, an simply keep outrunning the other fragments who jump over? Because they will, of course, when they have nowhere in this galaxy to go. You could jump to the next, I suppose, but on a timeline of billions or trillions of years, fleet fragments have gone to many galaxies, fragmenting more and more. And the galaxies themselves are moving. It’s only a matter of time before you’re jumping into galaxies already as populated as the one you left behind. What then?”

“I don’t know!” I snapped. “I can’t solve every problem, okay? I can only work with what I have. The first problem is getting the ship, and the fleet, to understand and prioritise the issue at all. All our genius scientists will have to figure out the rest, step by step. Maybe in five trillion years we’ll… we’ll be able to make oxygen and nitrogen from nothing, or something, and it won’t matter, but we can’t do that if we don’t survive that long.”

“Do we need to survive that long?”

“Yes!”

“Why?” Huspi gazed wistfully out at the stars. “Life has spread out far beyond our physical ability to communicate, to coordinate, or to control, yes. But that also means that it’s spread out beyond the reach of any singular disaster. If we get trapped, it’s because somebody else is on the front of the wave. The colonies behind us may die sometimes, but they’ll seed more colonies at different stars, and wherever there are plenty of unoccupied stars there will be more colonies spreading out to them. What we face isn’t death,Taya. It’s immortality.”

“It’s being sacrificed for somebody else’s immortality,” I said. “We created them. We created the Mission. Other ships were built to help the Courageous conquer the stars and at some point things got out of control. We’re the true descendents of the First Crew; we’re the… ugh, you know what I mean!”

“Heirs.”

“What?”

“It’s a word they use on family-based ships where people and families have a lot of private resources. An ‘heir’ is somebody who inherits your property or rights or titles when you die, or retire, or suchlike.”

What a useful word. “We’re their heirs!”

“And we’ve inherited a lot from them,” Huspi agreed. “But not the stars, because the stars never belonged to anybody to give. A star belongs to the colony that claims it. What we inherited was duty. The mission. And as you pointed out, the other ships in the fleet, and the other fleet fragments, built to help us on that mission… they inherited that duty, too. It’s something that we’ve been able to pass on to them, a burden carried by every ship in motion an potentially picked up again by promising colonies, under the right conditions. It’s a burden shared enough that anyone can put it down and trust that there are more than enough out there carrying it. And someday, our ship will do that. I’m not frightened of that.”

“It’s our duty to survive,” I said.

Huspi just sighed. “Don’t you ever get tired? I always feel like we’re running. Even more when I’m listening to the hum, but it’s not like the feeling is all that hidden otherwise. I feel like I’ve been running since long before I was born. I don’t know if we’re running to keep ahead of the things you fear, or running from something else, or we were just built to run in the first place from something that made sense to the First Crew a long time ago an now it’s just habit. Don’t you ever want to rest?”

If we rested, we’d never start running again. We’d be left behind. “If you want to stay in place, join the colony at Dragonseye,” I said acidly.

I’d meant it as an insult, but Huspi looked even more wistful. “I couldn’t do that,” ke said quietly. “I could never abandon the Courageous like that.”

And I wondered how much of Huspi’s speculation about the ship breaking down in its ‘old age’ was really due to horror and fear, and how much was a deep, shameful, long-buried hope.

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