Natural History Read online

  NATURALHISTORY

  Justina Robson

  Bantam Books New York Toronto London Sydney Auckland

  NATURAL HISTORY

  Published by arrangement with Pan Macmillan Ltd.

  A Bantam Spectra Book / January 2005

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  “American Pie”

  Words & Music by Don McLean

  Copyright © 1971 Mayday Music, USA. Universal / MCA Music Limited

  Elsinore House, 77 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JA

  Used by permission of Music Sales Ltd. All rights reserved.

  International copyright secured.

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2003 by Justina Robson

  Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Robson, Justina.

  Natural history / Justina Robson.

  p. cm.

  A novel.

  1. Artificial intelligence—Fiction. 2. Interplanetary travel—Fiction. 3. Life on other planets—Fiction. 4. Women archaeologists—Fiction. 5. Women historians—Fiction. 6. Space ships—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3618.O3366N38 2005

  813′.6—dc22 2004051995

  Visit our website at www.bantamdell.com

  eISBN: 978-0-553-90118-4

  v3.0_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Dedication

  About the Author

  1. ISOL AND THE ENGINE

  Day’s end: 5433.

  Base beacon delay: 3 years, 351 days.

  Speed: approaches 0.265 lights.

  Fixed Stars Estimate Navigational Error: 0.0134.

  Direction: Barnard’s Star, holding.

  Immediate Region: infestation of scattered micrometeors within density spectrum 0.001 to 0.032/m3. Bhupal halo configuration suggests ancient significant explosion. Expansion suggests incident congruent with Earth geotime 246BC: Archimedes works on his principles, Buddhism spreading over India, Punic Wars in full swing.

  Crystals of water present; saturation density per cubic metre 4 x 10-6; also frozen nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen; also carbon in the form of complex organic molecules within outer shells of iron and non-Earthlike fullerenes. Iron ores and silicates predominate. Free gases remain as negligible traces within immediate region.

  Damage sustained: catastrophic puncturing of primary skin, significant punctures of secondary skin. Heavy-particle absorption decreased to 45%. Radiation count falling by 6 rads/minute. Essential gas loss at 32%.

  Condition: critical.

  A long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me smile . . .

  Voyager Lonestar Isol was holed like a Swiss cheese, peppered with tiny wounds like a bird caught in a blast of shot. Much more of this and her Mites would fail, her immune system become stagnant from too high a demand, her fuel absorption become disproportionate to the fuel available ahead of her.

  And I knew that if I had my chance . . .

  Isol continued to hurtle through the scouring degradation of the meteor field, still in shock at its sudden appearance in her path. The constant bombardment, which had felt like a rough sanding at first, was now razing her. She hurt, she bled, but her colossal inertia drove her into the grit with the force of a missile, so that pieces only micrometres in diameter pierced straight through her at whatever vector she struck them.

  Even when she’d seen it, it had been far too late to turn. She’d had a warning of exactly 1.6108 seconds and, if she cared to love her numbers, by then it was a whole Golden Ratio too late—an entire Fibonacci crisis of suicidal beauty, fuck it. And in another few seconds it would be over, one way or another.

  Did you write the book of love?

  She’d had only two femtoseconds to realize that no diversion she could make was going to steer her clear of the ring of crap that had suddenly manifested itself. It hadn’t appeared in her awareness until the last moment, due to a lack of light in this star-forsaken region. That, combined with a lack of expectation in her mind and her overconfidence in her own ultra-high-resolution optics and the data from the fixed solar scanners back home. No telescope had reported any big dusts, so she’d assumed there weren’t any. Isol could process memories at fifty times the speed of an Unevolved human and have it feel like real time; but she couldn’t think of what to do when she saw the problem, and by then it had been too late. Two femtoseconds wasn’t even enough for the brain to make the first connection towards starting a gasp—if you had lungs.

  A long, long time ago, when she was little, she’d danced in a field of poppies listening to “American Pie,” not understanding a single word, around her the world as wide as a blue sky could stretch. The track had lasted half a second in those days, played as fast as she could comprehend it at the time—thinking she was some kind of genius as she dashed through one era of music after another. “American Pie” and its mystery had lasted time enough for one sharp intake of breath.

  These days she could play her music at far greater speeds without losing any nuance; Earth’s entire repertoire took only two years to listen to end to end—more than enough time to find favourites and make lists and endless recombinations of accompaniment to the cacophony of the universal radio.

  Now she played it slower than that, one line for every second. It seemed important as never before to understand it, reviewing and discarding all the billions of databased papers already written on its lyrics in order to find her own unique take on its perfect capture of the ineffable. She wanted to hear it so loud that the sound of her own death wouldn’t eclipse it.

  Do you have faith in God above?

  She saw the curve of her future suddenly start to veer into the cubic . . . the quartic . . . heading into its visible limit. It was too late, and it had been too late since the first day of her life when, as an extrasolar explorer, she’d been set on a track for speed and silence and the infinite depths of an ocean beyond all vastness. Even a Forged life is so short and this place is so very big. How could you stand to be late?

  Do you believe in rock and roll?

  A rock—much bigger than the rest—smashed through her right sailfin, punching a hole in it more than half a metre across. Numbness began to creep into her side. From the edges of the wound hydrocarbons and silicates bled out into a whitening tail behind her.

  Suddenly, as if the lump had left a secret decoder in its violent passage, Isol understood the song, even the line about the levee, although she didn’t know what a levee was. (Her insentient memory supplied some kind of ditch full of water runoff from green fields and a river, sodden with rain to burst
ing point.) It told her the song was about the death of Buddy Holly and the crash of his plane. But she knew it was for her, because she was the plane and the passenger and the song and the words, and the father, son and holy ghost were out beyond the light horizon.

  Can music save your mortal soul?

  At last she was in the clear, beyond the cloud of infinitesimal stones. But her body was failing. The damaged sailfin wouldn’t eat anymore, wouldn’t feel the soft breath of the solar winds or the hard blast of her reactor output. The drop in radiation made her feel a cold foreboding that was more than a physical chill. She didn’t need to create the graph to know the game was done.

  Slowing, she maintained course along the thread of light towards Barnard’s Star. Everything about her ached with regret and fury at her hot-headedness. Now she would drift until she died, for there were no stars close enough to supply sufficient energy to solve her shortfall. Barnard’s Star was to have been the first of many stops. She hadn’t even got to first base.

  I was a lonely teenage broncin’ buck with a pink carnation and a pickup truck . . .

  If only she’d seen it sooner. Then she might have had the time to make plans rather than simply seeing the stark promise of a detour and its deceleration. She might have had time to think, to slow down, to turn. But although her brain was made for the task, her eyes simply weren’t up to the job. Not that those who had made her could have known that—they’d never tested any prototypes in the field, for there could be no prototypes, only people; when you made someone you tried to give them the best possible shot, surely, didn’t you? Being among the first, she should have expected a few flaws, perhaps. But her head was made for speed and the silent heaven. She was perfect for this. Almost.

  The day the music died . . .

  Furious, she looked back at the debris field. All but invisible until you were right on it—positioned, as it was, far from stars and their planetary systems, far from the light of nebulae-scatter with nothing to cast its shadow upon, nothing at this range to reveal its proximity against the backdrop of glitter and dust, where worlds larger than the sun made a pinprick on her lenses no larger than an atom’s width. But with a second glance she saw that this was no comet-and-rock incident. The signatures of the elements, the shapes of the pieces . . . this huge mess wasn’t a cosmic accident of two bits of dumb mass colliding. It was an explosion with a centre and among its remains were fragments of complex organic material.

  That strange flavour of burning that now seemed so flat on her tongues: this was carbonization. The little pieces had been alive, and the huge lump that had taken away her only chance of survival with a single blow was a block of highly refined metals of non-natural type that had liquefied and congealed within moments—a bit of technology that was now a lump of heat-processed slag.

  For a second her astonishment outweighed her terror.

  This whole savage cloud had once been somebody.

  Bye-bye, Miss American Pie . . .

  This person had been undergoing their violent expansion for over a thousand years. Such a short time in cosmic terms, less than a moment. Not even a gasp.

  Isol turned away from her horrible intimacy with it—with them. Horror and disgust mingled with elation and made her feel sick. And here she was, dead as well, fulfilling her mission goal and her life’s dream in one move.

  First contact.

  She laughed at the irony, deep in her core chamber where the superhot reactions of nuclear fission juddered and the unequal slams of free electrons let the elements do her sobbing for her. Eventually the reaction would eat her up if she let it run hard. Switch it off, and she could freeze solid instead.

  So Isol makes the fundamental inherited goal of all explorers—contact—and in doing so is murdered accidentally by the long-dead native before introductions can be made: she often thought of herself in the third person. It was a way of looking at her insignificance. Now that seemed ludicrous, verging on the insane, as though she’d been writing her own story in a book: engineering it towards the triumph and victory of a happy ending with such determination that she hadn’t noticed when the plot went wrong. What a way to live.

  She kept on laughing, drifting away from the field on her single, one-shot trajectory, wondering if she should tell Earth about this or keep it to herself as the final word on a life that could never have had any other purpose, although it might have had another outcome.

  Mental note to Creators (you boz-eyed shitbags): beware of roadkill.

  The pain from the sailfin began to ache and bite as she withdrew support from it. Cold stiffened it and froze its thin, tattered panes. She cut the circulation at her shoulder and kept her song on replay, humming along, eyes closed as she watched her deceleration to 0.25 lights. She felt very tired suddenly. The rebellion in her against the Earthbound ancestors, which had previously been a burning vision strong enough to fuel her through anything, exhausted itself—so much so that she longed for a sight of the planet now, blue and green and white, afloat on its prosaic round.

  Her daily-link notes came in, relayed by beacons she had left behind her, their hominid-centric news mere years out of date. She deleted them.

  I met a girl who sang the blues . . .

  And then you get slammed by some other luckless schmuck’s corpse and you realize—what?

  That a piece of you is a little girl: picture her, a pink ballet dress replete with tutu and a very silly feather boa so long that it drags behind her and catches on the flowers in the field, long brown hair, a faintly, no, a very spoiled expression leading to a severe pout that looks utterly ridiculous. Where are the ruby slippers; three clicks to home? Why didn’t I get those instead of this stupid dress?

  That you’re not invincible.

  Dear God, the banality of all of this! A billion biographies have said as much on a lot less. Is there nothing about you that stands out and above all of that glibly mortal hyperbole, that came this far and saw so little?

  The last train for the coast . . .

  She switched the music off. Ahead of her lay her extinction, at a point not too far beyond the theoretical navigational marker she’d been going to hit—a virtual crossroads where the imaginary connecting lines between four “fixed” distant galaxies intersected. Her first milestone.

  But looking at it again . . .

  Something floated in the empty space there.

  At first she thought it was simply a fault in her optics, or a reflection of one of the shattered motes behind her. But even after considerable reboots and calculations it remained out there, exactly placed on the axial crossroads, as close as she could measure.

  Isol braked without hesitation this time. Anything seemed better than flinging herself headlong into nothing, even if it was only another long-dead rock.

  The sailfin snapped off her abruptly. It tumbled away to one side and began to outpace her gently. In another few million years it might come within the grip of a star and burn up.

  Venting and catastrophic skin repair were still consuming most of her available power. Even though it was already certain, her spirits sank as she felt the losses and the internal shrinkage they caused, the last-ditch warning systems they tripped.

  For 1 x 1012 oscillations of the radiation in the caesium spectrum within her atomic clock Isol marked time as she was forced to close down part of her reactor, cooling, ebbing. She was aware of a sluggishness in herself, exhaustion, soreness from the wounds, and nausea from the build-up of repair by-products in her system. As she waited to get close enough to this new rock, she listened to the changing patterns of the light of distant stars. Their falling tones told her of her decline. She slept a lot, and sometimes couldn’t tell if she were sleeping or awake except that, if anything happened meanwhile, she must have been asleep.

  In her sleep she returned to a place not unlike the Dreamtime where she’d grown up, before she had a body. In her youth she’d done the common things for a Forge-born in virtuo: assumed many shapes, experien
ced the world through a range of senses, and visited places that her adult life would never subsequently have allowed her to see. One in particular, the sea-depths of Earth’s ocean, she’d loved above all, no doubt because it resembled the space she was designed to inhabit.

  As an octopus, her head ballooning, her limbs soft but strong, she explored the coast of Australia. As a shark she patrolled the Barrier Reef and saw the silhouettes of divers there above her, shadows from another world. As a plesiosaur in an ocean from another time she floated in the semi-darkness of tropical waters filled with algae, watching for squid, nothing in her head that would pass for thought, only the leviathan impulses of hunger and the awareness of water cold and water warm against her skin. But it was as a soft-bodied jelly that she went beyond the reach of the light and drifted down into the deepest trenches where sulphur fumaroles vented their spleen and created small, hot pockets of rising water rich with bacteria that existed nowhere else on Earth. There she knew herself home.

  Here life was small and scarce. Tube worms, colourless, mouthless, lipless, eyeless, opened their digestive chambers and allowed specialized bacteria to feed on the rich minerals, absorbing their output in return. A few metres from the fumaroles’ empire the rock of the sea floor stretched out, a backyard of silty death.

  There were no worms here to plough fields rich with the sediments from above. Here Isol sat, silent and still, and examined a bone here and there, a piece of a thing, a tooth or the minute cogs of a long-lost watch. In this wilderness the blind forms of tiny scavengers, the relatives of prawn and crayfish, picked slowly and transferred morsels with robotic care into their untasting jaws. At these depths and pressures no bony fishes could endure. Nothing with a backbone, nothing that kept its strength on the inside.

  In her dying dreams Isol found herself down there again. From miles above her the distant conversation of whales and the occasional trace of a heavy engine boomed faintly, their echoes butting against the blunt silence of her mind; the futile stammers of winter ghosts. The vibrations shivered her entire body with their undecipherable information. She identified things by touch. She burnt herself by trying to feel how hot the tip of a fumarole tower was; and again when she strayed too close to a crack in the floor where oozing tubules of fresh lava were emerging, snub-nosed and crinkly, into the icy blackness—snorting sausage-shaped chargers straight from the bowels of hell. Hell’s shit. She was surprised to survive the encounter.