Transcendental (25 page)

Our father, Jak, was the lead scientist in the project, a great man skilled in genetics and other biological sciences, literature, and languages. Our beginnings as part of a single ovum, of course, are no different from any other multiple births, common among aliens and not uncommon among humans. Our upbringing was what made us different; we were encouraged to think and act as one. We were a unit, a species into ourselves, a race apart. When we became capable of taking care of ourselves—still children, but precocious children—we were removed to an isolated station where, alone, we were responsible for the terraforming of Ganymede.

Why the “Jays,” as we were called by a curious public? The scientists and statesmen who had created our cohort needed representatives who acted spontaneously, as one, who needed no verbal interaction to do what needed to be done. The challenges of terraforming an alien planet are unpredictable; responses to crises must be instant and intuitive. We were that group. And our superiors needed to shape our cohort into an instrument capable of coping with the worst that the universe, and its alien masters, could throw at humanity.

We—even now I cannot speak easily in the first person singular—understand that the process by which a planet or satellite is transformed into a world suitable for other species is controversial among galactic powers, and condemned by many. The galaxy contains millions of suns, most with planets in the Goldilocks belt; many of these never developed sentient life, and those that did sometimes never developed technology. Galactic critics of terraforming never hesitate to colonize worlds whose natives are technologically limited; we do not quarrel with their philosophy of bringing the blessings of the Galactic Confederation to the benighted. But we were committed to the Cedan philosophy of sentience: sentient life should be encouraged wherever it can exist. The only inhabitants of Ganymede were mindless bacteria, and even they clung to a precarious existence. We did not destroy the bacteria but made ourselves immune to their effects, even as we knew that they would not survive the changes we were told to create.

Planets or satellites that lack the conditions necessary to sustain complex life are like creatures whose mandate to evolve has been frustrated by the accidents of their early history. They are failed habitats, doomed by their pasts never to realize the potential existing in them during the explosive birth of the universe. They, too, need transcendence, and we were the machine that could bring it to them and let them fulfill their destinies. We brought salvation to the yearnings of inanimate matter. Or so Jak told us.

Ganymede is a satellite of Sol’s largest gas giant, Jupiter. Nonhumans know little about Sol’s system—why should you, with so many systems in the inhabited galaxy?—and even humans have little understanding of their own neighborhood. Early human astronomers named most of the planets, and all the satellites they could perceive in their primitive instruments, after ancient mythological deities in whom they no longer believed. Humans cherish the imagination and the imaginary more than most galactics, and they humanize their environment with fanciful names. The huge and mighty Jupiter, for instance, was the supreme god of the ancient Romans; Ganymede, the cupbearer to the gods and a favorite of Jupiter, was a human transported to heaven on the back of Jupiter, who had taken the form of an eagle. Ridiculous, no doubt. But there is much to ridicule in human beliefs and behavior—imagination fuels the human endeavor and its follies are the unavoidable byproducts.

The planet Jupiter has sixty-three satellites, but only eight of them are big enough to be considered candidates for terraforming, and only four of these have any reasonable potential. Each of these four is different except in their orbits far from the sun and its life-giving warmth. Except for the ring of debris left over from a failed planet, Jupiter is located in the next orbit out from Mars, the last rocky planet with any hope of livability, and two orbits out from the human birthplace, Earth. All of Jupiter’s major satellites suffered from significant habitability problems, receiving only four percent of the sunlight that falls upon Earth and orbiting within the intense charged particles of Jupiter’s radiation belt. The satellites, moreover, have significant components of frozen gases, some of them poisonous to human existence. They have little or no atmosphere but some have frozen volatiles that could be transformed into atmospheres by heating, especially water-ice in the case of Ganymede.

Jupiter is almost a system in itself. The gas giant contains more matter than all the rest of the planets in the solar system put together, and it looms in the sky like a failed sun. Its satellites are similarly sized. Ganymede is larger than the planet closest to the sun, Mercury—another planet named after an ancient god. But Ganymede is not as massive. Although it has an iron-rich liquid core inside a mantle of silicate rock, half of its mass—one thousand kilometers deep—is water. Most of it is frozen, although a saltwater sea lies two hundred kilometers deep, sandwiched between layers of ice. Its liquid core provides Ganymede with the only magnetosphere among solar satellites; it also affords the moon some protection against the effects of charged particles, primarily those from Jupiter.

*   *   *

Our father provided a habitat. It was constructed from one of the minor moons of Jupiter, hollowed out with lasers, and fitted with living and working quarters before being maneuvered into position as a satellite of Ganymede. There we matured and developed the complex relationships of clones. I will say no more about that aspect of our social lives except to mention that they were close, closer than siblings, closer than mates, closer than parents and children. But we were also guided by our mission. After education periods with recordings and discussions, we worked on terraforming. First we designed self-sustaining thermonuclear heat generators and ways of dropping them onto the frozen seas of Ganymede. Within a Terran year, we had constructed the first handful of them and landed them on the surface of the giant satellite. The failure rate was less than one in a hundred. As soon as they had landed, the generators melted bodies of water that would grow into lakes from which they would extract heavy water to refuel themselves. Soon their construction and dispersal became automated. Over a long expanse of time, they would eventually form open seas that would finally join to provide Ganymede with a liquid ocean kilometers deep. But that would not happen within our lifetimes and perhaps not within the lifetime of our culture. If that were the case, we would leave it as a gift to our successors—a water world suitable for a new generation.

Our job was not finished, however. Next we set up a process to fashion gigantic mirrors out of thin, coated films, and position them in the space around Ganymede so that they could focus the feeble rays of the sun upon Ganymede’s surface. They had to be strong enough to resist the bombardment of charged particles and the forces that worked to alter the mirrors’ positions, their shapes, and their focus. We tried many combinations of materials before we found one that was sturdy enough to survive but thin enough to manufacture and deploy. We designed and built computers equipped with lasers to monitor the focusing of these giant mirrors and to correct changes in their positions with high-powered laser bursts. When these space mirrors began to shine upon Ganymede and increase the amount of insolation, we had shortened the terraforming of the satellite by thousands of years.

Our final project was the creation of a monomolecular film that would form a cocoon-like sphere around Ganymede to prevent the escape of the atmosphere our thermonuclear generators and space mirrors would create. This was our greatest challenge, since it required not only the invention of a substance new to nature but one that, if created, also had to resist the charged particles of Jupiter’s radiation belt and restore itself after meteorite strikes and, eventually, the passage of ships. Finally, after many failed attempts, we developed a biological solution from the native bacteria of Ganymede—a simple cell equipped to reproduce and spread into a film that lived at the top of the new atmosphere nourished by the chemical brew liberated from Ganymede’s melted primal substances and energized by Jupiter’s charged particles.

That elegant solution brought us great praise from our father, even though he cautioned that we had unleashed a dangerous new living substance upon the universe that, in time, might evolve and proliferate into a competitor to other living creatures in the universe. He thought that unlikely, however, and he was willing to take the risk. The monomolecular film would take centuries before it completed its cocoon around Ganymede. And even if it escaped Ganymede and Jupiter, that would be far in the future when humans and other creatures would be equipped to handle any such problems.

What we did not know, however, was that each of us had been infected by our new creation; our immunization had not worked on the transformed bacteria. The effects were unnoticeable at first, and even when they appeared, we attributed them to our maturity and development. The bacteria became symbiotic parasites, strengthening our bodies, improving our reactions by adding neurons and diminishing the resistance of the nerve connections. Finally, as they developed, they became internal companions, collecting and analyzing data, translating difficult materials and languages, and counseling us on what to do and say and even think.

Then we knew what they were and what we were—full-body biological computers—and it was too late to turn back. They were our own transcendental devices, just as we had been the transcendental mechanism for Ganymede. The difference was that, like our relation to Ganymede, the change was not an improvement of our own capabilities but one imposed upon us. We were not elevated; our symbiote was the new creature. And it was the symbiote that put together the truth that this is what our father had planned from the beginning.

We were eight years old when we were left in the satellite we called “home,” but we had been raised in an isolated habitat orbiting Earth with no memories of anything before. Or rather we raised ourselves with the help of electronic equipment and supervision from another habitat in the same orbit. We were twenty-eight when we finished our task and assumed our new symbiotic existence. But we did not emerge from the experience intact. Jed and Jef died from radiation poisoning. They were in charge of the space mirrors and were exposed too long to Jupiter’s radiation belt. Jil and Jem died from accidents involving the thermonuclear generators and their drop onto the ice of Ganymede. Job and Jin died from a reaction to the symbiote infection.

Then our father addressed us once more—Jon and Jer and me.

*   *   *

He spoke to us in holographic projection, as he always did. When we thought we would not be overheard, we used to joke among ourselves that our father’s life was too precious to risk among the charged particles and debris of Jupiter’s belt. But the joke had a tinge of bitterness: we were there and we had lost two-thirds of ourselves.

“Your job is done,” Jak said. “Now you have a new task.”

“What of our brothers and sisters?” Jer said.

We waited for Jak’s reply. He was far from Jupiter, probably on his moon station or his La-Grange-point habitat, and transmission delays meant a disjointed conversation. Finally his answer came. “That five of you died in this noble effort was tragic—”

“Six!” Jer said.

Jak went on as if he had not heard—and, indeed, he would not for another four minutes: “—but the sacrifice must not be in vain. And it will not.”

“What can compensate for our loss?” Jer asked.

Jak went on as if he had heard the question. “You have accomplished something godlike, appropriate to mighty Jupiter himself. You have given life to dead matter. You have created a new world for the human species. Your names will be among those blessed by human generations.”

“And yours,” Jer said.

“In the process,” Jak continued, “you have remade yourselves. You started as gifted children, and you have become adults capable of anything. You have become like gods. You have become gods.”

“Those who survived,” Jer said.

“You are prepared for your next challenge,” Jak said, “to represent humanity in an alien galaxy. The galactics who control the stars are old and wise and powerful. Humanity is young and restless and troublesome. We emerged from our long evolutionary path like butterflies breaking free of our cocoons into a cold and hostile world. But, for a weak, system-bound species, we fought the alien confederation to a standstill. The losses on both sides were terrible, though far more significant on ours, with our limited numbers and resources, than on theirs. But we proved ourselves worthy of our place in the galaxy. Now a new issue has emerged to disturb the fragile peace that ensued.”

We waited for Jak to continue. What could be more important than the war that had just ended? What could be more important to us than the lives we had lost?

“A new religion is sweeping the galaxy,” he continued. “Or rather, a movement that may become a religion. It is based on a rumor that a Transcendental Machine has been discovered, a machine that can realize the potential in any sentient creature. You can imagine what such a machine might accomplish for any of the civilizations in the universe, including our own. And you can imagine what the possibility of such a machine might do to the fragile peace that was negotiated after the recent war.”

We looked at one another. My symbiote put words in my head: “Don’t listen to him,” it said. “We are your partners, your own transcendence. We can provide what that Transcendental Machine—if it exists—only promises. If you listen to him, you risk everything we have gained.”

Minutes passed, and then Jak said, “You haven’t said anything.”

“What is there to say?” Jer asked. “We understand the issue, but what can we do about it?”

After more minutes Jak responded, “An Earth ship has been ordered to pick up a mixed group of galactics at Terminal. Jan and Jon have been named to the crew. That took some doing, but I managed to call in some favors. The ship has already left, but Jan and Jon can join the ship at Terminal.”