From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed Nov 03 1999 - 06:19:21 MST
At 03:57 PM 2/11/99 -0600, Billy Brown wrote:
> you are assuming that no SI ever wants to do
>anything that would be especially visible to us. They don't disassemble
>solar systems to build things, they don't reorganize galaxies to optimize
>the mass distribution, and they certainly don't to any recognizable sort of
>cosmological engineering.
Emblematically (since They might be impelled by aesthetic whimsies as
readily as by economic imperatives), here's a fragment from STUCK IN FAST
FORWARD by me and Rory Barnes (HarperCollins Australia 1999):
=======
Now the sun was definitely brighter. In the year 2,173,698,172 its furnace
was burning harder, and according to Daddy it was more than ten percent
hotter than in our own time. We stood just outside the lava face of the
vacuole, shading our eyes. Early morning clouds were wispy and very white.
We had run down our supplies of water, so we went looking for a stream,
carrying a plastic bucket and a couple of bottles with screw-tops. Dad set
up his solar panels to refresh our battery supplies, and listened across
the radio spectrum. Nothing at all. The earth was empty again.
That night's gorgeous pastel sunset took at least an hour to fade, so Dad
said we'd obviously floated a long way on the local continental plate, well
down below the tropics again. But the wait for nightfall was worth it.
`Oh my god,' Dad said, as the first stars began to prick out in the heavens.
`Funny way to set up your satellites,' I muttered. I'd just finished off
the last chocolate bar from our stores, and so I was feeling rather grumpy.
I licked my lips regretfully, looking up at the pattern emerging overhead.
`They must have built more of those orbital rings and stuck them
everywhere. You'd think they'd bang into each other.'
`Not satellites, darling. Those are stars,' Daddy said, and came and sat
down beside me on a shelf of cooling rock, putting his arm around me
tightly. `That's what they've done to the stars.'
I didn't understand, and then I did, and my heart jumped and my
chocolate-lined stomach did a little terrified spasm.
The sky was a vast curving criss-cross grid of points of hard light, like
atoms seen from inside a crystal.
All my life, the stars had been scattered across the heavens pretty much at
random, except for the blurry band of the Milky Way. Oh, you could pick
out the odd bright constellation - the Southern Cross, with its Pointers,
Orion and its Belt - but I'd always known that they were just a kind of
game or trick the mind played on itself. Actually, the stars that seemed
to make up a cross or a belt were usually many hundreds of light years
apart, in the depths of space. It was only from earth that they formed the
patterns we chose to call constellations.
Not this lot. Oh, no.
Someone had actually revised the sky. Somebody had come in and moved the
stars around. Some Mind had reached out and flicked the billions of
burnings suns of the Milky Way as if they were some kid's marbles.
`A moiré pattern,' Dad mused.
`A what?' I looked at the changed universe with deep horror, but also with
a wild wonderment. What kinds of beings could do something like this? Fi
and I were raised with no religion, but this kind of caper made you think
of the myths and legends of Greece and Rome, gods who built the sky and
could change it with the jab of a finger. But those old-fashioned gods
were stuck on a flat earth under a sky where the sun was thought to spin
about the world, not the other way around. Those old story-tellers had no
idea how far away the stars were, or how big suns are.
`It's a spherical grid,' Dad was saying in a frail voice, `all the stars
have been moved to locations at regular intervals on a series of concentric
spheres,' but I hardly heard a word. I just looked and looked, and you
could see places where the spots of brilliance ran together, which was just
where the lanes of light overlapped in the endless dark deeps of galactic
space. The Milky Way itself was gone, its billions of stars relocated into
the grand crazy rational design. But you could pick out the core of the
galaxy, because that was the brighter place that the endless onion skins of
stars wrapped themselves around.
`Wow,' I said. `Oh, wow.'
===========
Damien Broderick
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