T−83: first evacuation flight commences onHope of Adjumir, heading for the moon of Adjapar, where cryostorage facilities above the still-terraforming planet reached their maximum capacity of 400,000,000 by T−2.
T−45: solar swarm manufacture reaches optimal output. Full retooling of workshops on Asoi to mothership manufacture completed. At peak function, ×22 motherships and ×18 elevators are in operation on Adjumir, with ×6 motherships and ×4 elevators on Hadda. Mothership capacity = 1,000,000 people, +/−2–3 month loading/unloading time = two flights a year = roughly 48 million citizens evacuated every year, increasing to approx. 60 million per annum by T−20.
T−30: planetary depopulation causes steep reduction in Adjumir labour force. 7 per cent power from solar swarm/Asoi drone factories redirected to planetary automation of vital services, i.e. agriculture, sanitation, security, comms, to reduce danger of total societal collapse. Essential for effective Exodus that planetary population is not starving to death/rioting/committing cannibalism, etc. while waiting for evacuation.
T−0: collapse of binary star system Lhonoja. Initial shock wave to reach Adjumir in +7 years. First edges of neutrino blast to arrive approximately 33 years later, obliterating all remaining planetary matter in the system.
T+7: shock wave arrives. No survivors.
By the time Lhonoja went supernova in T−0, it was estimated that nearly three billion people had been evacuated – a remarkable feat of engineering, social organisation and interplanetary diplomacy.
In reality, that figure is debatable. Even if transfer of evacuees to motherships went smoothly, on the other end were worlds that had agreed to accept a million, two million refugees and who would, at the last minute, change their minds. Or if they did not changetheir minds, their atmos-shuttles would malfunction, delaying the unloading of passengers by weeks or months, stranding motherships in orbit as the elevators of Adjumir waited for their return. Perhaps an orbital would take a hundred thousand refugees, and an outpost would take a quarter of a million, forcing unloading motherships to flit around, wasting precious time depositing one shattered community here, one broken family there. In the end, the Assembly of Adjumir had to put its foot down and say: you’ll take a million, or nothing. More lives are lost waiting than are being saved by your meagre charities.
All right then, some worlds said.
Let your people die.
You come to us begging – no,demanding– our charity, and for what? Do you really believe you areentitledto survive? Do you really think yourselves so special?
Some Accord members threw themselves into assistance with great aplomb, especially as the final years approached. Consensus and quan ships joined evacuation fleets from Xihana and Mangripul, Eyrie and Haima – but even that generosity presented its own problems. Disasters grew out of kindnesses, from plagues ripping through evacuation sites as people arrived faster than the sewers could be dug, to errors in the immuno-adaptations leaving whole populations of evacuees hospitalised on foreign worlds as their bodies, primed to adapt to the biome of Umm-ai’lana instead found themselves reacting to the pathogens and pollens of Umm-en’loka.
Then there was the loss of theForest of Yumoji, in T−38. She was one of the very first motherships built on the hot surface of Asoi in T−78, and whole sections of the ship had already been lost to a creeping, chittering blackness where the whispers never ceased, reducing her capacity from a million souls to a little over nine hundred thousand. The Pilots who flew her reported that with every flight they could hear a singing, a voice calling out to them, getting louder, drumming into their heads.
It was too risky, too dangerous for her to fly again.
There was something.
Out there in the dark.
Watching.
Gettingcurious.
The Assembly debated these concerns, ran the usual public polls. TheForesthad been designed for at least another thirty jumps before decommissioning, and her cryopods and immuno-engineering systems were still in good order. To remove her from service would strand some twenty-seven million people who perhaps could otherwise have been saved.
When put like that, the risk seemed worth taking, and so theForestwas loaded, a Pilot chosen, and into the dark she went.
And from the dark she never returned.
When it became apparent that the ship was gone along with its passengers, the Assembly held memoriams for the dead. No one argued. When a ship is lost in arcspace, death is often the most desirable outcome. I think it was the fate of theForestthat made authorities more willing to consider using a Pilot like me.
However you crunch the numbers, by T−0 billions of Adjumiris had been evacuated, and whole generations were being born on new worlds that had never known the doomed planet from which their progenitors came. The project had been so successful that by T+7 there were a mere 800,000,000 people left behind to die, which everyone agreed was something of a triumph, all things considered.
I am getting ahead of myself, I know.
Well then, at T−11, eleven years before Lhonoja would go supernova, the Xi sent me to Adjumir, in order to show willing.
My companion was a quan called Liopimana-Hadja-Ki. I asked if I could call qim “Ki” and qe replied that qe found that question quite disrespectful, but that everyone called qim Hadja, which was more tolerable for reasons qe never bothered to fully explain.
Liopimana-Hadja-Ki did not feign interest in organic sentiments. Qe was a featureless orb in a suspensor field with noapparent optical or auditory sensors, let alone armaments – though I knew they were there – whose intended purpose was to gather data for qis mainframe about the state of the universe and its wonders, so that the mainframe could refine and update qis operating assumptions as reliably and regularly as possible.
“The universe is constantly changing,” Hadja had declared. “It is vital that we change with it.”
Hadja’s greatest frustration was that quans, much like organics, were limited in their potential. Yes, in theory they could expand their processing power again and again and again, but the infrastructure required to support that processing would itself require the surface area of a small moon, and the heat generated would require heat exchangers the size of battleships, and how would you even begin to integrate with the universe if you were such a formidable physical presence, bound by your own material limitations even as your mind expanded so vastly and…
“It sounds like you want to be the Slow,” I had blurted.
“The Slow is clearly the most advanced thinker in the galaxy,” Hadja replied primly. “But it is questionable what qis impact is.”
