The scale of the visitations, the varied points of origin, the time in which these boxes must have been travelling all added to consternation among observers, a sense of something significant about to happen. Pundits pundited; conspiracy theorists grew irate. There was enough time between spotting the objects to their final deceleration for everyone to get really rather stressed.
A few observers pointed out that the Slow’s messengers were descending upon points within an eighty light-year radius with a clear and obvious centre, but their observations were dismissed – not because they were implausible, but because their implications were too alarming to consider. This is a flaw I have observed many times – people will expend vast energies in ignoring the obvious terrifying thingbecauseit terrifies them so. It is a trait that fascinates me to this day.
On Tu-mdo, of course, we had no idea that any of this was happening.
This turned out to be a mistake on the part of the Executorium, for on reaching stable orbit above the planetary surface, the Slow’s messenger proceeded to immediately, and seemingly without actually transmitting anything detectable in the electromagnetic spectrum, hijack every communication device within the system.
PEOPLE OF TU-MDO! qe proclaimed. IN ONE HUNDRED YEARS, THE BINARY STAR SYSTEMLK-08091881 WILL COLLAPSE IN UPON ITSELF. THE RESULTING SHOCK WAVE WILL TRAVEL OUT AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT AND OBLITERATE ALL LIFE WITHIN AN EIGHTY-THREE LIGHT−YEAR RADIUS. YOU HAVE UNTIL THEN TO PREPARE.
The wording was largely the same on every planet above which the Slow’s messengers came, with a few tweaks for localisation. On Adjumir, for example, the binary star system was identified as the Lovers – a sentimental bit of common colloquial that made itself immediately understood to the waiting populace. And on Haima, the radius of destruction was given in localised “qika” metrics rather than the more broadly used light year, with the phrase “obliterate all life” expanded to include the metric “of all degrees of sentience, constitutionally acknowledged and otherwise”.
Above orbital platforms and nascent moon-worlds, the Slow gave qis warning. In the darkest corners of the blackest mining belts; above the glittering capitals of triumphant civilisations, qe proclaimed the fate of billions, and those billions listened in enraptured silence and dread.
At Tu-mdo, sixteen seconds after the Slow began qis transmission, the authorities opened fire and blasted the messengers from the sky before they could squeak another word.
Regrettably, I was on the night side of the planet when the transmission went out, and thus slept through the entire thing.
Chapter 4
The first pioneer Shine children are taught about in school is Clonus um-Bagret Tererens. Hé was captain of the first Venture fleet, with its cargo of 3.2 million colonists on its four-hundred-year voyage across the stars. This was before arcspace travel, before we had learned to bend the impossible dark. Clonus um-Bagret Tererens famously chose the fleet’s final destination of Ko-mdo with a declaration of “There is no obstacle Man cannot overcome!”
This is another motto of the Shine, etched in gold above major corporate centres.
Happily for Clonus Tererens’ ambition, if not hís common sense, there was a lot about Ko-mdo to overcome. It had liquid water at the poles and enough carbon dioxide to feed habitation dome scrubbers, but the gravity was light, the magnetic shield was weak and the soil largely toxic to human life. But Clonus um-Bagret Tererens had a vision, and a belief in the inherent power of human ingenuity and strength of human labour. So long as we work, and work hard, without complaint, hé said, there is nothing we cannot achieve. And so it was, although later scholars questioned whether it ever in fact needed to be.
Clonus died before hé could see hís vision of a humanity elevated by labour come to fruition, so it was hís successor, Aemilis NonaWells, who put down the first oxygen revolt. Her swiftness and brutality was to become something of a theme in USV policies, and in the aftermath, certain ideas were codified into law, including the principle that every individual was only worth the sum of their labour. Slackers, scroungers, those who didn’t pull their weight – the frontier of space was too hard, too cruel for the rest to carry these, and if their number included those injured or old, well, that was just a harsh reality. The duty of every individual in the Shine was to ensure that they were working at the peak of their individual capacity; if everyone did that equally, there would be a perfect society where no one would have to worry about looking after anyone else at all.
By the time Quincitus Keto led the breakout from Ko-mdo to conquer the worlds of Bi-mdo and Gera-sa, the army hé led was almost unrecognisable from the original colonists who had come to Ko-mdo nearly three centuries ago. Breeding programmes had over-filled the cramped arcologies with too many unemployed teenagers, their limbs frail and thin in the weak gravity, gene-blasting radiation and meagre rations of Ko-mdo. But the peoples of the United Social Venture were not ones to lie down and die, and so with hís ragged ships hammered together by blood and will, with hís suicide troops and desperate force of arms, Quincitus Keto led the people of the USV out into the galaxy and to fresh new worlds, seizing by indomitable strength that which weaker peoples were too frail to defend. Thus the USV proved once and for all not merely that it was a force to be reckoned with, but that it was ideologicallyright. That hardy survivors, willing to work themselves to the bone, could with sheer guts and strength overcome any obstacle. Even an obstacle as absurd as trying to eke out a life in the dust devils of Ko-mdo, miserably failing in the attempt and then conquering nearby, far gentler systems when you eventually realised the scale of your generational, mind-boggling mistake.
A few millennia later, the Slow came to Tu-mdo.
Half the planet saw the Slow’s message, and though the Marketing Standards Agency raced to scrub all mention of it, even they couldn’t keep down conversation about the end of the world. Venture Management initially tried to shrug off the Slow’s message, claim it was a conspiracy, an insentient AI sent by the Accord to sow chaos and so on. Alas, the binary star system LK-08091881 – more generally known as Lhonoja – was only seventy-nine light years away, a mere jaunt in galactic terms, and every astronomer in the southern hemisphere, from advanced observatories to teenagers with a telescope, could turn their gaze upon the heavens and say but oh goodness, oh my, oh yes. There are two stars spinning towards each other, exactly as the Slow said, and if we look back through the historical data it would appear that they are on a collision course and actually the maths is fairly elementary now we bother to think about it…
The Ventures wiped the historical data.
This caused further outcry – it was too late, too much, the world could see the truth of it.
So they tried a different approach. Yes, Lhonoja was going to collapse in on itself, but no, it wasn’t a problem. Not a problem at all. The nearest planet to the blast – Cha-mdo – all that needed was a magnetic shield built in high orbit, a fairly simple bit of engineering, and it would be fine. And the rest of the Shine? It was far too far from the supernova to actually experience any harm. There’d be some nice dancing lights in the sky for a few days and maybe a couple of thunderstorms, and then it would pass, and where the light of Lhonoja had shone, now it would not.
Nothing to worry about.
Nothing to worry about at all.
This time, when the astronomers protested, the astronomers disappeared.
Then the physicists objected, and they disappeared as well.
Then the philosophers, the mathematicians, the planetarybiologists, the engineers, even a few political scientists – they vanished, and kept on vanishing, until no one was really left to object.
And that might have been the end of it, except that in Heom, one of the physicists they disappeared was Sarifi “Famed” im-Yyahwa, and she had Shine. A middling commnet personality, she went to the right parties, talked to the right people, hosted spectacular occasions when spectacle was required but knew also how to invite the correct manager to a quiet dinner at an appropriate place. She conformed enough to be accepted, but was mischievous enough in her opinions to stand out, and thus, one careful smile and polite “how fascinating – tell me aboutyou” at a time, she had risen, and people envied her. There is no Shine greater than being envied.
We are the United Social Venture, she said.
We are pioneers, resilient, hardy.
So why are we so afraid of the truth?
The Marketing Standards Agency initially let her broadcast, because she wasn’t advocating any especially radical change. “Just asking questions” was her motto. But the more she talked, the more people listened, not least as there didn’t seem anyone else worthwhile to tune into, and the more people listened, the more she clearly felt she had something to say.
