The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [110]
This news was, of course, fifty-eight years old, but it was no less sensational for that. AI-directed kalpa probes had located more than a dozen life-bearing planets, but we only had hard evidence of multicellular life on two of them, neither of which could be described as “Earthlike” no matter how much generosity was granted to the label. Hope’s first broadcast spoke of a world whose atmosphere was breathable with the aid of face masks, with abundant plant life and animals sufficiently similar to those of Earth to allow talk of “insects,” “reptiles,” “birds,” and “mammals.”
Hope had been sent out to find exactly such a world, ripe for colonization. The generations of its mortal crew had clung hard to that determination while news had followed them that Earth’s ecosphere had not been conclusively blighted. New data regarding the scarcity of planets that could be classified as “terraformable” must have poured into the ship’s data banks while it crawled through the void, but even that had not persuaded the ship’s masters to turn around. Now, they considered their decision to have been vindicated, and their initial howl of triumph was headline news even on Earth.
By the time Emily’s ship actually arrived on the moon, however, the news flow from the world that Hope’s captain had named Ararat was by no means so enthusiastic. The primitive nanotech systems deposited on the surface had made good progress in gantzing dwellings out of the alien soil, but attempts to adapt local reproductive systems to the manufacture of human foodstuffs had run into trouble, and the first people brought out of SusAn in order to work on the surface—not all of whom survived the revival process—were experiencing unexpected problems of psychological adaptation.
Although the SusAn systems installed on Hope had been rendered obsolete several centuries before there were some similar systems still in operation, in which the worst of the first generation of criminals sentenced to SusAn imprisonment were still confined, so the news that long-term freezing down seemed to have unwelcome psychotropic effects was not entirely irrelevant to the Earthbound.
Emily was less enthusiastic about the discovery than I had expected, but she made much of the elementary fact that other “Earthlike” planets did exist.
“The real crux of the matter isn’t Hope’s chances of establishing a human population on the surface of Ararat,” she argued, “but the evidence they’ve found of an extinct species of intelligent humanoid indigenes. That’s as close as we can come to proof of the fact that we aren’t alone in the galaxy without actually shaking hands with our mirror images. One humaniform race might be a fluke, but where there’s two there must be many more, even if one of the two is already defunct.”
“They’re not entirely sure that the sentients are extinct,” I told her. “Even if they’re still around, though, it doesn’t really prove anything. We’ve been scanning the sky for radio messages for a very long time now, so any other human races that have reached our level of technical sophistication must be very discreet. We mustn’t forget that Hope is a strange historical anomaly, launched in a blind panic. Our entire philosophy of cosmic exploration has changed since it went out. Other humaniform races might be busy doing exactly what we’re now busy doing: remaking their spacefarers physically and psychologically.”
“We, Morty?” she echoed, twitching an eyebrow. She was lightly cyborgized, and had almost certainly undergone some subtle somatic engineering, but her appearance was much as I remembered it—and mine must have been exactly as she remembered it. Neither of us was the type to go in for cosmetic modification for fashion’s sake.