[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
worried?
Pierce swallowed bitter saliva. The Library is not a place, Xiri, it s a time. It contains the sum total
of all recorded human knowledge, after the end of humanity. I m near to graduation, I m allowed to go
there to use it, but it s not, it s not safe. Sometimes people who go to the Library disappear and don t
come back. And sometimes they come back changed. It s not just a passive archive.
Xiri nodded, but looked skeptical. But what kind of danger can it pose, given the question you re
going to put to it? You re just asking for confirmation that we ve been honoring our sources. That s
not like asking for the place and time of your own death, is it?
I hope you re right, but I don t know for sure. Pierce paused. That s the problem. He raised her
hands to his lips and kissed the backs of her fingers. If it must be done, best do it fast. I ll go and
find out. I ll be back soon &
He stepped back a pace and activated his phone. Agent-trainee Pierce, requesting a Library slot.
There was a brief pause while the relays stored his message, awaited a transmission slot, then fired
them through the timegate to Control. Then he felt the telltale buzzing in the vicinity of his left kidney
that warned of an incoming wormhole. It opened around him, spinning out and engulfing him in scant
milliseconds, almost too fast to see: then he was no longer standing in the hall of his own mansion but
on a dark plain of artificial limestone, facing a doorway set into the edge of a vast geodesic dome
made from some translucent material: the Final Library.
A Brief Alternate History of the Solar System: Part Three
SLIDE 11.
One hundred billion years will pass.
Earth orbits a mere twenty million kilometers from its necrosun in this epoch, and the fires of the
accretion disk are banked. Continents jostle and shudder, rising and falling, as the lights strobe
around their edges (and occasionally in low equatorial orbit, whenever the Stasis permits a high-
energy civilization to arise).
By the end of the first billion years of the voyage, the night skies are dark and starless. The naked eye
can still barely, if it knows where to look see the Chaos galaxy formed by the collision of M-31
and the Milky Way; but it is a graveyard, its rocky planets mostly supernova-sterilized iceballs
ripped from their parent stars by one close encounter too many. Unicellular life (once common in the
Milky Way, at least) has taken a knock; multicellular life (much rarer) has received a mortal body
blow. Only the Stasis s lifeboat remains.
Luna still floats in Terrestrial orbit it is a useful tool to stir Earth s liquid core. Prone to a rocky
sclerosis, the Earth s heart is a major problem for the Stasis. They can t let it harden, lest the
subduction cycle and the deep carbon cycle on which the biosphere depends grind to a halt. But there
are ways to stir it up again. They can afford to wait half a billion years for the Earth to cool, then
reseed the reborn planet with archaea and algae. After the first fraught experiment in reterraforming,
the Stasis find it sufficient to reboot the mantle and outer core once every ten billion years or so.
The universe changes around them, slowly but surely.
At the end of a hundred billion years, uranium no longer exists in useful quantities in the Earth s crust.
Even uranium 238 decays eventually, and twenty one half-lives is more than enough to render it an
exotic memory, like the bright and early dawn of the universe. Other isotopes will follow suit,
leaving only the most stable behind.
(The Stasis have sufficient for their needs, and might even manufacture more were it necessary
using the necrostar s ergosphere as a forge. But the Stasis don t particularly want their clients to
possess the raw materials for nuclear weapons. Better by far to leave those tools by the wayside.)
The sky is dark. The epoch of star formation has drawn to a close in the galaxies the Earth has left.
No bright new stellar nurseries glitter in the void. All the bright, fast-burning suns have exploded and
faded. All the smaller main-sequence stars have bloated into dyspeptic ruddy giants, then exhausted
their fuel and collapsed. Nothing bright remains save a scattering of dim red and white dwarf stars.
Smaller bodies planets, moons, and comets are slowly abandoning their galaxies, shed from stars
as their orbits become chaotic, then ejecting at high speed from the galaxy itself in the wake of near
encounters with neighboring stars. Like gas molecules in the upper atmosphere of a planet warmed by
a star, the lightest leave first. But the process is inexorable. The average number of planets per star is
falling slowly.
(About those gas molecules: the Stasis have, after some deliberation, taken remedial action. Water
vapor is split by ultraviolet light in the upper atmosphere, and the Earth can ill afford to lose its
hydrogen. A soletta now orbits between Earth and the necrosun, filtering out the short-wavelength [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl fopke.keep.pl
worried?
Pierce swallowed bitter saliva. The Library is not a place, Xiri, it s a time. It contains the sum total
of all recorded human knowledge, after the end of humanity. I m near to graduation, I m allowed to go
there to use it, but it s not, it s not safe. Sometimes people who go to the Library disappear and don t
come back. And sometimes they come back changed. It s not just a passive archive.
Xiri nodded, but looked skeptical. But what kind of danger can it pose, given the question you re
going to put to it? You re just asking for confirmation that we ve been honoring our sources. That s
not like asking for the place and time of your own death, is it?
I hope you re right, but I don t know for sure. Pierce paused. That s the problem. He raised her
hands to his lips and kissed the backs of her fingers. If it must be done, best do it fast. I ll go and
find out. I ll be back soon &
He stepped back a pace and activated his phone. Agent-trainee Pierce, requesting a Library slot.
There was a brief pause while the relays stored his message, awaited a transmission slot, then fired
them through the timegate to Control. Then he felt the telltale buzzing in the vicinity of his left kidney
that warned of an incoming wormhole. It opened around him, spinning out and engulfing him in scant
milliseconds, almost too fast to see: then he was no longer standing in the hall of his own mansion but
on a dark plain of artificial limestone, facing a doorway set into the edge of a vast geodesic dome
made from some translucent material: the Final Library.
A Brief Alternate History of the Solar System: Part Three
SLIDE 11.
One hundred billion years will pass.
Earth orbits a mere twenty million kilometers from its necrosun in this epoch, and the fires of the
accretion disk are banked. Continents jostle and shudder, rising and falling, as the lights strobe
around their edges (and occasionally in low equatorial orbit, whenever the Stasis permits a high-
energy civilization to arise).
By the end of the first billion years of the voyage, the night skies are dark and starless. The naked eye
can still barely, if it knows where to look see the Chaos galaxy formed by the collision of M-31
and the Milky Way; but it is a graveyard, its rocky planets mostly supernova-sterilized iceballs
ripped from their parent stars by one close encounter too many. Unicellular life (once common in the
Milky Way, at least) has taken a knock; multicellular life (much rarer) has received a mortal body
blow. Only the Stasis s lifeboat remains.
Luna still floats in Terrestrial orbit it is a useful tool to stir Earth s liquid core. Prone to a rocky
sclerosis, the Earth s heart is a major problem for the Stasis. They can t let it harden, lest the
subduction cycle and the deep carbon cycle on which the biosphere depends grind to a halt. But there
are ways to stir it up again. They can afford to wait half a billion years for the Earth to cool, then
reseed the reborn planet with archaea and algae. After the first fraught experiment in reterraforming,
the Stasis find it sufficient to reboot the mantle and outer core once every ten billion years or so.
The universe changes around them, slowly but surely.
At the end of a hundred billion years, uranium no longer exists in useful quantities in the Earth s crust.
Even uranium 238 decays eventually, and twenty one half-lives is more than enough to render it an
exotic memory, like the bright and early dawn of the universe. Other isotopes will follow suit,
leaving only the most stable behind.
(The Stasis have sufficient for their needs, and might even manufacture more were it necessary
using the necrostar s ergosphere as a forge. But the Stasis don t particularly want their clients to
possess the raw materials for nuclear weapons. Better by far to leave those tools by the wayside.)
The sky is dark. The epoch of star formation has drawn to a close in the galaxies the Earth has left.
No bright new stellar nurseries glitter in the void. All the bright, fast-burning suns have exploded and
faded. All the smaller main-sequence stars have bloated into dyspeptic ruddy giants, then exhausted
their fuel and collapsed. Nothing bright remains save a scattering of dim red and white dwarf stars.
Smaller bodies planets, moons, and comets are slowly abandoning their galaxies, shed from stars
as their orbits become chaotic, then ejecting at high speed from the galaxy itself in the wake of near
encounters with neighboring stars. Like gas molecules in the upper atmosphere of a planet warmed by
a star, the lightest leave first. But the process is inexorable. The average number of planets per star is
falling slowly.
(About those gas molecules: the Stasis have, after some deliberation, taken remedial action. Water
vapor is split by ultraviolet light in the upper atmosphere, and the Earth can ill afford to lose its
hydrogen. A soletta now orbits between Earth and the necrosun, filtering out the short-wavelength [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]