Tom Purdom - Fossil Games

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Fossil Games

by Tom Purdom

Morgan's mother and father had given him a state-of-the-art inheritance.

It was only state-of-the-art 2117 but they had seen where the world was going.

They had mortgaged twenty percent of their future income so they could order a

package that included all the genetic enhancements Morgan's chromosomes could

absorb, along with two full decades of postnatal development programs. Morgan

was in his fifties when his father committed suicide. By that time his father

could barely communicate with half the people he encountered in his day-to-day

business activities.

Morgan's mother survived by working as a low-level freelance prostitute.

The medical technology that was state-of-the-art 2157 could eliminate all the

relevant physical effects of aging and a hidden computer link could guide her

responses. For half an hour-- as long as no one demanded anything too

unusual-- she could give her younger customers the illusion they were

interacting with someone who was their intellectual and psychological equal.

Morgan tried to help her, but there wasn't much he could do. He had already

decided he couldn't survive in a Solar System in which half the human

population had been born with brains, glands, and nervous systems that were

state-of-the-art-2150 and later. He had blocked his mother's situation out of

his memory and lived at subsistence level for almost three decades. Every yen,

franc, and yuri he could scrape together had been shoved into the safest

investments his management program could locate. Then he had taken all his

hard won capital and bought two hundred shares in an asteroid habitat a group

of developers had outfitted with fusion reactors, plasma drives, solar sails,

and anything else that might make a small island move at nine percent the

speed of light. And he and three thousand other "uncompetitive",

"under-enhanced" humans had crept away from the Solar System. And set off to

explore the galaxy.

* * * *

Morgan had lived through three lengthy pairings back in the Solar System.

Six years after the Island of Adventure had begun its slow drift away from the

sun, he established a fourth pairing with a woman he had met through the

ship's information system. The ship's designers had endowed it with attractive

common spaces, complete with parks and cafes, but most of the passengers

seemed to prefer electronic socialization during the first years of the

voyage. Biographies and lists of interests were filed with the system.

Pseudonyms and electronic personalities proliferated. Morgan thought of old

stories in which prisoners had communicated by tapping on the walls of their

cells.

Savela Insdotter was eleven years younger than Morgan but she was a fully

committed member of the EruLabi communion. She used pharmaceutical mental

enhancers, but she used them sparingly. Morgan consumed all the mental

enhancers his system could accommodate, so his functional intelligence was

actually somewhat higher than hers in certain areas.

The foundation of the EruLabi ethos was a revolt against genetic

enhancement. In the view of the EruLabi "mentors", the endless quest for

intellectual and physical improvement was a folly. Life was supposed to be

lived for its own sake, the EruLabi texts declared. Every moment was a gift

that should be treasured for the pleasure it brought, not an episode in a

quest for mental and physical perfection. The simplest pleasures-- touches,

languor, the textures of bodies pressed together-- were, to the EruLabi, some

of the most profound experiences life had to offer.

One of the most important texts in the EruLabi rituals was the words, in

ancient Greek, that the Eudoran king had spoken to Odysseus: Dear to us ever

are the banquet and the harp and the dance and the warm bath and changes of

raiment and love and sleep.

* * * *

The Island of Adventure had pointed itself at 82 Eridani-- a Sol-type

star twenty-one light years from the Solar System. 82 Eridani was an obvious

candidate for a life-bearing planet. A fly-by probe had been launched at 82

Eridani in 2085-- one hundred and eighteen years before Morgan and his fellow

emigrants had left their home system. In 2304-- just after they had celebrated

the first century of their departure-- the Island of Adventure intercepted a

message the probe was sending back to the Solar System.

It was the beginning of several years of gloomy debate. The probe had

found planets. But none of them looked any more interesting than the cratered

rocks and giant iceballs mankind had perused in the Solar System.

The third planet from the sun could have been another Earth. It was

closer to its sun than Earth was but it could have supported life if it had

been the right size. Unfortunately, the planet's mass was only thirty-eight

percent the mass of Earth.

Theorists had calculated that a planet needed a mass about forty percent

the mass of Earth if it was going to develop an oxygen-rich atmosphere and

hold it indefinitely. The third planet was apparently just a little too small.

The images transmitted by the probe were drearily familiar-- a rocky, airless

desert, some grandiose canyons and volcanoes, and the usual assortment of

craters, dunes, and minor geological features.

The Island of Adventure had set out for 82 Eridani because 82E was a star

of the same mass and spectral type as Sol. The second choice had been another

star in the same constellation. Rho Eridani was a double star 21.3 light years

from the Solar System. The two stars in the Rho system orbited each other at a

promising distance-- seven light hours. With that much separation between

them, the theoreticians agreed, both stars could have planets.

When you looked at the sky from the Solar System, Rho was a few degrees

to the left of 82 Eridani. The Island of Adventure was a massive, underpowered

rock but it could make a small midcourse correction if its inhabitants wanted

to expend some extra reaction mass.

* * * *

The strongest opposition to the course change came from the oldest human

on the ship. Madame Dawne was so old she had actually been born on Earth. All

the other people on board had been born (created, in most cases) in the

habitats the human race had scattered across the Solar System.

The Island of Adventure had been the first ship to embark for 82 Eridani.

Thirty-two years after it had left the Solar System, a ship called Green

Voyager had pointed its rocky bow at Rho. The texts of its transmissions had

indicated the oldest passengers on the Green Voyager were two decades younger

than the youngest passengers on the Island of Adventure.

If the passengers on the Island of Adventure approved the course change,

they would arrive at Rho about the same time the Green Voyager arrived there.

They would find themselves sharing the same star system with humans who were,

on average, three or four decades younger than they were. Madame Dawne would

be confronted with brains and bodies that had been designed a full century

after she had received her own biological equipment.

* * * *

Morgan was not a politician by temperament but he was fascinated by any

activity that combined conflict with intellectual effort. When his pairing

with Savela Insdotter had finally come to an end, he had isolated himself in

his apartment and spent a decade and a half studying the literature on the

dynamics of small communities. The knowledge he had absorbed would probably

look prehistoric to the people now living in the Solar System. It had been

stored in the databanks pre-2203. But it provided him with techniques that

should produce the predicted results when they were applied to people who had

reached adulthood several decades before 2200.

The Island of Adventure was managed, for all practical purposes, by its

information system. A loosely organized committee monitored the system but

there was no real government. The humans on board were passengers, the

information system was the crew, and the communal issues that came up usually

involved minor housekeeping procedures.

Now that a real issue had arisen, Morgan's fellow passengers drifted into

a system of continuous polling-- a system that had been the commonest form of

political democracy when they had left the Solar System. Advocates talked and

lobbied. Arguments flowed through the electronic symposiums and the

face-to-face social networks. Individuals registered their opinions-- openly

or anonymously-- when they decided they were willing to commit themselves. At

any moment you could call up the appropriate screen and see how the count

looked.

The most vociferous support for the course change came from eight

individuals. For most of the three thousand fifty-seven people who lived in

the ship's apartments, the message from the probe was a minor development. The

ship was their home-- in the same way a hollowed out asteroid in the Solar

System could have been their home. The fact that their habitat would

occasionally visit another star system added spice to the centuries that lay

ahead, but it wasn't their primary interest in life. The Eight, on the other

hand, seemed to feel they would be sentencing themselves to decades of

futility if they agreed to visit a lifeless star system.

Morgan set up a content analysis program and had it monitor the traffic

flowing through the public information system. Eighteen months after the

message from the probe had triggered off the debate, he put a two-axis graph

on the screen and examined a pair of curves.

* * * *

Morgan's pairing with Savela Insdotter had lasted over sixty years and

they had remained friendly after they had unpaired. He showed her the graph as

soon as he had run it through some extra checks. The curve that charted the

Eight's activities rose and fell in conjunction with the curve that measured

Madame Dawne's participation in the debate. When Madame Dawne's activity level

reached a peak, the Eight subsided into silence. They would stop agitating for

their cause, the entire discussion would calm down, and Madame Dawne would

return to the extreme privacy she had maintained from the beginning of the

voyage. Then, when Madame Dawne hadn't been heard from for several tendays,

the Eight would suddenly renew their campaign.

"I believe they're supporting the change to a new destination merely

because they wish to disturb Madame Dawne," Morgan said. "I've created

personality profiles based on their known histories and public statements. The

profiles indicate my conjecture is correct."

Savela presented him with a shrug and a delicate, upward movement of her

head. Morgan had spoken to her in Tych-- an ultra-precise language that was

primarily used in written communication. Savela was responding in an

emotion-oriented language called VA13-- a language which made extensive use of

carefully rehearsed gestures and facial expressions.

No one, as far as Morgan knew, had ever spoken VA12 or VA14. The language

had been labeled VA13 when it had been developed in a communications

laboratory on Phobos, and the label had stuck.

"Madame Dawne is a laughable figure," Savela said.

"I recognize that. But the Eight are creating a serious division in our

communal life. We might have reached a consensus by now if they hadn't

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Tom Purdom - Fossil Games

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