Jo?o thought of the technology in much less romantic terms. Even a decade after the operation, he still didn’t like the way they could be in each other’s heads. He understood the advantages of the communication system, which allowed them to stay constantly in touch, but it felt clumsy and alienating, as though they were slowly turning into cyborgs, machines. He never used it unless it was urgent.
I’ll be there, Maggie said, and quickly made her way up to the research deck, closer to the center of the ship. Here, the gravity simulated by the spinning hull was lighter, and the colonists joked that the location of the labs helped people think better because more oxygenated blood flowed to the brain.
Maggie Chao had been chosen for the mission because she was an expert on self-contained ecosystems and also because she was young and fertile. With the ship traveling at a low fraction of the speed of light, it would take close to four hundred years (by the ship’s frame of reference) to reach 61 Virginis, even taking into account the modest time-dilation effects. That required planning for children and grandchildren so that, one day, the colonists’ descendants might carry the memory of the three hundred original explorers onto the surface of an alien world.
She met Jo?o in the lab. He handed her a display pad without saying anything. He always gave her time to come to her own conclusions about something new without his editorial comment. That was one of the first things she liked about him when they started dating years ago.
“Extraordinary,” she said as she glanced at the abstract. “First time Earth has tried to contact us in a decade.”
Many on Earth had thought the Sea Foam a folly, a propaganda effort from a government unable to solve real problems. How could sending a centuries-long mission to the stars be justified when there were still people dying of hunger and diseases on Earth? After launch, communication with Earth had been kept to a minimum and then cut. The new administration did not want to keep paying for those expensive ground-based antennas. Perhaps they preferred to forget about this ship of fools.
But now, they had reached out across the emptiness of space to say something.
As she read the rest of the message, her expression gradually shifted from excitement to disbelief.
“They believe the gift of immortality should be shared by all of humanity,” Jo?o said. “Even the farthest wanderers.”
The transmission described a new medical procedure. A small, modified virus—a molecular nano-computer, for those who liked to think in those terms—replicated itself in somatic cells and roamed up and down the double helices of DNA strands, repairing damage, suppressing certain segments and overexpressing others, and the net effect was to halt cellular senescence and stop aging.
Humans would no longer have to die.
Maggie looked into Jo?o’s eyes. “Can we replicate the procedure here?” ?We will live to walk on another world, to breathe unrecycled air.
“Yes,” he said. “It will take some time, but I’m sure we can.” ?Then he hesitated. “But the children . . .”
Bobby and Lydia were not the result of chance but the interplay of a set of careful algorithms involving population planning, embryo selection, genetic health, life expectancy, and rates of resource renewal and consumption.
Every gram of matter aboard the Sea Foam was accounted for. There was enough to support a stable population but little room for error. The children’s births had to be timed so that they would have enough time to learn what they needed to learn from their parents, and then take their place as their elders died a peaceful death, cared for by the machines.
“. . . would be the last children to be born until we land,” Maggie finished Jo?o’s thought. The Sea Foam had been designed for a precise population mix of adults and children. Supplies, energy, and thousands of other parameters were all tied to that mix. There was some margin of safety, but the ship could not support a population composed entirely of vigorous, immortal adults at the height of their caloric needs.
“We could either die and let our children grow,” Jo?o said, “or we could live forever and keep them always as children.”
Maggie imagined it: the virus could be used to stop the process of growth and maturation in the very young. The children would stay children for centuries, childless themselves.
Something finally clicked in Maggie’s mind.
“That’s why Earth is suddenly interested in us again,” she said. “Earth is just a very big ship. If no one is going to die, they’ll run out of room eventually too. Now there is no other problem on Earth more pressing. They’ll have to follow us and move into space.”
? ? ?
You wonder why there are so many stories about how people came to be? It’s because all true stories have many tellings.
Tonight, let me tell you another one.
There was a time when the world was ruled by the Titans, who lived on Mount Othrys. The greatest and bravest of the Titans was Cronus, who once led them in a rebellion against Uranus, his father and a tyrant. After Cronus killed Uranus, he became the king of the gods.
But as time went on, Cronus himself became a tyrant. Perhaps out of fear that what he had done to his own father would happen to him, Cronus swallowed all his children as soon as they were born.
Rhea, the wife of Cronus, gave birth to a new son, Zeus. To save the boy, she wrapped a stone in a blanket like a baby and fooled Cronus into swallowing that. The real baby Zeus she sent away to Crete, where he grew up drinking goat milk.
Don’t make that face. I hear goat milk is quite tasty.
When Zeus was finally ready to face his father, Rhea fed Cronus a bitter wine that caused him to vomit up the children he had swallowed, Zeus’s brothers and sisters. For ten years, Zeus led the Olympians, for that was the name by which Zeus and his siblings would come to be known, in a bloody war against his father and the Titans. In the end, the new gods won against the old, and Cronus and the Titans were cast into lightless Tartarus.
And the Olympians went on to have children of their own, for that was the way of the world. Zeus himself had many children, some mortal, some not. One of his favorites was Athena, the goddess who was born from his head, from his thoughts alone. There are many stories about them as well, which I will tell you another time.
But some of the Titans who did not fight by the side of Cronus were spared. One of these, Prometheus, molded a race of beings out of clay, and it is said that he then leaned down to whisper to them the words of wisdom that gave them life.
We don’t know what he taught the new creatures, us. But this was a god who had lived to see sons rise up against fathers, each new generation replacing the old, remaking the world afresh each time. We can guess what he might have said.
Rebel. Change is the only constant.
? ? ?
“Death is the easy choice,” Maggie said.
“It is the right choice,” Jo?o said.
Maggie wanted to keep the argument in their heads, but Jo?o refused. He wanted to speak with lips, tongue, bursts of air, the old way.
Every gram of unnecessary mass had been shaved off the Sea Foam’s construction. The walls were thin and the rooms closely packed. Maggie and Jo?o’s voices echoed through the decks and halls.
All over the ship, other families, who were having the same argument in their heads, stopped to listen.
“The old must die to make way for the new,” Jo?o said. “You knew that we would not live to see the Sea Foam land when you signed up for this. Our children’s children, generations down the line, are meant to inherit the new world.”
“We can land on the new world ourselves. We don’t have to leave all the hard work to our unborn descendants.”
“We need to pass on a viable human culture for the new colony. We have no idea what the long-term consequences of this treatment will be on our mental health—”
“Then let’s do the job we signed up for: exploration. Let’s figure it out—”