The crowd was slowly dispersing, leaving Archimedes and his children to their mourning. I took the opportunity to look Archimedes over. I had only an estimate of his age from when I first showed up, of course, but I put him at about seventy, which put him slightly older than Moses when he passed away. And Moses had been considered ancient.
All of which meant that I would probably be attending another funeral soon. I vowed it would be my last.
77. Completion
Bill
April 2221
Delta Pavonis
It took a little over four years for the Others to strip Delta Pavonis.
It was an impressive speed, until you realized that exponential behavior was involved. They brought a huge complement of autofactories, which they used to produce equipment, which mined resources for the production of more equipment. At some point, they stopped building equipment and started loading the cargo vessels. Finally, they harvested most of the equipment they’d built. The fleet that left the system consisted of only cargo vessels and death asteroids.
Once they were gone, we moved in to examine the damage. The asteroid belt and any small moons in the system had been stripped, of course. What really hurt was the state of Delta Pavonis 4.
The Others hadn’t been concerned with ecological damage, obviously. They’d left the planet a dirty ball of mud. All the green had long since faded to a dull brown. The blue of the oceans was replaced by a mottled grey, and the ice caps had either melted or been coated with dust and soot.
Every major city had been demolished. The lack of corpses was, in a way, a blessing. But it left a ghostly, empty tableau that would have been completely appropriate to any of a hundred post-apocalyptic movies.
I took it as long as I could, then I turned off the video feeds, put my face in my hands, and wept.
*
Jacques agreed that rehabilitation of DP-4 would take a long time, but he quite correctly pointed out that flying the Pavs to another system far enough away from the Others to be safe would possibly take just as long. We had a reasonable candidate—a wandering Bob had found a suitable colonization target at HIP 84051. At more than 40 light years from Sol, it didn’t even rate a name. Just a minor designation in the constellation Ara.
I popped over to visit Will. “Hey guy. How are you holding up?”
Riker still wore a haunted look. Homer’s suicide had affected him more than anyone would have thought possible. With the perfect memory that being a replicant brought with it, things didn’t fade with time. The vengeance that he had extracted had helped some, but there would always be a hole in the Bobiverse.
He gave me a small smile. “Holding steady, Bill. You here about HIP 84051-2?”
At my nod, he continued, “It was on the discussion agenda, and when I brought up the circumstances, the UN voted to make it available to the Pav refugees. Honestly, I think it’s a little too far from Sol to be really attractive, anyway.”
I sat down and materialized a coffee, and took a moment to look around. Will had long since given up the Star Trek motif, and he was going by his first name—um, I guess Number One’s first name, anyway—most of the time, now. That was the name that our relatives knew him by, anyway.
The VR resembled a housing unit on Vulcan, although I recognized some décor and paraphernalia from Original Bob’s apartment. I smiled to see the Limited Edition Spock plaque, signed by Leonard Nimoy, hanging on the wall.
“Life just keeps getting more complicated, doesn’t it?” I raised the coffee in salute.
“Suppose so.” Will stretched, then materialized a coffee of his own. “I’m beginning to think Bob-1 has the right idea. He’s been talking about going out again, once Archimedes is gone. Just point the ship and accelerate for a while.”
I sighed and nodded. We were, what, eight to ten generations deep in Bobs, now? Bob-1 had achieved a kind of legendary status. He rarely showed up at moots any more, and when he did, it was like a Shatner sighting. I felt a deep sympathy for him. He was the first of us to get emotionally involved with ephemerals, and until Jacques and the Pavs, his had had the worst outcome.
“I understand you’re going to wake some Pav and put the question to them,” Will said.
“Mm, yeah. Jacques has an unreasonable attachment to the idea of recolonizing DP-4, in my opinion. But he’s rational enough to see it.”
Will returned one of his rare full-on smiles. “Well, Bob, right?”
We laughed together, and I continued, “So we’ll give them the choice—attempt to recolonize DP-4, or head for a new world with an already-established ecosystem. And a compatible one, as seems to be the norm.” I chuckled. “I sure wish I could go back and talk to Dr. Carlisle. I bet he’d be tickled that his theories have been so emphatically vindicated.”
Will nodded but didn’t comment. I sat back, and we sipped our coffees in silence, simply enjoying the company and the momentary pause in existence.
*
The Pav huddled in a corner, whimpering. I’d expected a certain level of fear, but the Pav’s reaction bordered on xenophobia.
But I doubted the, uh, recruitment had involved a lot of discussion and consent. Kidnapping was a pretty accurate description. The specimen in front of us was probably still traumatized.
At that moment, the door to the chamber opened and three more Pav staggered in. They were still suffering from post-stasis confusion, but they reacted in instinctive Pav pack fashion, by huddling in a pile with our first candidate. The presence of company seemed to calm her significantly.
Over the next few hours, we brought in several more Pav, until we had eight of them in the room. The number was arbitrary, but Jacques’ investigation of the species had indicated a general maximum of eight adults to a family group. We hoped that it was a significant number for them.
When they appeared outwardly calm and had started to compare notes with each other, I decided it was time for official first contact.
“Hello.”
All eight Pav went into alert posture. The resemblance to meerkats was even more pronounced than usual, and in better circumstances I would have chuckled at the tableau.
“Who are you? Where are we?”
This was not going to be easy. “My name is Bill. I’m part of BobNet.” The translation routine rendered proper names phonetically, but the sounds wouldn’t mean anything to them. “Who we are is a very long story. Where you are and why, is a shorter and very unpleasant story.”
I described the Others to them, and explained their habit of raiding systems and killing off planets. A monitor on one wall displayed images of Others, the aftermath of Zeta Tucanae, and finally the destruction of Delta Pavonis 4.