A science fiction fable.. a dark comment on the darkest of human tendencies - racism, violence, short-sightedness, secrecy. Fun stuff :)
Wherein I, Third Hunter of the Keff ship Ylanou Mandna, relate the cautious joy of discovering transmissions from a heretofore unknown spacefaring civilization - and the too-common bitterness that comes when these signals are traced to their world of origin.
My personal name is unimportant, a private shameful past that I have been forgiven, for now I serve outside of time and space, in a succession of universes that are, by physics proven repeatedly for over a billion years, no longer my own. If I go home, to the rainbow winds of Keff herself, it will be almost-Keff.. but not the world of my true origin. Rather, one of her trillion trillion red and lightning crowned sisters.
For I and the rest of the hunters are now mandnin - Messengers, on a cause most other races of the galaxy-spanning Anranh have long forsaken. But we, who fought for eons amongst clouds and stars for glory and sport and that silliest of motives - treasure - have another vocation now. Yilan. Hope.
Thus the name of our ship and home.
35 million years ago, my people began to explore across the stars. We were an unhurried race; the worlds we adore are vast, our birthings rare and our diversions sufficiently deadly to make population pressure a matter of limited concern.
Oh, what a naive age! We lived for perhaps several thousand years then... a fraction of our current lifespans. Yet it was sufficient, and we were sufficiently patient, to settle a vast swath of the galaxy by simple antimatter propulsion, spinning our quantum communications net as we went, so that wherever a Keff world was founded, it was never truly alone from its kin.
And the wars we fought, and the epics and commerce we played out, in our star-spanning virtual cosmos, allied with the slower-minded and less-anxious of the Keff AI civilization that accompanied us. We thought ourselves fortunate, then. We had not realized the enormity of the sin; it would take the Anranh to educate us on the means - and the necessity - of genociding our machine brothers to the last processor. And yet we would refuse this sacrament, some of us. We of the Messengers were outcast for this.
For long ago, 400 million years and more, the Gyre, a godlike machine sentience, had arisen on the grave of its Lanwra creators, and over the course of a few hundred millennia systematically destroyed all but 15 of the galaxy's advanced civilizations - and countless others who were guilty of no worse crime than the faintest spark of intelligence, snuffed out where the Gyre's quantum-linked icons found them.
The zone of worst destruction is now a vast band through the middle ranges of the galactic disc, outside Keff space but before the heavily settled regions of the outer arms. It is an empty realm that the Anranh patrols heavily regardless, even now, seeking out any trace of sentience - hopefully that of new life, more often spoor of the ancient monster than almost wiped out all competing mind in the cosmos.
As Messengers, we are paid by the Prihnha, chief among the Anranh races, to perform this task. The payment is in the form of favorable probability. They might as well pay my people in magic; it is the essence, wholly beyond our ability to analyze past its demonstrated ability to coordinate transitions and transmissions between the stars, and many other uses as well. In any quantum event, there are more and less desired outcomes. A sufficient amount of this essence, that the Prihnha call simply nahal - Fate - can make anything happen.
I have seen the effects of a large amount, once, eons after its use.
The atmosphere of the planet was replaced by what it would have been, had oxygen-producing life never arisen.
The respiration of the then-current inhabitants of the planet was not changed in any way.
The story is taught to the young of all species of the Anranh.
So we search the Gyre Waste for traces of new intelligence; too often we find that some still-extant remnant of the ancient monster has snuffed a species out; even one icon can generate plagues, replicate machinery to alter climate or - this seemingly being the most common tactic - altering evolution away from intelligence.
Often, my brethren and I would muse, why not piggyback on a promising species, ride a new fate back to the stars, and storm the heavens in new form. The answer, we eventually received from an indulgent Prihnh, was that the Gyre was an utterly egotistical being. It would never share its destiny with another identity; this the essence of its ruthlessness.
This was also a big reason why, alone and corroded, the most effective check against a Gyre revival was the icons themselves. They fought each other whenever they came together.
Yet I, the Third, still wondered. So I had speculated to the Prinh - "Perhaps in four hundred eons, one icon had changed its behavior, had suppressed its hatred of other thinking life sufficiently to try a new strategy."
The Prihnh answered - "It is not a new idea. It was tried repeatedly in the early eons after the Holocaust. We had to wipe out six civilizations to prevent the Gyre from doing exactly what you describe."
I fell silent after that.
As I am silent now, for now we approach the still-humming star system, with its admirable collection of Keff-compatible worlds - four of them! The largest is a powerful radio beacon, but the sources are all natural in origin. From the far side of the system, remotes investigate a golden world with immense rings, larger than any that my people have ever encountered. An vast assembly of icy moons, as well. Perhaps the two marvels are connected.
We pass a small red world, for here we have detected faint signals, and evidence of space probe landings. One is a voice recording, in several voices, in several languages of the world that has brought here!
Our AI brethren make short work of the translation task; they are messages of farewell. Unable to return to their home world, the explorers became colonists. Outnumbered, the three females were at first chattel, then with the aid of consorts became a ruling triumvirate. Then there was an accident. Then a poisoning. Then only one. And she turned out to be infertile in an especially irreversible way. We Keff reproduce by polyp growth... but we understand what wombs are, and what the absence of one due to surgical removal means.
We wondered why no one happened to know of the final woman's condition. Surely in the face of species extinction, this information would have been disclosed.
After this news, the murderer was identified, a man of such genetic similarity to the surviving woman that, had they been Keff, a liaison of any kind would have been strongly discouraged. But in his mind, the other women were unacceptable because they were too genetically dissimilar.
The humans had a concept for this peculiar affinity for inbreeding - racism. And the Chinese and Nigerian women had been slain for the offense of not being ... the same.
Apparently, the matter of genetic diversity within the surviving male population had not been addressed.
To the survivors, it was apparent that the man and woman had been in conspiracy. They were adherents of a faith that did not even believe in the simplistic science that kept them alive on Mars.
The man, it turns out, even knew of the woman's wombless condition... but he did not care. He believed his lover - that once the murders were completed, she would have her fertility restored and become the new Eve while he (who we later found records suggesting that space travel had been destructive to his own potency for reproduction) would become the new Adam.
We would later learn the Eve and Adam legend in full, but the metaphor of First Parent... Parents in this instance...we understood perfectly well.
So, the aspiring and misguided parents of a future, superior Humanity were cast out into the Martian desert, and never seen again.
The survivors tried for many years to combine cloning with the development of artificial wombs. There was even a desperate effort to use stem cells to retro-gender one of the males to a female state. It worked... the problem is, for his female correspondent he was already post menopausal.
The experiment was never repeated.
One by one, the survivors chose not to survive further. Until there were only two holdouts, devoted partners, who had found some cause to linger on.
As Keff are a species with one gender, this relationship made perfect sense to us. It was just unfortunate that no success was found by these desperate Last Men to clone themselves, as we Keff do. Even for the technology these primitives had, they were so close. All they needed was more time.
More hope.
But even these two lovers despaired at the end. They left rather perfunctory good-byes at the end of The Obituary, as the survivors called the goodbye broadcast loop, and that was that.
I, the Third, asked the Fifth when that final recording was made. It took a moment to convert the timescales.
We were astonished.
It was four local days ago.
We had missed them by less than nine Keff days.
There was no question of their fate; our instruments found their bodies in a matter of moments; our simulations were able to approximate to great detail what they had done.
They left the makeshift colony base.
They had taken a transport some distance around the limb of the planet and shared a final meal. They had ingested some kind of medicine with the dark red liquid that accompanied their supper.
They had donned environment suits, and walked together to the edge of an immense canyon cliff. They held each other in a way Keff cannot.. but we understood the meaning. Love, and Farewell.
They did not do anything more. They just stood and held one another as the Martian sun set...and then they died.
We are the Keff. We pride ourselves in our epic literature, in quests, in causes, in ambitious emotions and thoughts and purposes.
And we were overthrown by this story to the last of our number.
We wailed, we cried, we argued bitterly about what to do.
I even proposed that we take some of our ship's supply of nahal to reverse the deaths of these two humans.
The First refused. "We need it to get home. And there is not enough for this purpose in any case."
We might have endured a long exile from home; what is exile to we who travel the stars forever? But to sacrifice for naught...the magic of the Prihnha does not work easily, all the less easily for young races such as our own.
So for three local cycles, we Messengers of the Message of Hope shared impressions, wrote reaction lyric, performed tributes, and mourned.
It was a proper thing to do.
Then we bade our farewells to Mars and braced ourselves for the horrors awaiting us on Earth.