Things Fall Apart: Chapter 53

Newer York, The Starfall Museum, 7 Tammuz 2541 AS

The Starfall Museum proved to be like the administration building, a structure within the core. This was explained easily enough when Ellison, who of course knew the place well, pointed out it predated the buildout of the rings. "They started building this place while they were still en route from Sol. Even if the planet had proven perfect, they had plans to maintain the ship as a hub for orbital industry, and to house people who either couldn't or didn't want to get accustomed to higher gravity."

Where the admin center was multi-storey tower, the museum looked to be at most two storeys—wide rather than tall. As promised, it was surrounded with botanical gardens whose beauty was apparent even on the walk through them to get to the museum. Singer definitely hoped they'd have time and energy to explore them more when they were done inside.

The entry hall followed a familiar pattern, taking up the whole vertical space. Where the actual second storey began, the wall facing the entry hall had displays announcing the latest special exhibits. Arrows on the floor past the admissions line clearly led off to the right, while to the left was the inevitable gift shop.

There were people here, including families with children, but it was not crowded, just as they'd been led to expect. They stood in the queue, which moved quickly, and the only advantage they took of their diplomatic status was Ellison waving her station ID card to account for everybody's admission. The young person staffing the kiosk took a moment to be startled when they read the ID on their screen, then looked at the rest of the party as if seeing them—particularly Singer, Cadotte, and Espinoza, in their undress uniforms—for the first time. Blinking, they said, "One moment please!" and tried, not entirely successfully, to be subtle about getting the attention of another staff member, older and more assured.

There was a quick, low conversation, during which the supervisor—for that was clearly the case from body language alone—calmly told the younger person that everything was just fine and to simply admit the group as they would any adult party of that size. Reassured, they did just that, smiling with a hint of apology as they said, "Enjoy the museum!"

Ellison, unfazed, said, "We will, I assure you!" and the party proceeded through. The supervisor sidled up to Ellison and said, "Sorry about that. They're new, and you're their first diplomatic party."

Ellison was apparently feeling charming today, and beamed at the supervisor, "I'm always happy to help provide an educational experience."

No longer concerned that any offense had been taken, the supervisor visibly relaxed. "Thank you, ambassador. Have a great day!"

"That's the plan!" the ambassador responded, and led the party toward the arrows off to the right.

If one followed the arrows, the museum was laid out chronologically. The first hall, Founders Hall, held exhibits about the people who had planned, funded, and eventually built the ship and the community that would go aboard her. Cadotte said, "This could easily be a museum of its own!"

Espinoza nodded, "There are other museums, here and on New Anaheim, that specialize. The Outbound Museum, for example, focuses exclusively on this period." He made a face, and said, "Honestly that one verges a bit deeper into veneration of the founders than I'm comfortable with. This museum was always intended as a kind of overview. It's actually been built out a little to accommodate important events up through about the 550s AS. If you count from here—", he said, pointing to the very first exhibit, a painting representing Rabbi David's first meeting with the other people who were remembered as founders of the Outbound, "—then that's still covering over a thousand years of history."

Reading the display screen under the painting, Singer was informed that the event it represented took place on 22 March 2352 CE, or 4 Nisan 6112 OHC. No attempt to place the date directly into the current calendar system of Newer York was made, except to note that it was 70 years to the day before Dream of Spring broke orbit and began its journey.

Progressing through the room, there was a display of different designs that had been floated for the ship, and another showing in slightly more detail the evolution of the "winning" design into the actual vessel. Singer was a little startled at how much the station still resembled the ship as it appeared on launch day, three thousand years ago. The spokes and rings made a difference, but the core was still distinctly recognizable.

Espinoza stopped them to gush for a while over the exhibit describing the core's mechanisms for dealing with thrust. Even though his main engineering focus was propulsion and not mechanical engineering, his enthusiasm for this particular achievement was plain. But then, Singer recalled Espinoza had timed his last visit here to coincide with the last time they'd exercised the feature, stopping rotation and moving the station with linear thrust. Cadotte said, "That could also be another museum all by itself, easily, couldn't it?"

Espinoza had a kind of dreamy look in his eye at the prospect. "There really should be one. I should think about that, when things are less fraught."

Singer's brain skipped a groove. None of them had said so much as a word, in ages, about what they might do when they were not picking up all the pieces the Incident had scattered. Singer realized she had not even allowed herself to believe such a time would exist. Certainly, it would take megaseconds, maybe tens of megaseconds, to even get to the bottom of what exactly happened, who had made it happen, and how everyone in the TCTO had been affected by it. Right now, Singer, her crew, and their one ship were the only ones actively on that particular job.

Singer could see Ellison looking at her—proof, if Singer needed any, that Ellison shared her gift. O'Halloran had already moved on to the next exhibit down; Cadotte was clearly enjoying Espinoza's moment of vision, undismayed. Singer had no idea how visible her distress at this moment was, but Ellison had clearly caught it...and then saw that she, in turn, had been caught.

Sidling a little closer to Singer, Ellison said, very quietly, "Now you know why I drink." There was no defense or shame in the statement—just a fact.

Singer could only nod. She refused to make this outing about her distress, and forcibly refocused her attention on the exhibit O'Halloran had moved to.

This was a small sidebar about scientific breakthroughs that had not been part of the Outbound's work, but had made the journey possible, or easier. The artificial magnetosphere, for example, had been invented a century before the project had begun, and been key in reducing how much mass a ship or habitat needed to protect against radiation.

Singer realized this was something she took for granted, along with the next breakthrough—nanoimmunology. Without that one, a visit like hers to the station would stand the risk of killing just about everyone without intending to. Any contact between widely separated human communities ran the risk of spreading diseases each group had no experience with.

The third one, Singer found surprisingly dear to her heart given how important Chef had become to her and her crew: nanorecycling. It had not led immediately to replication as the TCTF practiced it. Rather, it allowed things to be rendered down to useful elements or compounds that could be reused. Primitive as it seemed, without it, the ship would never have been able to make the journey as a closed system, and Earth would not have been able to stave off its collapse as long as it turned out to.

Other developments were directly credited to the Outbound Project, though. The ship had needed much more efficient engines to have a hope of budging the mass they intended to move and accelerate it—and eventually decelerate it—in a reasonable amount of time. Here, a certain amount of bias was shown, and some of the more religious, enclosing character of the original Outbound was seen. The Outbound had offered these breakthroughs to the various governments of Earth, only to have them rejected by people who were no longer interested even in the planets of their own solar system, let alone the stars. Singer was not an expert on the period, but she found it difficult to believe that nobody was willing to take a freely offered patent and do something useful with it, but that's how the exhibit made it sound.

That room ended on launch day, and flowed naturally into the next room, which was dedicated to the journey. This room compressed over three hundred years of subjective travel time into a smaller room than the one dedicated to the planning phase. The overall impression was that people just lived their lives, and nothing very interesting happened, which Singer found hard to believe.

That said, the exhibits about life on the ship-under-thrust were certainly fascinating. Singer had grown up on a planet, and joined a fleet that shamelessly used modern artificial gravity instead of spin or thrust, just as it indulged in replication. Having already covered the mechanisms of the core in the previous exhibit, this was more about how other parts of the ship worked.

The innermost core, of course, was a large open cylinder, with some buildings in it. Those buildings rode on the same "trays" that Espinoza crowed about. The rings that got built out later were also created with open space and buildings in mind, but during the Sabbatical Cruise, people either moved back into the core or otherwise shifted elsewhere. The rings were designed to withstand thrust, but not to be inhabited during it.

But between the inner core and the outer hull were several layers called "the onion", and that's where most people had lived during the voyage. Those were laid out more like Singer's own ship, with one key difference: when the ship was under thrust, the side the thrust was coming from became the floor.

Preparing for this did not involve swinging rooms around, but it did involve sliding them around. Corridors became lift-shafts and vice versa. It was an elaborate sliding-tile puzzle. It did not depend on every room moving independently—whole blocks moved together. There had been mishaps with this system, where blocks got stuck, but the timing of transitions had slop in it. During the Sabbatical Cruise, sometimes, they just moved people out of stuck blocks and worked around it.

Singer's brain was having trouble wrapping around it all, despite the simulations and, even live video, of the process, but somehow the image of the sliding-tile puzzle stuck in her brain.

One exhibit, titled, "The Saddest Day of the Journey," commemorated the last signal that was received from the tight-beam transmitter that had been left in Earth orbit. "From that point until the Rediscovery of 247 AS," the display said, "we believed Earth had already collapsed, and we were the last humans in existence."

The museum did not dwell on that potentially sour note, nor did it spend much more time on the journey itself. The next hall was the Starfall Hall, which felt redundant given the name of the museum, but Singer had already gleaned that the name of the building itself was a bit of a misnomer, itself an historical artifact.

It took no time at all for Singer to detect the biases that President Robina Thirteen had complained of when they'd all been discussing the museum over dinner. As the ship had grown closer to TRAPPIST-1, it became increasingly clear that all previous efforts had missed crucial facts about their target world, mainly in how its atmosphere was composed. How or why even the relatively primitive efforts of Earth's 21st through 24th Centuries, CE had missed the levels of sulfur dioxide naturally occurring in the atmosphere, along with reasonable amounts of nitrogen and oxygen, remained mysterious to this day. It was just a fact, and one that immediately divided the Outbound.

The division, however, had not been an even split. It turned out many of the passengers were indifferent or actively fearful of attempting to live on a planet in the open air, anyway. Singer had known any number of born-spacers who felt the same way, who took up roles in Fleet that definitely meant they did not go on landing teams. Even growing up on a station with a core like Newer York's didn't guarantee immunity from agoraphobia. There was no sky here—just someone else's ground above your head.

The split became a rebellion, the first significant violence in the entire history of the journey somehow. Being the victors who wrote history, the exhibit clearly painted especially Richard and Anna, the power-couple at the heart of the rebellion, as the villains. It was admittedly hard to deny that status when Anna had pled guilty to killing, however unintentionally, the chief Rabbi of the time.

Of course, they got what they wanted as "punishment": the planet. Just not the way they wanted it—with the full population of the ship dedicated to making the planet a home. Just thirty-seven people went down with their leaders, in the end, to found Revi'i. The exhibit showed its bias, again, by not sharing anything more about that story.

Singer made a promise to herself to read up more on that story, and, someday, to make it downwell to see the Revi'ini's story, complete with their own biases.

The next set of exhibits detailed the bootstrapping era. First, mining ships had to be sent out to start gleaning useful materials from the asteroids. In fact, this had predated the rebellion—and a good thing, too, since the ship had carried no landing boats. The plan had always been to build industry in orbit, mining asteroids in the inner belt, then build landing craft. Even the mining ships had not been built ahead of time, although the parts for them were, as had parts for small satellites to handle the industrial processing of those materials. From that were built more ships, more smelters and factories, and then finally, a small village station.

That and future village stations were originally temporary quarters, to allow the "ship of Theseus" process to go forward. People could be shifted out of living sections so those sections could be completely rehabbed. Once the process was done, the village stations themselves got a once-over, even though they were much younger, and then started to be used to actually grow the overall population. After all, if this was the last bastion of humanity, there needed to be both more eggs, and more baskets.

The galleries that followed immediately after were interesting, but not quite as momentous. They talked about historical figures, the gradual evolution into a city, and so on. The next gallery to be really impactful, at least in Singer's later memories, was the Baldursdottir Hall.

The room was named after the captain of one of Earth's first Skip-equipped explorer ships, Lewis and Clark, sent by Arctic Union to see what could be seen now that light speed was no longer a hard limitation. Arriving in TRAPPIST-1, they were entirely surprised to find it inhabited. The Outbound had been remembered by Earth as a failed attempt at the stars. They'd been fictionalized in multiple reboots of a science fiction franchise, but everybody believed Dream of Spring had perished on the journey, just as the Outbound had believed Earth had collapsed behind them.

What followed was a period of reacquaintance, high drama, low comedy, and eventually an understanding that neither side could really force anything on the other. Earth had already been building an anchorage at Neptune for skipships. That now became a larger affair, learning lessons from how Newer York was constructed and remained self-sufficient. A second switch-off station was built at Jupiter, and for a while it looked like Earth might start actually colonizing the solar system after all.

But the old atavism seemed hard to shake, and Earth's governments' outreach stalled as they focused on keeping their own fragile ecosystem going. Neptune Anchorage fell more into Newer York's orbit, politically speaking, being only two weeks skip-travel compared to months on conventional drive between Earth and Neptune. Trade and even some migration happened, but the strongest trade was in information, which required hardly any mass to carry at a time when the Skip's mass penalties drastically limited cargo traffic. Skip, unlike time compression, could not be used to send signals independent of ships. Even data had to be carried by physically traveling.

Again, the exhibits seemed to speed through a long period of "not much happened" to come at last to the final gallery, dedicated to the violent events of the mid-540s After Starfall. Chaotic events in the David's Star system had seemed to subside, only to culminate actual catastrophic loss of Earth. The barges already en route to Earth from Jupiter had no choice but to continue, and report what they found. With all the orbitals gone, they were left to figure out how to get back upwell with no way to refuel. Pooling resources and cramming into the crew sections of their ships, they made it, but they were all but starving when they finally got close enough for Jove Junction to usefully help them.

After that, everyone concluded that Earth was simply too deep in Sol's well to mount any effective rescue or even investigation.

Singer had been dimly aware of this history before, but reading it now at the exhibit, she found herself not so much reliving her earlier gloom as sympathizing deeply. Tau Ceti's well was not so deep that Cherryh would be an impossible visit, but her orders cautioned against it. If any significant rescue operation were necessary, the resources currently available would not cut it. Zephyr was no cargo ship, and had no vast store of emergency supplies to dole out to people who might be displaced by crashed orbitals and exploded power plants.

Singer found herself abruptly in need of a seat. She found a bench and planted herself without a word to anyone. Then realized she had, in fact, not been talking much at all. Once she'd been caught sideways by Espinoza's dreamy look and thoughts of something "after", she'd retreated into herself.

She was caught by the comparison of calamities, even while reminding herself that it wasn't a competition, and certainly not one she wanted to win.

The devastation of Earth, two thousand years ago, was far worse for humanity overall, even though it had affected only Earth. Adding up Jove Junction, Neptune Anchorage, Newer York and Revi'i at the time, only a couple hundred-thousand human beings had remained in the whole universe.

By contrast, far more human beings lived outside the TCTO systems than in them. This had been a disaster for her civilization, but she was starting to see a bit of the Admiral's point of view on this. For humanity as a whole, this was tragic beyond measure, but there were lots of eggs in lots of baskets, still.

Despite which, she still felt strangely and suddenly like history was rhyming, and her brain was racing with the idea, without anywhere in particular to race to.

The rest of the party had noticed her abrupt search for a place to sit, and gathered around. Singer was almost annoyed by the solicitude just now. She needed to think. But Cadotte asked, "Captain?" and deserved an answer.

Singer looked up not at Cadotte, but at Espinoza, and asked, "Did they ever determine what happened to Earth? Like, really what happened?"

Espinoza took the question at face value, thought about it, and said, "The barges got a pretty good view of the aftermath, but nobody really saw what happened. The deorbiting of most of the stations had wrought havoc. Several of the domes—you understand that, much like Revi'i, Earthers were largely living in domed cities by then—had been smashed by falling debris."

He hesitated, and she caught it, and said, "But...?"

"But there was evidence of further environmental collapse, separate from the deorbits. Nobody was ever sure which came first. It all seemed to happen fast enough that nobody on Earth actually managed to get much word out. Even at the time, that seemed strange. The only warning there seemed to have been were a couple of news stories about big storms, that kind of thing, and a spate of bad solar weather. There had been a few really big solar flares right before that could have caused the Big Deorbit, and also tipped the environmental conditions over once and for all."

"So...it was natural?"

"It could have been natural. That's always been the official position, anyway."

"You're hedging, Ari."

"We're in public, Captain."

So they were. Singer finally recalled herself. She'd been so wrapped up in her own head most of their visit that she'd forgotten they did not have the museum to themselves. She looked to Ellison, who said, "Perhaps this is a conversation to have with our friends tomorrow."

Singer nodded, and then took one more moment to get a grip on herself. She was on the edge of something, but this was not the time or the place to chase it down. There were still gardens to see, and she had not lost her desire—her need—to see them. To see life in profusion.

Then there was going to be meeting the first tender from her ship and facilitating the reunion of Robina and Alexander. It was indicative of her strange state of mind that that reunion suddenly felt simultaneously, and paradoxically, like the most and the least important thing in existence.

If she'd been alone, she might have permitted herself a momentary meltdown over it. She was not. She slowly breathed in, then out, and said, "Time for the gardens?"

Ellison looked at her like a mother trying to decide if her child had a fever or really was well enough to go play. Finally, she said, in something like the charming voice she'd used on the clerk and their supervisor when they'd all come in, "Yes, that sounds like an excellent idea!"

Cadotte's face split with a grin that Singer felt was genuine, and wondered if they'd been oblivious to Singer's distress or simply were learning some of Ellison's tricks. "Can we stop in the gift shop, though?"

Singer stood and couldn't really help but smile back. "Gift shop, definitely. Then gardens!"

"Excellent!" Cadotte said, and taking it for permission, took the lead in that direction.