Creative Commons – The Plainsrunner – Chapter Fifty-Three

Continuing the serial release of The Plainsrunner under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license – (CC-BY-SA).

This is the penultimate chapter. Here we learn about Archie’s people and what happened when the Visitor came and attacked Grasswind and Sunward. After this story finishes tomorrow, I will be uploading more readings to the YouTube channel, Okanagan Reader.

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rjb

Chapter Fifty-Three – The Story

Archie looked at his friends on the other side of the window, then at his new friends on this side. The mood was somber and did not fit with his idea of how this moment should be. Here they had two distant cousins, the Grasswindians and the Sunwardians, separated for millennia and finally reunited. And they had two alien species meeting for the first time. And a great historical wrong was soon going to be made at least partially right. This should be an occasion for celebration, not for gloom and politics. He was going to have to change that. It was time to tell the story.

He began with the comets, and how they began by visiting them and worked their way up to living on them. How they would ride long period comets far out in their solar system and back in again. He focused on the spectrum comets, the really large, really long period ones named after the colors of the spectrum. Red and Orange, the first two. The tragedy of Yellow Comet, and its rebirth as Green Comet.

Then the Visitor came, and Red Comet was destroyed re-entering the system. Excitement and welcome turned into horror as the Visitor swept through, killing everyone it could find. Orange and Green were able to change their trajectories, making their orbits hyperbolic and leaving their home forever. Now those two comets have set themselves between the stars and built themselves up into constructs housing many people.

Tallgrass listened patiently, squelching the questions that kept popping up, until he could do it no more. “The Visitor,” he said, stopping when everyone looked at him. But he continued. “The Visitor that destroyed your world. Is it the same thing that destroyed ours?”

“Yes,” said Archie.

“But this isn’t it. The Visitor and the Prime are different.”

“That’s right. The Prime is a hundred kilometers long. The Visitor was only twenty. But it had a lot more scouts and modules, and many more weapons. It was the killer. The Prime just came along after it and harvested resources.”

“Then how …” Tallgrass stopped himself. “Sorry,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“No problem,” said Archie. “I’ll let Fran tell the next part because it more directly affects her comet, Green. I’m from Orange Comet.”

So Fran told how the two comets, occupied by the only surviving members of their species, set themselves between their old star and the two stars they thought the Visitor was most likely to visit next. After a long time it came in Green’s direction, and they attacked it, severely damaging it and putting it out of commission.

They felt it might be safe to visit their old system now, to see how it was doing, and that’s when they discovered the Prime. At first they thought it must be the master of the Visitor, sending it out ahead and coming along behind, but then it left, heading back the way it came. They were curious, so they went after it, one ball from Green Comet and one from Orange.

“Like the the ball on the stern of the Prime,” said Tallgrass. “That’s how you travel.”

“That’s right,” said Fran. “That’s how we caught the Prime, and then we tied ourselves onto it. Eventually we figured out that the Prime wasn’t the master, but rather a docile servant, and we made ourselves more at home.”

They rode the Prime all the way back to its origin, where they met the Makers, who had sent out the Visitor in the first place. But then it was just a little thing. A von Neumann machine sent out to explore the stars. It didn’t grow into a world killer until later.

Pilgrim One interrupted. “You met the people who sent the Visitor? What did you do? Did you punish them?”

“No,” said Fran. “They were busy punishing themselves. By the time the Visitor reached its first star, the Makers had driven themselves into a deep dark age.”

“So they go unpunished?”

“We saw no point in punishing their descendants.”

Pilgrim One obviously disagreed, but these people had suffered worse than his people had, so he stifled his objection.

After waiting a moment to see if Pilgrim One had any more to add, Archie took over the narration. He said, “What Fran didn’t tell you is that she was so important in saving her comet from annihilation that some people formed a theology with her as its saint.” He shook his head. “That caused no end of trouble.” He nodded at Pilgrim One, who was staring at Frances, his face vacillating between awe and hostility.

Archie continued. “By the time we left the Maker world we had pretty well figured out what happened. The Makers sent out their von Neumann machine, then their civilization collapsed. The Visitor, still a tiny thing, must have had something go wrong with its programming that caused it to become fanatical in its objectives. It was meant to explore, locate resources and build the necessary machinery to do the job. It did that, but on a large scale, with no governance. It was now an unguided, minimally intelligent device whose only purpose was to go from star to star, building itself up and collecting resources. And it had a whole galaxy to work with.”

Tallgrass jumped in again. “And then it came here, right? But by then it was bigger.” He frowned. “But why did it attack us. Why didn’t it just do its job and move on?”

“We think it perceived you as a threat to its resources.” said Archie. “So it subdued you.”

“It sure did,” said Tallgrass, “but not as badly as it did you.”

“No,” said Archie. “We think it was evolving to do its job more efficiently and more thoroughly. And we think it was insane.”

“Did radio have something to do with it? Is that why we have this taboo about radio?”

“Yes. In our system it immediately attacked and destroyed any source of radio transmissions.” Archie stared off, over Fran’s shoulder into the vast space of Green Comet’s square. When he came back he had a hard smile. “But we don’t have to worry about that any more. The Visitor is dead and its cargo drone is not dangerous.”

“So we don’t have to worry about radio any more?” asked Tallgrass. “Actually we never did after the Visitor left, did we?”

“No,” said Archie. “It was never coming back, and the Prime, which remained here gathering resources, is not insane.”

Pilgrim One said, “You speak of resources. Does that mean that this Prime is full of resources?”

“Yes,” said Archie. “Well, no,” he amended. “It was full of resources, but we left a third at the Maker world, took a third back to ours, and brought the rest here.”

“You gave our resources to those murderers?” Pilgrim One was outraged.

“Well,” said Archie, “they weren’t the murderers, just their descendants. Part of the resources came from the first star visited, the uninhabited one, and it was their machine that gathered them. Also, we needed them to keep the laser going so we could get home.”

Pilgrim One was dissatisfied, but Tallgrass said, “You deserve to do whatever you want with the resources. You suffered the worst. You killed the Visitor. And you tamed the Prime. You were within your rights to keep it all for yourselves.”

“Yes, we could have.” Archie looked at Fran on the other side of the window, and they smiled at each other. “But no,” he said, looking at Tallgrass, “we couldn’t have. It wouldn’t have been right.”

Tallgrass’s eyes shone, but Pilgrim One looked disgusted. Tallgrass said, “So you brought our share back here, for us. What is your plan now?”

Archie was about to answer when he was distracted by the arrival of a person leading six robots. “Ah,” he said. “Thank you.” To his guests he said, “There’s one for each of you. We’re so used to being able to fly everywhere that we’ve spread out a lot. The distances are too great for you to comfortably walk them, so each of you can have one of these to help you get around.”

They looked at the eight-limbed robots, all identical to Scarface except for the scar and the dent. Tallgrass grinned and pushed off the wall, trying to decide which one to pick.