Chapter 9
The Shine had shot down the messengers of the Slow when they came to its worlds.
In the years since the Slow had come with qis warning, the crackdown on even mentioning the impending end of several worlds had been brutal.
Sometimes a sign was seen – two circles, overlapping, an image like binary suns.
Sometimes a name was whispered: Sarifi, Glastya Row – but at the destruction of Lhonoja, the commnet within the Shine would carry nothing more and nothing less than its usual array of programming and light entertainment.
Not so on Adjumir.
Adjumir lay only seven light years from the collapsing heart of Lhonoja, and unlike the Shine, the Assemblies of that planet had been more than interested in what the Slow had to say.
PEOPLES OF ADJUMIR! qe had proclaimed. IN ONE HUNDRED NORMYEARS, THE BINARY STAR SYSTEM KNOWN AS THE LOVERS WILL COLLAPSE IN UPON ITSELF. THE RESULTING SHOCK WAVE WILL TRAVEL OUT AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT AND OBLITERATE ALL LIFE WITHIN AN EIGHTY-THREE LIGHT?YEAR RADIUS.
DO NOT BE AFRAID.
THERE IS STILL TIME.
It was of course impossible to save the planet. The peoples of Adjumir and its sister planet Hadda knew this, and after the initial shock they reached the conclusion that if they could not save their worlds, the next best thing they could do was try to save their people.
Thus, Exodus was born.
This is a timeline of Exodus, beginning one hundred (T?100) years before the supernova that would eventually kill the planet:
T?100: Emergency Planetary Assemblies created to write new constitution, dedicating society to evacuation and repopulation among the stars.
Acceleration of Adjapar terraforming project (safely located some two hundred light years outside the blast radius of Lhonoja) and installation of cryofacilities on nearby moon to house transitory population until completion of terraforming (est. 650 years until arcology stage, 910 years until breathable atmosphere).
Acceleration of solar swarm deployment around local star, with the objective of creating a self-sustaining energy-manufacturing process for evacuation vessel construction on planet Asoi.
Diplomatic activity on all friendly Accord worlds stepped up to find refugee worlds/habitats where Adjumiri citizens may find safe harbour.
Introduction of random lottery system to choose evacuees for eventual Exodus flights.
T?91: powered by solar swarm, Asoi workshops commence mothership manufacture. Completion of first vessel in T?84. Space elevator construction commences on surfaces of Adjumir and Hadda for population transfer to mothership, completion of first elevator in T?86.
T?85: demographic slump under way on Adjumir.
Steep decline in birth rate stabilises at 0.
7 births per fertile female, declining again at T?10 to 0.
2 births. Some demographic slump is desirable, reducing the overall number of expected casualties when the world dies.
However, an overall collapse of the population too soon reduces the number of healthy youths available for evacuation in +/?25 years, thus decreasing the viability of new communities among the stars.
T?83: first evacuation flight commences on Hope of Adjumir, heading for the moon of Adjapar, where cryostorage facilities above the still-terraforming planet reached their maximum capacity of 400,000,000 by T?2.
T?45: solar swarm manufacture reaches optimal output.
Full retooling of workshops on Asoi to mothership manufacture completed.
At peak function, ×22 motherships and ×18 elevators are in operation on Adjumir, with ×6 motherships and ×4 elevators on Hadda.
Mothership capacity = 1,000,000 people, +/?2–3 month loading/unloading time = two flights a year = roughly 48 million citizens evacuated every year, increasing to approx. 60 million per annum by T?20.
T?30: planetary depopulation causes steep reduction in Adjumir labour force.
7 per cent power from solar swarm/Asoi drone factories redirected to planetary automation of vital services, i.e.
agriculture, sanitation, security, comms, to reduce danger of total societal collapse.
Essential for effective Exodus that planetary population is not starving to death/rioting/committing cannibalism, etc. while waiting for evacuation.
T?0: collapse of binary star system Lhonoja. Initial shock wave to reach Adjumir in +7 years. First edges of neutrino blast to arrive approximately 33 years later, obliterating all remaining planetary matter in the system.
T+7: shock wave arrives. No survivors.
By the time Lhonoja went supernova in T?0, it was estimated that nearly three billion people had been evacuated – a remarkable feat of engineering, social organisation and interplanetary diplomacy.
In reality, that figure is debatable. Even if transfer of evacuees to motherships went smoothly, on the other end were worlds that had agreed to accept a million, two million refugees and who would, at the last minute, change their minds.
Or if they did not change their minds, their atmos-shuttles would malfunction, delaying the unloading of passengers by weeks or months, stranding motherships in orbit as the elevators of Adjumir waited for their return.
Perhaps an orbital would take a hundred thousand refugees, and an outpost would take a quarter of a million, forcing unloading motherships to flit around, wasting precious time depositing one shattered community here, one broken family there.
In the end, the Assembly of Adjumir had to put its foot down and say: you’ll take a million, or nothing.
More lives are lost waiting than are being saved by your meagre charities.
All right then, some worlds said.
Let your people die.
You come to us begging – no, demanding – our charity, and for what? Do you really believe you are entitled to survive? Do you really think yourselves so special?
Some Accord members threw themselves into assistance with great aplomb, especially as the final years approached.
Consensus and quan ships joined evacuation fleets from Xihana and Mangripul, Eyrie and Haima – but even that generosity presented its own problems. Disasters grew out of kindnesses, from plagues ripping through evacuation sites as people arrived faster than the sewers could be dug, to errors in the immuno-adaptations leaving whole populations of evacuees hospitalised on foreign worlds as their bodies, primed to adapt to the biome of Umm-ai’lana instead found themselves reacting to the pathogens and pollens of Umm-en’loka.
Then there was the loss of the Forest of Yumoji, in T?38.
She was one of the very first motherships built on the hot surface of Asoi in T?78, and whole sections of the ship had already been lost to a creeping, chittering blackness where the whispers never ceased, reducing her capacity from a million souls to a little over nine hundred thousand.
The Pilots who flew her reported that with every flight they could hear a singing, a voice calling out to them, getting louder, drumming into their heads.
It was too risky, too dangerous for her to fly again.
There was something.
Out there in the dark.
Watching.
Getting curious.
The Assembly debated these concerns, ran the usual public polls.
The Forest had been designed for at least another thirty jumps before decommissioning, and her cryopods and immuno-engineering systems were still in good order.
To remove her from service would strand some twenty-seven million people who perhaps could otherwise have been saved.
When put like that, the risk seemed worth taking, and so the Forest was loaded, a Pilot chosen, and into the dark she went.
And from the dark she never returned.
When it became apparent that the ship was gone along with its passengers, the Assembly held memoriams for the dead.
No one argued. When a ship is lost in arcspace, death is often the most desirable outcome.
I think it was the fate of the Forest that made authorities more willing to consider using a Pilot like me.
However you crunch the numbers, by T?0 billions of Adjumiris had been evacuated, and whole generations were being born on new worlds that had never known the doomed planet from which their progenitors came.
The project had been so successful that by T+7 there were a mere 800,000,000 people left behind to die, which everyone agreed was something of a triumph, all things considered.
I am getting ahead of myself, I know.
Well then, at T?11, eleven years before Lhonoja would go supernova, the Xi sent me to Adjumir, in order to show willing.
My companion was a quan called Liopimana-Hadja-Ki. I asked if I could call qim “Ki” and qe replied that qe found that question quite disrespectful, but that everyone called qim Hadja, which was more tolerable for reasons qe never bothered to fully explain.
Liopimana-Hadja-Ki did not feign interest in organic sentiments.
Qe was a featureless orb in a suspensor field with no apparent optical or auditory sensors, let alone armaments – though I knew they were there – whose intended purpose was to gather data for qis mainframe about the state of the universe and its wonders, so that the mainframe could refine and update qis operating assumptions as reliably and regularly as possible.
“The universe is constantly changing,” Hadja had declared. “It is vital that we change with it.”