Free The New Space Opera 2 by Gardner Dozois Page B

stuff, give rise to stellar nurseries that only some stunted refugee from the bottom of a gravity well could ever call lethal .
    Darwin’s an abstraction here, an irrelevant curiosity. This Island puts the lie to everything we were ever told about the machinery of life. Sun-powered, perfectly adapted, immortal, it won no struggle for survival: where are the predators, the competitors, the parasites? All of life around 428 is one vast continuum, one grand act of symbiosis. Nature here is not red in tooth and claw. Nature, out here, is the helping hand.
    Lacking the capacity for violence, the Island has outlasted worlds. Unencumbered by technology, it has outthought civilizations. It is intelligent beyond our measure, and—
    â€”and it is benign . It must be. I grow more certain of that with each passing hour. How can it even conceive of an enemy?
    I think of the things I called it, before I knew better. Meat balloon. Cyst . Looking back, those words verge on blasphemy. I will not use them again.
    Besides, there’s another word that would fit better, if the chimp has its way: roadkill. And the longer I look, the more I fear that that hateful machine is right.
    If the Island can defend itself, I sure as shit can’t see how.
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    â€œ Eriophora ’s impossible, you know. Violates the laws of physics.”
    We’re in one of the social alcoves off the ventral notochord, taking a break from the library. I have decided to start again from first principles. Dix eyes me with an understandable mix of confusion and mistrust; my claim is almost too stupid to deny.
    â€œIt’s true,” I assure him. “Takes way too much energy to accelerate a ship with Eri ’s mass, especially at relativistic speeds. You’d need the energy output of a whole sun. People figured if we made it to the stars at all,we’d have to do it in ships maybe the size of your thumb. Crew them with virtual personalities downloaded onto chips.”
    That’s too nonsensical even for Dix. “ Wrong . Don’t have mass, can’t fall toward anything. Eri wouldn’t even work if it was that small.”
    â€œBut suppose you can’t displace any of that mass. No wormholes, no Higgs conduits, nothing to throw your gravitational field in the direction of travel. Your center of mass just sits there in, well, the center of your mass.”
    A spastic Dixian head-shake. “ Do have those things!”
    â€œSure we do. But for the longest time, we didn’t know it.”
    His foot taps an agitated tattoo on the deck.
    â€œIt’s the history of the species,” I explain. “We think we’ve worked everything out, we think we’ve solved all the mysteries, and then someone finds some niggling little data point that doesn’t fit the paradigm. Every time we try to paper over the crack, it gets bigger, and before you know it, our whole worldview unravels. It’s happened time and again. One day, mass is a constraint; the next, it’s a requirement. The things we think we know—they change , Dix. And we have to change with them.”
    â€œBut—”
    â€œThe chimp can’t change. The rules it’s following are ten billion years old and it’s got no fucking imagination—and really that’s not anyone’s fault, that’s just people who didn’t know how else to keep the mission stable across deep time. They wanted to keep the mission on track, so they built something that couldn’t go off it; but they also knew that things change , and that’s why we’re out here, Dix. To deal with things the chimp can’t.”
    â€œThe alien,” Dix says.
    â€œThe alien.”
    â€œChimp deals with it just fine.”
    â€œHow? By killing it?”
    â€œNot our fault it’s in the way. It’s no threat—”
    â€œI don’t care whether it’s a threat or not! It’s alive, and it’s intelligent, and