Invisible Planets: Collected Fiction by Hannu Rajaniemi

Author:Hannu Rajaniemi [Rajaniemi, Hannu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Relato, Ciencia ficción
Publisher: ePubLibre
Published: 2014-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Invisible Planets

(with apologies to Italo Calvino)

Travelling through Cygnus 61, as it prepares to cross the gulf between the galaxies, the darkship commands its sub-minds to describe the worlds it has visited.

In the lives of darkships, as in the journeys of any ambassador, there always comes a time that is filled with doubt. As the dark matter neutralinos annihilate each other in its hungry Chown drive heart and push it ever closer to the speed of light, the darkship wonders if it truly carries a cargo worthy of the Network and the Controller. What if the gift it carries, the data it has painstakingly gathered from the electromagnetic echoes of young civilisations and the warm infrared dreams of Dyson spheres, the information written onto tons upon tons of endlessly coiled DNA strands that hold petabytes in a single gram, is nothing more than a scrawled message in a bottle, to be picked up by a fisherman on an unknown shore and then discarded, alien and meaningless?

That is why—before the relentless hand of Lorentz squeezes the ship’s clocks so thin that aeons pass with every tick and the starry gaze of the Universe gathers into a single blazing, blue-shifted, all-judging eye—the ship studies its memory and tries to discern a pattern subtle enough to escape entropy’s gnawing.

During the millennia of its journey, the darkship’s mind has expanded, until it has become something that has to be explored and mapped. The treasures it contains can only be described in metaphors, brittle and misleading and distant, like mirages. And so, more and more, amongst all the agents in its sprawling society of mind, the darkship finds itself listening to the voice of a tiny sub-mind, so insignificant that she is barely more than a wanderer lost in a desert, coming from reaches of the ship’s mind so distant that she might as well be a traveller from another country that has stumbled upon an ancient and exotic kingdom on the other side of the world, and now finds herself serving a quizzical, omnipotent emperor.

The sub-mind gives the ship neither simulations nor mind-states but words. She communicates with symbols, hints and whispers that light up old connections in the darkship’s mind, bright cities and highways seen from orbit, maps of ancient planets, drawn with guttural monkey sounds.

PLANETS AND DEATH

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