The Floating Cradle

Eleven

When the tanta launched that fateful first starship, the Floating Cradle, there were three wars—one major and two minor—being waged on Cognata's surface. The majority of combatants were machines, but that was little comfort to the three million people turned into refugees. Another six million were homeless for reasons besides war; thirteen million went hungry. Each year, just under a million would die of preventable diseases or infections, while another two or three million perished from issues related to poor sanitation. Even by the most pessimistic estimates, these people accounted for only half a percent of Cognata's five billion tanta; today, twenty-one Earth years later, that number is relatively unchanged. A statistical anomaly. A footnote to be read at one's own election.

When the Floating Cradle made its inaugural leap to faster-than-light speed, the tanta were yet to achieve cures for cancer or the common cold, let alone unlock the secrets to immortality. However, they had made modest gains in increasing their average lifespan; a hundred years ago, no tantum had ever lived past sixty-five Earth years, and now they make it to their early eighties with decent regularity. It doesn't seem a feat on the level of, say, constructing a vessel capable of ferrying living beings across trillions upon trillions of miles of space, but that just goes to show there are some things even stronger than the fear of death. What constitutes a long life, after all, is relative.

At the time of the Cradle's manufacture in orbit of Cognata (which, incidentally, cost twice the United States' entire GDP for the year 2012 and required about six thousand tons of raw material for the fusion core alone), no society on their planet's surface had transcended the use of money or completely eradicated poverty. They had not found a way to upload their consciousnesses to computers or generate life from non-life. They were yet to make a piece of art to please the entire world. They couldn't promise every baby born that it wouldn't someday suffer at the hands of another. They were no closer to God—to consensus on its existence or lack thereof—than we comparatively primitive Homo sapiens were, wallowing in pitiable ignorance one hundred and seventy light years away.

The first human beings to step foot on Cognata, a mere thirteen years ago, would tell you all that I have written, but with different emphasis. In fact, it is from a textbook authored by these pioneers that I pull my facts and figures, a textbook circulated across the United States to high schools like mine where the gymnasium roof leaks and they can't afford to give the janitors dental. These pioneers would tell you how, on Cognata, war has been elevated to a perfunctory diplomatic exercise, carried out in sparsely populated areas to minimize casualties. How food production has been outsourced to the planet's moons, Lac and Mel, how they make no more than what they need—need, of course, being calculated from demand in the market. How waste is ejected into space, and energy is extracted from stars—living things make for imperfect systems, but what better mitigator than infinity, that which can never run out? They'd go on to say how the population is stable and congenital abnormalities are unheard of thanks to the mandatory institution of the artificial womb (and, the other side of that coin: tubal ligation for every infant born).

Freedom from birth. Freedom from the selfish gene.

Tanta mature and die more quickly than humans; they evolved on a planet with ten times as much atmospheric pressure. The pioneers—all of mankind—were awed at the embarrassment of riches the tanta had extracted from their planet, that they, despite their limitations, could construct the space-cleaving Cradle (a stroke beyond the ken of any species until it executes it). The pioneers were awed because in the face of tantic excellence they saw reflected a new age of man, one that would spring forward in the blink of an eye, outstripping all the petty grievances that once held it back. The tanta are not enlightened, not gods, not by a long shot—and yet look what they have wrought!

The Afterword of my textbook ends with this benediction:

"Homo sapiens gazes into the gulf of space tilled by these visitors from a foreign star, hands grasping the tools of self-determination, poised to plant the seed of its glorious rebirth."