Iterations and other stories (collection)

People in there did have a tendency to float facing the ground instead of the sky. I nodded for her to go on.

“Well, our eyes didn’t evolve here,” continued Tadders. “If we did come from a rocky world, the sun would have been seen against an empty, non-reflective sky. It must be much, much brighter inside the Dyson sphere than it ever was on the original homeworld.”

“Surely our eyes would have adapted to deal with the brighter light here.”

“How?” asked Tadders. “Even after the great war, we regained a measure of civilization fairly quickly. There was no period during which we were reduced to survival of the fittest. Human beings haven’t undergone any appreciable evolution since long before our ancestors built the sphere. Which means our eyes are as they originally were: suited for much dimmer light. Of course, the ancients may have had drugs or other things that made the interior light seem more comfortable to them, but whatever they used must have been lost in the war.”

“I suppose,” I said.

“But you, me, and everyone else in our settlement who has lived inside the sphere—we’ve damaged our retinas, without even knowing it.”

I saw what she was getting at. “But the children—the children born here, on the outside of the sphere—

She nodded. “The children born here, after we left the interior, have never been exposed to the brightness inside, and so they see just as well in the dark as our distant, distant ancestors did, back on the homeworld. The points of light the children are seeing really do exist, but they’re simply too faint to register on the damaged retinas we adults have.”

My head was swimming. “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe. But— but what are those lights?”

Tadders pursed her lips, then lifted her shoulders a bit. “You want my best guess? I think they’re other suns, like the one our ancestors encased in the sphere, but so incredibly far away that they’re all but invisible.” She looked up, out the clear roof of the dome covering our town, out at the uniform blackness, which was all either of us could make out. She then used one of the words I’d taught her, a word transliterated from the ancient texts—a word we could pronounce but whose meaning we’d never really understood. “I think,” she said, “that the points of light are stars.”

There were thousands of documents stored in the ancient computers; my job was to try to make sense of as many of them as I could. And I made much progress as Dalt continued to grow up. Eventually, he and the other children were able to match the patterns of stars they could see in the sky to those depicted in ancient charts I’d found. The patterns didn’t correspond exactly; the stars had apparently drifted in relation to each other since the charts had been made. But the kids—the adolescents, now—were indeed able to discern the constellations shown in the old texts; ironically, this was easier to do, they said, when some of the lights of our frontier town were left on, drowning out all but the brightest stars.

According to the charts, our sun—the sun enclosed in the Dyson sphere—was the star the ancients had called Tau Ceti. It was not the original home to humanity, though; our ancestors were apparently unwilling to cannibalize the worlds of their own system to make their Dyson sphere. Instead, they—we—had come from another star, the closest similar one that wasn’t part of a multiple system, a sun our ancestors had called Sol.

And the planet—that was the term—we had evolved on was, in the infinite humility of our wise ancestors, called by a simple, unassuming name, one I could easily translate: Dirt.

Old folks like me couldn’t live on Dirt now, of course. Our muscles—including our hearts—were weak compared to what our ancestors must have had, growing up under the stupendous gravity of that tiny, rocky world.

But—

But locked in our genes, as if for safekeeping, were all the potentials we’d ever had as a species. The ability to see dim sources of light, and—

Yes, it must be there, too, still preserved in our DNA.

The ability to produce muscles strong enough to withstand much, much higher gravity.

You’d have to grow up under such a gravity, have to live with it from birth, said Dr. Tadders, to really be comfortable with it, but if you did—

I’d seen Kobost’s computer animation showing how we might have moved under a much greater gravity, how we might have deployed our bodies vertically, how our spines would have supported the weight of our heads, how our legs might have worked back and forth, hinging at knee and ankle, producing sustained forward locomotion. It all seemed so bizarre, and so inefficient compared to spending most of one’s life floating, but—

But there were new worlds to explore, and old ones, too, and to fully experience them would require being able to stand on their surfaces.