Previously on The Weight of Worlds

Elias, the greasiest of the space scouts, has discovered a world that has been shaped by continent wide artificial gravity fields. Intrigued by the advanced technology, he has landed on the planet and began traveling to the center of one of the artificial gravity field, meeting a family of alien hunter gatherers on the way.

* * *

Elias spent the entire day walking with the small family of natives. After an hour, his leg ached, and after a few more, he could barely focus on anything else. But aside from a few times when they stopped at paths and the two largest of them clicked at each other and pointed in different directions, having a minor argument about the best way to go, they never slowed. As the sun went down, Elias was reminded of his days in the war. With all the rockets and spaceships, often the best way for soldiers to get where they needed to be was for them to walk.

But as they entered a massive clearing, Elias was glad the sun had set. The device in front of him was a giant octahedron. It was floating about twenty feet in the air and had a glow that was dim enough that he wouldn’t have seen it in daylight, but it gave the entire clearing an ethereal look.

There were also hundreds of the aliens in the large clearing. Some had tents, others were cooking. At the center of the clearing was the first permanent structure he had seen on this world. A stairway of shaped stones that led to a small platform next to the giant floating rock.

This was a place of worship if Elias had ever seen one. And he understood. Even if the people of this world understood gravity as fluid, this was miraculous. And right now, Elias couldn’t prove that was wrong. If this stone was the source of the gravity, then it was like no technology he had ever imagined and it had been here long enough to shape the world. Almost certainly longer than the people.

Even the light didn’t show as an energy source. That at least helped explain why the massive amount of power didn’t register on any of his sensors. Something was hiding it because just the light itself should register no the sensors.

He climbed the stairs, worried that the natives might find his approach to it sacrilegious. But they didn’t seem to have advanced enough to kill people in the name of their gods. That would get them named savages by the people of the commonwealth, many of whom thought if something wasn’t worth killing for, it didn’t count.

As he got nearer, he began to see ways that the rock wasn’t just a rock. The glow came from between the millions of tiny cubes that made up the octahedron. Each of them appeared to be entirely separate from all the others, though so close together they looked solid from more than a few inches away.

They were too small for him to pull away just one, but he grabbed a few between his thumb and index finger. There was a slight tug, but when they came away, the others flowed into the gap, filling it. The few in his hand went inert and fell apart like sand.

He could only assume that the device could repair itself, since every sign was that it had been here for hundreds of thousands of years and possibly far longer. So he reached out to grab a bigger handful. His scarred fingers got a good grip, but this time it felt less solid. Something had changed.

He then felt the gravity shift, and he fell forward into the octahedron. For a moment, he was sure this was his end. He had triggered the device’s defense and would drown in the sandlike technology. Then he felt himself hit the ground.

He couldn’t feel the devices anymore, so he carefully opened his eyes. He wasn’t surrounded by it or, in the clearing, surrounded by the insect-like aliens. He was lying on his back on a bed in a room made of similar technology to the octahedron, but more metallic and reflective.

Before he could move, he heard a smooth, powerful voice say, “You’re not supposed to be here.”

Allowing his head to fall back, he said, “I don’t know where this is. I was just trying to understand the planet.”

“It is a protected place. Our children are not to be interfered with.”

This place was clearly far more technology advanced than the commonwealth. So if that was a threat, they could likely back it up.

Standing at the edge of the bed was the young native he had been traveling with, though his face was a bit more human, likely to make it easier for him to speak. As he looked at him, he saw the same glow as the octahedron and it grew brighter until all that was left was light, partially transparent, in the shape not of a native, but a human. An irritated human, from how its arms were crossed across its chest, the eyes, which were simply gaps in the light, were glaring at him.

“So, you built all of this and leave them on the surface to survive on their own?”

“Not entirely on their own. We are with them, though we are them while we are with them. We protect them from some, like you, but they must evolve on their own. We hope that in a few hundred thousand more years, perhaps a million, they will become part of us.

Trying to put it all together, Elias said, “So, let me understand this. You evolved on this planet, let’s say, millions of years ago, and became a technologically advanced species. Then you left your bodies behind to allow other species to evolve, while you lived among them in corporeal form. But that doesn’t explain anything about the gravity.”

“That’s because you misunderstand at such a core level that every supposition you make is incorrect. Let us start from the beginning. We did not evolve on this planet. It is not a planet. And we did not leave behind our bodies. This place is our body, as are the plants, animals, and even our children.

For a moment, Elias thought about the plant on his ship that he called the soul of a dying world. He had always believed that every planet had a soul. Something unique that made it different from every other world. He had never decided if that was metaphysical or metaphorical, but then he had never met the soul of a planet before.

But then he considered the sandlike technology in his pouch, and the way the alien looked like a native, and he realized that perhaps in this case it wasn’t metaphysical or metaphorical. The creature in front of him was a projection. Something for him to interact with. And the native it had been before was as real as the others. In some way, he couldn’t fully parse the technology and the being he was looking at were the same thing. It even explained the artificial gravity in some sense. If the entire world was made of this technology, then it could be hollow and so much less dense.

“How many of you are there?” Elias asked.

“That question is not entirely answerable, but I believe you are beginning to understand. We are as many as the sands of the sea, and as few as one. We are the multitude and the one. We are our children, and they will someday be us. But we are also not them. And they are not us. And they will not be us. But we may be them.”

Elias’s head hurt. It always did when he tried to talk to more evolved species. Perhaps it was his brain trying to cram in concepts that it wasn’t evolved enough to hold. But he didn’t think so. He thought it was because they were universally condescending and obnoxious. Though he supposed he was probably similarly condescending to Rust, and he wondered if he annoyed the dog the same way this was annoying him. If so, the dog had more grace than he did, because he never showed it.

“So, I don’t belong here,” Elias said, realizing that his best option now was to get off the planet before they put a leash on him, or something more dramatic, like neutering him so he’d be less rambunctious.

“You are perhaps less dangerous to our people than we had believed. You will be allowed to leave,” the alien said.

“More of my people will come,” Elias said. He hadn’t filed a report with the Corp yet, but even if he didn’t tell them anything, the commonwealth was expanding quickly and large parts of it didn’t particularity care if a planet was already occupied.

“We are in no danger. But we will do what needs to be done to protect our children,” the creature said.

With the level of technology they had, that could mean building a shield around the planet or wiping out the entire commonwealth and Elias thought they might be equally difficult for them. But the evidence suggested a race that held ethics at least similar to humans and likely better. And he suspected they had been watching him, so he said, “You don’t have any ferrocerium rods? I hate walking away without anything useful.”

“You have my fishhooks,” the light said, then Elias sank into the bed as it seemed to lose cohesion. This time it lasted longer than before. When he opened his eyes, he was standing in front of the Ghostwake. He glanced around more carefully, making sure there was nothing else happening, then he got on his ship.

After rubbing Rust’s head until the dog stopped jumping up on him, he went down to the workbench and pulled the fishhooks carefully out of his pouch. At first, they looked normal. But when he turned the lights off, he saw they gave off the same faint glow as other octahedron that was at the center of the artificial gravity field. They were made of the same alien technology. So, it had understood his point. A hint of their technology. Not enough to understand it on its own, but given enough time and understanding, it might lead him to something useful.

He put them into one of the hundreds of drawers filled with trinkets, bobbles, and souvenirs. They could be studied later. He then went to the control panel of the Ghostwake and lifted off. As he did, the gravity of the world seemed not only to reduce but, for a moment, to push upward. Like someone who was ready for you to leave the party, putting their hand lightly on your shoulder and guiding you towards the door.

In orbit, he took one last moment to get a recording of the beautiful world. He wanted a record of its long shores of overlapping circles and zoomed in on the edges of those circles to see the storms that lived along those paths as the winds interacted with the gravity of different parts of the world and seemed to create walls around the different sections creating vastly different ecosystems on the world.

Elias hoped they were right when they said they could protect this place. And as he considered that, the gravity seemed to fluctuate one last time. The Ghostwake shook, and a few of his tools fell off the wall in the workshop. He glanced away to make sure that Rust was safe and not overly scared.

When he glanced back, the world was gone. He didn’t know what had happened. Perhaps they had just cloaked it, or perhaps shifted into some other dimension, teleported to some other part of the galaxy, or just turned the entire thing into a giant engine and flown away.

The Ghostwake had been recording it, of course. He could just rewatch it and see. But that felt like cheating, so he said, “Computer, delete all video and sensor recordings for the last thirty seconds.”

There was a moment of silence, and then an affirmative beep. A shame he would never know, he thought. But that was interrupted as another of his lights began to flicker. He flicked it with his finger, and it came back on. It was probably time to go somewhere he could get supplied. But he didn’t see any harm in staying out here on the edge a little longer.