The Island - Peter Watts

Peter Watts 22 The Island
"Maybe's not the first gate it's seen," Dix suggests. "Think there's
maybe another gate out here?"
I shake my head. "We'd have seen the lensing artefacts by now."
"You ever run into anyone before?"
"No." We have always been alone, through all these epochs.
We have only ever run away.
And then always from our own children.
I crunch some numbers. "Hundred eighty two days to
insemination. If we move now we've only got to tweak our
bearing by a few mikes to redirect to the new coordinates. Well
within the green. Angles get dicey the longer we wait, of course."
"We can't do that," the chimp says. "We would miss the gate by
two million kilometers."
"Move the gate. Move the whole damn site. Move the
refineries, move the factories, move the damn rocks. A couple
hundred meters a second would be more than fast enough if we
send the order now. We don't even have to suspend construction,
we can keep building on the fly."
"Every one of those vectors widens the nested confidence limits
of the build. It would increase the risk of error beyond allowable
margins, for no payoff."
"And what about the fact that there's an intelligent being in our
path?"
"I'm already allowing for the potential presence of intelligent
alien life."
"Okay, first off, there's nothing potential about it. It's right
fucking there. And on our current heading we run the damn thing
over."
"We're staying clear of all planetary bodies in Goldilocks orbits.
We've seen no local evidence of spacefaring technology. The
current location of the build meets all conservation criteria."
"That's because the people who drew up your criteria never
anticipated a live Dyson sphere!" But I'm wasting my breath, and
I know it. The chimp can run its equations a million times but if
there's nowhere to put the variable, what can it do?
There was a time, back before things turned ugly, when we had
clearance to reprogram those parameters. Before we discovered