It was almost evening now and Mose had to go and do the chores. He half expected the thing might haul out the birdcage and be gone when he came back to the house. And he tried to be sore at it for its selfishness – it had taken from him and had not tried to pay him back – it had not, so far as he could tell, even tried to thank him. But he made a poor job of being sore at it.
It was waiting for him when he came from the barn carrying two pails full of milk. It followed him inside the house and stood around and he tried to talk to it. But he didn’t have the heart to do much talking. He could not forget that it would be leaving, and the pleasure of its present company was lost in his terror of the loneliness to come.
For now he didn’t even have his money to help ward off the loneliness.
As he lay in bed that night, strange thoughts came creeping in upon him – the thought of an even greater loneliness than he had ever known upon this runty farm, the terrible, devastating loneliness of the empty wastes that lay between the stars, a driven loneliness while one hunted for a place or person that remained a misty thought one could not define, but which it was most important one should find.
It was a strange thing for him to be thinking, and quite suddenly he knew it was no thought of his, but of this other that was in the room with him.
He tried to raise himself, he fought to raise himself, but he couldn’t do it. He held his head up a moment, then fell back upon the pillow and went sound asleep.
Next morning, after Mose had eaten breakfast, the two of them went to the machine shed and dragged the birdcage out. It stood there, a weird alien thing, in the chill brightness of the dawn.
The critter walked up to it and started to slide between two of the bars, but when it was halfway through, it stepped out again and moved over to confront Old Mose.
“Good-bye, friend,” said Mose. “I’ll miss you.”
There was a strange stinging in his eyes.
The other held out its hand in farewell, and Mose took it and there was something in the hand he grasped, something round and smooth that was transferred from its hand to his.
The thing took its hand away and stepped quickly to the birdcage and slid between the bars. The hands reached for the basket and there was a sudden flicker and the birdcage was no longer there.
Mose stood lonely in the barnyard, looking at the place where there was no birdcage and remembering what he had felt or thought – or been told? – the night before as he lay in bed.
Already the critter would be there, out between the stars, in that black and utter loneliness, hunting for a place or thing or person that no human mind could grasp.
Slowly Mose turned around to go back to the house, to get the pails and go down to the barn to get the milking done.
He remembered the object in his hand and lifted his still-clenched fist in front of him. He opened his fingers and the little crystal ball lay there in his palm – and it was exactly like the one he’d found in the slitted flap in the body he had buried in the garden. Except that one had been dead and cloudy and this one had the living glow of a distant-burning fire.
Looking at it, he had the strange feeling of a happiness and comfort such as he had seldom known before, as if there were many people with him and all of them were friends.
He closed his hand upon it and the happiness stayed on – and it was all wrong, for there was not a single reason that he should be happy. The critter finally had left him and his money was all gone and he had no friends, but still he kept on feeling good.
He put the ball into his pocket and stepped spryly for the house to get the milking pails. He pursed up his whiskered lips and began to whistle and it had been a long, long time since he had even thought to whistle.
Maybe he was happy, he told himself, because the critter had not left without stopping to take his hand and try to say good-bye.
And a gift, no matter how worthless it might be, how cheap a trinket, still had a basic value in simple sentiment. It had been many years since anyone had bothered to give him a gift.
It was dark and lonely and unending in the depths of space with no Companion. It might be long before another was obtainable.
It perhaps was a foolish thing to do, but the old creature had been such a kind savage, so fumbling and so pitiful and eager to help. And one who travels far and fast must likewise travel light. There had been nothing else to give.
Refugium
Stephen Baxter
I opened this anthology with a brand new story and I’m closing it with one. Stephen Baxter (b. 1957) is one of Britain’s major writers of science fiction. His first stories appeared in Interzone from 1987, introducing his Xeelee sequence, but he first rose to international attention with The Time Ships (1995), his sequel to Wells’s The Time Machine. He has since produced several highly acclaimed sf novels such as Voyage (1996) and Titan (1997), as well as collaborating with Arthur C. Clarke on The Light of Other Days (2000). He has recently started his Manifold series. This is planned as a multi-verse epic exploring Fermi’s Paradox: are we alone? It centres around astronaut Reid Malenfant and his family. The first book was Time: Manifold One (1999). The following story is the latest in the series.
Celso and I were ejected from the Sally Brind. Frank Paulis had brought us to the Oort Cloud, that misty belt far from the sun where huge comets glide like deep-sea fish.
Before us, an alien craft sparkled in the starlight.
On the inside of my suit helmet a tiny softscreen popped into life and filled up with a picture of Paulis. He was wizened, somewhere over eighty years old, but his eyes glittered, sharp.
Even now, I begged. “Paulis. Don’t make me do this.”
Paulis was in a bathrobe; behind him steam billowed. He was in his spa at the heart of the Brind – a luxury from which Celso and I had been excluded for the long hundred days it had taken to haul us all the way out here. “Your grandfather would be ashamed of you, Michael Malenfant. You forfeited choice when you let yourself be put up for sale in a debtors’ auction.”
“I just had a streak of bad luck.”
“A streak spanning fifteen years hustling pool and a mountain of bad debts?”
Celso studied me with brown eyes full of pity. “Do not whine, my friend.”
“Paulis, I don’t care who the hell my grandfather was. You can see I’m no astronaut. I’m forty years old, for Christ’s sake. And I’m not the brightest guy in the world –”
“True, but unimportant. The whole point of this experiment is to send humans where we haven’t sent humans before. Exactly who probably doesn’t matter. Look at the Bubble, Malenfant.”
The alien ship was a ten-foot balloon plastered with rubies. Celso was already inspecting its interior in an intelligent sort of way.
Paulis said, “Remember your briefings. You can see it’s a hollow sphere. There’s an open hatchway. We know that if you close the hatch the device will accelerate away. We have evidence that its effective final speed is many times the speed of light. In fact, many millions of times.”
“Impossible,” said Celso.
Paulis smiled. “Evidently, not everyone agrees. What a marvellous adventure! I only wish I could come with you.”
“Like hell you do, you dried-up old bastard.”
He took a gloating sip from a frosted glass. “Malenfant, you are here because of faults in your personality.”
“I’m here because of people like you.”
Celso took my arm.
“In about two minutes,” Paulis said cheerfully, “the pilot of the Sally Brind is going to come out of the airlock and shoot you both in the temple. Unless you’re in that Bubble with the hatch closed.”
Celso pushed me towards the glittering ball.
I said, “I won’t forget you, Paulis. I’ll be thinking of you every damn minute –”
But he only grinned.
My name is Reid Malenfant.
You know me, Michael. And you know I was always an incorrigible space cadet. I
campaigned for, among other things, private mining expeditions to the asteroids. I hope you know my pal, Frank J. Paulis, who went out there and did what I only talked about.
But I don’t want to talk about that. Not here, not in this letter. I want to be more personal. I want you to understand why your grandpappy gave over his life to a single, consuming project.
For me, it started with a simple question: What use are the stars?
Paulis had installed basic life-support gear in the Bubble. Celso already had his suit off and was busy collapsing our portable airlock.
Through the net-like walls of the Bubble I looked back at the Sally Brind. I could see at one extreme the fat cone shape of Paulis’s Earth return capsule, and at the other end the angular, spidery form of the strut sections that held the nuke reactor and its shielding.
Beside our glittering toy-ship the Brind looked crude, as if knocked together by stone axes.
I had grown to hate the damn Brind. In the months since we left lunar orbit, she had become a prison to me. Now, as I looked back at her, drifting in this purposeless immensity, she looked like home.
When I took off my suit I found I’d suffered some oedema, swelling caused by the accumulation of fluid under my skin – in the webs of my fingers, in places where the zippers had run, and a few other places where the suit hadn’t fitted as well as it should. The kind of stuff the astronauts never tell you about. But there was no pain, no loss of muscle or joint function that I could detect.
“Report,” Paulis’s voice, loud in our ears, ordered.
“The only instrument is a display, like a softscreen,” said Celso. He inspected it calmly. It showed a network of threads against a background of starlike dots.
“Your interpretation?”
“This may be an image of our destination. And if these are cosmic strings,” Celso said dryly, “we are going further than I had imagined.”
I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I looked more closely at the starlike dots. They were little spirals.
Galaxies?
Celso continued to poke around. “The life support equipment is functioning nominally.”
“I’ve given you enough for about two months,” said Paulis. “If you’re not back by then, you probably won’t be coming back at all.”
Celso nodded.
“Time’s up,” Paulis said. “Shut the hatch, Malenfant.”
I shot back, “You’ll pay for this, Paulis.”
“I don’t think I’ll be losing much sleep, frankly.” Then, with steel: “Shut the hatch, Malenfant. I want to see you do it.”
Celso touched my shoulder. “Do not be concerned, my friend.” With a lot of dignity he pressed a wall-mounted push-button.
The hatch melted into the hull, closing us in.
The Bubble quivered. I clung to the soft wall.
Paulis’s voice cut out. The sun disappeared. Electric-blue light pulsed in the sky. There was no sensation of movement.
But suddenly – impossibly – there was a planet outside, a fat steel-grey ball. A world of water. Earth?
It looked like Earth. But, despite my sudden, reluctant stab of hope, I knew immediately it was not Earth.
Celso’s face was working as he gazed out of the Bubble, his softscreen jammed against the hull, gathering images. “A big world, larger than Earth – but what difference does that make? Higher surface gravity. More internal heat trapped. A thicker crust, but hotter, more flexible; lots of volcanoes. And the crust couldn’t support mountains in that powerful gravity . . . Deep oceans, no mountains tall enough to peak out of the water – life clustering around deep-ocean thermal vents –”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“We are already far from home.”
I said tightly, “I can see that.”
He looked at me steadily, and rested his hands on my shoulders. “Michael, we have already been projected to the system of another star. I think –”
There was a faint surge. I saw something like streetlamps flying past. And then a dim pool of light soaked across space below us.
Celso grunted. “Ah. I think we have accelerated.”
With a click, the hull turned transparent as glass.
The streetlamps had been stars.
And the puddle of light was a swirl, a bulging yellow-white core wrapped around by streaky spiral-shaped arms.
It was the Galaxy. It fell away from us.
That was how far I had already come, how fast I was moving.
I assumed a foetal position and stayed that way for a long time.
As a kid I used to lie out on the lawn, soaking up dew and looking at the stars, trying to feel the Earth turning under me. It felt wonderful to be alive – hell, to be ten years old, anyhow. Michael, if you’re ten years old when you get to read this, try it sometime. Even if you’re a hundred, try it anyhow.
But even then I knew that the Earth was just a ball of rock, on the fringe of a nondescript galaxy. And I just couldn’t believe that there was nobody out there looking back at me down here. Was it really possible that this was the only place where life had taken hold – that only here were there minds and eyes capable of looking out and wondering?
Because if so, what use are the stars? All those suns and worlds, spinning through the void, the grand complexity of creation unwinding all the way out of the Big Bang itself . . .
Even then I saw space as a high frontier, a sky to be mined, a resource for humanity. Still do. But is that all it is? Could the sky really be nothing more than an empty stage for mankind to strut and squabble?
And what if we blow ourselves up? Will the universe just evolve on, like a huge piece of clockwork slowly running down, utterly devoid of life and mind? What would be the use of that?
Much later, I learned that this kind of “argument from utility” goes back all the way to the Romans – Lucretius, in fact, in the first century AD. Alien minds must exist, because otherwise the stars would be purposeless. Right?
Sure. But if so, where are they?
I bet this bothers you too, Michael. Wouldn’t be a Malenfant otherwise!
Celso spoke to me soothingly. Eventually I uncurled.
The sky was embroidered with knots and threads. A fat grey cloud drifted past.
After a moment, with the help of Celso, I got it into perspective. The embroidery was made up of galaxies. The cloud was a supercluster of galaxies.
We were moving fast enough to make a supercluster shift against the general background.
“We must be travelling through some sort of hyper-space,” Celso lectured. “We hop from point to point. Or perhaps this is some variant of teleportation. Even the images we see must be an illusion, manufactured for our comfort.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“But you should have been prepared for all this,” said Celso kindly. “You saw the image – the distant galaxies, the cosmic strings.”
“Celso –” I resisted the temptation to wrap my arms around my head. “Please. You aren’t helping me.”
He looked at me steadily. Supercluster light bathed his aquiline profile; he was the sort you’d pick as an ambassador for the human race. I hate people like that. “If the builders of this vessel are transporting us across such distances, there is nothing to fear. With such powers they can surely preserve our lives with negligible effort.”
“Or sit on our skulls with less.”
“There is nothing to fear save your own human failings.”
I sucked weak coffee from a nippled flask. “You’re starting to sound like Paulis.”
He laughed. “I am sorry.” He turned back to the drifting supercluster, calm, fascinated.
Just think about it, Michael. Life on Earth got started just about as soon as it could – as soon as the rocks cooled and the oceans gathered. Furthermore, life spread over Earth as fast and as far as it could. And already we’re starting to spread to other worlds. Surely this can’t be a unique trait of Earth life.
/> So how come nobody has come spreading all over us?
Of course the universe is a big place. But even crawling along with dinky ships that only reach a fraction of lightspeed – ships we could easily start building now – we could colonise the Galaxy in a few tens of millions of years. 100 million, tops.
100 million years: it seems an immense time – after all, 100 million years ago dinosaurs ruled the Earth. But the Galaxy is 100 times older still. There has been time for Galactic colonisation to have happened many times since the birth of the stars.
Remember, all it takes is for one race somewhere to have evolved the will and the means to colonize; and once the process has started it’s hard to see what could stop it.
But, as a kid on that lawn, I didn’t see them.
Advanced civilizations ought to be very noticeable. Even we blare out on radio frequencies. Why, with our giant radio telescopes we could detect a civilization no more advanced than ours anywhere in the Galaxy. But we don’t.
We seem to be surrounded by emptiness and silence. There’s something wrong.
This is called the Fermi Paradox.
The journey was long. And what made it worse was that we didn’t know how long it would be, or what we would find at the end of it – let alone if we would ever come back again.
The two of us were crammed inside that glittering little Bubble the whole time.
Celso had the patience of a rock. Trying not to think about how afraid I was, I poked sticks into his cage. I ought to have driven him crazy.
“You have a few ‘human failings’ too,” I said. “Or you wouldn’t have ended up like me, on sale in a debtors’ auction.”
He inclined his noble head. “What you say is true. Although I did go there voluntarily.”
I choked on my coffee.
“My wife is called Maria. We both work in the algae tanks beneath New San Francisco.”
I grimaced. “You’ve got my sympathy.”
“We remain poor people, despite our efforts to educate ourselves. You may know that life is not easy for non-Caucasians in modern California. . . .” His parents had moved there from the east when Celso was very young. “My parents loved California – or at least, the dream of California – a place of hope and tolerance and plenty, the society of the future, the Golden State.” He smiled. “But my parents died disappointed. And the California dream had been dead for decades . . .”
The Mammoth Book Of Science Fiction Page 52
