Space m-2

by Stephen Baxter

  It wouldn’t be a comfortable ride out to Neptune. The toilets never seemed to vent properly. There was a chorus of bangs, wheezes, and rattles when they tried to sleep. The solar panels had steadily degraded so that there was never enough power, even this close to the Sun. Madeleine soon tired of half-heated meals, lukewarm coffee, and tepid bathing water.

  But forty people had lived in this windowless cavern slum for the five years it had taken Gurrutu to reach Neptune: eating hydroponically grown plants, recycling their waste, trying not to drive each other crazy. The tank had been slung with hammocks and blankets, little nests of humans seeking privacy. Three children had been born here.

  Madeleine found scratches on an aluminum bulkhead that recorded a child’s growth, the image of a favorite uncle tucked into the back of a storage cupboard.

  The ship could have been built in the twenty-first century — even the twentieth. Human research into spaceflight engineering had all but stopped when the Gaijin had arrived. Madeleine thought of the Gaijin flower-ships that had carried her to the Saddle Point radius and beyond: jewelled, perfect, faultless.

  But Gurrutu was simply the best Nemoto could do. And soit was heroic. With such equipment, Nemoto had reachedNeptune — thirty times Earth’s distance from the Sun, ten times farther out than the asteroid belt. Only Malenfant himself, unaided by Gaijin, had gone farther — and his mission had been a one-man stunt. Nemoto had sent two hundred colonists.

  As she labored over the lashed-up systems, improvising repairs, Madeleine’s respect for Nemoto deepened.

  And, while Madeleine worked, the Earth slid liquidly past the windows of the Gurrutu.

  Those old environmentalist Cassandras had been proven right, Madeleine learned. The climate really had been only metastable; in the end, after forty thousand years of digging and building and burning, humans managed to destabilize the world, tip over the whole damn bowl of cherries, until it settled with stunning rapidity into this new, lethal state.

  Madeleine could see patterns in the ice — ripples, lines of debris, varying colors — where the ice had flowed from its fastnesses at the poles and the mountain peaks. There was little cloud over the great ice sheets — merely wisps of cirrus, streaked by winds that seemed to tear perpetually around immense low-pressure systems squatting over the frozen poles.

  The ice covered most of Canada, and a great tongue of it extended far into the American Midwest, reaching farther south than the Great Lakes — or where the lakes used to be. Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, and the other cities were all gone now, drowned. The familiar lobed shapes of the Great Lakes themselves had been overwhelmed by a new, glimmering ocean that stretched a thousand kilometers inland from the eastern seaboard. And to the west, a ribbon of water stretched up from Puget Sound toward Alaska. The land itself was crushed down under the weight of the ice, and seawater had flowed eagerly into the shallow depressions so formed.

  Even to the south of the ice line, the land was grievously damaged. Desert stretched from Oregon through Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa — a belt of immense, rippled sand dunes. It was a place of violent winds, for heavy, cold air poured off the ice over the exposed land, and she saw giant dust storms that persisted for days. At night she saw lights glimmer in the vast expanse, flickering: just campfires lit by descendants of midwestern Americans who must be reduced to living like Bedouins in that great cold desert.

  South of the ice, Earth at first glance looked as temperate and habitable as it had always done. She could see green in the tropical areas, coral reefs, ships plying to and fro through warm, ice-free seas. But nowhere was unaffected. The great rain forests of equatorial Africa and the Amazon Basin had shrunk back into isolated pockets, surrounded by swathes of what looked like grasslands. Conversely, the Sahara seemed to be turning green. Even the shapes of the continents had changed as glistening sheets of continental shelves were exposed by the falling sea level.

  In the southern United States there were still cities: great misty-gray urban sprawls around the coasts and along the river valleys, from Baja California, along the Mexican border, the Gulf of Mexico, to Florida. But New Orleans seemed to be burning continually, great fires blocks wide sending up black smoke plumes that streaked out over hundreds of kilometers. Likewise, there appeared to be a small war raging around Orlando; she made out what looked like tank tracks, frequent explosions that lit up the night.

  It was impossible to gather direct news. Presumably all communication was carried out by land lines or with point-to-point modulated lasers; belatedly, it seemed, the inhabitants of Earth had learned the wisdom of not broadcasting their business to the stars. It did appear, though, that some of these wars had been blazing since before the return of the ice.

  The most savage conflict appeared to be occurring in northern Africa, where the population of Eurasia — hundreds of millions — had tried to drain into the southern European countries and the new North African grasslands. But any orderly relocation had long broken down. Huge black craters scarred the Sahara, some of them glimmering as if with puddles of glass; and once she made out the telltale shape of a mushroom cloud, rising like a perfect toy from an ochre African horizon.

  And — more sinister still — she could see new forms on Earth’s long-suffering hide. They were great sprawling structures, spiderlike, silvery: not like human cities, more centrally organized, the pieces interconnected, like single buildings spanning tens of kilometers. These were Gaijin colonies. There were several of them in the ice-free middle latitudes, with no sign of human occupancy nearby. There were even a handful on the ice sheets themselves, places no human could survive. Nobody knew what the Gaijin were doing in there.

  She felt a cold fury. Couldn’t the Gaijin have done something to stop this, to halt the collapse of her world? If not, why the hell were they here?

  Ben said he wanted to go to Earth, to Australia, one last time before he left forever. Madeleine quailed at the idea. That’s not my planet anymore. But she didn’t want to oppose Ben’s complex impulse.

  An automated ground-to-orbit shuttle came climbing up to meet them. Nemoto had found someone who had agreed to host them, if briefly.

  They skimmed through morning light toward Australia, approaching from the south. They received no calls for identification; there was no attempt at traffic control, nothing from the ground. It was like approaching an uninhabited planet.

  They drifted over Sydney. The city was still populated, its suburbs scarred by conflict, but there was no harbor; Sydney had been left beached in the country’s drying interior. The rust-red deserts of the center appeared still more desiccated than before. But she saw no signs of humanity. Alice Springs, for example, was burned out, a husk; nothing moved there.

  They skimmed low over the great geological features south of the Alice, Ayers Rock and the Olgas. These were uncompromising lumps of hard, ancient sandstone protruding from the flat desert, extensively carved by megayears of water flows. To the Aborigines, nomads on this unforgiving tabletop landscape, these formations must have been as striking as the medieval cathedrals that had loomed over Europe. And so the Aborigines had made them places of totemic and religious significance, spinning Dreamtime stories from cracks and folds until the rocks became a kind of mythic cinema, frozen in geological time. It had been a triumph of the imagination, she supposed, in a land like a sensory deprivation tank.

  This had briefly been a center for tourism. The tourists were long gone now, the Western influence vanished in an instant, a dream of fat and affluence. But the Aborigines had remained. From the air she saw slim figures moving slowly over the landscape, round faces turned up to her vehicle, all as it had been for twelve thousand years — just as Ben had once foreseen, she remembered.

  Ben peered from his window, silent, withdrawn.

  Perhaps a hundred kilometers south of the Alice, they saw a structure of bright blue, a dot in the desert. A tent.

  The shuttle dipped, fell like a brick, and skidded to a halt half a ki
lometer distant from the tent.

  Nobody came to meet them. After a few minutes they climbed down to the ground and walked toward the tent.

  The land was an immense orange-red table, the sky a sheet of washed-out blue. There was utter silence here: no bird song, no insects. The Sun was high, ferocious, the heat tremendous and dry. They walked cautiously, unused to Earth’s heavy gravity.

  Madeleine felt overwhelmed. Save for a few space walks, it was the first time she had been out of a cramped hab module, out in a landscape, for years.

  Ben touched her arm. She stopped. Through the heat haze of the horizon, something moved, stately, silent.

  “It looks like a lizard,” she whispered. “A komodo dragon, maybe. But—”

  “But it’s immense.”

  “Another Gaijin experiment, you think?”

  “I think we ought to keep still,” he said.

  The lizard, a Mesozoic nightmare, paused for long seconds, perhaps a minute, a tongue the length of a whip lashing out at something unseen. Then it moved on, turning away from the humans.

  They hurried on.

  Their host was a woman: an American, small, compact, stern-faced, her thick black hair tied back severely behind her head. She was dressed in a silvery coverall. She was called Carole Lerner.

  Lerner looked them up and down contemptuously. “Nemoto told me to expect you. She didn’t tell me you were two babes in the wood.” She eyed them with hard suspicion. “I have a hoard.”

  Ben frowned. “What?”

  Lerner said. “I’m not about to tell you where. If I die my caches will self-destruct.”

  Madeleine understood quickly. Medicine had collapsed, along with everything else, when the ice had come. So no more antiaging treatments. Such supplies had become the most precious items on the planet. She held up her hands. “We’re no threat to you, Carole.”

  Lerner kept watching them.

  At last, sternly, she brought them into the tent, which was blessedly cool, the air moist. She dug out a couple of coveralls, indicated they should put them on. “These are priceless. Literally. Therm-aware clothing, all but indestructible. Nobody makes them anymore. People hand them down like heirlooms, mother to child. Be careful with them.”

  “We will,” Madeleine promised.

  The tent had no partitions. Ben shrugged, stripped naked, and climbed into his coverall. Madeleine followed suit.

  Lerner began to boil water for a drink, and she gave them food: a rehydrated soup, its flavor unidentifiable. She looked about sixty. She was in fact much older than that. She turned out to be the Carole Lerner, the woman who had — following another project of Nemoto’s — descended into the clouds of Venus and become the first, and only, human to set foot there.

  Ben glanced around, at piles of rock samples, data discs, a few old-fashioned paper books, heavily thumbed, their pages dusty and yellowed.

  “My work,” Lerner growled, watching him. “I’m a geologist. No previous generation has lived through the onset of an Ice Age.”

  “Are there still journals, science institutes, universities?” Ben asked.

  “Not on Earth,” Lerner said, scowling. “I’m caching my samples and notes. Buried deep enough so the animals can’t get ’em. And I post my results and interpretation to the Moon, Mars.” She eyed Madeleine, hostile. “I know what you’re thinking. I’m some old nut, an obsessive. Science doesn’t matter anymore. You star travelers make me sick. You hop and skip through history, and you don’t see a damn thing. I’ll tell you this. The Gaijin work on long time scales. We’re mayflies to them. And that’s why science matters now. More than ever. So we can stay in the game.”

  Madeleine raised her hands. “I didn’t…”

  But Lerner had turned her attention to her soup, her anger subsiding. Ben touched Madeleine’s arm, and she fell silent.

  This is a woman, she thought, who has spent a long time alone.

  Lerner had a small car, just a bubble of plastic on a light frame, powered by batteries kept topped up by a big solar-cell array, and with a gigantic tank of water strapped to its roof. The next day she piled them in and drove them west.

  After a couple of hours they reached an area that seemed a little less arid. Madeleine saw green vegetation, trees, tufts of grass, birds wheeling. They came to a shallow creek, dry, that Lerner turned to follow. They passed what appeared to be an abandoned farm, burned out.

  They climbed a shallow rise, and Lerner slowed the car, let it run forward almost noiselessly. Finally, as they neared the crest, she cut the engine and let the car’s momentum carry it forward in silence.

  As they went over the rise, the land opened up before Madeleine.

  There was water, a great calm blue pool of it, stretching halfway to the horizon, utterly unexpected in this dry old place. She could actually smell the water. Her soul felt immediately lifted, some primitive instinct responding.

  And it took a full minute of looking, of letting her eyes become accustomed to the landscape, before she could see the animals.

  There was a herd of what looked like rhinoceros, lumbering cylinders of flesh, jostling clumsily at the water’s edge. But they had no horns. One of them raised a massive head in which small black eyes were embedded like studs. It was quite spectacularly ugly. She saw that it had small, oddly human feet; it trod delicately.

  “Diprotodons,” Lerner murmured. “Very common now.”

  Madeleine made out kangaroolike creatures of all sizes — bizarre, overblown animals, some so huge it seemed they could barely lift themselves off the ground; but jump they did, in clumsy lollops. There were creatures like ground sloth that Lerner said were a variety of giant wombat.

  And there were predators. Madeleine saw packs of wolf-sized animals warily circling the grazing, drinking herbivores. Some resembled dogs, some cats.

  “It’s the same elsewhere,” Lerner said. “As the ice spreads, the grasslands and forests of the temperate climes are retreating, to be replaced by tundra, steppe, spruce forests.”

  “Places these reconstructed creatures can survive,” Ben said.

  “Yes. But the Gaijin aren’t responsible for everything. In Asia there are reindeer, musk oxen, horses, bison. In North America, the wolves and bears and even the mountain lions are making a recovery.” She smiled again. “But in the valley of the Thames, I’ve heard, there are woolly mammoths… Now that I’d like to see.”

  They sat for long hours watching antique herbivores feed.

  They drove on. They drove for hours.

  It was only after they had returned to Lerner’s camp, with the shuttle parked patiently by, that Madeleine realized she hadn’t seen a single human being, not one, nor any sign of recent human habitation, all day.

  They stayed three days. Gradually Lerner seemed to learn to tolerate them.

  At the end of the last day, Lerner made them a final meal. As the Sun sank to the horizon, they sat sipping recycled water in the shade of Lerner’s tent.

  They swapped sea stories. Lerner told them about Venus. In return, they told her of the Chaera, huddling in the dismal glow of a black hole. And they talked of the changes that had come over humanity.

  “There were a lot of words,” Lerner said sourly. “Refugee, relocate, discontinuity, famine, disease, war. There was death on a scale we haven’t seen since the twentieth century. And people keep right on being born. You know what the average age of humans is now?”

  “What?”

  “Fifteen years old. Just fifteen. To most people on the planet this is normal.” She waved a hand, indicating the depopulated town, the ice-transformed climate, the strange reconstructed animals, the wispy flower-ships that crossed the sky above. “We’re in the middle of a fucking epochal catastrophe here, and people have forgotten.” She spat in the dirt and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  Ben leaned forward. “Carole. Do you think Nemoto is right? That the Gaijin are trying to destroy us?”

  Lerner squinted. “I don’t
think so. But they don’t want to save us either. They are… studying us.”

  “What are they trying to find out?”

  “Beats me. But then, they probably wouldn’t understand what I’m trying to find out.”

  After a time, Lerner went out to fetch more drink.

  In Ben’s arms, Madeleine murmured, “We humans don’t seem to age very well, do we?”

  “No.”

  But then, she thought, humans aren’t meant to live so long. Maybe the Gaijin are used to this perspective. We aren’t. And the feeling of helplessness is crushing. No wonder Lerner is an obsessive, Nemoto a recluse.

  Ben was silent.

  “You’re thinking about Lena,” she said. “Are you frightened?”

  “Why should I be frightened?”

  “A hundred years is a long time,” Madeleine said gently.

  “But we are yirritja and dhuwa,” he said. “We are matched.”

  She hesitated. “And us?”

  He just smiled, absently.

  Too hot, she peered up at the sky. There was a lot of dust suspended in the air, obscuring many of the stars, and the Moon was almost full, gray splashed with virulent green. Nevertheless, she could see flower-ships swooping easily across the sky. Alien ships, orbiting Earth, unremarked.

  And beyond the ships, she saw flickers among the stars. In the direction of the great constellation of Orion, for instance. Sparks, bursts. As if the stars were flaring, exploding. She’d noticed this before, found no explanation. It was strange, chilling. The sky wasn’t supposed to change.

  Clearly, something was headed this way. Something that spanned the stars, a wave front of colonizing aliens, perhaps.

  “I don’t like it here,” she said.

  “You mean Australia?”

  “No. The planet. The sky. It isn’t ours anymore.”

  “If it ever was.”

  I’m frightened of the sky, Madeleine thought. But I can’t run away again. I’m involved — just as Nemoto intended.