Space m-2

by Stephen Baxter

  I have to go to Triton.

  To do what? Blindly follow Nemoto’s latest insane scheme?

  She smiled inwardly. Maybe I’ll think of something when we get there.

  Lerner brought back a bottle of some kind of hooch; it tasted like fortified wine.

  She smiled at them coldly. “I heard that in Spain and France people have gone back to the caves, where the art still survives from the last Ice Age. And they are adding new layers of painting, of the animals they see around them. Maybe it was all a dream, do you think? The warm period, the interglacial, our civilization. Maybe all that matters is the ice, and the cave.”

  As the light failed, and the inhabited Moon brightened, they drank a series of toasts: to Venus, to the Chaera, to Earth, to the ice.

  Chapter 22

  Triton Dreamtime

  Even before Neptune showed a disc, Madeleine could see that it was blue, and Triton white. Blue planet, white moon, swimming mistily out of the huge slow-moving dark like exotic deep-sea fish.

  Neptune swelled into a disc, made almost full by the pinpoint Sun behind her. The looming planet was dim, at first just a faintly blue hole against the stars, then gradually, as her eyes dark-adapted, filling with misty detail, becoming a ball of subtle blue and violet, visibly structured. Bands of darker blue girdled the planet, following lines of latitude. There were big storm systems, swirling knots like Jupiter’s red spot. And there were thin stripes of white, higher clouds far above the blue, clouds that formed and dissipated within a few hours, surprisingly rapidly. Sometimes, when the angle of the Sun was right, she could see those high clouds casting shadows on the deeper layers beneath.

  She was a long way from home.

  It was impossible even to grasp the immensities of scale here. The Sun showed as no more than an intense star, bright enough to cast shadows, gray but razor sharp. The Sun’s gravity grip was so loosened that Neptune took more than a hundred times as long as Earth to complete a single orbit. And Neptune was surrounded by emptiness more than ten times wider than Earth’s orbit around the Sun — an emptiness, indeed, that could have contained the whole of Jupiter’s orbit.

  Out here, in the stillness and cold and dark, the worlds that had spawned were not like Earth. Here the planets had grown immense, misty, stuffed with light elements like hydrogen and helium that had boiled away from the hot, busy inner worlds. So Neptune’s rocky core was buried beneath thick layers of opaque gas; the blue was of methane, not water; there were no continents or ice caps here.

  But she had not expected that Neptune would be so stunningly Earthlike. She felt tugs of nostalgic longing; for Earth itself, of course, was no longer blue, but a diseased white: the white of encroaching ice.

  On the last day of its long flight, Gurrutu, engines blazing, swept around the limb of Neptune. The maneuver occurred in complete silence, and as Madeleine watched the huge world swim past her, it was as if she were flying through some cold, dark, gigantic cathedral.

  And there was Triton, already bright and growing brighter, a pink-white pearl floating in emptiness.

  The final approach to Triton was a challenge for the navigation routines. Triton, uniquely among the Solar System’s larger moons, orbited Neptune in a retrograde manner, opposite to the spin of Neptune itself. And Triton’s orbit was severely pitched up, some twenty degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic. It was thought these eccentricities of Triton were a relic of its peculiar origin: It had once been an independent body, like Pluto, but had been captured by Neptune, perhaps by impact with another moon or by grazing Neptune’s atmosphere, a catastrophic event that had resulted in global melting before the moon had learned to endure its entrapment.

  Gurrutu entered a looping elliptical orbit. Madeleine watched as a surface of crumpled, pink-streaked water ice rolled beneath the craft. Triton’s misty twilight was marked by a single, yellow, man-made beacon: at the site of Kasyapa Township, home to Ben Roach’s people. They were not alone in Triton orbit. Many emigrant transport ships, of the same design as Gurrutu, still circled here. Others had been driven into the surface, to be broken up for raw materials.

  After a day, a small shuttle came up to meet them. Triton’s atmosphere, a wisp of nitrogen laced with hydrocarbons, was too thin to support any kind of aircraft; so the shuttle would descend from orbit standing on its rockets, as Apollo astronauts had once landed on the Moon.

  As the lander swiveled, the icy ground opened out before her. It was white, laced with pink and, here and there, darker streaks, like wind-blown dust. It was crowded with detail, she saw, with ridges and clefts and pits in the ice, as if the skin of the planet had shriveled in some impossible heat.

  The lander tipped up and fell sharply, entering the last phase of its descent routine. The horizon flattened out quickly, and detail exploded at her. She was descending into a region crisscrossed by shallow ridges, a parquetry of planes and pits in the ice. But there was evidence of human activity: two long straight furrows cut across the random geologic features, a pair of roadways as straight as any Roman road, neatly melted into the ice. And at their terminus, set at the center of one of the walled ice pits, she saw a small octagonal pad of what looked like concrete, a cluster of silvery tanks and other buildings nearby.

  The final landing was gentle. Madeleine and Ben suited up and climbed out of the lander.

  The plain around them was still, the fuel tanks and crude surface buildings pale and silent. Under her boots there was a crunch of frost overlaying a harder, whiter rock.

  Not rock, she told herself. This was ice, water ice. She scraped at the ice with her boot. It was impenetrable, unyielding, and she failed to mark its surface; it was like a hard, compacted stone. Here, in the intense cold, ice played the part of silicate rocks on Earth. There was an elusive pink stain about the ice, almost too faint to see. Some kind of sunlight-processed organics, perhaps.

  She took a step forward, two. She floated and hopped, moonwalk-style. In fact, she knew, Triton’s gravity was little more than half the strength of the Moon’s. But she was a big clumsy human with a poor gravity sense; to her body, Triton and Moon were both lumped together in a catch-all category called “weak gravity.”

  She looked up, into a black sky. There was no sense of air above her, no scattering of the sunlight: only a deep, starry sky, as if seen from the high desert — but with a dominant bright pinprick at the center of it. The Sun was bright enough to cast shadows, but it was not like authentic sunlight, she thought, more like illumination by a very bright planet, like Venus. The land was a plain of pale white, delicate, a land of midnight stillness, its planes and folds seeming gauzy in the thin light. It seemed a creation of smoke or mist, not of rock-solid ice.

  Now she tipped back and peered overhead, where Neptune hung in the sky. The planet appeared as large as fifteen of Earth’s full Moons, strung across the sky together. It was half-full, gaunt, almost spectral.

  From the corner of her eye she saw movement: flakes of pure white, sparsely descending around her.

  “Snow, on Triton?”

  “I think it’s nitrogen,” Ben said.

  Madeleine tried to catch a flake of nitrogen snow on her glove. She wondered how the crystals would differ from the water-ice snow of Earth. But the flakes were too elusive, too sparse, and they were soon gone.

  Ben tapped her shoulder and pointed to another corner of the sky, closer to the horizon. There was what looked like a star, perhaps surrounded by a diffuse disc of light.

  It was a Gaijin engineering convoy: alien ships, built of asteroid rock and ice, en route to Triton.

  The refugee Yolgnu had established their home in the rim wall of a shallow, circular depression called Kasyapa Cavus. This was on the eastern edge of Bubembe Regio, a region of so-called cantaloupe terrain, the complex, parquetlike landscape of the type Madeleine had noticed during the landing. The Cavus had a smooth, bowl-like floor, easy to traverse. There were tractors here, whose big, gauzy, balloon tires seemed to have made no i
mpression on the icy ground. Kasyapa Township was a system of branching caverns. The colonists had burrowed far into the ice-rock, ensuring that a thick layer of ice and spacecraft-hull metal shielded them from the radiation flux of Neptune’s magnetosphere and from the relic cosmic radiation of deep space.

  She was given a cabin, a crude cube dug into the ice. She moved her few personal belongings — book chips, a few clothes, virtuals of an X-ray burster and a black-hole accretion ring — into the cabin. Her things looked dowdy and old, out of place. The wall surface — Triton ice sealed and insulated by a clear plastic — was smooth and hard under Madeleine’s hand. After the cool spaces of the Neptune system, she found Kasyapa immediately claustrophobic.

  Ben Roach was swallowed up by the family he had left behind, two whole new generations of nephews and nieces and grand-nephews and grand-nieces.

  And here, of course, was Lena Roach. She had become a small, precise woman whose silences suggested great depths. She hadn’t seen her husband, Ben, for a hundred of her years, for most of her long life. But she had waited for him, built a home in the most unforgiving of environments.

  It was immediately clear she still loved Ben, and he lovedher, despite the gulfs of time that separated them. Madeleine watched their calm, deep reunion with awe and envy. It was like grandmother greeting grandson, like wife meeting husband, complex, multilayered.

  She explored fitfully, moodily.

  It was obvious to her that the colony was failing.

  The people were thin, their skins pale. Malnourished, they were specters in the dim sunlight. People moved slowly, despite the welcoming gentleness of the gravity. Energy was something to be conserved. There was an atmosphere of a prison here. These had once been people of openness, of the endless desert, she reminded herself. Now they were confined here, inside this icy warren. She thought that must be hurting them, perhaps on a level they didn’t appreciate themselves.

  There were few children.

  The people of Kasyapa were welcoming, but she found they were locked into tight family groups. She would always be an outsider here.

  Madeleine spent a lot of time alone, cooped up in her ice-walled box. She engaged in peculiar time-delayed conversations with Nemoto; with a minimum of ten hours between comment and reply, it was more like receiving mail. Still, they spoke. And gradually Nemoto revealed the deeper purpose she had concocted for Madeleine.

  “These people are starving,” Nemoto whispered. “And yet they are sitting on a frozen ocean…”

  Triton was, Nemoto told her, probably the Solar System’s most remote significant and accessible cache of water, within the Kuiper Belt anyhow. She said that Robert Goddard, the American rocketry pioneer, had proposed — in a paper called “The Last Migration” — that Triton could be used as an outfitting and launching post for interstellar expeditions. “That was in 1927,” Nemoto said.

  “Goddard was a farsighted guy,” Madeleine murmured.

  “…Even if he got it wrong,” Nemoto was saying — had said, ten hours earlier. “Even if, as it turns out, Triton will be used as a staging post for expeditions from the stars. And not used by us, but by ETs. The Gaijin.”

  But the ocean under Madeleine’s feet, tens of kilometers thick, was useless for the colonists as long as it was frozen hard as rock.

  “Imagine if we could melt that ocean,” Nemoto said, her face an expressionless mask.

  But how? The Sun was too remote. Of course the sunlight could be collected, by mirrors or lenses. But how big would such a mirror have to be? Thousands of kilometers wide, more? Such a project seemed absurd.

  “It’s not the way humans work,” Madeleine said gloomily. “Look at the colonists here, burrowing like ants. We’re small and weak. We have to take the worlds as they are given to us, not rebuild them.”

  Nemoto’s reply came many hours later. “And yet, that is exactly what we must do if we are to prevail. We are going to have to act more like Gaijin than humans.”

  Nemoto had a plan. It involved diverting a moon called Nereid, slamming it into Triton.

  Madeleine was immediately outraged. This was arrogance indeed.

  But she let Nemoto’s data finish downloading.

  It was a remarkable, bold scheme. The rocket engines that had brought the colonists here would now be used to divert a moon. The numbers added up. It could be done, Madeleine realized reluctantly. It would take a year, no more.

  It was also, Madeleine thought, quite insane. She pictured Nemoto, stranded centuries out of her time, isolated, skulking in corners of the Moon, concocting mad schemes to hurl outer-planet moons back and forth, an old woman fighting the alien invasion, single-handed.

  And yet, and yet…

  She looked inward. What is it I want?

  All her family, the people she had grown up with, were lost in the past, on a frozen world. She was rootless. And yet she had no pull to join this tight community, had felt no envy of Ben when Lena had recaptured him, on his arrival here. Her life had become a series of episodes, as she’d drifted through scenes of a more-or-less incomprehensible history. Was it even possible to sustain a consistent motivation — to find something to want?

  Yes, she realized. It isn’t necessary to be picaresque. Look at Nemoto. She still knows what she wants, the same as she always did, after all these years. Maybe the same applied to Reid Malenfant, wherever he was. And maybe that was why Madeleine was attracted to Nemoto’s projects — not for the worth of the work, but for Nemoto’s singular strength of mind.

  She went to discuss it with Ben. His first reaction was like hers.

  “What you’re proposing is barbaric,” Ben said. “You talk of smashing one moon into another. You will destroy both.”

  “It’s technically feasible. Nemoto’s numbers prove that a deflection of Nereid by the thruster systems from the orbiting transports would—”

  “I’m not talking about feasibility. Many things are feasible. That doesn’t make them right. Once Triton is changed, it is changed forever. Who knows what future, wiser generations might have made of these resources we expend so carelessly?”

  “But the Gaijin are on their way now.”

  “We wreck this world, or they do. Is that the choice you offer?”

  “Triton is ours to wreck, not theirs!”

  He considered. “I will concede your plan has one positive outcome,” he said at length.

  “What?”

  “We are barely surviving here. The Yolgnu. That much is obvious. Perhaps with what you intend—”

  She nodded. “It will work, Ben.”

  “There will be a lot of opposition. People have been living here for generations. This is their home. As it is.”

  “I know. It’s going to be hard for all of us.”

  “What will you do now?”

  She considered. She hadn’t thought it through that far. “We can send probes to Nereid,” she said. “Survey the emplacements of the thrust units, perhaps even initiate the work. Ben, those Gaijin are on their way, whatever we do. If we leave this too long we might not be able to do anything anyhow.” She squinted up at the ice roof, imagining the abandoned ships circling overhead. “We could even begin the deflection, start the thrusters. It will take a year of steady burning to set up the collision. But I’ll initiate nothing irrevocable until you get agreement from your people.”

  “You started out your career as a transporter of weapons,” he said sadly. “And you are still transporting weapons.”

  That irritated her. “Look, Triton is a lifeless planet. There is nothing here but humans, and what we brought.”

  He eyed her. “Are you sure?”

  After a couple of months, to Madeleine’s surprise, Lena Roach invited her to “go walkabout,” as she called it, to go see something more of Triton.

  Madeleine was a little suspicious. She remained the focus of the colony’s intense debate about its future; few people were so open with her that such offers didn’t come with strings.

>   She spoke to Ben.

  He laughed. “Well, you’re right. Everybody’s got a point of view. Lena has her opinion. But what harm can it do to go out and see some ice?”

  Madeleine thought it over for a day.

  The Nereid project had begun. Ben had loaned her Kasyapa engineers to detach the engine units from the transport hulks in orbit around Triton, reconfigure them for operation on Nereid, improvise systems to extract fuel from the substance of the moon. She had a small monitoring station set up in her ice cell that showed her, by telemetry and a visual feed, that sparse array of engines burning, twenty-four hours a day, consuming Nereid’s own material as fuel and reaction propellant, slowly, slowly pushing the battered moon out of its looping ellipse. It was good to have a project, to be able to immerse herself in engineering detail.

  But she would have a year to wait, even if Kasyapa’s great debate concluded in an acceptance of her program. Ben, torn between his lost family and the endless work of the colony, had little time to spend with her. There were few people here, nowhere to escape, little to do. She still spent much of her time alone, in her ice cell, immersed in virtuals, reading up on the dismal history she had skipped over.

  Getting out of here would be a good thing. She agreed to go along with Lena.

  So they climbed aboard a surface tractor, a big balloon-tire bubble.

  At first they drove in silence, the tractor bouncing gently. Madeleine felt as if she were floating, all but naked, above Triton’s icy ground. The sky was a velvet dome crowded with stars, and with that subtle, misty hull of Neptune riding at the zenith above their heads.

  Lena was a small, compact woman, her movements patient and precise. She had been just twenty when Ben had departed for the Saddle Point. Her age was over a hundred and twenty years old, but, thanks to rejuvenation treatments, she might have been forty. But she didn’t act forty, Madeleine thought; she acted old.