Space m-2

by Stephen Baxter

  The only light came from the flames of rush torches, flickering in that downward breeze, and Malenfant’s impressions built up slowly.

  He made out a large heap of ore, crushed to powder, contained within a rough open chamber hollowed out of the stone. Maybe that ore was the yellow-cake de Bonneville had talked about. Long spears of what appeared to be charcoal — like scorched tree trunks — stuck out of the heap from all sides and above. Water was carried in channels in the walls and pipes of clay, and poured into the heart of the heap. He guessed the heap contained a hundred tons of yellow-cake; there were at least forty charred trunks protruding from it.

  The chamber was full of people.

  There were a lot of tall Uprights, many squat habilines, and some Waganda: men, women, and children who limped doggedly through the darkness, intense heat, and live steam, serving the heap as if it were some ugly god. They hauled at the charcoal trunks, drawing them from the yellow-cake, or thrust them deeper inside. Or else they hauled simple wheelbarrows of the yellow-cake powder to and from the heap, continually replenishing it. Their illness was obvious, even from here. Peering down from far above, it was like looking over some grotesque anthill, alive with motion.

  The heap was intensely hot — Malenfant could feel its heat burning his face — and the water emerged from the base of the heap as steam, which roared away through a further series of pipes. There was a lot of leakage, though, and live steam wreathed the heap’s ugly contours.

  The principle was obvious. The heap was an energy source. The steam produced by the heap must, by means of simple pumps and other hydraulic devices, power the various gadgets he’d witnessed: Mtesa’s ascending throne, the fountains. Maybe the water that passed through the system was itself pumped up from some deeper water table by the motive power of the steam.

  There had to be a lot of surplus energy, though.

  And now he made out a different figure, emerging from some deeper chamber at the base of the pit. It was a woman. She looked like a cross between a habiline and an Upright: big frame, thick neck, head thrust forward. She was wearing a suit, of some translucent plastic, that enclosed her body, hands, and head. She was familiar to him, from a hundred TV shows and school-book reconstructions. She was Neandertal: another of humanity’s lost cousins.

  Holy shit, he thought.

  There was a flash of light from the hidden chamber, from some invisible source.

  It was blue, a shade he recognized.

  Neandertals, and pressure suits, and electric blue light. Unreasoning fear stabbed him.

  He got out of there as fast as he could.

  The next day Malenfant visited de Bonneville again. Malenfant brought him a small bottle of pombe; de Bonneville fell on this avidly, jealously hiding it from the other inmates of the ward. Malenfant wanted to ask about the Engine, but de Bonneville had his own tale to tell.

  “Listen, Malenfant. Let me tell you how I came to this pass. It started long before you arrived…”

  De Bonneville told him that a gift had arrived for Mtesa, the emperor, from Lukongeh, king of the neighboring Ukerewe. There had been five ivory tusks, fine iron wire, six white monkey skins, a canoe large enough for fifty crew — and Mazuri, an Upright girl, a comely virgin of fourteen, a wife suitable for the Kabaka.

  “Mtesa’s harem numbers five hundred. Mtesa has the pick of many lands; and many of the harem are, as I can testify, of the most extraordinary beauty. But of them all, Mazuri was the comeliest.”

  “I think I saw her in the palace. Mtesa likes her.”

  “She has—” De Bonneville waved his damaged hands in a decayed attempt at sensuality. “ — she has that animal quality of the Uprights. That intensity. When she looks you in the eyes, you see direct into her primeval soul. Do you know what I’m talking about, Malenfant?”

  “Yes. But I’m a hundred years old,” Malenfant said wistfully.

  “Mazuri was young, impetuous, impatient at her betrothal to Mtesa — a much older man, and lacking the vigor of her own kind…”

  De Bonneville fell silent, in a diseased reverie.

  “Tell me about the Engine.”

  “The Waganda say the yellow-cake is suffused with the Breath of Kimera,” de Bonneville said, dismissive. “It is the Breath that supplies the heat. But a given portion of yellow-cake is eventually exhausted of its Breath, and we must extract and replace the cake, continually.”

  “What about the tree trunks?”

  “We must insert and extract the trunks, according to the instructions of—” He quoted a term Malenfant didn’t know, evidently a sort of foreman. “The Breath is invisible and too rapid to have much effect — except on the human body, apparently, which it ravages! The tree trunks are inserted to slow down the Breath from the heart of the heap. Do you see? Then it gets to work on the rest of the yellow-cake. And that is, in turn, encouraged to produce its own Breath in response. It’s like a cascade, you see. But the Waganda can control this, by withdrawing their charred trunks; this has the effect of allowing the Breath to speed up, and escape the heap harmlessly…”

  A cascade, yes, Malenfant thought. A chain reaction.

  “And the water? What’s that for?”

  “The emission of the Breath is associated with great heat — which is the point of the Engine. Water flows through the hillside, through the engine. The water is a cooling agent, which carries off this heat before any damage is done to the Engine. And the heat, of course, turns the water to steam, which in turn is harnessed to drive Mtesa’s various toy devices and fripperies…” Malenfant heard how de Bonneville’s voice slowed as he said that, as if some new idea was coming to him.

  To Malenfant, it all made sense.

  Twentieth-century nuclear-fission piles had been simple devices. They were just heaps of a radioactive material, such as uranium, into which reaction-controlling moderators, for example carbon rods, were thrust. Technical complexity only came if you cared about human safety: shields, robot devices to control the moderators, a waste-extraction process, and so forth. If you didn’t care about wasting human life, a reactor could be made much more simply.

  With a little instruction, a tribe of Neandertals could operate a nuclear reactor. A bunch of children could. Especially if you didn’t care about safety.

  “It’s the Breath that makes you ill,” he said.

  “Indeed.”

  “Why not others? Why not Mtesa himself?”

  “The Breath is contained by the hundreds of meters of rock within which the Engine is housed. But, though it is not spoken of, there is much illness among the general population; and there are elaborate taboos about associating too closely with products of the Engine — you shouldn’t drink the water that has circulated through the yellow-cake, for instance.”

  Malenfant remembered how Nemoto had warned him against inserting his hands in Mtesa’s fountains. He felt, now, a renewed itching in his own damaged skin.

  Shit, he thought. I must have taken a dose myself.

  De Bonneville waved his gnarled hands. “The Engine is clearly very ancient, Malenfant. The Waganda’s legend says it was constructed by an old king, seventeen generations before our own glorious Mtesa. It seems to me the Waganda have learned how to control their crude device, not by proceeding from a body of established knowledge as we might have done, but by trial and error over generations — and expensive trial and error at that. Expensive in human life, I mean!” But he was tiring, and losing interest. “Let me tell you of Mazuri…”

  “You screwed the king’s favorite wife. You asshole, de Bonneville.”

  “I tried to put her aside, when I left Rubaga to meet you. But when I returned, full of pombe and the excitement of the hunt, there she was… Ah, Malenfant, those eyes, that skin, that mouth…”

  He was found out. Mtesa’s fury had been incandescent. De Bonneville was expelled from his position in court — dragged, by a rope around his neck, by Mtesa’s enthusiastic Lords of the Cord, and subjected to fifty blows with
a stick, a punishment severe enough to lame him — and then banished to the lowliest position of Rubaga society: to work in the yellow-cake Engines, buried deep within the hillside.

  De Bonneville grasped Malenfant’s arm with his ruined, clawlike hands. “It was all a trap, Malenfant. One accumulates enemies so easily in such a place as this! And I… I was always impetuous rather than careful… I was led into a trap, and I have been destroyed! Seeing you now, a traveler, makes me understand anew how much has been robbed from me by these savages of the future. But—”

  “Yes?”

  His blue eyes gleamed in his blackened ruin of a face. “But de Bonneville shall have his revenge, Malenfant. Oh, yes! His determination is sweet and pure…”

  He confronted Nemoto.

  “Nemoto, you know what the Engine is, don’t you? It’s a nuclear pile. A fucking nuclear pile.”

  Nemoto shrugged. “It’s just a heap. Maybe a hundred tons of ‘yellow-cake’ — which is a uranium ore — with burned tree stumps used as graphite moderators. It was a geological accident: yellow-cake seams inside this hollow mountain, and some natural water stream running over the pile, cooling it…”

  Natural nuclear reactors had formed in various places around the planet, where the geological conditions had been right. What was needed was a concentration of uranium ore, and then some kind of moderator. The function of the moderator was to slow down the neutrons, the heavy particles emitted by decaying uranium atoms. A slowed-down neutron would impact with another atomic nucleus and make that decay, and the neutron products of that event would initiate more decays — on and on, in the cascade of collapsing nuclei the physicists called a chain reaction.

  Under Rubaga’s mountain, the action of water, over billions of years, had washed uranium ore from the rock and caused it to collect in seams at the bottom of a shallow sea. The uranium had then been overlaid by inert sand, and the rocks compressed and uplifted by tectonic forces, the uranium further concentrated by the slow rusting of surrounding rocks in the air. Thus had been created seams of uranium, great lenticular deposits, two or three meters thick and perhaps ten times as wide, under their feet, right here.

  At first there had been no chain reaction. But then water and organic matter, seeping into cracks in the uranium seams, had served as primitive moderators, slowing the neutrons down sufficiently for the reaction process to start.

  “The reaction probably started as a series of scattered fires in concentrations of the uranium ore,” Nemoto whispered. “Then it spread to less rich areas nearby. It was self-controlling; as the water was boiled by the reaction’s heat it would be forced out of the rock — and the reaction would be dampened, until more water seeped back from the surface layers above, and the reaction could begin again.” She smiled thinly. “And that is what the Neandertal community here discovered. It took them a couple of centuries, but they learned to tinker with the process, inserting burned wood — graphite — as secondary moderators…”

  The workers in the pile maintained it with their bare hands. At times the workers had to haul heaps of yellow-cake from one part of the pile to another; or they mixed the yellow-cake, by hand, with other moderator compounds; or they cleared out the coolant-water pipes — the small fingers of children were well adapted for that particular chore. And as well as the regular operation of the pile, they had to cope with accidents, types of which Nemoto listed in the local language: leakages, spill-outs, crumbles, hot beds, slaps.

  “Why did the Neandertals need to do this?”

  “Because of us: Homo Sapiens, Malenfant. For a while, after the ice, the Earth was empty. The Gaijin implanted their little pockets of reconstructed prehumans. But then along we came, and it all unraveled as it had before, thirty or forty thousand years ago. You’ve seen how the locals treat the Uprights, the habilines.”

  “Yes.”

  “So it was with the Neandertals… except here. The Neandertals had their uranium, their radioactivity. They laced water supplies. They tipped their spears… It helped keep back the humans, until a smart human leader — a predecessor of Mtesa — came along and struck a deal.”

  “So Mtesa supplies human slaves to the Neandertals. To maintain the pile.”

  “Essentially. Makes you think, doesn’t it, Malenfant? If only the true Neandertals, of our own deep past, had discovered such a resource, perhaps they could have kept us at bay, survived into modern times — I mean, our times.”

  Malenfant frowned. “It doesn’t sound too stable. A nuclear pile isn’t much of a weapon… You’d think that Mtesa’s soldiers could overwhelm the Neandertals, take what they wanted, drive them out. And the radioactivity — we’re all living on top of a raw nuke pile, here. Even those who don’t have to go work in that hole in the ground are going to suffer contamination.”

  Nemoto grimaced. “You are not living in Clear Lake now, Malenfant. These people accept things we wouldn’t have. The Waganda have built a stable social arrangement around their Engine. They keep their bloodlines reasonably pure by stigmatizing any individual showing signs of mutation or radiation sickness. It’s a kind of symbiosis. The Waganda use the Engine’s energy. But the Engine maintains itself by poisoning a proportion of the Waganda population. Mostly they use Uprights and habilines anyhow; among the humans, only Mtesa’s victims finish up in the Engine.”

  Malenfant said, “Those toys of Mtesa’s — the fountains and the Caesar’s Palace trick throne — can’t absorb more than a few percent of the pile’s energy… The rest of it runs that Saddle Point gateway. Doesn’t it, Nemoto? And that is the true purpose of this place. This is some huge Gaijin project. ”

  “I am no tourist guide, Reid Malenfant. I don’t know anything.” She looked away from him. “Now leave me alone.”

  Malenfant had trouble sleeping. He felt ill, and at times he felt overwhelmed by fear.

  He’d glimpsed a Saddle Point gateway, buried deep in this African hillside. That was where all the power went. And that downward breeze had been air passing through the gateway, a leak in the fabric of the world.

  He felt drawn to the gateway, as if by some gravitational field.

  I don’t want this, he thought. I just wanted to run home. But I brought myself here. I chose to come to this place, kept digging until I found this, the center of it all. A way back into the game. Just like Nemoto.

  A way to fulfill whatever purpose the Gaijin seemed to have for him.

  I can’t do it. Not again. I just want to be left alone. I don’t have to follow this path, to do anything.

  But the logic of his life seemed to say otherwise.

  Spare me, he thought; and he wished he believed in a god to receive his prayers.

  Malenfant was woken, rudely, by a shuddering of his pallet. His eyes snapped open to darkness, and he sucked in hot African air. For a second he thought he was in orbit: a blowout in the shuttle orbiter, a micrometeorite that had smashed through Number Two Window…

  He was alone in his villa, and the grass roof was intact. He pushed off his cover and tried to stand.

  The ground shook again, and there was a deep, subterranean groaning, a roar of stressed rock. A quake, then?

  Through the glassless windows of the villa, a new light broke. He saw a glow, red-white and formless, that erupted in a gout of fire over the rooftops of Rubaga. Grass huts ignited as tongues of glowing earth came licking back to ignite the flimsy constructions. He heard screaming, the patter of bare feet running.

  That fount of flame came from the heart of the town, Malenfant saw immediately — from the well of Kimera, from the pit of that monstrous Engine.

  De Bonneville. It had to be. In some way, he’d carried out his vague threat.

  The shuddering subsided, and Malenfant was able to stand. He pulled on his biocomposite coverall and stepped out of the villa.

  All of Rubaga’s populace appeared to be out in the narrow streets: courtiers, peasants, courtesans, and chiefs, all running in terror. The big gates of the capital’s surro
unding cane fence had been thrown open, and Malenfant could see how the great avenues were already thronged with people, running off into the countryside’s green darkness.

  Malenfant set off through the capital toward the center of the plateau. He had to push his way through the panicking hordes of Waganda, who fled past him like wraiths of smoke.

  By the time he’d reached the dead heart of the hilltop, even the great grass palace of Mtesa was alight.

  Malenfant hurried into the central plain, away from the scorching huts. He reached the blighted zone with relief; for the first time in many minutes, he could draw a full breath.

  The fire of Kimera loomed out of the earth before Malenfant, huge and angry and deadly; and all around the rim of the plain he saw the glow of Rubaga’s burning huts. Christ, he was in the middle of a miniature Chernobyl. And it scared the shit out of him to think that there was nobody here, nobody, who understood what was going on, nobody at the controls.

  He walked on, his feet heavy, his chest and face scorching in the growing heat. His hands were burned and tingling, and the light of the fire was brilliant before him. He didn’t see how he could get any closer. He began to circle the blaze. He stumbled frequently, and his eyes were sore and dry.

  I am, he thought, too fucking old for this.

  Then he saw what looked like a fallen animal, inert on the ground. Malenfant braved the fire, sheltering his head with his arms, and approached.

  It was de Bonneville. He lay facedown in the barren earth of Rubaga. Malenfant could see, from scrabbles in the dirt, that he had walked away from the pit until he could walk no more, then crawled, and at last had dragged himself by his broken fingertips across the ground.

  Malenfant knelt down and slid his arms beneath the deformed torso. De Bonneville was disconcertingly light, like a child, and Malenfant was able to turn him over and lay that balloonlike head on his lap.