Space m-2

by Stephen Baxter

  There was little Gaijin traffic, just as virtual Nemoto had said.

  But she found signatures of unknown ships — solar-sail craft, they appeared to be, great fleets of them, a gigantic shell that surrounded the system. They were still out among the remote orbits of the comets for now, but they were converging, like a fist closing on the fat warmth of the inner system.

  Cracker fleets, come to disrupt the Sun.

  Earth seemed dead. The Moon was a fading blue, silent. There were knots of human activity in the asteroids, on Mars — and on Triton. And she found signs of refugee fleets, humans fleeing inward to the core of the system, to Mercury. But no ships arrived at or left remote Triton.

  When she understood that, she knew where she must go first.

  The Gaijin flower-ship sailed around Triton, its fusion light illuminating smooth plains of ice. It was a world covered by a chill ocean, like Earth’s Arctic, with not a scrap of solid land; but the thin ice crust was easily broken by the slow pulsing tides of this small moon, exposing great black leads of water that bubbled and steamed vigorously, trying to evaporate and fill up all of empty space.

  There were six human settlements.

  The settlements looked like clusters of bubbles on a pond, she thought. They were sprawling, irregular patches of modular construction — not rigid, clearly designed to float over the tides. Five settlements seemed abandoned — no lights, no power output, no sign of an internal temperature significantly above the background. Even the sixth looked largely shut down, with only a handful of lights at the center of the bubble-cluster, the outskirts abandoned to the cold.

  She radioed down requests for permission and instructions for landing. Only automated beacons responded. The answers came through in a human voice, but in a language she didn’t recognize. The translation suite embedded in her equipment couldn’t handle it either. She had the Gaijin put her down on what appeared to be a landing site, close to a system of air locks.

  Suited up, she stepped out of the conical Gaijin lander.

  Frost covered every surface. But it was gritty, hard as sand. Remember, Madeleine, water ice is rock on Triton.

  She walked carefully to the edge of the platform and looked out beyond the bounds of the bubble city. A point-source Sun cast wan, colorless light over smooth ice fields. Neptune, a faint, misty-blue ball, was rising over the horizon, making the light on the ice deep, subtle, complex, the shadows softly glowing. Pointlessly beautiful, she thought. She turned away.

  She found a door large enough for a suited human. She couldn’t understand the elaborate script instructions beside the control panel. But there was one clear device: a big red button. Press me. She hit it with her fist.

  Radio noise screeched. The door slid back, releasing a puff of air that crystallized immediately. She hurried into a small, brightly lit air lock. The door slammed shut, and the air lock immediately repressurized.

  She twisted off her helmet. Air sighed out of her suit, and her ears popped. The air was biting cold. It smelled stale.

  She palmed a panel that opened the inner door, and found herself looking into a long, unadorned corridor that twisted out of sight.

  Wandering through the corridors, carrying her helmet, she was eventually met by a woman. She was evidently a cop: spindly, fragile-looking after fifteen hundred years of adaptation to low gravity, but she carried a mean-looking device that could only be a handgun.

  The cop walked Madeleine, luggage pack and all, into the center of town. The cop’s skin was jet black. Madeleine’s translator software couldn’t interpret her language.

  Madeleine caught glimpses of abandoned corridors and some kind of complex, gigantic machinery at the heart of everything. In one area she passed over a clear floor, water rippling underneath, black and deep. She saw something swimming there, sleek and fast and white, quickly disappearing into the deeper darkness.

  The cop delivered her to a cramped suite of offices. Madeleine sat in an anteroom, waiting for attention. Maybe this was the office of the mayor, she thought, or the town council. There was no sign of the colony’s Aboriginal origins, save for a piece of art on the wall: about a meter square, pointillist dots in shades of cobalt red. A Dreamtime representation, maybe.

  Madeleine was starting to get the picture. Triton was a small town, at the fringe of interstellar space. They weren’t used to visitors, and weren’t much interested either.

  Eventually a harassed-looking official — another woman, her frizzy hair tied back sharply from her forehead — came into the room. She studied Madeleine with dismay.

  Madeleine forced a smile. “Pleased to meet you. Who are you, the mayor?”

  The woman frowned and jabbered back impatiently.

  But Madeleine smiled and nodded, and tapped her helmet. “That’s it. Keep talking. My name is Madeleine Meacher. I’ve come from the stars…”

  Her translator suite was essentially Gaijin. How ironic that seventeen centuries after the Gaijin came wandering unannounced into the asteroid belt, humans should need alien technology to talk to each other.

  At last the translator began to whisper.

  “At last. Thanks for your patience. I—”

  “And I am very busy,” the translator whispered, ghosting the woman’s speech. “We should progress this issue, the issue of your arrival here.”

  “My name is Meacher…” Madeleine summarized her CV.

  The woman turned out to be called Sheela Dell-Cope. She was an administrative assistant in the office of the headman here — although, as far as Madeleine could make out, the headman was actually a woman.

  “I have a mission,” Madeleine said. “I bring bad news. Bad news from the stars.”

  The woman silenced her with an upraised hand. “There is the question of your residency, including the appropriate fee…”

  Madeleine was forced to sit through a long and elaborate list of rules regarding temporary residency. To Dell-Cope, Madeleine Meacher was strange, incomprehensible, a visitor from another time, another place. Now I am the Gaijin, Madeleine thought.

  She was going to have to apply for the equivalent of a visa. And she would have to pay for each day she stayed, or else work for her air. This was a closed, marginal world, where every breath had to be paid for.

  “The work is not pleasant,” Dell-Cope said. “Servicing the otec. Or working with the Flips, for instance.”

  That meant nothing to Madeleine, but she got the idea. “I’ll pay.” She had a variety of Gaijin high-tech gadgets that she could use for a fee. Anyhow she wasn’t going to be here long, come what may.

  As it turned out, the painting on the wall was a representation of an ancient Aboriginal artwork: the Dreaming of a creature of the Australian Outback, the honey ant. But it was a copy of a copy of a copy, done in seaweed dyes. And, she was prepared to bet, nobody on Triton knew what a honey ant was anyhow.

  She was given a room in a residential area. There seemed to be no hotels here.

  The room was just a cube carved out of concrete. It had a bed, some scattered and unfamiliar furniture — spindly low-gravity chairs — a small galley, and a comms station with an utterly baffling human interface.

  Not that the galley was so easy either. She shouted at it and poked it, her favored way of dealing with newfangled technology, until she found a way to make it decant a hot liquid, some kind of tea.

  There were no windows. The room was just a concrete box, a sarcophagus, a cave. Here in the emptiness on the edge of interstellar space, humans were hiding from the sky.

  What are you doing here, Meacher?

  What was she supposed to do? Simply blurt out her news — that an alien invasion fleet had massed on the rim of the Solar System, that it was almost certain to spill into the region of Neptune’s orbit soon, that she was here, with her friendly Gaijin, to help these people evacuate to worlds their ancestors had left behind a thousand years earlier? It seemed absurd, melodramatic.

  She worked at the comms equipment, str
iving to make it do what she wanted. It was a strange irony, she thought, that comms equipment, whose purpose was after all to join people together, always turned out to have the most baffling designs, presenting the worst challenges to the out-of-time traveler.

  She tried to make an appointment to meet the headman, but she was stalled. She tried farther down the local hierarchy, as best she could figure it out, but got nowhere there either.

  Nobody was interested in her.

  Frustrated, on a whim, she decided to hunt for descendants of the colonists she had known. With the help of her translator she asked the comms station to find her people with “Roach” in their surname.

  Most of the surnames scrolling before her, phonetically rendered, were unfamiliar. But there were a few families with compound surnames that included the name “Rush.”

  Just around the corner, in fact, in the same floating bubble as this room, there was a man — apparently living alone — with the surname Rush-Bayley.

  She spent a frustrating hour persuading the comms unit to leave him a message.

  She took long walks through the city’s emptiness. Lights turned themselves on, then off again when she passed, so she walked in a moving puddle of illumination.

  She walked from bubble to floating bubble over bridges of what seemed to be ceramic; when the bubbles shifted against each other, the interfaces creaked, ominously. She encountered few people. Her footsteps echoed, as if she were walking through immense hangars.

  Madeleine imagined this place had been designed for ten, twenty times as many people as it held now. And she thought of those other colonies, abandoned on the waters of Triton.

  It saddened her that nothing — save a few sentimental tokens like paintings — survived of the Aboriginal culture that Ben’s generation had brought here. After all, even fifteen hundred years on Triton were dwarfed by maybe sixty thousand years of Australia. But the Dreamtime legends, it seemed, had not survived the translation from the ancient deserts of Australia to these enclosed, high-tech bubbles.

  She reached the center of the kilometers-wide colony. Here, a great structure loomed out of the ice-crusted sea, visible through picture windows. It was mounted on a stalk, and it reared up to a great dome-shaped carapace some hundreds of meters above the ice. It was a little like a water tower. She picked out engineering features: evaporators, demisters, generators, turbines, condenser tubing. Madeleine learned that this tower was based on a taproot that descended far into the ocean, kilometers deep, in fact.

  This was the otec. The name turned out to be an acronym from old English, for Ocean Thermal Energy Converter. It was a device to extract energy from the heat difference between the deep ocean waters, at just four degrees below freezing, and the surface ice, at more than a hundred below. The otec turned out to be the main power source for the colony. It was fifteen hundred years old, as old as the colony itself, and it was maintained by the colonists with a diligent, monkish devotion. There were other power sources, like fusion plants. But the colonists were short of metal; the nearest body of rock, after all, was the silicate core of Triton, drowned under hundreds of kilometers of water. The colonists were able to fix the otec, clunky machinery through it was, with materials they could extract from the water around them.

  After a couple of empty days, she found her comms unit glowing green. She poked at it, trying to figure out why.

  It turned out there was a message on it, from Rush-Bayley.

  Adamm Rush-Bayley was tall, thin, dark. He wore a loose smocklike affair, his skinny legs bare. The smock was painted with vibrant colors — red, blue, green — a contrast to the drab environment.

  He turned out to be seventy years old, though he didn’t look it.

  He looked nothing like Ben, of course, or Lena. Had she been hoping that she could retrieve something of Ben, her own vanished past? How could he be like Ben, sixty generations removed?

  His family had kept alive Ben’s story, however, his name — and the story of the Nereid impact. And so he looked at her with mild curiosity. “You’re the same Madeleine Meacher who—”

  “Yes.”

  “How very strange. Of course we have records.” He smiled. “There is a public archive, and my family kept its own mementoes. Perhaps you’d like to see them.”

  “I was there for the live show, remember.”

  “Yes. You must have fascinating stories.” He didn’t sound all that fascinated, though, to Madeleine; it seemed clear he’d rather show her the records his family had cherished than hear her testimony from history. The past was a thing to own, to lock away in boxes and archives, not to explore.

  It wasn’t the first time she had encountered such a reaction.

  He made her a meal in his home, which was a multichamber cave. The food was shellfish, with what appeared to be processed seaweed or algae as a side dish. They ate off plates made of a kind of paper. The paper wasn’t based on cellulose, she learned, but on chitin extracted from the shells of lobsters.

  Adamm’s clothes were made from seaweed — or more precisely a seaweed extract called algin. Algin could be spun into silklike threads and was the basis of virtually all the colonists’ clothing and other fabric, as well as products like films, gels, polishes, paints. There was even algin additive in her food.

  They talked tentatively while they ate.

  Adamm made a minor living making pearl artifacts. He showed her a pearl the size of her fist that had been sliced open and hollowed out to make a box for a mildly intoxicating snufflike powder. The pearl was exquisite, the workmanship so-so.

  Most of the work he did was for one engineering concern or another; luxury was at a premium here. He could only sell, after all, to his fellow citizens. It seemed to her that nobody was rich here, nobody terribly poor. But this was Adamm’s home, and he was used to its conditions.

  Most people, she learned, were probably older than they looked to her. Here in the low-gravity environment of Triton, and with antiaging mechanisms wired centuries earlier into the human genome, life expectancy was around two centuries. And it would have been even higher if not for problems with the colony’s life support. “We have crashes and blooms, diseases, toxicity…”

  The biosphere was just too small.

  Right now Adamm lived alone. He had one child by a previous marriage. He was considering marrying again, trying for more children. But there was a quota.

  He listened, without commenting, to her talk of interstellar war. Madeleine had the impression that Adamm was merely being polite to somebody who might have known his ancestors.

  She felt herself losing concentration, overwhelmed by cultural inertia.

  After the meal, they took a walk.

  He guided her to an area like an atrium. It was walled, roofed, and floored with transparent sheeting, and for once there was no sense of enclosure. Around her, stretching to a close, tightly curving horizon, was a sheet of ice; above her was Neptune’s faint globe, slowly rising as Triton spun through its long artificial day; beneath her feet she could see the Triton ocean, through which pale white forms skimmed.

  She said, “I remember when Neptune hung in the sky, unmoving. Seeing it rise like that is… eerie. But I suppose it makes Triton more Earthlike.”

  She glimpsed hostility on his face.

  “Travelers like you have returned before,” he said, her translator filtering out any emotion from his voice. “What does it matter if Triton is Earthlike or not? Madeleine, I’ve never seen Earth. Why would I want to?”

  The little clash depressed her. Of course he’s right, she thought; Earth must sound as alien to Adamm as the accretion-disc home of the Chaera would have to me. Fifteen hundred years; fifty, sixty generations… We humans just can’t maintain cultural concentration, even over such an insignificant span.

  While the Gaijin sail on.

  As if on cue, there was a flash in the sky, somewhere beyond the blue shoulder of Neptune.

  She grabbed Adamm’s hand; he recoiled from her to
uch. “There. Did you see that?”

  Ne. “…No.”

  There was nothing to see now, no afterglow, no repeat show. She felt like a kid who had glimpsed a meteor in the desert sky, a flash nobody else had seen. “It’s not just a light in the sky,” she said defensively. “It might have been the destruction of an ice moon, or a comet nucleus—”

  “This is your war?” Adamm asked reluctantly.

  “Adamm, the war isn’t mine. But it is real…”

  A sleek white shape broke the water beneath her feet. She stepped back, startled. She saw a smooth, streamlined head, closed eyes, a small mouth — something like a dolphin, she thought. The creature opened its mouth and uttered a cry that was high-pitched and complex, like a door creaking.

  Then it flipped backward and disappeared from view, leaving Madeleine stunned, disturbed.

  “War,” Adamm said sourly. Then he sighed. “I suppose you mean well. But it seems so… remote.”

  “Believe me, it isn’t. Adamm, I’m going to need your help. The headman won’t see me. You have to help me convince people.”

  He laughed, not unkindly. He pointed down to the black water. “Start with them.”

  “Who?”

  “The Flips. Try convincing them. They’re people too.”

  She peered into the water, stunned.

  He walked away. She had no choice but to follow.

  The headman’s office loaned her a hard-shelled suit, full of smart stuff and heating elements. She descended into the water, from a bay on the outskirts of the bubble city, through a hole neatly cut in the ice.

  She fell slowly, in deepening darkness. She moved around experimentally. She couldn’t feel the cold, and the water pressure here on this low-gravity moon was pretty low, but the water resisted her movements. When the hole in the ice was just a pinpoint of blue light above her, she turned on her helmet lamps. The beams penetrated only a few meters into the murk. She ran a quick visual check of her systems and glanced upward to see her tether coiling reassuringly up through the water, her physical link to the world of air and light above.