Space m-2

by Stephen Baxter

  “They really are coming, aren’t they, Nemoto?”

  Nemoto turned, face hidden. “Of course they are. We are both too old for illusion, Meacher. They are wasps around a honey pot, which is Mercury’s fat iron core.”

  Together, they walked around the spreading array, glass flowers that sparkled with the light of stars and ET ships.

  Madeleine tried to talk to Nemoto, to draw her out. After all, their acquaintance — never friendship — went back across sixteen hundred years, to that steamy office in Kourou, a tank of spinning Chaera on the pre-Paulis Moon. But Nemoto wouldn’t talk of her life, her past: she would talk of nothing but the great issues of the day, Mercury and the Crackers and the great ET colonization pulse all around them, the huge and impersonal.

  Madeleine wondered if that was normal.

  But there was nothing normal about a woman who had lived through seventeen centuries, for God’s sake. Nemoto was probably the oldest human being who had ever lived; to survive, Nemoto must have put herself through endless reengineering, of both body and mind. And, unlike the lonely star travelers, she had lived through all those years on worlds full of people: Earth, the Moon, Mercury. Her biography must run like an unbroken thread through the tangled tapestry of a millennium and a half of human history.

  But Madeleine truthfully knew little of this ancient, enigmatic woman. Had she ever married, ever fallen in love? Had she ever had children? And if so, were they alive — or had she outlived generation after generation of descendants? Perhaps nobody knew, nobody but Nemoto herself. And Nemoto would talk of none of this, refused to be drawn as she tended her plants of glass.

  But in her slow-moving, aged way, she seemed focused, Madeleine thought. Determined, vigorous. Almost happy. As if she had a mission.

  Madeleine decided to challenge her.

  She walked among the glassy leaves. She bent, awkwardly, and picked up a glimmering leaf; it broke away easily. It was very fine, fragile. When she crushed it carelessly, it crumbled.

  Nemoto made a small move toward her, a silent admonition.

  Madeleine dropped the leaf carefully. “I’ve been reading up,” she said.

  “You have?”

  “On you. On your, umm, career.” She waved a hand at the leaves. “I think I know what you’re doing here.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Moon flowers. You brought them here, to Mercury. This isn’t just about growing solar sails. There are Moon flowers all over this damn planet. You’ve been seeding them, haven’t you?”

  Nemoto hunkered down and studied the plant before her. “They grow well here. The sunlight, you see. I gen-enged them — if you can call it that; the genetic material of these flowers is stored in a crystalline substrate that is quite different from our biochemistry. Well. I removed some unnecessary features.”

  “Unnecessary?”

  “The rudimentary nervous system. The traces of consciousness.”

  “Nemoto — why? Will dying Mercury become a garden?”

  “What do you think, Meacher?”

  “That you’re planning to fight back. Against the Crackers.You are remarkable, Nemoto. Even now, even here, you continue the struggle… And these flowers have something to do with it.”

  Nemoto was as immobile as her flowers, the delicate glass petals reflected in her visor. “I wonder how they started,” she said. “The Crackers. How they began this immense, destructive odyssey. Have you ever thought about that? Surely no species intends to become a breed of rapacious interstellar locusts. Perhaps they were colonists on some giant starship, a low-tech, multigeneration ark. But when they got to their destination they’d gotten too used to spaceflight. So they built more ships, and just kept going… Perhaps the gimmick — blowing up the target Sun for an extra push — came later. And once they’d worked out how to do it, reaped the benefits, they couldn’t resist using it. Over and over.”

  “Not a strategy designed to make them popular.”

  “But all that matters, in this Darwinian Galaxy of ours,is short-term effectiveness. No matter how many Suns you destroy, how many worlds you trash, there simply isn’t the timeto have qualms about such things. And so it goes, as the Galaxy turns, oblivious to the tiny beings warring and dying on its surface…”

  She walked on, tending her garden, and Madeleine followed.

  “You must help us,” Carl ap Przibram said.

  Madeleine sat uncomfortably, wondering how to respond. She felt claustrophobic in this bureaucrat’s office, crushed by the layers of Mercury rock over her head, the looming nearness of the Sun: as if she could somehow sense its huge weight, its warp of space.

  He leaned forward. “For fifteen centuries my people lived like this.” He held up his hands, indicating the close rocky walls. “In environments that were enclosed. Fragile. Shared.” His face clouded with anger, hostility. “We didn’t have the luxury for… aggression. Warfare.”

  Now she understood. “As we did, on ‘primitive Earth.’ Is that what you think? But my world was small too. We could have unleashed a war that might have made the planet uninhabitable.”

  “That’s true.” He jabbed a Chopin finger at her. “But you didn’t think that way, did you? You, Madeleine Meacher, used to ship weapons, from one war zone to another. That was your job, how you made a living.

  “You come from a unique time. We remember it even now;we are taught about it. Uniquely wasteful. You were still fat onenergy, from Earth’s ancient reserves. You managed to get a toehold on other worlds, the Moon. But you squandered your legacy — turned it into poisons, in fact, that trashed your planet’s climate.”

  She stood up. “I’ve heard this before.” It was true; the bitterness at the well-recorded profligacy of her own “fat age” had scarcely faded in the centuries since, and the travelers, time-stranded refugees from that era, made easy targets for bile and prejudice. But it scarcely mattered now. “Carl ap Przibram, tell me what you want of me.”

  “I’ve been authorized to deal with you. To offer you what we can…”

  It turned out to be simple, unexpected. Impossible. The Coalition wanted to put her in charge of Mercury’s defenses: assembling weapons and a fighting force of some kind, training them up, devising tactics. Waging war on the Crackers.

  She laughed; ap Przibram looked offended. She said, “You think I’m some kind of warrior barbarian, come from the past to save you with my primitive instincts.”

  He glared. “You’re more of a warrior — and a barbarian — than I will ever be.”

  “This is absurd. I know nothing of your resources, your technology, your culture. How could I lead you?” She eyed him, suspicious. “Or is there another game being played here? Are you looking for a fall guy? Is that it?”

  He puzzled over the translation of that. Then his frown deepened. “You are facetious, or foolish. If we fail to defend ourselves, there will be no ‘fall guys.’ In the worst case there will be nobody left at all, blameworthy or otherwise. We are asking you because…”

  Because they are desperate, she thought, these gentle, spindly, asteroid-born people. Desperate, and terrified, in the face of this Darwinian onslaught from the stars.

  “I’ll help any way I can,” she said. “But I can’t be your general. I’m sorry,” she added.

  He closed his eyes and steepled his fingers. “Your friends, the refugees from Triton, are still in orbit.”

  “I know that,” she snapped.

  He said nothing.

  “Oh,” she said, understanding. “You’re trying to bargain with me.” She leaned on the desk. “I’m calling your bluff. You haven’t let them starve up there so far. You won’t let them die. You’ll bring them down when you can; you aren’t serious in your threats.”

  His thin face twisted with embarrassment. “This wasn’t my idea, Madeleine Meacher.”

  “I know that,” she said more gently.

  “In the end,” he said, “none of this may matter. The Crackers have little interest in our hist
ory and our disputes and our intrigues with each other.”

  “It’s true. We’re vermin to them.” Anger flared in her at that thought, the word Dorothy had used.

  But it’s true, she thought.

  This, here on Mercury, may be the largest concentration of humans left anywhere. And if the Crackers succeed in their project, it will be the end of mankind. None of our art or history, our lives and hopes and loves, will matter. We’ll be just another forgotten, defeated race, just another layer of organic debris in the long, grisly history of a mined-out Solar System.

  I can’t let that happen, she thought. I must see Nemoto again.

  On the surface of Mercury, Nemoto sighed. “You know, the Crackers’ strategy — making Suns nova — isn’t really all that smart. When you’re more than a few diameters away from your disrupted star it starts dwindling into a point source, and the light wind’s intensity falls off rapidly. But if you have a giant star — say a red giant — you are sailing with a wall of light behind you, and you get a runaway effect; it takes much longer for the wind to dwindle. You see?”

  “So—”

  “So the best strategy for the Crackers would be to tamper with the Sun’s evolution. To make it old before its time, to balloon it to a red giant that would reach out to Earth’s orbit, and ride out that fat crimson wind. But the Crackers aren’t smart enough for that. None of the ETs out there are really smart, you know.”

  “Maybe the Crackers are working on an upgrade,” Madeleine suggested dryly.

  “Oh, no doubt,” Nemoto said, matter-of-fact. “The question is, will they have time to figure out how to do it before their race is run?”

  “Why haven’t you told the refugees what you are up to, Nemoto?”

  “Meacher, the people on this ball of iron are conservative — and split. There are many factions here. Some believe the Crackers may be placated. That these ETs will just leave of their own accord.”

  “That’s ridiculous. The Crackers can’t leave. They must dismantle the Sun to continue their expansion.”

  “Nevertheless, such views are held. And such factions would, if they knew of my project, seek to shut me down.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “The settlers here must go as deep as they can, deep into the interior.”

  Just as Dorothy Chaum had said. “When?”

  “When the Cracker ships are here. When all the wasps have swarmed to the honey pot.”

  “I’ll try. But what of you, Nemoto?”

  Nemoto just laughed.

  Madeleine leaned forward. “Tell me what happened to Malenfant.”

  Nemoto would not meet her eyes.

  She told Madeleine something of what sounded like a long and complicated story, embedded in Earth’s tortured latter history, of a Saddle Point gateway in the heart of a mountain in Africa. Her account was cool, logical, without feeling.

  “So he went back,” Madeleine said. “Back through the Saddle Points, back to the Gaijin, after all.”

  “You don’t understand,” Nemoto said without emotion. “He had no choice. I sent him back. I manipulated the situation to achieve that…”

  Madeleine covered Nemoto’s cold hand.

  “…Just as I have manipulated half of mankind, it seems. I exiled Malenfant, against his will.” Nemoto continued sharply. “I believe I have sent him to his death, Meacher. But if it is a crime, it will be justified — if the Gaijin can make use of that death.”

  “I guess you have to believe that,” Madeleine murmured.

  “Yes. Yes, I have to.”

  Her manner was odd — even for Nemoto — too cool, logical; too bright, Madeleine thought.

  Madeleine knew that no human could survive more than a thousand years without emptying a clutter of memory from her overloaded head. Nemoto must have found a way to edit her memories, to reorder, even delete them — a process, of course, that meant the editing of her personality too.

  Perhaps she has attempted to cleanse her memories of Malenfant, her guilt over her betrayal of him. That is how she has been able to achieve such distance from it.

  But if so, she was only partially successful. For this action against the Crackers, whatever it is, will kill her, Madeleine realized.

  And Nemoto is embracing the prospect.

  Madeleine worked hard on Carl ap Przibram, trying to get him to take Nemoto’s advice seriously. It wasn’t easy, given her lack of any detailed understanding of what Nemoto might be trying to attempt. But at last he yielded and got her a slot before the Coalition’s top council.

  It was an uneasy session. It took place in a steamy cave crammed with a hundred delegates from different factions, none of them natives, jammed in here against their will in the bowels of Mercury. There was a range of body types, she observed, mostly variants on the tall, stick-thin, low-gravity template; but there were a number of delegates adapted for zero gravity, even exotic atmospheres, in environment tanks, wheelchairs, and other supportive apparatus.

  She faced rows of faces glaring with suspicion, fear, self-interest, even contempt. This wasn’t going to be easy. But she recognized, here in the main governing council, one of the women from the Triton transports, which had at last been allowed to land. These people were prickly, awkward, superstitious, fearful. But even in this dire strait, they welcomed refugees, and even gave them a place at the top table.

  It made her obscurely proud. This is what the Gaijin should have studied, she thought. Not wrinkles in our genome. This: even in this last refuge, we refuse to give up, and we still welcome strangers.

  She launched into her presentation. She stayed on her feeta good hour as speaker after speaker assailed her. She didn’t always have answers, but she weathered the storm, trying to persuade by her steady faith, her unwavering determination.

  Not everybody was convinced. That was never going to be possible. But in the end, factions representing a good 60 percent of the planet’s population agreed to concur with Nemoto’s advice.

  Immensely relieved, Madeleine went back to her room and slept twelve hours.

  The final evacuation was swift.

  The remnants of humanity had fled inward, to Mercury. And now they were converging even more tightly, flowing over the surface of Mercury in monorails or tractors or short-hop suborbit shuttles, gathering in the great basin of Caloris Planitia: the shattered ground where, under a high and unforgiving Sun, humans had burrowed in search of water.

  And, meanwhile, the last of the giant interstellar fleet of Cracker sailing craft were settling into dense, complex orbits around Mercury: wasps around honey, just as Nemoto had said. Data flowed between the Cracker craft, easily visible, even tapped by the cowering humans. These ETs clearly had no fear of interference, now the Gaijin had withdrawn.

  Maybe it would take the Crackers a thousand years to make ready for their great star-bursting project. Maybe it would take a thousand days, a thousand hours. Nobody knew.

  Madeleine spent some time with Carl ap Przibram, the nearest thing to a friend she had here.

  They had a very stiff dinner, in his apartment. The recycling loops were tight; illogical as it might be, she found it difficult to eat food that must have been through Carl’s body several times at least. On the way, she’d decided to invite him to have sex. But it was an offer made more in politeness than lust; and his refusal was entirely polite, too, leaving them both — she suspected — secretly relieved.

  Madeleine spent her last day on Mercury inside the Paulis mine in Caloris. This was a tube half a kilometer wide, the walls clear, the rocks beyond glowing orange-hot. It was the big brother of Frank Paulis’s first ancient well on the Moon. This mine had never been completed, and perhaps never would be; but now it served a new purpose as a deep shelter for the remnants of humanity.

  Giant temporary floors of spider silk and aluminum had been spun out over the shaft, cut through by supply ducts and cabling and a giant firefighter’s pole of open elevators. Here — safe from radiation and the S
un’s heat and the shadow’s cold — half of Mercury’s population, a million strong, was being housed in flimsy bubbles of spider silk and aluminum. The Paulis tunnel wasn’t pressurized, of course, and so big flexible walkways ran between the bubbles. The floors were misty and translucent, as were the hab bubbles; and, looking down into the glowing pit of humanity, Madeleine could see people scattered over floor after floor, moving around their habs like microbes in droplets of water, receding into a misty, light-filled infinity.

  It was well known she was planning to leave today. In the upper levels many faces were turned up to her — she could see them, just pale dots. She had always been isolated, especially in this latest of her parachute drops back into human history. Perhaps she was getting too old, too detached from the times. In fact she suspected the displaced Triton colonists rather resented her — as if she, who had guided them here, had somehow been responsible for the disaster that had befallen their home.

  Anyhow, it was done. She turned her back on the glimmering interior of the Paulis mine, its cache of humans, and returned to the surface.

  She flew up from Mercury, up through a cloud of Cracker ships.

  Great sails were all around her. Even partly furled, theywere huge, spanning tens of kilometers, like pieces of filmy landscapes torn loose and thrown into the sky. Some of themhad been made transparent rather than furled, so that the bright light of the Sun shone through skeletal structures of shining threads. And the wings had a complex morphology, each warping and twisting and curling, presumably in response to the density of the light falling on it, and the thin shadows cast by its neighbors.

  The Cracker ships sailed close to each other: in great layers, one over the other, sometimes barely half a kilometer apart, a tiny separation compared to the huge expanse of the wings. Sometimes they were so close that a curl in one wing would cause a rippling response in others, great stacks of the wings turning like the pages of an immense book. But Madeleine never once saw those great wings touch; the coordination was stunning.