Last and First Contacts (Imaginings)

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Recordings of the past?’

  He nodded – then his mouth twitched. ‘Ironic, isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, it was traces of some past disaster that stranded us here.’

  ‘There’s got to be a catch with this Berry device,’ I said quickly. ‘It sounds too easy.’

  ‘Yah. The interferometer needs particles that have remained clean. Stayed buried somewhere since the event we’re interested in.’

  ‘So the images don’t get obscured by later ones.’

  ‘That’s the idea. And that’s why we’re here. The stuff inside this comet must have remained undisturbed since the birth of the sun – and maybe before.’ His voice cracked. ‘And we’ve now spent three days in this damn place avoiding the subject.’

  I recoiled from his sudden violence. ‘What subject?’ I asked weakly.

  ‘You know what subject. How do we choose, Slater? Who’s going home – and who isn’t?’ He took a lumbering pace towards me. His hands were clenched into small fists. ‘You tell me. You’re twice my age. You tell me.’

  I spread my hands. ‘Be fair, Bead. I’ve no experience of situations like this… But I have got a wife and a kid.’

  He flinched.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said gently. ‘I guess neither of us wants to die.’

  ‘So what do we do?’ He scuffed at the ice. ‘Draw lots? Have a snowball fight?’

  I gathered up the equipment. ‘Take it easy, will you?’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking. That I’m no pilot. That you’re the only one who could make it home.’

  ‘I’m thinking you’d need coaching,’ I said. ‘But you could do it, Bead. Look – we’ve got time yet. We’ll work it out.’

  I stalked off towards another sampling site.

  ‘How do I know you’d help me? That you wouldn’t trick me? How?’

  His accusing voice filled my head. You’re walking away again, I told myself. Go back and face him; finish it now. Coward –

  I walked on.

  Bead worked with his feet up. Here in his lab at the centre of the ship he looked like part of the equipment.

  I handed him a coffee. ‘How’s it going?’

  He turned from a large viewscreen. His eyes were bleary but full of wonder. ‘Astonishing,’ he said. He sipped his coffee. ‘I’m digging deeper than anyone’s dug before. Look.’

  He pointed at the viewscreen. It bore a hazy image of a young star, wreathed in amniotic gas. ‘The sun. Less than a million years old.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  He shook his head smugly. ‘A billion years earlier than the previous record. After only four days’ work… And the core that’s in the Berry interferometer at the moment is the deepest yet; who knows how far back we’ll go.’

  I stared at the machinery. Somewhere in there ferocious laser beams were ripping the heart out of a fragment of comet slush.

  A ‘ready’ message beeped from a terminal. ‘Watch this, Slater. You can see some live results.’ He worked a keypad expertly. In this environment he was fast and capable. Vital. His death was unthinkable.

  I concentrated on the viewscreen. A harsh blur, blue-white. Bead focussed the image. The star was enormous, a sack of brooding anger. Planets circled it cautiously.

  Bead frowned. ‘What the hell –’

  ‘Well, it’s a star,’ I said, ‘but it’s certainly not the sun. Now or in the past.’

  ‘This is the oldest sample I’ve taken. What are we seeing?’ His face lit up. ‘Slater…’ he breathed.

  I smiled. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘This has got to be the primordial – the ancient star that went supernova, sending out shock waves that led to the birth of our sun. We’ve found a fragment from the primordial – or one of its planets. I don’t believe this.’

  A spark slid away from one of the inner planets.

  ‘Can you zoom with this thing?’ I asked.

  Bead worked his instruments. We swooped in towards the planet –

  It was laced with light.

  The spark was a spaceship. A cage of threads and planes, it must have been a thousand kilometres long.

  As we closed in further I made out the ship’s crew. They were pillars of sky blue, drifting like shadows within the translucent walls.

  The image broke up and the screen filled with static.

  Bead sat back. ‘That’s it,’ he said softly.

  He began to check his recordings.

  I couldn’t sleep.

  In silence I suited up and walked out onto the surface of the comet. In the tiny gravity my boots barely left a mark in the charcoal crust. Was I walking on bones, five billion years old?

  I leapt up from the comet’s surface; it shrank to a crude sphere below me. Slow as a snowflake I drifted back down.

  Our world had been born out of the corpse of another.

  I tried to empathise with the blue pillars, reach them through the wall of deep time. Had they raged at the unfairness as their sun blew up in their faces? Or had they understood that death is sometimes necessary, so that new life can begin?

  Surely that was so. I felt their calmness lingering in this desolate place.

  I came to a decision.

  Bead would never have the courage to face death. That was obvious. And I wouldn’t be forgotten. A trace of me would remain, like a Berry phase in the hearts of my family.

  I landed softly.

  The port was open. Bead stood silhouetted, holding something like a bazooka. ‘Don’t come any closer, Slater!’

  ‘What the hell –’

  A flash of light, invisibly violet. A soundless explosion in the ice at my feet. I froze.

  ‘I’ve warned you.’ His voice was a brittle surface.

  ‘Where did you get the weapon from, Bead?’

  ‘I took apart the Berry device,’ he said. ‘And I’m having the ship. I’m sorry, Slater. But I don’t want to die. Try to understand.’

  I took a step forward; the bazooka twitched. ‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘It’s okay; you can take the ship.’

  ‘No tricks, Slater!’

  ‘But you’ll have to let me train you. You’ll never fly it otherwise. Now let me back in and –’

  Another bolt; my shoulder exploded into a spray of crimson. I slapped a patch onto my suit and felt the cold wash through me.

  ‘You made me do it!’ he screamed. ‘You made me!’ And the port slammed shut.

  After a few seconds, vapour began to pool around the drive tubes.

  I squeezed at the pain in my shoulder, staring at my shadow on the nucleus crust. He’d never make it…We’d both die in this wilderness…

  What shadow? How the hell was I casting a shadow?

  I whirled, wrenching my shoulder and tumbling into the ice.

  The alien craft came over the horizon like a fantastic dawn. Out of its thousand-mile walls floated a shoal of sky-blue pillars.

  I laughed. ‘Bead – look! They’ve survived!’

  The pillars clustered around me, fine as wedding veils. Their kindness bathed me. Their ship must have been the ‘ghost’ our sensors picked up – the source of the energy that wrecked us. ‘Bead! Shut down the drive and come out. It’s – it’s delightful!’

  Through the pale figures I saw our ship lumber from the comet’s surface.

  ‘Bead! Bead! Listen to me. It’s not a trick!’ I pushed through an ancient body – it crackled like old paper – and tried to run to the ship. ‘Bead! Don’t kill yourself! They’ll save us!’

  A blast of reaction gas knocked me into the slush.

  The ship rose, blurred –

  – and blossomed into the harsh light of a fusion explosion.

  The cerulean pillars lifted me like a child. We swam through space towards their ship, and home.

  Tempest 43

  From the air, Freddie caught the first glimpse of the rocket that was to carry her into space.

  The plane descended towards a strip of
flat coastal savannah. The land glimmered with standing water, despite crumbling concrete levees that lined the coast, a defence against the risen sea. This was Kourou, Guiana, the old European launch centre, on the eastern coast of South America. It was only a few hundred kilometres north of the mouth of the Amazon. Inland, the hills were entirely covered by swaying soya plants.

  Freddie couldn’t believe she was here. She’d only rarely travelled far from Winchester, the English city where she’d been born, and Southampton where she worked. Hardly anybody travelled far. She’d certainly never flown before, and she had a deep phobic sense of the litres of noxious gases spewing from the plane’s exhaust.

  But now the plane banked, and there was her spaceship, a white delta-wing standing on its tail, and she gasped.

  Antony Allen, the UN bureaucrat who had recruited her for this unlikely assignment, misread her mood. Fifty-something, sleek, corporate, with a blunt Chicago accent, he smiled reassuringly. ‘Don’t be afraid.’

  The plane came down on a short smart-concrete runway. Allen hurried Freddie onto a little electric bus that drove her straight to a docking port at the base of the shuttle, without her even touching the South American ground, or even smelling the air.

  And before she knew it she was lying on her back in an immense foam-filled couch, held in place by thick padded bars. The ship smelled of electricity and, oddly, of new carpets. A screen before her showed a view down the shuttle’s elegant flank to the scarred ground.

  Allen strapped in beside her. ‘Do you prefer a countdown? It’s optional. We’re actually the only humans aboard. Whether you find that reassuring or not depends on your faith in technology, I suppose.’

  ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this. It’s so – archaic! I feel I’m locked into an AxysCorp instrumentality.’

  He didn’t seem to appreciate the sharpness of her tone. Perhaps he’d prefer to be able to patronise her. ‘This shuttle’s got nothing to do with AxysCorp, which was broken up long ago.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘And you’re a historian of the Heroic Solution. That’s why you’re here, as I couldn’t find anybody better qualified to help resolve this problem on Tempest 43. So look on it as field work. Brace yourself.’

  With barely a murmur the shuttle leapt into the air. No amount of padding could save Freddie from the punch of acceleration.

  The ground plummeted away.

  Tempest 43 was a weather control station, one of a network of fifty such facilities thrown into space in the 2070s, nearly a century ago, by the now maligned AxysCorp geoengineering conglomerate. An island in the sky over the Atlantic, Tempest 43 was locked into a twenty-four-hour orbit, to which Freddie would now have to ascend.

  But before proceeding up to its geosynchronous rendezvous the shuttle went through one low-orbit checkout. For Freddie, snug in her theme-park couch, it was ninety magical minutes, as the cabin walls turned virtual-transparent, and the Earth spread out below her, bright as a tropical sky.

  The ship sailed over the Atlantic towards western Europe. She wished she knew enough geography to recognise how much of the coastline had been bitten into by the risen sea. At the Spanish coast Freddie saw vapour feathers gleaming white, artificial cloud created by spray turbines to deflect a little more sunlight from an overheated Earth. Southern Spain, long abandoned to desert, was chrome-plated with solar-cell farms, and studded with vast silvered bubbles, lodes of frozen-out carbon dioxide. The Mediterranean was green-blue, thick with plankton stimulated to grow and draw down carbon from the air. On the far side of the Gibraltar Strait, the Sahara bloomed green, covered in straight-edged plantations fed by desalinated ocean water. And as she headed into evening she saw the great old cities of southern Europe, the conurbations’ brown stain pierced by green as they fragmented back into the villages from which they had formed.

  Asia was plunged in night, the land darker than she had expected, with little waste light seeping out of the great metropolitan centres of southern Russia and China and India. The Pacific was vast and darkened too, and it was a relief to reach morning, and to pass over North America. She was disappointed that they travelled too far south to have a chance of glimpsing the camels and elephants and lions of Pleistocene Park, the continent’s reconstructed megafauna.

  And as they reached the east coast they sailed almost directly over the Florida archipelago. Freddie was clearly able to see the wound cut by the hurricane. She called for a magnification. There was Cape Canaveral, venerable launch gantries scattered like matchsticks, the immense Vehicle Assembly Building broken open like a plundered bird’s egg. The hurricane was the reason for her journey – and, incidentally, the ruin of Canaveral was the reason she had had to launch from Guiana. Hurricanes weren’t supposed to happen, not in 2162. Stations like Tempest 43 had put a stop to all that a century ago. Something had gone wrong.

  Antony Allen spent most of the orbit throwing up into paper bags.

  At last the shuttle leapt up into deeper space, silent and smooth, and Earth folded over on itself.

  ‘Tempest 43, Tempest 43, this is UN Space Agency Shuttle C57-D. You ought to be picking up our handshaking request.’

  A smooth, boyish voice filled the cabin. ‘C57-D, your systems have interfaced with ours. Physical docking will follow shortly.’

  ‘I’m Doctor Antony Allen. I work on the UN’s Climatic Technology Legacy Oversight Panel. With me is Professor Frederica Gonzales of the University of Southampton, England, Europe. Our visit was arranged through –’

  ‘You are recognised, Doctor Allen.’

  ‘Who am I speaking to? Are you the station’s AI?’

  ‘A subsystem. Engineering. Please call me Cal.’

  Allen and Freddie exchanged glances.

  Allen growled, ‘I never spoke to an AI with a personal name.’

  Freddie said, a bit nervous, ‘You have to expect such things in a place like this. The creation of sentient beings to run plumbing systems was one of the greatest crimes perpetrated during the Heroic Solution, especially by AxysCorp. This modern shuttle, for instance, won’t have a consciousness any more advanced than an ant’s.’

  That was the party line. Actually Freddie was obscurely thrilled to be in the presence of such exotic old illegality. Thrilled, and apprehensive.

  Allen called, ‘So are you the subsystem responsible for the hurricane deflection technology?’

  ‘No, sir. That’s in the hands of another software suite.’

  ‘And what’s that called?’

  ‘He is Aeolus.’

  Allen barked laughter.

  Now a fresh voice came on the line, a brusque male voice with the crack of age. ‘That you, Allen?’

  Freddie was startled. This voice sounded authentically human. She’d just assumed the station was unmanned.

  ‘Glad to hear you’re well, Mister Fortune.’

  ‘Well as can be expected. I knew your grandfather, you know.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I know that.’

  ‘He was in the UN too. As pious and pompous as they come. And now you’re a bureaucrat. Runs in the genes, eh, Allen?’

  ‘If you say so, Mister Fortune.’

  ‘Call me Fortune…’

  Fortune’s voice was robust British, Freddie thought. North of England, maybe. She said to Allen, ‘A human presence, on this station?’

  ‘Not something the UN shouts about.’

  ‘But save for resupply and refurbishment missions the Tempest stations have had no human visitors for a century. So this Fortune has been alone up here all that time?’ And how, she wondered, was Fortune still alive at all?

  Allen shrugged. ‘For Wilson Fortune, it wasn’t a voluntary assignment.’

  ‘Then what? A sentence? And your grandfather was responsible?’

  ‘He was involved in the summary judgement, yes. He wasn’t responsible.’

  Freddie thought she understood the secrecy. Nobody liked to look too closely at the vast old machines that ran the world. Leave t
he blame with AxysCorp, safely in the past. Leave relics like this Wilson Fortune to rot. ‘No wonder you need a historian,’ she said.

  Fortune called now, ‘Well, I’m looking forward to a little company. You’ll be made welcome here, by me and Bella.’

  Now it was Allen’s turn to be shocked. ‘By the dieback, who is Bella?’

  ‘Call her an adopted daughter. You’ll see. Get yourself docked. And don’t mess up my paintwork with your attitude rockets.’

  The link went dead.

  Shuttle and station interfaced surprisingly smoothly, considering they were technological products separated by a century. There was no mucking about with airlocks, no floating around in zero gravity. Their cabin was propelled smoothly out of the shuttle and into the body of the station, and then was transported out to a module on an extended strut, where rotation provided artificial gravity.

  The cabin door opened, to reveal Wilson Fortune, and his ‘adopted daughter’, Bella.

  Allen stood up. ‘We’ve got a lot to talk about, Fortune.’

  ‘That we do. Christ, though, Allen, you’re the spit of your grandfather. He was plug-ugly too.’ His archaic blasphemy faintly shocked Freddie.

  Fortune was tall, perhaps as much as two full metres, and stick thin. He wore a functional coverall; made of some self-repairing orange cloth, it might have been as old as he was. And his hair was sky blue, his teeth metallic, his skin smooth and young-looking, though within the soft young flesh he had the rheumy eyes of an old man. Freddie could immediately see the nature of his crime. He was augmented, probably gen-enged too. No wonder he had lived so long; no wonder he had been sentenced to exile up here.

  The girl looked no more than twenty. Ten years younger than Freddie, then. Pretty, wide-eyed, her dark hair shoulder-length, she wore a cut-down coverall that had been accessorised with patches and brooches that looked as if they had been improvised from bits of circuitry.

  She stared at Allen. And when she saw Freddie, she laughed.

  ‘You’ll have to forgive my daughter,’ Fortune said. His voice was gravelly, like his eyes older than his face. ‘We don’t get too many visitors.’