Last and First Contacts (Imaginings)

by Stephen Baxter

  I yelled, ‘Jack, no!’ In the same instant half the German toughs fell on him, and the other half, including Ciliax, crowded out of the room.

  I had been expecting an explosion in the cabin. I cowered. But there was only a distant crump, like far-off thunder. The deck, subtly, began to pitch …

  Day 34. We aren’t dead yet.

  The picture has become clearer. Jack sabotaged the Goering’s main control links; the switch he held was a radio trigger. But it didn’t quite work; we didn’t pitch into the sea. The technicians bodged up a fix to stabilise our attitude, and even keep us on our course, heading ever east. This whale of the sky still swims through her element. But the crew can’t tell yet if she remains dirigible – if we will ever be able to fly her home again.

  Six people died, some crewmen on the flight deck, a couple of technicians wrestling with repairs outside. And Jack, of course. Already beaten half to death, he was presented to a summary court presided over by the Captain. Then Fassbender gave him to the crew. They hung him up in the hold, then while he still lived cut him down, and pitched him into the sea.

  I don’t know what Ciliax made of all this. He said these common airmen lacked the inventiveness of the SS, to whom he was under pressure to hand over Jack. Ciliax has a core of human decency, I think.

  So we fly on. The engineers toil in shifts on the Goering’s shattered innards. I have more faith in engineers than in gods or gargoyles, priests or politicians. But I no longer believe I will ever see England again. There. I’ve written it down, so it must be true. I wonder what strange creatures of the sea will feast on Jack’s flesh …

  Day 50. Another round number, another pointless milestone.

  I estimate we have travelled a distance that would span from the earth to the moon. Think of that! Perhaps in another universe the German genius for technology would have taken humans on just such an epic voyage, rather than this pointless slog.

  We continue to pass over island groups and chains. On one island yesterday, covered by a crude-looking jungle of immense feathery ferns, I saw very exotic animals running in herds, or peering with suspicion at our passage. Think of flightless birds, muscular and upright and with an avian nerviness; and think of a crocodile’s massive reptilian patience; combine the two, and you have what I saw.

  How did the dinosaurs die? Was it an immense volcanic episode, a comet or other fire from the sky, a deadly plague, some inherent weakness of the reptilian race? Whatever it was, it seems that no matter how dramatic the disaster that seeks to wipe you out, there is always room to run. Perhaps on this peculiar folded-up earth of ours there is no species that has ever gone extinct. What a marvellous thought!

  But if they were dinosaurs, down on that island, we will never know. The plane no longer stops to orbit, for it cannot; the chariots no longer fly down to investigate thunder lizards. And we plough on ever east, ever further over the ocean, ever deeper into a past even beyond the dinosaurs.

  My social life is a bit of a challenge these days.

  As our food and water run out, our little aerial community is disintegrating into fiefdoms. The Water Barons trade with the Emperors of the Larder, or they will go to war over a tapped pipeline. Occasionally I hear pronouncements from the invisible Captain Fassbender, but I am not certain how far his word holds sway any longer. There have been rumours of a coup by the SS officers. The movie-makers are filming none of this. Their morale was the first to crumble, poor lambs.

  I last saw Wolfgang Ciliax ten days ago. He was subtle and insidious; I had the distinct impression that he wanted me to join a sort of harem. Women are the scarcest commodity of all on this boat. Women, and cigarettes. You can imagine the shrift he got from me.

  I sleep in barricaded rooms. In the guts of the Beast I have stashes of food and water, and cigarettes and booze to use as currency in an emergency. I keep out of the way of the petty wars, which will sort themselves out one way or another.

  Once I had to bale out over Malaya, and I survived in the jungle for a week before reaching an army post. This is similar. It’s also rather like college life. What larks!

  [Editor’s note: Many fragmentary entries follow. Some are undated, others contain only mathematical jottings or geometric sketches. The reader is referred to a more complete publication forthcoming in Annals of Psychiatry.]

  Day 365. A year, by God! A full year, if I have counted correctly, though the calendar is meaningless given how many times we have spun around this watery earth – or appear to have. And if the poor gutted Beast is still keeping to her nominal speed, then I may have travelled two million miles. Two million. And still no America!

  I believe I am alone now. Alone, save for the valve mind of Hans, and perhaps the odd rat.

  The food ran out long ago, save for my stashes. The warfare between the Fuhrers of Spam and the Tsars of Dried Eggs became increasingly fragmented, until one man fell on the next for the sake of a cigarette stub. Others escaped, however, in chariots that went spinning down to one lost island or another. Klaus was one of them. I hope they survive; why not? Perhaps some future expedition, better equipped than ours, may retrieve their descendants.

  And the Beast is hollowed out, much of her burned, depopulated save for me. I have explored her from one end to the other, seeking scraps of food and water, pitching the odd corpse into the drink. The only place I have not investigated is the sealed hold of the atom engine. Whatever survives in there has failed to break out.

  However the engine continues to run. The blades of the Merlins turn still. Even the heating works. I should put on record that no matter how badly we frail humans have behaved, the Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches Hermann Goering has fulfilled her mission flawlessly.

  This can’t go on forever, though. Therefore I have decided to set my affairs in order: to begin with, my geometrical maunderings. I have left a fuller account – that is, complete with equations – in a separate locker. These journal notes are intended for the less mathematical reader; such as my mother (they’re for you, Mummy! – I know you’ll want to know what became of me).

  I have had to make a leap of faith, if you will. As we drive on and on, with no sight of an end to our journey, I have been forced to consider the possibility that there will be no end – that, just as it appears, the Pacific is not merely anomalously large, but, somehow, infinite. How can this be?

  Our greatest geometer was Euclid. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you? He reduced all of the geometry you can do on a plane to just five axioms, from which can be derived that menagerie of theorems and corollaries that have been used to bother schoolchildren ever since.

  And even Euclid wasn’t happy with the fifth axiom, which can be expressed like this: parallel lines never meet. That seems so obvious it doesn’t need stating, that if you send off two lines at right angles to a third, like rail tracks, they will never meet. On a perfect, infinite plane they wouldn’t. But on the curved surface of the earth, they would: think of lines of longitude converging on a pole. And if space itself is curved, again, ‘parallel’ lines may meet – or they may diverge, which is just as startling. Allowing Euclid’s axiom to be weakened in this way opens the door to a whole set of what are rather unimaginatively called ‘non-Euclidian geometries’. I will give you one name: Bernhard Riemann. Einstein plundered his work in developing relativity.

  And in a non-Euclidean geometry, you can have all sorts of odd effects. A circle’s circumference may be more or less than ‘pi’ times its diameter. You can even fit an infinite area into a finite circumference: for, you see, your measuring rods shrink as those parallel lines converge. Again I refer you to one name: Henri Poincaré.

  You can see where I am going with this, I think. It seems that our little globe is a non-Euclidean object. Its geometry is hyperbolic. It has a finite radius – as you can see if you look at its shadow on the moon – but an infinite surface area, as we of the Goering have discovered. The world has a Fold in it, in effect. As I drive into the Fold I g
row smaller and ever more diminished, as seen from the outside – but I feel just as Bliss-sized as I always did, and there is plenty of room for me.

  This seems strange – to put it mildly! But why should we imagine that the simple geometry of something like an orange should scale up to something as mighty as a planet?

  Of course this is just one mathematical model which fits the observations; it may or may not be definitive. And many questions remain open, such as astronomical effects, and the nature of gravity on an infinite world. I leave these issues as an exercise for the reader.

  One might question what difference this makes to us mere mortals. But surely geography determines our destiny. If the Pacific could have been spanned in the Stone Age, perhaps by a land bridge, the Americas’ first inhabitants might have been Asian, not Africans who crossed the Atlantic. And certainly in our own century if the Pacific were small enough for America and Japan to have rubbed against each other, the convulsion of war we have endured for the last decade would not have turned out the way it did.

  Besides all that – what fun to find yourself living on such a peculiar little planet, a World with a Fold! Don’t you think…?

  Date unknown. Sorry, I’ve given up counting. Not long after the last entry, however.

  With my affairs in order I’m jumping ship. Why?

  Point one: I’ve eaten all the food. Not the Spam, obviously.

  Point two: I think I’m running out of world, or at least the sort of world I can live on. It’s a long time since I saw a mastodon, or a dinosaur. I still cross over island groups, but now they are inhabited, if at all, by nothing but purplish slime and what look like mats of algae. Very ancient indeed, no doubt.

  And ahead things change again. The sky looks greenish, and I wonder if I am approaching a place, or a time, where the oxygen runs out. I wake up in the night panting for breath, but of course that could just be bad dreams.

  Anyhow, time to ditch.

  It’s the end of the line for me, but not necessarily for the Goering. I think I’ve found a way to botch the flight deck equipment: not enough to make her fully manoeuvrable again, but at least enough to turn her around and send her back the way she came, under the command of Hans. I don’t know how long she can keep flying. The Merlins have been souped up with fancy lubricants and bearings for longevity, but of course there are no engineers left to service them. If the Merlins do hold out the Goering might one day come looming over Piccadilly Circus again, I suppose, and what a sight she will be. Of course there will be no way of stopping her I can think of, but I leave that as another exercise for you, dear reader.

  As for me, I intend to take the Spit. She hasn’t been flown since Day 1, and is as good as new as far as I can tell. I might try for one of those slime-covered rocks in the sea.

  Or I might try for something I’ve glimpsed on the horizon, under the greenish sky. Lights. A city? Not human, surely, but who knows what lies waiting for us on the other side of the Fold in the World?

  What else must I say before I go?

  I hope we won’t be the last to come this way. I hope that the next to do so come, unlike us, in peace.

  Mummy, keep feeding my cats for me, and I’m sorry about the lack of grandchildren. Bea will have to make up the numbers (sorry, sis!).

  Enough, before I start splashing these pages with salt water. This is Bliss Stirling, girl reporter for the BBC, over and out!

  [Editor’s note: There the transcript ends. Found lodged in a space between bulkheads, it remains the only written record of the Goering’s journey to have survived on board the hulk. No filmed or tape-recorded material has been salvaged. The journal is published with respect to the memory of Miss Stirling. However as Miss Stirling was contracted by the BBC and the Royal Geographic Society specifically to cover the Goering’s Pacific expedition, all these materials must be regarded as COPYRIGHT the British Broadcasting Conglomerate MCMLII. Signed PETER CARINHALL, Board of Governors, BBC.]

  No More Stories

  ‘It’s strange to find myself in this position. Dying, I mean. I’ve always found it hard to believe that things will just go on afterwards. After me. That the sun will come up, the milkman will call. Will it all just fold up and go away when I’ve gone?’

  These were the first words his mother said to Simon, when he got out of the car.

  She stood in her doorway, old-lady stocky, solid, arms folded, over eighty years old. Her wrinkles were runnels in papery flesh that ran down to a small, frowning mouth. She peered around the close, as if suspicious.

  Simon collected his small suitcase from the back of the car. It had a luggage tag from a New York flight, a reminder that he was fifty years old, and that he did have a life beyond his mother’s, working for a biotech company in London, selling gen-enged goldfish as children’s pets. Now that he was back in this Sheffield suburb where he’d grown up, his London life seemed remote, a dream.

  He locked the car and walked up to his mother. She presented her cheek for him to kiss. It was cold, rough-textured.

  ‘I had a good journey,’ he said, for he knew she wouldn’t ask.

  ‘I am dying, you know,’ she said, as if to make sure he understood.

  ‘Oh, Mother.’ He put an arm around her shoulders. She was hard, like a lump of gristle and bone, and didn’t soften into the hug. She had cancer. They had never actually used that word between them.

  She stepped back to let him into the house. The hall was spotless, obsessively cleaned and ordered, yet it smelled stale. A palm frond folded into a cross hung on the wall, a reminder that Easter was coming, a relic of intricate Catholic rituals he’d abandoned when he left home. He put his suitcase down.

  ‘Don’t put it there,’ his mother said.

  A familiar claustrophobia closed in around him. ‘All right.’ He grabbed the case and climbed the stairs, fourteen of them as he used to count in his childhood. But now there was an old-lady safety banister fixed to the wall.

  She had made up one of the twin beds in the room he had once shared with his brother. There wasn’t a trace of his childhood left in here, none of his toys or books or school photos.

  He came downstairs. ‘Mother, I’m gasping. Can I make a cup of tea?’

  ‘The pot’s still fresh. I’ll fetch a cup and saucer.’ She bustled off to the kitchen.

  He walked into the lounge.

  The only change he could see since his last visit was a fancy new standard lamp with a downturned cowl, to shed light on the lap of an old lady sitting in the best armchair, facing the telly, peering at her sewing with fading eyes. The old carriage clock, a legacy from a long-dead great uncle, still sat in its place on the concrete 1970s fireplace. The clock was flanked by a clutter of photos, as usual. Most of them were fading colour prints of grandchildren. Simon had no grandchildren to offer, and so was unrepresented here. But the photos had been pushed back to make room for a new image in a gold frame. Brownish, blurred and faded, it was a portrait of a smiling young man in a straw boater. He had a long, strong face. Simon recognised the photo, taken from a musty old album and evidently blown up. It was his grandfather, Mother’s Dad, who had died when Simon was five or six.

  Just for a moment the light seemed odd to him. Cold, yellow-purple. And there was something strange beyond the window. Pillow-like shapes, gleaming in a watery sun. He saw all this from the corner of his eye. But when he turned to look directly, the light from the picture window turned spring green, shining from the small back garden, with its lawn and roses and the last of the azalea blossom. Maybe his eyes were tired from the drive, playing tricks.

  ‘It’s just for comfort. The photo.’

  The male voice made Simon turn clumsily, almost tripping.

  A man sat on the sofa, almost hidden behind the door, with a cup of tea on an occasional table. ‘Sorry. You didn’t see me. Didn’t mean to make you jump.’ He stood and shook Simon’s hand. ‘I’m Gabriel Nolan.’ His voice had a soft Irish burr. Maybe sixty, he was short, round, bald as
an egg. He wore a pale jacket, black shirt, and dog collar. He had biscuit crumbs down his front.

  Simon guessed, ‘Father Nolan?’

  ‘From Saint Michael’s. The latest incumbent.’

  The last parish priest Simon remembered had been the very old, very frail man who had confirmed him, aged thirteen.

  Mother came in, walking stiffly, cradling a cup and saucer. ‘Sit down, Simon, you’re blocking the light.’

  Simon sat in the room’s other armchair, with his back to the window. Mother poured out some tea with milk, and added sugar, though he hadn’t taken sugar for three decades.

  ‘Simon was just admiring the portrait of your father, Eileen.’

  ‘Well, I don’t have many pictures of Dad. You didn’t take many in those days. That’s the best one, I think.’

  ‘We find comfort in familiar things, in the past.’

  ‘I always felt safe when Dad was there,’ Mother said. ‘In the war, you know.’

  But, Simon thought, Granddad was long dead. She’d led a whole life since then, the life that included Simon’s own childhood. Mother always had been self-centred. Any crisis in her children’s lives, like Mary’s recurrent illness as a child, or the illegitimate kid Peter had fathered as a student, somehow always turned into a drama about her. Now somehow she was back in the past with her own father in her own childhood, and there was no room for Simon.

  Mother said, ‘There might not be anybody left who remembers Dad, but me. Do you think we get deader, when there’s nobody left who remembers us?’

  ‘We live on in the eyes of Christ.’

  Simon said, ‘Father Nolan, don’t you think Mother should talk to the doctor again? She won’t listen to me.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Simon,’ Mother said.

  ‘Best to accept,’ said Father Nolan. ‘If your mother has. Best not to question.’

  They both stared back at him, seamless, united. Fifty years old he felt awkward, a child who didn’t know what to say to the grown-ups.