Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Malenfant’s first task, every day, was to swab down the walls of his hab module with disinfected wipes. In zero gravity micro-organisms tended to flourish, surviving on free-floating water droplets in the air. It took long, dull hours.

  When he was done with his swabbing, it was exercise time. Malenfant pounded at a treadmill bolted to a bracket in the middle of the habitation module. After an hour Malenfant would find pools of sweat clinging to his chest. Malenfant had to put in at least two hours of hard physical exercise every day.

  On it went. Boring a hole in the sky, the old astronauts had called it, the dogged cosmonauts on Salyut and Mir. Looking at stars, pissing in jars. To hell with that. At least he was going someplace, unlike those guys.

  He communicated with his controllers on Earth and Moon using a ten-watt optical laser, which gave him a data rate of twenty kilobits a second. He followed the newscasts that were sent up to him, which he picked up with his big, semi-transparent main antenna.

  As the months wore on, interest in his mission faded. Something else he’d expected. Nobody followed his progress but a few Gaijin obsessives – including Nemoto, he hoped, who had, deploying her shadowy, vast resources, helped assemble the funding for this one-shot mission – not that she ever made her interest known.

  Sometimes, even during his routine comms passes, there was nobody to man the other end of the link.

  He didn’t care. After all they couldn’t call him back, however bored they were.

  While he worked his treadmill, his only distraction was a small round observation port, set in the pressure hull near him, and so he stared into that. To Malenfant’s naked eye, the Perry was alone in space. Earth and Moon were reduced to star-like points of light. Only the diminishing sun still showed a disc.

  The sense of isolation was extraordinary. Exhilarating.

  He had a sleeping nook called a kayutka, a Russian word. It contained a sleeping bag strapped to the wall. When he slept he kept the kayutka curtained off, for an illusory sense of privacy and safety. He kept his most personal gear here, particularly a small animated image of Emma, a few seconds of her laughing on a private NASA beach close to the Cape.

  He woke up to a smell of sweat, or sometimes antifreeze if the coolant pipes were leaking, or sometimes just mustiness – like a library, or a wine cellar.

  Brind had tried another tack. ‘You’re seventy-two years old, Malenfant.’

  ‘Yeah, but seventy-two isn’t so exceptional nowadays. And I’m a damn fit seventy-two.’

  ‘It’s pretty old to be enduring a many-year spaceflight.’

  ‘Maybe. But I’ve been following lifespan-extending practices for decades. I eat a low fat, low calorie diet. I’m being treated with a protein called co-enzyme Q10, which inhibits ageing at the cellular level. I’m taking other enzymes to maintain the functionality of my nervous system. I’ve already had many of my bones and joints rebuilt with biocomposite enhancements. Before the mission I’m going to have extensive heart bypass surgery. I’m taking drugs targeted at preventing the build-up of deposits of amyloid fibrils, proteins which could cause Alzheimer’s –’

  ‘Jesus, Malenfant. You’re a kind of grey cyborg, aren’t you? You’re really determined.’

  ‘Look, microgravity is actually a pretty forgiving environment for an old man.’

  ‘Until you want to return to a full Earth gravity.’

  ‘Well, maybe I don’t.’

  After two hundred and sixty days, half-way into the mission, the fusion-pulse engine shut down. The tiny acceleration faded, and Malenfant’s residual sense of up and down disappeared. Oddly, he felt queasy; a new bout of space adaptation syndrome floored him for four hours.

  Meanwhile, the Perry fired its nitrogen tet and hydrazine reaction control thrusters, and turned head over heels. It was time to begin the long deceleration to the solar focus.

  The Perry, at peak velocity now, was travelling at around seven million metres per second. That amounted to two per cent of the speed of light. At such speeds, the big superconducting hoops came into their own. They set up a plasma shield forward of the craft, which sheltered it from the thin interstellar hydrogen it ran into. This turnaround manoeuvre was actually the most dangerous part of the trajectory, when the plasma field needed some smart handling to keep it facing ahead at all times.

  The Perry was by far the fastest man-made object ever launched, and so – Malenfant figured, logically – he had become the fastest human. Not that anyone back home gave a damn.

  That suited him. It clarified the mind.

  Beyond the windows now there was only blackness, between Malenfant and the stars. At five hundred astronomical units from the sun, he was far beyond the last of the planets; even Pluto reached only some forty astronomical units. His only companions out here were the enigmatic ice moons of the Kuiper Belt, fragments of rock and ice left undisturbed since the birth of the sun, each of them surrounded by an emptiness wider than all the inner solar system. Further beyond lay the Oort cloud, the shadowy shell of deep space comets; but the Oort’s inner border, at some thirty thousand astronomical units, was beyond even the reach of this attenuated mission.

  When the turnaround manoeuvre was done, he turned his big telescopes and instrument platforms forward, looking ahead to the solar focus.

  ‘You must want to come home. You must have family.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And now –’

  ‘Look, Sally, all we’ve done since finding the Gaijin is talk, for twelve years. Somebody ought to do something. Who better than me? And so I’m going to the edge of the system, where I expect to encounter Gaijin.’ He grinned. ‘I figure I’ll cross all subsequent bridges when I come to them.’

  ‘Godspeed, Malenfant,’ she said, chilled. She sensed she would never see him again.

  The Perry slowed to a relative halt. From a thousand AU, the sun was an overbright star in the constellation Cetus, and the inner system – planets, humans, Gaijin and all – was just a puddle of light.

  Malenfant, cooped up in his hab module, spent a week scanning his environment. He knew he was in the right area, roughly; the precision was uncertain. Of course, if some huge interstellar mother craft was out here, it should be hard to miss.

  There wasn’t a damn thing.

  He went in search of Alpha Centauri’s solar focus. He nudged the Perry forward, using his reaction thrusters and occasional fusion-pulse blips.

  The focusing of gravitational lensing was surprisingly tight. Alpha Centauri’s focal point spot was only a few kilometres across, in comparison with the hundred billion kilometres Malenfant had crossed to get here.

  He took his time, shepherding his fuel.

  At last he had it. In his big optical telescope there was an image of Alpha Centauri A, the largest component of the multiple Alpha system. The star’s image was distorted into an annulus, a faintly orange ring of light.

  He recorded as much data as he could and fired it down his laser link to Earth. The processors there would be able to deconvolve the image and turn it into an image of the multiple-star Alpha Centauri system, perhaps even of any planets hugging the two main stars.

  This data alone, he thought, ought to justify the mission to its sponsors.

  But he still didn’t turn up any evidence of Gaijin activity.

  A new fear started to gnaw at him. For the first time he considered seriously the possibility that he might be wrong about this. What if there was nothing here, after all? If so, his life, his reputation, would be wasted.

  And then his big supercooled infrared sensors picked up a powerful new signature.

  The object passed within a million kilometres of him.

  His telescopes returned images, tantalizingly blurred. The thing was tumbling, sending back glimmering reflections from the remote sun; the reflections helped the processors figure out its shape.

  The craft was maybe fifty metres across. It was shaped something like a spider. A dodecahedral central unit sprouted
arms, eight or ten of them, which articulated as it moved. It seemed to be assembling itself as it travelled.

  It wasn’t possible to identify its purpose, or composition, or propulsion method, before it passed out of sight. But, he was prepared to bet, it was heading for the asteroid belt.

  It was possible to work out where the drone had come from. It was a point along the sun’s focal line, further out, no more distant from the Perry than the Moon from Earth.

  Malenfant turned his telescopes that way, but he couldn’t see a thing.

  Still, he felt affirmed. Contact, by damn. I was right. I can’t figure out how or what, but there sure is something out here.

  He powered up his fusion-pulse engine, one more time. It would take him twenty hours to get there.

  It was just a hoop, some kind of metal perhaps, facing the sun. It was around thirty metres across, and it was sky blue, the colour dazzling out here in the void. It was silent, not transmitting on any frequency, barely visible at all in the light of the point-source sun.

  There was no huge mother-ship emitting asteroid-factory drones. Just this enigmatic artefact.

  He described all this to Sally Brind, back in Houston. He would have to wait for a reply; he was six light-days from home.

  After a time, he decided he didn’t want to wait that long.

  The Perry drifted beside the Gaijin hoop, with only occasional station-keeping bursts of its thrusters.

  Malenfant shut himself up inside the Perry’s cramped airlock. He’d have to spend two hours in here, purging the nitrogen from his body. His antique Shuttle-class EVA Mobility Unit would contain oxygen only, at just a quarter of sea level pressure, to keep it flexible.

  Malenfant pulled on his thermal underwear, and then his Cooling and Ventilation Garment, a corrugated layering of water coolant pipes. He fitted his urine collection device, a huge, unlikely condom.

  He lifted up his Lower Torso Assembly; this was the bottom half of his EMU, trousers with boots built on, and he squirmed into it. He fitted a tube over his condom attachment; there was a bag sewn into his Lower Torso Assembly garment big enough to store a couple of pints of urine. The LTA unit was heavy, the layered material awkward and stiff. Maybe I’m not quite the same shape as I used to be, forty years ago.

  Now it was time for the HUT, the Hard Upper Torso piece. His HUT was fixed to the wall of the airlock, like the top half of a suit of armour. He crouched underneath, reached up his arms, and wriggled upwards. Inside the HUT there was a smell of plastic and metal. He guided the metal rings at his waist to mate and click together. He fixed on his Snoopy flight helmet, and over the top of that he lifted his hard helmet with its visor, and twisted it into place against the seal at his neck.

  The ritual of suit assembly was familiar, comforting. As if he was in control of the situation.

  He studied himself in the mirror. The EMU was gleaming white, with the Stars and Stripes still proudly emblazoned on his sleeve. He still had his final mission patch stitched to the fabric, for STS-194. Looking pretty good for an old bastard, Malenfant.

  Just before he depressurized, he tucked his snap of Emma into an inside pocket.

  He opened the airlock’s outer hatch.

  For twenty months he’d been confined within a chamber a few metres across; now his world opened out to infinity.

  He didn’t want to look up, down or around, and certainly not at the Gaijin artefact. Not yet.

  Resolutely he turned to face the Perry. The paintwork and finishing over the hull’s powder-grey meteorite blanket had pretty much worn away and yellowed; but the dim sunlight made it look as if the whole craft had been dipped in gold.

  His MMU, the Manned Manoeuvring Unit, was stowed in a service station against the Perry’s outer hull, under a layer of meteorite fabric. He uncovered the MMU and backed into it; it was like fitting himself into the back and arms of a chair. Latches clasped his pressure suit. He powered up the control systems, and checked the nitrogen-filled fuel tanks in the backpack. He pulled his two hand controllers round to their flight positions, and released the service station’s captive latches.

  He tried out the manoeuvring unit. The left hand controller pushed him forward, gently; the right hand enabled him to rotate, dip and roll. Every time a thruster fired a gentle tone sounded in his headset.

  He moved in short straight lines around the Perry. After years in a glass case at KSC, not all of the pack’s reaction control thrusters were working. But there seemed to be enough left for him to control his flight. And the automatic gyro stabilization was locked in.

  It was just like working around Shuttle, if he focused on his immediate environment. But the light was odd. He missed the huge, comforting presence of the Earth; from low Earth orbit, the daylit planet was a constant overwhelming presence, as bright as a tropical sky. Here there was only the sun, a remote point source that cast long, sharp shadows; and all around he could see the stars, the immensity which surrounded him.

  Now, suddenly – and for the first time in the whole damn mission – fear flooded him. Adrenaline pumped into his system, making him feel fluttery as a bird, and his poor old heart started to pound.

  Time to get with it, Malenfant.

  Resolutely, he worked his right hand controller, and he turned to face the Gaijin artefact.

  The artefact was a blank circle, mysterious, framing only stars. He could see nothing that he hadn’t seen through the Perry’s cameras, truthfully; it was just a ring of some shining blue material, its faces polished and barely visible in the wan light of the sun.

  But that interior looked jet black, not reflecting a single photon cast by his helmet lamp.

  He glared into the disc of darkness. What are you for? Why are you here?

  There was, of course, no reply.

  First things first. Let’s do a little science here.

  He pulsed his thrusters and drifted towards the hoop itself. It was electric blue, glowing as if from within, a wafer-thin band the width of his palm. He could see no seams, no granularity.

  He reached out a gloved hand, fabric encasing monkey fingers, and tried to touch the hoop. Something invisible made his hand slide away, sideways.

  No matter how hard he pushed, how he braced himself with the thrusters, he could get his glove no closer than a millimetre or so from the material. And always that insidious, soapy feeling of being pushed sideways.

  He tried running his hand up and down, along the hoop. There were – ripples, invisible but tangible.

  He drifted back to the centre of the hoop. That sheet of silent darkness faced him, challenging. He cast a shadow on the structure from the distant pinpoint sun. But where the light struck the hoop’s dark interior, it returned nothing: not a highlight, not a speckle of reflection.

  Malenfant rummaged in a sleeve pocket with stiff gloved fingers. He held up his hand to see what he had retrieved. It was his Swiss Army knife. He threw the knife, underarm, into the hoop.

  The knife sailed away in a straight line.

  When it reached the black sheet it dimmed, and it seemed to Malenfant that it became reddish, as if illuminated by a light that was burning out.

  The knife disappeared.

  Awkwardly, pulsing his thrusters, he worked his way around the artefact. The MMU was designed to move him in a straight line, not a tight curve; it took some time.

  On the far side of the artefact, there was no sign of the knife.

  A gateway, then. A gateway, here at the rim of the solar system. How appropriate, he thought. How iconic.

  Time to make a leap of faith, Malenfant. He fired his RCS, and began to glide forward.

  The gate grew, in his vision, until it was all around him. He was going to pass through it – if he kept going – somewhere near the centre.

  He looked back at the Perry. Its huge, misty main antenna was pointed back towards Earth, catching the light of the sun like spider-web. He could see instrument pallets held away from the hab module’s yellowed, cloth-clad
bulk, like rear-view mirrors. The pallets were arrays of lenses, their black gazes uniformly fixed on him.

  Just one press of his controller and he could stop right here, go back.

  He reached the centre of the disc. An electric blue light bathed him. He leaned forward inside his stiff HUT unit, so he could look up.

  The artefact had come to life. The electric blue light was glowing from the substance of the circle itself. He could see speckles in the light. Coherent, then. And when he looked down at his suit, he saw how the white fabric was criss-crossed by the passage of dozens of points of electric blue glow.

  Lasers. Was he being scanned?

  He said, ‘This changes everything.’

  The blue light increased in intensity, until it blinded him. There was a single instant of pain –

  Chapter 6

  TRANSMISSION

  ‘We think a Gaijin flower-ship is a variant of the old Bussard ramjet design,’ Sally Brind said. She had spread a fold-up softscreen over one time-smoothed wall of Nemoto’s lunar cave. Now – Maura squinted to see – the ’screen filled up with antique design concepts: line images of gauzy, unlikely craft, obsessively labelled with captions and arrows. ‘It is a notion that goes back to the 1960s …’

  Nemoto’s home – here on the Japanese Moon, deep in Farside – had turned out to be a crude, outmoded subsurface shack close to the infrared observatory where she’d made her first discovery of Gaijin activity in the belt. Here, it seemed, Nemoto had lived for the best part of two decades. Maura thought she couldn’t stand it for more than a couple of hours.

  There wasn’t even anywhere to sit, aside from Nemoto’s low pallet, Maura had immediately noticed, and both Sally and Maura had carefully avoided that. Fortunately the Moon’s low gravity made the bare rock floor relatively forgiving, even for the thin flesh that now stretched over Maura’s fragile bones. There were some concessions to humanity – an ancient and worn scrap of tatami, a tokonoma alcove containing a jinja, a small, lightweight Shinto shrine. But most of the floor and wall space, even here in Nemoto’s living area, was taken up with science equipment: anonymous white boxes that might have been power sources or sensors or sample boxes, cables draped over the floor, a couple of small, old-fashioned softscreens.