Space

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Conscious or not they are different from us,’ Brind said. ‘For example, the Gaijin can turn their brains off.’

  That startled Madeleine.

  ‘It’s true,’ Chaum said. ‘When they are at repose, as far as we can tell, they are deactivated. Madeleine, if you had an off-switch on the side of your head – even if you could be sure it would be turned back on again – would you use it?’

  Madeleine hesitated. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I don’t see how I could tell if I was still me, when I rebooted.’

  Chaum sighed. ‘But that doesn’t seem to trouble the Gaijin. Indeed, the Gaijin seem to be rather baffled by our big brains. Madeleine, your mind is constantly working. Your brain doesn’t rest, even in sleep; it consumes the energy of a light bulb – a big drain on your body’s resources – all the time; that’s why we’ve had to eat meat all the way back to Homo Erectus.’

  Madeleine protested, ‘But without our brains we wouldn’t be us.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Chaum. ‘But to be us, to the Gaijin, seems to be something of a luxury.’

  ‘Ms Chaum, what do you want from them?’

  Frank Paulis laughed out loud. ‘She wants to know if there was a Gaijin Jesus. Right?’

  Chaum smiled without resentment. ‘The Gaijin do seem fascinated by our religions.’

  Madeleine was intrigued. ‘And do they have religion?’

  ‘It’s impossible to tell. They don’t give away a great deal.’

  ‘That’s no surprise,’ Paulis said sourly.

  ‘They are very analytical,’ Chaum said. ‘They seem to regard our kind of thinking as pathological. We spread ideas to each other – right or wrong, useful or harmful – like an unpleasant mental disease.’

  Brind nodded. ‘This is the old idea of the meme.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Chaum. ‘A very cynical view of human culture.’

  ‘And,’ Paulis asked dryly, ‘have your good Catholic memes crossed the species barrier to the Gaijin?’

  ‘Not as far as I can tell,’ Dorothy Chaum said. ‘They think in an orderly way. They build up their knowledge bit by bit, testing each new element – much as our scientists are trained to do. Perhaps their minds are too organized to allow our memes to flourish. Or perhaps they have their own memes, powerful enough to beat off our feeble intruder notions. Frankly I’m not sure what the Gaijin make of our answers to the great questions of existence. What seems to interest them is that we have answers at all. I suspect they don’t …’

  Madeleine said, ‘You sound disappointed with what you’ve found here.’

  ‘Perhaps I am,’ Chaum said slowly. ‘As a child I used to dream of meeting the aliens: who could guess what scientific and philosophical insights they might bring? Well, these Gaijin do appear to be a life form millions of years old, at least. But, culturally and scientifically, they are really little evolved over us.’

  Madeleine felt herself warming to this earnest, thoughtful woman. ‘Perhaps we’ll find the really smart ones out there among the stars. Maybe they are on their way now.’

  Chaum smiled. ‘I certainly envy you your chance to go see for yourself. But even if we did find such marvellous beings, the result may be crushing for us.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘God shows His purposes through us, and our progress,’ she said. ‘At least, this is one strand of Christian thinking. But what, then, if our spiritual development is far behind that of the aliens? Somewhere else He may have reached a splendour to which we can add nothing.’

  ‘And we wouldn’t matter any more.’

  ‘Not to God. And, perhaps, not to ourselves.’

  They turned away from the disappointing aliens, and walked out into the flat light of Kefallinian noon.

  Later, Frank Paulis took Madeleine to one side.

  ‘Enough bullshit,’ he said. ‘Let’s you and me talk business. You’re fast-forwarding through thirty-six years. If you’re smart, you’ll take advantage of that fact.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Compound interest,’ he said.

  Madeleine laughed. After her encounter with such strangeness, Paulis’s blunt commercial calculation seemed ludicrous. ‘You aren’t serious.’

  ‘Sure. Think about it. Invest what you can of your fee. After all you won’t be touching it while you’re gone. At a conservative five per cent you’re looking at a five-fold payout over your thirty-six years. If you can make ten per cent that goes up to thirty-one times.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Sure. What else are you going to do with it? You’ll come back a few months older, subjectively, to find your money has grown like Topsy. And think about this. Suppose you make another journey of the same length. You could multiply up that factor of thirty-fold to nearer a thousand. You could shuttle back and forth between here and Sirius, let’s say, getting richer on every leg, just by staying alive over the centuries.’

  ‘Yeah. If everything stays the same back home. If the bank doesn’t fail, the laws don’t change, the currency doesn’t depreciate, there’s no war or rebellion or plague, or a take-over of mankind by alien robots.’

  He grinned. ‘That’s a long way off. A lifetime pumped by relativity is a whole new way of making money. You’d be the first, Meacher. Think about it.’

  She studied him. ‘You really want me to take this trip, don’t you?’

  His face hardened. ‘Hell, yes, I want you to make this trip. Or, if you can’t get your head sufficiently out of your ass, somebody. We have to find our own way forward, a way to deal with the Gaijin and those other metal-chewing cyborgs and giant interplanetary bugs and whatever else is heading our way from the Galactic core.’

  ‘Is that really the truth, Paulis?’

  ‘Oh, you don’t think so?’

  ‘Maybe you’re just disappointed,’ she goaded him. ‘A lot of people were disappointed because the Gaijin didn’t turn out to be a bunch of father figures from the sky. They didn’t immediately start beaming down high technology and wisdom and rules so we can all live together in peace, love and understanding. The Gaijin are just there. Is that what’s really bugging you, Paulis? That infantile wish to just give up responsibility for yourself –’

  He eyed her. ‘You really are full of shit, Meacher. Come on. You still have to see the star of this freak show.’ He led her back into the facility. They reached another corner, another curtained-off Gaijin enclosure. ‘We call this guy Gypsy Rose Lee,’ he said.

  Beyond the curtain was another Gaijin. But it was in pieces. The central dodecahedron was intact, save for a few panels, but most of those beautiful articulated arms lay half-disassembled on the floor. The last attached arm was steadily plucking wiry protrusions off the surface of the dodecahedron, one by one. Lenses of various sizes lay scattered over the floor, like gouged-out eyeballs.

  Human researchers in white all-over isolation gear were crawling over the floor, inspecting the alien gadgetry.

  ‘My God,’ Madeleine said. ‘It’s taking itself apart.’

  ‘Cultural exchange in action,’ Paulis said sourly. ‘We gave them a human cadaver to take apart – a volunteer, incidentally. In return we get this. A Gaijin is a complicated critter; this has been going on six months already.’

  A couple of the researchers – two earnest young women – overheard Paulis, and turned their way.

  ‘But we’re learning a lot,’ one of the researchers said. ‘The most basic question we have to answer is: are the Gaijin alive? From the point of view of their complexity, you’d say they are; but they seem to have no mechanism for heredity, which we think is a prerequisite for any definition of a living thing –’

  ‘Or so we thought at first. But seeing the way this thing is put together has made us think again –’

  ‘We believed the Gaijin might be von Neumann machines, perfect replicators –’

  ‘But it may be that perfect replication is impossible in principle. Uncertainty, chaos �
�’

  ‘There will be drift in each generation. Like genetic drift. And where there is variation, there can be selection, and so evolution –’

  ‘But we still don’t know what the units of replication are here. It may be a lower level than the individual Gaijin –’

  ‘The subcomponents that comprise them, perhaps. Maybe the Gaijin are a kind of vehicle for replication of their components, just as you could say we humans are a vehicle to enable our genes to reproduce themselves …’

  Breeding, evolving machines? Madeleine found herself shuddering.

  Paulis said, ‘Do you see now? We are dealing with the truly alien here, Madeleine. These guys might spout Latin in their synthesized voices, but they are not like us. They come from a place we can’t even imagine, and we don’t know where they are going, and we sure as hell don’t know what they are looking for here on Earth. And that’s why we have to find a way to deal with them. Go ahead. Take a good long look.’

  The Gaijin plucked a delicate panel of an aluminium-like soft metal off its own hide; it came loose with a soft sucking tear, exposing jewel-like innards. Perhaps it would keep on going until there was only that grasping robot hand left, Madeleine thought, and then the hand would take itself apart too, finger by gleaming finger, until there was nothing left that could move.

  Chapter 9

  FUSION SUMMER

  Brind drew up contracts. Madeleine tidied up her affairs; preparing for a gap of thirty-six years, at minimum, had a feeling of finality. She said goodbye to her tearful mother, rented out her apartment, sold her car. She took the salary up front and invested it as best she could, with Paulis’s help.

  She decided to give her little capsule a call-sign: Friendship-7.

  And, before she knew it, before she felt remotely ready for this little relativistic death, it was launch day.

  Friendship-7’s protective shroud cracked open. The blue light of Earth flooded the cabin. Madeleine could see fragments of ice, shaken free of the hull of the booster; they glittered around the craft like snow. And she could see the skin of Earth, spread out beneath her like a glowing carpet, as bright as a tropical sky. On the antique Proton, it had been one mother of a ride. But here she was – at last – in orbit, and her spirits soared. To hell with the Gaijin, to hell with Brind and Paulis. Whatever else happened from here on in, they couldn’t take this memory away from her.

  She travelled through a single orbit of the Earth. There were clouds piled thickly around the equator. The continents on the night side were outlined by chains of city lights.

  She could see the big eco-repair initiatives, even from here, from orbit. Reforestation projects were swathes of virulent green on the continents of the northern hemisphere. The southern continents were filled with hot brown desert, their coasts lined grey with urban encrustation. Patches of grey in the seas, bordering the land, marked the sites of disastrous attempts to pump carbon dioxide into the deep oceans. Over Antarctica, laser arrays glowed red, labouring to destroy tropospheric chlorofluorocarbons. The Gulf was just a sooty smudge, drowning in petrochemical smog. And so on.

  From here she could see the disturbing truth: that space was doing Earth no damn good at all. Even though this was a time of off-world colonies and trade with interstellar travellers, most of mankind’s efforts were directed towards fixing up a limited, broken-down ecology, or dissipated on closed-economy problems: battles over diminishing resources in the oceans, on the fringes of the expanding deserts.

  She wondered, uneasily, what she would find when she returned home, thirty-six years from now.

  Madeleine would live in an old Shuttle Spacelab – a tiny reusable space station, seventy years old and flown in orbit twice – dug out of storage at KSC, gutted and refurbished. At the front was her small pressurized hab compartment, and there were two pallets at the rear fitted with a bunch of instruments which would be deployed at the neutron star: coronagraphs, spectroheliographs, spectrographic telescopes.

  Brind gave her a powerful processor to enable her to communicate, to some extent, with her Gaijin hosts. It was a bioprocessor, a little cubical unit. The biopro was high technology, and it was the one place they had spent serious amounts of Paulis’s money. And it was human technology, not Gaijin. Madeleine was fascinated. She spent a long time going over the biopro’s specs. It was based on ampiphiles, long molecules with watery heads and greasy tails, that swam about in layers called Langmuir – Blodgett films. The active molecules used weak interactions – hydrogen bonding, van der Waals forces and hydrophobic recognition – to assemble themselves into a three-dimensional structure, supramolecular arrays thousands of molecules long.

  Playing with the biopro was better than thinking about what was happening to her, where she was headed.

  She wasn’t so happy to find, though, when she first booted up the biopro, that its human interface design metaphor was a two-dimensional virtual representation of Frank Paulis’s leathery face.

  ‘Paulis, you egotistical bastard.’

  ‘Just want to make you feel at home.’ The image flickered a little, and his skin was blocky – obviously digitally generated. It – he – turned out to be backed up by a complex program, interactive and heuristic. He could respond to what Madeleine said to him, learn, and grow.

  He would be company, of a sort.

  ‘Are you in contact with the Gaijin?’

  He hesitated. ‘Yes. In a way. Anyhow I’ll keep you informed. In the meantime, the best thing you can do is follow your study program.’ He started downloading some kind of checklist; it chattered out of an antique teletype.

  ‘You have got to be kidding.’

  ‘You’ve a lot of training on the equipment still to complete,’ virtual Paulis said.

  ‘Terrific. And should I study neutron stars, bursters, whatever the hell they are?’

  ‘I’d rather not. I want your raw reactions. If I coach you too much it will narrow your perception. Remember, you’ll be observing on behalf of all mankind. We may never get another chance. Now. Maybe we can start with the spectroheliograph deployment procedure …’

  When she flew once more over the glittering east coast of North America, the Gaijin ship was waiting to meet her.

  In Earth orbit, the Gaijin flower-ship didn’t look so spectacular. It was laid out something like a squid, a kilometre long and wrought in silver, with a bulky main section as the ‘head’ and a mess of ‘tentacles’ trailing behind.

  Dodecahedral forms, silvered and anonymous, drifted from the cables, and clustered around Madeleine’s antique craft. Her ship was hauled into the silvery rope stuff. Strands adhered to her hull, until her view was criss-crossed with shining threads, and she had become part of the structure of the Gaijin ship. She felt a mounting claustrophobia as she was knit into the alien craft. How did Malenfant stand all this?

  Then the flower-ship unfolded its petals. They made up an electromagnetic scoop, a thousand kilometres wide. The lower edge of the scoop brushed the fringe of Earth’s atmosphere, and plasma sparkled.

  Madeleine felt her breath shortening. This is real, she thought. These crazy aliens are really going to do this. And I’m really here.

  She fought panic.

  After a couple of widening loops around the planet Madeleine sailed out of Earth’s orbit, and she was projected into strangeness.

  Eating interplanetary hydrogen, it took the flower-ship one hundred and ninety-eight days to travel out to the burster’s Saddle Point, eight hundred AU from the sun.

  Saddle Point gateways must destroy the objects they transport.

  For eighteen years a signal crossed space, towards a receiver gateway which had been hauled to the system of the burster neutron star. For eighteen years Madeleine did not exist. She was essentially dead (though not legally).

  Thus, Madeleine Meacher crossed interstellar space.

  There was no sense of waking – is it over? – she was just there, with the Spacelab’s systems whirring and clicking around her a
s usual, like a busy little kitchen. Her heart was pounding, just as it had been a second before – eighteen years before.

  Everything was the same. And yet –

  ‘Meacher.’ It was virtual Paulis’s voice. ‘Are you all right?’

  No. She felt extraordinary: renewed, revived. She remembered every instant of it, that burst of exquisite pain, the feeling of reassembling, of sparkling. Was it possible she had somehow retained some consciousness during the transition?

  My God, she thought. This could become addictive.

  A new, complex light was sliding over the back of her hand. She suddenly remembered where she was. She made for her periscope.

  From the dimly-lit, barren fringe of the solar system, she had been projected immediately into a crowded space. She was, in fact, sailing over the surface of a star.

  The photosphere, barely ten thousand kilometres below, was a flat-infinite landscape, encrusted by granules each large enough to swallow the Earth, and with the chromosphere – the thousand-kilometre-thick outer atmosphere – a thin haze above it all. Polarizing filters in the viewport periscope dimmed its light to an orange glow. As she watched, one granule exploded, its material bursting across the star’s surface; neighbouring granules were pushed aside, so that a glowing, unstructured scar was left on the photosphere, a scar which was slowly healed by the eruption of new granules.

  From the tangled hull of the flower-ship, an instrument pod of some kind uncoiled on a graceful pseudopod. Gaijin instruments peered into the umbra of a star-spot below her. ‘This is an F-type white dwarf star, Meacher,’ Paulis said. ‘A close cousin of the sun, the dominant partner of the binary pair in this system.’

  I mightn’t have come here, she thought. She felt an odd, retrospective panic. Brind might have picked on somebody else. I might have turned them down. I might have died, without ever imagining this was possible.

  … But I just lost eighteen years, she thought. Nearly half my life. Just like that. She tried to imagine what was happening on Earth, right now. Tried and failed.