Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Madeleine’s employer was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, before a small butsudan, a Buddha shelf, under the window. She was a Japanese, a small, wizened woman, her face imploded, criss-crossed by Vallis Marineris grooves. Her remnant of hair was a handful of grey wisps, clinging to a liver-spotted scalp. She had been born in 1990. That made her more than a hundred and forty years old, close to the record. Nobody knew how she was keeping herself alive.

  She was, of course, Nemoto.

  Nemoto touched a carved statue. ‘A Buddha,’ she said, ‘of fused regolith from the Mare Ingenii. Once such an artefact would have seemed very exotic.’ She got up stiffly and went to a coffee pot. ‘You want some? I also have green tea.’

  ‘No. I burn my mouth too easily.’

  ‘That’s a loss.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’ An inability to drink hot black coffee was the Discontinuity handicap which Madeleine felt most severely.

  She studied Nemoto, this legendary figure from the deep past, and sought awe, even curiosity. She felt only numbness, impatience. ‘When do you want me to start work?’

  Nemoto smiled thinly. ‘Straight to business, Meacher? As soon as you can. The first launches start in a month.’

  Madeleine had been hired to prepare two hundred rookie astronauts for spaceflight.

  ‘Not astronauts,’ Nemoto corrected her. ‘Emigrants.’

  ‘Emigrants to Triton.’

  ‘Yes. Two hundred Aborigines, from the heart of the Australian outback, establishing a new nation on a moon of Neptune. Inspiring thought, don’t you think?’

  Or absurd, Madeleine reflected.

  ‘All you have to do is familiarize them with microgravity. We’ve established a hydro training facility here, and so forth. Just stop them throwing up or going crazy before we can get them transferred to the transport. I assigned Ben Roach to shepherd you for your first couple of days. He’s a smart-ass kid, but he has his uses.’

  Madeleine tried to focus on what Nemoto was saying, the details of her outlandish scheme. Triton? Why, for God’s sake? Surrounded by strangeness, numbed by the Discontinuity, it was hard to care.

  Nemoto eyed Madeleine. ‘You feel – disoriented. Here we sit: mirror images, relics of the twenty-first century, both stranded in an unanticipated future. The only difference is in how we got here. You by your relativistic hop, skip and jump across light years and decades – the scenic route.’ She grinned. ‘And I came the hard way.’ Her teeth were black, Madeleine noticed.

  She said, ‘But we’re both damaged by the experience, in our different ways.’

  Nemoto shrugged. ‘I ended up with all the power.’

  ‘Power over me, anyhow.’

  ‘Meacher, I still need crew for the transport.’

  ‘You’re offering me a flight to Triton?’

  ‘If you’re interested. Your Discontinuity won’t be a serious liability if –’

  ‘Forget it.’

  Madeleine stood up. Her left leg buckled and she nearly fell; she had to cling to the desk top. It was as if Madeleine was the old woman. She found she’d been applying too much weight to the leg and the blood supply had been cut off. She hadn’t noticed, of course; and that kind of damage was too subtle for the biocomp suit to pick up.

  Nemoto watched her, calculating, without sympathy. ‘The Triton colony is crucial,’ she said. ‘Strategic.’

  This was the Nemoto Madeleine had heard of. ‘You’re still working for the future of the species, Nemoto.’

  ‘Yes, if you want to know.’

  Madeleine’s heart sank. Nemoto would be hard to deal with rationally. People with missions always were.

  But only Nemoto would give her a job.

  Aside perhaps from Reid Malenfant – and even after all this time nobody knew what had become of him – Madeleine had been the first human to leave the solar system. Her experiences in the light of other stars had been astonishing.

  Her first return to the solar system had been something of a triumph – although even then she’d been aware of a historical dislocation, as if the world had had a layer of strangeness thrown over it. And she had been shocked by the sudden – to her – deaths of her mother, and of poor Sally Brind, and many others she had known.

  At least Frank Paulis’s get-rich-slow compound interest scheme had worked out that first time. And she had earned herself a little fame. She was the first star traveller – aside from Malenfant – and that earned her some profile.

  But she hadn’t been sorry to leave again, to escape into the clean blue light of the Saddle Points, replacing the baffling human world with the cold external mysteries of the stars.

  Her later returns had been less enjoyable.

  The truth was that as the decades peeled away on Earth, and the novelty wore off, nobody much cared about the star travellers – and few were prepared to protect the interests of these historical curiosities. So, the last time she came back, Madeleine had returned to find that a devaluation of the UN dollar, the new global currency, had wiped out a lot of the value of her savings. And then had come the banks’ decision to close the swelling accounts of the star travellers, a step that had been backed by inter-government agencies up to and including the UN.

  Meanwhile no insurance company would touch her, or anyone else who had been through the Saddle Point gateways, after the Discontinuity condition had been diagnosed.

  Which was why Madeleine needed money.

  Nemoto was attached to no organization. Madeleine couldn’t have defined her role. But her source of power was clear enough: she had stayed alive.

  Thanks to longevity treatments, Nemoto, and a handful of privileged others, had gotten so old that they formed a new breed of power-player, their influence coming from contacts, webs of alliances, ancient debts and favours granted. Nemoto was a gerontocrat, modelling herself on the antique Communist officials who still ran China.

  Madeleine wouldn’t have been surprised to find it was Nemoto herself, or the other gerontocrats, who lay behind the whole scam. The closure of the star travellers’ accounts had given Nemoto a good deal of leverage over Madeleine, and those who had followed in her path. And the strategy had put a block on any ambitions the star travellers might have had to use their effective longevity to accrue power back home.

  She wondered if the gerontocrats – conservative, selfish, reclusive, obsessive – were responsible for a more general malaise that seemed to her to have afflicted this fast-forwarded world. There had been change – new fashions, gadgetry, terminology – but, it seemed to her, no progress. In science and art she could see no signs of meaningful innovation. The world’s nations evolved, but the various supranational structures had not changed for decades: the political institutions that wielded the power had ossified.

  And meanwhile, the world still laboured under the old burdens of a fast-changing ecology and resource shortages, and minor wars continued to be an irritant at every fractured joint between peoples.

  Nobody was solving these ancient problems. Worse, it seemed to her, nobody was even trying any more. You could no longer, for example, get reliable statistics on population numbers, or disease occurrences, or poverty. It was as if history had stopped when the Gaijin had arrived.

  … But it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t have changed a thing. The travelling itself was the thing, the point of it all. The rest was ancient history, even to Madeleine herself.

  Ben showed her to her apartment. He had to show her how to open the door. In 2131, God help her, you had to work door locks with foot studs.

  The East Guiana spaceport, built up by the Europeans in the 1980s, extended maybe twenty kilometres along the coast of the Atlantic, from Sinnamary to Kourou, which was actually an old fishing village. There were control buildings, booster integration buildings, solid booster test stands and launch complexes, all identified by baffling French acronyms: BAF, BIL, BEAP – and connected by roads and rail tracks that looked, from her window, like gashes in the foliage.

&n
bsp; Ariane had been nice-looking technology, for its time, a hundred and fifty years earlier. It had been superseded by new generations of spaceplanes, even before the Gaijin had taken over most of Earth’s ground-to-orbit traffic with their clean, flawless landers. But when the French released political control of East Guiana, the new government decided to refurbish what was left at Kourou.

  So East Guiana, one of the smallest and poorest nations on Earth, suddenly had a space program.

  Ariane had kept flying even as history moved on, and nations and corporations and alliances had formed and dissolved, leaving new configurations whose very names were baffling to Madeleine. But Ariane remained, an antique, disreputable, dirty, unreliable launcher, used by agencies without the funds to afford something better.

  Like Nemoto.

  Maybe, Madeleine thought, it wasn’t a surprise that Nemoto, another relic of the first Space Age, had gravitated here.

  The residential quarters had been set up in an abandoned solid-propellant factory, a building that dated back to before Madeleine’s birth. The cluster of buildings was still called UPG, for Usine de Propergol de Guyane. It was a jumble of white cubes spilling over a hill-side, like a Mediterranean village. It was sparsely set up, but comfortable enough. About four hundred people lived here: the Aborigine emigrants, and permanent technical and managerial staff to operate the automated facilities. Once twenty thousand had been housed in Kourou, a fifth of the country’s population. The feeling of emptiness, of age and abandonment, was startling.

  She slept for a few hours. Then she drifted about her apartment, tinkering.

  It was startling how often and how much everyday gadgets changed. The toilet, for instance, was just a hole in the ground, and it took her an age to figure out how to make it flush. The shower was just as bad; it took a call to Ben to establish that to set the heat, you had to put your finger in a little test sink, and let the thing read your body temperature.

  And so on. All stuff everybody else here had grown up with. It was like being in a foreign country, wherever she went, even in her home town; she’d long grown tired of people not taking her requests for basic information seriously. And every time she came back from another Einsteinian fast-forward it got worse.

  Anyhow, a few minutes after stepping out of the shower, her skin was prickling with sweat again.

  She felt no discomfort, of course. The Discontinuity left her with numbness where pain or discomfort should sit. Like a fading-down of reality. She towelled herself dry again, trying not to scrape her skin.

  Perhaps it should have been expected. Before the reality of Saddle Point teleportation had been demonstrated, there had been those who had doubted whether human minds could ever, even in principle, be downloaded, stored or transmitted. The way data was stored in a brain was not simple. A human mind appeared to be a process, dynamic, and no static ‘snapshot’, no matter how sophisticated the technology, could possibly capture its richness. So it was argued.

  The fact that the first travellers, including Madeleine, had survived Saddle Point transitions seemed to belie this pessimistic point of view. But perhaps, in the longer term, those doubts had been borne out.

  She knew there was talk of treatment for Discontinuity sufferers. Madeleine wasn’t holding her breath: nobody was putting serious money into the problem. There were only a handful of star travellers, and nobody cared much about them anyhow. And so Madeleine had to wear a constricting biocomp sensor suit, which warned her when she’d sat still for too long, or when her skin was burned or frozen, and woke her up in the night to turn her over.

  Maybe the Gaijin weren’t affected the same way. Nobody knew.

  She stood, naked, at an open window, trying to get cool. It was evening. She looked across kilometres of hilly country, all of it coated by burgeoning life. There was a breeze, lifting loose leaves high enough to cross the balcony. But the breeze served only to push more water-laden air into her face.

  The blanket of foliage coating the hills around the launch areas looked etiolated: the leaves yellowed, stunted, the trees sickly and small by comparison with their neighbours further away. And the leaves at her feet were yellow and black, others holed, as if burned.

  She pulled on a loose dress and walked a kilometre to the block containing Ben’s apartment.

  She glimpsed Aborigines: her trainees, men, women and children, passing back and forth in little groups, engaged in their own errands and concerns. They showed no interest in her. They were loose-limbed people, many of them going barefoot, some of the women overweight; they wore loose togas like Ben’s, the cloth worn, dirty, well-used. Their faces were round, a paler brown than she had expected, with blunt noses, prominent brows. Many of them wore breathing filters or sun screen, and their skin was marked by cancer scars.

  They were alien to Madeleine, but no more so than most of the people of the year 2131.

  Ben welcomed her. He served her a meal: couscous rice with saffron, chunks of soya, a light local wine.

  He told her about his wife. She was called Lena; she was only twenty, a decade younger than Ben. She was in orbit, working on the big emigrant transports Nemoto was assembling. Ben hadn’t seen her for months.

  Madeleine felt easy with Ben. He even took care with the words he used. Language drift seemed remarkably rapid; less than a century out of her time, even if she was familiar with a word, she couldn’t always recognize its pronunciation, and had learned it wasn’t safe to assume she knew its modern usage. But Ben made sure that she understood.

  ‘It’s strange finding Aborigines here,’ Madeleine said. ‘So far from home.’

  ‘Not so strange. After all East Guiana is another colonial relic. The French wanted to follow the example of the British in Australia, by peopling East Guiana with convicts.’ He grinned, his teeth white and young, a contrast in Madeleine’s mind to the ruined mouth of Nemoto. He said, ‘Anyhow, now we can escape on the fizzers.’ He mimed a rocket launch with two hands clasped as in prayer. ‘Whoosh.’

  ‘Ben – why Triton? I know Nemoto has her own objectives. But for you …’

  ‘Nemoto’s offer was the only one we had. We have nowhere else to go. But perhaps we would follow her anyway. Nemoto is marginalized, her ideas ridiculed – most vigorously by friends of the Gaijin. But she is right, on the deepest of levels. We used to think we were alone in a primordial universe. Suddenly we find ourselves in a dangerous, crowded universe littered with ruins. There was fear, and deep anger at the discovery of the violation of Venus. It might have been a sister world to Earth – or Earth might have been the victim. With time, the outrage faded – but we remembered; we, a people who have been dispossessed already.’

  More leaves blew in from a darkening sky, broken, damaged by rocket exhaust.

  Ben told her he came from central Australia, born into a group called the Yolgnu. ‘When I was a boy my family lived by a river bank, living in the old way. But the authorities, the white people, came and moved us to a place called Framlingham. Just a row of shacks and tin houses. Then, when I was eight years old, more white men took me away to an orphanage. The men were from the Aboriginal Protection Board. When they thought I was civilized enough, they sent me to foster parents in Melbourne. White people, called Nash. They were rich and kind. You see, it was the policy of the Government to solve their Aboriginal problem once and for all, by making me white.’

  All of this stunned her, embarrassed her. She said, ‘You must hate them.’

  He smiled. ‘It had been tried before. They were always frightened, first of the Japanese, then of Indonesians and Chinese, flowing down from the north, with their eyes on Australia’s empty spaces, its huge mineral deposits. Now perhaps they fear the Gaijin, come to take their land. And each time they exorcise their fears using us. I do not hate them. I understand them.’

  To her surprise, he turned out to hold a doctorate in black hole physics. But he had been drawn back to Framlingham, as had others of his generation. Slowly they had constructed a
dream of a new life. Almost all of the people escaping to Triton were from Framlingham, he said. ‘It was a wrench to leave the old lands. But we will find new lands, make our own world.’

  Ben served her sambuca, an Italian liqueur: a new craze, it seemed. Sambuca was clear, aniseed flavoured. Ben floated Brazilian coffee beans in her glass, and set it alight. The alcohol burned blue in the fading light, cupped in the open space above the liquid, and the coffee beans hissed and popped. The flames were to release the oils from the beans, Ben said, and infuse the drink with the flavour of the coffee.

  He doused the flames and took careful sips from her glass, testing its temperature for her so that Madeleine would not burn her lips. The flavour of the hot liquid was strong, sharp enough to push at the boundary of her Discontinuity.

  They sat under the darkling sky, and the stars came out.

  Ben pointed out constellations for her, and he traced out other features of the celestial sphere for her, the geography of the sky.

  There was the celestial equator, an invisible line that was a projection of Earth’s equator on the sky. From here, of course, the equator passed right over their heads. Lights moved along that line, silent, smoothly traversing, like strangely orderly fireflies. They were orbital structures: factories, dwellings, even hotels. Many of them were Chinese, Ben told her; Chinese corporations had built up a close working relationship with the Gaijin. Then he distracted her with another invisible line called the ecliptic. The ecliptic was the equator of the solar system, the line the planets traced out. It was different from the Earth’s equator, because Earth’s axis was tipped over through twenty-three degrees or so.