Space

by Stephen Baxter

  … Rather, the ecliptic used to be invisible. Now, Madeleine found, it was marked out by a fine row of new stars, medium bright, some glowing white but others a deeper yellow to orange. It was like a row of street lamps.

  Those lights were cities, Madeleine learned: the new Gaijin communities, hollowed out of the giant rocks that littered the asteroid belt, burning with fusion light. No human had gotten within an astronomical unit of those new lamps in space.

  It was beautiful, chilling, remarkable. The people of this time had grown up with all this. But, nevertheless, she thought, the sky is full of cities, and huge incomprehensible ruins. New toilets and telephones she could accept. But even the solar system had changed while she had been away, and who would have anticipated that?

  She felt too hot, dizzy.

  She considered making a pass at Ben. It would be comforting.

  He seemed receptive.

  ‘What about Lena?’

  He smiled. ‘She is not here. I am not there. We are human beings. We have ties of gurrutu, of kinship, which will forever bind us.’

  She took that as assent. She reached out in the dark, and he responded.

  They made love in the equatorial heat, a slick of perspiration lubricating their bodies. Ben’s skin was a sculpture of firm planes, and his hands were confident and warm. She felt remote, as if her body was a piece of equipment she had to control and monitor.

  Ben sensed this. He was tender, and held her for comfort. He was fascinated by her skin, he said. The skin of a woman tanned by the light of different stars.

  She couldn’t feel his touch.

  She slept badly. In her dreams Madeleine spun through rings of powder-blue metal, confronted visions of geometric forms. Triangles, dodecahedra, icosahedra. When Madeleine cried out, Ben held her.

  At one point she saw that Ben, sleeping, was about to knock the coffee pot, and still-hot liquid would pour over his chest. She grabbed the spout, taking a few splashes, and pushed it away. She felt nothing, of course. She wiped her hand dry on a tissue, and waited for sleep.

  When they woke they found that the coffee had burned her hand severely.

  Ben treated her. ‘The absence of pain,’ he said, ‘is evidently a mixed blessing.’

  She’d heard this before, and had grown impatient. ‘Pain is an evolutionary relic. Sure, it serves as an early warning system. But we can replace that, right? Get rid of sharp edges. Soak the world with software implants, like my biocomp, to warn and protect us.’

  Ben studied her. He said, ‘Do you know what the central reticular formation is?’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me?’

  ‘It’s a small section of the brain. And if you excite this formation – in the brain of a normal human – the perception of pain disappears. This is the locus of the Discontinuity damage. I am talking of qualia, the inner sensations, aspects of consciousness. Your pain, objectively, still exists, in terms of the response of your body; what has been removed is the corresponding qualia, your perception of it. Put an end to discomfort, and there is an end to the emotions linked with pain. Fear. Grief. Pleasure.’

  ‘So my inner life is diminished.’

  ‘Yes. Consciousness is not well understood, nor the link between mind and body. Perhaps other qualia, too, are being distorted or destroyed by the Saddle Point transitions.’

  But, Madeleine thought, my dreams are of alien artefacts. Perhaps my qualia are not simply being destroyed. Perhaps they are being – replaced. It was a thought that hadn’t struck her before. Resolutely she pushed it away.

  ‘How do you know so much about this?’

  ‘I have ambitions myself to travel to the stars. To see a black hole, before I build my farm on Triton. It is worth my studying what would happen to me … Madeleine,’ he said slowly, ‘there is something I should tell you. Even though Nemoto has forbidden it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Chinese discovered it first, in their dealings with the Gaijin. Some say it is a Gaijin gift, in fact. Nemoto has worked to suppress knowledge of it. But I –’

  ‘Tell me, damn it.’

  ‘There is a cure for the Discontinuity.’

  She was electrified. Terrified.

  He said, ‘You know, the remarkable thing is that the reticular formation is in the oldest part of the brain. We share it with our most ancient ancestors. Madeleine, you have returned from the stars, changed. There are those who think we are forging a new breed of humans, out there beyond the Saddle Points. But, perhaps, we are merely swimming through the dreams of ancestral fish.’

  He smiled and held her again.

  She stormed into Nemoto’s office.

  Nemoto was busy; an Ariane launch was imminent. She took a look at the bandaging swathing Madeleine’s hand. ‘You ought to be careful.’

  ‘There’s a way to reverse the Discontinuity. Isn’t there?’

  ‘… Oh.’ Nemoto stood and faced the window, the Ariane mock-up framed there. She held her hands behind her back, and her posture was stiff. ‘That smart-ass kid. Sit down, Madeleine.’

  ‘Isn’t there?’

  ‘I said sit down.’

  Madeleine complied. She had trouble arranging herself on Nemoto’s office furniture.

  ‘Yes, there’s a way,’ Nemoto said. ‘If you’re treated correctly before you go through a gateway, the translation can be used to reverse the Discontinuity damage.’

  ‘Then why are you hiding this?’ Madeleine asked, and then, ‘Send me to a Saddle Point.’

  Nemoto looked at Madeleine from her mask of a face. ‘You’re sure you want this back? The pain, the anguish of being human –’

  ‘Yes.’

  Nemoto turned and sat down; she nested her hands on the table top, the fingers like intertwined twigs. ‘You have to understand the situation we face,’ she said. ‘Most of us are sleeping. But some of us believe we’re at war.’ She meant the Gaijin, of course, and their great belt cities, their swooping forays through the inner solar system – and the other migrants who were following, still decades or centuries away but nevertheless on the way, noisily building along the spiral arm. ‘You must see it – you, when you return from your jaunts to the stars. Everybody’s busy, too busy with the short term, unable to see the trends. Only us, Madeleine; only us, stranded out of time.’

  Something connected for Madeleine. ‘… Oh. That’s why you have kept the cure so quiet.’

  ‘Do you see why we must do this, Meacher? We need to explore every option. To have soldiers – warriors – who are free of pain –’

  ‘Free of consciousness itself.’

  ‘Perhaps. If that’s necessary.’

  Madeleine felt disgusted, sullied. Discontinuity was, after all, nothing less than the restructuring of her consciousness by Saddle Point transitions. How typical of humanity to turn this remarkable experience into a weapon. How monstrous.

  She sat back. ‘Send me through a Saddle Point.’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or I expose what you’ve been doing. Concealing a cure for the Discontinuity.’

  Nemoto considered. ‘This is too big an issue to horse-trade with the likes of you. But,’ she said, ‘I will make you an exchange.’

  ‘An exchange?’

  ‘I’ll send you to a Saddle Point. But afterwards you go to Triton with the Aborigines. We have to make sure that colony succeeds.’

  Madeleine shook her head. ‘It will take decades for me to complete a round-trip through a gateway.’

  Nemoto smiled thinly. ‘It doesn’t matter. It will take the Yolgnu years to reach Neptune, more years to establish any kind of viable colony. And we’re playing a long game here. Some day the Gaijin will confront us directly. Some of us don’t understand why that hasn’t already happened. We need to be prepared, when it does.’

  ‘And Triton is a part of this scheme?’

  Nemoto didn’t answer.

  But of course it was, Madeleine thought. Everything is a part of Nemoto’s grand design. Everythin
g, and everyone: my need for money and healing, Ben’s people’s need for refuge – all just levers for Nemoto to press.

  Nemoto said, ‘Where?’

  ‘Where what?’

  ‘Where do you want to go, on your health cruise?’

  ‘I don’t care. What does it matter?’

  ‘… There might be something suitable,’ Nemoto said at length. ‘There is another alien species, here in the Earth-Moon system. Did you know that? They are called the Chaera. Their star system is exotic. It includes a miniature black hole, which … well.’ She eyed Madeleine. ‘Your friend Ben is a black hole specialist. Perhaps he will go with you. How amusing.’

  Amusing. Another little relativistic death.

  There was a rumble of noise. They turned to the window. Kilometres away, beyond the mangrove swamps, Madeleine could see the booster’s slim nose lift above the trees, the first glow of the engines. The light of the solid boosters seemed to spill over the tree line – startlingly bright rocket light glimmering from the flat swamps – as Ariane rolled on its axis.

  ‘There,’ Nemoto said. ‘You made me miss the launch.’

  Chapter 15

  COLONISTS

  Six months:

  Once Nemoto had given her the date of her Saddle Point mission it was all she could think about. The rest of her life – her work in Kourou and elsewhere, her legal struggles to get back some of the money that had been impounded from her accounts, even her developing, low-key relationship with Ben – all of that faded to a background glow compared to the diamond-bright prospect of encountering another Saddle Point gateway, at that specified, slowly approaching date in the future.

  She’d met other star travellers, returned from one or two hops into the sky with the Gaijin. All of them were determined to go on. She imagined a cloud of human travellers, journeying deeper and deeper into the strange cosmos, their ties to a blurred, fast-forwarding Earth stretching and loosening.

  It wasn’t just the Discontinuity. She didn’t belong here. After all, she couldn’t even work the toilets.

  She longed to leave.

  The Japanese-built lander touched the Moon, its rockets throwing up a cloud of fast-settling dust. There were various artefacts here, sitting on the surface of the Moon, and Nemoto, the spider at the heart of this operation, was waiting for them, anonymous in a black suit.

  Ben and Madeleine suited up carefully. Madeleine made sure Ben followed her lead; she was, after all, the experienced astronaut.

  She climbed down a short ladder to the surface. She dropped from step to step, in the gentle gravity. She stepped off the last rung onto regolith, which crunched like snow under her weight.

  She walked away from the lander.

  The colours of the Moon weren’t strong: in fact the most colourful thing here was their Nishizaki Heavy Industries aluminium-frame lander, which, from a distance, looked like a small, fragile insect, done out in brilliant black, silver, orange and yellow. The Sea of Tranquillity was close to the Moon’s equator, so Earth was directly above her head, and it was difficult to tip back in her pressure suit to see it. But when Ben goes to live on Triton, she thought, the sun will be a bright point source. And Earth will be no more than a pale blue point of light, only made visible by blocking out the sun itself. How strange that will be.

  Nemoto was showing Ben the various artefacts she had assembled here. Madeleine saw a set of blocky metal boxes, trailing cables. These were, it turned out, a pair of high-power X-ray lasers. ‘A small fission bomb is the power source. When the bomb is detonated, a burst of X-ray photons is emitted. The photons travel down long metal rods. This generates an intense beam. In effect, the power of the bomb has been focused …’

  These were experimental weapons, it emerged, dating from the late twentieth century. They had been designed as satellite weapons, intended to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles.

  Madeleine asked, ‘And what have the Gaijin paid us for this obscene old gadgetry?’

  ‘That’s not your concern.’

  The habitat which would keep them alive was another masterpiece of improvisation and low cost, Madeleine thought, like her fondly-remembered Friendship-7. It was based on two modules – called FGB, Russian-built, and the Service Module, American-built – scavenged from the old NASA International Space Station. The Service Module had been enhanced with an astrophysics instrument pallet.

  Madeleine slipped her gloved hand into Ben’s. ‘We ought to name our magnificent ship,’ she said.

  Ben thought it over. ‘Dreamtime Ancestor.’

  Nemoto said, ‘Come meet the Chaera.’

  The last artefact, sitting on the regolith, was a tank, a glass cube. It contained a translucent disc about a metre across, swimming slowly through oxygen-blue fluid.

  It was an Eetie: a Chaera, an inhabitant of the black hole system that was the destination of this mission. The Chaera had, after the Gaijin, been the second variant of Eetie to come to the solar system.

  Aside from all the dead ones in the past, of course.

  Ben stepped forward. He touched the glass walls of the tank with his gloved hand. The Chaera rippled; it looked something like a stingray. She wondered if it was trying to talk to Ben.

  … The Chaera had eyes, she saw: four of them spaced evenly around the rim of the stingray shape, dilating lids alternately opening. Human-like eyes, gazing out at her, eyes on a creature from another star. She shivered with recognition.

  Through a hairline crack in the Chaera’s tank, fluid bubbled and boiled into vacuum.

  ‘You need to understand that the nature of this mission is a little different,’ Nemoto said. ‘You are going to a populated system. The Chaera have technology, it seems, but they lack spaceflight. The Gaijin made contact with them and initiated a trading relationship. The Chaera requested specific artefacts, which we’ve been able to supply.’ She grunted. ‘Interesting. The Gaijin actually seem to be learning to run rudimentary trading relationships, from us. Before, perhaps they simply appropriated, or killed.’

  Ben said, ‘Killed? Your view of the Gaijin is harsh indeed, Nemoto.’

  Madeleine asked, ‘What are the Gaijin getting from the Chaera in return for this?’

  ‘We don’t know. The Chaera spend their days quietly in the service of their God. And their requirement, it seems, is simple. You will help them talk to God.’

  Ben said dryly, ‘With an X-ray laser?’

  ‘Just focus on the science,’ Nemoto said, sounding weary. ‘Learn about black holes, and about the Gaijin. That’s what you’re being sent for. Don’t worry about the rest.’

  The Chaera swam like melting glass, glimmering in Earthlight.

  Ben Roach seemed to sense her urgency, her longing for time to pass.

  He offered to take her to Australia, to show her places where he’d grown up. ‘You ought to reconnect a little. No matter how far you travel, you’re still made of Earth atoms, rock and water.’

  ‘Aborigine philosophy?’ she asked, a little dismissive.

  ‘If you like. The Earth gave you life, gave you food and language and intelligence, and will take you back when you die. There are stories that humans have already died, out there among the stars. Their atoms can’t return to the Earth. And, conversely, there are Gaijin here.’

  ‘None of the Gaijin have died here.’ That was true; the three ambassadors she had encountered on Kefallinia were still there, still functioning decades later. ‘Perhaps they can’t die.’

  ‘But if they do, then their atoms, not of the Earth, will be absorbed by the Earth’s rocks.’

  ‘Perhaps that is a fair trade,’ she said. ‘We should extend your philosophy. The universe is the greater Earth; the universe births us, takes us back when we die. All of us, humans, Gaijin, everybody.’

  ‘Yes. Besides, there are lessons to learn.’

  ‘Are you trying to educate me, Ben? What is there to see in Australia?’

  ‘Will you come?’

  It would ea
t up time. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  From the air Australia looked flat, rust-red, and littered with rippling, continent-spanning sand dunes and shining salt flats, the relics of dead seas. It was eroded, very dry, very ancient; even the sand dunes, she learned, were thirty thousand years old. Human occupancy seemed limited to the coastal strip, and a few scattered settlements in the interior.

  They flew into Alice Springs, in the dry heart of the island continent.

  As they approached the airport she saw a modern facility: a huge white globe, other installations. In among the structures she saw the characteristic gleaming cones of Gaijin landers. New silvery fencing had been flung out across the desert for kilometres around the central structures.

  The extent of the Gaijin holding, here in central Australia, startled her. The days when the Gaijin had been restricted to a heavily-guarded compound on a Greek island were long past, it seemed.

  Ben grimaced. ‘This is an old American space tracking facility called Pine Gap. There used to be a lot of local hostility to it. It was said that even the Prime Minister of Australia didn’t know what went on in there. And the local Aboriginal communities were outraged when their land was taken away.’

  ‘But now,’ she said dryly, ‘the Americans have gone. We don’t do any space tracking, because we don’t have a space program that requires it any more.’

  ‘No,’ he murmured. ‘And so they gave Pine Gap to the Gaijin.’

  ‘When?’

  He shrugged. ‘Forty years ago, I think.’ Before he was born.

  It was the same all over the planet, Madeleine knew. Everywhere they touched the Earth, the Gaijin were moving out: slowly, almost imperceptibly, but it was all one way. And every year there were more weary human refugees, forced to flee their homes.