Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Few people protested strongly, because few saw the trends. Nemoto is right, she thought. The Gaijin are exploiting our short lives. Nemoto is right to try to survive, to stretch out her life, to see what is being done to us.

  But Ben surprised her. Being here, seeing this, he lost his detachment; he became unhappy, angry. ‘The Gaijin care even less about our feelings than the Europeans. But we were here before the Gaijin, long before the Europeans. They are all Gaijin to us. Some of us are fleeing. But maybe one day they will all have gone, all the foreigners, and we will slip off our manufactured clothes and walk into the desert once more. What do you think? …’

  The plane landed heavily, in a cloud of billowing red dust.

  Alice Springs – Ben called it the Alice – turned out to be a dull, scrubby town, a grid of baking-hot streets. Its main strip was called Todd Street, a dreary stretch of asphalt that dated back to the days of horses and hitching posts. Now it might have been transplanted from small-town America, a jumble of bars, soda fountains and souvenir stores.

  Madeleine studied the store windows desultorily. There were Australian mementoes – stuffed kangaroos and wallabies, animated T-shirts and books and data discs – but there was also, to cash in on the nearness of the Pine Gap reserve, a range of Gaijin souvenirs, models of landers and flower-ships, and animated spider-like Gaijin toys that clacked eerily back and forth across the display front. But there were few tourists now, it seemed; that industry, already dwindling before Madeleine’s first Saddle Point jaunt, was now all but vanished.

  They stayed in an anonymous hotel a little way away from Todd Street. There was an ugly old eucalyptus outside, pushing its way through the asphalt. The tree had small, tough-looking dark green leaves, and it was shedding its bark in great ash-grey strips that dangled from its trunk. ‘A sacred monument,’ Ben said gently. ‘It’s on the Caterpillar Dreaming.’ She didn’t know what that meant. SmartDrive cars wrenched their way around the tree’s stubborn, ancient presence; once, in the days when people drove cars, it must have been a traffic hazard.

  A couple of children ambled by – slim, lithe, a deep black, plastered with sunblock. They stared at Ben and Madeleine as they stared at the tree. Ben seemed oddly uncomfortable under their scrutiny.

  It’s because he’s a foreigner too, she thought. He’s been away too long, like me. This place isn’t his any more, not quite. She found that saddening, but oddly comforting. Always somebody worse off than yourself.

  They rested for a night.

  At her window the Moon was bright. Fat bugs swarmed around the hotel’s lamps, sparking, sizzling. It was so hot it was hard to sleep. She longed for the simple, controllable enclosure of a spacecraft.

  The next morning they prepared to see the country – to go out bush, as Ben called it. Ben wore desert boots, a loose singlet, a yellow hard hat and tight green shorts he called ‘stubbies’. Meacher wore a loose poncho and a broad reflective hat and liberal layers of sunblock on her face and hands. After all, she wouldn’t even be able to tell when this ferocious sun burned her.

  They had rented a car, a chunky four-wheel-drive with immense broad tyres, already stained deep red with dust. Ben loaded up some food – tucker, he called it, his accent deepening as he spoke to the locals – and a lot of water, far more than she imagined they would need, in big chilled clear-walled tanks called Eskis, after Eskimo. In fact the car wouldn’t allow itself to be started unless its internal sensors told it there was plenty of water on board.

  The road was a straight black strip of tarmac – probably smart concrete, she thought, self-repairing, designed to last centuries without maintenance. It was empty of traffic, save for themselves.

  At first she glimpsed fences, wind-pumps with cattle clustered around them, even a few camels.

  They passed an Aboriginal settlement, surrounded by a link fence. It was a place of tin-roof shacks, and a few central buildings that were just brown airless boxes – a clinic, a church perhaps. Children seemed to be running everywhere, limbs flashing. Rubbish blew across the ground, where bits of glass sparkled.

  They didn’t stop; Ben barely glanced aside. Madeleine was shocked by the squalor.

  Soon they moved beyond human habitation, and the ground was crimson and treeless. Nothing moved but the wispy shadows of high clouds. It was too arid here to farm or even graze.

  ‘A harsh place,’ she said unnecessarily.

  ‘You bet,’ Ben said, his eyes masked by mirrored glasses. ‘And getting harsher. It’s becoming depopulated, in fact. But it was enough for us. We touched the land lightly, I suppose.’

  It was true. After tens of millennia of trial and error and carefully accumulated lore, the Aborigines had learned to survive here, in a land starved of nutrient and water. But there was no room for excess: there had been no fixed social structure, no prophets or chiefs, no leisured classes, and their myths were dreams of migration. And, before the coming of the Europeans, the weak, infirm and elderly had been dealt with harshly.

  In a land the size of the continental United States, there had been only three hundred thousand of them. But the Aborigines had survived, where it might seem impossible.

  As the ground began to rise, Ben stopped the car and got out. Madeleine emerged into hot, skin-sucking dust, flat dense light, stillness.

  She found herself walking over a plateau of sand hills and crumbled, weathered orange-red rock, red as Mars, she thought, broken by deep, dry gulches. But there was grass here, tufts of it, yellow and spiky; even trees and bushes, such as low, spiky-leaved mulgas. Some of the bushes had been recently burned, and green shoots prickled the blackened stumps. To her eyes, there was the look of park land about these widely separated trees and scattered grass; but this land had been shaped by aridity and fire, not western aesthetics.

  Ben seemed exhilarated to be walking, stretching his legs, thumbs hooked in the straps of a backpack. ‘Australia is a place for creatures who walk,’ he said. ‘That’s what we humans are adapted for. Look at your body some time. Every detail of it, from your long legs to your upright spine, is built for long, long walks through unforgiving lands, of desert and scrub. Australia is the kind of land we’ve been evolved for.’

  ‘So we’ve been evolved to be refugees,’ Madeleine said sourly.

  ‘If you like. Looking at the crowd that seems to be on the way along the spiral arm, maybe that’s a good thing. What do you think?’

  Walking, he said, was the basis of the Dreamtime, the Aboriginal Genesis.

  ‘In the beginning there was only the clay. And the Ancestors created themselves from the clay – thousands of them, one for each totemic species …’ Each totemic Ancestor travelled the country, leaving a trail of words and musical notes along the lines of his footprints. And these tracks served as ways of communication between the most far-flung tribes.

  Madeleine had heard of this. ‘The song lines.’

  ‘We call them something like “The Footprints of the Ancestors”. And the system of knowledge and law is called the Tjukurpa … But, yes. The whole country is like a musical score. There is hardly a rock or a creek that has been left unsung. My “clan” isn’t my tribe, but all the people of my Dreaming, whether on this side of the continent or the other; my “land” isn’t some fixed patch of ground, but a trade route, a means of communication.

  ‘The main song lines seem to enter Australia from the north or north-west, perhaps from across the Torres Strait, and then weave their way southwards across the continent. Perhaps they represent the routes of the first Australians of all, when they ventured over the narrow Ice Age strait from Asia. That would make the lines remnants of trails that stretch much further back, over a hundred thousand years, across Asia and back to Africa.’

  ‘From Africa,’ she said, ‘to Triton.’

  ‘Where the land is unsung. Yes.’

  They climbed a little further, through clumps of the wiry yellow-white grass, which was called spinifex. She reached out to touch a clump, feel
ing nothing; Ben snatched her hand back. He turned it over. She saw spines sticking out of her palm.

  Patiently he plucked out the spines. ‘Everything here has spines. Everything is trying to survive, to hold onto its hoard of water. Just remember that … Look.’

  There was a crackle of noise. A female kangaroo, with a cluster of young, had broken cover from a stand of bushes.

  The kangaroos looked oddly like giant mice, clumsy but powerful, with rodent-like faces and thick fur. Their haunches were white against the red of the dirt. When the big female moved, she used a swivelling gait Madeleine had never seen before, using her tail and forelegs as props while levering herself forward on her great lower legs. There was a cub in her pouch – no, Ben said it was called a joey – a small head that protruded, curious, and even browsed on the spinifex as the mother moved.

  The creatures, seen close up, seemed extraordinarily alien to Madeleine: a piece of different biological engineering, as if she had wandered into some alternate world. The Chaera, she thought, are hardly less exotic.

  Something startled the kangaroos. They leapt away with great efficient bounds.

  Madeleine grinned. ‘My first kangaroo.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Ben said tightly. ‘I think that was a Procoptodon. A giant kangaroo. They grow as high as three metres …’

  Madeleine knew nothing about kangaroos. ‘And that’s unusual?’

  ‘Madeleine, Procoptodon has been extinct for ten thousand years. That’s what makes it unusual.’

  They walked on, further from the car, sipping water from flasks.

  ‘It’s the Gaijin,’ he said. ‘Of course it’s the Gaijin. They are restoring megafauna that have long been extinct here. There have been sightings of wanabe, a snake a metre in diameter and seven long, a flightless bird twice the mass of an emu called genyornis. The Gaijin seem to be tinkering with the genetic structure of existing species, exploring these archaic, lost forms.’

  They came upon an area of bare rock that was littered with bones. The bones were broken up and scattered, and had apparently been gnawed. Few of the fragments were large enough for her to recognize – was this an eye socket, that a piece of jaw?

  ‘We think they use parsimony analysis,’ Ben was saying. ‘DNA erodes with time. But you can deconstruct evolution if you have access to the evolutionary products. You track backwards to find the common gene from which all the products descended; the principle is to seek the smallest number of branch points from which the present family could have evolved. When you have the structure you can recreate the ancient gene by splicing synthesized sequences into modern genes. You see?’ He stopped, panting lightly. ‘And, Madeleine, here’s a thought. Australia has been an island, save for intervals of bridging during the Ice Ages, for a hundred million years. The genetic divergence between modern humans is widest between Australian natives and the rest of the population.’

  ‘So if you wanted to think about picking apart the human genome –’

  ‘– here would be a good place to start.’

  She thought of the Gaijin she had seen undoing itself, decades back, in Kefallinia. ‘Perhaps they are dismantling us. Taking apart the biosphere, to see how it works.’

  ‘Perhaps. You know, humans always believed that when the aliens arrived, they would bring wisdom from the stars. Instead they seem to have arrived with nothing but questions. Now, they have grown dissatisfied with our answers, and are seeking their own … Of course it might help if they told us what it is they are looking for. But we are starting to guess.’

  ‘We are?’

  They walked on, slowly, conserving their energy.

  He eyed her. ‘For somebody who has travelled so far, you sometimes seem to understand little. Let me tell you another theory. Can you see any cactus, here in our desert?’

  No, as it happened. In fact, now she thought about it, there were none of the desert plants she was accustomed to from the States.

  Ben told her now that this was because of Australia’s long history. Once it had been part of a giant super-Africa continent called Gondwanaland. When Australia had split off and sailed away, it had carried a freight of rainforest plants and animals which had responded to the growing aridity by evolving into the forms she saw here.

  He rubbed his fingers in the red dirt. ‘The continents are rafts of granite that ride on currents of magma in the mantle. We think the continents merge and break up, moving this way and that, under the influence of changes in those currents.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘But we don’t know what causes those magma currents to change. We used to think it must be some dynamic internal to the Earth.’

  ‘But now –’

  ‘Now we aren’t so sure.’ He smiled thinly. ‘Imagine a huge war. A bombardment from space. Imagine a major strike, an asteroid or comet, hitting the ocean. It would punch through the water like a puddle, not even noticing it was there, and then crack the ocean floor.’ His lips pursed. ‘Think of a scum on water. Now throw in a few rocks. Imagine the islands of dirt shattering, convulsing, whirling around and uniting again. That was what it was like. If it happened, it shaped the whole destiny of life on Earth. The impact structures wouldn’t be easy to spot, because the ocean floor gets dragged under the continents and melted. After two hundred million years, the ocean floor is wiped clean. Nevertheless there are techniques …’

  A huge war. Rocks hurled from the sky, battering the Earth. Tens of millions of years ago. The hot dusty land seemed to swivel around her.

  It sounded like an insane conspiracy theory. To attribute the evolution of Venus to the activities of aliens was one thing. But this … Could it possibly be true that everything she had seen today – the animals, the ancient land – all of it was shaped by intelligence, by careless war?

  ‘Is this why you brought me to Australia? To tell me this?’

  He grinned. ‘On Earth, as it is in Heaven, Madeleine. We seem to find it easy to discuss the remaking of remote rocky worlds by waves of invaders – even Venus, our twin. But why should Earth have been spared?’

  ‘And this is why you follow Nemoto?’

  ‘If the Gaijin understand this – that we live in a universe of such dreadful violence – don’t you think they should, at the very least, tell us? …’ Ben found what looked like a piece of thigh bone. ‘I’m not an expert,’ he said. ‘But I think this was a diprotodon. A wombat-like creature the size of a rhino.’

  ‘Another Gaijin experiment.’

  ‘Yes.’ He seemed angry again, in his controlled, internalized way. ‘Who knows how it died? From hunger, perhaps, or thirst, or just simple sunburn. These are archaic forms; this isn’t the ecology they evolved in.’

  ‘And so they die.’

  ‘And so they die.’

  They walked on, and found more bones of animals that should have been dead for ten thousand years, huge failed experiments, bleached in the unrelenting sun.

  The Saddle Point gateway was a simple hoop of some powder-blue material, facing the sun, perhaps thirty metres across. Madeleine thought it was classically beautiful. Elegant, perfect.

  As the flower-ship approached, Madeleine’s fear grew. Ben told her Dreamtime stories, and she clung to him. ‘Tell me …’

  There was no deceleration. At the last minute the flower-ship folded up its electromagnetic petals, and the silvery ropes coiled back against the ship’s flanks, turning it into a spear that lanced through the disc of darkness.

  Blue light bathed Madeleine’s face. The light increased in intensity, until it blinded them.

  With every transition, there is a single instant of pain, unbearable, agonizing.

  … But this time, for Madeleine, the pain didn’t go away.

  Ben held her, as the cool light of different suns broke over the flower-ship, as she wept.

  Chapter 16

  ICOSAHEDRAL GOD

  The Saddle Point for the Chaera’s home system turned out to be within the accretion disc of th
e black hole itself. Ben and Madeleine clung to the windows as smoky light washed over the scuffed metal and plastic surfaces of the habitat.

  The accretion disc swirled below the flower-ship, like scum on the surface of a huge milk churn. The black hole was massive for its type, Madeleine learned – metres across. Matter from the accretion disc tumbled into the hole continually; X-rays sizzled into space.

  The flower-ship passed through the accretion disc. The view was astonishing.

  The disc foreshortened. They fell into shadows a million kilometres long.

  A crimson band swept upwards past the flower-ship. Madeleine caught a glimpse of detail, a sea of gritty rubble. The disc collapsed to a grainy streak across the stars; pea-sized pellets spanged off Ancestor’s hull plates. Then the ship soared below the plane of the disc.

  A brilliant star gleamed beneath the ceiling of rubble. This was a stable G2 star, like the sun, some five astronomical units away – about as far as Jupiter was from Sol. The black hole was orbiting that star, a wizened, spitting planet.

  Soon, the monitors mounted on the Ancestor’s science platform started to collect data on hydrogen alpha emission, ultraviolet line spectra, ultraviolet and X-ray imaging, spectrography of the active regions. Ben took charge now, and training and practice took over as the two of them went into the routine tasks of studying the hole and its disc.

  Nemoto had hooked up to the Chaera’s tank a powerful bioprocessor, a little cubical unit, which would enable the humans to communicate, to some extent, with the Chaera, and with their Gaijin hosts. When they booted it up, a small screen displayed the biopro’s human interface design metaphor. It was a blocky, badly synched, two-dimensional virtual representation of Nemoto’s leathery face.

  ‘The vanity of megalomaniacs,’ Madeleine murmured. ‘It’s a pattern.’

  Ben didn’t understand. The Nemoto virtual grinned.

  Ben and Madeleine hovered before a window into the Chaera’s tank.