Space

by Stephen Baxter

  At that moment, she felt the ties between them stretch, break. Now, she thought, I am truly alone; I have lost my only companion from the past. It was surprising how little it hurt.

  ‘Here is another possibility,’ Ben said. ‘Beyond ethics, beyond this perceived conflict with the Gaijin. You like to meddle, to smash things, Madeleine. You are like Nereid yourself, a rogue retrograde body, come to smash our little community. Perhaps this is why the plan is so appealing to you.’

  ‘Perhaps it is,’ she said, irritated. ‘You’ll have to judge my psychology for yourself.’

  And with an angry stab, she shut down the comms link.

  Alone in Gurrutu, she assembled a complete virtual projection of Triton, a three-dimensional globe a metre across. She looked for the last time at the ice surface of Triton, the subtle shadings of pink and white and brown.

  She switched to a viewpoint at Triton’s evacuated equator. It was as if she was standing on Triton’s surface.

  Nereid was supposed to do two things: to spin up Triton, and to melt its ancient oceans. Therefore she had steered the moon to come in at a steep angle, to deliver a sideways slap along Triton’s equator. And so, when she turned her virtual head, Nereid was looming low on the horizon: a lumpy, battered moon, visibly three-dimensional, rotating, growing minute by minute.

  An icon in the corner of her view recorded a steady countdown. She deleted it. She’d always hated countdowns.

  Her imaging systems picked out Gaijin flower-ships in low orbit around the moon, golden sparks arcing this way and that. She smiled. So the Gaijin were curious too. Let them watch. It would be, after all, the greatest impact in the solar system since the end of the primordial bombardment.

  Quite a show. And for once it would be humans lighting up the sky.

  The end, when it came, seemed brutally fast. Nereid grew from a spot of darkness, to a pebble, to a patch of rock the size of her hand, to, Jesus, a roof of rock over the world, and then –

  Blinding light. She gasped.

  The image snapped back to an overview of the moon. She felt as if she had died and come back to life.

  A plume of fragments was rising vertically from Triton’s surface, like one last mighty geyser: bits of red hot rock, steam, glittering ice, some larger fragments that soared like cannonballs.

  Nereid was gone.

  Much of the little moon’s substance must already have been lost, rock and ice and rich organic volatiles blasted to vapour in that first second of impact: lost forever, lost to space. Perhaps it would form a new, temporary ring around Neptune; perhaps eventually, centuries from now, some of it would rain back on Triton, or some other moon.

  This was an astoundingly inefficient process, she knew, and that had been a key objection of some of the Kasyapa factions. To burn up a moon, a whole four-billion-year-old moon, for such a poor gain is a crime. Madeleine couldn’t argue with that.

  Except to say that this was war.

  And now something emerged from the base of the plume. It was a circular shock wave, a wall of shattering ice like the rim of a crater, ploughing its way across the ground. The terrain it left behind was shattered, chaotic, and she could see the glint of liquid water there, steaming furiously in the vacuum and cold. Ice formed quickly, in sheets and floes, struggling to plate over the exposed water. But echoes of that great shock still tore at this transient sea, and immense plates, diamond white, arced far above the water before falling back in a flurry of fragments.

  Now, in that smashed region – from cryovolcanoes kilometres wide – volatiles began to boil out of Triton’s interior: nitrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia, water vapour. Nereid’s heat was doing its work; what was left of the sister moon must be settling towards Triton’s core, burning, melting, flashing to vapour. Soon a mushroom of thickening cloud began to obscure the broken, churning surface. Some of the larger fragments thrown up by that initial plume began to hurtle back from their high orbits, and burned streaks through Triton’s temporary atmosphere. And when they hit the churning water-ice beneath, they created new secondary plumes, new founts of destruction.

  The shock wall, kilometres high, ploughed on, overwhelming the ancient lands of ice, places where nitrogen frost still lingered. It was not going to stop, she realized now. The shock would scorch its way around the world. It would destroy all Triton’s subtlety, churning up the nitrogen snows of the north, the ancient organic deposits of the south, disrupting the slow nitrogen weather, destroying forever the ancient, poorly understood cantaloupe terrain. The shock wall would be a great eraser, she thought, eliminating all of Triton’s unsolved puzzles, four billion years of icy geology, in a few hours.

  But those billowing ice-volcano clouds were already spreading in a great loose veil around the moon, the vapour reaching altitudes where it could outrun the march of the shattered ice. Mercifully, after an hour, Triton was covered, the death of its surface hidden under a layer of roiling clouds, within which lightning flashed, almost continually.

  She heard from Ben that the Yolgnu were celebrating. This was Triton Dreamtime, the true Dreamtime, when giants were shaping the world.

  After three hours there was a new explosion, a new gout of fire and ice from the far side of the moon. That great shock wave had swept right around the curve of the moon, until it had converged in a fresh clap of shattered ice at the antipode of the impact. Madeleine supposed there would be secondary waves, great circular ripples washing back and forth around Triton like waves in a bathtub, as the new ocean, seething, sought equilibrium.

  Nemoto materialized before her.

  ‘You improvised well, Madeleine.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me, Nemoto. I was a good little soldier.’

  But Nemoto, of course, five hours away, couldn’t hear her. ‘… Triton is useless now to the Gaijin, who need solid ice and rock for their building programs. But it is far from useless to humans. This will still be a cold world; a thick crust of ice will form. But that ocean could, thanks to the residual heat of Nereid and Neptune’s generous tides, remain liquid for a long time – for millions of years, perhaps. And Earth life could inhabit the new ocean. Lightly modified anyhow – deep sea creatures, able to live off the heat of Triton’s churning core – plankton, fish, even whales. Triton, here on the edge of interstellar space, has become Earth-like. Imagine the future for these Aborigines,’ Nemoto said, seductively. ‘Triton was the son of Poseidon and Aphrodite. How apt …’

  This was Nemoto’s finest hour, Madeleine thought, this heroic effort to deflect – not just worlds – but the course of history itself. She tried to cling to her own feelings of triumph, but it was thin, lonely comfort.

  ‘One more thing, Meacher.’ Virtual Nemoto leaned towards her, intent, wizened. ‘One more thing I must tell you …’

  Later, she called Ben.

  He asked, ‘When are you coming home?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  Ben frowned at her. ‘You are being foolish.’

  ‘No. Kasyapa is your home, and Lena’s. Not mine.’

  ‘Then where? Earth? The Moon?’

  ‘I am centuries out of my time,’ she said. ‘Not there, either.’

  ‘You’re going back to the Saddle Points. But you are the great Gaijin hater, like Nemoto.’

  She shrugged. ‘I oppose their projects. But I’ll ride with them. Why not? Ben, they run the only ship out of port.’

  ‘What do you hope to learn out there?’

  She did not answer.

  Ben was smiling. ‘Madeleine, I always knew I would lose you to starlight.’

  She found it hard to focus on his face, to listen to his words. He was irrelevant now, she saw. She cut the connection.

  She thought over the last thing Nemoto had said to her. Find Malenfant. He is dying …

  Chapter 23

  CANNONBALL

  It had to be the ugliest planet Madeleine had ever seen.

  It was a ball the size of Earth, spinning slowly, lit up by an unremarka
ble yellow star. The land was a contorted, blackened mess of volcano calderas, rift and compression features, and impact craters that looked as if they had been punched into a metal block. Seas, lurid yellow, pooled at the shores of distorted continents. And the air was a thin, smoggy, yellowish wisp, littered with high mustard-coloured cirrus clouds.

  On the planet there were no obvious signs of life or intelligence: no cities gleaming on the dark side, no ships sailing those ugly yellow oceans. But there were three Gaijin flower-ships in orbit here, Madeleine’s and two others.

  Her curiosity wasn’t engaged.

  All the Gaijin would tell her about the planet was the name they gave it – Zero-Zero-Zero-Zero – the name, and the reason they had brought her here, across a hundred light years via a hop-skip-jump flight between Saddle Point gateways in half a dozen systems, a whole extra century deeper into the future: that they needed her assistance.

  Malenfant is dying.

  Reluctantly – after a year in transit, she had gotten used to her lonely life in her antique Gurrutu hab module – she collected her gear and clambered into a Gaijin lander.

  Madeleine stepped onto the land of a new world.

  Ridges in the hard crumpled ground hurt her feet. The air was murky grey, but more or less transparent; she could see the sun, dimmed to an unremarkable disc as if by high winter cloud. Immediately she didn’t like it here. The gravity was high – not crushing, but enough to make her heavy-footed, the bio pack on her back a real burden.

  Numbers scrolling across her faceplate told her the gravity was some forty per cent higher than Earth’s. And, since this world was about the same size as Earth, that meant that its density had to be around forty per cent higher too: closer to the density of pure iron.

  Earth was a ball of nickel-iron overlaid by a thick mantle of less dense silicate rock. The high density of this world must mean it had no rocky mantle to speak of. It was nickel-iron, all the way from core to surface, as if a much larger world had been stripped of its mantle and crust, and she was walking around on the remnant iron core.

  That wasn’t so strange. There were ways that could happen, in the violent early days of a system’s formation, when immense rogue planetesimals continue to bombard planets that were struggling to coalesce. Mercury, the solar system’s innermost planet, had suffered an immense primordial impact that had left that little world with the thinnest of mantles over its giant core.

  At least human scientists had presumed it was primordial. Nobody was sure about such things any more.

  She glanced around the sky. She was a hundred light years from home, a hundred light years in towards the centre of the Galaxy, roughly along a line that would have joined Earth to Antares, in Scorpio. But the sky was dark, dismal.

  There were no asteroid belts, only a handful of comets left orbiting further out, and two gas giants both stripped of their volatiles, reduced to smooth rocky balls. She was well inside the interstellar colonization wavefront that appeared to be sweeping out along the spiral arm and was nearing Earth, a hundred light years back. And this was a typical post-wavefront system: colonized, ferociously robbed of its resources by one short-sighted, low-tech predatory strategy or another, trashed, abandoned.

  Even the stars had been obscured, their light stolen by Dyson masks: dense orbiting habitat clouds, even solid spheres, asteroids and planets dismantled and made into traps for every stray photon. It was a depressing sight: an engineered sky, a sky full of scaffolding and ruins.

  Earth’s sky was primeval, comparatively. This was a glimpse of the future, for Earth.

  She walked further, away from the lander, which was a silvery cone behind her. She was only a few kilometres from the shore of one of those yellow seas; she figured it was on the far side of a low, crumpled ridge.

  She reached the base of the ridge and began to climb. In the tough gravity she was given a good workout; she could feel her temperature rising, the suit’s exoskeletal multipliers discreetly cutting in to give her a boost.

  She topped the ridge, breathing hard. A plain opened up before her: shaded red and black, littered by sand dunes and what looked like a big, heavily eroded impact crater. And off towards the smoky horizon, yes, there was that peculiar yellow ocean, wraiths of greenish mist hanging over it. It was a bizarre, surrealist landscape, as if all Earth’s colours had been exchanged for their spectral complements.

  And, only a hundred metres from the base of the ridge, she saw two Gaijin landers, silver cones side by side, each surrounded by fine rays of dust thrown out by landing rockets. Beside one of the landers was a Gaijin, utterly still, a spidery statue. Next to the other stood a human, in an exo-suit that didn’t look significantly different to Madeleine’s.

  The human saw her, waved.

  Madeleine hesitated for long seconds.

  Suddenly the world seemed crowded. She hadn’t encountered people since she last embraced Ben, on Triton. She’d certainly never met another traveller like this, among the stars. But it must have taken decades, even centuries, for the Gaijin to organize this strange rendezvous.

  She began to clamber down the ridge towards the landers, letting the suit do most of the work.

  The waving human turned out to be a Catholic priest, called Dorothy Chaum. Madeleine had met her before, subjective years ago. And inside one of the landers was another human, somebody she knew only by reputation.

  It was Reid Malenfant. And he was indeed dying.

  Malenfant was wasted. His head was cadaverous, the skull showing through thin, papery flesh, and his bald scalp was covered in liver-spots.

  Dorothy and Madeleine got Malenfant suited up, and hauled him to Dorothy’s lander. In this gravity it was hard work, despite their suits’ multipliers. But Dorothy’s lander had a more comprehensive med facility than Madeleine’s. Malenfant had nothing at all, save what the Gaijin had been able to provide.

  Malenfant had grown old, and had sunk into himself, like a tide going out, an ocean receding. He had managed to keep himself alive a good few years. But his equipment wasn’t sufficient any more – and the Gaijin he travelled with sure didn’t know enough about human biology to tinker. Not only that, he was suffering from the Discontinuity.

  When he had started to die, the Gaijin were confounded.

  ‘So they sent for us,’ Dorothy Chaum said, marvelling. ‘They sent signals out through the gateway links.’

  ‘How did they keep him alive so long?’

  ‘They didn’t. They just preserved him. They bounced his signal around the Saddle Point network, never making him corporeal for more than a few seconds at a time …’

  Madeleine studied Malenfant. Had he been aware, as he passed through one blue-flash gateway transition after another, of the light years and decades passing in seconds? Malenfant woke up while they were bed-bathing him. Stripped, washed, and immersed in a med tank. He looked Madeleine in the eyes. ‘Are you qualified to be scrubbing my balls?’

  ‘I’m the best you’re going to find, pal.’

  But now he was staring at Chaum, the diagrammatic white collar around her neck. ‘What is this, the last rites?’ He tried to struggle upright, on arms as thin as toothpicks.

  Madeleine shoved him back. ‘It will be if you don’t cooperate.’

  He swivelled that gaunt head. ‘Where’s my suit?’

  Dorothy frowned, and pointed to the Gaijin-manufactured envelope they’d bundled up in one corner. ‘Over there.’

  ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘My suit.’

  It turned out he meant his old NASA-era Shuttle EMU, a disgusting old piece of kit almost as far beyond its design limits as Malenfant himself. He wouldn’t relax until Madeleine got suited up, went across to the lander that had brought him here, and retrieved the EMU for him. Then again, it was the only possession he had in the world, or worlds. She could understand how he felt.

  He scrabbled in its pockets until he found a faded, much folded photograph, of a smiling woman on a beach.

  When they
had him in the tank, Madeleine spent a little time working on that gruesome old suit. She could fix the wiring shorts and the cooling-garment tubing leaks, polish out the scratches on the bubble helmet, patch the fabric. But she couldn’t make it clean again; the dust of many worlds was ingrained too deep into the fabric. And she couldn’t wash out the stink of Malenfant.

  All the time, visible through the lander’s windows, that Gaijin sat on the surface, as unmoving as a statue, watching, watching, as if waiting for Dorothy or Madeleine to make a mistake.

  While Malenfant was sleeping off twenty subjective years of travelling, Dorothy Chaum and Madeleine took a walk, across the battered iron plain, towards the yellow sea.

  They were each used to solitude and they were awkward, restless with each other – and with the notion that they’d been summoned here, given an assignment by the Gaijin. It didn’t make for good conversation.

  Dorothy was a short, squat woman, who looked as if she might have been built for this tough overloaded gravity. She seemed older than Madeleine remembered; her journey here had absorbed more of her subjective lifetime than Madeleine’s had.

  They passed the solitary Gaijin sentinel.

  ‘Malenfant calls it Cassiopeia,’ Dorothy murmured. ‘He says it’s been his constant companion since the solar system.’

  ‘A boy and his Gaijin. Cute.’

  Dorothy Chaum’s personal star quest seemed to be a sublimated search for God. That was how it seemed to Madeleine, anyhow.

  ‘I studied the Gaijin on Earth,’ Dorothy said. Madeleine could see her smile. ‘You remember that, on Kefallinia. I got my initial assignment from the Pope … I don’t even know if there is a Pope any more. The Gaijin have some things in common with us. Sure, they are robot-like creatures, but they are finite, built on about the same scale as we are, and they seem to have at least some individuality. But in spite of their similarity – or maybe because of it – I was immediately overwhelmed by their strangeness. So I was drawn to follow them to the stars, to work with them.’