Space

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘And have you discovered yet if a Gaijin has a soul?’

  Dorothy didn’t seem offended. ‘I don’t know if that question has any meaning. Conversely, you see, the Gaijin seem fascinated by our souls. Perhaps they are envious …’

  Dorothy stopped dead, and held out one hand. Madeleine saw there was some kind of black snow, or a thin rain of dust, settling on the white of her glove palm. ‘This is carbon,’ Dorothy said. ‘Soot. Just raining out of the air. Remarkable.’

  Madeleine supposed it was.

  They walked on through the strange exotic air.

  Madeleine prompted, ‘So you travelled with the Gaijin to try to understand.’

  ‘Yes. As I believe Malenfant did.’

  ‘And did you succeed?’

  ‘I don’t think so. What may be more serious,’ she said, ‘is that I don’t think the Gaijin are any closer to finding whatever it is they were seeking.’

  They reached the shore of the sea. It was a hard beach, loosely littered with rusty sand, and blackened with soot, as if worn away from some offshore seam of coal.

  The ocean was very yellow. The liquid was thin and it seemed to bubble, as if carbonated. Further out, mist banks hung, dense and heavy. Seeing this garish sea recede to a sharp yellow horizon was eerie.

  They stepped forward, letting the liquid lap over their boots. It left a fine gritty scum, and it felt cool, not cold. Vapour sizzled around Madeleine’s feet.

  Dorothy dipped a gloved finger into the sea, and data chattered over her visor. ‘Iron carbonyl,’ she murmured. ‘A compound of iron with carbon monoxide.’ She pointed at the vapour. ‘And that is mostly nickel carbonyl. A lower boiling point than the iron stuff …’ She sighed. ‘Iron compounds, an iron world. On Earth, we used stuff like this in industrial processes, like purifying nickel. Here, you could go swimming in it.’

  ‘I wonder if there is life here.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Dorothy said. ‘Of course there is life here. Don’t you know where you are?’

  Madeleine didn’t reply.

  Dorothy said, ‘That’s where the soot and the carbon dioxide comes from. I think there must be some kind of photosynthesis going on, making carbon monoxide. And then the monoxide reacts with itself to make free carbon and carbon dioxide. That reaction releases energy –’

  ‘Which animals can use.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There is life everywhere we look,’ Madeleine said.

  ‘Yes. Life seems to be emergent from the very fabric of the universe which contains us, hard-wired into physical law. And so, I suppose, mind is emergent too. Emergent monism: a nice label. Though we can scarcely claim understanding …’

  They stepped back on the shore, and walked further across the rusty dirt without enthusiasm.

  Then they saw movement.

  There was something crawling out of the sea. It was like a crab. It was low and squat, about the size of a coffee table, with a dozen or more spindly legs, and what must be sensors – eyes, ears? – complex little pods on the end of flimsy stalks that waved in the murky air. The whole thing was the colour of rust.

  And it had a dodecahedral body.

  Madeleine could hear it wheezing.

  ‘Lungs,’ Dorothy said. ‘It has lungs. But – look at those slits in the carapace there. Gills, you think?’

  ‘It’s like a lungfish.’

  The crab was clumsy, as if it couldn’t see too well, and its limbs slid about over the bone-hard shore. One of those pencil-thin legs caught in a crack, and snapped off. That hissing breath became noisier, and it hesitated, waving a stump in the air.

  Then the crab moved on, picking its way over the beach, as if searching for something.

  Dorothy bent and, fumbling with her gloved fingers, picked up the snapped-off limb. It looked simple: just a hollow tube, a wand. But there was a honeycomb structure to the interior wall. ‘Strength and lightness,’ she said. ‘And it’s made of iron.’ She smiled. ‘Iron bones. Natural robots. We always thought the Gaijin must have been manufactured, by creatures more or less like us – the first generation of them anyway. It was hard to take seriously the idea of such mechanical beasts evolving naturally. But perhaps that’s what happened …’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  She eyed Madeleine. ‘You really don’t know where you are? Didn’t the Gaijin tell you?’

  Madeleine had an aversion to chatting to Gaijin. She kept her counsel.

  Dorothy said, ‘This iron world is Zero-Zero-Zero-Zero, Madeleine. The origin of the Gaijin’s coordinates, the place their own colonization bubble started. The place they came from. No wonder they brought Malenfant here, if they thought he was going to die.’

  Madeleine felt no surprise, no wonder, no curiosity. So what? ‘But if that’s so, where are they all?’

  Dorothy sighed. ‘I guess the Gaijin are no more immune to the resource wars, and the predatory expansion of others, than we are.’

  ‘Even the Gaijin?’ The notion of the powerful, enigmatic, star-spanning Gaijin as victims was deeply chilling.

  Dorothy said, ‘If this is a robotic lungfish, maybe life here got pushed back into the oceans by the last wave of visitors. Maybe this brave guy is trying to take back the land, at last.’

  The crab thing seemed to have reached its highest point, attained the objective of its strange expedition. It stood there on the rusty beach for long minutes, waving those eye-stalks in the air. Madeleine wondered if it even knew they were here, if it recognized the Gaijin as its own remote descendant.

  Then it turned and crawled back into the yellow ocean, step by step, descending into that fizzing, smoky liquid with a handful of bubbles.

  ‘The Gaijin are not like us,’ Malenfant whispered. He was sitting propped up by cushions in a chair, wrapped in a blanket. He was bird-thin. They had had to bring him back to his own lander; after so long alone he had gotten too used to it, missed it too much. ‘Cassiopeia is constantly in flux,’ he said. “‘Cassiopeia” is just the name I gave her, after all. Her own name for herself is something like a list of catalogue numbers for her component parts – with a breakdown for subcomponents – and a paper trail showing their history. A manufacturing record, not really a name. She constantly replaces parts, panels, internal components, switching them back and forth. So her name changes. And so does her identity …’

  ‘Your cells wear out, Malenfant,’ Dorothy said gently. ‘Every few years there is a new you.’

  ‘But not as fast as that. It’s the way they breed, too – if you can call it that. Two or more of them will donate parts, and start assembling them, until you got a whole new Gaijin, who goes off to the store room to get the pieces to finish herself off. A whole new person. Now, where does she come from?’ He sighed. ‘They have continuity of memory, consciousness, but identity is fluid for them: you can divide it forever, or even mix it up. You see it when they debate. There’s no persuasion, no argument. They just – merge – and make a decision. But the Gaijin are cautious,’ he said slowly. ‘They are rational, they consider every side of every argument, they sometimes seem paralysed by indecision.’

  ‘Like Balaam’s Ass,’ Dorothy said, smiling. ‘Couldn’t decide between two identical bales of hay.’

  Madeleine asked, ‘What happened?’

  ‘Starved to death.’

  Malenfant went on, as if talking to himself, ‘They aren’t like us. They don’t glom onto a new idea so fast as we do –’

  Dorothy said, ‘Their minds are not receptive to memes. They have no sense of self –’

  ‘But,’ Malenfant said, ‘the Gaijin are interested in us. Don’t know why, but they are. And creatures like us. Religious types. Folks who mount crusades and kill each other and even sacrifice their lives, for an idea.’

  Madeleine remembered the Chaera, orbiting their black hole God, futilely worshipping it. Maybe Nemoto had been right; maybe it hadn’t been black hole technology the Gaijin were interested in, but the Chaera themselves.
But – why?

  Dorothy leaned forward. ‘Have the Gaijin ever talked about creatures like us? What becomes of us?’

  ‘I gather we mostly wipe ourselves out. Or think ourselves to extinction. Memes against genes. That’s if the colonization wars don’t get us first.’ He opened his rheumy eyes. ‘Earth, the solar system, might be swept aside by the incoming colonists. It’s happened before, and will happen again. But it isn’t the whole story. It can’t be.’

  Dorothy was nodding. ‘Equilibrium. Uniformity. Nemoto’s old arguments.’

  Madeleine didn’t understand.

  Malenfant smiled toothlessly at her. ‘Why does it have to be this way? That’s the question. Endless waves of exploitation and trashing, everybody getting driven back down to the level of pond life … You’d think somebody would learn better. What stops them all?

  ‘If what stopped an expansion was war, you’d have to assume that there are no survivors of such a war – not a single race, not a single breeding population. Or, if intelligent species are trashed by eco collapse, you have to assume that every species inevitably destroys itself that way.

  ‘You see the problem. We can think of a hundred ways a species might get itself into trouble. But whatever destructive process you come up with, it has to be one hundred per cent effective. If a single species escapes the net, wham, it covers the Galaxy at near-lightspeed.

  ‘But we don’t see that. What we see is a Galaxy that fills up with squabbling races – and then blam. Some mechanism drives them all back down to the pond. There has to be something else, some other mechanism. Something that destroys them all. A Reboot.’

  ‘A Galaxy-wide sterilization,’ Madeleine murmured.

  ‘And,’ Chaum said, ‘that explains Nemoto’s first-contact equilibrium.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Malenfant said. ‘That’s why they come limping around the Galaxy in dumb-ass ramscoops and teleport gates and the rest, time after time; that’s why nobody has figured out, for instance, how to bust lightspeed, or build a wormhole. Nobody lasted long enough. Nobody had the chance to get smart.’

  Madeleine stood, stretching in the dense gravity of this Cannonball world. She looked out the window at the dismal, engineered sky.

  Could it be true? Was there something out there even more ferocious than the world-shattering aliens whose traces humans had encountered over and over, even in their own solar system? – some dragon that woke up every few hundred megayears, and roared so loud it wiped the Galaxy clean of advanced life?

  And – how long before the dragon woke up again?

  Madeleine said, ‘You think the Gaijin know what it is? Are they trying to do something about it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Malenfant said. ‘Maybe. Maybe not.’

  Madeleine growled, ‘If they are just as much victims as we are, why don’t they just tell us what they are doing?’

  Malenfant closed his eyes, as if disappointed by the question. ‘We’re dealing with the alien here, Madeleine. They don’t see the universe the way we do – not at all. They have their own take on things, their own objectives. It’s amazing we can communicate at all when you think about it.’

  ‘But,’ Madeleine said, ‘they don’t want to go through a Reboot.’

  ‘No,’ he conceded. ‘I don’t think they want that.’

  Dorothy said, ‘Perhaps this is the next step, in the emergence of life and mind. Species working together, to save themselves. We need the Gaijin’s steely robotic patience, just as they need us, our humanity …’

  ‘Our faith?’ Madeleine asked gently.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Malenfant laughed, cynically. ‘If the Gaijin know, they aren’t telling me. They came to us for answers, remember.’

  Madeleine shook her head. ‘That’s not good enough, Malenfant. Not from you. You’re special to the Gaijin, somehow. You were the first to come out and confront them, the human who’s spent longest with them.’

  ‘And they saved your life,’ Dorothy reminded him. ‘They brought us here, to save you. You were dying.’

  ‘I’m still dying.’

  Madeleine said, ‘Somehow you’re important, Malenfant. You’re the key.’ Right there, right then, she had a powerful intuition that must be true.

  But the key to what?

  He held up skeletal hands, mocking. ‘You think they’re appointing me to save the Galaxy? Bullshit, with all respect.’ He rubbed his eyes, lay on his side, and turned to face the lander’s silver wall. ‘I’m just an old fucker who doesn’t know when to quit.’

  But maybe, Madeleine thought, that’s what the Gaijin cherish. Maybe they’ve been looking for somebody too stupid to starve to death, like that damn ass.

  Dorothy said slowly, ‘What do you want, Malenfant?’

  ‘Home,’ he said abruptly. ‘I want to go home.’

  Madeleine and Dorothy exchanged a glance.

  Malenfant had been a long time away. He could return to the solar system, to Earth, if he wished. But they both knew that for all of them, home no longer existed.

  IV

  BAD NEWS FROM THE STARS

  AD 3265–3793

  At the centre of the Galaxy there was a cavity, blown clear by the ferocious wind from a monstrous black hole. The cavity was laced by gas and dust, particles ionized and driven to high speeds by the ferocious gravitational and magnetic forces working here, so that streamers of glowing gas criss-crossed the cavity in a fine tracery. Stars had been born here, notably a cluster of blue-hot young stars just a fraction away from the black hole itself.

  And here and there rogue stars fell through the cavity – and they dragged streaming trails behind them, glowing brilliantly, like comets a hundred light years long.

  Stars like comets.

  He exulted. I, Reid Malenfant, got to see this, the heart of the Galaxy itself, by God! He wished Cassiopeia were here, his companion during those endless Saddle Point jaunts to one star after another …

  Again, at the thought of Cassiopeia, his anger flared.

  But the Gaijin were never our enemy, not really. They learned patience among the stars. They were just trying to figure it all out, step by step, in their own way.

  But it took too long for us.

  It was after all a long while before we could even see the rest of them, the great wave of colonizers and miners that followed the Gaijin, heading our way along the Galaxy’s spiral arm.

  The wave of destruction.

  Chapter 24

  KINTU’S CHILDREN

  Two hundred kilometres above the glowing Earth, a Gaijin flower-ship folded its electromagnetic wings. Drone robots pulled a scuffed hab module out of the ship’s stringy structure, and launched it on a slow, precise trajectory towards the Tree.

  Malenfant, inside the module, watched the Tree approach.

  The bulk of the Tree, orbiting the Earth, was a glowing green ball of branches and leaves, photosynthesizing busily. It trailed a trunk, hollowed-out and sealed with resin, that housed most of the Tree’s human population. Long roots trailed in the upper atmosphere: there were crude scoops to draw up raw material for continued growth, and cables of what Malenfant eventually learned was superconductor, generating power by being dragged through Earth’s magnetosphere.

  The Tree was a living thing twenty kilometres long, rooted in air, looping around Earth in its inclined circular orbit, maintaining its altitude with puffs of waste gas.

  It was, Malenfant thought, ridiculous. He turned away, incurious.

  He had been away from Earth for twelve hundred years, and had returned to the impossible date of AD 3265.

  Malenfant was exhausted. Physically he was, after all, more than a hundred years old. And because of the depletion of the Saddle Point links between Zero-Zero-Zero-Zero and Earth, he had been forced to take a roundabout route on the way back here.

  All he really wanted, if he was truthful, was to get away from strangeness: just settle down in his 1960s ranch house at Clear Lake, Houston, and pop a few beers, eat
potato chips and watch Twilight Zone reruns. But here, looking out at all this orbiting foliage, he knew that wasn’t possible, that it never would be. It was just as Dorothy Chaum had tried to counsel him, before they said their goodbyes back on the Cannonball. It was Earth down there, but it wasn’t his Earth. Malenfant was going to have to live with strangers, and strangeness, for whatever was left of his long and unlikely life.

  At least the ice has gone, though, he thought.

  His battered capsule slid to rest, lodging in branches, and Malenfant was decanted.

  There was nobody to greet him. He found an empty room, with a window. There were leaves, growing around his window. On the outside.

  Ridiculous. He fell asleep.

  When Malenfant woke, he was in some kind of hospital gown.

  He felt different. Comfortable, clean. He wasn’t hungry or thirsty. He didn’t even need a leak.

  He lifted up his hand. The skin was comparatively smooth, the liver spots faded. When he flexed his fingers, the joints worked without a twinge.

  Somebody had been here, done something to him. I didn’t want this, he thought. I didn’t ask for it. He cradled his resentment.

  He propped himself up before his window, and looked out at Earth.

  He could see its curve, a blue and white arc against black space. He made out a slice of pale blue seascape, with an island an irregular patch of grey and brown in the middle of it, and clouds scattered over the top, lightly, like icing sugar. He was so close to the skin of the planet that if he sat back the world filled his window, scrolling steadily past.

  Earth was bright: brighter than he remembered. Malenfant used to be a Shuttle pilot; he knew Earth from orbit – how it used to be anyhow. Now he was amazed by the clarity of the atmosphere, even over the heart of continents. He didn’t know if Earth itself had changed, or his memories of it. After all, his eyes were an old man’s now: rheumy, filled with nostalgia.

  One thing for sure, though. Earth looked empty.