Space

by Stephen Baxter

When he passed over oceans he looked for ship wakes, feathering out like brush strokes. He couldn’t see any. In the lower latitudes he could make out towns, a grey, angular patchwork, a tracery of roads. But no smog. No industries, then.

  And in the higher latitudes, towards the poles, he could see no sign of human habitation at all. The land looked raw, fresh, scraped clean, the granite flanks of exposed mountains shining like burnished metal, and the plains were littered with boulders, like toys dropped by a child. His geography was always lousy, and now it was a thousand years out of date – but it seemed to him the coastlines had changed shape.

  He wondered who, or what, had cleaned up the glaciation. Anyhow, it might have been AD 1000 down there, not 3265.

  Two people came drifting into his room. Naked, all but identical, they were women, but so slim they were almost sexless. They had hair that floated around them, like Jane Fonda in Barbarella.

  They were joined at the hip, like Siamese twins, by a tube of pink flesh.

  They hadn’t knocked, and he scowled at them. ‘Who are you?’

  They jabbered at him in a variety of languages, some of which he recognized, some not. Their arms and shoulders were big and well-developed, like tennis players, but their legs were wisps they kept tucked up beneath them. Microgravity adaptations. Their hair was blonde, but their eyes were almond-shaped, with folds of skin near the nose, like Chinese.

  Finally they settled on heavily accented English.

  ‘You must forgive stupidity.’ ‘We accommodate returning travellers –’ ‘– from many time periods, spread across a millennium –’ ‘– dating from Reid Malenfant himself.’

  When they talked they swapped their speech between one and the other, like throwing a ball.

  He said, ‘In fact, I am Reid Malenfant.’

  They looked at him, and then their two heads swivelled so that blank almond eyes stared into each other, their hair mingling. For these two, he thought, every day is a bad hair day.

  ‘You must understand the treatment you have been given,’ one said.

  ‘I didn’t want treatment,’ he groused. ‘I didn’t sign any consent forms.’

  ‘But your ageing was –’ ‘– advanced.’ ‘We have no cure, of course.’ ‘But we can address the symptoms –’ ‘Brittle bones, loss of immunity, nervous degeneration.’ ‘In your case accelerated by –’ ‘Exposure to microgravity.’ ‘We reversed free radical damage with antioxidant vitamins.’ ‘We snipped out senescent cell clusters from your epidermis and dermis.’ ‘We reversed the intrusion of alien qualia into your sensorium, a side-effect of repeated Saddle Point transits.’ ‘We removed various dormant infectious agents which you might return to Earth.’ ‘We applied telomerase therapy to –’

  ‘Enough. I believe you. I bet I don’t look a day over seventy.’

  ‘It was routine,’ a Bad Hair Day twin said. They fell silent. Then: ‘Are you truly Reid Malenfant?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The twins gave him food and drink. He didn’t recognize any of the liquids they offered him, hot or cold; they were mostly like peculiar teas, of fruit or leaves. He settled on water, which was clean and cold and pure. The food was bland and amorphous, like baby food. The Bad Hair Day twins told him it was all processed algae, spiced with a little vacuum greenery from the Tree itself.

  The twins pulled him gracefully through microgravity, along tunnels like wood-lined veins that twisted and turned, lit only by some kind of luminescence in the wood. It was like a fantasy spaceship rendered in carpentry, he thought.

  There were a few dozen colonists here, living in bubbles of air inside the bulk of the Tree. They were all microgravity-adapted, as far as he could see, some of them even more evolved than the twins. There was one guy with a huge dome of a head over a shrivelled-up body, sticks of limbs, a penis like a walnut, no pubic hair. To Malenfant he looked like a real science fiction type of creation, like the boss alien in Invaders from Mars.

  The people, however strange, looked young and healthy to Malenfant. Their skin was smooth, unwrinkled, unmarked save by tattoos; his own raisin-like face, the lines baked into it by years of exposure to Earth’s weather and ultraviolet light and heavy gravity, was a curiosity here, a badge of exotica.

  They all had almond eyes, folds of yellow skin.

  As far as Malenfant could make out this was a kind of reverse colony from the near-Earth asteroids, which had been settled by descendants of Chinese. Out there, it seemed, there were great bubble habitats where everyone had lived in zero gravity for centuries.

  Sometimes he thought he could hear a low humming, sniff a little ozone, feel hair-prickling static, as if he was surrounded by immense electrical or magnetic fields that tweaked at his body. Maybe it was so. Electromagnetic fields could be used to stimulate and stress muscles and bones, and even to counter bone wastage; NASA had experimented with such technologies. Maybe the Tree swaddled its human cargo in electricity, fixing their bones and muscles and flesh.

  But maybe there was no need for such clunky gadgetry, a thousand years downstream. After all the Tree provided a pretty healthy environment, of clean air, pure water, toxin-free foods: no pollutants or poisons or pathogens here, and even natural hazards – like Earth’s naturally-occurring radioactivity in soil and stone – could be designed out. Maybe if you gave people a good enough place to live, this was how they turned out, with health and longevity.

  And as for adaptation to microgravity, maybe that came naturally too. After all, he recalled, the dolphins and other aquatic mammals had had no need of centrifuges or electro stimulation to maintain their muscles and bones in the no-gravity environment they inhabited. Maybe these space-dwelling humans had more in common with the dolphins than the bony dirt-treaders of his own kind.

  The Tree itself had been gen-enged from giant ancestors on the Moon. Humans used the Tree for a variety of purposes: port, observation platform, resort. But the Tree’s own purpose was simply to grow and survive, and there seemed no obstacle to its doing so until the sun itself flickered and died.

  There was more than one Tree.

  In 3265, Earth was encased in a spreading web of vegetation, space-going Trees and airborne spiders, reaching down from space to the surface. And, slowly, systems were evolving the other way. One day there might be some kind of unlikely biological ladder, reaching from Earth to space. It was a strategy to ensure long-term access from space via stable biological means. Nobody could tell Malenfant whose strategy this was, however.

  The colonists in this Tree seemed to care for returning travellers like him with a breed of absent-minded charity. Beyond that, the twins’ motive in speaking to him seemed to be a vague curiosity. Maybe even just politeness.

  The Bad Hair Day twins’ variant of English contained a fraction of words, a fifth or a quarter, that were unrecognizable to Malenfant. Linguistic drift, he figured. It had, after all, been a thousand years; he was Chaucer meeting Neil Armstrong.

  They asked, ‘Where did you travel?’

  ‘I started at Alpha Centauri. After that I couldn’t always tell. I kind of bounced around.’

  ‘What did you find?’

  He thought about that. ‘I don’t know. I couldn’t understand much.’

  It was true. But now – just as Madeleine Meacher and Dorothy Chaum had sought him out, saved his life on that remote Cannonball world without asking his by-your-leave – so the Bad Hair Day twins had thrust unwelcome youth on him. He felt curious again. Dissatisfied. Damn it, he’d gotten used to being old. It had been comfortable.

  There were no other travellers here.

  He soon got bored with the Tree, the incomprehensible artefacts and activities it contained. Lonely, disoriented, he tried to engage the Bad Hair Day twins, his enigmatic nurses. ‘You know, I remember how Earth looked when I first went up in Columbia, back in ’93. 1993, that is. In those days we had to ride these big solid rocket boosters up to orbit, you know, and then, and then …’

  The twins would l
isten politely for a while. But then they would lock on each other, mouths pressed into an airtight seal, small hands sliding over bare flesh, their hair drifting in clouds around them, that bridge of skin between them folded and compressed, and Malenfant was just a sad old fart boring them with war stories.

  If he was going back to Earth, where was he supposed to land?

  He asked the Bad Hair Day twins for encyclopaedias, history books. The twins all but laughed at him. The people of AD 3265, it seemed, had forgotten history. The Bad Hair Day twins seemed to know little beyond their speciality, which was a limited – if very advanced – medicine. It was – disappointing. On the other hand, how much knowledge or interest had he ever had in the year AD 1000?

  He got frustrated. He railed at the twins. They just stared back at him.

  He would have to find out for himself.

  He still had the softscreen-like sensor pack Sally Brind had given him centuries ago, when he set off for the Saddle Point to the Alpha Centauri system. It would work as a multi-spectral sensor. He could configure it to overlay the images of Earth with representations in infrared, ultraviolet, radar imaging, whatever he wanted; he could select for the signatures of rock, soil, vegetation, water, and the products of industrialization like heavy metals, pollutants.

  Alone, he found a window and studied the planet.

  Earth was indeed depopulated.

  There were humans down there, but no communities bigger than a few tens of thousands. There were no industrial products, save for a thin smear of relics from the past, clustered around the old cities and strung out along the disused roads. He couldn’t even see signs of large-scale agriculture.

  Malenfant studied what was left of the cities of his day, those that had somehow survived the ice. New York, for example.

  In AD 3265, New York was green. It was a woodland of birch and oak, pushing out of a layer of elder thicket. He could still make out the shapes of roads, city blocks and parking lots, but they were green rectangles, covered with mosses, lichens and tough, destructive plants like buddleia. On Manhattan, some of the bigger concrete buildings still stood, like white bones poking above the trees, but they were bereft of windows, their walls stained by fires. Others had subsided, reduced to oddly shaped hummocks beneath the greenery. The bridges had collapsed, leaving shallow weirs along the river. He could see foxes, bats, wolves. There were more exotic creatures, maybe descended from zoo stock: deer, feral pigs.

  Some of the roads looked in good condition, oddly. Maybe the smart-concrete that was being introduced just before his departure from Earth had kept working. But the big multi-lane freeway that ran up out of Manhattan looked a little crazy to Malenfant, a wild scribble over grassed-over concrete. Maybe it wasn’t just repairing itself but actually growing, crawling like a huge worm across the abandoned suburbs, a semi-sentient highway over which no car had travelled for centuries.

  Once Malenfant saw what looked like a hunting party, working its way along the coast of the widened Hudson, stalking a thing like an antelope. The people were tall, naked, golden-haired. One of the hunters looked up to the sky, as if directly at Malenfant. It was a woman, her blue eyes empty. She had a neck like a shot-putter. Her face was, he thought, somehow not even human.

  When Malenfant left Earth, a thousand years ago, he had left behind no direct descendants. His wife, Emma, had died before they had a chance to have children together. But he’d had relatives: a nephew, two nieces.

  Now there was hardly anybody left on Earth. Malenfant wondered if anybody down there still bore a trace of his genes. And if so, what they had become.

  For sentimental reasons he looked for the Statue of Liberty. Maybe it was washed up on the beach, like in Planet of the Apes. There was no sign of the old lady.

  But he did find a different monument: an artefact kilometres across, a monstrous ring, slap in the middle of downtown Manhattan. It looked like a particle accelerator. Maybe it had something to do with the city’s battle against the ice. Whatever, it didn’t look human. It was out of scale.

  There was other evidence of high technology, scattered around the planet; but it didn’t seem to have much to do with humans either. For example, when the Tree drifted over the Pyrenees, the mountains on the crease of land between France and Spain, he could see a threading of light, perfect straight lines of ruby light, joining the peaks like a spider-web. His screen told him this was coherent light: lased. There were similar systems in other mountainous regions, scattered around the planet. The laser arrays worked continuously. Maybe they were adjusting the atmosphere somehow: burning out CFCs, for instance.

  And he observed flashes from sites around the equator, on Earth’s water hemisphere. A few minutes after each flash the air would get a little mistier. He estimated they must be coming every minute or so, on a global scale. He remembered twenty-first century schemes to increase Earth’s albedo – to increase the percentage of sunlight reflected back into space – by firing sub-micrometre dust up into the stratosphere: naval guns could have done the job. The point was to reduce global warming. But the dust would settle out: you would have needed to fire a shot every few seconds, maintained for years – decades, even centuries. Back then the idea was ridiculed. But such dust injections would account for the increase in global brightness he thought he’d observed.

  This was planetary engineering. All he could see from here were the gross physical schemes. Maybe down on the planet there was more: nanotechnological adjustments, for instance.

  Somebody was fixing the Earth. It didn’t look to Malenfant like it was anybody human. It would, after all, take centuries, maybe millennia. No human civilization could handle projects of that duration, or ever would be able to. So, give the job to somebody else.

  Not every change was constructive.

  In southern Africa there was a dramatic new crater. It looked like a scar in the greenery of the planet. He didn’t know if it was some kind of meteorite scar, or an open-cast mine, kilometres wide. Machines crawled over the walls and pit of the crater, visibly chewing up shattered rock, extracting piles of minerals, metals. From space, the machines looked like spiders: dodecahedral bodies maybe fifty metres wide, with eight or ten articulated limbs, working steadily at this open wound in the skin of Earth.

  Malenfant had seen such machines before. They were Gaijin factory drones, designed to chew up ice and rock. But now they weren’t off in the asteroid belt or stuck out on the cold rim of the solar system, billions of kilometres away. The Gaijin were here, on the surface of Earth itself. He wondered what they were doing.

  He looked further afield, seeking people, civilization.

  The most populous place on the planet, it appeared, was some kind of mountain-top community in the middle of Africa. It was, as far as he could remember his geography, in Uganda.

  And there was something odd about its signature in his sensor pack. From a source at the centre of the community he plotted heavy particles, debris from what looked like short half-life fission products. And there were some much more energetic particles: almost like cosmic rays.

  But they came from a source embedded deep within Earth itself.

  The only other similar sources, scattered around the planet, looked like deep radioactive-waste dumps.

  The Ugandan community wasn’t civilization, but it was the most advanced-looking technological trace on the planet. Population, and an enigma. Maybe that was the place for him to go.

  The Bad Hair Day twins showed him a wooden spaceship. It was, good God, his atmospheric entry capsule. It was like a seed pod, a flattened sphere of wood a couple of metres across. It was fitted with a basic canvas couch, and a life support system – just crude organic filters – that would last a couple of hours, long enough for the entry. The pod even had a window, actually grown into the wood, a blister of some clear stuff like amber. He would have to climb in through a dilating diaphragm that would seal up behind him, like being born in reverse.

  He spent some time huntin
g for the pod’s heatshield. The Bad Hair Day twins watched, puzzled.

  They kept him on orbit for another month or so, giving him gravity preparation: exercise, a calcium booster, electromagnetic therapy. They gave him a coverall of some kind of biocomposite material, soft to the touch but impossible to rip, smart enough to keep him at the right temperature. He packed inside the sphere his sole personal possession: his old Shuttle pressure suit, with its faded Stars and Stripes and the NASA logo, that he’d worn when he flew through that first gateway, a thousand AU from home, a thousand years ago. It was junk, but it was all he had.

  He enjoyed a last sleep in weightlessness.

  When he awoke the Tree was passing over South America. Malenfant could see the fresh water of the Amazon, noticeably paler than the salt of the ocean, the current so strong the waters had still failed to mingle hundreds of kilometres off shore.

  He climbed inside his capsule. The Bad Hair Day twins kissed him, one soft face to either cheek, and sealed him up in warm brown darkness.

  He was whiplashed out of the Tree by a flexing branch. A sensation of weight briefly returned to Malenfant, and he was pressed into his seat. When the cast-off was done, the weight disappeared.

  But now the pod was no longer in a free orbit, but falling rapidly towards the air.

  At the fringe of the atmosphere, the pod shuddered around him. He felt very aware of the lightness and fragility of this wooden nut-shell within which he was going to have to fall ass-first into the atmosphere.

  Within five minutes of separation from the Tree, frictional deceleration was building up: a tenth, two-tenths of a G. The deceleration piled up quickly, eyeballs-in, shoving him deeper against his couch.

  The pod shuddered violently. Malenfant was cocooned in a dull roaring noise. He gripped his couch and tried not to worry about it.

  As the heat shield rammed deeper into the air, a shell of plasma built up around the hull. Beyond the amber windows the blackness of space was masked by a deep brown, which quickly escalated through orange, a fiery yellow, and then a dazzling white. Particles of soot flew off the scorching outer hull of the pod and streaked over the window, masking his view; now all he could see were extreme surges of brightness, as if fireballs were flying past the craft.