Space

by Stephen Baxter

  From the surface of Earth, the ship would be a brilliant meteor, visible even in daylight. He wondered if there was anybody down there who would understand what they saw.

  The oak-like wood of the hull made for a natural heatshield, the Bad Hair Day twins had told him. All that resin would ablate naturally. It was a neater solution than the crude, clanking mechanical gadgets of his own era. Maybe, but he was an old-fashioned guy; he’d have preferred to be surrounded by a few layers of honest-to-God metal and ceramic.

  The glow started to fade, and the deceleration eased. Now the windows were completely blacked over by the soot, but a shield jettisoned with a bang, taking the soot away with it, and revealing a circle of clear blue sky.

  There was another crack as the first parachute deployed. The chute snatched at the pod and made it swing violently from side to side. He was pressed against one side of his couch and then the other, with the cabin creaking around him; he felt fragile, helpless, trapped in the couch.

  Two more drogue chutes snapped open, in quick succession, and then the main chute. He could see through his window a huge canopy of green leafy material, like a vegetable cloud against the blue sky. The chute looked reassuringly intact, despite its vegetable origins, and the swaying reduced.

  Malenfant glimpsed the ground. He could even track his progress, with maps in his sensor pack. He’d come down over the island that used to be called Zanzibar, on the east coast of Africa. And now he was drifting inland, to the north-west, towards Lake Victoria. Forest lay like thick green cloth over mountains.

  Malenfant felt his couch rise up beneath him. Collapsing sacs pumped compressed carbon dioxide into the base of his seat, preparing to act as a shock absorber on landing. He was pressed up against the curved roof of his pod, with only a small gap between his knees and the roof itself. He felt hemmed in, heavy, hot. Gravity pulled at him, tangibly.

  The pod hit the ground.

  The parachutes pulled the capsule forward, so Malenfant was tipped up onto his face, and then the pod started to careen across rocky ground, rocking backward and forward, spinning and rattling. His head rattled against his couch headrest.

  Finally the pod slithered to a halt.

  Malenfant found himself suspended on his side, with daylight pouring through the window behind him. The shock absorber was still pressing him against the roof, so he couldn’t see outside. He lifted his hands to his face. There was blood in his mouth.

  The pod wall dilated, releasing a flood of hot sunlit air into the capsule, so rich in oxygen and vegetable scents it made him gasp.

  He began the painful process of climbing out.

  His pod had come down on a low pebbly beach. The beach ran in a sinuous light-grey line between the darker grey face of a lake and the living green of a banana grove. From the margin of the lake to the highest hill-top, all he could see was contrasting shades of green, spreading like a carpet.

  This was the northern coast of Lake Victoria. It was the closest place to that population centre, with its odd radioactivity signature, that the Bad Hair Day twins would deliver him.

  Once he got his balance, he didn’t have any trouble walking. He didn’t feel dizzy, but oddly disoriented. He could feel his internal organs moving around, seeking a new equilibrium inside him. And he seemed to be immune to sunburn.

  But it was odd to be walking around without his pressure suit. Disconcerting. And the sense of openness, of scale, was startling. After all his travels, Malenfant had become an alien, uncomfortable on the surface of his home world.

  There was no sign of humanity.

  Malenfant made camp in the inert, scorched shell of his pod. He used the bubble helmet of his old NASA pressure suit to collect water from a brook, a little way inland. He ate figs and bananas. He figured if he was stuck here for long he’d try to fish that lake.

  The days were short and hot, although there was usually a scattering of cloud over the blue sky. He set up a stick in the sand, and watched its shadow shifting and lengthening with the hours. That way he figured out the time of local noon, and he reset his astronaut’s watch. If he was stuck here long enough he might find the equinox, and start filling out a calendar.

  The sunsets were spectacular. All that sub-micrometre dust.

  The nights were cold, and he would wrap himself up inside the Beta-cloth outer layers of his pressure suit, there on the beach. But he stayed awake long hours, studying a changed sky.

  The crescent Moon glowed blue.

  The crescent’s edge was softly blurred by a band of light, which stretched part way around the dark half of the satellite. There was a thick band of what looked like cloud, piled up over the Moon’s equator. On the darkened surface itself there were lights, strung out in lines: towns, or cities, outlining hidden lunar continents. The Moon had a twin light, a giant mirror that orbited it slowly, shedding light on the Moon’s shadowed hemisphere, which would otherwise languish in the dark for fourteen days at a time, probably long enough for the precious new air to start snowing out.

  And in the centre of the darkened hemisphere which faced him was a dazzling point glow. The point source was Earthlight, reflecting from the oceans of the Moon.

  Even a slim crescent Moon, now, drenched the sky with light, drowning out the stars and planets. The wildlife of Earth made use of the new light: he heard the croak of amphibians, the growl of some kind of cat. No doubt this changed Moon was working on the evolution of species, subtly.

  The Moon was beautiful, wonderful, its terraforming one heck of an achievement. But to Malenfant it was as unreachable as before Apollo, a thousand years ago. And, even from here, Malenfant could see Gaijin craft orbiting over the lunar poles.

  When the Moon set, taking its brilliant light with it, the full strangeness of the sky emerged.

  Huge objects drifted against the blackness, green and gold: Trees, spectral patches of life green, and Gaijin flower-ships, their open ramscoop mouths tangles of silvery threads, like dragonflies. There was a chain of lights clustered around the plain of the ecliptic, sparkles in knots and clusters, almost like streetlights seen from orbit. They were Gaijin asteroid-belt cities.

  The shapes of the constellations were mostly unchanged, the stars’ slow drift imperceptible in the mayfly beat he’d been away. A bright young star had come to life in Cassiopeia, turning that distinctive W shape into a zig-zag. But many more stars had dimmed, to redness or even lurid green – or they were missing altogether, masked by life. This was the mark of the colonization wave, pulsing along the Galaxy’s star lanes, an engineered consumption of system after system, heading this way.

  And in one part of the sky, loosely centred on the grand old constellation of Orion, stars were flickering, burning, sputtering to darkness. It was evidence of purposeful activity spread across many light years, and it made him shiver. Perhaps it was the war he had come to fear, breaking over the solar system.

  In the deepest dark of the nights he made out a huge, beautiful comet, sprawled across the zenith. Even with his naked eye he could see the bright spark of its nucleus, a tail that swept, feathery, curved, across the dome of the sky.

  Comets came from the Oort cloud. He wondered if there was any connection between this shining visitor, flying through the heart of the inner solar system, and the sparkling lights he saw around Orion, the remote disturbance there.

  One morning he crawled out of his pod, bollix naked.

  There was a man standing there, staring at him.

  Malenfant yelped, and clamped his hands over his testicles.

  The man – no more than a boy, probably – was tall, more than two metres high. His skin was copper brown, covered by a pale golden hair, so thick it was almost like fur, and his eyes were blue. He had muscles like an athlete’s. He was wearing some kind of breech cloth made of a coarse white material. He was carrying a sack. There was a belt around his waist, of some kind of leather. It contained a variety of tools, all of them stone, bone or wood: round axes, cleavers, scrapers
, a hammerstone.

  His neck was thick, like a weightlifter’s. He had a long low skull, with some kind of bony crest behind. And he had bony eyebrows, a sloping forehead under that blond hair. He had a big projecting jaw – no chin – strong-looking teeth, a heavy brow ridge shielding his eyes, a flat ape-like nose. He didn’t, Malenfant thought, look quite human. But he was beautiful for all that, his gaze on Malenfant direct and untroubled.

  He grinned at Malenfant, and emptied out the sack over the sand. It contained bananas, sweet potatoes and eggs. ‘Eat food hungry eat food,’ he said. His voice was high and indistinct, the consonants blurred.

  Malenfant, stunned, just stood and stared.

  His visitor folded up his sack, turned and ran off over the sand, a blur of golden-brown, leaving a trail of Man Friday footsteps on the beach.

  Malenfant grunted. ‘First contact,’ he said to himself. Curiouser and curiouser.

  He went to the tree line to do his morning business, then came back to the food. It made a change from fruit and fish.

  He settled down to waiting. Man Friday and his unseen compadres surely didn’t mean him any harm. Even so, he found it impossible not to stay close to his pod, glaring out at the tree line.

  He wondered what he could use for weapons. Discreetly, he got together a heap of the bigger stones he could gather from the beach.

  When his next visitors came, it was from the lake. He heard the voices first.

  Six canoes, crowded with men and women, came shimmering around the point of the bay. Malenfant squinted to focus his new, improved eyes.

  The crew looked to be of all races, from Aryan to Negro. Malenfant spotted a few beautiful, golden-haired creatures like his Man Friday. He saw what looked like the commander, standing up in one of the canoes. He was dressed in a bead-worked head-dress, adorned with long white cock’s feathers, and a snowy white and long-haired goat-skin, with a crimson robe hanging from his shoulders. To Malenfant he was a vision out of the Stone Age. But he was hunched over, as if ill.

  Empty-handed, Malenfant went down the beach to meet them.

  The canoes scraped onto the shore, and the commander jumped out and walked barefoot through shallow water to the dry sand. He stumbled, Malenfant saw, on legs swollen to the thickness of tree-trunks. His face was burned black, and patches of hair sprouted from his scalp like weeds. But his gaze was alert and searching.

  He reached out. There was a stench of rotting skin, and it was all Malenfant could manage not to recoil in disgust. To Malenfant, it looked like an advanced case of radiation poisoning. Something, he thought, is going on here.

  The commander opened his mouth to speak. His lips parted with a soft pop, and Malenfant saw how his mucous membranes were swollen up. He began talking to Malenfant in a language he couldn’t recognize. Swahili or Kiganda, maybe.

  Malenfant held up his hands. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand.’

  The commander looked startled. ‘Good God,’ he said, ‘a European … I never expected to see another European!’ His English was heavily accented.

  ‘Not European. American.’

  ‘You’re a deep traveller.’

  ‘Deep?’

  ‘Deep in time. Like me. I left Earth the first time in 2191. You?’

  ‘Earlier,’ said Malenfant.

  ‘Listen, I’m a kind of ambassador from the Kabaka.’

  ‘Kabaka?’

  ‘The emperor. Among other duties, I meet travellers. Not that they come often.’ He noticed Malenfant reacting to his condition. He smiled, his mouth a grisly gash that exposed black teeth. ‘Don’t worry about this. I fell out with the Kabaka for a while. Most people do. My name is Pierre de Bonneville. I used to be French. I went to Bellatrix with the Gaijin: Gamma Orionis, three hundred and sixty light years away. A remarkable trip.’

  ‘Why?’

  De Bonneville laughed. ‘I was a writer. A poet, actually. My country believed in sending artists to the stars: eyes and ears to bring home the truth, the inner truth, you see, of what is out there. I rode one of the last Arianes, from Kourou. Vast, noisy affair! But when I got home everyone had left, or died. There was nowhere to publish what I observed, noone to listen to my accounts.’

  ‘I know the feeling. My name’s Malenfant.’

  De Bonneville peered at him. He didn’t seem to recognize the name, and that suited Malenfant.

  The golden-haired crewmen poked curiously around the charred husk of Malenfant’s reentry pod.

  De Bonneville grinned. ‘You’re admiring my golden-haired crewmen. The Uprights. Kintu’s children, I call them.’

  ‘Kintu?’

  ‘… But then, we are all children of Kintu now. What do you want here, Malenfant?’

  Travellers and emperors, history and politics. Malenfant felt his new blood pump in his veins. He’d been among aliens too long. Now human affairs, with all their rich complexity, were embracing him again.

  He grinned. He said, ‘Take me to your leader.’

  Chapter 25

  WANPAMBA’S TOMB

  Pierre de Bonneville, with his crew of humans and golden-haired hominids, spent a night on the beach where Malenfant had fallen from orbit. By firelight, the human crew ate dried fish and sweet potatoes. The Uprights served the humans, who didn’t acknowledge or thank them in any way.

  De Bonneville started drinking a frothy beer he called pombe, of fermented grain. Within an hour he was bleary-eyed, thick-tongued, husky-voiced.

  When they were done with their chores the Uprights settled down away from the others. They built their own crude fire, and cooked something that sizzled and popped with fat; to Malenfant it smelled like pork.

  The boy who Malenfant had dubbed ‘Friday’ turned out to be called Magassa.

  De Bonneville told Malenfant how he had travelled here along the course of the Nile, from where Cairo used to be. Like Malenfant, he’d been drawn, on his return from the stars, to the nearest thing to a metropolis the old planet had to offer. The Nile journey sounded like quite a trip: in AD 3265, Africa was a savage place once more.

  ‘Listen to me. The ruler here is called Mtesa. Mtesa is the Kabaka of Uganda, Usogo, Unyoro and Karagwe – an empire three hundred kilometres in length and fifty in breadth, the biggest political unit in all this pagan world. Things have – reverted – here on Earth, Malenfant, while we weren’t looking. The people here have gone back to ways of life they enjoyed, or endured, centuries before your time or mine, before the Europeans expanded across the planet. You and I are true anachronisms. Do you understand? These people aren’t like us. They have no real sense of history. No sense of change, of the possibility of a different future or past. The date, by your and my calendars, may be AD 3265. But Earth is now timeless.’ He coughed, and hawked up a gob of blood-soaked phlegm.

  ‘What happened to you, de Bonneville?’

  The Frenchman grinned, and deflected the question. ‘Let me tell you how this country is. We’re like the first European explorers, coming here to darkest Africa, in the nineteenth century. And the Kabaka is a tough gentleman. When the traveller first enters this country, his path seems to be strewn with flowers. Gifts follow one another rapidly, pages and courtiers kneel before him, and the least wish is immediately gratified. So long as the stranger is a novelty, and his capacities or worth have not yet been sounded, it is like a holiday here. But there comes a time when he must make return. Do you follow me?’

  Malenfant thought about it. De Bonneville’s speech was more florid than Malenfant was used to. But then, he’d been born maybe two hundred years later than Malenfant; a lot could change in that time. Mostly, though, he thought de Bonneville had gotten a little too immersed in the local politics – who cared about this Kabaka? – not to mention becoming as bitter as hell.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  De Bonneville seemed frustrated. ‘Ultimately you must pay back the Kabaka for his hospitality. If you have weapons with you, you must give;
if you have rings, or good clothes, you must give. And if you do not give liberally, there will be found other means to rid you of your superfluities. Your companions will desert, attracted by the rewards of Mtesa. And one day, you will find yourself utterly bereft of your entire stock – and be stranded here, a thousand kilometres from the nearest independent community.’

  ‘And that’s what happened to you.’

  ‘When I stopped amusing him, the Kabaka dragged me before his court. And I – displeased him further. And, with a kiss from the Katekiro – Mtesa’s lieutenant – I was sentenced to a month in the Engine of Kimera.’

  ‘An Engine?’

  ‘It is a yellow-cake mine. I was put in with the lowest of the low, Malenfant. The sentence left me reduced, as you see. When I was released, Mtesa – in the manner of the half-civilized ruler he is – found me work in the court. I am a book-keeper.

  ‘Here’s something to amuse you. From my memories of Inca culture I recognized the number recording system here, which is like the quipu – that is to say, numerical records made up of knotted strings. The Kabaka has embraced this technology. Every citizen in this kingdom is stored in numbers: the date of her birth, her kinship through birth and marriage, the contents of her granaries and warehouses. I was able to devise an accounting system to assist Mtesa with tax levies, for which he showed inordinate gratitude, and I became something of a favourite at the court again, though in a different capacity.

  ‘But you see the irony, Malenfant. We travellers return from the stars to this dismal post-technological future – a world of illiterates – and yet I find myself a prisoner of an empire which lists the acts of every citizen as pure unadorned numbers. This may look like Eden to you; in fact it is a dread, soulless metropolis!’