Manifold: Space

by Stephen Baxter

  There was a rumble of noise. They turned to the window. Kilometers away, beyond the mangrove swamps, Madeleine could see the booster's slim nose lift above the trees, the first glow of the engines. The light of the solid boosters seemed to spill over the tree line – startlingly bright rocket light glimmering from the flat swamps – as the Ariane rolled on its axis.

  "There," Nemoto said. "You made me miss the launch."

  Chapter 15

  Colonists

  Six months.

  Once Nemoto had given her the date of her Saddle Point mission it was all she could think about. The rest of her life – her work in Kourou and elsewhere, her legal struggles to get back some of the money that had been impounded from her accounts, even her developing, low-key relationship with Ben – all of that faded to a background glow compared to the diamond-bright prospect of encountering another Saddle Point gateway at that specified, slowly approaching date in the future.

  She'd met other star travelers who had returned from one or two hops into the sky with the Gaijin. All of them were determined to go on. She imagined a cloud of human travelers journeying deeper and deeper into the strange cosmos, their ties to a blurred, fast-forwarding Earth stretching and loosening.

  It wasn't just the Discontinuity. She didn't belong here. After all, she couldn't even work the toilets.

  She longed to leave.

  The Japanese-built lander touched the Moon, its rockets throwing up a cloud of fast-settling dust. There were various artifacts here, sitting on the surface of the Moon, and Nemoto, the spider at the heart of this operation, was waiting for them, anonymous in a black suit.

  Ben and Madeleine suited up carefully. Madeleine made sure Ben followed her lead; she was, after all, the experienced astronaut.

  She climbed down a short ladder to the surface. She dropped from step to step in the gentle gravity. She stepped off the last rung onto regolith, which crunched like snow under her weight.

  She walked away from the lander.

  The colors of the Moon weren't strong; in fact, the most colorful thing here was their Nishizaki Heavy Industries aluminum-frame lander, which, from a distance, looked like a small, fragile insect, done out in brilliant black, silver, orange, and yellow. The Sea of Tranquillity was close to the Moon's equator, so Earth was directly above her head, and it was difficult to tip back in her pressure suit to see it. But when Ben goes to live on Triton, she thought, the Sun will be a bright point source. And Earth will be no more than a pale blue point of light, only made visible by blocking out the Sun itself. How strange that will be.

  Nemoto was showing Ben the various artifacts she had assembled here. Madeleine saw a set of blocky metal boxes, trailing cables. These were, it turned out, a pair of high-power X-ray lasers. "A small fission bomb is the power source. When the bomb is detonated, a burst of X-ray photons is emitted. The photons travel down long metal rods. This generates an intense beam. In effect, the power of the bomb has been focused..."

  These were experimental weapons, it emerged, dating from the late twentieth century. They had been designed as satellite weapons, intended to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles.

  "And what have the Gaijin paid us for this obscene old gadgetry?" Madeleine asked.

  "That's not your concern."

  The habitat that would keep them alive was another masterpiece of improvization and low cost, Madeleine thought, like her fondly remembered Friendship-7. It was based on two modules – a Russian-built one called FGB, and the American-built Service Module – scavenged from the old NASA International Space Station. The Service Module had been enhanced with an astrophysics instrument pallet.

  Madeleine slipped her gloved hand into Ben's. "We ought to name our magnificent ship," she said.

  Ben thought it over. "Dreamtime Ancestor."

  "Come meet the Chaera," Nemoto said.

  The last artifact, sitting on the regolith, was a tank, a glass cube. It contained a translucent disc about a meter across, swimming slowly through oxygen-blue fluid.

  It was an ET: a Chaera, an inhabitant of the black-hole system that was the destination of this mission. The Chaera had, after the Gaijin, been the second variant of ET to come to the Solar System.

  Aside from all the dead ones in the past, of course.

  Ben stepped forward. He touched the glass walls of the tank with his gloved hand. The Chaera rippled; it looked something like a stingray. She wondered if it was trying to talk to Ben.

  The Chaera had eyes, she saw: four of them spaced evenly around the rim of the stingray shape, dilating lids alternately opening. Humanlike eyes, gazing out at her, eyes on a creature from another star. She shivered with recognition.

  Through a hairline crack in the Chaera's tank, fluid bubbled and boiled into vacuum.

  "You need to understand that the nature of this mission is a little different," Nemoto said. "You are going to a populated system. The Chaera have technology, it seems, but they lack spaceflight. The Gaijin made contact with them and initiated a trading relationship. The Chaera requested specific artifacts, which we've been able to supply." She grunted. "Interesting. The Gaijin actually seem to be learning to run rudimentary trading relationships from us. Before, perhaps they simply appropriated, or killed."

  "Killed?" Ben said. "Your view of the Gaijin is harsh indeed, Nemoto."

  "What are the Gaijin getting from the Chaera in return for this?" Madeleine asked.

  "We don't know. The Chaera spend their days quietly in the service of their God. And their requirement, it seems, is simple. You will help them talk to God."

  "With an X-ray laser?" Ben asked dryly.

  "Just focus on the science," Nemoto said, sounding weary. "Learn about black holes, and about the Gaijin. That's what you're being sent for. Don't worry about the rest."

  The Chaera swam like melting glass, glimmering in Earthlight.

  Ben Roach seemed to sense her urgency, her longing for time to pass.

  He offered to take her to Australia, to show her places where he'd grown up. "You ought to reconnect a little. No matter how far you travel, you're still made of Earth atoms: rock and water."

  "Aborigine philosophy?" she asked, a little dismissive.

  "If you like. The Earth gave you life, gave you food and language and intelligence, and will take you back when you die. There are stories that humans have already died, out there among the stars. Their atoms can't return to the Earth. And, conversely, there are Gaijin here."

  "None of the Gaijin have died here." That was true; the three ambassadors she had encountered on Kefallinia were still there, still functioning decades later. "Perhaps they can't die."

  "But if they do, then their atoms, not of the Earth, will be absorbed by the Earth's rocks."

  "Perhaps that is a fair trade," she said. "We should extend your philosophy. The universe is the greater Earth; the universe births us, takes us back when we die. All of us: humans, Gaijin, everybody."

  "Yes. Besides, there are lessons to learn."

  "Are you trying to educate me, Ben? What is there to see in Australia?"

  "Will you come?"

  It would eat up time. "Yes," she said.

  From the air Australia looked flat, rust-red, and littered with rippling, continent-spanning sand dunes and shining salt flats, the relics of dead seas. It was eroded, very dry, very ancient; even the sand dunes, she learned, were thirty thousand years old. Human occupancy seemed limited to the coastal strip, and a few scattered settlements in the interior.

  They flew into Alice Springs, in the dry heart of the island continent.

  As they approached the airport she saw a modern facility: a huge white globe, other installations. In among the structures she saw the characteristic gleaming cones of Gaijin landers. New silvery fencing had been flung out across the desert for kilometers around the central structures.

  The extent of the Gaijin holding, here in central Australia, startled her. The days when the Gaijin had been restricted to a heavi
ly guarded compound on a Greek island were long past, it seemed.

  Ben grimaced. "This is an old American space-tracking facility called Pine Gap. There used to be a lot of local hostility to it. It was said that even the prime minister of Australia didn't know what went on in there. And the local Aboriginal communities were outraged when their land was taken away."

  "But now," she said dryly, "the Americans have gone. We don't do any space tracking, because we don't have a space program that requires it anymore."

  "No," he murmured. "And so they gave Pine Gap to the Gaijin."

  "When?"

  He shrugged. "Forty years ago, I think." Before he was born.

  It was the same all over the planet, Madeleine knew. Everywhere they touched the Earth, the Gaijin were moving out: slowly, almost imperceptibly, but it was all one-way. And every year there were more weary human refugees, forced to flee their homes.

  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 spiderlike 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-gray 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 anymore, 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 tires, 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, windmills 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 traveled 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 northwest, 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 farther 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 farther, through clumps of the wiry yellow-white grass, which was called spinifex. She reached out to touch a clump, feeling 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 adolescents, had broken cover from a stand of bushes.

  The kangaroos looked oddly like giant mice, clumsy but powerful, with rodentlike faces and thick fur. Their haunches were white against the red of the dirt. When the big female moved, she used a swiveling 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."