Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

  We passed through the rough ring of the Pevatron accelerator, and came to a group of more finished buildings at its centre. The area was heavily fenced off and the ground dosed with poison; this billion-pound facility had not yet been abandoned to the rats.

  ‘In fact,’ Amanda said, ‘you could say the Pevatron’s development is continuing, even now, as that works its way through its own, slow, superhuman calculations.’

  That was the quantum computer. Contained within one of the largest of the central buildings and held behind a glass wall, it was a translucent ball maybe three metres across that hovered in the air, suspended by magnetic fields and contained in a perfect vacuum. Walking back and forth in its hall I thought I saw hints of deeper structure, glimmering. Even aside from its engineering quality, that computer was one of the most beautiful pieces of sculpture I have ever seen.

  ‘Nobody knows how it works,’ Amanda said. ‘Not in detail, anyhow. It bootstrapped itself. It finished its own physical design, and now is working out its own programming for the task of running the Pevatron.’

  ‘That is one smart machine, then.’

  ‘But vulnerable.’ And she took off her pack, and pulled out pretty much what I expected: a lump of pale plastic, an explosive. I didn’t ask her where she had got it from. She slapped the plastic against the glass window, where it stuck easily, and attached a detonator charge that would be controlled by a radio switch. She showed me what to do, just in case: it was a gadget like a TV remote, with a big red button to push.

  ‘We need some distance,’ she said, and led me out of the building to the open air. ‘The quantum computer is the heart of the Pevatron – and where most of the money has been spent. If we destroy it there’s a good chance the project will be derailed enough to be cancelled altogether, especially given it’s in the middle of a disaster zone. Of course others might build equivalent facilities somewhere else, but at least we’d buy time to prove the reality of the time loops, and to protect against the danger.’

  We stood near the edge of the ring, looking back at the unprepossessing control buildings. ‘Do we really have to do this? To smash such a beautiful machine—’

  ‘I know,’ she said, smiling at me. ‘I feel it too. Yes, we have to do this. Because this is just the start. Look …’ She pulled a tablet out of her pack, and showed me how she had modelled the spread of the super-vermin. ‘These rats are fertile at four weeks old, and have a gestation time of about three weeks. When a litter is born, a percentage of it is thrown back in time four weeks. So they are mature just at the point they were born – if you see what I mean. That’s why we see this jump in the spread with each three-week generation.

  ‘But I’m speculating that under conditions of extreme stress – such as the overcrowding we’re already seeing here – some individuals, or their offspring, can be thrown back further still. Just as Penny suggested.’

  ‘To escape the population crash.’

  ‘That’s it. Because if you dive deep enough into the past, you always find virgin territory: you are the first of your kind, and your offspring can fill their boots. So, think about it. The first boom will start when the Pevatron comes online. Forty weeks later, crash …’ The authorities were predicting a crash for us around week forty, when the rats would have overrun Oxford, and there would be tens of millions of nests – hundreds of millions of rats, swarming over an area forty or fifty kilometres across. Amanda went on, ‘But suppose that a few extreme individuals escape back, say, a hundred weeks into the past, into the virgin time before the Pevatron was even turned on. Forty weeks later, their ancestors are still ahead of the first origin. But then there’s another crash—’

  ‘And another leap into the past, even deeper.’

  ‘Yes. And back they go, crash and leap, crash and leap, working their way ever deeper into history. Every time it will start as it did for us, with just a handful of cute-looking babies in a virgin world. Every time it will end with a crash.’ Behind her scuffed faceplate those seawater eyes were grave. ‘There’s nothing ahead of us, Joe. Nothing but rats swarming and fighting and dying; whatever human future once existed has been eaten.’ She waved a hand. ‘And soon none of this will exist either. We won’t just be dead; we will never even have existed. Our history, our very existence, consumed by the rats.’

  I touched the hand that held the bomb control. ‘And you think this will put it right?’

  ‘This must be where it started. I can’t think of anything else to do.’

  I would never have believed that the timid teacher I had got to know only months before would ever have been capable of setting up an operation like this, which shows how much I know about people. But she was trembling inside her suit.

  ‘I’m scared, Joe.’

  I squeezed her gloved hand. ‘Don’t be. To have figured this out, to have got this far – I could kiss you.’

  She looked away, shy even in that extreme moment. There were rats running around our feet. ‘We shouldn’t risk it.’

  ‘I guess not,’ I said. I will regret that choice for ever.

  She held up her control, the button under her gloved thumb. ‘I hope this works. Three, two, one—’

  It took me a long time to recover from the injuries I suffered in the next few seconds, and even longer to figure it all out.

  Amanda and I had talked about what the rise of the rats would mean for humanity – that is, our extinction. What we didn’t talk about was what it would mean for the rats themselves.

  Rats breed fast, and compete hard. In a future world empty of mankind there would be a quick radiation of forms; I imagined slavering wolf-like rats preying on big grazing antelope-like rats. And I imagined intelligence advancing. Why not? Rats are already smart and highly social, and the stuff we left behind would give a start to any tool-users. Whatever society they built would surely be quite unlike ours, however. Rats, with their different breeding strategy, show little loyalty to their many offspring; there would be no rodent Genghis Khan. And natural time travellers would wage wars of a qualitatively different kind from ours. All this in a rat future.

  But that future was always contingent. Suppose Amanda was right – suppose her one action in aborting the Pevatron was enough to stop the rise of the rats. Maybe a smart enough super-rat of the future would know that. And maybe he or she would come back in time to try to avert the extinction of its kind before it existed – or to confirm the defeat of mankind.

  This is all speculation. But it would explain what I saw.

  ‘Three, two, one—’

  I saw Amanda’s thumb press down on that red button.

  And in the same instant I saw a vertical line appear in space before us, and fold out, like a cardboard cut-out rotating.

  I’ve tried to describe it, even to draw it, for the doctors and physicists and policemen who have questioned me since. It was a rat, but a big rat, maybe a metre tall, upright, with some kind of metal mesh vest over its upper body, and holding a silvery tube, unmistakably a weapon, that it pointed at Amanda. Even as it appeared it opened its mouth wide – I saw typical rat incisors, just like Rutherford’s – and it screamed.

  And it started to glow.

  Amanda had told me how the scientists had hoped to detect the Pevatron’s miniature time machines by flashes of light: all the radiation that would ever fall on those wormholes, as long as they lasted, all pouring out at the moment of their formation. And right at the beginning of the affair Penny said the babies she found in the vacuum sphere were warm too, warm in their little bellies where the wormholes lay like tumours. Maybe there’s a limit to how much of that gathered radiation an organic time machine can stand – a limit to how far a much-evolved rat thing can throw itself back in time.

  I think the post-rat that tried to attack Amanda knew this. It was sacrificing itself in a hopeless attempt to save its timeline. If so, it was a hero of its kind. />
  I saw it die. Light shone out of its mouth, its boiling, popping eyes, and then out through its flesh and singed fur, as if it exploded from within. I closed my eyes, thus probably saving my sight. When its body detonated I was knocked to the ground, burned.

  Amanda, closer, did not survive.

  But she had pressed that button, and I felt a second concussion as her plastic explosive went up, and the quantum computer died.

  When the Harwell security officers found us there was not a trace of that damn rat to be seen – and none of its swarming ancestors who had been under my feet moments before – nothing but the body of Amanda, and me with a head full of memories of the Pevatron rats that nobody else shares, not even Penny.

  THE INVASION OF VENUS

  For me, the saga of the Incoming was above all Elspeth Black’s story. For she, more than anyone else I knew, was the one who had a problem with it.

  When the news was made public I drove out of London to visit Elspeth at her country church. I had to cancel a dozen appointments to do it, including one with the Prime Minister’s office, but I knew, as soon as I got out of the car and stood in the soft September rain, that it had been the right thing to do.

  Elspeth was pottering around outside the church, wearing overalls and rubber boots and wielding an alarming-looking industrial-strength jackhammer. But she had a radio blaring out a phone-in discussion, and indoors, out of the rain, I glimpsed a widescreen TV and laptop, both scrolling news – mostly fresh projections of where the Incoming’s decelerating trajectory might deliver them, and new deep-space images of their ‘craft’, if such it was, a massive block of ice like a comet nucleus, leaking very complex patterns of infrared radiation. Elspeth was plugged into the world, even out here in the wilds of Essex.

  She approached me with a grin, pushing back goggles under a hard hat. ‘Toby.’ I got a kiss on the cheek and a brief hug; she smelled of machine oil. We were easy with each other physically. Fifteen years earlier, in our last year at college, we’d been lovers, briefly; it had finished with a kind of regretful embarrassment – very English, said our American friends – but it had proven only a kind of speed bump in our relationship. ‘Glad to see you, if surprised. I thought all you civil service types would be locked down in emergency meetings.’

  For a decade I’d been a civil servant in the environment ministry. ‘No, but old Thorp –’ my minister ‘– has been in a continuous COBRA session for twenty-four hours. Much good it’s doing anybody.’

  ‘I must say it’s not obvious to the layman what use an environment minister is when the aliens are coming.’

  ‘Well, they’re trying to anticipate, worst case, some kind of attack from space. And a lot of what we can dream up is similar to natural disasters – a kinetic-energy weapon strike could be like a meteor fall, a sunlight occlusion like a massive volcanic event. And so Thorp is in the mix, along with health, energy, transport. Of course we’re in contact with other governments – and NATO, the UN. The most urgent issue right now is whether to signal or not.’

  She frowned. ‘Why wouldn’t we?’

  ‘Security. Elspeth, remember, we know absolutely nothing about these guys. What if our signal was interpreted as a threat? And there are tactical considerations. Any signal would give information to a potential enemy about our technical capabilities. It would also give away the very fact that we know they are here.’

  She scoffed. ‘“Tactical considerations.” Paranoid cobblers! And besides, I bet every kid with a CB radio is beaming out her heart to ET right now. The whole planet’s alight with radio messages, probably.’

  ‘Well, that’s true. You can’t stop it. But still, sending some kind of signal authorised by the government or an inter-government agency is another step entirely.’

  ‘Oh, come on. You can’t really believe anybody is going to cross the stars to harm us. What could they possibly want that would justify the cost of an interstellar mission?’

  So we argued. I’d only been out of the car for five minutes.

  We’d had this kind of discussion all the way back to late nights in college, some of them in her bed, or mine. She’d always been drawn to the bigger issues – ‘to the context,’ as she used to say. Though we’d both started out as maths students, her head had soon expanded in the exotic intellectual air, and she’d moved on to study older ways of thinking than the scientific – older questions, still unanswered. Was there a God? If so, or if not, what was the point of our existence? Why did we, or indeed anything, exist at all? In her later student years she took theology options, but quickly burned through that discipline and was left unsatisfied. She was repelled, too, by the modern atheists, with their aggressive denials. So, after college, she had started her own journey through life – a journey in search of answers.

  Now, of course, maybe some of those answers had come swimming in from the stars in search of her.

  That was why I’d felt drawn here, at this particular moment in my life. I needed Elspeth’s perspective. In the wan daylight I could see the fine patina of lines around the mouth I used to kiss, and the strands of grey in her red hair. I was sure she suspected, rightly, that I knew more than I was telling her – more than had been released to the public. But she didn’t follow that up for now.

  ‘Come see what I’m doing,’ she said, sharply breaking up the debate. ‘Watch your shoes.’ We walked across muddy grass towards the main door. The core of that old church, dedicated to St Cuthbert, was a Saxon-era tower; the rest of the fabric was mostly Norman, but there had been an extensive restoration in Victorian times. Within was a lovely space, if cold, the stone walls resonating. It was still consecrated, Church of England, but in this empty agricultural countryside it was one of a widespread string of churches united in a single parish, and rarely used.

  Elspeth had never joined any of the established religions, but she had appropriated some of their infrastructure, she liked to say. And here she had gathered a group of volunteers, wandering souls more or less like-minded. They worked to maintain the fabric of the church. And within, she led her group through what you might think of as a mix of discussions, or prayers, or meditation, or yoga practices – whatever she could find that seemed to work. It was the way religions used to be before the big monotheistic creeds took over, she argued. ‘The only way to reach God, or anyhow the space beyond us where God ought to be, is by working hard, by helping other people, and by pushing your mind to the limit of its capability, and then going a little beyond, and just listening. Beyond logos to mythos.’

  She was always restless, always trying something new. Yet in some ways she was the most contented person I ever met – at least before the Incoming showed up.

  Now, though, she wasn’t content about the state of the church’s foundations. She showed me where she had dug up flagstones to reveal sodden ground. ‘We’re digging out new drainage channels, but it’s a hell of a job. We may end up rebuilding the founds altogether. The very deepest level seems to be wood, huge piles of Saxon oak …’ She eyed me. ‘This church has stood here for a thousand years, without, apparently, facing a threat such as this before. Some measure of the true impact of climate change, right?’

  I shrugged. ‘I suppose you’d say we arseholes in the environment ministry should be concentrating on stuff like this rather than preparing to fight interstellar wars.’

  ‘Well, so you should. But maybe a more mature species would be preparing for positive outcomes. Think of it, Tobe! There are now creatures in this solar system who are smarter than us. They have to be, or they wouldn’t be here – right? Somewhere between us and the angels. Who knows what they can tell us? What is their science, their art – their theology?’

  I frowned. ‘But what do they want? For that’s what may count from now on – their agenda, not ours.’

  ‘There you are being paranoid again.’ But she hesitated. ‘What about Meryl and the kids?’


  ‘Meryl’s at home. Mark and Sophie are at school.’ I shrugged. ‘Life as normal.’

  ‘Some people are freaking out. Raiding the supermarkets.’

  ‘Some people always do. We want things to continue as normally as possible, as long as possible. Modern society is efficient, you know, Elspeth, but not very resilient. A fuel strike could cripple us in a week, let alone alien invaders.’

  She pushed a loose grey hair back under her hard hat, and looked at me suspiciously. ‘But you seem calm, considering. You know something. Don’t you, you bastard?’

  I grinned. ‘And you know me.’

  ‘Spill it.’

  ‘Two things. We picked up signals. Or, more likely, leakage. You know about the infrared stuff we’ve seen for a while, coming from the nucleus. Now we’ve detected radio noise, faint, clearly structured, very complex. It may be some kind of internal channel rather than anything meant for us. But if we can figure anything out from it—’

  ‘Well, that’s exciting. And the second thing? Come on, Miller.’

  ‘We have more refined trajectory data. All this will be released soon – it’s probably leaked already.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The Incoming are heading for the inner solar system. But they aren’t coming here – not to Earth.’

  She frowned. ‘Then where?’

  I dropped my bombshell. ‘Venus. Not Earth. They’re heading for Venus, Elspeth.’

  She looked into the clouded sky, the bright patch that, I knew, marked the position of the sun and the orbits of the inner planets, Venus and Mercury. ‘Venus? That’s a cloudy hellhole. What would they want there?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Well, I’m used to living with questions I’ll never be able to answer. Let’s hope this isn’t one of them. In the meantime, let’s make ourselves useful.’ She eyed my crumpled Whitehall suit, my patent leather shoes already splashed with mud. ‘Have you got time to stay? You want to help out with my drain? I’ve a spare overall that might fit.’