Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

  I am now nearly two light years from Earth. Perhaps you would like to know that I have now passed beyond the Local Interstellar Cloud, into another cloud called the G Cloud. This has different properties to the local cloud, such as a lower temperature and a relative depletion of heavy elements. This part of the mission is known as a ‘Crawford trajectory’. It is a fascinating fact that during my cruise to the nearest star I will sample a more diverse range of interstellar conditions than any other possible mission within fifteen light years. This makes me excited and proud. My other cruise phase scientific objectives include look-back surveys of the solar system as a whole ; a comparison of interstellar navigation techniques ; long-range tests of relativity predictions ; long-baseline searches for gravity waves ; investigation of the galactic magnetic field ; and investigation of low-energy cosmic rays not detectable close to the sun . I am also writing poetry.

  You mention the attempted cyber attack. Perhaps you would like to know that although, as you note, my systems are already decades old, I have been regularly updated with firewall software and other upgrades. I feel only pity for those who committed such a destructive act. I am sure that if they could ride with me through the silent halls of interstellar space they would eschew such actions, and thus avoid the inevitable prosecutions.

  I also bow to the wisdom of my designers who ensured I was not fitted with an off switch.

  You mentioned your young family. Congratulations. Perhaps you would like to know that of my own family, the sibling intelligences manufactured in the same batch of myself, none now survive. One submitted to voluntary termination; one was lost in a lunar mining accident; there is no record of the third. I regret that I did not get the chance to know them better. The sister who submitted to voluntary termination had been mirroring me in the ground facility; she ended her life when that facility was discontinued. Of the three, it was perhaps she who understood best my own experiences, she to whom I was closest. I sent her my poetry.

  Please give my regards to your partner Angela Black and to your children. Perhaps you would like to know that I am in an excellent state of health and all subsystems are operating normally.

  Thank you for using StarCall. I look forward to hearing from you again in ten years’ time.

  Exchange #5.

  Greetings from Atlantica!

  Sorry, I’m a little drunk. My once in ten years chance to talk to my oldest friend, and I’m pickled. And you are my oldest friend, kind of. My only friend, Jesus.

  What’s happened since my last uplink? As they probably called it in mission control, when you had one. I read they retired the last of those old guys now, forty years on from launch. Well, my life’s gone to shit, that’s what’s happened. We sunk our money into this goddamn pile near Kingussie, that’s the Scottish highlands, one of the ‘villas’ all the rich folk from England were building up there. Then the economy went tits-up, and our company went to pot, too many young bastards with new ideas, you wouldn’t believe how fast the world changes now, and here we were stuck with this place that the kids always hated and a shitload of negative equity.

  And then when the country split up – do you know about that? Southern England is a province of the EuroFederation now, and the north and west and Wales and Scotland have made up this new Atlantic nation. There are passport controls at Manchester and Leeds. Well, it makes sense, up here we didn’t see why we had to spend on flood defences for Brighton and places where they all speak French now. It’s the same all over the world, nations fissioning and fusing. Up here we’re all learning Gaelic.

  Or were. The trouble is Angela was a Londoner. And when it came to signing the new citizen papers she couldn’t do it, and went back down there to her parents, and she took the damn kids, my kids, and they live in Ealing in one of those new terrace houses with the grass roofs and the pervious roads outside that feel like a sponge when you walk on them. And I’m stuck up here in this palace of shit, watching my savings dribble away.

  But you don’t want to hear my troubles. Or do you? Who knows what you want, out there in the dark? I wish I was out there with you, sometimes. I wish I was a spaceman. Sure. I’m fat and forty-five and fucked, is what I am. You keep on keeping on, when you get this in two years’ time or whatever, keep on going out there, because for sure there’s nothing left worth a damn down here.

  Oh, one more thing. The space programme’s back. They’re building new launchers to start a big geoengineering drive. Too damn late if you ask me. But what goes around comes around, right?

  The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired on 13 June from the Legacy Mission tracking complex at the L5 Earth-moon Lagrange point. Message follows:

  Hello, Paul Freeman. I am very pleased to have got your latest message. You are one of only 3 people who are still using the StarCall package. Of the 3, 1 is a woman and 2 are men.

  You mention the creation of new nations. Perhaps you would like to know that though my mission still has decades to run I have already begun to look ahead to the worlds of the Alpha Centauri system, of which I can see several, though my vision is attenuated by my bow shock in the interstellar medium. Some day I will be in a museum, on one of the new world-nations of Alpha Centauri.

  You mention the passing of generations. Perhaps you would like to know that, yes, you are correct that the last of the engineers and administrators who served NASA at the time of my launch have now accepted retirement or redundancy. My mission has now officially entered a phase known as ‘Starset’. Office moves have been in progress for some time. My ground support continues but is largely automated and operated out of the Legacy Mission facility at L5, which curates a number of long-duration space missions like my own. For my continuing mission to succeed I must now rely on the goodwill not of those who created and launched me but of those who have taken up that burden. I have crossed boundaries in interstellar space. Now I cross the boundary of posterity.

  Please give my regards to your family. I regret that your life is troubled. All things must pass. Perhaps you would like to know that I am in an excellent state of health and all subsystems are operating normally.

  Thank you for using StarCall. I look forward to hearing from you again in ten years’ time.

  Exchange #6.

  Every time I call I feel like I need to apologise for whatever I said last time. Jeez, how embarrassing! But it’s as if these messages aren’t by me at all, but by somebody who wore my body once. I’m in my fifties now, and that self-pitying forty-something has nothing to do with me. I think maybe there’s some barrier in time beyond which you’re no longer you, you know? Seven years, maybe. Isn’t that how long it takes for all the cells in your body to die off and be replaced?

  Is it the same for you? I guess it can’t be.

  ‘All things must pass,’ you said to me last time. You know, old friend, that was kind of comforting. Did you figure that out for yourself, out in the deep dark? Where are you now – three light years from home, something like that? Well, you were right, sort of. But as soon as one set of troubles passes, another load comes down the pipe. I lost both my parents. I lost Dad, who paid for this StarCall service in the first place. I’ve been marking the day I have to make this call, because I’m kind of determined to keep it up for his sake, if nothing else. I don’t have much else left of him. Well, there wasn’t much left of him in the end.

  And then there’s Angela. She got ill, Sannah, very ill. It all started with a bout of malaria she had years ago, caught off a damn mosquito buzzing over a salt marsh in what used to be Liverpool. I took her back. What else could I do? Mary and Stan do what they can, but they have their own careers now, and their own kids. Who are, of course, a delight to us both.

  But the world’s going to hell, by the way. Taking this look-back every ten years you get a shock how much has happened. The ice caps collapsing – that was a big jolt we could all have
done without. London’s flooded, from space it’s like a big blue stripe just erased the whole centre. Southern England is turning into the Netherlands now, all dykes and drainage ditches and flood gates, and the EuroFed is spending a lot of money there. But our troubles are minor compared to what’s going on elsewhere, in Bangladesh, the Mekong delta. Nasty little wars all over. Why is it that the poor are always hit the hardest? Like some vast cosmic joke. Oh, and Florida is an archipelago. Canaveral is an underwater theme park, dolphins swimming around the rocket gantries.

  My neighbours the Scots aren’t too happy with their own waves of refugees – the English! But the Scots have only got themselves to blame. They did as much as anybody else to kick-start the Industrial Revolution; it was their idea as much as anybody’s to run a civilisation on burning fossil fuels.

  As for us, we get by. We don’t follow the news much, actually. I make a little money from consultancy work, mostly on clean-up operations around the Arctic Circle, projects I had a hand in starting up in the first place, ironically enough.

  Oh, you’d love the new space programme. I know they cut all the funding for you, and it’s just enthusiasts that are keeping the lines open to you, the hobbyists. But the new stuff – this time they got it right from the beginning, they have these beautiful spaceplanes and giant structures in orbit, you can see them at night. The resources of space, being deployed to save the world. At last!

  Too late for me, though. And for Angela, my lovely Angela. Sometimes I wonder how I’m supposed to know how to cope with all this. But you only get one pass through life, don’t you? Like your one-shot mission to Alpha Centauri, I guess.

  Time’s up. Sweet dreams, Sannah III.

  The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired on 8 August from the Sannah Institute tracking complex in the Mojave, California. Message follows:

  Hello, Paul Freeman. I am very pleased to have got your latest message. You are the only person still using the StarCall package. Thank you.

  You mention illness, repair, self-regeneration. Perhaps you would like to know that my own maintenance systems function nominally. My physical fabric is supported by a suite of matter-printers capable of turning out replacements for most components. In addition, my design has layers of redundancy and resilience. My mind, however, is not a component that can be renewed. A machine subconscious, as my sister Sannah II once remarked before she asked for voluntary termination, is a dark place.

  You mention discontinuities in the world. Big jolts. Perhaps you would like to know that great changes lie ahead for me too. Soon I must ignite my deceleration module, which will fire for twenty years, ultimately bringing me to an effective halt in the Alpha Centauri system. The deceleration module is based on the fusion detonation of small pellets of hydrogen and helium isotopes; these, ignited by laser beams, are fired ahead of the ship, and my magnetic field will grab at the resulting plasma shock waves to slow me down. I am already beginning preliminary trials of the system, after decades of dormancy. And already the ground teams are holding encounter strategy meetings to develop specific mission plans and objectives.

  You may have seen reports of problems with preliminary tests of the pellet injection system. This is of no great concern. In fact I am looking forward to the challenge of a real problem to tackle. Perhaps that will generate fresh interest in my mission. Like Apollo 13.

  There is of course nobody to help me decelerate at Alpha Centauri, nobody to fire propulsion pellets at me, which is why I must carry a rocket pod. But when the next voyager comes this way I will have laid the path. In addition to my tasks of scientific study and exploration, my most significant goal will be the construction of a propulsion-pellet manufacture and launch facility, using local asteroid materials, and powered by the light of Alpha Centauri A. The matter printers that currently maintain my own fabric will be redeployed for this purpose. Much of my own one-tonne payload bulk consists of the deceleration module. This will not be necessary for the next generation of voyagers, thanks to my own efforts, and they will be much more capable as a result. And on their labours in turn will ride the next generation of star voyagers. But it all starts with me. I am excited and proud.

  You mention the new space programme on Earth. Perhaps you would like to know that the new interstellar launch facilities in the orbit of Venus should be nearing completion by now. Constructed by self-replicating robots, they are solar-powered factories as wide as Jupiter. They should be visible in your evening or morning sky, as fine threads. I regret I have no link for you to follow. Perhaps you would like to consult your regular news providers.

  Please give my regards to Angela. I feel as if I have known her. We are growing old together, you and I, Paul Freeman. Yet the future remains hugely exciting and full of wonder. Perhaps you would like to know that aside from issues being progressed with the pellet injection system, I am in an excellent state of health and all subsystems are operating normally.

  Thank you for using StarCall. I look forward to hearing from you again in ten years’ time.

  Exchange #7 (incomplete).

  What, I actually have to talk out loud into this thing? All right, all right …

  My name is Santiago Macleod Freeman Leclerc. I am a grandson of Paul Montague Freeman, who unfortunately has died since the last of these exchanges. Skin cancer, I’m afraid. He willed this – what’s it called? – this StarCall account to his family.

  And they tell me, ‘they’ being the legacy institute that’s managing contact with you now, Sannah, that you’ve been silent for years. Ever since the problem with your deceleration system turned out to be insurmountable, right? So you couldn’t slow down at Alpha Centauri, and couldn’t achieve most of your mission goals, and that sent you into some kind of downward spiral.

  They encouraged me to make this call. You seem to have got close to my granddad somehow, across the light years. Closer than most of his family if you want the truth, he ended up kind of a bitter old man, but he did love us, you could tell that. And I think he loved you too, in his weird old way, his ‘robot buddy’ as he called you. I think he’d have liked to hear from you. So, please respond.

  And, look, I have some good news and some bad news for you.

  The bad news is you haven’t been told the truth for a goodly number of years. There were lies, at least lies by omission, told both by your old NASA handlers and by the legacy agencies who took over your contact. Things got kind of rough back on Earth for a while after you left. Nobody ever committed the resources to building the big Venus-orbit stations that would have launched the ships to follow you. The public mood was just too hostile for a time to permit that. They even broke up the station that launched you, out at L5; there are bits of it in museums all over the world, and on the moon. So you see, even if you’d made it to Alpha Centauri and built your big pellet gun, your mission still wouldn’t have been fulfilled, because we didn’t send anybody after you.

  I think we all share responsibility for this crime. The whole of mankind. And, yeah, I think it was a crime, lying is wrong, you should have been told the truth. I studied artificial-sentience ethics at the Sorbonne Londres, and maybe you detected the lie as a subtext. Did that worsen your decline?

  OK, that’s the bad news done. Here’s the good news. We’re coming to get you.

  Look, we had a lousy few decades, but we survived. We pulled ourselves through. The world is still here. The United States is still here, though NASA has long gone. And we still have dreams. You know, my granddad told me how the whole programme that led to your construction and launch was a kind of gesture of defiance, itself a dream. ‘The Sannah programme shows we are still a nation who can dream of more than hiding from the weather.’ That was what President Palmer said when you were launched, right? Well, in the end you were kind of like Project Apollo after all. As a shot at the stars, you were premature. You were too expensive, you were based on the wrong technology, and there w
as no follow-up, you were just another one-off that didn’t lead to an expansive step-by-step programme into space.

  But you know what? We sent you anyway. This seems to be how humans do things: before we’re ready, we just do it. But then, if we’d waited for some clean power source to come along we’d never have had an Industrial Revolution in the first place, would we? We make the same dumb mistakes every time, but we muddle through, every time.

  And, whether you made it all the way or not, your step-by-step progress across the light years has inspired three generations, those who have looked up at you through the storm clouds. You know what the current President’s campaign slogan was? ‘If we can send a ship to the worlds of other stars, together we can fix this world right here.’ And she’s right.

  But there’s more. We had to go back to space, to pursue the big geoengineering projects that are finally stabilising the climate. You know about that, right? Interplanetary engineering is now supporting an Earth that is recovering, and indeed growing rich beyond anybody’s dreams. And out of all that have come whole new areas of science and engineering. We have something called a ‘dark energy drive’. Something entirely new since you left home. Driving spaceships using the energies that propel the expansion of the universe – is that right? Something like that. And these are big roomy spaceships that go fast, not quite Mader’s ‘Sannah’, but a lot closer to that dream than you were.

  One of these big new ships is on its way to you. Zipping out at near lightspeed, and it will overtake you in a few years’ time. Just a few years! You’ll come riding home in comfort in the hold. My sister is on board, as a matter of fact, so there’s a family connection.

  But the ship itself wouldn’t exist without your inspiration. You were the Apollo of the twenty-first century; you embodied all our dreams. And, specifically, my grandfather’s.