Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Are you lonely?’

  That pulled him up. ‘What?’

  ‘The Fermi Paradox is all about loneliness, isn’t it? – the loneliness of mankind, orphaned in an empty universe … Your wife, Emma, died a decade back. I know you have a son, but you never remarried –’

  He glared at her. ‘You’re full of shit, lady.’

  She returned his glare, satisfied she had hit the mark.

  Later he would say to her, ‘The universe is out there, like it or not, regardless of our soap-opera human dramas. And it is bigger than your petty concerns. And the questions I deal with are bigger than your trivial pestering.’

  ‘Like Fermi.’

  ‘Like Fermi, yes.’

  ‘But you don’t have any answers to Fermi.’

  ‘Oh, that isn’t the trouble at all, Ms Manzoni. Don’t you understand that much? The trouble is we have far too many answers …’

  REFUGIUM

  Celso and I were ejected from the Sally Brind. Frank Paulis had brought us to the Oort Cloud, that misty belt far from the sun where huge comets glide like deep-sea fish.

  Before us, an alien craft sparkled in the starlight.

  On the inside of my suit helmet a tiny softscreen popped into life and filled up with a picture of Paulis. He was wizened, somewhere over eighty years old, but his eyes glittered, sharp.

  Even now, I begged. ‘Paulis. Don’t make me do this.’

  Paulis was in a bathrobe; behind his steam billowed. He was in his spa at the heart of the Brind – a luxury from which Celso and I had been excluded for the long hundred days it had taken to haul us all the way out here. ‘Your grandfather would be ashamed of you, Michael Malenfant. You forfeited choice when you let yourself be put up for sale in a debtors’ auction.’

  ‘I just had a streak of bad luck.’

  ‘A streak spanning fifteen years hustling pool and a mountain of bad debts?’

  Celso studied me with brown eyes full of pity. ‘Do not whine, my friend.’

  ‘Paulis, I don’t care who the hell my grandfather was. You can see I’m no astronaut. I’m forty years old, for Christ’s sake. And I’m not the brightest guy in the world –’

  ‘True, but unimportant. The whole point of this experiment is to send humans where we haven’t sent humans before. Exactly who probably doesn’t matter. Look at the Bubble, Malenfant.’

  The alien ship was a ten-foot balloon plastered with rubies. Celso was already inspecting its interior in an intelligent sort of way.

  Paulis said, ‘Remember your briefings. You can see it’s a hollow sphere. There’s an open hatchway. We know that if you close the hatch the device will accelerate away. We have evidence that its effective final speed is many times the speed of light. In fact, many millions of times.’

  ‘Impossible,’ said Celso.

  Paulis smiled. ‘Evidently, not everyone agrees. What a marvellous adventure! I only wish I could come with you.’

  ‘Like hell you do, you dried-up old bastard.’

  He took a gloating sip from a frosted glass. ‘Malenfant, you are here because of faults in your personality.’

  ‘I’m here because of people like you.’

  Celso took my arm.

  ‘In about two minutes,’ Paulis said cheerfully, ‘the pilot of the Sally Brind is going to come out of the airlock and shoot you both in the temple. Unless you’re in that Bubble with the hatch closed.’

  Celso pushed me towards the glittering ball.

  I said, ‘I won’t forget you, Paulis. I’ll be thinking of you every damn minute –’

  But he only grinned.

  My name is Reid Malenfant.

  You know me, Michael. And you know I was always an incorrigible space cadet. I campaigned for, among other things, private mining expeditions to the asteroids. I hope you know my pal, Frank J. Paulis, who went out there and did what I only talked about.

  But I don’t want to talk about that. Not here, not in this letter. I want to be more personal. I want you to understand why your grandpappy gave over his life to a single, consuming project.

  For me, it started with a simple question: What use are the stars?

  Paulis had installed basic life-support gear in the Bubble. Celso already had his suit off and was busy collapsing our portable airlock.

  Through the net-like walls of the Bubble I looked back at the Sally Brind. I could see at one extreme the fat cone shape of Paulis’s Earth return capsule, and at the other end the angular, spidery form of the strut sections that held the nuke reactor and its shielding.

  Beside our glittering toy-ship the Brind looked crude, as if knocked together by stone axes.

  I had grown to hate the damn Brind. In the months since we left lunar orbit, she had become a prison to me. Now, as I looked back at her, drifting in this purposeless immensity, she looked like home.

  When I took off my suit off I found I’d suffered some oedema, swelling caused by the accumulation of fluid under my skin – in the webs of my fingers, in places where the zippers had run, and a few other places where the suit hadn’t fit as well as it should. The kind of stuff the astronauts never tell you about. But there was no pain, no loss of muscle or joint function that I could detect.

  ‘Report,’ Paulis’s voice, loud in our ears, ordered.

  ‘The only instrument is a display, like a softscreen,’ said Celso. He inspected it calmly. It showed a network of threads against a background of starlike dots.

  ‘Your interpretation?’

  ‘This may be an image of our destination. And if these are cosmic strings,’ Celso said dryly, ‘we are going further than I had imagined.’

  I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I looked more closely at the starlike dots. They were little spirals.

  Galaxies?

  Celso continued to poke around. ‘The life-support equipment is functioning nominally.’

  ‘I’ve given you enough for about two months,’ said Paulis. ‘If you’re not back by then, you probably won’t be coming back at all.’

  Celso nodded.

  ‘Time’s up,’ Paulis said. ‘Shut the hatch, Malenfant.’

  I shot back, ‘You’ll pay for this, Paulis.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be losing much sleep, frankly.’ Then, with steel: ‘Shut the hatch, Malenfant. I want to see you do it.’

  Celso touched my shoulder. ‘Do not be concerned, my friend.’ With a lot of dignity he pressed a wall-mounted push-button.

  The hatch melted into the hull, closing us in.

  The Bubble quivered. I clung to the soft wall.

  Paulis’s voice cut out. The sun disappeared. Electric-blue light pulsed in the sky. There was no sensation of movement.

  But suddenly – impossibly – there was a planet outside, a fat steel-grey ball. A world of water. Earth?

  It looked like Earth. But, despite my sudden, reluctant stab of hope, I knew immediately it was not Earth.

  Celso’s face was working as he gazed out of the Bubble, his softscreen jammed against the hull, gathering images. ‘A big world, larger than Earth – but what difference does that make? Higher surface gravity. More internal heat trapped. A thicker crust, but hotter, more flexible; lots of volcanoes. And the crust couldn’t support mountains in that powerful gravity … Deep oceans, no mountains tall enough to peak out of the water – life clustering around deep-ocean thermal vents –’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

  ‘We are already far from home.’

  I said tightly, ‘I can see that.’

  He looked at me steadily, and rested his hands on my shoulders. ‘Michael, we have already been projected to the system of another star. I think –’

  There was a faint surge. I saw something like streetlamps flying past. And then a dim pool of light soaked across space below us.

  Celso grunted. ‘Ah. I think we have accelerated.’

  With a click, the hull turned transparent as glass.

  The streetlamps had been sta
rs.

  And the puddle of light was a swirl, a bulging yellow-white core wrapped around by streaky spiral-shaped arms.

  It was the Galaxy. It fell away from us.

  That was how far I had already come, how fast I was moving.

  I assumed a foetal position and stayed that way for a long time.

  As a kid I used to lie out on the lawn, soaking up dew and looking at the stars, trying to feel the Earth turning under me. It felt wonderful to be alive – hell, to be ten years old, anyhow. Michael, if you’re ten years old when you get to read this, try it sometime. Even if you’re a hundred, try it anyhow.

  But even then I knew that the Earth was just a ball of rock, on the fringe of a nondescript galaxy. And I just couldn’t believe that there was nobody out there looking back at me down here. Was it really possible that this was the only place where life had taken hold – that only here were there minds and eyes capable of looking out and wondering?

  Because if so, what use are the stars? All those suns and worlds, spinning through the void, the grand complexity of creation unwinding all the way out of the Big Bang itself …

  Even then I saw space as a high frontier, a sky to be mined, a resource for humanity. Still do. But is that all it is? Could the sky really be nothing more than an empty stage for mankind to strut and squabble?

  And what if we blow ourselves up? Will the universe just evolve on, like a huge piece of clockwork slowly running down, utterly devoid of life and mind? What would be the use of that?

  Much later, I learned that this kind of ‘argument from utility’ goes back all the way to the Romans – Lucretius, in fact, in the first century AD. Alien minds must exist, because otherwise the stars would be purposeless. Right?

  Sure. But if so, where are they?

  I bet this bothers you too, Michael. Wouldn’t be a Malenfant otherwise!

  Celso spoke to me soothingly. Eventually I uncurled.

  The sky was embroidered with knots and threads. A fat grey cloud drifted past.

  After a moment, with the help of Celso, I got it into perspective. The embroidery was made up of galaxies. The cloud was a supercluster of galaxies.

  We were moving fast enough to make a supercluster shift against the general background.

  ‘We must be travelling through some sort of hyperspace,’ Celso lectured. ‘We hop from point to point. Or perhaps this is some variant of teleportation. Even the images we see must be an illusion, manufactured for our comfort.’

  ‘I don’t want to know.’

  ‘But you should have been prepared for all this,’ said Celso kindly. ‘You saw the image – the distant galaxies, the cosmic strings.’

  ‘Celso –’ I resisted the temptation to wrap my arms around my head. ‘Please. You aren’t helping me.’

  He looked at me steadily. Supercluster light bathed his aquiline profile; he was the sort you’d pick as an ambassador for the human race. I hate people like that. ‘If the builders of this vessel are transporting us across such distances, there is nothing to fear. With such powers they can surely preserve our lives with negligible effort.’

  ‘Or sit on our skulls with less.’

  ‘There is nothing to fear save your own human failings.’

  I sucked weak coffee from a nippled flask. ‘You’re starting to sound like Paulis.’

  He laughed. ‘I am sorry.’ He turned back to the drifting super-cluster, calm, fascinated.

  Just think about it, Michael. Life on Earth got started just about as soon as it could – as soon as the rocks cooled and the oceans gathered. Furthermore, life spread over Earth as fast and as far as it could. And already we’re starting to spread to other worlds. Surely this can’t be a unique trait of Earth life.

  So how come nobody has come spreading all over us?

  Of course the universe is a big place. But even crawling along with dinky ships that only reach a fraction of lightspeed – ships we could easily start building now – we could colonize the Galaxy in a few tens of millions of years. 100 million, tops.

  100 million years: it seems an immense time – after all, 100 million years ago dinosaurs ruled the Earth. But the Galaxy is 100 times older still. There has been time for Galactic colonization to have happened many times since the birth of the stars.

  Remember, all it takes is for one race somewhere to have evolved the will and the means to colonize; and once the process has started it’s hard to see what could stop it.

  But, as a kid on that lawn, I didn’t see them.

  Advanced civilizations ought to be very noticeable. Even we blare out on radio frequencies. Why, with our giant radio telescopes we could detect a civilization no more advanced than ours anywhere in the Galaxy. But we don’t.

  We seem to be surrounded by emptiness and silence. There’s something wrong.

  This is called the Fermi Paradox.

  The journey was long. And what made it worse was that we didn’t know how long it would be, or what we would find at the end of it – let alone if we would ever come back again.

  The two of us were crammed inside that glittering little Bubble the whole time.

  Celso had the patience of a rock. Trying not to think about how afraid I was, I poked sticks into his cage. I ought to have driven him crazy.

  ‘You have a few “human failings” too,’ I said. ‘Or you wouldn’t have ended up like me, on sale in a debtors’ auction.’

  He inclined his noble head. ‘What you say is true. Although I did go there voluntarily.’

  I choked on my coffee.

  ‘My wife is called Maria. We both work in the algae tanks beneath New San Francisco.’

  I grimaced. ‘You’ve got my sympathy.’

  ‘We remain poor people, despite our efforts to educate ourselves. You may know that life is not easy for non-Caucasians in modern California …’ His parents had moved there from the east when Celso was very young. ‘My parents loved California – or at least, the dream of California – a place of hope and tolerance and plenty, the society of the future, the Golden State.’ He smiled. ‘But my parents died disappointed. And the California dream had been dead for decades …’

  It all started, he said, with the Proposition 13 vote in 1978. It was a tax revolt, when citizens began to turn their backs on public spending. More ballot initiatives followed, to cut taxes, limit budgets, restrict school-spending discretion, bring in tougher sentencing laws, end affirmative action, ban immigrants from using public services.

  ‘For fifty years California has been run by a government of ballot initiative. And it is not hard to see who the initiatives are favouring. The whites became a minority in 2005; the rest of the population is Latino, black, Asian and other groups. The ballot initiatives are weapons of resistance by the declining proportion of white voters. With predictable results.’

  I could sympathize. As a kid growing up with two radicals for parents – in turn very influenced by my grandfather, the famous Reid Malenfant himself – I soaked up a lot of utopianism. My parents always thought that the future would be better than the present, that people would somehow get smarter and more generous, overcome their limitations, learn to live in harmony and generosity. Save the planet and live in peace. All that stuff.

  It didn’t work out that way. Where California led, it seems to me, the rest of the human race has followed, into a pit of selfishness, short-sightedness, bigotry, hatred, greed – while the planet fills up with our shit.

  ‘But,’ Celso said, ‘your grandfather tried.’

  ‘Tried and failed. Reid Malenfant dreamed of saving the Earth by mining the sky. Bullshit. The wealth returned from the asteroid mines has made the rich richer – people like Paulis – and did nothing for the Earth but create millions of economic refugees.’

  And as for my grandfather, who everybody seems to think I ought to be living up to: his is a voice from the past, speaking of vanished dreams.

  Celso said, ‘Is there really no hope for us? Can we really not transcend our nature, s
ave ourselves?’

  ‘My friend, all you can do is look after yourself.’

  Celso nodded. ‘Yes. My wife and I could see no way to buy a decent life for our son Fernando but for one of us to be sold through an auction.’

  ‘You did that knowing the risk of coming up against a bastard like Paulis – of ending up on a chute to hell like this?’

  ‘I did it knowing that Paulis’s money would buy my Fernando a place in the sun – literally. And Maria would have done the same. We drew lots.’

  ‘Ah.’ I nodded knowingly. ‘And you lost.’

  He looked puzzled. ‘No. I won.’

  I couldn’t meet his eyes. I really do hate people like that.

  He said gently, ‘Tell me why you are here. The truth, now.’

  ‘Paulis bought me.’

  ‘The laws covering debtor auctions are strict. He could not have sent you on such a hazardous assignment without your consent.’

  ‘He bought me. But not with money.’

  ‘Then what?’

  I sighed. ‘With my grandfather. Paulis knew him. He had a letter, written before Reid Malenfant died, a letter for me …’

  A paradox arises when two seemingly plausible lines of thought meet in a contradiction. Throughout history, paradoxes have been a fertile seeding grounds for new ways of looking at the world. I’m sure Fermi is telling us something very profound about the nature of the universe we live in.

  But, Michael, neither of the two basic resolutions of the Paradox offer much illumination – or comfort.

  Maybe, simply, we really are alone.

  We may be the first. Perhaps we’re the last. If so, it took so long for the solar system to evolve intelligence it seems unlikely there will be others, ever. If we fail, then the failure is for all time. If we die, mind and consciousness and soul die with us: hope and dreams and love, everything that makes us human. There will be nobody even to mourn us …

  Celso nodded gravely as he read.