Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Dorehill’s was indeed a circular argument, his ‘evidence’ nothing but a check of internal consistency. Like most such fantastic notions his claims could never be verified or debunked, for they made no predictions which could be tested against fresh data. I imagined him hawking his notions around the academic community, gradually losing whatever reputation he once had, relying on favours and debts even to get a hearing. And now he had come to me.

  But he saw my scepticism, and anger flared in his eyes, startling me.

  ‘Okay, forget the UFOs and fairy tales,’ he snapped. ‘Let’s talk about the blindness in your own speciality.’

  I prickled. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘What would you say is the most fundamental question facing modern historians?’

  ‘I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.’

  ‘The emergence question. Consider the history of America. Quite suddenly, in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, you have the arrival of new populations around the coastal fringes of both northern and southern continents – English-speakers in Newfoundland and Virginia, French in Canada, Spanish in Mexico, Portuguese in South America – as if from nowhere, in a moment of historical time, with distinctive skin colours, cultures, technology, blood types, even different DNA signatures.’

  I shrugged. ‘Arrival surely isn’t the right word. The new groups must have been separated from their parent populations by geographical or climatic barriers, and in isolation they rapidly diverged, physically and culturally.’

  ‘That’s the standard line. But, come on, John – look at the holes! Why such a dramatic series of emergences occur all around the world, in such a short period of time? And how can such similar linguistic and cultural groups have developed spontaneously on different continents – English, for instance, in North America, Africa, Australia?’

  I was uneasy to be under attack in an area so far from my own speciality – which was, and is, Morocco’s Almoravide Empire of the eleventh century. ‘There are theories of linguistic convergence,’ I said uneasily. ‘Common grammars reflect the underlying structure of the human brain. It is a matter of neural hard-wiring –’

  ‘But if you actually observe them,’ he said sharply, ‘you’ll find that languages don’t converge. In fact languages drift apart – and at a fixed, measurable rate.

  ‘For example: suppose you have a land colonized by a group who pronounce the vowel in “bad” – what the phoneticians call RP Vowel 4 – with the mouth more closed, so it sounds like “bed”. A few decades later, a new bunch of colonists arrive, but by now they have reverted to the open pronunciation. Well, the older settlers seek a certain solidarity against the new arrivals, and they retain their closed pronunciation – in fact they close it further. But that makes for confusion with RP3, as in “bed”. So that must move over, sounding more like “bid”, RP2, which in turn becomes still more closed, sounding like “bead”, RP1. This is what the linguists call a push-chain –’

  I held up my hands. ‘Enough linguistics!’

  He permitted himself a fairly straightforward grin. ‘All right. But my point is, you can trace such phonetic chains in the versions of English spoken in America, Canada – the example I gave you is from Australia. We know that the divergence of the English group of languages began in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – there was a divergence, you see, not a convergence – just as the new populations emerged in Australia and America. It is as if there had been influxes of new settlers, interacting with the existing stock …’

  ‘Influxes from where?’

  He eyed me. ‘John, be honest – I think that if you had never before heard your quaint theories of emergence and convergence you would dismiss them out of hand. What we are looking at is the result of colonization – wave after wave of it …’

  Which was absurd, of course. I suppose I glared at him, unsympathetic.

  He smiled, but his expression was cold, his gaze directed inward. ‘We make patterns,’ he said now. ‘It’s in our nature. Scatter a handful of coloured pebbles on the ground and we make a picture out of them. That’s what you historians do. Make pretty pictures out of pebbles …’

  Now I had no idea what he was talking about. I had the awful feeling he was disintegrating, right in front of me. ‘Peter –’

  He looked at me. I peered into his church-window eyes. ‘You see – I think it’s happened again.’

  Even at college he was always the last to nurse another shot out of a dying bottle.

  And it had gone on from there. When he’d been hospitalized briefly after a thirty-fifth birthday party bender – complete with drunk-driving car crash – there had been some communication among his old college buddies. Maybe we all felt a little responsible; some of us (not me) gathered around.

  Dorehill said he wasn’t an alcoholic, clinically anyhow, and refused treatment. He gave up drinking, just like that, and had been sober for seven, eight years.

  Sure. Except that my uncle, a recovering alcoholic in my own family, would have summed up that behaviour in one word. Denial.

  I had to agree, having seen the pattern before. Dorehill might be dry, but he was still a problem drinker, to say the least. As he hadn’t been in a programme or sought counselling, he was at risk of relapse. And now here he was, sipping iced tea, wound up as tight as he could be, obsessing about 1962.

  A dry drunk. White-knuckle sober.

  None of which made him wrong, of course.

  ‘It was the war,’ he whispered. ‘Those damn missiles in Cuba. And the cockpit of the war would have been another ancient land – the mother of the newer colony nations, perhaps …’

  He talked on, rapidly, fanatically, barely coherently – of a great tongue of land sliced away, of landlocked towns suddenly becoming ports, of anomalous salt concentrations in the ocean, of how the world’s rocks and oceans juddered like a bathtub struck with a hammer, of fragments of memories transmuted into new folk tales – of the adjustment of every human mind on the planet.

  Solipsistic nonsense, of course. But as I listened, in the mundanity of that bright, bustling café, it suddenly seemed to me that I was huddled in a circle of light, a circle that reached only a few feet, and beyond there was nothing but darkness, unmapped, unexplored, incomprehensible.

  But then a waiter moved smoothly through the café and opened windows; at once a cool, salty breeze from the ocean wafted into the room, breaking up the heavy mugginess of the afternoon air.

  Once again I tried to be kind. ‘Look, Peter – you must see how this looks. I mean, where are these aliens of yours?’

  His face was set, composed. ‘You haven’t been listening.’

  ‘Well, this isn’t 4000 BC. For all the limitations of our eyes and minds, what of our records? TV, films – a billion photographs in family albums … Are you trying to tell me that they were all changed?’ I shook my head, impatient with myself. ‘And then there’s your claim that our modern nations were born of colonies of this detached place. In that case its history, its culture must be utterly intertwined with ours. How could any force, no matter how powerful, detach one from the other? And what of Occam’s razor?’ I rapped the tabletop between us. ‘It is simpler to assume that the table is real than that there is a vast invisible machine which generates the illusion of the table. Just as when I consider my own memories –’

  His lips quivered oddly, and that half-suppressed anger flared again. ‘So damn smug.’ But the anger faded as rapidly. ‘Ah, but you can’t help but think that way. We are such small creatures. Well, if nothing else, you are in at the birth of a new myth structure, John. How privileged you are.’ More emotions chased across his face – resentment, baffled curiosity, confusion. ‘You know, I sometimes wonder if it was necessary.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The amputation. Maybe we wouldn’t have gone to war after all.’

  I felt awkward, remorseful. ‘Look, Peter, I’m sorry if –’

  ‘We might have m
uddled through, without Their interference. Maybe that was how it turned out, in some other universe.’ He abruptly drained his cup. ‘More tea?’

  I’d had enough, of the tea and of Peter Dorehill. I got up to leave.

  But his voice pursued me, out into the shining air of the beach front. ‘You and I were just ten years old,’ he said. ‘Ten years old, John, when They stuck Their fingers in our heads. What do you think about that? …’

  A year after that last brief meeting, Peter Dorehill disappeared from view, theories and all, sliding off the face of the Earth like his purloined continent, presumed lost in a fog of alcohol. According to my uncle, dry drunks invariably lapse – and when they do, the fall is spectacular and destructive.

  Still, the news saddened me.

  On the day I heard about it I took a walk through Old Tangier, which is the medina, a walled Arab town, a maze of narrow alleys. I climbed to the Bordj el Marsa, the port battery which offers some of the best views of the city and its harbour. From there I followed the Bab el Bahr steps out of the old city to the port gates, and the beach promenade.

  Well, how could I tell if anything I remembered corresponded to the truth? Occam’s razor is only a philosophical principle – a guideline, not a law. Was I an arrogant plains ape, assuming that what I was capable of seeing comprised everything there was to see – making up comforting stories from patterns in scattered bits of historical wreckage – clinging to simplistic principles to convince me the stories were true – complacently judging a theory by the theorist who delivered it?

  But even if it was true – even if nothing anybody remembered before October 1962 was real – what was there to be done about it? That was the essential futility of Peter’s solipsism. He may have been right, but we must continue to behave as if it were not so. What else is there to do?

  … Of course, I thought, that might be what They want me to think.

  I smiled. I stared out over the enormous greyness of the ocean – the huge, misnamed Mediterranean, which stretches unbroken from North Africa to Scandinavia – and then I turned away and walked back into the bright, noisy clutter of Tangier.

  TRACKS

  Well, the Moon was a pretty exciting place to be, I can tell you that. Even if we hadn’t found alien beings.

  It was as we drove out at the start of our second EVA – our second day on the Moon, the second of our three – that we found the tracks. I know what you’re thinking. What tracks? There was no report of tracks in our TV transmission, or our radio transmission, or in the debriefing, or the still photographs. Nevertheless, they were there.

  Peter, I know there’s a kind of a stigma that hung over your father, for the rest of his life, after that mission. You don’t have to deny it. A sense of failure, right? A sense that he was a little reckless with that jump you’ve seen so many times on video, that fall that smashed up his backpack, the way we had to limp back to the LM and come hurrying home with half our objectives lost, a twenty-million-buck mission screwed up by one guy fooling around on the Moon.

  Well, I can tell you it wasn’t like that – not like that at all. But it’s something only your father and I knew, up to now. Today, now that old Joe is going to his grave, I want you to know the truth. And I want you to think about it, when you see that old Missing Man up in the sky this afternoon.

  If you want to know where we were, look up at a new Moon, and look for the chin of the Man, the highland area there. You might see a dimple, a bright pinpoint; I’m told some kids can see it with the naked eye. That’s Tycho Crater. A hole in the ground fifty miles across, big enough to swallow LA.

  And that’s where we walked, in 1973.

  The sky’s black, you know, but the ground is brightly lit, as if lit by floodlights on the floor of some huge theatre. A theatre stage, yeah. You lope across the surface, in the light of that big white spotlight that’s the sun. And with every step you kick up the dust from under your feet, and it goes flying out in straight lines, just glimmering once in the flat sunlight, before falling back.

  It was our second day. Our first day had been good, full of solid work. But morning is a week long, on the Moon. So I knew I had another bright morning, here on the Moon, stretching ahead of me.

  And today we were going climbing, up into the foothills of Tycho’s central peak. I whistled as I went to work.

  The Lunar Rover, yeah. Now that car was one terrific toy. It comes to the Moon folded up like a concertina against the side of the LM. To deploy it you pull on a pair of lanyards, and the chassis lowers slowly, like pulling down a drawbridge. Then, suddenly, wire-mesh wheels pop out from the four corners, complete with orange fenders.

  It worked just fine. We loaded up with our tools and our sample bags and what-not, and off we set, two good old boys at home on the Moon. Joe – as commander, he was the driver – kept complaining about the lack of front-wheel steering, which for some reason wouldn’t work, so he had to rely on the rear steering. I was just thrown around, especially when Joe took a swerve. The ground was nothing but bumps and hollows, an artillery field, and every time we hit an obstacle one or two wheels would come looming off of the ground, throwing up huge rooster tails of black dust behind them.

  It would have looked strange if there had been anyone around to see it, as we bounced our way over the surface of the Moon. The Rover is just a frame, with its wire wheels and fold-up seats and clusters of antennae and tool racks, and there’s the two of us, outsize in our shining white Moon suits, like two dough boys riding a construction-kit car.

  It was tough work driving directly away from the sun. The shadows, even of the smallest fragments of regolith, were hidden, and the light just glared back like off a snow field. But if you looked away from the sun, you looked into shades of grey, darker and darker. And that was pretty much all the colours there were on the Moon, except for what we brought with us, and what we left at home. Black sky, grey soil, blue Earth.

  I remember I was talking nine to the dozen about the geology, as we bounced along. I was trying to describe it for the guys in the back rooms, back in Houston. You never knew when some observation of yours was going to provide the key to understanding.

  But Joe was somewhat graver. He always was. Your father was a good five years older than me, remember, and he’d been to the Moon once already, on an orbital LM test flight, while I was a rookie; and I guess he just let me chatter.

  We got to the foothills and started to drive uphill. That Rover seemed to carry us without effort even under pretty steep hills. But I felt like I was about to slip out the back the whole time. And when we stopped, and I tried to get up, I could barely raise my suited body out of the seat. We were concerned that the Rover would run downhill, and in fact I could see one of its wheels was lifting off the surface. I just grabbed onto the Rover; it was so light I felt I could support it easily. We found an eroded old crater to park in, and when Joe drove it forward, there we were.

  Well, we found the big two-hundred-yard crater that was our main sampling objective. We climbed up towards the rim. It was like walking over a sand dune. In that old suit it felt as if I was inside an inflated tyre. But the footing under my feet got firmer, slowly.

  As I approached the crater rim I began to walk into a litter of rocks. They must have been dug out of the crater by the impact that formed it, and they had rained down here like artillery shells. But that was long ago. Now the rocks’ exposed faces were eroded, all but smoothed back into the surface from which they’d been dug out.

  And so I climbed, chattering about the geology the whole way.

  When I got to the crater itself I found it was maybe thirty yards deep, strewn with blocks ranging from a yard across to maybe fifteen yards.

  I turned around. A few yards away I could see Joe, working through his checklist. His white suit glowed in the sunlight, except for his lower legs and boots, which looked as if they had been dragged through a coal scuttle. He moved stiffly, scarcely bending from the waist, and when he moved he tipp
ed forward, like a leaning statue. But he was whistling, glowing in the light. We were happy up there. That’s how I’ll remember him, you know. Glowing on the Moon.

  Anyhow, it was at that moment, at the rim of that crater, that I saw the tracks.

  Rover tracks.

  I took a couple of seconds to get my breath, to think about it.

  Three-hundred-feet high, I was looking down at the mountain’s broad flank. It merged with a bright, undulating dust plain that swept away, just a sculpture of craters: craters on craters, young and sharp and cup-shaped overlying old and eroded and subtle. Beyond that I could see mountains thrusting up into space. All of this was diamond sharp, under a black sky. And out there in the middle of it all was a single human artefact: our lander, a gleaming metal speck.

  Well, I looked for the tracks again. They were still there. They were still Rover tracks.

  At first I thought they must be ours. I mean, whose else could they be? But I could see our tracks; they snaked back over the plain to the lander. These went west-east. In fact you could tell by the tread marks that the vehicle that had made these tracks was going to the east.

  I kind of shivered.

  I called to Joe. At first he didn’t believe me. I think he figured I might be in some kind of trouble, my suit overheating or some such. Anyhow, there were the tracks, large as life. And they still weren’t ours.

  Through all this, we hadn’t said a word, and we were out of sight of the Rover’s TV camera. I remember we flipped up our gold sun-visors and we just looked each other, and we came to a silent decision.

  We clambered down to the Rover. We told the Mission Control guy in charge of the camera where to point, and we told them to look for themselves. There they were, tracks on the Moon, made by a Lunar Rover that sure wasn’t ours. You could see them crystal clear in the TV images. I tell you, it was a relief to find that they saw them too, back in Mission Control.