Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  I tried to explain, but she looked distant, and avoided my eyes. It’s a look I’ve come to recognize: the sign of a closed mind.

  I turned and walked away from her, back to the house.

  ‘Wait,’ she called. ‘Don’t go … Could I, uh, could I come in too?’

  I left the door open.

  Later on, when it got dark, I heard her come in and sneak around. She opened the fridge door with a click, but there was nothing left. I’d poured the rotten milk down the sink. Then, after I went to bed, she crept upstairs to my mother’s bedroom.

  I heard her crying. I put my coat on and went into my mother’s room and sat on the edge of the single bed. She was sitting up, shivering and crying. It was nearly pitch black but I could see her big eyes looking at me.

  ‘You shouldn’t cry,’ I said. My voice sounded loud and clumsy. ‘We’ll be alright, as soon as the ships come.’

  The girl said nothing, sitting up in bed in her red coat. I could see her trembling like a rabbit.

  I went back to bed. I didn’t sleep again.

  I got out of bed feeling gritty and cold. The girl had gone, leaving my mother’s bed rumpled and cold. She wasn’t anywhere in the house, not even the kitchen.

  It took me a few minutes to find her. She’d walked as far away from the house as she could get, had flattened herself out against the glassy ground at the edge and reached out one hand to the blue-brown line. She had rings on three fingers on that hand. Her lips were blue and her eyes had rolled up, showing white. Her tongue was sticking out. I crawled out and grabbed her ankles, pulled her back into the air.

  She breathed again in huge gasps. When she opened her eyes and saw me she started to cry. ‘Let me go. Please.’

  I felt very angry. ‘You shouldn’t be scared. They’ll be here soon.’

  She shut her eyes and kept crying, and said: ‘Please, please …’ Over and over.

  And then she folded away. I’m not sure if I did it or if she did it herself. She just rolled flat into a sort of bright red streak and flashed away like a scarlet worm.

  So that was that. Since then I’ve been alone in this fog, waiting.

  I hope they’re here soon. I haven’t eaten anything for days now, and it’s getting very cold here …

  The police had found no sign of any girl, red-coated or otherwise.

  Sheila told the police what little she knew of Holland, and described the uncertain contact she had had with him. She tried to make the policemen share her understanding of Holland’s delusions and obsessions, of lines of space-time longitude and mental infections and golden UFOs – as far as she understood them herself – but she could see the police switching off, and labelling George Holland with brutal efficiency as ‘nutter’, or ‘anorak’.

  After an hour or so they seemed to have decided they had enough. They closed their notebooks, thanked her for her time, and left. They took the letter with them; by tomorrow, she expected, it would be all over the tabloids.

  After they’d gone, she found it hard to relax. She tried TV, and reading, but nothing distracted her.

  She couldn’t put aside the image of Holland dying alone, trapped at the ‘Pole’ he had constructed for himself, waiting endlessly for UFOs which never came.

  What was the true horror for Holland, the reason he had shut out the world? She’d always thought of UFO abduction, whatever the psychological truth of the phenomenon, as a horrific experience. But Holland seemed to have enjoyed his abduction. Perhaps the true terror for him was of the final abandonment, at the end of a life of abandonments: the terror of being the one they left behind …

  She went to bed. But sleep, never easy for her, seemed further away than ever. Holland’s bizarre world-view stayed in her head. Perhaps it was just her teacher’s sympathy. Or perhaps Holland with his last letter had, after all, infected her with some meme. Well, if so, by tomorrow, millions more who would read what she’d read were just as much at risk.

  She smiled. The loner who brought about the end of the universe. If she looked out in the street now, would she see his golden UFOs, cruising across the sky?

  … In fact, the light outside was oddly bright.

  She went to her window and pulled back the curtain. The window was misted up. She wiped the glass with her sleeve, and pressed her face to the window, looking for Orion.

  She couldn’t see the stars. The sky was a washed-out neon blur, grey and empty.

  BARRIER

  Let me say at once that I have no regrets.

  Both Gurzadian and I were men with wings on, and that means we were willing to accept risks. Naturally nobody expected the contingency we’ve come up against here, but we always knew the odds were against us in terms of getting all the way to Proxima II. In fact we would both have volunteered, even without the Draft.

  I’m downlinking everything in the hope somebody will pick this up, although we’ve had no contact with the ground for a hundred days now. Geezer seems to be stuck fast in this barrier at the edge of the solar system, so maybe someday somebody will come out here to pick this up, and read it.

  I’m not one for melodramatic gestures.

  I’ll complete as much as I can before the hull implodes.

  I joined Geezer in LEO, in low Earth orbit.

  I launched in a new-series Soyuz craft from Kazakhstan. Chemical technology: obsolete in these days of the Bias Drive, of course, but you may as well shoot ’em off as break ’em up. There was a sign on the launch pad saying ‘Reliable Launch Complex Guarantees Success’. That’s the kind of little touch you just don’t get back home any more, which, in my opinion, is all part of a more general decline.

  There was no foofaraw when we left. This was not Project Mercury. A lot of the coverage of America’s first interstellar mission failed even to mention the fact that two human beings were going along for the ride, and we never met a single one of the program’s head sheds. Once, when I flew Shuttle, I got to shake the hand of Ronald Reagan. Things sure have changed.

  Anyhow it was a thrill to feel those bolts blowing, and that boot up the rear as the Gs cut in, and to know I was leaving Earth once more.

  The truth is I’d gotten pretty tired of sitting around in the grey gulag waiting for my Demograph Draft. Anything would be better, I’d decided, even a ticket to the happy booth. And when my notice turned out to be the commission for Geezer, I was pleased – even relieved – but I found I wasn’t really so surprised to hear that old shipping-over music one more time.

  I was already over ninety years old.

  But I knew I was more than capable of returning to space, of doing this job. Jenna always said that I have spent much of my life trying to appear humble, but failing. Humility is not a favoured trait among air and space pilots, where a high premium is placed on performance.

  I suppose, however, I was surprised to find that the Draft was leading me, not to some sky-boring LEO mission as I first thought, but to the stars themselves.

  The Bias Drive’s acceleration is pretty low. We spent weeks in Earth orbit, slowly spiralling away.

  All in all, the old world hasn’t changed much since I first saw it from orbit in the early 1980s, Christ, nearly sixty years ago. Can’t honestly say it looks better now, however.

  There’s more desert, of course, all around the tropical belt. The cities are bigger and brighter than they were, although over the US – what’s left of it since the secessions – the view is obscured by the huge megacorporate logos laser-painted on the lower cloud decks. The logger wars are still blazing in South America; you can see the flash of weaponry at night.

  The China – Russia border is just a wilderness. You can see the string of bomb craters. I know there are still some who criticize the Administration for keeping us out of that conflict. Not me. A well-trained military man has reason to fear war.

  As we receded the signs of humanity were soon invisible. Earth became a planet of ocean, desert and ice, just as it always was.

  We sailed past the
bony Moon, and I glimpsed the shadows of Farside craters. I found myself singing that old song: Drifting and Dreaming. Even as a kid in small-town New Jersey I never dreamed I’d go further than this.

  Well, I was wrong. Earth and Moon receded, blue and grey.

  Gurzadian, my sole crewmate, was ten years older than me. He had a head like a bullet, a barrel chest and arms like a big Russian bear’s. He habitually wore a rumpled red jump-suit with the legs tied off in knots. The loss of his legs, after a Soyuz landing accident long before Geezer was ever thought of, didn’t make a damn difference to his mobility as far as I could see. In fact Gurzadian was living proof of the saw that in space your hands and arms do all the work and your legs just get in the way.

  I don’t know what I need tell you about Geezer.

  Geezer – strictly New Explorer – is mankind’s first interstellar craft, and it is a big maumoo. It is a cluster of six modules nose to nose around a transfer node, which is a Grand Central Station for ducts and pipes and cables. The modules are wrapped in thick insulating blankets, yellowing now and pitted by micrometeorites.

  Five of the modules are for science. There is a base block where we – I – sleep and live, and where the controls for the cooling systems and oxygen regenerators and waste recyclers and other stuff are situated. It’s like my old garage in here. There’s stuff bolted to every wall, and to reach anything you have to move layers of kipple. The pumps and fans make it sound like an old boiler-house. It always sounds louder at night; I don’t know why that should be. And it smells like a library: old books, mixed with a little engine oil. The musty book smell is mould, of course.

  Our power comes from big clunky nuclear-fission reactors descended from the old Soviet ‘Topaz’ design. The design of most of the components of this craft is basically Russian, in fact. The Russians have been learning to live in space with this technology for decades, and I for one was happy to step aboard.

  There are small automated orbiters and landers studded around the cluster, gliders and entry pods, intended to be deployed when we reached Proxima II. The probes are modern: small and smart, built around the latest autonomous-software designs – qubit technology in fact – and their micromechanical systems pack a lot of punch per pound. But they can’t carry people, not even a pair of chicken-boned old farts like Gurzadian and me. Well, that’s the nature of the modern space program, and there’s a whole debate to be had about man versus machine and the nature of human exploration I don’t have the time to get into here.

  The Bias Drive is just a little black box mounted on a boom.

  It thrusts through the cluster’s centre of gravity at a steady one per cent of G. Not much, but enough to get us to Proxima in forty-some years, with a peak velocity at turnaround of eighty per cent of lightspeed. Quite a marvel.

  Of course you have to realize that it’s only the propulsion technology that has developed since my day. Otherwise Geezer is just Station technology with a few more life-support loops closed. When the solids recycler broke down Gurzadian and I still had to take the covers off and stir our shit by hand. Hey ho.

  Forty years isn’t so much. But nobody can build systems for forty-year reliability, not without qubit technology anyhow. And that’s why we were sent along for the ride.

  Qubit technology is quantum computing. In a qubit chip, the bits are represented by the spin states of chloroform molecules. It seems these spin states exist simultaneously in some spooky way. A qubit machine beats out a conventional device every time because it can process its bits, not one after the other, but at the same time.

  The problem with qubits is their fragility and expense, and hence rarity. The top-of-the-range stuff is forever snapped up by the big corporations for their commercial purposes which, like the doings of federal agencies, are generally beyond me. The world is now run, it seems to me, by huge, shadowy qubit AIs, far beyond any kind of democratic control.

  Anyhow, for sure, NASA and the federal government can’t afford to buy in qubit technology big time. And there’s the paradox.

  It used to be that people were too expensive to haul into space, because they mass so much, not to mention all the related plumbing. It was more cost-effective to send out a smart little robot to explore by proxy. But the equation’s changed. The robots have gotten much more expensive. Meanwhile the Bias Drive has made human spaceflight dirt cheap, comparatively. Suddenly it’s cheaper to ship two old fuckers like Gurzadian and me, plumbing and all, with a brief to keep the ship’s systems working long enough to reach Proxima.

  Our telomerase implants should have kept at least one of us alive that long.

  A telomere is a series of organic compounds which cap the ends of chromosomes, like the plastic tip of a shoelace. The telomere gets shorter every time a cell divides. Eventually, the cell won’t divide any more, and it dies.

  When I reached my seventy-fifth birthday I was able to purchase telomerase treatment. Bluntly speaking this enzyme restored the telomere tips of my cells, and they became youthful again. My bones stopped getting weaker, my spine stopped curving, my skin stopped from sagging, my brain stopped shrinking, my shanks stopped withering, my gums no longer retreated. I wasn’t getting younger, of course, but I wasn’t getting any older either. I’m not spared the various afflictions of age. But thanks to my telomerase implant I have a life expectancy of a hundred and fifty upwards.

  Or did have.

  Of course the irony is that it was telomerase treatment which finally blew the values of our society out the water. That and the collapse of Medicare. In my opinion at least.

  Anyhow it all worked out. A few months out and Gurzadian and I had stripped down and rebuilt this big-old bomber until you could have run a white-glove inspection any hour of the day or night.

  There is a certain logic in sending old guys into space.

  Even before the demographic bomb you had astronauts still flying in their fifties and sixties. And the idea of crewing Mars ships, for example, with oldsters was openly discussed at NASA and elsewhere. If you go as far as Mars and back, you’ve taken on more than your recommended lifetime dose of radiation. Not a good idea until you’re done having your kids.

  Conversely the space environment can actually be beneficial. I know my heart has benefited from the reduced strain of low G. And we old timers are patient. A spacecraft is a cramped, unforgiving environment, and a hotshot of thirty is not necessarily the ideal crewman.

  Frankly I regard myself well suited to this berth. Experience is the key. Mock combat is not equivalent to facing a guy intent on killing you. Simulated emergencies are not an equivalent experience to bringing a Shuttle orbiter down on one fuel cell, as I once did. And so forth.

  What I’m saying is that I’m not sure a wet-diaper crew could have coped with what we found out here.

  I remember I was eating when the first problem came up.

  I was at the tiny table in the base block with my legs wrapped around my T-seat. Most of what we got to eat was Russian stuff, warm borsch and jellied perch, which is okay when you get used to it. But it was Christmas week, and that day I was treating myself to stew. I always liked Christmas.

  In came Gurzadian, swimming through the air like a fat Russian dolphin. He was somewhat excited. He was jabbering in a mix of Russian, English and pidgin, and when I slowed him down enough to untangle it all, it turned out he thought we had a problem with our trajectory, or maybe our navigation systems, or both.

  Since at the time we were rather remote from Earth – in fact, after twenty-one months, we were already more than twice as far from the sun as Pluto – this could, I felt, ruin my entire day.

  Let me set out the elements of interplanetary navigation. Navigation means the skill of plotting a route and directing a craft along it. In practice you determine your ship’s state – that is, its position and velocity – and estimate a trajectory from that point. The problem is made more interesting by relativistic effects as you approach lightspeed, such as aberration. All of t
his is an exercise in constrained optimization and adaptive parameter estimation, techniques in which I am somewhat skilled.

  When Gurzadian raised the alarm, I found our position and trajectory vectors were all undetermined.

  We began internal system checks. We have two basic data-gathering systems. The first of these is radiometric, in which our range and speed relative to Earth are estimated from properties of our radio signals, such as round-trip delay times and Doppler shifts. The second system is optical. We determine the craft’s position and attitude using observations of background stars and the planets. To achieve this we have a small Cassegrain telescope coupled to a light-sensitive diode sensor array. Measurements are accurate to one second of arc.

  The radiometry was all over the place, and the optical suite couldn’t find any of its target stars, and even the planets weren’t where they should be.

  We checked the systems and found them faultless. I also ran a number of diagnostic tests on the computer systems which supported the navigation suites. These are all American systems. They aren’t qubit, but they are based on ex-USAF rad-hardened silicon systems, and are pretty damn reliable.

  Gurzadian, being Russian, was somewhat sceptical of this, and he said something sarcastic along the lines of, ‘Well, if there is no fault in your systems, my friend, there must be a fault in the universe.’

  That was my prompt to look out the window. And, by golly, he was right.

  That was when we lost contact with the ground.

  It was a shame, because the first few months of the mission had gone about as well as could be expected.

  Gurzadian and I had gotten along pretty well, given our culture clashes. Russians always assume Westerners are soft and weak. Gurzadian would be condescending to me, and he tried to protect me from bad news. There was the time I woke to the smell of smoke. Gurzadian shrugged, and said there had been an unplanned burning of an oxygen cylinder. It turned out there had been a sheet of flame three feet long that nearly burned through one bulkhead in the biotech module. But this ‘unplanned burning’ wasn’t a fire, you understand, because nothing else had caught alight. And as Gurzadian had put it out he hadn’t thought necessary to report it to me.