Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  The Russians in space just get on and fix things without whining. Basically I admire that attitude; it’s something else we lost, somewhere along the way.

  The highlight was the gravity-assist swingby of Jupiter.

  We dug deep into the gravity well, for as you may know the lower the perijove the greater the assist obtained. Of course we were also thereby taken through Jupiter’s magnetosphere, the most ferocious radiation environment in the solar system outside the orbit of Mercury, but that’s okay; the little Proxima orbiters and landers are rad-hardened, and we’d both long exceeded federal worker radiation-dose allowances, not that anybody gave a shit.

  Jupiter is a hell of a sight, let me tell you. The shadows of the Galilean moons sail across the cloud tops, which are a kind of autumn gold, dimmer than you’d expect. My trusty Hasselblad jammed at closest approach, but I was able to tear it down. The problem was the gear train, a problem I fixed with a speck of Neosporin, an ointment from the medical kit.

  Anyhow the whole thing was terrific. Like something out of James Blish – remember Earthman Come Home? – the stuff that got me into space in the first place. Even Jupiter was a sight I never dreamed of seeing for myself – and here I was on my way to Proxima Centauri.

  I remember the stir when the first direct images of the Proxima exoplanets came in, blurred dots captured by the Hubble and the Superhubble in the early ‘oos. One superjovian, ten times the size of Jupiter, swooping in to about half Earth’s distance from the sun, and a string of five or more smaller Jovians. The interesting one, of course, is Proxima II, which looks to have a bunch of Earth-sized rocky moons, all about the right distance from the star for liquid water.

  Of course back then I never expected anyone to be sailing to the stars: not in my lifetime, probably never, certainly not if NASA had anything to do with it. But then NASA invented a star drive by accident.

  In the late ’90s NASA started its Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program, operating out of Lewis. No serious money, of course, just a handful of wacko funny-physics egghead types and a Web site. A PR stunt while NASA poured billions into Station.

  … Until, out of the blue, the double-domes came up with the Bias Drive.

  Gurzadian could have explained it better than me. It seems that the whole universe, atoms and people and stars, is generated from the wriggling of a membrane floating in 11-dimensional space. One of those dimensions is collapsed down, rolled up to a tube, and the way the membrane wraps itself around that tube generates the properties of the particles and forces we see around us.

  This is the M-theory: the new theory of everything. The M, it seems, stands for ‘membrane’, but as far as I’m concerned it could equally be ‘mirrors’ as in ‘smoke and’. They teach this stuff in the high schools now. Science has come a long way since I flunked geometry.

  It seems that old membrane can wrap itself up in two ways. A single loop generates energy levels from modes of vibration, like a violin string. Or the membrane can wind itself around the tube many times, and the number of turns gives you energy levels, like coils around an armature. One wrapping mode describes the large-scale structure of the universe. The other mode describes small-scale energy structures, such as those of an electron.

  But here’s the catch: when the tube is middle-sized, the vibration modes look the same as the wrapping modes. That means that the universe on very small scales looks the same as it does on large scales. This is called duality. For instance, electron charge by one description is equivalent to the size of things in another.

  Anyhow that, as I understand it, is how the Bias Drive works.

  A tiny piece of the universe is shrunk down and manipulated. Another piece, linked by duality, opens up behind the ship. It is a miniature Big Bang, a wave of space-time that pushes us forward. A little more precisely, the drive creates a localized asymmetric bias in the properties of space-time which generates a local propulsive gradient on the ship. It amounts to a rocket of infinite specific impulse.

  It was as if space-propulsion technology leaped forward a thousand years overnight.

  We should have expected something like the Bias Drive, back in the ’80s or ’90s. After all we’d been flying the same old Nazi missile technology for fifty years by then; we were overdue for a breakthrough. Gurzadian said science and technology doesn’t proceed in a smooth upward slope, but with big upward hops between plateaux. Punctuated equilibrium, he called it. And we lived long enough to see one of those punctuation marks.

  Anyhow, that is how I found myself sailing to the stars. It’s the paradox of modern America: a land of starships on the one hand, gulags for the old on the other. Maybe these tensions were already there, back when I grew up in New Jersey. All I know is it’s no longer my kind of America.

  After that first panic, it took some days to establish what was going on.

  The radio signals from Earth were reduced in frequency, as if red-shifted, and subject to excessive time delay, and reduced in magnitude. When we managed to reacquire the signal, Houston and Kalinin were both saying they had lost our beacon signal.

  We tried adjusting frequency and boosting the amplitude, but nobody, it seemed, could hear us.

  Meanwhile we measured whatever it was that was happening outside. I backed up the ship’s sensors with my own observations; for instance I mocked up a small theodolite to measure star angles.

  To cut a long story short: the magnitudes of the target stars were all lower than they should be. The angles between the target stars, when we managed to identify them, weren’t what they should be.

  I couldn’t come up with a consistent model for what we were seeing. If we’d somehow gained too much velocity, that could explain some of the effects, like the excessive redshifting of the ground signals. But it didn’t explain the redshifting of stars ahead of us – stars which ought to be turning blue as we hurtled toward them. And besides, those changing star angles weren’t consistent with any such hypothesis.

  Gurzadian developed his own theories.

  He said that as far as he could see space itself was distorted around us.

  He’d set up piezoelectric strain gauges to prove it to himself. It’s kind of flattening out, he said. There were stresses acting across Geezer’s cluster because of that – like tidal stresses.

  It was, he said, as if we were trapped in a bubble universe, which was collapsing around us. Ha ha.

  Meanwhile Gurzadian thought about the bigger picture.

  He quoted the assumption of mediocrity. We’d flown out of the solar system, straight into this muddled space. There was no reason to suppose the trajectory we’d selected was special in any way. Therefore you had to assume that the muddled space lay all around the solar system, like a shell enclosing the sun. A barrier. And all we could do was keep on driving into it.

  All I knew was, every time I looked out the window, the stars were getting dimmer and redder.

  But then there hadn’t been any scenery since Jupiter anyhow.

  I’ll be truthful and tell you that we’d got a little bored, before we hit the barrier anyhow.

  Of course we have a giant online library. I wish we had more honest-to-God books. But the truth is my concentration isn’t what it used to be. The surgeons call it the Tithonius syndrome: immortality, but ageing.

  We played games a lot. Low-G games, like where Gurzadian would make a loop of his thumb and forefinger and I would try to throw a pen through. We were a little better at catching cinnamon cubes in our mouths, like at cocktail hour with peanuts. We’d make it more interesting by knocking the cubes off course with blasts from an air hose.

  Gurzadian played a lot of his favourite discs, which are all Russian romance music. My hearing isn’t too good now so I forgave him that. Sometimes I admit I longed for the clean howl of an electric guitar, however.

  We would one-up each other continually. And we would bullshit, in a mixture of languages, the whole damn time. Mostly about the past, but that’s old people for you.r />
  I may have mentioned I grew up in a small town in New Jersey. My father had been an Army flier. He took me up for the first time when I was eight, in a beat-up Aeronca C3. We climbed into a stiff wind that blew so hard we flew backwards in relation to the ground. From then on I was hooked.

  I cut my teeth as a brown-shoe Navy man. That is, I was a Navy aviator. I saw some combat in Korea, which is detailed in the record. Later I moved to the Test Pilot School at Patuxent; I was therefore a member of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots before I joined the space program.

  I wasn’t sorry to retire from NASA. Once, briefly, we were a space-faring nation. England, Spain and Portugal crossed the seas and found greatness. Similarly we reached for the skies and ennobled ourselves. But I believe NASA has long lost its success mystique, and I have come to understand that our snout-in-the-trough politicians will not commit to a program that may take more than ten years to come to fruition, which rules out most serious ventures. To me it’s all of a piece with other turns our society has taken, which, while disastrous, are no surprise.

  After NASA and the Navy I went into various business ventures. I served on the boards of several suppliers to the major aerospace contractors. I retired from that, and went to live in a retirement community built like a fortress, and played a lot of golf. I thought I was heading for a rather long but comfortable dotage. The only cloud on my horizon had been the loss of my wife, Jenna, to cancer.

  That was when Congress started passing the demographics bills, which is why, in a nutshell, I find myself here.

  Gurzadian was always rather more reticent about his background.

  I knew that after leaving the Soviet space industry, he’d fled the collapse of Russia and found some work on Wall Street computer systems. But then he committed the crime of growing old.

  He’d been living quietly alone when it started. The talk-show jokes about long-lived geezers. The commentaries and black humour about the demographic bulges, the lack of jobs for the young, the burden of the growing number of elderly. The implicit approval for neglect and cruelty.

  Gurzadian actually witnessed one of the early attacks on a retirement home, the fat cops standing around doing nothing. He went hobbling in on his fake legs and got beat up for his trouble. Saved a couple of lives, however.

  He said he wasn’t surprised by what followed: punitive age-related taxes, the removal of the vote at age eighty-five, the grey stars we had implanted on our palms. He said it was a pattern he’d seen before: first they remove your dignity, then your property, then your rights, then your life. Until at last you’re cleansed.

  We talked for long hours. The way he told the familiar story was chilling; this was a man who had seen it all before, in a different context. The difference was, this time it wasn’t one ethnic group against another. It was children against parents.

  The thing of it is, of course, someday every last one of those who abuses us now is going to cross the barrier into the place we’re at. Payoff time.

  Please note we did have work to do.

  In the cluster’s various modules we did biotech research, and low-G material science, and astrophysics. Gurzadian had some astrophysics training, but we were both basically aviators. Therefore the ‘science’ we did was simple lab-rat stuff, working sensors and running experiments for ground-based researchers. There was a lot of the usual Nazi-doctor medical stuff as space slowly killed us.

  Gurzadian studied quasars. A quasar is a primitive galaxy lit up by the collapse of matter into a central, supermassive black hole. As the first observers to travel out of the dust-laden plane of the ecliptic, that was a key objective for us. Gurzadian said we were looking for the most ancient quasars, relics of the dark age of the universe.

  He liked to tell me stories, the potted history of the universe.

  First there was the light of the beginning. But as the Big Bang fireball expanded and cooled the light shifted out of the visible region of the spectrum, and the universe entered a dark age: just a few pinpricks, giant early stars and scattered quasars. The darkness lasted millions of years, while the universe grew a hundred times in size – until the first stars and galaxies formed, and the cosmos lit up like a Christmas tree. Quite a sight.

  Eventually the universe will be dark again, said Gurzadian. The star stuff will run out. It will take a trillion years, but that’s nothing compared to the long future.

  We’re fortunate, said Gurzadian. To exist in this little interval of light, between the darknesses. It made me glad, briefly, to be alive.

  As the first interstellar explorers, we would argue about the philosophy of starships. Like the old Fermi question: where the hell is everybody?

  The galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars. If just one of those supported a colonizing civilization, even with ships no more advanced than Geezer, the galaxy would be completely conquered in no more than a few million years. As the galaxy is billions of years old, Earth should have been colonized a hundred times over before life crawled out of the sea, and the night sky ought to look like Los Angeles from the air.

  But it doesn’t.

  Gurzadian had thought long and hard about these problems. The Russians have always had more than their share of space dreamers. Gurzadian believed they must be out there, looking in, because it’s logically impossible that they don’t exist. Maybe we just aren’t smart enough to recognize them. Or maybe they’re keeping themselves hidden. The zoo hypothesis, that’s called.

  Maybe we’ll find out the answers at Proxima, he would say. Ha ha.

  Funny thing was, he was half right.

  I’d like to put on record I was more than happy to accept Gurzadian as my crewmate. We didn’t always get along, but he knew this old bird inside and out before we left the ground. Besides which he was actually a pilot. In my opinion people who don’t fly the spacecraft should not be called astronauts. Both Gurzadian and I were, you would say, out-of-the-pack people.

  And, let me say, we both preferred talking philosophy and the old times to mulling over Demograph Draft horror stories.

  I don’t think either of us lost much sleep over those dimming stars.

  It was kind of a relief to find that our problems were only cosmological – that it was indeed the universe that was at fault and not our craft. We remained calm, and continued to do our bits of science, and to downlink our results and progress reports, whether or not anybody could hear us.

  If that sounds peculiar, you have to remember that neither of us were meant to survive the mission anyhow.

  The stars winked out one by one, fading into a redness like the inside of my eyelid. I admit my heart thumped a bit on the day we lost the sun.

  But the thing of it was, we could see something ahead. Something new.

  Grey stars.

  Not Proxima Centauri, though. Not really stars at all, in fact. Just a scattering of grey lights around the sky. Gurzadian said they looked like quasars. He was scared. None of this made sense to him; he couldn’t figure out what we were seeing, what had happened to the stars.

  As for me I felt kind of cheated. It’s no longer clear to me if Proxima even exists, or if it – and its planetary system – aren’t just some artefact of the huge shell which surrounds us. Damn it, Proxima ought to exist. Who the hell has the right to take away man’s nearest star – the dreams of my boyhood – and, worse, to render my mission meaningless, a vain flight in pursuit of a mirage?

  I remember the day I was given the grey star on my palm, a mark that I was too old to be given a job rather than some younger person. I marched to the welfare office and I wore that star with pride, damn it. I still have it here, a hundred AU from Sol.

  But it got worse.

  The life-extending technologies, like telomerase, started to be withdrawn. And they introduced the confiscation of assets at age eighty. Of course we’d have voted it down, if they hadn’t taken the vote away from us first, along with our drivers’ licences. Disenfranchizement and enslavement. What k
ind of society supports that?

  We bore it all. It was a bad day, though, when they broke up the nursing homes and retirement communities, and forced us all into the grey gulags, all of us whose families would not shelter us.

  We watched that shoot-out in West Virginia, a bunch of stay-put old soldiers pitting themselves against the FBI, and we cheered ourselves hoarse.

  In the end, of course, we couldn’t win.

  When we didn’t die off fast enough, they went further.

  It was a couple of days after we lost the sun that the biotech module blew. I was in the base block at the time, changing carbon dioxide scrubber canisters.

  There was a thud, a groan of strained metal, a flurry of red lights, a wailing klaxon.

  I did what I was trained to do, which was to stay absolutely still. If there was a bad leak the air would gush out of the ship, and my ears would pop suddenly and painfully, which would be about the last thing I would know about.

  To my relief I could feel the leak was a slow one.

  And then Gurzadian came barrelling past me, pulling his way to the transfer node. When we got there he began pulling out the cables and ducts that snaked into the biotech module, because that, he said, was where the leak was, and we had to get the hatch clear before we could close it.

  It took half an hour. Lousy design, I guess. Gurzadian said he’d been expecting a seam to blow for a couple of days. Geezer was being crushed by those damn space-time stresses. I just watched the barometer creep down to the 540 millibar mark, where we’d start to lose consciousness.