Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  “WhatisT

  Cornelius sat down and visibly tried to be patient. “It’s a sketch of the foundations of a theory of quantum gravity, which is a unification, awaited for a century, of general relativity and quantum theory, the two great pillars of physics.”

  “I thought we had that. String theory.”

  “String theory is part of it. But string theory is mathematically dense — after thirty years the theorists have only extracted a handful of predictions from it — and it’s limited besides; it doesn’t incorporate curved space in a natural way. And—”

  Emma pushed the report away. “What does this have to do with us?”

  He smiled. “Everything. The material turned up in a Foundation School in Australia, their Northern Territory. Produced by one of the inmates there.”

  Inmates. “You mean one of the Blue children?”

  “Yes. A ten-year-old from Zambia.”

  He handed over a photograph. A frightened-looking boy, strong white teeth, round eyes. “My God,” she said. “I know this boy.”

  “I know.” Taine looked at the image hungrily. “He’s the one we’ve been looking for. Don’t you see?”

  “No, I don’t.” She thought over what he had said. “You’re saying that finding this one boy was the objective of the whole program?” She pushed away the report. “Cornelius, I’m amazed you’ve come to me with this. In case you’re not aware of it, we’re being shut down up on Cruithne. In three months of surface operations we’ve discovered nothing to justify the diversion of the mission away from Reinmuth, with all the complication that brought us.”

  “We’ve gone over this many times,” he said tightly. “You’re well aware that the firefly robots have been restricted to a small area around the Nautilus. We have been marking time. There’s a lot of surface area to explore. And besides, we know there’s something to be found. We have the Feynman radio message—”

  “Sure,” she said harshly. “Or maybe all we were picking up was the Fermilab air-conditioning turning itself on and off. What do you think?”

  He eyed her, eyes bright, mouth small and tense. He seemed to be rocking back and forth in his chair, almost imperceptibly. “Emma, there is much, much, you’ve yet to understand about what’s .going on here. Remember we believe we are fighting for the destiny of the species.”

  She sighed. “So now what?”

  “Now we have to go get him.”

  “We?”

  “Perhaps he will remember you.”

  Sheena 6:

  Sheena 6 was the smartest of the young.

  It was no privilege. She had to work hard to absorb the new signs and concepts Dan sent to her.

  And there was much work to do.

  She learned to use the glovelike systems that made the firefly robots clamber over the asteroid ground, that strange place beyond the ship wall where there was no water. The mining equipment, designed to extract methane and water for the rocket fuel, was adapted to seek out essentials for the phytoplankton — nitrates and phosphates. No more sacks of water and dirt were fired to Earth. Under her command, fireflies took apart the methane rocket plants at the poles and began to haul the parts over the surface for new uses.

  Even in the hab itself there was much to do.-Dan showed her how to keep the water pure. Oxygen could be produced by the great metal cells, to keep the water fresh and vitalizing. There were beds of charcoal filters through which the water was pumped. But the charcoal had to be replaced by carbon extracted from asteroid material, burned in sun fire.

  Dan also tried to show her how to interpret the elaborate automatic monitoring systems that checked that the closed loops remained healthy. But this was no use to her. Squid senses were delicate. If the water was unbalanced, she could see, taste, smell it as it passed through her mantle, over her gills. She could see the twisting polarization of the light caused by murky pollutants. She could even hear the tiny cries of the plankton. She knew when the water was unhealthy. It was enough that she had the means to fix it.

  The processes were complex. But at heart, she learned, there was a simple principle. Her world, this droplet of water clinging to a rock, was so small it could not sustain itself. She took food out of it by feeding on krill; so she must find ways, direct or indirect, of returning raw materials for that food to the world.

  Very well.

  In the midst of this activity, Sheena 5 grew weaker. Sheena 6 tried to pummel her awake, a few hours longer.

  At last, though, Sheena’s black eyes clouded. Her young gathered around her. Look at me. Court me. Love me.

  Last confused words, picked out in blurred signs on a mottled carapace, stiff attempts at posture by muscles leached of strength.

  Sheena 6 hovered close to her mother. What had those darkening eyes seen? Was it really true that Sheena 5 had been hatched in an ocean without limits, an ocean where hundreds — thousands, millions — of squid hunted and fought, bred and died?

  Sheena 5’s arms drifted purposelessly, and the soft gravity of Cruithne started to drag her down for the last time.

  Sheena’s young fell on her, their beaks tearing into her cooling, sour flesh.

  With time, the Nautilus hab was stabilized. As long as the machines survived, so would the hab’s cargo of life.

  But it was too small.

  It had been built to sustain one squid. There were four of them now — four of Sheena’s young.

  The shortage of food wasn’t the only problem. At times Sheena 6 ached with the need to rip open the mantle of her most foolish brother.

  So Sheena, under instruction from Dan, went to work. Under her guidance the firefly robots began to assemble new engines, new flows of material. Dan tried to teach her sign labels for the chemical processes involved.

  Here was a small plant, for instance, that burned hydrogen and carbon dioxide to produce water and carbon monoxide. Then the carbon monoxide burned with further hydrogen to produce water and ethylene, and then the ethylene was used to produce polyethylene and polypropylene…

  The truth was she understood little. But she understood the end product.

  Plastics.

  With plastics she could make anything. She had the firefly robots toil over the plastic sheets and artifacts, cutting and joining. The shining sheets spread around the rocket at the pole and the glimmering habitat of Nautilus.

  These toy factories had been intended as trials of technologies and manufacturing processes that would have supported a human colony on Cruithne. But no humans had come to Cruithne.

  Soon there were four habs, linked by tunnels, one for each of Sheena’s young, the smart survivors.

  The habs filled up with water from melted asteroid substance. The krill and diatoms bred happily to fill the volume available. The habs were splashes of water and life on the asteroid’s crumbling, coal-dark surface; they looked like living things themselves, spawning and breeding.

  But already another cephalopod generation was coming: sacs of eggs clung to asteroid rock in all the habs.

  So they extended the habs further.

  And the greater volume required more power. Sheena extended the solar cell arrays that coated the surface of the asteroid, around the pole.

  But this wasn’t enough. So Sheena 6 found a way to make glass from Cruithne silicon compounds, and ceramics to make frames that held great wings of solar receptors in space, away from the surface.

  Unremarked by humans, the young of Sheena swarmed over their asteroid.

  The third generation emerged from their shells and started to look at their expanding world with new, curious, resentful eyes.

  Perhaps a fifth of them were smart. A fifth seemed a small number.

  As the young hunted their mindless brothers, Sheena wondered if there were ways to increase that proportion. And to make the squid smarter.

  And live longer.

  Sheena 6 thought about the future.

  It wouldn’t stop, Sheena 6 saw, more generations of young and more habs, u
ntil the asteroid was full, used up. What then? Would they turn on each other at last?

  But there was nobody to discuss her ideas with.

  The truth was, Sheena was isolated. Her siblings, even her own young, were remote from her.

  This new shoal had been hatched in the strangeness of space, and they swam in asteroid water, not the oceans of Earth. That was true of Sheena 6 also, of course, but she had worked with humans, with Dan, as had her mother before her. Perhaps she was closer to Earth than they were.

  Sheena 5 had talked about the great shoals of Earth, their dreaming songs of the million-year-deep past. These new squid cared nothing for Earth, nothing for the past. And their dreams, their dances and songs, were of the future.

  The siblings found new ways to control the firefly robots. They had begun to send firefly robots to explore the asteroid, places neither Sheena 5 nor even Sheena 6 had seen. They signed pictures to each other Sheena 6 couldn’t recognize: great starburst explosions, squid writhing and dying.

  It seemed they had found something on the far side of the asteroid. Something strange.

  They would not discuss it with her. When she sent a firefly robot crawling over there to investigate, they turned it around and sent it back.

  The siblings took to wearing sigils on their chromatophore-rich hides. Bright circles. Dan told her they were blue.

  Sheena 6 swam restlessly through the Nautilus hab, alone.

  She longed for the shoal. But she had never known the companionship of the true shoal; she had been born too late to have shoaled with the great clouds of squid on Earth, too early to join with these new, bright-eyed creatures of space. She was neither one nor the other.

  She had no purpose. She may as well die.

  Still, the restlessness burned in her, and curiosity itched.

  What was it that the others had found on the far side of the asteroid?

  She sent another firefly, but it too was turned back.

  Once, Sheena 5, her mother, had crossed space, traveled between worlds. Perhaps it would be appropriate if Sheena 6 — the closest of Sheena 5’s young, the last to have communicated with a human — were to do something similar.

  She. gathered her remaining machines and began to plan something new.

  Michael:

  There were legs before Michael when he opened his eyes. Pillars

  of cloth. A man’s legs.

  He tried not to move. He closed his eyes again. Perhaps if the man thought Michael was asleep he would go away, choose someone else. There was a strange, unearthly silence in the room. He imagined the others lying rigid, feigning sleep as he did.

  The Brothers hardly ever came here. The Sister, in her glass-fronted office at the end of the dormitory, would only come out if someone had done something wrong, like spill the slop bucket.

  It was never good when something unusual happened, because it meant that somebody was going to get hurt. All you could do was find ways to stop it being you.

  But tonight, it seemed, it was Michael’s turn.

  The man’s voice barked. It was the language they spoke here, not Michael’s language, and so he didn’t understand. Best not to say anything.

  But the man was still speaking to him, angrier now, too loud for him to ignore, to feign sleep.

  And now a fist the size of a child’s head came down and grabbed Michael’s grubby T-shirt. He felt the cloth dig under his arms, and he heard a seam rip. Michael was lifted up, bodily, his legs dangling.

  He hung there limp. A face like a cloud, puzzled and angry, loomed before him.

  He was set down on his bare feet, hard. He stood there and looked up at the man. It wasn’t one of the Brothers. The man turned away and spoke some more, this time to the Sister, who was standing at the end of Michael’s bed.

  The Sister took hold of Michael’s hand. He made a fist so she couldn’t take his fingers, but she shook his hand, hard, until his fingers uncurled, and then she grabbed them and squeezed them tightly.

  The Sister dragged him out of the dormitory. It was early morning. The gray of dawn had washed out, leaving the sky an empty blue, as always, and the bleached buildings of the School stretched away around him.

  The Sister took him to a smaller building, a place he’d never been into before. She opened the door and pushed him inside.

  He thought it was the cleanest place he had ever seen. The walls were white and so smooth they looked like skin. There were gleaming metal fixtures set in the roof, and bright strip lights that turned the air gray.

  The Sister started pulling at his clothes, lifting or ripping them off him. He endured this passively. He would get them back later.

  He reached out and touched the smooth wall. The grime on his palm left a mark. He snatched back his hand and looked at the Sister, wondering if she would punish him for that, but she didn’t seem to have noticed.

  When she had removed all his clothes she pushed him into the middle of the room, away from the walls. Then she walked out of the door and pulled it closed behind her.

  He just stood there in the middle of the room, because nobody had told him to do anything else.

  And then water began to gush from the ceiling, hard needle jets of it. It hissed against the walls, and battered at his flesh. At first he thought it might be rain. There used to be rain at home, in the summer. But there was never rain here.

  The roof rain grew harder, so hard it stung. There was an odd smell in it, like the smell of the liquid the Sisters sometimes used to hose out the dormitory. And it was getting hotter. He stumbled back, fetching up against the hard, slippery wall, but the rain seemed to follow him and there was nowhere to run, not even other children to hide behind.

  Perhaps this was his punishment, then. Perhaps it was because of the flashlight.

  He huddled down in the corner, wedged into the angle of the walls. He could see water trickling off his body into a hole in the middle of the floor. The water was stained brown and black, but after a time it began to run clear.

  Emma Stoney:

  Emma had become increasingly dismayed by the bad news that surrounded the Blue-children Schools. Nothing, however, could have prepared her for the reality of Red Creek.

  Red Creek turned out to be an Aboriginal reserve in Australia’s Northern Territory, reinstated by the Terra Nullius national government. A section of it had been hastily cordoned off to site this Foundation School. They were shown around by a “Brother” — a young Portuguese, darkly handsome and composed, dressed in a flapping black gown and dog collar.

  It was a bleak place.

  There were huts, like barracks, that had once been painted white, but the paint had faded to an indiscriminate pink. Otherwise there seemed to be no color at all, save the grayish red of the dust, here at the baked, eroded heart of Australia. The dust lay everywhere; as she walked she was trailed by a great cloud of it. Away from the reception area there seemed to be absolutely no vegetation, not a blade of grass. There was a hot, dry smell, of dust, dirty clothing, feces, and urine.

  They weren’t allowed into the huts. She saw no children.

  Here in Red Creek, three hundred children lived in administered squalor. Cornelius and the Brother remarked on none of this. The Brother talked instead of economies-of-scale joint administration of the School and the rest of the gin reservation.

  Gin. This word referred to Aborigines. It seemed to be a word of casual abuse. Likewise the Brother referred to the children here, of course, as Blues. Even though, he said in what was apparently meant to be a joke, most of the children here were black.

  Terra Nullius — the name of Australia’s governing party — meant “empty land.” It referred to the old fiction that Australia was unoccupied when Captain Cook planted the flag here, that the Aborigines had no rights to the lands they had inhabited for millennia. It was a good name for the policies the government followed ruthlessly.

  The native Australians had suffered a couple of centuries of persistent discrimination, wi
th the dispossession of land, the separation of children from parents for indenture as servants and laborers, and so on. There had been a brief summer of hope, hi the 1970s and after, when liberal, if flawed, protective legislation had been passed. It had all evaporated when the economy down-turned at the start of the new century and the soil erosion began to hit.

  Today, black children made up 3 percent of the youth in Australia, but 60 percent of those in prison. International human rights groups and Aboriginal organizations talked of torture and beatings. And so on.

  Modern Australia was a good place for a school like this. And the people who staffed it.

  The Portuguese Brother belonged to a Christian group called the Order of Christ. This was part of the shadowy coalition that supported the Milton Foundation. The Order turned out to have roots going back to the fourteenth century. It was a religious-military society originally set up to attack Islam in its own territories. The Order had included Vasco da Gama, for example, one of whose specialities was hanging Muslims from his masts and using them for crossbow practice.

  In the year 2011, here was the Order in the black heart of Australia, running a school. And it was partly funded by Bootstrap, with money that had passed through Emma’s control.

  Appalled, ashamed, she drew Cornelius aside. “Dear God, Cornelius.”

  He frowned. “You’re distressed.”

  “Hell, yes. I never imagined—”

  “There is no crime here,” Cornelius said smoothly. “The Brothers are actually here to protect the children. The Blues.”

  “Does Malenfant know about this?”

  Cornelius smiled. “What do you think?”

  Emma took deep breaths. Compartmentalize, Emma. One issue at a time.

  “Cornelius, how can a child, alone and uneducated, in this godforsaken School in the Australian outback, come up with a theory of everything?”

  “I could point to Einstein. He was a patent clerk, remember.

  His education was flawed. He didn’t even have access to experimental evidence. He just dreamed up relativity from first principles, by thinking hard. And—”