Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Emma said, “And these are our ultimate children? These wispy ghosts? The manipulation of structures spanning the universe, the endless contest of ingenuity versus entropy — was

  it all for this?”

  “That’s the deal,” Cornelius said harshly. “What else is there?”

  “Purpose,” Emma said simply. “We’re losing her.”

  Sheena was drifting out of the picture.

  Cornelius tapped his console. “The firefly is nearly out of attitude-control gas.”

  Every few minutes the beach ball drifted through the frame of the softscreen as the firefly’s helpless roll carried it around. The image was dim, blurred, at the extreme range of the failing camera. Emma took to standing close to the softscreen frame, staring at the squid’s image, trying to read any last signs.

  It’s like a wake, she thought.

  “We have to consider our next step,” Cornelius murmured.

  Malenfant frowned. “What next step?”

  “Look at the image. Look at it. We’ve found an artifact, a non-terrestrial artifact, on that asteroid. Exactly where the down-streamers pointed us. And they used it to teach us about the future: the trillions upon trillions of years that await us, if we can only find a way around the Carter catastrophe, which must be possible. My God, think of it. We caught the barest glimpse today, a flyby of the future. What if we established monitoring stations in each of those downstream islands? Think of what we’d achieve, what we’d see.

  “We have to retrieve that artifact. If we can’t get it off the asteroid, we have to study it in situ. Malenfant, we have to send people to Cruithne. And we must show this to Michael.”

  A look of unaccountable fear crossed Malenfant’s face.

  In the softscreen Sheena was a blurred patch of light, shadows moving across her sides. Sheena signed once more — Emma struggled to see — and then the screen turned a neutral gray.

  “It’s over,” Cornelius said. “The firefly’s dead. And so is Sheena.”

  “No,” Emma said. “No, I don’t think so.”

  Somehow, she knew, the Sheena understood what was happening to her. For the last thing Sheena had said, the last thing Emma could recognize before the image failed, was a question.

  Will I dream?

  Maura Della:

  Open journal. October 22,2011.

  I’ve never forgotten the first time I flew the length of Africa. The huge empty deserts, the mindless blankets of green life, the scattered humans clinging to coasts and river valleys.

  I’m a city girl. I used to think the human world was the whole world. That African experience knocked a hole in my confidence of the power of humans, of us, to change things, to build, to survive. The truth is that humans have barely made an impression on Earth — and Earth itself is a mote in a hostile universe. This shaped my thinking. If humanity’s hold on Earth is precarious, then, damn it, we have to work to make it less so.

  It’s only a generation since we’ve been able to see the whole Earth. And now, it seems, we can see the whole future, and what we must do to survive. And I hope we can cope.

  I admit, though, I found the whole thing depressing.

  It is of course the logical conclusion of my own ambition, which is that, on the whole, the human race should seek not to destroy itself — in fact, that it is our destiny to take over from the blind forces of inanimate matter and guide the future of the cosmos.

  It’s just it never occurred to me before that, in the end, all there will be out there to conquer is rabble, the cooling rains of the universe.

  I’m sixty-one years old. I’m not in the habit of thinking about death. I suppose I always had a vague plan to fight it: to use all my resources, every technique and trick I could find and pay for, to live as long as possible.

  But is it worth it? To cling to life until I’m drained of strength t and mind and hope? But isn’t that exactly what we saw in the far future, a senile species eking out the last of its energies, straggling against the dark?

  It seems to me that age, growing old, is a war between wisdom and bitterness. I’m not sure how I’ll come out of that war myself, assuming I get so far.

  Maybe some things are more important than life itself.

  But what?

  Emma Stoney:

  Even as his representatives wrestled with the bureaucratic demons that threatened to overwhelm him — even as the world alternately wondered at or mocked his light-and-shadow images of the far future — Reid Malenfant sprung another surprise.

  He went on TV and the Nets and announced a launch date for BDB-2, tentatively called O’Neill.

  And as Malenfant’s nominal, fictional, technically-plausible-only launch date approached, events seemed to be coming to a head. On the one hand a groundswell of popular support built up for Malenfant, with his enterprise and defiance and sense of mystery. But on the other hand the forces opposing him strengthened and focused their attacks.

  Look at it this way. If all this legal bullshit evaporates, and I’m ready to launch, I launch. If I ain ‘t ready to launch, I don’t launch. Simple as that. What am I wasting?

  Come watch me fly.

  He was wasting a few million bucks, actually, Emma thought, with every aborted launch attempt. But Malenfant knew that, and it wouldn’t stop him anyhow, so she kept it to herself.

  And she had to admit it worked: raising the stakes again, whipping up public interest to a fever pitch. Nothing like a countdown to focus the mind.

  Then, a couple of days before the “launch date” itself, Malenfant asked Emma to come out from Vegas. Things are hotting up, babe. I need you here…

  She refused Malenfant’s offer of a flight out to the compound. She decided to drive; she needed time to rest and think. She turned on the SmartDrive, opaqued the windows, and tried to sleep.

  It was only when the car woke her, some time before dawn on Malenfant’s “launch day,” that she began to be aware of the people.

  At first there was just a handful of cars and vans parked off the road, little oases of light in the huge desert night. But soon there were more: truck-camper vans, and cars with tent-trailers, and converted buses, and Jeeps with houses built on the back, and Land Rovers, and Broncos with bunks. There were tents lit from inside, people moving slowly in the predawn grayness. There were people sleeping in the cars, or even in the open, on inflatable mattresses and blankets.

  As she neared the Bootstrap site itself the density of people continued to increase, the little groups crowded more closely together. She saw a place where a blanket spread out under the tailgate of an ancient convertible was almost overlapping the groundsheet of a much more elaborate tent. In another, right next to an upscale mobile home, she saw an ancient Ford, its hood held in place by what looked like duct tape, with a child sleeping in the open trunk and dirty bare feet protruding from all the windows. And as dawn approached people were rising, stirring and scratching themselves, making breakfast, some climbing on top of their cars to see what was going on at the Bootstrap compound.

  She spotted what looked like a military vehicle: a squat, fierce-looking Jeep of some kind, with black, rectangular, tinted windows. A man was standing up, poking his head out of a sunroof. He was beefy, fortyish, shaven-haired. He shifted, as if he was having trouble standing. He was watching the compound with big, professional-looking binoculars. She thought he looked familiar, but she couldn’t think where from.

  When she looked again the Jeep had gone. It could only have driven off, away from the crowded road, into the desert.

  Farther in she spied uniforms and banners. There were religious groups here, both pro and anti Malenfant. Some of them were holding services or prayer sessions. There were animal rights campaigners holding animated posters of Caribbean reef squid, other protesters holding up images of sickly yellow babies. And then there was the spooky fringe, such as a group of women dressed in black shifts painted with bright blue circles, holding up sky-blue hoops to the sky. Take me! Take me!


  But these agenda-driven types were the minority, Emma realized, flecks of foam on the great ocean of ordinary people who had gathered here, on the day of Malenfant’s “launch.” There were whites, blacks, Asians, Latinos, Native Americans. There were young people, some infants in arms, and a lot of oldsters who probably remembered Apollo 11. There was no reason to suppose they weren’t just as thickly crowded as this on every approach to the Bootstrap compound.

  So how many? A million?

  But why were they here? What had drawn so many of them from so far?

  It was faith, she realized. Faith in Malenfant, faith that he could once more defy the various forces ranged against him: Reid Malenfant, an old-fashioned American can-do hero who had already brought back postcards from the future and was now about to launch a rocket ship and save the species single-handedly.

  I have to admit, Malenfant, you hit a nerve.

  And as she thought it through, as that realization crystallized in her, she understood, at last, what was happening today.

  My God, she thought. He s actually going to do it. He’s going to launch, come what may. That’s what this is all about.

  And she felt shock, even shame, that these strangers, so many of them, had understood Malenfant’s subliminal message better than she had. Come watch me fly, he’d told them; and here they were.

  She pressed forward with increasing urgency.

  At last she was through the crowds and the security barriers and inside the compound. And there — still a couple of miles away — was Malenfant’s ship, BDB-2, called O ‘Neill.

  She could see the slim profile of the booster stack: the angular space shuttle boat-tail at the base, the central tank with its slim solid boosters like white pencils to either side, the fat tube of the payload module on top. There were splashes of red and blue that must be the Stars and Stripes Malenfant had insisted must adorn all his ships, and the hull’s smooth curve glistened sharply where liquid air had frozen out frost from the desert night. The tower alongside the BOB looked minimal: slim and calm. There were clouds of vapor alongside the booster, little white knots that drifted from the tanks.

  Bathed in a white xenon glow, the booster looked small, remote, even fragile, like an object in a shrine. This was the flame to which all these people had been drawn.

  She got out of her car and ran to George Bench’s control

  bunker.

  The blockhouse was small, cramped, with an air of improvisation. One wall was a giant window, tinted, giving a view of the pad itself, the splash of light around the waiting booster. Facing the window were consoles — just desks piled with manuals and softscreens and coffee cups — each manned by a young T-shirted technician. At the back of the room were more people, arguing, running back and forth with manuals and piles of printout. Cables lay everywhere, in bundles across the floor and along the ceiling.

  In one doorway, being shepherded by one of Malenfant’s flunkies, there was a gaggle of what looked like federal-government types, gray suits and ties and little briefcases. One of them, protesting loudly, was Representative Mary Howell, Emma realized with a start, the former chemical engineer who had given Malenfant such a tough ride in the Congressional hearings.

  In the middle of all this, surrounded by people, yelling instructions and demanding information, there was Malenfant himself, with Cornelius — and Michael, the boy from Zambia. Cornelius was holding Michael’s hand, which was balled into a fist. Malenfant hurried forward. “Emma. Thank Christ you’re here.”

  She couldn’t think of a damn thing to say. Because all three of them — Malenfant, Cornelius, and Michael — were wearing one-piece orange garments covered in pockets and Velcro patches.

  They were flight pressure suits. Space suits.

  Art Morris:

  Art could see the rocket ship from the driving seat of the Rusty. But he was parked well away from the roads, on a patch of scrub it had been no trouble at all for the Rusty to reach.

  This Rusty — strictly a Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Targeting Vehicle, or RST-V — was the Marine Corps’ replacement for the Jeep. Like the Jeep it was all but indestructible. And it ran with a hybrid electric power system, which used a diesel-power generator to produce power for electric motors mounted on each wheel. The design was slighter and much more compact than mechanical drive trains, and there was built-in reliability: If one wheel failed, he could just keep motoring on three, or even two if they weren’t on the same side. And the wheels worked independently; the Rusty could turn around and around, like a ballerina.

  Best of all, when he turned off the generator and ran on batteries, there was no engine noise, no exhaust gases that might give away his position to any thermal sensors deployed by those guys on the fence.

  Art loved this Rusty. But it wasn’t his, of course. The only personal touch Art allowed himself was the snapshot of his daughter, Leanne, taped to the dash.

  The Rusty had been borrowed for him for the occasion by his good friend Willy Butts, who was still in the Marine Corps. Art’s first idea had just been to walk up to the compound and start blasting, but Willy had talked him out of it. You won’t get past the gate, man. Think about it. And you ‘II still be a couple miles from the rocket. What you need is a little transport. Leave it tome.

  And Willy, as he always did, had come through, and here was Art, and there was the rocket, waiting for him.

  He touched the ignition button. The Rusty’s engine started up with the quietest of coughs. He rolled forward, the big adjustable suspension smoothing out the ride for him over the hummocky ground.

  No more yellow babies, Malenfant. He tapped his photo. His little girl blew her candles one more time.

  Art switched over to silent running.

  Emma Stoney:

  Mary Howell stepped forward. “This is a joke. Malenfant, I could ground you under child-protection legislation if I didn’t already have this” She waved a piece of paper in his face. “You are in breach of federal aviation regulations parts twenty-three, twenty-five, twenty-seven, twenty-nine, and thirty-one, which govern airworthiness certification. I also have clear evidence that your maintenance program does not follow the procedures spelled out in FAA advisory circular AC 120-17 A. Furthermore—”

  Malenfant glared at Howell. “Representative, this has nothing to do with FAA regulations or any of that bullshit. This is personally vindictive.”

  George Hench, a headset clamped to his ears, growled to Malenfant. “If we’re going to stand down I have to know now.”

  Somehow the sight of Malenfant and Cornelius and a child, for God’s sake, trussed up in these astronaut suits, surrounded by the clamor of this out-of-control situation, summed up for Emma how far into lunacy Malenfant had slipped. “Malenfant, are you crazy?”

  “We’re going to fly, Emma. We have to. It’s become a duty.”

  “What about the four astronauts we trained up, at vast

  expense?”

  “They were training me,” Malenfant said. He smiled, looking

  almost wistful.

  Cornelius Taine shrugged. “That was always the plan. Who is

  better qualified?”

  “Another blind, Malenfant?”

  “Yeah… All but one. Jay. The girl. She had the right

  training.”

  “What for?”

  “To care for Michael.”

  George Hench was picking up something on his headset. He grimaced at Malenfant. “More inspectors incoming.”

  “Who is it this time?”

  “Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”

  Howell’s gaze flicked from George to Malenfant. “NRC? What’s this about the NRC?”

  “Scottish uranium,” Emma said grimly. “If they’re here it’s all unraveling. We’ll be lucky to avoid jail.”

  “But I’ve no choice.” Malenfant stared at her, as if trying to force her to agree with him through sheer power of personality. “Don’t you see that? I’ve had no choice since the mo
ment Cornelius talked his way into your office.”

  “This isn’t about mining the asteroids any more. Is it, Malenfant?”

  “No. It’s about whatever is waiting for us on Cruithne.”

  Cornelius grinned coldly. “And who knows ‘what that might

  be? The answers to everything, perhaps. The purpose of life.

  Who can say?”

  Malenfant said desperately, “The logic of my whole life has led me to this point, Emma. I’m trapped. And so is Michael. He’s been trapped ever since he was born, with that damn blue circle turning in his head. And I need you.”

  She felt oddly dizzy, and the colors leached from the world, as if she was about to faint. “What are you saying?”

  “Come with me.”

  “To Cruithne? “

  “It’s the only way. Michael is terrified of me. And Cornelius, come to that. But you—”

  “For God’s sake, I’m no astronaut. The launch would kill me.”

  “No, it won’t. It’s no worse than a roller coaster. And once we’re gone, we’re gone. These assholes from the FAA can’t reach us in outer space. Anyhow, at least you’ll be out of the country when they prosecute.”

  She sensed the great divergent possibilities, of past and future — for herself, Malenfant, perhaps the species itself — that flowed through this moment, as if her awareness were smeared across multiple realities, dimly lit.

  She said, “You’re frightened, aren’t you?”

  “Damn right. I’m terrified. I just wanted to go mine the asteroids. And now, this.” He looked down at Michael’s round eyes. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here, Emma. But I can’t get off the ride. I need you with me. Please.”

  But now the others were crowding around Malenfant again. Here was Mary Howell, yammering about her FAA regulations. Cornelius had picked up a headset and was shouting about how the gate guards were going to have trouble stalling the NRC inspectors. And George Hench, his face twisted, was watching the clock and following his endless prelaunch checks.