Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  And the moment came unexpectedly, softly.

  There was an instant of blinding light.

  Then it was as if a giant metal ball had dropped out of the sky. The center — the buildings, the drab dormitory, the fence, a few abandoned vehicles — seemed to blossom, flying apart, before they vanished, their form only a memory. A wave passed through the ground, neat concentric pulses of dirt billowing up, and it seemed to Maura that the air rippled as a monstrous ball of plasma, the air itself torn apart, and began to rise.

  The sensor burned out. The screen image turned to hash, and the bunker turned into an electronic cave, sealed from the world.

  The bunker was well protected. She barely felt the waves of heat and sound and light and shattered air that washed over it.

  “A backpack nuke,” she said to Dan Ystebo.

  “Cute name.”

  “About a kiloton. They buried it in the foundations, weeks ago.”

  A wall-mounted softscreen came back online, relaying a scratchy picture.

  It was an image of the center. Or rather, of the hole in the ground where the center had been. A cliche image, the stalk of a mushroom cloud.

  The camera zoomed in. There was something emerging from the base of the cloud. It was hard, round, silvery, reflective, like a droplet of mercury. It was impossible to estimate its size.

  There was utter silence in the bunker, the silver light of the droplet reflected in a hundred staring eyes.

  The droplet seemed to hover, for a heartbeat, two. And then it shot skyward, a blur of silver, too rapidly for the camera to follow.

  “I wonder where they are going,” Dan said.

  “The downstream, of course,” she said. “I hope…”

  “Yes?”

  “I hope they’ll understand.”

  The mushroom cloud swept over the sun.

  Emma Stoney:

  And on Cruithne, Emma prepared to explore an alien artifact.

  The continual shifting of the light, the slow wheel of the stars and the shrinking of her shadow, lent the place an air of surre-ality. Nothing seemed to stay fixed; it was as if craters and dust and people were swimming back and forth, toward her and away from her, as if distance and time were dissolving.

  Somehow, standing here on the asteroid’s complex surface, it didn’t seem so strange at all that the “empty” space around her was awash with trillions of neutrinos — invisible, all but intangible, sleeting through her like a ghost rain. If she was going to hear echoes from the future anywhere, she thought, it would be here.

  But nothing seemed real. It seemed wrong that she should be here, now; she felt like a shadow cast by the genuine, solid Emma Stoney, who was probably sitting in some office in New York or Vegas or Washington, still struggling to salvage something of Bootstrap’s tangled affairs.

  But here was Malenfant’s voice crackling in her headset, barking orders in his practical way. “Make sure you’re attached to at least two tethers at all times. Do you all understand? Cornelius, Emma, Michael?”

  One by one they answered — even Michael, in his eerie translated voice. Yes. I won ‘tfall off.

  “Let’s get on with it,” Cornelius murmured.

  Malenfant led them to a pair of guide cables. They were made of yellow nylon and had been pinned to the dirt by the fireflies.

  Looking ahead, Emma saw how the tethers snaked away over the asteroid’s tight, broken horizon. Malenfant said, “Clip yourself to the guide cables. We’ve practiced with the jaw clips; you know how to handle them. Remember, always keep ahold of at least two cables…”

  Emma lifted herself with her toes, tilted, and let herself fall gently forward. It was like falling through syrup. The complex, textured surface of the asteroid approached her faceplate; reflections skimmed across her gold visor.

  She let her gloved hands sink into the regolith. She heard a soft squeaking, like crushed snow, as her gloves pushed into the dust.

  This was the closest she had come to Cruithne.

  On impulse, she undipped her outer glove, exposing her skin-suited hand. She could actually see her skin, little circles of it amid the orange spandex, exposed to vacuum, forty million miles from Earth. Her hand seemed to prickle, probably more from the effects of raw sunlight than from the vacuum itself.

  She pushed her half-bare hand into the asteroid ground. The surface was sun-hot, but the regolith beneath was cold and dry. She felt grains — sharp, shattered, very small, like powder. But the dust was very loose, easily compacted; it seemed to collapse under her gentle pressure, and soft clouds of it gushed away from her fingers.

  When she had pushed her hand in maybe six inches, the dust started to resist her motion, as if compacting. But her probing fingers found something small and hard. A pebble. She closed her hands around it and pulled it out. It was complex, irregularly shaped, the size of her thumb joint. It was made of a number of different rock types, she could see, smashed and jammed together. It was a breccia, regolith compacted so the grains stuck together, analogous to sandstone on Earth.

  She rolled the pebble in her fingers, letting dust flake off on her skin, relishing the raw, physical contact, a window to reality.

  She tucked the pebble back in its hole. She rubbed her fingers over each other to scrape off a little of the dust that clung to her skinsuit glove, and put back her outer glove. Snug in its layers of cooling and meteorite-protection gear, her hand tingled after its adventure.

  When they were done, clipped to the cables in a line, Malenfant stood briefly to inspect them, then let himself fall back to the surface. “Here we go.” And he crawled away, toward the horizon.

  Emma dug her gloved hands into the regolith and pulled herself along the ground. She could see the feet of Michael ahead, was aware of Cornelius bringing up the rear behind her. It was like skimming along the floor of a swimming pool; she just paddled at the regolith with one hand, occasionally pushing at the ground to keep up.

  They covered the ground rapidly. Fireflies ghosted alongside them, scrabbling over the surface in a blur of pi tons and tethers, making this an expedition of scrambling humans and spiderlike robots.

  Her perspective seemed to swivel around so that she no longer felt as if she were sailing over a sea-bottom floor but climbing, scrambling up the face of some dusty cliff. But this cliff bulged outward at her, and there was nothing beneath her to catch her.

  And now the world seemed to swivel again, and here she was clinging to a ceiling like a fly. She found herself digging her gloves deep into the regolith. But she couldn’t support her weight here, let alone keep herself pinned flat against the roof. Her heart thumped, so loud in her ears it was painful.

  A hand grabbed her shoulder.

  It was dark, she realized. Without noticing she’d sailed into the shadow of the asteroid. She flipped up her gold visor, and now Malenfant loomed, a fat, ghostly snowman. There were stars all around his head. “You okay?”

  She took stock. Her stomach seemed to have calmed, the thumping of her heart slowing. “Maybe moving around this damn rock is harder than I expected.”

  She looked back. Cornelius came clambering along the guide ropes after her, paddling at the regolith like a clumsy fish. Despite the darkness of the asteroid’s short “night,” Cornelius wouldn’t lift his sun visor.

  Malenfant grinned at Emma and made a starfish sign in front of his face, a private joke from their marriage. The poor sap has barfed in his suit.

  Somehow that made Emma feel a whole lot better.

  “Anyhow it’s over.”

  “It is?”

  Malenfant helped her to her feet. “We’re here.”

  And she found herself facing the artifact.

  It was just a hoop of sky blue protruding from the asteroid ground, rimmed by stars. It sat in a neat craterlike depression maybe fifty yards across.

  She could see the marks of firefly pitons and tethers, the regular grooves made by scoops as the robots had dug out this anomaly from the eroded hu
lk of Cruithne. The fireflies had fixed a network of tethers and guide ropes around the artifact. They looked, bizarrely, like queuing ropes around some historic relic.

  Malenfant, tethered to the dirt, stood before the artifact, facing it boldly. Cornelius and Michael were clambering along more tethers toward him, ghosts in the pale starlight, just outlines against a background of black dirt and wheeling stars and alien blue.

  Emma approached the artifact. It was perfectly circular, as far as she could see, like a sculpture. A small arc at the base was buried in the dirt of Cruithne. There were stars all around the ring, in the night sky — but not within its hoop, she noticed now. The disc of space cut out by the hoop was black, blacker than the sky itself.

  It was obviously artificial. A made thing, in a place no human had been before.

  And it was glowing, here in the asteroid night. She glanced down at herself. There was blue artifact light on her, too, highlighting from the folds of her meteorite-protection oversuit.

  Malenfant said, “Let’s not freak out. It’s not going to bite us. We’re not going to slacken up on our tether drill, and we’re going to watch our consumables every second of the stay here. Is that understood? Okay, then.”

  Clipping themselves to the guide ropes, Emma firmly gripping Michael’s hand, the four humans moved in on the artifact.

  Reid Malenfant:

  Malenfant got to maybe six feet from the base of the hoop, where it slid into the regolith. The hoop towered over him. That interior looked jet black, not reflecting a single photon cast by his helmet lamp.

  He glared into the disc of darkness. What are you for? Why are you here?

  There was, of course, no reply.

  First things first. Let’s do a little science here, Malenfant.

  Sliding his tether clips along the guide ropes, he paced out the diameter of the hoop. Thirty feet, give or take. He approached the hoop itself. It was electric blue, glowing as if from within, a wafer-thin band the width of his palm. He could see no seams, no granularity.

  He reached out a gloved hand, fabric encasing monkey fingers, and tried to touch the hoop.

  Something invisible made his hand slide away, sideways.

  No matter how hard he pushed, how he braced himself against the regolith, he could get his glove no closer than an eighth of an inch or so to the material. And always that insidious, soapy feeling of being pushed sideways.

  He reported this to Cornelius, who grunted. “Run your hand up and down, along the hoop.”

  Malenfant did so. “There are… ripples.”

  “Tidal effects. I thought so.”

  “Tidal?”

  “Malenfant, that hoop may not be material.”

  “If it ain’t material, what is it?”

  Folded time.

  That was Michael, skimming easily around the artifact, as if he’d been born in this tiny gravity.

  Malenfant snapped, “What the hell does that mean?”

  Cornelius said, “He’s saying this thing might be an artifact of spacetime.” He labored at the instruments the fireflies were deploying. The instruments, sleek anonymous boxes, were connected to each other and to a central data-collection point by plastic-coated cables, light pipes, and diagnostic leads. The cluster of instruments was powered by a small radiothermal isotope power generator. The cables refused to uncoil properly and lie flat. Cornelius stared at chattering data, avoiding the stern mystery of the thing itself. “I have a gravity gradiometer here. I’m picking up some strange distortions to the local gravity field that… I need to figure out some kind of gravity-stress gauge that will tell me more.” Mumbling on, he tapped at his softscreen with clumsy gloved fingers.

  Malenfant understood not a damn word. He had the feeling Cornelius wouldn’t be much help here.

  He walked back to the center of the hoop. That sheet of silent darkness faced him, challenging.

  Abruptly the sun emerged from behind a hill to his left, as Cruithne’s fifteen-minute day rolled them all into light once more. His shadow stretched off, to his right, over the crumbled, glistening ground, shrinking as he watched.

  The sunlight dimmed the eerie blue glow of the hoop. But where the light struck the hoop’s dark interior, it returned nothing: not a highlight, not a speckle of reflection.

  He reached out a hand, palm up, to the dark surface.

  No.

  Michael was beside him. The kid reached up and grabbed Malenfant’s arm, trying to pull it back. But Michael was too light; his feet were dangling above the regolith, tethers snaking languidly around him.

  Malenfant lowered him carefully.

  Michael bent and rummaged in the asteroid dirt. He straightened up, hands and sleeves soiled, holding a pebble, an irregular chunk of breccia the size and shape of a walnut. He threw the stone, underarm, into the hoop.

  It sailed in a straight line, virtually undisturbed by Cruithne’s feeble gravity.

  Then the stone seemed to slow. It dimmed, and it seemed to Malenfant that it became reddish, as if illuminated by a light that was burning out.

  The stone disappeared.

  Michael was looking up at him, grinning.

  Malenfant patted his helmeted head. “You’re a scientist after my own heart, kid. Hands on. Let’s go find that rock.” He started to work his way around the artifact to the far side. The ropes were awkward, and clipping and unclipping the tethers took time.

  Michael stared around at the ground beneath the hoop. He was still grinning, the happiest he’d been since he had left Earth. My stone is not here.

  “Dear God,” Emma said. “Just as we saw when the firefly went through.”

  “Yeah. But seeing it for real is kind of spooky. I mean, where is that stone now?”

  Michael found another stone, dug out of the dirt, and he threw it into the black surface. The stone slowed, turned red, winked out. This time it looked to Malenfant as if it hadflattened as it approached the surface.

  “Malenfant.”

  He turned. Emma was pointing.

  The surface was churned up, pitted and cratered — but then, so was the surface all over the asteroid. What made this different was what lay in the craters.

  Scraps of flesh. Dead squid, bodies crushed and broken, disrupted by vacuum, desiccated, life-giving fluids lost to space.

  He loosened his tether and tried to get closer to her.

  “There was a war here,” Emma said.

  “Or an execution. Or—”

  “Or suicide.” He felt Emma’s hand creep into his. “It’s just like home.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe these are the ones who explored the artifact. The Sheenas. Or maybe some of them were touched by the downstream signal.”

  “Like Michael, and the other children.”

  “Yes. And the others feared them, feared what they had become, and killed them.”

  Or maybe, Malenfant thought, the smart ones won. He wasn’t sure which was the scarier prospect.

  “What have we got here, Cornelius?”

  “Ask the boy,” Cornelius snapped. “He’s the intuitive genius. I’m just a mathematician. Right now I’m trying to gather data.”

  Malenfant said patiently, “Tell me about your data, then.”

  “I didn’t know what to measure here. So I brought everything I can think of. I have photodetectors so I can measure the light that’s reflecting off that thing, and the light it emits, at a variety of energies. I have a gravity gradiometer, six rotating pairs of accelerometers, that they use in nuclear submarines to detect underwater ridges and mountains from variations in the gravity pull — nice plowshare stuff.

  “There’s a powerful magnetic field threading the artifact. Did I tell you that?

  “Oh, and I have particle detectors. Solid state, slabs of silicon that record electrical impulses set off by particles as they pass through. Nothing very elaborate. I even have a lashed-up neutrino detector that is showing some results; Malenfant, that thing seems to be a
powerful neutrino source.”

  Cornelius was talking too much. Spooked, Malenfant thought. Handling this less well than the kid, in fact. “What is an artifact of spacetime?”

  Cornelius hesitated. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m speculating.”

  Malenfant waited.

  Cornelius straightened up stiffly. “Malenfant, I feel like an ancient Greek philosopher, Pythagoras maybe, confronted by an electronic calculator. If we experiment we can make some guess about its function, but—”

  And Emma was yelling. “Michael!”

  Michael had taken off all his tethers. He looked back at Emma, waved, and then made a standing jump. In the low gravity he just sailed forward, tumbling slightly.

  Emma grabbed for him, but he had gone much too far to reach.

  He hit the black surface, square at the center, just as he’d clearly intended. He seemed to Malenfant to flatten — his image became tinged with red — and then he shot away, as if being dragged into some immense tunnel.

  There was a screech in Malenfant’s headset, a howl of white noise loud enough to hurt his ears. He saw Emma and Cornelius clap their hands to their helmets in a vain attempt to block out the noise.

  After a couple of seconds, mercifully, it ceased.

  But Michael was gone.

  Emma was standing before the artifact. “Michael!” The burnished hoop was gleaming in her gold faceplate. Malenfant couldn’t see her face. But he knew that tightness in her voice.

  He looked for something practical to do. Emma was unteth-ered, he saw. He bent and picked up loose tethers and clipped them to her belt.

  She turned to him. “So,” she said. “What do we do now?”

  “Malenfant.” It was Cornelius. “Listen to this.” He tapped at his softscreen, and a recording played in Malenfant’s headset. Words, too soft to make out.

  “It’s the screech,” Cornelius said. “It came from the artifact, a broad-spectrum radio pulse that—”

  “Turn up the volume, damn it.”

  Cornelius complied.

  It was, of course, Michael — or rather, his translated voice.

  I found my stone.