Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  And all over the world, old scores were being settled. There had been border conflicts all over the planet, including three limited nuclear exchanges. In southern Africa there had been outbreaks of Rift Valley fever, an ethnic-specific disease that killed ten times as many whites as blacks. Some people were turning to religion. Others were turning against it: there had been several assassination attempts on the pope, and something like a jihad seemed to be raging in Algeria. In the Middle East, a major Islam-Christianity conflict was looming, with some Muslim commentators arguing that the Christians were trying to accelerate the apocalypse of their Gospels.

  America wasn’t spared, of course. Science labs and technology institutes and corporations all over the country had been subject to attack, with the destruction of MIT being the worst single incident. As for the remnant Blue children, they had already long been targets; now there were commentators — even on network TV — describing the helpless kids as angels of the Apocalypse.

  And so it went.

  Amidst all this, the business of government went on; and as ever it was just one damn thing after another, as Maura and others strove to contain the damage.

  The Cruithne issue was containable.

  There had been more probes to the asteroid, endlessly photographing and measuring, to no damn purpose as far as she could see. There was talk of sending more humans, volunteers to pass through the artifact. Maura doubted such missions would be approved. What was the purpose, if no data could be sent back?

  Personally, she backed the USASF suggestion: to irradiate the surface of Cruithne, make it uninhabitable for a thousand years, and let the future, the damn downstreamers themselves, deal with it.

  Notwithstanding Malenfant’s illegal launch — the strange artifact he had encountered, the failure of the military task force sent after him, the apparent deaths of all concerned, the exodus of the enhanced squid — all of that had taken place on a rock off in space somewhere. The Cruithne picture show was just too far away, too abstract, too removed from people’s experience to deliver any real sense of threat, and already fading in the memory.

  There were even rumors that the whole thing had been faked: mocked-up images beamed down from some satellite by the FBI, the United Nations, rogue Third World powers, or some other enemy intent on destabilization, or mind control, or whatever else sprouted from the imagination of the conspiracy theorists. (And of course, as Maura knew well, there was a small department of the FBI set up to invent and encourage such false rumors.)

  But the Blue children were different.

  Maura had been startled by the fact that people, on the whole, seemed to applaud the use of the nuke. What was causing the current wave of panic was the fact that the attempt — the last resort, the source of all power in the Western mind — had failed.

  And then — spectacularly, inexplicably — the children had flown to the Moon. Their escape in that damned silver bubble had been tracked live on TV, as was their subsequent three-day flight to the Moon, and their feather-gentle landing in Tycho, one of the brightest craters on the Moon’s near side.

  The children were viewed with awe or terror or greed. In some parts of the world they were being used as weapons. Elsewhere they were seen as gods, or devils; already cities had burned over this issue.

  In some places the children were simply killed.

  Americans, of course, had responded with science. In America, kids were now studied and probed endlessly, even before they were born. If evidence of Blue superabilities was found, or even suspected, the children were taken away from their parents: isolated, restricted, given no opportunity to manipulate their environments, granted no contact with other children, Blue or otherwise.

  There were even, in remote labs, experiments going on to delete, surgically, the source of the Blues’ abilities. Lobotomies, by another name. None of it was successful, except destructively.

  The purpose of all this was control, Maura realized: people were trying, by these different stratagems, to regain control over their children, the destiny of the species, of their future.

  But it was futile. Because up there, in that silver speck sitting in the lunar dust, there is where the future will be decided…

  And meanwhile the Moon hung up there night after night, colonized somehow by American children, and the constantly circulating space telescope pictures of that strange silver dome on the lunar surface, like a mercury droplet, anonymous and sinister, served as inescapable symbols of the failure of the administration — of America — to cope.

  And yet, Maura thought, cope she must; and she labored to focus on her mounting responsibilities.

  After all, even in the worst case, we still have two centuries to get through.

  Reid Malenfant:

  Malenfant fell into light — searing white, brighter than sunlight — that blasted into his helmet. He jammed his eyes shut but could still see the glow shining pink-white through his closed lids, as if he had been thrown into a fire. There was no solid surface under him. He was falling, suspended in space. Maybe he had pushed himself away from Cruithne.

  Emma, squirming, slipped out of his grasp. He reached for her, floundering in this bath of dazzling light, but she was gone.

  He felt panic settling on his chest. His breathing grew ragged, his muscles stiffening up. He’d lost Emma; he had no idea where Cornelius was; he had no surface to cling to, no point of reference outside his suit.

  And all of this was taking place in utter silence.

  Something was wrong. Badly wrong. How come they hadn’t followed the Sheena to her stately vision of the far-future Galaxy? Where was Michael? Where was he”?

  Do something, Malenfant.

  The suit radio.

  “Emma? Cornelius? If you copy, if you’re there, respond. Emma—” He kept calling, and, fumbling for the control, turned up the gain on his headset. Nothing but static.

  He tried opening his eyes a crack. Nothing but the blinding glare. Was it a little dimmer, a little yellower, than before? Or was it just that his eyes were burning out, that this dimming would proceed all the way to a permanent darkness?

  Don’t grab at the worst case, Malenfant.

  But what’s the best case?

  He tried to calm his breathing, relax his muscles. He had to avoid burning up the suit’s resources. He reached for the helmet’s nipple dispenser, took a mouthful of orange juice. It was so hot it burned his tongue, but he held it in his mouth until it cooled, and swallowed it anyhow.

  There was a noise in his ear, so loud it made him start.

  “Emma?”

  But it was just the suit’s master alarm, an insistent, repetitive buzz. He risked a momentary glimpse again — that flood of yellow-white light, maybe a fraction less ferocious — and saw there were red lights all over the heads-up display on his faceplate. He felt for the touchpad on his chest — Christ, he could feel how hot it was even through his gloved fingers — and turned off the alarm.

  He didn’t need to be told what was wrong. He was immersed in this light and heat, coming from all around him. So there were no shadows, no place for the suit to dump its excess heat.

  He could smell a sharp burning, like in a dry sauna. The oxygen blowing over his face was like a desert wind. But, of course, he must breathe; he dragged the air into his throat and lungs, trying not to think about the pain. Christ, even the sweat that clung to his forehead in great microgravity drops felt as if it were about to boil; he shook his head, trying to rattle it off.

  The master alarm sounded again; he killed it again.

  So what are you going to do, Malenfant? Hang around here like a chicken in a microwave? Wish you had taken a bullet in the head from that trooper on Cruithne?

  Try something. Anything.

  The tethers.

  He fumbled at his waist. His surface-operations harness, the trailing tethers, were still there. He pulled in one tether until he got to the piton at the end — and snatched his hand away from the glowing heat of t
he metal.

  He started to whirl the piton around his head, like a lasso, slowly.

  Maybe he would hit Cruithne, or one of the others. The chances were slim, he supposed. But it was better than nothing.

  It would help if he could see what he was aiming for. He risked another glimpse.

  The light was definitely more yellow, but it was still dazzling, too bright to open his eyes fully.

  Concentrate on the feel of the tether in your hands. Pay out a little more; extend the reach.

  The master alarm again clamored in his ear. He let it buzz, concentrated on paying out his fishing line, hand over hand, taking little short panting breaths through a drying mouth, shutting out the heat. He had a lot of spare line at his waist, maybe a hundred feet of the fine, strong, lightweight nylon rope, and he could reach a long way with it before he was done.

  He didn’t feel quite so bad as before, he realized. At least he was doing something constructive, planning ahead beyond sucking in the next breath. And, of course, it helped that he wasn’t being cooked quite so vigorously.

  The buzzing shut itself off.

  He risked another glimpse. Beyond the winking red lights of his HUD, the white glare was turning to yellow, the yellow to orange: still bright as hell, like a sun just starting its dip toward a smoky horizon. Not something you’d choose to gaze into for long, but maybe bearable.

  A couple of the HUD’s red lights turned to yellow, then green. The air blowing over his face started to feel cooler.

  Still working his tether, he turned his head this way and that, peering out of his helmet. He looked down beneath his feet, up above his head, tried to twist around. He peered into the dimming yellow-orange glow. It was like staring into a neon tube. He had no sense of scale, of orientation, of space or time.

  He saw something. An orange-white blob, a little darker than the background glow, down below his feet. It was moving.

  Waving arms and legs.

  Suddenly his sense of scale cut in. It was a person, Emma or Cornelius or even Michael, suspended in space just as he was, forty, fifty feet away. Still alive, by God. Malenfant imagined the three of them tumbling out of the blue-circle portal, falling into this empty three-dimensional space, drifting slowly apart. Hope, unreasonably, pumped in his breast.

  But it couldn’t be Emma, he realized abruptly. There was no way she could kick with that damaged leg of hers.

  Cornelius, then. He was making a gesture with his hands, tracing out some kind of round shape, a circle.

  Malenfant was whirling his tether above his head; he would have to change the plane of rotation. That took a little skill and patience, but now he could actually see the heavy piton at the cable’s end against the orange-yellow glow, and soon he had the tether snaking out toward Cornelius.

  Malenfant tried calling again, but there was no reply from either Cornelius or Emma. He felt his own body rock to and fro in reaction to the tether’s swinging mass. The tether was swinging closer to Cornelius now, close enough surely for him to see it. But Cornelius, drifting, spinning, slowly receding, showed no awareness of what Malenfant was doing; he just kept repeating his circle gesture, over and over.

  At last the tether snagged on Cornelius.

  Cornelius reacted to the touch of the tether with a start. He twisted and reached out to his side with jerky, panicky gestures. And, to Malenfant’s immense relief, he grabbed the line, wrapped it around his waist a couple of times, and tied it off. Then he pulled on it gingerly and started to haul himself along it.

  Huge waves oscillated up and down the line. Malenfant felt his own motion change: gentle, complex tugs this way and that.

  Meanwhile the glow continued to dim, noticeably, the yellow increasingly tinged with orange rather than white. It was like being inside a giant iron sphere, heated to white hot, now cooling fast.

  The tether to Cornelius provided an anchor, of sorts, and Malenfant was able to pull himself around it. Like a damn trapeze artist, he thought. He twisted, trying to search all of this cooling three-dimensional space, looking for Emma.

  And there she was: in fact closer than Cornelius, no more than ten or fifteen feet away. She was directly above him, drifting, inert, her limbs starfished, her gold sun visor down. The blood was still leaking from her shattered leg, little droplets of it pumping out. She was slowly turning, as if her wound were a rocket, a miniature attitude thruster fueled by Emma’s blood.

  Malenfant got hold of another tether, checked that its piton was secure, and started swinging it around his head.

  He managed to get the tether to brush over Emma’s chest, but unlike Cornelius, she made no attempt to grab at it. He was going to have to hook her without her cooperation. He aimed for her good leg, playing out more line. If he could get the tether to hit her leg, the momentum of the piton might make it wrap around her ankle a couple of times.

  He tried once, missed. Tried again, missed.

  It was getting increasingly difficult to aim, as Cornelius clambered closer. In fact, Malenfant realized belatedly, Cornelius was actually dragging Malenfant away from Emma, toward their joint center of gravity. Malenfant glared down, across the twenty feet or so that still separated him from the doggedly working Cornelius. “Cornelius, hold it a minute. Can’t you see what I’m doing here? Cut me a little slack.” Cornelius didn’t respond. Malenfant tried waving at him, miming that he should back off. But Cornelius didn’t seem aware of that either.

  Swearing under his breath, Malenfant continued to work.

  It took a couple more swings, a couple more agonizing near misses, before Malenfant at last managed to hook his line around Emma’s foot. The tether immediately started to unravel, so Malenfant risked everything and gave the tether a hard yank.

  The tether came loose.

  But it had been enough, he saw with an immense relief; still starfished, passive, spinning, she was drifting toward him. He rolled up the tether hastily and slung it over his arm.

  She came sliding past him like a figure in a dream, not two feet away. He reached up and grabbed her good leg. He pulled her down to him until he had her in his arms once more. Under his gloved hand something crumbled away from Emma’s suit. It was a fine layer of white soot.

  Clumsily he pushed up her gold visor. There was her face, lit by the still-brilliant orange glow of the sky. Her eyes were closed, the fringe of hair that poked out of her comms hat plastered against her forehead by big, unearthly beads of sweat. It was hard to judge her color, but it looked to him as if her face was pink, burned, even blistered in a few places, on her cheekbones and chin. He reached out without thinking, meaning to touch her face, but of course his gloved hand just bumped against the glass of her faceplate.

  Enough. He was still in the business of survival, here. He got a tether rope and knotted it around his waist and Emma’s, making sure they couldn’t drift apart again.

  What next?

  Emma’s leg. It was still bleeding, pumping blood. A tourniquet, then. He grabbed a loop of tether rope.

  But now somebody was clambering over his back. It was Cornelius, of course, pulling himself along with big clumsy grabs. Malenfant felt a thump at the back of his helmet and heard a muffled shouting that carried through the fabric of Cornelius’ helmet and his own.

  “… that you? Malenfant? Is that…”

  Malenfant yelled back, as loudly as he could. “Yes, it’s me.”

  “… portal. Have you tethered us to the portal?” The words were very muffled, like somebody shouting through a wall. “The portal. Can you see it? Malenfant…”

  The portal. That’s what Cornelius had been signaling, even as he drifted away into space, with his circle gestures. The portal. The most important object in the world right now, because it was their only way out of this place.

  And it hadn’t even occurred to Malenfant to think about it.

  “Malenfant, I’m blind. All this light. I can’t see… The portal, Malenfant. Get us back to the portal.”

 
So, adrift in this featureless universe, he had another tough call. The portal, or Emma’s tourniquet.

  He shouted back to Cornelius. “I have Emma. I’ll find the portal. But she needs a tourniquet. Do you understand? A tourniquet.”

  “…tourniquet. The trooper. I remember…”

  Malenfant reached down and guided Cornelius’ hands to Emma’s damaged leg. As he touched Cornelius’ suit he kicked up another cloud of ash particles. He showed Cornelius by touch where the wound was, gave him a length of tether.

  Tentatively at first, then with more confidence, Cornelius began to work, pulling the rope around the damaged leg. Malenfant watched until he was sure Cornelius was, at least, going to do no more harm.

  Then Malenfant clambered over Cornelius’ back, turning this way and that, looking for the portal.

  There. It was an electric-blue circle, containing its disc of inky darkness, its color a painful contrast with the dimming, orange-red background of the sky. But it was drifting away fast. And when the portal was out of reach, it would be gone forever, and this little island of humanity would be stuck here for good.

  Hastily Malenfant prepared his tether, weighted with a piton to which asteroid dust still clung. Anchoring himself against Cornelius’ back, he whipped the tether around his head and flung it toward the portal. The tether was drifting well wide of the portal. Malenfant dragged it back, tried again, paying out the tether hastily. He tried again, and again.

  If he had been blinded, Cornelius had had it so much worse. But even so he had been thinking; he knew immediately how important it was to grab hold of the portal, and alone, blinded, overheating, he had even tried to signal the fact to whoever might be watching.

  Cornelius was one smart man.

  On the fifth or sixth time, the piton sailed neatly through the black mouth of the portal, dragging the uncoiling tether after it. He let it drift on. It was, in fact, a little eerie. He could see that the piton had just disappeared when it hit the portal surface, and now the tether, too, was vanishing as it snaked into the darkness.