Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Of course, if he chickened out, it would have to be in front of Michael and the weird entities who were watching through him.

  Malenfant grinned fiercely. To hell with it. He checked his teeth for bits of peanut, then went back to the room.

  Michael was wearing his kid-sized pressure suit now, and he had laid out Malenfant’s suit on the bed, beside the unused shirt and slacks. The components of the suit — skinsuit and outer garment and thermal garment and gloves and helmet and boots — looked unearthly, out of place in this mundane environment. And yet, Malenfant thought, the suit was actually the most normal thing about the whole damn room.

  “Are we going to need suits?”

  If we go like this. If you ‘d rather —

  “Hell, no.” Malenfant suited up quickly.

  Michael came to him with a pen he’d taken from the desk. You have some notes to write.

  “What notes? Oh. Okay.” Malenfant sighed, and bent stiffly in his suit. “What if I make a mistake?… Never mind.”

  He wrote out the notes hastily and stuck them where he thought they ought to be. And if he got it wrong, let some other bastard sort it out.

  He put on his gloves and helmet, and he walked to the door with Michael. When they got there he closed up his own suit and sealed Michael’s, and ran quick diagnostic checks on the kid’s systems.

  They turned and faced the door. Michael reached up and, clumsily, pulled it open.

  The corridor was gone. A blue-ring portal floated there, framing darkness.

  “Is this going to hurt?”

  No more than usual.

  “Great. Michael… I saw the future. But what was it like?”

  Michael paused. Huge. Primal. Beyond control. New minds emerged in great pulses.

  “Like Africa,” Malenfant said. “We always thought the future would be like America. Clean and empty and waiting to be shaped. I always thought that way. But our past was Africa. Dark and deep. And that’s how the future was.”

  Yes, Michael said.

  Malenfant braced himself and faced the portal. “Visors down,” he said.

  Michael lowered his gold visor, hiding his face. Malenfant saw the portal’s blue ring reflected in his visor. Then Michael held up his hand, like a son reaching for his father. Malenfant took the hand. The child’s fingers were buried in his own begrimed glove.

  They stepped forward. There was a blue flash, an instant of agonizing pain—

  — and Malenfant was floating in space. The instant transition to zero gravity was a shock, like falling off a cliff, and he had to swallow a few times to keep his peanuts down.

  He was surrounded by patient stars: above, below, all around him, childhood constellations augmented by the rich, still lights of deep space. There was a single splinter of brilliance below him. The sun? It was a point source that cast strong, sharp shadows over their suits.

  He was still holding Michael’s hand.

  Are you okay? Michael asked. His Seattle whine was a radio crackle. If you become uncomfortable —

  “I’ll be okay. What are we looking at, Michael? The sun?”

  Yes. We’re out of the plane of the ecliptic. That is, somewhere above the sun s north pole. We’re about five astronomical units out. Five times Earth’s orbit, about as far as Jupiter is from the sun. Forty-three minutes at light speed. What do you want to see?

  “Earth.”

  Then look. Michael pointed to a nondescript part of the sky.

  Malenfant sighted along his arm and saw a star, a spark that might have been pale blue, a lesser light beside it.

  And suddenly there was Earth, swimming before him, oceans and deserts and clouds and ice, just as it had always been. Sparks of light circled it, and drifted on its seas: ships, people, cities.

  He felt a lump knot in his throat. “Oh, my,” he said.

  We are two hundred years into the future, roughly. Our future.

  “The Carter catastrophe date. So Cornelius’ prediction was right. He would have been pleased…”

  Malenfant. There is little time. If you want to make your change, to reach back. It must be now.

  He drifted in space, letting his suit starfish, thinking of Emma.

  He whispered, “How do I do it?”

  Just tell me what you want.

  “Will I remember?”

  Consciousness spans the manifold.

  I don’t know if I have the strength, he thought.

  “She’ll forget me. Won’t she, Michael?”

  I’m just a kid, he said. How would I know?

  Your call, Malenfant. Keep her, or give her back her life.

  “Do it,” he whispered.

  … And the universe pivoted around him, the lines of possibility swirling, knitting new patterns of truth and dream, and he clutched at the boy.

  Emma Stoney:

  Death has always fascinated me. Ever since the death of my father, I suppose. I was just a kid. The endless slow rituals of funerals and mourning, the morbid business of moving the bodies around, boxing them and dressing them. It was as if we humans were seeking some control of the horrible arbitrariness, a cushion against the blunt finality of it.

  But that finality came, for me, when my father’s corpse was at last laid into the ground, and I realized it had stopped moving, forever. I remember I wanted to clamber into the grave and dig it up and somehow reanimate him a little longer. But even at age eight I knew that was impossible.

  All of the ceremonial stuff focuses on the needs of the living. But at the heart of every funeral there is the central mystery: that a sentient, conscious being has ceased to exist. It is a brutal reality our culture simply refuses to face — the reality of death for the dying.

  And the reality of my life is this, Maura: if I had gotten on that rocket ship with Malenfant, if I’d gone with him to the asteroid, I’d be dead now, as he is dead.

  But I didn’t go. I miss him, Maura. Of course. Every minute of every day. I miss his laugh, the way he tasted of the high desert, even the way he pulled my life around. But he’s gone.

  Anyhow, that’s why I’ll take the job. The Moon, you say?

  Maura Della:

  And for Maura — who had never been to the Moon, and now never would — the Moon hung in the Washington sky as it always had, the scar of the failed attack invisible to the naked eye. She kept a NASA feed running in her office, compiled from Hubble and lunar satellite cameras, images of the unmarked bubble artifact there on the Tycho surface.

  After all, if things had been just a little different, Maura Della might have been up there when the shit hit the fan. She’d have been caught in the crossfire herself, rather than her envoy.

  But as the incident on the Moon receded into the past, life went on. The panic subsides even as the data burns, she thought. Cruithne, even the Moon, are after all just lumps of rock a long way away.

  Maura tried to concentrate on her work.

  Here was a self-justifying report from the Lawrence Liver-more Laboratory on the exotic weapons technology they called FELs, free electron lasers, into which a goodly portion of the federal budget had been sunk, and which had been deployed, to spectacular failure, on the Moon. The basis of a PEL was a cyclotron, a closed ring that could be used to accelerate electrons. Although it was impossible for the electrons to exceed the speed of light there was no limit, it seemed, to the energy that could be piled into them. And that unlimited energy was the big advantage of PEL technology over conventional laser technology, like chemical. The report writers noted with jaunty technocrat-type confidence that a PEL should have been an ideal sword for fighting a war in a vacuum: in Earth orbit, or on the Moon.

  But it had failed. The PEL had burned the lunar base and the Never-Never Land dome to the ground. But it hadn’t so much as scratched the droplet of twisted space, or whatever it was, that sheltered the children — and presumably continued to do so, even now, sitting like a drop of mercury amid the rubble of the Tycho battlefield.

  All bul
lshit. The PEL was just another magic sword in a long line of such swords, technical solutions that were supposed to make the world better and safer and that, of course, always failed.

  Without finishing the report she consigned it to her incinerator.

  Here was an extraordinary handwritten memo from a colleague relaying rumors Maura had already heard, about the president himself. Whittacker had always had a grim religious bent, Maura knew. It had been part of his qualification for election, it seemed, in these fractured times. Now he was sunk in an apocalyptic depression from which — so it was said — teams of e-therapists and human analysts were struggling to lift him. That a man with his finger on the nuclear trigger should believe that the world was inevitably doomed — that life wasn’t worth living, that it may as well be concluded now — was, well, worrying. One beneficial side effect of the Bonfire strictures, oddly, was that you could rely on confidentiality rather more than in the past, so that information and speculation like this gained a wider currency…

  There was a soft knock on the door. Bonfire cops. She hastily incinerated the note and let them in.

  They came every hour, roughly, at irregular times. This time she had to endure a recording-gear sweep. It was brisk, thorough, humorless.

  It was all part of the Bonfire, a massive national — indeed international — exercise in paper shredding and data trashing.

  Maura was allowed to keep no records beyond a calendar day. Everything had to be handwritten and incinerated after use; not even carbon copies were permitted. Federal records — anything to do with Bootstrap, the Blues, the Carter phenomena — were being burned or wiped.

  Even beyond the bounds of the federal government, tapes and paper archives relating to the various incidents were being impounded and destroyed. Data-mining routines, legal and illegal, were being sent out to trash computer records.

  Of course there were stand-alone machines that couldn’t be reached by any of these means. But even these were being dealt with. For instance, there were ways to monitor the operation of computers within buildings, using water pipes as giant antennae. There were even outlandish Star Wars — type proposals coming out of the military, such as to drench the planet in magnetic media-wiping particle beams.

  All of this was incidentally doing a hell of a lot of damage to the economy, making the day the Dow Jones burst through a hundred thousand — blowing up all the computer-index stores in the process — seem like a picnic.

  The objective was simple, however. It was to remove all records of the Nevada Blue center, of the nuclear cleansing there, of Cruithne, of the battle on the Moon.

  The physical evidence would linger for decades. But it was essential that no record remain to contradict the official cover stories concocted by the FBI: the big lie about the rogue army officer; the piece of hostage-taking terrorism in Nevada, the attempted resolution of which had gone horribly wrong; the drastic accidental explosion that had wrecked NASA’s purely scientific Moon base; and so on.

  Of course even if every record was expunged, the truth would still exist in the heads and hearts of those involved. And so everybody with any significant knowledge — especially those, herself included, who had actually seen the Nevada center and had witnessed the failed “cleansing” operation — was under special scrutiny. There had been the public trials at which they had been forced to deny the truth of Carter, Cruithne, the Blues, all the rest. Even after that she was searched on entering and leaving the building, and she knew she was under heavy and constant surveillance.

  But still, as long as the memories existed, how could it be certain that not one of them, for the rest of their lives, would betray the great lie? Maura, depressed, could imagine an FBI lab somewhere even now cooking up a grisly high-tech mind-cleansing method where respect for the subject would be a lot less important than efficacy. And there was always the simplest way of all: the bullet in the back of the head…

  There were, in fact, rumors of “suicides” already. People dying for what they knew, what they remembered.

  The Bonfire had two goals. The first was simply crowd control. The extreme reactions to Malenfant’s wild broadcasts of future visions and time-paradox messages and doom-soon predictions had made authorities all around the planet wary of how to handle such information from now on. Bluntly, it didn’t matter if the world was coming to an end a week from Tuesday; for now, somebody had to keep sweeping the streets. So Malenfant’s information was being diminished, ridiculed, faked-up to look like clumsy hoaxes, hi the end, the e-psychologists promised, anybody who clung to the bad news from the future would start to look like a Cassandra: doomed to know the future, but powerless to do anything about it.

  Not everybody was going to be fooled by all this. But that wasn’t the real point. Bonfire’s true purpose was to fool the future. It was essential that the balance of evidence bequeathed to future historians was not sufficient to prove that the people of twenty-first-century America had gone to war with their children.

  Despite the personal difficulty, the infringement of various rights, Maura supported this huge project. This was, after all, a matter of national security. More than that, hi fact: it was essential to the future of the species itself.

  The U.S. government seemed to have fallen into a war with indefinable superbeings of the future. The only weapon at its disposal was the control of the information to be passed to future generations. And the government was pursuing that project with all the resources it could command — attempting to blindside the downstreamers before they were even born.

  The battle wasn’t completely impossible. There were precedents in history, some academics were pointing out. Almost all of history was a carefully constructed mythology for use as propaganda or nation building. The writers of the Gospels had spun out the unpromising story of a Nazarene carpenter-preacher into an instrument to shape the souls of humankind, all the way to and beyond the present day. Shouldn’t the modern U.S. government, with all the techniques and understanding at its disposal, be able to do infinitely better yet?

  But Maura had a premonition, deep and dark, that it was a war the present couldn’t win. The artifact on Cruithne, now in irradiated quarantine, and especially the spacetime bubble on the Moon, were there: real, undeniable. And so, in the end, was the truth.

  The cops left her.

  There was one more report on her desk. She skimmed it briefly, held it out to the incinerator.

  Then she put it back on her desk, picked up her phone, and called Dan Ystebo.

  “News from the Trojans,” she told him. “One of NASA’s satellites has picked up anomalous radiation. Strongly redshifted.” She read out details, numbers.

  My God. You know what this means?

  “Tell me”

  The squid are leaving, Maura… He talked, fast and at length, about what had become of his enhanced cephalopods. I guess he doesn’t get the chance too often, Maura thought sadly.

  We know they ‘ve spread out through the cloud of Trojans. We can only guess how many of them there are right now. The best estimate is in excess of a hundred billion. And it may be they are all cooperating. A single giant school. Do you know why the numbers are significant? A hundred billion seems to be a threshold… It takes a hundred billion atoms to organize to form a cell. It takes a hundred billion cells to form a brain. And maybe a hundred billion cephalopod minds, out in the Trojans, just light-minutes apart, have become something —

  “Transcendent.”

  Yes. We can’t even guess what it must be like, what they’re capable of now. Any more than a single neuron could anticipate what a human mind is capable of. Space is for the cephalopods, Maura. It never was meant for us.

  His voice, his bizarre speculation, was a noise from the past for Maura. It’s all receding, she thought. She sighed. “I think it no longer makes a difference one way or the other, Dan. And you ought to be careful who you discuss this with.”

  Yes.

  “Where are you working now?”
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  Brazzaville. I got a job in the dome here. Biosphere recI amation.

  “Rewarding.”

  / guess. Life goes on… Those redshift numbers. The cephalopods must be leaving at close to light speed.

  “Where do you think they are going?”

  Maybe that isn ‘t the point, Maura. Maybe the point is what they are trying to flee.

  At the end of the day she sat quietly at her desk, studying the Washington skyline. She snapped off the noise filters, so the chants and banners of the protesters outside became apparent.

  There was still much to do. The immediate future, regardless of Carter, was as dangerous as it had ever been. And the temptation many people seemed to feel to sacrifice their freedom to stern Utopians who promised to order that future for them was growing stronger.

  Maura, with a sinking heart, thought the loss of significant freedom might be impossible to avoid. But she could strive, as she always had, to minimize the harm.

  Or maybe that was a fight too far for her.

  If she left Washington now she wouldn’t be missed, she realized. She had few friends. Friendship was fragile here, and easily corroded. Not married, no partner, no children. Was she lonely, then?

  Well, perhaps.

  For a long time she had been, simply, so busy, even before this Malenfant business had blown up to consume her life, that she sensed she had forgotten who she was. She sometimes wondered what had kept her here for so long. Were her precious values — formed in a place and time far away from here — just a cover for deeper needs? Was there some deeper inadequacy within, a dissatisfaction she had wrestled to submerge with relentless activity all these years?

  If that was so, perhaps now, when she was left stranded by age and isolation, she would have to face herself for the first time.

  She looked out her window, and there was the Moon in the daylit sky. Beneath her the planet turned; sun and Moon and stars continued to wheel through the sky. She felt lifted out of herself, transcending her small concerns, as if she were a mouse running around some grand, incomprehensible clockwork.