by Adam Roberts
‘Your observations are entirely compromised by the thing they are observing! What you see as a huge, distant structure is actually a tiny mote of dust upon the lens of your telescope. Dark energy is your own unique contribution to the universe.’
Ange got herself some food. She held it in front of her helmet for a while, and pondered how to get it in her mouth. She could certainly hold her breath long enough to get the helmet off, and the food in, but there was always a risk that she would fumble her grip, and have to scrabble around to get the helmet back on. Was it a risk worth taking? She would be dead soon, but had no desire to die sooner than absolutely necessary. On the other hand, she was hungry.
‘For a while I couldn’t believe it. I sought out another, and s/he didn’t believe it either. The distortion certainly looked like consciousness; but how could there be so much of that in one tiny place! And what would happen if we went there - would it destroy our own minds? We debated it for a long time. A third joined us. Finally we decided to come. Approaching, we encroached upon the limit of your telecommunications, and were able to see your self-imaging. It was a shock. So profligate with thought, so promiscuous with consciousness! In an individual body cells die and are born all the time, but they’re just cells, they’re nothing more. But you! You treat the vast significance of individual consciousness as the most common thing in the universe! You are breathtakingly cavalier with individual life — yet, then again, why wouldn’t you be? New life is being born all the time on your world. It explains the uniquely turbulent nature of the concentration of this force; the raging furnace, consciousness being continually snuffed out, but continually replaced and more than replaced. It’s like looking into a solar maelstrom . . . and yet you live in it, as calmly as a flower in the dirt!’
‘Hard to believe.’
‘You said it! It keeps powering up, growing and growing, this concentration of the most powerful force in the cosmos. We came, we three, in part to see if there was anything we could do about it.’
‘And is there?’
‘It has destroyed my two companions.’
‘Oh,’ said Ange, surprised. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘We were giddy. We were intoxicated by the glory and seediness and splendour of it all. When they died I took my craft away, but my own consciousness has been . . . poisoned, I suppose you might say ... as well. So I have come back. I might as well expire here as anywhere. Here at the heart of the cosmos.’
The next question occurred to Ange only very belatedly: can you help me? I’ve suffered a series of malfunctions and don’t have enough air.
‘I know. I cannot help you. I’m sorry.’
‘Oh,’ said Ange. Then, ‘Ah well.’
‘I have a question, though.’
‘Shoot.’
‘The shape of the cosmos is big bang, rapid expansion and then final contraction and crunch. The rise of your . . . multiform species has overwhelmed that natural rhythm. So I suppose I want to ask: how can you not see it? But immersing myself in your communications and culture, I suppose I see the answer to that. The universe has renewed itself, systole and diastole, innumerable times; but your rise has interrupted that. Unless you do something it will all end in entropy. Can you bear the thought? Won’t you do something about that?’
‘You’re asking the wrong woman,’ said Ange, putting the food away in one of her suit pockets. ‘I’ve got three days left, max.’
‘It’s not a very well-formed, question, I suppose,’ said the alien, mournfully.
He, she, it - didn’t speak again.
Ange took the plunge, more out of boredom than hunger. Deep breath, pop up the helmet, morsel in mouth, helmet down again. Then she checked through the ship. She even managed to sleep - a nap, at any rate.
The next thing that happened was the arrival of a military sloop, the Glory of Carthage, burning its candle-end fierce in the night to decelerate after a high-g insertion. Ange was relieved and grateful to be rescued, of course; although they hadn’t come for her. The Cygnic craft had popped up on ten thousand sensor screens, and the Glory of Carthage had been the nearest. Of course they had rushed to that location: the Oort cloud was forbiddingly distant, but the space between Mars and Earth was thronged with craft of every kind.
They arrived too late: the Cygnic had gone, vanished, dead presumably, and he, she, its craft had vanished. So they took Ange on board and interviewed her and debriefed her and took her conversation with the last Cygnic very seriously indeed. But that didn’t mean they were able to answer the alien’s last question. Still, centre of the cosmos, after all! That’s something, isn’t it? Poor old Copernicus, thought Ange, drifting to sleep finally. Wrong after all.
She was alive, despite everything. Her flight home began with a 3g acceleration burst (the sort of thing only the military could provide), followed by some fraternising with the physically attractive crew. The flush of near-death and survival touched even Ange’s distant soul. And in her new eminence, the only Homo sapiens sapiens to have talked directly with the Cygnics, she found herself the focus of a great deal of attention. In this, without a murmur, she indulged herself; and broke her years-long period of celibacy with the crewman who appealed the most to her. She was not too old. It wasn’t too late for her, she told herself, to go back and give birth to a new civilisation, entire.
<
~ * ~
Me:topia
“He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky”
—Elizabeth Bishop
The first day and the first night.
They had come down in the high ground, an immense plateau many thousands of miles square. “The highlands,” said Murphy. “I claim the highlands. I’ll call them Murphyland.” Over an hour or so he changed his mind several times: Murphtopia, Murphia. “No,” he said, glee bubbling out in a little dance, a shimmy of the feet, a flourish of the hands. “Just Murphy, Murphy. Think of it! Where do you come from? I come from Murphy. I’m a Murphyite. I was born in Murphy.” And the sky paled, and then the sun appeared over the mountain tops and everything was covered with a tide of light. The dew was so thick it looked like the aftermath of a heavy rainstorm.
Sinclair, wading out from the shuttle’s wreckage through waist-high grass, drew a dark trail after him marking his path, like the photographic negative of a comet.
“I don’t understand what you’re so happy about,” said Edwards. It was as if he could not see the new land, this world that had popped out of nowhere. As if all he could see was the damage to the ship. But that was how Edwards’s mind worked. He had a practical mind.
“And are you sad for your ship,” sang Murphy, with deliberately overplayed oirishry, “all buckled and collapsed as it is?” Of course Murphy was a homo neanderthalis. The real deal. All four of these crewmen were. Of course you know what that means.
“You should be sad too, Murphy,” said Edwards, speaking in a level voice. “It’s your ship too. I don’t see how we are to get home without it.”
“But this is my home,” declared Murphy. And then sang his own name, or perhaps the name of his newly made land, over and over: ‘Murphy! Murphy! Murphy!”
~ * ~
The sun moved through the sky. The swift light went everywhere. It spilled over everything and washed back. The expanse of grassland shimmered in the breeze like cellophane.
~ * ~
Edwards climbed to the top of the buckled craft. The plasmetal was oily with dew, and his feet slipped several times. At the top he stood as upright as he dared, and surveyed the word. Mountains away to the west, grass steppes in every direction, north south and east, flowing downhill eastward towards smudges of massive forestation and the metallic inlaid sparkle of rivers, lakes, seas. That was some view, eastward.
The sun was rising from the west, which was an unusual feature. What strange world rotated like that? There were no earth-sized planets in the solar system that rotated like that.
&nb
sp; Did that mean they were no longer in the solar system? That was impossible. There was no means by which they could have travelled so far. Physics repudiated the very notion.
~ * ~
The air tasted fresh in his mouth, in his throat. Grass-scent. Rainwater and ozone.
~ * ~
And for long minutes there was no sound except the hushing of the grasses in the wind, and the distant febrile twitter of birds high in the sky. The sky gleamed, as full of the wonder of light as a glass brimful of bright water. Vins called up, “There are insects, I’ve got insects here, though they seem to be torpid.” He paused, and repeated the word, torpid.” When the dew evaporates a little they’ll surely come to life.”
Edwards grunted in reply, but his eye was on the sky. Spherical clouds, perfect as eggs, drifted in the zenith. Six of them. Seven. Eight. Edwards counted, turning his head. Ten.
~ * ~
Twelve.
~ * ~
And the air, moist with dew and fragrant with possibility, slid past him. And light all about. Silence, stained only by the swishing of the breeze.
Murphy was dancing below, kicking his feet through the wet grass. “Maybe Murphy isn’t such a good idea, by itself,” he called, to nobody in particular. “As a name, by itself. How about the Murphy Territories? How about the Land of Murphy?” And then, after half a minute when neither Edwards nor Vins replied, he added: “Don’t be sore, Vins. You can name some other place.”
Vins, went into the body of the shuttle to fetch out some killing jars for the insects.
~ * ~
Sinclair was away for hours. The sun rose, and the dew steamed away in wreathy barricades of mist. The grass dried out, and paled, and then bristled with dryness. It was a yellow, tawny sort of grass. By mid-day the sky was hot as a hot-plate, and Murphy had stripped off his chemise.
Sinclair returned, sweating. “It goes on and on,” he says. “Exactly the same. Steppe, and more steppe.”
The sun dropped over the eastern horizon. It quickly became cold.
The night sky was cloudless; stars like lit dewdrops on black. Breath petalled out of their mouths in transient, ghostly puffs. Edwards slept in the shuttle. Sinclair and Vins chatted, their voices subdued underneath the enormity of night sky. Murphy had a nicotine inhaler, and lay on the cooling roof of the crashed shuttle looking up at the stars puffing intermittently. Later they all joined Edwards in the shuttle and slept. Over their thoughtless, slumbering heads the stars glinted and prickled in the black clarity. Hours passed. The the sky cataracted to white with the coming dawn. Ivory-coloured clouds bubbled into the sky from behind the peaks of the highlands and swept down upon them. Before dawn rain started falling. Edwards woke at the drumroll sound of rain against the body of the crashed ship, sat up disoriented for a moment, then lay down again and went back to sleep.
“We’re dead, we’ve died, we’re dead,” said Murphy, perhaps speaking in his sleep.
~ * ~
The second day and the second night.
At breakfast, after dawn, it was still raining. The four of them ate inside the shuttle, with the door open. “Ah,” said Edwards, looking through the hatch at the shimmering lines of water. “The universal solvent.”
“But I should hate you,” said Murphy. “Because you can look at water and say ah the universal solvent.”
Edwards cocked his head on one side. “I don’t see your point,” he said.
“No, no,” said Murphy. “That’s not it. Oh, water, oh? This beautiful thing, this spiritual thing, purity and the power to cleanse, to baptise even. Light on water, is there a more beautiful thing? And all you can say when you see it is ah the universal solvent.”
Edwards put his mouth in a straight line. “But it is the universal solvent,” he said. “That’s one of its functions. Why do you say oh water oh?”
The rain outside was greeting their conversational interchanges with sustained and rapturous applause. The colour through the hatch was grey. The air looked like metal scored and overscored with myriad slant lines. It was chill.
“Can we lift off?” asked Sinclair. “Is there a way off-of this place?”
“Feel that,” Edwards instructed. He was not talking about any particular object, not instructing any of the crew to lift any particular object. What he meant was: feel how heavy we are. “That’s a full g. That’s what is to be overcome. We came down hard.”
“Hard,” confirmed Murphy.
“We weren’t expecting,” said Sinclair, “a whole world to pop out of the void. Nothing, nothing, nothing, then a whole world. We snapped our spine on this rock.”
“Let’s get one thing straight,” said Edwards, in his brusque and matter-of-fact voice. “This world did not pop out of nowhere. Worlds don’t pop out of nowhere.” He looked at his colleagues in turn. “That’s not what happened.”
“Turn it up, captain,” said Murphy. He applied the title sarcastically. It was the nature of this ship that its crew worked without ranks such as captain, second-in-command, all that bag-and-baggage of hierarchy. No military ship, this. This was not a merchant vessel either. They hadn’t been sliding along the frictionless thread of Earth-Mars or Earth-Moon hauling goods or transporting soldiery or anything like that. This was science. Science isn’t structured to recognise hierarchy.
“I’m only saying,” said Edwards, sheepishly. “I’m not wanting to suggest that I’m in charge.”
They were silent for a while, and the rain spattered and clattered enormously all about them. Encore! Encore!
It occurred to Edwards, belatedly, that Murphy might have been saying eau, water, eau.
“Right,” said Vins. “We’re all in a kind of intellectual shock, that’s what I think. We’ve been here two days now, and we haven’t even formulated a plausible hypothesis of what’s going on. We haven’t even tried.” He looked around at his colleagues. “Let’s review what happened.”
Murphy had his stumpy arms folded over his little chest. “Review, by all means,” he said. But then, when Vins opened his mouth to speak again, he interrupted immediately: “I’ve formed a hypothesis. It’s called Murphy. This is prime land, and I claim it. When we get back, or when we at least contact help and they come get us, I shall set up a private limited company to promote the settlement of Murphy. I’ll make a fortune. I’ll be mayor. I’ll be the alpha male.”
“Why you think,” said Edwards, thinking literally, “that such a contract would have any legal force upon Earth is beyond me.”
“Let’s review,” said Vins, in a loud voice.
Everybody looked at him.
“We’re flying. We drop below the ecliptic plane, no more than a hundred thousand klims. More than that?”
None of the others say anything. Then Sinclair says, “It was about that.”
“We saw a winking star,” Vins said. He did not stop talking, he continued on, even though Murphy tried to interrupt him with a sneering “Winking star, oh, that’s good on my mother’s health that’s good.” Vins wasn’t to be distracted when he got going. “It was out of the position of variable star 699, which is what we might have thought it otherwise. Except it wasn’t where 699 should’ve been. As we flew it grew in size, indicating a very reflective asteroid, or perhaps comet, out of the ecliptic. You,” Vins nodded at Sinclair, “argued it was a parti-coloured object rotating diurnally. But it was a fair way south of the ecliptic. Then what happened?”
“We all know what happened,” said Murphy. They may all have been homo neanderthalis, but they were bright. They all had their scientific educations. The real deal.
“Let’s review,” said Vins. “We need to know what’s happened. Act like scientists, people.”
“I’m a scientist no longer,” cried Murphy, with a flourish of his arm. “I’m the king of Murphtopia.”
“What happened,” said Edwards, slowly, thinking linearly and literally, “was we were tracking the curious wobble of the aster
oid. Or whatever it was. We flew close, and suddenly there was a world, a whole world, and—we came down. We re-entered sideways, and there was heat-damage to the craft, and then there was collision damage, and now it’s broken. And we’re sitting inside it.”
“Now,” said Vins. “Here’s a premise. Worlds don’t appear out of nowhere. Do we agree?”
Nobody disagreed.
“It’s a mountain and mohammed thing,” offered Sinclair. “Put it this way, which is more likely? That a whole Earth-sized planet pops out of nowhere in front of us? Or that we, for some reason, have popped into a new place?”
“I say we’re back on Earth,” said Murphy. “It looks like a duck, and it smells like a duck and it, uh, pulls the gravity of a duck, then it’s a duck.”
