World Engine

by Stephen Baxter

  Understood. In the few minutes of your flight you had become, aside from the Mars pioneers, probably the highest-profile astronaut since the shuttle crew that saved Skylab in 1978. And as far as the public was concerned it probably didn’t do any harm that you pulled your stunt almost exactly fifty years after Aldrin and Collins had heroically returned from the Moon without their commander.

  Hmm. So the Air Force took me under its blue wing. Into this super-hospital you’re talking about.

  As I said, they couldn’t save you, Malenfant. Instead they – froze you. Until medical facilities had advanced to the point where—

  Listen, Karla. No more head-shrink shilly-shallying. Just tell me. Where am I? . . .

  Colonel Malenfant. Welcome to the twenty-fifth century.

  The twenty-fifth.

  Take a moment to absorb that, Malenfant. Yes, this is the twenty-fifth century. To be precise—

  Why did you wake me? Why now?

  Because Emma—

  Emma? Who died at Phobos in 2005?

  Because Emma has asked for your help.

  3

  He thought he slept.

  He thought he woke.

  He opened his eyes. This time it worked.

  A grey surface before him. No, above him. Shining with a soft, sourceless light. Curving over him, like he was in some kind of all-body scanner.

  Medical equipment. Had to be. Was he still in hospital, then?

  He raised his head. Thumped his brow on a surface only centimetres above him.

  ‘Great start, Malenfant,’ he said, resting back.

  His own voice was subdued, soft, as if he was in some anechoic chamber. He heard it, though, heard his words, a physical sensation. Unlike the oddly disembodied speech he had exchanged with Karla before. And his forehead ached subtly where he had thumped it on the surface above.

  He was real again.

  He had a wider sense of his body too, he realised now. The heaviness of it, the mass. He tried to move around. Felt the weight as he lifted his arms, shifted his legs. The rustle of some loose, papery cloth over him, like a hospital gown. The odd twinge of discomfort, such as in the shoulder he’d dislocated playing college football, an injury that had come back to haunt him in his fifties. Well, you had to expect it.

  You had to expect a lot worse, in fact, when you went through a shuttle crash. As he remembered now, in unpleasant, vivid detail.

  ‘And I remember you, Karla,’ he said now.

  It was like a dream, thinking back. His debrief. The voice that had seemed to surround him, a warm bath of words. But he had lacked this sense of physicality. Of embeddedness. Like he had been floating in some sensory-deprivation tank. Anaesthetised, maybe, so he couldn’t feel his body at all. Even the deep inner senses: even proprioception – a long word every astronaut had to learn before being launched into microgravity, meaning the sense of one’s own body, its position in space, the relative positioning of its parts – even that had been lacking.

  ‘Well, I feel it all now,’ he murmured. ‘I’m back. I guess. Karla? Karla. You still there?’

  There was no reply.

  He lifted his hands to that neutral, neither hot nor cold lid just centimetres above his nose. He pressed, not too hard. No dice.

  Deliberately he dropped his hands. Took deep breaths, yoga breaths, filling the belly. ‘Been in tight corners before,’ he told himself. ‘Claustrophobic spaces. The time Mott and I went through that underwater retrieval exercise.’ It had been a mocked-up shuttle booster cabin on the bed of the ocean off Guantanamo, and the search-and-rescue guys were three hours late finding them. Or so they claimed. ‘Got through that, Nicola, didn’t we? Got through that, get through this. Right?’ He raised his hands again, deliberately drew them back before touching the lid. ‘But right now, whoever’s listening, I think I’d like to get out of this oven. This turkey is roasted, OK?’

  There was a crack, a soft sigh as of air pressure equalising – Malenfant felt a subtle cooling – and the lid lifted back. In that first moment, Malenfant glimpsed a clear white light. As if he was being born.

  Then he made out a clean-looking, uncluttered room, what looked like monitor screens on the walls.

  And a face over him, a man’s face, neither young nor old – thirtyish? Clean shaven, scalp bare. He smiled down. ‘Thought you would never ask. We have to be sure you’re ready, you see. The emergence from a coldsleep pod can be disconcerting. You have to really want to come out.’

  ‘I . . . My name is Reid Malenfant. Do you know me?’

  ‘No. But I hope to get to know you.’ A calm, clear voice, with what Malenfant might have called a mid-Atlantic accent: like American urban east coast, but softened.

  ‘Karla?’

  The smile broadened. ‘Not Karla. I’m sure she will send her regards from the Moon when she knows you’re awake at last. And you have your message from Emma Stoney, of course. We have a copy here.’

  Malenfant tried to process all that. Too much information, in a couple of sentences. ‘I was on the Moon? . . .’

  ‘Certainly. In a coldsleep facility under a mountain called Pico, which—’

  ‘Never mind.’ Bewildered, he put that aside. ‘Emma? We need to talk about that. Basically it’s impossible.’

  ‘One thing at a time. My name is Bartholomew. Which is, not coincidentally, derived from the name of this hospital, here in London.’

  ‘London? London, England? Look—’ Malenfant began to struggle, tried to move. He felt leaden, weighed down.

  ‘I’d take it easy if I were you.’

  Malenfant didn’t take it easy. He sat straight up, the room spun, the world receded from him with a golden light and a clamour of bells.

  And he collapsed back down in a dead faint.

  When he came back, he found himself in a wheelchair. Some kind of dressing gown on him, heavy and warm. Soft shoes on his sockless feet, like slippers.

  The room was dominated by a big tank, connected to ancillary equipment that hummed softly. An open lid. It was indeed like a medical scanner, he saw now. That soft blue light within.

  ‘So that’s the box I came in.’ His voice was a scratch.

  Bartholomew was sitting in an upright chair, watching him. He wore a practical-looking green uniform: trousers, a loose, short-sleeved tunic. There was one other person in the room, a woman, young, sitting on another chair. She wore a kind of coverall of what looked like wool, dyed deep brown. She was staring wide-eyed at Malenfant. She was pale, he saw, with dark hair cut short.

  Malenfant felt profoundly embarrassed to have put on the display he had, in front of an audience.

  Bartholomew came over, picking up a cup of some liquid on the way. ‘Drink this.’

  Malenfant took the cup, expecting plastic; it was some kind of ceramic. The broth looked like chicken soup. When he sipped, it tasted of potatoes, greens.

  There was a clock on the wall showing what looked like twenty-four-hour time. It was a little after thirteen hundred. And what looked like a calendar, with two dates, or numbers anyhow:

  AD 2469

  2 February

  Minus 928

  AD 2469. The twenty-fifth century, as advertised.

  He glanced at Bartholomew, the young woman. ‘I guess I have a lot of questions.’

  Bartholomew shrugged.

  The woman said, ‘Start where you like, Mister Reid. We’re here to help you. Both of us.’

  ‘Thanks. But my name is Reid Malenfant. It would be more correct to call me “Mister Malenfant”.’

  She nodded. ‘Ah. Of course. Your family names came last. All right. Mister Malenfant.’

  ‘Except that I am – was? – a colonel in the US Air Force.’

  She frowned. ‘I thought you were an astronaut.’

  ‘Well, I was in NASA’s astronaut corps, but strictly speaking I was never an astronaut. I flew shuttle booster stages that never got to orbit. So I never flew in space.’

  Bartholomew grinned. �
��Well, you have now.’

  ‘Right. The Moon. Karla. That’s something we need to talk about, right? But for now – look, I’m an astronaut with NASA, and a flyer with the Air Force, and a colonel. So—’

  ‘I should call you Colonel Malenfant.’

  ‘Just Malenfant.’

  ‘Now I am confused.’

  ‘Everybody calls me Malenfant. Even my wife does. Or did. Before she died. Except’ – and he faced Bartholomew – ‘Karla told me there was a message for me. And so did you. From her. That’s impossible. She died in 2005. Today’s date . . .’ He looked at the display on the wall. ‘My booster crash happened in the year 2019 . . .’

  Bartholomew nodded. ‘You’re guessing about the date, and you’re guessing right. That’s why we hang a calendar on the wall, so patients like you, reviving, can take in such information at their own pace. Today’s date is 2469. I looked up your calendars, to make sure the date format would make sense. We do still count the years according to the old Christian calendar, though we generally don’t say “AD” any more.’ He smiled brightly. ‘So that’s one thing that should make sense to you, at least.’

  Malenfant grunted. Except, he thought, that I’m about four hundred and fifty years out of time.

  One thing at a time, Malenfant.

  He looked again at the display. ‘And the second number – a minus?’

  The woman smiled brightly. ‘I looked up your era as well. Your astronaut jargon. I think you’d call that a countdown clock, Mister – umm, Malenfant.’

  ‘A countdown? Minus nine hundred and twenty-eight. Nine hundred and twenty-eight what? Hours, days?’

  ‘Years,’ Bartholomew said gently. ‘Nine hundred and some years, Malenfant.’

  ‘Until – what, AD 3397? Then what?’

  ‘Then the Destroyer.’

  That meant nothing.

  But it didn’t sound good.

  ‘We aren’t handling this very well, are we?’ The woman stood up, and went to a wall unit to fetch another cup of broth. Then she walked over to Malenfant, took his empty cup, handed him the fresh one. ‘Drink some more of this.’

  She wore a plain, bronze bangle on her wrist, she saw. He took the cup, sipped it. The broth tasted the same, and he felt oddly, illogically relieved. One bit of continuity, from one moment to the next: one tiny corner of this reality made sense.

  In the background Bartholomew, who Malenfant had tentatively labelled as a nurse, sat quietly, watching, still. Very still, Malenfant thought, and that seemed a little eerie.

  The woman pulled her chair over to Malenfant’s, sat before him, leaning, hands folded in her lap, her face intent. Maybe she sensed his disorientation, he thought.

  ‘I realise I haven’t told you my name.’ She plucked at her garment, at hand-stitched cotton and wool, a trace of nervousness. ‘It’s all such a jumble, isn’t it? For us, as well as you.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Bartholomew called now. ‘You’re by far the oldest coldsleeper I’ve ever had to treat. Not to mention the most famous. Every case is unique, but yours took a lot of research, even experimental trials, before you could be safely brought back.’

  Malenfant tried to take that in. ‘I . . . Thank you.’

  Bartholomew grinned. ‘Well, it’s not as if I have anything else to do.’

  Which was an odd reply, another dangling thread, but Malenfant ignored it and focused on the woman. ‘Your name,’ he prompted.

  ‘Yes. Sorry. My name is Greggson Deirdra. Umm, I guess you would say it as Deirdra Greggson.’

  ‘Greggson Deirdra,’ he repeated, committing the name firmly to memory. He had an intuition he was going to need allies in what was evidently a strange new world. ‘Nice name. I knew a Deirdre once.’

  ‘I chose the name myself,’ she said brightly. ‘It means wanderer. It was confirmed five years ago, on my twelfth birthday. The whole town was there.’

  Malenfant filed that away too. She was younger than she looked, then. ‘OK. And are you a wanderer, Deirdra?’

  ‘I guess so. The name felt right to me. My parents always said I was restless, even as a child. Oh, I would finish the jobs I had to do. Chores, and my schoolwork, and the town projects. I’ve done well at school, I guess. But in my spare time I always had trouble sticking at stuff. I never really liked to play, my mother said. I was always looking for projects.’

  ‘And what are you doing here?’ He glanced over at Bartholomew. ‘I’m guessing he is a nurse. But you . . .’

  ‘I volunteered. Every sleeper, when they come out of the coldsleep pods, needs a companion. Especially if their sleep has been long—’

  ‘And, like I said,’ Bartholomew put in, ‘nobody has slept as long as you have, Malenfant. As far as we know.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, since we didn’t even have “coldsleep pods” in 2019. Or at least, not that I knew about.’

  Deirdra said, ‘When I read about your case, I was just intrigued. I mean, you will need somebody sensible to show you around.’

  He grunted. ‘How to use the food replicators and the transmat pads?’

  She looked baffled. ‘I’ve never heard of transmat pads.’

  Bartholomew grinned. ‘Don’t worry about it. He’s teasing you. Those are pop-culture references that were dated even when he crashed his spaceship, probably.’

  Malenfant studied him. ‘I’m impressed you know that. And even the phrase, “pop culture”.’

  Bartholomew shrugged. ‘Looked it up.’

  But he had just been sitting in his chair the whole time, motionless as far as Malenfant could tell. He hadn’t looked up a damn thing, visibly. Malenfant filed that away. Another clue about this new world, and the people in it: this was evidently an environment drenched in smartness.

  And he filed away the observation, too, that Deirdra had not denied hearing of food replicators. It felt like a minor victory, if a scattershot one.

  He turned back to Deirdra. ‘So you volunteered to be my . . . helper.’

  Bartholomew said, ‘Call her a guide. You don’t need a helper. You’re not ill, Malenfant. The coldsleep pod wouldn’t have released you unless you were healthy enough to function.’

  He thought that over. ‘Yet I fainted when I sat up.’ He took an inventory. ‘I have a few aches and pains. My old shoulder injury—’

  ‘What do you expect, Malenfant? You went in there a broken fifty-nine-year-old man, and you’ve come out of it a fixed fifty-nine-year-old man. All we could do was put you back the way you were.’

  Malenfant grinned at Deirdra. ‘Kind of sharp for a nurse, isn’t he?’

  ‘I’m sure he’s good at his job.’

  Bartholomew laughed. ‘A ringing endorsement.’

  Malenfant growled, ‘OK, a guide. Look, I’m very grateful. But I am a man four centuries out of time. Call me Captain America.’

  Another puzzled frown from Deirdra. ‘Who?’

  Bartholomew called, ‘More long-lost pop culture, Malenfant?’

  ‘Frank Poole. Miles Monroe. Rip van Winkle, then. I guess I’m going to need a lot of guidance. I know – nothing – about the world out there. Beyond these four walls, in fact.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Well, Bartholomew here told me I’m in a hospital of the same name as him, in London.’

  She brightened. ‘Well, there you go. You are in London. At the bottom of the Thames Bay.’

  Malenfant did a double-take. ‘The Thames used to be a river. I’m under the sea?’

  Bartholomew said, ‘One thing at a time, Malenfant.’

  ‘OK. Well, at least I can understand you. Your language hasn’t, umm, evolved so much as that.’

  Bartholomew and Deirdra shared a glance.

  Bartholomew said gently. ‘I wouldn’t take too much comfort from that, Malenfant. You are getting a lot of help with translation.’

  Malenfant felt oddly crestfallen. That smart environment again. ‘Never mind. Look, Deirdra, my point is that I suspect I’m going to need a lot
of support. You surely have your own life to lead, and this will eat a big chunk of it.’ He shook his head. ‘Where are you with your schooling, for instance? Are you at college?’

  She looked unsure, and again glanced over her shoulder at Bartholomew, who shrugged.

  ‘It’s different now,’ Bartholomew said. ‘There’s a lot more of what you would have called home schooling, I think.’

  ‘But can you afford to take the time out?’

  Again she looked unsure. ‘You’re kind of asking questions that don’t make sense. Well, I suppose that’s the point – why you need me in the first place. I can take all the time I want at my studies. My whole life, if I like. And working with you will be a study in itself. In a way.’

  ‘Yeah. Grumpy Old Bastards 101. But what about your future plans? What about work?’

  Again she looked confused.

  Bartholomew put in, ‘Deirdra, you have to remember he doesn’t know what a stipend is, even. They didn’t have that system in his day.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘Oh, right. I think I imagined the system went further back than that. So even in the early twenty-first century—’

  ‘Yep. Basically, people had to work to stay alive, to eat. In Malenfant’s home nation most people were whole economic levels away from it being as stark as that, but that was the underlying truth.’

  She smiled. ‘This is going to be so fascinating, Malenfant.’

  He felt a mixture of flattery and unease. ‘I’m not some old book for you to study, you know.’

  ‘I understand that.’

  Impulsively, Deirdra took Malenfant’s hands in hers. She was young; her hands were soft, warm, but strong. By contrast his own skin felt tough, leathery. The physical contact shook him, oddly – it was the first time, it occurred to him, that he had been touched, while he had been conscious anyhow, since emerging from the pod.

  Deirdra said, ‘We have a lot to learn, you and I. You must feel completely lost. But the very first thing you do is to think about me, to express concern about the impact you might have on me, on my life. I think that shows you are a decent person, Malenfant. Unselfish.’

  ‘I . . . well, thanks. Not as decent as you, evidently.’