As Malenfant sat, Emma looked at the android. ‘Well, you haven’t introduced us, Malenfant.’
He bowed. ‘My name is Bartholomew.’
Emma’s eyes narrowed. ‘That damaged hand is obviously artificial.’
‘I am artificial. I have medical competences. I’ve been assigned to Malenfant’s care.’
‘Assigned, hell,’ Malenfant snapped. ‘I couldn’t get rid of you if I tried.’
‘You always did have a way of generating loyalty, Malenfant.’ Emma looked at Bartholomew more softly. ‘Thank you for taking care of my husband.’
‘Wish I could say it’s a pleasure. Malenfant. Drink the coffee. It has protein supplements, other good stuff to keep you functioning.’
‘I told you, I ate breakfast.’
‘Liar,’ said Emma and Bartholomew together, and they exchanged a look, and laughed.
‘All right, damn it.’ Malenfant sat, and sucked at the coffee.
‘You see,’ Emma said, ‘I know some of what’s become of you, Malenfant. But not all of it.’
‘How come you know anything? I only handed over the DNA swab yesterday.’ He looked with faint sadness at Emma. ‘You can’t be more than a few hours, umm, old.’
She smiled. ‘Try a week.’
‘A week? I don’t understand.’
Bartholomew ghosted forward again. ‘You want me to try to answer that, Malenfant? It was thought that you two would rather not have Kleio chipping in.’
‘Correct,’ Malenfant said. ‘We need the illusion of privacy at least. Tell me, then.’
‘Emma, this Emma, is less than a day old, sure. But she was run through preparation routines at an accelerated pace . . .’
Emma frowned. ‘I was in a room. Like a hotel room, and I’d just woken up. I didn’t have a clue where I was, Malenfant. The pieces came together slowly. As if I was not just waking normally, but post-operative, you know? Shaking off the anaesthetic.’
‘I know about that, believe me.’
‘There was a kind of nurse, coming in, going out. Female. Keeping me company, showing me how to make a coffee, helping me when I tried to walk, talk, do stuff. How to work a TV, or a thing like a TV. I didn’t know her name, though.’
‘A week?’
‘That was what it felt like, even if it was only hours, outside. There was even a little Monday-to-Sunday tear-off calendar on the wall.’
‘Very anachronistic.’
‘Tailored to my antique psychology, no doubt. A week, it felt like anyhow, while they tested me, questioned me—’
‘Questioned?’
‘Everything I know, or think I know, they have given me. I know that. I know how I . . . got here. My mind, my memories, it’s all just a construct of the stuff they ladled into my head: records, interpretations of the records, extrapolations from the genetics. I think at that stage they were just trying to see if it all fitted together.’ She looked oddly doubtful. ‘Like a user acceptance test of some software system. To see if I added up to a plausible persona. A plausible – simulacrum.’ She looked at him.
Malenfant tried not to choke up. ‘Oh, you’re more than that, Emma.’
‘Anyway, a week by my count, and I had time to learn about you, Malenfant. How you lived your life from ’05, when I was lost, to 2019, and your crash. What a terrible thing. And poor Michael.’
Malenfant shrugged. ‘To have lost both of us. I know. Well, he was twenty-four when he lost me. Only ten when you . . . disappeared.’
‘At Phobos.’
‘Yes. It was pretty hard, you know. Even just the uncertainty. If your lander had blown up as it descended on that damn moon, at least we’d have known. As it was you just – phased out of our lives. Like we’d lost the comms link. I stayed in Houston at the time, in Mission Control. Slept there, for days. Michael stayed with Joan.’ Emma’s sister. ‘He didn’t take it well. Why should he? Especially because it was so ambiguous. He couldn’t put it behind him. Went through a phase of running to the door every time there was an unexpected caller. Always hoped it was you, come home somehow, or at least news about you. Always disappointed.
‘It was a hell of an interval. They tried to reacquire, you know, for forty-eight hours, before you and Tom Lamb were declared dead. Even then they kept trying, of course, on and off. As did Bill Angel, who was waiting for you in Martian orbit.’
She closed her eyes. ‘I was mission specialist. Tom Lamb was the commander. The youngest of the Moonwalkers, as he always liked to remind the other Apollo guys who still hung around the Astronaut Office. And a Navy aviator, as he used to remind them the rest of the time. And Bill Angel was our pilot – very young, only thirty, experienced shuttle orbiter pilot. They were a real contrast, the veteran, the comparative rookie. Tom with those dark Italian looks, like an ageing Robert de Niro. And Bill, blond, blue-eyed. An Aryan angel, indeed. I remember it all so clearly. Diamond-sharp. Bill? What became of him? After we were lost.’
‘There was talk of sending up a lander from Mangala Station to retrieve him. In the end he came home alone. Made the docking with the Earth-return trajectory injector module. Left in September ’05, on schedule, got back a few months later, only mildly crazy from the isolation. Like Aldrin and Collins returning from the Moon, I guess.’ He studied her. ‘Do you remember anything about Phobos? The descent in your lander?’
‘Well, as we approached contact I remember Tom saying old Brer Rabbit had found his briar patch. Same thing he said when he set foot on the Moon. And then . . .’ She looked at him. ‘That’s pretty much it. Look, Malenfant, I’m a construct of the surviving records. This is where it feels . . . uncomfortable . . . for me. I don’t remember anything of the descent, not beyond the point where the comms fritzed out. I know no more than you do, I guess . . . And nothing of what followed, for you and Michael. Nothing of that. What about you? I know the bare bones, but—’
He shrugged. ‘I left the military. You’ll recall I’d been flying missions over Iraq. Hell, of course you remember. Took some compassionate leave – the kid needed shielding from the media attention if nothing else. But it didn’t work out. As if we couldn’t work our way around the loss of you.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘So you decided then was the time to join NASA? That must have left plenty of time for father–son bonding.’
‘Come on. Emma, I was only, what, forty-eight? Young for an astronaut. And I had a mass of relevant experience from flying the strato-tankers, just like handling the shuttle boosters.’
She nodded. ‘For sure, my own loss would have had nothing to do with your getting into the Astronaut Office.’
‘You know it. No room for sentiment in the flight rotation. I earned my place, worked my way in.’
‘Meanwhile Michael . . .’
Malenfant sighed. ‘I guess you’ll have seen his résumé, in your week of wakefulness. Got to college to study business administration. That was when I . . . lost him. Or he lost me. He was twenty-four when I crashed. For what came after that, well, you’ll have seen the stuff in the public records, the Answerer gave me that much. He built a career in coal mining, would you believe? Big development back then, 2030s, 2040s. Not that that ended well, as I now know. Look up Peak Carbon. Anyhow, we didn’t see each other much as before—’
‘Or at all? My God, Malenfant, he was your son. I leave you alone for five minutes.’
Suddenly, out of nowhere, she was weeping. She buried her face in her hands, shuddering, almost silent.
Malenfant sat there, helpless. His need to hold her tore his heart open.
At last she got herself under control. Blew her nose on a handkerchief that was presumably as unreal as she was. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Don’t apologise.’
‘This is pretty hard. For both of us, right? If I’d known how hard . . .’ She sighed. ‘Anyhow I think I can see how come it was so difficult for you to get hold of a DNA sample from the family. Bad feelings passed down the generations, right?’
> ‘Maybe. Or maybe they just value their privacy. I suppose they’re entitled. It’s a different age, Emma. Yes, I had to work hard to get that sample. During your sabbatical, I guess they showed you my Beatles on the rooftop stunt, huh?’
‘My God, Malenfant. Talk about an archaic reference. That happened before I was born.’
‘I don’t know. They seem to remember John Lennon.’ He strummed an imaginary guitar.
She laughed, dabbing at a running nose. ‘You do realise that probably no one else on this whole planet, in the Solar System, knows what we’re talking about? Except her, I guess.’
He frowned. ‘Who?’
‘The other Emma. Emma II, at Phobos. The one who sent the signal that they revived you for.’ She held her hands up. ‘I know you don’t want to deal with that.’
‘It’s like she’s some virtual-reality fantasy—’
‘No,’ Emma said.
She spoke with a tone now that Malenfant recognised – recognised very well. When she was being tough, saying something that was hard to say, hard for him to hear, yet had to be said anyhow – this was the tone she used.
‘You don’t get it, Malenfant. I am based on records from this world, this history, and on your memories – hell, on DNA inherited from our son. But I’m the virtual-reality fantasy. Don’t you see that? And she is not only real, or so it seems, she is the one that called for you from Phobos. She did. I don’t know how the hell she got there, but she did. And if she hadn’t, Malenfant, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. Because you would never have been wakened, not now. Whether you are her Malenfant or not. Don’t you think you have a duty to her?’
‘I . . .’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know if I can. Deal with Emma II, I mean.’
She snorted. ‘I can. In fact I have, during that week I had as the dream of some super-advanced computer of this ridiculous future. Have you listened to her message? All of it? Listened properly? Researched the background?’
‘I, I . . .’
‘Of course not. Well, I have. I even analysed it.’ She looked past him. ‘Bartholomew, can we play it now?’
Bartholomew stood. ‘Just say when you’re ready for the audio.’
Malenfant looked at Emma, as she called, ‘Roll it.’
And, obscured by radio crackle and automated beeps and pops, Malenfant and Emma listened, as the voice of Emma II once more filled the air.
This is Emma Stoney. NASA astronaut. The date is – well, hell, I have my mission clock but that means nothing now, I don’t know the date. Nothing makes sense since we emerged from our trial descent into Phobos. The ship, the hab module, is gone. We can’t pick up anything from Earth.
Damn it, Jupiter is in the wrong place, and from Martian orbit you can’t miss Jupiter, believe me. I don’t know the date, I don’t know the time.
Come on, Stoney, be professional. What do you know?
I know our ship, thrown together to go inspect the Phobos secular-descent anomaly, is – was – called Timor. The mission was international, cooperative. Even before we crew had begun training, there had been preparatory launches. Three heavy-lift Energias, up from Baikonur, lifting fuel tanks and our cargo module up to the Bilateral Space Station, where it was assembled and fired off. Safely delivered to Martian orbit, waiting for us, with supplies, fuel for the return flight – all in place before we even left the Earth.
Then three more Energias to haul up the components of our mission, the propellant tanks and injection stages, our hab module – a beefed-up BSS module – and the experimental little lander craft, just an open frame really, that we would use to explore Phobos.
We crew were lifted by space shuttle orbiter Endeavour, flight STS-89 . . .
We left Earth orbit on 21 November 2004. Two Americans, one Russian. My companions were Tom Lamb, once a Moonwalker, and Arkady Berezovoy, very experienced cosmonaut. We arrived in Martian orbit 3 June, 2005. We should have departed for Earth on 1 September, 2005. Well, we didn’t. And the date today is – was, according to my mission calendar anyhow – 14 June, 2006.
And this is a message for Reid Malenfant. If you can hear this, come get me . . . If anybody can, you can. I don’t know why I believe that, but I do—
And that fade-out, under a rising tide of static.
‘So,’ said Emma.
‘So what? This never happened. It makes no sense. The dates fit yours, the basic mission profile sounds right. But . . .’
Emma sighed. ‘Right. OK. It makes no sense. But there are a lot of clues in there to the bigger picture. Which does allow the personal stuff to make some sense, anyhow. Look at the mission profile she summarises.’
‘I never heard of these heavy-lift boosters she mentions. Energias.’
‘Neither had I. So, in my Virtual week in the tank, I looked it up. I mean, I asked . . . an Answerer?’
‘That’s the word.’ Malenfant frowned. ‘I heard this message a month ago, first time. Never occurred to me to check stuff that way. Research it.’
‘Which is one reason you’re incomplete without me, Malenfant. One of many reasons. No such beast as the Energias ever flew. But, I found out, at one time the Soviets did plan to build such a booster. A more modest follow-up in case the N1, their lunar rocket – their equivalent of the Saturn V – had failed.’
‘It didn’t fail. N1 got the cosmonauts to the Moon. But a few years later than us.’
‘Sure. I know that. And on my mission to Phobos, we used Saturn V derivatives for most of the heavy lift, as we’ve been doing since 1970, when we launched the Skylabs, the Moonlab. We certainly wouldn’t have gone cap in hand to the Soviets, even when they turned back into Russians, for some kind of cooperative launch programme. We had our Ares-Saturn N technology, and it was up to the job of reaching Phobos.’
In the 1970s, as Malenfant the teenage space buff had followed closely, after the first lunar landings, the Apollo-Saturn technology had been upgraded for interplanetary missions. For instance the S-II, the Saturn V’s second stage, a reliable workhorse burning liquid oxygen and hydrogen, had been developed into a booster for deep-space missions: not discarded during a launch as during the early lunar missions, but sent into orbit and refuelled. Then there had been a laborious and difficult development of a nuclear upper stage, to turn the Saturn V into the Saturn N . . .
Emma counted it off on her fingers. ‘So, to get to Phobos, we had multiple Saturn launches, rendezvous and docking in Earth orbit to put together the initial stack: the payload, plus an Earth-return booster, and three refuelled Saturn S-II stages for Mars injection . . . We had the technology to do it. And we crew rode up to orbit on shuttle. But.’
‘But what?’
‘But suppose we didn’t have any of that, Malenfant. Look – do you know any of the history of the space programme you took part in? Read the textbooks! If they still exist. The Answerers will know. My God, I wasn’t even alive in 1969, but you were . . .
‘Even before Apollo 11 got to the Moon, the Nixon administration was looking at what might happen afterwards. NASA came in with pie-in-the-sky follow-on proposals for space stations, Moon bases and Mars missions, eye-wateringly expensive.
‘But at the time, cutting costs was a big driver for the administration. We were at war, remember. Social care costs were rising steeply. Nixon was already thinking about his universal benefit plan. And NASA almost got canned completely. I’m serious, Malenfant. We would still need comsats and weather satellites and surveillance spy sats, but we didn’t need any more humans in space. Not at such costs.’
‘Oh. And then Armstrong died.’
‘Right. Armstrong died, on the Moon, in the middle of all this political horse-trading. And there was a public outpouring of grief that changed everything, at that moment. Well, you know the rest. Nixon funded more Apollo missions, an extension of Apollo-Saturn hardware for heavy lift and, ultimately, Mars, and the development of a space shuttle.
‘But – just th
ink, Malenfant. Suppose Nixon hadn’t given NASA the go-ahead. Suppose we’d cut right back, to – hell, I don’t know – just the shuttle, flying up and down to some crummy post-Skylab space station.’
‘That makes no sense. You wouldn’t develop a mature and reliable system like Apollo-Saturn and then just throw it away.’
‘I imagine it does make sense, if you really believe you can’t afford it.
‘Anyhow – stick with me here – suppose we’d done that. Suppose we had only a minimal space programme. Why, Emma II said she was launched on STS-89. You can’t take mission numbering as a literal count of shuttle missions, but in our reality—’
‘By the time I launched on my last mission, we were up to the seven-hundreds. In our reality. Jeez, what a phrase. What are we dealing with here, Emma?’
‘Just hold your nerve. This “Bilateral Space Station” she mentions – maybe a cooperation with Russia? – sounds like the peak achievement in space. Nobody on Mars . . .
‘And then the astronomers pick up an anomaly at Phobos. Suddenly we believe we have to get there. A compelling reason to go to Mars, at last! But we don’t have a technology to do it. What do you do?’
Malenfant was starting to understand. ‘Right. You improvise. You sketch out a mission profile like yours, Emma. I mean, the fuel requirements, the interplanetary trajectories, are going to be the same. But instead of Saturn Vs for the heavy lift, you sell your soul to the Russians for a few launches of these Energias.’
‘Right. And if you think about it, Malenfant, this is harder. Harder than the way we did it, I mean. We already had a mature system to get humans to Mars and back; we just had to stretch a little further to reach Phobos. They had nothing; maybe they had space stations, so some experience of long-duration spaceflight, but it’s not the same as the real thing. And they evidently had to integrate technologies from several different sources. And so on.’
‘They did it, though.’
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