World Engine

by Stephen Baxter

  Just like the Smithsonian, on a vast scale. Malenfant had not had such a tangible sense of his father’s presence for years – subjective years. Or his son’s.

  Bartholomew found them both. ‘Having fun?’

  Deirdra looked at Malenfant. ‘I think he is. He hasn’t said a word for a while.’

  Bartholomew nodded. ‘We’re here for business, remember.’

  ‘Right.’ Malenfant tried to pull himself together. ‘And the museum-piece spacecraft that is going to take us to Phobos—’

  ‘Is right over here,’ Kaliope said.

  Malenfant had already walked past this particular relic. It looked unspectacular in its present company, if solid, and bulky. It was rather, in fact, like an Apollo command and service module combination, a conical cabin topping a cylindrical main body, the latter with clusters of rocket nozzles and antennae. A much bigger, much fatter, much more complex-looking Apollo that sat on four legs not unlike an Apollo lunar lander’s.

  ‘Designed for a crew of five maximum,’ Kaliope said. ‘And of course this is only the crew module and planetary lander; the main body of the craft, for the interplanetary cruise, is at L5.’ Kaliope glanced around, seeking understanding. ‘Which is a stable point in the Moon’s orbit around the Earth, where we store components too large to be brought down to Earth. One of the Skylabs of your era, for instance, Malenfant. L5 is a kind of extension of this museum, formally. Behold your craft.’

  She waved a hand. An image of a ship coalesced in the air over her head, fully three-dimensional, suspended in space, brilliantly sunlit. Malenfant walked around this, and interrogated Kaliope until he understood.

  The ship was like an arrow, with a fat blade and sprawling fletches, and a bunch of balloons stuck to the shaft. The ‘blade’ was a copy of the smaller craft he stood beside now: living quarters contained in a roughly conical hab module, that sat on top of a service module stroke lander.

  The arrow’s shaft contained the interplanetary propulsion engine, which, after Kaliope’s explanation, Malenfant recognised as what would once have been called a magnetoplasma rocket. The propellant was hydrogen, stored as a liquid in those balloon tanks along the shaft. There was a compact fusion reactor whose energies ionised the hydrogen to plasma using powerful radio blasts – the fletches at the rear of the arrow were radiator panels, dumping waste heat from this process – and the plasma, bearing an electrical charge, was then grabbed by a magnetic field and hurled out of the back.

  The system, Kaliope said, would deliver a cruise velocity of five hundred kilometres a second.

  Malenfant nodded. ‘That’s, what, a hundred times the best liquid-chemical combinations? Impressive. Looks like good mature technology to me. And such a ship, with such a performance, purring along, should get us to Mars and back in a few weeks.’

  Mica was glaring at the hardware, as if it was at fault.

  Malenfant walked over to her. ‘So,’ he said quietly. ‘I guess what happens next is up to you.’

  Mica grabbed his arm and pulled him away, out of Deirdra’s earshot. ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it? You know, I believe I understood you at last when I saw you up on that damn Pylon roof, grinning like an idiot. You’re a trickster, Malenfant. You came out of nowhere, a random element disrupting our lives.’

  ‘I never intended—’

  ‘Listen to me. You left your own child behind when you flew into space, and you never came back for him. Now you are taking my child from me, for whatever reason. Just be damn sure you bring her back.’

  ‘I will. I promise—’

  ‘Enough. Now leave me alone.’

  He nodded gravely, stepped away, and turned back to the image of the spacecraft. Trying to compose himself after Mica’s flare of anger. Trying to mask his own exhilaration, despite the tentative nature of Mica’s approval. ‘So. Does this thing have a name?’

  Morrel grinned grudgingly. ‘Even I know that much about space travel, Malenfant. It is in a museum. This is the Last Small Step. The very last ship permitted to go out as part of that programme.’

  ‘Ah. I remember. And piloted by the guy who went in search of a planet of gold. OK. Well, I guess that if this is the last manned deep-space craft built by humans, the technology must be the most mature. All we need now is a pilot.’

  ‘Someone mention me?’

  And Stavros Gershon materialised out of thin air.

  THREE

  On Her First Mission to Phobos

  39

  As Malenfant had already learned, getting outline approval for a flight into space from the top councils of the Common Heritage wasn’t enough. ‘Ratification’ had to follow. It was going to be necessary for the mission plan for Malenfant’s quixotic journey to Mars and Phobos to be approved by various safety-conscious lower levels of what passed these days for the governance of mankind. People would even vote on it, the way Malenfant had seen the citizens of Birmingham vote every other day. The process had begun before the crew had landed, but a final verdict was thought to be some days away yet.

  Malenfant was restless. He didn’t hide it. Stuck in the Sahara Forest, he paced about, unable to settle. The antique spacecraft distracted him somewhat. He didn’t even try to feign interest in the sightseeing jaunts to other aspects of the great afforestation project that Kaliope tried to fix up for them, filling in the time.

  Deirdra seemed fascinated by this caged-up mood. ‘Were you always like this? Sort of – impatient.’

  Malenfant snorted. ‘Look, I was a booster pilot. Not on-orbit crew. My flights lasted hours, no more. But I did plenty of simulations of longer missions, during my training and after. I spent enough time in various confinement tanks, believe me. Waiting around for a specific purpose, for a reason, I was fine, if I had a goal. It’s when I had shit to do and some bureaucracy or other was stopping me getting on with it – that’s when I had the trouble.’

  Kaliope was calm and contemplative as ever. ‘But in this case, that “bureaucracy” is the process of gaining the informed consent for your jaunt from an interconnected mankind, Malenfant. For a venture pretty much without precedent in the last few centuries. I suspect there are plenty of people who see you, a relic of the wrecking generations, as being about to make an old mistake all over again. But on the other hand, as various global polls show—’

  A glimmer of hope. ‘What?’ Malenfant snapped.

  ‘You are proving surprisingly popular, Malenfant.’ She smiled. ‘The man on the Pylon.’

  ‘That’s what I heard from some of my friends too,’ Deirdra said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Not all of them.’

  ‘Oh, of course not.’

  The thought did distract him.

  But fifteen minutes later he was pacing again.

  In the end it took two weeks, fourteen days, for the approval to come – along with a packet of conditions.

  Malenfant went out into the forest and yelled a few times.

  Then it was back to business.

  So, how to get the Last Small Step out of its museum and back into space in the first place?

  There was no great enthusiasm for the simulated copy of Stavros Gershon to simply throttle up his engines and fly the ship out from the middle of an afforested Sahara, a feat of which the ship was eminently capable.

  In the end, a sensible compromise was reached.

  The lander modules of the Step would be launched direct to Earth orbit, crewed only by virtual pilot Gershon, but taking off from a hastily constructed floating pad in the middle of the Pacific, far from any land, and away even from any rich sector of the oceanic biosphere. Once in space, the modules would dock with the larger booster section – the head of the arrow joining the shaft, Malenfant thought – itself brought down cautiously from L5, after centuries in its parking slot in the Moon’s orbit.

  And then the human crew would be launched from Canaveral, in the womb of the more acceptable Scorpio.

  So, in mid-August, once the Step had been safely
assembled in orbit, Malenfant, Bartholomew and Deirdra said their own goodbyes at Canaveral to Greggson Mica and Prefect Morrel. That turned out to be a pretty stiff encounter.

  But all Malenfant really cared about was getting aboard the Scorpio, and slamming the damn hatch shut behind him at last.

  Once they were boarded, the launch procedure of the spaceplane was as perfunctory and efficient as before. And as the ship at last left the ground, as that ancient, inevitable weight of acceleration settled on Malenfant’s chest once more, he let out a rebel yell at the top of his voice.

  To be echoed by a response, almost as loud, from Deirdra, a couple of rows away in the nearly empty spaceplane.

  It took a single ninety-minute orbit of the Earth for the Scorpio to close on the Last Small Step.

  Malenfant, still strapped in his seat on doctor’s orders, watched, fascinated, as the craft loomed out of the dark, lit by the Sun and the softer tropical-sky glow of the Earth below. Of course Malenfant had inspected the Step’s design thoroughly on Earth, but now he saw it in its element: a bird released from its cage, and shining in the complex light.

  That arrow-shape still dominated the morphology, the long shaft with its cluster of propellant tanks and fin-like radiators, and the exotic reactor and engine units at the tail. By contrast the blunt structures at the other end looked almost antique, Apollo chic. Malenfant knew that once in Mars orbit this cylinder-and-cone would detach from the arrow-shaft main body, and then, thrillingly, guide them in to their contact with Phobos itself. The only new technology that had been created for this mission, so far as he knew, was an adaptor on the ship’s blunt nose, to enable the Scorpio, a modern spaceplane, to dock with the Step, a two-centuries-old relic.

  The approach by the Scorpio to the Step seemed alarmingly fast to Malenfant’s sensibilities, shaped in an age when everything in space had been done slowly and with huge caution. Then, just as rapidly, the spaceplane tipped, nose down, to present a docking port on its own cabin roof to the transfer module stuck to the nose of the Step.

  As soon as the docking was complete there was a rattle of locking latches. The roof hatch swung open – and there was Stavros Gershon waving an unreal hand. ‘About time. I was getting lonely up here. Sorry I can’t give you a hand with your stuff . . .’

  Not that there was much ‘stuff’ to transfer, just the crew in their pressure suits, a couple of bags of personal items. They took only minutes to make the transfer, before the hatch swung closed, and the spaceplane undocked with a soft clatter of released clamps.

  Malenfant found himself in a cluttered cabin, with walls plastered with smart screens, a few couches, control and instrument stations, the slim forms of two coldsleep pods, and doors that, he knew, led off to tiny sleep cubicles, and even tinier bathroom and galley areas. Malenfant had inspected all this on the ground, when the ship was still a museum piece. Down there the space had seemed cramped for one person, let alone two plus an android – but, he recalled, the ship was designed for a maximum of five crew. As many of his colleagues in the astronaut office had observed back in the day, in space, with a lack of gravity affording access to a third dimension, there always seemed more room.

  Gershon himself was drifting towards the left-hand seat of the pair of couches set before the main control station. Of course, the commander’s seat. Malenfant clambered clumsily over and settled into the right-hand chair.

  The light changed. Softened, darkened. Glancing out of a window, Malenfant saw that the craft had sailed through a sunset into the shadow of Earth.

  Deirdra, wide-eyed, lunged towards a port – and she moved too quickly, Malenfant saw; her eyes opened even wider, and she retched.

  Bartholomew, evidently recognising the symptoms early, was on hand with a plastic sick bag. He guided Deirdra to a couch with effortless competence. ‘Come sit next to me. Don’t worry. You’d be surprised how many people get caught like this. And you were fine on the way to the Moon, weren’t you? Maybe you were a little more careful then. Just take it easy, everything will settle down with time. Anyhow we’ll be under thrust again soon. Correct, Gershon?’

  ‘Right. We’re about to leave Earth orbit. Half a gravity for more than a day before we reach cruise velocity. Everybody buckled up?’

  Malenfant frowned. ‘We’re leaving on the first orbit?’

  Gershon shrugged. ‘This isn’t your steam-engine age, Malenfant. Where everything had to be checked over a dozen times before you had the confidence to take a step out the door. You come aboard, you close the hatch, and—’ With a theatrical gesture he slammed his unreal fist down on an unreal panel. ‘Thrust! So long, suckers.’

  Fascinated, Malenfant watched the displays as the plasma drive cut in. He saw how the fusion reactor was ramped up, and how its energies ionised a stream of hydrogen, turning it into an electrically charged propellant for the magnetic fields to expel. It was a smooth system, coming online almost silently, almost without a tremor.

  And yet the thrust steadily built up, vectored down through Malenfant’s upright torso, so that soon he felt as if he was sitting in this chair, rather than being strapped into it lest he float away.

  He glanced over his shoulder, and got a smile from Bartholomew, and a thumb’s up from a pale-looking Deirdra.

  What a turn-up. So here was Reid Malenfant, centuries out of his own time, saved from a near-certain death, and now en route to Mars itself, where Emma Stoney waited for him.

  An Emma, anyhow.

  40

  The Last Small Step, once free of Earth, would coast through a half-ellipse around the Sun, heading out from Earth to Mars – a total distance of about three astronomical units, three times Earth’s distance from the Sun. Thanks to its plasma drive, the Step’s cruising velocity was around five hundred kilometres a second – around fifty times the velocity required to escape Earth’s gravity, which was about as much as Malenfant’s generation had achieved with their spectacular but slow lunar journeys.

  But such was the scale of the Solar System that even at that pace it would still take twelve days to get to Mars.

  For now: Earth, receding. That was the view, just as during their lunar journey. Malenfant sat with Deirdra, gazing out at a swathe of the night side. Even the oceans of this new Earth looked empty to Malenfant, deprived of the lights of the great fleets, fishing and whaling, that had once hunted on an industrial scale. But the world swam away quickly. Soon one brilliant sunlit slice of daylight swam into view, dazzling them, and then they could see the whole Earth as a fat crescent, at first filling the window, gradually diminishing.

  Deirdra’s eyes were wide, her young mind almost visibly expanding. ‘We really are travelling across the Solar System, aren’t we, Malenfant?’

  ‘We really are, kid.’

  ‘I wish my mother had come along.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘You don’t know her like I do. I think she would have loved seeing this. If she was only able to just let herself loose a little . . .’

  After a time they saw the Moon, swimming into view from left field. ‘Been there, done that,’ Malenfant murmured. ‘See you again, Karla.’

  And after that, at six or seven hours out from engine start, with no interesting view outside, the flight got kind of boring.

  A couple of days in, almost shamefaced, Deirdra suggested they listen to the broadcasts from Earth. ‘It will be mostly about us, though . . .’

  That turned out to be true, for better or worse. Their trek across the Solar System, unprecedented in the lifetime of most people alive on Earth in the twenty-fifth century, was being tracked with avidity by instruments both amateur and professional. Malenfant was impressed that deep-space telescopes were able to return detailed images of the ship as it drifted, unpowered, alone in the dark – images then broadcast back to the ship itself.

  ‘We’re making a sensation,’ Malenfant admitted to Deirdra after a day of this. ‘Or, more specifically, you are.’

  She blushed, making h
erself look much younger. But it was true. Greggson Deirdra hadn’t much been noticed in the build-up to the flight, as she had been swept along in the tail of Comet Malenfant. But now she was in deep space, now that people saw one of their own fearlessly crossing the interplanetary gulf, she had become an object of real fascination, as he could tell from the chatter they downloaded. Malenfant vaguely wondered what changes to this strange, static future society Deirdra’s extraordinary, exceptional, fascinating example might make. And what changes the experience might make to Deirdra herself.

  Thus the twelve days wore away.

  And, gradually, Mars itself loomed out of the starry background.

  The planet was noticeably red before it showed a visible disc, Malenfant observed. But that disc was mostly illuminated, like a three-quarters-full Moon.

  The half-gravity deceleration from their interplanetary cruise took less time than the acceleration at the departure from Earth, as they had lost some velocity in climbing out of the Sun’s gravity well, and Mars’s own gravity was kinder than Earth’s. Still, it took hours to complete the burn – a return of half-gravity weight that Malenfant found surprisingly uncomfortable after less than a couple of weeks in zero gravity.

  And it was when they were five hours out from Mars – with the planet, still three-quarters of a million kilometres distant, showing a disc about the size of Earth’s Moon – that Malenfant first spotted Phobos with the naked eye.