World Engine

by Stephen Baxter

  Gershon looked profoundly unhappy. ‘Deeper than the moon is wide, Malenfant. Too deep to fit into Phobos. According to the radar reflections. That’s what I mean.’

  Malenfant had no idea what to make of that, what reply he could come up with.

  Proximity alarms pinged softly. The ship knew it was close to the surface now. Nearly down.

  Leave it for later, Malenfant.

  ‘Descending again,’ Gershon said, more calmly. ‘Nice and easy . . .’ Another, gentler shudder. ‘Harpoons away! And – contact light. We are now tethered to the ground – testing – yes, tethered securely. Thrusters off. We are already touching Phobos, holding on to it. Now we just reel ourselves in . . .’

  Malenfant peered out of the nearest window, leaning forward to see better. There was the crumpled ground below, illuminated by the spacecraft’s spotlights – and he could see the harpoon tethers, thin lines of bright orange reaching down to the battered ground. The lines rippled languidly as the lander pulled itself down to the surface.

  Now, as they dropped further, a horizon rose up around them, separating the dull grey ground below from a star-flecked sky above. The horizon itself, such as it was, was ragged, broken, and Malenfant realised he must be seeing the wall of Stickney, rising up around the lander.

  ‘There,’ Deirdra said, excited. ‘To the left! I think that must be your space probe, Stavros, the Mini-Sat.’

  Malenfant looked that way. Sure enough, there was a probe, classic architecture, an octagonal box set on spidery landing legs – he thought he saw threads that might be a miniaturised copy of the Step’s harpoon-and-tether system. Instruments were clustered on top of the main body, along with antennae, rods like open umbrellas and sprawling solar-energy panels. A separate pod might be a fusion pack.

  Aside from a little scattered dust on the hull, the centuries-old gadget looked as if it had been manufactured yesterday. There was even a neat white number ‘5’ stencilled on one panel. Malenfant imagined the probe beaming imagery back to Earth of this very landing . . .

  A tap on his shoulder.

  He turned. It was Deirdra. ‘You shouldn’t be out of your couch, not until we are down.’

  She pointed. ‘You’re missing it. Look over there.’

  She was right. He’d missed it. It was visible through the windows on the opposite side of the ship, and in various monitors.

  Another lander on the surface.

  A big one, this time. It reminded Malenfant of nothing so much as yet another derivative of the Apollo lunar lander, another box on a frame of legs, all wrapped in gold foil, and a bulbous, ungainly cabin on top. A cabin big enough for people. There were flags, fixed over the foil on the lander’s lower section. Malenfant made out the Stars and Stripes, what looked like the UN flag – and a red banner with a hammer and sickle in one corner. Behind it, more reflections, like silvery snow over the Phobos ground – no, some kind of blanket, spread out, solar cells maybe.

  ‘Nearly down,’ Gershon said. ‘Nice and easy. Three, two, one . . .’

  Malenfant barely felt the touchdown. The silencing of the attitude thrusters had been more noticeable.

  Gershon was grinning, pleased with himself, with the performance of his ship. ‘Beautiful. Just beautiful. The gentlest of kisses.’ He checked a couple of screens. ‘And you know what else? We already have some science data. Gentle as the landing was, we made this little moon ring like a bell, and the seismometers heard the echoes. Phobos is a heap of rocks and dust. A rubble pile, all the way to the centre. Just like everybody thought. Everybody but Shklovsky . . .’

  Malenfant barely heard. He was still staring out at that other craft. Only now did he notice that it seemed to be standing out of true, just off the vertical. Like it had come down hard. ‘I guess they followed the probe down, as we did. But a tough landing.’

  Deirdra stared at him. ‘You’re still missing the point, Malenfant. Look again.’

  And now he saw, before the lander, a single human being, standing alone on the surface of Phobos, encased in a heavy pressure suit. Grey Phobos dirt stained the lower legs. A figure who waved a gloved hand.

  Deirdra murmured, ‘How fast can you get into a skinsuit?’

  ‘Watch me.’

  Inside the Step’s airlock, Malenfant scrambled into his pressure suit. And he fitted the ‘snowshoes’ over his booted feet. Hastily fabricated back on Earth, with advice from Kaliope and the Answerers, the shoes were like tennis racquets fitted to his feet.

  When he was done, he opened the hatch. Stood in the open doorway, a few metres above the ground.

  He faced an astounding sight.

  Broken moon ground below. The long shadow of the lander cast by low, obviously diminished sunlight. Mars itself hanging fat and heavy in the sky over his head. He studied this view for maybe a dozen heartbeats.

  Then he got to work. He turned cautiously, clambered down the Step’s short ladder, and let himself drop to the surface.

  That last metre, after a journey of over four hundred million kilometres to Phobos, seemed to take an age. He watched his feet all the way down.

  The snowshoes settled on the surface with a soft crunch.

  When he was satisfied he wasn’t actually sinking, he lifted one foot and took a step. He left behind compacted dust, a clear print. Another step.

  ‘The snowshoes work fine,’ he reported. ‘I can move about freely.’

  ‘We hear you.’ Gershon’s voice.

  ‘Poetic first words on Phobos, by the way, Malenfant. History will remember the snowshoes.’

  ‘Shut up, Bartholomew.’

  Only now did he lift his head, to look through his visor, straight ahead.

  The similarity of that other lander to the old Apollo LM was even more striking, up close. He saw now that its landing legs were fitted with broad pads, not unlike his own snowshoes. An obvious design choice. Everything about the bird made sense.

  But this was not the Phobos lander design he remembered from Emma’s mission back in 2005. His Emma. For one thing they hadn’t carried the solar cell blanket he could see behind the ship.

  Not only that, the lander did seem to be leaning. He could see only three splayed legs of what had to be a set of four, and a corner of that lower module seemed to be resting on some heap of rubble. A bad landing, and they had come close to disaster, that was obvious. A skilful recovery, by somebody.

  And there, that lone figure before the open hatch.

  Malenfant took cautious steps forward. The visitor just stood there. Waiting for Malenfant, evidently watching.

  ‘They’re trying to talk to you, Malenfant,’ Gershon reported. ‘It’s a primitive comms system but we should be able to interface to it.’

  Primitive. The suit too looked antique, at least in the context of the tech of the twenty-fifth century that Malenfant was becoming accustomed to. More like a suit of his own shuttle era, or even the Apollo days, the stiff pressurised balloons the first lunar astronauts had had to walk around in. The sleeves and legs were covered in pockets. On the breast, miniature copies of those three flags, and what looked like a mission patch – hands joined, a handshake over Mars, with a rocky Phobos whizzing around it, the trajectory indicated by a curving arrow.

  A gold visor, obscuring the face.

  A name patch.

  He had to get close to read it. Sixty-year-old eyes, Malenfant. The name was given twice, once in what looked like Cyrillic writing, the second in English.

  STONEY, E. MSP.

  Gershon whispered, ‘We’ve set up the interface. You can talk to her, Malenfant.’

  Malenfant smiled. ‘Who ordered the pepperoni?’

  Now she moved, stumbling towards him.

  They collided like hot air balloons, and floated up into the vacuum, defying the feeble gravity of Phobos.

  43

  Emma, just take it easy. Relax. You’re safe now.

  Huh. Safe? Well, as I am still stuck on Phobos that’s something of a relative term, isn�
��t it?

  Fair comment. But at least you’re not alone any more.

  Aren’t I? All this seems like some kind of dream. Maybe I’m dying.

  I can assure you you’re not. My name is Bartholomew. I am—

  The doctor. Right . . . To die in space, though. You hear talk around the astronaut office. Gossip that leaks over from the Russians, who seem to have had way more accidents than they ever publicly acknowledged. Rumours that anoxia, dying for lack of air, isn’t the worst way to go. The brain kind of shuts down, and you stop being afraid, and you get a kind of euphoria, just before the end. A vision of Heaven, maybe.

  Not that Arkady ever spoke of that. Not openly, anyhow. Even when we were coasting through interplanetary space, further than anyone had gone before – nobody but the three of us—

  Arkady?

  Arkady Berezovoy. Phobos lander pilot. Very experienced cosmonaut. You can imagine, we two got to know each other very well during our mission, along with Tom Lamb. Arkady had grown up in a military town, a place full of legends of the Great Patriotic War, he said. But he had his eyes on space, even as a kid. And his grandmother encouraged him, would you believe? He said she gave him motion-sickness training on a fairground swing. I think he was being serious. He went on to become a test pilot at the Moscow Institute of Aviation. Worked in the design office, and flew helicopters and jets.

  During the flight, when he got the chance, he would spend hours talking to his family, back on the ground. They would joke, and sing corny old Russian folk songs. That was the Russian way, I think. He found it tough getting further and further out of touch, as we flew. The time delays, you see. And when he was working he could be dour.

  Very tall, with striking blue eyes. I think he was the most serious person I ever met. I trusted him with my life.

  He and Tom were like older brothers to me – I was the baby of the crew at thirty-four when we launched – thirty-five now, by the way. Thirty-six in a couple of months . . . And Arkady was my only companion, when the two of us came down to the surface in the lander. When we fell into the deepest hole in the universe . . . or something.

  Look – is all this a fantasy? As I gulp my last molecules of air? Can this be my anoxic version of paradise? A vision of Reid Malenfant grown old? Ha! Is that the best you can dream up, Emma?

  You are panicking, Emma. Really, you are safe. As safe as you can be in a spacecraft tethered to Phobos, as you say. You are not hallucinating. Take deep breaths – there is plenty of air for you, for all of us. Well, not that I need any of it. Everything you see around you, this spacecraft, is real.

  Huh. For a given value of ‘real’, as the poindexter types in Mission Control would say. That pilot guy of yours. Gershon? Some kind of hologram, right? When he tried to shake my hand—

  Stavros apologises for that. It was a reflex – a very human gesture by a being that is, as you say, only a projected simulacrum of a human.

  And you aren’t real either. In a sense. That crack about not breathing was a clue, right? You’re breaking it to me gently.

  I am not human. My name is Bartholomew. I have a human name, and I am a simulacrum of humanity. Unlike Stavros I do have a physical presence. That is necessary to perform my duties of medical support, the mission for which I was constructed. I have been assigned to the care of Reid Malenfant since he was extracted from his coldsleep tank on the Moon.

  Say what? In my time there are nothing but relics of Apollo on the Moon.

  I apologise. Malenfant asked me to talk to you first, to give you an easier transition. Here I am carelessly bombarding you with too much context-free information.

  I’ll say. Coldsleep? What’s that, some kind of suspended animation?

  The key point—

  How long was he suspended for? Is that why he looks so damn old? . . . No, that makes no sense. Suspended animation ought to keep him young. Look – I’ve picked up some hints about this – what date is it, where you come from?

  Emma – one step at a time. Let’s go back. You have been here on Phobos eight months. As you have experienced it, that is.

  About that.

  Malenfant knew you as a child, of course.

  Well, he was ten years older than me – but yes. Our families were close. Even if his was Episcopalian, mine Catholic. He always said he would convert if we had ever married . . .

  He tells me you were born in April 1970.

  That’s correct.

  And therefore, if you are now thirty-five, as you’ve told me—

  I know where you’re going. This year ought to be 2006. The year after I arrived at Phobos, right? My thirty-sixth birthday in a couple of months. But I already know something is wrong with that theory. Because we did not have giant Space Odyssey nuclear spacecraft like this one in my 2006. Let alone Blade Runner replicant doc-bots . . . Of course it’s possible that you people are out of time, not me.

  Anything is possible, it seems. We must evaluate the evidence.

  So we must. But no time-hopping explains Malenfant’s grey hairs.

  He has no hair.

  Don’t get smart. You know what I mean. How did he get that much older?

  Emma. You must be patient. All things will come clear, in time. The key point, you see, is that Malenfant was revived from his long sleep because of you. Because of the distress calls you transmitted from your lander, here on Phobos. Calls which mentioned Malenfant by name.

  And so –

  And so – well, here he is. Come to save you, Emma.

  Hmmph. Maybe. But he hasn’t got the guts to talk to me. Leaves it all to his Terminator sawbones.

  That reference is a little obscure, even though for the last months I have enjoyed Malenfant’s trove of elderly pop-culture gag lines. There is one question which I am sure would occur to Malenfant to ask, were he with you now. You mention relics on the Moon. Of the Apollo missions, you mean? What relics?

  Footprints and flags, and discarded lander stages, other junk. Why?

  You do not mention a grave. Which is what most people, I believe, first think of when they consider early human monuments on the Moon.

  A grave? Whose grave? Nobody died up there, back then. Everybody came home safe . . . Look, what is this? I’m getting more and more confused, I admit it, oxygen deprivation or not.

  I apologise again. I was indulging in curiosity, I suppose.

  For a robot you have some very human flaws.

  So Malenfant repeatedly reminds me. Emma – we have plenty of time. Just talk to me. Tell me your story. How you ended up here, alone on Phobos, moon of Mars.

  OK. But I wasn’t supposed to be alone . . .

  Come on, Emma. Think of it as a debrief. Like you are back in the astronaut office in Houston with Joe Muldoon and the rest of the bubbas . . .

  So my name is Emma Stoney.

  I am thirty-five years old. As I told you. On 21 November 2004, I departed Earth orbit from the Bilateral Space Station, in a craft called the Timor. I was one of a three-person crew. Mission commander was Colonel Tom Lamb of NASA. Once he had been the youngest Apollo Moonwalker. Lander pilot was Arkady Berezovoy of the Russian space agency, as I have mentioned. And I was mission specialist – I am a NASA astronaut. Our mission was to be the first deep-space crewed mission since the last of the Apollo missions to the Moon. And we were going much further—

  To Phobos. Moon of Mars.

  Correct. Where we were to investigate some anomalies, not least the secular acceleration of the moon – that is, why its orbit was decaying.

  We were following up Earth-based observations of Phobos that dated back to the 1960s, and automated spaceprobe investigations that led up to the Mariner 11 mission, dedicated to Phobos, in the late 1970s. A couple of years after that the idea of a crewed mission to Phobos was first floated, I think, by Carl Sagan and others. If ever there was a conundrum that deserved a specialist on the spot, it was Phobos. That was even before the Mariner started relaying back data about anomalous radiation types e
manating from the moon’s interior – specifically, from what we thought were craters inside Stickney.

  Radiation types?

  A kind of sunlight, it seemed, and at first it was assumed to be some kind of reflection. But spectral analysis by the Mariner showed it not to be our kind of sunlight at all. The astrophysicists made guesses. Once, soon after it was formed, the Sun was much dimmer, you know; its output strengthens with time. And back then sunlight had a subtly different spectrum. The Faint Young Sun, they call it. This isn’t my speciality, but it seems that what Mariner observed, glinting out of Phobos, was what you might have seen if you had studied the Sun from Martian orbit back around the birth of the Solar System itself. Which, needless to say, baffled everybody . . .

  Tell me how you got to be the one to fly to Phobos. You were born in 1970.

  Right. We established that.

  So I missed Neil Armstrong on the Moon. And after Apollo was done, no Americans in space for a decade.

  It was Malenfant who got me into space, you know. He was always this big gangly kid with his head full of dreams of space, and his books and posters and construction kits, and the model rockets and such he was already flying. He had absolutely no interest in a snotty little brat like me, needless to say. But he was a big presence in our lives. I guess everybody in the neighbourhood thought that he was on his way someplace special, space or otherwise. He had this charisma, you know?

  I do know. He rather imported that quality into my world. But don’t tell him I said so.

  Well, they started flying the space shuttle in 1981. I was eleven years old, and avid, and I watched the whole thing, even though Malenfant was away by then. I had posters of Young and Crippen in their spacesuits on my bedroom wall, like they were rock stars.

  Young and Crippen. What about Fred Haise?

  Who? The Apollo 13 Fred Haise? What about him?

  He was the booster commander on the first orbital flight of the STS. Malenfant would disconnect me if I got that wrong.

  . . . Sorry. What ‘booster commander’? Have we got our wires crossed? The STS, the space shuttle system, has solid rocket boosters. Crew only on the orbiter. It was always a controversial design choice, and faults in the boosters caused the Challenger disaster of . . . You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?