World Engine

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Because they picked up your call, from Phobos. Don’t forget that.’

  ‘So, you see, Malenfant, you at least are reasonable. Your story, I mean. It’s reasonable you should be here, now, sixty years old, physically, even after four centuries. Right?’ She made chopping motions in the air with her right hand, in a row, as if slicing a carrot. ‘There is a chain of consequences that has delivered you now, a man born in 1960, at physical age sixty, to this year 2469. This impossible, ridiculous year. It is logical. Even scientific. I can understand all that. Whereas I . . .’ She sighed. ‘I was born in 1970, and I feel like I’m thirty-five, even though I never got frozen for four hundred years. Your doctor has confirmed that, by the way.’

  ‘What? That you’re physical thirty-five? He never told me.’

  ‘There are subtle markers – cell degradation and stuff – heck, he could have just cut my head off to count the tree rings. And there was independent evidence, for instance from this lander’s systems. The logs show a continuous record. Even the lander’s fabric, if you test it for cosmic-ray damage and such, is consistent with it having been launched from Earth orbit just a few years ago. Not centuries.’ She smiled at him tiredly. ‘I don’t blame him for checking. Neither Bartholomew nor I could come up with a way I could have faked all this, Malenfant. Or that it could have been faked. I left Earth aged thirty-four, and I’m thirty-five now. By any measurement you care to make.’ She smiled, looking tired. ‘I guess I took a short-cut.’

  ‘A short-cut?’

  ‘You may be right that we come from different alternate realities, Malenfant. Two strands in some higher-order manifold of possible universes. If so, the strands don’t seem to run in neat parallel lines, like lanes on a highway, do they? They must – touch – in a more complicated way. Here, in Phobos. And maybe other places like it.’

  He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. ‘This is all getting a little abstract, Emma. We should be talking about us, not the manifold.

  ‘Look. I have a confession to make.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘A very personal one. Suppose I told you this isn’t the first time I spoke to you. I mean, since I came out of coldsleep. Not the first time in this age, this twenty-fifth century.’

  She stayed very still, staring at him.

  ‘You may want another coffee.’

  ‘What do you mean,’ she said, ‘not the first time? It’s the first I remember.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, it would be.’

  And he told her the whole story, of his visit to the Answerers, and the Pylons, and the Codex revenants he had encountered there. And of his struggle to find a living descendant to donate a genetic sample to create a Retrieved copy of Emma herself.

  He told her about climbing the Pylon. He smiled. ‘I had to make a real ass of myself to get noticed. Or a hero.’

  ‘Malenfant . . .’

  ‘Speaking to that – image – was a comfort. I can see why people do it, I guess. But it wasn’t enough. Not for me. Not even for her, in the end. You, she, knew her limitations. But it worked.’

  ‘Malenfant! Shut up. Go back. You looked for your descendants. Our descendants. This can’t be right. We can’t have any living descendants, in this age. Because you and I never had kids. We never married. Oh . . .’ She closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘Damn it. I can’t think this way. We didn’t marry, where I came from. But where you came from—’

  He nodded sadly. ‘Where I came from, in the version of history that led to all this, we did marry, Emma. And we had a kid. Born ten years before you left for Phobos.’

  She just stood there. Eyes closed. ‘A daughter?’

  ‘A son. Born 1995. Michael. His name was Michael.’

  ‘And you didn’t think to tell me. As soon as you found me, as soon as you got me into that fancy ship of yours. You didn’t think to tell me straight away that we had a son . . .’

  ‘I – am sorry. No, I didn’t think.’

  ‘Did you think I would care about anything else? Would you have? Would you?’

  Now the dam broke, the tears came. She fell on him, thumping his chest with hard, clenched fists. He was holding her to him before he realised that he was crying too.

  Then they made more coffee.

  45

  They drank the coffee. They shared a couple of rock-hard Russian biscuits.

  Then they snuggled, on a blanket laid over a bare aluminium floor that felt soft as a feather-bed to Malenfant, such was the forgiving nature of Phobos’s half-per-cent gravity.

  And Malenfant told Emma all he could remember of Michael.

  From his birth, through his boyhood, his scrapes and successes at school and college. His first girlfriend at age thirteen. His ambitions. The great sundering of his young life when Emma – that Emma, his mother – had lost her life at Phobos. The start he had already been making in the burgeoning coal industry. A story that for Malenfant was cut short when Michael was aged twenty-four, and the Constitution crash had catapulted Malenfant across four centuries.

  Emma calmed. She laughed, cried, whispered questions.

  When they ran down, she asked, ‘So you say you brought me back, as some kind of reconstructed revenant. Couldn’t you do the same for Michael? You have the genetic data. I mean, his descendants are our descendants.’

  ‘Sure. That was going to be next.’ He smiled, thinking back over half-baked resolutions made during those lonely hours in his room in Birmingham. ‘I wanted to . . . keep him for later. Does that sound callous? I was looking at a long life stuck in a time that wasn’t my own. I guess, at one point, before I got the chance to come out here, finding Michael again was all I could think of that was worthwhile for me to try to do.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ she said slowly. ‘Maybe, when this is all over – whatever this is – we can go back, meet Michael together.’

  ‘I’d like that. But – look, how are we going to deal with this, Emma? What does it mean to be alive and conscious in a universe that turns out not to be a universe at all but a, a kind of fraying tapestry? I’ll tell you something you probably never knew – well, if it happened at all in your timeline. From when we were kids. It was when I was old enough to start asking questions such as “why are we here?” and “what happens when we die, Dad?” Well, your grandmother smuggled me a copy of the Catholic catechism. Or some kind of kids’ version. Who made you? God made me . . . Why did God make you? God made me to know Him, love Him and serve Him on Earth, so that I can be happy with Him for ever in Heaven. Something like that.’

  She smiled. ‘That’s a terrible thing for Grannie to have done to an Episcopalian kid.’

  He shrugged. ‘I guess, not by her lights. Was she trying to save my soul? Anyhow, it just impressed me, that’s all. Maybe not the answers themselves, but their sheer confidence and clarity. They are answers, after all, to the most basic questions. Why are we here? What is the point of my few decades of life in an infinite and eternal universe? At least “God made me” was an answer, it was logical, it made some sense. Even if it put us in our place, as if we were all dumb little robots or something, programmed to give prayers of thanks. And maybe we will find some meaning, someday. There may be no answer to the question, Who made you? But maybe we will discover some purpose in the future, if we join some kind of galactic federation of mind . . .’

  She smiled, not unkindly. ‘Deep stuff, Malenfant.’

  ‘Not particularly. As deep as I get, though. And it’s kind of disappointing to me that four hundred years on, despite all the people of this age have achieved – and for all they seem to have found a kind of contentment – they have no better answers to the most fundamental questions than we had.’

  ‘Yes. Disappointing. But – who made Phobos?’

  He looked at her, frowning. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Or shaped it, anyhow. That’s obvious, isn’t it? I don’t know who made the universe, let alone the manifold – let alone me – but there mu
st have been a maker of all this, a Phobos engineer. It’s clearly not a simple, natural object, unmodified. I mean, the discovery of its evident anomalies were why I – why we Emmas, a whole fleet of us across the manifold, maybe – were sent here in the first place. There’s the secular acceleration, the decaying orbit. So you and I come from different histories, from different reality strands in the manifold. Where is it those strands seem to cross?’

  ‘Right here,’ he said. ‘Inside Phobos.’

  ‘So what are we going to do about it?’

  He grinned at her. ‘Explore, I guess. And find out who’s behind all this.’

  ‘Then let’s get to work. You finished that coffee?’

  46

  It took three days after their first encounter with Emma before the crew of the Last Small Step were ready to mount a mission into Phobos. The logical next move.

  Much of the first day had been spent on what Bartholomew tactfully called the debrief, as Malenfant and Emma had got to know each other again. Or, strictly speaking, these versions of themselves met for the first time.

  The second day was spent mostly on arguing about who was going to explore Phobos.

  Gershon ruled himself out. ‘I’m a virtual-reality construct, designed for one thing, to fly this ship. Even if the projection technology were up to it, which it isn’t, I’d be no use down there.’

  Deirdra came over, drawn to the conversation. ‘So you aren’t going, Stavros . . .’

  ‘And nor are you,’ Bartholomew said gently.

  Deirdra exploded – predictably, thought Malenfant. ‘What? Of course I’m going.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Malenfant said.

  ‘Then who is?’

  Bartholomew ticked it off on his fingers. ‘Emma. Well, it’s kind of her expedition. Second, Malenfant. It’s kind of his. Third, me.’

  ‘You? You’re no astronaut.’

  Bartholomew sighed. ‘But I am an android, Deirdra. As Malenfant knows, I’m pretty strong and flexible – I did carry him up that Pylon in a full gravity, remember. I’m trained in emergency medicine, among other disciplines. And, unlike any of you, if I get broken, I have a kit of spare parts that just plug in.’

  Malenfant touched Deirdra’s arm. ‘None of us are prepared for this. But you are untrained, entirely inexperienced in this kind of work. Even just spacewalking. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well, I’m not,’ Gershon said. ‘If we lose these people, then I’m going to have to fly this ship back to Earth. And there’s no way I am competent to report on what happened here. Not even legally. I need you to take the bad news back home with me, Deirdra. That would be a tough job. Tougher than going down that hole in the ground, if you ask me.’

  ‘And in the meantime,’ Malenfant said, ‘when we do go down there, we need somebody responsible here in mission control. More responsible than old Footprints and Flags anyhow.’

  Deirdra pursed her lips, evidently thinking it over. ‘I think that’s about fifty per cent bullshit. But I’ll accept it. And I know I’m going to get my chance in the future. I’ll treat this as a training exercise.’

  Malenfant nodded approvingly. ‘That attitude would have got you a long way in the astronaut office. And the language. I mean, bullshit? Evidently I’m a bad influence.’

  After that, after they had all slept on it, a third day was spent on planning and preparation.

  All three of the expeditionary party were fitted out with the Step’s standard-issue pressure suits. These were smart pieces of kit, entirely new to Emma, of course, which Malenfant had already tried out, and he knew it was a slightly eerie sensation even to don such a suit as with soft rustles and creaks the smart fabrics of the joints and sleeves and boots and leggings adjusted themselves around the shape of your body. It was like a ghostly massage. But Emma was a veteran of both American and Russian space technologies, and she adapted to another new system easily.

  Even Bartholomew wore a suit. He didn’t need life support, but the suit contained recovery, comms and other gear – and offered some protection for a body that was optimised to function in an environment comfortable for humans.

  Also it made him look like he fitted in.

  Then they were each attached to a lightweight tether on a reel, a smart carbon material, super-strong, that could extend to hundreds of metres. The tethers could also act as comms links if they got out of line of sight. Even the spools were smart technology; at a vocal command from any of them, or Gershon or Deirdra in the Step, the tethers would smoothly haul their burdens back from whatever situation they faced.

  And they all had gas guns, effectively miniature rocket packs either fixed to their suits or handheld, which enabled them to manoeuvre in a weightless environment – and this moon’s half-per-cent gravity was close enough to zero for such systems to be useful.

  The gas guns were the nearest thing they had to a weapon, Malenfant realised. Of course they weren’t here to wage war, but to explore.

  For now.

  On that final day they all spent some time outside the Step, getting used to their suits and practising moving around with the tethers and the gas guns.

  Then, one more restless sleep.

  While Phobos waited.

  47

  Malenfant led the others towards the rim of the shaft in the ground of Stickney Crater, moving slowly, slowly.

  The feeble sun was low, and Malenfant cast a long shadow ahead as he progressed with cautious, floating steps. Around him the ground of Phobos, a dark plain littered with dust and rubble. At his side his companions, Emma and Bartholomew, both concentrating on every step they made – Bartholomew looking a lot more graceful, in fact, and Malenfant envied his machine-mind’s ability to learn quickly. Behind him on the grey dirt the two ships sat a respectful distance apart: the bulky upright-Apollo shape of the Last Small Step lander section, Emma’s spidery, much more flimsy-looking twenty-first-century lander. Before him a small drone camera, released from the Step, hovering thanks to squirts of a tiny rocket engine, a lens peering resolutely back at him.

  Over his head, Mars.

  Mars!

  They stopped a few metres from the rim of the pit, as they had planned. Their white suits were already streaked with grey-black dirt, muck thrown up from Phobos readily clinging to their legs and bellies. Some kind of electrostatic effect, Malenfant supposed. The suits would be murder to clean. They were already breathing hard, Malenfant noticed – he and Emma anyhow. This tentative low-gravity walk was more of a strain than it looked.

  The pit before him, wide, pitch dark, was like the terminus of the world. The drone hovered over its gaping mouth.

  Bartholomew reached out, and touched each of them with a gloved hand; Malenfant knew he was enabling fast downloads of medical data. ‘It may not feel like it, but you are both doing fine.’

  ‘How about you?’

  ‘Oh, nothing an oil change wouldn’t cure. OK. Phase two.’ Bartholomew knelt in the dirt, and from a bag slung at his side he withdrew a set of pitons, along with a heavy-duty glove, like a pitcher’s mitt. He pulled the mitt over his right hand, over the more delicate white spacesuit glove, and, settling, just drove a piton into the ground. The first piton was trickiest as his weight was negligible, but once that one was fixed he could use it as leverage to push home the second, and four more.

  ‘Show-off,’ Malenfant said.

  ‘We discussed this, Malenfant. It’s efficient to exploit my excess physical strength at moments like this.’

  ‘I know. Show-off even so. Let’s get the ropes fixed.’

  They attached their spooled tethers to the pitons with briskly tied knots.

  Emma marvelled at the flexibility of her gloves. ‘You ever tried to tie a knot in an old NASA EVA suit, Malenfant? Like wearing a suit of armour.’

  ‘Yeah. This latter-day century got some things right.’

  Now they set the tether spools down on the ground, anchored to the pitons, and checked the tether ends were securely fixed to att
achments on their suits. They checked each other’s tethers twice, and then their own. Only then was Malenfant satisfied.

  Only then did he lead the way to the lip of the shaft in the ground.

  He tried to be analytical, to observe.

  The shaft was circular, maybe fifty metres across – as neat as if it had been cut with a laser, he thought. Where surface dust had drifted the rim was a little rougher. In one place he saw a deeper gouge that looked like it was where the leg of Emma’s lander had caught the lip of the pit, and been ripped away. From here there was no sign of that landing leg.

  He knew that this was where Arkady, the cosmonaut, had gone deep inside the pit, and was lost. In this shaft which, according to Gershon’s measurements on landing, was – had been then anyhow – too deep to fit into the very carcass of Phobos. And now he had to follow.

  He looked down, into the pit. He thought he made out a faint glow, electric blue.

  Experimentally he picked up a rock, a loose conglomerate, and threw it into the hole. It sailed slowly out of sight, apparently without coming to any harm, falling into the deep interior dark.

  ‘Deirdra, you see us?’

  ‘Yeah. Out the window, and through the eyes of the drone, which is right over your head, looking straight down that shaft. Are you going in?’

  Malenfant took a breath. ‘We’re going in. Come on, guys, let’s do this.’

  The controls of his manoeuvring system were set on his sleeve, simple touch pads. A swiped right forefinger over left sleeve pad made his gas gun blip, and he rose gently off the ground. The pulses of the gun were too smooth and gradual to be felt individually, and it was as if he had suddenly acquired the ability to fly like Superman.

  He drifted over the shaft, to somewhere near its centre. Emma and Bartholomew hung in the sky alongside him, their jets invisible. Three Kryptonians together. He could see their faces as they waited for his lead.

  ‘In we go.’

  They descended in formation.