World Engine

by Stephen Baxter

  Emma called back, ‘This reminds me of the Mirs. The Russian space stations – in my timeline anyhow.’

  ‘We had the Mir too,’ Malenfant murmured. ‘I never went there. No American ever did.’

  ‘Adapting Mir technology as a deep-space habitat had always been in the Russians’ plans,’ Emma said. ‘In my timeline. If a Mir can last a couple of years in Earth orbit, it can last a couple of years as a habitat for a Mars mission. Provided you have cracked such problems as long-term life support without resupply from the ground, of course. My Timor had modules that were descendants of Mir and western technology, combined.’

  ‘How can such a station die?’

  ‘Easily,’ Emma said, moving deeper in. ‘I learned a lot in training – and the Russians learned a lot from experience, with their Mirs and the Salyut stations before that. Usually it’s a loss of power – and a Russian station’s power mostly came from the Sun, from solar panels. If you drift out of alignment – say because of a collision with another craft, or a pressure leak – you quickly lose input power. And if you exhaust your batteries before regaining alignment, you have to try to reorient the station manually. Then, when your panels are back in the sunlight, you replenish your batteries, and then power up and reboot the automatic guidance system . . . But you may not get that far. Inside a powered-down station the immediate threat isn’t the cold so much as a build-up of carbon dioxide, when the scrubbers fail. You quickly get sleepy, headaches . . . Oh, no.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Back here. I found somebody. A person. A, a body. Suit badly ripped—’

  Malenfant was distracted by a shifting shadow, on the panels before him.

  He looked up.

  A plummeting shape. Shadowed in the light of Bartholomew’s head torch. A human figure, arms and legs extended, like a vampire descending.

  A vampire in an orange spacesuit.

  Holding a club.

  For a heartbeat Malenfant couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  Then he yelled, ‘Bartholomew! Above you!’

  Bartholomew reacted with more than human speed, and for once Malenfant was glad to see such capabilities in action. Even as the attacker swung the club, the medic got in position to fend off the first blow – that club was actually a kind of wrench, Malenfant saw, designed for zero-gravity use, the head weighted heavily with counter-torque mechanisms – and then Bartholomew grabbed the attacker’s two hands, twisted in the air, and pinned him down against a work surface. All unnaturally quickly. The assailant kicked and thrashed, but Bartholomew held on firmly – but almost tenderly, Malenfant thought, dazed.

  He could see a mouth moving behind a spittle-flecked visor – a man’s face – but could hear no words.

  Emma came floating back, wide-eyed. ‘Holy shit.’

  ‘Seconded,’ Malenfant said. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yeah. He was nowhere near me.’

  ‘I’m fine too, by the way,’ Bartholomew called, his voice jarred by the struggles of his captive. ‘In case you wondered.’

  Emma pulled a lead from a suit pocket. ‘This is designed for Russian tech. If his suit has the right kind of interface I can talk to him. Bartholomew, can you hold him still?’

  ‘Still enough.’

  Then, abstracted, Emma looked round. ‘Malenfant. You better go see what I found in back.’

  She’d said, a body. OK.

  He picked his way cautiously deeper into the cluttered craft, made more hazardous now by the junk Bartholomew’s assailant had disturbed. And he listened in to Emma’s halting conversation, broadcast over their own loops.

  ‘—ub’yu! Ya tebya ub’yu!’

  ‘He’s saying, “I will kill you.” I think he means you, Bartholomew.’

  ‘Great. I can understand him, of course.’

  Emma said evenly, ‘Umm – listen, don’t be afraid. Ne boysya. Uspokoysya. Be calm.’

  ‘Ostav menya v pokoye!’

  ‘Well, we can’t leave you alone, now you tried to kill us. Stop struggling. He won’t hurt you. Umm – menya zovut Emma. Emma.’

  The Russian shut up, his breathing noisy and ragged on the loop.

  Malenfant reached the body. A pressure suit ripped open at the back. Congealed blood. He recoiled from touching the obviously dead figure. But he could read a name tag.

  ‘Emma. Remind me. What was the surname of your Arkady?’

  ‘Vy govorite kak Moskva.’

  ‘He says I sound like a Muscovite . . . Berezovoy, Malenfant. His name was Berezovoy.’

  ‘Then I guess we found him. Name tags in both Cyrillic and English, like yours, Emma. What’s left of him.’

  To Emma’s credit, her voice barely wavered as she tried to calm the Russian. ‘Hush, now. Ne boysya. Ne boysya . . .’

  49

  Just take it easy. You’re safe now.

  What is this place?

  This is our ship. It is called the Last Small Step. You have been here three days – three days since we found you, in the pit on Phobos. One of us is a doctor. He – well, he is not human, he is a machine. I am not sure of the appropriate Russian vocabulary. A machine made like a human. But he is a doctor, and a competent one, and he has treated you scrupulously. You were suffering from starvation, dehydration, frostbite where your suit fabric failed, various trauma wounds, blood loss, and some radiation sickness which—

  Radiation sickness? How can that be treated?

  Good question, with a complex answer. It is difficult to describe. This being, Bartholomew, comes from a later epoch than – well, than us. His medicine is advanced. You must rest. But you are healing well . . . Can you hear me? Can you understand me?

  Your Russian is good. Your accent is strong but not incomprehensible. Yet I understand very little of what you say. Epochs?

  I am sorry if—

  I am your guest. I must thank you for sheltering me.

  You would have done the same, if the positions were reversed.

  I hope so. But I attacked you. I was frightened. I thought, you see, that whatever had harmed your comrade was coming after me. I have been alone for some time. One’s imagination works.

  I understand.

  I apologise. I should have welcomed you with vodka, and salo.

  Salted pork fat. Love it.

  You know our customs. But – but what ship is this? I recognise nothing like it in reports I have seen of vessels built by Russia, the United States, China.

  Well, it was built by none of those nations. Indeed those nations no longer exist . . . At least, I don’t think so. We will come to that. I understand little more than you do, frankly. I am a – newcomer too. But I am the only Russian speaker among us. We have machinery capable of translation, but we thought it best . . . This is a ship that was sent out from Earth to retrieve me, and my partner, from Phobos. As I said, it is called the Last Small Step—

  Your partner?

  He flew to Phobos with me, with one other, who did not follow us to . . . here. My partner was a cosmonaut, as you are.

  A cosmonaut? Russian?

  His name was Arkady Berezovoy.

  Ah. Indeed. I found him in the chamber of the blue hoops, his suit badly damaged. Yes, I read the name tag. Berezovoy. I feared he had been attacked.

  No. I think that the sharp edges of the blue hoops . . . It was an accident.

  I took him into the Mir. I tried to save him. He died in my arms. But otherwise . . .

  This make no sense. No sense at all. You are the woman who spoke to me before. In the Mir. Do I have that right, at least? The woman who speaks like a Muscovite.

  That’s right. My name is Emma Stoney. I . . . I am thirty-five years old. I am an astronaut. I flew with NASA. I spent a long time learning Russian. I always anticipated, you see, that if we were ever to get to Phobos – we, humanity – it would need to be a mission mounted by Russians and Americans, together. I learned my conversational Russian at Star City. Which of course is near Moscow. So, I guess I picked up the
accent, the idioms.

  There is much I do not understand. Things that do not fit. Americans and Russians, flying together to Phobos? Ha! They would strangle each other before they passed the Moon.

  I’m sorry. I’m making the same mistake the Step crew made with me when they found me. I was stranded on Phobos, like you. It turned out there was a lot of knowledge, experience that we had that did not overlap.

  I do not understand.

  Nor do I, actually. Or any of us, I don’t think. But we found out that it is best to start with the specifics. The big picture makes no sense. But the specifics, the human details, we can always find something in common there. We are all human beings, wherever we come from.

  I repeat my mocking laughter. Ha! You may relay that platitude back to the pilots of the drone planes, no doubt stationed in safety thousands of kilometres away in America and Britain and Germany, who destroyed Star City and other Russian space facilities, even as we explored Phobos. To touch a moon of Mars with Russian hands was a great triumph, even as the Americans cut off our feet.

  We must discuss all this.

  Perhaps. Let us start with details, as you suggest. Your partner? A cosmonaut?

  As I told you, his name was Arkady Berezovoy.

  Arkady . . . I do not recognise the name. When did he come to Star City?

  Why . . . I am not sure. I can tell you that he was an experienced cosmonaut, with several flights to his credit, before we left for Phobos in the year 2004.

  What? When? No, that is impossible. My own mission was the first ever to Phobos, even the Americans could not beat us to that goal, and we departed from Earth orbit in the year 2026 . . .

  Can you hear me?

  I’m sorry. You have to understand. We are in an extraordinary . . . situation here. All of us. And we find that we may have nothing in common with each other, not the most basic assumptions.

  Such as –

  Such as what the date is. I’m confusing you, I’m sure. You know, it’s not long since I found myself in this hall of mirrors myself. Maybe I’m not the right person to be doing this. I am sure the doctor has translation modules which—

  No. Please. Madam Stoney—

  Call me Emma.

  Emma. I am sorry for my shortness, my impatience. I can tell that this is difficult. Yet here you are, trying to help me. Please, stay. Let us work through this together.

  All right. Well, perhaps that will help me too. Thank you for your forgiveness – why, I still don’t know your name.

  Then we should start with that, Emma Stoney.

  I am Vladimir Pavlovich Viktorenko. My partner was Mikhail Alexeevich Glaskov. You may recognise my name; my father was the Viktorenko who commanded the flight of the famous Voskhod III in 1966.

  I don’t recall that . . . I apologise. Our pilot, Stavros Gershon, is something of a space buff, a fan of the exploits of that era . . . He’s saying now that our records show there were only two Voskhod flights. Perhaps your father’s flight was kept secret?

  Not at all! These were the days when the Soviet Union lauded its space exploits – while keeping the technical details private, of course.

  Look, Vladimir, go on with your account – tell me about your father. This kind of discrepancy is small fry, believe me.

  My father became internationally famous. He had taken the record for the longest spacewalk, on his flight. He visited events such as air shows, in Paris and Berlin, to speak of his experiences. This was all before I was born, of course. As I grew up he, and later my mother, proudly showed me memorabilia of those days. Photographs and medals.

  When were you born, Vladimir?

  In 1975. I am now fifty-three years old.

  Umm. So to you, this is the year 2028.

  A year that will be remembered, I am sure, not for my mission to Phobos, but for the treacherous pre-emptive war launched on Mother Russia by America and her allies . . .

  Tell me more about your family. You said that later it was your mother who had to tell you stories of the family, of your father’s exploits.

  Yes. He was first and foremost a pilot in the Soviet air force. He lost his life in the skies over Afghanistan in 1982.

  You were . . . seven years old. I am very sorry.

  I clung to his memory. It shone, never tarnished – and that was despite the western news and propaganda that was infiltrating the Soviet bloc by then. Propaganda, lies about space, and the astronauts and the cosmonauts . . . I never believed the accusations about Apollo 11 that were hurled at the Soviet Union. We had our own space programme, our own proud achievements – including my own father’s. We did not need to have committed such cowardly sabotage. Yet this was the background against which I grew up, as a small boy, a teenager.

  Vladimir. Pretend I don’t know anything of what you are talking about. What sabotage? What happened to Apollo 11?

  Ha! I am beginning to distrust you, Emma Stoney. What happened to Apollo 11? It became part of your national myth, the stories you Americans tell yourselves. The myth that you believe justifies your aggressive posture to the rest of the world. The King of England and his taxes! And now the so-called Apollo assassination! Lies about the KGB and their infiltration of the Grumman plants—

  Grumman? Grumman Aerospace, who built the Lunar Module? Please, Vladimir. Just tell me what you know.

  Well, it happened six years before I was born, you must remember. As the Apollo 11 Lunar Module came in to land on the Moon, the descent engine – it exploded. The astronauts were killed immediately, as far as anybody knows. The last words spoken, by Aldrin, became famous. He said, ‘Contact light.’ Meaning a probe, a physical probe, had just touched the surface, seconds before landing. And then . . .

  Umm. Stavros is checking our records again. In our timeline, or at least Stavros’s—

  Timeline? What do you mean?

  I . . . Hold fire on that, Vladimir. Stavros’s records do show that in our history there was a build-up of pressure and temperature in the LM descent engine, observed by mission control at Houston, just after landing. Caused by a blockage in a fuel line, fuel frozen by liquid helium. If the heat had got to it – yes, it would have gone up, like a small grenade. There was chatter about abort options.

  But the pressure in the lines subsided – the incident passed. It lasted only moments. Must have been terrifying, though.

  So the astronauts survived to reach the Moon’s surface – only to be hit by Armstrong’s heart attack, of course. That was how Armstrong died . . . Or at least that’s what Malenfant remembers. As far as I recall, both Armstrong and Aldrin saw out their mission and came home in triumph . . . I’m sorry, that doesn’t help, this must all be terribly confusing . . .

  Vladimir? Can you still hear me?

  This makes no sense. I cannot be mistaking these events, in my memory. Even though they occurred before I was born. Because they justified the aggressive posture which the United States adopted towards the Soviet Union thereafter.

  You mean, there was a suspicion that there was some kind of sabotage? That the LM was set up to fail on landing?

  My father believed that suspicion was seeded because when the Apollo 12 astronauts reached the Sea of Tranquillity to recover the bodies, they observed a Lunokhod, close by. Umm, an automatic probe, a rover. The Soviet space agency dispatched several such craft; they had landed one close by the Apollo 11 site, in order to inspect the accident. My father believed the motive was benevolent; perhaps our observations, shared with NASA, could have helped the Americans avoid another such disaster.

  But—

  But the Americans believed the Lunokhod was there to gloat. To return images, proof of what the KGB had achieved in destroying Apollo – in wrecking this supreme technocratic triumph, for the Americans. In any event, that moment was when enmity hardened between America and the Soviet Union, if it had not already.

  The Apollo 12 astronauts threw Moon rocks at the Lunokhod.

  That was November 1969. By 2028, those rocks w
ould be ballistic missiles targeting Soviet space facilities.

  That’s quite a story.

  You spoke of timelines. Different timelines, you mean. Different histories.

  That’s . . . what we appear to be tangled up in here, Vladimir. And different time zones, too.

  Time zones, you say?

  That’s another complication, Vladimir. You think the year is 2028. That is, I guess, where you came from. I believe it’s 2006.

  Impossible—

  I know. But to Malenfant, who came out here to find me in the Last Small Step, the year is 2469.

  I . . . perhaps your pronunciation has confused me . . .

  It’s the twenty-fifth century, Vladimir. Back on Earth, right now. It’s strange for me too. But I believe it; they’ve shown me broadcasts from down there . . . Not to mention the fact that the technology they have is way beyond anything we could aspire to, in our time. It’s something to do with Phobos, I think. Or maybe what it contains . . . You are silent . . . Once again I have this feeling I’m handling this badly.

  Let’s get back to what we should be talking about.

  You are seven years old.

  Your father dies.

  My father dies.

  A war hero. I was an only child. Sometimes I think that if I had had older brothers, I might have developed a more military mind, I might have followed my father in his career as a soldier, a warrior.

  But I was drawn to the other half of his achievements: his spaceflights. Space, you know, has been a dream of the Russian people since long before the Soviet Union even existed. Thinkers like Tsiolkovsky . . . Have you heard of Cosmism, Emma? A deep philosophy holding that the destiny for a unified mankind is space, and the infinity it offers. The eternity. That is why, I believe, space exploits were so essential to the Russian psyche.

  I know something of this. I trained in Russia, remember, and flew here with a cosmonaut. But we rarely spoke of such things, I admit. Perhaps even in my timeline the Russians were too wary of American materialism, as they saw it. This ‘Cosmism’, and whatever strand of thinking it had led to, stayed private. Mostly, anyhow. Until the vodka flowed.