And the events that happened back at the origin of the Solar System, when the worlds were still colliding, could have had huge consequences for what followed.
Better to say, such events were the root of significant branchings of history types in the greater manifold. For example, the Moon seems to have been created from the stuff of the Earth, thanks to a chance collision with another young planet, back in that epoch. If the parameters of that collision had been slightly different—
You’d get two moons. A bigger moon, a smaller moon. No moon at all . . .
You see, if you meddled with the event that created the Moon, you would not reshape any individual history, but you would reshape the manifold itself, as a probability distribution.
Ah. So if I, my template, went back with Malenfant to the age of the Engineers and somehow blocked the aiming of Shiva in the first place—
You would not save this timeline, no. Which has suffered the consequence of a collision. But you could reshape the manifold, prune the branches, so that the probability of the existence of many timelines in which such a collision did not occur could be greatly enhanced.
Umm. OK. That’s a good thing. And yet it feels . . . not enough. Because I couldn’t save people in this reality, could I?
Well, most of the population of Earth alive at the time of the Destroyer did survive the collision events, Greggson Deirdra. There was, after all, plenty of warning. There are bunkers, underground habitats.
But this is just – aftermath. Earth, as a planet habitable for humans, is doomed.
True.
And the received wisdom in my day was that humans cannot survive without the Earth – without a healthy terrestrial biosphere.
True again. But.
But?
But that isn’t the whole story yet, Deirdra. You may not yet be ready to process further information. If I could give you an image of the Earth as it is now, as seen from its detached Moon – glowing white with cloud, in the light of a too-close Sun – you would also see another kind of cloud, all around it. Pinpricks in the dark.
I don’t understand.
Ships, Greggson Deirdra. Thousands of them. Spacecraft of many designs, habitats of all shapes and sizes. I told you that you had inspired a new wave of interest in space travel. Well, there you see it – or you will.
For now they linger close to the wounded mother. Perhaps some of them will lift survivors out of the toxic pit Earth has become. And then they will move on, seeking new homes, new ways of living.
Wow. So much for Homeward. I can guess the logic. So maybe we can’t survive beyond Earth. But let’s try anyhow.
A very human illogic, but rather magnificent. They call themselves the Murmuration.
I guess Malenfant had a profound influence after all. That image of Malenfant on the Pylon, with the whole world looking on . . . It became iconic.
No, Deirdra. You misunderstand. As did we. We too feared the Destroyer, and the termination of knowledge. We asked Malenfant for his help.
You did? Wow. That must have inflated his ego to bursting.
But in the end it wasn’t about Malenfant. It wasn’t Malenfant’s example that inspired humanity. Not directly. It was you who went to Malenfant when he was woken. You who helped him find his way to a spacecraft, so he could reach Emma Stoney once again. You who inspired the journey to the comet cloud, in an attempt to deflect Shiva. You who tried to save us all. You who went back to Phobos.
Yours is a story left incomplete. But what we know – it may have been instinct, you were very young, but it was a good and profound instinct. And, by following that instinct, you changed the world. You may have reshaped the manifold itself . . . Greggson Deirdra, this story has never been about Malenfant. He is a trickster – a catalyst, yes. But you are the hero.
That is why we have Retrieved you now. Because the Murmuration asked it of us.
I did not think to ask who wanted me. I’m sorry . . . By the way. What became of Bartholomew?
The medical-support assistant?
He followed Malenfant, and me, wherever we went.
And he followed you into Phobos. So the records show.
Ha! Quite a journey, for a walking, talking set of rules, as Malenfant would have said. I hope it ended well, for him.
Maybe I should rest now. That’s a lot to take in. Even if I’m not sure I believe a word of all this.
That is your privilege. And rest is a good idea. Then, perhaps, we can discuss what you would like to do next, Greggson Deirdra. I mean, this copy, now that your original has gone to the past.
Why, that’s obvious, isn’t it?
It is?
You have a Moon full of children here, tucked away in their sleep pods. Children who have outlived the planet of their birth. Who’s going to take care of them?
Oh, I don’t need more rest.
Let’s get to work.
Afterword
Reid Malenfant and Emma Stoney were recurring characters in my Manifold series of books (Time, Space, Origin and Phase Space, 1999–2001), in which the title ‘World Engines’ was first used.
John M. Logsdon’s After Apollo? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) is a fine recent account of the post-Apollo decision-making process about the space programme by Nixon’s White House from 1969 to 1971. David Jenkins’s Space Shuttle: The History of Developing the National Space Transportation System (Voyageur Press, 2002) is a comprehensive history of NASA’s shuttle programme (in our timeline). The accident that befell Malenfant’s Constitution (a name originally applied to the shuttle test article that became Enterprise) was modelled on an incident that did occur on the shuttle’s first spaceflight on 12 April 1981, as reported in NASA’s ‘STS-1 Anomaly Report’, when a surge from one of the solid rocket boosters caused a strut to fail in the orbiter’s reaction control system.
It is true that flying to the Moon proved hazardous to the cardiac health of the Apollo astronauts, perhaps due to the effects of deep-space radiation (M. Delp et al., Scientific Reports, vol. 6, Article no. 29901, 2016). Indeed Apollo 15 astronaut James Irwin briefly lost consciousness on the lunar surface due to a heart rhythm disturbance, only to have a heart attack twenty-one months after his mission (R. S. Johnson et al., Biomedical Results of Apollo, NASA SP-368, 1975). The brief quotation in Chapter 50, from a speech that would have been given by Nixon if the Apollo 11 astronauts had died on the Moon, is reported in Logsdon (p.18). Gerard K. O’Neill’s vision of our future in space (The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, William Morrow, 1977), developed from the 1960s, is heavily dated but continues to inspire. Christian Davenport’s The Space Barons (Public Affairs, 2018) is a recent study of the new generation of space entrepreneurs.
The idea of a universal basic income and Richard Nixon’s championing of the idea is explored in Rutger Bergman’s Utopia for Realists (Bloomsbury, 2017). The H. G. Wells quotation in Chapter 13 (‘the elimination of drudgery . . .’) is from his Outline of History (Cassell, 1920). John Lennon’s contribution to history was well expressed by the excellent ‘Double Fantasy – John and Yoko’ exhibition, at the Museum of Liverpool, 2018. The history and philosophy of the Outer Space Treaty and related developments is explored in Thomas Gangale’s The Development of Outer Space (Santa Barbara, 2009). Regarding future non-agricultural food supplies, in 2018 it was reported that a Finnish company called Solar Foods was developing a process to manufacture food from hydrogen-oxidising bacteria, water, solar power, and trace inorganic materials.
The partial reconstruction of an individual’s genome from the DNA of descendants has indeed been achieved in the case of an African, son of a slave, abducted to Iceland in the eighteenth century (A. Jagadeesan et al., ‘Reconstructing an African haploid genome from the 18th century’, Nature Genetics, doi:10.1038/s41588-017-0031-6, January 2018). Meanwhile experiments in compiling searchable databases of historical knowledge include ‘Seshat’, established in 2010 at the University of Connecticut (‘History Lessons’ by Laura Spinney, New S
cientist, 15 October 2016).
The use of a combination of AI and magnetic resonance imaging scanning to ‘read minds’ is an advancing technology; see the report by Timothy Revell in New Scientist of 10 March 2018 (‘AI reads your mind to describe images’).
My speculations on the future of the climate have been informed by, among other recent works, The Human Planet by Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin (Pelican, 2018), on the notion of the Anthropocene and its implications for the future of human society, The New Wild by Fred Pearce (Icon Books, 2015), a provocative depiction of the future of nature, and David Archer’s The Long Thaw (Princeton, 2009), a convincing study of the long-term effects of extreme climate change. The notion of using large-scale tree growth to absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has been studied by visionary thinker Freeman Dyson (‘Can We Control the Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere?’, Energy, vol. 2, 1977, pp. 287–91) and promoted by, among others, Pakistani politician Imran Khan with his ‘billion tree tsunami’ pledge of 2015. See also L. Ornstein et al. (‘Terraforming the Sahara’, Climatic Change, vol. 97, 2009, pp. 409–37) on using the irrigated afforestation of the Sahara and Australian Outback to offset global warming. The ‘Pleistocene Park’ concept of reviving the mammoth steppe to aid climate control is being trialled in Siberia (see E. Kintisch, ‘Born to Rewild’, Science, vol. 350, 2015, pp. 1148–51).
As reported in the Guardian of 20 October 2017, the Japanese Aerospace and Exploration Agency (Jaxa), which has long-term plans for lunar colonisation, has confirmed the discovery of large-scale underground lava tubes on the Moon, possibly suitable for habitation. Emma II’s mission to Phobos is based on proposals made in Leadership and America’s Future in Space (NASA, August 1987), a blueprint for NASA’s future drawn up by a team led by astronaut Sally Ride in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster. Useful accounts of long-duration spaceflight on the Soviet-era Mir and the modern International Space Station respectively are Dragonfly by Bryan Burroughs (Fourth Estate, 1998) and Endurance by Scott Kelly (Doubleday, 2017).
The drive system used in the Last Small Step spacecraft is based on the VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) concept; see E. Seedhouse et al., To Mars and Beyond, Fast!, Springer, 2017. ‘Skyfarms’ much as depicted here were suggested and described by M. Hempsall (‘Skyfarm: Feeding a Large Space Population’, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 70, 2017, pp. 3–11).
That the apparent secular deceleration of Mars’s moon Phobos might be due to the moon being hollow was indeed proposed by the Russian astrophysicist Iosif Shklovsky (The Universe, Life, and Mind, Academy of Sciences USSR, Moscow, 1962). The space probes have proved that (in our reality) Phobos is a natural object, but is undergoing an orbital decay entirely accounted for by tidal effects.
A survey of current speculation on the hypothetical properties of ‘time crystals’ – described in Chapter 54 – was given by Shannon Palus in New Scientist of 6 May 2017.
Alternate-history speculation on what might have happened if Lord Halifax, rather than Churchill, had become Prime Minister of Great Britain in the crisis of 1940 has been developed by, among others, Andrew Roberts in his essay on ‘Prime Minister Halifax’ in More What If, ed. Robert Cowley (Macmillan, 2002). A recent and authoritative account of the post-war British space programme is C. N. Hill’s A Vertical Empire (Imperial College Press, 2012). The ‘Black Prince IV’ launch vehicle sketched here is based on Hill’s own speculation (p. 330) on how the British technology of 1964 could have been used to build a launch vehicle (almost) capable of sending a crewed Gemini spacecraft to orbit – a speculation Hill made in response to a similar design in a story called ‘Prospero One’ by myself and Simon Bradshaw (1996). A recent history of the British Aircraft Corporation’s ‘Mustard’ concept of the 1960s is Dan Sharp’s British Secret Projects 5: Britain’s Space Shuttle (Crecy Publishing, 2016). The British nuclear-power rocket engine technology hinted at here is based on the early post-war research described by Arthur C. Clarke in his Interplanetary Flight (Temple Press, 1950) and featured in his own early fiction. Today, under the UK Space Agency (search under www.gov.uk), a new generation is developing a new space industry in Britain.
Elizabeth Tasker’s Planet Factory (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2017) is a useful summary of the latest thinking on the formation of planetary systems. There are believed to be many rogue planets between the stars. The first known interstellar visitor to the Solar System, an asteroid, was observed in 2017 (‘Meet ’Oumuamua, the First-Ever Asteroid from Another Star’, Mike Wall, Scientific American, via Space.com, 16 November 2017).
The planetary rockets described here were inspired in part by a paper by Swiss physicist M. Taube (‘Future of the Terrestrial Civilisation Over a Period of Billions of Years’, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 35, 1982, pp. 219–25) on methods to move the Earth in a future age when our Sun will swell to a red giant.
All errors and misapprehensions are of course my sole responsibility.
Stephen Baxter
Northumberland
September 2018
Also By Stephen Baxter From Gollancz:
NON-FICTION
Deep Future
The Science of Avatar
FICTION
Mammoth
Longtusk
Icebones
Behemoth
Reality Dust
Evolution
Flood
Ark
Proxima
Ultima
Obelisk
Xeelee: An Omnibus
Xeelee: Endurance
Xeelee: Vengeance
Xeelee: Redemption
NORTHLAND
Stone Spring
Bronze Summer
Iron Winter
THE WEB
Gulliverzone
Webcrash
DESTINY’S CHILDREN
Coalescent
Exultant
Transcendent
Resplendent
A TIME ODYSSEY (with Arthur C. Clarke)
Time’s Eye
Sunstorm
Firstborn
TIME’S TAPESTRY
Emperor
Conqueror
Navigator
Weaver
The Medusa Chronicles (with Alastair Reynolds)
The Massacre of Mankind
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Gollancz
an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment
London ec4y 0dz
An Hachette UK Company
Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2019
The moral right of Stephen Baxter to be identified as
the author of this work has been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior permission of both the copyright owner and the
above publisher of this book.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library.
ISBN (eBook) 978 1 473 22320 2
Typeset by Input Data Services Ltd, Somerset
www.orionbooks.co.uk
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