Space m-2

by Stephen Baxter

  A great pulse of torn gas fled toward her over the horizon. It subsided in great arcs to the star’s surface, the battered atoms flailing in the star’s magnetic field — and again, a few seconds later — and once again, at deadly regular intervals. And the breaths of plasma grew more violent.

  “My God, Frank.”

  “Neutron star rise,” Paulis said gently. “Just watch. Watch and learn. And remember, for all of us.”

  The neutron star came over the horizon now, stalking disdainfully over its companion’s surface, their separation only a third that between the Earth and its Moon. The primary rose in a yearning tide as the neutron star passed, glowing gas forming a column that snaked up, no more than a few hundred meters across at its neck. Great lumps of glowing material tore free and swirled inward to a central point, a tiny object of such unbearable brightness that the periscope covered it with a patch of protective darkness.

  And then the explosion came.

  Blackness.

  Madeleine flinched. “What the hell—”

  The smart periscope had blanked over. The darkness cleared slowly, revealing a cloud of scattered debris through which the neutron star sailed serenely.

  “That’s a burster,” Paulis said dryly.

  The cloak of matter around the neutron star was building up again.

  Flash.

  The periscope blacked out once more.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Paulis said. “It comes every fourteen seconds, regular as your heartbeat. An X-ray flash bright enough to be seen from Earth.”

  She studied her instruments. The data was flowing in, raw, uninterpreted. “Paulis, I’m no double-dome. Tell me what’s happening. The primary’s star-stuff—”

  Flash.

  “ — fuses when it hits the neutron star, right?”

  “Yes. Hydrogen from the primary fuses to helium as it trickles to the neutron star’s surface. In seconds, the helium collects over the crust into a kind of atmosphere, meters thick. But it is a transient atmosphere that abruptly fuses further, into carbon and oxygen and other complex molecules—”

  Flash.

  “ — blasting away residual hydrogen as it does so.”

  The neutron star roared toward the flower-ship, dragging its great hump of star-stuff beneath it, and—

  Flash.

  — bellowing out its fusion yells. The Gaijin pulled the flower-ship’s petals in farther; the mouth of the ram closed to a tight circle.

  A circle that dipped toward the neutron star.

  “What are they doing?”

  “Try not to be afraid, Meacher.”

  The flower-ship swooped closer to the primary; red vacuoles fled beneath Madeleine like crowding fish. She sailed beneath the neutron star, skirting the mouth of fire it tore open in the flesh of the primary.

  Her body decided it was time for a fresh bout of space adaptation syndrome.

  The waste management station was another shuttle-era veteran, and it took some operating. When she came out, she opened her medical kit and took a scopalomine/Dexidrene.

  “Meacher, you’re entitled to a little nausea. You’re earning us a firsthand view of a neutron star. I’m proud of you.”

  “Frank, I’ve been flying for twenty years, fifteen professionally. I’ve flown to the edge of space. I have never had a ride like this.”

  “Of course not. No human has, in all of history.”

  “No human except Reid Malenfant.”

  “Yes. Except him.”

  She looked inside herself, and found, despite the queasiness, she was hooked.

  Maybe it didn’t matter what she would find, back home. Maybe she would choose to go on, like Reid Malenfant. Submit herself to the beautiful blue pain, over and over. And travel on to places like this…

  “Listen, Meacher. You’ll have to prepare yourself for the next encounter with the burster. The neutron star’s orbit around its parent is only eleven minutes.” His image seemed to be breaking up.

  “Frank, I think I’m losing you.”

  “No. I’m just diverting a lot of processing resources right now… I have something odd, from that neutron star flyby. I need some input from you.”

  “What kind of input?”

  “Interpretation. Look at this.”

  He brought up an image of the neutron star, at X-ray wavelengths. He picked out a section of the surface and expanded it. Bands of pixels swept over the image, enhancing and augmenting.

  “Do you know anything about neutron stars, Meacher? A neutron star is the by-product of a supernova — the violent, final collapse of a massive star at the end of its life. This specimen is as heavy as the Sun, but only around twenty kilometers wide. The matter in the interior is degenerate, the electron shells of its atoms collapsed by the pressure. The surface gravity is billions of g, although normal matter — bound by atomic bonds — can exist there. The surface is actually rigid, a metallic crust.”

  She looked more closely at the image. There were hexagons, faintly visible. “Looks like there are patterns on the surface of the neutron star.”

  “Yeah,” Paulis said. “Now look at this.”

  He flicked to other wavelengths. The things showed up at optical frequencies, even: patterns of tidy hexagons each a meteror so across. In a series of shots shown in chronological order, she could see how the patterns were actually spreading, their sixfold symmetry growing over the crystalline surface of the neutron star.

  Growing, to her unscientific mind, like a virus. Or a bacterial colony.

  Life, she thought, and she dissolved into wonder.

  “The Gaijin don’t seem surprised,” virtual Frank said.

  “Really?”

  “Life emerges everywhere it can. So they say… The star creatures’ metabolism is based on atomic bonds. Just as is ours — yours. Their growth paths follow the flux lines of the neutron star’s magnetic field, which is enormously powerful. Evidently the complex heavy atoms deposited by the fusion processes assist and stimulate their development. But eventually—”

  “I think I can guess.”

  On multiple softscreens, hexagons split and multiplied into patterns of bewildering complexity, ever changing. The images grew more blurred as the star’s rudimentary, and transient, atmosphere built up.

  “Think of it, Meacher,” Paulis said. His image was grainy, swarms of blocky pixels crossing his face like insects; nearly all the biopro’s immense processing power was devoted to interpreting the neutron star data. “The very air they move through betrays them; it grows too thick and explodes — wiping the creatures clean from the surface of their world.”

  “Well, not quite,” Madeleine said. “They survive somehow, for the next cycle.”

  “Yes. I guess the equivalent of spores must be deposited on or below the surface of the star. To survive these global conflagrations, every fourteen seconds, they must be pretty rudimentary, however — probably no more advanced than lichen. I wonder how much these frenetic little creatures might achieve if the fusion cycle was removed from their world…”

  She watched the surges of the doomed neutron star lichen, the hypnotic rhythm of disaster on a world like a trap.

  She stirred. Did it have to be this way?

  “Meacher—” Paulis said.

  “Shut up, Frank.”

  Maybe she wasn’t going to turn out to be just a passive observer on this mission after all. But she doubted if John Glenn would have approved of the scheme she was planning.

  The Gaijin told Paulis, by whatever indirect channels they were operating, that they planned two more days in orbit.

  Madeleine called up Paulis. “We have a decision to make,” she said.

  “A decision?”

  “On the siting of our UN-controlled teleport gateway.”

  “Yes. Obviously the recommendation is to place the gateway at L5, the trailing Lagrange stable point—”

  “No. Listen, Frank. This system must have a Saddle Point on the line between the neutron
star and its parent — somewhere in the middle of that column of hydrogen attracted from the primary.”

  “Of course.” He looked at her suspiciously. “There’s a gravitational equilibrium there, the L1 Lagrange point.”

  “That’s where I want the gateway.”

  He looked thoughtful — or rather his face emptied of expression, and she imagined mips being diverted to the data channel connecting him to the Gaijin. “But L1 is unstable. It would be difficult to maintain the gateway’s position. Anyway, there would be a net flow of hot hydrogen through the gateway, into the transmitter at the Solar System end. We won’t be able to use the gateway for two-way travel.”

  “Frank, for Christ’s sake, that’s hardly important. We can’t get out to the Solar System Saddle Points anyhow without the Gaijin hauling us there. Listen — you sent me on this mission to seek advantage. I think I found a way to do that. Trust me.”

  He studied her. “Okay.” He went blank again. “The Gaijin want more justification.”

  “All right. We’ll be disrupting the flow of hydrogen from the primary to its neutron-star companion. What will be the effect on the neutron star?”

  Paulis said slowly, “Without the steady drizzle of fusing hydrogen onto the surface, the helium layer will cease its cycle of growth and explosion. The burster will die.”

  “But the lichen life forms will live. Won’t they? No more fusion blowouts every fourteen seconds.”

  He thought it over. “You may be right, Meacher. And, free of the periodic extinction pulse, they may advance. My God. What an achievement. It will be as if we’ll have fathered a whole new race… But what’s the benefit to the Gaijin?”

  “They say they’ve come to us seeking answers,” she said briskly. “Maybe this is a place they will find some. A new race, new minds.”

  There was motion beyond her windows. She looked out, pressing her nose to the cool glass. The Gaijin were swarming over the hull of their flower-ship like metallic beetles, limbs flailing angularly. They were merging, she saw, becoming a gruesome metallic sea that writhed and rippled.

  “The Gaijin seem… intrigued,” Paulis said carefully.

  She waited while he worked his data stream to the Gaijin.

  “They agree, Meacher. I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said.

  “Me too, Frank. Me too.”

  The Gaijin opened up the flower-ship’s petals, and once more Madeleine swooped around the thin column of star-stuff.

  As soon as the UN Saddle Point gateway was established and operational, the result was extraordinary.

  The gateway was set at the thinnest point of the column of hot hydrogen torn from the primary. The gateway flared lurid blue, continually teleporting. At least fifty percent of the primary’s hydrogen — according to Paulis — was disappearing into the maw of the teleport gate. It looked as if the column of material had been neatly pruned by some cosmic gardener, capped with an almost flat surface.

  “Good,” Madeleine said. “It’s worked… We’re moving again.” She returned to her periscopes.

  The ship approached the neutron star. The star’s ruddy surface sparkled softly as residual material fell into its gravity well. Once more the elaborate hexagonal patterns flowed vigorously across the surface of the star — but the lichen seemed, oddly, to pause after a dozen seconds or so, as if expectant of the destruction to come.

  But the fusion fire did not erupt, and the creatures surged, as if with relief, to new parts of their world.

  A fourteen-second cycle to their growth remained, but that was soon submerged in the exuberant complexity of their existence. Flowing along magnetic flux lines, the lichen quickly transformed their star world; major sections of its surface changed color and texture.

  It was stunning to watch.

  She felt a surge of excitement. The data she would take back on this would keep the scientists busy for decades. Maybe, she thought, this is how the double-domes feel, at some moment of discovery.

  Or an intervening god.

  …Then, suddenly, the growth failed.

  It started first at the extremes; the lichen colonies began shriveling back to their heart lands. And then the color of the patterns, in a variety of wavelengths, began to fade, and the neat hexagonal structure became chaotic.

  The meaning was obvious. Death was spreading over the star.

  “Frank. What’s happening?”

  “I expected this,” the interface metaphor said.

  “You did?”

  “Some of my projections predicted it, with varying probability. Meacher, the lichen can’t survive without their fusion cycle. Our intervention from orbit was somewhat crude. Kind of anthropocentric. Maybe the needs of the little creatures down there are not as simple as we imagined. What if the fusion cycle is necessary to their growth and existence, in some way we don’t understand?”

  The fusion cycle had delivered layers of complex molecules to the surface. Maybe the crystalline soil down there needed its fusion summer, to wipe it clean and invigorate it, regularly. After all, extinction events on Earth led to increased biodiversity in the communities that derived from their survivors.

  And Madeleine had destroyed all that. Guilt stabbed at her stomach.

  “Don’t take it hard, Madeleine,” Paulis said.

  “Bullshit,” she said. “I’m a meddler.”

  “Your impulse was honorable. It was worth a try.” He gave her a virtual smile. “I understand why you did it. Even if the real Frank won’t… I think we’re heading for home, Meacher. We’ll be at the Lagrange point gateway in a couple of minutes. Prepare yourself.”

  “Thanks.” Thank God. Get me out of here.

  A couple of minutes, and eighteen years into the future…

  “And, you know,” Paulis said, “maybe there are deeper questions we haven’t asked here.” That didn’t sound like Frank Paulis, but one of his more reflective companions. A little touch of Dorothy Chaum, perhaps. “The Gaijin could have brought you — the first human passenger, after Malenfant — anywhere. Why here? Why did they choose to show you this? Nothing the Gaijin do is without meaning. They have layers of purpose.”

  She thought of that grisly, slow dismantling in Kefallinia, and shuddered.

  “Perhaps we are here because this is the truth,” the Paulis composite said. “The truth about the universe.”

  “This? This dismal cycle of disaster? Helpless life forms crushed back into the slime, over and over?”

  “On some symbolic level, perhaps, this is the truth for us all.”

  “I don’t understand, Frank.”

  “Maybe it’s better that you don’t.”

  The truth? No, she thought. Maybe for these wretched creatures, here on this bizarre star relic. Not for us; not for humans, the Solar System. Even if this is the cosmos’s cruel logic, why do we have to submit to it? Maybe we ought to find a way to fix it.

  Maybe Reid Malenfant would know the answer to such questions by now — wherever he was, if he was still alive. She wondered if it would ever be possible to find him.

  But none of that mattered now, for electric blue light enveloped her, like fusion summer.

  Chapter 10

  Travels

  And, far from home, here was Malenfant, all alone save for a sky full of Gaijin, orbiting a planet that might have been Earth, circling a star that might have been the Sun.

  He peered down at the planet, using the telescopic features of his softscreen, for long hours. It might have been Earth, yes: a little heavier, a little warmer, but nevertheless compellingly familiar, with a jigsaw arrangement of gray-brown continents and blue oceans and streaky white clouds and even ice caps, all of it shining unbearably brightly. Was that textured greenery really forest? Did those equatorial plains breed some analogy of grass? And were those sweeping shadows great herds of herbivores, the buffalo or reindeer of this exotic place?

  But, try as he might, he found no sign of intelligent life: no city geometries, no glowing art
ificial light, not even the thread of smoke or the sprinkling of firelight.

  This wasn’t a true copy of Earth. Of course not, how could it be? He knew there was no Africa here, no America, no Australia; these strange alien continents had followed their own long tectonic waltz. But those oceans really were made of liquid water — predominantly anyhow — and the air was mainly a nitrogen-oxygen mix, a bit thicker than Earth’s.

  Oxygen was unstable; left to itself it should soon combine with the rocks of the planet. So something had to be injecting oxygen into the atmosphere. Free oxygen was a sure sign of life — life that couldn’t be so terribly dissimilar to his own.

  But that atmosphere looked deeper, mistier than Earth’s; the blue of the oceans, the gray of the land, had a greenish tinge. And if he looked through the atmosphere toward the edge of the planet, he could see a pale yellow-green staining — a sickly, uncomfortable color. The green was the mark of chlorine.

  He tried to explain to his Gaijin companion, Cassiopeia, what it was that kept him staring down at this new world, long after he had exhausted the analytic possibilities of his eyeball scrutiny. “Look down there.” He pointed, and he imagined interpretative software aligning his finger with the set of his eyes.

  IT IS A PENINSULA.

  “True…” Pendant from a greater continent, set in a blue equatorial sea and surrounded by blue-white echoes of its outline, echoes that must be some equivalent of a coral reef. “It reminds me of Florida. Which is a region of America—”

  I KNOW OF FLORIDA. THIS PENINSULA IS NOT FLORIDA. Over the subjective months they’d been together, Cassiopeia’s English had gotten a lot better, and now she spoke to him using a synthesized human voice relayed over his old shuttle EMU headset.

  “But it’s like Florida. At least, enough to make me feel…”

  WHAT?

  He sighed.

  It had taken him forty years to get here from Alpha Centauri — including around six months of subjective time as he had coasted between various inner systems and Saddle Point gateways. System after system, world after world. Six months as he had tried to get to know the Gaijin, and they to know him.