Space m-2

by Stephen Baxter

  But those billowing ice-volcano clouds were already spreading in a great loose veil around the moon, the vapor reaching altitudes where it could outrun the march of the shattered ice. Mercifully, after an hour, Triton was covered, the death of its surface hidden under a layer of roiling clouds within which lightning flashed, almost continually.

  She heard from Ben that the Yolgnu were celebrating. This was Triton Dreamtime, the true Dreamtime, when giants were shaping the world.

  After three hours there was a new explosion, a new gout of fire and ice from the far side of the moon. That great shock wave had swept right around the curve of the moon until it had converged in a fresh clap of shattered ice at the antipode of the impact. Madeleine supposed there would be secondary waves, great circular ripples washing back and forth around Triton like waves in a bathtub, as the new ocean, seething, sought equilibrium.

  Nemoto materialized before her.

  “You improvised well, Madeleine.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Nemoto. I was a good little soldier.”

  But Nemoto, of course, five hours away, couldn’t hear her. “…Triton is useless now to the Gaijin, who need solid ice and rock for their building programs. But it is far from useless to humans. This will still be a cold world; a thick crust of ice will form. But that ocean could, thanks to the residual heat of Nereid and Neptune’s generous tides, remain liquid for a long time — for millions of years, perhaps. And Earth life — lightly modified anyhow — could inhabit the new ocean. Deep-sea creatures — plankton, fish, even whales — could live off the heat of Triton’s churning core. Triton, here on the edge of interstellar space, has become Earthlike. Imagine the future for these Aborigines,” Nemoto said seductively. “Triton was the son of Poseidon and Aphrodite. How apt…”

  This was Nemoto’s finest hour, Madeleine thought, this heroic effort to deflect not just worlds, but the course of history itself. She tried to cling to her own feelings of triumph, but it was thin, lonely comfort.

  “One more thing, Meacher.” Virtual Nemoto leaned toward her, intent, wizened. “One more thing I must tell you…”

  Later, she called Ben.

  “When are you coming home?” he asked.

  “I’m not.”

  Ben frowned at her. “You are being foolish.”

  “No. Kasyapa is your home, and Lena’s. Not mine.”

  “Then where? Earth? The Moon?”

  “I am centuries out of my time,” she said. “Not there either.”

  “You’re going back to the Saddle Points. But you are the great Gaijin hater, like Nemoto.”

  She shrugged. “I oppose their projects. But I’ll ride with them. Why not? Ben, they run the only ship out of port.”

  “What do you hope to learn out there?”

  She did not answer.

  Ben was smiling. “Madeleine, I always knew I would lose you to starlight.”

  She found it hard to focus on his face, to listen to his words. He was irrelevant now, she saw. She cut the connection.

  She thought over the last thing Nemoto had said to her. Find Malenfant. He is dying…

  Chapter 23

  Cannonball

  It had to be the ugliest planet Madeleine had ever seen.

  It was a ball the size of Earth, spinning slowly, lit up by an unremarkable yellow star. The land was a contorted, blackened mess of volcano calderas, rift and compression features, and impact craters that looked as if they had been punched into a metal block. Seas, lurid yellow, pooled at the shores of distorted continents. And the air was a thin, smoggy, yellowish wisp, littered with high mustard-colored cirrus clouds.

  On the planet there were no obvious signs of life or intelligence: no cities gleaming on the dark side, no ships sailing those ugly yellow oceans. But there were three Gaijin flower-ships in orbit here, Madeleine’s and two others.

  Her curiosity wasn’t engaged.

  All the Gaijin would tell her about the planet was the name they gave it — Zero-zero-zero-zero — and the reason they had brought her here, across a hundred light-years via a hop-skip-jump flight between Saddle Point gateways in half a dozen systems, a whole extra century deeper into the future: that they needed her assistance.

  Malenfant is dying.

  Reluctantly — after a year in transit, she had gotten used to her lonely life in her antique Gurrutu hab module — she collected her gear and clambered into a Gaijin lander.

  Madeleine stepped onto the land of a new world.

  Ridges in the hard crumpled ground hurt her feet. The air was murky gray, but more or less transparent; she could see the Sun, dimmed to an unremarkable disc as if by high winter cloud. Immediately she didn’t like it here. The gravity was high — not crushing, but enough to make her heavy-footed, the bio pack on her back a real burden.

  Numbers scrolling across her faceplate told her the gravity was some 40 percent higher than Earth’s. And, since this world was about the same size as Earth, that meant that its density had to be around 40 percent higher too: closer to the density of pure iron.

  Earth was a ball of nickel-iron overlaid by a thick mantle of less dense silicate rock. The high density of this world must mean it had no rocky mantle to speak of. It was nickel-iron, all the way from core to surface, as if a much larger world had been stripped of its mantle and crust, and she was walking around on the remnant iron core.

  That wasn’t so strange. There are ways that could happen, in the violent early days of a system’s formation, when immense rogue planetesimals continue to bombard planets that are struggling to coalesce. Mercury, the Solar System’s innermost planet, had suffered an immense primordial impact that had left that little world with the thinnest of mantles over its giant core.

  At least human scientists had presumed it was primordial. Nobody was sure about such things anymore.

  She glanced around the sky. She was a hundred light-years from home, a hundred light-years in toward the center of the Galaxy, roughly along a line that would have joined Earth to Antares, in Scorpio. But the sky was dark, dismal.

  There were no asteroid belts, only a handful of comets left orbiting farther out, and two gas giants both stripped of their volatiles, reduced to smooth rocky balls. She was well inside the interstellar colonization wave front that appeared to be sweeping out along the spiral arm and was nearing Earth, a hundred light-years back. And this was a typical post-wave-front system: colonized, ferociously robbed of its resources by one shortsighted, low-tech predatory strategy or another, trashed, abandoned.

  Even the stars had been obscured, their light stolen by Dyson masks: dense orbiting habitat clouds, even solid spheres, asteroids and planets dismantled and made into traps for every stray photon. It was a depressing sight: an engineered sky, a sky full of scaffolding and ruins.

  Earth’s sky was primeval, comparatively. This was a glimpse of the future, for Earth.

  She walked farther, away from the lander, which was a silvery cone behind her. She was only a few kilometers from the shore of one of those yellow seas; she figured it was on the far side of a low, crumpled ridge.

  She reached the base of the ridge and began to climb. In the tough gravity she was given a good workout; she could feel her temperature rising, the suit’s exoskeletal multipliers discreetly cutting in to give her a boost.

  She topped the ridge, breathing hard. A plain opened up before her: shaded red and black, littered by sand dunes and what looked like a big, heavily eroded impact crater. And off toward the smoky horizon, yes, there was that peculiar yellow ocean, wraiths of greenish mist hanging over it. It was a bizarre, surrealist landscape, as if all Earth’s colors had been exchanged for their spectral complements.

  And, only a hundred meters from the base of the ridge, she saw two Gaijin landers, silver cones side by side, each surrounded by fine rays of dust thrown out by landing rockets. Beside one of the landers was a Gaijin, utterly still, a spidery statue. Next to the other stood a human, in an exo-suit that didn’t look significantly di
fferent than Madeleine’s.

  The human saw her, waved.

  Madeleine hesitated for long seconds.

  Suddenly the world seemed crowded. She hadn’t encountered people since she had last embraced Ben, on Triton. She’d certainly never met another traveler like this, among the stars. But it must have taken decades, even centuries, for the Gaijin to organize this strange rendezvous.

  She began to clamber down the ridge toward the landers, letting the suit do most of the work.

  The waving human turned out to be a Catholic priest called Dorothy Chaum. Madeleine had met her before, subjective years ago. And inside one of the landers was another human, somebody she knew only by reputation.

  It was Reid Malenfant. And he was indeed dying.

  Malenfant was wasted. His head was cadaverous, the skull showing through thin, papery flesh, and his bald scalp was covered in liver spots.

  Dorothy and Madeleine got Malenfant suited up and hauled him to Dorothy’s lander. In this gravity it was hard work, despite their suits’ multipliers. But Dorothy’s lander had a more comprehensive med facility than Madeleine’s. Malenfant had nothing at all, save what the Gaijin had been able to provide.

  Malenfant had grown old and had sunk into himself, like a tide going out, an ocean receding. He had managed to keep himself alive a good few years. But his equipment wasn’t sufficient anymore — and the Gaijin he traveled with sure didn’t know enough about human biology to tinker. Not only that, he was suffering from the Discontinuity.

  When he had started to die, the Gaijin were confounded.

  “So they sent for us,” Dorothy Chaum said, marveling. “They sent signals out through the gateway links.”

  “How did they keep him alive so long?”

  “They didn’t. They just preserved him. They bounced his signal around the Saddle Point network, never making him corporeal for more than a few seconds at a time…”

  Madeleine studied Malenfant. Had he been aware, as he passed through one blue-flash gateway transition after another, of the light-years and decades passing in seconds?

  Malenfant woke up while they were bed-bathing him. Stripped, washed, and immersed in a med tank, he looked Madeleine in the eyes. “Are you qualified to be scrubbing my balls?”

  “I’m the best you’re going to find, pal.”

  But now he was staring at Chaum, the diagrammatic white collar around her neck. “What is this, the last rites?” He tried to struggle upright, on arms as thin as toothpicks.

  Madeleine shoved him back. “It will be if you don’t cooperate.”

  He swiveled that gaunt head. “Where’s my suit?”

  Dorothy frowned, and pointed to the Gaijin-manufactured envelope they’d bundled up in one corner. “Over there.”

  “No,” he whispered. “My suit.”

  It turned out he meant his old NASA-era Shuttle EMU, a disgusting old piece of kit almost as far beyond its design limits as Malenfant himself. He wouldn’t relax until Madeleine got suited up, went across to the lander that had brought him here, and retrieved the EMU for him. Then again, it was the only possession he had in the world, or worlds. She could understand how he felt.

  He scrabbled in its pockets until he found a faded, much folded photograph, of a smiling woman on a beach.

  When they had him in the tank, Madeleine spent a little time working on that gruesome old suit. She could fix the wiring shorts and the cooling-garment tubing leaks, polish out the scratches on the bubble helmet, patch the fabric. But she couldn’t make it absolutely clean again; the dust of many worlds was ingrained too deep into the fabric. And she couldn’t wash out the stink of Malenfant.

  All the time, visible through the lander’s windows, that Gaijin sat on the surface, as unmoving as a statue, watching, watching, as if waiting for Dorothy or Madeleine to make a mistake.

  While Malenfant was sleeping off twenty subjective years of traveling, Dorothy Chaum and Madeleine took a walk, across the battered iron plain, toward the yellow sea.

  They were each used to solitude, and they were awkward, restless with each other — and with the notion that they’d been summoned here, given an assignment by the Gaijin. It didn’t make for good conversation.

  Dorothy was a short, squat woman who looked as if she might have been built for this tough, overloaded gravity. She seemed older than Madeleine remembered; her journey here had absorbed more of her subjective lifetime than Madeleine’s had.

  They passed the solitary Gaijin sentinel.

  “Malenfant calls it Cassiopeia,” Dorothy murmured. “He says it’s been his constant companion since the Solar System.”

  “A boy and his Gaijin. Cute.”

  Dorothy Chaum’s personal star quest seemed to be a sublimated search for God. That was how it seemed to Madeleine, anyhow.

  “I studied the Gaijin on Earth,” Dorothy said. Madeleine could see her smile. “You remember that, on Kefallinia. I got my initial assignment from the Pope… I don’t even know if there is a Pope anymore. The Gaijin have some things in common with us. Sure, they are robotlike creatures, but they are finite, built on about the same scale as we are, and they seem to have at least some individuality. But in spite of their similarity — or maybe because of it — I was immediately overwhelmed by their strangeness. So I was drawn to follow them to the stars, to work with them.”

  “And have you discovered yet if a Gaijin has a soul?”

  Dorothy didn’t seem offended. “I don’t know if that question has any meaning. Conversely, you see, the Gaijin seem fascinated by our souls. Perhaps they are envious…”

  Dorothy stopped dead and held out one hand. Madeleine saw there was some kind of black snow, or a thin rain of dust, settling on the white of her glove palm. “This is carbon,” Dorothy said. “Soot. Just raining out of the air. Remarkable.”

  Madeleine supposed it was.

  They walked on through the strange exotic air.

  Madeleine prompted. “So you traveled with the Gaijin to try to understand.”

  “Yes. As I believe Malenfant did.”

  “And did you succeed?”

  “I don’t think so. What may be more serious,” she said, “is that I don’t think the Gaijin are any closer to finding whatever it is they were seeking.”

  They reached the shore of the sea. It was a hard beach, loosely littered with rusty sand and blackened with soot, as if worn away from some offshore seam of coal.

  The ocean was very yellow. The liquid was thin, and it seemed to bubble, as if carbonated. Farther out, mist banks hung, dense and heavy. Seeing this garish sea recede to a sharp yellow horizon was eerie.

  They stepped forward, letting the liquid lap over their boots. It left a fine gritty scum, and it felt cool, not cold. Vapor sizzled around Madeleine’s feet.

  Dorothy dipped a gloved finger into the sea, and data chattered over her visor. “Iron carbonyl,” she murmured. “A compound of iron with carbon monoxide.” She pointed at the vapor. “And that is mostly nickel carbonyl. A lower boiling point than the iron stuff…” She sighed. “Iron compounds, an iron world. On Earth, we used stuff like this in industrial processes, like purifying nickel. Here, you could go swimming in it.”

  “I wonder if there is life here.”

  “Oh yes,” Dorothy said. “Of course there is life here. Don’t you know where you are?”

  Madeleine didn’t reply.

  “That’s where the soot and the carbon dioxide comes from,” Dorothy said. “I think there must be some kind of photosynthesis going on, making carbon monoxide. And then the monoxide reacts with itself to make free carbon and carbon dioxide. That reaction releases energy—”

  “Which animals can use.”

  “Yes.”

  “There is life everywhere we look,” Madeleine said.

  “Yes. Life seems to be emergent from the very fabric of the universe that contains us, hardwired into physical law. And so, I suppose, mind is emergent too. Emergent monism: a nice label. Though we can scarcely cl
aim understanding…”

  They stepped back on the shore and walked farther across the rusty dirt without enthusiasm.

  Then they saw movement.

  There was something crawling out of the sea. It was like a crab, low and squat, about the size of a coffee table, with a dozen or more spindly legs, and what must be sensors — eyes, ears? — complex little pods on the end of flimsy stalks that waved in the murky air. The whole thing was the color of rust.

  And it had a dodecahedral body.

  Madeleine could hear it wheezing.

  “Lungs,” Dorothy said. “It has lungs. But… look at those slits in the carapace there. Gills, you think?”

  “It’s like a lungfish.”

  The crab was clumsy, as if it couldn’t see too well, and its limbs slid about over the bone-hard shore. One of those pencil-thin legs caught in a crack and snapped off. That hissing breath became noisier, and it hesitated, waving a stump in the air.

  Then the crab moved on, picking its way over the beach, as if searching for something.

  Dorothy bent and, fumbling with her gloved fingers, picked up the snapped-off limb. It looked simple: just a hollow tube, a wand. But there was a honeycomb structure to the interior wall. “Strength and lightness,” she said. “And it’s made of iron.” She smiled. “Iron bones. Natural robots. We always thought the Gaijin must have been manufactured, by creatures more or less like us — the first generation of them anyway. It was hard to take seriously the idea of such mechanical beasts evolving naturally. But perhaps that’s what happened…”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She eyed Madeleine. “You really don’t know where you are? Didn’t the Gaijin tell you?”