Space m-2

by Stephen Baxter

  “Thank you.” She raised the issue of her companions from Triton.

  “Their applications will be processed as speedily as possible.” He fell silent, his drawn face impassive.

  She tapped the desk with a fingernail. She found it hard to read his posture, the language of his face. “They’ve flown across the system, across thirty astronomical units, in landers designed for hundred-kilometer orbital hops. Those things are flying toilets. We have children, old people, disabled, ill…”

  “We are processing their applications. Until that is concluded there’s nothing I can do.”

  His eyes were hollow. The man is exhausted, she thought. He is overwhelmed, as Mercury is; and here I am with more refugees, boatloads of resentful ice dwellers from Triton. In such circumstances, bureaucracy is a medium of civilized discourse; at least he isn’t throwing me out.

  She resolved to be patient.

  At the appointed time she set off to meet Dorothy. There was a monorail link from Chao City to Bernini — slow, bumpy, uncomfortable, real pioneer stuff — and then she had to take a ride in an automated tractor, a thing of giant wire-mesh wheels, over lightly occupied Mercury.

  She arrived at what Dorothy had referred to as a solarsail farm.

  Outside the tractor she studied the sky.

  She could see few stars. Solar-sail ships swam, dimly visible, like sparks from a fire, swarming around Mercury’s equator, bringing more refugees. But there was a haze across the sky, a mistiness surrounding that too-large Sun disc, and a pale wash farther out, like a starless Milky Way. She was seeing the Sun’s tenuous atmosphere, made visible by the artificial occulting of the central star. And the flat belt of light farther out was the zodiacal light, the shining of dust particles and meteorites and asteroids in the plane of the ecliptic. Once Gaijin cities had shone there; now the asteroid belt was deserted once more.

  When she cupped her hands around her faceplate she could see the tail of yet another giant comet, smeared milkily over the black dome of the sky. She couldn’t see any Cracker ships, of course — not yet — even though, it was said, they had broken through the orbit of Neptune.

  As the Oort war had turned sour, Mercury had been annexed by a coalition of nations from the asteroid colonies: the near-Earths, the main belt, even a few from the Trojans in Jupiter’s orbit. It was hardly an occupation; nobody but a few hermit types had been living here anyhow. The setup here was barely democratic — a situation which, to their credit, appeared to disturb the emergency government, the Coalition. But it was functioning.

  The colonists had adapted technologies that had once been used in the initial colonization of the Moon: Once more, humans were forced to bake their air out of unyielding rock. But there were plans for the longer term — such as a Paulis mine at Caloris Planitia, the giant impact crater she’d observed from orbit. But this was not the Moon. Mercury was all iron core, with a little rocky rind. A different world, different challenges.

  Now she picked out a double star, a bright double pinpoint, one partner strikingly blue, the other a pale gray-white…

  “Earth, of course.” Here was Dorothy standing close by her side, in a suit so coated with black Mercury dust it was all but invisible, despite the brightness of the Sun. Her helmet was heavily shielded, just a golden bubble; Madeleine couldn’t see her face.

  They exchanged meaningless pleasantries, awkward; there were no obvious protocols for a relationship such as theirs.

  Then Dorothy loped heavily across the dusty plain. Madeleine, reluctantly, followed.

  The regolith crunched under her feet, the noise clearly audible, carried through her suit. In the virgin dust she left footprints, clear and sharp as on the Moon, and the dust she threw up clung to the fabric of her suit. But her footing was heavy, in this double-Moon gravity. No bunny-hop moonwalking here.

  It was like the Moon, yes — the same undulating surface, heavily eroded, crater on crater, so the surface was like a sea of dusty waves. But if anything the erosion was more complete here. There were hills — she was close to the rim wall of crater Bernini — but they were stoop-shouldered, coated in regolith. The smaller craters were little more than shadows of themselves, palimpsests, their features worn away.

  She hadn’t met Dorothy since they had been with Malenfant on the Gaijin’s home world and the three of them had set off to return to the Solar System by their different routes. Dorothy seemed different to Madeleine: more closed-in, secretive, perhaps obsessive. Somehow older.

  Dorothy paused and pointed to a hole in the ground. “Here’s where I live. Subsurface shelter. It isn’t so bad. Not if you’ve already spent subjective years in spacecraft hab modules.”

  At Madeleine’s feet was a flattened boulder, its exposed top worn smooth, like a lens. She bent stiffly, scuffed at the soil, and prised the rock out of the dirt. Most of the rock had been hidden in the dirt, like an iceberg. Underneath, it was sharp, a jagged boulder.

  “It probably dropped here a billion years ago,” Dorothy said, “thrown halfway around the planet by some impact. And since then any bits of it that stuck out have just been eroded flat, right here where it landed, layer by layer.”

  Madeleine frowned. “Micrometeorite impacts?”

  “Not primarily. At noon it gets hot enough to melt lead. And in the night, which lasts nearly six months, it’s cold enough to liquefy oxygen.”

  “Thermal stress, then.”

  “Yes. Shaped the landscape. Bane of the engineer’s life, here on this hot little world. Come on. Let me show you what I do for a living.”

  They walked briskly through a shallow crater littered with bits of glass.

  That, anyhow, was how it seemed to Madeleine at first glance. She was surrounded by delicate glass leaves that rested against the regolith, spiky needles protruding. There was, too, another type of structure: short, stubby cylinders, pointing at the sky, projecting in all directions, like miniature cannon muzzles. It was like a sculpture park.

  Dorothy stalked on without pausing. Some of the petal-shaped glass plates were crushed under Dorothy’s careless feet; Madeleine walked more carefully. “We can just grow sail panels right out of the rock,” Dorothy said. “These things are gen-enged descendants of vacuum flowers from the Moon. I’ve made myself something of an expert at this technology. Good to have a profession, on a world where you have to pay for the air you breathe, don’t you think?” She tilted back her head, her face obscured. “Next time you see a solar sailing ship, think of this place, how those gauzy ships are born, morphing right out of the rocks at your feet. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  They walked on. Madeleine asked about Malenfant.

  Dorothy shrugged. “I got back twenty years before you did. If he came directly back to the system after we parted, as he said he would, he might have arrived here centuries earlier yet. I don’t know what’s become of him.”

  Madeleine studied her. “You’re troubled. The time we had on the Cannonball—”

  “Not troubled, exactly. Guilty, perhaps.” She laughed. “Guilt: the Catholic church’s first patent.”

  “And that’s why you work so hard here.”

  “Analysis now, Madeleine?” Dorothy asked dryly. “I also work to live, as must we all… But still, yes, I failed Malenfant, there on the Cannonball. I used to be a priest. If ever there was a soul in torment, in his own silent, lonely way, it was Reid Malenfant. And I couldn’t find a way to help him.”

  Madeleine scowled, irritated. “What happened on the Cannonball was about Malenfant, Dorothy, not about you and your guilt. Malenfant was a victim. A tool of the Gaijin, dragged across the Galaxy, part of plans we still know nothing about. Why should he put up with that?”

  “Because he knew, or suspected, that it was the right thing to do, if the Gaijin had any hope—” She waved a gloved hand at the damaged sky. “ — of changing this. The rapacious colonization waves, the wars, the trashing of worlds, the extinctions. If there was even a chance of making a difference, it m
ight have been right for Malenfant to sacrifice himself.”

  “But he’s just a man, a human. Why should he give himself up? Would you?”

  Dorothy sighed. “I’m not the right person to ask anymore. Would you?”

  “I don’t know.” Madeleine was chilled. “Poor Malenfant.”

  “Wherever he is, whatever becomes of him, I hope he isn’t alone. Even Christ had the comfort of His family, at the foot of the cross. You brought refugees here, didn’t you?”

  Madeleine grunted. “I’m told that everybody here is a refugee. But here we are as safe as anywhere.”

  Dorothy barked laughter. “You don’t get it yet, do you? Obviously you haven’t spoken to Nemoto… She’s still alive. Did you know that? Centuries old… Of all the places to come — this, Mercury, as the last refuge of mankind? Wrong. ”

  “Mercury is deep in the inner system. So close to the Sun the Gaijin don’t want to come here.”

  “But the Gaijin are not the enemy,” Dorothy hissed. “You have to think things through, Madeleine. We think we know how the Crackers work. They manipulate the target star, causing it to nova…” A nova: a stellar explosion, releasing as much energy in a few days as a star would have expended in ten thousand years. “The Crackers feed on the light pulse, you see,” Dorothy said. “They ride their solar-sail craft out to more stars, scattering like seeds from a burst fungus, sailing past planets scorched and ruined. We used to think novae were natural, a question of a glitch in a star’s fusion processes, perhaps caused by an infall of material from a binary companion. Now we wonder if any nova we have observed historically has been natural. Perhaps all of them, all over the sky, have been the responsibility of the Crackers — or foul species like them.”

  And Madeleine started to see it. “How do you make a star nova?”

  “Simple. In principle. You set a chain of powerful particle accelerators in orbit around your target star. They create currents of charged particles, which set up a powerful magnetic field, caging the star — which can then be manipulated.”

  “…Ah. But you need a resource base to manufacture those thousands, millions of machines. And a place to make your new generation of solar sailing boats.”

  “Yes. Madeleine, here in the Solar System, what would be the ideal location for such a mine?”

  A rocky world orbiting conveniently close to the central star itself. A big fat core of iron and nickel just begging to be dug out and broken up and exploited, without even an awkward rocky shell to cut through…

  “Mercury,” Madeleine whispered. “What do we do? Do we have to evacuate?”

  “Where to?” Dorothy said, comparatively gently. “Meacher, remember where you are. We’ve already lost the Solar System. This is the last bolthole. All we can do is dig deep, deep down, as deep as possible.”

  Something about her emphasis on those words made Madeleine look hard at Dorothy, but her face remained obscured.

  “What are you doing here, Dorothy? You’re planning something, aren’t you?” Her mind raced. “Some way of striking back at the Crackers — is that what this is about? Are you working with Nemoto?”

  But Dorothy evaded the question. “What can we do? The Crackers have already driven off the Gaijin, a species much older and wiser and more powerful than us. We’re just vermin infesting a piece of prime real estate.”

  “If you believe we’re vermin, you really have lost your faith,” Madeleine said coldly.

  Dorothy laughed. “Compared to the Gaijin, even the Crackers, what other word would you use?” She peered up at the sky, her face obscured by scuffed glass. “Remember, Madeleine. Tell them to dig deep. That’s vital. As deep as they can…”

  She went back to Carl ap Przibram to discuss the issue of the Aborigines. Interstellar war or not, they still had no other place to go.

  “Please be straightforward with me. I appreciate you’re trying to help. I don’t want to offend you, or imply—”

  “ — that I’m some kind of immoral bastard,” he said tightly.

  The archaic term surprised her. She wondered what thirty-eighth-century oath lay on the other side of the chattering translators.

  “This isn’t an easy job,” he said. “People always find it hard to accept what I have to tell them.”

  “I sympathize. But I need you to help me. I’m a long way from home — from my time. It’s hard for me to understand what’s happening here, to progress the issue.” She pointed to the ceiling. “There are two hundred people up there. They’ve come all the way in from Triton, the edge of the Solar System. They have absolutely no place to go. They are completely dependent, refugees.”

  “We are all refugees.”

  She grunted. “That’s the standard mantra here, isn’t it?”

  He frowned at her. “But it’s true. And I don’t know if you understand how significant that is. I haven’t met a traveler before, Madeleine Meacher. But I’ve read about your kind.”

  “My kind?”

  “You were born on Earth, weren’t you? At a time when there were no colonies beyond the home planet.”

  “Not quite true—”

  “You are accustomed to think of us, the space dwellers, as exotic beings, somehow beyond the humanity you grew up with. But it isn’t like that. My home society, on Vesta, was fifteen centuries old. My ancestors spent all that time making the asteroid habitable. Centuries living in tunnels and lava tubes and caves, cowering from radiation, knowing that a single mistake could kill everything they cared about… We are a deeply conservative people, Madeleine Meacher. We are not used to travel. We are not world builders. We, too, are a long way from home.”

  “You got here first,” Madeleine said. “And now you’re driving everybody else off.”

  He shook his head. “It isn’t like that. If not for us, this — a habitable corner of Mercury — wouldn’t be here at all.”

  She stood up. “I know you’ll do your job, Carl ap Przibram.”

  He nodded. “I appreciate your courtesy. But you understand that doesn’t guarantee I will be able to let your party land here. If we cannot feed them…” He steepled his long fingers. “In the long run,” he said, “it may make no difference anyhow. Do you see that?”

  If the Crackers win, if they come here. That’s what he means.

  He studied her face, as if pleading for help, for understanding.

  Everybody does his best, she thought bleakly. How little it all means.

  Chapter 31

  Endgame

  In the final months, events unfolded with shocking rapidity. The great spherical fleet of Cracker vessels sailed inward — through the huge empty orbits of the outer planets, past abandoned asteroids, at last into the hot deep heart of the system.

  One by one, all over the system, beacons were extinguished: on Triton, the asteroids, Mars, human stories concluded without witness, in the cold and dark.

  The data miners found Nemoto — or, Madeleine thought, perhaps she consented to be found.

  It turned out Nemoto had shunned the underground colonies. She was working on the surface, in an abandoned science base in a big, smooth-floored crater called Bach, some thousand kilometers north of Chao City.

  Madeleine used the monorail to get to Bach. The rail was still functioning, for now; the encroaching Cracker ships had yet to interfere materially with Mercury in any way. Nevertheless there were no humans operating on the surface of Mercury, nobody amid the blindly toiling robots, diggers, and scrapers. And everywhere, tended by the robots or not, Madeleine saw the gleam of solar-sail flowers.

  In the shade of an eroded-smooth crater wall, Nemoto was toiling at a plain of tilled regolith. Here, one of the glass-leafed arrays had spread out over the heat-shattered soil. Nemoto was hunched over, monklike, a slow patient figure redolent of age, tending her plants of glass and light.

  The Sun was higher in the sky at this more northerly latitude, a ferocious ball, and Madeleine’s suit, gleaming silver, warned her frequently of excessive temp
eratures.

  “Nemoto—”

  Nemoto straightened up stiffly. She silenced Madeleine with a gesture, beckoned for her to come deeper into the shade, and pointed upward.

  Madeleine lifted her visor. Gradually, as her eyes adapted, the stars came out. The sky’s geography was swamped, in one corner, by the extensive glare of the Sun’s corona.

  But the stars were just a backdrop to a crowd of ships.

  They were all around Mercury now, spread out through three-dimensional space like a great receding cloud of dragonflies frozen in flight. Loose clusters of them already orbited the planet, looping east and west, north and south, cupping the light. And farther out there was a ragged swarm still on the way, reaching back to the hidden Sun, around which these misty invaders had sailed.

  Their filmy, silvery wings were caught folded or twisted, in the act of shifting better to catch the Sun’s light. The spread of those gauzy wings was huge, some of them thousands of kilometers across. These were no trivial inner-system skimmers, as humans had built, made to sail in the dense light winds close to the Sun; these were giant interstellar schooners, capable of traveling across light-years, through spaces where the brightest, largest star was reduced to a point.

  Not dragonflies, she thought. Locusts. For not one of those ships was human, Madeleine knew, or even Gaijin. Nothing but Crackers.

  “It’s remarkable to watch them,” Nemoto breathed. “I mean, over hours or days. Simply to stand here and watch. You can see them deploying their sails, you know. The sunlight pushes outward from the Sun, of course. But they sail in toward the Sun by tacking into the light: they lose a little orbital velocity, and then simply fall inward. But sailing ships that size are slow to maneuver. They must have been plotting their courses, here to Mercury, all the way in from the Oort cloud.”

  “I wonder what the sails are made of,” Madeleine said.

  Nemoto grunted. “Nothing we have ever been capable of. Maybe the Gaijin would know. Only diamond fiber would be strong enough for the rigging. And as for the sails, the best we can do is aluminized spider silk. Much too thick and heavy for ships of that size. Perhaps they grow the sails by some kind of vacuum deposition, molecule by molecule. Or perhaps they are masters of nanotech.”