Space m-2

by Stephen Baxter

  Madeleine rose up through all this, just bulling her way through in her squat little Gaijin lander. The wonderful wings just curled out of her way.

  At ten Mercury diameters, she looked back.

  Mercury was a ball of rock, maybe the size of her palmheld at arm’s length. It looked as if it were wrapped in silverypaper, shifting layers of it, as if it were some huge Christmaspresent — or perhaps as if immense silvery wasps were crawling all over it. Quite remarkably beautiful, she thought. But, shereflected bitterly, if there was one thing she had learned in her long and dubious career, it was that beauty clung as closely to objects of killing and pain and horror as to the good; and so itwas here.

  She stretched, weightless. She felt deeply — if shamefully — relieved to be alone once more, in control of her own destiny, without the complication of other people around her.

  Nemoto called her from the surface.

  “I’m surprised they let you through like that. The Crackers. You’re in a Gaijin ship, after all.”

  “But the Gaijin are gone. The Crackers clearly don’t believe the Gaijin are a threat anymore. And they don’t even seem to have noticed us humans.” The Crackers are just kicking over the anthill, she thought, without even looking to see what was there, what we were.

  “Meacher, how far out are you?”

  “Ten diameters.”

  “That should be sufficient,” Nemoto hissed.

  “Sufficient for what?… Never mind. Nemoto, how can you choose death? You’ve lived so long, seen so much.”

  “I’ve seen enough.”

  “And now you want to rest?”

  “No. What rest is there in death? I only want to act.”

  “To save the species one more time?”

  “Perhaps. But the battle is never over, Meacher. The longer we live, the deeper we look, the more layers of deception and manipulation and destruction we will find… Consider Mercury, for example, which may be doomed to become a resource mine for the Sun-breaking Crackers. Why, if I was a suspicious type, a conspiracy theorist, I might think it was a little odd that there should be a giant ball of crust-free nickel-iron placed so conveniently right here where the Crackers need it. What do you think? Could some predecessors of the Crackers — even their ancestors — have arranged the giant impact that stripped off Mercury’s crust and mantle, left behind this rust ball?”

  Madeleine was stunned by this deepening of the great violation of the Solar System. But, deliberately, she shook her head. “Even if that’s true, what difference does it make?”

  Nemoto barked laughter. “None at all. You’re right. One thing at a time. You always were practical, Meacher. And what next for you? Will you stay with the others, huddled in the caves of Mercury?”

  Madeleine frowned. “I’m not a good huddler, Nemoto. And besides, these are not my people.”

  “The likes of us have no ‘people’—”

  “Malenfant,” Madeleine said. “Wherever he is, whatever he faces, he is alone. I’m going to try to find him.”

  “Ah,” Nemoto whispered. “Malenfant, yes. He may be the most important of us all. Good-bye, Meacher.”

  “Nemoto?—”

  Mercury exploded.

  She had to go over it again, rerun the recordings, over and over, before she understood.

  It had happened in an instant. It was as if the top couple of meters of Mercury’s surface had just lifted off and hailed into the sky.

  All over Mercury — from the depths of Caloris Planitia to the crumpled lands at the antipode, from Chao City at the south pole to the abandoned settlements of the north — miniature cannon snouts had poked their way out of the regolith and fired into the sky. The bullets weren’t smart: just bits of rock and dust dug out of the deeper regolith. But they were moving fast, far faster than Mercury’s escape velocity.

  The Crackers didn’t stand a chance. Mercury rocks tore through filmy wings, overwhelming self-repair facilities. The Cracker ships, like butterflies in a reverse hailstorm, were shredded. Ships collided, or plunged to Mercury’s surface, or drifted into space, powerless, beyond the reach of help.

  The Moon flowers, of course, were the key — or rather their dumb, gen-enged descendants were, transplanted to Mercury by Nemoto, a wizened, interplanetary Johnny Appleseed. The Moon flowers could make a serviceable chemical-rocket propellant for their seed pores from aluminum and oxygen extracted from Moon rock — or Mercury rock. Nemoto had engineered the flowers’ descendants to make weapons.

  The Crackers had nobody even to fire back at, no way to avoid the rising storm of rock and dust. Even one survivor might have been sufficient to resume the Crackers’ mission, for all anybody knew. But there were no survivors. The Crackers had taken a thousand years to reach Mercury, to fly from Procyon and battle through a shell of Gaijin ships. It had taken humans — rock-world vermin, contemptuously ignored — a thousand seconds to destroy them.

  As she watched that cloud of peppery rock rise from the ground and rip through the gauzy ships — overwhelming them one by one, at last erupting into clear space — Madeleine whooped and howled.

  The debris cloud continued to expand, now beginning to tail after Mercury in its slow orbit around the Sun. It caught the brilliant light, like rain in sunshine. Maybe Mercury is going to have rings, she thought, rings that will shine like roadways in the sky. Nice memorial. The major features of the surface beneath had survived, of course; no backyard rocket was going to obliterate Caloris Planitia. But every square meter of the surface had been raked over.

  She contacted the Coalition.

  Every human on Mercury had survived — even those who hadn’t taken Nemoto’s advice about deep shelter. Already they were emerging, blinking, under a dusty, starry sky.

  Every human but Nemoto, of course.

  At least we have breathing space: time to rebuild, maybe breed a little, spread out, before the next bunch of ET assholes come chomping their way through the Solar System. Good for you, Nemoto. You did the best you could. Good job.

  As for me — story’s over here, Madeleine. Time to face the universe again.

  And so Madeleine fled before the hail of rubble from Mercury — still expanding, a dark and looming cloud that glittered with fragments of Cracker craft. Fled in search of Gaijin, and Reid Malenfant.

  PART FIVE

  The Children’s Crusade

  A.D. 8800, and Later

  Near the neutron star there were multiple lobes of light. They looked like solar flares to Malenfant: giant, unending storms rising from the neutron star’s surface. Farther out still, the founts of gas lost their structure, becoming dim, diffuse. They merged into a wider cloud of debris that seemed to be fleeing from the neutron star, a vigorous solar wind. And beyond that there were only the Galaxy core stars — watchful, silent, still, peering down as if in disapproval at this noisy, spitting monster.

  This was a pulsar. You could detect those radio beams from Earth.

  Malenfant had grown up with the story of the first detection of a pulsar. Pre-Gaijin astronomers had detected an unusual radio signal: a regular, ticking pulse, accurate to within a millionth of a second. Staring at such traces, the scientists had at first toyed with the idea it might be the signature of intelligence, calling from the stars.

  In fact, when envoys from the stars began to make their presence known, it was not as a gentle tick of radio noise but as a wave of destructive exploitation that scattered mankind and all but overwhelmed the entire Solar System — and the same thing had occurred many times before.

  We put up a hell of a fight, though, he thought. We even won some victories, in our tiny, scattershot way. But in the end it was going to count for nothing.

  It was ironic, he thought grimly. Those old pre-Gaijin stargazers had thought that first pulsar was a signal from little green men.

  In fact it was a killer of little green men.

  Chapter 32

  Savannah

  She woke to the movement of air: the rust
le of wind in trees, perhaps the hiss of grass, a gentle breeze on her face, the scent of dew, of wood smoke. Eyes closed, she was lying on her back. She could feel something tickling at her neck, the slippery texture of leaves under the palms of her hand. Somewhere crickets were calling.

  She opened her eyes. She was looking up at the branches of a tree, silhouetted against a blue-black sky.

  And the sky was full of stars. A great river of light flowed from horizon to horizon. It was littered with pink-white glowing clouds, crowded, beautiful.

  She remembered.

  Io. She had been on Io.

  Her Gaijin guides had taken her to a grave: Reid Malenfant’s grave, they said, dug by strong Neandertal hands. She had, briefly, despaired; she had been too late in her self-appointed mission; he had died alone after all, a long way from home.

  The Gaijin hadn’t seemed to understand.

  Then had come a blue flash, a moment of pain—

  And now, this. Where the hell was she? She sat up, suddenly afraid.

  She saw a flickering fire, a figure squatting beside it. A man. He was holding something on a stick, she saw, perhaps a fish. He stood straight now, and came walking easily toward her.

  She felt herself tense up farther.

  His head was silhouetted against the crowded stars; he was bald, his skin smooth as leather. It was Reid Malenfant.

  She whimpered, cowered back. “You are dead.”

  He crouched before her, reached out and held her hand. He felt warm, real, calm. “Take it easy, Madeleine.”

  “They put you in a hole in the ground, on Io. Jesus Christ—”

  “Don’t ask questions,” he said evenly. “Not yet. Concentrate on the here and now. How do you feel? Are you sick, hot, cold?”

  She thought about that. “I’m okay, I guess.” She wiggled her fingers and toes, turned her head this way and that. Everything intact and mobile; nothing aching; not so much as a cricked neck. Her trembling subsided, soothed by a relentless blizzard of detail, of normality. The here and now, yes.

  It was Reid Malenfant. He was wearing a pale blue coverall, white slip-on shoes. When she glanced down, she found she was wearing the same bland outfit.

  He was studying her. “You were out cold. I thought I’d better leave you be. We don’t seem to have any medic equipment here.”

  The smell of the fish reached her. “I’m hungry,” she said, surprised. “You’ve been fishing?”

  “Why not? I mined my old space suit. Not for the first time. A thread, a hook made from a zipper. I felt like Tom Sawyer.”

  …Never mind the fish. This guy is dead. “Malenfant, they buried you. Your burns…” But she was starting to remember more. The Neandertals had opened the grave. It was empty.

  “Just look at me now.” Emulating her, he clenched his fists, twisted his head. “I haven’t felt so good since the Bad Hair Day twins had a hold of me.”

  “Who?”

  “Long story. Look, you want some fish or not?” And he loped back to the fire, picked up another twig skewered through a second fish, and held it over his fire of brushwood.

  She got to her feet and followed him.

  The sky provided a soft light, as bright as a quarter-Moon, perhaps. Even away from that galactic stripe the stars were crowded. There was a pattern of bright stars near the zenith that looked like a box, or maybe a kite; there was another easy pattern farther over, six stars arranged in a rough, squashed ellipse. She recognized no constellations, though.

  The grassy plain rolled to the distance, dotted with sparse trees, the vegetation black and silver in the starlight. But where Malenfant’s fire cast a stronger light she could see the grass was an authentic green.

  Gravity about Earth normal, she noted absently.

  She thought she saw movement, a shadow flitting past a stand of trees. She waited for a moment, holding still. There was no sound, not so much as a crackle of undergrowth under a footstep.

  She hunkered down beside Malenfant, accepted half a fish, and bit into it. It was succulent but tasteless. “I never much liked fish,” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  “Where’s the stream?”

  He nodded, beyond the fire. “Thataway. I took a walk.”

  “During the daylight?”

  “No.” He tilted back his head. “When I woke up it was night, as deep as this. Still is.” He glanced up at the sky, picking out a complex of glowing clouds. “What do you think of the view?”

  The larger of the clouds was a rose of pink light. Its heart was speckled by bright splashes of light — stars? — and it was bordered by a band of deeper darkness, velvet blackness, where no stars shone. It was beautiful, strange.

  “That is a star birth nebula,” he said. “It’s probably much more extensive. All we can see is a blister, illuminated by a clutch of young stars at the center — see the way that glow is roughly spherical? The stars’ radiation makes the gases shine, out as far as it can reach, before it gets absorbed. But you can see more stars, younger stars, emerging from the fringes of the blister. That darker area all around the glow, eclipsing the stars behind, is a glimpse of the true nebula, dense clouds of dust and hydrogen, probably containing protostars that have yet to shine… Madeleine, I did a little amateur astronomy as a kid. I recognize that thing; it’s visible from Earth. We call it the Lagoon Nebula. And its companion over there is the Trifid. The Lagoon contains stars so young and bright you can see them with the naked eye, from Earth.”

  In all her travels around the Saddle Point network, Madeleine had seen nothing like this.

  “Ah,” Malenfant said, when she expressed this. “But we’ve come far beyond that, of course.”

  She shivered, suddenly longing for daylight. “Malenfant, in those trees over there. I thought I saw—”

  “There are Neandertals here,” he said quickly. “You needn’t fear them. I think they’re from Io. Maybe some of them are from Earth, too. I think they were brought here when they were close to death. I haven’t recognized any of them yet. There is one old guy I got to know a little, who died. I called him Esau. He must be here somewhere.”

  She tried to follow all that. He didn’t seem concerned, confused by the situation. There was, she realized, a lot he needed to tell her.

  “We aren’t on Io anymore, are we?”

  “No.” He pointed at the stars with his half-eaten fish. “That’s no sky of Earth. Or even of Io.”

  Madeleine felt something inside her crack. “Malenfant—”

  “Hey.” He was immediately before her, holding her shoulders, tall in the dark. “Take it easy.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just—”

  “We’re a long way from home. I know.”

  “I’ve got a lot to tell you.” She started to blurt out all that she’d seen since she, Malenfant, and Dorothy Chaum had returned to the Solar System from the Gaijin’s Cannonball home world: the interstellar war, the hail of comets into the Sun’s hearth, the Crackers.

  He listened carefully. He showed regret at the damage done to Earth, the end of so many stories. He smiled when she spoke of Nemoto. But after a time, as detail after detail spilled out of her, he held her shoulders again.

  “Madeleine.”

  She looked up at him; his eyes were wells of shadow in the starlight.

  “None of it matters. Look around, Madeleine. We’re a long way away from all that. There’s nothing we can do to affect any of it now…”

  “How far?”

  “Questions later,” he said gently. “The first thing I did when I woke up was go behind those bushes over there and take a good solid dump.”

  Despite herself, that made her laugh out loud.

  By the time they’d eaten more fish, and some yamlike fruit Malenfant had found, it was still dark, with no sign of a dawn. So Madeleine pulled together a pallet of leaves and dry grass, tucked her arms inside her coverall, and quickly fell asleep.

  When she woke it was still dark.

  Male
nfant was hunkered down close to a stand of trees. He seemed to be drawing in the dirt with a stick, peering at the sky. Beyond him there was a group of figures, shadowy in the starlight. Neandertals?

  There really was no sign of dawn, no sign of a moon: not a glimmer of light, other than starlight, on any horizon. And yet something was different, she thought. Were the stars a little brighter? Certainly that Milky Way glow close to the horizon seemed stronger. And, it seemed to her, the stars had shifted a little, in the sky. She looked for the star patterns she had noted last time she was awake — the box overhead, the ellipse. Were they a little distorted, a little more squashed together?

  She joined Malenfant. He handed her a piece of fruit, and she sat beside him.

  The Neandertals seemed to be a family group: five, six adults, about as many children. They seemed oblivious to Malenfant’s scrutiny. They were hairy, squat, naked: cartoon ape-men. And two of the children were wrestling, hard, tumbling over and over, as if they were more gorilla than human.

  “Why did you come here, Madeleine?” Malenfant asked slowly, avoiding her eyes.

  He seemed stiff; she felt embarrassed, as if she had been foolish, impulsive. “I volunteered. The Gaijin helped me. I wanted to find you.”

  “Why?”

  “I got to know you, on the Cannonball, Malenfant. I didn’t like the idea of you being alone when—”

  “When what?”

  She hesitated. “Do you know why you’re here?”

  “Just remember,” he said coolly, “I didn’t ask you to follow me.” He continued his sketching in the dust, angry.

  She shrank back, confused, lost; she felt farther from home than ever.

  She studied his sketches. They were crude, just scrapings made with the point of his stick. But she recognized the box, the ellipse.