Space m-2

by Stephen Baxter

  “It’s a star map,” she said.

  “Yeah. Kind of basic. Just a few score of the brightest stars. But look here, here, here…”

  Some of the points were double.

  “The stars have shifted,” she said.

  “Here’s where this was yesterday — or before we slept, anyhow. And here’s where it is now.” He shrugged. “The shift is small — hard to be accurate without instruments — but I think it’s real.”

  “I noted it too,” she said.

  “Not just a shift. Other changes. I think there are more stars than yesterday. They seem brighter. And they are flowing across the sky—” He swept his arms over his head, toward the bright Milky Way band on the horizon. “ — thataway.”

  “Why that way?”

  He looked up at her. “Because that’s where we’re headed. Come see.” He stood, took her by the hand and pulled her to her feet, and led her past a stand of trees.

  Now she saw the galactic band exposed to her full view: It was a river of stars, yes, but they were stars that were varied — yellow and blue and orange — and the river was crammed with exotic features, giant dark clouds and brilliant shining nebulae.

  “It looks like the Milky Way,” she said. “But—”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s not like this at home… I think we’re looking at the Sagittarius Spiral Arm.”

  “Which is not the arm that contains the Sun,” she said slowly.

  “Hell, no. That’s just a shingle, a short arc. This mother is the next arm in, toward the center of the Galaxy.” He swept his arm so his hand spanned the star river. “Look at those nebulae — see? The Eagle, the Omega, the Trifid, the Lagoon — a huge region of star birth, one of the largest in the Galaxy, immense clouds of gas and dust capable of producing millions of stars each. The Sagittarius Arm is one of the Galaxy’s two main spiral features, a huge whirl of matter that reaches from the hub of the Galaxy all the way out to the rim, winding around for a full turn. This is what you see if you head inward from the Sun, toward the Galaxy center.”

  Under the huge, crowded sky, she felt small, humbled. “We’ve come a long way, haven’t we, Malenfant?”

  “I think we busted out of the edge of the Saddle Point network. We know the network is no more than a couple of thousand light-years across, extending just a fraction of the way to the center of the Galaxy. We must have reached a radius where the Saddle Points aren’t working anymore. Which is a problem if you want to go farther… I think this is just the start of the true journey.”

  He was speaking steadily, evenly, as if discussing a hiking tour of Yosemite. She felt her self-control waver again. But she didn’t want to seem weak in front of Malenfant, this difficult cold man.

  “And,” she said, “where will that true journey take us?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe all the way to the center of the Galaxy.” He studied her, perhaps to see how well she could take this. Then he pointed. “Look, Madeleine — the Lagoon Nebula, up there, is five thousand light-years from Earth.”

  And so, therefore, she thought, the year is A.D. 8800, or thereabouts. It was a number that meant nothing to her at all. And, even if she turned around now and headed for home, assuming that was possible, it would be another five thousand years before she could get back to Earth.

  But the center of the Galaxy was twenty-five thousand light-years from the Sun. Even at light speed it would take fifty thousand years to get there and back. Fifty thousand years. This was no ordinary journey, not even like a history-wrenching Saddle Point hop; the human species itself was only a hundred thousand years old…

  He was still watching her. “I’ve had time to get used to this.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Madeleine…”

  “I mean it,” she snapped. She got up, turned her back, and walked away. She found a stream, drank and splashed her face, spent a few minutes alone, eyes closed, breathing deeply.

  Perhaps it’s just as well we humans can’t grasp the immensities we have begun to cross. If we were any smarter, we’d go crazy.

  Remember why you came here, Madeleine. For Malenfant. Whether he appreciates it or not, the asshole. Malenfant is strong. But maybe it helps him just to have me here. Somebody he has to look after.

  But her grasp of psychology always had been shaky. Anyhow, she was here, whether he needed her or not.

  She went back to Malenfant, at his patient vigil.

  One of the Neandertal women was working a rock, making tools. She held a core of what looked like obsidian, a glassy volcanic rock. She gave the core one sharp strike, and a flake of it dropped off. A few light strokes along the edge and the flake had become a tear-shaped blade, like an arrowhead. The woman, with a lopsided grin, gave the knife to one of the males, signing rapidly.

  “She’s saying he should be careful of the edge,” Malenfant murmured.

  She frowned. “I don’t understand how those guys got here.”

  He told her what he’d observed of the Neandertals’ burial practices: the mysterious Staff of Kintu.

  “So you think the Gaijin were rewarding the dying Neandertal workers for all their labors with this — a soapy Heaven.”

  He laughed. “If they were, they are the first gods in history to deliver on their afterlife promises.”

  She paced, feeling the texture of the grass under her feet, the breeze on her face. “Why is it like this? Trees, grass, streams — it feels like Africa. But it isn’t Africa, is it?”

  “No. But if you ask almost any human, anywhere, what type of landscape they prefer, it’s something like this. Open grass, a few flat-topped trees. Even Clear Lake, Houston, fits the pattern: grass out front, maybe a tree or two. And you never put your tree in front of your window; you need to be able to look out of your cave, to see the predators coming. After taking us apart for a thousand years, the Gaijin know us well. And our Neandertal cousins. We’re a hundred millennia out of Africa, Madeleine, and five thousand light-years distant.” He tapped his chest. “But it’s still here, inside us.”

  “You’re saying they’ve given us an environment that we’re comfortable with. A Neandertal theme park.”

  He nodded. “I think very little of what we see is real.” He pointed at the sky. “But that is real.”

  “How so?”

  “Because it’s changing.”

  She slept and woke again.

  And the sky, once more, had changed dramatically. She lay on her back alongside Malenfant, gazing up at the evolving sky.

  He started talking about how he had traveled here.

  “They put me through a whole series of Saddle Point jumps, taking me across the geography of the Galaxy… First I headed toward Scorpio. Our Sun is in the middle of a bubble in space, hundreds of light-years across — did you know that? A vacuum blown into the galactic medium by an ancient supernova explosion. But the Saddle Point leaps got longer and longer…”

  With the Sun already invisible, he had been taken out of the local bubble, into a neighboring void the astronomers called Loop One.

  “I saw Antares through the murk,” he said, “a glowing red jewel set against a glowing patch of sky, a burst of young stars they call the Rho Opiuchi complex. Hell of a sight. I looked back for the Sun. I couldn’t find it. But I saw a great sheet of young stars that slices through the galactic plane, right past Sol. They call that Gould’s Belt, and I knew that was where home was.

  “And when I looked ahead, there was a band of darkness. I was reaching the inner limit of our spiral arm, looking into the rift between the arms, the dense dark clouds there. And then, beyond the rift, I arrived here — in this place, with the Neandertals…”

  “And the stars.”

  “Yes.”

  While she slept, the stars had continued to migrate. Now they had all swum their way up toward that Sagittarius Arm horizon, the way Malenfant said they were heading. The opposite horizon looked dark, for all its stars had fled. All the stars in the sky, in fact, had
crowded themselves into a disc, centered on a point some way above the brighter horizon — at least she guessed it was a disc; some of it was below her horizon. And the colors had changed; the stars had become green and yellow and blue.

  Now, in what situation would you expect to see the stars swimming around the sky like fish?

  “This is the aberration of starlight, isn’t it, Malenfant? The distortion of the visible universe, which you would see if—”

  “If you travel extremely quickly. Yes,” he said softly.

  She understood the principle. It was like running in the rain, a rain of starlight. As she ran faster, the rain would hit her harder, in her face, her body. If she ran extremely fast indeed, it would be as if the rain were almost horizontal…

  “We’re on a starship,” she breathed.

  “Yeah. We’re moving so fast that most of the stars we see up ahead must be red giants, infrared sources, invisible to us in normal times. All the regular stars have been blue-shifted to invisibility. Wherever we’re going, we’re traveling the old-fashioned way: in a spaceship, pushed up to relativistic speeds. And we’re still accelerating.”

  She sat up and dug her fingers into the grass. “But it doesn’t feel like a starship. Where is the crew? Where are we going? What will happen when we get there?”

  “When I found you, I hoped you were going to tell me.” He got to his feet. “What do you think we should do now?”

  She shrugged. “Walk. There’s nothing to stay for here.”

  “Okay. Which way?”

  She pointed to the glowing Sagittarius Arm horizon, the place the stars were fleeing, their putative destination.

  He smiled. “And add a couple of kilometers an hour to our eighty percent of light speed? Why not? We’re walking animals, we humans.”

  Malenfant picked up a sack that turned out to contain his ancient space suit, the wreck she had spent hours fixing up on the Cannonball. Obeying some obscure impulse for tidiness, he scuffed over his dirt-scraped star map. Then they set off.

  They passed the Neandertal family, who sat just where they had yesterday.

  When Madeleine looked back, the Neandertals were still sitting, unmoving, as the humans receded and the stars flowed overhead.

  The next time she woke, there was only a single source of light in the sky. It was a small disc, brighter than a full Moon, less bright than the Sun seen from Earth, tinged distinctly bluish.

  Aside from that the cloudless sky was utterly empty.

  Malenfant was standing before her, staring at the light. Beyond him she could see Neandertals, a family group of them, standing too, staring into the light, their awkward heads tipped back. Shadows streamed from the light, shadows of people and trees, steady and dark.

  She stood beside Malenfant. “What is it? Stars?”

  He shook his head. “The stars are all blue-shifted to invisibility. All of them.”

  “Then what—”

  “I think that’s the afterglow.” The background heat of the universe, left over from the Big Bang, stretched to a couple of degrees above absolute zero. “We’re going so fast now, just a tad lower than light speed, that even that has been crumpled up by aberration, crushed into a tiny disc. Some spectacle, don’t you think?” He held his hand up before him, shading the universe-Sun; she saw its shadow on his face. “You know, I remember the first time I left Earth, en route to the Saddle Point. And I looked back and saw the Earth dwindle to a dot of light smaller than that. Everything I’d ever known — five billion years of geology and biology, of sliding continents and oceans and plants and dinosaurs and people — all of it was crammed into a splinter of light, surrounded by nothing. And now the whole damn universe, stars and galaxies and squabbling aliens and all, is contained in that little smudge.”

  He told her he thought they were riding an antimatter rocket.

  “…It explains what the Gaijin were doing on Io, tapping the energy of Jupiter’s magnetosphere. Probably turned the whole moon into one big atom smasher, and picked the antimatter out of the debris.” The antimatter rocket could be a kind called a beam-core engine, he speculated. “It’s simple, in principle. You just have your tanks of atoms and antiatoms — hydrogen, probably, the antistuff contained in a magnetic trap — and you feed it into a nozzle and let it blow itself up. The electrons make gamma rays, and the nuclei make pions, all high energy stuff. Some of the pions are charged, so that’s what you throw out the back as your exhaust… There are other ways to do it. I don’t imagine the Gaijin have a very advanced design.”

  “It must have taken the Gaijin a long time, an immense project, to assemble the antimatter they needed.”

  “Oh, yeah. Hauling those superconductor cables all the way out from Venus, and everything. Big engineering.”

  “But,” Madeleine said deliberately, “there is no way you could haul all of this—” She indicated the plain, the trees. “ — a ship the size of a small moon up to relativistic speeds, all the way to the Galaxy core. Is there?”

  He looked into the sky. “I saw a study that said you would need a hundred tons of antimatter to haul a single ragged-assed astronaut to Proxima Centauri. At the time it would have taken our biggest atom smasher two centuries to produce so much as a milligram. I doubt that whatever the Gaijin built on Io was so terribly advanced over that. So — no, Madeleine. You couldn’t haul a small moon.”

  She studied her hand, pinched the flesh. The pinch hurt. “What are we, Malenfant? You think we’re some kind of simulations running inside a giant computer?”

  “It’s possible.” His voice contained a shrug, as if it didn’t matter. “It only takes a finite number of bits to encode a human being. That’s because of uncertainty, the graininess of nature… If not for that, the Saddle Point gateways wouldn’t be possible at all. On the other hand—” He dug into the ground until he came up with a stone the size of his thumbnail. “ — if the universe was the size of this rock, then each star would be the size of a quark. There are orders of magnitude of scale, structure, beneath the level of a human. Maybe we’re real, but shrunken down somehow. Plenty of room down there.”

  She felt a pulse in her head, a pressure. “But,” she said, “if we’re just emulations in some toy starship, we’re dead. I mean, we’re no longer us. Are we? How can we be?”

  He eyed her. “The first time you stepped through a gateway you were no longer you. Every transition is a death, a rebirth. Why do you think it hurts so much?”

  She felt weak, her legs numb. Carefully, she lowered herself to the grass, dug her hands into the rich cool texture of the ground.

  He knelt beside her, took her hand. “Listen. I don’t mean to be so tough on you. What do I know? I only have guesses too. I’ve had more time to get used to this stuff, is all.” He went on with difficulty. “I know you came here to help me. I remember the way you fixed my suit, on the Cannonball. You were… kind.”

  She said nothing.

  “I just don’t think you can help,” he said. His face was turning hard again. “Or will help.”

  That chilled her, his harsh dismissal. “Help with what, Malenfant? Why did the Gaijin go to all this trouble — to train Neandertals to mine antimatter on Io, build a starship, hurl it across light-years?”

  He looked troubled at that. “I think — I have this awful feeling, a suspicion — that the purpose of it all was me. A huge alien conspiracy, all designed to give me a ride across the Galaxy.” He studied her, face emptied by wonder. “Or is that paranoid, megalomaniacal? Do you think I’m crazy, Madeleine?”

  Beyond him, perhaps a half kilometer away, she made out a new shadow: angular, gaunt, crisp and precise before the cosmos light.

  It was a Gaijin.

  “Maybe we’ll soon find out,” she said.

  They approached the Gaijin. It just stood there impassively, silent. Madeleine saw how the pencil-thin cones that terminated its legs were stained green by crushed grass, and that a little quasi-African dust had settled on the surfa
ces of its upper carapace.

  Malenfant said he recognized it. It was the individual Gaijin he had come to know as Cassiopeia.

  “Oh, really? And how do you know that, Malenfant? The Gaijin are just spidery robots. Don’t they all look alike?”

  He didn’t try to answer.

  Madeleine found the Gaijin’s calm mechanical silence infuriating. She bent down and picked up a handful of dirt. She threw it at the Gaijin; it pinged off that impassive hide, not making so much as a scratch. “You. Space robot. You’ve been playing with us since you showed up in our asteroid belt. I don’t care how alien you are. No more fucking games.”

  Malenfant seemed shocked by her swearing. A corner of her found amusement at that. Malenfant really was a man of his time: Here they were hurtling away from Earth at a tad less than light speed, shrunk to quark-sized copies or else trapped in some alien virtual reality, and he was shocked to hear a woman swear. But he just stood and let her rant her heart out. Therapy, for absorbing one shock after another.

  She ran out of energy, slumped back to the grass, numbed by tiredness.

  The Gaijin stirred, like a turret swiveling. Madeleine thought she heard something like hydraulics, perhaps a creak of metal scraping on metal. The Gaijin spoke, its booming voice a good emulation of a human’s — a woman’s voice, in fact, with a tinge of Malenfant’s own accent.

  NO DOUBT YOU’RE WONDERING WHY I ASKED YOU HERE TODAY, Cassiopeia said.

  The silence stretched. Malenfant peered up at the Gaijin doubtfully.

  “She made a joke,” Madeleine said slowly. “This ridiculous alien robot made a joke.”

  Malenfant stared at Madeleine. Then he threw his hands in the air, slumped back on the grass, and laughed.

  Pretty soon, Madeleine caught the bug. The laugh seemed to start in her belly and burst out of her throat and mouth, despite her best efforts to contain it.

  So they laughed, and kept on laughing, while the Gaijin waited for them.

  And, cradling its precious cargo of mind and hope and fear, the ten-centimeters-long starship hurtled onward toward the core of the Galaxy, and its destiny.