Space

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Do you know what a burster is?’

  Madeleine frowned. ‘No kind of weapon I’ve ever heard of.’

  ‘It’s not a weapon, Meacher. It’s a star.’

  Madeleine was, briefly, electrified.

  ‘Look, Meacher, we have a proposal for you.’

  ‘What makes you think I’ll be interested?’

  Brind’s voice was gravelly and full of menace. ‘I know a great deal about you.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘If you must know, through the tax bureau. You have operated your –’ she waved a hand dismissively ‘– enterprises in over a dozen countries over the years. But you’ve paid tax on barely ten per cent of the income we can trace.’

  ‘Never broken a law.’

  Brind eyed Madeleine, as if she had said something utterly naive. ‘The law is a weapon of government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.’

  Madeleine tried to figure out Brind. Her biocomposite suit looked efficient, not expensive. Brind was a wage slave, not an entrepreneur. She guessed, ‘You’re from the government?’

  Brind’s face hardened. ‘When I was young, we used to call what you do gun-running. Although I don’t suppose that’s how you think of it yourself.’

  The remark caught Madeleine off guard. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m a pilot. All I ever wanted to do is fly; this is the best job I could get. In a different universe, I’d be –’

  ‘An astronaut,’ said Frank Paulis.

  The foolish, archaic word got to Madeleine. Here, of all places.

  ‘We know about you, you see,’ Sally Brind said, almost regretfully. ‘All about you.’

  ‘There are no astronauts any more.’

  ‘That isn’t true, Meacher,’ Paulis said. ‘Come with us. Let us show you what we’re planning.’

  Brind and Paulis took her out to Launch Complex 41, the old USASF Titan pad at the northern end of ICBM Row. Here, Brind’s people had refurbished an antique Soviet-era Proton launcher.

  The booster was a slim black cylinder, fifty-three metres tall. Six flaring strap-on boosters clustered around the first stage, and Madeleine could pick out the smaller stages above. A passenger capsule and hab module would be fixed to the top, shrouded by a cone of metal.

  ‘Our capsule isn’t much more sophisticated than an Apollo,’ Brind said. ‘It only has to get you to orbit and keep you alive for a couple of hours, until the Gaijin come to pick you up.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Would you like to see your hab module? It’s being prepared in the old Orbiter Processing Facility …’

  ‘Get to the point,’ Madeleine said. ‘Where are you planning to send me? And what exactly is a burster?’

  ‘A type of neutron star. A very interesting type. The Gaijin are sending a ship there. They’ve invited us – that is, the UN – to send a representative. An observer. It’s the first time they’ve offered this, to carry an observer beyond the solar system. We think it’s important to respond. We can send our own science platform; we’ll train you up to use it. We can even establish our own Saddle Point gateway in the neutron star system. It’s all part of a wider trade and cultural deal, which –’

  ‘So you represent the UN?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  Paulis said, ‘We need somebody with the qualifications and experience to handle a journey like this. You’re about the right age, under forty. You’ve no dependants that we can trace.’ He sighed. ‘A hundred years ago, we’d have sent John Glenn. Today, the best fit is the likes of you. You’ll be well paid.’ He eyed Madeleine. ‘Believe me, very well paid.’

  Madeleine thought it over, trying to figure the angles. ‘That Proton is sixty years old, the design even older. You don’t have much of a budget, do you?’

  Paulis shrugged. ‘My pockets aren’t as deep as they used to be.’

  Brind prickled. ‘What does the budget matter? For Christ’s sake, Meacher, don’t you have any wonder in your soul? I’m offering you, here, the chance to travel to the stars. My God – if I had your qualifications, I’d jump at the chance.’

  ‘And you aren’t truly the first,’ Paulis said. ‘Reid Malenfant –’

  ‘– is lost. Anyhow it’s not exactly being an astronaut,’ Madeleine said sourly. ‘Is it? Being live cargo on a Gaijin flower-ship doesn’t count.’

  ‘Actually a lot of people agree with you,’ Paulis said. ‘That’s why we’ve struggled to assemble the funding. Noone is interested in human spaceflight in these circumstances. Most people are happy just to wait for the Gaijin to parachute down more interstellar goodies from the sky …’

  ‘Why don’t you just send along an automated instrument pallet? Why send a human at all?’

  ‘No.’ Brind shook her head firmly. ‘We’re deliberately designing for a human operator.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we want a human there. A human like you, God help us. We think it’s important to try to meet them on equal terms.’

  Madeleine laughed. ‘Equal terms? We limp into orbit, and rendezvous with a giant alien ramjet capable of flying to the outer solar system?’

  ‘Symbolism, Meacher,’ Paulis said darkly. ‘Symbols are everything.’

  ‘How do you know the Gaijin respond to symbols?’

  ‘Maybe they don’t. But people do. And it’s people I’m interested in. Frankly, Meacher, we’re seeking advantage. Not everybody thinks we should become so completely reliant on the Gaijin. You’ll have a lot of discretion out there. We need someone with – acumen. There may be opportunities.’

  ‘What kind of opportunities?’

  ‘To get humanity out from under the yoke of the Gaijin,’ Paulis said. For the first time there was a trace of anger in his voice, passion.

  Madeleine began to understand.

  There were various shadowy groups who weren’t happy with the deals the governments and corporations had been striking with the Gaijin. This trading relationship was not between two equals. And besides the Gaijin must be following their own undeclared goals. What about the stuff they were keeping back? What would happen when the human economy was utterly dependent on the trickle of good stuff from the sky? And suppose the Gaijin suddenly decided to turn off the faucets – or, worse, decided to start dropping rocks?

  Beyond that, the broader situation continued to evolve, year on year. More and more of the neighbouring stars were lighting up with radio and other signals, out to a distance of some thirty light years. It was evident that a ferocious wave of emigration was coming humanity’s way, scouring along the Orion-Cygnus spiral arm. Presumably those colonists were propagating via Saddle Point gateways, and they were finding their target systems empty – or undeveloped, like the solar system. And as soon as they arrived they started to build, and broadcast.

  Humans knew precisely nothing about those other new arrivals, at Sirius and Epsilon Eridani and Procyon and Tau Ceti and Altair. Maybe humans were lucky it was the Gaijin who found them first, the first to intervene in the course of human history. Or maybe not. Either way, facing this volatile and fast-changing future, it seemed unwise – to some people – to rely entirely on the goodwill of the first new arrivals to show up. Evidently those groups were now trying, quietly, to do something about it.

  But Madeleine’s first priority was the integrity of her own skin.

  ‘How far is it to this burster?’

  ‘Eighteen light years.’

  Madeleine knew the relativistic implications. She would come back stranded in a future thirty-six years remote. ‘I won’t do it.’

  ‘It’s that or the Gulf,’ Brind said evenly.

  The Gulf. Shit. After twenty years of escalating warfare over the last oil reserves the Gulf was like the surface of Io: glassy nuke craters punctuated by oil wells which would burn for decades. Even with biocomp armour, her life expectancy would be down to a few months.

  She turned, and lifted her face to the Florida
sun. It looked like she didn’t have a choice.

  But, she suspected, she was kind of glad about that. Something inside her began to stir at the thought of this improbable journey.

  And crossing the Galaxy with the Gaijin might be marginally safer than flying Sängers into N’Djamena, anyhow.

  Paulis seemed to sense she was wavering. ‘Spend some time,’ he said. ‘We’ll introduce you to our people. And –’

  ‘And you’ll tell me how you’re going to make me rich.’

  ‘Exactly.’ He grinned. He had very even, capped teeth.

  She was flown to Kefallinia, the Ionian island which the Gaijin had been granted as a base on planet Earth. From the air the island looked as if it had been painted on the blue skin of the sea, a ragged splash of blue-grey land, everywhere indented with bays and inlets, like a fractal demonstration. Off the coast she spotted naval ships, grey slabs of metal, principally a US Navy battle group.

  On the ground the sun was high, the air hot and still and very bright, like congealed light, and the rocks tumbled from a spine of mountains down to the tideless sea.

  People had lived here, it was thought, for six thousand years. Not any more, of course: not the natives anyhow. When the UN deal with the Gaijin had been done, the Kefallinians were evacuated by the Greek government, most to sites in mainland Greece, others abroad. Those who came to America had been vocal. They regarded themselves as refugees, their land stolen, their culture destroyed by this alien invasion. Rightly so, Madeleine thought.

  But the Kefallinians weren’t the only dispossessed on planet Earth, and their plight, though newsworthy, wasn’t attention-grabbing for long.

  At the tiny airport she saw her first piece of close-up genuine Gaijin technology: a surface-to-orbit shuttle, a squat cone of some shimmering metallic substance. It looked too fragile to withstand the rigours of atmospheric entry. And yet there it was, large as life, sitting right next to the Lear jets and antiquated island-hoppers.

  From the airport she was whisked to the central UN facility, close to the old capital of Argostoli. The facility was just a series of hastily prefabricated buildings and bunkers, linked by walkways and tunnels. The central building, containing the Gaijin themselves, was a crude aluminium box.

  Surrounding the Gaijin shelter there were chapels and temples and mosques, embassies from various governments and inter-governmental bodies, a science park, representatives of most of the world’s major corporations. All of these groups, she supposed, were here trying to get a piece of the action, one way or another.

  The senior US government official here, she learned, was called the Planetary Protection Officer. The PPO post had been devised in the 1990s to coordinate quarantine measures to handle samples of Mars rock returned to Earth, and such-like. With the arrival of the Gaijin, the joke post had become somewhat more significant.

  The military presence was heavy, dug in all over the complex. There were round-the-clock patrols by foot soldiers and armoured vehicles. Copters hovered overhead continually, filling the languid air with their crude rattle, and fighter planes soared over the blue dome of the sky, flight after flight of them.

  To some extent this show of military power, as if the Gaijin were being contained here by human mil technology, was a sop for public opinion. Look: we are dealing with these guys as equals. We are in control. We have not surrendered … Madeleine had even heard senior military officers describing the Gaijin as ‘bogeys’ and ‘tin men’, and seeking approval to continue their wargaming of hypothetical Gaijin assaults. But she’d seen enough warfare herself to believe that there was no way humans could prevail in an all-out conflict with the Gaijin. The hoary tactic of dropping space rocks on the major cities would probably suffice for them to win. So the smarter military minds must know that mankind had no choice but to accommodate.

  But there was a splash of darkness on the concrete, close to the Gaijin facility: apparently a remnant of a near-successful protest assault on the Gaijin, an incident never widely publicized. Happily the Gaijin had shown none of the likely human reaction to such an incident, no desire to retaliate. It made Madeleine realize that the military here were looking two ways: protecting mankind from its alien visitors, and vice versa.

  She stood on heat-soaked concrete and looked up at the sky. Even now, in the brightness of a Mediterranean day, she could see the ghostly shapes of flower-ships, their scoops hundreds of kilometres wide, cruising above the skies of Earth. At that moment, the idea that humans could contain the Gaijin, engage them in dialogue, control this situation, seemed laughable.

  They had to put on paper coveralls and overboots and hats, and they were walked through an airlock. The Gaijin hostel worked to about the cleanliness standard of an operating theatre, Madeleine was told.

  Inside the big boxy buildings, it was like a church, of a peculiarly stripped-down, minimalist kind: there was a quiet calm, subdued light, and people in uniform padded quietly to and fro in an atmosphere of reverence.

  In fact, Madeleine found, that church analogy was apt. For the Gaijin had asked to meet the Pope.

  ‘And other religious leaders, of course,’ said Dorothy Chaum, as she shook Madeleine’s hand. ‘Strange, isn’t it? We always imagined the aliens would make straight for the Carl Sagan SETI-scientist types, and immediately start “curing” us of religion and other diseases of our primitive minds. But it isn’t working out that way at all. They seem to have more questions than answers …’

  Chaum turned out to be an American, a Catholic priest who had been assigned by the Vatican to the case of the Gaijin from their first detection. She was a stocky, sensible-looking woman who might have been fifty, her hair frizzed with a modest grey. Madeleine was shocked to find out she was over one hundred years old. Evidently the Vatican could buy its people the best life-extending treatments.

  They walked towards big curtained-off bays. The separating curtain was a nearly translucent sheet stretched across the building, from ceiling to floor, wall to wall.

  And there – beyond the curtain, bathed in light – was a Gaijin.

  Machinery, not life: that was her first impression. She recognized the famous dodecahedral core. It was reinforced at its edges – presumably to counter Earth’s gravity – and it was resting, incongruously, on a crude Y-frame trailer. A variety of instruments, cameras and other sensors, protruded from the dodecahedron’s skin, and the skin itself was covered with fine bristly wires. Three big robot arms stuck out of that torso, each articulated in two or three places. Two of the arms were resting on the ground, but the third was waving around in the air, fine manipulators at the terminus working.

  She looked in vain for symmetry.

  Humans had evolved to recognize symmetry in living things – left-to-right, anyhow, because of gravity. Living things were symmetrical; non-living things weren’t – a basic human prejudice hard-wired in from the days when it paid to be able to pick out the predator lurking against a confusing background. In its movements this Gaijin had the appearance of life, but it was angular, almost clumsy-looking – and defiantly not symmetrical. It didn’t fit.

  Human researchers were lined up with their noses pressed against the curtain. A huge bank of cameras and other apparatus was trained on the Gaijin’s every move. She knew a continuous image of the Gaijin was being sent out to the net, twenty-four hours a day. There were bars which showed nothing but Gaijin images on huge wall-covering softscreens, all day and all night.

  The Gaijin was reading a book, turning its pages with cold efficiency. Good grief, Madeleine thought, disturbed.

  ‘The Gaijin are deep space machines,’ said Brind. ‘Or life forms, whatever. But they’re hardy; they can survive in our atmosphere and gravity. There are three of them, here in this facility: the only three on the surface of the planet. We’ve no way of knowing how many are up there in orbit, or further out, of course …’

  Dorothy Chaum said to her, ‘We think we’re used to machinery. But it’s eerie, isn’t it?’
>
  ‘If it’s a machine,’ Madeleine said, ‘it was made by no human. And it’s operated by none of us. Eerie. Yes, you’re right.’ She found herself shuddering, oddly, as that crude mechanical limb clanked. She’d lived her life with machinery, but this Gaijin was spooking her, on some primitive level.

  Dorothy Chaum murmured, ‘We speak to them in Latin, you know.’ She grinned, dimpling, looking younger. ‘It’s the most logical human language we could find; the Gaijin have trouble with all the irregular structures and idioms of modern languages like English. We have software translation suites to back us up. But of course it’s a boon to me. I always knew those long hours of study in the seminary would pay off.’

  ‘What do you talk about?’

  ‘A lot of things,’ Brind said. ‘They ask more questions than they volunteer answers. Mostly, we figure out a lot from clues gleaned from inadvertent slips.’

  ‘Oh, I doubt that anything about the Gaijin is inadvertent,’ Chaum said. ‘Certainly their speech is not like ours. It is dull, dry, factual, highly structured, utterly unmemorable. There seems to be no rhythm, no poetry – no sense of story. Simply a dull list of facts and queries and dry logic. Like the listing of a computer program.’

  ‘That’s because they are machines,’ Paulis growled. ‘They aren’t conscious, like we are.’

  Chaum smiled gently. ‘I wish I felt so sure. The Gaijin are clearly intelligent. But are they conscious? We know of examples of intelligence without consciousness, right here on Earth: social insects like ant colonies, the termites. And you could argue there can be consciousness without much intelligence, as in a mouse. But is advanced intelligence possible without consciousness of some sort?’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Paulis with disgust. ‘You gave these clanking tin men a whole island, they’ve been down here for five whole years, and you can’t even answer questions like that?’

  Chaum stared at him. ‘If I could be sure you are conscious, if I even knew for sure what it meant, I’d concede your point.’