Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Her head, positioned up at the top of her trunk, was about where his was. He saw three eyes, what appeared to be a mouth, other orifices that might be ears, nostrils. She seemed to be naked, save for a belt slung over one of her three shoulders, like a sash. He could see tools dangling there: a lump of quartz-like rock that could have been a hand-held hammer, what looked like a bow of the natural-plastic wood. Stone Age technology, he thought.

  … Of course Stone Age. Most metals would just corrode here. Gold would survive, but try making a workable axe out of that. Even fire would be problematic; all that chlorine would inhibit flame. There could be no ceramics, for instance.

  Because of an accident of biochemistry these people were stuck forever in the Stone Age. And since most rock would be corroded away, there wasn’t even much of that.

  Maybe these people had a rich culture, an oral tradition, dance. But that was all they could ever have. He watched the woman-thing whirl, with admiration, with pity.

  WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE PATTERNLESS SOUNDS THEY MAKE?

  ‘Patternless –’ Malenfant smiled. ‘Perceptual incongruence, Cassiopeia. Transform your data. Look at the frequency content, the ratios between the tones … We’ve discussed this before.’ The Gaijin analysed sound digitally, not with analogue microphone-like systems like the human ear. And so the patterns they judged as agreeable – valuable, anyhow – were complex numeric constructs, not the harmonies that pleased human ears.

  A long silence. IT IS A FORM OF MUSIC.

  ‘Yes. They’re singing, Cassiopeia. Singing, that’s all.’

  Now the dancing reached a climax, the howl of voices more intense. One of the dancers spun out of the group, whirling in a decaying orbit towards that pit around which they all gyrated.

  Then, with a fast, shimmying movement, she got to her belly and slid gracefully into the hole.

  The dancers continued, for thirty seconds, a minute, two, three, four. Malenfant just watched.

  At last the potholer returned. Malenfant saw that trio of upper arms come flopping over the rim of the pit. She seemed to be in trouble. Dancers broke away, four or five of them hurrying to haul their partner out of the hole.

  She lay on her back, shuddering, obviously distressed. But she held up something to the light. It was long, dark brown, pitted and heavily corroded. It was a bone – bigger than any human bone, half Malenfant’s height, and with a strange protrusion at one end – but unmistakably a bone even so.

  ‘Cassiopeia – what’s hurting her?’

  CHLORINE POISONING. CHLORINE IS A HEAVY GAS. IT POOLS IN LOW PLACES.

  ‘Like that hole in the ground.’

  YES.

  ‘And so, when she went down there to retrieve that bone –’

  The dancer had been asphyxiated. She was tolerant of chlorine, but couldn’t breathe it.

  The potholer passed the bone on to another. Malenfant saw that where her long, flipper-like hand had wrapped around the bone, it had been corroded. And when the dancer took hold of it, the bone surface sizzled and smoked to her touch. Carbonate, burning in the air.

  That’s what would happen to my bones here, slowly but surely. That bone can’t have belonged to any creature now extant, here on this chlorine-drenched planet.

  SHE SACRIFICED HER LIFE.

  ‘Why? What’s the point?’

  Cassiopeia seemed to hesitate. WE WERE HOPING YOU COULD TELL US.

  He turned his back on the whirling, singing dancers, and trudged back to his lander.

  He felt exhausted, depressed.

  ‘This wasn’t always a chlorine dump. Was it, Cassiopeia?’

  NO, she replied.

  That bone pit was the key. That, and the sparse biosphere.

  Once this had been a world very much like Earth, with the chlorine locked in the ocean. Then it had been – seeded. All it had taken was a single strain of chlorine-fixing microbes. The bugs found themselves in a friendly, bland atmosphere, with lots of chloride just floating around in the ocean, waiting to be used. And so it began.

  It had happened a long time ago, a hundred million years or more. Time enough for life forms to adapt. Some of them had evolved defences against the spreading stain of chlorine. Others had learned to incorporate chlorine into their cells to make themselves unpalatable to anyone wanting to eat them. Some even used the chlorine as a gas attack against predators or prey, like the tree mouse that had spat in his face. And so on. Thus, a chlorine-resistant biosphere had arisen.

  But the bone pit contained relics of the original native life, sent to extinction by the chlorine. The relics must have been trapped for megayears under a layer of limestone; but at last the limestone just dissolved, under rain like battery acid, exposing the bones.

  The Gaijin believed the seeding of the planet with chlorine-fixers had probably been deliberate.

  WE HAVE FOUND MANY WAYS TO KILL A WORLD, MALENFANT. THIS IS ONE OF THE MORE SUBTLE.

  Subtle and disguised; the chlorine-fixers might have evolved naturally, and after such a length of time it would be hard to prove otherwise. But the Gaijin had come across this modus operandi before.

  The thought shocked him more deeply than he had thought possible. This world wasn’t natural; it was like a corpse, strangled.

  WE UNDERSTAND HOW TO KILL A WORLD, Cassiopeia said. WE EVEN UNDERSTAND WHY.

  ‘Competition for resources?’

  BUT WE DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY THAT DANCER KILLED HERSELF.

  ‘It was ritual, Cassiopeia. As far as I could see. Religion, maybe.’ The dancers couldn’t possibly understand the story of their world, the meaning of the ancient fossils. Maybe they thought they were the bones of the giants who had created their world.

  But this was the most alien thing of all to the Gaijin.

  MALENFANT, WHAT IS IT THAT MAKES A SENTIENT BEING SACRIFICE THE POSSIBILITY OF A TRILLION YEARS OF CONSCIOUSNESS FOR AN IDEA?

  ‘Hell, I can’t tell you that.’

  BUT YOU DID THE SAME, WHEN YOU CAME THROUGH THE SOL GATEWAY. YOU COULD NOT KNOW WHAT LAY ON THE OTHER SIDE. YOU MUST HAVE EXPECTED TO DIE.

  ‘What is this, Anthropology 101? Is this so important to you?’

  The answer startled him.

  MALENFANT, IT MAY BE THE MOST IMPORTANT THING OF ALL.

  The planet was folding over, dwindling into a watery-blue dot, achingly familiar.

  But it was the scene of a huge crime, a biocide on a scale he could barely comprehend – and committed so impossibly long ago.

  ‘So strange,’ he murmured. ‘Earth, the solar system, contains nothing like this.’

  The Gaijin would not reply to that, and he felt a deep, abiding unease.

  But the solar system was primordial. You could see that was true.

  Wasn’t it?

  Chapter 11

  ANOMALIES

  Carole Lerner drifted out of the airlock.

  She was tethered by a series of metal clips to a guide line, along which she pulled herself hand over hand. The line connected her ship to a moonlet. The line seemed flimsy and fragile, strung as it was between spaceship and moonlet, two objects that floated, resting on no support, in empty three-dimensional space.

  But it was a space dominated by an immense, dazzling sphere, for Carole Lerner was in orbit around planet Venus.

  Before Carole had come here – the first human to visit Venus, Earth’s twin planet – nobody even knew Venus had a moon. Her mother had spent a life studying Venus, and never knew about the moon, probably never even dreamed of being here, like this.

  With no sensation of motion, floating in space, she and her ship swept around the planet, moving into its shadow so that it narrowed to a fine-drawn crescent. Close to the terminator, the blurred sweep that divided day from night, she saw shadowy forms: alternating bands of faint light and dark, hazy arcs. And near the equator there seemed to be yellowish spots, a little darker than the background. But these details were nothing to do with any ground features. All of these wisps and ghosts were a
rtefacts of the strange, complex structure of Venus’s great cloud decks – or perhaps they were manufactured by her imagination, as she sought to peer through that thick blanket of air.

  Now, at the apex of her looping trajectory, she moved deep into the shadow of the planet, and the crescent narrowed further, becoming a brilliant line drawn against the darkness. As the sun touched the cloud decks there was a brief, startling moment of sunset, and layers in the clouds showed as overlaid, smoothly curving sheets, fading from white down to yellow-orange. And then a faint, ghostly ring lit up all around the planet: sunlight refracted through the dense air.

  As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she saw the stars coming out one by one, framing that ringed circle of darkness. But one star, as if a rogue, moved balefully across the equator of that black disc, glowing orange-yellow. It was a Gaijin flower-ship, one of the small fleet that had followed her all the way here from the Moon.

  ‘The cloud tops of Venus,’ Nemoto whispered, her voice turned to a dry autumn-leaf rustle by the low quality radio link. ‘I envy you, Carole.’

  Carole grunted. ‘Another triumph for Man in Space.’ She waited the long minutes as her words, encoded into laser light, crossed the inner solar system to Earth’s Moon.

  ‘You are facetious,’ Nemoto eventually replied. ‘It is not appropriate. You know, I grew up close to a railway line, a great transport artery. I lay in my parents’ small apartment and I could hear the horns of the night freight trains. My parents were city dwellers; their lives had been static, unchanging. But the night trains reminded me every night that there were vehicles that could take me far away, to mountains, forest, or sea.

  ‘The Gaijin frighten me. But when I see their great ships sailing across the night, I am stirred by a ghost of the wanderlust I enjoyed, or suffered, as a girl. I envy you your adventure, child …’

  Incredible, Carole thought. I’ve travelled a hundred million kilometres with barely a word from that wizened old relic, and now she wants to open up her soul.

  She twisted in space and looked back at her ship.

  It was a complex collection of parts – a cylinder, bulging tanks, a cone, a giant umbrella shape, a rocky shield – all fixed to an open, loose framework of struts, made from lunar aluminium. The shield was made of blown lunar rock: grey, imposing, now heavily scorched and ablated, the shield had protected her on arrival at Venus, when her craft had dived straight into the upper atmosphere, giving up its interplanetary velocity to air friction. The big central cylinder was her hab module, the cramped box within which she had endured the long flight out here. The hab trailed a rocket engine unit – gleaming pipes and tanks surrounding a gaping, charred nozzle – and big soft-walled tanks of hydrogen and oxygen, the fuel that would bring her out of Venusian orbit and back home to Earth’s Moon. A wide, filmy umbrella was positioned on long struts before the complex of components. The umbrella, glistening with jewel-like photovoltaic cells, doubled as sunshade, solar energy collector and long-range antenna.

  Stuck to the side of the hab module was her lander, a small, squat, silvery cone with a fat, heavy heatshield. The lander was the size and shape of an old Apollo Command Module. This tiny, complex craft would carry her down through Venus’s clouds to the hidden surface, keep her alive for a few days, and then – after extracting much of its fuel from Venus’s atmosphere – bring her back to orbit once more.

  The craft looked clunky, crude, and compared to the grace of Gaijin technology very obviously human. But, after such a long journey in its womb-like interior, Carole felt an illogical fondness for the ship. After all, the trip hadn’t been easy for it either. The thick meteorite-shield blankets swathed over its surface were yellowed and pocked by tiny impact scars. The paintwork had been yellowed by sunlight and blistered by the burns of reaction control thrusters. The big umbrella had failed to open properly – one strut had snapped in unfurling – causing the ship to undergo ingenious manoeuvres to keep in its limited shade.

  Fondness, yes. Before she left the Moon, Carole had failed to name her ship. She’d thought it sentimental, a habit from a past to which she didn’t belong. She regretted it now.

  ‘… No wonder we missed the moon,’ Nemoto was saying. ‘It’s small, very light, and following an orbit that’s even wider and more elliptical than yours, Carole. Retrograde, too. And it’s loosely bound; energetically it’s close to escaping from Venus altogether –’

  She turned to face the moonlet. It swam in darkness. It was a rough sphere, just a hundred metres across, its dark and dusty surface pocked by a smattering of craters.

  Carole knew she wasn’t in control of this mission, even nominally. But she was the one who was here, looping extravagantly around Venus. ‘Are you sure this is necessary, Nemoto? I came here for Venus, not for this.’

  But Nemoto, of course, had not yet heard her question. ‘… A captured asteroid, perhaps? That would explain the orbit. But its shape appears too regular. And the cratering is limited. How old? Less than a billion years, more than five hundred million. And there is an anomaly with the density. Therefore – Ah. But what is necessity? You have a fat reserve of fuel, Carole, even now, more than enough to bring you home. And we are here, not for pure science, but to investigate anomalies. Look at this thing, Carole. This object is too small, too symmetrical to be natural. And its density is so low it must be hollow.

  ‘Carole, this is an artefact. And it has been here, orbiting Venus, for hundreds of millions of years. That is its significance.’

  She held her hands out before the approaching moonlet.

  There was no discernible gravity. It was not like jumping down to the surface of a world, but more like drifting towards a dark, dusty wall.

  When her gloves impacted, a thin layer of dust compressed under her fingertips. The gentle pressure was sufficient to slow her, and then she found a layer of hard rock beneath.

  Grains billowed up around her hands, sparkling. Some of them clung to her gloves, immediately streaking their silvery cleanliness, and some drifted away, unrestrained by this odd moonlet’s tenuous gravity.

  It was an oddly moving moment. I’ve come a hundred million kilometres, she thought. All that emptiness. And now I’ve arrived. I’m touching this lump of debris. Perhaps all travellers feel like this, she mused.

  Time to get to work, Carole.

  She took a piton from her belt. She had hastily improvised it from framing bolts on the ship. With a geology hammer intended for Venus, she pounded at the spike. Then she clipped a tether line to the piton.

  ‘It looks like Moon dust,’ she reported to distant Nemoto. She scooped up a dust sample and passed it through a portable lab unit for a quick analysis. Then she held the lab over the bare exposed rock and let its glinting laser beam vaporize a small patch, to see if the colours of the resulting rock mist might betray its nature.

  Then, spike by spike, she began to lay a line from her anchor point, working across the folds and ridges of this battered, tightly curved miniature landscape, towards the pole of the moonlet. There, Nemoto said, she had detected what appeared to be a dimple, a crater too deep for its width: it was an anomaly, here on this anomalous moon.

  Nemoto, reacting to her first observations and images, began to whisper in her ear, a remote insect. ‘Lunar regolith, yes. And that rock is very much like lunar highlands material: basically plagioclase feldspar, a calcium – aluminium silicate. Carole, this appears to be a bubble of lunar-type rock – a piece of a larger body, a true Venusian moon, perhaps? – presumably dug out, melted, shaped, thrown into orbit … but why? And why such a wide, looping trajectory? …’

  She kept talking, speculating, theorizing. Carole tuned her out. After all, in a few more minutes, she would know.

  She had reached the dimple. It was a crater perhaps two metres across – but whereas most of the craters here, gouged out by impacts, were neat, shallow saucers, this one was much deeper than its width – four, five metres perhaps.

  Almost cylindrical.r />
  She found her heart hammering as she clambered into this pit of ancient darkness; a superstitious fear engulfed her.

  With brisk motions, she fixed a small radio relay box to the lip of the dimple. Then she stretched a thin layer of gas-trapping translucent plastic over the dimple. Of course by doing this she was walling herself up inside this hole in the ground. It was illogical, but she made sure she could punch out through that plastic sheet before she finished fixing it in place.

  She saw something move in the sky above. She gasped and stumbled, throwing up a spray of dust.

  A flower-ship cruised by, its electromagnetic petals folded, jewel-like Gaijin patrolling its ropy flanks.

  She scowled up. ‘I want company,’ she said. ‘But you don’t count.’

  She turned away, and let herself drift down to the bottom of the pit.

  She landed feet-first. The floor of the pit felt solid, a layer of rock. But the dust was thicker here, presumably trapped by the pit. When she looked up she saw a circle of stars framed by black, occluded by a little spectral distortion from the plastic.

  Nothing happened. If she’d expected this ‘door’ to open on contact, she was disappointed.

  But Nemoto wasn’t surprised. ‘This artefact – if that’s what it is – may predate the first mammals, Carole. You wouldn’t expect complex equipment to keep functioning so long, would you? But there must be a backup mechanism. And I’ll wager that is still working.’

  So Carole got to her hands and knees, trying to keep from pushing herself away from the ground, and she scrabbled in the dirt, her gloved hands soon filthy.