Space

by Stephen Baxter

If Madeleine had encountered this creature in some deep sea aquarium – and given she was no biologist – she mightn’t have thought it outlandishly strange. After all it had those remarkable eyes.

  The eyes were, of course, a stunning example of convergent evolution. On Earth, eyes conveyed such a powerful evolutionary advantage that they had been developed independently perhaps forty times – while wings seemed to have been invented only three or four times, and the wheel not at all. Although details differed – the eyes of fish, insects and people were very different – nevertheless all eyes showed a commonality of design, for they were evolved for the same purpose, and were constrained by physical law.

  You might have expected Eeties to show up with eyes.

  The Chaera communicated by movement, their rippling surfaces sending low-frequency acoustic signals through the fluid in which they swam. In the tank, lasers scanned the Chaera’s surface constantly, picking up the movements and affording translations.

  Inter-species translation was actually getting easier, after the first experience with the Gaijin. A kind of meta-language had been evolved, an interface which served as a translation buffer between Eetie ‘languages’ and every human tongue. The meta-language was founded on concepts – space, time, number – which had to be common to any sentient species embedded in three-dimensional space and subject to physical law, and it had verbal, mathematical and diagrammatic components; to Madeleine’s lay understanding it seemed to be a fusion of Latin and Lincos.

  Madeleine felt an odd kinship with the spinning, curious creature, a creature that might have come from Earth, much more sympathetic than any Gaijin. And if we have found you so quickly, perhaps we will find less strangeness out there than we expect.

  Ben asked, ‘What is it saying?’

  Virtual Nemoto translated. ‘The Chaera saw the disc unfolding. “What a spectacle. I am the envy of generations …”’

  Mini black holes, Madeleine learned, were typically the mass of Jupiter. Too small to have been formed by processes of stellar collapse, they were created a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, baked in the fireball at the birth of the universe.

  Mini black holes, then, seemed to be well understood. The oddity here was to find such a hole in a neat circular orbit around this sun-like star.

  ‘And the real surprise,’ said virtual Nemoto, ‘was the discovery, by the Gaijin, of life, infesting the accretion disc of a mini black hole. The Chaera. It seems that this black hole is God for the Chaera.’

  ‘They worship a black hole?’ Madeleine asked.

  ‘Evidently,’ said Nemoto impatiently. ‘If the translation programs are working. If it’s possible to correlate concepts like “God” and “worship” across species barriers.’

  Ben murmured wordlessly. Madeleine looked over his shoulder.

  In the central glare of the accretion disc, there was something surrounding the black hole, embedding it.

  The black hole was set into a net-like structure that started just outside the Schwarzschild radius, and extended kilometres. The structure was a regular solid of twenty triangular faces.

  ‘It’s an icosahedron,’ Ben said. ‘My God, it is so obviously artificial. The largest possible Platonic solid. Triumphantly three-dimensional.’

  Madeleine couldn’t make out any framework within the icosahedron, or any reinforcement for its edges; it was a structure of sheets of almost transparent film, each triangle hundreds of metres wide. The glow of the flower-ship’s hungry ramscoop shone and sparkled from the multiple facets.

  ‘It must be mighty strong to maintain its structure against the hole’s gravity, the tides,’ Ben said. ‘It seems to be directing the flow of matter from the accretion disc into the event horizon …’

  It was a jewel-box setting for a black hole. A comparative veteran of interstellar exploration, Madeleine felt stunned.

  The Chaera thrashed in its tank.

  Nemoto said, ‘Time to pay the fare. Are we ready to speak to God?’

  Madeleine turned to Ben. ‘We didn’t know about this. Maybe we should think about what we’re doing here.’

  He shrugged. ‘Nemoto is right. It is not our mission.’ He began the operations they’d rehearsed.

  Reluctantly, Madeleine worked a console to unship the first of the old X-ray lasers; the monitors showed it unfolding from its mount like a shabby flower.

  The self-directed laser dove into the heart of the system, heading for its closest approach to the hole.

  Ben murmured, ‘Three, two, one.’

  There was a flash of light, pure white, which shone through the Service Module’s ports.

  Various instruments showed surges, of particles and electromagnetic radiation. The laser’s fission-bomb power source had worked. The shielding of Ancestor seemed adequate.

  The X-ray beam washed over the surface of ‘God’. The net structure stirred, like a sleeping snake.

  The Chaera quivered.

  Ben was watching the false-colour images. ‘Madeleine. Look.’

  The surface of ‘God’ was alive with motion; the icosahedral netting was bunching itself around a single, brooding point, like skin crinkling round an eye.

  ‘I can give you a rough translation from the Chaera,’ said Nemoto. “‘She heard us.’”

  Madeleine asked, “‘She”?’

  ‘God, of course. “If I have succeeded … Then I will be the most honoured of my race. Fame – wealth – my choice of mates –”’

  Madeleine laughed sourly. ‘And, of course, religious fulfilment.’

  Ben monitored a surge, of X-ray photons and high-energy particles, coming from the hole – and the core at the centre of the crinkled net exploded. A pillar of radiation punched through the accretion disc like a fist.

  The Chaera wobbled around its tank.

  ‘“God is shouting,”’ Nemoto said. She peered out of her biopro monitor tank, her wizened virtual face creased with doubt.

  The beam blinked out, leaving a trail of churning junk.

  The flower-ship entered a long powered orbit which would take it, for a time, away from the black hole, and in towards the primary star and its inner system. Madeleine and Ben watched the black hole and its enigmatic artefact recede to a toy-like glimmer.

  The Chaera inhabited the accretion disc’s larger fragments.

  In the Ancestor’s recorded images, Chaera were everywhere, spinning like frisbees over the surface of their worldlets – or whipping through the accretion mush to a neighbouring fragment – or basking like lizards, their undersides turned up to the black hole.

  The beam from ‘God’ had left a track of glowing debris through the accretion disc, like flesh scorched by hot iron. The track ended in a knot of larger fragments.

  In the optical imager, jellyfish bodies drifted like soot flakes.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ Madeleine said. ‘The Chaera have evolved to feed off the X-radiation from the black hole … from “God”. Is that right?’

  ‘Evolved or adapted. So it seems,’ Nemoto said dryly. “‘God provides us in all things.’”

  Ben said, ‘So the Chaera try to – shout – to “God”. Some of them pray. Some of them build great artefacts to sparkle at Her. Like worshipping the sun, praying for dawn. Basically they’re trying to stimulate X-radiation bursts. All the Gaijin have done is to sell them a more effective communication mechanism.’

  ‘A better prayer wheel,’ Madeleine murmured. ‘But what are the Gaijin interested in here? The black hole artefact?’

  ‘Possibly,’ Nemoto said. ‘Or perhaps the Chaera’s religion. The Gaijin seem unhealthily obsessed with such illogical belief systems.’

  ‘But,’ Madeleine said, ‘that X-ray laser delivers orders of magnitude more energy into the artefact than anything the Chaera could manage. It looks as if the energy of the pulse they get in return is magnified in proportion. Perhaps the Chaera don’t understand what they’re dealing with, here.’

  Nemoto translated: “‘God’s h
oly shout shatters worlds.’”

  The main star was very sun-like. Madeleine, filled with complex doubts about her mission, pressed her hand to the window, trying to feel its warmth, hungering for simple physical pleasure.

  There was just one planet here. It was a little larger than the Earth, and it followed a neat circular path through the star’s habitable zone, the region within which an Earth-like planet could orbit.

  But they could see, even from a distance, that this was no Earth. It was silent on all wavelengths. And it gleamed, almost as bright as a star itself; it must have cloud decks like Venus.

  On a sleep break, Ben and Madeleine, clinging to each other, floated before the nearest thing they had to a picture window. Madeleine peered around, seeking constellations she might recognize, even so far from home, and she wondered if she could find Sol.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ Ben whispered.

  ‘There always is.’

  ‘I’m serious.’ He let his fingers trace out a line across the black sky. ‘What do you see?’

  With the sun eclipsed by the shadow of the FGB Module, she gazed out at the subtle light. There was that bright planet, and the dim red disc of rubble surrounding the Chaera black hole, from here just visible as more than a point source of light.

  Ben said, ‘There’s a glow, around the star itself, covering the orbit of that single planet. Can you see?’ It was a diffuse shine, Madeleine saw, cloudy, ragged-edged. Ben said, ‘That’s an oddity in itself. But –’

  Then she got it. ‘Oh. No zodiacal light.’

  The zodiacal light, in the solar system, was a faint glow along the plane of the ecliptic. Sometimes it was visible from Earth. It was sunlight, scattered by dust that orbited the sun in the plane of the planets. Most of the dust was in or near the asteroid belt, created by asteroid collisions. And in the modern solar system, of course, the zodiacal light was enhanced by the glow of Gaijin colonies.

  ‘So if there’s no zodiacal light –’

  ‘There are no asteroids here,’ said Ben.

  ‘Nemoto. What happened to the asteroids?’

  ‘You already know, I think,’ virtual Nemoto hissed.

  Ben nodded. ‘They were mined out. Probably long ago. This place is old, Madeleine.’

  The electromagnetic petals of the flower-ship sparkled hungrily as it chewed through the rich gas pocket at the heart of the system, and the shadows cast by the sun – now nearby, full and fat, brimming with light – turned like clock hands on the ship’s complex surface. But that diffuse gas cloud was now dense enough that it dimmed the further stars.

  Data slid silently into the FGB Module.

  Ben said, ‘It’s like a fragment of a GMC – a giant molecular cloud. Mostly hydrogen, some dust. It’s thick – comparatively. A hundred thousand molecules per cubic centimetre … The sun was born out of such a cloud, Madeleine.’

  ‘But the heat of the sun dispersed the remnants of our cloud … didn’t it? So why hasn’t the same thing happened here?’

  ‘Or,’ virtual Nemoto said sourly, ‘maybe the question should be: how come the gas cloud got put back around this star?’

  They flew around the back of the sun. Despite elaborate shielding, light seemed to fill every crevice of the FGB module. Madeleine was relieved when they started to pull away, and headed for the cool of the outer system, and that single mysterious planet.

  It took a day to get there.

  They came at the planet with the sun behind them, so it showed a nearly full disc. It glared, brilliant white, just a solid mass of cloud from pole to pole, blinding and featureless. And it was surrounded by a pearly glow of interstellar hydrogen, like an immense, misshapen outer atmosphere.

  The flower-ship’s petals opened wide, the lasers working vigorously, and decelerated smoothly into orbit.

  They could see nothing of the surface. Their instruments revealed a world that was indeed like Venus: an atmosphere of carbon dioxide, kilometres thick, scarcely any water.

  There was, of course, no life of any kind.

  The Chaera spun in its tank, volunteering nothing.

  Ben was troubled. ‘There’s no reason for a Venus to form this far from the sun. This world should be temperate. An Earth.’

  ‘But,’ Nemoto hissed, ‘think what this world has that Earth doesn’t share.’

  ‘The gas cloud,’ Madeleine said.

  Ben nodded. ‘All that interstellar hydrogen. Madeleine, we’re so far from the sun now, and the gas is so thick, that the hydrogen is neutral – not ionized by sunlight.’

  ‘And so –’

  ‘And so the planet down there has no defence against the gas; its magnetic field could only keep it out if it was charged. Hydrogen has been raining down from the sky, into the upper air.’

  ‘Once there, it will mix with any oxygen present,’ Nemoto said. ‘Hydrogen plus oxygen gives –’

  ‘Water,’ Madeleine said.

  ‘Lots of it,’ Ben told her. ‘It must have rained like hell, for a million years. The atmosphere was drained of oxygen, and filled up with water vapour. A greenhouse effect took off –’

  ‘All that from a wisp of gas?’

  ‘That wisp of gas was a planet-killer,’ Nemoto whispered.

  ‘But why would anyone kill a planet?’

  Nemoto said, ‘It is the logic of growth. This has all the characteristics of an old system, Meacher. Caught behind a wave of colonization – all its usable resources dug out and exploited …’

  Madeleine frowned. ‘I don’t believe it. It would take a hell of a long time to eat up a solar system.’

  ‘How long do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. Millions of years, perhaps.’

  Nemoto grunted. ‘Listen to me. The growth rate of the human population on Earth, historically, was two per cent a year. Doesn’t sound much, does it? But it’s compound interest, remember. At that rate your population doubles every thirty-five years, an increase by tenfold every century or so. Of course after the twentieth century our growth rates collapsed; we ran out of resources.’

  ‘Ah,’ Ben said. ‘What if we’d kept on growing?’

  ‘How many people could Earth hold?’ Nemoto whispered. ‘Ten, twenty billion? Meacher, the whole of the inner solar system out to Mars could supply only enough water for maybe fifty billion people. It might have taken us a century to reach those numbers. Of course there is much more water in the asteroids and the outer system than in Earth’s oceans, perhaps enough to support ten thousand trillion human beings.’

  ‘A huge number.’

  ‘But not infinite – and only six tenfold jumps away from ten billion.’

  ‘Just six or seven centuries,’ Ben said.

  ‘And then what?’ Nemoto whispered. ‘Suppose we start colonizing, like the Gaijin. Earth is suddenly the centre of a growing sphere of colonization, whose volume must keep increasing at two per cent a year, to keep up with the population growth. And that means that the leading edge, the colonizing wave, has to sweep on faster and faster, eating up worlds and stars and moving on to the next, because of the pressure from behind …’

  Ben was doing sums in his head. ‘That leading edge would have to be moving at lightspeed within a few centuries, no more.’

  ‘Imagine how it would be,’ Nemoto said grimly, ‘to inhabit a world in the path of such a wave. The exploitation would be rapid, ruthless, merciless, burning up worlds and stars like the front of a forest fire, leaving only ruins and lifelessness. And then, as resources are exhausted throughout the lightspeed cage, the crash comes, inevitably. Remember Venus. Remember Polynesia.’

  ‘Polynesia? …’

  ‘The nearest analogue in our own history to interstellar colonization,’ Ben said. ‘The Polynesians spread out among their Pacific islands for over a thousand years, across three thousand kilometres. But by about AD 1000 their colonization wavefront had reached as far as it could go, and they had inhabited every scrap of land. Isolated, each island surrounded by others alr
eady full of people, they had nowhere to go.

  ‘On Easter Island they destroyed the native ecosystem in a few generations, let the soil erode away, cut down the forests. In the end they didn’t even have enough wood to build more canoes. Then they went to war over whatever was left. By the time the Europeans arrived the Polynesians had just about wiped themselves out.’

  Nemoto said, ‘Think about it, Meacher. The lightspeed cage. Imagine this system fully populated, a long way behind the local colonization wavefront, and surrounded by systems just as heavily populated – and armed – as they were. And they were running out of resources. There surely were a lot more space dwellers than planet dwellers, but they’d already used up the asteroids and the comets. So the space dwellers turned on the planet. The inhabitants were choked, drowned, baked.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Madeleine said. ‘Any intelligent society would figure out the dangers long before breeding itself to extinction.’

  ‘The Polynesians didn’t,’ said Ben dryly.

  The petals of the flower-ship opened once more, and they receded from the corpse-like planet into the calm of the outer darkness.

  It was time to talk to the icosahedral God again. The second X-ray punch laser was launched.

  After studying the records of the last encounter, Ben had learned how the configuration of the icosahedral artefact anticipated the direction of the resulting beam. Now Madeleine watched the core squint into focus. The killer beam would again lance through the accretion disc – and, this time, right into one of the largest of the Chaera worldlets.

  Millions of Chaera were going to die. Madeleine could see them, infesting their accretion disc, swarming and living and loving.

  In its tank, their Chaera passenger drifted like a Dali watch.

  Madeleine said, ‘Nemoto, we can’t go ahead with the second firing.’

  ‘But they understand the consequences,’ virtual Nemoto said blandly. ‘The Chaera have disturbed the artefact a few times in the past, with their mirrors and smoke signals. Every time it’s killed some of them. But they need the X-ray nourishment … Meacher,’ she warned, ‘don’t meddle as you did at the burster. If you meddle, the Gaijin may not allow human passengers on future missions. And we won’t learn about systems like this. We’ll have no information; we won’t be able to plan … Besides, the laser is already deployed. There’s nothing you can do about it.’