Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Malenfant said, ‘Those toys of Mtesa’s – the fountains and the Caesar’s Palace trick throne – can’t absorb more than a few per cent of the pile’s energy … The rest of it runs that Saddle Point gateway. Doesn’t it, Nemoto? And that is the true purpose of this place. This is some huge Gaijin project.’

  ‘I am no tourist guide, Reid Malenfant. I don’t know anything.’ She looked away from him. ‘Now leave me alone.’

  Malenfant had trouble sleeping. He felt ill, and at times he felt overwhelmed by fear.

  He’d glimpsed a Saddle Point gateway, buried deep in this African hill-side. That was where all the power went. And that downward breeze had been air passing through the gateway, a leak in the fabric of the world.

  He felt drawn to the gateway, as if by some gravitational field.

  I don’t want this, he thought. I just wanted to run home. But I brought myself here. I chose to come to this place, kept digging until I found this, the centre of it all. A way back into the game. Just like Nemoto.

  A way to fulfil whatever purpose the Gaijin seemed to have for him.

  I can’t do it. Not again. I just want to be left alone. I don’t have to follow this path, to do anything.

  But the logic of his life seemed to say otherwise.

  Spare me, he thought; and he wished he believed in a god to receive his prayers.

  Malenfant was woken, rudely, by a shuddering of his pallet. His eyes snapped open to darkness, and he sucked in hot African air. For a second he thought he was in orbit: a blow-out in the Shuttle Orbiter, a micrometeorite that had smashed through Number Two Window …

  He was alone in his villa, and the grass roof was intact. He pushed off his cover and tried to stand.

  The ground shook again, and there was a deep, subterranean groaning, a roar of stressed rock. A quake, then?

  Through the glassless windows of the villa, a new light broke. He saw a glow, red-white and formless, which erupted in a gout of fire over the roof-tops of Rubaga. Grass huts ignited as tongues of glowing earth came licking back to ignite the flimsy constructions. He heard screaming, the patter of bare feet running.

  That fount of flame came from the heart of the town, Malenfant saw immediately – from the well of Kimera – from the pit of that monstrous Engine.

  De Bonneville. It had to be. In some way, he’d carried out his vague threat.

  The shuddering subsided, and Malenfant was able to stand. He pulled on his biocomposite coverall and stepped out of the villa.

  All of Rubaga’s populace appeared to be out in the narrow streets: courtiers, peasants, courtesans and chiefs, all running in terror. The big gates of the capital’s surrounding cane fence had been thrown open, and Malenfant could see how the great avenues were already thronged with people, running off into the countryside’s green darkness.

  Malenfant set off through the capital towards the centre of the plateau. He had to push his way through the panicking hordes of Waganda, who fled past him like wraiths of smoke.

  By the time he’d reached the dead heart of the hill-top, even the great grass Palace of Mtesa was alight.

  Malenfant hurried into the central plain, away from the scorching huts. He reached the blighted zone with relief; for the first time in many minutes, he could draw a full breath.

  The fire of Kimera loomed out of the earth before Malenfant, huge and angry and deadly; and all around the rim of the plain he saw the glow of Rubaga’s burning huts. Christ: he was in the middle of a miniature Chernobyl. And it scared the shit out of him to think that there was nobody here, nobody, who understood what was going on, nobody at the controls.

  He walked on, his feet heavy, his chest and face scorching in the growing heat, his burned hands tingling, and the light of the fire was brilliant before him. He didn’t see how he could get any closer. He began to circle the blaze. He stumbled frequently, and his eyes were sore and dry.

  I am, he thought, too fucking old for this.

  Then he saw what looked like a fallen animal, inert on the ground. Malenfant braved the fire, sheltering his head with his arms, and approached.

  It was de Bonneville. He lay face-down in the barren earth of Rubaga. Malenfant could see, from scrabbles in the dirt, that he had walked away from the pit until he could walk no more, then crawled, and at last he had dragged himself by his broken fingertips across the ground.

  Malenfant knelt down, and slid his arms beneath the deformed torso. De Bonneville was disconcertingly light, like a child, and Malenfant was able to turn him over, and lay that balloon-like head on his lap.

  De Bonneville’s blue eyes flickered open. ‘Good God. Malenfant. Have you any beer?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry, de Bonneville.’

  ‘You must get away from here. Your life is forfeit, Malenfant, if you confront the Breath of Kimera …’ His eyes slid closed. ‘I did it. I …’

  ‘The Engine?’

  ‘It was the water,’ he said dreamily. ‘Once I made up my mind to act, it was simple, Malenfant … I just blocked the pipes, where they admit the water to the well …’

  ‘You blocked the coolant?’

  ‘All that heat, with nowhere for it to go … You know, it took just minutes. I could hear them crying and screaming, as the burning, popping yellow-cake scorched their bodies and feet, even as they thrust their tree-trunks into the heap. It took just minutes, Malenfant …’

  De Bonneville, limping on his already damaged legs, had escaped the well minutes before the final ignition and explosion.

  ‘And was it worth it?’ Malenfant asked. ‘You came back from the stars, to do this?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ de Bonneville said, his eyes fluttering closed. ‘For he had destroyed me. Mtesa. If I die, his empire dies with me … And more than that.’ De Bonneville tried to lick his lips, but his mouth was a mass of popping sores. ‘It was you, Malenfant. You, a heroic figure returned from the deep past! From an age when humans, we Westerners, strove to do more than simply survive, in a world abandoned to the Gaijin. You and I come from an age where people did things, Malenfant. My God, we shaped whole worlds. You reminded me of that. And so I determined to shape mine …’

  He subsided, and his body grew more limp.

  Dawn light spread from the east, and Malenfant saw a cloud of smoke, a huge black thunderhead, lifting up into the sky.

  It was you, de Bonneville had said. My fault, he thought. All my fault. I was probably meant to die, out there, among the stars. It should have been that way. Not this.

  He cradled de Bonneville in the dawn light, until the shuddering breaths had ceased to rack him.

  The morning after the explosion, Malenfant was arrested.

  Malenfant was hauled by two silent guards to Mtesa’s temporary court, in a spacious hut a couple of kilometres from Wanpamba’s Tomb, and he was hurled to the dust before the Kabaka.

  His trial was brief, efficient, punctuated with much shouting and stabbing of fingers. He wasn’t granted a translator. But from the fragments of local language he’d picked up he learned he had been accused of causing the explosion, this great epochal crime.

  Nemoto stood silently beside the Kabaka while the comic-opera charade ran its course. She did this, he realized. She framed me.

  To his credit, Mtesa seemed sceptical of all this, irritated by the proceedings. He seemed to have taken a liking to Malenfant, and was shrewd enough to perceive this as an obscure dispute between Malenfant and the Katekiro. Why are you involving me? Can’t you sort it out yourself?

  But the verdict was never really in doubt to anyone.

  When it was done, the Lords of the Cord came to Malenfant. Rope was looped around his neck, and he was dragged to his feet.

  Nemoto walked forward, hunched over, and stood before him. In English, she said, ‘You’re to be treated leniently, Malenfant. You won’t be working the Engine. You’re to be cast –’

  ‘Into the pit.’ And then he saw it. ‘The gateway. You’re forcing me to the Saddle Point gateway. That’s
what this is all about, isn’t it?’

  ‘You saw the light, Malenfant. If I thought that pressure suit of yours would fit me, I would take it from you. I would walk into the Engine of Kimera and confront the enigma at its heart, following those mysterious others who come and go … But I cannot. It is my fate to remain here, amusing the Kabaka, until the ageing treatments fail, and I die.

  ‘I had to do this, Malenfant. I could see your reluctance to go forward – even though you brought yourself here, to the centre of things. I could see you could not bring yourself to take the last step.’

  ‘So you pushed me. Why, for God’s sake? Why are you doing this?’

  ‘Not for the sake of God. For history. Look around you, Malenfant. Look at the huge strangeness of this future Earth. Certainly the arrival of Eeties deflected our history – and those exploding stars in the sky tell of more deflections yet to come. But no human has ever been in control of the great forces that shaped a world, of history and climate and geology; only a handful of us have even witnessed such changes.’

  ‘If none of us can deflect history, you’re killing me for nothing.’

  ‘Ah.’ She smiled. ‘But individual humans have changed history, Malenfant – not the way I tried to, with plots and schemes and projects – but by walking into the fire, by giving themselves. Do you see? And that is your destiny.’

  ‘You’re a monster, Nemoto. You play with lives. The right hand of this Stone Age despot is the right place for you.’

  She raised a bony wrist and brushed blood-flecked spittle from her chin, seeming not to hear him.

  He was overwhelmed with fear and anger. ‘Nemoto. Spare me.’

  She leaned forward and kissed his cheek; her lips were dry as autumn leaves, and he could smell blood on her breath. ‘Goodbye, Malenfant.’

  The cords around his neck tightened, and he was hauled away.

  The rest of it unfolded with a pitiless logic. As a prisoner, condemned, Malenfant had no choice, no real volition; it was easy to submit to the process, to become detached, let his fear float away.

  He was indeed treated with leniency. He was allowed to go back to his hut. He retrieved his EMU, his ancient pressure suit in its sack of rope.

  He was taken to the rim of the central desolation.

  There was a small party waiting: guards, with two other prisoners, both young women, naked save for loin-cloths, with their hands tied behind their backs. The prisoners returned his stare dully. Malenfant saw they’d both been beaten severely enough to lay open the skin over their spines.

  I’ve come a long way, thought Malenfant, for this: a walk into hell, with two of the damned.

  Once more he descended the crude spiral staircase.

  Soon they were so deep that the circle of open sky at the top of the shaft was shrunk to a blue disc smaller than a dime, far above him. The only light came from irregularly-placed reed torches. The stairs themselves were crudely cut and too far apart to make the descent easy; soon Malenfant was hot, and his legs ached.

  The prisoners’ faces shone, taut with fear.

  They passed two big exits gouged in the rock wall, one to either side of the cylindrical shaft. The air from these exits was marginally less stale than elsewhere. Perhaps they led to the great avenues from east and west which he’d noticed from outside, tunnels which led into the body of the hill-side itself.

  A hundred metres down, water spouted from clay founts, elaborately shaped, mounted on the walls. The water, almost every drop of it, was captured by spiral canals which wound around the shaft, in parallel to the stairway. The founts gushed harder as they descended – water pressure, thought Malenfant – and soon the spiral canals were filled with bubbling, frothing liquid, which took away some of the staleness of the still air of the well. But the founts and channels were severely damaged by fire, cracked and crudely repaired; water leaked continually.

  Already he was hot and dizzy; a mark of the dose he’d already taken, maybe. He reached towards a canal to get a handful of water. But a dark, bony hand shot out of the darkness, pushing him away. It was one of the prisoners, her eyes wide in the gloom.

  Malenfant watched the narrow, bleeding shoulders of the prisoner as she descended before him. Here she was, going down into hell, no more than a kid, and yet she’d reached out to keep a foreigner from harm.

  Deeper and deeper. There was no trace of natural daylight left now.

  They reached a point where the two prisoners were released to a dormitory, hollowed out of the rock, presumably to be put to work later. Before they were pushed inside, they peered down into the pit, with loathing and dread. For here, after all, was the Engine which was to be their executioner.

  And Malenfant was going on, deeper. The guards prodded at his back, pushing him forward.

  At last the descent became more shallow. Malenfant surmised they were approaching the heart of the hollowed-out mountain. They stopped maybe fifteen metres above the base of the well. From here, Malenfant had to go on alone.

  By the light of a smoking torch, with a mime, he asked a favour of the guards. They shrugged, incurious, not unwilling to take a break.

  Malenfant pulled his battered old NASA pressure suit from its sack.

  He lifted up his Lower Torso Assembly, the bottom half of his EMU, trousers with boots built on, and he squirmed into it. Next he wriggled into the upper torso section. He fixed on his Snoopy flight helmet, and over the top of that he lifted his bubble helmet, starred and scratched with use. He twisted it into place against the seal at his neck.

  The guards watched dully.

  He looked down at himself. By the light of a different star, Madeleine Meacher had spent time repairing this suit for him. The EMU was still a respectable white, with the Stars and Stripes still proudly emblazoned on his sleeve.

  … But then the little ritual of donning the suit was over, and events enfolded him in their logic once more.

  Was this it? After all his travels, his long life, was he now to die, alone, here?

  Somehow he couldn’t believe it. He gathered his courage.

  Leaving the staring guards behind, he walked further down the crude stairwell, deeper towards the fire. The starring of his battered old bubble helmet made the flames dance and sparkle; it was kind of pretty. His own breath was loud in the confines of the helmet, and he felt hot, oxygen-starved already, although that was probably just imagination. His backpack was inert – no hiss of oxygen, no whir of fans – and it was a heavy mass on his back. But maybe the suit would protect him a little longer.

  He’d just keep walking, climbing down these steps in the dark, as long as he could. He didn’t see what else he could do.

  It didn’t seem long, though, before the heat and airlessness got to him, and the world turned grey, and he pitched forward. He got his hands up to protect his helmet, and rolled on his back, like a turtle.

  He couldn’t get up. Maybe he ought to crawl, like de Bonneville, but he couldn’t even seem to manage that.

  He was, after all, a hundred years old.

  He closed his eyes.

  It seemed to him he slept a while. He was kind of surprised to wake up again.

  He saw a face above him. A dark, heavy face. Was it de Bonneville? No, de Bonneville was dead.

  Thick eye ridges. Deep eyes. An ape’s brow, inside some kind of translucent helmet.

  He was being carried. Down, down. Even deeper into the mountain of Kimera. There were strong arms under him.

  Not human arms.

  But then there was a new light. A blue glow.

  He smiled. A glow he recognized.

  Cradled in inhuman arms, lifted through the gateway, Reid Malenfant welcomed the pain of transition.

  There was a flash of electric-blue light.

  Chapter 27

  THE FACE OF KINTU

  Long ago, long long ago.

  Kintu giant comes down from north.

  Nothing.

  No earths, no stars, no people. Kintu sad. Ki
ntu lonely. Very lonely. Nothing nothing nothing.

  Kintu breathes in. Breathes in what? Breathes in nothing.

  Chest swells, big big big. Round. Mouth of Kintu here, Navel of Kintu there. Breathe in, big big big, blow in, all that nothing.

  Skin pops, pop pop pop. Worlds. Stars. People. Popping out of skin, pop pop pop. Still breathes in, in in in, big big big.

  Here. Now. The Face of Kintu. Here. See how skin pops, pop pop pop, new baby worlds, new life, things to eat. We live where, on Face of Kintu.

  The Staff of Kintu. People die, people don’t die. Inside the Staff of Kintu. Happy happy happy. Live how long, long time, long long time, forever.

  In future, long long time. Kintu throw Staff, long long way. Throw Staff where, to Navel of Kintu. People live on belly of Kintu, long long time, long long way, how happy, happy happy happy.

  Everyone else what? Dead.

  The transition pain dissipated, like frost evaporating. He felt the hard bulge of the arms which carried him, the iron strength of biceps.

  His head was tipped back. He saw the white fleshy underside of a tiny beardless chin. Beyond that, all he could see was black sky. Some kind of wispy high cloud, greenish. A rippling aurora.

  His weight had changed. He was light as an infant, as a dried-up twig.

  Not Earth, then.

  He could be anywhere. Encoded as a stream of bits, he could have been sent a thousand light years from home. And because Saddle Point signals travelled at mere lightspeed, he could be a thousand years away from a return. Even the enigmatic Earth he’d returned to, the Earth of 3265, might be as remote as the Dark Ages from the year of his birth.

  Or not.

  Now a face loomed over him, as broad and smooth as the Moon, encased in a crude pressure-suit helmet that was not much more than a translucent sack. Obviously hominid. But the face had big heavy eye-ridges, and a huge flat nose that thrust forward, and a low hair-line. Thick black eyebrows, like a Slav, wide dark eyes. Those eye-ridges gave her a perpetually surprised look.