Space

by Stephen Baxter

  But that wasn’t the way Neandertal women behaved. They were not coy, he thought.

  It may be humans and Neandertals couldn’t interbreed anyhow. And for sure, a few hundred millennia of separate evolution had given them a different set of come-on signals. He began to understand how it might have been back in the deep past: how two equally gifted, resourceful, communicative, curious, emotionally rich human species could have been crammed together into one small space – and yet be as mindless of each other as two types of birds in his old back yard. It was chilling, epochally sad.

  He thought of Valentina’s massive hand grabbing his balls, and what was left of his erection drained away.

  The Neandertals held a ceremony.

  They pulled back the groundsheet of the teepee, to reveal a brick-red ground. The teepee filled up with a pungent, bleach-like stink: sulphur dioxide.

  Briskly the Neandertals dug out a grave. They used their strong bare hands, working together efficiently and co-operatively. A metre or so down they started hauling out dirt that was stained a more vivid orange and blue.

  Malenfant inspected it curiously: this was, after all, the soil of Io. The dirt looked just like crumbled-up rock, but it was laced with orange, yellow and green: sulphur compounds, he supposed, suffused through the rock. There were a few grains of native sulphur, crumbling yellow crystals.

  The deeper dirt looked as if it was polluted by lichen.

  Some of this was colourless, a dull grey, and some of it was green and purple. Malenfant had never been a biologist, but he knew there were types of bacteria on Earth that flourished in environments like this: acidic, sulphur-rich, oxygen free, like the volcanic vents on Earth. Maybe there was actually some photosynthesis going on here. Or maybe it was based on some more exotic kind of chemistry. There could be underground reservoirs where some kind of plants stored energy by binding up sulphur dioxide into a less stable compound, like sulphur trioxide; and maybe there were even simple animals which breathed that in, burning elemental sulphur, for energy …

  Scientifically, he supposed, it was interesting. But he was never going to know. And he wasn’t here for the science, any more than the Neandertals.

  And anyhow, Malenfant, life in the universe is commonplace. And so, it seems, is death.

  When the grave was dug, they lowered the body of Esau into it. Valentina got down there with him, and curled him up into a kind of foetus shape. The girl surrounded the old man with a handful of artefacts, maybe stuff that had been important to him: a flute, for instance, carved out of what looked like a femur.

  And Valentina tucked the totem rod, the Staff of Kintu, into Esau’s dead hand.

  After that Valentina stayed in the grave with the corpse a long, long time. There was a lot of signing, back and forth; Malenfant couldn’t follow many words, but he could see a rhythmic flow to the signs, as they washed around the grave. They were singing, he suspected.

  When at last Valentina clambered out, Malenfant felt his own morbid mood start to lift. The Neandertals started to throw Io dirt back into the grave.

  Then – just before the grave was closed over, Esau turned his shrunken head, lifted a stick-like arm.

  Opened gummy eyes.

  The Neandertals kept right on kicking in Io dirt.

  … But he was still alive. Malenfant froze, with no idea what to say or do.

  Stick to your own business, Malenfant. Be grateful they didn’t do it to you.

  After that, he found it difficult to sleep. He kept hearing scrabbling, scratching at the ground beneath him.

  He was startled awake.

  There was a bright electric-blue glow, coming from under the groundsheet, leaking into the teepee’s conical space. A glow, coming from the old geezer’s grave.

  Malenfant had seen that glow before: a thousand astronomical units from Earth, and by the light of other suns, and in the heart of an African mountain, and even here, on Io. It was the glow of Saddle Point gateway technology.

  He tried to ask Valentina, the others. But he didn’t have the words, and they slapped him away.

  A while after that – it might have been a couple of days – the Neandertals lifted the sheet and started to dig out the grave.

  To Malenfant’s relief, the stink wasn’t too bad, and masked by the sulphur dioxide. Maybe the wrong bacteria in the soil, he wondered.

  Valentina reached down into the grave and pulled out the metal Staff. She showed no signs of the distress she had exhibited before.

  The Neandertals, with little fuss or ceremony, started to refill the grave.

  Malenfant got close enough to look inside the grave. It was empty. He felt his skin prickle, a kid at Halloween.

  He tried to get a look at the Staff. Maybe it was the cause of that electric-blue Saddle Point glow, the disappearance of the corpse. But the girl hid it away.

  A party set out along the cables once more, Valentina and Malenfant included. Malenfant kept to himself, ignoring the fantastic scenery, even ignoring the aches of his own rebuilt body.

  His head seemed to be starting to work again, if reluctantly. And slowly, step by step, he was figuring out the set-up here.

  This arrangement with the Gaijin wasn’t all one way. There was a reward for the Neandertals, it seemed, beyond the gift of this remote moon.

  He thought about the electric-blue Saddle Point flash that came out of old Esau’s grave. Saddle Point teleport gateways worked by destroying a body so as to record its quantum-mechanical structure. Every passage into a gateway was like a miniature death anyhow. Maybe the Staff of Kintu, that little metal artefact, stored some kind of recorded pattern, from the dying old geezer.

  Maybe Esau – and perhaps all the Neandertals’ ancestors, stretching back centuries – were still, in a sense, alive, their Saddle Point signals stored in the Staff. No wonder the Neandertals took such care of the artefact. Maybe that was their reward, to live on in the Staff, until –

  Until what?

  Until, he thought, they had gathered enough energy, with the huge engines which encased Io. Until Kintu was ready to throw his Staff, all the way to his Navel. Just like in the songs.

  He grinned; he had it. That Staff, rattling around in some Neandertal backpack, was no totem. It was a fucking spaceship.

  And that was why they were gathering all this energy, from the natural dynamo that was Io.

  Malenfant, excited, grabbed Valentina’s arm. ‘Listen to me.’

  She lifted a hand to slap him.

  He backed off and tried to sign. Wait. Tell me, you tell me. Staff of Kintu, Navel. You go Navel, in Staff. Navel what Navel, what what what. ‘Oh, damn it. What are the Gaijin making here? Antimatter? What is the Navel? Is that where the Gaijin are heading?’ She slapped him, knocking him back, but he kept going. Navel. ‘Kintu has belly, belly, Navel … I’m right, aren’t I?’ Speak true know true. ‘I –’

  She prepared to slap him again.

  Beneath his feet the ground felt suddenly hot. It was like standing on a griddle. He backed away, instinctively, until he reached a place where the gritty dirt was cooler.

  Valentina hadn’t moved. She was looking down, as if baffled. The ground was starting to darken, its shade deepening down from the ubiquitous red. Blue gas erupted around Valentina’s feet, like a stage effect.

  It was a volcanic plume, opening up right under Valentina.

  When the ground started to crumble, he didn’t even think about it. He just lunged forwards, fists outstretched. It seemed to take an age to arc through Io’s feeble gravity.

  He hit her on her shoulders as hard as he could. Despite her greater mass and low centre of gravity, she toppled backwards, and fell away from the vent towards harder ground. She was safe.

  Malenfant, on the other hand, was helpless.

  He was falling in desperate low-gravity slow-motion, spread-eagled, right down into the centre of the vent, which had opened up into a bubbling pit of dark molten sulphur. He could feel the skin of his chest and
face blistering, bubbling like the sulphurous ground. Evidently his magic suit wasn’t going to protect him from this one.

  He laughed. So it ends here. At least he’d gotten to know the answer. Some of it, anyhow.

  There were worse deaths.

  The sulphur bubbled up over him, and the pain was overwhelming.

  But there was a strong hand at his neck –

  After that, only fragments:

  Lying flat. No feeling anywhere.

  Stars overhead. Vision bouncing. One eye still working? Being carried?

  Walls around him, lifting up, a circle of thick-browed faces.

  … Oh. A grave. He was the old geezer now. He tried to laugh, but nothing seemed to be working.

  A rain of blackness over him. Dirt. It spattered on his chest, his face. Pain stung where it hit exposed flesh. There were hands working above him, big powerful hands like spades, scooping up dirt to throw over him. Valentina’s hands, others.

  The dirt landed in his eyes, his mouth. It tasted of bleach.

  I’m alive. They’re burying me. I’m alive!

  He tried to cry out, but his throat was clogged by dirt. He tried to rise, but his limbs had no strength, as if he was swaddled up in bandages.

  The dirt rained on his face, a black sulphurous hail. He couldn’t even move.

  There was something in the corner of his vision. A metallic glint.

  A flash of electric-blue light.

  Chapter 28

  PEOPLE CAME FROM EARTH

  A little before Dawn, Xenia Makarova stepped out of her house into silvery light. The air frosted white from her nose, and the deep Moon chill cut through papery flesh to her spindly bones.

  The silver-grey light came from Earth and Mirror in the sky: twin spheres, the one milky cloud, the other a hard image of the sun. But the light was still dim enough to allow her to see the changed, colonized stars, as well as the fainter stripes of the comets that hailed through the inner system, one after another, echoes of the titanic war being waged on the solar system’s rim.

  And beyond the comets the new supernova – the destructive blossoming of the star the astronomers had once labelled Phi Cassiopeiae – was still brilliant, as bright as Venus perhaps, though dimming. When Xenia had been born such a spectacle, a supernova a mere nine thousand light years away, would have been a source of great scientific and public interest. Not today, of course, not in the year AD 3480.

  But now the sun itself was shouldering above the horizon, dimming even the supernova. Beads of light like trapped stars marked the summits of Tycho’s rim mountains, and a deep bloody crimson was working its way high into the tall sky. Almost every scrap of the air in that sky had been drawn from the heart of the Moon by the great Paulis mines. But now the mines were shut down, the Moon’s core exhausted, and she imagined she could see the lid of the sky, the millennial leaking of the Moon’s air into space.

  She walked down the path that led to the circular sea. There was frost everywhere, of course, but the path’s lunar dirt, patiently raked in her youth, was friendly and gripped her sandals. The water at the sea’s rim was black and oily, lapping softly. She could see the grey sheen of pack ice further out, though the close horizon hid the bulk of the sea from her. Fingers of sunlight stretched across the ice, and grey-gold smoke shimmered above open water.

  There was a constant tumult of groans and cracks as the ice rose and fell on the sea’s mighty shoulders. The water never froze at Tycho’s rim; conversely, it never thawed at the centre, so that there was a fat torus of ice floating out there around the central mountains. It was as if the rim of this artificial ocean was striving to emulate the unfrozen seas of Earth which bore its makers.

  She thought she heard a barking, out on the pack ice. Perhaps it was a seal. And a bell clanked: an early fishing boat leaving port, a fat, comforting sound that carried easily through the still, dense air. She sought the boat’s lights, but her eyes, rheumy, stinging with cold, failed her.

  She paid attention to her creaking body: the aches in her too-thin, too-long, calcium-depleted bones, the obscure spurts of pain in her urethral system, the strange itches that afflicted her liver-spotted flesh. She was already growing too cold. Mirror returned enough heat to the Moon’s long Night to keep the seas from freezing, the air from snowing out. But she would have welcomed a little more comfort.

  She turned and began to labour back up her regolith path to her house.

  When she got there, Berge, her grandson, was waiting for her. She did not know then, of course, that he would not survive the new Day.

  He was eager to talk about Leonardo da Vinci.

  Berge had taken off his wings and stacked them up against the concrete wall of her house. She could see how the wings were thick with frost, so dense the paper feathers could surely have had little play. Even long minutes after landing he was still panting, and his smooth fashionably-shaven scalp, so bare it showed the great bubble profile of his lunar-born skull, was dotted with beads of grimy sweat.

  She scolded him even as she brought him into the warmth, and prepared hot soup and tea for him in her pressure kettles. ‘You’re a fool as your father was,’ she said. His father, of course, had been Xenia’s son. ‘I was with him when he fell from the sky, leaving you orphaned. You know how dangerous it is in the pre-Dawn turbulence.’

  ‘Ah, but the power of those great thermals, Xenia,’ he said, as he accepted the soup. ‘I can fly kilometres high without the slightest effort …’

  Only Berge called her Xenia.

  She would have berated him further, which was the prerogative of old age. But she didn’t have the heart. He stood before her, eager, heartbreakingly thin. Berge always had been slender, even compared to other skinny lunar folk; but now he was clearly frail.

  And, most ominous of all, a waxy, golden sheen seemed to linger about his skin. She had no desire to comment on that – not here, not now, not until she was sure what it meant, that it wasn’t some trickery of her own age-yellowed eyes.

  So she kept her counsel.

  They made their ritual obeisance – murmurs about dedicating their bones and flesh to the salvation of the world – and finished up their soup.

  And then, with his youthful eagerness, Berge launched into the seminar he was evidently itching to deliver on Leonardo da Vinci, long-dead citizen of a long-dead planet. Brusquely displacing the empty soup bowls to the floor, he produced papers from his jacket and spread them out before her. The sheets, yellowed and stained with age, were covered in a crabby, indecipherable handwriting, broken with sketches of gadgets or flowing water or geometric figures.

  She picked out a luminously beautiful sketch of the crescent Earth …

  ‘No, Xenia,’ said Berge patiently. ‘Not Earth. Think about it. It must have been the crescent Moon.’ Of course he was right; she’d lived on the Moon too long. ‘You see, Leonardo understood the phenomenon he called the ashen Moon – like our ashen Earth, the old Earth visible in the arms of the new. He was a hundred years ahead of his time with that one.’

  This document had been called many things in its long history, but most familiarly the Codex Leicester. Berge’s copy had been printed off in haste during The Failing, those frantic hours when the Moon’s dying libraries had disgorged great snowfalls of paper, a last desperate download of their stored electronic wisdom before the power failed. It was a treatise centring on what Leonardo called the ‘body of the Earth’, but with diversions to consider such matters as water engineering, the geometry of Earth and Moon, and the origins of fossils.

  The issue of the fossils particularly excited Berge. Leonardo had been much agitated by the presence of the fossils of marine creatures, fishes and oysters and corals, high in the mountains of Italy. Lacking any knowledge of tectonic processes, he had struggled to explain how the fossils might have been deposited by a series of great global floods.

  It made her remember how, when Berge was small, she once had to explain to him what a ‘fossil’ was.
There were no fossils on the Moon: no bones in the ground, save those humans had put there. But now, of course, Berge was much more interested in the words of long-dead Leonardo than his grandmother’s.

  ‘You have to think about the world Leonardo inhabited,’ he said. ‘The ancient paradigms still persisted: the stationary Earth, a sky laden with spheres, crude Aristotelian proto-physics. But Leonardo’s instinct was to proceed from observation to theory – and he observed many things in the world which didn’t fit with the prevailing world view –’

  ‘Like mountain-top fossils.’

  ‘Yes. Working alone, he struggled to come up with explanations. And some of his reasoning was, well, eerie.’

  ‘Eerie?’

  ‘Prescient.’ Gold-flecked eyes gleamed. The boy flicked back and forth through the Codex, pointing out spidery pictures of Earth and Moon and sun, neat circles connected by spidery light ray traces. ‘Remember, the Moon was thought to be a crystal sphere. What intrigued Leonardo was why the Moon wasn’t much brighter in Earth’s sky. If the Moon was a crystal sphere, perfectly reflective, it should have been as bright as the sun.’

  ‘Like Mirror.’

  ‘Yes. So Leonardo argued the Moon must be covered in oceans.’ He found a diagram showing a Moon coated with great out-of-scale choppy waves and bathed in spidery sunlight rays. ‘Leonardo said waves on the Moon’s oceans must deflect much of the reflected sunlight away from Earth. He thought the darker patches visible on the surface must mark great standing waves, or even storms, on the Moon.’

  ‘He was wrong,’ she said. ‘In Leonardo’s time, the Moon was a ball of rock. The dark areas were just lava sheets.’

  ‘Yes, of course. But now,’ Berge said eagerly, ‘the Moon is mostly covered by water. You see? And there are great storms, wave crests hundreds of kilometres long, which are visible from Earth – or would be, if anybody was left to see …’