Space

by Stephen Baxter

  But he had no more need of soup.

  It seemed too soon when the Day was done, and the cold started to settle on the land once more, with great pancakes of new ice clustering around the rim of the Tycho sea.

  Xenia summoned Berge’s friends, teachers, those who had loved him.

  She clung to the greater goal: that the atoms of gold and nickel and zinc which had coursed in Berge’s blood and bones, killing him like the mustard plants of Maginus – killing them all, in fact, at one rate or another – would now gather in even greater concentrations in the bodies of those who would follow. Perhaps the pathetic scrap of gold or nickel which had cost poor Berge his life would at last, mined, close the circuit which would lift the first ceramic-hulled ships beyond the thick, deadening atmosphere of the Moon.

  Perhaps. It was cold comfort.

  But still they ate the soup, of Berge’s dissolved bones and flesh, in solemn silence. They took his life’s sole gift, further concentrating the metal traces to the far future, shortening their own lives as he had.

  She had never been a skilful host. As soon as they could, the young people dispersed. She talked with Berge’s teachers, but they had little to say to each other; she was merely his grandmother, after all. She wasn’t sorry to be left alone.

  Before she slept again, even before the sun’s bloated hull had slid below the toothed horizon, the winds had turned. The warmer air was treacherously fleeing after the sinking sun. Soon the first flurries of snow came pattering on the black, swelling surface of the Tycho sea.

  Her seals slid back into the water, to seek out whatever riches or dangers awaited them under Moon core ice.

  Chapter 29

  BAD NEWS FROM THE STARS

  When Madeleine Meacher arrived back in the solar system – just moments after passing through the pain of her last Saddle Point transition – she was stunned to find Nemoto materializing in the middle of her small hab module.

  ‘Nemoto. You. What – how –’

  Nemoto was small, hunched over, her face a mask of sourness. This was a virtual, of course, and a low-quality one; Nemoto floated in the air, not quite lined up with the floor.

  Nemoto glanced about, as if surprised to be here. ‘Meacher. So it’s you. What date is it?.’

  Madeleine had to look it up. AD 3793.

  Nemoto laughed hollowly. ‘How absurd.’

  There was no perceptible time delay. That meant the originating transmitter must be close. But, of course, there had been no way Nemoto could have known which Saddle Point gateway Madeleine would arrive from. ‘Nemoto, what are you?’

  Nemoto grunted impatiently. ‘I am a limited-sentience projection. My function is to wait for the star travellers to return. I dusted the Saddle Point radius, all around the system. Dusted it with monitors, probes, transmitters. Technology has moved on, Meacher. Look it up. It scarcely matters … Listen to what I have to say.’

  ‘Nemoto –’

  ‘Listen, damn you. The Gaijin have been fighting the Crackers. Out on the rim of the system.’

  ‘I know that –’

  ‘The war has lasted five centuries, perhaps more. The Oort cloud is deep, Meacher, a deep trench. But now the war is lost.’

  The simple, stunning brutality of the statement shocked Madeleine. ‘Are you sure?’

  Nemoto barked laughter. ‘The Gaijin are withdrawing from the solar system. They don’t bother to hide this from us. Just as most people don’t bother to look up, into the sky, and see what is going on … Oh, many of the Gaijin remain. Scouts, observers, transit craft like this one. But the bulk of the Gaijin fleet – mostly constructed from stolen solar system resources, our asteroids – has begun to withdraw to the Saddle Points. The outer system war is over.’

  ‘And the Crackers …’

  ‘Are on the way into the inner system. They are already through the heliopause, the perimeter of the solar wind.’ The virtual flickered, became blocky, all but transparent. ‘The end game approaches.’

  ‘Nemoto, what must I do?’

  ‘Go to Mercury. Find me.’ She looked down at herself, as if remembering. ‘That is, find Nemoto.’

  ‘And what of you? Nemoto, what is a limited-sentience projection?’

  Nemoto raised a hand that was crumbling into bits of light. She seemed puzzled, as if she was finding out for herself as she spoke. ‘I am autonomous, heuristic, sentient. I was born sixty seconds ago, to give you this message. But my function is fulfilled. I’m dying.’ She looked at Madeleine, as if shocked by the realization, and reached out.

  Madeleine extended a hand, but her fingers passed through a cloud of light.

  With a thin wail, the Nemoto virtual broke up.

  Sailing in from the rim of the solar system, Madeleine used Gaijin technology to study the strange new age into which she had been projected.

  There was little Gaijin traffic, just as virtual Nemoto had said.

  But she found signatures of unknown ships – solar sail craft, they appeared to be, great fleets of them, a gigantic shell that surrounded the system. They were still out among the remote orbits of the comets for now, but they were converging, like a fist closing on the fat warmth of the inner system.

  Cracker fleets, come to disrupt the sun.

  Earth seemed dead. The Moon was a fading blue, silent. There were knots of human activity in the asteroids, on Mars – and Triton. And she found signs of refugee fleets, humans fleeing inwards to the core of the system, to Mercury. But no ships arrived at or left remote Triton.

  When she understood that, she knew where she must go first.

  The Gaijin flower-ship sailed around Triton, its fusion light illuminating smooth plains of ice. It was a world covered by a chill ocean, like Earth’s Arctic, with not a scrap of solid land; but the thin ice crust was easily broken by the slow pulsing tides of this small moon, exposing great black leads of water that bubbled and steamed vigorously, trying to evaporate and fill up all of empty space.

  There were six human settlements.

  The settlements looked like clusters of bubbles on a pond, she thought. They were sprawling, irregular patches of modular construction – not rigid, clearly designed to float over the tides. Five settlements seemed abandoned – no lights, no power output, no sign of an internal temperature significantly above the background. Even the sixth looked largely shut down, with only a handful of lights at the centre of the bubble-cluster, the outskirts abandoned to the cold.

  She radioed down requests for permission and instructions for landing. Only automated beacons responded. The answers came through in a human voice, but in a language she didn’t recognize. The translation suite embedded in her equipment couldn’t handle it either. She had the Gaijin put her down on what appeared to be a landing site, close to a system of airlocks.

  Suited up, she stepped out of the conical Gaijin lander.

  Frost covered every surface. But it was gritty, hard as sand. Remember, Madeleine, water ice is rock on Triton.

  She walked carefully to the edge of the platform, and looked out beyond the bounds of the bubble city. A point source sun cast wan colourless light over smooth ice fields. Neptune was rising over the horizon, a faint, misty-blue ball, making the light on the ice deep, subtle, complex, the shadows softly glowing. Pointlessly beautiful, she thought. She turned away.

  She found a door large enough for a suited human. She couldn’t understand the elaborate script instructions beside the control panel. But there was one clear device, a big red button: Press me. She hit it with her fist.

  Radio noise screeched. The door slid back, releasing a puff of air that crystallized immediately. She hurried into a small, brightly-lit airlock. The door slammed shut and the airlock immediately repressurized.

  She twisted off her helmet. Air sighed out of her suit, and her ears popped. The air was biting cold. It smelled stale.

  She palmed a panel that opened the inner door, and found herself looking into a long, unadorned corridor that twisted out of sigh
t.

  Wandering through the corridors, carrying her helmet, she was eventually met by a woman. She was evidently a cop: spindly, fragile-looking after fifteen hundred years of adaptation to low gravity, but she carried a mean-looking device that could only be a hand-gun.

  The cop walked Madeleine, luggage pack and all, into the centre of town. The cop’s skin was jet black. Madeleine’s translator software couldn’t interpret her language.

  Madeleine caught glimpses of abandoned corridors, and some kind of complex, gigantic machinery at the heart of everything. In one area she passed over a clear floor, water rippling underneath, black and deep. She saw something swimming there, sleek and fast and white, quickly disappearing into the deeper darkness.

  The cop delivered her to a cramped suite of offices. Madeleine sat in an anteroom, waiting for attention. Maybe this was the office of the Mayor, she thought, or the town council. There was no sign of the colony’s Aboriginal origins, save for a piece of art on the wall: around a metre square, pointillist dots in shades of cobalt red. A Dreamtime representation, maybe.

  Madeleine was starting to get the picture. Triton was a small town, at the fringe of interstellar space. They weren’t used to visitors, and weren’t much interested either.

  Eventually a harassed-looking official – another woman, her frizzy hair tied back sharply from her forehead – came into the room. She studied Madeleine with dismay.

  Madeleine forced a smile. ‘Pleased to meet you. Who are you, the Mayor?’

  The woman frowned, and jabbered back impatiently.

  But Madeleine smiled and nodded, and tapped her helmet. ‘That’s it. Keep talking. My name is Madeleine Meacher. I’ve come from the stars …’

  Her translator suite was essentially Gaijin. How ironic that seventeen centuries after the Gaijin came wandering unannounced into the asteroid belt, humans should need alien technology to talk to each other.

  At last the translator began to whisper.

  ‘At last. Thanks for your patience. I –’

  ‘And I am very busy,’ the translator whispered, ghosting the woman’s speech. ‘We should progress this issue, the issue of your arrival here.’

  ‘My name is Meacher …’ Madeleine summarized her CV.

  The woman turned out to be called Sheela Dell-Cope. She was an administrative assistant in the office of the Headman here – although, as far as Madeleine could make out, the Headman was actually a woman.

  ‘I have a mission,’ Madeleine said. ‘I bring bad news. Bad news from the stars.’

  The woman silenced her with an upraised hand. ‘There is the question of your residency, including the appropriate fee …’

  Madeleine was forced to sit through a long and elaborate list of rules regarding temporary residency. To Dell-Cope, Madeleine Meacher was strange, incomprehensible, a visitor from another time, another place. Now I am the Gaijin, Madeleine thought.

  She was going to have to apply for an equivalent of a visa. And she would have to pay for each day she stayed, or else work for her air. This was a closed, marginal world, where every breath had to be paid for.

  ‘The work is not pleasant,’ Dell-Cope said. ‘Servicing the otec. Or working with the Flips, for instance.’

  That meant nothing to Madeleine, but she got the idea. ‘I’ll pay.’ She had a variety of Gaijin high-tech gadgets that she could use for a fee. Anyhow she wasn’t going to be here long, come what may.

  As it turned out, the painting on the wall was a representation of an ancient Aboriginal artwork: the Dreaming of a creature of the Australian Outback, the honey-ant. But it was a copy of a copy of a copy, done in seaweed dyes. And, she was prepared to bet, nobody on Triton knew what a honey-ant was anyhow.

  She was given a room in a residential area. There seemed to be no hotels here.

  The room was just a cube carved out of concrete. It had a bed, some scattered and unfamiliar furniture – spindly low-G chairs – a small galley, and a comms station with an utterly baffling human interface.

  Not that the galley was so easy either. She shouted at it and poked it, her favoured way of dealing with new-fangled technology, until she found a way to make it decant a hot liquid, some kind of tea.

  There were no windows. The room was just a concrete box, a sarcophagus, a cave. Here in the emptiness on the edge of interstellar space, humans were hiding from the sky.

  What are you doing here, Meacher?

  What was she supposed to do? Simply blurt out her news – that an alien invasion fleet had massed on the rim of the solar system, that it was almost certain to spill into the region of Neptune’s orbit soon, that she was here, with her friendly Gaijin, to help these people evacuate to worlds their ancestors had left behind a thousand years earlier? It seemed absurd, melodramatic.

  She worked at the comms equipment, striving to make it do what she wanted. It was a strange irony, she thought, that comms equipment, whose purpose was after all to join people together, always turned out to have the most baffling designs, presenting the worst challenges to the out-of-time traveller.

  She tried to make an appointment to meet the Headman, but she was stalled. She tried further down the local hierarchy, as best she could figure it out, but got nowhere there either.

  Nobody was interested in her.

  Frustrated, on a whim, she decided to hunt for descendants of the colonists she had known. With the help of her translator she asked the comms station to find her people with ‘Roach’ in their surname.

  Most of the surnames scrolling before her, phonetically rendered, were unfamiliar. But there were a few families with compound surnames which included the name ‘Rush’.

  Just around the corner, in fact, in the same floating bubble as this room, there was a man – apparently living alone – with the surname Rush-Bayley.

  She spent a frustrating hour persuading the comms unit to leave him a message.

  She took long walks through the city’s emptiness. Lights turned themselves on, off again when she passed, so she walked in a moving puddle of illumination.

  She walked from bubble to floating bubble over bridges of what seemed to be ceramic; when the bubbles shifted against each other, the interfaces creaked, ominously. She encountered few people. Her footsteps echoed, as if she was walking through immense hangars.

  Madeleine imagined this place had been designed for ten, twenty times as many people as it held now. And she thought of those other colonies, abandoned on the waters of Triton.

  It saddened her that nothing – save a few sentimental tokens like paintings – survived of the Aboriginal culture that Ben’s generation had brought here. After all, even fifteen hundred years on Triton were dwarfed by maybe sixty thousand years of Australia. But the Dreamtime legends, it seemed, had not survived the translation from the ancient deserts of Australia to these enclosed, high-tech bubbles.

  She reached the centre of the kilometres-wide colony. Here, a great structure loomed out of the ice-crusted sea, visible through picture windows. It was mounted on a stalk, and reared up to a great dome-shaped carapace, some hundreds of metres above the ice. It was a little like a water tower. She picked out engineering features: evaporators, demisters, generators, turbines, condenser tubing. Madeleine learned that this tower was based on a taproot that descended far into the ocean, kilometres deep, in fact.

  This was the otec. The name turned out to be an acronym from old English, for Ocean Thermal Energy Converter. It was a device to extract energy from the heat difference between the deep ocean waters, at just four degrees below freezing, and the surface ice, at more than a hundred below. The otec turned out to be the main power source for the colony. It was fifteen hundred years old, as old as the colony itself, and maintained by the colonists with a diligent, monkish devotion. There were other power sources, like fusion plants. But the colonists were short of metal; the nearest body of rock, after all, was the silicate core of Triton, drowned under hundreds of kilometres of water. The colonists were able to fix the
otec, clunky machinery though it was, with materials they could extract from the water around them.

  After a couple of empty days, she found her comms unit glowing green. She poked at it, trying to figure out why.

  It turned out there was a message on it, from Rush-Bayley.

  Adamm Rush-Bayley was tall, thin, dark. He wore a loose smock-like affair, his skinny legs bare. The smock was painted with vibrant colours, red, blue, green, a contrast to the drab environment.

  He turned out to be seventy years old, though he didn’t look it.

  He looked nothing like Ben, of course, or Lena. Had she been hoping that she could retrieve something of Ben, her own vanished past? How could he be like Ben, sixty generations removed?

  His family had kept alive Ben’s story, however, his name – and the story of the Nereid impact. And so he looked at her with mild curiosity. ‘You’re the same Madeleine Meacher who –’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How very strange. Of course we have records.’ He smiled. ‘There is a public archive, and my family kept its own mementoes. Perhaps you’d like to see them.’

  ‘I was there for the live show, remember.’

  ‘Yes. You must have fascinating stories.’ He didn’t sound all that fascinated, though, to Madeleine; it seemed clear he’d rather show her the records his family had cherished than hear her testimony from history. The past was a thing to own, to lock away in boxes and archives, not to explore.

  It wasn’t the first time she had encountered such a reaction.

  He made her a meal in his home, which was a multi-chamber cave. The food was shellfish, with what appeared to be processed seaweed or algae as a side dish. They ate off plates made of a kind of paper. The paper wasn’t based on cellulose, she learned, but on chitin extracted from the shells of lobsters.

  Adamm’s clothes were made from seaweed – or more precisely a seaweed extract called algin. Algin could be spun into silk-like threads, and was the basis of virtually all the colonists’ clothing and other fabric, and products like films, gels, polishes, paints. There was even algin additive in her food.