Space

by Stephen Baxter

  They talked tentatively while they ate.

  Adamm made a minor living making pearl artefacts. He showed her a pearl the size of her fist that had been sliced open and hollowed out to make a box for a mildly intoxicating snuff-like powder. The pearl was exquisite, the workmanship so-so.

  Most of the work he did was for one engineering concern or another; luxury was at a premium here. He could only sell, after all, to his fellow citizens. It seemed to her that nobody was rich here, nobody terribly poor. But this was Adamm’s home, and he was used to its conditions.

  Most people, she learned, were probably older than they looked to her. Here in the low gravity environment of Triton, and with anti-ageing mechanisms wired centuries earlier into the human genome, life expectancy was around two centuries. And it would have been even higher if not for problems with the colony’s life support. ‘We have crashes and blooms, diseases, toxicity …’

  The biosphere was just too small.

  Right now Adamm lived alone. He had one child by a previous marriage. He was considering marrying again, trying for more children. But there was a quota.

  He listened, without commenting, to her talk of interstellar war. Madeleine had the impression that Adamm was merely being polite to somebody who might have known his ancestors.

  She felt herself losing concentration, overwhelmed by cultural inertia.

  After the meal, they took a walk.

  He guided her to an area like an atrium. It was walled, roofed and floored with transparent sheeting, and for once there was no sense of enclosure. Around her, stretching to a close, tightly curving horizon, was a sheet of ice; above her was Neptune’s faint globe, slowly rising as Triton spun through its long artificial day; beneath her feet she could see the Triton ocean, through which pale white forms skimmed.

  She said, ‘I remember when Neptune hung in the sky, unmoving. Seeing it rise like that is – eerie. But I suppose it makes Triton more Earth-like.’

  She glimpsed hostility on his face.

  ‘Travellers like you have returned before,’ he said, her translator filtering out any emotion from his voice. ‘What does it matter if Triton is Earth-like or not? Madeleine, I’ve never seen Earth. Why would I want to?’

  The little clash depressed her. Of course he’s right, she thought; ‘Earth-like’ must sound as alien to Adamm as the accretion-disc home of the Chaera would have to me. Fifteen hundred years; fifty, sixty generations … We humans just can’t maintain cultural concentration, even over such an insignificant span.

  While the Gaijin sail on.

  As if on cue, there was a flash in the sky, somewhere beyond the blue shoulder of Neptune.

  She grabbed Adamm’s hand; he recoiled from her touch. ‘There. Did you see that?’

  Ne. ‘… No.’

  There was nothing to see now, no afterglow, no repeat show. She felt like a kid who had glimpsed a meteor in the desert sky, a flash nobody else had seen. She said defensively, ‘It’s not just a light in the sky. It might have been the destruction of an ice moon, or a comet nucleus –’

  Adamm asked reluctantly, ‘This is your war?’

  ‘Adamm, the war isn’t mine. But it is real …’

  A sleek white shape broke the water beneath her feet. She stepped back, startled. She saw a smooth, streamlined head, closed eyes, a small mouth – something like a dolphin, she thought. The creature opened its mouth and uttered a cry, high-pitched, complex, like a door creaking.

  Then it flipped backwards and disappeared from view, leaving Madeleine stunned, disturbed.

  ‘War,’ Adamm said sourly. Then he sighed. ‘I suppose you mean well. But it seems so – remote.’

  ‘Believe me, it isn’t. Adamm, I’m going to need your help. The Headman won’t see me. You have to help me convince people.’

  He laughed, not unkindly. He pointed down to the black water. ‘Start with them.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Flips. Try convincing them. They’re people too.’

  She peered into the water, stunned.

  He walked away. She had no choice but to follow.

  The Headman’s office loaned her a hard-shelled suit, full of smart stuff and heating elements. She descended into the water, from a bay on the outskirts of the bubble city, through a hole neatly cut in the ice.

  She fell slowly, in deepening darkness. She moved around experimentally. She couldn’t feel the cold, and the water pressure here on this low-G moon was pretty low, but the water resisted her movements. When the hole in the ice was just a pinpoint of blue light above her, she turned on her helmet lamps. The beams penetrated only a few metres into the murk. She ran a quick visual check of her systems, and glanced upwards to see her tether coiling reassuringly up through the water, her physical link to the world of air and light above.

  Deep-sea diving on Triton. She’d never liked swimming, even on a real planet.

  She was alone. The colonists didn’t take to the water much. Their deep ocean was just a resource, a mine, not a place to explore, still less play.

  Something wriggled past her faceplate.

  She recoiled. Her chin jammed against her air inlet, and there was a sudden decrease in pressure; her ears popped alarmingly.

  She calmed herself down. It had only been a fish. She didn’t recognize the species – a native Earth type, or gen-enged for this peculiar environment?

  She fell faster.

  The murky dust grew thicker. It was probably organic debris, she had been warned: decomposed body parts, drifting down to the deep ocean floor. More critters and plants drifted up past her. There were strands of seaweed, what looked like tiny shrimps, more fish of a variety of shapes and sizes, even what appeared to be a sea horse.

  There was a whole biosphere down here, gen-enged from Earth life. There was little photosynthesis: not enough sunlight for that. Most of the energy for life here came from the heat of Triton’s interior. So the food chain was anchored in communities of exotic bugs clustered around smoking, mineral-laden vents, cracks in the ocean floor hundreds of kilometres from the light.

  … She felt it before she could see it, a sudden and unexpected nuzzling at her legs, soft, warm, curious. She twisted around in the water, tether looping.

  It was like a dolphin, yes: a small dolphin, sleek body a couple of metres long, streamlined fur pure white, powerful flukes and stubby fins. But it – no, he; there was a fully operational penis down there, beneath the sleek belly – he had a face that had little in common with a dolphin’s: a blunt rounded shape, a wide, stretched mouth, a nose squashed flat and the nostrils extended into two slits. Bubbles streamed from a blowhole at the top of his head. And the eyes were closed; she could make out no brows, no lids.

  No eyes, she realized. But what use were eyes, in this deep darkness?

  This was a human, of course: or rather, a post-human, gen-enged for this environment, the true, deep heart of Triton, far beneath the cold, attenuated huddles of the surface.

  He swum around her smoothly, brushing her legs, feet, arms, chest. She heard a pulsing click, perhaps some form of echo-sounding …

  He rolled on his back.

  Enough analysis, Madeleine.

  Without thinking, she reached out with her gloved hand and scratched his corrugated, gun-metal-grey belly. She could feel nothing of the texture of his fur. But the clicks and pops he made deepened, seeming to denote satisfaction.

  ‘Can you hear me? Can you understand? …’ Are you a Roach too, she thought, some remote, metamorphosed child of Ben and Lena?

  For reply he wriggled away and floated there, just out of her reach.

  She had to let herself drift a little deeper to touch him again. He let her stroke him a couple more minutes, then wriggled away again. And she had to descend further, reach out again.

  And again, and again.

  He’s testing me, she realized slowly. Playing some game with me. Psychology. Still human enough for that.

  And, she saw by the swelling of
his impressive penis, it was giving him a kick.

  She rose up a little, folded her arms.

  When he saw she wasn’t playing any more, he rolled on his front and his fins beat at the water, as if in frustration. But then he quickly forgave her, and began rolling around her legs, nuzzling and butting.

  More shadows in the water, she saw now: two, three, four Flips. They clustered around her curiously. She wondered if her first companion had called to them, in some manner she couldn’t detect. She tried not to flinch as their powerful bodies brushed the equipment that kept her alive; they showed no malevolence, only a kind of affectionate curiosity, and her gear was surely designed to survive encounters like this.

  Now one of them – her first friend maybe, impossible to say – began to emit a new kind of sound. It was a kind of whistle, much purer than the echo clicks or the squeaky-door groans she had heard before.

  Another joined in, making a whistle that wavered a bit but soon settled on the same pitch as the first. And now she heard a pulsing, overlaid on their simple pure-tone singing. Beats, she thought, the interference of one tone with another.

  The other Flips joined in, singing their own notes, producing more beats. As a piece of music it was simple, just a cluster of pure tones in straightforward harmony with each other. But the beats were more complex, an elusive pattern of pulses that shifted, hopping from one frequency to another, sometimes too rapidly for her to follow.

  On a whim she activated a feed to her concrete cave room, up in the surface colony, and let the translator suite record the singing. Then she closed her eyes and let herself drift, immersed in song, oblivious even to the gentle touch of the Flips as they swam around her.

  … The Flips scattered, suddenly, as if in panic, disappearing into the gloom, leaving her alone. She felt shocked, oddly bereft; without the song, the world seemed empty.

  But now she heard a new noise: a deep regular thrumming. Something was approaching through the water ahead of her, something massive, a texture that spanned the ocean.

  It was a net.

  She paced back and forth in Adamm’s lounge. ‘What kind of people are you? Those Flips are your –’

  ‘Children?’ He smiled, languid, sipping a kind of wine whose principal ingredient was seaweed. ‘Cousins? Brothers, sisters? Don’t be absurd. They are a different species. They became that way by choice. When they first went into the sea, they took tools, ways of extracting metal. They discarded it all, bit by bit. They even discarded their hands, and their eyes, everything that makes us human. They chose to go back, you see, back to – mindlessness. It was ideological.’

  She wondered how much, if any, of that was true. ‘But to hunt them down –’

  He studied her curiously. ‘Do you imagine we eat them? You don’t think much of us, do you? The Flips are just a pest. They disrupt the ecology. They interfere with the city’s systems, the filter valves for instance …’

  Perhaps, she thought.

  The translator had analysed the Flips’ singing.

  With no referents, it was impossible to provide a one-to-one translation. But it was obvious the song was full of structure. The suite identified patterns in the choice of frequencies, the way the beats were manipulated, in their spacing and timing and intonation and pitch … The suite estimated that an hour of such singing could encode a million bits. Which was, for comparison, about the information content of Homer’s Odyssey.

  The Flips couldn’t match the richness of whale song of Earth. Not yet. A few more centuries, she thought, and they’d have it.

  So the Song went on after all, here in this watery desert, a place even more elemental than the Outback.

  Adamm was still talking. ‘… And you needn’t imagine they are some kind of cute pet. Some of them have turned predatory, you know. Ecological niches tend to be filled … They consume each other. Look, they’re just Flips. They don’t matter.’

  ‘And nor did your ancestors, in white Australia.’

  His face hardened. ‘You created this world, I suppose, with your stunts, firing moons back and forth. And now you want to destroy it, evacuate thousands of people.’ He smiled. ‘History remembers you as a meddler. Grandiose. Ideas above your capabilities.’ But even as he spoke he seemed distant, as if unable to believe he was challenging this historical figure – as if he was facing down Columbus, or Julius Caesar. He gazed out at interstellar darkness, the edge of the system. ‘If these aliens are as powerful as you claim, maybe we should just accept what’s going to happen. Like death. You can’t fight that.’

  She growled, ‘No, but you can put it off.’ She stood. ‘I’m not interested in your opinion of me, or your analysis. I’m going to see the Headman, whether she likes it or not. I’ll do what I can to arrange evacuation to the inner system for everybody who wants it. Even the Flips.’

  He eyed her, saying nothing; somehow she sensed this remote grandson of long-dead Ben and Lena wasn’t going anywhere, with or without her.

  ‘Goodbye, Adamm.’

  Goodbye, goodbye.

  Chapter 30

  REFUGE

  The Gaijin flower-ship soared on a fast, efficient powered trajectory into the crowded heart of the solar system. The sun grew brighter, swamping the subtleties of the star-laden sky, its glaring light more and more the dominant presence in the universe.

  Madeleine felt an unreasonable, illogical sense of claustrophobia. There were no walls here, and there was room for whole planets to swim through the dark; and yet this place felt oppressive, closed in, like the heart of a city. She spent much time with the lander’s windows opaqued against the yellow-white glare, drifting beneath a cool, austere virtual Neptune.

  The Gaijin refused to carry Madeleine any closer to the sun than the orbit of Earth. She was going to have to proceed on to Mercury in the cramped confines of a lander designed primarily for orbit-to-ground hops.

  The few hundred refugees from Triton who had followed her back into the heart of the system would have to endure the same rigours. The transfer into the landers was ill-tempered, chaotic.

  It had proved impossible to communicate to the deep-ocean aquatics the need to evacuate. So she had been forced to leave them behind, those dolphin-like post-humans, abandoning them to whatever mysterious fate awaited them, without ever even knowing if they understood what was happening to them.

  Just as, perhaps, the retreating Gaijin wondered of her.

  As she watched the flower-ship sail away back into the outer darkness, she felt an entirely unexpected pang of loneliness, of abandonment.

  She’d always suspected that Malenfant’s habit of giving his Gaijin companion a name – of treating Cassiopeia as some analogue of a human individual – was just anthropomorphism, sloppy sentimentality. But the fact was she actually liked these aloof, stately, rational Gaijin a lot more than she liked some humans – notably the racist-type surface colonists she had encountered on Triton. The Gaijin were ancient, much-travelled, had endured experiences unimaginable to most humans; to them, a single, short-lived human and her concerns must seem as evanescent, as meaningless – and yet perhaps as beautiful – as the curl of a thread of smoke, the splash of a single raindrop.

  At last, ten days after the Gaijin had left her, planet Mercury sailed into view. She was approaching at an angle from the night side, so to her it was a bony crescent against the black, slowly opening up, its cratering apparent even from a great distance.

  She slid into orbit, and was held there while an electronic bureaucracy – run by a governing body called the Coalition – processed her requests to land, machines separated by centuries of technical and social development seeking a way to speak to each other.

  Mercury, turning beneath her, was like the Moon’s elder brother, just a ball of rock with a pale, thickly cratered surface. But there was no Mercury equivalent of the Moon’s great maria; whatever process had formed those great lunar seas of frozen lava hadn’t operated here. And there were features unlike anything on the M
oon: zones of crumpling, ridges and folds and cracks, like the wrinkled skin of a dried tomato, as if the planet had shrunk after its formation.

  The stand-out feature was one immense impact basin, maybe thirty degrees north of the equator. She sailed over a ragged ring of mountains – not a simple rim, but a structure, with the tallest mountains innermost, and lower foothills further out. Inside the ring there was a relatively smooth floor, scarred by ridges, folds and rifts that followed roughly concentric patterns, like the glaze on an old dinner plate. It was a fantastic sight, a basin that took her lander long minutes to skim over on its first approach pass, circles of mountains big enough neatly to encompass the Great Lakes.

  And, in the deep shadows right at the huge crater’s heart, she saw lights, a hint of order, buildings and tracks. It was a human settlement, here in the deepest scar on the most inhospitable planet in the solar system. She ought to have been uplifted by the spectacle. But that tiny spark in the midst of such ferocious desolation seemed merely absurd.

  There was a lot of traffic in the sky.

  They were human ships. Most of them were driven by solar sails, filmy and beautiful, wispy shapes that tacked against Mercury’s impassive rocky face, the slow evolution of their forms betraying the intelligent control that guided them. The ships rode the hail of photons that came from the huge, nearby sun, a much more effective means of transportation here than at Earth’s orbit and beyond.

  It was immediately obvious that there were more ships arriving than leaving. But then there was no other place for humans to go, here in the solar system of the year AD 3793; Mercury was a sink of people, not a source.

  On the far side of Mercury she saw a type of landscape she’d never seen before: broken up, chaotic, almost shattered. She worked out that it was at the exact antipode of that giant impact structure, the target of converging spherical shock waves that must have travelled around the world; rock-smashing energies had focused here and made the land flex and crumble and boil.