Space

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘That is a star birth nebula,’ he said. ‘It’s probably much more extensive. All we can see is a blister, illuminated by a clutch of young stars at the centre – see the way that glow is roughly spherical? – the stars’ radiation makes the gases shine, out as far as it can reach, before it gets absorbed. But you can see more stars, younger stars, emerging from the fringes of the blister. That darker area all around the glow, eclipsing the stars behind, is a glimpse of the true nebula, dense clouds of dust and hydrogen, probably containing proto-stars that have yet to shine … Madeleine, I did a little amateur astronomy as a kid. I recognize that thing; it’s visible from Earth. We call it the Lagoon Nebula. And its companion over there is the Trifid. The Lagoon contains stars so young and bright you can see them with the naked eye, from Earth.’

  In all her travels around the Saddle Point network, Madeleine had seen nothing like this.

  ‘Ah,’ Malenfant said, when she expressed this. ‘But we’ve come far beyond that, of course.’

  She shivered, suddenly longing for daylight. ‘Malenfant, in those trees over there. I thought I saw –’

  ‘There are Neandertals here,’ he said quickly. ‘You needn’t fear them. I think they’re from Io. Maybe some of them are from Earth, too. I think they were brought here when they were close to death. I haven’t recognized any of them yet. There is one old guy I got to know a little, who died. I called him Esau. He must be here somewhere.’

  She tried to follow all that. He didn’t seem concerned, confused by the situation. There was, she realized, a lot he needed to tell her.

  ‘We aren’t on Io any more, are we?’

  ‘No.’ He pointed at the stars with his half-eaten fish. ‘That’s no sky of Earth. Or even of Io.’

  Madeleine felt something inside her crack. ‘Malenfant –’

  ‘Hey.’ He was immediately before her, holding her shoulders, tall in the dark. ‘Take it easy.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s just –’

  ‘We’re a long way from home. I know.’

  ‘I’ve got a lot to tell you.’ She started to blurt out all that she’d seen since she, Malenfant and Dorothy Chaum had returned to the solar system from the Gaijin’s Cannonball homeworld: the interstellar war, the hail of comets into the sun’s hearth, the Crackers.

  He listened carefully. He showed regret at the damage done to Earth, the end of so many stories. He smiled when she spoke of Nemoto. But after a time, as detail after detail spilled out of her, he held her shoulders again.

  ‘Madeleine.’

  She looked up at him; his eyes were wells of shadow in the starlight.

  ‘None of it matters. Look around, Madeleine. We’re a long way away from all that. There’s nothing we can do to affect any of it now …’

  ‘How far?’

  He said gently, ‘Questions later. The first thing I did when I woke up was go behind those bushes over there and take a good solid dump.’

  Despite herself, that made her laugh out loud.

  By the time they’d eaten more fish, and some yam-like fruit Malenfant had found, it was still dark, with no sign of a dawn. So Madeleine pulled together a pallet of leaves and dry grass, and tucked her arms inside her coverall, and quickly fell asleep.

  When she woke it was still dark.

  Malenfant was hunkered down close to a stand of trees. He seemed to be drawing in the dirt with a stick, peering around at the sky. Beyond him there was a group of figures, shadowy in the starlight. Neandertals?

  There really was no sign of dawn, no sign of a moon: not a glimmer of light, other than starlight, on any horizon. And yet something was different, she thought. Were the stars a little brighter? Certainly that Milky Way glow close to the horizon seemed stronger. And, it seemed to her, the stars had shifted a little, in the sky. She looked for the star patterns she had noted last time she was awake – the box overhead, the ellipse. Were they a little distorted, a little more squashed together?

  She joined Malenfant. He handed her a piece of fruit, and she sat beside him.

  The Neandertals seemed to be a family group, five, six adults, about as many children. They seemed oblivious to Malenfant’s scrutiny. They were hairy, squat, naked: cartoon ape men. And two of the children were wrestling, hard, tumbling over and over, as if they were more gorilla than human.

  Malenfant asked slowly, avoiding her eyes: ‘Why did you come here, Madeleine?’

  He seemed stiff; she felt embarrassed, as if she had been foolish, impulsive. ‘I volunteered. The Gaijin helped me. I wanted to find you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I got to know you, on the Cannonball, Malenfant. I didn’t like the idea of you being alone when –’

  ‘When what?’

  She hesitated. ‘Do you know why you’re here?’

  ‘Just remember,’ he said coolly, ‘I didn’t ask you to follow me.’ He continued his sketching in the dust, angry.

  She shrank back, confused, lost; she felt further from home than ever.

  She studied his sketches. They were crude, just scrapings made with the point of his stick. But she recognized the box, the ellipse.

  ‘It’s a star map,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah. Kind of basic. Just a few score of the brightest stars. But look here, here, here …’

  Some of the points were double.

  ‘The stars have shifted,’ she said.

  ‘Here’s where this one was yesterday – or before we slept, anyhow. And here’s where it is now.’ He shrugged. ‘The shift is small – hard to be accurate without instruments – but I think it’s real.’

  ‘I noted it too,’ she said.

  ‘Not just a shift. Other changes. I think there are more stars than yesterday. They seem brighter. And they are flowing across the sky –’ he swept his arms over his head, towards the bright Milky Way band on the horizon ‘– thataway.’

  ‘Why that way?’

  He looked up at her. ‘Because that’s where we’re headed. Come see.’ He stood, took her by the hand and pulled her to her feet, and led her past a stand of trees.

  Now she saw the Galactic band exposed to her full view: it was a river of stars, yes, but they were stars that were varied, yellow and blue and orange, and the river was crammed with exotic features, giant dark clouds and brilliant shining nebulae.

  ‘It looks like the Milky Way,’ she said. ‘But –’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s not like this at home … I think we’re looking at the Sagittarius Spiral Arm.’

  She said slowly, ‘Which is not the arm which contains the sun.’

  ‘Hell, no. That’s just a shingle, a short arc. This mother is the next arm in, towards the centre of the Galaxy.’ He swept his arm so his hand spanned the star river. ‘Look at those nebulae – see? – the Eagle, the Omega, the Trifid, the Lagoon – a huge region of star-birth, one of the largest in the Galaxy, immense clouds of gas and dust capable of producing millions of stars each. The Sagittarius Arm is one of the Galaxy’s two main spiral features, a huge whirl of matter that reaches from the hub of the Galaxy all the way out to the rim, winding around for a full turn. This is what you see if you head inward from the sun, towards the Galaxy centre.’

  Under the huge, crowded sky, she felt small, humbled. ‘We’ve come a long way, haven’t we, Malenfant?’

  ‘I think we busted out of the edge of the Saddle Point network. We know the network is no more than a couple of thousand light years across, extending just a fraction of the way to the centre of the Galaxy. We must have reached a radius where the Saddle Points aren’t working any more. Which is a problem if you want to go further … I think this is just the start of the true journey.’

  He was speaking steadily, evenly, as if discussing a hiking tour of Yosemite. She felt her self-control waver again. But she didn’t want to seem weak in front of Malenfant, this difficult cold man.

  ‘And,’ she said, ‘where will that true journey take us?’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe all the way to
the centre of the Galaxy.’ He studied her, perhaps to see how well she could take this. Then he pointed. ‘Look, Madeleine – the Lagoon Nebula, up there, is five thousand light years from Earth.’

  And so, therefore, she thought, the year is 8800 AD, or thereabouts. It was a number that meant nothing to her at all. And, even if she turned around now and headed for home, assuming that was possible, it would be another five thousand years before she could get back to Earth.

  But the centre of the Galaxy was twenty-five thousand light years from the sun. Even at lightspeed it would take fifty thousand years to get there and back. Fifty thousand years. This was no ordinary journey, not even like a history-wrenching Saddle Point hop; the human species itself was only a hundred thousand years old …

  He was still watching her. ‘I’ve had time to get used to this.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Madeleine …’

  ‘I mean it,’ she snapped. She got up, turned her back and walked away. She found a stream, drank and splashed her face, spent a few minutes alone, eyes closed, breathing deeply.

  Perhaps it’s just as well we humans can’t grasp the immensities we have begun to cross. If we were any smarter, we’d go crazy.

  Remember why you came here, Madeleine. For Malenfant. Whether he appreciates it or not, the asshole. Malenfant is strong. But maybe it helps him just to have me here. Somebody he has to look after.

  But her grasp of psychology always had been shaky. Anyhow, she was here, whether he needed her or not.

  She went back to Malenfant, at his patient vigil.

  One of the Neandertal women was working a rock, making tools. She held a core of what looked like obsidian, a glassy volcanic rock. She gave the core one sharp strike, and a flake of it dropped off. A few light strokes along the edge and the flake had become a tear-shaped blade, like an arrow-head. The woman, with a lop-sided grin, gave the knife to one of the males, signing rapidly.

  Malenfant murmured, ‘She’s saying he should be careful of the edge.’

  She frowned. ‘I don’t understand how those guys got here.’

  He told her what he’d observed of the Neandertals’ burial practices: the mysterious Staff of Kintu.

  ‘So you think the Gaijin were rewarding the dying Neandertal workers for all their labours with this – a soapy Heaven.’

  He laughed. ‘If they were, they are the first gods in history to deliver on their afterlife promises.’

  She paced, feeling the texture of the grass under her feet, the breeze on her face. ‘Why is it like this? Trees, grass, streams – it feels like Africa. But it isn’t Africa, is it?’

  ‘No. But if you ask almost any human, anywhere, what type of landscape they prefer, it’s something like this. Open grass, a few flat-topped trees. Even Clear Lake, Houston, fits the pattern: grass out front, maybe a tree or two. And you never put your tree in front of your window; you need to be able to look out of your cave, to see the predators coming. After taking us apart for a thousand years, the Gaijin know us well. And our Neandertal cousins. We’re a hundred millennia out of Africa, Madeleine, and five thousand light years distant.’ He tapped his chest. ‘But it’s still here, inside us.’

  ‘You’re saying they’ve given us an environment that we’re comfortable with. A Neandertal theme park.’

  He nodded. ‘I think very little of what we see is real.’ He pointed at the sky. ‘But that is real.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Because it’s changing.’

  She slept and woke again.

  And the sky, once more, had changed dramatically. She lay on her back alongside Malenfant, gazing up at the evolving sky.

  He started talking about how he had travelled here.

  ‘They put me through a whole series of Saddle Point jumps, taking me across the geography of the Galaxy … First I headed towards Scorpio. Our sun is in the middle of a bubble in space, hundreds of light years across – did you know that? – a vacuum blown into the Galactic medium by an ancient supernova explosion. But the Saddle Point leaps got longer and longer …’

  With the sun already invisible, he had been taken out of the local bubble, into a neighbouring void the astronomers called Loop 1.

  ‘I saw Antares through the murk,’ he said, ‘a glowing red jewel set against a glowing patch of sky, a burst of young stars they call the Rho Opiuchi complex. Hell of a sight. I looked back for the sun. I couldn’t find it. But I saw a great sheet of young stars that slices through the Galactic plane, right past Sol. They call that Gould’s Belt, and I knew that was where home was.

  ‘And when I looked ahead, there was a band of darkness. I was reaching the inner limit of our spiral arm, looking into the rift between the arms, the dense dark clouds there. And then, beyond the rift, I arrived here – in this place, with the Neandertals …’

  ‘And the stars.’

  ‘Yes.’

  While she had slept, the stars had continued to migrate. Now they had all swum their way up towards that Sagittarius Arm horizon, the way Malenfant said they were heading. The opposite horizon looked dark, for all its stars had fled. All the stars in the sky, in fact, had crowded themselves into a disc, centred on a point some way above that brighter horizon – at least she guessed it was a disc; some of it was below her horizon. And the colours had changed; the stars had become green and yellow and blue.

  Now, in what situation would you expect to see the stars swimming around the sky like fish?

  ‘This is the aberration of starlight, isn’t it, Malenfant? The distortion of the visible universe, which you would see if –’

  ‘If you travel extremely quickly. Yes,’ he said softly.

  She understood the principle. It was like running in the rain, a rain of starlight. As she ran faster, the rain would hit her harder, in her face, her body. If she ran extremely fast indeed, it would be as if the rain was almost horizontal …

  ‘We’re on a starship,’ she breathed.

  ‘Yeah. We’re moving so fast that most of the stars we see up ahead must be red giants, infrared sources, invisible to us in normal times. All the regular stars have been blue-shifted to invisibility. Wherever we’re going, we’re travelling the old-fashioned way: in a spaceship, pushed up to relativistic speeds. And we’re still accelerating.’

  She sat up and dug her fingers into the grass. ‘But it doesn’t feel like a starship. Where is the crew? Where are we going? What will happen when we get there?’

  ‘When I found you, I hoped you were going to tell me.’ He got to his feet. ‘What do you think we should do now?’

  She shrugged. ‘Walk. There’s nothing to stay for here.’

  ‘Okay. Which way?’

  She pointed to the glowing Sagittarius Arm horizon, the place the stars were fleeing, their putative destination.

  He smiled. ‘And add a couple of kilometres an hour to our eighty per cent of lightspeed? Why not? We’re walking animals, we humans.’

  Malenfant picked up a sack, which turned out to contain his ancient spacesuit, the wreck she had spent hours fixing up on the Cannonball. Obeying some obscure impulse for tidiness, he scuffed over his dirt-scraped star map. Then they set off.

  They passed the Neandertal family, who sat just where they had yesterday.

  When Madeleine looked back, the Neandertals were still sitting, unmoving, as the humans receded, and the stars flowed overhead.

  The next time she woke, there was only a single source of light in the sky. It was a small disc, brighter than a full Moon, less bright than the sun seen from Earth, tinged distinctly bluish.

  Aside from that the cloudless sky was utterly empty.

  Malenfant was standing before her, staring at the light. Beyond him she could see Neandertals, a family group of them, standing too, staring into the light, their awkward heads tipped back. Shadows streamed from the light, shadows of people and trees, steady and dark.

  She stood beside Malenfant. ‘What is it? Stars?’

  He shook his head.
‘The stars are all blue-shifted to invisibility. All of them.’

  ‘Then what –’

  ‘I think that’s the afterglow.’ The background heat of the universe, left over from the Big Bang, stretched to a couple of degrees above absolute zero. ‘We’re going so fast now, just a tad lower than lightspeed, that even that has been crumpled up by aberration, crushed into a tiny disc. Some spectacle, don’t you think? …’He held his hand up before him, shading the universe-sun; she saw its shadow on his face. ‘You know, I remember the first time I left Earth, en route to the Saddle Point. And I looked back and saw the Earth dwindle to a dot of light smaller than that. Everything I’d ever known – five billion years of geology and biology, of sliding continents and oceans and plants and dinosaurs and people – all of it was crammed into a splinter of light, surrounded by nothing. And now the whole damn universe, stars and galaxies and squabbling aliens and all, is contained in that little smudge.’

  He told her he thought they were riding an antimatter rocket.

  ‘… It explains what the Gaijin were doing on Io. Tapping the energy of Jupiter’s magnetosphere. Probably turned the whole moon into one big atom-smasher, and picking the antimatter out of the debris.’ The antimatter rocket could be a kind called a beam-core engine, he speculated. ‘It’s simple, in principle. You just have your tanks of atoms and anti-atoms – hydrogen, probably, the anti-stuff contained in a magnetic trap – and you feed it into a nozzle and let it blow itself up. The electrons make gamma rays, and the nuclei make pions, all high energy stuff, and some of the pions are charged, so that’s what you throw out the back as your exhaust … There are other ways to do it. I don’t imagine the Gaijin have a very advanced design.’

  ‘It must have taken the Gaijin a long time, an immense project, to assemble the antimatter they needed.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Hauling those superconductor cables all the way out from Venus, and everything. Big engineering.’

  ‘But,’ Madeleine said deliberately, ‘there is no way you could haul all of this –’ she indicated the plain, the trees ‘– a ship the size of a small moon up to relativistic speeds, all the way to the Galaxy core. Is there?’