Manifold: Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Malenfant grunted. "The old Fermi paradox. Troubled me as a kid, even before I heard of Fermi."

  "Me too." He could see her smile. "You see, Malenfant, we have much in common. And the logic behind the paradox troubles me still."

  "Even though you think you have found aliens."

  She let that hang, and he found he was holding his breath.

  Cautiously, she said, "How would it make you feel, Malenfant, if I was right?"

  "If you had proof that another intelligence exists? It would be wonderful. I guess."

  "Would it?" She smiled again. "How sentimental you are. Listen to me: Humanity would be in extreme danger. Remember, by your own argument, the assumption on which a colonizing expedition operates is that it is appropriating an empty system. Such a probe could destroy our worlds without even noticing us."

  He shivered; his spiderweb suit felt thin and fragile.

  "Think it through further," she said. "Think like an engineer. If an alien replicator probe were to approach the Solar System, where would it seek to establish itself? What are its requirements?"

  He thought about it. You'll need energy; plenty of it. So, stay close to the Sun. Next: raw materials. The surface of a rocky planet? But you wouldn't want to dip into a gravity well if you didn't have to... Besides, your probe is designed for deep space –

  "The asteroid belt," he said, suddenly seeing where all this was leading. "Plenty of resources, freely floating, away from the big gravity wells... Even the main belts aren't too crowded, but you'd probably settle in a Kirkwood gap, to minimize the chance of collision. Your orbit would be perturbed by Jupiter, just like the asteroids', but it wouldn't require much station-keeping to compensate for that. And some kind of ship or colony out there, even a few kilometers across, would be hard for us to spot." He looked at her sharply. "Is that what this is about? Have you found something in the belt?"

  "The plain facts are these. I have surveyed the Kirkwood gaps with the sensors here. And, in the gap which corresponds to the one-to-three resonance with Jupiter, I have found –" She pointed to her virtual model, to a broad, precise gap.

  At the center of the gap, a string of rubies shone, enigmatic, brilliant in the shadows.

  "These are sources of infrared," she said. "Sources I cannot explain."

  Malenfant bent to study the little beads of light. "Could they be asteroids that have strayed into the gap after collisions?"

  "No. The sources are too bright. In fact, they are each emitting more heat than they receive from the Sun. I am, of course, seeking firmer evidence: for example, structure in the infrared signature; or perhaps there will be radio leakage."

  He stared at the ruby lights. My God. She's right. If these are emitting heat, this is unambiguous: It's evidence of industrial activity...

  His heart thumped. Somehow he hadn't accepted what she had said to him, not in his gut, not up to now. But now he could see it, and his universe was transformed.

  He made out her face in the dim light reflected from the regolith, the smooth sweep of human flesh here in this dusty wilderness. Though it must have been a big moment for her to show him this evidence – a moment of triumph – she seemed troubled. "Nemoto, why did you ask me here? Your work is a fine piece of science, as far as I can see. The interpretation is unambiguous. You should publish. Why do you need reassurance from me?"

  "I know this is good science. But the answer is wrong. Very wrong. The koan is not resolved at all. Don't you see that?" She glared up at the sky, as if trying to make out the signature of the aliens with her own eyes. "Why now?"

  He glimpsed her meaning.

  They must have just arrived, or we'd surely see their works, the transformed asteroids swarming... But why should they arrive now, just as we ourselves are ready to move beyond the Earth – just as we are able to comprehend them? A simple coincidence? Why shouldn't they have come here long ago?

  He grinned. Old Fermi wasn't beaten yet; there were deeper layers of the paradox here, much to unravel, new questions to ask.

  But it wasn't a moment for philosophy.

  His mind was racing. "We aren't alone. Whatever the implications, the unanswered questions – my God, what a thought. We'll need the resources of the race, of all of us, to respond to this."

  She smiled thinly. "Yes. The stars have intervened, it seems. Your kokuminsei, your people's spirit, must revive. It will be satori – a reawakening. Come." She held out her hand. "We should go back to Edo. We have much to do."

  He squinted, trying to make out the constellations against the glare of the regolith. There was gaijin-kusai there, the smell of foreigner, he thought. He felt exhilarated, awakened, as if a hiatus was coming to an end. This changes everything.

  He took Nemoto's hand, and they walked back across the regolith to the tractor.

  Chapter 2

  Baikonur

  The priest was not what Xenia Makarova had expected.

  Xenia herself wasn't religious. And Xenia's family, emigrant to the United States four generations ago, had been Orthodox. What did she know about Catholic priests? So she had expected the cliché: some gaunt old man, Italian or Irish, shriveled up by a lifetime of celibacy, dressed in a flapping black cassock that would soak up the toxic dust and prove utterly unsuitable for the conditions here at the launch site.

  Her first surprise had come when the priest had expressed no special accommodation requirements, but had been happy to stay in the town of Baikonur, along with the technicians who worked for Bootstrap here at the old Soviet-era launch station. Baikonur – once called Leninsk, at the heart of Kazakhstan – was a place of burned-out offices and abandoned, windowless apartments, of roads and roofs coated with strata of gritty brown powder, blown from the pesticide-laden salt flats of the long-dead Aral Sea a few hundred kilometers away. Baikonur was a relic of Soviet dreams, plagued by crime and ill health. Not a good place to stay.

  So Xenia wasn't sure what to expect by the time the bus drew up to the security gate, and she went out to greet her holy guest.

  The priest must have been sixty, small, compact: fit looking, though she showed some stiffness climbing down from the bus. Camera drones, glittering toys the size of beetles, whirred out in a cloud around her head.

  Her, yes: of course it would be a female, one of the Vatican's first cadre of women priests, that would be assigned to this most PR-friendly of operations.

  And no black cassock. The priest, dressed in loose, comfortable-looking therm-aware shirt and slacks, could have held any one of a number of white-collar professions: an accountant, maybe, or a space scientist of the kind Frank Paulis had recruited in droves, or even a lawyer like Xenia herself. It was only the dog collar, a thin band of white at the throat, that marked out a different vocation.

  From the shadows of her broad, sensible Sun hat the priest smiled out at Xenia. "You must be Ms. Makarova."

  "Call me Xenia. And you?"

  "Dorothy Chaum." The smile grew a little weary. "I'm neither Mother, nor Father, thankfully. You must call me Dorothy."

  "It's a pleasure to have you here, Ms. – Dorothy."

  Dorothy flapped at the drones buzzing around her head like flies. "You're a good liar. I'll try to trouble you as little as I can." And she looked beyond Xenia, into the rocket compound, with questing, curious eyes.

  Maybe this won't be so bad after all, Xenia thought.

  Xenia, in fact, had been against the visit on principle, and she had told her boss so. "For God's sake, Frank. This is a space launcher development site. It's a place for hard hats, not haloes."

  Frank Paulis – forty-five years old, squat, brisk, bustling, sleek with sweat even in his air-conditioned offices – had just tapped his softscreen. "Just like it says in the mail here. This character is here on behalf of the Pope, to gather information on the mission –"

  "And bless it. Frank, the Bruno is a mission to the asteroids. We're going out to find ETs, for God's sake. To have some quack waving incense and throwing holy w
ater over our ship is... ridiculous. Medieval."

  Frank had gotten a look in his eyes she'd come to recognize. You have to be realistic, Xenia. Live in the real world. "The Vatican is one of our principal sponsors. They've a right to access."

  "The Church is using us as part of its repositioning," she'd protested sourly. It was true; the Church had spent much of the new millennium rebuilding, after the multiple crises that had assailed it after the turn of the century: sexual scandals, financial irregularities, a renewed awareness of the horrors of Christian history – the Crusades and the Inquisition chief amongst them. "We mustn't forget," Xenia said sourly, "the Church's refusal to acknowledge female reproductive rights and to address the issue of population growth, a position not abandoned until 2013, a historic wrong which must be on a par with –"

  "Nobody's arguing," Frank said gently. "But who are you suggesting is cynical? Us or them? Look, I don't care about the Church. All I care about is its money, and there's still a hell of a lot of that. And, just like any other corporate sponsor, the Church is entitled to its slice of the PR pie."

  "Sometimes I think you'd take money from the Devil himself if it got your Big Dumb Booster a little closer to the launch pad."

  "Since we have a bunch of those apocalyptic cultists here – the ones who think the Gaijin are demons sent to punish us, or whatever – I suppose I am taking money from the other guy. Well, at least it shows balance." Frank put his arm around her – he had to reach up to do it – and guided her out of his office. "Xenia, this witch doctor isn't going to be with us for long. And, believe me, a priest is going to be a lot easier for you to entertain than some of the fat cats we have to put up with."

  "Me? Frank, if you knew how much I resent the implication that my time isn't valuable –"

  "Bring her to the lecture. That will eat up a couple of hours."

  "What lecture?"

  He frowned. "I thought you knew. Reid Malenfant, on the philosophy of extraterrestrial life."

  She had to retrieve the name from deep memory. "The dried-up old coot from the talk shows?"

  "Reid Malenfant, the ex-astronaut. Reid Malenfant, the codiscoverer of alien life five years back. Reid Malenfant, modern icon, come to give our grease monkeys a pep talk." He grinned. "Lighten up, Xenia. Maybe it will be interesting."

  "Are you going?"

  "Of course I am." And, gently, he had closed the door.

  Xenia and Dorothy were SmartDriven around Baikonur, the standard-issue corporate tour.

  Baikonur, the Soviet Union's long-hidden space city, had been pretty much a derelict by the time Frank Paulis took it over and began renovation. Stranded at the heart of a chill, treeless steppe, connected to the Russian border by a single antique rail line, it was like a run-down military base, dotted with hangars and launch pads and fuel tanks. Even after years of work by Bootstrap here, there were still piles of rusty junk strewn over the more remote corners of the base – some of it said to be the last relics of Russia's never-successful Moon rockets.

  But Dorothy's attention was diverted, away from Xenia's sound bites on the history and the engineering and the mission of Bootstrap, by the folks Frank Paulis referred to as the Sports Fans: adherents of one view or another about the Gaijin, seemingly attracted here irresistibly.

  The Sports Fans lived at the fringe of the launch complex in semi-permanent camps, contained by tough link fences. They spent their time chanting, costume wearing, leafleting, performing protests of one baffling kind or another, right up against the fences, carefully watched over by Bootstrap security staff and drone robots. They were funded, presumably, by savings, or sponsors, or by whatever they could sell of their experiences and their witness on the data nets, and they were a fat, easy revenue source for the local Kazakhs – which was why they were tolerated here.

  Xenia tried to guide Dorothy away from all this, but Dorothy demurred. And so they began a slow drive around the fences, as Dorothy peered out, and Xenia struggled to contain her impatience.

  Public reaction to the Gaijin – as it had developed over the five years since the announcement of the discovery by Nemoto and Malenfant – had bifurcated. There were two broad schools of thought. The technical terms among psychologists and sociologists, Xenia had learned, were "millennialists" and "catastrophists."

  The millennialists, taking their lead from thinkers like Carl Sagan – not to mention Gene Roddenberry – believed that no star-spanning culture could possibly be hostile to a more primitive species like humanity, and the Gaijin must therefore be on their way to educate us or uplift us or save us from ourselves. The more intellectual millennialists had at least produced some useful, if slanted, material: careful studies of parallels with intercultural contact in Earth's past, ranging from the dreadful fall-out of Western colonialism through to the essentially benevolent impact of the transmission of learning from Arabian and ancient Greek cultures to the medieval West.

  But some millennialists were more direct. Various giant, elaborate structures – featuring the peace sigil, the yin and yang, the Christian cross, a human hand – had been cut or burned or painted on Earth's surface. Giant graffiti, Dorothy thought, painted in the deserts of America and Africa and Asia and Australia and even, illegally, on the Antarctic ice cap, its creators wistfully hoping to catch the eye of the anonymous, toiling strangers out in the belt.

  Others were even less subtle. Right here before her now there was a circle of people, hands open and faces raised to the desert sky, all steadily praying. She knew there had been similar gatherings, some in continuous session, at many of the world's key religious and mystic sites: Jerusalem, Mecca, the pyramids, the European stone circles. Take me! Take me!

  Meanwhile, the catastrophists believed that the aliens represented terrible danger.

  Much of their fear and anger was directed at the aliens themselves, of course, and there were elaborate schemes for military assaults on their supposed asteroid bases – justified, in some cases, by appeal to the evident malice of most of the aliens reported in UFO abduction cases of the past. There was even one impressive presentation – complete with animation and sound effects, emanating from softscreen posters draped over Bootstrap's link fence – from a major aerospace cartel. The military-industrial-complex types were as always seeking to turn the new situation into lucrative new contracts, and how better than to be asked to build giant asteroid-belt battle cruisers?

  But the catastrophists had plenty of rage left over to be directed at other targets, healthily fueled by conspiracy theorists. There were still some who held that the U.S. government had been collaborating with the aliens since Roswell, 1947. "I wish they had been," Frank had once said tiredly. "It would make life a lot easier."

  And there were protests aimed at government agencies at all levels, the United Nations, scientific bodies, and anybody thought to be involved in the general cover-up. The most spectacular of the related assaults had been the grenade attack that had caused the destruction of the decrepit, never-flown Saturn V Moon rocket that had lain for decades as a monument outside NASA's Johnson Space Center.

  It kept the Bootstrap guards watchful.

  "Intriguing," Dorothy murmured. "Disturbing."

  "But places like this always concentrate the noise," Xenia said gently. "The vast majority of people out there in the real world are simply indifferent to the whole thing. When the news about the Gaijin first broke it was an immediate sensation, taking over every media outlet – for a day or two, perhaps a week. I was already working with Frank at the time. He was electrified – well, we both were; we thought the news the most significant of our lifetimes. And the business opportunities it might open up sent Frank running around in circles."

  Dorothy smiled. "That sounds like the Frank Paulis I've read about."

  "But then there was no more fresh news..."

  After a couple of weeks, the Gaijin had been crowded off the front pages. Politics had assumed its usual course, and all the funds hastily promised in that fi
rst startling morning after the Nemoto-Malenfant discovery – for deeper investigations and robot probes and manned missions and the rest – had soon evaporated.

  "But the news was too... lofty," Dorothy murmured. "Inhuman. It changed everything. Suddenly the universe swiveled around us; suddenly we knew we weren't alone, and how we felt about ourselves, about the universe and our place in it, could never be the same again.

  "And yet, nothing changed. After all the Gaijin didn't do anything but crawl around their asteroids. They didn't respond to any of the signals they were sent, whether by governments or churches or ham-radio crackpots."

  Frank had gotten involved in some of that, in fact; the early messages had been framed using a universal-language methodology that dated back to the 1960s, called Lincos: lots of redundancy and framing to make the message patterns clear, a simple primer that worked up from basic mathematical concepts through physics, chemistry, astronomy... A lot of beautiful, fascinating work, none of which had raised so much as a peep from the Gaijin.

  "And meanwhile," Dorothy went on, "there were still babies to deliver, crops to grow, politicking to pursue, and wars to fight. As my father used to say, the next morning you still had to put your pants on one leg at a time.

  "You know," she said thoughtfully, "I'm generally in favor of all this activity. Your Sports Fans, I mean. The only way we have to absorb such changes in our view of the world, and ourselves, is like this: by talking, talking, talking. At least the people here care enough to express an opinion. Look at that." It was a softscreen poster showing a download from the net: a live image returned by some powerful telescope, perhaps in orbit or on the Moon, of the asteroid belt anomalies: a dark, grainy background, a line of red stars, twinkling, blurred. "Alien industry, live from space. The most popular Internet site, I'm told. People use it as wallpaper in their bedrooms. They seem to find it comforting."

  Xenia snorted. "Sure. And you know who makes most use of that image? The astrologers. Now you can have your fortune told by the lights of Gaijin factories. I mean, Jesus... Sorry. But it says it all."