Manifold: Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Human researchers in white all-over isolation gear were crawling over the floor, inspecting the alien gadgetry.

  "My God," Madeleine said. "It's taking itself apart."

  "Cultural exchange in action," Paulis said sourly. "We gave them a human cadaver to take apart – a volunteer, incidentally. In return we get this. A Gaijin is a complicated critter; this has been going on six months already."

  A couple of the researchers – two earnest young women – overheard Paulis, and turned their way.

  "But we're learning a lot," one of the researchers said. "The most basic question we have to answer is: Are the Gaijin alive? From the point of view of their complexity, you'd say they are; but they seem to have no mechanism for heredity, which we think is a prerequisite for any definition of a living thing – "

  "Or so we thought at first. But seeing the way this thing is put together has made us think again – "

  "We believed the Gaijin might be von Neumann machines, perfect replicators – "

  "But it may be that perfect replication is impossible in principle. Uncertainty, chaos – "

  "There will be drift in each generation. Like genetic drift. And where there is variation, there can be selection, and so evolution –"

  "But we still don't know what the units of replication are here. It may be a lower level than the individual Gaijin –"

  "The subcomponents that comprise them, perhaps. Maybe the Gaijin are a kind of vehicle for replication of their components, just as you could say we humans are a vehicle to enable our genes to reproduce themselves..."

  Breeding, evolving machines? Madeleine found herself shuddering.

  "Do you see now?" Paulis asked. "We are dealing with the truly alien here, Madeleine. These guys might spout Latin in their synthesized voices, but they are not like us. They come from a place we can't even imagine, and we don't know where they are going, and we sure as hell don't know what they are looking for here on Earth. And that's why we have to find a way to deal with them. Go ahead. Take a good long look."

  The Gaijin plucked a delicate panel of an aluminumlike soft metal off its own hide; it came loose with a soft, sucking tear, exposing jewel-like innards. Perhaps it would keep on going until there was only that grasping robot hand left, Madeleine thought, and then the hand would take itself apart too, finger by gleaming finger, until there was nothing left that could move.

  Chapter 9

  Fusion Summer

  Brind drew up contracts. Madeleine tidied up her affairs; preparing for a gap of thirty-six years, at minimum, had a feeling of finality. She said good-bye to her tearful mother, rented out her apartment, sold her car. She took the salary up front and invested it as best she could, with Paulis's help.

  She decided to give her little capsule a call sign: Friendship-7.

  And, before she knew it, before she felt remotely ready for this little relativistic death, it was launch day.

  Friendship-7's protective shroud cracked open. The blue light of Earth flooded the cabin. Madeleine could see fragments of ice, shaken free of the hull of the booster; they glittered around the craft like snow. And she could see the skin of Earth, spread out beneath her like a glowing carpet, as bright as a tropical sky. On the antique Proton, it had been one mother of a ride. But here she was – at last – in orbit, and her spirits soared. To hell with the Gaijin, to hell with Brind and Paulis. Whatever else happened from here on in, they couldn't take this memory away from her.

  She traveled through a single orbit of the Earth. There were clouds piled thickly around the equator. The continents on the night side were outlined by chains of city lights.

  She could see the big eco-repair initiatives, even from here, from orbit. Reforestation projects were swathes of virulent green on the continents of the northern hemisphere. The southern continents were filled with hot brown desert, their coasts lined gray with urban encrustation. Patches of gray in the seas, bordering the land, marked the sites of disastrous attempts to pump carbon dioxide into the deep oceans. Over Antarctica, laser arrays glowed red, laboring to destroy tropospheric chlorofluorocarbons. The Gulf was just a sooty smudge, drowning in petrochemical smog. And so on.

  From here she could see the disturbing truth: that space was doing Earth no damn good at all. Even though this was a time of off-world colonies and trade with interstellar travelers, most of mankind's efforts were directed toward fixing up a limited, broken-down ecology, or were dissipated on closed-economy problems: battles over diminishing resources in the oceans, on the fringes of the expanding deserts.

  She wondered, uneasily, what she would find when she returned home, thirty-six years from now.

  Madeleine would live in the old shuttle Spacelab – a tiny reusable space station, seventy years old and flown in orbit twice – dug out of storage at KSC, gutted and refurbished. At the front was her small pressurized hab compartment, and there were two pallets at the rear fitted with a bunch of instruments that would be deployed at the neutron star: coronagraphs, spectroheliographs, spectrographic telescopes.

  Brind gave her a powerful processor to enable her to communicate, to some extent, with her Gaijin hosts. It was a bioprocessor, a little cubical unit. The biopro was high technology, and it was the one place they had spent some serious amounts of Paulis's money. And it was human technology, not Gaijin. Madeleine was fascinated. She spent a long time going over the biopro's specs. It was based on ampiphiles, long molecules with watery heads and greasy tails, that swam about in layers called Langmuir-Blodgett films. The active molecules used weak interactions – hydrogen bonding, van der Waals forces and hydrophobic recognition – to assemble themselves into a three-dimensional structure, supramolecular arrays thousands of molecules long.

  Playing with the biopro was better than thinking about what was happening to her, where she was headed.

  She wasn't so happy to find, though, when she first booted up the biopro, that its human interface design metaphor was a two-dimensional virtual representation of Frank Paulis's leathery face.

  "Paulis, you egotistical bastard."

  "Just want to make you feel at home." The image flickered a little, and his skin was blocky – obviously digitally generated. It – he – turned out to be backed up by a complex program, interactive and heuristic. He could respond to what Madeleine said to him, learn, and grow.

  He would be company, of a sort.

  "Are you in contact with the Gaijin?"

  He hesitated. "Yes, in a way. Anyhow I'll keep you informed. In the meantime, the best thing you can do is follow your study program." He started downloading some kind of checklist; it chattered out of an antique teletype.

  "You have got to be kidding."

  "You've a lot of training on the equipment still to complete," virtual Paulis said.

  "Terrific. And should I study neutron stars, bursters, whatever the hell they are?"

  "I'd rather not. I want your raw reactions. If I coach you too much it will narrow your perception. Remember, you'll be observing on behalf of all mankind. We may never get another chance. Now. Maybe we can start with the spectroheliograph deployment procedure..."

  When she flew once more over the glittering east coast of North America, the Gaijin ship was waiting to meet her.

  In Earth orbit, the Gaijin flower-ship didn't look so spectacular. It was laid out something like a squid, a kilometer long and wrought in silver, with a bulky main section as the "head" and a mess of "tentacles" trailing behind.

  Dodecahedral forms, silvered and anonymous, drifted from the cables and clustered around Madeleine's antique craft. Her ship was hauled into the silvery rope stuff. Strands adhered to her hull until her view was crisscrossed with shining threads and she had become part of the structure of the Gaijin ship. She felt a mounting claustrophobia as she was knit into the alien craft. How had Malenfant stood all this?

  Then the flower-ship unfolded its petals. They made up an electromagnetic scoop a thousand kilometers wide. The lower edge of the scoop brushe
d the fringe of Earth's atmosphere, and plasma sparkled.

  Madeleine felt her breath shortening. This is real, she thought. These crazy aliens are really going to do this. And I'm really here.

  She fought panic.

  After a couple of widening loops around the planet Madeleine sailed out of Earth's orbit, and she was projected into strangeness.

  Eating interplanetary hydrogen, it took the flower-ship 198 days to travel out to the burster's Saddle Point, eight hundred AU from the Sun.

  Saddle Point gateways must destroy the objects they transport.

  For eighteen years a signal crossed space, toward a receiver gateway that had been hauled to the system of the burster neutron star. For eighteen years Madeleine did not exist. She was essentially – though not legally – dead.

  Thus, Madeleine Meacher crossed interstellar space.

  There was no sense of waking – is it over? – she was just there, with the Spacelab's systems whirring and clicking around her as usual, like a busy little kitchen. Her heart was pounding, just as it had been a second before – eighteen years before.

  Everything was the same. And yet –

  "Meacher." It was virtual Paulis's voice. "Are you all right?"

  No. She felt extraordinary: renewed, revived. She remembered every instant of it, that burst of exquisite pain, the feeling of reassembling, of sparkling. Was it possible she had somehow retained some consciousness during the transition?

  My God, she thought. This could become addictive.

  A new, complex light was sliding over the back of her hand. She suddenly remembered where she was. She made for her periscope.

  From the dimly lit, barren fringe of the Solar System, she had been projected immediately into a crowded space. She was, in fact, sailing over the surface of a star.

  The photosphere, barely ten thousand kilometers below, was a flat-infinite landscape encrusted by granules each large enough to swallow the Earth, and with the chromosphere – the thousand-kilometer-thick outer atmosphere – a thin haze above it all. Polarizing filters in the viewport periscope dimmed the light to an orange glow. As she watched, one granule exploded, its material bursting across the star's surface; neighboring granules were pushed aside so that a glowing, unstructured scar was left on the photosphere, a scar that was slowly healed by the eruption of new granules.

  From the tangled hull of the flower-ship, an instrument pod of some kind uncoiled on a graceful pseudopod. Gaijin instruments peered into the umbra of a star spot below her.

  "This is an F-type white dwarf star, Meacher," Paulis said. "A close cousin of the Sun, the dominant partner of the binary pair in this system."

  I mightn't have come here, she thought. She felt an odd, retrospective panic. Brind might have picked on somebody else. I might have turned them down. I might have died, without ever imagining this was possible.

  But I just lost eighteen years, she thought. Nearly half my life. Just like that. She tried to imagine what was happening on Earth, right now. Tried and failed.

  Virtual Paulis had issues of his own. "Remarkable," he said.

  "What?"

  Paulis sounded wistful. "Meacher, we didn't want to emphasize the point overmuch before you left, but you're the first human to have passed through a Saddle Point teleport except for Malenfant, and he never reported back. We didn't know what would happen."

  "Maybe I would have arrived here as warm meat. All the lights on but nobody at home. Is that what you expected?"

  "It was a possibility. Philosophically."

  "The Gaijin pass back and forth all the time."

  "Ah, but perhaps they don't have souls, as we do."

  "Souls, Frank?" She was growing suspicious. "It isn't just you in there, is it? I can't imagine Frank Paulis discussing theology."

  "I'm a composite." He grinned. "But I – that is, Paulis – won the fight to be front man."

  "Now that sounds like Frank."

  "For thousands of years we've wondered about the existence of a soul. Does the mind emerge from the body, or does the soul have some separate existence, somehow coupled to the physical body? Consider a thought experiment. If I made an exact duplicate of you, down to the last proton and electron and quantum state, but a couple of meters to the left – would that copy be you? Would it have a mind? Would it be conscious?"

  "But that's pretty much what we've done. Isn't it? But rather than a couple of meters..."

  "Eighteen light-years. Yes. But still, as far as I can tell, you – I mean the inner you – have emerged unscathed. The teleport mechanism is a purely physical device. It has transported the machinery of your body – and yet your soul appears to have arrived intact as well. All this seems to prove that we are after all no more than machines – no more than the sum of our parts. A whole slew of religious beliefs are going to be challenged by this one simple fact."

  She looked inward. "I'm still Madeleine. I'm still conscious." But then, she reflected, I would think so, wouldn't I? Maybe I'm not truly conscious. Maybe I just think I am.

  The ship surged as the flower scoop thumped into pockets of richly ionized gas; the universe was, rudely, intruding into philosophy.

  "I don't understand how come the Saddle Point wasn't out on some remote rim, like in the Solar System."

  "Meacher, the gravitational map of this binary system is complex, a lot more than Sol's. There is a solar focus point close to each of the system's points of gravitational equilibrium. We emerged from L4, the stable Lagrange point that precedes the neutron star in its orbit, and that's where we'll return."

  "There must be other foci, on the rim of the system. Other Saddle Points that would be a lot safer to use."

  "Sure." Virtual Frank grinned. "But the Gaijin aren't human, remember. They seem to have utter confidence in their technology, their shielding, the reliability and control of their ramjets. We have to assume that the Gaijin know what they're doing..."

  Madeleine turned to the consoles. Soon her monitors showed that data was starting to come in on hydrogen alpha emission, ultraviolet line spectra, ultraviolet and X-ray imaging, spectrography of the active regions, zodiacal light, spectroheliographs. Training and practice took over as she went into the routine tasks, and as she worked, some of her awe went away.

  "Meacher. Look ahead."

  She reached for the periscope again. She looked at the approaching horizon – over which dawn was breaking. Dawn, on a star?

  A great pulse of torn gas fled toward her over the horizon. It subsided in great arcs to the star's surface, the battered atoms flailing in the star's magnetic field – and again, a few seconds later – and once again, at deadly regular intervals. And the breaths of plasma grew more violent.

  "My God, Frank."

  "Neutron star rise," Paulis said gently. "Just watch. Watch and learn. And remember, for all of us."

  The neutron star came over the horizon now, stalking disdainfully over its companion's surface, their separation only a third that between the Earth and its Moon. The primary rose in a yearning tide as the neutron star passed, glowing gas forming a column that snaked up, no more than a few hundred meters across at its neck. Great lumps of glowing material tore free and swirled inward to a central point, a tiny object of such unbearable brightness that the periscope covered it with a patch of protective darkness.

  And then the explosion came.

  Blackness.

  Madeleine flinched. "What the hell –"

  The smart periscope had blanked over. The darkness cleared slowly, revealing a cloud of scattered debris through which the neutron star sailed serenely.

  "That's a burster," Paulis said dryly.

  The cloak of matter around the neutron star was building up again.

  Flash.

  The periscope blacked out once more.

  "You'll get used to it," Paulis said. "It comes every fourteen seconds, regular as your heartbeat. An X-ray flash bright enough to be seen from Earth."

  She studied her instruments. The da
ta was flowing in, raw, uninterpreted. "Paulis, I'm no double-dome. Tell me what's happening. The primary's star-stuff –"

  Flash.

  "– fuses when it hits the neutron star, right?"

  "Yes. Hydrogen from the primary fuses to helium as it trickles to the neutron star's surface. In seconds, the helium collects over the crust into a kind of atmosphere, meters thick. But it is a transient atmosphere that abruptly fuses further, into carbon and oxygen and other complex molecules –"

  Flash.

  "– blasting away residual hydrogen as it does so."

  The neutron star roared toward the flower-ship, dragging its great hump of star-stuff beneath it, and –

  Flash.

  – bellowing out its fusion yells. The Gaijin pulled the flower-ship's petals in farther; the mouth of the ram closed to a tight circle.

  A circle that dipped toward the neutron star.

  "What are they doing?"

  "Try not to be afraid, Meacher."

  The flower-ship swooped closer to the primary; red vacuoles fled beneath Madeleine like crowding fish. She sailed beneath the neutron star, skirting the mouth of fire it tore open in the flesh of the primary.

  Her body decided it was time for a fresh bout of space adaptation syndrome.

  The waste management station was another shuttle-era veteran, and it took some operating. When she came out, she opened her medical kit and took a scopalomine/Dexidrene.

  "Meacher, you're entitled to a little nausea. You're earning us a firsthand view of a neutron star. I'm proud of you."

  "Frank, I've been flying for twenty years, fifteen professionally. I've flown to the edge of space. I have never had a ride like this."

  "Of course not. No human has, in all of history."

  "No human except Reid Malenfant."