Manifold: Space

by Stephen Baxter

  The wave of destruction.

  Chapter 24

  Kintu's Children

  Two hundred kilometers above the glowing Earth, a Gaijin flower-ship folded its electromagnetic wings. Drone robots pulled a scuffed hab module out of the ship's stringy structure and launched it on a slow, precise trajectory toward the Tree.

  Malenfant, inside the module, watched the Tree approach.

  The bulk of the Tree, orbiting the Earth, was a glowing green ball of branches and leaves, photosynthesizing busily. It trailed a trunk, hollowed out and sealed with resin, that housed most of the Tree's human population. Long roots trailed in the upper atmosphere: There were crude scoops to draw up raw material for continued growth, and cables of what Malenfant eventually learned was superconductor, generating power by being dragged through Earth's magnetosphere.

  The Tree was a living thing twenty kilometers long, rooted in air, looping around Earth in its inclined circular orbit, maintaining its altitude with puffs of waste gas.

  It was, Malenfant thought, ridiculous. He turned away, incurious.

  He had been away from Earth for twelve hundred years, and had returned to the impossible date of A.D. 3265.

  Malenfant was exhausted. Physically, he was, after all, more than a hundred years old. And because of the depletion of the Saddle Point links between Zero-zero-zero-zero and Earth, he had been forced to take a roundabout route on the way back here.

  All he really wanted, if he was truthful, was to get away from strangeness: just settle down in his 1960s ranch house at Clear Lake, Houston, and pop a few beers, eat potato chips, and watch Twilight Zone reruns. But here, looking out at all this orbiting foliage, he knew that wasn't possible, that it never would be. It was just as Dorothy Chaum had tried to counsel him, before they said their good-byes back on the Cannonball. It was Earth down there, but it wasn't his Earth. Malenfant was going to have to live with strangers, and strangeness, for whatever was left of his long and unlikely life.

  At least the ice has gone, though, he thought.

  His battered capsule slid to rest, lodging in branches, and Malenfant was decanted.

  There was nobody to greet him. He found an empty room, with a window. There were leaves, growing around his window. On the outside.

  Ridiculous. He fell asleep.

  When Malenfant woke, he was in some kind of hospital gown.

  He felt different. Comfortable, clean. He wasn't hungry or thirsty. He didn't even need a leak.

  He lifted up his hand. The skin was comparatively smooth, the liver spots faded. When he flexed his fingers, the joints worked without a twinge.

  Somebody had been here, done something to him. I didn't want this, he thought. I didn't ask for it. He cradled his resentment.

  He propped himself up before his window and looked out at Earth.

  He could see its curve, a blue-and-white arc against black space. He made out a slice of pale blue seascape, with an island an irregular patch of gray and brown in the middle of it, and clouds scattered over the top, lightly, like icing sugar. He was so close to the skin of the planet that if he sat back the world filled his window, scrolling steadily past.

  Earth was bright: brighter than he remembered. Malenfant used to be a shuttle pilot; he knew Earth from orbit – how it used to be anyhow. Now he was amazed by the clarity of the atmosphere, even over the heart of continents. He didn't know if Earth itself had changed, or his memories of it. After all, his eyes were an old man's now: rheumy, filled with nostalgia.

  One thing for sure, though. Earth looked empty.

  When he passed over oceans he looked for ship wakes, feathering out like brush strokes. He couldn't see any. In the lower latitudes he could make out towns; a gray, angular patchwork; a tracery of roads. But no smog. No industries, then.

  And in the higher latitudes, toward the poles, he could see no sign of human habitation at all. The land looked raw, fresh, scraped clean, the granite flanks of exposed mountains shining like burnished metal, and the plains littered with boulders, like toys dropped by a child. His geography had always been lousy – and now it was a thousand years out of date – but it seemed to him the coastlines had changed shape.

  He wondered who, or what, had cleaned up the glaciation. Anyhow, it might have been A.D. 1000 down there, not 3265.

  Two people came drifting into his room. Naked, all but identical, they were women, but so slim they were almost sexless. They had hair that floated around them, like Jane Fonda in Barbarella.

  They were joined at the hip, like Siamese twins, by a tube of pink flesh.

  They hadn't knocked, and he scowled at them. "Who are you?"

  They jabbered at him in a variety of languages, some of which he recognized, some not. Their arms and shoulders were big and well developed, like tennis players', but their legs were wisps they kept tucked up beneath them: microgravity adaptations. Their hair was blond, but their eyes were almond shaped, with folds of skin near the nose, like the Chinese.

  Finally they settled on heavily accented English.

  "You must forgive stupidity." "We accommodate returning travelers –" "– from many time periods, spread across a millennium –" "– dating from Reid Malenfant himself."

  When they talked they swapped their speech between one and the other, like throwing a ball.

  He said, "In fact, I am Reid Malenfant."

  They looked at him, and then their two heads swiveled so that blank almond eyes stared into each other, their hair mingling. For these two, he thought, every day is a bad hair day.

  "You must understand the treatment you have been given," one said.

  "I didn't want treatment," he groused. "I didn't sign any consent forms."

  "But your aging was –" "– advanced." "We have no cure, of course." "But we can address the symptoms –" "Brittle bones, loss of immunity, nervous degeneration." "In your case accelerated by –" "– exposure to microgravity." "We reversed free-radical damage with antioxidant vitamins." "We snipped out senescent cell clusters from your epidermis and dermis." "We reversed the intrusion of alien qualia into your sensorium, a side-effect of repeated Saddle Point transits." "We removed various dormant infectious agents that you might return to Earth." "We applied telomerase therapy to –"

  "Enough. I believe you. I bet I don't look a day over seventy."

  "It was routine," a Bad Hair Day twin said. They fell silent. "Are you truly Reid Malenfant?" one asked then.

  "Yes."

  The twins gave him food and drink. He didn't recognize any of the liquids they offered him, hot or cold; they were mostly like peculiar teas, of fruit or leaves. He settled on water, which was clean and cold and pure. The food was bland and amorphous, like baby food. The Bad Hair Day twins told him it was all processed algae, spiced with a little vacuum greenery from the Tree itself.

  The twins pulled him gracefully through microgravity, along tunnels like wood-lined veins that twisted and turned, lit only by some kind of luminescence in the wood. It was like a fantasy spaceship rendered in carpentry, he thought.

  There were a few dozen colonists here, living in bubbles of air inside the bulk of the Tree. They were all microgravity-adapted, as far as he could see, some of them even more evolved than the twins. There was one guy with a huge dome of a head over a shriveled-up body, sticks of limbs, a penis like a walnut, no pubic hair. To Malenfant he looked like a real science fiction type of creation, like the boss alien in Invaders from Mars.

  The people, however strange, looked young and healthy to Malenfant. Their skin was smooth, unwrinkled, unmarked save by tattoos; his own raisinlike face, the lines baked into it by years of exposure to Earth's weather and ultraviolet light and heavy gravity, was a curiosity here, a badge of exotica.

  They all had almond eyes, folds of yellow skin.

  As far as Malenfant could make out this was a kind of reverse colony from the near-Earth asteroids, which had been settled by descendants of the Chinese. Out there, it seemed, there were great bubble habit
ats where everyone had lived in zero gravity for centuries.

  Sometimes he thought he could hear a low humming, sniff a little ozone, feel hair-prickling static, as if he was surrounded by immense electrical or magnetic fields that tweaked at his body. Maybe it was so. Electromagnetic fields could be used to stimulate and stress muscles and bones, and even to counter bone wastage; NASA had experimented with such technologies. Maybe the Tree swaddled its human cargo in electricity, fixing their bones and muscles and flesh.

  But maybe there was no need for such clunky gadgetry, a thousand years downstream. After all the Tree provided a pretty healthy environment, of clean air, pure water, toxin-free foods: no pollutants or poisons or pathogens here. And even natural hazards like Earth's naturally occurring radioactivity in soil and stone could be designed out. Maybe if you gave people a good enough place to live, this was how they turned out, with health and longevity.

  And as for adaptation to microgravity, maybe that came naturally too. After all, he recalled, the dolphins and other aquatic mammals had had no need of centrifuges or electro stimulation to maintain their muscles and bones in the no-gravity environment they inhabited. Maybe these space-dwelling humans had more in common with the dolphins than the bony dirt-treaders of his own kind.

  The Tree itself had been gen-enged from giant ancestors on the Moon. Humans used the Tree for a variety of purposes: port, observation platform, resort. But the Tree's own purpose was simply to grow and survive, and there seemed no obstacle to its doing so until the Sun itself flickered and died.

  There was more than one Tree.

  In 3265, Earth was encased in a spreading web of vegetation, space-going Trees and spidery airborne tendrils, reaching down from space to the surface. And, slowly, systems were evolving the other way. One day there might be some kind of unlikely biological ladder reaching from Earth to space. It was a strategy to ensure long-term access from space via stable biological means. Nobody could tell Malenfant whose strategy this was, however.

  The colonists in this Tree seemed to care for returning travelers like him with a breed of absent-minded charity. Beyond that, the twins' motive in speaking to him seemed to be a vague curiosity – maybe even just politeness.

  The Bad Hair Day twins' variant of English contained a fraction of words, a fifth or a quarter, that were unrecognizable to Malenfant. Linguistic drift, he figured. It had, after all, been a thousand years; he was Chaucer meeting Neil Armstrong.

  "Where did you travel?" they asked.

  "I started at Alpha Centauri. After that I couldn't always tell. I kind of bounced around."

  "What did you find?"

  He thought about that. "I don't know. I couldn't understand much."

  It was true. But now – just as Madeleine Meacher and Dorothy Chaum had sought him out, saved his life on that remote Cannonball world without asking his by-your-leave – so the Bad Hair Day twins had thrust unwelcome youth on him. He felt curious again. Dissatisfied. Damn it, he'd gotten used to being old. It had been comfortable.

  There were no other travelers here.

  He soon got bored with the Tree, the incomprehensible artifacts and activities it contained. Lonely, disoriented, he tried to engage the Bad Hair Day twins, his enigmatic nurses. "You know, I remember how Earth looked when I first went up in Columbia, back in '93 – 1993, that is. In those days we had to ride these big solid rocket boosters up to orbit, you know, and then, and then..."

  The twins would listen politely for a while. But then they would lock on each other, mouths pressed into an airtight seal, small hands sliding over bare flesh, their hair drifting in clouds around them, that bridge of skin between them folded and compressed, and Malenfant was just a sad old fart boring them with war stories.

  If he was going back to Earth, where was he supposed to land?

  He asked the Bad Hair Day twins for encyclopedias, history books. The twins all but laughed at him. The people of A.D. 3265, it seemed, had forgotten history. The Bad Hair Day twins seemed to know little beyond their specialty, which was a limited – if very advanced – medicine. It was... disappointing. On the other hand, how much knowledge or interest had he ever had in the year A.D. 1000?

  He got frustrated. He railed at the twins. They just stared back at him.

  He would have to find out for himself.

  He still had the softscreenlike sensor pack Sally Brind had given him centuries ago, when he set off for the Saddle Point to the Alpha Centauri system. It would work as a multispectral sensor. He could configure it to overlay the images of Earth with representations in infrared, ultraviolet, radar imaging, whatever he wanted; he could select for the signatures of rock, soil, vegetation, water, and the products of industrialization like heavy metals, pollutants.

  Alone, he found a window and studied the planet.

  Earth was indeed depopulated.

  There were humans down there, but no communities bigger than a few tens of thousands. There were no industrial products, save for a thin smear of relics from the past, clustered around the old cities and strung out along the disused roads. He couldn't even see signs of large-scale agriculture.

  Malenfant studied what was left of the cities of his day, those that had somehow survived the ice. New York, for example.

  In A.D. 3265, New York was green. It was a woodland of birch and oak, pushing out of a layer of elder thicket. He could still make out the shapes of roads, city blocks, and parking lots, but they were green rectangles covered with mosses, lichens, and tough, destructive plants like buddleia. On Manhattan, some of the bigger concrete buildings still stood, like white bones poking above the trees, but they were bereft of windows, their walls stained by fires. Others had subsided, reduced to oddly shaped hummocks beneath the greenery. The bridges had collapsed, leaving shallow weirs along the river. He could see foxes, bats, wolves, deer, feral pigs. And there were more exotic creatures, maybe descended from zoo stock.

  Some of the roads looked in good condition, oddly. Maybe the smart-concrete that was being introduced just before his departure from Earth had kept working. But the big multilane freeway that ran up out of Manhattan looked a little crazy to Malenfant, a wild scribble over grassed-over concrete. Maybe it wasn't just repairing itself but actually growing, crawling like a huge worm across the abandoned suburbs, a semisentient highway over which no car had traveled for centuries.

  Once Malenfant saw what looked like a hunting party, working its way along the coast of the widened Hudson, stalking a thing like an antelope. The people were tall, naked, golden haired. One of the hunters looked up to the sky, as if directly at Malenfant. It was a woman, her blue eyes empty. She had a neck like a shot-putter. Her face was, he thought, somehow not even human.

  When Malenfant had left Earth, a thousand years ago, he had left behind no direct descendants. His wife, Emma, had died before they had had a chance to have children together. But he'd had relatives: a nephew, two nieces.

  Now there was hardly anybody left on Earth. Malenfant wondered if anybody down there still bore a trace of his genes. And if so, what they had become.

  For sentimental reasons he looked for the Statue of Liberty. Maybe it was washed up on the beach, like in Planet of the Apes. There was no sign of the old lady.

  But he did find a different monument: an artifact kilometers across, a monstrous ring, slap in the middle of downtown Manhattan. It looked like a particle accelerator. Maybe it had something to do with the city's battle against the ice. Whatever, it didn't look human. It was out of scale.

  There was other evidence of high technology scattered around the planet, but it didn't seem to have much to do with humans either. For example, when the Tree drifted over the Pyrenees, the mountains on the crease of land between France and Spain, he could see a threading of light – perfect straight lines of ruby light – joining the peaks like a spiderweb. His screen told him this was coherent light: lased. There were similar systems in other mountainous regions, scattered around the planet. The laser arrays wo
rked continuously. Maybe they were adjusting the atmosphere somehow: burning out CFCs, for instance.

  And he observed flashes from sites around the equator, on Earth's water hemisphere. A few minutes after each flash the air would get a little mistier. He estimated they must be coming every minute or so, on a global scale. He remembered twenty-first century schemes to increase Earth's albedo – to increase the percentage of sunlight reflected back into space – by firing submicrometer dust up into the stratosphere: Naval guns could have done the job. The point was to reduce global warming. But the dust would settle out: You would have needed to fire a shot every few seconds, maintained for decades, even centuries. Back then the idea was ridiculed. But such dust injections would account for the increase in global brightness he thought he'd observed.

  This was planetary engineering. All he could see from here were the gross physical schemes. Maybe down on the planet there was more: nanotechnological adjustments, for instance.

  Somebody was fixing the Earth. It didn't look to Malenfant like it was anybody human. It would, after all, take centuries, maybe millennia. No human civilization could handle projects of that duration, or ever would be able to. So, give the job to somebody else.

  Not every change was constructive.

  In southern Africa there was a dramatic new crater. It looked like a scar in the greenery of the planet. He didn't know if it was some kind of meteorite scar or an open-cast mine kilometers wide. Machines crawled over the walls and pit of the crater, visibly chewing up shattered rock, extracting piles of minerals, metals. From space, the machines looked like spiders: dodecahedral bodies maybe fifty meters wide, with eight or ten articulated limbs, working steadily at this open wound in the skin of Earth.

  Malenfant had seen such machines before. They were Gaijin factory drones, designed to chew up ice and rock. But now they weren't off in the asteroid belt or stuck out on the cold rim of the Solar System billions of kilometers away. The Gaijin were here, on the surface of Earth itself. He wondered what they were doing.