Manifold: Space

by Stephen Baxter

  For he had no head.

  A sense of body, briefly. Spread-eagled against the sail's gauzy netting. Clinging by fingers and toes, monkey digits, here at the center of the Galaxy.

  A metaphor, of course, an illusion to comfort his poor human mind. What was he truly? A partial personality, downloaded into a clumsy robot, clinging to this monstrous structure, bathed by the lethal radiation of a neutron star?

  And even now the robot he rode was working, knitting away at the net. This body was working, without having to be told, directed, by me, or anybody else.

  But that's the way it is, Malenfant. Self is an illusion, remember. You've always been a passenger, riding inside that bony cage of a skull of yours. It's just that now it's a little more... explicit.

  Welcome to reality.

  But if I'm a robot, why the pain?

  He looked for Cassiopeia, for any of the Gaijin, reassuring dodecahedral bulks. He saw none, though the unwelcome enhancements of his vision let him zoom and peer through the spaces all around him.

  But when he thought of Cassiopeia, anger flooded him. Why?

  It had been just minutes since she had embraced him on that grassy simulated plain... Hadn't it?

  How do you know, Malenfant? How do you know you haven't been frozen in some deep data store for ten thousand years?

  And how do you know this isn't the first time you surfaced like this?

  How could he know? If his identity assembled, disintegrated again, what trace would it leave on his memory? What was his memory? What if he was simply restarted each time, wiped clean like a reinitialized computer? How would he know?

  In renewed terror, lost in space and time – in helpless, desolating loneliness – he tried again to scream. But he could not, of course.

  The sail shuddered. Great ripples of disturbance, thousands of kilometers long, wafted through the net. As the waves passed, he saw others shaken loose, equipment hurled free, damaged.

  Without his conscious control, he was aware how his body – or bodies? How do you know you're even in one place, Malenfant? – grasped tighter to the fine structure.

  He felt a clustering of awareness around him. Other workers here, perhaps. Other parts of himself.

  Frightened.

  Have faith, he told his companions, his other parts. Or his disciples.

  But that was the problem. They didn't have faith. Faith was a dangerous idea. The only thing less dangerous, in fact, was the universe itself, this terrible rebooting accident of celestial mechanics.

  All this had happened before: the wars, the destruction, the abandonment of work, the resumption, the patient repairs.

  There was a species he thought of as the Fire-eaters. They were related to the Crackers, who had tried to disrupt Earth's Sun. But these more ambitious cousins wanted to steal part of the sail and wrap up a hypernova, one of the largest exploding stars in the Galaxy. As best he understood it they would try to capture a fraction of that astonishing energy in order to hurl themselves out of the Galaxy within an ace of light speed. And that way, their subjective experience stretched to near immobility by time dilation, they would outlive this reboot, and the one after it, and the one after that. He remembered a diversion of resources, a great war, huge damage to the sail, before the Fire-eaters were driven off.

  ...He remembered.

  Yes. He had surfaced, like this, become Malenfant before, cowering under a sky full of silent, deadly, warring ETs, in a corner of the sail where the threads buckled and broke.

  Surfaced more than once.

  Many times.

  How long have I been here? And between these intervals of half-remembered awareness, how long have I toiled here, awake but unaware?

  Ah, yes, but take a look at where you are, Malenfant.

  He looked up from the rippling sail, away from the lethal neutron star, and into the complex sky.

  He was at the heart of the Galaxy, within the great central cluster of stars, no more than a couple of dozen light-years from the very center. At that center there was a cavity some twenty light-years wide, encased by a great shell of crowded, disrupted stars; the neutron star binary huddled at the inner boundary of this shell.

  The emptiness of the "cavity" was only relative. There was a great double-spiral architecture of stars, like a miniature copy of the Galaxy, trapped here at its heart. The spiraling stars were dragged into their tight orbits around the object at the Galaxy's gravitational core itself: a black hole with a broad, glowing, spitting accretion disc, a hole itself with the mass of some three million Suns. It was the violent winds from the vast accretion disc that had created this relative hollowness.

  But still the cavity was crammed with gas and dust, itsparticles ionized and driven to high speeds by the ferocious gravitational and magnetic forces working here, so that streamers of glowing gas crisscrossed the cavity in a fine tracery. Stars had been born here, notably a cluster of blue-hot young stars just a fraction away from the black hole itself. And here and there rogue stars fell through the cavity – and they dragged streaming trails behind them, glowing brilliantly, like comets a hundred light-years long.

  Stars like comets.

  He exulted. I, Reid Malenfant, got to see this, the heart of the Galaxy itself, by God! He wished Cassiopeia were here, his companion during those endless Saddle Point jaunts to one star after another...

  But again, at the thought of Cassiopeia, his anger flared.

  And now, his reassembled mind clearer, he remembered why.

  He had found out after submitting to Cassiopeia's cold, agonizing embrace, after arriving here, an unknown time later.

  He had learned that even if all went well here – if the wars ceased, if the supplies of raw materials didn't fail, even if the neutron-star sail, this marvelous artifact, was completed and worked as advertised – even then, it wouldn't do him a blind bit of good.

  Because it would already be too late. For him. And his people.

  This binary, yes: this implosion was far enough in the future to affect, with this low-tech solution, robots and nets and solar-wind rockets. But this wasn't the next scheduled to blow up.

  There was another coalescing neutron-star binary, buried still deeper in the Galaxy's diseased heart, another reboot. And it was already too late to stop that one, too late to avert the coming catastrophe.

  This unlikely sail would work. But it was too long-term. The project would avert the next reboot but one.

  We were always doomed. All we could do was make it better for the next cycle, advance the project far enough that they – the next to evolve from the pond scum of the Galaxy, the next to stumble on the half-finished sail after another few tens of millions of years – they would understand a little better than we had, would know what to do, how to finish it.

  The first designers of the sail, sometime before the last reboot, had known it. Cassiopeia had known it.

  She hadn't thought to tell him, though, before he... died. Maybe she didn't think it was significant. After all a sacrifice was a sacrifice. Maybe he simply hadn't understood; maybe she'd expected him to be able to think it through himself. After all, she could see the mathematics.

  He remembered how it felt, to find out. It had been the final betrayal.

  And hence, the anger.

  But it didn't matter. In fact, it made his work, the role here, still more important.

  Humans, Gaijin, Chaera, all of the current "generation" of galactic sentients – all of those who contributed to the sail's slow building – they were all doomed, no matter what happened here.

  But this was all they could do: to make things better for the next time.

  And, he told himself, thinking of Madeleine, the alternative to all this pain – a lifeless universe doomed to nothing but meaningless expansion – would be much worse.

  Have courage, he told himself/themselves. We have a noble goal. Our death doesn't matter. The future, the children... Even if they are not our children, they are what matters. We will
prevail.

  He must continue. He must reach out to others, working here. Infect them.

  Convert them.

  This wasn't a project, after all. It was a crusade.

  The net shuddered again. That damn war.

  He was dissolving, sinking back. He didn't fight it. It was good.

  Malenfant sighed, metaphorically. You don't have to be crazy to work here but it helps.

  Blue light that gathered around him. Pain that intensified.

  Cassiopeia, he flared. Why did you betray me?

  No center.

  The universe, of tasks, of things.

  The anchoring. The self-maintenance. The work.

  Always the work.

  Epilogue

  The Gaijin colony lay quietly beneath its translucent bubble, the beveled edges of the buildings making the little city look like a scattering of half-melted toys. Beyond the bubble an airless, desolate plain stretched to a clean horizon. Shadows raked the plain.

  Looking up, she traced the quasar's fantastic geometry.

  The powerhouse at the quasar's heart, barely two hundred light-years away, was a pinpoint of unnatural brightness. Twin sprays of electron flux tore from the poles of the powerhouse, straining to zenith and nadir. And swaddling the waist of the quasar was a torus of glowing rubble. This colony world orbited almost within the torus, so that the debris looked like a pair of celestial arms reaching around the powerhouse to touch the fake clouds nestling under the bubble.

  The sky was full of dodecahedral frameworks, triangular faces glimmering, drifting like angular soap bubbles.

  It was glorious, astonishing.

  She had traveled a billion light-years from Earth, across the curve of the universe. She wasn't aware of it. She had been in store, or bouncing from gateway to gateway without downloading, since leaving Malenfant.

  I am a billion years from home, she thought. Everything I knew is buried under deep layers of past. Humans must have fled Earth, or become extinct. Earth's biosphere itself could not survive so long as this. Perhaps I am the last human.

  Perhaps I am, by now, a construct of alien qualia; perhaps I'm not even human anymore myself.

  Well, I don't have to face that. Not yet.

  She looked to the zenith. A scattering of galaxies glimmered through her bubble. The galaxies glowed green, every one of them.

  Life everywhere. Triumphant. Awe, wonder, love surged in her.

  It was proof, of course. Just waking up again, emerging from the Saddle Point network, had been proof. Humans and their allies – or rivals or successors – had beaten the countdown clock, had burst out of the limits of the Galaxy and gone on, spreading across the universe, building their Saddle Point links.

  And if they had gotten as far as this, they must be everywhere. Hell of a thought.

  But –

  Where to now, Madeleine?

  She wondered if Malenfant could have survived, in one form or another, even over such an immense span of space and time. She had, after all. She smiled, thinking of Malenfant, the original gray cyborg.

  The quasar dipped to the horizon now; optical filters in the bubble around her softened its shape, turning it red. The electron flux was splayed across the sky like brush marks on velvet. The last traces of quasar light touched the sky like cool smoke.

  It was so beautiful it hurt.

  She turned away, and went in search of Reid Malenfant.

  Afterword

  A good recent survey of the state of our thinking on extraterrestrial life is Paul Davies's Are We Alone? (Penguin Books, 1995). The passages set on the Moon are based in part on conversations with former astronaut Charles M. Duke, who in 1972 walked on the Moon as lunar module pilot of Apollo 16. There really are naturally occurring nuclear reactors; a reference is "Fossil Nuclear Reactors" by Michel Maurette, Annual Review of Nuclear Science, v. 26, pp. 319 – 350 (1976). I published a technical article on the feasibility of the Moon's deep ocean in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (v. 51, pp. 75 – 80, 1998).

  Any errors, omissions, or misinterpretations are of course my responsibility.

  Stephen Baxter

  Great Missenden

  February 2000

  Copyright © 2001 by Stephen Baxter

  ISBN: 0-345-43078-6