Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

  When it happened I was just a kid, nineteen years old, on my way to study ecological salvaging in Ottawa, Canada, thanks to a European Union post-dieback Reconstruction scholarship. I think I would have been a poor student, and would pretty soon have been back home in Dhahran, working for my father’s struggling business. We turned abandoned oil wells into carbon sequestration sinks by filling them with algae-rich slurry. It could have been a living for me, but my older brother Muhammad would have got the lion’s share of the family fortune, such as it was. So I was exploring other options.

  But all this is a story never to be told. I never got to Ottawa.

  The shuttle was a Canadaspace suborbit hop from Riyadh to Ottawa. I wasn’t sipping champagne or signing autographs then, I can tell you. Crammed in a cattle-class tube with forty-nine other marginally poor, I was squeezed against the wall by the passenger next to me, a jolly lady from Burundi who spoke pleasantly. ‘You will study? Studying is beautiful. I myself am visiting a great-niece who is studying environmental ethics in Montreal. Do you know Montreal? Montreal is beautiful …’

  I was polite, but I tuned her out, for I was enjoying my first taste of spaceflight.

  From launch the ship sailed over the Gulf where, through the window to my left, I saw vapour feathers gleaming white, artificial cloud created by spray turbines to deflect a little more sunlight from an overheated Earth. The arid plains of the east were chrome-plated with solar-cell farms, and studded with silvered bubbles, lodes of frozen-out carbon dioxide. The Caspian Sea was green-blue, thick with plankton stimulated to grow and draw down carbon from the air. Asia was plunged in night, with little waste light seeping out of the brave new cities of southern Russia and China and India.

  The Pacific was vast and dark. It was a relief to reach morning, and to pass over North America.

  But all too soon we were starting our descent, banking over the desiccated Midwest. Far below us, tracing a line through the air, I saw the white glint of a sprayer plane, topping up faint yellow clouds of sun-shielding sulphur dioxide. And, given the position of the sun, if I had been able to see out to the right, towards space, I might have glimpsed the Stack, a cloud of smart mirrors a hundred thousand kilometres deep, forever poised between Earth and sun to scatter even more of the sunlight. But the right-hand window was eclipsed by the lady from Burundi.

  That was when it happened.

  The hull failure was caused by a combination of metal fatigue and, it is thought, a ding in the shuttle wall from some particle of orbital debris, probably a fleck of two-century-old frozen astronaut urine. Spacecraft are pretty safe. It took a compound failure to break through that shuttle’s multiply-redundant safety features. And if not for that complicated accident I’d have quietly landed at Ottawa with the rest, and subsided back into anonymity, and that would have been that.

  But the astronaut piss hit.

  A blow-out is a bang, an explosive event. At first I thought some terrorist had struck. There are many on Earth who oppose spaceflight. But then I felt the gale, heard the howling wind, and saw the space in front of me filled with bits of paper and plastic cups, all whirling towards my right. I started to feel cold immediately, and a pearly fog formed in the air, misting cabin lights that flashed red with alarm.

  Decompression. I had paid attention to the safety briefings. I opened my mouth wide, and allowed the air to rush out of my lungs, and from the other end let it go with the mother of all trumps.

  I knew I had only seconds of consciousness. Almost calmly, I wondered what I should do.

  But I was trapped in my seat by the lady from Burundi. Dying, she gripped my hand, and I squeezed back. She was trying to hold her breath. I imagined the air trapped in her lungs over-expanding and ripping open lung tissues and capillaries. The pain must have been agonising. And she was looking at her hands in horror, her bare arms. They were swelling. Soon the hand that held mine was huge, twice its size, comical, monstrous. Yet my hand was normal, almost. I thought I could see a kind of mist venting from my pores, and my skin seemed to be hardening, shrinking back. Not swelling at all.

  As her grip relaxed I pulled away.

  In the vacuum silence, the passengers around me were convulsing, or going limp. And then the stewardess, the solitary flight attendant in the cabin, came drifting over our heads, a broken air mask half-fitted over the swollen ruin of her pretty face, a drinks tray floating beside her. There would be no salvation from the crew.

  Still I sat in my seat. I was cold. Frost on my lips. Glaze of ice on eyes. Acute pain in my ears, a dry tearing in my throat. All this in mere seconds since the blow-out.

  Nobody else was moving. Was I the last one conscious?

  I broke out of my shock. I punched my seat clasp and wriggled out from behind the bulk of the lady from Burundi. Now, as I floated over the heads of the bloated, inert passengers, I saw the hole in the opposite wall for the first time. It was a neat rectangle, less than a half-metre wide, a slab of darkness. It was small.

  Smaller, in fact, I saw, than the attendant’s drinks tray.

  I moved fast. I pushed off from the wall and fielded the tray from mid-air. The tray had handles underneath, and a Velcro top to hold the drinks. Dragging it behind me, I squirted my way out of the hole and out into space. Then I turned around and held the tray in the hole, bracing my feet against the soft insulation blanket of the shuttle’s outer hull, pulling at the tray’s handles with my hands to seal the hole. And through a window I saw mist, the reserve air supply at last having a chance to fill up the cabin.

  It was only then that it occurred to me that I’d stranded myself outside the ship.

  Well, there was nothing for it but to hang on as long as I could. I didn’t feel scared, oddly, of death. I just imagined Muhammad’s face when he learned how foolishly I’d met my end. It would have been fitting, given what followed, if at that moment I’d glanced up to see the Stack of Earth-protecting mirrors with my freezing eyes, but I did not. I just laughed, inside, thinking of Muhammad.

  In a few minutes the cockpit crew, who wore their pressure suits all the time, were able to get through to the cabin and start delivering emergency medical aid. About half the passengers survived. Well, half is better than none. It took them fifteen more minutes to mount an operation to retrieve me from my impulsive spacewalk. I was unconscious by then. My flesh wasn’t swollen, but my skin was desiccated – the co-pilot said it was like handling a mummy. I was smiling. My eyes were closed.

  And my heart was beating, after fifteen minutes in space.

  My new life went through a series of phases.

  First I was a patient.

  Once on the ground, along with the other survivors I was whisked into an Ottawan hospital. I’d suffered much less than some of the other passengers. Their tissue swelling went down quickly, but many had ruptured lungs from trying to hold their breath, and air bubbles in the bloodstream, and brain damage from hypoxia, and so forth. With me it was mainly dehydration. After a couple of days of sleep and a drip in my arm, I was walking around. I appeared to suffer no lasting harm save for a mild blotchiness about my rehydrated skin.

  Then I was a media star, the boy who’d saved the spaceship. Even my shutting myself out of the ship was interpreted as bravery rather than crass stupidity. That was terrific, but it lasted mere hours. The world’s gaze moves on quickly. My brother Muhammad said that it would have lasted longer if I’d been better looking. (Later, Professor Stix sent out software agents to minimise search-engine links between my Vacuum Lad incarnation and this first amateur outing. It wasn’t hard, she said, which rather disappointed me.)

  Then I was a hero at home in Dhahran. Even Muhammad was briefly impressed. But as I anticipated he was soon tormenting me for my brilliant plan to seal myself outside the spaceship hull. My mother made a fuss of me, however.

  Then I became a medical curiosity. The doctors in Ottawa were unable to
figure out how come I was still alive. So they called me back for tests, to which my family agreed after negotiation of a fee and some discussion of medical copyright.

  And then I was referred to Professor Stix.

  I was flown to Munich, Germany, at the heart of the European Union.

  A driver met me at the airport and drove me into the city. I had never been to Europe before. I had never seen such wealth, even in Canada, never seen so much greenness, so much water.

  We arrived at an imposing campus-like institute. There I met Professor Stix for the first time. ‘Welcome,’ she said, and shook my hand. ‘I am Professor Maria Stix.’

  ‘Hello, Maria.’

  ‘You may call me Professor Stix.’ She led me to her office.

  She was perhaps forty. Her figure was sturdy yet voluptuous, her face beautiful but severe, her cheekbones set off by the way she wore her brown hair neatly swept back, her blue eyes if anything enhanced by the spectacles she wore. I lusted after her. I was, after all, nineteen years old.

  In her office, which was equipped like a doctor’s surgery, she immediately began a preliminary medical exam. ‘This is the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Zur Forderung der Wissenschaften e. V.,’ she said briskly, as she measured my (rising) blood pressure. We spoke in English; her accent was light, not German. ‘The institute, or its precursor, was founded in 1911 as the official scientific research organisation of Germany, and funded by the national government and later by the European Union to perform research in areas of particular scientific importance and in highly specialised or interdisciplinary fields.’

  I stumbled over the words. ‘Am I an interdisciplinary field?’

  She smiled. ‘Your survival is a puzzle.’

  ‘And who’s paying to solve that puzzle?’ I asked bluntly.

  ‘The European Space Agency. You can see the practicality.’ She sniffed, elegantly. ‘I myself am French. The Germans have something of a history in the field of extreme medicine, dating back to experiments performed on prisoners during the Second World War. You may debate the ethics of using such data.’ She grabbed my testicles. ‘Cough.’

  That was the beginning of an extensive survey of my peculiar condition. I was pulled and prodded, scanned and sampled, at every level of my being from my genetic composition upwards. It was not long before Professor Stix, with my consent, subjected me to further vacuum exposures, in a facility designed to test robotic spacecraft in conditions approaching space, a chamber like a vast steel coffin. My exposure was gradually increased from seconds to minutes, though Professor Stix did not dare take me anywhere close to the fifteen minutes to which I was exposed after the accident on the Canadaspace flight.

  After some weeks of this she gave me an informal précis of her results.

  ‘Your recovery times are actually improving,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Yet “recovery” is probably the wrong word. Your body accepts vacuum as an alien yet survivable medium, rather as my own body can survive underwater without ill effects.’

  I said nothing, imagining the Professor’s elegant figure underwater.

  ‘Your body has a number of mechanisms that enable it to survive. Your lungs and indeed your bowels are unusually efficient at venting air.’

  I grinned. ‘I fart like a hero.’

  ‘Hmm. And with internal gases removed, other conditions such as a rupture of lung tissues will not follow. In vacuum, most of us suffer ebullism, which is a swelling caused by the evaporation of water in the soft tissues. Your tissues, on the other hand, eject water rapidly through the pores, at least as deep as a few millimetres, and the outer skin collapses down to a tough, leathery integument. Like a natural spacesuit, protecting what lies beneath. There is also a unique film over your eyes, an extra layer which similarly toughens to retain your eyes’ moisture, though they are always prone to frosting. Meanwhile the pumping of your heart adjusts, and the balance of venous versus arterial pressure reaches unique levels in your vacuum-exposed body. Oxygen-rich blood actually seems to be trapped in your brain, thus nourishing it beyond normal limits and reducing the risk of hypoxia—’

  ‘How long could I survive in space?’

  She shrugged. ‘We could only discover that by testing you to destruction. I would suspect many hours – even days.’

  The next briefing she gave me, some weeks later, was rather less encouraging.

  In her office once more, she opened a drawer in her desk and produced a jar that she set on the table. It contained a kind of grub, dark brown, only a millimetre or two long.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘A tardigrade. Known in some countries as a water bear. Very common.’

  ‘Ugly little thing.’

  ‘Tardigrades can survive desiccation. Some have been known to last a decade without moisture. There are other creatures that can survive extreme dryness – rotifers, nematodes, brine shrimp. And this makes them capable of surviving in space, for as long as several days in some flight experiments.’

  ‘Like me.’

  ‘Yes. You also, it appears, have the capability to recover from moderate doses of radiation better than the average human. You have a mechanism that I suspect is rather like that of the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, with a capability of repairing cellular damage, even recovery of damaged DNA strands. It has always been an open question why such creatures should have facilities to enable them to survive in deep space for extended periods. Perhaps this is a relic of our true origins, if we came here from another planet, wafted as spores across space. These traits may be ancestral.’

  This sounded fanciful to me. I asked, indicating the tardigrade, ‘What has this fellow to do with me?’

  She said she believed she had discovered the cause of my peculiar abilities. There were traces of viral activity in my DNA, which had modified the genetic information there, leaving sequences that had some correlation with the genes of Deinococcus and the tardigrades and so forth. ‘This appears to be the result of an infection when you were very small. There is no trace of similar modifications in your parents.’

  ‘Something in the air.’

  ‘Possibly something artificial,’ she said. ‘I am speculating. Why would anybody create such an infection? And how did it get into your bloodstream? Just chance, perhaps.’

  I shrugged. ‘What next for me?’

  This was the bad news. The European Space Agency had hoped to use lessons from my anatomy as part of a conditioning regime for their own astronauts. But because my condition was genetic, and the result of agents Professor Stix had yet to identify, I was of no use.

  I was disappointed. ‘Perhaps I could become an astronaut.’

  She smiled, not unkindly.

  ‘Then is it over?’ I was already forgotten as a space hero. Was I now to be discarded even as a medical specimen? And, worse, was the flow of money from the Planck Institute to my family about to be cut off? Was it back to the slurry wells for me?

  Professor Stix seemed on the point of saying ‘yes’. But then she pouted, quite prettily. ‘Not necessarily. Let me give it some thought. In the meantime I will book you more time in the vacuum chamber.’

  Once more I submitted to my ordeal in that metal coffin.

  But I noticed a change in the testing regime. The intervals I was exposed to the vacuum were gradually increased. And, rather than lie inert on some bed with wires protruding from my body, now I was asked to perform various physical tasks – to walk around, to move weights, to complete small jobs of more or less complexity.

  It was obvious to me, even before Professor Stix admitted it, that this was no longer a medical study. I was being trained.

  After a couple more weeks, having thought it through, Professor Stix put her proposal to me.

  ‘It seems a shame to waste your unique abilities. You have already demonstrated your value in an em
ergency situation. You have no place in ESA’s exploration programme, but there are many commercial enterprises operating in near-Earth space – suborbital and orbital flights, hotels, factories, research establishments. At any given moment many hundreds of people are in orbit – and therefore subject to a risk of blow-out.’

  ‘What are you suggesting, Professor?’

  ‘That we hire you out, to the commercial organisations working in Earth orbit. You would serve as a fail-safe in case of the final catastrophe. Of course you could only be in one place at a time, on one flight at a time. But having you on hand, visibly present and ready for disaster, would be a profound psychological comfort for a lay passenger – much more so than theoretical assurances about fault-analysis trees and failure modes. You would be a luxury item, you see, in demand by high-paying customers. People fear decompression, however irrationally; people will pay for such comfort. It is very unlikely that you will ever have to face a real emergency again. I’ve already discussed this in principle with various insurance companies.’

  I smiled. ‘I like the idea. Tusun ibn Thunayan, life saver!’

  ‘Oh, that’s rather bland.’ She glanced over my body, evidently sizing me up. ‘We should think about branding. A costume of some kind. You would be your own walking advertisement.’

  ‘A mask! I could wear a mask.’

  She nodded slowly. ‘Anonymity. Yes, why not? It might protect your family from ruthless competitors who might seek, in vain, to find another like you among them. You would need a name.’

  ‘A name?’

  ‘Such as “Rescue Man”.’

  ‘That sounds rather unspecific,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘“Blow-Out Boy!”’

  ‘Ugh! That sounds pornographic … “Vacuum Lad”,’ she said thoughtfully.

  I think we both knew immediately that was the one. ‘I like it! You know, my older brother Muhammad has many advantages over me, but not a secret identity.’