Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Hmm. We will have to consider how to launch you as a commercial proposition. Once the costume is ready, other promotional material, a sound financial base in place, we should mount a demonstration to show your capabilities.’

  ‘“We”?’

  She smiled, as sweetly as she ever had at me. ‘Do you have an agent?’

  The public launch of Vacuum Lad went spectacularly well.

  Professor Stix and I ran up a certain amount of debt, for the costume and various marketing materials, and most significantly for the hire of an orbital shuttle from a Britain-based spaceline. Our flight lasted four full orbits, for two of which, in the world’s electronic gaze, I cavorted in space for up to ten minutes at a time. I performed simple tasks, demonstrated my lack of any supporting equipment, and, glamorous in my costume of silver and black, I shot through space powered by a small jetpack (with, at Professor Stix’s insistence, the backup of an invisible monomolecular thread that tethered me to the shuttle).

  The orders for my services came pouring in, through our chosen partners in the insurance industry. So did demands for media interviews, carefully filtered by Professor Stix. My family and countrymen rejoiced in my exploits. And then came the usual fringe contacts, from people who wanted to marry me or compete with me or assassinate me. (And that was the first I heard of the Earth First League, who opposed all human presence in space, and, therefore, me.)

  Our debts were soon cleared, and we were in business.

  Then followed months of a strangely idle, yet strangely exciting life. I was assigned to flights with various spacelines and stays at various orbital hotels, each of whom devised simple but effective failure-mode procedures for me to carry out in the event that my peculiar services should be required. In the uneventful hours I spent in flight, or the weeks I spent in the hotels, I was a celebrity, unmistakable in my dramatic costume. In return for my enigmatic company I was bought fine meals and wines, laden with gifts I shipped back to Professor Stix – and received offers of companionship, not all of which I turned down. Well, would you? I liked to boast about it to Muhammad. I did however often dream of the lovely Professor Stix rather than focus on whatever vacuously pretty rich girl was in my arms at the time. And I always kept my mask on.

  The Professor had assured me that I would very likely never have to deal with a genuine disaster again. Yet she was wrong.

  During my stay, the United Nations Hub was still little more than a torus, a tube of corridors and rooms, restaurants and fitness rooms, set slowly spinning about its midpoint to provide a small measure of apparent gravity. Its most spectacular features were big picture windows that looked down on the Earth far below, and on the ongoing construction all around the Hub, and a wheeling panorama of stars.

  This was just the start. The Hub was set high above the world in a stationary orbit, turning with the Earth itself. One day it would be linked to the planet by a thread, a space elevator, the fulfilment of an old dream, at which time it would blossom into the most spectacular resort in cislunar space, and a key node for transportation beyond Earth orbit.

  And that was why it was attacked by the Earth First League.

  This North American terrorist cell publicly expressed fears about the elevator’s economic impact on more traditional space industries. That was mere political cover. In fact it opposed all human presence in space for ideological reasons, as an expression of the technocratic thinking that, they say, led to the dieback and other horrors of recent centuries. So they tried to destroy the Hub – and they timed their attack for my presence aboard, so they could destroy me, an ultimate symbol of the human future in space. It was in this incident, you see, that I learned I had a sworn enemy.

  They targeted the windows, the beautiful picture windows. They were of a toughened, thick but very clear plastic, set in robust frames. The designers had believed that the Hub itself would have to fall apart before the windows failed. But the saboteurs had infiltrated the construction operation and had embedded strips of explosive in the very frames of several windows.

  In a blow-out you have to act fast. In vacuum, most people lose consciousness in ten seconds or so, and will be dead in a minute and a half, two minutes. I wore my jetpack as a matter of course, so it was strapped to my back when the explosion came. I hurled myself through a gaping, ripped-open window frame and for those two minutes retrieved the wriggling, convulsing bodies that had been hurled out into space, one after the other, and zipped them up in emergency pressurisation bags. I saved a dozen.

  Then I spent the next several minutes retrieving the inert bodies of those who had been thrown too far for me to catch in time, a dozen or so more.

  The incident cemented my fame. Demands for my services exploded, and my fees sky-rocketed. My life, already good, became better. I admit I felt as if I deserved this good fortune, this attention. Perhaps all nineteen-year-olds feel they are special.

  Yet guilt nagged at me, for the dozen I had not saved. What’s the point of a hero who can’t rescue everybody?

  And, in the sometimes lonely hours I spent in my luxury zero-gravity suites, waiting for emergencies that never came, I sometimes wondered if my abilities had been meant for more than this. Even Professor Stix, my one full confidante, could not answer such questions.

  Oddly, it never occurred to me to wonder if I was unique. Not until I discovered that I wasn’t.

  The contact came at Mumbai spaceport, as I waited to be shipped to an upper-crust L5 orbital hotel for a three-month residency.

  And there, in the first-class lounge, I was approached.

  ‘Excuse me. Is this seat free?’ He sat down beside me before I had a chance to reply.

  The man was older than me, or Professor Stix, perhaps fifty. He was soberly dressed, if a little plainly for the exotic setting of that lounge; he did not look like a first-class passenger. Yet he carried a ticket folder. For my part I didn’t recognise him. At first I thought he was a fan, and fretted vaguely that he might be some threat.

  But from the moment I looked closely at him I knew why he had approached me. For, under a dark Indian complexion, I could see how his skin was mottled. Vacuum damage, you see.

  He smiled. ‘You’ve been enjoying yourself,’ he said, in clear but accented English. ‘But most of us prefer to keep a low profile.’

  My heart beat faster. ‘You are like me.’

  ‘Yes. Once I thought I was unique, too. Then another approached me, as I approach you now. It is not yet time for my ascension, of course. Or yours.’

  ‘Ascension? I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘All your questions will be answered. Even those,’ he said a bit sharply, ‘you have apparently not had the wit to ask. Don’t take your Sky Nigeria flight up to the Hilton.’ He handed me the ticket he was holding. ‘Take this one.’

  I glanced at it. ‘Peru Space.’ I wasn’t happy at the idea of switching. We were getting a kick-back from the shuttle company, Sky Nigeria.

  ‘The flight is just as comfortable, and takes off not much later.’

  ‘Why this one?’

  ‘Because of the route. This shuttle’s track takes you over the subsolar point. That is, you will cross the line between Earth and sun. And on that line, of course, lies the Stack.’

  ‘The Stack? The mirrors? What’s the Stack got to do with it?’

  He stood. ‘The Damocletian will tell you that.’

  ‘What Damocletian?’

  ‘It’s best you find out for yourself.’ He bent down, prised up a corner of my mask, and laughed. ‘“Vacuum Lad”. I don’t want you to think I’m po-faced, that we all disapprove. Your life does seem rather fun. And useful. You’re saving lives; you’re not any sort of criminal. But there are other choices, more satisfaction to be had. Have a good flight.’

  Of course curiosity burned. I could hardly refuse to go on the Peruvian flight. Could you?

/>   I cleared it with Professor Stix. I could give her only evasive reasons as to why I wanted to switch. I was uncomfortable lying to her, for in my way, you see, I was hopelessly in love with her. And yet, even before I boarded the shuttle, I had the feeling that from then on Professor Stix would play an increasingly diminished role in my life.

  And I was right. For it was on that flight, even as I sipped champagne and signed autographs, that there came that extraordinary scratch on the window.

  The woman in space gestured, indicating that I should move down the spaceplane to the airlock at the rear. Of course the flight crew were by now aware of the woman’s presence. It took me only a moment to persuade them to let me out through the lock; their human longing to be present at an historic moment in the career of Vacuum Lad overrode the safety rules.

  When the last of the air sighed away, I felt the usual hardening of my skin, the prickly cold around my eyes, the gush of air from my mouth and belly, the peculiar arrhythmic thumping of my heart. It was no longer painful to me, more a welcome thrill, like a bracing cold shower. I had gone through this experience many times, including Professor Stix’s experimental sessions in the vacuum tank in Munich.

  But never before had I swum into vacuum to see another waiting, like me dressed only in everyday clothes – in her case, a tough-looking coverall with soft boots, gloves and tools tucked into her belt. Behind her, at the other end of a trailing tether, was a kind of craft, drifting alongside the shuttle: like a yacht, with a patchy, gossamer sail suspended from a mast. The sail was huge. A man, as naked to vacuum as the woman, clung to the yacht’s slim body – and there was a child, I saw, astonished, no more than seven or eight years old, a boy playing restlessly with the rigging attached to the single mast.

  The woman smiled at me. I mouthed, as clearly as I could, How are we to speak?

  She reached for me. Her hands in mine were warm. She pulled me close, opened her mouth, and kissed me. It was an oddly polite, asexual gesture, but as our lips sealed I could feel her tongue, taste the faint spice of her trapped residual breath. And with that trace of trapped air she whispered to me. ‘If we touch – see, let your teeth touch mine – speech carries through the bone, the skin.’ Her accent was light American. ‘My name is Mary Webb. I was born in Iowa. And you, Vacuum Lad?’

  Suspended in orbit, my lips locked to this strange woman’s, it was not a time for anonymity. I told her my full name.

  ‘I suppose you’re wondering why we sent for you.’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Ask your questions.’

  ‘Your yacht,’ I said impulsively. ‘Is that a solar sail?’

  ‘Yes. We ride on the pressure of sunlight. Slow but reliable, and free. Ben loves it. My son, you see him playing there …’

  ‘He was born in space?’

  ‘Yes, he was born in space. But still, most of us are born on Earth and incubate there, as you have, before emerging.’

  ‘“Incubate”?’

  ‘You wonder where we live. The yacht is actually part of our home. We inhabit the Stack.’

  ‘The Stack. The mirrors?’ My lips locked to hers, I rolled my eyes to look up. The Stack was a swarm of mirrors, individually invisible, yet their cumulative effect was a subtle darkening and blurring of the sun.

  ‘Each mirror is about a metre across. They are sheets of a silicon nitride ceramic. There are millions of them, of course. You can see our sail is stitched together from several mirrors. My husband made the sail. He’s good with his hands.’

  The man was grinning at me, across the gulf of space, grinning as I kissed his wife. Beneath me the Earth turned, and passengers and crew goggled at us from the shuttle’s windows.

  ‘You live on the Stack?’

  ‘That’s right. On it, in it, around it. It is why we exist. Why you exist. And why, some day, you will join us.’

  I didn’t like the sound of that. ‘I don’t understand any of this.’

  ‘What,’ she asked, ‘do you know of AxysCorp?’

  It was all a relic of the very bad days of a hundred years past, when the collapse of the planet’s climate was acute. Some feared that the gathering extinction event might soon overwhelm mankind: the dieback. The governments and intergovernmental agencies at last reached for drastic measures.

  ‘Geoengineering,’ Mary Webb said. ‘Massive human intervention in the processes of nature, everything from seeding the sea with iron to make it flourish, to building giant engines to draw down carbon dioxide from the air. A company called AxysCorp was responsible for the Stack, a system of mirrors at the Lagrange point designed to reduce the sunlight falling on the Earth.’

  ‘It worked,’ I murmured into her mouth. ‘Didn’t it? The climate was stabilised. Billions of lives were saved. The recovery began. That’s what I learned at school.’

  ‘Yes, that’s so. But AxysCorp’s projects were always controversial. What if the Stack, for example, were to fail? If so, the warming it had kept away would hit the planet in one fell swoop – worse than without the Stack in the first place. Can you see?’

  ‘So it cannot be allowed to fail.’

  ‘But every engineering system fails in the end. And so the Stack is not so much a shield as a sword of Damocles suspended over the world.’

  ‘Ah. And you “Damocletians”—’

  ‘Are AxysCorp’s backup solution.’

  AxysCorp, I learned now, had seeded the air of Earth with a genetically engineered virus, a virus that created a whole new breed of space-tolerant humans specifically equipped to maintain their giant space systems. People would persist, the argument went, where machines would fail: people, self-motivating, self-repairing, self-reproducing, the ideal fail-safe backup. But people of the right sort had to be engineered.

  ‘The virus is still in the atmosphere. Every year a handful of individuals are infected and modified. Many of them live and die without ever knowing they are potential Damocletians. But if some accident befalls them, an exposure to low pressure or vacuum—’

  ‘As befell me.’

  ‘We contact those who become aware of what they are. And we invite them to join us up here, when they are ready.’

  I felt angry. ‘I was meddled with, my whole life changed, by engineers who were dead long before I was born. What about ethics? What about my rights, my choice?’

  Mary sighed, a peculiar noise in the back of her throat. ‘Actually, this is typical of the AxysCorp projects. Given immense budgets, huge technical facilities, virtually unlimited power, and negligible political scrutiny, their technicians often experimented. Played. Even the Stack was an innovative solution to the problem of building a space shield – innovative compared to the big discs thrown up by the Chinese, for instance. But they often went too far. Some AxysCorp outcomes are effectively crime scenes. We, however, have recognition of our status as citizens with full human rights by the UN’s Climatic Technology Legacy Oversight Panel.’

  ‘But you’re forced to live on the Stack.’

  ‘Not forced. But it’s where we’re at home. What we’re for. We have shelters, of course; most of the time we’re out of the vacuum. We have factories and workshops. We repair old mirrors and manufacture new ones – no, that’s the wrong language, it’s more than that, more spiritual. We tend the field of mirrors, as a gardener tends a flower bed. Flowers of light. In Iowa we had a garden. This is the same. It’s … enriching.’

  ‘And that’s what you want of me. To come and join you in the endless weeding of your mirror garden, all for the benefit of those down on Earth, who know nothing of you and care less. For that I should leave behind my life—’

  ‘Your identity as Vacuum Lad?’

  I blushed behind my horny outer layer of skin.

  ‘You have family?’

  ‘Yes. They would miss me. And I, I would even miss Muhammad. My brother.’ />
  ‘Yet they are not like you. Yet this is your place.’ She embraced me. ‘Listen. It’s wonderful here. We live as no human has before. And we aren’t limited to the Stack. Look again at our yacht. We sail on light, down to the Earth – away to the moon, where the children play in the craters and kick up the dust. Some of us are talking about an expedition to a comet.’

  ‘A comet?’

  ‘Why not? We can live anywhere, anywhere between the planets and the stars.’ She twisted so she was looking down. ‘We protect the Earth. That is why we are here. But sometimes the Earth looks very small. It is easy to forget it even exists. Those long-dead geoengineers didn’t mean it to be so, but that’s the way it worked out.

  ‘Some say that the very adaptations of microbes and animals that the geneticists used to manufacture us are relics of a dispersal of life across space in the deep past. Now those same adaptations are being used to spread life once more, human life, across the solar system. We are the future, Vacuum Lad. Not those down below.’

  And she withdrew, breaking her long kiss.

  I fulfilled my obligations. I returned to the shuttle, and flew on to the Hilton. On a secure link I told Professor Stix of all that had happened to me.

  For now my life will go on. I continue to earn. I have my family to think of – even Muhammad. And for now Earth needs Vacuum Lad. That’s what the contracts and my agency agreement with Professor Stix say. And it’s what I believe, too. It is my duty.

  And then there is the Earth First League to be dealt with. My enemies have tried again to assassinate me, more than once. Mary Webb talks of war, war between the Damocletians and the League, between the sky and the ground. A resolution is approaching.

  Beyond that I am unsure.

  In space, I look down at the comfortable fug of gravity and air where my family lives. But on the ground, I look up to the stars where Mary Webb and her Damocletians swim, and my skin itches to harden, my lungs to empty of stale air.