Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Meg Lyall was standing with her arms spread wide, as if crucified. She turned around and around, with the creaky, uncertain motions of great age, enjoying Mars.

  Bob stood there, hideously embarrassed.

  She said, ‘You want to know the best thing about modern Mars? Skinsuits.’ She flexed her hand, watching the fabric crumple and stretch, waves of colour crossing its surface. ‘Back in ’29 we had to lock ourselves up in great clunky lobster suits, all hard shells and padding, so heavy you could barely take a step. Now it’s like we’re not wearing anything at all.’

  ‘Not really.’

  She looked up at him, her rheumy eyes Earth-blue. ‘No. You’re right. It’s not really like walking over a grassy field, out in the open air, is it? Which is what you think you’ll be doing in six months’ time.’ She looked up at Earth’s bright glint. ‘Sixty years after the Reboot, Earth is a world of fortresses. Even the grass is under guard. But maybe they’ll let you walk on it even so. After all, you’re famous!’

  Resentment sparked easily, as it always did. ‘You won’t put me off going.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ She seemed shocked at the suggestion. ‘That isn’t it at all. You have to go. It’s very important. There may be nothing more important. You’ll see. Walk with me.’

  He couldn’t refuse. But he wouldn’t let her hold his hand.

  April 2008

  Tricester is in Oxfordshire, England. It is a strange place, I suppose: both old and new, an ancient leafy village in the shadow of a huge particle accelerator facility called Corwell, a giant circular ridge of green landscaping. It is a place crowded with history.

  My name is Marshall Reid, by the way. I am a science teacher at the village school.

  Here’s how it begins for me.

  On a bright spring afternoon I lead a field trip of eleven school-children to the Corwell plant. As we troop past the anonymous buildings there is an emergency, some failure of containment, and a blue flash overwhelms us all. I am dazzled but unhurt. Some of the children are still, silent, as if distracted, others very frightened. They all seem unharmed.

  There are predictable fears of a radiation leak. The guides quickly herd us into a holding area.

  Miranda Stewart is called in, and introduced to us. She is Emergency Planning Officer for the region, the local authority official in nominal charge of such operations, supposedly coordinating the various emergency services. She is 50-ish, a Geordie, a former soldier. I like her immediately; she is a reassuring presence.

  But Stewart is overwhelmed by the techs and suits and experts from the environment ministry. Scientists in protection gear crawl scarily over the site with Geiger counters.

  We teachers and pupils are held in the middle of all this, sitting in our neat rows, surrounded by officials and police and medics, our mobile phones besieged by anxious parents. We are all bewildered and scared.

  Reluctantly Stewart concedes that the village should be cordoned off, proper tests run on the inhabitants and the local crops, and so on. But no alarm will be raised; there will be a cover story about a chemical leak.

  The police set up blocks around the plant and village. There is press attention, and Green protesters quickly appear at the barriers. Emma, my wife, encounters this perimeter, returning from work in London.

  Emma, at 31 a little younger than me, is a PR consultant. She misses life in the capital. Emma is seven-months pregnant. To her, the Corwell incident is the final straw; this is not a safe place to raise a kid. Later that day we argue again about moving back to London. But I am devoted to my job, and loyal to the kids. The argument is inconclusive, as usual.

  Meanwhile, at the plant (so I learn later), the technicians are finding no signs of radiation damage. But one technician, checking surrounding foliage, finds a nest of mice – a nest without babies.

  I have the feeling this is only the start of something larger. Hence my decision to keep this journal.

  When Bob looked back, he saw that the tractor had already sunk behind Mars’s close horizon. He had no idea where they were going. He wasn’t enjoying the oily feel of his suit’s smart material as it slithered over his skin, seeking to equalize temperature and pressure over his body. It was like being held in a huge moist hand.

  He’d only stepped on the raw surface of Mars a dozen times in his life. It was a frozen desert – what was there to see? He had spent all his life rattling around in the cramped corridors of Mangala or Ares or Hellas, surrounded by walls painted the glowing colours of Earth, purple and blue and green.

  Earth! He could see it now, a blue-white evening star just rising, the only colour in this whole rust-ridden landscape – Earth, where he had dreamed of escaping even before he had realized that he was a freak.

  He was the youngest child on Mars: the last to be born, as colonists abandoned by Earth dutifully shut down their lives. A little later he had been orphaned, making him even more of a freak.

  He owed Mars nothing. He didn’t fit. Everybody stared at him, pitying. Well, another week and he was out of here: the only evacuee Earth would allow.

  But first he had to get through this gruesome ritual of a visit with Meg Lyall.

  On she talked.

  ‘I guess you’re used to the fireflies. Surely they are going to watch you all the way home. Just like when I rode the Ares out here, back in 2029 …’ More old-woman reminiscing, he thought gloomily. ‘There we were in our big ugly hab module, and we were surrounded by drifting cams the whole way out. At first I figured people were watching to see us screw, or take a dump, or fight. But it turned out the highest ratings were for ordinary times, when we were just working calmly, making our meals, sleeping. Like watching fish in a tank. But you’ve never seen a fish. Maybe even then people were too isolated. Now it’s a lot worse, of course. But we’re social animals; we need people around us … What do you think?’

  ‘I think you ought to tell me where we’re going.’

  She stopped and turned, breathing hard, to face him. ‘Why, we’re already there. Don’t you know your history?’

  She led him over a shallow rise. And there, under a low translucent dome only thinly coated with Martian dust, sat the Beagle 2.

  May 2008

  After a couple of weeks the cordon has been lifted. But technicians still patrol the area with their anonymous instruments, and the children and I are subject to ongoing medical checks.

  I have tried to protect the children. But there is media attention: unwelcome headlines, cartoons of huge-brained kids glowing in the dark. I am angry, of course. My pupils have already been betrayed by the authorities who should protect them, and now they are depicted as freaks.

  The school’s pet rabbits have produced no young.

  Paul Merrick has shown up, rucksack on his back, looking for a place to stay.

  Merrick, 40-ish, is a Jeff Goldblum-lookalike American environmental scientist. He has become something of a maverick, with controversial theories about holistic aspects of the environment. At college he taught Emma.

  And they had a relationship.

  Now Emma has called him in; she knew Merrick would be intrigued by the accident and she wants to know his views.

  I am not pleased to see this ghost from Emma’s past.

  Merrick and Emma do some unauthorized exploration of Corwell. I suspect Emma, now on maternity leave, wants something to take her mind off the approaching upheaval in her own life: a last youthful adventure.

  They find birds’ nests without eggs.

  They are discovered by Emergency Planning Officer Stewart. She tries to throw them out, and blusters about this being a routine clean-up operation. But Merrick asks probing questions about the instances of sterility, which are already the talk of the village. Stewart points out that the sheep and cattle in neighbouring farms are giving birth as usual. Merrick says this may be because of different gestation periods; if some kind of sterilization effect has occurred, short-gestation creatures would be the first to be affected. Stewart �
� not a scientist and, I suspect, not kept fully in the know by the ministry types – is disturbed, but is sure there is a ‘rational’ explanation.

  When she tells me this part of the story, Emma rubs her bump thoughtfully.

  Merrick, Emma and I talk it over in the pub. To my discomfiture, Emma tells Merrick too much personal stuff: that her conception was an accident while we were on holiday, for example. Merrick, though restrained, is obviously jealous.

  Merrick says predictable things. That it is as if we are running a huge, uncontrolled experiment on nature. That England is a small and crowded place, where nature has been saturated by everything we could throw at her – electromagnetic radiation, pesticides, genetic modification, acid rain and now even exotic radiation from the nuclear accident. That we have stressed natural systems beyond their limits. That something strange is happening here as a result – but who knows what?

  Meaningless talk. I resolve to focus on the immediate issues before me, on the people I care for, Emma and the field-trip kids.

  The Beagle wasn’t much to look at. It was just a pie-dish pod that had bounced down from out of the sky under a system of parachutes and gasbags. Disc-shaped solar-cell panels had unfolded over the dirt, and a wand of sensors had stuck up like a periscope. And that was it. When people had come looking for it five decades after its landing, Beagle had been all but buried by windblown toxic dust.

  And yet, by baking its tiny soil samples and sniffing the thin air, Beagle 2 had discovered life on Mars.

  ‘It was the atmospheric sensor that did it,’ Lyall said. ‘The probe could directly examine only one little patch of landscape, but a Martian cow could fart anywhere on Mars and Beagle could sense the methane. It took another thirty years before anybody had a sample they could hold in their hand, but Beagle proved it was here to be found.’

  Even before Lyall and her crew had left Earth, the findings of unmanned probes had already shattered many ancient dreams of Mars. There were no canal builders, no lusty princesses, no wistful golden-eyed poets, no leathery lung-plants. For a time, Mars had been thought to be dead altogether.

  But then a meteorite, a fossil-laden scrap of Mars brought to Earth by cosmic chance, had changed all that.

  Young Mars and Earth, billions of years ago, had been like sisters: both warm, both glistening with shallow oceans and ponds. And both had harboured life – sister life, as it turned out, spawned on one world or the other and blown across space on the meteorite wind.

  Lyall turned around, letting her gloved fingertips trace out the line of the crater walls. ‘I don’t think you can imagine how strange this scenery is to me, still. To see a crater like this with water features in it: gully networks and dried river beds and the rippling beaches of ancient lakes … A crater punched in rock that formed at the bottom of a sea, a crater that later got flooded, over and over. When I was your age, I’d have given anything to be transported here, to stand where you are standing – to know what I know now.’ Bob thought she behaved as if she had just stepped down out of that creaky old spaceship of hers.

  Mars had been too small. It could not hold onto the gases its volcanoes vented, and without tectonic recycling the atmosphere became locked in carbonate rocks. The air thinned, the oceans and land froze, and the harsh sunlight destroyed the water.

  And yet life persisted.

  ‘Slime,’ Bob said. ‘Life on Mars is pond scum, kilometres down.’

  Lyall glared, as if he’d insulted her personally. ‘Not pond scum. Biofilms. Martian life is not primitive. It is the result of four billion years of evolution – a different evolution. The anaerobic life forms organize themselves, working together, one living off the output of another. Life on Mars is all about cooperation. Some say that the whole Martian biota, stuck down in those deep thermal vents, is nothing but one vast community …’

  ‘Sure. But so what? You can’t eat it. It doesn’t do anything.’

  Lyall struggled to remain serious, then a grin cracked her leathery face. ‘Okay. I felt the same as you, even though I was forty years old before I got here. Once we got through the first phase surface op I made it my mission to find something more.’

  ‘More?’

  ‘More than a damn microbe. Something with a backbone and a brain. Something like me.’

  June 2008

  Frogs in the school pond have produced spawn, but no tadpoles.

  As rumours spread of the sterilities, the children remain the focus of unwelcome attention. Some of them are showing signs of stress – strange paintings and stories, odd games in the playground – they are becoming withdrawn, turning to each other for comfort.

  They are just victims of the same hyper-technological accident which apparently triggered the sterility problems. But it is as if the children are being transformed into witches, in some monstrous mass mind. Absurd, paradoxical, frightening.

  Meanwhile the ministry scientists are considering pulling out. Their tests have proved inconclusive.

  Merrick argues against this. He says that something subtle and strange is unfolding here, which we must study. He walks Stewart, Emma and me through a tree-of-life evolution wall chart; the sterility effects are working their way ‘down’ the tree, from younger and more complex forms of life, like mammals, to the older. He predicts that reptiles will be the next animal group to show symptoms.

  Stewart sticks to her chain of command, determined to keep control and minimize disorder and panic.

  But now a personal crisis looms for us. Emma has gone into labour. A doctor and midwife attend.

  Merrick, typically, uses the event to gather more data. He asks distracting questions about instances of human conception in the village since the accident. The midwife repeats a few rumours.

  And meanwhile there are more stories of empty nests, vacant ponds, all over this scrap of ancient English countryside.

  She had sent Bob the letter: a genuine letter, written by hand on flimsy sheets of plastic-sealed paper. Bob didn’t understand the half of it. But he knew it was about the Reboot, the origin of Earth’s disaster.

  ‘I never knew him,’ she said. ‘Reid, I mean. He was just some English guy. Dead now, I guess. I don’t even know why he sent me the letter. We were first on Mars; we got mails from all over. Maybe he saw a bond between us. He was there at the beginning of a new world, as was I.’

  ‘Doctor Lyall –’

  She laid her hand on his shoulder – softly, but her fingers were strong, like claws. ‘Indulge me a little more. It’s important. Believe me.’

  She took a few steps away from the memorialized Beagle, and scuffed at ruddy Martian dirt with her toe. ‘I learned my fossil hunting before I left Earth. I worked out in the desert heartlands of Kenya. That’s in Africa. You’ve heard of Africa? You know, people have lived in that area for two million years or more. But even there you don’t find bones just sticking out of the ground. You have to be systematic. You have to know where to look and how to look.

  ‘The landscape of Mars is billions of years older than Africa. Everything is worn to dust. Fossil-hunting here is unimaginably harder.’ She pointed to the distant crater walls. ‘But not impossible. I looked in craters like this, at exposed layers of sedimentary rock.’

  Bob felt a remote curiosity stir. ‘And you found something.’

  Lyall smiled. ‘It took years.’ From a pocket in her suit she dug out a scrap of rock, embedded in a disc of clear plastic. She handed it to Bob.

  He turned it over and over. It was like a paperweight. Except for the fact that it contained two bands of shading, divided by a neat, sharp line, it looked like every other rock on Mars.

  He was obscurely disappointed. ‘I can’t see anything.’

  ‘The evidence is microscopic. This is only a show sample anyhow. But they were here, Bob: multicellular life, complex life, a whole community. There seems to have been an evolutionary explosion like Earth’s pre-Cambrian, buried in Mars’s deep past – much earlier than anything comparable on Ea
rth. They lived in the oceans. There were squat bottom feeders, and sleek-shelled swimmers that seem to have been functionally equivalent to fish –’

  ‘Why doesn’t everybody know about this?’

  ‘Because we are still trying to figure out how they all died.’

  He shrugged. ‘What is there to figure? Mars dried out and froze.’

  ‘But the extinction was sudden,’ she said. She pointed to the line between the different-coloured layers in the rock. ‘You find rocks like this on Earth. The lines mark places in the geological record where there have been great extinction events. Below, life. Above, no life – or at any rate, a different life, a sparser life.’

  ‘Like the dinosaurs.’

  She nodded approvingly. ‘Yes. These are Mars’s dinosaurs, Bob. But it wasn’t a comet that killed them. It wasn’t the freeze – not directly; it happened much too rapidly for that.’

  Then Bob saw it; it was as if the ruddy landscape swivelled around the bit of rock. ‘It was a Reboot.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Just like Earth.’

  ‘Just like Earth.’

  July 2008

  Now, Merrick has found, even insects are failing to reproduce, and on the farms crops are failing.

  This unfolding environmental disaster is of course impossible to conceal. The cordon is back. Government officials, scientists and the press are crawling over the area. There is a news blackout on the school and heavy security – ‘for the children’s protection’. I am glad Miranda Stewart is still involved, trying to maintain decent conditions for the children, responding to my requests for normality.

  But the children have been isolated. Once more they are subject to scrutiny and endless tests from doctors, social workers, educationalists, psychologists, other scientists. These ‘experts’ find nothing, of course. I see it as all part of the absurd witch-hunt.

  The childrens’ parents are agitated, frightened, angry. ‘We don’t want our child to be special. Why us?’ Some are threatening to sue me or the government. But the children have not actually been injured. There is nothing I can say to reassure them.