Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Beyond the membrane shone a milky, blurred sun – with, near it, a smaller crescent. That, she knew, was the Earth, all its great oceans reduced to a droplet. This craft was scooting around the sun after Earth like a fish swimming after its school.

  She let the lazy, whale-like roll of the ship carry her away from the glare of the sun, and she peered into the darkness, where she could see the stars.

  She had been trained to recognize many of the stars. She used this knowledge to determine her position in space far more accurately than even Dan could have, from far-off Earth.

  But to Sheena the stars were more than navigation beacons. Sheena’s eyes had a hundred times the number of receptors of human eyes, and she could see a hundred times as many stars.

  To Sheena the universe was crowded with stars, vibrant and alive. The Galaxy was a reef of stars beckoning her to come jet along its length.

  But there was only Sheena here to see it. Her sense of loss grew inexorably.

  So, swimming in starlight, Sheena cradled her unhatched young, impatiently jetting clouds of ink in the rough shape of a male with bright, mindless eyes.

  Maura Della was involved in all this because – in the year 2030, as the planet’s resources dwindled – Earth had become a bear pit.

  Take water, for instance.

  Humanity was using more than all the fresh water that fell on the planet. Unbelievable. So, all over Asia and elsewhere, water wars were flaring up, and at least one nuke had been lobbed, between India and Pakistan.

  America’s primary international problem was the small, manysided war that was flaring in Antarctica, now that the last continent had been ‘opened up’ to a feeding frenzy of resource-hungry nations – a conflict that constantly threatened to spill out to wider arenas.

  And so on.

  In Maura’s view, all humanity’s significant problems came from the world’s closure, the lack of a frontier.

  Maura Della had grown up believing in the importance of the frontier. Frontiers were the forcing ground for democracy and inventiveness. In a closed world, science was strangled by patent laws and other protective measures, and technological innovation was restricted to decadent entertainment systems and the machinery of war. It was a vicious circle, of course; only smartness could get humanity out of this trap of closure, but smartness was the very thing that had no opportunity to grow.

  America, specifically, was going to hell in a handbasket. Long dwarfed economically by China, now threatened militarily, America had retreated, become risk-averse. The rich cowered inside vast armoured enclaves; the poor lost themselves in VR fantasy worlds; American soldiers flew over the Antarctic battle zones in armoured copters, while the Chinese swarmed over the icebound land they had taken.

  And, such were the hangovers from America’s dominant days, the US remained the most hated nation on Earth.

  The irony was, there were all the resources you could wish for, floating around in the sky: the asteroids, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, free power from the sun. People had known about this for decades. But after seventy years of spaceflight nobody had come up with a way to get into Earth orbit that was cheap and reliable enough to make those sky mines an economic proposition.

  But now this NASA back-room wacko, Dan Ystebo from JPL, had come up with a way to break through the bottleneck, a Space Squid that could divert one of those flying mountains.

  Maura didn’t care what his own motives were; she only cared how she could use his proposals to achieve her own goals.

  So when Dan invited her to JPL for the rendezvous, she accepted immediately.

  Maura looked around Dan Ystebo’s JPL cubicle with distaste, at the old coffee cups and fast-food wrappers amid the technical manuals and rolled-up softscreens. Dan seemed vaguely embarrassed, self-conscious; he folded his arms over his chest.

  One softscreen, draped across a partition, showed a blue-green, rippling spacecraft approaching an asteroid. The asteroid was misshapen and almost black, the craters and cracks of its dusty surface picked out by unvarying sunlight.

  ‘Tell me what I’m getting for my money here, Dan.’

  He waved his plump hand. ‘Near-Earth asteroid 2018JW, called Reinmuth. A ball of rock and ice half a mile across. It’s a C-type.’ Dan was excited, his voice clipped and wavering, a thin sweat on his brow as he tried to express himself. ‘Maura, it’s just as we hoped. A billion tons of water, silicates, metals and complex organics – aminos, nitrogen bases. Even Mars isn’t as rich as this, pound for pound …’

  Dan Ystebo was out of his time, Maura thought. He would surely have preferred to work here in the 1960s and ’70s, when science was king, and the great probes were being planned, at outrageous expense: Viking, Voyager, Galileo. But that wasn’t possible now.

  JPL, initiated as a military research lab, had been taken back by the Army in 2016.

  It hadn’t been possible to kill off JPL’s NASA heritage immediately, not while the old Voyagers still bleeped away forlornly on the rim of the solar system, sending back data about the sun’s heliopause and other such useless mysteries.

  And Dan Ystebo was making the best of it, in this military installation, with his Nazi-doctored Space Squid. He would probably, Maura realized, have gen-enged her and stuck her in a box if it got him a mission to run.

  She said, ‘Before somebody asks me, tell me again why we have to bring this thing to Earth orbit.’

  ‘Reinmuth’s orbit is close to Earth’s. But that means it doesn’t line up for low-energy missions very often; the orbits are like two clocks running slightly adrift of each other. The NEOs were never as easy to reach as the space-junkie types like to believe. We’d have to wait all of forty years before we could repeat Sheena’s trajectory.’

  ‘Or bring Sheena home.’

  ‘ … Yes. But that’s irrelevant anyhow.’

  Irrelevant. He doesn’t understand, she thought. This had been the hardest point of the whole damn mission to sell, to the House and the public. If we are seen to have killed her for no purpose, we’re all finished.

  … And now the moment of rendezvous was here.

  The firefly spark tracked across the blackened surface. The gentle impact came unspectacularly, with a silent turning of digits from negative to positive.

  There was a small splash of grey dust.

  And then she could see it, a green fragment of Earth embedded in the hide of the asteroid.

  Beneath the translucent floor Sheena could see a grainy, grey-black ground. Dan told her it was a substance older than the oceans of Earth. And, through the curving walls of the ship, she was able to see this world’s jagged horizon, barely tens of yards away.

  Her world. She pulsed with pride, her chromatophores prickling.

  And she knew, at last, she was ready.

  Sheena laid her eggs.

  They were cased in jelly sacs, hundreds of them in each tube. There was no spawning ground here, of course. So she draped the egg sacs over the knot of machinery at the heart of her miniature ocean, which had now anchored itself to the surface of Reinmuth.

  Fish came to nose at the eggs. She watched until she was sure that the fish were repelled by the jelly that coated the eggs, which was its purpose.

  All this was out of sight of Dan’s cameras. She did not tell him what she had done. She could not leave her water habitat; yet she was able to explore.

  Small firefly robots set off from the habitat, picking their way carefully over the surface of the asteroid. Each robot was laden with miniature instruments, as exquisite as coral, all beyond her understanding.

  But the fireflies were under her control. She used the waldo, the glove-like device into which she could slip her long arms and so control the delicate motions of each firefly.

  … Soon the babies were being hatched: popping out of their dissolving eggs one by one, wriggling away, alert, active, questioning. With gentle jets of water, she coaxed them towards sea grass.

  Meanwhile, she had work to do.
<
br />   Sheena sent the fireflies to converge at one pole of Reinmuth. There, patiently, piece by piece, she had them assemble a small chemical factory, pipes and tanks and pumps, and a single flaring nozzle which pointed to the sky. Precious solar panels, spread over the dusty ground, provided power.

  The factory began its work. Borers drew up surface regolith and the rock and ice which lay deeper within. Chemical separation processes filtered out methane ice and stored it, while other processes took water ice, melted it and passed it through electrical cells to separate it into its components, oxygen and hydrogen.

  This whole process seemed remarkable to Sheena. To take rock and ice, and to transform it into other substances! But Dan told her that this was old, robust technology, practised by NASA and other humans for many times even his long lifetime.

  Mining asteroids was easy. You just had to get there and do it.

  Meanwhile the young were growing explosively quickly, converting half of all the food they ate to body mass. She watched the males fighting: I am large and fierce. Look at my weapons. Look at me!

  Most of the young were dumb. Four were smart.

  She was growing old now, and tired easily. Nevertheless she taught the smart ones how to hunt. She taught them about the reef, the many creatures that lived and died there. And she taught them language, the abstract signs Dan had given her. Soon their mantles rippled with questions. Who? Why? Where? What? How?

  She did not always have answers. But she showed them the machinery that kept them alive, and taught them about the stars and sun, and the nature of the world and universe, and about humans.

  At last the structure at the pole was ready for its test.

  Under Sheena’s control, simple valves clicked open. Gaseous methane and oxygen rushed together and burned in a stout chamber. Through robot eyes Sheena could see combustion products emerge, ice crystals that caught the sunlight, receding in perfectly straight lines. It was a fire fountain, quite beautiful.

  And Sheena could feel the soft thrust of the rocket, the huge waves that pulsed slowly through the hab’s water.

  The methane rocket, fixed at the axis of the asteroid’s spin, would push Reinmuth gradually out of its orbit and send it to intercept Earth.

  Dan told her there was much celebration, within NASA. He did not say so, but Sheena understood that this was mainly because she had finished her task, before dying.

  Now, she was no longer needed. Not by the humans, anyway.

  The young ones seemed to understand, very quickly, that Sheena and all her young would soon exhaust the resources of this one habitat. Already there had been a number of problems with the tightly closed environment loops: unpredictable crashes and blooms in the phytoplankton population.

  The young were very smart. Soon they were able to think in ways that were beyond Sheena herself.

  For instance, they said, perhaps they should not simply repair this fabric shell, but extend it. Perhaps, said the young, they should even make new domes and fill them with water.

  Sheena, trained only to complete her primary mission, found this a very strange thought.

  But there weren’t enough fish, never enough krill. The waters were stale and crowded.

  This was clearly unacceptable.

  So the smart young hunted down their dumb siblings, one by one, and consumed their passive bodies, until only these four, and Sheena, were left.

  When the storm broke, Dan Ystebo was in his cubicle in the science rooms at JPL, in the middle of an online conference on results from Reinmuth.

  Maura Della stood over him, glaring.

  He touched the softscreen to close down the link. ‘Senator –’

  ‘You asshole, Ystebo. How long have you known?’

  He sighed. ‘Not long. A couple of weeks.’

  ‘Did you know she was pregnant before the launch?’

  ‘No. I swear it. If I’d known I’d have scrubbed the mission.’

  ‘Don’t you get it, Ystebo? We’d got to the point where the bleeding-heart public would have accepted Sheena’s death. But this has changed everything …’

  It’s over, he thought, listening to her anger and frustration.

  She visibly tried to calm down. ‘The thing is, Dan, we can’t have that asteroid showing up in orbit with a cargo of sentient squid corpses. People would think it was monstrous.’ She blinked. ‘In fact, so would I.’

  He closed his eyes. ‘I don’t suppose it’s any use pointing out how stupid it is to stop now. We spent the money already. We have the installation on Reinmuth. It’s working; all we have to do is wait for rendezvous. We achieved the goal, the bootstrap.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said gently, regretfully. ‘People are – not rational, Dan.’

  ‘And the future, the greater goal –’

  ‘We’re still engaged in a race between opportunity and catastrophe. We have to start again. Find some other way.’

  ‘This was the only chance. We just lost the race.’

  ‘I pray not,’ she said heavily. ‘Look – do it with decency. Let Sheena die in comfort. Then turn off the rockets.’

  ‘And the babies?’

  ‘We can’t save those either way, can we?’ she said coolly. ‘I just hope they forgive us.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ Dan said.

  The water which trickled through her mantle was cloudy and stank of decay. She drifted, aching arms limp, dreaming of a male with bright, mindless eyes.

  But the young wouldn’t let her alone.

  Danger near. You die we die. They were flashing the fast, subtle signals employed by a shoal sentinel, warning of the approach of a predator.

  There was no predator here, of course, save death itself.

  She tried to explain it to them. Yes, they would all die – but in a great cause, so that Earth, NASA, the ocean, could live. It was a magnificent vision, worthy of the sacrifice of their lives.

  Wasn’t it?

  But they knew nothing of Dan, of NASA, of Earth.

  No. You die we die.

  They were like her. But in some ways they were more like their father. Bright. Primal.

  Dan Ystebo cleared his desk, ready to go work for a gen-eng biorecovery company in equatorial Africa. All he was hanging around JPL for was to watch Sheena die, and the bio-signs in the telemetry indicated that wouldn’t be so long now.

  Then the Deep Space Network radio telescopes would be turned away from the asteroid for the last time, and whatever followed would unfold in the dark and cold, unheard, and to hell with it.

  … Here was a new image in his softscreen. A squid, flashing signs at him: Look at me. Dan. Look at me. Dan. Dan. Dan.

  He couldn’t believe it. ‘Sheena?’

  He had to wait the long seconds while his single word, translated to flashing signs, was transmitted across space.

  Sheena 6.

  ‘ … Oh.’ One of the young.

  Dying.Water. Water dying. Fish. Squid. Danger near. Why.

  She’s talking about the habitat biosphere, he realized. She wants me to tell her how to repair the biosphere. ‘That’s not possible.’

  Not. Those immense black eyes. Not. Not. Not. The squid flashed through a blizzard of body patterns, bars and stripes pulsing over her hide, her head dipping, her arms raised. I am large and fierce. I am parrotfish, seagrass, rock, coral, sand. I am no squid, no squid, no squid.

  He had given Sheena 5 no sign for ‘liar’, but this squid, across millions of miles, bombarding him with lies, was doing its best.

  But he was telling the truth.

  Wasn’t he? How the hell could you extend the fixed-duration closed-loop life-support system in that ball of water to support more squid, to last much longer, even indefinitely?

  … But it needn’t stay closed-loop, he realized. The Bootstrap hab was sitting on an asteroid full of raw materials. That had been the point of the mission in the first place.

  His brain started to tick at the challenge.

  It would be
a hell of an effort, though. And for what? His NASA pay was going to run out any day, and the soldier boys who had taken back JPL, and wanted to run nothing out of here but low-Earth-orbit milsat missions, would kick his sorry ass out of here sooner than that.

  To tell the truth he was looking forward to moving to Africa. He’d live in comfort, in the Brazzaville dome, far from the arenas of the global conflict likely to come; and the work there would be all for the good, as far as he was concerned. None of the ethical ambiguities of Bootstrap.

  So why are you hesitating, Ystebo? Are you growing a conscience, at last?

  ‘I’ll help you,’ he said. ‘What can they do, fire me?’

  That wasn’t translated.

  The squid turned away from the camera.

  Dan started to place calls.

  Sheena 6 was the smartest of the young.

  It was no privilege. There was much work.

  She learned to use the glove-like systems that made the firefly robots clamber over the asteroid ground. The mining equipment was adapted to seek out essentials for the phytoplankton, nitrates and phosphates.

  Even in the hab itself there was much to do. Dan showed her how to keep the water pure, by pumping it through charcoal filters. But the charcoal had to be replaced by asteroid material, burned in sun fire. And so on.

  With time, the hab was stabilized. As long as the machines survived, so would the hab’s cargo of life.

  But it was too small. It had been built to sustain one squid.

  So the firefly robots took apart the rocket plant at the pole and began to assemble new engines, new flows of material, sheets of asteroid-material plastic.

  Soon there were four habs, linked by tunnels, one for each of Sheena’s young, the smart survivors. The krill and diatoms bred happily. The greater volume required more power, so Sheena extended the sprawling solar-cell arrays.

  The new habs looked like living things themselves, spawning and breeding.

  But already another cephalopod generation was coming: sacs of eggs clung to asteroid rock, in all the habs.