Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Alone or not alone – why do we care so much?

  I think I know now. It’s because we are lonely. On Earth there is nobody closer to us than the chimps; we see nobody like us in the sky.

  But then, each of us is alone. I have been alone since your grandmother, Emma, died. And now I’m dying too, Michael; what could be lonelier than that?

  That’s why we care about Fermi. That’s why I care.

  Michael, I’m looking at you, here in this damn hospital room with me; you’re just born, just a baby, and you won’t remember me. But I’m glad I got to meet you. I hope you will learn more than I have. That you will be wiser. That you will be happier. That you won’t be alone.

  I said, ‘I guess we know the truth about Fermi now. As soon as intelligence emerges on some deadbeat world like Earth, along come the Bubbles to take everybody away. Leaving all the lights on but nobody home. That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘But what a vast enterprise,’ Celso said. ‘Remember, a key difficulty with the Fermi Paradox has always been consistency. If there is a mechanism that removes intelligent life from the stars and planets, it must do so unfailingly and everywhere: it must be all but omniscient and omnipotent.’

  ‘So the universe must be full of those damn Bubbles.’

  ‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘Or perhaps there is only one …’

  ‘But why? Why go to all this trouble, to build this – this vast theme park?’

  He grinned. ‘Extinction, Michael. This is a dangerous universe for fragile beings such as ourselves. Left to our own devices, it doesn’t look as if we are smart enough to get through many more centuries, does it? Maybe the Bubbles have come just in time. And remember that life can be readily destroyed – by impact events, volcanism and other instability – by chance events like nearby supernovae or the collision of neutron stars – by more dramatic occurrences like the collision of galaxies – and in the end, of course, all stars will die, all free energy sources dwindle … We are stalked by extinction, Michael; we are all refugees.

  ‘But one energy source will not fade away: the energy trapped in the cosmic strings. So I think they built this place, and they sent out their trawler-like vessels. The refugium is a defiance of extinction – a mechanism to ensure that life and mind may survive into the unimaginable future –’

  I sniffed, looking up at a fake sun. ‘But isn’t that a retreat? This great sink of life isn’t our world. To come here is an end to striving, to ambition, to the autonomy of the species.’ I thought of the Bubbles clustering around Earth, like antibodies around a source of infection. I thought of human cities, New York and London and Beijing, emptied and overgrown like the dismal ruins of Alpha Centauri A-IV.

  But Celso said, ‘Not really. They were just thinking of their children. Rather like me, I guess. And there are adventures to be had here. We will design flying machines and go exploring. There may be no limit to the journeys we, or our children, will make, up and down this great corridor, a corridor that encircles the universe, no limit to the intelligences we might meet. And here, sheltered in this refugium, the human species could last forever … think of that.’ He studied me. ‘As for you, I didn’t know you were so restless, Michael. Heroism, now wanderlust. You have travelled across half the cosmos, and at the end of your journey you found yourself. Maybe your grandfather’s genes really are working within you.’

  The boy spoke around a mouthful of fish. ‘If you are lonely, sir, why don’t you go home?’

  I smiled. ‘Easier said than done.’

  ‘No, really. You know the screen in the Bubble – the one that showed our destination?’

  ‘The cosmic string picture … what about it?’

  ‘Well, in your Bubble it’s changed.’

  Celso stared at the boy, then ran to the Bubble. ‘He’s right,’ he breathed.

  The screen showed a picture of the Earth – continents, grey-blue oceans – unmistakeable and lovely.

  I kissed that damn kid.

  Celso nodded. ‘They know you wish to leave.’ He shrugged. ‘The choice of the species is surely clear; this, not that beautiful, fragile blue bauble, is mankind’s destiny. But individuals are free …’

  There was a distant shiver of motion. A third Bubble sailed towards us across the plain. I hardly noticed it.

  Without hesitation I jumped into the open hatchway of our Bubble. ‘Listen,’ I said to Celso, ‘are you sure you don’t want to come? It’s going to be a tough life here.’

  He rejoined his family. ‘Not for us. Goodbye, my friend. Oh – here.’ He handed me his softscreen. ‘With the information I have gathered in this you will become a rich man.’

  The new vessel drifted to rest.

  I couldn’t have cared less. I banged the button to shut the hatch. My Bubble lifted.

  Through the net walls I could see the new arrival tumble out onto the raw earth. I recognized him. He was the reason the new Bubble had been summoned for me. The person who’d made sure he’d been on my mind throughout the whole journey.

  Frank J. Paulis was wearing his bathrobe. He wailed.

  Celso caught my eye and winked. Paulis would be doing a lot of worm digging before he was allowed back to his spa and Bootstrap and his sprawling empire. I wished I’d been there when that damn Bubble had shown up to scoop him away.

  But maybe Paulis had got what he wanted, at that. The answer – in this universe, anyhow. My grandfather would have been pleased for him, I thought.

  The landscape fell away, and I flew past toy stars.

  LOST CONTINENT

  Without warning Dorehill leaned across the table. ‘Close your eyes.’

  I was startled into obeying.

  ‘Don’t think before replying. Tell me who you are.’

  And, just for a second or two, nothing came. It was as if I was drifting in a fog. Who am I? Where am I from? How did I get here?

  The answers quickly loomed out of that pearly fog. I saw my own face, at age six and sixteen and thirty-six; my parents, our somewhat dilapidated family house in Nantucket; my study, my books; Mary’s sweet face, the kids, our home here in Tangier. It all came together, a mosaic of images, a tidy narrative.

  Too tidy? Was that Dorehill’s point?

  He was watching me, those desperate eyes bright. ‘You see? You see? How do you know your past is real? How do you know that everything you think you remember wasn’t conjured into existence a couple of seconds ago, knitted into place for you, a – a tapestry to cover up the holes in the wall? Don’t you think it’s at least possible? …’

  It had been nearly twenty years since I had last seen Peter Dorehill, at our graduation together. Now, in the cool brightness of a café on Tangier’s beach promenade, we sipped mint tea and appraised each other, as old acquaintances will.

  The years had made Dorehill gaunt, as if the softer parts of his personality had worn away. I had soon learned he was still full of words, words, words, just as he always had been. But I detected something in his eyes, about his stance, as if he was wound up to explosive tension.

  Knowing his history, I thought I recognized the signs. It seemed to me he looked – as my father used to say of my uncle – ‘white-knuckle sober’. Perhaps he was finding Islamic Morocco trying.

  But, intense or not, I could see no chain of reasoning, no string of words which might lure a man like Peter Dorehill into the murky solipsistic waters of Lost Continent mythmaking.

  ‘It began with geology,’ he told me. ‘My chosen profession after Stanford, if you remember. Three decades ago – in October 1962 – savage earth tremors were experienced around a great half-ring of land, from Scandinavia, down through the Russian ports of Leningrad and Lvov and Odessa, on through Alexandria and the north African coast – even as far as Tangier, where we sit. Many of these quakes were in regions far from any geological fault. All of them occurred within minutes of each other. And at the same time, tsunamis marched across the Atlantic to smash against the east coast of America.’

>   I nodded. I remembered all this, of course; we had both been ten years old at the time. ‘And this is what you have been working on.’

  ‘Not exactly.’ He grinned, rueful. ‘You know me, John: an unanswered question is an endless, nagging irritation. I’ve always been fascinated by the puzzle of that sudden chthonic jolt. How did it happen? Why then, and in those specific sites? What could have triggered it all? And so on.

  ‘But, after taking my master’s, I found that nobody was working seriously on the problem. This was just a dozen or so years after the event, remember. Oh, the geological records were there to inspect – there had been no fast answers; there was still work to be done – but even so, it struck me that people had turned away from the mystery, had lost interest. I couldn’t understand it. But I got nowhere fast. Forced to earn a crust, I took a job with an oil company.’

  ‘But you kept digging.’

  ‘You see, you do know me! I wondered if it might be fruitful to look a little wider. I wanted to know what else was going on in that autumn of 1962.’

  I said dryly, ‘I seem to remember that the news of the period was somewhat dominated by missiles in Cuba.’

  He smiled and pushed back a straggling grey hair from his startlingly high forehead. (Why are we always so shocked by the ageing of friends from youth?) ‘Correct – and maybe significant. In that month virtually every commentator was predicting nuclear war – a war which was averted only by some adroit diplomacy, and a large pinch of luck. But I went further than that. I looked at trends in other disciplines – such as yours, John. I consulted newspaper records. I even dug around in the drugstore tabloids.’

  ‘What were you looking for?’

  ‘I didn’t know – I suspected I wouldn’t know until I found it. I sensed a pattern, out there somewhere … It’s hard to be more clear than that. All I did find were more unanswered questions. For instance there was a rash of stories of UFO visitations and alien abductions.’

  ‘Peter, there are always UFO stories –’

  ‘Not in such numbers, and with such consistency. Anyhow there’s more – much of which ought to interest a historian like yourself, John.’

  My smile froze a little at that, but I kept listening.

  With diligent (if probably amateurish) research he had, he claimed, uncovered clusters of new folk tales.

  ‘Shiite imams in Algeria told me how the Trumpet of Israfil sounded over the northern ocean – how Iblis, Satan, rose and resumed his defiance of God’s great command: Be. The Orthodox Christians of the Russian coast spoke of a recent return by Satan, who they call the Murderer of the Beginning. Even modern practitioners of the old Norse religions whispered stories of an irruption of Ginnungagap, the primeval void, into the modern world.

  ‘These fragmentary tales were expressed in the differing mythic structures of local populations. But they were all alike. And I found them scattered in a great circle, running along the North African coast, through the Middle East and Russia, as far as Scandinavia.’

  I said reluctantly, ‘The same as the 1962 quake arc.’

  His eyes gleamed. ‘You see the pattern. I felt I was skirting some enormous, hidden event, revealed not so much by evidence as by a notable absence. I believe these tales are fragments of recollection – smashed, scattered, broken – like the ring of debris that surrounds an impact crater.’ He eyed me. ‘You think I’m babbling.’

  I forced a smile. ‘Peter, I’m making no judgement.’ But in fact my heart was sinking.

  Because we had already moved from geology to mythmaking, and I suspected I was about to be introduced to his Lost Continent theory.

  I suppose I felt a lingering fondness for Dorehill. I hadn’t forgotten Stanford and our late-night bull sessions, fuelled by bad food, whiskey, dope and fellowship, when we had talked about anything and everything.

  Aliens, for instance – or the lack thereof, a favourite bullshit topic.

  Where is everybody? Peter would ask, lecturing as usual, younger, wispy-bearded, hairier, almost as intense. Why isn’t there evidence of extraterrestrial civilization all around us? They should be here by now. Even if They are long gone, surely we should see Their mighty ruins all around us …

  Perhaps we were being anthropomorphic, we would say. Perhaps They were nothing like us – not recognizable as life forms at all – or perhaps They were pursuing projects we can’t even imagine. But even if we had no idea what Their great structures are for, we would surely recognize them as artificial. And so on.

  But it was always Peter who came up with the wackiest notions. They might simply be invisible. The physicists talk of mirror matter, of an elusive unseen twin for every particle in nature. Are there mirror stars? Are there planets inhabited by mirror organisms, invisible to our senses? Do Their ships of mirror matter slide through our solar system even now? … It looked as if he hadn’t changed.

  But I had. College was long ago and far away, an intense confinement where seeming friendships could be forged between basically incompatible types, friendships that fell apart pretty rapidly once we were all let out into the real world. I had kept in touch with few of my friends and acquaintances from those days – and certainly not Peter Dorehill.

  So it was guilt as much as friendship, I guess, that kept me in my seat in that sunlit café.

  It was still harmless enough. We talked around the parameters of the mythos: of tales of rich island-nations whose powerful conquering princes became wicked and impious, until their lands were swallowed up by the sea.

  The conventional explanation of Lost Continent myths is well known. Almost certainly, if there is anything in such legends at all, they stem from real events – volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis and the like – enough to shatter civilizations. Such half-memories are handed down through the ages, mutating and elaborating as they go. In later times, efforts are often made to identify the wonderful land with an actual country, to no avail, of course.

  All of which is a rational, logical justification of the archetypical legends, deriving from a very human reaction to devastating, barely comprehended events.

  But Peter Dorehill had another explanation.

  He closed his eyes. ‘Imagine a great and ancient civilization. Its territories are encrusted with fine buildings, works of art, libraries full of learning.

  ‘And now, imagine a race of beings. Beings from another world.’

  Though I kept carefully still, he sensed my reaction. His eyes snapped open like camera shutters.

  ‘This is an outrageous hypothesis,’ he said. ‘There’s no easy way to express it. Just hear me out. You always were a good listener, John. And as you listen, try to imagine how you would prove me wrong.’

  ‘Aliens,’ I prompted. ‘Extraterrestrials.’

  ‘Yes. They have powers and ambitions, perhaps, far beyond human imagining – and yet They are aesthetes who share some of our own conceptions of beauty. In particular, They take great pleasure in the ancient glories of this old country.

  ‘But now They see that it is all soon to be destroyed. Perhaps it will be devastated by some natural disaster, a volcanic eruption, a quake or a flood. Or perhaps it is threatened by humanity – by war, or the collapse of empire. The specifics do not matter. What does matter is what They do about it.

  ‘They come to a decision.

  ‘It is an operation as simple and delicate as removing a prized vase from the grasp of a foolish child. They carefully detach the old country from the Earth, and remove it and its treasures to – another place, a museum perhaps, safe from humanity and the vagaries of our untamed planet.

  ‘But They face a dilemma. They will not submit Earth’s inhabitants to the trauma of such a display of power. The operation has to be performed stealthily.’

  I raised an eyebrow at that. ‘Stealthily?’

  ‘What a tremendous, monstrous act! They must distort all records mentioning, however obliquely, the lost lands. Histories have to be truncated and rewritten – They must f
orce entire cultures to forget their roots – They have to suppress our very memories of the place.

  ‘The operation itself is a – a cauterization. But it is hardly clean. Nothing is without flaw, in our mortal universe … As the amputation is made, just as the Earth shudders, so the mass psyche reacts. We are bereft, and we seek expression.’

  ‘Ah. Hence the volcanism and so forth associated with such events. They are a consequence, not a cause.’

  ‘Yes –’

  ‘And hence the Lost Continent legends.’

  ‘Yes. Hence the legends. They are memories, you see – half-erased, inchoate, seeking expression …’

  As kindly as I could, I pointed out, ‘But you have no proof.’

  ‘It is in the nature of the event itself that proof is erased.’

  ‘Then the argument’s circular.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, with a kind of strained patience. ‘Of course that’s true. But that doesn’t make it wrong, does it? And think about it. How would it be to live through such an event, to witness such a – a miracle? Would we even be able to perceive it? We evolved as plain-dwelling hunter-gatherers, and our sensoriums are conditioned to the hundred-mile scale of Earth landscapes. And if we aren’t programmed to register something, we simply don’t see it …’

  And on, and on.

  I was growing irritated, and not a little bored.

  Although I couldn’t quite see where 1962 fit into all this, I had heard Dorehill’s ‘theory’ before – versions of it anyhow. As a professional historian I am pestered by believers in such tales – which often allow the marvellous inhabitants of the lost lands to live on, at the Earth’s poles or under the sea, casually meddling with history – tales usually embroidered with ‘proof’ concerning Aboriginal art or the building of South American temples – and all these believers are more or less like Dorehill: each obsessed with a single idea, seeing nothing of the greater themes of history, vague about or even ignorant of the meaning of evidence and proof.