Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  She peered around frantically, trying to get a first impression of the principals’ reaction. She saw the back of Malenfant’s head as he stared stolidly at the unresponsive screen, as if willing the displays to change. Veep Della frowned and stroked her chin.

  Cornelius Taine was grinning.

  Something is very, very wrong here. And you want to know something else?

  Kate floated in the dark, freed of gravity and sensation, listening to her own voice.

  ‘Tell me,’ he whispered.

  It’s getting wronger. They tested the whole set-up the day before with a bounce off a deep-space comet a hundred astronomical units out – twice as far as Pluto. I happen to know they repeated the echo test off that same comet a few hours after the Centauri experiment failed.

  ‘And they couldn’t find the comet.’

  You’re getting the idea. Michelangelo shouldn’t have failed. It couldn’t have failed …

  This was one of her virtual correspondents, an entity (maybe multiple) she knew only as Rodent, his/her/their anonymity protected by layers of encryption and chaff. But the transmission was encoded in her own voice; she liked to imagine it was the other half of herself, dreaming-Kate whispering across her corpus callosum, that bridge between her brain’s hemispheres within which was embedded the implant that had dropped her into this virtual world.

  But the images that floated before her now, of angular, expensive machinery, had come from no dream.

  The laser burst was generated in low Earth orbit by a nuclear fusion pulse. A trillion watts of power compressed into a fraction of a second. They have been building toys like this for decades, at places like Lawrence Livermore. Got a big boost under Gore-Clinton, and even more under Clinton-Clinton …

  Much had been learned about other worlds, even from Earth, by techniques like Michelangelo’s: the cloud-shrouded surface of Venus had first been studied by radar beams emitted from giant ground-based radio telescopes, for instance. But Alpha A-4 was more than seven thousand times as far away as Pluto, the solar system’s outermost planet. Michelangelo’s vast outreaching was orders of magnitude more difficult than anything attempted before – and in some quarters had been criticized as premature.

  Maybe those critics had been proved right. ‘So the experiment failed. It happens.’

  Kate, the laser worked. Look, they could see the damn pulse as it was fired off into the dark.

  ‘But that’s just the first step. You’re talking about a shot across four light years, of projecting planetary movements across four years’ duration.’ The scientists had had to aim their pulse, not at A-4 itself, but at the place A-4 was expected to be by the time the light pulse got there. It had been a speed-of-light pigeon shoot – but a shoot of staggering precision. ‘And Alpha Centauri is a triple star; what if the planet’s motions were perturbed, or –’

  A-4 is so close to its parent that its orbit is as stable as Earth’s. Kate, believe me, this is just Newtonian clockwork; the predictions couldn’t have gone wrong. Likewise the geometry of the reflection. Once those photons were launched, an echo had to come back home.

  ‘Then maybe the receiving equipment is faulty.’

  They were watching for those photons with equipment on Earth, in low Earth orbit, on the Moon, and with the big Trojan-point radio telescope array. Short of the sun going nova, what fault could take down all of that? Kate, Michelangelo had to work. There are inquiries going on at every level from the lab boys to the White House, but they’ll all conclude the same damn thing.

  In swam an image of Malenfant, justifying himself on some TV show. ‘There’s nothing wrong with our technology,’ he was saying. ‘So maybe there is something wrong with the universe …’

  See?

  Kate sighed. ‘So what’s the story? Obscure space experiment fails in unexplained manner … There’s no meat in that sandwich.’

  Do what you do best. Focus on the people. Go find Malenfant. And ask him about Voyager.

  ‘Voyager – the spacecraft?’

  You know, when it fires, that damn laser destroys itself. Makes a single cry to the stars, then dies, a billion dollars burned up in a fraction of a second. Kind of a neat metaphor for our wonderful military-industrial complex, don’t you think?

  She failed to find Malenfant. She did find his son. She cleared her desk and went to see the son, two days after the failed experiment.

  Meanwhile, so far as she could see, the world continued to turn, people went about their business, and the news was the usual buzz of politics and personalities – of Earthbound matters like the water war in the Sahel, the latest Chinese incursion into depopulated Russia, the Attorney General’s continuing string of extra-marital affairs.

  Most people knew about the strange news from Alpha Centauri. Few seemed to think it mattered. The truth was, for all the mutterings of Rodent and his ilk, she wasn’t sure herself. She still sensed there was a story here, however.

  And she was growing a little scared.

  Mike Malenfant, aged 30, lived with his wife, Saranne, in a suburb of Houston called Clear Lake.

  He opened the door. ‘Oh. Ms Manzoni.’

  ‘Call me Kate … Have we met?’

  ‘No.’ He grinned at her. ‘But Malenfant told me about you, and what you said to him the night of Michelangelo. Seemed to bug him more than the failure itself.’

  She thought, He calls his dad by his surname? Father-son rivalry? He didn’t look much like his father: rounder, smaller, with dense black hair he must have inherited from his mother. ‘Uh, would you rather I left?’

  ‘No. My dad is a little 1970s sometimes. I don’t have a problem with what you do. How did you find me? We keep our name out of the books.’

  That wouldn’t have stopped her, she thought. But it had been easier than that. ‘I played a hunch. Malenfant used to live here, with Emma. So I guessed –’

  He grinned again. ‘You guessed right. Malenfant will be even more pissed to know he’s so predictable.’ He took her indoors and introduced his wife, Saranne: pretty, heavily pregnant, tired-looking. ‘Tea?’

  With a camera drone hovering discreetly at her shoulder, Kate began gently to interview the couple.

  Close to the Johnson Space Center, Clear Lake was a place of retro-chic wooden-framed houses backing onto the fractal-edged water. This had long been a favoured domicile of NASA astronauts and their families. When Malenfant’s career had taken him away from Houston and NASA, son Mike had happily – so it seemed – taken over the house he had grown up in, with its battered rowboat still tied up at the back.

  Some of what Mike had to say – about the life of a soft-muscled, intellectual boy growing up as the son of America’s favourite maverick astronaut – was illuminating, and might make a useful colour piece some day. So Kate wasn’t being entirely dishonest. But her main objective, of course, was to keep them talking until Malenfant showed up – as he surely would, since she’d sent a provocative note to his message service to say she was coming.

  Mike hadn’t followed his father’s career path. He had become a virtual character designer, moderately successful in his own right. Now, with his business-partner wife expecting their first child, this was maybe a peak time of his life. But even so he didn’t seem to resent the unspoken and obvious truth that Kate was here because he was Malenfant’s son, not for himself alone.

  One thing that was immediately nailed home in her awareness was how much Mike – and, it seemed, Malenfant himself – missed Emma: Mike’s mother, Malenfant’s wife, taken away by cancer before she was forty. She wondered how much of a difference it might have made to everybody’s lives if Emma had survived.

  As the low-afternoon sun started to glint off the stretch of lake out back, the old man arrived.

  He launched into her as soon as he walked in the door. ‘Ms Manzoni, the great pap-peddler. You aren’t welcome here. This is my son’s home, and I have a job to do. So why don’t you take your drones and your implants and shove them up –�
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  ‘As far as the implants are concerned,’ Kate said dryly, ‘somebody already did that for me.’

  That got a laugh out of Mike, and the mood softened a little.

  But Malenfant kept up his glare. ‘What do you want, Manzoni?’

  ‘Tell me about Voyager,’ she said.

  Mike and Saranne looked quizzical. Malenfant looked away.

  Aha, she thought.

  ‘Voyager,’ she said to Mike and Saranne. ‘Two space probes designed to explore the outer planets, launched in the 1970s. Now they are floating out of the solar system. About a decade ago they crossed the heliopause – the place where the star winds blow, the boundary of interstellar space – right, Malenfant? But the Voyagers are still working, even now, and the big radio telescopes can still pick up their feeble signals … A heroic story, in its way.’

  Mike shrugged. ‘So, a history lesson. And?’

  ‘And now something’s happened to them. That’s all I know.’

  Malenfant was stony-faced, arms folded.

  For a moment it looked like developing into an impasse. But then, to Kate’s surprise, Saranne stepped forward, hands resting on her belly. ‘Maybe you should tell her what she wants to know, Malenfant.’

  It was as if Malenfant was suddenly aware she was there. ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s a lot of buzz about your experiment.’ Saranne was dark, her eyes startling blue. ‘There’s something strange going on, isn’t there? Don’t you think we’ve a right to know about it?’

  Malenfant softened. ‘Saranne – it’s not so easy. Sometimes there is no use asking questions, because there are no meaningful answers.’

  Kate frowned. ‘And sometimes there are answers, but there’s nothing to be done – is that it, Malenfant? Don’t tell the children the truth, for fear of frightening them –’

  His anger returned. ‘This has nothing the hell to do with you.’

  Saranne said, ‘Come on, Malenfant. If she’s found out something, so will everybody else soon enough. This isn’t 1960.’

  He barked a bitter laugh.

  ‘Voyager,’ Kate prompted.

  ‘Voyager. Okay. Yesterday the Deep Space Network lost contact with the spacecraft. Both Voyagers 1 and 2. Within a couple of hours.’

  Mike said, ‘Is that so significant? They were creaky old relics. They were going to fade out sometime.’

  Malenfant eyed his son. ‘Both together? After so long? How likely is that? And anyhow we had a handle on how much power they had left. It shouldn’t have happened.’

  Kate said, ‘Was this after the comet, or before?’

  Mike said, ‘What comet?’

  ‘The one that went missing when your father’s laser tried to echo-sound it.’

  Malenfant frowned. Evidently he hadn’t expected her to know about that either. ‘After,’ he said. ‘After the comet.’

  Kate tried to put it together in her head. A series of anomalies, then: that missing planet of Alpha Centauri, a comet out in the dark, the lonely Voyagers. All evaporating.

  Each event a little closer to the sun.

  Something is coming this way, she thought. Like footprints in the dew.

  A softscreen chimed; Mike left the room to answer it.

  Malenfant kept up his glare. ‘Come on, Manzoni. Forget Voyager. What do you really want here?’

  Kate glanced at Malenfant and Saranne, and took another flyer. ‘What’s the source of the tension between you two?’

  Malenfant snapped, ‘Don’t answer.’

  But Saranne said evenly, ‘It’s this.’ She stroked her bump. ‘Baby Michael.’ She watched Malenfant’s uncomfortable reaction. ‘See? He’s not even happy with the fact that we know Michael’s sex, that we named him before his birth.’

  ‘You know it’s not that,’ Malenfant growled.

  Kate guessed, ‘Has the child been enhanced?’

  ‘Nothing outrageous,’ Saranne said quickly. ‘Anti-ageing treatments: telomerase, thymus and pineal-gland adjustments. In the womb he’s been farmed for stem cells and organ clones. And we chose a few regenerative options: regrowing fingers, toes and spinal column …’

  ‘He’ll be able to hibernate,’ Malenfant said, his tone dangerously even. ‘Like a goddamn bear. And he might live forever. Nobody knows.’

  ‘He’s going to grow up in a dangerous world. He needs all the help he can get.’

  Malenfant said, ‘He’s your kid. You can do what you like.’

  ‘He’s your grandson. I wish I had your blessing.’ But her tone was cool; Kate saw she was winning this battle.

  Malenfant turned on Kate. ‘How about your family, Ms Manzoni?’

  She shrugged. ‘My parents split when I was a kid. I haven’t seen my father since. My mother –’

  ‘Another broken home. Jesus.’

  ‘It’s not a big deal, Malenfant. I was the last in my high school class to go through a parental divorce.’ She smiled at Saranne, who smiled back.

  But Malenfant, visibly unhappy, was lashing out at Kate, where he couldn’t at Saranne. ‘What kind of way to live is that? It’s as if we’re all crazy.’

  Saranne said carefully, ‘Malenfant has a certain amount of difficulty with the modern world.’

  Kate said, ‘Malenfant, I don’t believe you’re such a sour old man. You ought to be happy for Saranne and Mike.’

  Saranne said, ‘And I sure have the right to do the best for my kid, Malenfant.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, you do,’ he said. ‘And the responsibility. God knows I admire you for that. But can’t you see that if everyone does what’s best for themselves alone, we’re all going to hell in a handbasket? What kind of world will it be where the rich can buy immortality, while the poor continue to starve as fast as they breed?’

  Kate thought she understood. ‘You always look to the big picture, Malenfant. The Fermi Paradox, the destiny of mankind. Right? But most people don’t think like that. Most people focus the way Saranne is focused, on whatever is best for their kids. What else can we do?’

  ‘Take a look around. We’re living in the world that kind of thinking has created.’

  She forced a smile. ‘We’ll muddle through.’

  ‘If we get the chance,’ Malenfant said coldly.

  Mike came back into the room, looking stunned. ‘That was the Vice President. There’s a helicopter on the way from Ellington Air Force Base. For you, Malenfant.’

  Malenfant said, ‘I’ll be damned.’

  Saranne looked scared. ‘The Vice President?’

  Kate frowned. ‘Malenfant, don’t you think you should find out what’s going on before you get to Washington?’ She walked to a wall and slapped it, opening up its comms facilities. ‘Maybe you ought to ask Cornelius Taine.’

  ‘Ask him what?’

  She thought quickly, wondering where those footsteps would next fall. What was the furthest planet from the sun? … ‘Pluto. Ask him about Pluto.’

  Malenfant evidently didn’t enjoy being told what to do by the likes of Kate Manzoni. But he punched in ident codes, and began to interact with a small patch of the wall.

  Kate and the others waited; it wasn’t a moment for small talk. Kate strained to hear the sounds of the chopper.

  At length Malenfant straightened up. Before him, embedded in the smart wall, was an image of a planet: blue, streaked with white cloud.

  Kate’s heart thumped. ‘Earth?’

  He shook his head. ‘And not Pluto either. This is a live image of Neptune. Almost as far out as Pluto. A strange blue world, blue as Earth, on the edge of interstellar space …’

  Saranne said uneasily, ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Not Neptune itself. Triton, its moon. Look.’ He pointed to a blurred patch of light, close to Neptune’s ghostly limb. When he tapped the wall, the patch moved, quite suddenly. Another tap, another move. Kate couldn’t see any pattern to the moves, as if the moon was no longer following a regular orbit.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.


  ‘Triton has started to … flicker. It hops around its orbit – or adopts another orbit entirely – or sometimes it vanishes, or is replaced by a ring system.’ He scratched his bald pate. ‘According to Cornelius, Triton was an oddity – circling Neptune backwards – probably created in some ancient collision event.’

  ‘Even odder now,’ Mike said dryly.

  ‘Cornelius says that all these images – the multiple moons, the rings – are all possibilities, alternate outcomes of how that ancient collision might have come about. As if other realities are folding down into our own.’ He searched their faces, seeking understanding.

  Mike said, ‘Malenfant, what has this to do with your laser shot?’

  Malenfant spread his hands. ‘Mike, I talk big, but we humans are pretty insignificant in the bigger scheme of things. Out there in the dark, somebody is playing pool with a moon. How can we have affected that?’

  Kate took a breath. Neptune: a long way away, out in the dark, where the planets are cloudy spheres, and the sun’s light is weak and rectilinear. But out there, she thought, something strange is stirring: something with awesome powers indeed, beyond human comprehension.

  And it’s coming this way. Whatever it is. She shuddered, and suppressed the urge to cross herself.

  Saranne asked, ‘Are the stars still shining?’

  It struck Kate as an odd, naive question, but Malenfant seemed touched. ‘Yes,’ he said gently. ‘Yes, the stars are still shining.’

  Kate heard the flap of chopper blades. On impulse she snapped, ‘Malenfant – take me with you.’

  He laughed and turned away.

  Mike said, ‘Maybe you should do it, Malenfant. I have the feeling she’s smarter than you. Somebody needs to be thinking when you meet the Vice President.’

  Malenfant turned to Kate. ‘Quite a story you’re building up here, Manzoni.’

  If, she thought, I ever get to file it.

  Outside, the noise of the descending chopper mounted. The reddening evening light dappled on the water of the lake, as it had always done, as if the strange lights in the sky were of no more import than a bad dream.