Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  “What?”

  “Well,, it’s possible Michael has had a little help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  He looked into the air, his pale blue eyes milky with light. “You have to think like a downstreamer. Anticipate them.”

  “You really are insane, Cornelius.”

  He smiled. He turned and walked away after the Portuguese Brother.

  She had no choice but to follow him.

  They returned to the reception area, and waited for the child, Michael, to be brought to them.

  Michael:

  In the rain house, the water stopped. He sat, shivering.

  Then warm air gushed from the ceiling over him. The light grew strange, and he felt his skin tingle.

  The door banged open, and the Sister returned.

  He cowered, burying his hands between his thighs, but she hauled his hands out and dragged him to his feet.

  She pulled him from the room into the open air. The sun felt harsh on his skin, which no longer had its warm screen of dirt. There were clothes here, but they weren’t his. She prodded him. Her meaning was clear.

  Reluctantly he bent down and picked up the clothes, and pulled them on. They were crisp and white, a T-shirt and long trousers and even socks and a pair of shoes. But they scratched his denuded skin. Besides, they had no blue circle, and he was confused.

  When he was dressed, the Sister grabbed his hand again and dragged him once more.

  Now they walked the length of the School compound. The Sister took great long strides with a harsh, regular gait, and he had to half run to keep up. Once he almost fell. She screamed at him, evidently concerned he might have dirtied his new clothes.

  They soon left behind the dormitory blocks, their paint peeling in the endless sunlight.

  He started to feel frightened again. Although it was just a short walk from his own block, he didn’t recognize the buildings here. He must have been brought past them when he arrived here, but he didn’t remember, and he had never been so far since. Would he know his way back to his dormitory again? He tried to memorize the buildings he passed, but there was too much newness here.

  He tried dragging his toe in the dirt, so as to leave a trail he might follow to get back. But when the Sister saw him she shouted at him because he had soiled his new white shoes, and she cuffed his head.

  They were coming toward one of the buildings now. It had an open door, darkness inside. There was a fence beyond this building, and beyond that the desert stretched away, flat and empty.

  The Brothers had told them all about the desert. It stretched away a long way from the School, so far you would soon collapse of thirst, and even if you did manage to cross it you would find people who would punish you and send you back. So even if you somehow got out of the School there was nowhere to go, nobody to help you.

  The Sister dragged him toward the dark doorway. He couldn’t help but pull back. This was the end of the journey, and whatever awaited him, whatever he had been prepared for in the building with the rain and the light, was here, inside this building.

  Sometimes children were taken away from the dormitory and never came back. Would he find their bleached bones piled up here?

  The Sister dragged him inside, and he tried not to scream.

  Cornelius Taine:

  I can tell you now why I believe Michael is so important.

  I have had long arguments with Malenfant over this: Malenfant, who feels it is callous to manipulate the lives of children so.

  But Michael is not merely a child.

  The Milton project was, of course, a cover. We have our own theory on the origin of the Blues, the bright children.

  We believe the downstreamers must be trying to signal us. Because we would, if we knew what they know. But we’re not convinced that some technological gadget is the correct solution, even though we’ve got to try.

  Perhaps instead the downstreamers are also targeting something else. Perhaps they are targeting the most widespread programmable information storage system on the planet.

  I mean, of course, the human brain. Especially the brains of the young: empty, impressionable, easily shaped.

  We don’t know how. We don’t know what it would feel like. We don’t seem to hear downstreamer voices in our heads.

  Or perhaps we do — perhaps we always have — but we just don’t recognize them.

  Quite a thought, isn’t it? Is it possible that Michael — born into ancient dust and squalor, unable to read or write, and yet dreaming of a four-dimensional universe — is more than some precocious genius, that he is actually being influenced, somehow, by time-traveler beams from the future?

  It may sound fantastic, a dip into insanity.

  But what if it’s true?

  And… what if Michael and his generation aren’t the first? There have always been isolated geniuses, with insights and wisdom that seem to transcend the time and place they were born into.

  Perhaps this has been going on a long time.

  Michael is a treasure beyond price. Malenfant seems to understand this now.

  None of us yet knows where this extraordinary multifaceted journey is taking us. But it is clear to me that the boy, Michael, and this man, Malenfant, together are the key element.

  I feel I have been groping in the dark. And yet I feel proud to have reached so far, to have been the catalyst to this essential relationship.

  The first time Malenfant met Michael he seemed electrified, as if by recognition.

  The fate of the other Blue children, incidentally, is irrelevant.

  Michael:

  Inside the building it was cold. Air blew on his skin, chill and dry. There was a table and chairs and doors, but no people here, no children.

  The Sister pushed him to a chair opposite the table. He sat down.

  The Sister went to one of the doors. She opened it, and he glimpsed people beyond: adults talking and holding glasses, drinks. The door closed behind the Sister, and he was left alone.

  He glanced around. There was nobody here. He could see no cameras or softscreens.

  He slid off the chair and crossed to the table, feet padding on the hard floor. There was a paper plate on the table with something on it, curling and dry and brown. Perhaps it was the rind of some fruit. He crammed a piece of it into his mouth and pushed the rest inside his shirt. The rind was sharp on his tongue, tough and hard to chew.

  The door opened abruptly. He turned. People came in: the Sister and another woman.

  When the Sister saw him with the plate her face twisted. He saw her fist bunch, but something made her keep from hitting him. Instead she bent down and grabbed his face, pinching his cheeks until he had to spit out the rind onto the floor.

  The other woman came forward. She looked familiar.

  Memory floated into his head, unwelcome. She had come to the village, in the days before. Stoney. Stef had called her Stoney.

  Suddenly he knew what they were going to do to him. After Stoney had come to the village, he had been taken to this School. Now here she was again, and he would be taken away again, somewhere worse than this, where he would have to learn the rules over again.

  Stoney took a step toward him.

  He fell to the ground, covering his belly and head, waiting for the blows.

  But Stoney was reaching for him with open hands. She stroked his back. He looked up in surprise.

  She was doing something he had never seen an adult do before. Something he’d thought only children did.

  She was crying.

  Emma Stoney:

  A week after Emma got back from Australia, Cornelius called a meeting-at the Mount Palomar Observatory, from where he had been trying to observe Cruithne.

  Emma — working furiously, unable to sleep, unable to put out of her mind what she’d seen in Australia — tried to veto this. But of course she was overruled.

  And so, at the behest of Cornelius Taine and his bright insanities, she was dragged across the count
ry once more.

  To reach Mount Palomar, Emma had to fly into San Diego, and then she faced an hour’s drive east up into the San Jacinto Mountains. The highway was modern. Her driver — a chatty, overweight woman — told her the highway had been laid by prisoners from a local jail.

  They reached the group of telescopes that made up the observatory. The site was dominated by the dome of the giant two-hundred-inch reflector: a national monument, its heart a mirror made of twenty tons of honeycombed glass. But tonight, even though the skies were clear — if stained a little by sodium-lit smog — the big dome was closed up.

  Cornelius Taine met Emma at her car. She turned away from him, refusing to speak.

  Apparently undisturbed, he led her to a small support building. Brightly lit, the hut was crammed with humming information technology, much of it looking a little antiquated. There were a few junior researchers working here, quietly bullshitting as they gave up another night of their lives to this slow, obsessive work, waiting for Earth to pass through the starlight shadow of some rock in space. The dedication, the ingenuity with which data was squeezed out of such invisibly small opportunities, was awesome.

  They aren’t here, she thought, unlike Cornelius, because of the Carter catastrophe, whatever Cruithne means for him. They aren’t even paid well. They just do it because…

  Actually, she didn’t really understand why they did it.

  In this nervous, overcompensating crew, Cornelius in his black suit looked ice-cool and in control.

  They reached a small, cluttered office. Emma had arrived late; the others, it seemed, had already started.

  Malenfant was pacing the room, his movements large and aggressive and exaggerated. She hadn’t seen him since she got back from Australia. Dan Ystebo was sitting there, cradling a doughnut, looking obscurely pleased with himself.

  And Emma was deeply disturbed to see that Michael was here: the boy from Africa whom she had retrieved from the nightmare camp in the Australian desert. He was wearing loose, clean clothes. He was sitting in a corner of the office with his back to a wall. He was playing with a prism, letting its scattered light wash over his eyes.

  She hissed to Malenfant, “What is he doing here?”

  “I don’t know yet, Emma,” Malenfant said. “I know it seems wrong. But I don’t think we have any choice.”

  She frowned. He sounded frightened.

  Cornelius stood by them. “Michael is safe and well, his situation legally controlled.” His eyes were very pale, like pieces of glass. “You know, Emma, if you were so concerned about this boy, you could have taken the initiative. You could have tried to find him a guardian of your choice, for instance. But you didn’t. You’re like all the bleeding hearts who have been shouting loud and long recently about the Schools and the treatment of the Blue children. As long as the kids were out of sight you didn’t care what happened to them.”

  She found she couldn’t meet his eyes.

  She noticed that even as Michael watched his prism, his eyes flickered, his gaze traveling over the adults. He doesn’t trust us, she thought. He’s expecting us to turn on him again, as we — the adult world — have done before.

  She sat down, troubled. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Tense, excited, Malenfant said, “You got something, haven’t you? Something on Cruithne.”

  Cornelius nodded curtly. “To business. One thing at a time, yes? Thanks to our friend Dan here, the squidjiave survived on Cruithne.” He tapped at touchpads embedded in the table surface. “Unfortunately they aren’t talking to us. They are even turning away fireflies controlled by the squid faction who have remained in the primary Nautilus hab bubble — a faction who seem to be reasonably loyal. We’re trying to establish direct control of the fireflies ourselves, bypassing the cephalopods. In the meantime, ironically, we have had to rely on remote sensors, from Earth and Earth-orbital satellites, to figure out what is happening up there.”

  Malenfant said to Emma, “Ironic because we sent the squid up there in the first place to give us a better look at Cruithne.”

  Cornelius started to bring up data — graphs, bar charts — on the softscreens embedded in the tabletop. “You’d be surprised how much we can figure out about an asteroid just by looking at it. We can see how bright our asteroid is by comparing it with nearby stars, see how fast it’s moving by watching it against the background sky, see how its brightness changes so we can guess its shape, see what color the rocks are and so guess what they’re made of. Also we use radio telescopes to bounce radar beams off Cruithne’s surface. By comparing the echo with the outgoing beam, we can tell even more about the asteroid: its shape, rotation, surface properties, position and velocity, composition.

  “We’ve found that the surface morphology of some parts of the asteroid is unusual. And not just because of the presence of the squid habs. We did manage to pick up a signal from one of the firefly drones that got close enough to return an image, a partial image, before it was turned away.”

  Malenfant snapped, “Close enough to what?”

  For answer, Cornelius flashed up an image in the tabletop softscreens.

  Emma shared a firefly’s view of Cruithne:

  A star field; a lumpy horizon; a broken, pitted, dark gray surface highlighted by a light source somewhere behind her, presumably fixed to the robot whose electronic eyes she was looking through. She saw bits of the firefly in the foreground: a metal manipulator arm, a couple of tethers pinning the drone to the surface. Her view was restricted; the drone was low, hugging the surface, bringing the asteroid’s horizon in close.

  And on that horizon she saw—

  What?

  It was an arc, bright blue. It seemed utterly smooth, geometrically pure. It stretched from one side of the frame to the other, obviously artificial.

  She felt cold. This was strange, utterly unexpected.

  “Holy shit,” Malenfant said. “It’s an artifact, isn’t it?”

  “That,” Cornelius said, “is what our AWOL squid have dug out on Cruithne. What you see is only part of the structure. After sending this the firefly was turned back. I can show you an image of the whole thing.” He tapped at his softscreen. “Taken from the ground, however. Distressingly remote, blurred.”

  Emma leaned forward. She saw a potato-shaped object — gray, lumpy, and scarred — against a dark background. “Cruithne,” she said.

  The image was animated; Cruithne rotated, gracefully, about its long axis, bringing something into view. Standing in a pit, deep and neatly round, there was a structure.

  It was a blue circle.

  Overenlarged, it was just a ring of blocky pixels. It was obviously the extension of the arc the firefly had approached. She had no way of gauging its size. There were squid habs clustered around the circle, golden splashes, not touching it directly.

  Within the circle itself there was only darkness.

  “It’s about thirty feet tall. We tried bouncing radar and laser signals off the artifact. It doesn’t have the same reflective properties as the rest of the asteroid. In fact we don’t seem to be getting any radar echo at all. It’s hard to be definitive. The clutter from the surrounding surface—”

  Malenfant said, “So what does that mean?”

  “Maybe it’s perfectly absorbent. Or maybe it’s a hole.”

  Malenfant frowned. “A hole? What kind of hole?”

  “An infinitely deep one.” Cornelius smiled. “We’re looking for a better explanation. We’ve also detected other anomalies. Radiation, high-energy stuff. Some oddities, pions and positrons. We think there must be high-energy processes going on there.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t seem to reflect light. That blue glow comes from the substance itself. It has no spectral lines. Just a broad-spectrum glow.”

  Emma shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “If it were made of atoms,” he said patiently, “any kind of atoms, it would emit precise frequencies, because the electrons in atoms jump between quantized e
nergy levels.”

  “So this isn’t made of atoms,” Dan said, wondering.

  “We should soon get back direct control of a couple of robots,” Cornelius said. “Then, if this is a hole in space, let’s find out where it leads. We’ll send in a firefly.”

  Malenfant paced, obsessive, exultant. “So it’s true. It’s an artifact, out there on Cruithne. You were right, Cornelius. This will stick it to those assholes at the FAA and NASA and Congress.”

  Emma looked inside herself, searching for awe, even terror perhaps. She found only numbness.

  Malenfant’s mind was immediately on the implications for his projects, Emma realized, his business. Not on the thing itself, its blunt reality. And yet, if this was real, everything was different.

  Wasn’t it?

  Cornelius was smiling. Dan was sitting with his mouth open. Michael’s prism-lit eyes were on her, empty and open.

  It took Cornelius another week to set it up.

  Sitting in her office in Vegas autumn sunlight, trying to deal with her work — the complex, drawn-out destruction of Bootstrap, the various related scandals concerning the end of the world and the Blue children and the squid — what she had seen on Mount Palomar seemed unreal. A light show.

  Artifacts on an asteroid? A hole in space?

  It couldn’t possibly be real.

  And yet she found it unaccountably hard to concentrate.

  Malenfant, during this period, was a pain in the ass. He threw himself into Bootstrap affairs, but it was obvious he was trying to distract himself: angry, vigorous, frustrated, burning up nervous energy. Emma did her best to keep him away from the press.

  At last Cornelius called Emma and Malenfant to a meeting at Eschatology’s offices in New York. Emma considered ignoring the request: excluding Cornelius, and the strain of madness and inhumanity he had introduced into her life.

  But, she found, she couldn’t. She had to know.

  With a sense of dread, she put her affairs on hold and flew out with Malenfant.

  Cornelius met them at Reception and led them to a conference room.