Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  “Maybe?”

  “Listen, Ms. Della, there are opportunities as well as threats here. If you feed a nugget neutrons or light ions it will eat them, giving off energy in the process. You could conceivably throw in radioactive waste. Tritium, for instance. Then, when the nugget is fat enough, you could bombard it with heavy ions to split it. Two nuggets. Then four, then eight… A safe, efficient, clean energy source. Extremely valuable. And—”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t have to outline the weapons potential. More than half the researchers here are from military labs.”

  “Okay. And I take it the children won’t tell you how they managed all this.”

  “No.”

  So, Maura thought, Tinkerbell was at once a great possible boon to humankind, and at the same time a great possible threat. Both carrot and stick. Almost as if the children planned it that way.

  These Blue children, it seemed, had upped the stakes. For the first time a group of children had moved beyond eerie behavior and startling intellectual stunts to the physical, to something approaching superhuman powers.

  Already we were terrified of them, she thought. But if… when this news gets out…

  “Okay, Dan. What now?”

  “The children want to talk to you.”

  “Me? I have no power here.”

  “But the children know you. At least, Tom Tybee does.”

  She closed her eyes, took a breath. But who am I negotiating with, exactly? And on behalf of whom? It seemed humankind’s relationship with its strange Blue offspring was about to reach a new crisis.

  Dan grinned. “It’s take-me-to-your-leader time, Representative.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  They walked out of the lab room. Her shadow, cast by the trapped cosmological glow, streamed ahead of her.

  Anna was waiting for her in the principal’s office. Maura walked in with Reeve and Dan Ystebo.

  When they entered, Anna backed away against the wall. Maura could see bruises on her neck, and when she opened her mouth she was missing a lower front tooth. “Just you,” Anna said to Maura. Her voice had the faintest trace of Aussie twang.

  Principal Reeve said, “Now, Anna—”

  Maura held up her hand.

  “Just you,” Anna said. “That was the deal.”

  Maura nodded. “If you say so. But I need your help. I’d like Dan here—” Maura indicated him. “ — to stay with me. I don’t understand as much of the technical stuff as I ought to.” She forced a smile. “Without Dan to interpret, it will take me a lot longer to figure out what you want. I guarantee, positively guarantee, he’s no threat to you. But if you want him to leave, he leaves.”

  Anna’s cool gray eyes flickered. “He can stay. Not her.”

  Reeve was visibly tired, stressed-out, baffled, angry. “Representative, she’s a child. And you’re letting her give you orders.”

  “We nearly allowed her to be killed, Principal,” Maura said gently. “I think she has a right to a little control over the situation. Don’t you?”

  Reeve shook her head, furious. But she left, slamming the door behind her.

  Anna showed no reaction.

  Maura said, “We’re going to sit down, Anna. All right? In these two chairs, on this side of the desk. You can sit, or stand, whatever you want.”

  Anna nodded, and Dan and Maura sat down.

  Anna said, “Would you like a drink?”

  Maura was surprised. “I — yes. Yes, please.”

  Anna crossed to the water cooler, neatly extracted two paper cups, walked gracefully around the table and handed them to Dan and Maura.

  “Thank you,” Maura said, sipping the water. It was warm, a little stale. “Now, Anna. Tell me what it is you want.”

  Anna dug her hand in a pocket of her gold jumpsuit, pulled out a crumpled piece of paper, and pressed it on the desk. She pushed it across to Maura.

  The paper looked like a page torn out of an exercise book. It contained a list written out in a childish hand, complete with errors, a couple of the longer words even phonetically spelled.

  She passed it to Dan Ystebo. “Deuterium,” he read. “A linear electrostatic decelerator… Maura, I think they want to grow Tinkerbell. Maybe even make her some companions.”

  Anna said, “We will give you the Tinkerbell. And others.” She frowned with the effort of speaking, as if English were becoming unfamiliar. “They could light cities, drive starships.” She looked at Maura. “Do you understand?”

  “So far,” Maura said dryly.

  “We have other gifts to offer,” said Anna. “In the future.”

  “More technology?”

  Anna was concentrating, a crease appearing in the middle of her perfect forehead. “We are still learning, here at this center. And elsewhere.”

  Dan leaned forward. “Are you in touch with the others? The other children, like you? In the other centers? How?”

  She returned his gaze calmly. “We have suggestions. Ways of making food. Ways to make medicine, to make ill people well, to make them—” that pause, the struggle with the language again “ — not grow old. And we have better ways for people to be together.”

  Dan frowned. “What do you mean? Politics? Ethics?”

  “I don’t know those words.”

  Maura said, “Better ways for people like me to run things.”

  “Yes. But nobody should have to run things.”

  Dan laughed out loud. “She gotcha there, Representative.”

  “We have to work all this out,” Anna said.

  “I understand,” Maura said evenly. But the promise is there. “And you will give us all this.”

  “In return.”

  “In return for what?”

  “No harm.”

  Maura nodded. “You must understand I can’t promise you anything. Those in charge here have a wider duty, to protect people. Do you understand that people are frightened of you?”

  Anna returned her gaze, and Maura felt chilled.

  “This is an important time,” Anna said suddenly. “Everything we do now is very important. Because everything comes out of

  here.”

  “Out of the here and now,” Dan said. “The future flows from this moment. We cast long shadows. Is that what you mean?”

  Anna didn’t reply. She seemed to be withdrawing.

  Dan was frustrated. “Why are you here? To help us avoid the Carter catastrophe? Are you from the future, Anna?”

  There was no reply, and Maura put her hand on Dan’s arm to silence him.

  The sunlight outside the center buildings was hot, flat, glaring.

  Tinkerbell in a cage.

  Everything Maura had seen seemed unreal, remote, as if swimming away into space after Reid Malenfant.

  “Quite a prospectus those kids offer,” Dan was saying.

  “Yes.”

  “New technologies, new medicine, new clean power. What sounded like a Utopian political and ethical framework. Peace and prosperity for all.”

  “Absolutely,” Maura said.

  “So, you think anyone will listen?”

  “Not a hope in hell.”

  Dan sighed. “But we’ll want the goodies even so, won’t we?”

  “You bet. You think we can afford to give them what they want? The deuterium, the decelerator…”

  “Representative, I’m not sure if we can afford not to.” Dan glanced around to be sure nobody else could overhear them. “So here we have these children building their magic cage just in time for this quark nugget — which has been wandering the universe since the Big Bang — to come floating in, ripe to be captured. And not only that, it arrives in the nick of time to save Anna from the evil clutches of wacko Wayne Dupree. And on exactly the right trajectory, too.”

  “Coincidence?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Not in a million years,” she said.

  Ystebo scratched his belly. “I’d offer you longer odds than that… I th
ink we’re dealing with another of those damn causal loops. Somebody, far enough downstream, has the technology to reach into the past to deflect the path of a quark nugget just so, to make it arrive right on cue to save the day. It may have been traveling a billion years, just to get here and play its part. The ulti-

  mate deus ex. machinal

  “And that makes you feel…”

  “Awed. Terrified.”

  “Dan, are they threatening us?”

  “Not directly. But, look: if we don’t cooperate, the children will know in the future, when they grow up, when they get downstream. I mean, they’ll remember what we did, and they’ll send more quark nuggets from the Big Bang and get what they want anyhow, maybe causing a lot more damage.” He seemed to be shivering, despite the heavy warmth of the sun. “If you think about it, it could happen any moment, depending on the decisions we make. It won’t even be necessary to wait for consequent actions to flow; the children will know. Representative, we can’t be sure what we’re dealing with here. A multiheaded monster spanning past, present, and future. The children have, effectively, unlimited power…”

  The thought of the children, their grown versions, in the future — in the far downstream, with much enhanced powers — reaching back with some kind of time-manipulation technology to right the wrongs they suffered here was startling. Children have been victims throughout history, she thought bleakly; maybe all children should have such power, and we would treat them with respect.

  But then she found herself thinking like a politician, as someone responsible for her nation’s destiny: Now, assuming this threat from the downstream children is real, how would you go about eliminating it?

  Why, by making sure the children never reach the downstream. Of course.

  Immediately she filed that ugly logic, its foul conclusion, in the back of her mind.

  But she knew it would be with her, part of her calculation, from now on; and she hated herself for it.

  “So,” Dan said. “What do we do now?”

  “The same as always,” Maura said briskly. “We try not to do too much damage while we wait to see what happens next. Oh. Is there any way we can contact the mother? Tom Tybee’s mother?”

  Dan laughed. “Don’t you know where she is right now?”

  They walked on toward the security fence, where their car was waiting.

  June Tybee

  The throwing-up had started when Bucephalus was still on the

  ground.

  That was nerves rather than space sickness. But it began in earnest once the injection to Earth orbit was complete, and the crew were put through the complexity of docking with the preor-bited tanks of fuel required to reach Cruithne. Then when the diarrhea cut in, the recycled air filled with a stench so powerful June knew they would be living with it for the rest of the trip.

  And you couldn’t open the windows, not once.

  June suffered herself. Most of the troopers did. But she got over it four, five days out.

  Not everybody adapted so well, however. Eight troopers — sixteen percent of the total — -just kept barfing and shitting and getting weaker and weaker, unable even to hold down a morsel of food. So they had been allocated a corner of one of the decks, screened off from the rest, and were basically treated as casualties, nonfunctional for the duration of the voyage, all the way out to Cruithne and back.

  The rest of the troopers endured tough exercise regimes: three or more hours a day on treadmills, on elasticated ropes for stretching against, and so forth. Even so, the medics said, they would likely suffer some longer-term physiological damage: bone calcium depletion and other shit. But that could be treated later, when they got back to Earth. On their return in glory, after the medals and the handshakes from the prez, they would all be retired on fat pensions, with a full entitlement to sell their stories to the highest bidders. Plenty of time to put right a little calcium loss then.

  What was more important now was getting through the mission in one piece, so June could get back to Bill and Tom and Billie and the rest of her life.

  A week out, the troopers dismantled the interior of this big five-deck troop module, opening up a giant cylindrical space like a huge oil can, and they began their zero G exercises in earnest.

  At first her head felt like a bag of fluid that just sloshed about every time she moved. But that passed, and she soon found herself ricocheting back and forth across the oil can, practicing landing, deploying the pitons and tethers that would hold her to the asteroid’s surface, readying her weapons, smoothly working up .to a fully suited drill. All of these maneuvers were basically impossible on Earth, despite the efforts at simulation in the big NASA flotation-tank facilities.

  June found, in fact, that once she was over her sickness she reveled in the freedom of zero G — to be able to fly through the air, free to move in three dimensions, without the clinging resistance of water.

  Some of the troopers groused when, three weeks out from home, they started exercises sealed up in their full space suits. But June welcomed it. Sealed off from the rest of the troopers, she only had to smell herself — a sour stink of sweat and determination.

  Despite the distraction of the training, the long journey out soon became pretty hellish. She was out in the middle of interplanetary space, after all; she really hadn’t expected this sense of confinement, even claustrophobia.

  And the tedium of life aboard a spacecraft was dismaying: the hours she had to spend every day on the dull, repetitive exercises or, worse, cleanup duties — scraping algae off of the walls, fixing water-recycling systems that had proven balky since they left Earth, and so on, a lot of such work in this thrown-together, gremlin-ridden ship.

  The troopers’ spare time, what there was of it, was taken up with what you’d expect. TV, card games (Velcro strips on the back), and a surprising amount of casual sex — hetero, homo, bi, solo, couples, and larger groups — much of it exploring the possibilities of the zero G regime. June had avoided all of that, and nobody had bothered her; the fifty-fifty male-female ratio saw to that.

  Instead, she spent a lot of her time reading.

  The accounts of the early astronauts, for instance. Not the flash-bang glory of Apollo and the rest of the early U.S. program, but the Russians: dogged cosmonauts with names like Dobro-volsky, Patsayev, Volkov, Lazarev, Makorov, Popovich…

  From as early as 1971 the cosmonauts had endured hundreds of days in low Earth orbit in Soviet space stations, the Salyuts and the Mir, just boring a hole in the sky, nowhere to go, trying to keep themselves alive and sane. Some of those old guys had traveled farther and longer than she had — if not in a straight line — and they had only dubious tractor-factory technology to rely on. And some of the cosmonauts hadn’t come home.

  Reading their accounts somehow made the Bucephalus less of a prison, for her.

  That and thinking about Tom and Billie.

  Faster than Reid Malenfant, the Bucephalus streaked across space toward Cruithne.

  Maura Della:

  Open journal. March 3,2012.

  It was, of course, the extraordinary incident at Nevada that led to the decision — the right one, I think — to shut down the Blue education centers. The idea was to try to liquidate the threat, eliminate the unknowns, represented by the Blue children. Those responsible for the safety of the nation had no other choice.

  The media images of cold-eyed childcare professionals backed up by heavily armed troops going into the centers and bundling bewildered, unresisting kids out of their beds are offensive to anyone with a soul. However strange these children might be they are still just kids. But it had to be done.

  Anyway I know that what offends people about those images is not so much the handling of the children itself but the way we were made to confront our own hypocrisy. Everybody has always known, in their hearts, that the true purpose of the centers was containment. Everybody is complicit. Guilty, ashamed, but still afraid, we turned away.

  Now the children, s
eparated from their fellows, have disappeared into secure environments, mostly military, all across the country. Out of sight they will be forgotten; separated, they will be contained. That’s the idea anyhow.

  It isn’t particularly palatable. But the problem did appear to be approaching a resolution.

  Except at Nevada itself.

  The wisest thing for me to do would have been to keep out of it; no matter what the resolution to the situation, there was absolutely nothing to gain for me. But staying away just wasn’t an option. My damnable conscience, a true handicap for a -politician, saw to that.

  Which is how I came to be at the center when the climax came…

  Dan Ystebo was waiting at the security gate when Maura got back to the center.

  A week after the quark-nugget incident, the grade-school facade of the place had been stripped away. Most of the staff, including Principal Reeve, were gone. Security was tighter than ever, with what looked to Maura like a substantial military force deployed around the perimeter fence and across the compound. Guys with guns, in heavy body armor.

  Dan walked her briskly to the heart of the compound. He looked fat and flustered, but she suspected he was relishing his informality and sloppiness compared to the stiff military types who now ran the place. Many of the rooms had been cleared out and given over to military functions — weapons storage, surveillance, a command post — with here and there a discarded toy or the dangling corner of some child’s painting as deeply incongruous reminders of the life and youth that had, if briefly and under restraint, come to this corner of the Nevada desert.

  “I prepared you a written report,” Dan was saying. “I can download it to—”

  “Just summarize.”

  “The first stage of the clearance operation went to plan. Inasmuch as these goons had a plan at all…”

  Most of the children, Dan said, had been cleared out of the center on the first sweep. But a hard core of a dozen or so had barricaded themselves in one of the lab rooms and wouldn’t be moved. And one of the children was — had to be, of course — little Tom Tybee.