by Adam Roberts
That didn’t bother Ange. Death frightened her not at all. What worried her was not death but the dead, which is to say their overwhelming multitudinousness. If death were extinction she would be happy. After all, there is something individual, something cleanly specific about extinction. Her worry was that somehow she wouldn’t die, but would find herself in a cavernous chamber containing all the outnumbering dead doomed to spend eternity in that hell of other people the old philosophers fretted about. And wasn’t there something true about that, too? It is the individual who dies, after all; the group - the species, the genes - live on. Immortality is a mass event, and if you would flee the clamorous, overheated urgency of the great crowd then you can only, really, take solace in your own existential oblivion. A crowd flowed over Luna Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.
Her animus against her fellow creatures was not precisely rational, although it sometimes took a quasi-scientific form. This was how she thought of it, when she brought it consciously into her mind (something she did not often do): the weight of numbers is ruinous. The topography of the Earth is collapsing under the pressure even as humanity hurried to lunaform and areoform new landscapes. The petri dish is foaming with bacteria, having gobbled the disc of nutrient jelly to a sliver, and is still consuming it although starvation will necessarily follow. When she was younger, before her marriage, Ange had been quite active in a Netherlands-based Ehrlich group, agitating for much more aggressive population control. It was not enough, she thought, to flatten the rising curve; human numbers had to be actively reduced. But the group eventually fractured - some stayed true to the group’s original Pimentelist beliefs; some insisted more radical Francipettian strategies were needful; a small group declared that mass terrorist action was needed. The bickering depressed and alienated Ange; she distanced herself from her former friends, and moved to a different country.
All that felt a long time ago, now, on the far side of seven years of married life, a union that, despite being untraumatic, had been filled to the brim with ruin. To the brim. On the rare occasions she thought of her husband now, she saw in her mind’s-eye only a flank of cheek, dotted with black stubble; his D-shaped nose in profile, his eye caught by something away in the distance, something that wasn’t, ultimately, her at all.
Alicia, speaking with what she fondly thought of as insight, told Ange what her problem was. You have trouble empathising with other people, she said. That’s why you like Mars so much. It’s so underpopulated. Ange Mlinko thought this wrong on both counts. For, one thing she didn’t much like Mars - the deserts might be void of human life, but nobody ever went outside the pressurised homesteads, and they were high with the reek of population. And at any rate, it seemed to her that her problem was not a lack of empathy, but rather an excess of that debilitating human emotion. When she walked amongst a crowd of people, she felt the presence of each and every one. Most humans blanked the individuals, saw only the crowd. She seemed to lack the heartlessness to do that.
Anyway, because she could hardly sit around watching the live feed from the Leibniz, and driving herself mad with what might have been - and because large single-occupancy houses with immaculately maintained gardens don’t come cheap in this, our overcrowded world - she went back to work. She flew a dozen shuttle runs up-and-down, landing in a slowmo gout of dust in the deadeye middle of Copernicus’ crater.
Then she took a contract for a Mars flight, a two-month there-and-back. Delivering barnacles, no less. Great slabs of barnacles, to be seeded into half a dozen lakes and - whatnot, not-what, stabilise, or add texture, or begin to filter out particulates, or something. It was a three-crew job, and her colleagues were an elderly man called Maurice Sleight and a young woman called Ostriker. The launch was busy, and then a flight liaison with a chunk of ice: Ange could concentrate on doing her job and forget everything else. Then there was a hitch; their ice block, though tagged with the appropriate codes, turned out to be not their ice block at all. They had located it quickly, grappled it without difficulty and had decanted only a small percentage, but then there was a lot of angry chatter on the feed that threatened a lawsuit. So they had to put it back in the orbit in which they found it. It was an awkward manoeuvre decoupling and setting it in a clean orbit. And then they had to burn more fuel than Ange liked lining themselves up with the proper ice-piece. Maurice scowled. Ostriker said, ‘It’s all idiotic, such a waste of time ... ice is ice. Why couldn’t we just swap?’
But that wasn’t the way it worked; and so Ostriker and Maurice began over again decanting the slush into the tanks, and Ange made sure the proper remittances were sent off to claim compensation from the tagging company - it had been their foul-up, after all, not Ange’s, and even if the claimable amount was small, better that the taggers cover it.
‘It’s good,’ said Maurice, in his sepulchral voice. ‘This way, we get the unluck out of the way early.’
He was referring to the widespread fliers’ superstition: that each trip into space was allotted one piece of unluck by the Fates. It might happen early in the voyage or late, it might be trivial or catastrophic, but it would come. To suffer a minor glitch early on was, accordingly, a good thing. Ange nodded, and got on with her work. She doubted that a miscatalogue incident counted as the voyage’s unluck, although she would be happy if it did. She had, indeed, a curious relationship to superstition. As a rational and self-contained individual she understood it was all nonsense, of course. Yet it was more than simply the cultural inertia of generations of pilots and ship crew that made her follow the traditions to the letter. She sometimes wondered if individuals such as her, the ungregarious, the loners, were more likely to be superstitious than other people. The sociable individual at least had the crowd as a buffer between themselves and the unyielding, pitiless indifference of the universe: friends, family, lovers, acquaintances. The locust in the middle of its folding aerial blanket of fellow beings. But the loner had to rely on herself to develop such mental strategies as might bolster her mind against the dark.
At any rate, whilst never doubting that it was a trivial matter of confirmation bias, Ange nonetheless observed that each of her voyages was structured around one major moment of unluck, small or large.
The correct ice was loaded at last, and they were set. So, with a last roll around the Earth, they inserted themselves and made their way to Mars. Once they were in plain flight, they had nothing but spare time. Maurice withdrew to his cabin to meditate. Ange didn’t like to question the particularity of his religious observation, but he was evidently devout. Ostriker, on the other hand, showed distressing signs of wanting to be Ange’s friend, and loitered about her as she went through her routines, and gabbled and chatted.
‘The latest communication from the Cygnics is that, apparently, they’re not from Cygnus after all. So we’re not supposed to call them that anymore.’
‘Really,’ said Ange, coolly.
‘But they won’t say where they are from! Why do you think they’re so evasive?’
‘I’ve really no idea.’
‘They’re up to something. They must be! I heard that in addition to the Leibniz, the UE Strike sent a stealth ship, heavily armed. Do you think we can trust them? The aliens?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Ange, giving her words as unambiguous an inflection as she could manage, so as to communicate: I don’t care.
‘We’re not special,’ was Ostriker’s opinion. ‘The fact that these aliens are here proves that the cosmos is teeming with life. Teeming! They would hardly have stumbled across us, otherwise - tucked away in this inconsequential branch of a spiral arm. Alien life must be swarming all over the galaxy. The fact that we haven’t come across them until now, all that Fermi-so-called-paradox, was just bad luck. Or good luck!’
‘Mm,’ said Ange.
Ostriker laughed.
‘But as to why they’re being so coy: waiting out in the Oort cloud! I mean! Who knows? If they travel all th
e way here, from Cygnus, or from some star hundreds of light years more distant behind Cygnus, or from wherever they came from . . . why stop out there? It’ll take the Leibniz a year to get there! That’s just rude. Or stupid.’ Ostriker opened her eyes wide. ‘Do you think that’s it? Maybe they’re stupid! Maybe we think they’re super-intelligent, but they’re actually sub-normal for their species!’
‘The Leibniz is halfway there, now,’ Ange pointed out. ‘Only six months to go.’
‘I know. Exciting, though? Yes, yes, yes. I guess we’ll get some answers when the Leibniz gets there. Hey, Ange! I was inplugged earlier, checking the newswebs, and I happened across a manifold of possibles for the Leibniz crew - including your name! Wow. Wow!’
‘Yes,’ Ange conceded, wearily. ‘But the longlist was hundreds of possibles long.’
‘Still! I didn’t realise I was flying with such a celebrity.’
Ostriker’s laugh was a horrible sound, a tortuous friction in the air. Ange hated her laugh more than anything else about her.
Oh, how depressing it was: the prospect of two months in close quarters with her. Ange withdrew into herself as far as she could. She began to wish she had pretended to have religiously meditative duties, like Maurice; but it was too late for that now. Nor could she bring herself to grasp the nettle and actually pick a fight with her. One blazing row, to be followed by blissful weeks of resentful silence between them. Ange thought about it, and even tried out possible lines in her mind, but she could never summon the courage actually to pick the fight. And this was despite many moments of provocation from her crewmate.
‘Those people agitating for massive population reduction,’ Ostriker said, as the three of them drank coffee together (Maurice at the end of his shift, Ostriker at the beginning of hers). ‘They’re so stupid!’
‘How so?’ said Ange.
‘Of course they’re idiots! We need more people, not less!’
Maurice looked dolefully at Ange, but said nothing.
‘Some might argue,’ Ange said, with schoolma’am severity, ‘that there are already so many people on the planet that the environment is collapsing under the weight.’
‘That’s such nonsense. Such nonsense! I look at it this way: population is pressure. The greater the population, the greater the pressure.’
Ange responded cautiously, ‘Yes?’
‘So we need more pressure, that’s what I think. The Earth is like a great champagne bottle; we need more pressure, and more, and then we’ll burst the cork and fizz out into the galaxy! I bet that’s how the Cygnics, or whatever they’re called, began their space age. I bet their homeworld, wherever it is, became intolerably crowded, so they just had to flee into the cosmos!’
This was the most infuriating thing Ange had heard in a long time, and she reacted to her fury characteristically, by withdrawing even further inside herself. Maurice performed his duties, and then sequestered himself in his cabin for whatever monkish devotions his religion required. Ange checked and rechecked the ship, went over the cargo again. She worked methodically to calm her anger. But Ostriker kept in-plugging to check the latest news-updates. The Cygnics had stopped replying to all communications from humankind, she reported. Some took this to be an ominous sign, others said it was entirely in keeping with the eccentricity of the aliens. It hardly mattered.
One night Ange had a dream. She was back in her house. A man clothed entirely in black, with white skin and black eyeballs, stood balanced upon an opened book. ‘Population is selfregulating,’ he said. ‘But we must understand self in the largest way! The Cygnic aliens have come to winnow humanity, and they will destroy a third, and a third more will die of famine and disease after they have gone! Rejoice!’
In the dream, Ange felt exhilarated by this revelation; although as soon as she woke she felt the prickles of guilt. The words stayed with her all day. Could they be prophetic? The aliens, from wheresoever they came, had been consistent, really, only in their eccentricity. Like many, Ange assumed this was the index to some deeper non-fit between the two species; they had learned English with apparent fluency, but the fundamental structures of the language did not map onto the way the aliens saw the universe. What if the Cygnics viewed death as a trivial matter? What if they had come to harvest humanity? What if the crew of the Leibniz picked up some bizarre Wellsian plague from their encounter with alienness, something that managed to jump quarantine and ravage the planet?
It was out of her hands, at any rate. She had not been chosen for that crew.
And in the end neither Ostriker’s incessance nor Maurice’s gloomy withdrawal prevented Ange from doing her job. Mars, marmite-red, patched with blotches of yellow and brown, grew larger in the cockpit window every day; and then they fell into Martian orbit. They had arrived; halfway through their commission. Ange brought the ship down into Robinsontown, and the containers were unpacked and replaced with empty tanks, and that was that. After a month in flight, with only twice-daily sessions in the elastic stretchers to maintain muscle and bone, even the meagre Martian gravity was burdensome to them. They were entitled to three days downtime; but by general agreement Ange took the ship back into space after a day and a half.
The usual orbital business. The return flight was easier, since Mars-to-Earth was, as it were, downhill. And then they were away again.
Three days into the return flight, the big news broke. The aliens (people had not given up on calling them ‘Cygnics’, despite everything) had gone - departed, vanished, flown away. The period of disbelief, of checking and rechecking the sensor readings, was brief. The aliens’ craft was so large, and displayed so prominent a radiation profile, it could hardly be missed. It was gone. Some said it had rendered itself invisible, via incomprehensible eldritch alien tech, some even argued that this invisibility was preliminary to the creatures launching a stealth attack on Earth. But most people believed that what seemed to have happened had indeed happened - they had come to our out-of-the-way solar system, they had spoken to us, they had agreed to meet us - provided only that we schlepped out to the Oort cloud, of all places - and then they had pissed off, without so much as a goodbye. What did it mean? Debate fizzed and flared wherever humans existed. ‘The swans have departed’ became the most inplugged song in recording history.
It was certainly an inconvenience for the Leibniz; the craft was three weeks from Uranus, but moving so rapidly that a slingshot would only kink their onward path rather than spinning it one-eighty to direct them back in towards the sun. There was hot debate about what to do. Should they continue to the Oort cloud, and hope the aliens returned (they agreed to meet us, after all) - or should they spin about, abandon their carefully pre-plotted there-and-back-again trajectory of arcs and ellipses and curls - instead decelerate by the brute application of fuel, spin about Uranus and batten down for a long slow freefall back to Earth?
‘Looks like it was lucky you didn’t get that gig on the Leibniz,’ said Ostriker. ‘What if they continue all the way out to the Oorts, and the Cygnics don’t meet them? What a wasted journey. I can’t believe they’ve gone! Can you believe they’ve gone, Ange?’
‘I can,’ said Mlinko.
‘Well I can’t. I can’t! To come all this way, initiate contact, and then just . . . buzz off? Why?’
‘The universe doesn’t always give us coherent whys,’ was Maurice’s opinion. ‘Doesn’t often, in fact.’
‘That can’t be right! It must mean something. At the least,’ Ostriker pressed, very animated and excited, ‘there must be some explanation. Why would they just go?’
Ange didn’t say anything, but it seemed to her more than likely that the departure was as random and inexplicable thing as the arrival. She believed (and this belief was as close to religion as she came) that the universe was not structured according to the logic of the human mind, despite the fact - ironically enough, perhaps - that the human mind is unavoidably part of the cosmos. The billions of buzzing Homo sapiens brain
s craved pattern, structure and resolution; they saw the beauty of the rainbow’s bend in every story arc. The cosmos liked structure too, of course; but of a much less complicated, or perhaps it would be truer to say a much more monotonously replicated, kind. Hydrogen and helium everywhere in varying alternated clumps; the inverse-square-law everywhere in every direction. Everything existent, nothing mattering. And above all the cosmos had no sense of story whatsoever. If aliens arrive in a human story and set up a meeting, why then there must be a pay-off of some kind. But neither set-up nor pay-off was the logic of the cosmos; and most assuredly the latter was never intrinsically folded neatly inside the former, waiting to germinate. If the aliens had randomly vanished, as they seemed to have done, then that was (Ange thought) just one more unharmonious broken-off piece of the infinitely unharmonious piecemeal cosmos.
Ostriker refused to believe it. She speculated tiresomely about the possible reasons for the Cygnics’ departure. Maybe they had been recalled to their home planet; maybe some warp-technology disaster or FTL-motor-accident had winked the ship out of existence unexpectedly. Maybe there had been a mutiny aboard the ship. Perhaps (Ostriker waxed creative upon this last idea) different tribes of aliens aboard the vast craft had quarrelled over whether to embrace humanity or destroy us, and the evil aliens had imprisoned the good aliens, until the latter had staged one last desperate counter-coup, destroying their own ship and heroically sacrificing their lives to save the planet of ignorant humankind.