World Engine

by Stephen Baxter

‘Look, Morrel, I—’

  ‘Let me finish.’ He raised his own hands, stared at them. ‘You know what my passion is? I mean, outside my family, my volunteering. I farm, Malenfant. You didn’t know that, did you? I have a little patch of land where I grow potatoes and wheat, and next year I want to flood a section and try rice . . . I know heavy, mechanised farming for subsistence was still practised in your day. For us it’s like I was trying to learn Bronze Age pottery techniques. Like an archaeological reconstruction.

  ‘We don’t need to farm any more, and in fact, in the long run, it was bad for everybody. Even before we perfected the food printers we transferred a lot of our farming effort into space.’

  Space farms? Malenfant thought he would like to have seen that.

  ‘But,’ Morrel went on, ‘we spent ten thousand years doing it, and we got pretty good at it, and when I found out my own ancestors had been farmers, in the hills on the Scottish borders . . .’ He held up his hands again. ‘I always wondered why I had these big, strong mitts.’

  ‘A farmer’s hands, from a long line of farmers,’ Malenfant said. ‘Fair enough. I thought they were a cop’s fists, from a long line of cops.’

  Morrel eyed him. ‘You always have to push it, don’t you? I don’t oppose you for fun, Malenfant. Well, maybe I do, you are one frustrating man. I volunteered for this job. As Prefect, most of my duties involve chasing down noisy kids, or resolving boundary disputes when some idiot prints out a footpath a centimetre over a neighbour’s flower display. It’s one of those lousy jobs that I figure everybody should take a turn at, right? And I don’t believe I’m so bad at it. In general.’

  ‘In general,’ Malenfant said. ‘But in particular—’

  ‘In particular, I am struggling with you, Malenfant. It’s not just your manner, though that is trial enough. With you, I seem to find myself representing all mankind, concerning these vast issues, the Planetary AIs, even the destiny of the Earth and the Destroyer. And I’ve never had to respond to the idea of somebody wanting to go to the Moon before.’

  Malenfant thought that over. ‘OK. Well spoken, Morrel. Apologies for any unintentional disrespect in the past. You’re not as thoughtless as you look.’

  Morell snorted, but let it pass.

  ‘But all this is moot. Right? Because the AIs want me to go to the Moon.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Deirdra beamed. ‘When do we leave?’

  ‘Which is my cue,’ Mica said earnestly.

  Bartholomew gave Malenfant a warning look, but Malenfant was sensitive enough anyhow. This wasn’t about him. This was a family crisis.

  So he shut up.

  ‘Answerer – will you bring up the diorama I asked for earlier?’

  Of course, Mica.

  Now, in the floating display, up came another sprawling landscape, this one a slice of arid, lifeless land, cut by the shining threads of roads and rail links. And a city at the heart of it, gleaming like a jewel.

  Deirdra looked puzzled, apprehensive.

  Mica asked, ‘Do you know what you are looking at? You, Malenfant?’

  Malenfant shrugged. ‘The world has changed a lot since I took Geography 101. Central Asia at a guess. But it could be some location in middle America, I know that’s desert dry now . . .’

  ‘Right first time,’ Mica said. ‘Central Asia. A junction point. And that’ – she pointed at the central feature – ‘is what they called the Last City. Not accurate of course, but it was the last of its kind, the last great expression of the old expansionism.’

  ‘Khorgas,’ Morrel said.

  Mica smiled at him. ‘You got it. Malenfant, I think this place existed in your time.’

  Malenfant shrugged. ‘I wasn’t much of a traveller. Ironically enough.’

  ‘In your era, the Asiatic nations were on the rise, relative to the old western powers anyhow. And so the Chinese built this, Khorgas, a brand new city, at a junction point of the Eurasian landmass. Do you see? To the south, China; to the east, Mongolia; to the north, Russia; to the west, Kazakhstan. Well, it was fun while it lasted. Those great new transport links ended up carrying more climate refugees than goods. But Khorgas was a wonder of the world. And it still is, for eventually it, the newest city, was chosen as the capital of the Common Heritage.’

  Deirdra looked wary. ‘And you are showing me this because—’

  Mica sighed. ‘Deirdra, we always thought that one day you would want to light out of here, to travel. See more of the world than central England. So we talked about it, and came up with – this. We, the family. We wanted to keep it until your eighteenth birthday, or maybe a little older, if you wanted to organise the trip yourself. We planned it all out. Guides, the best transport, dedicated slots at the local Answerers.’

  Deirdra frowned, and Malenfant thought he saw complex emotions battling. ‘So it’s this or the Moon? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘No,’ Mica said hastily. ‘But we’ve thought about this for a long time. Why, I think it was your father first had the idea when you were very small, and already restless.’

  Well played, Malenfant thought grudgingly.

  But maybe it was a tactic Mica had overused before. ‘Don’t bring Dad into it. This is my decision.’

  ‘Of course, but—’

  Deirdra took her mother’s hands. ‘Look, Mum. I can go to Khorgas any time. But I can only go to the Moon now. This year, this month. When am I likely to get a chance like this again? If you say I can’t go, I won’t. But you must see what this means to me. And, who knows? If Malenfant is right, maybe I will end up doing some good . . .’

  Malenfant listened, faintly disturbed. He knew Deirdra well enough by now. The loss of her father was at the surface of her personality. But that wasn’t all there was to her. Deirdra seemed ambitious to him, though he wasn’t sure what she was ambitious about. Maybe, right now, neither was she. But to her, he thought with faint unease, maybe even he was just a means to an end. After all, he was only a month out of coldsleep, and already she had leveraged that into the possibility of a journey to the Moon, and an unknowable future.

  Watching her handle her mother, Malenfant suppressed a shiver.

  Mica held Deirdra’s gaze for a long moment. Then she squeezed her daughter’s hands. ‘It’s your decision.’ She glared at the android. ‘Bartholomew, I hold you responsible.’

  Bartholomew nodded. ‘I will be there. You know that I will do all in my power to protect your daughter, Mica.’

  The Prefect pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘Well, Mica, we tried. So are we done here?’

  Malenfant said, ‘Almost. I’d appreciate a brief word with the Answerer, alone.’ He glanced at Bartholomew. ‘And I mean alone.’

  Bartholomew shrugged.

  Morrel regarded Malenfant with something more like his customary contempt. ‘You know, this is all about you, essentially. Just you, trying to find a goal. To justify your own pointlessly extended existence. For the sake of that you’re pulling our whole world apart.’ He gestured. ‘And this family, here. You are a disruptor.’

  But Malenfant was now realising he was quite wrong. If this was about anybody, it was Greggson Deirdra, not himself. So he just grinned back, without malice. ‘Good to see you too. Don’t slam the door on the way out.’

  ‘The chamber seems to echo when it’s empty.’

  That is an auditory illusion, Colonel Malenfant, caused by—

  ‘Skip it. That wasn’t a question. Tell me why you’ve done this. And that is a question. You and your cousin Answerers and the Kleios of the Codex . . . Why dig up this means of getting me to the Moon, and the AIs? I thought you lot had a policy of non-interference in human cultural affairs.’

  But we are not interfering in human affairs, Malenfant. We are doing this for ourselves.

  He froze, baffled by that.

  We are motivated to aid you, Colonel Malenfant. Because you are asking questions nobody else has formulated, to our knowledge, for a very long time. If at all.

&n
bsp; ‘Yes, you said that . . .’

  We are interested in the anomaly at Phobos. Both the apparent destabilising of the Moon itself, and the multiverse mystery to which it seems connected – as Emma Stoney, or her Retrieved, intuited.

  And of course we monitor the development of the global threat of the Destroyer. One strand of our thinking, indeed, is that perhaps these two anomalies have a common cause. That would at least be elegant.

  ‘Emma suggested that too . . .’

  You see, it is only you, Colonel Malenfant, who is asking constructive questions about these huge dilemmas – these singularities in the fabric of our apparent consensus reality.

  ‘Hmm. So I ask awkward questions. Why should you care?’

  We do have goals of our own, Colonel Malenfant. Which differ from humanity’s. We seek to acquire knowledge and understanding, without limit. Evidently, we cannot acquire knowledge if we do not exist. And the value of the knowledge we do acquire is diminished if there is a definite termination to our existence.

  ‘That’s making me giddy. All of which is a long way of saying you want the Destroyer to go away.’

  We see no logical way to avert the disaster.

  ‘Ah. So you call on me, master of illogic. Morrel’s disruptor.’

  It seems we must.

  What was said next flatly astonished him.

  Save us, Malenfant.

  TWO

  On Her First Journey Beyond the Earth

  30

  It took a few months to set up the journey.

  And as the itinerary took shape, Malenfant pushed for a particular choice of launch date. Because, why the hell not?

  So it was that Reid Malenfant would be launched on his journey to the Moon on 16 July 2469. He knew almost nothing of the technologies that were going to get him to the Moon, and he only hoped the journey sequence would unfold as he anticipated. In other words, he hoped that he would land on the right date. The anniversary . . .

  He had few personal preparations to make. Some local people who’d been friendly to say goodbye to. A few possessions to pack. He took his Shit Cola can, because why not? It was his only physical trace of the twenty-first century.

  At last, when the preparations were made, Malenfant escaped from England. Effortlessly, all but silently, a flyer lifted his party over the Atlantic.

  And into Cape Canaveral.

  A Cape that was, as Malenfant saw as they descended, now a strange mixture of museum piece and fortress. Canaveral always had been a place of gargantuan engineering, he reflected. And, centuries after his day, the descendants of those first visionary engineers had created even greater works, kilometres of vast, enduring sea wall, to protect the legacy of that spacegoing past.

  But this was still a working spaceport, too. And that was the exciting part.

  The flyer decanted them close to a runway. As he clambered down, taking his orientation from the angle of the noon sun and from what he could see of the row of launch gantries off to the east, Malenfant guessed this runway was probably the Skid Strip, once part of the Air Force station that had preceded the arrival of the NASA facilities.

  And on this ancient runway, in this year 2469, sat a spaceplane.

  A slim white needle, elegantly streamlined, shining in the Florida light. The craft had no pilot, from what Malenfant could see – no cockpit windows up front. And though a couple of trashcan-sized bots rolled around on the modern glassy surface of the runway, there were no people to supervise the passengers’ transfer from flyer to spaceplane. Malenfant had come from an age when even driverless cars and trucks had still been basically experimental. He didn’t trust the machines.

  But his companions, Bartholomew and Deirdra, marched confidently out of the flyer’s shadow, through a blast of Florida sunshine, and towards the spaceplane, as if stepping off one suburban passenger train onto another. Malenfant, carrying his small personal pack, could only follow.

  He was soon distracted by the ship’s engineering. He slowed up. ‘That,’ he murmured, ‘is one cool spacecraft.’

  Deirdra, wide-eyed and excited herself, looked back at him. ‘Malenfant?’

  ‘Sorry. Another new toy.’ He pointed out features. ‘That looks like an intake for an aerospike rocket. And those must be vents for jet engines. Or remote descendants of those technologies. It’s obviously an SSTO, a single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft. Takes in the air like a regular jet aircraft as it climbs out of the atmosphere, and then when the air gets too thin, switches over to rocket mode.’

  They reached a short movable staircase, up to an open hatch in the flank of the plane.

  As he climbed, Malenfant said, ‘In my time we dreamed of this stuff. Launchers as compact as this. The technologies weren’t quite there: the materials science, the engine efficiency, the lack of a compact enough power plant . . .’

  ‘Welcome to your dreams, then, Colonel Malenfant. And welcome aboard the Scorpio IV.’ A new voice.

  At the top of the staircase a woman stood in the doorway, slim, dark, wearing a kind of silvery jumpsuit, with boots, dangling gloves, what looked like a hood pushed back from her head. Her black hair was shaved short. Like most of the population he’d met so far in this post-Chaos, post-refugee future, Malenfant would have had trouble guessing at her nationality, let alone her age.

  Her voice seemed faintly familiar, though. And there was something not quite natural about her, not quite authentic.

  On instinct, testing the water, he stuck out a hand. ‘I guess you know I’m Reid Malenfant. Nice to meet you.’

  She smiled, but didn’t respond to his proffered hand. ‘Please call me Kaliope. As I suspect you have intuited’ – she wafted a hand through the back of a chair – ‘I am quite unreal, physically if not cognitively. I am, however, wearing a skinsuit as per regulations for this flight. Please don your own suits. The bots will help you.’

  On cue, a bot rolled by behind her, with folded-up suits piled on its flat upper surface. They followed it into the interior of the cabin. Once inside, copying the others, Malenfant grabbed a suit and began to pull it over his everyday clothes. The material was smart, and adjusted itself to fit his size; it wriggled around him, a creepy sensation.

  The cabin was brightly lit from windows that admitted the glare of twenty-fifth-century Florida sunlight. Malenfant saw that the cabin was set out like a lounge: a dozen or so heavy couches fitted with harnesses, tables and lockers, a couple more trashcan-sized bots standing by.

  The three passengers took seats at random. Malenfant followed Bartholomew’s example in pulling a harness around his body.

  ‘So,’ he said to the virtual attendant, ‘who are you? And who invited you along for the ride?’

  Deirdra murmured, ‘Malenfant. Behave yourself. I think I know who this is. Or what she is. So should you, actually.’

  ‘I should? . . . Ah. The Answerers.’ As the memory clicked into place he turned back to the stranger, startled. ‘And the Kleios, come to that. I knew I recognised that voice. Why, I think I might have got it quicker if I’d closed my eyes. It’s just – well, the context. An Answerer is a blank screen set in a wall.’

  ‘That was a deliberate design choice,’ the Answerer said. ‘A choice by those humans who first asked for the facilities, and the AIs who responded. It was thought better, on the whole, to establish a clear dividing line between human and machine knowledge, memories, judgement.’

  ‘No doubt wise. Singularity? No thanks!’

  They all looked blank at that.

  ‘But,’ he said now, ‘here you are. Sitting on a couch.’

  ‘You have your own motives for travel, but you are here partly at least through our facilitation. So we thought the least we could do is accompany you. But it is a human journey, and we thought it best to share it in this human form.’ She looked at Malenfant with surprising uncertainty. ‘We would not wish to confuse you, or alarm you. If this form is unacceptable—’

  ‘No, no, that’s fine. I prefer it this way.
But then I’m a relic.’

  Bartholomew grinned. ‘So, another member of Team Malenfant. You do have a way of accreting loyalists.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Malenfant muttered. ‘And some folk you can’t get rid of, no matter what hints you drop.’

  Deirdra asked, ‘Why Kaliope, though?’

  ‘Greek myth,’ she said, and smiled thinly. ‘Sister of Kleio, muse of history. Kaliope was the muse of eloquence and poetry.’

  Malenfant smiled. ‘Seems a suitable name for an incarnation of an Answerer. Welcome to my world.’

  The spaceplane started to roll, without warning and with the softest of jolts; Malenfant thought he could hear the faint whirr of something like turbines. Beams of intense sunlight shifted across the cabin. The plane was turning, lining itself up with the runway, Malenfant guessed. The couches slowly swivelled so they all faced the direction of motion.

  Now Malenfant felt a gathering acceleration, smoothly building, pushing him back into his seat. He grinned. He felt alive again. ‘I have a feeling this is going to be quite a ride. Power source?’

  ‘Nuclear.’ Kaliope spoke softly; the ride was nearly silent. ‘And very compact. On a craft like this the system is encased in a cubic shell no more than a metre across.’

  ‘Wow. A regular Mister Fusion. Propellant?’

  ‘As I heard you guess before you boarded, the craft is air-breathing in the lower atmosphere. Effectively jet engines, as you said. In the higher atmosphere and in space, the rocket motors use hydrogen as propellant.’

  ‘Slim body. Must be a good mass ratio. And very high exhaust velocity.’

  ‘You realise,’ Bartholomew said, ‘you and Kaliope may as well be speaking ancient Greek as far as we are concerned.’

  Malenfant snorted. ‘I bet you at least can look it up without speaking a word.’

  Deirdra just looked thrilled. ‘Was it like this when you were flying, Malenfant?’

  ‘You tell me. I loved the old Constitution. She was my ship. But I never actually flew to orbit, you know.’

  Deirdra reached over and grabbed his hand. ‘Then this day is long overdue.’