World Engine

by Stephen Baxter

  Deirdra seemed to turn those words over. ‘I suppose if I were sensible I’d think about it. Maybe talk to my mother. I never was very sensible. And, to get to Shiva, parent of the Destroyer – this is why I volunteered to be with you, Malenfant.’ She waved a hand. ‘Not this specific plan. Because I had the feeling you would do something.’

  ‘Something?’

  ‘Something to bust everything open.’ She grinned, returning his gaze boldly.

  And Malenfant shivered, at the depth of determination he suddenly saw in her. In this kid, who had intuited something was wrong with her world, who had intuited something could be done about it – and as a result, here was Malenfant, at Phobos, talking his way into a ten-year mission to the Oort cloud.

  Who’s in charge here? Not you, evidently, Malenfant.

  ‘OK,’ he said feebly. ‘Well, think about it even so.’

  ‘Whereas,’ Vladimir Viktorenko said now, ‘I need no time to think. I myself have come far enough; this marvellous adventure is yours, Malenfant, Emma – you especially, Deirdra, as this is your world, your time. For me, I wish only to return to Russia. My Russia, war-ravaged as she is.’

  Lighthill exchanged a glance with Gershon, who nodded. ‘We can fix that before we leave. If we guide you back through Phobos to your Road, Vladimir—’

  ‘And I will fly you home,’ Gershon said. ‘If, again, these British are kind enough to guide me back through Phobos to my home reality afterwards.’

  ‘So,’ Lighthill said reluctantly. ‘Three warm bodies and a robot. I think we can handle that, Mr Nash, don’t you?’

  ‘I will amend the lavatory cleaning rota right away, sir.’

  As they broke, Deirdra impulsively grabbed the Russian’s arm.

  ‘But why, Vladimir? Your country is in ruins. Why go back?’

  He covered her hand with his own withered fingers. ‘Because I must tell the parents of Mikhail Alexeevich Glaskov how he died.’

  FOUR

  On Her Intervention at Persephone

  59

  Malenfant opened his eyes.

  To find Bartholomew staring down at him.

  ‘We are three days out from Persephone,’ Bartholomew said.

  Malenfant sniffed the air. ‘Tobacco smoke,’ he said. ‘It’s like I’m back in 1990.’ He found his voice scratchy, his mouth dry, his throat vaguely sore. When he tried to move it felt stiff, difficult.

  ‘You know the drill by now,’ Bartholomew said.

  ‘I should do.’

  Bartholomew helped him sit up, an arm around his shoulders, strong, competent – the flesh of his hands artificially warmed to human body temperature. All part of the illusion of kindness.

  ‘How do you feel?’ Bartholomew asked.

  ‘How do you think I feel? Like the first time I was pulled out of one of these coldsleep cans. I’m a repeat-offender Sleeping Beauty.’

  Bartholomew handed him a cup of glop, which Malenfant reluctantly sipped. ‘Well,’ Bartholomew said, ‘you ain’t been asleep. And you ain’t no beauty.’

  Malenfant snorted a laugh, and the fluid went down the wrong way. ‘And you’ve spent way too much time with me.’

  ‘Now that I can confirm. As to how you feel—’

  Malenfant twisted, working his shoulders, his back. ‘Like I rusted up. Like I always do. I’ll be fine. How about the others?’

  Bartholomew glanced over his shoulder. ‘Still in their pods. Their vital signs are normal.’

  ‘I sense a “but”.’

  ‘Well, as you said you’re a veteran of these tanks now, Malenfant. The risk for first-time patients is always higher simply because one does not know how a given body will react. Also Deirdra is younger than optimal for a sleeper. As for Emma, she is frail – fundamentally healthy, or I would not have allowed the coldsleep at all – but her body systems have been left scarred by the primitive long-duration spaceflight she endured, the lack of gravity, the poor radiation shielding, the inadequate environmental support systems. I have no reason to believe either of them has come to any harm. But I am less confident of that than I was about you, Malenfant.’

  ‘And you woke me first because of that?’

  ‘If I need a spare pair of hands to help with some emergency on revival of the others, I would prefer it was yours.’

  ‘Ah. Rather than the Brits.’

  ‘Correct. No, don’t move yet. Just drink your drink.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Drink your drink.’

  Malenfant drained the cup with a sigh. ‘I think you could have trusted Nicola Mott.’

  ‘Maybe. She seems a good person, yes. But this is a different Nicola, Malenfant. This one was never your co-pilot. She never knew you, or even an avatar of you, until you bumped into each other on Phobos. There is no reason she would feel any obligation to you, or the others. Her duty is clearly to her mission. To King-Emperor Harold III.’ He smiled.

  ‘You stayed conscious? The whole three years?’

  ‘I kept out of the way.’

  Malenfant thought that over. ‘I guess that if I had an off-switch, I’d feel the same way.’

  ‘The British did talk to me, though. Especially Wing Commander Lighthill.’

  ‘He did, did he? What about? Details of the world you came from?’

  ‘Mostly about the technology.’

  ‘What technology?’

  ‘Coldsleep. He claims there have been experiments in extended human hibernation, back in Britain—’

  ‘Well, that rings true, doesn’t it? Always been a centre for that kind of research, evidently back to before the various jonbar hinges split us all apart. That was why I was woken in Britain myself.’

  ‘You know how capable their spacecraft are. Here we are halfway to the Oort cloud after just a few years. But, Lighthill said to me, with the coldsleep pods they could reach the stars. Journeys not of years, but of centuries. Millennia, even.

  ‘I had the sense that he was trying to find the parameters of some kind of bargain. The secrets of their fusion propulsion, for instance, in exchange for coldsleep. They had had no interest in the Earth of this timeline, before. As they told us, they failed even to receive comprehensible transmissions, from technologies centuries ahead of their own. But now, having met your party, they see potential.’

  ‘Look, I don’t belong to your society any more than Lighthill does. Would you have the authority to make such deals?’

  ‘Certainly not, as an artificial entity. Nor would Deirdra, who is not yet of adult age. In fact, under the Common Heritage, I am not certain there is a competent entity to represent all of mankind in trade negotiations with these people. This is unprecedented.’

  Malenfant barked laughter. ‘Maybe that’s for the best. I remember old stories of time travellers dipping into the past and arming the ancient Romans with rifles, for instance. Making a mess of history. I guess the dilemma here is subtly different. These British do not come from our timeline. Not even a close relative of it. What are the ethics of meddling with somebody else’s past? . . . Well, if we ever get home, let’s ask Kaliope. In the meantime . . .’ He thought it over. ‘Clearly we should make no deals. But, look – Bartholomew, I imagine you aren’t programmed to lie.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘You said that with an admirably straight face. But let’s keep these Brits dangling.’

  ‘Dangling?’

  ‘Don’t refuse outright. Just put them off. Say we don’t have the authority to make any such deals.’

  Bartholomew nodded. ‘Ah. Which will keep them interested in us. Motivated to work with us. And it also happens to be truthful.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I think that will work. The British are clearly highly authoritarian themselves, as well as patriarchal. They will respect our appeals to a higher authority.’

  ‘What do you make of them? They’re not like the British I know. Their language seems archaic to me, given they are from 2005 – like they were stuck in
the 1940s. You’ve now spent much longer dealing with them than I have.’

  ‘They are not like the British I knew either. Not like Deirdra and her family. Under the school-days banter they are – hard. Humourless. Calculating. Decisive. Used to wielding power over other people.’

  Malenfant grinned. ‘I guess you don’t get to own half the planet by being nice.’

  Bartholomew nodded. ‘We should treat them as allies, then. But be wary.’

  ‘You got it. So, a shower and a shave for me. Then shall we wake Emma and Deirdra?’

  It was now June 2472.

  Malenfant had slept away three more years.

  And as they went through their recovery routines, slowly, step by step, the destination approached.

  60

  The Harmonia sailed easily into orbit around Persephone. After that it took a couple of days for the ship to make its rendezvous with Melinoe, the moon, a game of orbital catch-up played with squirts of the ship’s main motor.

  The crew used slide rules to calculate the orbital dynamics. Malenfant stared as Lighthill and Nicola slid the components of the little gadgets back and forth and scribbled down numbers on calibrated pads.

  And Malenfant inspected Persephone.

  Against a star-littered background, the planet itself was a neat circle, black – like the disc of the Moon at a total solar eclipse. Beyond one edge of the planet, an even dimmer, misshapen shadow was cast against the dark – a second moon, perhaps.

  The planet was not quite featureless. Malenfant could make out patches of a silvery sheen, particularly towards the poles, that looked like ice. In lower latitudes a dim mottling of darker ground against a smoother background – continents, rising up from shallow sea beds? And, at the edge of the planet, what looked like wrinkles – mountains, plateaux perhaps? Malenfant even thought he made out a dim red glow in one area, roughly circular. Some kind of geological event maybe, a volcanic caldera – must be a big one, if so, a regular Yellowstone.

  And, just visible at the equator, a dark line, like a scratch on the image. Malenfant, after his briefing with the Planetary AIs, knew what that represented. The line of towers, each twenty kilometres tall, that strode right around this world’s equator.

  The little moon approached.

  Nash said, ‘Melinoe itself is just a lump of ice and rubble, not much more impressive than Deimos, say. Here we are out in the comet cloud. Your – Oort cloud?’

  ‘That’s the name,’ Malenfant said, ‘though we put the formal boundary further out, I think.’

  ‘The moons have the typical composition of comet cores: dust, water ice, organics. Seems most likely that they weren’t formed with the planet, but happened to fall into orbit around it, after the planet sailed out here from the inner system. Probably a late arrival, in fact, like Phobos and Deimos at Mars.’

  ‘Sailed out?’

  Lighthill glanced at him. ‘Well, of course. We know that much. The deep-space observatories at Outer Station have observed many planetary systems now, in various stages of formation or decrepitude. And we do know planets don’t seem generally to finish up orbiting where they formed. Although the bods seem uncertain as to how Persephone could have ended up in such a neat circular orbit. You’d expect it to be on some wildly elliptical path – if it hadn’t been thrown out of the Solar System altogether.’

  Deirdra had, perhaps unconsciously, drifted out of her chair to see closer. ‘Wow. It’s like another Earth, isn’t it? But an Earth that got thrown away from the Sun.’

  ‘Yes,’ Nicola said, approvingly. ‘Exactly right. Around a quarter larger radius. Twice the mass. Somewhat higher gravity. There were oceans; you can see the ice. Maybe there are frozen lakes and rivers down there too. Under the frozen air, of course. Continents and seas. Mountain-building. Why, that may still be going on; this world is out in the cold but it still has its inner heat.’ She pointed to the region of lurid crimson. ‘That looks like a major volcanic province, the boffins say. And those mountains you can make out on the horizon may be very old, compared to what you see on Earth. No erosion, you see. Which tears down mountains on Earth from the moment they are built . . .’

  Nash said, ‘There are some scientists who think that Persephone here would actually have been more hospitable to life than Earth itself, if it hadn’t been thrown out into the dark. It’s that bit bigger, you see – that bit warmer, more mountains and coastlines where life could evolve, more active geology to move the continents around and promote evolution – shallower oceans, so you would have lots of islands as laboratories for evolution. Instead . . . Well, look at it. What a place to visit! A ruin of a world. Cold as charity. You would have to mine the air to breathe, and the only water is ice as hard as concrete, and the only traces of native life are abortions four billion years old.’

  Malenfant was startled by that. Life? But Nash said no more. Park it, Malenfant. He said, ‘But what it does have is those peculiar-looking towers around the equator.’ He grinned tightly. ‘Alien artefacts?’

  ‘Best guess,’ Lighthill said.

  ‘Ah. Which I imagine is one reason you dashed out there. To beat the Americans and the Germans, the way you got to Phobos first . . . And,’ he said, with a glance at Deirdra, ‘in this particular Road where Shiva is such a threat, right now Persephone, out of place, out of time, laden with huge alien technologies, lies almost on a direct line between Shiva and the Sun.’

  ‘As discussed before,’ Lighthill said heavily. ‘And handy as a refuelling stop en route. But I don’t see what damn use that fact is to you.’

  ‘Nor do I, quite,’ Malenfant said. ‘Not yet. But that’s why I wanted to come out here. It’s a coincidence – or not, given the loaded hands we keep being dealt by the manifold. Maybe it’s some kind of opportunity. Call it an instinct.’

  And Deirdra nodded, her expression grim.

  Lighthill shrugged and turned away.

  Melinoe, inner moon of Persephone, turned out to have very much the same dimensions as Phobos, a battered, roughly spherical lump measuring about twenty-five kilometres on its longest axis. It circled Persephone some four diameters out from the primary. That gave it a thirty-two-hour ‘month’, so it was a little outside synchronous orbit; Persephone’s day was twenty-five hours. As with Phobos some tidal effect seemed to have lined up that longer axis with the direction of its orbital motion.

  But there the resemblance seemed to end, Malenfant realised, peering out.

  Of course the little world was hard to see at all. Out here the Sun was eerie, a too-bright star, like nothing in the sky of Earth – as a supernova might appear, Malenfant thought – and the light it cast was feeble. But still, Malenfant could make out, here and there on Melinoe’s surface, a reflection, a glint of ice.

  Ice. There was how Melinoe differed from Phobos, Malenfant saw. All objects in the Solar System had been formed from the protoplanetary disc, from a mixture of dust, ice and gases – and the further you went from the Sun, the more ice had been found. So Earth, an inner world, was dominated by rock. Phobos, which had probably formed out beyond Mars’s orbit in the asteroid belt, was a heap of rocky rubble contaminated with ice and hydrated compounds. Whereas Melinoe, a chunk that had probably formed far from the Sun before being sent out here by some accidental slingshot, was clearly more ice than rock.

  Which made Melinoe useful for humans, who had come here to mine that water ice for oxygen to breathe, and hydrogen to refuel their fusion-rocket spacecraft, and indeed the ice itself would serve as reaction mass for those rockets. Although Lighthill was still coy about the details of the Harmonia’s drive.

  And that was why the brightest single feature on Melinoe’s surface was a brilliant spark of light: the lamps of a human settlement, a thousand astronomical units from home. Malenfant allowed himself a moment of pride at the sight of that lonely spark: pride on behalf of mankind, even if he didn’t particularly like the arrogant British who, in this particular reality strand, had achieved such a feat.
>
  With the matching orbit achieved and Melinoe approaching, everybody peered out, eager to see the destination. In the final approach, amid shallow craters, presumably the scars of previous descents, Malenfant saw shelters like half-cylinders lying end to end, surrounded by ground visibly churned up by footprints and tracks. Nash called the shelters ‘Nissen huts’. They were heaped with loose ice, presumably for heat insulation and radiation protection. There was what looked like a fuel store, a dome standing separate from the rest that might house some kind of atomic reactor, a big, sprawling antenna farm, and various anonymous trenches and pits that looked like they might be the result of scientific studies. A couple of fat-wheeled tractors stood by the huts, and further out was a beefy-looking craft, standing on four legs that protruded from a battered heat shield, that Malenfant suspected might be a lander designed to take on the higher gravity of Persephone itself. All of this was illuminated by powerful lamps hanging from unfeasibly tall low-gravity masts, anchored to the dirt.

  Lighthill remarked, ‘What you don’t see from here is the big resource extraction plant we’ve established on the far side. Simple affair: mining gear to dig up the ice, electrolysis to separate out the hydrogen and oxygen, a catapult to fire up filled polymer tanks into space for the Harmonia to collect . . . All waiting for us before we head onwards into the deep dark, or indeed head home.’

  Deirdra pointed out a gaunt tube with the glimmer of a mirror at its base. ‘That must be a telescope. It’s just like at Plato, on the Moon. You don’t need a heavy tube and stuff where there’s no air, and not much gravity either.’

  ‘And I guess,’ Emma said, ‘that this little moon is tidally locked to the primary. The same face turned to Persephone all the time?’

  Nash looked over and grinned. ‘Quite right, Miss Stoney. Rather a convenient location for an astronomer in that regard – where your principal target of study just hangs in the sky above you. Not that we have a specialised astronomer here; everybody has to be pretty much a jack of all trades.’