Kitabı oxu: «Phase Space»
STEPHEN BAXTER
PHASE SPACE
STORIES FROM THE MANIFOLD
AND ELSEWHERE
COPYRIGHT
Voyager an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2002
Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2002
Cover image of Calabi-yau manifold © Laguna Design/Getty Images
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Stephen Baxter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780008134501
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007387335
Version: 2015-09-02
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
DREAMS (I)
Moon-Calf
EARTHS
Open Loops
Glass Earth, Inc.
Poyekhali 3201
Dante Dreams
War Birds
WORLDS
Sun-Drenched
Martian Autumn
Sun God
Sun-Cloud
MANIFOLD
Sheena 5
The Fubar Suit
Grey Earth
Huddle
PARADOX
Refugium
Lost Continent
Tracks
Lines of Longitude
Barrier
Marginalia
The We Who Sing
The Gravity Mine
Spindrift
Touching Centauri
DREAMS (II)
The Twelfth Album
Afterword
Keep Reading
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
Kate Manzoni, with Reid Malenfant and Cornelius Taine, stood on Mike’s porch. Inside the house, the baby was crying. Baby Michael – son of Mike – Malenfant’s grandson.
And in the murky Houston sky, new Moons and Earths burst like silent fireworks, glowing blue or red or yellow, each lit by the light of its own out-of-view sun.
It was just seven days since the failed echo from Alpha Centauri.
Malenfant said, ‘So what are we looking at?’
‘Phase space.’ Cornelius seemed coldly excited. ‘The phase space of a system is the set of all conceivable states of that system. We’re glimpsing the wider phase space of the universe, Malenfant.’
Kate wondered how that remark helped.
No traffic moved on the street. Everybody had gone home, or anyhow found a place to hunker down, until –
Well, until what, Kate? As she had followed this gruesome step-by-step process from the beginning, she had studiously avoided thinking about its eventual outcome: when the wave of unreality, or whatever it was, came washing at last over Earth, over her. It was unimaginable – even more so than her own death. At least after her death she wouldn’t know about it; would even that be true after this?
Now there were firebursts in the sky. Human fire.
‘Nukes,’ Malenfant said softly. ‘We’re fighting back, by God. Well, what else is there to do but try? God bless America.’
Saranne snapped, ‘Come back in and close the damn door.’
The three of them filed meekly inside. Saranne, clutching her baby, stalked around the house’s big living room, pulling curtains, as if that would shut it all out. But Kate didn’t blame her; it was an understandable human impulse.
Malenfant threw a light switch. It didn’t work.
Mike came in from the kitchen. ‘No water, no power.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess that’s it.’ He moved around the room, setting candles on tables and the fire hearth; their glow was oddly comforting. The living room was littered with pails of water, cans of food. It was as if they were laying up for a snowstorm, Kate thought.
Malenfant said, ‘What about the softscreens?’
Mike said, ‘Last time I looked, all there was to see was a loop of the President’s last message. The one about playing with your children, not letting them be afraid. Try again if you want.’
Nobody had the heart.
The light that flickered around the edges of the curtains seemed to be growing more gaudy.
‘Kind of quiet,’ Mike said. ‘Without the traffic noise –’
The ground shuddered, like a quake, like a carpet being yanked from under them.
Saranne clutched her baby, laden with its useless immortality, and turned on Cornelius. ‘All this from your damn fool stunt. Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone? We were fine as we were, without all this. You had no right – no right …’
‘Hush.’ Malenfant moved quickly to her, and put an arm around her shuddering shoulders. ‘It’s okay, honey.’ He drew her to the centre of the room and sat with her and the infant on the carpet. He beckoned to the others. ‘We should hold onto each other.’
Mike seized on this eagerly. ‘Yes. Maybe what you touch stays real – you think?’
They sat in a loose ring. Kate found herself between Malenfant and Saranne. Saranne’s hand was moist, Malenfant’s as dry as a bone: that astronaut training, she supposed.
‘Seven days,’ Malenfant said. ‘Seven days to unmake the world. Kind of Biblical.’
‘A pleasing symmetry,’ Cornelius said. His voice cracked.
The candles blew out, all at once. The light beyond the curtains was growing brighter, shifting quickly, slithering like oil.
The baby stopped crying.
‘Hold my hand, Malenfant,’ Kate whispered.
‘It’s okay –’
‘Just hold my hand.’
DREAMS (I)
MOON-CALF
This time they have a couple of hours to spare before the bookstore signing, so Jays and Alice check into their hotel, and take a walk.
Hereford turns out to be a small, picturesque little town like so many crowded into England. It is incredible to Jays that they are only a hundred thirty miles west of London, and yet they’ve already all but come out of England into Wales. The centre is pretty, with a lot of historical curiosities, some of them incredibly old – ‘Nell Gwynne was born here,’ Alice points out, ‘I thought she was a character from a novel’ – but it is a little clogged with traffic.
The older houses are built of old red sandstone, Jays recognizes.
They walk along a river called the Wye. It is a steamy June afternoon – today, in fact, is the longest day of the year – with the sky a high, pale blue dome, and the reflection of the cathedral shines in the water. But the river is running low, and the willows are having trouble dipping to the water surface, and the grass sward is long and yellow, for England is suffering another of its baked-dry summers. The climate is changing here, with Mediterranean weather patterns working their way up from southern Europe. But, Jays remembers, England always looked pale brown or grey, not green, from orbit.
At around five, they walk into the cathedral. A choir of schoolboys is practising, and their thin, delicate voices float on the air. There are tourists here, but they move around quietly, looking up. Jays is conscious of the loud click of the toecaps of his boots on the flags.
Alice reads from a guide pamphlet. ‘“The cathedral is mainly Norman.” Some of it is nine hundred years old, Jays. “Of special interest are the carved stalls, the fourteenth-century Mappa Mundi in the south transept, the chapels, the tombs and the library, with its chained and rare books.”’ She sniffs. ‘I’m becoming acclimatized to all this great age, I think.’
Jays runs a hand over a huge slab of sandstone embedded in a pillar. Somebody has carved a graffito here – ‘Dom. Gonsales’ – but even this desecration is self-evidently ancient.
‘Nice rock?’ Alice asks dryly.
Jays grins as they walk on. ‘Actually, yes. This is Devonian sandstone –’
‘Don’t tell me. When dinosaurs ruled the Earth.’
‘Hell, no. Much older than that. This stuff is about four hundred million years old, Alice. We’re on the coast of the Old Red Sandstone Continent. The rock here was laid down in lakes and deltas; most of southern England was covered by ocean. There were plants on land, but no animals yet …’
She nods as if listening, but she has found a small book stall, and is starting to browse.
Jays scratches the frosting of white that is all that is left of his hair. He is now seventy years old, fit and California-tanned. For twenty-five years, since his Apollo flight, his one and only spaceflight, he has been a bore about the Moon. And now his interest in geology is making him a bore about the Earth, too.
It is kind of heroic, he thinks, to be dull on two planets.
Alone, he wanders a little further. He tries to fix the church in his memory.
Most of the great English cathedrals stopped developing during the Reformation in the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII took his country away from the Church of Rome. Compared to the great churches in Catholic countries like Spain or Italy, swamped by centuries of ornamentation, English cathedrals have a certain austere class, he has decided.
He comes to a small, rather ugly side chapel. It isn’t roped off, but there are no tourists here. The walls are much darker than the rest of the church, and that, together with the filtering of the light by a couple of niggardly slit-windows, adds to a sense of gloom and age.
Jays, on impulse, steps inside. There are a couple of pews before a small, nondescript altar, and a stand of unlit candles. There is dust on the pews. A paper sign, stuck to the wall with putty, tells him this is Bishop Godwin’s Chapel, XVII Century. So this chapel is older than his nation. The windows are filled with panes of stained glass, which show what look, oddly, like Chinese scenes.
He runs his hand over the wall. Maybe the dark coloration is candle black, he thinks. But his fingers come away clean, save for a little dust.
He decides to apply a little geology. It looks more like an igneous or metamorphic rock than a sedimentary, like a sandstone. It is dark and isn’t coarse-grained, so that makes it a basalt. And there are fine gas bubbles embedded in the surface. A vesicular basalt, then, a lava that has cooled on the surface of the Earth.
He looks around. The chapel’s walls are all constructed of the dark basalt.
A lava, here in the heart of Britain?
He looks around, but there is no leaflet to explain the chapel’s history, nor anybody to ask about it.
Alice is still in the bookshop, leafing through a pamphlet.
‘Hell of a thing,’ he says.
She smiles abstractedly. ‘Look at this. It’s about you.’ She passes him the little book.
It is called The Man In The Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales, the Speedy Messenger.
The story is about how a man called Gonsales trains swans to carry him through the air. Twenty-five of them, each attached to a pulley, save him from a shipwreck. But the swans hibernate on the Moon, and carry Gonsales there …
And so on. It is a seventeenth-century tale, he sees, reprinted by some local enthusiast. The kind of stuff they now call proto-science fiction.
Domingo Gonsales. He tells her about the graffito he saw.
She takes the book back. ‘Maybe it was a fan. Or a literary critic. What did you want to tell me?’
He describes the lava walls to her. ‘It’s just it doesn’t make any sense, geologically.’
She pulls a face. ‘Geology,’ she says. She has a broad, high-cheekboned face, highlighted blond hair and intense blue eyes. At forty-five, she still turns heads. In a way he is glad she is getting a little older. It makes him less open to the accusation that he’s picked up a trophy wife, after Mary dumped him. And Alice has turned out to be one hell of a PA and agent, as his modest literary career has taken off.
‘Remember what I told you. You can tell the geology of an area just by looking at the old buildings there …’
Once, most of Britain was covered by a shallow ocean, which deposited gigantic chalk layers. But then Britain tipped up, and the ice came, scraping most of the chalk off the top half of the island. Now, as you travel south from Scotland, you traverse younger and younger landscapes: billion-year-old gabbros and granites and basalts in Scotland, belts of successively younger sedimentaries as you come down through England, until you reach the youngest of all, the marine Pleistocene clays and sands around London, less than sixty million years old.
His signing tour has taken in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Preston, Manchester, Birmingham, Peterborough, as well as London. He’s insisted on taking a train or a hired car everywhere, never flying, so he could see the old buildings – churches, houses, pubs, even railway stations – which stand like geological markers, constructed of the native rock.
‘Anyhow that’s why the basalt in that chapel is so odd,’ he says.
‘If it is basalt.’
‘Sure it is. Come on, Mary; I know basalts. All the damn Moon rocks we picked up were basalts. It’s just unusual for such an old building to feature such displaced materials. They didn’t have the haulage capability we have now …’
She shrugs. ‘They built Stonehenge from that rock from Wales, and that’s a lot older. It’s just a few tons of some Scottish stone.’
‘But what the hell’s it doing here, in the Godwin Chapel?’
‘Godwin?’ She frowns at that, and looks again at the book she is holding. According to the jacket The Man In The Moone was written by Francis Godwin, Bishop of Hereford, in the seventeenth century. ‘How about that,’ she says. ‘You suppose it is the same guy?’
He shrugs. ‘We could check.’
She reaches for her purse. ‘Anyhow this settles it. I thought nine pounds is a little steep for forty-three pages, but I guess this book has been waiting here for us to find it.’
She pays for the book, and he wants to go back to the chapel, but there is no time left before the signing.
So, Colonel Holland, why ‘Jays’?
It is a question he’s answered a hundred times before, but what the hell. ‘It was my sister. When she was a kid she couldn’t say “James” right. It came out “Jays”. It stuck as a nickname.’
Is it true you changed your name by deed poll to Jays?
‘No. And it’s not true I trademarked it, either …’
Laughter.
The little lecture room in back of the book store is maybe half-full, rows of faces turned to him like miniature moons, filled with pleasant interest. He decides he is going to enjoy the event, even if he feels intimidated by the giant show cards his publisher has sent over from London – ‘Rocky Worlds – A Vision of the Future by a Man Who’s Been There …’
Why the title?
‘Something that occurred to me on the Moon,’ he says. ‘Maybe Earth is unique. But the Moon isn’t, even in our solar system. The Galaxy has got to be full of small, rocky, airless worlds like the Moon. Right? I was only a quarter million miles from Earth, but if I looked away from Charlie and the LM, away from the Earth, if I shielded my eyes so I could see some stars, I could have been anywhere in the Galaxy – hell, anywhere in the universe …’
The audience move, subtly, showing he has hit the wonder nerve. Even though he’s cheating a little. He had no time for such reflection on the Moon; such insights have come from polishing those memories in his head like jewels, until he can’t tell any more what was fresh observation on the Moon, or the maundering of an old man.
Sitting here, his hands flapping like birds in front of him in his nervousness, he knows how he comes across: he is a retiring, almost inarticulate man – hell, he is just a pilot after all – who has been thrust forward by history, and has made himself articulate.
Your books are full of geology. But you weren’t trained in geology for your Apollo flight.
That isn’t quite true. They had some training from geologists attached to the project – they’d be taken to Meteor Crater, Arizona, or some such place, and told to look – they had to try to be geologists, at least by proxy, in a wilderness no true scientist had ever trodden, and maybe never would.
But in the end it came down to completing the checklist, and wrestling with unexpectedly balky equipment, and anyhow the LM put them down on a mare which turned out to be a dull lava plain …
… a plain that shone, tan brown and grey, beneath a black sky, with a surface that crunched beneath his feet like fresh snow, rock flour impact-shattered by three billion years of bombardment, pocked with craters of all sizes from yards across to pinpricks, and he remembers how he pushed his fingers into the surface, monkey fingers swathed in white pressure-suit gloves, but he came up against stiff resistance a few inches in where the impacts tamped down the regolith to a greater density than any compacting machine could achieve, and when he pulled out his hand his glove was stained coal black …
But such moments were rare, as he spent three days bouncing across that bright, sandy surface with his commander in the Lunar Rover, wisecracking and whistling and cussing; for the point of the journey was not the science of the Moon, of course, nor even the political stuff that pushed them so far, but simply to get through the flight with a completed checklist and without a screw-up, so you were in line for another …
But for him, there never had been another. After returning home he was caught up in the PR hoopla, stuff he’d hated, stuff that led him to drink a hell of a lot more than he should. And by the time he’d come out of that he found himself without a wife and out of NASA, and too old to go back to the Air Force.
It was a time he thinks of as his Dark Age.
But he kept in touch with the studies of the Moon rocks he brought back. It prodded in Jays a lingering interest in geology. He took a couple of night classes, and has done a few field trips. For a while it was just a way to fill up time between Amex commercials and daytime talk shows, but he has soon come to know a lot more about his home planet than he ever did about the lonely little world he, and only eleven other guys in all history, have visited. Hell of a thing.
And, gradually, the geology stuff has hooked his imagination.
Death Valley, for instance: if you manage to look beyond the tourist stuff about bauxite miners and mule trains, what you have there is a freshwater lake, teeming with wildlife and flora, that has gotten cut off from the sea. Over twenty thousand years the lake dwindles and becomes more and more saline; the trees and bushes die off and the topsoil washes away, exposing the bedrock, and the lakes’ inhabitants are forced to adapt to the salt or die …
His first short story is slight, a tale of a human tribe struggling to survive on the edge of such a lake.
Nods, from the sf enthusiasts in the audience. ‘The Drying’.
It sold for a couple hundred bucks to one of the science-fiction magazines, he suspects for curiosity over his name alone. A novel, painfully tapped into a primitive word processor, followed soon after. He hadn’t read sf since he was a kid, and now he rediscovered that sense of time and space as a huge, pitiless landscape that impelled him towards space in the first place.
A couple of books later his sales dwindled, when the celebrity angle wore off. But then they started to pick up again, and he is pleased with that, because he suspects people are starting to buy his fiction for itself, not because of him.
He doesn’t say all this to his audience, however. But they probably know it. His life is a matter of public record, after all.
Are you arguing for a return to space, in your books?
‘I guess so. I think we need to be out there. You don’t need to know much geology to see that … In a few thousand years the ice will be back, scraping the whole damn place down to the bedrock again, and I don’t know how we’re proposing to cope with that. And then there are other hazards, further out …’
The next big rock. The dinosaur killer.
‘It’s on its way, maybe wandering in from the Belt right now, with all our names written on it … But I’m not propagandizing here. This is just fiction, right? I want your beer money, not your vote.’
Laughter.
Do you feel bitter about the big shut-down that happened after Apollo? Do you blame the Confucians, or the eunuchs?
That question, from a little guy in a battered anorak, throws him. But he remembers that odd Chinese-looking design in the stained glass in that peculiar chapel, and he wants to pursue the point. But the little guy starts to lecture about the Ming Dynasty, and the bookstore owner moves them on.
After an hour or so, the owner winds up the q-and-a. He signs maybe a dozen copies of the new book, and some stock, and a couple of battered paperback editions of the older stuff.
Before dinner, the store owner takes them to a pub called the Wellsian. ‘I thought you’d like to see this …’ Bizarrely, it is an H.G. Wells theme pub, with mock-ups of the Hollywood Time Machine and Martian tripods stuck over vaguely Victorian decor. There is a bar menu which, though containing the usual bland rubber-chicken options, nevertheless has each dish referenced to Wells: ‘H.G. Tagliatelle’, or ‘Herbert George’s Chicken Kiev’, and so on.
He has his picture taken under an engraved line from First Men In The Moon, about a Moon-calf – a word which, the bookstore guy tells him, is actually an old English word meaning something like blockhead, and which gives him an opportunity for more gentle joshing.
Alice seems to be trying not to laugh. ‘It’s the weirdest place I’ve ever seen,’ she says. ‘H.G. Wells had nothing to do with Hereford.’
‘Nor does basalt.’
Jays accepts a diet soda. The little guy from the q-and-a, who’d talked about China, is here, cradling a pint of some flat English beer. His name, it turns out, is Percy, he is aged maybe fifty, and he works with the Cathedral’s collection of rare books. His clothes have a vaguely musty smell, not necessarily unpleasant. When he speaks his voice is something of a bray, and the other locals tend to look away and change the subject; he is evidently something of a local eccentric.
Nevertheless he isn’t bugging Jays, and he seems to know all about China. Jays lets him open up about his eunuch reference.
Once, says Percy, the Chinese led the world in technology: they had printing, gunpowder, the compass, in some cases centuries before Europe. At the time of the early Ming Dynasty, in the early fifteenth century, they even went exploring.
They built fifteen-hundred-ton ‘treasure ships’, each big enough to carry five hundred men. Chinese explorers rounded southern Asia to Bengal, Ceylon and even reached the east coast of Africa in 1420, prefiguring the Portuguese expeditions by fifty years. The ships brought home exotic novelties – people, animals, plants – and struck terror wherever they landed.
‘The great voyages were led by Admiral Zheng-Ho,’ says Percy, ‘who was a eunuch. But in 1436 a new emperor came to the throne, called Zheng Dung. He cut the building of ships, the construction of armaments and so forth. The Navy fell apart, and China was isolated from the rest of the world, until the barbarians from Europe came sailing up four centuries later. There are obvious resonances for our times –’
‘Yeah,’ growls Jays.
‘The cause of it all was conflict between the Confucian scholars who ran the imperial bureaucracy, and the Grand Eunuchs of the Imperial Court. The eunuchs’ voyages were seen as a threat to the bureaucracy. But the Confucians were in charge of educating the emperor and they had played a long game. They had convinced the young Zheng Dung that China was self-sufficient, and didn’t need to deal with the barbarian lands at its rim. So they blocked technological development, to maintain their feudal power …’
Some of the other fans, sensing the implicit approval Jays is bestowing on Percy, are edging closer. They start to speculate, as Jays has learned fans will do, about what-if parallel universes in which the Chinese kept going. Perhaps Francis Drake would have faced an Armada of Chinese treasure-ships. Perhaps Zheng-Ho might have reached America before Columbus. And so on.
Jays asks Percy what happened to Zheng-Ho. He shrugs, almost spilling the beer he has barely sipped. ‘There are stories that he went off to the hinterland and tried to keep exploring, with technologies out of the grasp of the bureaucrats. China is a big country, after all; there was room for such things. And room for a lot of legends. Zheng had followers, who are supposed to have kept up the work after his death, until the Confucians closed them down. It’s probably all apocryphal. Man-carrying rockets, for instance.’
There is general laughter at this, and there is more speculative chatter about a Chinese space programme of the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries.
Jays is reminded of what he once knew of the history of rocketry. The Chinese developed the first rockets around the year 1000 A.D., under the Sung Dynasty: the versions that leaked to Europe via the usual trade routes were just crude affairs, gunpowder-filled bamboo or pasteboard tubes with little power and unpredictable trajectories … Still, reflects Jays, in the heart of China, there might have been five centuries of development of this technology by Zheng-Ho’s day.
There is also, it seems, a Chinese legend local to Hereford: of a sixteenth-century traveller from Spain who came here with what sounds like a goods caravan, laden with exotic jewellery and herbs, all, he claimed, from the heart of mysterious Cathay.
Oddly, he also brings rocks.
The tale is recorded in the Godwin Chapel’s stained-glass window. And some of the locals remember the incident by keeping up an old tradition of a festival held on the fifteenth of August, celebrating the day a Chinese goddess was supposed to drink a magic elixir and fly to the Moon. There are invitations for Jays to come back on the fifteenth of August, a couple of months away.
Alice has finished her white-wine spritzer, and is discreetly plucking at his sleeve.
They make their farewells and apologies, and escape into the cooling air of the evening.
In the pub garden, a wood-fire barbecue is burning, wood to make this cultural import seem more traditionally English, he guesses. The smell of the wood takes him right back, across twenty-five years …
… after the first Moonwalk, when the oxygen had rushed back into the aluminium balloon that was the LM’s cabin, and both of them were covered in grime, when Charlie took off his helmet, and Jays took a picture of his smiling, lined, bearded face, and then of the area outside, the flag and equipment and the parked Rover and footprints everywhere, footprints that might last a million years, and when he took his own helmet off, there was a pungent smell, the odour of wood-smoke, or maybe of gunpowder: it is the smell of Moondust, slow-burning in oxygen from Earth …
But it is time for dinner with the publisher’s rep, and they walk on.
In bed, Jays glances through the Godwin book. It is a comedy – he guesses – lacking the gloss of modern science fiction. But some of the ideas seem reasonably sophisticated, for its time. The good Bishop was a little mixed up about the size of the stars, but his universe was Copernican – with the planets circling the sun – and he got gravity more or less right, with references to different gravity on the Earth and Moon, weightlessness between worlds, and the problems of re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere.
Jays has read, or rather discarded, some modern hard sf which contains worse bloopers.
He describes all this to Alice. ‘It’s hardly a traveller’s guide,’ he says, ‘but –’
She takes the book from him and kisses him on the cheek. ‘You’re very sweet, but very transparent. You’d love it to be true, wouldn’t you?’
‘What?’
‘I could see what you were thinking, in that ridiculous pub. Maybe the Chinese went to the Moon, in the fifteenth century. Maybe the story somehow reached England – here, Hereford – perhaps through the traveller they talked about.’
‘And maybe Bishop Godwin wrote it up.’
She leafs through the book. ‘But why not just tell the story straight? Why all this stuff about swans? Why not just write about the Chinese admiral and his rockets?’
He shrugs. ‘Because he couldn’t be straight. Just as I write science fiction, rather than documentary.’ It is true. His autobiography was actually ghosted. They have had discussions like this before, prompted by reviews and analysis of his work.
‘The analogy doesn’t hold,’ she says. ‘You did something extraordinary, something no human had done before. And you weren’t trained to describe it. Not even to observe. No wonder you write your books. It’s your way of working it out in your own head.’
He shrugs. ‘It was that, or find Jesus like the other guys. Anyway, my point is nobody would have believed Godwin. Think of the context of the times. Nobody believed Copernicus, for God’s sake. Maybe Godwin didn’t believe it himself.’
‘I don’t believe it. Listen to this. Gonsales finds an inhabited Moon, and the creatures live in a Utopia and are superior to us. Of course. And they weed out any who fall short of the mark, and throw them off to Earth … “The ordinary vent for them is a certain high hill in the North of America, whose people I can easily believe to be wholly descended from them …”’
He laughs. ‘Damn these Brits. Ungrateful even then. What happens to Gonsales in the end?’
Alice flicks through the book. ‘The Moon prince gives him jewels, he sets off for Earth with his swans … and lands in China, where they lock him up as a magician.’ She throws the book down. ‘China. And I hope you’re not going to read anything into that. I’m going to throw this damn book away. You’re obsessed, Jays. You look for Moon stories that don’t exist. I don’t blame you. But it’s the truth. You’re a Moon-calf …’
She turns her light out.
It is many hours before he can sleep.
He has to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. It is an old-man’s thing. He tries to float out of bed, and falls to the floor, heavy on the carpet. This has happened before.
The next day is their last in England, and they have to take a train into London, then the Tube back out to Heathrow.
Jays gets up early. Without waking Alice, he slips on his track suit and sneakers, and runs out into empty streets. Squat electric carts are delivering milk, whirring along the streets, making a noise that reminds him of the prototype Lunar Rovers he saw under test at Boeing.
He jogs until the air, already hot, is whistling in his throat.
He reaches the cathedral. It is locked up, and he is disappointed, but he discovers he can work his way around the outside. He quickly finds the Godwin Chapel. It is hard to miss, a dark, grimy encrustation on the cool sandstone of the cathedral.
He runs his hand over the exterior of the rock. It is heavily weathered, of course, and encrusted with lichen. But its vesicular nature is easy to confirm, in the bright morning light.
He knows that lunar basalts, formed when the great primordial impact basins were flooded with lava, have a lot in common with terrestrial lavas – they are mostly feldspar, pyroxene, olivine and ilmenite – but there are key differences too. Lunar rocks possess native iron, for instance. They have been subjected to shock damage from micrometeorite impact, and to radiation damage from solar wind and cosmic rays. They have some trace elements, such as hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen, implanted there by the solar wind. They contain no water at all …
He wishes he could take a sample. But he has no tools. And who would run the assay for him? He works his way around the chapel, running his hands over the surface.
He finds that a chunk of the chapel wall, a fist-sized pebble, has broken away from one corner. The pebble is just lying in the grass.
He cannot tell if this is frost damage, or perhaps vegetative, or some minor piece of vandalism.
Guiltily, he slips the pebble into his pocket.
On the train to London, with the two of them facing each other surrounded by luggage, he toys with the pebble.
‘Scottish basalt,’ Alice says.
‘Sure.’
‘You should be ashamed.’ She is laughing, but he senses she means it. ‘If every American tourist came away with trophies there’d be none of England left …’
He knows she is right. He does not want to keep this piece.
She calls him a Moon-calf again.
He waits until she has gone to the buffet for a fresh coffee. He glances around; nobody can see him.
He has a full can of diet soda. He rests his rock, on a newspaper, on the tiny British Rail table that is fixed to the wall before him. He smashes the rock with the base of the can; the rock cracks open.
As the interior is exposed to the air for the first time, there is a smell like wood-smoke.
He breathes it in for a few seconds. Then he brushes the fragments of rock into the palm of his hand, and dumps it out the window. The rock is scattered along the track, and lost; he brushes the last grains from his hands.
When Alice returns, London is approaching, modern suburbs crowding out the ancient English landscape. They start to talk about the flight home, checking tickets and terminals and passports.
EARTHS
OPEN LOOPS
It began, in fact, with a supernova: thus, from the beginning, it was a causal chain shaped by stupendous violence.
The star was a blue supergiant, twenty times the mass of Earth’s sun, fifty thousand times as bright. It had formed a mere million years ago.
Nevertheless there was life here.
It had come drifting on the interstellar winds from older, more stable systems, and taken root on worlds which cautiously skirted the central fire.
But the hydrogen fuel in the star’s fusing core was already exhausted.
The core, clogged with helium ash, began to burn that ash itself, helium nuclei fusing to carbon. And the carbon compacted to neon, the neon to oxygen … At last iron nuclei snowed, inert, on the centre of the star.
The core’s free-fall implosion took fractions of a second. The star’s outer layers were suddenly suspended over an effective vacuum. They collapsed inwards, the infalling layers crashing onto the rigid core remnant, and rebounded violently. The reflected shock wave was hurled out of the centre of the star, dragging away the star’s outer layers with it …
For a week, the dying star outshone its Galaxy.
For forty years the expanding shell of matter travelled, preceded by a sleet of electromagnetic radiation: gamma rays, X rays, visible light. A human eye might have seen a brilliant blue-white star grow suddenly tremendously luminous, fifty times as bright as the Moon, as bright as all the other stars in the sky combined.
But Earth did not exist, nor even, yet, the sun. The garish light of the supernova washed, instead, over the thin tendrils of a gas cloud: cold, inert, stable.
And in any event no human telescope could have detected, rushing before the light storm, a single, delicate, spidery silhouette.
A fleeing craft.
Scale: Exp 1
In the confines of Ehricke’s airlock Oliver Greenberg put on his gloves and snapped home the connecting rings. Then he lifted his helmet over his head.
The ritual of the suit checklist was oddly comforting. In fact, it was just the old Shuttle EVA routine he’d undergone a half-dozen times, in an orbiter-class airlock just like this.
But the Ehricke was no dinged-up old orbiter, and right now he was far from low Earth orbit.
He felt his heart hammer under his suit’s layers.
Mike Weissman, on the hab-module’s upper deck, was monitoring him. ‘EV1, you have a go for depress.’
Greenberg turned the depress switch on the control panel. ‘Valve to zero.’ He heard a distant hiss. ‘Let’s motor.’ He twisted the handle of the outer airlock hatch and pushed.
Oliver Greenberg gazed out into space.
He moved out through the airlock’s round hatchway. There was a handrail and two slide wires that ran the length of the curving hull, and Greenberg tethered himself to them. It was a routine he’d practised a hundred times in the sims at Houston, a dozen times in LEO. There was no reason why now should be any different.
No reason, except that the Earth wasn’t where it should be.
In LEO, the Earth had been a bright floor beneath him all the time, as bright as a tropical sky. But out here, Earth was all of five million kilometres away, reduced to a blue button the size of a dime three or four arms-lengths away, and Greenberg was suspended in a huge three-hundred-sixty-degree planetarium just studded with stars, stars everywhere …
Everywhere, that is, except for one corner of the sky blocked by a vaguely elliptical shadow, sharp-edged, one rim picked out by the sun.
It was Ra-Shalom: Greenberg’s destination.
He was looking along the length of the Ehricke’s hab module. It was a tight cylinder, just ten metres long and seven wide, home to four crew for this year-long jaunt. The outer hull was crammed with equipment, sensors and antennae clustered over powder-white and gold insulating blankets. At the back of the hab module he could see the bulging upper domes of the big cryogenic fuel tanks, and when he turned the other way there was the Earth-return module, an Apollo-sized capsule stuck sideways under the canopy of the big aerobrake.
The whole thing was just a collection of cylinders and boxes and canopies, thrown together as if at random, a ropy piece of shit.
But in a vessel such as this, Americans planned to sail to Mars.
Not Oliver Greenberg, though.
One small step time, he thought.
He pulled himself tentatively along the slide wire and made his way to the PMU station, on the starboard side of the hab module. The Personal Manoeuvring Unit was a big backpack shaped like the back and arms of an armchair, with foldout head- and leg-rests on a tubular frame. Greenberg ran a quick check of the PMU’s systems. It was old Shuttle technology, cannibalized from the Manned Manoeuvring Units that had enabled crew to shoot around orbiter cargo bays. But today, it was being put to a use its designers never dreamed of.
He turned around, and backed into the PMU.
‘Ehricke, EV1,’ he said. ‘Suit latches closed.’
‘Copy that.’
He pulled the PMU’s arms out around him and closed his gloved hands around the hand-controllers on the end of the arms. He unlatched the folded-up body frame. He rested his neck against the big padded rest, and settled his feet against the narrow footpads at the bottom of the frame, so he was braced. Today’s EVA was just a test reconnaissance, but a full field expedition to Ra could last all of eight hours; the frame would help him keep his muscle movements down, and so reduce resource wastage.
Greenberg released his tethers. A little spring-loaded gadget gave him a shove in the back, gentle as a mother’s encouraging pat, and he floated away from the bulkhead.
… Suddenly he didn’t have hold of anything, and he was falling.
Oh, shit, he thought.
He had become an independent spacecraft. The spidery frame of the PMU occulted the dusting of stars around him.
He tested out his propulsion systems.
He grasped his right-hand controller, and pushed it left. There was a soft tone in his helmet as the thruster worked; he saw a faint sparkle of exhaust crystals, to his right. In response to the thrust, he tipped a little to the left. He had four big fuel tanks on his back, and twenty-four small reaction control-system nozzles. In fact he had two systems, a heavy-duty hot gas bipropellant system – kerosene and nitric acid – for the big orbital changes he would have to make to reach Ra, and a cold-gas nitrogen thruster for close control at the surface of the rock.
When he started moving, he just kept on going, until he stopped himself with another blip of his thrusters.
Greenberg tipped himself up so he was facing Ra-Shalom, with the Ehricke behind him.
‘Ehricke, I’m preparing to head for Ra.’
‘We copy, Oliver.’
He fired his kerosene thruster and felt a small, firm shove in the small of his back. Computer graphics started to scroll across the inside of his face plate, updating burn parameters. He was actually changing orbit here, and he would have to go through a full rendezvous procedure to reach Ra. That was what had gotten him this job, in fact. Greenberg had flown several of the missions which docked a Shuttle orbiter with the old Mir, and then with the Space Station. He had even been chief astronaut, for a while.
Then the VentureStar had outdated his piloting skills, and he was grounded, at age fifty.
NASA was full of younger guys now, preparing for the LMP, the Lunar-Mars Programme that was at the heart of NASA’s current strategy, inspired by the evidence the sample-return probes had come up with of life on Mars.
This mission, a year-long jaunt to the near-Earth asteroid Ra-Shalom, was a shakedown test of the technologies that would be needed to get to Mars. Ra provided an intermediate goal, between lunar flights of a few weeks and the full Mars venture that would take years, setting major challenges in terms of life-support loop closure and systems reliability.
But there was also, he was told, good science to be done here.
Not that he gave a shit about that.
He was only here, tinkering with plumbing and goddamn pea plants, because nobody else in the Office had wanted to be distracted from the competition for places on the Mars flights to come.
The angle of the sun was changing, and the slanting light changed Ra from a flat silhouette to a potato-shaped rock in space, fat and solid. Ra’s surface was crumpled, split by ravines, punctured by craters of all sizes. There was one big baby that must have been a kilometre across, its walls spreading around the cramped horizon.
The rock was more than three kilometres long, spinning on its axis once every twenty hours. It was as black as coal dust. Ra-Shalom was a C-type asteroid – carbonaceous, fat with light elements, coated by carbon deposits. It had probably formed at the chilly outer rim of the asteroid belt. Ra was like a folded-over chunk of the Moon, its beat-up surface a record of this little body’s dismal, violent history.
At a computer prompt, he prepared for his final burn. ‘Ready for Terminal Initiation.’
‘Copy that, Oliver.’
One last time the kerosene thrusters fired, fat and full.
‘Okay, EV1, Ehricke. Coming up to your hundred-metre limit.’
‘Copy that.’
He came to a dead stop, a hundred metres from the surface of Ra-Shalom. The asteroid’s complex, battered surface was like a wall in front of him. He felt no tug of gravity – Ra’s G was less than a thousandth of Earth’s – it would take him more than two minutes to fall in to the surface from here, compared to a few seconds on Earth.
He was comfortable. The suit was quiet, warm, safe. He could hear the whir of his backpack’s twenty-thousand rpm fan. But he missed the squeaks and pops on the radio which he got used to in LEO as he drifted over UHF stations on the ground.
He blipped his cold-gas thrusters, and drifted forward. This wasn’t like coming in for a landing; it was more like walking towards a cliff face, which bulged gently out at him, its coal-like blackness oppressive. He made out more detail, craters overlaid on craters down to the limit of visibility.
He tweaked his trajectory once more, until he was heading for the centre of a big crater, away from any sharp-edged crater walls or boulder fields. Then he just let himself drift in, at a metre a second. If he used the thrusters any more he risked raising dust clouds that wouldn’t settle. There were four little landing legs at the corners of his frame; they popped out now, little spear-shaped penetrators designed to dig into the surface and hold him there.
The close horizon receded, and the cliff face turned into a wall that cut off half the universe.
He collided softly with Ra-Shalom.
The landing legs, throwing up dust, dug into the regolith with a grind that carried through the PMU structure. The dust hung about him. Greenberg was stuck here, clinging to the wall inside his PMU frame like a mountaineer to a rock face.
He turned on his helmet lamp. Impact glass glimmered.
Unexpectedly, wonder pricked him. Here was the primordial skin of Ra-Shalom, as old as the solar system, just centimetres before his face. He reached out and pushed his gloved hand into the surface, a monkey paw probing.
The surface was thick with regolith: a fine rock flour, littered with glassy agglutinates, asteroid rock shattered by aeons of bombardment. His fingers went in easily enough for a few centimetres – he could feel the stuff crunching under his pressure, as if he was digging into compacted snow – but then he came up against much more densely packed material, tamped down by the endless impacts.
He closed his fist and pulled out his hand. A cloud of dust came with it, gushing into his face like a hail of meteorites. He looked at the material he’d dug out. There were a few bigger grains here, he saw: it was breccia, bits of rock smashed up in multiple impacts, welded back together by impact glass. There was no gravity to speak of; the smallest movement sent the fragments drifting out of his palm.
His glove, pristine white a moment ago, was already caked black with dust. He knew the blackness came from carbon-rich compounds. There were hydrates too: water, locked up in the rock, just drifting around out here. In fact rocks like Ra were the only significant water deposits between Earth and Mars. It might prove possible to use the rock’s resources to close the loops of mass and energy circulating in Ehricke’s life support, even on this preliminary jaunt.
Ra could probably even support some kind of colony, off in the future. So it was said.
Greenberg had always preferred to leave the sci-fi stuff to the wackos in the fringe study groups in NASA, and focus on his checklist. Still, it was a nice thought.
He allowed himself a moment to savour this triumph. Maybe he would never get to Mars. But he was, after all, the first human to touch the surface of another world since Apollo 17.
He pushed his hand back into the pit he’d dug, ignoring the fresh dust he raised.
The cloud was scattered, thin and dark, across ten light years. It was gas laced with dust grains – three-quarters hydrogen, the rest helium, some trace elements – visible only to any observers as a shadow against the stars.
When the supernova’s gale of heavy particles washed over it, the cloud’s stability was lost. It began to fall in on itself.
In a ghostly inverse of the inciting supernova explosion, the core of the cloud heated up as material rained in upon it, its rotation speeding up, an increasingly powerful electromagnetic field whipping through the outer debris. The core began to glow, first at infra-red wavelengths, and then in visible light.
It was the first sunlight.
Scale: Exp 2
Oliver Greenberg was bored.
He was actually glad to get the call from Gita Weissman about the balky rock splitter in Shaft Seven, even though the lost time would mean they weren’t going to make quota this month.
At least it made a change from the usual CELSS problems, CELSS for closed environment and life-support systems, a term nobody used except him any more. Even after a century, nobody had persuaded a pea plant to grow nice straight roots in microgravity, and the loss from the mass loops in the hydroponic tanks continued at a stubborn couple of per cent a month, despite the new generation of supercritical water oxidizers they used to reduce their solid wastes.
It’s still about pea plants and plumbing, he thought dismally.
He started clambering into his skinsuit, hauling the heavy fabric over his useless legs.
He took a last glance around the glass-wall displays of his hab module. It shocked him when the displays showed him he was the only one of Ra’s two thousand inhabitants on the surface.
Well, hell, it suited him out here, even if it had stranded him in this lonely assignment, monitoring the systems that watched near-Ra space. Most of the inhabitants of Ra had been born up here, and lived their lives encased in the fused-regolith walls of old mine shafts. They didn’t know any better.
Greenberg, though, preferred to keep a weather eye on the stars, unchanged since his Iowa boyhood. He even liked seeing Earth swim past on its infrequent close approaches, like a blue liner on a black ocean, approaching and receding. It made him nostalgic. Even if he couldn’t go home any more.
Suited up, he shut down the glass-wall displays. The drab green walls of the hab module were revealed, with their equipment racks and antique bathroom and galley equipment and clumsy-looking up-down visual cues. This was just an old Space Station module, dragged out here and stuck to the surface of Ra-Shalom, covered over with a couple of metres of regolith. He was tethered in the rim shadow of Helin Crater, the place he’d landed on that first jaunt in the Ehricke. And that had been all of a hundred years ago, my God.
He pushed his way through the diaphragm lock set in the floor of his hab module. He was at the top of one of Shaft Two, one of the earliest they’d dug out, with those first clumsy drill-blast-muck miners. It was a rough cylinder ten metres across, lined with regolith glass and hung with lamps and tethers; it descended beneath him, branching and curving.
He grabbed hold of a wall spider, told it his destination, and let it haul him on down into the tunnel along its stay wires.
Thus, clinging to his metal companion, he descended into the heart of Ra-Shalom.
His legs dangled uselessly, and so he set his suit to tuck them up to his chest. He was thinking of taking the surgeons’ advice, and opting for amputation. What the hell. He was a hundred and fifty years old, give or take; he wasn’t going to start complaining.
Anyhow, apart from that, the surgeons were preserving him pretty well. They were treating him to a whole cocktail of growth hormones and DHEA and melatonin treatments and beta-carotene supplements, not to mention telomere therapy and the glop those little nano-machines had painted on the surface of his shrivelled-up brain to keep him sharp.
These guys were good at keeping you alive.
This asteroid was small. A stable population was important, and a heavy investment in training needed a long payback period to be effective. So the birth rate was low, and a lot of research was directed to human longevity.
He understood the logic. But still, he missed the sound of children playing, every now and again. The youngsters here didn’t seem to mind that, which made them a little less than human, in his view. But maybe that was part of the adjustment humans were having to make, as they learned to live off-Earth.
In fact he missed his own kids, his daughters, even though, astonishingly, they were now both old ladies themselves.
The surgeons had even managed to repair some of the cumulative microgravity damage he’d suffered over the years. For instance, his skeletal and cardiac muscles were deeply atrophied. Until they found a way to stabilize it, his bone calcium had continued to wash out in his urine, at a half per cent a month. At last, the surgeons said, the inner spongy bone, the trabeculae, had vanished altogether, without hope of regeneration.
He never had been too conscientious about his time in the treadmills. It had left him a cripple, on Earth.
So, at age eighty, he’d left Earth.
Even then they had been closing down the cans – the early stations starting with Mir and the Space Station, that had relied completely on materials brought up from Earth. In retrospect it just didn’t make sense to haul material up from Earth at great expense, when it was already here, just floating around in the sky, in rocks like Ra.
So he’d come back to come out to Ra-Shalom, the place that had made him briefly famous.
He suspected the surgeons liked to have him around, as a control experiment. The youngsters were heavily treated from birth, up here, to enable them to endure a lifetime of microgravity. Not a one of them could land on Earth, of course, or even Mars. But not too many of them showed a desire to do any such thing.
The wall spider, scuttling busily, brought him to the mine face, the terminus of Shaft Seven. It was a black, dusty wall, like a coal face. There was dust everywhere, floating in the air.
There were five or six people here, in their brightly coloured skinsuits, scraping their way around the stalled miner. Their suits were seamless and without folds, to guard against the dust. They were all tall, their limbs spindly as all hell, their skeletal structures pared down as far as they would go.
The miner itself clung to the walls with a dozen fat legs, with the balky rock splitter itself held out on a boom before the face. It was a radial-axial design with a percussive drill, powered by hydraulics, with a drill feed, a radial splitter and a loader. But for now it was inert.
One of the youngsters came up to him. It was Gita Weissman, Mike’s granddaughter. She grinned through her translucent faceplate; her skinsuit was what they used to call Day-Glo orange.
‘Dust,’ she said. ‘It’s always the dust.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Grab a pump. We want to get this baby back on line or we’ll miss quota again.’
He started to prepare a vacuum-pump tube.
The ‘dust’ was surface rock flour: half of it invisible to the naked eye, abrasive, and electrostatically sticky. Despite their best efforts it had gotten all the way through the interior workings of Ra, coating every surface.
A lot of Earthbound experience was worthless up here. No machine, for example, which used its own weight for leverage was going to be any use. Nevertheless, some terrestrial technologies, like coal gasification, had proven to be good bases for development of systems that gave a low capital investment and a fast payback.
Greenberg remembered how they’d celebrated when the ore processors had first started up, and water had come trickling out of crushed and heated asteroid cinder. It had touched, he supposed, something deep and human, some atavistic response to the presence of water here, the stuff of life in this ancient rock from space.
Whatever, it had been one terrific party.
And this rock, and many others like it, had proven to be as rich as those old sci-fi-type dreamers, who Greenberg used to laugh at, had hoped. Ra was fat with water – twenty per cent of its mass, locked up in hydrate minerals and in subsurface ice. It exported kerogen, a tarry petrochemical compound found in oil shales, which contained a good balance of nutrients: primordial soup, they called it. Ra pumped out hydrogen, methane, kerosene and methanol for propellants, and carbon monoxide, hydrogen and methane combinations to support metal processing …
And so on.
Ra was just a big volatiles warehouse floating around in the sky. And with the big surface mass drivers that Greenberg called softball pitchers, Ra products were shipped to places that were volatile-poor – like Mars, lacking nitrogen, and the Moon, dry as a desert. It was a lot cheaper to export them from a rock floating around up here than from all the way at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well.
To Greenberg’s great surprise, Ra’s inhabitants had become rich.
The first justification for opening up the rocks had been to make them serve as short-term resource factories to aid in the colonization of the Moon, Mars and beyond. But it wasn’t working out like that. Sure, the gravity well colonies were in place, but they were hardly thriving; they were always going to be dependent on key volatiles shipped in from somewhere else. And they didn’t have much to trade; Ra could purchase high-grade metals much more cheaply from other rocks.
There were actually more humans living in the rocks now than on the Moon or Mars. And Ra had more trade with other rocks than anybody else – even Earth …
He saw there was one articulated joint on the splitter boom that was giving particular problems; its prophylactic cover had been taken off, revealing a knobby joint with big, easily replaced parts, already half-dismantled, like the knee joint of a T Rex.
The youngsters were talking about more advances in technology. Like nanotech miners which would chomp their way through the rock without any human intervention at all. Greenberg kind of hoped it wouldn’t be for a while, though; he preferred machinery big enough to see, and wrestle with. It gave him a purpose, a reason to use the upper-body strength he’d brought up from Earth.
The workers got out of the way of him, and, whistling, he moved into the balky joint with his vacuum line.
Screw Mars, he thought as he worked; he liked it here.
The remnant of the cloud moulded itself into a flattened, rotating disc. Solid particles condensed: ices of water and hydrocarbons in the cooler, outer rim, but only rocky debris in the hot, churning heart of the nebula. Planetesimals formed, massive, misshapen bodies that collided and accreted as they raced around the new sun.
And, out of the collisions, planets grew: rocky worlds in the hot centre, volatile-fat giants further out. A powerful wind blew from the sun, violently ejecting the amniotic remnants of the birth cloud. Planetesimals rained down on the surfaces of the new worlds, leaving scars that would persist for billions of years.
The gravity of young Jupiter plucked at the belt of planetesimals further in, preventing their coalescence into larger bodies. So, in the gap between Jupiter and Mars, the planetesimals survived as asteroids: rocky chunks closest to the sun, volatile-rich snowballs at the outer rim, moulded by impacts with each other, melted by radioactivity and electrical induction.
And it was to the asteroids that the starship came: after billions of years drifting like a seed between the stars, still running from the supernova, exhausted, depleted, its ancient machinery cradling the generations that swarmed within, evolving, never understanding their plight.
Scale: Exp 3
The nanobugs woke him; with reluctance he swam up from dreams of sunlit days with his daughters on the beaches of Galveston.
He emerged into a gritty, unwelcome reality. Here he was: half a man, with his whole lower body replaced by the gleaming box he called his PMU, pipes and tubes everywhere, still rattling around inside his clumsy old hab module.
Not that there could be much left of his original home. That old NASA stuff had mostly worn out after a decade, let alone a thousand years. But the Weissmans, or anyhow the robots they’d assigned to keeping him alive, quietly rebuilt this old box around him, just as they rebuilt him continually, nanobugs crawling through his body while he slept away the years.
Well, the hell with it. He dug out a packet of food – the label reassured him it was chicken soup, and as far as he was concerned that was what it was – and he shoved it into the rehydration drawer of his galley.
He moved to a window, the little nitrogen reaction-control squirters on his PMU hissing softly. The window gave onto a shaft cut through the regolith, which had a massive lid that would swing down on him in case of a solar flare or some such. It gave him a good view of the surface of Ra-Shalom, and a slice of the night side of Earth, and a handful of stars.
Water-blue light glared out of Ra.
When he’d first come here, Ra had been just a lump of dirty carbonaceous stone. Now, the old craters and ravines transformed into a patchwork of windows, roofed over with some kind of smart membrane.
Greenberg could see into the lens-like surface of one of the crater windows. And right now, a few minutes from the aerobraking of Toutatis, the Weissmans were swimming up from the big spherical ocean they were building in the hollowed-out interior of Ra, swimming up to watch a light show hardly any of them understood, probably.
The Weissmans came in a variety of shapes. There were even still a few standard-issue four-limbed humans around. But the most common morphology was something like a mermaid, with the legs – useless, heavy distractions in microgravity – replaced by a kind of fish tail, useful for swimming around in the air, or the interior ocean. A lot of them had gills and never came out of the water at all, and some were covered in fur that streamlined and warmed their bodies.
The Weissmans had done away with every part of the body which wasn’t needed in microgravity. And some had gone further. Some didn’t have hands, or arms. In an age of ubiquitous and one hundred per cent reliable machinery – machinery which could manufacture other machinery – human beings, it seemed, didn’t need to be toolmakers any more.
To Greenberg, they looked like nothing so much as seals.
It was their choice, or their progenitors anyhow. But what Greenberg couldn’t figure was what they did all day.
Greenberg himself still had work to do, in these rare intervals of wakefulness: monitoring Ra’s external systems, checking the import of volatile and metal-rich cargoes.
But maybe the Weissmans were just being kind. There were probably gigantic smart systems that backed up every action he took. He was a kind of museum piece, he supposed: the first human to rendezvous with an asteroid, all those years ago, a living totem for the Weissmans of Ra.
He finished the soup and let go of the packet, and a domestic bot – a fussy little bastard like a trash can with attitude thrusters – came hissing out of its corner and grabbed the bag.
Greenberg felt sour, grumpy and isolated.
He studied Earth, which swam past on one of its closest approaches to the rock in years.
He remembered from his first orbital missions aboard Shuttle, all those centuries ago, how the coastal rims of the continents would just glow with artificial light. Greenberg had supposed, then, that it would go on, that the Earth would just get richer and fatter and brighter.
But it hadn’t worked out that way. Earth, in fact, grew darker every time he looked.
Once the expansion into the near-Earth rocks had begun, it wasn’t long before a move further out followed: first to Phobos and Deimos, the captured asteroids that circled Mars, and then out into the main belt itself. Vesta, one of the biggest of the main belt rocks, had been the first to be extensively colonized, and now it was the hub of further expansion, little archipelagos of busy mines and colonization, scattered across the belt.
And, so Greenberg understood, there were some pioneers who had gone even farther afield: to the comets out in the Oort Cloud, and the Kuiper Belt, where billions of ice moons the size of Ganymede swam through the darkness.
Of course the techniques they used nowadays made Ra look primitive. Those universal fabricators, for instance, that sucked in asteroid ore at one end and pumped out whatever you wanted at the other, using something called molecular-beam epitaxy to spray atoms and molecules directly onto a substrate. Greenberg didn’t understand any of these new gadgets, even the stuff you could see.
It was strange for Greenberg to remember now how much agonizing there had been when he was growing up about the depletion of Earth’s resources, the need to close the loops of mass and energy, as if Earth itself was one big CELSS. Nobody worried about that any more; the solar system had worked out to be just too rich in resources; those loops would stay open for a long time yet.
It took a long time for the economics and demographics and such to work out, but it had all been pretty much inevitable, it seemed to Greenberg. It was just so much cheaper to send resources skimming between the rocks than to haul them out of the planets’ big gravity wells. The colonies on Mars and the Moon had shrivelled and died, and Earth – growing poorer, its population steadily declining – had turned into a kind of huge theme park: a museum of the human species, but studded with pits of abject poverty, in the darkened ruins of the old cities. Nobody knew what was happening in those pits.
And nobody much cared, because beyond old Earth there were too many people even to count.
If you knew where to look, the sky was full of inhabited rocks, with their little orbital necklaces of solar power stations, and habitats studding their surfaces or buried inside, green and blue, the old colours of life. It was estimated that for every person alive when Greenberg was born, there were a billion human souls now. That was a hell of a thought. And when he considered some of the assholes he used to have to work with back in those days, a dismaying one.
In Ra there was a whole bunch of little Weissmans, though not all of them used Mike’s old name any more, and so in his head Greenberg thought of them all as Weissmans; it made it easier to love them. Mike would have been pleased, anyhow. There were no Greenbergs, though. His line had finished with a great-grandchild, a male, who had got caught up in the New AIDS epidemic of the twenty-second century, and died childless. It was ironic. Here was Greenberg, perhaps the oldest surviving human, and not one of all those teeming trillions floating around the system could claim direct descent from him.
On the other hand, by the laws of statistics, there ought to be a billion Einsteins out there. Nobody knew what they were all doing. They sure weren’t working together.
All those pious dreams of the space buffs of some kind of giant solar-system civilization had never been remotely likely. There were just too many people. The human race had gathered into a billion small-town-sized tribes and splintered, shaping and seeking goals unimaginable to an Earth-born geezer like him.
It seemed to him, in fact, that he was watching the end of the species, as a unitary whole: two million years out of Africa, the race had escaped from the cradle and was growing, to where the hell nobody could even guess.
… And now here came Toutatis on its aerobraking pass.
The rock looked like a comet glowing in the thin upper air of Earth, streaking by in a perfect straight line below Greenberg. It made the cities and oceans of Earth glow like the day – it must have been a remarkable sight from down there – and asteroid light played on his own face, the ancient bones of his eye sockets.
The encounter was over in seconds. The trail of scorched air soon dissipated and dimmed, and Toutatis, its orbit subtly altered, passed on towards its next encounter. It was going to take fifty years to nudge Toutatis into its final low Earth orbit, but planning projects on that kind of time scale didn’t seem to trouble the inhabitants of Toutatis, or anybody else.
The show was over. The people of Ra-Shalom drifted away from their blue watery windows, and returned to their mysterious business within.
Greenberg had never meant to live for a thousand years. It was ridiculous. Nobody else had stuck around like this. It was just that he would have had to have chosen when to die, and that was something he had never expected to face when he grew up, and he just had no instinct for it.
Anyhow, if he let himself die, he would have missed this.
Greenberg, with a sigh, turned away from the window and went to his instrument consoles.
It was a massive asteroid, big enough to have dragged itself into a sphere, with planet-like layers of internal structure, rich in metals, rocks and volatiles. It was bathed by the light of a sun only three times as far away as from Earth.
The guardians considered carefully. It was, after all, to be the repository of all that was left of their designers’ species, until even this new young sun guttered and died.
They were machines designed to plan for billions of years. They had already nursed their fragile cargo across such deserts of time. Now, looking to the future, they must plan for evolution, even the loss of mind.
It was a good home, rich in energy and resources.
The guardians were satisfied. They closed themselves down.
Within the rock, history continued.
Scale: Exp 4
It was to be quite a day, as the last of Ra’s ore was transmuted, and Greenberg made sure the Weissmans woke him up to see it. In the event he nearly missed it, it took so long to put him together again.
Greenberg’s window was the same old tunnel through fused regolith, but the view beyond changed as he watched, the last of the grey-black old crap literally dissolving before his eyes, to be replaced by a sharp, tight blue curve of watery horizon.
Too damn sharp, he thought. He wondered if those asshole nanobugs had changed his eyes on him again while he’d slept. But even his naps lasted a century at a time, longer than he had once expected to live; they had time.
Anyhow, his new eyes showed him a blue world, the landscape softly pulsing, with Greenberg’s NASA-style space station hab module stuck stubbornly to the side under its crust of regolith, like a leech clinging to flesh. Ra was just water now, encased by some smart membrane that held the whole thing in place and collected solar energy and regulated temperature and stuff. It looked like a little clone of Earth, in fact, and Greenberg thought it was somehow appropriate that today that tired, depopulated old Earth itself was over somewhere the far side of the sun, invisible, forgotten, the last traces of man being scraped off by the returned glaciers.
Under the pulsing surface of Ra he could make out dark brown shapes, graceful and lithe: people, Weissmans, whole schools of them flipping around the interior. And now here came a child, wriggling up to the membrane, pushing its disturbingly human face up to the wall, peering out – with curiosity or indifference, he couldn’t tell which – at the stars. It broke his unreconstructed twentieth-century heart to see that little girl’s face stuck on the end of such a fat, unnatural body.
An adult came by and chivvied the kid away, into the deeper interior; Greenberg saw their sleek shapes disappear into the misty blue.
The Weissmans had been working on making their environment as simple and durable as they could. They were planning for the long haul, it seemed. So, the whole rock had been transformed into this spherical ocean, and the biosphere had been cut down to essentially two components: Weissmans, post-humans, swimming around in a population of something that was descended from blue-green algae. The algae, feeding on sunlight, were full of proteins, vitamins and essential amino acids. And the humans ate the algae, drank the water, breathing in oxygen, breathing out carbon dioxide to feed the algae.
When people died their bodies were allowed to drift down to the centre of the world, where supercritical water reactors worked to break down their residues and return their body masses to the ecosystem.
The loops were as closed as they could be. The loss that entropy dictated was made up by the energy steadily gathered by that smart membrane, and a few nanobugs embedded there. Greenberg understood that research was going on to eliminate the last few technological components of the system: maybe those supercritical water reactors could be replaced by something organic, and maybe even the surface membrane and the last nanobugs could be done away with. For instance, a few metres of water would serve as a radiation shield.
It was a kind of extreme end result, Greenberg supposed, of the technology evolution that had begun all the way back with John Glenn in his cramped little Mercury tin can, breathing in canned air for his few orbits of the home planet.
But the Weissmans were not much like John Glenn.
He didn’t know any of their names. He didn’t care to. For a long time now, longer than he cared to think, there had been hardly anybody alive who remembered him from one waking period to the next, from one of his ‘days’ to another. Hell of a thing. He preferred to talk to the machines, in fact.
Greenberg didn’t even know if the Weissmans were still human any more.
The last of the true humans, as he recognized them, had been leaving the system for millennia.
It had been necessary. For a time, as the human population grew exponentially, it looked as if even the solar system’s vast resources were in danger of depletion.
So somebody had to leave, to open up the loops once more.
There was a whole variety of ways to go, all of them based on pushing people-laden rocks out of the system. You could mount a big mass driver on the back of your rock and use its substance as reaction mass. Close to the sun, you could use its heat to just boil off volatiles. You could use a solar sail. You could use Jupiter’s powerful electromagnetic field as a greater mass driver. And so on. There was even a rumour of an anti-matter factory, out in the Kuiper Belt somewhere.
Greenberg’s favourite method was the most resolutely low-tech. Just nudge your rock out of its stable orbit, let it whip through the gravity fields of Jupiter and Saturn a few times, and you could slingshot your way out of the system for free. Of course it might take you ten thousand years to reach your destination, at Barnard’s Star or E Eradini or E Indi. But what the hell; you probably had with you more water than in the whole of the Atlantic Ocean.
Greenberg accepted the necessity of the migration. But to him it had been a drain, not just on the system’s titanic population, but on the human spirit.
The solar system had been left a drab, depopulated place. All the engineering types had gone, leaving behind the navel-gazing seals of Ra, and similar relics scattered around the system.
The Weissmans, turned in on themselves, had their own interests. They were probing into a lot of areas well beyond his expertise. Like the possibility of tapping into zero-point field energy, the energy of the vacuum itself, so dense you could – it was said – boil all the oceans of Earth itself with the energy contained in a coffee cup of empty space. Then there was the compact energy stored in topological defects, little packets of space that had gotten tangled up and folded over in the Big Bang, containing some of the monstrous primeval energies within, just waiting to be tapped and opened up …
Research and development, carried on by a community of goddamn seals, with no hands or tools. Greenberg didn’t know how they did it. It was one of the many things about the Weissmans he didn’t understand.
He did know they were trying to extend their consciousness. Mind, it seemed, was a quantum process, intimately bound to the structure of space and time. And in space, after ten thousand years free of the distortions of the muddy pond of atmosphere at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well, consciousness – the Weissmans claimed – was taking a huge evolutionary leap forward, to new realms of power and control and depth.
Maybe.
To Greenberg, it was all very well to dream of super-minds of the future, but right now, he suspected there was nobody left, for instance, who was giving thought to pushing a troublesome asteroid out of its orbit, where once the children of man had rearranged worlds almost at will.
And, Greenberg was coming to realize, that might make a big difference in the future.
He still had some of his old monitoring systems, or patiently reconstructed copies anyhow. He studied Ra’s evolving trajectory around the sun.
And, gradually, he’d learned something that had disturbed him to his core.
Near-Earth asteroids wandered in steadily from the main belt, their orbits tweaked by the gravity of Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Earth itself. They hung around for thirty megayears or so, their orbits slowly evolving. Then they would encounter one of three fates, with equal probability: they would hit Earth, or hit Venus, or be slingshot out of the system altogether.
The cratering record on Earth showed this had been going on for billions of years. The smaller the object type, the more frequent the collision. Every few thousand years, for instance, Earth would be hit by an object a hundred metres or so across, big enough to dig out a new Meteor Crater, as in Arizona, where Apollo Moonwalkers had once trained. Earth had actually suffered a few fresh strikes like that while Greenberg had been observing.
And every few tens of millions of years, a much larger body would strike.
Such an object had struck the Earth sixty-five million years ago, at Chicxulub in Mexico. It had caused the extinction of most of the species extant at that time.
It was known as the dinosaur killer.
Earth was overdue for another impact like that.
Near-Earth asteroid orbits were pretty much chaotic. It was like the weather used to be, back when he lived in a place that had weather. But as computers had gotten smarter, the path of Ra-Shalom had been pushed out, in the computer’s digital imagination, further and further. Finally it had become clear to Greenberg what Ra’s ultimate fate would be.
Ra wasn’t going to hit Venus, or be thrown out of the system to the stars. Ra was going to hit Earth.
Ra was the next dinosaur killer.
It was a long time ahead: all of a million years from now. But it worried him that right now, nobody seemed to know how to deflect this damn rock.
Whenever he got the chance, he sounded off about the dinosaur killer problem. The Weissmans told him they had plans to deal with it, when the time came. Greenberg wasn’t sure whether he believed that.
And he wasn’t sure he wanted to be around to see this chewed-up rock auger in on the surface of the planet where he was born. But he couldn’t turn his back.
Within the confines of the tiny world, civilizations fell and rose; by turns, the refugee race fell to barbarism, or dreamed of the stars. The guardians had planned for this.
But the little world was not stable. This they had not anticipated.
Its orbit was close to a resonance with that of Jupiter: it circled the sun three times in each of Jupiter’s stately years. The powerful tug of Jupiter worked on the asteroid’s trajectory, millennium after millennium.
Quite suddenly, the orbit’s ellipticity increased. The asteroid started to swing deep into the warm heart of the solar system.
There was nothing the inhabitants could do to steer their rock. Some adapted. Many died. Superstitions raged.
For the first time, the asteroid dipped within the orbit of Earth.
Pulsuz fraqment bitdi.
