Phase Space
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.
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.