Space

II

TRAVELLERS

AD 2061–2186

He told himself: All this – the neutron star sail, the toiling community – is a triumph of life over blind cosmic cruelty. We ain’t taking it any more.

But when he thought of Cassiopeia, anger flooded him. Why?

It had been just minutes since she had embraced him on that grassy simulated plain … hadn’t it?

How do you know, Malenfant? How do you know you haven’t been frozen in some deep data store for ten thousand years?

And … how do you know this isn’t the first time you surfaced like this?

How could he know? If his identity assembled, disintegrated again, what trace would it leave on his memory? What was his memory? What if he was simply restarted each time, wiped clean like a reinitialized computer? How would he know?

But it didn’t matter. I did this to myself, he thought. I wanted to be here. I laboured to get myself here. Because of what we learned, as the years unravelled. That the Gaijin would be followed by a great wave of visitors. And that the Gaijin were not even the first – just as Nemoto had intuited from the start. And nothing we learned about those earlier visitors, and what had become of them, gave us comfort.

Slowly, as they began to travel the stars, humans learned to fear the universe, and the creatures who lived in it. Lived and died.

Chapter 8

AMBASSADORS

Madeleine Meacher barely got out of N’Djamena alive.

Nigerian and Cameroon troops were pushing into the airstrip just as the Sänger’s undercarriage trolley jets kicked in. She heard the distant crackle of automatic fire, saw vehicles converging on the runway. Somewhere behind her was a clatter, distant and small; it sounded as if a stray round had hit the Sänger.

Then the spaceplane threw itself down the runway, pressing her back into her seat, its leap forward sudden, gazelle-like. The Sänger tipped up on its trolley, and the big RB545 engines kicked in, burning liquid hydrogen. The plane rose almost vertically. The gunfire rattle faded immediately.

She shot into cloud and was through in a second, emerging into bright, clear sunshine.

She glanced down: the land was already lost, remote, a curving dome of dull desert-brown, punctuated with the sprawling grey of urban development. Fighters – probably Nigerian, or maybe Israeli – were little points of silver light in the huge sky around her, with contrails looping through the air. They couldn’t get close to Madeleine unless she was seriously unlucky.

She lit up the scramjets, and was kicked in the back, hard, and the fighters disappeared.

The sky faded down to a deep purple. The turbulence smoothed out as she went supersonic. At thirty thousand metres, still climbing, she pushed the RB545 throttle to maximum thrust. Her acceleration was a Mach a minute; on this sub-orbital hop to Senegal she’d reach Mach 15, before falling back to Earth.

She was already so high she could see stars. Soon the reaction control thrusters would kick in, and she’d be flying like a spacecraft.

It was the nearest she’d ever get to space, anyhow.

For the first time since arriving in Chad with her cargo of light artillery shells, she had time to relax. The Sänger was showing no evidence of harm from the gunfire.

The Sänger was a good, solid German design, built by Messerschmitt – Boelkow – Blohm. It was designed to operate in war zones. But Madeleine was not; safe now in her high-tech cocoon, she gave way to the tension for a couple of minutes.

While she was still shaking, the Sänger logged into the nets and downloaded her mail. Life went on.

That was when she found the message from Sally Brind.

Brind didn’t tell Madeleine who she represented, or what she wanted. Madeleine was to meet her at Kennedy Space Center. Just like that; she was given no choice.

Over the years Madeleine had received a lot of blunt messages like this. They were usually either from lucrative would-be employers, or some variant of cop or taxman. Either way it was wise to turn up.

She acknowledged the message, and instructed her data miners to find out who Brind was.

She pressed a switch, and the RB545s shut down with a bang. As the acceleration cut out she was thrust forward against the straps. Now she had gone ballistic, like a hurled stone. Coasting over the roof of her trajectory in near-silence, she lost all sensation of speed, of motion.

And, at her highest point, she saw a distant glimmer of light, complex and serene: it was a Gaijin flower-ship, complacently orbiting Earth.

When she got back to the States, Madeleine flew out to Orlando. To get to KSC she drove north along US 3, the length of Merritt Island. There used to be security gates; now there was nothing but a rusting fence, with a new smart-concrete road surface cut right through it.

She parked at the Vehicle Assembly Building. It was early morning. The place was deserted. Sand drifted across the empty car park, gathering in miniature dunes.

She walked out to the old press stand, a wooden frame like a baseball bleacher. She sat down, looking east. The sun was in her eyes, and already hot; she could feel it draw her face tight as a drum. To the right, stretching off to the south, there were rocket gantries. In the mist they were two-dimensional, colourless. Most of them were disused, part-dismantled, museum pieces. The sense of desolation, abandonment, was heavy in the air.

Sally Brind had turned out to work for Bootstrap, the rump of the corporation which had sent a spacecraft to the Gaijin base in the asteroid belt, three decades earlier.

Madeleine was not especially interested in the Gaijin. She had been born a few years after their arrival in the solar system; they were just a part of her life, and not a very exciting part. But she knew that four decades after the first detection of the Gaijin – and a full nineteen years after they had first come sailing in from the belt, apparently prompted by Reid Malenfant’s quixotic journey – the Gaijin had established something resembling a system of trade with humanity.

They had provided some technological advances: robotics, vacuum industries, a few nanotech tricks like their asteroid mining blankets, enough to revolutionize a dozen industries and make a hundred fortunes. They had also flown human scientists on exploratory missions to other planets: Mars, Mercury, even the moons of Jupiter. (Not Venus, though, oddly, despite repeated requests.) And the Gaijin had started to provide a significant proportion of Earth’s resources from space: raw materials from the asteroids, including precious metals, and even energy, beamed down as microwaves from great collectors in the sky.

Humans – or rather, the governments and corporations who dealt with the Gaijin – had to ‘pay’ for all this with resources common on Earth but scarce elsewhere, notably heavy metals and some complex organics. The Gaijin had also been allowed to land on Earth, and had been offered cultural contact. The Gaijin had, strangely, shown interest in some human ideas, and a succession of writers, philosophers, theologians, and even a few discreditable science fiction authors had been summoned to converse with the alien ‘ambassadors’.

The government authorities, and the corporations who were profiting, seemed to regard the whole arrangement as a good deal. With the removal of the great dirt-making industries from the surface of the Earth – power, mining – there was a good chance that eco recovery could, belatedly, become a serious proposition.

Not everybody agreed. All those shut-down mines and decommissioning power plants were creating economic and environmental refugees. And there were plenty of literal refugees too, for instance, all the poor souls who had been moved out of the great swathes of equatorial land that had been given over to the microwave receiving stations.

Thus the Gaijin upheaval had, predictably, caused poverty, even famine and war.

It was thanks to that last Madeleine made her living, of course. But everybody had to survive.

‘… I wonder if you know what you’re looking at, here.’ The voice had come from behind her.

A woman sat in the stand, in the row behind Madeleine. Her bony wrists stuck out of an environment-screening biocomp bodysuit. She must have been sixty. There was a man with her, at least as old, short, dark and heavy-set.

‘You’re Brind.’

‘And you’re Madeleine Meacher. So we meet. This is Frank Paulis. He’s the head of Bootstrap.’

‘I remember your name.’

He grinned, his eyes hard.

‘What am I doing here, Brind?’

For answer, Brind pointed east, to the tree line beyond the Banana River. ‘I used to work for NASA. Back when there was a NASA. Over there used to be the site of the two great launch complexes: 39-B to the left, 39-A to the right. 39-A was the old Apollo gantry. Later they adapted it for Shuttle.’ The sunlight blasted into her face, making it look flat, younger. ‘Well, the pads are gone now, pulled down for scrap. The base of 39-A is still there, if you want to see it. There’s a sign the pad rats stuck there for the last launch. Go, Discovery! Kind of faded now, of course.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Do you know what a burster is?’

Madeleine frowned. ‘No kind of weapon I’ve ever heard of.’

‘It’s not a weapon, Meacher. It’s a star.’

Madeleine was, briefly, electrified.

‘Look, Meacher, we have a proposal for you.’

‘What makes you think I’ll be interested?’

Brind’s voice was gravelly and full of menace. ‘I know a great deal about you.’

‘How come?’

‘If you must know, through the tax bureau. You have operated your –’ she waved a hand dismissively ‘– enterprises in over a dozen countries over the years. But you’ve paid tax on barely ten per cent of the income we can trace.’

‘Never broken a law.’

Brind eyed Madeleine, as if she had said something utterly naive. ‘The law is a weapon of government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.’

Madeleine tried to figure out Brind. Her biocomposite suit looked efficient, not expensive. Brind was a wage slave, not an entrepreneur. She guessed, ‘You’re from the government?’

Brind’s face hardened. ‘When I was young, we used to call what you do gun-running. Although I don’t suppose that’s how you think of it yourself.’

The remark caught Madeleine off guard. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m a pilot. All I ever wanted to do is fly; this is the best job I could get. In a different universe, I’d be –’

‘An astronaut,’ said Frank Paulis.

The foolish, archaic word got to Madeleine. Here, of all places.

‘We know about you, you see,’ Sally Brind said, almost regretfully. ‘All about you.’

‘There are no astronauts any more.’

‘That isn’t true, Meacher,’ Paulis said. ‘Come with us. Let us show you what we’re planning.’

Brind and Paulis took her out to Launch Complex 41, the old USASF Titan pad at the northern end of ICBM Row. Here, Brind’s people had refurbished an antique Soviet-era Proton launcher.

The booster was a slim black cylinder, fifty-three metres tall. Six flaring strap-on boosters clustered around the first stage, and Madeleine could pick out the smaller stages above. A passenger capsule and hab module would be fixed to the top, shrouded by a cone of metal.

‘Our capsule isn’t much more sophisticated than an Apollo,’ Brind said. ‘It only has to get you to orbit and keep you alive for a couple of hours, until the Gaijin come to pick you up.’

‘Me?’

‘Would you like to see your hab module? It’s being prepared in the old Orbiter Processing Facility …’

‘Get to the point,’ Madeleine said. ‘Where are you planning to send me? And what exactly is a burster?’

‘A type of neutron star. A very interesting type. The Gaijin are sending a ship there. They’ve invited us – that is, the UN – to send a representative. An observer. It’s the first time they’ve offered this, to carry an observer beyond the solar system. We think it’s important to respond. We can send our own science platform; we’ll train you up to use it. We can even establish our own Saddle Point gateway in the neutron star system. It’s all part of a wider trade and cultural deal, which –’

‘So you represent the UN?’

‘Not exactly.’

Paulis said, ‘We need somebody with the qualifications and experience to handle a journey like this. You’re about the right age, under forty. You’ve no dependants that we can trace.’ He sighed. ‘A hundred years ago, we’d have sent John Glenn. Today, the best fit is the likes of you. You’ll be well paid.’ He eyed Madeleine. ‘Believe me, very well paid.’

Madeleine thought it over, trying to figure the angles. ‘That Proton is sixty years old, the design even older. You don’t have much of a budget, do you?’

Paulis shrugged. ‘My pockets aren’t as deep as they used to be.’

Brind prickled. ‘What does the budget matter? For Christ’s sake, Meacher, don’t you have any wonder in your soul? I’m offering you, here, the chance to travel to the stars. My God – if I had your qualifications, I’d jump at the chance.’

‘And you aren’t truly the first,’ Paulis said. ‘Reid Malenfant –’

‘– is lost. Anyhow it’s not exactly being an astronaut,’ Madeleine said sourly. ‘Is it? Being live cargo on a Gaijin flower-ship doesn’t count.’

‘Actually a lot of people agree with you,’ Paulis said. ‘That’s why we’ve struggled to assemble the funding. Noone is interested in human spaceflight in these circumstances. Most people are happy just to wait for the Gaijin to parachute down more interstellar goodies from the sky …’

‘Why don’t you just send along an automated instrument pallet? Why send a human at all?’

‘No.’ Brind shook her head firmly. ‘We’re deliberately designing for a human operator.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we want a human there. A human like you, God help us. We think it’s important to try to meet them on equal terms.’

Madeleine laughed. ‘Equal terms? We limp into orbit, and rendezvous with a giant alien ramjet capable of flying to the outer solar system?’

‘Symbolism, Meacher,’ Paulis said darkly. ‘Symbols are everything.’

‘How do you know the Gaijin respond to symbols?’

‘Maybe they don’t. But people do. And it’s people I’m interested in. Frankly, Meacher, we’re seeking advantage. Not everybody thinks we should become so completely reliant on the Gaijin. You’ll have a lot of discretion out there. We need someone with – acumen. There may be opportunities.’

‘What kind of opportunities?’

‘To get humanity out from under the yoke of the Gaijin,’ Paulis said. For the first time there was a trace of anger in his voice, passion.

Madeleine began to understand.

There were various shadowy groups who weren’t happy with the deals the governments and corporations had been striking with the Gaijin. This trading relationship was not between two equals. And besides the Gaijin must be following their own undeclared goals. What about the stuff they were keeping back? What would happen when the human economy was utterly dependent on the trickle of good stuff from the sky? And suppose the Gaijin suddenly decided to turn off the faucets – or, worse, decided to start dropping rocks?

Beyond that, the broader situation continued to evolve, year on year. More and more of the neighbouring stars were lighting up with radio and other signals, out to a distance of some thirty light years. It was evident that a ferocious wave of emigration was coming humanity’s way, scouring along the Orion-Cygnus spiral arm. Presumably those colonists were propagating via Saddle Point gateways, and they were finding their target systems empty – or undeveloped, like the solar system. And as soon as they arrived they started to build, and broadcast.

Humans knew precisely nothing about those other new arrivals, at Sirius and Epsilon Eridani and Procyon and Tau Ceti and Altair. Maybe humans were lucky it was the Gaijin who found them first, the first to intervene in the course of human history. Or maybe not. Either way, facing this volatile and fast-changing future, it seemed unwise – to some people – to rely entirely on the goodwill of the first new arrivals to show up. Evidently those groups were now trying, quietly, to do something about it.

But Madeleine’s first priority was the integrity of her own skin.

‘How far is it to this burster?’

‘Eighteen light years.’

Madeleine knew the relativistic implications. She would come back stranded in a future thirty-six years remote. ‘I won’t do it.’

‘It’s that or the Gulf,’ Brind said evenly.

The Gulf. Shit. After twenty years of escalating warfare over the last oil reserves the Gulf was like the surface of Io: glassy nuke craters punctuated by oil wells which would burn for decades. Even with biocomp armour, her life expectancy would be down to a few months.

She turned, and lifted her face to the Florida sun. It looked like she didn’t have a choice.

But, she suspected, she was kind of glad about that. Something inside her began to stir at the thought of this improbable journey.

And crossing the Galaxy with the Gaijin might be marginally safer than flying Sängers into N’Djamena, anyhow.

Paulis seemed to sense she was wavering. ‘Spend some time,’ he said. ‘We’ll introduce you to our people. And –’

‘And you’ll tell me how you’re going to make me rich.’

‘Exactly.’ He grinned. He had very even, capped teeth.

She was flown to Kefallinia, the Ionian island which the Gaijin had been granted as a base on planet Earth. From the air the island looked as if it had been painted on the blue skin of the sea, a ragged splash of blue-grey land, everywhere indented with bays and inlets, like a fractal demonstration. Off the coast she spotted naval ships, grey slabs of metal, principally a US Navy battle group.

On the ground the sun was high, the air hot and still and very bright, like congealed light, and the rocks tumbled from a spine of mountains down to the tideless sea.

People had lived here, it was thought, for six thousand years. Not any more, of course: not the natives anyhow. When the UN deal with the Gaijin had been done, the Kefallinians were evacuated by the Greek government, most to sites in mainland Greece, others abroad. Those who came to America had been vocal. They regarded themselves as refugees, their land stolen, their culture destroyed by this alien invasion. Rightly so, Madeleine thought.

But the Kefallinians weren’t the only dispossessed on planet Earth, and their plight, though newsworthy, wasn’t attention-grabbing for long.

At the tiny airport she saw her first piece of close-up genuine Gaijin technology: a surface-to-orbit shuttle, a squat cone of some shimmering metallic substance. It looked too fragile to withstand the rigours of atmospheric entry. And yet there it was, large as life, sitting right next to the Lear jets and antiquated island-hoppers.

From the airport she was whisked to the central UN facility, close to the old capital of Argostoli. The facility was just a series of hastily prefabricated buildings and bunkers, linked by walkways and tunnels. The central building, containing the Gaijin themselves, was a crude aluminium box.

Surrounding the Gaijin shelter there were chapels and temples and mosques, embassies from various governments and inter-governmental bodies, a science park, representatives of most of the world’s major corporations. All of these groups, she supposed, were here trying to get a piece of the action, one way or another.

The senior US government official here, she learned, was called the Planetary Protection Officer. The PPO post had been devised in the 1990s to coordinate quarantine measures to handle samples of Mars rock returned to Earth, and such-like. With the arrival of the Gaijin, the joke post had become somewhat more significant.

The military presence was heavy, dug in all over the complex. There were round-the-clock patrols by foot soldiers and armoured vehicles. Copters hovered overhead continually, filling the languid air with their crude rattle, and fighter planes soared over the blue dome of the sky, flight after flight of them.

To some extent this show of military power, as if the Gaijin were being contained here by human mil technology, was a sop for public opinion. Look: we are dealing with these guys as equals. We are in control. We have not surrendered … Madeleine had even heard senior military officers describing the Gaijin as ‘bogeys’ and ‘tin men’, and seeking approval to continue their wargaming of hypothetical Gaijin assaults. But she’d seen enough warfare herself to believe that there was no way humans could prevail in an all-out conflict with the Gaijin. The hoary tactic of dropping space rocks on the major cities would probably suffice for them to win. So the smarter military minds must know that mankind had no choice but to accommodate.

But there was a splash of darkness on the concrete, close to the Gaijin facility: apparently a remnant of a near-successful protest assault on the Gaijin, an incident never widely publicized. Happily the Gaijin had shown none of the likely human reaction to such an incident, no desire to retaliate. It made Madeleine realize that the military here were looking two ways: protecting mankind from its alien visitors, and vice versa.

She stood on heat-soaked concrete and looked up at the sky. Even now, in the brightness of a Mediterranean day, she could see the ghostly shapes of flower-ships, their scoops hundreds of kilometres wide, cruising above the skies of Earth. At that moment, the idea that humans could contain the Gaijin, engage them in dialogue, control this situation, seemed laughable.

They had to put on paper coveralls and overboots and hats, and they were walked through an airlock. The Gaijin hostel worked to about the cleanliness standard of an operating theatre, Madeleine was told.

Inside the big boxy buildings, it was like a church, of a peculiarly stripped-down, minimalist kind: there was a quiet calm, subdued light, and people in uniform padded quietly to and fro in an atmosphere of reverence.

In fact, Madeleine found, that church analogy was apt. For the Gaijin had asked to meet the Pope.

‘And other religious leaders, of course,’ said Dorothy Chaum, as she shook Madeleine’s hand. ‘Strange, isn’t it? We always imagined the aliens would make straight for the Carl Sagan SETI-scientist types, and immediately start “curing” us of religion and other diseases of our primitive minds. But it isn’t working out that way at all. They seem to have more questions than answers …’

Chaum turned out to be an American, a Catholic priest who had been assigned by the Vatican to the case of the Gaijin from their first detection. She was a stocky, sensible-looking woman who might have been fifty, her hair frizzed with a modest grey. Madeleine was shocked to find out she was over one hundred years old. Evidently the Vatican could buy its people the best life-extending treatments.