STEPHEN BAXTER
SPACE
MANIFOLD 2

COPYRIGHT

HarperVoyager an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2000

Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2000

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.

Source ISBN: 9780008134471

Ebook Edition © November 2012 ISBN 9780007499793

Version: 2015-09-01

DEDICATION

To my nephew, Thomas Baxter andSimon Bradshaw and Eric Brown

EPIGRAPH

Innumerable suns exist; innumerable earths

revolve around these suns in a manner similar to

the way the seven planets revolve around our

sun. Living beings inhabit these worlds …

GIORDANO BRUNO (1548–1600)

If they existed, they would be here.

ENRICO FERMI (1901–1954)

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Part I: Foreigners

Chapter 1: Gaijin

Chapter 2: Baikonur

Chapter 3: Debates

Chapter 4: Ellis Island

Chapter 5: Saddle Point

Chapter 6: Transmission

Chapter 7: Reception

Part II: Travellers

Chapter 8: Ambassadors

Chapter 9: Fusion Summer

Chapter 10: Travels

Chapter 11: Anomalies

Chapter 12: Sister Planet

Chapter 13: The Roads of Empire

Chapter 14: Dreams of Ancestral Fish

Chapter 15: Colonists

Chapter 16: Icosahedral God

Chapter 17: Lessons

Part III: Trenchworks

Chapter 18: Moon Rain

Chapter 19: Dreams of Rock and Stillness

Chapter 20: The Tunnel in The Moon

Chapter 21: Homecoming

Chapter 22: Triton Dreamtime

Chapter 23: Cannonball

Part IV: Bad News From The Stars

Chapter 24: Kintu’s Children

Chapter 25: Wanpamba’s Tomb

Chapter 26: Kimera’s Breath

Chapter 27: The Face of Kintu

Chapter 28: People Came From Earth

Chapter 29: Bad News From The Stars

Chapter 30: Refuge

Chapter 31: End Game

Part V: The Children’s Crusade

Chapter 32: Savannah

Chapter 33: The Fermi Paradox

Chapter 34: The Children’s Crusade

Epilogue

Afterword

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Stephen Baxter

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

My name is Reid Malenfant.

You know me. And you know I’m an incorrigible space cadet.

You know I’ve campaigned for, among other things, private mining expeditions to the asteroids. In fact, in the past I’ve tried to get you to pay for such things. I’ve bored you with that often enough already, right?

So tonight I want to be a little more personal. Tonight I want to talk about why I gave over my life to a single, consuming project.

It started with a simple question:

Where is everybody?

As a kid I used to lie at night out on the lawn, soaking up dew and looking at the stars, trying to feel the Earth turning under me. It felt wonderful to be alive – hell, to be ten years old, anyhow.

But I knew that the Earth was just a ball of rock, on the fringe of a nondescript galaxy.

As I lay there staring at the stars – the thousands I could pick out with my naked eyes, the billions that make up the great wash of our Galaxy, the uncounted trillions in the galaxies beyond – I just couldn’t believe, even then, that there was nobody out there looking back at me down here. Was it really possible that this was the only place where life had taken hold – that only here were there minds and eyes capable of looking out and wondering?

But if not, where are they? Why isn’t there evidence of extraterrestrial civilization all around us?

Consider this. Life on Earth got started just about as soon as it could – as soon as the rocks cooled and the oceans gathered. Of course it took a good long time to evolve us. Nevertheless we have to believe that what applies on Earth ought to apply on all the other worlds out there, like or unlike Earth; life ought to be popping up everywhere. And, as there are hundreds of billions of stars out there in the Galaxy, there are presumably hundreds of billions of opportunities for life to come swarming up out of the ponds – and even more in the other galaxies that crowd our universe.

Furthermore, life spread over Earth as fast and as far as it could. And already we’re starting to spread to other worlds. Again, this can’t be a unique trait of Earth life.

So, if life sprouts everywhere, and spreads as fast and as far as it can, how come nobody has come spreading all over us?

Of course the universe is a big place. There are huge spaces between the stars. But it’s not that big. Even crawling along with dinky ships that only reach a fraction of lightspeed – ships we could easily start building now – we could colonize the Galaxy in a few tens of millions of years. One hundred million, tops.

One hundred million years: it seems an immense time – after all, a hundred million years ago the dinosaurs ruled Earth. But the Galaxy is a hundred times older still. There has been time for Galactic colonization to have happened many times since the birth of the stars.

Remember, all it takes is for one race somewhere to have evolved the will and the means to colonize; and once the process has started it’s hard to see what could stop it.

But, as a kid on that lawn, I didn’t see them. I seemed to be surrounded by emptiness and silence.

Even we blare out on radio frequencies. Why, with our giant radio telescopes we could detect a civilization no more advanced than ours anywhere in the Galaxy. But we don’t.

More advanced civilizations ought to be much more noticeable. We could spot somebody building a shell around their star, or throwing in nuclear waste. We could probably see evidence of such things even in other galaxies. But we don’t. Those other galaxies, other reefs of stars, seem to be as barren as this one.

Maybe we’re just unlucky. Maybe we’re living at the wrong time. The Galaxy is an old place; maybe They have been, flourished, and gone already. But consider this: even if They are long gone, surely we should see Their mighty ruins, all around us. But we don’t even see that. The stars show no signs of engineering. The solar system appears to be primordial, in the sense that it shows no signs of the great projects we can already envisage, like terraforming the planets, or tinkering with the sun, and so on.

We can think of lots of rationalizations for this absence.

Maybe there is something that kills off every civilization like ours before we get too far – for example, maybe we all destroy ourselves in nuclear wars or eco collapse. Or maybe there is something more sinister, plagues of killer robots sliding silently between the stars, which for their own antique purposes kill off fledgling cultures.

Or maybe the answer is more benevolent. Maybe we’re in some kind of quarantine – or a zoo.

But none of these filtering mechanisms convinces me. You see, you have to believe that this magic suppression mechanism, whatever it is, works for every race in this huge Galaxy of ours. All it would take would be for one race to survive the wars, or evade the vacuum robots, or come sneaking through the quarantine to sell trinkets to the natives – or even just to start broadcasting some Eetie version of The Simpsons, anywhere in the Galaxy – and we’d surely see or hear them.

But we don’t.

This paradox was first stated clearly by a twentieth-century physicist called Enrico Fermi. It strikes me as a genuine mystery. The contradictions are basic: life seems capable of emerging everywhere; just one starfaring race could easily have covered the Galaxy by now; the whole thing seems inevitable – but it hasn’t happened.

Thinking about paradoxes is the way human understanding advances. I think the Fermi paradox is telling us something very profound about the universe, and our place in it. Or was.

Of course, everything is different now.

I
FOREIGNERS

AD 2020–2042

… And he felt as if he was drowning, struggling up from some thick, viscous fluid, up towards the light. He wanted to open his mouth, to scream – but he had no mouth – and no words. What would he scream?

I.

I am.

I am Reid Malenfant.

He could see the sail.

It was a gauzy sheet draped across the crowded stars of this place – where, Malenfant? why, the core of the Galaxy, he thought, wonder breaking through his agony – and within the sail, cupped, he could see the neutron star, an angry ball of red laced with eerie synchrotron blue, like a huge toy.

A star with a sail attached to it. Beautiful. Scary.

Triumph surged. I won, he thought. I resolved the koan, the great conundrum of the cosmos; Nemoto would be pleased. And now, together, we’re fixing an unsatisfactory universe. Hell of a thing.

… But if you see all this, Malenfant, then what are you?

He looked down at himself.

Tried to.

A sense of body, briefly. Spread-eagled against the sail’s gauzy netting. Clinging by fingers and toes, monkey digits, here at the centre of the Galaxy. A metaphor, of course, an illusion to comfort his poor human mind.

Welcome to reality.

The pain! Oh, God, the pain.

Terror flooded over him. And anger.

And, through it, he remembered the Moon, where it began …

Chapter 1
GAIJIN

A passenger in the HOPE-3 tug, Reid Malenfant descended towards the Moon.

The Farside base, called Edo, was a cluster of concrete components – habitation modules, power plants, stores, manufacturing facilities – half-buried in the cratered plain. Comms masts sprouted like angular flowers. The tug pad was just a splash of scorched Moon-dust concrete, a couple of kilometres further out. Around the station itself, the regolith was scarred by tractor traffic.

Robots were everywhere, rolling, digging, lifting; Edo was growing like a colony of bacilli in nutrient.

A hi-no-maru, a Japanese sun flag, was fixed to a pole at the centre of Edo.

‘You are welcome to my home,’ Nemoto said.

She met him in the pad’s airlock, a large, roomy chamber blown into the regolith. Her face was broad, pale, her eyes black; her hair was elaborately shaved, showing the shape of her skull. She smiled, apparently habitually. She could have been no more than half Malenfant’s age, perhaps thirty.

Nemoto helped Malenfant don the suit he’d been fitted with during the flight from Earth. The suit was a brilliant orange. It clung to him comfortably, the joints easy and loose, although the sewn-in plates of tungsten armour were heavy.

‘It’s a hell of a development from the old EMUs I wore when I was flying Shuttle,’ he said, trying to make conversation.

Nemoto listened politely, after the manner of young people, to his fragments of reminiscence from a vanished age. She told him the suit had been manufactured on the Moon, and was made largely of spider silk. ‘I will take you to the factory. A chamber in the lunar soil, full of immense spinnerets. A nightmare vision! …’

Malenfant felt disoriented, restless.

He was here to deliver a lecture, on colonizing the Galaxy, to senior executives of Nishizaki Heavy Industries. But here he was being met off the tug by Nemoto, the junior researcher who’d invited him out to the Moon, just a kid. He hoped he wasn’t making some kind of fool of himself.

Reid Malenfant used to be an astronaut. He’d flown the last Shuttle mission – STS-194, on Discovery – when, ten years ago, the space transportation system had reached the end of its design life, and the International Space Station had finally been abandoned, incomplete. No American had flown into space since – save as the guest of the Japanese, or the Europeans, or the Chinese.

In this year 2020, Malenfant was sixty years old and feeling a lot older – increasingly stranded, a refugee in this strange new century, his dignity woefully fragile.

Well, he thought, whatever the dubious politics, whatever the threat to his dignity, he was here. It had been the dream of his long life to walk on another world. Even if it was as the guest of a Japanese.

And even if he was too damn old to enjoy it.

They stepped through a transit tunnel and directly into a small tractor, a lozenge of tinted glass. The tractor rolled away from the tug pad. The wheels were large and open, and absorbed the unevenness of the mare; Malenfant felt as if he were riding across the Moon in a soap bubble.

Every surface in the cabin was coated with fine, grey Moon dust. He could smell the dust; the scent was, as he knew it would be, like wood ash, or gunpowder.

Beyond the window, the Mare Ingenii – the Sea of Longing – stretched to the curved horizon, pebble-strewn. It was late in the lunar afternoon, and the sunlight was low, flat, the shadows of the surface rubble long and sharp. The lighting was a rich tan when he looked away from the sun, a more subtle grey elsewhere. Earth was hidden beneath the horizon, of course, but Malenfant could see a comsat crawl across the black sky.

He longed to step through the glass, to touch that ancient soil.

Nemoto locked in the autopilot and went to a little galley area. She emerged with green tea, rice crackers and dried ika cuttlefish. Malenfant wasn’t hungry, but he accepted the food. Such items as the fish were genuine luxuries here, he knew; Nemoto was trying to honour him.

The motion of the tea, as she poured it in the one-sixth gravity, was complex, interesting.

‘I am honoured you have accepted my invitation to travel here, to Edo,’ Nemoto said. ‘You will of course tour the town, as you wish. There is even a Makudonarudo here. A McDonald’s. You may enjoy a bifubaaga! … soya, of course.’

He put down his plate and tried to meet her direct gaze. ‘Tell me why I’ve been brought out here. I don’t see how my work, on long-term space utilization, can be of real interest to your employers.’

She eyed him. ‘You do have a lecture to deliver, I am afraid. But – no, your work is not of primary concern to Nishizaki.’

‘Then I don’t understand.’

‘It is I who invited you, I who arranged the funding. You ask why. I wished to meet you. I am a researcher, like you.’

‘Hardly a researcher,’ he said. ‘I call myself a consultant, nowadays. I am not attached to a university.’

‘Nor I. Nishizaki Heavy Industries pay my wages; my research must be focused on serving corporate objectives.’ She eyed him, and took some more fish. ‘I am salariman. A good company worker, yes? But I am, at heart, a scientist. And I have made some observations which I am unable to reconcile with the accepted paradigm. I searched for recent scientific publications concerning the subject area of my – hypothesis. I found only yours.

‘My subject is infrared astronomy. At our research station, away from Edo, the company maintains radiometers, photometers, photopolarimeters, cameras. I work at a range of wavelengths, from twenty to a hundred microns. Of course a space-borne platform is to be preferred: the activities of humankind are thickening the Moon’s atmosphere with each passing day, blocking the invisible light I collect. But the lunar site is cheap to maintain, and is adequate for the company’s purposes. We are considering the future exploitation of the asteroids, you see. Infrared astronomy is a powerful tool in the study of those distant rocks. With it we can deduce a great deal about surface textures, compositions, internal heat, rotation characteristics –’

‘Tell me about your paradigm-busting hypothesis.’

‘Yes.’ She sipped her green tea. She said calmly, ‘I believe I have observational evidence of the activity of extraterrestrial intelligences in the solar system.’

The silence stretched between them, electric. Her words were shocking, quite unexpected.

But now he saw why she’d brought him here.

Since his retirement from NASA, Malenfant had avoided following his colleagues into the usual ex-astronaut gravy ponds, lucrative aerospace executive posts and junior political positions. Instead, he’d thrown his weight behind research into what he regarded as long-term thinking: SETI, using gravitational lensing to hunt for planets and Eetie signals, advanced propulsion systems, schemes for colonizing the planets, terraforming, interstellar travel, exploration of the venerable Fermi paradox.

All the stuff that Emma had so disapproved of. You’re wasting your time, Malenfant. Where’s the money to be made out of gravitational lensing? …

But his wife was long gone, of course. Struck down by cancer: the result of a random cosmic accident, a heavy particle that had come whizzing out of an ancient supernova and flown across the universe to damage her just so … It could have been him; it could have been neither of them; it could have happened a few years later, when cancer had been reduced to a manageable disease. But it hadn’t worked out like that, and Malenfant, burnt out, already grounded, had been left alone.

So he had thrown himself into his obsessions. What else was there to do?

Well, Emma had been right, and wrong. He was making a minor living on the lecture circuit. But few serious people were listening, just as she had predicted. He attracted more knee-jerk criticism than praise or thoughtful response; in the last few years, he’d become regarded as not much more than a reliable talk-show crank.

But now, this.

He tried to figure how to deal with this, what to say. Nemoto wasn’t like the Japanese he had known before, on Earth, with their detailed observance of reigi – the proper manner.

She studied him, evidently amused. ‘You are surprised. Startled. You think, perhaps, I am not quite sane to voice such speculations. You are trapped on the Moon with a mad Japanese woman. The American nightmare!’

He shook his head. ‘It’s not that.’

‘But you must see that my speculations are not so far removed from your own published work. Like myself, you are cautious. Nobody listens. And when you do find an audience, they do not take you seriously.’

‘I wouldn’t be so blunt about it.’

‘Your nation has turned inward,’ Nemoto said. ‘Shrunk back.’

‘Maybe. We just have different priorities now.’ In the US, flights into space had become a hobby of old men and women, dreams of an age of sublimated warfare which had left behind only images of charmingly antique rocket craft, endlessly copied around the data nets. Nothing to do with now.

She said, ‘Then why do you continue, to argue, to talk, to expose yourself to ridicule?’

‘Because –’ Because if nobody thinks it, it definitely won’t happen.

She was smiling at him; she seemed to understand. She said, ‘The kokuminsei, the spirit of your people, is asleep. But in you, and perhaps others, curiosity burns strong. I think we two should defy the spirit of our age.’

‘Why have you brought me here?’

‘I am seeking to resolve a koan,’ she said. ‘A conundrum that defies logical analysis.’ Her face lost its habitual smile, for the first time since they’d met. ‘I need a fresh look – a perspective from a big thinker – someone like you. And –’

‘Yes?’

‘I am afraid, I think,’ she said. ‘Afraid for the future of the species.’

The tractor worked its way across the Moon, following a broad, churned-up path. Nemoto offered him more food.

The tractor drew up at an airlock at the outskirts of Edo. A big NASDA symbol was painted on the lock: NASDA for Japan’s National Space Development Agency. With the minimum of fuss, Nemoto led Malenfant through the airlock and into Edo, into a colony on the Moon.

Here, at its periphery, Edo was functional. The walls were bare, of fused, glassy regolith. Ducts and cables were stapled to the roof. People wore plain, disposable paper coveralls. There was an air of bustle, of heavy industry.

Nemoto led him through Edo, a gentle guided tour. ‘Of course the station is a great achievement,’ she said. ‘No less than ninety-five flights of our old H-2 rockets were required to ferry accommodation modules and power plants here. We build beneath the regolith, for shelter from solar radiation. We bake oxygen from the rocks, and mine water from the polar permafrost …’

At the centre of the complex, Edo was a genuine town. There were public places: bars, restaurants where the people could buy rice, soup, fried vegetables, sushi, sake. There was even a tiny park, with shrubs and bamboo grass; a spindly lunar-born child played there with his parents.

Nemoto smiled at Malenfant’s reaction. ‘At the heart of Edo, ten metres beneath lunar regolith, there are cherry trees. Our children study beneath their branches. You may stay long enough to see ichi-buzaki, the first state of blossoming.’

Malenfant saw no other Westerners. Most of the Japanese nodded politely. Many must have known Nemoto – Edo supported only a few hundred inhabitants – but none engaged her in conversation. His impression of Nemoto as a loner, rather eccentric, was reinforced.

As they passed one group he heard a man whisper, ‘Wah! – gaijin-kusai.’

Gaijin-kusai. The smell of foreigner. There was laughter.

Malenfant spent the night in what passed for a ryokan, an inn. His apartment was tiny, a single room. But, despite the bleak austerity of the fused-regolith walls, the room was decorated Japanese style. The floor was tatami – rice straw matting – polished and worn with use. A tokonoma, an alcove carved into the rock, contained an elaborate data net interface unit; but the owners had followed tradition and had hung a scroll painting there – of a dragonfly on a blade of grass – and some flowers, in an ikebana display. The flowers looked real.

There was a display of cherry blossom, fixed to the wall under clear plastic. The contrast of the pale living pink with the grey Moon rock was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

In this tiny room he was immersed in noise: the low, deep rumblings of the artificial lungs of the colony, of machines ploughing outward through the regolith. It was like being in the belly of a huge vessel, a submarine. Malenfant thought wistfully of his own study: bright Iowa sunlight, his desk, his equipment.

Edo kept Tokyo time, so Malenfant, here on the Moon, suffered jet lag. He slept badly.

Rows of faces.

‘… How are we to populate the Galaxy? It’s actually all a question of economics.’ Over Malenfant’s head a virtual image projected in the air of the little theatre, its light glimmering from the folded wooden walls.

Malenfant stared around at the rows of Japanese faces, like coins shining in this rich brown dark. They seemed remote, unreal. Many of these people were NASDA administrators; as far as he could tell there was nobody from Nishizaki senior management here, nominally his sponsors for the trip.

The virtual was a simple schematic of stars, randomly scattered. One star blinked, representing the sun.

Malenfant said, ‘We will launch unmanned probes.’ Ships, little dots of light, spread out from the toy sun. ‘We might use ion rockets, solar sails, gravity assists – whatever. The first wave will be slow, no faster than we can afford. It doesn’t matter. Not in the long term.

‘The probes will be self-replicating: Von Neumann machines, essentially. Universal constructors. Humans may follow, by such means as generation starships. However it would be cheaper for the probes to manufacture humans in situ, using cell synthesis and artificial womb technology.’ He glanced over the audience. ‘You wish to know if we can build such devices. Not yet. Although your own Kashiwazaki Electric has a partial prototype.’

At that there was a stir of interest, self-satisfied.

As his virtual light-show continued to evolve, telling its own story, he glanced up at the walls around him, at the glimmer of highlights from wood. This was a remarkable place. It was the largest structure in Edo, serving as community centre and town hall and showpiece, the size of a ten-storey building.

But it was actually a tree, a variety of oak. The oaks were capable of growing to two hundred metres under the Moon’s gentle gravity, but this one had been bred for width, and was full of intersecting hollowed-out chambers. The walls of this room were of smooth polished wood, broken only subtly by technology – lights, air vents, virtual display gear – and the canned air here was fresh and moist and alive.

In contrast to the older parts of Edo – all those clunky tunnels – this was the future of the Moon, the Japanese were implicitly saying. The living Moon. What the hell was an American doing here on the Moon, lecturing these patient Japanese about colonizing space? The Japanese were doing it, patiently and incrementally working.

But – yes, incrementally: that was the key word. Even these lunar colonists couldn’t see beyond their current projects, the next few years, their own lifetimes. They couldn’t see where this could all lead. To Malenfant, that ultimate destination was everything.

And, perhaps, Nemoto and her strange science would provide the first route map.

The little probe-images had reached their destination stars.

‘Here is the heart of the strategy,’ he said. ‘A target system, we assume, is uninhabited. We can therefore program for massive and destructive exploitation of the system’s resources, without restraint, by the probe. Such resources are useless for any other purpose, and are therefore economically free to us. And so we colonize, and build.’

More probes erupted from each of the first wave of target stars, at greatly increased speeds. The probes reached new targets; and again, more probes were spawned, and fired onwards. The volume covered by the probes grew rapidly; it was like watching the expansion of gas into a vacuum.

He said, ‘Once started, the process is self-directing, self-financing. It would take, we think, ten to a hundred million years for the colonization of the Galaxy to be completed in this manner. But we must invest merely in the cost of the initial generation of probes. Thus the cost of colonizing the Galaxy will be less, in real terms, than that of our Apollo program of fifty years ago.’

His probes were now spreading out along the Galaxy’s spiral arms, along lanes rich with stars. His Japanese audience watched politely.

But as he delivered his polished words he thought of Nemoto and her tantalizing hints of otherness – of a mystery which might render all his scripted invective obsolete – and he faltered.

Trying to focus, feeling impatient, he closed with his cosmic-destiny speech. ‘… This may be a watershed in the history of the cosmos. Think about it. We know how to do this. If we make the right decisions now, life may spread beyond Earth and Moon, far beyond the solar system, a wave of green transforming the Galaxy. We must not fail …’ And so on.

Well, they applauded him kindly enough. But there were few questions.

He got out, feeling foolish.

The next day Nemoto said she would take him to the surface, to see her infrared spectroscopy results at first hand.

They walked through the base to a tractor airlock, and suited up once more. The infrared station was an hour’s ride from Edo.

A kilometre out from Edo itself, the tractor passed one of the largest structures Malenfant had yet seen. It was a cylinder perhaps a hundred and fifty metres long, ten wide. It looked like a half-buried nuclear submarine. The lunar surface here was scarred by huge gullies, evidently the result of strip-mining. Around the central cylinder there was a cluster of what looked like furnaces, enclosed by semi-transparent domes.

‘Our fusion plant,’ Nemoto said. ‘Edo is powered by the fusion of deuterium, the hydrogen isotope, with helium-3.’

Malenfant glared out with morbid interest. Here, as in most technological arenas, the Japanese were way out ahead of Americans. Twenty per cent of the US’s power now came from the fusion of two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium. But hydrogen fusion processes, even with such relatively low-yield fuel, had turned out to be unstable and expensive: high-energy neutrons smashed through reactor walls, making them brittle and radioactive. The Japanese helium-3 fusion process, by contrast, produced charged protons, which could be kept away from reactor walls with magnetic fields.

However, the Earth had no natural supply of helium-3.

Nemoto waved a hand. ‘The Moon contains vast stores of helium-3, locked away in deposits of titanium minerals, in the top three metres of the regolith. The helium came from the sun, borne on the solar wind; the titanium acted like a sponge, soaking up the helium particles. We plan to begin exporting the helium to Earth.’

‘I know.’ The export would make Edo self-sufficient.

She smiled brightly, young and confident in the future.

Out of sight of Edo, the tractor passed a cairn of piled-up maria rubble. On the top there was a sake bottle, a saucer bearing rice cakes, a porcelain figure. There were small paper flags around the figure, but the raw sunlight had faded them.

‘It is a shrine,’ Nemoto explained. ‘To Inari-samma. The Fox God.’ She grinned at him. ‘If you close your eyes and clap your hands, perhaps the kami will come to you. The divinities.’

‘Shrines? At a lunar industrial complex?’

‘We are an old people,’ she said. ‘We have changed much, but we remain the same. Yamato damashi – our spirit – persists.’

At length the tractor drew up to a cluster of buildings set on the plain. This was the Nishizaki Heavy Industries infrared research station.

Nemoto checked Malenfant’s suit, then popped the hatch.

Malenfant climbed stiffly down a short ladder. As he moved, clumsily, he heard the hiss of air, the soft whirr of exoskeletal multipliers. These robot muscles helped him overcome the suit’s pressurization and the weight of his tungsten anti-radiation armour.

His helmet was a big gold-tinted bubble. His backpack, like Nemoto’s, was a semi-transparent thing of tubes and sloshing water, six litres full of blue algae that fed off sunlight and his own waste products, producing enough oxygen to keep him going indefinitely. In theory.

Actually Malenfant missed his old suit: his Space Shuttle EMU, Extravehicular Mobility Unit, with its clunks and whirrs of fans and pumps. Maybe it was limited compared to this new technology. But he hated to wear a backpack that sloshed, for God’s sake, its mass pulling him this way and that in the low gravity. And his robot muscles – amplifying every impulse, dragging his limbs and tilting his back for him – made him feel like a puppet.

He dropped down the last metre; his small impact sent up a little spray of dust, which fell back immediately.

And here he was, walking on the Moon.

He walked away from the tractor, suit whirring and lurching. He had to go perhaps a hundred metres to get away from tractor tracks and footsteps.

He reached unmarked soil. His boots left prints as crisp as if he had stepped out of Apollo 11.

There were craters upon craters, a fractal clustering, right down to little pits he could barely have put his fingertip into, and smaller yet. But they didn’t look like craters – more like the stippling of raindrops, as if he stood in a recently ploughed and harrowed field, a place where rain had pummelled the loose ground. But there had been no rain here, of course, not for four billion years.

The sun cast brilliant, dazzling light. Otherwise the sky was empty, jet black. But he was a little surprised that he had no sense of openness, of immensity all around him, unlike a desert night sky at home. He felt as if he was on a darkened stage, under a brilliant spotlight, with the walls of the universe just a little way away, just out of view.

He looked back at the tractor, with the big red sun of Japan painted on its side. He thought of a terraformed Moon, of twin blue worlds. He felt tears, hot and unwelcome, prickle his eyes. Damn it. We were here first. We had all this. And we let it go.

Nemoto waited for him, a small figure on the Moon’s folded plain, her face hidden behind her gold-tinted bubble of glass.

She led him into the cluster of buildings. There was a small fission power plant, tanks of gases and liquids. A living shelter was half-buried in the regolith.

The centre of the site was a crude cylindrical hut, open to the sky, containing a battery of infrared sensors and computer equipment. The infrared detectors themselves were immersed in huge vessels of liquid helium. Robots crawled between the detectors, monitoring constantly, their complex arms stained by Moon dust.

Nemoto walked up to a processor control desk. A virtual image appeared, hovering over the compacted regolith at the centre of the hut. The virtual was a ring of glistening crimson droplets, slowly orbiting.

Nemoto said, ‘Here is a summary of my survey of the asteroid belt. Or “belts”, I should say, for there are gaps between the sub-belts – the Kirkwood gaps, swept clear by resonances with Jupiter’s gravity field.’ The Kirkwood gaps were dark bands, empty of crimson drops. ‘Of course Nishizaki Heavy Industries is very interested in asteroids. There is a mine in Sudbury, Ontario, which for a long time was a rich source of nickel. The nickel seam is disc-shaped. It is almost certainly the scar of an ancient asteroid collision with the Earth.’

‘Mineral extraction, then.’

‘There is a scheme to retrieve a fragment of the asteroid Geographos, which crosses Earth’s orbit. We may cleave it with controlled explosions. Perhaps we can deliver fragments to orbit, using lunar gravity assists and grazes against the Earth’s atmosphere. Or we may initiate a controlled impact with the Moon. This exercise alone would yield more than nine hundred billion dollars’ worth of nickel, rhenium, osmium, iridium, platinum, gold – so much, in fact, the planet’s economy would be transformed, making estimates of wealth difficult.’

Malenfant walked around the instrument hut. The novelty of his Moonwalk was wearing off; his suit scratched, his helmet was hot, and his condom was itching. ‘Nemoto, it’s time you got to the point.’

‘The koan,’ she said. The virtual ring shone in her visor, making her face invisible. ‘Let us look at the stars.’

She took his gloved hand in hers – through the thick layers of glove he could barely feel the pressure of her fingers – and she led him out of the building. The virtual asteroid ring, eerily, followed them out.

They stood in the deep shadow of the structure. With a motion, she indicated he should lift his visor.

He raised his head so he couldn’t see the ground or the buildings, and he turned around and around, as he used to as a kid, on the darkest Moonless nights back home.

The stars, of course: thousands of them, peppering the sky all around him, crowding out the bright-star constellations seen from Earth. And now, at last, came that elusive feeling of immensity. From the Moon it was much easier to see that he was just a mote clinging to a round ball of rock, spinning endlessly in an infinite, three-dimensional starry sky.

‘Look.’ Nemoto, pointing, swept out an arc of the sky, where dusty light shone.

Despite the crowding stars, Malenfant recognized one or two constellations – Cygnus and Aquila, the swan and the eagle. And, where she pointed, a river of light ran through the constellations, a river of stars. It was the Milky Way: the Galaxy, the disc of stars in which Sol and all its planets were embedded, seen edge on and turned into a band of light that wrapped around the sky. But, as it passed through Cygnus and Aquila, that band of light seemed to split into two, twin streams separated by a dark gap. In fact the rift was a shadow, cast by dark clouds blocking the light from the star banks behind.

Nemoto pointed. ‘See how the darkness starts out narrow in Cygnus, then broadens in Aquila, sweeping wider through Serpens and Opiuchus. This is the effect of perspective. We are seeing a band of dust as it comes from the distance in Cygnus, passing closest to the sun in Aquila and Opiuchus. Malenfant, we live in a spiral arm of this Galaxy – a small fragment, in fact, called the Orion Arm. And spiral arms typically have lanes of dust on their inside edges.’

‘Like that one.’

‘Yes. That is the inner edge of our spiral arm, hanging in the sky for all to see.’ Her shadowed eyes glimmered, full of starlight. ‘It is possible to make out the Galaxy’s structure, you see: to witness that we are embedded in a giant spiral of stars – even with the naked eye. This is where we live.’

‘Why are you showing me this?’

‘Look at the Galaxy, Malenfant. It appears to be a giant machine – no, an ecology – evolved to make stars. And there are hundreds of millions of galaxies beyond our own. Is it really conceivable, given all of that immensity, all that structure, that we are truly alone? – that life emerged here, and nowhere else?’

Malenfant grunted. ‘The old Fermi paradox. Troubled me as a kid, even before I heard of Fermi.’

‘Me too.’ He could see her smile. ‘You see, Malenfant, we have much in common. And the logic behind the paradox troubles me still –’

‘Even though you think you have found aliens.’

She let that hang, and he found he was holding his breath.

Cautiously, she said, ‘How would it make you feel, Malenfant, if I was right?’

‘If you had proof that another intelligence exists? It would be wonderful. I guess.’

‘Would it?’ She smiled again. ‘How sentimental you are. Listen to me: humanity would be in extreme danger. Remember, by your own argument, the assumption on which such a colonizing expedition operates is that it is appropriating an empty system. Such a probe could destroy our worlds without even noticing us.’

He shivered; his spider-web suit felt thin and fragile.

‘Think it through further,’ she said. ‘Think like an engineer. If an alien replicator probe were to approach the solar system, where would it seek to establish itself? What are its requirements?’

He thought about it. You’ll need energy; plenty of it. So, stay close to the sun. Next: raw materials. The surface of a rocky planet? But you wouldn’t want to dip into a gravity well if you didn’t have to … Besides, your probe is designed for deep space –

‘The asteroid belt,’ he said, suddenly seeing where all this was leading. ‘Plenty of resources, freely floating, away from the big gravity wells … Even the main belts aren’t too crowded, but you’d probably settle in a Kirkwood gap, to minimize the chance of collision. Your orbit would be perturbed by Jupiter, just like the asteroids’, but it wouldn’t require much station-keeping to compensate for that. And some kind of ship or colony out there, even a few kilometres across, would be hard for us to spot.’ He looked at her sharply. ‘Is that what this is about? Have you found something in the belt?’

‘The plain facts are these. I have surveyed the Kirkwood gaps with the sensors here. And, in the gap which corresponds to the one-to-three resonance with Jupiter, I have found –’ She pointed to her virtual model, to a broad, precise gap.

At the centre of the gap, a string of rubies shone, enigmatic, brilliant in the shadows.

‘These are sources of infrared,’ she said. ‘Sources I cannot explain.’

Malenfant bent to study the little beads of light. ‘Could they be asteroids that have strayed into the gap after collisions?’

‘No. The sources are too bright. In fact, they are each emitting more heat than they receive from the sun. I am, of course, seeking firmer evidence: for example, structure in the infrared signature; or perhaps there will be radio leakage.’

He stared at the ruby lights. My God. She’s right. If these are emitting heat, this is unambiguous: it’s evidence of industrial activity …

His heart thumped. Somehow he hadn’t accepted what she had said to him, not in his gut, not up to now. But now he could see it, and his universe was transformed.

He made out her face in the dim light reflected from the regolith, the smooth sweep of human flesh here in this dusty wilderness. Though it must have been a big moment for her to show him this evidence – a moment of triumph – she seemed troubled. ‘Nemoto, why did you ask me here? Your work is a fine piece of science, as far as I can see. The interpretation is unambiguous. You should publish. Why do you need reassurance from me?’

‘I know this is good science. But the answer is wrong. Very wrong. The koan is not resolved at all. Don’t you see that?’ She glared up at the sky, as if trying to make out the signature of aliens with her own eyes. ‘Why now?’

He glimpsed her meaning.

They must have just arrived, or we’d surely see their works, the transformed asteroids swarming … But why should they arrive now, just as we ourselves are ready to move beyond the Earth – just as we are able to comprehend them? A simple coincidence? Why shouldn’t they have come here long ago?

He grinned. Old Fermi wasn’t beaten yet; there were deeper layers of the paradox here, much to unravel, new questions to ask.

But it wasn’t a moment for philosophy.

His mind was racing. ‘We aren’t alone. Whatever the implications, the unanswered questions – my God, what a thought. We’ll need the resources of the race, of all of us, to respond to this.’

She smiled thinly. ‘Yes. The stars have intervened, it seems. Your kokuminsei, your people’s spirit, must revive. It will be satori – a reawakening. Come.’ She held out her hand. ‘We should go back to Edo. We have much to do.’

He squinted, trying to make out the constellations against the glare of the regolith. There was gaijin-kusai there, the smell of foreigner, he thought. He felt exhilarated, awakened, as if a hiatus was coming to an end. This changes everything.

He took Nemoto’s hand, and they walked back across the regolith to the tractor.

Chapter 2
BAIKONUR

The priest was not what Xenia Makarova had expected.

Xenia herself wasn’t religious. And Xenia’s family, emigrant to the United States four generations ago, had been Orthodox. What did she know about Catholic priests? So she had expected the cliché: some gaunt old man, Italian or Irish, shrivelled up by a lifetime of celibacy, dressed in a flapping black cassock that would soak up the toxic dust and prove utterly unsuitable for the conditions here at the launch site.

Her first surprise had come when the priest had expressed no special accommodation requirements, but had been happy to stay in the town of Baikonur, along with the technicians who worked for Bootstrap here at the old Soviet-era launch station. Baikonur – once called Leninsk, at the heart of Kazakhstan – was a place of burned-out offices and abandoned, windowless apartments, of roads and roofs coated with strata of gritty brown powder, blown from the pesticide-laden salt flats of the long-dead Aral Sea a few hundred kilometres away. Baikonur was a relic of Soviet dreams, plagued by crime and ill-health. Not a good place to stay.

So Xenia wasn’t sure what to expect by the time the bus drew up to the security gate, and she went out to greet her holy guest.

The priest must have been sixty, small, compact: fit-looking, though she showed some stiffness climbing down from the bus. Camera drones, glittering toys the size of beetles, whirred out in a cloud around her head.

Her, yes: of course it would be a female, one of the Vatican’s first cadre of women priests, that would be assigned to this most PR-friendly of operations.

And no black cassock. The priest, dressed in loose, comfortable-looking therm-aware shirt and slacks, could have held any one of a number of white collar professions: an accountant, maybe, or a space scientist of the kind Frank Paulis had recruited in droves, or even a lawyer like Xenia herself. It was only the dog collar, a thin band of white at the throat, that marked out a different vocation.

From the shadows of her broad, sensible sun-hat the priest smiled out at Xenia. ‘You must be Ms Makarova.’

‘Call me Xenia. And you –’

‘Dorothy Chaum.’ The smile grew a little weary. ‘I’m neither Mother, nor Father, thankfully. You must call me Dorothy.’

‘It’s a pleasure to have you here, Ms – Dorothy.’

Dorothy flapped at the drones buzzing around her head like flies. ‘You’re a good liar. I’ll try to trouble you as little as I can.’ And she looked beyond Xenia, into the rocket compound, with questing, curious eyes.

Maybe this won’t be so bad after all, Xenia thought.

Xenia, in fact, had been against the visit on principle, and she had told her boss so. ‘For God’s sake, Frank. This is a space launcher development site. It’s a place for hard hats, not haloes.’

Frank Paulis – forty-five years old, squat, brisk, bustling, sleek with sweat even in his air-conditioned offices – had just tapped his softscreen. ‘Just like it says in the mail here. This character is here on behalf of the Pope, to gather information on the mission –’

‘And bless it. Frank, the Bruno is a mission to the asteroids. We’re going out to find Eeties, for God’s sake. To have some quack waving incense and throwing holy water over our ship is – ridiculous. Mediaeval.’

Frank had got a look in his eyes she’d come to recognize. You have to be realistic, Xenia. Live in the real world. ‘The Vatican are one of our principal sponsors. They’ve a right to access.’

‘The Church is using us as part of its repositioning,’ she’d protested sourly. It was true; the Church had spent much of the new millennium rebuilding, after the multiple crises that had assailed it after the turn of the century: sexual scandals, financial irregularities, a renewed awareness of the horrors of Christian history – the Crusades and the Inquisition chief amongst them. ‘Not to mention,’ Xenia said bitterly, ‘the Church’s refusal to acknowledge female reproductive rights and to address the issue of population growth, a position not abandoned until 2013, a historic wrong which must be on a par with –’

‘Nobody’s arguing,’ Frank said gently. ‘But – who are you suggesting is cynical? Us or them? Look, I don’t care about the Church. All I care about is its money, and there’s still a hell of a lot of that. And, just like any other corporate sponsor, the Church is entitled to its slice of the PR pie.’

‘Sometimes I think you’d take money from the Devil himself if it got your Big Dumb Booster a little closer to the launch pad.’

‘Since we have a bunch of those apocalyptic cultists here – the ones who think the Gaijin are demons sent to punish us, or whatever – I suppose I am taking money from the other guy. Well, at least it shows balance.’ Frank put his arm around her – he had to reach up to do it – and guided her out of his office. ‘Xenia, this witch doctor isn’t going to be with us for long. And, believe me, a priest is going to be a lot easier for you to entertain than some of the fat cats we have to put up with.’

‘Me … Frank, if you knew how much I resent the implication that my time isn’t valuable –’

‘Bring her to the lecture. That will eat up a couple of hours.’

‘What lecture?’

He frowned. ‘I thought you knew. Reid Malenfant, on the philosophy of extraterrestrial life.’

She had to retrieve the name from deep memory. ‘The dried-up old coot from the talk shows?’

‘Reid Malenfant, the ex-astronaut. Reid Malenfant, the co-discoverer of alien life five years back. Reid Malenfant, modern icon, come to give our grease monkeys a pep talk.’ He grinned. ‘Lighten up, Xenia. Maybe it will be interesting.’

‘Are you going?’

‘Of course I am.’ And, gently, he had closed the door.

Xenia and Dorothy were SmartDriven around Baikonur, the standard-issue corporate tour.

Baikonur, the Soviet Union’s long-hidden space centre, had been pretty much a derelict by the time Frank Paulis took it over and began renovation. Stranded at the heart of a chill, treeless steppe, connected to the Russian border by a single antique rail line, it was like a run-down military base, dotted with hangars and launch pads and fuel tanks. Even after years of work by Bootstrap here, there were still piles of rusty junk strewn over the more remote corners of the base – some of it said to be the last relics of Russia’s never-successful Moon rockets.

But Dorothy’s attention was diverted, away from Xenia’s sound bites on the history and the engineering and the mission of Bootstrap, by the folks Frank Paulis referred to as the Sports Fans: adherents of one view or another about the Gaijin, seemingly attracted here irresistibly.

The Sports Fans lived at the fringe of the launch complex in semi-permanent camps, contained by tough link fences. They spent their time chanting, costume-wearing, leafleting, performing protests of one baffling kind or another, right up against the fences, carefully watched over by Bootstrap security staff and drone robots. They were funded, presumably, by savings, or sponsors, or by whatever they could sell of their experiences and their witness on the data nets, and they were a fat, easy revenue source for the local Kazakhs – which was why they were tolerated here.

Xenia tried to guide Dorothy away from all this, but Dorothy demurred. And so they began a slow drive around the fences, as Dorothy peered out, and Xenia struggled to contain her impatience.

Public reaction to the Gaijin – as it had developed over the five years since the announcement of the discovery by Nemoto and Malenfant – had bifurcated. There were two broad schools of thought. The technical terms among psychologists and sociologists, Xenia had learned, were ‘millennialists’ and ‘catastrophists’.

The millennialists, taking their lead from thinkers like Carl Sagan – not to mention Gene Roddenberry – believed that no star-spanning culture could possibly be hostile to a more primitive species like humanity, and the Gaijin must therefore be on their way to educate us or uplift us or save us from ourselves. The more intellectual millennialists had at least produced some useful, if slanted, material: careful studies of parallels with intercultural contact in Earth’s past, ranging from the dreadful fall-out of western colonialism through to the essentially benevolent impact of the transmission of learning from Arabian and ancient Greek cultures to the medieval west.

But some millennialists were more direct. Various giant, elaborate structures had been cut or burned or painted on Earth’s surface – featuring the peace sigil, the yin and yang, the Christian cross, a human hand – giant graffiti, Dorothy thought, painted in the deserts of America and Africa and Asia and Australia and even, illegally, on the Antarctic ice cap, its creators wistfully hoping to catch the eye of the anonymous, toiling strangers out in the belt.

Others were even less subtle. Right here before her now there was a circle of people, hands open and faces raised to the desert sky, all steadily praying. She knew there had been similar gatherings, some in continuous session, at many of the world’s key religious and mystic sites: Jerusalem, Mecca, the pyramids, the European stone circles. Take me! Take me!

Meanwhile, the catastrophists believed that the aliens represented terrible danger.

Much of their fear and anger was directed at the aliens themselves, of course, and there were elaborate schemes for military assaults on their supposed asteroid bases – justified, in some cases, by appeal to the evident malice of most of the aliens reported in UFO abduction cases of the past. There was even one impressive presentation – complete with animation and sound effects, emanating from softscreen posters draped over Bootstrap’s link fence – from a major aerospace cartel. The military-industrial-complex types were as always seeking to turn the new situation into lucrative new contracts, and how better than to be asked to build giant asteroid-belt battle cruisers?

But the catastrophists had plenty of rage left over to be directed at other targets, healthily fuelled by conspiracy theorists. There were still some who held that the US government had been collaborating with the aliens since Roswell, 1947 – ‘I wish they had been,’ Frank once said tiredly; ‘it would make life a lot easier’ – and there were protests aimed at government agencies at all levels, the United Nations, scientific bodies, and anybody thought to be involved in the general cover-up. The most spectacular of the related assaults had been the grenade attack which had caused the destruction of the decrepit, never-flown Saturn V Moon rocket which had lain for decades as a monument outside NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

It kept the Bootstrap guards watchful.

‘Intriguing,’ Dorothy murmured. ‘Disturbing.’

Xenia said gently, ‘But places like this always concentrate the noise. The vast majority of people out there in the real world are simply indifferent to the whole thing. When the news about the Gaijin first broke it was an immediate sensation, taking over every media outlet – for a day or two, perhaps a week. I was already working with Frank at the time. He was electrified – well, we both were; we thought the news the most significant of our lifetimes. And the business opportunities it might open up sent Frank running around in circles.’

Dorothy smiled. ‘That sounds like the Frank Paulis I’ve read about.’

‘But then there was no more fresh news …’

After a couple of weeks, the Gaijin had been crowded off the front pages. Politics had assumed its usual course, and all the funds hastily promised in that first startling morning after the Nemoto – Malenfant discovery – for deeper investigations and robot probes and manned missions and the rest – had soon evaporated.

‘But the news was too – lofty,’ Dorothy murmured. ‘Inhuman. It changed everything. Suddenly the universe swivelled around us; suddenly we knew we weren’t alone, and how we felt about ourselves, about the universe and our place in it, could never be the same again.

‘And yet, nothing changed. After all the Gaijin didn’t do anything but crawl around their asteroids. They didn’t respond to any of the signals they were sent, whether by governments or churches or ham-radio crackpots.’

Frank had gotten involved in some of that, in fact; the early messages had been framed using a universal-language methodology that dated back to the 1960s, called Lincos: lots of redundancy and framing to make the message patterns clear, a simple primer which worked up from basic mathematical concepts through physics, chemistry, astronomy … A lot of beautiful, fascinating work, none of which had raised so much as a peep from the Gaijin.

‘And meanwhile,’ Dorothy went on, ‘there were still babies to deliver, crops to grow, politicking to pursue and wars to fight. As my father used to say, the next morning you still had to put your pants on one leg at a time.

‘You know,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘I’m generally in favour of all this activity. Your Sports Fans, I mean. The only way we have to absorb such changes in our view of the world, and ourselves, is like this: by talking, talking, talking. At least the people here care enough to express an opinion. Look at that.’ It was a softscreen poster showing a download from the net: a live image returned by some powerful telescope, perhaps in orbit or on the Moon, of the asteroid belt anomalies: a dark, grainy background, a line of red stars, twinkling, blurred. ‘Alien industry, live from space. The most popular Internet site, I’m told. People use it as wallpaper in their bedrooms. They seem to find it comforting.’

Xenia snorted. ‘Sure. And you know who makes most use of that image? The astrologers. Now you can have your fortune told by the lights of Gaijin factories. I mean, Jesus … Sorry. But it says it all.’

Dorothy laughed good-naturedly.

They drove away from the Sports Fans’ pens, and approached the pad itself: the true centre of attention, bearing Bootstrap’s first interplanetary ship, Frank Paulis’s pride and joy.

Xenia could see the lines of a rust-brown external tank, the slim pillars of solid rocket boosters. The stack was topped by a tubular cover that gleamed white in the sun. Somewhere inside that fairing rested the Giordano Bruno, a complex robot spacecraft that would some day ride out to the asteroids, and seek out the Gaijin that lurked there – if Frank could drive the test program to completion, if Xenia could guide the corporation through the maze of legislation that still impeded them.

As Xenia studied the ship, Dorothy studied her.

Dorothy said, ‘Frank Paulis relies on you a lot, doesn’t he? I know that formally you are head of Bootstrap’s legal department …’

‘I’m the first name on Frank’s call list. He relies on me to get things done.’

‘And you’re happy with your role.’

‘We do share the same goals, you know.’

‘Umm. Your ship looks something like the old Space Shuttle.’

‘So it should,’ said Xenia, and she launched into a standard line. ‘This is what we here at Bootstrap call our Big Dumb Booster. It’s actually comprised largely of superannuated Space Shuttle components. You’ll immediately see one benefit over the standard Shuttle design, which is in-line propulsion; we have a much more robust stack –’

Dorothy said with smooth humour, ‘I’m no more an engineer than you are, Xenia.’

Xenia allowed herself a grin. ‘Sorry. It’s hard to change the script after doing this so many times … This is primarily a launcher to the planets. Or the asteroids.’

Dorothy smiled. ‘You have built a rocket ship for America.’

Xenia bristled. ‘It does seem rather a scandal that America, first nation to land a human being on another planet, has let its competence degrade to the point that it has no heavy-lift space launch capability at all.’

‘But the Chinese are in Earth orbit, and the Japanese are on the Moon. There’s even a rumour that the Chinese are preparing a flight of their own out to the asteroids.’

Xenia squinted at the washed-out, dusty sky. ‘Dorothy, it’s five years since the Gaijin showed up in the solar system. But you can’t call it contact. Not yet. As you said, they haven’t responded to any of our signals. All they do is build, build, build. Maybe if we do manage to send a probe there, we’ll achieve real contact, the kind of contact we’ve always dreamed of.’

‘And you think America should be first.’

‘If not us, who? The Chinese? …’

A siren sounded: an engine test was due. With smooth efficiency, the car’s SmartDrive cut in and swept them far from danger.

‘… We used to think that life was pretty unlikely – maybe even unique to Earth,’ Malenfant was saying. ‘An astronomer called Fred Hoyle once said that the idea that you could shuffle organic molecules in some primeval soup and, purely by chance, come up with a DNA molecule is about like a whirlwind passing through an aircraft factory and assembling scattered parts into a 747.’ Laughter. ‘But now we think those notions are wrong. Now we think that the complexity that defines and underlies life is somehow hardwired into the laws of physics. Life is emergent.

‘Imagine boiling a pan of water. As the liquid starts to convect, you’ll see a regular pattern of cells form, kind of like a honeycomb – just before the proper boiling cuts in and the motion becomes chaotic. Now, all there is in the pan is water molecules, billions of them. Nobody is telling those molecules how to organize themselves into those striking patterns. And yet they do it.

‘That’s an example of how order and complexity can emerge from an initial uniform and featureless state. And maybe life is just the end product of a long series of self-organizing steps like that …’

Malenfant was giving his lecture in Bootstrap’s roomy, air-conditioned public affairs auditorium: the one place Frank had been prepared to spend some serious money, aside from on the engineering itself. Xenia and Dorothy arrived a little late. To Xenia’s surprise, the auditorium was pretty nearly full, and she had to squeeze them into two seats at the back.

The stage was bare save for a lectern and a plastic mock-up, three metres tall, of the Big Dumb Booster – that, and Malenfant.

To Xenia, Reid Malenfant – a lithe but sun-wrinkled sixty-something, his polished-bald head shining under the overhead lights – was an unprepossessing sight. Even as he spoke he seemed oddly out of place, blinking at his audience as if he wasn’t sure what he was doing here.

But the audience, mostly of young engineers, seemed spellbound. She spotted Frank himself in the front row, a dark, hulking figure before the grounded astronaut, gazing raptly with the rest. That old space dust still carried some magic, she supposed; there was something primal here, about wanting to be close to the wizard, the sage who had been involved in that first wondrous discovery – as if, just by being close, it was possible to soak up a little of that marvellous light.

Malenfant went on, ‘We’d come to believe, even before the Gaijin showed up, that life must be common. We believe nature is uniform, so the laws and processes that work here work everywhere else. And now we hold to the Copernican principle: we believe that we aren’t in any unique place in space or time. So if life is here, on Earth, it must be everywhere – in one form or another.

‘So the fact that living things have come sailing into the asteroid belt from the stars (if they are living, that is) isn’t much of a surprise. But what is a surprise is that they should be just arriving, here, now. If they exist, why weren’t they here before?

‘It is good scientific practice, when you’re facing the unknown, to assume a condition of equilibrium: a stable state, not a state of change. Because change is unusual, special.

‘Now, maybe you see the problem. What we seem to face with the Gaijin is the arrival – the very first arrival we can detect – of alien colonists in the solar system. And so we find ourselves – not in a time of equilibrium – but at a time of transition, in fact of possibly the most fundamental change of all. It’s so unlikely it isn’t true.

‘To put it another way, this is the question that was avoided by all those terrible alien-invasion sci-fi movies I grew up with as a kid.’ Laughter, a little baffled, from the younger guys. What’s a ‘movie’? ‘Why should these bug-eyed guys arrive now, just when we have tanks and nukes to fight them with?’

Malenfant gazed around at his audience, his eyes deep-sunken, tired-looking, wary. ‘I’m telling you this because you people are the ones who have taken up the challenge, where governments and others have shamefully failed, to get out there and figure out what’s going on. There are obvious mysteries about the Gaijin – some of which might be resolved as soon as we get our first good look at them. But there are other, deeper questions which their very presence here poses, questions which go right to the heart of the nature of the universe itself, and our place in it. And right now, only you are doing anything which might help us tackle those questions.

‘You have my support. Do your work well. Godspeed. Thank you.’

The applause began, politely at first.

It was a polished performance, Xenia supposed. She imagined this man thirty years ago giving pep talks at Space Shuttle component factories. Do good work!

But, to her surprise, the applause was continuing, even growing thunderous. And to her deeper surprise, she found herself joining in.

Xenia and Dorothy had some trouble reaching Frank Paulis and Malenfant, so walled off was the astronaut by a crowd of eager young engineer types.

Dorothy studied Xenia’s expression. ‘You don’t quite go for all this hero worship, do you, Xenia?’

‘Do you think I’m cynical?’

‘No.’

Xenia grimaced. ‘But it – frustrates me. We’re living through first contact, an era unique in the human story, whatever the future holds. At least Bootstrap is trying to respond. Away from here, aside from what we’re doing, all I see is irrationalism. That, and positioning. Various bodies trying to use this discovery for their own purposes.’

‘Like the Church?’

‘Well, isn’t it?’

‘We all must pursue our own goals, Xenia. At least the Church’s involvement in this project of yours represents a tangible demonstration that we are working our way through the crisis of faith the Gaijin have caused us.’

‘What crisis?’

‘The Vatican began its first modern evaluation of the implication of extraterrestrial life for Christianity back in the ’90s. But the debate has been going on much longer than that. We seem to have believed there were other minds out there long before we even had any clear notion of what out there actually was … This intuition seems to be an expression of our deep embedding in the universe; if the cosmos created us, it could surely create others. Did you know that Saint Augustine, back in the sixth century, speculated about Eeties?’

‘He did?’

‘Augustine decided they couldn’t exist. If they did, you see, they would require salvation – a Christ of their own. But that would remove the uniqueness of Christ, which is impossible. Such theological conundrums plague us to this day … You can laugh if you like.’

Xenia shook her head. ‘The idea that we might go out there and try to convert the Gaijin does seem a little odd.’

‘But we don’t know why they are here,’ Dorothy pointed out. ‘Would seeking truth be such an invalid reason?’

‘And now you’re here to bless the BDB,’ Xenia said.

‘Not exactly. Perhaps you’ve already done that, by naming it after Giordano Bruno. I take it you know who he was.’

‘Of course.’ The first thinker to have expressed something like the modern notion of a plurality of worlds – planets orbiting suns, many of them inhabited by beings more or less like humans. Earlier thinkers on other worlds had imagined parallel versions of a Dante’s-Inferno pocket universe, centred on a stationary Earth. ‘You have to imagine other worlds before you can conceive of travelling there.’

‘But Bruno was anticipated,’ Dorothy said gently. ‘A cardinal we know as Nicolas of Cusa, who lived in the fifteenth century …’

Dorothy’s lecturing tone seemed quite inappropriate to Xenia, making her impatient. ‘Whatever his antecedents, Bruno was killed by the Church for his heresy.’

Dorothy said, ‘He was burned, in 1600, for a mystical attack on Christianity, not for his argument about aliens, or even his defence of Copernicus.’

‘That makes it okay?’

Dorothy continued to study her quietly.

At last the crowd of techie acolytes was breaking up.

‘… You can’t know how much I admire you, Colonel Malenfant,’ Frank was saying. ‘I’m twenty years younger than you. But I modelled myself on you.’

Malenfant eyed him dubiously. ‘Then I’m in hell.’

‘No, I mean it. You started a company called Bootstrap. You had plans to exploit the asteroids.’

‘It failed. I was a lousy businessman. And when I lost my wife –’

‘Sure, but you had the right idea. If not for that –’

Malenfant was looking longingly at the BDB mock-up. ‘If not for that, if the universe was a different shape – yes; maybe I’d have done all this. And who knows what I’d have found?’

The silence stretched. Dorothy Chaum was frowning, Xenia noticed, as she studied Malenfant’s cloudy, troubled expression.

Chapter 3
DEBATES

It was four more years before Malenfant encountered Frank J Paulis again.

In 2029, Malenfant was invited to the Smithsonian at Washington, DC as a guest at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science – or at least, a stream of it supported by the SETI Institute, a privately funded outfit based in Colorado and devoted to the study of the Gaijin, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and other good stuff.

Despite the subject matter of the conference, Malenfant had come here with some reluctance.

He had grown wary of appearing in public. As Paulis’s robot probe swung relentlessly out from Earth, the unwelcome notoriety he had attracted nine years back was picking up again. He thought of it as the Buzz Aldrin syndrome: But you were there … When people looked at him, he thought, they saw a symbol, not a human being; they saw somebody who was incapable of doing original work ever again. It was a regard that was embarrassing, paralysing, and it made him feel very old. Not only that, Malenfant had found himself the target of unwelcome attention of the most extreme factions from either side of the spectrum, both the xenophobes and xenophiles.

But he had been invited here by Maura Della, a now-retired Congresswoman he’d encountered in the course of the unravelling of that initial discovery.

Maura Della was about Malenfant’s age, small, neat and spry. She had served as part of the President’s science advisory support at the time of the Gaijin announcement, when Malenfant and Nemoto had been dragged before the President himself, the Secretary of Defense, the Industrial Relations Council, and various Presidential task forces, as the Administration sought an official posture concerning the Gaijin. Unlike some of the Beltway apparatchiks Malenfant had encountered in those days, Della had proved to be tough but straightforward in her dealings with Malenfant, and he had grown to respect her sense of responsibility about SETI and other issues. It would be good to see her again.

And, he hoped, maybe she was still close enough to the centre of power to give him a genuine insight into anything new.

In that, as it turned out, he would not be disappointed.

At first, though, the conference – summing up what was known about the Gaijin, nine long years after discovery – proved to be meagre stuff. In the absence of new fact the proceedings were dominated by presentations on the impact of the Gaijin’s existence on philosophical principles.

Thus, the first talk Maura Della escorted him to was on the brief and unrewarding history of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Since the 1950s appropriately tuned radio telescopes had been turned on promising nearby stars, like Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eradini. Over the years the search was taken up by NASA and upgraded and automated, until it was possible to search thousands of likely radio frequencies at very high speed.

But decades of patient, longing search had turned up nothing but a few evanescent, tantalizing whispers of pattern.

As Malenfant listened to the stream of detail and acronyms, of project after project – Ozma, Cyclops, Phoenix – he became consumed with pity for these patient, hungry listeners, hoping to hear the faintest of whispers from beyond the stars. For, of course, it had always been futile, wrong-headed. Equilibrium, he thought: either the sky is silent because it is empty, or else the aliens should be everywhere. There should have been no need to seek out whispers; if we weren’t alone, the sky should, metaphorically, have been blazing with light.

The next speaker impressed Malenfant rather more. She was a geologist from Caltech called Carole Lerner – no older than thirty, spiky, argumentative. She had tried to come up with a new answer to the conundrum of the arrival of the Gaijin. Maybe there had been no sign of the Gaijin before, said Lerner, because they had only recently evolved – and not among the stars, but where they had been found, in the asteroid belt itself.

There had been suggestions for some decades that life could get a foothold in comets – perhaps in pockets of liquid water, drenched with the organic compounds that laced cometary interiors – and, of course, some asteroids were believed to be burned-out comets, or at least to have a comparable composition to comets. The coincidence of the emergence of a spacefaring alien race in the asteroids now, just as we reached a similar state, might be explained by a convergence of timescales. Perhaps it simply took this long, a few billion years, for life to crawl its way from the ponds to the stars, no matter where it originated.

It was a nice hypothesis, Malenfant reflected, but he judged that the coincidence of timescales was surely too neat to be convincing. Still, this was the first speaker Malenfant had heard at the conference who had attempted to address the deeper issues which obsessed the likes of Nemoto. He glanced at his softscreen, seeking presenters’ bio details.

Lerner’s general specialism was the volcanic history of the planet Venus. Malenfant wasn’t surprised to learn she was having trouble finding funding to continue her work. One side-effect of the arrival of the Gaijin had been a decline of interest in the sciences. It seemed to be generally assumed that the Gaijin would eventually hand over the answers to any questions humans could possibly pose; so why spend time – and, more significantly, money – seeking out answers now? No genuine scientist Malenfant had ever met would have been satisfied with such passivity, of course; it seemed to him this Carole Lerner might be consumed with exactly that impatience.

The next paper, given by a heavy-set academic from the SETI Institute, turned out to have his own name in the title: ‘The Nemoto – Malenfant Contact – An Example of How Not to Do It’.

Maura Della sat back to listen with an expression of intense enjoyment.

The presentation was based on a bureaucratic protocol devised to cover the event of alien contact. The protocol was first worked out by NASA in the 1990s, and then, after the cancellation of government funding for SETI and the NASA project’s take-over by private institutions, developed further by the UN and national governments.

Malenfant – as one of only two people in all history to have been placed in the situation covered by the protocol – had never bothered to read it. He wasn’t surprised to learn now that it was top-down, officious and almost comically foolish in its optimism that central control could be maintained:

‘After concluding that the discovery appears to be credible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, and after informing other parties to this declaration, the discoverer should inform observers throughout the world through the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams of the International Astronomical Union, and should inform the Secretary General of the United Nations in accordance with Article XI of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Bodies. Because of their demonstrated interest in and expertise concerning the question of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, the discoverer should simultaneously inform the following international institutions of the discovery and should provide them with all pertinent data and recorded information concerning the evidence: the International Telecommunication Union, the Committee on Space Research, of the International Council of Scientific Unions, the International Astronautical Federation, the International Academy of Astronautics, the International Institute of Space Law, Commission 51 of the International Astronomical Union and Commission J of the International Radio Science Union …’

Malenfant and Nemoto, by comparison, had gone straight on the talk shows.

Playfully, Maura slapped Malenfant’s wrist. ‘Naughty, naughty. All those Commissions you skipped. You made a lot of enemies there.’

‘But,’ he said, ‘I did get to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House. You know, this guy makes it sound as if he’d rather we hadn’t made the discovery at all, rather than making it the wrong way.’

‘Human nature, Malenfant. You took away his toy.’

Now the speaker opened the floor for comments.

The discussion soon turned to how the situation should be managed from here. There were plenty of calls for behavioural scientists to study ways in which the public response to the news could be somehow anticipated and controlled, for research into popular public images of Eeties, discussion of analogies with the response to missions like Apollo to the Moon and Viking to Mars, and suggestions that SETI proponents should make use of media like webcasts, games and music to present SETI and Eetie themes ‘responsibly’.

Maura pulled an elaborate face. ‘Don’t these people realize the cat is already out of the bag? You can’t control the public’s access to information any more – and you certainly can’t control their response. Nor should you try, in my opinion.’

At last the speaker cleared off the stage, and Malenfant’s spirits lifted a little. As an engineer, he knew that a bucket-load of philosophical principles wasn’t worth a grain of good hard fact. And that was why the next item, by Frank Paulis, was a breath of fresh air. After all, it was Paulis, with his money and his initiative, who was actually going out there to look.

Paulis’s images of his en-route spacecraft, the Bruno, showed a gangly, glittering dragonfly of solar-cell panels and gauzy antennae and sensors mounted on long booms, surrounded by a swarm of microsats devoted to fly-around inspections and repairs.

The launch had been uneventful, the first years of the long flight enlivened only by the usual hardware glitches and nail-biting techie dramas. It struck Malenfant as remarkable how little space technology seemed to have progressed in seventy years since the first Sputnik; the design of the Bruno would probably have been recognizable, give or take a few sapphire-based quantum chips, to Wernher von Braun. But flying in space had always been a conservative business; if you had only one shot, you wanted your ship to work, not to serve as the test bed for new gadgets and ideas.

Anyhow, the Bruno had survived its man-made crises. The ship was still a year away from its rendezvous with what appeared to be the primary construction site – or colony, or nest – of the Gaijin. The asteroid belt was a broad lane of rubble; already the probe had encountered a number of those dusty wanderers, never visited before or seen in close-up. But – Paulis promised, standing before slide after slide of coal-dark, anonymous rocks – the best was yet to come. For, in the darkness, the Gaijin awaited.

After a morning of such thin gruel, Malenfant retreated to his hotel room.

He travelled light these days: just bathroom stuff, a couple of self-cleaning suits and sets of underwear, a softscreen that was all he needed to connect him to the rest of the species – and a single ornament, a piece of unbelievably ancient rock from the far side of the Moon, carved into an exquisite fox god. He had become minimal. The time he spent on the Japanese Moon, he supposed, had changed him, no doubt for the better.

He spent a half hour watching heavily filtered and interpreted news on his softscreen. He needed to know what was going on, but he was too old to have any patience with the evanescent buzz of instant commentaries.

A corner of his softscreen rippled with light: an incoming message.

It was Nemoto. It was the first time she’d contacted Malenfant in years.

‘Nemoto! Where are you?’

There was a delay of a few seconds before her reply came back, her face creasing into a thin smile. That could place her on the Moon. But the delay could be a fake …

‘You should know better than to ask me that, Malenfant.’

‘Yeah. Sorry.’

She was still under forty, but she wasn’t ageing well, he thought. Her hair remained thick and jet black, but her oval face had shed its prettiness: grown angular, the bones showing, her eyes dark and sunken with suspicion. Her voice, from the softscreen’s tiny speakers, was an insect whisper. ‘You are enjoying the conference?’

‘Not much.’ He shared with her his gripe over too many philosophers.

‘But there are worse fools. Here is some more philosophy for you. “This is the way I think the world will end – with general giggling by all the witty heads, who think it is a joke.” Kierkegaard.’

‘He got it right.’ Whoever he was.

‘And philosophy can sometimes guide us, Malenfant.’

‘For instance –’

‘For instance, the notion of equilibrium …’

It was like resuming a conversation they had pursued, on and off, for nine years; a slow teasing-out of the koan.

After their notoriety following the announcement of the aliens in the belt, Nemoto had recoiled completely. She’d refused all offers of public appearances, had quit her job, had turned down offers of research positions from a dozen of the world’s most prestigious universities and corporations, and had effectively disappeared. All this while Malenfant had slogged around the public circuit with diminishing enthusiasm, enduring the brickbats and bouquets that came from his sliver of fame. She had been an Armstrong, he sometimes thought wryly, to his own Aldrin.

But she was continuing her researches – though what her purpose was, and where her money was coming from, he couldn’t have said.

She didn’t like the Gaijin, though. That much was obvious.

She said softly, ‘We imagined only two possible equilibrium states: no aliens, or aliens everywhere. We have diagnosed this moment, the moment of first contact, as a transition between equilibriums, brief and therefore unlikely for us to be living through. But what if that’s wrong? What if this is the true state of equilibrium?’

Malenfant frowned. ‘I don’t get it. Contact changes everything. How can a change be described as an equilibrium?’

‘If it happens more than once. Over and over and over. In that case it’s no coincidence that I happen to be alive, here and now, to witness this. It’s no coincidence that we happen to have a technical culture capable of detecting the signals, even initiating contact, of a sort, just at this moment. Because this isn’t unique.’

‘You’re saying this happened before? That others have been here? Then where did they go?’

‘I can’t think of any answers that don’t scare me, Malenfant.’

He studied her. Her eyes were almost invisible, her face an expressionless mask. The background was dark, anonymous, no doubt scrambled beyond the reach of image enhancement routines.

He considered what to say. You’re spending too much time alone. You need to get out more. But he was scarcely a friend to this strange, obsessive woman. ‘You’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, haven’t you?’

She seemed offended. ‘This is the destiny of the species.’

He sighed. ‘What is it you called me about, Nemoto?’

‘To warn you,’ she said. ‘It isn’t quite true that we are waiting on Frank Paulis and his space probe for new data. There are two items of interest. First, a fresh interpretation. I’ve been able to deduce patterns from the infrared signature of the Gaijin’s activity in the belt. I believe I have determined their pattern of propagation.’

Her face disappeared, to be replaced by the virtual display of the type she’d first shown him in the silence of the Moon. It was a ring of glistening crimson droplets, slowly orbiting: the asteroid belt, complete with dark Kirkwood gaps. And there was the gap with the one-to-three resonance with Jupiter, with its string of rubies, enigmatic, brilliant.

‘Watch, Malenfant …’

Malenfant bent close to the screen and studied the little beads of light. The images cycled with small vector arrows, which showed velocity and acceleration. The rubies weren’t in simple orbits about the sun, he saw; they seemed to be spreading around the belt, some of them actually moving retrograde, against the motion of the rest of the belt.

The motion was intriguing.

Nemoto said, ‘Imagine the arrows projected backwards.’

‘Ah,’ Malenfant said. ‘Yes. They might converge.’

Nemoto cut in a routine to extrapolate back from the Gaijin sites’ velocity vectors. ‘This is rough and ready,’ she admitted. ‘I had to make a lot of assumptions about how the objects’ trajectories had deviated from simple orbits through the sun’s gravitational field. But it did not take long before I found an answer.’

The projected paths arced out of the asteroid belt – out, away from the sun, into the deeper darkness, before converging.

Malenfant tapped the screen. ‘You found it. The prime radiant. Where these probes, or factories, or whatever the hell they are, are emanating from.’

Nemoto said, ‘It is one point four times ten to power fourteen metres from the sun. That is –’

‘About a thousand astronomical units out.’ A thousand times as far as Earth from the sun. ‘Somewhere in the direction of Virgo … But why there?’

‘I do not know. I need more data, more work.’

‘And your second item?’

She eyed him. ‘You are meeting Maura Della. Ask her about Rigil Kent.’

Rigil Kent. Also known as Alpha Centauri, nearest star system to the sun, four light years away.

‘Nemoto –’

But the softscreen had already filled up with the everyday froth of the online news channels; Nemoto had receded into darkness.

He was taken to lunch by former Congresswoman Della.

After lunch they strolled around the conference hall, glancing at poster presentations and the fringe sessions. Malenfant felt uncomfortable being out in public like this.

‘I wouldn’t be too concerned,’ Maura said. ‘Not here; you have to be afraid of the ones who stay at home polishing the telescope sights on their rifles.’

‘Not funny, Maura.’

‘Perhaps not. Sorry.’

She hadn’t said a significant word during lunch; now he couldn’t contain himself any more. ‘Rigil Kent,’ he said.

She slowed to a halt. Her voice low, she said, ‘You spoiled my surprise. I should have known you’d find out.’

‘What’s going on, Maura?’

For answer she took him to a small, over-priced coffee bar. On a handheld softscreen she showed him images of the great radio telescope at Arecibo, various microwave satellites, activity in the Main Bay at JPL: arcs of consoles, young, excited engineers on roller chairs, information flickering over screens before them.

‘Malenfant, we’ve picked up a signal. From Alpha Centauri.’

‘What – how –’

She pressed a finger to his lips.

As it turned out – though this bit of news had been Maura’s true motive for inviting him here – there was little more to tell. Maura had gotten the news from her contacts in the government. The signal was faint, first picked up by an orbital microwave satellite. But it was nothing like the neatly structured Lincos signals humans had been sending to the asteroid belt. It was heavily compressed, a mush of apparently incoherent noise, with only evanescent hints of structure – much what Earth might have sounded like, from four light years away.

‘Or it may be an efficient signal,’ Malenfant said hoarsely. ‘It can’t be cheap to signal between the stars. You’d take out as much redundancy – repetitive structure – as possible. If you don’t know how to decode it, such a signal must look like noise …’ Either way the implication was clear. This wasn’t a signal meant for humans.

But whoever was there, at Alpha Centauri, had only just started to broadcast – or rather, only four years in the past, given the time it took for signals to crawl to Earth.

In fact the signal’s existence and nature were still being verified. ‘This time we’re following the protocols, Malenfant …’

‘Is it the Gaijin? Or somebody else?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘Keep me informed.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘But keep it to yourself.’

Malenfant stayed in his hotel room the rest of the night, unable to relax, pacing back and forth until Nemoto called again.

He was furious Nemoto had known all about Centauri. But he controlled his irritation.

‘At least,’ he said, ‘this discovery demolishes theories that the Gaijin might be native to our solar system. If they came from Centauri –’

‘Of course they don’t come from Centauri,’ Nemoto said. ‘Why would they suddenly start making such a radio clatter if that was so? No, Malenfant. They only just arrived in the Centauri system. Just as they only just arrived here. Apparently we are watching the vanguard of a wave of colonization, Malenfant, extending far from our system.’

‘But –’

Nemoto waved a delicate hand before her face. ‘But that isn’t important, Malenfant. None of this is. Not even the activity in the asteroids.’

‘Then what is?’

‘I have determined the nature of the Gaijin’s prime radiant, here in the solar system.’

‘The nature? You said it is a thousand AU out. What’s out there to have a nature at all?’

‘A solar focus,’ Nemoto said.

‘The what?’

‘That far out is where you will find the focal points of the sun’s gravitational field. Images of remote stars, magnified by gravitational lensing. And the star that is focussed at the Gaijin prime radiant is –’

‘Alpha Centauri?’ The stubbly hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.

She said grimly, ‘You see, Malenfant? Any number of probes to the belt won’t answer the fundamental questions.’

‘No.’ Malenfant shook his head, mind racing. ‘We’ve got to send somebody out there. Through a thousand AU; out to the solar focus … But that’s impossible.’

‘Nevertheless that is the challenge, Malenfant. There – at the solar focus – is where the answers will be found. That is where we must go.’

Chapter 4
ELLIS ISLAND

Maura was flying around an asteroid.

The asteroid – whimsically christened Ellis Island by the Bootstrap flight controllers at JPL – was three kilometres wide, twelve long. The compound body looked like two lumpy barbecue potatoes stuck end-to-end, dark and dusty. Maura could see extensions of the Bruno’s equipment ahead of her: elaborate claws and grapples, lines that coiled out across space to where rocket-driven pitons had already dug themselves into the asteroid’s soft, friable surface.

With an effort she turned her head. Her viewpoint swivelled. The asteroid shifted out to the left; the image, heavily enhanced and extrapolated from the feed returned by Bruno, blurred slightly as the processors struggled to keep up with her wilfulness.

She was suspended in a darkness that was broken only by pinpoints of light. There were stars all around her: above, below, behind. Here she was in the middle of the asteroid belt, but there was not a single body, save for Ellis itself, large enough to show a disc. Even the sun had shrunk to a yellow dot, casting long shadows, and she knew that it shed on this lonely rock only a few per cent of the heat and light it vouchsafed Earth.

The asteroid belt had turned out to be surprisingly empty, a cold, excessively roomy place. And yet it was here the Gaijin had chosen to come.

Xenia Makarova, Bootstrap’s VIP host for the day, whispered in her ear. ‘Ms Della, are you enjoying the show?’

She suppressed a sigh. ‘Yes, dear. Of course I am. Very impressive.’

And so it was. In her time as part of the President’s science advisory team, she’d put in a lot of hours on spaceflight stunts like this, manned and unmanned. She had to admit that being able to share the experience vicariously – to be able to sit in her own apartment wearing her VR headband, and yet to ride down to the asteroid with the probe itself – was a vast improvement on what had been on offer before: those cramped visitors’ booths behind Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center, that noisy auditorium at JPL.

And yet she felt restless, here in the dark and cold. She longed to cut her VR link to the Bruno feed, to drink in the sunlight that washed over the Baltimore harbour area, visible from her apartment window just a metre away.

She said to Xenia, ‘It’s just that space operations are always so darn slow.’

‘But we have to take it slow,’ Xenia said. ‘Encountering an asteroid is more like docking with another spacecraft than landing; the gravity here is so feeble the main challenge is not to bounce off and fly away.

‘We’re coming down at the asteroid’s north pole. The main Gaijin site appears to be at the other rotation pole, the south pole. What we intend is to land out of sight of the Gaijin – assuming we haven’t been spotted already – and work our way around the surface to the alien. That way we may be able to keep a measure of control over events …’

‘This is a terribly dark and dusty place, isn’t it?’

‘That’s because this is a C-type asteroid, Ms Della. Ice, volatiles and organic compounds: just the kind of rock we might have chosen to mine for ourselves, for life support, propellant.’

Yes, Maura thought with a flicker of dark anger. This is our belt, our asteroid. Our treasure, a legacy of the solar system’s violent origins for our future. And yet there are Gaijin here – strangers, taking our birthright.

Her anger surprised her; she hadn’t suspected she was so territorial. It’s not as if they landed in Antarctica, she told herself. The asteroids aren’t yet ours; we have no claim here, and therefore shouldn’t feel threatened by the Gaijin’s appropriation.

And yet I do.

The Alpha Centauri signal – though the first, picked up a year ago – was no longer unique. Whispers in the radio wavebands had been detected across the sky: from Barnard’s Star, Wolf 359, Sirius, Luyten 726–8 – the nearby stars, the sun’s close neighbours, the first destinations planned in a hundred interstellar-colonization studies, homes of civilizations dreamed of in a thousand science fiction novels.

One by one, the stars were coming out.

There were patterns to the distribution. No star further than around nine light years away had yet lit up with radio signals. But the signals weren’t uniform. They weren’t of the same type, or even on the same frequencies; such differences were just as confusing as the very existence of the signals. And meanwhile the Gaijin, the solar system’s new residents, remained quiet: they seemed to be producing no electromagnetic output but the infrared of their waste heat.

It was as if a wave of colonization had abruptly reached this part of the Galaxy, this remote corner of a ragged spiral arm, and diverse creatures – or machines – were busily digging in, building, perhaps breeding, perhaps dying. Nobody knew how the colonists had gotten here. Nobody could even guess why they had come now.

But it seemed to Maura that already one fact was clear about the presumed Galactic community: it was messy and diverse, just as much as the human communities of Earth, if not more. In a way, she supposed, that was even healthy. If communities separated by light years had turned out to be identical, it would be an oppressive sky indeed. But it was sure going to make figuring out the meaning of it all a lot more difficult.

And, for Maura, that was a matter to regret.

She was never short of work, of invitations like this. She knew that as part of the amorphous community of pols and workers who never really got the stink of the Beltway out of their nostrils, she was prized by corporations like Bootstrap as an opinion-former, perhaps a conduit to power. But she was, officially, retired. Perhaps she should sit back and stop thinking so hard, and just let the pretty light shows from the sky wash over her.

But that wasn’t in her nature. And, after all, Reid Malenfant was older than she was, and she knew he continued to agitate for a deeper engagement with the mystery of these Gaijin, for more probes, other missions. If he was still active, then perhaps she should be.

But, in this complicated universe, she was too damn old. The more complicated it was, the more likely it was that she would never live to see this puzzle – perhaps the greatest mystery ever to confront humanity – unravelled.

Now a technical feed faded up in Maura’s other ear. ‘Closing with the target at two metres per second, range just under a klick, one metre per second cross-range. Hydrazine thruster tests in progress: +X, -X, +Y, -Y, +Z, -Z, all check out. Counting down to the thruster burn to null our approach and cross-range velocities a klick above the ground. Then we’re on gyro-lock to touchdown …’

With an effort of will, Maura tuned out the irrelevant voices.

The asteroid became a wall that approached her in slow, dusty silence; the tether lines twisted before her, retaining their coils in the absence of gravity. She made out surface features, limned by sunlight: craters, scarps, ridges, valleys, striations where it looked as if the asteroid’s surface had been crumpled or stretched. Some of the craters were evidently new, relatively anyhow, with neat bowl shapes and sharp rims. Others were much older, little more than circular scars overlaid by younger basins and worn down, presumably by a billion years of micrometeorite rain.

And there were colours on Ellis’s folded-over landscape, spectral shades that emerged from the dominant grey-blackness. The sharper-edged craters and ridges seemed to be slightly bluish, while the older, low-lying areas were more subtly red. Perhaps this was some deep space weathering effect, she thought; perhaps aeons of sunlight had wrought these gentle hues.

She sighed. It really was lovely, in a quite unexpected way – like so much of the universe she found herself in. By God, I love it all, she thought. How can I retire? If I did, I would miss this.

And now, with a kiss of dust, the Bruno reached its destination.

The techs began cheering tinnily.

A year before the Bruno’s arrival – after the AAAS meeting – Malenfant had returned to the Johnson Space Center, for the first time in two decades.

The campus looked pretty much unchanged: the same blocky black and white buildings, with those big nursery-style numbers on their sides, scattered over square kilometres of grassy plain here at the south-east suburban edge of Houston, all contained by a mesh fence from NASA Road One. (But it wasn’t called the NASA Road any more.) In the surrounding streets there were still run-down strip malls and fast food places and Seven-Elevens.

But inside the campus itself, there was no sign of the tourists who used to ride between the buildings in their long tram trains. And though there were plenty of historic-marker plaques, nobody was making history here any more.

The cherry trees were still here, though, and the green grass still seemed to glow.

He wasn’t here to sight-see. He had come to meet Sally Brind, who ran a NASA department called the Solar System Exploration Division. He made his way to Building 31.

Inside, the air conditioning was ferocious, a hell of a contrast to the flat moist Houston heat outside. Malenfant welcomed the plummeting temperature; it was like old times.

Reid Malenfant had loomed over Sally Brind. He was leaning on her desk, resting his weight on big, bony knuckles. He was around twice Brind’s age and he was a legend out of the past. And, to her, he was as intimidating as hell.

‘We got to get out to the solar focus,’ he began.

‘Hello, good morning, nice to meet you, thanks for giving up your time,’ she said dryly.

He backed off a little, and stood up straight. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘Don’t tell me. At your time of life, you don’t have time to waste.’

‘No, I’m just a rude asshole. Always was. Mind if I sit down?’

She said, ‘Tell me about the solar focus.’

He moved a pile of glossies from a chair; they were digitized artist’s impressions of a proposed, never-to-be-funded, unmanned mission to Io, Jupiter’s moon. ‘What I’m talking about, specifically, is a mission to the solar focus of Alpha Centauri – the nearest star system.’

‘I know about Alpha Centauri.’

‘Yes … The sun’s gravitational field acts as a spherical lens, which magnifies the intensity of the light of a distant star. At the point of focus, out on the rim of the system, the gain can be hundreds of millions; at the right point, it would be possible to communicate across stellar distances with equipment no more powerful than you’d need to talk between planets. The Gaijin may be using the Centauri solar focus as a communication node. The theorists are calling it a Saddle Point. Actually there is a separate Saddle Point for each star. All roughly at the same radius, because of –’

‘All right. And why do we need to go to Alpha Centauri’s focus?’

‘Because Alpha was the first source of extrasolar signals. And because the Gaijin are there. We have evidence that the Gaijin entered the system at the Alpha solar focus. From there, they sent a fleet of some kind of construction or mining craft into the asteroid belt. Sally, we now have infrared signatures, showing the activity in the asteroid belt, going back ten years.’

‘There is an unmanned probe en route to the asteroid belt. Maybe we should wait for its results.’

Malenfant flared. ‘A private initiative. Not relevant, anyhow. The solar focus – that is where the action is.’

‘You don’t actually have any direct evidence of anything out at the solar focus, do you?’

‘No. Only what we’ve inferred from the asteroid belt data.’

‘But there’s no signature of any huge interstellar mother ship out there, at the rim. As there would have to be, if you’re right.’

‘I don’t have all the answers. That’s why we have to get out there and see. And to tell the damn Gaijin we’re here.’

‘I don’t see how I can help you.’

‘This is NASA’s Solar System Exploration Division. Right? So, now we need to go do some exploring.’

‘NASA doesn’t exist any more,’ she said. ‘Not as you knew it, when you were flying Shuttle. The JSC is run by the Department of Agriculture –’

‘Don’t patronize me, kid.’

She sighed. ‘I apologize. But I think you have to be realistic about this, sir. This isn’t the 1960s. I’m really just a kind of curator, of the grey literature.’

‘Grey?’

‘Studies and proposals that generally never made it to the light of day. The stuff is badly archived; a lot of it isn’t yet digitized, or even on fiche … Even this building is seventy years old. I bet it would be closed for good if it wasn’t for the Moon rocks.’

That was true; elsewhere in this building, fifty per cent of the old Apollo samples still lay sealed in their sample boxes, still awaiting analysis, after six decades. Now that there were Japanese living on the Moon, Brind suspected the boxes would stay sealed forever, if only so they could serve as samples of the Moon as it used to be in its pristine, prehuman condition. An ironic fate for those billion-dollar nuggets.

‘I know all that,’ he said. ‘But I used to work for NASA. Where else am I supposed to go? Look – I want you to figure out how it could be done. How can we send a human to the solar focus? It will all come together, once we have a viable scheme to fix on. I can get the hardware, the funding.’

She arched an eyebrow. ‘Really?’

‘Sure. And the science will be good. After all, we still haven’t sent a human out beyond the orbit of the Moon. We can drop probes on Jupiter, Pluto en route. We’ll get sponsorship from the Europeans and Japanese for that. The US government ought to contribute, too.’

You make it sound so easy, Colonel Malenfant … ‘Why should these organizations back you? We haven’t sent a human into orbit, other than as a passenger of NASDA or ESA, in twenty years.’

‘Otherwise,’ said Malenfant, ‘we’ll have to let the Japanese do this alone.’

‘True.’

‘Also there’ll be a lot of media interest. It will be a hell of a stunt.’

‘A stunt is right,’ she said. ‘It would be a spectacular one-shot. Just like Apollo. And look where that got us.’

‘To the Moon,’ he said severely, ‘forty years before the Japanese.’

She chose her next words carefully. ‘Colonel Malenfant, you must be aware that it will be difficult for me to support you.’

He eyed her. ‘I know I’m thought of as an obsessive. Twenty years after Shuttle was grounded, I’m still working out a kind of long, lingering disappointment about the shape of my career. I want to pursue this Gaijin hypothesis because I’m obsessed with them, because I want America to get back into space. I have an agenda. Right?’

‘I – yes. I guess so. I’m sorry.’

‘Hell, don’t be. It’s true. I was never too good at the politics here. Not even in the Astronaut Office. I never got into any of the cliques: the spacewalkers, the sports fans, the commanders, the bubbas who hung out at Molly’s Pub. I was never interested enough. Even the Russians mistrusted me because I wasn’t enough of a team player.’ He slapped his leathery hand on her desk. ‘But the Gaijin are here. Sally, I’ve waited ten years for our government, any government, to act on that lunar infrared evidence. Only Frank Paulis responded – a private individual, with that one damn probe. Now, I’ve decided to do something about it, before I drop dead.’

‘How far away is the solar focus?’

‘A thousand astronomical units.’ A thousand times as far as the distance between Earth and sun.

She whistled. ‘You’re crazy.’

‘Sure.’ He grinned, showing even, rebuilt teeth. ‘Now tell me how to do it. Treat it as an exercise, if you like. A thought experiment.’

She said dryly, ‘Do you have an astronaut in mind?’

His grin widened. ‘Me.’

Dark, crumpled ground, a horizon that was pin-sharp and looked close enough to touch, a sky full of stars dominated by a single bright spark …

Maura felt herself lurch as the probe began to make its way across the folded-over asteroid earth. She saw pitons and tethers lance out ahead of her field of view, extruding and hauling back, tugging the robot this way and that. Her viewpoint swivelled up and down, and some augmentation routine in the virtual generators was tickling her hind brain, making her feel as if she was riding right along with the robot over this choppy, rocky sea. With a sub-vocalized command, she told the software to cut it out; some special effects she could live without.

Xenia whispered to her audience of VIPs. ‘As we move we’re being extremely cautious. The surface gravity is even weaker than you might expect for a body this size. Remember this “dumbbell asteroid” is a contact binary, a compound body; imagine two pool balls snuggled up against each other, spinning around their point of contact. We’re a fly crawling over the far side of one of those pool balls. The dumbbell is spinning pretty rapidly, and here, at the pole, centrifugal force almost cancels out the gravity. But we modelled all these situations; Bruno knows what he’s doing. Just sit tight and enjoy the ride.’

And now something was looming beyond that close horizon. It was like the rise of a moon – but this moon was small and dark and battered, a twin of the world over which she crawled. It was the other lobe of the dumbbell.

Xenia said, ‘We’re studying the ground as we travel. As we don’t know what to look for, we’ve carried broad-spectrum surveying equipment. For instance, if the Gaijin came here to extract light metals such as aluminium, magnesium or titanium, they would most likely have used processes like magma electrolysis or pyrolysis. The same processes could be used for oxygen production. In the case of magma electrolysis the main slag component would be ferrosilicon. From a pyrolysis process we would expect to find traces of elemental iron and silicon, or perhaps slightly oxidized forms …’

We are crawling across a slag heap, Maura thought, trying to figure out what was made here. But are we being too anthropomorphic? Would a Neandertal conclude that we must be unintelligent because, searching our nuclear reactors, she could find no chippings from flint cores?

But what else can we do? How can we test for the unknowable?

The asteroid’s second lobe had all but ‘risen’ above the horizon now. It was a ball of rock, black and battered, that hung suspended over the land, as if in some Magritte painting. She could even see a broad band of crushed, flattened rock ahead, where one flying mountain rested against the other.

The second lobe was so close it seemed Maura could see every fold in its surface, every crater, even the grains of dust there. How remarkable, she thought.

The probe’s mode of travel had changed now, she noticed; the pitons were applying small sideways or braking tweaks to an accelerating motion towards the system’s centre of gravity, that contact zone. Gravity must be decreasing in strength the tug of the rock below her balanced by the equal mass of rock above, so that the net force was becoming more and more horizontal, and the probe was simply pulled across the surface.

Now the second lobe was so close, in this virtual diorama, it was over her head. Its crumpled inverted landscape formed a rocky roof. It was dark here, with the sun occluded, and the slices of starlight in the gap between the worlds were growing narrower.

Lamps lit up on the probe, and they played on the land beneath, the folded roof above. She longed to reach up and touch those inverted craters, as if a toy Moon had been hung over her head, a souvenir from some Aristotelian pocket universe.

‘… I think we have something,’ Xenia said quietly.

Maura looked down. Her field of view blurred as the interpolation routines struggled to keep up.

There was something on the ground before her. It looked like a blanket of foil, aluminium or silver, ragged-edged, laid over the dark regolith. Aside from a fringe a metre or two wide, it appeared to be buried in the loose dirt. Its crumpled edges glinted in the low sunlight.

It was obviously artificial.

Brind had next met Malenfant a few months later, at Kennedy Space Center.

Malenfant found KSC depressing; most of the launch gantries had been demolished or turned into rusting museum pieces. But the visitors’ centre was still open. The Shuttle exhibit – artefacts, photographs and virtuals – was contained within a small geodesic dome, yellowing with age.

And there, next to the dome, was Columbia, a genuine orbiter, the first to be flown in space. A handful of people were sheltering from the Florida sun in the shade of her wing; others were desultorily queuing on a ramp to get on board. Columbia’s main engines had been replaced by plastic mock-ups, and her landing gear was fixed in concrete. Columbia was forever trapped on Earth, he thought.

He found Brind standing before the astronaut memorial. This was a big slab of polished granite, with names of dead astronauts etched into it. It rotated to follow the sun, so that the names glowed bright against a backdrop of sky.

‘At least it’s sunny,’ he said. ‘Damn thing doesn’t work when it’s cloudy.’

‘No.’ The granite surface, towering over them, was mostly empty. The space program had shut down leaving plenty of room for more names.

Sally Brind was short, thin, intense, with spiky, prematurely grey hair; she was no older than forty. She affected small round black glasses, which looked like turn-of-the-century antiques. She seemed bright, alert, engaged. Interested, he thought, encouraged.

He smiled at her. ‘You got any answers for me?’

She handed him a folder; he leafed through it.

‘Actually it was a lot of fun, Malenfant.’

‘I’ll bet. Gave you something real to do.’

‘For the first time in too long. First we looked at a continuous nuclear fusion drive. Specific impulse in the millions of seconds. But we can’t sustain a fusion reaction for long enough. Not even the Japanese have managed that yet.’

‘All right. What else?’

‘Maybe photon propulsion. The speed of light – the ultimate exhaust velocity, right? But the power plant weight and energy you’d need to get a practical thrust are staggering. Next we thought about a Bussard ramjet. But it’s beyond us. You’re looking at an electromagnetic scoop that would have to be a hundred kilometres across –’

‘Cut to the chase, Sally,’ he said gently.

She paused for effect, like a kid doing a magic trick. Then she said: ‘Nuclear pulse propulsion. We think that’s the answer, Malenfant. A series of micro-explosions – fusion of deuterium and helium-3 probably – set off behind a pusher plate.’

He nodded. ‘I’ve heard of this. Project Orion, back in the 1960s. Like putting a firecracker under a tin can.’

She shaded her eyes from the sun’s glare. ‘Well, they proved the concept, back then. The Air Force actually ran a couple of test flights, in 1959 and 1960, with conventional explosives. And it’s got the great advantage that we could put it together quickly.’

‘Let’s do it.’

‘Of course we’d need access to helium-3.’

‘NASDA will supply that. I have some contacts … Maybe we should look at assembly in lunar orbit. How are you going to keep me alive?’

She smiled. ‘The ISS is still up there. I figure we can cannibalize a module for you. Have you decided what you want to call your ship?’

‘The Commodore Perry,’ he said without hesitation.

‘Uh huh. Who –?’

‘Perry was the guy who, in 1853, took the US Navy to Japan and demanded they open up to international trade. Appropriate given the nature of my mission, don’t you think?’

‘It’s your ship.’ She glanced about. ‘Anyhow, what are you doing out here?’

He nodded at the Shuttle exhibit. ‘They’ve got my old EMU in there, on display. I’m negotiating to get it back.’

‘EMU?’

‘My EVA Mobility Unit. My old pressure suit.’ He patted his gut, which was trim. ‘I figure I can still get inside it. I can’t live with those modern Jap designs full of pond scum. And I want a manoeuvring unit …’

She was looking at him oddly, as if still unable to believe he was serious.

‘Not ours,’ whispered Xenia. ‘Nothing to do with Bruno.’

Suddenly Maura found it difficult to breathe. This is it, she thought. This unprepossessing blanket: the first indubitably alien artefact, here in our solar system. Who put the blanket there? What was its purpose? Why was it so crudely buried?

A robot arm reached forward from the probe, laden with sensors and a sample-grabbing claw. She wished that was her hand, that she could reach out too, and stroke that shining, unfamiliar material.

But the claw was driven by science, not curiosity; it passed over the blanket itself and dug a shallow groove into the regolith that lay over it, sampling the material.

Within a few minutes the results of the probe’s analysis were coming in, and she could hear the speculation begin in Bootstrap’s back rooms.

‘These are fines, and they are ilmenite-rich. About forty per cent, compared to twenty per cent in the raw regolith.’ ‘And the agglutinate has been crushed.’ ‘It’s as if it has been beneficiated. It’s just what we’d do.’ ‘Not like this. So energy-intensive …’

She understood some of this. Ilmenite was a mineral – a compound of iron, titanium, and oxygen – that was common in long-exposed regolith on airless bodies like the Moon and the asteroids. Its importance was that it was a key source of volatiles: light and exotic compounds implanted there over billions of years by the solar wind, the thin, endless stream of particles that fled from the sun. But ilmenite was difficult to concentrate, extract and process; the best mining techniques the lunar Japanese had thought up were energy-intensive and relied on a lot of heavy-duty, unreliable equipment.

‘I knew it!’ somebody cried. ‘There’s no helium-3 in the processed stuff! None at all!’ ‘None to the limits of the sensors, you mean.’ ‘Sure, but –’ ‘You mean they’re processing the asteroids for helium-3? Is that all?’

Maura felt oddly disappointed. If the Gaijin were after helium-3, did that mean they used fusion processes similar to – perhaps no more advanced than – those already known to humans? And if so, they can’t be so smart – can they?

In her ears, the speculation raged on.

‘… I mean, how dumb can these guys be? Helium-3 is scarce in asteroid regolith because you’re so far from the sun, which implants it. The Moon is a lot richer. If they came in a couple of astronomical units –’ ‘They could just buy all they want from the Japanese.’

Laughter.

‘But maybe they can’t come in any closer. Maybe they need, I don’t know, the cold and the dark.’ ‘Maybe they are scared of us. You thought about that?’

‘They aren’t so dumb. You see any rock-crushers and solar furnaces here? That’s what we’d have to use to get as efficient an extraction process. Think about that blanket, man. It has to be nanotech.’

She understood what that meant too: there was no brute force here, no great ugly machines for grinding and crushing and baking as humans might have deployed, nothing but a simple and subtle reworking of the regolith at a molecular, or even atomic, level.

‘That blanket must be digging its way into the asteroid grain by grain, picking out the ilmenite and bleeding the helium-3. Incredible.’ ‘Hey, you’re right. Maybe it’s extending itself as it goes. The ragged edge –’ ‘It might eat its way right through that damn asteroid.’ ‘Or else wrap the whole thing up like a Thanksgiving turkey …’ ‘We got to get a sample.’ ‘Bruno knows that …’

Nanotechnology: something, at last, beyond the human. Something other. She shivered.

But now there was something new, at the corner of her vision, something that shouldered its way over the horizon. It was glittering, very bright against the dark sky. Huge.

It was as if a second sun had risen above the grimy shoulder of Ellis. But this was no sun.

The prattling, remote voices fell silent.

It was perhaps a kilometre long, and wrought in silver. There was a bulky main section, a smoothly curved cylinder, with a mess of silvery ropes trailing behind. Dodecahedral forms – perhaps two or three metres across, silvered and anonymous – clung to the tentacles. There were hundreds of them, Maura saw. Thousands. Like insects, beetles.

A ship. Suddenly she remembered why they were here: not to inspect samples of regolith, not to pick at cute nanotechnological toys. They were here to make contact.

And this was it. She imagined history’s view swivelling, legions of scholars in the halls of an unknown future inspecting this key moment in human destiny.

She found she had to force herself to take a breath.

The ship was immense, panning out of her view, cutting the sky in half. Its lower rim brushed the asteroid’s surface, and plasma sparkled.

The Bootstrap voices in her ear buzzed. ‘My God, it’s beautiful.’ ‘It looks like a flower.’ ‘It must be a Bussard ramjet. That’s an electromagnetic scoop –’ ‘It’s so beautiful, a flower-ship …’ ‘Yeah. But you couldn’t travel between the stars in a piece of junk like that!’

Now those shining beetles drifted away from the ropes. They skimmed across space towards the Bruno. Were these dodecahedra individual Gaijin? What was their intention?

Silver ropes descended like a net across her point of view now, tangling up the Bruno, until the view was criss-crossed with silver threads. The threads seemed to tauten. To cries of alarm from the insect voices at Bootstrap’s mission control, the probe was hauled backwards, and its gentle grip on the asteroid was loosened, tethers and pitons flying free in a slow flurry of sparkling dust.

The brief glimpse of the Gaijin ship was lost. Stars and diamond-sharp sun wheeled, occluded by dust specks and silver ropes.

Maura felt her heart beat fast, as if she was herself in danger. She longed for the Bruno to burst free of its restraints and flee from these grasping Gaijin, running all the way back to Earth. But that was impossible. In fact, she knew, the Bruno was designed to be captured, even dissected; it contained cultural artefacts, samples of technology, attempts to communicate based on simple diagrams and prime number codes. Hello. We are your new neighbours. Come over for a drink, let’s get to know each other …

But this did not feel like a welcoming embrace, a contact of equals. It felt like capture. Maura made a stern effort to sit still, not to struggle against silver ropes that were hundreds of millions of kilometres away.

Chapter 5
SADDLE POINT

The Commodore Perry was assembled in lunar orbit.

The fuel pellets were constructed at Edo, on the Moon, by Nishizaki Heavy Industries, and hauled up to orbit by a fleet of tugs. Major components like the pusher plate and the fuel magazine frame were manufactured on Earth, by Boeing. The components were lifted off Earth by European and Japanese boosters, Ariane 12s and H-VIIIs.

After decades in orbit the old International Space Station module had a scuffed, lived-in look. When the salvage crew had moved in the air had been foul and the walls covered with a scummy algae, and it had taken a lot of renovation to render it habitable again.

The various components of the Perry were plastered with sponsors’ logos. That didn’t matter a damn to Malenfant; he knew most of his paintwork would be scoured off in a few months anyhow. But he made sure that the Stars and Stripes was large, and visible.

Malenfant prepared himself for the trip.

In her cramped office at JSC, Brind challenged him, one last time. She felt, obscurely, that it was her duty.

‘Malenfant, this is ridiculous. We know a lot more about the Gaijin now. We have the results returned by the probe –’

‘The Bruno.’

‘Yes. The glimpses of the beautiful flower-ship. Fascinating.’

‘But that was two years ago,’ Malenfant growled. ‘Two years! The Gaijin still won’t respond to our signals. And we aren’t even going back. The government shut down Frank Paulis’s operation after that one shot. National security, international protocols …’

She shrugged.

‘Exactly,’ he snapped. ‘You shrug. People have lost interest. We’ve got the attention span of mayflies. Just because the Gaijin haven’t come storming into the inner system in flying saucers –’

‘Don’t you think that’s a good point? The Gaijin aren’t doing us any harm. We’re over the shock of learning that we aren’t alone. What’s the big deal? We can deal with them in the future, when we’re ready. When they are ready.’

‘No. Colonizing the solar system is going to take centuries, minimum. The Gaijin are playing a long game. And we have to get into the game before it’s too late. Before we’re cut out, forever.’

‘What do you think their ultimate intentions are?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe they want to dismantle the rocky planets. Maybe take apart the sun. What would you do?’

Oddly, in her mundane, cluttered office, her security badge dangling at her neck, she found herself shivering.

The Perry looped through an elliptical two-hour orbit around the Moon. On the lunar surface, the lights of the spreading Japanese colonies and helium-3 mines glittered.

The completed ship was a stack of components fifty metres long. At its base was a massive, reinforced pusher plate, mounted on a shock-absorbing mechanism of springs and crushable aluminium posts. The main body of the craft was a cluster of fuel magazines. Big superconducting hoops encircled the whole stack.

Now pellets of helium-3 and deuterium were fired out of the back of the craft, behind the pusher plate. They formed a target the size of a full stop. A bank of carbon dioxide lasers fired converging beams at the target.

There was a fusion pulse, lasting two hundred and fifty nanoseconds. And then another, and another.

Three hundred micro-explosions each second hurled energy against the pusher plate. Slowly, ponderously, the craft was driven forward.

From Earth, the new Moon was made brilliant by fusion fire.

The acceleration of the craft was low, just a few per cent of G. But it was able to sustain that thrust for a long time – years, in fact – and once the Perry had escaped lunar orbit, its velocity mounted inexorably.

Within, Reid Malenfant settled down to the routines of long-duration spaceflight.

His hab module was a shoebox, big enough for him to stand up straight. He drenched it with light from metal halide lamps, hot white light like sunlight, to keep the blues away. The walls were racks which held recovery units, designed for easy replacement. There were wires and cables and ducts, running along the corners of the hab module and across the walls. A robot spider called Charlotte ran along the wires, cleaning and sucking dust out of the air. Despite his best efforts, the whole place was soon messy and cluttered, like an overused utility room. Gear was scattered everywhere, stuck to the floor and walls and ceiling with straps and Velcro. If he brushed against a wall he could cause an eruption of gear, of pens and softscreens and clipboards and data discs and equipment components, and food cans and toothpaste and socks.

Much of the key equipment was of Russian design – the recycling systems, for instance. He had big generators called Elektrons which could produce oxygen from water distilled from his urine. Drinking water was recovered from humidity in the air. There was a system of scrubbers called Vozdukh that removed carbon dioxide from the air. He had a backup oxygen generator system based on the use of ‘candles’, big cylinders containing a chemical called lithium perchlorate which, when heated, gave off oxygen. He had emergency oxygen masks that worked on the same principle. And so on.

It was all crude and clunky, but – unlike the fancier systems American engineers had developed for the Space Station – it had been proven, over decades, actually to work in space, and to be capable of being repaired when it broke down. Still, Malenfant had brought along two of most things, and an extensive tool kit.

Malenfant’s first task, every day, was to swab down the walls of his hab module with disinfected wipes. In zero gravity micro-organisms tended to flourish, surviving on free-floating water droplets in the air. It took long, dull hours.

When he was done with his swabbing, it was exercise time. Malenfant pounded at a treadmill bolted to a bracket in the middle of the habitation module. After an hour Malenfant would find pools of sweat clinging to his chest. Malenfant had to put in at least two hours of hard physical exercise every day.

On it went. Boring a hole in the sky, the old astronauts had called it, the dogged cosmonauts on Salyut and Mir. Looking at stars, pissing in jars. To hell with that. At least he was going someplace, unlike those guys.

He communicated with his controllers on Earth and Moon using a ten-watt optical laser, which gave him a data rate of twenty kilobits a second. He followed the newscasts that were sent up to him, which he picked up with his big, semi-transparent main antenna.

As the months wore on, interest in his mission faded. Something else he’d expected. Nobody followed his progress but a few Gaijin obsessives – including Nemoto, he hoped, who had, deploying her shadowy, vast resources, helped assemble the funding for this one-shot mission – not that she ever made her interest known.

Sometimes, even during his routine comms passes, there was nobody to man the other end of the link.

He didn’t care. After all they couldn’t call him back, however bored they were.

While he worked his treadmill, his only distraction was a small round observation port, set in the pressure hull near him, and so he stared into that. To Malenfant’s naked eye, the Perry was alone in space. Earth and Moon were reduced to star-like points of light. Only the diminishing sun still showed a disc.

The sense of isolation was extraordinary. Exhilarating.

He had a sleeping nook called a kayutka, a Russian word. It contained a sleeping bag strapped to the wall. When he slept he kept the kayutka curtained off, for an illusory sense of privacy and safety. He kept his most personal gear here, particularly a small animated image of Emma, a few seconds of her laughing on a private NASA beach close to the Cape.

He woke up to a smell of sweat, or sometimes antifreeze if the coolant pipes were leaking, or sometimes just mustiness – like a library, or a wine cellar.

Brind had tried another tack. ‘You’re seventy-two years old, Malenfant.’

‘Yeah, but seventy-two isn’t so exceptional nowadays. And I’m a damn fit seventy-two.’

‘It’s pretty old to be enduring a many-year spaceflight.’

‘Maybe. But I’ve been following lifespan-extending practices for decades. I eat a low fat, low calorie diet. I’m being treated with a protein called co-enzyme Q10, which inhibits ageing at the cellular level. I’m taking other enzymes to maintain the functionality of my nervous system. I’ve already had many of my bones and joints rebuilt with biocomposite enhancements. Before the mission I’m going to have extensive heart bypass surgery. I’m taking drugs targeted at preventing the build-up of deposits of amyloid fibrils, proteins which could cause Alzheimer’s –’

‘Jesus, Malenfant. You’re a kind of grey cyborg, aren’t you? You’re really determined.’

‘Look, microgravity is actually a pretty forgiving environment for an old man.’

‘Until you want to return to a full Earth gravity.’

‘Well, maybe I don’t.’

After two hundred and sixty days, half-way into the mission, the fusion-pulse engine shut down. The tiny acceleration faded, and Malenfant’s residual sense of up and down disappeared. Oddly, he felt queasy; a new bout of space adaptation syndrome floored him for four hours.

Meanwhile, the Perry fired its nitrogen tet and hydrazine reaction control thrusters, and turned head over heels. It was time to begin the long deceleration to the solar focus.

The Perry, at peak velocity now, was travelling at around seven million metres per second. That amounted to two per cent of the speed of light. At such speeds, the big superconducting hoops came into their own. They set up a plasma shield forward of the craft, which sheltered it from the thin interstellar hydrogen it ran into. This turnaround manoeuvre was actually the most dangerous part of the trajectory, when the plasma field needed some smart handling to keep it facing ahead at all times.

The Perry was by far the fastest man-made object ever launched, and so – Malenfant figured, logically – he had become the fastest human. Not that anyone back home gave a damn.

That suited him. It clarified the mind.

Beyond the windows now there was only blackness, between Malenfant and the stars. At five hundred astronomical units from the sun, he was far beyond the last of the planets; even Pluto reached only some forty astronomical units. His only companions out here were the enigmatic ice moons of the Kuiper Belt, fragments of rock and ice left undisturbed since the birth of the sun, each of them surrounded by an emptiness wider than all the inner solar system. Further beyond lay the Oort cloud, the shadowy shell of deep space comets; but the Oort’s inner border, at some thirty thousand astronomical units, was beyond even the reach of this attenuated mission.

When the turnaround manoeuvre was done, he turned his big telescopes and instrument platforms forward, looking ahead to the solar focus.

‘You must want to come home. You must have family.’

‘No.’

‘And now –’

‘Look, Sally, all we’ve done since finding the Gaijin is talk, for twelve years. Somebody ought to do something. Who better than me? And so I’m going to the edge of the system, where I expect to encounter Gaijin.’ He grinned. ‘I figure I’ll cross all subsequent bridges when I come to them.’

‘Godspeed, Malenfant,’ she said, chilled. She sensed she would never see him again.

The Perry slowed to a relative halt. From a thousand AU, the sun was an overbright star in the constellation Cetus, and the inner system – planets, humans, Gaijin and all – was just a puddle of light.

Malenfant, cooped up in his hab module, spent a week scanning his environment. He knew he was in the right area, roughly; the precision was uncertain. Of course, if some huge interstellar mother craft was out here, it should be hard to miss.

There wasn’t a damn thing.

He went in search of Alpha Centauri’s solar focus. He nudged the Perry forward, using his reaction thrusters and occasional fusion-pulse blips.

The focusing of gravitational lensing was surprisingly tight. Alpha Centauri’s focal point spot was only a few kilometres across, in comparison with the hundred billion kilometres Malenfant had crossed to get here.

He took his time, shepherding his fuel.

At last he had it. In his big optical telescope there was an image of Alpha Centauri A, the largest component of the multiple Alpha system. The star’s image was distorted into an annulus, a faintly orange ring of light.

He recorded as much data as he could and fired it down his laser link to Earth. The processors there would be able to deconvolve the image and turn it into an image of the multiple-star Alpha Centauri system, perhaps even of any planets hugging the two main stars.

This data alone, he thought, ought to justify the mission to its sponsors.

But he still didn’t turn up any evidence of Gaijin activity.

A new fear started to gnaw at him. For the first time he considered seriously the possibility that he might be wrong about this. What if there was nothing here, after all? If so, his life, his reputation, would be wasted.

And then his big supercooled infrared sensors picked up a powerful new signature.

The object passed within a million kilometres of him.

His telescopes returned images, tantalizingly blurred. The thing was tumbling, sending back glimmering reflections from the remote sun; the reflections helped the processors figure out its shape.

The craft was maybe fifty metres across. It was shaped something like a spider. A dodecahedral central unit sprouted arms, eight or ten of them, which articulated as it moved. It seemed to be assembling itself as it travelled.

It wasn’t possible to identify its purpose, or composition, or propulsion method, before it passed out of sight. But, he was prepared to bet, it was heading for the asteroid belt.

It was possible to work out where the drone had come from. It was a point along the sun’s focal line, further out, no more distant from the Perry than the Moon from Earth.

Malenfant turned his telescopes that way, but he couldn’t see a thing.

Still, he felt affirmed. Contact, by damn. I was right. I can’t figure out how or what, but there sure is something out here.

He powered up his fusion-pulse engine, one more time. It would take him twenty hours to get there.

It was just a hoop, some kind of metal perhaps, facing the sun. It was around thirty metres across, and it was sky blue, the colour dazzling out here in the void. It was silent, not transmitting on any frequency, barely visible at all in the light of the point-source sun.

There was no huge mother-ship emitting asteroid-factory drones. Just this enigmatic artefact.

He described all this to Sally Brind, back in Houston. He would have to wait for a reply; he was six light-days from home.

After a time, he decided he didn’t want to wait that long.

The Perry drifted beside the Gaijin hoop, with only occasional station-keeping bursts of its thrusters.

Malenfant shut himself up inside the Perry’s cramped airlock. He’d have to spend two hours in here, purging the nitrogen from his body. His antique Shuttle-class EVA Mobility Unit would contain oxygen only, at just a quarter of sea level pressure, to keep it flexible.

Malenfant pulled on his thermal underwear, and then his Cooling and Ventilation Garment, a corrugated layering of water coolant pipes. He fitted his urine collection device, a huge, unlikely condom.

He lifted up his Lower Torso Assembly; this was the bottom half of his EMU, trousers with boots built on, and he squirmed into it. He fitted a tube over his condom attachment; there was a bag sewn into his Lower Torso Assembly garment big enough to store a couple of pints of urine. The LTA unit was heavy, the layered material awkward and stiff. Maybe I’m not quite the same shape as I used to be, forty years ago.

Now it was time for the HUT, the Hard Upper Torso piece. His HUT was fixed to the wall of the airlock, like the top half of a suit of armour. He crouched underneath, reached up his arms, and wriggled upwards. Inside the HUT there was a smell of plastic and metal. He guided the metal rings at his waist to mate and click together. He fixed on his Snoopy flight helmet, and over the top of that he lifted his hard helmet with its visor, and twisted it into place against the seal at his neck.

The ritual of suit assembly was familiar, comforting. As if he was in control of the situation.

He studied himself in the mirror. The EMU was gleaming white, with the Stars and Stripes still proudly emblazoned on his sleeve. He still had his final mission patch stitched to the fabric, for STS-194. Looking pretty good for an old bastard, Malenfant.

Just before he depressurized, he tucked his snap of Emma into an inside pocket.

He opened the airlock’s outer hatch.

For twenty months he’d been confined within a chamber a few metres across; now his world opened out to infinity.

He didn’t want to look up, down or around, and certainly not at the Gaijin artefact. Not yet.

Resolutely he turned to face the Perry. The paintwork and finishing over the hull’s powder-grey meteorite blanket had pretty much worn away and yellowed; but the dim sunlight made it look as if the whole craft had been dipped in gold.

His MMU, the Manned Manoeuvring Unit, was stowed in a service station against the Perry’s outer hull, under a layer of meteorite fabric. He uncovered the MMU and backed into it; it was like fitting himself into the back and arms of a chair. Latches clasped his pressure suit. He powered up the control systems, and checked the nitrogen-filled fuel tanks in the backpack. He pulled his two hand controllers round to their flight positions, and released the service station’s captive latches.

He tried out the manoeuvring unit. The left hand controller pushed him forward, gently; the right hand enabled him to rotate, dip and roll. Every time a thruster fired a gentle tone sounded in his headset.

He moved in short straight lines around the Perry. After years in a glass case at KSC, not all of the pack’s reaction control thrusters were working. But there seemed to be enough left for him to control his flight. And the automatic gyro stabilization was locked in.

It was just like working around Shuttle, if he focused on his immediate environment. But the light was odd. He missed the huge, comforting presence of the Earth; from low Earth orbit, the daylit planet was a constant overwhelming presence, as bright as a tropical sky. Here there was only the sun, a remote point source that cast long, sharp shadows; and all around he could see the stars, the immensity which surrounded him.

Now, suddenly – and for the first time in the whole damn mission – fear flooded him. Adrenaline pumped into his system, making him feel fluttery as a bird, and his poor old heart started to pound.

Time to get with it, Malenfant.

Resolutely, he worked his right hand controller, and he turned to face the Gaijin artefact.

The artefact was a blank circle, mysterious, framing only stars. He could see nothing that he hadn’t seen through the Perry’s cameras, truthfully; it was just a ring of some shining blue material, its faces polished and barely visible in the wan light of the sun.

But that interior looked jet black, not reflecting a single photon cast by his helmet lamp.

He glared into the disc of darkness. What are you for? Why are you here?

There was, of course, no reply.

First things first. Let’s do a little science here.

He pulsed his thrusters and drifted towards the hoop itself. It was electric blue, glowing as if from within, a wafer-thin band the width of his palm. He could see no seams, no granularity.

He reached out a gloved hand, fabric encasing monkey fingers, and tried to touch the hoop. Something invisible made his hand slide away, sideways.

No matter how hard he pushed, how he braced himself with the thrusters, he could get his glove no closer than a millimetre or so from the material. And always that insidious, soapy feeling of being pushed sideways.

He tried running his hand up and down, along the hoop. There were – ripples, invisible but tangible.

He drifted back to the centre of the hoop. That sheet of silent darkness faced him, challenging. He cast a shadow on the structure from the distant pinpoint sun. But where the light struck the hoop’s dark interior, it returned nothing: not a highlight, not a speckle of reflection.

Malenfant rummaged in a sleeve pocket with stiff gloved fingers. He held up his hand to see what he had retrieved. It was his Swiss Army knife. He threw the knife, underarm, into the hoop.

The knife sailed away in a straight line.

When it reached the black sheet it dimmed, and it seemed to Malenfant that it became reddish, as if illuminated by a light that was burning out.

The knife disappeared.

Awkwardly, pulsing his thrusters, he worked his way around the artefact. The MMU was designed to move him in a straight line, not a tight curve; it took some time.

On the far side of the artefact, there was no sign of the knife.

A gateway, then. A gateway, here at the rim of the solar system. How appropriate, he thought. How iconic.

Time to make a leap of faith, Malenfant. He fired his RCS, and began to glide forward.

The gate grew, in his vision, until it was all around him. He was going to pass through it – if he kept going – somewhere near the centre.

He looked back at the Perry. Its huge, misty main antenna was pointed back towards Earth, catching the light of the sun like spider-web. He could see instrument pallets held away from the hab module’s yellowed, cloth-clad bulk, like rear-view mirrors. The pallets were arrays of lenses, their black gazes uniformly fixed on him.

Just one press of his controller and he could stop right here, go back.

He reached the centre of the disc. An electric blue light bathed him. He leaned forward inside his stiff HUT unit, so he could look up.

The artefact had come to life. The electric blue light was glowing from the substance of the circle itself. He could see speckles in the light. Coherent, then. And when he looked down at his suit, he saw how the white fabric was criss-crossed by the passage of dozens of points of electric blue glow.

Lasers. Was he being scanned?

He said, ‘This changes everything.’

The blue light increased in intensity, until it blinded him. There was a single instant of pain –

Chapter 6
TRANSMISSION

‘We think a Gaijin flower-ship is a variant of the old Bussard ramjet design,’ Sally Brind said. She had spread a fold-up softscreen over one time-smoothed wall of Nemoto’s lunar cave. Now – Maura squinted to see – the ’screen filled up with antique design concepts: line images of gauzy, unlikely craft, obsessively labelled with captions and arrows. ‘It is a notion that goes back to the 1960s …’

Nemoto’s home – here on the Japanese Moon, deep in Farside – had turned out to be a crude, outmoded subsurface shack close to the infrared observatory where she’d made her first discovery of Gaijin activity in the belt. Here, it seemed, Nemoto had lived for the best part of two decades. Maura thought she couldn’t stand it for more than a couple of hours.

There wasn’t even anywhere to sit, aside from Nemoto’s low pallet, Maura had immediately noticed, and both Sally and Maura had carefully avoided that. Fortunately the Moon’s low gravity made the bare rock floor relatively forgiving, even for the thin flesh that now stretched over Maura’s fragile bones. There were some concessions to humanity – an ancient and worn scrap of tatami, a tokonoma alcove containing a jinja, a small, lightweight Shinto shrine. But most of the floor and wall space, even here in Nemoto’s living area, was taken up with science equipment: anonymous white boxes that might have been power sources or sensors or sample boxes, cables draped over the floor, a couple of small, old-fashioned softscreens.

As Sally spoke, Nemoto – thin, gaunt, eyes invisible within dark hollows – pottered about her own projects. Walking with tiny, cautious steps, she minutely adjusted her equipment – or, bizarrely, watered the small plants that flourished on brackets on the walls, bathed by light from bright halide lamps.

Still, the languid flow of the water from Nemoto’s can – great fat droplets oscillating as they descended towards the tiny green leaves – was oddly soothing.

Sally continued her analysis of the Gaijin’s putative technology. ‘The ramjet was always seen as one way to meet the challenge of interstellar journeys. The enormous distances even to the nearest stars would require an immense amount of fuel. With a ramjet, you don’t need to carry any fuel at all.

‘Space, you see, isn’t empty. Even between the stars there are tenuous clouds of gas, mostly hydrogen. Bussard, the concept originator, proposed drawing in this gas, concentrating it, and pushing it into a fusion reaction – just as hydrogen is burned into helium at the heart of the sun.

‘The trouble is, those gas clouds are so thin your inlet scoop has to be gigantic. So Bussard suggested using magnetic fields to pull in gas from an immense volume, hundreds of thousands of kilometres around.’

She brought up another picture: an imaginary starship startlingly like a marine creature – a squid, perhaps, Maura thought – a cylindrical body with giant outreaching magnetic arms, preceded by darting shafts of light.

‘The interstellar gas would first have to be electrically charged, to be deflected by the magnetic scoops. So you would pepper it with laser beams, as you see here, to heat it to a plasma, as hot as the surface of the sun. It’s an exotic, difficult concept, but it’s still easier than hauling along all your fuel.’

‘Except,’ Nemoto murmured, labouring at her gadgets, ‘that it could never work.’

‘Correct …’

Maura had been privy to similar breakdowns and extrapolations emanating from the Department of Defense and the US Air & Space Force, and – given that Sally’s summary was based on no more than piecework by various space buff special-interest groups and NASA refugees in various corners of the Department of Agriculture – Maura thought it hung together pretty well.

The problem with Bussard’s design was that only a hundredth of all that incoming gas could actually be used as fuel. The rest would pile up before the accelerating craft, clogging its magnetic intakes; Bussard’s beautiful ship would expend so much energy pushing through this logjam it could never achieve the kind of speeds essential for interstellar flight.

Sally presented various developments of the basic proposal to get around this fundamental limitation. The most promising was called RAIR – pronounced ‘rare’ – for Ram-Augmented Interstellar Rocket. Here, the intake of interstellar hydrogen would be greatly reduced, and used only to top up a store of hydrogen fuel the starship was already carrying. It was thought that the RAIR design could perform two or three times better than the Bussard system, and achieve perhaps ten or twenty per cent of the speed of light.

‘And, as far as we can tell from the Bruno data,’ said Sally, ‘that Gaijin flower-ship was pretty much a RAIR design: exotic-looking, but nothing we can’t comprehend. Bruno actually passed through what seemed to be a stream of exhaust, before it ceased to broadcast.’ A nice euphemism, thought Maura, for trapped and dismantled. ‘The exhaust was typical of products of a straightforward deuterium – helium-3 fusion reaction, of the type we’ve been able to achieve on Earth for some decades.’

Sally hesitated. She was a small woman, neat, earnest, troubled. ‘There are puzzles here. We can think of a dozen ways the Gaijin design could be improved – nothing that’s in our engineering grasp right now, but certainly nothing that’s beyond our physics. For instance the deuterium – helium fusion reaction is about as low-energy and clunky as you can get. There are much more productive alternatives, like reactions involving boron or lithium. I think I always imagined that when Eetie finally showed up, she would have technology beyond our wildest dreams – beyond our imagining. Well, the flower-ships are pretty, but they aren’t the way we’d choose to travel to the stars –’

‘Especially not in this region,’ Nemoto said evenly.

Maura said, ‘What do you mean?’

Nemoto smiled thinly, the bones of her face showing through papery skin. ‘Now that we are, like it or not, part of an interstellar community, it pays to understand the geography of our new terrain. The interstellar medium, the gases that would power a ramjet, is not uniform. The sun happens not to be in a very, umm, cloudy corner of the Orion Spiral Arm. We are moving, in fact, through what is called the ICM – the intercloud medium. Not a good resource for a ramjet. But of course the flower-ships are not interstellar craft.’ She eyed Maura. ‘You seem surprised. Isn’t that obvious? These ships, with their small fraction of lightspeed, would take many decades even to reach Alpha Centauri.’

Maura said, ‘But time dilation – clocks slowing down as you speed up –’

Nemoto shook her head. ‘Ten per cent of lightspeed is much too slow for such effects to become significant. The flower-ships are interplanetary cruisers, designed for travel at speeds well below that of light, within the relatively dense medium close to a star. The Gaijin are interplanetary voyagers; only accidentally did they become interstellar pioneers.’

‘Then,’ asked Maura reasonably, ‘how did they get here?’

Nemoto smiled. ‘The same way Malenfant has departed the system.’

‘Just tell me.’

‘Teleportation.’

Maura had brought Sally Brind here because she’d grown frustrated, even worried, by the passage of a full year since Malenfant’s disappearance: a year in which nothing had happened.

Nothing obvious had changed about the Gaijin’s behaviour. The whole thing had long vanished from the mental maps of most of the public and commentators, who had dismissed Malenfant’s remarkable jaunt as just another odd subplot in a slow, rather dull saga that already spanned decades. The philosophers continued to debate and agonize over the meaning of the reality of the Gaijin for human existence. The military were, as always, wargaming their way through various lurid scenarios, mostly involving the Gaijin invasion of Earth and Moon, huge armed flower-ships hurling lumps of asteroid rock at the helpless worlds.

Meanwhile, the various governments and other responsible authorities were consumed by indecision.

Truthfully, the facts were still too sparse, questions still proliferating faster than answers were being obtained, mankind’s image of these alien intruders still informed more by old fictional images than any hard science. The picture was not converging, Maura realized with dismay, and history was drifting away from meaningful engagement with the Gaijin.

Which was why she had set up this meeting. Nemoto had, after all, been the first to detect the Gaijin – she had quickly understood the implications of her discovery – and she had immediately selected the one person, Reid Malenfant, who had, in retrospect, been best placed to help articulate her discovery to the world, and even to do something about it.

If anybody could help Maura think through the jungle of possibilities of the future, it was surely Nemoto.

But still – teleportation?

Maura closed her eyes. So I have to imagine these Gaijin e-mailing themselves from star to star. She suppressed a foolish laugh.

Nemoto continued to tinker with her apparatus, her plants.

Sally Brind said slowly, ‘Let’s be clear. You think the hoop Malenfant found was some kind of teleportation node. Then why not locate this – gateway – in the asteroid belt? Why place it all the way out on the rim of the system, with all the trouble and effort that causes? …’

Nemoto kept her counsel, letting the younger woman think it through.

Sally snapped her fingers. ‘But if you teleport from another star you must basically fire a stream of complex information by conventional signal channels – that is, light or radio waves – at the solar system, the target. And the place to pick that up with greatest fidelity is the star’s solar focus, where the signal gain is in the hundreds of millions … But Malenfant can’t have known this. He can’t have deduced the mechanism of teleportation.’

‘But his intuition is strong,’ Nemoto said, smiling. ‘He recognized a gateway, and he stepped through it. Contact had been his purpose, after all.’

‘I thought,’ Maura said doggedly, ‘teleportation was impossible. Because you’d need to map the position and velocity of every particle making up the artefact you want to transmit. And that violates the Uncertainty Principle.’ The notion that, because of quantum fuzziness, it was impossible to map precisely the position and momentum of a particle. And if you couldn’t make such a map, how could you encode, transmit and reconstruct such a complex object as a human being?

‘If you did it so crudely as that, yes,’ Nemoto said. ‘In a quantum universe, no such classical process could possibly work. Even in principle we know only one way to do this, to teleport. An unknown quantum state can be disassembled into, then later reconstructed from, purely classical information and purely non-classical correlations …’

Maura said tightly, ‘Nemoto, please.’

‘This is a teleport machine,’ Nemoto said, waving her hand at her strung-out junk. ‘Sadly I can only teleport one photon, one grain of light, at a time. For the moment.’

‘Sally, do you understand any of this?’

‘I think so,’ Sally said. ‘Look, quantum mechanics allows for the long-range correlation of particles. Once two objects have been in contact, they’re never truly separated. There is a kind of spooky entanglement, called EPR correlation.’

‘EPR?’

‘For Einstein – Podolsky – Rosen, the physicists who came up with the notion.’

‘I do not transport the photon,’ Nemoto said. ‘I transmit a description of the photon. The quantum description.’ She tapped two boxes. ‘Transmitter and receiver. These contain a store of EPR-correlated states – that is, they were once in contact, and so are forever entangled, as Sally puts it.

‘I allow my photon to, umm, interact with ancillary particles in the receiver. The photon is absorbed, its description destroyed. But the information I extract about the interaction can then be transmitted over to the receiver. There I can use the other half of my entangled pair to reconstruct the original quantum state.’

Sally said, still figuring it out, ‘The receiver has to be entangled with the transmitter. What the builders must have done is send over the receiver gate – the hoop Malenfant found – by some conventional means, a slower-than-light craft like a flower-ship. The gate is EPR-correlated with another object back home, a transmitter. The transmitter makes a joint measurement on itself and the unknown quantum system of the object to be teleported. The transmitter then sends the receiver gate the classical result of the measurement. Knowing this, the receiver can convert the state of its EPR twin into an exact replica of the unknown quantum state at the transmitter …’

‘So now you have two photons,’ Maura said slowly to Nemoto. ‘The original and the version you’ve reconstructed.’

‘No,’ said Nemoto, with strained patience. ‘I explained this. The original photon is destroyed when it yields up its information.’

Sally said, ‘Maura, quantum information isn’t like classical information, the stuff you’re used to. Quantum information can be transformed, but not duplicated.’ She studied Maura, seeking understanding. ‘But, even if we’re right about the principle here, there is a lot here that is far beyond us. Think about it. Nemoto can teleport a single photon; the Gaijin gateway can teleport something with the mass of a human being. Malenfant’s body contained –’

‘Some ten to power twenty-eight atoms,’ Nemoto said. ‘That is ten billion billion billion. And therefore it must take the same number of kilobytes, to order of magnitude, to store the data. If not more.’

‘Yes,’ Sally said. ‘By comparison, Maura, all the books ever written probably amount to a mere thousand billion kilobytes. The data compression involved must be spectacular. If we could get hold of that technology alone, our computing and telecoms industries would be transformed.’

‘And there is more,’ Nemoto said. ‘Malenfant’s body was effectively destroyed. That would require the extraction and storage of an energy equivalent of some one thousand megaton bombs …’

His body was destroyed. Nemoto said it so casually.

‘So,’ Sally said slowly, ‘the signal that encodes Malenfant is currently being transmitted between a transmitter-receiver link –’

‘Or links,’ said Nemoto.

‘Links?’

‘Do you imagine that such a technology would be limited to a single route?’

Sally frowned. ‘You’re talking about a whole network of gateways.’

‘Perhaps placed in the gravitational foci of every star system. Yes.’

And now, all at once, Maura saw it: a teleport network spanning the huge gaps between the stars, grand data highways along which one could travel – and without being aware even of the passing of time. ‘My God,’ she murmured. ‘The roads of empire.’

‘And so,’ Sally said, working her way through Nemoto’s thinking, ‘the Gaijin built the gateways. Right?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Nemoto gently. ‘The Gaijin are much too – primitive. They were limited to their system, as we are to ours. In their crude ramjet flower-ships, exploring the rim of the system, they stumbled on a gateway – or perhaps they were guided to look there by others, as we have been by the Gaijin in turn.’

Maura said, ‘If not the Gaijin, then who?’

‘For now, that is unknowable.’ Nemoto gazed at her clumsy apparatus, as if studying the possibilities it implied.

Sally Brind got to her feet and moved slowly around the cramped apartment, drifting dreamily in the low lunar gravity. ‘It takes years for a signal, even a teleport signal, to travel between the stars. This must mean that nobody out there has developed faster-than-light technology. No warp drives, no wormholes. Kind of low tech, don’t you think?’

Nemoto said, ‘In such a Galaxy, processes – cultural contacts, conflicts – will take decades, at least, to unfold. If Malenfant is heading to a star, it will take years for his signal to get there, more years before we could ever know what became of him.’

‘And so,’ Maura said dryly, ‘what must we do in the meantime?’

Nemoto smiled, her cheekbones sharp. ‘Why, nothing. Only wait. And try not to die.’

In the silent years that followed, Maura Della often thought of Malenfant.

Where was Malenfant?

Even if Nemoto was right, with his body destroyed – as the detailed information about the contents and processes of his body and brain shot towards the stars – where was his soul? Did it ride the putative Gaijin laser beam with him? Was it already dispersed?

And would the thing that would be reconstructed from that signal actually be Malenfant, or just some subtle copy?

Still, in all this obscure physics there was a distinct human triumph. Malenfant had found this mysterious gateway. And passed through. She remembered the resentment she had felt while watching the Gaijin’s calm appropriation of solar system resources in the asteroid belt, their easy taking of the Bruno. Now Malenfant had fired himself back through the transport system the Gaijin themselves had used, back to the nest of the Gaijin, and Maura felt a stab of savage satisfaction.

Hey, Gaijin. You have mail …

But these issues weren’t for Maura.

She had done her best to use Nemoto’s insights and other inputs to rouse minds, to shape policy. But the time had come for her to retire, to drive out of the Beltway at last. She went home, to a small town called Blue Lake, in northern Iowa, her old state, the heart of the Midwest.

Her influence was ended. Too damn old.

I don’t have decades left; I don’t have the strength to stay alive, waiting, like Nemoto, while the universe ponderously unfolds; for me, the story ends here. You’ll just have to get along by yourself, Malenfant.

Godspeed, Godspeed.

Chapter 7
RECEPTION

The blue light faded.

He realized he’d been holding his breath. He let it out, gasping; his chest ached. He was grasping the MMU hand controllers compulsively. He flexed his hands; the gloves were stiff.

The blue artefact was all around him, inert once more. He couldn’t see any difference; the sun’s light glimmered from its polished surface, casting double shadows –

Double?

He looked up, to the sun, and flipped up his gold visor.

The sun seemed a little brighter, a strong yellow-white. And it was a double pinprick now, two jewels on a setting of velvet. The light was actually so bright it hurt his eyes, and when he looked away there were tiny double spots on his retina, bright yellow against red mist.

It wasn’t the sun, of course. It was a binary star system. There was a misty lens-shaped disc around the twin stars: a cloud of planetary material, asteroids, comets – a complex inner system, illuminated by double starlight. Even from here, just from that smudge of diffuse light, he could see this was a busy, crowded place.

He worked his controller and swivelled. Beyond the gate, the Perry was gone.

No. Not gone. Just parked a few light years away, is all.

He had no idea how the artefact had worked its simple miracle. Nor, frankly, did he care. It was a gateway – and it had worked, and taken him to the stars.

Yes, but where the hell, Malenfant?

He looked around the sky. The stars were a rich carpet, overwhelming the familiar constellations.

After some searching he found Orion’s belt, and the rest of that great constellation. The hunter looked unchanged, as far as he could see. Orion’s stars were scattered through a volume of space a thousand light years deep, and the nearest of them – Betelgeuse, or maybe Bellatrix, he couldn’t recall – was no closer than five hundred light years from the sun.

That told him something. If you moved across interstellar distances your viewpoint would shift so much that the constellation patterns would distort, the lamps scattered through the sky swimming past each other like the lights of an approaching harbour. He couldn’t have come far, then, not on the scale of the distances to Orion’s giant suns: a handful of light years, no more.

And, given that, he knew where he was. There was only one system like this – two Sol-like stars, bound close together – in the sun’s immediate neighbourhood. This was indeed Alpha Centauri, no more remote from Sol than a mere four light years plus change. Just as he had expected.

Alpha Centauri: the dream of centuries, the first port of call beyond Pluto’s realm – a name that had resonated through a hundred starship studies, a thousand dreams. And here he was, by God. He felt his mouth stretch wide in a grin of triumph.

He blipped his thrusters and swivelled, searching the sky until he found another constellation, a neat, unmistakable W-shape picked out by five bright stars. It was Cassiopeia, familiar from his boyhood astronomy jags. But now there was an extra star to the left of the pattern, turning the constellation into a crude zigzag. He knew what that new star must be, too.

Suspended in immensity, here at the rim of the Alpha Centauri system, Malenfant looked back at the sun.

The sun is a star – just a star. Giordano Bruno was right after all, he thought.

But if it took light four years to get here, it had surely taken him at least as long, however the portal worked. Suddenly I am four years into the future. And, even if I was to step home now – assuming that was possible – it would be another four years before I could feel the heat of the sun again.

How strange, he thought, and he felt subtly cold.

Movement, just ahead of him. He rotated again.

It was a spider robot, like a scaled-down copy of the one he had seen on the other side of the portal. There was a puff of what looked like reaction control engines, little sprays of crystals that glittered in the remote double light. Crude technology, he thought, making assessments automatically. It was heading towards the gate, its limbs writhing stiffly.

It seemed to spot him.

It stopped dead, in another flurry of crystals, a good distance away, perhaps a kilometre. But distances in space were notoriously hard to estimate, and he had no true idea of the robot’s size.

Those articulated limbs were still writhing. Its form was complex, shifting – obviously functional, adaptable to a range of tasks in zero gravity. But overall he saw that the limbs picked out something like a W shape, like the Cassiopeia constellation, centred on a dodecahedral core. He had no idea what it was doing. Perhaps it was studying him. He could barely see it, actually; the device was just an outline in Alpha Centauri light.

Malenfant calculated.

He hadn’t expected a reception committee. This was just a workaday gateway, a portal for unmanned robot worker drones. Maybe the Gaijin themselves were off in the warmth of that complex, crowded inner system.

He reckoned he had around five hours life support left. If he went back – assuming the portal was two-way – he might even make it back to the Perry.

Or he could stay here.

It would be one hell of a message to send on first contact, though, when the inhabitants of the Centauri system came out to see what was going on, and found nothing but his desiccated corpse.

But you’ve come a long way for this, Malenfant. And if you stay, dead or alive, they’ll sure know we are here.

He grinned. Whatever happened, he had achieved his goal. Not a bad deal for an old bastard.

He worked his left hand controller; with a gentle shove, the MMU thrust him forward, towards the drone.

He took his time. He had five hours to reach the drone. And he needed to keep some fuel for manoeuvring at the close, if he was still conscious to do it.

But the drone kept working its complex limbs, pursuing its incomprehensible tasks. It made no effort to come out to meet him.

And, as it turned out, his consumables ran out a lot more quickly than he had anticipated.

By the time he reached the drone, his oxygen alarm was chiming, softly, continually, inside his helmet. He stayed conscious long enough to reach out a gloved hand, and stroke the drone’s metallic hide.

When he woke again, it was as if from a deep and dreamless sleep.

The first thing he was aware of was an arm laid over his face. It was his own, of course. It must have wriggled free of the loose restraints around his sleeping bag.

Except that his hand was contained in a heavy spacesuit glove, which was not the way he was accustomed to sleeping.

And his sleeping bag was light years away.

He snapped fully awake. He was floating in golden light. He was rotating, slowly.

He was still in his EMU – but, Christ, his helmet was gone, the suit compromised. For a couple of seconds he fumbled, flailing, and his heart hammered.

He forced himself to relax. You’re still breathing, Malenfant. Wherever you are, there is air here. If it’s going to poison you, it would have done it already.

He exhaled, then took a deep lungful – filtered through his nose, with his mouth clamped closed. The air was neutral temperature, transparent. He could smell nothing but a faint sourness, and that probably emanated from himself, the cramped confines of a suit he’d worn for too long.

He was stranded in golden light, beyond which he could make out the stars, slightly dimmed, as if by smoke. There was the dazzling-bright pairing of Alpha Centauri. He hadn’t come far, then.

Were there walls around him? He could see no edges, no seams, no corners. He stretched out his feet and gloved fingers. His questing fingers hit a soft membrane. Suddenly the wall snapped into focus, just centimetres from his face: a smooth surface, overlaid by what felt like cables the width of his thumb, but welded somehow to the wall. The cables were a little hard to grip, but he clamped his fingers around them.

Anchored, he felt a lot more comfortable.

The wall itself was soft, neither warm nor cold, smooth beyond the discrimination of his touch. It curved tightly around him. Perhaps he was in some kind of inflated bubble; it could be no more than a few metres across. And it wasn’t inflated to maximum tension. When he pushed at the wall it rippled in great languid waves, pulses of golden light that briefly occluded the stars.

He picked at the membrane with one fingernail. It felt like some kind of plastic. He had no reason to believe it was anything more advanced; the Gaijin had not shown themselves to be technological super-beings. He could have easily taken a scraping of this stuff, analysed it with a small portable lab. Except he didn’t have a portable lab.

Something bumped against his leg. ‘Shit,’ he said. He whirled, scrabbling at the embedded ropes, until he was backed up against the wall.

It was the helmet from his Shuttle EMU.

He picked it up and turned it over in his gloved hands. The helmet had a snap-on metal ring, to fit it to the rest of the suit – or rather, it used to. The attachment had been cut, as if by a laser.

The Gaijin – or their robot drones, here on the edge of the Alpha system – had found him in a shell of gases: air that roughly matched what they must have known, from some equivalent of spectrograph studies, of the composition of Earth’s atmosphere. So they had provided more of the gases in this containment, and broken open his suit – and then, presumably, hoped for the best.

He took off his gloves. He found he was still wearing his lightweight comms headset. He pulled it off and tucked it inside the helmet. There was no sign of his manoeuvring unit.

… And now a kind of after-shock cut in. He rested against the slowly rippling wall, lit up by gold-filtered Centauri light, four light years from home. The robots had been smart, he realized with a shiver. After all the robots, if not the Gaijin themselves, shared nothing like human anatomy. What if they’d decided to see if his whole head was detachable? He felt very old, fragile, and unexpectedly lonely – as he hadn’t during the long months of his Perry flight to the Saddle Point.

What now?

First things first. You need a bio break, Malenfant.

He forced himself to take a leak into the condom he still wore. He felt the warm piss gather in the sac inside his suit. Piss that had been magically transported across four light years. He probably ought to bottle it; if he ever got back home he could probably sell it, a memento of man’s first journey to the stars.

There was movement, a wash of light beyond the bubble wall. Something immense, bright, cruising by silently.

He swivelled, still pinching hold of the embedded ropes, until he faced outwards. He pressed his face against the bubble wall, much as he used to as a kid, staring out of his bedroom window, hoping for snow.

The moving light was a flower-ship.

The Gaijin craft sailed across the darkness, heading for the warm glow at the heart of the Centauri system. The cables and filaments that shaped the maw of its electromagnetic scoops were half-furled, and they waved with slow grace as the ship slowly swivelled on its long axis, perhaps intent on some complex course correction. Dodecahedral shapes swarmed over its flanks, reduced by distance to toy-like specks, fast-moving, intent, purposeful. They almost looked as if they were rebuilding the ship as it travelled – as perhaps they were; Malenfant imagined a flexible geometry, a ship that could adjust its form to the competing needs of the cold stillness here at the rim of this binary system, and the crowded warmth at its heart.

But still, despite its strangeness, he felt a tug at his heart as the flower-ship receded. Don’t leave me here, drifting in space.

But he wasn’t adrift, he saw now. There were ropes embedded in the outer surface of his shell, ropes which gathered in a loosely plaited tether, as if this bubble of air had been trapped by spider-web. The tether, loosely coiled, led across space – not to the flower-ship – but to something hidden by the curve of the bubble.

He pushed himself across the interior of the bubble to look out the other side.

In the dim light of the distant Alpha suns, he made out only an outline: a rough ball that must have been kilometres across, the glimmer of what looked like frost from crater dimples and low mountains.

From one spacesuit pocket he dug out a fold-up softscreen, unpacked it and plastered it against the wall of the bubble. This ’screen had been designed as a low-light and telescopic viewer. Soon its enhancement routines were cutting in, and it became a window through which he peered, angling his head to change his view.

The object seemed to be a ball of ice. It might have been an asteroid, but he was a long way from those double suns. This was more likely the Alpha equivalent of a Kuiper object, an ice moon – or maybe he was even in this system’s Oort cloud, and this was the head of some long-period comet.

And now he made out movement on that icy surface: continual, complex, almost rippling. He tapped at the softscreen, instructing it to magnify and enhance some more.

He saw drone robots, swarming everywhere, their complex limbs working like cockroach legs. The drones moved back and forth in files and streams, endless traffic. Here and there in the flow there were islands of stillness, nodes where the swirl gathered in knots and eddies. And in a few places he saw the gleam of silvery blankets, perhaps like the nano-blankets Frank Paulis’s probe had found on that belt asteroid back home. Maybe they were making more flower-ships. Or perhaps these were von Neumann machines, he thought, replicators engaged primarily on making more copies of themselves, and they would continue until every gram of this remote ball of ice and rock had been converted into purposeful machinery.

But everywhere he looked, as he scanned his ’screen, he could see endless, purposeful movement – perhaps millions of drones, the toiling community making up a glinting, robotic sea. His overwhelming impression was of cooperation, of blind, unquestioning, smoothly efficient obedience to a higher communal goal. These robots had more in common with hive insects, he thought, ants or termites, than with humans.

… But perhaps I should have expected this, he thought. Humans were competitive. But there was no reason to suppose that everybody else had to be that way. Maybe a competitive technological community could only reach a certain point before it became unstable and destroyed itself. Arms races could only take you so far. Perhaps only the cooperative could survive. In which case, he thought, what we are going to find as we move further out is, inevitably, more of this. Termite colonies. And, perhaps, nobody like us.

Damn, he thought. I might be the only true individual in this whole star system. What a bleak and terrifying notion.

But if the robots were replicators they weren’t very good ones.

They all seemed to be based on the design of the type he had first met, with that chunky dodecahedral body, limbs sprouting in a variety of configurations, apparently specialized. But otherwise these toiling drones appeared somewhat diverse. The differences weren’t great: a few extra limbs here, a touch of asymmetry there, each dodecahedron slightly diverging from the geometric ideal – but they were there.

Perhaps the authentic von Neumann vision – of identical replicators spawning each other – was impossible without true nanotech, a command of materials and manufacturing right down to the atomic level. He imagined a fleet of these limited, imperfect robots being unleashed on the Galaxy, ordered to travel from star to star, to build others of their kind … and, with each generation, getting it subtly wrong.

But for there to be such a wide variety of ‘mutations’ as he saw here, there surely had to have been an awful lot of generations.

Or, he thought, what if these are the Gaijin?

He had been assuming that behind these ‘mere’ machines there had to be something bigger, something smarter, something more complex. Lack of imagination, Malenfant. Anthropomorphic. Deal with what you see, not what you imagine might be waiting for you.

He tired of watching the incomprehensible swarming of the robots, and he turned his enhancement softscreen on Alpha Centauri.

Each of the near-twins looked hauntingly like the sun – but if the brighter star, Alpha A, were set in place of the sun, its companion, Alpha B, would be within the solar system: closer than planet Neptune, in fact.

And there were planets here. The interpretative software built into his softscreen began to trace out orbits – one, two, three of them, tight around bright Alpha A – of small rocky worlds, perhaps twins of Earth or Venus or Mars. A couple of minutes later, similar orbits had been sketched out around the companion, B.

Alpha Centauri wasn’t just a twin star; it was a twin solar system. If Earth had been transplanted here the second sun would be a brilliant star. There would be double sunrises, double sunsets, strange eclipses of one star by the other; the sky would be a bright and complex place. And there would have been a whole other planetary system a few light-hours away: so close humans would have been able to complete interstellar journeys maybe as early as the 1970s. He felt an odd ache of possibilities lost, nostalgia for a reality that had never come to be.

The double system contained only one gas giant – and that was small compared to mighty Jupiter, or even Saturn. It was looping, it seemed, on a strange metastable orbit that caused it to fly, on decades-long trajectories, back and forth between the two stars. And as the stars followed their own elliptical orbits around each other, it seemed highly likely that within a few million years the rogue planet would be flung out into the dark, from whence, perhaps, it had come.

If there were few giants, the Alpha sky was full of minor planets, asteroids, comet nuclei. Unlike the orderly lanes of Earth, these asteroid clouds extended right across the space between the stars, and into the surrounding volume. As the ’screen’s software began to plot density contours within the glittering asteroid clouds, Malenfant made out knots and bands and figure-of-eight loops, even what looked like spokes radiating from each star’s central system: clouds of density marked out by the sweeping paths of flocks of asteroids, shepherded by the competing pulls of the stars and their retinues of planets. From an Earth orbiting Alpha A or B, there would be a line across the sky, marking out the plane of the ecliptic: dazzling, alluring, the sparkle of trillions of asteroids, the promise of unimaginable wealth.

The pattern seemed clear. The mutual influence of A and B had prevented the formation of giant planets. All the volatile material that had been absorbed into Sol’s great gas giants had here been left unconsolidated. Malenfant, who had spent half his life arguing for the mining of space resources, felt his fingers itch as he looked at those immense clouds of floating treasures. Here it would have been easy, he thought with some bitterness.

But this was not a place for humanity, and perhaps it never would be. For now the software posted tiny blue flags, all around the rim of the system. These were points of gravitational-lensing focus, Saddle Points, far more of them than in Sol’s simple unipolar gravity field. And there was movement within those dusty lanes of light: bright yellow sparks, Gaijin flower-ships, everywhere.

The solar system is impoverished by comparison, he thought. This is where the action is in this part of space: Alpha Centauri, riddled with so many Saddle Points it’s like Grand Central Station, and with a sky full of flying mines to boot. He felt humbled, embarrassed, like a country cousin come to the big city.

There was a blur of motion, washing across his magnified vision.

He rocked back, peering out of his bubble with naked eyes.

It was a robot, skittering this way and that on its attitude thrusters, crystals of reaction gas sparkling in Alpha light. It came to rest and hovered, limbs splayed, no more than ten metres from the bubble.

Malenfant pushed himself to the wall nearest the robot, pressed his face against the membrane, and stared back.

Its attitude suggested watchfulness. But he was probably anthropomorphizing again.

That dodecahedral core, fat and compact, must have been a couple of metres across. It glistened with panels of complex texture, and there were apertures in the silvery skin within which more machinery gleamed, unrecognizable. The robot had various appendages. A whole forest of them no more than centimetres long bristled from every surface of the core, wiry, almost like a layer of fur. But two of the limbs were longer – ten metres each, perhaps – and articulated like the robot arms carried by the old Space Shuttle, each ending in a knot of machinery. He noticed small attitude thruster nozzles spread along the arms. The whole thing reminded him of one of the old space probes – Voyager, perhaps, or Pioneer – that dense solid core, the flimsy booms, a spacecraft built like a dragonfly.

The robot showed signs of wear and age: crumpled panels on the dodecahedral core; an antenna-like protrusion that was pitted and scarred, as if by micrometeorite rain; one arm that appeared to have been broken and patched by a sheath of newer material. This is an old machine, he thought, and it might have been travelling a long, long time; he wondered how many suns had baked its fragile skin, how many dusty comet trails clouds had worn away at those filmy structures.

Right now the two arms were held upwards, as if in an air of supplication, giving the robot an overall W-shape – like the first robot he’d seen.

Could this be the same machine I met when I came through the hoop? Or, he wondered, am I anthropomorphizing again, longing for individuality where none exists? After all, this thing could never be mistaken for something alive – could it? If nothing else its lack of symmetry – one arm was a good two metres longer than the others – was, on some profound level, deeply disturbing.

He gave in to his sentimentality.

‘Cassiopeia,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’ll call you.’

Female, Malenfant? But the thing did have a certain delicacy and grace. Cassiopeia, then. He raised a hand and waved.

He half-expected a wave back from those complex robot arms, but they did not move.

… But now there was a change. An object that looked for all the world like a telephoto lens came pushing out of an aperture in the front of Cassiopeia’s dodecahedral torso, and trained on him.

He wondered if Cassiopeia had just manufactured the system, in response to its – her – perceived need, in some nano factory in her interior. More likely the technology was simpler, and this ‘camera’ had been assembled from a stock of parts carried within. Maybe Cassiopeia was like a Swiss Army knife, he thought: not infinitely flexible, but with a stock of tools that could be deployed and adapted to a variety of purposes.

And then, once again, he was startled – this time by a noise from within his bubble.

It was a radio screech. It had come from the comms headset tucked inside his helmet.

He grabbed the helmet, pulled out the headset and held one speaker against his ear. The screech was so loud it was painful, and, though he thought he detected traces of structure in the signal, there was nothing resembling human speech.

He glanced out at the robot, Cassiopeia, still patiently holding her station alongside his membrane.

She’s trying to communicate, he thought. After years of ignoring the radio and other signals we beamed at her colleagues in the asteroid belt, she’s decided I’m interesting enough to talk to.

He grinned. Objective achieved, Malenfant. You made them notice us, at least.

… Yes, but right now it wasn’t doing him much good. The signal he was being sent might contain whole libraries of interstellar wisdom. But he couldn’t decode it; not without banks of supercomputers.

They still have no real idea what they’re dealing with here, he thought, how limited I am. Maybe I’m fortunate they didn’t try hitting me with signal lasers.

If we’re going to talk, it will have to be in English. Maybe they can figure that out; we’ve been bombarding them with dictionaries and encyclopaedias for long enough. And it will have to be slow enough for me to understand.

He dug in a pocket on the leg of his suit until he found a thick block of paper and a propelling pencil.

Another moment of contact, then: the first words exchanged between human being and alien. Words that would presumably be remembered, if anybody ever found out about this, long after Shakespeare was forgotten.

What should he say? Poetry? A territorial challenge? A speech of welcome?

At last, he grunted, licked the pencil lead, and wrote out two words in blocky capitals. Then he pressed the pad up against the clear membrane.

THANK YOU

With its – her – telescopic eye, Cassiopeia peered at the paper block for long minutes.

From her angular body Cassiopeia extruded a new pseudopod. It carried a small metal block the size and shape of his note pad.

The block bore a message. In English. The text was in a neat, unadorned font.

COMMUNICATION DYSFUNCTION. REPAIRS MANDATED. REPAIRS PERFORMED. DECISION CONSTRAINED.

He frowned, trying to figure out the meaning. We don’t understand. Why are you thanking us? You would have died. We had no choice but to help you.

He thought, then wrote out: IT SHOWED GOODWILL BETWEEN OUR SPECIES. Not the right word, that species; but he couldn’t think of anything better. MAYBE WE WILL UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER IN THE FUTURE. MAYBE WE WILL LIVE IN PEACE.

The reply: DECISION CONSTRAINED BUT NOT SINGLE-VALUED. INFORMATION REQUIRED CONCERNING OBJECTIVE: REPLICATION; RESOURCE APPROPRIATION; ACTIVITY PROHIBITION; EXOTIC. WHICH.

We didn’t have to keep you alive, asshole. We didn’t know what the hell you were doing here, and we needed to find out. Maybe you wanted to make lots of little Malenfants from Centauri asteroids. Maybe you wanted to take away our resources for some other purposes. Maybe you wanted to stop us doing what we’re doing. Or maybe something else we can’t even guess. What are you doing here?

Take care with your answer, Malenfant. Most of those options, from a Gaijin point of view, aren’t too healthy; you mustn’t let them think you’re some kind of von Neumann rapacious terminator robot yourself, or they’ll slit open this air sac, and then your belly.

I’M HERE OUT OF CURIOSITY.

A pause. COMMUNICATION DYSFUNCTION.

What??

He wrote, WHERE DID YOU COME FROM? WHO MADE YOU? ARE THEY NEARBY?

Another, longer pause. SEVERAL THOUSAND ITERATIONS SINCE INITIALIZATION. We are thousands of generations removed from those who began the migration.

Then these are the Gaijin, he thought. They don’t know who made them. They’ve forgotten. Or maybe nobody made them. After all, you believe you evolved, Malenfant; why not them?

He wrote out, WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE HERE?

REPLICATION. CONSTRUCTION. SEARCH.

So they did come here from somewhere else … and that last word, finally, gave him hope he was dealing with something more than a fixed machine here, more than simple mechanical goals.

SEARCH, he wrote. SEARCH FOR WHAT?

The answer chilled him. SEARCH OBJECT: OPTION TO AVOID COMING STERILIZATION EVENT. EXISTENCE OF OPTION QUERY.

My God, he thought. We always thought the aliens would come and teach us. Wrong. These guys are coming to us for answers.

Answers to whatever it is they are fleeing. The ‘sterilization event’.

For long minutes he gazed at Cassiopeia’s crumpled, complex hide. Then he wrote carefully, WE MUST TALK. BUT I NEED FOOD.

OPTION: RETURN BEFORE EXPIRATION. We can take you home before you die.

WHAT ELSE?

OPTION: MANUFACTURE FOOD. ITERATIVE PROCESS, SUCCESS ANTICIPATED.

Reassuring, he thought dryly.

COROLLARY: CONTINUE.

He wrote, CONTINUE? YOU MEAN I CAN GO ON?

OPTION: ORIGIN NODE. OPTION: OTHER NODES. We can take you home. Or we can take you further. Other places. Even further than this.

Even deeper in time, too. My God.

He thought about it for sixty seconds.

I WANT TO GO ON, he said. MAKE ME FOOD.

Then he added, PLEASE.

Maura Della died eight years after Malenfant’s disappearance into the Gaijin portal, a few months before a signal at lightspeed could have completed the journey to Alpha Centauri and back.

But when those months had passed – when the new signals arrived, bearing news from Alpha Centauri – the great asteroid belt flower-ships at last opened up their electromagnetic wings, and a thousand of them began to sail in towards the crowded heart of the solar system, and Earth.

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.

They walked towards big curtained-off bays. The separating curtain was a nearly translucent sheet stretched across the building, from ceiling to floor, wall to wall.

And there – beyond the curtain, bathed in light – was a Gaijin.

Machinery, not life: that was her first impression. She recognized the famous dodecahedral core. It was reinforced at its edges – presumably to counter Earth’s gravity – and it was resting, incongruously, on a crude Y-frame trailer. A variety of instruments, cameras and other sensors, protruded from the dodecahedron’s skin, and the skin itself was covered with fine bristly wires. Three big robot arms stuck out of that torso, each articulated in two or three places. Two of the arms were resting on the ground, but the third was waving around in the air, fine manipulators at the terminus working.

She looked in vain for symmetry.

Humans had evolved to recognize symmetry in living things – left-to-right, anyhow, because of gravity. Living things were symmetrical; non-living things weren’t – a basic human prejudice hard-wired in from the days when it paid to be able to pick out the predator lurking against a confusing background. In its movements this Gaijin had the appearance of life, but it was angular, almost clumsy-looking – and defiantly not symmetrical. It didn’t fit.

Human researchers were lined up with their noses pressed against the curtain. A huge bank of cameras and other apparatus was trained on the Gaijin’s every move. She knew a continuous image of the Gaijin was being sent out to the net, twenty-four hours a day. There were bars which showed nothing but Gaijin images on huge wall-covering softscreens, all day and all night.

The Gaijin was reading a book, turning its pages with cold efficiency. Good grief, Madeleine thought, disturbed.

‘The Gaijin are deep space machines,’ said Brind. ‘Or life forms, whatever. But they’re hardy; they can survive in our atmosphere and gravity. There are three of them, here in this facility: the only three on the surface of the planet. We’ve no way of knowing how many are up there in orbit, or further out, of course …’

Dorothy Chaum said to her, ‘We think we’re used to machinery. But it’s eerie, isn’t it?’

‘If it’s a machine,’ Madeleine said, ‘it was made by no human. And it’s operated by none of us. Eerie. Yes, you’re right.’ She found herself shuddering, oddly, as that crude mechanical limb clanked. She’d lived her life with machinery, but this Gaijin was spooking her, on some primitive level.

Dorothy Chaum murmured, ‘We speak to them in Latin, you know.’ She grinned, dimpling, looking younger. ‘It’s the most logical human language we could find; the Gaijin have trouble with all the irregular structures and idioms of modern languages like English. We have software translation suites to back us up. But of course it’s a boon to me. I always knew those long hours of study in the seminary would pay off.’

‘What do you talk about?’

‘A lot of things,’ Brind said. ‘They ask more questions than they volunteer answers. Mostly, we figure out a lot from clues gleaned from inadvertent slips.’

‘Oh, I doubt that anything about the Gaijin is inadvertent,’ Chaum said. ‘Certainly their speech is not like ours. It is dull, dry, factual, highly structured, utterly unmemorable. There seems to be no rhythm, no poetry – no sense of story. Simply a dull list of facts and queries and dry logic. Like the listing of a computer program.’

‘That’s because they are machines,’ Paulis growled. ‘They aren’t conscious, like we are.’

Chaum smiled gently. ‘I wish I felt so sure. The Gaijin are clearly intelligent. But are they conscious? We know of examples of intelligence without consciousness, right here on Earth: social insects like ant colonies, the termites. And you could argue there can be consciousness without much intelligence, as in a mouse. But is advanced intelligence possible without consciousness of some sort?’

‘Jesus,’ said Paulis with disgust. ‘You gave these clanking tin men a whole island, they’ve been down here for five whole years, and you can’t even answer questions like that?’

Chaum stared at him. ‘If I could be sure you are conscious, if I even knew for sure what it meant, I’d concede your point.’

‘Conscious or not they are different from us,’ Brind said. ‘For example, the Gaijin can turn their brains off.’

That startled Madeleine.

‘It’s true,’ Chaum said. ‘When they are at repose, as far as we can tell, they are deactivated. Madeleine, if you had an off-switch on the side of your head – even if you could be sure it would be turned back on again – would you use it?’

Madeleine hesitated. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t see how I could tell if I was still me, when I rebooted.’

Chaum sighed. ‘But that doesn’t seem to trouble the Gaijin. Indeed, the Gaijin seem to be rather baffled by our big brains. Madeleine, your mind is constantly working. Your brain doesn’t rest, even in sleep; it consumes the energy of a light bulb – a big drain on your body’s resources – all the time; that’s why we’ve had to eat meat all the way back to Homo Erectus.’

Madeleine protested, ‘But without our brains we wouldn’t be us.’

‘Sure,’ said Chaum. ‘But to be us, to the Gaijin, seems to be something of a luxury.’

‘Ms Chaum, what do you want from them?’

Frank Paulis laughed out loud. ‘She wants to know if there was a Gaijin Jesus. Right?’

Chaum smiled without resentment. ‘The Gaijin do seem fascinated by our religions.’

Madeleine was intrigued. ‘And do they have religion?’

‘It’s impossible to tell. They don’t give away a great deal.’

‘That’s no surprise,’ Paulis said sourly.

‘They are very analytical,’ Chaum said. ‘They seem to regard our kind of thinking as pathological. We spread ideas to each other – right or wrong, useful or harmful – like an unpleasant mental disease.’

Brind nodded. ‘This is the old idea of the meme.’

‘Yes,’ said Chaum. ‘A very cynical view of human culture.’

‘And,’ Paulis asked dryly, ‘have your good Catholic memes crossed the species barrier to the Gaijin?’

‘Not as far as I can tell,’ Dorothy Chaum said. ‘They think in an orderly way. They build up their knowledge bit by bit, testing each new element – much as our scientists are trained to do. Perhaps their minds are too organized to allow our memes to flourish. Or perhaps they have their own memes, powerful enough to beat off our feeble intruder notions. Frankly I’m not sure what the Gaijin make of our answers to the great questions of existence. What seems to interest them is that we have answers at all. I suspect they don’t …’

Madeleine said, ‘You sound disappointed with what you’ve found here.’

‘Perhaps I am,’ Chaum said slowly. ‘As a child I used to dream of meeting the aliens: who could guess what scientific and philosophical insights they might bring? Well, these Gaijin do appear to be a life form millions of years old, at least. But, culturally and scientifically, they are really little evolved over us.’

Madeleine felt herself warming to this earnest, thoughtful woman. ‘Perhaps we’ll find the really smart ones out there among the stars. Maybe they are on their way now.’

Chaum smiled. ‘I certainly envy you your chance to go see for yourself. But even if we did find such marvellous beings, the result may be crushing for us.’

‘How so?’

‘God shows His purposes through us, and our progress,’ she said. ‘At least, this is one strand of Christian thinking. But what, then, if our spiritual development is far behind that of the aliens? Somewhere else He may have reached a splendour to which we can add nothing.’

‘And we wouldn’t matter any more.’

‘Not to God. And, perhaps, not to ourselves.’

They turned away from the disappointing aliens, and walked out into the flat light of Kefallinian noon.

Later, Frank Paulis took Madeleine to one side.

‘Enough bullshit,’ he said. ‘Let’s you and me talk business. You’re fast-forwarding through thirty-six years. If you’re smart, you’ll take advantage of that fact.’

‘How?’

‘Compound interest,’ he said.

Madeleine laughed. After her encounter with such strangeness, Paulis’s blunt commercial calculation seemed ludicrous. ‘You aren’t serious.’

‘Sure. Think about it. Invest what you can of your fee. After all you won’t be touching it while you’re gone. At a conservative five per cent you’re looking at a five-fold payout over your thirty-six years. If you can make ten per cent that goes up to thirty-one times.’

‘Really.’

‘Sure. What else are you going to do with it? You’ll come back a few months older, subjectively, to find your money has grown like Topsy. And think about this. Suppose you make another journey of the same length. You could multiply up that factor of thirty-fold to nearer a thousand. You could shuttle back and forth between here and Sirius, let’s say, getting richer on every leg, just by staying alive over the centuries.’

‘Yeah. If everything stays the same back home. If the bank doesn’t fail, the laws don’t change, the currency doesn’t depreciate, there’s no war or rebellion or plague, or a take-over of mankind by alien robots.’

He grinned. ‘That’s a long way off. A lifetime pumped by relativity is a whole new way of making money. You’d be the first, Meacher. Think about it.’

She studied him. ‘You really want me to take this trip, don’t you?’

His face hardened. ‘Hell, yes, I want you to make this trip. Or, if you can’t get your head sufficiently out of your ass, somebody. We have to find our own way forward, a way to deal with the Gaijin and those other metal-chewing cyborgs and giant interplanetary bugs and whatever else is heading our way from the Galactic core.’

‘Is that really the truth, Paulis?’

‘Oh, you don’t think so?’

‘Maybe you’re just disappointed,’ she goaded him. ‘A lot of people were disappointed because the Gaijin didn’t turn out to be a bunch of father figures from the sky. They didn’t immediately start beaming down high technology and wisdom and rules so we can all live together in peace, love and understanding. The Gaijin are just there. Is that what’s really bugging you, Paulis? That infantile wish to just give up responsibility for yourself –’

He eyed her. ‘You really are full of shit, Meacher. Come on. You still have to see the star of this freak show.’ He led her back into the facility. They reached another corner, another curtained-off Gaijin enclosure. ‘We call this guy Gypsy Rose Lee,’ he said.

Beyond the curtain was another Gaijin. But it was in pieces. The central dodecahedron was intact, save for a few panels, but most of those beautiful articulated arms lay half-disassembled on the floor. The last attached arm was steadily plucking wiry protrusions off the surface of the dodecahedron, one by one. Lenses of various sizes lay scattered over the floor, like gouged-out eyeballs.

Human researchers in white all-over isolation gear were crawling over the floor, inspecting the alien gadgetry.

‘My God,’ Madeleine said. ‘It’s taking itself apart.’

‘Cultural exchange in action,’ Paulis said sourly. ‘We gave them a human cadaver to take apart – a volunteer, incidentally. In return we get this. A Gaijin is a complicated critter; this has been going on six months already.’

A couple of the researchers – two earnest young women – overheard Paulis, and turned their way.

‘But we’re learning a lot,’ one of the researchers said. ‘The most basic question we have to answer is: are the Gaijin alive? From the point of view of their complexity, you’d say they are; but they seem to have no mechanism for heredity, which we think is a prerequisite for any definition of a living thing –’

‘Or so we thought at first. But seeing the way this thing is put together has made us think again –’

‘We believed the Gaijin might be von Neumann machines, perfect replicators –’

‘But it may be that perfect replication is impossible in principle. Uncertainty, chaos –’

‘There will be drift in each generation. Like genetic drift. And where there is variation, there can be selection, and so evolution –’

‘But we still don’t know what the units of replication are here. It may be a lower level than the individual Gaijin –’

‘The subcomponents that comprise them, perhaps. Maybe the Gaijin are a kind of vehicle for replication of their components, just as you could say we humans are a vehicle to enable our genes to reproduce themselves …’

Breeding, evolving machines? Madeleine found herself shuddering.

Paulis said, ‘Do you see now? We are dealing with the truly alien here, Madeleine. These guys might spout Latin in their synthesized voices, but they are not like us. They come from a place we can’t even imagine, and we don’t know where they are going, and we sure as hell don’t know what they are looking for here on Earth. And that’s why we have to find a way to deal with them. Go ahead. Take a good long look.’

The Gaijin plucked a delicate panel of an aluminium-like soft metal off its own hide; it came loose with a soft sucking tear, exposing jewel-like innards. Perhaps it would keep on going until there was only that grasping robot hand left, Madeleine thought, and then the hand would take itself apart too, finger by gleaming finger, until there was nothing left that could move.

Chapter 9
FUSION SUMMER

Brind drew up contracts. Madeleine tidied up her affairs; preparing for a gap of thirty-six years, at minimum, had a feeling of finality. She said goodbye to her tearful mother, rented out her apartment, sold her car. She took the salary up front and invested it as best she could, with Paulis’s help.

She decided to give her little capsule a call-sign: Friendship-7.

And, before she knew it, before she felt remotely ready for this little relativistic death, it was launch day.

Friendship-7’s protective shroud cracked open. The blue light of Earth flooded the cabin. Madeleine could see fragments of ice, shaken free of the hull of the booster; they glittered around the craft like snow. And she could see the skin of Earth, spread out beneath her like a glowing carpet, as bright as a tropical sky. On the antique Proton, it had been one mother of a ride. But here she was – at last – in orbit, and her spirits soared. To hell with the Gaijin, to hell with Brind and Paulis. Whatever else happened from here on in, they couldn’t take this memory away from her.

She travelled through a single orbit of the Earth. There were clouds piled thickly around the equator. The continents on the night side were outlined by chains of city lights.

She could see the big eco-repair initiatives, even from here, from orbit. Reforestation projects were swathes of virulent green on the continents of the northern hemisphere. The southern continents were filled with hot brown desert, their coasts lined grey with urban encrustation. Patches of grey in the seas, bordering the land, marked the sites of disastrous attempts to pump carbon dioxide into the deep oceans. Over Antarctica, laser arrays glowed red, labouring to destroy tropospheric chlorofluorocarbons. The Gulf was just a sooty smudge, drowning in petrochemical smog. And so on.

From here she could see the disturbing truth: that space was doing Earth no damn good at all. Even though this was a time of off-world colonies and trade with interstellar travellers, most of mankind’s efforts were directed towards fixing up a limited, broken-down ecology, or dissipated on closed-economy problems: battles over diminishing resources in the oceans, on the fringes of the expanding deserts.

She wondered, uneasily, what she would find when she returned home, thirty-six years from now.

Madeleine would live in an old Shuttle Spacelab – a tiny reusable space station, seventy years old and flown in orbit twice – dug out of storage at KSC, gutted and refurbished. At the front was her small pressurized hab compartment, and there were two pallets at the rear fitted with a bunch of instruments which would be deployed at the neutron star: coronagraphs, spectroheliographs, spectrographic telescopes.

Brind gave her a powerful processor to enable her to communicate, to some extent, with her Gaijin hosts. It was a bioprocessor, a little cubical unit. The biopro was high technology, and it was the one place they had spent serious amounts of Paulis’s money. And it was human technology, not Gaijin. Madeleine was fascinated. She spent a long time going over the biopro’s specs. It was based on ampiphiles, long molecules with watery heads and greasy tails, that swam about in layers called Langmuir – Blodgett films. The active molecules used weak interactions – hydrogen bonding, van der Waals forces and hydrophobic recognition – to assemble themselves into a three-dimensional structure, supramolecular arrays thousands of molecules long.

Playing with the biopro was better than thinking about what was happening to her, where she was headed.

She wasn’t so happy to find, though, when she first booted up the biopro, that its human interface design metaphor was a two-dimensional virtual representation of Frank Paulis’s leathery face.

‘Paulis, you egotistical bastard.’

‘Just want to make you feel at home.’ The image flickered a little, and his skin was blocky – obviously digitally generated. It – he – turned out to be backed up by a complex program, interactive and heuristic. He could respond to what Madeleine said to him, learn, and grow.

He would be company, of a sort.

‘Are you in contact with the Gaijin?’

He hesitated. ‘Yes. In a way. Anyhow I’ll keep you informed. In the meantime, the best thing you can do is follow your study program.’ He started downloading some kind of checklist; it chattered out of an antique teletype.

‘You have got to be kidding.’

‘You’ve a lot of training on the equipment still to complete,’ virtual Paulis said.

‘Terrific. And should I study neutron stars, bursters, whatever the hell they are?’

‘I’d rather not. I want your raw reactions. If I coach you too much it will narrow your perception. Remember, you’ll be observing on behalf of all mankind. We may never get another chance. Now. Maybe we can start with the spectroheliograph deployment procedure …’

When she flew once more over the glittering east coast of North America, the Gaijin ship was waiting to meet her.

In Earth orbit, the Gaijin flower-ship didn’t look so spectacular. It was laid out something like a squid, a kilometre long and wrought in silver, with a bulky main section as the ‘head’ and a mess of ‘tentacles’ trailing behind.

Dodecahedral forms, silvered and anonymous, drifted from the cables, and clustered around Madeleine’s antique craft. Her ship was hauled into the silvery rope stuff. Strands adhered to her hull, until her view was criss-crossed with shining threads, and she had become part of the structure of the Gaijin ship. She felt a mounting claustrophobia as she was knit into the alien craft. How did Malenfant stand all this?

Then the flower-ship unfolded its petals. They made up an electromagnetic scoop, a thousand kilometres wide. The lower edge of the scoop brushed the fringe of Earth’s atmosphere, and plasma sparkled.

Madeleine felt her breath shortening. This is real, she thought. These crazy aliens are really going to do this. And I’m really here.

She fought panic.

After a couple of widening loops around the planet Madeleine sailed out of Earth’s orbit, and she was projected into strangeness.

Eating interplanetary hydrogen, it took the flower-ship one hundred and ninety-eight days to travel out to the burster’s Saddle Point, eight hundred AU from the sun.

Saddle Point gateways must destroy the objects they transport.

For eighteen years a signal crossed space, towards a receiver gateway which had been hauled to the system of the burster neutron star. For eighteen years Madeleine did not exist. She was essentially dead (though not legally).

Thus, Madeleine Meacher crossed interstellar space.

There was no sense of waking – is it over? – she was just there, with the Spacelab’s systems whirring and clicking around her as usual, like a busy little kitchen. Her heart was pounding, just as it had been a second before – eighteen years before.

Everything was the same. And yet –

‘Meacher.’ It was virtual Paulis’s voice. ‘Are you all right?’

No. She felt extraordinary: renewed, revived. She remembered every instant of it, that burst of exquisite pain, the feeling of reassembling, of sparkling. Was it possible she had somehow retained some consciousness during the transition?

My God, she thought. This could become addictive.

A new, complex light was sliding over the back of her hand. She suddenly remembered where she was. She made for her periscope.

From the dimly-lit, barren fringe of the solar system, she had been projected immediately into a crowded space. She was, in fact, sailing over the surface of a star.

The photosphere, barely ten thousand kilometres below, was a flat-infinite landscape, encrusted by granules each large enough to swallow the Earth, and with the chromosphere – the thousand-kilometre-thick outer atmosphere – a thin haze above it all. Polarizing filters in the viewport periscope dimmed its light to an orange glow. As she watched, one granule exploded, its material bursting across the star’s surface; neighbouring granules were pushed aside, so that a glowing, unstructured scar was left on the photosphere, a scar which was slowly healed by the eruption of new granules.

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