STEPHEN BAXTER
TIME
MANIFOLD 1

COPYRIGHT

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.

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

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 1999

Copyright © Stephen Baxter 1999

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.

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 ebook 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 ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any written content or picture content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780006511823

Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007383009

Version: 2018-12-03

PRAISE

Praise for Stephen Baxter:

‘Stephen Baxter proves what a cosmic thinker he is’

Washington Post Book World

‘Baxter handles a complex and gripping plot with his customary aplomb … The ending will blow your mind … go out and buy everything else that Baxter has ever written’

New Scientist

‘Baxter has emerged as a master of cosmological hard SF, a writer enamored of alien viewpoints and radical settings, with a sense of sublime immensities and an ingenuity at working permutations on the question of what is human’

Locus

DEDICATION

To two space cadets: My nephew, James Baxter Kent Joosten, NASA

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

1: Bootstrap

2: Downstream

3: Cruithne

4: Manifold

Afterword

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Reid Malenfant:

You know me. And you know I’m a 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 look a little further out. Tonight I want to tell you why I care so much about this issue that I devoted my life to it.

The world isn’t big enough any more. You don’t need me to stand here and tell you that. We could all choke to death, be extinct in a hundred years.

Or we could be on our way to populating the Galaxy.

Yes: the Galaxy. Want me to tell you how?

Turns out it’s all a question of economics.

Let’s say we set out to the stars. We might use ion rockets, solar sails, gravity assists. It doesn’t matter.

We’ll probably start as we have in the Solar System, with automated probes. Humans may follow. One per cent of the helium-3 fusion fuel available from the planet Uranus, for example, would be enough to send a giant interstellar ark, each ark containing a billion people, to every star in the Galaxy. But it may be cheaper for the probes to manufacture humans in situ, using cell synthesis and artificial womb technology.

The first wave will be slow, no faster than we can afford. It doesn’t matter. Not in the long term.

When the probe reaches a new system, it phones home, and starts to build.

Here is the heart of the strategy. A target system, we assume, is uninhabited. We can therefore anticipate massive 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.

I thought you’d enjoy that line. There’s nothing an entrepreneur likes more than the sound of the word ‘free’.

More probes will be built and launched from each of the first wave of target stars. The probes will reach new targets; and again, more probes will be spawned, and fired onward. The volume covered by the probes will grow rapidly, like the expansion of gas into a vacuum.

Our ships will spread along the spiral arm, along lanes rich with stars, farming the Galaxy for humankind.

Once started, the process will be self-directing, self-financing. It would take, the double-domes 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.

This vision isn’t mine alone. It isn’t original. The rocket pioneer Robert Goddard wrote an essay in 1918 – ninety-two years ago – called ‘The Ultimate Migration’, in which he imagined space arks built from asteroid materials carrying our far-future descendants away for the death of the sun. The engineering detail has changed; the essence of the vision hasn’t.

We can do this. If we succeed, we will live forever.

The alternative is extinction.

And, people, when we’re gone, we’re gone.

As far as we can see we’re alone, in an indifferent universe. We see no sign of intelligence anywhere away from Earth. We may be the first. Perhaps we’re the last. It took so long for the Solar System to evolve intelligence it seems unlikely there will be others, ever.

If we fail, then the failure is for all time. If we die, mind and consciousness and soul die with us: hope and dreams and love, everything that makes us human. There will be nobody even to mourn us.

To be the first is an awesome responsibility. It’s a responsibility we must grasp.

I am offering you a practical route to an infinite future for mankind, a future of unlimited potential. Some day, you know it, I’ll come back to you again for money: seedcorn money, that’s all, so we can take a first step – self-financing even in the medium term – beyond the bounds of Earth. But I want you to see why I’ll be doing that. Why I must.

We can do this. We will do this. We’re on our own. It’s up to us.

This is just the beginning. Join me.

Thank you.

Michael:

This is what I have learned, Malenfant. This is how it is, how it was, how it came to be.

In the afterglow of the Big Bang, humans spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across billions upon billions of years.

Everywhere they found life.

Nowhere did they find mind – save what they brought with them or created – no other against which human advancement could be tested.

With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages.

They learned of other universes from which theirs had evolved. Those earlier, simpler realities too were empty of mind, a branching tree of emptiness reaching deep into the hyperpast.

It is impossible to understand what minds of that age – the peak of the species, a race hundreds of billions of times older than your mankind, Malenfant – were like. They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not even to learn. They had nothing in common with us, their ancestors of the afterglow.

Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.

The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile and ultimately lethal.

There was despair and loneliness.

There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. There was an age of suicide, as the finest of humanity chose self-destruction against further purposeless time and struggle.

The great rivers of mind guttered and dried.

But some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to the darkness, to accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably old.

And, at last, they realized that this was wrong. It wasn’t supposed to have been like this.

Burning the last of the universe’s resources, the final downstreamers – dogged, all but insane – reached to the deepest past. And – oh.

Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon. It’s starting –

1

BOOTSTRAP

What seest thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Emma Stoney:

Of course Emma had known that Reid Malenfant – failed astronaut, her ex-husband, her current boss – had been buying up Space Shuttle rocket engines and static-firing them in the California desert. She’d thought it was all part of an elaborate waste-disposal plan.

She hadn’t known he was planning to use the rockets to reach the asteroids.

Not until Cornelius Taine told her about it.

About that, and a lot more besides.

‘… Ms Stoney.’

The voice was soft, dry, and it startled her. Emma straightened up from her softscreen.

There was a man standing before her, here in the pastel light of her Las Vegas office: a thin Caucasian, 1980s pinstripe suit, neatly cropped hair. ‘I surprised you. I’m sorry. My name’s Cornelius,’ he said. ‘Cornelius Taine.’

Neutral accent. Boston? He looked about forty. She saw no sign of cosmetic enhancement. High cheekbones. Stress muscles around his eyes.

How the hell had he gotten in here?

She reached for the security touchpad under her desk. ‘I didn’t notice you come in.’

He smiled. He seemed calm, rational, business-like. She lifted her finger off the button.

He stretched out his hand and she shook it; his palm was dry and soft, as if even his perspiration was under control. But she didn’t enjoy the touch. Like handling a lizard, she thought. She let go of the hand quickly.

She said, ‘Have we met before?’

‘No. But I know of you. Your picture is in the company reports. Not to mention the gossip sites, from time to time. Your complicated personal history with Reid Malenfant –’

He was making her uncomfortable. ‘Malenfant is kind of high profile,’ she conceded.

‘You call him Malenfant.’ He nodded, as if storing away the fact.

‘You’re with the corporation, Mr Taine?’

‘Actually it’s Doctor. But please, call me Cornelius.’

‘Medical doctor?’

‘The other sort.’ He waved a hand. ‘Academic. Mathematics, actually. A long time ago. Yes, in a manner of speaking, I am with Bootstrap. I represent one of your major shareholder groups. That’s what got me past your very conscientious secretary in the outer office.’

‘Shareholders? Which group?’

‘We work through a number of dummies.’ He looked at her desk. ‘No doubt when you get back to your softscreen you’ll soon be able to determine which, and the extent of our holdings. Ultimately, I work for Eschatology, Inc.’

Oh, shit. Eschatology, as far as she knew, was one of those UFO-hunting nut groups which were attracted to Malenfant’s enterprises like flies.

He watched her, apparently knowing what she was thinking. ‘Why are you here, Dr Taine?’

‘Cornelius, please. Naturally we wish to check on how your husband is using our money.’

‘Ex-husband. You can do that through the company reports or the press.’

He leaned forward. ‘But I don’t recall any news releases about this waste-reduction enterprise in the Mojave.’

‘You’re talking about the rocket plant. It’s a new project,’ she said vaguely. ‘Speculative.’

He smiled. ‘Your loyalty is admirable. But you’ve no need to defend Malenfant, Ms Stoney. I’m not here to criticize or obstruct. Divert, perhaps.’

‘Divert what?’

‘The trajectory of Reid Malenfant’s covert activities. I’m talking about his true purpose, beneath all the misdirection.’

‘True purpose?’

‘Come now. You don’t think anyone believes an entrepreneur with Malenfant’s track record is reconditioning man-rated rocket engines just to burn industrial waste, do you?…’ He studied her. Or perhaps you truly don’t know the truth. How remarkable. In that case we both have much to learn.’ He smiled easily. ‘We believe Malenfant’s motives are sound – that’s why we invest in him – although his objectives are too narrow. I saw his speech in Delaware the other night. Impressive stuff: colonizing the Galaxy, immortality for mankind. Of course, he hasn’t thought it through.’

‘Would you believe me if I said I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about?’

‘Oh, yes.’ He eyed her. His eyes were a pale blue, the colour of the skies of her California childhood, long gone. ‘Yes, now that I’ve met you, I believe you. Perhaps we understand your ex-husband better than you do.’

‘And what is it you understand about him?’

‘That he’s the only man who can save the human race from the coming catastrophe.’ He said it without inflection.

She had absolutely no idea how to reply. The moment stretched.

Once more she wondered if this man was dangerous.

On impulse, she decided to cancel the rest of her day and drive out to Malenfant’s desert operation. Maybe, all things considered, it was time to see it for herself. And she invited Cornelius along for the ride.

She called ahead to let Malenfant know she was on the way. But, working on the principle that she should never miss a chance to make Malenfant’s life more difficult, she didn’t warn him about Cornelius Taine.

Out of Vegas she took the I-15, the main route to LA three hundred miles away. Out of town she was able to cut in the SmartDrive. The car’s limiter, controlled by the invisible web of satellites far above, switched out as the automatic control took over, and her speed rose smoothly through a hundred and fifty miles per hour.

As the sun climbed, the air grew hotter. She rolled up her window, felt the air conditioning cool and moisten the air.

Without warning Cornelius said, as if resuming an interrupted conversation, ‘Yes, the Delaware speech was interesting. But something of a throwback for Malenfant. He’s usually much more discreet about his true ambitions …’

When Malenfant had first started making money, as a small-scale aerospace consultant, he had spread himself over the media arguing for an expansion of American effort in space: a new generation of heavy launchers, new manned vehicles, a return to the Moon. He talked about the riches waiting in space, escape from Malthusian limits to growth, the ability to save the species from such calamities as an asteroid collision with the Earth, and so forth. The usual space-buff propaganda.

Cornelius said, ‘The image Malenfant built of himself was clear. Here was a man who was rich and was destined to get richer, and who was clearly prepared to throw some of his money at the old dreams of space. But then his businesses started to struggle. Isn’t that true? …’

It was true. Investors had grown wary of this talk-show visionary. Space was important for business, but business only cared about the constellations of utilitarian satellites in low Earth orbit, for communications and weather and surveillance. Thus far and no further.

And Malenfant attracted no support from serious agencies – particularly from NASA. NASA had long grown wary of frightening away its political backers by thinking too big, and was focused on doing sexy science with small, cheap unmanned probes, while sustaining the careers and empires associated with the giant bureaucracy which ran the manned space programme, with its ageing Shuttle fleet and a half-built and much-delayed Space Station.

In fact Malenfant himself started to attract unwelcome personal attention. There were bar-room psychoanalysts all over the media who found a common pattern in his failure to have kids, his frustrated ambition to fly in space, and his lofty ambitions for the future of man. And then there were the kooks – the conspiracy theorists, the UFO nuts, the post-New Age synthesists, the dreaming obsessives – none of whom had anything to offer Malenfant but bad PR.

Then along had come the yellow babies in Florida, and even NASA space launches were suspended, and that seemed to be that.

As Cornelius talked, she discreetly booted up the car’s softscreen and referenced Cornelius Taine.

Thirty-eight years old. Born in Texas, not that you’d know it from the accent. Once a professional mathematician, an academic. Brilliant was the word used in the brief biog she found.

A full professor at Princeton at twenty-seven. Washed out at thirty.

She couldn’t find out why, or what he’d been doing since then. She set off a couple of data miners to answer those questions for her.

After the yellow babies, Malenfant had regrouped.

He disappeared from the TV screens. He continued to fund educational efforts – books, TV shows, movies. Emma, working within the Bootstrap corporation, saw no harm in that, nothing but positive PR, and tax-efficient besides. But in public Malenfant largely withdrew from his propagandizing, and withheld any investment from what he started to call the ‘pie-in-the-sky stuff’.

And, quietly, he began to build a seriously large business empire. For instance, he had pioneered the mining of methane as a fuel source from the big high-pressure hydrate deposits on the sea bed off North Carolina. He had leased the technology to other fields, off Norway and Indonesia and Japan and New Zealand, and bought up shares judiciously. Soon methane production was supplying a significant percentage of global energy output.

The giant tents Malenfant’s companies had erected over the sea floor, to decompose the hydrates and trap the gases, had become a symbol of his flair and ambition.

And Malenfant was on his way to becoming remarkably rich.

Space, it seemed, was the place Reid Malenfant had started from, not where he was going.

… Until – Emma thought, if Taine is right – this.

‘Of course,’ Cornelius said, ‘Malenfant’s ambition is to be applauded. I mean his real ambition, beyond this – umm, diversionary froth. I hope you understand this is my basic position. What grander goal is there to work for than the destiny of the species?’ He spread thin fingers. ‘Man is an expansive, exploring animal. We conquered Earth with Stone Age technology. Now we need new resources, new skills to fund our further growth, space to express our differing philosophies …’ He smiled. ‘I have the feeling you don’t necessarily share these views.’

She shrugged. This was an argument she’d rehearsed with Malenfant many times. ‘It’s such a gigantic, mechanistic, depressing vision. Maybe we should all just learn to get along with each other. Then we wouldn’t have to go to all the trouble of conquering the Galaxy. What do you think?’

He laughed. ‘Your marriage must have been full of fire.’ And he continued to ask her questions, trying to draw her out.

Enough. She wasn’t prepared to be pumped by this faintly sinister man about her boss, let alone her ex-husband. She buried herself in e-mails, shutting him out.

Cornelius sat in silence, as still as a basking lizard.

After an hour they reached the Californian border.

There was a border post here. An unsmiling guard scanned Emma’s wrist bar-code, her eyes hidden by insectile camera-laden sun-glasses. Since Emma and Cornelius proved to be neither black nor Latino nor Asian, and did not intend to take up permanent occupancy in the Golden State nor seek employment there, they were allowed through.

California, Emma thought sourly, is not what it used to be.

Highway 58, heading towards Mojave, took them through the desert. The sun climbed higher, and hard light fell from a hot, ozone-leached sky. The ground was baked, bleached, flat and hard as a paving slab, with only gnarled and blackened Joshua trees to challenge the endless horizontals. Somewhere to her right was Death Valley, which had, in 2004, logged the world’s all-time highest temperature at 139 degrees.

They reached Edwards Air & Space Force Base – or rather they began to drive alongside its chain-link fence, forty miles of it running alongside the highway. Edwards, with its endless expanse of dry salt lakes – natural runways – was the legendary home of the test pilot. But from the highway she could see nothing at all, no planes or hangars or patrolling men-in-black guards. Nothing but miles of link fence. The accountant in her began, involuntarily, to compute the cost of all that wire.

Still, the closeness of Edwards, with its connotation of 1960s astronaut glamour, was, she was sure, the reason Malenfant had chosen this area for his newest project. Malenfant’s methods with people were coarse, but he knew the power of symbols.

And it was, indeed, only a little way beyond Edwards that she came to the site of Malenfant’s project.

The main gate was little more than a hole in the fence, barred by a crash barrier that carried a small, almost unobtrusive, Bootstrap corporate logo. The guard was a hefty woman with a small, dazzling-bright pistol at her hip. Emma’s company credentials, appended to the u-v barcode i-d she wore on her left wrist, were enough to get her and Cornelius through the gate.

Inside the gate there was a Portakabin, once more displaying the corporate logo. Beyond that there was more desert. There was no metalled road surface, just tracks snaking to the dusty horizon.

Emma pulled the car over and climbed out. She blinked in the sudden light, felt perspiration start out of her flesh after a few seconds of the desert’s dry, sucking warmth. The shade of the cabin, even badly air-conditioned, was a relief.

She took in the cabin’s contents with a glance. Malenfant’s joky company mission statement was repeated several times: Bootstrap: Making Money in a Closed Economy – Until Something Better Comes Along … There were display stands showing the usual corporate PR, much of it approved by herself, about the methane extraction fields, and Bootstrap’s clean-up activities at Hanford and the Ukraine nuke plants and Alaska, and so forth.

Bootstrap had tied up a recent youth-oriented sponsorship with Shit Cola, and so there was a lot of bright pink Shit livery about the stands. Cornea gumbo, Emma thought: too cluttered and bright. But it defrayed the costs. And the Shit audience – sub-age-25, generally sub-literate consumers of the planet’s trendiest soft drink – were showing themselves amenable to subtle Bootstrap persuasion, mixed in with their diet of endless softsoaps and thongathons.

No evidence here of giant rocket plants in the desert, of course.

Cornelius was looking around in silence, an amused half-smile on his lips. She was finding his quiet know-all attitude intensely irritating, his silences disturbing.

She heard the whine of an electric engine, a car of some kind pulling up outside. With relief she stepped out the door.

The car was a late-model jeep, a bare frame mounted on big fat tyres, with a giant solar-cell carapace glistening like beetle chitin. It carried two people, talking animatedly. The passenger was a woman, unknown to Emma: sixty, perhaps, slim and smart, wearing some kind of trouser suit. Practical but a little hot, Emma thought.

And the driver was, of course, Reid Malenfant.

Malenfant got out of the car like a whip uncoiling. He bounded up to Emma, grabbed her arms, and kissed her cheek; his lips were rough, sun-cracked. He was ruinously tall, thin as a snake, bald as a coot. He was wearing a blue NASA-type jump-suit and heavy black boots. As usual, he looked somehow larger than those around him, as if too big for the landscape. She could smell desert dust on him, hot and dry as a sauna. He said, ‘What kept you?’

She hissed, ‘You’ve a hell of a nerve, Malenfant. What are you up to now?’

‘Later,’ he whispered. The woman with him was climbing out of the car with caution, but she seemed limber enough. Malenfant said to Emma, ‘Do you know Maura Della?’

‘Representative Della? By reputation.’

Maura Della stepped forward, a thin smile on her lips. ‘Ms Stoney. He’s told me all about you.’

‘I bet he has.’ Emma shook her hand; Delia’s grip was surprisingly strong, stronger than Cornelius Taine’s, in fact.

Malenfant said, ‘I’m trying to win the Representative’s support for the project here. But I suspect I’ve a little way to go yet.’

Della said, ‘Damn right. Frankly it seems incredible to me that you can attempt to build an eco-friendly project around rocket engines …’

Malenfant pulled a face at Emma. ‘You can tell we’re in the middle of an argument here.’

‘We sure are,’ said Della.

Malenfant fetched plastic water bottles from the car and handed them out while Maura Della kept on talking.

‘… Look, the Space Shuttle actually dumps more exhaust products into the atmosphere than any other current launcher. Water, hydrogen, hydrogen chloride and nitrogen oxides. The chloride can damage the ozone layer –’

‘If it got into the stratosphere,’ Malenfant said amiably, ‘which it doesn’t, because it rains out first.’

‘65% of it does. The rest escapes. Anyhow there are other effects. Ozone depletion because of the deposition of frozen water and aluminium oxide. Global warming contributions from carbon dioxide and particulates. Acid rain from the hydrogen chloride and the NOX products –’

‘Limited to a half-mile around the launch site.’

‘But there. Anyhow there are also the toxins associated with rocket launches, which only need to be present in small amounts. Nitrogen tet can cause acute pulmonary oedemas, hydrazine is carcinogenic – and there are old studies linking aluminium with Alzheimer’s.’

Malenfant barked laughter. ‘The aluminium in rocket motors is one hundredth of one per cent of the total US annual production. We’d have to be launching like Buck Rogers to do any real damage.’

‘Tell that to the mothers of the Florida yellow babies,’ Della said grimly.

It had been a massive scandal. Medical studies had revealed a series of birth abnormalities showing up in Daytona, Orlando and other communities close to Cape Canaveral, in Florida. Abnormal livers, faulty hearts, some external defects; a plague of jaundice, sometimes associated with serious neurological diseases. Yellow babies.

Naturally Malenfant was prepared for this. ‘First of all,’ he said evenly, ‘the medicos are split over whether the cluster exists at all. And even if it does, who the hell knows what the cause is?’

Della shook her head. ‘Heptyl has been detected in soil and plants. Along the east coast of Florida it reaches as much as point three milligrams per kilogram –’

Emma asked, ‘Heptyl?’

‘Dimethyl hydrazine. Unburned rocket fuel. Highly toxic; hydrazine compounds are notorious liver and central nervous system poisons. Furthermore we know it can linger for years in bodies of water, rivers and marshes …’ Della smiled thinly. ‘I’m sorry. I guess we got a little worked up, driving around out here. As you probably know, Malenfant has been kibitzing Congress for some time. Me specifically. I thought I should come see if this rocket shop of his is just another hobby-club tax write-off, or something serious.’

Emma nodded. Right now she didn’t see why she should make life easy for Malenfant. ‘He calls you Bill Proxmire in a skirt.’ Proxmire had been a notorious NASA-opposing Senator of the late twentieth century.

Maura Della smiled. ‘Well, I don’t wear skirts much. But I’ll take it as a compliment.’

‘Damn right,’ said Malenfant easily, utterly unfazed. ‘Proxmire was an unthinking opponent of progress –’

‘While I,’ said Della dryly to Emma, ‘am a thinking opponent of progress. And therefore, Malenfant is calculating, amenable to persuasion.’

‘I told you it was a compliment,’ Malenfant said.

As the two of them fenced, Cornelius Taine had been all but invisible, standing in the shadows of the Portakabin’s doorway. Now he stepped forward, as if materializing, and smiled at Malenfant. Cornelius didn’t blink in the harsh sunlight, Emma noticed. Maybe he was wearing image-processing cornea implants.

Malenfant frowned at him, startled. ‘And who the hell are you?’

Cornelius introduced himself and his company.

Malenfant growled. ‘Eschatology. I thought I told the guards to keep you kooks out of the compound.’

Emma tugged his sleeve. ‘I brought him in.’ She murmured about the shareholding Cornelius represented. ‘Take him seriously, Malenfant.’

Cornelius said, ‘I’m here to support you, Colonel Malenfant. Really. I don’t represent any threat to you.’

‘Malenfant. Just call me Malenfant.’ He turned to Della. ‘I apologize for this. I get these bullshit artists all the time.’

Della murmured, ‘I suspect you only have yourself to blame for that.’

Cornelius Taine was holding up manicured hands. ‘You have me wrong, Malenfant. We’re not psychics. We are scientists, engineers, economists, statisticians. Thinkers, not dreamers. I myself was formerly a mathematician, for instance.

‘Eschatology has built on the pioneering work of thinkers like Freeman Dyson who, in the 1970s, began to consider the future scientifically. Since then we, and others, have worked hard to compile, umm, a road map of the future. In fact, Colonel Malenfant, we already have proof that our studies of the future are generally successful.’

‘What proof?’

‘We’ve become rich out of them. Rich enough to invest in you.’ He smiled.

‘Why have you come here today?’

‘To emphasize we support you. That is, we support your true objectives. We know about Key Largo,’ said Cornelius.

Della looked confused. ‘Key Largo? In Florida?’

The name meant nothing to Emma. But she saw it had caught Malenfant off balance.

‘This is too complicated for me,’ Malenfant said at last. ‘Get in the jeep. Please. We’ve got some hardware to see. Now that I do understand.’

Meekly, harbouring their own thoughts, they obeyed.

It was a three-mile drive to the test stand, further than Emma had expected. Bootstrap owned a big piece of desert, it seemed.

Malenfant’s base here was like a miniaturized version of Edwards: miles of chain-link fence cutting out a hole in the desert, a hole within which exotic technology lurked, the scent of other worlds.

But there was a lot of plant here: fuel tanks and hangar-like buildings and skeletal test stands. Malenfant just drove past it all without comment or explanation. Was there a secret purpose here, more equipment than could be explained away by the waste-disposal cover story?

Malenfant and Maura Della continued to argue about space and rockets. Cornelius Taine was oddly detached. He sat apparently relaxed, hands neatly folded before him, gaze sweeping over the desert, as the babble of chemical names and statistics went on. There was something repellent about his surface of self-containment.

Emma was financial controller of Bootstrap – not to mention Malenfant’s ex-wife – but that meant little to Malenfant in terms of openness and sharing of information with her. She knew he did rely on her to keep the company within the fiscal regulations, though. And that meant that, in a bizarre way, he trusted her to break through his elaborate webs of deceit and concealment in time to comply with the reporting rules. It was a kind of dance between them, a game of mutual dependence played to unspoken conventions.

In a way, she admitted to herself, she enjoyed it.

But she did wonder – if Cornelius turned out to be right – if Malenfant had gone too far this time. Secret rocket ships in the desert? So 1950s, Malenfant …

Still, here in this desert, just a few score miles from Edwards itself, Reid Malenfant – supple, tanned, vigorous, cheerful – seemed at home. Much more than in a boardroom in Vegas or Manhattan or DC. He looked like what he was, she thought – or rather what he had always wanted to be – a Right Stuff pilot of the old school, maybe somebody who could have gotten all the way into space himself.

But, of course, it hadn’t worked out that way.

They reached the engine test facility. It was a big open box of scaffolding and girders, with zigzag walkways scribbled across the structure, and a giant crane peering over the top of everything. Lights sparkled over the rig, bright despite the intensity of the afternoon sun. It looked like a piece of a chemical factory, unaccountably shipped out here to the dull California desert. But on a boxy structure at the centre of the ugly conglomerate Emma could see, crudely painted over, a NASA roundel.

And there, as if trapped at the heart of the clumsy industrial metalwork, she saw the slim, snub-nosed form of a Space Shuttle external tank: a shape familiar from images of more than a hundred successful Cape Canaveral launches, and one memory-searing failure. White vapour was venting from somewhere in the stack and it wreathed around the girders and tubing, softening the sun’s glare.

Oddly, she felt cooler; perhaps the heat capacity of this giant mass of liquid fuel was sufficient to chill the desert air, her own body.

Malenfant pulled up the jeep, and they stepped out. Malenfant waved at hard-hatted engineers, who waved or shouted back, and he guided his party around the facility.

‘What we have in there is a kind of mock-up of a Space Shuttle. We have the external fuel tank, of course, and a complete aft section, with three main engines in place. Where the rest of the orbiter would go we have a boilerplate truss section. The Shuttle engines we use are obsolete: they’ve all flown in space several times, and have been decommissioned. We got the test hardware from NASA’s old Shuttle main engine test facility in Mississippi, the Stennis Space Center.’ He pointed to a fleet of tankers parked alongside the facility. They were giant eighteen-wheelers, but against the rig they looked like beetles at the foot of an elephant. ‘At Stennis they bring in the fuel, lox and liquid hydrogen, by barge. We don’t have that luxury …’

They reached a flame pit, a mighty concrete conduit dug into the desert alongside the test rig. Malenfant said, ‘We’ve already achieved 520-second burns here, equivalent to a full Shuttle flight demonstration test, at one hundred per cent thrust.’ He smiled at Maura Della. ‘This is the only place in the world anybody is firing Shuttle main engines right now, still the most advanced rocket engines in the world. We have a nineteen-storey-high fuel tank in there, eight hundred tons of liquid fuel chilled through three hundred degrees or below. When the engines fire up the turbo-pumps work at forty thousand revs per minute, a thousand gallons of fuel are consumed every second –’

‘All very impressive, Malenfant,’ said Della, ‘but I’m hardly likely to be overwhelmed by engineering gosh-wow numbers. This isn’t the 1960s. You really think you need to assemble all this space hardware just to lose a little waste?’

‘Surely. What we plan is to use rocket combustion chambers as high-temperature, high-volume incinerators.’ He led them to a show board, a giant flow diagram showing mass streams, little rockets with animated yellow flames glowing in their hearts. ‘We reach two to three thousand Centigrade in there, twice as high as in most commercial incinerators, which are based on rotary kiln or electric plasma technology. We feed the waste material through at high speed, first to break it down and then to oxidize it. Any toxic products are removed by a multistage cleansing process that includes scrubbers to get acidic gases out of the exhaust.

‘We think we can process most poisonous industrial by-products, and also nerve gas and biological weapons, at a much greater speed and a fraction the cost of conventional incinerators. We think we’ll be able to process tons of waste every second. We could probably tackle massive ecological problems, like cleaning out poisoned lakes.’

‘Getting rich by cleaning the planet,’ Della said.

Malenfant grinned, and Emma knew he had worked his way onto home ground. ‘Representative, that’s the philosophy of my corporation. We live in a closed economy. We’ve girdled the Earth, and we have to be aware that we’re going to have to live with whatever we produce, useful goods or waste … But, if you can spot the flows of goods and materials and economic value, it’s still possible to get rich.’

Cornelius Taine had walked away from the others. Now he was clapping, slowly and softly. Gradually he caught the attention of Malenfant and Della.

‘Captain Future. I forgot you were here,’ Malenfant said sourly.

‘Oh, I’m still here. And I have to admire the way you’re handling this. The plausibility. I believe you’re even sincere, on the level of this cover-up.’

Maura Della said, ‘Cover-up? What are you talking about?’

‘Key Largo,’ said Cornelius. ‘That’s what this is really all about. Isn’t it, Malenfant?’

Malenfant glowered at him, calculating.

Here we go, Emma thought bleakly. Not for the first time in her life with Malenfant she had absolutely no idea what was going to come next, as if she was poised over a roller-coaster drop.

Cornelius said, ‘I watched your Delaware speech the other night.’

Malenfant looked even more uncomfortable. ‘Expanding across the Galaxy, all of that? I’ve given that talk a dozen times.’

‘I know,’ said Cornelius. ‘And it’s admirable. As far as it goes.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That you haven’t thought it through. You say you’re planning a way for mankind to live forever. Getting off the Earth is the first step, et cetera. Fine. But what then? What is forever? Do you want eternity? If not, what will you settle for? A billion years, a trillion?’ He waved a hand at the sun-drenched sky. ‘The universe won’t always be as hospitable as this warm bath of energy and light. Far downstream –’

‘Downstream?’

‘I mean, in the far future – the stars will die. It is going to be cold and dark, a universe of shadows. Do you hope that humans, or human descendants, will survive even then? … You haven’t thought about this, have you? And yet it’s the logical consequence of everything you’re striving for.

‘And there is more,’ Cornelius said. ‘Perhaps you are right that we are alone in this universe, the first minds of all. Since the universe is believed to have evolved from others, we may be the first minds to have emerged in a whole string of cosmoses. That is an astounding thought. And if it is true – what is our purpose? That, you see, is perhaps the most fundamental question facing mankind, and ought to shape everything you do, Malenfant. Yet I see no sign in any of your public statements that you have given any consideration to all this …’

The meaning of life? Was this guy for real? But Emma shivered, as if in this hot desert light the wind of a billion years was sweeping over her.

‘We understand, you see,’ said Cornelius.

‘Understand what?’

‘That you are trying to initiate a clandestine return to space here.’

Malenfant barked, ‘Bull hockey.’

Emma and Maura Della spoke together,

‘Malenfant, he alleged this earlier –’

‘If this is true –’

‘Oh, it’s true,’ Cornelius said. ‘Come clean, Malenfant. The truth is he wants to do more than fire off rockets to burn waste. He wants to build a rocket ship – in fact a fleet of rocket ships – and launch them from here, the heart of the desert, and send them all the way to the asteroids.’

Malenfant said nothing.

Della was visibly angry. ‘This is not what I came here for.’

Cornelius said, ‘Malenfant, we back you. A mission to a NEO, a near-Earth object, makes obvious economic and technical sense: the first step in any expansion off-planet, in the short to medium term. And in the long term, it could make the difference.’

Della said, ‘What difference?’

‘The difference,’ Cornelius said easily, ‘between the survival of the human species, and its extinction.’

‘So is that what you came to tell me, you swivel-eyed freak?’ snapped Malenfant. ‘That I get to save the world?’

‘Actually we think it’s possible,’ said Cornelius evenly.

Della frowned, eyebrows arched sceptically. ‘Really. So tell us how the world will end.’

‘We don’t know how. We think we know when, however. Two hundred years from now.’

The number – its blunt precision – startled them to silence.

Malenfant looked from one to the other – the suspicious ex-wife, the frowning Congressman, the mysterious prophet – and Emma saw he was, rarely for him, hemmed in.

Malenfant drove them back to the Portakabin. They travelled in silence, sunk in their respective moods, wary of each other. Only Cornelius, self-absorbed, seemed in any way content.

At the cabin Malenfant served them drinks, beer and soda and water, and they stood in the Californian desert.

Voices drifted over the baked ground, amplified and distorted, as a slow countdown proceeded.

Malenfant kept checking his watch. It was a fat, clunky Rolex. No implants or active tattoos for Reid Malenfant, no sir. For a man with his eye on the future, Emma thought, he often seemed wedded to the past.

The firing started.

Emma saw a spark of light, an almost invisible flame at the base of the stand, billowing white smoke. And then the noise came, a nonlinear crackle tearing at the air. The ground shook, as if she was witnessing some massive natural phenomenon, a waterfall or an earthquake, perhaps. But this was nothing natural.

Malenfant had once taken her to see a Shuttle launch. She’d had tears in her eyes then, from sheer exhilaration at the man-made power of the thing. And there were tears now, she found to her reluctant surprise, even at the sight of this pathetic, cut-down half-ship, trapped in its steel cage and bolted to the Earth.

She said, ‘Cornelius is right. Isn’t he, Malenfant? You’ve been lying to me for months. Years, maybe.’

Malenfant touched her arm. ‘It’s a long story.’

‘I know. I’ve lived it. Damn you,’ she whispered. ‘There’s a lot of unfinished business here, Malenfant.’

‘We’ll handle it,’ Malenfant said. ‘We can handle this guy Cornelius and his band of airheads. We can handle anybody. This is just the beginning.’

Cornelius Taine watched, eyes opaque.

Bill Tybee:

My name is Bill Tybee.

… Is this thing working? Oh, shit. Start again.

Hi. My name is Bill Tybee, and this is my diary.

Well, kind of. It’s really a letter for you, June. It’s a shame they won’t let us talk directly, but I hope this makes up for your not being home for your birthday, a little ways anyhow. You know Tom and little Billie are missing you. I’ll send you another at Christmas if you aren’t here, and I’ll keep a copy at home so we can all watch it together.

Come see the house.

Here’s the living room. Sorry, I folded up the cam. There. Can you see now? You notice I got the video wall replaced, finally. Although I hate to think what the down payments are going to do to our bank balance. Maybe we could have got by with the old one, just the hundred channels, what do you think? Oh, I got the solar-cell roof replaced too. That storm was a bitch.

Here’s Billie’s bedroom. I’m whispering because she’s asleep. She loves the hologram mobile you sent her. Everybody says how smart she is. Same as her brother. I mean it. Even the doctors agree about Billie; they’re both off the, what did they say, the percentile charts, way off. You managed to give birth to two geniuses here, June. I know they don’t get it from their father!

I’ll kiss her for you. There you go, sweet pea. One from me too.

Here we are in the bathroom. Now, June, I know it’s not much as part of the guided tour. But I just want to show you this stuff because you’re not to worry about it. Here’s my med-alert ribbon, this cute silver thing. See? I have to wear it every time I leave the house, and I ought to wear it indoors too. And here are the pills I have to take every day, in this bubble packet. The specialist says they’re not just drugs but also little miniature machines, tumour-busters that go prowling around my bloodstream looking for the defective cells before breaking themselves up and flushing them out of, well, I won’t show you out of where. Here I am taking my pill for today. See? Gone. Nothing to worry about.

The Big C just ain’t what it used to be. Something you have to live with, to manage, like diabetes, right?

Come on. Let’s go see if Tom will let us into his room. He loves those star pictures you sent him. He’s been pinning them up on his wall …

Emma Stoney:

Emma was still furious when she drove into work, the morning after her trip to the plant.

Even this early on an August morning, the Vegas streets were thronged. People in gaudy artificial fabrics strolled past the giant casinos: the venerable Caesar’s Palace and Luxor and Sands, the new TwenCen Park with its cartoon reconstructions of 30s gangster-land Chicago and 60s Space Age Florida and 80s yuppie-era Wall Street. The endless lights and laser displays made a storm of colour and motion that was dazzling even against the morning sunlight, like glimpses into another, brighter universe. But the landscape of casinos and malls didn’t stay static; there were a number of vacant or redeveloping lots, like missing teeth in a smiling jaw.

And whatever the façade, the scene within was always the same: square miles of lush, ugly carpet, rows of gaming machines fed by joyless punters, blackjack tables kept open twenty-four hours a day by the virtual dealers.

Still, the people seemed to be changing, slowly. Not so fat, for one thing; no doubt the fatbuster pills were to thank for that. And she was sure there were fewer children, fewer young families than there used to be. Demography in action: the greying of America, the concentration of buying power in the hands of the elderly.

Not that it was so easy to tell how old people were any more. There were fewer visible signs of age: faces were smoothed to seamlessness by routine cosmetic surgery, hair was restored to the vigour and colour of a five-year-old’s.

Emma herself was approaching forty now, ten years or so younger than Malenfant. Strands of her hair were already white and broken. She wore them with a defiant pride.

Malenfant had moved his corporation here, out of New York, five years ago. A good place for business, he said. God bless Nevada. Distract the marks with gambling toys and virtual titties while you pick their pockets … But Emma hated Vegas’s tacky joylessness. It had taken a lot of soul-searching for her to follow Malenfant.

Especially after the divorce.

He’d said, So we aren’t married any more. That doesn’t mean I have to fire you, does it? Of course she had given in, come with him. Why, though?

He wasn’t her responsibility, as the e-therapists continually emphasized. He wasn’t even open with her. This latest business with the Shuttle engines – if true – was yet another piece of evidence for that. And he had, after all, broken up their marriage and pushed her away.

Yet, in his own complex, confused way, he still cared about her. She knew that. And so she had a motive for working with him. Maybe if she was still in his life, he might give more thought to his grandiose plans than otherwise.

Maybe he would keep from strip-mining the planet, in order to spare her feelings. Or maybe not.

Her e-therapists warned that this was a wound that would never close, as long as she stayed with Malenfant, worked with him. But then, maybe it was a wound that wasn’t meant to close. Not yet, anyhow. Not when she still didn’t even understand why.

When Emma walked into Malenfant’s office, she found him sitting with his feet on his desk, crushed beer cans strewn over the surface. He was talking to a man she didn’t know: an upright military type of about seventy, dressed in a sports shirt and slacks straight out of Cheers circa 1987, with a bare frosting of white hair on a scalp burned nutmeg brown. The stranger got up on Emma’s entrance, but she ignored him.

She faced Malenfant. ‘Company business.’

Malenfant sighed. ‘It’s all company business. Emma, meet George Hench. An old buddy of mine from Air & Space Force days –’

George nodded. ‘When it used to be just plain Air Force,’ he growled.

‘Malenfant, why is he here?’

‘To take us into space,’ said Reid Malenfant. He smiled, a smile she’d seen too often before. Look what I did. Isn’t it neat?

‘So it’s true. You’re just incredible, Malenfant. Does the word accountability mean anything to you? This isn’t a cookie jar you’re raiding. This is a business. And we can’t win with this. A lot of people have looked at commercial space ventures. The existing launcher capacity is going to be sufficient to cover the demand for the next several years. There is no market.’

Malenfant nodded. ‘You’re talking about LEO stuff. Communications, Earth resources, meteorology, navigation –’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you’re right, although demand patterns have a way of changing. You can’t sell cruises until you build a cruise liner. But I’m not talking about low Earth orbit. We will build a heavy-lift booster, a direct ascent single-throw out of Earth orbit …’

And now she knew that everything Cornelius Taine had told her had been true. ‘You really are talking about going to the asteroids, aren’t you? Why, for God’s sake?’

George Hench said, ‘Because asteroids are flying mountains of stainless steel and precious metals, such as gold and platinum. Or they are balls of carbon and water and complex organics. A single metallic-type near-Earth object would be worth, conservatively, trillions in today’s market. It would be so valuable, in fact, that it would change the market itself. And if you reach a C-type, a carbonaceous chondrite, full of water and organic compounds, you can do what the hell you like.’

‘Such as?’

Malenfant grinned. ‘You can throw bags of water and food and plastics back to Earth orbit, where they would be worth billions in saved launch costs. Or you could let a hundred thousand people go live in the rock. Or you can refuel, and go anywhere. Bootstrapping, like it says on the letterhead. The truth is I don’t know what we’re going to find. But I know that everything will be different. It will be like Cecil Rhodes discovering diamonds in southern Africa.’

‘He didn’t discover the mine,’ she said. ‘He just made the most money.’

‘I could live with that.’

Hench said earnestly, ‘The key to making money out of space is getting the costs of reaching Earth orbit down by a couple of magnitudes. If you fly on Shuttle, you’re looking at thirty-five thousand bucks per pound to orbit –’

‘And,’ said Malenfant, ‘because of NASA’s safety controls and qual standards it takes years and millions of dollars to prepare your payload for flight. The other launch systems available are cheaper but still too expensive, unreliable and booked up anyhow. We can’t hire, Emma, and we can’t buy. That’s why we have to build our own.’

Emma shook her head. ‘But it’s impossible. People have been trying to come up with cheap launchers for years.’

‘Yes,’ said Hench. ‘And every time they are killed by the Gun Club.’

She eyed him. ‘The “Gun Club”?’

‘NASA,’ Hench growled. ‘Bureaucrat lifers with turf to defend. And the space lobby in the USASF, which anyhow has always been overruled by the fighter pilots who run that service –’

She turned back to Malenfant. ‘And the permissions we’ll need? The legal obstacles, the safety rules? Have you thought about any of that stuff? Malenfant, this is such a leap in the dark. Not even NASA are launching space ships right now.’

Hench cackled. ‘But that’s the beauty of it. The excitement. Ms Stoney, we are historically a capitalistic frontier people. We’ve known space is the new frontier since 1950. Now’s the time to wriggle out from under the Gun Club federal guys and do it the way we always should have.’

Malenfant shrugged. ‘Emma, I’ve got the business plans lined up if you want to see them, and potential investors coming out of my ass – bankers, investment brokers, merchant bankers, financiers, venture capitalists from Citibank, Prudential Bache, Morgan Trust –’

‘All of which you’ve kept from me. For God’s sake, Malenfant. Forget your drinking buddies and after-dinner audiences. How the hell do we persuade real investors to risk real money?’

Hench said, ‘By building incrementally. By cutting tin fast. By building a little, flying a little, getting off the ground as fast as we can. That’s how we built the Thor …’ In the 1950s, with the Atlas and Titan intercontinental ballistic missiles already under development, the US defined a need for a smaller, simpler weapon for intermediate range missions, to be based in Britain and Turkey. The Thor, built from Atlas parts, would be the answer. ‘… You’d call it a Skunk Works operation today,’ Hench said. ‘We had that damn bird on the pad a year after the contract was signed. And we did it within budget, too. Not only that, McDonnell took it over and upgraded it to the Delta, and that baby is still flying and making money today. And that’s why I’m confident I’m going to be able to deliver …’

Hench’s eyes were a washed-out, watery brown, and flecked by damaged blood vessels. Malenfant was listening, rapt, to this old man’s reminiscences.

Emma realized that, of course, his decision was already made, the new program under this man implemented and running, a done deal; Malenfant would implicitly trust Hench, his personal Wernher von Braun, to deliver as he promised, and he would take a personal interest again only when there was hardware ready to fly on some launch pad.

But even if the technology worked, even if the costs worked out as Malenfant seemed to believe, there was the Gun Club and all the other opposing forces which had killed earlier turf-threatening new initiatives – forces which had pushed Malenfant himself into this covert scheme, obviously concocted over years, in absolute secrecy even from her.

But now it’s out in the open, what, she thought uneasily, is to stop the bad guys from killing us too? And if they do, where will that leave Malenfant? Where, in fact, will it leave me?

For she knew, of course, that she was already involved: that she would follow Malenfant wherever his latest dream took him, for better or worse. What a schmuck I am, she thought. She resolved to make more time for her e-therapists.

Hench talked on, urgently, meaninglessly, about rockets and engineering projects. For some reason she thought of Cornelius Taine, his cold eyes, his bleak, crazy warnings of the future.

‘… Malenfant.’

‘Yeah?’

‘What are you doing at Key Largo?’

Spaiz Kadette:

> Copy this and pass it on.

> The news is just incredible. After all that coverage over the weekend there can’t be a soul on the planet who isn’t aware of Reid Malenfant and what he’s trying to do out in the Mojave.

> Naturally the usual nay-sayers are hovering, moaning that Colonel Malenfant is acting outside the law, or is screwing up the environment, or is in some other way irresponsible.

> And there is the usual stench of hypocrisy and decay from the bloated corpse that is NASA, our space agency, the agency that should have done all this for us decades ago anyhow.

> Here’s the pitch.

> Following a hastily-convened gathering in Hollywood, CA, a new society tentatively called the Flying Mountain Society has been formed. If you want to join, it will cost 500 dollars US or equivalent.

> For that investment you won’t get any information or brochures or member services. We will not print glossy magazines or feed a giant staff. In fact we will have no full-time employees. As we are not another NASA booster club you won’t get glossy pictures of spacecraft that will never be built. All you will get is a guarantee that we won’t waste your money.

> FMS isn’t the only space organization, but it does exist solely to get us into space.

> Here’s the catch. Don’t join unless you are a hardworking person. Don’t join unless you support Colonel Malenfant’s goal of developing a space industry in our lifetimes, and are prepared to work for it.

> In fact we’d prefer you didn’t join at all. We’d prefer you started up your own local chapter, affiliated to the Society, which we hope will evolve into a global umbrella organization of pressure groups and activists.

> You can start with a bake sale. You can start by bombarding the schools with images of asteroids. You can start by hiking out to the Mojave, rolling up your sleeves and helping Colonel Malenfant any way he can use you.

> There is incidentally no truth in the rumours propagated in some sections of the press that the Flying Mountain Society is in any way affiliated with or funded by Bootstrap Inc. or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates as, quote, ‘a propaganda exercise’. This is in fact counterfactual malice spread by Colonel Malenfant’s turf-warrior enemies.

> If you want to get involved, reply to this mail. Better yet just get to work …

Maura Della:

Open journal. September 3 2010.

It was soon after my visit to Malenfant’s experimental site in the Mojave that the news broke about Bootstrap’s true purpose – that is, to assemble a private heavy-lift vehicle with Space Shuttle technology, to send some kind of mining mission to an asteroid.

I don’t know if Cornelius Taine had anything to do with that. Presumably yes, if it served his shadowy organization’s purposes. But it wasn’t impossible the leak had come from elsewhere; Bootstrap is surely as porous as any large organization.

Anyhow, I find myself being sucked into the project. Somehow, through the leak and my covert involvement – the fact that I didn’t blow the whistle immediately I got back from the Mojave – I’m becoming seduced into considering not just rocket engine firings, not just a private launch system, but the NEO mission itself.

This seems to be Malenfant’s modus operandi: to build up an unstoppable momentum, to launch first and answer questions later.

The usual forces of darkness are already gathering in Congress to oppose this. It’s going to be a struggle.

But I already know I’m not going to walk away from Malenfant, despite his outlandish, covert scheming.

You see, I happen to think Reid Malenfant is right. For the cost of one more space launch – which is undisputed, financial and environmental – it might be possible to reach a near-Earth object, actually to start exploiting one of those sun-orbiting gold mines, and so, just as Malenfant’s corporate title suggests, bootstrap a new human expansion into space.

I think we’ve all become desensitized to the state of our world.

We live in a closed economy, an economy of limits. Grain yields globally have been falling since 1984, fishing yields since 1990. And yet the human population continues to grow. This is the stark reality of the years to come.

It seems to me our best hope for getting through the next century or so is to reach some kind of steady state: recycle as much as possible, try to minimize the impact of industry on the planet, try to stabilize the population numbers. For the last five to ten years I have, in my small way, been working towards exactly that goal, that new order. I don’t see that any responsible politician has a choice.

I must say I entered politics with rather higher hopes of the future than I enjoy now.

But even the steady state, our best-hope future, may not be achievable without space.

Without power and materials from space we are doomed to shuffle a known – in fact diminishing – stockpile of resources around the planet. Some players get rich, others get poor. But it’s not even a zero sum game; in the long term we’re all losers.

It isn’t just a question of economics. It’s what this does to our spirit.

We are frightened of the future. We exclude strangers, try to hold on to what we have, rather than risk the search for something better. We spend more energy seeking someone to blame for our present woes than building for a better future. We’ve become a planet full of old people – old in spirit, anyhow. Speaking as a sexagenarian I know what I’m talking about.

The point is that if we could open up the limits to growth, then we can all be winners. It’s as simple as that.

That is why I’m prepared to back Malenfant. Not, you’ll note, because I like his methods. But the ends, I suspect, in this case justify the means.

However all this is going to take some extremely delicate opinion management. Especially over what Malenfant is doing at Key Largo …

Sheena 5:

… And, in the warm, shallow waters of the continental shelf off Key Largo:

The night was over. The sun, a fat ball of light, was already glimmering above the water surface, which rippled with flat-light. Sheena 5 had spent the night alone, foraging for food among the sea bed grasses. She had eaten well, of small fish, prawns, larvae; she had been particularly successful using her arms to flush out hiding shrimp from the sand.

But now, in the brightness of day, the squid emerged from the grasses and corals, and rose in the water. The shoals formed in small groups and clusters, eventually combining into a community a hundred strong that soared in arcs and rows through the water. Their jets made the rich water sing as they chattered to each other, simple sentences picked out by complex skin patterns, body posture, texture:

Court me. Court me. See my weapons! I am strong and fierce. Stay away! Stay away! She is mine! …

It was the ancient cephalopod language, Sheena knew, a language of light and shadow and posture, the ‘words’ shivering one into the other, words of sex and danger and food. It was a language as old as the squid – millions of years old, much older than humans – and it was rich and beautiful, and she shoaled and chattered with joy.

… But there was a shadow on the water. And Sheena’s deep gravity sense told her of an approaching infrasonic rumble, quite characteristic: it was a barracuda, a vicious predator of the squid. This one was young and small, but no less dangerous for that.

The sentinels, scattered around the fringes of the shoal, immediately adopted concealment or bluff postures. Their simple words blared lies at the approaching predator, and warned the rest of the shoal.

Black bands on the mantle, arms limp, swimming rapidly backwards: Look at me. I am a parrotfish. I am no squid.

Clear body, dark arms in a downward V: Look at us. We are sea grass, sargassum, drifting in the current. We are no squid.

A pseudomorph, a squid-shaped blob of ink, hastily emitted and bound together by mucus: Look at us. We are squid. We are all squid.

Turn to predator, spread arms, white spots and false eyes to increase apparent size: Look at me. I am strong and fierce. Flee!

The dark shape lingered close, just as a true barracuda would, before diving into the shoal, seeking to break it up.

Sheena knew that there would be no true predators here, in this garden-like reserve. Sheena recognized the glimmer of steel, the camera lenses pockmarking the too-smooth hide of the beast, the regular churn of the propellers in back. She understood that the shadow could only be a watching Bootstrap machine.

But she sensed a dull recognition of this fact in the glittering animal minds of her cousins, all around her; they were smart too, smart enough to know they were safe here. Besides, so sophisticated were their defences that the squid were rarely troubled by predators. So there was an element of play in the darting concealment and watchfulness of the shoal.

And then came the hunt.

The slim cylinder cruised through the posturing, half-concealed squid. Recognition pulsed through the shoal. Some of them spread their arms, covered their mantles with patterns of bars and streaks. Look at me. I have seen you. I will flee. It is futile to chase me.

Now one of the squid shoal, a strong male, broke free and jetted in front of the barracuda. A pattern began to move over his skin in steady waves, a patchwork of light and dark brown that radiated from his streamlined body to the tip of his tentacles. It was the pattern Dan called the passing cloud. Stop and watch me.

The barracuda cruised to a stop.

The male spread his eight arms, raised his two long tentacles, and his green binocular eyes fixed on the barracuda. Confusing patterns of light and shade pulsed across his hide. Look at me. I am large and fierce. I can kill you.

The metal barracuda hung in the water, apparently mesmerized by the pattern, just as a predator should have been if it had been real.

Slowly, cautiously, the male drifted towards the barracuda, coming to within a mantle length, gaze fixed on the fish.

At the last moment the barracuda turned, sluggishly, and started to slide away through the water.

But it was too late for that.

The male lunged. His two long tentacles whipped out – too fast even for Sheena to see – and their club-like pads of suckers pounded against the barracuda hide, sticking there.

The barracuda surged forward. It was unable to escape. The male pulled himself towards the barracuda and wrapped his eight strong arms around its body, his body pattern changing to an exultant uniform darkening, careless now of detection.

But when the male tried to jet backwards, hauling at the prey, the barracuda was too massive and strong.

The male broke the stand-off by rocketing forward until his body slammed into the barracuda’s metal hide – he seemed shocked by the hardness of the ‘flesh’ – and he wrapped his two long, powerful tentacles around the slim grey body.

Then he opened his mouth and stabbed at the hull with his beak. The hull broke through easily, Sheena saw; evidently it was designed for this. The male injected poison to stun his victim, and then dug deeper into the hide to extract the warm meat beneath. And meat there was, what looked like fish fragments to Sheena, booty planted there by Dan.

The squid descended, chattering their ancient songs, diving through the cloud of rich, cold meat, lashing their tentacles around the stricken prey. Sheena joined in, her hide flashing in triumph, cool water surging through her mantle, relishing the primordial power of this kill despite its artifice.

… That was when it happened.

Maura Della:

‘Ms Della, welcome to Oceanlab,’ Dan Ystebo said.

As she clambered stiffly down through the airlock into the habitat, the smell of air freshener overwhelmed Maura. The two men here, biologist Dan Ystebo and a professional diver, watched her sheepishly.

She sniffed. ‘Woodland fragrance. Correct?’

The diver laughed. He was a burly fifty-year-old, but the dense air mixture here, hydreliox, turned his voice into a Donald Duck squeak. ‘Better than the alternative, Ms Della.’

Maura found a seat between the two men before a bank of controls. The seat was just a canvas frame, much repaired with duct tape. The working area of this hab was a small, cramped sphere, its walls encrusted with equipment. It featured two small, tough-looking windows, and its switches and dials were shiny and worn with use. The lights were dim, the instruments and screens glowing. A sonar beacon pinged softly, like a pulse.

The sense of confinement, the feel of the weight of water above her head, was overwhelming.

Dan Ystebo was fat, breathy, intense, thirtyish, with Coke-bottle glasses and a mop of unlikely red hair, a typical geek scientist type. Igor to Malenfant’s Doctor Frankenstein, she thought. His face was underlit by the orange glow of his instrument panel. ‘So,’ he said awkwardly. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think it feels like one of those old Soviet-era space stations. The Mir, maybe.’

‘That’s not so far off,’ Dan said, evidently nervous, talking too fast. ‘This is an old Navy installation. Built in the 1960s, nearly fifty years ago. It used to be in deep water out by Puerto Rico, but when a hab diver got himself killed the Navy abandoned it and towed it here, to Key Largo.’

‘Another Cold War relic,’ she said. ‘Just like NASA.’

Dan smiled. ‘Swords into ploughshares, ma’am.’

She leaned forward, peering into the windows. Sunlight shafted through dusty grey water, but she saw no signs of life, not a fish or frond of seaweed. ‘So where is she?’

Dan pointed to a monitor, a modern softscreen pasted over a scuffed hull section. It showed a school of squid, jetting through the water in complex patterns. The image was evidently enhanced; the water had been turned sky blue. ‘We don’t rely on naked eye so much,’ Dan said.

‘Which one is Sheena 5?’

Dan touched the softscreen image, picking out one of the squid, and the virtual camera zoomed in.

The streamlined, torpedo-shaped body was a rich burnt-orange, mottled black. Wing-like fins rippled elegantly alongside the body.

‘Sepioteuthis sepioidea,’ Dan said. ‘The Caribbean reef squid. About as long as your arm. See her countershading? The light is downwelling, coming from above; she has shaded her mantle – brighter below – to eliminate the effect of shadow. Making herself disappear … Squid, all cephalopods in fact, belong to the phylum Mollusca.’

‘Molluscs? I thought molluscs had feet.’

‘They do.’ Dan pointed. ‘But in the squid the foot has evolved into the funnel, here, leading into the mantle, and the arms and tentacles here. The mantle cavity contains the viscera – the circulatory, excretory, digestive, reproductive systems. But the gills also lie in there; the squid “breathes” by extracting oxygen from the air that passes over the gills. And Sheena can use the water passing through the mantle cavity for jet propulsion; she has big ring muscles which –’

‘How do you know that’s her?’

Dan pointed again. ‘See the swelling between the eyes, around the oesophagus?’

‘That’s her enhanced brain?’

‘A squid’s neural layout isn’t like ours. Sheena has two nerve cords running like rail tracks the length of her body, studded with pairs of ganglia. The forward ganglia pair is expanded into a mass of lobes. We gen-enged Sheena and her grandmothers to –’

‘To make a smart squid.’

‘Ms Della, squid are smart anyway. They are molluscs, invertebrates, but they are functionally equivalent to fish. In fact they seem to have evolved – a long time ago, during the Jurassic – in competition with the fish. They have senses based on light, scent, taste, touch, sound – including infrasound – gravity, acceleration, perhaps even an electric sense. See the patterns on Sheena’s hide?’

‘Yes.’

‘They’re made by chromatophores, sacs of pigment granules surrounded by muscles. The chromatophores are under conscious control; Sheena can open or close them as she chooses. The pigments are black, orange and yellow. The underlying colours, blues and violets, are created by passive cells we call reflecting … Ms Della, Sheena can control her skin patterns consciously. She can make bands, bars, circles, annuli, dots. She can even animate the display. The mantle skin is like a reverse retina, where neural signals are converted to patches of shade, rather than the other way around.’

‘And these patterns are signals?’

‘Not just the skin patterns. A given signal seems to be made up of a number of components: the patterns, skin texture – rough or smooth, posture – the attitude of the limbs, head, body, fins – and locomotor components – whether Sheena is resting, jetting, hovering, grabbing, ink-jetting. There may be electric or sonic components too; we can’t be sure.’

The diver growled, ‘Ms Della, we’ve barely scratched the surface with these animals. Not to mention their deep water cousins. Until the last few decades all we did was lower nets and see what we could catch. We used to say it was like trying to understand the animals of the land by working with a butterfly net from a balloon in the clouds.’

Maura said, ‘And what do they use this marvellous signalling for?’

Dan sighed. ‘Again we aren’t sure. They don’t hunt cooperatively. They forage alone by night, and shoal by day. The shoaling seems to be to provide protection while they rest. The squid don’t hide on the bottom like octopuses; they shoal over seagrass beds where there are few predators. They have elaborate courtship rituals. And the young seem to learn from the old. They post sentinels. Very effectively too; though they may have six or seven predator encounters per hour – with yellow jacks and mutton snappers, barracuda and houndfish, coming at them from anywhere – the squid kill rate is very low.

‘But a squid shoal is not a community like ours. They don’t play or groom. There are no leaders among them. The squid don’t show much loyalty to each other; they don’t care for their young, and individuals move between shoals every few days.

‘And they live only a couple of years, mating only once or twice. The squid live fast and die young; it’s not clear to us why such short-lived animals need such complex behaviour, communication systems and breeding rituals … Yet they have them. Ms Della, these are not like the animals you may be familiar with. Perhaps they are more like birds.’

‘And you claim that these communication systems are actually a language.’

Dan scratched his beard. ‘We’ve been able to isolate a number of primal linguistic components which combine in a primitive grammar. Even in unenhanced squid. But the language seems to be closed. It’s about nothing but food, sex and danger, as far as we can see. It’s like the dance of the bee.’

‘Unlike human languages.’

‘Yes. What we have done is open up the language of the squid. We built on the basic patterns and grammar the squid already employ. The number of signals Sheena can produce is not unlimited, of course, but even unenhanced squid have a very wide “vocabulary” taking into account the range of intensity, duration and so forth they can employ. We think they express, for example, moods and intentions with these factors. And some of this stuff is extremely ancient. Some of the simpler signals – the deimatic displays designed to drive off predators, for example – can be observed among the octopuses. And the squid diverged from them back in the early Mesozoic, some two hundred million years ago. Anyhow, building on this, we believe Sheena – or at any rate her descendants – should be able to express an infinite number of messages. Just as you or I can, Ms Della. Squid are clever molluscs. Giving them language was easy.’

‘How do you train them?’

‘With positive reinforcement. Mostly.’

‘Mostly?’

He sighed. ‘I know what you’re asking. Yes, cephalopods can feel pain. They have free nerve endings in the skin. We use low-voltage electric currents to deliver mild shocks during discrimination training. They react as if – well, as you would if I touched you with a stinging nettle. It’s no big deal. Ms Della, I hope you aren’t going to get hung up on this. I cherish Sheena – above and beyond her mission. I wouldn’t damage her. I have no interest in hurting her.’

Studying him, she realized she believed him. But she sensed a certain lack in him, a lack of a moral centre. Perhaps that was a prerequisite in any sentient creature who would inflict pain on another.

Dan was still talking. ‘… Designing the Sheena series of enhancements, we were able to prove that the areas of the brain responsible for learning are the vertical and superior frontal lobes that lie above the oesophagus.’

‘How did you prove that?’

Dan blinked. ‘By cutting away parts of squid brains.’

Maura sighed. Memo, she thought. Do not let Igor here repeat this Nazi doctor stuff in front of the cameras.

She felt uneasy on a deeper level, too. Here was Dan Ystebo hijacking the squid’s evidently remarkable communications senses for his own purposes: for capturing banal commands transmitted by humans. But Dan had admitted he didn’t know what all this rich speech was really for. What if we are damaging Sheena, Maura thought, by excluding her from the songs of her shoals?

Does a squid have a soul?

They studied Sheena. Her head was crowned by a beak surrounded by flipper-like arms, and two forward-looking eyes, blue-green rimmed with orange, peered briefly into the camera.

Alien eyes. Intelligent.

How did it feel, to be Sheena?

And could Sheena possibly understand that humans – Reid Malenfant and his associates, in fact – were planning to have her fly a rocket ship to an asteroid?

The squid school on the softscreen seemed to be hunting now. They were moving in formation around an unmanned camera buoy. The images were spectacular, Jacques Cousteau stuff.

‘They swim awful fast,’ she said.

‘They’re not swimming,’ Dan said patiently. ‘When they swim, they use their fins. Right now they are squirting water out of vents. Jet propulsion.’

‘You understand why I’m here. Malenfant is asking me to go into bat for you on the Hill Monday. I have to put my reputation on the line, to enable this project.’

‘I know that.’

‘Tell me this, Dr Ystebo. You’re sure, absolutely sure, this is going to work?’

‘Absolutely.’ He spoke with a calm conviction. ‘Ms Della, you have to see the power of Malenfant’s conception. I’m convinced Sheena will be able to function in space and at the NEO. She is smart, obviously adapted to gravity-free conditions – there’ll be no calcium depletion or body fluid redistribution or any of that crap for her – almost as if she has been evolved for the conditions of space travel, as we self-evidently haven’t. And she can manipulate her environment. We have a variety of waldo-driven instruments which will enable her to carry out her functions on the NEO.’

‘I’m told the squid are social creatures. And they’re very mobile, obviously. Whereas Sheena will be alone, and the can we’re going to cram her into –’

‘She’ll have a lot of facilities, Ms Della. Including comms, of course. We’ll do everything we can to keep her functioning.’

Functioning. ‘Why not an octopus? Squid are social creatures – in fact, isn’t it true that their consciousness arises from their social structures? Whereas octopuses, I’m told, are solitary, sedentary creatures anyhow who could stand the isolation and confinement.’

‘But not so smart,’ Dan said. ‘They work alone. They don’t need to communicate. And they rely on smell, not sight, to hunt. Thanks to those squid eyes – forward-placed for binocular vision – Sheena will be able to navigate through space for us. It had to be a squid, Ms Della. If she’s a little uncomfortable en route, that’s a price we’ll have to pay.’

‘And what about the return trip? The stresses of re-entry, rehabilitation …’

‘In hand,’ Dan said vaguely. He blinked like an owl.

In hand. Sure. You’re not the one going to the asteroid, you charmless nerd.

Maura found herself convinced. Malenfant knows what he’s doing, right down the line. I have to force the approvals through, on Monday. Sheena – smart, flexible and a lot cheaper than an equivalent robot, even when you took into account the launch costs for her life support environment – was the item that had closed Reid Malenfant’s interplanetary design.

There were some things working in her favour. Behind the scenes Malenfant had already begun to assemble promises of the technical support he was going to need. His old buddies at NASA had started to find ways to free up deep space communications, and provide support for detailed mission design and other support facilities. And it would help, she thought, that this wouldn’t be solely a NASA-related project; cooperation from Woods Hole in Massachusetts and the research institute at Monterey Bay Aquarium in California diluted the hostility NASA always attracted on the Hill.

… But, she thought, if I succeed I will be forever associated with this. And if the news about the brave little squid turns sour enough I may not survive myself.

Dan said, ‘I’ve been working with Sheena for months now. I know her. She knows me. And I know she’s committed to the mission.’

‘You think she understands the risks?’

Dan looked uncomfortable. ‘We’re counselling her. And we’re planning to have Sheena make some kind of statement of her own. Something we can broadcast, of course with a translation. If something does go wrong we hope the public will accept it as a justified sacrifice.’

Maura grunted, unconvinced. ‘Tell me this,’ she said. ‘If you were her – would you go?’

‘Hell, no,’ he said. ‘But I’m not her. Ms Della, every moment of her life, from the moment she was hatched, Sheena has been oriented to the goal. It’s what she lives for. The mission.’

Sombrely Maura watched the squid, Sheena, as she flipped and jetted in formation with her fellows.

I need to pee, she realized.

She turned to Dan. ‘How do I, uh …’

The old diver type handed her a steel jar with a yellow label that had her name on it. ‘Your Personal Micturition Vessel. Welcome to the space program, Ms Della.’

Perhaps reacting to some out-of-shot predator threat, the squid shoal collapsed to a tight school and jetted away with startling speed, their motion three-dimensional and complex, rushing out of the virtual camera’s field of view.

Sheena 5:

The courting began.

The squid swam around each other, subtly adopting new positions in time and space: each female surrounded by two, three, four males. Sheena enjoyed the dance, the ancient, rich choreography – even though she knew courting was not for her: it never could be, after she had been selected by Bootstrap.

Dan had explained it all.

… But now, regardless of Dan’s strictures, regardless of the clamouring mind she carried, he came for her: the killer male, one tentacle torn on some loose fragment of metal, bearing his wound proudly.

She should swim away. But here he was next to her, swimming back and forth with her. She fled, a short distance, but he pursued her, swimming with her, his every movement matching hers.

She knew this was wrong. And yet it was irresistible.

She felt a skin pattern flush over her body, a pied mottling of black and clear, speckled with white spots. It was a simple, ancient message. Court me.

He swam closer.

But the other males, still orbiting her, began to encroach, their eyes hard and intent. The hunter, her male, swam up to meet the most bold, his arms flaring, head dark, bright bands on his mantle. Get away. She is mine! The male refused to back off, his body pattern flaring to match the hunter’s. But the hunter raised his body until his fins bumped the intruder’s, who backed away.

Now he came back to her. She could see his far side was a bright uniform silver, a message to the other males: Keep away, now. Keep away. She is mine! But the side closest to her was a soothing uniform grey-black, a smooth texture into which she longed to immerse herself, to shut off the clattering analysis of the brain the humans had given her. As he rolled the colours tracked around his body, and she could see the tiny muscles working the pigment sacs on his hide.

Now he faced her, open arms starfished around his mouth. His eyes were on her: green and unblinking, avid, mindless, without calculation. Utterly irresistible. And already he was holding out his hectocotylus towards her, the modified arm bearing the clutch of spermatophores at its tip.

For a last instant she remembered Dan, his rigid human face peering out of glass windows at her, the little panels he sent into the water flashing their signs. Mission Sheena mission. Bootstrap! Mission! Dan!

She knew she must not do this.

But then the animal within her rose, urgent.

She opened her mantle to the male. He pumped water into her, seeking to flush out the sperm of any other mate. And then his hectocotylus reached for her, striking swiftly, and lodged his needle-like spermatophore among the roots of her arms.

Already, it was over.

And yet it was not. She could choose whether or not to embrace the spermatophore and place it in her seminal receptacle.

The male was withdrawing. All around her, the squid’s flashing songs pulsed with life.

She knew, compared to a human’s, her life was short: flashing, bright, lasting one summer, two at most, a handful of matings. And she was alone: she did not know her parents, would never know her young, might never see this mate of hers again.

And yet it did not matter. For there was consolation in the shoal, and the shoal of shoals: the ancient songs that reached back to a time before humans, before whales, before even the fish. The songs, poetry of light and dance, made every squid aware she was part of a continuum that stretched back to those ancient seas, and on to the incomprehensible future; and that her own brief, vibrant life was as insignificant, yet as vital, as a single silver scale on the hide of a fish.

Sheena, with her human-built mind, was the first of all squid to be able to understand this. And yet every squid knew it, on some level that transcended the mind.

But Sheena was no longer part of that continuum. Dan understood nothing of the shoal – not really – but he had stressed that much to her. Sheena was different, with different goals: human goals.

Even as the male receded, she felt overwhelmed with sadness, loneliness, isolation.

Flaring anger at the humans who had done this to her, she closed her arms over the spermatophore, and drew it inside her.

e-CNN:

… Following the revelation that a genetically enhanced squid is to be the effective control centre of Reid Malenfant’s quixotic mission to an asteroid <detail>, there has been a predictable outcry from conservation and wildlife rights groups.

But there was an unexpected reaction on Wall Street today where stocks in information technology companies took a beating. Prices <full listing> quoted for the traditional giants like IBM <link> and Microsoft <link> tumbled, but so did the prices for companies like Qbit <link> and Biocom <link>, recent stars of the markets with their stream of successes in the burgeoning fields of quantum-technology computing and bio-computing <backgrounder>.

The reason for all this action is Bootstrap’s rejection of traditional IT solutions in favour of the apparently exotic choice of an enhanced animal. Now, analysts are questioning whether the industry’s reputation for overpriced, unreliable and bug-ridden products is finally taking its toll.

Most of the firms we contacted refused to comment. But an e-spokesperson for IBM said today <animation> that …

Ocean Child:

Thank you, your honour. I only want to say this.

I want everybody to know what we in the Eden League are attempting.

We are developing an internal technology which will selectively suppress the so-called ‘higher’ brain functions in humans. It is clear to us that our ‘intelligence’ has been of no real evolutionary advantage and therefore we intend to discard it. That is why I have no regrets about the mine we attempted to drop onto the laboratory at Key Largo. Frankly I wish it had worked, and I know that statement will affect my sentencing. I don’t care; in fact I welcome it.

And I can announce from this platform that we have already started researching a counter-technology that will similarly restore the squid to their innocence.

What those fascist scientists are doing is cruel.

I don’t mean the experiments where they scoop out the brains of a sentient, intelligent creature. I don’t mean the way they plan to put them to work, farming the oceans for us and even shooting them off into space, where once they were free.

I mean the fact that these animals have been given minds at all.

For centuries we have dragged these beautiful creatures from the Ocean for our food. Now, for our own convenience, we have committed a much greater crime. We have inflicted on these squid an awareness of mortality. And for that, may the Mother Ocean forgive us.

Thank you. That’s all.

Emma Stoney:

Cornelius Taine said, ‘We are invoking deep principles of scientific thinking. Copernicus pointed out that the Earth moves around the sun, not the other way around, and so we were displaced from the centre of the universe. The Copernican principle has guided us ever since. Now we see Earth as just one star, unexceptional, among billions in the Galaxy.

‘We don’t expect to find ourselves in a special place in space. Why should we expect to be in a special place in time? But that is what you have to accept, you see, if you believe mankind has a future with very distant limits. Because in that case we must be among the very first humans who ever lived …’

‘Get to the point,’ Malenfant said softly.

‘… All right. Based on arguments like this, we think a catastrophe is awaiting mankind. A universal extinction, a little way ahead.

‘We call this the Carter catastrophe.’

Emma shivered, despite the warmth of the day.

Malenfant had suggested they follow up Cornelius Taine’s sudden intrusion into their lives by accepting his invitation to come to the New York head offices of Eschatology, Inc. Emma resisted – in her view they had far more important things to talk about than the end of the world – but Malenfant insisted.

Cornelius, it seemed, had gotten under his skin.

So here they were: the three of them sitting at a polished table big enough for twelve, with small inlaid softscreens, and on the wall a grey-glowing monitor screen.

Malenfant sucked aggressively at a beer. ‘Eschatology,’ he snapped. ‘The study of the end of things. Right? So tell me about the end of the world, Cornelius. What? How?’

‘That we don’t know,’ said Cornelius evenly. ‘There are many possibilities. Impact by an asteroid or a comet, another dinosaur killer? A giant volcanic event? A global nuclear war is still possible. Or perhaps we will destroy the marginal, bio-maintained stability of the Earth’s climate … As we go on, we find more ways for the universe to destroy us – not to mention new ways in which we can destroy ourselves. This is what Eschatology, Inc. was set up to consider. But there’s really nothing new in this kind of thinking. We’ve suspected that humanity was doomed to ultimate extinction since the middle of the nineteenth century.’

‘The Heat Death,’ said Malenfant.

‘Yes. Even if we survive the various short-term hazards, entropy must increase to a maximum. In the end the stars must die, the universe will cool to a global uniformity a fraction above absolute zero, and there will be no usable energy, anywhere.’

‘I thought there were ways out of that,’ said Malenfant. ‘Something to do with manipulating the Big Crunch. Using the energy of a collapsing universe to live forever.’

Cornelius laughed. ‘There have been ingenious models of how we might escape the Death, survive a Big Crunch. But they are all based on pushing our best theories of physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, into areas where they break down – such as the singularity at the end of a collapsing universe. Anyway we already know, from cosmological data, that there is no Big Crunch ahead of us. The universe is doomed to expand forever, without limit. The Heat Death, in one form or another, seems inevitable.’

‘But that would give us billions of years,’ said Malenfant.

‘In fact more,’ said Cornelius. Orders of magnitude more.’

‘Well, perhaps we should settle for that,’ Malenfant said dryly.

‘Perhaps. Still, the final extinction must come at last. And the fact of that extinction is appalling, no matter how far downstream it is.’

‘But,’ said Emma sceptically, ‘if you’re right about what you said in the desert, we don’t have trillions of years. Just a couple of centuries.’

Cornelius was watching Malenfant, evidently hoping for a reaction. ‘Extinction is extinction; if the future must have a terminus, does it matter when it comes?’

‘Hell, yes,’ said Malenfant. ‘I know I’m going to die someday. That doesn’t mean I want you to blow my brains out right now.’

Cornelius smiled. ‘Exactly our philosophy, Malenfant. The game itself is worth the playing.’

Emma knew Cornelius felt he had won this phase of the argument. And, gradually, step by step, he was drawing Malenfant into his lunacy.

She sat impatiently, wishing she wasn’t here.

She looked around this small, oak-panelled conference room. There was a smell of polished leather and clean carpets: impeccable taste, corporate lushness, anonymity. The only real sign of unusual wealth and power, in fact, was the enviable view – from a sealed, tinted window – of Central Park. They were high enough here to be above the Park’s main u-v dome. She saw people strolling in the Park, children playing on the glowing green grass, the floating sparks of police drones everywhere.

Emma wasn’t sure what she had expected of Eschatology. Maybe a trailer home in Nevada, the walls coated with tabloid newspaper cuttings, the interior crammed with cameras and listening gear. Or perhaps the opposite extreme: an ultramodern facility with a giant virtual representation of the organization’s Mister Big beamed down from orbit, no doubt stroking his white cat.

But this office, here in the heart of Manhattan, was none of that. It was essentially ordinary. That made it all the more scary, of course.

Malenfant said now, ‘So tell me how you know we only have two hundred years.’

Cornelius smiled. ‘We’re going to play a game.’

Malenfant glared.

Cornelius reached under the table and produced a wooden box, sealed up. It had a single grooved outlet, with a wooden lever alongside. ‘In this box there are a number of balls. One of them has your name on it, Malenfant; the rest are blank. If you press the lever you will retrieve the balls one at a time, and you may inspect them. The retrieval will be truly random.

‘I won’t tell you how many balls the box contains. I won’t give you the opportunity to inspect the box, save to draw out the balls with the lever. But I promise you there are either ten balls in here – or a thousand. Now. Would you hazard which is the true number, ten or a thousand?’

‘Nope. Not without evidence.’

‘Very wise. Please, pull the lever.’

Malenfant drummed his fingers on the table top. Then he pressed the lever.

A small black marble popped into the slot. Malenfant inspected it; it was blank. Emma could see there was easily room for a thousand such balls in the box, if need be.

Malenfant scowled and pressed the lever again.

His name was on the third ball he produced.

‘There are ten balls in the box,’ said Malenfant immediately.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because if there was a thousand in there it’s not likely I’d reach myself so quickly.’

Cornelius nodded. ‘Your intuition is sound. This is an example of Bayes’s rule, which is a technique for assigning probabilities to competing hypotheses with only limited information. In fact –’ he hesitated, calculating ‘– the probability that you’re right is now two-thirds, on the basis of your ball being third out.’

Emma tried to figure that for herself. But, like most probability problems, the answer was counter-intuitive.

‘What’s your point, Cornelius?’

‘Let’s think about the future.’ Cornelius tapped the softscreen embedded in the tabletop before him. The small monitor before Emma lit up, and a schematic graph drew itself elegantly on the screen. It was a simple exponential curve, she recognized, a growth rising slowly at first, steepening up to a point labelled ‘now’. Cornelius said, ‘Here is a picture of the growth of the human population over time. You can see the steep rise in recent centuries. It is a remarkable fact that ten per cent of all the humans who have ever existed are alive now. More than five per cent of all humans, Malenfant, were born after you were …

‘But that is the past. Let’s imagine how the future might develop. Here are three possibilities.’ The curve continued to climb, steepening as it did so, climbing out of Emma’s frame. ‘This,’ said Cornelius, ‘is the scenario most of us would like to see. A continued expansion of human numbers. Presumably this would require a move off-planet.

‘Another possibility is this.’ A second curve extrapolated itself from the ‘now’ point, a smooth tip over to a flat horizontal line. ‘Perhaps our numbers will stabilize. We may settle for the resources of the Earth, find a way to manage our numbers and our planet indefinitely. A bucolic and unexciting picture, but perhaps it is acceptable.

‘But there is a third possibility.’ A third curve climbed a little way past the ‘now’ marker – then fell spectacularly to zero.

‘Jesus,’ said Malenfant. ‘A crash.’

‘Yes. Studies of the population numbers of other creatures, lower animals and insects, often show this sort of shape. Plague, famine, that sort of thing. For us, the end of the world, soon.

‘Now. You can see that in the first two cases, the vast majority of humans are yet to be born. Even if we stay on Earth, we estimate we have a billion years ahead of us before changes in the sun will render Earth’s biosphere unviable. Even in this restricted case we would have far more future than past.

‘And if we expand off-planet, if we achieve the kind of future you’re working for, Malenfant, the possibilities are much greater. Suppose we – or our engineered descendants – colonize the Galaxy. There are four hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, many of which will provide habitable environments for far longer than a mere billion years. Then the total human population, over time, might reach trillions of times its present number.’

‘… Oh. And that’s the problem,’ Malenfant said heavily.

‘You’re starting to see the argument,’ Cornelius said, approving.

‘I’m not,’ said Emma.

Malenfant said, ‘Remember his game with the balls and the box. Why are we here now? If we really are going on to the stars, you have to believe that you were born in the first one-billionth part of the total human population. And how likely is that? Don’t you get it, Emma? It’s as if I drew out my ball third out of a thousand –’

‘Far more unlikely than that, in fact,’ said Cornelius.

Malenfant got up and began to pace the room, excited. ‘Emma, I don’t know statistics from my elbow. But I used to think like this as a kid. Why am I alive now? Suppose we do go on to colonize the Galaxy. Then most of the humans who ever live will be vacuum-sucking cyborgs in some huge interstellar empire. And it’s far more likely that I’d be one of them than what I am. In fact the only pop curve where it’s reasonably likely that we’d find ourselves here, now, is –’

‘The crash,’ said Emma.

‘Yes,’ Cornelius said sombrely. ‘If there is a near-future extinction, it is overwhelmingly likely that we find ourselves alive within a few centuries of the present day. Simply because that is the period when most humans who ever lived, or who will ever live, will have been alive. Ourselves among them.’

‘I don’t believe this for a second,’ Emma said flatly.

‘It is impossible to prove, but hard to refute,’ said Cornelius. ‘Put it this way. Suppose I tell you the world will end tomorrow. You might think yourself unlucky that your natural life span has been cut short. But in fact, one in ten of all humans – that is, the people alive now – would be in the same boat as you.’ He smiled. ‘You work in Las Vegas. Ask around. Losing out to one in ten odds is unlucky, but not drastically so.’

Emma said, ‘You can’t argue from analogy like this. There are a fixed number of balls in that box. But the total number of possible humans depends on the undetermined and open-ended future – it might even be infinite. And how can you possibly make predictions about people who don’t even exist yet – whose nature and powers and choices we know absolutely nothing about? You’re reducing the most profound mysteries of human existence to a shell game.’

Cornelius said patiently, ‘You’re right to be sceptical. Nevertheless we have thirty years of these studies behind us now. The methodology was first proposed by a physicist called Brandon Carter in a lecture to the Royal Society in London in the 1980s. And we have built up estimates based on a range of approaches, calling on data from many disciplines –’

Malenfant said hoarsely, ‘When?’

‘Not earlier than 150 years from now. Not later than 240.’

Malenfant cleared his throat. ‘Cornelius, what’s this all about? Is this an extension of the old eggs-in-one-basket argument? Are you going to push for an off-planet expansion?’

Cornelius was shaking his head. ‘I’m afraid that’s not going to help.’

Malenfant looked surprised. ‘Why not? We have centuries. We could spread over the Solar System –’

‘But that’s the point,’ said Cornelius. ‘Think about it. My argument wasn’t based on any one threat, or any assumptions about where humans might be located, or what level of technology we might reach. It was an argument about the continued existence of humanity, come what may. Perhaps we could even reach the stars, Malenfant. But it will do us no good. The Carter catastrophe will reach us anyhow.’

‘Jesus,’ said Malenfant. ‘What possible catastrophe could obliterate star systems – reach across light years?’

‘We don’t know.’

There was a heavy silence in the wood-laden room.

Malenfant said gruffly: ‘So tell me what you want from me.’

Cornelius said evenly, ‘I’m coming to that.’ He stood up. ‘May I bring you more drinks?’

Emma got out of her chair and walked to the window. She looked out over Central Park, the children playing. They were engaged in some odd, complex game of shifting patterns. She watched for a while; it looked almost mathematical, like a geometric form of communication. Kids were strange these days. Getting brighter, according to the news media. Maybe they needed to be.

But some things never changed. Here came a buggy, she saw, crossing through the Park, drawn by a horse, tireless and steady. The world, bathed in smoky, smog-laden sunlight, looked rich, ancient yet renewed, full of life and possibilities.

… Was it possible Cornelius was right? That all this could end, so soon?

Two hundred more years was nothing. There were hominid tools on the planet two million years old.

And, she thought, will there be a last day? Will there still be a New York, a Central Park – the last children of all playing here on that day? Will they know they have no future?

Or is all this simple craziness?

Malenfant touched her arm. ‘This is one hell of a thing, isn’t it?’ She recognized the tone, the look. All the scepticism and hostility he had shown to Cornelius out in the desert had evaporated. Here was another Big Idea, and Reid Malenfant was distracted, like a kid by a new shiny toy.

Shit, she thought. I can’t afford for Malenfant to take his eye off the ball. Not now. And it’s my fault. I could have dumped Cornelius in Vegas, found a way to block his approach … Too late, too late.

She tried, anyhow. ‘Malenfant, listen. I’ve been digging up Cornelius’s past.’

Malenfant turned, attentive.

Some of it was on the record. She hadn’t even recognized the terms mathematicians used to describe Cornelius’s academic achievement – evidently it covered games of strategy, economic analysis, computer architecture, the shape of the universe, the distribution of prime numbers – anyhow he had been on his way, it seemed, to becoming one of the most influential minds of his generation.

But he had always been – well, odd.

His gift seemed non-rational: he would leap to a new vision, somehow knowing its rightness instinctively, and construct laborious proofs later. Cornelius had remained solitary: he attracted awe, envy, resentment.

As he approached thirty he drove himself through a couple of years of feverish brilliance.

Maybe this was because the well of mathematical genius traditionally dries up at around that age, a prospect which must have terrified Taine, so that he thought he was working against time.

Or maybe there was a darker explanation, Emma’s e-therapists speculated. It wasn’t unknown for creativity to derive from a depressive or schizoid personality. And creative capacities could be used in a defensive way, to fend off mental illness.

Maybe Cornelius was working hard in order to stay sane. If he was, it didn’t seem to have worked.

The anecdotes of Cornelius’s breakdown were fragmentary.

At first he was just highly aware, watchful, insomniac. Then he began to see patterns in the world around him – the cracks in the sidewalk, telephone numbers, the static of dead television screens. He said he was on the verge of deep cosmic insights, available only to him –

‘Who says all this?’

‘His colleagues. His doctors’ case notes, later. You see the pattern, Malenfant? Everything got twisted around. It was as if his faith in the rationality and order of the universe had turned against him, becoming twisted and dysfunctional.’

‘Yeah. Right. And envy and peer pressure and all that good stuff had nothing to do with it.’

‘Malenfant, on his last day at Princeton they found him in the canteen, slamming his head against a wall, over and over.’

After that Cornelius had disappeared for two years. Emma’s data miners had been unable to trace how he spent that time. When he re-emerged, it wasn’t to go back to Princeton but to become a founding board member of Eschatology, Inc.

And here was Emma now, with Malenfant, in the orderly office of this apparently calm, rational, highly intelligent man. Talking about the end of the world.

She whispered urgently, ‘Don’t you get it, Malenfant? Here’s a guy who tells us he sees patterns in the universe nobody else can make out – a guy who believes he can predict the end of humanity.’ A guy who seemed on the point of inducing Malenfant to turn aside his own gigantic projects to follow his insanity. ‘Are you listening?’

Malenfant touched her arm. ‘I hear what you say,’ he said. ‘But –’

‘But what?’

‘What if it’s true? Whether Cornelius is insane or not, what if he’s right? What then?’ His eyes were alive, excited.

Emma watched the children in the Park.

Cornelius returned and invited them to sit once more. He had brought a fresh chilled beer for Malenfant and a coffee for Emma: a decent latte in a china cup, smelling as if it had been freshly brewed and poured by a human hand. She was impressed, as was, no doubt, the intention.

Cornelius sat down. He coughed. ‘Now comes the part you may find hard to believe.’

Malenfant barked laughter. ‘Harder than the death of mankind in two hundred years? Are you for real?’

Cornelius said, with a nod to Emma, ‘Here’s a little more dubious logic for you. Suppose, in the next few decades, humans – our descendants – do find a way to avoid the catastrophe. A way for us to continue, into the indefinite future.’

‘That’s impossible, if your arguments are correct.’

‘No. Merely highly unlikely. But in that case – and knowing the hugeness of the catastrophe to come – if they did find a way, what might our descendants try to do?’

Malenfant frowned. ‘You’re losing me.’

Cornelius smiled. ‘They would surely try to send us a message.’

Emma closed her eyes. The madness deepens, she thought.

‘Woah.’ Malenfant held up his hands. ‘You’re talking about sending a message back in time?’

Cornelius went on, ‘And the most logical thing for us to do would be to make every effort to detect that message. Wouldn’t it? Because it would be the most important message ever received. The future of the species would depend on it.’

‘Time paradoxes,’ whispered Emma. ‘I always hated stories about time paradoxes.’

Malenfant sat back. Suddenly, to Emma, he looked much older than his fifty years. ‘Jesus. What a day. And this is what you want me for? To build you a radio that will pick up the future?’

‘Perhaps the future is already calling. All we have to do is try, any which way. They’re our descendants. They know we are trying. They even know how we are trying. And so they can target us. Or will. Our language is a little limited here … You are unique, Malenfant. You have the resources and the vision to carry this through. Destiny awaits you.’

Malenfant turned to Emma. She shook her head at him. We ought to get out of here. He looked bemused.

He turned back to Cornelius. ‘Tell me one thing,’ he said. ‘How many balls were there in that damn box?’

But Cornelius would only smile.

Reid Malenfant:

Afterwards, they shared a cab to the airport.

‘…Remember those arguments we used to have?’

He smiled. ‘Which arguments in particular?’

‘About whether to have kids.’

‘Yeah. We agreed our position, didn’t we? If you have kids you’re a slave to your genes. Just a conduit from past to future, from the primeval ocean to galactic empire.’

‘Right now,’ she said, ‘that doesn’t seem such a bad ambition. And if we did have kids, we might be able to figure it out better.’

‘Figure out what?’

She waved a hand at the New York afternoon. ‘The future. Time and space. Doom soon. I think I’m in some kind of shock, Malenfant.’

‘Me too –’

‘But I think if I had kids I’d understand better. Because those future people who will never exist, except as Cornelius’s statistical phantoms, would have been my children. As it is, they have nothing to do with me. To them I’m just a – a bubble that burst, utterly irrelevant, far upstream. So their struggles don’t mean anything. We don’t mean anything. All our struggles, the way we loved each other and fell out with each other and fought like hell. Our atom of love. None of it matters. Because we’re transient. We’ll vanish, like bubbles, like shadows, like ripples on a pond.’

‘We do matter. You do. Our relationship does, even if it is –’

‘Self-contained? Sealed off?’

‘You aren’t irrelevant to me, Emma. And my life, what I’ve achieved, means a lot to me … But that’s me sublimating. That’s what you diagnosed years ago, isn’t it?’

‘I can’t diagnose anything about you, Malenfant. You’re just a mass of contradictions.’

He said, ‘If you could change history, like Cornelius says the future people are trying to – if you could go back and fix things between us – would you?’

She thought about that. ‘The past has made us what we are. If we changed it we’d lose ourselves. Wouldn’t we? … No, Malenfant. I wouldn’t change a damn thing. But –’

‘Yeah?’

She was watching him, her eyes as black as deep lunar craters. ‘That doesn’t mean I understand you. And I don’t love you.’

‘I know that,’ he said, and he felt his heart tear.

Bill Tybee:

… June, I know you want me to tell you everything, good and bad, so here goes.

The good is that Tom loves the Heart you sent him for his birthday. He carries it around everywhere, and he tells it everything that happens to him, though to tell you the truth I don’t understand the half of what he says to it myself.

Here’s the bad. I had to take Tom out of school yesterday.

Some kids picked on him.

I know we’ve had this shit before, and we want him to learn to tough it out. But this time it went beyond the usual bully-the-Brainiac routine. The kids got a little rough, and it sounds as if there was a teacher there who should have intervened but didn’t. By the time the Principal was called, it had gotten pretty serious.

Tom spent a night in hospital. It was only one night, just bruising and cuts and one broken bone, in his little finger. But he’s home now.

If I turn this screen around … wait … You can see him. Fine, isn’t he?

He’s a little withdrawn. I know we discourage that rocking thing he does, but today’s not the day.

You can see he’s reading. I have to admit I still find it a little scary the way he flips over the pages like that, one after the other, a page a second. But he’s fine, just our Tom.

So you aren’t to worry. But I’ll want assurances from that damn school before I let Tom go back there again.

Anyway, enough. I want to show you Billie’s painting.

Emma Stoney:

When she heard Malenfant had hauled Dan Ystebo out from Florida, Emma stormed down to Malenfant’s office.

‘…Here’s the question, Dan,’ Malenfant was saying. ‘How would you detect a signal from the future?’

Behind his beard, Dan Ystebo’s mouth was gaping. His face and crimson hair shone, greasy, and there were two neat half-moons of dampness under his armpits: souvenirs, Emma thought, of his flight from Florida, the first available, and his Yellow SmartCab ride from the airport. ‘What are you talking about, Malenfant?’

‘A signal from the future. What would you do? How would you build a receiver?’

Dan looked, confused, from Malenfant to Emma. ‘Malenfant, for Christ’s sake, I’ve got work to do. Sheena 5 –’

‘You’ve got a good team down there,’ said Malenfant. ‘Cut them a little slack. This is more important.’ He pulled out a chair and pushed at Dan’s shoulders, almost forcing him down. He had a half-drunk can of Shit; now he shoved it to Dan. ‘Thirsty? Drink. Hungry? Eat. Meantime, think.’

‘Yo,’ Dan said uncertainly.

‘You’re my Mr Science, Dan. Signals from the future. What, how? Wait until you hear the stuff I’m onto here. It’s incredible. If it pans out it will be the most important thing we’ve ever done – Christ, it will change the world. I want an answer in twenty-four hours.’

Dan looked bewildered. Then a broad smile spread over his face. ‘God, I love this job. Okay. You got connections in here?’

Malenfant stood over him, and showed him how to log on from the softscreen built into the desk.

When Dan was up and running, Emma pulled at Malenfant’s sleeve and took him to one side. ‘So once again you’re ripping up the car park.’

Malenfant grinned and ran his big hand over his bare scalp. ‘I’m impulsive. You used to like that in me.’

‘Don’t bullshit, Malenfant. First I find we’ve invested millions in Key Largo. Then I learn that Dan, the key to that operation, is reassigned to this la-la Eschatology bullshit –’

‘But he’s done his job at Largo. His juniors can run with the ball a while …’

‘Malenfant, Dan isn’t some general purpose boffin like in the movies. He’s a specialist, a marine biologist. If you want someone to work on time travel signals you need a physicist, or an engineer. Better yet a sci fi writer.’

He just snorted at that. ‘People are what counts. Dan is my alpha geek, Emma.’

‘I don’t know why I stay with you, Malenfant.’

He grinned. ‘For the ride, girl. For the ride.’

‘All right. But now we’re going to sit down and do some real work. We have three days before your stakeholder presentation and the private polls do not look good for us … Are you listening to me, Malenfant?’

‘Yeah.’ But Malenfant was watching Dan. ‘Yeah. Sorry. Come on. We’ll use your office.’

Reid Malenfant:

Malenfant had called the stakeholder presentation to head off a flight of capital after the exposure of his off-Earth projects.

He hired a meeting room at the old McDonnell Douglas Huntingdon Beach complex in California. McDonnell had been responsible for the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft back in spaceflight’s Stone Age – or Golden Age, depending on your point of view. Mercury and Gemini, ‘little ships that could’, had been highly popular with the astronaut corps. Also he had the room lined with displays of pieces of hardware taken from his Mojave development shops: hydraulic actuators and auto-pilots and vernier motors, real, scorch-marked rocket engineering.

To the smart operator, Malenfant liked to say, everything is a symbol.

Emma nudged him. It was time.

He stood up and climbed onto the stage. The audience buzz dropped, and the lights dimmed.

Once again, a turning point, he thought, another make or break crisis. If I succeed today, then the Big Dumb Booster flies. If I fail – then, hell, I find another way.

He was confident, in command. He began.

‘…We at Bootstrap believe it is possible that America can dominate space in the twenty-first century – making money doing it – just as we dominated commercial aviation in the twentieth century. In fact, as I will try to explain, I believe we have a duty to the nation, indeed the human species, at least to try.

‘But the first thing we have to do is to bring down Earth-to-orbit costs,’ he said. ‘And there are two ways to achieve that. One way is to build a new generation of reusable spacecraft.’

The first challenge came, a voice floating from the back of the room. We already have a reusable spacecraft. We’ve been flying it for thirty years.

Malenfant held his hands up. ‘Much as I admire NASA’s achievements, to call the Space Shuttle reusable is to stretch the word to yield point. After each Shuttle flight the Orbiter has to be stripped down, reassembled and re-certified from component level up. It would actually be cheaper to build a whole new Orbiter every time.’

So you’re proposing a new reusable craft? Lockheed have spent gigabucks and years developing –

‘I’m not aiming for reusability at all, if you’ll forgive me. Because the other approach to cutting launch costs is to use expendables that are so damn cheap that you don’t care if you throw them away. Hence, the Big Dumb Booster.’

Using the giant softscreen behind him he let them look at a software-graphic image of George Hench’s BDB on the pad. It looked something like the lower half of a Space Shuttle – two solid rocket boosters strapped to a fat, rust-brown external fuel tank – but there was no moth-shaped Shuttle Orbiter clinging to the tank. Instead the tank was topped by a blunt-nosed payload cover almost as fat and wide as the tank itself. And there were no NASA logos: just the Bootstrap insignia, and a boldly displayed Stars and Stripes.

There were some murmurs from his audience, one or two snickers. Somebody said, It looks more Soviet than anything American.

So it did, Malenfant realized, surprised. He made a note to discuss that with Hench, to take out the tractor-factory tinge. Symbolism was everything.

Malenfant pulled up more images, including cutaways giving some construction details. ‘The stack is over 300 feet tall. You have a boat-tail of four Space Shuttle main engines here, attached to the bottom of a modified Shuttle external tank, so the lower stage is powered by liquid oxygen and hydrogen. You’ll immediately see one benefit over the standard Shuttle design, which is in-line propulsion; we have a much more robust stack here. The upper stage is built on one Shuttle main engine. Our performance to low Earth orbit will be 135 tons – twice what the Shuttle can achieve.

‘But LEO performance is secondary. This is primarily an interplanetary launcher. We can throw fifty tons directly onto an interplanetary trajectory. That makes the avionics simple, incidentally. We don’t need to accommodate Earth orbit or re-entry or landing. Just point and shoot …’

It may be Big and Dumb but it’s scarcely cheap.

‘Oh, but it is. What you have here is a bird built from technology about as proven and basic as we can find. We only use Shuttle engines and other components at the end of their design lifetimes. And as I’ve assured you before I am investing not one thin dime in R&D. I’m interested in reaching an asteroid, not in reinventing the known art. We believe we could be ready for launch in six months.’

What about testing?

‘We will test by flying, and each time we fly we will take up a usable payload.’

That’s ridiculous. Not to say irresponsible.

‘Maybe. But NASA used that approach to accelerate the Saturn V development schedule. Back then they called it all-up testing. We’re walking in mighty footsteps.’

There was some laughter at that.

You have the necessary clearance for all this?

‘We’re working on it.’

More laughter, a little more sympathetic.

‘As for our own financial soundness in the short term, you have the business plans, downloaded in the softscreens in front of you. Capital equipment costs, operating costs, competitive return on equity and cost of debt, the capital structure including the debt to equity ratio, other performance data such as expected flight rate, tax rates and payback periods. Even the first flight is partially funded by scientists who have paid to put experiments aboard, from private corporations, the Japanese and European space agencies, even NASA.’

You must realize your whole cost analysis here is based on flawed assumptions. The only reason you can pick up Shuttle engines cheap is because the Shuttle program exists in the first place. So it’s a false saving.

‘Only somebody funded by federal money would call any saving “false”,’ said Malenfant. ‘But it doesn’t matter. This is a bootstrap project, remember. All we need is to achieve the first few flights. After that we’ll be using the resources we find out there to bootstrap ourselves further out. Not to mention make ourselves so rich we’ll be able to buy the damn Shuttle program.

‘I know this isn’t easy to assess for any investor who isn’t a technologist. Exercising due diligence, how would I check out such a business plan? Who else but by giving it to my brother-in-law at NASA? After all, NASA has the only rocket experts available. Right?

‘But NASA will give you the same answer every time. It won’t work. If it did, NASA would be doing it, and we aren’t. All I can ask of you is that you don’t just go to NASA. Seek out as many opinions as you can. And research the history of NASA’s use of bureaucratic and political machinery to stifle similar initiatives in the past.’

There was some stirring at that, even a couple of boos, but he let it stand.

‘Let me show you where I want to go.’ He pulled up a blurred radar image of an asteroid, a lumpy rock. ‘This piece of real estate is called Reinmuth. It is a near-Earth asteroid, discovered in 2005. It is what the astronomers call an M-type, solid nickel-iron with the composition of a natural stainless steel.

‘One cubic kilometre of it ought to contain seven billion tons of iron, a billion tons of nickel, and enough cobalt to last three thousand years, conservatively worth six trillion bucks. If we were to extract it all we would transform the national economy, in fact, the planet’s economy.’

How can you expect government to support an expansionist space colonization program?

‘I don’t. I just want government to get out of the way. Oh, maybe government could invest in some fast-track experimental work to lower the technical risk.’ Nodding heads at that. ‘And there may be kick-starts the government can provide – like the Kelly Act of 1925, when the government gave mail contracts to the new airlines. But that’s just seedcorn stuff. This program isn’t called Bootstrap for nothing.

‘We have a model from history. The British Empire worked to a profit. How? The British operated a system of charter companies to develop potential colonies. The companies themselves had to bear the costs of administration and infrastructure: running the local government, levying taxes, maintaining a police force, administering justice. Only when a territory proved itself profitable would the British government step in and raise the flag.

‘The French and Germans, by contrast, worked the other way around: government followed by exploitation and trade. By 1900 colonial occupation had cost the French government the equivalent of billions of dollars. We don’t want to make the same mistake.

‘We believe the treaties governing outer space resources are antiquated, inappropriate and probably unenforceable. We believe it is up to the US government to revoke those treaties and begin to offer development charters along the lines I’ve described. What we’re offering here is the colonization of the Solar System, and the appropriation of its resources as appropriate, on behalf of the United States – at virtually zero cost to the US taxpayer. And we all get rich as Croesus in the process.’

There was a smattering of applause at that.

He stepped forward to the front of the stage. Before him there was a sea of faces – mostly men, of course, most of them over fifty and therefore as conservative as hell. There were representatives of his corporate partners here – Aerojet and Honeywell and Deutsche Aerospace and Scaled Composites, Inc. and Martin Marietta and others – as well as representatives of the major investors he still needed to attract, and four or five NASA managers, even a couple of uniformed USASF officers. Movers and shakers, the makers of the future, and a few entrenched opponents.

He marshalled his words.

‘This isn’t a game we’re playing here. In a very real sense we have no choice.

‘I cut my teeth on the writings of the space colony visionaries of the ’60s and ’70s. O’Neill, for instance. Remember him? All those cities in space. Those guys argued, convincingly, that the limits to economic growth could be overcome by expansion into space. They made the assumption that the proposed space programs of the time would provide the capability to maintain the economic growth required by our civilization.

‘None of it happened.

‘Today, if we want to start to build a space infrastructure, we’ve lost maybe forty years, and a significant downgrade of our capability to achieve heavy lift into orbit. And the human population has kept right on growing. Not only that, there is a continuing growth in wealth per person. Even a pessimistic extrapolation says we need total growth of a factor of sixty over the rest of this century to keep up.

‘But right now we ain’t growing at all. We’re shrinking.

‘We lose twenty-five billion tons of topsoil a year. That’s equivalent to six 1930s dustbowls. Aquifers – such as those beneath our own grain belt – are becoming exhausted. Our genetically uniform modern crops aren’t proving too resistant to disease. And so on. We are facing problems which are spiralling out of control, exponentially.

‘Let me put this another way. Suppose you have a lily, doubling in size every day. In thirty days it will cover the pond. Right now it looks harmless. You might think you need to act when it covers half the pond. But when will that be? On the twenty-ninth day.

‘People, this is the twenty-ninth day.

‘Here’s the timetable I’m working to.

‘We need to be able to use power from space to respond to the global energy shortage by 2020. That’s just ten years from now.

‘By 2050 we need a working economy in space, returning power, microgravity industrial products and scarce resources to the Earth. We might even be feeding the world from space by then. We’ll surely need tens of thousands of people in space to achieve this, an infrastructure extending maybe as far as Jupiter. That’s just forty years away.

‘By 2100 we probably need to aim for economic equivalence between Earth and space. I can’t hazard what size of economy this implies. Some say we may need as many as a billion people out there. We can figure it out later.

‘These are targets, not prophecy. We may not achieve them; if we don’t try, we certainly won’t. My point is that we’ve sat around with our thumbs up our butts for too long. If we start now, we may just make it. If we leave it any longer, we may not have a planet to launch our spaceships from …

‘And,’ he said, ‘in the end, have faith.’

In who? You?

Malenfant smiled.

His speech was well rehearsed, and it almost convinced him. But Cornelius’s Carter stuff nagged away at the back of his head. Was all this stuff, the exploitation of the Solar System for profit, really to be his destiny? Or – something else, something he couldn’t yet glimpse?

He felt his pulse race at the prospect.

Behind him, the softscreen’s software-generated images gently morphed into a shot of a Big Dumb Booster, real hardware sitting on the pad, a pillar of heavy engineering wreathed in vapour under a burning blue sky, a spaceship ready for launch.

Damn if he couldn’t see some glistening eyes out there, shining in the transmitted desert light. ‘This is a live image,’ he said. ‘We’re ramping up for our first smoke test. People, this is just the beginning. I’m going places. Come aboard.’

He waited for the applause. It came.

Emma Stoney:

It only took a week before Dan had designed and set up his first message-from-the-future experiment, at a place called the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia. Emma was relieved that the funding required was modest, comparatively anyhow, and Malenfant was able to pull strings to get his way without, as far as she could tell, any visible damage to the company.

Translation: nobody had found out yet what the hell they were doing.

Weeks went by and the experiment produced nothing useful. Malenfant shuttled between Vegas, the Mojave and West Virginia.

After a month of trying to convince Malenfant to come back to work, Emma cleared her diary and caught a flight to West Virginia.

She had a Bootstrap driver take her out to the radio observatory. She arrived at midnight.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory proved to be set in a leafy valley surrounded by forest-clad hills. In the cloudless October sky a sliver of Moon floated among the stars.

As her eyes dark-adapted Emma made out a cluster of upturned dishes, each cluttered with spidery receiving equipment. The dishes seemed to glow, silver and white, as they peered up hopefully into an impenetrable, infinite sky. Occasionally one of the dishes would move on its fragile-looking stand, with a grind of heavy equipment, at the obscure command of one of the observers in the low, cheap-looking buildings. She wondered how many of the researchers here were now working for Bootstrap or for Eschatology – in either case, presumably, funded by Malenfant’s money.

She was taken to a grassy area where half a dozen folding lawn chairs had been set up. Malenfant, Dan Ystebo and Cornelius Taine were working their way through a couple of six-packs. All of them were bundled up against the chill.

Dan, crumpled and slightly drunk, looked as if he hadn’t changed his T-shirt since Florida. Cornelius wasn’t drinking. He was wearing his customary designer suit, neat and seamless; somehow he seemed sealed off from this environment, green hills and silence and stately nature.

Malenfant was pacing, restless, his footprints dark against the dew on the grass.

She sighed. Malenfant, in this obsessive mood, took some management. Well, she’d expected this to take some time.

She sat down gingerly on a spare chair, and accepted a beer. ‘I should have brought a heavier coat.’

Dan said sleepily, ‘After the first six-pack you don’t notice the cold.’

‘So what have you picked up from our silver-suited descendants?’

Cornelius shook his head. ‘We didn’t expect success so easily. We just had to eliminate the most obvious possibility.’

She glanced around. ‘These are radio telescopes. Right? You’re expecting to pick up back-to-the-future messages by radio waves?’

Dan said, ‘We’re trying to build a Feynman radio here, Emma.’

‘Feynman? As in Richard Feynman?’

Malenfant was smiling. ‘Turns out,’ he said, ‘there’s a loophole in the laws of physics.’

Cornelius held up his hands. ‘Look, suppose you jiggle an atom to produce a radio wave. We have equations which tell us how the wave travels. But the equations always have two solutions.’

‘Two?’

Dan scratched his belly and yawned. ‘Like taking a square root. Suppose you have a square lawn, nine square yards in area. How long is the side?’

‘Three yards,’ she said promptly. ‘Because three is root nine.’

‘Okay. But nine has another square root.’

‘Minus three,’ she said. ‘I know. But that doesn’t count. You can’t have a lawn with a side of minus three yards. It makes no physical sense.’

Dan nodded. ‘In the same way the electromagnetism equations always have two solutions. One, like the positive root, describes the waves we’re familiar with, travelling into the future, that arrive at a receiver after they left the transmitter. We call those retarded waves. But there’s also another solution, like the negative root –’

‘Describing waves arriving from the future, I suppose.’

‘Well, yes. What we call advanced waves.’

Cornelius said, ‘It’s perfectly good physics, Ms Stoney. Many physical laws are time-symmetric. Run them forward, and you see an atom emitting a photon. Run them backward, and you see the photon hitting the atom …’

‘Which is where Feynman comes in,’ Dan said. ‘Feynman supposed the outgoing radiation is absorbed by matter, gas clouds, out there in the universe. The gas is disturbed, and gives off advanced waves of its own. The energy of all those little sources travels back in time to the receiver. And you get interference. One wave cancelling another. All the secondary advanced waves cancel out the original advanced wave at the transmitter. And all their energy goes into the retarded wave.’

‘It’s kind of beautiful,’ Malenfant said. ‘You have to imagine all these ghostly wave echoes travelling backward and forward in time, perfectly synchronized, all working together to mimic an ordinary radio wave.’

Emma had an unwelcome image of atoms sparsely spread through some dark, dismal future, somehow emitting photons in a mysterious choreography, and those photons converging on Earth, gathering in strength, until they fell to the ground here and now, around her …

‘The problem is,’ Cornelius said gently, ‘Feynman’s argument, if you think about it, rests on assumptions about the distribution of matter in the future of the universe. You have to suppose that every photon leaving our transmitters will be absorbed by matter somewhere – maybe in billions of years from now. But what if that isn’t true? The universe isn’t some cloud of gas. It’s lumpy, and it’s expanding. And it seems to be getting more transparent.’

Dan said, ‘We thought it was possible that not all the advanced waves cancel out perfectly. Hence all this. We use the radio dishes here to send millisecond-pulse microwave radiation into space. Then we vary the rig: we send out pulses into a dead-end absorber. And we monitor the power output. Remember the advanced waves are supposed to contribute to the energy of the retarded wave, by Feynman’s theory. If the universe isn’t a perfect absorber –’

‘Then there would be a difference in the two cases,’ Emma said.

‘Yeah. We ought to see a variation, a millisecond wiggle, when we beam into space, because the echo effect isn’t perfect. And we hope to detect any message in those returning advanced echoes – if somebody downstream has figured out a way to modify them.

‘We pick cloudless nights, and we aim out of the plane of the Galaxy, so we miss everything we can see. We figure that only one per cent of the power will be absorbed by the atmosphere, and only three per cent by the Galaxy environment. The rest ought to make it – spreading out, ever more thinly – to intergalactic space.’

Cornelius said, ‘Of course we can be sure that whatever message we do receive will be meaningful to us.’ He looked around; his skin seemed to glow in the starlight. ‘I mean, to the four of us, personally. For they know we are sitting here, planning this.’

Emma shivered again. ‘And did you find anything?’

‘Not to a part in a billion,’ said Cornelius.

There was silence, save for a distant wind rustling ink-black trees.

Emma found she had been holding her breath. She let it out gently. Of course not, Emma. What did you expect?

‘Crying shame,’ said Dan Ystebo, and he reached for another beer. ‘Of course experiments like this have been run before. You can find them in the literature. Schmidt in 1980. Partridge, Newman a few years earlier. Always negative … Which is why,’ he said slowly, ‘we’re considering other options.’

Emma said, ‘What other options?’

Cornelius said, ‘We must use something else – something that isn’t absorbed so easily as photons. A long mean free path length. Neutrinos.’

‘The spinning ghosts.’ Dan belched, and took a pull at his beer. ‘Nothing absorbs neutrinos.’

Emma frowned, only vaguely aware what a neutrino was. ‘So how do you make a neutrino transmitter? Is it expensive?’

Cornelius laughed. ‘You could say that.’ He counted the ways on his hands. ‘You set off a new Big Bang. You spark a supernova explosion. You turn a massive nuclear power plant on and off. You create a high-energy collision in a particle accelerator …’

Malenfant nodded. ‘Emma, I was going to tell you. I need you to find me an accelerator.’

Enough, she thought.

Emma stood and drew Malenfant aside. ‘Malenfant, face it. You’re being spun a line by Cornelius here, who has nothing to show you, nothing but shithead arguments based on weird statistics and games with techno toys. He’s spinning some kind of schizoid web, and he’s drawing you into it. It has to stop here before –’

He snapped, ‘If something goes wrong in the cockpit you don’t give up. You try something else. And then another thing. Again and again until you find something that works. Have a little faith, Emma.’ Emma opened her mouth, but he had already turned back to Dan Ystebo. ‘Now tell me how we detect these damn neutrons.’

‘Neutrinos, Malenfant …’

Cornelius leaned over to Emma. ‘The Wheeler-Feynman stuff may seem spooky to you. It seems spooky to me: the idea of radio waves passing back and forth through time … But it’s actually fundamental to our reality.

‘Why is there a direction to time at all? Why does the future feel different from the past? Some of us believe it’s because the universe is not symmetrical. At one end there is the Big Bang, a point of infinite compression. And at the other there is the endless expansion, infinite dilution. They couldn’t be more different.

‘We can figure out the structure to the universe by making observations, expressing it in such terms. But what difference does it make to an electron? How does it “know” that the forward-in-time radio waves are the “correct” ones to emit?

‘Maybe it’s because of those back-in-time echoes. Perhaps an electron can tell where it is in time – and which way it’s facing. And that’s how come the forward-in-time waves are the ones that make sense.

‘All this is analogy and anthropomorphism. Of course electrons don’t “know” anything. I could say, more formally, that the Wheeler-Feynman theory provides a way for the boundary conditions of the universe to impose a selection effect on retarded waves. But that would just be blinding you with science; and we wouldn’t want that, would we?’ He was smiling, his teeth white. He was toying with her, she realized.

Malenfant and Ystebo talked on, slightly drunk, eager. It seemed to Emma that their voices rose up into the sky, small and meaningless, and far above the stars wheeled, unconcerned.

Bill Tybee:

Tuesday.

Well, June, I had my meeting with Principal Bradfield. She’s still determined she won’t take Tom back.

At least I found out a little more.

Tom, well, he isn’t the only one. The only supersmart kid, I mean. There are three others they’ve identified at the school, and a couple more they’re suspicious about. That makes it a couple per thousand, and that’s about right.

It seems this is some kind of nationwide phenomenon. Maybe global.

But the numbers are uncertain. The kids are usually identified only when they get to school.

The Principal says they are disruptive. If you have one of them in a class they get bored and impatient and distract everybody else. If there is more than one, they kind of hook up together and start doing their own projects, even using their own private language, the Principal says, until you can’t control them anyhow.

And then there’s the violence. The Principal wasn’t about to say so but I got the impression some of the teachers aren’t prepared to protect the kids properly.

I asked the Principal, why us? But she didn’t have an answer.

Nobody knows why these kids are emerging anyhow. Maybe some environmental thing, or something in the food, or some radiation effect that hit them in the womb. It’s just chance it happened to be us.

Anyhow the school board are looking at some other solution for Tom. Maybe he’ll have a teacher at home. We might even get an e-teacher, but I don’t know how good they are. I did read in the paper there have been proposals for some kind of special schools just for the smart kids, but that wouldn’t be local; Tom would have to board.

Anyhow I don’t want Tom to be taken off to some special school, and I know you feel the same.

I want him to be smart. I’m proud that he’s smart. But I want him to be normal, just like other kids. I don’t want him to be different.

Tom wants me to download some of the stuff from his Heart for you. Just a second …

Emma Stoney:

Back in her Vegas office, Emma sat back and read through her latest submission to Maura Della.

… The antique treaties that govern space activities are examples of academic lawmaking. They were set down far in advance of any activity they were supposed to regulate. They certainly fail to address the legitimate needs of private corporations and individuals who might own space-related resources and/or exploit them for profit. In fact they are more political statements by the former Soviet Union and Third World nations than a workable set of legal rules.

We believe the most appropriate action is therefore to get our ratification of the Treaties revoked. There are precedents for this, notably when President Carter revoked the Panama Canal Treaty by an executive order. And to put it bluntly, since the US signed these Treaties with a single main competitor in mind – the Soviet Union, a competitor which no longer even exists – there is no reason to be morally bound by them …

Malenfant was picking a fight by building his damn spaceship, out in the desert, exposing it to the cameras, and daring the bureaucrats and turf warriors and special-interest groups to shut him down. That boldness had carried him a long way. But Emma suspected that Malenfant had had an easy ride so far; the bureaucratic infighting had barely begun.

Emma – with a team of specialist lawyers mostly based in New York, and with backing from Maura and other friends in Washington – was trying to clear away the regulatory issues which could ground Malenfant’s BDBs just as surely as a blow-up on the pad.

Space activities were regulated, internationally, by various treaties which dated back to the Stone Age of spaceflight: days when only governments operated spacecraft, treaties drafted in the shadow of the Cold War. But the mass of badly drafted legislation and treaties gave rise to anomalies and contradictions.

Consider tort liabilities, for instance. If Malenfant had been operating an airline, and one of his planes crashed on Mexico, then he would be responsible and his insurance would have to soak up the damages and lawsuits. But under the terms of a 1972 space liability convention, if Malenfant’s BDB crashed, the US government itself would be liable.

Another problem area was the issue of certification of airworthiness – or maybe spaceworthiness – of Malenfant’s BDBs. Every aircraft that crossed an international border was supposed to carry a certificate of airworthiness from its country of registry, a certificate of manufacture and a cargo manifest. So was a BDB an air vehicle? Federal aviation regulations actually contained no provisions for certificating a space vehicle. When she’d dug into the records she’d found that the FAA – the Federal Aviation Administration – had dodged the issue regarding the Space Shuttle when, in 1977, it had ruled that the Shuttle Orbiter was not an aircraft, despite being a winged vehicle that glided home.

It was a mess of conflicting and unreasonable regulations, at national and international levels. Maybe it was going to take a bull-headed operator like Malenfant to break through this thicket.

And all that just concerned the operation of a private spacecraft. When Malenfant reached his asteroid, there would be a whole different set of problems to tackle.

Malenfant didn’t want to own the asteroid; he just wanted to make money out of it. But it wasn’t clear how he could do even that.

Malenfant was arguing for a system that could enforce private property rights on the asteroid. The patent and property registry of a powerful nation – specifically the US – would be sufficient. The claims would be enforceable internationally by having the US Customs Office penalize any import that was made to the US in defiance of such a claim. This mechanism wouldn’t depend on the US, or anybody else, actually claiming sovereignty over the rock. There was actually a precedent: the opening-up of trans-Appalachian America in the 17th century, long before any settler got there, under a system of British Crown land patents.

But the issue was complex, disputatious, drowned in ambiguous and conflicting laws and treaties.

Unutterably wearying.

She got up from her desk and poured herself a shot of tequila, a particular weakness since her college days. The harsh liquid seemed to explode at the back of her throat.

… Did she actually believe all this? Did she think it was right? Did the US have the moral authority unilaterally to hand out off-world exploitation charters to people like Malenfant?

The precedents weren’t encouraging – for instance, the British Empire’s authorization of brutal capitalists like Cecil Rhodes had led to such twentieth-century horrors as apartheid. And there was of course the uncomfortable fact that the upkeep and defence of the British Empire, though admirably profitable for some decades, had ultimately bankrupted its home country, a detail Malenfant generally omitted to mention in his pep talks to investors and politicians.

Meanwhile – like a hobby for her spare time – she was, somewhat more reluctantly, pursuing Malenfant’s other current obsession. Find me an accelerator … With glass in hand she tapped at her softscreen, searching for updates from her assistants and data miners.

A candidate particle physics laboratory had quickly emerged: Fermilab, outside Chicago, where Malenfant had a drinking-buddy relationship with the director. So Emma started to assemble applications for experiment time.

Immediately she had found herself coming up against powerful resistance from the researchers already working at Fermilab, who saw the well-spring of their careers being diverted by outsiders. She tried to make progress through the Universities Research Association, a consortium of universities in the US and overseas. But she met more obstruction and resistance. She had to fly to Washington to testify before a sub-panel of something called the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel of the Department of Energy, which had links into the President’s science adviser.

The problem was that the facilities and experiments required giant sums of money. The physicists were still smarting from the cancellation by Congress in the 1990s of the Superconducting Supercollider, a fifty-three mile tunnel of magnets and particle beams which would have been built under a cotton field in Ellis County, Texas, and would have cost as much as a small space station. And in spite of all the megabucks spent there didn’t seem to have been a fundamental breakthrough in the field for some decades.

Well, the news today, she learned now, was that the approval for the Fermilab runs had come through.

It wasn’t a surprise. She had found the physicists intelligent, prone to outrage – but also politically naive and easily outmanoeuvred.

She sat back, thinking. The question was, what she should do with this news.

She decided to sit on it for now, trying to squeeze a little more productivity out of Malenfant. Because when she told Malenfant they’d won, he would take the first plane to Chicago. And she had a lot of issues to discuss with him.

Such as the pressure Cornelius was applying for Bootstrap to get involved with another of Eschatology’s pet projects: the Milton Foundation.

The Foundation was a reaction to the supersmart children who seemed to be sprouting like weeds across the planet. The Foundation was proposing to contact these kids to make sure their special needs were met, and to try to ensure they got the opportunities they needed to exercise their abilities. No potential Einsteins doomed to waste their brief lives toiling in fields, no putative Picassos blown apart in mindless wars – no more ‘mute inglorious Miltons’. Everyone would benefit: the kids themselves, their families, and the human race as a whole, with this bright new intellectual resource to call on.

That was the prospectus, and it had sold easily to Malenfant; it fit in with his view of a future that needed to be managed, ideally by Reid Malenfant.

But it was worrying for Emma, on a number of levels.

Here was a report, for example, on some kid who’d turned up in Zambia, southern Africa. He seemed the brightest of all, according to some globally applied assessment rating. But did that make it right to take him out and dump him in some school, maybe on another continent? What could a kid like that, or even his parents, possibly know about getting involved with a powerful, amorphous Western entity like Eschatology?

And besides, what really lay behind this strange phenomenon of supersmart children? Could it really be some kind of unusually benign environmental-change effect, as the experts seemed to be saying?

Her instinct, if she felt she wasn’t in control of some aspect of the business, was always to go see for herself. She had to get out there and see for herself how all this worked, just once. This Zambia case, the first in Africa, might be just the excuse.

Of course it could be the tequila doing her thinking for her.

Africa. Jesus.

She poured another shot.

The journey was gruelling, a hop over the Atlantic to England and then an interminable overnighter south across Europe, the Mediterranean and the dense heart of Africa.

She flew into Harare, Zimbabwe. Then she had to take a short internal flight to Victoria Falls, the small tourist-choked town on the Zimbabwe side of the Falls themselves.

At her hotel, she slept for twelve hours.

The next morning a Bootstrap driver took her across the Falls, through a comic-opera immigration checkpoint, and into Zambia.

The man she had come to meet was waiting at the checkpoint. He was the teacher who had reported the boy to the Milton Foundation. He came forward hesitantly, holding out his hand. ‘Ms Stoney. I’m Stef Younger …’ He was small, portly, dressed in a kind of loose safari style, baggy shirt and shorts fitted with deep, bulging pockets. He couldn’t have been older than thirty; he was prematurely balding, and his scalp, burned pink by the winter sun, was speckled with sweat.

He was obviously southern African, probably from Zimbabwe or South Africa itself. His elaborate accent, forever linked to a nightmare past, made her skin prickle. But there were blue chalk-dust stains on his shirt, she noticed, the badge of the teacher since time immemorial, and she warmed to him, just a little.

They got back in the car, and drove away from the Falls.

Africa was flat and still and dusty, eroded smooth by time, apparently untouched by the twenty-first century. The only verticals were the trees and the skinny people, moving slowly through the harsh light.

They reached the town of Livingstone. She could discern the remnants of Art Deco style in the closed-up banks and factories and even a cinema, now sun-bleached and washed out to a uniform sand colour, all of it marred by ubiquitous Shit Cola ads.

Younger gave her a little tourist grounding.

This remained a place of grinding poverty. Misguided aid efforts had flooded the area with cheap Western clothes, and local crooks had used them to undercut and wipe out the textile factories that had once kept everybody employed.

Now the unemployment here ran at 80% of adults. And there was no kind of welfare safety net. If you didn’t have a relative who worked somewhere, you found some other way to live …

Younger pointed. ‘Look at that.’

At the side of the road, there was a baboon squatting on the rim of a rusty trash can. He held himself there effortlessly with his back feet, while he dug with his forearms into the trash.

Emma was stunned. She’d never been so close to a non-human primate before, outside a zoo, anyhow. The baboon was the size of a ten-year-old boy, lean and grey and obviously ferociously strong, eyes sharp and intelligent. So much more human than she might have thought.

Younger grinned. ‘He’s looking for plastic bags. He knows that’s where he will find food. Tourists think he’s cute. But give him food and he’ll be back tomorrow. Smart, see. Smart as a human. But he doesn’t think.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘He doesn’t understand death. You see the females carrying round dead infants, sometimes for days, trying to feed them.’

‘Maybe they’re grieving.’

‘Nah.’ Younger wound down his window and raised his fist.

The baboon’s head snapped around, sizing up Younger with a sharp tense glance. Then he leapt off the trash can rim and loped away.

Away from the town the road stretched, black and unmarked, across a flat, dry landscape. The trees were sparse, and in many instances smashed over, as if by some great storm. There was little scrub growing between the trees. But everywhere the land was shaped by tracks, the footsteps of animals and birds overlaid in the white Kalahari sands. The tracks of elephants were great craters bigger than dinner plates, and where the ground was firm she could see the print left by the tough, cracked skin of an elephant’s sole, a spidery map as distinctive as a fingerprint.

Emma was a city girl, and she was struck by the self-evident organization of the landscape here, the way the various species – in some cases separated genetically by hundreds of millions of years – worked together to maintain a stable environment for them all. Control, stability, organization, all without an organizing human mind, without a proboscidean Reid Malenfant to plan the future for them.

But this, she thought, was the past, for better or worse. Now mind was here, and had taken control; it was mind which would shape this landscape in future, and the whole of the planet, not blind evolution.

Maybe there is a lesson here for us all, she thought. Damned if I know what it is.

At length, driving through the bush, she saw elephants.

They moved through the trees, liquid graceful and silent, like dark clouds gliding over the Earth, shapers of this landscape. With untrained eyes she saw only impressionistic flashes: a gleam of tusks, a curling trunk, an unmistakable morphology. The elephants were myths of childhood and picture books and zoo visits, miraculously preserved in a world growing over with concrete and plastic and waste.

They came, at last, to a village.

The car stopped, and they climbed out. Younger spread his hands. ‘Welcome to Nakatindi.’ Huts of dirt and grass clustered to either side of the road and spread away to the flat distance.

Nervous – and embarrassed at herself for feeling so – Emma glanced back at the car. The driver had wound up and opaqued the windows. She could see him lying back, insulated from Africa in his air-conditioned bubble, his eyes closed, synth music playing.

As soon as she walked off the dusty hardtop road she was surrounded by kids, stick thin and bright as buttons. They were dressed in ancient Western clothes – T-shirts and shorts, mostly too big, indescribably worn and dirty, evidently handed down through grubby generations. The kids pushed at each other, tangles of flashing limbs, competing for her attention, miming cameras. ‘Snap me. Snap me alone.’ They thought she was a tourist.

The dominant colour, as she walked into the village, was a kind of golden brown. The village was constructed on the flat Kalahari sand that covered the area for a hundred miles around. But the sand here was marked only by human footprints, and pitted with debris, scraps of metal and wood.

The sky was a washed-out blue dome, huge and empty, and the sun was directly overhead, beating at her scalp. There were no shadows here, little contrast. She had a renewed sense of age, of everything worn flat by time.

There were pieces of car, scattered everywhere. She saw busted-off car doors used like garden gates, hub caps beaten crudely into bowls. Two of the kids were playing with a kind of skateboard, just a strip of wood towed along by a wire loop. The ‘wheels’ of the board were, she recognized with a shock, sawn-off lengths of car exhaust. Younger explained that a few years ago some wrecks had been abandoned a mile or so away. The villagers had towed them into town and scavenged them until there was nothing left.

‘… You’ll mostly see men here today, men and boys. It’s Sunday so some of the men will be drunk. The women and girls are off in the bush. They gather wild fruit, nuts, berries, that kind of stuff.’

There was no sanitation here, no sewage system. The people-women and girls – carried their water from a communal stand-pipe in yellowed plastic bowls and bottles. For their toilet they went into the bush. There was nothing made of metal, as far as she could see, save for the scavenged automobile parts and a few tools.

Not even any education, save for the underfunded efforts of gone-tomorrow volunteers like Younger.

Younger eyed her. ‘These people are basically hunter-gatherers. 150 years ago they were living Late Stone Age lives in the bush. Now, hunting is illegal. And so, this.’

‘Why don’t they return to the bush?’

‘Would you?’

They reached Younger’s hut. He grinned, self-deprecating. ‘Home sweet home.’

The hut was built to the same standard as the rest, but Emma could see within an inflatable mattress, what looked like a water-purifier, a softscreen with a modem and an inflatable satellite dish, a few toiletries. ‘I allow myself a few luxuries,’ Younger said. ‘It’s not indulgence. It’s a question of status.’

She frowned. ‘I’m not here to judge you.’

‘No. Fine.’ Younger’s mood seemed complex: part apologetic for the conditions here, part a certain pride, as if of ownership. Look at the good I’m doing here.

Depressed, Emma wondered whether, even if places of poverty and deprivation did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them, to give mixed-up people like Younger a purpose to their limited lives. Or maybe that was too cynical; he was, after all, here.

A girl came out of the hut’s shadows. She looked no more than ten, shoulder-high, thin as a rake in her grubby brown dress. She was carrying a bowl of dirty water. She seemed scared by Emma and she shrank back. Emma forced herself to smile.

Younger beckoned, and spoke to the girl softly. ‘This is Mindi,’ he told Emma. ‘My little helper. Thirteen years of age; older than she looks, as you can see. She keeps me from being a complete slob.’ He laid his soft hand on the girl’s thin shoulder; she didn’t react. When he let her go she hurried away, carrying the bowl on her head.

‘Come see the star of the show.’ Younger beckoned, and she followed him into the shadows of the little hut. Out of the glaring flat sunlight, it took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the dark.

She heard the boy before she saw him: soft breathing, slow, dusty movements, the rustle of cloth on skin.

He seemed to be lying on his belly on the floor. His face was illuminated by a dim yellow glow that came from a small flashlight, propped up in the dust. His eyes were huge; they seemed to drink in the flashlight light, unblinking.

Younger said, ‘He’s called Michael.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Eight, nine.’

Emma found herself whispering. ‘What’s he doing?’

Younger shrugged. ‘Trying to see photons.’

‘I noticed him when he was very young, five or six. He would stand in the dust and whirl around, watching his arms and clothes being pulled outwards. I’d seen kids with habits like that before. You see them focusing on the swish of a piece of cloth, or the flicker of light in the trees. Mildly autistic, probably: unable to make sense of the world, and so finding comfort in small, predictable details. Michael seemed a bit like that. But he said something strange. He said he liked to feel the stars pulling him around.’

She frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I had to look it up. It’s called Mach’s principle. How does Michael know if he is spinning around, or if the universe is all spinning around him?’

She thought about it. ‘Because he can feel the centripetal forces?’

‘Ah. But you can prove that a rotating universe, a huge matter current flowing around him, would exert exactly the same force. It’s actually a deep result of general relativity.’

‘My God. And he was figuring this out when he was five?’

‘He couldn’t express it. But, yes, he was figuring it out. He seems to have in his head, as intuition, some of the great principles the physicists have battled to express for centuries …’

‘And now he’s trying to see a photon?’

Younger smiled. ‘He asked me what would happen if he shone his flashlight up in the air. Would the beam just keep on spreading, thinner and thinner, all the way to the Moon? But he already knew the answer, or rather, he somehow intuited it.’

‘The beam fragments into photons.’

‘Yes. He called them light bits, until I taught him the physics term. He seems to have a sense of the discreteness of things. If you could see photons one at a time you’d see a kind of irregular flickering, all the same brightness: photons, particles of light, arriving at your eye one after another. That’s what he hopes to see.’

‘And will he?’

‘Unlikely.’ Younger smiled. ‘He’d need to be a few thousand miles away. And he’d need a photomultiplier to pick up those photons. At least, I think he would …’ He looked at her uneasily. ‘I have some trouble keeping up with him. He’s absorbed the simple math and physics I’ve been able to give him and taken them to places I never dreamed of. For instance he seems to have deduced special relativity too. From first principles.’

‘How?’

Younger shrugged. ‘If you have the physical insight, all you need is Pythagoras’s theorem. And Michael figured out his own proof of that two years ago.’

The boy played with his flashlight, obsessive, unspeaking, ignoring the adults.

She walked out into the sunshine, which was dazzling. Michael followed her out. In the bright light she noticed that Michael had a mark on his forehead. A perfect blue circle.

‘What’s that? A tribe mark?’

‘No.’ Younger shrugged. ‘It’s only chalk. He does it himself. He renews it every day.’

‘What does it mean?’

But Younger had no answer.

She told Younger she would return the following day with tests, and maybe she should meet Michael’s parents, discuss release forms and the compensation and conditions the Foundation offered.

But Younger said the boy’s parents were dead. ‘It ought to make the release easier,’ he said cheerfully.

She held up her hand to the boy, in farewell. His eyes widened as he stared at her hand. Then he started to babble excitedly to Younger, plucking his sleeve.

‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s the gold. The gold ring on your hand. He’s never seen gold before. Heavy atoms, he says.’

She had an impulse to give the boy the ring – after all, it was only a token of her failed marriage to Malenfant, and meant little to her.

Younger noticed her dilemma. ‘Don’t offer them anything. Gifts, money. A lot of people come here and try to give the shirt off their backs.’

‘Guilt.’

‘I guess. But you give one money, they all want it. They have no ambition, these fellows. They sit around with their beer and their four wives. They’re happy, in their way.’

She remembered that Younger had talked about the baboon in the trash in exactly the same tone of voice.

Mindi, the slim girl-child, now returned, carrying a plastic bowl of fresh water. She looked anxiously to Younger, and would not meet Emma’s eyes.

If she was thirteen, Emma thought, the girl was of marriageable age here. Maybe Stef Younger was finding more compensation in his life here than mere altruism.

It was a relief to climb into the car, to sip cool water and brush ten-million-year-old Kalahari dust out of her hair.

That night, she had trouble sleeping. She couldn’t get the image of those bright-button village kids out of her head. Mute inglorious Miltons, indeed.

On the way here Emma had done some more digging into the Milton Foundation.

Milton turned out to be a shadowy coalition of commercial, philanthropic and religious groups, particularly Christian. The Foundation was international, and its Schools had been set up in many countries, including the US. The children were in general separated from their families and homes, and spirited away to a School perhaps half a world away. In fact – so some journalists alleged – children were being moved from School to School, even between countries, making monitoring even more difficult.

Not everybody welcomed the arrival of a School full of children labelled as geniuses. Nobody likes a smart ass. In some places the Schools and children had actually come under physical attack, and there were rumours of one murder; the Foundation, she had learned, spent a remarkable amount of its money on security, and almost as much on public relations.

And there were darker stories still of what went on inside the Schools.

Emma’s doubts about associating Bootstrap with the initiative continued to grow. But she knew that until she came up with a stronger case for pulling back she was going to be overruled by Malenfant himself.

She wished she understood Cornelius and his shadowy associates better. She didn’t yet grasp how this program fitted in with Eschatology’s wider agenda: the end of the world, messages from the future … She had the intuition that what they were seeking wasn’t just smart children, but something much more strange.

And she wondered if that was exactly what she had found here in Africa.

She stepped onto her balcony.

Looking up at the stars, Michael’s stars, she could tell she was far from home. She recognized Ursa Major. But the familiar childhood panhandle shape was upside down, and its pointer stars were pointing below the horizon. And when the Moon rose, it climbed straight up into the sky, heading for a point somewhere over her head. Not only that, it was ripped up sideways; the Man in the Moon’s forehead was pointing north.

But it wasn’t the Moon that was tipped; it was herself; for she had flown around the belly of the planet, which was thereby proven to be round. It was a startling thought.

I should travel more, she thought.

How was it possible for a kid on the fringe of the African bush to figure out so much fundamental physics?

If she and Malenfant had had kids, she supposed, she might have a better instinct on how to handle this situation. But she didn’t, and the whole world of children, damaged or super-intelligent or otherwise, was a mystery to her.

… On a whim, she unfolded her softscreen and looked up the properties of gold.

She learned that relativistic effects, the strange and subtle effects of very high speeds and energies, determined the colour of gold.

In light elements, electrons orbited the nuclei of atoms at a few hundred miles per second – fast, but only a few per cent of the speed of light. But in elements with massive nuclei – like uranium, lead or gold – the electrons were dragged around at a large fraction of the speed of light, and relativity effects became important.

Most metals had a silvery lustre. But not gold. And that was because of the strange high-speed phenomena Michael seemed intuitively to understand, relativity time dilation effects operating deep within the gold atoms themselves.

She took off her ring and put it on the balcony before her. The stars were reflected in its scuffed surface. She wondered what Michael had seen as he stared into her ring.

When she got back to the States she found Malenfant had found out about the accelerator project clearances, and had holed himself up at Fermilab … where Dan Ystebo claimed, almost immediately, to have results.

She flew straight on to Illinois.

New York Times:

From an unpromising grade school in a run-down neighbourhood at the heart of New York City has come what may prove to be the most striking example yet of the recent wave of brilliant children <backgrounder>.

A group of children here – average age just eight – seem to have come up with a proof of the mathematical statement called the Riemann hypothesis. This is concerned with the distribution of prime numbers <click for detail>. The hypothesis is something which generations of professional mathematicians have failed to crack – and yet it has opened up to a bunch of children, in a few weeks of their working together at the school in their lunch breaks.

The result has electrified, terrified, astonished, according to temperament. The children at this New York school are the first to attract serious attention as a potential national resource from the academic and business communities and the federal government.

And it has also become the first to require round-the-clock armed guards.

The news of this obscure mathematical result has crystallized the fear some people seem to be forming over these super-kids. Police were forced to head off a mob that marched out to the school: angry, scared, evidently with ugly intent, a mob that had even included some of the parents and older brothers and sisters of the children themselves …

Emma Stoney:

Fermilab turned out to be thirty-five miles west of Chicago, close to a town called Batavia. From the air Illinois was a vast emptiness, studded by lost-looking little towns. Disoriented, jetlagged, she glimpsed Fermilab itself, the perfect circle of the collider ring set amid green tallgrass prairie, presumably replanted.

She wasn’t sure what she had expected of a super-science lab like this. Something futuristic, maybe, a city of glass and platinum where steely-eyed men in white suits made careful notes on super-advanced softscreens. What she found was an oddly park-like campus littered by giant constructions, like the abandoned toys of some monster child.

This artificial landscape, the huge constructions, made a startling contrast with the bare bleakness of Africa. But the concrete was cracked and streaked with rust and mould. This was an ageing, underfunded place, she thought, a lingering dream of a more expansive age.

But here and there she saw the sleek, cool curves of the Tevatron itself, a three-mile-wide torus within which subatomic particles were accelerated to a substantial fraction of the speed of light.

The main hall was called Wilson Hall, a surreal sixteen-storey sculpture of two towers connected by criss-crossing bridges. Inside there was a gigantic atrium stocked with trees and shrubs. Malenfant was waiting for her there. There were black stress rings around his eyes, but he was agitated, excited. ‘What do you think? Quite a place –’

‘It’s a technocrat’s wet dream.’

‘They rebuilt the prairie afterwards, you know. They even have a herd of buffalo here.’

‘We’re not here for the buffalo, Malenfant. Shall we get this over?’

He grinned. ‘Wait until you see what we got here, babe.’

He led her deeper into the complex, and into the cramped and jumbled technical areas. She found herself squirming past gigantic, unrecognizable pieces of apparatus. There were steel racks everywhere, crammed with badly-packed electronic instrumentation, and cable bunches over the floor, walls and ceilings; in some places they were bridged by little wooden ladders. There was a smell of oil, shaved metal, cut wood, cleaning solvents and insulation, all overlaid by a constant clamouring metallic noise. There was none of the controlled cool and order she’d expected.

Malenfant brought her to what he called the muon laboratory. This was some way away from the accelerator ring itself; it seemed that beams of high-speed protons were drawn off from the ring and impacted into targets here.

And here they found Dan Ystebo, wearing a smeared white coat over a disreputable T-shirt, hunched over softscreens spread out on a trestle-table. The screens were covered with particle-decay images and charts of counts, none of which Emma could understand.

Dan’s broad face split into a grin. ‘Yo, Emma. Have you heard? …’

Malenfant said, ‘One step at a time. Tell her what you’re doing here, Dan.’

Dan took a breath. ‘Making neutrinos. We’re slamming the Tevatron’s protons into a target to make pions.’

‘Pions?’

‘A pion is a particle, a combination of a quark and its anti-quark, and it is unstable. Pions decay into, among other things, neutrinos. So we have our neutrino source. But it should also be a source of advanced neutrinos, neutrinos coming from the future, arriving in time to make our pions decay …’

‘Backward ripples,’ Emma said.

‘Exactly – hopefully modified, and containing some signal.’

‘How do you detect a neutrino?’

Malenfant grunted. ‘It isn’t easy. Neutrinos are useful to us in the first place because matter is all but transparent to them. But we have a full-scale neutrino detector: a ton of dense photographic emulsion, the stuff you use on a camera film. When charged particles travel through this shit they leave a trail, like a jet contrail.’

‘I thought neutrinos had no charge.’

‘They don’t,’ said Dan patiently. ‘So what you have to look for is a place where tracks come out but none go in. That’s where a Tevatron neutrino has hit some particle in our emulsion. You get it? You have a mass of counters and magnets downstream of the emulsion, and you measure the photons with a twenty-ton lead-glass detector array, and the results are stored on laser discs and analysed by the data acquisition software –’

He talked on, lapsing continually into jargon she couldn’t follow.

But then they started talking about the neutrinos themselves.

Neutrinos, it seemed, barely existed: no charge, no mass, just a scrap of energy with some kind of spooky quantum-mechanical spin, fleeing at the speed of light. Spinning ghosts indeed. Most of them had come out of the Big Bang – or the time just after, when the whole universe was a soup of hot subatomic particles. But neutrinos didn’t decay into anything else. And so there were neutrinos everywhere. All her life she would be immersed in a sea of neutrinos, a billion of them for every particle of ordinary matter, relics of that first millisecond.

At that thought she felt an odd tingle, as if she could feel the ancient, invisible fluid that poured through her.

Now humans had sent waves rippling over the surface of that transparent ocean. And the waves, it seemed, had come reflecting back.

Dan talked fast, as excited as she’d ever seen him. Malenfant watched, rigid with interest. ‘Essentially we’ve been producing millisecond neutrino pulses,’ Dan said. He produced a bar chart, a scrappy series of pillars, uneven in height. ‘Anyhow, up until yesterday, we were just picking up our own pulses, unmodified. Then – this.’

A new bar chart, showing a long series of many pulses. Some of the pulses, now, seemed to be missing, or were much reduced in size.

Dan picked out the gaps with a fat finger. ‘See? On average, these events seem to have around half the neutrino count of the others. So half the energy.’ He looked at Emma, trying to see if she understood. ‘This is exactly what we’d expect if somebody downstream has some way of suppressing the advanced-wave neutrinos. The apparent retarded neutrinos then would have only half the strength –’

‘But it’s such a small effect,’ Emma said. ‘You said yourself neutrinos are hard to detect. There must be other ways to explain this, without invoking beings from the future.’

‘That’s true,’ Dan said. ‘Though if this sustains itself long enough we’re going to be able to eliminate other causes. Anyhow, that’s not all. We have enough data now to show that the gaps repeat. In a pattern.’

Malenfant growled, ‘This is new to me. A repeating pattern. A signal?’

Dan rubbed his greasy hair. ‘I don’t see what else it could be.’

‘A signal,’ said Malenfant. ‘Damn. Then Cornelius was right.’

Emma felt cold, despite the metallic stuffiness of the chamber.

Dan produced a simplified summary of several periods of the pattern, a string of black circles and white circles. ‘Look at this. The blacks are full-strength pulses, the whites half-strength. You get a string of six white. Then a break of two black. Then an irregular pattern for twelve pulses. Then two black, six white, and a break. Then another set of twelve black-whites, “framed” by the two black and six white combination. I think we’re seeing delimiters around these two strings of twelve pulses. And this is what repeats: over and over. Sometimes there are minor differences, but we think that’s caused by the experimental uncertainty.’

Malenfant said, ‘If it’s a signal, what does it mean?’

Emma said, ‘Binary numbers. The signals are binary numbers.’

They both turned to her.

Malenfant said, ‘Huh? Binary numbers? Why?’

She smiled, exhausted, jetlag-disoriented. ‘Because signals like this always are.’

Dan was nodding. ‘Yes. Right. I should have thought of that. We have to learn to think like Cornelius. The downstreamers know us. Maybe they are us, our future selves. And they know we’ll expect binary.’ He grabbed a pad and scribbled out two strings of 1 and 0:

1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1

0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 0

He sat back. ‘There.’

Malenfant squinted. ‘What’s it supposed to be?’

Emma found herself laughing. ‘Maybe it’s a Carl Sagan picture. A waving downstreamer.’ Shut up, Emma.

‘No,’ Dan said. ‘It’s too simple for that. They have to be numbers.’ He cleared his softscreen and began tapping in a simple conversion program. After a couple of minutes, he had it running.

3 7 5 3

1 9 8 6

They stared. Malenfant said, ‘What do they mean?’

Dan began to feed the raw neutrino counts through his conversion program, and the converted signals – live, as they were received in the film-emulsion detector – scrolled steadily up the screen.

3 7 5 3

1 9 8 6

3 7 5 3

1 9 8 6

3 7 5 3

1 9 8 6

‘Someone should call Cornelius,’ Dan said. ‘And –’

Malenfant said, ‘What?’

‘We only ran for a week before we picked this up. How did the downstreamers know when we were ready, when to switch on?’

Malenfant grinned. ‘Because they already knew when we’d be here.’

Emma didn’t share his evident glee at this result.

She felt dwarfed. She imagined the world wheeling around her, spinning as it carried her through darkness around the sun, around the rim of the Galaxy – and the Galaxy itself sailing off to its own remote destination, stars glimmering like the windows of a great ocean liner …

Messages from the future. Could it be true? – that there were beings, far beyond this place and time, trying to signal to the past, to her, through this lashed-up physics equipment?

Was Cornelius right? Right about everything? Right, too, about the Carter catastrophe, the coming extinction of them all?

It couldn’t be true. It was insanity. An infection of schizophrenia from Cornelius, that was damaging them all.

Malenfant, of course, was hooked. She knew him well enough to understand he would be unable to resist this new adventure, wherever it took him.

And how, she wondered, was she going to be able to persuade him to do any work at all, after this?

3 7 5 3

1 9 8 6

3 7 5 3

1 9 8 6

…

Reid Malenfant:

The puzzle of the Feynman radio message nagged at Malenfant, even as he threw himself into his myriad other projects. He would write out the numbers on a pad, or have them scroll up on a softscreen. He tried taking the numbers apart: factorizing them, multiplying them, dividing one by the other.

He got nowhere.

Cornelius Taine was equally frustrated. He would call Malenfant at odd time-zoned hours. Mathematics, even numerology, must be the wrong approach.

‘Why?’

What do you know about math, Malenfant? Remember the nature of the signal we’re dealing with here. Remember that the downstreamers are trying to communicate with us – specifically, with you.

‘Me?’

Yes. You’re the decision-maker here. There has to be some simple meaning in these numbers for you. Just look at the numbers, Cornelius urged. Don’t think too hard. What do they look like?

1 9 8 6

3 7 5 3

‘Umm, 1986 could be a date.’

A date?

1986: the year of Challenger and Chernobyl, a first overseas posting for a young pilot called Reid Malenfant. ‘It wasn’t the happiest year in history, but nothing so special for me … Hey. Cornelius. Could 3753 also represent a date?’ His skin prickled. ‘The 38th century – Christ, Cornelius, maybe that’s the true date of the Carter catastrophe.’

Cornelius’s softscreen image, slightly blurred, showed him frowning. It’s possible, but any date after a couple of centuries is very unlikely. Anything else?

‘No. Keep thinking, Cornelius.’

Yes…

And Malenfant would roll up the softscreen and return to his work, or try to sleep.

Until the day came when Cornelius, in person, burst into a BDB project progress meeting.

It was an airless Portakabin at the Mojave test site. Malenfant was with George Hench, poring over test results and subcontractor signoffs. And suddenly there was Cornelius: hot, dishevelled, pink with sunburn, tie knot loosened, white gypsum staining his lower legs, clinging to the fabric of his suit pants.

Malenfant couldn’t keep from laughing. ‘Cornelius, at last I’ve seen you out of control.’

Cornelius was panting. ‘I have it. The numbers. The Feynman numbers. I figured it out, Malenfant. And it changes everything.’

Despite the heat of the day, Malenfant felt goosebumps rise on his bare arms.

He made Cornelius sit down, take his jacket off, drink some water.

Cornelius brusquely cleared clutter from the tabletop – battered softscreens, quality forms, a progress chart labelled with bars and arrows, old-fashioned paper blueprints, sandwich wrappers and beer cans – and he spread his own softscreen over the desk.

‘It was staring us in the face the whole time,’ Cornelius said. ‘I knew it had to be connected to you, Malenfant, to your interests. Your obsessions, even. And it had to be something you could act on now. And what –’ he waved a hand ‘– could be a grander obsession than this, your asteroid mission?’

George Hench paced around the room, visibly unhappy.

Cornelius glanced up at George. ‘Look, I’m sorry to disrupt your work.’

George glared. ‘Malenfant, do we have to put up with this bull?’

‘Whatever it is, it ain’t bull, George. I’ve seen the set-up –’

‘Malenfant, I spent my career fending off handwaving artistes like this guy. Colour co-ordinators. Feng Shui artists. Even astrologers, for Christ’s sake. Sometimes I think the US is going back to the Middle Ages.’

Malenfant said gently, ‘George, there was no US in the Middle Ages.’

‘Malenfant, we have a job to do here. A big job. We’re going to a fucking asteroid. All I’m saying is, you need to focus on what’s important here.’

‘I accept that, George. But I have to tell you I’ve come to believe there’s nothing so important as the downstreamers’ message. If it’s real.’

Oh, it’s real,’ Cornelius said fervently. ‘And what it means is that you’re going to have to redirect your mission.’ Cornelius eyed George. ‘Away from Reinmuth.’

George visibly bristled. ‘Now, you listen to me –’

Malenfant held up a hand. ‘Let’s hear him out, George.’

Cornelius tapped at his softscreen. ‘When I began to wonder if the numbers referred to an asteroid, I thought 1986 might be a discovery date. So I logged onto the Minor Planet Center in Massachusetts.’ A table of numbers and letters scrolled down the screen; the first column, of four digits and two letters, all began with ‘1986’. ‘This is a list of all the asteroids first reported in 1986. This first code is a provisional designation –’

‘What do the letters mean?’

‘The first shows the half-month when the asteroid was discovered. The second is the order of discovery in that half-month. So 1986AA is the first asteroid to be discovered in the first half of January, 1986.’

Malenfant eyed the numbers with dismay. ‘Shit. There must be dozens, just for 1986.’

‘More in later years; asteroid watches have got better …’

‘So which one is ours?’

Cornelius smiled and pointed to the second column. ‘As soon as enough observations have been accumulated to determine the asteroid’s orbit, it is given an official designation, a permanent number, and sometimes a name.’

The official numbers, Malenfant saw with growing excitement, were in the range 3700–3800. Cornelius scrolled down, until he came to a highlighted line.

1986TO 3753 0.484 1.512 0.089 ….

The key numbers jumped out at Malenfant. 1986 3753.

‘Holy shit,’ he said. ‘It’s there. It’s real.’

‘Not only that,’ said Cornelius. ‘This little baby, 1986TO, is like no other asteroid in the Solar System.’

‘How so?’

Cornelius smiled. ‘It’s Earth’s second Moon. And nobody knows how it got there.’

George Hench stomped out to ‘go bend some tin’, glaring at Cornelius as he did so.

Cornelius, unperturbed, called up more softscreen data and told Malenfant what little was known about asteroid number 3753.

‘3753 is not in the main belt. In fact, it’s a near-Earth object, like Reinmuth. What the astronomers call an Aten.’

Malenfant nodded. ‘So its orbit mostly lies inside Earth’s.’

‘It was discovered in Australia. Part of a routine sky watch run out of the Siding Springs observatory. Nobody’s done any careful spectral studies or radar studies. But we think it’s a C-type: a carbonaceous chondrite, not nickel-iron, like Reinmuth. Water ice, carbon compounds. It probably wandered in from the outer belt – far enough from the sun that it was able to keep its volatile ices and organics – or else it’s a comet core. Either way, we’re looking at debris left over since the formation of the Solar System. Unimaginably ancient.’

‘How big is it?’

‘Nobody knows for sure. Three miles wide is the best guess.’

‘Does this thing have a name?’

Cornelius smiled. ‘Cruithne.’ He pronounced it Crooth-knee. ‘An ancient Irish name. The ancestor of the Picts.’

Malenfant was baffled. ‘What does that have to do with Australia ?’

‘It could have been worse. There are asteroids named after spouses, pets, rock stars. The orbit of Cruithne is what made it worth naming.’ Cornelius pointed to numbers. ‘These figures show the asteroid’s perihelion, aphelion, eccentricity …’

Asteroid 3753 orbited the sun in a little less than an Earth year. But it did not follow a simple circular path, like Earth; instead it swooped in beyond the orbit of Venus, out further than Mars. ‘And,’ said Cornelius, ‘it has an inclined orbit …’ Cornelius’s diagrams showed 3753’s orbit as a jaunty ellipse, tipped up from the ecliptic, the main Solar System plane, like Frank Sinatra’s hat.

Malenfant considered this looping, out-of-plane trajectory. ‘So what makes it a moon of the Earth?’

‘Not a moon exactly. Call it a companion. The point is, its orbit is locked to Earth’s. A team of Canadian astronomers figured this out in 1997. Watch.’

Cornelius produced a display showing the orbits of Earth and Cruithne from a point of view above the Solar System. Earth, a blue dot, sailed evenly around the sun on its almost-circular orbit. By comparison, Cruithne swooped back and forth like a bird.

‘Suppose we follow the Earth. Then you can see how Cruithne moves in relation.’

The blue dot slowed and stayed in place. Malenfant imagined the whole image circling, one revolution for every Earth year.

Relative to the Earth, Cruithne swooped towards Venus – inside Earth’s orbit – and rushed ahead of Earth. But then it would sail out past Earth’s orbit, reaching almost to Mars, and slow, allowing Earth to catch up. Compared to Earth it traced out a kind of kidney-bean path, a fat, distorted ellipse sandwiched between the orbits of Mars and Venus.

In the next ‘year’ Cruithne retraced the kidney-bean – but not quite; the second bean was placed slightly ahead of the first.

Cornelius said, ‘Overall 3753 is going faster than the Earth around the sun. So it spirals ahead of us, year on year …’ He let the images run for a while. Cruithne’s orbit was a compound of the two motions. Every year the asteroid traced out its kidney bean. And over the years the bean worked its way along Earth’s orbit tracing out a spiral around the sun, anti-clockwise.

‘Now, what’s interesting is what happens when the kidney bean approaches Earth again.’

The traced-out bean worked its way slowly towards the blue dot. The bean seemed to touch the Earth. Malenfant expected it to continue its spiralling around the sun.

It didn’t. The kidney bean started to spiral in the opposite direction: clockwise, back the way it had come.

Cornelius was grinning. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? You see, there are resonances between Cruithne’s orbit and Earth’s. When it comes closest, Earth’s gravity tweaks Cruithne’s path. That makes Cruithne’s year slightly longer than Earth’s, instead of shorter, as it is now. So Earth starts to outstrip the kidney bean.’ He ran the animation forward. ‘And when it has spiralled all the way back to where it started –’ Another reversal. ‘Earth tweaks again, and makes Cruithne’s year shorter again – and the bean starts to spiral back.’

He accelerated the timescale further, until the kidney bean ellipses arced back and forth around the sun.

‘It’s quite stable,’ said Cornelius. ‘For a few thousand years at least. Remember a single kidney bean takes around a year to be traced out. So it’s a long time between reversals. The last were in 1515 and 1900; the next will be in 2285 and 2680 –’

‘It’s like a dance,’ said Malenfant. ‘A choreography.’

‘That’s exactly what it is.’

Although Cruithne crossed Earth’s orbit, its inclination and the tweaking effect kept it from coming closer than forty times the distance from Earth to Moon. Right now, Malenfant learned, the asteroid was a hundred times the Earth-Moon distance away.

After a time Malenfant’s attention began to wander. He felt obscurely disappointed. ‘So we have an orbital curiosity. I don’t see why it’s so important you’d send a message back in time.’

Cornelius rolled up his softscreen. ‘Malenfant, NEOs – near-Earth objects – don’t last forever. The planets pull them this way and that, perturbing their orbits. Maybe they hit a planet, Earth or Venus or even Mars. Even if not, a given asteroid will be slingshot out of the Solar System in a few million years.’

‘And so –’

‘And so we have plausible mechanisms for how Cruithne could have been formed, how it could have got into an orbit close to Earth’s. But this orbit, so finely tuned to Earth’s, is unlikely. We don’t know how Cruithne could have got there, Malenfant. It’s a real needle-threader.’

Malenfant grinned. ‘And so maybe somebody put it there.’

Cornelius smiled. ‘We should have known. We shouldn’t have needed a signal from the downstreamers, Malenfant. That Earth-locked orbit is a red flag. Something is waiting for us, out there on Cruithne.’

‘What?’

‘I have absolutely no idea.’

‘So now what?’

‘Now, we send a probe there.’

Malenfant called back George Hench. The engineer prowled around the office like a caged animal.

‘We can’t fly to this piece of shit, Cruithne. Even if we could reach it, which we can’t, Cruithne is a ball of frozen mud.’

‘Umm,’ Cornelius said. ‘More to it than that. We’re looking at a billion tons of water, silicates, metals, and complex organics – aminos, nitrogen bases … Even Mars isn’t as rich as this, pound for pound. It’s the primordial matter, the stuff they made the Solar System out of. Maybe you should have planned to fire the probe at a C-type in the first place.’

Malenfant said evenly, ‘George, it’s true. We can easily make an economic case for Cruithne –’

‘Malenfant, Reinmuth is made of steel. My God, it gleams. And you want to risk all that for a wild goose chase with your la-la buddy?’

Malenfant let George run on, patiently. Then he said, ‘Tell me why we can’t get to Cruithne. It’s just another NEO. I thought the NEOs were easier to reach than the Moon, and we got there forty years ago.’

George sighed, but Malenfant could see his brain switching to a different mode. ‘Yeah. That’s why the space junkies have been campaigning for the NEOs for years. But most of them don’t figure the correct energy economics. Yes, if you look at it solely in terms of delta-vee, if you just add up the energy you need to spend to get out of Earth’s gravity well there are a lot of places easier to get to than the Moon. But you need to go a chart deeper than that. Your NEO’s orbit has to be very close to Earth’s: in the same plane, nearly circular, and with almost the same radius. Now, Reinmuth’s orbit is close to Earth’s. Of course it means that Reinmuth doesn’t line up for low-energy missions very often; the orbits are like two clocks running slightly adrift of each other –’

‘So tell me,’ Malenfant said heavily, ‘why Cruithne is so much more difficult.’

George ticked the problems off on his fingers. ‘Cruithne is twenty degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic. Plane changes are very energy-expensive. That’s why the Apollo guys landed close to the Moon’s equator. Two. Cruithne’s orbit is highly eccentric. So we can’t use the low-energy Hohmann trajectories we employ to transfer from one circular orbit to another, for instance in travelling from Earth to Mars. Changes to elliptic orbits are also energy-expensive. Three –’

Malenfant listened a while longer.

‘So you’ve stated the problem,’ said Malenfant patiently. ‘Now tell me how we do it.’

There was more bluster and bullshit and claims of impossibility, which Malenfant weathered.

And then it began.

George produced mass statements for the BDB and its payload, began to figure the velocity changes he would need to reach Cruithne, how much less manoeuvring capability he would have, how much less payload he could carry there compared to Reinmuth. Then he began calling in an array of technicians, all of whom started just as sceptical as himself, most of whom, in the end, were able to figure a reply. They called up Dan Ystebo at Key Largo to ask him how little living room his pet squid really, truly could survive in. Dan was furious, but he came back with answers.

It took most of the day. Slowly, painfully, a new mission design converged. Malenfant only had to sit there and let it happen, as he knew it would.

But there was a problem.

The present spacecraft design packed enough life support to take Sheena 5 to Reinmuth, support her work there, and bring her home again: she was supposed to come sailing into Earth’s atmosphere, behind a giant aeroshell of asteroid slag.

But there was no way a comparable mission to Cruithne could be achieved.

There was a way to meet the mission’s main objectives, however. In fact it would be possible to get Sheena to Cruithne much more rapidly.

By cutting her life support, and burning everything up on the way out.

For Sheena, a Cruithne voyage would be one way.

Emma Stoney:

From Emma’s perspective, sitting in her office in Vegas, everything was starting to fall apart.

The legalistic vultures were hovering over Malenfant and his toy spaceships, and meanwhile the investors, made distrustful by rumours of Malenfant’s growing involvement with bizarre futurian types, were starting to desert.

If Malenfant had made himself more available, more visible to shore up confidence, it might have made a difference. But he didn’t. Right through Christmas and into the New Year Malenfant remained locked away with Cornelius Taine, or holed up at his rocket test site.

It seemed to Emma events were approaching a climax. But still Malenfant wouldn’t listen to her.

So Emma went to the Mojave.

Emma stayed the night in a motel in the town of Mojave itself. She was profoundly uncomfortable, and slept little.

Her transport arrived before dawn. It was an Army bus. When she climbed aboard, George Hench was waiting for her. He had a flask of coffee and a bagel. ‘Breakfast,’ he said. She accepted gratefully; the coffee was industrial strength, but welcome.

The other passengers were young engineers, trying to sleep with their heads jammed in corners by the windows.

The drive out to the BDB test site was dull but easy. The sun had risen, the heat climbing, by the time they hit the thirty-mile road to Malenfant’s BDB launch complex – or launch simplex, as he liked to call it.

Hench jammed open the bus window. ‘Natural air conditioning,’ he said, cackling.

She glanced back. One or two of the youngsters behind them stirred.

Hench shrugged. ‘They’ll sleep.’

At the site the bus passed through the security fence and pulled over, and Emma climbed down cautiously. The light glared from the sand that covered everything, and the heat was a palpable presence that struck at her, sucking the moisture from her flesh.

The test site had grown. There were a lot more structures, a lot more activity even at this hour of the morning. But it was nothing like Cape Canaveral.

There were hardly any fixed structures at all. The place had the air of a construction site. There were trailers scattered over the desert, some sprouting antennae and telecommunications feeds. There weren’t even any fuel tanks that she could see, just fleets of trailers, frost gleaming on their tanks. People – engineers, most of them young – moved to and fro, their voices small in the desert’s expanse, their hard hats gleaming like insect carapaces.

And there was the pad itself, the centre of attention, maybe a mile from where she stood, bearing the Nautilus: Bootstrap’s first interplanetary ship, Reid Malenfant’s pride and joy. She saw the lines of a rust-brown Shuttle external tank and 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, she knew, a Caribbean reef squid, disoriented as all hell, would some day ride into space.

Hench said gruffly, ‘I’ll tell you, Ms Stoney –’

‘Emma.’

‘Working with those kids has been the best part of this whole damn project, for me. You know, these kids today come out of graduate school, and they are real whizzes with Computer Aided This and That, and they do courses in science theory and math and software design … but they don’t get to bend tin. Not only that, they’ve never seen anything fail before. In engineering, experience gained is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined. No wonder this country has fallen behind in every sphere that counts. Well, here they’ve had to build stuff, to budget and schedule. Some of the kids were scared off. But those that remained flourished …’

And here came Malenfant. He was wearing beat-up overalls – he even had a spanner in a loop at his waist – and his face and hands and scalp were covered in white dust patches. He bent to kiss her, and she could feel gritty sand on her cheek.

‘So what do you think of Nautilus? Isn’t she beautiful?’

‘Kind of rough and ready.’

Malenfant laughed. ‘So she’s supposed to be.’

An amplified voice drifted across the desert from the launch pad.

‘What was that?’

Hench shrugged. ‘Just a checklist item.’

‘You’re going through a checklist? A launch checklist?’

Malenfant said, ‘Demonstration test only. We’re planning two tests today. We’ve done it a dozen times, already. Later today we’ll even have that damn squid of Dan Ystebo’s up in the payload pod, on top of a fully fuelled ship. We’re ready. And Cruithne is up there waiting for us. And who knows what lies beyond that. As soon as you can clear away the legal bullshit –’

‘We’re working on it, Malenfant.’

Malenfant took her for a walk around the booster pad, eager to show off his toy. Malenfant and Hench, obviously high on stress and adrenaline, launched into war stories about how they’d built their rocket ship. ‘… The whole thing is a backyard rocket. It has Space Shuttle engines, and an F-15 laser gyro set and accelerometer, and the autopilot and avionics from a MD-11 airliner. In fact the BDB thinks it’s an MD-11 on a peculiar flight path. We sent the grad school kids scouring through the West Coast aerospace junkyards, and they came back with titanium pressure spheres and hydraulic actuators and other good stuff. And so on. Assembled and flight-ready in six months …’

He seemed to know every one of the dozens of engineers here by name. He was, by turns, manipulative, bullying, brutal, overbearing. But he was, she thought, always smart enough to ensure he wasn’t surrounded by sycophants and yea-sayers.

Maybe that’s why he keeps me on.

‘How safe is all this, Malenfant? What if the ship blows up, or a fuel store –’

He sighed. ‘Emma, my BDBs will blow up about as often as a 747 blows up on take-off. The industries have been handling LOX and liquid hydrogen safely for half a century. In fact I can prove we’re safe. We’ve kept the qual and reliability processes as simple as possible – no hundred-mile NASA paper chains – and we put the people on the ground in charge of their own quality. Qual upfront, the only way to do it.’ He looked into the sun, and the light caught the dust plastered over his face, white lines etched into the weather-beaten wrinkles of his face. ‘You know, this is just the beginning,’ he said. ‘Right now this is Kitty Hawk. You got to start somewhere. But some day this will be a true spaceport.’

‘Like Cape Canaveral?’

‘Oh, hell, no. Think of an airport. You’ll have concrete launch pads with minimal gantries, so simple we don’t care if we have to rebuild them every flight. We’ll have our own propellant and oxidizer manufacture facilities right here. The terminal buildings will be just like JFK or O’Hare. They’ll build new roads out here, better rail links. The spaceport will be an airport too. We’ll attract industries, communities. People will live here …’

But she heard tension in his voice, under the bubbling faith. She’d gotten used to his mood swings, which seemed to her to have begun around the time he was washed out of NASA. But today his mood was obviously fragile, and, with a little push, liable to come crashing apart.

The legal battle wasn’t won yet. Far from it. In fact, Emma thought, it was more like a race, as Bootstrap lawyers sought to find a way through the legal maze that would allow Malenfant to launch, or at least keep testing, before the FAA inspectors and their lawyers found a way to get access to this site and shut everything down.

Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow I have to confront him with the truth. The fact that we’re losing the race.

As the sun began to climb down the blue dome of sky, Emma requested an Army bus ride back to her motel in Mojave. There she pulled the blinds and spread out her softscreen. She fired off mails, ate room service junk, tried to sleep.

… The phone rang, jarring her awake. It was Malenfant.

Go to your window.

‘What?’

I’m simplifying a few bureaucratic processes, Emma.

He sounded a little drunk. And dangerous. She felt a cold chill settle at the pit of her stomach. ‘What are you talking about?’

Go to the window and you’ll see. I’ve been talking to Cornelius about Doctor Johnson. Once Johnson was asked how he would refute solipsism. You know, the idea that only you exist, all else is an illusion constructed by your mind …

She opened her shutters. In the direction of the test range, a light was spreading over the bottom half of the sky: a smeared yellow-white rising fast, not like a dawn.

Johnson kicked a rock. And he said, ‘I refute it thus’…

Oh, Malenfant. What have you done?’

They came to shut me down, Emma. We lost the race with those FAA assholes. One of those smart kids of George’s turned out to be an FBI plant. The inspectors arrived … They would have drained the Nautilus and broken her up. And then we’d never have reached Cruithne. I decided it was time to kick that rock. Emma, you should see the dust we’re raising!

And now a spark of light rose easily from the darkened horizon, climbing smoothly into the sky. It was yellow-white, like a fleck of sunlight, and it trailed a pillar of smoke and steam that glowed in the light spark.

She knew what that was, of course. The yellow-white was the burning of the solid propellents of the twin boosters, half-combusted products belching into the air; the central hydrogen-oxygen main engine flame was almost invisible. Already, she could see, the arc of the climbing booster was turning east, towards the trajectory that would take it off the planet.

And now the noise arrived, rocket thunder, billowing over her like the echo of a distant storm.

This is just the beginning, Malenfant whispered.

2

DOWNSTREAM

And so some day

The mighty ramparts of the mighty universe

Ringed around with hostile force

Will yield and face decay and come crumbling to ruin …

– LUCRETIUS

Sheena 5:

Drifting between worlds, the spacecraft was a miniature planet, a bubble of ocean just yards across.

The water was sufficient to protect its occupants from cosmic and solar radiation. And the water sustained concentric shells of life: a mist of diatoms feeding off the raw sunlight, and within them, in the deeper blue water, a shell of krill and crustaceans and small fish schools, hunting and browsing.

And, at the centre of it all, a single enhanced cephalopod.

… Here was Sheena, swimming through space.

Space: yes, she understood what that meant, that she was no longer in the wide oceans of Earth, but in a small, self-contained ocean of her own that drifted through emptiness, a folded-over ocean she shared only with the darting fish and the smaller, mindless animals and plants on which they browsed.

She glided at the heart of the Nautilus, where the water that passed through her mantle, over her gills, was warmest, richest. The core machinery, the assemblage of devices that maintained life here, was a black mass before her, suspended in dark water, lights winking over its surface, weeds and grasses clinging to it. Sheena saw no colours; she swam through a world of black, white and grey. But she could discern polarized light; and so now she saw that the light which gleamed from the polished surfaces of the machinery was subtly twisted, this way and that, giving her a sense of the solidity and extent of the machinery.

When the ship’s roll took her into shadow, she hunted and browsed.

She would rest on the sand patches that had been stuck to the metal, changing her mantle colour so as to be almost invisible. When the fish or the krill came by, all unawares, she would dart out and snatch them, crushing them instantly in her hard beak, ignoring their tiny cries.

Such simple ambushes were sufficient to feed her, so confused did the fish and krill appear in this new world which lacked up and down and gravity. But sometimes she would hunt more ambitiously, luring and stalking and pursuing, as if she was still among the rich Caribbean reefs.

But all too soon the ship’s languid roll brought her into the light, and brief night gave way to false day.

Rippling her fins, she swam away from the machinery cluster, away from the heart of the ship, where she lived with her shoals of fish. As she rose the water flowing through her mantle cooled, the rich oxygen thinning. She was swimming out through layers of life, and she sensed the subtle sounds of living things washing through the sphere: the smooth rush of the fish as they swam in their tight schools, the bubbling murmur of the krill on which they browsed, and the hiss of the diatoms and algae which fed them, and the deep infrasonic rumble of the water itself, compression waves pulsing through its bulk.

And just as each successive sphere of water was larger than the one it contained, so Sheena knew there was a hierarchy of life. To sustain her, there had to be ten times her weight in krill, and a hundred times in diatoms.

And if there had been other squid, of course, those numbers would increase. But there was no other squid here but herself.

For now.

She could see, through misty, life-laden water, the ship’s hull, a membrane above her like an ocean surface. Except that it wasn’t above her, as it would be in a true ocean. And there was no sandy ocean floor below. Instead the membrane was all around her, closed on itself, shimmering in great slow waves that curled around the sphere’s belly.

This was self-evidently a complex world, a curved world, a world without the simple top and bottom of the ocean; and the light was correspondingly complex, its polarization planes random, or else spiralling down around her.

But Sheena hunted in three dimensions. She could come to terms with all this strangeness. She knew she must, in fact.

She reached the wall of the ship.

The membrane was a firm, if flexible, wall. If she pushed at it, it pushed back. Human eyes could see that the wall was tinted gold. Dan had told her how beautiful this great golden egg had been in the skies of Earth, as it receded to the stars. Sheena ship good pretty, he said. Like Earth. Ship people see, gold bubble, ship of water …

Grass algae grew on the wall, their long filaments dangling and wafting in the currents. Crabs and shellfish grazed on the grass algae. The benthic grazers helped feed her, and in the process kept the walls clean.

Every creature in this small ocean had a part to play. Here, for instance, she drifted past a floating bank of seaweed. The seaweed cleaned the water, and used up drifting food that the algae and diatoms could not consume. And the seaweed was useful in itself. One of Sheena’s jobs was to gather the weed, when it grew too thick, and deliver it to a hopper in the machinery cluster. There it could be spun into fibres that Dan called sea silk. The sea silk would be used when she got to her destination, to make and repair the equipment she would use there.

Now the ship’s slow rotation carried Sheena into the light of a milky, blurred disc. It was the sun – dimmed by the membrane so it did not hurt her eyes – with, near it, a smaller crescent. That, she knew, was the Earth, all its great oceans reduced to a droplet. The craft scooted around the sun after Earth like a fish swimming after its school, seeking the rock that was the target for this mission.

Once, swimming under the arching membrane like this, she had been startled by a starburst of light, only a few moments’ swim from her. It had disappeared as soon as it had occurred – but it seemed to her that there was a flaw in the membrane, a small patch that had lost its lustrous glow; and she could see from the muddled polarization how the composition of the water had been disturbed beneath the flaw.

Then she had seen something moving, outside the membrane. She cowered, flashed signals of false threat and concealment, thinking it was some deep space predator.

It was no predator. It was just a box that squirted back and forth, emitting gentle little farts of glittering crystals. It was pulling a patch over the hole.

Dan told her it was a firefly robot, a smart little box with its own power supply and fuel and miniaturized machinery and cameras and machine intelligence. The ship carried a shoal of these small craft for external inspection and repairs like this.

But the little craft’s life was limited, intended for a single use only, and it could achieve only one thing, which was to fix the membrane – unlike Sheena, who could do many different things. When its job was done, its fuel expended, the craft neatly folded away its tool-bearing arms, and used the last breath of its fuel to push itself away from the ship. Sheena had watched as the little craft, discarded, dwindled to a sunlit point.

She had learned that her ship leaked all the time anyway, from tiny flaws and miniature punctures. And every few days the throwaway robots would scuttle over the membrane, tracking the vapour clouds, fixing the worst of the leaks, before sacrificing themselves.

She let the lazy, whale-like roll of the ship carry her away from the glare of the sun, and she peered into the darkness, where she could see the stars.

The stars were important. She had been trained to recognize many of them. When she had memorized their positions around the ship she would return to the machinery cluster and work the simple controls Dan had given her. By this means she could determine her position in space far more accurately than even Dan could have, from far-off Earth.

Then the rockets would flare, sending hails of exhaust particles shooting into space. They would push at the hide of the ship like a squid shoving at the belly of a whale. Waves, flaring with light, pulsed back and forth across the meniscus, illuminating the drifting clouds of algae, and Sheena could detect the subtle wash of gravity around her as the great mass of water was nudged back to its proper trajectory.

But to Sheena the stars were more than navigation beacons. Sheena’s eyes had a hundred times the number of receptors of human eyes, and she could see a hundred times as many stars.

To Sheena the universe was crowded with stars, vibrant and alive. The Galaxy was a reef of stars beckoning her to come jet along its length.

But there was only Sheena here to see it.

She found it hard to rest.

Sheena was utterly alone. Though she knew there were no predators here, that she was as safe as any squid had ever been, she could not rest: not without the complex protection of the shoal around her, its warnings and sentinels. And, of course, without the shoal she was cut off from the society of the squid, the mating and learning and endless dances of daylight.

Dan had provided a kind of dream shoal for her: squid-like shapes that swam and jetted around her, glimmering. But the polarization of the light from their false hides was subtly wrong, and the fake shoal was no comfort. She was surprised Dan had not understood.

As the mission progressed, as she grew progressively more weary, her loyalty to Dan crumbled, grain by grain.

e-CNN:

… And we return to our main story, the developing crisis around the illegal space launch by the Bootstrap corporation from their Mojave facility. It has become clear that the authorities, far from granting the approvals Bootstrap is seeking, were in fact moving to close down the operation completely. Joe …

… Thanks, Madeleine. We do know that Cruithne was not the original target of Reid Malenfant’s interplanetary ambitions. Originally he was planning to head for Reinmuth, another asteroid that is much richer in metals than Cruithne. So, why Cruithne?

It’s now emerged, from sources inside Bootstrap itself, that in recent months Malenfant has become convinced that the world itself may be coming to an end. And this global doom is somehow linked to asteroid Cruithne. What are we to make of this remarkable twist in this spectacular story?

We’ve been trying to determine if there is more to Malenfant’s fears about the future than mere paranoia. It is said there are respectable scientists who claim that it is a statistical fact that the world will end, taking all of us with it, in just a few centuries. Apparently this has been known in government circles since the 1980s. Again the Administration declined to comment. Madeleine …

Joe, Reid Malenfant, fifty-one, is highly charismatic and popular. Since the announcement of his interplanetary venture he has become something of a cult figure. In fact last year’s best-selling Christmas toys were models of Bootstrap’s so-called Big Dumb Booster, along with action figures and animated holograms of the intelligent squid crew, and even of Reid Malenfant himself.

But, while undoubtedly an attractive figure, Malenfant has long been regarded by commentators as an unstable personality.

However Bootstrap spokespersons are saying this is all scurrilous rumour put out by enemies of Reid Malenfant, perhaps within his own corporation …

John Tinker:

Yes, they threw me out of the Flying Mountain Society. Screw them.

And screw Reid Malenfant. Malenfant is a wimp.

Yes, he got his bird off the ground. But to continue to launch with 1940s-style chemical rockets is at best a diversion, at worst a catastrophic error.

People, you can’t lift diddley into space by burning chemicals.

There has been a solution on the drawing boards since the 1960s. Project Orion.

You take a big plate, attach it by shock-absorbers to a large capsule, and throw an atomic bomb underneath.

Your ship will move, believe me.

Then you throw another bomb, and another.

For an expenditure of a small part of the world’s nuclear stockpile you could place several million pounds in orbit.

I believe in the dream. I believe we should aim to lift a billion people into space by the end of the century. This is the only way to establish a population significant enough to build a genuine spacegoing industry infrastructure – and, incidentally, the only way to lift off enough people to make a dent in the planet’s population problem.

Yes, this will cause some fallout. But not much, compared to what we already added to the background radiation. What’s the big deal?

Malenfant is right; we are facing a crisis over the survival of the species. Hard times make for hard choices. Omelettes and eggs, people.

Anyhow, those bombs aren’t going to go away. If America doesn’t use them, somebody else will …

Art Morris:

My name is Art Morris and I am forty years old. I am a Marine, or used to be until I got disabled out.

My most prized possession is a snapshot of my daughter, Leanne.

In the snap she’s at her last birthday party, just five years old, in a splash of Florida sunshine. The snap’s one of those fancy modern ones that can show you movement, and it cycles through a few seconds of Leanne blowing at her cake. And it has a soundtrack. If you listen under the clapping and whoops of the family and the other kids, you can just hear her wheeze as she took her big breath. What you can’t see off the edge of the picture is me, just behind Leanne’s shoulder, taking a blow myself to make sure those damn candles did what she wanted them to do, making sure that something in her world worked, just once.

It wasn’t long after that that we had to put her into the ground. I didn’t understand half of what the doctors told me was wrong with her, but I got the headline.

She was a yellow baby, a space baby, a rocket baby.

Maybe by now she would have been one of these smart kids the news is full of. But she never got the chance.

I rejoiced when they shut down the space program. But now those assholes in the desert have started firing off their damn rockets again, regardless.

I keep Leanne’s picture taped to the dash of my car, or in my pocket.

Look what you did, Reid Malenfant.

Reid Malenfant:

Madame Chairman, this is not some wacko stunt. It is a sound business venture.

Here’s the plan from here on in.

Cruithne is a ball of loosely aggregated dirt: probably eighty per cent silicates, sixteen per cent water, two per cent carbon, two per cent metals. This is an extraordinarily rich resource.

Our strategy is to aim for the simplest technologies, fast return, fast payback.

The first thing we’re going to make up on Cruithne is rocket fuel. The fuel will be a methane-oxygen bipropellant.

Then we’ll start bagging up permafrost water from the asteroid, along with a little unprocessed asteroid material. We’ll use the propellant to start firing water back to Earth orbit – specifically, a type of orbit called HEEO, a highly eccentric Earth orbit, which in terms of accessibility is a good compromise place to store extraterrestrial materials.

Thus we will build a pipeline from Cruithne to Earth orbit.

This will not be a complex operation. The methane rockets are based on tried and trusted Pratt and Whitney designs. The cargo carriers will be little more than plastic bags wrapped around big dirty ice cubes.

But in HEEO this water will become unimaginably precious. We can use it for life support and to make rocket fuel. We think Nautilus should be able to return enough water to fuel a further twenty to fifty NEO exploration missions, at minimal incremental cost. This is one measure of the payback we’re intending to achieve. Also we can sell surplus fuel to NASA.

But we are also intending to trial more complex extraction technologies on this first flight. With suitable engineering, we can extract not just water but also carbon dioxide, nitrogen, sulphur, ammonia, phosphates – all the requirements of a life support system. We will also be able to use the asteroid dirt to make glass, fibreglass, ceramics, concrete, dirt to grow things in.

We are already preparing a crewed follow-up mission to Cruithne which will leverage this technology to establish a colony, the first colony off the planet. This will be self-sufficient, almost from day one.

And the colonists will pay their way by further processing the Cruithne dirt to extract its metals. The result will be around ninety per cent iron, seven per cent nickel, one per cent cobalt, and traces. The trace, however, includes platinum, which may be the first resource returned to the surface of the Earth; nickel and cobalt will probably follow.

(Incidentally I’m often asked why I’m going to the asteroids first, rather than the Moon. The Moon seems easier to get to, and is much bigger than any asteroid besides. Well, the slag that is left over after we extract the water and volatiles and metals from asteroid ore – the stuff we’d throw away – that slag is about equivalent to the richest Moon rocks. That’s why I ain’t going to the Moon.)

Later we’ll start the construction of a solar power plant in Earth orbit. The high-technology components of the plant, such as guidance, control, communications, power conversion and microwave transmission systems, will be assembled on Earth. The massive low-tech components – wires, cables, girders, bolts, fixtures, station-keeping propellants and solar cells – will all be manufactured in space from asteroid materials. This plan reduces the mass that will have to be lifted into Earth orbit several-fold. This plant will produce energy – safe, clean, pollution-free – we can sell back to Earth.

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