Phase Space (35 page)

I come from enterprising stock. One of my ancestors made a fortune hauling bauxite on twenty-mule trains out of Death Valley. He also got himself killed, however. Another ancestor was one of the first in the Texas oil fields. And so on.

We lost all the money, of course, long before I was born. But we’re a family with one hell of a tradition.

But when I grew up we were rattling around in a box, with no place to go.

I served in the Army. I studied astronomy. I tried to figure an angle: some place out there the Russians and Chinese hadn’t got locked up yet.

Finally I settled on the Trojans: little bunches of asteroids outside the main belt, sixty degrees ahead of and behind Jupiter, shepherded by gravity effects. The density of the rocks there is actually greater than in the main belt.

Not only that, the asteroids out there are different from the ones in the belt, which are lumps of basalt and metal. The Trojans are carbonaceous: that is, coated in carbon compounds. And they have water.

And nobody had been out there, ever.

I started to raise money.

My ship, when assembled, was a stack of boxes fifty metres long. At its base was a big pusher plate, mounted on shock absorbers. Around that there were fuel magazines and superconducting hoops. There were big solar-cell wings stuck on the sides.

The drive was a fusion-pulse pusher. It worked by shooting pellets of helium-3 and deuterium out back of the craft, behind the pusher plate, and firing carbon dioxide lasers at them. Each fusion pulse lasts two hundred and fifty nanoseconds. And then another, and another: three hundred microexplosions each second. My acceleration was three per cent of G.

My hab module was just a box, with a reconditioned Russian-design closed-loop life support, and an exercise bicycle.

It was a leaky piece of shit. For instance I watched the engineers fix up a ding in a reaction-control thruster fuel line with Kevlar and epoxy, the way you’d repair your refrigerator. I spent as little as I could on my ship, and a lot on my suit, which is a Japanese design. I called it my fubar suit, my safety option of last resort.

In the event, I was glad to have it.

I was looking at an eighteen-day trip to the Trojans.

I said goodbye to the investors, all of whom had bought a piece of my ass at no risk to themselves. I said goodbye to my daughter. That was hard. I’d said goodbye to her father long before.

I called my ship the
Malenfant,
after that great explorer. I wasn’t exploring, of course, but I always had a little romance in my soul, I think.

When I left Earth orbit, the glow of my drive turned Pacific night into day.

On her second day, she woke up a spindly-legged girl almost as tall, already, as her mother. She spent as long as she could in the water, dragging at the algae. They all did, most of the time.

There was never enough to eat. Sometimes the algae was so thin she could barely taste it sticking to her fingers. She was hungry, the whole time, and she kept on growing.

Her brother touched her shoulder. ‘Get out,’ he said. His name was Sun Eyes.

‘What?’

He took her hand and pulled her from the river. Everybody else was clambering up the curving bank too.

Something was approaching, under the surface of the water, from the darkness at the end of the hall. Something big and sleek and powerful, that churned the water.

Green Wave was one of a row of skinny naked people, waiting by the edge of the water. ‘What is it?’

Sun Eyes shrugged. ‘It’s a Worker.’

‘What’s a Worker?’

‘One of those.’

A lot of her questions were answered like that.

The river wasn’t really a river, more a long, stagnant pond. The Workers, coming by once or twice a day, stirred up the liquid. Maybe it was good for the algae, Green Wave speculated.

Anyhow, when a Worker came along, the people had to get out of the way.

As soon as it had gone, she joined the rush to splash back into the water. But the algae was thinner than before.

‘The Workers take away the algae,’ said Sun Eyes.

‘Why? Can’t they see we’re hungry?’

Sun Eyes shrugged.

‘I don’t like the Workers,’ said Green Wave.

Sun Eyes laughed at her.

The facts of her life were these:

This place was called Finger Hall. It was a cylinder, roofed over by some material that allowed in a dim, murky light during the short day. The river ran down its length. The Hall was maybe ten times as tall as an adult human.

The Hall, it was said, was one of five – five Fingers, in fact, lying parallel. The Halls were joined at one end by a big cavern, as her own fingers were joined at her hand. Her mother said she saw this Palm Cavern once, early in her life, three or four days ago. Her brother had never left Finger Hall.

The only drink was river water. The only food was river algae.

That day, her brother spent a lot of time with a girl. And there was a boy, Churning Wake, who started paying attention to Green Wave. He even brought her handfuls of algae, the only gift he had.

This was her second day. On the third, she came to understand, she would be expected to pair with somebody. Maybe this kid Churning Wake. She would have a baby of her own on the third or fourth day, maybe another.

And on the fifth day –

Her mother was five days old. She was thin, bent, her breasts empty sacks of flesh. Green Wave brought her algae handfuls.

An old man died. His children grieved, then carried his body to the edge of the water. He had been seven days old.

Soon a Worker clambered out of the water. It was a wide, fat disc, half the height of an adult, and its rim was studded with jointed limbs.

The Worker cut up the body of the old man, snip snip, into bloodless pieces. It loaded the chunks of corpse into a hatch on its back, and then closed itself up and slid smoothly back into the water.

‘Why did it do that?’ Green Wave asked.

‘I don’t know,’ her mother said. She was wheezing. ‘You have a lot of questions, Green Wave. His name was Purple Glow, because on the day he was born –’

‘Is that it? We’re born, we eat algae, we die? In
seven days
? Is that all there is?’

‘We care for each other. We tell the children stories.’

‘I don’t like it here.’

Her mother laughed, weakly. ‘Where else is there?’

I spent the first week throwing up, and drinking banana-flavoured rehydration fluids.

The sun turned to a shrunken yellow disc, casting long shadows. Even Jupiter was just a point of light, about as remote from me as from Earth.

There wasn’t a human being within millions of miles. A hell of a feeling.

I found it hard to sleep, listening to the rattles and bangs of my Russian life support. I wore my fubar suit the whole time.

I’d aimed for the largest Trojan, called 624 Hektor. At first it was just a starlike point, but it pulsed in brightness as I watched it. When I got a little closer, I could make out its shape.

624 Hektor:
take two big handfuls of Moon, complete with craters and dusty maria. Mould them into egg-shapes, each a hundred miles long. Now touch them together, sharp end to sharp end, and let them rotate, like one almighty peanut.

That’s 624 Hektor.

Nobody knows for sure how it got that way. Maybe there was a collision between two normal asteroids which produced a loosely consolidated, fragmented cloud of rubble, which then deformed into this weird compound configuration: two little worlds, made egg-shaped by their mutual attraction, joined in a soft collision.

It was exhilarating to see something no human had witnessed before. For a while, it was as if I really was Reid Malenfant. I sent a long radio letter to my kid, telling her what I could see.

Maybe that will be the last she’ll hear of my voice. Because I was still sightseeing when everything fell apart.

I don’t know what went wrong. It happened too fast. My best guess is my reaction-control system, little peroxide thrusters, was misaligned. I remembered that ding in the fuel line –

I came in too fast. I tried to turn. I even restarted the fusion pulse drive, but it wasn’t enough.

One of the spinning mountains came sweeping up, inexorable, to swat the
Malenfant
like a fly.

Before the impact, I closed up my fubar suit and bailed out.

The solar panels crumpled, and I saw cells tumble away, little black discs the size of my palm. When my hab module hit it cracked open right down a leaky Russian weld. The drive unit kept working, for a while; it lurched away from the surface, spinning crazily. Other fragments were bounced off the surface, the gravity too low to make them stick: pieces of my ship, scattering into trans-Jovian space.

It took a long time for 624 Hektor to reel me in.

I landed like a dust mote. My boots crunched on lightly-compacted regolith. It felt like loose snow.

I walked towards the wreck. The gravity was so low I kept tumbling away from the ground, as if I was suspended on some huge bungee cord.

Malenfant
was fubar, as we used to say in the Army: fucked up beyond all recognition. Just as well I had my fubar suit, I thought.

The stars wheeled around me.

The next day it was her mother’s turn.

Green Wave, three days old, was an adult herself now, and her growing pains had diminished. Not her hunger, though. And not her anger.

She stood with Churning Wake at the edge of the water, over her mother’s body. ‘Why does it have to be like this?’

‘It just is,’ said Churning Wake.

‘But she lived only a few days. In two, three, four days, it will be your turn, Churning Wake. And mine. It isn’t right. It isn’t enough.’

‘But it’s all we have. It’s all there’s ever been.’ He took her hand. ‘Accept it. Be calm.’

‘Like hell.’

After a time, he let her hand go.

A Worker slid through the water, its wake oily. It clattered up the curving shoreline of Finger Hall, and loomed over her mother’s corpse. It trailed a fine net which was crammed with algae. It raised up a glinting limb, which started to descend towards her mother’s body.

Green Wave lunged forward and grabbed the limb. It was cold and hard, its edges sharp. She twisted. There was a crunching noise, and the limb came away from its socket. Green Wave staggered back, breathing hard. There was a steady ticking from somewhere inside the Worker’s algae-crusted case.

Sun Eyes grabbed her shoulders. A day older, her brother already looked closer to death than life, she thought.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Why do they take away the dead?’ she snapped. ‘Why do they take away our food? We don’t have enough to eat. If we had more to eat, maybe we’d live longer.’

He looked doubtful. ‘How long?’

‘I don’t know.’ She struggled with the concept. ‘Ten days. Maybe twenty.’

‘
Twenty days
? That’s ridiculous.’

The Worker had come forward again, and was sawing industriously at her mother’s cadaver. It didn’t seem impeded by the loss of its limb.

‘You have to let her go,’ said Sun Eyes.

Green Wave looked at him bleakly.

When the beach was clean of traces of her mother the Worker slid back towards the water. The stump, where she had torn away the limb, trailed cables. The Worker sank beneath the water and began to surge towards the darkness at the end of Finger Hall.

The people clattered back into the water, to resume their endless feeding.

Green Wave, carrying her Worker limb, started to wade along the river.

Churning Wake stood on the bank, watching her. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I want to see where it’s taking all our food.’

‘What about
us
?’