Phase Space (44 page)

Too late now. Damn, damn.

He cried out, spun around. Frazil was standing stock still, staring up.

There was a creature standing here. Like a tall, very skinny human.

It
was
a human, he saw. A woman. Her face was small and neat, and there was barely a drop of fat on her, save around the hips, buttocks and breasts. Her chest was small. She had a coat of some fine fur – no, he realized with shock; she was wearing a false skin, that hugged her bare flesh tightly. She was carrying green stuff, food perhaps, in a basket of false skin.

She was twice his height.

Her eyes were undoubtedly human, though, as human as his, and her gaze was locked on his face. And in her eyes, he read fear.

Fear, and disgust.

He stepped forward. ‘We have come to help you,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Frazil.

‘We have come far –’

The tall woman spoke again, but he could not understand her. Even her voice was strange – thin, emanating from that shallow chest. She spoke again, and pointed, down towards the surface of the sea, far below.

Now he looked more closely he could see movement on the beach. Small dots, moving around. People, perhaps, like this girl. Some of them were small. Children, running free. Many children.

The woman turned, and started climbing away from them, down the slope towards her world, carrying whatever she had gathered from these high banks. She was shaking a fist at them now. She even bent to pick up a sharp stone and threw it towards Frazil; it fell short, clattering harmlessly.

Madeleine made her home in the depths of the crater, where air pooled, thick.

A single Gaijin flower-ship stayed in orbit, in case she called. The Gaijin seemed prepared to wait forever. Sometimes she glimpsed it, at dawn, at sunset.

Madeleine’s conditions were hardly primitive. She had the Gaijin lander, which served as a fine shelter. It was stocked with food-preparation technology; all she had to do was cram its hoppers full of vegetable material, once or twice a week. But she also had her garden, and the fruits and berries she gathered from the sparse trees here, and she drank exclusively water from the snow-melt streams. It pleased her to live as close to the Earth as she could.

She didn’t go near the circular sea, though. There were creatures living in there she couldn’t identify. Their sleek forms scarcely looked friendly. And she thought there were human-like creatures on the far side of the sea. She didn’t approach them either.

It was a world of scale and depth, of perspective. She would lie on her porch and watch the waterfalls glimmering through the air from the rocky walls, kilometres above, and gaze even beyond that, at the feathery tails of the great comets that swept across the sky.

Sometimes she saw creatures moving against the ice which lapped against the rim mountains, far above her. Her sensor packs, even at highest magnification, showed her only penguin-like creatures, waddling over the ice, huddling against ferocious winds. Perhaps they were indeed some remote descendants of penguins. Or even post-humans, gruesomely adapted to survive. She felt no temptation to seek them out. But their presence disturbed her.

The Moon’s grey face was reassuringly familiar. The tide of life on that patient satellite had long receded, and the face of the Man was restored to patient watchfulness. Just as she was.

It was a vigil, Madeleine had decided.

Once, she’d read of an island called San Nicolas, off Los Angeles. Long before the coming of the Europeans, it had been inhabited by native Americans. But the settlement had collapsed, the numbers dwindling, one by one.

The last survivor was a woman who had lived on, in complete isolation, for eighteen years.

How had
she
spent her time? Had she watched for canoes that had never come, hoped to see the return of some last, desperate emigrants? Or had she simply savoured her memories, and waited?

She tried not to think too hard. What good would that do?

Madeleine Meacher was no vigil-keeper.

She grew restless, despite herself.

This wasn’t her world, whether it belonged to the post-humans or not. Anyhow she had never been too good at sitting still.

She’d never forgotten her alternative plan, as she’d discussed with Malenfant. To travel on and on. Why the hell not?

But if she entered the Saddle Point network again, she might never come out. If so, she supposed, she’d never know about it.

She watched the sky, studying the changed stars. When the wind picked up, stirring her wispy hair, she went into her lander and prepared her evening meal.

The next day, she called the Gaijin down from the sky.

‘I don’t understand,’ Frazil said.

Night-Dawn thought of the loathing he had seen in the strange woman’s eyes. He saw himself through her eyes: squat, fat, waddling, as if deformed.

He felt shame. ‘We are not welcome here,’ he said.

‘We must bring the others here,’ Frazil was saying.

‘And what then? Beg to be allowed to stay, to enter the warmth? No. We will go home.’

‘Home? To a place where people live a handful of winters, and must scrape food from ice with their teeth? How can that compare to
this
?’

He took her hands. ‘But this is not for us. We are monsters to these people. As they are to us. And we cannot live here.’

She stared into the pit of light and green. ‘But in time, our children might learn to live there. Just as we learned to live on the ice.’

The longing in her voice was painful. He thought of the generations who had lived out their short, bleak lives on the ice. He thought of his mother, who had sought to protect him to the end; poor One-Tusk, who had died without seeing the people of the mountains; dear, loyal Frazil, who had walked to the edge of the world at his side.

‘Listen to me. Let these people have their hole in the ground. We have a
world.
We can live anywhere. We must go back and tell our people so.’

She sniffed. ‘Dear Night-Dawn. Always dreaming. But first we must eat, for winter is coming.’

‘Yes. First we eat.’

They inspected the rock that surrounded them. There was green
here,
he saw now, thin traces of it that clung to the surface of the rock. In some places it grew away from the rock face, brave little balls of it no bigger than his fist, and here and there fine fur-like sproutings.

They bent, reaching together for the green shoots.

The shadows lengthened. The sun was descending towards the circular sea, and one of Earth’s two Moons was rising.

When Kate had first met Malenfant, out at JPL, she could smell desert dust on him, hot and dry as a sauna.

But he was suspicious of her. Maybe he was suspicious of all journalists.

‘And you think there’s a story in the Fermi Paradox?’

She shrugged, non-committal. ‘I’m more interested in you, Colonel Malenfant.’

He was immediately defensive. ‘Just Malenfant.
’

‘
Of all the projects you could have undertaken when you were grounded, why front a stunt like this
?’

He shrugged. ‘Look, if you want to call this a stunt, fine. But we’re extending the envelope here. Today we’ll prove that we can touch other worlds. Maybe an astronaut is the right face to head up a groundbreaker project like this.
’

‘
Ex-astronaut.
’

His grin faded.

Fishing for an angle, she said, ‘Is that why you’re here? You were born in 1960, weren’t you? So you remember Apollo. But by the time you grew up cheaper and smarter robots had taken over the exploring. Now NASA says that when the International Space Station finally reaches the end of its life, it plans no more manned spaceflight of any sort. Is this laser project a compensation for your wash-out, Malenfant
?’

He barked a laugh. ‘You know, you aren’t as smart as you think you are, Ms Manzoni. It’s your brand of personality-oriented cod-psychology bullshit that has brought down –
’

‘
Are you lonely
?’

That pulled him up. ‘What
?’

‘
The Fermi Paradox is all about loneliness, isn’t it? – the loneliness of mankind, orphaned in an empty universe … Your wife, Emma, died a decade back. I know you have a son, but you never remarried –
’

He glared at her. ‘You’re full of shit, lady.
’

She returned his glare, satisfied she had hit the mark.

Later he would say to her, ‘The universe is out there, like it or not, regardless of our soap-opera human dramas. And it is bigger than your petty concerns. And the questions I deal with are bigger than your trivial pestering.
’

‘
Like Fermi.
’

‘
Like Fermi, yes.
’

‘
But you don’t have any answers to Fermi.
’

‘
Oh, that isn’t the trouble at all, Ms Manzoni. Don’t you understand that much? The trouble is we have far too many answers …
’

Celso and I were ejected from the
Sally Brind.
Frank Paulis had brought us to the Oort Cloud, that misty belt far from the sun where huge comets glide like deep-sea fish.

Before us, an alien craft sparkled in the starlight.

On the inside of my suit helmet a tiny softscreen popped into life and filled up with a picture of Paulis. He was wizened, somewhere over eighty years old, but his eyes glittered, sharp.

Even now, I begged. ‘Paulis. Don’t make me do this.’

Paulis was in a bathrobe; behind his steam billowed. He was in his spa at the heart of the
Brind
– a luxury from which Celso and I had been excluded for the long hundred days it had taken to haul us all the way out here. ‘Your grandfather would be ashamed of you, Michael Malenfant. You forfeited choice when you let yourself be put up for sale in a debtors’ auction.’

‘I just had a streak of bad luck.’

‘A streak spanning fifteen years hustling pool and a mountain of bad debts?’

Celso studied me with brown eyes full of pity. ‘Do not whine, my friend.’

‘Paulis, I don’t care who the hell my grandfather was. You can see I’m no astronaut. I’m forty years old, for Christ’s sake. And I’m not the brightest guy in the world –’

‘True, but unimportant. The whole point of this experiment is to send humans where we haven’t sent humans before. Exactly who probably doesn’t matter. Look at the Bubble, Malenfant.’

The alien ship was a ten-foot balloon plastered with rubies. Celso was already inspecting its interior in an intelligent sort of way.

Paulis said, ‘Remember your briefings. You can see it’s a hollow sphere. There’s an open hatchway. We know that if you close the hatch the device will accelerate away. We have evidence that its effective final speed is many times the speed of light. In fact, many millions of times.’

‘Impossible,’ said Celso.

Paulis smiled. ‘Evidently, not everyone agrees. What a marvellous adventure! I only wish I could come with you.’

‘Like hell you do, you dried-up old bastard.’

He took a gloating sip from a frosted glass. ‘Malenfant, you are here because of faults in your personality.’

‘I’m here because of people like you.’

Celso took my arm.

‘In about two minutes,’ Paulis said cheerfully, ‘the pilot of the
Sally Brind
is going to come out of the airlock and shoot you both in the temple. Unless you’re in that Bubble with the hatch closed.’

Celso pushed me towards the glittering ball.

I said, ‘I won’t forget you, Paulis. I’ll be thinking of you every damn minute –’

But he only grinned.