Phase Space (46 page)

‘But,’ Celso said, ‘your grandfather tried.’

‘Tried and failed. Reid Malenfant dreamed of saving the Earth by mining the sky. Bullshit. The wealth returned from the asteroid mines has made the rich richer – people like Paulis – and did nothing for the Earth but create millions of economic refugees.’

And as for my grandfather, who everybody seems to think I ought to be living up to: his is a voice from the past, speaking of vanished dreams.

Celso said, ‘Is there really no hope for us? Can we really not transcend our nature, save ourselves?’

‘My friend, all you can do is look after yourself.’

Celso nodded. ‘Yes. My wife and I could see no way to buy a decent life for our son Fernando but for one of us to be sold through an auction.’

‘You did that knowing the risk of coming up against a bastard like Paulis – of ending up on a chute to hell like this?’

‘I did it knowing that Paulis’s money would buy my Fernando a place in the sun – literally. And Maria would have done the same. We drew lots.’

‘Ah.’ I nodded knowingly. ‘And you lost.’

He looked puzzled. ‘No. I won.’

I couldn’t meet his eyes. I really do hate people like that.

He said gently, ‘Tell me why
you
are here. The truth, now.’

‘Paulis bought me.’

‘The laws covering debtor auctions are strict. He could not have sent you on such a hazardous assignment without your consent.’

‘He bought me. But not with money.’

‘Then what?’

I sighed. ‘With my grandfather. Paulis knew him. He had a letter, written before Reid Malenfant died, a letter for me …’

A paradox arises when two seemingly plausible lines of thought meet in a contradiction. Throughout history, paradoxes have been a fertile seeding grounds for new ways of looking at the world. I’m sure Fermi is telling us something very profound about the nature of the universe we live in.

But, Michael, neither of the two basic resolutions of the Paradox offer much illumination – or comfort.

Maybe, simply, we really are alone.

We may be the first. Perhaps we’re the last. If so, 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 …

Celso nodded gravely as he read.

I snorted. ‘Imagine growing up with a dead hero for a grandfather. And his one communication to me is a lecture about the damn Fermi Paradox. Look, Reid Malenfant was a loser. He let people manipulate him his whole life. People like Frank Paulis, who used him as a front for his predatory off-world capitalism.’

‘That is very cynical. After all this project, the first human exploration of the Bubbles, was funded privately – by Paulis. He must share some of the same, ah, curiosity as your grandfather.’

‘My grandfather had a head full of shit.’

Celso regarded me. ‘I hope we will learn enough to have satisfied Reid Malenfant’s curiosity – and that it does not cost us our lives.’ And he went back to work.

Humans fired off their first starships in the middle of the twentieth century. They were the US space probes called
Pioneer
and
Voyager,
four of them, launched in the 1970s to visit the outer planets. Their primary mission completed, they sailed helplessly on into interstellar space. They worked for decades, sending back data about the conditions they found. But they haven’t gone too far yet, all things considered; it will take the fastest of them tens of thousands of years to reach any nearby star.

The first genuine star probe was the European-Japanese
D’Urville:
a miniaturized robot the size of a hockey puck, accelerated to high velocity. It returned images of the Alpha Centauri system within a decade.

The
D’Urville
found a system crowded with asteroids and rocky worlds. None of the worlds was inhabited … but one of them had been inhabited.

From orbit,
D’Urville
saw neat buildings and cities and mines and what looked like farms, all laid out in a persistent hexagonal pattern.

But everything had been abandoned. The buildings were subsiding back into the yellow-grey of the native vegetation, though their outlines were clearly visible.
Farms and cities
: they must have been something like us. We must have missed them by no more than millennia. It was heartbreaking.

So what happened? There was no sign of war, or cosmic impact, or volcanic explosion, or eco-collapse, or any of the other ways we could think of to trash a world. It was as if everybody had just up and left, leaving a
Marie Celeste
planet.

But there were several Bubbles neatly orbiting the empty world, shining brightly, beacons blaring throughout the spectrum.

Since then more probes to other stars, followers of the
D’Urville,
have found many lifeless planets – and a few more abandoned worlds. Some of them appeared to have been inhabited until quite recently, like Alpha A-IV, some deserted for much longer. But always abandoned.

And everywhere we found Bubbles, their all-frequency beacons bleeping invitingly, clustering around those empty worlds like bees around a flower.

After a time one enterprising microprobe was sent
inside
a Bubble.

The hatch closed. The Bubble shot away at high speed, and was never heard from again.

It was shortly after that that Bubbles were found in the Oort cloud of our own solar system. Hatches open. Apparently waiting for us.

Paulis had set out the pitch for me. ‘Where do these Bubbles come from? Where do they go? And why do they never return? My company, Bootstrap, thinks there may be a lot of profit in the answers. Our probes haven’t returned. Perhaps you will.’

Or perhaps not.

It doesn’t take a Cornelius Taine to figure out that the Bubbles must have something to do with the fact that my grandfather’s night sky was silent.

…
Or maybe we aren’t alone, but we just can’t see them. Why not
?

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

Maybe it’s just that we all destroy ourselves in nuclear wars or eco collapse.

Or maybe there is something that kills off every civilization like ours before we get too far. Malevolent robots sliding silently between the stars, which for their own antique purposes kill off fledgling cultures.

Or something else we can’t even imagine.

Michael, every outcome I can think of scares me.

Celso called me over excitedly. ‘My friend, we have travelled for days and must have spanned half the universe. But I believe our journey is nearly over.’ He pointed. ‘Over there is a quasar. Which is a very bright, very distant object. And over there –’ He moved his arm almost imperceptibly. ‘I can see the same quasar.’

‘Well, golly gee.’

He smiled. ‘Such a double image is a characteristic of a cosmic string. The light bends around the string. You see?’

‘I still don’t know what a cosmic string is.’

‘A fault in space. A relic of the Big Bang, the birth of the universe itself … Do you know much cosmology, Michael?’

‘Not as such, no.’ It isn’t a big topic of conversation in your average poker school.

‘Imagine the universe, just a few years old. It is mere light years across, a soup of energy. Rapidly it cools. Our familiar laws of physics take hold. The universe settles into great lumps of ordered space, like – like the freezing surface of a pond.

‘But there are flaws in this sober universe, like the gaps between ice floes. Do you understand? Just as liquid water persists in those gaps, so there are great channels through which there still flows energy from the universe’s earliest hours. Souvenirs of a reckless youth.’

‘And these channels are what you call cosmic strings?’

‘The strings are no wider than ten hydrogen atoms. They are very dark, very dense – many tons to an inch.’ He cracked an imaginary whip. ‘The endless strings lash through space at almost the speed of light, throwing off loops like echoes. The loops lose energy and decay. But not before they form the kernels around which galaxies crystallize.’

‘Really? And what about this primordial energy?’

‘Great electric currents surge along the strings. Which are, of course, superconductors.’

It sounded kind of dangerous. I felt my stomach loosen – the reaction of a plains primate, utterly inappropriate, lost as I was in this intergalactic wilderness.

But now there was something new. I looked where Celso was pointing –

– and made out a small bar of light. It moved like a beetle across the background.

‘What’s that? A bead sliding on the string?’

He grabbed a softscreen, seeking a magnified image. His jaw dropped. ‘My friend,’ he said softly, ‘I believe you are exactly right.’

It was one of a series of such beads, I saw now. The whole damn string seemed to be threaded like a cheap necklace.

But now the perspective changed. That nearest bar swelled to a cylinder. To a wand that pointed towards us. To a tunnel whose mouth roared out of infinity and swallowed us.

We sailed along the tunnel’s axis, following a fine thread beaded with toy stars – a thread that had to be the cosmic string. The stars splashed coloured tubes on the tunnel walls; they hurtled by like posters in a subway to hell.

I clung to the Bubble walls. Even Celso blanched.

‘Of course,’ he yelled – and stopped himself. There was no noise, just the feeling there ought to have been. ‘Of course, we have still less reason to fear than before. Our speed must be vastly less than when we were in free space. And I believe we’re still slowing down.’

I risked a look.

We were dipping away from the axis. Those tremendous bands of light flattened out and became landscapes that streamed beneath us.

We slowed enough to make out detail.

One model sun was a ruddy giant. By its light, fungi the size of continents lapped vast mountain ranges.

The next sun was a shrunken dwarf; oceans of hydrogen or helium slithered over the tunnel walls. I saw something like an enormous whale. It must have had superconducting fluid for blood.

So it went, sun after sun, landscape after landscape. A subway filled with worlds. Worlds, and life.

Celso’s dark eyes shone with wonder. ‘This tunnel must be a million miles across. So much room …’

We dipped lower still. Atmosphere whistled. The latest sunlight looked warm and familiar, and the walls were coated with a jumble of blue and green.

The huge curved floor flattened out into a landscape, exploded into trees and grass and rivers; suddenly we landed, as simple as that.

Gravity came back with a thump. We fell into the base of our Bubble.

Without hesitation Celso pulled on his suit, set up our inflatable airlock, and kicked the hatch open.

I glimpsed grassy hills, and a band of night, and a white dwarf star.

I buried my face in the wall of the Bubble.

Celso came to me that evening.

(Evening? The toy sun slid along its wire and dimmed as it went. In the night, I could see Earthlike landscape smeared out over the other side of the sky.)

‘I want you to know I understand,’ Celso said gently. ‘You must come to terms with this situation. You must do it yourself. I will wait for you.’

I shut my eyes tighter.

The next morning, I heard whistling.

I uncurled. I pulled on my suit, and climbed out of the bubble.

Celso was squatting by a stream, fishing with a piece of string and a bit of wire. He’d taken his suit off. In fact, he’d stripped down to his undershorts. He broke off his whistling as I approached.

I cracked my helmet. The air smelt funny to me, but then I’m a city boy. There was no smog, no people. I could smell Celso’s fish, though.