Phase Space (66 page)

Mike shrugged. ‘So, a history lesson. And?’

‘And now something’s happened to them. That’s all I know.’

Malenfant was stony-faced, arms folded.

For a moment it looked like developing into an impasse. But then, to Kate’s surprise, Saranne stepped forward, hands resting on her belly. ‘Maybe you should tell her what she wants to know, Malenfant.’

It was as if Malenfant was suddenly aware she was there. ‘Why?’

‘There’s a lot of buzz about your experiment.’ Saranne was dark, her eyes startling blue. ‘There’s something strange going on, isn’t there? Don’t you think we’ve a right to know about it?’

Malenfant softened. ‘Saranne – it’s not so easy. Sometimes there is no use asking questions, because there are no meaningful answers.’

Kate frowned. ‘And sometimes there are answers, but there’s nothing to be done – is that it, Malenfant? Don’t tell the children the truth, for fear of frightening them –’

His anger returned. ‘This has nothing the hell to do with you.’

Saranne said, ‘Come on, Malenfant. If she’s found out something, so will everybody else soon enough. This isn’t 1960.’

He barked a bitter laugh.

‘
Voyager,
’ Kate prompted.

‘
Voyager.
Okay. Yesterday the Deep Space Network lost contact with the spacecraft. Both
Voyagers
1 and 2. Within a couple of hours.’

Mike said, ‘Is that so significant? They were creaky old relics. They were going to fade out sometime.’

Malenfant eyed his son. ‘Both together? After so long? How likely is that? And anyhow we had a handle on how much power they had left. It shouldn’t have happened.’

Kate said, ‘Was this after the comet, or before?’

Mike said, ‘What comet?’

‘The one that went missing when your father’s laser tried to echo-sound it.’

Malenfant frowned. Evidently he hadn’t expected her to know about that either. ‘After,’ he said. ‘After the comet.’

Kate tried to put it together in her head. A series of anomalies, then: that missing planet of Alpha Centauri, a comet out in the dark, the lonely
Voyagers.
All evaporating.

Each event a little closer to the sun.

Something is coming this way, she thought. Like footprints in the dew.

A softscreen chimed; Mike left the room to answer it.

Malenfant kept up his glare. ‘Come on, Manzoni. Forget
Voyager.
What do you really want here?’

Kate glanced at Malenfant and Saranne, and took another flyer. ‘What’s the source of the tension between you two?’

Malenfant snapped, ‘Don’t answer.’

But Saranne said evenly, ‘It’s this.’ She stroked her bump. ‘Baby Michael.’ She watched Malenfant’s uncomfortable reaction. ‘See? He’s not even happy with the fact that we know Michael’s sex, that we named him before his birth.’

‘You know it’s not that,’ Malenfant growled.

Kate guessed, ‘Has the child been enhanced?’

‘Nothing outrageous,’ Saranne said quickly. ‘Anti-ageing treatments: telomerase, thymus and pineal-gland adjustments. In the womb he’s been farmed for stem cells and organ clones. And we chose a few regenerative options: regrowing fingers, toes and spinal column …’

‘He’ll be able to hibernate,’ Malenfant said, his tone dangerously even. ‘Like a goddamn bear. And he might live forever. Nobody knows.’

‘He’s going to grow up in a dangerous world. He needs all the help he can get.’

Malenfant said, ‘He’s your kid. You can do what you like.’

‘He’s your grandson. I wish I had your blessing.’ But her tone was cool; Kate saw she was winning this battle.

Malenfant turned on Kate. ‘How about your family, Ms Manzoni?’

She shrugged. ‘My parents split when I was a kid. I haven’t seen my father since. My mother –’

‘Another broken home. Jesus.’

‘It’s not a big deal, Malenfant. I was the
last
in my high school class to go through a parental divorce.’ She smiled at Saranne, who smiled back.

But Malenfant, visibly unhappy, was lashing out at Kate, where he couldn’t at Saranne. ‘What kind of way to live is that? It’s as if we’re all crazy.’

Saranne said carefully, ‘Malenfant has a certain amount of difficulty with the modern world.’

Kate said, ‘Malenfant, I don’t believe you’re such a sour old man. You ought to be happy for Saranne and Mike.’

Saranne said, ‘And I sure have the right to do the best for my kid, Malenfant.’

‘Yes. Yes, you do,’ he said. ‘And the responsibility. God knows I admire you for that. But can’t you see that if
everyone
does what’s best for themselves alone, we’re all going to hell in a handbasket? What kind of world will it be where the rich can buy immortality, while the poor continue to starve as fast as they breed?’

Kate thought she understood. ‘You always look to the big picture, Malenfant. The Fermi Paradox, the destiny of mankind. Right? But most people don’t think like that. Most people focus the way Saranne is focused, on whatever is best for their kids. What else can we do?’

‘Take a look around. We’re living in the world that kind of thinking has created.’

She forced a smile. ‘We’ll muddle through.’

‘If we get the chance,’ Malenfant said coldly.

Mike came back into the room, looking stunned. ‘That was the Vice President. There’s a helicopter on the way from Ellington Air Force Base. For you, Malenfant.’

Malenfant said, ‘I’ll be damned.’

Saranne looked scared. ‘The Vice President?’

Kate frowned. ‘Malenfant, don’t you think you should find out what’s going on before you get to Washington?’ She walked to a wall and slapped it, opening up its comms facilities. ‘Maybe you ought to ask Cornelius Taine.’

‘Ask him what?’

She thought quickly, wondering where those footsteps would next fall. What was the furthest planet from the sun? … ‘Pluto. Ask him about Pluto.’

Malenfant evidently didn’t enjoy being told what to do by the likes of Kate Manzoni. But he punched in ident codes, and began to interact with a small patch of the wall.

Kate and the others waited; it wasn’t a moment for small talk. Kate strained to hear the sounds of the chopper.

At length Malenfant straightened up. Before him, embedded in the smart wall, was an image of a planet: blue, streaked with white cloud.

Kate’s heart thumped. ‘Earth?’

He shook his head. ‘And not Pluto either. This is a live image of Neptune. Almost as far out as Pluto. A strange blue world, blue as Earth, on the edge of interstellar space …’

Saranne said uneasily, ‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘Not Neptune itself. Triton, its moon. Look.’ He pointed to a blurred patch of light, close to Neptune’s ghostly limb. When he tapped the wall, the patch moved, quite suddenly. Another tap, another move. Kate couldn’t see any pattern to the moves, as if the moon was no longer following a regular orbit.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘Triton has started to … flicker. It hops around its orbit – or adopts another orbit entirely – or sometimes it vanishes, or is replaced by a ring system.’ He scratched his bald pate. ‘According to Cornelius, Triton was an oddity – circling Neptune backwards – probably created in some ancient collision event.’

‘Even odder now,’ Mike said dryly.

‘Cornelius says that all these images – the multiple moons, the rings – are all
possibilities,
alternate outcomes of how that ancient collision might have come about. As if other realities are folding down into our own.’ He searched their faces, seeking understanding.

Mike said, ‘Malenfant, what has this to do with your laser shot?’

Malenfant spread his hands. ‘Mike, I talk big, but we humans are pretty insignificant in the bigger scheme of things. Out there in the dark, somebody is playing pool with a moon. How can we have affected
that
?’

Kate took a breath.
Neptune
: a long way away, out in the dark, where the planets are cloudy spheres, and the sun’s light is weak and rectilinear. But out there, she thought, something strange is stirring: something with awesome powers indeed, beyond human comprehension.

And it’s coming this way. Whatever
it
is. She shuddered, and suppressed the urge to cross herself.

Saranne asked, ‘Are the stars still shining?’

It struck Kate as an odd, naive question, but Malenfant seemed touched. ‘Yes,’ he said gently. ‘Yes, the stars are still shining.’

Kate heard the flap of chopper blades. On impulse she snapped, ‘Malenfant – take me with you.’

He laughed and turned away.

Mike said, ‘Maybe you should do it, Malenfant. I have the feeling she’s smarter than you. Somebody needs to be thinking when you meet the Vice President.’

Malenfant turned to Kate. ‘Quite a story you’re building up here, Manzoni.’

If, she thought, I ever get to file it.

Outside, the noise of the descending chopper mounted. The reddening evening light dappled on the water of the lake, as it had always done, as if the strange lights in the sky were of no more import than a bad dream.

The limo pulled away. Malenfant, in his Navy uniform, was tweaking his cuffs. A blank-faced young soldier waited at his arm, ready to escort them into the building.

The Vice President’s official residence was a rambling brick mansion on a broad green lawn, set at the corner of 34
^th
Street and Massachusetts Avenue. Kate, who wasn’t as accustomed to Washington as she liked to pretend, thought it looked oddly friendly, like a small-town museum, rather than a major centre of federal power.

Beyond the security fence city life went on as usual, a stream of Smart-driven traffic washing with oily precision along the street, tourists and office workers drifting along the sidewalk, speaking into the air to remote contacts.

Malenfant said, ‘You wouldn’t think the damn sky was about to fall, would you?’

‘Everybody knows as much as we do,’ she said. ‘Nothing stays secret. So how come there isn’t –’

‘Panic buying?’ he grinned. ‘Rutting in the streets? Running for the hills? Because we don’t get it, Manzoni. Look in your heart.
You
don’t believe it, do you? Not deep down. We’re not programmed to look further than the other guy’s nose.’

Unexpectedly the young soldier spoke up. ‘“This is the way I think the world will end – with general giggling by all the witty heads, who think it is a joke.”’ They looked at him, surprised. ‘Kierkegaard. Sorry, sir. If you’re ready, will you follow me?’

When they reached Maura Della’s office, Cornelius Taine was already there, sitting bolt uptight on one of the overstuffed armchairs, already talking.

‘Past speculation on artificial realities provides us with clues as to our likely response to finding ourselves in a “planetarium”. You may remember movies in which the protagonist is the unwitting star of a TV show or movie, who invariably tries to escape. But the idea that the world around us may not be real reaches back to Plato, who wondered if what we see resembles the flickering shadows on a cave wall. And the notion of
creating
deceptive artificial environments dates back at least as far as Descartes, who in the seventeenth century speculated on the philosophical implications of a sense-manipulating “demon” – effectively a pre-technological virtual-reality generator …’

Della, listening, waved Malenfant and Kate to seats. Kate selected an expensive-looking upright that creaked under her weight.

The office was large and spacious. The furniture was stuffed leather, the big desk polished mahogany, the wallpaper and carpets lush. But Maura Della had stamped her personality on the room; on every wall were cycling softscreen images of the surfaces of Mars and Io, the gloomy oceans of Europa, a deep-space image of a galaxy field.

Malenfant leaned forward. ‘
Planetarium
? What the hell are you talking about, Cornelius?’

Cornelius regarded him coolly. ‘The logic is compelling, Malenfant. Your own logic: the Fermi Paradox, which you claim has driven your life. The Paradox defies our intuition, as well as philosophical principles such as the assumption of mediocrity, that it is only on our own apparently commonplace world that mind has evolved. The Paradox is surely telling us that something is fundamentally wrong with our view of the universe, and our place in it.’