Stephen Baxter - Last and First Contacts

A spark slid away from one of the inner planets.

‘Can you zoom with this thing?’ I asked.

Bead worked his instruments. We swooped in towards the planet –

It was laced with light.

The spark was a spaceship. A cage of threads and planes, it must have been a thousand kilometres long.

As we closed in further I made out the ship’s crew. They were pillars of sky blue, drifting like shadows within the translucent walls.

The image broke up and the screen filled with static.

Bead sat back. ‘That’s it,’ he said softly.

He began to check his recordings.

I couldn’t sleep.

In silence I suited up and walked out onto the surface of the comet. In the tiny gravity my boots barely left a mark in the charcoal crust. Was I walking on bones, five billion years old?

I leapt up from the comet’s surface; it shrank to a crude sphere below me. Slow as a snowflake I drifted back down.

Our world had been born out of the corpse of another.

I tried to empathise with the blue pillars, reach them through the wall of deep time. Had they raged at the unfairness as their sun blew up in their faces? Or had they understood that death is sometimes necessary, so that new life can begin?

Surely that was so. I felt their calmness lingering in this desolate place.

I came to a decision.

Bead would never have the courage to face death. That was obvious. And I wouldn’t be forgotten. A trace of me would remain, like a Berry phase in the hearts of my family.

I landed softly.

The port was open. Bead stood silhouetted, holding something like a bazooka. ‘Don’t come any closer, Slater!’

‘What the hell—’

A flash of light, invisibly violet. A soundless explosion in the ice at my feet. I froze.

‘I’ve warned you.’ His voice was a brittle surface.

‘Where did you get the weapon from, Bead?’

‘I took apart the Berry device,’ he said. ‘And I’m having the ship. I’m sorry, Slater. But I don’t want to die. Try to understand.’

I took a step forward; the bazooka twitched. ‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘It’s okay; you can take the ship.’

‘No tricks, Slater!’

‘But you’ll have to let me train you. You’ll never fly it otherwise. Now let me back in and—’

Another bolt; my shoulder exploded into a spray of crimson. I slapped a patch onto my suit and felt the cold wash through me.

‘You made me do it!’ he screamed. ‘You made me!’ And the port slammed shut.

After a few seconds, vapour began to pool around the drive tubes.

I squeezed at the pain in my shoulder, staring at my shadow on the nucleus crust. He’d never make it…We’d both die in this wilderness…

What shadow? How the hell was I casting a shadow?

I whirled, wrenching my shoulder and tumbling into the ice.

The alien craft came over the horizon like a fantastic dawn. Out of its thousand-mile walls floated a shoal of sky-blue pillars.

I laughed. ‘Bead – look! They’ve survived!’

The pillars clustered around me, fine as wedding veils. Their kindness bathed me. Their ship must have been the ‘ghost’ our sensors picked up – the source of the energy that wrecked us. ‘Bead! Shut down the drive and come out. It’s – it’s delightful!’

Through the pale figures I saw our ship lumber from the comet’s surface.

‘Bead! Bead! Listen to me. It’s not a trick!’ I pushed through an ancient body – it crackled like old paper – and tried to run to the ship. ‘Bead! Don’t kill yourself! They’ll save us!’

A blast of reaction gas knocked me into the slush.

The ship rose, blurred—

—and blossomed into the harsh light of a fusion explosion.

The cerulean pillars lifted me like a child. We swam through space towards their ship, and home.

From the air, Freddie caught the first glimpse of the rocket that was to carry her into space.

The plane descended towards a strip of flat coastal savannah. The land glimmered with standing water, despite crumbling concrete levees that lined the coast, a defence against the risen sea. This was Kourou, Guiana, the old European launch centre, on the eastern coast of South America. It was only a few hundred kilometres north of the mouth of the Amazon. Inland, the hills were entirely covered by swaying soya plants.

Freddie couldn’t believe she was here. She’d only rarely travelled far from Winchester, the English city where she’d been born, and Southampton where she worked. Hardly anybody travelled far. She’d certainly never flown before, and she had a deep phobic sense of the litres of noxious gases spewing from the plane’s exhaust.

But now the plane banked, and there was her spaceship, a white delta-wing standing on its tail, and she gasped.

Antony Allen, the UN bureaucrat who had recruited her for this unlikely assignment, misread her mood. Fifty-something, sleek, corporate, with a blunt Chicago accent, he smiled reassuringly. ‘Don’t be afraid.’

The plane came down on a short smart-concrete runway. Allen hurried Freddie onto a little electric bus that drove her straight to a docking port at the base of the shuttle, without her even touching the South American ground, or even smelling the air.

And before she knew it she was lying on her back in an immense foam-filled couch, held in place by thick padded bars. The ship smelled of electricity and, oddly, of new carpets. A screen before her showed a view down the shuttle’s elegant flank to the scarred ground.

Allen strapped in beside her. ‘Do you prefer a countdown? It’s optional. We’re actually the only humans aboard. Whether you find that reassuring or not depends on your faith in technology, I suppose.’

‘I can’t believe I’m doing this. It’s so – archaic! I feel I’m locked into an AxysCorp instrumentality.’

He didn’t seem to appreciate the sharpness of her tone. Perhaps he’d prefer to be able to patronise her. ‘This shuttle’s got nothing to do with AxysCorp, which was broken up long ago.’

‘I know that.’

‘And you’re a historian of the Heroic Solution. That’s why you’re here, as I couldn’t find anybody better qualified to help resolve this problem on Tempest 43. So look on it as field work. Brace yourself.’

With barely a murmur the shuttle leapt into the air. No amount of padding could save Freddie from the punch of acceleration.

The ground plummeted away.

Tempest 43 was a weather control station, one of a network of fifty such facilities thrown into space in the 2070s, nearly a century ago, by the now maligned AxysCorp geoengineering conglomerate. An island in the sky over the Atlantic, Tempest 43 was locked into a twenty-four-hour orbit, to which Freddie would now have to ascend.

But before proceeding up to its geosynchronous rendezvous the shuttle went through one low-orbit checkout. For Freddie, snug in her theme-park couch, it was ninety magical minutes, as the cabin walls turned virtual-transparent, and the Earth spread out below her, bright as a tropical sky.

The ship sailed over the Atlantic towards western Europe. She wished she knew enough geography to recognise how much of the coastline had been bitten into by the risen sea. At the Spanish coast Freddie saw vapour feathers gleaming white, artificial cloud created by spray turbines to deflect a little more sunlight from an overheated Earth. Southern Spain, long abandoned to desert, was chrome-plated with solar-cell farms, and studded with vast silvered bubbles, lodes of frozen-out carbon dioxide. The Mediterranean was green-blue, thick with plankton stimulated to grow and draw down carbon from the air. On the far side of the Gibraltar Strait, the Sahara bloomed green, covered in straight-edged plantations fed by desalinated ocean water. And as she headed into evening she saw the great old cities of southern Europe, the conurbations’ brown stain pierced by green as they fragmented back into the villages from which they had formed.