Stephen Baxter - Last and First Contacts

‘She asked if there will be a tomorrow.’

Simon stared at him. ‘When I was a kid,’ he said slowly, ‘I used to wonder what will happen when I die. It seemed outrageous that the universe should go on, after I, the centre of everything, was taken away. Just as my mother said to me yesterday.

‘Then I grew up a bit more. I started to think maybe everybody feels that way. Every finite mortal creature. The two things don’t go together, do they, my smallness, and the bigness of the sky?”

Father Nolan just listened.

Simon stepped towards the window. ‘What will I see if I pull back the curtain?’

‘Don’t,’ said Father Nolan.

‘Do you know what’s going on?’

‘I’m here for her. Not you.’

‘Will you tell me?’

The priest hesitated. ‘You’re a good boy. I suppose you deserve that.’

Simon touched Uncle Billy’s clock, pressed his palm against the wall behind it. ‘Is any of this real?’

‘As real as it needs to be.’

‘Is this really the year 2010?’

‘No.’

‘Then when?’

‘The future. Not as far as you might think.’

‘People are different.’

‘There are no people.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No. But you’re capable of understanding,’ Father Nolan said. ‘It’s no accident you work in biotechnology, you know. It was set up that way, so if you ever asked these questions, you’d have the background to grasp the answer.’

‘What has my job got to do with it?’

‘Nothing in itself. It’s where things are leading. Those Day-Glo fish you sell. How do you do that?’

Simon shrugged. ‘I don’t know the details. I do software. Gene splicing, basically.’

‘You splice genes from where?’

‘A modified soya, I think. Other sources.’

‘Yes. You swap genes around, horizontally, from microbes to plants to animals, even into people. It’s a new kind of gene transfer – or rather a very old one.’

‘Before the stromatolites.’

‘Yes. You’re planning to put this gene-transfer technology on the open market, aren’t you?’

It was like the drive to put a pc in every home, a few decades back. The domestication would start with biotech in the mines and factories and stores. Home use would follow. Eventually advanced home biotech kits, capable of dicing and splicing genomes and nurturing the results, would become as pervasive as pcs and mobile phones. Everybody would have one, and would use it to make new varieties of dogs and budgies, exotic orchids and apples. To create a new life form and release it into the world would be as easy as blogging. It was a question of accelerating trends. The world’s genetic inheritance would become open source. And then, a generation later, the technology would merge with the biology.

Simon said, ‘It’s the logical next step, in marketing terms. Like putting massive computing power in the hands of the public. That would have seemed inconceivable, in 1950. And the secondary results will be as unimaginable as the internet once was. Do you think it’s immoral? Unnatural?’

Father Nolan grinned. ‘If I were what I look like, perhaps I’d think that.’

‘What are you, then?’

‘I’m the end-product of your company’s business plans. Yours and a thousand others. It was only a few decades after your birthday-card goldfish that things took off. Remarkable. Only a few decades, to topple a regime of life that lasted two billion years.’

‘And things were different after that.’

‘Oh, yes. Darwinian evolution was slo-ow . For all the fancy critters that were thrown up, there was hardly a change in the basic biochemical machinery across two billion years.

‘Now there are no non-interbreeding species. Indeed, no individuals. The Darwinian interlude is over, and we are back to gene sharing, the way it used to be.

‘And everything has changed. Global climate change became trivial, for instance. With the fetters off, the biosphere adapted to the new conditions, optimising its metabolic and reproductive efficiency as it went.

‘And then,’ he said, ‘off into space.’

These words, simply spoken, implied a marvellous future.

‘Who is my mother?’

‘We are in a lacuna,’ Father Nolan said.

‘A what?’

‘A gap. A hole. In the totality of a living world. Sorry if that sounds a bit pompous. Your mother is a part of the totality, but cut away, you see. Living out a life as a human once lived it.’

‘Why? Is she being punished?’

‘No.’ He laughed. ‘On the contrary. She wanted to do this. It’s hard to express. We are a multipolar consciousness. She is part of the rest of us – do you see? She was an expression of a global desire.’

‘To do what?’

‘Not to forget.’ He stood up. Grave, patient, he had the manner of a priest, despite his hairy nose, his stained shirt. ‘I think you’re ready.’ He led Simon to the window, and pulled back the curtain.

Green stars.

The garden was gone.

The rest of the house was gone. The close, the park, Sheffield – Earth was gone, irrelevant. Mother had, incredibly, been right in her intuition. It had all been placed there as a stage set for her own life. But now her life had dwindled to the four walls of this room, and the rest of it could be discarded, for she would never need it again.

Just green stars. Simon pressed his ear to the window. He heard a reverberation, like an immense bell.

‘Earth life turning the Galaxy green. Our thoughts span light years. But we don’t want to forget how it was to be human.’ Father Nolan smiled. ‘It’s a paradox. We have in fact lost so much. As you said – the strange tragedy of being mortal in an unending universe. There’s no more poetry. No more epitaphs. No more stories. Just a solemn calm.’

‘Mother wanted to experience it. Human life.’

‘On behalf of the rest of us, yes.’

‘And what are you , Father?’

Father Nolan shrugged. ‘Everything else.’ He let the curtain drop, hiding the green stars.

The electric light was dimming.

Father Nolan sat down beside Mother and held her hand. ‘Only a few more minutes. Then it will be done.’

Simon sat on the other side of the bed. ‘What about me?’

‘You’re only here for her.’

‘But I’m conscious!’

‘Well, of course you are. She chose you, you know. You always thought she didn’t love you, didn’t you? But she chose you to be beside her, at the end, when all the others, Peter, Mary, even her own father, have all gone. Isn’t that enough?’

‘Do I have a soul, Father?’

‘I’m not qualified to say.’

Mother turned her head towards him, he thought. But her eyes were closed.

‘Help me,’ Simon whispered.

Father Nolan looked at him. Then he closed his eyes and bowed his head. ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.’

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’

The glow of the single bulb faded slowly, to black.

On the shore of Dreamers’ Lake we worked through the night. We had no choice; this pretty world was due to end in two more days. By the time dawn broke we had labelled all the lakes’ stromatolites, and had decided on three candidates, Charlie, Hotel and Juliet, for cognitive mapping. I was tentatively confident that Juliet was the most promising, but I was so dog-tired I didn’t trust my judgment any more.

So I was grateful when Citizen Associate Bisset brought us animists a tray of coffee.

‘Thanks.’ I took a cup, fixed its spigot to my facemask, and gulped it down, welcoming the caffeine fix. Bisset stood beside me on the pebble-strewn beach of that lake of fizzing, acidic water.