Stephen Baxter: Last and First Contacts

GC-174-IV was an infant world, its young sun a lamp hanging over jagged hills. The methane-green sky reflected in the lake’s sluggish ripples, and glistened on the pillow-like stromatolites. The scene was unearthly, beautiful – and I was grateful that the dawn light hid the swarming dangers of the sky, especially the rogue worldlet called the Hammer.

In the foreground my animist cubs were playing soccer, their shouts the only sound on this silent world. I longed to join in, but they didn’t want little old ladies like me.

‘“Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops…”’ Bisset was a lot taller than I was, and under his wide visor his face, turned to the sun, was a mask of wrinkles.

‘That’s a cute line,’ I said.

‘Shakespeare. Of course we’re two hundred light years from England.’

‘But there are hills, a lake, a sky here. Things have a way of converging.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I remember the first robot landing on Titan, Saturn’s moon. The first images from the surface of the Moon had looked like a pebble beach. Then the Vikings on Mars, and the Soviet probes on Venus – more pebbles, more beaches. And even on Titan, where they use water ice for rock—’

‘Pebbles.’

‘Yes.’

I eyed him curiously. Evidently he was older than he looked. We hadn’t spoken, but the Pegasus carried over fifty people, and was roomy enough for twice that number. ‘I’m Susan Knilans. Senior animist on this mission.’

He shook my gloved hand. ‘Professor Knilans, I’ve read about your work.’

‘Susan, please. And you are?’

‘Ramone Bisset.’

‘Ramone?’

He smiled. ‘My father named me after his favourite band. I used to be a software engineer, before the software learned to write itself. Now I’m a Citizen Associate. I’m working on the IGWI with Ulf Thoring.’

It took me a minute to decode the acronym. IGWI: the Inflationary Gravity Wave Interferometry experiment, the establishment of a vast interstellar network of gravity-wave detectors designed to map the echoes of the universe’s very first cataclysmic instants. ‘Interesting project.’

‘It sure is. Not that I understand much of it, either the science or the equipment.’

‘How do you get on with those IGWI guys?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m just the dogsbody.’

‘Don’t knock it. Umm, do you mind my asking how old you are?’

‘A hundred and thirty, to the nearest decade. Born in the 1980s.’ That explained his height; many of his generation, fed on ludicrously protein-rich diets, had grown tall. His accent was British, I thought, but softened by time.

‘Well,’ I admitted, ‘I’m half your age. So what are you doing here?’

‘You mean beside the lake, or on GC-IV?’

‘Start with the lake.’

‘I’m just curious. You’re here to map minds, aren’t you? Minds in those mounds.’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘I haven’t started my day yet. I thought I may as well be useful. You can never go wrong with a tray of coffees.’

‘So what about the deeper question? Why volunteer for GC-IV?’

‘Ah. Why are any of us here?’

‘To do our jobs.’ Captain Zuba joined us. She was a tough, heavily-built New Zealander, aged about fifty. She took one of Bisset’s coffees. ‘And to earn our pay.’

‘Yes, Captain,’ Bisset said respectfully. ‘But why not just sit at home? All humans are restless. Why?’ He pointed to the patient stromatolites. ‘ They don’t look restless.’

‘No,’ Zuba said, ‘but it’s a shame they aren’t, because in two days’ time, when the Hammer falls, they’re going to be toast. And speaking of which, the clock is ticking.’ She handed back the coffee cup, already drained, and stalked away, competent, efficient, a tick-box list on legs.

Bisset hesitated. ‘You know – to explore the universe in starships – it’s like something from the kind of science fiction that was out of date even before I was born.’

I wasn’t too sure what ‘science fiction’ was, and didn’t really want to know. On impulse I said, ‘Why don’t you come visit again tomorrow? I’ll give you the guided tour. You don’t even need to bring the drinks.’

He nodded like a gentleman. ‘I’d appreciate that.’ And he walked away, tray in gloved hand, boots crunching over the beach.

The day on GC-174-IV was near enough to twenty hours long ( was ; now it’s different, changed by the Hammer Blow). I worked through that day, and was dog tired by the end of GC-IV’s short afternoon. As half the complement of the Pegasus wended back to the airlocks the other shift was suiting up to go out; Zuba ensured we made the most of the time we had left.

That evening, before I turned in, I looked for Bisset.

The Pegasus is a tuna can. It sits on four stubby legs, just five metres across, and is only a couple of storeys high, externally. But inside it’s the size of a small hotel. A ship that’s bigger inside than out – another gift of the quantum foam technology that so suddenly opened up the stars. Anyhow, the Pegasus is roomy enough for all fifty of its crew to have a private cabin, but not big enough to hide.

I found Bisset in the lounge with Ulf Thoring and the rest of the IGWI crew. The guys were playing some variant of poker and drinking beer; I could see the pharmacy’s stock of sober-up nano-pills would be called on that night. Bisset sipped his beer and played a few hands, but you could see from the body language what was going on with those smart-ass college boys.

The Citizen-Associate programme of the International Xenographic Agency is aimed squarely at people like Ramone Bisset: his active life extended by decades by the new longevity treatments, his curiosity still bright, his skills long outmoded. Such is the capacity of a quantum-foam-drive starship that there is room for guys like Ramone, whatever they can contribute. It helps the sponsoring nations justify the IXA’s cost to their taxpayers: anybody can be an explorer, so the slogan goes. But the Associates aren’t necessarily given much respect.

I’m not in the habit of taking on lame ducks, and I suspected Bisset could look after himself. But I didn’t like to see a thoughtful man treated that way. I don’t blame the IGWI guys, however. All male, none older than thirty-five, all from a university at Stockholm, Ulf and his guys were a tightly bonded bunch, and too young to be empathetic.

I was glad when, at the start of my next work shift the following morning, Bisset showed up at Dreamers’ Lake.

My cubs were already at work, wading knee-deep in the scummy pond, attaching floating sensor pods to the cognitive net we’d placed over Juliet. I was standing on the comparative comfort of the beach, before a monitoring station on which the first signals were beginning to be processed.

Bisset raised his head to the brightening sky. ‘Nice morning.’

I murmured, ‘Perhaps. That makes me uneasy.’ I pointed upwards.

That was the Hammer, a worldlet the size of Mars, visible in the bright sky, clearly larger since the end of my last shift.

‘Ah,’ Bisset said. ‘You do get the feeling that it might fall at any moment and smash all of this.’

‘But not today. So, the guided tour. You understand what these mounds are? They occurred on primitive Earth – still do, in places where it’s too salty for the predators, like snails. They are layers of bacterial mats …’ A mat of blue-green algae will form on the scummy surface of a shallow pond. The mat traps mud, and then another layer forms on top of the first, and so on. With time the mound builds up, and specialised bacterial types inhabit the different layers, until you have a complex, interdependent, miniature ecology. ‘We’ve found bacterial mats everywhere we’ve looked—’