Stephen Baxter: Last and First Contacts

Zuba said, ‘We don’t know what we might find. We humans are lost now, but not forever. There’s a place for us.’

Bisset laughed softly. ‘Like the movie song.’

‘What movie?’ I wondered.

‘What is a movie?’ Ulf Thoring asked.

Zuba glanced up. The Hammer was an inverted landscape sliding over the dreaming stromatolites. ‘You might want to hurry it along.’

Bisset splashed to the edge of the water, and we hurried forward to help him.

Hara took days to walk the long road, from the hunters’ camps in the hills to the sandstone huts of the fisher folk by the marshy shore. But the road ran straight, its surface hard, the walking good. This directness pleased Hara, as she walked alone through the autumnal sunlight. She was fifteen years old.

Her father scolded her for these excursions. But Hara would be able to trade cattle leather for bream and mussels, and enough cockle shells for an anklet or two.

Besides, her father’s misgivings were to do with the road itself. People muttered darkly that it must have been built by vanished giants. But Hara had a practical turn of mind. A straight line was simply the most obvious way from hills to coast. And generations of patient walkers like herself had surely flattened the ground with their feet, without the help of giants: Britain was already an old country.

The wind rustled dying leaves. She could smell the ice that still lay not far to the north. She hoped to reach the coast before nightfall, and, perhaps, and to find a certain boy of the fisher-folk clan. Smiling, warm deep inside, she hurried on, her feet padding softly on the road’s grassy surface.

Under the unusually hot sun of this northern summer’s day, Marcus Plautius, stripped to the waist, worked with his men on the road.

Marcus didn’t have to do this. A centurion from north Italy, he had won his seniority the hard way. But road-making pleased him: the surveying with plumb lines and beacons, the grades of stone and gravel laid in sequence, the design that ensured good foundations, a decent walking surface, and reliable drainage. Maybe it was because of all the destruction he had seen that he found road-building so satisfying.

But a soldier understood that the roads were the Emperors’ supreme instrument of control. Just here they happened to be following the course of an old rutted track, but Roman roads ran straight whatever was in their way, their cold geometry freezing barbarian minds. And where roads ran, towns and prosperity flourished, and citizens paid their taxes – and Marcus’s salary.

So Marcus worked with a will, immersed in songs from Spain and Persia and Africa, and the road stretched true from horizon to horizon.

Seth sat in the musty dark of his toll gate lodge, chewing on tobacco. He had had an argument with his son.

Like his father, Seth was a turnpike gatekeeper. This was a profitable road, the obvious route to carry your cotton goods straight from city to port. And thanks to the tolls those who used the turnpike paid for its upkeep, so the old road was restored to its best condition since the Romans.

But now the railway had come, its culverts and embankments following the road’s own direct route. The turnpike traffic had reduced to a trickle, and the tolls dried up with it. Today Seth’s son Thomas had vowed that he would never become gatekeeper but would go work on the railway.

Seth heard a clattering of hooves. Another traveller, another penny. Sighing, he pulled himself up from his chair.

The road itself was aware.

It still followed the ancient, logical route between inland city and port. But now every centimetre was saturated with chips and actuators, and nano-machines repaired every crack, while the road monitored and controlled the traffic that thundered along it.

The road, integrated into a global transportation network, had become very smart indeed. And it understood a great deal.

Transport drove the global economy, but things were out of balance. For a century it had been cheaper to travel than to build. So children commuted to huge regional schools, their parents to work in faraway cities. But if you factored in the cost of waste and excess heat, transport really wasn’t so cheap after all – and the days of ‘cheap’ travel must soon end anyhow. And then what?

The road suspected that nothing like it was ever likely to be built again. But then it would sink back into the joy of purpose fulfilled, as storms of traffic broke over its long back.

Lida, fifteen years old, took days to walk the long road, from the hunters’ camps in the hills to the huts of the fisher folk by the shore, where she would trade rabbit skin for bream and mussels.

The road ran so straight and firm that people muttered darkly about its origins. But Lida was practical. This was simply the most obvious way from hills to coast, and generations of patient walkers like herself had surely flattened the ground. No need to imagine vanished giants.

The wind rustled dying leaves. She could smell the ice to the north; every day it edged closer. She hurried on.

And the road sensed the soft pad of her footsteps, and dreamed of vanished traffic.

March 15 th

Caitlin walked into the garden through the little gate from the drive. Maureen was working on the lawn.

Just at that moment Maureen’s mobile phone pinged. She took off her gardening gloves, dug the phone out of the deep pocket of her old quilted coat and looked at the screen. ‘Another contact,’ she called to her daughter.

Caitlin looked cold in her thin jacket; she wrapped her arms around her body. ‘Another super-civilisation discovered, off in space. We live in strange times, Mum.’

‘That’s the fifteenth this year. And I did my bit to help discover it. Good for me,’ Maureen said, smiling. ‘Hello, love.’ She leaned forward for a kiss on the cheek.

She knew why Caitlin was here, of course. Caitlin had always hinted she would come and deliver the news about the Big Rip in person, one way or the other. Maureen guessed what that news was from her daughter’s hollow, stressed eyes. But Caitlin was looking around the garden, and Maureen decided to let her tell it all in her own time.

She asked, ‘How’re the kids?’

‘Fine. At school. Bill’s at home, baking bread.’ Caitlin smiled. ‘Why do stay-at-home fathers always bake bread? But he’s starting at Webster’s next month.’

‘That’s the engineers in Oxford.’

‘That’s right. Not that it makes much difference now. We won’t run out of money before, well, before it doesn’t matter.’ Caitlin considered the garden. It was just a scrap of lawn, really, with a quite nicely stocked border, behind a cottage that was a little more than a hundred years old, in this village on the outskirts of Oxford. ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen this properly.’

‘Well, it’s the first bright day we’ve had. My first spring here.’ They walked around the lawn. ‘It’s not bad. It’s been let to run to seed a bit by Mrs Murdoch. Who was another lonely old widow,’ Maureen said.

‘You mustn’t think like that.’

‘Well, it’s true. This little house is fine for someone on their own, like me, or her. I suppose I’d pass it on to somebody else in the same boat, when I’m done.’

Caitlin was silent at that, silent at the mention of the future.

Maureen showed her patches where the lawn had dried out last summer and would need reseeding. And there was a little brass plaque fixed to the wall of the house to show the level reached by the Thames floods of two years ago. ‘The lawn is all right. I do like this time of year when you sort of wake it up from the winter. The grass needs raking and scarifying, of course. I’ll reseed bits of it, and see how it grows during the summer. I might think about getting some of it relaid. Now the weather’s so different the drainage might not be right any more.’