Stephen Baxter - Space

It was a nice hypothesis, Malenfant reflected, but he judged that the coincidence of timescales was surely too neat to be convincing. Still, this was the first speaker Malenfant had heard at the conference who had attempted to address the deeper issues that obsessed the likes of Nemoto. He glanced at his softscreen, seeking presenters’ bio details.

Lerner’s general specialism was the volcanic history of the planet Venus. Malenfant wasn’t surprised to learn she was having trouble finding funding to continue her work. One side effect of the arrival of the Gaijin had been a decline of interest in the sciences. It seemed to be generally assumed that the Gaijin would eventually hand over the answers to any questions humans could possibly pose; so why spend time — and, more significantly, money — seeking out answers now? No genuine scientist Malenfant had ever met would have been satisfied with such passivity, of course; it seemed to him this Carole Lerner might be consumed with exactly that impatience.

The next paper, given by a heavy-set academic from the SETI Institute, turned out to have his own name in the title: “The Nemoto-Malenfant Contact — An Example of How Not to Do It.”

Maura Della sat back to listen with an expression of intense enjoyment.

The presentation was based on a bureaucratic protocol devised to cover the event of alien contact. The protocol was first worked out by NASA in the 1990s, and then, after the cancellation of government funding for SETI and the NASA project’s takeover by private institutions, developed further by the UN and national governments.

Malenfant — as one of only two people in all history to have been placed in the situation covered by the protocol — had never bothered to read it. He wasn’t surprised to learn now that it was top-down, officious, and almost comically foolish in its optimism that central control could be maintained:

After concluding that the discovery appears to be credible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, and after informing other parties to this declaration, the discoverer should inform observers throughout the world through the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams of the International Astronomical Union, and should inform the secretary general of the United Nations in accordance with Article XI of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Bodies. Because of their demonstrated interest in and expertise concerning the question of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, the discoverer should simultaneously inform the following international institutions of the discovery and should provide them with all pertinent data and recorded information concerning the evidence: the International Telecommunication Union, the Committee on Space Research, the International Council of Scientific Unions, the International Astronautical Federation, the International Academy of Astronautics, the International Institute of Space Law, Commission 51 of the International Astronomical Union and Commission J of the International Radio Science Union…

Malenfant and Nemoto, by comparison, had gone straighton the talk shows.

Playfully, Maura slapped Malenfant’s wrist. “Naughty, naughty. All those commissions you skipped. You made a lot of enemies there.”

“But,” he said, “I did get to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House. You know, this guy makes it sound as if he’d rather we hadn’t made the discovery at all, rather than make it the wrong way.”

“Human nature, Malenfant. You took away his toy.”

Now the speaker opened the floor for comments.

The discussion soon turned to how the situation should be managed from here. There were plenty of calls for behavioral scientists to study ways in which the public response to the news could be somehow anticipated and controlled — for research into popular public images of ETs, discussion of analogies with the response to missions like Apollo to the Moon and Viking to Mars, and suggestions that SETI proponents should make use of media like webcasts, games, and music to present SETI and ET themes “responsibly.”

Maura pulled an elaborate face. “Don’t these people realize the cat is already out of the bag? You can’t control the public’s access to information anymore — and you certainly can’t control their response. Nor should you try, in my opinion.”

At last the speaker cleared off the stage, and Malenfant’s spirits lifted a little. As an engineer, he knew that a bucket-load of philosophical principles wasn’t worth a grain of good hard fact. And that was why the next item, by Frank Paulis, was a breath of fresh air. After all, it was Paulis, with his money and his initiative, who was actually going out there to look.

Paulis’s images of his en-route spacecraft, the Bruno, showed a gangly, glittering dragonfly of solar-cell panels and gauzy antennae and sensors mounted on long booms, surrounded by a swarm of microsats devoted to fly-around inspections and repairs.

The launch had been uneventful, the first years of the long flight enlivened only by the usual hardware glitches and nail-biting techie dramas. It struck Malenfant as remarkable how little space technology seemed to have progressed in seventy years since the first Sputnik; the design of the Bruno would probably have been recognizable, give or take a few sapphire-based quantum chips, to Wernher von Braun. But flying in space had always been a conservative business; if you had only one shot, you wanted your ship to work, not to serve as the test bed for new gadgets and ideas.

Anyhow, the Bruno had survived its man-made crises. The ship was still a year away from its rendezvous with what appeared to be the primary construction site — or colony, or nest — of the Gaijin. The asteroid belt was a broad lane of rubble; already the probe had encountered a number of those dusty wanderers, never visited before or seen in close-up. But, Paulis promised, standing before slide after slide of coal-dark, anonymous rocks, the best was yet to come. For in the darkness, the Gaijin awaited.

After a morning of such thin gruel, Malenfant retreated to his hotel room.

He traveled light these days: just bathroom stuff, a couple of self-cleaning suits and sets of underwear, a softscreen that was all he needed to connect him to the rest of the species, and a single ornament — a piece of unbelievably ancient rock from the far side of the Moon, carved into an exquisite Fox God. He had become minimal. The time he had spent on the Japanese Moon, he supposed, had changed him, no doubt for the better.

He spent a half hour watching heavily filtered and interpreted news on his softscreen. He needed to know what was going on, but he was too old to have any patience with the evanescent buzz of instant commentaries.

A corner of his softscreen rippled with light: an incoming message.

It was Nemoto. It was the first time she’d contacted Malenfant in years.

“Nemoto! Where are you?”

There was a delay of a few seconds before her reply came back, her face creasing into a thin smile. That could place her on the Moon. But the delay could be a fake…

“You should know better than to ask me that, Malenfant.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

She was still under forty, but she wasn’t aging well, he thought. Her hair remained thick and jet black, but her oval face had shed its prettiness: grown angular, the bones showing, her eyes dark and sunken with suspicion. Her voice, from the softscreen’s tiny speakers, was an insect whisper. “You are enjoying the conference?”

“Not much.” He shared with her his gripe over too many philosophers.

“But there are worse fools. Here is some more philosophy for you: ‘This is the way I think the world will end — with general giggling by all the witty heads, who think it is a joke.’ Kierkegaard.”