Stephen Baxter - Space

Her Gaijin guides had taken her to a grave: Reid Malenfant’s grave, they said, dug by strong Neandertal hands. She had, briefly, despaired; she had been too late in her self-appointed mission; he had died alone after all, a long way from home.

The Gaijin hadn’t seemed to understand.

Then had come a blue flash, a moment of pain—

And now, this. Where the hell was she? She sat up, suddenly afraid.

She saw a flickering fire, a figure squatting beside it. A man. He was holding something on a stick, she saw, perhaps a fish. He stood straight now, and came walking easily toward her.

She felt herself tense up farther.

His head was silhouetted against the crowded stars; he was bald, his skin smooth as leather. It was Reid Malenfant.

She whimpered, cowered back. “You are dead.”

He crouched before her, reached out and held her hand. He felt warm, real, calm. “Take it easy, Madeleine.”

“They put you in a hole in the ground, on Io. Jesus Christ—”

“Don’t ask questions,” he said evenly. “Not yet. Concentrate on the here and now. How do you feel? Are you sick, hot, cold?”

She thought about that. “I’m okay, I guess.” She wiggled her fingers and toes, turned her head this way and that. Everything intact and mobile; nothing aching; not so much as a cricked neck. Her trembling subsided, soothed by a relentless blizzard of detail, of normality. The here and now, yes.

It was Reid Malenfant. He was wearing a pale blue coverall, white slip-on shoes. When she glanced down, she found she was wearing the same bland outfit.

He was studying her. “You were out cold. I thought I’d better leave you be. We don’t seem to have any medic equipment here.”

The smell of the fish reached her. “I’m hungry,” she said, surprised. “You’ve been fishing?”

“Why not? I mined my old space suit. Not for the first time. A thread, a hook made from a zipper. I felt like Tom Sawyer.”

…Never mind the fish. This guy is dead. “Malenfant, they buried you. Your burns…” But she was starting to remember more. The Neandertals had opened the grave. It was empty.

“Just look at me now.” Emulating her, he clenched his fists, twisted his head. “I haven’t felt so good since the Bad Hair Day twins had a hold of me.”

“Who?”

“Long story. Look, you want some fish or not?” And he loped back to the fire, picked up another twig skewered through a second fish, and held it over his fire of brushwood.

She got to her feet and followed him.

The sky provided a soft light, as bright as a quarter-Moon, perhaps. Even away from that galactic stripe the stars were crowded. There was a pattern of bright stars near the zenith that looked like a box, or maybe a kite; there was another easy pattern farther over, six stars arranged in a rough, squashed ellipse. She recognized no constellations, though.

The grassy plain rolled to the distance, dotted with sparse trees, the vegetation black and silver in the starlight. But where Malenfant’s fire cast a stronger light she could see the grass was an authentic green.

Gravity about Earth normal, she noted absently.

She thought she saw movement, a shadow flitting past a stand of trees. She waited for a moment, holding still. There was no sound, not so much as a crackle of undergrowth under a footstep.

She hunkered down beside Malenfant, accepted half a fish, and bit into it. It was succulent but tasteless. “I never much liked fish,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“Where’s the stream?”

He nodded, beyond the fire. “Thataway. I took a walk.”

“During the daylight?”

“No.” He tilted back his head. “When I woke up it was night, as deep as this. Still is.” He glanced up at the sky, picking out a complex of glowing clouds. “What do you think of the view?”

The larger of the clouds was a rose of pink light. Its heart was speckled by bright splashes of light — stars? — and it was bordered by a band of deeper darkness, velvet blackness, where no stars shone. It was beautiful, strange.

“That is a star birth nebula,” he said. “It’s probably much more extensive. All we can see is a blister, illuminated by a clutch of young stars at the center — see the way that glow is roughly spherical? The stars’ radiation makes the gases shine, out as far as it can reach, before it gets absorbed. But you can see more stars, younger stars, emerging from the fringes of the blister. That darker area all around the glow, eclipsing the stars behind, is a glimpse of the true nebula, dense clouds of dust and hydrogen, probably containing protostars that have yet to shine… Madeleine, I did a little amateur astronomy as a kid. I recognize that thing; it’s visible from Earth. We call it the Lagoon Nebula. And its companion over there is the Trifid. The Lagoon contains stars so young and bright you can see them with the naked eye, from Earth.”

In all her travels around the Saddle Point network, Madeleine had seen nothing like this.

“Ah,” Malenfant said, when she expressed this. “But we’ve come far beyond that, of course.”

She shivered, suddenly longing for daylight. “Malenfant, in those trees over there. I thought I saw—”

“There are Neandertals here,” he said quickly. “You needn’t fear them. I think they’re from Io. Maybe some of them are from Earth, too. I think they were brought here when they were close to death. I haven’t recognized any of them yet. There is one old guy I got to know a little, who died. I called him Esau. He must be here somewhere.”

She tried to follow all that. He didn’t seem concerned, confused by the situation. There was, she realized, a lot he needed to tell her.

“We aren’t on Io anymore, are we?”

“No.” He pointed at the stars with his half-eaten fish. “That’s no sky of Earth. Or even of Io.”

Madeleine felt something inside her crack. “Malenfant—”

“Hey.” He was immediately before her, holding her shoulders, tall in the dark. “Take it easy.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just—”

“We’re a long way from home. I know.”

“I’ve got a lot to tell you.” She started to blurt out all that she’d seen since she, Malenfant, and Dorothy Chaum had returned to the Solar System from the Gaijin’s Cannonball home world: the interstellar war, the hail of comets into the Sun’s hearth, the Crackers.

He listened carefully. He showed regret at the damage done to Earth, the end of so many stories. He smiled when she spoke of Nemoto. But after a time, as detail after detail spilled out of her, he held her shoulders again.

“Madeleine.”

She looked up at him; his eyes were wells of shadow in the starlight.

“None of it matters. Look around, Madeleine. We’re a long way away from all that. There’s nothing we can do to affect any of it now…”

“How far?”

“Questions later,” he said gently. “The first thing I did when I woke up was go behind those bushes over there and take a good solid dump.”

Despite herself, that made her laugh out loud.

By the time they’d eaten more fish, and some yamlike fruit Malenfant had found, it was still dark, with no sign of a dawn. So Madeleine pulled together a pallet of leaves and dry grass, tucked her arms inside her coverall, and quickly fell asleep.

When she woke it was still dark.

Malenfant was hunkered down close to a stand of trees. He seemed to be drawing in the dirt with a stick, peering at the sky. Beyond him there was a group of figures, shadowy in the starlight. Neandertals?

There really was no sign of dawn, no sign of a moon: not a glimmer of light, other than starlight, on any horizon. And yet something was different, she thought. Were the stars a little brighter? Certainly that Milky Way glow close to the horizon seemed stronger. And, it seemed to her, the stars had shifted a little, in the sky. She looked for the star patterns she had noted last time she was awake — the box overhead, the ellipse. Were they a little distorted, a little more squashed together?