Stephen Baxter - Space

She joined Malenfant. He handed her a piece of fruit, and she sat beside him.

The Neandertals seemed to be a family group: five, six adults, about as many children. They seemed oblivious to Malenfant’s scrutiny. They were hairy, squat, naked: cartoon ape-men. And two of the children were wrestling, hard, tumbling over and over, as if they were more gorilla than human.

“Why did you come here, Madeleine?” Malenfant asked slowly, avoiding her eyes.

He seemed stiff; she felt embarrassed, as if she had been foolish, impulsive. “I volunteered. The Gaijin helped me. I wanted to find you.”

“Why?”

“I got to know you, on the Cannonball, Malenfant. I didn’t like the idea of you being alone when—”

“When what?”

She hesitated. “Do you know why you’re here?”

“Just remember,” he said coolly, “I didn’t ask you to follow me.” He continued his sketching in the dust, angry.

She shrank back, confused, lost; she felt farther from home than ever.

She studied his sketches. They were crude, just scrapings made with the point of his stick. But she recognized the box, the ellipse.

“It’s a star map,” she said.

“Yeah. Kind of basic. Just a few score of the brightest stars. But look here, here, here…”

Some of the points were double.

“The stars have shifted,” she said.

“Here’s where this was yesterday — or before we slept, anyhow. And here’s where it is now.” He shrugged. “The shift is small — hard to be accurate without instruments — but I think it’s real.”

“I noted it too,” she said.

“Not just a shift. Other changes. I think there are more stars than yesterday. They seem brighter. And they are flowing across the sky—” He swept his arms over his head, toward the bright Milky Way band on the horizon. “ — thataway.”

“Why that way?”

He looked up at her. “Because that’s where we’re headed. Come see.” He stood, took her by the hand and pulled her to her feet, and led her past a stand of trees.

Now she saw the galactic band exposed to her full view: It was a river of stars, yes, but they were stars that were varied — yellow and blue and orange — and the river was crammed with exotic features, giant dark clouds and brilliant shining nebulae.

“It looks like the Milky Way,” she said. “But—”

“I know,” he said. “It’s not like this at home… I think we’re looking at the Sagittarius Spiral Arm.”

“Which is not the arm that contains the Sun,” she said slowly.

“Hell, no. That’s just a shingle, a short arc. This mother is the next arm in, toward the center of the Galaxy.” He swept his arm so his hand spanned the star river. “Look at those nebulae — see? The Eagle, the Omega, the Trifid, the Lagoon — a huge region of star birth, one of the largest in the Galaxy, immense clouds of gas and dust capable of producing millions of stars each. The Sagittarius Arm is one of the Galaxy’s two main spiral features, a huge whirl of matter that reaches from the hub of the Galaxy all the way out to the rim, winding around for a full turn. This is what you see if you head inward from the Sun, toward the Galaxy center.”

Under the huge, crowded sky, she felt small, humbled. “We’ve come a long way, haven’t we, Malenfant?”

“I think we busted out of the edge of the Saddle Point network. We know the network is no more than a couple of thousand light-years across, extending just a fraction of the way to the center of the Galaxy. We must have reached a radius where the Saddle Points aren’t working anymore. Which is a problem if you want to go farther… I think this is just the start of the true journey.”

He was speaking steadily, evenly, as if discussing a hiking tour of Yosemite. She felt her self-control waver again. But she didn’t want to seem weak in front of Malenfant, this difficult cold man.

“And,” she said, “where will that true journey take us?”

He shrugged. “Maybe all the way to the center of the Galaxy.” He studied her, perhaps to see how well she could take this. Then he pointed. “Look, Madeleine — the Lagoon Nebula, up there, is five thousand light-years from Earth.”

And so, therefore, she thought, the year is A.D. 8800, or thereabouts. It was a number that meant nothing to her at all. And, even if she turned around now and headed for home, assuming that was possible, it would be another five thousand years before she could get back to Earth.

But the center of the Galaxy was twenty-five thousand light-years from the Sun. Even at light speed it would take fifty thousand years to get there and back. Fifty thousand years. This was no ordinary journey, not even like a history-wrenching Saddle Point hop; the human species itself was only a hundred thousand years old…

He was still watching her. “I’ve had time to get used to this.”

“I’m fine.”

“Madeleine…”

“I mean it,” she snapped. She got up, turned her back, and walked away. She found a stream, drank and splashed her face, spent a few minutes alone, eyes closed, breathing deeply.

Perhaps it’s just as well we humans can’t grasp the immensities we have begun to cross. If we were any smarter, we’d go crazy.

Remember why you came here, Madeleine. For Malenfant. Whether he appreciates it or not, the asshole. Malenfant is strong. But maybe it helps him just to have me here. Somebody he has to look after.

But her grasp of psychology always had been shaky. Anyhow, she was here, whether he needed her or not.

She went back to Malenfant, at his patient vigil.

One of the Neandertal women was working a rock, making tools. She held a core of what looked like obsidian, a glassy volcanic rock. She gave the core one sharp strike, and a flake of it dropped off. A few light strokes along the edge and the flake had become a tear-shaped blade, like an arrowhead. The woman, with a lopsided grin, gave the knife to one of the males, signing rapidly.

“She’s saying he should be careful of the edge,” Malenfant murmured.

She frowned. “I don’t understand how those guys got here.”

He told her what he’d observed of the Neandertals’ burial practices: the mysterious Staff of Kintu.

“So you think the Gaijin were rewarding the dying Neandertal workers for all their labors with this — a soapy Heaven.”

He laughed. “If they were, they are the first gods in history to deliver on their afterlife promises.”

She paced, feeling the texture of the grass under her feet, the breeze on her face. “Why is it like this? Trees, grass, streams — it feels like Africa. But it isn’t Africa, is it?”

“No. But if you ask almost any human, anywhere, what type of landscape they prefer, it’s something like this. Open grass, a few flat-topped trees. Even Clear Lake, Houston, fits the pattern: grass out front, maybe a tree or two. And you never put your tree in front of your window; you need to be able to look out of your cave, to see the predators coming. After taking us apart for a thousand years, the Gaijin know us well. And our Neandertal cousins. We’re a hundred millennia out of Africa, Madeleine, and five thousand light-years distant.” He tapped his chest. “But it’s still here, inside us.”

“You’re saying they’ve given us an environment that we’re comfortable with. A Neandertal theme park.”

He nodded. “I think very little of what we see is real.” He pointed at the sky. “But that is real.”

“How so?”

“Because it’s changing.”

She slept and woke again.

And the sky, once more, had changed dramatically. She lay on her back alongside Malenfant, gazing up at the evolving sky.