Stephen Baxter - Space

She felt a pulse in her head, a pressure. “But,” she said, “if we’re just emulations in some toy starship, we’re dead. I mean, we’re no longer us. Are we? How can we be?”

He eyed her. “The first time you stepped through a gateway you were no longer you. Every transition is a death, a rebirth. Why do you think it hurts so much?”

She felt weak, her legs numb. Carefully, she lowered herself to the grass, dug her hands into the rich cool texture of the ground.

He knelt beside her, took her hand. “Listen. I don’t mean to be so tough on you. What do I know? I only have guesses too. I’ve had more time to get used to this stuff, is all.” He went on with difficulty. “I know you came here to help me. I remember the way you fixed my suit, on the Cannonball. You were… kind.”

She said nothing.

“I just don’t think you can help,” he said. His face was turning hard again. “Or will help.”

That chilled her, his harsh dismissal. “Help with what, Malenfant? Why did the Gaijin go to all this trouble — to train Neandertals to mine antimatter on Io, build a starship, hurl it across light-years?”

He looked troubled at that. “I think — I have this awful feeling, a suspicion — that the purpose of it all was me. A huge alien conspiracy, all designed to give me a ride across the Galaxy.” He studied her, face emptied by wonder. “Or is that paranoid, megalomaniacal? Do you think I’m crazy, Madeleine?”

Beyond him, perhaps a half kilometer away, she made out a new shadow: angular, gaunt, crisp and precise before the cosmos light.

It was a Gaijin.

“Maybe we’ll soon find out,” she said.

They approached the Gaijin. It just stood there impassively, silent. Madeleine saw how the pencil-thin cones that terminated its legs were stained green by crushed grass, and that a little quasi-African dust had settled on the surfaces of its upper carapace.

Malenfant said he recognized it. It was the individual Gaijin he had come to know as Cassiopeia.

“Oh, really? And how do you know that, Malenfant? The Gaijin are just spidery robots. Don’t they all look alike?”

He didn’t try to answer.

Madeleine found the Gaijin’s calm mechanical silence infuriating. She bent down and picked up a handful of dirt. She threw it at the Gaijin; it pinged off that impassive hide, not making so much as a scratch. “You. Space robot. You’ve been playing with us since you showed up in our asteroid belt. I don’t care how alien you are. No more fucking games.”

Malenfant seemed shocked by her swearing. A corner of her found amusement at that. Malenfant really was a man of his time: Here they were hurtling away from Earth at a tad less than light speed, shrunk to quark-sized copies or else trapped in some alien virtual reality, and he was shocked to hear a woman swear. But he just stood and let her rant her heart out. Therapy, for absorbing one shock after another.

She ran out of energy, slumped back to the grass, numbed by tiredness.

The Gaijin stirred, like a turret swiveling. Madeleine thought she heard something like hydraulics, perhaps a creak of metal scraping on metal. The Gaijin spoke, its booming voice a good emulation of a human’s — a woman’s voice, in fact, with a tinge of Malenfant’s own accent.

NO DOUBT YOU’RE WONDERING WHY I ASKED YOU HERE TODAY, Cassiopeia said.

The silence stretched. Malenfant peered up at the Gaijin doubtfully.

“She made a joke,” Madeleine said slowly. “This ridiculous alien robot made a joke.”

Malenfant stared at Madeleine. Then he threw his hands in the air, slumped back on the grass, and laughed.

Pretty soon, Madeleine caught the bug. The laugh seemed to start in her belly and burst out of her throat and mouth, despite her best efforts to contain it.

So they laughed, and kept on laughing, while the Gaijin waited for them.

And, cradling its precious cargo of mind and hope and fear, the ten-centimeters-long starship hurtled onward toward the core of the Galaxy, and its destiny.

They drank from a stream, and ate fruit, and lay on the grass, letting the tension drain out. Madeleine thought she slept for a while, curled up against Malenfant in the grass, like they were two exhausted kids.

And then — when they were awake, sitting before Cassiopeia — the Gaijin waved a spidery metal limb, and the world dissolved. It melted like a defocusing image: grass and mud and trees and streams running together, everything but the three of them, two humans and a Gaijin, and that eerie universe-Sun, so that they seemed to be floating, bathed in a deeper darkness than Madeleine had ever known.

She reached out and grabbed Malenfant’s hand. It was warm, solid; she could see him, the folds on his jumpsuit picked out by the cosmic glow. She dug the fingers of her other hand into loamy soil beneath her. It was still there, cool and friable, invisible or not. She clung to its texture, to the pull of the fake world sticking her to the ground.

But Malenfant was staring upward, past the Gaijin’s metal shoulder. “Look at that. Holy shit.”

She looked up unwillingly, reluctant to face new wonders.

Above them, a ceiling of curdled light spanned the sky. It was a galaxy.

It was a disc of stars, flatter and thinner than she might have expected, in proportion to its width no thicker than a few sheets of paper. She thought she could see strata in that disc, layers of structure, a central sheet of swarming blue stars and dust lanes sandwiched between dimmer, older stars. The core, bulging out of the plane of the disc like an egg yolk, was a compact mass of yellowish light; but it was not spherical, rather markedly elliptical. The spiral arms were fragmented. They were a delicate blue laced with ruby-red nebulae and the blue-white blaze of individual stars — a granularity of light — and with dark lanes traced between each arm. She saw scattered flashes of light, blisters of gas. Perhaps those were supernova explosions, creating bubbles of hot plasma hundreds of light-years across.

But the familiar disc — shining core, spiral arms — was actually embedded in a broader, spherical mass of dim red stars. The crimson fireflies were gathered in great clusters, each of which must contain millions of stars.

The Gaijin hovered before the image, silhouetted, like the spidery projector cluster at the center of a planetarium.

“So, a galaxy,” said Madeleine. “Our Galaxy?”

“I think so,” Malenfant said. “It matches radio maps I’ve seen.” He pointed, tracing patterns. “Look. That must be the Sagittarius Arm. The other big structure is called the Outer Arm.” The two major arms, emerging from the elliptical core, defined the Galaxy, each of them wrapping right around the core before dispersing at the rim into a mist of shining stars and glowing nebulae and brooding black clouds. The other “arms” were really just scraps, she saw — the Galaxy’s spiral structure was a lot messier than she had expected — but still, she thought, the Sun is in one of those scattered “fragments.”

The Galaxy image began to rotate, slowly.

“A galactic day,” Malenfant breathed. “Takes two hundred million years to complete a turn…”

Madeleine could see the stars swarming, following individual orbits around the Galaxy core, like a school of sparkling fish. And the spiral arms were evolving too, ridges of light sparking with young stars, churning their way through the disc of the Galaxy. But the arms were just waves of compression, like the bunching of traffic jams, with individual stars swimming through the regions of high density.