Stephen Baxter - Space

Malenfant laughed at the Gaijin, mocking.

Madeleine felt disturbed at this blatant evidence of discord among the Gaijin. Weren’t they supposed to merge into some kind of supermind, make decisions by consensus, with none of the crude arguing and splits of human beings? Dissension like this, so visible, must represent an agony of indecision in the Gaijin community, faced by the immense challenge of the star sail project. Indecision — or schizophrenia.

Malenfant said, still challenging, “But your factions are wrong. Aren’t they? Completing this project isn’t a question of a game, theoretical or not. It is a question of sacrifice.”

Sacrifice? Madeleine wondered. Of what — or who?

MALENFANT, YOU ARE SHORT-LIVED — YOUR LIVES SO BRIEF, IN FACT, THAT YOU CAN OBSERVE NONE OF THE UNIVERSE’S SIGNIFICANT PROCESSES. YOUR RESPONSE TO OUR PRESENCE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM WAS SPLINTERED, CHAOTIC, FLUID. YOU DO NOT EVEN UNDERSTAND YOURSELVES.

AND YET YOU TRANSCEND YOUR BREVITY. HUMANS, DOOMED TO BRIEF LIVES, CHOOSE DEATH VOLUNTARILY — FOR THE SAKE OF AN IDEA. AND WITH EVERY DEATH, THAT IDEA GROWS STRONGER.

WE HAVE ENCOUNTERED MANY SPECIES ON OUR TRAVELS. RARELY HAVE WE ENCOUNTERED SUCH A CAPACITY FOR FAITH.

Malenfant stalked back and forth on the hillside, obviously torn. “What are you talking about, Cassiopeia? Do you expect me to start a religion? You want me to teach faith to the toiling robots and cyborgs and whatnot who are building the neutron-star sail — something to unite them, to force them to bury their differences, to persist and complete the project across generations… Is that it?”

No, Madeleine thought sadly. No, she is asking for something much more fundamental than that.

She wants you, Malenfant. She wants your soul.

And the Gaijin started talking of mind, and identity, and memes, and idea viruses.

To Cassiopeia, Malenfant was scarcely sentient at all. From the Gaijin’s point of view, Malenfant’s mind was no more than a coalition of warring idea viruses: uneasy, illogically constructed, temporary. The ideas grouped together in complexes that reinforced each other, mutually aiding replication — just as those other replicators, genes, worked together through human bodies to promote their own reproduction.

Yes, Madeleine thought, beginning to understand. And the most fundamental idea complex was the sense of self.

A self was a collection of memories, beliefs, possession, hopes, fears, dreams: all of them ideas, or receptacles for ideas. If an idea accreted to the self — if it became Malenfant’s idea, to be defended, if necessary, with his life — then its chance of replication was much stronger. His sense of self, of him self, was an illusion. Just a web woven by the manipulating idea viruses.

The Gaijin had no such sense of self. But sometimes, that was what you needed.

Malenfant understood. “Every damn one of the Gaijin has a memory that stretches back to those ugly yellow seas on the Cannonball. But they are… fluid. They break up into their component parts and scatter around and reassemble; or they merge in great ugly swarms and come out shuffled around. Identity for them is a transient thing, a pattern, like the shadow of a passing cloud. Not for us, though. And that’s why the Gaijin don’t have this.” He stabbed a finger at his chest. “They don’t have a sense of me.”

And without self, Madeleine saw, there could be no self-sacrifice.

That was why the Gaijin couldn’t handle the reboot prevention project. Only humans, it seemed — slaves of replicating ideas, nurtured and comforted by the illusion of the self — might be strong enough, crazy enough, for that.

Through the dogged sense of his own character, Malenfant must give the fragmented beings toiling here a sense of purpose, of worth beyond their own sentience. A sense of sacrifice, of faith, of self. To help the Gaijin, to save the Galaxy, Malenfant was going to have to become like the Gaijin. He was going to have to lose himself — and, in the incomprehensible community that labored over the strands of the sail, find himself again.

Malenfant, standing before the spidery Gaijin, was trembling. “And you think this will work?”

No, Madeleine thought. But they are desperate. This is a throw of the dice. What else can they do?

The Gaijin didn’t reply.

“I can’t do this,” Malenfant whispered at last, folding his hands over and over. “Don’t ask me. Take it away from me.”

Madeleine longed to run to him, to embrace him, offer him simple human comfort, animal warmth. But she knew she must not.

And still the Gaijin would not reply.

Malenfant stalked off over the empty grassland, alone.

Madeleine slept.

When she woke, Malenfant was still gone.

She lay on her back, peering up at a sky crowded with stars and glowing dust clouds. The stars seemed small, uniform, few of them bright and blue and young, as if they were deprived of fuel in this crammed space — as perhaps they were. And the dust clouds were disrupted, torn into ragged sheets and filaments by the immense forces that operated here.

Toward the heart of the Galaxy itself, there was structure, Madeleine saw. Laced over a backdrop of star swarms she made out two loose rings of light, roughly concentric, from her point of view tipped to ellipticity. The rings were complex: She saw gas and dust, stars gathered into small, compact globular clusters, spherical knots of all-but-identical pinpoints. In one place the outer ring had erupted into a vast knot of star formation, tens of thousands of hot young blue stars blaring light from the ragged heart of a pink-white cloud. The rings were like expanding ripples, she saw, or billows of gas from some explosion. But if there had been an explosion it must have been immense indeed; that outermost ring was a coherent object a thousand light-years across, big enough to have contained almost all the naked-eye stars visible from Earth.

And when Madeleine lifted her head, she saw that the inner ring was actually the base of an even larger formation that rose up and out of the general plane of the Galaxy. It was a ragged arch, traced out by filaments of shining gas, arching high into the less crowded sky above. It reminded her of images of solar flares, curving gusts of gas shaped by the Sun’s magnetic field — but this, of course, was immeasurably vaster, an arch spanning hundreds of light-years. And rising out of the arch she glimpsed more immensity still, a vast jet of gas that thrust out of the Galaxy’s plane, glimmering across thousands of light-years before dissipating into the dark.

It was a hierarchy of enormity, towering over her, endless expansions of scale up into the dark.

But of the Galaxy center itself, she could only see a tight, impenetrable cluster of stars — many thousands of them, swarming impossibly close together, closer to each other than the planets of the Solar System. Whatever structure lay deeper still was hidden by those crowded acolyte stars.

The Gaijin still stood on the ridge, silhouetted against the pulsar’s glow, hatefully silent.

Malenfant still hadn’t returned. Madeleine tried to imagine what was going through his head as he tried to submit himself to an unknown alien horror that would, it seemed, take apart even his humanity.

Madeleine got to her feet and stalked up to the Gaijin, confronting it. She was aware of Neandertals watching her curiously. They signed to each other, obscurely. Look at crazy flathead.

Madeleine shouted. “Why can’t you leave us alone? You came to our planet uninvited, you used up our resources, you screwed up our history—”

The Gaijin swiveled with eerie precision. WE MINEDASTEROIDS YOU PROBABLY WOULD NEVER HAVE REACHED. WITHOUT US YOU WOULD HAVE REMAINED UNAWARE OF THE CRACKERS UNTIL THEY REACHED THE HEART OF YOUR SYSTEM. AS TO YOUR HISTORY, THAT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. WE DID NOT INTERVENE. MOST OF YOU WOULD NOT HAVE WISHED THAT ANYHOW.