Stephen Baxter - Space

But here was old Esau, grinning from one side to the other of his flat face, deep eyes full of starlight. He was signing: the fistto the forehead, then left palm flat upright, supporting the right fist, which was making a thumb’s-up gesture. Hey, Stupid. I’ll help you.

Malenfant signed back. What help me what what?

Forefinger and middle finger together, on both hands, held out like a knife; a sharp chop downward, a stark, unmistakable sign. To die.

Cassiopeia embraced him.

He was pulled into her body, articulating arms folding about him. He could smell the burning tang of metal that had been exposed to vacuum, to the light of a hundred different Suns. And now finer arms, no more than tendrils, began to probe at his body, his skin, his mouth, his eyes.

Through a mist of metal cilia, he could see Madeleine on the hillside before him, weeping openly. “Tell them about me, Madeleine. Don’t let them forget.”

“I will. I promise.”

Now warm metal probed at his ears, the membranes of his mouth, even his eyes. Probed and pierced, a dozen stabs of sharp pain. Then came an insidious penetration, and he could taste blood. “It hurts, Madeleine.” He cried out; he couldn’t help it. “Oh, God!”

But now Esau was before him, signing vigorously. Stupid Stupid. Watch me me.

Malenfant tried to focus as the pain deepened.

Esau sat on the hillside. By the light of Galaxy-center stars, he held out a core of obsidian.

Malenfant reached forward. His bare arms trailed long shining tendrils, back to the cold body of the Gaijin, within which he was merging. He could move his fingers, he found. But they glinted, metallic.

Esau was still holding out the glassy rock, thrusting it at him.

Malenfant took the rock. He could feel its rough texture, but remotely, as if through a layer of plastic. He turned it over in his hands.

Esau held up a fresh lump of obsidian, hammers of bone and rock. He signed bluntly to Malenfant. Same as me, Stupid. Do same as me. Copy.

Obediently, Malenfant set to work, tapping clumsily at the rock, emulating Esau’s movements, practicing this most ancient of human crafts twenty-five thousand light-years from home.

“The Buddhists have a doctrine of anatta,” Madeleine murmured. “It means, no self. Or rather, the self is only temporary, like an idea or a story. ‘Actions do exist, and also their consequences, but the person that acts does not’… It won’t be so bad, Malenfant. Some people can do this for themselves. Some choose it…”

She was weeping, he saw, the tears leaking out of closed eyes. Weeping for him. But he must not think about her. He tried to bury himself in the tasks. He focused on the work, the movements of his hands and arms. He would think about Madeleine — and put the thought aside. The differences between his own hands and the Neandertal’s struck him, frustrating him with his own clumsiness. But he must put aside that thought too.

For brief periods, he got it. It was as if he saw the stone, the tool he was making, with a kind of stunning clarity: the thing itself, not the geologic processes that had produced the raw material, not the mysterious interstellar gateways that had brought him and the stone to this place, not even the tool’s ultimate purpose. Just the thing, and the act.

But then the spell would be broken, and plans and analyses and self-consciousness would return to clutter up his head, an awareness of Madeleine and Cassiopeia, and Esau, the trees and grass and the heart of the Galaxy, and the pain, that penetrated right to his core.

“You have to let it go, Malenfant,” Madeleine whispered. “Don’t think. Live in the now, the present moment. If ideas come up, reflections, memories, hopes, fears, let them go. Butterflies, flitting out the window. Treat everything equally. Don’t filter, don’t focus. Watch Esau…”

Esau, yes.

Malenfant was like an observer. But Esau was the rock he worked in its deep chthonic richness, in a way Malenfant perhaps could never be. It was a smooth, rolling, fleeting form of awareness, without past or future, memory or anticipation. It was like driving a car while holding a conversation. Like being stoned. Or like being five years old, and every moment a delicious Saturday morning.

Madeleine was still talking, but he could make out no words. She was receding, as if dissolving.

Good-bye, good-bye.

He closed his eyes.

…No, it wasn’t like that:

Eyes that were closed.

There was a blue flash, a moment of searing pain.

“Emma!” he cried.

And then—

Limbs that worked. Tactile, graceful. Tasks that were progressed.

The rope: complex, multilevel, a thing of monomolecular filaments, superconducting threads within. The extension of the rope, the repair of breaks, the tasks of the limbs.

Visual receptors, eyes. A repositioning.

Data nets above, below, all around, a great curving wall. At extremes, a flat-infinite plane, in every direction: the sail.

Above, the spitting neutron star, its envelope of gas.

Here, a body, a spiderlike form of many limbs, a dodecahedral box at the center. Multiple tasks for those limbs. The sail that was repaired, extended; the body that was maintained, adjusted, itself extended; records that were kept; a mesh of communications with others that was maintained, extended.

Other workers.

Some near. Some far. Some as this body, a common design. Millions of them. Some not. Tasks that were progressed.

The structure. Vibrations, the shudder of torn threads. Complex modes, wave forms in space and time.

War, in a remote part of the sail.

A position that was adjusted, an anchoring of the body that was improved and secured.

The work that was progressed in one part of the sail, war in other parts.

The anchoring. The self-maintenance. The work.

The universe, of tasks, of things.

No center.

…And he felt as if he were drowning, struggling up from some thick, viscous fluid, toward the light. He wanted to open his mouth, to scream — but he had no mouth, and no words. What would he scream?

I.

I am.

I am Malenfant…

No. Not just Malenfant. Malenfant / Esau / Cassiopeia.

The pain!

The shuddering of the net. The anchoring. The work that was progressed…

No! More than that. I feel the shudder. I must hold on to the net; I must continue the work, in the hope that sanity will prevail, the conflict is resolved, the work is continued, the greater goal achieved.

Thus it must be. Oh, God, the pain.

Terror flooded over him. And love. And anger.

He could see the sail.

It was a gauzy sheet draped across the crowded stars of this place. And within the sail, cupped, he could see the neutron star, an angry ball of red laced with eerie synchrotron blue, like a huge toy.

Beautiful. Scary.

And he saw it with eyes beyond the human.

He saw the sleeting rays that flowed beyond the human spectrum: the sail’s dazzle of ultraviolet, the sullen infrared glower of the star itself. He saw the sail, its curves, the star, from a dozen angles, as if the whole impossible, unlikely structure was a mote that swam within his own Godlike eyeball, visible from all sides at once, as if it had been flayed and pinned to a board before him.

And he saw the whole project embedded in time, the sail unfurling, growing, the star’s slow, reluctant deflection. He saw its origins — the sail shared design features with the artifact that had been found cupping a black hole in the system of the species called Chaera; perhaps it too was a relic of those vanished builders.