Stephen Baxter - Space

We were always doomed. All we could do was make it better for the next cycle, advance the project far enough that they — the next to evolve from the pond scum of the Galaxy, the next to stumble on the half-finished sail after another few tens of millions of years — they would understand a little better than we had, would know what to do, how to finish it.

The first designers of the sail, sometime before the last reboot, had known it. Cassiopeia had known it.

She hadn’t thought to tell him, though, before he… died. Maybe she didn’t think it was significant. After all a sacrifice was a sacrifice. Maybe he simply hadn’t understood; maybe she’d expected him to be able to think it through himself. After all, she could see the mathematics.

He remembered how it felt, to find out. It had been the final betrayal.

And hence, the anger.

But it didn’t matter. In fact, it made his work, the role here, still more important.

Humans, Gaijin, Chaera, all of the current “generation” of galactic sentients — all of those who contributed to the sail’s slow building — they were all doomed, no matter what happened here.

But this was all they could do: to make things better for the next time.

And, he told himself, thinking of Madeleine, the alternative to all this pain — a lifeless universe doomed to nothing but meaningless expansion — would be much worse.

Have courage, he told himself/themselves. We have a noble goal. Our death doesn’t matter. The future, the children… Even if they are not our children, they are what matters. We will prevail.

He must continue. He must reach out to others, working here. Infect them.

Convert them.

This wasn’t a project, after all. It was a crusade.

The net shuddered again. That damn war.

He was dissolving, sinking back. He didn’t fight it. It was good.

Malenfant sighed, metaphorically. You don’t have to be crazy to work here but it helps.

Blue light that gathered around him. Pain that intensified.

Cassiopeia, he flared. Why did you betray me?

No center.

The universe, of tasks, of things.

The anchoring. The self-maintenance. The work.

Always the work.

The Gaijin colony lay quietly beneath its translucent bubble, the beveled edges of the buildings making the little city look like a scattering of half-melted toys. Beyond the bubble an airless, desolate plain stretched to a clean horizon. Shadows raked the plain.

Looking up, she traced the quasar’s fantastic geometry.

The powerhouse at the quasar’s heart, barely two hundred light-years away, was a pinpoint of unnatural brightness. Twin sprays of electron flux tore from the poles of the powerhouse, straining to zenith and nadir. And swaddling the waist of the quasar was a torus of glowing rubble. This colony world orbited almost within the torus, so that the debris looked like a pair of celestial arms reaching around the powerhouse to touch the fake clouds nestling under the bubble.

The sky was full of dodecahedral frameworks, triangular faces glimmering, drifting like angular soap bubbles.

It was glorious, astonishing.

She had traveled a billion light-years from Earth, across the curve of the universe. She wasn’t aware of it. She had been in store, or bouncing from gateway to gateway without downloading, since leaving Malenfant.

I am a billion years from home, she thought. Everything I knew is buried under deep layers of past. Humans must have fled Earth, or become extinct. Earth’s biosphere itself could not survive so long as this. Perhaps I am the last human.

Perhaps I am, by now, a construct of alien qualia; perhaps I’m not even human anymore myself.

Well, I don’t have to face that. Not yet.

She looked to the zenith. A scattering of galaxies glimmered through her bubble. The galaxies glowed green, every one of them.

Life everywhere. Triumphant. Awe, wonder, love surged in her.

It was proof, of course. Just waking up again, emerging from the Saddle Point network, had been proof. Humans and their allies — or rivals or successors — had beaten the countdown clock, had burst out of the limits of the Galaxy and gone on, spreading across the universe, building their Saddle Point links.

And if they had gotten as far as this, they must be everywhere. Hell of a thought.

But—

Where to now, Madeleine?

She wondered if Malenfant could have survived, in one form or another, even over such an immense span of space and time. She had, after all. She smiled, thinking of Malenfant, the original gray cyborg.

The quasar dipped to the horizon now; optical filters in the bubble around her softened its shape, turning it red. The electron flux was splayed across the sky like brush marks on velvet. The last traces of quasar light touched the sky like cool smoke.

It was so beautiful it hurt.

She turned away, and went in search of Reid Malenfant.

A good recent survey of the state of our thinking on extraterrestrial life is Paul Davies’s Are We Alone? (Penguin Books, 1995). The passages set on the Moon are based in part on conversations with former astronaut Charles M. Duke, who in 1972 walked on the Moon as lunar module pilot of Apollo 16. There really are naturally occurring nuclear reactors; a reference is “Fossil Nuclear Reactors” by Michel Maurette, Annual Review of Nuclear Science, v. 26, pp. 319-350 (1976). I published a technical article on the feasibility of the Moon’s deep ocean in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (v. 51, pp. 75-80, 1998).

Any errors, omissions, or misinterpretations are of course my responsibility.

Stephen Baxter Great Missenden February 2000