Stephen Baxter - Space

Brind gave her a powerful processor to enable her to communicate, to some extent, with her Gaijin hosts. It was a bioprocessor, a little cubical unit. The biopro was high technology, and it was the one place they had spent some serious amounts of Paulis’s money. And it was human technology, not Gaijin. Madeleine was fascinated. She spent a long time going over the biopro’s specs. It was based on ampiphiles, long molecules with watery heads and greasy tails, that swam about in layers called Langmuir-Blodgett films. The active molecules used weak interactions — hydrogen bonding, van der Waals forces and hydrophobic recognition — to assemble themselves into a three-dimensional structure, supramolecular arrays thousands of molecules long.

Playing with the biopro was better than thinking about what was happening to her, where she was headed.

She wasn’t so happy to find, though, when she first booted up the biopro, that its human interface design metaphor was a two-dimensional virtual representation of Frank Paulis’s leathery face.

“Paulis, you egotistical bastard.”

“Just want to make you feel at home.” The image flickered a little, and his skin was blocky — obviously digitally generated. It — he — turned out to be backed up by a complex program, interactive and heuristic. He could respond to what Madeleine said to him, learn, and grow.

He would be company, of a sort.

“Are you in contact with the Gaijin?”

He hesitated. “Yes, in a way. Anyhow I’ll keep you informed. In the meantime, the best thing you can do is follow your study program.” He started downloading some kind of checklist; it chattered out of an antique teletype.

“You have got to be kidding.”

“You’ve a lot of training on the equipment still to complete,” virtual Paulis said.

“Terrific. And should I study neutron stars, bursters, whatever the hell they are?”

“I’d rather not. I want your raw reactions. If I coach you too much it will narrow your perception. Remember, you’ll be observing on behalf of all mankind. We may never get another chance. Now. Maybe we can start with the spectroheliograph deployment procedure…”

When she flew once more over the glittering east coast of North America, the Gaijin ship was waiting to meet her.

In Earth orbit, the Gaijin flower-ship didn’t look so spectacular. It was laid out something like a squid, a kilometer long and wrought in silver, with a bulky main section as the “head” and a mess of “tentacles” trailing behind.

Dodecahedral forms, silvered and anonymous, drifted from the cables and clustered around Madeleine’s antique craft. Her ship was hauled into the silvery rope stuff. Strands adhered to her hull until her view was crisscrossed with shining threads and she had become part of the structure of the Gaijin ship. She felt a mounting claustrophobia as she was knit into the alien craft. How had Malenfant stood all this?

Then the flower-ship unfolded its petals. They made up an electromagnetic scoop a thousand kilometers wide. The lower edge of the scoop brushed the fringe of Earth’s atmosphere, and plasma sparkled.

Madeleine felt her breath shortening. This is real, she thought. These crazy aliens are really going to do this. And I’m really here.

She fought panic.

After a couple of widening loops around the planet Madeleine sailed out of Earth’s orbit, and she was projected into strangeness.

Eating interplanetary hydrogen, it took the flower-ship 198 days to travel out to the burster’s Saddle Point, eight hundred AU from the Sun.

Saddle Point gateways must destroy the objects they transport.

For eighteen years a signal crossed space, toward a receiver gateway that had been hauled to the system of the burster neutron star. For eighteen years Madeleine did not exist. She was essentially — though not legally — dead.

Thus, Madeleine Meacher crossed interstellar space.

There was no sense of waking — is it over? — she was just there, with the Spacelab’s systems whirring and clicking around her as usual, like a busy little kitchen. Her heart was pounding, just as it had been a second before — eighteen years before.

Everything was the same. And yet—

“Meacher.” It was virtual Paulis’s voice. “Are you all right?”

No. She felt extraordinary: renewed, revived. She remembered every instant of it, that burst of exquisite pain, the feeling of reassembling, of sparkling. Was it possible she had somehow retained some consciousness during the transition?

My God, she thought. This could become addictive.

A new, complex light was sliding over the back of her hand. She suddenly remembered where she was. She made for her periscope.

From the dimly lit, barren fringe of the Solar System, she had been projected immediately into a crowded space. She was, in fact, sailing over the surface of a star.

The photosphere, barely ten thousand kilometers below, was a flat-infinite landscape encrusted by granules each large enough to swallow the Earth, and with the chromosphere — the thousand-kilometer-thick outer atmosphere — a thin haze above it all. Polarizing filters in the viewport periscope dimmed the light to an orange glow. As she watched, one granule exploded, its material bursting across the star’s surface; neighboring granules were pushed aside so that a glowing, unstructured scar was left on the photosphere, a scar that was slowly healed by the eruption of new granules.

From the tangled hull of the flower-ship, an instrument pod of some kind uncoiled on a graceful pseudopod. Gaijin instruments peered into the umbra of a star spot below her.

“This is an F-type white dwarf star, Meacher,” Paulis said. “A close cousin of the Sun, the dominant partner of the binary pair in this system.”

I mightn’t have come here, she thought. She felt an odd, retrospective panic. Brind might have picked on somebody else. I might have turned them down. I might have died, without ever imagining this was possible.

But I just lost eighteen years, she thought. Nearly half my life. Just like that. She tried to imagine what was happening on Earth, right now. Tried and failed.

Virtual Paulis had issues of his own. “Remarkable,” he said.

“What?”

Paulis sounded wistful. “Meacher, we didn’t want to emphasize the point overmuch before you left, but you’re the first human to have passed through a Saddle Point teleport except for Malenfant, and he never reported back. We didn’t know what would happen.”

“Maybe I would have arrived here as warm meat. All the lights on but nobody at home. Is that what you expected?”

“It was a possibility. Philosophically.”

“The Gaijin pass back and forth all the time.”

“Ah, but perhaps they don’t have souls, as we do.”

“Souls, Frank?” She was growing suspicious. “It isn’t just you in there, is it? I can’t imagine Frank Paulis discussing theology.”

“I’m a composite.” He grinned. “But I — that is, Paulis — won the fight to be front man.”

“Now that sounds like Frank.”

“For thousands of years we’ve wondered about the existence of a soul. Does the mind emerge from the body, or does the soul have some separate existence, somehow coupled to the physical body? Consider a thought experiment. If I made an exact duplicate of you, down to the last proton and electron and quantum state, but a couple of meters to the left — would that copy be you? Would it have a mind? Would it be conscious?”

“But that’s pretty much what we’ve done. Isn’t it? But rather than a couple of meters…”

“Eighteen light-years. Yes. But still, as far as I can tell, you — I mean the inner you — have emerged unscathed. The teleport mechanism is a purely physical device. It has transported the machinery of your body — and yet your soul appears to have arrived intact as well. All this seems to prove that we are after all no more than machines — no more than the sum of our parts. A whole slew of religious beliefs are going to be challenged by this one simple fact.”