Stephen Baxter - Space

Madeleine’s employer was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, before a small butsudan, a Buddha shelf, under the window. She was a Japanese, a small, wizened woman, her face imploded, crisscrossed by Vallis Marineris grooves. Her remnant of hair was a handful of gray wisps clinging to a liver-spotted scalp. She had been born in 1990. That made her more than 140 years old, close to the record. Nobody knew how she was keeping herself alive.

She was, of course, Nemoto.

Nemoto touched a carved statue. “A Buddha,” she said, “of fused regolith from the Mare Ingenii. Once such an artifact would have seemed very exotic.” She got up stiffly and went to a coffeepot. “You want some? I also have green tea.”

“No. I burn my mouth too easily.”

“That’s a loss.”

“Tell me about it.” An inability to drink hot black coffee was the Discontinuity handicap that Madeleine felt most severely.

She studied Nemoto, this legendary figure from the deep past, and sought awe, even curiosity. She felt only numbness, impatience. “When do you want me to start work?”

Nemoto smiled thinly. “Straight to business, Meacher? As soon as you can. The first launches start in a month.”

Madeleine had been hired to prepare two hundred rookie astronauts for spaceflight.

“Not astronauts,” Nemoto corrected her. “Emigrants.”

“Emigrants to Triton.”

“Yes. Two hundred Aborigines, from the heart of the Australian outback, establishing a new nation on a moon of Neptune. Inspiring thought, don’t you think?”

Or absurd, Madeleine reflected.

“All you have to do is familiarize them with microgravity. We’ve established a hydro training facility here, and so forth. Just stop them throwing up or going crazy before we can get them transferred to the transport. I assigned Ben Roach to shepherd you for your first couple of days. He’s a smart-ass kid, but he has his uses.”

Madeleine tried to focus on what Nemoto was saying, the details of her outlandish scheme. Triton? Why, for God’s sake? Surrounded by strangeness, numbed by the Discontinuity, it was hard to care.

Nemoto eyed Madeleine. “You feel… disoriented. Here we sit: mirror images, relics of the twenty-first century, both stranded in an unanticipated future. The only difference is in how we got here. You by your relativistic hop, skip, and jump across light-years and decades — the scenic route.” She grinned. “And I came the hard way.” Her teeth were black, Madeleine noticed.

“But we’re both damaged by the experience, in our different ways,” Madeleine said.

Nemoto shrugged. “I ended up with all the power.”

“Power over me, anyhow.”

“Meacher, I still need crew for the transport.”

“You’re offering me a flight to Triton?”

“If you’re interested. Your Discontinuity won’t be a serious liability if—”

“Forget it.”

Madeleine stood up. Her left leg buckled and she nearly fell; she had to cling to the desktop. It was as if Madeleine was the old woman. She found she’d been applying too much weight to the leg and the blood supply had been cut off. She hadn’t noticed, of course; and that kind of damage was too subtle for the biocomp suit to pick up.

Nemoto watched her, calculating, without sympathy. “The Triton colony is crucial,” she said. “Strategic.”

This was the Nemoto Madeleine had heard of. “You’re still working for the future of the species, Nemoto.”

“Yes, if you want to know.”

Madeleine’s heart sank. Nemoto would be hard to deal with rationally. People with missions always were.

But only Nemoto would give her a job.

Aside perhaps from Reid Malenfant — and even after all this time nobody knew what had become of him — Madeleine had been the first human to leave the Solar System. Her experiences in the light of other stars had been astonishing.

Her first return to the Solar System had been something of a triumph — although even then she’d been aware of a historical dislocation, as if the world had had a layer of strangeness thrown over it. And she had been shocked by the sudden — to her — deaths of her mother, and of poor Sally Brind, and many others she had known.

At least Frank Paulis’s get-rich-slow compound interest scheme had worked out that first time. And she had earned herself a little fame. She was the first star traveler — aside from Malenfant — and that earned her some profile.

But she hadn’t been sorry to leave again, to escape into the clean blue light of the Saddle Points, replacing the baffling human world with the cold external mysteries of the stars.

Her later returns had been less enjoyable.

The truth was that as the decades peeled away on Earth, and the novelty wore off, nobody much cared about the star travelers — and few were prepared to protect the interests of these historical curiosities. So the last time she came back, Madeleine had returned to find that a devaluation of the UN dollar, the new global currency, had wiped out a lot of the value of her savings. And then had come the banks’ decision to close the swelling accounts of the star travelers, a step that had been backed by intergovernmental agencies up to and including the UN.

Meanwhile no insurance company would touch her, or anyone else who had been through the Saddle Point gateways, after the Discontinuity condition had been diagnosed.

Which was why Madeleine needed money.

Nemoto was attached to no organization. Madeleine couldn’t have defined her role. But her source of power was clear enough: She had stayed alive.

Thanks to longevity treatments, Nemoto, and a handful of privileged others, had gotten so old that they formed a new breed of power-player, their influence coming from contacts, webs of alliances, ancient debts, and favors granted. Nemoto was a gerontocrat, modeling herself on the antique Communist officials who still ran China.

Madeleine wouldn’t have been surprised to find it was Nemoto herself, or the other gerontocrats, who lay behind the whole scam. The closure of the star travelers’ accounts had given Nemoto a good deal of leverage over Madeleine, and those who had followed in her path. And the strategy had put a block on any ambitions the star travelers might have had to use their effective longevity to accrue power back home.

She wondered if the gerontocrats — conservative, selfish, reclusive, obsessive — were responsible for a more general malaise that seemed to her to have afflicted this fast-forwarded world. There had been change — new fashions, gadgetry, terminology — but, it seemed to her, no progress. In science and art she could see no signs of meaningful innovation. The world’s nations evolved, but the various supranational structures had not changed for decades: the political institutions that wielded the power had ossified.

And meanwhile, the world still labored under the old burdens of a fast-changing ecology and resource shortages, and minor wars continued to be an irritant at every fractured joint between peoples.

Nobody was solving these ancient problems. Worse, it seemed to her, nobody was even trying anymore. You could no longer, for example, get reliable statistics on population numbers, or disease occurrences, or poverty. It was as if history had stopped when the Gaijin had arrived.

But it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t have changed a thing. The traveling itself was the thing, the point of it all. The rest was ancient history, even to Madeleine herself.

Ben showed her to her apartment. He had to show her how to open the door. In 2131, God help her, you had to work door locks with foot studs.

The East Guiana Spaceport, built by the Europeans in the 1980s, extended maybe twenty kilometers along the coast of the Atlantic, from Sinnamary to Kourou, which was actually an old fishing village. There were control buildings, booster-integration buildings, solid-booster test stands and launch complexes, all identified by baffling French acronyms — BAF, BIL, BEAP — and connected by roads and rail tracks that looked, from her window, like gashes in the foliage.