Stephen Baxter - Space

Ariane had been nice-looking technology, for its time, 150 years earlier. It had been superseded by new generations of space planes, even before the Gaijin had taken over most of Earth’s ground-to-orbit traffic with their clean, flawless landers. But when the French released political control of East Guiana, the new government decided to refurbish what was left at Kourou.

So East Guiana, one of the smallest and poorest nations on Earth, suddenly had a space program.

Ariane had kept flying even as history moved on, and nations and corporations and alliances had formed and dissolved, leaving new configurations whose very names were baffling to Madeleine. But Ariane remained: an antique, disreputable, dirty, unreliable launcher, used by agencies without the funds to afford something better.

Like Nemoto.

Maybe, Madeleine thought, it wasn’t a surprise that Nemoto, another relic of the first Space Age, had gravitated here.

The residential quarters had been set up in an abandoned solid-propellant factory, a building that dated back to before Madeleine’s birth. The cluster of buildings was still called UPG, for Usine de Propergol de Guyane. It was a jumble of white cubes spilling over a hillside, like a Mediterranean village. It was sparsely set up, but comfortable enough. About four hundred people lived here: the Aboriginal emigrants, and permanent technical and managerial staff to operate the automated facilities. Once, twenty thousand, a fifth of the country’s population, had been housed in Kourou. The feeling of emptiness, of age and abandonment, was startling.

She slept for a few hours. Then she drifted about her apartment, tinkering.

It was startling how often and how much everyday gadgets changed. The toilet, for instance, was just a hole in the ground, and it took her an age to figure out how to make it flush. The shower was just as bad; it took a call to Ben to establish that to set the heat, you had to put your finger in a little test sink and let the thing read your body temperature.

And so on. All stuff everybody else here had grown up with. It was like being in a foreign country, wherever she went, even in her hometown; she’d long grown tired of people not taking her requests for basic information seriously. And every time she came back from another Einsteinian fast-forward it got worse.

Anyhow, a few minutes after stepping out of the shower, her skin was prickling with sweat again.

She felt no discomfort, of course. The Discontinuity left her with numbness where pain or discomfort should sit. Like a fading-down of reality. She toweled herself dry again, trying not to scrape her skin.

Perhaps it should have been expected. Before the reality of Saddle Point teleportation had been demonstrated, there had been those who had doubted whether human minds could ever, even in principle, be downloaded, stored, or transmitted. The way data was stored in a brain was not simple. A human mind appeared to be a process, dynamic, and no static “snapshot,” no matter how sophisticated the technology, could possibly capture its richness. So it was argued.

The fact that the first travelers, including Madeleine, had survived Saddle Point transitions seemed to belie this pessimistic point of view. But perhaps, in the longer term, those doubts had been borne out.

She knew there was talk of treatment for Discontinuity sufferers. Madeleine wasn’t holding her breath: Nobody was putting serious money into the problem. There were only a handful of star travelers, and nobody cared much about them anyhow. And so Madeleine had to wear a constricting biocomp sensor suit that warned her when she’d sat still for too long or when her skin was burned or frozen, and that woke her up in the night to turn her over.

Maybe the Gaijin weren’t affected the same way. Nobody knew.

She stood, naked, at an open window, trying to get cool. It was evening. She looked across kilometers of hilly country, all of it coated by burgeoning life. There was a breeze, lifting loose leaves high enough to cross the balcony. But the breeze served only to push more water-laden air into her face.

The blanket of foliage coating the hills around the launch areas looked etiolated: the leaves yellowed, stunted, the trees sickly and small by comparison with their neighbors farther away. And the leaves at her feet were yellow and black, others holed, as if burned.

She pulled on a loose dress and walked a kilometer to the block containing Ben’s apartment.

She glimpsed Aborigines: her trainees — men, women, and children — passing back and forth in little groups, engaged in their own errands and concerns. They showed no interest in her. They were loose-limbed people, many of them going barefoot, some of the women overweight; they wore loose togas like Ben’s, the cloth worn, dirty, well used. Their faces were round, a paler brown than she had expected, with blunt noses, prominent brows. Many of them wore breathing filters or sunscreen, and their skin was marked by cancer scars.

They were alien to Madeleine, but no more so than most of the people of the year 2131.

Ben welcomed her. He served her a meal: couscous with saffron, chunks of soya, a light local wine.

He told her about his wife. She was called Lena; she was only twenty, a decade younger than Ben. She was in orbit, working on the big emigrant transports Nemoto was assembling. Ben hadn’t seen her for months.

Madeleine felt easy with Ben. He even took care with the words he used. Language drift seemed remarkably rapid; less than a century out of her time, even if she was familiar with a word, she couldn’t always recognize its pronunciation, and she had learned it wasn’t safe to assume she knew its modern usage. But Ben made sure that she understood.

“It’s strange finding Aborigines here,” Madeleine said. “So far from home.”

“Not so strange. After all, East Guiana is another colonial relic. The French wanted to follow the example of the British in Australia, by peopling East Guiana with convicts.” He grinned, his teeth white and young, a contrast in Madeleine’s mind to the ruined mouth of Nemoto. “Anyhow,” he said, “now we can escape on the fizzers.” He mimed a rocket launch with two hands clasped as in prayer. “Whoosh.”

“Ben — why Triton? I know Nemoto has her own objectives. But for you…”

“Nemoto’s offer was the only one we had. We have nowhere else to go. But perhaps we would follow her anyway. Nemoto is marginalized, her ideas ridiculed — most vigorously by friends of the Gaijin. But she is right, on the deepest of levels. We used to think we were alone in a primordial universe. Suddenly we find ourselves in a dangerous, crowded universe littered with ruins. There was fear and deep anger at the discovery of the violation of Venus. It might have been a sister world to Earth — or Earth might have been the victim. With time, the outrage faded, but we remembered — we, a people who have been dispossessed already.”

More leaves blew in from a darkening sky, broken, damaged by rocket exhaust.

Ben told her he came from central Australia, born into a group called the Yolgnu. “When I was a boy my family lived by a riverbank, living in the old way. But the authorities, the white people, came and moved us to a place called Framlingham. Just a row of shacks and tin houses. Then, when I was eight years old, more white men took me away to an orphanage. The men were from the Aboriginal Protection Board. When they thought I was civilized enough, they sent me to foster parents in Melbourne. White people, called Nash. They were rich and kind. You see, it was the policy of the government to solve their Aboriginal problem once and for all, by making me white.”

All of this stunned her, embarrassed her. “You must hate them,” she said.