Stephen Baxter - Space

Nemoto looked at Madeleine from her mask of a face. “You’re sure you want this back? The pain, the anguish of being human—”

“Yes.”

Nemoto turned and sat down; she nested her hands on the tabletop, the fingers like intertwined twigs. “You have to understand the situation we face,” she said. “Most of us are sleeping. But some of us believe we’re at war.” She meant the Gaijin, of course, and their great belt cities, their swooping forays through the inner Solar System — and the other migrants who were following, still decades or centuries away but nevertheless on the way, noisily building along the spiral arm. “You must see it — you, when you return from your jaunts to the stars. Everybody’s busy, too busy with the short term, unable to see the trends. Only us, Madeleine; only us, stranded out of time.”

Something connected for Madeleine. “Oh. That’s why you have kept the cure so quiet.”

“Do you see why we must do this, Meacher? We need to explore every option. To have soldiers — warriors — who are free of pain—”

“Free of consciousness itself.”

“Perhaps. If that’s necessary.”

Madeleine felt disgusted, sullied. Discontinuity was, after all, nothing less than the restructuring of her consciousness by Saddle Point transitions. How typical of humanity to turn this remarkable experience into a weapon. How monstrous.

She sat back. “Send me through a Saddle Point.”

“Or?”

“Or I expose what you’ve been doing — concealing a cure for the Discontinuity.”

Nemoto considered. “This is too big an issue to horse-trade with the likes of you. But,” she said, “I will make you an exchange.”

“An exchange?”

“I’ll send you to a Saddle Point. But afterward you go to Triton with the Aborigines. We have to make sure that colony succeeds.”

Madeleine shook her head. “It will take decades for me to complete a round-trip through a gateway.”

Nemoto smiled thinly. “It doesn’t matter. It will take the Yolgnu years to reach Neptune, more years to establish any kind of viable colony. And we’re playing a long game here. Some day the Gaijin will confront us directly. Some of us don’t understand why that hasn’t already happened. We need to be prepared, when it does.”

“And Triton is a part of this scheme?”

Nemoto didn’t answer.

But of course it was, Madeleine thought. Everything is a part of Nemoto’s grand design. Everything, and everyone: my need for money and healing, Ben’s people’s need for refuge — all just levers for Nemoto to press.

“Where?” Nemoto said suddenly.

“Where what?”

“Where do you want to go, on your health cruise?”

“I don’t care. What does it matter?”

“There might be something suitable,” Nemoto said at length. “There is another alien species, here in the Earth-Moon system. Did you know that? They are called the Chaera. Their star system is exotic. It includes a miniature black hole, which… Well.” She eyed Madeleine. “Your friend Ben is a black-hole specialist. Perhaps he will go with you. How amusing.”

Amusing. Another little relativistic death.

There was a rumble of noise. They turned to the window. Kilometers away, beyond the mangrove swamps, Madeleine could see the booster’s slim nose lift above the trees, the first glow of the engines. The light of the solid boosters seemed to spill over the tree line — startlingly bright rocket light glimmering from the flat swamps — as the Ariane rolled on its axis.

“There,” Nemoto said. “You made me miss the launch.”

Six months.

Once Nemoto had given her the date of her Saddle Point mission it was all she could think about. The rest of her life — her work in Kourou and elsewhere, her legal struggles to get back some of the money that had been impounded from her accounts, even her developing, low-key relationship with Ben — all of that faded to a background glow compared to the diamond-bright prospect of encountering another Saddle Point gateway at that specified, slowly approaching date in the future.

She’d met other star travelers who had returned from one or two hops into the sky with the Gaijin. All of them were determined to go on. She imagined a cloud of human travelers journeying deeper and deeper into the strange cosmos, their ties to a blurred, fast-forwarding Earth stretching and loosening.

It wasn’t just the Discontinuity. She didn’t belong here. After all, she couldn’t even work the toilets.

She longed to leave.

The Japanese-built lander touched the Moon, its rockets throwing up a cloud of fast-settling dust. There were various artifacts here, sitting on the surface of the Moon, and Nemoto, the spider at the heart of this operation, was waiting for them, anonymous in a black suit.

Ben and Madeleine suited up carefully. Madeleine made sure Ben followed her lead; she was, after all, the experienced astronaut.

She climbed down a short ladder to the surface. She dropped from step to step in the gentle gravity. She stepped off the last rung onto regolith, which crunched like snow under her weight.

She walked away from the lander.

The colors of the Moon weren’t strong; in fact, the most colorful thing here was their Nishizaki Heavy Industries aluminum-frame lander, which, from a distance, looked like a small, fragile insect, done out in brilliant black, silver, orange, and yellow. The Sea of Tranquillity was close to the Moon’s equator, so Earth was directly above her head, and it was difficult to tip back in her pressure suit to see it. But when Ben goes to live on Triton, she thought, the Sun will be a bright point source. And Earth will be no more than a pale blue point of light, only made visible by blocking out the Sun itself. How strange that will be.

Nemoto was showing Ben the various artifacts she had assembled here. Madeleine saw a set of blocky metal boxes, trailing cables. These were, it turned out, a pair of high-power X-ray lasers. “A small fission bomb is the power source. When the bomb is detonated, a burst of X-ray photons is emitted. The photons travel down long metal rods. This generates an intense beam. In effect, the power of the bomb has been focused…”

These were experimental weapons, it emerged, dating from the late twentieth century. They had been designed as satellite weapons, intended to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles.

“And what have the Gaijin paid us for this obscene old gadgetry?” Madeleine asked.

“That’s not your concern.”

The habitat that would keep them alive was another masterpiece of improvization and low cost, Madeleine thought, like her fondly remembered Friendship-7. It was based on two modules — a Russian-built one called FGB, and the American-built Service Module — scavenged from the old NASA International Space Station. The Service Module had been enhanced with an astrophysics instrument pallet.

Madeleine slipped her gloved hand into Ben’s. “We ought to name our magnificent ship,” she said.

Ben thought it over. “Dreamtime Ancestor.”

“Come meet the Chaera,” Nemoto said.

The last artifact, sitting on the regolith, was a tank, a glass cube. It contained a translucent disc about a meter across, swimming slowly through oxygen-blue fluid.

It was an ET: a Chaera, an inhabitant of the black-hole system that was the destination of this mission. The Chaera had, after the Gaijin, been the second variant of ET to come to the Solar System.

Aside from all the dead ones in the past, of course.

Ben stepped forward. He touched the glass walls of the tank with his gloved hand. The Chaera rippled; it looked something like a stingray. She wondered if it was trying to talk to Ben.