Stephen Baxter - Space

“Think about it, Meacher,” Nemoto said. “The light-speed cage. Imagine this system fully populated, a long way behind the local colonization wave front, and surrounded by systems just as heavily populated — and armed — as they were. And they were running out of resources. There surely were a lot more space dwellers than planet dwellers, but they’d already used up the asteroids and the comets. So the space dwellers turned on the planet. The inhabitants were choked, drowned, baked.”

“I don’t believe it,” Madeleine said. “Any intelligent society would figure out the dangers long before breeding itself to extinction.”

“The Polynesians didn’t,” Ben said dryly.

The petals of the flower-ship opened once more, and they receded from the corpselike planet into the calm of the outer darkness.

It was time to talk to the icosahedral God again. The second X-ray punch laser was launched.

After studying the records of the last encounter, Ben had learned how the configuration of the icosahedral artifact anticipated the direction of the resulting beam. Now Madeleine watched the core squint into focus. The killer beam would again lance through the accretion disc — and, this time, right into one of the largest of the Chaera worldlets.

Millions of Chaera were going to die. Madeleine could see them, infesting their accretion disc, swarming and living and loving.

In its tank, their Chaera passenger drifted like a Dali watch.

“Nemoto,” Madeleine said, “we can’t go ahead with the second firing.”

“But they understand the consequences,” virtual Nemoto said blandly. “The Chaera have disturbed the artifact a few times in the past, with their mirrors and smoke signals. Every time it’s killed some of them. But they need the X-ray nourishment… Meacher,” she warned, “don’t meddle as you did at the burster. If you meddle, the Gaijin may not allow human passengers on future missions. And we won’t learn about systems like this. We’ll have no information; we won’t be able to plan… Besides, the laser is already deployed. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

“It is the Chaera’s choice, Madeleine,” Ben said gently. “Their culture. It seems they’re prepared to die to attain what they believe is perfection.”

Nemoto quoted the Chaera. “It knows we’re arguing here. ‘Where there are prophecies, they will cease. Where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.’ ”

“Who’s the philosopher?” Madeleine asked sourly. “Some great Chaera mind of the past?”

Ben smiled. “Actually, it was quoting Saint Paul.”

Nemoto looked startled, as Madeleine felt.

“But there remain mysteries,” Ben said. “The Chaera look too primitive to have constructed that artifact. After all, it manipulates a black hole’s gravity well. Perhaps their ancestors built this thing. Or some previous wave of colonists, who passed through this system.”

“You aren’t thinking it through,” virtual Nemoto whispered. “The Chaera have eyes filled with salty water. They must have evolved on a world with oceans. They can’t have evolved here.”

“Then,” Madeleine snapped, “why are they here?”

“Because they had no place else to go,” Nemoto said. “They fled here — even modified themselves, perhaps. They huddled around an artifact left by an earlier wave of colonization. They knew that nobody would follow them to such a dangerous, unstable slum area as this.”

“They are refugees.”

“Yes. As, perhaps, we will become in the future.”

“Refugees from what?”

“From the resource wars,” Nemoto said. “From the hydrogen suffocation of their world. Like Polynesia.”

The core artifact trembled.

And Nemoto kept talking, talking. “This universe of ours is a place of limits, of cruel equations. The Galaxy must be full of light-speed cages like this, at most a few hundred light-years wide, traps for their exponentially growing populations. And then, after the ripped-up worlds have lain fallow, after recovery through the slow processes of geology and biology, it all begins again, a cycle of slash and burn, slash and burn… This is our future, Meacher: our future and our past. It is after all a peculiar kind of equilibrium: the contact, the ruinous exploitation, the crash, the multiple extinctions — over and over. And it is happening again, to us. The Gaijin are already eating their way through our asteroid belt. Now do you see what I’m fighting against?”

Madeleine remembered the burster, the slaughter of the star lichen fourteen times a second. She remembered Venus and Australia, the evidence of ancient wars even in the Solar System — the relics of a previous, long-burned-out colonization bubble.

Must it be like this?

Something in her rebelled. To hell with theories. The Chaera were real, and millions of them were about to die.

And there was — she realized, thinking quickly — something she could do about it.

“Oh, damn it… Ben. Help me. Go down to the FGB module. Get everything out of there you think we have to save.”

For long seconds, Ben thought it over. Then he nodded. “I’ll trust your instincts, Madeleine.”

“Good,” she said. “Now I have a little figuring to do.” She rushed to the instrument consoles.

Ben gathered their research materials: the biological and medical samples they’d taken from their bodies, data cassettes and diskettes, film cartridges, notebooks, results of the astrophysical experiments they had run in the neighborhood of the black hole. There was little personal gear in here, as their sleeping compartments were in the Service Module. He pulled everything together in a spare sleeping bag, and hauled it all up into the Service Module.

Madeleine glanced down for the last time through the FGB module’s picture window, at smoky accretion-disc light. The flower-ship skimmed past the flank of “God”; the netting structure swarmed around the pulsing core.

The Chaera thrashed in its tank.

Ben pulled down the heavy hatch between the modules — it hadn’t been closed since the flower-ship had swept them up from the surface of Earth’s Moon — and dogged it tight.

Madeleine was running a hasty computer program. “Remember the drill for a pressure-hull breach?” she called.

“Of course. But—”

“Three, two, one.”

There was a clatter of pyrotechnic bolts, an abrupt jolt.

“I just severed the FGB,” she said. “The explosive decompression should fire it in the right direction. I hope. I didn’t have time to check my figures, or verify my aim—”

Bits of radiation spat out like javelins as the core began to open.

“What have you done, Meacher?” Nemoto thundered.

She saw the FGB module for one last instant, its battered, patched-up form silhouetted against the gigantic cheek of “God.” In its way it was a magnificent sight, she thought: a stubby twentieth-century human artifact orbiting a black hole, fifty-four light-years from Earth.

And then the core opened.

The FGB Module got the X-ray pulse right in the rear end. Droplets of metal splashed across space… But the massive Russian construction lasted, long enough to shield the Chaera worldlets.

Just as Madeleine had intended.

The core closed; the surface of the net smoothed over. The slowly cooling stump of the FGB module drifted around the curve of the hole. Madeleine saluted it silently.

“The journey back is going to be cramped,” Ben said dryly.

The Saddle Point gateway hung before them, anonymous, eternal, indistinguishable from its copies in the Solar System, visible only by the reflected light of the accretion disc.