Stephen Baxter - Space

She sensed, though, that he knew anyhow.

After their journey to the stars, Madeleine and Ben returned to a silent Solar System.

Over a century had elapsed. They themselves had aged less than a year. It was now, astonishingly, the year 2240, an unimaginable, futuristic date. Madeleine had been braced for more historic drift, more cultural isolation.

Not for silence.

As the long weeks of their flight inward from the Saddle Point radius wore away, and the puddle of crowded light that was the inner system grew brighter ahead, they both grew increasingly apprehensive. At length, they were close enough to resolve images of Earth in the Ancestor ’s telescopes. They huddled together by their monitors.

What they saw was an Earth that was brilliant white.

Ice swept down from both poles, encroaching toward the equator. The shapes of the northern continents were barely visible under the huge frozen sheets. The colors of life, brown and green and blue, had been crowded into a narrow strip around the equator. Here and there, easily visible on the night side of the planet, Madeleine made out the spark of fires, of explosions. Gaijin ships orbited Earth, tracking from pole to pole, their ramscoops casting golden light that glimmered from the ice and the oceans, mapping and studying, still following their own immense, patient projects.

Madeleine and Ben were both stunned by this. They studied Earth for hours, barely speaking, skipping meals and sleep periods.

Ben, fearful for his wife, his people on Triton, grew silent, morbid, withdrawing from Madeleine. Madeleine found the loneliness hard to bear. When she slept her dreams were intense, populated by drifting alien artifacts.

The Gaijin flower-ship dropped them into orbit around Earth’s Moon.

Nemoto came to them, at last. She appeared as a third figure in the cramped, scuffed environment of Dreamtime Ancestor ’s Service Module, a digital ghost coalescing from a cloud of cubical pixels.

Her gaze lit on Madeleine. “Meacher. You’re back. You were expected. I have an assignment for you.” She smiled.

“I don’t believe you’re still alive,” Madeleine said. “You must be some kind of virtual simulation.”

“I don’t care what you think. Anyhow, you’ll never know.” Nemoto was small, shrunken, her face a leathery mask, as if with age she was devolving to some earlier proto-human form. She glanced around. “Where’s the FGB module?… Oh. ” Evidently she had just downloaded a summary of their mission from the virtual counterpart who had traveled with them. She glared. “You have to meddle, don’t you, Meacher?”

Madeleine passed a hand through Nemoto’s body; pixels clustered like butterflies. To Madeleine, ten more decades out of her time, the projection was impressive new technology. There was no sign of time delay; Nemoto — or the projector — must be here, on the Moon or in lunar orbit, or else her responses would be delayed by seconds.

“What about Triton?” Ben asked tightly.

Nemoto’s face was empty. “Triton is silent. It’s wise to be silent. But your wife is still alive.”

Madeleine sensed a shift in Ben’s posture, a softening.

“But,” Nemoto said now, “the colony is under threat. A fleet of Gaijin flower-ships and factories is moving out from the asteroids. They’re already in orbit around Jupiter, Saturn, even Uranus. They have projects out there, for instance on Jupiter’s moon Io, which we don’t understand.” Her face worked, her anger visible, even after all this time, her territoriality powerful. “The Earth has collapsed, of course. And though the fools down there don’t know it, the Moon faces long-term resource crises, particularly in metals. And so on. The Gaijin are winning, Meacher. Triton is the only foothold we humans have in the outer system. The last trench. We can’t let the Gaijin take it.”

And you have a plan, Madeleine realized, with a sinking heart. A plan that involves me. So she was immediately plunged back into Nemoto’s manipulation and scheming.

Ben was frowning. He asked Nemoto some pointed questions about her presence, her influence, her resources. What was the political situation now? Who was backing her? What was her funding?

She’d answer none of his questions. She wouldn’t eventell them where, physically, she was, before she disappeared, promising — or threatening — to be back.

Madeleine spent long hours at the windows, watching the Moon.

The Moon was controlled by a tight federal-government structure that seemed to blend seamlessly with a series of corporate alliances, which had grown mainly from the Japanese companies that had funded the first waves of lunar colonization. The lunar authorities had let the Ancestor settle into a wide two-hour orbit, but they wouldn’t let Madeleine and Ben land. It was clear to Madeleine that, to these busy lunar inhabitants, returned star travelers were an irrelevance.

Huge, glowing Gaijin flower-ships looped around the Moon from pole to lunar pole.

This new Moon glowed green and blue, the colors of life and humanity. The Lunar Japanese had peppered the great craters — Copernicus, Eudoxus, Gassendi, Fracastorius, Tsiolkovsky, Verne, many others — with domes, enclosing a freight of water and air and life. Landsberg, the first large colony, remained the capital. The domes were huge now, the crests of some of them reaching two kilometers above the ancient regolith, hexagonal-cell space-frame structures supported by giant, inhabited towers. Covered roads and linear townships connected some of the domes, glowing lines of light over the maria. The Japanese planned to extend their structures until the entire surface of the Moon was glassed over, in a worldhouse. It would be like an immense arboretum, a continuously managed biosphere.

All of this — Madeleine learned, tapping into the web of information which wrapped around the new planet — was fueled by huge core-tapping bores called Paulis mines. Frank Paulis himself was still alive. Madeleine felt a spark of pride that one of her own antique generation had achieved such greatness. But, fifty years after his huge technical triumph, Paulis was disgraced, incommunicado.

Virtual Nemoto materialized once more.

Madeleine had found out that Nemoto was still alive, as best anybody knew. But she had dropped out of sight for a long period. It was rumored she had lived as a recluse on Farside, still relatively uninhabited. It had been a breakdown, it seemed, that had lasted for decades. Nemoto would say nothing of any of this, nothing of herself, even of the history Madeleine and Ben had skipped over. Rather, she wanted to talk only of the future, her projects, just as she always had.

“Good news.” She smiled, her face skull-like. “I have a ship.”

“What ship?” Ben asked.

“Gurrutu. One of my colony ships. It’s completed the Earth-Neptune round trip twice already. It’s in high Earth orbit.” She looked wistful. “It’s actually safer there than orbiting the Moon. Here, it would be claimed and scavenged for its metals.” She studied them. “You must go to Triton.”

Ben nodded. “Of course.”

Nemoto eyed her. “And you, Meacher.”

Of course Ben must, Madeleine thought. Those are his people, out there in the cold, struggling to survive. It’s his wife, still conveniently alive, having traversed those hundred years the long way. But — regardless of Nemoto’s ambitions — it’s nothing to do with me.

But, as she gazed at Nemoto’s frail virtual figure, doggedly surviving, doggedly battling, she felt torn. Maybe you aren’t as disengaged from all this as you used to be, Madeleine.