Stephen Baxter - Space

And there were predators. Madeleine saw packs of wolf-sized animals warily circling the grazing, drinking herbivores. Some resembled dogs, some cats.

“It’s the same elsewhere,” Lerner said. “As the ice spreads, the grasslands and forests of the temperate climes are retreating, to be replaced by tundra, steppe, spruce forests.”

“Places these reconstructed creatures can survive,” Ben said.

“Yes. But the Gaijin aren’t responsible for everything. In Asia there are reindeer, musk oxen, horses, bison. In North America, the wolves and bears and even the mountain lions are making a recovery.” She smiled again. “But in the valley of the Thames, I’ve heard, there are woolly mammoths… Now that I’d like to see.”

They sat for long hours watching antique herbivores feed.

They drove on. They drove for hours.

It was only after they had returned to Lerner’s camp, with the shuttle parked patiently by, that Madeleine realized she hadn’t seen a single human being, not one, nor any sign of recent human habitation, all day.

They stayed three days. Gradually Lerner seemed to learn to tolerate them.

At the end of the last day, Lerner made them a final meal. As the Sun sank to the horizon, they sat sipping recycled water in the shade of Lerner’s tent.

They swapped sea stories. Lerner told them about Venus. In return, they told her of the Chaera, huddling in the dismal glow of a black hole. And they talked of the changes that had come over humanity.

“There were a lot of words,” Lerner said sourly. “Refugee, relocate, discontinuity, famine, disease, war. There was death on a scale we haven’t seen since the twentieth century. And people keep right on being born. You know what the average age of humans is now?”

“What?”

“Fifteen years old. Just fifteen. To most people on the planet this is normal.” She waved a hand, indicating the depopulated town, the ice-transformed climate, the strange reconstructed animals, the wispy flower-ships that crossed the sky above. “We’re in the middle of a fucking epochal catastrophe here, and people have forgotten.” She spat in the dirt and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

Ben leaned forward. “Carole. Do you think Nemoto is right? That the Gaijin are trying to destroy us?”

Lerner squinted. “I don’t think so. But they don’t want to save us either. They are… studying us.”

“What are they trying to find out?”

“Beats me. But then, they probably wouldn’t understand what I’m trying to find out.”

After a time, Lerner went out to fetch more drink.

In Ben’s arms, Madeleine murmured, “We humans don’t seem to age very well, do we?”

“No.”

But then, she thought, humans aren’t meant to live so long. Maybe the Gaijin are used to this perspective. We aren’t. And the feeling of helplessness is crushing. No wonder Lerner is an obsessive, Nemoto a recluse.

Ben was silent.

“You’re thinking about Lena,” she said. “Are you frightened?”

“Why should I be frightened?”

“A hundred years is a long time,” Madeleine said gently.

“But we are yirritja and dhuwa,” he said. “We are matched.”

She hesitated. “And us?”

He just smiled, absently.

Too hot, she peered up at the sky. There was a lot of dust suspended in the air, obscuring many of the stars, and the Moon was almost full, gray splashed with virulent green. Nevertheless, she could see flower-ships swooping easily across the sky. Alien ships, orbiting Earth, unremarked.

And beyond the ships, she saw flickers among the stars. In the direction of the great constellation of Orion, for instance. Sparks, bursts. As if the stars were flaring, exploding. She’d noticed this before, found no explanation. It was strange, chilling. The sky wasn’t supposed to change.

Clearly, something was headed this way. Something that spanned the stars, a wave front of colonizing aliens, perhaps.

“I don’t like it here,” she said.

“You mean Australia?”

“No. The planet. The sky. It isn’t ours anymore.”

“If it ever was.”

I’m frightened of the sky, Madeleine thought. But I can’t run away again. I’m involved — just as Nemoto intended.

I have to go to Triton.

To do what? Blindly follow Nemoto’s latest insane scheme?

She smiled inwardly. Maybe I’ll think of something when we get there.

Lerner brought back a bottle of some kind of hooch; it tasted like fortified wine.

She smiled at them coldly. “I heard that in Spain and France people have gone back to the caves, where the art still survives from the last Ice Age. And they are adding new layers of painting, of the animals they see around them. Maybe it was all a dream, do you think? The warm period, the interglacial, our civilization. Maybe all that matters is the ice, and the cave.”

As the light failed, and the inhabited Moon brightened, they drank a series of toasts: to Venus, to the Chaera, to Earth, to the ice.

Even before Neptune showed a disc, Madeleine could see that it was blue, and Triton white. Blue planet, white moon, swimming mistily out of the huge slow-moving dark like exotic deep-sea fish.

Neptune swelled into a disc, made almost full by the pinpoint Sun behind her. The looming planet was dim, at first just a faintly blue hole against the stars, then gradually, as her eyes dark-adapted, filling with misty detail, becoming a ball of subtle blue and violet, visibly structured. Bands of darker blue girdled the planet, following lines of latitude. There were big storm systems, swirling knots like Jupiter’s red spot. And there were thin stripes of white, higher clouds far above the blue, clouds that formed and dissipated within a few hours, surprisingly rapidly. Sometimes, when the angle of the Sun was right, she could see those high clouds casting shadows on the deeper layers beneath.

She was a long way from home.

It was impossible even to grasp the immensities of scale here. The Sun showed as no more than an intense star, bright enough to cast shadows, gray but razor sharp. The Sun’s gravity grip was so loosened that Neptune took more than a hundred times as long as Earth to complete a single orbit. And Neptune was surrounded by emptiness more than ten times wider than Earth’s orbit around the Sun — an emptiness, indeed, that could have contained the whole of Jupiter’s orbit.

Out here, in the stillness and cold and dark, the worlds that had spawned were not like Earth. Here the planets had grown immense, misty, stuffed with light elements like hydrogen and helium that had boiled away from the hot, busy inner worlds. So Neptune’s rocky core was buried beneath thick layers of opaque gas; the blue was of methane, not water; there were no continents or ice caps here.

But she had not expected that Neptune would be so stunningly Earthlike. She felt tugs of nostalgic longing; for Earth itself, of course, was no longer blue, but a diseased white: the white of encroaching ice.

On the last day of its long flight, Gurrutu, engines blazing, swept around the limb of Neptune. The maneuver occurred in complete silence, and as Madeleine watched the huge world swim past her, it was as if she were flying through some cold, dark, gigantic cathedral.

And there was Triton, already bright and growing brighter, a pink-white pearl floating in emptiness.

The final approach to Triton was a challenge for the navigation routines. Triton, uniquely among the Solar System’s larger moons, orbited Neptune in a retrograde manner, opposite to the spin of Neptune itself. And Triton’s orbit was severely pitched up, some twenty degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic. It was thought these eccentricities of Triton were a relic of its peculiar origin: It had once been an independent body, like Pluto, but had been captured by Neptune, perhaps by impact with another moon or by grazing Neptune’s atmosphere, a catastrophic event that had resulted in global melting before the moon had learned to endure its entrapment.