Stephen Baxter - Space

At least human scientists had presumed it was primordial. Nobody was sure about such things anymore.

She glanced around the sky. She was a hundred light-years from home, a hundred light-years in toward the center of the Galaxy, roughly along a line that would have joined Earth to Antares, in Scorpio. But the sky was dark, dismal.

There were no asteroid belts, only a handful of comets left orbiting farther out, and two gas giants both stripped of their volatiles, reduced to smooth rocky balls. She was well inside the interstellar colonization wave front that appeared to be sweeping out along the spiral arm and was nearing Earth, a hundred light-years back. And this was a typical post-wave-front system: colonized, ferociously robbed of its resources by one shortsighted, low-tech predatory strategy or another, trashed, abandoned.

Even the stars had been obscured, their light stolen by Dyson masks: dense orbiting habitat clouds, even solid spheres, asteroids and planets dismantled and made into traps for every stray photon. It was a depressing sight: an engineered sky, a sky full of scaffolding and ruins.

Earth’s sky was primeval, comparatively. This was a glimpse of the future, for Earth.

She walked farther, away from the lander, which was a silvery cone behind her. She was only a few kilometers from the shore of one of those yellow seas; she figured it was on the far side of a low, crumpled ridge.

She reached the base of the ridge and began to climb. In the tough gravity she was given a good workout; she could feel her temperature rising, the suit’s exoskeletal multipliers discreetly cutting in to give her a boost.

She topped the ridge, breathing hard. A plain opened up before her: shaded red and black, littered by sand dunes and what looked like a big, heavily eroded impact crater. And off toward the smoky horizon, yes, there was that peculiar yellow ocean, wraiths of greenish mist hanging over it. It was a bizarre, surrealist landscape, as if all Earth’s colors had been exchanged for their spectral complements.

And, only a hundred meters from the base of the ridge, she saw two Gaijin landers, silver cones side by side, each surrounded by fine rays of dust thrown out by landing rockets. Beside one of the landers was a Gaijin, utterly still, a spidery statue. Next to the other stood a human, in an exo-suit that didn’t look significantly different than Madeleine’s.

The human saw her, waved.

Madeleine hesitated for long seconds.

Suddenly the world seemed crowded. She hadn’t encountered people since she had last embraced Ben, on Triton. She’d certainly never met another traveler like this, among the stars. But it must have taken decades, even centuries, for the Gaijin to organize this strange rendezvous.

She began to clamber down the ridge toward the landers, letting the suit do most of the work.

The waving human turned out to be a Catholic priest called Dorothy Chaum. Madeleine had met her before, subjective years ago. And inside one of the landers was another human, somebody she knew only by reputation.

It was Reid Malenfant. And he was indeed dying.

Malenfant was wasted. His head was cadaverous, the skull showing through thin, papery flesh, and his bald scalp was covered in liver spots.

Dorothy and Madeleine got Malenfant suited up and hauled him to Dorothy’s lander. In this gravity it was hard work, despite their suits’ multipliers. But Dorothy’s lander had a more comprehensive med facility than Madeleine’s. Malenfant had nothing at all, save what the Gaijin had been able to provide.

Malenfant had grown old and had sunk into himself, like a tide going out, an ocean receding. He had managed to keep himself alive a good few years. But his equipment wasn’t sufficient anymore — and the Gaijin he traveled with sure didn’t know enough about human biology to tinker. Not only that, he was suffering from the Discontinuity.

When he had started to die, the Gaijin were confounded.

“So they sent for us,” Dorothy Chaum said, marveling. “They sent signals out through the gateway links.”

“How did they keep him alive so long?”

“They didn’t. They just preserved him. They bounced his signal around the Saddle Point network, never making him corporeal for more than a few seconds at a time…”

Madeleine studied Malenfant. Had he been aware, as he passed through one blue-flash gateway transition after another, of the light-years and decades passing in seconds?

Malenfant woke up while they were bed-bathing him. Stripped, washed, and immersed in a med tank, he looked Madeleine in the eyes. “Are you qualified to be scrubbing my balls?”

“I’m the best you’re going to find, pal.”

But now he was staring at Chaum, the diagrammatic white collar around her neck. “What is this, the last rites?” He tried to struggle upright, on arms as thin as toothpicks.

Madeleine shoved him back. “It will be if you don’t cooperate.”

He swiveled that gaunt head. “Where’s my suit?”

Dorothy frowned, and pointed to the Gaijin-manufactured envelope they’d bundled up in one corner. “Over there.”

“No,” he whispered. “My suit.”

It turned out he meant his old NASA-era Shuttle EMU, a disgusting old piece of kit almost as far beyond its design limits as Malenfant himself. He wouldn’t relax until Madeleine got suited up, went across to the lander that had brought him here, and retrieved the EMU for him. Then again, it was the only possession he had in the world, or worlds. She could understand how he felt.

He scrabbled in its pockets until he found a faded, much folded photograph, of a smiling woman on a beach.

When they had him in the tank, Madeleine spent a little time working on that gruesome old suit. She could fix the wiring shorts and the cooling-garment tubing leaks, polish out the scratches on the bubble helmet, patch the fabric. But she couldn’t make it absolutely clean again; the dust of many worlds was ingrained too deep into the fabric. And she couldn’t wash out the stink of Malenfant.

All the time, visible through the lander’s windows, that Gaijin sat on the surface, as unmoving as a statue, watching, watching, as if waiting for Dorothy or Madeleine to make a mistake.

While Malenfant was sleeping off twenty subjective years of traveling, Dorothy Chaum and Madeleine took a walk, across the battered iron plain, toward the yellow sea.

They were each used to solitude, and they were awkward, restless with each other — and with the notion that they’d been summoned here, given an assignment by the Gaijin. It didn’t make for good conversation.

Dorothy was a short, squat woman who looked as if she might have been built for this tough, overloaded gravity. She seemed older than Madeleine remembered; her journey here had absorbed more of her subjective lifetime than Madeleine’s had.

They passed the solitary Gaijin sentinel.

“Malenfant calls it Cassiopeia,” Dorothy murmured. “He says it’s been his constant companion since the Solar System.”

“A boy and his Gaijin. Cute.”

Dorothy Chaum’s personal star quest seemed to be a sublimated search for God. That was how it seemed to Madeleine, anyhow.

“I studied the Gaijin on Earth,” Dorothy said. Madeleine could see her smile. “You remember that, on Kefallinia. I got my initial assignment from the Pope… I don’t even know if there is a Pope anymore. The Gaijin have some things in common with us. Sure, they are robotlike creatures, but they are finite, built on about the same scale as we are, and they seem to have at least some individuality. But in spite of their similarity — or maybe because of it — I was immediately overwhelmed by their strangeness. So I was drawn to follow them to the stars, to work with them.”