Stephen Baxter - Space

It was, Malenfant thought, ridiculous. He turned away, incurious.

He had been away from Earth for twelve hundred years, and had returned to the impossible date of A.D. 3265.

Malenfant was exhausted. Physically, he was, after all, more than a hundred years old. And because of the depletion of the Saddle Point links between Zero-zero-zero-zero and Earth, he had been forced to take a roundabout route on the way back here.

All he really wanted, if he was truthful, was to get away from strangeness: just settle down in his 1960s ranch house at Clear Lake, Houston, and pop a few beers, eat potato chips, and watch Twilight Zone reruns. But here, looking out at all this orbiting foliage, he knew that wasn’t possible, that it never would be. It was just as Dorothy Chaum had tried to counsel him, before they said their good-byes back on the Cannonball. It was Earth down there, but it wasn’t his Earth. Malenfant was going to have to live with strangers, and strangeness, for whatever was left of his long and unlikely life.

At least the ice has gone, though, he thought.

His battered capsule slid to rest, lodging in branches, and Malenfant was decanted.

There was nobody to greet him. He found an empty room, with a window. There were leaves, growing around his window. On the outside.

Ridiculous. He fell asleep.

When Malenfant woke, he was in some kind of hospital gown.

He felt different. Comfortable, clean. He wasn’t hungry or thirsty. He didn’t even need a leak.

He lifted up his hand. The skin was comparatively smooth, the liver spots faded. When he flexed his fingers, the joints worked without a twinge.

Somebody had been here, done something to him. I didn’t want this, he thought. I didn’t ask for it. He cradled his resentment.

He propped himself up before his window and looked out at Earth.

He could see its curve, a blue-and-white arc against black space. He made out a slice of pale blue seascape, with an island an irregular patch of gray and brown in the middle of it, and clouds scattered over the top, lightly, like icing sugar. He was so close to the skin of the planet that if he sat back the world filled his window, scrolling steadily past.

Earth was bright: brighter than he remembered. Malenfant used to be a shuttle pilot; he knew Earth from orbit — how it used to be anyhow. Now he was amazed by the clarity of the atmosphere, even over the heart of continents. He didn’t know if Earth itself had changed, or his memories of it. After all, his eyes were an old man’s now: rheumy, filled with nostalgia.

One thing for sure, though. Earth looked empty.

When he passed over oceans he looked for ship wakes, feathering out like brush strokes. He couldn’t see any. In the lower latitudes he could make out towns; a gray, angular patchwork; a tracery of roads. But no smog. No industries, then.

And in the higher latitudes, toward the poles, he could see no sign of human habitation at all. The land looked raw, fresh, scraped clean, the granite flanks of exposed mountains shining like burnished metal, and the plains littered with boulders, like toys dropped by a child. His geography had always been lousy — and now it was a thousand years out of date — but it seemed to him the coastlines had changed shape.

He wondered who, or what, had cleaned up the glaciation. Anyhow, it might have been A.D. 1000 down there, not 3265.

Two people came drifting into his room. Naked, all but identical, they were women, but so slim they were almost sexless. They had hair that floated around them, like Jane Fonda in Barbarella.

They were joined at the hip, like Siamese twins, by a tube of pink flesh.

They hadn’t knocked, and he scowled at them. “Who are you?”

They jabbered at him in a variety of languages, some of which he recognized, some not. Their arms and shoulders were big and well developed, like tennis players’, but their legs were wisps they kept tucked up beneath them: microgravity adaptations. Their hair was blond, but their eyes were almond shaped, with folds of skin near the nose, like the Chinese.

Finally they settled on heavily accented English.

“You must forgive stupidity.” “We accommodate returning travelers—” “ — from many time periods, spread across a millennium—” “ — dating from Reid Malenfant himself.”

When they talked they swapped their speech between one and the other, like throwing a ball.

He said, “In fact, I am Reid Malenfant.”

They looked at him, and then their two heads swiveled so that blank almond eyes stared into each other, their hair mingling. For these two, he thought, every day is a bad hair day.

“You must understand the treatment you have been given,” one said.

“I didn’t want treatment,” he groused. “I didn’t sign any consent forms.”

“But your aging was—” “ — advanced.” “We have no cure, of course.” “But we can address the symptoms—” “Brittle bones, loss of immunity, nervous degeneration.” “In your case accelerated by—” “ — exposure to microgravity.” “We reversed free-radical damage with antioxidant vitamins.” “We snipped out senescent cell clusters from your epidermis and dermis.” “We reversed the intrusion of alien qualia into your sensorium, a side-effect of repeated Saddle Point transits.” “We removed various dormant infectious agents that you might return to Earth.” “We applied telomerase therapy to—”

“Enough. I believe you. I bet I don’t look a day over seventy.”

“It was routine,” a Bad Hair Day twin said. They fell silent. “Are you truly Reid Malenfant?” one asked then.

“Yes.”

The twins gave him food and drink. He didn’t recognize any of the liquids they offered him, hot or cold; they were mostly like peculiar teas, of fruit or leaves. He settled on water, which was clean and cold and pure. The food was bland and amorphous, like baby food. The Bad Hair Day twins told him it was all processed algae, spiced with a little vacuum greenery from the Tree itself.

The twins pulled him gracefully through microgravity, along tunnels like wood-lined veins that twisted and turned, lit only by some kind of luminescence in the wood. It was like a fantasy spaceship rendered in carpentry, he thought.

There were a few dozen colonists here, living in bubbles of air inside the bulk of the Tree. They were all microgravity-adapted, as far as he could see, some of them even more evolved than the twins. There was one guy with a huge dome of a head over a shriveled-up body, sticks of limbs, a penis like a walnut, no pubic hair. To Malenfant he looked like a real science fiction type of creation, like the boss alien in Invaders from Mars.

The people, however strange, looked young and healthy to Malenfant. Their skin was smooth, unwrinkled, unmarked save by tattoos; his own raisinlike face, the lines baked into it by years of exposure to Earth’s weather and ultraviolet light and heavy gravity, was a curiosity here, a badge of exotica.

They all had almond eyes, folds of yellow skin.

As far as Malenfant could make out this was a kind of reverse colony from the near-Earth asteroids, which had been settled by descendants of the Chinese. Out there, it seemed, there were great bubble habitats where everyone had lived in zero gravity for centuries.

Sometimes he thought he could hear a low humming, sniff a little ozone, feel hair-prickling static, as if he was surrounded by immense electrical or magnetic fields that tweaked at his body. Maybe it was so. Electromagnetic fields could be used to stimulate and stress muscles and bones, and even to counter bone wastage; NASA had experimented with such technologies. Maybe the Tree swaddled its human cargo in electricity, fixing their bones and muscles and flesh.