Stephen Baxter - Time

Xiaohu was particularly tired this night.

Her work, at the state-run municipal waste-processing plant, was as ever grim and demanding. And — notwithstanding the strange news from America, the bright new spark everyone could see on the face of the Moon — she had no choice but to attend the xuexi hui, the weekly political study session, in the large communal area at the base of the building.

Still, somewhat to her surprise, the materials distributed this week had actually been interesting.

Here, for example, was a new edition of an old pamphlet, An Outline of Certain Questions About Socialism, which dealt with the official Party response to the Carter prediction. It had surprised her. If Carter was correct, the pamphlet claimed, then only misery lay ahead for future generations. If a child never existed, it could not suffer. Therefore the moral thing was to stop producing children, to spare them pain.

The new doctrine was surely designed as a buttress for the Party’s long-standing attempts to control the national population. Everyone was used to official manipulations of the truth — to zhilu weima, to point at a deer and call it a horse, as the expression went.

But still, this resonated in Xiaohu’s tired mind. There was truth here, she thought. Genuine wisdom. But what did it mean for her?

She closed the window and stepped silently into her bedroom. Here was her daughter, Chai, sleeping silently in her cot, her face itself like a tiny round moon, her bud mouth parted.

Chai was not legitimate. Few people knew of her existence, not even her father. Xiaohu had been hatching elaborate plans to provide Chai with a life, an artificial background, a means to achieve respectability, education, a way of life.

Or rather, Xiaohu thought bleakly, a way to get through her life with the minimum pain. But now, the American predictions had made that impossible.

Negative utilitarianism, Xiaohu told herself, reducing evil rather than maximizing good. Perhaps that was all that had ever been possible in this flawed world. She felt enormously tired.

Xiaohu kissed her daughter. Then she took a pillow and set it gently on the child’s placid face.

Bob David:

He had always been good with his hands. By the age of seven or eight he had been stripping down truck engines with his father. By twelve he was building his own stock car from scrap.

The thing he was building now — here in his basement in this drafty tenement block in downtown Cambridge, Massachusetts — was simpler than that.

The key to it was a fancy new stuff called red mercury: a compound of antimony and mercury baked in a nuclear reactor, capable of releasing hundreds of times the energy contained in the same mass of TNT. Thanks to red mercury he would be able to fit his bomb into a briefcase.

Bob had grown up here, in Cambridge. He had spent his whole life resenting the asshole nerds who passed him by in class; even as a little kid he’d known that the future was theirs, not his. He’d learned the hard way that there weren’t too many places in the world for a guy who was only good with his hands.

He was glad when they started passing the Blue laws and hauling off the smart little assholes to those prison schools in Nevada and New York.

Ironically, the only paying, legal job Bob had ever gotten in his life had been at MIT, the nest of the killer nerds. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, even the walls bore the names of scientific gods: Archimedes and Darwin and Newton and Faraday and Pasteur and Lavoisier.

Bob worked in the kitchens, just a slop-out hand.

Even so, despite his resentment, he probably wouldn’t have come up with his plan if not for the end-of-the-world news.

He’d listened to what the president had to say. That the doom-soon news was only a prediction, a piece of math. That the Blue children were just children, no matter how strange they seemed. That they mustn’t react negatively; they mustn’t resort to despair and destruction.

Bob had thought about that.

He’d seen the TV shows and followed the chat groups. For sure the world was going to end, it seemed, even if nobody knew how. But there was a whole host of possibilities, from nuclear war to the air going sour to these genetic mutants, the Blues in their silver base on the Moon, taking over the planet.

And every one of these horrors, it seemed to Bob, was caused by science.

After that Bob had known what he had to do.

He had thought it would be hard to get hold of the raw materials. But that hadn’t been hard at all, as it turned out. Just as it hadn’t been hard for him to assemble the clean, beautiful machine that was birthing in his cellar.

Patiently he assembled his machine, testing each part before he added it, whistling.

Maura Della:

In western Europe the birthrate had dropped dramatically, as, it seemed, people tried to spare their unborn children the horror of existence. Conversely, the Japanese seemed to be descending into hedonistic excess. The unborn, who do not yet exist, have no rights; and therefore we are entitled to burn up the world. . .

And all over the world, old scores were being settled. There had been border conflicts all over the planet, including three limited nuclear exchanges. In southern Africa there had been outbreaks of Rift Valley fever, an ethnic-specific disease that killed ten times as many whites as blacks. Some people were turning to religion. Others were turning against it: there had been several assassination attempts on the pope, and something like a jihad seemed to be raging in Algeria. In the Middle East, a major Islam-Christianity conflict was looming, with some Muslim commentators arguing that the Christians were trying to accelerate the apocalypse of their Gospels.

America wasn’t spared, of course. Science labs and technology institutes and corporations all over the country had been subject to attack, with the destruction of MIT being the worst single incident. As for the remnant Blue children, they had already long been targets; now there were commentators — even on network TV — describing the helpless kids as angels of the Apocalypse.

And so it went.

Amidst all this, the business of government went on; and as ever it was just one damn thing after another, as Maura and others strove to contain the damage.

The Cruithne issue was containable.

There had been more probes to the asteroid, endlessly photographing and measuring, to no damn purpose as far as she could see. There was talk of sending more humans, volunteers to pass through the artifact. Maura doubted such missions would be approved. What was the purpose, if no data could be sent back?

Personally, she backed the USASF suggestion: to irradiate the surface of Cruithne, make it uninhabitable for a thousand years, and let the future, the damn downstreamers themselves, deal with it.

Notwithstanding Malenfant’s illegal launch — the strange artifact he had encountered, the failure of the military task force sent after him, the apparent deaths of all concerned, the exodus of the enhanced squid — all of that had taken place on a rock off in space somewhere. The Cruithne picture show was just too far away, too abstract, too removed from people’s experience to deliver any real sense of threat, and already fading in the memory.

There were even rumors that the whole thing had been faked: mocked-up images beamed down from some satellite by the FBI, the United Nations, rogue Third World powers, or some other enemy intent on destabilization, or mind control, or whatever else sprouted from the imagination of the conspiracy theorists. (And of course, as Maura knew well, there was a small department of the FBI set up to invent and encourage such false rumors.)