Stephen Baxter - Vacuum Diagrams

Earth was the first planet to be terraformed.

Meanwhile the Solar System was opened up.

Based in the orbit of Jupiter, an engineer called Michael Poole industriously took natural microscopic wormholes — flaws in space-time — and expanded them, making transit links big enough to permit spaceships to pass through.

Poole Interfaces were towed out of Jovian orbit and set up all over the System. The wormholes which connected the Interfaces enabled the inner System to be traversed in a matter of hours, rather than months. The Jovian system became a hub for interplanetary commerce.

And Port Sol — a Kuiper ice-object on the rim of the System — was to be established as the base for the first great interstellar voyages…

At the instant of his birth, a hundred impressions cascaded over him.

His body, still moist from budding, was a heavy, powerful mass. He stretched, and his limbs extended with soft sucking noises. He felt blood — thick with mechanical potency — surge through the capillaries lacing his torso.

And he had eyes.

There were people all around him, crowding, arguing, hurrying. They seemed tense, worried; but he quickly forgot the thought. It was too glorious to be alive! He stretched up his new limbs. He wanted to embrace all of these people, his friends, his family; he wanted to share with them his vigor, his anticipation of his life to come.

Now a cage of jointed limbs settled around him, protecting him from the crush. He stared up, recognized the fast-healing wound of a recent budding. He called out — but his speech membrane was still moist, and the sound he made was indecipherable. He tried again, feeling the membrane stiffen. “You are my father,” he said.

“Yes.” A huge face lowered towards him. He reached up to stroke the stern visage. The flesh was hardening. He felt a sweet pang of sadness. Was his father already so old, so near to Consolidation?

“Listen to me. See my face. Your name is Sculptor 472. I am Sculptor 471. You must remember your name.”

Sculptor 472. “Thank you,” he said seriously. “But—” But what did “Sculptor” mean? He searched his mind, the memory set he’d been born with. Limbs. Father. People. Consolidation. The Sun; the Hills. There was no referent for “Sculptor.” He felt a stab of fear; his limbs thrashed. Was something wrong with him?

“Calm yourself,” his father said evenly. “It is a name preserved from the past, referring to nothing.”

Sculptor 472. It was a good name; a noble name. He looked ahead to his life: his brief three-day morning of awareness and mobility, when he would talk, fight, love, bear his own buds; and then the long, slow, comfortable afternoon of Consolidation. “I feel happy to be alive, father. Everything is wonderful. I—”

“Listen to me.”

He stopped, confused; his father’s tone was savage, insistent.

Something was wrong.

“Things are — difficult, now. Different.”

Sculptor 472 wrapped his limbs around his torso. “Is it me?”

“No, child. The world is troubled.”

“But the Hills — Consolidation—”

“We had to leave the Hills.” There was shame in 471’s voice now; again Sculptor became aware of the crush of people beyond the cage of his father’s strong limbs. “The Hills are damaged. There are — Sun-people — strange forms, glowing, shining. We dare not go there. We had to flee.”

“But how will I Consolidate? Where will I go?”

“I’m sorry,” his father said. “We must travel far. Perhaps we will find new Hills, where we can Consolidate. Perhaps before your time is due.”

“But what about you?”

“Never mind me.” With harsh, urgent gestures, 471 poked at his son. “Come. Can you walk?”

Sculptor unwrapped his limbs, settled them to the ground and stood, experimentally. He felt a little dizzy, and some of his joints ached. “Yes. Yes, I’m fine. But I must know—”

“No more talking. Run, child!”

His father rolled away from him and surged stiffly after the fleeing people.

Without 471’s protective cage of limbs Sculptor was left exposed. The land here was bare, flat; the sky overhead was black and empty. He blinked away false memories of shaded Hills, of laughter and love.

His people surged to the horizon, abandoning him.

“Wait! Father, wait!”

Awkwardly, stumbling as he learned to ripple his eight limbs across the uneven ground, Sculptor hurried after his father.

Michael Poole joined the flitter in Lunar orbit. He was met by Bill Dzik, the Baked Alaska project director. Dzik was a burly, breathless man, his face rendered unnaturally smooth by Anti-Senescence treatment; he carried a small briefcase. His hand, plump and warm, engulfed Poole’s. “Mike. Thanks for meeting me.”

“I wasn’t expecting to see you here personally, Bill.”

Dzik tried to smile; his mouth was lost in the bulk of his face. “Well, we have a problem. I’m sorry.”

Poole stifled a sigh; a knot of tension settled in his stomach.

He followed Dzik into the flitter. The little ship was empty save for the pilot, a crop-haired woman who nodded briskly to Poole. Through the flitter’s curving windows Poole saw Luna’s ancient light, and the baby-blue tetrahedron that was the Interface to the wormhole to Baked Alaska. Poole and Dzik strapped themselves into adjacent seats, and with a ghost’s touch of acceleration the flitter surged forwards. Poole watched the approach of the hundred-yard-wide Interface; planes of silver-gold, fugitive, elusive, shone over the blue framework.

Problems, always problems. You should have stuck to physics, Mike.

Dzik shifted the briefcase on his lap and made to open it with his sausage-like fingers. He hesitated. “How’s the Cauchy coming on?”

You know how it’s coming on; you get my briefings from the Jovian site, and the rest of my reports. Poole decided to play along, unsure of Dzik’s mood. “Fine. Miriam Berg’s doing a good job out there. The ship’s GUTdrive is man-rated now, and the production of exotic material for the portals is underway. You know we’ve tapped into Io’s flux tube as an energy source, and…”

Dzik was nodding, his eyes on Poole’s face; but he wasn’t listening to a word.

“Come on, Bill,” Poole said. “I can take it. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

Dzik smiled. “Yeah.”

The Interface’s powder-blue struts slid past the flitter, obscuring the Moon.

Dzik opened the briefcase and drew out a series of photographs. “Look at these.” They were coarse images of the surface of Baked Alaska. The sky was empty save for a speckling of distant stars, any of which could have been the Sun. The landscape was bare, cracked ice — save for some odd, rooted structures rather like the stumps of felled trees.

“I’m sorry about the quality,” Dzik said. “These had to be taken from long range. Very long range.”

Poole riffled through the photos. “What’s this about, Bill?”

Dzik ran plump fingers through short, greasy hair. “Look, Mike, I’ve been involved in the wormhole projects almost as long as you have. And we’ve faced problems before. But they’ve been technical, or political, or…” Dzik counted on his fingers. “Solving the fundamental problem of wormhole instability using active feedback techniques. Developing ways to produce exotic matter on an industrial scale, enough to open the throats of wormholes a mile wide. Getting agreement from governments, local and cross-System, to lace the Solar System with wormhole transit paths. And the funding. The endless battles over funding…”