Stephen Baxter - Phase Space

He flew into darkness: the shadow of Earth. Reflections from the cabin lights on the windows made it hard to see out, but still Gagarin could make out the continents outlined by splashes of light, chains of them like streetlights along the coasts, and penetrating the interiors along the great river valleys. The chains of human-made light, the orange and yellow-white spider-web challenging the night, were oddly inspiring. But Gagarin was struck by how much of the planet was dark, empty: all of the ocean, of course, save for the tiny, brave lights of ships, and great expanses of desert, jungle and mountain.

Gagarin was struck not so much by Earth’s fragility as by its immensity, the smallness of human tenure, and the Vostok, for all the gigantic energy of its launch, was circling the Earth like a fly buzzing an elephant, huddled close to its hide of air.

Over the Pacific’s wrinkled hide he saw a dim glow: it was the light of the Moon.

He turned his head, and let his eyes adapt to the new darkness. Soon, for the first time since the launch, he was able to see the stars.

The sky was crowded with stars, he saw; it was something like the sky over the high desert of the Gobi, where he had completed his survival training, the air so thin and dry as to be all but perfectly transparent. Craning to peer through the tiny windows he sought the constellations, star patterns familiar since his boyhood, but the sky was almost too crowded to make them out …

Everywhere, stars were green.

The nearby stars, for instance: Alpha Centauri and Sirius and Procyon and Tau Ceti, names from science fiction, the homes of mankind in the ages to come. Green as blades of grass!

He tipped his head this way and that. Everywhere he looked it was the same: stars everywhere had turned to chlorophyll green.

What could this mean?

Yuri Gagarin flew on, alone in the dark of the Earth, peering out of his warm cabin into an unmarked celestial night.

At last he flew towards the sunlight once more. This first cosmonaut dawn was quite sudden: a blue arc, looking perfectly spherical, which suddenly outlined the hidden Earth. The arc thickened, and the first sliver of sun poked above the horizon. The shadows of clouds fled across the ocean towards him, and then the clouds turned to the colour of molten copper, and the lightening ocean was grey as steel, burnished and textured. The horizon brightened, through orange to white, and the colours of life leaked back into the world.

The green stars disappeared.

Space was a stranger place than he had imagined.

He looked down at the Earth. To Gagarin now, the Earth seemed like a huge cave: warm, well-lit, but an isolated speck on a black, hostile hillside, within which humanity huddled, telling itself stories to ward off the dark. But Gagarin had ventured outside the cave.

Gagarin wished he could return now, wished his brief journey was even briefer.

He closed his eyes. He sang hymns to the motherland. He saw flashes of light, meteoric streaks sometimes, against the darkness of his eyelid. He knew this must be some radiation effect, the debris of exploded stars perhaps, coursing through him. His soft human flesh was being remade, shaped anew, by space.

So the minutes wore away.

It would not be long now. He anticipated his return to Earth, when the radio commands from the ground control would order his spaceship to prepare itself. It would orient in its orbit, and his retro-rockets would blaze, slamming him with a full-body blow, forcing him back into his couch. Then would come the brief fall into the atmosphere, the flames around his portholes as the ablative coating of Swallow turned to ash, so that he became a man-made comet, streaking across the skies of Africa and Asia. And at last his ejection seat would hurl him from the spent capsule, and from four thousand metres he would drift to Earth on his parachute – landing at last in the deep spring air, perhaps on the outskirts of some small village, deep in the homeland, such as his own Klushino. The reverie warmed him.

Have you come from outer space ?

Yes, he would say. Yes, I have. Would you believe it? I certainly have …

But the stars, he would have to tell them, are green.

… We can’t continue. The anomalies are mounting. The Poyekhali is becoming aware of its situation.

Then we must terminate.

Do you authorize that? I don’t have the position to –

Just do it. I will accept the blame.

Again, the voices! He tried to shut them out, to concentrate on his work, as he had been trained and he had rehearsed.

He had no desire to return to Earth a crazy man.

And yet, even if it had to be so – horrible for him, for Valentia! – still his flight would not have been without value, for at least something would have been learned about the insidious deadliness of space.

He threw himself into his routine of duties once more. The end of the flight was crowding towards him, and he still had items to complete. He monitored his pulse, respiration, appetite and sensations of weightlessness; he transmitted electrocardiograms, pneumograms, electroencephalograms, skin-galvanic measurements and electro-oculograms, made by placing tiny silver electrodes at the corners of his eyes.

He ate a brief meal, a lunch squeezed from tubes stored in a locker set in the wall. He ate not because he was hungry, but because nobody had eaten in space before: Gagarin ate to prove that such normal human activities were possible, here in the mouth of space. He even drifted out of his couch and exercised; he had been given an ingenious regime based on rubber strips, which he could perform without doffing his pressure suit …

Again, a noise from outside the craft. Unfamiliar voices, a babble.

Laughter.

Were they laughing at him ? As if he was some ape in a zoo cage?

And – Holy Mother! – a scraping on the hull, as if hands were clambering over it.

The noises of the craft – the steady hum and whir of the instruments, the clatter of busy pumps and fans – all of it stopped, abruptly, as if someone had turned a switch.

Gagarin waited, his breath loud in his ears, the only sound.

The hatch, behind Gagarin’s head, scraped open. His ears popped as pressure changed, and a cold blue light seeped in on him.

There were shadows at the open port.

Not human shadows.

He tried to scream. He must reach for his helmet, try to close it, seek to engage his emergency air supply.

But he could not move.

Hands on his shoulders, cradling his head. Hands, lifting him from the capsule. Had he landed? Was he dreaming again? A moment ago, it seemed to him, he had been in orbit; and now this. Had something gone wrong? Had he somehow re-entered the atmosphere? Were these peasants from some remote part of the Union, lifting him from his crashed Swallow ?

But this was not Kazakhstan or any part of the Union, and, whatever these creatures were, they were not peasants.

He was out of the craft now. Faces ringed his vision. They looked like babies, he thought, or perhaps monkeys, with grey skin, oversized heads, huge eyes, and small noses, ears and mouths. He could not even tell if they were men or women.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the faces were still there, peering in on him.

He could not read their emotions. But it did seem to him that he found in one of the distorted faces a little more – compassion. Interest, at least …

So. Do you think this Poyekhali is conscious of where it is ?

It could be. It seems alert. If it is, we have broken the sentience laws …

The heads were raised in confrontation.

I won’t be held responsible for that. The systems are your accountability.