Space

He told himself: All this — the neutron star sail, the toiling community — is a triumph of life over blind cosmic cruelty. We ain’t taking it anymore.

But when he thought of Cassiopeia, anger flooded him. Why?

It had been just minutes since she had embraced him on that grassy, simulated plain… hadn’t it?

How do you know, Malenfant? How do you know you haven’t been frozen in some deep data store for ten thousand years?

And… how do you know this isn’t the first time you surfaced like this?

How could he know? If his identity assembled, disintegrated again, what trace would it leave on his memory? What was his memory? What if he was simply restarted each time, wiped clean like a reinitialized computer? How would he know?

But it didn’t matter. I did this to myself, he thought. I wanted to be here. I labored to get myself here. Because of what we learned, as the years unraveled: that the Gaijin would be followed by a great wave of visitors, and that the Gaijin were not even the first — just as Nemoto had intuited from the start. And nothing we learned about those earlier visitors, and what had become of them, gave us comfort.

Slowly, as they began to travel the stars, humans learnedto fear the universe, and the creatures who lived in it. Livedand died.

Chapter 8 Ambassadors

Madeleine Meacher barely got out of N’Djamena alive.

Nigerian and Cameroon troops were pushing into the airstrip just as the Sänger’s undercarriage trolley jets kicked in. She heard the distant crackle of automatic fire, saw vehicles converging on the runway. Somewhere behind her was a clatter, distant and small; it sounded as if a stray round had hit the Sänger.

Then the space plane threw itself down the runway, pressing her back into her seat, its leap forward sudden, gazellelike. The Sänger tipped up on its trolley, and the big RB545 engines kicked in, burning liquid hydrogen. The plane rose almost vertically. The gunfire rattle faded immediately.

She shot into cloud and was through in a second, emerging into bright, clear sunshine.

She glanced down: The land was already lost, remote, a curving dome of dull desert-brown, punctuated with the sprawling gray of urban development. Fighters — probably Nigerian, or maybe Israeli — were little points of silver light in the huge sky around her, with contrails looping through the air. They couldn’t get close to Madeleine unless she was seriously unlucky.

She lit up the scramjets and was kicked in the back, hard, and the fighters disappeared.

The sky faded down to a deep purple. The turbulence smoothed out as she went supersonic. At thirty thousand meters, still climbing, she pushed the RB545 throttle to maximum thrust. Her acceleration was a Mach a minute; on this suborbital hop to Senegal she’d reach Mach 15 before falling back to Earth.

She was already so high she could see stars. Soon the reaction-control thrusters would kick in, and she’d be flying like a spacecraft.

It was the nearest she’d ever get to space, anyhow.

For the first time since arriving in Chad with her cargo of light artillery shells, she had time to relax. The Sänger was showing no evidence of harm from the gunfire.

The Sänger was a good, solid German design, built by Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm. It was designed to operate in war zones, but Madeleine was not; safe now in her high-tech cocoon, she gave way to the tension for a couple of minutes.

While she was still shaking, the Sänger logged into the nets and downloaded her mail. Life went on.

That was when she found the message from Sally Brind.

Brind didn’t tell Madeleine who she represented, or what she wanted. Madeleine was to meet her at Kennedy Space Center. Just like that; she was given no choice.

Over the years Madeleine had received a lot of blunt messages like this. They were usually either from lucrative would-be employers, or some variant of cop or taxman. Either way it was wise to turn up.

She acknowledged the message and instructed her data miners to find out who Brind was.

She pressed a switch, and the RB545s shut down with a bang. As the acceleration cut out she was thrust forward against the straps. Now she had gone ballistic, like a hurled stone. Coasting over the roof of her trajectory in near silence, she lost all sensation of speed, of motion.

And, at her highest point, she saw a distant glimmer of light, complex and serene: it was a Gaijin flower-ship, complacently orbiting Earth.

When she got back to the States, Madeleine flew out to Orlando. To get to KSC she drove north along U.S. 3, the length of Merritt Island. There used to be security gates; now there was nothing but a rusting fence, with a new smart-concrete road surface cut right through it.

She parked at the Vehicle Assembly Building. It was early morning. The place was deserted. Sand drifted across the empty parking lot, gathering in miniature dunes.

She walked out to the old press stand, a wooden frame like a baseball bleacher. She sat down, looking east. The Sun was in her eyes, and already hot; she could feel it draw her face tight as a drum. To the right, stretching off to the south, there were rocket gantries. In the mist they were two-dimensional, colorless. Most of them were disused, part-dismantled, museum pieces. The sense of desolation, abandonment, was heavy in the air.

Sally Brind had turned out to work for Bootstrap, the rump of the corporation that had sent a spacecraft to the Gaijin base in the asteroid belt three decades earlier.

Madeleine was not especially interested in the Gaijin. She had been born a few years after their arrival in the Solar System; they were just a part of her life, and not a very exciting part. But she knew that four decades after the first detection of the Gaijin — and a full nineteen years after they had first come sailing in from the belt, apparently prompted by Reid Malenfant’s quixotic journey — the Gaijin had established something resembling a system of trade with humanity.

They had provided some technological advances: robotics, vacuum industries, a few nanotech tricks like their asteroid mining blankets — enough to revolutionize a dozen industries and make a hundred fortunes. They had also flown human scientists on exploratory missions to other planets: Mars, Mercury, even the moons of Jupiter. Not Venus, though, oddly, despite repeated requests. And the Gaijin had started to provide a significant proportion of Earth’s resources from space: raw materials from the asteroids, including precious metals, and even energy, beamed down as microwaves from great collectors in the sky.

Humans — or rather, the governments and corporations who dealt with the Gaijin — had to “pay” for all this with resources common on Earth but scarce elsewhere, notably heavy metals and some complex organics. The Gaijin had also been allowed to land on Earth and had been offered cultural contact. The Gaijin had, strangely, shown interest in some human ideas, and a succession of writers, philosophers, theologians, and even a few discreditable science fiction authors had been summoned to converse with the alien “ambassadors.”

The government authorities, and the corporations who were profiting, seemed to regard the whole arrangement as a good deal. With the removal of the great dirt-making industries from the surface of the Earth — power, mining — there was a good chance that eco recovery could, belatedly, become a serious proposition.

Not everybody agreed. All those shut-down mines and decommissioned power plants were creating economic and environmental refugees. And there were plenty of literal refugees too — for instance, all the poor souls who had been moved out of the great swathes of equatorial land that had been given over to the microwave receiving stations.

Thus the Gaijin upheaval had, predictably, caused poverty, even famine and war.

It was thanks to that last that Madeleine made her living, of course. But everybody had to survive.

“I wonder if you know what you’re looking at, here.” The voice had come from behind her.

A woman sat in the stand, in the row behind Madeleine. Her bony wrists stuck out of an environment-screening biocomp bodysuit. She must have been sixty. There was a man with her, at least as old, short, dark, and heavyset.

“You’re Brind.”

“And you’re Madeleine Meacher. So we meet. This is Frank Paulis. He’s the head of Bootstrap.”

“I remember your name.”

He grinned, his eyes hard.

“What am I doing here, Brind?”

For answer, Brind pointed east, to the tree line beyond the Banana River. “I used to work for NASA. Back when there was a NASA. Over there used to be the site of the two great launch complexes: Thirty-nine-B to the left, Thirty-nine-A to the right. Thirty-nine-A was the old Apollo gantry. Later they adapted it for the shuttle.” The sunlight blasted into her face, making it look flat, younger. “Well, the pads are gone now, pulled down for scrap. The base of Thirty-nine-A is still there, if you want to see it. There’s a sign the pad rats stuck there for the last launch: Go, Discovery! Kind of faded now, of course.”

“What do you want?”

“Do you know what a burster is?”

Madeleine frowned. “No kind of weapon I’ve ever heard of.”

“It’s not a weapon, Meacher. It’s a star.”

Madeleine was, briefly, electrified.

“Look, Meacher, we have a proposal for you.”

“What makes you think I’ll be interested?”

Brind’s voice was gravelly and full of menace. “I know a great deal about you.”

“How come?”

“If you must know, through the tax bureau. You have operated your—” She waved a hand dismissively. “ — enterprises in over a dozen countries over the years. But you’ve paid tax on barely ten percent of the income we can trace.”

“Never broken a law.”

Brind eyed Madeleine as if she had said something utterly naive. “The law is a weapon of government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.”

Madeleine tried to figure out Brind. Her biocomposite suit looked efficient, not expensive. Brind was a wage slave, not an entrepreneur. “You’re from the government?” she guessed.

Brind’s face hardened. “When I was young, we used to call what you do gunrunning. Although I don’t suppose that’s how you think of it yourself.”

The remark caught Madeleine off guard. “No,” she said. “I’m a pilot. All I ever wanted to do is fly; this is the best job I could get. In a different universe, I’d be—”

“An astronaut,” Frank Paulis said.

The foolish, archaic word got to Madeleine. Here, of all places.

“We know about you, you see,” Sally Brind said, almost regretfully. “All about you.”

“There are no astronauts anymore.”

“That isn’t true, Meacher,” Paulis said. “Come with us. Let us show you what we’re planning.”

Brind and Paulis took her out to Launch Complex 41, the old USASF Titan pad at the northern end of ICBM Row. Here, Brind’s people had refurbished an antique Soviet-era Proton launcher.

The booster was a slim black cylinder, fifty-three meters tall. Six flaring strap-on boosters clustered around the first stage, and Madeleine could pick out the smaller stages above. A passenger capsule and hab module would be fixed to the top, shrouded by a cone of metal.

“Our capsule isn’t much more sophisticated than an Apollo,” Brind said. “It only has to get you to orbit and keep you alive for a couple of hours, until the Gaijin come to pick you up.”

“Me?”

“Would you like to see your hab module? It’s being prepared in the old Orbiter Processing Facility…”

“Get to the point,” Madeleine said. “Where are you planning to send me? And what exactly is a burster?”

“A type of neutron star. A very interesting type. The Gaijin are sending a ship there. They’ve invited us — that is, the UN — to send a representative. An observer. It’s the first time they’ve offered this, to carry an observer beyond the Solar System. We think it’s important to respond. We can send our own science platform; we’ll train you up to use it. We can even establish our own Saddle Point gateway in the neutron star system. It’s all part of a wider trade and cultural deal, which—”

“So you represent the UN?”

“Not exactly.”

“We need somebody with the qualifications and experience to handle a journey like this,” Paulis said. “You’re about the right age, under forty. You’ve no dependents that we can trace.” He sighed. “A hundred years ago, we’d have sent John Glenn. Today, the best fit is the likes of you. You’ll be well paid.” He eyed Madeleine. “Believe me, very well paid.”

Madeleine thought it over, trying to figure the angles. “That Proton is sixty years old, the design even older. You don’t have much of a budget, do you?”

Paulis shrugged. “My pockets aren’t as deep as they used to be.”

Brind prickled. “What does the budget matter? For Christ’s sake, Meacher, don’t you have any wonder in your soul? I’m offering you, here, the chance to travel to the stars. My God — if I had your qualifications, I’d jump at the chance.”

“And you aren’t truly the first,” Paulis said. “Reid Malenfant—”

“ — is lost. Anyhow it’s not exactly being an astronaut,” Madeleine said sourly. “Is it? Being live cargo on a Gaijin flower-ship doesn’t count.”

“Actually a lot of people agree with you,” Paulis said. “That’s why we’ve struggled to assemble the funding. No one is interested in human spaceflight in these circumstances. Most people are happy just to wait for the Gaijin to parachute down more interstellar goodies from the sky…”

“Why don’t you just send along an automated instrument pallet? Why send a human at all?”

“No.” Brind shook her head firmly. “We’re deliberately designing for a human operator.”

“Why?”

“Because we want a human there. A human like you, God help us. We think it’s important to try to meet them on equal terms.”

Madeleine laughed. “Equal terms? We limp into orbit, and rendezvous with a giant alien ramjet capable of flying to the outer Solar System?”

“Symbolism, Meacher,” Paulis said darkly. “Symbols are everything.”

“How do you know the Gaijin respond to symbols?”

“Maybe they don’t. But people do. And it’s people I’m interested in. Frankly, Meacher, we’re seeking advantage. Not everybody thinks we should become so completely reliant on the Gaijin. You’ll have a lot of discretion out there. We need someone with… acumen. There may be opportunities.”

“What kind of opportunities?”

“To get humanity out from under the yoke of the Gaijin,” Paulis said. For the first time there was a trace of anger in his voice, passion.

Madeleine began to understand.

There were various shadowy groups who weren’t happy with the deals the various governments and corporations had been striking with the Gaijin. This trading relationship was not between two equals. And besides, the Gaijin must be following their own undeclared goals. What about the stuff they were keeping back? What would happen when the human economy was utterly dependent on the trickle of good stuff from the sky? And suppose the Gaijin suddenly decided to turn off the faucets — or, worse, decided to start dropping rocks?

Beyond that, the broader situation continued to evolve, year on year. More and more of the neighboring stars were lighting up with radio and other signals, out to a distance of some thirty light-years. It was evident that a ferocious wave of emigration was coming humanity’s way, scouring along the Orion-Cygnus Spiral Arm. Presumably those colonists were propagating via Saddle Point gateways, and they were finding their target systems empty — or undeveloped, like the Solar System. And as soon as they arrived they started to build, and broadcast.

Humans knew precisely nothing about those other new arrivals, at Sirius and Epsilon Eridani and Procyon and Tau Ceti and Altair. Maybe humans were lucky it was the Gaijin who found them first, the first to intervene in the course of human history. Or maybe not. Either way, facing this volatile and fast-changing future, it seemed unwise — to some people — to rely entirely on the goodwill of the first new arrivals to show up. Evidently those groups were now trying, quietly, to do something about it.

But Madeleine’s first priority was the integrity of her own skin.

“How far is it, to this burster?”

“Eighteen light-years.”

Madeleine knew the relativistic implications. She would come back stranded in a future thirty-six years remote. “I won’t do it.”

“It’s that or the Gulf,” Brind said evenly.

The Gulf. Shit. After twenty years of escalating warfare over the last oil reserves the Gulf was like the surface of Io: glassy nuke craters punctuated by oil wells that would burn for decades. Even with biocomp armor, her life expectancy would be down to a few months.

She turned and lifted her face to the Florida Sun. It looked like she didn’t have a choice.

But, she suspected, she was kind of glad about that. Something inside her began to stir at the thought of this improbable journey.

And crossing the Galaxy with the Gaijin might be marginally safer than flying Sängers into N’Djamena, anyhow.

Paulis seemed to sense she was wavering. “Spend some time,” he said. “We’ll introduce you to our people. And—”

“And you’ll tell me how you’re going to make me rich.”

“Exactly.” He grinned. He had very even, capped teeth.

She was flown to Kefallinia, the Ionian island that the Gaijin had been granted as a base on planet Earth. From the air the island looked as if it had been painted on the blue skin of the sea, a ragged splash of blue-gray land everywhere indented with bays and inlets, like a fractal demonstration. Off the coast she spotted naval ships, gray slabs of metal, principally a U.S. Navy battle group.

On the ground the Sun was high, the air hot and still and very bright, like congealed light, and the rocks tumbled from a spine of mountains down to the tideless sea.

People had lived here, it was thought, for six thousand years. Not anymore, of course: not the natives anyhow. When the UN deal with the Gaijin had been done, the Kefallinians were evacuated by the Greek government, most to sites in mainland Greece, others abroad. Those who came to America had been vocal. They regarded themselves as refugees, their land stolen, their culture destroyed by this alien invasion. Rightly so, Madeleine thought.

But the Kefallinians weren’t the only dispossessed on planet Earth, and their plight, though newsworthy, wasn’t attention-grabbing for long.

At the tiny airport she saw her first piece of close-up genuine Gaijin technology: a surface-to-orbit shuttle, a squat cone of some shimmering metallic substance. It looked too fragile to withstand the rigors of atmospheric entry. And yet there it was, large as life, sitting right next to the Lear jets and antiquated island hoppers.

From the airport she was whisked to the central UN facility, close to the old capital of Argostoli. The facility was just a series of hastily prefabricated buildings and bunkers linked by walkways and tunnels. The central building, containing the Gaijin themselves, was a crude aluminum box.

Surrounding the Gaijin shelter there were chapels and temples and mosques, embassies from various governments and inter-governmental bodies, a science park, representatives of most of the world’s major corporations. All of these groups, she supposed, were here trying to get a piece of the action, one way or another.

The senior U.S. government official here, she learned, was called the planetary protection officer. The PPO post had been devised in the 1990s to coordinate quarantine measures to handle samples of Mars rock returned to Earth, and suchlike. With the arrival of the Gaijin, the joke post had become somewhat more significant.

The military presence was heavy, dug in all over the complex. There were round-the-clock patrols by foot soldiers and armored vehicles. Copters hovered overhead continually, filling the languid air with their crude rattle, and fighter planes soared over the blue dome of the sky, flight after flight of them.

To some extent this show of military power, as if the Gaijin were being contained here by human mil technology, was a sop for public opinion. Look: we are dealing with these guys as equals. We are in control. We have not surrendered… Madeleine had even heard senior military officers describing the Gaijin as “bogeys” and “tin men,” and seeking approval to continue their war-gaming of hypothetical Gaijin assaults. But she’d seen enough warfare herself to believe that there was no way humans could prevail in an all-out conflict with the Gaijin. The hoary tactic of dropping space rocks on the major cities would probably suffice for them to win. So the smarter military minds must know that mankind had no choice but to accommodate.

But there was a splash of darkness on the concrete, close to the Gaijin facility: apparently a remnant of a near-successful protest assault on the Gaijin, an incident never widely publicized. Happily the Gaijin had shown none of the likely human reaction to such an incident, no desire to retaliate. It made Madeleine realize that the military here were looking two ways: protecting mankind from its alien visitors, and vice versa.

She stood on heat-soaked concrete and looked up at thesky. Even now, in the brightness of a Mediterranean day, she could see the ghostly shapes of flower-ships, their scoops hundreds of kilometers wide, cruising above the skies of Earth. At that moment, the idea that humans could contain the Gaijin, engage them in dialogue, control this situation, seemed laughable.

They had to put on paper coveralls and overboots and hats, and they were walked through an air lock. The Gaijin hostel worked to about the cleanliness standard of an operating theater, Madeleine was told.

Inside the big boxy buildings it was like a church, of a peculiarly stripped-down, minimalist kind: quiet calm, subdued light, and people in uniform padding quietly to and fro in an atmosphere of reverence.

In fact, Madeleine found, that church analogy was apt. For the Gaijin had asked to meet the Pope.

“And other religious leaders, of course,” Dorothy Chaum said as she shook Madeleine’s hand. “Strange, isn’t it? We always imagined the aliens would make straight for the Carl Sagan SETI-scientist types, and immediately start ‘curing’ us of religion and other diseases of our primitive minds. But it isn’t working out that way at all. They seem to have more questions than answers…”

Chaum turned out to be an American, a Catholic priest who had been assigned by the Vatican to the case of the Gaijin from their first detection. She was a stocky, sensible-looking woman who might have been fifty, her hair frizzed with a modest gray. Madeleine was shocked to find out she was over one hundred years old. Evidently the Vatican could buy its people the best life-extending treatments.

They walked toward big curtained-off bays. The separating curtain was a nearly translucent sheet stretched across the building, from ceiling to floor, wall to wall.

And there — beyond the curtain, bathed in light — was a Gaijin.

Machinery, not life: that was her first impression. She recognized the famous dodecahedral core. It was reinforced at its edges — presumably to counter Earth’s gravity — and it was resting, incongruously, on a crude Y-frame trailer. A variety of instruments — cameras and other sensors — protruded from the dodecahedron’s skin, and the skin itself was covered with fine, bristly wires. Three big robot arms stuck out of that torso, each articulated in two or three places. Two of the arms were resting on the ground, but the third was waving around in the air, fine manipulators at the terminus working.

She looked in vain for symmetry.

Humans had evolved to recognize symmetry in living things — left to right, anyhow — because of gravity. Living things were symmetrical; non-living things weren’t — a basic human prejudice hardwired in from the days when it paid to be able to pick out the predator lurking against a confusing background. In its movements this Gaijin had the appearance of life, but it was angular, almost clumsy looking — and defiantly not symmetrical. It didn’t fit.

Human researchers were lined up with their noses pressed against the curtain. A huge bank of cameras and other apparatus was trained on the Gaijin’s every move. She knew a continuous image of the Gaijin was being sent out to the net, twenty-four hours a day. There were bars that showed nothing but Gaijin images on huge wall-covering softscreens, all day and all night.

The Gaijin was reading a book, turning its pages with cold efficiency. Good grief, Madeleine thought, disturbed.

“The Gaijin are deep-space machines,” Brind said. “Or life-forms, whatever. But they’re hardy; they can survive in our atmosphere and gravity. There are three of them, here in this facility: the only three on the surface of the planet. We’ve no way of knowing how many are up there in orbit, or further out, of course…”

“We think we’re used to machinery,” Dorothy Chaum said to her. “But it’s eerie, isn’t it?”

“If it’s a machine,” Madeleine said, “it was made by no human. And it’s operated by none of us. Eerie. Yes, you’re right.” She found herself shuddering, oddly, as that crude mechanical limb clanked. She’d lived her life with machinery, but this Gaijin was spooking her, on some primitive level. “We speak to them in Latin, you know,” Dorothy Chaum murmured. She grinned, dimpling, looking younger. “It’s the most logical human language we could find; the Gaijin have trouble with all the irregular structures and idioms of modern languages like English. We have software translation suites to back us up. But of course it’s a boon to me. I always knew those long hours of study in the seminary would pay off.”

“What do you talk about?”

“A lot of things,” Brind said. “They ask more questions than they volunteer answers. Mostly, we figure out a lot from clues gleaned from inadvertent slips.”

“Oh, I doubt that anything about the Gaijin is inadvertent,” Chaum said. “Certainly their speech is not like ours. It is dull, dry, factual, highly structured, utterly unmemorable. There seems to be no rhythm, no poetry — no sense of story. Simply a dull list of facts and queries and dry logic. Like the listing of a computer program.”

“That’s because they are machines,” Paulis growled. “They aren’t conscious, like we are.”

Chaum smiled gently. “I wish I felt so sure. The Gaijin are clearly intelligent. But are they conscious? We know of examples of intelligence without consciousness, right here on Earth: social insects like ant colonies, the termites. And you could argue there can be consciousness without much intelligence, as in a mouse. But is advanced intelligence possible without consciousness of some sort?”

“Jesus,” Paulis said with disgust. “You gave these clanking tin men a whole island, they’ve been down here for five whole years, and you can’t even answer questions like that?”

Chaum stared at him. “If I could be sure you are conscious, if I even knew for sure what it meant, I’d concede your point.”

“Conscious or not, they are different from us,” Brind said. “For example, the Gaijin can turn their brains off.”

That startled Madeleine.

“It’s true,” Chaum said. “When they are at repose, as far as we can tell, they are deactivated. Madeleine, if you had an off switch on the side of your head — even if you could be sure it would be turned back on again — would you use it?”

Madeleine hesitated. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t see how I could tell if I was still me, when I rebooted.”

Chaum sighed. “But that doesn’t seem to trouble the Gaijin. Indeed, the Gaijin seem to be rather baffled by our big brains. Madeleine, your mind is constantly working. Your brain doesn’t rest, even in sleep; it consumes the energy of a light bulb — a big drain on your body’s resources — all the time; that’s why we’ve had to eat meat all the way back to Homo Erectus.”

“But without our brains we wouldn’t be us,” Madeleine protested.

“Sure,” Chaum said. “But to be us, to the Gaijin, seems to be something of a luxury.”

“Ms. Chaum, what do you want from them?”

Frank Paulis laughed out loud. “She wants to know if there was a Gaijin Jesus. Right?”

Chaum smiled without resentment. “The Gaijin do seem fascinated by our religions.”

Madeleine was intrigued. “And do they have religion?”

“It’s impossible to tell. They don’t give away a great deal.”

“That’s no surprise,” Paulis said sourly.

“They are very analytical,” Chaum said. “They seem to regard our kind of thinking as pathological. We spread ideas to each other — right or wrong, useful or harmful — like an unpleasant mental disease.”

Brind nodded. “This is the old idea of the meme.”

“Yes,” Chaum said. “A very cynical view of human culture.”

“And,” Paulis asked dryly, “have your good Catholic memes crossed the species barrier to the Gaijin?”

“Not as far as I can tell,” Dorothy Chaum said. “They think in an orderly way. They build up their knowledge bit by bit, testing each new element — much as our scientists are trained to do. Perhaps their minds are too organized to allow our memes to flourish. Or perhaps they have their own memes, powerful enough to beat off our feeble intruder notions. Frankly, I’m not sure what the Gaijin make of our answers to the great questions of existence. What seems to interest them is that we have answers at all. I suspect they don’t…”

“You sound disappointed with what you’ve found here,” Madeleine said.

“Perhaps I am,” Chaum said slowly. “As a child I used to dream of meeting the aliens: Who could guess what scientific and philosophical insights they might bring? Well, these Gaijin do appear to be a life-form millions of years old, at least. But, culturally and scientifically, they are really little evolved over us.”

Madeleine felt herself warming to this earnest, thoughtful woman. “Perhaps we’ll find the really smart ones out there among the stars. Maybe they are on their way now.”

Chaum smiled. “I certainly envy you your chance to go see for yourself. But even if we did find such marvelous beings, the result may be crushing for us.”

“How so?”

“God shows His purposes through us, and our progress,” she said. “At least, this is one strand of Christian thinking. But what, then, if our spiritual development is far behind that of the aliens? Somewhere else He may have reached a splendor to which we can add nothing.”

“And we wouldn’t matter anymore.”

“Not to God. And, perhaps, not to ourselves.”

They turned away from the disappointing aliens and walked out into the flat light of Kefallinian noon.

Later, Frank Paulis took Madeleine to one side.

“Enough bullshit,” he said. “Let’s you and me talk business. You’re fast-forwarding through thirty-six years. If you’re smart, you’ll take advantage of that fact.”

“How?”

“Compound interest,” he said.

Madeleine laughed. After her encounter with such strangeness, Paulis’s blunt commercial calculation seemed ludicrous. “You aren’t serious.”

“Sure. Think about it. Invest what you can of your fee. After all you won’t be touching it while you’re gone. At a conservative five percent you’re looking at a fivefold payout over your thirty-six years. If you can make ten percent that goes up to thirty-one times.”

“Really.”

“Sure. What else are you going to do with it? You’ll come back a few months older, subjectively, to find your money has grown like Topsy. And think about this. Suppose you make another journey of the same length. You could multiply up that factor of thirtyfold to nearer a thousand. You could shuttle back and forth between here and Sirius, let’s say, getting richer on every leg, just by staying alive over the centuries.”

“Yeah. If everything stays the same back home. If the bank doesn’t fail, the laws don’t change, the currency doesn’t depreciate, there’s no war or rebellion or plague, or a takeover of mankind by alien robots.”

He grinned. “That’s a long way off. A lifetime pumped by relativity is a whole new way of making money. You’d be the first, Meacher. Think about it.”

She studied him. “You really want me to take this trip, don’t you?”

His face hardened. “Hell, yes, I want you to make this trip. Or, if you can’t get your head sufficiently out of your ass, somebody. We have to find our own way forward, a way to deal with the Gaijin and those other metal-chewing cyborgs and giant interplanetary bugs and whatever else is heading our way from the Galactic core.”

“Is that really the truth, Paulis?”

“Oh, you don’t think so?”

“Maybe you’re just disappointed,” she goaded him. “A lot of people were disappointed because the Gaijin didn’t turn out to be a bunch of father figures from the sky. They didn’t immediately start beaming down high technology and wisdom and rules so we can all live together in peace, love, and understanding. The Gaijin are just there. Is that what’s really bugging you, Paulis? That infantile wish to just give up responsibility for yourself?”

He eyed her. “You really are full of shit, Meacher. Come on. You still have to see the star of this freak show.” He led her back into the facility. They reached another corner, another curtained-off Gaijin enclosure. “We call this guy Gypsy Rose Lee,” he said.

Beyond the curtain was another Gaijin. But it was in pieces. The central dodecahedron was intact, save for a few panels, but most of those beautiful articulated arms lay half disassembled on the floor. The last attached arm was steadily plucking wiry protrusions off the surface of the dodecahedron, one by one. Lenses of various sizes lay scattered over the floor, like gouged-out eyeballs.

Human researchers in white all-over isolation gear were crawling over the floor, inspecting the alien gadgetry.

“My God,” Madeleine said. “It’s taking itself apart.”

“Cultural exchange in action,” Paulis said sourly. “We gave them a human cadaver to take apart — a volunteer, incidentally. In return we get this. A Gaijin is a complicated critter; this has been going on six months already.”

A couple of the researchers — two earnest young women — overheard Paulis, and turned their way.

“But we’re learning a lot,” one of the researchers said. “The most basic question we have to answer is: Are the Gaijin alive? From the point of view of their complexity, you’d say they are; but they seem to have no mechanism for heredity, which we think is a prerequisite for any definition of a living thing—”

“Or so we thought at first. But seeing the way this thing is put together has made us think again—”

“We believed the Gaijin might be von Neumann machines, perfect replicators—”

“But it may be that perfect replication is impossible in principle. Uncertainty, chaos—”

“There will be drift in each generation. Like genetic drift. And where there is variation, there can be selection, and so evolution—”

“But we still don’t know what the units of replication are here. It may be a lower level than the individual Gaijin—”

“The subcomponents that comprise them, perhaps. Maybe the Gaijin are a kind of vehicle for replication of their components, just as you could say we humans are a vehicle to enable our genes to reproduce themselves…”

Breeding, evolving machines? Madeleine found herself shuddering.

“Do you see now?” Paulis asked. “We are dealing with the truly alien here, Madeleine. These guys might spout Latin in their synthesized voices, but they are not like us. They come from a place we can’t even imagine, and we don’t know where they are going, and we sure as hell don’t know what they are looking for here on Earth. And that’s why we have to find a way to deal with them. Go ahead. Take a good long look.”

The Gaijin plucked a delicate panel of an aluminumlike soft metal off its own hide; it came loose with a soft, sucking tear, exposing jewel-like innards. Perhaps it would keep on going until there was only that grasping robot hand left, Madeleine thought, and then the hand would take itself apart too, finger by gleaming finger, until there was nothing left that could move.

Chapter 9 Fusion Summer

Brind drew up contracts. Madeleine tidied up her affairs; preparing for a gap of thirty-six years, at minimum, had a feeling of finality. She said good-bye to her tearful mother, rented out her apartment, sold her car. She took the salary up front and invested it as best she could, with Paulis’s help.

She decided to give her little capsule a call sign: Friendship-7.

And, before she knew it, before she felt remotely ready for this little relativistic death, it was launch day.

Friendship-7 ’s protective shroud cracked open. The blue light of Earth flooded the cabin. Madeleine could see fragments of ice, shaken free of the hull of the booster; they glittered around the craft like snow. And she could see the skin of Earth, spread out beneath her like a glowing carpet, as bright as a tropical sky. On the antique Proton, it had been one mother of a ride. But here she was — at last — in orbit, and her spirits soared. To hell with the Gaijin, to hell with Brind and Paulis. Whatever else happened from here on in, they couldn’t take this memory away from her.

She traveled through a single orbit of the Earth. There were clouds piled thickly around the equator. The continents on the night side were outlined by chains of city lights.

She could see the big eco-repair initiatives, even from here, from orbit. Reforestation projects were swathes of virulent green on the continents of the northern hemisphere. The southern continents were filled with hot brown desert, their coasts lined gray with urban encrustation. Patches of gray in the seas, bordering the land, marked the sites of disastrous attempts to pump carbon dioxide into the deep oceans. Over Antarctica, laser arrays glowed red, laboring to destroy tropospheric chlorofluorocarbons. The Gulf was just a sooty smudge, drowning in petrochemical smog. And so on.

From here she could see the disturbing truth: that space was doing Earth no damn good at all. Even though this was a time of off-world colonies and trade with interstellar travelers, most of mankind’s efforts were directed toward fixing up a limited, broken-down ecology, or were dissipated on closed-economy problems: battles over diminishing resources in the oceans, on the fringes of the expanding deserts.

She wondered, uneasily, what she would find when she returned home, thirty-six years from now.

Madeleine would live in the old shuttle Spacelab — a tiny reusable space station, seventy years old and flown in orbit twice — dug out of storage at KSC, gutted and refurbished. At the front was her small pressurized hab compartment, and there were two pallets at the rear fitted with a bunch of instruments that would be deployed at the neutron star: coronagraphs, spectroheliographs, spectrographic telescopes.

Brind gave her a powerful processor to enable her to communicate, to some extent, with her Gaijin hosts. It was a bioprocessor, a little cubical unit. The biopro was high technology, and it was the one place they had spent some serious amounts of Paulis’s money. And it was human technology, not Gaijin. Madeleine was fascinated. She spent a long time going over the biopro’s specs. It was based on ampiphiles, long molecules with watery heads and greasy tails, that swam about in layers called Langmuir-Blodgett films. The active molecules used weak interactions — hydrogen bonding, van der Waals forces and hydrophobic recognition — to assemble themselves into a three-dimensional structure, supramolecular arrays thousands of molecules long.

Playing with the biopro was better than thinking about what was happening to her, where she was headed.

She wasn’t so happy to find, though, when she first booted up the biopro, that its human interface design metaphor was a two-dimensional virtual representation of Frank Paulis’s leathery face.

“Paulis, you egotistical bastard.”

“Just want to make you feel at home.” The image flickered a little, and his skin was blocky — obviously digitally generated. It — he — turned out to be backed up by a complex program, interactive and heuristic. He could respond to what Madeleine said to him, learn, and grow.

He would be company, of a sort.

“Are you in contact with the Gaijin?”

He hesitated. “Yes, in a way. Anyhow I’ll keep you informed. In the meantime, the best thing you can do is follow your study program.” He started downloading some kind of checklist; it chattered out of an antique teletype.

“You have got to be kidding.”

“You’ve a lot of training on the equipment still to complete,” virtual Paulis said.

“Terrific. And should I study neutron stars, bursters, whatever the hell they are?”

“I’d rather not. I want your raw reactions. If I coach you too much it will narrow your perception. Remember, you’ll be observing on behalf of all mankind. We may never get another chance. Now. Maybe we can start with the spectroheliograph deployment procedure…”

When she flew once more over the glittering east coast of North America, the Gaijin ship was waiting to meet her.

In Earth orbit, the Gaijin flower-ship didn’t look so spectacular. It was laid out something like a squid, a kilometer long and wrought in silver, with a bulky main section as the “head” and a mess of “tentacles” trailing behind.

Dodecahedral forms, silvered and anonymous, drifted from the cables and clustered around Madeleine’s antique craft. Her ship was hauled into the silvery rope stuff. Strands adhered to her hull until her view was crisscrossed with shining threads and she had become part of the structure of the Gaijin ship. She felt a mounting claustrophobia as she was knit into the alien craft. How had Malenfant stood all this?

Then the flower-ship unfolded its petals. They made up an electromagnetic scoop a thousand kilometers wide. The lower edge of the scoop brushed the fringe of Earth’s atmosphere, and plasma sparkled.

Madeleine felt her breath shortening. This is real, she thought. These crazy aliens are really going to do this. And I’m really here.

She fought panic.

After a couple of widening loops around the planet Madeleine sailed out of Earth’s orbit, and she was projected into strangeness.

Eating interplanetary hydrogen, it took the flower-ship 198 days to travel out to the burster’s Saddle Point, eight hundred AU from the Sun.

Saddle Point gateways must destroy the objects they transport.

For eighteen years a signal crossed space, toward a receiver gateway that had been hauled to the system of the burster neutron star. For eighteen years Madeleine did not exist. She was essentially — though not legally — dead.

Thus, Madeleine Meacher crossed interstellar space.

There was no sense of waking — is it over? — she was just there, with the Spacelab’s systems whirring and clicking around her as usual, like a busy little kitchen. Her heart was pounding, just as it had been a second before — eighteen years before.

Everything was the same. And yet—

“Meacher.” It was virtual Paulis’s voice. “Are you all right?”

No. She felt extraordinary: renewed, revived. She remembered every instant of it, that burst of exquisite pain, the feeling of reassembling, of sparkling. Was it possible she had somehow retained some consciousness during the transition?

My God, she thought. This could become addictive.

A new, complex light was sliding over the back of her hand. She suddenly remembered where she was. She made for her periscope.

From the dimly lit, barren fringe of the Solar System, she had been projected immediately into a crowded space. She was, in fact, sailing over the surface of a star.

The photosphere, barely ten thousand kilometers below, was a flat-infinite landscape encrusted by granules each large enough to swallow the Earth, and with the chromosphere — the thousand-kilometer-thick outer atmosphere — a thin haze above it all. Polarizing filters in the viewport periscope dimmed the light to an orange glow. As she watched, one granule exploded, its material bursting across the star’s surface; neighboring granules were pushed aside so that a glowing, unstructured scar was left on the photosphere, a scar that was slowly healed by the eruption of new granules.

From the tangled hull of the flower-ship, an instrument pod of some kind uncoiled on a graceful pseudopod. Gaijin instruments peered into the umbra of a star spot below her.

“This is an F-type white dwarf star, Meacher,” Paulis said. “A close cousin of the Sun, the dominant partner of the binary pair in this system.”

I mightn’t have come here, she thought. She felt an odd, retrospective panic. Brind might have picked on somebody else. I might have turned them down. I might have died, without ever imagining this was possible.

But I just lost eighteen years, she thought. Nearly half my life. Just like that. She tried to imagine what was happening on Earth, right now. Tried and failed.

Virtual Paulis had issues of his own. “Remarkable,” he said.

“What?”

Paulis sounded wistful. “Meacher, we didn’t want to emphasize the point overmuch before you left, but you’re the first human to have passed through a Saddle Point teleport except for Malenfant, and he never reported back. We didn’t know what would happen.”

“Maybe I would have arrived here as warm meat. All the lights on but nobody at home. Is that what you expected?”

“It was a possibility. Philosophically.”

“The Gaijin pass back and forth all the time.”

“Ah, but perhaps they don’t have souls, as we do.”

“Souls, Frank?” She was growing suspicious. “It isn’t just you in there, is it? I can’t imagine Frank Paulis discussing theology.”

“I’m a composite.” He grinned. “But I — that is, Paulis — won the fight to be front man.”

“Now that sounds like Frank.”

“For thousands of years we’ve wondered about the existence of a soul. Does the mind emerge from the body, or does the soul have some separate existence, somehow coupled to the physical body? Consider a thought experiment. If I made an exact duplicate of you, down to the last proton and electron and quantum state, but a couple of meters to the left — would that copy be you? Would it have a mind? Would it be conscious?”

“But that’s pretty much what we’ve done. Isn’t it? But rather than a couple of meters…”

“Eighteen light-years. Yes. But still, as far as I can tell, you — I mean the inner you — have emerged unscathed. The teleport mechanism is a purely physical device. It has transported the machinery of your body — and yet your soul appears to have arrived intact as well. All this seems to prove that we are after all no more than machines — no more than the sum of our parts. A whole slew of religious beliefs are going to be challenged by this one simple fact.”

She looked inward. “I’m still Madeleine. I’m still conscious.” But then, she reflected, I would think so, wouldn’t I? Maybe I’m not truly conscious. Maybe I just think I am.

The ship surged as the flower scoop thumped into pockets of richly ionized gas; the universe was, rudely, intruding into philosophy.

“I don’t understand how come the Saddle Point wasn’t out on some remote rim, like in the Solar System.”

“Meacher, the gravitational map of this binary system is complex, a lot more than Sol’s. There is a solar focus point close to each of the system’s points of gravitational equilibrium. We emerged from L4, the stable Lagrange point that precedes the neutron star in its orbit, and that’s where we’ll return.”

“There must be other foci, on the rim of the system. Other Saddle Points that would be a lot safer to use.”

“Sure.” Virtual Frank grinned. “But the Gaijin aren’t human, remember. They seem to have utter confidence in their technology, their shielding, the reliability and control of their ramjets. We have to assume that the Gaijin know what they’re doing…”

Madeleine turned to the consoles. Soon her monitors showed that data was starting to come in on hydrogen alpha emission, ultraviolet line spectra, ultraviolet and X-ray imaging, spectrography of the active regions, zodiacal light, spectroheliographs. Training and practice took over as she went into the routine tasks, and as she worked, some of her awe went away.

“Meacher. Look ahead.”

She reached for the periscope again. She looked at the approaching horizon — over which dawn was breaking. Dawn, on a star?

A great pulse of torn gas fled toward her over the horizon. It subsided in great arcs to the star’s surface, the battered atoms flailing in the star’s magnetic field — and again, a few seconds later — and once again, at deadly regular intervals. And the breaths of plasma grew more violent.

“My God, Frank.”

“Neutron star rise,” Paulis said gently. “Just watch. Watch and learn. And remember, for all of us.”

The neutron star came over the horizon now, stalking disdainfully over its companion’s surface, their separation only a third that between the Earth and its Moon. The primary rose in a yearning tide as the neutron star passed, glowing gas forming a column that snaked up, no more than a few hundred meters across at its neck. Great lumps of glowing material tore free and swirled inward to a central point, a tiny object of such unbearable brightness that the periscope covered it with a patch of protective darkness.

And then the explosion came.

Blackness.

Madeleine flinched. “What the hell—”

The smart periscope had blanked over. The darkness cleared slowly, revealing a cloud of scattered debris through which the neutron star sailed serenely.

“That’s a burster,” Paulis said dryly.

The cloak of matter around the neutron star was building up again.

Flash.

The periscope blacked out once more.

“You’ll get used to it,” Paulis said. “It comes every fourteen seconds, regular as your heartbeat. An X-ray flash bright enough to be seen from Earth.”

She studied her instruments. The data was flowing in, raw, uninterpreted. “Paulis, I’m no double-dome. Tell me what’s happening. The primary’s star-stuff—”

Flash.

“ — fuses when it hits the neutron star, right?”

“Yes. Hydrogen from the primary fuses to helium as it trickles to the neutron star’s surface. In seconds, the helium collects over the crust into a kind of atmosphere, meters thick. But it is a transient atmosphere that abruptly fuses further, into carbon and oxygen and other complex molecules—”

Flash.

“ — blasting away residual hydrogen as it does so.”

The neutron star roared toward the flower-ship, dragging its great hump of star-stuff beneath it, and—

Flash.

— bellowing out its fusion yells. The Gaijin pulled the flower-ship’s petals in farther; the mouth of the ram closed to a tight circle.

A circle that dipped toward the neutron star.

“What are they doing?”

“Try not to be afraid, Meacher.”

The flower-ship swooped closer to the primary; red vacuoles fled beneath Madeleine like crowding fish. She sailed beneath the neutron star, skirting the mouth of fire it tore open in the flesh of the primary.

Her body decided it was time for a fresh bout of space adaptation syndrome.

The waste management station was another shuttle-era veteran, and it took some operating. When she came out, she opened her medical kit and took a scopalomine/Dexidrene.

“Meacher, you’re entitled to a little nausea. You’re earning us a firsthand view of a neutron star. I’m proud of you.”

“Frank, I’ve been flying for twenty years, fifteen professionally. I’ve flown to the edge of space. I have never had a ride like this.”

“Of course not. No human has, in all of history.”

“No human except Reid Malenfant.”

“Yes. Except him.”

She looked inside herself, and found, despite the queasiness, she was hooked.

Maybe it didn’t matter what she would find, back home. Maybe she would choose to go on, like Reid Malenfant. Submit herself to the beautiful blue pain, over and over. And travel on to places like this…

“Listen, Meacher. You’ll have to prepare yourself for the next encounter with the burster. The neutron star’s orbit around its parent is only eleven minutes.” His image seemed to be breaking up.

“Frank, I think I’m losing you.”

“No. I’m just diverting a lot of processing resources right now… I have something odd, from that neutron star flyby. I need some input from you.”

“What kind of input?”

“Interpretation. Look at this.”

He brought up an image of the neutron star, at X-ray wavelengths. He picked out a section of the surface and expanded it. Bands of pixels swept over the image, enhancing and augmenting.

“Do you know anything about neutron stars, Meacher? A neutron star is the by-product of a supernova — the violent, final collapse of a massive star at the end of its life. This specimen is as heavy as the Sun, but only around twenty kilometers wide. The matter in the interior is degenerate, the electron shells of its atoms collapsed by the pressure. The surface gravity is billions of g, although normal matter — bound by atomic bonds — can exist there. The surface is actually rigid, a metallic crust.”

She looked more closely at the image. There were hexagons, faintly visible. “Looks like there are patterns on the surface of the neutron star.”

“Yeah,” Paulis said. “Now look at this.”

He flicked to other wavelengths. The things showed up at optical frequencies, even: patterns of tidy hexagons each a meteror so across. In a series of shots shown in chronological order, she could see how the patterns were actually spreading, their sixfold symmetry growing over the crystalline surface of the neutron star.

Growing, to her unscientific mind, like a virus. Or a bacterial colony.

Life, she thought, and she dissolved into wonder.

“The Gaijin don’t seem surprised,” virtual Frank said.

“Really?”

“Life emerges everywhere it can. So they say… The star creatures’ metabolism is based on atomic bonds. Just as is ours — yours. Their growth paths follow the flux lines of the neutron star’s magnetic field, which is enormously powerful. Evidently the complex heavy atoms deposited by the fusion processes assist and stimulate their development. But eventually—”

“I think I can guess.”

On multiple softscreens, hexagons split and multiplied into patterns of bewildering complexity, ever changing. The images grew more blurred as the star’s rudimentary, and transient, atmosphere built up.

“Think of it, Meacher,” Paulis said. His image was grainy, swarms of blocky pixels crossing his face like insects; nearly all the biopro’s immense processing power was devoted to interpreting the neutron star data. “The very air they move through betrays them; it grows too thick and explodes — wiping the creatures clean from the surface of their world.”

“Well, not quite,” Madeleine said. “They survive somehow, for the next cycle.”

“Yes. I guess the equivalent of spores must be deposited on or below the surface of the star. To survive these global conflagrations, every fourteen seconds, they must be pretty rudimentary, however — probably no more advanced than lichen. I wonder how much these frenetic little creatures might achieve if the fusion cycle was removed from their world…”

She watched the surges of the doomed neutron star lichen, the hypnotic rhythm of disaster on a world like a trap.

She stirred. Did it have to be this way?

“Meacher—” Paulis said.

“Shut up, Frank.”

Maybe she wasn’t going to turn out to be just a passive observer on this mission after all. But she doubted if John Glenn would have approved of the scheme she was planning.

The Gaijin told Paulis, by whatever indirect channels they were operating, that they planned two more days in orbit.

Madeleine called up Paulis. “We have a decision to make,” she said.

“A decision?”

“On the siting of our UN-controlled teleport gateway.”

“Yes. Obviously the recommendation is to place the gateway at L5, the trailing Lagrange stable point—”

“No. Listen, Frank. This system must have a Saddle Point on the line between the neutron star and its parent — somewhere in the middle of that column of hydrogen attracted from the primary.”

“Of course.” He looked at her suspiciously. “There’s a gravitational equilibrium there, the L1 Lagrange point.”

“That’s where I want the gateway.”

He looked thoughtful — or rather his face emptied of expression, and she imagined mips being diverted to the data channel connecting him to the Gaijin. “But L1 is unstable. It would be difficult to maintain the gateway’s position. Anyway, there would be a net flow of hot hydrogen through the gateway, into the transmitter at the Solar System end. We won’t be able to use the gateway for two-way travel.”

“Frank, for Christ’s sake, that’s hardly important. We can’t get out to the Solar System Saddle Points anyhow without the Gaijin hauling us there. Listen — you sent me on this mission to seek advantage. I think I found a way to do that. Trust me.”

He studied her. “Okay.” He went blank again. “The Gaijin want more justification.”

“All right. We’ll be disrupting the flow of hydrogen from the primary to its neutron-star companion. What will be the effect on the neutron star?”

Paulis said slowly, “Without the steady drizzle of fusing hydrogen onto the surface, the helium layer will cease its cycle of growth and explosion. The burster will die.”

“But the lichen life forms will live. Won’t they? No more fusion blowouts every fourteen seconds.”

He thought it over. “You may be right, Meacher. And, free of the periodic extinction pulse, they may advance. My God. What an achievement. It will be as if we’ll have fathered a whole new race… But what’s the benefit to the Gaijin?”

“They say they’ve come to us seeking answers,” she said briskly. “Maybe this is a place they will find some. A new race, new minds.”

There was motion beyond her windows. She looked out, pressing her nose to the cool glass. The Gaijin were swarming over the hull of their flower-ship like metallic beetles, limbs flailing angularly. They were merging, she saw, becoming a gruesome metallic sea that writhed and rippled.

“The Gaijin seem… intrigued,” Paulis said carefully.

She waited while he worked his data stream to the Gaijin.

“They agree, Meacher. I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said.

“Me too, Frank. Me too.”

The Gaijin opened up the flower-ship’s petals, and once more Madeleine swooped around the thin column of star-stuff.

As soon as the UN Saddle Point gateway was established and operational, the result was extraordinary.

The gateway was set at the thinnest point of the column of hot hydrogen torn from the primary. The gateway flared lurid blue, continually teleporting. At least fifty percent of the primary’s hydrogen — according to Paulis — was disappearing into the maw of the teleport gate. It looked as if the column of material had been neatly pruned by some cosmic gardener, capped with an almost flat surface.

“Good,” Madeleine said. “It’s worked… We’re moving again.” She returned to her periscopes.

The ship approached the neutron star. The star’s ruddy surface sparkled softly as residual material fell into its gravity well. Once more the elaborate hexagonal patterns flowed vigorously across the surface of the star — but the lichen seemed, oddly, to pause after a dozen seconds or so, as if expectant of the destruction to come.

But the fusion fire did not erupt, and the creatures surged, as if with relief, to new parts of their world.

A fourteen-second cycle to their growth remained, but that was soon submerged in the exuberant complexity of their existence. Flowing along magnetic flux lines, the lichen quickly transformed their star world; major sections of its surface changed color and texture.

It was stunning to watch.

She felt a surge of excitement. The data she would take back on this would keep the scientists busy for decades. Maybe, she thought, this is how the double-domes feel, at some moment of discovery.

Or an intervening god.

…Then, suddenly, the growth failed.

It started first at the extremes; the lichen colonies began shriveling back to their heart lands. And then the color of the patterns, in a variety of wavelengths, began to fade, and the neat hexagonal structure became chaotic.

The meaning was obvious. Death was spreading over the star.

“Frank. What’s happening?”

“I expected this,” the interface metaphor said.

“You did?”

“Some of my projections predicted it, with varying probability. Meacher, the lichen can’t survive without their fusion cycle. Our intervention from orbit was somewhat crude. Kind of anthropocentric. Maybe the needs of the little creatures down there are not as simple as we imagined. What if the fusion cycle is necessary to their growth and existence, in some way we don’t understand?”

The fusion cycle had delivered layers of complex molecules to the surface. Maybe the crystalline soil down there needed its fusion summer, to wipe it clean and invigorate it, regularly. After all, extinction events on Earth led to increased biodiversity in the communities that derived from their survivors.

And Madeleine had destroyed all that. Guilt stabbed at her stomach.

“Don’t take it hard, Madeleine,” Paulis said.

“Bullshit,” she said. “I’m a meddler.”

“Your impulse was honorable. It was worth a try.” He gave her a virtual smile. “I understand why you did it. Even if the real Frank won’t… I think we’re heading for home, Meacher. We’ll be at the Lagrange point gateway in a couple of minutes. Prepare yourself.”

“Thanks.” Thank God. Get me out of here.

A couple of minutes, and eighteen years into the future…

“And, you know,” Paulis said, “maybe there are deeper questions we haven’t asked here.” That didn’t sound like Frank Paulis, but one of his more reflective companions. A little touch of Dorothy Chaum, perhaps. “The Gaijin could have brought you — the first human passenger, after Malenfant — anywhere. Why here? Why did they choose to show you this? Nothing the Gaijin do is without meaning. They have layers of purpose.”

She thought of that grisly, slow dismantling in Kefallinia, and shuddered.

“Perhaps we are here because this is the truth,” the Paulis composite said. “The truth about the universe.”

“This? This dismal cycle of disaster? Helpless life forms crushed back into the slime, over and over?”

“On some symbolic level, perhaps, this is the truth for us all.”

“I don’t understand, Frank.”

“Maybe it’s better that you don’t.”

The truth? No, she thought. Maybe for these wretched creatures, here on this bizarre star relic. Not for us; not for humans, the Solar System. Even if this is the cosmos’s cruel logic, why do we have to submit to it? Maybe we ought to find a way to fix it.

Maybe Reid Malenfant would know the answer to such questions by now — wherever he was, if he was still alive. She wondered if it would ever be possible to find him.

But none of that mattered now, for electric blue light enveloped her, like fusion summer.

Chapter 10 Travels

And, far from home, here was Malenfant, all alone save for a sky full of Gaijin, orbiting a planet that might have been Earth, circling a star that might have been the Sun.

He peered down at the planet, using the telescopic features of his softscreen, for long hours. It might have been Earth, yes: a little heavier, a little warmer, but nevertheless compellingly familiar, with a jigsaw arrangement of gray-brown continents and blue oceans and streaky white clouds and even ice caps, all of it shining unbearably brightly. Was that textured greenery really forest? Did those equatorial plains breed some analogy of grass? And were those sweeping shadows great herds of herbivores, the buffalo or reindeer of this exotic place?

But, try as he might, he found no sign of intelligent life: no city geometries, no glowing artificial light, not even the thread of smoke or the sprinkling of firelight.

This wasn’t a true copy of Earth. Of course not, how could it be? He knew there was no Africa here, no America, no Australia; these strange alien continents had followed their own long tectonic waltz. But those oceans really were made of liquid water — predominantly anyhow — and the air was mainly a nitrogen-oxygen mix, a bit thicker than Earth’s.

Oxygen was unstable; left to itself it should soon combine with the rocks of the planet. So something had to be injecting oxygen into the atmosphere. Free oxygen was a sure sign of life — life that couldn’t be so terribly dissimilar to his own.

But that atmosphere looked deeper, mistier than Earth’s; the blue of the oceans, the gray of the land, had a greenish tinge. And if he looked through the atmosphere toward the edge of the planet, he could see a pale yellow-green staining — a sickly, uncomfortable color. The green was the mark of chlorine.

He tried to explain to his Gaijin companion, Cassiopeia, what it was that kept him staring down at this new world, long after he had exhausted the analytic possibilities of his eyeball scrutiny. “Look down there.” He pointed, and he imagined interpretative software aligning his finger with the set of his eyes.

IT IS A PENINSULA.

“True…” Pendant from a greater continent, set in a blue equatorial sea and surrounded by blue-white echoes of its outline, echoes that must be some equivalent of a coral reef. “It reminds me of Florida. Which is a region of America—”

I KNOW OF FLORIDA. THIS PENINSULA IS NOT FLORIDA. Over the subjective months they’d been together, Cassiopeia’s English had gotten a lot better, and now she spoke to him using a synthesized human voice relayed over his old shuttle EMU headset.

“But it’s like Florida. At least, enough to make me feel…”

WHAT?

He sighed.

It had taken him forty years to get here from Alpha Centauri — including around six months of subjective time as he had coasted between various inner systems and Saddle Point gateways. System after system, world after world. Six months as he had tried to get to know the Gaijin, and they to know him.

It seemed very important to them that they understood how he saw the universe, what motivated him. As for himself, he knew that understanding was going to be the only way humans were ever going to deal with these strangers from the sky.

But it was hard.

Cassiopeia would never have picked out that peninsula’s chance resemblance to Florida. Even if some mapping routine had done it for her, he supposed, it would have meant nothing, save as an example of convergent processes in geology. The Gaijin sought patterns, of course — it was hard to imagine a science that did not include elements of pattern recognition, of correlation and trend analysis — but they were not distracted by them, like humans.

No doubt this was simply a product of differing evolutionary origins. The Gaijin had evolved in the stately stillness of deep space, where there was, in general, time to think things through; humans had evolved in fast-moving, crowded environments where it paid to be able to gaze into the shadows of a tree, a complex visual environment of dapples and stripes, and pick out the tiger fast.

But the end result was that he simply could not communicate to Cassiopeia why it pleased him to pick out an analog of Florida off the shore of some unnamed continent, on a planet light-years from Earth.

Cassiopeia was still waiting for a reply.

“Never mind,” he said. He opaqued the membrane and began his routine for sleep.

Talking to aliens:

It didn’t help that he didn’t really have any idea who, or what, he was talking to.

He had no idea how complex an individual Gaijin was. Was Cassiopeia equivalent to a car, a bacterium, a person, something more?

And the question might have no meaning, of course. Just because he communicated with a discrete entity he called Cassiopeia, it didn’t mean there had to be anything like a corresponding person behind his projection. Maybe he was talking to a limb, or a hand, or a digit of some greater organism — a superbeing, or some looser Internet of minds.

Still, he had found places to start. His first point of contact had been navigation.

Both he and Cassiopeia were finite, discrete creatures embedded in a wider universe. And that universe split into obvious categories — space, stars, worlds, you, me. It had been straightforward to agree on a set of labels for Sol, Earth, and the nearby stars — even if that wasn’t the custom of the Gaijin. They thought of each star as a point on a dynamic four-dimensional map, defined not by a name but by its orientation compared to some local origin of coordinates. So their label for Sol was something like “Get to Alpha Centauri and hang a left for four light-years”… except that Alpha Centauri, the local center of Gaijin operations, was itself defined by an orientation compared to another, more remote origin of coordinates — and so on, recursively back, until you reached the ultimate origin: the starting point, the home world of the Gaijin.

And this recursive web of directions and labeling was, of course, subject to constant change, as the stars slid through the sky, changing their orientations to each other.

It was a system of thinking that was logical, and obviously useful for a species who had evolved to navigate among the stars — a lot more so than the Earthbound human habit of seeking patterns in the random lamps of the sky, patterns called constellations, that shifted because of perspective if you moved more than a couple of light-years from Earth. But it was a system that was far beyond the capacity of any human mind to absorb.

Another point of contact: You. Me. One. Two. In this universe, it seemed, it was impossible not to learn to count.

Malenfant’s math extended — shakily — as far as differential calculus, the basic tool mathematicians used to model reality. It did appear that Cassiopeia thought of the world in similar terms. Of course, Cassiopeia’s mathematical models were smarter than any human’s. The key to such modeling was to pick out the right abstractions from a complex background: close enough to reality to give meaningful answers, not so detailed they overwhelmed the calculations. For the Gaijin, the boundaries of abstraction and simplification were much farther back than any human’s, her models much richer.

And there were more fundamental differences. Cassiopeia seemed much smarter at solving the equations than Malenfant, or any human. He managed to set out for her the equations of fluid mechanics, one of his specialties at college, and she seemed to understand them qualitatively: She could immediately see how these equations, which in themselves merely described how scraps of flowing water interacted with each other, implied phenomena like turbulence and laminar flow, implications it had taken humans years — using sophisticated mathematical and computational tools — to tease out.

Could Cassiopeia look at the equations of relativity and see an implied universe of stars and planets and black holes? Could she look at the equations of quantum mechanics and see the intricate chemistry of living things?

Of course, that increased smartness must lead to a qualitative jump in understanding. A chimp didn’t think about things more simply than Malenfant did; it couldn’t grasp some of his concepts at all. There were clearly areas where Cassiopeia was simply working above Malenfant’s wretched head.

Cassiopeia had spent time trying to teach him about a phenomenon just a little beyond his own horizon — as chaos theory might have been to an engineer of, say, the 1950s. It was something to do with the emergence of complexity. The Gaijin seemed able to see how complexity, even life, naturally emerged from the simplest of beginnings: not fundamental physical laws, but something even deeper than that — as far as he could make out, the essential mathematical logic that underlay all things. Human scientists had a glimmering of this. His own DNA somehow contained, in its few billion bases, enough information to generate a brain of three trillion connections…

But for the Gaijin this principle went farther. It was like being given a table of prime numbers and being able to deduce atoms and stars and people as a necessary consequence of the existence of the primes. And since prime numbers, of course, existed everywhere, it followed there was life and people, humans and Gaijin, everywhere there could be.

Life sprouting everywhere, like weeds in the cracks of a pavement. It was a remarkable, chilling thought.

“Take me to your home,” he’d said one day.

Cassiopeia’s choice of a human label for her remote home was “Zero-zero-zero-zero,” the great sky map’s origin of coordinates.

I AM THE SUCCESSOR OF A REPLICANT CHAIN THAT EMERGED THERE, she’d said. She was descended from emigrants? Not exactly, because she’d continued. I RETAIN RECORDS OF ZERO-ZERO-ZERO-ZERO. Memories? Did each Gaijin come to awareness with copies of the memories of those who bore her — or constructed her? Were they, then, her memories, or a mere copy? IT IS POSSIBLE TO TRANSLATE TO ZERO-ZERO-ZERO-ZERO. THERE IS NO PURPOSE.

“I’d like to see it.”

THERE ARE RECORDS THAT—

“Your records only show me your world through your eyes. If we’re ever going to understand each other, you have to let me see for myself.”

There was a long hesitation after that.

FINALLY, she’d said then.

“What?”

THERE ARE MANY PLACES TO SEE. MANY WORLDS. BEFORE ZERO-ZERO-ZERO-ZERO.

“I understand. One day…”

ONE DAY.

But not today, Malenfant thought, as he opened his eyes to the light of a foreign Sun. Not today. Today, we are both far from home.

Cassiopeia provided him with an environment suit — a loosely cut coverall of what felt like a high-grade plastic. It had no zippers; he learned to seal it up by passing his thumb along the open seams. He lifted a hoodlike helmet over his head. There was a clear faceplate, a slightly opaque filter near his mouth.

There was no independent air supply, just one layer of fabric. The whole thing jarred with Malenfant’s intuition of the protection he would need to walk on an alien world. But Cassiopeia assured him it would be enough. And besides, the only alternative was his battered shuttle EMU suit, still with him, crammed into a corner of the lander, his only possession, long past its operational lifetime.

“Open the door. Please.”

The lander door dilated away. The world beyond was green and black.

The lander’s cabin floor was almost flush with the ground, and he stepped out, pace by pace, testing his suit. Gravity was a little more than Earth normal, comfortingly familiar, and the air pressure just a little higher than Earth’s sea level.

First impressions:

He was alone in an open forest, like park land. There were objects that were recognizably trees, about the size of Earth trees, and what appeared to be grass under his feet. Above his head a Sun sailed through a sky littered with high wispy cirrus clouds.

He closed his eyes. He could hear the soft hiss of wind over the grass, and a distant piping, for all the world like a bird’s song, and when he breathed in he filled his lungs with cool, crisp air.

It might have been Earth.

But when he opened his eyes, he saw a sky that was a lurid yellow-green. It was like a haze of industrial smog. The vegetation was a very deep green, almost black.

And he could smell chlorine.

His filter removed all but a trace of the chlorine compounds that polluted the atmosphere — including phosgene, toxic stuff humans had once used to slaughter each other. If not for his suit, this friendly looking world would soon kill him.

Chlorine: That was the big difference here. Most of Earth’s chlorine was locked up in the oceans, in the form of a stable chloride ion. This world seemed to have started out as roughly Earthlike. But something, one small detail, had been different: Here, something had pumped all that chlorine into the air.

He walked forward, over grass that crushed softly under his feet.

He reached a narrow valley, a rushing brook. There was a stand of trees nearby. The bed of the little stream was just a soft muddy clay, no sign of any rocks. The water was colorless, clear. He knelt down, stiffly, and dipped his fingers into the water. It was cold, its pressure gentle against his gloved hands.

WARNING. SOLUTION OF HYDROGEN CHLORIDE. HYPOCHLORIC ACID.

He snatched back his fingers. Like a swimming pool, he thought: Chlorine plus water gave a solution of acid and bleach. The weathering of any rocks here must be ferocious; no wonder only clays survived.

He straightened up to inspect a tree. He touched branches, leaves, a trunk, even a blossom. But to his gloved fingers the leaves felt slippery, soapy.

From a hollow in the tree trunk, at about his eye level, a small face peered out: the size and shape of a mouse’s, perhaps, but with a central mouth, three eyes arranged symmetrically around it. The mouth opened, showing flat grinding surfaces, and the little creature hissed, emitting a cloud of greenish gas. Then it ducked back into the hole, out of his sight.

The trunk didn’t feel like wood. He reached up and broke off a twig; it snapped reluctantly. The interior was springy, fibrous. The leaves, the tree trunk, were made of some kind of natural plastic — perhaps a form of polyvinyl chloride, PVC. If he could smell the blossom, it would surely stink like toxic waste.

It was like a grotesque model of a tree, a thing of plastic and industrial waste. And yet the breeze ruffled it convincingly, and sunlight dappled the green-black grass beneath.

In his ear, Cassiopeia, from orbit, began to lecture him about biochemistry. THE LIVING THINGS HERE ARE CONSTRUCTED OF CELLS — ANALOGOUS TO LIVING THINGS ON EARTH, TO YOU. THEIR METABOLISMS ARE NOT TOLERANT OF THE CHLORINE. BUT THEY HAVE EVOLVED SHIELDING AT THE CELLULAR LEVEL…

He interrupted. “There are trees here,” he said. “Grass. Flowers. Animals.” You see biochemistry. I see a flower, he thought.

There was a long silence.

It was the Gaijin way of seeing reality: from the equations of quantum mechanics, working up to a world. But that wasn’t the way Malenfant thought. Humans, it seemed, were better at broad comprehension than the Gaijin, quicker at abstracting simplicity from complexity. This object before Malenfant wasn’t a tree, because trees only grew on Earth. But it helped Malenfant to think in those terms, to seek patterns and map them back to what he knew.

The Gaijin, slowly, were learning to ape his thinking.

YES, came the reply. THERE ARE TREES.

“Cassiopeia. Why did you bring me here, to this chlorine-drenched waste dump?”

TO GATHER MORE DATA, MALENFANT.

Malenfant scowled at the sky.

The Gaijin seemed to be trying to educate him, for purposes of their own. They had shown him worlds, all of them very different, all of them bearing life. All of them scarred, in some way.

The Gaijin saw the universe as some immense computer program, he was coming to believe: an algorithm for generating life and, presumably, mind wherever and whenever it could.

The trouble was, the program had bugs.

He grunted. “All right. Where? How?”

WALK A KILOMETER, TOWARD THE SUN.

Muttering complaints, sipping cool water from a pipe inside his hood to dispel the swimming-pool taste of chlorine, he stalked on.

And, long before the kilometer was covered, he found people.

There was a crowd of them, a hundred or more, gathered around what appeared to be a pit in the ground. They moved in a kind of dance, chains of people weaving in and out to a murmur of noise, soft as a wind blowing.

Most of the dancers appeared to be somewhere near his own height. Few were taller, but several were a lot smaller — children? The elderly, withered by age?

Not humans, of course. But people, yes.

He glanced around, seeking cover. But Cassiopeia reassured him.

THERE IS A PERCEPTUAL DYSFUNCTION, MALENFANT. He translated to himself: They can’t see you.

“Why not?… Oh. Captain Cook.”

COMMUNICATION DYSFUNCTION.

There was a story — probably apocryphal — that on one of the islands visited by Cook, the natives had been unable even to see his great exploratory ships. They had never encountered such large floating artifacts before. It was only when Cook’s crew put out in landing boats that the natives were able to comprehend.

Thus, Malenfant was simply too strange an element in the dancers’ world for them to perceive.

“Never mind. Humans have limits like that too.”

Feeling a little bolder, he stepped forward, looking more closely.

He picked out one of the dancers. She — he decided the sex arbitrarily — stood upright. She had a clearly defined torso and head, sets of upper and lower limbs. But she had three of everything — three arms, three legs — and her limbs articulated back and forth in a complex, graceful way he found unnerving. She didn’t walk, exactly, shifting her weight from foot to stomping foot as he did. Rather, she spun around, whirling, letting one foot after another press lightly on the ground. It was high-speed and difficult to follow, like trying to figure out how a horse ran; but after he’d watched for a few seconds it seemed easy and natural.

Her head, positioned up at the top of her trunk, was about where his was. He saw three eyes, what appeared to be a mouth, other orifices that might be ears, nostrils. She seemed to be naked save for a belt slung over one of her three shoulders, like a sash. He could see tools dangling there: a lump of quartzlike rock that could have been a handheld hammer, what looked like a bow of the natural-plastic wood. Stone Age technology, he thought.

…Of course Stone Age. Most metals would just corrode here. Gold would survive, but try making a workable ax out of that. Even fire would be problematic; all that chlorine would inhibit flame. There could be no ceramics, for instance.

Because of an accident of biochemistry these people were stuck forever in the Stone Age. And since most rock would be corroded away, there wasn’t even much of that.

Maybe these people had a rich culture, an oral tradition, dance. But that was all they could ever have. He watched the woman-thing whirl, with admiration, with pity.

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE PATTERNLESS SOUNDS THEY MAKE?

“Patternless…” Malenfant smiled. “Perceptual incongruence, Cassiopeia. Transform your data. Look at the frequency content, the ratios between the tones… We’ve discussed this before.” The Gaijin analyzed sound digitally, not with analog microphonelike systems like the human ear. And so the patterns they judged as agreeable — valuable, anyhow — were complex numeric constructs, not the harmonies that pleased human ears.

A long silence. IT IS A FORM OF MUSIC, Cassiopeia stated.

“Yes. They’re singing, Cassiopeia. Singing, that’s all.”

Now the dancing reached a climax, the howl of voices more intense. One of the dancers spun out of the group, whirling in a decaying orbit toward that pit around which they all gyrated.

Then, with a fast shimmying movement, she got to her belly and slid gracefully into the hole.

The dancers continued, for thirty seconds, a minute, two, three, four. Malenfant just watched.

At last the potholer returned. Malenfant saw that trio of upper arms come flopping over the rim of the pit. She seemed to be in trouble. Dancers broke away, four or five of them hurrying to haul their partner out of the hole.

She lay on her back, shuddering, obviously distressed. But she held up something to the light. It was long, dark brown, pitted, and heavily corroded. It was a bone — bigger than any human bone, half Malenfant’s height, and with a strange protrusion at one end — but unmistakably a bone even so.

“Cassiopeia — what’s hurting her?”

CHLORINE POISONING. CHLORINE IS A HEAVY GAS. IT POOLS IN LOW PLACES.

“Like that hole in the ground.”

YES.

“And so, when she went down there to retrieve that bone…”

The dancer had been asphyxiated. She was tolerant of chlorine, but couldn’t breathe it.

The potholer passed the bone on to another. Malenfant saw that where her long, flipperlike hand had wrapped around the bone, it had been corroded. And when the dancer took hold of it, the bone surface sizzled and smoked to her touch. Carbonate, burning in the air.

That’s what would happen to my bones here, slowly but surely. That bone can’t have belonged to any creature now extant, here on this chlorine-drenched planet.

SHE SACRIFICED HER LIFE, Cassiopeia said.

“Why? What’s the point?”

Cassiopeia seemed to hesitate. WE WERE HOPING YOU COULD TELL US.

He turned his back on the whirling, singing dancers and trudged back to his lander.

He felt exhausted, depressed.

“This wasn’t always a chlorine dump. Was it, Cassiopeia?”

NO, she replied.

That bone pit was the key. That, and the sparse biosphere.

Once this had been a world very much like Earth, with the chlorine locked in the ocean. Then it had been… seeded. All it had taken was a single strain of chlorine-fixing microbes. The bugs found themselves in a friendly, bland atmosphere, with lots of chloride just floating around in the ocean, waiting to be used. And so it began.

It had happened a long time ago, a hundred million years or more. Time enough for life-forms to adapt. Some of them had evolved defenses against the spreading stain of chlorine. Others had learned to incorporate chlorine into their cells to make themselves unpalatable to anyone wanting to eat them. Some even used the chlorine as a gas attack against predators or prey, like the tree mouse that had spat in his face. And so on. Thus, a chlorine-resistant biosphere had arisen.

But the bone pit contained relics of the original native life, sent to extinction by the chlorine. The relics must have been trapped for megayears under a layer of limestone; but at last the limestone just dissolved, under rain like battery acid, exposing the bones.

The Gaijin believed the seeding of the planet with chlorine fixers had probably been deliberate.

WE HAVE FOUND MANY WAYS TO KILL A WORLD, MALENFANT. THIS IS ONE OF THE MORE SUBTLE.

Subtle and disguised; the chlorine fixers might have evolved naturally, and after such a length of time it would be hard to prove otherwise. But the Gaijin had come across this modus operandi before.

The thought shocked him more deeply than he had thought possible. This world wasn’t natural; it was like a corpse, strangled.

WE UNDERSTAND HOW TO KILL A WORLD, Cassiopeia said. WE EVEN UNDERSTAND WHY.

“Competition for resources?”

BUT WE DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY THAT DANCER KILLED HERSELF.

“It was ritual, Cassiopeia. As far as I could see. Religion, maybe.” The dancers couldn’t possibly understand the story of their world, the meaning of the ancient fossils. Maybe they thought they were the bones of the giants who had created their world.

But this was the most alien thing of all to the Gaijin.

MALENFANT, WHAT IS IT THAT MAKES A SENTIENT BEING SACRIFICE THE POSSIBILITY OF A TRILLION YEARS OF CONSCIOUSNESS FOR AN IDEA?

“Hell, I can’t tell you that.”

BUT YOU DID THE SAME WHEN YOU CAME THROUGH THE SOL GATEWAY. YOU COULD NOT KNOW WHAT LAY ON THE OTHER SIDE. YOU MUST HAVE EXPECTED TO DIE.

“What is this, Anthropology 101? Is this so important to you?”

The answer startled him.

MALENFANT, IT MAY BE THE MOST IMPORTANT THING OF ALL.

The planet was folding over, dwindling into a watery blue dot, achingly familiar. But it was the scene of a huge crime, a biocide on a scale he could barely comprehend — and one committed so impossibly long ago.

“So strange,” he murmured. “Earth, the Solar System, contains nothing like this.”

The Gaijin would not reply to that, and he felt a deep, abiding unease.

But the Solar System was primordial. You could see that was true.

Wasn’t it?

Chapter 11 Anomalies

Carole Lerner drifted out of the air lock.

She was tethered by a series of metal clips to a guideline, along which she pulled herself hand over hand. The line connected her ship to a moonlet. The line seemed flimsy and fragile, strung as it was between spaceship and moonlet, two objects that floated, resting on no support, in empty three-dimensional space.

But it was a space dominated by an immense, dazzling sphere, for Carole Lerner was in orbit around planet Venus.

Before Carole had come here — the first human to visit Venus, Earth’s twin planet — nobody even knew Venus had a moon. Her mother had spent a life studying Venus, and never knew about the moon, probably never even dreamed of being here, like this.

With no sensation of motion, floating in space, she and her ship swept around the planet, moving into its shadow so that it narrowed to a fine-drawn crescent. Close to the terminator, the blurred sweep that divided day from night, she saw shadowy forms: alternating bands of faint light and dark, hazy arcs. And near the equator there seemed to be yellowish spots, a little darker than the background. But these details were nothing to do with any ground features. All of these wisps and ghosts were artifacts of the strange, complex structure of Venus’s great cloud decks — or perhaps they were manufactured by her imagination, as she sought to peer through that thick blanket of air.

Now, at the apex of her looping trajectory, she moved deep into the shadow of the planet, and the crescent narrowed further, becoming a brilliant line drawn against the darkness. As the Sun touched the cloud decks there was a brief, startling moment of sunset, and layers in the clouds showed as overlaid, smoothly curving sheets, fading from white down to yellow-orange. And then a faint, ghostly ring lit up all around the planet: sunlight refracted through the dense air.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she saw the stars coming out one by one, framing that ringed circle of black. But one star, as if a rogue, moved balefully across the equator of that black disc, glowing orange-yellow. It was a Gaijin flower-ship, one of the small fleet that had followed her all the way here from the Moon.

“The cloud tops of Venus,” Nemoto whispered, her voice turned to a dry autumn-leaf rustle by the low-quality radio link. “I envy you, Carole.”

Carole grunted. “Another triumph for man in space.” She waited the long minutes as her words, encoded into laser light, crossed the inner Solar System to Earth’s Moon.

“You are facetious,” Nemoto eventually replied. “It is not appropriate. You know, I grew up close to a railway line, a great transport artery. I lay in my parents’ small apartment and I could hear the horns of the night freight trains. My parents were city dwellers; their lives had been static, unchanging. But the night trains reminded me every night that there were vehicles that could take me far away, to mountains, forest, or sea.

“The Gaijin frighten me. But when I see their great ships sailing across the night, I am stirred by a ghost of the wanderlust I enjoyed, or suffered, as a girl. I envy you your adventure, child…”

Incredible, Carole thought. I’ve traveled a hundred million kilometers with barely a word from that wizened old relic, and now she wants to open up her soul.

She twisted in space and looked back at her ship.

It was a complex collection of parts — a cylinder, bulging tanks, a cone, a giant umbrella shape, a rocky shield — all fixed to an open, loose framework of struts made from lunar aluminum. The shield was made of blown lunar rock: gray, imposing, now heavily scorched and ablated. The shield had protected her on arrival at Venus, when her craft had dived straight into the upper atmosphere, giving up its interplanetary velocity to air friction. The big central cylinder was her hab module, the cramped box within which she had endured the long flight out here. The hab trailed a rocket engine unit — gleaming pipes and tanks surrounding a gaping, charred nozzle — and big soft-walled tanks of hydrogen and oxygen, the fuel that would bring her out of Venusian orbit and back home to Earth’s Moon. A wide, filmy umbrella was positioned on long struts before the complex of components. The umbrella, glistening with jewel-like photovoltaic cells, served as sunshade, solar energy collector, and long-range antenna.

Stuck to the side of the hab module was her lander: a small, squat, silvery cone with a fat, heavy heat shield. The lander was the size and shape of an old Apollo command module. This tiny, complex craft would carry her down through Venus’s clouds to the hidden surface, keep her alive for a few days, and then — after extracting much of its fuel from Venus’s atmosphere — bring her back to orbit once more.

The craft looked clunky, crude, and compared to the grace of Gaijin technology very obviously human. But after such a long journey in its womblike interior, Carole felt an illogical fondness for the ship. After all, the trip hadn’t been easy for it either. The thick meteorite-shield blankets swathed over its surface were yellowed and pocked by tiny impact scars. The paintwork had been yellowed by sunlight and blistered by the burns of reaction-control thrusters. The big umbrella had failed to open properly — one strut had snapped in unfurling — causing the ship to undergo ingenious maneuvers to keep in its limited shade.

Fondness, yes. Before she left the Moon, Carole had failed to name her ship. She’d thought it sentimental, a habit from a past to which she didn’t belong. She regretted it now.

“…No wonder we missed the moon,” Nemoto was saying. “It’s small, very light, and following an orbit that’s even wider and more elliptical than yours, Carole. Retrograde, too. And it’s loosely bound; energetically it’s close to escaping from Venus altogether—”

She turned to face the moonlet. It swam in darkness. It was a rough sphere, just a hundred meters across, its dark and dusty surface pocked by a smattering of craters.

Carole knew she wasn’t in control of this mission, even nominally. But she was the one who was here, looping extravagantly around Venus. “Are you sure this is necessary, Nemoto? I came here for Venus, not for this.”

But Nemoto, of course, had not yet heard her question. “…A captured asteroid, perhaps? That would explain the orbit. But its shape appears too regular. And the cratering is limited. How old? Less than a billion years, more than five hundred million. And there is an anomaly with the density. Therefore… Ah. But what is necessity? You have a fat reserve of fuel, Carole, even now — more than enough to bring you home. And we are here not for pure science, but to investigate anomalies. Look at this thing, Carole. This object is too small, too symmetrical to be natural. And its density is so low it must be hollow.

“Carole, this is an artifact. And it has been here, orbiting Venus, for hundreds of millions of years. That is its significance.”

She held her hands out before the approaching moonlet.

There was no discernible gravity. It was not like jumping down to the surface of a world, but more like drifting toward a dark, dusty wall.

When her gloves impacted, a thin layer of dust compressed under her fingertips. The gentle pressure was sufficient to slow her, and then she found a layer of hard rock beneath. Grains billowed up around her hands, sparkling. Some of them clung to her gloves, immediately streaking their silvery cleanliness, and some drifted away, unrestrained by this odd moonlet’s tenuous gravity.

It was an oddly moving moment. I’ve come a hundred million kilometers, she thought. All that emptiness. And now I’ve arrived. I’m touching this lump of debris. Perhaps all travelers feel like this, she mused.

Time to get to work, Carole.

She took a piton from her belt. She had hastily improvised it from framing bolts on the ship. With a geology hammer intended for Venus, she pounded at the spike. Then she clipped a tether line to the piton.

“It looks like moondust,” she reported to distant Nemoto. She scooped up a dust sample and passed it through a portable lab unit for a quick analysis. Then she held the lab over the bare, exposed rock and let its glinting laser beam vaporize a small patch, to see if the colors of the resulting rock mist might betray its nature.

Then, spike by spike, she began to lay a line from her anchor point, working across the folds and ridges of this battered, tightly curved miniature landscape, toward the pole of the moonlet. There, Nemoto said she had detected what appeared to be a dimple, a crater too deep for its width: it was an anomaly, here on this anomalous moon.

Nemoto, reacting to her first observations and images, began to whisper in her ear, a remote insect. “Lunar regolith, yes. And that rock is very much like lunar highlands material: basically plagioclase feldspar, a calcium-aluminum silicate. Carole, this appears to be a bubble of lunar-type rock — a piece of a larger body, a true Venusian moon, perhaps? — presumably dug out, melted, shaped, thrown into orbit… But why? And why such a wide, looping trajectory?…”

She kept talking, speculating, theorizing. Carole tuned her out. After all, in a few more minutes, she would know.

She had reached the dimple. It was a crater perhaps two meters across — but whereas most of the craters here, gouged out by impacts, were neat, shallow saucers, this one was much deeper than its width — four, five meters perhaps.

Almost cylindrical.

She found her heart hammering as she clambered into this pit of ancient darkness; a superstitious fear engulfed her.

With brisk motions, she fixed a small radio relay box to the lip of the dimple. Then she stretched a thin layer of gas-trapping translucent plastic over the dimple. Of course by doing this she was walling herself up inside this hole in the ground. It was illogical, but she made sure she could punch out through that plastic sheet before she finished fixing it in place.

She saw something move in the sky above. She gasped and stumbled, throwing up a spray of dust.

A flower-ship cruised by, its electromagnetic petals folded, jewel-like Gaijin patrolling its ropy flanks.

She scowled up. “I want company,” she said. “But you don’t count.”

She turned away and let herself drift down to the bottom of the pit.

She landed feetfirst. The floor of the pit felt solid, a layer of rock. But the dust was thicker here, presumably trapped by the pit. When she looked up she saw a circle of stars framed by black, occluded by a little spectral distortion from the plastic.

Nothing happened. If she’d expected this “door” to open on contact, she was disappointed.

But Nemoto wasn’t surprised. “This artifact — if that’s what it is — may predate the first mammals, Carole. You wouldn’t expect complex equipment to keep functioning so long, would you? But there must be a backup mechanism. And I’ll wager that is still working.”

So Carole got to her hands and knees, trying to keep from pushing herself away from the ground, and she scrabbled in the dirt, her gloved hands soon filthy.

She found a dent.

It was maybe half a meter across. There was a bar across the middle of it. The bar was held away from the lower surface, and was fixed by a kind of hinge mechanism at one end.

Once more her heart hammered, and she felt a pulse in her forehead. Up to now, there had been nothing that could have proven, unambiguously, Nemoto’s assertion that the moonlet was an artifact. But there was surely no imaginable natural process by which a moon could grow a lever, complete with hinge.

She wrapped both hands around the lever and pulled.

Nothing happened. The lever felt immovable, as if it was welded tight to the rocky moon — as, of course, it might be, after all this time.

She braced herself with a piton hammered into the “door,” and pushed. Nothing. She twisted the lever clockwise, without success.

Then she twisted it counterclockwise.

The lever turned smoothly. She felt the click of buried, heavy machinery — bolts withdrawing, perhaps. The floor fell away beneath her.

Quickly she let go of the lever. She was left floating, surrounded by dust, suspended over a pit of darkness. Some kind of vapor sparkled out around her.

Making sure her pitons were secure, she slid past walls of rock and through the open door.

Nemoto’s recruitment pitch had been simple. “The flight will make you rich,” she’d promised.

Carole had been skeptical. After all, she was only going as far as Venus, a walk around the block compared to the light-years-long journeys undergone by the handful of interstellar travellers who had followed Reid Malenfant through the great Saddle Point gateways — even if, twenty years after the departure of Madeleine Meacher, the first, none of them had yet returned.

But still, Nemoto turned out to be right. Nemoto’s subtle defiance of the Gaijin’s unstated embargo on Venus had evidently struck a chord, and Carole’s shallow fame had indeed led to lucrative opportunities she hadn’t been ashamed to exploit.

But it wasn’t the money that had persuaded Carole to commit three years of her life to this unlikely jaunt.

“Think of your mother,” Nemoto had whispered, her masklike face twisted in a smile. “You know that I met her once, at a seminar in Washington. Reid Malenfant himself introduced us. She was fascinated by Venus. She would have loved to go there, to a new world.”

Guilt, the great motivator.

But Nemoto was right. Her mother had grown to love Venus, this complex, flawed sister world of Earth. She used to tell her daughter fantastic bedtime tales of how it would be to sink tothe base of those towering acid clouds, to stand on Venus itself, immersed in an ocean of air.

But her mother’s studies had been based on scratchy data returned by a handful of automated probes, sent by human governments in the lost pre-Gaijin days of the last century. When the Gaijin had showed up, all of that had stopped, of course.

Now humans rode Gaijin flower-ships to Mars, Mercury, even the moons of Jupiter. Where the Gaijin granted access, an explosion of data resulted, and human understanding advanced quickly. But the Gaijin were very obviously in control, and that caused a lot of frustration among the scientific community. The scientists wanted to see it all, not just what the Gaijin chose to present.

And there were major gaps in the Gaijin’s gift. Notably, Venus. There hadn’t been a single Gaijin-hosted human visit to Venus — although it was obvious, from telescopic sightings of flower-ship activity, that this was a major observation site for the Gaijin.

Not too many people cared about such things. To spend one’s entire life laboring in some obscure corner of science when it was obvious that the Gaijin already had so much more knowledge was dispiriting. Carole herself hadn’t followed in her mother’s footsteps. She had gone instead into theology, one of the many broadly philosophical boom areas of academic discipline. And her mother had gone to her grave unfulfilled, leaving Carole with a burden of obscure guilt.

The truth was, to Carole, these issues — the decline of science, the obscure activities and ambitions of the Gaijin — were dusty, the concerns of another century, of vanished generations. This was 2081: sixty years after Nemoto’s discovery of the Gaijin. To Carole, as she had grown up, the Gaijin were here; they had always been here, they always would be here. And so she had put aside her guilt, as much as any child can about her mother.

Until Nemoto had come along.

Nemoto: herself a weird historic relic, riven by barely comprehensible obsessions, huddled on the Moon, nursing her fragile body with a suite of ever-more-exotic antiaging technologies. Nemoto continually railed against the complacency of governments and other bodies regarding the Gaijin and their activities. “We have no sense of history,” she would say. “We have outlived our shock at the discovery of the Gaijin. We do not see trends. Perhaps the Gaijin rely on our mayfly life span to wear away our skepticism. But those of us who remember a time before the Gaijin know that this is not right… ”

And Nemoto was worried about Venus.

One thing that was well known about the Gaijin was that their favored theater of operations was out in the dark, among the asteroids or the stately orbits of the giant planets, or in the deeper cold of the comet clouds even farther out. They didn’t appear to relish the Solar System inward of Earth’s orbit, crammed with dust and looping rogue asteroids, drenched by the heat and light of a too-close Sun, a place where the gravity well was so deep that a ship had to expend huge amounts of energy on even the simplest maneuver.

So why were the Gaijin so drawn to Venus?

Nemoto had begun to acquire funding, from a range of shadowy sources, to initiate a variety of projects: all more or less anti-Gaijin — including this one.

And that was why the first human astronaut to Venus was under Nemoto’s control: not attached to a Gaijin flower-ship, but riding in a clunky and crude human-built spacecraft, little advanced from Apollo 13 as far as Carole could tell: a ship that had been fired into space from a great electromagnetic cargo launcher on the Moon.

The Gaijin could have stopped her, Carole supposed. But, though they had shadowed her all the way here, they had shown no inclination to oppose her directly. Perhaps that would come later.

Or perhaps, to the Gaijin, Carole and her fragile ship simply didn’t matter.

She was surrounded by blackness, the only lights the telltales in her helmet and on her chest panel. The aperture above her was a star field framed by the open doorway.

Nemoto, time-delayed, began to speculate about the vapors that had been trapped by the translucent sheet. “A good deal of sulphuric acid,” she said. “Other compounds… some clay particles… a little free oxygen! How strange…”

On her belt Carole carried a couple of miniaturized floods. She lit them now. Elliptical patches of light splashed on the walls of the chamber, which curved around her. She glimpsed an uneven, smoothly textured inner surface, some kind of structure spanning the interior.

She reported to Nemoto. “The moonlet is hollowed out. The chamber is roughly spherical, though the walls are not smooth. This single chamber must take up most of the volume of the moonlet. The walls can’t be much more than a few meters thick anywhere…” She aimed her beams at the center of the cavern. There was a dark mass there, about the size of a small car. It was fixed in place by a series of poles that jutted out radially, like the spokes of a wheel, to the wall of the chamber, fixing themselves to the moonlet’s equator. The spokes looked as if they were made from rock. Perhaps they had just been left in place when the chamber had been carved out.

She described all this without speculating about the purpose of the structures. Then she blipped her thruster pack and drifted to the wall.

The wall looked carved. She saw basins, valleys, little mountains and ridges, all on the scale of meters. It was like flying over a miniaturized landscape at some theme park.

“…The central structure is obviously a power source,” Nemoto was saying. “There is deuterium in there. Fusion, perhaps. A miniature Sun, suspended at the center of this hollow world. And from the topography of that inner surface it seems that the moonlet’s basins and valleys have been carved to take a liquid. Water? A miniature Sun, model rivers and seas — or at least, lakes. Perhaps the moonlet was spun up to provide artificial gravity… This is a bubble world, Carole, designed to support some form of life, independent of the outside universe.”

“But that makes no sense,” Carole replied. “We’re orbiting Venus. There’s a gigantic Sun just the other side of that wall, pumping out all the energy anybody could require. Why would anybody hide away in this… cave?”

But Nemoto, time-delayed, kept talking, of course, oblivious to her questions.

Carole stopped a meter or so short of the wall. She deployed her portable lab, letting its laser shine on the wall.

She stroked the wall’s surface. The texture was nothing like the lunar-surface rock and regolith of the moonlet’s exterior. Instead there seemed to be an underlay of crystalline substances that glinted and sparkled — quartz perhaps. Here and there, clinging to the crystalline substrate, she found a muddy clay. Though the “mud” was dried out in the vacuum, she saw swirls of color, complex compounds mixed in with the basic material. It reminded her of the gloopy mud of a volcanic hot spring.

The first results of her lab’s analysis began to chatter across its surface. Quartz, yes, and corundum — aluminum oxide. And everywhere, especially in those clay traces, she found traces of sulphuric acid.

Nemoto understood immediately.

“…Sulphuric acid. Of course. That is the key. What if these artificial lakes and rivers were once filled with acid? An acid biosphere is not as unlikely as it sounds. Sulphuric acid stays liquid over a temperature range three times that of water. Of course the acids dissolve most organic compounds — have you ever seen a sugar cube dropped in acid? But alkanes — simple straight-chain hydrocarbons — can survive. Or perhaps there is a biochemistry based on silicones, long-chain molecules based on silicon-oxygen pairs… Only a few common minerals can resist an acidic environment: quartz, corundum, a few sulphates. These walls have been weathered. Your mother would have understood… Venus is full of acid, you see. The clouds are filled with floating droplets of it. This is a good place to be, if what you need is acid…”

Carole gazed into the empty lake basins and tried to imagine creatures whose veins ran with acid. But this toy world, Nemoto had said, was hundreds of millions of years old. If any of their descendants survived they must be utterly transformed by time, she thought, as different from those who built this moonlet as I am from my mindless Mesozoic ancestors.

And if we found them — if we ever touched — we would destroy each other.

“…This bubble world is surely not meant to stay here, drifting around Venus, forever. We may presume that this was merely the construction site, Venus a resource mine. The bubble is already on a near-escape orbit; a little more energy and it could have escaped Venus altogether — perhaps even departed the Sun’s gravity field. You see?”

“I think so…”

“This rogue moonlet could travel to the nearer stars in a few centuries, perhaps, with its occupants warmed against the interstellar chill by their miniature interior Sun…”

They had been migrants to the Solar System, born in some remote, acidic sea. Perhaps they had come in a single, ancient moonlet, a single spore landing here as part of a wider migration. They had found raw materials in Venus’s orbit — perhaps a moon or captured asteroids — to be dismantled and worked. They had made more bubble worlds, filled them with oceans of sulphuric acid mined from Venus’s clouds, and sent them on their way — thousands, even millions of moon-ships, the next wave of colonization, continuing the steady diffusion of their kind.

“It’s a neat method,” Nemoto said. “Efficient, reliable. A low-technology way to conquer the stars…”

“Could it have been the Gaijin?” Carole asked.

“…But how convenient,” Nemoto was saying, “that these sulphur-eaters should arrive in the Solar System and find precisely what they needed: a planet like Venus whose clouds they could mine for their acid oceans, a convenient moon to dismantle. And where did the energy come from for all this?… Oh, no, Carole, these weren’t Gaijin. Whatever the secrets of this sulphuric-acid biology, it is nothing like the nature of the Gaijin. And this is all so much older than the Gaijin.”

Not the Gaijin, Carole thought, chilled. An earlier wave of immigrants, hundreds of millions of years in the past. The Gaijin weren’t even the first.

“We can’t know why they stopped before they had completed their project,” Nemoto said softly. “War. Cataclysm. Who knows? Perhaps we will find out on Venus. Perhaps that is what the Gaijin are here to discover.”

My mother’s generation grew up thinking the Solar System was primordial — basically unmodified by intelligence, before we crawled out of the pond. And now, though we had barely started looking, we found this: the ruin of a gigantic colonization and emigration project, ancient long, long before there were humans on Earth.

“You expected to find this,” she said slowly. “Didn’t you, Nemoto?”

“…Of course,” Nemoto said at last. “It was logically inevitable that we would find something like this — not the details, but the essence of it — somewhere in the Solar System. The violation. And the secretive activities of the Gaijin drew me here, to find it.

“One more thing,” Nemoto whispered. “Your data has enabled me to make a better estimate of the artifact’s age. It is eight hundred million years old.” Nemoto laughed softly. “Yes. Of course it is.”

Carole frowned. “I don’t understand. What’s the significance of that?”

“Your mother would have known,” Nemoto said.

Chapter 12 Sister Planet

Four hundred kilometers high, Carole was falling toward Venus. The lander had no windows; the conditions it had to survive were much too ferocious for that. But the inner walls were plastered with softscreens, to show Carole what lay beyond the honeycombed metal that cushioned her. Thus, the capsule was a fragile windowed cage, full of light, and her universe was divided into two: stars above, glowing planet below.

Her descent would be a thing of skips and hops and long glides as she shed her orbital energy. The sensation was so gentle, the panorama so elemental, that it was almost like a virtual simulation back on Earth. But this was no game, no simulation; she was really here, alone in this flimsy capsule, like a stone thrown into the immense air ocean of Venus, a hundred million kilometers from any helping hand.

Still she fell. The cloud decks below her remained featureless, but they were flattening to a perfect plain, like some geometric demonstration. Looking up, she could see a great cone of shining plasma trailing after her lander as it cut into the high air. She imagined seeing herself from space, a fake meteorite shining against the smooth face of Venus.

As her altitude unraveled the air thickened, and the bites of deceleration came hard and heavy, the buffeting more severe. Now the noise began; a thin screaming of tortured air, molecules broken apart by the heat of her descent, and there were flashes of plasma light at her virtual windows, like flashbulb pops. The temperature of the thin air outside rose to Earthlike levels, twenty or thirty centigrade.

But the air was not Earthlike. Sulphuric acid was already congealing around her, tiny droplets of it, acid formed by the action of sunlight on sulphur products and traces of oxygen that leaked up from the pool of air below.

At seventy kilometers she fell into the first clouds.

The stars winked out, and thick yellow mist closed around her. Soon even the Sun was perceptibly dimming, becoming washed out, as if seen through high winter clouds on Earth. Still the bulk of Venus’s air ocean lay beneath her. But she was already in the main cloud deck, twenty kilometers thick, the opaque blanket that had, until the age of space probes, hidden Venus’s surface from human eyes.

The buffeting became still more severe. But her capsule punched its way through this thin, angry air, and soon the battering of the high superstorms ceased.

Her main parachute blossomed open; she was briefly pushed back hard in her seat, and her descent slowed further. There was a rattle as small unmanned probes burst from the skin of her craft and arced away, seeking their own destiny.

The visibility was better than she had expected: perhaps she could see as far as one, even two kilometers. And she could make out layers in the cloud, sheets of stratumlike mist through which she fell, one by one.

Now came a patter against the hull: gentle, almost like hail, just audible under the moaning wind noise. She glimpsed particles slapping against the softscreen window: long crystals, like splinters of quartz. Were they crystals of solid sulphuric acid? Was that possible?

The hail soon disappeared. And, still fifty kilometers high, she dropped out of the cloud layer into clear air.

She looked up at the rigging, giant orange parachutes. The capsule was swaying, very slowly, suspended from the big parachute system. The clouds above were thick and solid, dense, with complex cumulus structures bulging below like misty chandeliers, almost like the clouds of Earth. The Sun was invisible, and the light was deeply tinged with yellow, fading to orange at the blurred horizon, as if she were falling into night. But there was still no sign of land below, only a dense, glowing haze.

With a clatter of explosive bolts her parachutes cut away, rippling like jellyfish, lost. She dropped further, descending into thickening haze. The lower air here was so dense it was more like falling into an ocean: Venus was not a place for parachutes.

The light was dimming, becoming increasingly more red.

Telltales lit up as her capsule’s protective systems came online. The temperature outside was rising ferociously, already far higher than the boiling point of water — though she was still twice as high as Earth’s highest cirrus clouds. The lander’s walls were a honeycomb, strong enough to withstand external pressures that could approach a hundred atmospheres. And the lander contained sinks, stores of chemicals like hydrates of lithium nitrate, which, evaporating, could absorb much of theferocious incoming heat energy. But the real heat dump was a refrigeration laser; every few minutes it fired horizontally, creating temperatures far higher even than those of Venus’s air.

I’m floating in a sea of acid, she thought, in a mobile refrigerator. It all seemed absurd, a system of clunky gadgetry. It was hard to believe the Gaijin would do it this way.

And yet it was all somehow wonderful.

Now there was a fresh pattering against the hull of the ship. More hail? No, rain — immense drops slamming against her virtual walls, streaking and quickly evaporating. This was true acid rain, she supposed, sulphuric acid droplets formed kilometers above. The rain grew ferocious, a sudden storm rattling against her walls, and the drops streaked and ran together, blurring her vision. For a brief moment she felt frightened, adrift in this stormy sky.

But, as quickly as it had begun, the rain tailed off. It was so hot now the rain was evaporating. A little deeper the intense heat would destroy the acid molecules themselves, leaving a mist of sulphur oxides and water.

Abruptly the haze cleared below her. As if she were peering down toward the bed of some orange sea, she made out structure below: looming forms, shadows, what looked like a river valley.

Land.

Suspended from a balloon, she drifted over a continent.

“This is Aphrodite,” Nemoto murmured from the distant Moon. “The size of Africa. Shaped like a scorpion — look at the map, Carole; see the claws in the west, the stinging tail to the east? But this is a scorpion fourteen thousand kilometers long, and stretching nearly halfway around the planet’s equator…”

Carole — in her refrigerated balloon-lifted lander, still very high — was drifting from the west, past the claws of the scorpion. She saw a monstrous plateau: nearly three thousand kilometers across, she learned, its surface some three kilometers above the surrounding plains, to which it descended sharply. But the surface of the plateau was far from smooth. She saw ridges, troughs, and domes, a bewildering variety of features, all crowded within a landscape that was blocky, jumbled, cut by intersecting ridges and gouges.

“The land looks as if it’s been cracked open,” she said. “And then reassembled. Like a parquet floor.”

“…Yes,” Nemoto whispered at last. “This is the oldest landscape on Venus. It shows a history of great heat, of cataclysm. We will see much geological violence here.”

Everywhere she looked the world was murky red, both sky and land, still, windless. The sky above was like an overcast Earth sky, the light a somber red, like a deep sunset — brighter than she had expected, but more Marslike, she thought, than Earthly. The Sun itself was invisible save for an ill-defined glare low on the horizon. The “day” here would last more than a hundred Earth days, a stately combination of Venus’s orbit around the Sun and its slow rotation — the “day” here was longer than Venus’s year, in fact.

Beyond the great plateau, she crossed a highland region that was riven by immense valleys — spectacular, stunning, and yet forever masked by the kilometers of cloud above, hidden away on this blasted planet where no eyes could see it. The easternmost part of Aphrodite was a broad, elongated dome, obviously volcanic, with rifts, domes, lava flows, and great shield volcanoes. But the most spectacular feature was a huge volcanic formation called Maat Mons: the largest volcano on Venus, three hundred kilometers wide and eight kilometers high. It was a twin to Mauna Loa, Earth’s largest volcano, stripped of concealing ocean.

This was a world of volcanism. The vast plains were covered by flood basalts — frozen lakes of lava, like the maria of the Moon — and punctured by thousands of small volcanoes, shield-shaped, built up by repeated outpourings of lava. But there were some shield structures — like the Hawaiian volcanoes, like Maat Mons — that towered five or eight kilometers above the plains, covered in repeated lava flows.

As she drifted farther east, away from Aphrodite and over a smooth basalt lowland, Carole learned to pick out features that had no counterparts on Earth. There were steep-sided, flat-topped domes formed by sticky lava welling up through flaws in the crust. There were volcanoes with their flanks gouged away by huge landslides that left ridges like protruding insect legs. There were domes surrounded by spiderweb patterns of fractures and ridges. There were volcanoes with flows that looked like petals, pushing out across the plains.

And, most spectacular, there were coronae: utterly unearthly, rings of ridges and fractures. Some of these were thousands of kilometers across, giant features each big enough to straddle much of the continental United States. Perhaps they were formed by blobs of upwelling magma that pushed up the crust and then spread out, allowing the center to implode, like a failed cake. To Carole the rings of swollen, distorted, and broken crust looked like the outbreak of some immense chthonic mold from Venus’s deep interior.

There were even rivers here.

Her balloon ship drifted over valleys kilometers wide and thousands of kilometers in length, unlikely Amazons complete with flood plains, deltas, meanders, and bars, here on a world where no liquid water could have flowed for billions of years — if ever. One of these, called Baltis Vallis, was longer than the Nile, and so it was the longest river valley in the Solar System. Perhaps the rivers had been cut by an exotic form of lava — for example, formed by a salty carbon-rich rock called carbonatite — that might have flowed in Venus’s still-hotter past.

Suspended from a balloon, Carole would drift over this naked world for a week while her eyes and the lander’s sensors probed at the strange landscapes below. And then, perhaps, she would land.

She was, despite herself, enchanted. Venus had no water, no life; and yet it was a garden, she saw: a garden of volcanism and sculptured rock. My mother would have understood all this, Carole thought with an echo of her old, lingering guilt. But my mother isn’t here. I’m here.

But Nemoto, coldly, told her to look for patterns. “You are not a tourist. Look beyond the spectacle, Carole. What do you see?”

What Carole saw was wrinkles and craters.

Wrinkles: the ground was covered with ridges and cracks, some of them running hundreds of kilometers, as if the whole planet were an apricot left too long in the Sun.

And craters: they were everywhere, hundreds of them, spread evenly over the whole of the planet’s surface. There were few very large craters — and few very small ones too; hardly any less than five or ten kilometers across.

“…Violence, you see,” Nemoto said. “Global violence. Those wrinkles in the lowlands, like the tesserae cracks of the highlands, are proof that the whole of the lithosphere, the outer crust of this planet, was stretched or compressed — all at the same time. What could do such a thing?

“And as for the craters, there is little wind erosion here, Carole; the air at the bottom of this turgid ocean of gas is very still, and so the craters have remained as fresh as when they were formed. Few are small, for that thick air screens out the smaller impactors, destroying them before they reach the ground. But, conversely, few of the craters are large. Certainly none of them compare with the giant basins of the Moon. But those immense lunar basins date back to the earliest days of the Solar System, when the sky was still full of giant rogue planetesimals. And so we can tell, you see—”

“ — that these craters are all young,” Carole said.

“ — that no crater is much older than eight hundred million years,” Nemoto said, not yet hearing her. “In fact, no feature on the surface of this planet appears older than that. Eight hundred million years: it might seem an immense age to you, but the planets are five times older still. Carole, eight hundred million years ago, something happened to Venus — something that distorted the entire surface, wiping it clean of older features, destroying four billion years of geologic heritage. We can never know what was lost, what traces of continents and seas were brutally melted…”

Eight hundred million years, Carole thought. The same age as the moonlet artifacts. That was the significance Nemoto saw. Her skin prickled.

What had been done to Venus, eight hundred million years ago?

She drifted into the planet’s long night. But there was no relief from the searing warmth, so effectively did the great blanket of air redistribute the heat; at midnight the air was only a few degrees cooler than at noon.

Nemoto’s automated probes, she learned, had found life on Venus, here on this baked, still planet.

Or rather, traces of life.

Like the heat-loving microbes of Earth’s deep ocean vents, these had been creatures that had once swum in a hot, salty ocean of water. Carole learned that human scientists had long expected to find such organisms here: organisms that must now be extinct everywhere, their potential lost forever, destroyed by the planet’s catastrophic heating. Nothing left but microscopic fossils in the oldest rocks…

The sky wound down through degrees of deepening crimson. As her eyes adapted to the dark, she saw that there was still light here — but no starlight could penetrate the immense column of air above. The ground itself was shining: she saw wrinkles and ridges and volcanic cones looming eerily from the dark.

On Venus, even at night, the rock was so hot it glowed.

But this faint illumination did not seem hellish. It was as if she were drifting over a fairyland, a land halfway to unreality; and the inversion of her perspective — darkness above, light below — seemed very strange.

When she reached the dawn terminator, there was a slow and subtle change, of ground glow to sky shine, and the world became normal once more.

Nemoto told her to prepare for landing. Nemoto’s agitated excitement was obvious. She directed Carole to head for the mountains. Through her automated probes, Nemoto had found something, a worthy target for their one-and-only attempt at landing.

Ishtar Terra was a continent the size of Australia, rising high above the global plains. Carole drifted in from the west, over a plateau called Lakshmi Planum: twice the size of Tibet, a place of huge volcanic outflows. The perimeter of the Planum was composed of rough mountain ranges — long, curved ridges with deep troughs between, terrain that reminded her of the Appalachians seen from the air. And its southern perimeter was a huge clifflike feature: three kilometers high, sloping at more than twenty degrees, its great flanks littered by landslides.

To the east the ground began to rise up toward the immense, towering mountain range called Maxwell Montes. She drifted south over one great summit. It was eleven kilometers tall, one and a half times as tall as Everest, and with a giant impact crater punched into its flank. She descended toward the southwestern corner of the massif.

The landing was gentle, flawless.

The first human on Venus. Mom, you should see me now.

Carole stepped forward, picking her way between loose plates of rock. There was no wind noise. But when her metal-booted feet crunched on loose rock, the noise was very sharp and piercing; sound, it seemed, would carry a long way in this dense, springy air.

The world was red.

The sky was tall above her, a vast diffuse dome of dull, oppressive red. The air was thick — it resisted her motions, like a fluid, as if she were immersed in some sea — but it was clear, and still. The rocks were crimson plates. There seemed to be some kind of frost on them; here and there they sparkled, dully. Now, how could that be?

She walked forward. She tried to describe the ground, to be a geologist.

“The plain has many fine features: honeycombs, small ridges, fissures. It is littered with flat plates of rock, one or two meters wide. It is like a flat, rocky desert on Earth.” She knelt to inspect a rock more closely; exoskeletal multipliers prodded her limbs, helping her position her heavy suit. “I can see strata in this rock. It looks like a terrestrial volcanic rock, perhaps a gabbro, but it seems to have been formed by multiple lava flows, over time. The rock is speckled by dark spots. They seem to be erosionpits. They are filled with soil. There is something like frost glittering, a very fine shimmer, clusters of crystals.” She had a lab unit. She pressed it against the surface of a rock, being sure she caught a little of that strange layer of frost.

Cautiously, with a hand encased in an articulated tungsten glove like a claw, she reached out to touch the rock. That frosty layer scraped away; it was clearly very thin. Of course it couldn’t be water-ice frost. What, then?

At her gentle prod, a section of the rock the size of her hand broke away along a plane and crumbled to dust and fragments that sank slowly to the ground.

She straightened up. Experimentally she raised one foot and stepped up onto a rock. It crumbled like a meringue, breaking along cracks that ran deep into the rock’s fabric.

This was chemical weathering. There was no water here to wash away the rocks, no rain to drench them, no frost to crack them, no strong winds to batter them with sand. But the dense, corrosive atmosphere worked its way into the fine structure of the rocks, eating them away from the inside. All over Venus, she thought, the rocks must simply be rotting in place, waiting for a nudge to crumble and fall.

She looked around.

She was standing on a plateau, here in the Maxwell Montes. To her south, no more than a kilometer away, a steep cliff led down to the deeper plains. To the north — beyond the squat lander on its sturdy legs — she could see the great shadowy bulks of the mountains, cones of a deeper crimson painted against the red sky.

She had landed some five kilometers above the mean level — there was no sea level on Venus, with no seas. Here, in the balmy heights of Ishtar Terra, it was some forty degrees cooler than on the great volcanic plains — though, at more than four hundred degrees centigrade, that was little help to her equipment — and the air pressure was only a third of its peak value, on the lowest plains. But this was nearly as deep into Venus’s air ocean as she could go.

Still, her suit was a monstrous shell of tungsten, more like a deep-sea diver’s suit than a space suit. On her back and chest she wore packs laden with consumables and heat exchangers, sufficient to keep her alive for a few hours. But, like her ship, her key piece of refrigeration technology was a set of lasers that periodically dumped her excess heat into the Venusian rock. The suit was ingenious, but hardly comfortable; Venus’s gravity was 90 percent of Earth’s, and the suit was heavy and confining.

She tilted back and looked up into the sky.

She couldn’t see the Sun; the dim, crimson light was uniform, thoroughly scattered, apparently without a source. But the sky was not featureless. She could see through the lower air and the haze to those great cloud decks, all of fifty kilometers above. There were holes in the clouds, patches of brighter sky, making it a great uneven sheet of light. And the patches were moving. The sky was full of giant shifting shapes of light and darkness, slowly forming and dissolving, like fragments of a nightmare. The flow was stately, silent, a sign of huge stratospheric violence far removed from the still, windless pool of air in which she stood.

Astonishing, beautiful. And nobody in all human history had seen this before her.

“I’ve analyzed your frost,” Nemoto said evenly. “It’s tellurium. Almost pure metal. On Venus, tellurium would vaporize at lower altitudes. So it has snowed out here, just as water snows out at the peaks of our own mountains.”

A snow of metal. How remarkable, Carole thought.

“Now,” Nemoto said slyly, “tellurium is rare. It makes up only one-billionth of one percent of our surface rocks, and we’ve no reason to believe the rocks of Venus differ so significantly. But tellurium, for a technological society, is useful stuff. We use it to improve stainless steel, and in electrolysis, and in electronics, and as a catalyst in refining petroleum. How did so much tellurium, such an exotic high-tech material, get deposited on Venus?”

Not by the natives, Carole thought, those wretched long-extinct bacteria. Visitors. Those who came here before us, before the Gaijin, long before. Perhaps they were the acid-breathers who built the moonlets. Perhaps they crashed here, and the tellurium was a relic of their ship: all that remains of them after eight hundred million years — a thin metallic frost on the mountains of Venus.

There was a sudden flash, far above. Many minutes later, she heard what sounded like thunder. Giant electrical storms raged in those high clouds. But there was no rain, of course.

She watched the clouds, entranced.

She walked steadily forward, heading southwest, away from the lander. Soon she was approaching the lip of the plateau. She could see no land beyond; evidently the drop-off was steep.

“Let me tell you what I believe,” Nemoto whispered. “When Venus formed, it was indeed a twin of Earth. I believe Venus rotated quickly, much as Earth does, as Mars does, taking no more than a few Earth days to spin on its axis; why should Venus have been different? I believe Venus was formed with a moon, like Earth’s. And I believe it had oceans, of liquid water. There is no reason why Venus should not have formed with as much water as Earth. There were oceans, and tides…”

With surprising suddenness, Carole came to the edge.

A cliff face fell away before her, marked here and there by the lobed flow of landslides. This great ridge ran for kilometers to either side, all the way to the horizon and beyond. And the slope continued down — on and on, down and down, as if she were looking over the edge of a continental shelf into some deeper ocean — until it merged with a plateau, far below, and then the planet-circling volcanic plain beyond that.

This was the edge of the Maxwell mountains region. This cliff descended six kilometers in just eight kilometers’ distance, an average slope of thirty-five degrees. There was nothing like it on Earth, anywhere.

She had to descend to the level of the Lakshmi Planum, six kilometers below, to study Nemoto’s puzzle. They hadn’t anticipated any surface journey of such length and difficulty; she hadn’t brought a surface vehicle, and the lander had neither the fuel nor the capability to fly her deeper into the ocean of air. And so she had to walk.

Nemoto had said she owed it to the human race to accept the risk, to complete her mission. Carole just thought she owed it to her mother, who would surely not have hesitated.

“Of course Venus is closer to the Sun; even wet, Venus was not an identical twin of Earth. The air was dominated by carbon dioxide. The oceans were hot — perhaps as hot as two hundred degrees — and the atmosphere humid, laden with clouds. But, thanks to the water, plate tectonics operated, and much of the carbon dioxide was kept locked up in the carbonate rocks, which were periodically subducted into the mantle, just as on Earth.

“Venus was a moist greenhouse, where life flourished…”

She found talus slopes, rubble left by crumbled rocks. It would require care, but this type of climb wasn’t so unfamiliar to Carole. She had hiked in places in the Rocky Mountains that were rather like this, places where chemical weathering seemed to dominate, even on Earth. But the depth would push the envelope of her suit’s design. And, of course, there was nobody here to help her up. So she took care not to fall.

After a couple of kilometers she paused for breath. She looked down, across kilometers of steeply sloping rock, to the Planum below.

She thought she could see something new, emerging from the murk: a long dark line, oddly straight, that disappeared here and there among folds in the rock, only to emerge once more farther along. As if somebody had reached down with a straightedge and scoured a deep dark cut into these hot rocks.

There was something beside the line, squat and dark, like a beetle. It seemed to her to be moving along the line. But perhaps that was her imagination.

She continued her careful climb downward.

“…But then the visitors came in their drifting interstellar moonlets,” Nemoto had said. “And they cared nothing for Venus or its life-forms. They just wanted to steal the moon, to propagate their rocky spore. So they stopped Venus spinning.”

At the base of the cliffs she paused for a few minutes, letting her heartbeat subside to something like normal, sipping water.

The black line was a cable. It was maybe two meters thick, featureless and black, and it was held a meter from the ground by crude, sturdy pylons of rock.

“How do you despin a planet?” Nemoto whispered. “We can think of a number of ways. You could bombard it with asteroids, for instance. But I think Venus was turned into a giant Dyson engine. Carole, I have observed cables like this all over the planet, wrapped east to west. They are fragmentary, broken — after all they are eight hundred million years old — but they still exist in stretches hundreds of kilometers long. Once, I would wager, the surface of Venus was wrapped in a cage of cables that followed the lines of latitude, like geographical markings on a schoolroom globe…”

She pressed her lab box against the cable. She even ran her hand along it, cautiously, but could feel nothing through the layers of her suit.

She began to walk alongside the cable. Some of the pylons were missing, others badly eroded. It was remarkable any of this stuff had lasted so long, she thought; it must be strongly resistant to Venus’s corrosive air.

“Electric currents would be passed through the cables,” Nemoto whispered. “The circulating currents would generate an intense magnetic field. This field would be used to couple the planet to its moon — perhaps the moon was dragged within its Roche limit, deliberately broken apart by tides.

“Thus they used the planet’s spin energy to break up its moon.

“They rebuilt the fragments into their habitats, their rocky bubbles. The moonlets would be hurled out of the system, each of them robbing Venus of a little more of its spin. I wonder how long it took — thousands, millions of years? And, as they worked, they waited for Venus to bake itself to death.

“The climate of Venus was destabilized by the spin-down, you see,” Nemoto said. “It got hotter. There must have been a paucity of rain, a terrible drought, at last no rain at all… And finally, the oceans themselves started to evaporate.

“When all the oceans were gone — life must already have been extinguished — the water in the air started to drift to the top of the atmosphere. There, it was broken up by sunlight. The hydrogen escaped to space, and the oxygen and remnant water made sulphuric acid in the clouds.

“And that was what the moonlet builders wanted, you see: the acid. They mined the acid out of the ruined air, perhaps with ships like our profac crawlers.

“It’s an efficient scheme, if you think it over. All you need is a fat, fast-spinning planet with a moon, and you get a source of moonlet ships, a way to launch them, and even a sulphuric acid mine. Venus, despun, was ruined. But they didn’t care. They had what they wanted.

“We are lucky they did not select Earth. Perhaps our Moon was too large, too distant; perhaps the Sun was too far away…”

But they didn’t finish the job, Carole thought. What great catastrophe, eight hundred million years ago, stopped them? Were some of Venus’s great impact craters the wounds left by remnants of that vanished moon falling from the sky, uncontrolled — or even the scars of some disastrous war?

For Venus, Nemoto said, things got worse still. When all its water was lost, plate tectonics halted. The shifting continents seized up, like an engine run out of oil. The planet’s interior heat was trapped, built up — until it was released catastrophically. “Mass volcanism erupted. There were immense lava floods, giant new volcanoes. Much of the surface fractured, crumpled, melted. And the carbon dioxide locked up in the rocks began to pump into the atmosphere, thickening it further…”

Something was moving, directly ahead of her.

It was the beetlelike thing that she had observed from the cliff. And it was working its way along the cable, gouging at it with complex tools she couldn’t make out, scoring it deeply.

It was a gray-black form the size of a small car. It was as tall as she was, its surface featureless, returning glinted highlights of Venus’s complex sky. And it was based on a dodecahedral core.

“Hello,” she said. “You haven’t been here for eight hundred million years.”

“Gaijin technology,” Nemoto whispered when she saw the image. “It is here to scavenge. Carole, this ancient cable is a superconductor, working at Venusian temperatures. Remarkable. Even the Gaijin have nothing like this. And what,” she hissed, “do they intend to do with it? Which of our planets or moons will they wrap up, like a Christmas parcel?”

An alarm chimed softly in Carole’s helmet. She must soon turn back, if she was to complete her long climb back to the lander in safety.

From here she could see the lower plains, the true floor of Venus, the great basalt ocean that covered the planet, still kilometers below her altitude. She longed to go farther, to climb down and explore. But she knew she must not. My mission is over, she realized. Here, at this moment; I have come as far as I can, and must turn back.

She was surprised how disappointed she felt. Earth would seem very confining after this, despite the wealth she expected to claw in from her celebrity. She glanced up at the twisting, pulsing clouds, fifty kilometers up. But no matter how far I travel, she thought, I will always remember this: Venus, where I was first to set foot.

This, and the immense crime I have witnessed here.

“If this happened once, it must have happened again and again,” Nemoto whispered. “A wave of colonists come to a star system like ours. They take what they want, ruinously mining out the resources, trashing what remains. And then they move on… or are somehow stopped. And then, later, when the planets have begun to heal, others follow, and the process begins again. Over and over.

“I predict we will find this everywhere. We can’t assume that anything in the Solar System is truly primordial. We don’t yet know how to look, and the scars will be buried deep in time. But here, it is unmistakable, the mark of their wasteful carelessness…”

Carole stepped carefully behind the blindly toiling Gaijin beetle machine and, peering patiently through the ruddy murk, sought scraps of superconductor.

Chapter 13 The Roads of Empire

Different Suns, a sheaf of worlds: Malenfant drifted among the stars, between flashes of blue teleport light.

It was a strange thought that because the Saddle Point links were so long — in some cases spanning hundreds of light-years, with transit times measured in centuries — there could be whole populations in transit at any moment, stored in Saddle Point transmissions: whole populations existing as frozen patterns of data arrowing between the stars, without thought or feeling, hope or fear.

And he was slowly learning something of the nature of the Saddle Point system itself.

A teleport interstellar transportation system made economic sense — of course, or else it wouldn’t have been built. Saddle Point signals were minimum strength. They seemed to be precisely directed, as if lased, and operated just above the background noise level, worked at frequencies designed to avoid photon quantization noise. And the gateways, of course, were placed at points of gravitational focusing, in order to exploit the billionfold gain available there. He figured, with back-of-the-envelope calculations, that with such savings the cost of information transfer was at least a billion times less than the cost of equivalent physical transfer, by means of ships crawling between the stars.

It was an interstellar transport system designed for creatures like the Gaijin, who relished the cold and dark at the rim of star systems, working at low temperatures and low energies and with virtually no leaked noise. No wonder we had such trouble detecting them, he thought.

But the physics of the system imposed a number of constraints.

Each receiver had to be quantum-entangled with a transmitter. What the builders must have done was to haul receiver gates to the stars by some conventional means, slower-than-light craft like flower-ships. But it was a system with a limited life. Each gate’s stock of entangled states would be depleted every time a teleportation was completed — and so each link could only be used a finite number of times.

Perhaps the builders still existed, and had sustained the motivations that led them to build the gates in the first place, and so were maintaining the gates. If not, the system must be fragmenting, as the key, much-used links ceased to operate. Perhaps the oldest sections had already failed.

It might be that the hubs, the oldest parts of the system, would be inaccessible to humans and Gaijin, the builders isolated, forever unknowable.

He wondered if that was important. It depended on how smart the builders had been, he supposed, how much they understood about what the hell was going on in this cruel universe. He was getting the impression that the Gaijin knew little more than humanity did: that they too were picking their way through this Galaxy of ruins and battle scars, trying to figure out why this kept happening.

Confined for most of his time to the habitats the Gaijin provided, Malenfant was a virtual prisoner. After a time — after years — he knew he was becoming institutionalized, a little stir crazy, too dependent on the small rituals that got him through the day.

He became devoted, obsessively so, to his suit, his shuttle EMU, his one possession. He spent hours repairing it and maintaining it and cleaning it. As much as possible he tried to leave his animated photo of Emma in the space-suit pocket where it had lain for years. He already knew every grain of it, every scrap of motion and sound; he couldn’t bear the thought of wearing it out, of it fading to white blankness; it would be like losing his own existence.

After a time it seemed to him he was getting ill. He sensed he was growing weaker. If he pinched his cheek — or even cut himself — it didn’t seem to hurt the way it should.

It didn’t trouble him, cocooned as he was in the tight confines of his habitats.

He did find out that the Gaijin didn’t suffer such problems.

The very basis of their minds was different. His consciousness was based on quantum-mechanical processes going on in his brain, which was why his whole brain — and his body, his brain’s support system — had to be transported, and was therefore somewhat corrupted by every Saddle Point transition.

Cassiopeia’s “mind” was more like a computer program. It was composed purely of classical information, stuff you could copy and store at will, stuff that didn’t have to be destroyed to be transmitted by the Saddle Points. When she went “through” a gateway, Cassiopeia’s program was simply halted. That way she used up fewer of the Saddle Point link’s stock of entangled states.

He wasn’t enough of a philosopher to say if all this disqualified her from being conscious, from having a soul.

There were other differences.

Periodically he would watch the Gaijin swarming like locusts over the hull of a flower-ship, thousands of them. They would merge, in clattering, glistening sheets, as if melting into each other, and then separate, Gaijin coalescing one by one as if dripping out of a solute.

The purpose of these great dissolved parliaments seemed to be a transfer of information, perhaps the making of decisions. If so it was an efficient system. The Gaijin did not need to talk to each other, as humans did, imperfectly striving to interpret for each other the contents of their minds. They certainly did not need to argue, or persuade; the shared data and interpretations of the merged state were either valid and valuable, or they were not.

But how was it possible to say that this Gaijin, who came out of the cluster, was the same individual as had entered such a merge? Was it meaningful even to pose the question?

To the Gaijin, mind and even identity were fluid, malleable things. To them, identity was something to be copied, broken up, shared, merged; it didn’t matter that the self was lost, it seemed to him, as long as continuity was maintained, so that each of the Gaijin, as currently manifested, could trace their memories back along a complex path to the remote place that had birthed the first of them.

And, likewise, he supposed, they could anticipate an unbounded future, of sentience, if not identity. A cold mechanical immortality.

He was less and less interested in the blizzard of worlds the Gaijin showed him. Even though, as it turned out, everywhere you looked there was life. Life and war and death. He strove to understand what the Gaijin were telling him — what they wanted him to do.

Chapter 14 Dreams of Ancestral Fish

Madeleine Meacher flew into Kourou from Florida.

The plane door slid open, and hot, humid air washed over her. This was East Guiana, a chunk of the northeastern coast of South America. All Madeleine could see, to the horizon, was greenery: an equatorial rain forest; thick, crowding trees; clouds of insects shimmering above mangrove swamps.

Already she felt oppressed by this crowding layer of life, the dense, moist air. In fact she felt a stab of panic at the thought that this big, heavy biosphere was unmanaged. Nobody at the controls. Madeleine guessed she’d spent too long in spacecraft.

Some kind of truck — good grief, it looked like it was running on gasoline — had dragged up a flight of steps to the plane. Madeleine was going to have to walk down herself, she realized. It was the year 2131, and, through the Saddle Points, Madeleine had traveled as far as twenty-seven light-years from Sol. And here, seventy years out of her time, she was walking down airline steps, as if it were 19 31.

Not a good start to my new career, Madeleine thought bleakly.

A man was waiting at the bottom of the steps. He looked about thirty, and he was a head shorter than Madeleine, with crisp black hair and a round face, the skin brown and leathery. He was wearing some kind of toga, white and cool.

She wanted to touch that face, feel its texture.

“Madeleine Meacher?”

“Yes.”

He stuck out his hand. “Ben Roach. I’m on the Triton project here. Welcome to South America’s spaceport.” His accent was complex, multinational, but with an Australian root.

She took his hand. It was broader than hers, the palm pink-pale; his flesh was warm, dry.

They walked toward a beat-up terminal building. There was vegetation here: scrubby, yellowed grass, drooping palms. It was a contrast to the lush blanket she’d glimpsed from the air.

“What happened to the jungle?”

He grinned. “Too many fizzers.” He glanced down, then took her hand again. “Oh. You are hurt.”

There was a deep cut on the index finger; a wound she’d somehow suffered on that creaky old staircase, probably. Madeleine studied the damaged finger, pulling it this way and that as if it were a piece of meat. “It’s my own fault; the plane was so hot I left off my biocomp gloves.” The gloves, like the rest of the bodysuit Madeleine wore, were made of a semisentient mesh of sensors that warned her when she was damaging herself.

“This is the Discontinuity,” Ben said, curious.

“Yeah. Too much teleportation is bad for you.” Eventually, as she played with the finger, she reopened the drying cut.

Ben stared curiously as fresh blood oozed.

Madeleine’s employer had set up an office in the spaceport Technical Center. This housed a run-down mission control center; a press office; a hospitality area; and a dusty, shut-down space museum: tinfoil models of forgotten satellites.

The office itself was cool, light, airy. Too neat. There was rice straw matting on the floor, and scroll paintings on the wall, and flowers. It was all traditional Japanese, though Madeleine could see that the “paintings” were on some kind of softscreen, and so were configurable.

The office had a view of the full-scale Ariane 5 mock-up that stood outside the entrance to the technical center. Sitting on its mobile launch table, the Ariane looked a little like the old American shuttles, with a fat liquid-propelled core booster — called the EPC, for Etage Principal Cryotechnique — flanked by two shorter strap-on solid boosters. The launch table itself was a lot more elegant than the shuttle’s Apollo-era gantries, though; it was a slim, curved tower of concrete and steel, like a piece of modern sculpture, dwarfed by the booster. This mock-up had to be 150 years old, Madeleine figured; its paintwork was eroded away, the old ESA markings barely visible. Mold and creepers clawed at the sides of the rocket — a slow, irreversible vegetable onslaught. The booster was drowned in green, as ancient and meaningless as the ruins of a Mayan temple.

Madeleine’s employer was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, before a small butsudan, a Buddha shelf, under the window. She was a Japanese, a small, wizened woman, her face imploded, crisscrossed by Vallis Marineris grooves. Her remnant of hair was a handful of gray wisps clinging to a liver-spotted scalp. She had been born in 1990. That made her more than 140 years old, close to the record. Nobody knew how she was keeping herself alive.

She was, of course, Nemoto.

Nemoto touched a carved statue. “A Buddha,” she said, “of fused regolith from the Mare Ingenii. Once such an artifact would have seemed very exotic.” She got up stiffly and went to a coffeepot. “You want some? I also have green tea.”

“No. I burn my mouth too easily.”

“That’s a loss.”

“Tell me about it.” An inability to drink hot black coffee was the Discontinuity handicap that Madeleine felt most severely.

She studied Nemoto, this legendary figure from the deep past, and sought awe, even curiosity. She felt only numbness, impatience. “When do you want me to start work?”

Nemoto smiled thinly. “Straight to business, Meacher? As soon as you can. The first launches start in a month.”

Madeleine had been hired to prepare two hundred rookie astronauts for spaceflight.

“Not astronauts,” Nemoto corrected her. “Emigrants.”

“Emigrants to Triton.”

“Yes. Two hundred Aborigines, from the heart of the Australian outback, establishing a new nation on a moon of Neptune. Inspiring thought, don’t you think?”

Or absurd, Madeleine reflected.

“All you have to do is familiarize them with microgravity. We’ve established a hydro training facility here, and so forth. Just stop them throwing up or going crazy before we can get them transferred to the transport. I assigned Ben Roach to shepherd you for your first couple of days. He’s a smart-ass kid, but he has his uses.”

Madeleine tried to focus on what Nemoto was saying, the details of her outlandish scheme. Triton? Why, for God’s sake? Surrounded by strangeness, numbed by the Discontinuity, it was hard to care.

Nemoto eyed Madeleine. “You feel… disoriented. Here we sit: mirror images, relics of the twenty-first century, both stranded in an unanticipated future. The only difference is in how we got here. You by your relativistic hop, skip, and jump across light-years and decades — the scenic route.” She grinned. “And I came the hard way.” Her teeth were black, Madeleine noticed.

“But we’re both damaged by the experience, in our different ways,” Madeleine said.

Nemoto shrugged. “I ended up with all the power.”

“Power over me, anyhow.”

“Meacher, I still need crew for the transport.”

“You’re offering me a flight to Triton?”

“If you’re interested. Your Discontinuity won’t be a serious liability if—”

“Forget it.”

Madeleine stood up. Her left leg buckled and she nearly fell; she had to cling to the desktop. It was as if Madeleine was the old woman. She found she’d been applying too much weight to the leg and the blood supply had been cut off. She hadn’t noticed, of course; and that kind of damage was too subtle for the biocomp suit to pick up.

Nemoto watched her, calculating, without sympathy. “The Triton colony is crucial,” she said. “Strategic.”

This was the Nemoto Madeleine had heard of. “You’re still working for the future of the species, Nemoto.”

“Yes, if you want to know.”

Madeleine’s heart sank. Nemoto would be hard to deal with rationally. People with missions always were.

But only Nemoto would give her a job.

Aside perhaps from Reid Malenfant — and even after all this time nobody knew what had become of him — Madeleine had been the first human to leave the Solar System. Her experiences in the light of other stars had been astonishing.

Her first return to the Solar System had been something of a triumph — although even then she’d been aware of a historical dislocation, as if the world had had a layer of strangeness thrown over it. And she had been shocked by the sudden — to her — deaths of her mother, and of poor Sally Brind, and many others she had known.

At least Frank Paulis’s get-rich-slow compound interest scheme had worked out that first time. And she had earned herself a little fame. She was the first star traveler — aside from Malenfant — and that earned her some profile.

But she hadn’t been sorry to leave again, to escape into the clean blue light of the Saddle Points, replacing the baffling human world with the cold external mysteries of the stars.

Her later returns had been less enjoyable.

The truth was that as the decades peeled away on Earth, and the novelty wore off, nobody much cared about the star travelers — and few were prepared to protect the interests of these historical curiosities. So the last time she came back, Madeleine had returned to find that a devaluation of the UN dollar, the new global currency, had wiped out a lot of the value of her savings. And then had come the banks’ decision to close the swelling accounts of the star travelers, a step that had been backed by intergovernmental agencies up to and including the UN.

Meanwhile no insurance company would touch her, or anyone else who had been through the Saddle Point gateways, after the Discontinuity condition had been diagnosed.

Which was why Madeleine needed money.

Nemoto was attached to no organization. Madeleine couldn’t have defined her role. But her source of power was clear enough: She had stayed alive.

Thanks to longevity treatments, Nemoto, and a handful of privileged others, had gotten so old that they formed a new breed of power-player, their influence coming from contacts, webs of alliances, ancient debts, and favors granted. Nemoto was a gerontocrat, modeling herself on the antique Communist officials who still ran China.

Madeleine wouldn’t have been surprised to find it was Nemoto herself, or the other gerontocrats, who lay behind the whole scam. The closure of the star travelers’ accounts had given Nemoto a good deal of leverage over Madeleine, and those who had followed in her path. And the strategy had put a block on any ambitions the star travelers might have had to use their effective longevity to accrue power back home.

She wondered if the gerontocrats — conservative, selfish, reclusive, obsessive — were responsible for a more general malaise that seemed to her to have afflicted this fast-forwarded world. There had been change — new fashions, gadgetry, terminology — but, it seemed to her, no progress. In science and art she could see no signs of meaningful innovation. The world’s nations evolved, but the various supranational structures had not changed for decades: the political institutions that wielded the power had ossified.

And meanwhile, the world still labored under the old burdens of a fast-changing ecology and resource shortages, and minor wars continued to be an irritant at every fractured joint between peoples.

Nobody was solving these ancient problems. Worse, it seemed to her, nobody was even trying anymore. You could no longer, for example, get reliable statistics on population numbers, or disease occurrences, or poverty. It was as if history had stopped when the Gaijin had arrived.

But it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t have changed a thing. The traveling itself was the thing, the point of it all. The rest was ancient history, even to Madeleine herself.

Ben showed her to her apartment. He had to show her how to open the door. In 2131, God help her, you had to work door locks with foot studs.

The East Guiana Spaceport, built by the Europeans in the 1980s, extended maybe twenty kilometers along the coast of the Atlantic, from Sinnamary to Kourou, which was actually an old fishing village. There were control buildings, booster-integration buildings, solid-booster test stands and launch complexes, all identified by baffling French acronyms — BAF, BIL, BEAP — and connected by roads and rail tracks that looked, from her window, like gashes in the foliage.

Ariane had been nice-looking technology, for its time, 150 years earlier. It had been superseded by new generations of space planes, even before the Gaijin had taken over most of Earth’s ground-to-orbit traffic with their clean, flawless landers. But when the French released political control of East Guiana, the new government decided to refurbish what was left at Kourou.

So East Guiana, one of the smallest and poorest nations on Earth, suddenly had a space program.

Ariane had kept flying even as history moved on, and nations and corporations and alliances had formed and dissolved, leaving new configurations whose very names were baffling to Madeleine. But Ariane remained: an antique, disreputable, dirty, unreliable launcher, used by agencies without the funds to afford something better.

Like Nemoto.

Maybe, Madeleine thought, it wasn’t a surprise that Nemoto, another relic of the first Space Age, had gravitated here.

The residential quarters had been set up in an abandoned solid-propellant factory, a building that dated back to before Madeleine’s birth. The cluster of buildings was still called UPG, for Usine de Propergol de Guyane. It was a jumble of white cubes spilling over a hillside, like a Mediterranean village. It was sparsely set up, but comfortable enough. About four hundred people lived here: the Aboriginal emigrants, and permanent technical and managerial staff to operate the automated facilities. Once, twenty thousand, a fifth of the country’s population, had been housed in Kourou. The feeling of emptiness, of age and abandonment, was startling.

She slept for a few hours. Then she drifted about her apartment, tinkering.

It was startling how often and how much everyday gadgets changed. The toilet, for instance, was just a hole in the ground, and it took her an age to figure out how to make it flush. The shower was just as bad; it took a call to Ben to establish that to set the heat, you had to put your finger in a little test sink and let the thing read your body temperature.

And so on. All stuff everybody else here had grown up with. It was like being in a foreign country, wherever she went, even in her hometown; she’d long grown tired of people not taking her requests for basic information seriously. And every time she came back from another Einsteinian fast-forward it got worse.

Anyhow, a few minutes after stepping out of the shower, her skin was prickling with sweat again.

She felt no discomfort, of course. The Discontinuity left her with numbness where pain or discomfort should sit. Like a fading-down of reality. She toweled herself dry again, trying not to scrape her skin.

Perhaps it should have been expected. Before the reality of Saddle Point teleportation had been demonstrated, there had been those who had doubted whether human minds could ever, even in principle, be downloaded, stored, or transmitted. The way data was stored in a brain was not simple. A human mind appeared to be a process, dynamic, and no static “snapshot,” no matter how sophisticated the technology, could possibly capture its richness. So it was argued.

The fact that the first travelers, including Madeleine, had survived Saddle Point transitions seemed to belie this pessimistic point of view. But perhaps, in the longer term, those doubts had been borne out.

She knew there was talk of treatment for Discontinuity sufferers. Madeleine wasn’t holding her breath: Nobody was putting serious money into the problem. There were only a handful of star travelers, and nobody cared much about them anyhow. And so Madeleine had to wear a constricting biocomp sensor suit that warned her when she’d sat still for too long or when her skin was burned or frozen, and that woke her up in the night to turn her over.

Maybe the Gaijin weren’t affected the same way. Nobody knew.

She stood, naked, at an open window, trying to get cool. It was evening. She looked across kilometers of hilly country, all of it coated by burgeoning life. There was a breeze, lifting loose leaves high enough to cross the balcony. But the breeze served only to push more water-laden air into her face.

The blanket of foliage coating the hills around the launch areas looked etiolated: the leaves yellowed, stunted, the trees sickly and small by comparison with their neighbors farther away. And the leaves at her feet were yellow and black, others holed, as if burned.

She pulled on a loose dress and walked a kilometer to the block containing Ben’s apartment.

She glimpsed Aborigines: her trainees — men, women, and children — passing back and forth in little groups, engaged in their own errands and concerns. They showed no interest in her. They were loose-limbed people, many of them going barefoot, some of the women overweight; they wore loose togas like Ben’s, the cloth worn, dirty, well used. Their faces were round, a paler brown than she had expected, with blunt noses, prominent brows. Many of them wore breathing filters or sunscreen, and their skin was marked by cancer scars.

They were alien to Madeleine, but no more so than most of the people of the year 2131.

Ben welcomed her. He served her a meal: couscous with saffron, chunks of soya, a light local wine.

He told her about his wife. She was called Lena; she was only twenty, a decade younger than Ben. She was in orbit, working on the big emigrant transports Nemoto was assembling. Ben hadn’t seen her for months.

Madeleine felt easy with Ben. He even took care with the words he used. Language drift seemed remarkably rapid; less than a century out of her time, even if she was familiar with a word, she couldn’t always recognize its pronunciation, and she had learned it wasn’t safe to assume she knew its modern usage. But Ben made sure that she understood.

“It’s strange finding Aborigines here,” Madeleine said. “So far from home.”

“Not so strange. After all, East Guiana is another colonial relic. The French wanted to follow the example of the British in Australia, by peopling East Guiana with convicts.” He grinned, his teeth white and young, a contrast in Madeleine’s mind to the ruined mouth of Nemoto. “Anyhow,” he said, “now we can escape on the fizzers.” He mimed a rocket launch with two hands clasped as in prayer. “Whoosh.”

“Ben — why Triton? I know Nemoto has her own objectives. But for you…”

“Nemoto’s offer was the only one we had. We have nowhere else to go. But perhaps we would follow her anyway. Nemoto is marginalized, her ideas ridiculed — most vigorously by friends of the Gaijin. But she is right, on the deepest of levels. We used to think we were alone in a primordial universe. Suddenly we find ourselves in a dangerous, crowded universe littered with ruins. There was fear and deep anger at the discovery of the violation of Venus. It might have been a sister world to Earth — or Earth might have been the victim. With time, the outrage faded, but we remembered — we, a people who have been dispossessed already.”

More leaves blew in from a darkening sky, broken, damaged by rocket exhaust.

Ben told her he came from central Australia, born into a group called the Yolgnu. “When I was a boy my family lived by a riverbank, living in the old way. But the authorities, the white people, came and moved us to a place called Framlingham. Just a row of shacks and tin houses. Then, when I was eight years old, more white men took me away to an orphanage. The men were from the Aboriginal Protection Board. When they thought I was civilized enough, they sent me to foster parents in Melbourne. White people, called Nash. They were rich and kind. You see, it was the policy of the government to solve their Aboriginal problem once and for all, by making me white.”

All of this stunned her, embarrassed her. “You must hate them,” she said.

He smiled. “This was merely a part of their shared history. They were always frightened, first of the Japanese, then of Indonesians and Chinese, flowing down from the north, with their eyes on Australia’s empty spaces, its huge mineral deposits. Now perhaps they fear the Gaijin, come to take their land. And each time they exorcise their fears using us. I do not hate them. I understand them.”

To her surprise, he turned out to hold a doctorate in black-hole physics. But he had been drawn back to Framlingham, as had others of his generation. Slowly they had constructed a dream of a new life. Almost all of the people escaping to Triton were from Framlingham, he said. “It was a wrench to leave the old lands. But we will find new lands, make our own world.”

Ben served her sambuca, an Italian liqueur: a new craze, it seemed. Sambuca was clear, aniseed flavored. Ben floated Brazilian coffee beans in her glass and set it alight. The alcohol burned blue in the fading light, cupped in the open space above the liquid, and the coffee beans hissed and popped. The flames were to release the oils from the beans, Ben said, and infuse the drink with the flavor of the coffee.

He doused the flames and took careful sips from her glass, testing its temperature for her so that Madeleine would not burn her lips. The flavor of the hot liquid was strong, sharp enough to push at the boundary of her Discontinuity.

They sat under the darkling sky, and the stars came out.

Ben pointed out constellations for her, and he traced other features of the celestial sphere for her, the geography of the sky.

There was the celestial equator, an invisible line that was a projection of Earth’s equator on the sky. From here, of course, the equator passed right over their heads. Lights moved along that line, silent, smoothly traversing, like strangely orderly fireflies. They were orbital structures: factories, dwellings, even hotels. Many of them were Chinese, Ben told her; Chinese corporations had built up a close working relationship with the Gaijin. Then he distracted her with another invisible line called the ecliptic. The ecliptic was the equator of the Solar System, the line the planets traced out. It was different from the Earth’s equator, because Earth’s axis was tipped over through twenty-three degrees or so.

…Rather, the ecliptic used to be invisible. Now, Madeleine found, it was marked by a fine row of new stars, medium bright, some glowing white but others a deeper yellow to orange. It was like a row of street lamps.

Those lights were cities, Madeleine learned: the new Gaijin communities, hollowed out of the giant rocks that littered the asteroid belt, burning with fusion light. No human had gotten within an astronomical unit of those new lamps in space.

It was beautiful, chilling, remarkable. The people of this time had grown up with all this. But nevertheless, she thought, the sky is full of cities, and huge incomprehensible ruins. New toilets and telephones she could accept. But even the Solar System had changed while she had been away, and who would have anticipated that?

She felt too hot, dizzy.

She considered making a pass at Ben. It would be comforting.

He seemed receptive.

“What about Lena?”

He smiled. “She is not here. I am not there. We are human beings. We have ties of gurrutu, of kinship, which will forever bind us.”

She took that as assent. She reached out in the dark, and he responded.

They made love in the equatorial heat, a slick of perspiration lubricating their bodies. Ben’s skin was a sculpture of firm planes, and his hands were confident and warm. She felt remote, as if her body were a piece of equipment she had to control and monitor.

Ben sensed this. He was tender, and held her for comfort. He was fascinated by her skin, he said: the skin of a woman tanned by the light of different stars.

She couldn’t feel his touch.

She slept badly. In her dreams Madeleine spun through rings of powder-blue metal, confronted visions of geometric forms. Triangles, dodecahedra, icosahedra. When Madeleine cried out, Ben held her.

At one point she saw that Ben, sleeping, was about to knock over the coffeepot, and still-hot liquid would pour over his chest. She grabbed the spout, taking a few splashes, and pushed it away. She felt nothing, of course. She wiped her hand dry on a tissue and waited for sleep.

When they woke they found that the coffee had burned her hand severely.

Ben treated her. “The absence of pain,” he said, “is evidently a mixed blessing.”

She’d heard this before, and had grown impatient. “Pain is an evolutionary relic. Sure, it serves as an early warning system. But we can replace that, right? Get rid of sharp edges. Soak the world with software implants, like my biocomp, to warn and protect us.”

Ben studied her. “Do you know what the central reticular formation is?” he asked.

“Why don’t you tell me?”

“It’s a small section of the brain. And if you excite this formation — in the brain of a normal human — the perception of pain disappears. This is the locus of the Discontinuity damage. I am talking of qualia: the inner sensations, aspects of consciousness. Your pain, objectively, still exists, in terms of the response of your body; what has been removed is the corresponding quale, your perception of it. Put an end to discomfort, and there is an end to the emotions linked with pain: fear, grief, pleasure.”

“So my inner life is diminished.”

“Yes. Consciousness is not well understood, nor the link between mind and body. Perhaps other qualia, too, are being distorted or destroyed by the Saddle Point transitions.”

But, Madeleine thought, my dreams are of alien artifacts. Perhaps my qualia are not simply being destroyed. Perhaps they are being… replaced. It was a thought that hadn’t struck her before. Resolutely she pushed it away.

“How do you know so much about this?”

“I have ambitions myself to travel to the stars. To see a black hole, before I build my farm on Triton. It is worth studying what would happen to me…

“Madeleine,” he added slowly, “there is something I should tell you. Even though Nemoto has forbidden it.”

“What?”

“The Chinese discovered it first, in their dealings with the Gaijin. Some say it is a Gaijin gift, in fact. Nemoto has worked to suppress knowledge of it. But I—”

“Tell me, damn it.”

“There is a cure for the Discontinuity.”

She was electrified. Terrified.

“You know,” he said, “the remarkable thing is that the reticular formation is in the oldest part of the brain. We share it with our most ancient ancestors. Madeleine, you have returned from the stars, changed. There are those who think we are forging a new breed of humans, out there beyond the Saddle Points. But perhaps we are merely swimming through the dreams of ancestral fish.”

He smiled and held her again.

She stormed into Nemoto’s office.

Nemoto was busy; an Ariane launch was imminent. She took a look at the bandaging swathing Madeleine’s hand. “You ought to be careful.”

“There’s a way to reverse the Discontinuity. Isn’t there?”

“Oh.” Nemoto stood and faced the window, the Ariane mock-up framed there. She held her hands behind her back, and her posture was stiff. “That smart-ass kid. Sit down, Madeleine.”

“Isn’t there?”

“I said sit down.”

Madeleine complied. She had trouble arranging herself on Nemoto’s office furniture.

“Yes, there’s a way,” Nemoto said. “If you’re treated correctly before you go through a gateway, the translation can be used to reverse the Discontinuity damage.”

“Then why are you hiding this?” Madeleine asked. “Send me to a Saddle Point.”

Nemoto looked at Madeleine from her mask of a face. “You’re sure you want this back? The pain, the anguish of being human—”

“Yes.”

Nemoto turned and sat down; she nested her hands on the tabletop, the fingers like intertwined twigs. “You have to understand the situation we face,” she said. “Most of us are sleeping. But some of us believe we’re at war.” She meant the Gaijin, of course, and their great belt cities, their swooping forays through the inner Solar System — and the other migrants who were following, still decades or centuries away but nevertheless on the way, noisily building along the spiral arm. “You must see it — you, when you return from your jaunts to the stars. Everybody’s busy, too busy with the short term, unable to see the trends. Only us, Madeleine; only us, stranded out of time.”

Something connected for Madeleine. “Oh. That’s why you have kept the cure so quiet.”

“Do you see why we must do this, Meacher? We need to explore every option. To have soldiers — warriors — who are free of pain—”

“Free of consciousness itself.”

“Perhaps. If that’s necessary.”

Madeleine felt disgusted, sullied. Discontinuity was, after all, nothing less than the restructuring of her consciousness by Saddle Point transitions. How typical of humanity to turn this remarkable experience into a weapon. How monstrous.

She sat back. “Send me through a Saddle Point.”

“Or?”

“Or I expose what you’ve been doing — concealing a cure for the Discontinuity.”

Nemoto considered. “This is too big an issue to horse-trade with the likes of you. But,” she said, “I will make you an exchange.”

“An exchange?”

“I’ll send you to a Saddle Point. But afterward you go to Triton with the Aborigines. We have to make sure that colony succeeds.”

Madeleine shook her head. “It will take decades for me to complete a round-trip through a gateway.”

Nemoto smiled thinly. “It doesn’t matter. It will take the Yolgnu years to reach Neptune, more years to establish any kind of viable colony. And we’re playing a long game here. Some day the Gaijin will confront us directly. Some of us don’t understand why that hasn’t already happened. We need to be prepared, when it does.”

“And Triton is a part of this scheme?”

Nemoto didn’t answer.

But of course it was, Madeleine thought. Everything is a part of Nemoto’s grand design. Everything, and everyone: my need for money and healing, Ben’s people’s need for refuge — all just levers for Nemoto to press.

“Where?” Nemoto said suddenly.

“Where what?”

“Where do you want to go, on your health cruise?”

“I don’t care. What does it matter?”

“There might be something suitable,” Nemoto said at length. “There is another alien species, here in the Earth-Moon system. Did you know that? They are called the Chaera. Their star system is exotic. It includes a miniature black hole, which… Well.” She eyed Madeleine. “Your friend Ben is a black-hole specialist. Perhaps he will go with you. How amusing.”

Amusing. Another little relativistic death.

There was a rumble of noise. They turned to the window. Kilometers away, beyond the mangrove swamps, Madeleine could see the booster’s slim nose lift above the trees, the first glow of the engines. The light of the solid boosters seemed to spill over the tree line — startlingly bright rocket light glimmering from the flat swamps — as the Ariane rolled on its axis.

“There,” Nemoto said. “You made me miss the launch.”

Chapter 15 Colonists

Six months.

Once Nemoto had given her the date of her Saddle Point mission it was all she could think about. The rest of her life — her work in Kourou and elsewhere, her legal struggles to get back some of the money that had been impounded from her accounts, even her developing, low-key relationship with Ben — all of that faded to a background glow compared to the diamond-bright prospect of encountering another Saddle Point gateway at that specified, slowly approaching date in the future.

She’d met other star travelers who had returned from one or two hops into the sky with the Gaijin. All of them were determined to go on. She imagined a cloud of human travelers journeying deeper and deeper into the strange cosmos, their ties to a blurred, fast-forwarding Earth stretching and loosening.

It wasn’t just the Discontinuity. She didn’t belong here. After all, she couldn’t even work the toilets.

She longed to leave.

The Japanese-built lander touched the Moon, its rockets throwing up a cloud of fast-settling dust. There were various artifacts here, sitting on the surface of the Moon, and Nemoto, the spider at the heart of this operation, was waiting for them, anonymous in a black suit.

Ben and Madeleine suited up carefully. Madeleine made sure Ben followed her lead; she was, after all, the experienced astronaut.

She climbed down a short ladder to the surface. She dropped from step to step in the gentle gravity. She stepped off the last rung onto regolith, which crunched like snow under her weight.

She walked away from the lander.

The colors of the Moon weren’t strong; in fact, the most colorful thing here was their Nishizaki Heavy Industries aluminum-frame lander, which, from a distance, looked like a small, fragile insect, done out in brilliant black, silver, orange, and yellow. The Sea of Tranquillity was close to the Moon’s equator, so Earth was directly above her head, and it was difficult to tip back in her pressure suit to see it. But when Ben goes to live on Triton, she thought, the Sun will be a bright point source. And Earth will be no more than a pale blue point of light, only made visible by blocking out the Sun itself. How strange that will be.

Nemoto was showing Ben the various artifacts she had assembled here. Madeleine saw a set of blocky metal boxes, trailing cables. These were, it turned out, a pair of high-power X-ray lasers. “A small fission bomb is the power source. When the bomb is detonated, a burst of X-ray photons is emitted. The photons travel down long metal rods. This generates an intense beam. In effect, the power of the bomb has been focused…”

These were experimental weapons, it emerged, dating from the late twentieth century. They had been designed as satellite weapons, intended to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles.

“And what have the Gaijin paid us for this obscene old gadgetry?” Madeleine asked.

“That’s not your concern.”

The habitat that would keep them alive was another masterpiece of improvization and low cost, Madeleine thought, like her fondly remembered Friendship-7. It was based on two modules — a Russian-built one called FGB, and the American-built Service Module — scavenged from the old NASA International Space Station. The Service Module had been enhanced with an astrophysics instrument pallet.

Madeleine slipped her gloved hand into Ben’s. “We ought to name our magnificent ship,” she said.

Ben thought it over. “Dreamtime Ancestor.”

“Come meet the Chaera,” Nemoto said.

The last artifact, sitting on the regolith, was a tank, a glass cube. It contained a translucent disc about a meter across, swimming slowly through oxygen-blue fluid.

It was an ET: a Chaera, an inhabitant of the black-hole system that was the destination of this mission. The Chaera had, after the Gaijin, been the second variant of ET to come to the Solar System.

Aside from all the dead ones in the past, of course.

Ben stepped forward. He touched the glass walls of the tank with his gloved hand. The Chaera rippled; it looked something like a stingray. She wondered if it was trying to talk to Ben.

The Chaera had eyes, she saw: four of them spaced evenly around the rim of the stingray shape, dilating lids alternately opening. Humanlike eyes, gazing out at her, eyes on a creature from another star. She shivered with recognition.

Through a hairline crack in the Chaera’s tank, fluid bubbled and boiled into vacuum.

“You need to understand that the nature of this mission is a little different,” Nemoto said. “You are going to a populated system. The Chaera have technology, it seems, but they lack spaceflight. The Gaijin made contact with them and initiated a trading relationship. The Chaera requested specific artifacts, which we’ve been able to supply.” She grunted. “Interesting. The Gaijin actually seem to be learning to run rudimentary trading relationships from us. Before, perhaps they simply appropriated, or killed.”

“Killed?” Ben said. “Your view of the Gaijin is harsh indeed, Nemoto.”

“What are the Gaijin getting from the Chaera in return for this?” Madeleine asked.

“We don’t know. The Chaera spend their days quietly in the service of their God. And their requirement, it seems, is simple. You will help them talk to God.”

“With an X-ray laser?” Ben asked dryly.

“Just focus on the science,” Nemoto said, sounding weary. “Learn about black holes, and about the Gaijin. That’s what you’re being sent for. Don’t worry about the rest.”

The Chaera swam like melting glass, glimmering in Earthlight.

Ben Roach seemed to sense her urgency, her longing for time to pass.

He offered to take her to Australia, to show her places where he’d grown up. “You ought to reconnect a little. No matter how far you travel, you’re still made of Earth atoms: rock and water.”

“Aborigine philosophy?” she asked, a little dismissive.

“If you like. The Earth gave you life, gave you food and language and intelligence, and will take you back when you die. There are stories that humans have already died, out there among the stars. Their atoms can’t return to the Earth. And, conversely, there are Gaijin here.”

“None of the Gaijin have died here.” That was true; the three ambassadors she had encountered on Kefallinia were still there, still functioning decades later. “Perhaps they can’t die.”

“But if they do, then their atoms, not of the Earth, will be absorbed by the Earth’s rocks.”

“Perhaps that is a fair trade,” she said. “We should extend your philosophy. The universe is the greater Earth; the universe births us, takes us back when we die. All of us: humans, Gaijin, everybody.”

“Yes. Besides, there are lessons to learn.”

“Are you trying to educate me, Ben? What is there to see in Australia?”

“Will you come?”

It would eat up time. “Yes,” she said.

From the air Australia looked flat, rust-red, and littered with rippling, continent-spanning sand dunes and shining salt flats, the relics of dead seas. It was eroded, very dry, very ancient; even the sand dunes, she learned, were thirty thousand years old. Human occupancy seemed limited to the coastal strip, and a few scattered settlements in the interior.

They flew into Alice Springs, in the dry heart of the island continent.

As they approached the airport she saw a modern facility: a huge white globe, other installations. In among the structures she saw the characteristic gleaming cones of Gaijin landers. New silvery fencing had been flung out across the desert for kilometers around the central structures.

The extent of the Gaijin holding, here in central Australia, startled her. The days when the Gaijin had been restricted to a heavily guarded compound on a Greek island were long past, it seemed.

Ben grimaced. “This is an old American space-tracking facility called Pine Gap. There used to be a lot of local hostility to it. It was said that even the prime minister of Australia didn’t know what went on in there. And the local Aboriginal communities were outraged when their land was taken away.”

“But now,” she said dryly, “the Americans have gone. We don’t do any space tracking, because we don’t have a space program that requires it anymore.”

“No,” he murmured. “And so they gave Pine Gap to the Gaijin.”

“When?”

He shrugged. “Forty years ago, I think.” Before he was born.

It was the same all over the planet, Madeleine knew. Everywhere they touched the Earth, the Gaijin were moving out: slowly, almost imperceptibly, but it was all one-way. And every year there were more weary human refugees, forced to flee their homes.

Few people protested strongly, because few saw the trends. Nemoto is right, she thought. The Gaijin are exploiting our short lives. Nemoto is right to try to survive, to stretch out her life, to see what is being done to us.

But Ben surprised her. Being here, seeing this, he lost his detachment; he became unhappy, angry. “The Gaijin care even less about our feelings than the Europeans. But we were here before the Gaijin, long before the Europeans. They are all Gaijin to us. Some of us are fleeing. But maybe one day they will all have gone, all the foreigners, and we will slip off our manufactured clothes and walk into the desert once more. What do you think?”

The plane landed heavily, in a cloud of billowing red dust.

Alice Springs — Ben called it the Alice — turned out to be a dull, scrubby town, a grid of baking-hot streets. Its main strip was called Todd Street, a dreary stretch of asphalt that dated back to the days of horses and hitching posts. Now it might have been transplanted from small-town America, a jumble of bars, soda fountains, and souvenir stores.

Madeleine studied the store windows desultorily. There were Australian mementoes — stuffed kangaroos and wallabies, animated T-shirts and books and data discs — but there was also, to cash in on the nearness of the Pine Gap reserve, a range of Gaijin souvenirs, models of landers and flower-ships, and animated spiderlike Gaijin toys that clacked eerily back and forth across the display front. But there were few tourists now, it seemed; that industry, already dwindling before Madeleine’s first Saddle Point jaunt, was now all but vanished.

They stayed in an anonymous hotel a little way away from Todd Street. There was an ugly old eucalyptus outside, pushing its way through the asphalt. The tree had small, tough-looking dark green leaves, and it was shedding its bark in great ash-gray strips that dangled from its trunk. “A sacred monument,” Ben said gently. “It’s on the Caterpillar Dreaming.” She didn’t know what that meant. SmartDrive cars wrenched their way around the tree’s stubborn, ancient presence; once, in the days when people drove cars, it must have been a traffic hazard.

A couple of children ambled by — slim, lithe, a deep black, plastered with sunblock. They stared at Ben and Madeleine as they stared at the tree. Ben seemed oddly uncomfortable under their scrutiny.

It’s because he’s a foreigner too, she thought. He’s been away too long, like me. This place isn’t his anymore, not quite. She found that saddening, but oddly comforting. Always somebody worse off than yourself.

They rested for a night.

At her window the Moon was bright. Fat bugs swarmed around the hotel’s lamps, sparking, sizzling. It was so hot it was hard to sleep. She longed for the simple, controllable enclosure of a spacecraft.

The next morning they prepared to see the country — to go out bush, as Ben called it. Ben wore desert boots, a loose singlet, a yellow hard hat and tight green shorts he called “stubbies.” Meacher wore a loose poncho and a broad reflective hat and liberal layers of sunblock on her face and hands. After all, she wouldn’t even be able to tell when this ferocious Sun burned her.

They had rented a car, a chunky four-wheel-drive with immense broad tires, already stained deep red with dust. Ben loaded up some food — tucker, he called it, his accent deepening as he spoke to the locals — and a lot of water, far more than she imagined they would need, in big chilled clear-walled tanks called Eskis, after Eskimo. In fact the car wouldn’t allow itself to be started unless its internal sensors told it there was plenty of water on board.

The road was a straight black strip of tarmac — probably smart-concrete, she thought, self-repairing, designed to last centuries without maintenance. It was empty of traffic, save for themselves.

At first she glimpsed fences, windmills with cattle clustered around them, even a few camels.

They passed an Aboriginal settlement surrounded by a link fence. It was a place of tin-roof shacks and a few central buildings that were just brown airless boxes: a clinic, a church perhaps. Children seemed to be running everywhere, limbs flashing. Rubbish blew across the ground, where bits of glass sparkled.

They didn’t stop; Ben barely glanced aside. Madeleine was shocked by the squalor.

Soon they moved beyond human habitation, and the ground was crimson and treeless. Nothing moved but the wispy shadows of high clouds. It was too arid here to farm or even graze.

“A harsh place,” she said unnecessarily.

“You bet,” Ben said, his eyes masked by mirrored glasses. “And getting harsher. It’s becoming depopulated, in fact. But it was enough for us. We touched the land lightly, I suppose.”

It was true. After tens of millennia of trial and error and carefully accumulated lore, the Aborigines had learned to survive here, in a land starved of nutrient and water. But there was no room for excess: There had been no fixed social structure, no prophets or chiefs, no leisured classes, and their myths were dreams of migration. And, before the coming of the Europeans, the weak, infirm, and elderly had been dealt with harshly.

In a land the size of the continental United States, there had been only three hundred thousand of them. But the Aborigines had survived, where it might seem impossible.

As the ground began to rise, Ben stopped the car and got out. Madeleine emerged into hot, skin-sucking dust, flat dense light, stillness.

She found herself walking over a plateau of sand hills and crumbled, weathered orange-red rock, red as Mars, she thought, broken by deep dry gulches. But there was grass here, tufts of it, yellow and spiky; even trees and bushes, such as low, spiky-leaved mulgas. Some of the bushes had been recently burned, and green shoots prickled the blackened stumps. To her eyes, there was the look of park land about these widely separated trees and scattered grass; but this land had been shaped by aridity and fire, not western aesthetics.

Ben seemed exhilarated to be walking, stretching his legs, thumbs hooked in the straps of a backpack. “Australia is a place for creatures who walk,” he said. “That’s what we humans are adapted for. Look at your body some time. Every detail of it, from your long legs to your upright spine, is built for long, long walks through unforgiving lands, of desert and scrub. Australia is the kind of land we’ve been evolved for.”

“So we’ve been evolved to be refugees,” Madeleine said sourly.

“If you like. Looking at the crowd that seems to be on the way along the spiral arm, maybe that’s a good thing. What do you think?”

Walking, he said, was the basis of the Dreamtime, the Aboriginal Genesis.

“In the beginning there was only the clay. And the Ancestors created themselves from the clay — thousands of them, one for each totemic species…” Each totemic Ancestor traveled the country, leaving a trail of words and musical notes along the lines of his footprints. And these tracks served as ways of communication between the most far-flung tribes.

Madeleine had heard of this. “The song lines.”

“We call them something like ‘the Footprints of the Ancestors.’ And the system of knowledge and law is called the Tjukurpa… But, yes. The whole country is like a musical score. There is hardly a rock or a creek that has been left unsung. My ‘clan’ isn’t my tribe, but all the people of my Dreaming, whether on this side of the continent or the other; my ‘land’ isn’t some fixed patch of ground, but a trade route, a means of communication.

“The main song lines seem to enter Australia from the north or northwest, perhaps from across the Torres Strait, and then weave their way southwards across the continent. Perhaps they represent the routes of the first Australians of all, when they ventured over the narrow Ice Age strait from Asia. That would make the lines remnants of trails that stretch much farther back, over a hundred thousand years, across Asia and back to Africa.”

“From Africa,” she said, “to Triton.”

“Where the land is unsung. Yes.”

They climbed a little farther, through clumps of the wiry yellow-white grass, which was called spinifex. She reached out to touch a clump, feeling nothing; Ben snatched her hand back. He turned it over. She saw spines sticking out of her palm.

Patiently he plucked out the spines. “Everything here has spines. Everything is trying to survive, to hold onto its hoard of water. Just remember that… Look. ”

There was a crackle of noise. A female kangaroo, with a cluster of adolescents, had broken cover from a stand of bushes.

The kangaroos looked oddly like giant mice, clumsy but powerful, with rodentlike faces and thick fur. Their haunches were white against the red of the dirt. When the big female moved, she used a swiveling gait Madeleine had never seen before, using her tail and forelegs as props while levering herself forward on her great lower legs. There was a cub in her pouch — no, Ben said it was called a joey — a small head that protruded, curious, and even browsed on the spinifex as the mother moved.

The creatures, seen close up, seemed extraordinarily alien to Madeleine: a piece of different biological engineering, as if she had wandered into some alternate world. The Chaera, she thought, are hardly less exotic.

Something startled the kangaroos. They leapt away with great efficient bounds.

Madeleine grinned. “My first kangaroo.”

“You don’t understand,” Ben said tightly. “I think that was a procoptodon: a giant kangaroo. They grow as high as three meters…”

Madeleine knew nothing about kangaroos. “And that’s unusual?”

“Madeleine, procoptodon has been extinct for ten thousand years. That’s what makes it unusual.”

They walked on, farther from the car, sipping water from flasks.

“It’s the Gaijin,” he said. “Of course it’s the Gaijin. They are restoring megafauna that have long been extinct here. There have been sightings of wanabe, a snake a meter in diameter and seven long, a flightless bird twice the mass of an emu called genyornis… The Gaijin seem to be tinkering with the genetic structure of existing species, exploring these archaic, lost forms.”

They came upon an area of bare rock that was littered with bones. The bones were broken up and scattered, and had apparently been gnawed. Few of the fragments were large enough for her to recognize — was this an eye socket, that a piece of jaw?

“We think they use parsimony analysis,” Ben was saying. “DNA erodes with time. But you can deconstruct evolution if you have access to the evolutionary products. You track backward to find the common gene from which all the products descended; the principle is to seek the smallest number of branch points from which the present family could have evolved. When you have the structure you can recreate the ancient gene by splicing synthesized sequences into modern genes. You see?” He stopped, panting lightly. “And, Madeleine, here’s a thought. Australia has been an island, save for intervals of bridging during the Ice Ages, for a hundred million years. The genetic divergence between modern humans is widest between Australian natives and the rest of the population.”

“So if you wanted to think about picking apart the human genome—”

“ — here would be a good place to start.”

She thought of the Gaijin she had seen undoing itself, decades back, in Kefallinia. “Perhaps they are dismantling us. Taking apart the biosphere, to see how it works.”

“Perhaps. You know, humans always believed that when the aliens arrived, they would bring wisdom from the stars. Instead they seem to have arrived with nothing but questions. Now, they have grown dissatisfied with our answers, and are seeking their own… Of course, it might help if they told us what it is they are looking for. But we are starting to guess.”

“We are?”

They walked on, slowly, conserving their energy.

He eyed her. “For somebody who has traveled so far, you sometimes seem to understand little. Let me tell you another theory. Can you see any cactus, here in our desert?”

No, as it happened. In fact, now she thought about it, there were none of the desert plants she was accustomed to from the States.

Ben told her now that this was because of Australia’s long history. Once it had been part of a giant super-Africa continent called Gondwanaland. When Australia had split off and sailed away, it had carried a freight of rain-forest plants and animals that had responded to the growing aridity by evolving into the forms she saw here.

He rubbed his fingers in the red dirt. “The continents are rafts of granite that ride on currents of magma in the mantle. We think the continents merge and break up, moving this way and that, under the influence of changes in those currents.”

“All right.”

“But we don’t know what causes those magma currents to change. We used to think it must be some dynamic internal to the Earth.”

“But now—”

“Now we aren’t so sure.” He smiled thinly. “Imagine a huge war. A bombardment from space. Imagine a major strike, an asteroid or comet, hitting the ocean. It would punch through the water like a puddle, not even noticing it was there, and then crack the ocean floor.” His lips pursed. “Think of a scum on water. Now throw in a few rocks. Imagine the islands of dirt shattering, convulsing, whirling around and uniting again. That was what it was like. If it happened, it shaped the whole destiny of life on Earth. The impact structures wouldn’t be easy to spot, because the ocean floor gets dragged under the continents and melted. After two hundred million years, the ocean floor is wiped clean. Nevertheless there are techniques…”

A huge war. Rocks hurled from the sky, battering the Earth. Tens of millions of years ago. The hot dusty land seemed to swivel around her.

It sounded like an insane conspiracy theory. To attribute the evolution of Venus to the activities of aliens was one thing. But this… Could it possibly be true that everything she had seen today — the animals, the ancient land — was all shaped by intelligence, by careless war?

“Is this why you brought me to Australia? To tell me this?”

He grinned. “On Earth, as it is in Heaven, Madeleine. We seem to find it easy to discuss the remaking of remote rocky worlds by waves of invaders — even Venus, our twin. But why should Earth have been spared? ”

“And this is why you follow Nemoto?”

“If the Gaijin understand this — that we live in a universe of such dreadful violence — don’t you think they should, at the very least, tell us?…” Ben found what looked like a piece of thigh bone. “I’m not an expert,” he said. “But I think this was a diprotodon. A wombatlike creature the size of a rhino.”

“Another Gaijin experiment.”

“Yes.” He seemed angry again, in his controlled, internalized way. “Who knows how it died? From hunger, perhaps, or thirst, or just simple sunburn. These are archaic forms; this isn’t the ecology they evolved in.”

“And so they die.”

“And so they die.”

They walked on, and found more bones of animals that should have been dead for ten thousand years — huge, failed experiments, bleached in the unrelenting Sun.

The Saddle Point gateway was a simple hoop of some powder-blue material, facing the Sun, perhaps thirty meters across. Madeleine thought it was classically beautiful. Elegant, perfect.

As the flower-ship approached, Madeleine’s fear grew. Ben told her Dreamtime stories, and she clung to him. “Tell me…”

There was no deceleration. At the last minute the flower-ship folded up its electromagnetic petals, and the silvery ropes coiled back against the ship’s flanks, turning it into a spear that lanced through the disc of darkness.

Blue light bathed Madeleine’s face. The light increased in intensity until it blinded them.

With every transition, there is a single instant of pain, unbearable, agonizing.

…But this time, for Madeleine, the pain didn’t go away.

Ben held her as the cool light of different Suns broke over the flower-ship, as she wept.

Chapter 16 Icosahedral God

The Saddle Point for the Chaera’s home system turned out to be within the accretion disc of the black hole itself. Ben and Madeleine clung to the windows as smoky light washed over the scuffed metal and plastic surfaces of the habitat.

The accretion disc swirled below the flower-ship, like scum on the surface of a huge milk churn. The black hole was massive for its type, Madeleine learned — meters across. Matter from the accretion disc tumbled into the hole continually; X rays sizzled into space.

The flower-ship passed through the accretion disc. The view was astonishing.

The disc foreshortened. They fell into shadows a million kilometers long.

A crimson band swept upward past the flower-ship. Madeleine caught a glimpse of detail, a sea of gritty rubble. The disc collapsed to a grainy streak across the stars; pea-sized pellets spanged off Ancestor ’s hull plates. Then the ship soared below the plane of the disc.

A brilliant star gleamed beneath the ceiling of rubble. This was a stable G2 star, like the Sun, some five astronomical units away — about as far as Jupiter was from Sol. The black hole was orbiting that star, a wizened, spitting planet.

Soon, the monitors mounted on the Ancestor ’s science platform started to collect data on hydrogen alpha emission, ultraviolet line spectra, ultraviolet and X-ray imaging, spectrography of the active regions. Ben took charge now, and training and practice took over as the two of them went into the routine tasks of studying the hole and its disc.

Nemoto had hooked up to the Chaera’s tank a powerful bioprocessor, a little cubical unit that would enable the humans to communicate, to some extent, with the Chaera and with their Gaijin hosts. When they booted it up, a small screen displayed the biopro’s human-interface design metaphor. It was a blocky, badly synched, two-dimensional virtual representation of Nemoto’s leathery face.

“The vanity of megalomaniacs,” Madeleine murmured. “It’s a pattern.”

Ben didn’t understand. The Nemoto virtual grinned.

Ben and Madeleine hovered before a window into the Chaera’s tank.

If Madeleine had encountered this creature in some deep-sea aquarium — and given she was no biologist — she mightn’t have thought it outlandishly strange. After all it had those remarkable eyes.

The eyes were, of course, a stunning example of convergent evolution. On Earth, eyes conveyed such a powerful evolutionary advantage that they had been developed independently perhaps forty times — while wings seemed to have been invented only three or four times, and the wheel not at all. Although details differed — the eyes of fish, insects, and people were very different — nevertheless all eyes showed a commonality of design, for they were evolved for the same purpose, and were constrained by physical law.

You might have expected ETs to show up with eyes.

The Chaera communicated by movement, their rippling surfaces sending low-frequency acoustic signals through the fluid in which they swam. In the tank, lasers scanned the Chaera’s surface constantly, picking up the movements and affording translations.

Interspecies translation was actually getting easier, after the first experience with the Gaijin. A kind of meta-language had been evolved, an interface that served as a translation buffer between ET “languages” and every human tongue. The meta-language was founded on concepts — space, time, number — that had to be common to any sentient species embedded in three-dimensional space and subject to physical law, and it had verbal, mathematical, and diagrammatic components; to Madeleine’s lay understanding it seemed to be a fusion of Latin and Lincos.

Madeleine felt an odd kinship with the spinning, curious creature, a creature that might have come from Earth, much more sympathetic than any Gaijin. And if we have found you so quickly, perhaps we will find less strangeness out there than we expect.

“What is it saying?” Ben asked.

Virtual Nemoto translated. “The Chaera saw the disc unfolding. ‘What a spectacle. I am the envy of generations…’ ”

Mini black holes, Madeleine learned, were typically the mass of Jupiter. Too small to have been formed by processes of stellar collapse, they were created a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, baked in the fireball at the birth of the universe.

Mini black holes, then, seemed to be well understood. The oddity here was to find such a hole in a neat circular orbit around this Sun-like star.

“And the real surprise,” virtual Nemoto said, “was the discovery, by the Gaijin, of life, infesting the accretion disc of a mini black hole. The Chaera. It seems that this black hole is God for the Chaera.”

“They worship a black hole?” Madeleine asked.

“Evidently,” Nemoto said impatiently. “If the translation programs are working. If it’s possible to correlate concepts like ‘God’ and ‘worship’ across species barriers.”

Ben murmured wordlessly. Madeleine looked over his shoulder.

In the central glare of the accretion disc, there was something surrounding the black hole, embedding it.

The black hole was set into a netlike structure that started just outside the Schwarzschild radius and extended kilometers. The structure was a regular solid of twenty triangular faces.

“It’s an icosahedron,” Ben said. “My God, it is so obviously artificial. The largest possible Platonic solid. Triumphantly three-dimensional.”

Madeleine couldn’t make out any framework within the icosahedron, or any reinforcement for its edges; it was a structure of sheets of almost transparent film, each triangle hundreds of meters wide. The glow of the flower-ship’s hungry ramscoop shone and sparkled from the multiple facets.

“It must be mighty strong to maintain its structure against the hole’s gravity, the tides,” Ben said. “It seems to be directing the flow of matter from the accretion disc into the event horizon…”

It was a jewel-box setting for a black hole. A comparative veteran of interstellar exploration, Madeleine felt stunned.

The Chaera thrashed in its tank.

“Time to pay the fare,” Nemoto said. “Are we ready to speak to God?”

Madeleine turned to Ben. “We didn’t know about this. Maybe we should think about what we’re doing here.”

He shrugged. “Nemoto is right. It is not our mission.” He began the operations they’d rehearsed.

Reluctantly, Madeleine worked a console to unship the first of the old X-ray lasers; the monitors showed it unfolding from its mount like a shabby flower.

The self-directed laser dove into the heart of the system, heading for its closest approach to the hole.

“Three, two, one,” Ben murmured.

There was a flash of light, pure white, that shone through the Service Module’s ports.

Various instruments showed surges of particles and electromagnetic radiation. The laser’s fission-bomb power source had worked. The shielding of Ancestor seemed adequate.

The X-ray beam washed over the surface of “God.” The net structure stirred, like a sleeping snake.

The Chaera quivered.

Ben was watching the false-color images. “Madeleine. Look.”

The surface of “God” was alive with motion; the icosahedral netting was bunching itself around a single, brooding point, like skin crinkling around an eye.

“I can give you a rough translation from the Chaera,” Nemoto said. “ ‘She heard us.’ ”

Madeleine asked, “ ‘She’?”

“God, of course. ‘If I have succeeded… then I will be the most honored of my race. Fame, wealth, my choice of mates — ’ ”

Madeleine laughed sourly. “And, of course, religious fulfillment.”

Ben monitored a surge of X-ray photons and high-energy particles coming from the hole — and the core at the center of the crinkled net exploded. A pillar of radiation punched through the accretion disc like a fist.

The Chaera wobbled around its tank.

“ ‘God is shouting,’ ” Nemoto said. She peered out of her biopro monitor tank, her wizened virtual face creased with doubt.

The beam blinked out, leaving a trail of churning junk.

The flower-ship entered a long, powered orbit that would take it, for a time, away from the black hole and in toward the primary star and its inner system. Madeleine and Ben watched the black hole and its enigmatic artifact recede to a toylike glimmer.

The Chaera inhabited the accretion disc’s larger fragments.

In the Ancestor ’s recorded images, Chaera were everywhere, spinning like frisbees over the surface of their worldlets, or whipping through the accretion mush to a neighboring fragment, or basking like lizards, their undersides turned up to the black hole.

The beam from “God” had left a track of glowing debris through the accretion disc, like flesh scorched by hot iron. The track ended in a knot of larger fragments.

In the optical imager, jellyfish bodies drifted like soot flakes.

“Let me get this straight,” Madeleine said. “The Chaera have evolved to feed off the X-radiation from the black hole… from ‘God.’ Is that right?”

“Evolved or adapted. So it seems,” Nemoto said dryly. “ ‘God provides us in all things.’ ”

“So the Chaera try to… shout… to ‘God,’ ” Ben said. “Some of them pray. Some of them build great artifacts to sparkle at Her. Like worshiping the Sun, praying for dawn. Basically they’re trying to stimulate X-radiation bursts. All the Gaijin have done is to sell them a more effective communication mechanism.”

“A better prayer wheel,” Madeleine murmured. “But what are the Gaijin interested in here? The black-hole artifact?”

“Possibly,” Nemoto said. “Or perhaps the Chaera’s religion. The Gaijin seem unhealthily obsessed with such illogical belief systems.”

“But,” Madeleine said, “that X-ray laser delivers orders of magnitude more energy into the artifact than anything the Chaera could manage. It looks as if the energy of the pulse they get in return is magnified in proportion. Perhaps the Chaera don’t understand what they’re dealing with, here.”

Nemoto translated. “ ‘God’s holy shout shatters worlds.’ ”

The main star was very Sunlike. Madeleine, filled with complex doubts about her mission, pressed her hand to the window, trying to feel its warmth, hungering for simple physical pleasure.

There was just one planet here. It was a little larger than the Earth, and it followed a neat circular path through the star’s habitable zone, the region within which an Earthlike planet could orbit.

But they could see, even from a distance, that this was no Earth. It was silent on all wavelengths. And it gleamed, almost as bright as a star itself; it must have cloud decks like Venus.

On a sleep break, Ben and Madeleine, clinging to each other, floated before the nearest thing they had to a picture window. Madeleine peered around, seeking constellations she might recognize, even so far from home, and she wondered if she could find Sol.

“Something’s wrong,” Ben whispered.

“There always is.”

“I’m serious.” He let his fingers trace out a line across the black sky. “What do you see?”

With the Sun eclipsed by the shadow of the FGB module, she gazed out at the subtle light. There was that bright planet, andthe dim red disc of rubble surrounding the Chaera black hole, from here just visible as more than a point source of light.

“There’s a glow around the star itself, covering the orbit of that single planet,” Ben said. “Can you see?” It was a diffuse shine, Madeleine saw, cloudy, ragged-edged. Ben continued. “That’s an oddity in itself. But—”

Then she got it. “Oh. No zodiacal light.”

The zodiacal light, in the Solar System, was a faint glow along the plane of the ecliptic. Sometimes it was visible from Earth. It was sunlight, scattered by dust that orbited the Sun in the plane of the planets. Most of the dust was in or near the asteroid belt, created by asteroid collisions. And in the modern Solar System, of course, the zodiacal light was enhanced by the glow of Gaijin colonies.

“So if there’s no zodiacal light—”

“There are no asteroids here,” Ben said.

“Nemoto. What happened to the asteroids?”

“You already know, I think,” virtual Nemoto hissed.

Ben nodded. “They were mined out. Probably long ago. This place is old, Madeleine.”

The electromagnetic petals of the flower-ship sparkled hungrily as it chewed through the rich gas pocket at the heart of the system, and the shadows cast by the Sun — now nearby, full and fat, brimming with light — turned like clock hands on the ship’s complex surface. But that diffuse gas cloud was now dense enough that it dimmed the farther stars.

Data slid silently into the FGB module.

“It’s like a fragment of a GMC — a giant molecular cloud,” Ben said. “Mostly hydrogen, some dust. It’s thick — comparatively. A hundred thousand molecules per cubic centimeter… The Sun was born out of such a cloud, Madeleine.”

“But the heat of the Sun dispersed the remnants of our cloud… didn’t it? So why hasn’t the same thing happened here?”

“Or,” virtual Nemoto said sourly, “maybe the question should be: How come the gas cloud got put back around this star? ”

They flew around the back of the Sun. Despite elaborate shielding, light seemed to fill every crevice of the FGB module. Madeleine was relieved when they started to pull away and head for the cool of the outer system, and that single mysterious planet.

It took a day to get there.

They came at the planet with the Sun behind them, so it showed a nearly full disc. It glared, brilliant white, just a solid mass of cloud from pole to pole, blinding and featureless. And it was surrounded by a pearly glow of interstellar hydrogen, like an immense, misshapen outer atmosphere.

The flower-ship’s petals opened wide, the lasers working vigorously, and it decelerated smoothly into orbit.

They could see nothing of the surface. Their instruments revealed a world that was indeed like Venus: an atmosphere of carbon dioxide, kilometers thick, scarcely any water.

There was, of course, no life of any kind.

The Chaera spun in its tank, volunteering nothing.

Ben was troubled. “There’s no reason for a Venus to form this far from the Sun. This world should be temperate. An Earth.”

“But,” Nemoto hissed, “think what this world has that Earth doesn’t share.”

“The gas cloud,” Madeleine said.

Ben nodded. “All that interstellar hydrogen. Madeleine, we’re so far from the Sun now, and the gas is so thick, that the hydrogen is neutral — not ionized by sunlight.”

“And so—”

“And so the planet down there has no defense against the gas; its magnetic field could only keep it out if it was charged. Hydrogen has been raining down from the sky, into the upper air.”

“Once there, it will mix with any oxygen present,” Nemoto said. “Hydrogen plus oxygen gives—”

“Water,” Madeleine said.

“Lots of it,” Ben told her. “It must have rained like hell, for a million years. The atmosphere was drained of oxygen, and filled up with water vapor. A greenhouse effect took off—”

“All that from a wisp of gas?”

“That wisp of gas was a planet killer,” Nemoto whispered.

“But why would anyone kill a planet?”

“It is the logic of growth,” Nemoto said. “This has all the characteristics of an old system, Meacher. Caught behind a wave of colonization — all its usable resources dug out and exploited…”

Madeleine frowned. “I don’t believe it. It would take a hell of a long time to eat up a star system.”

“How long do you think?”

“I don’t know. Millions of years, perhaps.”

Nemoto grunted. “Listen to me. The growth rate of the human population on Earth, historically, was two percent a year. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? But it’s compound interest, remember. At that rate your population doubles every thirty-five years, an increase by tenfold every century or so. Of course after the twentieth century our growth rates collapsed; we ran out of resources.”

“Ah,” Ben said. “What if we’d kept on growing?”

“How many people could Earth hold?” Nemoto whispered. “Ten, twenty billion? Meacher, the whole of the inner Solar System out to Mars could supply only enough water for maybe fifty billion people. It might have taken us a century to reach those numbers. Of course there is much more water in the asteroids and the outer system than in Earth’s oceans, perhaps enough to support ten thousand trillion human beings.”

“A huge number.”

“But not infinite — and only six tenfold jumps away from ten billion.”

“Just six or seven centuries,” Ben said.

“And then what?” Nemoto whispered. “Suppose we start colonizing, like the Gaijin. Earth is suddenly the center of a growing sphere of colonization whose volume must keep increasing at two percent a year, to keep up with the population growth. And that means that the leading edge, the colonizing wave, has to sweep on faster and faster, eating up worlds and stars and moving on to the next, because of the pressure from behind…”

Ben was doing sums in his head. “That leading edge would have to be moving at light speed within a few centuries, no more.”

“Imagine how it would be,” Nemoto said grimly, “to inhabit a world in the path of such a wave. The exploitation would be rapid, ruthless, merciless, burning up worlds and stars like the front of a forest fire, leaving only ruins and lifelessness. And then, as resources are exhausted throughout the light-speed cage, the crash comes, inevitably. Remember Venus. Remember Polynesia.”

“Polynesia?”

“The nearest analog in our own history to interstellar colonization,” Ben said. “The Polynesians spread out among their Pacific islands for over a thousand years, across three thousand kilometers. But by about A.D. 1000 their colonization wave front had reached as far as it could go, and they had inhabited every scrap of land. Isolated, each island surrounded by others already full of people, they had nowhere to go.

“On Easter Island they destroyed the native ecosystem in a few generations, let the soil erode away, cut down the forests. In the end they didn’t even have enough wood to build more canoes. Then they went to war over whatever was left. By the time the Europeans arrived the Polynesians had just about wiped themselves out.”

“Think about it, Meacher,” Nemoto said. “The light-speed cage. Imagine this system fully populated, a long way behind the local colonization wave front, and surrounded by systems just as heavily populated — and armed — as they were. And they were running out of resources. There surely were a lot more space dwellers than planet dwellers, but they’d already used up the asteroids and the comets. So the space dwellers turned on the planet. The inhabitants were choked, drowned, baked.”

“I don’t believe it,” Madeleine said. “Any intelligent society would figure out the dangers long before breeding itself to extinction.”

“The Polynesians didn’t,” Ben said dryly.

The petals of the flower-ship opened once more, and they receded from the corpselike planet into the calm of the outer darkness.

It was time to talk to the icosahedral God again. The second X-ray punch laser was launched.

After studying the records of the last encounter, Ben had learned how the configuration of the icosahedral artifact anticipated the direction of the resulting beam. Now Madeleine watched the core squint into focus. The killer beam would again lance through the accretion disc — and, this time, right into one of the largest of the Chaera worldlets.

Millions of Chaera were going to die. Madeleine could see them, infesting their accretion disc, swarming and living and loving.

In its tank, their Chaera passenger drifted like a Dali watch.

“Nemoto,” Madeleine said, “we can’t go ahead with the second firing.”

“But they understand the consequences,” virtual Nemoto said blandly. “The Chaera have disturbed the artifact a few times in the past, with their mirrors and smoke signals. Every time it’s killed some of them. But they need the X-ray nourishment… Meacher,” she warned, “don’t meddle as you did at the burster. If you meddle, the Gaijin may not allow human passengers on future missions. And we won’t learn about systems like this. We’ll have no information; we won’t be able to plan… Besides, the laser is already deployed. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

“It is the Chaera’s choice, Madeleine,” Ben said gently. “Their culture. It seems they’re prepared to die to attain what they believe is perfection.”

Nemoto quoted the Chaera. “It knows we’re arguing here. ‘Where there are prophecies, they will cease. Where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.’ ”

“Who’s the philosopher?” Madeleine asked sourly. “Some great Chaera mind of the past?”

Ben smiled. “Actually, it was quoting Saint Paul.”

Nemoto looked startled, as Madeleine felt.

“But there remain mysteries,” Ben said. “The Chaera look too primitive to have constructed that artifact. After all, it manipulates a black hole’s gravity well. Perhaps their ancestors built this thing. Or some previous wave of colonists, who passed through this system.”

“You aren’t thinking it through,” virtual Nemoto whispered. “The Chaera have eyes filled with salty water. They must have evolved on a world with oceans. They can’t have evolved here.”

“Then,” Madeleine snapped, “why are they here?”

“Because they had no place else to go,” Nemoto said. “They fled here — even modified themselves, perhaps. They huddled around an artifact left by an earlier wave of colonization. They knew that nobody would follow them to such a dangerous, unstable slum area as this.”

“They are refugees.”

“Yes. As, perhaps, we will become in the future.”

“Refugees from what?”

“From the resource wars,” Nemoto said. “From the hydrogen suffocation of their world. Like Polynesia.”

The core artifact trembled.

And Nemoto kept talking, talking. “This universe of ours is a place of limits, of cruel equations. The Galaxy must be full of light-speed cages like this, at most a few hundred light-years wide, traps for their exponentially growing populations. And then, after the ripped-up worlds have lain fallow, after recovery through the slow processes of geology and biology, it all begins again, a cycle of slash and burn, slash and burn… This is our future, Meacher: our future and our past. It is after all a peculiar kind of equilibrium: the contact, the ruinous exploitation, the crash, the multiple extinctions — over and over. And it is happening again, to us. The Gaijin are already eating their way through our asteroid belt. Now do you see what I’m fighting against?”

Madeleine remembered the burster, the slaughter of the star lichen fourteen times a second. She remembered Venus and Australia, the evidence of ancient wars even in the Solar System — the relics of a previous, long-burned-out colonization bubble.

Must it be like this?

Something in her rebelled. To hell with theories. The Chaera were real, and millions of them were about to die.

And there was — she realized, thinking quickly — something she could do about it.

“Oh, damn it… Ben. Help me. Go down to the FGB module. Get everything out of there you think we have to save.”

For long seconds, Ben thought it over. Then he nodded. “I’ll trust your instincts, Madeleine.”

“Good,” she said. “Now I have a little figuring to do.” She rushed to the instrument consoles.

Ben gathered their research materials: the biological and medical samples they’d taken from their bodies, data cassettes and diskettes, film cartridges, notebooks, results of the astrophysical experiments they had run in the neighborhood of the black hole. There was little personal gear in here, as their sleeping compartments were in the Service Module. He pulled everything together in a spare sleeping bag, and hauled it all up into the Service Module.

Madeleine glanced down for the last time through the FGB module’s picture window, at smoky accretion-disc light. The flower-ship skimmed past the flank of “God”; the netting structure swarmed around the pulsing core.

The Chaera thrashed in its tank.

Ben pulled down the heavy hatch between the modules — it hadn’t been closed since the flower-ship had swept them up from the surface of Earth’s Moon — and dogged it tight.

Madeleine was running a hasty computer program. “Remember the drill for a pressure-hull breach?” she called.

“Of course. But—”

“Three, two, one.”

There was a clatter of pyrotechnic bolts, an abrupt jolt.

“I just severed the FGB,” she said. “The explosive decompression should fire it in the right direction. I hope. I didn’t have time to check my figures, or verify my aim—”

Bits of radiation spat out like javelins as the core began to open.

“What have you done, Meacher?” Nemoto thundered.

She saw the FGB module for one last instant, its battered, patched-up form silhouetted against the gigantic cheek of “God.” In its way it was a magnificent sight, she thought: a stubby twentieth-century human artifact orbiting a black hole, fifty-four light-years from Earth.

And then the core opened.

The FGB Module got the X-ray pulse right in the rear end. Droplets of metal splashed across space… But the massive Russian construction lasted, long enough to shield the Chaera worldlets.

Just as Madeleine had intended.

The core closed; the surface of the net smoothed over. The slowly cooling stump of the FGB module drifted around the curve of the hole. Madeleine saluted it silently.

“The journey back is going to be cramped,” Ben said dryly.

The Saddle Point gateway hung before them, anonymous, eternal, indistinguishable from its copies in the Solar System, visible only by the reflected light of the accretion disc.

“You saved a world, Madeleine,” Ben said.

“But nobody asked you to,” virtual Nemoto said, her voice tinny. “You’re a meddler. Sentimental. You always were. The Chaera are still protesting. ‘Why did you hide God from us?’…”

Ben shrugged. “God is still there. I think all Madeleine has done is provide the Chaera with a little more time to consider how much perfection they really want to achieve.”

“Meacher, you’re such a fool,” Nemoto said.

Perhaps she was. But she knew that what she was learning — the dismal, stupid secret of the universe — would not leave her. And she wondered what she would find, when she reached home this time.

The blue glow of transition flooded over them, and there was an instant of searing, welcoming pain.

Chapter 17 Lessons

World after world after world.

He saw worlds something like Earth, but with oceans of ammonia or sulphuric acid or hydrocarbons, airs of neon or nitrogen or carbon monoxide. All of them alive, of course, one way or another.

But such relatively Earthlike planets turned out to be the exception.

He was shown a giant world closely orbiting a star called 70 Virginis. This world was a cloudy ball six times the mass of Jupiter. The Gaijin believed there were creatures living in those clouds: immense, whale-like beings feeding off the organics created in the air by the central star’s radiation. But colonists had visited here, long ago. At one pole of the planet there was what appeared to be an immense mining installation, perhaps there to extract organics or some other valuable volatile like helium-3. The installation was desolate, apparently scarred by battle.

Close to a star called Upsilon Andromedae, forty-nine light-years from Earth, he found a planet with Jupiter’s mass orbiting closer than Mercury to its Sun. It had been stripped of its cloud decks by the Sun’s heat, leaving an immense rocky ball with canyons deep enough to swallow Earth’s Moon. Malenfant saw creatures crawling through those deep shadows, immense beetlelike beings. They were protected from the Sun’s heat by tough carapaces and had legs like tree trunks strong enough to lift them against the ferocious gravity. Perhaps they fed off volatiles trapped in the eternal shadows, or seeping from the planet’s deep interior. Here the battles seemed to have been fought out over the higher ground; Malenfant saw a plain littered with the wreckage of starships.

Not far from the star Procyon there was a nomadic world, a world without a Sun, hurled by some random gravitational accident away from its parent star. It was in utter darkness, of course: a black ball swimming alone through space. But it was a big planet with a hydrogen-rich atmosphere; it warmed itself with the dwindling heat of the radioactive elements in its core, with volcanoes and earthquakes and tectonic shifts. Thus, under a lightless sky, there were oceans of liquid water — and in their depths life swarmed, feeding off minerals from the deeper hot rocks, not unlike the deep-sea animals that clustered around volcanic vents in Earth’s seas. Here, though, life was doomed, for the world’s core was inexorably cooling as the heat of its formation was lost.

But even this lonely planet had been subject to destructive exploitation by colonists; there were signs, Malenfant learned, of giant strip-mine gouges in the ocean floors, huge machines now abandoned, perhaps deliberately wrecked.

Everywhere, he had learned, life had emerged. But every world, every system, had been overrun by waves of colonization, followed by collapse or destructive wars — not once, but many times. Everywhere the sky was full of engineering, of ruins.

And the bad news continued. The universe itself could prove a deadly place. He was taken through a region a hundred light years-wide where world after world was dead, land and oceans littered with the diverse remains of separately evolved life.

There had been a gamma-ray burster explosion here, the Gaijin told him: the collision of two neutron stars, causing a three-dimensional shower of high-energy electromagnetic radiation and heavy particles that had wiped clean the worlds for light-years around. It had been a random cosmic accident that had cared nothing for culture and ambition, hope and love and dreams. Some life survived — on Earth, the deep-ocean forms, perhaps pond life, some insects would have endured the lethal showers. But nothing advanced made it through, and certainly nothing approaching sentience; after the accident, its effects over in weeks or months, it would require a hundred million years of patient evolution to fix the rent in life’s fabric suffered in this place.

But nothing was without cost, he learned; nothing without benefit. The intense energy pulse of nearby gamma-ray bursts could shape the evolution of young star systems; primordial dust was melted into dense iron-rich droplets that settled quickly to the central plain of a dust cloud and so accelerated the formation of planets. Without a close-by gamma-ray burst, it was possible that star systems like the Solar System could never have formed. Birth, amid death; the way of the universe.

Maybe. But such cold logic was no comfort for Malenfant.

The Gaijin seemed determined to show him as much as possible of this vast star-spanning graveyard, to drive home its significance. After a time it became unbearable, the lesson blinding in its cruelty: that if the universe didn’t get you, other sentient beings would.

Sometimes a spark within him rebelled. Does it have to be like this? Can’t we find another way?

But he was very weak now, very lonely, very old.

He huddled in his shelter, eyes closed, while the years, of the universe and of his life, wore away, drenched in blue Saddle Point light.

There is only so much, all things considered, that a man can take.