Space

“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 Sangers 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