Space

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…”