Space

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.