Space

Her, yes: of course it would be a female, one of the Vatican’s first cadre of women priests, that would be assigned to this most PR-friendly of operations.

And no black cassock. The priest, dressed in loose, comfortable-looking therm-aware shirt and slacks, could have held any one of a number of white-collar professions: an accountant, maybe, or a space scientist of the kind Frank Paulis had recruited in droves, or even a lawyer like Xenia herself. It was only the dog collar, a thin band of white at the throat, that marked out a different vocation.

From the shadows of her broad, sensible Sun hat the priest smiled out at Xenia. “You must be Ms. Makarova.”

“Call me Xenia. And you?”

“Dorothy Chaum.” The smile grew a little weary. “I’m neither Mother, nor Father, thankfully. You must call me Dorothy.”

“It’s a pleasure to have you here, Ms. — Dorothy.”

Dorothy flapped at the drones buzzing around her head like flies. “You’re a good liar. I’ll try to trouble you as little as I can.” And she looked beyond Xenia, into the rocket compound, with questing, curious eyes.

Maybe this won’t be so bad after all, Xenia thought.

Xenia, in fact, had been against the visit on principle, and she had told her boss so. “For God’s sake, Frank. This is a space launcher development site. It’s a place for hard hats, not haloes.”

Frank Paulis — forty-five years old, squat, brisk, bustling, sleek with sweat even in his air-conditioned offices — had just tapped his softscreen. “Just like it says in the mail here. This character is here on behalf of the Pope, to gather information on the mission—”

“And bless it. Frank, the Bruno is a mission to the asteroids. We’re going out to find ETs, for God’s sake. To have some quack waving incense and throwing holy water over our ship is… ridiculous. Medieval.”

Frank had gotten a look in his eyes she’d come to recognize. You have to be realistic, Xenia. Live in the real world. “The Vatican is one of our principal sponsors. They’ve a right to access.”

“The Church is using us as part of its repositioning,” she’d protested sourly. It was true; the Church had spent much of the new millennium rebuilding, after the multiple crises that had assailed it after the turn of the century: sexual scandals, financial irregularities, a renewed awareness of the horrors of Christian history — the Crusades and the Inquisition chief amongst them. “We mustn’t forget,” Xenia said sourly, “the Church’s refusal to acknowledge female reproductive rights and to address the issue of population growth, a position not abandoned until 2013, a historic wrong which must be on a par with—”

“Nobody’s arguing,” Frank said gently. “But who are you suggesting is cynical? Us or them? Look, I don’t care about the Church. All I care about is its money, and there’s still a hell of a lot of that. And, just like any other corporate sponsor, the Church is entitled to its slice of the PR pie.”

“Sometimes I think you’d take money from the Devil himself if it got your Big Dumb Booster a little closer to the launch pad.”

“Since we have a bunch of those apocalyptic cultists here — the ones who think the Gaijin are demons sent to punish us, or whatever — I suppose I am taking money from the other guy. Well, at least it shows balance.” Frank put his arm around her — he had to reach up to do it — and guided her out of his office. “Xenia, this witch doctor isn’t going to be with us for long. And, believe me, a priest is going to be a lot easier for you to entertain than some of the fat cats we have to put up with.”

“Me? Frank, if you knew how much I resent the implication that my time isn’t valuable—”

“Bring her to the lecture. That will eat up a couple of hours.”

“What lecture?”

He frowned. “I thought you knew. Reid Malenfant, on the philosophy of extraterrestrial life.”

She had to retrieve the name from deep memory. “The dried-up old coot from the talk shows?”

“Reid Malenfant, the ex-astronaut. Reid Malenfant, the codiscoverer of alien life five years back. Reid Malenfant, modern icon, come to give our grease monkeys a pep talk.” He grinned. “Lighten up, Xenia. Maybe it will be interesting.”

“Are you going?”

“Of course I am.” And, gently, he had closed the door.

Xenia and Dorothy were SmartDriven around Baikonur, the standard-issue corporate tour.

Baikonur, the Soviet Union’s long-hidden space city, had been pretty much a derelict by the time Frank Paulis took it over and began renovation. Stranded at the heart of a chill, treeless steppe, connected to the Russian border by a single antique rail line, it was like a run-down military base, dotted with hangars and launch pads and fuel tanks. Even after years of work by Bootstrap here, there were still piles of rusty junk strewn over the more remote corners of the base — some of it said to be the last relics of Russia’s never-successful Moon rockets.

But Dorothy’s attention was diverted, away from Xenia’s sound bites on the history and the engineering and the mission of Bootstrap, by the folks Frank Paulis referred to as the Sports Fans: adherents of one view or another about the Gaijin, seemingly attracted here irresistibly.

The Sports Fans lived at the fringe of the launch complex in semi-permanent camps, contained by tough link fences. They spent their time chanting, costume wearing, leafleting, performing protests of one baffling kind or another, right up against the fences, carefully watched over by Bootstrap security staff and drone robots. They were funded, presumably, by savings, or sponsors, or by whatever they could sell of their experiences and their witness on the data nets, and they were a fat, easy revenue source for the local Kazakhs — which was why they were tolerated here.

Xenia tried to guide Dorothy away from all this, but Dorothy demurred. And so they began a slow drive around the fences, as Dorothy peered out, and Xenia struggled to contain her impatience.

Public reaction to the Gaijin — as it had developed over the five years since the announcement of the discovery by Nemoto and Malenfant — had bifurcated. There were two broad schools of thought. The technical terms among psychologists and sociologists, Xenia had learned, were “millennialists” and “catastrophists.”

The millennialists, taking their lead from thinkers like Carl Sagan — not to mention Gene Roddenberry — believed that no star-spanning culture could possibly be hostile to a more primitive species like humanity, and the Gaijin must therefore be on their way to educate us or uplift us or save us from ourselves. The more intellectual millennialists had at least produced some useful, if slanted, material: careful studies of parallels with intercultural contact in Earth’s past, ranging from the dreadful fall-out of Western colonialism through to the essentially benevolent impact of the transmission of learning from Arabian and ancient Greek cultures to the medieval West.

But some millennialists were more direct. Various giant, elaborate structures — featuring the peace sigil, the yin and yang, the Christian cross, a human hand — had been cut or burned or painted on Earth’s surface. Giant graffiti, Dorothy thought, painted in the deserts of America and Africa and Asia and Australia and even, illegally, on the Antarctic ice cap, its creators wistfully hoping to catch the eye of the anonymous, toiling strangers out in the belt.

Others were even less subtle. Right here before her now there was a circle of people, hands open and faces raised to the desert sky, all steadily praying. She knew there had been similar gatherings, some in continuous session, at many of the world’s key religious and mystic sites: Jerusalem, Mecca, the pyramids, the European stone circles. Take me! Take me!

Meanwhile, the catastrophists believed that the aliens represented terrible danger.

Much of their fear and anger was directed at the aliens themselves, of course, and there were elaborate schemes for military assaults on their supposed asteroid bases — justified, in some cases, by appeal to the evident malice of most of the aliens reported in UFO abduction cases of the past. There was even one impressive presentation — complete with animation and sound effects, emanating from softscreen posters draped over Bootstrap’s link fence — from a major aerospace cartel. The military-industrial-complex types were as always seeking to turn the new situation into lucrative new contracts, and how better than to be asked to build giant asteroid-belt battle cruisers?

But the catastrophists had plenty of rage left over to be directed at other targets, healthily fueled by conspiracy theorists. There were still some who held that the U.S. government had been collaborating with the aliens since Roswell, 1947. “I wish they had been,” Frank had once said tiredly. “It would make life a lot easier.”

And there were protests aimed at government agencies at all levels, the United Nations, scientific bodies, and anybody thought to be involved in the general cover-up. The most spectacular of the related assaults had been the grenade attack that had caused the destruction of the decrepit, never-flown Saturn V Moon rocket that had lain for decades as a monument outside NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

It kept the Bootstrap guards watchful.

“Intriguing,” Dorothy murmured. “Disturbing.”

“But places like this always concentrate the noise,” Xenia said gently. “The vast majority of people out there in the real world are simply indifferent to the whole thing. When the news about the Gaijin first broke it was an immediate sensation, taking over every media outlet — for a day or two, perhaps a week. I was already working with Frank at the time. He was electrified — well, we both were; we thought the news the most significant of our lifetimes. And the business opportunities it might open up sent Frank running around in circles.”

Dorothy smiled. “That sounds like the Frank Paulis I’ve read about.”

“But then there was no more fresh news…”

After a couple of weeks, the Gaijin had been crowded off the front pages. Politics had assumed its usual course, and all the funds hastily promised in that first startling morning after the Nemoto-Malenfant discovery — for deeper investigations and robot probes and manned missions and the rest — had soon evaporated.

“But the news was too… lofty,” Dorothy murmured. “Inhuman. It changed everything. Suddenly the universe swiveled around us; suddenly we knew we weren’t alone, and how we felt about ourselves, about the universe and our place in it, could never be the same again.

“And yet, nothing changed. After all the Gaijin didn’t do anything but crawl around their asteroids. They didn’t respond to any of the signals they were sent, whether by governments or churches or ham-radio crackpots.”

Frank had gotten involved in some of that, in fact; the early messages had been framed using a universal-language methodology that dated back to the 1960s, called Lincos: lots of redundancy and framing to make the message patterns clear, a simple primer that worked up from basic mathematical concepts through physics, chemistry, astronomy… A lot of beautiful, fascinating work, none of which had raised so much as a peep from the Gaijin.

“And meanwhile,” Dorothy went on, “there were still babies to deliver, crops to grow, politicking to pursue, and wars to fight. As my father used to say, the next morning you still had to put your pants on one leg at a time.

“You know,” she said thoughtfully, “I’m generally in favor of all this activity. Your Sports Fans, I mean. The only way we have to absorb such changes in our view of the world, and ourselves, is like this: by talking, talking, talking. At least the people here care enough to express an opinion. Look at that.” It was a softscreen poster showing a download from the net: a live image returned by some powerful telescope, perhaps in orbit or on the Moon, of the asteroid belt anomalies: a dark, grainy background, a line of red stars, twinkling, blurred. “Alien industry, live from space. The most popular Internet site, I’m told. People use it as wallpaper in their bedrooms. They seem to find it comforting.”

Xenia snorted. “Sure. And you know who makes most use of that image? The astrologers. Now you can have your fortune told by the lights of Gaijin factories. I mean, Jesus… Sorry. But it says it all.”

Dorothy laughed good-naturedly.

They drove away from the Sports Fans’ pens and approached the pad itself: the true center of attention, bearing Bootstrap’s first interplanetary ship, Frank Paulis’s pride and joy.