Space. Stephen Baxter

      As Malenfant listened to the stream of detail and acronyms, of project after project – Ozma, Cyclops, Phoenix – he became consumed with pity for these patient, hungry listeners, hoping to hear the faintest of whispers from beyond the stars. For, of course, it had always been futile, wrong-headed. Equilibrium, he thought: either the sky is silent because it is empty, or else the aliens should be everywhere. There should have been no need to seek out whispers; if we weren’t alone, the sky should, metaphorically, have been blazing with light.

      The next speaker impressed Malenfant rather more. She was a geologist from Caltech called Carole Lerner – no older than thirty, spiky, argumentative. She had tried to come up with a new answer to the conundrum of the arrival of the Gaijin. Maybe there had been no sign of the Gaijin before, said Lerner, because they had only recently evolved – and not among the stars, but where they had been found, in the asteroid belt itself.

      There had been suggestions for some decades that life could get a foothold in comets – perhaps in pockets of liquid water, drenched with the organic compounds that laced cometary interiors – and, of course, some asteroids were believed to be burned-out comets, or at least to have a comparable composition to comets. The coincidence of the emergence of a spacefaring alien race in the asteroids now, just as we reached a similar state, might be explained by a convergence of timescales. Perhaps it simply took this long, a few billion years, for life to crawl its way from the ponds to the stars, no matter where it originated.

      It was a nice hypothesis, Malenfant reflected, but he judged that the coincidence of timescales was surely too neat to be convincing. Still, this was the first speaker Malenfant had heard at the conference who had attempted to address the deeper issues which obsessed the likes of Nemoto. He glanced at his softscreen, seeking presenters’ bio details.

      Lerner’s general specialism was the volcanic history of the planet Venus. Malenfant wasn’t surprised to learn she was having trouble finding funding to continue her work. One side-effect of the arrival of the Gaijin had been a decline of interest in the sciences. It seemed to be generally assumed that the Gaijin would eventually hand over the answers to any questions humans could possibly pose; so why spend time – and, more significantly, money – seeking out answers now? No genuine scientist Malenfant had ever met would have been satisfied with such passivity, of course; it seemed to him this Carole Lerner might be consumed with exactly that impatience.

      The next paper, given by a heavy-set academic from the SETI Institute, turned out to have his own name in the title: ‘The Nemoto – Malenfant Contact – An Example of How Not to Do It’.

      Maura Della sat back to listen with an expression of intense enjoyment.

      The presentation was based on a bureaucratic protocol devised to cover the event of alien contact. The protocol was first worked out by NASA in the 1990s, and then, after the cancellation of government funding for SETI and the NASA project’s take-over by private institutions, developed further by the UN and national governments.

      Malenfant – as one of only two people in all history to have been placed in the situation covered by the protocol – had never bothered to read it. He wasn’t surprised to learn now that it was top-down, officious and almost comically foolish in its optimism that central control could be maintained:

      ‘After concluding that the discovery appears to be credible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, and after informing other parties to this declaration, the discoverer should inform observers throughout the world through the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams of the International Astronomical Union, and should inform the Secretary General of the United Nations in accordance with Article XI of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Bodies. Because of their demonstrated interest in and expertise concerning the question of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, the discoverer should simultaneously inform the following international institutions of the discovery and should provide them with all pertinent data and recorded information concerning the evidence: the International Telecommunication Union, the Committee on Space Research, of the International Council of Scientific Unions, the International Astronautical Federation, the International Academy of Astronautics, the International Institute of Space Law, Commission 51 of the International Astronomical Union and Commission J of the International Radio Science Union …’

      Malenfant and Nemoto, by comparison, had gone straight on the talk shows.

      Playfully, Maura slapped Malenfant’s wrist. ‘Naughty, naughty. All those Commissions you skipped. You made a lot of enemies there.’

      ‘But,’ he said, ‘I did get to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House. You know, this guy makes it sound as if he’d rather we hadn’t made the discovery at all, rather than making it the wrong way.’

      ‘Human nature, Malenfant. You took away his toy.’

      Now the speaker opened the floor for comments.

      The discussion soon turned to how the situation should be managed from here. There were plenty of calls for behavioural scientists to study ways in which the public response to the news could be somehow anticipated and controlled, for research into popular public images of Eeties, discussion of analogies with the response to missions like Apollo to the Moon and Viking to Mars, and suggestions that SETI proponents should make use of media like webcasts, games and music to present SETI and Eetie themes ‘responsibly’.

      Maura pulled an elaborate face. ‘Don’t these people realize the cat is already out of the bag? You can’t control the public’s access to information any more – and you certainly can’t control their response. Nor should you try, in my opinion.’

      At last the speaker cleared off the stage, and Malenfant’s spirits lifted a little. As an engineer, he knew that a bucket-load of philosophical principles wasn’t worth a grain of good hard fact. And that was why the next item, by Frank Paulis, was a breath of fresh air. After all, it was Paulis, with his money and his initiative, who was actually going out there to look.

      Paulis’s images of his en-route spacecraft, the Bruno, showed a gangly, glittering dragonfly of solar-cell panels and gauzy antennae and sensors mounted on long booms, surrounded by a swarm of microsats devoted to fly-around inspections and repairs.

      The launch had been uneventful, the first years of the long flight enlivened only by the usual hardware glitches and nail-biting techie dramas. It struck Malenfant as remarkable how little space technology seemed to have progressed in seventy years since the first Sputnik; the design of the Bruno would probably have been recognizable, give or take a few sapphire-based quantum chips, to Wernher von Braun. But flying in space had always been a conservative business; if you had only one shot, you wanted your ship to work, not to serve as the test bed for new gadgets and ideas.

      Anyhow, the Bruno had survived its man-made crises. The ship was still a year away from its rendezvous with what appeared to be the primary construction site – or colony, or nest – of the Gaijin. The asteroid belt was a broad lane of rubble; already the probe had encountered a number of those dusty wanderers, never visited before or seen in close-up. But – Paulis promised, standing before slide after slide of coal-dark, anonymous rocks – the best was yet to come. For, in the darkness, the Gaijin awaited.

      

      After a morning of such thin gruel, Malenfant retreated to his hotel room.

      He travelled light these days: just bathroom stuff, a couple of self-cleaning suits and sets of underwear, a softscreen that was all he needed to connect him to the rest of the species – and a single ornament, a piece of unbelievably ancient rock from the far side of the Moon, carved into an exquisite fox god. He had become minimal. The time he spent on the Japanese Moon, he supposed, had changed him, no doubt for the better.

      He spent a half hour watching heavily filtered and interpreted news on his softscreen. He needed to know what was going on, but he was too old to have any patience with the evanescent buzz of instant commentaries.

      A corner of his softscreen rippled with light: an incoming message.