Space. Stephen Baxter

Madeleine. These guys might spout Latin in their synthesized voices, but they are not like us. They come from a place we can’t even imagine, and we don’t know where they are going, and we sure as hell don’t know what they are looking for here on Earth. And that’s why we have to find a way to deal with them. Go ahead. Take a good long look.’

      The Gaijin plucked a delicate panel of an aluminium-like soft metal off its own hide; it came loose with a soft sucking tear, exposing jewel-like innards. Perhaps it would keep on going until there was only that grasping robot hand left, Madeleine thought, and then the hand would take itself apart too, finger by gleaming finger, until there was nothing left that could move.

       Chapter 9

       FUSION SUMMER

      Brind drew up contracts. Madeleine tidied up her affairs; preparing for a gap of thirty-six years, at minimum, had a feeling of finality. She said goodbye to her tearful mother, rented out her apartment, sold her car. She took the salary up front and invested it as best she could, with Paulis’s help.

      She decided to give her little capsule a call-sign: Friendship-7.

      And, before she knew it, before she felt remotely ready for this little relativistic death, it was launch day.

      

      Friendship-7’s protective shroud cracked open. The blue light of Earth flooded the cabin. Madeleine could see fragments of ice, shaken free of the hull of the booster; they glittered around the craft like snow. And she could see the skin of Earth, spread out beneath her like a glowing carpet, as bright as a tropical sky. On the antique Proton, it had been one mother of a ride. But here she was – at last – in orbit, and her spirits soared. To hell with the Gaijin, to hell with Brind and Paulis. Whatever else happened from here on in, they couldn’t take this memory away from her.

      She travelled through a single orbit of the Earth. There were clouds piled thickly around the equator. The continents on the night side were outlined by chains of city lights.

      She could see the big eco-repair initiatives, even from here, from orbit. Reforestation projects were swathes of virulent green on the continents of the northern hemisphere. The southern continents were filled with hot brown desert, their coasts lined grey with urban encrustation. Patches of grey in the seas, bordering the land, marked the sites of disastrous attempts to pump carbon dioxide into the deep oceans. Over Antarctica, laser arrays glowed red, labouring to destroy tropospheric chlorofluorocarbons. The Gulf was just a sooty smudge, drowning in petrochemical smog. And so on.

      From here she could see the disturbing truth: that space was doing Earth no damn good at all. Even though this was a time of off-world colonies and trade with interstellar travellers, most of mankind’s efforts were directed towards fixing up a limited, broken-down ecology, or dissipated on closed-economy problems: battles over diminishing resources in the oceans, on the fringes of the expanding deserts.

      She wondered, uneasily, what she would find when she returned home, thirty-six years from now.

      Madeleine would live in an old Shuttle Spacelab – a tiny reusable space station, seventy years old and flown in orbit twice – dug out of storage at KSC, gutted and refurbished. At the front was her small pressurized hab compartment, and there were two pallets at the rear fitted with a bunch of instruments which would be deployed at the neutron star: coronagraphs, spectroheliographs, spectrographic telescopes.

      Brind gave her a powerful processor to enable her to communicate, to some extent, with her Gaijin hosts. It was a bioprocessor, a little cubical unit. The biopro was high technology, and it was the one place they had spent serious amounts of Paulis’s money. And it was human technology, not Gaijin. Madeleine was fascinated. She spent a long time going over the biopro’s specs. It was based on ampiphiles, long molecules with watery heads and greasy tails, that swam about in layers called Langmuir – Blodgett films. The active molecules used weak interactions – hydrogen bonding, van der Waals forces and hydrophobic recognition – to assemble themselves into a three-dimensional structure, supramolecular arrays thousands of molecules long.

      Playing with the biopro was better than thinking about what was happening to her, where she was headed.

      She wasn’t so happy to find, though, when she first booted up the biopro, that its human interface design metaphor was a two-dimensional virtual representation of Frank Paulis’s leathery face.

      ‘Paulis, you egotistical bastard.’

      ‘Just want to make you feel at home.’ The image flickered a little, and his skin was blocky – obviously digitally generated. It – he – turned out to be backed up by a complex program, interactive and heuristic. He could respond to what Madeleine said to him, learn, and grow.

      He would be company, of a sort.

      ‘Are you in contact with the Gaijin?’

      He hesitated. ‘Yes. In a way. Anyhow I’ll keep you informed. In the meantime, the best thing you can do is follow your study program.’ He started downloading some kind of checklist; it chattered out of an antique teletype.

      ‘You have got to be kidding.’

      ‘You’ve a lot of training on the equipment still to complete,’ virtual Paulis said.

      ‘Terrific. And should I study neutron stars, bursters, whatever the hell they are?’

      ‘I’d rather not. I want your raw reactions. If I coach you too much it will narrow your perception. Remember, you’ll be observing on behalf of all mankind. We may never get another chance. Now. Maybe we can start with the spectroheliograph deployment procedure …’

      When she flew once more over the glittering east coast of North America, the Gaijin ship was waiting to meet her.

      In Earth orbit, the Gaijin flower-ship didn’t look so spectacular. It was laid out something like a squid, a kilometre long and wrought in silver, with a bulky main section as the ‘head’ and a mess of ‘tentacles’ trailing behind.

      Dodecahedral forms, silvered and anonymous, drifted from the cables, and clustered around Madeleine’s antique craft. Her ship was hauled into the silvery rope stuff. Strands adhered to her hull, until her view was criss-crossed with shining threads, and she had become part of the structure of the Gaijin ship. She felt a mounting claustrophobia as she was knit into the alien craft. How did Malenfant stand all this?

      Then the flower-ship unfolded its petals. They made up an electromagnetic scoop, a thousand kilometres wide. The lower edge of the scoop brushed the fringe of Earth’s atmosphere, and plasma sparkled.

      Madeleine felt her breath shortening. This is real, she thought. These crazy aliens are really going to do this. And I’m really here.

      She fought panic.

      After a couple of widening loops around the planet Madeleine sailed out of Earth’s orbit, and she was projected into strangeness.

      

      Eating interplanetary hydrogen, it took the flower-ship one hundred and ninety-eight days to travel out to the burster’s Saddle Point, eight hundred AU from the sun.

      Saddle Point gateways must destroy the objects they transport.

      For eighteen years a signal crossed space, towards a receiver gateway which had been hauled to the system of the burster neutron star. For eighteen years Madeleine did not exist. She was essentially dead (though not legally).

      Thus, Madeleine Meacher crossed interstellar space.

      

      There was no sense of waking – is it over? – she was just there, with the Spacelab’s systems whirring and clicking around her as usual, like a busy little kitchen. Her heart was pounding, just as it had been a second before –