They drank from a stream, and ate fruit, and lay on the grass, letting the tension drain out. Madeleine thought she slept for a while, curled up against Malenfant in the grass, like two exhausted kids.
And then – when they were awake, sitting before Cassiopeia – the Gaijin waved a spidery metal limb, and the world dissolved. It melted like a defocusing image: grass and mud and trees and streams running together, everything but the three of them, two humans and a Gaijin, and that eerie universe-sun, so that they seemed to be floating, bathed in a deeper darkness than Madeleine had ever known.
She reached out and grabbed Malenfant’s hand. It was warm, solid; she could see him, the folds on his jumpsuit picked out by the cosmic glow. She dug the fingers of her other hand into loamy soil beneath her. It was still there, cool and friable, invisible or not. She clung to its texture, to the pull of the fake world sticking her to the ground.
But Malenfant was staring upwards, past the Gaijin’s metal shoulder. ‘Look at that. Holy shit.’
She looked up unwillingly, reluctant to face new wonders.
Above them, a ceiling of curdled light spanned the sky. It was a galaxy.
It was a disc of stars, flatter and thinner than she might have expected, in proportion to its width no thicker than a few sheets of paper. She thought she could see strata in that disc, layers of structure, a central sheet of swarming blue stars and dust lanes sandwiched between dimmer, older stars. The core, bulging out of the plane of the disc like an egg yolk, was a compact mass of yellowish light; but it was not spherical, rather markedly elliptical. The spiral arms were fragmented. They were a delicate blue laced with ruby-red nebulae and the blue-white blaze of individual stars – a granularity of light – and with dark lanes traced between each arm. She saw scattered flashes of light, blisters of gas. Perhaps those were supernova explosions, creating bubbles of hot plasma hundreds of light years across.
But the familiar disc – shining core, spiral arms – was actually embedded in a broader, spherical mass of dim red stars. The crimson fireflies were gathered in great clusters, each of which must contain millions of stars.
The Gaijin hovered before the image, silhouetted, like the spidery projector cluster at the centre of a planetarium.
‘So, a galaxy,’ said Madeleine. ‘Our Galaxy?’
‘I think so,’ Malenfant said. ‘It matches radio maps I’ve seen.’ He pointed, tracing patterns. ‘Look. That must be the Sagittarius Arm. The other big structure is called the Outer Arm.’ The two major arms, emerging from the elliptical core, defined the Galaxy, each of them wrapping right around the core before dispersing at the rim into a mist of shining stars and glowing nebulae and brooding black clouds. The other ‘arms’ were really just scraps, she saw – the Galaxy’s spiral structure was a lot messier than she had expected – but still, she thought, the sun is lost in one of those scattered ‘fragments’.
The Galaxy image began to rotate, slowly.
‘A galactic day,’ Malenfant breathed. ‘Takes two hundred million years to complete a turn …’
Madeleine could see the stars swarming, following individual orbits around the Galaxy core, like a school of sparkling fish. And the spiral arms were evolving too, ridges of light sparking with young stars, churning their way through the disc of the Galaxy. But the arms were just waves of compression, like the bunching of traffic jams, with individual stars swimming through the regions of high density.
And now, Madeleine saw, a new kind of evolution was visible in the disc. Like the pulsing bubbles of supernovae, each was a ripple of change that began at an individual star, before spreading across a small fraction of the disc. Within each wavefront the stars went out, or turned red, or even green; or sometimes the stars would pop and flare, fizzing with light.
‘Life,’ she said. ‘Dyson spheres. Star Crackers –’
‘Yes,’ Malenfant said grimly. ‘Colonization bubbles. Just like the one we got caught up in.’
The Gaijin said sombrely, THIS IS WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED.
Life – said Cassiopeia – was emergent everywhere. Planets were the crucible. Life curdled, took hold, evolved, in every nook and cranny it could find in the great nursery that was the Galaxy.
Characteristically life took hundreds of millions of years to accrue the complexity it needed to start manipulating its environment on a major scale. On Earth, life had stuck at the single-celled stage for billions of years, most of its history. Still, on world after world, complexity emerged, mind dawned, civilizations arose.
Most of these cultures were self-limiting.
Some were sedentary. Some – for instance, aquatic creatures, like the Flips – lacked access to metals and fire. Some just destroyed themselves, one way or another, through wars, or accidents, or obscure philosophical crises, or just plain incompetence – which last, Madeleine suspected, might have been mankind’s ultimate fate, left to its own devices.
Maybe one in a thousand cultures made it through such bottlenecks.
That fortunate few developed self-sustaining colonies off their home worlds, and – forever immune to the eggs-in-one-basket accidents which could afflict a race bound to a single world – they started spreading. Or else they made machines, robots that could change worlds and rebuild themselves, and sent them off into space, and they started spreading.
Either way, from one in a thousand habitable worlds, a wave of colonization started to expand.
There were many different strategies. Sometimes generations of colonists diffused slowly from star to star, like a pollutant spreading into a dense liquid. Sometimes the spread was much faster, like a gas into a vacuum. Sometimes there was a kind of percolation, a lacy, fractal structure of exploitation leaving great unspoiled voids within.
It was a brutal business. Lesser species – even just a little behind in the race to evolve complexity and power – would simply be overrun, their worlds and stars consumed. And if a colonizing bubble from another species was encountered, there were often ferocious wars.
Madeleine said sourly, ‘It’s hard to believe that every damn species in the Galaxy behaves so badly.’
Malenfant grinned. ‘Why? This is how we are. And remember, the ones who expand across the stars are self-selecting. They grow, they consume, they aren’t too good at restraining themselves, because that’s the way they are. The ones who aren’t ruthless predatory expansionists stay at home, or get eaten.’
Anyhow, the details of the expansion didn’t seem to matter. In every case, after some generations of colonization, conflicts built up. Resource depletion within the settled bubble led to pressure on the colonies at the fringe. Or else the colonizers, their technological edge sharpened by the world-building frontier, would turn inwards on their rich, sedentary cousins. Either way the cutting-edge colonizers were forced outwards, farther and faster.
Before long, the frontier of colonization was spreading out at near lightspeed, and the increasingly depleted region within, its inhabitants having nowhere to go, was riven by wars and economic crisis.
So it would go on, over millennia, perhaps megayears.
And then came the collapse.
It happened over and over. None of the bubbles ever grew very large – no more than a few hundred light years wide – before simply withering away, like a colony of bacteria frying under a sterilizing lamp. And one by one the stars would come out once more, shining cleanly out, as the red and green of technology and life dispersed.
‘The Polynesian syndrome,’ Madeleine said gloomily.
‘But,’ Malenfant growled, ‘it shouldn’t always be like this. Sooner or later one of those races has got to win the local wars, beat out its own internal demons, and conquer the Galaxy. But we know that not one has made it, across the billions of years of the Galaxy’s existence. And that is the Fermi Paradox.’
YES, said Cassiopeia. BUT THE GALAXY IS NOT ALWAYS SO HOSPITABLE A PLACE.
Now a new image was overlaid on the swivelling Galaxy: a spark that flared, a bloom of lurid blue light that originated close to the crowded core. It illuminated the nearby stars for perhaps an eighth of the galactic disc around it. And then, as the Galaxy slowly turned, there was another spark – and another, then another, and another still. Most of these events originated near the Galaxy core: something to do with the crowding of the stars, then. A few sparks, more rare, came from further out – the disc, or even the dim halo of orbiting stars that surrounded the Galaxy proper.
Each of these sparks caused devastation among any colonization bubbles nearby: a cessation of expansion, a restoring of starlight.
Death, on an interstellar scale.
Their virtual viewpoint changed, suddenly, swooping down into the plane of the Galaxy. As the spiral arms spread out above her, dissolving into individual stars which scattered over her head and out of sight, Madeleine cried out and clung to Malenfant. Now they swept inwards, towards the Galaxy’s core, and she glimpsed structure beyond the billowing stars, sculptures of gas and light and energy.
Her attention came to rest, at last, on a pair of stars – small, fierce, angry. These stars were close, separated by no more than a few tens of their diameters. The two stars looped around each other on wild elliptical paths, taking just seconds to complete a revolution – like courting swallows, Madeleine thought – but the orbits changed rapidly, decaying as she watched, evolving into shallower ellipses, neat circles.
A few wisps of gas circled the two stars. Each star seemed to glow blue, but the gas around them was reddish. Further out she saw a lacy veil of colour, filmy gas that billowed against the crowded background star clouds.
‘Neutron stars,’ said Malenfant. ‘A neutron star binary, in fact. That blue glow is synchrotron radiation, Madeleine. Electrons dragged at enormous speeds by the stars’ powerful magnetic fields …’
The Gaijin said, PERHAPS FIFTY PER CENT OF ALL THE STARS IN THE GALAXY ARE LOCKED IN BINARY SYSTEMS – SYSTEMS CONTAINING TWO STARS, OR PERHAPS MORE. AND SOME OF THESE STARS ARE GIANTS, DOOMED TO A RAPID EVOLUTION.
Malenfant grunted. ‘Supernovae.’
MOST SUCH EXPLOSIONS SEPARATE THE RESULTANT REMNANT STARS. ONE IN A HUNDRED PAIRS REMAIN BOUND, EVEN AFTER A SUPERNOVA EXPLOSION. THE PAIRED NEUTRON STARS CIRCLE EACH OTHER RAPIDLY. THEY SHED ENERGY BY GRAVITATIONAL RADIATION – RIPPLES IN SPACETIME.
The two stars were growing closer now, their energy ebbing away. The spinning became more rapid, the stars moving too fast for her to see. When the stars were no more than their own diameter apart, disruption began. Great gouts of shining material were torn from the surface of each star, and thrown out into an immense glowing disc that obscured her view.
At last the stars touched. They imploded in a flash of light.
A shock wave pulsed through the debris disc, churning and scattering the material, a ferocious fount of energy. But the disc collapsed back on the impact site almost immediately, within seconds, save for a few wisps that dispersed slowly, cooling.
‘Has to form a black hole,’ Malenfant muttered. ‘Two neutron stars … too massive to form anything less. This is a gamma ray burster. We’ve been observing them all over the sky since the 1960s. We sent up spacecraft to monitor illegal nuclear weapons tests beyond the atmosphere. Instead, we saw these.’
THERE IS INDEED A BURST OF GAMMA RAYS – VERY HIGH ENERGY PHOTONS. THEN COMES A PULSE OF HIGH-ENERGY PARTICLES, COSMIC RAYS, HURLED OUT OF THE DISC OF COLLAPSING MATTER, FOLLOWING THE GAMMA RAYS AT A LITTLE LESS THAN LIGHTSPEED.
THESE EVENTS ARE HIGHLY DESTRUCTIVE.
A NEARBY PLANET WOULD RECEIVE – IN A FEW SECONDS, MOSTLY IN THE FORM OF GAMMA RAYS – SOME ONE-TENTH ITS ANNUAL ENERGY INPUT FROM ITS SUN. BUT THE GAMMA RAY SHOWER IS ONLY THE PRECURSOR TO THE COSMIC RAY CASCADES, WHICH CAN LAST MONTHS. BATTERING INTO AN ATMOSPHERE, THE RAYS CREATE A SHOWER OF MUONS – HIGH-ENERGY SUBATOMIC PARTICLES. THE MUONS HAVE A GREAT DEAL OF PENETRATING POWER. EVEN HUNDREDS OF METRES OF WATER OR ROCK WOULD NOT BE A SUFFICIENT SHIELD AGAINST THEM.
Malenfant said, ‘I saw what these things can do, Madeleine. It would be like a nearby supernova going off. The ozone layer would be screwed by the gamma rays. Protein structures would break down. Acid rain. Disruption of the biosphere –’
A COLLAPSE IS OFTEN SUFFICIENT TO STERILIZE A REGION PERHAPS A THOUSAND LIGHT YEARS WIDE. IN OUR OWN GALAXY, WE EXPECT ONE SUCH EVENT EVERY FEW TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS – MOST OF THEM IN THE CROWDED GALAXY CORE.
Madeleine watched as the Galaxy image was restored, and bursts erupted from the crowded core, over and over.
Malenfant glared at the dangerous sky. ‘Cassiopeia – are you telling me that these collapses are the big secret – the cause of the Reboot, the galactic extinction?’
Madeleine shook her head. ‘How is that possible, if each of them is limited to a thousand light years? The Galaxy is a hundred times as wide as that. It would be no fun to have one of these things go off in your back yard. But –’
BUT, said Cassiopeia, SOME OF THESE EVENTS ARE – EXCEPTIONAL.
They were shown a cascade, image after image, burst after burst.
Some of the collapses involved particularly massive objects. Some of them were rare collisions involving three, four, even five objects simultaneously. Some of the bursts were damaging because of their orientation, with most of their founting, ferocious energy being delivered, by a chance of fate and collision dynamics, into the disc of the Galaxy, where the stars were crowded. And so on.
Some of these events were very damaging indeed.
Cassiopeia said, FROM THE WORST OF THE EVENTS THE EXTINCTION PULSE PROCEEDS AT LIGHTSPEED, SPILLING OVER THE GALAXY AND ALL ITS INHABITANTS, ALL THE WAY TO THE RIM AND EVEN THE HALO CLUSTERS. NO SHIELDING IS POSSIBLE. NO COMPLEX ORGANISM, NO ORGANIZED DATA STORE, CAN SURVIVE. BIOSPHERES OF ALL KINDS ARE DESTROYED …
So it finishes, Madeleine thought, the evolution and the colonizing and the wars and the groping towards understanding: all of it halted, obliterated in a flash, an accident of cosmological billiards. It was all a matter of chance, of bad luck. But there were enough neutron star collisions that every few hundred million years there was an event powerful enough, or well-directed enough, to wipe the whole of the Galaxy clean.
It had happened over and over. And it will happen again, she saw. Again and again, a drumbeat of extinction. That is what the Gaijin have learned.
‘And for us,’ Malenfant growled, ‘it’s back to the fucking pond, every damn time … So much for Fermi’s paradox. Nemoto was right. This is the equilibrium state for life and mind: a Galaxy full of new, young species struggling out from their home worlds, consumed by fear and hatred, burning their way across the nearby stars, stamping over the rubble of their forgotten predecessors.’
… And this is what the Gaijin tried to show me, Madeleine recalled, on my first Saddle Point jaunt of all, to the burster neutron star: the star lichen, fast-evolving life forms wiped out by a stellar fluke every fourteen seconds. It was a fractal image of this, the greater truth.
The Galaxy image abruptly receded, the spiral arms and the core and the surrounding halo imploding on itself like a burst balloon. Madeleine gasped at the sudden illusory motion. The world congealed around her: grass and trees and that black sky, all of it illuminated by fierce blue cosmic light. She was flooded with intense physical relief, as if she could breathe again.
But her mind was racing. ‘There must be ways to stop this. All we have to do is evade one collapse – and gain the time to put aside the wars and the trashing, and get a little smarter, and learn how to run the Galaxy properly. We don’t have to put up with this shit.’
Malenfant smiled. ‘Nemoto always did call you a meddler.’
BUT YOU ARE RIGHT, said the Gaijin. SOME OF US ARE TRYING …
Ahead of them, she saw a group of Neandertals. They were dancing, signing furiously to each other, jumping up and down in the light of the cosmos. Something was changing in the sky, and the Neandertals were responding.
She looked that way. That cosmic light point seemed to be expanding.
The unwrapping sky was full of stars. It was the centre of the Galaxy.
Malenfant was confronting the Gaijin. ‘Cassiopeia,’ he said softly, ‘what has all this got to do with me?’
The Gaijin said, MALENFANT, YOU ARE OUR BEST HOPE.
And now the Gaijin turned with a scrape of metal, a soft hiss as her feet sank deeper into the loam.
IT IS RISING.
She turned and began to stalk across the meadow, with that stiff, three-legged grace of hers, away from the stand of trees. Madeleine saw the Neandertals were following, a shadowy group of them, their muscles prominent in the starlight.
Malenfant grabbed her hand.
They walked through a meadow. The grass was damp, cool under her feet, and dew sparkled, a shattered mirror of the stars.
They were all immersed in diffuse shadowless light, in this place where every corner of the sky glowed as bright as the surface of the Moon. The light was silvery, the colours bleached out of everything; the grass was a deep green, the leaves on the trees black. Madeleine wondered vaguely if there was enough nourishment in that Galaxy light to fuel photosynthesis, if life could survive on a rogue, sunless planet here, just eating the dense starlight.
They topped a ridge, and looked down over a broad, shallow valley. There were scattered trees and standing water, ribbons and pools of silver-blue, all of it still and a little eerie in the diffuse starlight.
The Gaijin, Cassiopeia, had stopped, here at the crest. The Neandertals had gathered a little way away, along the ridge, and they were looking out over the valley.
But now one of the Neandertals came shambling towards Malenfant, with that clumsy, inefficient gait of theirs. It was a man, stoop-shouldered, the flesh over his ribs soft and sagging, and sweat slicked over his shoulders. That great brow pulled his face forward, so that his chin almost rested on his chest.
Malenfant said, ‘Hello, Esau –’
Esau slapped him, and his fingers rattled, his fist thumping his forehead.
Malenfant grinned, and translated. ‘Hello, Stupid.’ Malenfant seemed genuinely pleased to see this old Neandertal geezer again.
But now Cassiopeia stirred, and Madeleine grabbed his arm. ‘Malenfant. Look. Oh, shit.’
A new star was rising above the valley, over the newly revealed horizon, brighter than the background wash.
It was a neutron star, a brilliant crimson point. Near the star there were multiple lobes of light. They contained structure, veins and streamers, something like the wings of a butterfly around that ferocious, dwarfed body; they glowed pink and an eerie blue, perhaps through the synchrotron radiation of accelerated electrons.
And there was something alongside the star. It looked like netting – scoop-shaped, like a catcher’s mitt, facing the star as if endeavouring to grasp it.
Obviously artificial.
Cassiopeia said, OUR JOURNEY IS NOT YET DONE, MALENFANT. WE MUST PENETRATE THE GALACTIC CENTRE ITSELF. THIS IS WHAT WE WILL SEEK.
Malenfant said, ‘This is the site of a gamma ray burster. A future Reboot event. I’m right, aren’t I, Cassiopeia?’
THE STAR’S COMPANION IS AS YET SOME DISTANCE AWAY – BILLIONS OF KILOMETRES, IN FACT, TOO REMOTE TO SEE. AND YET THE CONVERGENCE HAS BEGUN. THE COLLISION IS INEVITABLE. UNLESS –
‘Unless somebody does something about it,’ Madeleine whispered.
That strange artefact continued to ride higher in the sky, like a filmy, complex moon. It was a net, cast across the stars. It must have been thousands of kilometres wide.
Madeleine found it impossible to believe it wasn’t a few metres above her head, almost close enough she could just reach out and touch. The human mind was just not programmed to see giant planet-spanning artefacts in the sky. Think of an aurora, she told herself, those curtains of light, rippling far above the air you breathe. And now imagine that: it would hang there far beyond any aurora, suspended in space, perhaps beyond the Moon …
But there was something wrong: the netting was obviously unfinished, and great holes had been rent into its structure.
Malenfant said, ‘It’s broken.’
YOU WOULD CALL THIS A SHKADOV SAIL …
It would be a thing of matter and energy, of lacy rigging and magnetic fields: a screen to reflect the neutron star’s radiation and solar wind. But it was bound to the star by invisible ropes of gravity.
‘Ah,’ Madeleine said. ‘You disturb the symmetry of the solar wind. You see, Malenfant? The wind from the star will push at the sail. But the sail isn’t going anywhere, relative to the star, because of gravity. So the wind gets turned back …’
‘It’s a stellar rocket,’ Malenfant said. ‘Using the solar wind to push aside the star.’
THAT IS THE PURPOSE. WHEN COMPLETE IT WILL BE A DISC A HUNDRED THOUSAND KILOMETRES ACROSS, ALL OF IT LACED WITH INTELLIGENCE, A DYNAMIC THING, CAPABLE OF SHAPING THE STAR’S SOLAR WIND, RESPONDING TO ITS COMPLEX CURRENTS.
Malenfant grinned. ‘Hot damn. Somebody is fighting back.’
Madeleine asked, ‘Who is building this thing? You?’
NOT US ALONE. MANY RACES HAVE COME HERE, COOPERATED ON THE SAIL’S CONSTRUCTION. IT APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN A RELIC FROM A PREVIOUS CYCLE, FROM BEFORE A PREVIOUS REBOOT.
‘Like the Saddle Point network.’
Madeleine peered doubtfully at the huge, unlikely structure. ‘How can a sail like that move a neutron star – an object more massive than the sun?’
THE THRUST IS VERY SMALL, THE ACCELERATION MINUSCULE. BUT OVER LONG ENOUGH PERIODS, SMALL THRUSTS ARE SUFFICIENT TO MOVE WORLDS. EVEN STARS.
‘And will that be enough to stop the coalescence of this binary, to stop the Reboot?’
NOT TO STOP IT. TO POSTPONE IT GREATLY, BY ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE. IF WE CAN DELAY THIS STERILIZATION EVENT –
‘We might win time,’ Malenfant said.
Madeleine challenged the Gaijin. ‘Is this really the best option? Haven’t you come up with anything smarter?’
Malenfant eyed her. ‘Like what?’
‘Hell, I don’t know. You could use antigravity. Einstein’s cosmological constant, the force that makes the universe expand. Or you could interfere with the fundamental constants of physics. For example there is a particle called the Higgs boson, which gives matter its mass. If you took it away, switched it off, you could make your neutron stars lighter, and then just push them aside. In fact, take all the mass away and they would fly off at the speed of light. Easy. Give me a lever and I will move the world …’
WE HAVE NO SUCH POWERS, said Cassiopeia, and Madeleine thought she detected sadness in that synthesized voice. WE HAVE SEARCHED. THERE IS NO CIVILIZATION SIGNIFICANTLY MORE ADVANCED THAN OUR OWN – EVEN BEYOND THE GALAXY.
IT IS LIKE YOUR FERMI PARADOX. IF THEY EXISTED, WE WOULD SEE THEM. IMAGINE A GALAXY WITH ALL THE STARS FARMED, COVERED BY DYSON SPHERES, THEIR PHYSICS ALTERED PERHAPS TO EXTEND THEIR LIFETIMES. IMAGINE THE GALAXY ITSELF ENCLOSED BY A DYSON STRUCTURE. AND SO ON. EVEN SUCH CLUMSY ENGINEERING, ON SUCH A SCALE, WOULD BE VISIBLE. WE SEE NO SUCH THING, AS FAR OUT AS WE LOOK, AS DEEP INTO SPACE AND TIME.
But it wasn’t a surprise, Madeleine thought. How long would it take a galactic civilization to rise – even supposing somebody could survive the wars and assorted despoliation? Because of lightspeed, it would take a hundred thousand years for a message to cross the Galaxy just once. How many such exchanges would it take to homogenize the shared culture of a thousand species, born of different stars and biochemistries, creatures of flesh and metal, of rock and gas? A thousand Galaxy crossings, minimum?
But that would take a hundred million years, and by that time the next burster would have blown its top, the next Reboot driven everybody back to pond scum.
So maybe this clumsy net really was the best anybody could do. But still, good intentions weren’t enough.
‘Tens of millions of years,’ she said. ‘You’d have to maintain that damn thing for tens of millions of years, to make a difference. How can any species remotely like us, or even you, maintain a consistency of purpose across megayears? None of us even existed in anything like our present forms so long ago.’
… BUT, Cassiopeia said slowly, WE MUST TRY.
Malenfant said, ‘We?’
YOU MUST JOIN US, MALENFANT.
Madeleine clutched at Malenfant’s hand. But he pushed her away. She looked up at him. His face was pinched, his eyes narrow. He was starting to feel scared, she realized, drawn out, as if pulled into space by the thing in the sky, up towards the zenith.
Because, she realized, this is his destiny.
Malenfant stood before the alien robot, silhouetted against Galaxy core light. He looked helplessly weak, Madeleine thought, a ragamuffin, before this representative of a cool, immeasurably ancient galactic power.
Yet it was Cassiopeia who was supplicating before Malenfant, the human.
‘You can’t do it,’ he said, wondering. ‘You can’t complete this project. There is something – missing in you.’
Cassiopeia said, THERE IS CONTROVERSY.
Madeleine glared up at that filmy structure. There were holes in the netting you could have passed a small planet through, places where thousand-kilometre threads seemed to have been burned or melted or distorted. Controversy.
‘Wars have been fought here,’ Malenfant said bluntly.
THE RACES OF THE GALAXY ARE VERY DIVERGENT. UNITY DISSOLVES. THERE IS FREQUENT CONFLICT. SOMETIMES A RACE WILL SEEK TO TAKE THIS TECHNOLOGY AND USE IT FOR ITS OWN PURPOSES; THE OTHERS MUST MOUNT A COALITION TO STOP THE ROGUE. SOMETIMES A RACE WILL SIMPLY ATTEMPT TO IMPOSE ITS WILL ON OTHERS. THAT USUALLY ENDS IN CONFLICT, AND THE EXPULSION OR EXTERMINATION OF THE AMBITIOUS.
Malenfant laughed. ‘Infighting. Sounds like every construction project I ever worked on.’
THERE ARE DIVERGENCES AMONG US.
Madeleine looked up, startled. ‘You mean, even among the Gaijin?’
THERE ARE FACTIONS WHO WOULD ARGUE THAT WE SHOULD ABANDON THE PROJECT TO OTHER RACES, CALCULATING –
Malenfant grunted. ‘Calculating that the others will finish the job for you – without you incurring the costs of the work. Gambling on the altruism of others, while acting selfishly. Games theory.’
OTHERS SEEK A TIME SYMMETRY …
Malenfant seemed baffled by that, but Madeleine thought she understood. ‘Like the Moon flowers, Malenfant. If the Gaijin could train themselves to think backward in time, then they needn’t face this – terminus – in the future.’
Malenfant laughed at the Gaijin, mocking.
Madeleine felt disturbed at this blatant evidence of discord among the Gaijin. Weren’t they supposed to merge into some kind of super-mind, make decisions by consensus, with none of the crude arguing and splits of human beings? Dissension like this, so visible, must represent an agony of indecision in the Gaijin community, faced by the immense challenge of the star sail project. Indecision – or schizophrenia.
Malenfant said, still challenging, ‘But your factions are wrong. Aren’t they? Completing this project isn’t a question of a game, theoretical or not. It is a question of sacrifice.’
Sacrifice? Madeleine wondered. Of what – or who?
MALENFANT, YOU ARE SHORT-LIVED – YOUR LIVES SO BRIEF, IN FACT, THAT YOU CAN OBSERVE NONE OF THE UNIVERSE’S SIGNIFICANT PROCESSES. YOUR RESPONSE TO OUR PRESENCE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM WAS SPLINTERED, CHAOTIC, FLUID. YOU DO NOT EVEN UNDERSTAND YOURSELVES.
AND YET YOU TRANSCEND YOUR BREVITY. AND YET HUMANS, DOOMED TO BRIEF LIVES, CHOOSE DEATH VOLUNTARILY – FOR THE SAKE OF AN IDEA. AND WITH EVERY DEATH, THAT IDEA GROWS STRONGER.
WE HAVE ENCOUNTERED MANY SPECIES ON OUR TRAVELS. RARELY HAVE WE ENCOUNTERED SUCH A CAPACITY FOR FAITH.
Malenfant stalked back and forth on the hill-side, obviously torn. ‘What are you talking about, Cassiopeia? Do you expect me to start a religion? You want me to teach faith to the toiling robots and cyborgs and what-not who are building the neutron star sail – something to unite them, to force them to bury their differences, to persist and complete the project across generations … Is that it?’
No, Madeleine thought sadly. No, she is asking for something much more fundamental than that.
She wants you, Malenfant. She wants your soul.
And the Gaijin started talking of mind, and identity, and memes, idea viruses.
To Cassiopeia, Malenfant was scarcely sentient at all. From the Gaijin’s point of view, Malenfant’s mind was no more than a coalition of warring idea-viruses, uneasy, illogically constructed, temporary. The ideas grouped together in complexes that reinforced each other, mutually aiding replication – just as those other replicators, genes, worked together through human bodies to promote their own reproduction.
Yes, Madeleine thought, beginning to understand. And the most fundamental idea complex was the sense of self.
A self was a collection of memories, beliefs, possession, hopes, fears, dreams: all of them ideas, or receptacles for ideas. If an idea accreted to the self – if it became Malenfant’s idea, to be defended, if necessary, with his life – then its chance of replication was much stronger. His sense of self, of himself, was an illusion. Just a web woven by the manipulating idea viruses.
The Gaijin had no such sense of self. But sometimes, that was what you needed.
Malenfant understood. ‘Every damn one of the Gaijin has a memory that stretches back to those ugly yellow seas on the Cannonball. But they are – fluid. They break up into their component parts and scatter around and reassemble; or they merge in great ugly swarms and come out shuffled around. Identity for them is a transient thing, a pattern, like the shadow of a passing cloud. Not for us, though. And that’s why the Gaijin don’t have this.’ He stabbed a finger at his chest. ‘They don’t have a sense of me.’
And without self, Madeleine saw, there could be no self-sacrifice.
That was why the Gaijin couldn’t handle the Reboot prevention project. Only humans, it seemed – slaves of replicating ideas, nurtured and comforted by the illusion of the self – might be strong enough, crazy enough, for that.
Through the dogged sense of his own character, Malenfant must give the fragmented beings toiling here a sense of purpose, of worth beyond their own sentience. A sense of sacrifice, of faith, of self. To help the Gaijin, to save the Galaxy, Malenfant was going to have to become like the Gaijin. He was going to have to lose himself … and, in the incomprehensible community that laboured over the strands of the sail, find himself again.
Malenfant, standing before the spidery Gaijin, was trembling. ‘And you think this will work?’
No, Madeleine thought. But they are desperate. This is a throw of the dice. What else can they do?
The Gaijin didn’t reply.
‘… I can’t do this,’ Malenfant whispered at last, folding his hands over and over. ‘Don’t ask me. Take it away from me.’
Madeleine longed to run to him, to embrace him, offer him simple human comfort, animal warmth. But she knew she must not.
And still the Gaijin would not reply.
Malenfant stalked off over the empty grassland, alone.
Madeleine slept.
When she woke, Malenfant was still gone.
She lay on her back, peering up at a sky crowded with stars and glowing dust clouds. The stars seemed small, uniform, few of them bright and blue and young, as if they were deprived of fuel in this crammed space – as perhaps they were. And the dust clouds were disrupted, torn into ragged sheets and filaments by the immense forces that operated here.
Towards the heart of the Galaxy itself, there was structure, Madeleine saw. Laced over a backdrop of star swarms she made out two loose rings of light, roughly concentric, from her point of view tipped to ellipticity. The rings were complex: she saw gas and dust, stars gathered into small, compact globular clusters, spherical knots of all-but-identical pinpoints. In one place the outer ring had erupted into a vast knot of star formation, tens of thousands of hot young blue stars blaring light from the ragged heart of a pink-white cloud. The rings were like expanding ripples, she saw, or billows of gas from some explosion. But if there had been an explosion it must have been immense indeed; that outermost ring was a coherent object a thousand light years across, big enough to have contained almost all the naked-eye stars visible from Earth.
And when Madeleine lifted her head, she saw that the inner ring was actually the base of an even larger formation that rose up and out of the general plane of the Galaxy. It was a ragged arch, traced out by filaments of shining gas, arching high into the less crowded sky above. It reminded her of images of solar flares, curving gusts of gas shaped by the sun’s magnetic field – but this, of course, was immeasurably vaster, an arch spanning hundreds of light years. And rising out of the arch she glimpsed more immensity still, a vast jet of gas that thrust out of the Galaxy’s plane, glimmering across thousands of light years before dissipating into the dark.
It was a hierarchy of enormity, towering over her, endless expansions of scale up into the dark.
But of the Galaxy centre itself, she could only see a tight, impenetrable cluster of stars – many thousands of them, swarming impossibly close together, closer to each other than the planets of the solar system. Whatever structure lay deeper still was hidden by those crowded acolyte stars.
The Gaijin still stood on the ridge, silhouetted against the pulsar’s glow, hatefully silent.
Malenfant still hadn’t returned. Madeleine tried to imagine what was going through his head, as he tried to submit himself to an unknown alien horror that would, it seemed, take apart even his humanity.
Madeleine got to her feet and stalked up to the Gaijin, confronting it. She was aware of Neandertals watching her curiously. They signed to each other, obscurely. Look at crazy flathead.
Madeleine shouted, ‘Why can’t you leave us alone? You came to our planet uninvited, you used up our resources, you screwed up our history –’
The Gaijin swivelled with eerie precision. WE MINED ASTEROIDS YOU PROBABLY WOULD NEVER HAVE REACHED. WITHOUT US YOU WOULD HAVE REMAINED UNAWARE OF THE CRACKERS UNTIL THEY REACHED THE HEART OF YOUR SYSTEM. AS TO YOUR HISTORY, THAT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. WE DID NOT INTERVENE. BUT MOST OF YOU WOULD NOT HAVE WISHED THAT ANYHOW.
‘You fucking immortal robots, you’re so damn smug. But for all your powers, you need Malenfant … But why Malenfant, for God’s sake?’
REID MALENFANT IS SELF-SELECTED. MADELEINE MEACHER, RECALL THAT HE MADE HIS WAY, SINGLE-HANDED, TO THE CENTRE OF OUR PROJECTS TWICE OVER, FIRST THROUGH THE ALPHA CENTAURI GATEWAY AND THEN THROUGH IO.
‘Reid Malenfant is a stubborn, dogged son-of-a-bitch. But he is still just a human being. Must he die?’
The Gaijin hesitated, for long minutes. Then: HE WILL NOT DIE.
No, she thought. He must endure something much more strange than that. As he seemed to know.
The Gaijin raised one spindly leg, as if inspecting it. MADELEINE MEACHER, IF YOU WISH US TO SPARE HIM, WE WILL COMPLY.
She was taken aback. ‘… What has it to do with me?’
YOU ARE HUMAN. YOU ARE MALENFANT’S FRIEND. YOU MADE A SACRIFICE OF YOUR OWN, TO FOLLOW HIM HERE. AND SO YOU HAVE RESPONSIBILITY. IF YOU WISH US TO SPARE MALENFANT, THEN SAY SO. WE WILL COMPLY.
‘And then what?’
WE HAVE SADDLE POINT GATEWAYS. WE CAN SEND HIM HOME, TO EARTH. BOTH OF YOU. WE CANNOT AVOID THE TIME DISLOCATION. BUT YOU CAN LIVE ON.
‘Even if he wants to go on?’
IT IS HARD FOR MALENFANT TO MAKE THE RIGHT CHOICE. FOR ANY HUMAN THIS WOULD BE SO. YOUR DECISION OVERRIDES HIS.
‘And if you let him go – then what about the project, the sail?’
WE MUST FIND ANOTHER WAY.
‘The Reboot would become inevitable.’
WE MUST FIND ANOTHER WAY.
Madeleine sank to the grass. Shit, she thought. She hadn’t expected this.
The notion of saving a Galaxy of sentient creatures from arbitrary annihilation was too big – too much for her to imagine, too grandiose. But she had lived through the overwhelming destructiveness of the attempted Eetie colonization of the solar system, found evidence of the other wasteful waves of horror of the deep past. She had seen it for herself.
And you once built a world, Madeleine. You’ve been known to show a little hubris yourself.
If this project succeeds, perhaps humans, and species like them, would never have to suffer such an ordeal again. Isn’t one man’s life worth such a prize?
But who am I to make that call?
… There was another option, she thought, that neither of them had expressed, neither she nor the Gaijin.
It doesn’t have to be Malenfant. Maybe I could take his place. Save him, and progress the project anyhow.
She wrapped her arms around herself. Malenfant is full of doubt and fear. Even now he might not be able to make it, make the sacrifice. But he is out there gathering his strength, his purpose. I could never emulate that.
The Gaijin waited with metallic patience.
‘Take him,’ she whispered, hating herself as she uttered the words. ‘Take Malenfant.’ Take him; spare me.
And, as soon as she made the choice, she remembered Malenfant’s inexplicable coldness when she arrived here.
She had ended up betraying him. Just as, she realized now, he had known she would, right from the beginning.
She buried her face in her hands.
After maybe a full day, Malenfant returned. Madeleine was sitting beside a sluggish stream, desultorily watching the evolution of Galaxy-core gas streamers.
Malenfant came running up.
He threw himself to the grass beside her. He was sweating, his bald pate slick, and he was breathing hard. ‘Jogging,’ he said. ‘Clears the head.’ He curled to a sitting position, cat-like. ‘This is a hell of a thing, isn’t it, Madeleine? Who would have thought it? … Nemoto should see me now. My mom should see me now.’ The change in him was startling. He seemed vigorous, rested, confident, focused. Even cheerful.
But she could see the battered photograph of his dead wife tucked into his sleeve.
She hugged her knees, full of guilt, unable to meet his eyes. ‘Have you decided what to do?’
‘There’s no real choice, is there?’
Tentatively she reached for his hand; he grabbed it, squeezed hard, his calm strength evident. ‘Malenfant, aren’t you afraid?’
He shrugged. ‘I was afraid the first time I climbed aboard a Shuttle orbiter, sitting up there on top of millions of tonnes of high explosive, in a rickety old ship that had been flying thirty years already. I was afraid the first time I looked into a Saddle Point gateway, not knowing what lay beyond. But I still climbed aboard that Shuttle, still went through the gateway.’ He glanced at her. ‘What about you? After …’
‘After you’re dead?’ she snapped impulsively.
He flinched, and she instantly regretted it.
She told him about the Gaijin’s offer of a ride home.
‘Take it. Go see Earth, Madeleine.’
‘But it won’t be my Earth.’
He shrugged. ‘What else is there?’
She said shyly, ‘I’ve been thinking. What if we – the sentients of the Galaxy, of this generation – do manage to come through the next Reboot? What if this time we don’t have to go back to the ponds? What if we get a chance to keep on building? If I keep on rattling around the Saddle Point gateways, maybe I’ll get to see some of that.’
He nodded. ‘Beaming between the stars, while the network gets extended. Onward and onward, without limit. I like it.’
‘Yeah.’ She glanced up. ‘Maybe I’ll get to see Andromeda, before I die. Or maybe not.’
‘There are worse ambitions.’
‘… Malenfant. Come with me.’
He shook his head. ‘Can’t do it, Madeleine. I’ve thought it over. And I bought Cassiopeia’s pitch.’ He looked up at the sky. ‘You know, as a kid I used to lie at night out on the lawn, soaking up dew and looking at the stars, trying to feel the Earth turning under me. It felt wonderful to be alive – hell, to be ten years old, anyhow. But I knew that the Earth was just a ball of rock, on the fringe of a nondescript galaxy. I just couldn’t believe, even then, that there was nobody out there looking back at me down here. But I used to wonder what would be the point of my life, of human existence, if the universe really was empty. What would there be for us to do but survive, doggedly, as long as possible? Which didn’t seem too attractive a prospect to me.
‘Well, now I know the universe isn’t empty, but crowded with life. And, even with the wars and extinctions and all, isn’t that better than the alternative – better than nothing? And you know, I think I even figured out the purpose of our lives in such a universe – mine, anyhow. To make it better for those who follow us. What else is there to do?’ He glanced at her, eyes cloudy. ‘Does that make any sense?’
‘Yes. But, Malenfant, the cost –’
‘Nemoto said it would be like this. Humans can’t change history, except this way. One of us, alone, going to the edge …’
Suddenly it was too much for her; she covered her face with her hands. ‘Fuck history, Malenfant. Fuck the destiny of the universe. We’re talking about you.’
He put an arm around her shoulders; he was warm, his body still hot from his run. ‘It’s okay,’ he said, trying to soothe her. ‘It’s okay. You know what? I think the Gaijin are jealous. Jealous, of us wretched little pink worms. Because we got something they don’t, something more precious than all the Swiss-Army-knife body parts in the universe, something more precious than a billion years of life.’
But now the Gaijin stood before them, suddenly there, tall and stark.
Malenfant said, his voice unsteady, ‘So soon, Cassiopeia?’
I AM SORRY, MALENFANT.
Malenfant straightened up, withdrew his arm from Madeleine’s shoulders. She felt the reluctance in the gesture. She’d provided him comfort after all, she realized; by caring for her, he had been able to put off confronting the reality of it all. But now, in the silent person of the Gaijin, the reality was here, and he had to face it alone.
But here was old Esau, grinning from one side to the other of his flat face, deep eyes full of starlight. He was signing: the fist to the forehead, then left palm flat upright, supporting the right fist, which was making a thumbs-up gesture. Hey, Stupid. I’ll help you.
Malenfant signed back. What help me what what?
Forefinger and middle finger together, on both hands, held out like a knife; a sharp chop downwards, a stark, unmistakable sign. To die.