Engineering Infinity (10 page)

“So they sent everything but the
people.
Two hundred and eighty thousand tonnes
in
one shot, to Mars.”

Bulldozers and cranes, fuel
tanks, powdered cement, bags of seeds and food, space suits, even a complete,
dismantled nuclear reactor: the
Tsarina
had included
everything potential colonists might need on a new world. Its builders knew it
had gone up, knew it had gotten to Mars; but they didn’t know where it had
landed, or whether it had landed intact.

A day after his visit to the
Tsarina
site, Gennady had sat outside this trailer with
Egorov, Kyzdygoi and a few other officials of the new Soviet. They’d drunk a
few beers and talked about the plan. “When our data-mining turned up the
Tsarina’
s manifest, it was like a light from heaven,”
Egorov had said, his hands opening eloquently in the firelight. “Suddenly we
saw what was possible, how to revive our people - all the world’s people -
around a new hope, after all hope had gone. Something that would combine Apollo
and Trinity into one event, and suddenly both would take on the meaning they
always needed to have.”

Egorov had started a crash
program to build an Orion rocket. They couldn’t get fissionable materials -
Gennady and his people had locked those up tightly and for all time. But the
metastables promised a different approach.

“We hoped the
Tsarina
was on Mars and intact, but we didn’t know for
sure, until Ambrose leaked his pictures.”

The new
Tsarina
would use a series of small, clean fusion blasts to lift off and, at the far
end, to land again. Thanks to Ambrose, they knew where the
Tsarina
was. It didn’t matter that the Americans did too; nobody else had a plan to get
there.

“And by the time they get their
acts together, we’ll have built a city,” said Kyzdygoi. She was wide-eyed with
the power of the idea. “Because we’re not going there two at a time, like Noah
in his Ark. We’re
all
going.” And she swung her arm
to indicate the hundreds of campfires burning all around them, where thousands
of men, women and children, hand-picked from among the citizens of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics Online, waited to amaze the world.

Gennady hunkered down in a little
fort he’d built out of seat cushions, and waited.

It was like a camera flash, and a
second later there was a second, then a third, and then the whole trailer
bounced into the air and everything Gennady hadn’t tied down went tumbling. The
windows shattered and he landed on cushions and found himself staring across
suddenly open air at the immolation of the building site.

The flickering flashes continued,
coming from above now. The pyramid was gone, and the cranes and heavy machinery
lay tumbled like a child’s toys, all burning.

Flash. Flash.

It was really happening.

Flash. Flash.
Flash...

Gradually, Gennady began to be
able to hear again. He came to realize that monstrous thunder was rolling
across the steppe, like a god’s drumbeat in time with the flashes. It faded, as
the flashes faded, until there was nothing but the ringing in his ears, and the
orange flicker of flame from the launch site.

He staggered out to find perfect
devastation. Once, this must once have been a common sight on the steppe; but
his Geiger counter barely registered any radiation at all.

And in that, of course, lay a
terrible irony. Egorov and his people had indeed divided history in two, but
not in the way they’d imagined.

Gennady ran for the command
trailer. He only had a few minutes before the air forces of half a dozen
nations descended on this place. The trailer had survived the initial blast, so
he scrounged until he found a jerry-can full of gasoline, and then he climbed
in.

There they were: Egorov’s
servers. The EMP from the little nukes might have wiped its drives, but Gennady
couldn’t take the chance. He poured gasoline all over the computers, made a
trail back to the door, then as the whole trailer went up behind him, ran to
the leaning-but-intact metal shed where the metastables had been processed, and
he did the same to it.

That afternoon, as he and Egorov
were watching the orderly queue of people waiting to enter the
New Tsarina
, Gennady had made his final plea. “Your
research into metastables,” Gennady went on. “I need it. All of it, and the
equipment and the backups; anything that might be used to reconstruct what you
did.”

“What happens to the Earth is no
longer our concern,” Egorov said with a frown. “Humanity made a mess here. It’s
not up to us to clean it up.”

“But to destroy it all, you only
need to be indifferent! And I’m asking, please, however much the world may have
disappointed you, don’t leave it like this.” As he spoke, Gennady scanned the
line of people for Ambrose, but couldn’t see him. Nobody had said where the
young American was.

Egorov had sighed in annoyance,
then nodded sharply. “I’ll have all the formulae and the equipment gathered
together. It’s all I have time for, now. You can do what you want with it.”

Gennady watched the flames twist
into the air. He was exhausted, and the sky was full of contrails and gathering
lights. He hadn’t destroyed enough of the evidence; surely, someone would figure
out what Egorov’s people had done. And then... Shoulders slumped under the
burden of that knowledge, he stalked into the darkness at the camp’s perimeter.

His rented Tata sat where they’d
left it when they first arrived here. After Kyzdygoi had confiscated his
glasses at the
Tsarina
site, she’d put them in the
Tata’s glove compartment. They were still there.

Before Gennady put them on, he
took a last unaided look at the burning campsite. Egorov and his people had
escaped, but they’d left Gennady behind to clean up their mess. The metastables
would be back. This new nightmare would get out into the world eventually, and
when it did, the traditional specter of nuclear terrorism would look like a
Halloween ghost in comparison. Could even the conquest of another world make up
for that?

As the choppers settled in
whipping spirals of dust, Gennady rolled up the Tata’s window and put on his
glasses. The
New Tsarina’
s EMP pulses hadn’t killed
them - they booted up right away. And, seconds after they did, a little flag
told him there was an email waiting for him.

It was from Ambrose, and it read:

Gennady:
sorry I didn’t have time to say goodbye.

I just wanted
to say I was wrong. Anything’s possible, even for me.

P.S. My room’s
going to have a fantastic view.

Gennady stared bitterly at the
words.
Anything’s possible...

“For you, maybe,” he said as
soldiers piled out of the choppers.

“Not me.”

Stephen Baxter

Stephen
Baxter is one of the most important science fiction writers to emerge from
Britain in the past thirty years. His
Xeelee
sequence of novels and short stories is arguably the most significant work of
future history in modern science fiction. He is the author of more than forty
books and over 100 short stories. His most recent books are the near-future
disaster duology,
Flood
and
Ark
, and
Stone Spring
, the first novel in
his
Northland
trilogy.

For me, the saga of the Incoming
was above all Edith Black’s story. For she, more than anyone else I knew, was
the one who had a problem with it.

When the news was made public I
drove out of London to visit Edith at her country church. I had to cancel a
dozen appointments to do it, including one with the Prime Minister’s office,
but I knew, as soon as I got out of the car and stood in the soft September
rain, that it had been the right thing to do.

Edith was pottering around
outside the church, wearing overalls and rubber boots and wielding an
alarming-looking industrial-strength jackhammer. But she had a radio blaring
out a phone-in discussion, and indoors, out of the rain, I glimpsed a
widescreen TV and laptop, both scrolling news - mostly fresh projections of
where the Incoming’s decelerating trajectory might deliver them, and new
deep-space images of their “craft,” if such it was, a massive block of ice like
a comet nucleus, leaking very complex patterns of infrared radiation. Edith was
plugged into the world, even out here in the wilds of Essex.

She approached me with a grin,
pushing back goggles under a hard hat. “Toby.” I got a kiss on the cheek and a
brief hug; she smelled of machine oil. We were easy with each other physically.
Fifteen years earlier, in our last year at college, we’d been lovers, briefly;
it had finished with a kind of regretful embarrassment - very English, said our
American friends - but it had proven only a kind of speed bump in our
relationship. “Glad to see you, if surprised. I thought all you civil service
types would be locked down in emergency meetings.”

For a decade I’d been a civil
servant in the environment ministry. “No, but old Thorp” - my minister - “has
been in a continuous COBRA session for twenty-four hours. Much good it’s doing
anybody.”

“I must say it’s not obvious to
the layman what use an environment minister is when the aliens are coming.”

“Well, among the scenarios they’re
discussing is some kind of attack from space. A lot of what we can dream up is
similar to natural disasters - a meteor fall could be like a tsunami, a
sunlight occlusion like a massive volcanic event. And so Thorp is in the mix,
along with health, energy, transport. Of course we’re in contact with other
governments - NATO, the UN. The most urgent issue right now is whether to
signal or not.”

She frowned. “Why wouldn’t you?”

“Security. Edith, remember, we
know absolutely nothing about these guys. What if our signal was interpreted as
a threat? And there are tactical considerations. Any signal would give
information to a potential enemy about our technical capabilities. It would
also give away the very fact that we know they’re here.”

She scoffed. “‘Tactical
considerations.’ Paranoid bullshit! And besides, I bet every kid with a CB
radio is beaming out her heart to ET right now. The whole planet’s alight.”

“Well, that’s true. You can’t
stop it. But still, sending some kind of signal authorised by the government or
an inter-government agency is another step entirely.”

“Oh, come on. You can’t really
believe anybody is going to cross the stars to harm us. What could they
possibly want that would justify the cost of an interstellar mission...?”

So we argued. I’d only been out
of the car for five minutes.

We’d had this kind of discussion
all the way back to late nights in college, some of them in her bed, or mine.
She’d always been drawn to the bigger issues; “to the context,” as she used to
say. Though we’d both started out as maths students, her head had soon expanded
in the exotic intellectual air of the college, and she’d moved on to study
older ways of thinking than the scientific - older questions, still unanswered.
Was there a God? If so, or if not, what was the point of our existence? Why did
we, or indeed anything, exist at all? In her later college years she took
theology options, but quickly burned through that discipline and was left
unsatisfied. She was repelled too by the modern atheists, with their aggressive
denials. So, after college, she had started her own journey through life - a
journey in search of answers. Now, of course, maybe some of those answers had
come swimming in from the stars in search of her.

This was why I’d felt drawn here,
at this particular moment in my life. I needed her perspective. In the wan
daylight I could see the fine patina of lines around the mouth I used to kiss,
and the strands of grey in her red hair. I was sure she suspected, rightly,
that I knew more than I was telling her - more than had been released to the
public. But she didn’t follow that up for now.

“Come see what I’m doing,” she
said, sharply breaking up the debate. “Watch your shoes.” We walked across
muddy grass towards the main door. The core of the old church, dedicated to St
Cuthbert, was a Saxon-era tower; the rest of the fabric was mostly Norman, but
there had been an extensive restoration in Victorian times. Within was a lovely
space, if cold, the stone walls resonating. It was still consecrated, Church of
England, but in this empty agricultural countryside it was one of a widespread
string of churches united in a single parish, and rarely used.

Edith had never joined any of the
established religions, but she had appropriated some of their infrastructure,
she liked to say. And here she had gathered a group of volunteers, wandering
souls more or less like-minded. They worked to maintain the fabric of the
church. And within, she led her group through what you might think of as a mix
of discussions, or prayers, or meditation, or yoga practices - whatever she
could find that seemed to work. This was the way religions used to be before
the big monotheistic creeds took over, she argued. “The only way to reach God,
or anyhow the space beyond us where God ought to be, is by working hard, by
helping other people - and by pushing your mind to the limit of its capability,
and then going a little beyond, and just
listening
.”
Beyond
logos
to
mythos.
She
was always restless, always trying something new. Yet in some ways she was the
most contented person I ever met - at least before the Incoming showed up.

Now, though, she wasn’t content
about the state of the church’s foundations. She showed me where she had dug up
flagstones to reveal sodden ground. “We’re digging out new drainage channels,
but it’s a hell of a job. We may end up rebuilding the founds altogether. The
very deepest level seems to be wood, huge piles of Saxon oak...” She eyed me. “This
church has stood here for a thousand years, without, apparently, facing a
threat such as this before. Some measure of climate change, right?”