Phase Space (45 page)

My name is Reid Malenfant.

You know me, Michael. And you know I was always an incorrigible space cadet. I campaigned for, among other things, private mining expeditions to the asteroids. I hope you know my pal, Frank J. Paulis, who went out there and did what I only talked about.

But I don’t want to talk about that. Not here, not in this letter. I want to be more personal. I want you to understand why your grandpappy gave over his life to a single, consuming project.

For me, it started with a simple question: What use are the stars
?

Paulis had installed basic life-support gear in the Bubble. Celso already had his suit off and was busy collapsing our portable airlock.

Through the net-like walls of the Bubble I looked back at the
Sally Brind.
I could see at one extreme the fat cone shape of Paulis’s Earth return capsule, and at the other end the angular, spidery form of the strut sections that held the nuke reactor and its shielding.

Beside our glittering toy-ship the
Brind
looked crude, as if knocked together by stone axes.

I had grown to hate the damn
Brind.
In the months since we left lunar orbit, she had become a prison to me. Now, as I looked back at her, drifting in this purposeless immensity, she looked like home.

When I took off my suit off I found I’d suffered some oedema, swelling caused by the accumulation of fluid under my skin – in the webs of my fingers, in places where the zippers had run, and a few other places where the suit hadn’t fit as well as it should. The kind of stuff the astronauts never tell you about. But there was no pain, no loss of muscle or joint function that I could detect.

‘Report,’ Paulis’s voice, loud in our ears, ordered.

‘The only instrument is a display, like a softscreen,’ said Celso. He inspected it calmly. It showed a network of threads against a background of starlike dots.

‘Your interpretation?’

‘This may be an image of our destination. And if these are cosmic strings,’ Celso said dryly, ‘we are going further than I had imagined.’

I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I looked more closely at the starlike dots. They were little spirals.

Galaxies?

Celso continued to poke around. ‘The life-support equipment is functioning nominally.’

‘I’ve given you enough for about two months,’ said Paulis. ‘If you’re not back by then, you probably won’t be coming back at all.’

Celso nodded.

‘Time’s up,’ Paulis said. ‘Shut the hatch, Malenfant.’

I shot back, ‘You’ll pay for this, Paulis.’

‘I don’t think I’ll be losing much sleep, frankly.’ Then, with steel: ‘Shut the hatch, Malenfant. I want to see you do it.’

Celso touched my shoulder. ‘Do not be concerned, my friend.’ With a lot of dignity he pressed a wall-mounted push-button.

The hatch melted into the hull, closing us in.

The Bubble quivered. I clung to the soft wall.

Paulis’s voice cut out. The sun disappeared. Electric-blue light pulsed in the sky. There was no sensation of movement.

But suddenly – impossibly – there was a planet outside, a fat steel-grey ball. A world of water.
Earth
?

It looked like Earth. But, despite my sudden, reluctant stab of hope, I knew immediately it was not Earth.

Celso’s face was working as he gazed out of the Bubble, his softscreen jammed against the hull, gathering images. ‘A big world, larger than Earth – but what difference does that make? Higher surface gravity. More internal heat trapped. A thicker crust, but hotter, more flexible; lots of volcanoes. And the crust couldn’t support mountains in that powerful gravity … Deep oceans, no mountains tall enough to peak out of the water – life clustering around deep-ocean thermal vents –’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

‘We are already far from home.’

I said tightly, ‘I can see that.’

He looked at me steadily, and rested his hands on my shoulders. ‘Michael,
we have already been projected to the system of another star.
I think –’

There was a faint surge. I saw something like streetlamps flying past. And then a dim pool of light soaked across space below us.

Celso grunted. ‘Ah. I think we have accelerated.’

With a click, the hull turned transparent as glass.

The streetlamps had been stars.

And the puddle of light was a swirl, a bulging yellow-white core wrapped around by streaky spiral-shaped arms.

It was the Galaxy. It fell away from us.

That was how far I had already come, how fast I was moving.

I assumed a foetal position and stayed that way for a long time.

As a kid I used to lie 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. Michael, if you’re ten years old when you get to read this, try it sometime. Even if you’re a hundred, try it anyhow.

But even then I knew that the Earth was just a ball of rock, on the fringe of a nondescript galaxy. And I just couldn’t believe that there was nobody out there looking back at me down here. Was it really possible that this was the only place where life had taken hold
–
that only here were there minds and eyes capable of looking out and wondering
?

Because if so, what use are the stars? All those suns and worlds, spinning through the void, the grand complexity of creation unwinding all the way out of the Big Bang itself …

Even then I saw space as a high frontier, a sky to be mined, a resource for humanity. Still do. But is that all it is? Could the sky
really be nothing more than an empty stage for mankind to strut and squabble
?

And what if we blow ourselves up? Will the universe just evolve on, like a huge piece of clockwork slowly running down, utterly devoid of life and mind? What would be the use of that
?

Much later, I learned that this kind of ‘argument from utility’ goes back all the way to the Romans
–
Lucretius, in fact, in the first century AD. Alien minds must exist, because otherwise the stars would be purposeless. Right
?

Sure. But if so, where are they
?

I bet this bothers you too, Michael. Wouldn’t be a Malenfant otherwise!

Celso spoke to me soothingly. Eventually I uncurled.

The sky was embroidered with knots and threads. A fat grey cloud drifted past.

After a moment, with the help of Celso, I got it into perspective. The embroidery was made up of galaxies. The cloud was a supercluster of galaxies.

We were moving fast enough to make a supercluster shift against the general background.

‘We must be travelling through some sort of hyperspace,’ Celso lectured. ‘We hop from point to point. Or perhaps this is some variant of teleportation. Even the images we see must be an illusion, manufactured for our comfort.’

‘I don’t want to know.’

‘But you should have been prepared for all this,’ said Celso kindly. ‘You saw the image – the distant galaxies, the cosmic strings.’

‘Celso –’ I resisted the temptation to wrap my arms around my head. ‘Please. You aren’t helping me.’

He looked at me steadily. Supercluster light bathed his aquiline profile; he was the sort you’d pick as an ambassador for the human race. I hate people like that. ‘If the builders of this vessel are transporting us across such distances, there is nothing to fear. With such powers they can surely preserve our lives with negligible effort.’

‘Or sit on our skulls with less.’

‘There is nothing to fear save your own human failings.’

I sucked weak coffee from a nippled flask. ‘You’re starting to sound like Paulis.’

He laughed. ‘I am sorry.’ He turned back to the drifting super-cluster, calm, fascinated.

Just think about it, Michael. Life on Earth got started just about as soon as it could – as soon as the rocks cooled and the oceans gathered. Furthermore, life spread over Earth as fast and as far as it could. And already we’re starting to spread to other worlds. Surely this can’t be a unique trait of Earth life.

So how come nobody has come spreading all over us
?

Of course the universe is a big place. But even crawling along with dinky ships that only reach a fraction of lightspeed – ships we could easily start building now – we could colonize the Galaxy in a few tens of millions of years. 100 million, tops.

100 million years: it seems an immense time – after all, 100 million years ago dinosaurs ruled the Earth. But the Galaxy is 100 times older still. There has been time for Galactic colonization to have happened many times since the birth of the stars.

Remember, all it takes is for one race somewhere to have evolved the will and the means to colonize; and once the process has started it’s hard to see what could stop it.

But, as a kid on that lawn, I didn’t see them.

Advanced civilizations ought to be very noticeable. Even we blare out on radio frequencies. Why, with our giant radio telescopes we could detect a civilization no more advanced than ours anywhere in the Galaxy. But we don’t.

We seem to be surrounded by emptiness and silence. There’s something wrong.

This is called the Fermi Paradox.

The journey was long. And what made it worse was that we didn’t know
how
long it would be, or what we would find at the end of it – let alone if we would ever come back again.

The two of us were crammed inside that glittering little Bubble the whole time.

Celso had the patience of a rock. Trying not to think about how afraid I was, I poked sticks into his cage. I ought to have driven him crazy.

‘You have a few “human failings” too,’ I said. ‘Or you wouldn’t have ended up like me, on sale in a debtors’ auction.’

He inclined his noble head. ‘What you say is true. Although I did go there voluntarily.’

I choked on my coffee.

‘My wife is called Maria. We both work in the algae tanks beneath New San Francisco.’

I grimaced. ‘You’ve got my sympathy.’

‘We remain poor people, despite our efforts to educate ourselves. You may know that life is not easy for non-Caucasians in modern California …’ His parents had moved there from the east when Celso was very young. ‘My parents loved California – or at least, the dream of California – a place of hope and tolerance and plenty, the society of the future, the Golden State.’ He smiled. ‘But my parents died disappointed. And the California dream had been dead for decades …’

It all started, he said, with the Proposition 13 vote in 1978. It was a tax revolt, when citizens began to turn their backs on public spending. More ballot initiatives followed, to cut taxes, limit budgets, restrict school-spending discretion, bring in tougher sentencing laws, end affirmative action, ban immigrants from using public services.

‘For fifty years California has been run by a government of ballot initiative. And it is not hard to see who the initiatives are favouring. The whites became a minority in 2005; the rest of the population is Latino, black, Asian and other groups. The ballot initiatives are weapons of resistance by the declining proportion of white voters. With predictable results.’

I could sympathize. As a kid growing up with two radicals for parents – in turn very influenced by my grandfather, the famous Reid Malenfant himself – I soaked up a lot of utopianism. My parents always thought that the future would be better than the present, that people would somehow get smarter and more generous, overcome their limitations, learn to live in harmony and generosity. Save the planet and live in peace. All that stuff.

It didn’t work out that way. Where California led, it seems to me, the rest of the human race has followed, into a pit of selfishness, short-sightedness, bigotry, hatred, greed – while the planet fills up with our shit.