Space (11 page)

It was just like working around the shuttle, if he focused on his immediate environment. But the light was odd. He missed the huge, comforting presence of the Earth; from low Earth orbit, the daylit planet was a constant, overwhelming presence, as bright as a tropical sky. Here there was only the Sun, a remote point source that cast long, sharp shadows; and all around he could see the stars, the immensity that surrounded him.

Now, suddenly -- and for the first time in the whole damn mission -- fear flooded him. Adrenaline pumped into his system, making him feel fluttery as a bird, and his poor old heart started to pound.

Time to get with it, Malenfant.

Resolutely, he worked his right hand controller, and he turned to face the Gaijin artifact.

The artifact was a blank circle, mysterious, framing only stars. He could see nothing that he hadn't seen through the
Perry
's cameras, truthfully; it was just a ring of some shining blue material, its faces polished and barely visible in the wan light of the Sun.

But that interior looked jet black, not reflecting a single photon cast by his helmet lamp.

He glared into the disc of darkness. What are you for? Why are you here?

There was, of course, no reply.

First things first. Let's do a little science here.

He pulsed his thrusters and drifted toward the hoop itself. It was electric blue, glowing as if from within, a wafer-thin band the width of his palm. He could see no seams, no granularity.

He reached out a gloved hand, spacesuit fabric encasing monkey fingers, and tried to touch the hoop. Something invisible made his hand slide away, sideways.

No matter how hard he pushed, how he braced himself with the thrusters, he could get his glove no closer than a millimeter or so from the material. And always that insidious, soapy feeling of being pushed sideways.

He tried running his hand up and down, along the hoop. There were... ripples, invisible but tangible.

He drifted back to the center of the hoop. That sheet of silent darkness faced him, challenging. He cast a shadow on the structure from the distant pinpoint Sun. But where the light struck the hoop's dark interior, it returned nothing: not a highlight, not a speckle of reflection.

Malenfant rummaged in a sleeve pocket with stiff, gloved fingers. He held up his hand to see what he had retrieved. It was his Swiss Army knife. He threw the knife, underhand, into the hoop.

The knife sailed away in a straight line.

When it reached the black sheet it dimmed, and it seemed to Malenfant that it became reddish, as if illuminated by a light that was burning out.

The knife disappeared.

Awkwardly, pulsing his thrusters, he worked his way around the artifact. The MMU was designed to move him in a straight line, not a tight curve; it took some time.

On the far side of the artifact, there was no sign of the knife.

A gateway, then. A gateway, here at the rim of the Solar System. How appropriate, he thought. How iconic.

Time to make a leap of faith, Malenfant. He fired his RCS and began to glide forward.

The gate grew, in his vision, until it was all around him. He was going to pass through it -- if he kept going -- somewhere near the center.

He looked back at the
Perry.
Its huge, misty main antenna was pointed back toward Earth, catching the light of the Sun like a spider web. He could see instrument pallets held away from the hab module's yellowed, cloth-clad bulk, like rear-view mirrors. The pallets were arrays of lenses, their black gazes uniformly fixed on him.

Just one press of his controller and he could stop right here, go back.

He reached the center of the disc. An electric blue light bathed him. He leaned forward inside his stiff HUT unit, so he could look up.

The artifact had come to life. The electric blue light was glowing from the substance of the circle itself. He could see speckles in the light. Coherent, then. And when he looked down at his suit, he saw how the white fabric was crisscrossed by the passage of dozens of points of electric blue glow.

Lasers. Was he being scanned?

"This changes everything," he said.

The blue light increased in intensity, until it blinded him. There was a single instant of pain--

"We think a Gaijin flower-ship is a variant of the old Bussard ramjet design," Sally Brind said. She had spread a fold-up softscreen over one time-smoothed wall of Nemoto's lunar cave. Now -- Maura squinted to see -- the screen filled up with antique design concepts: line images of gauzy, unlikely craft, obsessively labeled with captions and arrows. "It is a notion that goes back to the 1960s..."

Nemoto's home -- here on the Japanese Moon, deep in Farside -- had turned out to be a crude, outmoded subsurface shack close to the infrared observatory where she'd made her first discovery of Gaijin activity in the belt. Here, it seemed, Nemoto had lived for the best part of two decades. Maura thought
she
couldn't stand it for more than a couple of hours.

There wasn't even anywhere to sit, aside from Nemoto's low pallet, Maura had immediately noticed, and both Sally and Maura had carefully avoided
that.
Fortunately the Moon's low gravity made the bare rock floor relatively forgiving, even for the thin flesh that now stretched over Maura's fragile bones. There were some concessions to humanity -- an ancient and worn scrap of
tatami,
a
tokonoma
alcove containing a
jinja
-- a small, lightweight Shinto shrine. But most of the floor and wall space, even here in Nemoto's living area, was taken up with science equipment: anonymous white boxes that might have been power sources or sensors or sample boxes, cables draped over the floor, a couple of small, old-fashioned softscreens.

As Sally spoke, Nemoto -- thin, gaunt, eyes invisible within dark hollows -- pottered about her own projects. Walking with tiny, cautious steps, she minutely adjusted her equipment -- or, bizarrely, watered the small plants that flourished on brackets on the walls, bathed by light from bright halide lamps.

Still, the languid flow of the water from Nemoto's can -- great fat droplets oscillating as they descended toward the tiny green leaves -- was oddly soothing.

Sally continued her analysis of the Gaijin's putative technology. "The ramjet was always seen as one way to meet the challenge of interstellar journeys. The enormous distances even to the nearest stars would require an immense amount of fuel. With a ramjet, you don't need to carry any fuel at all.

"Space, you see, isn't empty. Even between the stars there are tenuous clouds of gas, mostly hydrogen. Bussard, the concept originator, proposed drawing in this gas, concentrating it, and pushing it into a fusion reaction -- just as hydrogen is burned into helium at the heart of the Sun.

"The trouble is, those gas clouds are
so
thin your inlet scoop has to be gigantic. So Bussard suggested using magnetic fields to pull in gas from an immense volume, hundreds of thousands of kilometers around."

She brought up another picture: an imaginary starship startlingly like a marine creature -- a squid, perhaps, Maura thought -- a cylindrical body with giant outreaching magnetic arms, preceded by darting shafts of light.

"The interstellar gas would first have to be electrically charged, to be deflected by the magnetic scoops. So you would pepper it with laser beams, as you see here, to heat it to a plasma, as hot as the surface of the Sun. It's an exotic, difficult concept, but it's still easier than hauling along all your fuel."

"Except," Nemoto murmured, laboring at her gadgets, "that it could never work."

"Correct..."

Maura had been privy to similar breakdowns and extrapolations emanating from the Department of Defense and the U.S. Air and Space Force, and -- given that Sally's summary was based on no more than piecework by various space buff special-interest groups and NASA refugees in various corners of the Department of Agriculture -- Maura thought it hung together pretty well.

The problem with Bussard's design was that only a hundredth of all that incoming gas could actually be used as fuel. The rest would pile up before the accelerating craft, clogging its magnetic intakes; Bussard's beautiful ship would expend so much energy pushing through this logjam it could never achieve the kind of speeds essential for interstellar flight.

Sally presented various developments of the basic proposal to get around this fundamental limitation. The most promising was called RAIR -- pronounced "rare" -- for Ram-Augmented Interstellar Rocket. Here, the intake of interstellar hydrogen would be greatly reduced, and would be used only to top up a store of hydrogen fuel the starship was already carrying. It was thought that the RAIR design could perform two or three times better than the Bussard system, and achieve perhaps 10 or 20 percent of the speed of light.

"And, as far as we can tell from the
Bruno
data," Sally said, "that Gaijin flower-ship was pretty much a RAIR design: exotic-looking, but nothing we can't comprehend.
Bruno
actually passed through what seemed to be a stream of exhaust, before it ceased to broadcast." A nice euphemism, thought Maura, for
was trapped and dismantled.
"The exhaust was typical of products of a straightforward deuterium-helium-3 fusion reaction, of the type we've been able to achieve on Earth for some decades."

Sally hesitated. She was a small woman, neat, earnest, troubled. "There are puzzles here.
We
can think of a dozen ways the Gaijin design could be improved -- nothing that's in our engineering grasp right now, but certainly nothing that's beyond our physics. For instance the deuterium-helium fusion reaction is about as low-energy and clunky as you can get. There are
much
more productive alternatives, like reactions involving boron or lithium. I think I always imagined that when ET finally showed up, she would have technology beyond our wildest dreams -- beyond our imagining. Well, the flower-ships are pretty, but they aren't the way
we'd
choose to travel to the stars--"

"Especially not in this region," Nemoto said evenly.

"What do you mean?" Maura said.

Nemoto smiled thinly, the bones of her face showing through papery skin. "Now that we are, like it or not, part of an interstellar community, it pays to understand the geography of our new terrain. The interstellar medium, the gases that would power a ramjet, is not uniform. The Sun happens not to be in a very, umm, cloudy corner of the Orion Spiral Arm. We are moving, in fact, through what is called the ICM -- the intercloud medium. Not a good resource for a ramjet. But of course the flower-ships are not interstellar craft." She eyed Maura. "You seem surprised. Isn't that obvious? These ships, with their small fraction of light speed, would take many decades even to reach Alpha Centauri."

"But time dilation -- clocks slowing down as you speed up--" Maura said.

Nemoto shook her head. "Ten percent of lightspeed is much too slow for such effects to become significant. The flower-ships are interplanetary cruisers, designed for travel at speeds well below that of light, within the relatively dense medium close to a star. The Gaijin are interplanetary voyagers; only accidentally did they become interstellar pioneers."

"Then," Maura asked reasonably, "how did they get here?"

Nemoto smiled. "The same way Malenfant has departed the system."

"Just tell me."

"Teleportation."

Maura had brought Sally Brind here because she'd grown frustrated, even worried, by the passage of a full year since Malenfant's disappearance: a year in which nothing had happened.

Nothing obvious had changed about the Gaijin's behavior. The whole thing had long vanished from the mental maps of most of the public and commentators, who had dismissed Malenfant's remarkable jaunt as just another odd subplot in a slow, rather dull saga that already spanned decades. The philosophers continued to debate and agonize over the meaning of the reality of the Gaijin for human existence. The military were, as always, war-gaming their way through various lurid scenarios, mostly involving the Gaijin invasion of Earth and the Moon, huge armed flower-ships hurling lumps of asteroid rock at the helpless worlds.

Meanwhile, the various governments and other responsible authorities were consumed by indecision.

Truthfully, the facts were still too sparse, questions still proliferating faster than answers were being obtained, mankind's image of these alien intruders still informed more by old fictional images than any hard science. The picture was not converging, Maura realized with dismay, and history was drifting away from meaningful engagement with the Gaijin.

Which was why she had set up this meeting. Nemoto had, after all, been the first to detect the Gaijin. She had quickly understood the implications of her discovery, and she had immediately selected the one person, Reid Malenfant, who had, in retrospect, been best placed to help articulate her discovery to the world, and even to do something about it.

If anybody could help Maura think through the jungle of possibilities of the future, it was surely Nemoto.

But still -- teleportation?

Maura closed her eyes. So I have to imagine these Gaijine-mailing themselves from star to star. She suppressed a foolish laugh.

Nemoto continued to tinker with her apparatus, her plants.

"Let's be clear," Sally Brind said slowly. "You think the hoop Malenfant found was some kind of teleportation node. Then why not locate this... gateway... in the asteroid belt? Why place it all the way out on the rim of the system, with all the trouble and effort that causes?"

Nemoto kept her counsel, letting the younger woman think it through.

Sally snapped her fingers. "But if you teleport from another star you must basically fire a stream of complex information by conventional signal channels -- that is, light or radio waves -- at the star system, the target. And the place to pick that up with greatest fidelity is the star's solar focus, where the signal gain is in the hundreds of millions... But Malenfant can't have known this. He can't have deduced the mechanism of teleportation."