Space (27 page)

Ben served her
sambuca,
an Italian liqueur: a new craze, it seemed.
Sambuca
was clear, aniseed flavored. Ben floated Brazilian coffee beans in her glass and set it alight. The alcohol burned blue in the fading light, cupped in the open space above the liquid, and the coffee beans hissed and popped. The flames were to release the oils from the beans, Ben said, and infuse the drink with the flavor of the coffee.

He doused the flames and took careful sips from her glass, testing its temperature for her so that Madeleine would not burn her lips. The flavor of the hot liquid was strong, sharp enough to push at the boundary of her Discontinuity.

They sat under the darkling sky, and the stars came out.

Ben pointed out constellations for her, and he traced other features of the celestial sphere for her, the geography of the sky.

There was the celestial equator, an invisible line that was a projection of Earth's equator on the sky. From here, of course, the equator passed right over their heads. Lights moved along that line, silent, smoothly traversing, like strangely orderly fireflies. They were orbital structures: factories, dwellings, even hotels. Many of them were Chinese, Ben told her; Chinese corporations had built up a close working relationship with the Gaijin. Then he distracted her with another invisible line called the ecliptic. The ecliptic was the equator of the Solar System, the line the planets traced out. It was different from the Earth's equator, because Earth's axis was tipped over through twenty-three degrees or so.

...Rather, the ecliptic
used
to be invisible. Now, Madeleine found, it was marked by a fine row of new stars, medium bright, some glowing white but others a deeper yellow to orange. It was like a row of street lamps.

Those lights were cities, Madeleine learned: the new Gaijin communities, hollowed out of the giant rocks that littered the asteroid belt, burning with fusion light. No human had gotten within an astronomical unit of those new lamps in space.

It was beautiful, chilling, remarkable. The people of this time had grown up with all this. But nevertheless, she thought, the sky is full of cities, and huge incomprehensible ruins. New toilets and telephones she could accept. But even the
Solar System
had changed while she had been away, and who would have anticipated that?

She felt too hot, dizzy.

She considered making a pass at Ben. It would be comforting.

He seemed receptive.

"What about Lena?"

He smiled. "She is not here. I am not there. We are human beings. We have ties of
gurrutu,
of kinship, which will forever bind us."

She took that as assent. She reached out in the dark, and he responded.

They made love in the equatorial heat, a slick of perspiration lubricating their bodies. Ben's skin was a sculpture of firm planes, and his hands were confident and warm. She felt remote, as if her body were a piece of equipment she had to control and monitor.

Ben sensed this. He was tender, and held her for comfort. He was fascinated by her skin, he said: the skin of a woman tanned by the light of different stars.

She couldn't feel his touch.

She slept badly. In her dreams Madeleine spun through rings of powder-blue metal, confronted visions of geometric forms. Triangles, dodecahedra, icosahedra. When Madeleine cried out, Ben held her.

At one point she saw that Ben, sleeping, was about to knock over the coffeepot, and still-hot liquid would pour over his chest. She grabbed the spout, taking a few splashes, and pushed it away. She felt nothing, of course. She wiped her hand dry on a tissue and waited for sleep.

When they woke they found that the coffee had burned her hand severely.

Ben treated her. "The absence of pain," he said, "is evidently a mixed blessing."

She'd heard this before, and had grown impatient. "Pain is an evolutionary relic. Sure, it serves as an early warning system. But we can replace that, right? Get rid of sharp edges. Soak the world with software implants, like my biocomp, to warn and protect us."

Ben studied her. "Do you know what the central reticular formation is?" he asked.

"Why don't you tell me?"

"It's a small section of the brain. And if you excite this formation -- in the brain of a normal human -- the perception of pain disappears. This is the locus of the Discontinuity damage. I am talking of qualia: the inner sensations, aspects of consciousness. Your pain, objectively, still exists, in terms of the response of your body; what has been removed is the corresponding quale, your perception of it. Put an end to discomfort, and there is an end to the emotions linked with pain: fear, grief, pleasure."

"So my inner life is diminished."

"Yes. Consciousness is not well understood, nor the link between mind and body. Perhaps other qualia, too, are being distorted or destroyed by the Saddle Point transitions."

But, Madeleine thought, my dreams are of alien artifacts. Perhaps my qualia are not simply being destroyed. Perhaps they are being... replaced. It was a thought that hadn't struck her before. Resolutely she pushed it away.

"How do you know so much about this?"

"I have ambitions myself to travel to the stars. To see a black hole, before I build my farm on Triton. It is worth studying what would happen to me...

"Madeleine," he added slowly, "there is something I should tell you. Even though Nemoto has forbidden it."

"What?"

"The Chinese discovered it first, in their dealings with the Gaijin. Some say it is a Gaijin gift, in fact. Nemoto has worked to suppress knowledge of it. But I--"

"Tell me, damn it."

"There is a cure for the Discontinuity."

She was electrified. Terrified.

"You know," he said, "the remarkable thing is that the reticular formation is in the oldest part of the brain. We share it with our most ancient ancestors. Madeleine, you have returned from the stars, changed. There are those who think we are forging a new breed of humans, out there beyond the Saddle Points. But perhaps we are merely swimming through the dreams of ancestral fish."

He smiled and held her again.

She stormed into Nemoto's office.

Nemoto was busy; an Ariane launch was imminent. She took a look at the bandaging swathing Madeleine's hand. "You ought to be careful."

"There's a way to reverse the Discontinuity. Isn't there?"

"Oh." Nemoto stood and faced the window, the Ariane mock-up framed there. She held her hands behind her back, and her posture was stiff. "That smart-ass kid. Sit down, Madeleine."

"I said sit down."

Madeleine complied. She had trouble arranging herself on Nemoto's office furniture.

"Yes, there's a way," Nemoto said. "If you're treated correctly before you go through a gateway, the translation can be used to
reverse
the Discontinuity damage."

"Then why are you hiding this?" Madeleine asked. "Send me to a Saddle Point."

Nemoto looked at Madeleine from her mask of a face. "You're sure you want
this
back? The pain, the anguish of being human--"

"Yes."

Nemoto turned and sat down; she nested her hands on the tabletop, the fingers like intertwined twigs. "You have to understand the situation we face," she said. "Most of us are sleeping. But some of us believe we're at war." She meant the Gaijin, of course, and their great belt cities, their swooping forays through the inner Solar System -- and the other migrants who were following, still decades or centuries away but nevertheless on the way, noisily building along the spiral arm. "You must see it --
you,
when you return from your jaunts to the stars. Everybody's busy, too busy with the short term, unable to see the trends. Only us, Madeleine; only us, stranded out of time."

Something connected for Madeleine. "Oh. That's why you have kept the cure so quiet."

"Do you see why we must do this, Meacher? We need to explore every option. To have soldiers -- warriors -- who are free of pain--"

"Free of consciousness itself."

"Perhaps. If that's necessary."

Madeleine felt disgusted, sullied. Discontinuity was, after all, nothing less than the restructuring of her consciousness by Saddle Point transitions. How typical of humanity to turn this remarkable experience into a weapon. How monstrous.

She sat back. "Send me through a Saddle Point."

"Or?"

"Or I expose what you've been doing -- concealing a cure for the Discontinuity."

Nemoto considered. "This is too big an issue to horse-trade with the likes of you. But," she said, "I will make you an exchange."

"An exchange?"

"I'll send you to a Saddle Point. But afterward you go to Triton with the Aborigines. We have to make sure that colony succeeds."

Madeleine shook her head. "It will take decades for me to complete a round-trip through a gateway."

Nemoto smiled thinly. "It doesn't matter. It will take the Yolgnu years to reach Neptune, more years to establish any kind of viable colony. And we're playing a long game here. Some day the Gaijin will confront us directly. Some of us don't understand why that hasn't already happened. We need to be prepared, when it does."

"And Triton is a part of this scheme?"

Nemoto didn't answer.

But of course it was, Madeleine thought. Everything is a part of Nemoto's grand design. Everything, and everyone: my need for money and healing, Ben's people's need for refuge -- all just levers for Nemoto to press.

"Where?" Nemoto said suddenly.

"Where what?"

"Where do you want to go, on your health cruise?"

"I don't care. What does it matter?"

"There might be something suitable," Nemoto said at length. "There is another alien species, here in the Earth-Moon system. Did you know that? They are called the Chaera.
Their
star system is exotic. It includes a miniature black hole, which... Well." She eyed Madeleine. "Your friend Ben is a black-hole specialist. Perhaps he will go with you. How amusing."

Amusing.
Another little relativistic death.

There was a rumble of noise. They turned to the window. Kilometers away, beyond the mangrove swamps, Madeleine could see the booster's slim nose lift above the trees, the first glow of the engines. The light of the solid boosters seemed to spill over the tree line -- startlingly bright rocket light glimmering from the flat swamps -- as the Ariane rolled on its axis.

"There," Nemoto said. "You made me miss the launch."

Once Nemoto had given her the date of her Saddle Point mission it was all she could think about. The rest of her life -- her work in Kourou and elsewhere, her legal struggles to get back some of the money that had been impounded from her accounts, even her developing, low-key relationship with Ben -- all of that faded to a background glow compared to the diamond-bright prospect of encountering another Saddle Point gateway at that specified, slowly approaching date in the future.

She'd met other star travelers who had returned from one or two hops into the sky with the Gaijin. All of them were determined to go on. She imagined a cloud of human travelers journeying deeper and deeper into the strange cosmos, their ties to a blurred, fast-forwarding Earth stretching and loosening.

It wasn't just the Discontinuity. She didn't
belong
here. After all, she couldn't even work the toilets.

She longed to leave.

The Japanese-built lander touched the Moon, its rockets throwing up a cloud of fast-settling dust. There were various artifacts here, sitting on the surface of the Moon, and Nemoto, the spider at the heart of this operation, was waiting for them, anonymous in a black suit.

Ben and Madeleine suited up carefully. Madeleine made sure Ben followed her lead; she was, after all, the experienced astronaut.

She climbed down a short ladder to the surface. She dropped from step to step in the gentle gravity. She stepped off the last rung onto regolith, which crunched like snow under her weight.

She walked away from the lander.

The colors of the Moon weren't strong; in fact, the most colorful thing here was their Nishizaki Heavy Industries aluminum-frame lander, which, from a distance, looked like a small, fragile insect, done out in brilliant black, silver, orange, and yellow. The Sea of Tranquillity was close to the Moon's equator, so Earth was directly above her head, and it was difficult to tip back in her pressure suit to see it. But when Ben goes to live on Triton, she thought, the Sun will be a bright point source. And Earth will be no more than a pale blue point of light, only made visible by blocking out the Sun itself. How strange that will be.

Nemoto was showing Ben the various artifacts she had assembled here. Madeleine saw a set of blocky metal boxes, trailing cables. These were, it turned out, a pair of high-power X-ray lasers. "A small fission bomb is the power source. When the bomb is detonated, a burst of X-ray photons is emitted. The photons travel down long metal rods. This generates an intense beam. In effect, the power of the bomb has been focused..."

These were experimental weapons, it emerged, dating from the late twentieth century. They had been designed as satellite weapons, intended to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles.

"And what have the Gaijin paid us for this obscene old gadgetry?" Madeleine asked.

"That's not your concern."

The habitat that would keep them alive was another masterpiece of improvization and low cost, Madeleine thought, like her fondly remembered
Friendship-7.
It was based on two modules -- a Russian-built one called FGB, and the American-built Service Module -- scavenged from the old NASA International Space Station. The Service Module had been enhanced with an astrophysics instrument pallet.