"Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)
Chapter 14 Dreams of Ancestral Fish
Madeleine Meacher flew into Kourou from Florida.
The plane door slid open, and hot, humid air washed over her. This was East Guiana, a chunk of the northeastern coast of South America. All Madeleine could see, to the horizon, was greenery: an equatorial rain forest; thick, crowding trees; clouds of insects shimmering above mangrove swamps.
Already she felt oppressed by this crowding layer of life, the dense, moist air. In fact she felt a stab of panic at the thought that this big, heavy biosphere was unmanaged. Nobody at the controls. Madeleine guessed she’d spent too long in spacecraft.
Some kind of truck — good grief, it looked like it was running on gasoline — had dragged up a flight of steps to the plane. Madeleine was going to have to walk down herself, she realized. It was the year 2131, and, through the Saddle Points, Madeleine had traveled as far as twenty-seven light-years from Sol. And here, seventy years out of her time, she was walking down airline steps, as if it were 19 31.
Not a good start to my new career, Madeleine thought bleakly.
A man was waiting at the bottom of the steps. He looked about thirty, and he was a head shorter than Madeleine, with crisp black hair and a round face, the skin brown and leathery. He was wearing some kind of toga, white and cool.
She wanted to touch that face, feel its texture.
“Madeleine Meacher?”
“Yes.”
He stuck out his hand. “Ben Roach. I’m on the Triton project here. Welcome to South America’s spaceport.” His accent was complex, multinational, but with an Australian root.
She took his hand. It was broader than hers, the palm pink-pale; his flesh was warm, dry.
They walked toward a beat-up terminal building. There was vegetation here: scrubby, yellowed grass, drooping palms. It was a contrast to the lush blanket she’d glimpsed from the air.
“What happened to the jungle?”
He grinned. “Too many fizzers.” He glanced down, then took her hand again. “Oh. You are hurt.”
There was a deep cut on the index finger; a wound she’d somehow suffered on that creaky old staircase, probably. Madeleine studied the damaged finger, pulling it this way and that as if it were a piece of meat. “It’s my own fault; the plane was so hot I left off my biocomp gloves.” The gloves, like the rest of the bodysuit Madeleine wore, were made of a semisentient mesh of sensors that warned her when she was damaging herself.
“This is the Discontinuity,” Ben said, curious.
“Yeah. Too much teleportation is bad for you.” Eventually, as she played with the finger, she reopened the drying cut.
Ben stared curiously as fresh blood oozed.
Madeleine’s employer had set up an office in the spaceport Technical Center. This housed a run-down mission control center; a press office; a hospitality area; and a dusty, shut-down space museum: tinfoil models of forgotten satellites.
The office itself was cool, light, airy. Too neat. There was rice straw matting on the floor, and scroll paintings on the wall, and flowers. It was all traditional Japanese, though Madeleine could see that the “paintings” were on some kind of softscreen, and so were configurable.
The office had a view of the full-scale Ariane 5 mock-up that stood outside the entrance to the technical center. Sitting on its mobile launch table, the Ariane looked a little like the old American shuttles, with a fat liquid-propelled core booster — called the EPC, for Etage Principal Cryotechnique — flanked by two shorter strap-on solid boosters. The launch table itself was a lot more elegant than the shuttle’s Apollo-era gantries, though; it was a slim, curved tower of concrete and steel, like a piece of modern sculpture, dwarfed by the booster. This mock-up had to be 150 years old, Madeleine figured; its paintwork was eroded away, the old ESA markings barely visible. Mold and creepers clawed at the sides of the rocket — a slow, irreversible vegetable onslaught. The booster was drowned in green, as ancient and meaningless as the ruins of a Mayan temple.
Madeleine’s employer was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, before a small butsudan, a Buddha shelf, under the window. She was a Japanese, a small, wizened woman, her face imploded, crisscrossed by Vallis Marineris grooves. Her remnant of hair was a handful of gray wisps clinging to a liver-spotted scalp. She had been born in 1990. That made her more than 140 years old, close to the record. Nobody knew how she was keeping herself alive.
She was, of course, Nemoto.
Nemoto touched a carved statue. “A Buddha,” she said, “of fused regolith from the Mare Ingenii. Once such an artifact would have seemed very exotic.” She got up stiffly and went to a coffeepot. “You want some? I also have green tea.”
“No. I burn my mouth too easily.”
“That’s a loss.”
“Tell me about it.” An inability to drink hot black coffee was the Discontinuity handicap that Madeleine felt most severely.
She studied Nemoto, this legendary figure from the deep past, and sought awe, even curiosity. She felt only numbness, impatience. “When do you want me to start work?”
Nemoto smiled thinly. “Straight to business, Meacher? As soon as you can. The first launches start in a month.”
Madeleine had been hired to prepare two hundred rookie astronauts for spaceflight.
“Yes. Two hundred Aborigines, from the heart of the Australian outback, establishing a new nation on a moon of Neptune. Inspiring thought, don’t you think?”
Or absurd, Madeleine reflected.
“All you have to do is familiarize them with microgravity. We’ve established a hydro training facility here, and so forth. Just stop them throwing up or going crazy before we can get them transferred to the transport. I assigned Ben Roach to shepherd you for your first couple of days. He’s a smart-ass kid, but he has his uses.”
Madeleine tried to focus on what Nemoto was saying, the details of her outlandish scheme. Triton? Why, for God’s sake? Surrounded by strangeness, numbed by the Discontinuity, it was hard to care.
Nemoto eyed Madeleine. “You feel… disoriented. Here we sit: mirror images, relics of the twenty-first century, both stranded in an unanticipated future. The only difference is in how we got here. You by your relativistic hop, skip, and jump across light-years and decades — the scenic route.” She grinned. “And I came the hard way.” Her teeth were black, Madeleine noticed.
“But we’re both damaged by the experience, in our different ways,” Madeleine said.
Nemoto shrugged. “I ended up with all the power.”
“Power over me, anyhow.”
“Meacher, I still need crew for the transport.”
“You’re offering me a flight to Triton?”
“If you’re interested. Your Discontinuity won’t be a serious liability if—”
“Forget it.”
Madeleine stood up. Her left leg buckled and she nearly fell; she had to cling to the desktop. It was as if Madeleine was the old woman. She found she’d been applying too much weight to the leg and the blood supply had been cut off. She hadn’t noticed, of course; and that kind of damage was too subtle for the biocomp suit to pick up.
Nemoto watched her, calculating, without sympathy. “The Triton colony is crucial,” she said. “Strategic.”
This was the Nemoto Madeleine had heard of. “You’re still working for the future of the species, Nemoto.”
“Yes, if you want to know.”
Madeleine’s heart sank. Nemoto would be hard to deal with rationally. People with missions always were.
But only Nemoto would give her a job.
Aside perhaps from Reid Malenfant — and even after all this time nobody knew what had become of him — Madeleine had been the first human to leave the Solar System. Her experiences in the light of other stars had been astonishing.
Her first return to the Solar System had been something of a triumph — although even then she’d been aware of a historical dislocation, as if the world had had a layer of strangeness thrown over it. And she had been shocked by the sudden — to her — deaths of her mother, and of poor Sally Brind, and many others she had known.
At least Frank Paulis’s get-rich-slow compound interest scheme had worked out that first time. And she had earned herself a little fame. She was the first star traveler — aside from Malenfant — and that earned her some profile.
But she hadn’t been sorry to leave again, to escape into the clean blue light of the Saddle Points, replacing the baffling human world with the cold external mysteries of the stars.
Her later returns had been less enjoyable.
The truth was that as the decades peeled away on Earth, and the novelty wore off, nobody much cared about the star travelers — and few were prepared to protect the interests of these historical curiosities. So the last time she came back, Madeleine had returned to find that a devaluation of the UN dollar, the new global currency, had wiped out a lot of the value of her savings. And then had come the banks’ decision to close the swelling accounts of the star travelers, a step that had been backed by intergovernmental agencies up to and including the UN.
Meanwhile no insurance company would touch her, or anyone else who had been through the Saddle Point gateways, after the Discontinuity condition had been diagnosed.
Which was why Madeleine needed money.
Nemoto was attached to no organization. Madeleine couldn’t have defined her role. But her source of power was clear enough: She had stayed alive.
Thanks to longevity treatments, Nemoto, and a handful of privileged others, had gotten so old that they formed a new breed of power-player, their influence coming from contacts, webs of alliances, ancient debts, and favors granted. Nemoto was a gerontocrat, modeling herself on the antique Communist officials who still ran China.
Madeleine wouldn’t have been surprised to find it was Nemoto herself, or the other gerontocrats, who lay behind the whole scam. The closure of the star travelers’ accounts had given Nemoto a good deal of leverage over Madeleine, and those who had followed in her path. And the strategy had put a block on any ambitions the star travelers might have had to use their effective longevity to accrue power back home.
She wondered if the gerontocrats — conservative, selfish, reclusive, obsessive — were responsible for a more general malaise that seemed to her to have afflicted this fast-forwarded world. There had been change — new fashions, gadgetry, terminology — but, it seemed to her, no progress. In science and art she could see no signs of meaningful innovation. The world’s nations evolved, but the various supranational structures had not changed for decades: the political institutions that wielded the power had ossified.
And meanwhile, the world still labored under the old burdens of a fast-changing ecology and resource shortages, and minor wars continued to be an irritant at every fractured joint between peoples.
Nobody was solving these ancient problems. Worse, it seemed to her, nobody was even trying anymore. You could no longer, for example, get reliable statistics on population numbers, or disease occurrences, or poverty. It was as if history had stopped when the Gaijin had arrived.
But it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t have changed a thing. The traveling itself was the thing, the point of it all. The rest was ancient history, even to Madeleine herself.
Ben showed her to her apartment. He had to show her how to open the door. In 2131, God help her, you had to work door locks with foot studs.
The East Guiana Spaceport, built by the Europeans in the 1980s, extended maybe twenty kilometers along the coast of the Atlantic, from Sinnamary to Kourou, which was actually an old fishing village. There were control buildings, booster-integration buildings, solid-booster test stands and launch complexes, all identified by baffling French acronyms — BAF, BIL, BEAP — and connected by roads and rail tracks that looked, from her window, like gashes in the foliage.
Ariane had been nice-looking technology, for its time, 150 years earlier. It had been superseded by new generations of space planes, even before the Gaijin had taken over most of Earth’s ground-to-orbit traffic with their clean, flawless landers. But when the French released political control of East Guiana, the new government decided to refurbish what was left at Kourou.
So East Guiana, one of the smallest and poorest nations on Earth, suddenly had a space program.
Ariane had kept flying even as history moved on, and nations and corporations and alliances had formed and dissolved, leaving new configurations whose very names were baffling to Madeleine. But Ariane remained: an antique, disreputable, dirty, unreliable launcher, used by agencies without the funds to afford something better.
Like Nemoto.
Maybe, Madeleine thought, it wasn’t a surprise that Nemoto, another relic of the first Space Age, had gravitated here.
The residential quarters had been set up in an abandoned solid-propellant factory, a building that dated back to before Madeleine’s birth. The cluster of buildings was still called UPG, for Usine de Propergol de Guyane. It was a jumble of white cubes spilling over a hillside, like a Mediterranean village. It was sparsely set up, but comfortable enough. About four hundred people lived here: the Aboriginal emigrants, and permanent technical and managerial staff to operate the automated facilities. Once, twenty thousand, a fifth of the country’s population, had been housed in Kourou. The feeling of emptiness, of age and abandonment, was startling.
She slept for a few hours. Then she drifted about her apartment, tinkering.
It was startling how often and how much everyday gadgets changed. The toilet, for instance, was just a hole in the ground, and it took her an age to figure out how to make it flush. The shower was just as bad; it took a call to Ben to establish that to set the heat, you had to put your finger in a little test sink and let the thing read your body temperature.
And so on. All stuff everybody else here had grown up with. It was like being in a foreign country, wherever she went, even in her hometown; she’d long grown tired of people not taking her requests for basic information seriously. And every time she came back from another Einsteinian fast-forward it got worse.
Anyhow, a few minutes after stepping out of the shower, her skin was prickling with sweat again.
She felt no discomfort, of course. The Discontinuity left her with numbness where pain or discomfort should sit. Like a fading-down of reality. She toweled herself dry again, trying not to scrape her skin.
Perhaps it should have been expected. Before the reality of Saddle Point teleportation had been demonstrated, there had been those who had doubted whether human minds could ever, even in principle, be downloaded, stored, or transmitted. The way data was stored in a brain was not simple. A human mind appeared to be a process, dynamic, and no static “snapshot,” no matter how sophisticated the technology, could possibly capture its richness. So it was argued.
The fact that the first travelers, including Madeleine, had survived Saddle Point transitions seemed to belie this pessimistic point of view. But perhaps, in the longer term, those doubts had been borne out.
She knew there was talk of treatment for Discontinuity sufferers. Madeleine wasn’t holding her breath: Nobody was putting serious money into the problem. There were only a handful of star travelers, and nobody cared much about them anyhow. And so Madeleine had to wear a constricting biocomp sensor suit that warned her when she’d sat still for too long or when her skin was burned or frozen, and that woke her up in the night to turn her over.
Maybe the Gaijin weren’t affected the same way. Nobody knew.
She stood, naked, at an open window, trying to get cool. It was evening. She looked across kilometers of hilly country, all of it coated by burgeoning life. There was a breeze, lifting loose leaves high enough to cross the balcony. But the breeze served only to push more water-laden air into her face.
The blanket of foliage coating the hills around the launch areas looked etiolated: the leaves yellowed, stunted, the trees sickly and small by comparison with their neighbors farther away. And the leaves at her feet were yellow and black, others holed, as if burned.
She pulled on a loose dress and walked a kilometer to the block containing Ben’s apartment.
She glimpsed Aborigines: her trainees — men, women, and children — passing back and forth in little groups, engaged in their own errands and concerns. They showed no interest in her. They were loose-limbed people, many of them going barefoot, some of the women overweight; they wore loose togas like Ben’s, the cloth worn, dirty, well used. Their faces were round, a paler brown than she had expected, with blunt noses, prominent brows. Many of them wore breathing filters or sunscreen, and their skin was marked by cancer scars.
They were alien to Madeleine, but no more so than most of the people of the year 2131.
Ben welcomed her. He served her a meal: couscous with saffron, chunks of soya, a light local wine.
He told her about his wife. She was called Lena; she was only twenty, a decade younger than Ben. She was in orbit, working on the big emigrant transports Nemoto was assembling. Ben hadn’t seen her for months.
Madeleine felt easy with Ben. He even took care with the words he used. Language drift seemed remarkably rapid; less than a century out of her time, even if she was familiar with a word, she couldn’t always recognize its pronunciation, and she had learned it wasn’t safe to assume she knew its modern usage. But Ben made sure that she understood.
“It’s strange finding Aborigines here,” Madeleine said. “So far from home.”
“Not so strange. After all, East Guiana is another colonial relic. The French wanted to follow the example of the British in Australia, by peopling East Guiana with convicts.” He grinned, his teeth white and young, a contrast in Madeleine’s mind to the ruined mouth of Nemoto. “Anyhow,” he said, “now we can escape on the fizzers.” He mimed a rocket launch with two hands clasped as in prayer. “Whoosh.”
“Ben — why Triton? I know Nemoto has her own objectives. But for you…”
“Nemoto’s offer was the only one we had. We have nowhere else to go. But perhaps we would follow her anyway. Nemoto is marginalized, her ideas ridiculed — most vigorously by friends of the Gaijin. But she is right, on the deepest of levels. We used to think we were alone in a primordial universe. Suddenly we find ourselves in a dangerous, crowded universe littered with ruins. There was fear and deep anger at the discovery of the violation of Venus. It might have been a sister world to Earth — or Earth might have been the victim. With time, the outrage faded, but we remembered — we, a people who have been dispossessed already.”
More leaves blew in from a darkening sky, broken, damaged by rocket exhaust.
Ben told her he came from central Australia, born into a group called the Yolgnu. “When I was a boy my family lived by a riverbank, living in the old way. But the authorities, the white people, came and moved us to a place called Framlingham. Just a row of shacks and tin houses. Then, when I was eight years old, more white men took me away to an orphanage. The men were from the Aboriginal Protection Board. When they thought I was civilized enough, they sent me to foster parents in Melbourne. White people, called Nash. They were rich and kind. You see, it was the policy of the government to solve their Aboriginal problem once and for all, by making me white.”
All of this stunned her, embarrassed her. “You must hate them,” she said.
He smiled. “This was merely a part of their shared history. They were always frightened, first of the Japanese, then of Indonesians and Chinese, flowing down from the north, with their eyes on Australia’s empty spaces, its huge mineral deposits. Now perhaps they fear the Gaijin, come to take their land. And each time they exorcise their fears using us. I do not hate them. I understand them.”
To her surprise, he turned out to hold a doctorate in black-hole physics. But he had been drawn back to Framlingham, as had others of his generation. Slowly they had constructed a dream of a new life. Almost all of the people escaping to Triton were from Framlingham, he said. “It was a wrench to leave the old lands. But we will find new lands, make our own world.”
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.”
“Isn’t there?”
“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.”