"Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)
Chapter 24 Kintu’s Children
Two hundred kilometers above the glowing Earth, a Gaijin flower-ship folded its electromagnetic wings. Drone robots pulled a scuffed hab module out of the ship’s stringy structure and launched it on a slow, precise trajectory toward the Tree.
Malenfant, inside the module, watched the Tree approach.
The bulk of the Tree, orbiting the Earth, was a glowing green ball of branches and leaves, photosynthesizing busily. It trailed a trunk, hollowed out and sealed with resin, that housed most of the Tree’s human population. Long roots trailed in the upper atmosphere: There were crude scoops to draw up raw material for continued growth, and cables of what Malenfant eventually learned was superconductor, generating power by being dragged through Earth’s magnetosphere.
The Tree was a living thing twenty kilometers long, rooted in air, looping around Earth in its inclined circular orbit, maintaining its altitude with puffs of waste gas.
It was, Malenfant thought, ridiculous. He turned away, incurious.
He had been away from Earth for twelve hundred years, and had returned to the impossible date of A.D. 3265.
Malenfant was exhausted. Physically, he was, after all, more than a hundred years old. And because of the depletion of the Saddle Point links between Zero-zero-zero-zero and Earth, he had been forced to take a roundabout route on the way back here.
All he really wanted, if he was truthful, was to get away from strangeness: just settle down in his 1960s ranch house at Clear Lake, Houston, and pop a few beers, eat potato chips, and watch Twilight Zone reruns. But here, looking out at all this orbiting foliage, he knew that wasn’t possible, that it never would be. It was just as Dorothy Chaum had tried to counsel him, before they said their good-byes back on the Cannonball. It was Earth down there, but it wasn’t his Earth. Malenfant was going to have to live with strangers, and strangeness, for whatever was left of his long and unlikely life.
At least the ice has gone, though, he thought.
His battered capsule slid to rest, lodging in branches, and Malenfant was decanted.
There was nobody to greet him. He found an empty room, with a window. There were leaves, growing around his window. On the outside.
Ridiculous. He fell asleep.
When Malenfant woke, he was in some kind of hospital gown.
He felt different. Comfortable, clean. He wasn’t hungry or thirsty. He didn’t even need a leak.
He lifted up his hand. The skin was comparatively smooth, the liver spots faded. When he flexed his fingers, the joints worked without a twinge.
Somebody had been here, done something to him. I didn’t want this, he thought. I didn’t ask for it. He cradled his resentment.
He propped himself up before his window and looked out at Earth.
He could see its curve, a blue-and-white arc against black space. He made out a slice of pale blue seascape, with an island an irregular patch of gray and brown in the middle of it, and clouds scattered over the top, lightly, like icing sugar. He was so close to the skin of the planet that if he sat back the world filled his window, scrolling steadily past.
Earth was bright: brighter than he remembered. Malenfant used to be a shuttle pilot; he knew Earth from orbit — how it used to be anyhow. Now he was amazed by the clarity of the atmosphere, even over the heart of continents. He didn’t know if Earth itself had changed, or his memories of it. After all, his eyes were an old man’s now: rheumy, filled with nostalgia.
One thing for sure, though. Earth looked empty.
When he passed over oceans he looked for ship wakes, feathering out like brush strokes. He couldn’t see any. In the lower latitudes he could make out towns; a gray, angular patchwork; a tracery of roads. But no smog. No industries, then.
And in the higher latitudes, toward the poles, he could see no sign of human habitation at all. The land looked raw, fresh, scraped clean, the granite flanks of exposed mountains shining like burnished metal, and the plains littered with boulders, like toys dropped by a child. His geography had always been lousy — and now it was a thousand years out of date — but it seemed to him the coastlines had changed shape.
He wondered who, or what, had cleaned up the glaciation. Anyhow, it might have been A.D. 1000 down there, not 3265.
Two people came drifting into his room. Naked, all but identical, they were women, but so slim they were almost sexless. They had hair that floated around them, like Jane Fonda in Barbarella.
They were joined at the hip, like Siamese twins, by a tube of pink flesh.
They hadn’t knocked, and he scowled at them. “Who are you?”
They jabbered at him in a variety of languages, some of which he recognized, some not. Their arms and shoulders were big and well developed, like tennis players’, but their legs were wisps they kept tucked up beneath them: microgravity adaptations. Their hair was blond, but their eyes were almond shaped, with folds of skin near the nose, like the Chinese.
Finally they settled on heavily accented English.
“You must forgive stupidity.” “We accommodate returning travelers—” “ — from many time periods, spread across a millennium—” “ — dating from Reid Malenfant himself.”
When they talked they swapped their speech between one and the other, like throwing a ball.
He said, “In fact, I am Reid Malenfant.”
They looked at him, and then their two heads swiveled so that blank almond eyes stared into each other, their hair mingling. For these two, he thought, every day is a bad hair day.
“You must understand the treatment you have been given,” one said.
“I didn’t want treatment,” he groused. “I didn’t sign any consent forms.”
“But your aging was—” “ — advanced.” “We have no cure, of course.” “But we can address the symptoms—” “Brittle bones, loss of immunity, nervous degeneration.” “In your case accelerated by—” “ — exposure to microgravity.” “We reversed free-radical damage with antioxidant vitamins.” “We snipped out senescent cell clusters from your epidermis and dermis.” “We reversed the intrusion of alien qualia into your sensorium, a side-effect of repeated Saddle Point transits.” “We removed various dormant infectious agents that you might return to Earth.” “We applied telomerase therapy to—”
“Enough. I believe you. I bet I don’t look a day over seventy.”
“It was routine,” a Bad Hair Day twin said. They fell silent. “Are you truly Reid Malenfant?” one asked then.
“Yes.”
The twins gave him food and drink. He didn’t recognize any of the liquids they offered him, hot or cold; they were mostly like peculiar teas, of fruit or leaves. He settled on water, which was clean and cold and pure. The food was bland and amorphous, like baby food. The Bad Hair Day twins told him it was all processed algae, spiced with a little vacuum greenery from the Tree itself.
The twins pulled him gracefully through microgravity, along tunnels like wood-lined veins that twisted and turned, lit only by some kind of luminescence in the wood. It was like a fantasy spaceship rendered in carpentry, he thought.
There were a few dozen colonists here, living in bubbles of air inside the bulk of the Tree. They were all microgravity-adapted, as far as he could see, some of them even more evolved than the twins. There was one guy with a huge dome of a head over a shriveled-up body, sticks of limbs, a penis like a walnut, no pubic hair. To Malenfant he looked like a real science fiction type of creation, like the boss alien in Invaders from Mars.
The people, however strange, looked young and healthy to Malenfant. Their skin was smooth, unwrinkled, unmarked save by tattoos; his own raisinlike face, the lines baked into it by years of exposure to Earth’s weather and ultraviolet light and heavy gravity, was a curiosity here, a badge of exotica.
They all had almond eyes, folds of yellow skin.
As far as Malenfant could make out this was a kind of reverse colony from the near-Earth asteroids, which had been settled by descendants of the Chinese. Out there, it seemed, there were great bubble habitats where everyone had lived in zero gravity for centuries.
Sometimes he thought he could hear a low humming, sniff a little ozone, feel hair-prickling static, as if he was surrounded by immense electrical or magnetic fields that tweaked at his body. Maybe it was so. Electromagnetic fields could be used to stimulate and stress muscles and bones, and even to counter bone wastage; NASA had experimented with such technologies. Maybe the Tree swaddled its human cargo in electricity, fixing their bones and muscles and flesh.
But maybe there was no need for such clunky gadgetry, a thousand years downstream. After all the Tree provided a pretty healthy environment, of clean air, pure water, toxin-free foods: no pollutants or poisons or pathogens here. And even natural hazards like Earth’s naturally occurring radioactivity in soil and stone could be designed out. Maybe if you gave people a good enough place to live, this was how they turned out, with health and longevity.
And as for adaptation to microgravity, maybe that came naturally too. After all, he recalled, the dolphins and other aquatic mammals had had no need of centrifuges or electro stimulation to maintain their muscles and bones in the no-gravity environment they inhabited. Maybe these space-dwelling humans had more in common with the dolphins than the bony dirt-treaders of his own kind.
The Tree itself had been gen-enged from giant ancestors on the Moon. Humans used the Tree for a variety of purposes: port, observation platform, resort. But the Tree’s own purpose was simply to grow and survive, and there seemed no obstacle to its doing so until the Sun itself flickered and died.
There was more than one Tree.
In 3265, Earth was encased in a spreading web of vegetation, space-going Trees and spidery airborne tendrils, reaching down from space to the surface. And, slowly, systems were evolving the other way. One day there might be some kind of unlikely biological ladder reaching from Earth to space. It was a strategy to ensure long-term access from space via stable biological means. Nobody could tell Malenfant whose strategy this was, however.
The colonists in this Tree seemed to care for returning travelers like him with a breed of absent-minded charity. Beyond that, the twins’ motive in speaking to him seemed to be a vague curiosity — maybe even just politeness.
The Bad Hair Day twins’ variant of English contained a fraction of words, a fifth or a quarter, that were unrecognizable to Malenfant. Linguistic drift, he figured. It had, after all, been a thousand years; he was Chaucer meeting Neil Armstrong.
“Where did you travel?” they asked.
“I started at Alpha Centauri. After that I couldn’t always tell. I kind of bounced around.”
“What did you find?”
He thought about that. “I don’t know. I couldn’t understand much.”
It was true. But now — just as Madeleine Meacher and Dorothy Chaum had sought him out, saved his life on that remote Cannonball world without asking his by-your-leave — so the Bad Hair Day twins had thrust unwelcome youth on him. He felt curious again. Dissatisfied. Damn it, he’d gotten used to being old. It had been comfortable.
There were no other travelers here.
He soon got bored with the Tree, the incomprehensible artifacts and activities it contained. Lonely, disoriented, he tried to engage the Bad Hair Day twins, his enigmatic nurses. “You know, I remember how Earth looked when I first went up in Columbia, back in ’93 — 1993, that is. In those days we had to ride these big solid rocket boosters up to orbit, you know, and then, and then…”
The twins would listen politely for a while. But then they would lock on each other, mouths pressed into an airtight seal, small hands sliding over bare flesh, their hair drifting in clouds around them, that bridge of skin between them folded and compressed, and Malenfant was just a sad old fart boring them with war stories.
If he was going back to Earth, where was he supposed to land?
He asked the Bad Hair Day twins for encyclopedias, history books. The twins all but laughed at him. The people of A.D. 3265, it seemed, had forgotten history. The Bad Hair Day twins seemed to know little beyond their specialty, which was a limited — if very advanced — medicine. It was… disappointing. On the other hand, how much knowledge or interest had he ever had in the year A.D. 1000?
He got frustrated. He railed at the twins. They just stared back at him.
He would have to find out for himself.
He still had the softscreenlike sensor pack Sally Brind had given him centuries ago, when he set off for the Saddle Point to the Alpha Centauri system. It would work as a multispectral sensor. He could configure it to overlay the images of Earth with representations in infrared, ultraviolet, radar imaging, whatever he wanted; he could select for the signatures of rock, soil, vegetation, water, and the products of industrialization like heavy metals, pollutants.
Alone, he found a window and studied the planet.
Earth was indeed depopulated.
There were humans down there, but no communities bigger than a few tens of thousands. There were no industrial products, save for a thin smear of relics from the past, clustered around the old cities and strung out along the disused roads. He couldn’t even see signs of large-scale agriculture.
Malenfant studied what was left of the cities of his day, those that had somehow survived the ice. New York, for example.
In A.D. 3265, New York was green. It was a woodland of birch and oak, pushing out of a layer of elder thicket. He could still make out the shapes of roads, city blocks, and parking lots, but they were green rectangles covered with mosses, lichens, and tough, destructive plants like buddleia. On Manhattan, some of the bigger concrete buildings still stood, like white bones poking above the trees, but they were bereft of windows, their walls stained by fires. Others had subsided, reduced to oddly shaped hummocks beneath the greenery. The bridges had collapsed, leaving shallow weirs along the river. He could see foxes, bats, wolves, deer, feral pigs. And there were more exotic creatures, maybe descended from zoo stock.
Some of the roads looked in good condition, oddly. Maybe the smart-concrete that was being introduced just before his departure from Earth had kept working. But the big multilane freeway that ran up out of Manhattan looked a little crazy to Malenfant, a wild scribble over grassed-over concrete. Maybe it wasn’t just repairing itself but actually growing, crawling like a huge worm across the abandoned suburbs, a semisentient highway over which no car had traveled for centuries.
Once Malenfant saw what looked like a hunting party, working its way along the coast of the widened Hudson, stalking a thing like an antelope. The people were tall, naked, golden haired. One of the hunters looked up to the sky, as if directly at Malenfant. It was a woman, her blue eyes empty. She had a neck like a shot-putter. Her face was, he thought, somehow not even human.
When Malenfant had left Earth, a thousand years ago, he had left behind no direct descendants. His wife, Emma, had died before they had had a chance to have children together. But he’d had relatives: a nephew, two nieces.
Now there was hardly anybody left on Earth. Malenfant wondered if anybody down there still bore a trace of his genes. And if so, what they had become.
For sentimental reasons he looked for the Statue of Liberty. Maybe it was washed up on the beach, like in Planet of the Apes. There was no sign of the old lady.
But he did find a different monument: an artifact kilometers across, a monstrous ring, slap in the middle of downtown Manhattan. It looked like a particle accelerator. Maybe it had something to do with the city’s battle against the ice. Whatever, it didn’t look human. It was out of scale.
There was other evidence of high technology scattered around the planet, but it didn’t seem to have much to do with humans either. For example, when the Tree drifted over the Pyrenees, the mountains on the crease of land between France and Spain, he could see a threading of light — perfect straight lines of ruby light — joining the peaks like a spiderweb. His screen told him this was coherent light: lased. There were similar systems in other mountainous regions, scattered around the planet. The laser arrays worked continuously. Maybe they were adjusting the atmosphere somehow: burning out CFCs, for instance.
And he observed flashes from sites around the equator, on Earth’s water hemisphere. A few minutes after each flash the air would get a little mistier. He estimated they must be coming every minute or so, on a global scale. He remembered twenty-first century schemes to increase Earth’s albedo — to increase the percentage of sunlight reflected back into space — by firing submicrometer dust up into the stratosphere: Naval guns could have done the job. The point was to reduce global warming. But the dust would settle out: You would have needed to fire a shot every few seconds, maintained for decades, even centuries. Back then the idea was ridiculed. But such dust injections would account for the increase in global brightness he thought he’d observed.
This was planetary engineering. All he could see from here were the gross physical schemes. Maybe down on the planet there was more: nanotechnological adjustments, for instance.
Somebody was fixing the Earth. It didn’t look to Malenfant like it was anybody human. It would, after all, take centuries, maybe millennia. No human civilization could handle projects of that duration, or ever would be able to. So, give the job to somebody else.
Not every change was constructive.
In southern Africa there was a dramatic new crater. It looked like a scar in the greenery of the planet. He didn’t know if it was some kind of meteorite scar or an open-cast mine kilometers wide. Machines crawled over the walls and pit of the crater, visibly chewing up shattered rock, extracting piles of minerals, metals. From space, the machines looked like spiders: dodecahedral bodies maybe fifty meters wide, with eight or ten articulated limbs, working steadily at this open wound in the skin of Earth.
Malenfant had seen such machines before. They were Gaijin factory drones, designed to chew up ice and rock. But now they weren’t off in the asteroid belt or stuck out on the cold rim of the Solar System billions of kilometers away. The Gaijin were here, on the surface of Earth itself. He wondered what they were doing.
He looked farther afield, seeking people, civilization.
The most populous place on the planet, it appeared, was some kind of mountaintop community in the middle of Africa. It was, as far as he could remember his geography, in Uganda.
And there was something odd about its signature in his sensor pack. From a source at the center of the community he plotted heavy particles, debris from what looked like short half-life fission products. And there were some much more energetic particles: almost like cosmic rays.
But they came from a source embedded deep within Earth itself.
The only other similar sources, scattered around the planet, looked like deep radioactive-waste dumps.
The Ugandan community wasn’t civilization, but it was the most advanced-looking technological trace on the planet. Population, and an enigma. Maybe that was the place for him to go.
The Bad Hair Day twins showed him a wooden spaceship. It was, good God, his atmospheric entry capsule. It was like a seed pod, a flattened sphere of wood a couple of meters across. It was fitted with a basic canvas couch and a life support system — just crude organic filters — that would last a couple of hours, long enough for the entry. The pod even had a window, actually grown into the wood, a blister of some clear stuff like amber. He would have to climb in through a dilating diaphragm that would seal up behind him, like being born in reverse.
He spent some time hunting out the pod’s heat shield. The Bad Hair Day twins watched, puzzled.
They kept him on orbit for another month or so, giving him gravity preparation: exercise, a calcium booster, electromagnetic therapy. They gave him a coverall of some kind of biocomposite material, soft to the touch but impossible to rip, smart enough to keep him at the right temperature. He packed inside the sphere his sole personal possession: his old shuttle pressure suit, with its faded Stars and Stripes and the NASA logo, that he’d worn when he flew through that first gateway, a thousand AU from home, a thousand years ago. It was junk, but it was all he had.
He enjoyed a last sleep in weightlessness.
When he awoke the Tree was passing over South America. Malenfant could see the fresh water of the Amazon, noticeably paler than the salt of the ocean, the current so strong the waters had still failed to mingle hundreds of kilometers offshore.
He climbed inside his capsule. The Bad Hair Day twins kissed him, one soft face to either cheek, and sealed him up in warm brown darkness.
He was whiplashed out of the Tree by a flexing branch. A sensation of weight briefly returned to Malenfant, and he was pressed into his seat. When the castoff was done, the weight disappeared.
But now the pod was no longer in a free orbit, but falling rapidly toward the air.
At the fringe of the atmosphere, the pod shuddered around him. He felt very aware of the lightness and fragility of this wooden nutshell within which he was going to have to fall ass-first into the atmosphere.
Within five minutes of separation from the Tree, frictional deceleration was building up: a tenth, two-tenths of a g. The deceleration piled up quickly, eyeballs-in, shoving him deeper against his couch.
The pod shuddered violently. Malenfant was cocooned in a dull roaring noise. He gripped his couch and tried not to worry about it.
As the heat shield rammed deeper into the air, a shell of plasma built up around the hull. Beyond the amber windows the blackness of space was masked by a deep brown, which quickly escalated through orange, a fiery yellow, and then a dazzling white. Particles of soot flew off the scorching outer hull of the pod and streaked over the window, masking his view; now all he could see were extreme surges of brightness, as if fireballs were flying past the craft.
From the surface of Earth, the ship would be a brilliant meteor, visible even in daylight. He wondered if there was anybody down there who would understand what they saw.
The oaklike wood of the hull made for a natural heat shield, the Bad Hair Day twins had told him. All that resin would ablate naturally. It was a neater solution than the crude, clanking mechanical gadgets of his own era. Maybe, but he was an old-fashioned guy; he’d have preferred to be surrounded by a few layers of honest-to-God metal and ceramic.
The glow started to fade, and the deceleration eased. Now the windows were completely blacked over by the soot, but a shield jettisoned with a bang, taking the soot away with it and revealing a circle of clear blue sky.
There was another crack as the first parachute deployed. The chute snatched at the pod and made it swing violently from side to side. He was pressed against one side of his couch and then the other, with the cabin creaking around him; he felt fragile, helpless, trapped in the couch.
Two more drogue chutes snapped open, in quick succession, and then the main chute. He could see through his window a huge canopy of green leafy material, like a vegetable cloud against the blue sky. The chute looked reassuringly intact, despite its vegetable origins, and the swaying reduced.
Malenfant glimpsed the ground. He could even track his progress, with maps in his sensor pack. He’d come down over the island that used to be called Zanzibar, on the east coast of Africa. And now he was drifting inland, to the northwest, toward Lake Victoria. Forest lay like thick green cloth over mountains.
Malenfant felt his couch rise up beneath him. Collapsing sacs pumped compressed carbon dioxide into the base of his seat, preparing to act as a shock absorber on landing. He was pressed up against the curved roof of his pod, with only a small gap between his knees and the roof itself. He felt hemmed in, heavy, hot. Gravity pulled at him, tangibly.
The pod hit the ground.
The parachutes pulled the capsule forward, so Malenfant was tipped up onto his face, and then the pod started to careen across rocky ground, rocking backward and forward, spinning and rattling. His head rattled against his couch headrest.
Finally the pod slithered to a halt.
Malenfant found himself suspended on his side, with daylight pouring through the window behind him. The shock absorber was still pressing him against the roof, so he couldn’t see outside. He lifted his hands to his face. There was blood in his mouth.
The pod wall dilated, releasing a flood of hot sunlit air into the capsule, so rich in oxygen and vegetable scents it made him gasp.
He began the painful process of climbing out.
His pod had come down on a low pebbly beach. The beach ran in a sinuous light-gray line between the darker gray face of a lake and the living green of a banana grove. From the margin of the lake to the highest hilltop, all he could see was contrasting shades of green, spreading like a carpet.
This was the northern coast of Lake Victoria. It was the closest place to that population center, with its odd radioactivity signature, that the Bad Hair Day twins would deliver him.
Once he got his balance, he didn’t have any trouble walking. He didn’t feel dizzy, but oddly disoriented. He could feel his internal organs moving around, seeking a new equilibrium inside him. And he seemed to be immune to sunburn.
But it was odd to be walking around without his pressure suit. Disconcerting. And the sense of openness, of scale, was startling. After all his travels, Malenfant had become an alien, uncomfortable on the surface of his home world.
There was no sign of humanity.
Malenfant made camp in the inert, scorched shell of his pod. He used the bubble helmet of his old NASA pressure suit to collect water from a brook, a little way inland. He ate figs and bananas. He figured if he was stuck here for long he’d try to fish that lake.
The days were short and hot, although there was usually a scattering of cloud over the blue sky. He set up a stick in the sand and watched its shadow shifting and lengthening with the hours. That way he figured out the time of local noon, and he reset his astronaut’s watch. If he was stuck here long enough he might find the equinox and start filling out a calendar.
The sunsets were spectacular. All the submicrometer dust.
The nights were cold, and he would wrap himself up inside the Beta-cloth outer layers of his pressure suit, there on the beach. But he stayed awake long hours, studying a changed sky.
The crescent Moon glowed blue.
The crescent’s edge was softly blurred by a band of light that stretched partway around the dark half of the satellite. There was a thick band of what looked like cloud, piled up over the Moon’s equator. On the darkened surface itself there were lights, strung out in lines: towns, or cities, outlining hidden lunar continents. The Moon had a twin light: a giant mirror that orbited it slowly, shedding light on the Moon’s shadowed hemisphere, which would otherwise languish in the dark for fourteen days at a time, probably long enough for the precious new air to start snowing out.
And in the center of the darkened hemisphere that faced him was a dazzling point glow. The point source was Earthlight, reflecting from the oceans of the Moon.
Even a slim crescent Moon, now, drenched the sky with light, drowning out the stars and planets. The wildlife of Earth made use of the new light: He heard the croak of amphibians, the growl of some kind of cat. No doubt this changed Moon was working on the evolution of species, subtly.
The Moon was beautiful, wonderful, its terraforming one heck of an achievement. But to Malenfant it was as unreachable as before Apollo, a thousand years ago. And, even from here, Malenfant could see Gaijin craft orbiting over the lunar poles.
When the Moon set, taking its brilliant light with it, the full strangeness of the sky emerged.
Huge objects drifted against the blackness, green and gold: Trees, spectral patches of green life; and Gaijin flower-ships, their open ramscoop mouths tangles of silvery threads, like dragonflies. There was a chain of lights clustered around the plain of the ecliptic, sparkles in knots and clusters, almost like streetlights seen from orbit. They were Gaijin asteroid-belt cities.
The shapes of the constellations were mostly unchanged, the stars’ slow drift imperceptible in the mayfly beat he’d been away. A bright young star had come to life in Cassiopeia, turning that distinctive W shape into a zig zag. But many more stars had dimmed, to redness or even lurid green — or they were missing altogether, masked by life. This was the mark of the colonization wave, pulsing along the Galaxy’s star lanes, an engineered consumption of system after system, heading this way.
And in one part of the sky, loosely centered on the grand old constellation of Orion, stars were flickering, burning, sputtering to darkness. It was evidence of purposeful activity spread across many light-years, and it made him shiver. Perhaps it was the war he had come to fear, breaking over the Solar System.
In the deepest dark of the nights he made out a huge, beautiful comet, sprawled across the zenith. Even with his naked eye he could see the bright spark of its nucleus, a tail that swept, feathery, curved, across the dome of the sky.
Comets came from the Oort cloud. He wondered if there was any connection between this shining visitor, flying through the heart of the inner Solar System, and the sparkling lights he saw around Orion, the remote disturbance there.
One morning he crawled out of his pod, buck naked.
There was a man standing there, staring at him.
Malenfant yelped and clamped his hands over his testicles.
The man — no more than a boy, probably — was tall, more than two meters high. His skin was copper brown, covered by a pale golden hair so thick it was almost like fur, and his eyes were blue. He had muscles like an athlete’s. He was wearing some kind of breechcloth made of a coarse white material. He was carrying a sack. There was a belt around his waist, of some kind of leather. It contained a variety of tools, all of them stone, bone, or wood: round axes, cleavers, scrapers, a hammer stone.
His neck was thick, like a weightlifter’s. He had a long low skull, with some kind of bony crest behind. And he had bony eyebrows, a sloping forehead under that blond hair. He had a big projecting jaw — no chin — strong-looking teeth, a heavy browridge shielding his eyes, a flat apelike nose. He didn’t, Malenfant thought, look quite human. But he was beautiful for all that, his gaze on Malenfant direct and untroubled.
He grinned at Malenfant and emptied out the sack over the sand. It contained bananas, sweet potatoes, and eggs. “Eat food hungry eat food,” he said. His voice was high and indistinct, the consonants blurred.
Malenfant, stunned, just stood and stared.
His visitor folded up his sack, turned, and ran off over the sand, a blur of golden brown, leaving a trail of Man Friday footsteps on the beach.
Malenfant grunted. “First contact,” he said to himself. Curiouser and curiouser.
He went to the tree line to do his morning business, then came back to the food. It made a change from fruit and fish.
He settled down to waiting. Man Friday and his unseen compadres surely didn’t mean him any harm. Even so, he found it impossible not to stay close to his pod, glaring out at the tree line.
He wondered what he could use for weapons. Discreetly, he got together a heap of the bigger stones he could gather from the beach.
When his next visitors came, it was from the lake. He heard the voices first.
Six canoes, crowded with men and women, came shimmering around the point of the bay. Malenfant squinted to focus his new, improved eyes.
The crew looked to be of all races, from Aryan to Negro. Malenfant spotted a few beautiful, golden-haired creatures like his Man Friday. He saw what looked like the commander, standing up in one of the canoes. He was dressed in a bead-worked headdress adorned with long white cock’s feathers, and a snowy white and long-haired goatskin, with a crimson robe hanging from his shoulders. To Malenfant he was a vision out of the Stone Age. But he was hunched over, as if ill.
Empty-handed, Malenfant went down the beach to meet them.
The canoes scraped onto the shore, and the commander jumped out and walked barefoot through shallow water to the dry sand. He stumbled, Malenfant saw, on legs swollen to the thickness of tree trunks. His face was burned black, and patches of hair sprouted from his scalp like weeds. But his gaze was alert and searching.
He reached out. There was a stench of rotting skin, and it was all Malenfant could manage not to recoil in disgust. To Malenfant, it looked like an advanced case of radiation poisoning. Something, he thought, is going on here.
The commander opened his mouth to speak. His lips parted with a soft pop, and Malenfant saw how his mucous membranes were swollen up. He began talking to Malenfant in a language he couldn’t recognize. Swahili or Kiganda, maybe.
Malenfant held up his hands. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
The commander looked startled. “Good God,” he said, “a European… I never expected to see another European!” His English was heavily accented.
“Not European. American.”
“You’re a deep traveler.”
“Deep?”
“Deep in time. Like me. I left Earth the first time in 2191. You?”
“Earlier,” said Malenfant.
“Listen, I’m a kind of ambassador from the Kabaka.”
“Kabaka?”
“The emperor. Among other duties, I meet travelers. Not that they come often.” He noticed Malenfant reacting to his condition. He smiled, his mouth a grisly gash that exposed black teeth. “Don’t worry about this. I fell out with the Kabaka for a while. Most people do. My name is Pierre de Bonneville. I used to be French. I went to Bellatrix with the Gaijin: Gamma Orionis, three hundred and sixty light-years away. A remarkable trip.”
“Why?”
De Bonneville laughed. “I was a writer. A poet, actually. My country believed in sending artists to the stars: eyes and ears to bring home the truth, the inner truth, you see, of what is out there. I rode one of the last Arianes, from Kourou. Vast, noisy affair! But when I got home everyone had left, or died. There was nowhere to publish what I observed, no one to listen to my accounts.”
“I know the feeling. My name’s Malenfant.”
De Bonneville peered at him. He didn’t seem to recognize the name, and that suited Malenfant.
The golden-haired crewmen poked curiously around the charred husk of Malenfant’s reentry pod.
De Bonneville grinned. “You’re admiring my golden-haired crewmen. The Uprights. Kintu’s children, I call them.”
“Kintu?”
“But then, we are all children of Kintu now. What do you want here, Malenfant?”
Travelers and emperors, history and politics. Malenfant felt his new blood pump in his veins. He’d been among aliens too long. Now human affairs, with all their rich complexity, were embracing him again.