PART TWO

Travelers

A.D. 2061-2186

He told himself: All this — the neutron star sail, the toiling community — is a triumph of life over blind cosmic cruelty. We ain’t taking it anymore.

But when he thought of Cassiopeia, anger flooded him. Why?

It had been just minutes since she had embraced him on that grassy, simulated plain… hadn’t it?

How do you know, Malenfant? How do you know you haven’t been frozen in some deep data store for ten thousand years?

And… how do you know this isn’t the first time you surfaced like this?

How could he know? If his identity assembled, disintegrated again, what trace would it leave on his memory? What was his memory? What if he was simply restarted each time, wiped clean like a reinitialized computer? How would he know?

But it didn’t matter. I did this to myself, he thought. I wanted to be here. I labored to get myself here. Because of what we learned, as the years unraveled: that the Gaijin would be followed by a great wave of visitors, and that the Gaijin were not even the first — just as Nemoto had intuited from the start. And nothing we learned about those earlier visitors, and what had become of them, gave us comfort.

Slowly, as they began to travel the stars, humans learnedto fear the universe, and the creatures who lived in it. Livedand died.

Chapter 8

Ambassadors

Madeleine Meacher barely got out of N’Djamena alive.

Nigerian and Cameroon troops were pushing into the airstrip just as the Sänger’s undercarriage trolley jets kicked in. She heard the distant crackle of automatic fire, saw vehicles converging on the runway. Somewhere behind her was a clatter, distant and small; it sounded as if a stray round had hit the Sänger.

Then the space plane threw itself down the runway, pressing her back into her seat, its leap forward sudden, gazellelike. The Sänger tipped up on its trolley, and the big RB545 engines kicked in, burning liquid hydrogen. The plane rose almost vertically. The gunfire rattle faded immediately.

She shot into cloud and was through in a second, emerging into bright, clear sunshine.

She glanced down: The land was already lost, remote, a curving dome of dull desert-brown, punctuated with the sprawling gray of urban development. Fighters — probably Nigerian, or maybe Israeli — were little points of silver light in the huge sky around her, with contrails looping through the air. They couldn’t get close to Madeleine unless she was seriously unlucky.

She lit up the scramjets and was kicked in the back, hard, and the fighters disappeared.

The sky faded down to a deep purple. The turbulence smoothed out as she went supersonic. At thirty thousand meters, still climbing, she pushed the RB545 throttle to maximum thrust. Her acceleration was a Mach a minute; on this suborbital hop to Senegal she’d reach Mach 15 before falling back to Earth.

She was already so high she could see stars. Soon the reaction-control thrusters would kick in, and she’d be flying like a spacecraft.

It was the nearest she’d ever get to space, anyhow.

For the first time since arriving in Chad with her cargo of light artillery shells, she had time to relax. The Sänger was showing no evidence of harm from the gunfire.

The Sänger was a good, solid German design, built by Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm. It was designed to operate in war zones, but Madeleine was not; safe now in her high-tech cocoon, she gave way to the tension for a couple of minutes.

While she was still shaking, the Sänger logged into the nets and downloaded her mail. Life went on.

That was when she found the message from Sally Brind.

Brind didn’t tell Madeleine who she represented, or what she wanted. Madeleine was to meet her at Kennedy Space Center. Just like that; she was given no choice.

Over the years Madeleine had received a lot of blunt messages like this. They were usually either from lucrative would-be employers, or some variant of cop or taxman. Either way it was wise to turn up.

She acknowledged the message and instructed her data miners to find out who Brind was.

She pressed a switch, and the RB545s shut down with a bang. As the acceleration cut out she was thrust forward against the straps. Now she had gone ballistic, like a hurled stone. Coasting over the roof of her trajectory in near silence, she lost all sensation of speed, of motion.

And, at her highest point, she saw a distant glimmer of light, complex and serene: it was a Gaijin flower-ship, complacently orbiting Earth.

When she got back to the States, Madeleine flew out to Orlando. To get to KSC she drove north along U.S. 3, the length of Merritt Island. There used to be security gates; now there was nothing but a rusting fence, with a new smart-concrete road surface cut right through it.

She parked at the Vehicle Assembly Building. It was early morning. The place was deserted. Sand drifted across the empty parking lot, gathering in miniature dunes.

She walked out to the old press stand, a wooden frame like a baseball bleacher. She sat down, looking east. The Sun was in her eyes, and already hot; she could feel it draw her face tight as a drum. To the right, stretching off to the south, there were rocket gantries. In the mist they were two-dimensional, colorless. Most of them were disused, part-dismantled, museum pieces. The sense of desolation, abandonment, was heavy in the air.

Sally Brind had turned out to work for Bootstrap, the rump of the corporation that had sent a spacecraft to the Gaijin base in the asteroid belt three decades earlier.

Madeleine was not especially interested in the Gaijin. She had been born a few years after their arrival in the Solar System; they were just a part of her life, and not a very exciting part. But she knew that four decades after the first detection of the Gaijin — and a full nineteen years after they had first come sailing in from the belt, apparently prompted by Reid Malenfant’s quixotic journey — the Gaijin had established something resembling a system of trade with humanity.

They had provided some technological advances: robotics, vacuum industries, a few nanotech tricks like their asteroid mining blankets — enough to revolutionize a dozen industries and make a hundred fortunes. They had also flown human scientists on exploratory missions to other planets: Mars, Mercury, even the moons of Jupiter. Not Venus, though, oddly, despite repeated requests. And the Gaijin had started to provide a significant proportion of Earth’s resources from space: raw materials from the asteroids, including precious metals, and even energy, beamed down as microwaves from great collectors in the sky.

Humans — or rather, the governments and corporations who dealt with the Gaijin — had to “pay” for all this with resources common on Earth but scarce elsewhere, notably heavy metals and some complex organics. The Gaijin had also been allowed to land on Earth and had been offered cultural contact. The Gaijin had, strangely, shown interest in some human ideas, and a succession of writers, philosophers, theologians, and even a few discreditable science fiction authors had been summoned to converse with the alien “ambassadors.”

The government authorities, and the corporations who were profiting, seemed to regard the whole arrangement as a good deal. With the removal of the great dirt-making industries from the surface of the Earth — power, mining — there was a good chance that eco recovery could, belatedly, become a serious proposition.

Not everybody agreed. All those shut-down mines and decommissioned power plants were creating economic and environmental refugees. And there were plenty of literal refugees too — for instance, all the poor souls who had been moved out of the great swathes of equatorial land that had been given over to the microwave receiving stations.