Space. Stephen Baxter
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a thousand dreams. And here he was, by God. He felt his mouth stretch wide in a grin of triumph.
He blipped his thrusters and swivelled, searching the sky until he found another constellation, a neat, unmistakable W-shape picked out by five bright stars. It was Cassiopeia, familiar from his boyhood astronomy jags. But now there was an extra star to the left of the pattern, turning the constellation into a crude zigzag. He knew what that new star must be, too.
Suspended in immensity, here at the rim of the Alpha Centauri system, Malenfant looked back at the sun.
The sun is a star – just a star. Giordano Bruno was right after all, he thought.
But if it took light four years to get here, it had surely taken him at least as long, however the portal worked. Suddenly I am four years into the future. And, even if I was to step home now – assuming that was possible – it would be another four years before I could feel the heat of the sun again.
How strange, he thought, and he felt subtly cold.
Movement, just ahead of him. He rotated again.
It was a spider robot, like a scaled-down copy of the one he had seen on the other side of the portal. There was a puff of what looked like reaction control engines, little sprays of crystals that glittered in the remote double light. Crude technology, he thought, making assessments automatically. It was heading towards the gate, its limbs writhing stiffly.
It seemed to spot him.
It stopped dead, in another flurry of crystals, a good distance away, perhaps a kilometre. But distances in space were notoriously hard to estimate, and he had no true idea of the robot’s size.
Those articulated limbs were still writhing. Its form was complex, shifting – obviously functional, adaptable to a range of tasks in zero gravity. But overall he saw that the limbs picked out something like a W shape, like the Cassiopeia constellation, centred on a dodecahedral core. He had no idea what it was doing. Perhaps it was studying him. He could barely see it, actually; the device was just an outline in Alpha Centauri light.
Malenfant calculated.
He hadn’t expected a reception committee. This was just a workaday gateway, a portal for unmanned robot worker drones. Maybe the Gaijin themselves were off in the warmth of that complex, crowded inner system.
He reckoned he had around five hours life support left. If he went back – assuming the portal was two-way – he might even make it back to the Perry.
Or he could stay here.
It would be one hell of a message to send on first contact, though, when the inhabitants of the Centauri system came out to see what was going on, and found nothing but his desiccated corpse.
But you’ve come a long way for this, Malenfant. And if you stay, dead or alive, they’ll sure know we are here.
He grinned. Whatever happened, he had achieved his goal. Not a bad deal for an old bastard.
He worked his left hand controller; with a gentle shove, the MMU thrust him forward, towards the drone.
He took his time. He had five hours to reach the drone. And he needed to keep some fuel for manoeuvring at the close, if he was still conscious to do it.
But the drone kept working its complex limbs, pursuing its incomprehensible tasks. It made no effort to come out to meet him.
And, as it turned out, his consumables ran out a lot more quickly than he had anticipated.
By the time he reached the drone, his oxygen alarm was chiming, softly, continually, inside his helmet. He stayed conscious long enough to reach out a gloved hand, and stroke the drone’s metallic hide.
When he woke again, it was as if from a deep and dreamless sleep.
The first thing he was aware of was an arm laid over his face. It was his own, of course. It must have wriggled free of the loose restraints around his sleeping bag.
Except that his hand was contained in a heavy spacesuit glove, which was not the way he was accustomed to sleeping.
And his sleeping bag was light years away.
He snapped fully awake. He was floating in golden light. He was rotating, slowly.
He was still in his EMU – but, Christ, his helmet was gone, the suit compromised. For a couple of seconds he fumbled, flailing, and his heart hammered.
He forced himself to relax. You’re still breathing, Malenfant. Wherever you are, there is air here. If it’s going to poison you, it would have done it already.
He exhaled, then took a deep lungful – filtered through his nose, with his mouth clamped closed. The air was neutral temperature, transparent. He could smell nothing but a faint sourness, and that probably emanated from himself, the cramped confines of a suit he’d worn for too long.
He was stranded in golden light, beyond which he could make out the stars, slightly dimmed, as if by smoke. There was the dazzling-bright pairing of Alpha Centauri. He hadn’t come far, then.
Were there walls around him? He could see no edges, no seams, no corners. He stretched out his feet and gloved fingers. His questing fingers hit a soft membrane. Suddenly the wall snapped into focus, just centimetres from his face: a smooth surface, overlaid by what felt like cables the width of his thumb, but welded somehow to the wall. The cables were a little hard to grip, but he clamped his fingers around them.
Anchored, he felt a lot more comfortable.
The wall itself was soft, neither warm nor cold, smooth beyond the discrimination of his touch. It curved tightly around him. Perhaps he was in some kind of inflated bubble; it could be no more than a few metres across. And it wasn’t inflated to maximum tension. When he pushed at the wall it rippled in great languid waves, pulses of golden light that briefly occluded the stars.
He picked at the membrane with one fingernail. It felt like some kind of plastic. He had no reason to believe it was anything more advanced; the Gaijin had not shown themselves to be technological super-beings. He could have easily taken a scraping of this stuff, analysed it with a small portable lab. Except he didn’t have a portable lab.
Something bumped against his leg. ‘Shit,’ he said. He whirled, scrabbling at the embedded ropes, until he was backed up against the wall.
It was the helmet from his Shuttle EMU.
He picked it up and turned it over in his gloved hands. The helmet had a snap-on metal ring, to fit it to the rest of the suit – or rather, it used to. The attachment had been cut, as if by a laser.
The Gaijin – or their robot drones, here on the edge of the Alpha system – had found him in a shell of gases: air that roughly matched what they must have known, from some equivalent of spectrograph studies, of the composition of Earth’s atmosphere. So they had provided more of the gases in this containment, and broken open his suit – and then, presumably, hoped for the best.
He took off his gloves. He found he was still wearing his lightweight comms headset. He pulled it off and tucked it inside the helmet. There was no sign of his manoeuvring unit.
… And now a kind of after-shock cut in. He rested against the slowly rippling wall, lit up by gold-filtered Centauri light, four light years from home. The robots had been smart, he realized with a shiver. After all the robots, if not the Gaijin themselves, shared nothing like human anatomy. What if they’d decided to see if his whole head was detachable? He felt very old, fragile, and unexpectedly lonely – as he hadn’t during the long months of his Perry flight to the Saddle Point.
What now?
First things first. You need a bio break, Malenfant.
He forced himself to take a leak into the condom he still wore. He felt the warm piss gather in the sac inside his suit. Piss that had been magically transported across four light years. He probably ought to bottle it; if he ever got back home he could probably sell it, a memento