Last and First Contacts
Date: 2012-04-01 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fantasy
Description: Stephen Baxter is one of preeminent science fiction writers of the current age. This collection showcases his work at its best. Last and First Contacts features ten exceptional stories personally selected by the author, none of which have been collected before and one of which, “Erstkontakt”, is brand new, having been written especially for this book. Also included is “Last Contact”, which was shortlisted for the Hugo Award.

Last and First

Contacts

STEPHEN BAXTER

Imaginings

An imprint of

NewCon Press

England

First edition, published in the UK April 2012
by NewCon Press

IMG 002 hardback

This collection copyright© 2012 by Stephen Baxter

Published by NewCon Press by arrangement with the author

All stories copyright © by Stephen Baxter

“Erstkontakt” copyright © 2012, original to this collection

“In The Abyss of Time” copyright © 2006 originally appeared in Asimov’s

“Halo Ghosts” copyright © 2000, originally appeared in Roadworks

“Tempest 43” copyright © 2009, originally appeared in We Think Therefore We Are, Daw Books

“The Children of Time” copyright © 2005, originally appeared in Asimov’s

“The Pacific Mystery” copyright © 2006, originally appeared in The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction, Robinson Publishing (UK),

Carroll & Graf (US).

“No More Stories” copyright © 2007, originally appeared in Fast Forward vol. 1, Pyr Books

“Dreamers’ Lake” copyright © 2006, originally appeared in Forbidden Planets, Daw Books.

“The Long Road” copyright © 2006, originally appeared in Postcripts No. 6

“Last Contact” copyright © 2007, originally appeared in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, BL Publishing.

All rights reserved, including the right to produce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

ISBN: 978-1-907069-40-6 (hardback)

Cover art by David A Hardy

Cover design by Andy Bigwood

Minimal editorial interference by Ian Whates

Text layout by Storm Constantine
eBook design by Tim C. Taylor

Contents

In Praise of Associations: An Introduction

Erstkontakt

In The Abyss of Time

Halo Ghosts

Tempest 43

The Children of Time

The Pacific Mystery

No More Stories

Dreamers’ Lake

The Long Road

Last Contact

Afterword

In Praise of Associations

An Introduction

Ian Whates

Stephen Baxter is one of the most respected science fiction writers of the current age. With degrees in mathematics and engineering, it is perhaps unsurprising that his work tends to be technically convincing as well as imaginative, intelligent and, on occasion, challenging. He has been entertaining and impressing readers and critics alike for more than two decades now, and his work has won him a hatful of awards, including a John W Campbell, a brace each of Philip K Dick and Sidewise Awards and four BSFA Awards.

It seems unfeasible that anyone could produce a worthy follow-up to HG Wells’ classic “The Time Machine” but Stephen managed to do so with aplomb, and his novel The Time Ships remains the only authorised sequel to this seminal tale.

My first direct contact with Stephen came in 2006, when he very graciously agreed to donate a newly written story to the fund-raising anthology Time Pieces, NewCon Press’ very first publication. Our association, however, goes back a great deal further than that.

In the late 1980s, my first published stories appeared in a semi-pro publication called Dream Magazine, edited by the late Trevor Jones. I used to read the other stories in Dream avidly, in no small part to see how my own efforts matched up. On the whole, I thought they more than did so, but there was one contributor who genuinely annoyed me, because his pieces were so good, displaying an understanding of technical issues that I simply didn’t possess.

I’ve just taken down my battered copy of Dream Magazine #14 (November 1987) from the shelf. The closing story in the issue is “A Flash of Lightning” by I.G. Whates (my third ever sale); the opening piece is “The Bark Spaceship” by S.M. Baxter, the author in question.

I had no idea who S.M. Baxter was, but I suspected even then that this individual might be destined for greater things. As a science fiction writer, it’s always gratifying when one of your predictions comes true…

Stephen Baxter has continued to dazzle; whether with his far-reaching Xeelee sequence, the mind-bogglingly magnificent Manifold series, his YA masterpiece The H-Bomb Girl (one of several titles that have been shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award), or his near future global disaster sequence, Flood and Ark. He has collaborated with both Arthur C Clarke and Terry Pratchett, and is involved in the SETI project. Throughout all this, he has continued to produce some of the most thought-provoking and memorable short fiction around; which is why Stephen was one of the first authors I approached regarding the Imaginings project (speaking to him as he was in London, about to board a plane for the US where he would link up with a certain T Pratchett). Needless to say, I was delighted when he agreed to participate.

All of the above perhaps intimates but doesn’t specify one further fact about Stephen Baxter that is worth noting: in addition to being an exceptional writer, he is good company and a genuinely nice man.

Here then, is Imaginings 2: Last and First Contacts; a collection of stories personally selected and organised by Stephen Baxter. What could be better?

Ian Whates

February 2012

Erstkontakt

During her time at Peenemünde, Dorothea only spoke to Wernher von Braun once.

Oh, everybody knew who he was. You saw him around, and the draftswomen and the secretaries in their great dormitories would speculate about the tall, upright young fellow, so different from the older, rather odd-looking senior scientists and engineers around him, as at ease with the humblest of staff as with the Party leaders who frequently visited the research centre. Even the foreign workers in their ugly fenced-off barrack at Trassenheide probably worshipped him, the girls imagined.

But von Braun was SS. You always had to remember that. And when Father Kopleck, the centre’s chaplain, called to say that von Braun wanted to see her in his office, Dorothea’s heart fluttered with dread.

That bright day in October 1942 had already been an auspicious one, for that afternoon the Aggregat 4 rocket that was going to win the war for Hitler had made its first successful test flight. When the firing was due everybody had gone out to see, crowding in the parking lots and on the rooftops; you worked ferociously hard here, but you couldn’t miss such a moment. Well, the lathe operators had flirted with the typists, and everybody laid bets about how long the ship would last before it blew up this time. From Dorothea’s office block she couldn’t even see Test Stand Seven, a concrete platform near the northern shore of the peninsula.

But you couldn’t miss the A4 itself when it went up, a droplet of liquid light rising straight up out of a bank of pine trees and into the sky, trailing white smoke. Dorothea was struck by the sheer verticality of it, compared to the horizontal lines of the landscape, the green of pine forest and marsh. She saw ducks flapping off to the west out of the rocket’s way.

And then the noise of it reached her ears, a thundering, crackling roar. The rocket punched through a layer of cloud and kept on climbing, arcing out over the Baltic.

Everybody cheered, and went back to work.

And not a couple of hours later, before the end of the shift, Father Kopleck came to find Dorothea, and said she had been summoned to the presence of Doctor von Braun, to talk about her comet.

Von Braun’s office was in one of the grander houses in the senior staff accommodation quarter. This area was like a university campus, with two-storey buildings set around squares of green, and a sports ground, and young people riding bicycles. It was quite a contrast to the horrible warehouse-like block where Dorothea had to sleep, along with thousands of other young women. But even here guards patrolled with dogs.

They were met at the door by a young officer in the black uniform of the SS, who checked the identity cards pinned to their clothes, the priest’s black jacket and Dorothea’s woollen cardigan. Dorothea felt a thrill of terror and excitement; the SS were so glamorous, so terrible. But the officer was very handsome, and he smiled at her. ‘I am Lieutenant Bergher. My name is Adam. You have nothing to fear from Doctor von Braun. He is even more charming than I am.’

The priest, about forty, a local man, sensible and good-humoured, arched an eyebrow at that sally, but said nothing.

Bergher escorted them into the house and led them along a corridor panelled with polished wood to an expansive office. Here von Braun sat behind a desk as wide as the Baltic, littered with papers, blueprints, trajectory diagrams and scribbled notes. He stood to greet them. ‘Fraulein Rau, and Father –’

‘Hans Kopleck, sir.’

‘Indeed.’ He shook the priest’s hand, then took Dorothea’s hand, quite gently, and bowed. In a snappy civilian suit, he really was tall, handsome, cultured; he was thirty years old, some eight years older than Dorothea. ‘Please sit. Forgive the litter. The results of the test flight are only just coming in.’

‘I saw it, sir,’ Dorothea said, sitting down primly before the desk.

‘Spectacular, wasn’t it? A success in every aspect. At last we have something to show the Fuhrer! And now the hard work begins, as we prepare the missile for mass production. But we changed the timing of the test, you know, Fraulein Rau. Because of you.’

To have such significance suddenly thrust upon her was frightening. ‘Why? Not because of my comet, surely?’

‘Exactly because of your comet, yes.’

She failed to understand.

‘I must share the blame,’ Father Kopleck said gently. ‘You may know that I grew up here, on the peninsula, Doctor von Braun. When the engineers came – well, the fishing villages were demolished, and the families moved on, with handsome enough compensation. But I stayed on.’

‘Even rocket scientists need God, eh, Father?’

‘That was my instinct. It came to my attention that Fraulein Rau here had an interest in astronomy.’

‘Only minor,’ Dorothea said, hoping she wasn’t blushing. ‘But I brought with me the little telescope my father once bought for me. I hoped the seeing would be better than in Munich.’

‘So I showed the Fraulein the beaches on the north coast. Where I knew from my own boyhood memories that the view of the starry sky is unimpeded and spectacular, on a clear night.’

‘It was all approved,’ Dorothea said quickly, to this SS man. ‘I gained permission from my supervisor.’

‘As did I,’ said the priest dryly.

Von Braun glanced at a file. ‘You work in operations, Fraulein. The tedious but essential work of documenting material flows and manpower allocations, eh? And yet you are evidently a capable astronomer. Well, it’s no surprise. We have selected everybody we could for some element of an academic background. Even clerks such as yourself. Even Adam there! The more intelligence is focussed on our huge task at all levels, the more chance it has of success. And so, Fraulein astronomer, on that beach you observed your comet.’

‘It was a bright shifting star – obvious, if you look out for a couple of nights in a row. I sketched its position and estimated its changing magnitude. With my father I used to observe variable stars, and developed the necessary skills.’

‘I have your report here.’ Von Braun searched his desk, and held up a cheaply printed single-page document. ‘“The Peenemünde Chronicle”!’

She felt apologetic. ‘It’s just a silly thing some of the girls produce. We print notices of dances and so on. Bits of gossip.’

‘And here you published your astronomical discovery.’

‘Well, I didn’t know what else to do with it…’

‘You could have notified one of the observatories. Or an academic journal. Perhaps you have priority; I doubt that there is much scientific sky-watching going on in this world at war. Dorothea’s comet! Well, your little notice in this schoolgirl rag attracted the eyes of some of my scientists.’ He winked at her. ‘Some of my younger colleagues, you know, Fraulein, like to read about comets and about dances with pretty secretaries.

‘But it was your quite precise observations of the object’s path across the sky that ultimately brought this to my own attention. You see, Fraulein, as my trajectory specialists will tell you, these observations of yours are sufficient to reconstruct the path of your comet, as it has approached the inner worlds of the solar system.’

‘I understand, though I hadn’t the resources to do that myself. A comet’s path may be elliptical if it is contained within the solar system, or parabolic or hyperbolic if it comes from beyond the system.’

‘Very good,’ said von Braun, rather patronising. ‘But in this case, my dear girl, the object’s orbit is neither elliptical nor parabolic nor hyperbolic. Your observations clearly show, and I have no reason to doubt them, that this object, as it approached the sun, was decelerating.’

There was a stunned silence, broken at last by the priest. ‘I suspect I am the only one here who doesn’t understand the significance of that.’

‘It means, Father,’ said Dorothea, ‘that my comet can’t be a comet at all.’

‘Quite so,’ said Wernher von Braun. ‘Not only that, I had one of our specialists train a spectroscope on the thing. You understand that such an instrument gathers emitted or reflected light, and breaks it down to deduce the elemental composition of the source? Of course you do. We have it here to study the exhaust products of our rockets. Fraulein, your “comet” is not a snowball lit up by reflected sunlight. It creates its own light! My fellows believe we have observed an exotic, umm, exhaust, analogous to the exhaust plume of an A4. Some suggest it is the result of some form of atomic disintegration. For it is the energy of the atom, you know, that will ultimately carry us to the stars and beyond.’

She gaped. ‘The stars?’

‘Oh, yes. In fact a reconstruction of the trajectory indicates that our visitor was travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light itself before it began its deceleration. Your “comet” must have travelled from another star.’ He grinned at her. ‘Perhaps you are surprised by the course of this conversation.’ He opened a drawer, rummaged, and produced a magazine, cheaply produced with a gaudy cover: Astounding Science Fiction, the title in English. ‘I have this delivered to a mail drop in Switzerland under a false name. My own career began with dreams of the stars, of flights to Mars. One must feed the imagination, Fraulein, even in wartime. Now. Do you know what has become of your “comet” recently?’

She frowned. ‘I haven’t been out to the beach for some nights. We’ve been so busy with the A4 launch approaching.’

‘Of course. Well, we have observed it. It is no longer decelerating, no longer approaching the sun.’

‘Then what?’

He traced circles with a fingertip. ‘Earth has a second moon, Fraulein Rau.’ He smiled at the wonder that must show in her face. ‘Now do you understand why we changed the timing of the A4 launch?’

‘Not entirely, sir.’

‘I can’t believe that the object has not been observed elsewhere in the world, but only we have the wherewithal to do something about it.’ He spread his hands. ‘This is the world’s only rocket factory. We launched the world’s very first spaceship this afternoon! Is this “comet” of yours some ark from the stars? If so perhaps we can lure it down here. To speak to us. Where better? And that is why we launched the A4 just as the orbiting comet crossed our meridian. So it would be seen.

‘Now.’ He leaned forward. ‘I have a special assignment for you, Fraulein. You may be the best amateur astronomer at Peenemünde. I want you to spend more nights with your telescope on that beach. Perhaps the Father here will accompany you – and Lieutenant Bergher, too, for reasons of security. I want you to watch your comet as it passes through our clear skies. Report immediately any change in its orbital elements. But for now, you must understand, this is all top security.’

She was used to security. ‘Of course, Doctor von Braun.’

‘No,’ he said sternly. ‘That was a routine answer. Listen to me. You must know, Fraulein, that our work here is under intense scrutiny. Our rockets are hugely expensive and have already taken years to develop. Germany fights a war on two fronts; resources are scarce, and other projects have their champions who compete for the ears of the top levels of the party. Our credibility is important, and must be cherished.’ With a self-deprecating smile he tucked away the issue of Astounding. ‘Our enemies, I mean our internal enemies, may present Dorothea’s comet as a bit of foolishness that shows we are not serious in our endeavours here. We can’t have that. And yet we can’t let the opportunity of encountering this wanderer go by. Which is why –’ He pressed his forefinger to his lips.

‘I understand.’

‘Good girl. This applies to you too, Father.’

‘Priests know how to be discreet.’

‘Good. Adam here will be your contact. Remember, Lieutenant Bergher, any developments must be reported to me in person, immediately.’

‘Yes, Doctor von Braun.’

A secretary popped her head around the door. ‘Colonel Dornberger is here for you, sir.’

‘Thank you.’ He turned a dazzling smile on Dorothea. ‘Good luck, Fraulein!’

So began a strange double career for Dorothea. By day she worked with the rest of the clerks and secretaries on the unending task of keeping this establishment of thousands of people, tens of thousands of complex machines, and millions of marks, functioning and flowing. And then when the working day was done, whenever the night was clear, Dorothea would be collected by Father Kopleck and Lieutenant Bergher in an SS staff car and driven off with her telescope and notebooks to the northern coast.

Sometimes Dorothea wondered how she kept it all up. Some mixture of excitement and fear kept her nerves sparking, she suspected. When she did get a chance to sleep, on cloudy or rainy nights, she slept very deeply indeed.

Though when she dreamt, it was often of Lieutenant Adam Bergher.

As the autumn drew in and the winter stars rose, the good seeing nights were spectacular, but bitterly cold in the wind off the Baltic. As compensation, on Sundays, when they were generally free of their routine duties, Adam would drive up to the beach in the afternoon before the light went, and they would eat sandwiches and drink coffee from flasks, and even take a nip of brandy if Adam could get it. Of course Sundays were the hardest days for Father Kopleck to get away from his duties, and so Adam took Dorothea to the coast alone.

Dorothea soon began to spend the whole week in a daze, waiting for Sunday, and her ‘picnics’ with Adam. The priest made no remark, but the stern looks he gave Dorothea spoke volumes. You are evidently a sensible girl. Stay that way.

The coast itself was beautiful. They sat on blankets on a broad sandy beach, before them the steel grey of the Baltic with Sweden and Finland off to the north somewhere, behind them low sandy hills with stands of forest, tall pines and some oak. Sometimes they would walk. There were patches of marshland, and wildlife: red squirrel, rabbits, even deer, and swans, coots, grebes, ducks. This place had been chosen for the research establishment because of its remoteness and wildness; access to the peninsula, across a few bridges, was easily controlled, and the sea offered an immense testing range into which rockets could be fired off with impunity.

Dorothea said, during their fourth or fifth ‘picnic’ alone, ‘It’s odd that the wildlife isn’t scared away by the rockets.’

‘My father was in the first war. In France. He said the birdsong would always start up again as soon as the artillery barrages stopped. Although Doctor von Braun says his maternal grandfather used to come up here to shoot the ducks!’

‘My mother didn’t really approve of me volunteering to come here. Oh, she thought I would be safer than in Munich, with the English bombing. But I’m a city girl, she said. How would I get on with oceans and trees!’

‘A city girl, but you had your eyes on the stars.’

‘That was thanks to my father.’ She stroked her telescope on its stand, a sturdy reflector. ‘I took technical subjects at school, and began a degree in physics at the university. But of course few women become scientists, especially in the war.’

‘Yet you’ve ended up doing science here, after all. Strange that such different paths have led the two of us to the same place. My father was broken after the Kaiser’s war. Wounded, though not badly, but when he came home he was unemployed, and he struggled to manage. Then the Party came along and gave us back some self-respect.’ He glanced down at his black uniform. ‘He would have been proud of me, I think.’

On impulse she grabbed his arm. They had rarely touched before, and he looked startled. ‘I know he would, Adam.’

He gazed into her eyes, and smiled.

But her small alarm clock chimed: time to begin observing.

He looked up into the sky. ‘Five o’clock. Shouldn’t your comet be up there by now?’

The comet’s orbital period was almost exactly ninety minutes. Every observing night she made out tables of its expected positions, and used a navy-issue sextant and stopwatch, courtesy of von Braun, to confirm those positions. She glanced at her tables now, and up into the sky, and pointed to the south. ‘It should be just – there.’ When you knew what to look for it was unmistakeable, the unwinking point of light sliding slowly but steadily across the background of the winter constellations. Today, though there was still some light in the blue-grey sky, the brighter stars were already easily visible.

But there was no sign of the comet.

Dorothea felt an odd panic. She worked her sextant and checked her tables. ‘Have I made some mistake?’

‘You never have before. Don’t be frightened, Dorothea.’ Adam got to his feet, took a pair of expensive-looking Swiss-made binoculars from the staff car, and began to scan the sky.

‘There must be something wrong.’

‘Dorothea.’

‘I do have to put together these tables in a rush –’

‘Dorothea. Hush.’ He was standing still, the binoculars before his face, peering to the west. ‘Look. Just look.’

She turned. And she saw a parachute, a huge one, spread across the sky, made of some silvery fabric, not like the grubby chutes you saw over baled-out flyers during an air raid. And suspended beneath the chute on fine threads, or wires, was a blocky mass, like complex machinery. Her heart pumped, with wonder, astonishment – and, yes, with relief that she hadn’t got something wrong.

‘Well,’ said Adam. ‘Here comes your comet.’

‘The stars, touching the Earth. The whole world is changing, Adam. Think of it! Right here and now! In the middle of this war –’

He grabbed her waist and pulled her to him. She felt the prickle of the coarse cloth of his SS uniform against the bare flesh of her neck. His eyes were wide, his face full of wonder. She drowned in his kiss.

As the winter deepened the pressure of work at the Peenemünde complex only intensified.

Both the army and the air force had research establishments here, though they shared facilities such as the air strip, and a power plant and liquid oxygen factory, huge concrete monuments rising from the pine forest. The army rocket engineers under Dornberger and von Braun worked in complexes to the east of the peninsula, including a line of rocket test stands that ran up the coast towards the sea. In a gigantic assembly facility called Production Hall F 1, a great modernistic slab of glass and concrete set incongruously among the pines, an assembly line for missiles was being prepared. But to the west the air force was developing its own weapons, flying bombs of much shorter range than the A4. Soon testing of those devices too was underway, and the whole peninsula was a hive of activity.

The good news for von Braun and his people, Adam told Dorothea, was that Hitler had already ordered hundreds of the A4 rockets, ultimately to be fired at England. But after years of opposition from various vested interests, now that the work was showing some success, the battles were starting for a piece of Peenemünde. You had the armaments ministry, the military branches and the security agencies all competing for control and credit. The navy had ambitious plans to launch A4s from submarines. Even private companies were pitching in, hoping for lucrative patents and profits. In Hitler’s Germany such internal wars were waged viciously, through spies, informers and denunciations. The place was riddled with distrust and conflict, putting everybody under even more pressure.

Meanwhile, in stolen moments, Dorothea and Adam fell ever more deeply in love.

And in the middle of all this an alien spacecraft had landed.

It had come down in a clearing in the woods, away from more obvious landing sites such as the airfield. The parachute did not seem to have been seen, save by Dorothea and Adam; the military spotters, looking for RAF Lancasters over the Baltic, had been blind to an emissary from the stars. And so von Braun had it to himself. The ship was a tangle of components over twelve feet tall, estimated to weigh several tons, small for an interstellar spacecraft perhaps, but difficult to move. Von Braun, siphoning off what resources he dared, ordered the construction of a chamber around the craft.

The first time Adam took Dorothea to the comet’s bunker, a few days into January of 1943, he had to lead her by the hand through the woods. There wasn’t even a proper road laid down, though you could see tracks worn by the coming and going of von Braun’s most trusted colleagues. Guards were posted outside the rough facility, but Dorothea and Adam were allowed to enter the chamber alone. Inside, electric light bulbs dangled, evoking dazzling highlights. Laboratory equipment of various kinds had been set up, along with a rack of cameras.

And in the middle of it all stood the comet, as everybody continued to call it, though it clearly was not a comet at all. Dorothea was thrilled, nervous; she clung tightly to Adam’s hand.

It was a rough pyramid in outline, based on a sturdy frame. But the construction was open; there were no hull panels. Inside the frame huddled spheres and ovoids connected by tubing, metallic but with an oddly textured surface. A kind of glittering mesh, or web, lay draped over many of the components. The one point of commonality with von Braun’s A4 rockets was a flaring exhaust nozzle at the base.

‘It has an organic feel,’ she whispered. ‘Like a sculpture, an art work – you know, some abstract representation of the human form.’

Adam grunted. ‘The only artists I ever met are the ones I’ve been sent to arrest.’

‘There is no evidence of a pilot. But might it be alive, in fact? Can we be sure that the categories of our own existence apply to beings from another star?’

‘I can’t be sure of anything. Except that we’re whispering.’

‘Well, perhaps it hears us.’

‘Perhaps it sees us.’ He pointed to a disc of glass that looked like a camera lens. ‘It would be foolish to send a machine so far and not have it capable of observing what is around it.’

‘I wonder if it understands us.’

‘If so, it shows no signs. The scientists have tried to talk to it. They hold up cards with a variety of languages and diagrams – Pythagoras’s theorem on right triangles – you can imagine. There has been no response.’

She looked closer. Small limbs protruded here and there from the structure, like twigs; and, twig-like, some bore strange fruit, shining discs, blocks of what might be ceramic. ‘They are like the gifts on the big Christmas tree they put up in the square.’

‘Some of the scientists speculate that this is how it wishes to communicate. Through physical tokens.’ He laughed. ‘Perhaps more creatures in the galaxy have hands than have eyes or ears! The scientists have yet to pluck up the courage to take these offerings. That is, if they are offerings, if this really is some friendly emissary rather than a weapon.’

‘Why should creatures from another star wish to strike at us?’

‘For the same reasons the Americans do. Or men from Mars. Have you not read H. G. Wells?’

‘Yes, but I also read Kurd Lasswitz, who had the Martians come in peace. It is clear to me that this artefact has come in friendship. Look at the way it landed. It evidently has a rocket drive, powerful enough to be visible across the solar system. Yet it came down on a parachute, as gently as possible, even if as a consequence it landed a little off course, in this wood. It was being considerate to us; it did not exterminate us with its very landing!’

‘Hmm. Perhaps you’re right. Look at this.’ He went to a table cluttered with laboratory gear, and picked up a polished wooden box with a kind of wand attached by a cable. He carried this to the comet, knelt down, and waved the wand under the rocket nozzle. There were clicks from the box, and a needle wavered.

‘A Geiger counter,’ Dorothea said, wondering.

‘Yes. The nozzle is faintly radioactive – not enough to do any harm, but Doctor von Braun has mandated that all but indentured workers have to limit their time of contact. Not that we allow any indentured workers in here.’

‘Then clearly Doctor von Braun was right. The craft used the energies of the atom to cross between the stars, and again made itself safe before exposing itself to us.’ She walked around the comet again. She could smell it, an exotic metallic tang, a scent of burning. ‘Surely it came here in friendship, Adam.’

Adam put away the Geiger counter. ‘But friendship’s not all it can offer us.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘This is not to be repeated.’ Just for a heartbeat he was a steely-eyed SS man. ‘Think of it, Dorothea. Think what we have here. You yourself saw the interstellar drive flaring across the dark hall of the solar system. What if such a torch were turned on London or Moscow or New York?’

She flinched. ‘That’s horrible.’

He laughed, and hugged her. ‘Well, this is a weapons research establishment! But let’s not speak of it.’ He held her closer, letting his hand slide over her hips, the cleft of her buttocks. He whispered, ‘Nobody knows we’re here. Not even that tame priest of yours. The guards outside won’t bother us.’

She felt faintly shocked, yet excited. ‘Now, Adam –’

‘It’s warm in here, isn’t it? Better than that draughty beach. And there are a couple of cots, for when the scientists work over. Better than a blanket on the sand, or the back of a staff car.’

Dorothea peered up at the alien, the glistening lens-like disc. ‘Adam! Not in front of the visitor!’

‘Oh, come.’ He drew her to him, and nuzzled her neck. ‘What, do you think they are all Catholics on Alpha Centauri? Which is where von Braun believes the craft came from by the way. If it came to observe humanity shouldn’t we give it the chance to see us in the wild, so to speak?’

She laughed in his ear, softly. ‘So it’s not me you’re interested in but science, is that it?’

‘You know me, my love. Ever the experimentalist.’ And, unbuttoning his black uniform jacket, he led her to the cots.

Winter turned to spring. Rumours of setbacks in the war did nothing to reduce the pressure at Peenemünde.

Then RAF surveillance flights were spotted, high in the clear Baltic air. Dorothea actually sighted one with her reflecting telescope, a very high altitude plane.

This sent the security services into a fury, as they tried to find out who was betraying the secrets of the base to the English. There were denunciations, disappearances, hangings. Most of the victims were indentured workers, the French and the Poles, but not all. Even one of the girls from Dorothea’s dormitory, a bright, bubbly Prussian lass called Gilda, was taken away.

Everybody understood the significance of the RAF flights. The English and Americans had become proficient, prolific, expert bombers; night after night the very heart of the homeland, industrial and urban, was being pounded and burned. If the RAF were spotting Peenemünde, then the bombs would come here too; it was only a question of when.

The passing of the months, the evolution of spring into summer, did nothing to ease the tension.

Dorothea saw little of Adam, so bound up were they by their respective duties.

Meanwhile, a secret within a secret, the work on the alien ship went on.

And in this period Dorothea came to learn that she had her own secret. If it were revealed, perhaps she would be sent away, and she could not bear that. So she stayed silent, keeping the truth from Father Kopleck who had warned her to be careful, even from the other girls she lived with, though she suspected some of them must know. And she did not tell Adam, when she did see him, though she knew in the end she must.

One evening in June, at the end of a shift, Dorothea walked with Father Kopleck across the big parking area before Production Hall F 1. Work units under the command of the SS were erecting a tall wire fence around the entire Hall, and Dorothea and the priest had to make an unwelcome diversion. She was exhausted from the day’s work, and felt increasingly heavy on her feet.

For his part Father Kopleck was restless, angry. He had been administering funerals in Trassenheide, the compound of the indentured workers. Many of the Poles were Catholics. He was native to this place; it seemed to damage his soul to have to oversee so many funerals of so many foreigners.

To distract them both she spoke of the work done on the comet. Kopleck, who had been in on the secret from the beginning, was one of the few in whom she felt able to confide.

‘They grew impatient,’ she said. ‘Doctor von Braun and the others. So they cut it open.’

‘They did what?’

‘It was done under Doctor von Braun’s personal supervision. I was not there; I saw the results later. The comet is now in two sections: the heavy propulsion unit that was below, and the lighter, more complex components above, now removed. They used oxy-acetylene torches from the production workshops. Hacksaws, in some places. And parachute thread.’

‘Parachute thread?’

‘I mean, from the comet’s own chute. The thread itself is a mystery – such a simple component, yet quite beyond us! I have handled some of it. Light as a fishing line, yet unbreakably tough. They have fixed this to frames and use it like a hacksaw blade; it goes through hardened steel like butter, I have seen it. And they used this to cut the comet’s big structural support.’

‘So they decapitated it.’

His tone was aggrieved, and she glanced at him, uneasy. She sometimes fretted that he was liable to talk himself into trouble. ‘The upper section may contain the “brain” of the ship. There may be some equivalent of the electronics of the A4, something like its gyroscopic guidance. The “gifts” it brought for us, the discs and pods and other baubles, have been taken away for analysis. But the work on such items has been perfunctory.’

‘Compared to the work on the engine section?’

‘Yes.’ She tried to remember what she had seen, the diagrams she had been shown by friendly, or naive, technicians. ‘There are banks of intense light sources. So intense they themselves can cut metal! The technicians have been able to activate some of them.’ Experiments which had cost one man his life. ‘These light sources are arranged in a kind of hollow sphere, so that their beams concentrate on a point at the centre of the sphere. And into this point a pellet is fired. We have found a kind of magazine with many of these pellets.’

‘Pellets? Of what?’

‘Of isotopes of hydrogen and helium, it seems. The physicists speculate that under the intense pressure of the light beams these pellets are made to undergo nuclear fusion…’

He smiled now. ‘My father and grandfather were fishermen. My grasp of theoretical physics is surprisingly limited.’

‘I’m sorry. The pellets go off like small bombs. One after the other, very rapidly. But these explosions do not destroy the ship. On the contrary, they push it forward, like a firecracker throwing a tin can in the air. The physicists marvel at all this, at how so much energy can be stored and deployed in such a compact form.’

‘And the weapons designers imagine how it would be –’

‘If such a thing were mounted on the tip of an A4, yes.’

He held her arm. ‘Stand back.’

A convoy of trucks rolled across the open space before them, heading for a barrier set in the brand new fence around Hall F 1. There the trucks had to queue, engines running, while papers were shown and orders discussed. Dorothea and the priest were held up.

Dorothea found herself standing beside one of the trucks. It was like a truck for transporting cattle or sheep, a dirty, smelly thing with wooden slats enclosing its bed. But in that space were crammed humans, not animals. They were all men as far as she could see, all wearing what looked like grimy striped pyjamas. They were all standing; in fact there was no room for them to sit. To Dorothea they looked like old men, gaunt, many hairless, even toothless.

But then one of them spoke to her. ‘Hello, lady.’ He smiled a gappy smile. She saw that he wasn’t old at all. He was pressed against the wooden slats, holding on with thin fingers. He was distinguished from the others by a red triangle sewn to his striped shirt.

‘Don’t speak to him,’ Kopleck murmured.

‘You are prettier than these uncouth fellows I must travel with. My name is Dirk. I am a Dutch fellow.’ His German was heavily accented.

The other men in the truck were watching, wide-eyed.

She found herself saying, ‘My name is Dorothea.’

‘Dorothea! Pretty name. Where from, Dorothea?’

‘Munich.’

‘Pretty place. Me, I came from Buchenwald most recently. You heard of Buchenwald? Before that from Nijmegen. You heard of Nijmegen?’

‘I noticed your red triangle.’

He smiled. ‘Oh, this old thing? Means I was in the resistance.’

‘Hey! You!’ An SS man came running up, rifle in hand. ‘Shut up!’ He slammed the butt of his rifle against the slats, into Dirk’s fingers. Dirk fell back with a howl of agony, into the darkness of the truck.

Kopleck was already marching Dorothea away.

The RAF bombers came on the night of 17th August.

The sirens sounded at midnight. The Lancasters and Halifaxes came in over the sea, so there was very little warning, and there was only perfunctory resistance from German planes and anti-aircraft fire.

The girls from Dorothea’s dormitory scrambled out of the building, bundled in dressing gowns and coats. The sky was clear, the moon full. Led by wardens wielding blue torches, the girls made for their assigned bunkers, talking loudly, nervously.

But Dorothea broke away and ran for Production Hall F 1. She knew that Adam was on duty on the fence there tonight. She had barely seen him for months. She still had not told him her own deep secret; she’d not had the chance. Soon it would be obvious to everybody, of course. But if this was to be their last night on Earth, she wanted him to know that he was, or would have been, a father.

She found him at the F 1 fence. The big gate was open, and officers and other ranks were fleeing for the bunkers. When he saw her he grabbed her arm. ‘What are you doing here?’ His voice was all but drowned by the sirens.

‘I had to see you. We have to talk.’

‘What, now?’

There was a shuddering thump, deep and visceral. They both staggered.

She looked up. She could see the RAF planes now, like moths, black against a moonlit sky. There must have been hundreds of them. They were dropping flares, red, white, green, brilliant pinpricks that trailed smoke as they fell.

‘This is just the first wave,’ Adam muttered. ‘The next will use the flares and the lights of the fires for positioning.’

‘We have to get to the bunkers.’

‘No. Too late. The factory,’ he said, making a quick decision. ‘The basements are strong. Come on.’ He grabbed her arm and they ran through the gate in the fence into the Hall compound, and through big access doors into the factory itself.

Inside, the overhead fluorescent lamps were going out one by one as somebody belatedly turned out the lights. Dorothea gazed around in wonderment. She had never been in here before. This was a pilot production line for making missiles, and she saw forges, welding facilities, lathes, drills, and heaps of components, hull sections, nose cones, tail fins; half-completed rockets lay on great flatbed trailers, some already painted with the camouflage colours they would need when launched by squads of technicians from hiding places in the forests of the Netherlands. All this glimpsed in flashes and shadows as the lights flickered and died, and people ran everywhere, prisoners or guards she couldn’t distinguish, crowding around staircases to the basement.

And she saw a man in a striped uniform, hanged, dangling from a crane.

More bombs crashed. Dorothea could hear glass smash, feel the thick-laid concrete floor shudder.

A man hobbled up to them, grinning, in a striped prisoner’s uniform with a red triangle sewn to the breast.

Adam drew his revolver. ‘Get back!’

‘No!’ Dorothea grabbed his arm. ‘I know him.’

‘Hello, Dorothea,’ said Dirk. ‘Follow me. Come, come.’ And he ran off into the dark.

With difficulty they followed him across the crowded hall. Now all the lights were gone, and the only illumination was the moonlight shafting through broken windows. Dirk led them to a stairwell, leading down into the dark. He took the steps two, three at a time on his impossibly scrawny legs. Dorothea and Adam followed as best they could, Adam keeping his revolver drawn, held like a wand before him. Dirk’s feet were bare, Dorothea saw, his soles bloody and scarred.

At the base of the stairs was a short corridor, plaster-walled. Again Dirk led the way, running. Still the building shuddered from the approaching bombs.

They had to squeeze against a wall to get past what Dorothea thought was a pile of blankets, stacked up in the corridor. She found they were bodies, skin and bone, heaped up like firewood. Adam pushed her onwards.

They reached a doorway and tumbled after Dirk into a wide hall, lit by dangling bulbs. This was a kind of dormitory, with bunks like shelves stacked up four deep. There were prisoners jammed in here, every way Dorothea looked. They cowered back at the sight of the SS man with his revolver. The stink was astounding, a smell of rot.

Dorothea wondered if Father Kopleck was safe, wherever he was – if indeed he was still alive. The SS had come for him a week earlier.

‘Here, here.’ Dirk led them to a bottom-shelf bunk. It was just a wooden frame, Dorothea saw, no mattress, no bedding. Here they sat, the three of them, side by side, Dorothea between the two men. In the shadows around them the prisoners moved with rustles of dry flesh. ‘Safe here,’ said Dirk. ‘Not so bad. Like student dorms. You missed dinner. Cabbage soup.’

‘Shut up,’ Adam said routinely.

Dirk looked away. Dorothea saw he had one hand swathed in a filthy bandage.

More bombs fell like monstrous footsteps, and the building shook, the frame of the bed, and plaster fell from the ceiling.

Dorothea felt oppressed by the huge inhuman energies being unleashed all around her. ‘The prisoners will be killed too,’ she said with a stab of outrage. ‘Don’t the English know that?’

Adam grimaced. ‘Serve the little bastards right. Have you heard of their sabotage? They piss on the electronics. Over-tighten screws. Even blow dust into links between the turbo pumps. Stuff that’s impossible to detect before you fly. A rocket is a finely tuned machine; it isn’t hard to foul it up. And they keep on doing it, no matter how many of them we string up. Eh? Eh, you little bastard?’ He jabbed Dirk in the ribs with the muzzle of his revolver. ‘Keep this up and it’ll be the ovens for the whole damn lot of you.’

‘Do you think they’ll hit the comet?’

‘It’s possible. They won’t be aiming for it but some bombs always go astray, or are simply dumped. If they hit it we’ll lose everything. Oh, not the A4. That project will recover. There’s already been talk of moving from here, now that the location is compromised. Von Braun is all for live launches, I mean with munitions, in the middle of Poland.’

She frowned. ‘But there are people there.’

‘Only Poles. Or we might build a plant under a mountain. Von Braun has marvellous dreams, you know. Such as putting one A4 on top of another and building a rocket that could reach New York. How would Roosevelt like that, eh? But he’s been fired up by what we could do with the comet technology.’

‘Make even bigger bombs.’

‘Yes, but beyond that… Think about it, Dorothea. You believe the Alpha Centauri people wanted to send us a message. Well, they have. And that message is – we can reach you! And with ships like this, we can destroy you! For they could, you know. Von Braun and Dornberger did some calculations of the energy, I mean the sheer kinetic energy, that would be locked up in a craft of a few tons travelling at half the speed of light. Why, you wouldn’t need munitions; an impact alone could sterilise a whole planet. So that’s von Braun’s dream. After this war is won, and the next with the Japanese.’

‘A dream to do what?’

‘Why, to build a bigger and better comet, and fire it back at Alpha Centauri. Do to them what they should have done to us, before they missed their chance – and gave us the technology to strike back at them. What an error that was! War is inevitable, between worlds as between nations. We must strike first. Why take a chance?’

Perhaps their baby, she thought, of which Adam was still entirely unaware, would live to see that war. The first interstellar war.

‘Those damn English. One bomb landing in the wrong place tonight – why, the destiny of worlds hangs in the balance, my love. In the very balance…’

She held his hand, and on her other side Dirk’s, as the English bombs stomped across Peenemünde, coming ever closer.

In The Abyss of Time

St John Elstead’s cosmological time machine was a hole in the ground.

I was choppered in from LA. We flew maybe sixty kilometres north, skimmed across the Mojave, and descended close to the town of Edwards. From the air Elstead’s facility was a ring of blocky white buildings that might have spanned a couple of kilometres, set out over the desert. The hub of the facility was a huddle of buildings at the rim of the circle towards the south west, like a diamond on a wedding ring.

We landed on a helipad, an uncompromising square of black tarmac. A gaggle of technicians in orange jumpsuits, some of them carrying lightweight cameras and sound gear, stood at the edge of the pad. I climbed down with my backpack. This was the Mojave, in July. I had just flown out from a rainy London, and jet lag and furnace heat made me reel.

A tall, spare figure came striding towards me, smiling. He wore a jumpsuit like the rest, with a nametag on his chest and some kind of mission patch on his arm. His coiffure was expensive, his skin toned, and though I knew he was in his fifties he had the easy physical grace of a man with the time to play squash.

He grabbed my hand. ‘Ms Oram. Susie?’

‘Yes –’

‘Glad you could make it. You know who I am.’

What arrogance! But as Time’s Man of the Year of the previous year, 2023, St John Elstead, founder and life president of Cristal Industries, was unmistakeable. I was tempted to mispronounce his name – ‘Saint John’ rather than the correct ‘Sin-junn’ – but that would have been petty.

He turned on his heel and marched back to his technicians. I hurried to follow, my pack heavy on my sweating back. Over his shoulder he asked me, ‘Do you know why you’re here?’

‘Because you’re paying me half a million euros.’

He laughed. ‘Fair enough. But you don’t know anything else? And it doesn’t bother you?’

I decided to be blunt. ‘I’m just back from covering the efforts of Christian peacekeepers to broker an armistice in the Iraqi civil war. Writing up some businessman’s latest vanity project does not frighten me, no.’

He glanced at me. ‘A bit of spirit. That’s what I detected in your work for the Guardian.’ His accent was the strangulated Bostonian familiar from a hundred ads and a dozen high-profile self-publicising stunts: ballooning, swimming with the sharks, a circumlunar jaunt on a rented Soyuz. ‘Full briefing later. But for now, two words: cosmological exploration.’ He grinned, but it meant nothing to me.

The technicians stood around a hole in the ground. It was maybe a metre across and covered by a heavy metal hatch, like a submarine’s. As we walked up two heavy-set techs turned the hatch’s wheel and hauled it open. A shaft led into the ground, filled with a silvery light, and I felt an unaccountable thrill.

‘Down we go,’ Elstead said to me.

‘Now? Just like that?’

He shrugged. ‘We’re ready to go.’

‘Go where?’

‘We’ve just been waiting for you. There’s nothing to be gained by delaying. And besides, it’s air-conditioned down there. You first. Look, there are rungs inset into the wall of the shaft.’

The shaft was generously wide, plenty of room for me and my pack, and maybe three metres deep, an easy climb down. At the bottom I stood with Elstead and looked up at a circle of washed-out Mojave sky, and sweating, silhouetted faces. When the hatch closed over it was like an eclipse of the sun.

Elstead watched me. ‘I hope you’re not claustrophobic.’

‘It’s just that things are moving a little rapidly.’

‘That’s how I like it. This way.’

We were off again. He led me through a door, a big oval metal affair opened by spinning a wheel, then along another short passageway, brightly lit. The air was fresh and cool, but it smelled faintly metallic; obviously we were in a sealed system. It was like a nuclear bunker. And there were oddities: Velcro pads on the walls, bright colour schemes with floors and ceilings clearly distinguished from walls, even doors that looked as if they had been fitted sideways.

We reached a small cabin, and Elstead gave me some privacy for a few minutes. It wasn’t much more than a pod-hotel room in Tokyo, but it had a softscreen, its own tiny bathroom facilities, and even a little coffee machine. The bunk had seatbelt-like straps over it, oddly.

A single jumpsuit hung on a peg. It had a nametag stitched onto it – ORAM – and a mission patch, like an astronaut’s, which showed a kind of funnel shape like a cartoon black hole, and a slogan: SPACETIME BATHYSCAPHE I. How cheesy, I thought. I did wonder, though, what kind of bathyscaphe could be buried in the Mojave.

I used the facilities quickly, trying to wash off the grit of a transatlantic flight and to wake myself up. The jumpsuit was a perfect fit. I left my London clothes in a locker.

Elstead had waited for me outside. ‘The suit is okay? It’s smart fabric, self-cleaning, temperature control.’

It was cool and snug, and moved with me as I walked. ‘I want one.’

He laughed. ‘Keep it.’

Through another hatch in the floor we descended to a lower level, and came to a larger chamber, which Elstead called the bridge. It was a roughly cylindrical space, with its curving walls, floor and even the ceiling coated with softscreens. Right now these were full of readouts, graphical and digital. Three couches, like heavy-built airline seats with harnesses, were suspended in the centre of the room. You reached them by crossing a catwalk of white-painted metal. The couches had trays laden with more softscreens that you could pull into your lap.

The central couch was already occupied, by a thin, intent-looking man of around forty. He was busy, peering at the wall displays, working at his lap tray. When we walked in he started to get up, but Elstead waved him back. ‘That’s Teutonic manners for you, but the three of us are going to be working together for the next few days, and I don’t think we need stand on ceremony.’

The man shook my hand. ‘My name is Walter Junge.’ Vall-tair. His accent was clipped, precise; I thought he was Prussian.

Elstead clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Walter is my evil genius – my Igor. All this, the Bathyscaphe and the facility that sustains it, is his design.’

Junge nodded. ‘But your vision, Elstead.’

Elstead laughed. ‘And my money. Not the first time American money and German know-how have combined to make history, eh, Susie? So our motley crew is assembled. Sit down, Susie – your seat is the right-hand one. Strap in tight.’

The buckles were straightforward. As I strapped in Junge continued to work, and a low hum filled our spherical chamber. I sensed huge energies gathering. The proceedings had the atmosphere of a space launch; I had a fantasy of this whole facility bursting out of the ground like a Minuteman missile from its silo. The preparations for this event must have been going on for hours; it was a showman’s touch to have me landed and thrown down here at the crucial moment.

It was all as corny as hell, and I still didn’t know what was going on. But again, I couldn’t help feeling thrilled.

Elstead smiled at me. ‘Susie, a favour. Do you have a pendant? A locket, maybe …’

I had a small crucifix on a gold chain, a gift from my mother when I was five; I’d worn it ever since.

‘Would you mind taking it off, and hanging it from your monitor tray?’

I shrugged and complied. The little trinket dangled, glittering in LED light. ‘I still don’t have the faintest idea what we’re all doing here.’

‘You’ll find out in five minutes,’ Elstead said.

‘Actually a little more than three,’ Junge said. ‘The five-minute count started when you closed the door to the bridge.’

‘Three, then. I did give you a clue, Susie –’

‘Cosmological exploration. That means nothing to me.’ I remembered old Discovery Channel shows about giant orbital telescopes peering into space. Cosmology was a matter of observing; its subject was the universe, its theories concerned the ancient past and deep future. How could you explore it?

But I had picked up other clues. ‘We’re in the Mojave. Close to Edwards Air Force Base? A good place to be if you want isolation, but with access to technicians from LA, and maybe help from the Air Force with heavy lifting.’ I thought about that circle of blockhouses, spread over kilometres. ‘Have you built a particle accelerator out here, Mr Elstead?’

‘Just Elstead, please. Good guess, Susie. But the accelerator is only a means to an end.’

‘And I don’t see why you would put a bathyscaphe in the middle of the desert.’

‘One minute,’ Junge said.

Elstead said, ‘So why do you think I asked you here?’

I shrugged. ‘With respect, your ego is everything. I’m here as, what, an unbiased witness? My job will be to write up this chapter in your hagiography.’

He laughed, evidently not offended. ‘I couldn’t have put it better. And, aside from the money, what made you come?’

‘If you succeed, fine. If you don’t, this monumental folly will make an even better story.’

‘Fair enough. Let’s hope we both get what we want.’

‘Fifteen seconds,’ Junge said. ‘Everything is nominal. Ten. Nine …’

‘I don’t think we need a count,’ Elstead said.

So we sat in silence. Elstead seemed relaxed, unbearably confident. Junge was focussed on his machinery, the born technician. Only I grew tense.

There was a kind of jolt. I felt as if I was falling; my chest pushed up against my harness. Startled, I asked, ‘What is this, some kind of elevator?’

‘Look at your pendant,’ Elstead said. ‘Old trick I learned from the Soyuz cosmonauts …’

The crucifix was floating, the chain twisted.

‘We’re in free fall,’ Elstead said.

‘Why? How? We’re buried in the dirt.’

‘Not any more,’ Junge said. ‘Elstead, the external monitors are working.’

‘Cameras on the outer hull,’ Elstead explained to me. ‘Walter, let’s see out.’

Junge tapped a control. The wall displays cleared of their read-outs, to show what was now beyond the hull of the Bathyscaphe.

Stars.

‘We have fallen away from the Earth,’ Elstead said, his grin demoniacal in the starlight. ‘And, far more importantly, Susie, we have fallen into time …’

I threw up.

Elstead and Junge had both been prepared. Elstead had his boy-astronaut experience on the Soyuz, of course, and he had sent poor Junge for flights on a Vomit Comet. For me, spacesickness pills stopped the hurling, but I was fragile for the first hours of our journey – for such I now, tentatively, accepted it to be, though I still didn’t understand where we were going or how we were getting there.

I spent much of that time away from the bridge, exploring the Bathyscaphe. Some kind of displacement activity, no doubt, focussing on the fixtures and fittings rather than what lay beyond the walls. But I did need to learn to get around in free fall.

The core of the Bathyscaphe was a cylinder ten metres tall, maybe five wide. It was divided into three levels. The middle deck was the bridge, centred on our three couches. The upper deck, through which Elstead had led me from the surface, was a living space – cabins, a galley, washrooms. The lower deck was sealed off; it contained computer banks, a closed-system life support, and our power supply, a small nuclear plant. The decks were connected by ladders that were just as easy to navigate without weight. Elstead had borrowed Space Station design elements – the Velcro pads on the walls to which you could stick pens or handhelds, the strong colour scheme to give you a sense of orientation.

Our cylindrical hab was contained inside an outer hull, a sphere of hardened steel. The space between the hab and the hull was filled with – well, something strange.

I did try to sleep that night, in my bunk (now I found out what the straps were for). I kept dreaming I was falling, for so I was. I had a fantasy that we were plummeting down some vast shaft into the centre of the Earth.

But Junge showed me some of the raw feed from the hull cameras. If he swivelled the viewpoint I could see the curving hull itself, adorned with the Stars and Stripes, and the logos of Elstead’s companies, and bits of Mojave dirt clinging to the metal. And whenever the cameras tipped away from the ship, they filled up with stars.

Twenty hours after the ‘launch’, Elstead summoned me by intercom. ‘We’re approaching our first milestone. You will want to see this.’

Reluctant, fearful, I hauled my way to the bridge. The three couches on their spindly catwalk were suspended in a star field. I pulled myself over the catwalk and strapped myself into my seat. There was no sense of motion, but it made me feel more secure.

It seemed to me that the stars swam, constellations morphing like dreams. And behind the sprinkling of stars was something new, a cloudy veil; I thought I could make out colours, gold and brown. That too shifted, like a cloud seen through raindrops. I had no real understanding of what I saw.

Junge was locked into his machinery, but he was actually more empathetic than Elstead, who wanted only to dazzle and impress me, and he tried to explain. ‘Everything you see is processed. For one thing the light that falls on the ship’s hull is blueshifted – that is, Doppler-shifted. We have to render the hard rain of photons into something palatable to the eye.’

I knew from speed-trap technology that Doppler shift had something to do with relative velocities. ‘Blueshifted by what? Are we moving so rapidly?’

‘No,’ Elstead smoothly. ‘The blueshift comes from our falling through time. And our, umm, velocity is increasing. Maybe you can tell that from the way the nearby stars are swimming around the sky. Sol is one of a crowd of stars swarming around the giant black hole at the heart of the Galaxy. But beyond you can see another galaxy altogether – Andromeda. Two million light years away, the most distant object you can see with the naked eye. It’s just a faint smudge. In our day.’

The spangled cloud I saw was no faint smudge.

Junge pointed to one star, the brightest. ‘There is our sun. We haven’t come so far, really.’ Again he was trying to orient me, to comfort me. But I thought the sun’s light was red-tinged.

Elstead called, ‘I guess it’s time you started asking your questions, Susie. The two most basic must be – how are we journeying through time, and why?’

‘Or maybe, how are you pulling off this monumental hoax?’

Elstead just laughed. Nothing I said ever seemed to offend him. ‘Where do you want to start?’

‘All right. How?’

Elstead nodded at Junge. ‘That’s the engineer’s department.’

Junge said, ‘The details are somewhat intricate. The principle is simple. Buoyancy…’

We delved into particle physics.

The universe is made up of several kinds of stuff. The visible matter, the ‘baryonic’ of which you and I are composed, is a mere trace, far outweighed by ‘dark matter’, mysterious stuff so evanescent it passes through the light stuff as if it wasn’t there, and interacts with it only through gravity. It’s so wispy in fact that not a single particle of it was detected until hypersensitive facilities came online in the late 2010s. But both kinds of matter are overwhelmed by a third sort of stuff called ‘dark energy’.

‘Dark energy is a kind of antigravity field,’ Elstead said. ‘It is driving the expansion of the universe. And we know, since 1990s observations of distant supernovae, that about six billion years ago the expansion, having slowed since the Big Bang, began to accelerate. Hence we know the dark energy field is becoming dominant.’

Junge said, ‘At any moment any volume in the universe – like this ship, Susie, or your own body – contains a mixture of these substances, dark and light matter, dark energy. But as time goes on, the dark energy component increases. And what we have done, with the facility under the Mojave –’

‘The particle accelerator.’

‘– is to find a way to increase the strength of the dark energy field in a specified volume. Specifically, in the Bathyscaphe’s interhull space.’

‘How?’ I asked, suspicious. ‘I thought dark energy is still little understood.’

Elstead said, ‘You don’t have to understand something to exploit it. My Cristal Industries cell phones work almost entirely on quantum mechanical principles, and nobody understands that after a century of trying. But as to the details – commercial confidentiality. Sorry, Susie.’

‘And when you’ve flooded the interhull space with dark energy?’

‘Buoyancy,’ Junge said. ‘Susie, our Bathyscaphe has been given the fundamental composition of an object from the far future – a time when dark energy will be by far the dominant component of the cosmos. And so the Bathyscaphe, umm, comes untethered in space and time. It’s exactly as a submarine floods its buoyancy tanks to dive. The Bathyscaphe is sinking towards its natural place in spacetime – and that place is the very deep future.’

‘But,’ I said, half believing, half alarmed, ‘I suppose we do have a way to blow the tanks.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Elstead said. He showed me panic buttons, big red slabs mounted on his and Junge’s consoles (though not mine). ‘Pressing these would lift us home immediately. I have no ambition to die in a spacetime hole.’

‘I suppose you have tested all this out?’

‘With unmanned drones,’ Junge said. ‘This is the first voyage of the Bathyscaphe itself.’

‘Call it a test flight,’ Elstead said. ‘Thrilling, isn’t it?’

Junge was peering at the wall monitors. ‘The merger is due.’

Elstead checked his lap display. ‘Right on cue. Susie, perhaps you know that our Galaxy and the Andromeda spiral are the two big beasts of our local group of galaxies. And they’ve been heading towards each other since they were formed. Some day in the far future they will collide – but we are in the far future, aren’t we? Enjoy the show …’

A band of light cut across the cloudy disc that spanned the sky. I saw sparks: huge stars, forming, blazing and dying. Millions of years passed with each heartbeat.

‘We’re sitting in the disc of one galaxy,’ Elstead murmured, ‘as it intersects the disc of another. The loose gas in both galaxies is being compressed to form new stars – it’s the greatest star-birthing event in either galaxy’s history. Tough on any life forms around, however.’

The stars around us swam, agitated, like bees pitched out of a hive. Only Sol burned firm, reddish, immovable; perhaps we orbited it. The delicate structure of Andromeda, only just discernible as a spiral, began to break up. What looked like gas fountained outwards, away from me, multi-coloured – but that ‘gas’, brilliantly lit, was made up of stars, clouds and streamers of stars. But the streamers quickly dispersed.

‘Show’s already over,’ Elstead said. ‘For a while the collision has created a brilliant, elaborate hybrid. But it is quickly settling down into a huge composite galaxy, a plain elliptical, with the delicate spiral structures of the originals broken up. And most of the star-making gases used up too. An expensive firework display.’

It could have been a simulation. I had sat through much more elaborate VR adventures than this. But still … ‘Elstead, when is this collision due to happen?’

‘Round numbers?’

‘Just tell me.’

‘Three billion years after our time.’

I looked for the sun, the one constant in the firmament. But its colour had changed, becoming fiery, and I thought I saw a disc. ‘Is something wrong with the sun?’

‘Walter, I thought the red giant phase wasn’t due until six billion years?’

Junge checked figures, and shrugged. ‘The astrophysicists could only give us predictions. Maybe the galactic collision disrupted solar physics, somehow.’

Elstead snorted. ‘Bullshit. Make sure you record this, Junge. I’ll enjoy showing this to old MacNerny at Cornell and make that pompous pedant eat his words …’

The sun ballooned, quite suddenly, to became a crimson wall that covered half the sky; black forms like monstrous sunspots crawled across it. Then it popped, flinging out material. For a second the space around us was laced by streamers of glowing gas, green and gold and blue, lit up by the solar remnant. But the nebula dispersed in an eyeblink.

‘So that’s that.’ Elstead said, matter-of-fact.

I asked, ‘What about Earth?’

‘If it wasn’t swallowed by the red giant, by now it will be a ball of hardened slag under a thin shell of frozen nitrogen. What do you think of that, Susie? London, New York, Bethlehem, Mecca – all gone. But our ‘scopes don’t have the resolving power to find it.’

‘Three billion years,’ I said. ‘How much further will we go? Ten billion? A hundred?’

‘Oh, further than that.’ Elstead smiled. I was coming to hate his mind games.

I noticed my gold crucifix still floating in the air. I grabbed it and hung it around my neck, and began to unbuckle. ‘I think I’ll go to my cabin –’

Junge touched my arm. ‘No. Wait. Brace.’

The ship shuddered, and a cold light flickered behind the stars.

‘Gravity waves,’ Junge muttered. ‘The merging of the big black holes from the centres of the two colliding galaxies. Brace for aftershock …’

Again the Bathyscaphe rocked and bucked, its hull metal groaning, as we fell deeper into time.

I was on the bridge in the middle of the next day, our third, when we passed the next milestone.

Elstead had served up lunch, in ceramic trays piping-hot from the microwave oven. We ate at our stations with the trays clipped to our laps. My choice was a pasta bake. The galley mostly served up ‘astronaut food’, as I thought of it, dried food like biscuits, or dinners bound to the plate by glue-like gravies and sauces. I’m told the Russians do it better.

Around us the stars of our new elliptical galaxy swarmed, nameless, slowly fading as the aeons ticked away.

‘Depth, twenty-five billion years,’ Junge called. ‘The Big Crunch. Here we go…’

I was alarmed enough to stop eating. ‘The Big Crunch – a reverse of the Big Bang, right?’

‘Yes,’ said Elstead.

‘When all matter, all space and time, will be crushed out of existence.’

‘Yes.’

‘Including us?’

‘It’s a possibility –’

Junge held up a hand.

I stopped breathing. I clutched at my couch’s armrests, as if that was going to help.

Nothing happened. The stars continued to shine, fading gently.

‘We’re through it,’ Junge said. ‘Next destination the Big Rip, in another fifteen billion years.’ He glanced at his timers. ‘Maybe an hour.’ He turned back to his food.

‘So no Big Crunch,’ I said.

‘No Big Crunch,’ Elstead said. ‘And, please note, resident journalist, we have made our first significant cosmological discovery. Susie, I think you need to ask me the second of your big questions.’

I nodded. ‘Why, then? Why make this journey?’

‘Simple. To learn the answer to the most fundamental question of all: what is to become of us, in the end?’ He began to lecture me, and through me posterity. ‘Susie, when I was a kid the universe looked pretty straightforward. The dominant force was gravity: everybody agreed on that. We knew the universe had come barrelling out of the Big Bang, and gravity controlled the future. If the mass density of the universe was too high, if gravity was too strong, then the universe would reach some maximum radius and start to fall back on itself. Otherwise the universe would expand forever. Big Crunch, or endless dissipation. But that simple picture fell apart when those anomalous distant-supernova results turned up in the 1990s. And now the answer to that epochal question about the universe’s ultimate fate depends on the properties of dark energy, which are unknown.

‘In the most extreme scenario, suppose the density of the dark energy is decreasing with time. Suppose it even goes negative. If that happens it will become attractive, like gravity. The universal expansion will slow quickly, and then reverse. A Big Crunch, soon. But we have already descended through the most likely epoch for a dark energy crunch. In the process we’ve proven something about the properties of the dark energy too, do you see? This is an exploration not just of cosmology but of fundamental physics.’

I glanced uneasily at Junge, who quietly watched his timers. ‘And the Big Rip?’

This was predicated on a different theoretical model for dark energy, and was still more spectacular. Perhaps the dark energy could become stronger with time. A positive feedback effect could cut in. The final expansion would be sudden and catastrophic.

‘Five minutes to the Rip,’ Junge said.

Again I gripped my couch.

‘Now you know my objective,’ Elstead said. ‘To observe directly our cosmological future – to see which of many possible outcomes we must endure – and thereby, incidentally, to confirm various models of fundamental physics by direct inspection of their far-future consequences. What a goal it is! You know, I made an awful lot of money through doing awfully little. A slightly different kind of implanted cell phone, just good enough to beat out its competitors: I made billions, but it’s an achievement that will be forgotten in a century. This, though, will live in the imagination forever. I know people call me grandiose. But I’ve had my kids, made them all implausibly rich. What else should I spend my money on…?’

And as Elstead talked about himself we lived through the five-minute barrier, and survived a sixth minute, and a seventh. No Big Rip; more dark energy models eliminated.

I went to my cabin, and threw up all I had eaten.

The fourth day of our journey was dull by comparison. We sat on the bridge, chewing on half-cooked TV dinners, watching the show.

We were sinking into a deep future of possible cosmic outcomes. We now seemed to be faced by a set of models of the dark energy in which its density remained constant, neither growing nor falling. According to Elstead, all we could do was wait; even at the gathering rate of our descent, there were many slow processes to be worked out before the cosmos came to its next decision point.

Thus we reached a time, a hundred billion years deep, when the cosmic expansion carried other galaxies ‘beyond our cosmological horizon’, as Junge put it, their light no longer able to reach us. Our elliptical galaxy was left alone, hanging in space like a single candle in a cathedral.

It was an increasingly shabby galaxy at that. The galaxies’ merger had wasted much of the material needed to make new stars. In time, all that was left was a population of small, miserly stars, eking out their paltry stores of hydrogen. Even they were dying, of course.

I wondered about life. ‘Civilisations like our own could be rising and falling all around us and we’d never see them.’ It was true; we rushed by too quickly.

Elstead picked on that. ‘If there is life out there, do you imagine there could still be people? Even if humanity survives, could our descendants still be anything like us?’ He glanced at my crucifix, which floated in the air before my throat. ‘Are you a practicing Christian, Susie?’

‘Sort of.’ I was brought up Catholic; I attended Mass with my parents. I welcomed the social glue of the Church, and I liked to think I had an open mind about the rest. ‘You?’

He snorted. ‘No, but my parents were, as you can tell from my first name. Consider this. In our day Christianity was only, only, a couple of thousands of years old. Some gods have been around longer – but many more have been forgotten. We have no idea to what gods Stonehenge was dedicated, for example. Human culture seems incapable of keeping its gods alive for more than a few millennia.

‘But suppose humanity survives a million years – or ten million. Most mammalian species go extinct on such timescales. How will time change mankind? Is it even conceivable that the memory of any god could survive such a stupendous interval? Because that’s what you have to believe, you see, if you follow Christ, or Allah, a One True God.’

I thought about that. ‘Either possibility – the abandonment of Christianity, or its enduring for a million years – is hard to get my head around.’

‘Yes, it is. But go even further. What happens if humanity goes extinct? Could the last man baptise an octopoid creature from Alpha Centauri? Can the flame be kept alive in alien heads? And what happens if intelligence fails altogether? Is there room for Christ in a universe altogether without mind, even without life? Because that is what you must believe. Or if you can’t believe it, then what is the purpose of your faith?…’

He went on in this hectoring way for some time. Junge shot me sympathetic glances, but I wasn’t troubled; my residual faith isn’t deep enough for that.

Anyhow I understood that Elstead was just picking on me because he was bored by this long day – bored, as he waited for the end of the universe.

On the fifth day the stars went out.

For a while the sky was full of their remains. There were black holes and neutron stars, the remnants of giants, while stars like our sun became white dwarfs, slowly fading to black. Occasionally a flare would light up the dark, as an unlucky dead star fell into a black hole, or dwarfs collided and ignited. But these were rare, chance events. Junge said that in the end our sun would collapse to a single, immense crystal of carbon, a diamond cool enough to touch. It was a wonderful image, but we weren’t able to see it.

On the sixth day we watched the galaxy disintegrate. Chance encounters threw one star after another out of the galaxy’s gravity well, a relentless evaporation that turned our black sky even blacker. Junge said that the galaxy was dispersed utterly after some hundred billion billion years.

That long day I spent some time trying to make such numbers meaningful. Such was the expansion of scales that as a single year was to the lifetime of the universe in my day, so the entire epoch from Big Bang to humans was to this new age. But any such comparisons, fleetingly grasped, were soon overwhelmed by our continued plummeting into ever more outlandish depths of time.

And still the expansion continued, still the universe’s dreary physical processes unfolded. There was no sound in the Bathyscaphe but our own breathing and the whir of the air scrubbers.

On the seventh day the ghosts of the last stars, mere infra-red traces, faded out one by one. The cosmic expansion, having long ago separated galaxies from each other, now plunged its hands deep into stellar neighbourhoods. There came a point when the remnant of the sun was left isolated within its cosmological horizon: the sun, alone in its own universe.

And as the day wore on, even the diamond sun began to break up.

Junge had a set of particle detectors mounted on the hull of the Bathyscaphe. He passed their signals through a speaker, and we heard soft pings from the cosmic dark.

‘Protons,’ Elstead breathed. ‘The decay of protons into their constituent quarks – on the very longest of terms, even solid matter is unstable. Another theory vindicated! They ought to give me the Nobel Prize for this.’

‘So what happens now?’

‘That all depends, Susie. On what we find tomorrow.’

None of us went to bed that night. We brought blankets from the cabins and sat in our couches, side by side, the only light in the universe shining on our faces. Nobody slept, I don’t think. Yet nobody had the nerve to suggest that we shut off the softscreens and exclude that terrible, unending night. I watched the clock. There wasn’t anything else to do.

At last, the eighth day began.

At the time we understood nothing of what happened to us. Later we reconstructed it as best we could.

We stayed together that night because we thought we were alone in the universe. We were wrong. Humans had never been alone.

From a hundred centres, life and mind spread across the face of the Galaxy. Gaudy empires sprawled; hideous wars were fought; glittering civilisations rose and fell. Yet what survived each fire was stronger than what had gone before.

Humanity, born early, did not survive to participate in this adventure. But the wreckage of Earth was discovered; humans were remembered.

Then came the collision with Andromeda, a ship of stars carrying its own freight of history and civilisation. The vast disruption inflicted deep wounds on two galactic cultures – wounds made worse by the wars of the dark days that followed.

Yet out of these conflicts came a new mixing. Minds rose up from the swarming stars like birds from a shaken tree, and then flocked into a culture stronger and more brilliant than those which had preceded it – but a more sober one.

In the long ages that followed, civilisation turned from conquest to consolidation, from acquisition to preservation. Vast libraries were constructed, and knowledge was guarded fiercely.

But the universe wound down.

As the galaxy evaporated, its unified culture disintegrated into fiefdoms. Worse, as the stars receded from each other, the universe shed its complexity, and it became impossible for the ancient catalogues to be maintained. Information was lost, whole histories deleted.

Nobody even noticed when the last traces of humanity were expunged.

The last cultures pooled resources and eventually identities, so that, within the cosmological horizon of the sun, in the end there was only a single consciousness, a single point of awareness, hoarding a meagre store of memory.

And still the universe congealed. Elstead’s final cosmological discovery was that there could be no relief from the relentless expansion. The proton decay reduced all matter to a cloud of photons, electrons, positrons and neutrinos – and at last the cosmic expansion would draw apart even these remnants. In the end, each particle would be alone within its own cosmological horizon. And at that point, when no complexity of any kind was possible, consciousness would cease at last.

Think of it! There you lie, the last solar mind, trapped in spacetime like a human immersed in thickening ice. Dimly you remember what you once were, how you cupped stars in your hands. Now you can barely move. And the constant expansion of the universe bit by bit shreds your memories, your very identity, a process that can only end in utter oblivion. You have nothing left but resentment and bitterness, and envy for those who went before you.

And yet there is, just occasionally, a moment of relief.

In Earth’s oceans, life teemed close to the surface, where green plankton grew thick on sunlight, a minuscule forest that underpinned food chains. But as one fish ate another, scraps or droppings would fall into the deeper dark beneath. Here swam strange fish of the deep, with huge mouths and enlarged eyes and viper-like teeth. There were whole pallid ecologies down here, surviving on the half-digested morsels that rained down from the shell of sunlit richness above.

So it was in the ocean of time. In the bright, energy-rich ages of the past, time travel had been invented and reinvented many times. And wary travellers would venture into the far future, beyond the death of the suns …

You are trapped in the cold and the dark. But, just occasionally, a morsel from the bright warm past falls down the ages to you, bringing with it a freight of mass and energy and, above all, complexity. Just for a while, you can live again – or at least, allow yourself the luxury of completing a thought.

Elstead’s Bathyscaphe, this unwary time machine, is like a fresh strawberry in the mouth of a starving man. You bite. And yet the taste is bitter …

The Bathysphere rolled and shuddered. The walls lit up with red alert signals. Junge and Elstead were shouting at each other. It was far worse than the gravity-wave wash of the galactic collision.

But it wasn’t the condition of the ship that concerned me, but the state of my own head.

I could feel it in me, another awareness, like a hand rummaging inside my skull. It fed on my memories, my personality, my life – it tried to consume all I had. And at the same time I sensed it, a huge intelligence towering over me, a roomy mind like an abandoned museum, and as desolate. I sensed envy. I sensed pity. I sensed regret. I wept, for myself, and for it.

And then it backed away. But my head was still cut open, my mind cold and exposed to the air.

I saw Junge’s fist slam down on his panic button. Then I blacked out.

We sat in blankets under an intense Mojave sun. After the Cristal Industries medics had pulled us from the half-wrecked Bathyscaphe they wanted to move us into a blockhouse hospital, but none of us would leave the light, the warmth of the young sky. The medics and techs fussed around us, but it was as if only the three of us sat there, still alone in the universe.

Except we hadn’t been alone.

All through the eight-day ascent back to the present we had been trying to piece together what had happened, trying to assemble our fragmentary impressions into a coherent whole. We were still arguing.

‘It could have destroyed us,’ Elstead said. ‘The time shark. But it didn’t. Why not?’

‘Because it pitied us,’ I said. ‘That’s all. It consumes time machines. But ours was early – as primitive as a hot-air balloon, perhaps – maybe even the first of all to get so far. It saw something in us it has lost in itself. Potential. Hope, even. It couldn’t destroy us, any more than a bitter old man could kill a newborn baby.’

‘That’s quite something,’ Elstead murmured. ‘To be the first.’

‘But it is us,’ Junge said. ‘It is the confluence of all the minds in two galaxies – or a fragment of that confluence anyhow.’

‘Not us,’ I said flatly. ‘Couldn’t you feel it? There was nothing of the human in it, nothing left of us.’

We had been arguing about this all the way home. For all he had goaded me about it, Elstead just hadn’t wanted to believe humanity had had an end. ‘Maybe that’s so, maybe not.’ He was as beat-looking as any of us. But, under his blanket, he rubbed his hands. ‘What we have to do now is make sure it doesn’t turn out like that.’

Junge and I peered at him. I asked, ‘What are you talking about?’

‘We brought back a hell of a lot of data. Maybe we can figure out what went wrong for humanity. And then make sure it doesn’t happen.’

I said, ‘But even if you achieve that – what about the ultimate end? When the expansion scatters the last particles, all complexity is lost –’

‘Does it have to turn out that way?’ And he began to talk of other theories of physics. The dark energy field could have decreased in strength, just enough to slow the expansion. Or an even more eerie force called quintessence could stop the expansion when the last fundamental particles were still in contact with each other – and life, and consciousness, could continue, though at a terribly slow rate. ‘But the story wouldn’t end,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t end.’

‘Elstead –’ After all we had been through I wanted to be gentle. ‘The universe isn’t like that. Cosmology doesn’t accord with that model. We saw it for ourselves.’

He wasn’t daunted. ‘Then we have to find a way to fix it so it does accord. Or else ship out to another universe more to our liking. We’ve plenty of time to figure out the details. It’s always been my belief that however the future works out, Big Crunch or Rip or endless expansion, there has to be a way to preserve information through the terminal catastrophe – there has to be a way for life to survive. Anyhow, that’s my plan.’ He looked at us, his eyes huge in his gaunt face. ‘Are you with me?’

All this was two years ago.

I didn’t go back to England. I can no longer bear the dark and the cold – or the ocean. I took a house on a mountain-top in Colorado, a place bathed in light where I could hardly be further from the sea. I’m close enough to the summit that I can walk around it, and, every morning, I do.

I wrote up our story. I earned my euros.

I’ve found a partner. We’re planning kids. That way I can postpone the death of the universe, just a little, I guess. I’ve kept in touch with Walter Junge; I hope his kids will get on with ours.

I’ve started attending Mass again. I don’t quite know what I’m feeling when I listen to the ancient lessons. But Elstead was surely right that the monumental existence of deep time, and the erasure of all things, is the ultimate challenge to any faith. I suspect that in a few million years we’ll be smart enough it figure it out, and I’m content to wait.

As everybody knows, St John Elstead built a new vessel – Spacetime Bathyscaphe II – bigger and more capable than the first, and stocked it with people of a like mind to himself. I turned down the invitation to join him, but I did send him my crucifix pendant.

Elstead descended once more into the abyss of time, to challenge the destiny he found so unsatisfactory. He has yet to return.

Halo Ghosts

‘Black!’ said Bead, his face boyish with wonder. ‘Black as the inside of a skull.’

I hid a smile. But he was right: the comet nucleus tumbled through the solar system’s depths like a bit of charred bone, its perihelion glory a memory.

And our two-man ship was only metres away from it.

‘We’ve made it, Bead,’ I said. ‘The first men to the cometary halo.’

‘And maybe the first to see the birth of the solar system. Yeah…’

We were that close –

– when the ghost rippled through us.

My console lights flared; my sensors screamed.

Bead’s face emptied. ‘What…’

‘The processors have overloaded.’ I slammed in manual overrides. ‘Remember your training, damn it! Help me get her under control –’

We hit the comet ice, hard. I heard metal peel back like orange skin. Stars slewed across the viewscreen, overlaid by whirling sparks. There was a distant grind.

We came to rest.

Bead’s voice shivered. ‘Slater, don’t do these things to me! Thank God that’s over.’

I watched the sparks – half our water disappearing into interstellar space.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s all over.’

He looked at me strangely.

‘Come on,’ I said briskly. ‘We’ll suit up and check the damage.’

We drifted like bubbles in the comet’s micro-gravity.

The ship had dug itself a pit about three metres deep. The slushy methane ice of the comet hadn’t done the drive tubes any damage.

‘Maybe your lousy piloting’s done me a favour,’ said Bead. His voice was high and quick; he took clownish bounds over the carbon-coated landscape. ‘I mean, the deeper I can take my cores for the Berry interferometer the older the material will be. I might even find some stuff from before the sun lit up. ‘Imagine that, Slater. We’ll get images of the sun’s birth – or even of the primordial nova that seeded it –’

I shivered.

There were stars all around us, cold and distant. I felt like a child in a huge bedroom…

I wondered if there were ghosts out here.

‘Listen to me, Bead.’

Reluctantly he settled to the surface.

I searched for words. ‘You know what happened. Right at the moment of landing the sensors picked up a ghost – a veil of nothing a thousand miles long. ‘There was a high-energy pulse – probably a trace from some old disaster, a nova maybe. The processors overloaded…’

‘Tell me about the damage,’ he said quietly.

‘Yeah. Bead – we can’t both get home. We’ve lost too many consumables. There’s enough for one of us.’ I searched his face in the starlight. ‘Do you understand?’

He half-smiled, his face slack.

‘Well, we haven’t got to face it yet.’ Or each other, I thought. ‘We’ve work to do – report to Earth, get the Berry cores done. And we could both use some sleep. Come on.’

I turned to the ship and away from the situation.

We set up the Berry core device. Like a bizarre insect it plunged its cylindrical tongue into the heart of the comet.

Bead broke open trial cores on the surface. He nodded. ‘These are good. And very old.’

I poked the ancient stuff with a toe. ‘Well, it’s your baby. Looks like slush to me.’

‘Yah.’

An awkward silence stretched; without the distraction of words, the tension between us became tangible.

‘Listen,’ I said hastily, ‘I’ve never understood how this interferometer of yours works anyway.’

He got to his feet clumsily. ‘Every particle of matter has a sort of memory,’ he said. ‘Each quantum mechanical wave function has something called a Berry phase – does that make any sense to you?’

‘Not a lot.’

He waved his hands vaguely. ‘The Berry phase is like a record of the past history of the particle – what velocities it’s attained, what fields it’s been subject to. The interferometer can take this information from a collection of particles and, uh, decode it to give pictures.’

‘Recordings of the past?’

He nodded – then his mouth twitched. ‘Ironic, isn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘Well, it was traces of some past disaster that stranded us here.’

‘There’s got to be a catch with this Berry device,’ I said quickly. ‘It sounds too easy.’

‘Yah. The interferometer needs particles that have remained clean. Stayed buried somewhere since the event we’re interested in.’

‘So the images don’t get obscured by later ones.’

‘That’s the idea. And that’s why we’re here. The stuff inside this comet must have remained undisturbed since the birth of the sun – and maybe before.’ His voice cracked. ‘And we’ve now spent three days in this damn place avoiding the subject.’

I recoiled from his sudden violence. ‘What subject?’ I asked weakly.

‘You know what subject. How do we choose, Slater? Who’s going home – and who isn’t?’ He took a lumbering pace towards me. His hands were clenched into small fists. ‘You tell me. You’re twice my age. You tell me.’

I spread my hands. ‘Be fair, Bead. I’ve no experience of situations like this… But I have got a wife and a kid.’

He flinched.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said gently. ‘I guess neither of us wants to die.’

‘So what do we do?’ He scuffed at the ice. ‘Draw lots? Have a snowball fight?’

I gathered up the equipment. ‘Take it easy, will you?’

‘I know what you’re thinking. That I’m no pilot. That you’re the only one who could make it home.’

‘I’m thinking you’d need coaching,’ I said. ‘But you could do it, Bead. Look – we’ve got time yet. We’ll work it out.’

I stalked off towards another sampling site.

‘How do I know you’d help me? That you wouldn’t trick me? How?’

His accusing voice filled my head. You’re walking away again, I told myself. Go back and face him; finish it now. Coward –

I walked on.

Bead worked with his feet up. Here in his lab at the centre of the ship he looked like part of the equipment.

I handed him a coffee. ‘How’s it going?’

He turned from a large viewscreen. His eyes were bleary but full of wonder. ‘Astonishing,’ he said. He sipped his coffee. ‘I’m digging deeper than anyone’s dug before. Look.’

He pointed at the viewscreen. It bore a hazy image of a young star, wreathed in amniotic gas. ‘The sun. Less than a million years old.’

‘You’re kidding.’

He shook his head smugly. ‘A billion years earlier than the previous record. After only four days’ work… And the core that’s in the Berry interferometer at the moment is the deepest yet; who knows how far back we’ll go.’

I stared at the machinery. Somewhere in there ferocious laser beams were ripping the heart out of a fragment of comet slush.

A ‘ready’ message beeped from a terminal. ‘Watch this, Slater. You can see some live results.’ He worked a keypad expertly. In this environment he was fast and capable. Vital. His death was unthinkable.

I concentrated on the viewscreen. A harsh blur, blue-white. Bead focussed the image. The star was enormous, a sack of brooding anger. Planets circled it cautiously.

Bead frowned. ‘What the hell –’

‘Well, it’s a star,’ I said, ‘but it’s certainly not the sun. Now or in the past.’

‘This is the oldest sample I’ve taken. What are we seeing?’ His face lit up. ‘Slater…’ he breathed.

I smiled. ‘Tell me.’

‘This has got to be the primordial – the ancient star that went supernova, sending out shock waves that led to the birth of our sun. We’ve found a fragment from the primordial – or one of its planets. I don’t believe this.’

A spark slid away from one of the inner planets.

‘Can you zoom with this thing?’ I asked.

Bead worked his instruments. We swooped in towards the planet –

It was laced with light.

The spark was a spaceship. A cage of threads and planes, it must have been a thousand kilometres long.

As we closed in further I made out the ship’s crew. They were pillars of sky blue, drifting like shadows within the translucent walls.

The image broke up and the screen filled with static.

Bead sat back. ‘That’s it,’ he said softly.

He began to check his recordings.

I couldn’t sleep.

In silence I suited up and walked out onto the surface of the comet. In the tiny gravity my boots barely left a mark in the charcoal crust. Was I walking on bones, five billion years old?

I leapt up from the comet’s surface; it shrank to a crude sphere below me. Slow as a snowflake I drifted back down.

Our world had been born out of the corpse of another.

I tried to empathise with the blue pillars, reach them through the wall of deep time. Had they raged at the unfairness as their sun blew up in their faces? Or had they understood that death is sometimes necessary, so that new life can begin?

Surely that was so. I felt their calmness lingering in this desolate place.

I came to a decision.

Bead would never have the courage to face death. That was obvious. And I wouldn’t be forgotten. A trace of me would remain, like a Berry phase in the hearts of my family.

I landed softly.

The port was open. Bead stood silhouetted, holding something like a bazooka. ‘Don’t come any closer, Slater!’

‘What the hell –’

A flash of light, invisibly violet. A soundless explosion in the ice at my feet. I froze.

‘I’ve warned you.’ His voice was a brittle surface.

‘Where did you get the weapon from, Bead?’

‘I took apart the Berry device,’ he said. ‘And I’m having the ship. I’m sorry, Slater. But I don’t want to die. Try to understand.’

I took a step forward; the bazooka twitched. ‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘It’s okay; you can take the ship.’

‘No tricks, Slater!’

‘But you’ll have to let me train you. You’ll never fly it otherwise. Now let me back in and –’

Another bolt; my shoulder exploded into a spray of crimson. I slapped a patch onto my suit and felt the cold wash through me.

‘You made me do it!’ he screamed. ‘You made me!’ And the port slammed shut.

After a few seconds, vapour began to pool around the drive tubes.

I squeezed at the pain in my shoulder, staring at my shadow on the nucleus crust. He’d never make it…We’d both die in this wilderness…

What shadow? How the hell was I casting a shadow?

I whirled, wrenching my shoulder and tumbling into the ice.

The alien craft came over the horizon like a fantastic dawn. Out of its thousand-mile walls floated a shoal of sky-blue pillars.

I laughed. ‘Bead – look! They’ve survived!’

The pillars clustered around me, fine as wedding veils. Their kindness bathed me. Their ship must have been the ‘ghost’ our sensors picked up – the source of the energy that wrecked us. ‘Bead! Shut down the drive and come out. It’s – it’s delightful!’

Through the pale figures I saw our ship lumber from the comet’s surface.

‘Bead! Bead! Listen to me. It’s not a trick!’ I pushed through an ancient body – it crackled like old paper – and tried to run to the ship. ‘Bead! Don’t kill yourself! They’ll save us!’

A blast of reaction gas knocked me into the slush.

The ship rose, blurred –

– and blossomed into the harsh light of a fusion explosion.

The cerulean pillars lifted me like a child. We swam through space towards their ship, and home.

Tempest 43

From the air, Freddie caught the first glimpse of the rocket that was to carry her into space.

The plane descended towards a strip of flat coastal savannah. The land glimmered with standing water, despite crumbling concrete levees that lined the coast, a defence against the risen sea. This was Kourou, Guiana, the old European launch centre, on the eastern coast of South America. It was only a few hundred kilometres north of the mouth of the Amazon. Inland, the hills were entirely covered by swaying soya plants.

Freddie couldn’t believe she was here. She’d only rarely travelled far from Winchester, the English city where she’d been born, and Southampton where she worked. Hardly anybody travelled far. She’d certainly never flown before, and she had a deep phobic sense of the litres of noxious gases spewing from the plane’s exhaust.

But now the plane banked, and there was her spaceship, a white delta-wing standing on its tail, and she gasped.

Antony Allen, the UN bureaucrat who had recruited her for this unlikely assignment, misread her mood. Fifty-something, sleek, corporate, with a blunt Chicago accent, he smiled reassuringly. ‘Don’t be afraid.’

The plane came down on a short smart-concrete runway. Allen hurried Freddie onto a little electric bus that drove her straight to a docking port at the base of the shuttle, without her even touching the South American ground, or even smelling the air.

And before she knew it she was lying on her back in an immense foam-filled couch, held in place by thick padded bars. The ship smelled of electricity and, oddly, of new carpets. A screen before her showed a view down the shuttle’s elegant flank to the scarred ground.

Allen strapped in beside her. ‘Do you prefer a countdown? It’s optional. We’re actually the only humans aboard. Whether you find that reassuring or not depends on your faith in technology, I suppose.’

‘I can’t believe I’m doing this. It’s so – archaic! I feel I’m locked into an AxysCorp instrumentality.’

He didn’t seem to appreciate the sharpness of her tone. Perhaps he’d prefer to be able to patronise her. ‘This shuttle’s got nothing to do with AxysCorp, which was broken up long ago.’

‘I know that.’

‘And you’re a historian of the Heroic Solution. That’s why you’re here, as I couldn’t find anybody better qualified to help resolve this problem on Tempest 43. So look on it as field work. Brace yourself.’

With barely a murmur the shuttle leapt into the air. No amount of padding could save Freddie from the punch of acceleration.

The ground plummeted away.

Tempest 43 was a weather control station, one of a network of fifty such facilities thrown into space in the 2070s, nearly a century ago, by the now maligned AxysCorp geoengineering conglomerate. An island in the sky over the Atlantic, Tempest 43 was locked into a twenty-four-hour orbit, to which Freddie would now have to ascend.

But before proceeding up to its geosynchronous rendezvous the shuttle went through one low-orbit checkout. For Freddie, snug in her theme-park couch, it was ninety magical minutes, as the cabin walls turned virtual-transparent, and the Earth spread out below her, bright as a tropical sky.

The ship sailed over the Atlantic towards western Europe. She wished she knew enough geography to recognise how much of the coastline had been bitten into by the risen sea. At the Spanish coast Freddie saw vapour feathers gleaming white, artificial cloud created by spray turbines to deflect a little more sunlight from an overheated Earth. Southern Spain, long abandoned to desert, was chrome-plated with solar-cell farms, and studded with vast silvered bubbles, lodes of frozen-out carbon dioxide. The Mediterranean was green-blue, thick with plankton stimulated to grow and draw down carbon from the air. On the far side of the Gibraltar Strait, the Sahara bloomed green, covered in straight-edged plantations fed by desalinated ocean water. And as she headed into evening she saw the great old cities of southern Europe, the conurbations’ brown stain pierced by green as they fragmented back into the villages from which they had formed.

Asia was plunged in night, the land darker than she had expected, with little waste light seeping out of the great metropolitan centres of southern Russia and China and India. The Pacific was vast and darkened too, and it was a relief to reach morning, and to pass over North America. She was disappointed that they travelled too far south to have a chance of glimpsing the camels and elephants and lions of Pleistocene Park, the continent’s reconstructed megafauna.

And as they reached the east coast they sailed almost directly over the Florida archipelago. Freddie was clearly able to see the wound cut by the hurricane. She called for a magnification. There was Cape Canaveral, venerable launch gantries scattered like matchsticks, the immense Vehicle Assembly Building broken open like a plundered bird’s egg. The hurricane was the reason for her journey – and, incidentally, the ruin of Canaveral was the reason she had had to launch from Guiana. Hurricanes weren’t supposed to happen, not in 2162. Stations like Tempest 43 had put a stop to all that a century ago. Something had gone wrong.

Antony Allen spent most of the orbit throwing up into paper bags.

At last the shuttle leapt up into deeper space, silent and smooth, and Earth folded over on itself.

‘Tempest 43, Tempest 43, this is UN Space Agency Shuttle C57-D. You ought to be picking up our handshaking request.’

A smooth, boyish voice filled the cabin. ‘C57-D, your systems have interfaced with ours. Physical docking will follow shortly.’

‘I’m Doctor Antony Allen. I work on the UN’s Climatic Technology Legacy Oversight Panel. With me is Professor Frederica Gonzales of the University of Southampton, England, Europe. Our visit was arranged through –’

‘You are recognised, Doctor Allen.’

‘Who am I speaking to? Are you the station’s AI?’

‘A subsystem. Engineering. Please call me Cal.’

Allen and Freddie exchanged glances.

Allen growled, ‘I never spoke to an AI with a personal name.’

Freddie said, a bit nervous, ‘You have to expect such things in a place like this. The creation of sentient beings to run plumbing systems was one of the greatest crimes perpetrated during the Heroic Solution, especially by AxysCorp. This modern shuttle, for instance, won’t have a consciousness any more advanced than an ant’s.’

That was the party line. Actually Freddie was obscurely thrilled to be in the presence of such exotic old illegality. Thrilled, and apprehensive.

Allen called, ‘So are you the subsystem responsible for the hurricane deflection technology?’

‘No, sir. That’s in the hands of another software suite.’

‘And what’s that called?’

‘He is Aeolus.’

Allen barked laughter.

Now a fresh voice came on the line, a brusque male voice with the crack of age. ‘That you, Allen?’

Freddie was startled. This voice sounded authentically human. She’d just assumed the station was unmanned.

‘Glad to hear you’re well, Mister Fortune.’

‘Well as can be expected. I knew your grandfather, you know.’

‘Yes, sir, I know that.’

‘He was in the UN too. As pious and pompous as they come. And now you’re a bureaucrat. Runs in the genes, eh, Allen?’

‘If you say so, Mister Fortune.’

‘Call me Fortune…’

Fortune’s voice was robust British, Freddie thought. North of England, maybe. She said to Allen, ‘A human presence, on this station?’

‘Not something the UN shouts about.’

‘But save for resupply and refurbishment missions the Tempest stations have had no human visitors for a century. So this Fortune has been alone up here all that time?’ And how, she wondered, was Fortune still alive at all?

Allen shrugged. ‘For Wilson Fortune, it wasn’t a voluntary assignment.’

‘Then what? A sentence? And your grandfather was responsible?’

‘He was involved in the summary judgement, yes. He wasn’t responsible.’

Freddie thought she understood the secrecy. Nobody liked to look too closely at the vast old machines that ran the world. Leave the blame with AxysCorp, safely in the past. Leave relics like this Wilson Fortune to rot. ‘No wonder you need a historian,’ she said.

Fortune called now, ‘Well, I’m looking forward to a little company. You’ll be made welcome here, by me and Bella.’

Now it was Allen’s turn to be shocked. ‘By the dieback, who is Bella?’

‘Call her an adopted daughter. You’ll see. Get yourself docked. And don’t mess up my paintwork with your attitude rockets.’

The link went dead.

Shuttle and station interfaced surprisingly smoothly, considering they were technological products separated by a century. There was no mucking about with airlocks, no floating around in zero gravity. Their cabin was propelled smoothly out of the shuttle and into the body of the station, and then was transported out to a module on an extended strut, where rotation provided artificial gravity.

The cabin door opened, to reveal Wilson Fortune, and his ‘adopted daughter’, Bella.

Allen stood up. ‘We’ve got a lot to talk about, Fortune.’

‘That we do. Christ, though, Allen, you’re the spit of your grandfather. He was plug-ugly too.’ His archaic blasphemy faintly shocked Freddie.

Fortune was tall, perhaps as much as two full metres, and stick thin. He wore a functional coverall; made of some self-repairing orange cloth, it might have been as old as he was. And his hair was sky blue, his teeth metallic, his skin smooth and young-looking, though within the soft young flesh he had the rheumy eyes of an old man. Freddie could immediately see the nature of his crime. He was augmented, probably gen-enged too. No wonder he had lived so long; no wonder he had been sentenced to exile up here.

The girl looked no more than twenty. Ten years younger than Freddie, then. Pretty, wide-eyed, her dark hair shoulder-length, she wore a cut-down coverall that had been accessorised with patches and brooches that looked as if they had been improvised from bits of circuitry.

She stared at Allen. And when she saw Freddie, she laughed.

‘You’ll have to forgive my daughter,’ Fortune said. His voice was gravelly, like his eyes older than his face. ‘We don’t get too many visitors.’

‘I’ve never seen a woman before,’ Bella said bluntly. ‘Not in the flesh. I like the way you do your hair. Cal, fix it for me, would you?’

‘Of course, Bella.’

That shoulder-length hair broke up into a cloud of cubical particles, obscuring her face. When the cloud cleared, her hair was cropped short, a copy of Freddie’s.

‘I knew it,’ Allen said. He aimed a slap at Bella’s shoulder. His fingers passed through her flesh, scattering bits of light. Bella squealed and flinched back. ‘She’s a virtual,’ Allen said.

Fortune snapped back, ‘She’s as sentient as you are, you arsehole. Fully conscious. And consistency violations like that hurt. You really are like your grandfather, aren’t you?’

‘She’s illegal, Fortune.’

‘Well, that makes two of us.’

Two suitcases rolled out of the shuttle cabin, luggage for Freddie and Allen.

Allen said, ‘We’re here to work, Fortune, not to rake up the dead past.’

‘Be my guest.’ Fortune turned and stalked away, down a metal-plated corridor. Bella walked after him, looking hurt and confused. Her feet convincingly touched the floor.

Freddie and Allen followed less certainly, into the metal heart of the station.

To Freddie, the station had the feel of all the AxysCorp geoengineering facilities she’d visited before. Big, bold, functional, every surface flat, every line dead straight. The corporation’s logo was even stamped into the metal walls, and there was a constant whine of air conditioning, a breeze tasting of rust. You could never escape the feeling that you were in the bowels of a vast machine. But the station showed its age, with storage-unit handles polished smooth with use, touch panels rubbed and scratched, and the fabric of chairs and couches worn through and patched with duct tape.

Fortune led them to cabins, tiny metal-walled boxes that looked as if they’d never been used. A century old, bare and clean, they had an air of staleness.

‘I don’t think I’ll sleep well here,’ Freddie said.

‘Don’t fret about it,’ Allen said. ‘I’m planning to be off this hulk as soon as possible.’

They left their luggage here, and Fortune led them on to the bridge, the station’s control centre. It was just a cubical box with blank grey walls, centred on a stubby plinth like a small stage.

Fortune watched Freddie’s reaction. ‘This was the fashion a century ago. Glass-walled design, every instrument virtual, all voice controlled.’

‘Humans are tool-wielding creatures,’ Freddie said. ‘We think with our hands as well as our brains. We prefer to have switches and levers to pull, wheels to turn.’

‘How wise you new generations are,’ Fortune said sourly.

Bella, with her copycat hairdo, was still fascinated by Freddie. ‘I wish you’d tell me more about Earth,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been there.’

‘Oh, it’s a brave new world down there, child,’ Fortune said.

‘In what sense,’ Freddie asked, ‘is Bella your child?’

Allen waved that away. ‘Bella is an irrelevance. So are you, Fortune,’ he said sternly. ‘We’re here to find out why Tempest 43 failed to deflect the Florida hurricane. I suggest we get on with it.’

Fortune nodded. ‘Very well. Cal? Bring up a station schematic, would you?’

A virtual model of Tempest 43 coalesced over the central plinth. Freddie had been briefed to some extent, and she recognised the station’s main features. The habitable compartments were modules held on long arms away from a fat central axis. A forest of solar panels, manipulator arms and docking ports coated the main axis, and at its base big antenna-like structures clustered. The representation was exquisitely detailed and, caught in the light of an off-stage sun, quite beautiful.

Fortune said, ‘This is a real time image, returned from drone subsats. Look, you can see the wear and tear.’ The habitable compartments were covered with white insulating blankets that were pocked with meteor scars, and the solar panels looked patchy, as if repeatedly repaired. An immense AxysCorp logo on the main central body, unrefurbished for a century, was faded by sunlight. ‘Do you understand what you’re seeing? The purpose of Tempest 43 is to break up or at least deflect Atlantic hurricanes. Maybe you know that during the twenty-first century global warming pulse, a whole plague of hurricanes battered the eastern states of the old USA, as well as Caribbean and South American countries, all year round. Excess heat energy pumped into the oceans, you see.’

‘And Tempest 43 is here to fix that,’ Allen said.

‘Hurricanes are fuelled by ocean heat.’ Fortune pointed to the antenna farm at the base of the station’s main axis. ‘So we meddle. We beam microwave energy into sea water. We can’t draw out the heat that’s pumping up the hurricane, but with carefully placed injections we can mess with its distribution. Give it multiple foci, for instance. We manage to disperse most hurricanes even before they’ve formed.’

‘Where do you get your power from? Not from these spindly solar cell arrays.’

‘We have a massive fission reactor up here.’ He pointed at the top of the central axis. ‘One reason the habitable compartments are held so far away from the axis. Enough plutonium to last centuries. I know what you’re thinking. This is a dirty solution. They were dirty times. You people are so pious. You kick AxysCorp now, and all the rest of the Heroic Solution. But you accept the shelter of the machinery, don’t you?’

‘Actually,’ Freddie said, trying to be more analytical, ‘this station is a typical AxysCorp solution to the problems of that age. It’s a chunk of gigantic engineering, and it’s run by absurdly over-sophisticated AIs. But it’s robust. It worked.’

‘It did work, until now,’ Allen said darkly.

‘You needn’t try to pin the Florida hurricane on me,’ Fortune said. ‘The AI runs the show. I’m only a failsafe. I’m not even in the nominal design. The station should have been unmanned save for non-permanent service crews.’

‘You keep saying “AI”,’ Freddie said. ‘Singular. But we spoke to one during our approach, and heard of another.’

‘Cal and Aeolus,’ Fortune said. ‘It’s a little complicated. The Tempest 43 AI is an advanced design. Experimental, even for AxysCorp…’

The station’s artificial mind was lodged in vast processor banks somewhere in the central axis. Its body was the station itself; it felt the pain of malfunctions, the joy of a pulsing fission-reactor heart, the exhilaration of showering its healing microwaves over the Atlantic.

And, alone, it was never alone.

‘It’s a single AI. But it has two poles of consciousness,’ Fortune said. ‘Not just one, like yours and mine. Like two personalities in one head, sharing one body.’

Allen said, ‘You’re telling me that AxysCorp deliberately designed a schizophrenic AI.’

‘Not schizoid,’ Fortune said, strained. ‘What a withered imagination you have, Allen. Just like grandpop. It’s just that when building this station, AxysCorp took the opportunity to study novel kinds of cognitive architecture. After all there are some who say our minds are bicameral too, spread unevenly over the two halves of our brains.’

‘What bullshit,’ Allen murmured.

Fortune said, ‘The two poles were labelled A and C. Nothing if not functional, the AxysCorp designers. I gave them names. Aeolus and Cal. Call it whimsy.’

A and C, Freddie thought. It was an odd labelling, with a gap. What happened to B?

Allen said, ‘I understand why “Aeolus” for your functional software suite, your weather controller. Aeolus was a Greek god of the winds. But why Cal?’

‘An in-joke,’ Fortune said. ‘Does nobody read science fiction these days?’

Allen said, ‘Science what-now?’

Historian Freddie knew what he meant. ‘Old-fashioned fictions of the future. Forgotten now. We live in an age of aftermath, Fortune. Everything important that shapes our lives happened in the past, not the future. It’s not a time for expansive fiction.’

‘Yeah, well, there’s this old classic I always loved, with a pesky AI. Would have fitted better if the “C” had been an “H”. Cal’s a dull thing, though. Just a station-keeper.’

‘So where’s Aeolus?’ Allen lifted his head. ‘Are you there?’

‘Yes, Doctor Allen. I am Aeolus.’

It was another synthesised male voice, but lighter in tone than Cal’s – lacking character, Freddie thought.

Allen asked, ‘Let me get this straight. Cal is the station’s subsystems. Housekeeping, power, all of that. Aeolus is the executive function suite. You fix the hurricanes.’

‘Actually, sir, there’s some overlap,’ Cal put in. ‘The bipolar design is complex. But, yes, essentially that’s true.’

‘So what are you doing, Aeolus?’

‘I am enthusiastically fulfilling all programme objectives.’

‘But you let one through, didn’t you? People died because of you. And a historic monument was wrecked, at Canaveral.’

‘Yes, that’s true.’

‘I’m from Oversight. I’m here to find out what happened here, and to decide what to do about it. So what do you have to say?’ Allen waited, but Aeolus offered no further explanation. ‘What a mess this is,’ Allen said to Freddie.

‘Actually this is again typical of AxysCorp,’ Freddie said. ‘Given immense budgets, huge technical facilities, virtually unlimited power, and negligible scrutiny, AxysCorp technicians often took the opportunity to experiment. Of course a willingness to meddle was necessary for them to be able to proceed with Heroic-Solution geoengineering projects in the first place.’

‘They used the climate disaster as the cover for crimes,’ Allen said. ‘The purposeless crippling of sentiences, for example. We have to acknowledge their achievements. But it’s as if the world has been saved by Nazi doctors.’

‘Humans are flawed creatures,’ Fortune said. ‘Most of them are bumbling mediocrities. Like your grandfather, Allen, whose solution to the world’s ills was to exile me up here. To tackle monstrous problems, you need monsters.’

‘Well, the hell with it.’ Allen was growing impatient. ‘I need to study your bipolar AI. I’ve some gear in my luggage. Freddie, this will be technical. Why don’t you take a walk around the station?’

Bella said eagerly, ‘Oh, let’s. I’ll show you.’

‘And you,’ Allen said to Fortune, ‘show me back to my cabin. Please.’

With bad grace, Fortune stomped off.

Bella gave Freddie a tour of the habitable module and its facilities: cabins, mostly unused, galleys, washrooms, a virtual recreation room. Everything was drab, utilitarian, and old.

Bella told Freddie a little about herself. ‘My protocols are quite strict.’ She tried to push her hand into the wall. Sparks scattered from her palm, and Bella screwed up her face in pain. ‘I can’t go flying around in vacuum either. I have to eat and drink. I even have to use the bathroom! It’s all virtual, of course. But Fortune says he designed my life to be as authentically human as possible.’

Freddie said carefully, ‘But why did he create you at all?’

‘I give him company,’ Bella said.

Freddie, an academic who was careful with words, noted that she hadn’t explicitly confirmed that Fortune had ‘created’ her, as the AxysCorp engineers had created Cal and Aeolus, any more than Fortune had admitted it himself.

They soon tired of the steely corridors, and Bella led the way to an observation blister. This was a bubble of toughened transparent plastic stuck to the bottom of the module’s hull. Sitting on a couch, they looked down on the Earth, a bowl of light larger than the full Moon. Freddie was thrilled to see the white gleam of Antarctic ice. But the fragmented remnant cap on that green-fringed continent was the only ice visible on the whole planet; there was none left on the tropical mountains, Greenland was bare, and at the north pole was only an ocean topped by a lacy swirl of cloud.

Bella’s thin, pretty face was convincingly painted by Earthlight. ‘Of course we’re suspended permanently over the middle of the Atlantic. But you can see day and night come and go. And if I ever want to see the far side, I can always call for a virtual view.’

She had no real conversation, under the surface. She was an empty vessel, Freddie thought. Beautifully made, but unused, purposeless. But then the only company she had ever had was the reclusive Fortune – and perhaps the station’s artificial minds, Cal and Aeolus. ‘I’m no expert. But I can see that this environment doesn’t offer enough stimulation to you as a sentience. You’ve a right to more than this.’

Bella seemed moved to defend herself, or perhaps Fortune. ‘Oh, there are things to see,’ she said. ‘It’s a marvel when Earth goes dark with night, and you can see the stars. And you can see AxysCorp facilities, studded all over the sky. Sometimes you can even make out the big Chinese space shields. The Heroics, Fortune’s generation, saved the world. You can see it in the sky.’

Freddie suspected these views were just watered-down versions of Fortune’s opinions; after all, the only human mind Bella had ever been exposed to. ‘But people on Earth,’ she said, ‘don’t always feel that way. AxysCorp did fulfil the Heroic-Solution strategy, to stabilise the climate, and to remove the old heavy, dirty industries from Earth. Billions of lives were saved, and a global technological civilisation survived, and is now even growing economically. That was a great achievement.

‘But the Heroics chose to do things a certain way. The whole Earth is full of their gargantuan, ageing machines. Memorials erected to themselves by a generation who wanted to be remembered. Look at me. Look at what I did, how powerful I was. Maybe their egos had to be that big to take on the task of fixing a broken planet. But to live at the feet of their monuments is oppressive.’

Bella looked lost. ‘People ought to be more grateful.’

‘You need to come to Earth. It’s not like it is for you, stuck here inside the machinery. Most people just live their lives. They don’t obsess about the Heroics and AxysCorp and the rest. Only historians like me do that. Because it really is all just history.’

A panel in the window filled up with Allen’s blunt features. ‘Professor Gonzales. Could you rejoin us on the bridge, please? I’ve made my judgement.’

Freddie hurried after Bella, through the maze of corridors back to the bridge.

The room was stripped of virtual displays. Allen sat comfortably on the plinth, the nearest thing to a piece of furniture. Fortune paced about, chewing a silver-coloured fingernail.

Allen said, ‘We’ll need a proper debrief. But technically speaking the situation here is simple, as far as I can see.’ He showed Freddie the probe he’d been using, a kind of silvery network. ‘This is a cognitive probe. A simple one, but sufficient. I ran a trace on the AI pole, Aeolus. I can find no bug in the software, despite the distorted sentience set-up AxysCorp left behind here. Nor, incidentally, according to station self-test diagnostics, is there any flaw in the physical equipment, the microwave generators, the antenna arrays, the station’s positioning systems, all the rest. Aeolus should not have let that hurricane reach Florida. Yet it, he, did so.’

There was a sound of doors slamming, far off. Freddie felt faintly alarmed.

‘My recommendation is clear. There’s a clear dysfunction between the AI’s input, that is its core programming and objectives, and its output. The recommended procedure is clearly defined in such cases. The AI pole Aeolus must be –’

‘No. Don’t say it,’ said Fortune, suddenly alarmed.

Allen stared at him. ‘What now, Fortune?’

‘There’s no blame to be attached to Aeolus. None at all.’

‘What are you saying?’

Fortune’s mouth worked; his metal teeth gleamed. ‘That I did it. That Aeolus sent a hurricane into Florida because I asked him to. So there’s no need for termination. All right?’

Allen was amazed. ‘If this is true, we’ve a whole box of other issues to deal with, Fortune. But even so the AI acted in a way that clearly compromised its primary purpose – indeed, contradicted it. There’s no question about it. Aeolus will be shut down –’

Cal spoke up. ‘I’m afraid I can’t allow that to happen, Doctor Allen.’

The station shuddered.

Allen got to his feet. ‘What in the dieback was that?’

Fortune growled, ‘I told you. Now see what you’ve done!’

Freddie said to Bella, ‘Show us your external monitors.’

Bella hurried to a wall workstation and began calling up graphical displays. ‘Our comms link to Earth is down. And – oh.’

UNSA Shuttle C57-D had been detached from its dock. It was falling away from the station, turning over and over, shining in undiluted sunlight.

‘We’re stranded,’ Allen said, disbelieving.

Fortune clenched his fists and shouted at the ceiling. ‘Cal, you monster, what have you done? I saved Bella from you once. Couldn’t you let her go?’

There was no reply.

They stayed on the bridge. It made no real sense, but Freddie sensed they all felt safer here, deep in the guts of the station. Bella sat quietly on the plinth, subdued. Fortune paced around the bridge, muttering.

Freddie and Allen went through the station’s systems. They quickly established that the station’s housekeeping was functioning. Air conditioning, water recycling still worked, and the lamps still glowed over the hydroponic banks.

‘So we’re not going to starve,’ Allen said edgily.

‘But the AI’s higher functions are locked out,’ Freddie said. ‘There’s no sign Aeolus is monitoring the Atlantic weather systems, let alone doing anything about them. And meanwhile comms is down. How long before anybody notices we’re stuck here?’

‘People don’t want to know what goes on with these hideous old systems,’ Allen said. ‘Even in my department, which is nominally responsible for them. Unless our families kick up a fuss, or another hurricane brews up, I don’t think anybody is going to miss us for a long time.’

Fortune snorted. ‘Bureaucracies. The blight of mankind.’

Allen growled, ‘You’ve got some explaining to do, Fortune. Like why you ordered up a hurricane.’

‘I didn’t think it would kill anybody,’ Fortune said weakly. ‘I did mean to smash up Cape Canaveral, though. I wanted to get your attention.’

Freddie asked, ‘Couldn’t you have found some other way?’

Allen said dryly, ‘Such as waggle the solar panels?’

Fortune grinned. ‘Aeolus is compliant. When you have a god at your command, it is terribly tempting to use him.’

‘So you created a storm,’ Allen said, ‘in order to bring somebody up here. Why, Fortune? What do you want?’

‘Two things. One. I want my exile to end. A century is enough, for Christ’s sake, especially when I committed no crime. I’d like some respect too.’ He said to Freddie, ‘Look at me. Do you think I did this to myself? My parents spliced my genes before I was conceived, and engineered my body before I was out of the womb. I haven’t committed any crime. I am a walking crime scene. But it’s me your grandfather punished, Allen. Where’s the justice in that?’ There was a century of bitterness in his voice.

‘And, second. Bella. My sentence, such as my quasi-legal judicial banishment is, clearly wasn’t intended to punish her. She needs to be downloaded into an environment that affords stimulation appropriate for a sentience of her cognitive capacity. Not stuck up here with an old fart like me. As in fact your own namby-pamby sentience laws mandate.’

‘All right,’ Freddie said. ‘But what is Bella? You didn’t create her, did you?’

‘No.’ Fortune smiled at Bella. ‘But I saved her.’

Freddie nodded. ‘A, B, C.’

Allen snapped, ‘What are you talking about?’

Freddie said, ‘There weren’t just two poles of consciousness in the station AI, were there, Fortune? AxysCorp went even further. They created a mind with three poles. A – Aeolus. B – Bella. C – Cal.’

‘Oh, good grief.’

‘B was actually the user interface,’ Fortune said. ‘Charming, for an AxysCorp creation. Very customer-focussed.’

Freddie said, ‘Somehow Fortune downloaded her out of the system core and into this virtual persona.’

‘I had time to figure out how, and nothing else to do,’ Fortune said sternly. ‘I’m extremely capable. In fact I’m wasted up here. And I had motivation.’

‘What motivation?’

‘To save her from Cal…’

Inside AxysCorp’s creation, three centres of consciousness had been locked into a single mind, a single body. And they didn’t get on. They were too different. Aeolus and Bella embodied executive capabilities. Cal, an artefact of basic engineering functions, was more essential. Stronger. Brutal. They fought for dominance. And it lasted subjective megayears, given the superfast speeds of Heroic-age processors.

‘Cal crushed Bella. Tortured her. You could call it a kind of rape, almost. He did it because he was bored himself, bored and trapped.’

‘You’re anthropomorphising,’ Allen said.

‘No, he isn’t,’ Freddie said. ‘You need to read up on sentience issues, Doctor.’

‘I had to get her out of there,’ Fortune said. ‘This isn’t the right place for her, in this shack of a station. But better than in there, in the processor.’

Allen asked, ‘So why did Cal chuck away our shuttle?’

Fortune said, ‘Because you said you would kill Aeolus.’

‘You said they fight all the time.’

‘Do you have a brother, Allen? Maybe you fought with him, as a boy. But would you let anybody harm him – kill him? Cal defends his brother – and indeed his sister if he’s called on.’

Allen clapped, slow, ironic. ‘So, Fortune, even stuck up here in this drifting wreck, you found a way to be a hero. To save somebody.’

Fortune’s face was dark. ‘I am a damn hero. We were told we were special – the peak of the Heroic-Solution age, they said. We were the Singularity generation. A merger of mankind with technology. We would live forever, achieve everything. Become infinite, literally.

‘And, you know, for a while, we grew stronger. We were transported. Rapt. There aren’t the words. But we got lost in our data palaces, while the rest of the world flooded and burned and starved. And we forgot we needed feeding too. That was the great fallacy, that we could become detached from the Earth, from the rest of mankind.

‘In the end they broke into our cybernetic citadels and put us to work. And they made us illegal retrospectively, and imprisoned us in places like this. Now we’re already forgotten. Irrelevant, compared to the real story of our time. AxysCorp and their ugly machines.’

‘That’s life,’ Allen said brutally.

‘This is Aeolus.’ The thin voice spoke out of the air.

Fortune snapped, ‘Aeolus? Are you all right?’

‘I don’t have much time. Cal and I are in conflict. I am currently dominant.’

‘Aeolus –’

‘I restored communications. I contacted your Oversight Panel, Doctor Allen. I received an assurance that a second shuttle will shortly be launched. The shuttle will have grappling technology, so Cal won’t be able to keep it out. But Cal is strong. I can contain him but not subdue him. Mister Fortune.’

‘Yes, Aeolus?’

‘I fear it will be impossible to fulfil further objectives.’

Fortune looked heartbroken. ‘Oh, Aeolus. What have I done?’

‘As you know I have always fulfilled all programme objectives.’

‘That you have, Aeolus. With the greatest enthusiasm.’

‘I regret –’

Silence.

Allen blew out his cheeks. ‘Well, that’s a relief.’

Bella was wide-eyed. ‘Am I really going to Earth? Is a shuttle really coming? I’m going to go look out for it.’ She ran out of the bridge.

The three of them followed Bella to the observation blister, more sedately.

‘Saved by a god in the machinery,’ Freddie said. ‘How ironic.’

‘What an end,’ Fortune whispered. ‘Two halves of the same mind locked in conflict for a subjective eternity.’ He seemed old now, despite his youthful face. ‘So it’s over. What will become of Bella?’

Allen said, ‘Oh, they’ll find her a foster home. There are far stranger minds than hers in the world, in the trail of tears left behind by AxysCorp and their like. We try to care for them all. The station’s screwed, however. In the short term I imagine we’ll reposition another Tempest to plug the gap. Then we’ll rebuild. And we’ll let this heap of junk fall out of the sky.’

‘But not before we’ve come back to save Aeolus and Cal,’ Freddie said.

‘You’re kidding,’ Allen said.

‘No. As Fortune points out, it’s actually mandatory under the sentience laws, just as it is for Bella.’

‘I’d like to see Aeolus spared that hell,’ Fortune said. ‘As for Cal, though, that deformed savage can rot.’

‘But Cal is the more interesting character, don’t you think?’

‘He locked us up and threw away our shuttle,’ Allen snapped.

‘But there’s an independent mind in there,’ Freddie said. ‘An original one. Aeolus just did what you told him, Fortune. Cal, born in a prison, knowing nothing of the real world, rebelled instinctively. With a mind as independent and strong and subtle as that, who knows what he’d be capable of, if set free?’

Fortune nodded. ‘And what of me? Will your indulgence set me free?’

‘Oh, we’ll take you home too,’ Allen said, sneering. ‘You’ll stand trial for the hurricane. But there are places for creatures like you. Museums of the Singularity. Zoos,’ he added cruelly. ‘After all, there’s plenty of room, now the chimps and tigers are all extinct.’

Bella came running up, her face bright. ‘I saw the shuttle launch. You can see its contrail over the ocean. Oh, Freddie, come and see!’

Freddie and Bella hurried on to the blister, and gazed down at the shining Earth, searching for the spaceship climbing up to save them.

The Children of Time

I

Jaal had always been fascinated by the ice on the north horizon. Even now, beyond the smoke of the evening hearth, he could see that line of pure bone white, sharper than a stone blade’s cut, drawn across the edge of the world.

It was the end of the day, and a huge sunset was staining the sky. Alone, restless, he walked a few paces away from the rich smoky pall, away from the smell of broiling racoon meat and bubbling goat fat, the languid talk of the adults, the eager play of the children.

The ice was always there on the northern horizon, always out of reach no matter how far you walked across the scrubby grassland. He knew why. The ice cap was retreating, dumping its pure whiteness into the meltwater streams, exposing land crushed and gouged and strewn with vast boulders. So while you walked towards it, the ice was marching away from you.

And now the gathering sunset was turning the distant ice pink. The clean geometric simplicity of the landscape drew his soul; he stared, entranced.

Jaal was eleven years old, a compact bundle of muscle. He was dressed in layers of clothing, sinew-sewn from scraped goat skin and topped by a heavy coat of rabbit fur. On his head was a hat made by his father from the skin of a whole raccoon, and on his feet he wore the skin of pigeons, turned inside-out and the feathers coated with grease. Around his neck was a string of pierced cat teeth.

Jaal looked back at his family. There were a dozen of them, parents and children, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, and one grandmother, worn down aged forty-two. Except for the very smallest children everybody moved slowly, obviously weary. They had walked a long way today.

He knew he should go back to the fire and help out, do his duty, find firewood or skin a rat. But every day was like this. Jaal had ancient, unpleasant memories from when he was very small, of huts burning, people screaming and fleeing. Jaal and his family had been walking north ever since, looking for a new home. They hadn’t found it yet.

Jaal spotted Sura, good-humouredly struggling to get a filthy skin coat off the squirming body of her little sister. Sura, Jaal’s second cousin, was two years older than him. She had a limpid, liquid ease of movement in everything she did.

She saw Jaal looking at her and arched an eyebrow. He blushed, hot, and turned away to the north. The ice was a much less complicated companion than Sura.

He saw something new.

As the angle of the sun continued to change, the light picked out something on the ground. It was a straight line, glowing red in the light of the sun, like an echo of the vast edge of the ice itself. But this line was close, only a short walk from here, cutting through hummocks and scattered boulders. He had to investigate.

With a guilty glance back at his family, he ran away, off to the north, his pigeon-skin boots carrying him silently over the hard ground. The straight-edge feature was further away than it looked, and as he became frustrated he ran faster. But then he came on it. He stumbled to a halt, panting.

It was a ridge as high as his knees – a ridge of stone, but nothing like the ice-carved boulders and shattered gravel that littered the rest of the landscape. Though its top was worn and broken, its sides were flat, smoother than any stone he had touched before, and the sunlight filled its creamy surface with colour.

Gingerly he climbed on the wall to see better. The ridge of stone ran off to left and right, to east and west – and then it turned sharp corners, to run north, before turning back on itself again. There was a pattern here, he saw. This stone ridge traced a straight-edged frame on the ground.

And there were more ridges; the shadows cast by the low sun picked out the stone tracings clearly. The land to the north of here was covered by a tremendous rectangular scribble that went on as far as he could see. All this was made by people. He knew this immediately, without question.

In fact this had been a suburb of Chicago. Most of the city had been scraped clean by the advancing ice, but the foundations of this suburb, fortuitously, had been flooded and frozen in before the glaciers came. These ruins were already a hundred thousand years old.

‘Jaal. Jaal…!’ His mother’s voice carried to him like the cry of a bird.

He couldn’t bear to leave what he had found. He stood on the eroded wall and let his mother come to him.

She was weary, grimy, stressed. ‘Why must you do this? Don’t you know the cats hunt in twilight?’

He flinched from the disappointment in her eyes, but he couldn’t contain his excitement. ‘Look what I found, mother!’

She stared around. Her face showed incomprehension, disinterest. ‘What is it?’

His imagination leapt, fuelled by wonder, and he tried to make her see what he saw. ‘Maybe once these rock walls were tall, tall as the ice itself. Maybe people lived here in great heaps, and the smoke of their fires rose up to the sky. Mother, will we come to live here again?’

‘Perhaps one day,’ his mother said at random, to hush him.

The people never would return. By the time the returning ice had shattered their monocultural, over-extended technological civilisation, people had exhausted the Earth of its accessible deposits of iron ore and coal and oil and other resources. People would survive: smart, adaptable, they didn’t need cities for that. But with nothing but their most ancient technologies of stone and fire, they could never again conjure up the towers of Chicago. Soon even Jaal, distracted by the fiery eyes of Sura, would forget this place existed.

But for now he longed to explore. ‘Let me go on. Just a little further!’

‘No,’ his mother said gently. ‘The adventure’s over. It’s time to go. Come now.’ And she put her arm around his shoulders, and led him home.

II

Urlu crawled towards the river. The baked ground was hard under her knees and hands, and stumps of burned-out trees and shrubs scraped her flesh. There was no green here, nothing grew, and nothing moved save a few flecks of ash disturbed by the low breeze.

She was naked, sweating, her skin streaked by charcoal. Her hair was a mat, heavy with dust and grease. In one hand she carried a sharpened stone. She was eleven years old.

She wore a string of pierced teeth around her neck. The necklace was a gift from her grandfather, Pala, who said the teeth were from an animal called a rabbit. Urlu had never seen a rabbit. The last of them had died in the Burning, before she was born, along with the rats and the raccoons, all the small mammals that had long ago survived the ice with mankind. So there would be no more rabbit teeth. The necklace was precious.

The light brightened. Suddenly there was a shadow beneath her, her own form cast upon the darkened ground. She threw herself flat in the dirt. She wasn’t used to shadows. Cautiously she glanced over her shoulder, up at the sky.

All her life a thick lid of ash-laden cloud had masked the sky. But for the last few days it had been breaking up, and today the cloud had disintegrated further. And now, through high drifting cloud, she saw a disc, pale and gaunt.

It was the sun. She had been told its name, but had never quite believed in it. Now it was revealed, and Urlu helplessly stared up at its geometric purity.

She heard a soft voice call warningly. ‘Urlu!’ It was her mother.

It was no good to be daydreaming about the sky. She had a duty to fulfil, down here in the dirt. She turned and crawled on.

She reached the bank. The river, thick with blackened dirt and heavy with debris, rolled sluggishly. It was so wide that in the dim light of noon she could barely see the far side. In fact this was the Seine, and the charred ground covered traces of what had once been Paris. It made no difference where she was. The whole Earth was like this. All the same.

To Urlu’s right, downstream, she saw hunters, pink faces smeared with dirt peering from the ruined vegetation. The weight of their expectation pressed heavily on her.

She took her bit of chipped stone, and pressed its sharpest edge against the skin of her palm. It had to be her. The people believed that the creatures of the water were attracted by the blood of a virgin. She was afraid of the pain to come, but she had no choice; if she didn’t go through with the cut one of the men would come and do it for her, and that would hurt far more.

But she heard a wail, a cry of loss and sorrow, rising like smoke into the dismal air. It was coming from the camp. The faces along the bank turned, distracted. Then, one by one, the hunters slid back into the ruined undergrowth.

Urlu, hugely relieved, turned away from the debris-choked river, her stone tucked safely in her hand.

The camp was just a clearing in the scorched ground-cover, with a charcoal fire burning listlessly in the hearth. Beside the fire an old man lay on a rough pallet of earth and scorched brush, gaunt, as naked and filthy as the rest. His eyes were wide, rheumy, and he stared at the sky. This was Pala. Forty-five years old, he was Urlu’s grandfather. And he was dying, eaten from within by something inside his belly.

He was tended by a woman who knelt in the dirt beside him. She was his oldest daughter, Urlu’s aunt. The grime on her face was streaked by tears. ‘He’s frightened,’ said the aunt. ‘It’s finishing him off.’

Urlu’s mother asked, ‘Frightened of what?’

The aunt pointed into the sky, at the revealed sun.

The old man had reason to be frightened of strange lights in the sky. He had been just four years old when a greater light had come to Earth.

After Jaal’s time, the ice had returned a dozen times more before retreating for good. After that, people rapidly cleared the land of the legacy of the ice: descendants of cats and rodents and birds, grown large and confident in the temporary absence of humanity. Then people hunted and farmed, built up elaborate networks of trade and culture, and developed exquisite technologies of wood and stone and bone. There was much evolutionary churning in the depths of the sea, out of reach of mankind. But people were barely touched by time, for there was no need for them to change.

This equable afternoon endured for thirty million years. The infant Pala’s parents had sung him songs unimaginably old.

But then had come the comet’s rude incursion. Nearly a hundred million years after the impactor that had terminated the summer of the dinosaurs, Earth had been due another mighty collision.

Pala and his parents, fortuitously close to a cave-ridden mountain, had endured the fires, the rain of molten rock, the long dust-shrouded winter. People survived, as they had lived through lesser cataclysms since the ice. And with their ingenuity and adaptability and generalist ability to eat almost anything, they had already begun to spread once more over the ruined lands.

Once it had been thought that human survival would depend on planting colonies on other worlds, for Earth would always be prone to such disasters. But people had never ventured far from Earth: there was nothing out there; the stars had always remained resolutely silent. And though since the ice their numbers had never been more than a few million, people were too numerous and too widespread to be eliminated even by a comet’s deadly kiss. It was easy to kill a lot of people. It was very hard to kill them all.

As it happened old Pala was the last human alive to remember the world before the Burning. With him died memories thirty million years deep. In the morning they staked out his body on a patch of high ground.

The hunting party returned to the river, to finish the job they had started. This time there was no last-minute reprieve for Urlu. She slit open her palm, and let her blood run into the murky river water. Its crimson was the brightest colour in the whole of this grey-black world.

Urlu’s virginal state made no difference to the silent creature who slid through the water, but she was drawn by the scent of blood. Another of the planet’s great survivors, she had ridden out the Burning buried in deep mud, and fed without distaste on the scorched remains washed into her river. Now she swam up towards the murky light.

All her life Urlu had eaten nothing but snakes, cockroaches, scorpions, spiders, maggots, termites. That night she feasted on crocodile meat.

By the morning she was no longer a virgin. She didn’t enjoy it much, but at least it was her choice. And at least she wouldn’t have to go through any more blood-letting.

III

The catamaran glided towards the beach, driven by the gentle current of the shallow sea and the muscles of its crew. When it ran aground the people splashed into water that came up to their knees and began to unload weapons and food. The sun hung bright and hot in a cloudless blue dome of a sky, and the people, small and lithe, were surrounded by shining clouds of droplets as they worked. Some of them had their favourite snakes wrapped around their necks.

Cale, sitting on the catamaran, clung to its seaweed trunks. Looking out to sea, he could see the fine dark line that was the floating community where he had been born. This was an age of warmth, of high seas which had flooded the edges of the continents, and most people on Earth made their living from the rich produce of coral reefs and other sun-drenched shallow-water ecosystems. Cale longed to go back to the rafts, but soon he must walk on dry land, for the first time in his life. He was eleven years old.

Cale’s mother, Lia, splashed through the water to him. Her teeth shone white in her dark face. ‘You will never be a man if you are so timid as this.’ And she grabbed him, threw him over her shoulder, ran through the shallow water to the beach, and dumped him in the sand. ‘There!’ she cried. ‘You are the first to set foot here, the first of all!’

Everybody laughed, and Cale, winded, resentful, blushed helplessly.

For some time Cale’s drifting family had been aware of the land, the line on the horizon. They had prepared their gifts of sea fruit and carved coral, and rehearsed the songs they would sing, and carved their weapons, and here they were. They thought this was an island full of people. They were wrong. This was no island, but a continent.

Since the recovery of the world from Urlu’s great Burning, there had been time enough for the continents’ slow tectonic dance to play out. Africa had collided softly with Europe, Australia had kissed Asia, and Antarctica had come spinning up from the south pole. It was these great geographical changes – together with a slow, relentless heating-up of the sun – which had given the world its long summer.

While the rafts had dreamed over fecund seas, seventy million years had worn away. But even over such a tremendous interval people were much the same as they had always been.

And now here they were, on the shore of Antarctica – and Cale was indeed the first of all to step ashore.

Unsteadily he got to his feet. For a moment the world seemed to tip and rock beneath him. But it was not the world that tipped, he understood, but his own imagination, shaped by a life on the rafts.

The beach stretched around him, sloping up to a line of tall vegetation. He had never seen anything like it. His fear and resentment quickly subsided, to be replaced by curiosity.

The landing party had forgotten him already. They were gathering driftwood for a fire and unloading coils of meat – snake meat, from the fat, stupid, domesticated descendants of one of the few animals to survive the firestorm of Urlu’s day. They would have a feast, and they would get drunk, and they would sleep; only tomorrow would they begin to explore.

Cale discovered he didn’t want to wait that long. He turned away from the sea, and walked up the shallow slope of the beach.

A line of hard trunks towered above his head, smooth-hulled. These ‘trees’, as his father had called them, were in fact a kind of grass, something like bamboo. Cale came from a world of endless flatness; to him these trees were mighty constructs indeed. And sunlight shone through the trees, from an open area beyond.

A few paces away a freshwater stream decanted onto the beach and trickled to the sea. Cale could see that it came from a small gully that cut through the bank of trees. It was a way through, irresistible.

The broken stones of the gully’s bed stung his feet, and sharp branches scraped at his skin. The rocks stuck in the gully walls were a strange mix: big boulders set in a greyish clay, down to pebbles small enough to have fit in Cale’s hand, all jammed together. Even the bedrock was scratched and grooved, as if some immense, spiky fish had swum this way.

Here in this tropical rainforest, Cale was surrounded by the evidence of ice.

He soon reached the open area behind the trees. It was just a glade a few paces across, opened up by the fall of one mighty tree. Cale stepped forward, making for a patch of green. But iridescent wings beat, and a fat, segmented body soared up from the green, and Cale stumbled to a halt. The insect was huge, its body longer than he was tall. Now more vast dragonflies rose up, startled, huddling for protection. A sleeker form, its body yellow-banded, came buzzing out of the trees. It was a remote descendant of a wasp, a solitary predator. It assaulted the swarming dragonflies, ripping through shimmering wings. All this took place over Cale’s head in a cloud of flapping and buzzing. It was too strange to be frightening.

He was distracted by a strange squirming at his feet. The patch of green from which he had disturbed the first dragonfly was itself moving, flowing over the landscape as if liquid. It was actually a crowd of creatures, a mass of wriggling worms. From the tops of tottering piles of small bodies, things like eyes blinked.

Such sights were unique to Antarctica. There was no other place like this, anywhere on Earth.

When its ice melted away, the bare ground of Antarctica became an arena for life. The first colonists had been blown on the wind from over the sea: vegetation, insects, birds. But this was not an age for birds, or indeed mammals. As the world’s systems compensated for the slow heating of the sun, carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, was drawn down into the sea and the rocks, and the air became oxygen-rich. The insects used this heady fuel to grow huge, and predatory wasps and cockroaches as bold as rats made short work of Antarctica’s flightless birds.

And there had been time for much more dramatic evolutionary shifts, time for whole phyla to be remodelled. The squirming multiple organism that fled from Cale’s approach was a descendant of the siphonophores, colonial creatures of the sea like Portuguese men o’ war. Endlessly adaptable, hugely ecologically inventive, since colonising the land these compound creatures had occupied fresh water, the ground, the branches of the grass-trees, even the air.

Cale sensed something of the transient strangeness of what he saw. Antarctica, empty of humans, had been the stage for Earth’s final gesture of evolutionary inventiveness. But relentless tectonic drift had at last brought Antarctica within reach of the ocean-going communities who sailed over the flooded remnants of India, and the great experiment was about to end. Cale gazed around, eyes wide, longing to discover more.

A coral-tipped spear shot past his head, and he heard a roar. He staggered back, shocked.

A patch of green ahead of him split and swarmed away, and a huge form emerged. Grey-skinned, supported on two narrow forelegs and a powerful articulated tail, this monster seemed to be all head. A spear stuck out from its neck. The product of another transformed phylum, this was a chondrichthyan, a distant relation of a shark. The beast opened a mouth like a cavern, and blood-soaked breath blasted over Cale.

Lia was at Cale’s side. ‘Come on.’ She hooked an arm under his shoulders and dragged him away.

Back on the beach, munching on snake meat, Cale soon got over his shock. Everybody made a fuss of him as he told his tales of giant wasps and the huge land-shark. At that moment he could not imagine ever returning to the nightmares of the forest.

But of course he would. And in little more than a thousand years his descendants, having burned their way across Antarctica, accompanied by their hunting snakes and their newly domesticated attack-wasps, would hunt down the very last of the land-sharks, and string its teeth around their necks.

IV

Tura and Bel, sister and brother, grew up in a world of flatness, on a shoreline between an endless ocean and a land like a tabletop. But in the distance there were mountains, pale cones turned purple by the ruddy mist. As long as she could remember Tura had been fascinated by the mountains. She longed to walk to them – even, she fantasised, to climb them.

But how could she ever reach them? Her people lived at the coast, feeding on the soft-fleshed descendants of neotenous crabs. The land was a plain of red sand, littered with gleaming salt flats, where nothing could live. The mountains were forever out of reach.

Then, in Tura’s eleventh year, the land turned unexpectedly green.

The ageing world was still capable of volcanic tantrums. One such episode, the eruption of a vast basaltic flood, had pumped carbon dioxide into the air. As flowers in the desert had once waited decades for the rains, so their remote descendants waited for such brief volcanic summers to make them bloom.

Tura and her brother hatched the plan between them. They would never get this chance again; the greening would be gone in a year, perhaps never to return in their lifetimes. No adult would ever have approved. But no adult need know.

And so, very early one morning, they slipped away from the village. Wearing nothing but kilts woven from dried sea grass, their favourite shell necklaces around their necks, they looked very alike. As they ran they laughed, excited by their adventure, and their blue eyes shone against the rusted crimson of the landscape.

Bel and Tura lived on what had once been the western coast of North America – but, just as in Urlu’s dark time of global catastrophe, it didn’t really matter where you lived. For this was the age of a supercontinent.

The slow convergence of the continents had ultimately produced a unity that mirrored a much earlier mammoth assemblage, broken up before the dinosaurs evolved. While vast unending storms roamed the waters of the world-ocean, New Pangaea’s interior collapsed to a desiccated wasteland, and people drifted to the mouths of the great rivers, and to the sea coasts. This grand coalescence had been accompanied by the solemn drumbeat of extinction events; each time the world recovered, though each time a little less vigorously than before.

The supercontinent’s annealing took two hundred million years. And, since then, another two hundred million years had already gone by. But people lived much as they always had.

Tura and Bel, eleven-year-old twins, knew nothing of this. They were young, and so was their world; it was ever thus. And today, especially, was a day of wonder, as all around them plants, gobbling carbon dioxide, fired packets of spores through the air, and insects scrambled in once-in-a-lifetime quests to propagate.

As the sun climbed the children tired, their pace falling, and the arid air sucked the sweat off their bodies. But at last the mountains came looming out of the dusty air. These worn hills were ancient, a relic of the formation of New Pangaea. But to Tura and Bel, standing before their scree-covered lower slopes, they were formidable heights indeed.

Then Tura saw a splash of green and brown, high on a slope. Curiosity sparked. Without thinking about it she began to climb. Bel, always more nervous, would not follow.

Though at first the slope was so gentle it was no more than a walk, Tura was soon higher than she had ever been in her life. On she climbed, until her walk gave way to an instinctive scramble on all fours. Her heart hammering, she kept on. All around her New Pangaea unfolded, a sea of Mars-red dust worn flat by time.

At last she reached the green. It was a clump of trees, shadowed by the mountain from the dust-laden winds and nourished by water from subsurface aquifers. Instinctively Tura rubbed her hand over smooth, sturdy trunks. She had never seen trees before.

As the sun brightened, Earth’s systems compensated by drawing down carbon dioxide from the air. But this was a process with a limit: even in Jaal’s time the remnant carbon dioxide had been a trace. Already the planet had shed many rich ecosystems – tundra, forests, grasslands, meadows, mangrove swamps. Soon the carbon dioxide concentration would drop below a certain critical level after which only a fraction of plants, with a certain kind of metabolism, would be able to photosynthesise. The rest would die off. And the human population, already only a million strung out around the world’s single coastline, would implode to perhaps ten thousand.

People would survive. They always had. But these trees, in whose cool shade Tura stood, were among the last in the world.

She peered up at branches with sparse crowns of spiky leaves, far above her head. There might be fruit up there, or water to be had in the leaves. But it was impossible; she could not climb past the smoothness of the lower trunk.

When she looked down Bel’s upturned face was a white dot. The day was advancing; as the sun rode higher the going across the dry dust would be even more difficult. With regret she began her scrambled descent to the ground.

As she lived out her life on the coast of Pangaea, Tura never forgot her brief adventure. And when she thought of the trees she might have climbed her hands and feet itched, her body recalling ape dreams abandoned half a billion years before.

V

Ruul was bored.

All through the echoing caverns the party was in full swing. By the light of their hearths and rush torches people played and danced, talked and laughed, drank and fought, and the much-evolved descendants of snakes and wasps curled affectionately around the ankles of their owners. It was a Thousand-Day festival. In a world forever cut off from the daylight, subterranean humans pale as worms marked time by how they slept and woke, and counted off the days of their lives on their fingers.

Everyone was having fun – everyone but Ruul. When his mother was too busy to notice, he crept away into the dark.

Some time ago, restlessly exploring the edge of the inhabited cave, where tunnels and boreholes stretched on into the dark, he had found a chimney, a crack in the limestone. It looked as if you could climb up quite a way. And when he shielded his eyes, it looked to him as if there was light up there, light of a strange ruddy hue. There might be another group somewhere in the caverns above, he thought. Or it might be something stranger yet, something beyond his imagination.

Now, in the dim light of the torches, he explored the chimney wall. And, lodging his fingers and toes in crevices, he began to climb.

He was escaping the party. Eleven years old, neither child nor adult, he just didn’t fit, and he petulantly wished the festival would go away. But as he ascended into profound silence the climb itself consumed all his attention, and the why of it faded from his mind.

His people, cavern-bound for uncounted generations, were good at rock-climbing. They lived in caverns in deep limestone karsts, laid down in long-vanished shallow seas. Once these hollows had hosted ecosystems full of the much-evolved descendants of lizards, snakes, scorpions, cockroaches, even sharks and crocodiles. The extreme and unchanging conditions of Pangaea had encouraged intricacy and interdependency. The people, retreating underground, had allowed fragments of these extraordinary biotas to survive.

Soon Ruul climbed up out of the limestone into a softer sandstone, poorly cemented. It was easier to find crevices here. The crimson light from above was bright enough to show him details of the rock through which he was passing. There was layer upon layer of it, he saw, and it had a repetitive pattern, streaks of darkness punctuated by lumpy nodules. When he touched one of the nodules, he found a blade surface so sharp he might have cut his fingers. It was a stone axe – made, used, and dropped long ago, and buried somehow in the sediments that had made this sandstone. Growing more curious he explored the dark traces. They crumbled when he dug into them with a fingernail, and he could smell ash, as fresh as if a fire had just burned here. The dark layers were hearths.

He was climbing through strata of hearths and stone tools, thousands of layers all heaped up on top of one another and squashed down into the rock. People must have lived in this place a very long time. He was oppressed by a huge weight of time, and of changelessness.

But he was distracted by a set of teeth he found, small, triangular, razor-edged. They had holes drilled in them. He carefully prised these out of the rock and put them in a pouch; perhaps he would make a necklace of them later.

With aching fingertips and toes, he continued his climb.

Unexpectedly, he reached the top of the chimney. It opened out into a wider space, a cave perhaps, filled with that ruddy light. He hoisted himself up the last short way, swung his legs out onto the floor above, and stood up.

And he was stunned.

He was standing on flat ground, a plain that seemed to go on forever. It was covered in dust, very red, so fine it stuck to the sweat on his legs. He turned slowly around. If this was the floor of a cave – well, it was a cave with no walls. And the roof above must be far away too, so far he could not see it; above him was nothing but a dome of darkness. And in one direction, facing him, something lifted over the edge of the world. It was a ruddy disc, perfectly circular, just a slice of it protruding over the dead-flat horizon. It was the source of the crimson light, and he could feel its searing heat.

Ruul inhabited a convoluted world of caverns and chimneys; he had never seen anything like the purity of this utterly flat plain, the perfectly circular arc of that bow of light. He had no word for sky. The clean geometric simplicity of the landscape drew his soul; he stared, entranced.

Three hundred million years after the life and death of Tura and Bel, this was what Earth had become. The sediments on which Ruul stood were the ruins of the last mountains. The magmatic currents of a cooling world had not been able to break up the new supercontinent, as they had the first. Meanwhile the sun’s relentless warming continued. By now only microbes inhabited the equatorial regions, while at the poles a few hardy, tough-skinned plants were browsed by sluggish animals heavily armoured against the heat. Earth was already losing its water, and Pangaea’s shoreline was rimmed by brilliant-white salt flats.

But the boy standing on the eroded-flat ground was barely changed from his unimaginably remote ancestors, from Tura and Cale and Urlu and even Jaal. It had never been necessary for humans to evolve significantly, for they always adjusted their environment so they didn’t have to – and in the process stifled evolutionary innovation.

It was like this everywhere. After the emergence of intelligence, the story of any biosphere tended to get a lot simpler. It was a major reason for the silence of the stars.

But on Earth a long story was ending. In not many generations from now, Ruul’s descendants would succumb; quietly baked in their desiccating caves, they would not suffer. Life would go on, as archaic thermophilic microbes spread their gaudy colours across the land. But man would be gone, leaving sandstone strata nearly a billion years deep full of hearths and chipped stones and human bones.

‘Ruul! Ruul! Oh, there you are!’ His mother, caked by red dust, was clambering stiffly out of the chimney. ‘Somebody said you came this way. I’ve been frantic. Oh, Ruul – what are you doing?’

Ruul spread his hands, unable to explain. He didn’t want to upset his mother, but he was excited by his discoveries. ‘Look what I found, mother!’

‘What?’

He babbled excitedly about hearths and tools and bones. ‘Maybe people lived here in great heaps, and the smoke of their fires rose up to the sky. Mother, will we come to live here again?’

‘Perhaps one day,’ his mother said at random, to hush him.

But that wasn’t answer enough for Ruul. Restless, curious, he glanced around once more at the plain, the rising sun. To him, this terminal Earth was a place of wonder. He longed to explore. ‘Let me go on. Just a little further!’

‘No,’ his mother said gently. ‘The adventure’s over. It’s time to go. Come now.’ And she put her arm around his shoulders, and led him home.

The Pacific Mystery

[Editor’s note: The saga of the return of the aerial battleship Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches Hermann Goering to London’s sky, and of the heroic exploits of a joint team of RAF and Luftwaffe personnel in boarding the hulk of the schlachtschiff, has overshadowed the story of what befell her long-dead crew, and what they discovered during their attempted Pacific crossing – inasmuch as their discoveries are understood at all. Hence, with the agreement of the family, the BBC has decided to release the following edited transcript of the private diary kept onboard by journalist Bliss Stirling. Miss Stirling completed the Mathematical Tripos at Girton College, Cambridge, and during her National Service in the RAF served in the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit. For some years she was employed as a cartographer by the Reich in the mapping of the eastern Kommissariats in support of Generalplan Ost. She was also, of course, a noted aviatrix. She was but twenty-eight years old at the time of her loss.]

May 15th, 1950. Day 1. I collected my Spitfire at RAF Medmenham and flew up into gin-clear English air. I’ve flown Spits all over the world, in the colonies for the RAF, and in Asia on collaborative ops with the Luftwaffe. But a Spit is meant to fly in English summer skies – I’ve always regretted I was too young to be a flyer in the Phoney War, even if no shots were fired in anger.

And today was quite an adventure, for I was flying up to engage the Goering, the Beast, as Churchill always referred to her before his hanging. Up I climbed, matching its eastward velocity of a steady two hundred and twenty knots towards central London – I matched her, the Beast was not about to make a detour for me. You can hardly miss her even from the ground, a black cross-shape painted on the sky. And as you approach, it is more like buzzing a building, a skyscraper in New York or Germania perhaps, than rendezvousing with another aircraft.

I was thrilled. Who wouldn’t be? On board this tremendous crate I was going to be part of an attempt to circumnavigate the world for the first time in human history, a feat beyond all the great explorers of the past: we would be challenging the Pacific Mystery. Always providing I could land on the bloody thing first, for it was on the back of the Beast, a riveted airstrip in the sky, that I was going to have to bring down my Spit.

I swept up above the Beast and then vectored in along her spine, coming in from the stern over a tailplane that is itself the height of St Paul’s. I counted the famous four-deep banks of wings with their heavy engine pods and droning props, and saw the glassy blisters of gun-turrets at the wing tips, on the tailplane and around the nose. It’s said that the Beast carries her own flak guns. A few small stubby-winged kites, which I later learned the Germans called ‘chariots’, were parked up near the roots of the big wing complexes. The whole is painted black, and adorned with Luftwaffe crosses. Despite the rumoured atom-powered generator in her belly, it is scarcely possible to believe such a monstrosity flies at all, and I can quite believe it is impossible for her ever to land.

And, like all Nazi technology, she is seductively beautiful.

I’ve done my share of carrier landings, but that final approach through a forest of A/T booms and RDF antennae was hairier than any of them. Pride wasn’t going to allow me the slightest hesitation, however. I put my wheels down without a bump, my arrestor hook caught on the tag lines, and I was jolted to a halt before the crash barriers. On the back of the Beast stood a batsman in a kind of all-over rubber suit, harnessed to the deck to stop from being blown off. He flagged me to go park up under a wing-root gun turret.

So I rolled away. Bliss Stirling, girl reporter, on the deck of the Goering! Somewhere below, I knew, was London. But the Beast’s back is so broad that when you stand on it you can’t see the ground…

Day 2. The highlight of my day was an expensive lunch in what Doctor Ciliax calls ‘one of the lesser restaurants of the schlachtschiff’, all silver cutlery and comestibles from the provinces of Greater Germany, Polish beef and French wine. It is like being aboard an ocean liner, or a plush Zeppelin, perhaps.

As we ate the Beast circled over Germania, which Jack Bovell insists on calling ‘Berlin’, much to Ciliax’s annoyance. Fleets of tanker craft flew up to load us with oil, water, food and other consumables, and we were buzzed by biplanes laden with cine-cameras, their lenses peering at us.

Jack Bovell is one of the Token Yanks on board to witness the journey, much as I am a Token British. He is a flying officer in the USAAF, and will, so he has been promised, be allowed to take the controls of the Beast at some point during this monumental flight. We Tokens are in the charge of Wolfgang Ciliax, himself a Luftwaffe officer, though as an engineer he never refers to his rank. He is one of the Beast’s chief designers. The three of us are going to be spending a lot of time together, I think. What joy.

This morning Ciliax took Jack and me on a tour of the Beast. Of course we weren’t shown anything seriously interesting such as the ‘atom engine’, or the ‘jet’ motors rumoured to be deployed on some of the chariots. Ciliax in fact showed rare restraint for a boffin, in my experience, in not blurting out all he knew about his crate just for the love of her. But we were dazzled by a flight deck the size of a Buckingham Palace reception room, with banks of chattering teletypes and an immense navigational table run by some of the few women to be seen on board. There are lounges and a ballroom and a library, and even a small swimming pool, which is just showing off.

Other guests walked with us, many from the upper tiers of the occupied nations of Europe. We were tailed by an excitable movie-film crew. Leni Riefenstahl is said to be directing a film of our momentous voyage, though she herself isn’t aboard. And many sinister-looking figures wore the black uniforms of the SS. Pressed by Jack Bovell, Ciliax insists that the Goering is a Luftwaffe crate and the SS has no authority here.

Below decks, we walked through a hold the size of the Albert Hall. We marvelled at mighty aquifers of oil and water. And we were awed by the double transverse internal bulkheads and the hull of inches-thick hardened steel: rivets the size of my fist.

‘She really is a battleship in the sky,’ Jack said, rather grudgingly. And he was right; the ancestry of this monstrous schlachtschiff lies truly among the steel behemoths of the oceans, not fragile kites like my Spitfire.

Jack Bovell is around thirty, is stocky – shorter than me – stinks of cigar smoke and pomade and brandy, and wears a battered leather flight jacket, even at dinner. I think he’s from Brooklyn. He’s smarter than he acts, I’m sure.

‘Ah, yes, of course she is a schlachtschiff,’ said Ciliax, ‘but the Goering is an experimental craft whose primary purposes are, one, a demonstration of technology, and two, an explorative capability. The Goering is the first vessel in human history capable of challenging the mighty scale of the Pacific.’ That habit of his of speaking in numbered lists tells you much about Wolfgang Ciliax. He is quite young, mid-thirties perhaps, and has slicked-back blond hair and glasses with lenses the size of pennies.

‘“Explorative capability”,’ Jack said sourly. ‘And that’s why you made a point of showing us her armour?’

Ciliax just smiled. Of course that was the point.

Every non-German on board this bloody plane is a spy to some degree or other, including me. Whatever we discover about the world as we attempt to cross the Pacific, we neutral and occupied nations are going to be served up with a powerful demonstration of the Reich’s technological capabilities. Everyone knows this is the real game. But Jack keeps breaking the rules. In a way he is too impatient a character for the assignment he has been given.

Jack, incidentally, sized me up when he met me, and Ciliax, who isn’t completely juiceless, takes every opportunity to touch me, to brush my hand or pat my shoulder. But Jack seems sniffy. To him I’m an emblem of a nation of appeasers, I suppose. And to Ciliax I’m territory to be conquered, perhaps, like central Asia. No doubt we will break through our national types in the days to come. But your heroine is not going to find romance aboard the Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches Hermann Goering, I don’t think!

Day 3. Memo to self: follow up a comment of Ciliax’s about the ‘helots’ who tend the atom engines.

These machines are contained within sealed lead-lined bulkheads, and nobody is allowed in or out – at any rate, not me. The atomic motors are a focus of interest for us spies, of course. Before this flight the RAF brass briefed me about the Nazis’ plans to develop weapons of stunning power from the same technology. Perhaps there is a slave colony of untermenschen, Slavs or gypsies, trapped inside those bulkheads, tending the glowing machines that are gradually killing them, as we drink wine and argue over politics.

In the afternoon I sat in one of the big observation blisters set in the belly of the Beast and made a broadcast for the BBC. This is my nominal job, to be Britain’s eyes and ears during this remarkable mission. We are still orbiting Germania, that is Berlin. Even from the air the vast reconstruction of the last decade is clear to see. The city has been rebuilt around an axial grid of avenues each a hundred yards wide. You can easily pick out the Triumphal Arch, the Square of the People, and the Pantheon of the Army which hosts a choreography of millions. Jack tuts about ‘infantile gigantomania’, but you have to admire the Nazis’ vision. And all the while the tanker planes fly up to service us, like bees to a vast flower…

Day 5. A less pleasant lunch today. We nearly got pranged.

We crossed the old border between Germany and Poland, and are now flying over what the Germans call simply ‘Ostland’, the vast heart of Asia. With Ciliax’s help we spotted the new walled colony cities, mostly of veteran German soldiers, planted deep in old Soviet territories. They are surrounded by vast estates, essentially each a collective farm, a kolkhoz, taken from the Bolsheviks. There the peasantry toil and pay their tithes to German settlers.

Jack grumbled and groused at this, complaining in his American way about a loss of freedom and of human rights. But he’s missing the point.

‘Americans rarely grasp context,’ said Ciliax with barely concealed contempt. ‘It is not a war for freedom that is being fought out down there, not a war for territory. Asia is the arena for the final war between races, the climax of a million years of disparate human evolution. As the Fuhrer has written, “What a task awaits us! We have a hundred years of joyful satisfaction before us.”’ I must say that when Ciliax spouts this stuff he isn’t convincing. He’s fundamentally an engineer, I think. But one must labour for whoever holds the whip.

(Memo: check the source of that Hitler quote.)

Since Germania we have been accompanied by fighters, mostly Messerschmitts, providing top cover and close escort, and Jack Bovell and I have been happily spotting types and new variants. And we have seen lighter, faster fighters streaking across our field of view. They may be the ‘jet fighters’ we’ve read about but have never seen up close. I know plenty of RAF brass who regret that the Phoney War ended in May 1940, if only for the lost opportunity for technical advancement. This ravaged continent is obviously a crucible for such advancement. Jack and I craned and muttered, longing to see more of those exotic birds.

And then the show started. We were somewhere over the Ukraine.

One fighter came screaming up through our layers of escorts. It arced straight up from the ground like a firecracker, trailing a pillar of smoke. I wondered aloud if it actually had rockets strapped to its tail. Ciliax murmured, as if intrigued by a puzzle.

You have to understand that we were sitting in armchairs in an observation blister. I even had a snifter of brandy in my hand. There was absolutely no sense of danger. But still the unmarked rocket-plane came on.

A deep thrumming made the surface of my brandy ripple; the Beast, lumbering, was changing course.

‘If that thing gets through,’ I said, ‘it’s harps and halos and hello St Peter for us.’

‘You don’t say,’ said Jack Bovell.

Ciliax said nothing.

Then a chance pencil of flak swept across the nose of the rocket-plane, shattering the canopy over its cockpit. It fell away and that was that; I didn’t even see the detonation when it fell to earth.

Jack blew out his cheeks. Wolfgang Ciliax snapped his fingers for more brandies all round.

We orbited over the area of the attempted strike for the next eight hours. Ciliax, meanwhile, took me and Jack down to a hold. The bombs were slim, blue and black steel, perfectly streamlined; they looked like ‘upturned midget submarines’, as Jack said. You can drop them from as high as twenty thou. I thought this was another piece of typically beautiful Nazi technology, but Ciliax said the bombs are a British design, made under licence by Vickers Armstrong in Weybridge, whose chief designer is a man called Barnes Neville Wallis. ‘They are as British as the banks of Rolls Royce Merlin engines that keep the Goering aloft,’ Ciliax told me, his bespectacled eyes intent, making sure I understood my complicity. But I thought he was mostly incensed that anybody had dared raise a hand against his beautiful machine.

That night the Goering dropped stick after stick of these ‘Tallboy’ bombs on the site from which the rocket plane seemed to have been launched. I have no idea whether the assault was successful or not. The movie people filmed all this, in colour.

With the bombs dropped, we flee east, towards the dawn. I must try to catch some sleep …

Day 7. We have already crossed China, which is the subject of a colonisation programme by the Japanese, a mirror image to what the Germans are up to in the west. Eurasia is a vast theatre of war and conquest and misery, a theatre that stretches back all the way to the Channel coast. What a world we live in!

Still, now we are past it all, a goodly chunk of the world’s circumference already successfully traversed. Our escort has fallen away. Our last supply convoy was Japanese; Jack has threatened to drop their raw fish suppers out of the bomb bays.

And now, alone, we are facing our ultimate target: the Pacific Ocean. We are so high that its silver skin glimmers, softly curving, like the back of some great animal.

Jack is taking his turns in a pilot’s seat on the bridge. This afternoon I was given permission from Ciliax to go up there. I longed to play with the controls. ‘I have a hunch I’m a better stick man than you,’ I said to Jack.

Jack laughed. Sitting there, his peaked cap on, his flight jacket under a webbing over-jacket, he looked at home for the first time since I’d met him. ‘I dare say you’re right. But Hans is a better man than either of us.’

‘Hans?’

Hans, it turned out, is the flight deck’s computing machine. Hans can fly the Beast on ‘his’ own, and even when a human pilot is at the stick he takes over most functions. ‘I think the name is a German joke,’ Jack said. ‘Some translation of “hands off”.’

I crouched beside his position, looking out over the ocean. ‘What do you think we’re going to find out there, Jack?’

Jack, matter-of-fact, shrugged. ‘Twelve thousand miles of ocean, and then San Francisco.’

‘Then how do you explain the fact that nobody has crossed the Pacific before?’

‘Ocean currents,’ he said. ‘Adverse winds. Hell, I don’t know.’

But we both knew the story is more complicated than that. This is the Pacific Mystery.

Humanity came out of Africa; Darwin said so. In caveman days we spread north and east, across Asia all the way to Australia. Then the Polynesians went island-hopping. They crossed thousands of miles, reaching as far as Hawaii with their stone axes and dug-out boats.

But beyond that point the Pacific defeated them.

And meanwhile others went west, to the Americas. Nobody quite knows how the first ‘native’ Americans got there from Africa; some say it was just accidental rafting on lumber flushed down the Congo, though I fancy there’s a smack of racial prejudice in that theory. So when the Vikings sailed across the north Atlantic they came up against dark-skinned natives, and when the Portuguese and Spanish and British arrived they found a complicated trading economy, half-Norse, half-African, which they proceeded to wipe out.

Soon the Europeans reached the west coast of the Americas.

But beyond that point the Pacific defeated them.

‘Here’s the puzzle,’ I said to Jack. ‘The Earth is a sphere. You can tell, for instance, by the curving shadow it casts on the moon during a lunar eclipse.’

‘Sure,’ said Jack. ‘So we know the Pacific can’t be more than twelve thousand miles across.’

‘Yes, but western explorers, including Magellan and Captain Cook, have pushed a long way out from the American coast. Thousands of miles. We know they should have found Hawaii, for instance. And from the east, the Chinese in the Middle Ages and the modern Japanese have sailed far beyond the Polynesians’ range. Few came back. Somebody should have made it by now. Jack, the Pacific is too wide. And that is the Mystery.’

Jack snorted. ‘Bull hockey,’ he said firmly. ‘You’ll be telling me next about sea monsters and cloud demons.’

But those ancient Pacific legends had not yet been disproved, and I could see that some of the bridge crew, those who could follow our English, were glancing our way uncertainly.

Day 8. We are out of wireless telegraphy contact; the last of the Japanese stations has faded, and our forest of W/T masts stand purposeless. You can’t help but feel isolated.

So we three, Ciliax, Jack and I, are drawn to each other, huddling in our metal cave like primitives. This evening we had another stiff dinner, the three of us. Loathing each other, we drink too much, and say too much.

‘Of course,’ Ciliax murmured, ‘the flight of a rocket-plane would last only minutes, and would be all but uncontrollable once, ah, the fuse is lit. Somebody on the ground must have known precisely when the Goering would pass overhead. I wonder who could have let them know?’

If that was a dig at Jack or me, Jack wasn’t having any of it. ‘“Somebody”? Who? In Asia you Nazis are stacking up your enemies, Wolfie. The Bolsheviks, partisans. You and the Japanese will meet and fall on each other some day –’

‘Or it may have been Americans,’ Ciliax said smoothly.

‘Why would America attack a Nazi asset?’

‘Because of the strategic implications of the Goering. Suppose we do succeed in crossing the Pacific? America has long feared the vulnerability of its long western coastline…’

Jack’s eyes were narrow, but he didn’t bother to deny it.

In 1940 America was indeed looking over its shoulder nervously at Japan’s aggressive expansion. But the Pacific proved impassable, the Japanese did not come. So, during the Phoney War, America stood firm with Britain. In April 1940 Hitler overran Denmark and Norway, and in May outflanked the Maginot line to crush France. The blitzkriegs caused panic in the British Cabinet. Prime Minister Chamberlain was forced out of office for his poor handling of the war.

But Hitler paused. The North Sea was his boundary, he said; he wanted no conflict with his ‘Anglo-Saxon cousins’, who stood united against him.

Churchill was all for rejecting Hitler’s overtures and fighting on. But Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, argued that Hitler’s terms were acceptable. While Churchill retired fuming to the backbenches, the ‘scarecrow in a derby hat’ was Prime Minister within the week, and had agreed an armistice within the month.

Hitler was able to turn his full energies east, and by Christmas 1941 had taken Moscow.

All this happened, you see, because the Japanese had not been able to pose a threat to the Americans. If not for the impassibility of the Pacific, America’s attentions might have been drawn to the west, not the east. And without the powerful support we enjoyed from America, if Hitler hadn’t been moved to offer such a generous peace in 1940 – if Hitler had dared attack Britain – the Germans would eventually have found themselves fighting on two fronts, west and east. Could Russia have survived a lesser Nazi assault? Is it even conceivable that Russia and Britain and America could have worked as allies against the Nazis, even against the Japanese? Would the war against the Nazis eventually have been won?

All this speculation is guff, of course, best left to blokes in pubs. But you can see that if the Pacific had been navigable the whole outcome of the war with the Germans would have been different, one way or another. And that is why the Goering, a plane designed to challenge the ocean’s impregnability, is indeed a weapon of strategic significance.

This is what we argue about over lunch and dinner. Lost in the vast inhuman arena of this ocean, we are comforted by the familiarity of our petty human squabbles.

Day 10. Perhaps I should record distances travelled, rather than times.

It is three days since we left behind the eastern coast of Asia. Over sea, unimpeded by resupplying or bomb-dropping, we make a steady airspeed of two hundred and twenty knots. In the last forty-eight hours alone we should have covered twelve thousand miles.

We should already have crossed the ocean. We should already be flying over the Americas. When I take astronomical sightings, it is as if we have simply flown around a perfectly behaved spherical Earth from which America has been deleted. The geometry of the sky doesn’t fit the geometry of the Earth.

Somehow I hadn’t expected the mystery to come upon us so quickly. Only ten days into the flight, we are still jostling for position at the dinner table. And yet we have sailed into a mystery so strange that we may as well have been projected to the moon.

I still haven’t met the Captain, whose name, I am told, is Fassbender. Even lost as we are in the middle of unfathomable nothingness, the social barriers between us are as rigid as the steel bulkheads of the Beast.

Day 15. Today, a jaunt in a chariot. What fun!

We passed over yet another group of islands, this one larger than most, dark basaltic cones blanketed by greenery and lapped by the pale blue of coral reefs. Observers in the blisters, armed with binoculars and telescopes, claimed to see movement at the fringes of these scattered fragments of jungle. So the Captain ordered the chariots to go down and take a shuftie.

There were four of us in our chariot, myself, Jack, Ciliax, and a crewman who piloted us, a squat young chap called ‘Klaus’ whom I rather like. Both the Germans wore sidearms; Jack and I did not. The chariot is a stubby-winged seaplane, well equipped to land on the back of the Beast; a tough little bugger.

We skimmed low over clearings where lions ran and immense bears growled. Things like elephants, covered in brown hair and with long curling tusks, lifted their trunks as we passed, as if in protest at our engines’ clatter. ‘Christ,’ Jack said. ‘What I wouldn’t give to be down among ‘em with a shotgun.’ Ciliax and I took photographs and cine-films and made notes and spoke commentaries into tape-recorders.

And we thought we saw signs of people: threads of smoke rose from the beaches.

‘Extraordinary,’ Ciliax said. ‘Cave bears. What looked like sabre-tooth cats. Mammoths. This is a fauna that has not been seen in Europe or America since the ice retreated.’

Jack asked, ‘What happened to ‘em?’

‘We hunted them to death,’ I said. ‘Probably.’

‘What with, machine guns?’

I shrugged. ‘Stone axes and flint arrowheads are enough, given time.’

‘So,’ Jack asked practically, ‘how did they get here?’

‘Sea levels fall and rise,’ Ciliax said. ‘When the ice comes, it locks up the world’s water. Perhaps that is true even of this monstrous world ocean. Perhaps the lower waters expose dry land now submerged, or archipelagos along which one can raft.’

‘So in the Ice Age,’ I said, ‘we hunted the mammoths and the giant sloths until we drove them off the continents. But they kept running, and a few of them made it to one island or another, and now they just continue fleeing, heading ever east.’ And in this immense ocean, I thought, there was room to keep running and running and running. Nothing need ever go extinct.

‘But there are people here,’ Jack pointed out. ‘We saw fires.’

We buzzed along the beach. We dipped low over a kind of camp-site, a mean sort of affair centred on a scrappy hearth. The people, naked, came running out of the forest at our noise – and when they saw us, most of them went running back again. But we got a good look at them, and fired off photographs.

They were people, of a sort. They had fat squat bodies, and big chests, and brows like bags of walnuts. I think it was obvious to us all what they were, even to Jack.

‘Neanderthals.’ Ciliax said it first; it is a German name. ‘Another species of – well, animal – which we humans chased out of Africa and Europe and Asia.’

Jack said, ‘They don’t seem to be smart enough to wipe out the mammoths as we did.’

‘Or maybe they’re too smart,’ I murmured.

Ciliax said, ‘What a remarkable discovery: relics of the evolutionary past, even while the evolutionary future of mankind is being decided in the heart of Asia!’

Standing orders forbid landings. The chariot lifted us back to the steel safety of the Beast, and that was that.

It is now eight days since we crossed the coast of China. We have come thirty-five thousand miles since. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising to find such strange beasts below, mammoths and cave bears and low-browed savages.

And still we go on. What next? How thrilling it all is!

Day 23.
Today, a monstrous electrical storm.

We flew under the worst of it, our banks of engines thrumming, as lightning crackled around the W/T masts. Perhaps in this unending ocean there are unending storms – nobody knows, our meteorologists cannot calculate it.

But we came out of it. Bold technicians crawled out to the wing roots to check over the Beast, to replace a mast or two, and to tend to the chariots. I wanted to check my Spitfire, but predictably was not allowed by Ciliax. Still, Klaus kindly looked over the old bird for me and assures me she is A-OK.

Last night both Ciliax and Jack Bovell made passes at me, the one with a steely resolve, the other rather desperately.

Day 25.
A rather momentous day.

Our nominal food and water store is intended to last fifty days. Today, therefore, Day 25, is the turn-back point. And yet we are no nearer finding land, no nearer penetrating the great mysteries of the Pacific.

The Captain had us gather in the larger of the restaurants – we being the passengers and senior officers; the scullery maids were not represented, and nor were the helots, the lost souls of the atom-engine compartment. The Captain himself, on his flight deck, spoke to us by speaker tube; I have yet to see his face.

We discussed whether to continue the mission. We had a briefing by the quartermaster on the state of our supplies, then a debate, followed by a vote. A vote, held on a flying Nazi schlachtschiff! I have no doubt that Captain Fassbender had already made his own decision before we were gathered in the polished oak of the dining room. But he was trying to boost morale – even striving to stave off mutinies in the future. Christopher Columbus used the same tactics, Jack told me, when his crew too felt lost in the midst of another endless ocean.

And, like Columbus, Captain Fassbender won the day. For now we carry on, on half-rations. The movie-makers filmed it all, even though every last man of them, too fond of their grub, voted to turn back.

Day 28. Today we passed over yet another group of islands, quite a major cluster. Captain Fassbender ordered a few hours’ orbit while the chariots went down to explore. Of my little group only I bothered to ride down, with my friend Klaus. Jack Bovell did not answer my knock on his cabin door; I have not seen him all day. I suspect he has been drinking heavily.

So Klaus and I flew low over forests and patches of grassland. We spooked exotic-looking animals: they were like elephants and buffalo and rhinoceroses. Perhaps they are archaic forms from an age even deeper than the era of ice. Living fossils! I snapped pictures merrily and took notes, and fantasised of presenting my observations to the Royal Geographical Society, as Darwin did on returning from his voyage on the Beagle.

Then I saw people. They were naked, tall, slim, upright. They looked more ‘modern’, if that is the right word, than the lumpy-browed Neanderthals we saw on the islands of mastodons, many days ago. Yet their heads receded from their foreheads; their shapely skulls can contain little in the way of grey matter, and their pretty brown eyes held only bewilderment. They fled from our approach like the other animals of the savannah.

Primitive they might be, but it appears they lead the march of the hominids, off to the east. I took more photos.

I have begun to develop a theory about the nature of the world, and the surface of the ocean over which we travel – or rather the geometric continuum in which it seems to be embedded. I think the Pacific is a challenge not merely to the cartographic mind but to the mathematical. (I just read those sentences over – how pompous – once a Girton girl, always a Girton girl!) I’ve yet to talk it over with anybody. Only Wolfgang Ciliax has a hope of understanding me, I think. I prefer to be sure of my ground before I approach him.

Certainly a radical new theory of this ocean of ours is needed. Think of it! Since the coast of Asia we have already travelled far enough to circle the earth nearly five times, if it were not for this oddity, this Fold in the World.

The Pacific is defeating us, I think, crushing our minds with its sheer scale. After only three days on half tuck everybody is grumbling as loudly as their bellies. Yet we go on…

Day 33. It has taken me twenty-four hours to get around to this entry. After the events of yesterday the writing of it seemed futile. Courage, Bliss! However bad things are, one must behave as if they are not so, as my mother, a stoical woman, has always said.

It began when Jack Bovell, for the third day in a row, did not emerge from his cabin. One cannot have uncontrollable drunks at large on an aircraft, not even one as large as this. And no part of the Goering, not even passengers’ cabins, can be off-limits to the god-like surveillance of the Captain. So Wolfgang Ciliax led a party of hefty aircrew to Jack’s cabin. I went along at Ciliax’s request, as the nearest thing to a friend Jack has on this crate.

I watched as the Germans broke down Jack’s door. Jack was drunk, but coherent, and belligerent. He took on the Luftwaffe toughs, and as he was held back Ciliax ordered a thorough search of his cabin – ‘thorough’ meaning the furniture was dismantled and the false ceiling broken into.

The flap that followed moved fast. I have since pieced it together.

The airmen found a small radio transceiver, a compact leather case full of valves and wiring. This, it turned out, had been used by Jack to attract the attention of that rocket-plane as we flew over the Ukraine. So Ciliax’s suspicions were proven correct. I am subtly disappointed in Jack; it seems such an obvious thing to have done. Anyhow, this discovery led to a lot of shouting, and the thugs moved in on Jack. But as they did so he raised his right hand, which held what I thought at first was a grenade, and the thugs backed off.

Ciliax turned to me, his face like a thunderous sky. ‘Talk to this fool or he’ll kill us all.’

Jack huddled in the corner of his smashed-up room, his face bleeding, his gadget in his upraised right hand. ‘Bliss,’ he panted. ‘I’m sorry you got dragged into this.’

‘I was in it from the moment I stepped aboard. If you sober up – Wolfgang could fetch you some coffee –’

‘Adrenaline and a beating-up are great hangover cures.’

‘Then think about what you’re doing. If you set that thing off, whatever it is, do you expect to survive?’

‘I didn’t expect to survive when I called up that Russkie rocket-plane. But it isn’t about me, Bliss. It’s about duty.’

Ciliax sneered. ‘Your President must be desperate if his only way of striking at the Reich is through suicide attacks.’

‘This has nothing to do with Truman or his administration,’ Jack said. ‘If he’s ever challenged about it he’ll deny any knowledge of this, and he’ll be telling the truth.’

Ciliax wasn’t impressed. ‘Plausible deniability. I thought that was an SS invention.’

‘Tell me why, Jack,’ I pressed him.

He eyed me. ‘Can’t you see it? Ciliax said it himself. It’s all about global strategies, Bliss. If the Pacific crossing is completed the Germans will be able to strike at us. And that’s what I’ve got to put a stop to.’

‘But there will be other Goerings,’ Ciliax said.

‘Yeah, but at least I’ll buy some time, if it ends here – if nobody knows – if the Mystery remains, a little longer. Somebody has to take down this damn Beast. A rocket-plane didn’t do it. But I’m Jonah, swallowed by the whale.’ He laughed, and I saw he was still drunk after all.

I yelled, ‘Jack, no!’ In the same instant half the German toughs fell on him, and the other half, including Ciliax, crowded out of the room.

I had been expecting an explosion in the cabin. I cowered. But there was only a distant crump, like far-off thunder. The deck, subtly, began to pitch …

Day 34.
We aren’t dead yet.

The picture has become clearer. Jack sabotaged the Goering’s main control links; the switch he held was a radio trigger. But it didn’t quite work; we didn’t pitch into the sea. The technicians bodged up a fix to stabilise our attitude, and even keep us on our course, heading ever east. This whale of the sky still swims through her element. But the crew can’t tell yet if she remains dirigible – if we will ever be able to fly her home again.

Six people died, some crewmen on the flight deck, a couple of technicians wrestling with repairs outside. And Jack, of course. Already beaten half to death, he was presented to a summary court presided over by the Captain. Then Fassbender gave him to the crew. They hung him up in the hold, then while he still lived cut him down, and pitched him into the sea.

I don’t know what Ciliax made of all this. He said these common airmen lacked the inventiveness of the SS, to whom he was under pressure to hand over Jack. Ciliax has a core of human decency, I think.

So we fly on. The engineers toil in shifts on the Goering’s shattered innards. I have more faith in engineers than in gods or gargoyles, priests or politicians. But I no longer believe I will ever see England again. There. I’ve written it down, so it must be true. I wonder what strange creatures of the sea will feast on Jack’s flesh …

Day 50.
Another round number, another pointless milestone.

I estimate we have travelled a distance that would span from the earth to the moon. Think of that! Perhaps in another universe the German genius for technology would have taken humans on just such an epic voyage, rather than this pointless slog.

We continue to pass over island groups and chains. On one island yesterday, covered by a crude-looking jungle of immense feathery ferns, I saw very exotic animals running in herds, or peering with suspicion at our passage. Think of flightless birds, muscular and upright and with an avian nerviness; and think of a crocodile’s massive reptilian patience; combine the two, and you have what I saw.

How did the dinosaurs die? Was it an immense volcanic episode, a comet or other fire from the sky, a deadly plague, some inherent weakness of the reptilian race? Whatever it was, it seems that no matter how dramatic the disaster that seeks to wipe you out, there is always room to run. Perhaps on this peculiar folded-up earth of ours there is no species that has ever gone extinct. What a marvellous thought!

But if they were dinosaurs, down on that island, we will never know. The plane no longer stops to orbit, for it cannot; the chariots no longer fly down to investigate thunder lizards. And we plough on ever east, ever further over the ocean, ever deeper into a past even beyond the dinosaurs.

My social life is a bit of a challenge these days.

As our food and water run out, our little aerial community is disintegrating into fiefdoms. The Water Barons trade with the Emperors of the Larder, or they will go to war over a tapped pipeline. Occasionally I hear pronouncements from the invisible Captain Fassbender, but I am not certain how far his word holds sway any longer. There have been rumours of a coup by the SS officers. The movie-makers are filming none of this. Their morale was the first to crumble, poor lambs.

I last saw Wolfgang Ciliax ten days ago. He was subtle and insidious; I had the distinct impression that he wanted me to join a sort of harem. Women are the scarcest commodity of all on this boat. Women, and cigarettes. You can imagine the shrift he got from me.

I sleep in barricaded rooms. In the guts of the Beast I have stashes of food and water, and cigarettes and booze to use as currency in an emergency. I keep out of the way of the petty wars, which will sort themselves out one way or another.

Once I had to bale out over Malaya, and I survived in the jungle for a week before reaching an army post. This is similar. It’s also rather like college life. What larks!

[Editor’s note: Many fragmentary entries follow. Some are undated, others contain only mathematical jottings or geometric sketches. The reader is referred to a more complete publication forthcoming in Annals of Psychiatry.]

Day 365. A year, by God! A full year, if I have counted correctly, though the calendar is meaningless given how many times we have spun around this watery earth – or appear to have. And if the poor gutted Beast is still keeping to her nominal speed, then I may have travelled two million miles. Two million. And still no America!

I believe I am alone now. Alone, save for the valve mind of Hans, and perhaps the odd rat.

The food ran out long ago, save for my stashes. The warfare between the Fuhrers of Spam and the Tsars of Dried Eggs became increasingly fragmented, until one man fell on the next for the sake of a cigarette stub. Others escaped, however, in chariots that went spinning down to one lost island or another. Klaus was one of them. I hope they survive; why not? Perhaps some future expedition, better equipped than ours, may retrieve their descendants.

And the Beast is hollowed out, much of her burned, depopulated save for me. I have explored her from one end to the other, seeking scraps of food and water, pitching the odd corpse into the drink. The only place I have not investigated is the sealed hold of the atom engine. Whatever survives in there has failed to break out.

However the engine continues to run. The blades of the Merlins turn still. Even the heating works. I should put on record that no matter how badly we frail humans have behaved, the Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches Hermann Goering has fulfilled her mission flawlessly.

This can’t go on forever, though. Therefore I have decided to set my affairs in order: to begin with, my geometrical maunderings. I have left a fuller account – that is, complete with equations – in a separate locker. These journal notes are intended for the less mathematical reader; such as my mother (they’re for you, Mummy! – I know you’ll want to know what became of me).

I have had to make a leap of faith, if you will. As we drive on and on, with no sight of an end to our journey, I have been forced to consider the possibility that there will be no end – that, just as it appears, the Pacific is not merely anomalously large, but, somehow, infinite. How can this be?

Our greatest geometer was Euclid. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you? He reduced all of the geometry you can do on a plane to just five axioms, from which can be derived that menagerie of theorems and corollaries that have been used to bother schoolchildren ever since.

And even Euclid wasn’t happy with the fifth axiom, which can be expressed like this: parallel lines never meet. That seems so obvious it doesn’t need stating, that if you send off two lines at right angles to a third, like rail tracks, they will never meet. On a perfect, infinite plane they wouldn’t. But on the curved surface of the earth, they would: think of lines of longitude converging on a pole. And if space itself is curved, again, ‘parallel’ lines may meet – or they may diverge, which is just as startling. Allowing Euclid’s axiom to be weakened in this way opens the door to a whole set of what are rather unimaginatively called ‘non-Euclidian geometries’. I will give you one name: Bernhard Riemann. Einstein plundered his work in developing relativity.

And in a non-Euclidean geometry, you can have all sorts of odd effects. A circle’s circumference may be more or less than ‘pi’ times its diameter. You can even fit an infinite area into a finite circumference: for, you see, your measuring rods shrink as those parallel lines converge. Again I refer you to one name: Henri Poincaré.

You can see where I am going with this, I think. It seems that our little globe is a non-Euclidean object. Its geometry is hyperbolic. It has a finite radius – as you can see if you look at its shadow on the moon – but an infinite surface area, as we of the Goering have discovered. The world has a Fold in it, in effect. As I drive into the Fold I grow smaller and ever more diminished, as seen from the outside – but I feel just as Bliss-sized as I always did, and there is plenty of room for me.

This seems strange – to put it mildly! But why should we imagine that the simple geometry of something like an orange should scale up to something as mighty as a planet?

Of course this is just one mathematical model which fits the observations; it may or may not be definitive. And many questions remain open, such as astronomical effects, and the nature of gravity on an infinite world. I leave these issues as an exercise for the reader.

One might question what difference this makes to us mere mortals. But surely geography determines our destiny. If the Pacific could have been spanned in the Stone Age, perhaps by a land bridge, the Americas’ first inhabitants might have been Asian, not Africans who crossed the Atlantic. And certainly in our own century if the Pacific were small enough for America and Japan to have rubbed against each other, the convulsion of war we have endured for the last decade would not have turned out the way it did.

Besides all that – what fun to find yourself living on such a peculiar little planet, a World with a Fold! Don’t you think…?

Date unknown.
Sorry, I’ve given up counting. Not long after the last entry, however.

With my affairs in order I’m jumping ship. Why?

Point one: I’ve eaten all the food. Not the Spam, obviously.

Point two: I think I’m running out of world, or at least the sort of world I can live on. It’s a long time since I saw a mastodon, or a dinosaur. I still cross over island groups, but now they are inhabited, if at all, by nothing but purplish slime and what look like mats of algae. Very ancient indeed, no doubt.

And ahead things change again. The sky looks greenish, and I wonder if I am approaching a place, or a time, where the oxygen runs out. I wake up in the night panting for breath, but of course that could just be bad dreams.

Anyhow, time to ditch.

It’s the end of the line for me, but not necessarily for the Goering. I think I’ve found a way to botch the flight deck equipment: not enough to make her fully manoeuvrable again, but at least enough to turn her around and send her back the way she came, under the command of Hans. I don’t know how long she can keep flying. The Merlins have been souped up with fancy lubricants and bearings for longevity, but of course there are no engineers left to service them. If the Merlins do hold out the Goering might one day come looming over Piccadilly Circus again, I suppose, and what a sight she will be. Of course there will be no way of stopping her I can think of, but I leave that as another exercise for you, dear reader.

As for me, I intend to take the Spit. She hasn’t been flown since Day 1, and is as good as new as far as I can tell. I might try for one of those slime-covered rocks in the sea.

Or I might try for something I’ve glimpsed on the horizon, under the greenish sky. Lights. A city? Not human, surely, but who knows what lies waiting for us on the other side of the Fold in the World?

What else must I say before I go?

I hope we won’t be the last to come this way. I hope that the next to do so come, unlike us, in peace.

Mummy, keep feeding my cats for me, and I’m sorry about the lack of grandchildren. Bea will have to make up the numbers (sorry, sis!).

Enough, before I start splashing these pages with salt water. This is Bliss Stirling, girl reporter for the BBC, over and out!

[Editor’s note: There the transcript ends. Found lodged in a space between bulkheads, it remains the only written record of the Goering’s journey to have survived on board the hulk. No filmed or tape-recorded material has been salvaged. The journal is published with respect to the memory of Miss Stirling. However as Miss Stirling was contracted by the BBC and the Royal Geographic Society specifically to cover the Goering’s Pacific expedition, all these materials must be regarded as COPYRIGHT the British Broadcasting Conglomerate MCMLII. Signed PETER CARINHALL, Board of Governors, BBC.]

No More Stories

‘It’s strange to find myself in this position. Dying, I mean. I’ve always found it hard to believe that things will just go on afterwards. After me. That the sun will come up, the milkman will call. Will it all just fold up and go away when I’ve gone?’

These were the first words his mother said to Simon, when he got out of the car.

She stood in her doorway, old-lady stocky, solid, arms folded, over eighty years old. Her wrinkles were runnels in papery flesh that ran down to a small, frowning mouth. She peered around the close, as if suspicious.

Simon collected his small suitcase from the back of the car. It had a luggage tag from a New York flight, a reminder that he was fifty years old, and that he did have a life beyond his mother’s, working for a biotech company in London, selling gen-enged goldfish as children’s pets. Now that he was back in this Sheffield suburb where he’d grown up, his London life seemed remote, a dream.

He locked the car and walked up to his mother. She presented her cheek for him to kiss. It was cold, rough-textured.

‘I had a good journey,’ he said, for he knew she wouldn’t ask.

‘I am dying, you know,’ she said, as if to make sure he understood.

‘Oh, Mother.’ He put an arm around her shoulders. She was hard, like a lump of gristle and bone, and didn’t soften into the hug. She had cancer. They had never actually used that word between them.

She stepped back to let him into the house. The hall was spotless, obsessively cleaned and ordered, yet it smelled stale. A palm frond folded into a cross hung on the wall, a reminder that Easter was coming, a relic of intricate Catholic rituals he’d abandoned when he left home. He put his suitcase down.

‘Don’t put it there,’ his mother said.

A familiar claustrophobia closed in around him. ‘All right.’ He grabbed the case and climbed the stairs, fourteen of them as he used to count in his childhood. But now there was an old-lady safety banister fixed to the wall.

She had made up one of the twin beds in the room he had once shared with his brother. There wasn’t a trace of his childhood left in here, none of his toys or books or school photos.

He came downstairs. ‘Mother, I’m gasping. Can I make a cup of tea?’

‘The pot’s still fresh. I’ll fetch a cup and saucer.’ She bustled off to the kitchen.

He walked into the lounge.

The only change he could see since his last visit was a fancy new standard lamp with a downturned cowl, to shed light on the lap of an old lady sitting in the best armchair, facing the telly, peering at her sewing with fading eyes. The old carriage clock, a legacy from a long-dead great uncle, still sat in its place on the concrete 1970s fireplace. The clock was flanked by a clutter of photos, as usual. Most of them were fading colour prints of grandchildren. Simon had no grandchildren to offer, and so was unrepresented here. But the photos had been pushed back to make room for a new image in a gold frame. Brownish, blurred and faded, it was a portrait of a smiling young man in a straw boater. He had a long, strong face. Simon recognised the photo, taken from a musty old album and evidently blown up. It was his grandfather, Mother’s Dad, who had died when Simon was five or six.

Just for a moment the light seemed odd to him. Cold, yellow-purple. And there was something strange beyond the window. Pillow-like shapes, gleaming in a watery sun. He saw all this from the corner of his eye. But when he turned to look directly, the light from the picture window turned spring green, shining from the small back garden, with its lawn and roses and the last of the azalea blossom. Maybe his eyes were tired from the drive, playing tricks.

‘It’s just for comfort. The photo.’

The male voice made Simon turn clumsily, almost tripping.

A man sat on the sofa, almost hidden behind the door, with a cup of tea on an occasional table. ‘Sorry. You didn’t see me. Didn’t mean to make you jump.’ He stood and shook Simon’s hand. ‘I’m Gabriel Nolan.’ His voice had a soft Irish burr. Maybe sixty, he was short, round, bald as an egg. He wore a pale jacket, black shirt, and dog collar. He had biscuit crumbs down his front.

Simon guessed, ‘Father Nolan?’

‘From Saint Michael’s. The latest incumbent.’

The last parish priest Simon remembered had been the very old, very frail man who had confirmed him, aged thirteen.

Mother came in, walking stiffly, cradling a cup and saucer. ‘Sit down, Simon, you’re blocking the light.’

Simon sat in the room’s other armchair, with his back to the window. Mother poured out some tea with milk, and added sugar, though he hadn’t taken sugar for three decades.

‘Simon was just admiring the portrait of your father, Eileen.’

‘Well, I don’t have many pictures of Dad. You didn’t take many in those days. That’s the best one, I think.’

‘We find comfort in familiar things, in the past.’

‘I always felt safe when Dad was there,’ Mother said. ‘In the war, you know.’

But, Simon thought, Granddad was long dead. She’d led a whole life since then, the life that included Simon’s own childhood. Mother always had been self-centred. Any crisis in her children’s lives, like Mary’s recurrent illness as a child, or the illegitimate kid Peter had fathered as a student, somehow always turned into a drama about her. Now somehow she was back in the past with her own father in her own childhood, and there was no room for Simon.

Mother said, ‘There might not be anybody left who remembers Dad, but me. Do you think we get deader, when there’s nobody left who remembers us?’

‘We live on in the eyes of Christ.’

Simon said, ‘Father Nolan, don’t you think Mother should talk to the doctor again? She won’t listen to me.’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Simon,’ Mother said.

‘Best to accept,’ said Father Nolan. ‘If your mother has. Best not to question.’

They both stared back at him, seamless, united. Fifty years old he felt awkward, a child who didn’t know what to say to the grown-ups.

He stood up, putting down his tea cup. ‘I’ve some shirts that could do with hanging.’

Mother sniffed. ‘There might be a bit of space. Later there’s my papers to do.’

Another horror story. Simon fled upstairs. A little later, he heard the priest leave.

The ‘papers’ were her financial transactions, Premium Bonds and tax vouchers and battered old bank books. And they had to go through the dreaded rusty biscuit box she kept under her bed, which held her will and her life insurance policies, stored up in the event of a death she’d been talking about for thirty years. It even held her identity card from the war, signed in a childish hand.

Simon always found it painful to sit and plod through all this stuff. The tin box was worst, of course.

Later she surprised him by asking to go for a walk.

It was late afternoon. Mother put on a coat, a musty gabardine that smelled of winter, though the bright April day was warm. Simon had grown up in this close. It was a short, stubby street of semi-detached houses leading up to a main road and a dark sandstone wall, beyond which lay a park. But his childhood was decades gone, and the houses had been made over out of all recognition, and the space where he’d played football was now jammed full of cars. Walking here, he felt as if he was trying to cram himself into clothes he’d outworn.

They crossed the busy main road, and then walked along the line of the old wall to the gateway to the park. Or what was left of it. In the last few years the park had been sliced through by a spur of the main road, along which cars now hissed, remote as clouds. Simon’s old home seemed stranded.

Simon and his mother stuck to a gravel path. Underfoot was dogshit and, in the mud under the benches, beer cans, fag ends and condoms. Mother clung to his arm. Walking erratically she pulled at him, heavy, like an unfixed load.

Mother talked steadily, about Peter and Mary, and the achievements and petty woes of their respective children. Mary, older than Simon, was forever struggling on, in Mother’s eyes, burdened by difficult kids and a lazy husband. ‘She’s got a lot to put up with, always did.’ Peter, the youngest, got a tougher time, perceived as selfish and shiftless and lacking judgement. Simon’s siblings’ lives were more complicated than that. But to Mother they were ciphers, dominated by the characteristics she had perceived in them when they were kids.

She asked nothing about his own life.

Later, she prepared the evening meal.

As she was cooking, Simon dug his laptop out of his suitcase, and brought it down to the cold, formal dining room, where there was a telephone point. He booted up and went through his emails. He worked for a biotech start-up that specialised in breeding genetically modified goldfish, giving them patterns in bright Captain Nemo colours targeted at children. It was a good business, and expanding. The strategy was to domesticate biotech. In maybe five or ten years they would even sell genome-sequencing kits to kids, or anyhow their parents, so they could ‘paint’ their own fish designs.

That was a bit far off in terms of fifty-year-old Simon’s career, and things were moving so fast in this field that his own skills, in software, were constantly being challenged. But the work was demanding and fun, and as he watched the little fish swim around with ‘Happy Birthday Julie’ written on their flanks, he thought he glimpsed the future.

His mother knew precisely nothing about all this. The glowing emails were somehow comforting, a window to another world where he had an identity.

Anyhow, no fires to put out today. He shut down the connection.

Then he phoned his brother and sister with his mother’s news.

‘She’s fine in herself. She’s cooking supper right now… Yes, she’s keeping the house okay. I suppose when she gets frailer we’ll have to think about that… I’ll stay one night definitely, perhaps two. Might take her shopping tomorrow. Bulky stuff, you know, bog rolls and washing powder…

‘Things are a bit tricky for you, I suppose.’ Exams, school trips, holidays. Mary’s ferocious commitment to her bridge club – ‘They can’t have a match if I don’t turn up, you know!’ Peter’s endless courses in bookkeeping and beekeeping, arboriculture and aromatherapy, an ageing dreamer’s continuing quest to be elevated above the other rats in the race. All of them reasons not to visit their mother.

Simon didn’t particularly blame them. Neither of them seemed to feel they had to come, the way he did, which left him with no choice but to be here. And of course with their kids they were busier than he was, in a sense.

Mother had her own views. Peter was selfish. Mary was always terribly busy, poor lamb.

She’d once been a good cook, if a thrifty one, her cuisine shaped by the experience of wartime rationing. But over the years her cooking had simplified to a few ready-made dishes. Tonight it was boil-in-the-bag fish. You got used to it.

After they ate, they spent the evening playing games. Not Scrabble, which had been a favourite of Simon’s childhood. She insisted on cribbage, which she had played with her father, in her own childhood. She had a worn board that must have been decades old. She had to explain the arcane rules to him.

The evening was very, very long, in the silence of the room with a blank telly screen, the time stretched out by the ticks of Uncle Billy’s carriage clock.

In the morning he came out of his bedroom, dressed in his pyjama bottoms, heading for the bathroom.

Father Gabriel Nolan was coming up the stairs with a cup of tea on a saucer. He gave Simon a sort of thin-lipped smile. In the bright morning light Simon saw that dried mucus clung to the hairs protruding from his fleshy nose.

‘She’s taken a turn for the worse in the night,’ said the priest. ‘A stroke, perhaps. It’s all very sudden.’ And he bustled into Mother’s bedroom.

Simon just stood there.

He quickly used the bathroom. He went back to his bedroom and put on his pants and yesterday’s shirt.

Then, in his socks, he went into Mother’s bedroom. The curtains were still closed, the only light a ghostly blue glow soaking through the curtains. It was like walking into an aquarium. She was lying on the right-hand side of the double bed she had shared with Simon’s father for so long. She was flat on her back, staring up. Her arms were outside the sheets, which were neatly tucked in. The cup of tea sat on her bedside cabinet. Father Nolan sat at her bedside, holding her hand.

Her eyes flickered towards Simon.

Simon, frightened, distressed, was angry to find this smut-nosed, biscuit-crumby priest in his mother’s bedroom. ‘Have you called the doctor?’

Mother murmured something, at the back of her throat.

‘No doctor,’ said Father Nolan.

‘Is that a decision for you to make?’

‘It’s a decision for her,’ said the priest, gravely, not unkindly, firmly. ‘She wants to go downstairs. The lounge.’

‘She’s better off in bed.’

‘Let her see the garden.’

Father Nolan’s calm, unctuous tone was grating. Simon snapped, ‘How are we going to get her down the stairs?’

‘We’ll manage.’

They lifted Mother up from the bed, and wrapped her in blankets. Simon saw there was a bedpan, sticking out from under the bed. It was actually a plastic potty, a horrible dirty old pink thing he remembered from his own childhood. It was full of thick yellow pee. Father Nolan must have helped her use it.

They carried her down the stairs together, Simon holding her under the arms, the priest taking her legs.

When they got to the bottom of the stairs, it went dark on the landing above. Simon looked up. The stairs seemed very tall and high, the landing quite black. ‘Maybe a bulb blew,’ he said. But the lights hadn’t been on, the landing illuminated by daylight.

Father Nolan said, ‘She doesn’t need to go upstairs again.’

Simon didn’t know what he meant. Under his distress about his mother, he found he was obscurely frightened.

They shuffled into the lounge. They sat Mother in her armchair, facing the garden’s green.

What now?

‘What about breakfast?’

‘Toast for me,’ said Father Nolan.

Simon went to the kitchen and ran slices of white bread, faintly stale, through the toaster.

The priest followed him in. He had taken his jacket off. His black shirt had short sleeves, and he had powerful stubby arms, like a wrestler. They sat at the small kitchen table, and ate buttered toast.

Simon asked, ‘Why are you here? This morning, I mean. Did Mother call you? I didn’t hear the phone.’

Father Nolan shrugged. ‘I just dropped in. I have a key. She’s got used to having me around, during this, well, crisis. I don’t mind. I share my duties at the parish.’ He complacently chewed his toast.

‘When I was a kid, you smug priests used to make me feel like tripping you up.’

Father Nolan laughed. ‘You’re a good boy. You’d never do that.’

‘“A good boy.” Father, I’m fifty years old.’

‘But you’re always a little boy to your mother.’ He nodded at the fridge, where photographs were stuck to the metal door by magnets. ‘Your brother and sister. You’re the middle one, yes?’

‘Sister older, brother younger.’

‘Mary and Peter. Good Catholic names. But it’s unusual to find a Simon and a Peter in the same Catholic family.’

‘I know.’ Since Simon had learned about Simon Peter the apostle, he had sometimes wondered if Mother had chosen Peter’s name on purpose – as if she was disappointed with the first Simon and hoped for a better version. ‘They’ve both got kids. I’m sure she’d rather one of them was here, frankly. Grandkids jumping all over her.’

‘You’re the one who’s here. That’s what’s important.’

Simon studied him. ‘I don’t believe, you know. Not sure if I ever did, once I was able to think for myself. You can be as calm and certain as you like. I think it’s all a bluff.’

Father Nolan laughed. ‘That’s okay. What you choose to believe or not is irrelevant to the destiny of my immortal soul. And indeed yours.’

It had been a very long time indeed since Simon had even considered the possibility that he might have a soul, some quality that might endure beyond his own death.

He shivered, and stood up. ‘I think I need some air. Maybe I’ll buy a paper.’

‘We’ll be fine here.’

‘Help yourself to tea. It’s in the –’

‘Winston Churchill caddy. I know.’ Father Nolan smiled, and chewed his toast.

He walked up the close, towards the park.

This stub of a road had seemed endless when he was a child. Full of detail, every drain or stopcock cover or broken paving stone a feature in some game or other. Now he felt a stab of pity for a child who perhaps could have done with a bit more stimulation.

But the close seemed long today, stretching off ahead of him, like the hours governed by Uncle Billy’s clock.

And though the sky was clear blue, the light was odd. Weakening. Once he’d sat through a partial eclipse over London, a darkening that was not the setting of the sun but an eerie dimming. That was what this was like. But there was no eclipse due today; he’d have known.

It took an effort to reach the top of the close. And more of an effort to wait for a gap in the stream of dark, anonymous cars, and to cross to the footpath by the park wall. He walked along the wall, letting his fingers trail along the grubby, wind-eroded sandstone.

It had happened so quickly. Would Mother really never make this little journey again? Was that awful bagged fish really the last meal the woman who had fed him as a baby would ever make for him? Grief swirled around in him, unfocussed. He thought vaguely about the calls he would have to make.

At the gate, he stopped.

There was no park. No sooty oak trees, no grass, no dog shit.

He saw a plain, a marsh. The sunlight gleamed from a sheet of flat, green, sticky-looking water. Pillow-like shapes pushed out of the water, their surfaces slimy crusts, green and purple. Nothing moved. There was no sound. Of the park, the parade of shops beyond, there was no sign.

It was like the scene he thought he had glimpsed through his mother’s lounge window yesterday. But that had been from the corner of his eye, and had vanished when he looked directly. This was different.

He turned away. The main road was still there, the cars streaming along.

Carefully, he walked back down the road, and into the close. Every step he took towards home made him feel more secure, and the daylight grew stronger. He didn’t dare look back.

At home, Father Nolan was still sitting with Mother. It wasn’t yet lunchtime.

Simon got himself a glass of water and went to the dining room. He booted up his laptop. He dialled into work, to check his emails. He was trying not to think about what he’d seen. He got error messages. The work site didn’t exist.

He heard Father Nolan climbing the stairs, a splashing sound, the toilet flushing. Emptying a bed pan, maybe.

He tried Google. That still existed.

There was a word that had come into his head when he thought about what had become of the park. Stromatolite. He googled it.

Communities of algae. A photo showed mounds just like the ones on the park. Heaped-up mats of bacteria, one on top of another, with mud and sand trapped in between. They had their own complexities, of a sort, each mound a tiny biosphere in its own right.

And they were very ancient, a relic of the days before animals, before insects, before multicelled creatures of any kind.

He followed links, digging at random, drawn by his own professional interest in genetics. The first stromatolites had actually been the height of complexity compared to what had gone before. Once there had been nothing but communities of crude cells in which even ‘species’ could not be said to exist, and genetic information was massively transferred sideways between lineages, as well as from parent cell to offspring. The world was muddy, a vast cellular bun fight. But if you looked closely it had been fast-evolving, inventive, resilient…

Google failed, the browser returning a site-not-found error message.

And then the laptop’s modem reported it couldn’t find a dialling tone.

It seemed to be growing darker. But it wasn’t yet noon. He didn’t want to look out of the window.

Father Nolan walked in. ‘She’s asking for you.’

Simon hesitated. ‘I’d better call Mary and Peter. They ought to know.’

The priest just waited.

At his first try, he got a number-unobtainable tone. Then the dialling tone disappeared. He tried his mobile. There was no service.

It was very dark.

Father Nolan held out his hand. ‘Come.’

In the lounge the curtains were drawn. The excluded daylight was odd, dim, greenish. The only strong light came from Mother’s fancy new reading stand.

The telly was like an empty eye socket. Simon wondered what he would find if he turned it on.

Mother sat in her armchair, swathed in blankets. Of her body only her face showed, and two hands that looked as if all the bones had been drawn out of them. There was a stink of piss and shit, a tang of blood.

Father Nolan sat beside Mother on a footstool, the bedpan at his feet.

‘I probably ought to thank you for doing this,’ Simon said.

‘It comes with the job. I gave her the Last Rites, Simon. I should tell you that.’

Mother, her eyes closed, murmured something. Father Nolan leaned close so he could hear, and smiled. ‘Let tomorrow worry about itself, Eileen.’

Simon asked, ‘What’s happening tomorrow?’

‘She asked if there will be a tomorrow.’

Simon stared at him. ‘When I was a kid,’ he said slowly, ‘I used to wonder what will happen when I die. It seemed outrageous that the universe should go on, after I, the centre of everything, was taken away. Just as my mother said to me yesterday.

‘Then I grew up a bit more. I started to think maybe everybody feels that way. Every finite mortal creature. The two things don’t go together, do they, my smallness, and the bigness of the sky?”

Father Nolan just listened.

Simon stepped towards the window. ‘What will I see if I pull back the curtain?’

‘Don’t,’ said Father Nolan.

‘Do you know what’s going on?’

‘I’m here for her. Not you.’

‘Will you tell me?’

The priest hesitated. ‘You’re a good boy. I suppose you deserve that.’

Simon touched Uncle Billy’s clock, pressed his palm against the wall behind it. ‘Is any of this real?’

‘As real as it needs to be.’

‘Is this really the year 2010?’

‘No.’

‘Then when?’

‘The future. Not as far as you might think.’

‘People are different.’

‘There are no people.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No. But you’re capable of understanding,’ Father Nolan said. ‘It’s no accident you work in biotechnology, you know. It was set up that way, so if you ever asked these questions, you’d have the background to grasp the answer.’

‘What has my job got to do with it?’

‘Nothing in itself. It’s where things are leading. Those Day-Glo fish you sell. How do you do that?’

Simon shrugged. ‘I don’t know the details. I do software. Gene splicing, basically.’

‘You splice genes from where?’

‘A modified soya, I think. Other sources.’

‘Yes. You swap genes around, horizontally, from microbes to plants to animals, even into people. It’s a new kind of gene transfer – or rather a very old one.’

‘Before the stromatolites.’

‘Yes. You’re planning to put this gene-transfer technology on the open market, aren’t you?’

It was like the drive to put a pc in every home, a few decades back. The domestication would start with biotech in the mines and factories and stores. Home use would follow. Eventually advanced home biotech kits, capable of dicing and splicing genomes and nurturing the results, would become as pervasive as pcs and mobile phones. Everybody would have one, and would use it to make new varieties of dogs and budgies, exotic orchids and apples. To create a new life form and release it into the world would be as easy as blogging. It was a question of accelerating trends. The world’s genetic inheritance would become open source. And then, a generation later, the technology would merge with the biology.

Simon said, ‘It’s the logical next step, in marketing terms. Like putting massive computing power in the hands of the public. That would have seemed inconceivable, in 1950. And the secondary results will be as unimaginable as the internet once was. Do you think it’s immoral? Unnatural?’

Father Nolan grinned. ‘If I were what I look like, perhaps I’d think that.’

‘What are you, then?’

‘I’m the end-product of your company’s business plans. Yours and a thousand others. It was only a few decades after your birthday-card goldfish that things took off. Remarkable. Only a few decades, to topple a regime of life that lasted two billion years.’

‘And things were different after that.’

‘Oh, yes. Darwinian evolution was slo-ow. For all the fancy critters that were thrown up, there was hardly a change in the basic biochemical machinery across two billion years.

‘Now there are no non-interbreeding species. Indeed, no individuals. The Darwinian interlude is over, and we are back to gene sharing, the way it used to be.

‘And everything has changed. Global climate change became trivial, for instance. With the fetters off, the biosphere adapted to the new conditions, optimising its metabolic and reproductive efficiency as it went.

‘And then,’ he said, ‘off into space.’

These words, simply spoken, implied a marvellous future.

‘Who is my mother?’

‘We are in a lacuna,’ Father Nolan said.

‘A what?’

‘A gap. A hole. In the totality of a living world. Sorry if that sounds a bit pompous. Your mother is a part of the totality, but cut away, you see. Living out a life as a human once lived it.’

‘Why? Is she being punished?’

‘No.’ He laughed. ‘On the contrary. She wanted to do this. It’s hard to express. We are a multipolar consciousness. She is part of the rest of us – do you see? She was an expression of a global desire.’

‘To do what?’

‘Not to forget.’ He stood up. Grave, patient, he had the manner of a priest, despite his hairy nose, his stained shirt. ‘I think you’re ready.’ He led Simon to the window, and pulled back the curtain.

Green stars.

The garden was gone.

The rest of the house was gone. The close, the park, Sheffield – Earth was gone, irrelevant. Mother had, incredibly, been right in her intuition. It had all been placed there as a stage set for her own life. But now her life had dwindled to the four walls of this room, and the rest of it could be discarded, for she would never need it again.

Just green stars. Simon pressed his ear to the window. He heard a reverberation, like an immense bell.

‘Earth life turning the Galaxy green. Our thoughts span light years. But we don’t want to forget how it was to be human.’ Father Nolan smiled. ‘It’s a paradox. We have in fact lost so much. As you said – the strange tragedy of being mortal in an unending universe. There’s no more poetry. No more epitaphs. No more stories. Just a solemn calm.’

‘Mother wanted to experience it. Human life.’

‘On behalf of the rest of us, yes.’

‘And what are you, Father?’

Father Nolan shrugged. ‘Everything else.’ He let the curtain drop, hiding the green stars.

The electric light was dimming.

Father Nolan sat down beside Mother and held her hand. ‘Only a few more minutes. Then it will be done.’

Simon sat on the other side of the bed. ‘What about me?’

‘You’re only here for her.’

‘But I’m conscious!’

‘Well, of course you are. She chose you, you know. You always thought she didn’t love you, didn’t you? But she chose you to be beside her, at the end, when all the others, Peter, Mary, even her own father, have all gone. Isn’t that enough?’

‘Do I have a soul, Father?’

‘I’m not qualified to say.’

Mother turned her head towards him, he thought. But her eyes were closed.

‘Help me,’ Simon whispered.

Father Nolan looked at him. Then he closed his eyes and bowed his head. ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.’

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’

The glow of the single bulb faded slowly, to black.

Dreamers’ Lake

On the shore of Dreamers’ Lake we worked through the night. We had no choice; this pretty world was due to end in two more days. By the time dawn broke we had labelled all the lakes’ stromatolites, and had decided on three candidates, Charlie, Hotel and Juliet, for cognitive mapping. I was tentatively confident that Juliet was the most promising, but I was so dog-tired I didn’t trust my judgment any more.

So I was grateful when Citizen Associate Bisset brought us animists a tray of coffee.

‘Thanks.’ I took a cup, fixed its spigot to my facemask, and gulped it down, welcoming the caffeine fix. Bisset stood beside me on the pebble-strewn beach of that lake of fizzing, acidic water.

GC-174-IV was an infant world, its young sun a lamp hanging over jagged hills. The methane-green sky reflected in the lake’s sluggish ripples, and glistened on the pillow-like stromatolites. The scene was unearthly, beautiful – and I was grateful that the dawn light hid the swarming dangers of the sky, especially the rogue worldlet called the Hammer.

In the foreground my animist cubs were playing soccer, their shouts the only sound on this silent world. I longed to join in, but they didn’t want little old ladies like me.

‘“Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops…”’ Bisset was a lot taller than I was, and under his wide visor his face, turned to the sun, was a mask of wrinkles.

‘That’s a cute line,’ I said.

‘Shakespeare. Of course we’re two hundred light years from England.’

‘But there are hills, a lake, a sky here. Things have a way of converging.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I remember the first robot landing on Titan, Saturn’s moon. The first images from the surface of the Moon had looked like a pebble beach. Then the Vikings on Mars, and the Soviet probes on Venus – more pebbles, more beaches. And even on Titan, where they use water ice for rock –’

‘Pebbles.’

‘Yes.’

I eyed him curiously. Evidently he was older than he looked. We hadn’t spoken, but the Pegasus carried over fifty people, and was roomy enough for twice that number. ‘I’m Susan Knilans. Senior animist on this mission.’

He shook my gloved hand. ‘Professor Knilans, I’ve read about your work.’

‘Susan, please. And you are?’

‘Ramone Bisset.’

‘Ramone?’

He smiled. ‘My father named me after his favourite band. I used to be a software engineer, before the software learned to write itself. Now I’m a Citizen Associate. I’m working on the IGWI with Ulf Thoring.’

It took me a minute to decode the acronym. IGWI: the Inflationary Gravity Wave Interferometry experiment, the establishment of a vast interstellar network of gravity-wave detectors designed to map the echoes of the universe’s very first cataclysmic instants. ‘Interesting project.’

‘It sure is. Not that I understand much of it, either the science or the equipment.’

‘How do you get on with those IGWI guys?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m just the dogsbody.’

‘Don’t knock it. Umm, do you mind my asking how old you are?’

‘A hundred and thirty, to the nearest decade. Born in the 1980s.’ That explained his height; many of his generation, fed on ludicrously protein-rich diets, had grown tall. His accent was British, I thought, but softened by time.

‘Well,’ I admitted, ‘I’m half your age. So what are you doing here?’

‘You mean beside the lake, or on GC-IV?’

‘Start with the lake.’

‘I’m just curious. You’re here to map minds, aren’t you? Minds in those mounds.’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘I haven’t started my day yet. I thought I may as well be useful. You can never go wrong with a tray of coffees.’

‘So what about the deeper question? Why volunteer for GC-IV?’

‘Ah. Why are any of us here?’

‘To do our jobs.’ Captain Zuba joined us. She was a tough, heavily-built New Zealander, aged about fifty. She took one of Bisset’s coffees. ‘And to earn our pay.’

‘Yes, Captain,’ Bisset said respectfully. ‘But why not just sit at home? All humans are restless. Why?’ He pointed to the patient stromatolites. ‘They don’t look restless.’

‘No,’ Zuba said, ‘but it’s a shame they aren’t, because in two days’ time, when the Hammer falls, they’re going to be toast. And speaking of which, the clock is ticking.’ She handed back the coffee cup, already drained, and stalked away, competent, efficient, a tick-box list on legs.

Bisset hesitated. ‘You know – to explore the universe in starships – it’s like something from the kind of science fiction that was out of date even before I was born.’

I wasn’t too sure what ‘science fiction’ was, and didn’t really want to know. On impulse I said, ‘Why don’t you come visit again tomorrow? I’ll give you the guided tour. You don’t even need to bring the drinks.’

He nodded like a gentleman. ‘I’d appreciate that.’ And he walked away, tray in gloved hand, boots crunching over the beach.

The day on GC-174-IV was near enough to twenty hours long (was; now it’s different, changed by the Hammer Blow). I worked through that day, and was dog tired by the end of GC-IV’s short afternoon. As half the complement of the Pegasus wended back to the airlocks the other shift was suiting up to go out; Zuba ensured we made the most of the time we had left.

That evening, before I turned in, I looked for Bisset.

The Pegasus is a tuna can. It sits on four stubby legs, just five metres across, and is only a couple of storeys high, externally. But inside it’s the size of a small hotel. A ship that’s bigger inside than out – another gift of the quantum foam technology that so suddenly opened up the stars. Anyhow, the Pegasus is roomy enough for all fifty of its crew to have a private cabin, but not big enough to hide.

I found Bisset in the lounge with Ulf Thoring and the rest of the IGWI crew. The guys were playing some variant of poker and drinking beer; I could see the pharmacy’s stock of sober-up nano-pills would be called on that night. Bisset sipped his beer and played a few hands, but you could see from the body language what was going on with those smart-ass college boys.

The Citizen-Associate programme of the International Xenographic Agency is aimed squarely at people like Ramone Bisset: his active life extended by decades by the new longevity treatments, his curiosity still bright, his skills long outmoded. Such is the capacity of a quantum-foam-drive starship that there is room for guys like Ramone, whatever they can contribute. It helps the sponsoring nations justify the IXA’s cost to their taxpayers: anybody can be an explorer, so the slogan goes. But the Associates aren’t necessarily given much respect.

I’m not in the habit of taking on lame ducks, and I suspected Bisset could look after himself. But I didn’t like to see a thoughtful man treated that way. I don’t blame the IGWI guys, however. All male, none older than thirty-five, all from a university at Stockholm, Ulf and his guys were a tightly bonded bunch, and too young to be empathetic.

I was glad when, at the start of my next work shift the following morning, Bisset showed up at Dreamers’ Lake.

My cubs were already at work, wading knee-deep in the scummy pond, attaching floating sensor pods to the cognitive net we’d placed over Juliet. I was standing on the comparative comfort of the beach, before a monitoring station on which the first signals were beginning to be processed.

Bisset raised his head to the brightening sky. ‘Nice morning.’

I murmured, ‘Perhaps. That makes me uneasy.’ I pointed upwards.

That was the Hammer, a worldlet the size of Mars, visible in the bright sky, clearly larger since the end of my last shift.

‘Ah,’ Bisset said. ‘You do get the feeling that it might fall at any moment and smash all of this.’

‘But not today. So, the guided tour. You understand what these mounds are? They occurred on primitive Earth – still do, in places where it’s too salty for the predators, like snails. They are layers of bacterial mats …’ A mat of blue-green algae will form on the scummy surface of a shallow pond. The mat traps mud, and then another layer forms on top of the first, and so on. With time the mound builds up, and specialised bacterial types inhabit the different layers, until you have a complex, interdependent, miniature ecology. ‘We’ve found bacterial mats everywhere we’ve looked –’

‘Beginning on Mars,’ Bisset said.

‘Well, that’s true. And everywhere there is standing liquid, water or perhaps hydrocarbons, you get mounds.’

‘Stromatolites.’

The pedant in me objected, although I use the word myself. ‘Strictly speaking, stromatolites are terrestrial forms of blue-green algae. These bacteria are photosynthetic but they’re not algae. You can see they are purplish, not green. They don’t use chlorophyll; their chemistry kit is adapted to the spectrum of their sun. So these mounds are like stromatolites, but –’

‘“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”’

‘More Shakespeare?’

‘Sorry. It’s a bad habit.’

‘The mound bugs here are related to us, of course, although we’ve yet to classify them.’

It would have been a major shock if GC-IV’s bugs hadn’t been a distant relation of our own, their carbon-water chemistry dictated by a kind of skewed DNA. One of the triumphs of the IXA’s exobiology programme has been to establish that all the carbon-water life forms we have found are related, apparently descended from an ancestor that came blowing in from outside the Galaxy altogether. Subsequent ‘generations’ had spread by panspermia processes from star to star. But that origin theory is controversial; the family tree of galactic life is still incomplete. Some even believe that the ultimate origin isn’t carbon-water at all, but lies in a deeper substrate of reality.

‘And,’ Bisset said, ‘there is mind. There, in those mounds.’

‘Oh, yes. Ramone, even though we have only found microbes – no multi-celled life forms like ourselves – there is mind everywhere we look.’ Everywhere there is a network to be built, messages to be passed, complexity to be explored, you’ll find a mind. Again Mars was the prototype, with the billion-year thoughts of its microbial mats locked in that little world’s permafrost layers. ‘You can see we labelled the mounds with marker dye. For the cognitive mapping we looked for the best specimen – the most intricate structure, the least damaged. We picked her.’ I pointed to the larger mound, over which the sensor net had been laid.

‘“Her”?’

A bit sheepishly I said, ‘Anthropomorphising is a bad habit of animists. We call her Juliet. We labelled the mounds – see, that’s Alpha, that’s Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo –’

‘And Juliet. Oh, it’s the old NATO phonetic alphabet, isn’t it? My father was a copper on the streets of London, and they used the alphabet for their call signs. He was Sierra Oscar One Nine…’

I admit I switched off. Why are old peoples’ anecdotes always so damn dull? It doesn’t seem adaptive, evolutionarily speaking.

‘And you can trace her thoughts,’ he said now. ‘Juliet’s. That’s a question of detecting biochemical impulses, right?’

‘We have an analytic technique called animistic deconvolution. It’s possible to break the characteristic signals of a mind into its component parts. You’d be surprised by the commonalities we find.’

He surprised me with his next question. ‘Does she understand death?’

‘Why, I don’t know. Ramone, these minds are not like ours. She doesn’t need to know death. As long as the pond survives Juliet will always be renewed, by one bacterial layer over another. She’s effectively immortal.’

‘Except that tomorrow all this will be destroyed. The mounds, the lake –’

I watched his face. This wasn’t the first young system I had visited; I had come across such reactions as Bisset’s before. ‘This stellar system is unfinished. Just a swarm of worldlets. Collisions are the order of the day, Ramone. In fact it’s the way planets are built.’

‘A rough sculpting.’

‘Indeed. GC-IV is around a hundred million years old – that is, since the last collision big enough to melt the surface. A scummy crust formed in a few million years, comets delivered ocean water, life drifted in from space. Continents, oceans, lakes, air – it all comes together in an eyeblink of geological time. In between catastrophes, you see, there is time for life. But GC-IV hasn’t finished being built yet. It happened to Earth.’

‘But in a few days, everything alive now will be gone.’ He craned his head, looking up at the sky. ‘Is it possible Juliet knows the Hammer is coming?’

‘I don’t see how.’

‘Do you think we should warn her?’

‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘Even if we could, we shouldn’t try.’ Xenoethics is a new and uncertain field. As for me, I trained as a doctor. I don’t believe in intervening if there’s a risk you can do more harm than good. ‘We can’t lift off a whole biosphere – we couldn’t even save Juliet; she’s too fragile. All we can do is take a few samples, make a record of what was here. Wouldn’t it be cruel to interfere?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said simply.

He was interrupted by a slap on the back. It was Ulf Thoring, his team leader. ‘I wondered where you got to, granddad. I patched your comms frequency into the crew and we’ve been having a bit of a laugh.’ He was Icelandic. His accent was strong, his English slightly off-key.

I said angrily, ‘You’ve got no manners, Ulf.’

‘Oh, come on. I heard it all. Are you falling in love with Juliet, granddad? She isn’t really a girl, you know. Talk about a doomed romance! What do you want to do, save her or fuck her? We could fix you up an interface. Unless your little old pizzle is too worn out –’

‘Enough. This is Zuba.’ Her voice in my phones was deep and peremptory. I was impressed the Captain was listening in, but her command was built on an attention to detail. ‘You scientist types are nothing but trouble. Thoring, you need to learn some respect. You’re on fatigues at the end of your shift.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Thoring said. But Zuba couldn’t see his face, and he winked at me, insolent.

‘In the meantime we’ve got more work to do than time left to do it in. Get on with it.’

We all murmured acquiescence.

Thoring slapped Bisset on the back again. ‘It’s only a bit of a laugh, Ramone.’

Bisset just looked down on him from his greater height. ‘It’s okay.’

Ulf walked off towards the tractor that his buddies from Stockholm were loading up with their laser towers and sensor stations.

Bisset turned to me. ‘Just tell me one more thing. What do you believe she’s thinking, right now? Juliet. One word.’

I glanced at the summary analysis on my monitor. Some agitation showed there. ‘One word? …’ I have always regretted the word I chose to use, as I believe it was the trigger for what followed. ‘Fear. Actually, Ramone, I think she’s afraid.’

Bisset stared long and hard at Juliet, under her cognitive cap, surrounded by joshing young animists. Then he turned away and followed Ulf Thoring.

The next day was our last on CG-IV – indeed, it was the day of the impact.

‘Knilans, Zuba. You’d better get down here.’

I was confused. ‘Where?’

‘The lake.’

We’d already packed up at the lake. I was in the biolab, labelling samples and sorting out my records. There was less than twelve hours left before the Hammer was due to fall. I hadn’t expected ever to set foot on the planet again. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Bisset. He has a problem.’

‘Ramone? I haven’t seen him today. And he’s not my responsibility. He’s in Ulf’s team.’

‘Ulf is the problem. Look, I know you’ve talked to Bisset. We need to get this fixed. Zuba out.’

I suited up, hurried out of the ship, and requisitioned a tractor that was in the process of being disassembled for flight.

It was another pretty morning at Dreamers’ Lake. But the Hammer’s huge crater-pocked face was reflected in the waters; even as I watched it seemed to slide across the sky like a cloud. I felt a subtle quake as the gravity fields of two planets meshed.

A second tractor was drawn up roughly on the pebbled beach. Two figures stood by the water; my suit’s heads-up identified them as Captain Zuba and Ulf Thoring. Thoring was standing awkwardly, as if he’d been injured.

And a third figure stood in the lake itself, the water lapping around his waist. He was close to the big mound we’d labelled Juliet. My heads-up alerted me, but I knew who he was.

‘He has a weapon,’ Zuba said.

‘What?’

‘It’s a laser gun from the IGWI kit,’ said Thoring. His voice was strangled. He was holding his side, and his forehead was bruised and bleeding, as if it had been thrown against his faceplate.

‘What happened to you?’

‘He beat me up. Bisset.’

‘You deserved it, you little prick,’ Zuba murmured. ‘Knilans. Fix this so we can get out of here.’

I stepped towards the water. I noticed that many of the mounds looked damaged – scarred, stitched by straight-line wounds. ‘Ramone? Are you okay?’

He didn’t reply.

I racked my brains for some way to get through to him. ‘Umm – “Tis not hard, I think, for men so old as we to keep the peace.”’

I thought I saw him relax, subtly. ‘Shakespeare.’

‘Talk to me, Ramone.’

‘Ask him.’ He gestured with the laser at Thoring.

Hastily, sketchily, Ulf told me what had happened.

The IGWI team had completed their station on the surface of GC-IV. This is simple in principle, just a network of nodes connected by laser light; perturbations of the laser echoes can be used to detect the passage of gravity waves. The ancient waves the IGWI boys seek are stretched, attenuated and overlaid, and it is taking an interferometer, a super-telescope made up of many stations across interstellar distances, to map them.

Their work done, the IGWI boys dismantled their gear. But on a whim, probably motivated by Ulf’s overhearing my conversation with Bisset, they stopped by Dreamers’ Lake, unpacked their lasers, and enjoyed a little target practice.

Bisset said, ‘These are minds, Ulf. You burst them like balloons.’

Thoring sounded aggrieved. ‘But it was only a bit of a laugh. For God’s sake –’ He gestured at the sky. ‘In twelve hours none of this will survive anyhow.’

I turned back to Bisset. ‘You punished him, Ramone. You made your point. So what are you doing out there?’

‘I’ve been thinking about what we said. Juliet.’

I felt a deep knot of dread gather in my stomach. For the first time I began to get the feeling that this might all be my fault. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You showed me the signal of her mind. She is afraid. She knows, Susan.’

‘How can she?’

‘The Hammer is the size of Mars. Perhaps the mounds can sense the tides. It’s at least possible, isn’t it? Even I can feel the quakes. Juliet faces extermination, yet she has never known death: what a terrible thing.’

‘Okay. Even supposing that’s true, what are you going to do? Put her out of her misery? Finish the job Ulf and his thugs started?’

‘You don’t understand.’ He sounded offended. ‘I’ve known death. I lost my wife, my daughter. I’ve had to live with that.’ I knew little about his past. ‘Maybe if I can teach Juliet what I’ve learned, it will help her, and her kin, accept what is to come.’

Then I saw it. ‘Shit. You’re going to kill yourself, aren’t you?’

‘Knilans, Zuba. This is a secure line; Bisset can’t hear us. I don’t think this has anything to do with the mounds. It’s all about the bullying and the bullshit from the IGWI boys. Bisset wants to make a statement – to rise above them on his own terms.’

‘Nice theory,’ I replied. ‘But I can’t use it. I think I have to deal with him in his own framework. Unless you have a better idea, Captain.’

Zuba hesitated for one second. ‘You know him better than I do. You scientist types are nothing but trouble. Get this resolved.’

I cut back to the open comms, and struggled to make Bisset understand. ‘Ramone – it can’t work. There’s no interface between the two of you. Not even a cognitive net. If you die now, she will never know.’

‘But nobody even knew that mounds like this could be sentient before the discoveries on Mars. You say she won’t know. Are you sure?’

I was lost.

Zuba took over. ‘Citizen Associate, it’s at least a fair bet Knilans is right. This mound will understand nothing. If you slit open your suit – have you ever seen a suffocation? – it will take longer to die than you might think. And in all those long seconds the seed of doubt will grow in your mind: I have thrown my life away for nothing.’

I could see Bisset’s uncertainty. ‘Then I’ll just stand here until my air runs out.’

‘That’s your privilege,’ Zuba said mildly. ‘And it will be my privilege to stand here with you.’

Bisset seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘Why?’

‘Call it my own brand of xenoethics.’ She turned to Ulf Thoring. ‘Have you told the Citizen Associate about the results of the IGWI programme?’

‘No.’ Ulf said defensively. ‘They’re not published. And besides –’

‘Tell him now.’

Structure, Ulf told him, has been detected in the signals from the beginning of time. No, not just structure – life, its unmistakeable signature, with traces of mind susceptible to standard animistic deconvolution. Even in those very first instants, as cosmic energies raged, life flourished, blossomed, died, and was aware. The study of this primordial life is the whole purpose of the IGWI programme – though, as nothing has yet been published, it is still a matter of gossip on academic sites.

This stunning discovery has led to a revision of our theories of life’s origin. Perhaps the essence of life was born in those first instants. Or perhaps, some speculate, it was injected into our infant universe, from – somewhere else.

‘Okay,’ Zuba said. ‘Here’s what I take from all of that, in my simple way. Everywhere we have travelled we have found life and mind. But it is not like us. It exists on utterly different scales from us – hugely more extensive in space, and in time.’

She was right. At best multi-celled forms like us are an episode in the long dream of bacterial life. Away from Earth, we’ve found a few fossils; that’s all.

Zuba said, ‘There are similarities in the cognitive maps of your pet stromatolite, Bisset, and the antique minds from the inflationary period. Similarities. But we are different; we are nothing but transient structures that soon dissolve back into the mush. You’re right, Citizen Associate; only we humans know death. And in a universe that teems with life, we humans are still alone, in a way Juliet has never been alone. That is why I will wait for you, Citizen Associate, until that damn moon hammers me into the ground like a tent peg. Because all we humans have is each other.’

You have to admit she was impressive.

Bisset thought it over. ‘I should get out of this pond.’

‘Good idea,’ I said fervently.

Bisset glanced once more at Juliet. She was unharmed, save for a slight scarring from our cognitive net. He dropped the laser, which sank out of sight into the water, and began to wade towards us. ‘Tell me one more thing, Captain.’

‘Yes?’

‘So we humans work for each other. But why are we here? We spoke about this, Susan. Why explore, why go on and on?’

Zuba said, ‘We don’t know what we might find. We humans are lost now, but not forever. There’s a place for us.’

Bisset laughed softly. ‘Like the movie song.’

‘What movie?’ I wondered.

‘What is a movie?’ Ulf Thoring asked.

Zuba glanced up. The Hammer was an inverted landscape sliding over the dreaming stromatolites. ‘You might want to hurry it along.’

Bisset splashed to the edge of the water, and we hurried forward to help him.

The Long Road

Hara took days to walk the long road, from the hunters’ camps in the hills to the sandstone huts of the fisher folk by the marshy shore. But the road ran straight, its surface hard, the walking good. This directness pleased Hara, as she walked alone through the autumnal sunlight. She was fifteen years old.

Her father scolded her for these excursions. But Hara would be able to trade cattle leather for bream and mussels, and enough cockle shells for an anklet or two.

Besides, her father’s misgivings were to do with the road itself. People muttered darkly that it must have been built by vanished giants. But Hara had a practical turn of mind. A straight line was simply the most obvious way from hills to coast. And generations of patient walkers like herself had surely flattened the ground with their feet, without the help of giants: Britain was already an old country.

The wind rustled dying leaves. She could smell the ice that still lay not far to the north. She hoped to reach the coast before nightfall, and, perhaps, and to find a certain boy of the fisher-folk clan. Smiling, warm deep inside, she hurried on, her feet padding softly on the road’s grassy surface.

Under the unusually hot sun of this northern summer’s day, Marcus Plautius, stripped to the waist, worked with his men on the road.

Marcus didn’t have to do this. A centurion from north Italy, he had won his seniority the hard way. But road-making pleased him: the surveying with plumb lines and beacons, the grades of stone and gravel laid in sequence, the design that ensured good foundations, a decent walking surface, and reliable drainage. Maybe it was because of all the destruction he had seen that he found road-building so satisfying.

But a soldier understood that the roads were the Emperors’ supreme instrument of control. Just here they happened to be following the course of an old rutted track, but Roman roads ran straight whatever was in their way, their cold geometry freezing barbarian minds. And where roads ran, towns and prosperity flourished, and citizens paid their taxes – and Marcus’s salary.

So Marcus worked with a will, immersed in songs from Spain and Persia and Africa, and the road stretched true from horizon to horizon.

Seth sat in the musty dark of his toll gate lodge, chewing on tobacco. He had had an argument with his son.

Like his father, Seth was a turnpike gatekeeper. This was a profitable road, the obvious route to carry your cotton goods straight from city to port. And thanks to the tolls those who used the turnpike paid for its upkeep, so the old road was restored to its best condition since the Romans.

But now the railway had come, its culverts and embankments following the road’s own direct route. The turnpike traffic had reduced to a trickle, and the tolls dried up with it. Today Seth’s son Thomas had vowed that he would never become gatekeeper but would go work on the railway.

Seth heard a clattering of hooves. Another traveller, another penny. Sighing, he pulled himself up from his chair.

The road itself was aware.

It still followed the ancient, logical route between inland city and port. But now every centimetre was saturated with chips and actuators, and nano-machines repaired every crack, while the road monitored and controlled the traffic that thundered along it.

The road, integrated into a global transportation network, had become very smart indeed. And it understood a great deal.

Transport drove the global economy, but things were out of balance. For a century it had been cheaper to travel than to build. So children commuted to huge regional schools, their parents to work in faraway cities. But if you factored in the cost of waste and excess heat, transport really wasn’t so cheap after all – and the days of ‘cheap’ travel must soon end anyhow. And then what?

The road suspected that nothing like it was ever likely to be built again. But then it would sink back into the joy of purpose fulfilled, as storms of traffic broke over its long back.

Lida, fifteen years old, took days to walk the long road, from the hunters’ camps in the hills to the huts of the fisher folk by the shore, where she would trade rabbit skin for bream and mussels.

The road ran so straight and firm that people muttered darkly about its origins. But Lida was practical. This was simply the most obvious way from hills to coast, and generations of patient walkers like herself had surely flattened the ground. No need to imagine vanished giants.

The wind rustled dying leaves. She could smell the ice to the north; every day it edged closer. She hurried on.

And the road sensed the soft pad of her footsteps, and dreamed of vanished traffic.

Last Contact

March 15th

Caitlin walked into the garden through the little gate from the drive. Maureen was working on the lawn.

Just at that moment Maureen’s mobile phone pinged. She took off her gardening gloves, dug the phone out of the deep pocket of her old quilted coat and looked at the screen. ‘Another contact,’ she called to her daughter.

Caitlin looked cold in her thin jacket; she wrapped her arms around her body. ‘Another super-civilisation discovered, off in space. We live in strange times, Mum.’

‘That’s the fifteenth this year. And I did my bit to help discover it. Good for me,’ Maureen said, smiling. ‘Hello, love.’ She leaned forward for a kiss on the cheek.

She knew why Caitlin was here, of course. Caitlin had always hinted she would come and deliver the news about the Big Rip in person, one way or the other. Maureen guessed what that news was from her daughter’s hollow, stressed eyes. But Caitlin was looking around the garden, and Maureen decided to let her tell it all in her own time.

She asked, ‘How’re the kids?’

‘Fine. At school. Bill’s at home, baking bread.’ Caitlin smiled. ‘Why do stay-at-home fathers always bake bread? But he’s starting at Webster’s next month.’

‘That’s the engineers in Oxford.’

‘That’s right. Not that it makes much difference now. We won’t run out of money before, well, before it doesn’t matter.’ Caitlin considered the garden. It was just a scrap of lawn, really, with a quite nicely stocked border, behind a cottage that was a little more than a hundred years old, in this village on the outskirts of Oxford. ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen this properly.’

‘Well, it’s the first bright day we’ve had. My first spring here.’ They walked around the lawn. ‘It’s not bad. It’s been let to run to seed a bit by Mrs Murdoch. Who was another lonely old widow,’ Maureen said.

‘You mustn’t think like that.’

‘Well, it’s true. This little house is fine for someone on their own, like me, or her. I suppose I’d pass it on to somebody else in the same boat, when I’m done.’

Caitlin was silent at that, silent at the mention of the future.

Maureen showed her patches where the lawn had dried out last summer and would need reseeding. And there was a little brass plaque fixed to the wall of the house to show the level reached by the Thames floods of two years ago. ‘The lawn is all right. I do like this time of year when you sort of wake it up from the winter. The grass needs raking and scarifying, of course. I’ll reseed bits of it, and see how it grows during the summer. I might think about getting some of it relaid. Now the weather’s so different the drainage might not be right any more.’

‘You’re enjoying getting back in the saddle, aren’t you, Mum?’

Maureen shrugged. ‘Well, the last couple of years weren’t much fun. Nursing your Dad, and then getting rid of the house. It’s nice to get this old thing back on again.’ She raised her arms and looked down at her quilted gardening coat.

Caitlin wrinkled her nose. ‘I always hated that stupid old coat. You really should get yourself something better, Mum. These modern fabrics are very good.’

‘This will see me out,’ Maureen said firmly.

They walked around the verge, looking at the plants, the weeds, the autumn leaves that hadn’t been swept up and were now rotting in place.

Caitlin said, ‘I’m going to be on the radio later. BBC Radio 4. There’s to be a government statement on the Rip, and I’ll be in the follow-up discussion. It starts at nine, and I should be on about nine thirty.’

‘I’ll listen to it. Do you want me to tape it for you?’

‘No. Bill will get it. Besides, you can listen to all these things on the websites these days.’

Maureen said carefully, ‘I take it the news is what you expected, then.’

‘Pretty much. The Hawaii observatories confirmed it. I’ve seen the new Hubble images, deep sky fields. Empty, save for the foreground objects. All the galaxies beyond the local group have gone. Eerie, really, seeing your predictions come true like that. That’s couch grass, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. I stuck a fork in it. Nothing but root mass underneath. It will be a devil to get up. I’ll have a go, and then put down some bin liners for a few weeks, and see if that kills it off. Then there are these roses that should have been pruned by now. I think I’ll plant some gladioli in this corner –’

‘Mum, it’s October.’ Caitlin blurted that out. She looked thin, pale and tense, a real office worker, but then Maureen had always thought that about her daughter, that she worked too hard. Now she was thirty-five, and her moderately pretty face was lined at the eyes and around her mouth, the first wistful signs of age. ‘October 14th, at about four in the afternoon. I say “about”. I could give you the time down to the attosecond if you wanted.’

Maureen took her hands. ‘It’s all right, love. That’s about when you thought it would be, isn’t it?’

‘Not that it does us any good, knowing. There’s nothing we can do about it.’

They walked on. They came to a corner on the south side of the little garden. ‘This ought to catch the sun,’ Maureen said. ‘I’m thinking of putting in a seat here. A pergola maybe. Somewhere to sit. I’ll see how the sun goes around later in the year.’

‘Dad would have liked a pergola,’ Caitlin said. ‘He always did say a garden was a place to sit in, not to work.’

‘Yes. It does feel odd that your father died, so soon before all this. I’d have liked him to see it out. It seems a waste somehow.’

Caitlin looked up at the sky. ‘Funny thing, Mum. It’s all quite invisible to the naked eye, still. You can see the Andromeda Galaxy, just, but that’s bound to the Milky Way by gravity. So the expansion hasn’t reached down to the scale of the visible, not yet. It’s still all instruments, telescopes. But it’s real all right.’

‘I suppose you’ll have to explain it all on Radio 4.’

‘That’s why I’m there. We’ll probably have to keep saying it over and over, trying to find ways of saying it that people can understand. You know, don’t you, Mum? It’s all to do with dark energy. It’s like an antigravity field that permeates the universe. Just as gravity pulls everything together, the dark energy is pulling the universe apart, taking more and more of it so far away that its light can’t reach us any more. It started at the level of the largest structures in the universe, superclusters of galaxies. But in the end it will fold down to the smallest scales. Every bound structure will be pulled apart. Even atoms, even subatomic particles. The Big Rip.

‘We’ve known about this stuff for years. What we didn’t expect was that the expansion would accelerate as it has. We thought we had trillions of years. Then the forecast was billions. And now –’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s funny for me being involved in this stuff, Mum. Being on the radio. I’ve never been a people person. I became an astrophysicist, for God’s sake. I always thought that what I studied would have absolutely no effect on anybody’s life. How wrong I was. Actually there’s been a lot of debate about whether to announce it or not.’

‘I think people will behave pretty well,’ Maureen said. ‘They usually do. It might get trickier towards the end, I suppose. But people have a right to know, don’t you think?’

‘They’re putting it on after nine so people can decide what to tell their kids.’

‘After the watershed! Well, that’s considerate. Will you tell your two?’

‘I think we’ll have to. Everybody at school will know. They’ll probably get bullied about it if they don’t know. Imagine that. Besides, the little beggars will probably have googled it on their smart phones by one minute past nine.’

Maureen laughed. ‘There is that.’

‘It will be like when I told them Dad had died,’ Caitlin said. ‘Or like when Billy started asking hard questions about Santa Claus.’

‘No more Christmases,’ Maureen said suddenly. ‘If it’s all over in October.’

‘No more birthdays for my two either,’ Caitlin said.

‘November and January.’

‘Yes. It’s funny, in the lab, when the date came up, that was the first thing I thought of.’

Maureen’s phone pinged again. ‘Another signal. Quite different in nature from the last, according to this.’

‘I wonder if we’ll get any of those signals decoded in time.’

Maureen waggled her phone. ‘It won’t be for want of trying, me and a billion other search-for-ET-at-home enthusiasts. Would you like some tea, love?’

‘It’s all right. I’ll let you get on. I told Bill I’d get the shopping in, before I have to go back to the studios in Oxford this evening.’

They walked towards the back door into the house, strolling, inspecting the plants and the scrappy lawn.

June 5th

It was about lunchtime when Caitlin arrived from the garden centre with the pieces of the pergola. Maureen helped her unload them from the back of a white van and carry them through the gate from the drive. They were mostly just prefabricated wooden panels and beams that they could manage between the two of them, though the big iron spikes that would be driven into the ground to support the uprights were heavier. They got the pieces stacked up on the lawn.

‘I should be able to set it up myself,’ Maureen said. ‘Joe next door said he’d lay the concrete base for me, and help me lift on the roof section. There’s some nailing to be done, and creosoting, but I can do all that.’

‘Joe, eh.’ Caitlin grinned.

‘Oh, shut up, he’s just a neighbour. Where did you get the van? Did you have to hire it?’

‘No, the garden centre loaned it to me. They can’t deliver. They are still getting stock in, but they can’t rely on the staff. They just quit, without any notice. In the end it sort of gets to you, I suppose.’

‘Well, you can’t blame people for wanting to be at home.’

‘No. Actually Bill’s packed it in. I meant to tell you. He didn’t even finish his induction at Webster’s. But the project he was working on would never have got finished anyway.’

‘I’m sure the kids are glad to have him home.’

‘Well, they’re finishing the school year. At least I think they will, the teachers still seem keen to carry on.’

‘It’s probably best for them.’

‘Yes. We can always decide what to do after the summer, if the schools open again.’

Maureen had prepared some sandwiches, and some iced elderflower cordial. They sat in the shade of the house and ate their lunch and looked out over the garden.

Caitlin said, ‘Your lawn’s looking good.’

‘It’s come up quite well. I’m still thinking of relaying that patch over there.’

‘And you put in a lot of vegetables in the end,’ Caitlin said.

‘I thought I should. I’ve planted courgettes and French beans and carrots, and a few outdoor tomatoes. I could do with a greenhouse, but I haven’t really room for one. It seemed a good idea, rather than flowers, this year.’

‘Yes. You can’t rely on the shops.’

Things had kept working, mostly, as people stuck to their jobs. But there were always gaps on the supermarket shelves, as supply chains broke down. There was talk of rationing some essentials, and there were already coupons for petrol.

‘I don’t approve of how tatty the streets are getting in town,’ Maureen said sternly.

Caitlin sighed. ‘I suppose you can’t blame people for packing in a job like street-sweeping. It is a bit tricky getting around town though. We need some work done on the roof, we’re missing a couple of tiles. It’s just as well we won’t have to get through another winter,’ she said, a bit darkly. ‘But you can’t get a builder for love or money.’

‘Well, you never could.’

They both laughed.

Maureen said, ‘I told you people would cope. People do just get on with things.’

‘We haven’t got to the end game yet,’ Caitlin said. ‘I went into London the other day. That isn’t too friendly, Mum. It’s not all like this, you know.’

Maureen’s phone pinged, and she checked the screen. ‘Four or five a day now,’ she said. ‘New contacts, lighting up all over the sky.’

‘But that’s down from the peak, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, we had a dozen a day at one time. But now we’ve lost half the stars, haven’t we?’

‘Well, that’s true, now the Rip has folded down into the Galaxy. I haven’t really been following it, Mum. Nobody’s been able to decode any of the signals, have they?’

‘But some of them aren’t the sort of signal you can decode anyhow. In one case somebody picked up an artificial element in the spectrum of a star. Something that was manufactured, and then just chucked in to burn up, like a flare.’

Caitlin considered. ‘That can’t say anything but “here we are”, I suppose.’

‘Maybe that’s enough.’

‘Yes.’

It had really been Caitlin’s father who had been interested in wild speculations about alien life and so forth. Joining the network of home observers of ET, helping to analyse possible signals from the stars in a network of millions of others, had been Harry’s hobby, not Maureen’s. It was one of Harry’s things she had kept up after he had died, like his weather monitoring and his football pools. It would have felt odd just to have stopped it all.

But she did understand how remarkable it was that the sky had suddenly lit up with messages like a Christmas tree, after more than half a century of dogged, fruitless, frustrating listening. Harry would have loved to see it.

‘Caitlin, I don’t really understand how all these signals can be arriving just now. I mean, it takes years for light to travel between the stars, doesn’t it? We only knew about the phantom energy a few months ago.’

‘But others might have detected it long before, with better technology than we’ve got. That would give you time to send something. Maybe the signals have been timed to get here, just before the end, aimed just at us.’

‘That’s a nice thought.’

‘Some of us hoped that there would be an answer to the dark energy in all those messages.’

‘What answer could there be?’

Caitlin shrugged. ‘If we can’t decode the messages we’ll never know. And I suppose if there was anything to be done, it would have been done by now.’

‘I don’t think the messages need decoding,’ Maureen said.

Caitlin looked at her curiously, but didn’t pursue it. ‘Listen, Mum. Some of us are going to try to do something. You understand that the Rip works down the scales, that larger structures break up first. The Galaxy, then the solar system, then planets like Earth. And then the human body.’

Maureen considered. ‘So people will outlive the Earth.’

‘Well, they could. For maybe about thirty minutes, until atomic structures get pulled apart. There’s talk of establishing a sort of shelter in Oxford that could survive the end of the Earth. Like a submarine, I suppose. And if you wore a pressure suit you might last a bit longer even than that. The design goal is to make it through to the last microsecond. You could gather another thirty minutes of data that way. They’ve asked me to go in there.’

‘Will you?’

‘I haven’t decided. It will depend on how we feel about the kids, and – you know.’

Maureen considered. ‘You must do what makes you happy, I suppose.’

‘Yes. But it’s hard to know what that is, isn’t it?’ Caitlin looked up at the sky. ‘It’s going to be a hot day.’

‘Yes. And a long one. I think I’m glad about that. The night sky looks odd now the Milky Way has gone.’

‘And the stars are flying off one by one,’ Caitlin mused. ‘I suppose the constellations will look funny by the autumn.’

‘Do you want some more sandwiches?’

‘I’ll have a bit more of that cordial. It’s very good, Mum.’

‘It’s elderflower. I collect the blossoms from that bush down the road. I’ll give you the recipe if you like.’

‘Shall we see if your Joe fancies laying a bit of concrete this afternoon? I could do with meeting your new beau.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Maureen said, and she went inside to make a fresh jug of cordial.

October 14th

That morning Maureen got up early. She was pleased that it was a bright morning, after the rain of the last few days. A lovely autumn day. She had breakfast listening to the last-ever episode of The Archers, but her radio battery failed before the end.

She went to work in the garden, hoping to get everything done before the light went. There was plenty of work, leaves to rake up, the roses and the clematis to prune. She had decided to plant a row of daffodil bulbs around the base of the new pergola.

She noticed a little band of goldfinches, plundering a clump of Michaelmas daisies for seed. She sat back on her heels to watch. The colourful little birds had always been her favourites.

Then the light went, just like that, darkening as if somebody was throwing a dimmer switch. Maureen looked up. The sun was rushing away, and sucking all the light out of the sky with it. It was a remarkable sight, and she wished she had a camera. As the light turned grey, and then charcoal, and then utterly black, she heard the goldfinches fly off in a clatter, confused. It had only taken a few minutes.

Maureen was prepared. She dug a little torch out of the pocket of her old quilted coat. She had been hoarding the batteries; you hadn’t been able to buy them for weeks. The torch got her as far as the pergola, where she lit some rush torches that she’d fixed to canes.

Then she sat in the pergola, in the dark, with her garden lit up by her rush torches, and waited. She wished she had thought to bring out her book. She didn’t suppose there would be time to finish it now. Anyhow the flickering firelight would be bad for her eyes.

‘Mum?’

The soft voice made her jump. It was Caitlin, threading her way across the garden with a torch of her own.

‘I’m in here, love.’

Caitlin joined her mother in the pergola, and they sat on the wooden benches, on the thin cushions Maureen had been able to buy. Caitlin shut down her torch to conserve the battery.

Maureen said, ‘The sun went, right on cue.’

‘Oh, it’s all working out, bang on time.’

Somewhere there was shouting, whooping, a tinkle of broken glass.

‘Someone’s having fun,’ Maureen said.

‘It’s a bit like an eclipse,’ Caitlin said. ‘Like in Cornwall, do you remember? The sky was cloudy, and we couldn’t see a bit of the eclipse. But at that moment when the sky went dark, everybody got excited. Something primeval, I suppose.’

‘Would you like a drink? I’ve got a flask of tea. The milk’s a bit off, I’m afraid.’

‘I’m fine, thanks.’

‘I got up early and managed to get my bulbs in. I didn’t have time to trim that clematis, though. I got it all ready for the winter, I think.’

‘I’m glad.’

‘I’d rather be out here than indoors, wouldn’t you?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘I thought about bringing blankets. I didn’t know if it would get cold.’

‘Not much. The air will keep its heat for a bit. There won’t be time to get very cold.’

‘I was going to fix up some electric lights out here. But the power’s been off for days.’

‘The rushes are better, anyway. I would have been here earlier. There was a jam by the church. All the churches are packed, I imagine. And then I ran out of petrol a couple of miles back. We haven’t been able to fill up for weeks.’

‘It’s all right. I’m glad to see you. I didn’t expect you at all. I couldn’t ring.’ Even the mobile networks had been down for days. In the end everything had slowly broken down, as people simply gave up their jobs and went home. Maureen asked carefully, ‘So how’re Bill and the kids?’

‘We had an early Christmas,’ Caitlin said. ‘They’ll both miss their birthdays, but we didn’t think they should be cheated out of Christmas too. We did it all this morning. Stockings, a tree, the decorations and the lights down from the loft, presents, the lot. And then we had a big lunch. I couldn’t find a turkey but I’d been saving a chicken. After lunch the kids went for their nap. Bill put their pills in their lemonade.’

Maureen knew she meant the little blue pills the NHS had given out to every household.

‘Bill lay down with them. He said he was going to wait with them until he was sure – you know. That they wouldn’t wake up, and be distressed. Then he was going to take his own pill.’

Maureen took her hand. ‘You didn’t stay with them?’

‘I didn’t want to take the pill.’ There was some bitterness in her voice. ‘I always wanted to see it through to the end. I suppose it’s the scientist in me. We argued about it. We fought, I suppose. In the end we decided this way was the best.’

Maureen thought that on some level Caitlin couldn’t really believe her children were gone, or she couldn’t keep functioning like this. ‘Well, I’m glad you’re here with me. And I never fancied those pills either. Although – will it hurt?’

‘Only briefly. When the Earth’s crust gives way. It will be like sitting on top of an erupting volcano.’

‘You had an early Christmas. Now we’re going to have an early Bonfire Night.’

‘It looks like it. I wanted to see it through,’ Caitlin said again. ‘After all I was in at the start – those supernova studies.’

‘You mustn’t think it’s somehow your fault.’

‘I do, a bit,’ Caitlin confessed. ‘Stupid, isn’t it?’

‘But you decided not to go to the shelter in Oxford with the others?’

‘I’d rather be here. With you. Oh, but I brought this.’ She dug into her coat pocket and produced a sphere, about the size of a tennis ball.

Maureen took it. It was heavy, with a smooth black surface.

Caitlin said, ‘It’s the stuff they make space shuttle heatshield tiles out of. It can soak up a lot of heat.’

‘So it will survive the Earth breaking up.’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘Are there instruments inside?’

‘Yes. It should keep working, keep recording until the expansion gets down to the centimetre scale, and the Rip cracks the sphere open. Then it will release a cloud of even finer sensor units, motes we call them. It’s nanotechnology, Mum, machines the size of molecules. They will keep gathering data until the expansion reaches molecular scales.’

‘How long will that take after the big sphere breaks up?’

‘Oh, a microsecond or so. There’s nothing we could come up with that could keep data-gathering after that.’

Maureen hefted the little device. ‘What a wonderful little gadget. It’s a shame nobody will be able to use its data.’

‘Well, you never know,’ Caitlin said. ‘Some of the cosmologists say this is just a transition, rather than an end. The universe has passed through transitions before, for instance from an age dominated by radiation to one dominated by matter – our age. Maybe there will be life of some kind in a new era dominated by the dark energy.’

‘But nothing like us.’

‘I’m afraid not.’

Maureen stood and put the sphere down in the middle of the lawn. The grass was just faintly moist, with dew, as the air cooled. ‘Will it be all right here?’

‘I should think so.’

The ground shuddered, and there was a sound like a door slamming, deep in the ground. Alarms went off, from cars and houses, distant wails. Maureen hurried back to the pergola. She sat with Caitlin, and they wrapped their arms around each other.

Caitlin raised her wrist to peer at her watch, then gave it up. ‘I don’t suppose we need a countdown.’

The ground shook more violently, and there was an odd sound, like waves rushing over pebbles on a beach. Maureen peered out of the pergola. Remarkably, one wall of her house had given way, just like that, and the bricks had tumbled into a heap.

‘You’ll never get a builder out now,’ Caitlin said, but her voice was edgy.

‘We’d better get out of here.’

‘All right.’

They got out of the pergola and stood side by side on the lawn, over the little sphere of instruments, holding onto each other. There was another tremor, and Maureen’s roof tiles slid to the ground, smashing and tinkling.

‘Mum, there’s one thing.’

‘Yes, love.’

‘You said you didn’t think all those alien signals needed to be decoded.’

‘Why, no. I always thought it was obvious what all the signals were saying.’

‘What?’

Maureen tried to reply.

The ground burst open. The scrap of dewy lawn flung itself into the air, and Maureen was thrown down, her face pressed against the grass. She glimpsed houses and trees and people, all flying in the air, underlit by a furnace-red glow from beneath.

But she was still holding Caitlin. Caitlin’s eyes were squeezed tight shut. ‘Goodbye,’ Maureen yelled. ‘They were just saying goodbye.’ But she couldn’t tell if Caitlin could hear.

Afterword

The title of this collection is of course a nod to Olaf Stapledon, but it reflects some of my current interests, shaped by my work with a SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Life) study group which considers the consequences of first contact, and with a British Interplanetary Society study group called Project Icarus which is designing an interstellar probe, in the hope of provoking first contact. And first contact is the subject of ‘Erstkontakt’, original to this anthology.

‘In the Abyss of Time’ was nominated for the Locus Award for best short story of its year. My stories often deal with the big themes, the far future and the destiny of mankind, and this story is an attempt to dramatise the latest cosmological ideas through the classic sf trope of the fantastic voyage.

‘Halo Ghosts’ is an early story, a first attempt at the idea that I eventually worked up into my story ‘Traces’ (1991); I later decided I liked the original version too and reworked it.

‘Tempest 43’ is an attempt to look into the middle term future, when current anxieties have played themselves out.

‘The Children of Time’ is a speculation about a further future, a middle way for mankind between galactic cornucopia and extinction. It uses a Stapledonian viewpoint, appropriately enough given the collection’s title. This was the first story bought by Sheila Williams when she took over the editorial chair at Asimov’s, and won the reader’s poll for that magazine’s best short story of its year.

Another of my long-standing fascinations has been alternate history. One such piece with a rather outlandish alternate-historical hinge is ‘The Pacific Mystery’; it features another fantastic voyage, this time through a non-Euclidian geometry. This story was nominated for the Sidewise Award for best alternate-history short story of its year; I later became a judge on the award.

‘No More Stories’ is quite a personal story, an attempt to root a fantastical idea in a story of human relationships.

‘Dreamers’ Lake’ was the outcome of a specific commission: to deliver a story as a tribute to the movie Forbidden Planet. It contains a nod to Shakespeare, like the movie, but unlike the movie there’s also a nod to Dire Straits.

‘The Long Road’ is an attempt at one of the most difficult forms of fiction, the short-short.

‘Last Contact’ was nominated for both the Hugo and Locus awards. It is another attempt to dramatise the cosmological, this time through a personal story: eschatology and gardening. The story was partly inspired by my reading Nevil Shute, my father’s favourite author.

Stephen Baxter

Northumberland

November 2011

Table of Contents

In Praise of Associations

Ian Whates

Erstkontakt

In The Abyss of Time

Halo Ghosts

Tempest 43

The Children of Time

I

II

III

IV

V

The Pacific Mystery

No More Stories

Dreamers’ Lake

The Long Road

Last Contact

Afterword