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TRACES

Stephen Baxter

To my father

Contents

Traces

Darkness

The Droplet

No Longer Touch the Earth

Mittelwelt

Journey to the King Planet

The Jonah Man

Downstream

The Blood of Angels

Columbiad

Brigantia's Angels

Weep for the Moon

Good News

Something for Nothing

In the Manner of Trees

Pilgrim 7

Zemlya

Moon Six

George and the Comet

Inherit the Earth

In the MSOB

Afterword

Traces

By the time we reached the comet, Dillard and I had spent fifteen months together inside the two-man

GUTship; and, although we'd respected each other's privacy as far as possible, I'd come to know him as

well as I've known anyone. And I believed that his Holistic faith was as well-founded as it was possible

to be.

So, when his faith crumbled before the ancient images we extracted from the comet core, I was

profoundly shocked.

I was the pilot of the GUTship while Dillard was the mission specialist, with special responsibility for the

Berry archaeological imaging process. The ship itself looked a little like a giant parasol: a stem five

hundred yards long tipped by our lifecell, a fat disc some fifty yards wide, while the 'handle' of the

parasol, at the other end of the stem, was a block of asteroid ice within which the GUT drive was

embedded.

The lifecell was cluttered with communications banks, with living equipment such as a galley, shower and

Virtual tank, and with lab equipment. Thus, much of the lifecell was of necessity common ground to

Dillard and me—but it also contained two precious privacy booths into which we could retreat, with

books or vision cubes, in order to make-believe we were somewhere else. We decorated the booths in

styles of our own choosing—I fixed mine to match my fancy of the sailing ships of old Earth, with

blackened ship's timbers, a narrow bunk and creaking floorboards (I never found out what Dillard did to

his; I liked to imagine a bare stone cell containing a jug of water, a hard bed with a single blanket, and a

few books—but this was whimsy: the Holistics are not renowned for their asceticism).

In any event, Dillard and I spent much of our journey in polite avoidance of each other. Ship's days

would pass with scarcely a word between us, and such conversations as we had tended to centre around

work.

So my journey to the Oort Cloud with a minister of the First Church of Christ the Holistic wasn't the

cartoon nightmare one might imagine.

One of the few times we discussed Dillard's beliefs came at turnover. After seven months at one gee we

were a sixth of a light year from Earth and travelling at three-quarters of lightspeed: just enough to tinge

the receding Sol with redshift. Now we were to begin the slow deceleration to our rendezvous point in

the Cloud. The GUT drive closed down and gravity lifted from the lifecell, and Dillard and I strapped

loosely into our couches. I touched a panel and the lifecell turned transparent, so that we lay in a bowl of

multicolored light, suspended amid stars. Verniers nudged the ship over so that the diamond-hard stars

wheeled around us.

Dillard turned on his side and peered down through the floor. He was a stocky man, a head shorter than

me, and, at forty-five, some ten years older. Now I could make out the starlit outline of his blandly

handsome, blocky face. 'Brewster, look down there.' I twisted to see. The ship's main stem emerged

from the base of the lifecell and dwindled into the distance like an exercise in perspective, finishing in the

amorphous grey mass of the asteroid ice block. Dillard grinned. 'That block was a perfect cube when we

left the Moon.'

I nodded. 'Well, we've used a little less than half of it: just about on schedule. We shouldn't run out of gas

until we get to the comet.'

'Let's hope we can refill as planned.'

Most of our conversation was like this: gentle, delivered in the mildest of tones, and meaningless. Dillard

was always calm, friendly and interested in everything; habitually he would run a hand over his greying

blond crewcut and turn to me, unfailingly curious.

I felt guilty for not liking him more than I did.

We continued to consider the GUT drive. GUT stands for 'Grand Unified Theory', that philosophical

system which describes the fundamental forces of nature as aspects of a single superforce. The GUT

drive consists of a fist-sized chuck of hydrogen locked into a superconducting bottle and bombarded to

creation physics temperatures. At such temperatures only the unified superforce can act. When the

hydrogen is bled from the bottle the superforce goes through 'phase transitions', decomposing into the

four familiar forces of nature—strong and weak nuclear, gravitational and electromagnetic. Just as steam

releases heat when it goes through a phase transition by condensing to water, so at each transition of the

superforce a pulse of energy is emitted.

The GUT phase energy flashes asteroid ice to plasma; the superheated plasma is expelled through a

nozzle, so that a GUTship is a kind of steam rocket.

A random impulse prompted me to observe to Dillard, 'Of course it was GUT phase transition energy,

liberated during the cooling period after the Big Bang, that fuelled the expansion of the universe itself.'

He raised his head and studied me patiently.

I went on, tempted to needle him, 'Seems almost blasphemous—doesn't it?—to put such a godlike force

into a box and ride it...'

Dillard smiled. In his gentle Boston accent he said, 'If we thought it was blasphemy the Church would

hardly have funded the expedition.'

'But I thought your faith was based on the sanctity of nature.'

'It is. But that does not preclude the advance of technology. We believe that nature has been designed for

the use of wise people.'

'Ah,' I said. 'The anthropic principle. The theory that the fundamental constants underpinning the universe

were set so that human life would be possible; that even the primordial supernova, which caused the birth

of the Sun, was part of some Grand Design—'

'Something like that.' Dillard's face was like a sketch, with small mouth and nose, widespread eyes and

barely a wrinkle; now he wore a smile that was irritatingly tolerant. 'Brewster, we've spent the last seven

months skirting the topic of faith, and I suspect that was the wisest path.' He looked up through the clear

roof; the turning manoeuvre was almost completed now, so that we were looking back the way we had

come. 'But I'll say this,' he went on. 'Blasphemy is an outdated concept. Look up, Brewster; that

redshifted blur is the Sun and, with a little wishful thinking, you can make out around it a muddy pool of

light that is the inner Solar System. Earth alone holds life—'

'As far as we know.'

'As far as we know after a century of assiduous research, yes—and I can cup the extent of intelligence's

spread in the palm of my hand. Brewster, we believe that the reduction of entropy—the encouragement

of self-organization—is sacred. If we are here for any reason it is to build, to spread, to grow and learn.

As yet we've built nothing.

'You can only blaspheme if you shout loudly enough for God to hear. We've a way to go before we

achieve that.'

Dillard's church had been the first to weld late twentieth century scientific notions—such as cosmology's

anthropic philosophy, the self-organization principles of the chaos scientists, Lovelock's Gaia ideas—to a

subframe of simple, robust Christianity.

The new religion, I reflected, had been ideally comforting for the spiritually starved Western world—and

it had spread like a virus. Science and technology suddenly became spiritually valid activities, and we

walked with a swagger, confident of our preeminence in the universe.

Still, despite my own cynicism, I conceded that Dillard's conviction was impressive; perhaps it ought to

have been inspiring, even...

But I come from Liverpool—not the Martian colony but that battered old city on the west coast of

England—and my family have been lapsed Catholics for generations. So there is a scarred hole in me

where faith (perhaps) ought to lie, and the conviction of others serves only to make me feel threatened.

At that moment—despite the fact that underneath it all I had come to respect Dillard—I wished only to

pry at his beliefs, to seek to undermine them. Yet, perhaps I was hoping that he would stand firm even

so; I think somewhere inside me there was a baffled child seeking comfort from Dillard's steadfastness.

I said nothing, and the moment passed.

At length a low bell tolled, signifying the return of gravity. With some relief I turned the hull opaque,

locking out the universe.

The months wore away, and at last the ship reached its greatest distance from the Sun. The relativistic

tinges faded from the stars as the GUT drive sighed to stillness. I turned the hull transparent once more,

and we peered out.

The comet was a grey ghost fifty miles wide, sliding along the rim of the Sun's gravity well like a bristled

spectre.

This comet was one of billions in the Oort Cloud, a rough sphere a third of a light year from the Sun.

Comets are balls of grubby snow; only if they fall into the depths of the Solar System does the Sun's heat

cause them to blaze across the sky. But this nucleus had never fallen; since the birth of the

planets—perhaps even since the primordial supernova—it had circled alone here, as undisturbed and

discrete as some eyeless fish of the ocean depths.

And this isolation was precisely why we had come to visit. As Dillard had explained during the voyage,

'Brewster, if we're careful this comet could yield Berry phase image data from half way back to the Big

Bang itself...' He had grinned, boyish. 'This will knock those portraits of Caesar into a cocked hat, eh?'

The Berry phase of an electron is a quantum attribute which records the particle's history: its

displacements and velocities, the forces which have acted on it... The Berry phase is the particle's

memory. The effect was discovered in the 1980s, but it was not until this century that a way was found to

cross-correlate the phases of a multitude of particles to reconstruct three-dimensional traces of

macroscopic events...

Images of the past.

When the first Berry image was made public—a murky swampscape reconstructed from a lump of

coal—there was wild speculation. Perhaps, for example, you could take a core from the Notebooks and

gaze into the eyes of Leonardo...

But it didn't work out like that. Earthbound particles have been handled, eaten, excreted, incorporated

into bone, ground to meal, buried, burned, blasted, over and again. Trying to untangle all that is next to

impossible.

By the time we left Earth only the face of Gaius Julius Caesar had emerged from the gloom of centuries,

thanks to a chance isolated find in Britain.

But, still, image archaeology had caught the imagination of the world. And when Holistic Church money

had started to pour into glamorous science projects, Berry phase research was a prime candidate.

So here I was, orbiting a comet in a ship mostly owned by the First Church.

Well, I wasn't complaining. As long as I was here.

We got to work. I closed down the ship's flight systems, and Dillard began to deploy the Berry phase

analysis equipment. Five small probes nosed their way out of a stem-mounted cargo pod and spread

themselves evenly around the comet nucleus; Dillard took particular care that the probes' vernier exhaust

did not contaminate the comet surface.

Then, from each probe, electric-blue laser light lanced into the comet. Five superhot wavefronts

converged at lightspeed on the dead centre of the nucleus. A cubic centimetre of the ancient ice flashed

to plasma, and the light beams carried precious Berry phase data back to the probes.

It took less than a second.

Dillard was flushed and excited; perspiration had gathered in droplets over his scalp. I couldn't help but

smile. 'Is that all there is to it?'

He wiped his brow, grinning. 'This is where the hard work starts...'

'Call me when you find something.'

With the Berry extraction complete I was free to set up the rest of our research programme. Over the

next few days a hail of small robots tumbled eagerly to the comet surface, and laser and other beams

scored the icescape.

At length, restless, I suited up and climbed out of the ship through the airlock; from the transparent roof

of the lifecell I kicked off towards the comet nucleus. As the ship receded beneath me the lighted lifecell

became a raft of incongruous normality, adrift in a bottomless sea.

I turned myself over and descended feet first towards the comet.

Spires and needles of ice hundreds of feet high bristled menacingly towards me. It was like falling into

some cartoon mountain range. As I passed one triple-edged peak I reached out a gloved hand,

cautiously; the substance of the peak evaporated within my grasp, less substantial than candyfloss.

These fantastic structures had condensed here thanks to a stillness lasting billions of years; but one trip

around the Sun would wipe this nucleus clean.

I landed and—with a hiss transmitted through my suit—I sank to about knee depth in insubstantial

gossamer. I found I could walk about with little difficulty, and my motion jumbled the ice into new,

precarious sculptures. I walked in a faery city worked in silver and ebony, laced with threads of purplish

organic compounds. Arches of feathery ice twisted over my head, seeming to defy even the microgravity

of this place.

A movement to my left caught my eye: a fist-sized sample robot clambered busily out of the interior of the

comet, its tiny caterpillar treads spinning. For a few seconds it lay as if resting, surrounded by a crater of

disturbed ice; then it retracted its treads, sprouted a tiny rocket nozzle, and set off towards the GUTship,

leaving me alone with the antique stillness.

I let my heart open up. Moments like this, I suspected, were why I endured the pain, loneliness and

boredom of deep space flight; moments like this gave my life its meaning and definition; moments like this

were as close as I would ever come to the numinous.

My helmet radio hissed to life. 'Brewster.' Dillard's voice sounded flat. 'You'd better come back.'

I frowned, my mood broken. 'What is it?'

'...I've found something.'

He would say no more. With a growing sense of unease I kicked off from the surface of the comet,

careless now of the ice sculptures I shattered.

Dillard had extracted a sequence of Berry phase images from the comet core material. When I joined him

he was cycling them through his workbench.

I was stunned.

There was a star—not Sol, but a monster: huge, brooding and blighted by vast spots. A clutch of planets

showed as discs and crescents.

'These are good quality traces,' Dillard said, his voice tight. 'And remember that a Berry image is like an

animated hologram, containing depth and time information; there's so much data here that—'

I touched his shoulder. 'Dillard, you don't need to lecture me. These images are—magical.'

Dillard seemed to take comfort from my impressed reaction, and some of his customary bland

composure returned. Underneath, though, I sensed a deep disturbance which I could not understand;

hesitant expressions chased across his face.

The stellar system shifted across the screen as the imaging process panned over prehistory. At length the

'camera' selected one of the planets, a ruddy crescent off to the left of the huge star, and zoomed in. I

stared at the picture, willing myself to make out surface details; but as the planet image grew it continually

shattered into boxes of uniform colour which only hesitantly reformed. Dillard explained that we were

close to the process's limit of resolution.

The crescent settled at the centre of the workbench, distinctly red and tipped by small icecaps.

There were stars within the horns of the crescent.

I stared stupidly, shaking my head.

'Cities, on the nightside,' Dillard said calmly.

'Cities?'

'Watch.' For a moment I studied him: his broad face remained blank and his shoulders were hunched as

he worked the workbench controls. His reaction continued to strike me as odd, but my excitement at the

Berry traces was overwhelming, and I turned once more to the images.

Now more details trickled through the frosted-glass imaging process. A little above the world's surface I

made out sections of arcs; it was rather as if the planet image had been sketched hastily and was

surrounded by remains of earlier drafts. At first I speculated that the world was ringed; but the truth, as it

emerged, was far stranger: a Net of light surrounded the planet, a wide mesh like a longitude-latitude

grid. Beads of green and brown slid along the Net, here and there dropping to the surface through the

thin layer of air.

Now a ship dropped gracefully into the image, a slim cylinder of startling blue; it slid through the Net and

settled towards the planet surface. It was difficult to be sure of the scale—but the ship looked so vast

that its keel must have been bent to match the curve of the world.

The image faded, leaving the workbench empty.

I reached behind me, found a couch, and pulled myself into it. 'Dillard, man; I don't know what to say.'

He spread his wide hands flat on the workbench.

I said, 'This is a triumph. More than we could have expected. This is—the discovery of the age! The first

evidence of life, intelligence beyond Earth. So we're not alone—'

'But we are.' There was an edge in his voice and again I caught the impression of some deep distress.

'These images are more than five billion years old, Brewster.'

'But there may be other traces of their passing.' Suddenly my overworked imagination was full of images

of a new Renaissance, as GUTships scoured the Oort Cloud for the wisdom of a lost race—

'No. Brewster, you've had some astrophysical training; think it through. What did you make of that star?

Was it a quiet little main-sequencer like Sol?'

I remembered the star: massive, swollen even, with those deep spots racing across its surface—

Dillard mused, 'Already they must have been preparing for the betrayal of their star. Perhaps they moved

their cities underground, or erected force fields. Perhaps they were even planning to move their worlds.'

'The star is going to supernova,' I breathed.

'Wrong. It did supernova. Five billion years ago.'

I felt a great sadness settle over me. 'So we've lost them.' My head seemed to clear as my wilder

imaginings evaporated. Dillard still drifted over his workbench, his labourer's hands spread flat against its

empty surface. 'Dillard, forgive me,' I said. 'I still can't understand the way you're taking this. To extract

this data is a great achievement. Why is it distressing you so?'

He turned away, his face working. 'Brewster, I'm going to take a break. Excuse me. There isn't much

more I can do with the facilities here in any event; when we get back to Earth I will be able to extend the

range of the Berry images forwards and backwards in time—maybe all the way up to the explosion

itself—'

I said harshly, 'Dillard, your faith has taken a dent today, hasn't it? Is that the problem? Your Church is

based on the premise that the universe was designed for man; and that therefore we are alone. Its mass

appeal is based on that anthropocentric element. Yet today you have found proof that another race

existed.'

'Brewster—'

'But you're a scientist, man. Surely you can rise above this. The old Christian churches had to absorb

Darwin's ideas; if your faith is strong enough it will survive—'

'Brewster.' His voice was hard and his hands had gathered into fists. 'Please don't lecture me on matters

you don't understand.'

And he pulled himself away from the bench and into his privacy booth.

I stared after him.

And, at length, I began to work it out.

Dillard's faith had been more than damaged. It had been destroyed.

The Berry process had shown us another race building cities, sailing between planets. Perhaps they too

had evolved some equivalent of our anthropic theory, by which they also believed the universe had been

built as a sort of racial adventure playground for them.

But their sun had exploded, and their worlds were put to fire.

Perhaps Dillard's faith could have survived even these blows, but there was more.

For this comet was a relic of the birth of the Solar System, of the great compressive wave which had

crossed this region of space and sparked into existence the Sun and a host of other stars...

A wave emanating from a supernova.

Today Dillard and I had seen the star which had exploded so that Earth, and human life, could be born;

and so our very substance was composed of the blasted carcasses of that lost race. Just as we, one day,

would die so that some other people, fantastically different, could arise—another race to believe, fondly

and foolishly, that the universe was designed for them alone.

Anthropocentrism was dead.

Dillard's Church would probably survive, I reflected, even with its anthropic heart ripped out; the

cynicism of its wealthy leaders would see to that. But Dillard was an intelligent and honest man, and now

he would have to come to terms with this amputation of his philosophy.

As would I. I grieved—not for Dillard, but for my confused self, left once more without even the faith of

others for comfort.

Clumsily I made the workbench replay the Berry traces, over and again.

Darkness

Philmus fell out of the light.

She staggered as she dropped into her new body; it was small, compact, with a lower centre of gravity

than her own. Hillegas's Virtual scenario flooded over her, a penetrative assault of vision, sounds and

smells.

A room: large, gloomy, giving onto a veranda. It was day, but so dark that candles burned on the

mantel. A log fire made the room hot, the air heavy. Through the open French window she could

see terraced gardens, sweeping down to a lake. Vine leaves crowded around the window frame;

but the leaves were small and yellow, under-nourished, and the sky outside was piled thick with

brooding clouds.

At a desk before the window sat a man. Sheets of paper on the desk-top were covered with fine,

ink-blotched handwriting, heavily revised. There was other furniture in the room: a couch, a

heavy armchair, bookcases, small tables. There was an overpowering scent of dirt—musk—barely

overlaid by perfumes; the people of this age had had odd notions of hygiene, she remembered.

Philmus held up her hands: they were delicate, the palms free of calluses, and there was a silk ruff around

her wrists. The hands were those of a twenty-year-old; she'd lost about thirty years in age, she estimated.

Her dress, blue, was heavy around her legs—it consisted of layers of stiff, useless material—and

something dug into her waist, maybe a corset. Her hair was pulled back into what might be a bun, so tight

it hurt.

Another man stood beside her. Was this Hillegas? Tall, young, thinning blond hair, a rather blank

expression. His suit was of some rough, dark material; his boots were polished and dark against the

carpet.

'Christ,' she said. 'I hate this part. The arrival.' Her voice, she found, was high-pitched.

To her surprise, the man at the desk seemed to react. He turned and ran his hands through a mop of

hair—red, shot with grey. 'Polidori?' He peered at her—no, through her, she realized. He looked

perhaps thirty. He wore a shirt open at the neck, what looked like jodhpurs, and boots like Hillegas's.

Hillegas ignored him. 'We're in the Villa Diodati,' he murmured to Philmus. 'By the shore of Lac

Léman—Lake Geneva. It's 1816. July.'

'July? But it's so dark. It's more like winter.'

The man at the desk stood and stepped towards them. 'Is that you, Polidori?' His accent was

clipped—not like modern British—almost Germanic, Philmus thought. His face was strong, compelling,

but pale and dark-eyed, she saw, and there was a layer of unattractive fat over his belly and ribs. He had

a limp; one of his shoes was built up. 'I hear you speak—I see you, but indistinctly—are you spectres?

Oh! damn this weather—for a bit of sunlight...'

The man was only three feet from Philmus. 'Can he see us?'

'No,' Hillegas said.

'Are you sure? Maybe there's some leakage—'

Hillegas walked indifferently around the red-haired man and crossed to the desk. Philmus followed

uneasily, oddly embarrassed, avoiding the man's questing eyes.

Hillegas pointed to one of the sheets on the desk. '"The brows of men by the despairing light/ Wore an

unearthly aspect, as by fits/ The flashes fell upon them..."' He turned to her, evidently excited. 'This is it!

The manuscript of Darkness...'

The red-haired man turned and strode back to the desk. 'Damn you,' he shouted. He picked up a page

of his manuscript, crumpled it dramatically and hurled it towards the window. The paper disappeared as

soon as it passed through the window-frame, out of the man's sight; it was clumsy, and Philmus's doubts

about the quality of Hillegas's simulation deepened. The man cried, 'I cannot write!—not the simplest

letter. It is as if you have scooped out half my brain, and all of my heart! Why do you spectres not simply

kill me?' He opened a drawer in the desk, angrily searching for something.

'Something's wrong,' Philmus said, watching him. 'Definitely. He is aware of us, and he's conscious of a

change in his internal condition. He knows he's not the man of his memories.'

Hillegas stared at the man with a kind of greed. 'But the simulation's worked. Don't you see? He's in the

middle of composing Darkness. I'll be able to ask him—But I need more processing power. Especially if

I'm going to achieve a definitive reconstruction of the poem's composition.'

'I don't think you're listening to me,' she said. She felt tired, and her Virtual body, in its restricting, heavy

clothes, was irritating her. 'This isn't a question of authenticity, Hillegas. If you've allowed this projection

to become fully self-aware, you've broken the sentience laws.'

Hillegas's face showed an echo of anger. The face was odd, inhuman, not a full reflection of his mind; it

was as if the small muscles around his mouth, governing expression, had been cut. Hillegas's body, like

much of the rest of the simulation, was imperfectly visualized; he'd obviously devoted most of the mips

available to him to the core of his Virtual, the man at the desk.

Then Hillegas's lips moved—he was sub-vocing, she realized belatedly.

'Hillegas. Don't try anything—'

Hillegas's body seemed to shimmer, and it became more solid, subtly; she was aware of his stronger

presence, there in the room with her, as if his gravity field had been increased. She felt wraith-like,

insubstantial by comparison.

The red-haired man stared at Hillegas, his full lips parting in shock. To him, Philmus realized, a shadow

had just congealed into flesh and blood.

Events moved rapidly, then, out of her control.

Hillegas stepped forward, his hands spread wide. 'Lord Byron. I—'

The other man took something from the desk drawer. It was a pistol. He fired it, directly into Hillegas's

chest.

It was more an explosion than a shot. Byron's arm was hurled backwards by the recoil. The ball, hard

and massive, ripped through Hillegas's torso, and embedded itself in the wall beyond. There was a sharp

stink of cordite.

Hillegas looked down, startled, at the hole in his chest. Pixels fluttered about him, blocks of colour in the

air.

Philmus sub-voced herself up to Hillegas's density. Byron saw her materialize, and saliva streaked at the

corner of his mouth. He dropped the pistol on the desk, and rubbed his firing arm.

Philmus stepped forward. 'Congratulations, Hillegas. Now you've really blown it.'

Stephen Baxter - Traces

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