Stephen Baxter - Manifold 1 - Time

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Manifold:
Time
Stephen Baxter
To two space cadets:
My nephew, James Baxter
Kent Joosten, NASA
Reid Malenfant
You know me. And you know I'm a space cadet.
You know I've campaigned for, among other things, private mining expeditions to the asteroids. In
fact, in the past I've tried to get you to pay for such things. I've bored you with that often
enough already, right?
So tonight I want to look a little farther out. Tonight I want to tell you why I care so much
about this issue that I devoted my life toil.
The world isn't big enough any more. You don't need me to stand here and tell you that. We could
all choke to death, be extinct in a hundred years.
Or we could be on our way to populating the Galaxy.
Yes, the Galaxy. Want me to tell you how?
Turns out it's all a question of economics.
Let's say we set out to the stars. We might use ion rockets, solar sails, gravity assists. It
doesn't matter.
We'll probably start as we have in the Solar System, with automated probes. Humans may follow. One
percent of the helium-3 fusion fuel available from the planet Uranus, for example, would be enough
to send a giant interstellar ark, each ark containing a billion people, to every star in the
Galaxy. But it may be cheaper for the probes to manufacture humans in situ, using cell synthesis
and artificial womb technology.
The first wave will be slow, no faster than we can afford. It doesn 't matter. Not in the long
term.
When the probe reaches a new system, it phones home, and starts to build.
Here is the heart of the strategy. A target system, we assume, is uninhabited. We can therefore
anticipate massive exploitation of the system's resources, without restraint, by the probe. Such
resources are useless for any other purpose, and are therefore economically free to us.
I thought you'd enjoy that line. There's nothing an entrepreneur likes more than the sound of the
wordfree.
More probes will be built and launched from each of the first wave of target stars. The probes
will reach new targets; and again, more probes will be spawned, and fired onward. The volume
covered by the probes will grow rapidly, like the expansion of gas into a vacuum.
Our ships will spread along the spiral arm, along lanes rich with stars, farming the Galaxy for
humankind.
Once started, the process will be self-directing, self-financing. It would take, the double-domes
think, ten to a hundred million years for the colonization of the Galaxy to be completed in this
manner. But we must invest merely in the cost of the initial generation of probes.
Thus the cost of colonizing the Galaxy will be less, in real terms, than that of our Apollo
program of fifty years ago.
This vision isn't mine alone. It isn't original. The rocket pioneer Robert Goddard wrote an essay
in 1918-ninety-two years ago- called The Ultimate Migration, in which he imagined space arks built
from asteroid materials carrying our far-future descendants away from the death of the sun. The
engineering detail has changed; the essence of the vision hasn't.
We can do this. If we succeed, we will live forever.
The alternative is extinction.
And, people, when we're gone, we're gone.
As far as we can see we're alone, in an indifferent universe. We see no sign of intelligence
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anywhere away from Earth. We may be the first. Perhaps we're the last. It took so long for the
Solar System to evolve intelligence it seems unlikely there will be others, ever.
If we fail, then the failure is for all time. If we die, mind and consciousness and soul die with
us: hope and dreams and love, everything that makes us human. There will be nobody even to mourn
us.
To be the first is an awesome responsibility. It's a responsibility we must grasp.
I am offering you a practical route to an infinite future for humankind, a future of unlimited
potential. Someday, you know it, I'll come back to you again for money: seedcorn money, that's
all, so we can take a first step-self-financing even in the medium term-beyond the bounds of
Earth. But I want you to see why I'll be doing that. Why I must.
We can do this. We will do this. We're on our own. It's up to us.
This is just the beginning. Join me.
Thank you.
Michael
This is what I have learned, Malenfant. This is how it is, how it was, how it came to be.
In the afterglow of the Big Bang, humans spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and
brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and
death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets.
There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and
confluence across billions upon billions of years.
Everywhere they found life.
Nowhere did they find mind-save what they brought with them or created-no other against which
human advancement could be tested.
With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved
a power undreamed of in earlier ages.
They learned of other universes from which theirs had evolved. Those earlier, simpler realities
too were empty of mind, a branching tree of emptiness reaching deep into the hyperpast.
It is impossible to understand what minds of that age-the peak of humankind, a species hundreds of
billions of times older than humankind-were like. They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not
even to learn. They had nothing in common with us, their ancestors of the afterglow.
Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.
The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile, and ultimately lethal.
There was despair and loneliness.
There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. There
was an age of suicide, as the finest of humanity chose self-destruction against further
purposeless time and struggle.
The great rivers of mind guttered and dried.
But some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to the darkness, to
accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably old.
And, at last, they realized that this was wrong. It wasn't supposed to have been like this.
Burning the last of the universe's resources, the final down-streamers-dogged, all but insane-
reached to the deepest past. And-oh.
Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon. It's starting-
PART ONE
Bootstrap
What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of
Time?
William Shakespeare
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Emma Stoney
Of course Emma had known that Reid Malenfant-failed astronaut, her ex-husband, her current boss-
had been buying up space shuttle rocket engines and static-firing them in the California desert.
She'd thought it was all part of an elaborate waste-disposal plan.
She hadn't known he was planning to use the rockets to reach the asteroids.
Not until Cornelius Taine told her about it.
About that, and a lot more besides.
"Ms. Stoney."
The voice was soft, dry, and it startled her. Emma straightened up from her softscreen.
There was a man standing before her, here in the pastel light of her Las Vegas office: a thin
Caucasian, 1980s pinstripe suit, neatly cropped hair. "I surprised you. I'm sorry. My name's
Cornelius," he said. "Cornelius Taine."
Neutral accent. Boston? He looked about forty. She saw no sign of cosmetic enhancement. High
cheekbones. Stress muscles around his eyes.
How the hell had he gotten in here?
She reached for the security touchpad under her desk. "I didn't notice you come in."
He smiled. He seemed calm, rational, businesslike. She lifted her finger off the button.
He stretched out his hand and she shook it; his palm was dry and soft, as if even his perspiration
was under control. But she didn't enjoy the touch. Like handling a lizard, she thought. She let go
of the hand quickly.
She said, "Have we met before?"
"No. But I know of you. Your picture is in the company reports. Not to mention the gossip sites,
from time to time. Your complicated personal history with Reid Malenfant."
He was making her uncomfortable. "Malenfant is kind of high profile," she conceded.
"You call him Malenfant" He nodded, as if storing away the fact.
"You're with the corporation, Mr. Taine?"
"Actually it's Doctor. But please, call me Cornelius."
"Medical doctor?"
"The other sort." He waved a hand. "Academic. Mathematics, actually. A long time ago. Yes, in a
manner of speaking, I am with Bootstrap. I represent one of your major shareholder groups. That's
what got me past your very conscientious secretary in the outer office."
"Shareholders? Which group?"
"We work through a number of dummies." He looked at her desk. "No doubt when you get back to your
softscreen you'll soon be able to determine which, and the extent of our holdings. Ultimately, I
work for Eschatology, Inc."
Oh, shit. Eschatology, as far as she knew, was one of those UFO-hunting nut groups that were
attracted to Malenfant's enterprises like flies.
He watched her, apparently knowing what she was thinking.
"Why are you here, Dr. Taine?"
"Cornelius, please. Naturally we wish to check on how your husband is using our money."
"Ex-husband. You can do that through the company reports or the press."
He leaned forward. "But I don't recall any news releases about this waste-reduction enterprise in
the Mojave."
"You're talking about the rocket plant. It's a new project," she said vaguely. "Speculative."
He smiled. "Your loyalty is admirable. But you've no need to defend Malenfant, Ms. Stoney. I'm not
here to criticize or obstruct. Divert, perhaps."
"Divert what?"
"The trajectory of Reid Malenfant's covert activities. I'm talking about his true purpose, beneath
all the misdirection."
"True purpose?"
"Come now. You don't think anyone believes an entreprene with Malenfant's track record is
reconditioning man-rated rocket engines just to burn industrial waste, do you?" He studied her.
"Or perhaps you truly don't know the truth. How remarkable. In that case we both have much to
learn." He smiled easily. "We believe Malenfant's motives are sound-that's why we invest in him-
although his objectives are too narrow. I saw his speech in Delaware the other night. Impressive
stuff: colonizing the Galaxy, immortality for humankind. Of course, he hasn't thought it through."
"Would you believe me if I said I don't know what the hell you're talking about?"
"Oh, yes." He eyed her. His eyes were a pale blue, the color of the skies of her California
childhood, long gone. "Yes, now that I've met you, I believe you. Perhaps we understand your ex-
husband better than you do."
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"And what is it you understand about him?"
"That he's the only man who can save the human race from the coming catastrophe." He said it
without inflection.
She had absolutely no idea how to reply. The moment stretched.
Once more she wondered if this man was dangerous.
On impulse, she decided to cancel the rest of her day and drive out to Malenfant's desert
operation. Maybe, all things considered, it was time to see it for herself. And she invited
Cornelius along for the ride.
She called ahead to let Malenfant know she was on the way. But, working on the principle that she
should never miss a chance to make Malenfant's life more difficult, she didn't warn him about
Cornelius Taine.
Out of Vegas she took the 1-15, the main route to L.A. 300 miles away. Out of town she was able to
cut in the SmartDrive. The car's limiter, controlled by the invisible web of satellites far above,
switched out as the automatic control took over, and her speed rose smoothly through 150 miles per
hour.
As the sun climbed, the air grew hotter. She rolled up her window, felt the air-conditioning cool
and moisten the air.
Without warning Cornelius said, as if resuming an interrupted conversation, "Yes, the Delaware
speech was interesting. But something of a throwback for Malenfant. He's usually much more
discreet about his true ambitions."
When Malenfant had first started making money, as a small-scale aerospace consultant, he had
spread himself over the media arguing for an expansion of American effort in space: a new
generation of heavy launchers, new manned vehicles, a return to the Moon. He talked about the
riches waiting in space, escape from Malthusian limits to growth, the ability to save the species
from such calamities as an asteroid collision with the Earth, and so forth. The usual space-buff
propaganda.
"The image Malenfant built of himself was clear," Cornelius said. "Here was a man who was rich and
was destined to get richer, and who was clearly prepared to throw some of his money at the old
dreams of space. But then his businesses started to struggle. Isn't that true?"
It was true. Investors had grown wary of this talk-show visionary. Space was important for
business, but business only cared about the constellations of utilitarian satellites in low Earth
orbit, for communications and weather and surveillance. Thus far and no farther.
And Malenfant attracted no support from serious agencies- particularly from NASA. NASA had long
grown wary of frightening away its political backers by thinking too big, and was focused on doing
sexy science with small, cheap, unmanned probes while sustaining the careers and empires
associated with the giant bureaucracy that ran the manned -space program, with its aging shuttle
fleet and a half-built and much-delayed space station.
In fact Malenfant himself started to attract unwelcome personal attention. There were barroom
psychoanalysts all over the media who found a common pattern in his failure to have kids, his
frustrated ambition to fly in space, and his lofty ambitions for the future of humankind. And then
there were the kooks-the conspiracy theorists, the UFO nuts, the post-New Age synthe-sists, the
dreaming obsessives-none of whom had anything to offer Malenfant but bad PR.
Then along had come the yellow babies in Florida, and even NASA space launches were suspended, and
that seemed to be that.
As Cornelius talked, she discreetly booted up the car's soft-screen and referenced Cornelius
Taine.
Thirty-eight years old. Born in Texas, not that you'd know it from the accent. Once a professional
mathematician, an academic. Brilliant was the word used in the brief bio she found.
A full professor at Princeton at twenty-seven. Washed out at thirty.
She couldn't find out why, or what he'd been doing since then. She set off a couple of data miners
to answer those questions for her.
After the yellow babies, Malenfant had regrouped.
He disappeared from the TV screens. He continued to fund educational efforts-books, TV shows,
movies. Emma, working within the Bootstrap corporation, saw no harm in that, nothing but positive
PR, and tax-efficient besides. But in public Malenfant largely withdrew from his propagandizing,
and withheld any investment from what he started to call the "pie-in-the-sky stuff."
And, quietly, he began to build a seriously large business empire. For instance, he had pioneered
the mining of methane as a fuel source from the big high-pressure hydrate deposits on the seabed
off North Carolina. He had leased the technology to other fields, off Norway and Indonesia and
Japan and New Zealand, and bought up shares judiciously. Soon methane production was supplying a
significant percentage of global energy output.
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The giant tents Malenfant's companies had erected over the sea floor, to decompose the hydrates
and trap the gases, had become a symbol of his flair and ambition.
And Malenfant was on his way to becoming remarkably rich.
Space, it seemed, was the place Reid Malenfant had started from, not where he was going.
Until, Emma thought, if Taine is right-this.
"Of course," Cornelius said, "Malenfant's ambition is to be applauded. I mean his real ambition,
beyond this, umm... diversionary froth. I hope you understand this is my basic position. What
grander goal is there to work for than the destiny of the species?" He spread thin fingers. "Man
is an expansive, exploring animal. We conquered Earth with Stone Age technology. Now we need new
resources, new skills to fund our further growth, space to express our differing philosophies." He
smiled. "I have the feeling you don't necessarily share these views."
She shrugged. This was an argument she'd rehearsed with Malenfant many times. "It's such a
gigantic, mechanistic, depressing vision. Maybe we should all just learn to get along with each
other. Then we wouldn't have to go to all the trouble of conquering the Galaxy. What do you
think?"
He laughed. "Your marriage must have been full of fire." And he continued to ask her questions,
trying to draw her out.
Enough. She wasn't prepared to be pumped by this faintly sinister man about her boss, let alone
her ex-husband. She buried herself in e-mails, shutting him out.
Cornelius sat in silence, as still as a basking lizard.
After an hour they reached the California border.
There was a border post here. An unsmiling guard scanned Emma's wrist barcode, her eyes hidden by
insectile camera-laden sunglasses. Since Emma and Cornelius proved to be neither black nor Latino
nor Asian, and did not intend to take up permanent occupancy in the Golden State nor seek
employment there, they were allowed through.
California, Emma thought sourly, is not what it used to be.
Highway 58, heading toward Mojave, took them through the desert. The sun climbed higher, and hard
light fell from a hot, ozone-leached sky. The ground was baked, bleached, flat and hard as a
paving slab, with only gnarled and blackened Joshua trees to challenge the endless horizontals.
Somewhere to her right was Death Valley, which had, in 2004, logged the world's all-time highest
temperature at 139 degrees.
They reached Edwards Air & Space Force Base-or rather they began to drive alongside its chain-link
fence, forty miles of it running along-side the highway. Edwards, with its endless expanse of dry
salt lakes-natural runways-was the legendary home of the test pilot. But from the highway she
could see nothing at all-no planes or hangars or patrolling men-in-black guards. Nothing but miles
of link fence. The accountant in her began, involuntarily, to compute the cost of all that wire.
Still, the closeness of Edwards, with its connotation of 1960s astronaut glamour, was, she was
sure, the reason Malenfant had chosen this area for his newest project. Malenfant's methods with
people were coarse, but he knew the power of symbols.
And it was, indeed, only a little way beyond Edwards that she came to the site of Malenfant's
project.
The main gate was little more than a hole in the fence barred by a crash barrier that carried a
small, almost unobtrusive, Boot-strap corporate logo. The guard was a hefty woman with a small,
dazzling-bright pistol at her hip. Emma's company credentials, appended to the UV barcode ID she
wore on her left wrist, were enough to get her and Cornelius through the gate.
Inside the gate there was a Portakabin, once more displaying the corporate logo. Beyond that there
was more desert. There was no metalled road surface, just tracks snaking to the dusty horizon.
Emma pulled the car over and climbed out. She blinked in the sudden light, felt perspiration start
out of her flesh after a few seconds of the desert's dry, sucking warmth. The shade of the cabin,
even badly air-conditioned, was a relief.
She took in the cabin's contents with a glance. Malenfant's joky company mission statement was
repeated several times: Bootstrap: Making Money in a Closed Economy-Until Something Better Comes
Along. There were display stands showing the usual corporate PR, much of it approved by her, about
the methane extraction fields, and Bootstrap's cleanup activities at Hanford and the Ukraine nuke
plants and Alaska, and so forth.
Bootstrap had tied up a recent youth-oriented sponsorship with Shit Cola, and so there was a lot
of bright pink Shit livery about the stands. Cornea gumbo, Emma thought: too cluttered and bright.
But it defrayed the costs. And the Shit audience-sub-age twenty-five, generally subliterate
consumers of the planet's trendiest soft drink-were showing themselves amenable to subtle
Bootstrap persuasion, mixed in with their diet of endless softsoaps and thongathons.
No evidence here of giant rocket plants in the desert, of course.
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Cornelius was looking around in silence, an amused half smile on his lips. She was finding his
quiet know-all attitude intensely irritating, his silences disturbing.
She heard the whine of an electric engine, a car of some kind pulling up outside. With relief she
stepped out the door.
The car was a late-model Jeep, a bare frame mounted on big fat tires, with a giant solar-cell
carapace glistening like beetle chitin. It carried two people, talking animatedly. The passenger
was a woman unknown to Emma: sixty, perhaps, slim and smart, wearing some kind of trouser suit.
Practical but a little hot, Emma thought.
And the driver was, of course, Reid Malenfant.
Malenfant got out of the car like a whip uncoiling. He bounded up to Emma, grabbed her arms, and
kissed her cheek; his lips were rough, sun-cracked. He was ruinously tall, thin as a snake, bald
as a coot. He was wearing a blue NASA-type jumpsuit and heavy black boots. As usual, he looked
somehow larger than those around him, as if too big for the landscape. She could smell desert dust
on him, hot and dry as a sauna. He said, "What kept you?"
She hissed, "You've a hell of a nerve, Malenfant. What are you up to now?"
"Later," he whispered. The woman with him was climbing out of the car with caution, but she seemed
limber enough. Malenfant said to Emma, "Do you know Maura Della?" ;
"Representative Della? By reputation."
Maura Della stepped forward, a thin smile on her lips. "Ms. Stoney. He's told me all about you."
"I bet he has." Emma shook her hand; Della's grip was surprisingly strong, stronger than Cornelius
Taine's, in fact.
Malenfant said, "I'm trying to win the representative's support for the project here... But I
suspect I've a little way to go yet."
"Damn right," Della said. "Frankly it seems incredible to me that you can attempt to build an eco-
friendly project around rocket engines."
Malenfant pulled a face at Emma. "You can tell we're in the middle of an argument here."
"We sure are," Della said.
Malenfant fetched plastic water bottles from the car and handed them out while Maura Della kept on
talking. "Look," she said, "the space shuttle actually dumps more exhaust products into the
atmosphere than any other current launcher. Water, hydrogen, hydrogen chloride, and nitrogen
oxides. The chloride can damage the ozone layer-"
"If it got into the stratosphere," Malenfant said amiably, "which it doesn't, because it rains out
first."
"Sixty-five percent of it does. The rest escapes. Anyhow there are other effects. Ozone depletion
because of the deposition of frozen water and aluminum oxide. Global warming contributions from
carbon dioxide and particulates. Acid rain from the hydrogen chloride and the NOX products-"
"Limited to a half mile around the launch site."
"But there. Anyhow there are also the toxins associated with rocket launches, which only need to
be present in small amounts. Nitrogen let can cause acute pulmonary edemas, hy-drazine is
carcinogenic, and there are old studies linking aluminum with Alzheimer's."
Malenfant barked laughter. "The aluminum in rocket motors is one hundredth of one percent of the
total U.S. annual production. We'd have to be launching like Buck Rogers to do any real damage."
"Tell that to the mothers of the Florida yellow babies," Della said grimly.
It had been a massive scandal. Medical studies had shown a series of birth abnormalities showing
up in Daytona, Orlando, and other communities close to Cape Canaveral, in Florida. Abnormal
livers, faulty hearts, some external defects; a plague of jaundice, sometimes associated with
serious neurological diseases. Yellow babies.
Naturally Malenfant was prepared for this. "First of all," he said evenly, "the medicos are split
over whether the cluster exists at all. And even if it does, who the hell knows what the cause
is?"
Della shook her head. "Heptyl has been detected in soil and plants. Along the east coast of
Florida it reaches as much as point three milligrams per kilogram-"
Emma asked, "Heptyl?"
"Dimethyl hydrazine. Unburned rocket fuel. Highly toxic; hydrazine compounds are notorious liver
and central nervous system poisons. Furthermore we know it can linger for years in bodies of
water, rivers, and marshes." Della smiled thinly. "I'm sorry. I guess we got a little worked up,
driving around out here. As you probably know, Malenfant has been kibitzing Congress for some
time. Me specifically. I thought I should come see if this rocket shop of his is just another
hobby-club tax write-off, or something serious."
Emma nodded. Right now she didn't see why she should make life easy for Malenfant. "He calls you
Bill Proxmire in a skirt." Proxmire had been a notorious NASA-opposing senator of the late
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twentieth century.
Maura Della smiled. "Well, I don't wear skirts much. But I'll take it as a compliment."
"Damn right," Malenfant said easily, utterly unfazed. "Prox-mire was an unthinking opponent of
progress-"
"While I," Della said dryly to Emma, "am a thinking opponent of progress. And therefore, Malenfant
is calculating, amenable to persuasion."
"I told you it was a compliment," Malenfant said.
As the two of them fenced, Cornelius Taine had been all but invisible, standing in the shadow of
the Portakabin's doorway. Now he stepped forward, as if materializing, and smiled at Malenfant.
Cornelius didn't blink in the harsh sunlight, Emma noticed. Maybe he was wearing image-processing
corneal implants.
Malenfant frowned at him, startled. "And who the hell are you?"
Cornelius introduced himself and his company.
Malenfant growled. "Eschatology. I thought I told the guards to keep you kooks out of the
compound."
Emma tugged his sleeve. "I brought him in." She murmured about the shareholding Cornelius
represented. "Take him seriously, Malenfant."
"I'm here to support you, Colonel Malenfant," Cornelius said. "Really. I don't represent any
threat to you."
"Malenfant. Just call me Malenfant." He turned to Della. "I apologize for this. I get these
bullshit artists all the time."
"I suspect you only have yourself to blame for that," Della murmured.
Cornelius Taine was holding up manicured hands. "You have me wrong, Malenfant. We're not psychics.
We are scientists, engineers, economists, statisticians. Thinkers, not dreamers. I myself was
formerly a mathematician, for instance.
"Eschatology has built on the pioneering work of thinkers like Freeman Dyson who, in the 1970s,
began to consider the future scientifically. Since then we, and others, have worked hard to
compile, umm, a road map of the future. In fact, Colonel Malenfant, we already have proof that our
studies of the future are generally successful."
"What proof?"
"We've become rich out of them. Rich enough to invest in you" He smiled.
"Why have you come here today?"
"To emphasize we support you. That is, we support your true objectives. We know about Key Largo,"
Cornelius said.
Della looked confused. "Key Largo? In Florida?"
The name meant nothing to Emma. But she saw it had caught Malenfant off balance.
"This is too complicated for me," Malenfant said at last. "Get in the Jeep. Please. We've got some
hardware to see. Now that I do understand."
Meekly, harboring their own thoughts, they obeyed.
It was a three-mile drive to the test stand, farther than Emma had expected. Bootstrap owned a big
piece of desert, it seemed.
Malenfant's base here was like a miniaturized version of Edwards: miles of chain-link fence
cutting out a hole in the desert, a hole within which exotic technology lurked, the scent of other
worlds.
But there was a lot of plant here: fuel tanks and hangarlike buildings and skeletal test stands.
Malenfant just drove past it all without comment or explanation. Was there a secret purpose here,
more equipment than could be explained away by the waste-disposal cover story?
Malenfant and Maura Della continued to argue about space and rockets. Cornelius Taine was oddly
detached. He sat apparently relaxed, hands neatly folded before him, gaze sweeping over the
desert, as the babble of chemical names and statistics went on. There was something repellent
about his surface of self-containment.
Emma was financial controller of Bootstrap-not to mention Malenfant's ex-wife-but that meant
little to Malenfant in terms of openness and sharing of information with her. She knew he did rely
on her to keep the company within the fiscal regulations, though. And that meant that, in a
bizarre way, he trusted her to break through his elaborate webs of deceit and concealment in time
to comply with the reporting rules. It was a kind of dance between them, a game of mutual
dependence played to unspoken conventions.
In a way, she admitted to herself, she enjoyed it.
But she did wonder-if Cornelius turned out to be right-if Malenfant had gone too far this time.
Secret rocket ships in the desert? So 1950s, Malenfant...
Still, here in this desert, just a few score miles from Edwards itself, Reid Malenfant-supple,
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tanned, vigorous, cheerful- seemed at home. Much more than in a boardroom in Vegas or Manhattan or
D.C. He looked like what he was, she thought-or rather what he had always wanted to be-a Right
Stuff pilot of the old school, maybe somebody who could have gotten all the way into space
himself.
But, of course, it hadn't worked out that way.
They reached the engine test facility. It was a big open box of scaffolding and girders, with
zigzag walkways scribbled across the structure, and a giant crane peering over the top of
everything. Lights sparkled over the rig, bright despite the intensity of the afternoon sun. It
looked like a piece of a chemical factory, unaccountably shipped out here to the dull California
desert. But on a boxy structure at the center of the ugly conglomerate Emma could see, crudely
painted over, a NASA roundel.
And there, as if trapped at the heart of the clumsy industrial metalwork, she saw the slim, snub-
nosed form of a space shuttle external tank: a shape familiar from images of more than a hundred
successful Cape Canaveral launches, and one memory-searing failure. White vapor was venting from
somewhere in the stack, and it wreathed around the girders and tubing, softening the sun's glare.
Oddly, she felt cooler; perhaps the heat capacity of this giant mass of liquid fuel was sufficient
to chill the desert air, her own body.
Malenfant pulled up the Jeep, and they stepped out. Malenfant waved at hard-hatted engineers, who
waved or shouted back, and he guided his party around the facility.
"What we have in there is a kind of mock-up of a space shuttle. We have the external fuel tank, of
course, and a complete aft section, with three main engines in place. Where the rest of the
orbiter would go we have a boilerplate truss section. The shuttle engines we use are obsolete:
They've all flown in space several times, and have been decommissioned. We got the test hardware
from NASA's old shuttle main engine test facility in Mississippi, the Stennis Space Center." He
pointed to a fleet of tankers parked alongside the facility. They were giant eighteen-wheelers,
but against the rig they looked like beetles at the foot of an elephant. "At Stennis they bring in
the fuel, lox, and liquid hydrogen, by barge. We don't have that luxury."
They reached a flame pit, a mighty concrete conduit dug into the desert alongside the test rig.
Malenfant said, "We've already achieved 520-second burns here, equivalent to a full shuttle flight
demonstration test, at one hundred percent thrust." He smiled at Maura Della. "This is the only
place in the world anybody is firing shuttle main engines right now, still the most advanced
rocket engines in the world. We have a nineteen-story-high fuel tank in there, eight hundred tons
of liquid fuel chilled through three hundred degrees or below. When the engines fire up, the turbo
pumps work at forty thousand revs per minute, a thousand gallons of fuel are consumed every second-
"
"All very impressive, Malenfant," Della said, "but I'm hardly likely to be overwhelmed by
engineering gosh-wow numbers. This isn't the 1960s. You really think you need to assemble all this
space hardware just to lose a little waste?"
"Surely. What we plan is to use rocket combustion chambers as high-temperature, high-volume
incinerators." He led them to a show board, a giant flow diagram showing mass streams, little
rockets with animated yellow flames glowing in their hearts. "We reach two to three thousand
centigrade in there, twice as high as in most commercial incinerators, which are based on rotary
kiln or electric plasma technology. We feed the waste material through at high speed, first to
break it down and then to oxidize it. Any toxic products are removed by a multistage cleansing
process that includes scrubbers to get acidic gases out of the exhaust.
"We think we can process most poisonous industrial byproducts, and also nerve gas and biological
weapons, at a much greater speed and a fraction of the cost of conventional incinerators. We think
we'll be able to process tons of waste every second. We could probably tackle massive ecological
problems, like cleaning out poisoned lakes."
"Getting rich by cleaning the planet," Della said.
Malenfant grinned, and Emma knew he had worked his way onto home ground. "Representative, that's
the philosophy of my corporation. We live in a closed economy. We've girdled the Earth, and we
have to be aware that we're going to have to live with whatever we produce, useful goods or waste.
But, if you can spot the flows of goods and materials and economic value, it's still possible to
get rich."
Cornelius Taine had walked away from the others. Now he was clapping, slowly and softly. Gradually
he caught the atten-
tion of Malenfant and Della.
"Captain Future. I forgot you were here," Malenfant said
sourly.
"Oh, I'm still here. And I have to admire the way you're handling this. The plausibility. I
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believe you're even sincere, on the level of this cover-up."
Maura Della said, "Cover-up? What are you talking about?"
"Key Largo," Cornelius said. "That's what this is really all about. Isn't it, Malenfant?"
Malenfant glowered at him, calculating.
Here we go, Emma thought bleakly. Not for the first time in her life with Malenfant she had
absolutely no idea what was going to come next, as if she were poised over a roller-coaster
drop.
"I watched your Delaware speech the other night," Cornelius
said.
Malenfant looked even more uncomfortable. "Expanding across the Galaxy, all of that? I've given
that talk a dozen times."
"I know," Cornelius said. "And it's admirable. As far as it goes."
"What do you mean?"
"That you haven't thought it through. You say you're planning a way for humankind to live forever.
Getting off the Earth is the first step, et cetera. Fine. But what then? What is forever! Do you
want eternity? If not, what will you settle for? A billion years, a trillion?" He waved a hand at
the sun-drenched sky. "The universe won't always be as hospitable as this warm bath of energy and
light. Far downstream-"
"Downstream?"
"I mean, in the far future-the stars will die. It is going to be cold and dark, a universe of
shadows. Do you hope that humans, or human descendants, will survive even then? You haven't
thought about this, have you? And yet it's the logical consequence of everything you're striving
for.
"And there is more," Cornelius said. "Perhaps you are right that we are alone in this universe,
the first minds of all. Since the universe is believed to have evolved from others, we may be the
first minds to have emerged in a whole string of cosmoses. That is an astounding thought. And if
it is true, what is our purpose? That, you see, is perhaps the most fundamental question facing
humankind, and ought to shape everything you do, Malenfant. Yet I see no sign in any of your
public statements that you have given any consideration to all this."
The meaning of life? Was this guy for real? But Emma shivered, as if in this hot desert light the
wind of a billion years was sweeping over her.
"We understand, you see," Cornelius said.
"Understand what?"
"That you are trying to initiate a clandestine return to space here."
"Bull hockey," Malenfant barked.
Emma and Maura Della spoke together.
"Malenfant, he alleged this earlier-"
"If this is true-"
"Oh, it's true," Cornelius said. "Come clean, Malenfant. The truth is he wants to do more than
fire offrockets to burn waste. He wants to build a rocket ship-in fact a fleet of rocket ships-and
launch them from here, the heart of the desert, and send them all the way to the asteroids."
Malenfant said nothing.
Della was visibly angry. "This is not what I came here for."
Cornelius said, "Malenfant, we back you. A mission to an NEO, a near-Earth object, makes obvious
economic and technical sense: the first step in any expansion off-planet, in the short to medium
term. And in the long term, it could make the difference."
"What difference?" Della said.
"The difference," Cornelius said easily, "between the survival of the human species, and its
extinction."
"So is that what you came to tell me, you swivel-eyed freak?" Malenfant snapped. "That I get to
save the world?"
"Actually we think it's possible," Cornelius said evenly.
Della frowned, eyebrows arched skeptically. "Really. So tell us how the world will end."
"We don't know how. We think we know when, however. Two hundred years from now."
The number-its blunt precision-startled them to silence.
Malenfant looked from one to the other-the suspicious ex-wife, the frowning congresswoman, the
mysterious prophet- and Emma saw he was, rarely for him, hemmed in.
Malenfant drove them back to the Portakabin. They traveled in silence, sunk in their respective
moods, wary of each other. Only Cornelius, self-absorbed, seemed in any way content.
At the cabin Malenfant served them drinks-beer and soda and water-and they stood in the California
desert.
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Voices drifted over the baked ground, amplified and distorted, as a slow countdown proceeded.
Malenfant kept checking his watch. It was a fat, clunky Rolex. No implants or active tattoos for
Reid Malenfant, no sir. For a man with his eye on the future, Emma thought, he often seemed wedded
to the past.
The firing started.
Emma saw a spark of light, an almost invisible flame at the base of the stand, billowing white
smoke. And then the noise came, a nonlinear crackle tearing at the air. The ground shook, as if
she were witnessing some massive natural phenomenon, a waterfall or an earthquake, perhaps. But
this was nothing natural.
Malenfant had once taken her to see a shuttle launch. She'd had tears in her eyes then, from sheer
exhilaration at the man-made power of the thing. And there were tears now, she found to her
reluctant surprise, even at the sight of this pathetic, cut-down half ship, trapped in its steel
cage and bolted to the Earth.
"Cornelius is right. Isn't he, Malenfant?" she said. "You've been lying to me for months. Years,
maybe."
Malenfant touched her arm. "It's a long story."
"I know. I've lived it. Damn you," she whispered. "There's a lot of unfinished business here,
Malenfant."
"We'll handle it," Malenfant said. "We can handle this guy Cornelius and his band of airheads. We
can handle anybody. This is just the beginning."
Cornelius Taine watched, eyes opaque.
Bill Tybee
My name is Bill Tybee.
Is this thing working? Oh, shit. Start again.
Hi. My name is Bill Tybee, and this is my diary.
Well, kind of. It's really a letter for you, June. It's a shame they won't let us talk directly,
but I hope this makes up for your not being home for your birthday, a little ways anyhow. You know
Tom and little Billie are missing you. I'll send you another at Christmas if you aren't here, and
I'll keep a copy at home so we can all watch it together.
Come see the house.
Here's the living room. Sorry, I folded up the cam. There. Can you see now? You notice I got the
video wall replaced, finally. Although I hate to think what the down payments are going to do to
our bank balance. Maybe we could have got by with the old one, just the hundred channels, what do
you think? Oh, I got the solar-cell roof replaced too. That storm was a bitch.
Here's Billie's bedroom. I'm whispering because she's asleep. She loves the hologram mobile you
sent her. Everybody says how smart she is. Same as her brother. I mean it. Even the doctors agree
about Billie; they're both off the, what did they say, the percentile charts, way off. You managed
to give birth to two geniuses here, June. I know they don't get it from their father!
I'll kiss her for you. There you go, sweet pea. One from me too.
Here we are in the bathroom. Now, June, I know it's not much as part of the guided tour. But I
just want to show you this stuff because you're not to worry about it. Here's my med-alert ribbon,
this cute silver thing. See? I have to wear it every time I leave the house, and I ought to wear
it indoors too. And here are the pills I have to take every day, in this bubble packet. The
specialist says they're not just drugs but also little miniature machines, tumor-busters that go
prowling around my bloodstream looking for the defective cells before breaking themselves up and
flushing them out of, well, I won't show you out of where. Here I am taking my pill for today.
See? Gone. Nothing to worry about.
The Big C just ain't what it used to be. Something you have to live with, to manage, like
diabetes, right?
Come on. Let's go see if Tom will let us into his room. He loves those star pictures you sent him.
He's been pinning them up on his wall...
Emma Stoney
Emma was still furious when she drove into work, the morning after her trip to the plant.
Even this early on an August morning, the Vegas streets were thronged. People in gaudy artificial
fabrics strolled past the giant casinos: the venerable Caesar's Palace and the Luxor and the
Sands, the newTwenCen Park with its cartoon reconstructions of '30s gangster-land Chicago and '60s
Space Age Florida and '80s yuppie-era Wall Street. The endless lights and laser displays made a
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摘要：

file:///F|/rah/Stephen%20Baxter/Baxter,%20Stephen%20-%20Manifold%20Time.\txtManifold:TimeStephenBaxterTotwospacecadets:Mynephew,JamesBaxterKentJoosten,NASAReidMalenfantYouknowme.AndyouknowI'maspacecadet.YouknowI'vecampaignedfor,amongotherthings,privateminingexpedit\ionstotheasteroids.Infact,inthepas...

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