Anticopernicus (3 page)

Maurice looked dolefully at Ange, but said nothing.

—Some might argue, Ange said, with schoolmam severity, that there are already so many people on the planet that the environment is collapsing under the weight.

—That’s
such
nonsense. Such nonsense! I look at it this way: population is pressure. The greater the population, the greater the pressure.

Ange responded cautiously: Yes.

—So we need
more
pressure, that’s what I think. The Earth is like a great champagne bottle; we need
more
pressure, and more, and then we’ll burst the cork and fizz out into the galaxy! I bet that’s how the Cygnics, or whatever they’re called, began their space age. I bet their homeworld, wherever it is, became intolerably crowded, so they just
had
to flee into the cosmos!

This was the most infuriating thing Ange had heard in a long time, and she reacted to her fury characteristically, by withdrawing even further inside herself. Maurice performed his duties, and then sequestered himself in his cabin for whatever monkish devotions his religion required. Ange checked and rechecked the ship, went over the cargo again. She worked methodically to calm her anger. But Ostriker kept in-plugging to check the latest news-updates. The Cygnics had stopped replying to all communications from humankind, she reported. Some took this to be an ominous sign, others said it was entirely in keeping with the eccentricity of the aliens. It hardly mattered.

One night Ange had a dream. She was back in her house. A man clothed entirely in black, with white skin and black eyeballs, stood balanced upon an opened book. ‘Population is self-regulating,’ he said. ‘But we must understand self in the largest way! The Cygnic aliens have come to winnow humanity, and they will destroy a third, and a third more will die of famine and disease after they have gone! Rejoice!’

In the dream, Ange felt exhilarated by this revelation; although as soon as she woke she felt the prickles of guilt. The words stayed with her all day. Could they be prophetic? The aliens, from wheresoe’er they came, had been consistent, really, only in their eccentricity. Like many, Ange assumed this was the index to some deeper non-fit between the two species; they had learned English with apparent fluency, but the fundamental structures of the language did not map onto the way the aliens saw the universe. What if the Cygnics viewed death as a trivial matter? What if they
had
come to harvest humanity? What if the crew of the Leibniz, picked up some bizarre Wellsian plague from their encounter with alienness, something that managed to jump quarantine and ravage the planet?

It was out of her hands, at any rate. She had not been chosen for
that
crew.

And in the end neither Ostriker’s incessance nor Maurice’s gloomy withdrawal, prevented Ange from doing her job. Mars, marmite-red, patched with blotches of yellow and brown, grew larger in the cockpit window every day; and then they fell into Martian orbit. They had arrived; halfway through their commission. Ange brought the ship down into Robinsontown, and the containers were unpacked and replaced with empty tanks, and that was that. After a month in flight, without only twice daily sessions in the elastic stretchers to maintain muscle and bone, even the meagre Martian gravity was burdensome to them. They were entitled to three days downtime; but by general agreement Ange took the ship back into space after a day and a half.

The usual orbital business. The return flight was easier, since Mars-to-Earth was, as it were, downhill. And the they were away again.

Three days into the return flight, the big news broke. The aliens (people had not given up on calling them ‘Cygnics’, despite everything) had gone—departed, vanished, flown away. The period of disbelief, of checking and rechecking the sensor readings, was brief. The aliens’ craft was so large, and displayed so prominent a radiation profile, it could hardly be missed. It was gone. Some said it had rendered itself invisible, via incomprehensible eldritch alien tech; and some even argued that this invisibility was preliminary to the creatures launching a stealth attack on Earth. But most people believed that what seemed to had happened had indeed happened: they had come to our out-of-the-way solar system, they had spoken to us, they had agreed to meet us—provided only that we schlepped out to the Oort cloud, of all places—and
then
they had pissed off, without so much as a goodbye. What did it mean? Debate fizzed and flared wherever humans existed. ‘The swans have departed’ became the most in-plugged song in recording history.

It was certainly an inconvenience for the
Leibniz
; the craft was three weeks from Uranus, but moving so rapidly that a slingshot would only kink their onward path rather than spinning it one-eighty to direct them back in towards the sun. There was hot debate about what to do. Should they continue to the Oort cloud, and hope the aliens returned (they agreed to meet us, after all)—or should they spin about, abandon their carefully pre-plotted there-and-back-again trajectory of arcs and ellipses and curls—instead decelerate by the brute application of fuel, spin about Uranus and batten down for a long slow freefall back to Earth?

—Looks like it was lucky you
didn’t
get that gig on the
Leibniz
, said Ostriker. What if they continue all the way out to the Oorts, and the Cygnics
don’t
meet them? What a wasted journey. I can’t believe they’ve gone! Can you believe they’ve gone, Ange?

—I can, said Mlinko.

—Well
I
can’t. I
can’t
! To come all this way, initiate contact, and then just ... buzz off? Why?

—The universe doesn’t always give us coherent whys, was Maurice’s opinion. Doesn’t often, in fact.

—That can’t be right! It
must
mean something! At the least, Ostriker pressed, very animated and excited, there must be some explanation. Why would they just go?

Ange didn’t say anything, but it seemed to her more than likely that the departure was as random and inexplicable thing as the arrival. She believed (and this belief was as close to religion as she came) that the universe was not structured according to the logic of the human mind, despite the fact—ironically enough, perhaps—that the human mind is unavoidably part of the cosmos. The billions of buzzing homo sapiens brains craved pattern, structure and resolution; they saw the beauty of a story arc in every rainbow’s bend. The cosmos liked structure too, of course; but of a much less complicated, or perhaps it would be truer to say a much more
monotonously replicated
, kind. Hydrogen and helium everywhere in varying alternated clumps; the inverse-square-law everywhere in every direction. Everything existent, nothing mattering. And above all the cosmos had no sense of
story
whatsoever. If aliens arrive in a human story and set up a meeting, why, then there
must
be a pay-off of some kind! But neither set-up nor pay-off was not the logic of the cosmos; and most assuredly the latter was never intrinsically folded neatly inside the former, waiting to germinate. If the aliens had randomly vanished, as they seemed to have done, then that was (Ange thought) just one more unharmonious broken-off piece of the infinitely unharmonious piecemeal cosmos.

Ostriker refused to believe it. She speculated tiresomely about the possible reasons for the Cygnics’ departure. Maybe they had been recalled to their home planet; maybe some warp-technology disaster or FTL-motor-accident had winked the ship out of existence unexpected. Maybe there had been a mutiny aboard the ship. Perhaps (Ostriker waxed creative upon this last idea) different tribes of aliens aboard the vast craft had quarrelled over whether to embrace humanity or destroy us, and the evil aliens had imprisoned the good aliens, until the latter had staged one last desperate counter-coup, destroying their own ship and heroically sacrificing their lives to save the planet of ignorant humankind.

—Not entirely likely, Ange observed drily.

It hardly mattered. The
Leibniz
was instructed to continue on its way, in the hope that the Cygnics would reappear. If they did not, then the craft was to undergo scientific investigation of the Oort cloud (as if there were any science left to do there that probes had not already done!) But the aliens showed no signs of returning. Their prior communications were pored over, in all their prolix eccentricity, for any clues as to their behaviour. People agreed that they had either gone by design, or else had suffered some accident; humanity seemed unable to think of a third possibility. But if the former circumstance obtained then they were presumably unwilling, and if the latter arguably unable, to make the rendezvous previously arranged.

It was all very unsatisfying.

Ange did not find it so, however. On the contrary she found the offkilter non-symmetry of the whole thing actually rather pleasing; pleasing in an
aesthetic
sense. And, even without the actual rendezvous there was no denying that humanity
had
experienced first contact. We now knew for certain we were not alone in the universe. And that had to count for something. Didn’t it?

Surely it did.

Then one morning Maurice did not report for his shift; and Ange and Ostriker overrode his doorlock to find him dead in his harness. It took a half hour to determine what had happened. All those occasions when Maurice had returned to his room to ‘meditate’ he had in fact been indulging his chronic drug habit—addicted, a quick bloodcheck confirmed, both to pinopiates and to the ‘linktin’ pharmakon. It was an overdose of the latter, presumably accidental, that had killed him.

It was a shock, of course; although if Ange were honest she would concede that it was the
fact
of it that was a shock rather than any emotional experience of actual bereavement. After all, she’d hardly known him. Orstriker thought this mildly shocking. We shared this ship with him for weeks and weeks, she noted. Yet we never got to know him!

—He kept himself to himself, Ange said.

—You can see why! How did he get the medical OKs?

—I’ll have to look into that, Ange agreed; although she knew what she would find. It wasn’t beyond the wit of humankind to falsify medical certification. It wasn’t even that expensive.

They bagged the corpse, sealed the bag in medimesh, and stowed it up amongst the ice at the ship’s nose, to keep it cold. Ange took charge of the remainder of Maurice’s illegal stash. She wondered whether she should simply jettison this into space, but when she reported the incident to the corporate offices she was told to retain them for legal reasons.

—The irony is, said Ostriker, temporarily distracted from her endless speculation about the nature and purpose of the Cygnics’ visit, the
irony
is that he had already called the voyage’s one unluck!

—He had, Ange agreed. The mislabelled ice.

—Turns out that wasn’t the voyage’s unluck. That was just a minor inconvenience, after all.
He
is the voyage’s unluck, poor soul.

In a less-than-rational way, Ange found herself darkly pleased by this turn of events. She had, she realised, never believed that the incident with the ice right at the start of the voyage had been enough to defang the possibility of later disaster. But this, a dead crewperson (the first in her entire career, in fact) was unmistakably unlucky. Nobody would argue with that.

They continued earthward, the long slow roll back down the sun’s gravitational slope. Ange and Ostriker had to rejig the shift patterns, but there wasn’t that much to do now that they were fully underway, and it wasn’t too onerous. Despite the death on board, or perhaps because of it (who knows how morbid human happiness truly is?) the mood lightened. Ange found Ostriker less annoying. Her obsessive over-and-over chatter about the alien visitation acquired the flavour of a harmless quirk. Ange found herself more cheerful, for every time she woke after another sleep she knew herself closer to her home.

She worked her shift, and roused Ostriker and went to sleep herself. As she slept she had an elaborate dream about two trees. In one, a pointillist blur of starlings pulsed and flushed around the bare branches, touching down and immediately taking off again, their wings abuzz like insects, like insects, like insects. A brown cloud. By contrast the other tree was bare: black branches like stretched out leather belts, a trunk with the bulgy, structural solidity of black rock. In this second tree there was a single bird, a magpie, and it was clutching the branch upon which it perched with such force, with such improbable strength that the wood was being wrung out like a damp cloth, and sap was dribbling to the ground.

Ange was woken abruptly by a cacophony of ship’s alarms. As she unhooked herself from her harness, scrabbling to regain full consciousness, she knew what had happened. A micrometeorite—dust, rock, ice, at these velocities it hardly mattered what—had struck.

Ange hauled herself through and made her way up the main corridor. The whole ship was shuddering: like a house during an earthquake, or a fat man shaking with fear. If Ange hung in space she was still, but as soon as she reached out and touched the fabric of the craft the vibration communicated itself to her, and her very teeth zizzed in her jaw. The corridor was a chimney, a borehole. It was the inside of a riflebarrel. The corridor flexed and groaned.

She silenced the alarm’s barbaric yawp. Then she checked the schematics.

The bulkheads had all sealed automatically. She worked as quickly as she could checking compartment after compartment and opening these. Each time she passed through a door she shut it behind her. Where there was one micrometeorite there were likely to be more. But she had to get to Ostriker.

She located the forward position where the pinhead meteor had hit. The ship schematic showed that it had come on a freak trajectory, from the side, avoiding the mass of bulked shielding the nose of the craft. Its speed had been its own, then; and not a function of the ship’s own velocity, although it had been going plenty fast enough to enter through the forward 2 hull plate and exit through the forward 7 hull plate. Ange checked the room beyond, found it stable at two thirds pressure, and overrode the bulkhead lock.