Phase Space (40 page)

‘Lon’ for tomorrow,’ Mary echoed, seeking to comfort her.

‘Yes. But
you
do not dream of the future, do you? For you there is only today. Here especially, with your Long Day and your Long Night, as if a whole year is made of one tremendous day.’

Overhead, a single bright star appeared.

Nemoto gasped. ‘The first star since the spring. How marvellous, how beautiful, how fragile.’ She settled back on her bundle of skins. ‘You know, the stars here are the same – I mean the same as those that surround the world where I grew up, the Blue Earth. But the way they swim around the sky is not the same.’ She was trying to raise her arm, perhaps to point, but could not. ‘You have a different pole star here. It is somewhere in Leo, near the sky’s equator. I cannot determine which … Your world is tipped over, you see, like Uranus, like a top lying on its side; that is how the Big Whack shaped it here. And so for six months, when your pole points at the sun, you have endless light; and for six months endless dark … Do you follow me? No, I am sure you do not.’ She coughed, and seemed to sink deeper into the skins. ‘All my life I have sought to understand. I believe I would have pursued the same course whichever of our splintered worlds I had been born into. And yet, and yet –’ She arched her back, and Mary laid her huge hands on Nemoto’s forehead, trying to soothe her. ‘And yet I die alone.’

Mary took her hand. It was delicate, like a child’s. ‘Not alone,’ she said.

‘Ah. I have you, don’t I, Mary? I have a friend. That is something, isn’t it? That is an achievement …’ Nemoto tried to squeeze Mary’s hand; it was the gentlest of touches.

And the sun, as if apologetically, slid beneath the horizon. Crimson light towered into the sky.

There are no books here. There is nothing like writing of any kind. And there is no art: no paintings on animal skins or cave walls, no tattoos, not so much as a dab of crushed rock on a child’s face.

As a result, the Hams’ world is a startlingly drab place, lacking art and story.

To me, a beautiful sunset is a comforting reminder of home, a symbol of renewal, a sign of hope for a better day tomorrow. But to the Hams, I believe, a sunset is just a sunset. But every sunset is like the first they have ever seen.

They are clearly aware of past and future, of change within their lives. They care for each other. They will show concern over another’s wounds, and lavish attention on a sickly infant. They show pain, and fear, a great sense of loss when a loved one dies
–
and a deep awareness of their own mortality.

But they are quite without religion.

Think what that means. Every morning Mary must wake up, as alert and conscious as I am, and she must face the horror of life full in the face
–
without escape, without illusion, without consolation.

As for me, I have never abandoned my shining thread of hope that someday I will get out of here
–
without that I would fear for my sanity. But perhaps that is just my
Homo sapiens
illusion, my consolation.

Before the sun disappeared again, Mary had placed her friend in the ground, the ground of this Grey Earth.

The memory of Nemoto faded, as memories will.

But sometimes, sparked by the scent of the breeze that blew off the sea – a scent of different places – she would think of Nemoto, who had died far from home, but who had not died alone.

A blue flash, a moment of searing pain.

Madeleine Meacher was home.

She had fled the solar system at a time of war. The sun itself had been under attack, from interstellar bandits called the Crackers. Thanks to Einstein, she had arrived home from the stars a
hundred thousand years
later.

She waited in trepidation for data.

His birth was violent. He was expelled from warm red-dark into black and white and
cold,
a cold that dug into his flesh immediately.

He hit a hard white surface and rolled onto his back.

He tried to lift his head. He found himself inside a little fat body, grey fur soaked in a ruddy liquid that was already freezing.

Above him there was a deep violet-blue speckled with points of light, and two grey discs.
Moons.
The word came from nowhere, into his head. Moons, two of them.

There were people with him, on this surface. Shapeless mounds of fat and fur that towered over him.
Mother.
One of them was his mother. She was speaking to him, gentle wordless murmurs.

He opened his mouth, found it clogged. He spat. Air rushed into his lungs, cold, piercing.

Tenderly his mother licked mucus off his face.

But now the great wind howled across the ice, unimpeded. It grew dark. A flurry of snow fell across him.

His mother grabbed him and tucked him into a fold of skin under her belly. He crawled onto her broad feet, to get off the ice. There was bare skin here, thick with blood vessels, and he snuggled against its heat gratefully. And there was a nipple, from which he could suckle.

He could feel the press of other people around his mother, adding their warmth.

He slept, woke, fed, slept again, barely disturbed by his mother’s shuffling movements.

The sharp urgency of the cold dissipated, and time dissolved.

He could hear his mother’s voice, booming through her big belly. She spoke to him, murmuring; and, gradually, he learned to reply, his own small voice piping against the vast warmth of her stomach. She told him her name –
No-sun –
and she told him about the world: people and ice and rock and food. ‘
Three winters:
one to grow, one to birth, one to die …’ Birth, sex and death. The world, it seemed, was a simple place.

The cold and wind went on, unrelenting. Perhaps it would go on forever.

She told him stories, about human beings.

‘ … We survived the Collision,’ she said. ‘We are surviving now. Our purpose is to help others. We will never die …’ Over and over.

To help others.
It was good to have a purpose, he thought. It lifted him out of the dull ache of the cold, that reached him even here.

He slept as much as he could.

There were no ships to greet her, no signals from the inner system.

The sun was still shining, though, just as it always had.

Did that mean the Crackers had indeed been repulsed? Or had the sun simply found some new equilibrium, after their meddling?

Madeleine found three giant comets, swooping through the heart of the system. Another was on its way, sailing in from the Oort cloud, due in a century or two.

She sought out Earth.

Too far to make out details. There was oxygen in the air, though. Was that a good sign? Oxygen was reactive. The rocks would rust, taking the oxygen out of the air. Unless there was an agency to replace it. Such as life. If all the life had been scraped off the Earth, how long would it take the oxygen to disappear?

Was Earth alive or dead?

She didn’t know. The alien Gaijin were her allies. They had taken her to the stars and back, in search of Reid Malenfant. But they couldn’t tell her what had become of Earth.

The Earth seemed bright, white. A pale-white dot. Silent.

She sailed towards the inner system, black dread thickening.

No-sun pulled her broad feet out from under him, dumping him onto the hard ice. It was like a second birth. The ice was dazzling white, blinding him.
Spring.

The sun was low to his right, its light hard and flat, and the sky was a deep blue-black over a landscape of rock and scattered scraps of ice. On the other horizon, he saw, the land tilted up to a range of mountains, tall, blood-red in the light of the sun. The mountains were to the west of here, the way the sun would set; to the east lay that barren plain; it was morning, here on the ice.

East. West. Morning. Spring.
The words popped into his head, unbidden.

There was an austere beauty about the world. But nothing moved in it, save human beings.

He looked up at his mother. No-sun was a skinny wreck; her fur hung loose from her bones. She had spent herself in feeding him through the winter, he realized.

He tried to stand. He slithered over the ice, flapping ineffectually at its hard surface, while his mother poked and prodded him.

There was a sound of scraping.

The people had dispersed across the ice. One by one they were starting to scratch at the ice with their long teeth. The adults were gaunt pillars, wasted by the winter. There were other children, little fat balls of fur like himself.

He saw other forms on the ice: long, low, snow heaped up against them, lying still. Here and there fur showed, in pathetic tufts.

‘What are
they
?’

His mother glanced apathetically. ‘Not everybody makes it.’

‘I don’t like it here.’

She laughed, hollowly, and gnawed at the ice. ‘Help me.’

After an unmeasured time they broke through the ice, to a dark liquid beneath.
Water.

When the hole was big enough, No-sun kicked him into it.

He found himself plunged into dark fluid. He tried to breathe, and got a mouthful of chill water. He panicked, helpless, scrabbling. Dark shapes moved around him.

A strong arm wrapped around him, lifted his head into the air. He gasped gratefully.

He was bobbing, with his mother, in one of the holes in the ice. There were other humans here, their furry heads poking out of the water, nostrils flaring as they gulped in air. They nibbled steadily at the edges of the ice.

‘Here’s how you eat,’ No-sun said. She ducked under the surface, pulling him down, and she started to graze at the underside of the ice, scraping at it with her long incisors. When she had a mouthful, she mushed it around to melt the ice, then squirted the water out through her big, overlapping molars and premolars, and munched the remnants.

He tried to copy her, but his gums were soft, his teeth tiny and ineffective.

‘Your teeth will grow,’ his mother said. ‘There’s algae growing in the ice. See the red stuff?’

He saw it, like traces of blood in the ice. Dim understandings stirred.

‘Look after your teeth.’

‘What?’

‘Look at him.’

A fat old man sat on the ice, alone, doleful.

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘His teeth wore out.’ She grinned at him, showing incisors and big canines.

He stared at the old man.

The long struggle of living had begun.

Later, the light started to fade from the sky: purple, black, stars. Above the western mountains there was a curtain of light, red and violet, ghostly, shimmering, semi-transparent.

He gasped in wonder. ‘It’s beautiful.’

She grinned. ‘The night dawn.’

But her voice was uneven; she was being pulled under the water by a heavy grey-pelted body. A snout protruded from the water and bit her neck, drawing blood. ‘Ow,’ she said. ‘Bull –’

He was offended. ‘Is that my father?’

‘The Bull is everybody’s father.’

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘What’s my name?’

She thought for a moment. Then she pointed up, at the sky burning above the mountains like a rocky dream. ‘Night-Dawn,’ she said.

And, in a swirl of bubbles, she slid into the water, laughing.

Triton was gone.

Neptune had a new ring, of chunks of rock and ice that was slowly dispersing. Because of its retrograde orbit, Triton had been doomed anyhow: to spiral closer to Neptune, to be broken up by the increasing tides. But not
yet
; not for hundreds of millions of years.

The asteroids were – sparse. They had been broken up for their resources, sailed away, destroyed in wars. The solar system, it seemed, had been overrun, mined out, just like so many others.