Phase Space (47 page)

I splashed my face in the stream. The water felt pure enough to have come out of a tap. I said: ‘I’d like an explanation, I think.’

Celso competently hauled out another fish. (At least it looked like a fish.) ‘Simple,’ he said. ‘The line is a thread from an undergarment. The hook is scavenged from a ration pack. For bait I am using particles of food concentrate. Later we can dig for worms and –’

‘Forget the fishing.’

‘We can eat the fish, just as we can breathe the air.’ He smiled. ‘It is of no species I have ever seen. But it has the same biochemical basis as the fish of Earth’s oceans and rivers. Isn’t that marvellous?
They
knew we were coming – they brought us here, right across the universe – they stocked the streams with fish –’

‘We didn’t come all this way to bloody fish. What’s going on here, Celso?’

He wrapped the line around his wrist and stood up. Then, unexpectedly, he grabbed me by the shoulders and grinned in my face. ‘You are a hero, my friend Michael Malenfant.’

‘A hero? All I did was get out of bed.’

‘But, for you, that step across the threshold of the Bubble was a great and terrible journey indeed.’ He shook me gently.
‘I understand.
We must all do what we can, yes? Come now. We will find wood for a fire, I will build a spit, and we will eat a fine meal.’ He loped barefoot across the grass as if he’d been born to it.

Grumbling, I followed.

Celso gutted the fish with a bit of metal. I couldn’t have done that to save my life. The fish tasted wonderful.

That night we sat by the dying fire. There were no stars, of course, just bands of light on the horizons like twin dawns.

Celso said at length, ‘This place, this segment alone, could swallow more than ten thousand Earths. So much room … And we flew over dozens of other inside-out worlds. I imagine there’s a home for every life form in the universe – perhaps, in fact, a refuge for all logically possible life forms …’

I looked up to the cylinder’s invisible axis. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me the whole thing’s built around a cosmic string. And the power for all the dinky suns comes from the huge currents left over from the Big Bang.’

‘I would guess so. And power for the gravity fields we stand in – although there may be a simpler mechanism. Perhaps the tube is spinning, providing gravity by centripetal forces.’

‘But you’d have to spin the tube at different rates. You know, some of the inhabitants will be from tiny moons, some will be from gas giants …’

‘That’s true.’ He clapped me on the shoulder. ‘We’ll make a scientist of you yet.’

‘Not if I can help it.’ I hunched up, nostalgic for smog and ignorance. ‘But what’s the point of all this?’

‘The point – I think – is that species become extinct.
Even humans …
I did not always work in the algae farms. Once I had higher ambitions.’ He smiled. ‘I would have been an anthropologist, I think. Actually my speciality would have been palaeoanthropology. Extinct homs.’

‘Homs?’

‘Sorry: field slang. Hominids. The lineage of human descent. I did some work, as a student, in the field in the desert heartlands of Kenya. At Olduvai I was privileged to make a key find. It was just a sharp-edged fragment of bone about the size of my thumb, the colour of lava pebbles.’

‘But it was a bit of skull.’

‘Homs don’t leave many fossils, Michael. You very rarely find ribs, for example. Until humans began to bury each other, a hundred thousand years ago, ribs were the first parts of a corpse to be crunched to splinters by the carnivores. It took me months before I learned to pick out the relics, tiny specks against the soil …

‘Well. Believe me, we were very excited. We marked out the site. We broke up the dirt. We began to sieve, looking to separate bits of bone from the grains of soil and stone. After weeks of work you could fit the whole find into a cigarette packet. But that counts as a phenomenal find, in this field.

‘What we had found was a trace of a woman. She was
Homo erectus.
Her kind arose perhaps two million years ago, and became extinct a quarter-million years ago. They had the bodies of modern humans, but smaller brains. But they were highly successful. They migrated out of Africa and covered the Old World.’

I said dryly, ‘Fascinating, Celso. And the significance –’

‘
They are gone,
Michael. This is what my field experiences taught me. Here was another type of human –
extinct.
All that is left is shards of bone from which we have to infer everything – the ancient homs’ appearance, gait, behaviour, social structure, language, culture, tool-making ability – everything we know, or we think we know about them.
Extinction.
It is a brutal, uncompromising termination, disconnecting the past from the future.

‘And for an intelligent species this over-death is an unbearable prospect. Everything that might make a life valuable after death – memory, achievement – is wiped away.
There is nobody even left to grieve.
Do you see?’

He was genuinely agitated; I envied his intensity of emotion. ‘But what has this to do with the builders?’

He lay on his back and stared at the empty sky. ‘I think the builders are planning ahead. I think this is a
refugium,
as the ecologists would say. A place to sit out the cold times to come, the long Ice Age of the universe – a safeguard against extinction.’ He sighed. ‘I think your grandfather understood about extinction, Michael.’

I stared at the fire, my mind drifting. He was thinking of the destiny of mankind. I was just thinking about myself. But then, I hadn’t asked to be here. ‘Maybe this is okay for you. Sun, trees, fishing, mysterious aliens. But I’m a city boy.’

‘I am sorry for you, my friend. But I, too, am far from my family.’

It was a long night, and not a whole lot of laughs.

A new sun slid down the wire. The dew misted away.

I rubbed my eyes; my back was stiff as hell from sleeping unnaturally without a mattress on the ground.

There were two alien Bubbles. They bobbled in the breeze, side by side.

One was ours. Its door gaped; I recognized our kit inside it. Within the second Bubble I thought I could make out two human forms.

I shook Celso awake. ‘We’ve got company.’

We stood before the new vessel. Its hatch opened.

There was a woman; a small boy clung to her. They were a terrified mess. When they recognized Celso –

Look, I have some decency. I took a walk along the stream.

After an hour I rejoined the family. They were having a nice fish breakfast, talking animatedly.

Celso grinned. ‘My friend Michael Malenfant. Please meet my wife, Maria, and Fernando, my son.’

Maria still wore the grimy coverall of an algae tank worker. She said: ‘The Bubble came and scooped me up from work; and Fernando from his school.’

I gaped. ‘The Bubbles have come to Earth?’

They had, it seemed: great gossamer fleets of them, sailing in from the Oort Cloud, an armada perhaps triggered by our foolhardy jaunt.

‘They make the sky shine,’ said the boy, beaming.

‘Of course it is logical,’ said Celso. ‘The aliens would want to reconstruct stable family units.’

‘I wonder how they knew who to bring.’

Celso smiled. ‘I would guess they studied us – or rather the Bubble did – during the journey. Whoever was most in our thoughts would be selected. The puzzles of the human heart must be transparent to the builders of such a monumental construct as this.’

‘We were scared,’ said Fernando proudly, chewing the flesh off a fishy spine.

‘I’ll bet.’ I imagined the scenes in those nightmarish farms as a Bubble came sweeping over the algae beds … ‘So now what? Do you think you’ll stay here?’

Celso took a deep breath. ‘Oh, yes.’

‘Better than the algae farms, huh.’

‘It is more than that. This will be a fine land in which to build a home, and for Fernando to grow. Other people will be brought here soon. We will farm, build cities.’ He took my arm. ‘But you look troubled, my friend. I must not forget you in my happiness. Was no one in your heart during our journey?’

In my hop-skip-and-jump life I’d never made the time to get close enough to anyone to miss them.

He put his hand on my arm. ‘Stay with us.’ His son smiled at me.

Once again I found myself unable to meet Celso’s kind eyes.

Michael, much of my life has been shaped by thinking about the Fermi Paradox. But one thing I never considered was the subtext.

Alone or not alone
–
why do we care so much
?

I think I know now. It’s because we are lonely. On Earth there is nobody closer to us than the chimps; we see nobody like us in the sky.

But then, each of us is alone. I have been alone since your grandmother, Emma, died. And now I’m dying too, Michael; what could be lonelier than that
?

That’s why we care about Fermi. That’s why I care.

Michael, I’m looking at you, here in this damn hospital room with me; you’re just born, just a baby, and you won’t remember me. But I’m glad I got to meet you. I hope you will learn more than I have. That you will be wiser. That you will be happier. That you won’t be alone.

I said, ‘I guess we know the truth about Fermi now. As soon as intelligence emerges on some deadbeat world like Earth, along come the Bubbles to take everybody away. Leaving all the lights on but nobody home. That’s all there is to it.’

‘But what a vast enterprise,’ Celso said. ‘Remember, a key difficulty with the Fermi Paradox has always been consistency. If there is a mechanism that removes intelligent life from the stars and planets, it must do so unfailingly and everywhere: it must be all but omniscient and omnipotent.’

‘So the universe must be full of those damn Bubbles.’

‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘Or perhaps there is only one …’

‘But
why
? Why go to all this trouble, to build this – this vast theme park?’

He grinned. ‘Extinction, Michael. This is a dangerous universe for fragile beings such as ourselves. Left to our own devices, it doesn’t look as if we are smart enough to get through many more centuries, does it? Maybe the Bubbles have come just in time. And remember that life can be readily destroyed – by impact events, volcanism and other instability – by chance events like nearby supernovae or the collision of neutron stars – by more dramatic occurrences like the collision of galaxies – and in the end, of course, all stars will die, all free energy sources dwindle … We are stalked by extinction, Michael; we are all refugees.

‘But one energy source will not fade away: the energy trapped in the cosmic strings. So I think they built this place, and they sent out their trawler-like vessels. The refugium is a defiance of extinction – a mechanism to ensure that life and mind may survive into the unimaginable future –’

I sniffed, looking up at a fake sun. ‘But isn’t that a retreat? This great sink of life isn’t our world. To come here is an end to striving, to ambition, to the autonomy of the species.’ I thought of the Bubbles clustering around Earth, like antibodies around a source of infection. I thought of human cities, New York and London and Beijing, emptied and overgrown like the dismal ruins of Alpha Centauri A-IV.

But Celso said, ‘Not really. They were just thinking of their children. Rather like me, I guess. And there are adventures to be had here. We will design flying machines and go exploring. There may be no limit to the journeys we, or our children, will make, up and down this great corridor, a corridor that encircles the universe, no limit to the intelligences we might meet. And here, sheltered in this refugium, the human species could last
forever …
think of that.’ He studied me. ‘As for you, I didn’t know you were so restless, Michael. Heroism, now wanderlust. You have travelled across half the cosmos, and at the end of your journey you found yourself. Maybe your grandfather’s genes really are working within you.’

The boy spoke around a mouthful of fish. ‘If you are lonely, sir, why don’t you go home?’

I smiled. ‘Easier said than done.’

‘No, really. You know the screen in the Bubble – the one that showed our destination?’