Phase Space (56 page)

And, let me say, we both preferred talking philosophy and the old times to mulling over Demograph Draft horror stories.

I don’t think either of us lost much sleep over those dimming stars.

It was kind of a relief to find that our problems were only cosmological – that it was indeed the universe that was at fault and not our craft. We remained calm, and continued to do our bits of science, and to downlink our results and progress reports, whether or not anybody could hear us.

If that sounds peculiar, you have to remember that neither of us were meant to survive the mission anyhow.

The stars winked out one by one, fading into a redness like the inside of my eyelid. I admit my heart thumped a bit on the day we lost the sun.

But the thing of it was, we could see something ahead. Something new.

Grey stars.

Not Proxima Centauri, though. Not really stars at all, in fact. Just a scattering of grey lights around the sky. Gurzadian said they looked like quasars. He was scared. None of this made sense to him; he couldn’t figure out what we were seeing, what had happened to the stars.

As for me I felt kind of cheated. It’s no longer clear to me if Proxima even exists, or if it – and its planetary system – aren’t just some artefact of the huge shell which surrounds us. Damn it, Proxima
ought
to exist. Who the hell has the right to take away man’s nearest star – the dreams of my boyhood – and, worse, to render my mission meaningless, a vain flight in pursuit of a mirage?

I remember the day I was given the grey star on my palm, a mark that I was too old to be given a job rather than some younger person. I marched to the welfare office and I wore that star with pride, damn it. I still have it here, a hundred AU from Sol.

But it got worse.

The life-extending technologies, like telomerase, started to be withdrawn. And they introduced the confiscation of assets at age eighty. Of course we’d have voted it down, if they hadn’t taken the vote away from us first, along with our drivers’ licences. Disenfranchizement and enslavement. What kind of society supports
that
?

We bore it all. It was a bad day, though, when they broke up the nursing homes and retirement communities, and forced us all into the grey gulags, all of us whose families would not shelter us.

We watched that shoot-out in West Virginia, a bunch of stay-put old soldiers pitting themselves against the FBI, and we cheered ourselves hoarse.

In the end, of course, we couldn’t win.

When we didn’t die off fast enough, they went further.

It was a couple of days after we lost the sun that the biotech module blew. I was in the base block at the time, changing carbon dioxide scrubber canisters.

There was a thud, a groan of strained metal, a flurry of red lights, a wailing klaxon.

I did what I was trained to do, which was to stay absolutely still. If there was a bad leak the air would gush out of the ship, and my ears would pop suddenly and painfully, which would be about the last thing I would know about.

To my relief I could feel the leak was a slow one.

And then Gurzadian came barrelling past me, pulling his way to the transfer node. When we got there he began pulling out the cables and ducts that snaked into the biotech module, because that, he said, was where the leak was, and we had to get the hatch clear before we could close it.

It took half an hour. Lousy design, I guess. Gurzadian said he’d been
expecting
a seam to blow for a couple of days.
Geezer
was being crushed by those damn space-time stresses. I just watched the barometer creep down to the 540 millibar mark, where we’d start to lose consciousness.

Then the power failed, all over the ship. Dim emergency lights came on, and the cabin lights and instrument panels went dead, and the banging of the pumps and fans fell silent.

My ears started to pop again, and I could feel my lungs pulling at the thinning air. Some seam had split wide open.

Gurzadian pulled out the last cables by main force, and dived into the biotech module. Before I could stop him he pulled the hatch closed behind him, and held it there until the pressure difference forced it closed. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do to get it open.

I worked fast. I got that transfer node sealed off, suited up, and went in after Gurzadian. Too late, of course.

The Demograph Draft put us back to work. But it was work you wouldn’t want to expend a young life on, or even an expensive qubit AI.

So you had spry eighty-year-olds riding plastic cars across the Mid-East deserts, clearing mines for the combat soldiers marching behind. You had ninety-year-olds in flimsy rad suits going in to clear out Hanford, and the closed Russian cities near Chelyabinsk and Tomsk where they used to manufacture weapons-grade uranium, and so forth.

You had centenarians sent off in one-way Rube Goldberg spaceships to the Moon and Mars and the stars.

But if you were too frail, if you failed all the suitability assessments, there were always the happy booths, a whole block of them in every grey gulag. The final demographic adjustment.

Here’s what always brought tears to my eyes: the fact that we always marched into the places they sent us – even the happy booths – singing and waving and
smiling.
Mine is a generation that understands duty, a generation that risked their lives over and over to leave a legacy for our children, and we are doing it over again now. You can call that a small-town value if you like. The first American astronauts all came from out-of-the-way communities, and small-town values marked us out. It seems to me that values diminish in proportion to the growth of a community, which explains a great deal of the world we see today.

In my opinion it was those core values which led Gurzadian to sacrifice himself for me and the mission. And I would have done exactly the same for him.

I wrapped him in his country’s flag and said a few words. I pushed him out through a science airlock. I could see him receding from the ship, into the darkness, lit only by the lights of the cluster. Just before I lost him he became a smudge against the grey stars, smeared out by the funny space around me.

I grieved, of course. But I won’t dwell on the loss. Test pilots have always been killed with regularity. And that, whatever the designers of this mission intended, is what we have been: the test pilots of man’s first starship.

I went through Gurzadian’s stuff. It was like when Jenna died. All his jumble and clutter was where he left it, and when I sorted it I knew he was never coming back to disorder it again. I found a couple of last messages for his family – a handful of grandkids – and downlinked them, in hope.

I moved into the base block, because that’s closest to the ship’s centre of gravity, and it’s about the bulkiest piece of shit anyhow. It should survive the space-time stress longer than the other modules. If anyone wants my skinny ass because I gave up the science programs, they can have it.

A couple of days ago I heard a bang, which could have been the materials science module failing. But the instruments in the astrophysics module are working still. I can even get an image out of the Cassegrain.

All I can see is grey light. Quasars.

Here’s what I think.

I think I’m coming out the other side of the barrier that surrounds the solar system. I think I’m seeing the universe as it really is.

Young.
Still in its dark age, just as Gurzadian described it.

We – the solar system – are stuck in some kind of M-theory bubble. What we see from the Earth, looking out through the enclosing barrier, is an image of a much older universe. But it isn’t real. It can’t be.

I think this is all some kind of experiment.
Somebody
out there in the real, young, dark-age universe is fast-forwarding a chunk of space, to see how it all turns out. And we live in that chunk.

I like the irony, incidentally. Here I am, the first star traveller, sent out here because I’m an old and useless fucker. And yet I find the universe is younger than anyone thought.

Anyway that’s your resolution to the Fermi paradox, Gurzadian, old buddy.
They
were here all the time, all around us. Playing with us. I wonder what they think of us, of a society that sends its old people out to die in the dark, alone.

I’ve considered cutting this short. I have a number of options from the medical kit. Or I could simply open the hatch. Sitting in this metal tube and waiting for the walls to cave in doesn’t appeal.

It’s time to get off my soap-box. I had the great good fortune to participate in a common dream to test the limits of mankind’s imagination and daring. It is, I hope, a dream I have passed on to those who read this account. The stars may be gone, but we still have the sun and its children; and what lies beyond this barrier may be far more strange and wonderful than we ever imagined.

You see, I’ve come to think this bubble around our universe is maybe some kind of eggshell we have to break out of.

Or maybe it’s no coincidence that we’ve gotten stuck like this just as we develop a space-bending star drive. Maybe this is flypaper.

Whatever, I’m confident that someday – in bigger and better ships than
Geezer
– we’ll be able to break out.

I will say that we are not the same America I grew up in, but we can be again. Maybe the challenge of taking on whoever it was dared to put us inside this cosmic box will be the making of us.

I’ve decided I will stick around a little longer. Maybe I’ll luck out and see the first stars come out, that Christmas tree light-up Gurzadian talked about. I always did like Christmas.

(Author’s note: I was sent the document below anonymously. The document itself, a photocopy, is government-speak, bland to the point of unreadability. But the notes scribbled in the margins are intriguing.)

United States General Accounting Office

GAO report to the Honorable William X. Lambie,

House of Representatives

June 1998

GOVERNMENT RECORDS

Results of a Search for Records Concerning the 1983 Explosion

near Cross Fork, Nevada

SUMMARY ONLY

GAO/NSRAF-96–244

From: United States General Accounting Office, Washington, DC 20548. National Security and International Affairs Division. June 24, 1998.

To: The Honorable William X Lambie, House of Representatives.

Dear Mr Lambie:

After fifteen years, speculation continues on the truth of the large explosion which is alleged to have taken place at a covert US military research facility in Nevada.

Some observers speculate that the explosion was the destruction of a conventional rocket; others that it was caused by the crash of an aircraft, perhaps of an extraterrestrial nature; others that agencies of the government have been engaged in a misinformation campaign to conceal some deeper truth, such as a successful launch of some space vehicle; others that this was the demolition of a covert military facility.

In its 1984 official report and since, the Air Force has denied the reality of the explosion.

Concerned that the Department of Defense may not have provided you with all available information on the incident, you asked us to determine any government records concerning the incident. We examined a wide range of classified and unclassified documents dating from 1965 through the 1980s. The full scope and methodology of our work are detailed in the full report …

Sir:

I read your counterfactual ‘novel’. About NASA going on to Mars in the 1980s, instead of shutting everything down after Apollo? What a crock.

Counterfactuality does not serve the needs of the truth. But now, at last, the truth is starting to come out.

And the truth is, people have been to Mars.

They are walking around among us right now. And nobody knows about it.

Of course much of the data returned by the old Mars probes has always been kept from the public. These include: