Phase Space (65 page)

He fell silent, gazing at Kate, who had managed to worm her way to the front of the loose pack. He glanced at her name-tag. ‘Ms Manzoni. From –?’

‘I’m freelancing today.’ She forced a smile. She could smell desert dust on him, hot and dry as a sauna.

‘And you think there’s a story in the Fermi Paradox?’

She shrugged, non-committal. ‘I’m more interested in you, Colonel Malenfant.’

He was immediately suspicious, even defensive. ‘Just Malenfant.’

‘Of all the projects you could have undertaken when you were grounded, why front a stunt like this?’

He shrugged. ‘Look, if you want to call this a stunt, fine. But we’re extending the envelope here. Today we’ll prove that we can touch other worlds. Maybe an astronaut is the right face to head up a groundbreaker project like this.’

‘Ex-astronaut.’

His grin faded.

Fishing for an angle, she said, ‘Is that why you’re here? You were born in 1960, weren’t you? So you remember Apollo. But by the time you grew up cheaper and smarter robots had taken over the exploring. Now NASA says that when the International Space Station finally reaches the end of its life, it plans no more manned spaceflight of any sort. Is this laser project a compensation for your wash-out, Malenfant?’

He barked a laugh. ‘You know, you aren’t as smart as you think you are, Ms Manzoni. It’s your brand of personality-oriented cod-psychology bullshit that has brought down –’

‘Are you lonely?’

That pulled him up. ‘What?’

‘The Fermi Paradox is all about loneliness, isn’t it? – the loneliness of mankind, orphaned in an empty universe … Your wife, Emma, died a decade back. I know you have a son, but you never remarried –’

He glared at her. ‘You’re full of shit, lady.’

She returned his glare, satisfied she had hit the mark.

But as she prepared her next question, the auditorium crowd took up chanting along with a big softscreen clock: ‘ … Twenty! … Nineteen! … Eighteen! …’ She looked away, distracted, and Malenfant took the opportunity to move away from her.

She worked her way through the crowd until she could see the big softscreen display at the front of the auditorium. It was a tapestry of more-or-less incomprehensible graphic and digital updates.

She prepared her floating camera drones, and the various pieces of recording technology embedded in her flesh and clothing. The truth was, whatever data came back with those interstellar photons wouldn’t matter; today’s iconic image would be that pure instant of triumph when that faint echo returned from Alpha A-4, and those graphs and charts leapt into jagged animation. And that, and the accompanying swirl of emotions, would be what she must capture.

But in the midst of her routine she found room for a sliver of wonder. This was after all about reaching out to a second Earth, just as Malenfant had said – maybe it was a stunt, but
what
a stunt …

Everybody was growing quiet, all faces turned up to the big softscreen.

The ticking clock moved into the positive.

The shimmering graphs remained flatlined.

There was silence. Then, as nothing continued to happen, a mutter of conversation.

Kate was baffled.
There had been no echo.
How could that be? She knew this was an experiment that would have been accurate to a fraction of a second; there was no possibility of a time error. Either the receiving equipment had somehow failed to work – or else the laser pulse from Earth had gone sailing right through planet Alpha A-4 as if it was an image painted on glass …

She peered around frantically, trying to get a first impression of the principals’ reaction. She saw the back of Malenfant’s head as he stared stolidly at the unresponsive screen, as if willing the displays to change. Veep Della frowned and stroked her chin.

Cornelius Taine was grinning.

Something is very, very wrong here. And you want to know something else
?

Kate floated in the dark, freed of gravity and sensation, listening to her own voice.

‘Tell me,’ he whispered.

It’s getting wronger. They tested the whole set-up the day before with a bounce off a deep-space comet a hundred astronomical units out – twice as far as Pluto. I happen to know they repeated the echo test off that same comet a few hours
after
the Centauri experiment failed.

‘And they couldn’t find the comet.’

You’re getting the idea. Michelangelo shouldn’t have failed. It
couldn’t
have failed …

This was one of her virtual correspondents, an entity (maybe multiple) she knew only as Rodent, his/her/their anonymity protected by layers of encryption and chaff. But the transmission was encoded in her own voice; she liked to imagine it was the other half of herself, dreaming-Kate whispering across her corpus callosum, that bridge between her brain’s hemispheres within which was embedded the implant that had dropped her into this virtual world.

But the images that floated before her now, of angular, expensive machinery, had come from no dream.

The laser burst was generated in low Earth orbit by a nuclear fusion pulse. A trillion watts of power compressed into a fraction of a second. They have been building toys like this for decades, at places like Lawrence Livermore. Got a big boost under Gore-Clinton, and even more under Clinton-Clinton …

Much had been learned about other worlds, even from Earth, by techniques like Michelangelo’s: the cloud-shrouded surface of Venus had first been studied by radar beams emitted from giant ground-based radio telescopes, for instance. But Alpha A-4 was more than seven
thousand
times as far away as Pluto, the solar system’s outermost planet. Michelangelo’s vast outreaching was orders of magnitude more difficult than anything attempted before – and in some quarters had been criticized as premature.

Maybe those critics had been proved right. ‘So the experiment failed. It happens.’

Kate, the laser worked. Look, they could see the damn pulse as it was fired off into the dark.

‘But that’s just the first step. You’re talking about a shot across four light years, of projecting planetary movements across four years’ duration.’ The scientists had had to aim their pulse, not at A-4 itself, but at the place A-4 was expected to be by the time the light pulse got there. It had been a speed-of-light pigeon shoot – but a shoot of staggering precision. ‘And Alpha Centauri is a triple star; what if the planet’s motions were perturbed, or –’

A-4 is so close to its parent that its orbit is as stable as Earth’s. Kate, believe me, this is just Newtonian clockwork; the predictions couldn’t have gone wrong. Likewise the geometry of the reflection. Once those photons were launched, an echo had to come back home.

‘Then maybe the receiving equipment is faulty.’

They were watching for those photons with equipment on Earth, in low Earth orbit, on the Moon, and with the big Trojan-point radio telescope array. Short of the sun going nova, what fault could take down all of that? Kate, Michelangelo had to work. There are inquiries going on at every level from the lab boys to the White House, but they’ll all conclude the same damn thing.

In swam an image of Malenfant, justifying himself on some TV show. ‘There’s nothing wrong with our technology,’ he was saying. ‘So maybe there is something wrong with the universe …’

See
?

Kate sighed. ‘So what’s the story? Obscure space experiment fails in unexplained manner … There’s no meat in that sandwich.’

Do what you do best. Focus on the people. Go find Malenfant. And ask him about
Voyager.

‘
Voyager –
the spacecraft?’

You know, when it fires, that damn laser destroys itself. Makes
a single cry to the stars, then dies, a billion dollars burned up in a fraction of a second. Kind of a neat metaphor for our wonderful military-industrial complex, don’t you think
?

She failed to find Malenfant. She did find his son. She cleared her desk and went to see the son, two days after the failed experiment.

Meanwhile, so far as she could see, the world continued to turn, people went about their business, and the news was the usual buzz of politics and personalities – of Earthbound matters like the water war in the Sahel, the latest Chinese incursion into depopulated Russia, the Attorney General’s continuing string of extra-marital affairs.

Most people knew about the strange news from Alpha Centauri. Few seemed to think it mattered. The truth was, for all the mutterings of Rodent and his ilk, she wasn’t sure herself. She still sensed there was a story here, however.

And she was growing a little scared.

Mike Malenfant, aged 30, lived with his wife, Saranne, in a suburb of Houston called Clear Lake.

He opened the door. ‘Oh. Ms Manzoni.’

‘Call me Kate … Have we met?’

‘No.’ He grinned at her. ‘But Malenfant told me about you, and what you said to him the night of Michelangelo. Seemed to bug him more than the failure itself.’

She thought, He calls his dad by his surname? Father-son rivalry? He didn’t look much like his father: rounder, smaller, with dense black hair he must have inherited from his mother. ‘Uh, would you rather I left?’

‘No. My dad is a little 1970s sometimes. I don’t have a problem with what you do. How did you find me? We keep our name out of the books.’

That wouldn’t have stopped her, she thought. But it had been easier than that. ‘I played a hunch. Malenfant used to live here, with Emma. So I guessed –’

He grinned again. ‘You guessed right. Malenfant will be even more pissed to know he’s so predictable.’ He took her indoors and introduced his wife, Saranne: pretty, heavily pregnant, tired-looking. ‘Tea?’

With a camera drone hovering discreetly at her shoulder, Kate began gently to interview the couple.

Close to the Johnson Space Center, Clear Lake was a place of retro-chic wooden-framed houses backing onto the fractal-edged water. This had long been a favoured domicile of NASA astronauts and their families. When Malenfant’s career had taken him away from Houston and NASA, son Mike had happily – so it seemed – taken over the house he had grown up in, with its battered rowboat still tied up at the back.

Some of what Mike had to say – about the life of a soft-muscled, intellectual boy growing up as the son of America’s favourite maverick astronaut – was illuminating, and might make a useful colour piece some day. So Kate wasn’t being entirely dishonest. But her main objective, of course, was to keep them talking until Malenfant showed up – as he surely would, since she’d sent a provocative note to his message service to say she was coming.

Mike hadn’t followed his father’s career path. He had become a virtual character designer, moderately successful in his own right. Now, with his business-partner wife expecting their first child, this was maybe a peak time of his life. But even so he didn’t seem to resent the unspoken and obvious truth that Kate was here because he was Malenfant’s son, not for himself alone.

One thing that was immediately nailed home in her awareness was how much Mike – and, it seemed, Malenfant himself – missed Emma: Mike’s mother, Malenfant’s wife, taken away by cancer before she was forty. She wondered how much of a difference it might have made to everybody’s lives if Emma had survived.

As the low-afternoon sun started to glint off the stretch of lake out back, the old man arrived.

He launched into her as soon as he walked in the door. ‘Ms Manzoni, the great pap-peddler. You aren’t welcome here. This is my son’s home, and I have a job to do. So why don’t you take your drones and your implants and shove them up –’

‘As far as the implants are concerned,’ Kate said dryly, ‘somebody already did that for me.’

That got a laugh out of Mike, and the mood softened a little.

But Malenfant kept up his glare. ‘What do you want, Manzoni?’

‘Tell me about
Voyager,
’ she said.

Mike and Saranne looked quizzical. Malenfant looked away.

Aha, she thought.

‘
Voyager,
’ she said to Mike and Saranne. ‘Two space probes designed to explore the outer planets, launched in the 1970s. Now they are floating out of the solar system. About a decade ago they crossed the heliopause – the place where the star winds blow, the boundary of interstellar space – right, Malenfant? But the
Voyagers
are still working, even now, and the big radio telescopes can still pick up their feeble signals … A heroic story, in its way.’