Kitabı oku: «Time»

1

BOOTSTRAP

What seest thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Emma Stoney:

Of course Emma had known that Reid Malenfant – failed astronaut, her ex-husband, her current boss – had been buying up Space Shuttle rocket engines and static-firing them in the California desert. She’d thought it was all part of an elaborate waste-disposal plan.

She hadn’t known he was planning to use the rockets to reach the asteroids.

Not until Cornelius Taine told her about it.

About that, and a lot more besides.

‘… Ms Stoney.’

The voice was soft, dry, and it startled her. Emma straightened up from her softscreen.

There was a man standing before her, here in the pastel light of her Las Vegas office: a thin Caucasian, 1980s pinstripe suit, neatly cropped hair. ‘I surprised you. I’m sorry. My name’s Cornelius,’ he said. ‘Cornelius Taine.’

Neutral accent. Boston? He looked about forty. She saw no sign of cosmetic enhancement. High cheekbones. Stress muscles around his eyes.

How the hell had he gotten in here?

She reached for the security touchpad under her desk. ‘I didn’t notice you come in.’

He smiled. He seemed calm, rational, business-like. She lifted her finger off the button.

He stretched out his hand and she shook it; his palm was dry and soft, as if even his perspiration was under control. But she didn’t enjoy the touch. Like handling a lizard, she thought. She let go of the hand quickly.

She said, ‘Have we met before?’

‘No. But I know of you. Your picture is in the company reports. Not to mention the gossip sites, from time to time. Your complicated personal history with Reid Malenfant –’

He was making her uncomfortable. ‘Malenfant is kind of high profile,’ she conceded.

‘You call him Malenfant.’ He nodded, as if storing away the fact.

‘You’re with the corporation, Mr Taine?’

‘Actually it’s Doctor. But please, call me Cornelius.’

‘Medical doctor?’

‘The other sort.’ He waved a hand. ‘Academic. Mathematics, actually. A long time ago. Yes, in a manner of speaking, I am with Bootstrap. I represent one of your major shareholder groups. That’s what got me past your very conscientious secretary in the outer office.’

‘Shareholders? Which group?’

‘We work through a number of dummies.’ He looked at her desk. ‘No doubt when you get back to your softscreen you’ll soon be able to determine which, and the extent of our holdings. Ultimately, I work for Eschatology, Inc.’

Oh, shit. Eschatology, as far as she knew, was one of those UFO-hunting nut groups which were attracted to Malenfant’s enterprises like flies.

He watched her, apparently knowing what she was thinking. ‘Why are you here, Dr Taine?’

‘Cornelius, please. Naturally we wish to check on how your husband is using our money.’

‘Ex-husband. You can do that through the company reports or the press.’

He leaned forward. ‘But I don’t recall any news releases about this waste-reduction enterprise in the Mojave.’

‘You’re talking about the rocket plant. It’s a new project,’ she said vaguely. ‘Speculative.’

He smiled. ‘Your loyalty is admirable. But you’ve no need to defend Malenfant, Ms Stoney. I’m not here to criticize or obstruct. Divert, perhaps.’

‘Divert what?’

‘The trajectory of Reid Malenfant’s covert activities. I’m talking about his true purpose, beneath all the misdirection.’

‘True purpose?’

‘Come now. You don’t think anyone believes an entrepreneur with Malenfant’s track record is reconditioning man-rated rocket engines just to burn industrial waste, do you?…’ He studied her. Or perhaps you truly don’t know the truth. How remarkable. In that case we both have much to learn.’ He smiled easily. ‘We believe Malenfant’s motives are sound – that’s why we invest in him – although his objectives are too narrow. I saw his speech in Delaware the other night. Impressive stuff: colonizing the Galaxy, immortality for mankind. Of course, he hasn’t thought it through.’

‘Would you believe me if I said I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about?’

‘Oh, yes.’ He eyed her. His eyes were a pale blue, the colour of the skies of her California childhood, long gone. ‘Yes, now that I’ve met you, I believe you. Perhaps we understand your ex-husband better than you do.’

‘And what is it you understand about him?’

‘That he’s the only man who can save the human race from the coming catastrophe.’ He said it without inflection.

She had absolutely no idea how to reply. The moment stretched.

Once more she wondered if this man was dangerous.

On impulse, she decided to cancel the rest of her day and drive out to Malenfant’s desert operation. Maybe, all things considered, it was time to see it for herself. And she invited Cornelius along for the ride.

She called ahead to let Malenfant know she was on the way. But, working on the principle that she should never miss a chance to make Malenfant’s life more difficult, she didn’t warn him about Cornelius Taine.

Out of Vegas she took the I-15, the main route to LA three hundred miles away. Out of town she was able to cut in the SmartDrive. The car’s limiter, controlled by the invisible web of satellites far above, switched out as the automatic control took over, and her speed rose smoothly through a hundred and fifty miles per hour.

As the sun climbed, the air grew hotter. She rolled up her window, felt the air conditioning cool and moisten the air.

Without warning Cornelius said, as if resuming an interrupted conversation, ‘Yes, the Delaware speech was interesting. But something of a throwback for Malenfant. He’s usually much more discreet about his true ambitions …’

When Malenfant had first started making money, as a small-scale aerospace consultant, he had spread himself over the media arguing for an expansion of American effort in space: a new generation of heavy launchers, new manned vehicles, a return to the Moon. He talked about the riches waiting in space, escape from Malthusian limits to growth, the ability to save the species from such calamities as an asteroid collision with the Earth, and so forth. The usual space-buff propaganda.

Cornelius said, ‘The image Malenfant built of himself was clear. Here was a man who was rich and was destined to get richer, and who was clearly prepared to throw some of his money at the old dreams of space. But then his businesses started to struggle. Isn’t that true? …’

It was true. Investors had grown wary of this talk-show visionary. Space was important for business, but business only cared about the constellations of utilitarian satellites in low Earth orbit, for communications and weather and surveillance. Thus far and no further.

And Malenfant attracted no support from serious agencies – particularly from NASA. NASA had long grown wary of frightening away its political backers by thinking too big, and was focused on doing sexy science with small, cheap unmanned probes, while sustaining the careers and empires associated with the giant bureaucracy which ran the manned space programme, with its ageing Shuttle fleet and a half-built and much-delayed Space Station.

In fact Malenfant himself started to attract unwelcome personal attention. There were bar-room psychoanalysts all over the media who found a common pattern in his failure to have kids, his frustrated ambition to fly in space, and his lofty ambitions for the future of man. And then there were the kooks – the conspiracy theorists, the UFO nuts, the post-New Age synthesists, the dreaming obsessives – none of whom had anything to offer Malenfant but bad PR.

Then along had come the yellow babies in Florida, and even NASA space launches were suspended, and that seemed to be that.

As Cornelius talked, she discreetly booted up the car’s softscreen and referenced Cornelius Taine.

Thirty-eight years old. Born in Texas, not that you’d know it from the accent. Once a professional mathematician, an academic. Brilliant was the word used in the brief biog she found.

A full professor at Princeton at twenty-seven. Washed out at thirty.

She couldn’t find out why, or what he’d been doing since then. She set off a couple of data miners to answer those questions for her.

After the yellow babies, Malenfant had regrouped.

He disappeared from the TV screens. He continued to fund educational efforts – books, TV shows, movies. Emma, working within the Bootstrap corporation, saw no harm in that, nothing but positive PR, and tax-efficient besides. But in public Malenfant largely withdrew from his propagandizing, and withheld any investment from what he started to call the ‘pie-in-the-sky stuff’.

And, quietly, he began to build a seriously large business empire. For instance, he had pioneered the mining of methane as a fuel source from the big high-pressure hydrate deposits on the sea bed off North Carolina. He had leased the technology to other fields, off Norway and Indonesia and Japan and New Zealand, and bought up shares judiciously. Soon methane production was supplying a significant percentage of global energy output.

The giant tents Malenfant’s companies had erected over the sea floor, to decompose the hydrates and trap the gases, had become a symbol of his flair and ambition.

And Malenfant was on his way to becoming remarkably rich.

Space, it seemed, was the place Reid Malenfant had started from, not where he was going.

… Until – Emma thought, if Taine is right – this.

‘Of course,’ Cornelius said, ‘Malenfant’s ambition is to be applauded. I mean his real ambition, beyond this – umm, diversionary froth. I hope you understand this is my basic position. What grander goal is there to work for than the destiny of the species?’ He spread thin fingers. ‘Man is an expansive, exploring animal. We conquered Earth with Stone Age technology. Now we need new resources, new skills to fund our further growth, space to express our differing philosophies …’ He smiled. ‘I have the feeling you don’t necessarily share these views.’

She shrugged. This was an argument she’d rehearsed with Malenfant many times. ‘It’s such a gigantic, mechanistic, depressing vision. Maybe we should all just learn to get along with each other. Then we wouldn’t have to go to all the trouble of conquering the Galaxy. What do you think?’

He laughed. ‘Your marriage must have been full of fire.’ And he continued to ask her questions, trying to draw her out.

Enough. She wasn’t prepared to be pumped by this faintly sinister man about her boss, let alone her ex-husband. She buried herself in e-mails, shutting him out.

Cornelius sat in silence, as still as a basking lizard.

After an hour they reached the Californian border.

There was a border post here. An unsmiling guard scanned Emma’s wrist bar-code, her eyes hidden by insectile camera-laden sun-glasses. Since Emma and Cornelius proved to be neither black nor Latino nor Asian, and did not intend to take up permanent occupancy in the Golden State nor seek employment there, they were allowed through.

California, Emma thought sourly, is not what it used to be.

Highway 58, heading towards Mojave, took them through the desert. The sun climbed higher, and hard light fell from a hot, ozone-leached sky. The ground was baked, bleached, flat and hard as a paving slab, with only gnarled and blackened Joshua trees to challenge the endless horizontals. Somewhere to her right was Death Valley, which had, in 2004, logged the world’s all-time highest temperature at 139 degrees.

They reached Edwards Air & Space Force Base – or rather they began to drive alongside its chain-link fence, forty miles of it running alongside the highway. Edwards, with its endless expanse of dry salt lakes – natural runways – was the legendary home of the test pilot. But from the highway she could see nothing at all, no planes or hangars or patrolling men-in-black guards. Nothing but miles of link fence. The accountant in her began, involuntarily, to compute the cost of all that wire.

Still, the closeness of Edwards, with its connotation of 1960s astronaut glamour, was, she was sure, the reason Malenfant had chosen this area for his newest project. Malenfant’s methods with people were coarse, but he knew the power of symbols.

And it was, indeed, only a little way beyond Edwards that she came to the site of Malenfant’s project.

The main gate was little more than a hole in the fence, barred by a crash barrier that carried a small, almost unobtrusive, Bootstrap corporate logo. The guard was a hefty woman with a small, dazzling-bright pistol at her hip. Emma’s company credentials, appended to the u-v barcode i-d she wore on her left wrist, were enough to get her and Cornelius through the gate.

Inside the gate there was a Portakabin, once more displaying the corporate logo. Beyond that there was more desert. There was no metalled road surface, just tracks snaking to the dusty horizon.

Emma pulled the car over and climbed out. She blinked in the sudden light, felt perspiration start out of her flesh after a few seconds of the desert’s dry, sucking warmth. The shade of the cabin, even badly air-conditioned, was a relief.

She took in the cabin’s contents with a glance. Malenfant’s joky company mission statement was repeated several times: Bootstrap: Making Money in a Closed Economy – Until Something Better Comes Along … There were display stands showing the usual corporate PR, much of it approved by herself, about the methane extraction fields, and Bootstrap’s clean-up activities at Hanford and the Ukraine nuke plants and Alaska, and so forth.

Bootstrap had tied up a recent youth-oriented sponsorship with Shit Cola, and so there was a lot of bright pink Shit livery about the stands. Cornea gumbo, Emma thought: too cluttered and bright. But it defrayed the costs. And the Shit audience – sub-age-25, generally sub-literate consumers of the planet’s trendiest soft drink – were showing themselves amenable to subtle Bootstrap persuasion, mixed in with their diet of endless softsoaps and thongathons.

No evidence here of giant rocket plants in the desert, of course.

Cornelius was looking around in silence, an amused half-smile on his lips. She was finding his quiet know-all attitude intensely irritating, his silences disturbing.

She heard the whine of an electric engine, a car of some kind pulling up outside. With relief she stepped out the door.

The car was a late-model jeep, a bare frame mounted on big fat tyres, with a giant solar-cell carapace glistening like beetle chitin. It carried two people, talking animatedly. The passenger was a woman, unknown to Emma: sixty, perhaps, slim and smart, wearing some kind of trouser suit. Practical but a little hot, Emma thought.

And the driver was, of course, Reid Malenfant.

Malenfant got out of the car like a whip uncoiling. He bounded up to Emma, grabbed her arms, and kissed her cheek; his lips were rough, sun-cracked. He was ruinously tall, thin as a snake, bald as a coot. He was wearing a blue NASA-type jump-suit and heavy black boots. As usual, he looked somehow larger than those around him, as if too big for the landscape. She could smell desert dust on him, hot and dry as a sauna. He said, ‘What kept you?’

She hissed, ‘You’ve a hell of a nerve, Malenfant. What are you up to now?’

‘Later,’ he whispered. The woman with him was climbing out of the car with caution, but she seemed limber enough. Malenfant said to Emma, ‘Do you know Maura Della?’

‘Representative Della? By reputation.’

Maura Della stepped forward, a thin smile on her lips. ‘Ms Stoney. He’s told me all about you.’

‘I bet he has.’ Emma shook her hand; Delia’s grip was surprisingly strong, stronger than Cornelius Taine’s, in fact.

Malenfant said, ‘I’m trying to win the Representative’s support for the project here. But I suspect I’ve a little way to go yet.’

Della said, ‘Damn right. Frankly it seems incredible to me that you can attempt to build an eco-friendly project around rocket engines …’

Malenfant pulled a face at Emma. ‘You can tell we’re in the middle of an argument here.’

‘We sure are,’ said Della.

Malenfant fetched plastic water bottles from the car and handed them out while Maura Della kept on talking.

‘… Look, the Space Shuttle actually dumps more exhaust products into the atmosphere than any other current launcher. Water, hydrogen, hydrogen chloride and nitrogen oxides. The chloride can damage the ozone layer –’

‘If it got into the stratosphere,’ Malenfant said amiably, ‘which it doesn’t, because it rains out first.’

‘65% of it does. The rest escapes. Anyhow there are other effects. Ozone depletion because of the deposition of frozen water and aluminium oxide. Global warming contributions from carbon dioxide and particulates. Acid rain from the hydrogen chloride and the NOX products –’

‘Limited to a half-mile around the launch site.’

‘But there. Anyhow there are also the toxins associated with rocket launches, which only need to be present in small amounts. Nitrogen tet can cause acute pulmonary oedemas, hydrazine is carcinogenic – and there are old studies linking aluminium with Alzheimer’s.’

Malenfant barked laughter. ‘The aluminium in rocket motors is one hundredth of one per cent of the total US annual production. We’d have to be launching like Buck Rogers to do any real damage.’

‘Tell that to the mothers of the Florida yellow babies,’ Della said grimly.

It had been a massive scandal. Medical studies had revealed a series of birth abnormalities showing up in Daytona, Orlando and other communities close to Cape Canaveral, in Florida. Abnormal livers, faulty hearts, some external defects; a plague of jaundice, sometimes associated with serious neurological diseases. Yellow babies.

Naturally Malenfant was prepared for this. ‘First of all,’ he said evenly, ‘the medicos are split over whether the cluster exists at all. And even if it does, who the hell knows what the cause is?’

Della shook her head. ‘Heptyl has been detected in soil and plants. Along the east coast of Florida it reaches as much as point three milligrams per kilogram –’

Emma asked, ‘Heptyl?’

‘Dimethyl hydrazine. Unburned rocket fuel. Highly toxic; hydrazine compounds are notorious liver and central nervous system poisons. Furthermore we know it can linger for years in bodies of water, rivers and marshes …’ Della smiled thinly. ‘I’m sorry. I guess we got a little worked up, driving around out here. As you probably know, Malenfant has been kibitzing Congress for some time. Me specifically. I thought I should come see if this rocket shop of his is just another hobby-club tax write-off, or something serious.’

Emma nodded. Right now she didn’t see why she should make life easy for Malenfant. ‘He calls you Bill Proxmire in a skirt.’ Proxmire had been a notorious NASA-opposing Senator of the late twentieth century.

Maura Della smiled. ‘Well, I don’t wear skirts much. But I’ll take it as a compliment.’

‘Damn right,’ said Malenfant easily, utterly unfazed. ‘Proxmire was an unthinking opponent of progress –’

‘While I,’ said Della dryly to Emma, ‘am a thinking opponent of progress. And therefore, Malenfant is calculating, amenable to persuasion.’

‘I told you it was a compliment,’ Malenfant said.

As the two of them fenced, Cornelius Taine had been all but invisible, standing in the shadows of the Portakabin’s doorway. Now he stepped forward, as if materializing, and smiled at Malenfant. Cornelius didn’t blink in the harsh sunlight, Emma noticed. Maybe he was wearing image-processing cornea implants.

Malenfant frowned at him, startled. ‘And who the hell are you?’

Cornelius introduced himself and his company.

Malenfant growled. ‘Eschatology. I thought I told the guards to keep you kooks out of the compound.’

Emma tugged his sleeve. ‘I brought him in.’ She murmured about the shareholding Cornelius represented. ‘Take him seriously, Malenfant.’

Cornelius said, ‘I’m here to support you, Colonel Malenfant. Really. I don’t represent any threat to you.’

‘Malenfant. Just call me Malenfant.’ He turned to Della. ‘I apologize for this. I get these bullshit artists all the time.’

Della murmured, ‘I suspect you only have yourself to blame for that.’

Cornelius Taine was holding up manicured hands. ‘You have me wrong, Malenfant. We’re not psychics. We are scientists, engineers, economists, statisticians. Thinkers, not dreamers. I myself was formerly a mathematician, for instance.

‘Eschatology has built on the pioneering work of thinkers like Freeman Dyson who, in the 1970s, began to consider the future scientifically. Since then we, and others, have worked hard to compile, umm, a road map of the future. In fact, Colonel Malenfant, we already have proof that our studies of the future are generally successful.’

‘What proof?’

‘We’ve become rich out of them. Rich enough to invest in you.’ He smiled.

‘Why have you come here today?’

‘To emphasize we support you. That is, we support your true objectives. We know about Key Largo,’ said Cornelius.

Della looked confused. ‘Key Largo? In Florida?’

The name meant nothing to Emma. But she saw it had caught Malenfant off balance.

‘This is too complicated for me,’ Malenfant said at last. ‘Get in the jeep. Please. We’ve got some hardware to see. Now that I do understand.’

Meekly, harbouring their own thoughts, they obeyed.

It was a three-mile drive to the test stand, further than Emma had expected. Bootstrap owned a big piece of desert, it seemed.

Malenfant’s base here was like a miniaturized version of Edwards: miles of chain-link fence cutting out a hole in the desert, a hole within which exotic technology lurked, the scent of other worlds.

But there was a lot of plant here: fuel tanks and hangar-like buildings and skeletal test stands. Malenfant just drove past it all without comment or explanation. Was there a secret purpose here, more equipment than could be explained away by the waste-disposal cover story?

Malenfant and Maura Della continued to argue about space and rockets. Cornelius Taine was oddly detached. He sat apparently relaxed, hands neatly folded before him, gaze sweeping over the desert, as the babble of chemical names and statistics went on. There was something repellent about his surface of self-containment.

Emma was financial controller of Bootstrap – not to mention Malenfant’s ex-wife – but that meant little to Malenfant in terms of openness and sharing of information with her. She knew he did rely on her to keep the company within the fiscal regulations, though. And that meant that, in a bizarre way, he trusted her to break through his elaborate webs of deceit and concealment in time to comply with the reporting rules. It was a kind of dance between them, a game of mutual dependence played to unspoken conventions.

In a way, she admitted to herself, she enjoyed it.

But she did wonder – if Cornelius turned out to be right – if Malenfant had gone too far this time. Secret rocket ships in the desert? So 1950s, Malenfant …

Still, here in this desert, just a few score miles from Edwards itself, Reid Malenfant – supple, tanned, vigorous, cheerful – seemed at home. Much more than in a boardroom in Vegas or Manhattan or DC. He looked like what he was, she thought – or rather what he had always wanted to be – a Right Stuff pilot of the old school, maybe somebody who could have gotten all the way into space himself.

But, of course, it hadn’t worked out that way.

They reached the engine test facility. It was a big open box of scaffolding and girders, with zigzag walkways scribbled across the structure, and a giant crane peering over the top of everything. Lights sparkled over the rig, bright despite the intensity of the afternoon sun. It looked like a piece of a chemical factory, unaccountably shipped out here to the dull California desert. But on a boxy structure at the centre of the ugly conglomerate Emma could see, crudely painted over, a NASA roundel.

And there, as if trapped at the heart of the clumsy industrial metalwork, she saw the slim, snub-nosed form of a Space Shuttle external tank: a shape familiar from images of more than a hundred successful Cape Canaveral launches, and one memory-searing failure. White vapour was venting from somewhere in the stack and it wreathed around the girders and tubing, softening the sun’s glare.

Oddly, she felt cooler; perhaps the heat capacity of this giant mass of liquid fuel was sufficient to chill the desert air, her own body.

Malenfant pulled up the jeep, and they stepped out. Malenfant waved at hard-hatted engineers, who waved or shouted back, and he guided his party around the facility.

‘What we have in there is a kind of mock-up of a Space Shuttle. We have the external fuel tank, of course, and a complete aft section, with three main engines in place. Where the rest of the orbiter would go we have a boilerplate truss section. The Shuttle engines we use are obsolete: they’ve all flown in space several times, and have been decommissioned. We got the test hardware from NASA’s old Shuttle main engine test facility in Mississippi, the Stennis Space Center.’ He pointed to a fleet of tankers parked alongside the facility. They were giant eighteen-wheelers, but against the rig they looked like beetles at the foot of an elephant. ‘At Stennis they bring in the fuel, lox and liquid hydrogen, by barge. We don’t have that luxury …’

They reached a flame pit, a mighty concrete conduit dug into the desert alongside the test rig. Malenfant said, ‘We’ve already achieved 520-second burns here, equivalent to a full Shuttle flight demonstration test, at one hundred per cent thrust.’ He smiled at Maura Della. ‘This is the only place in the world anybody is firing Shuttle main engines right now, still the most advanced rocket engines in the world. We have a nineteen-storey-high fuel tank in there, eight hundred tons of liquid fuel chilled through three hundred degrees or below. When the engines fire up the turbo-pumps work at forty thousand revs per minute, a thousand gallons of fuel are consumed every second –’

‘All very impressive, Malenfant,’ said Della, ‘but I’m hardly likely to be overwhelmed by engineering gosh-wow numbers. This isn’t the 1960s. You really think you need to assemble all this space hardware just to lose a little waste?’

‘Surely. What we plan is to use rocket combustion chambers as high-temperature, high-volume incinerators.’ He led them to a show board, a giant flow diagram showing mass streams, little rockets with animated yellow flames glowing in their hearts. ‘We reach two to three thousand Centigrade in there, twice as high as in most commercial incinerators, which are based on rotary kiln or electric plasma technology. We feed the waste material through at high speed, first to break it down and then to oxidize it. Any toxic products are removed by a multistage cleansing process that includes scrubbers to get acidic gases out of the exhaust.

‘We think we can process most poisonous industrial by-products, and also nerve gas and biological weapons, at a much greater speed and a fraction the cost of conventional incinerators. We think we’ll be able to process tons of waste every second. We could probably tackle massive ecological problems, like cleaning out poisoned lakes.’

‘Getting rich by cleaning the planet,’ Della said.

Malenfant grinned, and Emma knew he had worked his way onto home ground. ‘Representative, that’s the philosophy of my corporation. We live in a closed economy. We’ve girdled the Earth, and we have to be aware that we’re going to have to live with whatever we produce, useful goods or waste … But, if you can spot the flows of goods and materials and economic value, it’s still possible to get rich.’

Cornelius Taine had walked away from the others. Now he was clapping, slowly and softly. Gradually he caught the attention of Malenfant and Della.

‘Captain Future. I forgot you were here,’ Malenfant said sourly.

‘Oh, I’m still here. And I have to admire the way you’re handling this. The plausibility. I believe you’re even sincere, on the level of this cover-up.’

Maura Della said, ‘Cover-up? What are you talking about?’

‘Key Largo,’ said Cornelius. ‘That’s what this is really all about. Isn’t it, Malenfant?’

Malenfant glowered at him, calculating.

Here we go, Emma thought bleakly. Not for the first time in her life with Malenfant she had absolutely no idea what was going to come next, as if she was poised over a roller-coaster drop.

Cornelius said, ‘I watched your Delaware speech the other night.’

Malenfant looked even more uncomfortable. ‘Expanding across the Galaxy, all of that? I’ve given that talk a dozen times.’

‘I know,’ said Cornelius. ‘And it’s admirable. As far as it goes.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That you haven’t thought it through. You say you’re planning a way for mankind to live forever. Getting off the Earth is the first step, et cetera. Fine. But what then? What is forever? Do you want eternity? If not, what will you settle for? A billion years, a trillion?’ He waved a hand at the sun-drenched sky. ‘The universe won’t always be as hospitable as this warm bath of energy and light. Far downstream –’

‘Downstream?’

‘I mean, in the far future – the stars will die. It is going to be cold and dark, a universe of shadows. Do you hope that humans, or human descendants, will survive even then? … You haven’t thought about this, have you? And yet it’s the logical consequence of everything you’re striving for.

‘And there is more,’ Cornelius said. ‘Perhaps you are right that we are alone in this universe, the first minds of all. Since the universe is believed to have evolved from others, we may be the first minds to have emerged in a whole string of cosmoses. That is an astounding thought. And if it is true – what is our purpose? That, you see, is perhaps the most fundamental question facing mankind, and ought to shape everything you do, Malenfant. Yet I see no sign in any of your public statements that you have given any consideration to all this …’

The meaning of life? Was this guy for real? But Emma shivered, as if in this hot desert light the wind of a billion years was sweeping over her.

‘We understand, you see,’ said Cornelius.

‘Understand what?’

‘That you are trying to initiate a clandestine return to space here.’

Malenfant barked, ‘Bull hockey.’

Emma and Maura Della spoke together,

‘Malenfant, he alleged this earlier –’

‘If this is true –’

‘Oh, it’s true,’ Cornelius said. ‘Come clean, Malenfant. The truth is he wants to do more than fire off rockets to burn waste. He wants to build a rocket ship – in fact a fleet of rocket ships – and launch them from here, the heart of the desert, and send them all the way to the asteroids.’

Malenfant said nothing.

Della was visibly angry. ‘This is not what I came here for.’

Cornelius said, ‘Malenfant, we back you. A mission to a NEO, a near-Earth object, makes obvious economic and technical sense: the first step in any expansion off-planet, in the short to medium term. And in the long term, it could make the difference.’

Della said, ‘What difference?’

‘The difference,’ Cornelius said easily, ‘between the survival of the human species, and its extinction.’

‘So is that what you came to tell me, you swivel-eyed freak?’ snapped Malenfant. ‘That I get to save the world?’

‘Actually we think it’s possible,’ said Cornelius evenly.

Della frowned, eyebrows arched sceptically. ‘Really. So tell us how the world will end.’

‘We don’t know how. We think we know when, however. Two hundred years from now.’

The number – its blunt precision – startled them to silence.

Malenfant looked from one to the other – the suspicious ex-wife, the frowning Congressman, the mysterious prophet – and Emma saw he was, rarely for him, hemmed in.

Malenfant drove them back to the Portakabin. They travelled in silence, sunk in their respective moods, wary of each other. Only Cornelius, self-absorbed, seemed in any way content.

At the cabin Malenfant served them drinks, beer and soda and water, and they stood in the Californian desert.

Voices drifted over the baked ground, amplified and distorted, as a slow countdown proceeded.

Malenfant kept checking his watch. It was a fat, clunky Rolex. No implants or active tattoos for Reid Malenfant, no sir. For a man with his eye on the future, Emma thought, he often seemed wedded to the past.

The firing started.

Emma saw a spark of light, an almost invisible flame at the base of the stand, billowing white smoke. And then the noise came, a nonlinear crackle tearing at the air. The ground shook, as if she was witnessing some massive natural phenomenon, a waterfall or an earthquake, perhaps. But this was nothing natural.

Malenfant had once taken her to see a Shuttle launch. She’d had tears in her eyes then, from sheer exhilaration at the man-made power of the thing. And there were tears now, she found to her reluctant surprise, even at the sight of this pathetic, cut-down half-ship, trapped in its steel cage and bolted to the Earth.

She said, ‘Cornelius is right. Isn’t he, Malenfant? You’ve been lying to me for months. Years, maybe.’

Malenfant touched her arm. ‘It’s a long story.’

‘I know. I’ve lived it. Damn you,’ she whispered. ‘There’s a lot of unfinished business here, Malenfant.’

‘We’ll handle it,’ Malenfant said. ‘We can handle this guy Cornelius and his band of airheads. We can handle anybody. This is just the beginning.’

Cornelius Taine watched, eyes opaque.

Bill Tybee:

My name is Bill Tybee.

… Is this thing working? Oh, shit. Start again.

Hi. My name is Bill Tybee, and this is my diary.

Well, kind of. It’s really a letter for you, June. It’s a shame they won’t let us talk directly, but I hope this makes up for your not being home for your birthday, a little ways anyhow. You know Tom and little Billie are missing you. I’ll send you another at Christmas if you aren’t here, and I’ll keep a copy at home so we can all watch it together.

Come see the house.

Here’s the living room. Sorry, I folded up the cam. There. Can you see now? You notice I got the video wall replaced, finally. Although I hate to think what the down payments are going to do to our bank balance. Maybe we could have got by with the old one, just the hundred channels, what do you think? Oh, I got the solar-cell roof replaced too. That storm was a bitch.

Here’s Billie’s bedroom. I’m whispering because she’s asleep. She loves the hologram mobile you sent her. Everybody says how smart she is. Same as her brother. I mean it. Even the doctors agree about Billie; they’re both off the, what did they say, the percentile charts, way off. You managed to give birth to two geniuses here, June. I know they don’t get it from their father!

I’ll kiss her for you. There you go, sweet pea. One from me too.

Here we are in the bathroom. Now, June, I know it’s not much as part of the guided tour. But I just want to show you this stuff because you’re not to worry about it. Here’s my med-alert ribbon, this cute silver thing. See? I have to wear it every time I leave the house, and I ought to wear it indoors too. And here are the pills I have to take every day, in this bubble packet. The specialist says they’re not just drugs but also little miniature machines, tumour-busters that go prowling around my bloodstream looking for the defective cells before breaking themselves up and flushing them out of, well, I won’t show you out of where. Here I am taking my pill for today. See? Gone. Nothing to worry about.

The Big C just ain’t what it used to be. Something you have to live with, to manage, like diabetes, right?

Come on. Let’s go see if Tom will let us into his room. He loves those star pictures you sent him. He’s been pinning them up on his wall …

Emma Stoney:

Emma was still furious when she drove into work, the morning after her trip to the plant.

Even this early on an August morning, the Vegas streets were thronged. People in gaudy artificial fabrics strolled past the giant casinos: the venerable Caesar’s Palace and Luxor and Sands, the new TwenCen Park with its cartoon reconstructions of 30s gangster-land Chicago and 60s Space Age Florida and 80s yuppie-era Wall Street. The endless lights and laser displays made a storm of colour and motion that was dazzling even against the morning sunlight, like glimpses into another, brighter universe. But the landscape of casinos and malls didn’t stay static; there were a number of vacant or redeveloping lots, like missing teeth in a smiling jaw.

And whatever the façade, the scene within was always the same: square miles of lush, ugly carpet, rows of gaming machines fed by joyless punters, blackjack tables kept open twenty-four hours a day by the virtual dealers.

Still, the people seemed to be changing, slowly. Not so fat, for one thing; no doubt the fatbuster pills were to thank for that. And she was sure there were fewer children, fewer young families than there used to be. Demography in action: the greying of America, the concentration of buying power in the hands of the elderly.

Not that it was so easy to tell how old people were any more. There were fewer visible signs of age: faces were smoothed to seamlessness by routine cosmetic surgery, hair was restored to the vigour and colour of a five-year-old’s.

Emma herself was approaching forty now, ten years or so younger than Malenfant. Strands of her hair were already white and broken. She wore them with a defiant pride.

Malenfant had moved his corporation here, out of New York, five years ago. A good place for business, he said. God bless Nevada. Distract the marks with gambling toys and virtual titties while you pick their pockets … But Emma hated Vegas’s tacky joylessness. It had taken a lot of soul-searching for her to follow Malenfant.

Especially after the divorce.

He’d said, So we aren’t married any more. That doesn’t mean I have to fire you, does it? Of course she had given in, come with him. Why, though?

He wasn’t her responsibility, as the e-therapists continually emphasized. He wasn’t even open with her. This latest business with the Shuttle engines – if true – was yet another piece of evidence for that. And he had, after all, broken up their marriage and pushed her away.

Yet, in his own complex, confused way, he still cared about her. She knew that. And so she had a motive for working with him. Maybe if she was still in his life, he might give more thought to his grandiose plans than otherwise.

Maybe he would keep from strip-mining the planet, in order to spare her feelings. Or maybe not.

Her e-therapists warned that this was a wound that would never close, as long as she stayed with Malenfant, worked with him. But then, maybe it was a wound that wasn’t meant to close. Not yet, anyhow. Not when she still didn’t even understand why.

When Emma walked into Malenfant’s office, she found him sitting with his feet on his desk, crushed beer cans strewn over the surface. He was talking to a man she didn’t know: an upright military type of about seventy, dressed in a sports shirt and slacks straight out of Cheers circa 1987, with a bare frosting of white hair on a scalp burned nutmeg brown. The stranger got up on Emma’s entrance, but she ignored him.

She faced Malenfant. ‘Company business.’

Malenfant sighed. ‘It’s all company business. Emma, meet George Hench. An old buddy of mine from Air & Space Force days –’

George nodded. ‘When it used to be just plain Air Force,’ he growled.

‘Malenfant, why is he here?’

‘To take us into space,’ said Reid Malenfant. He smiled, a smile she’d seen too often before. Look what I did. Isn’t it neat?

‘So it’s true. You’re just incredible, Malenfant. Does the word accountability mean anything to you? This isn’t a cookie jar you’re raiding. This is a business. And we can’t win with this. A lot of people have looked at commercial space ventures. The existing launcher capacity is going to be sufficient to cover the demand for the next several years. There is no market.’

Malenfant nodded. ‘You’re talking about LEO stuff. Communications, Earth resources, meteorology, navigation –’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you’re right, although demand patterns have a way of changing. You can’t sell cruises until you build a cruise liner. But I’m not talking about low Earth orbit. We will build a heavy-lift booster, a direct ascent single-throw out of Earth orbit …’

And now she knew that everything Cornelius Taine had told her had been true. ‘You really are talking about going to the asteroids, aren’t you? Why, for God’s sake?’

George Hench said, ‘Because asteroids are flying mountains of stainless steel and precious metals, such as gold and platinum. Or they are balls of carbon and water and complex organics. A single metallic-type near-Earth object would be worth, conservatively, trillions in today’s market. It would be so valuable, in fact, that it would change the market itself. And if you reach a C-type, a carbonaceous chondrite, full of water and organic compounds, you can do what the hell you like.’

‘Such as?’

Malenfant grinned. ‘You can throw bags of water and food and plastics back to Earth orbit, where they would be worth billions in saved launch costs. Or you could let a hundred thousand people go live in the rock. Or you can refuel, and go anywhere. Bootstrapping, like it says on the letterhead. The truth is I don’t know what we’re going to find. But I know that everything will be different. It will be like Cecil Rhodes discovering diamonds in southern Africa.’

‘He didn’t discover the mine,’ she said. ‘He just made the most money.’

‘I could live with that.’

Hench said earnestly, ‘The key to making money out of space is getting the costs of reaching Earth orbit down by a couple of magnitudes. If you fly on Shuttle, you’re looking at thirty-five thousand bucks per pound to orbit –’

‘And,’ said Malenfant, ‘because of NASA’s safety controls and qual standards it takes years and millions of dollars to prepare your payload for flight. The other launch systems available are cheaper but still too expensive, unreliable and booked up anyhow. We can’t hire, Emma, and we can’t buy. That’s why we have to build our own.’

Emma shook her head. ‘But it’s impossible. People have been trying to come up with cheap launchers for years.’

‘Yes,’ said Hench. ‘And every time they are killed by the Gun Club.’

She eyed him. ‘The “Gun Club”?’

‘NASA,’ Hench growled. ‘Bureaucrat lifers with turf to defend. And the space lobby in the USASF, which anyhow has always been overruled by the fighter pilots who run that service –’

She turned back to Malenfant. ‘And the permissions we’ll need? The legal obstacles, the safety rules? Have you thought about any of that stuff? Malenfant, this is such a leap in the dark. Not even NASA are launching space ships right now.’

Hench cackled. ‘But that’s the beauty of it. The excitement. Ms Stoney, we are historically a capitalistic frontier people. We’ve known space is the new frontier since 1950. Now’s the time to wriggle out from under the Gun Club federal guys and do it the way we always should have.’

Malenfant shrugged. ‘Emma, I’ve got the business plans lined up if you want to see them, and potential investors coming out of my ass – bankers, investment brokers, merchant bankers, financiers, venture capitalists from Citibank, Prudential Bache, Morgan Trust –’

‘All of which you’ve kept from me. For God’s sake, Malenfant. Forget your drinking buddies and after-dinner audiences. How the hell do we persuade real investors to risk real money?’

Hench said, ‘By building incrementally. By cutting tin fast. By building a little, flying a little, getting off the ground as fast as we can. That’s how we built the Thor …’ In the 1950s, with the Atlas and Titan intercontinental ballistic missiles already under development, the US defined a need for a smaller, simpler weapon for intermediate range missions, to be based in Britain and Turkey. The Thor, built from Atlas parts, would be the answer. ‘… You’d call it a Skunk Works operation today,’ Hench said. ‘We had that damn bird on the pad a year after the contract was signed. And we did it within budget, too. Not only that, McDonnell took it over and upgraded it to the Delta, and that baby is still flying and making money today. And that’s why I’m confident I’m going to be able to deliver …’

Hench’s eyes were a washed-out, watery brown, and flecked by damaged blood vessels. Malenfant was listening, rapt, to this old man’s reminiscences.

Emma realized that, of course, his decision was already made, the new program under this man implemented and running, a done deal; Malenfant would implicitly trust Hench, his personal Wernher von Braun, to deliver as he promised, and he would take a personal interest again only when there was hardware ready to fly on some launch pad.

But even if the technology worked, even if the costs worked out as Malenfant seemed to believe, there was the Gun Club and all the other opposing forces which had killed earlier turf-threatening new initiatives – forces which had pushed Malenfant himself into this covert scheme, obviously concocted over years, in absolute secrecy even from her.

But now it’s out in the open, what, she thought uneasily, is to stop the bad guys from killing us too? And if they do, where will that leave Malenfant? Where, in fact, will it leave me?

For she knew, of course, that she was already involved: that she would follow Malenfant wherever his latest dream took him, for better or worse. What a schmuck I am, she thought. She resolved to make more time for her e-therapists.

Hench talked on, urgently, meaninglessly, about rockets and engineering projects. For some reason she thought of Cornelius Taine, his cold eyes, his bleak, crazy warnings of the future.

‘… Malenfant.’

‘Yeah?’

‘What are you doing at Key Largo?’

Spaiz Kadette:

> Copy this and pass it on.

> The news is just incredible. After all that coverage over the weekend there can’t be a soul on the planet who isn’t aware of Reid Malenfant and what he’s trying to do out in the Mojave.

> Naturally the usual nay-sayers are hovering, moaning that Colonel Malenfant is acting outside the law, or is screwing up the environment, or is in some other way irresponsible.

> And there is the usual stench of hypocrisy and decay from the bloated corpse that is NASA, our space agency, the agency that should have done all this for us decades ago anyhow.

> Here’s the pitch.

> Following a hastily-convened gathering in Hollywood, CA, a new society tentatively called the Flying Mountain Society has been formed. If you want to join, it will cost 500 dollars US or equivalent.

> For that investment you won’t get any information or brochures or member services. We will not print glossy magazines or feed a giant staff. In fact we will have no full-time employees. As we are not another NASA booster club you won’t get glossy pictures of spacecraft that will never be built. All you will get is a guarantee that we won’t waste your money.

> FMS isn’t the only space organization, but it does exist solely to get us into space.

> Here’s the catch. Don’t join unless you are a hardworking person. Don’t join unless you support Colonel Malenfant’s goal of developing a space industry in our lifetimes, and are prepared to work for it.

> In fact we’d prefer you didn’t join at all. We’d prefer you started up your own local chapter, affiliated to the Society, which we hope will evolve into a global umbrella organization of pressure groups and activists.

> You can start with a bake sale. You can start by bombarding the schools with images of asteroids. You can start by hiking out to the Mojave, rolling up your sleeves and helping Colonel Malenfant any way he can use you.

> There is incidentally no truth in the rumours propagated in some sections of the press that the Flying Mountain Society is in any way affiliated with or funded by Bootstrap Inc. or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates as, quote, ‘a propaganda exercise’. This is in fact counterfactual malice spread by Colonel Malenfant’s turf-warrior enemies.

> If you want to get involved, reply to this mail. Better yet just get to work …

Maura Della:

Open journal. September 3 2010.

It was soon after my visit to Malenfant’s experimental site in the Mojave that the news broke about Bootstrap’s true purpose – that is, to assemble a private heavy-lift vehicle with Space Shuttle technology, to send some kind of mining mission to an asteroid.

I don’t know if Cornelius Taine had anything to do with that. Presumably yes, if it served his shadowy organization’s purposes. But it wasn’t impossible the leak had come from elsewhere; Bootstrap is surely as porous as any large organization.

Anyhow, I find myself being sucked into the project. Somehow, through the leak and my covert involvement – the fact that I didn’t blow the whistle immediately I got back from the Mojave – I’m becoming seduced into considering not just rocket engine firings, not just a private launch system, but the NEO mission itself.

This seems to be Malenfant’s modus operandi: to build up an unstoppable momentum, to launch first and answer questions later.

The usual forces of darkness are already gathering in Congress to oppose this. It’s going to be a struggle.

But I already know I’m not going to walk away from Malenfant, despite his outlandish, covert scheming.

You see, I happen to think Reid Malenfant is right. For the cost of one more space launch – which is undisputed, financial and environmental – it might be possible to reach a near-Earth object, actually to start exploiting one of those sun-orbiting gold mines, and so, just as Malenfant’s corporate title suggests, bootstrap a new human expansion into space.

I think we’ve all become desensitized to the state of our world.

We live in a closed economy, an economy of limits. Grain yields globally have been falling since 1984, fishing yields since 1990. And yet the human population continues to grow. This is the stark reality of the years to come.

It seems to me our best hope for getting through the next century or so is to reach some kind of steady state: recycle as much as possible, try to minimize the impact of industry on the planet, try to stabilize the population numbers. For the last five to ten years I have, in my small way, been working towards exactly that goal, that new order. I don’t see that any responsible politician has a choice.

I must say I entered politics with rather higher hopes of the future than I enjoy now.

But even the steady state, our best-hope future, may not be achievable without space.

Without power and materials from space we are doomed to shuffle a known – in fact diminishing – stockpile of resources around the planet. Some players get rich, others get poor. But it’s not even a zero sum game; in the long term we’re all losers.

It isn’t just a question of economics. It’s what this does to our spirit.

We are frightened of the future. We exclude strangers, try to hold on to what we have, rather than risk the search for something better. We spend more energy seeking someone to blame for our present woes than building for a better future. We’ve become a planet full of old people – old in spirit, anyhow. Speaking as a sexagenarian I know what I’m talking about.

The point is that if we could open up the limits to growth, then we can all be winners. It’s as simple as that.

That is why I’m prepared to back Malenfant. Not, you’ll note, because I like his methods. But the ends, I suspect, in this case justify the means.

However all this is going to take some extremely delicate opinion management. Especially over what Malenfant is doing at Key Largo …

Sheena 5:

… And, in the warm, shallow waters of the continental shelf off Key Largo:

The night was over. The sun, a fat ball of light, was already glimmering above the water surface, which rippled with flat-light. Sheena 5 had spent the night alone, foraging for food among the sea bed grasses. She had eaten well, of small fish, prawns, larvae; she had been particularly successful using her arms to flush out hiding shrimp from the sand.

But now, in the brightness of day, the squid emerged from the grasses and corals, and rose in the water. The shoals formed in small groups and clusters, eventually combining into a community a hundred strong that soared in arcs and rows through the water. Their jets made the rich water sing as they chattered to each other, simple sentences picked out by complex skin patterns, body posture, texture:

Court me. Court me. See my weapons! I am strong and fierce. Stay away! Stay away! She is mine! …

It was the ancient cephalopod language, Sheena knew, a language of light and shadow and posture, the ‘words’ shivering one into the other, words of sex and danger and food. It was a language as old as the squid – millions of years old, much older than humans – and it was rich and beautiful, and she shoaled and chattered with joy.

… But there was a shadow on the water. And Sheena’s deep gravity sense told her of an approaching infrasonic rumble, quite characteristic: it was a barracuda, a vicious predator of the squid. This one was young and small, but no less dangerous for that.

The sentinels, scattered around the fringes of the shoal, immediately adopted concealment or bluff postures. Their simple words blared lies at the approaching predator, and warned the rest of the shoal.

Black bands on the mantle, arms limp, swimming rapidly backwards: Look at me. I am a parrotfish. I am no squid.

Clear body, dark arms in a downward V: Look at us. We are sea grass, sargassum, drifting in the current. We are no squid.

A pseudomorph, a squid-shaped blob of ink, hastily emitted and bound together by mucus: Look at us. We are squid. We are all squid.

Turn to predator, spread arms, white spots and false eyes to increase apparent size: Look at me. I am strong and fierce. Flee!

The dark shape lingered close, just as a true barracuda would, before diving into the shoal, seeking to break it up.

Sheena knew that there would be no true predators here, in this garden-like reserve. Sheena recognized the glimmer of steel, the camera lenses pockmarking the too-smooth hide of the beast, the regular churn of the propellers in back. She understood that the shadow could only be a watching Bootstrap machine.

But she sensed a dull recognition of this fact in the glittering animal minds of her cousins, all around her; they were smart too, smart enough to know they were safe here. Besides, so sophisticated were their defences that the squid were rarely troubled by predators. So there was an element of play in the darting concealment and watchfulness of the shoal.

And then came the hunt.

The slim cylinder cruised through the posturing, half-concealed squid. Recognition pulsed through the shoal. Some of them spread their arms, covered their mantles with patterns of bars and streaks. Look at me. I have seen you. I will flee. It is futile to chase me.

Now one of the squid shoal, a strong male, broke free and jetted in front of the barracuda. A pattern began to move over his skin in steady waves, a patchwork of light and dark brown that radiated from his streamlined body to the tip of his tentacles. It was the pattern Dan called the passing cloud. Stop and watch me.

The barracuda cruised to a stop.

The male spread his eight arms, raised his two long tentacles, and his green binocular eyes fixed on the barracuda. Confusing patterns of light and shade pulsed across his hide. Look at me. I am large and fierce. I can kill you.

The metal barracuda hung in the water, apparently mesmerized by the pattern, just as a predator should have been if it had been real.

Slowly, cautiously, the male drifted towards the barracuda, coming to within a mantle length, gaze fixed on the fish.

At the last moment the barracuda turned, sluggishly, and started to slide away through the water.

But it was too late for that.

The male lunged. His two long tentacles whipped out – too fast even for Sheena to see – and their club-like pads of suckers pounded against the barracuda hide, sticking there.

The barracuda surged forward. It was unable to escape. The male pulled himself towards the barracuda and wrapped his eight strong arms around its body, his body pattern changing to an exultant uniform darkening, careless now of detection.

But when the male tried to jet backwards, hauling at the prey, the barracuda was too massive and strong.

The male broke the stand-off by rocketing forward until his body slammed into the barracuda’s metal hide – he seemed shocked by the hardness of the ‘flesh’ – and he wrapped his two long, powerful tentacles around the slim grey body.

Then he opened his mouth and stabbed at the hull with his beak. The hull broke through easily, Sheena saw; evidently it was designed for this. The male injected poison to stun his victim, and then dug deeper into the hide to extract the warm meat beneath. And meat there was, what looked like fish fragments to Sheena, booty planted there by Dan.

The squid descended, chattering their ancient songs, diving through the cloud of rich, cold meat, lashing their tentacles around the stricken prey. Sheena joined in, her hide flashing in triumph, cool water surging through her mantle, relishing the primordial power of this kill despite its artifice.

… That was when it happened.

Maura Della:

‘Ms Della, welcome to Oceanlab,’ Dan Ystebo said.

As she clambered stiffly down through the airlock into the habitat, the smell of air freshener overwhelmed Maura. The two men here, biologist Dan Ystebo and a professional diver, watched her sheepishly.

She sniffed. ‘Woodland fragrance. Correct?’

The diver laughed. He was a burly fifty-year-old, but the dense air mixture here, hydreliox, turned his voice into a Donald Duck squeak. ‘Better than the alternative, Ms Della.’

Maura found a seat between the two men before a bank of controls. The seat was just a canvas frame, much repaired with duct tape. The working area of this hab was a small, cramped sphere, its walls encrusted with equipment. It featured two small, tough-looking windows, and its switches and dials were shiny and worn with use. The lights were dim, the instruments and screens glowing. A sonar beacon pinged softly, like a pulse.

The sense of confinement, the feel of the weight of water above her head, was overwhelming.

Dan Ystebo was fat, breathy, intense, thirtyish, with Coke-bottle glasses and a mop of unlikely red hair, a typical geek scientist type. Igor to Malenfant’s Doctor Frankenstein, she thought. His face was underlit by the orange glow of his instrument panel. ‘So,’ he said awkwardly. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think it feels like one of those old Soviet-era space stations. The Mir, maybe.’

‘That’s not so far off,’ Dan said, evidently nervous, talking too fast. ‘This is an old Navy installation. Built in the 1960s, nearly fifty years ago. It used to be in deep water out by Puerto Rico, but when a hab diver got himself killed the Navy abandoned it and towed it here, to Key Largo.’

‘Another Cold War relic,’ she said. ‘Just like NASA.’

Dan smiled. ‘Swords into ploughshares, ma’am.’

She leaned forward, peering into the windows. Sunlight shafted through dusty grey water, but she saw no signs of life, not a fish or frond of seaweed. ‘So where is she?’

Dan pointed to a monitor, a modern softscreen pasted over a scuffed hull section. It showed a school of squid, jetting through the water in complex patterns. The image was evidently enhanced; the water had been turned sky blue. ‘We don’t rely on naked eye so much,’ Dan said.

‘Which one is Sheena 5?’

Dan touched the softscreen image, picking out one of the squid, and the virtual camera zoomed in.

The streamlined, torpedo-shaped body was a rich burnt-orange, mottled black. Wing-like fins rippled elegantly alongside the body.

‘Sepioteuthis sepioidea,’ Dan said. ‘The Caribbean reef squid. About as long as your arm. See her countershading? The light is downwelling, coming from above; she has shaded her mantle – brighter below – to eliminate the effect of shadow. Making herself disappear … Squid, all cephalopods in fact, belong to the phylum Mollusca.’

‘Molluscs? I thought molluscs had feet.’

‘They do.’ Dan pointed. ‘But in the squid the foot has evolved into the funnel, here, leading into the mantle, and the arms and tentacles here. The mantle cavity contains the viscera – the circulatory, excretory, digestive, reproductive systems. But the gills also lie in there; the squid “breathes” by extracting oxygen from the air that passes over the gills. And Sheena can use the water passing through the mantle cavity for jet propulsion; she has big ring muscles which –’

‘How do you know that’s her?’

Dan pointed again. ‘See the swelling between the eyes, around the oesophagus?’

‘That’s her enhanced brain?’

‘A squid’s neural layout isn’t like ours. Sheena has two nerve cords running like rail tracks the length of her body, studded with pairs of ganglia. The forward ganglia pair is expanded into a mass of lobes. We gen-enged Sheena and her grandmothers to –’

‘To make a smart squid.’

‘Ms Della, squid are smart anyway. They are molluscs, invertebrates, but they are functionally equivalent to fish. In fact they seem to have evolved – a long time ago, during the Jurassic – in competition with the fish. They have senses based on light, scent, taste, touch, sound – including infrasound – gravity, acceleration, perhaps even an electric sense. See the patterns on Sheena’s hide?’

‘Yes.’

‘They’re made by chromatophores, sacs of pigment granules surrounded by muscles. The chromatophores are under conscious control; Sheena can open or close them as she chooses. The pigments are black, orange and yellow. The underlying colours, blues and violets, are created by passive cells we call reflecting … Ms Della, Sheena can control her skin patterns consciously. She can make bands, bars, circles, annuli, dots. She can even animate the display. The mantle skin is like a reverse retina, where neural signals are converted to patches of shade, rather than the other way around.’

‘And these patterns are signals?’

‘Not just the skin patterns. A given signal seems to be made up of a number of components: the patterns, skin texture – rough or smooth, posture – the attitude of the limbs, head, body, fins – and locomotor components – whether Sheena is resting, jetting, hovering, grabbing, ink-jetting. There may be electric or sonic components too; we can’t be sure.’

The diver growled, ‘Ms Della, we’ve barely scratched the surface with these animals. Not to mention their deep water cousins. Until the last few decades all we did was lower nets and see what we could catch. We used to say it was like trying to understand the animals of the land by working with a butterfly net from a balloon in the clouds.’

Maura said, ‘And what do they use this marvellous signalling for?’

Dan sighed. ‘Again we aren’t sure. They don’t hunt cooperatively. They forage alone by night, and shoal by day. The shoaling seems to be to provide protection while they rest. The squid don’t hide on the bottom like octopuses; they shoal over seagrass beds where there are few predators. They have elaborate courtship rituals. And the young seem to learn from the old. They post sentinels. Very effectively too; though they may have six or seven predator encounters per hour – with yellow jacks and mutton snappers, barracuda and houndfish, coming at them from anywhere – the squid kill rate is very low.

‘But a squid shoal is not a community like ours. They don’t play or groom. There are no leaders among them. The squid don’t show much loyalty to each other; they don’t care for their young, and individuals move between shoals every few days.

‘And they live only a couple of years, mating only once or twice. The squid live fast and die young; it’s not clear to us why such short-lived animals need such complex behaviour, communication systems and breeding rituals … Yet they have them. Ms Della, these are not like the animals you may be familiar with. Perhaps they are more like birds.’

‘And you claim that these communication systems are actually a language.’

Dan scratched his beard. ‘We’ve been able to isolate a number of primal linguistic components which combine in a primitive grammar. Even in unenhanced squid. But the language seems to be closed. It’s about nothing but food, sex and danger, as far as we can see. It’s like the dance of the bee.’

‘Unlike human languages.’

‘Yes. What we have done is open up the language of the squid. We built on the basic patterns and grammar the squid already employ. The number of signals Sheena can produce is not unlimited, of course, but even unenhanced squid have a very wide “vocabulary” taking into account the range of intensity, duration and so forth they can employ. We think they express, for example, moods and intentions with these factors. And some of this stuff is extremely ancient. Some of the simpler signals – the deimatic displays designed to drive off predators, for example – can be observed among the octopuses. And the squid diverged from them back in the early Mesozoic, some two hundred million years ago. Anyhow, building on this, we believe Sheena – or at any rate her descendants – should be able to express an infinite number of messages. Just as you or I can, Ms Della. Squid are clever molluscs. Giving them language was easy.’

‘How do you train them?’

‘With positive reinforcement. Mostly.’

‘Mostly?’

He sighed. ‘I know what you’re asking. Yes, cephalopods can feel pain. They have free nerve endings in the skin. We use low-voltage electric currents to deliver mild shocks during discrimination training. They react as if – well, as you would if I touched you with a stinging nettle. It’s no big deal. Ms Della, I hope you aren’t going to get hung up on this. I cherish Sheena – above and beyond her mission. I wouldn’t damage her. I have no interest in hurting her.’

Studying him, she realized she believed him. But she sensed a certain lack in him, a lack of a moral centre. Perhaps that was a prerequisite in any sentient creature who would inflict pain on another.

Dan was still talking. ‘… Designing the Sheena series of enhancements, we were able to prove that the areas of the brain responsible for learning are the vertical and superior frontal lobes that lie above the oesophagus.’

‘How did you prove that?’

Dan blinked. ‘By cutting away parts of squid brains.’

Maura sighed. Memo, she thought. Do not let Igor here repeat this Nazi doctor stuff in front of the cameras.

She felt uneasy on a deeper level, too. Here was Dan Ystebo hijacking the squid’s evidently remarkable communications senses for his own purposes: for capturing banal commands transmitted by humans. But Dan had admitted he didn’t know what all this rich speech was really for. What if we are damaging Sheena, Maura thought, by excluding her from the songs of her shoals?

Does a squid have a soul?

They studied Sheena. Her head was crowned by a beak surrounded by flipper-like arms, and two forward-looking eyes, blue-green rimmed with orange, peered briefly into the camera.

Alien eyes. Intelligent.

How did it feel, to be Sheena?

And could Sheena possibly understand that humans – Reid Malenfant and his associates, in fact – were planning to have her fly a rocket ship to an asteroid?

The squid school on the softscreen seemed to be hunting now. They were moving in formation around an unmanned camera buoy. The images were spectacular, Jacques Cousteau stuff.

‘They swim awful fast,’ she said.

‘They’re not swimming,’ Dan said patiently. ‘When they swim, they use their fins. Right now they are squirting water out of vents. Jet propulsion.’

‘You understand why I’m here. Malenfant is asking me to go into bat for you on the Hill Monday. I have to put my reputation on the line, to enable this project.’

‘I know that.’

‘Tell me this, Dr Ystebo. You’re sure, absolutely sure, this is going to work?’

‘Absolutely.’ He spoke with a calm conviction. ‘Ms Della, you have to see the power of Malenfant’s conception. I’m convinced Sheena will be able to function in space and at the NEO. She is smart, obviously adapted to gravity-free conditions – there’ll be no calcium depletion or body fluid redistribution or any of that crap for her – almost as if she has been evolved for the conditions of space travel, as we self-evidently haven’t. And she can manipulate her environment. We have a variety of waldo-driven instruments which will enable her to carry out her functions on the NEO.’

‘I’m told the squid are social creatures. And they’re very mobile, obviously. Whereas Sheena will be alone, and the can we’re going to cram her into –’

‘She’ll have a lot of facilities, Ms Della. Including comms, of course. We’ll do everything we can to keep her functioning.’

Functioning. ‘Why not an octopus? Squid are social creatures – in fact, isn’t it true that their consciousness arises from their social structures? Whereas octopuses, I’m told, are solitary, sedentary creatures anyhow who could stand the isolation and confinement.’

‘But not so smart,’ Dan said. ‘They work alone. They don’t need to communicate. And they rely on smell, not sight, to hunt. Thanks to those squid eyes – forward-placed for binocular vision – Sheena will be able to navigate through space for us. It had to be a squid, Ms Della. If she’s a little uncomfortable en route, that’s a price we’ll have to pay.’

‘And what about the return trip? The stresses of re-entry, rehabilitation …’

‘In hand,’ Dan said vaguely. He blinked like an owl.

In hand. Sure. You’re not the one going to the asteroid, you charmless nerd.

Maura found herself convinced. Malenfant knows what he’s doing, right down the line. I have to force the approvals through, on Monday. Sheena – smart, flexible and a lot cheaper than an equivalent robot, even when you took into account the launch costs for her life support environment – was the item that had closed Reid Malenfant’s interplanetary design.

There were some things working in her favour. Behind the scenes Malenfant had already begun to assemble promises of the technical support he was going to need. His old buddies at NASA had started to find ways to free up deep space communications, and provide support for detailed mission design and other support facilities. And it would help, she thought, that this wouldn’t be solely a NASA-related project; cooperation from Woods Hole in Massachusetts and the research institute at Monterey Bay Aquarium in California diluted the hostility NASA always attracted on the Hill.

… But, she thought, if I succeed I will be forever associated with this. And if the news about the brave little squid turns sour enough I may not survive myself.

Dan said, ‘I’ve been working with Sheena for months now. I know her. She knows me. And I know she’s committed to the mission.’

‘You think she understands the risks?’

Dan looked uncomfortable. ‘We’re counselling her. And we’re planning to have Sheena make some kind of statement of her own. Something we can broadcast, of course with a translation. If something does go wrong we hope the public will accept it as a justified sacrifice.’

Maura grunted, unconvinced. ‘Tell me this,’ she said. ‘If you were her – would you go?’

‘Hell, no,’ he said. ‘But I’m not her. Ms Della, every moment of her life, from the moment she was hatched, Sheena has been oriented to the goal. It’s what she lives for. The mission.’

Sombrely Maura watched the squid, Sheena, as she flipped and jetted in formation with her fellows.

I need to pee, she realized.

She turned to Dan. ‘How do I, uh …’

The old diver type handed her a steel jar with a yellow label that had her name on it. ‘Your Personal Micturition Vessel. Welcome to the space program, Ms Della.’

Perhaps reacting to some out-of-shot predator threat, the squid shoal collapsed to a tight school and jetted away with startling speed, their motion three-dimensional and complex, rushing out of the virtual camera’s field of view.

Sheena 5:

The courting began.

The squid swam around each other, subtly adopting new positions in time and space: each female surrounded by two, three, four males. Sheena enjoyed the dance, the ancient, rich choreography – even though she knew courting was not for her: it never could be, after she had been selected by Bootstrap.

Dan had explained it all.

… But now, regardless of Dan’s strictures, regardless of the clamouring mind she carried, he came for her: the killer male, one tentacle torn on some loose fragment of metal, bearing his wound proudly.

She should swim away. But here he was next to her, swimming back and forth with her. She fled, a short distance, but he pursued her, swimming with her, his every movement matching hers.

She knew this was wrong. And yet it was irresistible.

She felt a skin pattern flush over her body, a pied mottling of black and clear, speckled with white spots. It was a simple, ancient message. Court me.

He swam closer.

But the other males, still orbiting her, began to encroach, their eyes hard and intent. The hunter, her male, swam up to meet the most bold, his arms flaring, head dark, bright bands on his mantle. Get away. She is mine! The male refused to back off, his body pattern flaring to match the hunter’s. But the hunter raised his body until his fins bumped the intruder’s, who backed away.

Now he came back to her. She could see his far side was a bright uniform silver, a message to the other males: Keep away, now. Keep away. She is mine! But the side closest to her was a soothing uniform grey-black, a smooth texture into which she longed to immerse herself, to shut off the clattering analysis of the brain the humans had given her. As he rolled the colours tracked around his body, and she could see the tiny muscles working the pigment sacs on his hide.

Now he faced her, open arms starfished around his mouth. His eyes were on her: green and unblinking, avid, mindless, without calculation. Utterly irresistible. And already he was holding out his hectocotylus towards her, the modified arm bearing the clutch of spermatophores at its tip.

For a last instant she remembered Dan, his rigid human face peering out of glass windows at her, the little panels he sent into the water flashing their signs. Mission Sheena mission. Bootstrap! Mission! Dan!

She knew she must not do this.

But then the animal within her rose, urgent.

She opened her mantle to the male. He pumped water into her, seeking to flush out the sperm of any other mate. And then his hectocotylus reached for her, striking swiftly, and lodged his needle-like spermatophore among the roots of her arms.

Already, it was over.

And yet it was not. She could choose whether or not to embrace the spermatophore and place it in her seminal receptacle.

The male was withdrawing. All around her, the squid’s flashing songs pulsed with life.

She knew, compared to a human’s, her life was short: flashing, bright, lasting one summer, two at most, a handful of matings. And she was alone: she did not know her parents, would never know her young, might never see this mate of hers again.

And yet it did not matter. For there was consolation in the shoal, and the shoal of shoals: the ancient songs that reached back to a time before humans, before whales, before even the fish. The songs, poetry of light and dance, made every squid aware she was part of a continuum that stretched back to those ancient seas, and on to the incomprehensible future; and that her own brief, vibrant life was as insignificant, yet as vital, as a single silver scale on the hide of a fish.

Sheena, with her human-built mind, was the first of all squid to be able to understand this. And yet every squid knew it, on some level that transcended the mind.

But Sheena was no longer part of that continuum. Dan understood nothing of the shoal – not really – but he had stressed that much to her. Sheena was different, with different goals: human goals.

Even as the male receded, she felt overwhelmed with sadness, loneliness, isolation.

Flaring anger at the humans who had done this to her, she closed her arms over the spermatophore, and drew it inside her.

e-CNN:

… Following the revelation that a genetically enhanced squid is to be the effective control centre of Reid Malenfant’s quixotic mission to an asteroid <detail>, there has been a predictable outcry from conservation and wildlife rights groups.

But there was an unexpected reaction on Wall Street today where stocks in information technology companies took a beating. Prices <full listing> quoted for the traditional giants like IBM <link> and Microsoft <link> tumbled, but so did the prices for companies like Qbit <link> and Biocom <link>, recent stars of the markets with their stream of successes in the burgeoning fields of quantum-technology computing and bio-computing <backgrounder>.

The reason for all this action is Bootstrap’s rejection of traditional IT solutions in favour of the apparently exotic choice of an enhanced animal. Now, analysts are questioning whether the industry’s reputation for overpriced, unreliable and bug-ridden products is finally taking its toll.

Most of the firms we contacted refused to comment. But an e-spokesperson for IBM said today <animation> that …

Ocean Child:

Thank you, your honour. I only want to say this.

I want everybody to know what we in the Eden League are attempting.

We are developing an internal technology which will selectively suppress the so-called ‘higher’ brain functions in humans. It is clear to us that our ‘intelligence’ has been of no real evolutionary advantage and therefore we intend to discard it. That is why I have no regrets about the mine we attempted to drop onto the laboratory at Key Largo. Frankly I wish it had worked, and I know that statement will affect my sentencing. I don’t care; in fact I welcome it.

And I can announce from this platform that we have already started researching a counter-technology that will similarly restore the squid to their innocence.

What those fascist scientists are doing is cruel.

I don’t mean the experiments where they scoop out the brains of a sentient, intelligent creature. I don’t mean the way they plan to put them to work, farming the oceans for us and even shooting them off into space, where once they were free.

I mean the fact that these animals have been given minds at all.

For centuries we have dragged these beautiful creatures from the Ocean for our food. Now, for our own convenience, we have committed a much greater crime. We have inflicted on these squid an awareness of mortality. And for that, may the Mother Ocean forgive us.

Thank you. That’s all.

Emma Stoney:

Cornelius Taine said, ‘We are invoking deep principles of scientific thinking. Copernicus pointed out that the Earth moves around the sun, not the other way around, and so we were displaced from the centre of the universe. The Copernican principle has guided us ever since. Now we see Earth as just one star, unexceptional, among billions in the Galaxy.

‘We don’t expect to find ourselves in a special place in space. Why should we expect to be in a special place in time? But that is what you have to accept, you see, if you believe mankind has a future with very distant limits. Because in that case we must be among the very first humans who ever lived …’

‘Get to the point,’ Malenfant said softly.

‘… All right. Based on arguments like this, we think a catastrophe is awaiting mankind. A universal extinction, a little way ahead.

‘We call this the Carter catastrophe.’

Emma shivered, despite the warmth of the day.

Malenfant had suggested they follow up Cornelius Taine’s sudden intrusion into their lives by accepting his invitation to come to the New York head offices of Eschatology, Inc. Emma resisted – in her view they had far more important things to talk about than the end of the world – but Malenfant insisted.

Cornelius, it seemed, had gotten under his skin.

So here they were: the three of them sitting at a polished table big enough for twelve, with small inlaid softscreens, and on the wall a grey-glowing monitor screen.

Malenfant sucked aggressively at a beer. ‘Eschatology,’ he snapped. ‘The study of the end of things. Right? So tell me about the end of the world, Cornelius. What? How?’

‘That we don’t know,’ said Cornelius evenly. ‘There are many possibilities. Impact by an asteroid or a comet, another dinosaur killer? A giant volcanic event? A global nuclear war is still possible. Or perhaps we will destroy the marginal, bio-maintained stability of the Earth’s climate … As we go on, we find more ways for the universe to destroy us – not to mention new ways in which we can destroy ourselves. This is what Eschatology, Inc. was set up to consider. But there’s really nothing new in this kind of thinking. We’ve suspected that humanity was doomed to ultimate extinction since the middle of the nineteenth century.’

‘The Heat Death,’ said Malenfant.

‘Yes. Even if we survive the various short-term hazards, entropy must increase to a maximum. In the end the stars must die, the universe will cool to a global uniformity a fraction above absolute zero, and there will be no usable energy, anywhere.’

‘I thought there were ways out of that,’ said Malenfant. ‘Something to do with manipulating the Big Crunch. Using the energy of a collapsing universe to live forever.’

Cornelius laughed. ‘There have been ingenious models of how we might escape the Death, survive a Big Crunch. But they are all based on pushing our best theories of physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, into areas where they break down – such as the singularity at the end of a collapsing universe. Anyway we already know, from cosmological data, that there is no Big Crunch ahead of us. The universe is doomed to expand forever, without limit. The Heat Death, in one form or another, seems inevitable.’

‘But that would give us billions of years,’ said Malenfant.

‘In fact more,’ said Cornelius. Orders of magnitude more.’

‘Well, perhaps we should settle for that,’ Malenfant said dryly.

‘Perhaps. Still, the final extinction must come at last. And the fact of that extinction is appalling, no matter how far downstream it is.’

‘But,’ said Emma sceptically, ‘if you’re right about what you said in the desert, we don’t have trillions of years. Just a couple of centuries.’

Cornelius was watching Malenfant, evidently hoping for a reaction. ‘Extinction is extinction; if the future must have a terminus, does it matter when it comes?’

‘Hell, yes,’ said Malenfant. ‘I know I’m going to die someday. That doesn’t mean I want you to blow my brains out right now.’

Cornelius smiled. ‘Exactly our philosophy, Malenfant. The game itself is worth the playing.’

Emma knew Cornelius felt he had won this phase of the argument. And, gradually, step by step, he was drawing Malenfant into his lunacy.

She sat impatiently, wishing she wasn’t here.

She looked around this small, oak-panelled conference room. There was a smell of polished leather and clean carpets: impeccable taste, corporate lushness, anonymity. The only real sign of unusual wealth and power, in fact, was the enviable view – from a sealed, tinted window – of Central Park. They were high enough here to be above the Park’s main u-v dome. She saw people strolling in the Park, children playing on the glowing green grass, the floating sparks of police drones everywhere.

Emma wasn’t sure what she had expected of Eschatology. Maybe a trailer home in Nevada, the walls coated with tabloid newspaper cuttings, the interior crammed with cameras and listening gear. Or perhaps the opposite extreme: an ultramodern facility with a giant virtual representation of the organization’s Mister Big beamed down from orbit, no doubt stroking his white cat.

But this office, here in the heart of Manhattan, was none of that. It was essentially ordinary. That made it all the more scary, of course.

Malenfant said now, ‘So tell me how you know we only have two hundred years.’

Cornelius smiled. ‘We’re going to play a game.’

Malenfant glared.

Cornelius reached under the table and produced a wooden box, sealed up. It had a single grooved outlet, with a wooden lever alongside. ‘In this box there are a number of balls. One of them has your name on it, Malenfant; the rest are blank. If you press the lever you will retrieve the balls one at a time, and you may inspect them. The retrieval will be truly random.

‘I won’t tell you how many balls the box contains. I won’t give you the opportunity to inspect the box, save to draw out the balls with the lever. But I promise you there are either ten balls in here – or a thousand. Now. Would you hazard which is the true number, ten or a thousand?’

‘Nope. Not without evidence.’

‘Very wise. Please, pull the lever.’

Malenfant drummed his fingers on the table top. Then he pressed the lever.

A small black marble popped into the slot. Malenfant inspected it; it was blank. Emma could see there was easily room for a thousand such balls in the box, if need be.

Malenfant scowled and pressed the lever again.

His name was on the third ball he produced.

‘There are ten balls in the box,’ said Malenfant immediately.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because if there was a thousand in there it’s not likely I’d reach myself so quickly.’

Cornelius nodded. ‘Your intuition is sound. This is an example of Bayes’s rule, which is a technique for assigning probabilities to competing hypotheses with only limited information. In fact –’ he hesitated, calculating ‘– the probability that you’re right is now two-thirds, on the basis of your ball being third out.’

Emma tried to figure that for herself. But, like most probability problems, the answer was counter-intuitive.

‘What’s your point, Cornelius?’

‘Let’s think about the future.’ Cornelius tapped the softscreen embedded in the tabletop before him. The small monitor before Emma lit up, and a schematic graph drew itself elegantly on the screen. It was a simple exponential curve, she recognized, a growth rising slowly at first, steepening up to a point labelled ‘now’. Cornelius said, ‘Here is a picture of the growth of the human population over time. You can see the steep rise in recent centuries. It is a remarkable fact that ten per cent of all the humans who have ever existed are alive now. More than five per cent of all humans, Malenfant, were born after you were …

‘But that is the past. Let’s imagine how the future might develop. Here are three possibilities.’ The curve continued to climb, steepening as it did so, climbing out of Emma’s frame. ‘This,’ said Cornelius, ‘is the scenario most of us would like to see. A continued expansion of human numbers. Presumably this would require a move off-planet.

‘Another possibility is this.’ A second curve extrapolated itself from the ‘now’ point, a smooth tip over to a flat horizontal line. ‘Perhaps our numbers will stabilize. We may settle for the resources of the Earth, find a way to manage our numbers and our planet indefinitely. A bucolic and unexciting picture, but perhaps it is acceptable.

‘But there is a third possibility.’ A third curve climbed a little way past the ‘now’ marker – then fell spectacularly to zero.

‘Jesus,’ said Malenfant. ‘A crash.’

‘Yes. Studies of the population numbers of other creatures, lower animals and insects, often show this sort of shape. Plague, famine, that sort of thing. For us, the end of the world, soon.

‘Now. You can see that in the first two cases, the vast majority of humans are yet to be born. Even if we stay on Earth, we estimate we have a billion years ahead of us before changes in the sun will render Earth’s biosphere unviable. Even in this restricted case we would have far more future than past.

‘And if we expand off-planet, if we achieve the kind of future you’re working for, Malenfant, the possibilities are much greater. Suppose we – or our engineered descendants – colonize the Galaxy. There are four hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, many of which will provide habitable environments for far longer than a mere billion years. Then the total human population, over time, might reach trillions of times its present number.’

‘… Oh. And that’s the problem,’ Malenfant said heavily.

‘You’re starting to see the argument,’ Cornelius said, approving.

‘I’m not,’ said Emma.

Malenfant said, ‘Remember his game with the balls and the box. Why are we here now? If we really are going on to the stars, you have to believe that you were born in the first one-billionth part of the total human population. And how likely is that? Don’t you get it, Emma? It’s as if I drew out my ball third out of a thousand –’

‘Far more unlikely than that, in fact,’ said Cornelius.

Malenfant got up and began to pace the room, excited. ‘Emma, I don’t know statistics from my elbow. But I used to think like this as a kid. Why am I alive now? Suppose we do go on to colonize the Galaxy. Then most of the humans who ever live will be vacuum-sucking cyborgs in some huge interstellar empire. And it’s far more likely that I’d be one of them than what I am. In fact the only pop curve where it’s reasonably likely that we’d find ourselves here, now, is –’

‘The crash,’ said Emma.

‘Yes,’ Cornelius said sombrely. ‘If there is a near-future extinction, it is overwhelmingly likely that we find ourselves alive within a few centuries of the present day. Simply because that is the period when most humans who ever lived, or who will ever live, will have been alive. Ourselves among them.’

‘I don’t believe this for a second,’ Emma said flatly.

‘It is impossible to prove, but hard to refute,’ said Cornelius. ‘Put it this way. Suppose I tell you the world will end tomorrow. You might think yourself unlucky that your natural life span has been cut short. But in fact, one in ten of all humans – that is, the people alive now – would be in the same boat as you.’ He smiled. ‘You work in Las Vegas. Ask around. Losing out to one in ten odds is unlucky, but not drastically so.’

Emma said, ‘You can’t argue from analogy like this. There are a fixed number of balls in that box. But the total number of possible humans depends on the undetermined and open-ended future – it might even be infinite. And how can you possibly make predictions about people who don’t even exist yet – whose nature and powers and choices we know absolutely nothing about? You’re reducing the most profound mysteries of human existence to a shell game.’

Cornelius said patiently, ‘You’re right to be sceptical. Nevertheless we have thirty years of these studies behind us now. The methodology was first proposed by a physicist called Brandon Carter in a lecture to the Royal Society in London in the 1980s. And we have built up estimates based on a range of approaches, calling on data from many disciplines –’

Malenfant said hoarsely, ‘When?’

‘Not earlier than 150 years from now. Not later than 240.’

Malenfant cleared his throat. ‘Cornelius, what’s this all about? Is this an extension of the old eggs-in-one-basket argument? Are you going to push for an off-planet expansion?’

Cornelius was shaking his head. ‘I’m afraid that’s not going to help.’

Malenfant looked surprised. ‘Why not? We have centuries. We could spread over the Solar System –’

‘But that’s the point,’ said Cornelius. ‘Think about it. My argument wasn’t based on any one threat, or any assumptions about where humans might be located, or what level of technology we might reach. It was an argument about the continued existence of humanity, come what may. Perhaps we could even reach the stars, Malenfant. But it will do us no good. The Carter catastrophe will reach us anyhow.’

‘Jesus,’ said Malenfant. ‘What possible catastrophe could obliterate star systems – reach across light years?’

‘We don’t know.’

There was a heavy silence in the wood-laden room.

Malenfant said gruffly: ‘So tell me what you want from me.’

Cornelius said evenly, ‘I’m coming to that.’ He stood up. ‘May I bring you more drinks?’

Emma got out of her chair and walked to the window. She looked out over Central Park, the children playing. They were engaged in some odd, complex game of shifting patterns. She watched for a while; it looked almost mathematical, like a geometric form of communication. Kids were strange these days. Getting brighter, according to the news media. Maybe they needed to be.

But some things never changed. Here came a buggy, she saw, crossing through the Park, drawn by a horse, tireless and steady. The world, bathed in smoky, smog-laden sunlight, looked rich, ancient yet renewed, full of life and possibilities.

… Was it possible Cornelius was right? That all this could end, so soon?

Two hundred more years was nothing. There were hominid tools on the planet two million years old.

And, she thought, will there be a last day? Will there still be a New York, a Central Park – the last children of all playing here on that day? Will they know they have no future?

Or is all this simple craziness?

Malenfant touched her arm. ‘This is one hell of a thing, isn’t it?’ She recognized the tone, the look. All the scepticism and hostility he had shown to Cornelius out in the desert had evaporated. Here was another Big Idea, and Reid Malenfant was distracted, like a kid by a new shiny toy.

Shit, she thought. I can’t afford for Malenfant to take his eye off the ball. Not now. And it’s my fault. I could have dumped Cornelius in Vegas, found a way to block his approach … Too late, too late.

She tried, anyhow. ‘Malenfant, listen. I’ve been digging up Cornelius’s past.’

Malenfant turned, attentive.

Some of it was on the record. She hadn’t even recognized the terms mathematicians used to describe Cornelius’s academic achievement – evidently it covered games of strategy, economic analysis, computer architecture, the shape of the universe, the distribution of prime numbers – anyhow he had been on his way, it seemed, to becoming one of the most influential minds of his generation.

But he had always been – well, odd.

His gift seemed non-rational: he would leap to a new vision, somehow knowing its rightness instinctively, and construct laborious proofs later. Cornelius had remained solitary: he attracted awe, envy, resentment.

As he approached thirty he drove himself through a couple of years of feverish brilliance.

Maybe this was because the well of mathematical genius traditionally dries up at around that age, a prospect which must have terrified Taine, so that he thought he was working against time.

Or maybe there was a darker explanation, Emma’s e-therapists speculated. It wasn’t unknown for creativity to derive from a depressive or schizoid personality. And creative capacities could be used in a defensive way, to fend off mental illness.

Maybe Cornelius was working hard in order to stay sane. If he was, it didn’t seem to have worked.

The anecdotes of Cornelius’s breakdown were fragmentary.

At first he was just highly aware, watchful, insomniac. Then he began to see patterns in the world around him – the cracks in the sidewalk, telephone numbers, the static of dead television screens. He said he was on the verge of deep cosmic insights, available only to him –

‘Who says all this?’

‘His colleagues. His doctors’ case notes, later. You see the pattern, Malenfant? Everything got twisted around. It was as if his faith in the rationality and order of the universe had turned against him, becoming twisted and dysfunctional.’

‘Yeah. Right. And envy and peer pressure and all that good stuff had nothing to do with it.’

‘Malenfant, on his last day at Princeton they found him in the canteen, slamming his head against a wall, over and over.’

After that Cornelius had disappeared for two years. Emma’s data miners had been unable to trace how he spent that time. When he re-emerged, it wasn’t to go back to Princeton but to become a founding board member of Eschatology, Inc.

And here was Emma now, with Malenfant, in the orderly office of this apparently calm, rational, highly intelligent man. Talking about the end of the world.

She whispered urgently, ‘Don’t you get it, Malenfant? Here’s a guy who tells us he sees patterns in the universe nobody else can make out – a guy who believes he can predict the end of humanity.’ A guy who seemed on the point of inducing Malenfant to turn aside his own gigantic projects to follow his insanity. ‘Are you listening?’

Malenfant touched her arm. ‘I hear what you say,’ he said. ‘But –’

‘But what?’

‘What if it’s true? Whether Cornelius is insane or not, what if he’s right? What then?’ His eyes were alive, excited.

Emma watched the children in the Park.

Cornelius returned and invited them to sit once more. He had brought a fresh chilled beer for Malenfant and a coffee for Emma: a decent latte in a china cup, smelling as if it had been freshly brewed and poured by a human hand. She was impressed, as was, no doubt, the intention.

Cornelius sat down. He coughed. ‘Now comes the part you may find hard to believe.’

Malenfant barked laughter. ‘Harder than the death of mankind in two hundred years? Are you for real?’

Cornelius said, with a nod to Emma, ‘Here’s a little more dubious logic for you. Suppose, in the next few decades, humans – our descendants – do find a way to avoid the catastrophe. A way for us to continue, into the indefinite future.’

‘That’s impossible, if your arguments are correct.’

‘No. Merely highly unlikely. But in that case – and knowing the hugeness of the catastrophe to come – if they did find a way, what might our descendants try to do?’

Malenfant frowned. ‘You’re losing me.’

Cornelius smiled. ‘They would surely try to send us a message.’

Emma closed her eyes. The madness deepens, she thought.

‘Woah.’ Malenfant held up his hands. ‘You’re talking about sending a message back in time?’

Cornelius went on, ‘And the most logical thing for us to do would be to make every effort to detect that message. Wouldn’t it? Because it would be the most important message ever received. The future of the species would depend on it.’

‘Time paradoxes,’ whispered Emma. ‘I always hated stories about time paradoxes.’

Malenfant sat back. Suddenly, to Emma, he looked much older than his fifty years. ‘Jesus. What a day. And this is what you want me for? To build you a radio that will pick up the future?’

‘Perhaps the future is already calling. All we have to do is try, any which way. They’re our descendants. They know we are trying. They even know how we are trying. And so they can target us. Or will. Our language is a little limited here … You are unique, Malenfant. You have the resources and the vision to carry this through. Destiny awaits you.’

Malenfant turned to Emma. She shook her head at him. We ought to get out of here. He looked bemused.

He turned back to Cornelius. ‘Tell me one thing,’ he said. ‘How many balls were there in that damn box?’

But Cornelius would only smile.