Space. Stephen Baxter

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      The Sports Fans lived at the fringe of the launch complex in semi-permanent camps, contained by tough link fences. They spent their time chanting, costume-wearing, leafleting, performing protests of one baffling kind or another, right up against the fences, carefully watched over by Bootstrap security staff and drone robots. They were funded, presumably, by savings, or sponsors, or by whatever they could sell of their experiences and their witness on the data nets, and they were a fat, easy revenue source for the local Kazakhs – which was why they were tolerated here.

      Xenia tried to guide Dorothy away from all this, but Dorothy demurred. And so they began a slow drive around the fences, as Dorothy peered out, and Xenia struggled to contain her impatience.

      Public reaction to the Gaijin – as it had developed over the five years since the announcement of the discovery by Nemoto and Malenfant – had bifurcated. There were two broad schools of thought. The technical terms among psychologists and sociologists, Xenia had learned, were ‘millennialists’ and ‘catastrophists’.

      The millennialists, taking their lead from thinkers like Carl Sagan – not to mention Gene Roddenberry – believed that no star-spanning culture could possibly be hostile to a more primitive species like humanity, and the Gaijin must therefore be on their way to educate us or uplift us or save us from ourselves. The more intellectual millennialists had at least produced some useful, if slanted, material: careful studies of parallels with intercultural contact in Earth’s past, ranging from the dreadful fall-out of western colonialism through to the essentially benevolent impact of the transmission of learning from Arabian and ancient Greek cultures to the medieval west.

      But some millennialists were more direct. Various giant, elaborate structures had been cut or burned or painted on Earth’s surface – featuring the peace sigil, the yin and yang, the Christian cross, a human hand – giant graffiti, Dorothy thought, painted in the deserts of America and Africa and Asia and Australia and even, illegally, on the Antarctic ice cap, its creators wistfully hoping to catch the eye of the anonymous, toiling strangers out in the belt.

      Others were even less subtle. Right here before her now there was a circle of people, hands open and faces raised to the desert sky, all steadily praying. She knew there had been similar gatherings, some in continuous session, at many of the world’s key religious and mystic sites: Jerusalem, Mecca, the pyramids, the European stone circles. Take me! Take me!

      Meanwhile, the catastrophists believed that the aliens represented terrible danger.

      Much of their fear and anger was directed at the aliens themselves, of course, and there were elaborate schemes for military assaults on their supposed asteroid bases – justified, in some cases, by appeal to the evident malice of most of the aliens reported in UFO abduction cases of the past. There was even one impressive presentation – complete with animation and sound effects, emanating from softscreen posters draped over Bootstrap’s link fence – from a major aerospace cartel. The military-industrial-complex types were as always seeking to turn the new situation into lucrative new contracts, and how better than to be asked to build giant asteroid-belt battle cruisers?

      But the catastrophists had plenty of rage left over to be directed at other targets, healthily fuelled by conspiracy theorists. There were still some who held that the US government had been collaborating with the aliens since Roswell, 1947 – ‘I wish they had been,’ Frank once said tiredly; ‘it would make life a lot easier’ – and there were protests aimed at government agencies at all levels, the United Nations, scientific bodies, and anybody thought to be involved in the general cover-up. The most spectacular of the related assaults had been the grenade attack which had caused the destruction of the decrepit, never-flown Saturn V Moon rocket which had lain for decades as a monument outside NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

      It kept the Bootstrap guards watchful.

      ‘Intriguing,’ Dorothy murmured. ‘Disturbing.’

      Xenia said gently, ‘But places like this always concentrate the noise. The vast majority of people out there in the real world are simply indifferent to the whole thing. When the news about the Gaijin first broke it was an immediate sensation, taking over every media outlet – for a day or two, perhaps a week. I was already working with Frank at the time. He was electrified – well, we both were; we thought the news the most significant of our lifetimes. And the business opportunities it might open up sent Frank running around in circles.’

      Dorothy smiled. ‘That sounds like the Frank Paulis I’ve read about.’

      ‘But then there was no more fresh news …’

      After a couple of weeks, the Gaijin had been crowded off the front pages. Politics had assumed its usual course, and all the funds hastily promised in that first startling morning after the Nemoto – Malenfant discovery – for deeper investigations and robot probes and manned missions and the rest – had soon evaporated.

      ‘But the news was too – lofty,’ Dorothy murmured. ‘Inhuman. It changed everything. Suddenly the universe swivelled around us; suddenly we knew we weren’t alone, and how we felt about ourselves, about the universe and our place in it, could never be the same again.

      ‘And yet, nothing changed. After all the Gaijin didn’t do anything but crawl around their asteroids. They didn’t respond to any of the signals they were sent, whether by governments or churches or ham-radio crackpots.’

      Frank had gotten involved in some of that, in fact; the early messages had been framed using a universal-language methodology that dated back to the 1960s, called Lincos: lots of redundancy and framing to make the message patterns clear, a simple primer which worked up from basic mathematical concepts through physics, chemistry, astronomy … A lot of beautiful, fascinating work, none of which had raised so much as a peep from the Gaijin.

      ‘And meanwhile,’ Dorothy went on, ‘there were still babies to deliver, crops to grow, politicking to pursue and wars to fight. As my father used to say, the next morning you still had to put your pants on one leg at a time.

      ‘You know,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘I’m generally in favour of all this activity. Your Sports Fans, I mean. The only way we have to absorb such changes in our view of the world, and ourselves, is like this: by talking, talking, talking. At least the people here care enough to express an opinion. Look at that.’ It was a softscreen poster showing a download from the net: a live image returned by some powerful telescope, perhaps in orbit or on the Moon, of the asteroid belt anomalies: a dark, grainy background, a line of red stars, twinkling, blurred. ‘Alien industry, live from space. The most popular Internet site, I’m told. People use it as wallpaper in their bedrooms. They seem to find it comforting.’

      Xenia snorted. ‘Sure. And you know who makes most use of that image? The astrologers. Now you can have your fortune told by the lights of Gaijin factories. I mean, Jesus … Sorry. But it says it all.’

      Dorothy laughed good-naturedly.

      They drove away from the Sports Fans’ pens, and approached the pad itself: the true centre of attention, bearing Bootstrap’s first interplanetary ship, Frank Paulis’s pride and joy.

      Xenia could see the lines of a rust-brown external tank, the slim pillars of solid rocket boosters. The stack was topped by a tubular cover that gleamed white in the sun. Somewhere inside that fairing rested the Giordano Bruno, a complex robot spacecraft that would some day ride out to the asteroids, and seek out the Gaijin that lurked there – if Frank could drive the test program to completion, if Xenia could guide the corporation through the maze of legislation that still impeded them.

      As Xenia studied the СКАЧАТЬ