Galaxias Read online

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  EVENT

  DAY

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  YEAR

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  DECADE

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  GALACTIC YEAR

  42

  Afterword

  Credits

  Also By Stephen Baxter from Gollancz:

  Copyright

  For Elvy May Moylan

  b. 11 April 2021

  and

  Molly Alice Baxter

  b. 17 July 2021

  EVENT

  1973–2057

  On 3 December 1973, a small spacecraft passed Jupiter.

  The craft, American-built, was called Pioneer 10.

  As its makers had intended, the close approach to Jupiter caused the giant planet’s gravity field to hurl the craft further and faster than on arrival. And by the time it left Jupiter, Pioneer was moving too fast to fall back into the Sun’s gravity well.

  Pioneer 10 thus became the first human-made artefact destined to reach interstellar space.

  A breakout had been made.

  The Sinus Medii, the ‘Central Bay’, a sea of dry dust, had a striking location: right at the centre of the Moon’s permanently Earth-turned face.

  Before the events of 2057, however, no human had come here, even though a permanent human outpost orbited the Moon, and descents to places of interest had become commonplace. No human footprints marked the dust of the Central Bay.

  By then, however, the Bay had been carefully watched by human eyes for nearly a century.

  Two automated probes had come here.

  In November 1967 a spidery craft called Surveyor 6 had landed here, clumsily – and then fired its rocket engine and hopped a few metres over the surface. The purpose had been to test the restarting of engines on the Moon’s surface, an essential engineering requirement if astronauts were to be landed on the Moon and sent safely home. The little craft, having achieved its makers’ goals, quickly died – but not before it had made an accidental discovery.

  This was a chance encounter. The next was intentional, and covert.

  In December 1972 the Moon suffered a large impact. This was caused by the guided fall onto the Moon of a discarded, spent rocket, the third stage of the Saturn V booster that had propelled Apollo 17 and its crew to the Moon. During the Apollo programme there had been many such impacts of abandoned vehicle components, the purpose to make the Moon ring with seismic waves, and so afford glimpses of its interior structure.

  This was not the purpose of this impact.

  No impact before had come so close to the Sinus Medii, to within a few hundred kilometres. This landfall was by design.

  And even as the jolt of impact reverberated through the body of the Moon, another small craft, not unlike Surveyor 6 but never publicly named, landed close to its defunct predecessor.

  This particular Saturn impact had been an act of concealment. A concealment of the second probe’s landing, by one group of humans from others.

  This time there was no engine test, no short-lived experiments and observations.

  Only watchfulness.

  Peace returned to the Moon.

  That, and watchfulness. Mutual watchfulness.

  Until December 1973, as Pioneer 10 passed Jupiter.

  On the Moon, in the Sinus Medii, an eye opened.

  An observation was made.

  A message was sent.

  No reply could be expected for years. There was patience. The patience of aeons.

  An eye closed.

  After that, again, mutual watchfulness returned.

  In 1985 an acknowledgement of the 1973 message was received from the third-level node.

  In 2008 an acknowledgement was received from the second-level node.

  In 2056 an acknowledgment was received from the first-level node. And a notification of what was to come.

  In 2057, on 5 January, it began. In the Sinus Medii, an eye opened once more.

  And, in England, a hard rain fell across the face of Tash Brand.

  DAY

  5–6 January 2057

  1

  0940 GMT

  On Friday, 5 January 2057, in the morning of that day as experienced near the Greenwich meridian, many eyes happened to be turned to the Moon and the Sun: human and artificial eyes, on Earth and beyond. For that morning the Moon, following its own orbit, was sliding into a position precisely between Earth and Sun, so that the Moon’s shadow would pass over a swathe of Earth’s surface – in the southern hemisphere, across the ocean south of Africa – neatly and precisely hiding the Sun’s disc from human eyes across that swathe.

  It was a solar eclipse, with the moment of greatest eclipse, the midpoint of totality, due at 0948 Greenwich Mean Time.

  A chain of events began at 0940 GMT.

  The timing was deliberate, of course. Anticipating the eclipse.

  But the primary event occurred at the location of the Sun itself.

  The very first human instruments to detect the event were a fleet of solar science probes, launched by many nations, which followed fast, swooping orbits around the Sun, even over its poles, or diving perilously deep into its corona, its outer atmosphere.

  This day they recorded baffling, anomalous data, before losing their orbital moorings in space, and scattering like startled birds.

  It took eight minutes at lightspeed for the first observable effects – primarily gravitational and electromagnetic, light – to reach the orbit of Moon and Earth. So, as had been intended, the effects arrived precisely at the moment of greatest eclipse.

  And, given the line-up of Earth, Moon, Sun, at this moment of eclipse, these effects were first detectable on the Moon’s far side – the side closest to the Sun, closer than anywhere on Earth.

  The first technology in the Earth-Moon system to record the event, it was later established, was at the Maccone Observatory, an automated deep-space telescope complex near the centre of that averted face, in a crater called Daedalus. For some years the lunar far side, shielded from the Earth’s visual brightness and radio noise, had been maintained as a park for astronomy. The Maccone instrument suite watched the sky constantly, in many wavelengths – visible light, radio, infra-red, even gravity waves. And it was equipped to raise automatic alarms if unexpected events were observed.

  Such an event was now observed.

  The signal set, rich in anomalous data, was immediately flagged as extraordinary. Records were made, summary reports hastily compiled, alerts tagged. This took nanoseconds.

  Then it took a fiftieth of a second to transmit the information around the Moon, through the fibre-optic communications network that, in the year 2057, lay draped across the dusty lunar hills like a sparse nervous system.

  At much the same moment, visible evidence of the event reached human eyes: in lunar space, the eyes of a dozen multinational crew observing the events of the solar eclipse from the unique perspective of their orbital habitat, Lunar Gateway III.

  It was less than two seco
nds more before visible evidence of the event reached the Earth itself.

  And consequences unfolded.

  As, in the Sinus Medii, an eye opened to watch the reaction.

  2

  0948 GMT

  At twelve minutes to ten this Friday morning, under an overcast winter sky, Tash Brand was crossing the River Tyne, heading north, on her way home from work at Government House.

  The Gateshead Millennium Bridge, built to commemorate a calendar transition that had happened twenty-seven years before thirty-year-old Tash was even born, was showing its age, she often thought. It was pedestrians only, a tilting bridge long since rusted into immobility, and the walkway surface, heavily remodelled, could sometimes be roughed up so you had to watch your step, even in the daylight, at least on a gloomy, overcast, winter morning like this one.

  But Tash liked to walk. She took her time.

  In fact – this was a few minutes before 0948, as she would remember later – she had already slowed up, feeling calmer the further she got from House with its endless adrenaline-pumping culture of urgency. It was like that even on relatively quiet days, and there were few quiet days. This morning she was emerging from yet another unscheduled all-nighter, this one caused by another attempted landing of French boat people, disgruntled citizens of federal Europe, in the Wash.

  She came to a halt halfway across the river, took a breath, leaned against a handrail, and just looked. The light was poor, which wasn’t unusual for the time of year – she had grown up in Surrey and had yet to get used to the shorter midwinter days up here, with sunrise only an hour and a half ago. Her father often reminded her of how her mother, Nigerian-born, had never got used to English winter days, even in the south.

  But still the view was rich. Behind her the big box of Government House on the Gateshead bank: a monument of smartwood, a righteous carbon sink from its wood pile foundations all the way to its grass-covered roof. You couldn’t get more modern than that – or much newer. It was only a year since the English federal government, long decamped from a flooded London and eager to establish its credentials as a uniter of a new England of quasi-independent regions, had moved here after a five-year stay in Birmingham. There had been some controversy about the functions of government being carried out so far north; the comms links made it irrelevant where Parliament sat, of course, but this was felt to be undiplomatically close to the surly English-Scottish international border.

  What the hell, Tash thought, looking back. House itself was a spectacular sight, and the views it offered from within could be even more spectacular, when the Sun rose over the North Sea – on a good day, some swore, you could see the turning blades of the huge Dogger Island wind farm, far out to sea. In fact it looked as if it might eventually turn out to be one such good day today; looking back at that eastern horizon now she saw the clouds growing ragged, revealing the deep blue of a winter morning sky.

  Meanwhile, to her left, old Newcastle sprawled across its own hilly bank, connected to the Gateshead side by multiple bridges thrown across the Tyne, some centuries old, all of them echoes of originals constructed back when this place had been one terminus of Hadrian’s Wall. And the city itself offered a very modern view with its grassed-over roofs, tree-crowded avenues, white-painted buildings – nowadays it had the look of a theme park, so her father often said sourly, when the Sun caught it right.

  Not many of her colleagues made this walk, though it was a reasonably short trek to the Manors district, to the east of the city centre, where accommodation for junior workers like Tash had been commandeered when the government had come to town. Most used the traffic tunnel that had been cut beneath the river, for speed and security. Tash, though, actually preferred being forced to take a little more time than the minimum, when she got the chance.

  And, she was slowly learning, she liked being close to the river too. Like all British rivers, the Tyne was well controlled, from drainage schemes across the flood plain further west, to the barrier at its mouth on the east coast protecting it from North Sea storm surges. Looking down at the waters, grey in the cloud-choked light, she always had the sense of something bigger than herself, processes shaping the world on a scale far larger than she was ever likely to affect. Even if she was now a worm in the core of the apple of government, as Mel had once called her.

  She smiled at that thought. That was Mel Kapur for you – always ready for a smartass put-down in case she ever got pretentious – not to mention Zhi, similarly acidic. Though Tash gave as good as she got. These were her closest friends, since college days, a decade back: herself, Wu Zhi, Mel Kapur. Always in her thoughts, it seemed.

  Maybe, standing here, dawdling before going home, her subconscious was prompting her to give them a call. It was an unusual day after all.

  She knew that Mel was eclipse-watching over the southern ocean – aboard Skythrust Two, lucky fiend – and Zhi, luckier yet, was actually up in space, aboard the Lodestone station, ready to make his own observations. Waiting for an eclipse that was due about now, she vaguely remembered. What an experience for them.

  The In-Jokes, as they had called themselves ever since a gloomy virus-lockdown term they had shared at Yale. They were all studious, thoughtful. Kind of serious, she supposed now, looking back. They had drifted together as other groups had formed around them – groups often self-identifying around in-jokes of some kind, relics of parties, or through the frat houses which were nothing but extended in-jokes themselves. It was Zhi who, as the three of them had sat gloomily in the corner of some bar one night, had come up with the name. ‘We are the In-Jokes. And for us the in-joke is: there is no In-Joke.’

  Well, it seemed funny at the time.

  Although it had been the Pacific Incident that had caused them to bond for life, she supposed. When the three of them had nearly died in a botched survival exercise, one of Zhi’s astronaut-cadet tests: a chopper drop into the water. They worked together, and had got out of there, and had never been out of touch since. Even though their careers had diverged, with Zhi heading for research in space, Mel for astronomy, and Tash, always less academic – her degree subject had been the sociology of science – went into government work. Still they stayed together.

  Later, she would remember that was what she was thinking of. Her friends.

  What she was thinking of when the Blink came.

  And the light went away.

  Suddenly, standing there on the bridge, she was plunged into pitch darkness.

  And a hard rain fell across the face of Tash Brand.

  It was a short, sharp burst out of nowhere, from a sky thick with cloud. Tash, shocked, bewildered, in sudden darkness, turned her head away, fumbled for her hood.

  But she staggered, losing her orientation, and stumbled off a kerb, into the central walkway, nearly turning an ankle.

  Pitch dark. What the hell? The light had just gone, with maybe a few seconds of fade-out – and she couldn’t be sure about that.

  It was as if she were deep in the bowels of House, and the power supply had failed. Not that it ever would. But she was outdoors.

  Somebody screamed, along the bridge. She heard distant car horns.

  Pitch dark.

  Out in the open, under the sky, for God’s sake. You didn’t get power-failure blackouts outdoors. Standing there, unwilling to move, to take a step, she realised she was thinking like a child, slowly, utterly bewildered, not logically. But she felt helpless as a child, all the control she thought she had had over her world stripped away.

  She took a step, stumbled again, nearly tripping on that kerb again.

  A rail – she had been leaning on a handrail, that must be just ahead. She reached out, flailing. Found the rail. Clung to it with her gloved hands. Then, with more confidence, she stepped back up to the raised kerb.

  She tried to take stock. She was standing on the bridge still, she could feel the rough surface under her feet, she had been looking out over the water. Right here. She thought she heard the lap, no
w. So that was still here.

  She felt a deep, visceral, almost superstitious fear. You didn’t get power failures out of doors. So, what else could have happened?

  Her sight was gone.

  No.

  She heard herself sob.

  But she had heard that scream, from somebody else on the bridge. Now more voices were calling. Think, Tash. Why would other people be calling out if you had gone blind? Why sound their horns?

  She clung to her rail and cast about – there. A spark of light, like a phone. A way off down the bridge – back the way she had come, towards the south. Was there a vague patch of light in the sky beyond that? Maybe her eyes were dark-adapting—

  A phone. The spark of light was a phone. Stupid, stupid. She scrambled in her pocket for her own phone – don’t drop it, for God’s sake – and flipped it open.

  A little rectangle of light, dazzling, the usual mundane menu.

  ‘Shit, shit. Thank you, thank you.’

  She waved the phone about, like a torch. It shed a glow around her, a few metres in any direction. She was still on the bridge. There was the river, even, returning the faintest of reflections from the glow of her phone.

  She felt as if her bubble of perception, her awareness of the world around her, was opening out slowly, slowly. She took a step back from the rail – her rail – though she held on to it for comfort, and looked around properly.

  Dark everywhere. A sudden night. Below her, the river, now looking a deep, oily black. But above her head one stray light, hanging from the bridge structure somewhere like a forgotten Christmas decoration.

  To her left, the city on the north bank was visible, just, with a few lights showing, lit windows, a few ad hoardings. Maybe her eyes were adapting to the dark. To her right the big pile of House on the south bank became more clearly visible too, patches of it shining with the glow of artificial lights, the big clearwood window panels vivid rectangles – but much dimmer than daylight, she realised now.

  And there were those people on the bridge with her. She hadn’t really even registered their existence before the dark came. More and more glowing pinpoints in the dark, people digging out their phones and watches and headbands. The speckles of light glittered and bobbed, like a swarm of fireflies along the bridge. Everybody seemed to have stopped still, their faces pale masks in the scraps of light.