The Thousand Earths Read online

  To the memory of my mother,

  b. Sarah Marion Richmond (1929–2018),

  my grandmother b. Sarah Elizabeth Moorhead (1895–1977),

  and my great-grandmother b. Sarah Hackett (1869–1940).

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  John Hackett

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Mela

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  John Hackett

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Mela

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  John Hackett

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Mela

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  John Hackett

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Mela

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  John Hackett

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Mela and John Hackett

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Afterword

  Credits

  Also by Stephen Baxter

  Copyright

  John Hackett

  AD 2154

  1

  It began with an ending.

  It ended with a beginning.

  Denise Libby had come all the way out to Jupiter, from Earth, to interview her ex-husband, John Hackett.

  Now, alone in a tiny, automated shuttle, Denise Libby barely felt the push, barely heard the hiss of the steam-rocket engines as the craft lifted her from the surface of Callisto, moon of Jupiter. She said: ‘Hull to transparent.’

  The cabin stayed opaque. Like a wall of dumb steel.

  She’d been told that this was standard: local rules. Only long-term residents, the local police, emergency workers and other privileged folk were to be entrusted with the giddying sight of an ascent from, or descent to, any of Jupiter’s inhabited moons. Just too vertiginous a sight for a novice, so the rule went. Or, more likely, the burgeoning conflict between Earth and its Jovian colonies mandated secrecy on all sides. Weapons platforms to be glimpsed, perhaps. Even mining operations not authorised by Earth …

  Bah. She tried anyhow.

  ‘Hull to transparent,’ she said again.

  John wasn’t even here for Jupiter, or Callisto, or interplanetary politics. Not directly. John would soon be heading out of this rich planetary system, with a crew of similarly minded suicidal idiots, on a one-way mission to the Andromeda galaxy. Hell of a thing, a round trip of five million light-years – and five million years one-way into the future.

  And here she was being nursemaided by this dumb little toy ship.

  ‘Hull to transparent, damn it. Hull to transparent. Hull to—’

  The hull turned transparent.

  Now she seemed to be floating in a kind of outline of a craft, a box of slim but robust-looking girders holding together the bulky globe of a fusion engine, and fat propellant tanks. Other anonymous installations that were presumably the elements of the life-support system that kept her alive. All of this in a frame suspended in empty space.

  And there, far below, was Callisto, a brownish sphere only dimly lit by the distant Sun. During the transit from Earth – a hundred days of continuous fusion-rocket thrust – there had been little for her to see or do. A journey spent in a kind of grim silence, without external comms. For, in a Solar System poised, it seemed, for war, such ships ran silent in the interplanetary night.

  Now, though, at last, here was Callisto itself, suspended beneath her. The furthest out of Jupiter’s four largest moons – larger than Earth’s Moon – and covered by craters, it looked to Denise like a huge ball of glass peppered with gunshot impacts. In fact, she knew, this moon’s surface was very ancient, some of those scars tremendously old. But the geology was quite unlike the superficially similar impact scarring of Earth’s Moon, for this remote world was more than half water ice by mass. The craters were frozen splashes.

  And that was why the governments of Earth had come here, bypassing the rogue, fractious, noisy, independent settlements in the asteroid belt. For water. Water to sustain human lives in habitats, water for fusion fuel for spacecraft, water not controlled by the monopolistic rock rats in the belt, water for rapidly advancing industry.

  Industry that had already supported the construction of humanity’s first crewed starship.

  Which brought her focus back to the task in hand. Not that she could see anything yet of John or his craft, the Perseus, right now. She turned around, peering through the transparent hull, trying to orient herself by the tremendous cosmic entities arrayed around her: the Sun, Callisto, the brilliant sparks that were more of Jupiter’s moons … But where the hell was Jupiter itself?

  At last, as she twisted around, she saw a fine crescent cradling a disc of darkness. A thin line, just a bow of ruddy light, the outer edge faintly diffuse against the deeper dark beyond.

  But the inner edge was quite sharp. Technological. An artefact.

  And suddenly it all came into focus. ‘Oh. I get it, Hackett. I can’t see Jupiter because your damn ship is so big it eclipses Jupiter. Almost.’

  ‘Perseus to Callisto shuttle.’ John’s smooth voice, sounding in the air.

  ‘You show-off bastard. It must have taken some navigation to set that stunt up. You might have warned me.’

  ‘Would you have listened? That would have been a first. I have you locked on to my docking system. Just sit tight, I’ll bring you in. And don’t go pressing any buttons.’

  ‘There aren’t any buttons—’

  ‘Our dark energy ramscoop is somewhat fragile. Mint tea – still your choice?’

  It hadn’t been for years, even before the break-up. Even before the death of Sarah, their niece, the event which had ultimately driven that break-up. But it wasn’t a moment for scoring points, she knew. ‘Mint tea,’ she said calmly.

  And, little by little, the cloud banks of Jupiter slipped out from behind the tremendous scoop-sail. King of the planets, eclipsed by a human artefact.

  ‘See you soon,’ said Hackett.

  The smart shuttle had no trouble finding its way past the ramscoop sail, or rather through it. Close to, it turned out to be a kind of mesh of sparse threads, making an array of gaping holes, each a neat hexagon.

  But, as the shuttle neared the structure, from Denise’s point of view it opened out into a wall across the sky. A wall, she reminded herself, against which fifteen planets the size of Earth could have been set in a row, and still leave room at the margins. And at each intersection of the thread mesh she saw technology, glittering knots, evidently complex.

  ‘I’m guessing I’m seeing the dark energy access stations,’ she murmured, as one of those great hexagonal gaps opened up around her.

  ‘Not all active yet,’ John called back. ‘We are still testing the sail, the integrity of the structure, the smart feedback and control mechanisms. I say we – everybody else has gone under already.’

  ‘The other six of the Andromeda seven. All in their float tanks?’

  ‘Where I will be joining them soon. To sleep through five gravities’ thrust for twelve years – or two and a half million years as the outside world will have it, thanks to relativity, as we approach the speed of light. All the way to the Andromeda galaxy.

  ‘As for me, there are final checks to be done as we ramp up to full operating thrust. At each node of the scoop we have a kind of particle accelerator, which sends a particular form of neutrino, called a sterile neutrino, into the higher-dimensional bulk in which our universe floats – floats, like a membrane in water. That’s where dark energy comes from. Our universe, our membrane, is expanding, like a balloon, because of mysterious currents in that strange higher ocean, so to
speak. Which we can now tap, as an inexhaustible source of propellant if you will …’

  He was speaking in tidy, pre-digested paragraphs. The ones given to many press and government briefings before, no doubt.

  ‘John, have you really forgotten that I know all this? I worked with you when you were developing the proposal, you and your backers. Remember? I had to help you pitch it so it sounded like a technology for a long-range science mission—’

  ‘And they don’t come much longer-range than the Andromeda galaxy—’

  ‘And not just as a demonstrator for a fancy new technology that gets Earth away from depending on the rock rats back in the asteroids. No fusion engine, so no need for the rock rats’ precious water. And so much for their resource monopoly. Interplanetary politics, right?’

  ‘It’s to be regretted. We do what we can in the times we live in … You should be through the scoop by now.’

  It had been a while since she had looked out. She saw he was right. She had passed through that immense array, and now found herself floating in a kind of heaven of threads and nets, all softly illuminated by the distant Sun – and by the still dimmer light of Jupiter itself, that broad face with its sombre, churning bands of cloud. In a sense she was inside the distributed structure of the ship itself.

  ‘Can you see the habitat modules?’

  She followed the threads; there had to be millions of them, but all the lines converged on a distant knot of technology. She touched a screen, pulled an image into the air, and magnified it. It was a blunt square, four rod-like modules fixed at their corners.

  ‘I see you. Bring me in, John …’

  2

  ‘Welcome to the Perseus.’

  He was wearing a vivid green jumpsuit, soft slippers. A UN logo on his breast.

  They embraced, stiffly.

  Then they drifted weightless through the ship, side by side.

  The modules he ushered her through, floating in zero gravity, were the usual glistening space tech. Every square centimetre of every wall panel was smart, including those of the widely separated cabins within which John’s six crewmates were already sleeping the dreamless artificial sleep of induced hibernation. She was struck by the general use of green and blue tones within the craft – gentle, Earthlike. Aside from that she could have been in any of the space facilities she had visited before, from near-Earth orbit to the Moon, the asteroids – and now to here, Jupiter with its huge water-rich moons, where, everyone agreed, the battle to decide the course of the next few human centuries was likely to be fought.

  John was much more interesting than such planetary-scale abstractions, more interesting than interplanetary war. People always were. He would have been interesting to Denise even if he hadn’t been part of the first crew to Neptune, outermost of the planets. Even if this man hadn’t once been her husband.

  She said, ‘You shaved your head again.’

  ‘Depilation as usual, facing the long sleep. Losing the eyebrows was worse. And down below—’

  ‘You put on weight—’

  ‘As us hibernators always do in advance. Of course, you’re recording all this, images and sound? Hence the obvious questions?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry there’s so little to see. In fact there won’t be much for two and a half million years, until Andromeda is off our starboard bow.’

  She admitted it. That line thrilled her.

  She let him guide her to a refectory, where, yes, mint tea had already been poured into zero-gravity lidded cups. They sat at a table, astronaut style, with their legs wrapped around bars under the seats to hold them steady. He was fifty years old now, two years older than Denise. He was tall, lean, comfortable in his body, trained for the mission. Never handsome, she thought, but striking – especially with that shaven head. Friendly, though, his expression always open.

  ‘You have questions,’ he said calmly. ‘Personal and otherwise, I should imagine.’

  ‘All on the record,’ she replied, equally calmly.

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘OK, then. What’s the true purpose of this mission, John? In your view. You can be honest now; it’s not going to get canned, from this point. And why so eager to do this now? Is it to demonstrate Earth’s technological superiority, before the interplanetary cold war between the Vesta League and the UN gets hot?’

  He looked abstracted, considering his answer. ‘Cold War. You’re referring to terrestrial conflicts, and the analogy is inexact. When was the – the nuclear war that never quite happened – two centuries back? Actually our current tensions look back to much older models of political control, older sources of power.’

  ‘You’re talking about the water.’

  ‘Of course. You know the argument. Water is essential to sustain life, and industry of various kinds. Earth is rich in water. Whereas there is – was – little water in near-Earth space. A few cold traps on the Moon, and in the near-Earth asteroids, scrapings that could have kept terrestrial-scale industry going for a few days, no more. The rock rats, seeking some kind of commercial monopoly, scavenge water-rich asteroids – in all, the asteroids hold about a fifth as much as in Earth’s oceans. But it’s expensive to extract and ship – and Earth has slapped an environmental protection order on most of the water-rich bodies, citing possible biological traces. And away from that, and with Mars controlled by Earth, there was nowhere for the rock rats to expand. Not inwards, anyhow.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t go colonise an asteroid if you weren’t interested in expanding further such as before in the aridity.’

  ‘Correct. They had to move out, really. Because Earth was running a water empire, by then. This is what I mean by older forms of polities. The current regime is like some of the early empires on Earth, in the aridity of the Near East of Eurasia. Control somebody’s water, which was needed for irrigation back then, and you control their very existence. And thus Earth has been controlling water supplies in space. So, to expand, the rock rats looked to Jupiter, where the big Galilean moons have water to spare—’

  ‘Only for Earth, the UN, to dash out and claim it all for themselves.’

  ‘Correct. A region of space with the water resources to support billions in comfort. Some estimate trillions, actually. And you have Jupiter itself, that huge atmosphere to mine. Jupiter is the future of this Solar System—’

  ‘And the water empire has pre-emptively grabbed it all. But not securely.’

  He grinned, nodded, his bare head shining in the harsh artificial light. ‘The rock rats are firmly entrenched in the asteroids, and are good at this space stuff. They do have an opportunity, for the next decade or two, to fight back against this land grab. But nobody is fighting yet,’ he said. ‘Thankfully.’

  She sipped her mint tea. It was fine, just not what she would have chosen. ‘But we are facing off. Just as the Americans and Russians faced each other in the Cold War, then.’

  ‘In the end, they pulled back from global conflict. I guess because there were enough wise heads on either side who could see what the consequences might be if they went ahead. An interplanetary war today would be hugely damaging too. Everything in space is so … fragile. Throw a big rock at a space habitat and it bursts like a soap bubble. Throw a big rock at Earth – and the rock rats could do that with the same technology we developed to push rocks away from the Earth – and—’

  ‘Mass extinction,’ she said.

  ‘Right. I do believe this is a war the UN has to win. But without fighting.’

  She had heard these arguments before, but this was being played up for the recording. ‘The water empire should win? Aren’t they the bad guys, squashing the heroic little pioneer rock rats?’

  ‘No. Because even if we don’t exterminate ourselves in the process, we know that unregulated expansion has to falter, somewhere. Exponential growth just goes on and on, erasing everything, every accessible resource. The planets, the moons, the comets – it could all be gone in just a few millennia. And then where are you?’ He shook his head. ‘We can’t just grow. We need regulation, like it or not. And the UN’s water empire is in a position to regulate – in our time, anyhow.’

  She studied him. ‘And this,’ she waved a hand, ‘is your response. A … cultural response to the new Cold War?’

  ‘If you like. A demonstration of a higher purpose. Showing that we can do more than fight each other.’

  ‘Why go so far as Andromeda, though?’

  He spread his fingers on the table top between them. Even the backs of his hands had been depilated, she saw, in advance of his coldsleep.