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  He glanced out at the robot, Cassiopeia, still patiently holding her station alongside his membrane.

  She’s trying to communicate, he thought. After years of ignoring the radio and other signals we beamed at her colleagues in the asteroid belt, she’s decided I’m interesting enough to talk to.

  He grinned. Objective achieved, Malenfant. You made them notice us, at least.

  Yes, but right now it wasn’t doing him much good. The signal he was being sent might contain whole libraries of interstellar wisdom, but he couldn’t decode it — not without banks of supercomputers.

  They still have no real idea what they’re dealing with here, he thought, how limited I am. Maybe I’m fortunate they didn’t try hitting me with signal lasers.

  If we’re going to talk, it will have to be in English. Maybe they can figure that out; we’ve been bombarding them with dictionaries and encyclopedias for long enough. And it will have to be slow enough for me to understand.

  He dug in a pocket on the leg of his suit until he found a thick block of paper and a propelling pencil.

  Another moment of contact, then: the first words exchanged between human being and alien. Words that would presumably be remembered, if anybody ever found out about this, long after Shakespeare was forgotten.

  What should he say? Poetry? A territorial challenge? A speech of welcome?

  At last he grunted, licked the pencil lead, and wrote out two words in blocky capitals. Then he pressed the pad up against the clear membrane.

  THANK YOU

  With its — her — telescopic eye, Cassiopeia peered at the paper block for long minutes.

  From her angular body Cassiopeia extruded a new pseudopod. It carried a small metal block the size and shape of his notepad.

  The block bore a message. In English. The text was in a neat, unadorned font.

  COMMUNICATION DYSFUNCTION. REPAIRS MANDATED. REPAIRS PERFORMED. DECISION CONSTRAINED.

  He frowned, trying to figure out the meaning. We don’t understand. Why are you thanking us? You would have died. We had no choice but to help you.

  He thought, then wrote out: IT SHOWED GOODWILL BETWEEN OUR SPECIES. Not the right word, that species; but he couldn’t think of anything better. MAYBE WE WILL UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER IN THE FUTURE. MAYBE WE WILL LIVE IN PEACE.

  The reply: DECISION CONSTRAINED BUT NOT SINGLE-VALUED. INFORMATION REQUIRED CONCERNING OBJECTIVE: REPLICATION; RESOURCE APPROPRIATION; ACTIVITY PROHIBITION; EXOTIC. WHICH.

  We didn’t have to keep you alive, asshole. We didn’t know what the hell you were doing here, and we needed to find out. Maybe you wanted to make lots of little Malenfants from Centauri asteroids. Maybe you wanted to take away our resources for some other purposes. Maybe you wanted to stop us doing what we’re doing. Or maybe something else we can’t even guess. What are you doing here?

  Take care with your answer, Malenfant. Most of those options, from a Gaijin point of view, aren’t too healthy; you mustn’t let them think you’re some kind of von Neumann rapacious terminator robot yourself, or they’ll slit open this air sac, and then your belly.

  I’M HERE OUT OF CURIOSITY.

  A pause. COMMUNICATION DYSFUNCTION.

  What??

  He wrote, WHERE DID YOU COME FROM? WHO MADE YOU? ARE THEY NEARBY?

  Another, longer pause. SEVERAL THOUSAND ITERATIONS SINCE INITIALIZATION. We are thousands of generations removed from those who began the migration.

  Then these are the Gaijin, he thought. They don’t know who made them. They’ve forgotten. Or maybe nobody made them. After all, you believe you evolved, Malenfant; why not them?

  He wrote out, WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE HERE?

  REPLICATION. CONSTRUCTION. SEARCH.

  So they did come here from somewhere else. And the Gaijin’s last word, finally, gave him hope he was dealing with something more than a fixed machine here, more than simple mechanical goals.

  SEARCH, he wrote. SEARCH FOR WHAT?

  The answer chilled him. SEARCH OBJECT: OPTION TO AVOID COMING STERILIZATION EVENT. EXISTENCE OF OPTION QUERY.

  My God, he thought. We always thought the aliens would come and teach us. Wrong. These guys are coming to us for answers.

  Answers to whatever it is they are fleeing. The “sterilization event.”

  For long minutes he gazed at Cassiopeia’s crumpled, complex hide. Then he wrote carefully, WE MUST TALK. BUT I NEED FOOD.

  OPTION: RETURN BEFORE EXPIRATION. We can take you home before you die.

  WHAT ELSE?

  OPTION: MANUFACTURE FOOD. ITERATIVE PROCESS, SUCCESS ANTICIPATED.

  Reassuring, he thought dryly.

  COROLLARY: CONTINUE.

  He wrote, CONTINUE? YOU MEAN I CAN GO ON?

  OPTION: ORIGIN NODE. OPTION: OTHER NODES. We can take you home. Or we can take you farther. Other places. Even farther than this.

  Even deeper in time, too. My God.

  He thought about it for sixty seconds.

  I WANT TO GO ON, he said. MAKE ME FOOD.

  Then he added, PLEASE.

  Maura Della died eight years after Malenfant’s disappearance into the Gaijin portal, a few months before a signal at light speed could have completed the journey to Alpha Centauri and back.

  But when those months had passed — when the new signals arrived, bearing news from Alpha Centauri — the great asteroid belt flower-ships at last opened up their electromagnetic wings, and a thousand of them began to sail in toward the crowded heart of the Solar System, and toward Earth.

  PART TWO

  Travelers

  A.D. 2061-2186

  He told himself: All this — the neutron star sail, the toiling community — is a triumph of life over blind cosmic cruelty. We ain’t taking it anymore.

  But when he thought of Cassiopeia, anger flooded him. Why?

  It had been just minutes since she had embraced him on that grassy, simulated plain… hadn’t it?

  How do you know, Malenfant? How do you know you haven’t been frozen in some deep data store for ten thousand years?

  And… how do you know this isn’t the first time you surfaced like this?

  How could he know? If his identity assembled, disintegrated again, what trace would it leave on his memory? What was his memory? What if he was simply restarted each time, wiped clean like a reinitialized computer? How would he know?

  But it didn’t matter. I did this to myself, he thought. I wanted to be here. I labored to get myself here. Because of what we learned, as the years unraveled: that the Gaijin would be followed by a great wave of visitors, and that the Gaijin were not even the first — just as Nemoto had intuited from the start. And nothing we learned about those earlier visitors, and what had become of them, gave us comfort.

  Slowly, as they began to travel the stars, humans learnedto fear the universe, and the creatures who lived in it. Livedand died.

  Chapter 8

  Ambassadors

  Madeleine Meacher barely got out of N’Djamena alive.

  Nigerian and Cameroon troops were pushing into the airstrip just as the Sänger’s undercarriage trolley jets kicked in. She heard the distant crackle of automatic fire, saw vehicles converging on the runway. Somewhere behind her was a clatter, distant and small; it sounded as if a stray round had hit the Sänger.

  Then the space plane threw itself down the runway, pressing her back into her seat, its leap forward sudden, gazellelike. The Sänger tipped up on its trolley, and the big RB545 engines kicked in, burning liquid hydrogen. The plane rose almost vertically. The gunfire rattle faded immediately.

  She shot into cloud and was through in a second, emerging into bright, clear sunshine.

  She glanced down: The land was already lost, remote, a curving dome of dull desert-brown, punctuated with the sprawling gray of urban development. Fighters — probably Nigerian, or maybe Israeli — were little points of silver light in the huge sky around her, with contrails looping through the air. They couldn’t get close to Madeleine unless she was seriously
unlucky.

  She lit up the scramjets and was kicked in the back, hard, and the fighters disappeared.

  The sky faded down to a deep purple. The turbulence smoothed out as she went supersonic. At thirty thousand meters, still climbing, she pushed the RB545 throttle to maximum thrust. Her acceleration was a Mach a minute; on this suborbital hop to Senegal she’d reach Mach 15 before falling back to Earth.

  She was already so high she could see stars. Soon the reaction-control thrusters would kick in, and she’d be flying like a spacecraft.

  It was the nearest she’d ever get to space, anyhow.

  For the first time since arriving in Chad with her cargo of light artillery shells, she had time to relax. The Sänger was showing no evidence of harm from the gunfire.

  The Sänger was a good, solid German design, built by Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm. It was designed to operate in war zones, but Madeleine was not; safe now in her high-tech cocoon, she gave way to the tension for a couple of minutes.

  While she was still shaking, the Sänger logged into the nets and downloaded her mail. Life went on.

  That was when she found the message from Sally Brind.

  Brind didn’t tell Madeleine who she represented, or what she wanted. Madeleine was to meet her at Kennedy Space Center. Just like that; she was given no choice.

  Over the years Madeleine had received a lot of blunt messages like this. They were usually either from lucrative would-be employers, or some variant of cop or taxman. Either way it was wise to turn up.

  She acknowledged the message and instructed her data miners to find out who Brind was.

  She pressed a switch, and the RB545s shut down with a bang. As the acceleration cut out she was thrust forward against the straps. Now she had gone ballistic, like a hurled stone. Coasting over the roof of her trajectory in near silence, she lost all sensation of speed, of motion.

  And, at her highest point, she saw a distant glimmer of light, complex and serene: it was a Gaijin flower-ship, complacently orbiting Earth.

  When she got back to the States, Madeleine flew out to Orlando. To get to KSC she drove north along U.S. 3, the length of Merritt Island. There used to be security gates; now there was nothing but a rusting fence, with a new smart-concrete road surface cut right through it.

  She parked at the Vehicle Assembly Building. It was early morning. The place was deserted. Sand drifted across the empty parking lot, gathering in miniature dunes.

  She walked out to the old press stand, a wooden frame like a baseball bleacher. She sat down, looking east. The Sun was in her eyes, and already hot; she could feel it draw her face tight as a drum. To the right, stretching off to the south, there were rocket gantries. In the mist they were two-dimensional, colorless. Most of them were disused, part-dismantled, museum pieces. The sense of desolation, abandonment, was heavy in the air.

  Sally Brind had turned out to work for Bootstrap, the rump of the corporation that had sent a spacecraft to the Gaijin base in the asteroid belt three decades earlier.

  Madeleine was not especially interested in the Gaijin. She had been born a few years after their arrival in the Solar System; they were just a part of her life, and not a very exciting part. But she knew that four decades after the first detection of the Gaijin — and a full nineteen years after they had first come sailing in from the belt, apparently prompted by Reid Malenfant’s quixotic journey — the Gaijin had established something resembling a system of trade with humanity.

  They had provided some technological advances: robotics, vacuum industries, a few nanotech tricks like their asteroid mining blankets — enough to revolutionize a dozen industries and make a hundred fortunes. They had also flown human scientists on exploratory missions to other planets: Mars, Mercury, even the moons of Jupiter. Not Venus, though, oddly, despite repeated requests. And the Gaijin had started to provide a significant proportion of Earth’s resources from space: raw materials from the asteroids, including precious metals, and even energy, beamed down as microwaves from great collectors in the sky.

  Humans — or rather, the governments and corporations who dealt with the Gaijin — had to “pay” for all this with resources common on Earth but scarce elsewhere, notably heavy metals and some complex organics. The Gaijin had also been allowed to land on Earth and had been offered cultural contact. The Gaijin had, strangely, shown interest in some human ideas, and a succession of writers, philosophers, theologians, and even a few discreditable science fiction authors had been summoned to converse with the alien “ambassadors.”

  The government authorities, and the corporations who were profiting, seemed to regard the whole arrangement as a good deal. With the removal of the great dirt-making industries from the surface of the Earth — power, mining — there was a good chance that eco recovery could, belatedly, become a serious proposition.

  Not everybody agreed. All those shut-down mines and decommissioned power plants were creating economic and environmental refugees. And there were plenty of literal refugees too — for instance, all the poor souls who had been moved out of the great swathes of equatorial land that had been given over to the microwave receiving stations.

  Thus the Gaijin upheaval had, predictably, caused poverty, even famine and war.

  It was thanks to that last that Madeleine made her living, of course. But everybody had to survive.

  “I wonder if you know what you’re looking at, here.” The voice had come from behind her.

  A woman sat in the stand, in the row behind Madeleine. Her bony wrists stuck out of an environment-screening biocomp bodysuit. She must have been sixty. There was a man with her, at least as old, short, dark, and heavyset.

  “You’re Brind.”

  “And you’re Madeleine Meacher. So we meet. This is Frank Paulis. He’s the head of Bootstrap.”

  “I remember your name.”

  He grinned, his eyes hard.

  “What am I doing here, Brind?”

  For answer, Brind pointed east, to the tree line beyond the Banana River. “I used to work for NASA. Back when there was a NASA. Over there used to be the site of the two great launch complexes: Thirty-nine-B to the left, Thirty-nine-A to the right. Thirty-nine-A was the old Apollo gantry. Later they adapted it for the shuttle.” The sunlight blasted into her face, making it look flat, younger. “Well, the pads are gone now, pulled down for scrap. The base of Thirty-nine-A is still there, if you want to see it. There’s a sign the pad rats stuck there for the last launch: Go, Discovery! Kind of faded now, of course.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Do you know what a burster is?”

  Madeleine frowned. “No kind of weapon I’ve ever heard of.”

  “It’s not a weapon, Meacher. It’s a star.”

  Madeleine was, briefly, electrified.

  “Look, Meacher, we have a proposal for you.”

  “What makes you think I’ll be interested?”

  Brind’s voice was gravelly and full of menace. “I know a great deal about you.”

  “How come?”

  “If you must know, through the tax bureau. You have operated your—” She waved a hand dismissively. “ — enterprises in over a dozen countries over the years. But you’ve paid tax on barely ten percent of the income we can trace.”

  “Never broken a law.”

  Brind eyed Madeleine as if she had said something utterly naive. “The law is a weapon of government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.”

  Madeleine tried to figure out Brind. Her biocomposite suit looked efficient, not expensive. Brind was a wage slave, not an entrepreneur. “You’re from the government?” she guessed.

  Brind’s face hardened. “When I was young, we used to call what you do gunrunning. Although I don’t suppose that’s how you think of it yourself.”

  The remark caught Madeleine off guard. “No,” she said. “I’m a pilot. All I ever wanted to do is fly; this is the best job I could get. In a different universe, I’d be—”
>
  “An astronaut,” Frank Paulis said.

  The foolish, archaic word got to Madeleine. Here, of all places.

  “We know about you, you see,” Sally Brind said, almost regretfully. “All about you.”

  “There are no astronauts anymore.”

  “That isn’t true, Meacher,” Paulis said. “Come with us. Let us show you what we’re planning.”

  Brind and Paulis took her out to Launch Complex 41, the old USASF Titan pad at the northern end of ICBM Row. Here, Brind’s people had refurbished an antique Soviet-era Proton launcher.

  The booster was a slim black cylinder, fifty-three meters tall. Six flaring strap-on boosters clustered around the first stage, and Madeleine could pick out the smaller stages above. A passenger capsule and hab module would be fixed to the top, shrouded by a cone of metal.

  “Our capsule isn’t much more sophisticated than an Apollo,” Brind said. “It only has to get you to orbit and keep you alive for a couple of hours, until the Gaijin come to pick you up.”

  “Me?”

  “Would you like to see your hab module? It’s being prepared in the old Orbiter Processing Facility…”

  “Get to the point,” Madeleine said. “Where are you planning to send me? And what exactly is a burster?”

  “A type of neutron star. A very interesting type. The Gaijin are sending a ship there. They’ve invited us — that is, the UN — to send a representative. An observer. It’s the first time they’ve offered this, to carry an observer beyond the Solar System. We think it’s important to respond. We can send our own science platform; we’ll train you up to use it. We can even establish our own Saddle Point gateway in the neutron star system. It’s all part of a wider trade and cultural deal, which—”

  “So you represent the UN?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “We need somebody with the qualifications and experience to handle a journey like this,” Paulis said. “You’re about the right age, under forty. You’ve no dependents that we can trace.” He sighed. “A hundred years ago, we’d have sent John Glenn. Today, the best fit is the likes of you. You’ll be well paid.” He eyed Madeleine. “Believe me, very well paid.”