LITMIR.BIZ

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photon; the Gaijin gateway can teleport something with the mass of a human being. Malenfant’s body contained –’

      ‘Some ten to power twenty-eight atoms,’ Nemoto said. ‘That is ten billion billion billion. And therefore it must take the same number of kilobytes, to order of magnitude, to store the data. If not more.’

      ‘Yes,’ Sally said. ‘By comparison, Maura, all the books ever written probably amount to a mere thousand billion kilobytes. The data compression involved must be spectacular. If we could get hold of that technology alone, our computing and telecoms industries would be transformed.’

      ‘And there is more,’ Nemoto said. ‘Malenfant’s body was effectively destroyed. That would require the extraction and storage of an energy equivalent of some one thousand megaton bombs …’

      His body was destroyed. Nemoto said it so casually.

      ‘So,’ Sally said slowly, ‘the signal that encodes Malenfant is currently being transmitted between a transmitter-receiver link –’

      ‘Or links,’ said Nemoto.

      ‘Links?’

      ‘Do you imagine that such a technology would be limited to a single route?’

      Sally frowned. ‘You’re talking about a whole network of gateways.’

      ‘Perhaps placed in the gravitational foci of every star system. Yes.’

      And now, all at once, Maura saw it: a teleport network spanning the huge gaps between the stars, grand data highways along which one could travel – and without being aware even of the passing of time. ‘My God,’ she murmured. ‘The roads of empire.’

      ‘And so,’ Sally said, working her way through Nemoto’s thinking, ‘the Gaijin built the gateways. Right?’

      ‘Oh, no,’ said Nemoto gently. ‘The Gaijin are much too – primitive. They were limited to their system, as we are to ours. In their crude ramjet flower-ships, exploring the rim of the system, they stumbled on a gateway – or perhaps they were guided to look there by others, as we have been by the Gaijin in turn.’

      Maura said, ‘If not the Gaijin, then who?’

      ‘For now, that is unknowable.’ Nemoto gazed at her clumsy apparatus, as if studying the possibilities it implied.

      Sally Brind got to her feet and moved slowly around the cramped apartment, drifting dreamily in the low lunar gravity. ‘It takes years for a signal, even a teleport signal, to travel between the stars. This must mean that nobody out there has developed faster-than-light technology. No warp drives, no wormholes. Kind of low tech, don’t you think?’

      Nemoto said, ‘In such a Galaxy, processes – cultural contacts, conflicts – will take decades, at least, to unfold. If Malenfant is heading to a star, it will take years for his signal to get there, more years before we could ever know what became of him.’

      ‘And so,’ Maura said dryly, ‘what must we do in the meantime?’

      Nemoto smiled, her cheekbones sharp. ‘Why, nothing. Only wait. And try not to die.’

      

      In the silent years that followed, Maura Della often thought of Malenfant.

      Where was Malenfant?

      Even if Nemoto was right, with his body destroyed – as the detailed information about the contents and processes of his body and brain shot towards the stars – where was his soul? Did it ride the putative Gaijin laser beam with him? Was it already dispersed?

      And would the thing that would be reconstructed from that signal actually be Malenfant, or just some subtle copy?

      Still, in all this obscure physics there was a distinct human triumph. Malenfant had found this mysterious gateway. And passed through. She remembered the resentment she had felt while watching the Gaijin’s calm appropriation of solar system resources in the asteroid belt, their easy taking of the Bruno. Now Malenfant had fired himself back through the transport system the Gaijin themselves had used, back to the nest of the Gaijin, and Maura felt a stab of savage satisfaction.

      Hey, Gaijin. You have mail …

      But these issues weren’t for Maura.

      She had done her best to use Nemoto’s insights and other inputs to rouse minds, to shape policy. But the time had come for her to retire, to drive out of the Beltway at last. She went home, to a small town called Blue Lake, in northern Iowa, her old state, the heart of the Midwest.

      Her influence was ended. Too damn old.

      I don’t have decades left; I don’t have the strength to stay alive, waiting, like Nemoto, while the universe ponderously unfolds; for me, the story ends here. You’ll just have to get along by yourself, Malenfant.

      Godspeed, Godspeed.

       Chapter 7

       RECEPTION

      The blue light faded.

      He realized he’d been holding his breath. He let it out, gasping; his chest ached. He was grasping the MMU hand controllers compulsively. He flexed his hands; the gloves were stiff.

      The blue artefact was all around him, inert once more. He couldn’t see any difference; the sun’s light glimmered from its polished surface, casting double shadows –

      Double?

      He looked up, to the sun, and flipped up his gold visor.

      The sun seemed a little brighter, a strong yellow-white. And it was a double pinprick now, two jewels on a setting of velvet. The light was actually so bright it hurt his eyes, and when he looked away there were tiny double spots on his retina, bright yellow against red mist.

      It wasn’t the sun, of course. It was a binary star system. There was a misty lens-shaped disc around the twin stars: a cloud of planetary material, asteroids, comets – a complex inner system, illuminated by double starlight. Even from here, just from that smudge of diffuse light, he could see this was a busy, crowded place.

      He worked his controller and swivelled. Beyond the gate, the Perry was gone.

      No. Not gone. Just parked a few light years away, is all.

      He had no idea how the artefact had worked its simple miracle. Nor, frankly, did he care. It was a gateway – and it had worked, and taken him to the stars.

      Yes, but where the hell, Malenfant?

      He looked around the sky. The stars were a rich carpet, overwhelming the familiar constellations.

      After some searching he found Orion’s belt, and the rest of that great constellation. The hunter looked unchanged, as far as he could see. Orion’s stars were scattered through a volume of space a thousand light years deep, and the nearest of them – Betelgeuse, or maybe Bellatrix, he couldn’t recall – was no closer than five hundred light years from the sun.

      That told him something. If you moved across interstellar distances your viewpoint would shift so much that the constellation patterns would distort, the lamps scattered through the sky swimming past each other like the lights of an approaching harbour. He couldn’t have come far, then, not on the scale of the distances to Orion’s giant suns: a handful of light years, no more.

      And, given that, he knew where he was. There was only one system like this – two Sol-like stars, bound close together – in the sun’s immediate neighbourhood. This was indeed Alpha Centauri, no more remote from Sol than a mere four light years plus change. Just as he had expected.

      Alpha Centauri: the dream of centuries, the first port of call beyond Pluto’s realm

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