LITMIR.BIZ

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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.’

      Madeleine thought it over, trying to figure the angles. ‘That Proton is sixty years old, the design even older. You don’t have much of a budget, do you?’

      Paulis shrugged. ‘My pockets aren’t as deep as they used to be.’

      Brind prickled. ‘What does the budget matter? For Christ’s sake, Meacher, don’t you have any wonder in your soul? I’m offering you, here, the chance to travel to the stars. My God – if I had your qualifications, I’d jump at the chance.’

      ‘And you aren’t truly the first,’ Paulis said. ‘Reid Malenfant –’

      ‘– is lost. Anyhow it’s not exactly being an astronaut,’ Madeleine said sourly. ‘Is it? Being live cargo on a Gaijin flower-ship doesn’t count.’

      ‘Actually a lot of people agree with you,’ Paulis said. ‘That’s why we’ve struggled to assemble the funding. Noone is interested in human spaceflight in these circumstances. Most people are happy just to wait for the Gaijin to parachute down more interstellar goodies from the sky …’

      ‘Why don’t you just send along an automated instrument pallet? Why send a human at all?’

      ‘No.’ Brind shook her head firmly. ‘We’re deliberately designing for a human operator.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Because we want a human there. A human like you, God help us. We think it’s important to try to meet them on equal terms.’

      Madeleine laughed. ‘Equal terms? We limp into orbit, and rendezvous with a giant alien ramjet capable of flying to the outer solar system?’

      ‘Symbolism, Meacher,’ Paulis said darkly. ‘Symbols are everything.’

      ‘How do you know the Gaijin respond to symbols?’

      ‘Maybe they don’t. But people do. And it’s people I’m interested in. Frankly, Meacher, we’re seeking advantage. Not everybody thinks we should become so completely reliant on the Gaijin. You’ll have a lot of discretion out there. We need someone with – acumen. There may be opportunities.’

      ‘What kind of opportunities?’

      ‘To get humanity out from under the yoke of the Gaijin,’ Paulis said. For the first time there was a trace of anger in his voice, passion.

      Madeleine began to understand.

      There were various shadowy groups who weren’t happy with the deals the governments and corporations had been striking with the Gaijin. This trading relationship was not between two equals. And besides the Gaijin must be following their own undeclared goals. What about the stuff they were keeping back? What would happen when the human economy was utterly dependent on the trickle of good stuff from the sky? And suppose the Gaijin suddenly decided to turn off the faucets – or, worse, decided to start dropping rocks?

      Beyond that, the broader situation continued to evolve, year on year. More and more of the neighbouring stars were lighting up with radio and other signals, out to a distance of some thirty light years. It was evident that a ferocious wave of emigration was coming humanity’s way, scouring along the Orion-Cygnus spiral arm. Presumably those colonists were propagating via Saddle Point gateways, and they were finding their target systems empty – or undeveloped, like the solar system. And as soon as they arrived they started to build, and broadcast.

      Humans knew precisely nothing about those other new arrivals, at Sirius and Epsilon Eridani and Procyon and Tau Ceti and Altair. Maybe humans were lucky it was the Gaijin who found them first, the first to intervene in the course of human history. Or maybe not. Either way, facing this volatile and fast-changing future, it seemed unwise – to some people – to rely entirely on the goodwill of the first new arrivals to show up. Evidently those groups were now trying, quietly, to do something about it.

      But Madeleine’s first priority was the integrity of her own skin.

      ‘How far is it to this burster?’

      ‘Eighteen light years.’

      Madeleine knew the relativistic implications. She would come back stranded in a future thirty-six years remote. ‘I won’t do it.’

      ‘It’s that or the Gulf,’ Brind said evenly.

      The Gulf. Shit. After twenty years of escalating warfare over the last oil reserves the Gulf was like the surface of Io: glassy nuke craters punctuated by oil wells which would burn for decades. Even with biocomp armour, her life expectancy would be down to a few months.

      She turned, and lifted her face to the Florida sun. It looked like she didn’t have a choice.

      But, she suspected, she was kind of glad about that. Something inside her began to stir at the thought of this improbable journey.

      And crossing the Galaxy with the Gaijin might be marginally safer than flying Sängers into N’Djamena, anyhow.

      Paulis seemed to sense she was wavering. ‘Spend some time,’ he said. ‘We’ll introduce you to our people. And –’

      ‘And you’ll tell me how you’re going to make me rich.’

      ‘Exactly.’ He grinned. He had very even, capped teeth.

      

      She was flown to Kefallinia, the Ionian island which the Gaijin had been granted as a base on planet Earth. From the air the island looked as if it had been painted on the blue skin of the sea, a ragged splash of blue-grey land, everywhere indented with bays and inlets, like a fractal demonstration. Off the coast she spotted naval ships, grey slabs of metal, principally a US Navy battle group.

      On the ground the sun was high, the air hot and still and very bright, like congealed light, and the rocks tumbled from a spine of mountains down to the tideless sea.

      People had lived here, it was thought, for six thousand years. Not any more, of course: not the natives anyhow. When the UN deal with the Gaijin had been done, the Kefallinians were evacuated by the Greek government, most to sites in mainland Greece, others abroad. Those who came to America had been vocal. They regarded themselves as refugees, their land stolen, their culture destroyed by this alien invasion. Rightly so, Madeleine thought.

      But the Kefallinians weren’t the only dispossessed on planet Earth, and their plight, though newsworthy, wasn’t attention-grabbing for long.

      At the tiny airport she saw her first piece of close-up genuine Gaijin technology: a surface-to-orbit shuttle, a squat cone of some shimmering metallic substance. It looked too fragile to withstand the rigours of atmospheric entry. And yet there it was, large as life, sitting right next to the Lear jets and antiquated island-hoppers.

      From the airport she was whisked to the central UN facility, close to the old capital of Argostoli. The facility was just a series of hastily prefabricated buildings and bunkers, linked by walkways and tunnels. The central building, containing the Gaijin themselves, was a crude aluminium box.

      Surrounding the Gaijin shelter there were chapels and temples and mosques, embassies from various governments and inter-governmental bodies, a science park, representatives of most of the world’s major corporations. All of these groups, she supposed, were here trying to get a piece of the action, one way or another.

      The senior US government official here, she learned, was called the Planetary Protection Officer. The PPO post had been devised in the 1990s to coordinate quarantine measures to handle samples of Mars rock returned to Earth, and such-like. With the arrival of the Gaijin, the joke post had become somewhat more significant.

      The military presence was heavy, dug in all over the complex. There were round-the-clock patrols by foot soldiers and armoured vehicles. Copters hovered overhead continually, filling the languid air with their crude rattle, and fighter planes soared over the blue dome

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