Phase Space. Stephen Baxter
all intents and purposes. And it would have stayed that way if Gagarin and his generation – Americans and Russians – had not risked their lives to enter space in their converted ICBMs and primitive little capsules.
The destiny of all life, forever, was in their hands. And if they had failed – if they had turned back from space, if war had come and they had turned themselves to piles of radioactive ash – there might now, in this future age, be no life, no mind, anywhere. For every human alive in 1961, there are now billions – perhaps tens of billions. Gagarin’s simple flight in his Vostok spaceship was perhaps the most important event in the history of mankind, our greatest wonder of all …
The monkey face, looking in at him. Perhaps, he thought, it might once have been human. Do you understand what is being said? This is what we tell people. It is what this – monument – is for. Every day, Gagarin flies again.
You see that Gagarin will never be forgotten. Gagarin’s actions, heroic and trivial, continue to haunt our present.
Emotions swirled in him: pride, terror, awe, loneliness.
He tried to understand how this might have been done. Had they stolen his ashes from the wall of the Kremlin, somehow recombined them to –?
No. Not that.
Then what? And what of Valentia, Yelena, Galya? Where they buried under dust millennia deep?
… Enough. It is time to rest.
To rest … And when he woke? What would become of Yuri Gagarin, in this impossible year? Would he be placed in a zoo, like an ape man?
But you are not Gagarin.
… And now, as he tried to comprehend that, for long seconds his mind was empty of thought.
But his memories – his wife and daughters, the thrust of the booster, the sweet air of the steppe – were so real. How could it be so?
You should never have become aware of this.
Oddly, he felt tempted to apologize.
There have been more than three thousand of you before without mishap – in fact, you are Poyekhali 3201 …
His name. At least he had learned his name.
Think of it this way. Gagarin’s mission lasted a single orbit of the Earth. As long as was necessary to complete its purpose.
And so, his life –
… is as long as is necessary for its purpose. We face significant penalties for this malfunction, in fact. Our laws are intended to protect you, not us. But that is our problem, not yours. You will feel no pain. That is a comfort to me. Relax, now.
There was a fringe of darkness around his vision, like the mouth of a cave, receding from him. It was like the blue face of Earth, as he had seen it from orbit. And in that cave mouth he saw the faces of his wife and daughters turned up to him, diminishing. He tried to fix their faces in his minds, his daughters, his father, but it was as if his mind was a candle, his thoughts guttering, dissolving.
It seemed very rapid. It was not fair. His mission had been stolen from him!
He cried out, once, before the blackness closed around him.
… And now, it was as if the dream continued. Suddenly it was sunrise, and he was standing at the launch pad in his bright orange flight suit with its heavy white helmet, emblazoned ‘CCCP’ in bright red.
He breathed in the fresh air of a bright spring morning. Beyond the pad, the flat Kazakhstan steppe had erupted into its brief bloom, with evanescent flowers pushing through the hardy grass.
Yuri Gagarin felt his heart lift.
Technicians and engineers surrounded him. All around him he saw faces: faces turned to him, faces shining with awe. Even the zeks had been allowed to see him today, to see the past separate from the future.
Gagarin smiled on them all.
And they smiled back, as Poyekhali 3202 prepared to recite the familiar words for them.
She was flying.
She felt light, insubstantial, like a child in the arms of her father.
Looking back she could see the Earth, heavy and massive and unmoving, at the centre of everything, a ball of water folded over on itself.
Rising ever faster, she passed through a layer of glassy light, like an airliner climbing through cloud. She saw how the layer of light folded over the planet, shimmering like an immense soap bubble. Embedded in the membrane she could see a rocky ball, like a lumpy cloud, below them and receding.
It was the Moon.
Philmus woke, gasping, scared.
Another Dante dream.
… But was it just a dream? Or was it a glimpse of the thoughts of the deep chemical mind which – perhaps – shared her body?
She sat up in bed and reached for her tranqsat earpiece. It had been, she thought, one hell of a case.
It hadn’t been easy getting into the Vatican, even for a UN sentience cop.
The Swiss Guard who processed Philmus was dressed like something out of the sixteenth century, literally: a uniform of orange and blue with a giant plumed helmet. But he used a softscreen, and under his helmet he bore the small scars of tranqsat receiver implants.
It was eight in the morning. She saw that the thick clouds over the cobbled courtyards were beginning to break up to reveal patches of celestial blue. It was fake, of course, but the city Dome’s illusion was good.
Philmus was here to study the Virtual reconstruction of Eva Himmelfarb.
Himmelfarb was a young Jesuit scientist-priest who had caused a lot of trouble. Partly by coming up with – from nowhere, untrained – a whole new Theory of Everything. Partly by discovering a new form of intelligence, or by going crazy, depending on which fragmentary account Philmus chose to believe.
Mostly by committing suicide.
Sitting in this encrusted, ancient building, in the deep heart of Europe, pondering the death of a priest, Philmus felt a long way from San Francisco.
At last the guard was done with his paperwork. He led Philmus deeper into the Vatican, past huge and intimidating ramparts, and into the Apostolic Palace. Sited next to St Peter’s, this was a building which housed the quarters of the Pope himself, along with various branches of the Curia, the huge administrative organization of the Church.
The corridors were narrow and dark. Philmus caught glimpses of people working in humdrum-looking offices, with softscreens and coffee cups and pinned-up strip cartoons, mostly in Italian. The Vatican seemed to her like the headquarters of a modern multinational – Nanosoft, say – run by a medieval bureaucracy. That much she’d expected.
What she hadn’t anticipated was the great sense of age here. She was at the heart of a very large, very old, spider-web.
And somewhere in this complex of buildings was an ageing Nigerian who was held, by millions of people, even in the second decade of the twenty-first century, to be literally infallible. She shivered.
She was taken to the top floor, and left alone in a corridor.
The view from here, of Rome bathed in the city Dome’s golden, filtered dawn, was exhilarating. And the walls of the corridor were coated by paintings of dangling willow-like branches.