The Spacetime Pit Plus Two Read online

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Spacetime Pit

  Green-Eyed Monster

  Sunfly

  The Authors

  Acknowledgements

  The Spacetime Pit Plus Two

  STEPHENBAXTER

  ERICBROWN

  On Stephen Baxter:

  ‘Ideas come thick and fast, and an exhilarating sense of wonder is guaranteed’ – Independent

  ‘With every passing year, the oft-made remark that Baxter is Arthur C Clarke’s heir seems more and more apt’ – SFX

  ‘There’s real beauty and excitement to Baxter’s writing’ – Starburst

  ‘Stephen Baxter is an incredibly skilled author – a successor to Arthur C Clarke and Philip K Dick...’ – Book Bag

  ~

  On Eric Brown:

  ‘A masterful storyteller’ – Strange Horizons

  ‘Brown’s spectacular creativity creates a constantly compelling read’ – Kirkus

  ‘SF infused with a cosmopolitan and literary sensibility... accomplished and affecting’ – Paul J McAuley

  ‘British writing with a deft, understated touch: wonderful’ – New Scientist

  Published by

  infinity plus

  www.infinityplus.co.uk

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  © 2018 Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown

  ‘The Spacetime Pit’ © 1996 Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown

  ‘Green-Eyed Monster’ © 2000 Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown

  ‘Sunfly’ © 1995 Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown

  Cover image © Johan Swanepoel

  Cover and interior design © Keith Brooke

  All rights reserved.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  The moral right of Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  Introduction

  by Eric Brown

  Collaboration between writers is a curious process.

  I’ve tried writing with a number of authors, and it often doesn’t work; there’s no initial spark, or our writing styles, and methods, are too dissimilar to forge an effective working relationship. It doesn’t matter how much I like the other person, or how similar our ideas about life, art and politics might be—if there isn’t that elusive, almost alchemical spark at some point in the process, collaboration is doomed to a series of false starts and aborted stories.

  My most prolific writing partner is Keith Brooke: together we’ve written more than a dozen stories, two novellas and a novel. With Keith, the process is wonderfully easy. What isn’t so easy is finding the time to write something together: we live at opposite ends of the country, and for much of the time are often engaged on solo projects. On the rare occasions that our busy schedules afford us a window of opportunity, we swap ideas until something sparks, and not long after that we have a fully-fledged story-line, which one of us begins and then the other takes up, and so on, until the tale is finished.

  The second writer I’ve collaborated with is the late Michael Coney, author of such classic SF novels as Brontomek! , Hello Summer, Goodbye , and The Girl With A Symphony In Her Fingers , as well as a host of excellent short stories. Although we lived half a world apart at the time, Mike in British Columbia and I in England, we corresponded by email and over a period of six months wrote a long short story, the biological murder-mystery set on an alien world, ‘The Trees of Terpsichore Three’, which was published in the Scottish SF magazine Spectrum 8 .

  I’ve also collaborated with my friend and fellow curry aficionado Tony Ballantyne, author the Hard SF novels Recursion and Twisted Metal , and one of my favourite fantasy novels of all time, Dream London . A while back I wrote a series of stories about a race of aliens who come to Earth and bestow the gift of voluntary immortality on the human race. Tony liked these tales, and had an idea for one. He started the story, I took it up and finished it, and then we each rewrote the other’s sections. ‘Matthew’s Passion’, collected in my fix-up novel Kéthani , is the result: Tony imbued the tale with spirituality and his knowledge of music, attributes I signally lack.

  Which brings me to the collaborations which form the content of the current volume, The Spacetime Pit Plus Two, and my collaborator, Stephen Baxter, the author of such ground-breaking novels as The Time-Ships, Evolution, The Light of Other Days with Arthur C Clarke, and the Xeelee story sequence.

  I first met Steve at a science-fiction convention, the Nottingham MexiCon of 1989. We’d both just started selling short stories to markets such as Interzone and David S Garnett’s Zenith anthologies, and were in the process of writing our first novels. Not only did we have our writing in common, and our love of the genre, but a passion for football: Steve follows Liverpool, while I, for my sins, suffer the travails of Leeds United. We got on well, and it wasn’t long before one of us suggested collaborating on a story or two.

  This was over twenty years ago, and sad to say I have no recollection of how we went about the process of collaboration, though Steve reminds me that we worked on ‘Spacetime...’ when I visited him in Prestwood in the summer of ’95. I do recall that I had the initial idea for ‘The Spacetime Pit’, which Steve, with his scientific and technological nous, proceeded to pull apart at the seams and stitch back together in a way that would work. It’s a grim tale that spans billions of years, but has the dilemma of a human being at its very core. ‘Spacetime...’ won the 1996 Interzone readers’ poll for best story.

  The second story in the volume is ‘Green-Eyed Monster’. By contrast, it’s a light-hearted tale about bodily transmogrification, love and jealousy. It’s nice to be able to write a tale from the viewpoint of a toad from time to time. I rarely write humorous stories, but on rereading this one I found myself chuckling: Steve must have written those passages.

  The final story, ‘Sunfly’, is a strange tale set on a very alien world—a strip of land girdling a sun—and follows the exploits of student Onara as she comes to understand not only her world but her destiny within its complex history.

  Enough. Herein, collected for the first time in one volume for your entertainment, is The Spacetime Pit Plus Two ...

  Eric Brown

  Cockburnspath

  2018

  The Spacetime Pit

  Shuttle lurched. “Primary shipboard systems failure.”

  Wake stared through the monitor as lightning leapt between fat cotton-wool clouds. She was deep inside this remote gravity well, inside a storm, and fast falling further in.

  “Switch to secondary, Shuttle. Affirm.”

  Shuttle bucked through turbulent air.

  “I said, ‘Affirm.’”

  “Crew loss scenario.”

  She felt sweat prickle her skin beneath her flight suit. “Detail.”

  “Ninety per cent likelihood of secondary shipboard systems failure.”

  Shit. That was non-survivable, all right, according to the book.

  “Switch to manual. Tell Mother I’m aborting the landing and coming home.”

  “Boosters inoperable. No pressure in propellant tank. Crew loss–”

  “–scenario. Right,” she muttered. Now what ?

  Shuttle was old, but it wasn’t supposed to fail. It was loaded up with redundant systems to keep it functioning, if minimally, for years.

  In the end, though, everything failed. If it hadn’t been this storm, the lightning strikes Shuttle had taken, it would have been some other damn thing, on some other remote world.r />
  Wake was on her own, out here at the rim of human expansion. Her training had hammered home that, in the end, she couldn’t rely on the equipment. It was up to her to keep herself alive. If A fails, try B! If B fails, try C!

  If she couldn’t get back to orbit, she’d land. She would need raw materials, for repairs, fuel. She couldn’t see the surface, had no real idea what kind of conditions she was dropping into here. She’d have to deal with that later.

  Lightning leapt before Shuttle, flashing in Wake’s face, dazzling her. Shuttle took a sickening dive to starboard.

  “Give me the coordinates of the Alpha One landmass.”

  “Affirm.”

  The grey, ragged clouds parted, revealing an ocean of beaten grey steel. On the horizon sat an island, mountainous, irregular. She was skimming just a couple of hundred metres above peaking waves.

  Christ. And it’s only an hour since I was in the sauna on Mother.

  “Secondary systems shutdown imminent.”

  “Advise emergency procedure.”

  “Crew loss scenario. ”

  “Oh, for God’s sake–”

  Shuttle was now, frankly, falling out of the sky. One option left. She got out of her seat and staggered towards Pod. Shuttle’s floor tipped under her in a compound, violent motion; she lurched, clattering against consoles and equipment boxes.

  She reached the long, hexagonal coffin and slid inside. Cold subdermals snaked over her skin.

  “Instructions,” Pod said.

  “Use your heuristic algorithms. Assess the situation. Ensure minimal danger. Prepare damage reports, locality surveys, survival scenarios...”

  “Affirm.”

  The lid closed over her. She closed her hands over the locket at her neck and thought of Ben.

  She felt a kick in the back as Pod threw itself out of Shuttle.

  ~

  She’d orbited the fifth planet of this dim star, a hundred light years from Earth, for two days, before deciding to come in for a closer look. It looked vaguely Earthlike: thick cloud cover over transparent oxygen-nitrogen air, oceans of water. The only landmass of any significance was the largest island of an archipelago straddling the equator. There were traces of green on the island, but her sensors didn’t betray any hint of chlorophyll. She couldn’t see any sign of Eetee organisation—no industrial smog, no large structures, no radio or other signals.

  She was pretty sure the planet wouldn’t be directly habitable, and there would be no Contact here. But maybe it could be terraformed.

  Wake was paid by a complicated system to do with the number of useful worlds she turned up in each survey sweep, and how useful each world was. Possibly terraformable was pretty low down the list of desirables and wouldn’t pay her much.

  Maybe just enough to justify a landing, she’d decided at last.

  The day after this landing, she’d been due to ship out and head home. In fact she was only three days from Earth, using Mother’s Alcubierre FTL drive.

  ~

  She surfaced through a sea of anaesthetics.

  “Status report.”

  “Crew survival not assured.”

  Terrific . She struggled to sit up. Pod was tilted, so her head was maybe twenty degrees below her feet, and the crystal canopy was obscured by something—the drapes of the parachute, she realised belatedly. Through the uncovered half of the canopy she made out a blindingly green-blue sky.

  Green? Of course. From the scattering of the orange light of this G8-class sun –

  “Where’s Mother?”

  “Orbital elements are one hundred twenty-three point four by–”

  “Show me.”

  Fine reticles appeared in the glass of the canopy. Guided by them she picked out a silver point steady in the south-west sky, brilliant despite the daylight: Mother, in its stationary orbit, over this landmass. She felt a surge of relief.

  Pod’s report said the air outside was close enough to Earth’s to sustain her for a few hours, but there were some mild toxins. She could spend no more than a couple of hours at a time out of Pod. She couldn’t move far, then.

  Temperature thirty Celsius. A bright summer’s day on Alpha One.

  Right now Mother would be sending out ‘Crew Loss’ buoys. If Wake could get to Shuttle she could instruct Mother to start emitting mayday FTL buoys, telling the Universe she was still alive. There was no guarantee anyone would respond, but it was a better chance than nothing.

  And if she did get to Shuttle, of course, she might do better than that; maybe she could figure out a way to get back to orbit, to Mother.

  She pushed at the canopy; it opened with a sigh of hydraulics, shrugging off the parachute.

  Pod had come down in the foothills of an eroded mountain range. She stood on a grass-covered plateau. Well, it looks like grass. Beyond the lip of the plateau a green valley fell away, widening towards a ribbon of ocean to the south. A quicksilver thread of river twisted across the valley bottom. U-shaped valley. Glaciated, probably. There were plants, something like trees: short, thick-boled, with a haze of crimson leaves. The sun sat on the horizon, huge, too orange.

  The panorama was sufficiently different to send a shiver down her spine.

  She touched the locket around her neck. From within the heart-shaped crystal Ben smiled. Ben’s two girls—Wake’s granddaughters, microgravity-slender—held onto his arm and waved. The hologram had been taken in the Shelter, the big, bright, grass-walled chamber at the heart of the L5 colony, the place children were brought up. The Earth colours, the chlorophyll green of the grass and trees, were strikingly different from Alpha One. As if this planet was a poor mock-up.

  She kneeled down and picked a few blades of the ‘grass’. It was more like a six-fold clover leaf. And the green tint was like copper oxide, not chlorophyll-bright.

  “Pod. Tell me about the biota.”

  “Most numerous atoms are silicon, hydrogen, oxygen. Silicon bonds form the basic architecture of–”

  She stopped listening. Oh, great. I’ve discovered silicon-based life. That was supposed to be impossible. Silicon couldn’t form double bonds like carbon; silicon couldn’t form the metastable compounds which encouraged the development of large, complex molecules... Evidently, nature here had found a way.

  It didn’t matter a damn to her. Basic science was part of her contract, but it paid hardly anything. What was most significant was the fact that not even Pod’s smart digestive sacs would be able to turn these silicon-based raw materials into food for her.

  She interrupted Pod’s lecture. “Tell me about supplies.”

  “Five days at nominal intake.”

  Five days of gloop fed to her intravenously by the sub-dermals. I need to find that damn Shuttle.

  Pod gave her a bearing for Shuttle’s crash site. It was a kilometre to the south, down the valley.

  She walked over soft, grass-carpeted ground, plucking diamond-shaped leaves from the trees. The green wasn’t quite right, and neither was the sky, but it was almost impossible to believe that there was nothing here she could eat.

  The crash site was a scar in the hillside, all but grown over. She found what might have been the comms deck; its case was corroded and broken open, and a kind of lichen spilled out when she tried to lift it.

  She went back to Pod. “How long have I been down here?”

  “Two local years.” Which was about one Earth year.

  “A year? Why so long? ”

  “Pod seeking crew survival assurance. Not attainable. Opened at limit of heuristic algorithms for further direction.”

  She squatted down on the grass and hugged her knees. She hadn’t anticipated such a gap. She hadn’t even thought to ask Pod how long she’d been inert. Too damn long ; so long she’d already lost Shuttle, in the accelerated entropy of this spacetime pit.

  She figured options.

  She could try to signal. But, hell, she didn’t have enough power to send anything that would be picked up at interstellar distances.
And besides, it would take decades for a lightspeed signal to reach anywhere inhabited.

  She could try to build a Shuttle, get back to orbit. Yeah. But she knew Pod didn’t have the resources to enable her to turn unmined iron ore into a spacegoing craft. And besides, she was no engineer.

  She was trapped here, in this gravity pit, alone, out of touch, and everybody who knew her must have been told she was dead.

  She let go, just for a second.

  Then she straightened up. To hell with that. She needed some options.

  ...At the foot of the valley, two or three kilometres away, a thin thread of smoke rose into the air.

  ~

  She hurried back to Pod. She slipped a vocoder headset over her head, fixing the microphone before her mouth, and then she fastened a laser pistol to her belt.

  The sun had climbed from the horizon. It’s local morning, then. Another thing she hadn’t thought to inquire of Pod. I have to get more observant, less self-obsessed, if I’m to live through this . She walked down the steep hillside into the valley.

  There were fields in the valley bottom. They were delimited by low walls of boulders, glacial deposit hauled away from the soil. She made out more threads of smoke, a collection of tiny, mud-coloured huts. Eetees.

  She passed small brown quadrupeds: ruminants browsing on the grass-analogue. Silicon-based birds pulsed through the air around her, their chirps high and piercing. The whole place was just a feast of convergent evolution, she thought.

  After a kilometre she found a path worn into the hillside. She followed the twisting, copper- coloured track to the valley bottom.

  The first dwelling she came to, a timber and adobe shack on stilts, was on the other side of a field planted with orderly rows of what looked like beet. There were crude ploughs, made of some wood-analogue, standing around in the field. Not technologically advanced, then. This could be the sticks, of course. She needed to find a city, industrial advancement.

  She was forming a tentative plan. It would take the resources of a partially industrialised society, at least, to project her back to orbit. Maybe these Eetees had space technology. If so, she had to find it.