World Engines: Creator

by Stephen Baxter

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

Trapped on an alternate Earth, the combined crews of a crashed Russian spaceship, a British expeditionary force and a group of strays from the future must work together to survive, escape, and discover what led them to this point. All are from parallel universes where small changes in history led to different realities, and the tensions between the groups are rising.

But some changes were not small. The solar system has been altered, changed, shaped in the various realities, and the World Engineers - unspeakably powerful, completely unknown - are still active. Why have they populated this planet with humanity's ancestors and dinosaurs? What is on the moon of Saturn that gives off such an odd light? And even if they can be found, can they be stopped - and should they be?

Malenfant, Deidra and the rest of their party must find a way off the planet, back into space, and into the many dimensions seeking the answer...

Release date: August 20, 2020

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 560

Sample

1

‘You tell them, kid . . .’

He had been dreaming of . . .

Of Michael. Not his lost son Michael. Another Michael, somehow important . . .

It faded.

He coughed, coming fully awake.

And saw a roof above him.

That was his first impression. A slanting, rough surface, brown, seen in some flickering light – a candle? Canvas, maybe. No – leather. He could smell it, a kind of mixture of stockyard and new shoes.

‘Damn big sheets, though, if it is leather. Can’t see any stitching. What kind of animal . . .’

‘You’ll find out.’

‘Did I say that out loud?’

A shadowed face like a moon, hanging over him. ‘Yes, you did say it out loud, Malenfant. Though you’ve been mumbling a lot. Irina has been spending a great deal of time talking to you, as you drifted in and out.’

‘Irina? Who?’

‘Umm – do you know who you are?’

‘Hell, yes.’ He had a coughing spasm. ‘Though my voice is evidently a croak. My name is Reid Malenfant. Still is. And you are—’ An instant’s hesitation, as if his brain was slowly rebooting. ‘Bartholomew.’

A grin on that face.

‘Where are we, Tin Man? In some kind of circus tent?’ He turned his head cautiously, and he didn’t feel like he was spinning around or about to pass out again so that was a good sign. He saw that the tent was actually a kind of tepee, supported by one big central upright, what looked like a trimmed tree trunk. But a big trunk, a regular pillar, the stumps of crudely hacked-away branches showing, the whole fairly rammed into the ground. He had an immediate impression of immense strength, crudely applied, in the building of this place.

‘And, no stitching. In that big tent up there. The leather. Not that I can see.’

‘Stop repeating yourself.’

‘I’m not. Stop diagnosing.’

‘I’m not. So you think you can sit up this time?’

‘This time? . . . Never mind.’

He took a breath, got his arms under his body, clenched his stomach muscles, and pushed upwards. He felt Bartholomew’s arm around his shoulders. Solid, strong, steady – too steady, clearly artificial – but hugely reassuring just the same. Not that he was going to admit that.

Raised up, he looked around some more.

A dirt floor, loosely covered with leather throws. That big central pole. Yeah, candles, he was right about that, big fat stubs of wax burning on flat stones. What looked like pallets, beds – heaps of leather and straw roughly the size and shape of beds anyhow. Bits of clothing, coloured blue, orange, slate grey, dumped everywhere, that stood out against the mud colours of the rest of this structure. And a few pieces of modern equipment – ‘modern’ meaning deriving from the time epoch he and Bartholomew and Greggson Deirdra had come from, the twenty-fifth century, and the slightly clunkier, halfway-to-steampunk gear that came from the early twenty-first-century British expedition they had stumbled across at Phobos (or, he reminded himself, a version of Phobos).

Nobody in here right now, save for Malenfant and Bartholomew.

Malenfant found that he was wearing nothing but grimy underwear.

He lifted his own scrawny wrist, to see a bangle hanging there, a bronze bracelet. This was a very advanced product of the tech of the twenty-fifth century that, by reading from and writing to his cerebral cortex, performed various useful miracles, seamless translation being one of them.

He was wearing nothing but underwear and the bangle.

‘Where is everybody else?’

Bartholomew hesitated. ‘You do remember—’

‘The crash. We lost Niki . . . Nicola Mott. And Bob Nash. Yeah, I remember. I remember it all. I think.’ He pursed his lips. ‘And I remember going through it all with Irina. Irina Viktorenkova. Who I presume was here already, when we fell out of the sky. She fished us out. I talked about it all with her.’

‘That you did. I was there, too.’

‘Eavesdropping as usual.’

‘As to where everybody is – hate to tell you, Malenfant, the other survivors are all a little further along the road to recovery than you. Nobody badly injured in the crash, aside from our two fatalities. They are all younger than you.’

‘And fitter. I get it.’

‘I mean, centuries younger according to the calendar, thanks to the time you spent in a coldsleep pod on the Moon – but biologically so too.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ He pushed Bartholomew’s arm away and swung his legs away from the bed. ‘Well, I need to see them even so.’

‘I bet that’s not the very first thing you need.’

As his body’s systems slowly reconnected to his brain, he had to agree. ‘So where’s the head in this M.A.S.H.?’

‘Not far away. A hole in the ground, essentially, but hygienic enough. Irina has been getting that stuff right as far as I can see. Here.’

From the ground beside the pallet Bartholomew produced a metre-long stick, evidently a cut-down branch, with a roughly shaped end. Again Malenfant had the impression of great strength crudely applied to make this thing.

Still, its function was obvious, and he recoiled. ‘You expect me to walk with a stick?’

‘Malenfant, you are a very old man. You have been through one hell of a gruelling experience. And, let me remind you, you are on Persephone. A different Persephone.’

‘Persephone II, we said we’d call it.’

‘Whatever. But just as in the comet-cloud version we visited before, this is a super Earth. Nearly one-third higher gravity, remember? So take the stick, and be damn grateful I don’t just carry you in my arms like an infant. Also you need a drink of water before—’

‘Ah, give me the damn stick.’

So Bartholomew walked him into a kind of side-structure to the big tent, evidently the privy, a place you could get to without going out in the rain. (If there was ever rain here.) Just a hole in the ground with a couple of planks set over it. But the stench was surprisingly mild; it seemed that layers of some kind of moist earth had been thrown down over the detritus.

When he was done, Bartholomew helped him take a brisk shower under a bucket of lukewarm water, and then dress in a reasonably clean coverall – NASA blue, but a product of twenty-fifth-century matter printers. Apparently undamaged, but Malenfant knew such garments were, to a degree, self-repairing.

Then Bartholomew led him through a tangle of tie ropes, thick strands of what looked like tree bark – bark that had been chewed to make it pliable, it appeared – held down by fat stakes driven into a ground of what looked like flood-plain clay.

And out into the open. At last Malenfant got a look at the world he was stranded on. His first conscious look from the ground, anyhow.

‘You’re doing a lot better than the first time you woke, Malenfant. Do you remember? Irina was very patient. You were half-conscious. Some of what you babbled was . . . strange. She sat with you for hours, as you talked and talked . . .’

Slowly, Malenfant started to remember. Can you hear me? She’d asked that, over and over . . .

2

Can you hear me?

Hear, yes. I can’t see.

Try to be calm. It’s over now.

Over? . . .

Do you know who you are?

Are we at Persephone? Or whatever the hell we ought to call this big green version of that rock ball . . . Persephone II, not like the frozen rock ball we found off in the outer Solar System in that different strand, that different reality . . . all those continents and oceans and . . . I remember . . . the British ship, the Harmonia . . . no, we were in the lander, we’d had to rebuild it, the Charon II, we called it. And, yes, this . . . different Solar System we are in. A different reality strand, plucked out of the manifold of all possible realities.

And here, a strand where Saturn has no rings.

Saturn?

Yeah . . . Amid all the strangeness, a radio-silent Earth and so forth, that was what struck Deirdra most when we found it through the telescopes. Turns out she always had a thing about Saturn. Here, no rings, and a funny-looking extra moon . . . But we came here first, to Persephone. Because it looked even more Earthlike than Earth, the version hereabouts anyhow. A big fat green ball where Mars ought to be. We’re going down, down to Persephone, we’re going to land. But . . .

Let’s go back. First things first. Do you know who you are?

I . . . Yes.

Your name?

My name. I—

Lie back. Don’t try to open your eyes.

I’m fine. And I know my damn name. I’m Reid Malenfant. You know me. The guy who crashed the space shuttle. And now I crashed again, I guess.

Listen to me, Reid Malenfant.

Just Malenfant.

Listen. Your Russian is very good. But I am afraid that I do not in fact know you. I never heard your name before you came here. I know nothing of this ‘space shuttle’. Apparently not the craft in which you landed—

What do you mean, my Russian is good? I don’t know a damn word of Russian. Save for a few cuss words I picked up from Vladimir Viktorenko when we picked him up from his wrecked ship on Phobos.

Hello.

Hello? You still there?

I am still here.

You dropped out for a moment there. I was worried . . . You shut up when I mentioned Vlad. Vladimir Pavlovich Viktorenko . . . Do you know his name?

In a sense. Possibly.

What does that mean?

My own name is Viktorenkova. Irina Viktorenkova. That is my marriage name. And I have a son. A son called Vladimir. Vladimir Pavlovich Viktorenko. He is not here. I am far from home.

I . . . ah. OK. I’m guessing now that isn’t a coincidence at all. One thing we have learned about the manifold is that, even if it is some kind of infinite multiverse, the – Roads – it is comprised of, that’s a British term, group together in bundles. Alternate histories sprouting from some common origin, a point of divergence. America gets to the Moon first, or Russia does. Or, much deeper divergences. Planet Mars exists, or it doesn’t. But these bundles, these similar Roads, can interact in more subtle ways. There are – resonances. Nicola Mott, who flew down in the Charon with me – I flew with her before, or a version of her, in a different reality, a different Road, a different spacecraft.

Manifold. Resonance. Roads. Bundles.

Yes?

We know of your ‘manifold’. We too tentatively explore it. But we have a different vocabulary. We call it ‘moving in the higher dimensions’. Your Russian is very clear, Malenfant. Even concerning such abstract concepts.

Ah. OK. Actually I know no Russian at all. Can you see my right arm? Do I have a bangle on my wrist? Like a copper bracelet?

I . . . Yes. You have it.

That’s how we’re communicating. Through a smart technology, from a time centuries after my own era – from the twenty-fifth century.

The twenty-fifth century. To me – this is the year 1992.

Never mind. I’m taking it too fast as ever. You do get used to it. Believe me. Ask Bartholomew. Maybe he has a bangle to spare for you. Sure would help, I guess.

Actually he, Bartholomew, is not here. He is tending to the others.

The others.

Shit.

I need to know about my crew.

You just woke up. You have been through a crash, a serious medical trauma. I don’t think you can expect—

Tell me, damn it.

Very well. But, let’s take it in order.

Tell me what you remember.

3

I remember . . .

Eight of us came through the Phobos passageways to this new system. Eight, including Bartholomew.

Except we found Phobos orbiting Venus, not Mars. I remember how the Sun blinded us. It was so unexpected; we didn’t anticipate emerging so deep in the Solar System.

But we looked around the System. Earth was radio-silent. It didn’t even look like Earth. But Persephone – well, we could see its oceans glint, with the naked eye, across astronomical units.

We weren’t where we expected to be, you see.

Where was that?

Or when, maybe. We had been trying to get back to the dawn of the Solar System. Crazy as that sounds. We wanted to figure out why we find ourselves tumbling across a manifold of possible realities, where histories are different – even the planets are different, wildly so. Different timelines, connected by – portals. Well, the British had found passages, what they called chimneys, in that tangle of spacetime anomalies you can reach through Phobos, chimneys that they thought extended, not just across the manifold, but to the deep past.

You see, they thought they had seen anomalous sunlight, coming through the chimneys. Too dim, and with a subtly different spectral mix . . . They thought it was the light of a much younger Sun. Sunlight of the past. So we figured we could – well, study that deep past. Even visit it. Find out about who might have been meddling, back there. To create those deep divergences in the present.

So we dived back into Phobos, moon of Mars. But maybe we lost our way. Where we came out, the Sun looked – modern. And even Phobos wasn’t Phobos any more. Or anyhow not in the same place.

Yes. The portal-moon. But we call it Anteros. It is indeed one of the two moons of Venus, where I came from. As it is here.

Two moons, yeah, I remember now, we saw it when we came through . . . Here, Venus has two moons.

So instead of a young Solar System, we emerged into . . . this. Different. What looked like the present day to us – our present, that is – but with the planets all wrong. A different Venus, Mercury – a different Earth. A silent Earth, no radio we could detect. And, instead of Mars – this. What looked like the Persephone we had schlepped out to the edge of the Solar System to find, but here, not out in the cold, but here, where Mars was supposed to be . . . The same, but different. Like James Bond in the movies, with a new face every ten years. We actually called this world Persephone II, like a sequel in some franchise. Ha!

I know little of this James Bond.

Forget it. Pop culture, my Achilles heel.

However, we have evidently spent more time here than you have . . .

Who’s ‘we’?

We can come to that. As to the date, though, we have made estimates based on the positions of the stars, and indeed of the outer planets. Jupiter onwards . . . These, save for Pluto, appear to follow much the same orbits as, umm, as where we came from.

Yeah. We noticed that. If all these different parallel realities result in some kind of perturbation of the formation of the Solar System, which is what it looks like – well, maybe it takes one hell of a big perturbation to deflect Jupiter significantly. Like a cannonball sitting on a pool table; you aren’t going to deflect that baby, no matter how skilfully you strike the cue ball.

Our best estimate is that the date, in this version of the Solar System, is AD 2020. We cannot be more precise.

That’s pretty impressive . . . But you said it isn’t 2020 where you came from?

No. 1992, by the western Christian calendar.

Slips in time as well as differences in the unfolding history. We did observe this before.

Before?

Long story. On our way here we . . . Damn it. We. My people. I keep losing focus. I was piloting that damn ship, the Charon lander, me and Nicola Mott . . .

Tell me, then. Take your time. Start again.

You said there were eight of you.

Yeah. So eight of us came through Phobos to this place, in the Harmonia. Big interplanetary exploration ship.

Once we were clear of Phobos, or Anteros, we had that big debate on where to go. Persephone or Earth or even ringless Saturn. That extra moon of Saturn, you know, we found it glows with a light that isn’t – natural. Like reflected sunlight, but not quite. As if from a different Sun – or a younger Sun, Josh Morris said, in one of those flashes of intuitive brilliance he can have . . . And that turned out to be the lure that drew us through the portal to this place, remember. That young sunlight, leaking out of that ice moon.

But in the end, we were attracted by Persephone, this fat, rich, sunlit version of the Persephone we visited before. And when we got here we could see a lot, even from orbit. Life, what looked like forest, grasslands. Herds of animals, some of them huge on those big sprawling continents.

And threads of smoke, the mark of fires that looked – well, human-made. Maybe. We saw two fairly significant, fairly persistent occurrences. And both of them on this big continent we call Caina, north of the equator. We saw your own camp fires here at this southern shore, the mouth of a big river, right? And the other, what even might be some kind of technical development, off on a big volcanic plateau in the middle of the continent. We also saw what looked like a gas burner, a flare. Our orbit wasn’t favourable—

We call the plateau itself the Shield. We have no name for this continent. Your Caina.

We had to come down and see – also replenishing our stores would have been a good idea – and find out who was already here. So we plotted our landing site. Look, we chose what looked like the less developed of the two human-type settlements.

You were cautious. Understandable. It is a strange world to you; you had no idea who we were, what we were doing.

Besides, we needed an equatorial landing place. We also wanted to check out whether there was any sign of the Towers we had seen on that other Persephone, out in the comet cloud.

Towers?

Strung around the equator . . . Never mind. If they were here, you would know about them. Our plan was to land on Iscariot – the continent like an equatorial belt – due south of here, across the strait from the river delta, your camp. Then we would cross the water when we were secure.

But even before we could leave orbit we had to rebuild our lander, which we lost in that other reality, at that other Persephone. And we had lost two of our crew in the process, two Brits. But Harmonia is designed for long-duration flight without resupply or refitting, and she has this main hold that is like a museum of spare parts, and we raided that, and we cannibalised the mother ship a little, and we got the Charon II built.

We decided to take seven of our eight crew down. We thought it was going to be a while before we figured out this new world, even with a lot of us working at it . . .

Lighthill stayed in orbit. Wing Commander Geoff Lighthill. Cambridge man, as he reminds you several times a day . . . Ha! Good officer, and overall commander of the ship. He stayed up there, working comms, maintaining the Harmonia, and running an astronomical survey.

And the rest of us – the Charon seven, including myself and Bartholomew. Emma, Deirdra, and the Brits: Nicola, Josh Morris, Bob Nash. Strictly speaking I was co-pilot to Nicola Mott – and, as I may have said, in the year 2019, in another version of history, it had been two versions of us who had tried to bring the space shuttle booster stage Constitution down from orbit to Cape Canaveral. Tried and failed, and that descent killed that version of Nicola. And now—

Nicola. The second Nicola. She did not survive the descent to Persephone.

I know. I know. I stayed aware myself long enough to see that . . . Damn it, she was right beside me. Again. Those damn manifold resonances.

Be calm.

She died at my side, twice. How the hell am I supposed to stay calm about that?

The others, though. Let me think it through. You have to imagine them in the lander, sitting behind us two pilots, racked up on fold-out couches. They kept quiet during the landing, as they were supposed to. Trained to, in fact, the British crew anyhow. There was Deirdra, and Emma II—

You actually call her Emma II?

Just tell me if they’re OK.

Five of you survived. Including Bartholomew. All save Nicola, and one other. The others are unharmed – so I would say. Bartholomew describes minor medical conditions—

Who else? Who did we lose?

Bob Nash.

Damn it. Damn it. Lighthill called him ‘Oxford’. Pipe-smoker. And the British crew’s engineer – we will miss him. I guess we’re stranded down here, until we get the Charon fixed up to take us back to orbit and the Harmonia, and he would have led that effort.

But the rest survived. Greggson Deirdra—

Met her as a teenager. She was right there when I was defrosted, in a drowned London. She’s from the twenty-fifth century, and one of the strongest human beings I have ever encountered, young as she is. Another long story. And the young scientist – Josh Morris?

He is safe. Traumatised, says Bartholomew, but—

He’s a right to be. Young guy, awkward. His twentieth, twenty-first-century science grounding is out of date, but his mind would shine in any epoch, and he will be a hell of an asset in the days to come. But we will have to look after him.

Hello?

Are you still there?

I am making notes.

Ha! Not a bad idea. When I was a kid my father used to try to drum good habits into me. Making notes was one of them, when I was doing my amateur astronomy and stuff . . .

Tell me about your father.

I’m remembering more of it. The descent, in the Charon. We were doing fine . . . Then, something in the sky ahead of us . . . A damn huge obstruction, bright blue, a – a circle, turned out to be, we saw it first as an oval, nearly edge on.

Malenfant.

Phobos blue. Yeah, like the wheels we saw in the place we called the Sculpture Garden, inside Phobos. Manifold technology.

Malenfant.

World Engineer technology. Yeah. And we were just flying at the damn thing, it came out of nowhere—

Malenfant—

We couldn’t turn fast enough in that bucket, it was little more than a glider—

Stay calm.

Calm. Yeah.

Tell me about your father.

4

Bartholomew helped him outside.

They were in some kind of river valley. Well, hell, there was the river, maybe half a kilometre away, a grey, fast-flowing stream. But the floor of this valley was broad, contained by shallow sandstone walls to either side – he made out thick strata, banded layers in the brown-crimson rock – and beyond that, visible in the misty air, more walls, much more distant, rising up. As if the river had cut through some immense pre-existing canyon. The light was diffuse, scattered by a low cloud layer. In fact, he saw now, the cloud seemed to dip down below the level of the remote canyon walls, blurring them to invisibility.

He turned to look downstream, and saw the Sun, hanging high in the sky over this long, complex valley. Almost overhead – but it looked dimmer, smaller, for this wasn’t Earth. This version of Persephone, Earthlike as it seemed to be, was at the position of Mars, not Earth, so a good fifty per cent or more further from the Sun.

There was a wind, not that strong, but uneven, unsettling. The higher clouds were moving fast.

‘Weather feels kind of blustery. What time of year is it – spring, the fall? It has that unstable feel.’

‘Actually we’re close to midsummer just here,’ Bartholomew said. ‘It’s not that seasonal – so I’m told. Not much of an axial tilt. But it’s a big world, with big, energetic weather systems.’

‘And not comfortable, I’m guessing.’

Bartholomew shrugged. ‘It’s not built for humans. Or rather, humans didn’t evolve here. Your problem. You’re the tropical ape. I’m a waterproof mech with a built-in hundred-year power pack.’

‘Show-off.’

Malenfant glanced around at the small settlement, on the valley floor. The big tent he had come out of was the dominant structure, he saw. But there were smaller tents, maybe used for storage, carefully lashed down – evidently you had to expect high winds here. Super Earth, Malenfant. Super weather.

And now he saw what he was looking for. People.

A small knot, too far away to distinguish, some in blue or grey coveralls, and some not, a couple of them dressed in what looked like leather, or crudely made cloth . . . Some sat beside a couple of frames on the ground, like home-made stretchers, with bundles wrapped in cloth heaped on top. Smoke from a small fire snaked into the air, dispersing quickly, like the thicker smoke that came from the fire in the big tepee.

And a couple of other bundles, lying on the ground. Longer. Isolated. Body length.

He took one limping step that way before Bartholomew took his arm.

Malenfant pulled away. ‘That’s where I need to be. With my people.’

Bartholomew glanced at him with a look Malenfant might have read as pity, if he hadn’t known that there was nothing inside the medic’s waterproof exterior but a kind of animated rule set. So Bartholomew claimed, at least.

‘First of all,’ Bartholomew said gently, ‘they aren’t your anything. Second of all, they’ve been functioning perfectly well – OK, maybe not so well, but well enough – without you so far. And what they don’t need is you blundering in half awake and with zero briefing. For instance, do you even know where you are?’

‘Persephone. Yeah, but where on Persephone?’ He thought back. Half-remembered reconstructing it all with Irina, his muse during his recovery. ‘OK. We intended to land on the northern coast of Iscariot, south of the strait between Iscariot and Caina. But in fact we fell into the sea to the south of Caina . . .’

He tried to visualise it. He glanced around again, at the river valley, the canyon’s steep sandstone walls, the glimpse of a canyon structure beyond, all under that lid of turbulent cloud. ‘If I remember, much of Caina is pretty high altitude. It was so even on that other, lifeless Persephone out in the dark. That was a big granite dome. But here, a lot of sandstone . . . The river.’ Malenfant was still thinking slowly. ‘Which must be flowing towards the coast, right? So’ – he pointed down the valley – ‘that way must be south. How far are we from the coast?’

‘Further than you might think, Malenfant.’

‘Right. We aren’t so far from the equator, given how high the Sun is . . . I guess the local time is around midday? The middle of a twenty-five-hour day.’

‘Well done.’

He whirled around, pivoting on his stick. Would have fallen if Bartholomew hadn’t grabbed him around the waist, more or less discreetly.

Greggson Deirdra was approaching, with Emma Stoney.

The hell with it. He threw away the stick, and ran to them.

5

My father. Right.

So I was born in 1960, Christian calendar.

I came from a family of flyers. My father flew in the Korean War, my grandfather in the Second World War. Umm . . . I think Stalin called it your ‘Great Patriotic War’.

Who?

Here we go again. Stick to the point, Malenfant. So I grew up with a head full of flying – and of space. I was nine years old when Apollo 11 landed – first to the Moon – and I cried my eyes out when it was revealed that Armstrong died at the moment of touchdown.

Hello?

You’ve gone quiet on me again.

You are speaking of American space programmes? The first American to walk on the Moon was, if I remember correctly, John Glenn, as a guest aboard the Vernadsky in . . . Never mind. You were telling me of your life. You were nine, ten years old when this Armstrong landed on the Moon?

Yeah. Perfect age, right? After that I had a head full of space. My father always encouraged me.

OK. So after the triumph and the tragedy of Apollo, we – America – started on a more sustainable space strategy. We had the space shuttle, a two-stage Earth-to-orbit transport, two fully reusable aircraft mated at launch. We had space stations in the Skylabs, and later Space Station Freedom. And we built on Apollo-Saturn, the technology that had taken us to the Moon, to venture further. The first humans to land on Mars were American, who landed there in 1986. So there were plenty of opportunities to get into space.

Meanwhile Emma and I had grown up together – kind of, she was ten years younger. We had drifted apart, got back together . . . We married in 1992. She was twenty-two. But by then—

You were flying in space?

Actually, no. I had applied to NASA, that is our space agency, and failed to make the cut, at first. This was the 1980s. So I decided to take time out to build up my flying skills, and joined the USAF. Our air force.

But Emma, meanwhile, had ambitions of her own. She was picking a smarter stratagem. Phobos had been big in the news since the late eighties, when Carl Sagan pushed for NASA to send a specialised probe there – and of course the Phobos anomalies had already been a mystery for decades. So Emma had picked up on that . . .

Phobos, moon of Mars. Anteros, moon of Venus.

Right. I think it is Anteros. And Phobos, at the same time. Not some kind of copy. The same thing. One thing we learned about the manifold is that you can have an object in two places at once . . . It’s not reality as we know it. Some quantum thing, probably.

But as for Phobos, actually the first anomalies – visible from Earth – were first pointed out by a Russian astronomer. Guy named Shklovsky . . .

The main problem was what they called the secular deceleration of Phobos. The moon’s orbit was apparently decaying, like the first Skylab – umm, like a space station orbiting too low, and skimming Earth’s atmosphere. The drag brings it down, eventually. Now, Phobos was a pretty hefty chunk of rock, and shouldn’t have been decaying so quickly. It was Shklovsky who suggested that the moon might be hollow. Anyhow, that’s why agitation was growing to send a dedicated, properly equipped crewed mission there – as opposed to having the Mangala Station crew take a detour from the surface of Mars.

To us, Phobos’s anomalies are