Space
2020. Fueled by an insatiable curiosity, Reid Malenfant ventures to the far edge of the solar system, where he discovers a strange artifact left behind by an alien civilization: A gateway that functions as a kind of quantum transporter, allowing virtually instantaneous travel over the vast distances of interstellar space.What lies on the other side of the gateway? Reid decides to find out. Yet he will soon be faced with an impossible choice that will push him beyond terror, beyond sanity, beyond humanity itself.Meanwhile on Earth the Japanese scientist Nemoto fears her worst nightmares are coming true. Startling discoveries reveal that the Moon, Venus, even Mars once thrived with life. Life that was snuffed out not just once but many times, in cycles of birth and destruction. And the next chilling cycle is set to begin again . . .
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STEPHEN BAXTER
SPACE
MANIFOLD 2
HarperVoyager an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2000
Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2000
Cover image of Calabi-yau manifold © Laguna Design/Getty Images
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Stephen Baxter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008134471
Ebook Edition © November 2012 ISBN 9780007499793 Version: 2015-09-01
To my nephew, Thomas Baxter andSimon Bradshaw and Eric Brown
Innumerable suns exist; innumerable earths
revolve around these suns in a manner similar to the way the seven planets revolve around our sun. Living beings inhabit these worlds …
GIORDANO BRUNO (1548–1600)
If they existed, they would be here.
ENRICO FERMI (1901–1954)
CONTENTS
Chapter 13: The Roads of Empire
Chapter 14: Dreams of Ancestral Fish
Chapter 19: Dreams of Rock and Stillness
Chapter 20: The Tunnel in The Moon
Part IV: Bad News From The Stars
Chapter 28: People Came From Earth
Chapter 29: Bad News From The Stars
Part V: The Children’s Crusade
My name is Reid Malenfant.
You know me. And you know I’m an incorrigible space cadet.
You know I’ve campaigned for, among other things, private mining expeditions to the asteroids. In fact, in the past I’ve tried to get you to pay for such things. I’ve bored you with that often enough already, right?
So tonight I want to be a little more personal. Tonight I want to talk about why I gave over my life to a single, consuming project.
It started with a simple question:
Where is everybody?
As a kid I used to lie at night out on the lawn, soaking up dew and looking at the stars, trying to feel the Earth turning under me. It felt wonderful to be alive – hell, to be ten years old, anyhow.
But I knew that the Earth was just a ball of rock, on the fringe of a nondescript galaxy.
As I lay there staring at the stars – the thousands I could pick out with my naked eyes, the billions that make up the great wash of our Galaxy, the uncounted trillions in the galaxies beyond – I just couldn’t believe, even then, that there was nobody out there looking back at me down here. Was it really possible that this was the only place where life had taken hold – that only here were there minds and eyes capable of looking out and wondering?
But if not, where are they? Why isn’t there evidence of extraterrestrial civilization all around us?
Consider this. Life on Earth got started just about as soon as it could – as soon as the rocks cooled and the oceans gathered. Of course it took a good long time to evolve us. Nevertheless we have to believe that what applies on Earth ought to apply on all the other worlds out there, like or unlike Earth; life ought to be popping up everywhere. And, as there are hundreds of billions of stars out there in the Galaxy, there are presumably hundreds of billions of opportunities for life to come swarming up out of the ponds – and even more in the other galaxies that crowd our universe.
Furthermore, life spread over Earth as fast and as far as it could. And already we’re starting to spread to other worlds. Again, this can’t be a unique trait of Earth life.
So, if life sprouts everywhere, and spreads as fast and as far as it can, how come nobody has come spreading all over
