like ours before we get too far – for example, maybe we all destroy ourselves in nuclear wars or eco collapse. Or maybe there is something more sinister, plagues of killer robots sliding silently between the stars, which for their own antique purposes kill off fledgling cultures.
Or maybe the answer is more benevolent. Maybe we’re in some kind of quarantine – or a zoo.
But none of these filtering mechanisms convinces me. You see, you have to believe that this magic suppression mechanism, whatever it is, works for every race in this huge Galaxy of ours. All it would take would be for one race to survive the wars, or evade the vacuum robots, or come sneaking through the quarantine to sell trinkets to the natives – or even just to start broadcasting some Eetie version of The Simpsons, anywhere in the Galaxy – and we’d surely see or hear them.
But we don’t.
This paradox was first stated clearly by a twentieth-century physicist called Enrico Fermi. It strikes me as a genuine mystery. The contradictions are basic: life seems capable of emerging everywhere; just one starfaring race could easily have covered the Galaxy by now; the whole thing seems inevitable – but it hasn’t happened.
Thinking about paradoxes is the way human understanding advances. I think the Fermi paradox is telling us something very profound about the universe, and our place in it. Or was.
Of course, everything is different now.
AD 2020–2042
… And he felt as if he was drowning, struggling up from some thick, viscous fluid, up towards the light. He wanted to open his mouth, to scream – but he had no mouth – and no words. What would he scream?
I.
I am.
I am Reid Malenfant.
He could see the sail.
It was a gauzy sheet draped across the crowded stars of this place – where, Malenfant? why, the core of the Galaxy, he thought, wonder breaking through his agony – and within the sail, cupped, he could see the neutron star, an angry ball of red laced with eerie synchrotron blue, like a huge toy.
A star with a sail attached to it. Beautiful. Scary.
Triumph surged. I won, he thought. I resolved the koan, the great conundrum of the cosmos; Nemoto would be pleased. And now, together, we’re fixing an unsatisfactory universe. Hell of a thing.
… But if you see all this, Malenfant, then what are you?
He looked down at himself.
Tried to.
A sense of body, briefly. Spread-eagled against the sail’s gauzy netting. Clinging by fingers and toes, monkey digits, here at the centre of the Galaxy. A metaphor, of course, an illusion to comfort his poor human mind.
Welcome to reality.
The pain! Oh, God, the pain.
Terror flooded over him. And anger.
And, through it, he remembered the Moon, where it began …
A passenger in the HOPE-3 tug, Reid Malenfant descended towards the Moon.
The Farside base, called Edo, was a cluster of concrete components – habitation modules, power plants, stores, manufacturing facilities – half-buried in the cratered plain. Comms masts sprouted like angular flowers. The tug pad was just a splash of scorched Moon-dust concrete, a couple of kilometres further out. Around the station itself, the regolith was scarred by tractor traffic.
Robots were everywhere, rolling, digging, lifting; Edo was growing like a colony of bacilli in nutrient.
A hi-no-maru, a Japanese sun flag, was fixed to a pole at the centre of Edo.
‘You are welcome to my home,’ Nemoto said.
She met him in the pad’s airlock, a large, roomy chamber blown into the regolith. Her face was broad, pale, her eyes black; her hair was elaborately shaved, showing the shape of her skull. She smiled, apparently habitually. She could have been no more than half Malenfant’s age, perhaps thirty.
Nemoto helped Malenfant don the suit he’d been fitted with during the flight from Earth. The suit was a brilliant orange. It clung to him comfortably, the joints easy and loose, although the sewn-in plates of tungsten armour were heavy.
‘It’s a hell of a development from the old EMUs I wore when I was flying Shuttle,’ he said, trying to make conversation.
Nemoto listened politely, after the manner of young people, to his fragments of reminiscence from a vanished age. She told him the suit had been manufactured on the Moon, and was made largely of spider silk. ‘I will take you to the factory. A chamber in the lunar soil, full of immense spinnerets. A nightmare vision! …’
Malenfant felt disoriented, restless.
He was here to deliver a lecture, on colonizing the Galaxy, to senior executives of Nishizaki Heavy Industries. But here he was being met off the tug by Nemoto, the junior researcher who’d invited him out to the Moon, just a kid. He hoped he wasn’t making some kind of fool of himself.
Reid Malenfant used to be an astronaut. He’d flown the last Shuttle mission – STS-194, on Discovery – when, ten years ago, the space transportation system had reached the end of its design life, and the International Space Station had finally been abandoned, incomplete. No American had flown into space since – save as the guest of the Japanese, or the Europeans, or the Chinese.
In this year 2020, Malenfant was sixty years old and feeling a lot older – increasingly stranded, a refugee in this strange new century, his dignity woefully fragile.
Well, he thought, whatever the dubious politics, whatever the threat to his dignity, he was here. It had been the dream of his long life to walk on another world. Even if it was as the guest of a Japanese.
And even if he was too damn old to enjoy it.
They stepped through a transit tunnel and directly into a small tractor, a lozenge of tinted glass. The tractor rolled away from the tug pad. The wheels were large and open, and absorbed the unevenness of the mare; Malenfant felt as if he were riding across the Moon in a soap bubble.
Every surface in the cabin was coated with fine, grey Moon dust. He could smell the dust; the scent
