Phase Space by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online

New AIDS epidemic of the twenty-second century, and died childless. It was ironic. Here was Greenberg, perhaps the oldest surviving human, and not one of all those teeming trillions floating around the system could claim direct descent from him.
    On the other hand, by the laws of statistics, there ought to be a billion Einsteins out there. Nobody knew what they were all doing. They sure weren’t working together.
    All those pious dreams of the space buffs of some kind of giant solar-system civilization had never been remotely likely. There were just too many people. The human race had gathered into a billion small-town-sized tribes and splintered, shaping and seeking goals unimaginable to an Earth-born geezer like him.
    It seemed to him, in fact, that he was watching the end of the species, as a unitary whole: two million years out of Africa, the race had escaped from the cradle and was growing, to where the hell nobody could even guess.
    … And now here came Toutatis on its aerobraking pass.
    The rock looked like a comet glowing in the thin upper air of Earth, streaking by in a perfect straight line below Greenberg. It made the cities and oceans of Earth glow like the day – it must have been a remarkable sight from down there – and asteroid light played on his own face, the ancient bones of his eye sockets.
    The encounter was over in seconds. The trail of scorched air soon dissipated and dimmed, and Toutatis, its orbit subtly altered, passed on towards its next encounter. It was going to take fifty years to nudge Toutatis into its final low Earth orbit, but planning projects on that kind of time scale didn’t seem to trouble the inhabitants of Toutatis, or anybody else.
    The show was over. The people of Ra-Shalom drifted away from their blue watery windows, and returned to their mysterious business within.
    Greenberg had never meant to live for a thousand years. It was ridiculous. Nobody else had stuck around like this. It was just that he would have had to have chosen when to die, and that was something he had never expected to face when he grew up, and he just had no instinct for it.
    Anyhow, if he let himself die, he would have missed this.
    Greenberg, with a sigh, turned away from the window and went to his instrument consoles.
    It was a massive asteroid, big enough to have dragged itself into a sphere, with planet-like layers of internal structure, rich in metals, rocks and volatiles. It was bathed by the light of a sun only three times as far away as from Earth.
    The guardians considered carefully. It was, after all, to be the repository of all that was left of their designers’ species, until even this new young sun guttered and died.
    They were machines designed to plan for billions of years. They had already nursed their fragile cargo across such deserts of time. Now, looking to the future, they must plan for evolution, even the loss of mind.
    It was a good home, rich in energy and resources.
    The guardians were satisfied. They closed themselves down.
    Within the rock, history continued.
Scale: Exp 4
    It was to be quite a day, as the last of Ra’s ore was transmuted, and Greenberg made sure the Weissmans woke him up to see it. In the event he nearly missed it, it took so long to put him together again.
    Greenberg’s window was the same old tunnel through fused regolith, but the view beyond changed as he watched, the last of the grey-black old crap literally dissolving before his eyes, to be replaced by a sharp, tight blue curve of watery horizon.
    Too damn sharp, he thought. He wondered if those asshole nanobugs had changed his eyes on him again while he’d slept. But even his naps lasted a century at a time, longer than he had once expected to live; they had time.
    Anyhow, his new eyes showed him a blue world, the landscape softly pulsing, with Greenberg’s NASA-style space station hab module stuck stubbornly to the side under its crust of regolith, like a leech clinging to flesh. Ra was just water now,