Xeelee: Endurance

by Stephen Baxter

  And Harry popped into the air in front of me. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘You wanted me to make that suggestion, didn’t you?’

  ‘Well, I hoped you would. If I’d made it they’d have refused, and Michael would never have forgiven me for suggesting it.’ He grinned. ‘I knew there was a reason I wanted to have you along, Jovik Emry. Well done. You’ve served your purpose.’

  Virtual Poole, still in his baby universe, spoke again. ‘Miriam.’

  She straightened up. ‘I’m here, Michael.’

  ‘I’m not sure how long I have left. What will happen when the power goes?’

  ‘I programmed the simulation to seem authentic, internally consistent. It will be as if the power in the Crab lifedome is failing.’ She took a breath, and said, ‘Of course you have other options to end it before then.’

  ‘I know. Thank you. Who were they, do you think? Whoever made the spiders? Did they build this pocket universe too? Or was it built for them? Like a haven?’

  ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. Michael, I’m sorry. I—’

  ‘Don’t be. You know I would have chosen this. But I’m sorry to leave you behind. Miriam – look after him, the other Michael. I, we, need you.’

  She looked at the original Poole, who was working at the GUTengine. ‘We’ll see,’ she said.

  ‘And tell Harry – well. You know.’

  She held a hand up to the empty air. ‘Michael, please—’

  ‘It’s enough.’ The Virtuals he had been projecting broke up into blocks of pixels, and a faint hiss, the carrier of his voice, disappeared from my hearing. Alone in his universe, he had cut himself off.

  The original Poole approached her, uncertain of her reaction. ‘It’s done. The GUTengine has been programmed. We’re ready to go, Miriam. As soon as we’re out of here, it will blow.’

  She turned away from him, her face showing something close to hatred.

  16

  So, harnessed to a spider oblivious of the impending fate of its vast and ancient project, we rose into the dark. It had taken us days to descend to this place, and would take us days to return to the surface, where, Harry promised, he would have a fresh balloon waiting to pick us up.

  This time, though I was offered escape into unconsciousness, I stayed awake. I had a feeling that the last act of this little drama had yet to play itself out. I wanted to be around to see it.

  We were beyond the lower ice layers and rising through two hundred and fifty kilometres of sea when Miriam’s timer informed us that the GUTengine had detonated, far beneath us. Insulated by the ice layer, we felt nothing. But I imagined that the spider that carried us up towards the light hesitated, just fractionally.

  ‘It’s done,’ Poole said firmly. ‘No going back.’

  Miriam had barely spoken to him since the cavern. She had said more words to me. Now she said, ‘I’ve been thinking. I won’t accept it, Michael. I don’t care about you and Harry and your damn vote. As soon as we get home I’m going to report what we found.’

  ‘You’ve no evidence—’

  ‘I’ll be taken seriously enough. And someday somebody will mount another expedition, and confirm the truth.’

  ‘All right.’ That was all he said. But I knew the matter was not over. He would not meet my mocking eyes.

  I wasn’t surprised when, twelve hours later, as Miriam slept cradled in the net draped from the spider’s back, Poole took vials from her pack and pressed them into her flesh, one by a valve on her leg, another at the base of her spine.

  I watched him. I’d seen this done before, more than once. ‘You’re going to edit her memories, aren’t you? Download her identity, edit it, load it back . . . All to keep her quiet. Planned this with Dad, did you?’

  ‘Shut up,’ he snarled, edgy, angry.

  ‘What will you make her believe – that she stayed up on the Crab with Harry the whole time, while you went exploring and found nothing? That would work, I guess.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you.’

  But I had plenty to say to him. I am no saint myself, and Poole disgusted me as only a man without morality himself can be disgusted. ‘I think you love her. I even think she loves you. Yet you are prepared to mess with her head and her heart, even her personality, to serve your grandiose ambitions. Let me tell you something. The Poole she left behind in that pocket universe – the one she said goodbye to – he was a better man than you will ever be again. Because he was not tainted by the great crime you committed when you destroyed the cavern. And because he was not tainted by this.

  ‘And let me make some predictions. No matter what you achieve in the future, Michael Poole, this crime will always be at the root of you, gnawing away. And Miriam will never love you again. Even though you wipe out her memory of these events, there will always be something between you; she will sense the lie. She will leave you, and then you will leave her. One thing I know better than you is people, and what goes on in their hearts. You remember I said this.

  ‘And, Poole, maybe those whose work you have wrecked will some day force you to a reckoning.’

  He was open, defenceless, and I was flaying him. He had no answer. He cradled the unconscious Miriam, even as his machines drained her memory.

  We did not speak again until we emerged into the murky daylight of Titan.

  EPILOGUE

  It didn’t take the Virtual Poole long to check out the status of his fragile craft.

  The power in the lifedome’s internal cells might last – what, a few hours? As far as he could tell there was no functional link between the dome and the rest of the Hermit Crab; none of his controls worked. Maybe that was beyond the scope of Miriam’s simulation. So he had no motive power.

  He didn’t grouse about this, nor did he fear his future. Such as it was.

  The universe beyond the lifedome was strange, alien. The toiling spiders down on the ice moon seemed like machines, not alive, not sentient. He tired of observing them. He turned on lights, green, blue. The lifedome was a little bubble of Earth, isolated.

  Michael was alone, in this whole universe. He could feel it.

  He got a meal together. The mundane chore, performed in a bright island of light around the lifedome’s small galley, was oddly cheering. Miriam’s simulation was good, here in his familiar personal space; he didn’t find any limits or glitches. Lovingly constructed, he thought.

  He carried the food to his couch, lay back with the plate balancing on one hand, and dimmed the dome lights. He finished his food and set the plate carefully on the floor. He drank a glass of clean water.

  Then he went to the freefall shower and washed in a spray of hot water. He tried to open up his senses, to relish every particle of sensation. There was a last time for everything, for even the most mundane experiences. He considered finding some music to play, a book to read. Somehow that might have seemed fitting.

  The lights failed. Even the instrument slates winked out.

  Well, so much for music. He made his way back to his couch. Though the sky was bright, illuminated by the nearest protosun, the air grew colder; he imagined the heat of the lifedome leaking out. What would get him first, the cold, or the failing air?

  He wasn’t afraid. And he felt no regret that he had lost so much potential life, all those AS-extended years. Oddly, he felt renewed: young, for the first time in decades, the pressure of time no longer seeming to weigh on him.

  He was sorry he would never know how his relationship with Miriam might have worked out. That could have been something. But he found, in the end, he was glad that he had lived long enough to see all he had.

  He was beginning to shiver, the air sharp in his nostrils. He lay back in his couch and crossed his hands on his chest. He closed his eyes.

  A shadow crossed his face.

  He opened his eyes, looked up. There
was a ship hanging over the lifedome.

  Michael, dying, stared in wonder.

  It was something like a sycamore seed wrought in jet black. Night-dark wings which must have spanned hundreds of kilometres loomed over the Crab, softly rippling.

  The cold sank claws into his chest; the muscles of his throat abruptly spasmed, and dark clouds ringed his vision. Not now, he found himself pleading silently, his failing vision locked onto the ship, all his elegiac acceptance gone in a flash. Just a little longer. I have to know what this means. Please . . .

  Poole’s consciousness was like a guttering candle flame. Now it was as if that flame was plucked from its wick. And the flame, with its tiny fear, its wonder, its helpless longing to survive, was spun out into a web of quantum functions, acausal and nonlocal.

  The last heat fled from the craft; the air in the translucent dome began to frost over the comms panels, the couches, the galley, the abandoned body. And the ship and all it contained, no longer needed, broke up into a cloud of pixels.

  A century and a half later, the future invaded the Solar System.

  It had been humanity’s own fault; everyone recognised that. Under the leadership of Michael Poole, the ‘Interface project’ – a link to a future a millennium and a half ahead, created by towing a wormhole mouth across interstellar space behind Poole’s GUTship Cauchy – had been completed. Why had Poole’s wormhole time bridge been built? There were endless justifications: what power could a glimpse of the future afford? But the truth was that it had been built for little more than the sheer joy of it. Poole did it because he could.

  Later, it would be difficult to recapture the mood of those times. The anthropic theories of cosmological evolution were somewhere near their paradigmatic peak. Some people believed humans were alone in the universe. Others even believed the universe had been designed, by some offstage agency, with the sole object of producing and supporting humans. Given time, humans would do anything, go anywhere, achieve whatever they liked.

  But Poole’s Interface had been a bridge to the real future, not the dream. And what Jovik Emry had once called ‘the magnificence and the grandiose folly’ of Michael Poole had devastating consequences.

  The incident that followed the return of the Cauchy, later to be known as the Emergency, was confused, chaotic, difficult for historians to disentangle. Future Earth – at the other end of Poole’s time bridge, a millennium and a half hence – would be under occupation by an alien species about whom almost nothing was known. Rebel humans from the occupation era were pursued back through time, through Poole’s Interface, by warships under the control of the occupiers. The rebels, with the help of Michael Poole, destroyed the warships, and Poole sealed the Interface wormhole. Poole himself was lost in time.

  It had been a war – brief, spectacular, like no battle fought in solar space before or since, but a war nevertheless. The Solar System, stunned, slowly recovered.

  And the rebels, stranded in their past, fled the Solar System in a captured GUTdrive ship, evidently intending to use relativistic time dilation effects to erode away the years back to their own era.

  All the rebels fled.

  So it was thought.

  STARFALL

  AD 4771–4820

  AD 4771. Starfall minus 49 years. Between Alpha Centauri and Sol.

  Minya and Huul stood together on the comet’s observation deck, in freefall, gently embraced by smart webbing. Beneath their feet lay the bulk of the comet nucleus, a fifty-kilometres-wide ball of dirty water-ice. Above their heads was the fine carapace of the observation blister, and above that nothing but stars, a field of jewels.

  Huul drank in the view, for he knew he had only moments left to enjoy it. Already the bots were working at the fringe of the window, coating it over with an authentic-looking layer of comet frost. When the blister was covered altogether it would be dismantled, this outer level of decking collapsed, and the human crew confined to a huddle of chilly chambers deep in the comet’s heart.

  And Huul’s son, yet unborn, would never see the stars – not until he was older than Huul was now. Huul, with a spasm of regret, put his hand on his wife’s belly, trying to feel the warmth of the baby within.

  Minya knew what he was thinking. She was tougher than he was, but more empathetic too. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘We are sacrificing a great deal – and we are imposing that sacrifice on our son. But his son will thank us.’

  Huul grunted. ‘Perhaps. But he might be the one doing the fighting, by the time the comet gets to Sol, in forty-nine years.’

  ‘I know, I know. Let’s just enjoy the view, while it lasts.’

  He gazed out at the stars. ‘Isn’t it strange to think that whether you live in Alpha System or the Solar System, the stars you see are much the same? We have that much in common, at least.’

  ‘True. With a couple of exceptions.’ She pointed back the way they had come, back to Alpha Centauri, which even from this immense distance showed as a clear double sun.

  And when Huul looked the other way he saw a compact constellation. From Earth it was a W shape, known as Cassiopeia, one of the most easily recognisable of the star figures, but as seen from Alpha, and from here, there was an extra star to the left of the pattern, turning the constellation into a crude scribble. That star was Sol, bright but not exceptionally so, the first star of mankind.

  ‘It doesn’t look much, does it?’ Minya murmured. ‘Just a lantern in the sky. But that is the seat of the Shiras, the source of all our trouble.’

  ‘And that,’ said Huul with mordant humour, ‘is where you and I will die.’

  ‘You mustn’t talk like that,’ Minya snapped. ‘The Starfall project is already magnificent, Huul. Magnificent!’

  She was right, Huul knew. The starborn’s rebellion against Earth had already been decades in the planning. The supplying of this comet-ship by lightsail out of Alpha, about as covert an operation as could be mounted on such a scale, had alone taken decades. And now the comet had been nudged onto a path that would take it sailing into the Solar System less than five decades from now, decelerating onto a trajectory intended to make it appear that this was just another long-period comet making an entirely natural visit to its parent star. But a crew of saboteurs would be huddled in its icy heart, locked into a tightly closed miniature ecology, not allowing as much as a stray erg of leaked heat to betray their presence.

  Minya said, ‘The earthworms won’t know we’re among them until we’re bright in the skies of Earth. And then we’ll see what’s what. Remember, Huul. We will be the Second Wave of the Starfall assault, second only to the smart plague. When we have helped cut away the tyranny of the Shiras at the root, to us will accrue much glory – and to our descendants for all time, as far as mankind journeys in time and space.’

  But the labouring bots were almost done in frosting over the observation dome. And Huul thought, I will die without ever seeing another star.

  Minya tugged at his hand. ‘Come on. We’ve work to do.’

  AD 4801. Starfall minus 19 years. Tau Ceti.

  The flitter from the Facula arrowed towards the centre of the daylit face of the planet. Tau Ceti II was a small, warm, watery world, all but drowned by a vast ocean, and habitually swathed in cloud – and now, according to Sol imperial intelligence, host to an unauthorised human colony.

  ‘There’s definitely something wrong,’ Pella said.

  Stillich turned to his First Officer. Pella sat with the assault squad, crammed into the translucent hull of this intra-System flitter. She was peering obsessively at a diorama of their target. The marines themselves sat in their smartsuits, the sunburst sigil of the Empire of Sol on their breasts. Stillich got grins back, but he could sense their nervousness, and Pella’s fretting wasn’t helping.

  The journey out from Sol, in a slower-than-light GUTship, had – thanks to time dilation effects – been over five
years subjective, more than thirteen objective. This was Stillich’s first interstellar jaunt under his own command, and he understood that his primary task during the cruise out had been to keep his crew interested, with a training programme half a decade long intended to sharpen them for this very moment, the planetfall. Stillich, in fact, had already started to turn his attention to the return journey, when another five-year programme would prepare the crew for the culture shock of their return. To Stillich, the journey itself had been the principal challenge. He had not expected the mission, the subduing of a bunch of secondary colonists from Alpha, to present any problems.

  But now here was Pella with her analyses, mucking up morale right at the climax of the mission.

  He murmured to her, ‘There’s no evidence of any threat to us from these ragged-arsed colonists, Number One. Whoever they are, however they got here.’

  Pella was bright, but she was young, at thirty a decade or so younger than Stillich. And she had a strong, prickly sense of herself. ‘No, sir. But what we’re seeing doesn’t make sense. The colony isn’t just illegal. It looks wrong. Half-dismantled, rebuilt. Look.’ She showed him hastily processed drone images of circular landforms, evidence of abandoned structures. ‘There can’t be more than a few thousand people on the planet. Why would you move?’

  Stillich shrugged. ‘Weather. Seismic problems. There’s any number of reasons why you might get your first location wrong—’

  ‘These are interstellar colonists, Captain. They’re unlikely to be so foolish. I’d be happier if we were going into this situation better informed.’

  So would I, Stillich thought, but he wasn’t about to say so before his troops. He forced a grin. ‘We’re just going to have to have our wits about us when we land. Right, lads?’

  He was rewarded with a muted cheer. ‘You said it, Captain.’