‘Yes.’
‘And we’ll still be able to talk, won’t we?’
‘Until I grow out of my dreaming faculty – yes. I’ll try as long as I can. Vala is waving at me. I think she wants me to rest.’
‘We’ll talk later. One way or another.’
‘Yes. One way or another. Goodbye, Lura . . .’
13
Coton at last drifted to sleep.
Vala returned to the Marshal’s cabin. Fold-out seats had been set up by the main observation window, and Sand sat there, cradling a cup of hot tea, Virtual status displays hovering around her head.
Behind a partition Sand’s crew controlled the flitter with military competence. And in another cabin Croq the antiquarian was adjusting his ancient Ghost teleport equipment, complaining about the challenge of interfacing systems from technological traditions separated by hundreds of thousands of years. But in this lounge the atmosphere was calm.
Vala sat down with Sand and picked up her own cup – which, when it sensed her presence, began to fill up with tea, a minor miracle bequeathed by some long-dead engineer of the deep past.
Sand asked, ‘Is the boy sleeping?’
‘Badly. The dreams—’
‘How sweet it is to hear their conversation,’ Sand said. Vala had arranged a pickup so that Coton’s sub-vocalising of Lura’s speech could be heard. ‘Boy chatting to girl, an eternal story. They aren’t so far removed in age, are they, Academician? Maybe if this girl is successfully retrieved through your lashed-up teleport, they’ll fall in love! How fitting that would be. If she isn’t turned into some grotesque protoplasmic mass, or if a million years in Beta’s super-gravity hasn’t turned her kind into monsters. And if the process doesn’t burn out his frontal lobe. Does Coton fully understand the risks for himself, by the way? I imagine not – I imagine you haven’t fully informed him – for Coton might have refused, and then you might have had to face the inconvenience of forcing him to obey your will. That wouldn’t fit your image of yourself at all, would it, Vala, as an Academician or a grandmother?’
Guilt swirled in Vala, under a crust of denial. But she had lived a long time and was in control of her emotions, she believed; and she clung to the principle that higher purposes sometimes required sacrifices. Yes, she thought. If she’d had to force her grandson into this, she would have done it. ‘Does it give you pleasure to jab at me in this way, Marshal?’
‘I am interested in people. I could hardly fulfil my role otherwise. And you are quite an extraordinary specimen, Academician. So much conflict! You seethe with ambition and resentment.’
‘Resentment? I am a Weaponised, Marshal Sand. And I am highly educated. The more a Weaponised learns of her own past and the past of her kind, the more resentment deepens, I would say. A natural reaction.’ She savoured her anger, as she savoured the tea’s exotic flavour on her tongue. ‘Why, we Weaponised don’t need the Xeelee Scourge. We have you normals, and that’s enough.’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Vala. You have hardly been persecuted, have you? You make an inappropriate martyr! And besides – what is “normal”? Humanity has been engaged in interstellar war for a million years. After such a history perhaps we are all Weaponised. It’s just that with some of us it isn’t so obvious—’
A faint alarm chimed, and Sand pointed to one of the Virtuals fluttering around her head. It expanded to show a schematic of the ship, with lenticular forms sweeping around it.
‘The mag-field creatures again,’ Vala said.
‘Yes. They don’t seem able to keep away. They beat against the hull like butterflies battering against a window.’
Vala wondered what this stern Marshal knew of butterflies. ‘Military goals were rarely achieved with these projects, you know. The Weaponising. When you read the records of that period, you sometimes think the Integrality scientists created such beings simply because they could . . . And certainly little thought was given to those abandoned when the military projects were over.’
‘How do we look to them, do you imagine, the mag-field butterflies?’
Vala shrugged. ‘Cages of electromagnetic and molecular forces. Perhaps like themselves, but made of clumsy, dense stuff, rather than their own graceful plasma wisps. That’s if they perceive such different creatures as ourselves as intelligent entities in the first place. It’s interesting – there may be forms in universe Beta that don’t exist here, that perhaps we would have trouble recognising as sentient, or even alive. Like the “beasts of gravitic chemistry” that supposedly swarm in accretion surfaces surrounding their great black holes . . .’
‘All that complexity. And all implicit, I suppose, in the knotted-up strangeness that was the universe Beta Big Bang – as our own existence was implicit in our own singularity.’ Sand studied her own hand, and the Virtual displays’ green and red light reflected in her clear eyes. ‘How strange it all is.’
Vala realised she knew nothing of Sand’s background. Did she have children of her own, for example? ‘You are in a reflective mood today, Marshal. I’ll admit that you are not the person I took you for, when we first met in this very flitter down on Delta Seven.’
‘Well, there you are. How can we expect to make sense of the universe if we can’t understand each other – eh, Academician?’
‘I haven’t wished to push the issue, for fear it would drive you off. But I’m not sure I understand why, in the end, you’ve diverted resources to support this project of mine. Unlike the Starfolk, I can’t see that the Beta castaways will be of any use to you as a weapon.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’ Sand gestured, conjured another Virtual, and with a wave sent it spinning through the air to Vala. ‘Here’s a conceptual study on how we might use Beta itself as a source of gravitons, perhaps of gravity waves . . . After all, the ancient starbreaker weapon is essentially a gravity wave cannon. Could Beta work as a universal energy source for such weapons? Or, as you said yourself, Beta is a messy, porous spacetime. Perhaps it could be used as some kind of cosmic interchange, a wormhole junction. The Xeelee might use it that way already. Maybe we could even tap into the energies of Beta’s Big Crunch, which is coming soon.’
Vala smiled. ‘You would weaponise an entire cosmos? You think big, for a soldier.’
‘We are fighting a big war.’
‘But I don’t buy any of that as a personal motive for attempting this rescue, of Lura and her people. What is it, Marshal? Humanitarianism?’
Sand shrugged, unperturbed. ‘Call it that if you want. We are a species who once won a Galaxy. I believe that even now we should aspire to do more than simply retreat – that even as the darkness closes in, at least we can help each other.’ She was looking steadily at Vala, with a hint of that cold humour in her eyes. ‘And what about you, Academician? I hardly think you’re here for reasons of warmth and kindness. Oh, it might have started out that way, when you first heard of the plight of these Beta castaways through the mouth of Coton. But it’s gone beyond that now, hasn’t it? The risk you’re prepared to take with Coton has convinced me of that.
‘You scientists are all the same. You don’t want to make this transfer to save the castaways. You want to do it because you think you can. And the cost is irrelevant. Why, you’re as bad as the Weaponeers of the Integrality, who made your ancestors and whom you affect to despise. You’re nothing but a crucible of ambition. And into this crucible your own grandson, young and smiling, is to be thrust.’
Vala glared at her. But she was the first to turn away, her face hot. The Marshal laughed.
Another alarm sounded, a gentle chime.
Croq rapped on the door and opened it. ‘The Beta castaways have powered up their booth. We’re ready to attempt the transfer.’
Sand looked Vala in the eye, and the Academician knew what she was thinking. Last chance to back out.
Vala stood. ‘Let’s do this.’
14
The whale ploughed steadily towards the Core of Cores. The crew huddled behind the whale’s face, singing their eerie repetitive chants.
Lura sat looking out through the whale’s scarred hide. Her Mole was in her arms, and the great Supply Machine that the whale had literally bitten off from the perimeter of the Raft was lying on its back beside her. On its far side Brother Pesten sat, long since awed into silence.
The whale shuddered and shook, and let out another deep, agonised groan. Well might it groan, Lura thought, for it had been many shifts since Otho and his crew had forced it to leave the last rich nebula where it had been able to feed, and it had begun this appalling dive deep into the heart of the tremendous gravitational system in which they were all embedded. Otho had said his whale would never recover from this ordeal – and Lura sensed that he would never forgive her for that, whatever the outcome of this strange adventure.
Yet here they were, plunging into the Core of Cores, at the behest of a boy from another universe.
For some shifts the whale had ploughed through layers of the thick black debris cloud that surrounded the Core itself. But now things were changing. Sombre clouds parted before them, and the debris began to show depth and structure. A pale, pinkish light shone upwards, and veils of the stuff of shattered stars and nebulae arched over the whale, dwarfing it.
Then, abruptly, the clouds cleared, and they were sailing over the Core of Cores itself.
‘By the Bones,’ Pesten muttered, an ancient, un-Brother-like curse. ‘It’s like a planet.’
The Core of Cores was a compact surface clustered about the massive black hole at its heart, a flattened sphere that would have taken hundreds of shifts to walk across – if you could have withstood the gravity. It was by far the largest organised object any of them had ever seen or heard of.
And it was indeed like the ‘planets’ Coton had described in his own universe, a planet rendered in shades of red and pink against charcoal grey and black. There were ‘oceans’ of some quasi-liquid material, thick and red as blood; they lapped at ‘lands’ that thrust above the general spherical surface. There were even small ‘mountain ranges’, like wrinkles in the skin of a soured fruit, and clouds like smoke that sped across the face of the seas. There was continual motion: huge waves crossed the seas, and the mountain sheets seemed to evolve endlessly, and the coasts of the strange continents writhed.
Pesten was ecstatic. He peered through the whale skin as if he wished he could climb through it. ‘It is more like an Alpha world, as Coton described them, than anything we’ve seen before. More like Earth itself than anything we’ve ever seen! Perhaps it’s the largest-scale structure to be found in Beta. Yet even this is much smaller than a trivial Alpha world.
‘You understand that we’re seeing a kind of shell containing the black hole itself. It represents a balance between the influx of material from the debris cloud, and the radiation from the accretion around the black hole itself. It is not as Coton described the environment of Alpha black holes; this has much more structure, and apparently a greater density. And it is held together by something else unique to Beta – gravitic chemistry!’
‘You sound as if you’re proud of it.’
‘Well, why shouldn’t I be? There is no spectacle like this in Alpha.’
‘But it has nothing to do with us,’ Lura murmured.
‘Yes, yes . . . You have your Mole? We must send images of what we’re seeing through to Alpha.’
The crew muttered. Lura saw that they were silhouetted against a new, paler glow, and they were pointing. Lura turned to see. At the centre of one of the strange continents was a grid of pink-white light, etched into the surface like a vast game board.
‘Look,’ Pesten breathed. ‘Look!’
Ideas crowded into Lura’s mind. ‘Life,’ she whispered.
‘And intelligence. Two staggering discoveries in a single glance.’
‘How is this possible?’
‘Well, why should it not be so? Life feeds on sharp energy gradients, places where structure emerges out of chaos and organisation arises.’
Not for the first time Lura wondered how much of the ancient learning he repeated he really understood.
And now she saw more gridworks. Some covered whole continents, and lines of light arrowed around the globe, and embedded in the lattice Lura thought she saw individual structures: pyramids, tetrahedrons and cubes.
‘But we knew they were here,’ she said. ‘Didn’t we, Brother? That was the whole point of our endless labour to shift the star kernels, and drop them into the Core of Cores. These were our gods, the inhabitants of the Core. And they rewarded us with oxygen, pumped out into the veil of nebulae . . .’
The Mole murmured, ‘This is Coton, speaking for Academician Vala. She says she’s surprised to find evidence of intelligence here, despite your beliefs. She thought you were just being superstitious about gods in the Core of Cores.’
Pesten flared. ‘Primitive we may be compared to you – we have forgotten much in this hostile place – but we are not fools!’
‘No, no . . . She apologises . . . That’s not the point she was trying to make. She imagined the oxygen venting was unrelated to your kernel-dropping. Like praying for rain, she says. Now she’s not so sure. However, she says it’s unlikely that whatever intelligence resides here needs your lumps of iron. Look at the scale of this Core; think of the masses involved. She thinks that the intelligences of the Core most likely took the infall of your star kernels as a signal that life persisted in the clouds of nebulae surrounding the Core – chemical life, like yours. And as long as it did, the Core beings have tried to support you. As if your kernels were messages, cries for help hurled into the Core. You were right that there were mighty minds in the Core, protecting life in your cosmos. It’s just that they weren’t gods . . .’
Lura was stunned by these ideas.
Pesten said, ‘To think of it – that creatures of this scale, and so different in every way, should take any notice of us.’
‘Empathy seems to be universal,’ said Coton, through the Mole. But Lura wasn’t sure what that word meant. ‘In the end, however, Vala says, this experiment in symbiosis will end. Symbiosis, grandmother, what does that mean? For the nebulae, all of them, are dying, as your stars go out.’
Lura knew this was true. But long after the trees and whales and sky-wolves were extinct, and all the stars and nebulae were dark, and the people were all gone, the gravitic entities would still swarm over their roiling black hole world. These creatures were the true denizens of this Beta cosmos; humans, soft, wet, dirty and flabby, were mere transient interlopers.
Of course when the ‘Big Crunch’ Coton had described came to this universe, even the gravitic gods of the Core of Cores would not survive.
There was a soft chime. Coton called through the Mole, ‘The spacetime stresses – the graviton flux—’
Pesten said, ‘Just tell us!’
‘My grandmother says we’re ready to try the transfer.’
Lura quailed from the metal box that lay beside her.
The engineers in universe Alpha had found a way to modify the Raft Supply Machine.
They had had Pesten connect it to the Mole with bits of wire pulled out of the stumps of one machine and thrust into orifices in the other. This had been enough, it seemed, for information to be sent chattering from universe Alpha via the Mole into the Supply Machine.
And then, under instruction from Alpha, the Supply Machine had rebuilt itself. Lura had seen waves of sparking light pass through its carcass, and a ripple of tiny adjustments, like muscles flexing under skin. Coton had told her that the machine had smaller machines inside, most too small even to see, that were intended to repair minor flaws – as the body of a human or a tree could heal its own petty injuries. Now, via the Mole, the engineers had subverted these little mec
hanisms and had ordered them, not to fix the Supply Machine, but to turn it into something else entirely.
Of all the changes made, Lura had understood very few – but the most obvious had been the growth of a seam along the side of the Supply Machine’s carcass, complete with thick metal hinges. Now Pesten and Otho got their fingers under the lip of this seam and lifted. The lid of the great box rose slowly, for it was very massive, but at last it flipped back and fell away. And in the interior you could clearly see a space hollowed out from the nest of components that had been crammed in there – a nest the size and shape of a human body.
Lura felt Pesten’s hand slide into hers; his palm was clammy, as if he was more afraid than she was.
Otho glared at her. ‘So you’re going to climb into this thing, and the Brother and I will close the lid on you, and some kind of little knives are going to come out and chop you up—’
‘Not knives,’ Pesten said.
‘Then what? There won’t be anything left of her. That’s what they said.’
‘It’s been turned into a quantum-level scanner . . .’ But Pesten fell silent.
Lura knew he understood little. It may as well be knives, she thought.
‘You’re afraid,’ Otho said, watching her.
‘Of course, I’m afraid,’ she snapped. ‘Wouldn’t you be? But there will be somebody on the other side of this door who knows me, and will help me.’
‘You really believe that?’
‘If it was all fake, why would Coton and his people go to all this trouble?’ She looked at him closely, the sharp, intelligent eyes, the brutalised features. ‘You helped us get this far. You could have just killed us, as Anka always seemed to want you to do. But you didn’t. You believe in what we’re doing.’
‘This machine’s old. And now it’s been fooled around with. Suppose it breaks down before the rest of us can get through?’
‘So what are you saying? That you want to go first? If so, help yourself.’
Xeelee: Endurance Page 36