Ring xs-4

by Stephen Baxter

  “How did I feel?” Milpitas stabilized her scooter and studied Mark, a half-smile on her face. “You sound like a Keplerian… They’re dippier than anyone else back home on Mars. Ah, but I guess that’s your job, isn’t it? The social engineer.”

  Mark smiled. “Maybe. But I’m off-duty now.”

  “Sure you are.” Milpitas thought for a moment. “I guess our work isn’t so dissimilar, Mark. Your job — as I understand it — is to come up with ways for us to live with each other over a thousand years. Mine is to ensure that the ship itself — the external fabric of the mission — can sustain itself. When it came to redesigning Northern, I didn’t like messing up Louise’s nice, clean designs, frankly. But if you’re going to succeed at something like this you have to take no chances. You have to plan.” Her eyes lost their focus, as if she were looking at something far away. “It had to be done. And it was worth it. Anything’s worth it, for the project, of course.” Her expression cleared, and she looked at Mark, appearing confused. “Is that answering your question?”

  “I think so.”

  Mark hung back a little, and let Milpitas move ahead, up toward the complex maintenance bulkhead. He fell into line with Louise.

  “You don’t look so happy,” Louise said.

  Mark shrugged. “Just a little spooked by Serena, I guess.”

  Louise snorted. “Aren’t we all.”

  Many of the original crew of the Northern — who had, after all, seen themselves as potential colonists of the Tau Ceti system, not as time travelers with quasi mystical goals about saving the species — had decided not to stay with the ship after its new flight plan was announced by Louise. Louise had lost, for instance, the genial Sam Gillibrand, her original first assistant. On the other hand, Serena Milpitas — and Uvarov, for that matter — had seemed eager to join the project after its rescoping by Superet.

  Both Milpitas and Uvarov seemed natural Superet supporters, to Mark; they’d absorbed with a chilling alacrity the induction programs Superet had offered them all.

  Milpitas and Uvarov had become converts. Mark thought uneasily.

  “You know, I always liked Sam Gillibrand,” he said wistfully. “Sam wants to go to Tau Ceti and build houses under the light of a new sun; the dark possibilities of five megayears hence couldn’t be of less interest to him. Serena is different, though. Under all that bluff Martian chatter and confident engineering, there’s something darker — more driven. Obsessive, even.”

  “Maybe,” Louise said. “But, just as human engineering isn’t yet up to thousand year flights, so the average human head isn’t capable of thinking on thousand year timescales.” She sighed and ran her fingers through her close-cropped hair. “Serena Milpitas can win through for the mission, Mark. Both Milpitas and Uvarov seem able to think in millennia — megayears, even. And as a consequence, or as a cause, they are dark, multilevelled, complex people.” She looked at Mark sadly. “The Superet stuff is spooky, I agree. But I think it comes with the territory, Mark.”

  Maybe in the complexities of the future the home-builders like Sam would be obsolete, their simple skills and motivation displaced in a dangerous Universe, Mark thought. Perhaps Superet and its converts represented the human of the future — the next wave of evolution, what the species would have to become to survive on cosmic timescales.

  Maybe. But — judging by Milpitas and Uvarov — there wouldn’t be too many laughs.

  Anyway, he thought gloomily, he was going to have ten centuries with these people to find out about them… And it was going to be Lethe’s own challenge for him to construct a viable society around them.

  “It still surprises me that you agreed to sign up for this,” he said. “I mean, they took away your mission.”

  Louise shrugged. “We’ve been over this enough times. Let’s face it, they would have taken Northern away from me anyway. I want to see the ship perform. And — ”

  “Yes?”

  She grinned. “Besides, after I got over my irritation at the way Superet runs its affairs, I realized no one’s ever tried a thousand-year flight before. Or tried to establish a time bridge across five million years. I can get one over on Michael Poole, wherever he is — ”

  “Yes, but look what happened to him.”

  Mark could see what was going on inside Louise’s head. With the Superet mission — with this immense stunt — she was going to be able to bypass the intimidating shadow of the future, simply by leaping over it. And she was obviously entranced by the idea of taking her technology to its limits. But he wondered if she really — really — had any idea of the scale of the problems they would face.

  He opened his mouth to speak.

  Louise, with unusual tenderness, laid a finder over his lips, closing them. “Come on, Mark. We’ve a thousand years to think of all the problems. Time enough. Today, the ship is bright and new; today, it’s enough for me to believe the mission is going to be fun.”

  With a sudden access of vigor she twisted the handle of her scooter and hurried after the others.

  Lieserl. Take it easy. You’re doing fine.

  She looked up, tipping back her head. Already she was dropping out of the complex, exhilarating world of the convection region, with its immense turbulent cells, tangled flux tubes and booming p-waves. She stared upwards, allowing herself the luxury of nostalgia. The convective-zone cavern had come to seem almost homely, she realized.

  Homely… at least compared to the regions she was going to enter now.

  We’re still getting good telemetry, Lieserl.

  “Good. I’m relieved.”

  Lieserl, how are you feeling?

  She laughed. With a mixture of exasperation and affection, she said, “I’ll feel better when you lose your ‘good telemetry’, Kevan, and I don’t have to listen to your dumb-ass questions any more.”

  You’ll miss me when I’m gone.

  “Actually,” Lieserl said, “that’s probably true. But I’m damned if I’m going to tell you so.”

  Scholes laughed, his synthesized voice surprisingly unrealistic. You haven’t answered my question.

  Her arms still outstretched, she looked down at her bare feet. “Actually, I feel a little like Christ. Dali’s Christ, perhaps, suspended in the air over an uncaring landscape.”

  Yeah, Scholes said casually. My thought exactly.

  Now she plunged through the last ghost-forms of convective cells. It was exactly like falling out of a cloud bank. The milky-white surface of the plasma sea was exposed beneath her; huge g-mode waves crawled across its surface, like thoughts traversing some huge mind.

  Her rate of fall suddenly increased. It felt as if the bottom had dropped out of her stomach.

  “Lethe,” she whispered.

  Lieserl?

  She found her chest tightening — and that was absurd, of course, because she had no chest. She struggled to speak. “I’m okay, Kevan. It’s just a little vertigo.”

  Vertigo?

  “Virtual vertigo. I feel like I’m falling. This illusion’s too damn good.”

  Well, you are falling, Lieserl. Your speed’s increased, now you’re out of the convective stuff.

  “I’m scared, Kevan.”

  Take it easy. The telemetry is —

  “Screw the telemetry. Just talk to me.”

  He hesitated. You’re a hundred thousand miles beneath the photosphere. You’re close to the boundary of the radiative zone; the center of the Sun is another seven hundred thousand miles below you.

  “Don’t look down,” she breathed.

  Right. Don’t look down. Listen, you can be proud; that’s deeper than any probe we’ve dropped before.

  Despite her fear, she couldn’t let that go. “So I’m a probe, now?”

  Sorry. We’re looking at the new material squirting through the other end of your refrigerator-wormhole now. I can barely see the Interface for the science platforms clustered around it. It’s a great sight, Lieserl; we’ve universities from all over the System queui
ng up for observation time. The density of the gas around you is only about one percent of water’s. But it’s at a temperature of half a million degrees.

  “Strong stuff.”

  Angel tears, Lieserl…

  The plasma sea was rushing up toward her, bland, devouring. Suddenly she was convinced that she, and her flimsy wormhole, were going to disappear into that well of fire with barely a spark. “Oh, Lethe!” She tucked her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her lower legs, so that she was falling curled up in a fetal ball.

  Lieserl, you’re not committed to this. If you want to pull out of there —

  “No.” She closed her eyes and rested her forehead against her knees. “No, it’s all right. I’m sorry. I’m just not as tough as I think I am, sometimes.”

  The wormhole is holding together. We think, after the redesign we’ve done, that you can penetrate at least the first few thousand miles of the radiative zone, without compromising the integrity of the wormhole. Maybe deeper; the temperature and pressure gradients are pretty small. But you know we didn’t advise this dive —

  “I know it.” She opened her eyes and faced the looming sea once more. The fear was still huge, like a vice around her thinking. “Kevan, I’d never assemble the courage to go through this a second time. It’s now or never. I’ll even try to enjoy the ride.”

  Stay with it, Lieserl.

  “Yeah,” she growled. “And you stay with me — ”

  Suddenly her fall was halted. It felt as if she had run into a wall of glass; her limbs spread-eagled against an invisible barrier and the breath was knocked out of her illusory lungs. Helpless, she was even thrown back up into the “air” a short distance; then her fall resumed, even more precipitately than before.

  She screamed: “Kevan!”

  We saw it, Lieserl. I’m still here; it’s okay. Everything’s nominal.

  Nominal, she thought sourly. How comforting. “What in Lethe was that?”

  You’re at the bottom of the convective layer. You should have been expecting something like that.

  “Yes?” she snarled. “Well, maybe you should have damn well told me — yike!”

  Again, that sudden, jarring arrest, followed by a disconcerting hurl into the air, as if she were an autumn leaf in the breeze.

  Like snakes and bloody ladders, she thought.

  You’re passing through the boundary layer between the radiative and connective zones, is all, Scholes said with studied calm. Below you is plasma; above you atomic gas — matter cool enough for electrons to stick to nuclei.

  The photons emerging from the fusing core just bounce off the plasma, but they dump all their energy into the atomic gas. It’s the process that powers the connective zone, Lieserl. A process that drives connective founts bigger than worlds. So you shouldn’t be surprised if you encounter a little turbulence. In fact, out here we’re all interested by the fact that the boundary layer seems to be so thin…

  We’re still tracking you, Lieserl; you shouldn’t be afraid. You’re through the turbulence now, aren’t you? You should be falling freely again.

  “Yes. Yes, I am. So I’m in the sea, now?”

  The sea?

  “The plasma sea. The radiative zone.”

  Yes.

  “But — ”

  Suddenly, almost without warning, the familiar skyscape of convection cells and flux tubes was misting from her sight, whiting out. There was whiteness above, before, below her; it was like being suspended inside some huge, chilling eggshell.

  But what? What is it, Lieserl? What’s wrong?

  For the first time she felt real panic creep around her mind.

  “I can’t see, Kevan.”

  Mark, rising through brightly lit air, looked down. He was nearing the top of the loading bay now. The base was a floor of glass far below him, with the spine and drive section ghostly forms beyond; people and ’bots criss-crossed the bay, hauling their cargo.

  Mark tried to analyze his own impressions as they rose. For a moment he fought an irrational surge of vertigo: a feeling — despite the evidence of his eyes that he was in zero-gee — that if he tumbled from this scooter he would plummet to that floor of glass, far below. He concentrated on the environment close to him, the thick layer of warm, bright air all round him. But that made the glimpses of the spine and drive — the brutal limbs of the ship — seem unreal, as if the emptiness of space beyond the fragile walls of the dome was an illusion.

  Mark felt uneasy. The ship was so huge, so complex — so convincing. After a few decades, it would be terribly easy to believe that this ship was a world, to forget that there was anything real, or significant, beyond its walls.

  Now they were approaching the roof of the bay: the maintenance bulkhead. Mark drew level with Garry Uvarov, and they stared up at the mile-wide layer of engineering above them. The bulkhead was a tangle of pipes, ducts and cables, an inverted industrial landscape. There were even tree-roots, Mark saw. People and ’bots swarmed everywhere, working rapidly and apparently efficiently; even as Mark watched the bulkhead’s complex surface seemed to evolve, the ducts and tubes creeping across the surface like living things. It was a little like watching life spread through some forest of metal and plastic.

  “Extraordinary how primitive it all is,” Mark said to Uvarov. “Cables and ducts — it’s like some sculpture from a museum of industrial archaeology.”

  Uvarov waved a cultured hand toward the pipes above him. “We’re carrying human beings — barely-evolved, untidy sacks of water and wind — to the stars. We are cavemen inside a starship. That’s why the undersurface of this bulkhead seems so crude to you, Mark; it’s simply a reflection of the crudity of our own human design. We sail the stars. We even have nanobots to rebuild us when we grow old. But we remain primitives; and when we travel, we need immense boxes with pipes and ducts to carry our breath, piss and shit.” He grinned. “Mark, my passion my career — is the improvement of the basic human stock. Do you imagine the Xeelee carry all this garbage around with them?”

  They passed through access ports in the maintenance bulkhead and ascended into the habitable sections.

  There were fifteen habitable Decks in the mile-deep life-dome, each around a hundred yards apart. Some of the main levels were subdivided, so that the interior of the life-dome was a complex warren of chambers of all sizes. Elevator shafts and walkways pierced the Decks. The shafts were already in use as zero-gee access channels; they’d be left uncompleted, without machinery, until closer to departure.

  Now the little party entered one shaft and began to rise, slowly, past the cut through Decks.

  Many of the chambers were still unfinished, and a succession of Virtual designs were being tried out in some of them; Mark peered out at a storm of parks, libraries, domestic dwellings, theaters, workshops, blizzarding through the chambers.

  Uvarov said, “How charming. How Earthlike. More concessions to the primitive in us, of course.”

  Mark frowned. “Primitive or not, Uvarov, we have to take some account of human needs when designing an environment like this. As you should know. The chambers have been laid out on a human scale; it’s important people shouldn’t feel dwarfed to insignificance by the scale of the artifacts around them — or, on the other hand, cramped and confined by ship walls. Why, some of the chambers are so large it would be possible for an inhabitant to forget he or she was inside a ship at all.”

  Uvarov grunted. “Really. But isn’t that more evidence that we as a species aren’t really yet up to a flight like this? It would be so easy to be immersed in the sensory impressions of the here-and-now, which are so much more real than the fragility of the ship, the emptiness outside the thin walls. It would be tempting to accept this ship as a world in itself, an invulnerable background against which we can play out our own tiny, complex human dramas, much as our distant forefathers did on the plains of Africa, billions of miles away.

  “Think of the pipes and ducts under that maintenance bulkhead. P
erhaps our ancestors, in simpler times, imagined that some such infrastructure lay underneath the flat Earth. The Universe was a box, with the Earth as its floor. The sky was a cow whose feet rested on the four corners of the Earth — or perhaps a woman, supporting herself on elbows and knees — or a vaulted metal lid. Around the walls of the box-world flowed a river on which the sun and moon gods sailed each day, entering and vanishing through stage doors. The fixed stars were lamps, suspended from the vault. And, presumably, underneath it all lay some labyrinth of tunnels and ducts through which the waters and the gods could travel to begin their daily journeys afresh. The heavens could change, but they were predictable; to the human consciousness — still half-asleep — this was a safe, contained, cozy, womb-like Universe. Mark Wu, is our Northern, today, so unlike the Earth as envisaged by — let us say — a Babylonian, or an Egyptian?”

  Mark rubbed his chin. Uvarov’s patronizing style irritated him, but his remarks plugged in closely to his own vague sense of disquiet. “Maybe not,” he replied sharply. “But then you and I, and the others, have a responsibility to ensure that the inhabitants of the ship don’t slip back into some pre-rational state. That they don’t forget.”

  “Ah, but will that be so easy, over a thousand years?”

  Mark peered out at the half-built libraries and parks uneasily.

  Uvarov said, “I’ve heard about some of the programs you and your social engineering teams are devising. Research initiatives and so forth — make-works, obviously.”

  “Not at all.” Mark found himself bridling again. “I’m not going to deny we need to find something for people to do. As you keep saying, we’re primitives; we aren’t capable of sitting around in comfort for a thousand years as the journey unravels.

  “Some of the work is obvious, like the maintenance and enhancement of the ship. But there will be programs of research. Remember, we’ll be cut off from the rest of the human Universe for most of the journey. Some of your own projects come into this category, Uvarov — like your AS enhancement program.” He thought about that, then said provocatively, “Perhaps you could come up with some way of replicating Milpitas’ triple-redundancy ideas within our own bodies.”