Ring xs-4

by Stephen Baxter

  The photon flood followed her around.

  She forced herself to accept the fact that the photino birds were doing this deliberately. They were diverting the random walks of photons to flood her with the damn things.

  For a while, fear touched her heart. Were the birds trying to kill this unwanted alien in the midst of their flocks — perhaps by seeking to overload her refrigeration system?

  If so, there wasn’t much she could do about it. She didn’t have any help to call on, and no real way to escape. For a long time she limped after the birds in their endless circling of the core, monitoring the photon flux and trying to control her fear, her sense of imprisonment and panic.

  But the flux remained steady — increased, but easily tolerated by her onboard systems. And the birds showed no sign of hostile intent to her; they continued to swirl around her in gaudy streams, or else they gathered behind her in their huge, neat, cone-shaped formations. They made no attempt to shield their young from her, or to protect their fragile-looking interior structures.

  And, slowly, she began to understand.

  This deliberate diversion of the photon flux into her wasn’t a threat, or an attempt to destroy her. Perhaps they thought she was injured, or even dying. They must be able to perceive radiant energy disappearing into her wormhole gullet. The birds were helping her — trying to supply her with more of what must seem to them to be her prerequisites for life.

  The gift was useless, of course — in fact, given the increased strain on her refrigeration systems, worse than useless. But, she thought wryly, it’s the thought that counts.

  The birds were trying to feed her.

  Feeling strangely warmed, she accepted the gift of the photino birds with good grace.

  As time wore on, she watched the Sun’s death proceed, with increasing pace. She felt an obscure, dark thrill as the huge physical processes unraveled around her.

  The core, still plagued by the photino bird flocks, contracted and continued to heat up. At last, a temperature of tens of millions of degrees was reached in the layers of hydrogen surrounding the cankered core. A shell of fusing hydrogen ignited, outside the core, and began to burn its way out of the heart of the Sun. At first Lieserl wondered if the photino birds would try to quench this new shell of energy, as they had the hydrogen core. But they swept through the fusing shell, ignoring its brilliance. Helium ash was deposited by the shell onto the dead core; the core continued to grow in mass, collapsing still further under its own weight.

  The heat energy emitted by the shell, with that of the inert, collapsing core, was greater than that which had been emitted by the original fusing core.

  The Sun couldn’t sustain the increased heat output of its new heart. In an astonishingly short period it was forced to expand — to become giant.

  Louise Ye Armonk stood on the forecastle deck of the Great Britain, peering down at the southern pole of Triton.

  The Britain sailed through space half a mile above the satellite’s thin, gleaming cap of nitrogen ice; steam trailed through space, impossibly, from the ship’s single funnel. The ice cap curved beneath the prow of the ship as seamlessly as some huge eggshell. The southern hemisphere of Neptune’s largest moon was just entering its forty-year summer, and the ice cap was receding; when Louise tilted back her head she could see thin, high cirrus clouds of nitrogen ice streaming northwards on winds of evaporated pole material.

  She walked across the deck, past the ship’s bell suspended in its elaborate cradle. The huge, misty bulk of Neptune was reflected in the bell’s gleaming surface, and Louise ran her hand over the cool contours of the shaped metal, making it rock gently; the multiple, amorphous images of Neptune slid gracefully across the metal.

  From here the Sun was a bright star, a remote point of light; and the blue light of Neptune, eerily Earthlike, bathed the lines of the old ship, making her seem ethereal, not quite substantial — paradoxical, Louise reflected, since the Britain was actually the only real artifact in her sensorium at present.

  As the Britain neared the ragged edge of Triton’s ice cap, a geyser blew, almost directly in front of the floating ship. Dark substrate material laced with nitrogen ice plumed into the air, rising ten miles from the plain; as it reached the thin, high altitude wind the plume turned through a right angle and streamed across the face of Triton. Louise walked to the lip of the forecastle deck and followed the line of the plume back down to the surface of the moon, where she could just see the fine crater in the ice at the plume’s base. The geyser was caused by the action of the sun’s heat on pockets of gas trapped beneath thin crusts of ice. Shards of ice were sprinkled around the site of the eruption, and some splinters still cartwheeled through the thin nitrogen atmosphere, slowly returning to the surface under the languid pull of Triton’s gravity.

  This was one of her favorite Virtual dioramas, although it was actually one of the least familiar. The capability of her processors to generate these dioramas was huge, but not infinite; she’d deliberately kept the Neptune diorama in reserve, rationing its use over the unchanging centuries, to try to conserve its appeal.

  It wasn’t hard to analyze why this particular Virtual scene appealed to her so much. The landscape of this remote moon was extraordinary and unfamiliar, and surprisingly full of change, fueled by the energies of distant Sol; and Neptune’s blue mass, with its traceries of nitrogen cirrus, was sufficiently Earthlike to prompt deep, almost buried feelings of nostalgia in her — and yet different enough that the references to Earth were almost subliminal, obscure enough that she was not tempted to descend into morbid longing. And -

  Pixels swirled before her suddenly, a thousand self-orbiting blocks of light. Surprised, she almost stumbled; she gripped onto the rail at the edge of the deck for support.

  The pixels coalesced with a soundless concussion into the image of Mark Wu. The projection was poor: the Virtual floated a few inches above the deck, and cast no shadow in Neptune’s pale light.

  “Lethe’s waters,” Louise said, “don’t do that. You startled me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mark said. Even his voice was coarse and blocky, Louise noticed. “It was urgent. I had to interrupt you. I — ”

  “And this projection’s lousy. What’s the matter with you?” Louise felt her mind slide comfortably into one of its familiar sets — what Mark called her analytical griping. She’d be able to while away a good chunk of the empty day interrogating the processor, picking over details of this representation of Mark. “You’re even floating above the deck, damn it. I wouldn’t be surprised if you start losing the illusion of solidity next. And — ”

  “Louise. I said it was urgent.”

  She found her voice trailing off, her concentration dissolving.

  Mark stepped toward her, and his face enhanced visibly, fleshing out and gaining violet-blue tones of Neptunian light. The processors projecting Mark were obviously trying to help her through this interaction. But the rest of his body remained little more than a three-dimensional sketch — a sign that he was diverting most of the available processing power to another priority. “Louise,” Mark said, his voice soft but insistent. “Something’s happened. Something’s changed.”

  “Changed?” Nothing’s changed — not significantly — for nearly a thousand years…

  Mark smiled. “Your mouth is open.”

  She swallowed. “I’m sorry. I think you’re going to have to give me a bit of time with this.”

  “I’m going to turn off the diorama.”

  She looked up with unreasonable panic at the remote face of Neptune. “Why?”

  “Something’s happened, Louise — ”

  “You said that already.”

  “The lifedome.” His eyes were fixed on hers.

  She felt dreamy, light, almost unconcerned, and she wondered if the nanobots working within her body were feeding her some subtle tranquilizer. “Tell me.”

  “Someone is trying to use one of the ports in the lifedome base.” Mark’s eye
s were deep, probing. “Do you understand, Louise? Can you hear what I’m saying?”

  “Of course I can,” she snapped.

  After five centuries without contact, someone was leaving the lifedome. She tried to grasp the reality of Mark’s statement, to envisage it. Someone was coming.

  “Turn off the projection,” she told Mark wearily. “I’m ready.”

  Neptune collapsed suddenly, like a burst balloon; Triton shriveled into a billion dwindling pixels, and the light of Sol flickered out. For a moment there was only the Great Britain, the undeniable reality of Brunel’s old ship hard and incongruent at the center of this infinity of grayness, of the absence of form; Mark stood before her on the battered deck, his too-real face fixed on hers, reassuring.

  Then the Universe returned.

  Arrow Maker was falling out of the world.

  He sat in the craft — this pod, as Uvarov had called it — with his bow and quiver piled neatly on the seat next to him. His bare legs dangled over his chair’s smooth lip. There was a simple control console, just within his reach before him.

  The pod’s walls were transparent, making the cylindrical hull almost invisible. The pod was nothing, less sheltering than an insubstantial dream; the four seats, with Maker and his incongruous, futile bow, seemed to be dropping unsupported through the air.

  Uvarov had pointed out the pod to him. Maker had barely been able to see it — a box of translucent strangeness in a world of strangeness.

  Uvarov had told him to get into the pod. Maker, without thought, it seemed, had obeyed.

  Through the floor of the pod he could see the port approaching. It was a rectangle set in the base of the lifedome, bleak and unadorned, bordered by a line of pale brilliance. He could still see stars through the lifedome base, but he realized now that it wasn’t perfectly transparent. It returned some reflection of the sourceless inner light of the lifedome, making it a genuine floor across the world. Perhaps a layer of dust had collected over the base during the long centuries, spoiling its pristine clarity.

  By contrast there was nothing within the expanding frame of the port — nothing, not even Uvarov’s stars. The frame was rising toward him, preparing to swallow him and this foolish craft like an opening mouth.

  The port was a doorway to emptiness.

  He felt his bowels loosen. Fear was constantly with him, constantly threatening to erupt from his control…

  Spinner’s voice sounded small, distorted, emanating from the air. “Maker? Can you hear me? Are you all right?”

  He cried out and gripped the edges of his seat. His throat was so tight with tension he couldn’t speak. He closed his eyes, shutting out the huge, bizarre unrealities around him, and tried to get some control. He lifted his hands to his waist; he touched the liana rope Spinner had wrapped around him as a good luck talisman, just before his departure.

  “Maker? Arrow Maker?”

  “…Spinner,” he gasped. “I can hear you. Are you all right?”

  She laughed, and just for a moment he could visualize her round, sardonic face, the way she would push her spectacles up her short nose. “That’s hardly the point, is it? The question is, are you all right?”

  “Yes.” He opened his eyes, cautiously. The invisible engines of this bubble-pod hummed, almost silently, and below him the exit from the lifedome was a floor of gray emptiness, expanding toward him with exquisite slowness. “Yes, I’m all right. You startled me a bit, that’s all.”

  “I’m not surprised.” The voice of the tall, dry man from the Decks — Morrow was rendered even more flat than usual by the distortions of the hidden communications devices. “Maybe we should have spent more time showing you what to expect.”

  “Is there anything you want?”

  “Yes, Spinner-of-Rope.” Arrow Maker felt small, fragile, isolated, like a child in a vehicle made for adults. All around him there was a sharp, empty smell: of plastic and metal, an absence of life. He longed for the rich humidity of the jungle. “I wish we could go home,” he told his daughter.

  “For Life’s sake, stop this babbling.” The voice of Garry Uvarov was like a rattle of bone against glass. “Arrow Maker,” Uvarov said. “Where are you?”

  Maker hesitated. The lifedome exit was huge beneath him now — he was so close to it, in fact, that its corners and edges were foreshortened; the semi-transparent surface of the lifedome turned into a rim of distant, star-spangled carpet around this immense cavity. He felt himself cringe. He reached out blindly for his bow and clutched it to his chest; it was a small token of normality in this world of strangeness. “I can’t be more than a dozen feet from the exit. And I — ”

  The lip of the port, brightly lit, slid upwards around the pod, now; Arrow Maker felt as if he were being immersed in some bottomless pool.

  When she understood the birds were trying to feed her, she tried to pick out individuals among the huge flocks. She told herself she wanted to study the birds: learn more of their lifecycle, mediated as it was by baryonic matter, and perhaps even try to become empathetic with the birds, to try to comprehend their individual and racial goals.

  But making friends with photino birds — forming contact with individuals in anything like a conventional human sense — simply wasn’t a possibility for her, it emerged. They were so nearly alike — after all, she reflected, given their simple reproductive strategy the birds were very nearly clones of each other that it was all but impossible for her to tell them apart. And, on their brief orbits around the Sun, they flashed past her so quickly. She certainly couldn’t identify them closely enough to follow individuals through consecutive orbits past her.

  So — though she was surrounded by the birds, and bathed in their strange, luminous generosity — Lieserl remained, still, fundamentally alone.

  She felt intense disappointment at this. At first she told herself that this was a symptom of her limited understanding of the birds: Lieserl, as the frustrated scientist.

  But this was just a rationalization, she knew.

  She forced herself to be honest. What some part of her really wanted, deep down, was for the photino birds to accept her — if not as one of their own, then as a tolerable alien in their midst.

  When she first diagnosed this about herself, she felt humiliated. For the first time she was glad there was nobody observing her, no latter-day equivalent of Kevan Scholes studying her telemetry and deducing her mental state. Was she really so pathetic, so internally weak, that she needed to cling to crumbs of friendship — even from these dark-matter creatures, whose alienness from her was so fundamental that it made the differences between humans and Qax look like close kinship?

  Was she really so lonely?

  The subsequent embarrassment and fit of self-loathing took a long time to fade.

  Individual contact with the birds would be meaningless anyway. Since they were so alike, their behavior as individuals so undifferentiated, racial goals seemed far more important to the birds than individual goals. Personality was subsumed beneath the purpose of the species to a far greater extent than it ever had been with humans — even at the time of the Assimilation, she thought, when opposition to the Xeelee had emerged as a clear racial goal for humanity.

  She watched the birds breed, endlessly, the swarms of clumsy young sweeping on uncontrolled elliptical orbits around the Sun’s core in pursuit of their parents.

  The birds’ cloning mode of reproduction seemed to shape the course of their lives.

  At first the cloning seemed restrictive — even claustrophobic. Racial goals, downloaded directly from the mother’s awareness into the young, overrode any individual ambitions. The young were robots, she decided, programmed from birth to fulfill the objectives of the species.

  But then, so had she been programmed by her species — and so, to some extent, had every human who had ever lived, she thought. It was all a question of degree.

  And anyway, would it really be so terrible, to be a photino bird?

  With species-ob
jective programming must come an immense fund of wisdom. The youngest photino bird would come to awareness with an expanded set of racial memories and drivers surely beyond the comprehension of any human.

  Phillida had boasted that she — Lieserl — would become, with her close and accurate control of her memories and the functions of her mind, the most conscious human who had ever lived. Maybe that was once true. But, even at the height of her powers, Lieserl’s degree of awareness was surely a mere candle compared to the immense conscious power available to the humblest of the photino birds.

  And perhaps, she thought wistfully, these birds were all components of some extended group-mind — perhaps to analyze the consciousness of any individual bird would be as meaningless as to study the awareness of a single component in her own processing banks, or one neuron in the brain of a conventional human.

  Perhaps.

  But that didn’t seem important to Lieserl, compared to the sense of belonging the birds must share.

  Lieserl, the eternal outsider, watched the birds sweep past her in their lively, coordinated flights. She felt awe — and something else: envy.

  She pulled away from the shrinking core of the Sun, out through the searing hydrogen-fusing shell, and soared up into the envelope — the bloated, gaseous mantle that the outer forty percent of giant-Sun’s mass had become. The envelope was a universe of thin gas — so thin, she imagined, that if she tried hard enough she could see out through these teeming layers, to the stars beyond (or what was left of them).

  The Sun was a red giant. It had become a pocket cosmos in itself, with its own star — the hydrogen-fusion shell around the dead core — blazing at the center of this clogged, gas-filled space. But the outer layers, the mantle, had become so swollen that they utterly dwarfed the core. In fact, the dimensions of the Sun were like those of an atom, she realized, with the shrunken, blazing core occupying the same proportion of space within its mantle-cloud as did the nucleus of an atom within its cloud of electrons.