Ring xs-4

by Stephen Baxter

  Well, she damn well should have imagined it.

  “Uvarov. You must respond. We’re still in flight.” She tried to imagine the old eugenicist’s condition, extrapolating wildly from the few words she’d heard him speak. “Uvarov, can you hear me? You have to stop him — the man in the pod, this Arrow Maker. He’ll destroy himself…” And, she thought sourly, maybe the whole damn ship as well. “You know as well as I do that the Interface can’t be used during the flight. The kinetic energy difference between our Interface and the one back in the past will make the wormhole unstable. If your Arrow Maker flies that pod in there, he’ll wreck the wormhole.”

  “You’re lying,” Uvarov rasped. “The journey’s over. We’ve seen the stars.”

  “Uvarov, listen to me. We’re still relativistic.” She turned to peer out of the galley’s small windows. The Britain was suspended beneath the belly of the lifedome, so that the dome was huge and brilliant above her; the spine pierced space a few hundred yards away. And, all around the spine, the starbow — the ring of starlight aberrated by their motion — gleamed dully, infinitely far away.

  With a small corner of her mind, she longed to shut this out, to erect some Virtual illusion to hide in.

  “I can see the damn starbow, Uvarov. With my own eyes, right now. We’re decelerating, but we’re still relativistic. We have decades of this journey ahead of us yet…” Was it possible Uvarov had forgotten?

  In the background she could hear Mark’s voice patiently pleading with the primitive in the pod; her desks showed her endless representations of the processors’ failed attempts to override the pod’s autonomous systems, and the astonishingly rapid convergence of the pod with the Interface.

  He pushed the crude control as far forward as it would go. The pod hurtled past the spine. He felt mesmerized, bound up in the extraordinary events around him, beyond any remnants of fear.

  Once again a frame of light embraced the pod, expanding, enclosing, like a swallowing mouth. This time, the frame was triangular, not rectangular; it was rimmed by blue light, not silver-white. And it contained — not a bleak, charcoal-gray emptiness — but a pool of golden light, elusive, shimmering.

  There were stars in that pool. How ironic it was, thought Arrow Maker, that perhaps here at last he would find the stars of which old, mad Uvarov had dreamed.

  The ghost-man — Mark — was still speaking to him, urgently; but the ghost was crumbling into cubes of light, which scattered in the air, shrinking and melting.

  Arrow Maker barely noticed.

  Suddenly, she thought she understood.

  She spoke rapidly. “Uvarov, listen. Please. The skydome above the forest isn’t truly transparent. It’s semisentient — it’s designed to deconvolve the distorting effects of the flight, to project an illusion of stars, of normal sky. Garry, can you hear me? The skydome shows a reconstruction of the sky and I think you’ve forgotten that it’s a reconstruction. The forest people can’t have seen the stars.” She tried to find words to reach this man, whom she’d first known a thousand years ago. “I’m sorry, Garry. I truly am. But you must make him turn back.”

  “Louise.” Mark’s voice was clipped, urgent. “Arrow Maker is not responding. I’m starting to break up; we’re already within the exoticity field of the Interface, and — ”

  Uvarov screamed, “The Interface, Arrow Maker! You’ll travel back across five million years — tell them we’re here, that we made it, Arrow Maker!”

  Now there were other voices on Uvarov’s link: a man, a girl. “Maker! Maker! Come back…”

  Mark’s voice faded out.

  On Louise’s desk, the gleaming, toylike images, of pod and Interface, converged.

  The blue-white framework was all around him now, its glow flooding the cabin of the pod with shadowless light and banishing the spine and lifedome, as if they were insubstantial. The pod shuddered, its framework glowing blue-violet.

  The voice of Spinner-of-Rope, his daughter, became indistinct.

  He called to her: “Look after your sister, Spinner-of-Rope.”

  He couldn’t make out her reply. Soon there was only the tone of her dear voice, pleading, pressing.

  A tunnel — lined by sheets of light, shimmering, impossibly long — opened out before him.

  He sank into the golden pool, and even Spinner’s voice was lost.

  Louise massaged her temples and closed her eyes. There was nothing more she could do. Not now.

  She remembered how it had become clear — early in the flight, after a shockingly short time — that the Northern’s fragile artificial society was going to collapse. Mark had helped her understand the cramped social dynamics going on inside the lifedome: the dome contained a closed system, he said, with positive socio-feedback mechanisms leading to wild instabilities, and…

  But understanding hadn’t helped them cope with the collapse.

  The first rebellion had been inspired by one of Louise’s closest allies: Uvarov, who had led his eugenics-inspired withdrawal to the forest. After that Superet or rather, the Planners who had turned the original Superet philosophy into a bizarre ideology — had subverted whatever authority Louise had retained and imposed its will on the remaining inhabitants of the lifedome.

  Louise and Mark had withdrawn to this place: to the converted, secure Great Britain. From here Louise had isolated the starship’s essential systems — life support and control — from the inhabitants of the dome. During the long centuries since — long after Mark’s death, long after the occupants of the dome had forgotten her existence — she had watched over the swarming masses within the lifedome: regulating their air, ensuring the balance of the small, enclosed ecologies was maintained, guiding the ship to its final destination.

  What the people did to each other, what they believed, was beyond her control. Perhaps it always had been. All she strove to do was to keep as many as possible of them alive.

  But now, if the wormhole was lost, it had all been for nothing. Nothing.

  The kinetic energy of the pod shattered the spacetime flaw that was the wormhole. The portal behind it imploded at lightspeed, and gravitational waves and exotic particles pulsed around the craft.

  Arrow Maker felt the air thicken in his lungs, cold settling over his bare skin. The pod jolted, and he was almost thrown out of his seat; calmly he unwrapped Spinner’s liana-rope from his waist and tied it around his torso and the seat, binding himself securely.

  He held his hands before his face. He saw frost, glistening on his skin; his breath steamed in the air before him.

  The pod’s fragile hull cracked and starred; one by one the craft’s systems — its heating, lights, air — collapsed under the hammer-blows of this impossible motion.

  Through a transient network of wormholes which collapsed behind him in storms of heavy particles and gravity waves. Arrow Maker fell across past and future, the light of collapsing spacetime playing over his shivering flesh.

  Light flared from the Interface. It gushed from every face of the tetrahedron like some liquid, bathing the Northern in violet fire.

  It was like a small sun.

  The starship shuddered. The steady glow of the GUT-drive flickered — actually flickered, for the first time in centuries. The Britain, old and fragile in its cradle, rocked back and forth, and Louise heard a distant clatter of falling objects, the incongruously domestic sound of sliding furniture.

  All over the lifedome, lights flickered and died.

  14

  He was the last man.

  He was beyond time and space. The great quantum functions which encompassed the Universe slid past him like a vast, turbulent river, and his eyes were filled with the gray light against which all phenomena are shadows.

  Time wore away, unmarked.

  And then —

  There was a box, drifting in space, tetrahedral, clear-walled.

  From around an impossible corner a human entered the box. He sat in a battered, fragile craft which tumbled through space.
A rope was wrapped around his waist, and he was dressed in treated animal skins. He was gaunt, encrusted in filth, his skin ravaged by frost.

  He stared out at the stars, astonished.

  Spacetime-fire erupted into the box, finally engulfing the little craft.

  Something had changed. History had resumed.

  Michael Poole’s extended awareness stirred.

  PART III

  Event: Sol

  15

  Louise Ye Armonk stood on the pod’s short ladder. Below her, the ice of Callisto was dark, full of mysterious depths in the smoky Jovian ring-light.

  She felt a starburst of wonder. For the first time in a thousand subjective years she was going to walk on the surface of a world.

  She stepped forward.

  Her feet settled to the ice with a faint crunch. Her boots left well-defined, ribbed prints in the fine frost which coated Callisto’s surface.

  The thick environment suit felt heavy, despite the easiness of Callisto’s thirteen-percent-gee gravity. Louise lifted her hands and pressed her palms together; she was barely able to feel her hands within the clumsy gloves. The suit was a thousand years old. Trapped inside this thing she felt deadened, aged, as if she were forced to work within some glutinous fluid.

  She looked around, peering through her murky faceplate, squinting to make out detail through the plate’s degraded image-enhancement. As her sense of wonder faded, she felt irritation grow; she knew it was weak of her, but, damn it, she missed the crystal clarity of her Virtual dioramas.

  Jupiter and Sol were both below the little moon’s infinite-flat, icy horizon: but Jupiter’s new rings arced spectacularly out of the horizon and across the sky. The ring system’s far edge occluded the stars, razor-sharp, and the ice and rock particles of the rings sparkled milky crimson in the cool, distant sunlight.

  The rings were like a huge artifact, she thought. Here, a mote on a plain of ice, she felt dwarfed to insignificance.

  She tipped back her head and looked at the stars.

  It had already been a year since the Northern’s speed had dropped sufficiently for the last relativistic effects to bleach from the Universe, a year in which they’d slowly coasted in from the outer System to Jupiter. The Northern had been in orbit around the Jovian moon for several days now, and Morrow had been working down here for most of that time. Preliminary scans from the Northern had told them that there was something buried inside the freshly frozen Callisto ice — something anomalous. Morrow, with his team of ’bots, was trying to find out what that was.

  But this was Louise’s own first trip down to the surface. And the experience of being immersed in a sky — a genuine, spread out, distortion-free starry sky — was an unnerving novelty to Louise, after so long being surrounded by the washed-out starbow of near-lightspeed.

  But what a sky it was — a dull, empty canopy of velvet, peppered by the corpses of stars: wizened, cooling dwarfs, the bloated hulks of giants — some huge enough to show a disc, even at interstellar distances — and, here and there, the traceries of debris, handfuls of spider-web thrown across the sky, which marked the sites of supernovas.

  There was a grunt, and a diffuse shadow fell across the ice.

  Louise turned. Spinner-of-Rope was making her slow, cautious way out of the pod after her. Spinner’s small body, made bulky by the suit, was silhouetted against the pod lights. She placed each footstep deliberately on the surface, and she held her arms out straight.

  Louise grinned at Spinner. “You look ridiculous.”

  “Oh, thanks,” Spinner said sourly. Through the dully reflective faceplate Louise could see the glint of Spinner’s spectacles, the glare of face paint, the white of Spinner’s teeth. Spinner said, “I just don’t want to go slip-sliding across this ice-ball of a moon.”

  Louise looked down and scuffed the surface with her toe, leaving deep scratches. Within the ice she could see defects: planes, threads and star-shaped knots, imperfections left by the freezing process. “This is ice, but it’s not exactly smooth.”

  Spinner waddled up to her and sniffed; the noise was like a scratch in Louise’s earpiece. “Maybe,” Spinner said. “But it’s a lot smoother than it used to be.”

  “…Yes.”

  “Look,” Spinner said, pointing. “Here comes the Northern.” Louise turned and peered up, dutifully. The Northern, trailing through its hour-long orbit, was a thousand miles above the surface. Subvocally she ordered her faceplate to enhance the image. The ship became a remote matchstick, bright red in the light of Sol; it looked impossibly fragile, like some immense toy, she thought. The asteroid ice which had provided reaction mass for so long was a dark, anonymous lump, barely visible now that the great blue flame of the GUTdrive had been stilled after its thousand-year service. The spine, with its encrustation of antennae and sensor ports, was like an organic thing, bony, coated by bleached parasites. Red sunlight pooled like blood in the antennae cups. Still fixed to the spine was the wreckage of the worm-hole Interface — twisted so that its tetrahedral form was lost-beyond recognition, the electric-blue sparkle of its exotic matter frame dulled.

  And the lifedome itself — eggshell-delicate — was huge atop that skinny spine, like the skull of a child. Most of the dome was darkened — closed up, impenetrable — but the upper few layers still glistened with light.

  Within those bland walls, Louise reflected, two thousand people still went about their small, routine lives. Beyond Louise and her close companions, there were very few within the lifedome’s fragmented societies who even knew that the Northern’s immense journey was, at last, over.

  “How are you doing down there?”

  She winced. The sudden voice in her ear had been raucous, overloud — another problem with this damn old suit.

  “Mark, I’m fine. How are you?”

  “What can you see? What are you thinking?”

  “Mostly I can see the inside of this faceplate. Couldn’t you have got it cleaned up? It smells like something’s been living in it for a thousand years.”

  He laughed.

  “…I see the stars. What’s left of them.”

  “Yes.” Mark was silent for a moment. “Well, it’s just as we suspected from the deconvolved reconstructions during the flight… but never quite believed, maybe. It’s the same picture all over the sky, Louise; we’ve found no exceptions. It’s incredible. In the five million years of our flight, stellar evolution has been forced through at least five billion years. And the effect isn’t limited to this Galaxy. We can’t even see the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, for example.”

  The sky was lowering, oppressive. She said, “Superet got it about right, didn’t they? Remember the projections they showed us in the Virtual dome in New York, when they recruited us?”

  “Yes… wizened stars, faded galaxies. Depressing, isn’t it?”

  She smiled. “Maybe. But the sky’s become an astrophysicist’s dream lab.”

  “But it can’t have been much of a dream for anyone left alive here, in the Solar System, when those novae and supernovae started going off. The sleet of hard radiation and massive particles must have been unrelenting, for a million years…”

  “Yes. A hard rain indeed. That will have sterilized the whole damn place — ”

  ” — if there had been anyone left alive here by then. Which we’ve yet to find evidence of. Well, we’re still following up our four leads — the maser radiation coming out of the Sun, the very strange gravity waves coming from Sagittarius, the artifact in the ice, here on Callisto, and that weak beacon in transPlutonian space… But we’re no further forward understanding any of it.”

  “I can see the forest,” Spinner murmured, her faceplate upturned.

  Louise studied the lifedome more carefully, enhanced the image with artificial colors — and there, indeed, she could see a thin layer of Earth green at the leading edge of the life-dome, the layer of living things stained dark by the aged sunlight.

  That pet forest, she thought suddenly
, might be the only green left, anywhere in the Universe.

  Absurdly, she felt her throat tightening; she found it difficult to pull her gaze away from that drifting particle of home.

  There was a hand on her arm, its weight barely registering through the numbing, stiff fabric of the suit. Spinner smiled. “I know how you feel.”

  Louise peered through the faceplate at this odd girl-woman, with her glinting spectacles and her round, childish face.

  After Spinner’s father had wrecked the Interface — and with it, any chance of getting home again — Louise had offered Spinner and her people AS-treatment. And, looking at Spinner now, fifty years later, it was hard to remember that this was no longer a child, but a sixty-five-year-old woman.

  “I doubt you know how I feel,” she said coldly. “I doubt it very much.”

  Spinner studied her for a few moments, her painted face expressionless behind her plate.

  They climbed back into the pod.

  The little ship rose to a height of a mile, then levelled off and coasted parallel to the surface. Louise looked back. Their landing jets had blown a wide, shallow crater in the ice; it marred a plain which stretched, seamless and featureless, to the close horizon.

  Louise sat in her seat; surrounded by the disconcertingly transparent hull, she felt — as always, in these pods — as if she were suspended in space. Below them the Callisto plain was a geometrical abstraction; above them. Northern climbed patiently past the deep, gleaming rings of Jupiter, a spark against those smooth arcs.

  The main activity on Callisto was centered around Morrow’s excavation site on the far side of the moon, the Jupiter-facing side. The purpose of this jaunt was to have a general scout, and to give Spinner-of-Rope some more experience of working outside the ship, the feel of standing on a planet surface… Even, Louise thought, a surface so featureless, and with a sky so bare, that the moon had become almost an abstract representation of a planet.