Ring xs-4

by Stephen Baxter

  In contrast to the crowded sky of the ruins of the Jovian system, there was emptiness here.

  The Sun was a ball of dull red, below the cage and to her right. Even here, on the rim of the System, Sol still showed a large disc, and sent bloody light slanting up through her cage.

  To her left the worldlet Louise called Port Sol rotated, slowly. The little ice moon was scarred by hundreds of craters: deep, surprisingly regular. The tiny moon had supplied the ancient interstellar GUTships with ice for reaction mass. There were still buildings here, tight communities of them all over the surface; Spinner could see the remnants of domes, pylons and arches, spectacular microgravity architecture which must have been absurdly expensive to maintain.

  But the buildings were closed, darkened, and thin frost coated their surfaces; the pylons and graceful domes were collapsed, with bits of glass and metal jutting like snapped bones.

  “I recognize some of this,” Louise said. “Some of the geography, I mean. I could even tell you place names. Can you believe that — after five megayears?

  “…But I guess that’s just telling us that Port Sol was abandoned not long after my time. Once the Squeem hyperdrive was acquired, the GUTship lines — even the worm-hole route operators — must have become suddenly obsolete. There was no longer any economic logic to sustain Port Sol. I wonder what the last days were like… Perhaps the Port was kept going by tourism, for a while. And, thinking back, there would have been a few who wouldn’t want to return to the crowded pit of the inner System. Perhaps some of them stayed here until their AS treatment finally failed them…

  “Maybe that’s how it was,” she said. “But I think I’d rather imagine they closed the place up with one major party.”

  “How did Port Sol survive the wars?”

  “Who would want to come here?” Louise said drily. “What is there to fight over? There’s nothing that’s even worth destroying. Spinner, Port Sol must have been abandoned for most of the five megayears since the Northern’s departure. It’s drifted around the rim of the System, unremarked and never visited, while the tides of the Xeelee wars washed over the inner worlds. The System is probably littered with sites like this — abandoned, too remote to be worth tracking down for study, or exploitation, or even to destroy. All encrusted with bits of human history — and lost lives, and bones.”

  Spinner laughed uneasily; she wasn’t used to such reflection from the engineer.

  She twisted her head, looking around the sky. “I don’t like it here, Louise,” she said. “It’s barren. Abandoned. I thought the Jupiter system was bad, but — ”

  Apart from the Sun and Port Sol, only the distant dimmed stars shone here, impossibly remote. Spinner felt cowed by the dingy immensity all around her: she felt that her own spark of human life and warmth was as insignificant against all this darkness as the dim glow of the touch-pad lights on her waldoes.

  Empty. Barren. These were the true conditions of the Universe, she thought; life, and variety, and energy, were isolated aberrations. The Northern forest-Deck — the whole of that enclosed world which had seemed so huge to her, as a child — was nothing but a remote scrap of incongruous green, irrelevant in all this emptiness.

  Louise said, “I know how you’re feeling. At least at Jupiter there was something in the sky. Right? Listen to me, Spinner; it’s all a question of scale. Port Sol is a Kuiper object — a ball of ice traveling around the Sun about fifty AUs out. AUs — astronomical units — that means — ”

  “I know what it means.”

  “Spinner, Jupiter is only five AUs from the center of the Sun. So we’re ten times further out from the heart of the System than Northern is… so far out that we’re on the edge of the Solar System, so far that the other bodies in the System — save Sol itself — are reduced to points of light, invisible without enhancement. Spinner, emptiness is what you have to expect, out here.”

  “Sure. So tell me how it makes you feel.”

  Louise hesitated. “Spinner-of-Rope, five million years ago I came here to work in the old days, while the Great Northern was being constructed…”

  Louise spoke of bustling, sprawling, vigorous human communities nestling among the ancient ice-spires of the Kuiper object. The sky had been full of GUTships and stars, with Sol a bright yellow gleam in Capricorn.

  “But now,” Louise said, her voice tight, “look at the Sun… Spinner-of-Rope, even from this far out — even from fifty AUs — the damn thing is twice as wide as the Moon, seen from old Earth. It’s obscene to me. It makes it impossible for me to forget, even for a moment, what’s been done.”

  Spinner sat silently for a moment. Memories of Earth meant nothing to her, but she could feel the pain in Louise’s voice.

  “Louise, do you want to land here?”

  “No. There’s nothing for us down there… It was only an impulse that brought me out here in the first place; we had no evidence that anything had survived. I’m sorry, Spinner.”

  Spinner sighed. “Where to now?”

  “Well, since we’re out here in the dark, let’s stay out. We’re still picking up that remote beacon.”

  “Where’s the signal coming from?”

  “Further out than we are now — about a hundred AUs — and a goodly distance around the equatorial plane from Port Sol. Spinner-of-Rope, we’re looking at another few days in the saddle, for you. Can you stand it?”

  Spinner sighed. “It’s not getting any easier. But it’s not going to get any worse, is it?” …And, she thought, it wasn’t as if the base they had established amid the ruins of the Jupiter system was so fantastically inviting a place to get back to. “Let’s get it over.”

  “All right. I’ve already laid in your course…”

  There could be no true dialogue, Garry Uvarov thought, between Lieserl — the strange, lonely exile in the Sun — and the crew of the returned Great Northern.

  The corpse of Jupiter was only just over a light-hour from the center of the Sol-giant, but Lieserl’s maser messages took far longer than that to percolate out of the Sun along the flanks of their immense convection cells. So communications roundtrips — between the Northern and the antiquated wormhole terminus that supported Lieserl’s awareness — took several days.

  Still, once contact was established, a prodigious amount of information flowed, asynchronously, back and forth across the tenuous link.

  “Incredible,” Mark murmured. “She dates from our own era — she was placed within the Sun at almost exactly the same time as our launch.”

  It sounded as if Mark were speaking from somewhere inside Uvarov’s own head. Uvarov swiveled his sightless face about the dining saloon. “You’re forgetting your spatial focus again,” he snapped. “I know you’re excited, but — ”

  There was a soft concussion; Uvarov pictured Virtual sound-sources reconfiguring throughout the saloon. “Sorry,” Mark said, from a point in the air a few feet before Uvarov’s head.

  “As far as I can tell, she’s human,” Mark said. “A human analogue, anyway. The woman’s been in there, alone, for five million years, Uvarov. I know that subjectively she won’t have endured all that time at a normal human pace, but still…

  “She’s another Superet project — just as we are. Which is why there’s such a coincidence in dates. We must both date from Superet’s most active period, Uvarov.”

  Uvarov smiled. “Perhaps. And yet, what has resulted of all the grand designs of those days? Superet was planning to adjust the future of mankind — to ensure the success of the species. But what is the outcome? We have: one half-insane relic of a woman-Virtual, wandering about inside the Sun, one broken-down GUTship, the Northern… and a Sun become a giant in a lifeless Solar System.” He worked his numb mouth, but there was no phlegm to spit. “Hardly a triumph. So much for the abilities of humans to manage projects on such timescales. So much for Superet!”

  “But Lieserl has followed a lot of the history of the human race — in patches, and from a distance, but she kn
ows more than we could ever hope to have uncovered otherwise. She lost contact with the rest of the race only as humans entered a late period called the Assimilation, when mankind was moving into direct competition with the Xeelee.”

  Uvarov couldn’t wrench his imagination away from the plight of Lieserl. “But, I wonder, are these few, pathetic scraps of data sufficient compensation for a hundred thousand lifetimes of solitude endured by this unfortunate Lieserl, in the heart of a dying star?”

  Mark synthesized a sniff. “I don’t know,” he said frankly. “Maybe you’re a better philosopher than I am, Uvarov; maybe you can come to judgments on the moral value of data. At this moment I don’t really care where this information has come from.”

  “No,” Uvarov said. “I don’t suppose you do.”

  “I’m simply grateful that, because Lieserl exists, we’ve managed to learn something of humanity’s five-megayear past… and of the photino birds.”

  “Photino birds?”

  The timbre of Mark’s voice changed; Uvarov imagined his stupid, pixel-lumped face splitting into a grin. “That’s Lieserl’s phrase. She found what she was sent in to find — dark matter energy flows, sucking the energy out of the core of the Sun. But it wasn’t some inanimate process, as her designers had expected: Lieserl found life, Uvarov. She’s not alone. She’s surrounded by photino birds. And I think she rather enjoys the company…”

  “Lieserl…” Uvarov rolled the name around his mouth, savoring its strangeness. “An unusual name, even a thousand years ago.” Uvarov’s patchy, unreliable memory fired random facts into his tired forebrain. “Einstein had a child called Lieserl. I mean Albert Einstein, the — ”

  “I know who he was.”

  “His wife was called Mileva,” Uvarov said. “Why do I remember this?… They bore a child, Lieserl — but out of wedlock: a source of great shame in the early twentieth century, I understand. The child was adopted. Einstein had to choose between his child, and his career in science… all that beautiful science of his. What a choice for any human to have to make!

  “So this woman has the name of a bastard,” he said. “A name redolent of isolation. How appropriate. How lonely she must have been…

  “And now she enjoys the company of dark matter life forms,” he mused. “I wonder if she still remembers she was once human.”

  Port Sol was twenty light-hours from the source of the beacon, Louise estimated. The nightfighter would be able to complete the trip in fifty hours.

  Spinner-of-Rope, working her rudimentary controls with growing confidence, opened up the sail-wings of the nightfighter. She glanced over her shoulder to watch the wings. Her view was partially obscured by Louise’s life-lounge, an improvised encrustation which sat, squat, on the thick construction material shoulders of the ship’s wing-mountings, just behind her own cage. One of the Northern’s small, glass-walled pods had been fixed there too.

  The nightfighter used its domain wall antigravity effect to protect the lounge, with Louise in it, from its extremes of acceleration. After a lot of experimentation they had found that securely attaching the lounge, and other artifacts, to the structure of the Xeelee nightfighter was enough to fool the craft into treating the enhancements as part of its structure.

  But still, despite the human obstructions, Spinner could see the sparkle of the cosmic-string rims of the wings as they wound out across hundreds of miles of space, hauling open the night-blackness of the domain wall wings themselves. As they unfurled, the wings curved over on themselves with a grace and delicacy astonishing, Spinner thought, in artifacts so huge — and yet those curves seemed imbued with a terrific sense of vigor, of power.

  She touched the waldoes.

  The wings pulsed, once.

  There was an instant in which she could see Port Sol recede from her, a flashbulb impression of squat human buildings and gaping ice-wounds which imploded to a light-point with a terrifying, helpless velocity.

  And then the worldlet was gone. Within a heartbeat, Port Sol had become too dim even to show up as a point — and there was no longer a frame of reference against which she could judge her speed.

  Then, with slow sureness as her speed built up, blue shift began to stain the stars ahead of her once more. For a few hours relativistic effects would spuriously restore those aged lights to something like the brilliance they had once enjoyed.

  …And again she had the sense, almost undefinable, of someone here with her, inside the cage — a presence, surely human, staring out wistfully at the blue shifted stars as she did.

  She wondered whether she should tell Louise about this. But — real or not, external to her own, fuddled mind or not — her companion wasn’t threatening.

  And besides, what would Louise make of it? What could she do about it?

  As the starbow coalesced around her once more, Spinner-of-Rope opaqued her faceplate, wriggled in her couch until an irritating wrinkle of cloth behind her back had smoothed itself out, and tried to sleep.

  The slow, wide orbits of Port Sol and the beacon source had left them ninety degrees apart, as seen from the center of the Sun. Louise had laid in a course which took the nightfighter on a wide, high trajectory high above the plane of the System, arcing across its outer regions. The nightfighter’s path was like a fly hopping across a plate, from one point on the plate’s rim to another.

  The Sun sat like a bloated, grotesque spider at the heart of its ruined System. All of the inner planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth/Luna — were gone… save only Mars, which had been reduced to a scorched cinder, surely barren of life, its orbit taking it skimming through the outer layers of the new red giant itself.

  In a few more millennia that fragile orbit would erode, pitching Mars, too, into the flames.

  Of the outer gas giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune — all had survived with little change, save imploded Jupiter. But the outermost planet of all — the double world Pluto/Charon — had disappeared.

  Spinner listened to Louise describe all this. “So where did Pluto go?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Louise said. “There’s not a trace to be seen, anywhere along its old orbital path. Maybe we’ll never know.

  “Spinner, a lot of the minor bodies of the System seem to have taken a real beating. Some of that is no doubt due to the Sun’s new, extreme state… but maybe some of it has been deliberate, too.”

  Once, the Solar System had served as host to billions of minor bodies. The Oort Opik Cloud was — had once been — a swarm of a hundred billion comets circling through an immense, sparse shell of space, between four light-months and three light-years from the Sun. Now, that cloud was denuded.

  Louise said, “Many of the comets must have been destroyed by the growth of the Sun — flashed to steam by its huge outpouring of heat energy, in one last, extravagant fling… They would have been visible from other systems, actually; they’d have inserted water lines, briefly, in the spectrum of the Sun: a kind of spectral Last Post for the Solar System, if there was anybody left, anywhere, to see.”

  Further in toward the Sun, there were the Kuiper objects, like Port Sol; icy worldlets, orbiting not far outside the widest planetary orbits. And throughout the System there were more rings of small objects — like the asteroids, shepherded into semi-stable orbits by the gravitational interaction of the major planets.

  “But all those worldlet rings are depleted,” Louise said. “Now, some of that depletion must be due to the Sun’s forced evolution, not to mention the loss of three of the inner planets. But many of the small objects must have been populated, by the era of the Xeelee wars.”

  “So the objects might have been deliberately destroyed — more casualties of war.”

  “Right.”

  Spinner swilled apple-juice around her mouth, wishing she had some way to spit it out — or better still, to clean her teeth.

  Spinner had learned of the Solar System only through Louise’s bookslates and records, but she’d gained an impression of an immense, bu
stling, prosperous world-system. There had been huge orbital habitat-cities, heavily populated worlds laced together by wormhole transit routes, and ships like immense, extravagant diamonds crossing the face of the yellow-gold Sun. Somewhere inside her — despite all the dire warnings of Superet — she’d hoped to arrive here and find it all just as she’d read.

  Instead, there was only this decayed Sun and its ruined worlds… even the wormhole routes, it seemed, had been shut down. And here she was, stuck inside the pilot-cage of an alien craft, chasing across tens of billions of miles in search of one, sad, isolated beacon.

  She began to take her body through a simple regime of calisthenics, exercises she could get through without climbing out of her couch. “So, Louise. You’re telling me that Sol is dead. The System is dead. And you sound… upset about it. But what else did you expect to find?”

  “I expected nothing. I hoped for more,” Louise said. “But I guess the slow destruction of the Sun, coupled with the Xeelee assaults, were together enough to wipe the System clean…”

  Spinner felt, suddenly, profoundly depressed, as if the weight of all those lost years, those hundreds of billions of lives which had resulted in nothing but this cosmic rubble, was bearing down on her.

  “Louise, I don’t want to hear any more.”

  “All right, Spinner. I — ”

  Spinner shut her off.

  She blanked out her faceplate, and filled its inner side with a soothing, cool green light, the light which had filtered through leaves from an artificial Sun to illuminate her childhood. She immersed herself in the warm feel of her muscles, as she pushed through her exercises.

  Immersed in the cries of the klaxon, Morrow’s party held a council of war.

  “I’ve been scouting,” Mark said. “And as far as I can tell it’s the same all over the Decks. No people, anywhere. The same emptiness… Everyone has been taken into the Temples. And it’s not going to be easy to get them out.”

  “Let’s leave them in there, then,” Trapper-of-Frogs said practically. “If that’s what they want.”