Ring xs-4

by Stephen Baxter

  She tried to settle into her couch. Between each discontinuity-drive jaunt she’d had Mark adjust the couch’s contours, but still it didn’t seem to fit her correctly. Maybe it was because of the biostat sensors with which she continued to be encrusted, for each flight…

  Or maybe, she thought dispiritedly, it was just that she was so tired of this bombardment of strangeness.

  She fingered her chest, against which — under her suit — lay her father’s arrowhead. Before her was the black horse shoe of the Xeelee control console, with its three grafted-on waldoes. She stared at the waldo straight ahead of her — the one which controlled the hyperdrive. Superficially the waldo was just another box of metal and plastic, its telltale lights glowing warmly; but now it seemed to loom large in her vision, larger even than the corpse of the Sun…

  “Spinner. Can you hear me?”

  “Yes, Louise. I’m here.”

  “Are you all right? You’re in your couch?”

  Spinner allowed herself a sigh of exasperation. “Yes, I’m in my couch, just where you saw me not five minutes ago.”

  Louise laughed. “All right, Spinner, I’m sorry. I’m in the life-lounge. Look whatever risks you take in this, I’ll be right here sharing them…”

  Now Spinner laughed. “Thanks, Louise; that’s making me feel a lot better.”

  Louise was silent for a moment, and Spinner imagined her lopsided, rather tired grin. “I never was much of a motivator. It’s amazing I ever got as far as I did in life… Are you ready to start?”

  Spinner took a deep breath; her throat was tight, and she felt light, remote as if this were all some Virtual show, not connected to anything real.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  There was silence; Louise Ye Armonk seemed to be holding her breath.

  “Spinner-of-Rope, if you need more time — ”

  “I said, I’m ready.” Spinner opened her eyes, settled into her crash couch, and flexed her gloved fingers. Before her, the touchpads on the hyperdrive waldo glowed.

  “Tell me what to do, Louise.”

  The Sun was a brooding mass to her right hand side, flooding the cage with dull red light.

  There were three touchpads in a row, all shining yellow. Without thinking about it. Spinner stabbed her forefinger at the middle touchpad.

  The ambient light — changed.

  She was aware that she had stopped breathing; even her pulse, loud in her ears inside this helmet, seemed to have slowed to a crawl.

  She was staring at her gloved hand, the outstretched forefinger still touching the surface of the waldo; beyond that, in her peripheral vision, she could see the ribs of the construction-material cage. It was all just as it had been, a heartbeat before.

  …Except that the shadows which her hand cast across the waldo box had altered, subtly.

  Before, the diffuse globe of the Sun had flooded her field of view with a crimson, bloody glow, and her cage was filled with streaky, soft-edged shadows. But now the shadows had moved around, almost through a hundred and eighty degrees. As if the Sun — or whatever light source was acting now — had moved around to her left.

  She lifted her hand and turned it over before her face, studying the way the light fell across her fingers, the creases in the glove material. The quality of the light itself had changed, too; now it seemed more diffuse — the shadows still softer, the light pinker, brighter.

  She dropped her hand to her chest. Through layers of suit material she could feel the hard edges of her father’s arrow blade, pressing against her chest. She pushed the point of the head into her body, feeling her skin break; the tiny pinpoint of pain was like a single, stationary point of reality amid this Universe of wheeling light.

  She turned her head, slowly.

  The Sun had gone. Where its immense bulk had coated the sky with crimson smoke, there was only emptiness — blackness, a smearing of wizened stars.

  And to her left there had appeared a wall of pinkish gas, riven by lanes of dark, its edges diffusing into blackness. It was a cloud full of stars; it must be light-years across.

  She must have traveled hundreds — perhaps even thousands of light-years. And she’d felt nothing. A mere touch of a button…

  She folded forward, dropping her head into her lap. She clutched the arrowhead to her chest, stabbing at her skin, over and over; she spread one hand against her faceplate and scrabbled at it, seeking her face. She felt her bladder loosen; warm liquid gushed through her catheter.

  “Spinner-of-Rope. Spinner…”

  Hands on her shoulders, shaking her; a distant voice. Her thumb was crammed into her mouth. The pain in her chest had become a dull ache.

  Someone pulled her hand away from her mouth, gently.

  Before her there was a square, weary face, concern showing through an uneven smile, a crop of gray, stiff hair.

  “Louise… ?”

  Louise’s smile broadened. “So you’re with us again. Thank Life for that; welcome back.”

  Spinner looked around. She was still in her cage; the waldoes still sat on their jet-black horseshoe of construction material before her, their touchpad lights burning. But a dome of some milky, opaque material had been cast around the cage, shutting out the impossible sights outside.

  Louise regarded her gravely. She hovered beyond the cage, attached by a short length of safety rope; reaching through the cage bars she held out a moistened cloth. “Here. You’d better clean yourself up.”

  Spinner glanced down at herself. Her helmet lay in her lap. Her hands were moist with spittle — and she’d dribbled down her chin — and where Louise had opened Spinner’s suit at the chest, there was a mass of small, bleeding punctures.

  “What a mess,” Spinner said. She dabbed at her chest.

  Louise shrugged. “It’s no great trouble, Spinner. Although I had to move fast; I needed to get the air-dome up around you before you managed to open your faceplate.”

  Spinner picked up her helmet; reaching through the faceplate, she found an apple-juice nipple. “Louise, what happened to me?”

  Louise grinned and reached through the construction-material bars; with her old, leathery hand she touched Spinner’s cheek. “The hyperdrive happened to you. You’ve nothing to be ashamed of, Spinner. I knew this wouldn’t be easy, but I had no idea how traumatic it would be.”

  Spinner frowned. “There was no sensation of movement at all. It seemed like magic, impossible. Even with the discontinuity drive there are visual effects; you can see the planets looming up at you, and the blue shift, and — ”

  Louise sighed and rubbed her face. “I know. Sometimes, I think I forget that this is a Xeelee ship. It’s just not designed for human comfort… I guess we can conclude that the Xeelee are a little tougher, psychologically, than we are.”

  “But did it work, Louise?”

  “Yes. Yes, it worked, Spinner. We crossed over two thousand light-years — in a time so brief I couldn’t even measure it…”

  Louise took her hand from Spinner’s cheek and rested it on her shoulder. “Spinner, I can de-opaque this dome. If you feel you want me to.”

  Spinner didn’t want to think about it. “Do it, Louise.”

  Louise picked up her helmet and whispered instructions into its throat mike.

  The Trifid Nebula, from Earth, had once been a faint glow in the constellation of Sagittarius — as broad as the full Moon in the sky, but far dimmer; at over two thousand light-years from Earth, powerful telescopes had been needed to reveal its glorious colors. Light took fully thirty years to cross its extent.

  Louise and Mark had chosen the Trifid as the first hyperdrive target. Even if the nightfighter’s trajectory was off by hundreds of light-years, the Nebula should surely be an unmistakable landmark.

  But the waldo had worked. Louise’s programming had brought the nightfighter to within sixty light-years of the rim of the Nebula.

  The Nebula was a wall, sprawled across half of Spinner’s sky. It was a soft edged st
udy in pinks and reds. Dark lanes cut across the face of the Nebula in a rough Y-shape, dividing the cloud into three parts. The material seemed quite smooth, Spinner thought, like some immense watercolor painting. Stars shone through the pale outer edges of the Nebula — and shone, too, from within its bulk.

  “This is an emission nebula, Spinner,” Louise said abstractedly. “There are stars within the gas; ultraviolet starlight ionizes hydrogen in the Nebula, making the gas shine in turn…” She pointed. “Those dark rifts are empty of stars; they’re dozens of light-years long. The Nebula is called the Trifid because of the way the lanes divide the face into three… see? And — can you see those smaller, compact dark spots? They’re called Bok globules… the birth places of new stars, forming inside the Nebula.”

  Spinner-of-Rope turned to Louise; the engineer sounded flat, distant.

  “Louise? What’s wrong?”

  Louise glanced at her. “I’m sorry, Spinner. I should be celebrating, I guess. After all, the hyperdrive delivered us just where I expected to be. And I was only using the Trifid as a landmark, anyway. But — damn it, the Trifid used to be so much more, Spinner. The colors, all the way through the spectrum from blue, and green, all the way to red… There were hot, bright young stars in there which made it blaze.

  “But now, those stars are gone. Snuffed out, or exploded, or rushed through their lifecycles; like every other star in the damn Galaxy.

  “I just find it hard to accept all this. I try, but every so often something like this comes along, and hits me in the eye.”

  Spinner turned to the Nebula again, trying to lose herself in its light.

  Louise smiled, her face outlined by the Nebula’s soft light. “And what about you?… Why, Spinner, you’re crying.”

  Surprised, Spinner raised the heel of her wrist to her cheeks. There was moisture there. She brushed it away, embarrassed. “I’m fine,” she said. “It’s just — ”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s so beautiful.” Spinner stared at the eagle wings of the Nebula, drinking in its pale colors. “Louise, I’m so lucky to be here, to see this. Uvarov might have sent someone else through the Locks, that first time; not me and Arrow Maker. You might have asked someone else to learn to run your nightfighter for you — and not me.

  “Louise, I might have missed this. I might have died without seeing it — without ever even knowing it existed.” She looked at Louise uncertainly. “Do you understand?”

  Louise smiled. “No.” She reached into the cage and patted Spinner’s arm. “But once I would have felt the same way. Come on, Spinner. We’ve done what we came to do. Let’s go home.”

  Spinner-of-Rope picked up her helmet. As she fastened up her suit, she kept her eyes fixed on the impossible beauty of the Trifid.

  22

  Lieserl walked into the dining saloon of the Great Britain.

  She hesitated, uncertain, in the low doorway. She was stunned by the antique beauty of the place: by its fine pillars and plasterwork, the mirrors glimmering on the walls. She was the last to arrive for this strange dinner; there were six people — three men and three women — already seated, facing each other at the center of one of the long tables. The only light came from candles (real candles, or Virtuals?) set on the table between them. As the people talked, their faces, and the fine cutlery and glass, shone in the flickering, golden light; shadows stretched across the rest of the old saloon, turning it into a place of mystery — even romance.

  One of the men turned as she came in. He rose, pushing back his chair, and walked toward her, smiling. His blue eyes were bright in a dark face.

  She felt an odd, absurd, flutter of nervousness in her throat; she raised her hand to her mouth, and felt the coarseness of her flesh, the lines etched deep there. This was her first genuine human interaction in five million years… But how ludicrous to suffer adolescent nerves like this! She was an AI, geologically old, yet within mere subjective days of returning to the company of humans she had become immersed once more in the complex, impossibly difficult world of human interactions.

  She felt a sudden, intense, nostalgic desire to return to the clean, bright interior of the Sun. All those millennia, orbiting the core with the photino birds, seemed like a long, fantastic dream to her now: an interval within this, the true human reality…

  The man reached out and touched her arm. His flesh was firm, warm.

  She cried out and stumbled backwards.

  Five faces, bright with candlelight, turned toward her, and the conversation died.

  No one had touched Lieserl in megayears.

  The man leaned toward her, his blue eyes bright and mischievous. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t resist that. I’m Mark Bassett Friar Armonk Wu.”

  She straightened herself up, primly, and glared at him. The sudden touch had left a trembling, deep in her stomach, and she was sure a flush was spreading over her cheeks, despite her age of physical-sixty. She was vividly aware — too aware, distractingly so — of Mark’s presence beside her.

  He took her arm again, more delicately, and escorted her toward the dinner party. “I won’t startle you again, I promise. And I’m the only Virtual here other than you, of course.”

  “These Virtual illusions are just too damn good sometimes,” she said. Her voice sounded feathery — weak, she thought. It was going to take her a long time to forgive Mark Wu for that trick.

  He led her to a seat and pulled it out for her — so that was Virtual, too — and she sat with the rest.

  The woman opposite her leaned forward and smiled. Lieserl saw a square, strong face, tired eyes, a thatch of grizzled hair. “I’m Louise Ye Armonk,” she said. “You’re welcome here, Lieserl.”

  “Ah,” Lieserl said. “Louise. The leader.”

  One of the men — grotesquely blind, bald, wrapped in a blanket — allowed his head to rock back on its spindle of a neck, and bellowed laughter.

  Louise looked weary. “Lieserl, meet Garry Uvarov… You’ve spoken with him before.”

  Louise introduced the rest: Morrow, a spindly, reticent man who, with Uvarov, had supervised her downloading through the maser link from the Interface carcass (now abandoned) inside the Sun; and two tiny, young-looking women with strange names — Spinner-of-Rope, Trapper-of-Frogs — their bare flesh startlingly out of place in the formal surroundings of the saloon. Their faces were painted with vivid, intimidating splashes of scarlet, and patches of their scalps were shaven bare. The older-looking one of the pair wore glinting spectacles and carried a crude arrowhead on a thong tied around her neck.

  Lieserl was still new enough to all this to be intensely aware of her own appearance. Her hands cast soft shadows, and her brooch — of intertwined snakes and ladders — glittered in the candlelight. Looking out from the twin caverns of her eyes, she saw how the flickering of the light was reflected, with remarkable accuracy, on the blurred outlines of her own face; she knew she must look quite authentic to the others.

  She smiled at Louise Ye Armonk. “You’ve invested a great deal of processing power in me.”

  Louise looked a little defensive; she pulled back slightly from the table. “We can afford it. The Northern’s on idle. We’ve plenty of spare capacity.”

  “I wasn’t criticizing. I was thanking you. I can see you’re trying to make me welcome.”

  Mark, sitting beside Lieserl, leaned toward her. “Don’t mind Louise. She’s always been as prickly as a porcupine…”

  Spinner-of-Rope, the girl with the spectacles, said: “A what?”

  “…and that’s why I divorced her.”

  “I divorced him,” Louise Ye Armonk said. “And still couldn’t get rid of him.”

  “Anyway,” Mark said to Lieserl, “maybe you should reserve your thanks until you’ve seen the food.”

  The meal was served by autonomic ’bots. A ’bot — presumably a Virtual — served Mark and Lieserl.

  The meal was what Louise Ye Armonk called “traditional British” — just wh
at somebody called “Brunel” would once have enjoyed, on an occasion like this, she said. Lieserl stared at the plates of simulated animal flesh doubtfully. Still, she enjoyed the wine, and the sensation of fresh fruit; with discreet subvocal commands she allowed herself to become mildly drunk.

  The conversation flowed well enough, but seemed a little stilted, stale to Lieserl.

  During the meal, Trapper-of-Frogs leaned toward her. “Lieserl…”

  “Yes?”

  “Why are you so old?”

  Uvarov, the crippled surgeon, threw back his head and bellowed out his ghastly laughter once more. Trapper looked confused, even distressed. Watching Uvarov, Lieserl felt herself start to incubate a deep, powerful dislike.

  She smiled at Trapper, deliberately. “It’s all right, dear.” She spread her hands, flexing the thin webbing between thumb and forefinger, immersing herself in the new reality of the sensation. “It’s just that this is how I remember myself. I chose this Virtual shell because it reflects how I still feel inside, I suppose.”

  “It’s how you were before you were loaded into the Sun?” Spinner-of-Rope asked.

  “Yes… although by the time I reached my downloading I was quite a bit older than my aspect now. You see, they actually let me die of old age… I was the first person in a long time to do so.”

  She began to tell them of how that had felt — of the blights of age, of rheumy eyes and failing bladders and muscles like pieces of old cloth — but Spinner-of Rope held her hand up. Spinner smiled, her eyes large behind her glasses. “We know, Lieserl. We’ll take you to the forest sometime; we’ll tell you all about it.”

  The meal finished with coffee and brandy, served by the discreet ’bots. Lieserl didn’t much care for the brandy, but she loved the flavor of the coffee. Virtual or not.

  Mark nodded at her appreciation. “The coffee’s authenticity is no accident. I spent years getting its flavor right. After I got stranded in this Virtual form I spent longer on replicating the sensations of coffee than anything.” His blue eyes were bright. “Anything, except maybe those of sex…”