Ring xs-4

by Stephen Baxter

  “Mark, look at this,” she said. “These chairs would fit either of us.”

  Mark had found something — two objects — at the end of the desk; he had the ’bot roll across and pick the objects up. Mark’s face was lit with wonder; he bent to inspect the first object, held before him in the ’bot’s delicate grab. “This is some kind of stylus,” he said. “Could be something as simple as an ink pen…” The ’bot held up the second object. “But this thing is unmistakable, Lieserl. Look at it. It’s a cup.” His hands on his knees, he looked up at her. “The builders of this place must have been gone a million years. But it’s as if they just stepped outside.”

  Uvarov rasped, “Who? I wish you’d speak to me, damn it. What have you found?”

  Mark and Lieserl looked at each other.

  “People,” Lieserl said. “We’ve found people, Uvarov.”

  Mark sat with Louise in her oak-paneled bedroom inside the Great Britain. Mark had called up a Virtual schematic of the Northern’s lifedome; the schematic was a cylinder three feet tall, hovering over her bed. The schematic showed a lifedome which sparkled with glass and light, and the greenery of the forest Deck glowed under the skydome at the crown.

  Louise felt something move inside her; the lifedome looked so beautiful — so fragile.

  She stared around at the familiar polished walls of her room — it was actually two of the old ship’s state rooms, knocked together and converted. Here was the center of her world, if anywhere was; here were her few pieces of old furniture, her clothes, her first, antique data slate — which still contained the engineering sketches of the Great Britain she’d prepared during her first visit to the old ship as a teenager, five million years and half a Universe away. If only, she thought, if only she could pull this room around her like some huge wooden blanket, never to emerge into the complex horrors of the world…

  But here was Mark, politely sitting on the corner of her bed and watching her face. And now he said quietly: “Here it comes, Louise.”

  She forced herself to look at the Virtual of the lifedome.

  Mark pointed at the mid-section of the lifedome. A horizontal line of blue-white light appeared; it shimmered bale-fully against the clear substance of the lifedome, like a sword blade.

  “The string has sliced into us from this side. I guess we can be grateful the relative velocity was actually quite low…”

  The string cut easily into the substance of the dome, like a hot wire into butter.

  Louise, watching in the silence of her room, felt as if the string were cutting into her own body; she imagined she could hear the shriek of lost air, the screams of her helpless human charges.

  Mark looked blank as his processors worked. He said rapidly, “The wake took a slice out of the hull tens of yards thick. Lethe. We’re losing a lot of air, Louise, but the self repair systems are working well… A lot of our infrastructure has gone down quickly — too damn quickly; I think we need to take a look at our redundancies again, if we make it through this…”

  “And the Decks? What’s happening in there?”

  He hesitated. “I can’t tell, Louise.”

  She felt useless; the control panels in the room mocked her with their impotence. She felt the blame for this ghastly accident fall on her shoulders, like a tangible weight. I’m responsible for bollixing up those distance evaluation routines. I’m responsible for insufficient redundancy — and for losing touch with Spinner-of-Rope in the cage, just when we need her most. If only I could talk to Spinner, maybe she could get us out of here. If only —

  “The geometry of the string is just as theory predicted,” Mark said. “I’m getting measurements of pi in the regions around the string… 3.1402, compared to the flat-space value of 3.1415926… The conical space has an angle deficit of four minutes of arc.

  “At this moment we have a quarter-mile length of string, actually inside the lifedome, Louise. That’s a total mass of four hundred billion billion tons.” Mark looked bemused. “Life, Louise, think about that; that’s the mass of a fair sized moon…”

  Her introspection was futile. The destruction of the life dome could be suddenly — mere seconds away. And, in the end, she was helpless. All I could do, in those last, frantic moments, was sound the damn klaxon…

  There was a whisper of spider-web light above Spinner. She could see how the string made the stars slide across the sky, just above the lifedome. The encroaching string was like the foregathering of some huge, supernatural storm around the Northern.

  Don’t be afraid…

  She twisted in her couch and tightened her restraints. “What in Lethe do you expect me to be?” she yelled at Poole. “We’ve been hit by a length of cosmic string, damn it. This could finish us off. I have to get us out of here.” She placed her hands on the waldoes. “But I don’t know what to do. Louise? Louise, can you hear me?”

  You know she can’t.

  Feverishly, Spinner said, “Maybe we’re already hit; maybe that’s why the connection went down. But what if she managed to program a routine into the waldoes before we lost the connection? Maybe — ”

  Come on, Spinner-of-Rope. You know that’s not true.

  “But I have to move the ship!” she wailed. The thump of her heartbeat sounded impossibly loud in the confined space of the helmet. “Can’t you see that?”

  Yes. Yes, I see that.

  “But I don’t know how — or where — without Louise…”

  A hand rested over hers. Despite the thickness of her glove fabric, she could feel the warm roughness of Michael Poole’s palm.

  I will help you. I’ll show you what you must do.

  The invisible fingers tightened, pushing her hands against the waldoes. Behind her, the nightfighter opened its wings.

  Morrow, crumpled against the Deck beside the crushed body of Planner Milpitas, stared up into the wake of the cosmic string.

  The structure of the middle Decks was fragile; it simply imploded into the string wake. Morrow saw homes which had stood for a thousand years rip loose from the Deck surfaces as if in the grip of some immense tornado; the buildings exploded, and metal sheets spun through the air. The newer structures, spun across the air in zero-gee, crumpled easily as the wake passed. Much of the surface of Deck Two was torn loose and tumbled above him, chunks of metal clattering into each other. Morrow saw patterns of straight lines and arcs on those fragments of Deck: shards of the soulless circular geometry which had dominated the Deck’s layout for centuries.

  People, scattered in the air like dolls, clattered against each other in the wake. The string passed through a Temple. The golden tetrahedron — the proudest symbol of human culture — collapsed like a burst balloon around the path of the string, and shards of gold-brown glass, long and lethal, hailed through the air.

  And now the string passed through another human body, that of a hapless woman. Morrow heard the banal, mundane sounds of her death: a scream, abruptly cut off, a moist, ripping sound, and the crunch of bone, sounding like a bite into a crisp apple.

  The woman’s body, distorted out of recognition, was cast aside; tumbling, it impacted softly with the Deck.

  The wake of a cosmic string… The wake was the mechanism that had constructed the large-scale structure of the Universe. It was the seed of galaxies. And we have let it loose inside our ship, Morrow thought.

  Once the string passed through the lifedome completely, the Northern would die at last, as surely as a body severed from its head…

  Morrow, immersed in his own pain, wanted to close his eyes, succumb to the oblivion of unconsciousness. Was this how it was to end, after a thousand years?

  But the quality of the noise above him — the rush of air, the screams — seemed to change.

  He stared up.

  The string, still cutting easily through the structure, had slowed to a halt.

  “Mark,” Louise hissed. “What’s happening?”

  The string had cut a full quarter-mile into the lifedome. For a mom
ent the blue glowing string hovered, like a scalpel embedded in flesh.

  Then the Virtual display came to life once more. The electric-blue string executed a tight curve and sliced its way back out of the lifedome, exiting perhaps a quarter-mile above its entry point.

  Louise wished there was a god, to offer up her thanks.

  “It’s done a lot more damage on the way out — but we are left with an intact lifedome,” Mark said. “The ’bots and autonomic systems are sealing up the breaches in the hull.” He looked up at Louise. “I think we’ve made it.”

  Louise, floating above her bed, hugged her knees against her chest. “But I don’t understand how, Mark.”

  “Spinner-of-Rope saved us,” Mark said simply. “She opened up the discontinuity drive and took us away from there at half lightspeed — and in just the right direction. See?” Mark pointed. “She pulled the ship backwards, and away from the string.”

  She looked into his familiar, tired eyes, and wished she could hug him to her. “It was Spinner-of-Rope. You’re right. It must have been. But the voice link to Spinner was one of the first things we lost. And we certainly didn’t have time to work up routines for the waldoes.”

  “In fact, we’re still out of touch with Spinner,” Mark said.

  “So how did she know?” Louise studied the scarred Virtual lifedome. “The trajectory she chose to get us out of this was almost perfect, Mark. How did she know?”

  Spinner-of-Rope buried her faceplate in her gloves; within her environment suit she trembled, uncontrollably.

  It’s over, Spinner. You did well. It’s time to look ahead.

  “No,” she said. “The string hit the ship. The deaths, the injuries — ”

  Don’t dwell on it. You did all you could.

  “Really? And did you, Michael Poole?” she spat.

  What do you mean?

  “Couldn’t you have helped us more? Couldn’t you have warned us that the thing was coming?”

  He laughed, softly and sadly. I’m sorry, Spinner. I’m not superhuman. I didn’t have any more warning than your people. I’m pretty much bound by the laws of physics, just as you are…

  She dropped her hands and thumped the side of the couch. There was still no link — voice or data — to Louise, and the rest of the crew. She was isolated out here — stuck in the pilot’s cage of an alien ship, with only a five-million year-old ghost for company.

  She felt a swelling of laughter, inside her chest; she bit it back.

  Spinner-of-Rope?

  “I’m scared, Michael Poole. I’m even scared of you.”

  I don’t blame you. I’m scared of me.

  “I don’t know what to do. What if Louise can’t get back in touch?”

  He was silent for a moment. Then: Look, Spinner, your people can’t stay here. In this time frame, I mean.

  “Why not?”

  Because there’s nothing for you here. The Ring — which you came to find — is ruined. This rubble of string fragments can’t offer you anything.

  “Then what?”

  You have to move on, Spinner. You have to take your people to where they can find shelter and escape. His hands, warm and firm, closed invisibly over hers once more. I’ll show you. Will you trust me?

  “Where are we going?”

  In search of the Ring.

  “But — but the Ring is here. And it’s destroyed. You said so yourself.”

  Yes, he said patiently. But it wasn’t always so…

  30

  The ’bot rolled fussily across the floor, its fat wheels crunching over the dust it had brought in from the surface of the neutron star planet. It held a bundle of sensors out before it on a flexible arm. Light, brilliant white, glared from the sensor arm. The way the ’bot held out its sensor pack was rather prissy, Lieserl thought, as if the ’bot didn’t quite approve of what it was being forced to inspect in here.

  The ’bot rolled up to one of the four chairs and sniffed at it cautiously.

  “There’s exotic matter here,” Mark said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “The ’bot has found exotic matter,” Mark repeated evenly. “Somewhere inside the building.”

  Uvarov growled from the pod, “But we’ve seen no evidence of wormhole construction here. And that structure is too small to house a wormhole Interface.”

  “I’m just reporting what the ’bot’s telling me,” Mark snapped, letting his irritation show. “Maybe we should gather a few more facts before wasting our time speculating, Uvarov.”

  The ’bot was still lingering close to one of the chairs — the second from the left of the row of four, Lieserl noted irrelevantly. As she watched, the ’bot extended more arms, unfolded more packages of sensor equipment; it loomed over the chair menacingly, like some mechanical spider.

  Mark walked up to the ’bot, his face expressionless. “It’s somewhere inside the chair. The exoticity…”

  “Inside the chair?” Lieserl felt like laughing, almost hysterically. “What happened, did someone drop exotic matter down behind the cushion while watching a Virtual show?”

  He glared at her. “Come on, Lieserl. There is a construct of exotic matter embedded in this chair. It’s tiny — only a few fractions of an inch across — but it’s there.” He turned to the ’bot. “Maybe we can cook up some kind of magnified Virtual image…”

  Pixels swirled before Lieserl’s face, brushing her cheeks intangibly; she stepped back.

  The pixels coalesced into a crude sketch, suspended in the air. It looked like a jewel — clear, complete and seamless hanging before her. There were hints of further structure inside, not yet resolved by the ’bot’s imaging systems.

  She recognized the form.

  “Lethe. Another tetrahedron,” she said.

  “Yes. Another tetrahedron… The form seems to have become a badge of humanity, doesn’t it? But this one is barely a sixteenth of an inch across.”

  Pixels of all colors hailed through the interior of the little tetrahedron, as if scrambling for coherence. Lieserl caught elusive, tantalizing hints of structure. At one point it seemed that she could see another, smaller tetrahedron forming, nested inside the first — just as this construct was nested inside the tetrahedral form of the base as a whole. She wondered if the whole of this structure was like a Russian doll, with a series of tetrahedra snuggled neatly inside each other…

  The magnified image was rather pleasing, she thought. It reminded her of the toy she’d had during her lightning-brief childhood: a tiny village immersed in a globe of water, with frozen people and plastic snowflakes… Thinking that, she felt a brief, incongruous pang of regret that her childhood, even as unsatisfactory as it had been, was now so remote.

  “Well, my exotic matter grain is in there somewhere,” Mark said. “But the ’bot is having trouble getting any further resolution.” He looked confused. “Lieserl, there’s something very strange inside that little tetrahedral box.”

  She kept her face expressionless; at times it was quite convenient to be a Virtual — it gave her such control. Strange. Right. But what could be stranger than to be here: on the planet of a neutron star hurtling at lightspeed across the battlefield at the end of time? What can make things stranger than that?

  “There’s a droplet of neutron superfluid in there,” Mark said. He peered into the formless interior of the tetrahedron, as if by sheer willpower he might force it to give up its secrets. “Highly dense, at enormous temperatures and pressures… Lieserl, the tetrahedron contains matter at conditions you’d expect to find deep in the interior of a neutron star — in a region beneath the solid crust, called the mantle. That’s what the ’bot is trying to see into.”

  Lieserl stared at the swirling mists inside the tetrahedron. She knew that a neutron star had the mass of a normal star, but compressed into a globe only a few miles in diameter. The matter was so dense that electrons and protons were forced together into neutrons; this superfluid of neutrons was a hundred billion billion times as
dense as water.

  “If that’s so, how are the pressures contained? This construct is like a bomb, waiting to go off.”

  He shook his head. “Well, it looks as if the people who built this place found a way. And the construct may have been stable for a long time — millions of years, perhaps. You know, I wish we had more time to spend here. We don’t even know how old this base is — from how many years beyond our time this technology dates.”

  “But why construct such a thing?” She stared into the tetrahedron. “Why fill a little box with reconstructed neutron star material? Mark, do you think this was some kind of laboratory, for studying neutron star conditions?”

  Uvarov’s ruined voice brayed laughter into her ears. “A laboratory? My dear woman, this is a war zone; I think basic science was unlikely to be on the agenda for the men and women who built this base. Besides, this neutron star is hardly typical. The people who came here placed discontinuity-drive engines at the star’s pole, and drove it across space at close to lightspeed. Now, what research purpose do you think that served?”

  Mark ignored him. He squatted down on his haunches before the image and peered up at it; the glow of the shifting pixels inside the tetrahedron cast highlights from his face and environment suit. “I don’t think the stuff in there was reconstructed, Lieserl.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it.” He pointed at the image. “We know there is exotic matter in there… and as far as we know the primary purpose of exotic matter is the construction of spacetime wormholes. I think there’s a wormhole Interface in there, Lieserl.”

  She frowned. “Wormhole mouths are hundreds of yards — or miles — across.”

  He straightened up. “That’s true of the Interfaces we can construct. Who knows what will be possible in the future? Or rather — ”

  “We know what you mean,” Uvarov snapped from the pod.