Xeelee: Vengeance

by Stephen Baxter

  But Martians, said Harry, were a self-reliant, ornery, argumentative bunch who were the bane of his life. So one more complaint from Jack Grantt, Poole thought, wouldn’t really make much difference.

  ‘. . . It is him. I told you. The tattoo on his forehead gives it away.’

  ‘It doesn’t look right, though. The tattoo.’

  ‘That’s because his was one of the first, dummy. Must have been if you think about it. They hadn’t got it stylised yet . . .’

  Two young people came drifting down towards them, from a sky full of houses.

  A male and a female, they looked alike, with tousled blond hair grown long and tied back. Clear blue eyes. They might have been seventeen, eighteen. Wearing loose, practical coveralls, with knees and lower sleeves dirty, they looked as if they’d come straight from farmyard chores. And they both had stylised tetrahedral sigils, picked out in lime green, on their foreheads.

  Grantt clucked. ‘Stop staring, you two; you’ve no manners. Yes, it’s him. Michael Poole, meet Flammarion; her brother is Weinbaum. My stepchildren.’

  Poole made a double-take. ‘Stepchildren?’

  The girl snorted. ‘That’s typical of you, Jack. The most important person in the Solar System comes visiting, and you didn’t tell us about him. You didn’t even tell him about us.’

  Grantt looked weary rather than embarrassed. ‘If I owe anybody an apology, fine.’

  Poole said, ‘I met step-children before, years back. You married again, Jack?’

  He nodded. ‘I’ll introduce you to Tania. These kids lost their father during the evacuation. Lots of broken families, here in Chiron. Lots of new families being put together. Like a living jigsaw.’

  ‘Well, I’m happy for you.’ Poole studied the boy. ‘Weinbaum, though. An Anthropocene-era fiction writer, yes? I heard of him.’

  The boy looked puzzled. ‘No, it’s a crater on Mars. Or was.’

  Grantt said, ‘Another fashion. People have started naming their kids after features on Mars – so we don’t forget, you see – and some of the youngsters, like these two, have adopted names of their own. They were six and seven years old when the Cage came down. But of course those features were named in the first place after mythological entities and famous figures and whatnot from Earth. I know Flammarion was an astronomer.’

  The girl eyed Poole critically. ‘You’re not as tall as you look in the Virtual dramas.’

  He grinned. ‘I’ve heard that before. They use actors. Even in the documentary features, they clean up the imagery.’

  ‘You should have had that tattoo fixed,’ Weinbaum said, glancing at Poole’s forehead. ‘Although it has got a kind of primitive authenticity.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Ours were properly designed.’

  ‘Some people are programming it into their genes,’ Weinbaum said. ‘So your baby is born with the tattoo. The Sigil of Free Humanity. But we think that’s wrong. It makes more sense if the child has to choose to wear it, or not, when it grows up. Some people are having a kind of ceremony when the tattoo is made.’

  ‘Like a baptism,’ Jack Grantt said, with a warning look at Poole.

  Poole longed to turn away from the intense gaze of these two bright, hardworking teenagers, with their vivid tattoos. He wasn’t sure if it was worse to be worshipped or reviled. Either way, he suspected he spent too much of his time these days hiding away from it all. ‘I’m no messiah,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Maybe not. But you’re all we’ve got.’ Grantt tried and failed to put an arm around Poole’s Virtual shoulders, an instinctive category error that reminded Poole of his mother. ‘Come on. Look, I arranged for you to give a talk at our school later. I’m sure you won’t mind that. But for now, come see what we’ve been doing out here. We don’t just play at farmer in the sky . . .’

  Grantt led Poole up an ice stalk to one of the more complex structures. It turned out to be a cluster of workrooms. There were people apparently on duty in here, and the space was heavy with information technology, with softscreens on the walls, and Virtual figures, abstract and figurative, that floated in the air.

  ‘This,’ Grantt said cryptically, ‘is where we keep our own eye on the Xeelee. And where we entertain guests.’

  ‘Guests?’

  They turned a corner, and Poole found himself facing Highsmith Marsden and Miriam Berg, both shimmering with the faint, glistening unreality of Virtual projections.

  66

  Poole and Miriam stood in the gentle gravity, facing each other. One projected from Jovian orbit, the other from the Oort Cloud.

  At length Poole said, ‘Not like you to be lost for words, Miriam.’

  ‘On the other hand,’ she snapped back, ‘it is entirely like you. Do you even remember when we last met in person?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘I’ll tell you. Eight years ago. Not long after the Displacement, when Highsmith and I came out to Cold Earth in person for one of Harry’s super-secret summits. Creeping across the outer System for two hundred days in a low-thrust, low-emission GUTship . . . And it’s not actually face to face now, is it?’

  Highsmith Marsden was grinning, his grey-white hair a drifting halo in the low gravity. ‘Oh, must you behave so, you too? All this fencing. Sometimes you seem so immature I find myself looking for gills. Miriam, give him a hug.’

  Their collision, two Virtual spin-offs embracing, was uncomfortable. Then Poole stopped thinking and gave in to the moment.

  Holding him tight, she whispered sternly, ‘You haven’t changed, Michael. I don’t believe the hype about you, for good or ill, any more than you do yourself. But we’ve got work to do. So pull yourself together.’

  Grantt smiled. ‘And come see what the Xeelee is doing to our Solar System.’

  He led them through the rest of the rooms, where technicians adjusted displays, and earnest-looking observers made notes on softscreens. Virtual models of planets and moons hung in the air.

  Highsmith Marsden looked on with apparent approval. ‘A museum of orreries. We have a very similar set-up back on Gallia Three.’

  Grantt said, ‘Of course we share all our data and interpretations with Earth, Gallia and other refuges. But here’s our intelligence-gathering operation in action. Not that things change much day to day. The Xeelee is nothing if not deliberate.’

  In one room the Caged Worlds were shown. These were the major bodies once inhabited by large numbers of humans, and now on notice of destruction by the cherry-red frames which trapped them. By this point they included Earth’s detached Moon, and Venus, where lava gushed through a thick layer of an atmosphere long since frozen out by mankind’s sunshield. Even Mercury. And Mars, of course. The first victim. Mars was almost featureless now, Poole saw. Even the great Tharsis volcanoes had slumped. Islands of a kind of dark slag floated on a global ocean of sullenly glowing magma. After ten years enough energy had been injected into that world to melt the planet’s fifty-kilometres-thick crust almost entirely. But still that Cage kept the planet pinned.

  ‘We think,’ Marsden said, ‘that with time, the Xeelee, or its devices, will dismantle Mars entirely. And ultimately, presumably, all the Solar System’s planets and moons – first, those which have, or had, trace human populations, but we see no reason why it should stop there. This will take some time. It’s estimated that it will take fourteen centuries to pour in enough energy to take Mars apart, for example. We know the giants – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune – are receiving attention too. We had to evacuate our stations in the high clouds. Some different kind of gravity weapon, it seems, missiles sent down into their interiors. A long-term destabilisation seems to be under way. Perhaps, ultimately, implosions will—’

  ‘And the smaller worlds? The lesser moons, the asteroids?’

  ‘The Dust Plague,’ Grantt said grimly. ‘Come take a look.’

  He
led them to another room, which hosted a big schematic display of clusters of the minor worlds and asteroids of the Solar System. These images were returned by the high-inclination Eyrie stations, which were still crewed, and ran as silent as the rest. The asteroid belt, a ring around the Sun, sparkled with light, the markers of attacks, as it had in such representations for a decade.

  ‘This all began with the Cache,’ Grantt said. ‘And the Paragons who inhabit it. They’re still producing Probes – and you know that one of those babies can entirely dismantle a body seventy kilometres across in a single blow.’

  ‘Beyond that, however,’ Marsden said, and Poole thought his tone sounded very pedantic-scholar for such a narrative of destruction, ‘as we have been monitoring, what we call the Dust Plague continues. Quasi-biological technology, using the mass-energy of our asteroids against them: converting debris to weapons to take out yet more asteroids.

  ‘Quasi-biological: we have been observing this self-replicating strategy for some time, but now we think in fact that to achieve this the Xeelee may have unleashed yet another kind of life in the Solar System. Another of their client species? Another relic from the early days of the universe? These seem to be nasty little knots of animated spacetime – quite unlike anything we’ve seen before. Feeding on the gravitational binding energy of the very objects they destroy. Eating them from the inside out, bursting them open, to make more copies of themselves. And so it spreads, until nothing is left. Ultimately even the smallest bodies, even pebbles in the sky, will be reduced to dust.’

  Miriam regarded the images. ‘With the benefit of hindsight we think we can discern distinct phases in the Xeelee’s attack. After the initial emergence from the wormhole, and its gathering of equipment and energy from Mercury and the Sun, it unleashed its initial Probes to test us, to explore. Then followed its programme of targeted destruction of inhabited worlds and bodies: from Mars, Earth and Moon to the smallest deep-space habitat. Now it is proceeding to assail bodies where we have yet to establish a significant presence, resources we have yet to tap: the giant planets, the uninhabited rocky worlds and moons, the asteroids and comets. All of it. And surely the wave of destruction will expand beyond the planetery System, to the Kuiper Belt, ultimately the Oort Cloud. So that we can never recover, I suppose: not here, in the Solar System, at any rate. But as Jack says, this programme will take some time to complete.’

  Grantt said, ‘And that gives us a fighting chance. For now there’s a healthy number of humans surviving in the Solar System. In fact because Earth itself survived, most of humanity, in terms of the pre-Xeelee population, is still alive.’

  Most. Poole turned away at that word. He felt Miriam’s Virtual hand slip into his.

  Highsmith Marsden proclaimed, ‘It can’t be doubted that the Xeelee strategy has been flawed – well, that’s clear, if even a fraction of humanity still has a decent chance to survive. We know that the Xeelee had to wait until the human creation of a wormhole before it could complete its journey here from the future; by definition we already had an off-planet presence by then. We were already scattered, and couldn’t be caught by a single strike on Earth, for instance.

  ‘Since it arrived it has moved on us slowly, deliberately, remorselessly – but without covering our avenues of retreat, such as out to the Kuipers and the Oort Cloud. It seems to have created no global observation post such as our own Eyries. Perhaps its previous experiences have shaped it. Perhaps it did not expect us to be so resourceful, so elusive.’

  Poole thought that over. ‘And maybe that’s how we managed to beat them in the Exultant War. Or would have.’

  Marsden eyed him. ‘And if that means that you are one of the most highly developed intelligences in the Galaxy, then I despair, Michael Poole, I despair.’

  Grantt went on, ‘So we have this interval, this respite, and we have to use it wisely. We of Chiron have figured out a plan of our own . . .’

  Another room, another display.

  Chiron was actually a relative newcomer to the planetery Solar System, Poole learned now. It had probably begun its existence as a bit of orbiting debris in the Kuiper Belt, beyond Pluto, left over from the formation of the planets. Chance encounters with other bodies, collisions or gravitational slingshots, had brought it drifting into the inner System, and had jostled it into this present orbit, looping between Saturn and Uranus.

  ‘But it’s probably only been here for ten million years or less,’ Grantt said. ‘And, left alone, in ten more million years close encounters with Saturn or Uranus would probably have thrown it out of its current orbit. After that, maybe it would sail close to the Sun and become a short-period comet; maybe it would collide with Saturn or Jupiter. Or – it might be flung out of the System altogether.’

  Miriam smiled. ‘Ah. And maybe if you give it the subtlest nudge, next time you sail close to Saturn—’

  ‘That’s the idea. Chiron’s escape from the Solar System can be made to look natural. No cause for alarm, for the Xeelee. And then we’ll ride a slow boat to the stars. Even if we aim right, it will be millennia before any kind of landfall, but Chiron has all we need to survive. After that – well, if the Xeelee doesn’t hunt us down, we’ll see what the future brings.’

  Poole turned to Miriam. ‘And you? Gallia Three is hiding in the Trojans right now – in Jupiter’s orbit, that much closer in than Chiron.’

  ‘And at a stable location, gravitationally,’ she said. ‘If we wander out of there it won’t be nearly as convincing in terms of fooling the Xeelee. Which is one reason we aren’t going anywhere soon. But the Xeelee’s programme of asteroid-busting will reach the Trojans eventually.’

  Marsden nodded. ‘I am determined that even if we must move the habitat, we will not flee. We were the first human sanctuary to go stealthed – as you will remember, Michael Poole, at my recommendation, right at the beginning of all this, despite a squawk of objections. And we have achieved a great deal. I believe that we have a duty to leave at least one human community inside the System that birthed us, even as the rest scatter.’

  Grantt nodded. ‘I don’t envy you. But I can see that’s the right thing to do.’ He turned to Poole. ‘But that leaves the biggest issue, of course. The largest human refuge of all.’

  ‘Earth,’ Miriam said. ‘A billion people. Stuck on a world slowly turning into a huge cryogenic lab. What next for them?’

  ‘We’re working on it,’ Poole said bluntly.

  Marsden looked at the Virtual images, hanging in the air around them. ‘There is a kind of abstract, silent beauty in all this. Mars has rings, now, like Saturn.

  ‘But this phase won’t last long. The Xeelee may take a hundred thousand years to finish the job. But in geological terms, or astrophysical, that’s a blink of an eye. And after that blink the Solar System will be rubble,’ he said brutally. ‘Less than rubble. Dust. All of it. It will be as if the Solar System has been taken back to its birth, when there was nothing but the young Sun and a disc of rubble, yet to form into the planets. Nothing here save the Sun, and the dust, and the Xeelee.’

  Marsden gazed into the Virtual sunlight. ‘I was born on Earth, you know. I grew up in Achinet, in fact. We were not rich, not well-connected. But I was privileged. For no human child will ever again be raised as I was, under the open sky.’ He faced Poole, and gripped his arm hard, Virtual flesh against Virtual flesh. ‘Make it pay, Michael Poole. I will do all I can to give you the tools you need. Make the Xeelee pay.’

  Poole stayed a week on Chiron.

  He spent time with Flammarion and Weinbaum and their friends, all of them sporting tetrahedron tattoos. Most of these youngsters were already forgetting there had ever been any other world than this, the heart of a centaur, to grow up in, and they had no need to forgive Poole for what he had done to Earth. Poole hoped some of the sense of renewal that he got from these kids would transmit back to his original, on Cold Earth.

 
Miriam and Marsden uploaded back to Gallia on the sixth day. Poole suspected he would never see Miriam again; not for the first time, he had plans, not yet revealed. He sensed she had the same intuition. Their farewell wasn’t cold, but it seemed perfunctory. A brief embrace. A lost future. They parted with secrets.

  On the seventh and last day Grantt threw a party. Poole morbidly called it a wake, for his short-lived Virtual.

  Then, that evening, there came at last the time for the transmission back to Earth, the uploading back to his original. Because of the need for stealth, the timing was quite precise, a question of obscure algorithms; transmission directions and timings had to be optimised for minimal detectability, given the relative positions of the Xeelee and its known agents in the Solar System.

  And it was because of this last-minute analysis of the Xeelee’s movements that this copy of Poole became aware of a striking new development, just as he prepared for his own Virtual death.

  Across the Solar System the Xeelee’s great projects continued unhindered. The Cache remained, a source of Probes, a refuge for Paragons and Dust Plague fabricators and other entities.

  But the Xeelee had gone.

  67

  ad 3665

  On the fifteenth anniversary of the Displacement, Poole and Nicola called a meeting in the family compound on Princess Elizabeth Land – a location that was no longer among the coldest on the planet, as Poole reflected with bleak humour every time he came here.

  Of course no Poole family gathering was without an agenda. This time it was Poole and Nicola who had an announcement to make. So they gathered in the lounge: Michael, Harry, Muriel – Gea too – were all here, and Shamiso Emry. They sat with drinks. Poole was handed a single malt by Harry, serving bots being rare nowadays – though not so rare as the malt whisky itself. At first the talk was quiet. Poole sat still for only a little of it.