Vacuum Diagrams

by Stephen Baxter

  "Comms Officer, what is your answer?"

  "I must consult."

  "Please hurry. I am desperate."

  Thet's smile broadened as the minute passed. Rodi realized that the metamorphosis was a liberation for her; she made a much better warrior than missionary.

  "Time's up, Rodi."

  "Integrality? We will do as you say."

  "Thank you!"

  And Rodi slammed the flitter into hyperspace; Thet snarled.

  The Exaltation was beginning to split up.

  The Arks, the metamorphosed battleships, continued to drop into three-space... but they returned battered and bleeding, and there were fewer each time.

  The bulk of the fleet, now isolated from infection, cruised on its way.

  Rodi probed at his feelings. Had he betrayed his race by wrecking this grand design?

  But the stratagem itself had been a betrayal — of the generations who had lived and died in the Exaltation, and, yes, of the ideal of the Integrality itself.

  He wondered if Gren's hypothesis, of a key embedded in fragments of poetry, could hold truth. It seemed fantastic... and yet the fragments of verse had indeed been laid there, like a trail. Perhaps there were a dozen keys, scattered across the light years and centuries, reinforcing each other — some perhaps even embedded in the structure of the space through which the Exaltation must pass.

  Or perhaps, Rodi thought bleakly, no key was necessary. He thought of Thet. She, in retrospect, had been all too willing to throw over the ideals of the Integrality, and indulge in warfare once more — key or no key.

  But the perpetrators of this epochal plot had been too clever. In their search for a fine lie they had stumbled on a truth — the truth at the heart of the Integrality's philosophy — and that truth, Rodi realized, was driving him to act as he did.

  And so in the end it was the truth which had betrayed them.

  Rodi would never see his parents again.

  But the Exaltation would go on. He could join another Ark, and—

  Thet's voice hissed through the distorted inseparability net. "I know... you've done..."

  Unity Ark loomed in his monitors, its bulk cutting him off from the Exaltation.

  "Thet. There's no point—"

  The flitter slammed.

  "...next time..."

  Roaring with frustration he dropped into three-space, emerging poised over the Ring.

  Unity Ark closed, bristling with weapons. Thet's image was clear. "It's over, Rodi."

  Rodi took his hands from the controls. He felt very tired. "Okay, Thet. You're right. It's over. We're both cut off from the Exaltation. We're stranded here. Kill me if you like."

  Unity Ark exploded at him. Thet stared into his eyes.

  Then she cried out, as if in pain.

  The Ark veered sideways, avoiding Rodi, and disappeared into the mist at the heart of the Ring.

  "Integrality calling Comms Officer."

  "This is the Comms Officer."

  "How are you?"

  "I am not the one who spoke to you previously. My mother died in the recent convocation."

  "...I'm sorry."

  "Did we succeed?"

  In simple terms, Rodi told the story.

  "So, in the end, Thet spared you. Why?"

  "I don't know. Perhaps the futility of it all got through to her. Perhaps she realized that with all contact with the Exaltation lost her best chance of survival was to take the Ark away, try for a new beginning in some fresh Universe..." And perhaps some lingering human feeling had in the end triumphed over the programing.

  "But now you are stranded, Rodi. You have lost your family."

  "...Yes."

  "You are welcome here. You could join my sexual grouping. The surgery required is superficial—"

  Rodi laughed. "Thank you. But that's well beyond my resources."

  "What, then?"

  He remembered Darby's wise kindness. If the Lunar colonists welcomed him, perhaps the loss of his family would grow less painful...

  "We will remember you, and your Integrality."

  "Thank you, Comms Officer."

  Rodi turned the battered flitter and set course for the Moon.

  Fragments of humanity. Relics of forgotten battles, aborted assaults...

  Here was the most extravagant mission of all.

  Once the system had been a spectacular binary pair, adorning some galaxy lost in the sky. Then one of the stars had suffered a supernova explosion, briefly and gloriously outshining its parent galaxy. The explosion had destroyed any planets, and damaged the companion star. After that, the remnant neutron star slowly cooled, glitching as it spun like some giant stirring in its sleep, while its companion star shed its life-blood hydrogen fuel over the neutron star's wizened flesh. Slowly, a ring of companion-gas formed around the neutron star, and the system's strange, spectral second system of planets coalesced.

  Then human beings had come here.

  The humans soared about the system, surveying. They settled on the largest planet in the smoke ring. They threw microscopic wormhole mouths into the cooling corpse of the neutron star, and down through the wormholes they poured devices and human-analogues, made robust enough to survive in the neutron star's impossibly rigorous environment.

  The devices and human-analogues had been tiny, like finely jeweled toys.

  The human-analogues and their devices swarmed to a magnetic pole of the neutron star, and great machines were erected there: discontinuity drives, perhaps powered by the immense energy reserves of the neutron star itself.

  Slowly at first, then with increasing acceleration, the neutron star — dragging its attendant companion, ring and planets with it — was forced out of its parent galaxy and thrown across space, a bullet of stellar mass fired at almost light speed.

  "A bullet," I said. "Yes. An apt term."

  A bullet directed at the heart of the Xeelee Project.

  "But," Eve said, "when the single, immense shot had been fired, little thought was given to those abandoned within the star, their usefulness over..."[5]

  Hero

  A.D. 193,474

  WHEN THEA WORE THE HERO'S SUIT, Waving became extraordinary.

  Breathless, she swept from the leafy fringe of the Crust forest and down, down through the Mantle's vortex lines, until it seemed she could plunge deep into the bruised-purple heart of the Quantum Sea itself!

  Was this how life had been, before the Core Wars? Oh, how she wished she had been born into the era of her grandparents — before the Wars — instead of these dreary, starving times.

  She turned her face towards the South Pole, that place where all the vortex lines converged in a pink, misty infinity. She surged on through the Air, drowning her wistfulness and doubt in motion...

  But there was something in the way.

  Everyone had heard of the Hero, of course. The Hero myth was somehow more vivid to Thea than, say, the legends of the Ur-humans, who (it was said) had come from beyond the Star to build people to live here in the Mantle — and who then, after the Core Wars, had abandoned them. Perhaps it was because the Hero was of her own world, not of some misty, remote past.

  Even as she grew older — and she came to understand how dull and without prospect her parents' world really was — Thea longed for the Hero, in his suit of silver, to come floating up through the sky to take her away from the endless, drudging poverty of this life of hunting and scavenging at the fringe of the Crust forest.

  But by the time she reached the age of fifteen she'd come to doubt that the Hero really existed: in the struggle to survive amid the endless debris of the Core Wars, the Hero was just too convenient a wish-fulfilling myth to be credible.

  She certainly never expected to meet him.

  "Thea! Thea!"

  Snug inside her cocoon of woven spin-spider webbing, Thea kept her eyecups clamped closed. Her sister, Lur, was eighteen — three years older than Thea — and yet, Thea thought sourly, she still had the thin, grating t
ones of an adolescent. Just like a kid, especially when she was scared—

  Scared.

  The thought jolted Thea awake. She struggled to free her arms of the cocoon's clinging webbing, and pushed her face out into the cool Air. She shook her head to clear clouded Air out of her sleep-rimmed eyecups.

  Thea cast brisk, efficient glances around the treacherous sky. Lur was still calling her name. Danger was approaching, then. But from where?

  Thea's world was the Mantle of the Star, an immense cavern of yellow-white Air bounded above by the Crust and below by the Quantum Sea. The Crust itself was a rich, matted ceiling, purple-streaked with krypton grass and the graceful curves of tree trunks. Far below Thea, the Sea formed a floor to the world, mist-shrouded and indistinct. All around her, filling the Air between Crust and Sea, the vortex lines were an electric-blue cage. The lines filled space in a hexagonal array spaced about ten mansheights apart; they swept around the Star from the far upflux — the North — and arced past her like the trajectories of immense, graceful animals, converging at last into the soft red blur that was the South Pole, millions of mansheights away.

  Thea's people lived at the lower, leafy fringe of the Crust forest. Their cocoons were suspended from the trees' outer branches, soft forms among the shiny, neutrino-opaque leaves; and as the humans emerged they looked — Thea thought with a contempt that surprised her — like bizarre animals: metamorphosing creatures of the forest, not human at all. But the cries of children, the frightened, angry shouts of adults, were far too human... The tribe's small herd of Air-pigs, too, were squealing in unison, thrashing inside the loose net that bound them together, and staining the Air green with their jetfarts.

  But where was the danger?

  She held her fingers up before her face, trying to judge the spacing and pattern of the vortex lines. Were they drifting, becoming unstable?

  Twice already in Thea's short life, the Star had been struck by Glitches — starquakes. During a Glitch, the vortex lines would come sliding up through the Air, infinite and deadly, scything through the soft matter of the Crust forest — and humans, and their belongings — as if they were no more substantial than spoiled Air-pig meat...

  But today the lines of quantized spin looked stable: only the regular cycles of bunching which humans used to count their time marred the lines' stately progress.

  Then what? A spin-spider, perhaps? But spiders lived in the open Air, building their webs across the vortex lines; they wouldn't venture into the forest.

  She saw Lur, now; her sister was trying to Wave towards her, obviously panicking, her limbs uncoordinated, thrashing at the Magfield. Lur was pointing past Thea, still shouting something—

  There was a breath of Air at Thea's back. A faint shadow.

  She shifted her head to the right, feeling the lip of her cocoon scratch her bare skin.

  A ray, no more than two mansheights away, slid softly towards her.

  Thea froze. Rays were among the forest's deadliest predators. She couldn't possibly get out of the cocoon and away in time — her only hope was to stay still and pray that the ray didn't notice she was here...

  The ray was a translucent cloud a mansheight across. It was built around a thin, cylindrical spine, and six tiny, spherical eyes ringed the babyish maw set into its sketch of a face. The fins were six wide, thin sheets spaced evenly around the body; the fins rippled as the ray moved, electron gas sparkling around their leading edges. The flesh was almost transparent, and Thea could see shadowy fragments of some meal passing along the ray's cylindrical gut.

  The ray came within a mansheight of her. It slowed. She held her breath and willed her limbs into stillness.

  I might live through this yet...

  Then — with ghastly, heart-stopping slowness — the ray swiveled its hexagon of eyes towards her, unmistakably locking onto her face.

  She closed her eyes. Perhaps if she didn't struggle it would be quicker...

  Then, he came.

  There was a blue-white flash: a pillar of electron light that penetrated even her closed eyecups, and ripped through the encroaching silver-gray shadow of the ray.

  She cried out. It was the first sound she had made since waking into this nightmare, she realized dully.

  She opened her eyes. The ray had pulled away from her and was twisting in the air. The ray was being attacked, she saw, disbelieving: a bolt of electron light swept down through the Air and slanted into the ray's misty structure, leaving the broad fins in crudely torn shreds. The ray emitted a high, thin keening; it tried to twist its head around to tear into this light-demon—

  No, Thea saw now; this was no bolt of light, no demon: this was a man, a man who had wrapped his arms around the thin torso of the ray and was squeezing it, crushing the life out of the creature even as she watched.

  She hung in her cocoon, even her fear dissolving in wonder. It was a man, true, but like no man she'd seen before. Instead of ropes and ponchos of Air-pig leather, this stranger wore an enclosing suit of some supple, silver-black substance that crackled with electron gas as he moved. Even his head was enclosed, with a clear plate before his face. There was a blade — a sword, of the same gleaming substance as the suit — tucked into his belt.

  The ray stopped struggling. Fragments of half-digested leaf matter spewed from its gaping mouth, and its eyestalks folded in towards the center of its face.

  The man pushed the corpse away from him. For a moment his shoulders seemed to hunch, as if he were weary; with gloved hands he brushed at his suit, dislodging shreds of ray flesh which clung there.

  Thea stared, still in her cocoon, unable to take her eyes from his shimmering movements.

  Now the man turned to Thea. With a single, feathery beat of his legs he Waved to her. The suit was of some black material inlaid with silvery whirls and threads. Apart from a large seam down the front of the chest, the suit was an unbroken whole, complete like an spin-spider eggshell. Behind the half-reflective helmet plate she could see a face — surprisingly thin, with two dark eyecups. When he spoke, his voice was harsh, but sounded as natural as if he were one of her own people.

  "Are you all right? Are you hurt?"

  Before Thea could answer Lur came Waving clumsily out of the sky, her small breasts shaking. Lur grabbed at Thea's cocoon and clung to it, burying her face in Thea's neck, sobbing.

  Thea saw the stranger's shadowed gaze slice over Lur's body with analytical interest.

  Thea encompassed Lur's shoulders in her arms. She kept her eyes fixed on the man's face. "Are you real? I mean — are you him? The Hero?"

  Was it possible?

  He looked at her and smiled obscurely, his face indistinct in the shadows of his suit.

  She tried to analyze her feelings. As a child, when she'd envisaged this impossible moment — of the actual arrival of the Hero, from out of nowhere to help her — she'd always imagined a feeling of safety: that she would be able to immerse herself in the Hero's massive, comforting presence.

  But it wasn't like that. With his face half-masked the Hero wasn't comforting at all. In fact he seemed barely human, she realized.

  Behind the translucent pane, the Hero's eyes returned to Lur, calculating.

  Her father wept.

  Wesa's thin, tired face, under its thatch of prematurely yellowed hair-tubes, was twisted with anguish. "I couldn't reach you. I could see what was happening, but—"

  Embarrassed, she submitted to his embrace. Wesa's thin voice, with its words of self-justification, had less to do with her safety than with working out his own shock and shame, she realized.

  As soon as she could, she got away from her father's clinging grasp.

  Her people were clustered around the Hero.

  The Hero ran a gloved thumb down the seam set in the suit's chest panel; the suit opened. He peeled it off whole, as if he were shedding a layer of skin. Under the suit he wore only gray undershorts, and his skin was quite sallow. He was much thinner than he'd seemed inside the suit, alt
hough his muscles were hard knots.

  Thea felt repelled. Just a man, then. Is that all there is to it? And an old man, too, with yellowed hair-tubes and sunken, wrinkled face — older than anyone in her tribe, she realized.

  He passed the suit to Wesa. Thea's father took the ungainly thing and tied it carefully to a tree branch. Suspended there, its empty limbs dangling and its chest sunken and billowing, the suit looked still more grotesque and menacing — like a boned man, she thought.

  Wesa — and Lur, and some of the others — clustered around the Hero again, bringing him food. Some of their prime food, too, the most recent of the Air-pig cuts.

  The Hero crammed the food into his wizened mouth, grinning.

  Later, the Hero donned his suit and went up into the forest, towards the root ceiling, alone. When he returned, he dragged a huge Air-pig after him.

  The people — Lur and Wesa among them — clustered around again, patting at the fat Air-pig. The Air-pig's body was a rough cylinder; now, in its terror, its six eyestalks were fully extended, and its huge, basking maw was pursed up closed. Futile jetfarts clouded the Air around it.

  It would have taken a team of men and women days to have a chance of returning with such a catch.

  Even through his faceplate Thea could see the Hero's grin, as the people praised him.

  She Waved away from the little encampment and perched in the thin outer branches of the forest. She snuggled against a branch, feeling the cold wood smooth against her skin, and nibbled at the young leaves which grew behind the wide, mature outer cups.

  Then she curled into a ball against the branch, pushed more soft leaves into her mouth and tried to sleep.

  A soft moan awoke her.

  The smell of growing leaves was cloying in her nostrils. Blearily, she pushed her head out of the branches and into the Air.

  There was motion far below her, silhouetted against the deep purple of the Quantum Sea. It was the Hero and her sister, Lur; they spiraled languidly around the vortex lines. The Hero wore his shining suit, but it was open to the waist. Lur had wrapped her legs around his hips. She arched away from him, her eyes closed. The Hero's skin looked old, corrupted, against Lur's flesh.