Vacuum Diagrams

by Stephen Baxter

  They walked on despondently.

  "Did grandmother tell you what I'm trying to find?"

  "Yess. The... Eight Roomss."

  "The trouble is I've no idea how to get there... or even how we'll recognize it when we find it. We're walking at random."

  Orange hissed, "From the ss-stories I have heard, you will... know it wh-when you ssee it..."

  Teal looked at her carefully. Was there a trace of amusement in that clumsy voice?

  "What stories? What are you talking about?"

  But the huge round face was blank.

  On the fifteenth day... or maybe the sixteenth... a blizzard hit them.

  It was a moving wall that reached up to the clouds. It turned Teal's world to a blur of huge flakes; the air was almost unbreathable.

  "We must... must keep moving," Orange trumpeted. He buried his face in her snow-laden fur. She wrapped her trunk around his shoulders. "F... follow me," she said. "We will find... the Eight Rooms..."

  He closed his eyes and struggled on.

  The storm took days to clear.

  Teal woke to a world silenced by snow. Brushing clear his clothes, he sat up to look around.

  Orange was staring straight ahead, her fingers working in agitation.

  "Wha..." Teal squinted in the direction she was looking, to the red-lit north.

  There was something on the horizon: a patch of darkness amid the snow.

  A structure.

  It was a cube with sides about half as tall again as a man. The walls were unbroken save for a single large door set in the south-facing side.

  The whole thing was hovering about an arm's length from the ground.

  "The s-songss," hissed the mummy-cow. "That iss what... the songs describe..."

  "The Eight Rooms," Teal sighed. "You were right. It's unmistakable."

  Orange quivered; he studied her curiously. She was paralyzed by fear... but she'd known where to look. He thought of generations of mummy-cows, used and despised by the people they'd been designed to serve — but all the time hoarding a knowledge and lore, a kind of courage, of their own.

  He wondered uneasily how much else there was to learn about the world.

  He stumbled to his feet, then patted Orange's flank. "Come on," he said. "Just a bit further..."

  Orange wouldn't come closer than a few paces to the structure. Teal approached alone. He knelt in the snow and passed his hand underneath the cube. "Must take an awful lot of hot air to hold this up..."

  Teal walked up to the door and pushed tentatively. He found his chest tightening.

  Orange whimpered and buried her eyes in her trunk.

  He opened the door wide. The interior was pale blue.

  Teal hadn't seen blue for a decade.

  Blinking away tears, he climbed into the room.

  They spent the night under cover for the first time since Teal's exile. He woke in comparative warmth and took a slow breakfast on water and a cheeselike bud.

  It had taken a lot of coaxing to get Orange to clamber into the room.

  "There's nothing to fear — it's just a big teepee."

  "No, it is-isn't..."

  "Well, maybe not..."

  Now she huddled uncomfortably at the center of the floor, standing in her own muddy footprints.

  Teal inspected the room. He'd found it empty save for a thing like a lamp bracket attached to the ceiling. There were doors leading out from all four walls — even hatches in the floor and ceiling.

  The doors watched him like blank eyes.

  He ran his hands over the blue walls. The material was warm, slightly yielding — disconcertingly skinlike. He thought of stroking his wife's belly through a soft leather blanket.

  He pushed the image away.

  He took his coil of rope from Orange's pannier. He tied one end round his waist. "Here," he said. "Don't let go of this. If you don't hear from me... after a while, try to pull me back. Do you understand? And whatever happens, go back and tell my grandmother what you've seen. All right?"

  The great head dipped. He stroked her trunk, once.

  He turned to the door opposite the entrance to the cube. Orange shivered as she watched him. Now then, he thought, logic tells me there's nothing beyond this door. Only another way out, to the snow.

  Right?

  He pushed at the door. It swung back smooth as a muscle.

  There was another room beyond. It was like a mirror-image of the first: bare walls, single light pendant, doors all over it—

  Maybe it really was a reflection.

  No, that was stupid. He looked back at the trembling brown hulk of Orange. There was no Orange in the second room... and no Teal, for that matter.

  He stepped through the door.

  Well, the floor felt solid enough... and the air was just — air.

  All his intuition told him he should have been hovering at waist-height somewhere outside the boxlike structure. Instead, here he was...

  He laughed. So Allel's old song had been wrong. The wonder of the second room wasn't in what it contained, but in the fact that it was there at all.

  Pulling the rope of twisted leather behind him he pushed at the door in the left-hand wall of the second room. Beyond was a third room, another copy of the first.

  He decided he wasn't surprised.

  More confidently he walked through the third room and pushed at the door to his left. Beyond this he'd presumably find a fourth room, making up a square array of rooms, and then he could turn left again to find his way round the square back to Orange—

  The fourth room wasn't empty. It contained Orange. He was looking at her left side; she held a grubby rope that stretched forward through an open door.

  She turned her head to him, eyes wide with astonishment.

  He jumped back, trembling. Could he have miscounted the rooms?

  His mind racing, he took Allel's knife from his belt and placed it gently on the floor inside Orange's room. Then he walked back through the third and second rooms.

  In the first room, Orange was facing him. "Take it easy," he murmured abstractedly to her. "It's all right..."

  The door to her left was ajar. A stone knife lay on the floor, just inside the first room. He walked across to pick it up, tucked it into his belt.

  Well, it felt real. Were there two knives now?

  He walked around to the third room again. The knife beyond the door was gone... of course.

  So there was no fourth room to make up the square.

  He sat on the bare floor of the third room and closed his eyes. If he wasn't careful, the strangeness of the place was going to overwhelm him.

  He opened his eyes. He looked speculatively up at the hatch set in the ceiling of the third room. Surely he would break out of this odd cycle if he climbed up another level.

  He stood up straight. The lamp fitting was just out of his reach, but he found that if he — jumped — he could just grab it with both hands.

  He hung there for a moment, gently swinging, the burn scars around his chest itching slightly. Then he arced backwards, swung both feet forwards and slammed them into the roof hatch.

  It fell back with a soft thump. Another swing, one-armed this time, and Teal had grabbed the edge of the hatch-frame. Then it was simple to haul himself up into the room. Orange's rope trailed after him.

  The fourth room was empty — another copy of the first, with the usual lamp fitting and the six exits. He took a few deep breaths and let his heart rattle to rest; and then, with a kind of confidence — surely there was nothing else that could be thrown at him — he strode forward and pushed open a door.

  He almost cried out.

  Through the door in the wall he was looking into the first room again — but the whole room was tipped on its side. Orange looked as if she was clinging to a wall, a huge hairy spider. A rope trailed from her trunk out of a door ahead of her.

  He shoved the door closed hastily, fighting back a sudden wave of nausea. Suppose he'd stepped forward
... surely sideways would suddenly have become down, and he would have fallen full-length onto poor Orange. And if she'd looked up as he stood there, would she have seen him sticking sideways out into the air like an outstretched arm?

  He didn't even try to work out the explanation this time. With some reluctance he turned and walked across to the door opposite Orange's. What next? Unconsciously he pulled his stone knife from his belt.

  He opened the door.

  It was the Eighth Room.

  For the first time in a hundred thousand generations, starlight entered human eyes.

  Orange had no way of telling the time.

  She couldn't even count well enough to keep track of her thumping heartbeats. Holding her rope she hummed a song to herself.

  She sang it over and over, ever faster.

  The rope had been slack for too long now, surely. Trembling, she shuffled to the open door and fanned out one great ear.

  Silence.

  Was he dead?

  Her hands slipping in anxiety, she began to pull the rope towards her. There was a weight at the end that moved unevenly—

  —and then there was a bump and a slackening of the rope, as if the weight had fallen a considerable distance.

  She waited, urging the silence to yield up its secrets. But she didn't dare go beyond that door.

  She began hauling at the rope again. Now it moved easily. At last Teal's limp form came through the door, still clutching his grandmother's knife.

  His eyes were open. They stared through her, and the walls, at... something that made her shiver.

  She gathered him to the warmth of her underbelly and bathed his face with antiseptic saliva, longing for him to wake.

  She waited in the alien place for days.

  Teal's breath was even but his eyes never flickered. Hunger growled in her own belly. Soon she wouldn't even be able to feed him...

  Finally she wrapped his face in his hood and, with difficulty, loaded the man and his tools over her broad back. With her delicate fingers she pried open the entrance.

  She emerged into a blizzard.

  Keeping her trunk arched back over her precious cargo she battered her way through the storm, stumbling as her great stumps of legs buried themselves in drifts and slurries.

  The blizzard wouldn't stop. She found she couldn't even detect the passing of night and day.

  Finally she sank to her knees, exhausted. She lowered Teal to the snow. His lips were gray.

  Snowflakes like flat stones battered unnoticed at her huge eyes. So she had failed, and Teal would die...

  She raised her trunk and bellowed out her defiance. Then she searched among Teal's effects for his stone knife.

  Standing away from Teal, she held the knife in both her hands, point towards her, and worked her fingers around the handle.

  Then she jerked the point backwards into her chest and ripped it down her underbelly, as far as she could reach.

  The pain was astonishing. It didn't seem fair.

  She dropped the knife and wrapped her hands around the slit flesh. Then she shuffled towards Teal, leaving a streak like a bloody snail.

  She covered him with her ripped body, let the soft stuff inside gush over him. With the last of her strength she held her head high, to make sure all of Teal was tucked inside her. Then she let go. Her head slumped forward, and now the snow was as soothing as her mother's trunk had once been.

  Her body had been designed, from the cellular level up, to serve humans; and now, she knew, it was performing one last miracle. Oxygen-bearing blood would bathe the shocked man like amniotic fluid, while her internal organs, now independent semi-sentient creatures, would cluster round him in this ultimate emergency and cradle him against the cold for as long as he needed.

  She felt her thoughts break up and crumble.

  Her mother came towards her across the snow. She was carrying a Sun on her back, but it wasn't orange, old, failing like the real Sun. It was yellow, and it melted the snow.

  Allel heard the shouting from the gloom of her teepee.

  Nobody shouted these days. With the Sun never brighter than the twilights of her youth, there wasn't much to shout about.

  Except...

  She unhinged her stiff old legs and rose from her leather mat. Outside, Home was a bloodstained raft floating over the landscape. The Sun was bright enough to sting her watery eyes, and the breeze pricked at the scar bisecting her face.

  All the excitement was at the north of the little settlement. She saw her grandson Damen standing there, massive and obstructive. A few other villagers were walking towards Damen, dull curiosity brightening their drab faces.

  Someone brushed past Allel: Erwal, Teal's wife. When she realized what was happening Erwal began to run.

  It was him. It had to be. He'd survived, and returned. Allel hobbled over the icy mud.

  Damen heard Erwal coming. He turned and spread his arms to catch her. "No! Ignore him. Don't hurt yourself anymore..."

  Beyond them a silent figure stood alone. Allel squinted, but found it hard to make out a face.

  Erwal shook her small fist. "Keep away from here. Keep away! I lost my baby because of the hurt you caused me, you... madman. Keep away from me." Then, deliberately, she pulled Damen's head down towards her and kissed him full on the lips. Teal watched this with no sign of emotion.

  Damen wrapped his arm round Erwal's shoulder and turned to Teal. "You'll have to stay away, brother," he said sadly. "There's nothing for you here. You're an exile."

  Allel came alongside Damen, gasping with the exertion. It was the furthest she'd walked from her teepee since her injury. "Why?" she asked. "Why bother, Damen? He's lost his family already — lost everything. What more can you do to him?" She looked around at the dozen or so villagers clustered around them. They were an array of shabby indifference, their eyes large and slack in malnourished faces. A baby cried feebly at its mother's shriveled breast. "We're at the end of things. Who cares anymore?"

  Damen frowned doubtfully. Then he turned and led Erwal away.

  The other villagers drifted back to their chores.

  Allel was left alone.

  In the gathering darkness Teal was obscure... changed. Allel walked towards him, wrapping her skinny arms around herself.

  "Tell me what you saw. Tell me what was in the Eighth Room."

  Teal smiled.

  The far wall of the Eighth Room had been a great window, he said. He'd stepped cautiously through the door — and then the other sides of the cubical room had faded to clarity.

  Dressed in skins, and brandishing a stone weapon, a human being once more stared out of a cave at the stars.

  The stars were points of light unimaginably far away... much further than the distance between Shell and Home. He turned around and around, stepping over the rope that led back to Orange. There was no sign of the world he'd folded out of; the crystal box was suspended in space.

  Gradually he began to make out patterns.

  There was a great ball of stars over there on the right, neat as a mummy-cow's meat pod — but he guessed that this star pod was bigger than a million of his worlds. Above his head there were fragments of a cubical lattice, draped with wisps of violet gas... and behind him, most spectacular of all, a sextet of varicolored stars that rotated visibly around an empty center. Great arches of fire leapt between the sisters' surfaces.

  There were loops of stars, knots of stars, stars in sheets like the cloaks of a god.

  He remembered Allel describing the stars in the old days, randomly scattered like seeds. Well, since humans had hidden away, someone had rebuilt the Universe.

  ...Something moved past the stars. And again—

  Nameless objects, black as night, were moving around him. They stroked at this fragile container like the hands of a huge parent.

  He felt no threat. There was a sense of reassurance, of welcome, in their gestures.

  I was meant to be here, he realized abruptly. Allel was right: the world
is freezing by design. It spat me out, and these creatures have been waiting for me.

  The half-dozen shapes now drew away from his box and gathered together in a great blur transiting the stars. They moved past and through each other, ever faster, weaving themselves into a tight knot of darkness—

  —and then, in a sprinkle of prismatic light, they shot away to... somewhere else.

  They'd finished with the Universe, abandoned it. But they'd left something behind.

  It was a ship. It nuzzled against his box, a great shell big enough to hold his village and a hundred more. The Universe would be his.

  The stars began to spin like sparks in a fire. They tilted, overwhelming him.

  His next memory was of crawling out of the corpse of the mummy-cow.

  Allel shifted her weight between her stiff legs. "Xeelee ships," she croaked. "That's what you saw. Ships like plucking fingers." She coughed feebly, feeling the cold of the dying day sink into her flesh. "Listen. I know what you've sacrificed to do this. I know you've lost everything important to you... But, Teal, you've saved us all."

  She reached out a hand to her grandson.

  Teal didn't react. Allel dropped the hand nervously.

  "You knew what I'd find, didn't you?" Teal asked coolly. "You suspected the truth of our history — the completeness of our defeat by the Xeelee."

  Allel sighed, and folded her arms over her concave chest. "Yes. The truth about the past has been hidden from us so long and so well that it had to be painful. The story I learned when I was young was comforting: the Xeelee as marauding monsters bent on destroying us; our valiant fight and honorable defeat. A comforting myth.

  "I've thought hard about that story... and seen past it to the truth.

  "We were a weak and foolish race. We attacked the Xeelee, unable to bear their superiority. We were defeated. But we would have kept on attacking them until we were destroyed.

  "And so the Xeelee locked us away like destructive children... for our own good. Just like an elder brother, eh? It's not easy to accept."

  "No, it isn't," Teal murmured. "We didn't build this world to save us from the Xeelee. The Xeelee built it to save us from ourselves."