Vacuum Diagrams

by Stephen Baxter

  Allel studied his empty face. She thought of seeing the stars: of waking in a place without a roof over the world.

  But, of course, the frozen lands to the north made the stars as unattainable for her as her own lost youth.

  "Well." She wiped dampness from her eyes. "Come to my teepee. I've got food. And blankets."

  She turned and began to hobble back to her home.

  There was a transparent box, half as tall again as a man. It hung in space, in orbit around a cooling white dwarf star, apparently forgotten and purposeless. It would have had no conceivable significance in the long twilight of the Universe... if it had not occupied the site of Earth, the long-vanished original home of man, long consumed by its own sun.

  A Qax had once visited the site. It was puzzled. The box was evidently one three-dimensional facet of a hypercube, extending into folded space. Perhaps it was a gateway, an interface to some pocket Universe. Such things had been constructed by the Xeelee elsewhere in the Galaxy.

  But why here, in the ruined cradle of humanity?

  The Qax had placed quantum-inseparability markers around the box. The Qax were linked to the markers by single quantum wave functions, ghostly threads that stretched across light years, and they had scattered millions of markers over the spaces once inhabited by humans.

  At last the human called Teal walked into the box. He stared, openmouthed, at the stars. He was gaunt, filthy, and dressed in treated tree-bark; a rope tied to his waist snaked around a corner and into another Universe. After some time the rope grew taut and Teal's limp form was hauled away.

  The inseparability markers blared their warnings. A Qax hauled itself like a spider along the quantum web to the box — but it arrived too late; the box was empty. The Qax hissed, settling into space like condensing mist.

  With a patience born of millions of years it prepared to wait a little longer.

  The event spread like a soft blue dye through the linked quantum phenomena which comprised Paul's being. At the site of Earth there was a human once more: but a human alone, weak, tired, close to dissolution. Paul, godlike, pondered the implications for an unimaginable interval.

  Then he came to a decision. He reconstructed his awareness; a quantum jewel danced against the clear walls of the Eighth Room.

  History had resumed.

  "Allel was right," I said. "The defeat, the imprisonment, by the Xeelee was complete. Unbearably so. What a humiliating scenario."

  "Perhaps. Humans as Eloi, to the Xeelee's Morlocks."

  "....Eloi?"

  "Never mind. Another prophecy, much older than mine..."

  Inside the hypersphere cage, the human story seemed over. But the rhythms of life persisted, and with them the unwelcome urge to survive...

  The Baryonic Lords

  A.D. 4,101,284

  ERWAL PUSHED OUT THE GREASED flap of the teepee. Hot, humid air gushed into the blizzard, turning instantly into fog.

  Damen, dozing, grunted and burrowed more deeply into his pile of furs.

  Erwal pulled her mummy-cow furs more tightly around her neck and stepped out into the snow — it had drifted some three feet deep against the teepee's walls — and smoothed closed the flap. Clutching her slop pail she looked about in bewilderment. The world seemed to have collapsed to a small, gray sphere around her; rarely before had she seen snow so heavy. The flakes clung to her eyelids and already she could feel the down on her upper lip becoming stiff with cold. Dropping her head she began her struggle through the blizzard.

  Somewhere above the clouds, she thought wistfully, was the Sun, still winding through its increasingly meaningless spiral between the worlds.

  Already the snow had soaked through her leggings and was beginning to freeze against her skin. With a sense of urgency she forced her legs through the snow, dragging the slop pail behind her. Soon she was out of sight of the teepee; the rest of the village remained hidden by walls of snow, so that she had to make her way by memory alone.

  At last she reached the village's central stand of cow-trees. She leaned against a tree for a few minutes, sucking at air that seemed thick with the snow. Then she began to dig with her bare hands into the drifts at the base of the tree, finally exposing hard, brown earth. She dumped the contents of her slop pail against the roots of the cow-tree and stamped the waste firmly down against the wood. Then, wearily, she straightened up and began to select some of the tree's more mature buds, filling her pockets. The meat buds were small, hard, anemic; she bit into one, tasting sourness.

  A villager approached through the storm. At first Erwal made out only a blur of rags against the snow, but the villager noticed Erwal and leaned into the wind, making towards her.

  Erwal shouted: "Good day!"

  From within a voluminous hood there came a muffled, brittle laugh; then the hood was pushed back to reveal the thin, pretty features of Sura, wife of Borst. "It's hardly that, Erwal." Sura had dragged her own slop pail across the drifts; now she dumped her waste alongside Erwal's. As she worked Sura's shapeless fur blanket fell open and Erwal made out a bundle suspended over her thin chest, a sling of skin from which protruded tiny hands, a small, bare leg. Erwal frowned; the baby's exposed flesh seemed blue-tinged.

  Once Sura had finished Erwal held her head close to the girl's. "How are you, Sura? How are your family?"

  "Borst is ill." Sura smiled, her eyes oddly bright. "His lungs will not clear; he has been barely able to stand." Absently she patted the bundle against her chest.

  "Sura, will you let me visit your teepee? At home there is only myself and Damen..."

  "Thanks, my friend, but I'm sure I can manage." Again that bright look entered the girl's pale eyes and she brushed a wisp of hair back from a high forehead. "The child is a burden, but she's such a comfort."

  "I'm sure she is," Erwal said evenly. The pain of her own lost child — stillborn soon after Teal's first mysterious voyage away from the village — was too long ago to mean anything now, and the dismal fact that she and Damen had proven unable to bear another child had come to seem trivial compared to the huge, greater tragedy sweeping down over their little community.

  "How is the baby? Will you allow me?..." Erwal opened Sura's blanket just a few inches, tenting the flaps so that the snow was kept from the child, and ran her fingers over the hot bundle. Sura looked on, a vacant smile hovering about her mouth. The child's breathing was rapid, ragged; the tiny hands were as if carved from ice. "Sura, you must take the child indoors. Keep her covered. I am afraid her limbs are frozen—"

  "She needs air," Sura said, her voice high. "It's so musty in the teepee."

  Erwal stared into Sura's eyes. Her skin was smooth but her eyes were ringed with dark shadows. Sura was little more than a child herself. "Sura," Erwal said urgently, "you aren't thinking clearly. The child is too cold."

  The shallow smile evaporated. Sura brushed Erwal's hands away resentfully, and began to paw at the baby. "She'll be all right." She cupped one tiny hand in her own and began to rub vigorously.

  "Sura, take care, I beg you."

  "She just needs to get warm—"

  There was a soft crackle, as if a thin crust of ice had broken.

  It was a sound that Erwal knew she would remember to her dying day.

  Sura's head jerked down; her jaw seemed to be swinging loose, the muscles in her cheeks slack. Erwal, watching in horror, felt as if she would faint; it was as if she saw the whole tableau, Sura, the child and the snow, from a great distance.

  Sura opened the hands which had cupped the child's. Detached fingers lay like tiny jewels on Sura's callused flesh. The child whimpered, stirred against its mother. Sura jerked her hands back, so that the frozen pieces of flesh fell to the snow. She pulled her blanket tight around her and ran, oblivious to the drifting snow.

  Erwal bent and scooped up the tiny fingers, the fragments of palm and wrist.

  When she returned to the teepee, Damen had woken. Wrapped in a blanket, he held a pot of water over the fire with woo
den tongs, and he scowled at the draught Erwal made. The smoke from the fire, disturbed, swirled around the teepee walls in search of the vent at the apex.

  Erwal, wrapped in her furs, felt like something inhuman, a gigantic animal intruding into this place of warmth. She pushed away the furs, hauled off her frozen leggings and huddled near the fire; Damen wrapped a heavy arm around her until the shivering stopped. When the water boiled Damen poured it over fragments of mummy-tree bark. Erwal sucked at the thin, steaming tea.

  Then she opened her hand.

  Damen picked up one tiny finger. His face gray, he studied the tiny nail, the knuckle's bloodless termination. Then he took the rest of the fragments from Erwal and dropped them into the fire. "Whose child?"

  "Borst and Sura; I met her at the tree stand with her slops. I have to go to her, Damen."

  "Do you want me to come?"

  "...No. It's best if I go alone, I think. You keep the teepee warm." She drank her tea, deeply reluctant to don her furs once more. "Damen, we can't go on like this. Every year is worse than the last. I suspect the trees are starting to die, and even the mummy-cows aren't immortal."

  "I know, love. But what can we do? We have to survive until the Sun recovers, and then—"

  "But what if it doesn't recover? It's been failing since your grandmother's day. Allel told us so herself. And now — Damen, it's only early autumn, but the blizzard out there is blind; if we're not careful the teepees could be snowed over before the winter's out." She shivered, imagining tiny pockets of warmth lost in the snow, the humans within suffocating, cooling, calling to each other.

  "The Sun will recover," Damen said wearily.

  She said urgently, "But we don't have to wait here to die. Teal said—"

  "No." He shook his massive head, his gray beard scraping over his chest.

  "But he told us there was a way out of here," she insisted. "The Eight Rooms. He found them, saw them. Your grandmother believed him."

  "Allel was a foolish old woman."

  "And Teal returned there. He said he'd leave a trail for the rest of us. Maybe if—"

  He wrapped both arms around her. "Erwal, my brother was crazy. He hurt you, fought with me... He lost his life for nothing But now it's over. He's gone, and—"

  "What if he survived?"

  "Erwal..."

  She sighed, pulled herself away from him, and began to haul her leggings over her still-cold feet.

  Damen sat in silence, staring at the fire.

  As she pushed through the snow Erwal heard odd snatches of song. The melodies, soft, harmonized and sad, were fragmented by the wind, and at first she thought she was dreaming. Then Sura's teepee loomed out of the snow. Before it she made out a series of low mounds about as tall as she was. Occasionally a trunk would lift out of a mound, the two very human hands at its bifurcated tip twisting together, and slowly the songs grew clearer.

  At last Erwal recognized the ancient chants of the mummy-cows.

  Five cows, almost the village's full complement, were grouped in a tight circle about a sixth; the latter lay at the center of the circle, and Erwal saw that some viscous fluid had leaked from its bulk into the snow. She pushed back her hood. "Sand? Are you here?"

  One of the mummy-cows lifted her head; under a cap of snow a squat, cylindrical skull rotated on a neck joint and plate-sized eyes fixed on Erwal. "...I amm-m hhere, Err-waal..."

  Erwal fixed her fingers in the shaggy fur covering Sand's muzzle. Since Erwal's childhood, Sand had been her favorite. "What's wrong? Why are you gathered here?"

  Sand moaned and scuffed with delicate fingers at the snow before her. "It iss-s Cale. We are... s-singing for her..."

  "Singing? But why?..."

  Sand closed her eyes.

  Erwal turned to inspect the body at the center of the group. Cale was silent, utterly motionless, and when Erwal pushed her fingers through the fur she felt only a diminishing warmth.

  How could this have happened? The mummy-cows rarely reproduced these days — there was too little fodder for them to generate the growth required — but they were virtually immortal. She walked around the fallen cow to the patch of moisture she had noticed earlier. She bent and touched the stuff. It was blood. Crouching, she probed upwards at the mummy-cow's belly, exploring the soaked and matted fur. There was a tear in the flesh, a gash at least two feet long that was sharp and clean; performed by a stone knife.

  She took deep breaths of the chill air; then she forced herself to reach forward, lift aside the flap of cut flesh, push her hands into the glistening stuff inside the cow.

  She found a still, cold form. Snakelike entrails had coiled around the body in a hopeless attempt to keep it warm. Exploring by touch, Erwal found the tiny buds, hard as gristle, which had begun to grow to replace the child's lost hands.

  "She's dead, isn't she?"

  Erwal withdrew her arms, rubbed snow over them to clean them, tucked them once more into her clothes. Sura stood beside her, her arms loose at her side. "...Yes, Sura. I'm sorry."

  "It worked for your husband, didn't it? Teal, I mean. That mummy-cow he took to the Eight Rooms kept him alive by opening herself up... I suppose you despise me because I have killed a cow." Sura sounded resigned, no longer caring. "Will you punish me?"

  Erwal stood. "No, Sura. I understand."

  "You do?"

  "You were trying to save your child. What more can any of us do? What else is there? Come on." She took Sura's unresisting arm. "Let's go to your teepee."

  "Yes," Sura said.

  On the first clear day of the tepid spring the villagers filed in silence to a low hill a mile from the village. After months in the fug of the teepees Erwal took deep breaths of the cold, fresh air, and felt the blood stir within her. She looked around with renewed interest. It was a still, windless day; above her the lakes and rivers of Home shone like threads in a carpet. The ruddy light of the Sun was almost cheerful, and frosty snow crackled beneath her feet. She tried to imagine what it must have been like in the days before she was born, when the Sun was yellow and so hot that, even in spring, you could discard your furs and leggings and run like a child in some huge teepee.

  At the top of the hill orange flowers were struggling to blossom through the permafrost. The villagers gathered in a rough circle around the flowers; some clasped their hands before them, others dropped their heads so their chins rested on their shirts of fur. Damen stepped into the middle of the circle. "We're here for those who died in the winter." His voice was flat and lifeless. Without ceremony he intoned a list of names.

  "...Borst, husband of Sura. Brought down by fluid in the lungs. A girl, daughter of Borst and Sura; the frost attacked her flesh in the blizzards..."

  Numbly Erwal counted the names. Twenty-two in all, mostly children. She glanced around the silent group; there were surely no more than a hundred souls left. Already, she knew, the outer portions of the village had been abandoned, so that their homes were encircled by silent, ruined teepees.

  There were hardly any old people left, it struck her suddenly. In fact, she and Damen were the old people now. Who would be the last to go? she wondered morbidly. Some child, crying over the cooling bodies of its parents?

  At that moment her resolution crystallized. With or without Damen, she had to leave this place.

  Damen finished his list. After a brief, gloomy silence, the group broke up and returned to the teepees.

  Twenty-five adults decided to commit to Erwal's plan. With their children, thirty-seven people would travel with her.

  They gathered at the edge of the village. The split families and parting friends found little to say in the way of farewells. Erwal, with the assistance of Sura, made final adjustments to the harness around the neck of Sand, the one mummy-cow they were to take. To the harness was attached a broad pallet piled with furs, blankets and cow-tree buds. The rest of the expedition, spare clothes heaped on their bodies, looked on in subdued silence.

  "I don't know what to say."
<
br />   Erwal turned. Damen, thick arms folded, stood watching her. "Damen, don't even try."

  He frowned. "Pride's an odd thing," he mused. "I should know. I've been proud, and stubborn. Pride can make it hard to admit you're wrong, no matter how misguided you come to realize—"

  Erwal laughed, not unkindly. "I should swallow my pride, admit my mistake, should I?"

  He looked hurt. "Erwal, you could die out there."

  "But I believe we'd die here." She touched his arm, ruffling the mat of thick black hair which grew there. "This expedition needs you—"

  "But I need you."

  It was as if the Sun had broken through cloud. Struggling to keep her voice steady, Erwal said, "You've picked the damnedest time to say such a thing."

  "I'm sorry."

  Deliberately, with a sense of pain, she turned her head from him. "It's time to go."

  "Where?"

  "You know where. To the north. The way Teal described. A journey of a few days, following his markers and directions, to the Eight Rooms."

  He snorted. "Following the babble of a mummy-cow and a madman?"

  "Damen, don't spoil this." She studied him, desperate to hold on to these final traces of warmth. "I know what I'm doing."

  "I know. I'm sorry, Erwal; we've been over all of this before, haven't we?"

  "A hundred times." She smiled.

  "...I wish you well."

  She hugged him, feeling the rough fur of his shirt under her bare forearms. "And I you, love."

  "I won't see you again."

  "...Perhaps if I find what I'm looking for I'll be able to return for you."

  He held her away, his face hard. "Sure you will."

  With that, they parted.

  With gentle encouragement the mummy-cow began its lumbering motion, the laden pallet scoring tracks into the hard ground. Erwal walked arm in arm with Sura. She turned back until the village was out of sight; for long after she was gone, she suspected, the dark bulk of Damen would be stationed at the edge of the village, hoping for her return.