Vacuum Diagrams

by Stephen Baxter

  He scratched his chin. "But the food lockers—"

  "I wouldn't take the mummy-cow," she said briskly. "No one would starve."

  "I don't know..."

  She took both his hands in hers. "Arke, I've saved all your lives. Now I think I am saving them again! Don't you owe it to me to let me try?"

  He stared up at her uncertainly, the lines of his face softened by the twilight of the chamber.

  "Let's talk to the others in the morning," he said.

  There was grumbling, complaint at the possible loss of the ship's wonderful facilities — and, Erwal was moved to find, genuine concern at her own welfare.

  But they agreed.

  It took a couple of days for the villagers to set up camp in the Eight Rooms once more; but at last the ship was cleared, save only for a few stray blankets, garments and other oddments. Erwal spent the time experimenting with the ship's panels, trying to work out a destination.

  There was a light hand on her shoulder. Erwal turned. "Sura..."

  The girl smiled down at her. "Are you ready?"

  "What are you doing here?"

  The smile broadened. "I couldn't let you go alone, could I?"

  A soft warmth was added to the brew of exhilaration and fear already swirling within Erwal. Briefly she covered Sura's hand with her own — and then turned to the controls and slid her hands into the mittens.

  The ship quivered.

  Paul brooded over the wreckage of the Solar System.

  Since the retreat of the Xeelee the Universe had been lost to baryonic life forms. The photino birds had not yet completed their vast conversion programs — stars were still shining, the Ring not yet closed — but at last, in a time not very distant, the final light would be extinguished and the baryonic Universe would grow uniform and cold, a stable home for the photino birds.

  A shipful of primitive humans had no possibility of survival in a Universe occupied by such a force.

  Therefore the humans would have to follow the Xeelee. Perhaps this escape had been the intention of the Xeelee all along, Paul mused. Perhaps they had provided many other junior baryonic races with similar "lifeboats," so they could follow the Xeelee to a place where baryonic life was still possible.

  He saw it now. His humans would have to use their ship to cross space and pass through Bolder's Ring.

  And Paul would have to guide them there. He felt a surge of determination, of anticipation...

  And of fear.

  Around his decision the diffuse cloud that comprised Paul's awareness coalesced. He prepared to return to the ship —

  But there was something in the way.

  Paul stopped. He assembled awareness foci to consider the new barrier, confused. The wave-function guides he was following had been distorted, even terminated, and—

  He was being watched.

  Paul froze, shocked; his sub-personalities condensed into something almost as coherent and limited as his old corporeal self.

  There was something here: something aware and able to study him... and to stop him.

  As if trembling, he tried to respond. The data that formed his being was stored in a lattice of quantum wave functions; now he distorted that lattice deliberately to indicate an omission. A lack. A question.

  —Who are you?—

  The answer was imposed directly on his awareness; it was like being exposed to a raw, vicious dream, to a million years of venom.

  —Qax.—

  The gateway between the Eighth Room and the ship healed shut, leaving Erwal and Sura alone in the ship.

  "Where shall we go?" Sura asked innocently.

  Erwal smiled. "Well, that's a good question." And, she realized, she barely knew how to start framing an answer. She flexed the gloves, and the panels, which had been displaying scenes of stars and of the Eighth Room, now filled with representations which were obviously artificial.

  Sura stared at the graphic circles, the cones and ellipses, with confusion. "What does all this mean?"

  Erwal withdrew her hands from the mittens. "I can only guess. But I think these pictures are meant to show us what this world is like." She reached up to grasp Sura's hand. "Sura, you know that the world we came from was like a box. There was the Shell below our feet, and Home above us, closing us in."

  Sura sniffed. "Any child could see that."

  "Yes. But now we've come out of that box; and out here it's different. There is no box anymore! The Eighth Room, the doorway to the box, is just — hanging there."

  "The way the first Room was hanging over the ground, when we found it?"

  "Yes, but — even more so," said Erwal, struggling to make sense. "It simply hangs! And there is no ground above it, or below it, as far as I can see. Just empty space, and a great pit of stars."

  Sura, her mouth hanging open, thought it over. "I feel scared."

  So do I, Erwal thought grimly; and she reflected on the many times she had instinctively sought a colorful roof-world over her head, and how she had cowered in her seat, wishing she were at home in her teepee with a hard roof of rock between her and the stars.

  Sura studied images of the Eighth Room. "If we've just come out of a great box — through the Eighth Room — then why can't we see the outside of the box from here? All you can see is the Room itself!" Sura sounded aggrieved, as if this were an affront to her intelligence.

  Erwal sighed and pushed a lock of hair from her brow. "That's just one of a hundred — a thousand things about this situation I don't understand at all. I think we have to proceed with what we can understand."

  "And what's that?" Sura asked irritably. "Because none of this makes any sense so far."

  Erwal pointed to a particular schematic. This showed a bright light, little more than a dot, surrounded by nine concentric circles. A small, framework cube sat on the third circle from the center, slowly following the track in an anticlockwise direction; a complex arrangement of light points similarly followed the sixth circle. The other circles were empty. "Look at that," said Erwal. "What does that remind you of?"

  Sura reached out and, with one finger, touched the framework cube. The screen blanked and filled up with a magnified image of the cube; Sura snatched back her finger, startled.

  Erwal laughed. "Don't be afraid. The panels won't hurt you."

  "The box is the Eighth Room."

  "That's right." Erwal touched a blank part of the image and the circles returned. "I think this shows where the Room is, you see. It's following this circular path around the bright light. And here's — something else — following the sixth circle."

  "What's the bright light?"

  "I don't know."

  Sura touched the bright point; it expanded to show a dim globe, yellowing and pocked by huge dark spots. "Do you think we should go there?"

  Erwal shrugged. "I don't know."

  Sura restored the image of circles and counted. "Nine circles. We're on the third, and this other marking is on the sixth. But the other circles are empty. I wonder why."

  "I don't know," Erwal said. "Maybe there were things there originally, which were destroyed. Or taken away."

  "What could they have been?"

  "Oh, Sura, how should I know?"

  "I'm sorry." Sura studied the picture. "Well, then; there seems to be only one place to go."

  "The sixth circle?"

  "Yes. But how do we get there?"

  Erwal smiled at her, slid her hands into the mittens once more, and flexed her fingers. A feeling of power, of release, swept over her. "That's the easy part," she said slowly. "I just close my eyes—"

  The ship had waited a million years for this.

  It spread its sycamore-seed wings wide and soared through the wreckage of the Solar System, barely restrained by the tentative will of the woman at the controls.

  Erwal and Sura felt waves of motion-echoes. It was, thought Erwal, like being a child again and riding the shoulders of a lively mummy-cow.

  Sura laughed and clung to Erwal's neck.<
br />
  Within minutes the voyage was over; the ship, cooling, folded its wings.

  The women stared up at the view panels.

  At the heart of the sixth-circle complex was a single, immensely large, flattened sphere of gas. Much of the gas glowed a dull red, the color of burnt wood, although here and there fires still raged within the atmosphere, blurred patches of yellow or white. Three smaller globes, equally spaced, circled the center sphere; their panel images bristled with detail. Further out there was a ring of debris, broad and softly sparkling; Erwal wondered if there had once been still more of these globes, now long since destroyed.

  She bade the ship slide around the limb of the fireball. She watched the burning landscape unfold beneath her, and shivered with a sudden sense of scale. "Sura, that thing is immense."

  "What is it? Is it a sun?"

  "Perhaps. But it is far bigger than our Sun ever was. And it seems to be nearly burnt out now."

  "Perhaps it lit up the smaller globes," Sura said brightly. "Perhaps people lived on the other globes, and set fire to this one to give them warmth. Erwal, is that possible?"

  "Anything's possible," Erwal murmured.

  The ship had dipped so close that it had flattened into a landscape of glowing gas. Erwal felt a sudden thrill of apprehension. Without hesitating she pulled the ship up and away from the Sunworld.

  "Let's go see the smaller globes," she said to Sura.

  Beneath Saturn's ruined atmosphere, ancient defense systems stirred.

  Erwal brought the ship to the nearest of the globes. Soon the little world filled a panel; from pole to pole it was encrusted with detail, so that its surface reminded Erwal of fine leatherwork — or, perhaps, of a cow-tree overrun with lichen and moss. She spread her wings and swooped close over the surface: a miniature landscape rushed with exhilarating speed beneath her bow.

  Sura clapped her hands, childlike.

  Erwal studied the panel. Now she saw that the surface was coated with buildings: they were all about the scale of the Eighth Room, but they came in every shape Erwal could imagine — domes, cubes, pyramids, cylinders and spires — and there were bowls and cup-shaped amphitheaters lying open to the sky. Arcs and loops of cable, fixed to the buildings, lay draped over the landscape, knitting it all together like some immense tapestry.

  Nowhere did Erwal see an open space, a single blade of grass. And nowhere did she see any sign of people.

  With immense care she bade the ship settle to the top of one of the broader buildings. Sura wanted to climb out and explore — perhaps see what was inside the mysterious buildings — but the ship's door would not open.

  "I think the ship knows what's best for us," Erwal said. "Maybe we shouldn't go outside. It might be too hot — or too cold — or perhaps it's dangerous for us in some other way we can't imagine."

  "But it's so frustrating!"

  Erwal frowned. "Well, perhaps there's something I can do about that." She slid her hands into her mittens. "Here's something I found a few days ago. Come and see."

  The panel over the control table showed the blank exterior of a bubble-shaped building; a circular door led to an intriguing — but darkened — interior. Now Erwal moved her thumbs, raised her wrists — and the field of view of the window panel moved forward. It was as if the darkened doorway was approaching.

  She felt Sura clutch the back of her chair. The girl said, "Erwal, are we moving?"

  "No," Erwal said slowly. "But the picture is. Do you understand?" She waited nervously for the girl's reaction. Oddly, of all the miracles Erwal had encountered, she had found this one of the most difficult to absorb. So she was in a craft that traveled through emptiness: well, birds flew through the air, did they not?... And it was well known that humans had once built such crafts as routinely as Damen now built a fire. Even the Friend's visions were reminiscent of dreams she had endured before, particularly since the final disappearance of Teal. So these phenomena were just extensions of the familiar.

  But a window was just a hole in a teepee, with a flap to gum down when the wind rose. Obviously every time you looked through a window you would see the same scene.

  The idea that a window, without moving, could show different scenes — so that it was as if she were looking through the eyes of another — was beyond comprehension.

  But Sura stared at the unfolding image, eyes empty of wonder. She said: "Very nice. Can you make it go any faster?"

  Deflated, Erwal sighed. Maybe she should give up trying to work these things out, and accept the windows, as Sura evidently did, for what they were.

  Useful magic.

  For the next hour and more they roamed vicariously through the abandoned streets of the city-world. This had obviously once been a world of people — they recognized chairs, bedrooms, tables, all clearly human-sized. But there was no sign of humanity: no pictures on the walls, no decoration anywhere, no curtains or rugs beyond the severely functional. And building after building was filled with huge devices, quite unrecognizable to the two women: vast cylinders lying on their side or pointing through apertures at the sky, and rooms full of gray, coldly anonymous boxes.

  Everywhere was darkness and — Erwal felt — coldness. The building-world had been left neat, perfect — not a chair overturned — and quite empty.

  Sura, squatting on the floor, wrapped her arms about herself and shivered. "I don't think I would have liked to have lived here."

  "Nor I." Erwal wondered about the purpose of all these banks of machines and boxes. The devices lacked the simple, human utility of the lockers she had found on the ship; these machines were brooding, almost threatening. Perhaps this was a world of weapons, of war.

  Maybe, she thought, it was just as well they had found this place empty.

  "Erwal." Sura stood gracefully and pointed at the image in the panel; an array of gray boxes was sliding away from them. "What's happening? Are you moving the image again?"

  Erwal held her hands up before her face. "You can see I'm not. Sura, I don't understand what is happening." She thrust her hands into the gloves and changed the images in the panels; she looked below, above, to either side of the ship, half-expecting to espy a group of giant machine-men hauling at the ship...

  Then she found something.

  A tubular curtain, transparent but stained with blue, had fallen all around the ship. Its walls sparkled. The tube reached miles above the surface of the little world, and, looking up it, Erwal could see that it stretched all the way to the ruined Sun-world.

  The ship was rising up this tunnel.

  Soon the machine-world shrank to a fist-sized ball beneath them.

  "Erwal! Do something! Take us away from here! If we crash into the Sun-thing, we'll be destroyed!"

  But Erwal could only clench her mittened fists. "I can't," she said softly, staring at the panel. "I can't do anything. It won't respond."

  The walls of the tunnel rushed by, a blur now.

  A box had closed around Paul.

  Of course it was not possible for Paul to be subjected to a simple physical confinement; nevertheless the wave-function world lines which constituted his being — and his link to Sol — were bent to the point of breaking by the immaterial walls around him.

  He couldn't move.

  Shock and surprise surged through him. Of all the strange things he had seen in his travels this was the first to endanger him directly. With a startling shift of perspective he realized that he had come to think of himself as a god, an observer, invulnerable, above interference. Now he felt an overpowering urge to retreat into the cave of a simple quasi-human self-model... but if he went that way, madness and terror would surely follow.

  Striving for order he set up limited sub-personalities to study his prison. Data began to reach him, and slowly he came to understand.

  He was trapped in the focal zone of a radiation of an enormously high frequency. The zone was a sphere only a few feet across; nonlinear effects causing energy to cascade into lower frequencies must
have made the zone glow like a jewel. Individual photons darted through the focus like birds, their wavelength a hundred billion billion times smaller than the radius of an electron; the short wavelength implied immense energy, so that each photon was a potent little bullet of energy/mass... in fact, so massive that each photon was almost a quantum black hole. And it was this that was confining him. Black holes cut the world lines of which he was composed; it was as if a corporeal human were confined by a web of a billion burning threads.

  So it was an effective cage. The Qax had taken him.

  That left one question: why?

  Calm now, he rearranged the data strung along his wave-function components so that the omissions represented by the question were clear and sharp.

  He waited. He did not trouble to measure the time.

  ...The Qax returned.

  Paul rapidly assembled a set of multiple attention foci. There was a more coherent feel to the sleet of singularity radiation now; in a systematic fashion the frequencies, phases and paths of the powerful quanta were being modified by their passage through his being. He was being interrogated, he realized: each photon was taking a few more bits of data from him, no doubt for study by his captor. It was a data dump; he was being read as if he were some crude storage device.

  He felt no resentment; nor did he try to hide. What was the point? His captor had to be aware already of the little band of humans skimming their crude ship around Sol's gravity well. His best hope was to let the Qax learn, wait for some kind of feedback.

  But he kept his question representations in place.

  Slowly he discerned a further evolution in the hail of photons. He spread his awareness as wide as he dared, and, like a man straining to hear distant fragments of conversation, he listened. He caught glimpses of the Qax itself, elusive impressions of something fast, quick-thinking, physically compact; the radiation cage imprisoning him implied a command of the deepest structure of the physical Universe.

  ...And he heard hatred.

  The brutal fact of it was shocking, overpowering. The Qax hated him; it hated him because he was human, and that loathing warped the path of every photon that tore through him. The hatred dominated his captor's existence and was harnessed to a determination to expunge every trace of humanity from the Universe.