Timelike Infinity xs-2

by Stephen Baxter

  The Qax continued to speak. Its words were like distant trumpet notes. "Jasoft Parz. This is as difficult for me, for any sentient being, as it is for you… even for the Spline. But it will pass. Do not let it undermine your sanity. Concentrate on what I am saying to you.

  "Jim Bolder, in his stolen craft, evaded the Xeelee engineers. He returned to the Qax home system, where his journey had begun. Jasoft, the Qax are a trading nation. Bolder had returned with a treasure valuable beyond price: data on the greatest Xeelee artifact. It will not surprise you that the Qax decided to, ah, retain the data.

  "But Bolder tricked us."

  There was a glimmering around Parz now, a ghostly shimmer, a reflection of ripples, like moonlight on a sea.

  "The details have never become clear. Bolder should have emerged from hyperspace into a region surrounded by Spline warships, all bearing gravity-wave starbreaker technology… He failed to do so. Bolder survived, escaped.

  "Starbreakers were used. In the confusion and panic, they brushed the Qax sun. It was enough to cause the sun to become unstable — ultimately, to nova.

  "The Qax were forced to flee. Dozens of individuals died in the exodus. Our power was lost, and the Occupation of Earth crumbled…"

  Jasoft Parz, bewildered and disoriented as he was, could not help but exult at this.

  A gray light, without form and structure, spread into existence around him… No, not around him, he realized; he was part of this light: it was as if this were the gray light that shone beneath reality, the light against which all phenomena are shadows. His panic subsided, to be replaced by a sense of calm power; he felt as if he were light-years wide and yet no wider than an atom, a million years old and yet fresher than a child’s first breath.

  "Qax. What the hell is happening?"

  "Causality stress, Parz. Perceptual dysfunction. Causality is not a simple phenomenon. When objects are once joined, they become part of a single quantum system… and they must remain joined forever thereafter, via superlight quantum effects. You should imagine you are walking across a beach, calling into existence a trail of footsteps as you go. The footsteps may fade with time as you pass on, but each of them remains bound to you by the threads of quantum functions."

  "And when I pass out of my own region of spacetime?"

  "The threads are cut. Causal bonds are broken and must be re-formed…"

  "Dear God, Qax. Is this pain worth it, just to travel through time?"

  "To achieve one’s goals: yes," the Qax said quietly.

  "Finish the story," Jasoft Parz said.

  "Finish it?"

  "Why are the Xeelee building a way out of the universe? What are they seeking?"

  "I suspect if we knew the answer to that," the Qax said, "we would know much of the secret truth of our universe. But we do not. The story must remain unfinished, Jasoft Parz.

  "But consider this. What if the Xeelee are not seeking something beyond their Ring — but are fleeing something in this universe?

  "What do Xeelee fear, do you suppose?"

  Parz, buffeted, disoriented, could find no reply.

  The Spline warship surged through time.

  Chapter 9

  The Friend of Wigner, Jaar, was waiting for Michael Poole at the entrance to the Crab’s grounded boat.

  Poole stood on the boat’s exit ramp, bathed in eerie Jovian light. He looked out at the waiting young man, the scatter of Xeelee construction-material buildings in the distance, the glimpses of ancient stones — and over it all the looming, perfect curve of Jupiter.

  He felt too old for this.

  He’d got through the events of the previous day — the landing, the encounter with Miriam, the bombardment of strangeness — on a kind of psychic momentum. But the momentum had gone now; he’d emerged only reluctantly from a troubled sleep to face the dangers, the pressures of the day, the need to find a way to deal with Miriam’s presence here.

  Miriam had spent the sleeping period in the boat. Harry had had the decency to abandon his rights-for-AIs rhetoric for a few hours and had gone into stasis to leave them alone. But Miriam and Michael hadn’t slept together. What were they, kids? They had talked, and held each other’s hands, and finally stumbled to separate bunks. Somehow an acquiescence to lust didn’t seem the right reaction to a century of separation, the renewal of an antique, and combative, relationship.

  He wished he hadn’t let Harry talk him into this jaunt. He would have exchanged all he had seen and learned to return to the calmness of his station in the Oort Cloud, his slow tinkering at the fringes of exotic-matter physics.

  Of course if he got his head cleaned out, as Harry had done, he’d be able to face all this with a fresh eye.

  Well, the hell with that.

  Poole walked down the ramp and onto the tough English grass. The Wigner’s Friend smiled at him; Poole saw a young man, tall and whiplash thin, dressed in the standard-issue pink coverall. Bony wrists and ankles protruded from the coarse material. Under a high, cleanshaven dome of a scalp he shared the pallid, hothouse complexion of Shira, and his eyes were watery-brown. Jaar’s stance was a little awkward. Poole guessed that even fifteen centuries hence someone of this height and build would spend his life ducking to avoid looking clumsy, but there was something beyond that, something about the way the Friend’s legs looked bowed -

  Rickets. Was it possible that such a curse had been allowed to return to the Earth? Poole’s heart moved.

  "You are Michael Poole. I am honored to meet you."

  "And you’re Jaar — the guide Shira promised?"

  "I am a physical sciences specialist. I trust you slept peacefully."

  "Not very." Poole grinned. "I have too many questions."

  Jaar nodded with the solemnity of the young. "You have a fine mind, Mr. Poole; it is natural for you to question—"

  "And," Poole went on sharply, "Shira said she’d send someone who could provide answers."

  Jaar smiled obscurely, and in that expression Poole recognized something of the abstractedness of Shira. Jaar seemed disengaged, uninterested in this little duel, or indeed in any form of interpersonal contact. It was as if he had much more important things weighing on his mind.

  "Shira did say that there was little purpose trying to hide from you anything whose existence you had already deduced."

  "So you’ve been sent along to humor an old man?"

  "No one sent me, Mr. Poole," Jaar said. "I volunteered for the honor."

  "It’s me who’s honored, Jaar."

  With a little bow Jaar invited Poole to walk with him; side by side, they strolled across the pink-stained grass toward the heart of the earth-craft.

  Poole said, "You’re only the second Friend I’ve met… and yet you seem very similar, in disposition, to Shira. Forgive my rudeness, Jaar, but are all you Friends so alike?"

  "I don’t think so, Mr. Poole."

  "Call me Michael. But you have an inner calm, a strange certainty — even after running the gauntlet of the Qax Navy; even after falling willy-nilly through a hole in spacetime…"

  "I am sure that what we have come here to do is right."

  Poole nodded. "Your Project. But you’re not allowed to tell me what that is."

  "I’m something of a scientist myself; like you, I was born with the curse of an inquiring mind. It must be infuriating to have an area of knowledge blocked from you like this… I apologize." Jaar’s smile was smooth, bland, unyielding; his bald head seemed oddly egglike to Poole, seamless and lacking information. "But you must not think we are all alike, Michael. The Friends are from very different backgrounds, disparate circumstances. Granted we were selected for this mission on the grounds of youth and physical fitness, so we share those characteristics; but perhaps we seem similar to you simply because we are from such a removed reference frame. Perhaps the differences between us are diminished by our distance from you."

  "Perhaps," Poole said, and he laughed. "But I’m not naive, lad."

  "I’m sure tha
t’s so," Jaar said smoothly. "And yet, without AS technology, none of us shares your two hundred years, Mr… Michael." For a precious second he sounded almost mischievous. "Perhaps you simply aren’t used to the company of young people."

  Poole opened his mouth… then closed it again, feeling vaguely embarrassed. "Maybe you’re right." he said.

  They walked silently for a while.

  An inner calm, a strange certainty… Poole wondered if the mysterious purpose of this mission could have some mystical, or religious, content; perhaps it wasn’t the scientific or engineering project he had first assumed. He had a sudden bizarre image of the battered stones of the henge being aligned with a sunrise over the cloudy limb of Jupiter…

  There were certainly elements of a religious devotion among these strange young people. Their blanked-out demeanor, their lack of hope for themselves, he thought. Yes, that was the key to it. Somehow they had no dreams of personal gain, or happiness, in all this. Perhaps the mission plan called for them to sacrifice their lives, Poole wondered; and now he imagined the fragile earth-craft, its mission over, plunging into the forbidding depths of the Jovian atmosphere, ancient menhirs tumbling away like matchsticks.

  But what religious sect would style itself the Friends of Wigner?

  They reached the "village" that surrounded the ancient henge at the heart of the earth-craft. Jaar led Poole past cones, cylinders, and cubes, all a few feet above head height and composed of the dove-gray Xeelee substance, and scattered in rough rows over the grass. Save for the doorways cut into the buildings it was, thought Poole, like wandering through the play pit of some monstrous child. Knots of young people moved about their tasks calmly and unhurriedly; some of them bore the flat, compact computing devices Berg had called "slates."

  They reached a hemispherical hut, anonymous among the rest. "What’s this?" Poole asked. "Home, sweet home? No offense, but I ate enough seaweed with Shira yesterday—"

  Jaar laughed, not unpleasantly. "No, Michael; though I would be honored if you would be my guest in my quarters later. This building is for access."

  "Access?"

  "To the interior of the earth-craft. To the plane of singularities." Jaar studied him, seeming puzzled. "That’s what you wanted to see, wasn’t it?"

  Poole smiled. "What are we waiting for?"

  * * *

  They stepped into the dome, Jaar ducking to bring his head under the razor-sharp lintel. Poole felt light on his feet here, almost buoyant; the surface gravity must be a little less than outside. Inside the dome was a slim cylinder that sat on a floor of Xeelee material. A doorway was cut into the cylinder.

  Jaar climbed into the cylinder, hunching his thin shoulders; Poole followed. Silently a panel slid over the entrance, sealing them in. The cylinder was cramped, seamless. There was a diffuse, pearly light, but Poole could find no source; it was a little like being inside a neon tube, he thought.

  Poole was aware of Jaar studying him with a kind of amused patience. Now Jaar smiled. "This is an elevator. The terminology hasn’t changed since your day. It will take us into the interior."

  Poole nodded, feeling oddly nervous; he wasn’t exactly used to exposing himself to the possibility of physical danger. "Right. So we’re over an elevator shaft, cut through the plane of singularities. Hence the reduced gravity."

  Jaar seemed to respond to his nervousness. "If you’re not ready—"

  "You don’t have to coddle me along, Jaar."

  "All right." Jaar touched a section of blank wall. He did not try to hide what he was doing from Poole, even though he must have been aware that Poole would memorize every moment of this trip.

  There was no noise. But the floor seemed to fall away. Poole’s stomach lurched and, without intending to, he reached behind himself for the stability of the wall.

  Jaar murmured, "It will pass."

  Now, as Poole floated, a band of pressure passed up the length of his body: but it was an inverse, negative pressure, like the pressures of exotic matter, which pulled his stomach and chest outward rather than compress them.

  Jaar still watched him steadily with his blank brown eyes. Poole kept his face carefully blank. Damn it, he should have been prepared for this; as Jaar had said he’d deduced the structure of the interior of the craft already. "The plane of singularities," he said, his voice reasonably steady. "We’re passing through it. Right?"

  Jaar nodded approvingly. "And the pressure you feel about your chest is the gravitational attraction of the singularities. When you stand on the surface of the earth-craft the plane is below you and draws you down, so simulating the gravitational field of the Earth; but here in the interior of the craft the plane is all around us."

  The sharp gravitational plane had reached Poole’s neck now; absurdly he found himself raising his head, as if trying to keep his head above a gravitational sea.

  Jaar said, "Now, Michael — be ready. You may want to anchor yourself to the walls, as before."

  "This time I’ve worked it out. We’re going to tip over. Right?"

  "Be ready."

  Now the plane passed over Poole’s head and away from him. For a few seconds there was a disconcerting feeling of falling upward that rapidly translated, as Poole’s sensorium went through a hundred-eighty-degree swivel, to a sense of plummeting headfirst downward. Then came rotation, the sharp pull of Coriolis forces at his belly. The elevator cage was turning about an axis somewhere near his waist. Oddly enough Poole did not feel threatened now; it was like being a small child again, like swinging through the air in the strong, safe arms of Harry. The real Harry.

  The turn was completed. The sideways Coriolis died away; with a sigh of relief Poole felt himself settle to a normal-feeling floor. Not quite normal; he felt his ears pop. Jaar smiled kindly at him. "Don’t worry," he said. "It took me a while to get used to it."

  Poole frowned, feeling an absurd need to demonstrate his manhood to this young man. "I’ve told you, you don’t need to coddle me. We’ve passed through the plane; now we’ve turned upside down, so the holes are beneath our feet again, and everything feels normal. Right?"

  Jaar nodded, in unmoved assent. He palmed another section of the wall and the elevator door panel slid aside.

  Jaar stepped out onto a clear, glassy surface. Poole followed, almost stumbling; in the gentle gravity the clear surface was as slippery as hell. When he was steady on his feet, Poole raised his head.

  The earth-craft was hollow.

  Poole was at the center of an artificial cave that looked as if it occupied most of the craft’s bulk. Above his head there was a dome of Xeelee dove-gray, about twenty yards tall at its highest point, and below him a sheet of glass that met the dome at a seamless horizon. Beneath the glass was a hexagonal array of blue and pink bars, each cell in the array about a yard wide.

  Tubes of glass — hollow shafts, each a yard wide — rained from the roof, terminating six feet above the floor. It made the dome look like some huge, absurd chandelier, Poole thought. A blocky control console was fixed to the floor beneath each tube. Through the holes in the roof Poole could see patches of Jovian cloud-pink. The shafts looked like fairy-land cannon, pointing at Jupiter.

  People — young men and women in pink jumpsuits, Wigner’s Friends — moved about the clear surface, talking and carrying the ubiquitous AI slates; the huge, sparkling pillars dangled unnoticed above their heads like trapped sunlight. The Friends moved with the mercury-slow grace Poole associated with inhabitants of low-gravity worlds like Luna. Their voices, low and serious, carried clearly to Poole, and it was as if he were inside some huge building — perhaps a travel terminus.

  The diffuse light seemed to come from the domed ceiling itself, with a little blue-pink toning from the array beneath the floor. It was like being inside a huge lightbulb. Or, perhaps, in the imaginary caverns inside the Earth conjured up by one of Poole’s favorite authors, the ancient Verne.

  Jaar smiled and bowed slightly. "So," he said, "the guided tour. Over your h
ead we have a dome of Xeelee construction material. In fact the construction material passes under the floor we stand on and under the singularity plane, forming a shell within the craft broken only by the access shafts."

  "Why?"

  Jaar shrugged. "Construction material is impervious to all known radiation."

  "So it protects the passengers from riding so close to the black holes."

  "And it prevented the Qax from detecting our activity and becoming overly suspicious. Yes. In addition, our hyperdrive engine has been incorporated into the fabric of the construction-material shell."

  "How did you build the Xeelee shell?"

  Jaar rubbed his nose. "You don’t ‘build’ construction material. You grow it. It took humans centuries to work out how, from the first discovery of abandoned Xeelee flowers."

  Poole pointed to the floor. "And under here, the plane of singularities."

  Jaar dropped to one knee; Poole joined him, and they peered through the floor at the enigmatic spokes of blue and pink-violet. Jaar said, "This surface is not a simple transparent sheet; it is semisentient. What you see here is largely a false-color rendering.

  "You have deduced, from your observations of the dimpled gravity field on the surface, that our craft is held together by mini-black hole singularities." He pointed to a node in the hexagonal array. "There is one of them. We manufactured and brought about a thousand of the holes with us through time, Michael."

  The holes, the Friend explained, were charged, and were held in place by an electromagnetic lattice. The false colors showed plasma flux lines in the lattice, and high-frequency radiation from infalling matter crushed by the singularities.

  Hawking evaporation caused each singularity to glow at a temperature measured in teradegrees. The megawatts generated by the captive, evaporating holes provided the earth-craft’s power — power for the hyperdrive, for example.

  The evaporation was whittling away at the mass-energy of each hole, inexorably. But it would take a billion years for the holes to evaporate completely.