‘Who was it?’
The Governor ignored the question. ‘Our biochemical products had enormous market value, and we were able to build a trading empire - by proxy - spanning light-years. But we must still rely on clients for larger projects—’
‘Clients like humans. Or like the Spline, who cart you around in their bellies.’
‘Few of us leave the home world. The risks are too great.’
Parz settled back in his chair. ‘Governor, you’ve known me for a long time. You must know how I’ve been driven crazy, for all these years, by knowing so little about the Qax. But I’m damn sure you haven’t shown me all this as a long-service reward.’
‘You’re correct, Ambassador.’
‘Then tell me what you want of me.’
The Governor replied smoothly, ‘Parz, I need your trust. I want access to the future. I want humans to build me a new time Interface. And I want you to direct the project.’
It took Parz a few minutes to settle his churning thoughts. ‘Governor, I don’t understand.’
‘The revival of the ancient exotic matter technologies should not be difficult, given the progress of human science in the intervening millennium and a half. But the parameters will differ from the first project ...’
Parz shook his head. He felt slow, stupid and old. ‘How?’
Through the flitter’s tabletop the Qax transmitted an image to Parz’s slate: an appealing geometrical framework, icosahedral, its twenty sides rendered in blue and turning slowly. ‘The new Interface must be large enough to permit the passage of a Spline freighter,’ the Governor said. ‘Or some other craft sufficiently large to carry Qax.’
A traveller through a wormhole interface suffered gravitational tidal stresses on entering the exotic-matter portal framework, and on passing through the wormhole itself. Parz had been shown, now, that a Qax was far more vulnerable to such stress than a human. ‘So the throat of the wormhole must be wider than the first,’ he mused. ‘And the portals must be built on a larger scale, so that the exotic-matter struts can be skirted—’
Parz touched the slate thoughtfully; the geometrical designs cleared.
The Qax hesitated. ‘Parz, I need your co-operation on this project.’ There seemed to be a note of honesty, of real supplication, in the Governor’s synthesized voice. ‘I have to know if this will cause you difficulty ‘
Parz frowned. ‘Why should it?’
‘You are a collaborator,’ the Qax said harshly, and Parz flinched. ‘I know the ugliness that word carries, for humans. And now I am asking you to collaborate with me on a project whose success may cause great symbolic damage to humans. I am aware of how much the small success of the time-journeying rebels has meant to humans, who see us as oppressive conquerors—’
Parz smiled. ‘You are oppressive conquerors.’
‘Now, though, I am asking you to subvert this emblem of human defiance to the needs of the Qax. I regard this as an expression of great trust. Yet, perhaps to you this is the vilest of insults.’
Parz shook his head, and tried to answer honestly - as if the Qax were an externalization of his own conscience, and not a brooding conqueror who might crush him in an instant. ‘I have my views about the Qax Occupation, my own judgements on actions you have taken since,’ he said slowly. ‘But my views won’t make the Qax navies go away, or restore the technologies, capabilities and sheer damn dignity which you have taken from us.’
The Qax said nothing.
‘I am a practical man. I was born with a talent for diplomacy. For mediation. By doing the job I do, I try to modify the bleak fact of Qax rule into a livable arrangement for as many humans as possible.’
‘Your fellows might say that by working with us you are serving only to perpetuate that rule.’
Parz spread his age-marked hands, finding time to wonder that he was speaking so frankly with a Qax. ‘Governor, I’ve wrestled with questions like this for long hours. But, at the end of it, there’s always another problem to address. Something urgent, and practical, which I can actually do something about.’ He looked up at the ball of slowly seething liquid. ‘Does that make any sense?’
‘Jasoft, I think we are of like mind, you and I. That is why I chose you to assist me in this enterprise. I fear that the precipitate actions of these rebels, these Friends of Wigner, represent the gravest peril - not just to the Qax, but perhaps to humanity as well.’
Parz nodded. ‘That thought’s occurred to me too. Meddling with history isn’t exactly a proven science ... and which of us would wish to trust the judgement of these desperate refugees?’
‘Then you will help me?’
‘Governor, why do you want to travel forward in time? How will that help you with your problem from the past?’
‘Don’t you see what an opportunity this technology represents? By constructing a portal to the future I can consult with an era in which the problem has already been addressed and resolved. I need not make a decision on this momentous matter with any uncertainty about the outcome; I can consult the wisdom of those future Qax and refer to their guidance ...’
Parz wondered vaguely if some sort of time paradox would be invoked by this unlikely scheme. But aloud he said, ‘I understand your intention, Governor. But - are you sure you want to do this? Would it not be better to make your own decisions, here and now?’
The Governor’s interpreted voice was smooth and untroubled, but Parz fancied he detected a note of desperation. ‘I cannot take that risk, Parz. Why, it’s entirely possible I will be able to consult myself ... a self who knows what to do. Will you help me?’
The Qax is out of its depth, Parz realized. It genuinely doesn’t know how to cope with this issue; the whole of this elaborate new Interface project, which will absorb endless energy and resources, is all a smokescreen for the Governor’s basic lack of competence. He felt a stab of unexpected pride, of chauvinistic relish at this small human victory.
But then, fear returned through the triumph. He had been honest with the Governor ... Could he really bring himself to trust the judgement of these Friends of Wigner, to whom accident had provided such power?
And, surely, this victory of procrastination would increase the likelihood that they’d all be left helpless in the face of the wave of unreality from the past.
But, Parz reflected, he had no choices to make.
‘I’ll help you, Governor,’ he said. ‘Tell me what we have to do first.’
4
With her message to Michael Poole dispatched and still crawling over the Solar System at mere lightspeed, Miriam Berg sat on coarse English grass, waiting for the Wigner girl, Shira.
Berg had built a time machine and carried it to the stars. But the few days of her return through the wormhole to her own time had been the most dramatic of her life.
Before her the lifeboat from the Cauchy lay in a shallow, rust-brown crater of scorched soil. The boat was splayed open like some disembowelled animal, wisps of steam escaping its still-glowing interior; the neat parallel slices through its hull looked almost surgical in their precision, and she knew that the Friends had taken particular pleasure, in their own odd, undemonstrative way, in using their scalpel-like cutting beams to turn drive units into puddles of slag.
The - murder - of her boat by the Friends had been a price worth paying, of course, for getting her single, brief message off to Poole. He would do something; he would be coming ... Somehow, in formulating her desperate scheme, she had never doubted that he would still be alive, after all these years. But still, she felt a twinge of conscience and remorse as she surveyed the wreckage of the boat; after all this was the destruction of her last link with the Cauchy, with the fifty men, women and Friends with whom she had spent a century crossing light-years and millennia - and who were now stranded on the far side of the wormhole in the future they had sought so desperately to attain, that dark, dehumanized future of the Qax Occupation.
How paradoxical, she thought, to have returned through
the wormhole to her own time, and yet to feel such nostalgia for the future.
She lay on her back in the grass and peered up at the salmon-pink clouds that marbled the monstrous face of Jupiter. Tilting her head a little she could still make out the Interface portal - the wormhole end which had been left in Jovian orbit when the Cauchy departed for the stars, and through which this absurd earth-craft of the Friends of Wigner had come plummeting through time. The portal, sliding slowly away from the earth-craft on its neighbouring orbit, was a thumbnail sketch rendered in cerulean blue against the cheek of Jupiter. It looked peaceful - pretty, ornamental. The faces of the tetrahedron, the junctions of the wormhole itself, were misty, puzzled-looking washes of blue-gold light, a little like windows.
It was hard to envisage the horrors which lay only subjective hours away on the other side of that space-time flaw.
She shivered and wrapped her arms around her body. After she’d landed on the earth-craft the Friends had given her one of their flimsy, one-piece jumpsuits; she was sure it was quite adequate for this fake climate, but, damn it, she just didn’t feel warm in it. But she suspected she’d feel just as shivery in the warmest clothing; it wasn’t the cold that was her problem, she suspected, but a craving to return to the safe metal womb that the Cauchy had become. During her century of flight, whenever she had envisaged the end of her journey, she had anticipated a pleasurable tremor on stepping out of a boat for the first time and drinking in the fresh, blue air of Earth ... even an Earth of the distant future. Well, she hadn’t got anywhere near Earth; and surely to God anybody would be spooked by a situation like this. To be stranded on a clod of soil a quarter-mile wide - with no enclosing bubble or force shell as far as she could tell - a clod which had been wrenched from the Earth and hurled back through time and into orbit around Jupiter—
She decided that a healthy dose of fear at such a moment was quite the rational response.
She heard footsteps, rustling softly through the grass.
‘Miriam Berg.’
Berg raised herself on her elbows. ‘Shira. I’ve been waiting for you.’
The girl from the future sounded disappointed. ‘I trusted you, Miriam. I gave you the freedom of our craft. Why did you send this message?’
Berg squinted up at Shira. The Friend was tall - about Berg’s height, a little under six feet - but there the similarity ended. Berg had chosen to be AS-frozen at physical age around forty-five - a time when she had felt most at home in herself. Her body was wiry, tough and comfortable; and she liked to think that the wrinkles scattered around her mouth and brown eyes made her look experienced, humorous, fully human. And her cropped hair, grizzled with grey, was nothing to be ashamed of. Shira, by contrast, was aged about twenty-five. Real age, soon to be overwhelmed by time, thanks to the Qax’s confiscation of the AS technology. The girl’s features were delicate, her build thin to the point of scrawny. Berg couldn’t get used to Shira’s clean-shaven scalp and found it hard not to stare at the clean lines of her skull. The girl’s skin was sallow, her dark-rimmed eyes blue, huge and apparently lashless; her face, the prominent teeth and cheekbones, was oddly skeletal - but not unpretty. Shira was much as Berg imagined Earthbound city-dwellers of a few centuries before Berg’s own time must have looked: basically unhealthy, surviving in a world too harsh for humans.
Berg would have sworn that she had even spotted fillings and yellowed teeth embedded in Shira’s jaw. Was it possible that dental caries had returned to plague mankind again, after all these centuries?
What a brutal testament to the achievements of the Qax Occupation forces, Berg reflected bitterly. Shira was like a creature from Berg’s past, not her future. And, now that Berg was deprived of the medical facilities of the Cauchy - not to mention AS technology - no doubt soon she, too, would become afflicted by the ills that had once been banished. My God, she thought; I will start to age again.
She sighed. She was close to her own time, after all; maybe - unlikely as it seemed - she could get back home. If Poole made it through ...
‘Shira,’ she said heavily, ‘I didn’t want to make you unhappy. I hate myself for making you unhappy. All right? But when I learned that you had no intention of communicating with the humans of this era - of my era - of telling them about the Qax ... then of course I had to oppose you.’
Shira was unperturbed; she swivelled her small, pretty face to the wreck of the boat. ‘You understand we had to destroy your craft.’
‘No, I don’t understand that you had to do that. But it’s what I expected you to do. I don’t care. I achieved my purpose; I got my message off despite all of you.’ Berg smiled. ‘I’m kind of pleased with myself for improvising a radio. I was never a hands-on technician, you know—’
‘You were a physicist,’ Shira broke in. ‘It’s in the history books.’
Berg shivered, feeling out of time. ‘I am a physicist,’ she said. She got stiffly to her feet and wiped blades of grass from her backside. ‘Can we walk?’ she asked. ‘This place is depressing me.’
Berg, casting about for a direction, decided to set off for the lip of the earth-craft; Shira calmly fell into step beside her, bare feet sinking softly into the grass.
Soon they were leaving behind whatever gave this disc of soil its gravity; the ground seemed to tilt up before them, so that it was as if they were climbing out of a shallow bowl, and the air started to feel thin. About thirty feet short of the edge they were forced to stop; the air was almost painfully shallow in Berg’s lungs, and even felt a little colder.
At the edge of the world tufts of grass dangled over emptiness, stained purple by the light of Jupiter.
‘I think we have a basic problem of perception here, Shira,’ Berg said, panting lightly. ‘You ask why I betrayed your trust. I don’t understand how the hell a question like that has got any sort of relevance. Given the situation, what did you expect me to do?’
The girl was silent.
‘Look at it from my point of view,’ Berg went on. ‘Fifteen hundred years after my departure in the Cauchy I was approaching the Solar System again ...’
As the years of the journey had worn away, the fifty aboard Cauchy had grown sombrely aware that the worlds they had left behind were aging far more rapidly than they were; the crew were separated from their homes by growing intervals of space and time.
They were becoming stranded in the future.
... But they carried the wormhole portal. And, they knew, through the wormhole only a few hours’ flight separated them from the era of their birth. It was a comfort to imagine the worlds they had left behind on the far side of the spacetime bridge, still attached to the Cauchy as if by some umbilical of stretched spacetime, and living their lives through at the same rate as the Cauchy crew, patiently waiting for the starship to complete its circuit to the future.
At last, after a subjective century, the Cauchy would return to Jovian orbit. Fifteen centuries would have worn away on Earth. But still their wormhole portal would connect them to the past, to friends and worlds grown no older than they had.
‘I don’t know what I was expecting exactly as we neared Sol,’ Berg said. ‘We’d run hundreds of scenarios, both before and during the journey, but we knew it was all guesswork; I guess inside I was anticipating anything from radioactive wastelands, to stone axes, to gods in faster-than-light chariots.
‘But what I’d never anticipated was what we found. Earth under the thumb of super-aliens nobody has even seen ... and look what came hurtling out to meet us, even before we’d got through the orbit of Pluto.’ She shook her head at the memory. ‘A patch of Earth, untimely ripp’d from England and hurled into space; a few dozen skinny humans clinging to it desperately.’
She remembered venturing from the steel security of the Cauchy into Jovian space, an envoy in her solo lifeboat, and tentatively approaching the earth-craft; she had scarcely been able to believe her eyes as the ship had neared a patch of countryside that looked as if it had been cut out of a tourist
catalogue of Earth and stuck crudely onto the velvet backdrop of space. Then she had cracked the port of the boat on landing, and had stepped out onto grass that rustled beneath the tough soles of her boots ...
For a brief, glorious few minutes the Friends had clustered around her in wonder.
Then Shira had come to her - related fifteen centuries of disastrous human history in as many minutes - and explained the Friends’ intentions.
Within a couple of hours of landing Berg had been forced to crouch to the grass with the rest as the earth-craft plummeted into the gravity tube that was the wormhole. Berg shuddered now as she remembered the howling radiation which had stormed around the fragile craft, the ghastly, mysterious dislocation as she had travelled through time.
She hadn’t been allowed to get a message off to the crew of the Cauchy. Perhaps her Cauchy shipmates were already dead at the hands of the Qax - if that word ‘already’ had any meaning, with spacetime bent over on itself by the wormhole.
‘It has been an eventful few days,’ she said wryly. ‘As a welcome home this has been fairly outrageous.’
Shira was smiling, and Berg tried to focus. ‘I’m glad you say that: outrageous,’ Shira said. ‘It was the very outrageousness of the idea which permitted us to succeed under the eyes of the Qax, as we planned. Come, let us talk; we have time now.’
They turned and began to stroll slowly back down the rim-hill and towards the interior of the craft. As they walked, Berg had the uncomfortable feeling that she was descending into and climbing out of invisible dimples in the landscape, each a few feet wide and perhaps inches shallow. But the land itself was as flat as a tabletop to the eye. She was experiencing unevenness in the field which held her to this quarter-mile disc of soil and rock; whatever they used to generate their gravity around here clearly wasn’t without its glitches.
Shira said, ‘You must understand the situation. We knew, from surviving records of your time, that your return to the Earth with the Interface portal was imminent. If you had succeeded, a gateway to the free past might have become available to us. We conceived the Project—’
Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring Page 30