Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring

by Stephen Baxter

  Berg looked at her sharply. ‘What Project?’

  Shira ignored the question. ‘The Qax authorities were evidently unaware of your approach, but clearly, once they detected your vessel and its unique cargo, you would be destroyed. We had to find a way to meet you before that happened.

  ‘So, Miriam. We had to build a space vessel, and in the full and knowing gaze of the Qax.’

  ‘Yeah. You know, Shira, we’re going to have to sort out which tense to use here. Maybe we need to invent a whole new grammar - future past, uncertain present ...’

  Shira laughed unselfconsciously, and Berg felt a little more human warmth for her.

  They walked through a grove of light-globes. The globes, hovering in the air perhaps ten feet from the soil, gave out sun-like heat and warmth, and Berg paused for a few moments, feeling on her face and in her newly aging bones the warmth of a star she had abandoned a subjective century before. In the yellow-white light of the globe the flesh-pink glow of Jupiter was banished, and the grass looked normal, wiry and green; Berg ran a slippered toe through it. ‘So you camouflaged your ship.’

  ‘The Qax do not interfere with areas they perceive as human cultural shrines.’

  ‘Hurrah for the Qax,’ said Berg sourly. ‘Perhaps they’re not such bad fellows after all.’

  Shira raised the ridges from which her eyebrows had been shaved. ‘We believe that this is not altruism but calculation on the part of the Qax. In any event the policy is there - and it is a policy which may be manipulated to our gain.’

  Berg smiled, her mind full of a sudden, absurd image of rebels in grimy jumpsuits burrowing like moles under cathedrals, pyramids, the concrete tombs of ancient fission reactors. ‘So you built your ship under the stones.’

  ‘Yes. More precisely, we readied an area of land for the flight.’

  ‘Where did you get the resources for this?’

  ‘The Friends of Wigner have adherents System-wide,’ Shira said. ‘Remember that by the time of the first encounter with the Qax, humans had become a starfaring species, able to command the resources of multiple systems. The Qax control us - almost completely. But in the small gap left by that “almost” there is room for great undertakings ... projects to match, perhaps, the greatest works of your own time.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on that,’ Berg said with grim confidence.

  They walked on, towards the heart of the craft. ‘So,’ said Berg, ‘you got your ship ready. How did you get it off the planet and into space?’

  ‘A stolen Squeem hyperdrive device,’ said Shira. ‘It cast a lenticular field around the craft, initially isolating it - and a surrounding layer of air - from the planet. Then the drive was used to hurl the craft into space, to bring it to the vicinity of your Cauchy. Then - after the rendezvous with your ship - the drive was used to carry the craft through the Interface.’

  ‘The Squeem. That’s the race humans came up against earlier, right? Before the Qax.’

  ‘And who, in their defeat, afforded us much of the basic technology we needed to get out of the Solar System.’

  ‘How will we defeat them?’

  Shira grinned. ‘Read your history books.’

  ‘So,’ Berg said, ‘is the Squeem drive operating now?’

  ‘Minimally. It serves as a radiation screen.’

  ‘And to keep the air stuck to the ship, right?’

  ‘No, the craft’s gravity does that.’

  Berg nodded; maybe here was a chance to get a little more meaningful information. ‘Artificial gravity? Things have come a long way since my day.’

  But Shira only frowned.

  They approached the dwellings and workplaces of the Friends. The buildings, simple cubes and cones built on a human scale, were scattered around the heart of this landscape ship like toys, surrounding the old stones at the centre of the disc. The building material was uniformly dove-grey and - when Berg ran her fingertips over the wall of a tepee as she passed - smooth to the limit of sensation. But it was human-warm, without the cold of metal. This was ‘Xeelee construction material’, one of the many technological miracles which had apparently seeped down to mankind - and their foes, like the Squeem and the Qax - from the mysterious Xeelee, lords of creation.

  Friends moved among the buildings, patiently going about their business. One small group had collected around one of the data capture devices they called ‘slates’, and were arguing over what looked like a schematic of the earth-craft.

  They nodded to Shira, and to Berg with glances of curiosity.

  Berg had counted about thirty Friends of Wigner aboard the craft, roughly split between male and female. They appeared to be aged between twenty-five and thirty, and all seemed healthy and intelligent. Obviously this crew had been selected by the wider Friends organization for their fitness for the mission. All followed the shaved-skull fashion of Shira - some, Berg had noticed with bemusement, had indeed removed their eyelashes. But they were surprisingly easy to distinguish from each other; the shape of the human skull was, she was learning, as varied - and could be as appealing to the eye - as the features of the face.

  ‘You’ve done well to get so far,’ Berg said.

  ‘More than well,’ said Shira coolly. ‘Our craft has successfully traversed the portal, without significant damage or injury. Our supplies - and our recycling gear - should suffice to sustain us in this orbit around Jupiter for many years. Long enough for our purposes.’ She smiled. ‘Yes, we have done well.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Berg sourly studied the busy knots of Friends. ‘You know, it might help me a lot to understand you if you told me what the hell your Project is all about.’

  Shira studied her sadly. ‘That would not be appropriate.’

  Berg took a stance before her, hands on hips, and set her face into what she knew would be a commanding scowl. ‘Don’t hide behind platitudes, Shira. Damn it all to hell, it was my ship - my Interface - which you used to get as far as you have. And it’s the lives of my crew, lost on the wrong side of the wormhole, which have paid for the success you so complacently report. So you owe me a bit more than that patronizing crap.’

  Shira’s pretty, paper-fine face creased with what looked like real concern. ‘I’m sorry, Miriam. I’m not meaning to patronize you. But I - we - genuinely believe that it wouldn’t be right to tell you.’

  ‘Why? At least tell me that much.’

  ‘I can’t. If you understood the Project then you would also see why you can’t be told any more.’

  Berg laughed in her face. ‘Are you kidding me? Is that supposed to satisfy me?’

  ‘No,’ Shira said, grinning almost cheekily, and again, for a moment, Berg felt a tug of genuine empathy with this strange, secret person from the other side of time. ‘But it really is all I can give you.’

  Berg scraped her fingers across her wiry stubble of hair. ‘What is it you’re afraid of? Do you think that it’s possible I’ll oppose you - try to obstruct the Project?’

  Shira nodded seriously. ‘If you gained only partial understanding, then that is possible. Yes.’

  Berg frowned. ‘I don’t think you’re talking about understanding - but about faith. Even if I knew what you were up to, I might oppose it if I didn’t share the same irrational faith in its success. Is that it?’

  Shira did not reply to that; her gaze was clear and untroubled.

  ‘Shira, maybe you genuinely need my help,’ Berg said. ‘I’d rather not rely on the faith that my ship is going to fly, if I’ve got a chance of getting into the drive and making sure it does.’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that, Miriam,’ Shira said. She smiled disarmingly. ‘And I wish you’d stop pumping me.’

  Berg touched the girl’s elbow. ‘Shira, we’re on the same side,’ she said urgently. ‘Don’t you see that?’ She gestured vaguely in the direction of the inner Solar System. ‘You’ve got the resources of five planets - of Earth itself - to call on. Once people understood what you’re trying to avert - the nightmare of the Qax
Occupation - you would be given all the help the worlds could muster. You’d have the strength of billions.’

  ‘It wouldn’t work, Miriam,’ Shira said. ‘Remember, we have developed fifteen centuries beyond you. There is little your people could do to help.’

  Berg stiffened, drawing away from the girl. ‘We could pack a hell of a punch, Shira. What if the Qax follow us back in time, through the portal? Won’t you need help to stave them off?’

  ‘We can defend ourselves,’ Shira said calmly.

  That sent a shiver through Berg, but she pressed on: ‘Then imagine a hundred violently armed GUTships crashing through that portal, and into the future. They could do a hell of a lot of damage—’

  Shira shook her head. ‘A single Spline warship could scythe them down in a moment.’

  ‘Then let’s use the advantage of the centuries we’ve gained.’ Berg slammed her fist into her palm. ‘There’s not a Qax alive at this moment who even knows humans exist. We could go and roast them in their nest. If you gave us the secret of the Squeem hyperdrive, we could build a faster-than-light armada and—’

  Shira laughed delicately. ‘You’re so melodramatic, Miriam. So violent!’ She made a wide cage of her hands. ‘At this moment, the Qax already operate an interstellar trading empire spanning hundreds of star systems. The thought of an ill-equipped rabble of humans from fifteen centuries before my time having any hope of overcoming that might is risible, frankly. And, besides - we are not hyperdrive engineers. We could not “pass on the secrets” of the Squeem drive, as you put it.’

  ‘Then let our engineers take it apart.’

  ‘Any such attempt would result in the devastation of half a planet.’

  Berg found herself bridling again. ‘You’re still being patronizing,’ she protested. ‘Even insulting. We’re not complete dummies, you know; we are your ancestors, after all. Maybe you ought to have more respect.’

  ‘My friend, your thinking is simplistic. We did not come here to attempt a simple military assault on the Qax. Even were it to succeed - which it could not - it would not be sufficient. Our purpose is at once more subtle - and yet capable of achieving much, much more.’

  ‘But you won’t tell me what it is? You won’t trust me. Me, your own great-to-the-nth grandmother—’

  Shira smiled. ‘I would be proud to share some fraction of your genetic heritage, Miriam.’

  Side by side they walked on, still heading towards the centre of the earth-craft. Soon they had cleared the belt of construction-material huts with their knots of busy people, and the hum of the Friends’ conversation faded behind them; when they reached the centre of the craft it was as if they were entering a little island of silence.

  And as the two women walked into the broken circle of stones, that seemed entirely appropriate to Berg.

  There were no globe-lights here; the stones, hulking and ancient, stood defiant in the smoky light of Jupiter. Berg stood beneath one of the still-intact sarsen arches and touched the cold blue-grey surface of a standing stone; it wasn’t intimidating or cold, she thought, but friendly - more like stroking an elephant. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘you could cause a hell of a stir just by landing this thing on Earth. Maybe on Salisbury Plain, a few miles from the original - which, of course, is standing there in the wind and the rain, in this time zone. If it were up to me, I couldn’t resist it, Project or no Project.’

  Shira grinned. ‘The thought does have an appeal.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Berg walked towards the centre of the circle, stepping over crumbled fragments of rock. She turned slowly around, surveying the truncated landscape, trying to see this place through the eyes of the people who built it four thousand years earlier. How would this place have looked at the solstice, standing on the bare shoulders of Salisbury Plain, with no sign of civilization anywhere in the universe save a few scattered fires on the plain, soon dying in the dawn light?

  ... But now her horizon was hemmed in by the anonymous grey shoulders of the Friends’ construction-material huts; and she knew that even if she had the power to blow those huts away she would reveal only a few hundred yards of scratched turf, a ragged edge dangling over immensities. And when she tilted her head back she could see the arc of Jupiter’s limb, hanging like an immense wall across the universe.

  The old stones were dwarfed by such grandeur. They seemed pathetic.

  Absurdly she felt a lump rising to her throat. ‘Damn it,’ she said gruffly.

  Shira stepped closer and laid her hand on Berg’s arm. ‘What is it, my friend?’

  ‘You had no right to do it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To hijack these stones! This isn’t their place; this isn’t where they are meant to be. How could you murder all that history? Even the Qax never touched the stones; you said so yourself.’

  ‘The Qax are an occupying power,’ Shira murmured. ‘If they thought it in their interest, they would grind these stones into dust.’

  ‘But they did not,’ Berg said, her jaw tight. ‘And one day, with or without you, the Qax would be gone. And the stones would still stand! - but for you.’

  Shira turned her face up to Jupiter, her bare skull limned in salmon-pink light. ‘Believe me, we - the Friends - are not without conscience when it comes to such matters. But in the end, the decision was right.’ She turned to Berg, and Berg was aware of a disturbingly religious, almost irrational, aspect to the girl’s pale, empty blue eyes.

  ‘How do you know?’ Berg asked heavily.

  ‘Because,’ Shira said slowly, as if speaking to a child, ‘in the end, no harm will have come to the stones.’

  Berg stared at her, wondering whether to laugh. ‘Are you crazy? Shira - you’ve burrowed under the stones, wrapped a hyperdrive field around them, ripped them off the planet, run them through the gauntlet of the Qax fleet, and thrown them fifteen hundred years back in time! What more can you do to them?’

  Shira smiled, concern returning to her face. ‘You know I will not reveal our intentions to you. I can’t. But I can see you are concerned, and I want you to believe this, with all your heart. When our Project has succeeded, Stonehenge will not have been harmed.’

  Berg pulled her arm away from the girl’s hand, suddenly afraid. ‘How is that possible? My God, Shira, what are you people intending to do?’

  But the Friend of Wigner would not reply.

  5

  The flitter nestled against the Spline’s stomach lining; small, clawlike clamps extended from the flitter’s lower hull and embedded themselves in hardened flesh.

  Jasoft Parz, watching the anchoring manoeuvre from within the flitter, felt his own stomach turn in sympathy.

  He ran rapid tests of the integrity of his environment suit - green-glowing digits scrolled briefly across his wide faceplate - and then, with a nod of his head, instructed the flitter’s port to open. There was a hiss of equalizing pressure, a breeze which for a few moments whispered into the cabin, pushing weakly at Parz’s chest. Then Parz, with a sigh, unbuckled his restraints and clambered easily out of his chair. Since the last time he’d visited the Governor inside his Spline flagship, back in Earth orbit a full year ago, the AS treatments had done wonders for some of his more obvious ailments, and it was a blessed relief to climb out of a chair without the accompaniment of stabbing agonies in his back.

  Antibody drones had fixed a small, flat platform over the Spline’s stomach lining close to the lip of the flitter’s port; a compact translator box was fixed to it. Briskly, Parz pulled himself out of the flitter and activated electromagnets in the soles of his boots to pin his feet to the platform. Soon he was done, and was able to stand in a reasonably dignified fashion.

  He looked around. The hull of the flitter, resting beside him, was like some undigested morsel in the gut of the Spline. He turned his face up to the ball of boiling fluid suspended above him; alongside it, shimmering in the murky gloom of the Spline gut, was a Virtual of the scene outside - the icosahedral wormhole portal, a sliver of Jupit
er itself. ‘Governor,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  The Governor’s voice sounded from the translator box, slightly muffled in Parz’s ears by the thick air. ‘Indeed. A full year since those damned Friends of Wigner absconded. A wasted year, as we’ve struggled to put right the situation. And now we reach the climax, here in the shadow of Jupiter, eh, Parz?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say wasted,’ Parz said smoothly. ‘The building and launch of the new Interface portals was a great success; I was astonished at the rapid progress made.’

  ‘Thank you for the part you played in that enterprise, Jasoft Parz.’

  ‘My actions weren’t for your benefit, in particular.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said the Qax. ‘But what does your motive avail me, if the result is as I required? I understand that your motive was your personal reward, the AntiSenescence treatment which—’

  ‘Not just that,’ Parz said coldly. ‘I happened to think that the revival of the old exotic-matter industries was a good thing for humans.’ It had not been without cost, of course. With the single-mindedness available only in a command society, most of the human worlds - Earth, Mars, Luna, Titan - had been transformed into little more than exotic-matter factories, all their resources dedicated to the single goal. But the completion of such a massive project based on purely human technology - even a project instigated by the Qax - had done a great deal for the self-esteem of the race. ‘After all, the damned thing was built and launched within six months, Governor.’

  ‘I understand your pride,’ the Governor said in its smoothly neutral feminine voice. ‘And I’m glad to see that time has not withered your outspoken tongue, Ambassador.’

  Parz said sourly, ‘What is it you understand? Governor, you’ve underestimated us before, remember. The escape of the Friends—’

  ‘Must I bolster your pride, Jasoft?’ the Governor cut in. ‘I have invited you here to witness the triumph of our work together.’