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

by Stephen Baxter

  When he was able he released her, grasped her shoulders and peered into her face. ‘My God, Miriam, I thought you were dead. When I saw the lifeboat—’

  She smiled, her lips thin. ‘Not very friendly of them, was it? But they haven’t done me any harm, Mike; they just’ - now the stiffness returned - ‘they just stop me from doing things. Maybe I’m getting used to it. I’ve had a year of it now ...’

  ‘And the journey through time? How was that?’

  Her face seemed to crumple, before she regained control. ‘I survived it,’ she said.

  Poole stepped away from her with a sense of embarrassment. He was aware of Harry standing close beside him, but kept his eyes averted from Harry’s face; he was two centuries old, and he was damned if he was going to put up with any more fatherly affection. Not right now.

  There was a woman with Miriam, he saw now: as tall as Miriam, slightly scrawny, her thin, bony face young-looking and pretty - except for a dome of a shaven head, which Poole found it hard to keep his eyes away from. The woman regarded him steadily. Her pale-eyed gaze was somehow disturbing: Poole saw in it the naivety of youth overlaid with a kind of blank impassivity.

  Harry stepped forward to the girl and held out his arms. ‘Well, Michael got his welcome; how about me?’

  Michael groaned inwardly. ‘Harry—’

  The girl swivelled her head to Harry and took a neat step back. ‘That would be pleasant if it were possible, sir,’ she said, her face solemn.

  Harry grinned and shrugged theatrically. ‘Are my pixels showing again? Damn it, Michael, why didn’t you tell me?’

  Berg leaned close to Poole. ‘Who’s the asshole?’

  ‘Would you believe, my father?’

  Berg screwed up her face. ‘What an embarrassment. Why don’t you pull the plug? He’s only a Virtual.’

  ‘Not according to him.’

  ‘Michael Poole.’ Now the girl, having extricated herself from Harry’s attention, was facing Poole; her complexion was quite poor, the skin around her eyes bruised-looking and tired. Poole felt himself drawn to the weakness of this girl from the future - such a contrast to the high-technology superbeings he’d imagined in his wilder moments. Even the single-piece coverall she wore was, like Miriam’s, of some coarse, cheap-looking artificial fabric.

  ‘I’m Poole,’ he said. ‘You’ve already met my father.’

  ‘My name is Shira. I’m honoured to meet you.’ Her accent was modern-sounding but neutral. ‘Your achievements are still famous, in my day,’ the girl said. ‘Of course we would not be here to meet you without your Interface project—’

  Berg cut in sharply, ‘Is that why you let them land, instead of blowing them out of the sky?’

  ‘We would not have done that, Miriam Berg,’ Shira said. She sounded vaguely hurt.

  ‘Okay, but you could have cut and run with your hyperdrive, like you did from the other ships—’

  The word hit Poole like a slap to the face. ‘They do have a hyperdrive?’

  Berg said sourly, ‘Sure. Now ask if she’ll let you inspect it.’

  Harry pressed forward and pushed his young face close to the girl’s. ‘Why have you come here, to our time? Why has there been only one message from this craft to the rest of the Solar System?’

  ‘You have many questions,’ Shira said, holding her hands up before her as if to ward Harry off. ‘There will be time to answer you at leisure. But, please, you are our guests here; you must allow us to receive you into our hospitality.’

  Harry pointed at the sliced-open wreckage of the Cauchy lifeboat. ‘Some hospitality you’ve shown so far.’

  ‘Don’t be crass, Harry,’ Poole said, irritated. ‘Let’s hear what they have to say.’ He turned to the girl and tried to sound gracious. ‘Thank you, Shira.’

  ‘I’ll take you to my home,’ Shira said. ‘Please follow me.’ And she turned and led the way towards the centre of the earth-craft.

  Poole, Harry and Berg trailed a few paces behind Shira. Harry’s Virtual eyes flicked everywhere as they entered the loose maze of single-storey, grey-walled buildings which covered the central section of the craft.

  Poole tried to keep from touching Berg, from grabbing her again as if he were a boy.

  As they walked, Poole had the odd sensation that he was stepping into, and then climbing out of, shallow dimples in the grass-coated earth; but the area looked level, as far as he could see. The dimples seemed to be about a yard in width. He watched Shira covertly as she led them through the little village; she was walking gracefully, but he noticed how she, too, rocked backwards and forwards from the vertical by a few degrees, as if negotiating invisible potholes.

  Harry, of course, sailed a fraction of an inch over the grassy surface.

  Harry leaned close to Berg and whispered, ‘She looks about twenty-five. How old is she really?’

  ‘About twenty-five.’

  ‘Don’t kid me.’

  ‘I’m serious.’ Berg ran a hand through her wire-stiff crop of hair. ‘They’ve lost AS technology ... or, rather, had it taken away from them. By the Qax.’

  Harry looked as if he couldn’t believe it. ‘What? How can that have happened? I imagined these people would be far in advance of us ... That was part of the thrill of Michael’s time-interface experiment in the first place.’

  ‘Yes,’ Poole said grimly, ‘but it looks as if history isn’t a monotonic process. Anyway, who are the Qax?’

  ‘She’ll tell you,’ Berg said grimly. ‘She won’t tell you much else, but she’ll tell you about the Qax. These people call themselves the Friends of Wigner.’

  ‘Wigner?’ Poole asked. ‘Eugene Wigner, the quantum physicist?’

  ‘As far as I know.’

  ‘Why?’

  Berg shrugged sadly, her bony shoulders scratching against the rough material of her jumpsuit. ‘I think if I knew the answer to that, I’d know most of it.’

  Poole whispered, ‘Miriam, what have you found out about the gravity generator?’

  Berg looked at him. ‘Do you want the detail, or just a précis?’

  ‘A précis will do—’

  ‘Diddley squat. They won’t tell me anything. I don’t think they want to tell anybody anything. Frankly, I think they’d prefer I wasn’t here. And they certainly weren’t enamoured of me when I smuggled out my signal to you.’

  ‘Why me?’ Poole asked.

  ‘Partly because I thought that if anyone could figure out what’s going on here it would be you. And partly because I thought that you had a better chance than anyone else of being allowed to land here; yours is about the only name from our era these people know. And partly—’

  ‘Yes?’

  Berg shrugged, on the edge of embarrassment. ‘Because I needed a friend.’

  Walking beside her, Poole touched her arm.

  He turned to the Virtual. ‘Harry, these invisible dips in the landscape—’

  Harry, surprised, said, ‘What dips?’

  ‘They’re about a yard apart,’ Poole said. ‘I think they’re caused by an unevenness of a few per cent in whatever’s generating the gravity in this place.’

  Berg nodded. ‘I figured out that much. We must be climbing in and out of little gravity wells, right?’

  ‘Harry, tell me if the dips are consistent with a distribution of point masses, somewhere under the surface in the body of the craft.’

  Harry nodded and looked unusually thoughtful.

  ‘What does he know?’ Berg asked.

  ‘I’m not asking him,’ Poole said patiently. ‘I’m really asking the boat. Miriam, Harry’s like a camouflaged terminal to the boat’s central processor; one of the main reasons - no, the main reason - for bringing him along is that the future folk might find him easier to accept than a packful of lab equipment.’

  Harry looked pained, but he kept ‘thinking’.

  They reached what was evidently Shira’s ‘home’, a conical ten-feet-tall tepee. There was an open triangular entrance. Sm
iling, Shira beckoned them in. Poole ran a fingertip over the edge of the doorway; the dove-grey material of the tepee was rigid, vaguely warm to the touch - so not metallic - and felt more than sharp enough to cut flesh.

  Two of the fist-sized light-globes hovered near the roof of the tepee, casting softened double shadows; they bobbed like paper lanterns in response to random currents in the air. The inner walls were blank of decoration - they bore the same dull dove-grey sheen as the exterior - and the floor area, fifteen feet across near the base, contained a single piece of furniture, a low, hard-looking bed, and what looked like thick rugs, or perhaps scatter-cushions.

  They stood around awkwardly. Interestingly, now they were inside the tepee Harry seemed to be having trouble with his resolution; his face and limbs crumbled into sugar-cube-sized pixels, and then reassembled.

  Shira bade them sit, and left them.

  Stiffly, Berg and Poole pulled a couple of the cushions to the centre of the floor and sat, a few inches apart; Harry made a show of sitting on the bed, but the resolution was so poor that from time to time he broke up into such a cloud of disparate pixels that Poole could see right through him, to the grey wall. Poole laughed. ‘You look terrible,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks,’ Harry said, his voice indistinct. ‘It’s the material of the walls; it’s blocking the signal from the boat. What you’re getting is scattered through the doorway.’

  ‘What about the gravity wells?’

  Harry nodded, his face furred with pixels. ‘You were right. The dips are consistent with point masses, ten million tons each, set out in a hexagonal array a yard under the surface we stand on ... Here comes Shira.’

  Shira floated through the doorway, smiling, bearing three plates on a tray. ‘From our kitchens. I’m sorry there’s nothing for you,’ she said to Harry. The Virtual’s reply was lost in a defocused blur - mercifully, thought Poole.

  The light-globes, clearly semi-sentient, dipped closer to their heads, casting an incongruously cozy light over the meal. The globes didn’t seem to be aware of Harry, though, and drifted through his head and upper chest; Harry, stoical, ignored them. Poole wasn’t hungry but he used the plain metal cutlery Shira handed him to cut into his meal curiously. The food was hot. There was something which had the fibre of a white meat, and a thick green vegetable like cabbage, soft as if overboiled. Shira poured a clear, sparkling drink from a bottle into small blue beakers; sipping it, Poole found it had a sweet, mildly alcoholic tang, like a poor wine.

  ‘It’s good,’ he said, evoking a polite smile from Shira. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Sea food,’ said Berg around a mouthful. ‘The meat stuff is based on an edible fungus. And the green sludge is processed seaweed.’

  Shira nodded slightly, in assent.

  ‘Sounds efficient,’ Poole said.

  ‘It is,’ said Berg sourly. ‘Although that’s all it is. Mike, they’ve shown me some pictures of their Earth. Cities flattened. The continents bordered by thick, chlorophyll green: offshore farms. The produce from what’s left of the planet’s arable dry land is exported off-planet. The complex molecules are highly prized, apparently, and raise a good price. For the Qax. Michael, they’ve turned the planet into a damn factory.’

  Dark speculations filled Poole’s head. Shira’s poor physical state, the confiscation of AS technology, the occupation of Earth by an alien power ... When he’d envisaged the future to which he had built a bridge he’d foreseen strangeness, yes, but progress . . . dignity.

  Instead, here was this shabby girl with her flavourless food ...

  He asked Berg, ‘Who do the Qax get a good price from?’

  She turned to him with a thin, strained smile. ‘You’ve a lot to catch up on, Michael. It’s a big galaxy out there. A jungle. Dozens, hundreds of races competing for resources.’

  Poole put his plate down beside him on the rug, and faced Shira calmly. ‘I’m full of questions,’ he said. ‘And the fragments Miriam has learned have only added to them. I know you’re reluctant to share what you know, but—’

  ‘I won’t deny that,’ Shira said, graciously enough. Her eyes were warm. ‘But you are a scientist, Michael Poole; and the skill of a scientist is in asking the right question.’ She gestured, indicating the tepee, her fragment of world. ‘From all you have seen today, what is the right question, do you think? Ask it and I shall try to answer you.’

  Harry, a blur of pixels, murmured: ‘The right question? But how—’

  Poole shut out Harry’s voice and tried to focus, to find the key to all this teeming strangeness, a way into the girl’s bizarre world. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Shira - what are the walls of the tepee made of?’

  Shira nodded, a faint smile on her thin lips. ‘Xeelee construction material,’ she said.

  ‘And who,’ asked Poole carefully, ‘are the Xeelee?’

  Shira sipped her wine and, thoughtfully, answered him.

  The Xeelee owned the universe.

  When humans emerged from the Solar System, limping along in the first sublight GUTdrive ships, they entered a complex universe peopled by many intelligent races. Each race followed its own imperatives, its own goals.

  When humans dealt with humans, in the days before interstellar flight, there had always been a residual bond: they all belonged to the same species, after all. There had always been a prospect of one day communicating, sharing, settling down to a mutually acceptable system of government.

  Among the races men encountered, as they peered in awe about their suburb of the Galaxy, there was no bond; there was no law, save the savage laws of economics.

  Not two centuries after Poole’s time, Earth had been captured and put to work by the group-mind aquatic creatures called the Squeem.

  Harry whistled. ‘It’s a tough place out there.’

  ‘Yes,’ Shira said seriously. ‘But we must regard junior races like the Squeem - even the Qax - as our peers. The key advantage held over us by the Squeem, in those first years, was hyperdrive technology.’ But the hyperdrive, like many other of the key technological components of the local multispecial civilization - if it could be called that - was essentially Xeelee in origin.

  Wherever men, or any of the races men dealt with, had looked, the Xeelee were there, Shira said. Like gods, aloof from the rest: all-powerful, uncaring, intent on their own vast works, their own mysterious projects.

  ‘What are those projects?’ Poole asked.

  Nobody knew, Shira said. It was hard to be sure, but it seemed that the other junior races were just as ignorant.

  Berg leaned forward. ‘Are we sure the Xeelee exist, then?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Shira with certainty.

  The Xeelee were aloof ... but a little careless. They left fragments of their technology around for the junior races to pick up.

  ‘We think this stuff is trivial for the Xeelee,’ said Shira. ‘But a single artifact can be enough to galvanize the economy of a race - perhaps give it a significant advantage over its neighbours.’ Her face, in the uneven light of the hovering globes, looked still more drawn and tired. ‘Michael, we humans are new to this; and the other species are hardly open to questioning. But we believe that wars have been fought - genocides committed - over artifacts the Xeelee must regard as little more than trinkets.’

  Shira gave him some examples:

  Hyperdrive. Poole’s mouth watered.

  The construction material: monomolecular sheets, virtually indestructible, which, in the presence of radiant energy, would grow spontaneously from the fist-sized objects known as ‘Xeelee flowers’.

  Instantaneous communication, based on quantum inseparability—

  ‘No,’ Poole protested. ‘That’s not possible; you can’t send information down quantum-inseparability channels.’

  Shira smiled. ‘Tell the Xeelee.’

  Innovation among the junior races was nearly dead, Poole learned. It was a waste of effort, it was universally felt, trying to reinvent something the Xeelee had probably devel
oped a billion years ago. And besides, while you devoted your resources to researching something, your neighbour would probably spend his on a pirated Xeelee version of the same thing and come blazing into your home system ...

  Shira sketched more of the story of mankind.

  The light, inefficient yoke of the Squeem was thrown off with (in retrospect) ease, and humans moved out into the Galaxy again, in new ships based on the Xeelee hyperdrive ... stolen, at second hand, from the Squeem.

  Then humans encountered the Qax. And people were made to grow old again.

  ‘And are you here to escape the Qax?’

  Shira’s mouth closed, softly. Obviously, Poole thought, he was reaching the boundaries of what Shira was prepared to tell him.

  ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘your intention must be to find a way to overthrow them.’

  Shira smiled. ‘You’re an intelligent man, Michael Poole. It must be obvious that I don’t wish to answer such questions. I hope you won’t force me to be rude—’

  Berg snorted and folded her arms. ‘Damn it, here’s the brick wall I’ve come up against since this clod of earth came flying up in the path of the Cauchy. Shira, what’s obvious to me is that you’re out to get rid of the Qax. But why the hell won’t you let us help you? We might seem primitive to you, but, lady, we can pack a punch.’

  ‘We’ve discussed this before,’ Shira said patiently.

  ‘But she has a point,’ Poole said. ‘If nothing else, we can offer you AS technology. You don’t have to grow old, Shira; think about that.’

  Shira’s expression remained unclouded. ‘I doubt if you’ll believe me, but that really doesn’t matter.’

  Harry seemed to shiver. ‘This girl gives me the creeps,’ he said, blurred.

  ‘I believe you,’ Poole said patiently to Shira. ‘I understand there are more important things than life itself ... But still: Miriam has a point. What have you to gain by turning aside the resources of a Solar System?’