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

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Maybe they just don’t trust us to help,’ Harry mused. ‘Maybe we’d be like chimpanzees working alongside nuclear physicists ... or, perhaps she’s scared of a time paradox.’

  Berg shook her head, her sour expression fixed on the girl. ‘Maybe. But I’ve another theory.’

  ‘Which is?’ Poole asked.

  ‘That if they let us know what they’re really up to, we’d stop them.’

  Shira’s laugh was unconvincingly light. ‘This is a pleasant game.’

  Poole frowned. ‘Well, at least I’ve learned enough to understand now some of the things that have been puzzling me,’ he said.

  Shira looked nonplussed.

  ‘Your ship was constructed under the nose of an occupying force,’ he said. ‘So you were forced to build it in camouflage.’

  ‘Yes.’ Shira smiled. ‘We are proud of our deception. Until the moment of its launch, when we activated a hyperdrive shell, the earth-craft was indistinguishable from any other patch of Earth, save for the ancient stones which served further to misdirect the Qax.’

  ‘Hence no hull,’ Poole said. ‘But still, the craft was more than detectable. After all, it has the mass of a small asteroid; there must have been gravitational anomalies, detectable by the Qax from orbit, before its launch.’

  Shira shrugged, looking irritatingly amused. ‘I cannot speak for the Qax. Perhaps they have grown complacent.’

  Poole, sitting cross-legged on the thin cushion, settled back on his haunches. He peered into the girl’s calm face. There was something about Shira that troubled him. It was hard to remember that, in the absence of AS treatment, her chronological age was the same as her biological age; and youth, Poole realized with a twinge of sadness, had become a novelty in his world. But for a girl of twenty-five she had an inner deadness that was almost frightening. She had described the bloody history of mankind, the depressing vista of endless, undignified war between the stars, even the Qax Occupation - of which her knowledge was first hand - with flat disinterest.

  It was as if, Poole realized uneasily, life held no meaning for this girl.

  He leaned forward. ‘All right, Shira, let’s not play games. I know what you’re doing here; what I don’t yet know is why you’re here.’

  Shira dropped her eyes to the empty tray, the cooling food. She asked quietly, ‘And what is it, in your judgement, that we are intending to do?’

  Poole thumped his fist against the Xeelee-material floor. ‘Your earth-craft is a honeycomb of singularities. And that, apart from the hyperdrive, is all you seem to have brought back through time. And you’ve stayed in Jovian orbit. You could have used your hyperdrive to go anywhere in the System, or beyond ...

  ‘I think you’re planning to implode Jupiter; to use your singularities to turn it into a black hole.’

  He heard Harry gasp. Berg touched his shoulder. ‘My God, Michael; now you know why I wanted you here. Do you think they can do it?’

  ‘I’m sure they can.’ Poole kept his eyes locked on Shira’s downturned face. ‘And it’s obvious that the project is something to do with the overthrow, or the removal, of the Qax from their future occupation. But I don’t yet know how it will work. Nor have I decided if we should let them do it.’

  Shira lifted her head to him now, her weak blue eyes lit by a sudden anger. ‘How dare you oppose us? You’ve no idea what we intend; how can you have the audacity—’

  ‘How can you have the audacity to change history?’ Poole asked quietly.

  Shira closed her eyes and sat in a lotus-like position for a few seconds, her thin chest swelling with deep, trembling breaths. When she opened her eyes again she seemed calmer. ‘Michael Poole, I would prefer you as an ally than as an enemy.’

  He smiled at her. ‘And I you.’

  She stood, her limbs unwinding gracefully. ‘I must consult.’ And, without saying any more, she nodded and left.

  Poole and Berg picked at the now cold food; Harry watched them through a haze of static.

  8

  Parz, alone, curled up tightly, floated in Spline entoptic fluid. ‘Jasoft Parz. Jasoft. You should wake now.’

  Parz uncurled abruptly, the dense liquid and his skintight environment suit making the movements of his limbs heavy. He blinked to clear sleep from his eyes. A single light-globe floated with him in the three-yard-wide chamber which contained him; the heavy fluid, disturbed by his movements, cast graceful, waved shadows on the blood-red walls.

  For a second he was disoriented, unable to remember where he was, why he was here; he thrashed, helpless as a hooked fish, clumsily swimming towards the nearest wall. Tubes trailed after him like transparent umbilical cords, linking him to a heavy metal box fixed to one wall.

  ‘Parz. Are you awake? It is time.’

  The voice of the Qax - of the new Governor of Earth, the bleak, murderous Qax from the future - sounded again, but it had an oddly calming effect on Parz as he clung to thick folds in the fleshy wall of the chamber; his fragmented attention focused on the words, and something of his composure returned.

  He whispered, finding his throat closed and dry. ‘Yes, I’m awake.’

  ‘I will open the eyelid.’

  ‘No, please.’ Jasoft, with a bizarre sense of modesty, felt reluctant to have the curtains of this makeshift sleeping chamber drawn aside before he was fully ready. He pushed away from the wall and operated controls embedded in the right wrist of his suit. ‘Give me a minute.’

  The Qax did not reply; Parz envisaged its impatience.

  Parz’s skinsuit, a transparent overlay over thin cotton garments, had been designed for long-duration wear. Now Parz felt the material whisper over his skin; his pores were cleansed, his beard, toe- and fingernails trimmed. A nipple popped out of the inside of his faceplate, which he pressed to his lips, and an ice-cool liquid flavoured like fresh apple juice coursed into his mouth. When he was done he opened his mouth and let ultrasonics work on his teeth.

  He emptied his bladder and watched the waste filter back along the pipes to the wall unit for recycling.

  His breakfast and toilet over, Parz spent a few minutes bending and stretching, trying to work all of his major muscle groups. He worked particularly hard on his back and shoulders; after eight hours in a foetal position his upper spine - still heavy with age, despite the AS treatments - creaked with a papery stiffness.

  When he was done his breathing was a little deeper and he felt the tingle of fresh blood reaching the surface of his flesh. Ruefully, he realized that this was as good as he was going to feel all day. These suits were good at what they did, but living in one was no substitute for a decent cabin: for waking up to a shower with fresh water, and a breakfast of something you could actually bite into, damn it.

  Well, that hadn’t been an option. Nor had his attendance on this whole damn mission of the Qax’s, of course.

  ‘Parz,’ the Qax rasped. ‘You’ve had five minutes.’

  Parz nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I needed time to wake up properly.’

  The Qax seemed to think that over. ‘Parz, the next few subjective hours could be the most significant in the history of both our species. You are privileged to be the only human of your era to witness these events. And you took time to cleanse yourself after your sleep?’

  ‘I’m human,’ Parz snapped. ‘Even when the world is coming to an end I have to put my trousers on one leg at a time.’

  The Qax considered that. ‘And your metaphorical trousers are now on?’

  ‘Open the damn eyelid.’

  The walls of the Spline’s huge eyeball trembled, sending small shock waves through the heavy entoptic fluid to brush against Jasoft’s skin. Muscles hauled at sheets of heavy flesh, and the eyelid lifted like a curtain. Through the rubbery greyness of the Spline’s cornea, salmon-pink light swept into the eyeball, dwarfing the yellow glow of Jasoft’s light-globe, and causing his slender, suspended form to cast a blurred shadow on the purple-veined retina behind him. Jasoft swam easily to the
inside face of the pupil; feeling oddly tender about the Spline’s sensations, he laid his suited hands carefully on the warm, pliant substance of the lens.

  Outside, the universe was a blurred confusion of pink, gunmetal grey and baby blue; Jasoft kept his eyes steady, giving their image-enhancing software time to work. After a few seconds deconvolution routines cut in with an almost audible click, transforming the blurred patches to objects of clarity, and therefore menace.

  There was Jupiter, of course: huge cyclones tracked across its bruised, purple-pink countenance. Another ship glided past - a second Spline, its pores bristling with sensors and weaponry. The eyeball Parz inhabited rotated to follow the second ship, and swirls in the entoptic fluid buffeted Parz, causing him to bounce gently against the lens.

  Now Parz’s Spline turned, driven by some interior flywheel of flesh, blood and bone; the eye swept away from Jupiter and fixed on the baby-blue patch he’d seen earlier, now resolved into a tetrahedron of exotic matter. Sheets of elusive silver-gold stretched across the triangular faces of the Interface portal, sometimes reflecting fragmented images of Jupiter, and sometimes permitting elusive glimpses of other times, other starfields.

  The portal came steadily into Parz’s view. The Spline must already be inside the squeezed-vacuum exoticity zone which surrounded the mouth of the wormhole itself, and soon the portal was so close that Jasoft had to press his faceplate against the warm Spline lens to make out its vertices.

  ‘It’s almost time,’ he whispered.

  ‘Yes, Ambassador,’ the Qax growled. ‘Almost time.’

  The words which sounded in his headpiece were - as ever - bland, synthesized, the product of a translator box somewhere in the Spline. ‘Qax, I wish I knew what you were feeling.’

  The Qax paused for some seconds. Then, ‘Anticipation. Anticipation of satisfaction. My goal is close. Why do you ask this?’

  Jasoft shrugged. ‘Why not? I’m interested in your reactions. Just as you must be interested in mine. Otherwise, why would you have brought me here?’

  ‘I’ve explained that. I need a way into human perceptions.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Parz said without anger. ‘Why do you bother to justify yourself in that way? Qax, you’re travelling back in time to destroy humanity - to eradicate forever the unlimited potential of a species. What do you care about human perception?’

  ‘Jasoft Parz,’ the Qax said, its voice almost silky now, the relish audible, ‘you are the only human to return through time with this Qax expedition. Fifteen centuries ago humans were still largely confined to the dull star system of their birth. When we have destroyed the home planet - and scoured the neighbouring worlds and spaces - you will be the only human left alive. And, with the termination of your species’ line, you will also be the last human. How will that feel?’

  Parz felt his lifetime of compromise - of diplomacy - weigh down on him, a cargo still heavy despite his AS rejuvenation. He tried, as he’d tried before, to comprehend the significance of the Qax’s monstrous act. Surely it was his duty, as the last human, to feel the pain of this crime, to suffer on behalf of his race.

  But he couldn’t. It was beyond him. And, he thought, he had moved beyond hope.

  He wondered how he’d feel, though, if he had children of his own.

  He nodded, infinitely tired. ‘So. You’ve brought me here so you can watch me, as I watch my race die. I did not understand before; I guess I was hoping for - what? nobility? - from the murderer of my species. But it really is as petty as that. My reaction, the grief of one man, will amplify for you the emotional significance of the event. It will heighten your pleasure. Won’t it?’

  ‘Pleasure? I am not psychopathic, Jasoft Parz,’ the Qax said. ‘But the sweetness of my revenge will be great.’

  ‘Revenge for what?’

  ‘For the destruction of my own world, of the home of the Qax, by the actions of a single human.’

  Parz had been told something of the story.

  A few centuries after Parz’s era, there would be a human: Jim Bolder, an unremarkable man. The Qax would try to employ Bolder, to exploit him for gain. But Bolder would deceive them - somehow trick them into turning starbreakers on their own sun.

  The new Governor came from a future in which the comparatively lenient Occupation of Earth had led, inexorably, to the destruction of the Qax home world, to a diaspora in which dozens of the fragile Qax had perished. In this timeline the Qax were marginalized; humans, freed of the Occupation, grew far stronger.

  The Qax wanted to change all that.

  Ironically, Parz had come to understand, the rebellion of the Friends of Wigner had nothing to do with the ultimate collapse of the Occupation, in this timeline. Whatever the rebels’ scheme was it was seen as irrelevant by the Qax - in fact, the sequence of time bridges initiated by the rebellion was actually an opportunity for the Qax to move back into time, far beyond Bolder, and to rectify their earlier leniency.

  Parz, baffled and disturbed by the philosophy of it all, wondered if a multiplicity of variant worlds would be initiated by this series of trips into the past, of closed timelike curves. In the original variant, the prime timeline, saw no impact on events from either the rebels’ activities or the Qax’s actions; the timeline would unfold with relentless logic to the Qax dispersal. The Qax, now, hoped to return through time to crush humanity before such events had a chance to occur; this second variant would see the emergence of the Qax as the dominant species in the absence of mankind. The rebels presumably, with their unknown project, hoped to initiate a third variant in which the Occupation would be crushed before the time of Jim Bolder - of whom, of course, the rebels could have no knowledge; to them the Occupation must have looked immense and eternal.

  But even that wasn’t the end of it, Parz realized; for presumably the actions of the various groups of time travellers would interact to set off a fourth, fifth or sixth variant ... But most human philosophers seemed to agree, now, that only one of these variants could be considered ‘real’; only one could be collapsed into actuality by the observation of conscious minds.

  Parz pressed his face against the warm lens material; it yielded like thin rubber. The electric-blue struts of the Interface portal had almost embraced the Spline now; the nearest face, which already blocked out the stars, the moons of Jupiter, was dark and empty, its blackness relieved only by a hint of autumn gold. Parz twisted his head about. He caught a glimpse of the second Spline he’d seen earlier; it hovered above and behind the Qax’s ship, following it towards the portal. ‘Some armada,’ he said. ‘Two ships?’

  ‘Two are all that is required. The humans of fifteen centuries ago will have no means of defence against the weaponry of the Spline craft. The second craft will destroy the vessel of these rebels from your present - these Friends of Wigner - while my ship will besiege Earth.’

  Parz felt his throat tighten. ‘How?’

  ‘Starbreaker beams.’

  Parz closed his eyes.

  ‘Maybe your revenge won’t be so sweet,’ he said, seeking advantage randomly. ‘What about causality? Maybe I’ll pop out of existence as soon as my ancestors are destroyed. Maybe you will, too. Have you thought about that? And then the destruction of your world by this human hero will never have happened ... and you’ll have no reason, or means, to travel through time to assault the Earth.’ But then, he thought further, if the Qax did not travel back through time, surely humanity would survive to destroy the Qax world after all ... ‘We’ll be caught in a causality loop, won’t we?’

  ‘Jasoft Parz, causality does not operate in such a simplistic fashion. In such a circumstance the different outcomes may all exist simultaneously, like the probabilities expressed by a quantum function. But only one of those possibilities will be collapsed into actuality—’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Parz said grimly. ‘You’re talking about destroying a race ... about altering history on a cosmic scale, Qax.’

  ‘Yes, we are sure. My intention is to close off
all probabilities, all variants of reality in which humanity can survive. After the destruction of your System, you will be the only human left alive.’

  ‘And you and I will disappear into nonexistence,’ Parz said grimly.

  ‘No,’ the Qax said. ‘But the timeline from which we emerged will no longer exist, as a potentiality. We will be stranded, out of time. But my job will be done.’

  Yes, Parz thought, what it’s saying is possible. It was more than genocide. The Qax was plotting not just the destruction of humankind but the destruction of all variant realities in which humanity might have survived.

  The Qax’s calculation somehow penetrated Parz’s numbed heart more deeply than anything else. How could a sentient being discuss such gruesome events - the destruction of species, of worlds, of timelines - in the language of cold logic, of science?

  Damn it, Parz protested silently; we’re talking about the snuffing out of species - of the potential of countless billions of souls as yet unborn ...

  But, as always, he realized dully, the Qax were doing nothing which humans had not tried to perpetrate on members of their own species in the past.

  ‘Parz, shortly we will be entering the throat of the wormhole. You must be prepared for causality stress.’

  ‘Causality stress?’ Parz stared into the blank, gaping mouth of the wormhole portal; the hints of silver-gold were gone now, leaving only a darkness which grew over the stars. ‘You know, Qax, you intend to destroy my home world. And yet all I feel now is a personal dread of entering that damn wormhole.’

  ‘You are a limited species, Jasoft Parz.’

  ‘Perhaps we are. Perhaps we’re better off that way.’

  The Spline trembled; to Jasoft, cushioned as he was by the entoptic matter, the mile-wide animal’s shudder was like a mild earth tremor.

  ‘I’m frightened, Qax.’

  ‘Imagine my concern.’

  The Spline’s shuddering became continuous; Parz felt it as a high-frequency vibration of the entoptic fluid - small waves beating against his flesh like insect wings - and an underlying bass rumble which resounded from the immense skeleton of the Spline itself. The ship was suffering.