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

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘You’ll be killed,’ Shira said, clutching at straws.

  He laughed. ‘Funnily enough, that doesn’t seem to matter so much any more ... But I don’t want to take you all with me, if I don’t have to. Harry, give me an option to get them off before we hit.’

  ‘Working,’ Harry said calmly. ‘Thirteen minutes to the portal, now.’

  Parz seemed to squirm, uncomfortable, in his chair. ‘I’m not certain I deserve such a reprieve,’ he said.

  ‘Then think of it as an assignment,’ Michael said briskly. ‘I need you to get this girl off the ship. Do you think she’s going to go voluntarily?’

  Parz studied Shira briefly, as she continued to stand before Michael, clenching and unclenching her small fists. ‘Perhaps not,’ he said sadly.

  ‘Twelve minutes,’ Harry said.

  14

  From a scarred, bruised socket in the elephant-grey hide of the Spline, a three-yard-wide eyeball popped into space, trailing a length of thick optic nerve. Antibody drones, squabbling and scrambling over each other, swarmed over the translucent surface of the eyeball and along the length of the nerve trunk. Red laser light sparked from the mouths of a dozen of the drones, sawing at the trunk; at last the trunk parted, with fully a yard of its length disintegrating into laser-sliced fragments. The warship surged up towards the blue mouth of the Interface portal; drones, scrabbling to hang on, slid away from the abandoned eyeball and from the severed trunk, still spitting at each other with tiny, fierce bolts of laser light.

  As the Spline receded to a knot of bruised flesh, Jasoft Parz turned and surveyed the interior of the eye chamber. His only companion, the Wigner Friend girl Shira, floated somewhere near the eyeball’s geometric centre, her thin body curled into a loose foetal position, her eyes half-closed. Studying her, Parz felt suddenly vulnerable in this chamber, dressed as he was only in this ill-fitting, rather worn gown of Michael Poole’s. The entoptic fluid had been drained, the eyeball hurriedly pumped full of air to accommodate the two of them; and he had forgone his skinsuit, in order to share the dangers Shira would have to face.

  He shivered with a sudden chill of fear, feeling naked.

  He sought something to say.

  ‘You must not fear the future, my dear. Michael Poole has done his best to preserve us from the fate he has decreed for himself. We have air in this chamber sufficient for many hours, and Poole has given us heating elements, a packet of water and food. We should survive long enough to be picked up by the craft of this era. And I’ve every reason to believe you’ll soon be reunited with your own people, on the earth-craft.’

  Now she swivelled her head to face him; her watery-blue eyes seemed bruised, as if from weeping. ‘Cold comfort coming from a servant of the Qax, Jasoft Parz.’

  He tried not to flinch. ‘I can’t blame you for that,’ he said patiently. ‘But such labels are behind us now, Shira. We are here, you and I, in this ancient time frame; and here, after the destruction of the Interface, we will spend the rest of our lives. You must begin to accept that, and think forward—’

  ‘I accept I am trapped,’ she said. ‘I accept little else.’

  ‘Trapped in the past? You shouldn’t think of it like that. We have been brought to a new era - in many ways a better era, a golden age in man’s history. Think of it, Shira; the humans of this era are looking outwards, only beginning to explore the potentialities of the universe in which they are embedded, and the resources of their own being. They have banished many of the ills, social as well as physiological - hunger, disease, untimely death, which, thanks to the Qax, our lost contemporaries endure. There are many projects here for you to—’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she snapped. ‘I do not mean trapped merely in the past. I mean trapped in the future. Thanks to the destruction of the Project by the insane arrogance of Michael Poole, I am trapped in this single, doomed timeline.’

  ‘Ah. Your vision of globally optimized event chains—’

  ‘Don’t speak to me of visions, collaborator.’ Her words were delivered in an even, matter-of-fact tone, and were the more stinging for that. ‘What visions have sustained you?’

  He felt the muscles of his cheeks twitch. ‘Look, Shira, I’m trying to help you. If you want to insult me, then that’s fine. But sooner or later you’re going to have to accept the fact that, like me, you’re trapped here. In the past.’

  She turned her head away again, quite gracefully, and bowed it towards her knees; her body rocked a little in the air. ‘No,’ she said.

  He began to feel irritated. ‘What do you mean, “no”? Once the damn Interface is closed down you’ll have no way back to the future.’

  Now, unexpectedly, she smiled. ‘No short cut. No, I accept that. But there is another way back. The longer way.’

  He frowned.

  She went on, ‘I mean to accept AntiSenescence treatment here. If I’m offered it, or can buy it. And then—’

  ‘—And then it’s a simple matter of living through fifteen centuries - fifty generations - waiting for the reemergence of singularity technology. So you can start all over again. Is that what you mean?’

  Her smile lingered.

  ‘How can you think in such terms?’ he demanded. ‘You got to know Michael Poole; after two centuries of life his head was so full of detritus, of layers of experience, that at times he could barely function. You saw that, didn’t you? Why do you think he spent decades, literally, alone in that GUTship in the cometary halo? And you’re talking, almost casually, about lasting more than seven times as long. How can any purpose endure through such an immense timescale? It’s - beyond the human ...’

  The girl did not reply, but her smile lingered on, inwardly directed; and Parz, despite his superiority in years to this girl, felt as if he had become something weak and transient, a mayfly, beside the immense, burning purpose of Shira.

  Harry crystallized onto the empty couch beside Michael. The image was weak and wavering, the pixels crowding and of uneven size - evidently Harry didn’t have available the processing power he’d used earlier - but there was at least an illusion of solidity, of another presence in the lifedome, and Michael felt grateful enough for that.

  Michael lay back on his couch, trying to achieve a state of inner, and outer, relaxation, but he was betrayed by knots of tension in his forehead, his neck, his upper back. He watched the Interface portal blossom open above his head. It spanned most of the dome now. The Spline warship, with the Crab embedded within, was moving along a trajectory which passed the cheek of Jupiter tangentially, and from Michael’s position the portal now hung against a backdrop of velvet space, of distant, inhabited stars. The portal’s clean blue-violet geometry - and the burnished-gold effect of the glimmering faces of the tetrahedron, the shadowy reflections of other times and places - were really quite beautiful.

  Harry said, his voice scratchy, ‘I suppose you do know what you’re doing?’

  Michael couldn’t help but laugh. ‘It’s a bit late to ask that now.’

  Harry cleared his throat. ‘I mean, this whole caper has been improvised: I just wondered if you had any clearer ideas about your precise intentions when, say, you were ramming a lump of comet-ice down the throat of a Spline warship from the future.’

  ‘Well, it worked, didn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, through sheer luck. Only because the Spline was bemused by causality stress, and poor old Jasoft started setting fire to the Spline’s nervous system.’

  Michael smiled. ‘It wasn’t luck. Not really. What beat the Qax in the end was their own damned complacency. Jasoft was a loophole, a weakness, which they brought back through time with them. If it hadn’t been for Jasoft Parz they would have left some other hole, another Achilles’ heel for us to exploit. They were so certain they could scrape us out of the Solar System without any trouble, so certain there was nothing we could do to resist them—’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Harry threw up his ghostly hands. ‘Come on, Michael. How are we goi
ng to destroy the wormhole?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure.’

  ‘Oh, terrific.’ Harry’s face turned fuzzy for a moment and Michael imagined that more processing power was being diverted from the image. Now it downgraded further, until the illusion of a solid presence in the chair beside Michael was almost lost.

  ‘Harry, is there some problem? I thought we were on routine running until we hit the Interface.’

  Harry’s voice came to him through a sea of phasing and static. ‘It’s these drones,’ he said. ‘They’re just too damn smart.’

  ‘I thought you had them under control. You organized them to cast off the eye chamber with Shira and Parz, to cut the nerve trunk—’

  ‘Yeah, but I’m not experienced at handling them. Remember, they’re not simple remotes; they have a lot of processing power of their own. It’s like - I don’t know - like trying to get work done by a few thousand strong-willed ten-year-olds. Michael, one bunch of them has gone ape. They’ve formed into a raiding party; they’re working through the carcass in search of the high-density power sources. They’re being resisted by others because the damage they’re doing is going to be detrimental to the functioning of the Spline in the long run. But the resistance isn’t organized yet ... and any drone which opposes them is chewed up by those damn little laser jaws of theirs.’

  Michael laughed. ‘What’s going to be the outcome?’

  ‘I don’t know ... The raiders are heading for the heart of the Spline, now. And I mean the heart, literally; a city-block of power-cells and muscle stumps centred around the hyperdrive unit. The area of greatest energy density. If the raiders get through there’ll be hell to pay; the rest of the ship’s systems will be too drained of power to be able to do anything about it, and ultimately they’ll decommission the hyperdrive ... But it might not get that far. Other drones are forming up to oppose them. It looks as if there’s going to be a pitched battle, soon, somewhere in the region of the heart. But at the moment my money is on the rogue, rebel drones; the defenders just haven’t got the leadership—’

  Michael cut in, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Harry, will you shut up about the drones? Who cares about the damn drones, at a time like this?’

  Harry frowned, blurredly. ‘Look, Michael, this isn’t a joke. These rebels could disable the hyperdrive, out from under us. And you want to use the hyperdrive in your scheme to wreck the Interface, don’t you?’

  ‘What’s the timescale for all this?’

  Harry turned away, flickering. ‘Twenty minutes for the battle to resolve itself. Another ten for the rebels, assuming they win, to cut their way into the heart and get to the hyperdrive and other power sources. Let’s say thirty, total, at the outside, before we lose hyperdrive functionality.’

  Michael pointed up at the Interface. ‘And how long before we’re in the guts of that thing?’

  Harry thought for a few seconds. ‘Six minutes, tops.’

  ‘Okay, then. That’s why you should forget about the damn drones. By the time they’ve done their worst it will all be over, one way or the other.’

  Harry pulled a face. ‘All right, point taken. But it doesn’t get you out of explaining to me how you’re going to blow up the Interface portal.’ Harry turned his head up to the blue-glowing portal, and - with an evident surge of processing concentration - he produced blue-violet highlights on his Virtual cheekbones. ‘I mean, if we simply ram that portal, the corpse of this damn ship is going to be cut up like ripe cheese, isn’t it?’

  ‘Right. I doubt if you could do much harm to a structure of exotic matter by smashing it with a lump of conventional material; the density difference would make it as absurd as trying to knock down a building by blowing it a kiss ... We’re going to enter the Interface as best we can in this tub—’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Harry, do you understand how the hyperdrive works?’

  Harry grinned. ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means that I’ve now merged with the residuum of the Spline’s consciousness. And the operation of the hyperdrive is buried in there somewhere ... But it’s like working the muscles that let you stand up and walk about. Do you understand me?’ He looked at Michael, almost wistfully, his face more boyish than ever. ‘The Spline core of me knows all about the hyperdrive. But the human shell of Harry, what’s left of it, knows damn-all. And - I find I’m scared, Michael.’

  Michael found himself frowning, disturbed by Harry’s tone. ‘You sound pathetic, Harry.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry you don’t approve,’ Harry said defiantly. ‘But it’s honest. I’m still human, son.’

  Michael shook his head, impatient with the sudden jumble of emotions he found stirring inside him. ‘The hyperdrive,’ he said sternly. ‘All right, Harry. How many dimensions does spacetime have?’

  Harry opened his mouth, closed it again. ‘Four. Three space, one time. Doesn’t it? All wrapped up into some kind of four-dimensional sphere ...’

  ‘Wrong. Sorry, Harry. There are actually eleven. And the extra seven is what allows the hyperdrive to work ...’

  The grand unified theories of physics - the frameworks which merged gravitation and quantum mechanics - predicted that spacetime ought to assume a full eleven dimensions. The logic, the symmetry of the ideas would allow little else.

  And eleven dimensions there turned out to be.

  But human senses could perceive only four of those dimensions, directly. The others existed, but on a tiny scale. The seven compactified dimensions were rolled into the topological equivalent of tight tubes, with diameters well within the Planck length, the quantum limit to measurement of size.

  ‘Well, so what? Can we observe these compactifed tubes?’

  ‘Not directly. But, Harry, looked at another way, the tubes determine the values of the fundamental physical constants of the universe. The gravitational constant, the charge on the electron, Planck’s constant, the uncertainty scale ...’

  Harry nodded. ‘And if one of these tubes of compactification were opened up a little—’

  ‘—the constants would change. Or,’ said Michael significantly, ‘vice versa.’

  ‘You’re getting to how the hyperdrive works.’

  ‘Yes ... As far as I can make out, the hyperdrive suppresses, locally, one of the constants of physics. Or, more likely, a dimensionless combination of them.’

  ‘And by suppressing those constants—’

  ‘—you can relax the compactification of the extra dimensions, locally, at least. And by allowing the ship to move a short distance in a fifth spacetime-dimension, you can allow it to traverse great distances in the conventional dimensions.’

  Harry held up his hands. ‘Enough. I understand how the hyperdrive works. Now tell me what it all means.’

  Michael turned to him and grinned. ‘Okay, here’s the plan. We enter the Interface, travel into the wormhole—’

  Harry winced. ‘Let me guess. And then we start up the hyperdrive.’

  Michael nodded.

  The Interface portal was immense over them, now. One glimmering pool of a facet filled Michael’s vision, so close that he could no longer make out the electric blue struts of exotic matter which bounded it.

  ‘Three minutes away,’ Harry said quietly.

  ‘Okay.’ As an afterthought Michael added: ‘Thanks, Harry.’

  ‘Michael - I know this won’t, and mustn’t, make a damn bit of difference - but I don’t think there’s any way I can survive this. I can’t function independently of the Spline any more; I’ve interwoven the AI functionalities of Spline and Crab so much that if one fails, so must the other ...’

  Michael found himself reaching out to the Virtual of his father; embarrassed, he drew his hand back. ‘No. I know. I’m sorry, I guess. If it’s any consolation I’m not going to live through it either.’

  Harry’s young face broke up into a swarm of pixels. ‘That’s no consolation at all, damn you,’ he whis
pered distantly.

  The Interface was very close now; Michael caught reflections of the Spline in that great, glimmering face, as if the facet were some immense pool into which the warship was about to plunge.

  Harry crumbled into pixel dust, reformed again, edgily. ‘Damn those drones,’ he grumbled. ‘Look, Michael, while there’s enough time there’s something I have to tell you ...’

  The intrasystem freighter settled over the battered, gouged-out Spline eyeball. Cargo-bay doors hung open like welcoming lips, revealing a brightly lit hold.

  The eye bumped against the hold’s flat ceiling, rebounding softly; a few yards of chewed-up optic nerve followed it like a grizzled remnant of umbilical cord, wrapping itself slowly around the turning eye. Then the hold doors slid shut, and the eye was swallowed.

  In an airlock outside the hold, Miriam Berg pressed her face to a thick inspection window. She cradled a heavy-duty industrial-strength hand-laser, and her fingers rattled against the laser’s casing as the hold’s pressure equalized.

  She cast her gaze around the scuffed walls of the hold with some distaste. This was the Narlikar out of Ganymede, an inter-moon freighter run by a tinpot two-man shipping line. She knew she shouldn’t expect too much of a ship like this. The D’Arcy brothers performed a dirty, dangerous job. Normally this hold would contain water ice from Ganymede or Europa, or exotic sulphur compounds excavated with extreme peril from the stinking surface of Io. So that would explain some of the stains. But sulphur compounds didn’t scratch tasteless graffiti onto the hold walls, she thought. Nor did they leave sticky patches and half-eaten meals all over - it seemed - every work surface. Still, she was lucky there had been even one ship in the area capable of coming to pick up this damn eyeball so quickly. Most of the ships in the vicinity of the Interface portal were clean-lined government or military boats - but it had been the D’Arcy brothers, in their battered old tub, who had come shouldering through the crowd to pick her up from the earth-craft in answer to the frantic, all-channel request she’d put out when she’d realized what Poole was up to.