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

by Stephen Baxter

  She watched the Spline eyeball bounce around in the hold’s thickening air. It was like some absurd beachball, she thought sourly, plastered with dried blood and the stumps of severed muscles. But there was a clear area - the lens? - through which human figures, tantalizingly obscure, could be seen.

  Michael . . .

  Now a synthesized bell chimed softly, and the door separating her from the hold fell open. Towing the laser, Berg threw herself into the eyeball-filled hold.

  The air in the hold was fresh, if damn cold through the flimsy, begrimed Wignerian one-piece coverall she’d been wearing since before the Qax attack. She took a draught of atmosphere into her lungs, checking the pressure and tasting the air—

  ‘Jesus.’

  —and she almost gagged at the mélange of odours which filled her head. Maybe she should have anticipated this. The gouged-out Spline eyeball stank like three-week-old meat - there was a smell of burning, of scorched flesh, and subtler stenches, perhaps arising from the half-frozen, viscous purple gunk which seemed to be seeping from the severed nerve trunk. And underlying it all, of course, thanks to her hosts the D’Arcys, was the nose-burning tang of sulphur.

  Every time the eyeball hit the walls of the hold, it squelched softly.

  She shook her head, feeling her throat spasm at the stench. Spline ships; what a way to travel.

  After one or two more bounces, air resistance slowed the motion of the sphere. The eyeball settled, quivering gently, in the air at the centre of the hold.

  Beyond the Spline’s clouded lens she could see movement; it was like looking into a murky fishtank. There was somebody in there, peering out at her.

  It was time.

  Her mind seemed to race; her mouth dried. She tried to put it all out of her head and concentrate on the task in hand. She raised her laser.

  The D’Arcys, after picking her up from the earth-craft, had loaned her this hand-laser, a huge, inertia-laden thing designed for slicing ton masses of ore from Valhalla Crater, Callisto. It took both hands and the strength of all her muscles to set the thing swinging through the air to point its snout-like muzzle at the Spline eyeball, and all her strength again to slow its rotation, to steady it and aim. She wanted to set the thing hanging in the air so that - with any luck - she’d slice tangentially at the eyeball, cutting away the lens area without the beam lancing too far into the inhabited interior of the eyeball. Once the laser was aimed, she swam over and, pressing her face as close to the clouding lens as she could bear, she peered into the interior. There were two people in there, reduced to little more than stick-figures by the opacity of the dead lens material. With her open palm she slapped at the surface of the lens - and her hand broke through a crust-like surface and sank into a thick, mouldering mess; she yanked her hand away, shaking it to clear it of clinging scraps of meat. ‘Get away from the lens!’ She shouted and mouthed the words with exaggerated movements of her lips, and she waved her hands in brushing motions.

  The two unidentifiable passengers got the message; they moved further away from the lens, back into the revolting shadows.

  Taking care not to touch the fleshy parts again, Berg moved away and back to her laser. She palmed the controls, setting the dispersion range for five yards. A blue-purple line of light, geometrically perfect, leapt into existence, almost grazing the cloudy lens; Berg checked that the coherence was sufficiently low that the beam did no more than cast a thumb-sized spot of light on the hold’s far bulkhead.

  Shoving gently at the laser, she sliced the beam down. As the opaque lens material burned and shrivelled away from laser fire, brownish air puffed out of the eyeball, dispersing rapidly into the hold’s atmosphere; and still another aroma was added to the mélange in Berg’s head - this one, oddly, not too unpleasant, a little like fresh leather.

  A disc of lens material fell away, as neat as a hatchway. Droplets of some fluid leaked into the air from the rim of the removed lens, connecting the detached disc by sticky, weblike threads.

  She still couldn’t see into the meaty sphere; and there was silence from the chamber she had opened up.

  Berg thumbed the laser to stillness. Absently she reached for the detached lens-stuff and pulled it from the improvised hatchway; the loops of entoptic material stretched and broke, and she sent the disc spinning away.

  Then, unable to think of anything else to do, and quite unable to go into the opening she’d made, she hovered in the air, staring at the surgically clean, leaking lip of the aperture.

  Thin hands emerged, grasped the lip uncertainly. The small, sleek head of Jasoft Parz emerged into the air of the Narlikar. He saw Berg, nodded with an odd, stiff courtesy, and - with an ungainly grace - swept his legs, bent at the knees, out of the aperture. He shivered slightly in the fresh air outside the eyeball; he was barefoot, and dressed in a battered, begrimed dressing gown - one of Michael’s, Berg realized. Parz seemed to be trying to smile at her. He hovered in the air, clinging to the aperture of the eye with one hand like an ungainly spider. He said, ‘This is the second time I’ve been extracted from a Spline eyeball, after expecting only death. Thank you, Miriam; it’s nice to meet you in the flesh.’

  Berg was quite unable to reply.

  Now a second figure emerged slowly from the eye. This was the Wigner girl Shira, dressed - like Berg - in the grubby remnants of a Wigner coverall. The girl perched on the lip of the aperture, her legs tucked under her, and briefly scanned the interior of the freighter’s hold, her face blank. She faced Berg. ‘Miriam. I didn’t expect to see you again.’

  ‘No.’ Berg forced the words out. ‘I ...’

  There was something like compassion in Shira’s eyes - the closest approximation to human warmth Miriam had ever seen in that cold, skull-like visage - and Berg hated her for it. The Friend said, ‘There’s nobody else, Miriam. There’s only the two of us. I’m sorry.’

  Berg wanted to deny what she said, to shove past these battered, stained strangers and hurl herself headfirst into the eyeball, search it for herself. Instead she kept her face still and dug her nails into her palm; soon she felt a trickle of blood on her wrist.

  Parz smiled at her, his green eyes soft. ‘Miriam. They - Michael and Harry - have contrived a scheme. They are going to use the wreckage of the Spline to close the wormhole Interface, to remove the risk of any more incursions from the Qax occupation future. Or any other future, for that matter.’

  ‘And they’ve stayed aboard. Both of them.’

  Parz’s face was almost comically solemn. ‘Yes. Michael is very brave, Miriam. I think you should take comfort from—’

  ‘Bollix to that, you pompous old fart.’ Berg turned to Shira. ‘Why the hell didn’t he at least speak to me? He turned his comms to slag, didn’t he? Why? Do you know?’

  Shira shrugged, a trace of residual, human concern still evident over her basic indifference. ‘Because of his fear.’

  ‘Parz calls him brave. You call him a coward. What’s he afraid of?’

  Shira’s mouth twitched. ‘Perhaps you, a little. But mostly himself.’

  Parz nodded his head. ‘I think she’s right, Miriam. I don’t think Michael was certain he could maintain his resolve if he spoke to you.’

  Berg felt anger, frustration, surge through her. Of course she’d known people die before; and her lingering memories of those times had always been filled with an immense frustration at unfinished business - personal or otherwise. There was always so much left to say that could now never be said. In a way this was worse, she realized; the bastard wasn’t even dead yet but he was already as inaccessible as if he were in the grave. ‘That’s damn cold comfort.’

  ‘But,’ Jasoft Parz said gently, ‘it’s all we can offer.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She shook her head, trying to restore some sense of purpose. ‘Well, we may as well go and watch the fireworks. Come on. Then let’s see if these tinpot freighters run to shower cubicles ...’

  The freighter’s bridge was cramped, stuffy, every flat surface
coated with notes scrawled on adhesive bits of paper. Only the regal light of Jupiter, flooding into the squalid space through a clear-view port, gave the place any semblance of dignity. The D’Arcy brothers, fat, moon-faced and disconcertingly alike, watched from their control couches as Berg led her bizarre party onto their bridge. Berg said gruffly, ‘Jasoft. Shira. Meet your great-grandparents.’

  Then, leaving the four of them staring cautiously at each other, Miriam turned her face to the clear-view port, lifted her face to the zenith. Against the cheek of Jupiter the frame of the Interface portal was a tetrahedral stencil; and the Spline warship, the lodged wreckage of the Crab clearly visible even at this distance, was like a bunched fist against the portal’s geometric elegance.

  As she watched, the warship entered the Interface; blood-coloured sparks ringing the Spline where the battered carcass brushed the exotic-matter frame of the portal.

  Berg considered raising a hand in farewell.

  The sparks flared until the Spline was lost to view.

  Miriam closed her eyes.

  15

  The lifedome of the Crab was swallowed by the encroaching darkness of the Interface portal. Michael, staring up through the dome, found himself cowering.

  Blue-violet fire flared from the lip of the lifedome; it was like multiple dawns arising from all around Michael’s limited horizon. Harry, from the couch beside Michael’s, looked across fearfully. Michael said, ‘That’s the hull of the Spline hitting the exotic-matter framework. I’d guess it’s doing a lot of damage. Harry, are you—’

  The holographic Virtual of Harry Poole opened its mouth wide - impossibly wide - and screamed; the sound was an inhuman chirp that slid upwards through the frequency scales and folded out of Michael’s sensorium.

  The Virtual smashed into a hail of pixels and crumbled, sparkling.

  The Spline shuddered as it entered the spacetime wormhole itself; Michael, helplessly gripping the straps which bound him to his couch, found it impossible to forget that the vessel which was carrying him into the future was no product of technology, but had once been a fragile, sentient, living thing.

  Harry’s head popped back into existence just above Michael’s face. Harry looked freshly scrubbed, his hair neatly combed. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said sheepishly. ‘I should have anticipated the shock as we hit the exotic matter. I think I’ll be okay now; I’ve shut down a lot of the nerve/sensor trunks connecting the central processor to the rest of the ship. Of course I’ve lost a lot of functionality.’

  A vast sense of loss, of alienation, swept over Michael; Harry’s face was an incongruously cheerful blob of animation in a vision field otherwise filled with the emptiness of a spacetime flaw. He forced himself to reply. ‘I - hardly think it matters any more. As long as we can power up the hyperdrive.’

  ‘Sure. And I’ve my battalions of loyal antibody drones protecting the remaining key areas of the ship; they ought to be able to hold out until it doesn’t matter one way or the other.’ The Virtual head plummeted disconcertingly towards Michael until it hovered a mere foot above his nose; it peered down at him with exaggerated concern. ‘Are you okay, Michael?’

  Michael tried to grin, to come back with a sharp reply, but the feeling of desolation was like a black, widening pool inside his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I’m not damn well okay.’

  Harry nodded, looking sage, and receded into the air. ‘You have to understand what’s happening to you, Michael. We’re passing from one time frame to another. Remember how Jasoft Parz described this experience? The quantum functions linking you to your world - the nonlocal connections between you and everything and everybody you touched, heard, saw - are being stretched thin, broken ... You’re being left as isolated as if you’d only just been born.’

  ‘Yes.’ Michael gritted his teeth, trying to suppress a sensation of huge, psychic pain. ‘Yes, I understand all of that. But it doesn’t help. And it doesn’t help, either, that I’ve just left behind Miriam, everyone and everything I know, without so much as a farewell. And it doesn’t help that I face nothing but death; and that only the level of pain remains to be determined ... I’m scared, Harry.’

  Harry opened his mouth to speak, closed it again; convincing-looking tears brimmed in his eyes.

  An unreasonable anger flared in Michael. ‘Don’t you get sentimental on me again, you damn - facsimile.’

  Harry’s grin was slight. ‘Should we activate the hyperdrive?’ he asked softly. ‘Get this affair over and done with?’

  Michael closed his eyes and shook his head, his neck muscles stiff and tight, almost rigid. ‘Not yet. Wait until we’re well inside the throat of the wormhole.’

  Harry hesitated. ‘Michael, what exactly will the hyperdrive operation do to the wormhole?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure,’ Michael said. ‘How can I know for sure? No one’s tried such a damn fool experiment before. Look, a wormhole is a flaw in space-time, kept open by threads of exotic matter. And it’s an unstable flaw.

  ‘When the hyperdrive operates, the dimensionality of spacetime is changed, locally. And if we do that inside the wormhole itself - deep inside, near the midpoint, where the stress on the flawed spacetime will be highest - I don’t see how the wormhole feedback control systems can maintain stability.’

  ‘And then what?’

  Michael shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. But I’m damn sure the Interface will no longer be passable. And I’m hoping that the collapse we initiate will go further, Harry. Remember that more wormhole links have been set up, to the future beyond Jim Bolder and his heroics. I don’t want to leave the opportunity for more Qax of that era to come back and try wrecking history again.’

  ‘Can we close the other wormholes?’

  Poole shrugged. ‘Maybe. Wormholes put spacetime under a lot of stress, Harry ...’

  ‘ ... And us?’ Harry asked gently.

  Michael met the Virtual’s gaze. ‘What do you think? Look, I’m sorry, Harry.’ He frowned. ‘Well, what were you going to tell me?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Your big secret. Just before we hit the exotic matter.’

  Harry’s head shrank a little in an odd, shy gesture. ‘Ah. I was vaguely hoping you’d forgotten that.’

  Michael clicked his tongue, exasperated. ‘My God, Harry, we’ve just minutes to live and you’re still a pain in the arse.’

  ‘I’m dead.’

  ‘... What?’

  ‘I’m dead. The real Harry Poole, that is. The original.’ Harry’s eyes held Michael’s and his tone was level, matter-of-fact. ‘I’ve been dead thirty years, now, Michael. More, in fact.’

  Michael, lost in quantum isolation, tried to make sense of this ghostly news. ‘How did you - he—’

  ‘I reacted adversely to a stage of the AS treatment. Couldn’t accept it; my body couldn’t take any more. One in a thousand react like that, they tell me. I lived a few more years. I aged rapidly. I, ah - I stored this Virtual as soon as I understood what was going to happen. I didn’t have any specific purpose in mind for it. I didn’t plan to transmit it to you. I just thought, maybe, it might be of use to you one day. A comfort, even.’

  Michael frowned. ‘I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry. I ... know how much your youth, your—’

  ‘My good looks, health and potency.’ Harry grinned. ‘Don’t be afraid to say it, Michael; I’m kind of beyond modesty. All the things I wanted to keep, which irritated you so much.’

  ‘I know how much life meant to you.’

  Harry nodded. ‘Thank you. I’m thanking you for him. He - Harry - died before I, the Virtual, was animated. I share his memories up to the point where he took the Virtual copy; then there’s a gap. Before the end of his life he left me a message, though.’

  Michael shook his head. ‘He left one of his own Virtuals a message. Well, that’s my father.’

  ‘Michael, he said he didn’t fear death.’ Harry looked thoughtful. ‘He’d changed, Michael. Changed from the person I was, or a
m. I think he wanted me to tell you that, in case you ever encountered me. Perhaps he thought it would be a comfort.’

  The Spline shuddered again, more violently now, and Michael, staring beyond the dome, seemed to see detail in what had previously been formlessness. Blue-white light, sparking from tortured hull-flesh, continued to flare at the edge of his vision. Fragments of light swam from a vanishing point directly above his head down the spacetime walls and, fading, shot down over his horizon. They were flashes, sheets of colourless light; it was like watching lightning behind clouds. This was radiation generated, he knew, by the unravelling of stressed spacetime, here deep in the throat of the flaw. He gripped the couch. For the first time he had a genuine sensation of speed, of limitless, uncontrollable velocity. The lifedome was a fragile, vulnerable thing above him, no more protection than a canvas tent as he plummeted through this spacetime flaw; and he tried not to cower, to hide his head from the sky which stretched over him.

  ‘Why didn’t he tell me?’

  Harry’s expression hardened. ‘He didn’t know how to tell you. He was genuinely concerned about causing you pain - I hope you believe that. But the basic reason was that the two of you haven’t shared a moment of closeness, of - of intimacy - since you were ten years old. That’s why.’ He glared down at Michael. ‘What did you expect? He turned to his friends, Michael.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘So am I,’ said Harry earnestly. ‘So was he. But that was the way it was.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with living so damned long,’ Michael said. ‘Soured relationships last for ever.’ He shook his head. ‘But still ... I’d never even have heard about it if you hadn’t been transmitted to persuade me to come in from the Oort Cloud.’

  ‘They - the multi-government committee set up to handle this incident - thought I’d have a better chance of persuading you if you didn’t know; if I didn’t tell you about the death.’

  Michael almost smiled. ‘Why the hell did they think that?’

  ‘What do multi-government committees know about the relationship between father and son?’