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

by Stephen Baxter

  The walls of the wormhole seemed to be constricting like a throat. Still the lightning-like splashes of light shone through the walls. ‘I think it’s time,’ Michael said. ‘You’ll handle the hyperdrive?’

  ‘Sure. I guess you don’t need a countdown ... Michael. You have a message.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Who the hell can be contacting me now?’

  Harry, his face straight, said, ‘It’s a representative of the rebel antibody drones. They’re not unintelligent, Michael; somehow they’ve patched in to a translator circuit. They want me to let them talk to you.’

  ‘What do they want?’

  ‘They’ve ringed the hyperdrive. The drones consider it - ah, a hostage.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They’re willing to sue for peace. In the spirit of interspecies harmony. They have a long list of conditions, though.’ Harry frowned down at Michael. ‘Do you want to hear what they are? First—’

  ‘No. Just tell me this. Do you still control the hyperdrive?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Michael felt the tension drain out of his neck muscles, it seemed for the first time in days; a sensation of peace swept over him. He laughed. ‘Tell them where they can stick their list.’

  Harry’s head ballooned. He smiled, young and confident. ‘I think it’s time. Goodbye, Michael.’

  The hyperdrive engaged. The Spline warship convulsed.

  Ribbons of blue-white light poured through the cracking walls of spacetime; Michael could almost feel the photons as they sleeted through the absurd fragility of the lifedome.

  A lost corner of Michael’s consciousness continued to analyse, even to wonder. He was seeing unbearable shear stresses in twisted spacetime resolving themselves into radiant energy as the wormhole failed. At any moment now the residual shielding of the lifedome would surely collapse; already the flesh of the Spline corpse must be boiling away. Knowing what was happening didn’t really help, of course - something which, Michael thought, it was a bit late to discover.

  Harry’s Virtual imploded, finally, under the pressure of the godlike glare beyond the dome.

  Bits of the wormhole seemed literally to fall away before the Crab. Cracks in spacetime opened up like branching tunnels, stretching to infinity.

  Michael wasn’t sure if that should be happening. Maybe this wouldn’t go quite according to plan ...

  Spacetime was shattering. Michael screamed and pressed his fists to his eyes.

  On the earth-craft, the image of the Interface portal glittered on every data slate.

  Miriam Berg sat on scorched grass, close enough to the centre of the earth-craft to see, beyond the ruined construction-material homes of the Friends of Wigner, the brownish sandstone shards that marked the site of the ancient henge.

  Jasoft Parz, clothed in a fresh but ill-fitting Wignerian coverall, sat close to her, his short legs stretched out on the grass. The Narlikar’s only boat stood on blackened earth close by her. The D’Arcys had brought her back here, after her retrieval of Shira and Jasoft Parz.

  She was aware that Parz’s green eyes were fixed on her. That he was almost radiating sympathy.

  Well, damn him. Damn them all.

  Her legs tucked under her, Miriam stared at the slate on her lap, at the delicate image of the portal it contained, as if willing herself to travel into the slate, shrinking down until she, too, could follow Michael Poole through the spacetime wormhole. If she concentrated really hard, she could shut out all the rest of it: this strange, rather chilling man from the future beside her, the distant activities of the Friends, even the damned thin air and irregular gravity of the devastated earth-craft.

  The moment stretched. The portal glimmered like a diamond on her slate.

  Then, with shocking suddenness, blue-white light flared silently inside the portal, gushing from every one of the tetrahedral frame’s facets. It was as if a tiny sun had gone nova inside the frame. The light of the wormhole’s collapse glared from the slates carried by Parz, the Friends, as far as she could see; it was as if everyone held a candle before them, and the light generated by that failing spacetime flaw illuminated all their young, smooth faces.

  The light died. When she looked again at her slate the portal was gone; broken fragments of the exotic-matter frame, sparking, tumbled away from a patch of space which had become ordinary, finite once more.

  She threw the slate face down on the grass.

  Jasoft Parz laid his slate more gently on the ground. ‘It is over,’ he said. ‘Michael Poole has succeeded in sealing the wormhole; there can be no doubt.’

  Berg shoved her fingers, hard, into the battered earth, welcoming the pain of bent-back nails. ‘Those damn struts of exotic matter will have to be cleared. Hazard to navigation.’

  He said, ‘It is over, you know. You’ll have to find ways of letting it go.’

  ‘Letting what go?’

  ‘The past.’ He sighed. ‘And, in my case, the future.’

  She lifted her head, studied the huge, brooding bulk of Jupiter. ‘The future is still yours ... your own future. There is plenty for you to explore here. And the Friends, of course.’

  He smiled. ‘Such as?’

  ‘AS treatment for a start. And, for the first time in your lives, some modern - sorry, ancient - health checks.’

  Jasoft smiled, quietly sad. ‘But we are aliens on our native planet. Stranded so far from our own time ...’

  She shrugged. ‘There are plenty of you, including the Friends. And they’re young, basically fit. You could found a colony; there’s plenty of room. Or head for the stars.’ She smiled, remembering the strange voyage of the Cauchy. ‘Of course we don’t yet have the hyperdrive to offer you. Strictly sublight only ... But the wonder of the journey is no less for that, I can assure you.’

  ‘Yes. Well, Miriam, such projects might attract these young people, if not me ...’

  She looked at him now. ‘What do you mean? What about you, Jasoft?’

  He smiled and spread his long, age-withered fingers. ‘Oh, I think my story is over now. I’ve seen, done, learned more than I ever dreamed. Or deserved to.’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘You’re going to refuse further AS treatment? Look, if you feel some guilt about the function you performed in the Qax Occupation Era, nobody in this age is going to—’

  ‘It’s not that,’ he said gently. ‘I’m not talking about some complicated form of suicide, my dear. And I don’t suffer greatly from guilt, despite the moral ambivalence of what I’ve done with my life. I certainly believe I left my era for the last time aboard that damn Spline warship having done more good than harm ... It’s just that I think I’ve seen enough. I know all I could wish to know, you see. I know that, although the Project of these rebels - the Friends of Wigner - has failed, Earth will ultimately be liberated from the grip of the Qax. I don’t need to learn anything more. I certainly don’t feel I need to see any more of it laboriously unfold. Do you understand that?’

  Berg smiled. ‘I think so. Though I must chide you for thinking small. The Friends of Wigner have projects which extend to the end of time.’

  ‘Yes. And, as for their future, I suspect they are already engaged on designs of their own.’

  She nodded. ‘You’ve told me what Shira said. Take the long way home, by surviving through the centuries until the era of your birth returns ... and then what? Start the whole damn business over again?’

  ‘Perhaps. Though I hear they’ve done a little more thinking since I spoke to Shira. You mention a sublight star trip. I think that would appeal to the Friends, if only because it would let them exploit relativistic time-dilation effects—’

  ‘—and get home that bit quicker; in a century instead of fifteen.’ She smiled. ‘Well, it’s one way to waste your life, I suppose.’

  ‘And you, Miriam? You’ve been a century away yourself; this must be almost as great a dislocation for you as it is for me. What will you do?’

  She shrugged, ruffling her hair.
‘Maybe I’ll go with the Friends,’ she murmured. ‘Maybe I’ll take them to the stars and back, journey through fifteen centuries once more—’

  ‘—and see if Michael Poole emerges into the Qax occupation future, dashing valiantly from the imploding wormhole?’ He smiled.

  She looked up to the Jupiter-roofed zenith, trying to make out the pieces of the shattered portal. ‘It might make me feel better,’ she said. ‘But, Jasoft, I know I’ve lost Michael. Wherever he is now I can never reach him.’

  They sat for a moment, watching images of shattered, tumbling exotic matter through the discarded slates. At length he said, ‘Come. It is cold here, and the air is thin. Let us return to the Narlikar boat. I would like some more warmth. And food.’

  She dropped her head from the sky. ‘Yeah. That’s a good idea, Jasoft.’

  She stood, her legs stiff after so long curled beneath her. Almost tenderly Jasoft took her arm, and they walked together to the waiting boat.

  Spacetime is friable.

  The fabric of spacetime is riddled with wormholes of all scales. At the Planck length and below, wormholes arising from quantum uncertainty effects blur the clean Einsteinian lines of spacetime. And some of the wormholes expand to the human scale, and beyond - sometimes spontaneously, and sometimes at the instigation of intelligence.

  Spacetime is like a sheet of ice, permeated by flaws, by hairline cracks.

  When Michael Poole’s hyperdrive was activated inside the human-built wormhole Interface, it was as if someone had smashed at that ice floe with a mallet. Cracks exploded from the point of impact, widened; they joined each other in a complex, spreading network, a tributary pattern which continually formed and reformed as spacetime healed and shattered anew.

  The battered, scorched corpse of the Spline warship bearing the lifedome of the Crab, Michael Poole, and a cloud of rebellious antibody drones emerged from the collapsing wormhole into the Qax Occupation Era at close to the speed of light. Shear energy from the tortured spacetime of the wormhole transformed into high-frequency radiation, into showers of short-lived, exotic particles which showered around the tumbling Spline.

  It was like a small sun exploding amid the moons of Jupiter. Vast storms were evoked in the bulk of the gas giant’s atmosphere, a world already bearing the wound of the growing black holes in its heart. A moon was destroyed. Humans were killed, blinded.

  Cracks in shattering spacetime propagated at the speed of light.

  There was already another macroscopic spacetime wormhole in the Jovian system: the channel set up to a future beyond the destruction of the Qax star, the channel through which Qax had travelled towards the past, intent on destroying humanity.

  Under the impact of Poole’s hammer-blow arrival - as Poole had expected - this second spacetime flaw could not retain its stability.

  The wormhole mouth itself expanded, exoticity ballooning across thousands of miles and engulfing the mass-energy of Michael Poole’s unlikely vessel. The icosahedral exotic-matter frame which threaded the wormhole mouth exploded, a mirror image of the destruction witnessed by Miriam Berg fifteen centuries earlier. Then the portal imploded at lightspeed; gravitational shockwaves pulsed from the vanishing mouth like Xeelee starbreaker beams, scattering ships and moons.

  Through a transient network of wormholes which imploded after him in a storm of gravity waves and high-energy particles, Michael Poole hurtled helplessly into the future.

  16

  Chains of events threaded the future.

  A human called Jim Bolder flew a Xeelee nightfighter into the heart of the Qax home system, causing them to turn their starbreaker weapons on their own sun.

  The Qax occupation of Earth collapsed. Humans would never again be defeated, on a significant scale, by any of the junior species.

  Humans spread across stars, their spheres of influence expanding at many times lightspeed. A period known as the Assimilation followed during which the wisdom and power of other species were absorbed, on an industrial scale.

  Soon, only the Xeelee stood between humans and dominance.

  The conflict that followed lasted a million years.

  When it was resolved only a handful of humans, and human-derived beings, remained anywhere in the universe.

  The Projects of the Xeelee, the inexorable workings of natural processes, continued to change the universe.

  Stars died. More stars formed, to replace those which had already failed ... but as the primal mix of hydrogen and helium became polluted with stellar waste products, the formation rate of new stars declined exponentially.

  And darker forces were at work. The stars aged ... too rapidly.

  The Xeelee completed their great Projects, and fled the decaying cosmos.

  Five million years after the first conflict between human and Qax, the wreckage of a Spline warship emerged, tumbling, from the mouth of a wormhole which blazed with gravitational radiation. The wormhole closed, sparkling.

  The wreck - dark, almost bereft of energy - turned slowly in the stillness. It was empty of life.

  Almost.

  Quantum functions flooded over Michael Poole like blue-violet rain, restoring him to time. He gasped at the pain of rebirth.

  Humans would call it the antiXeelee.

  It was ... large. Its lofty emotions could be described in human terms only by analogy.

  Nevertheless - the antiXeelee looked on its completed works and was satisfied.

  Its awareness spread across light-years. Shining matter littered the universe; the Xeelee had come, built fine castles of that shining froth, and had now departed. Soon the stuff itself would begin to decay, and already the antiXeelee could detect the flexing muscles of the denizens of that dark ocean which lay below.

  The function of the antiXeelee had been to guide the huge Projects of the Xeelee, the Projects whose purpose had been to build a way out of this deadly cosmos. In order to achieve their goals, the Xeelee had even moved back through time to modify their own evolution, turning their history into a closed timelike curve, a vacuum diagram. The antiXeelee was the consciousness driving this process, travelling - like an antiparticle - back in time from the moment of its dissolution to the moment of its creation.

  Now the job was done. The antiXeelee felt something like contentment at the thought that its charges had escaped, were now beyond the reach of those ... others, who the Xeelee had in the end been unable to oppose.

  The antiXeelee could let go.

  It spread wide and thin; soon, with a brief, non-localized burst of selectrons and neutralinos its awareness would multiply, fragment, shatter, sink into the vacuum ...

  But not yet. There was something new.

  It didn’t take Michael long to check out the status of his fragile craft.

  There was some power still available to the lifedome from its internal cells. That might last - what, a few hours? As far as he could tell, there was no functional link between the dome and the rest of the Hermit Crab, nor had the links set up by Harry to the Spline ship survived ... save for one, glowing telltale on the comms desks which Michael studiously ignored; the damn rebel drones could chew the ship up as far as he was concerned, now.

  So he had no motive power. Not so much as an in-system boat; no way of adjusting his situation.

  He didn’t grouse about this, nor did he fear his future, such as it was. It was a miracle he’d even survived his passage through the wormhole network ... This was all a bizarre bonus.

  Harry was gone, of course.

  The universe beyond the lifedome looked aged, dead, darkened. The lifedome was a little bubble of light and life, isolated.

  Michael was alone, here at the end of time. He could feel it.

  He gathered a meal together; the mundane chore, performed in a bright island of light around the life-dome’s small galley, was oddly cheering. He carried the food to his couch, lay back with the plate balancing on one hand, and dimmed the dome lights.

  God alone knew where he was ... if ‘whe
re’ could have a meaning, after such a dislocation in spacetime. The stars were distant, dark, red. Could so long have passed? - or, he wondered, could something, some unknown force, have acted to speed the stars’ aging in the aeons beyond the flashbulb slice of time occupied by humans?

  There was no large-scale sign of human life, or activity; nor, indeed, of any intelligent life.

  Intelligence would have had time to work, Michael reflected. After millions of years, with a faster-than-light hyperdrive and singularity technology in the hands of hundreds of species, the universe should have been transformed ...

  The reconstruction of the universe should have been as obvious as a neon sign a thousand light-years tall.

  ... But the universe had merely aged.

  He knew from the subjective length of his passage through the wormholes that he couldn’t have travelled through more than a few million years - a fraction of the great journey to timelike infinity - and yet already the tide of life had receded. Were there any humans left, anywhere?

  He smiled wistfully. So much for Shira’s grand dreams of life covering the universe, of manipulating the dynamic evolution of spacetime itself ...

  There would be no ‘Ultimate Observer’, then. The Project of the Friends of Wigner could not, after all, have succeeded: there would have been nobody to hear the elaborately constructed message. But, Michael thought as he gazed out at the decayed universe, by God it had been a grand conception. To think of finite humans, already long since dust, even daring to challenge these deserts of time ...

  He finished his food, set the plate carefully on the floor. He drank a glass of clean water, went to the free-fall shower, washed in a spray of hot water. He tried to open up his senses, to relish every particle of sensation. There was a last time for everything, for even the most mundane experiences.

  He considered finding some music to play, a book to read. Somehow that might have seemed fitting.

  The lights failed. Even the comms telltale from the drones winked out.

  Well, so much for reading a book.