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

by Stephen Baxter

  Mur’s young face was hard, cold and determined; his eyes were pits of darkness as he peered at Dura and Farr. ‘It’s her time. She’s early, but the Glitch ... You’ll have to help me.’

  ‘All right.’ Dura lifted Dia’s hands away from her belly, gently but firmly, and ran her fingers quickly over the uneven bulge. She could feel the baby’s limbs pushing feebly at the walls which still restrained it. The head was low, deep in the pelvis. ‘I think the head’s engaged,’ she said. Dia’s young, thin face was fixed on hers, contorted with pain; Dura tried to smile at her. ‘It feels fine. A little while longer ...’

  Dia hissed, her face creased with pain, ‘Get on with it, damn you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Dura looked around desperately; the Air around them was still empty, the nearest Human Beings dozens of mansheights away. They were on their own.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to resist the temptation to search the Air for Logue. She delved deep inside herself, looking for strength.

  ‘It’s going to be all right,’ she said. ‘Mur, hold her neck and shoulders. You’ll have to brace her there; if you Wave a little you’ll hold yourself in place, and ...’

  ‘I know what to do,’ Mur snapped. Still holding Dia’s small head against his chest, he grasped her shoulders and Waved slowly, his strong legs beating at the Air.

  Dura felt awkward, inadequate. Damn it, she thought, aware of the pettiness of her own reaction, damn it, I’ve never done this on my own before. What do they expect?

  What next? ‘Farr, you’ll have to help me.’

  The boy hovered in the Air a mansheight away, his mouth gaping. ‘Dura, I ...’

  ‘Come on, Farr, there’s nobody else,’ Dura said. As he came close to her she whispered, ‘I know you’re frightened. I’m frightened too. But not as much as Dia. It’s not so difficult as all that, anyway. We’ll do fine ...’

  As long as nothing goes wrong, she thought.

  ‘All right,’ Farr said. ‘What do I do?’

  Dura took hold of Dia’s right leg, wrapping her fingers tightly around the lower calf. The woman’s muscles were trembling and slick with Air-sweat, and Dura could feel the legs pushing apart; Dia’s vagina was opening like a small mouth, popping softly. ‘Take her other leg,’ she told Farr. ‘Like I’ve done. Get a tight hold; you’re going to have to pull hard.’

  Farr, hesitant and obviously scared, did as he was told.

  The baby moved, visibly, further into the pelvic area. It was like watching a morsel of food disappear down some huge neck. Dia arched back her head and moaned; the muscles in her neck were stiff and prominent.

  ‘It’s time,’ Dura said. She glanced around quickly. She and Farr were in position, holding Dia’s ankles; Mur was already Waving, quite hard, pushing at his wife’s shoulders, so that the little ensemble drifted slowly through the Air. Both Mur’s and Farr’s eyes were locked on Dura’s face.

  Dia called out again, wordlessly.

  Dura leaned back, grasping Dia’s calf, and pushed firmly with her legs at the Magfield. ‘Farr! Do what I’m doing. We have to open her legs. Go on; don’t be afraid.’

  Farr watched her for a moment, then leaned back and Waved in a copy of his sister’s movements. Mur cried out and shoved hard at his wife’s shoulders, balancing Farr and Dura.

  Dia’s legs parted easily. She screamed.

  Farr’s hands slid over Dia’s convulsing calf; in his shock he seemed to stumble in the Air, his eyes wide. Dia’s thighs twitched back towards each other, the muscles shuddering.

  ‘No!’ Mur shouted. ‘Farr, keep going; you mustn’t stop now!’

  Farr’s distress was evident. ‘But we’re hurting her.’

  ‘No.’

  Damn it, Dura thought, Farr should know what’s happening here. Dia’s pelvis was hinged; with the birth so close the cartilage locking the two segments of the pelvis together would have dissolved into Dia’s blood, leaving her pelvis easily opened. Her birth canal and vagina were already stretching, gaping wide. Everything was working together to allow the baby’s head an easy passage from the womb to the Air. It’s easy, Dura thought. And it’s easy because the Ur-humans designed it to be easy, maybe even easier than for themselves . . .

  ‘It’s meant to be like this,’ she shouted at Farr. ‘Believe me. You’ll hurt her if you stop now, if you don’t help us. And you’ll hurt the baby.’

  Dia opened her eyes. The cups brimmed with tears. ‘Please, Farr,’ she said, reaching towards him vaguely. ‘It’s all right. Please.’

  He nodded, mumbling apologies, and pulled once more at Dia’s leg.

  ‘Easy,’ Dura called, trying to match his motion. ‘Not too fast, and not jerkily; nice and smooth ...’

  The birth canal gaped like a green-dark tunnel. Dia’s legs parted further than it would have seemed possible; Dura could see, under the thin flesh around the girl’s hips, how the pelvis had hinged wide.

  Dia screamed; her stomach convulsed.

  The baby came suddenly, wriggling down the birth passage like an Air-piglet. It squirted into the Air with a soft, sucking noise; droplets of dense, green-gold Air sprayed around it. As soon as it was out of the canal the baby started to Wave, instinctively but feebly, across the Magfield within which it would be embedded for all of its life.

  Dura’s eyes locked on Farr. He was following the baby’s uncertain progress through the Air, his mouth slack with wonder; but he was still firmly holding Dia’s leg. ‘Farr,’ Dura commanded. ‘Come back towards me now. Slowly, steadily - that’s it ...’

  Dia’s only danger now was that her hinged bones would not settle neatly back into place without dislocation; and even if all went well, for a few days she would be barely able to move as the halves of her pelvis knitted together once more. With Dura and Farr guiding them, her legs closed smoothly; Dura could see the bones around Dia’s pelvis sliding smoothly back into place.

  Mur had managed to snatch a rag, a remnant of some piece of clothing, from the littered Air; now he wiped tenderly at Dia’s relaxing, half-sleeping face. Dura took some of the rag and mopped at Dia’s thighs and belly.

  Farr Waved slowly towards them. He had chased after and caught the baby, Dura saw; now he held the child against his chest as proudly as if it were his own, uncaring of the birth fluid which pooled on his chest. The infant’s mouth was still distorted into the characteristic horn-shape it had needed to lock on to the womb-wall nipples which sustained it before its birth; and its tiny penis had popped out of the protective cache between its legs.

  Farr, grinning, held the baby out to its mother. ‘It’s a boy,’ he said.

  ‘Jai,’ Dia whispered. ‘He’s Jai.’

  Forty Human Beings had survived, of fifty. All but six adult Air-pigs, four of them male, were gone. The Net, torn and scattered, was irreparable.

  Logue was lost.

  The tribe huddled together in the Magfield, surrounded by featureless Air. Mur and Dia clung together, cradling their new, mewling baby. Dura uncomfortably led the Human Beings through a brief service of prayers, calling down the beneficence of the Xeelee. Adda stayed close to her, silent and strong despite his age, and Farr’s hand was a constant presence in hers.

  Then the bodies they’d managed to retrieve were released into the Air; they slid, dwindling, down to the Quantum Sea.

  Philas, wife of the dead Esk, approached Dura after the service, Waving stiffly. The two women studied each other, not speaking; Adda and the rest moved away, averting their faces.

  Philas was a thin, tired-looking woman; her uneven hair was tied back with a piece of rope, making her face look skeletal. She stared at Dura, as if daring her to grieve.

  The Human Beings were monogamous ... but there were more adult women than men. So monogamy doesn’t make sense, Dura thought wearily, and yet we practise it anyway. Or rather, we pay lip-service to it.

  Esk had loved them both ... at any rate, he had shown tenderness to them both. And his relationship with
Dura had been no secret to Philas, or to anyone else, for that matter. It had certainly done Philas no harm.

  Perhaps Philas and Dura could help each other now, Dura thought. Perhaps hold each other. But they wouldn’t even speak about it.

  And she, Dura, would not even be allowed to grieve openly.

  At last Philas spoke. ‘What are we going to do, Dura? Should we rebuild the Net? What should we do?’

  Staring into the woman’s dull eyecups, Dura wanted to retreat into herself, to bring forward her own grief for her father, for Esk, as a shield against Philas’s demands. I don’t know. I don’t know. How could I know?

  But there was nowhere to retreat.

  2

  Ten Human Beings - Dura with Farr in tow, Adda, the newly widowed Philas, and six other adults - climbed out of the site of the devastated encampment. They Waved steadily across the Magfield and towards the Crust, in search of food.

  Adda, as was his custom, stayed a small distance away from the rest as they Waved across the field-lines. One of his eyes was matted over with the scars of age - thinking about it now he gave that cup a quick poke with a fingertip to dislodge some of the less welcome little creatures who were continually trying to establish residence in there - but the other eye was as keen as it had ever been, and as he Waved he swept his gaze through the Air above, below and all around them. He liked to stay apart to keep an eye on things ... and it allowed him to hide the fact that he sometimes had trouble keeping up with the rest. It was his boast that he could still Wave as good as any damn kid. It wasn’t true, of course, but it was his boast. He used to wriggle across the Magfield like an Air-piglet with a neutrino fount up its arse, he recalled wistfully, but that was a long time ago. Now he must look like a Xeelee’s grandmother. Adda’s vertebrae seemed to be seizing up one by damn one as time wore away, so that his Waving was more like thrashing; it took a conscious effort to thrust his pelvis back, to let his legs flop behind the motion of his hips, to let his head drive ahead of the bending of his spine. And his skin was coarsened by age, too, tough as old tree-bark in places; that had its advantages, but it meant that he had trouble feeling the places where the electric currents induced in his epidermis by his motion across the Magfield were strongest. Damn it, he could barely feel the Magfield now; he was, he thought sourly, Waving from memory.

  Much like sex these days.

  As always he carried his battered and trusted spear, a sharpened pole of wood prised from a tree trunk by his own father hundreds of months ago. His fingers nestled comfortably in the gripping grooves carved expertly in the shaft, and electrical currents Magfield-induced in the wood tingled in his palm. As his father had taught him, he kept the spear pointed along the direction of the Magfield across which they climbed ... for, of course, the wood - in fact any material - was stronger in the direction of the Magfield than across it. And as any child knew, if danger did approach it would most likely come along the Magfield lines, in which direction motion was invisibly easy.

  There weren’t many predators who would attack humans, but Adda had seen a few, and his father had told him of worse. The rays, for instance ... Even a mature Air-boar - the tougher cousin of the Air-pig - could give a man or woman a hard fight, and could carry away a child as easy as snipping krypton grass away from the Crust, if it was hungry enough.

  Even half as hungry as the Human Beings were going to grow before much longer.

  He looked along the gleaming cage of vortex lines which swept to red-mist infinity at the South Pole, slicing up the sky around his companions. As always - whenever he travelled even a short distance from the illusory completeness of the tribe’s tiny human environ - he was struck by the immensity of the Mantle-world; and as his eye followed the converging parallels of the vortex lines he felt as if his tiny spirit, helpless with awe, was somehow drawn along the lines. The island of scattered debris which marked the site of their devastated encampment was a dirt-coloured mote Air-marooned in the clean, yellow-white immensities of the Star. And his companions - nine of them still, he counted automatically - were Waving across the field lines with unconscious synchronization, ropes and nets wrapped loosely around their waists, their faces upturned to the Crust. One man had peeled away from the rest; he had found an abandoned spin-spider web slung across the vortex lines, and was searching it efficiently for eggs.

  Human Beings looked so beautiful when they moved. And when a shoal of the kids went whirling along the Magfield - flapping their legs so hard you could see the glow of the induced fields shining in their limbs, and spiralling around the flux lines fast enough to turn them into blurs - well, it was hard to imagine a better sight in this or any of the fabled, lost worlds of the Ur-humans.

  But at the same time humans looked so fragile, dwarfed as they were by the immensities of the vortex-line cage and by the deep and deadly mysteries of the Quantum Sea far below. Somehow an Air-pig looked the part for this environment, he thought. Round and fat and solid ... Why, even a neutrino fount didn’t have to be the end for an Air-pig; all it had to do was to tuck in its eyes, fold down its fins and ride out the storm. Unless it got blasted out of the Star altogether, what could happen? When the fount was done the pig could just unfold, graze on whatever foliage it could find - for trees were trees, whichever part of the Crust they were growing out of - and mate with the first Air-pig it came across. Or get mated with, Adda thought with a grin.

  Humans weren’t like that. Humans were delicate. Easily smashed up, broken apart. He thought of Esk: a damn fool, but nobody deserved to die like that. And, more than anything else, humans were strange. If Adda were to pluck one of these irritating little nibblers out of his dud eye now and look at it up close, he knew he’d find the same basic design as the average Air-pig: six fins, symmetrically placed, an intake-mouth to the front, jet vents to the rear, six tiny eyes. All Mantle animals were the same, just scaled big and small, or with differences of proportion; the basic features could be recognized even in superficially different creatures like rays.

  ... Except for humans. There was nothing, no other animal, like a human in all this world.

  That wasn’t a surprise, of course. Every kid learned at his mother’s breast how the Ur-humans had come from somewhere far away - a place much better than this, of course; Adda suspected every human on every world grew up believing that - and had left children here to grow, to be strong, and to join the community of mankind one day, all under the beneficial and all-too-abstract gaze of that multiple God, the Xeelee.

  So the Human Beings had been put there. Adda had no doubt about the basic truth of the old story - damn it, you only had to watch humans in flight to see the blinding self-evidence of it - but on the other hand, he thought as he watched the flock of Human Beings soar across the sky, he wouldn’t really want to be built like an Air-pig. Fat and round and flying by farts?

  Mind you, flatulence was one skill he had bettered as he had got older. Maybe it wouldn’t have been such a bad idea to have been an Air-pig after all.

  Adda was the oldest surviving Human Being. He knew what the others thought of him: that he was a sour old fool, too gloomy for his own good. But he didn’t care much about that. He hadn’t survived longer than any of his contemporaries by accident. But he was, and always had been, essentially a simple man, not gifted with the power over people and language shown by, say, a Logue. Or even a Dura, he thought, even though she mightn’t realize it yet. So if he irritated folk with anecdotes of his boyhood ... but, even as they laughed at him, if they soaked up any one of the small lessons which had kept him alive ... well, that was all right by Adda.

  Of course, there were fragments from the past he didn’t share with anyone. He’d no doubt, for instance, that the Glitches were changing.

  There had always been Glitches, spin storms. He even knew what caused them, in an abstract sort of way: the slowing of the Star’s rotation, and the consequent explosive equalizations of spin energy. But over the last few years the Glitches had got worse ... f
ar worse, and much more frequent.

  Something else was causing Glitches now. Something unknowably powerful, disrupting the Star ...

  Of course, his crotchety exterior had a major advantage - one he’d never admitted to anyone else, and only half-allowed to himself. By acting so sour he never had to show the unbearable love he felt for his fellow humans as he watched their alien, vulnerable, impossibly beautiful flight across the Magfield, or the heartbreak he endured at the loss of even the most wasted, most spoiled life.

  Hefting his dragging spear in tiring fingers, Adda kicked on towards the treetops of the Crust with renewed vigour.

  Farr hovered in the Air, his knees tucked against his chest. With four or five brisk pushes he emptied his bowels. He watched the pale, odourless pellets of shit sail sparkling into the empty Air and sink towards the underMantle. Dense with neutrons, the waste would merge into the unbreathable underMantle and, perhaps, sink at last into the Quantum Sea.

  He’d never been so high.

  The treetops were only a few minutes’ Waving above him now: only a score of mansheights or so. The round, bronzed leaves of the trees, all turned towards the Quantum Sea, formed a glimmering ceiling over the world. As he Waved he stared up at that ceiling longingly, as if the leaves somehow represented safety - and yet he looked nervously too. For beyond the leaves were the tree trunks, suspended in darkness; and beyond the trunks lay the Crust itself, where all manner of creatures prowled ... At least according to old Adda, and some of the other kids.

  But still, Farr realized, he’d rather be up there amidst the trees than - suspended - out here.

  He pushed at the Magfield and shimmered upwards.

  Farr, young as he was, was used to the feeling of fear. Of mortal terror, even. But he was experiencing a kind of fear new to him - a novelty - and he probed at it, trying to understand.

  The nine adults around him Waved steadily upwards, their faces turned up to the trees like inverted leaves. Their bodies moved efficiently and with varying degrees of grace, and Farr could smell the musky photons they exuded, hear the steady rhythm of their breathing as they worked, wordless. His own breath was rapid; the Air up here felt thin, shallow. And he was growing colder, despite the hard work of Waving.