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

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘I’m glad you could join me,’ Muub greeted him with a professional smile. ‘I wanted to talk to you.

  Adda glowered past his leech at Muub’s shaved head, his finery. ‘Why? Who or what are you?’

  Muub allowed himself a heartbeat’s cold silence. ‘My name is Muub. I am Physician to the Committee . . . and Administrator of the Hospital of the Common Good, where your injuries have been treated.’ He decided to go on the offensive. ‘Sir, we met before, when you were first carried into the Hospital by one of our citizens. On that occasion - though I don’t expect you to remember - you told me to “bugger off”. Well, I failed to accept that invitation, choosing instead to have you treated. I have asked you to view the Garden today as my guest, as a friendly gesture to one who is new to Parz and who is alone here. But frankly, if you’re not prepared to be courteous then you are free to depart.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll behave,’ Adda grumbled. ‘Though I’ll not swallow the pretence that you’ve done me any sort of favour by treating my injuries. I know very well that you’re exacting a handsome price from the labour of Dura and Farr.’

  Muub frowned. ‘Ah, your companions from upflux. Yes, I understand they have found indentures.’

  ‘Slave labour,’ Adda hissed.

  Muub made himself relax. Anyone who could survive at the court of Hork IV could put up with a little goading from an eyeless old fool from the upflux. ‘I’ll not let you needle me, Adda. I’ve invited you here to enjoy the Garden - the spectacle - and I fully intend that that is how we will spend the day.’

  Adda held his stare for a few moments; but he did not pursue the discussion, and turned his head to view the Fount.

  The superfluid fountain was the centrepiece of the Garden. It was based on a clearwood cylinder twenty microns across, fixed to a tall, thin pedestal. Inside the cylinder hovered a rough ball of gas, stained purple-blue, quivering slowly. The cylinder - fabulously expensive in itself, of course - was girdled by five hoops of polished Corestuff, and it bristled with poles which protruded from its surface. Barrels - boxes of wood embossed with stylized carvings of the heads of Hork IV and his predecessors - were fixed to the ends of the poles inside the cylinder.

  Beautiful young aerobats - male and female, all naked - Waved spectacularly through the Air around the cylinder, working its elaborate mechanisms. The electric blue of the vortex lines cast shimmering highlights from the clearwood, and the soft, perfect skin of the aerobats glowed with golden Air-light.

  The upfluxer, Adda, made a disgusting noise through his nose. ‘You brought me here to see this?’

  Muub smiled. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand what you’re seeing.’

  Adda scowled, his hostility evident. ‘Then tell me.’

  ‘Superfluidity.’ Muub pointed. ‘The cylinder contains a low-pressure region. There’s hardly any Air in there, I mean . . . except for the sphere in the centre. That’s just Air, but stained blue so you can see it. The hoops around the cylinder, there, are generating a localized magnetic field. Do you understand me? Like the Magfield, but artificial. Controllable. The magnetic field keeps the cylinder from being crushed by the pressure of the Air outside. And it’s designed to keep the little Air inside the cylinder in that ball at the centre.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So we can view the Air - within which we are ordinarily immersed - from the outside, as it were.

  ‘Adda, Air is a neutron superfluid - a quite extraordinary substance which, were inhabitants of some other world to discover it, would seem miraculous. Quantized circulation - the phenomena which causes all the spin in the Air to collect into vortex lines - is only one aspect. Watch, now, as the vessels are lowered and raised from the sphere of Air.’

  A handsome young aerobat - a girl with blue-dyed hair - grasped one of the poles protruding from the cylinder and pushed it through the clearwood wall. The base of the ornate barrel at its far end dipped into the sphere of blue Air. The barrel wasn’t completely immersed; the girl held the barrel still so that its rim protruded from the surface of the Air by a good two or three microns.

  Blue-stained Air visibly crawled up the sides of the box and over the lip, pooling inside. It was like watching a living creature, Muub thought, fascinated and charmed as always by the spectacle.

  When the box had filled itself to the level of the rest of the sphere, the aerobat drew it slowly out of the sphere and brought it to rest again, so that its base was placed perhaps five microns above the surface. Now the blue Air slid over the sides and, in a thin stream which poured from the base of the vessel, returned eagerly to the central sphere.

  The aerobat troupe maintained this display at all hours of the day, at quite remarkable expense. Adda watched the cycle through a couple of times, his good eye empty of expression.

  Muub watched him surreptitiously, then shook his head. ‘Don’t you have any interest in this? Even your eye-leech is showing more awareness, man!’ He felt driven, absurdly, to justify the display. ‘The Fount is demonstrating superfluidity. When the vessel is lowered into the pool, a thin layer of the fluid is adsorbed onto the vessel’s surface. And the Air uses that fine layer - just a few neutrons thick - to gain access to the interior of the vessel. When the vessel’s withdrawn the Air uses the same channel to return to the main bulk, the sphere. Quite remarkable.

  ‘The hoops maintain a slight magnetic gradient from the geometric centre of the cylinder. That gradient restricts the residual Air to that sphere at the centre . . . and it is the resulting difference in electromagnetic potential energy which drives the cycle of the fountain. And . . .’ ‘Riveting,’ Adda said dryly.

  Muub bit back a sharp comment. ‘Well, I know you people have different priorities in life. Let’s view the rest of the Garden . . . perhaps some of it will remind you of the world you have left behind. I’m curious as to how you lived, actually.’

  ‘We upfluxers?’ Adda asked acidly.

  Muub replied smoothly, ‘You Human Beings. For example, superfluidity . . . Have you retained much knowledge of such matters?’

  Adda said, ‘Much of the lore absorbed by our children is practical and everyday . . . how to repair a net; how to keep yourself clean; how to turn the battered corpse of an Air-pig into a meal, a garment, a source of weapons, a length of rope.’

  Muub felt himself shudder delicately.

  ‘But knowledge is our common heritage, City man,’ Adda murmured. ‘We would scarcely allow you to rob us of that, as you robbed us of our place here ten generations ago.’

  Turning, Muub led Adda slowly away from the Fount. Beside the youthful grace of the aerobats, Adda’s ungainly stiffness was laughable - and yet heart-breaking, Muub thought. They passed through one of Hork’s experimental ceiling-farm areas. Here a new strain of wheat - tall and fat-stemmed - thrust from a simulated section of Crust-forest root-ceiling.

  ‘Tell me, Adda. What are your plans now?’

  ‘Why should you care?’

  ‘I’m curious.’

  Adda was silent for a while; then, grudgingly, he replied: ‘I’m going to go back. Back to the upflux. What else?’

  ‘And how do you propose to achieve that?’

  ‘I’ll damn well Wave there if I have to,’ Adda growled. ‘If I can’t get one of your citizens to take me home in one of those pig-drawn cars you have.’

  Muub was tempted to mock. He tried to summon up sympathy, to put himself in Adda’s situation - alone and far from home in a place he must find frighteningly strange, despite his bravado. ‘My friend,’ he said evenly, ‘with all respect to the skills of my staff in the Common Good, and to the remarkable progress you are making . . . I have to say it will be a long time before you are fit for such a journey. Even by car, the trek would kill you.’

  Adda snarled. ‘I’ll take my chance.’

  ‘And, if you made it home you’d never be as strong as you were, frankly. Your pneumatic system has been weakened to well below its nominal level.’

  Adda’s resp
onse, when it came, seemed doubtful. ‘I couldn’t hunt?’

  ‘No,’ Muub shook his head firmly. ‘Even if you were able to Wave fast enough to creep up on, let us say, an aged and unfit Air-pig . . .’ - that won a slight smile from the upfluxer - ‘even so, you could never survive the low pressures, the thin Air of the upper Mantle. You see, you would be a burden on your people if you returned. I’m sorry.’

  Adda’s anger was apparently directed inwards now. ‘I will not be a burden. I wanted to die, after my injury. You did not allow me to die.’

  ‘It was the choice of your companions. They did not allow you to die; they sold their labour to pay for your continued health. Adda, you owe it to them to maximize the usefulness of your new life.’

  Adda shook his head stiffly, the bandaging rustling at his neck. ‘I cannot return home. But I have nothing here.’

  ‘Perhaps you could find work. Anything you could earn would reduce the burden on your friends.’ . . . And help besides, Muub forbore to add, to pay for Adda’s own food and shelter once his medical treatment was concluded.

  ‘What could I do? Do you hunt here? I can’t see myself being much use stalking blades of mutated grass.’

  They had come now to a simulation of the wild Crust-forest. Dwarf Crust-trees - slender whips no taller than a mansheight - thrust out of the roof of Parz. A clutch of young ray, shackled to the roof surface by short lengths of rope, snapped at them as they passed. Muub glanced at Adda, curious about the old man’s reaction to this toy forest. But Adda had turned his face up to the vortex lines swooping over the City; his good eye was half-closed, as if he were peering at something, and the leech crawled, ignored, over his face.

  Muub hesitated. ‘When I first encountered you, you were swaddled in make-shift bandages. And you had splints . . . Do you remember? The splints seemed actually to be spears, of varying lengths and thicknesses. All decorated with fine engravings.’

  ‘What of it? Are you suggesting I could get a price for them here? I thought your people, your Guards, were well enough equipped with their bows and whips.’

  ‘Indeed. No, we do not need your weapons . . . as weapons. But as artifacts the spears have a certain - novelty.’ Muub sought the right words. ‘A kind of primitive artistry that is really rather appealing. Adda, I suspect you could get a decent price for your artifacts, especially from collectors. And if, by chance, you were capable of producing more . . .’

  There was an odd change in the quality of light around them. Muub glanced around, half-expecting to find that they had fallen into the shadow of an Air-car; but the sky was empty, save for the vortex lines. Still the feeling of change persisted, though, unsettling Muub; he pulled his robe closer around him.

  Adda laughed. ‘I’d rather die than whore myself.’

  Muub opened his mouth, shaping a reply. That may be the choice, old man . . . But now there was some sort of disturbance among the courtiers around them. No longer drifting in their intense little knots of intrigue, the courtiers were gathering together as if for comfort, pointing at the sky. ‘I wonder what’s wrong. They seem scared.’

  ‘Look up,’ Adda said dryly. ‘Perhaps that has something to do with it.’

  Muub looked into the old man’s sour, battered face, and then lifted his head to the open Air.

  The flux lines were moving. They were surging upwards, away from the City, rising like huge knife-blades towards the Crust.

  ‘Glitch,’ Adda said, his voice tight. ‘Another one. And a bad one. Muub, you must do what you can to protect your people.’

  ‘Is the City in danger?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps not. But those in the ceiling-farms certainly are . . .’

  Muub, in the last moment before rushing to his duties, found time to remember that Adda’s own people too were exposed to all of this, lost somewhere in the sky.

  The Air above him seemed to shimmer; somewhere a courtier screamed.

  It was Rauc who first noticed the change in the sky.

  Dura and Rauc were working together in a corner of Qos Frenk’s ceiling-farm. Dura was wearing the mandatory Air-tank, but she wore the veil pushed back from her face; and the heavy wooden tank thumped against her back as she worked. She had pushed her head and shoulders high into the stems of wheat, so that she was surrounded by a bottomless cage of the yellow-gold plants. She reached above her head with both hands, burrowing with her fingers among the roots of the wheat. Stems scratched her bare arms. Here was another sapling; it felt warm and soft, undeniably a living thing, a thin thread of heavy-nuclei material pulsing along its axis. Young Crust-trees were the most persistent danger to Frenk’s crop, springing up endlessly despite continual weeding. The saplings - thinner than a finger’s width - were difficult to see, but easy to pick out from among the wheat-stems by touch. She allowed her fingers to track along the sapling’s length further up into the shadows of the wheat. She probed at its roots, which snaked up into the tangle of roots and plants which comprised the forest ceiling, and patiently prised them out.

  It was dull, mindless work, but not without a certain satisfaction: she enjoyed the feel of the plants in her fingers, and relished deploying the simple skills she was learning. Maybe in some other life she might have been a good farmer, she thought. She liked the orderliness of the farm - although not the pressure of other people - and the work was simple enough to leave her mind free to wander, to think of Farr, of the upflux, and . . .

  Rauc half-laughed. ‘Look at that. Dura, look . . . How strange.’

  Vaguely irritated at this irruption into her daydream, Dura dropped down from the inverted field. Emerging into the clear Air, she rubbed her hands free of dust. ‘What is it?’

  Rauc hovered in the Air, Waving gently; she pointed downwards. ‘Look at the vortex lines. Have you ever seen them behave like that before?’

  Vortex lines, acting strangely?

  Dura snapped her head downwards and raked her gaze across the sky.

  The vortex lines were shimmering - infested with so many small instabilities that it was difficult to see the lines themselves. At the limit of vision Dura could just make out individual ripples racing along the lines, like small, scurrying animals. And the lines were exploding upwards, out of the Mantle and towards the Crust. Towards the farm. Towards her.

  All of the lines were moving, as deep into the sky as she could see; the parallel ranks of them hurtled evenly out towards her.

  There was something else, too: a dark shape far away, at the edge of her peripheral vision; it scored the yellow horizon with a pencil of blue-white light.

  ‘Rauc,’ she said. ‘We have to move.’

  Rauc looked up at her, the thin, tired face beneath its veiled hat registering unconcern. ‘Why? What’s wrong?’

  Dura brushed the hat from her head, impatiently shrugging off the straps of her Air-tank. ‘Give me your hand.’

  ‘But why . . .’

  ‘It’s a Glitch. And if we don’t move now we’ll be killed. Give me your hand. Now!’

  Rauc’s mouth opened wide. Dura saw shock in her expression, but no fear yet. Well, there would be time enough for that. She grabbed Rauc’s hand; the labourer’s palm was toughened by her work but the hand was cool, free of the heat of terror. She kicked at the Magfield with both legs, Waving downwards, away from the Crust and towards the approaching flux lines. At first Rauc was dead inertia behind her; but after a few strokes Rauc, too, began to Wave.

  When the Star suffered a Glitch the Mantle could not sustain its even, gently slowing pattern of rotation. The superfluid Air tried to expel the excess rotation from its bulk by pushing the arrays of vortex lines - lines of quantized vorticity - out towards the Crust. And the lines themselves suffered instabilities, and could break down . . .

  The women dropped into the racing forest of vortex lines. The lines were usually about ten mansheights apart, so - in normal times - they were easy to avoid. But now, at the birth of this spin storm, they were already rising faster than a
Human Being could Wave. The vortex lines fizzed past the women, sparkling electric blue. Instabilities the size of a fist raced along them, colliding, merging, collapsing.

  Rauc whimpered. Unwelcome images of the last Glitch, of Esk imploding around the rogue vortex line, crowded Dura’s head. She concentrated on the buffeting of the Air against her bare skin, the thin, unnatural taste of it on her lips, the deadly sparkle of the vortex lines. Now was all that mattered - now, and surviving into the future through this moment.

  The vortex lines were growing denser as they crowded towards the Crust, seeking an impossible escape from the Star. It was becoming harder to dodge the lines as they swept past her like infinite blades; she was forced to twist backwards and forwards, slithering between lines. The instabilities were becoming more prominent, too; now ripples almost a mansheight high were marching along the soaring lines, deepening and quickening as they passed. There was a terrible beauty in the way the complex waveforms sucked energy from the vortex lines and surged forwards. The Air was filled with the deafening, deadening heat-roar of the lines.

  Soon Dura’s arms and legs, already stiff from a long shift, were aching, and the Air seemed to scrape through her lungs and capillaries. But now, as they penetrated the rushing vortex forest and moved deeper into the Mantle, the lines were starting to thin out. Dura, gratefully, looked down and saw that they were approaching a volume where the lines - though still cutting the Air with preternatural speed - were spaced at about their normal density. Further in still the Air seemed almost clear of lines, temporarily purged of its vorticity.

  Dura released Rauc’s hand and risked a look back.

  The vortex lines soared upwards into the Crust, slicing through nuclear matter and embedding themselves amid the complex nuclei of the Crust material. As they entered the forest ceiling the lines thrashed with instabilities, sending bits of broken matter flying into the Air. The lines were tearing apart Qos Frenk’s ceiling-farm. The crops she had tended only heartbeats earlier were now uprooted, fat wheat-stems scattered in the Air. Ironically, Dura could see Crust-tree saplings, anchored by their deeper roots to the forest ceiling, surviving the spin storm where the mutated grass could not.