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

by Stephen Baxter

  20

  Three metres deep.

  It was a depth Dura couldn’t comprehend. Humans were confined within the Mantle to a shell of superfluid Air only a few metres thick. Her first journey with Toba to the Pole from the upflux - so far that she had felt she was travelling around the curvature of the Star itself - had only been about thirty metres.

  Now she was drilling whole metres into the unforgiving bulk of the Star itself. She imagined the Star crushing their tiny wooden boat and spitting them out, like a tiny infestation. And it was small comfort to remember that their journey would be broken before reaching such a depth only if they achieved their goal ... if the unimaginable really did, after all, emerge from the Core to greet them.

  By the end of the second day they were already well below the nebulous boundary of the habitable layer of Air. The yellow brightness of the Air outside the windows had faded - to amber, then a deeper orange, and finally to a blood-purple colour reminiscent of the Quantum Sea. Dura pressed her face against cold clearwood, hoping to see something - anything: exotic animals, unknown, inhuman people, some kind of structure inside the Star. But there was only the muddy purple of the thickening Air, and her own distorted, indistinct reflection in the wood-lamps’ green light. She was trapped in here - with her fears, and with Hork. She had expected to feel small, vulnerable inside this tiny wooden box as it burrowed its way into the immense guts of the Star; but the thick darkness beyond the window made her claustrophobic, trapped. She retreated into herself. She tended the fretting pigs, slept as much as she could, and kept her eyes averted from Hork’s.

  His determined efforts to talk to her, on the third day, were an intrusion.

  ‘You’re pensive.’ His tone was offensively bright. ‘I hope this adventure isn’t causing you any - ah - philosophic difficulties.’

  He’d left his console and had drifted up the cabin, close to her station near the pigs’ harness. She stared at the broad, fat-laden face, the mound of beard around his mouth. When she’d first been introduced to Hork she’d been fascinated and disconcerted - as Hork intended, no doubt - by that beard, by this man with hair on his face. But now, as she looked closer, she could see the way the roots of the beard’s hair-tubes were arranged in a neat hexagonal pattern over Hork’s chin ... The beard had been transplanted, either from Hork’s own scalp or from one of his more unfortunate subjects.

  So the beard wasn’t impressive, she decided. Just decadent. And besides, it was yellowing more quickly than the hair on his head; another few years and Hork would look truly absurd.

  How huge, how intrusive, how irritating he was. The tension between them seemed to crackle like electron gas.

  ‘Philosophic difficulties? I’m not superstitious.’

  ‘I didn’t suggest you were.’

  ‘We aren’t religious about the Xeelee. I don’t fear that we’re going to bring down the wrath of the Xeelee, if that’s what you mean. But Human Beings - alone - would never have attempted this journey into the Star.’

  ‘Because the Xeelee will look after you, like mama in the sky.’

  Dura sighed. ‘Not at all. In fact, quite the opposite ... We have to accept the actions of the Xeelee without question - for we believe that their goals will prove in the long term to be of benefit to us all, to humans as a race. Even if it means the destruction of the Star - even if it means our own destruction.’

  Hork shook his head. ‘You upfluxers are full of laughs, aren’t you? Well, it’s a chilly faith. And damn cold comfort.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Dura said. ‘It’s not meant to be comforting. Back up there ...’ - she jerked her thumb upward, to the world of light and humans - ‘there is my comfort. My family and people.’

  Hork studied her. His face, under its layers of fat, was broad and coarsely worked, but - she admitted grudgingly - not without perception and sensitivity. ‘You fear death, Dura, despite your knowledge.’

  Dura laughed and closed her eyes. ‘I told you; knowledge is not necessarily a comfort. I’ve no reason not to fear death ... and, yes, I fear it now.’

  Hork breathed deeply. ‘Then have faith in me. We’ll survive. I feel it. I know it ...’

  His face was close to hers, so close she could smell sweet bread on his breath. His expression was clear, set. Determination seemed to shine from, him; just for a moment Dura felt tempted to let herself wallow in that determination, to relax in his massive strength as if he were her father reborn.

  But she resisted. She said harshly, ‘So you’ve no fear of death? Will your power in Parz help you overcome the final disaster?’

  ‘Of course it won’t,’ he said. ‘And I’m not without fear. That surprises you, doesn’t it? I’m not a fool without the imagination to be afraid, upfluxer; nor am I so arrogant as to suppose myself beyond the reach of death. I know that in the end I am as weak as the next man in the face of the great forces of the Star - let alone the unknowns beyond it. But, just at this moment, I’m ...’ He waved a hand in the Air. ‘I’m exhilarated. I’m doing something more than waiting for the next Glitch to hit Parz, or coping with the devastation of the last one. I’m trying to change the world, to challenge the way things are.’ His eyecups were dark wells. ‘And I couldn’t bear to allow anyone else to go into the dark at the heart of the Star, and not be there.’ He looked at her. ‘Can you understand that?’

  ‘Some say you’re running away from the real problems. That genuine courage would lie in staying behind and wrestling with the disaster, not flying off on a spectacular, wasteful jaunt.’

  He nodded, his smile grim. ‘I know. Muub’s among them. Oh, don’t worry; I won’t do anything about it. It’s a point of view. Even one I share, in my darkest moments.’ He grinned. ‘But I like to think my father would have been proud of me, if he could have seen me now. He always thought I was so - practical. So unimaginative. And yet ...’

  There was a thud from the hull of the ‘Flying Pig’; the little craft shuddered in the Air. The pigs squealed, thrashing in their stall, and with a single, involuntary movement Dura and Hork grabbed at each other.

  The craft settled. Hork’s expansive belly, liquid beneath its covering of glittering material, was heavy against Dura’s stomach and breasts.

  ‘What was that?’

  The small, regular arrays of hair at the fringe of his beard wafted as he breathed. ‘Corestuff bergs,’ he said, his voice tight. ‘That’s all. Corestuff bergs. If either of us was a Fisherman we’d not have been startled - that’s why they come down here in the first place: to fish for the Corestuff bergs. The “Pig” is designed to cope with little impacts like that; there’s nothing to fear.’ His arms were still around her - and her arms were in turn wrapped around his torso, her hands clutching at the layers of material over his back - and now he reached up to stroke her hair. She wanted, suddenly, to bury herself in this bulky strength, to hide deep inside the warm darkness of the eyecups which were huge before her.

  She scrabbled at his clothing, found a line of buttons down the seam at his side; and she felt his thick, clumsy fingers travelling over her own coverall.

  A last shred of rationality made her assess his expression, his open mouth and flaring, shining nostrils, and she saw that his need was as great as hers.

  His clothing came apart, and she peeled a layer of thick, expensive material away from his belly and chest. She ran her left hand down the curve of his stomach and found his cache; with a deft, tender motion she pulled out the small penis, wrapped it in her fingers and squeezed it gently. It swelled rapidly, pushing at her palm like a small animal. He’d opened her coverall now, and she shrugged out of it, kicking her legs impatiently out of the clinging material and letting the garment drift away into the Air. She felt Hork’s hand slide, dry and hot, up her thigh and between her legs; she opened her thighs softly and he ran his fingers over her cleft, as clumsily and eagerly as an adolescent. There was a coolness inside her, and she knew that she was ready, that membranes inside her were al
ready sighing lubricating Air into her. Now she took Hork’s penis - it was pulsing, rhythmically - and pushed it deep inside her; it entered her easily. He sighed, and buried his face in her shoulder; she turned her head, resting her cheek on his hair. His penis was like a warm, beating heart inside her. His legs, still clothed, were warm and rough against hers as she began to scissor her thighs, back and forth, letting the pattern of her movements stimulate the muscle walls inside her.

  At last she felt herself clench at him, hard; she shuddered, and she heard him gasp, his bulk heavy against hers as they drifted in the Air. Her muscles pulsed around him, and for a few seconds she felt flutters, beats, as the rhythms of their bodies strove to merge. But soon they coalesced, and she felt a surge of triumph as the walls of her vagina throbbed in unison with Hork.

  He came quickly, and she only heartbeats later. They cried out and shuddered against each other; she felt the muscles of his back move under her fingers.

  Hork slumped against her. She held him against her body, curling her fingers in his hair, unwilling to release his warmth and mass. She felt his penis still inside her, small and hot. The moment of closeness stretched on, and she thought of how strange this liaison would have seemed to her - deep in the lethal depths of the Star with the ruler of an astonishing City - if she could have imagined it, in the days before she left the upflux. For some reason she thought of Deni Maxx, the brisk doctor from Muub’s Hospital. But your coupling would have seemed much stranger to a watching Ur-human, Dura imagined her saying. We believe their sexual mechanism was based - not on compression, like ours - but on frictional forces. That’s obviously impossible for us, embedded in superfluid as we are, so when they designed us . . .

  Slowly the closeness faded. The sounds of the craft - the snuffling of the feeding Air-pigs, the soft whirr of the turbine axle, the slow hissing of the wood-lamps - seeped back into her awareness. Hork’s bulk seemed separate from her once more, and she became aware of folds of cloth trapped uncomfortably between their bodies, of a stiffness in her back as her body leaned forward over his belly.

  Gently she pushed him away. His penis fell out of her with a soft, warm sound.

  He looked into her eyes, smiled - he looked as if he had been crying, she thought briefly, startled - and tucked his penis back into its cache. He hauled his coverall around the circumference of his stomach, and she reached for her discarded clothes.

  ‘Well,’ she said at last. ‘Where did that come from?’

  He drifted away from her and settled back into the small seat close to the control console; she saw how his sparkling coverall was noticeably less elegant now, crumpled and sitting askew on his shoulders. ‘Fear,’ he said simply. His composure was restored, she saw, but he wasn’t bothering to restore his usual abrasive front. The atmosphere between them had changed; the tension which had pervaded the ship in the days since its launch had dissipated. ‘Fear. Obviously. I needed - comfort. I needed to lose myself. I don’t know if that’s enough of a reason; I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be.’ Absently she reached up and fed more leaf fragments into the pigs’ hopper. ‘I wanted it too.’

  He ran his hands over the simple instruments before him. ‘I meant what I said, you know. For myself, I’d rather be here, running this ship, than anywhere in the Star. In Parz, the problems I have to deal with, day to day ...’ For a brief, empathetic moment she could imagine how it must be to be in a position like Hork’s - with the welfare of not just himself, not just his family, but of thousands resting on his shoulders. She watched the set of his face and recalled the hint of weeping she thought she’d detected; briefly she felt she understood him. He said, ‘Nothing ever gets solved, you see. That’s the trouble. Or if it does, the next day it is worse. At least here ...’ He grasped the simple controls. ‘At least here, I am doing something. Going somewhere!’

  ‘Yes, but doing what? Going where?’

  He looked up at her. ‘You know there’s no reply to that. We’re seeking help, from whatever came out of the Core once before to destroy us.’

  ‘And how are we supposed to find it?’

  ‘You sound like the Finance sub-Committee,’ he said sourly. ‘All we can do is put ourselves into a position where they can find us . . . whoever they are.’

  She felt her mood swinging away from him now; she felt hot and vaguely soiled, and once more the tight curves of the walls seemed to close in around her. She recalled, now, that they hadn’t kissed once. She didn’t even like this man. ‘So you’re happy to be going somewhere. Anywhere. Is that what this is really all about? - providing you with recreation from your awful burdens? And if it is, did you really have to drag me down into the depths with you?’

  For a moment there was an element of hurt in his face, and his lips parted as if he were about to protest; but then he smiled, and she saw his defensive front enclose him once more. ‘Now, now. Let’s not bicker. We don’t want to be found at odds when our host from the Core comes to meet us, do we?’

  ‘I don’t think I can restrain myself for such a long wait,’ she said with contempt, and she turned back to her pigs, stroking and soothing them.

  There was another thud at the hull, a scrape along the length of the ship. This one was softer than before, but still Dura found herself shuddering. She calmed the nervous pigs with quiet words, and wondered if she had been right - if it really would be such a long wait, after all.

  Electron gas crackling from its superconducting hoops, the tiny wooden ship laboured centimetre after centimetre into the thickening depths of the neutron star.

  Bzya was to be put on double shifts, inside the Bells. He didn’t know when he would next have enough free time to get away from the Harbour between dives. So he invited Adda and Farr to come see him off, in a place he called a ‘bar’.

  Adda found the place with some difficulty. The bar was a small, cramped chamber tucked deep inside the Downside. The only light came from guttering wood-lamps on the walls; in the green, poky gloom Adda was strongly aware of how deep inside the carcass of the City he was buried.

  In one corner of the bar was a counter where a couple of people were apparently serving something, some kind of food. Rails criss-crossed the chamber with no apparent pattern; men and women clustered together in small groups on the rails, slowly eating their way through bowls of what looked like bread, and talking desultorily. Adda saw heavy workers’ tunics, scarred flesh, thick, twisted limbs. One or two appraising stares were directed at the upfluxer.

  Bzya was alone at a length of rail, close to the far wall. He saw Adda and raised an arm, beckoning him over; three small bowls were fixed to the rail beside him.

  Adda pushed forward, feeling self-conscious in his bandages, and clambered stiffly through the crowded place, aware of the babble of conversation all around him.

  ‘Adda.’ Bzya smiled through his distorted face, and waved Adda to a clear space of rail. Adda hooked one arm over the rail, hooking himself comfortably into place. ‘Thanks for coming down.’ Bzya glanced, once, past Adda towards the door, then turned back to his bowls.

  Adda caught the look. ‘No Farr,’ he said heavily. ‘I’m sorry, Bzya. I couldn’t find him.’

  Bzya nodded. ‘I expect he’s Surfing again.’

  ‘I know you did a lot for him, when he was working in the Harbour; he should have ...’

  Bzya held up his thick palm. ‘Forget it. Look, if I was his age I’d rather be losing myself in the sky with the Surfers than sitting in a poky place like this with two battered old fogeys. And with the Games coming up in a couple of days, they’ll only have one thing on their minds. Or maybe two,’ he said slyly. He nodded at the three bowls on the rail. ‘Anyway, it just means there’s more of this stuff for us.’

  Adda looked down at the row of bowls. They were crudely carved of wood and were little larger than his cupped palm, and they were fixed to the rail by stubs of wood. The bowls contained small slices of what might have been bread. Adda, cautiously, pulled out a smal
l, round slice; it was dense, warm and moist to the touch. He turned it over doubtfully. ‘What the hell’s this?’

  Bzya laughed, looking pleased with himself. ‘I didn’t think you’d have heard of it yet. No bars in the upflux, eh, my friend?’

  Adda glared. ‘I’m supposed to eat this stuff?’

  Bzya extended his fingers, inviting Adda to do so.

  Adda sniffed at the plastic stuff, squeezed it, and finally took a small nibble. It was as hot, dense and soggy as it looked - unpleasant inside the mouth - and the taste was sour, unidentifiable. Adda swallowed the fragment. ‘Disgusting.’

  ‘But you’ve got to treat it right.’ Bzya dipped into the bowl, drew out a thick handful of the stuff, and crammed it into his mouth. His big jaws worked as he chewed the stuff twice, then swallowed it down in one go. He closed his eyes as the hot food passed down his throat; and after a few seconds he shuddered briefly, suppressing a sigh. Then he belched. ‘That’s how you take beercake.’

  ‘Beercake?’

  ‘Try it again.’

  Adda reached into the second bowl and lifted a healthy handful of cake to his mouth. It sat in his mouth, hot, dense and eminently indigestible; but, with determination; he bit into it a couple of times and then swallowed, forcing his throat to accept the incompressible stuff. The cake passed down his throat, a hard, painful lump. ‘Fabulous,’ he said when it was gone. ‘I’m so glad I came.’

  Bzya grinned and held up his palm.

  ... And a heat seemed to surge smoothly out from Adda’s stomach, flooding his body and head; his palms and feet tingled, as if being worked by invisible fingers, and his skull seemed to swell in size, filling up with a roomy, comfortable warmth. He looked down at his body, astonished, half-expecting to see electron gas sparking around his fingertips, to hear his skin sighing with the new warmth. But there was no outward change.