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

by Stephen Baxter

  After a few seconds the heat-surge wore away, but when it had receded it left Adda feeling subtly altered. The bar seemed cosier - friendlier - than even a moment before, and the smell of the remaining beercake was pleasing, harmonious, enticing.

  ‘Welcome to beercake, my friend, and a new lifelong relationship.’

  The pleasing warmth induced by the cake still permeated Adda. He poked at the cake with a new wonder. ‘Well, I’ve not eaten anything with such an impact before, up- or downflux.’

  ‘I didn’t think so.’ Bzya picked up a piece of cake and compressed it between his fingers. ‘Farr is developing a taste too, I ought to say. It’s a mash, mostly of Crust-tree leaf. But it’s fermented - in huge Corestuff vessels, for days ...’

  ‘Fermented?’

  ‘Spin-spider web is put into the vats with the mash. There’s something in the webbing, maybe in the glistening stuff that makes it sticky, which reacts with the mash and changes it to beercake. Magic.’

  ‘Sure.’ Adda took another mouthful of the beercake now; it was as revolting as before, but the anticipation of its after-effects made the taste much easier to bear. He swallowed it down and allowed the warmth to filter through his being.

  ‘What does the stuff cost?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Bzya shrugged. ‘The Harbour authorities provide it for us. As much as we want, as long as we’re able to do our jobs.’

  ‘What do you mean? Is it bad for you?’

  ‘If you overdo it, yes.’ Bzya rubbed his face. ‘It works on the capillaries in your flesh - dilates them - and some of the major pneumatic vessels in the brain. The flow of Air is subtly altered, you see, and ...’

  ‘And you feel wonderful.’

  ‘Yeah. But if you use it too often, you can’t recover. The capillaries stay dilated ...’

  Adda gazed around the bar, at this safe, marvellous place. ‘That seems all right to me.’

  ‘Sure. Your head would be a wonderful place to live in. But you couldn’t function, Adda; you couldn’t do a job. And if it gets bad enough you couldn’t even feed yourself, without prompting. But, yes, you’d feel wonderful about it.’

  ‘And I don’t suppose this City is so forgiving of people who can’t hold down jobs.’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Don’t the Harbour managers worry they’re going to lose too many of their Fishermen, to this cake stuff? Why dole it out free?’

  Bzya shrugged. ‘They lose a few. But they don’t care. Adda, we’re expendable. It doesn’t take long to train up a new Fisherman, and there’re always plenty of recruits, in the Downside. And they know the cake keeps us here in the bars, happy, quiet, and available. They gain more than they lose.’ He chomped another mouthful. ‘And so do I.’

  Adda worked his way slowly through the bowl, cautiously observing the cake’s increasing effects on him. Every so often he moved his fingers and feet, testing his coordination. If he got to the point where he even thought he might be losing control, he promised himself, he’d stop.

  The Fisherman had fallen silent; his huge fingers toyed with the cake.

  ‘I hear you’re on double shifts. Whatever that means.’

  Bzya smiled, indulgent. ‘It means I’m assigned to the Bells twice as frequently as usual. It’s because they’re running twice as many dives as usual.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The upflux Glitch. No wood coming into the City. Not enough, anyway. People bitch about food rationing, but the wood shortage is just as important in the longer term. And let’s hope the day never comes when they have to ration beercake ... Anyway, they want more Corestuff metal, to use as building material. ’

  ‘Building? Are they extending the City?’

  ‘Rebuilding. It goes on all the time, Adda, mostly deep in the guts of the place. Small repairs, maintenance. Although,’ he said, leaning forward conspiratorially, ‘there are rumours that it isn’t just the need to keep up routine repairs that’s prompted this increased demand.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘They’re trying to strengthen the City’s structure. Rebuild the skeleton with more Corestuff. They’re not shouting about it for fear of causing panic; but they’re endeavouring to make it more robust in the face of future problems. Like a closer Glitch.’

  Adda frowned. ‘Can they do that? Will it work?’

  ‘I’m not an engineer. I don’t know.’ Bzya chewed on the cake, absently. ‘But I doubt it,’ he said without emotion. ‘The City’s so huge; you’d have to rip most of its guts out to strengthen it significantly. And it’s a ramshackle structure. I mean, it grew; it was never planned. It was built for space, not strength.’

  Parz had been one of the first permanent settlements founded after humanity was scattered through the Mantle following the Core Wars. At first Parz was a random construct of ropes and wood, no more significant than a dozen others, drifting freely above the Pole. But at the Pole the bodies of men and women were significantly stronger, and so Parz grew rapidly; and its position at the only geographically unique point in the southern hemisphere of the Mantle gave it strategic and psychological significance. Soon it had become a trading centre, and had wealth enough to afford a ruling class - the first in the Mantle since the Wars. The Committee had been founded, and the growth and unification of Parz had proceeded apace.

  Parz’s wealth exploded when the Harbour was established - Parz was the first and only community in the Mantle able to extract and exploit the valuable Corestuff. Soon the scattered community of the cap of Mantle around Parz, the region eventually to be called the hinterland, fell under Parz’s economic influence. Eventually the hinterland and City worked as a single economic unit, with the raw materials and taxes of the hinterland flowing into Parz, with Corestuff and - more importantly - the stability and regulation provided by Parz’s law washing back in return. Eventually only the far upflux, bleak and inhospitable, remained disunited from Parz, home to a few tribes of hunters, and bands of Parz exiles like the Human Beings themselves.

  Adda bit into more cake. ‘I’m surprised people accepted being taken over like that. Didn’t anybody fight?’

  Bzya shook his head. ‘It wasn’t seen as a conquest. Parz is not an empire, although it might seem that way to you. Adda, people remembered the time before the Wars, when humans lived in safety and security throughout the Mantle. We couldn’t return to those times; we’d lost too much. But Parz was better than nothing: it offered stability, regulation, a framework to live in. People gripe about their tithes - and nobody’s going to pretend that the Committee get it right all the time - but most of us would prefer taxes to living wild. With all respect to you, my friend.’ He bit into his cake. ‘And that’s still true today; as true as it ever was.’

  Two of the bowls were already empty. Adda felt the seduction of this place, that he could have sat here in this companionable glow with Bzya for a long time. ‘Do you really believe that? Look at your own position, Fisherman; look at the dangers you face daily. Is this really the best of all possible lives for you?’

  Bzya grinned. ‘Well, I’d exchange places with Hork any day, if I thought I could do his job. Of course I would. And there are plenty of people closer to me, in the Harbour, who I’d happily throttle, if I thought it would make the world a better place. If I didn’t think they’d just bring in somebody worse. I accept I’m at the bottom of the heap, here, Adda. Or close to it. But I believe it’s the way of things. I will fight injustice and inequity - but I accept the need for the existence of the heap itself.’ He looked carefully at Adda. ‘Does that make sense?’

  Adda thought it over. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘But it doesn’t seem to matter much.’

  Bzya laughed. ‘Now you see why they give us this stuff for free. Here.’ He held out the third bowl. ‘Your good health, my friend.’

  Adda reached for the cake.

  A couple of days later Bzya’s shifts should have allowed him another break. Adda searched for Farr, but couldn’t find him, so he went down to the
bar alone. He entered, awkward and self-conscious in his dressings, peering into the gloomier corners.

  He couldn’t find Bzya, and he didn’t stay.

  21

  In the interior of the Star there were no sharp boundaries, merely gradual changes in the dominant form of matter as pressures and densities increased. So there was no dramatic plunge, no great impacts as the ‘Flying Pig’ hauled itself deeper: just a slow, depressing diminution of the last vestiges of Air-light. And the glow cast by the wood-lamps fixed to the walls was no substitute; with its smoky greenness and long, flickering shadows, the gloom in the cabin was quite sinister.

  To Dura, hunched over herself in her corner of the ship, this long, slow descent into darkness was like a lingering death.

  Soon, though, the ride became much less even. The ship swayed alarmingly and at one point was nearly upended. The labouring pigs, their shadows huge on the ship’s roof, bleated pathetically; Hork laughed, his eyecups pools of green darkness.

  Dura’s fingers scrabbled over the smooth wooden walls in search of purchase. ‘What’s happening? Why are we being pummelled like this?’

  ‘Every Bell hits underMantle currents. The only difference is, we’ve no Spine to steady us.’ Hork spoke to her slowly, as if she were stupid. Since their single physical encounter, his aloof hostility had been marked. ‘The substance of the Mantle at these depths is different from our Air . . . or so my tutors used to tell me. It’s still a superfluid of neutrons, apparently, but of a different mode from the Air: it’s anisotropic - it has different properties in different directions.’

  Dura frowned. ‘So in some directions it’s like the Air, and it doesn’t impede our progress. But in others ...’

  ‘ . . . it feels thick and viscous, and it batters against our magnetic shield. Yes.’

  ‘But how can you tell which directions it’s Air-like?’

  ‘You can’t.’ Hork grinned. That’s the fun of it.’

  ‘But that’s dangerous,’ she said, uneasily aware of how childlike she sounded.

  ‘Of course it is. That’s why the Harbour suffers so many losses.’

  ... And this is where I sent my brother, she thought with a shiver. She felt strangely, retrospectively fearful. Here, drifting through this anisotropic nightmare, it was as if she were fearing for her brother for the first time.

  Still, after a while Dura found she could ignore - almost - the constant, uneven buffeting. Immersed in the hot, fetid atmosphere of the ship, with the warm stink of the pig-farts and the patient, silent work of Hork at his control box, she was even able to doze.

  Something slammed into the side of the ship.

  Dura screamed and jolted fully awake. She felt herself quiver from the blow, as if someone had punched her own skull; she looked around, wild-eyed, for the source of the disaster. The pigs were squealing furiously. Hork, still at his controls, was laughing at her.

  ‘Damn you. What was that?’

  He spread his hands. ‘Just a little welcoming card from the Quantum Sea.’ He pointed. ‘Look out of the window.’

  She turned to stare through the clearwood. The Mantle here was utterly dark, but the lamps of the ship cast a green glow for a few microns through the murky, turbulent stuff. And there were forms drifting through that dim ocean - blocky, irregular shapes, many of them islands large enough to swallow up this tiny craft. The blocks slid silently upwards past the ship and towards the distant Mantle - or rather, Dura realized, the ‘Pig’ herself was hurtling down past them on her way towards the Core.

  ‘Corestuff bergs ... Islands of hyperonic matter,’ Hork said. ‘No Fisherman would tackle bergs of such a size . . . but then, no Fisherman has ever been so deep.’

  Dura stared gloomily out at the vast, slow-moving bulks of hyperonic matter. If they were unlucky enough, she realized - if they were caught by a combination of a large enough mass and an adverse current - their little ship would be crushed like a child’s skull, magnetic protection or no. ‘How deep are we?’

  Hork peered at the crude meters on his control panel; his beard scratched softly at the meters’ clearwood covers. ‘Hard to say,’ he said dismissively. ‘Our tame experts were very clever at finding ways for us to travel so far, but not so clever at letting us know where we are. But I’d guess . . .’ He scowled. ‘Perhaps five metres below the City.’

  Dura gasped. Five metres . . . Five hundred thousand mansheights. Why, surely even an Ur-human would be awed by such a journey.

  ‘Of course, we’ve no real control over our position. All we’ve the capability to do is to descend and, if we live through that, to come up again. But we could emerge anywhere; we’ve no idea where these currents are taking us.’

  ‘We’ve discussed this problem. Wherever we emerge we need only follow the Magfield to the South Pole.’

  Hork smiled at her. ‘But that could be tens of metres from the City . . . It could take months to return. And then we will rely on your upfluxer survival skills to enable us to endure, in the remote wilds of the Star. I will place myself in your hands, and I anticipate that the journey home will be . . . interesting.’

  The impacts from the hyperonic bergs were coming thick and fast now. Hork pulled at the wooden levers on his control panel and slowed their progress down to a crawl; Dura watched through the windows as the thickening masses of Corestuff clustered around the ‘Pig’, held back from crushing her only by the invisible walls of the magnetic shield.

  At last Hork flicked over his controls and pushed himself away from the panel. ‘You may as well let the animals rest,’ he said to Dura. ‘That’s as far as we’re going.’

  Dura frowned and peered out of the windows. ‘We can’t penetrate any deeper?’

  Hork shrugged, and yawned elaborately. ‘Not unless a channel through the bergs opens up. The bergs are like a solid mass from here on in - you can see for yourself. No, this is the end of the journey.’ He drifted up through the cabin, took some fragments of untouched leaf matter from the pigs’ trough and chewed it without enthusiasm. He handed more handfuls of food to Dura. ‘Here,’ he said.

  Dura took the food and bit into it thoughtfully. The whine of the turbine was stilled now, and she was suspended in a silence broken only by the hoarse wheezing of the pigs and by the soft thumping of hyperonic fragments against the magnetic shield. The pigs, still bound into their harnesses, were trembling with the panic of their blocked flight; their sixfold eyes rolled. As she ate, Dura ran her hands over the dilated pores of their flanks; the simple action of soothing the frightened animals - of tending creatures even more scared than herself - seemed to calm her.

  Hork folded his arms, his massive shoulder muscles bunching under his glittering costume. ‘Well, this is the strangest picnic I’ve ever had.’

  ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘Who knows?’ He grinned at her, a fragment of his professional charm showing. ‘Maybe that’s all we’ve come so far to find.’ He pointed out of the window. ‘Corestuff. Hard, dangerous, and dead. Anyway, it’s not over yet. We’ve only just arrived, after all. We can stay here for days, if we have to.’

  Dura laughed. ‘Maybe you should go out and make a speech. Wake the Colonists out of their thousand-year slumber.’

  Hork studied her impassively, his heavy jaw working; then he turned away from her, rebuffing her completely.

  She felt alone and a little foolish. In the renewed silence of the cabin, her fear crowded in once more. She stroked the quivering pigs and sucked on leaf-matter.

  She wondered how long they would have to wait here, before Hork would give up - or, terrifyingly, before something happened.

  In the end, they didn’t have to wait very long at all.

  Hork screamed, his voice thin and high with terror.

  Somehow Dura had fallen asleep again. She jolted awake, the muggy Air thick in her lungs and eyes. She looked around quickly.

  The green glow of the lamps filled the cabin with eerie, sharp shadows. The pigs were squealing,
terrified, arching in their restraints. Hork, all his arrogance and cockiness gone, had backed against a wall, his coverall rumpled and stained, his hands fruitlessly seeking a weapon. It was as if the inhabitants of the ‘Flying Pig’, human and animal alike, had radiated away from the heart of the cylindrical craft, like fragments of a slow explosion. Dura blinked, trying to clear her vision. No, not an explosion, she saw; hovering at the geometric centre of the cylinder - the focus of all this terror - was another person. A third human, here where it was impossible for any human to be . . .

  Or rather, she realized as she stared more closely, it was - something - with the form of a human. She saw a bulky woman, evidently older than herself, dressed in what might have been a Fisherman’s tunic. But the material glowed, softly crimson, and it looked seamless. Hair, deep black, was tied tightly around her scalp. A purple glow shone out of eyecups, nostrils and mouth.

  . . . But there was something in those eyecups, she saw. There was flesh in there, spheres which moved independently of the face, like animals trapped inside the skull.

  She felt the leaves rise in her throat; she wanted to scream, scrabble at the walls of the craft to escape this. She held herself as still as she could, forcing herself to study the vision.

  ‘It’s like a woman,’ she whispered to Hork. ‘A human. But that’s impossible. How could a human survive down here? There’s no Air to breathe, or ...’

  Hork sounded impatient, though his breath still rattled with fear. ‘This isn’t a human, obviously. It’s ... something else, using the form of a human. A human-shaped sac of fire.’

  ‘What else? What is it?’

  ‘How am I supposed to know?’

  ‘Do you think it’s Xeelee?’

  ‘No human has ever seen a Xeelee. Anyway, the Xeelee are just legend.’

  Astonishingly, she found anger building inside her. At a time like this, she felt patronized. She glared at him and hissed, ‘Legends are why you brought me here, remember?’

  The Chair of Parz City shot an exasperated glance at her; then he turned to face the woman-thing, and when he spoke Dura found herself admiring the steadiness of his tone. ‘You,’ he challenged. ‘Intruder. What do you want with us?’