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

by Stephen Baxter

  Arrow Maker smiled. ‘Then being fearful - cautious, at least - is the only rational response.’

  ‘Unless you’re fifteen years old.’

  ‘I heard that.’ Spinner rejoined them; she punched Morrow, lightly, in the ribs; her small, hard fist sank into layers of body-fat, and he tried not to react to the sudden, small pain.

  They descended a ramp, and passed down from Deck One and onto Deck Two, the first of the inhabited levels.

  Morrow tried to see his world through the fresh eyes of the forest people. The drab, stained surfaces of the bulkheads above and below, the distant, slightly mist-shrouded, hull walls, all provided a frame around the world - regular, ordered, enclosed. Immense banners of green copper-stain disfigured one hull wall. Stair-ramps threaded between the Decks like hundred-yard-long traceries of spider-webs, and the elevator shafts were vertical pillars which pierced the levels, apparently supporting the metal sky. The rigid circular-geometry layout of Deck Two was easy to discern. Buildings - homes, factories, the Planners’ Temples - clustered obediently in the Deck’s neat sectors and segments.

  Morrow felt embarrassed, obscurely depressed. His world was unimaginative, constricting - like the interior of some huge machine, he thought. And a battered, failing, ageing machine at that.

  They set off down a chord-way which ran directly to Milpitas’ Temple.

  A woman came near them. Morrow knew her - she was called Perpetuation; she ran a shop in a poor part of Sector 4. She walked steadily along the way towards them, eyes downcast. She looked tired, Morrow thought; it must be her shift end.

  Then she looked up, and saw the forest folk. Perpetuation slowed to a halt in the middle of the chord-way, her mouth hanging slack. Morrow saw beads of sweat break out over her scalp.

  In his peripheral vision, Morrow saw Spinner-of-Rope reach for her blowpipe.

  He raised a hand and tried to smile. ‘Perpetuation. Don’t be alarmed. We’re on our way to the Temple, to . . .’

  He let his voice trail off. He could see Perpetuation wasn’t hearing him. In fact, she seemed to be having difficulty in believing the evidence of her own eyes; she kept looking past Morrow’s party, along the chord-way towards her home.

  It was as if the forest party didn’t exist - couldn’t exist - for her.

  She looked absurd. But she reminded Morrow, disturbingly, of his own first reaction to Spinner-of-Rope.

  Perpetuation scurried off the path, ran around them, and continued on her way without looking back. Spinner seemed to relax. She slung her blowpipe over her shoulder once more.

  ‘For the love of Life,’ Morrow snapped at the girl, suddenly impatient, ‘you were in no danger from that poor woman. She was terrified. Couldn’t you see that?’

  Spinner returned his stare, wide-eyed.

  Uvarov turned up his blind face; Arrow Maker explained briefly what had happened. Uvarov barked laughter. ‘You are wrong, Morrow. Of course Spinner was in danger here. We all are.’

  Arrow Maker, plodding beside Morrow, frowned. ‘I don’t understand. This place is strange, but I’ve seen no danger.’

  Morrow said, ‘I agree. You’re under no threat here . . .’

  Uvarov laughed. ‘You think not? Maker, try to remember this lesson. It might keep you alive a little longer. The most precious thing to a human being is a mind-set: more precious than one’s own life, even. Human history has taught us that lesson time and again, with its endless parade of wars - human sacrifices en masse - thousands of deaths over the most trivial of differences of religious interpretation.

  ‘We do not fit into the mind-set of the people within these Decks. That poor woman walked around us, convincing herself we are not real! By our presence here - by our very existence, in fact - we are disturbing the mind-set of the people here . . . in particular, of those ancients who control this society.

  ‘They may not even realize it themselves, but they will seek to destroy us. The lives of three or four strangers is a cheap price to pay for the preservation of a mind-set, believe me.’

  ‘No,’ Morrow said. ‘I can’t accept that. I don’t always agree with the Planners. But they aren’t killers.’

  ‘You think not?’ Uvarov laughed again. ‘The survivalists - your “Planners” - are psychotic. Of course. As I am. And you. We are a fundamentally flawed species. Most of humanity, for most of its history, has been driven by a series of mass psychotic delusions. The labels changed, but the nature of the delusions barely varied . . .’

  Uvarov sighed. ‘We built this marvellous ship - we created Paradoxa. We dreamed of saving the species itself. We launched, towards the stars and the future . . .

  ‘But, unfortunately, we had to take the contents of our heads with us.’

  Morrow recalled Perpetuation’s expression, as she had systematically shut out the existence of the forest folk. Maybe, he thought grimly, this was going to be even harder than he’d anticipated.

  Lieserl remembered the first time she’d lost contact with the outside human worlds altogether. It had hurt her more than she’d expected.

  She’d tested her systems; the telemetry link was still functioning, but input from the far end had simply ceased - quite abruptly, without warning.

  Confused, baffled, resentful, she had withdrawn into herself for a while. If the humans who had engineered her, and dumped her into this alien place, had now decided to abandon her - well, so would she them . . .

  Then, when she calmed down a little, she tried to figure out why the link had been broken.

  From the clues provided by Michael Poole’s quixotic wormhole flight into the future, Paradoxa had put together a sketchy chronology of man’s future history. Lieserl mapped her internal clocks against the Paradoxa chronology.

  When she first lost contact, already millennia had passed since her downloading into the Sun.

  Earth was occupied, she’d found.

  Humans had diffused out beyond the Solar System in their bulky, ponderous slower-than-light GUTships. It had been a time of optimism, of hope, of expansion into an unlimited future.

  Then the first extra-Solar intelligence had been encountered, somewhere among the stars: the Squeem, a race of group-mind entities with a wide network of trading colonies.

  Impossibly rapidly, the Squeem had overwhelmed human military capabilities and occupied Earth. The systematic exploitation of Solar resources - for the benefit of an alien power - was begun.

  Sometimes, Lieserl speculated about why the dire warnings of Paradoxa - based on Poole’s data - had failed to avert the very catastrophes, like the Squeem occupation, that Paradoxa had predicted. Maybe there was an inevitability to history - maybe it simply wasn’t possible to avert the tide of events, no matter how disastrous.

  But Lieserl couldn’t accept such a fatalistic view.

  Probably the simple truth was that - by the time enough centuries had passed for the predictions of Paradoxa to come true - those predictions simply weren’t accepted any more. The people who had actually encountered the Squeem must have been pioneers - traders, builders of new worlds. To them, Earth and its environs had been a remote legend. If they’d ever even heard of Paradoxa, it would have been dismissed as a remote fringe group clinging fanatically to shards of dire prediction from the past, with no greater significance than astrologers or soothsayers.

  But, Lieserl realized, Paradoxa’s predictions had actually been right.

  After the Squeem interregnum, contact with her had suddenly been restored.

  She remembered how words and images had suddenly come pouring once more through the revived telemetry links. At first she had been terrified by this sudden irruption into her cetacean drifting through the Sun’s heart.

  Her new capcom - ragged, undernourished, but endlessly enthusiastic - told her that the yoke of the Squeem had been cast off. Humans were free again, able to exploit themselves and their own resources as they saw fit. Not only that, Lieserl learned, the Squeem occupation had left humans with a legacy of hi
gh technology - a hyperdrive, a faster-than-light means of travelling between the stars.

  Hyperdrive technology hadn’t originated with the Squeem, it was learned rapidly. They had acquired it from some other species, by fair means or foul; just as humanity had now ‘inherited’ it.

  The true progenitors, of much of the technology in the Galaxy, were known . . . at least from afar.

  Xeelee.

  The lost human colonies on the nearby stars were contacted and revitalized, and a new, explosive wave of expansion began, powered by the hyperdrive. Humans spread like an infection across the Galaxy, vigorous, optimistic once more.

  Lieserl, drifting through her fantasy of Sun-clouds, watched all this from afar, bemused. Contact with her was maintained only fitfully; Lieserl with her wormhole technology was a relic - a bizarre artifact from the past, drifting slowly to some forgotten goal inside the Sun.

  In the first few years after the overthrow of the Squeem, humans had prospered - flourished, expanded. But Lieserl grew increasingly depressed as she fast-forwarded through human history. The Universe beyond the Solar System seemed to be a place full of petty, uncreative races endlessly competing for Xeelee scraps. But maybe, she thought sourly, that made it a good arena for mankind.

  Then - devastatingly - a war was fought, and lost, with another alien power: the Qax.

  Earth was occupied again.

  There were more birds joining the flock than leaving it, she realized slowly.

  The birds joining the cloud came in from random directions. But there was a pattern to the paths of the departing birds: there was a steady flow of the outgoing birds in one direction, in the Sun’s equatorial plane, to some unknown destination.

  The point was, more birds were arriving than departing. The cloud at the heart of the Sun was being grown. The birds were expanding the cloud deliberately.

  She felt as if she were being dragged along a deductive chain, reluctantly, to a place she didn’t want to go. She found, absurdly, that she liked the birds; she didn’t want to think ill of them.

  But she had to consider the possibility.

  Was it really true? What if the birds knew what they were doing to the Sun? Oh, the precise form of their intelligence - their awareness - didn’t matter. They might even be some form of group consciousness, like the Squeem. The key question was their intent.

  Could the wildest speculations of Paradoxa be, after all, correct? Did the birds represent some form of malevolent intelligence which intended to extinguish the Sun?

  Were they smothering the Sun’s fusion fire by design?

  And if so, why?

  Brooding, she sank deeper into the flock, watching, correlating.

  They reached the Paradoxa Planners’ Temple in Sector 3.

  The little party slowed. Arrow Maker and Spinner seemed to have coped well with the sights and sounds of their journey so far, but the glowing, tetrahedral mass of the Temple, looming above them, seemed to have awed them at last. Morrow found it hard to control his own nervousness. After all it was only a few shifts since his own last, painful, personal interview with Milpitas; and now, standing here, he wondered at his own temerity at coming back like this.

  Garry Uvarov stirred in his cocoon of stained blanket, his sightless face questing. When he spoke his cheeks, paper-thin, rustled. ‘What’s going on? Why have we stopped?’

  ‘We’ve arrived,’ Morrow said. ‘This is the Planners’ Temple. And—’

  Uvarov snorted, cavernously. ‘Temple. Of course they’d call it that. Arrow Maker,’ he snapped. ‘Tell me what you see.’

  Arrow Maker, hesitantly, described the tetrahedral pyramid, its glowing-blue edges, the sheets of glimmering brown-gold stretched across the faces.

  Uvarov’s head quivered; he seemed to be trying to nod. ‘An Interface mockup. These damned survivalists; always so full of themselves. Temple.’ He twisted his head; Morrow, fascinated, could see the vertebrae of his neck, individually articulating. ‘Well? What are we waiting for?’

  Morrow, his anxiety and nervousness tightening in his chest, moved forward towards the Temple.

  ‘Milpitas? Milpitas?’ Uvarov’s gaunt face showed some interest. ‘I knew a Milpitas: Serena Harvey Gallium Harvey Milpitas . . .’

  ‘My grandmother,’ Planner Milpitas said. He sat back in his chair and steepled his long fingers, a familiar gesture that Morrow watched, fascinated. ‘One of the original crew. She died a long time ago—’

  Uvarov’s chair rolled, restlessly, back and forth across Milpitas’ soft carpet; Arrow Maker, Morrow and Spinner were forced to crowd to the back of Milpitas’ small office to avoid Uvarov. ‘I know all that, damn it. I didn’t ask for her life history. I said I knew her. Glib tongue, she had, like all Martians.’

  Milpitas, behind his desk, regarded Uvarov. Morrow conceded with a certain respect that the Planner’s composure, his certainty, hadn’t been ruffled at all by the irruption into his ordered world of these painted savages, this gaunt ancient from the days of the launch itself.

  The Planner asked, ‘Why have you come here?’

  ‘Because you wouldn’t come out to meet me,’ Uvarov growled. ‘You arrogant bastard. I should have—’

  ‘But why,’ Milpitas pressed with patient distaste, ‘did you wish to meet me at all?’ Now he let his cold eyes flicker over the silent forest folk. ‘Why not stay in your jungle, climbing trees with your friends here?’

  Morrow heard Spinner-of-Rope growl under her breath.

  Uvarov’s nostrils flared, the papery skin stretching. ‘I won’t be spoken to like that by the likes of you. Who’s in charge here?’

  ‘I am,’ Milpitas said calmly. ‘Now answer my question.’

  Garry Uvarov raised his face; in the subdued, sourceless light of Milpitas’ office his eye sockets looked infinitely deep. ‘You people were always the same.’

  Milpitas looked amused. ‘What people, exactly?’

  ‘You survivalists. Your blessed grandmother and the rest of the crew she fell in with, who thought they were the only ones, the sacred guardians of Paradoxa’s mission. Always trying to control everybody else, to fit us all into your damn hierarchies.’

  ‘If you’ve come all this way to debate social structures, then let’s do so,’ Milpitas said easily. ‘There are reasons for devising hierarchical societies - purposes for devising bureaucracies. Did you ever think of that, old man?’ He waved a languid hand. ‘We’re confined here - obviously - within a finite environment. We have limited resources. We’ve no means of obtaining more resources. So we need control. We must plan. We need consistency of behaviour: a regulated society designed to maximize efficiency until the greater goal is reached. And a bureaucracy is the best way of—’

  ‘Power! ’ Uvarov’s voice was a sudden rant.

  His head jerked forward on its stem of neck. ‘You’ve built walls around the world, walls around people. Consistency of behaviour my arse. We’re talking about power, Milpitas. That’s all. The power to flatten and control - to impose illiteracy - even to remove the right to reproduce. You’re damned inhuman; you people always were. And—’

  Milpitas laughed; he seemed completely unperturbed. ‘How long have you been isolated up there in the trees, Dr Uvarov? How many centuries? And have you cherished this bitterness all that time?’

  ‘You’re obsessed with control. You survivalists . . . With your perverted vision of the Paradoxa goal, your exclusive access to the truth.’

  Milpitas’ laughter faded, and a cold light came into his eyes. ‘I know your history, Dr Uvarov. It’s familiar enough. Your rejection of AS treatment, your bizarre experiment to breed longevity into your people - your victims, I should say . . . And you talk to me of obsession. Of control. You dare talk to me of these things . . .’

  In his brief time with the forest folk, Morrow had learned of Uvarov’s eugenic ambitions.

  Uvarov had rejected AS treatment - and any artificial means - as the way to immortality. To improve the stock, it was
necessary to change the species, he argued.

  Humans were governed by their genes. They - and every other living thing - were machines, designed by the genes to ensure their own - the genes’ - survival. Genes gave their hosts life - and killed them.

  Genes which killed their hosts tended to be removed from the gene pool. Thus, a gene which killed young bodies would have no way of being passed on to offspring. But a gene which killed old bodies after they’d reproduced could survive.

  So, perversely, lethal genes in older bodies could propagate.

  Uvarov had come to understand that senile decay was simply the outcome of late-acting lethal genes, which could never be selected out of the gene pool by breeding among the young.

  After two centuries of flight, Garry Uvarov had determined to improve the stock of humanity the starship was carrying to the future. AS treatment used nanobotic techniques to eliminate ageing effects directly, at the biochemical level, but did not challenge the genes directly.

  Even before AS treatment had started to fail him, Uvarov had declared war on the lethal genes which were killing him.

  He and his followers had occupied the forest Deck, effectively sealing it off. He sent his people into the forest and told them that they would have a simple life: take nourishment from the forest, make simple tools. AS treatment was abandoned, and within a few years the forest floor and canopy were alive with the voices of children.

  Then, Uvarov banned any reproduction before the age of forty.

  Uvarov had enforced his rule with iron discipline; stalking through the forest, or ascending, grim-faced, into the canopy, Uvarov and a team of close followers had performed several quick, neat abortions.

  After some generations of this, he pushed the conception limit up to forty-five. Then fifty.

  The population in the forest dipped, but slowly started to recover. And, gradually, the lethal genes were eliminated from the gene pool.