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

by Stephen Baxter

  Spinner sat silently for a moment. Memories of Earth meant nothing to her, but she could feel the pain in Louise’s voice.

  ‘Louise, do you want to land here?’

  ‘No. There’s nothing for us down there . . . It was only an impulse that brought me out here in the first place; we had no evidence that anything had survived. I’m sorry, Spinner.’

  Spinner sighed. ‘Where to now?’

  ‘Well, since we’re out here in the dark, let’s stay out. We’re still picking up that remote beacon.’

  ‘Where’s the signal coming from?’

  ‘Further out than we are now - about a hundred AUs - and a goodly distance around the equatorial plane from Port Sol. Spinner-of-Rope, we’re looking at another few days in the saddle, for you. Can you stand it?’

  Spinner sighed. ‘It’s not getting any easier. But it’s not going to get any worse, is it?’ . . . And, she thought, it wasn’t as if the base they had established amid the ruins of the Jupiter system was so fantastically inviting a place to get back to. ‘Let’s get it over.’

  ‘All right. I’ve already laid in your course . . .’

  There could be no true dialogue, Garry Uvarov thought, between Lieserl - the strange, lonely exile in the Sun - and the crew of the returned Great Northern.

  The corpse of Jupiter was only just over a light-hour from the centre of the Sol-giant, but Lieserl’s maser messages took far longer than that to percolate out of the Sun along the flanks of their immense convection cells. So communications round-trips - between the Northern and the antiquated wormhole terminus that supported Lieserl’s awareness - took several days.

  Still, once contact was established, a prodigious amount of information flowed, asynchronously, back and forth across the tenuous link.

  ‘Incredible,’ Mark murmured. ‘She dates from our own era - she was placed within the Sun at almost exactly the same time as our launch.’

  It sounded as if Mark were speaking from somewhere inside Uvarov’s own head. Uvarov swivelled his sightless face about the dining saloon. ‘You’re forgetting your spatial focus again,’ he snapped. ‘I know you’re excited, but—’

  There was a soft concussion; Uvarov pictured Virtual sound-sources reconfiguring throughout the saloon. ‘Sorry,’ Mark said, from a point in the air a few feet before Uvarov’s head.

  ‘As far as I can tell, she’s human,’ Mark said. ‘A human analogue, anyway. The woman’s been in there, alone, for five million years, Uvarov. I know that subjectively she won’t have endured all that time at a normal human pace, but still . . .

  ‘She’s another Paradoxa project - just as we are. Which is why there’s such a coincidence in dates. We must both date from Paradoxa’s most active period, Uvarov.’

  Uvarov smiled. ‘Perhaps. And yet, what has resulted of all the grand designs of those days? Paradoxa was planning to adjust the future of mankind - to ensure the success of the species. But what is the outcome? We have: one half-insane relic of a woman-Virtual, wandering about inside the Sun, one broken-down GUTship, the Northern . . . and a Sun become a giant in a lifeless Solar System.’ He worked his numb mouth, but there was no phlegm to spit. ‘Hardly a triumph. So much for the abilities of humans to manage projects on such timescales. So much for Paradoxa!’

  ‘But Lieserl has followed a lot of the history of the human race - in patches, and from a distance, but she knows more than we could ever hope to have uncovered otherwise. She lost contact with the rest of the race only as humans entered a late period called the Assimilation, when mankind was moving into direct competition with the Xeelee.’

  Uvarov couldn’t wrench his imagination away from the plight of Lieserl. ‘But, I wonder, are these few, pathetic scraps of data sufficient compensation for a hundred thousand lifetimes of solitude endured by this unfortunate Lieserl, in the heart of a dying star?’

  Mark synthesized a sniff. ‘I don’t know,’ he said frankly. ‘Maybe you’re a better philosopher than I am, Uvarov; maybe you can come to judgements on the moral value of data. At this moment I don’t really care where this information has come from.’

  ‘No,’ Uvarov said. ‘I don’t suppose you do.’

  ‘I’m simply grateful that, because Lieserl exists, we’ve managed to learn something of humanity’s five-megayear past . . . and of the photino birds.’

  ‘Photino birds?’

  The timbre of Mark’s voice changed; Uvarov imagined his stupid, pixel-lumped face splitting into a grin. ‘That’s Lieserl’s phrase. She found what she was sent in to find - dark matter energy flows, sucking the energy out of the core of the Sun. But it wasn’t some inanimate process, as her designers had expected: Lieserl found life, Uvarov. She’s not alone. She’s surrounded by photino birds. And I think she rather enjoys the company . . .’

  ‘Lieserl . . . ’ Uvarov rolled the name around his mouth, savouring its strangeness. ‘An unusual name, even a thousand years ago.’ Uvarov’s patchy, unreliable memory fired random facts into his tired forebrain. ‘Einstein had a child called Lieserl. I mean Albert Einstein, the—’

  ‘I know who he was.’

  ‘His wife was called Mileva,’ Uvarov said. ‘Why do I remember this? . . . They bore a child, Lieserl - but out of wedlock: a source of great shame in the early twentieth century, I understand. The child was adopted. Einstein had to choose between his child, and his career in science . . . all that beautiful science of his. What a choice for any human to have to make!

  ‘So this woman has the name of a bastard,’ he said. ‘A name redolent of isolation. How appropriate. How lonely she must have been . . .

  ‘And now she enjoys the company of dark matter life forms,’ he mused. ‘I wonder if she still remembers she was once human.’

  Port Sol was twenty light-hours from the source of the beacon, Louise estimated. The nightfighter would be able to complete the trip in fifty hours.

  Spinner-of-Rope, working her rudimentary controls with growing confidence, opened up the sail-wings of the nightfighter. She glanced over her shoulder to watch the wings. Her view was partially obscured by Louise’s life-lounge, an improvised encrustation which sat, squat, on the thick construction material shoulders of the ship’s wing-mountings, just behind her own cage. One of the Northern’s small, glass-walled pods had been fixed there too.

  The nightfighter used its domain wall antigravity effect to protect the lounge, with Louise in it, from its extremes of acceleration. After a lot of experimentation they had found that securely attaching the lounge, and other artifacts, to the structure of the Xeelee nightfighter was enough to fool the craft into treating the enhancements as part of its structure.

  But still, despite the human obstructions, Spinner could see the sparkle of the cosmic-string rims of the wings as they wound out across hundreds of miles of space, hauling open the night-blackness of the domain wall wings themselves. As they unfurled, the wings curved over on themselves with a grace and delicacy astonishing, Spinner thought, in artifacts so huge - and yet those curves seemed imbued with a terrific sense of vigour, of power.

  She touched the waldoes.

  The wings pulsed, once.

  There was an instant in which she could see Port Sol recede from her, a flashbulb impression of squat human buildings and gaping ice-wounds which imploded to a light-point with a terrifying, helpless velocity.

  And then the worldlet was gone. Within a heartbeat, Port Sol had become too dim even to show up as a point - and there was no longer a frame of reference against which she could judge her speed.

  Then, with slow sureness as her speed built up, blue shift began to stain the stars ahead of her once more. For a few hours relativistic effects would spuriously restore those aged lights to something like the brilliance they had once enjoyed.

  . . . And again she had the sense, almost undefinable, of someone here with her, inside the cage - a presence, surely human, staring out wistfully at the blue-shifted stars as she did.

  She wondered whether she shou
ld tell Louise about this. But - real or not, external to her own, fuddled mind or not - her companion wasn’t threatening.

  And besides, what would Louise make of it? What could she do about it?

  As the starbow coalesced around her once more, Spinner-of-Rope opaqued her faceplate, wriggled in her couch until an irritating wrinkle of cloth behind her back had smoothed itself out, and tried to sleep.

  The slow, wide orbits of Port Sol and the beacon source had left them ninety degrees apart, as seen from the centre of the Sun. Louise had laid in a course which took the nightfighter on a wide, high trajectory high above the plane of the System, arcing across its outer regions. The nightfighter’s path was like a fly hopping across a plate, from one point on the plate’s rim to another.

  The Sun sat like a bloated, grotesque spider at the heart of its ruined System. All of the inner planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth/Luna - were gone . . . save only Mars, which had been reduced to a scorched cinder, surely barren of life, its orbit taking it skimming through the outer layers of the new red giant itself.

  In a few more millennia that fragile orbit would erode, pitching Mars, too, into the flames.

  Of the outer gas giants - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune - all had survived with little change, save imploded Jupiter. But the outermost planet of all - the double world Pluto/Charon - had disappeared.

  Spinner listened to Louise describe all this. ‘So where did Pluto go?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Louise said. ‘There’s not a trace to be seen, anywhere along its old orbital path. Maybe we’ll never know.

  ‘Spinner, a lot of the minor bodies of the System seem to have taken a real beating. Some of that is no doubt due to the Sun’s new, extreme state . . . but maybe some of it has been deliberate, too.’

  Once, the Solar System had served as host to billions of minor bodies The Oort-Opik Cloud was - had once been - a swarm of a hundred billion comets circling through an immense, sparse shell of space, between four light-months and three light-years from the Sun. Now, that cloud was denuded.

  Louise said, ‘Many of the comets must have been destroyed by the growth of the Sun - flashed to steam by its huge outpouring of heat energy, in one last, extravagant fling . . . They would have been visible from other systems, actually; they’d have inserted water lines, briefly, in the spectrum of the Sun: a kind of spectral Last Post for the Solar System, if there was anybody left, anywhere, to see.’

  Further in towards the Sun, there were the Kuiper objects, like Port Sol: icy worldlets, orbiting not far outside the widest planetary orbits. And throughout the System there were more rings of small objects - like the asteroids, shepherded into semi-stable orbits by the gravitational interaction of the major planets.

  ‘But all those worldlet rings are depleted,’ Louise said. ‘Now, some of that depletion must be due to the Sun’s forced evolution, not to mention the loss of three of the inner planets. But many of the small objects must have been populated, by the era of the Xeelee wars.’

  ‘So the objects might have been deliberately destroyed - more casualties of war.’

  ‘Right.’

  Spinner swilled apple-juice around her mouth, wishing she had some way to spit it out - or better still, to clean her teeth.

  Spinner had learned of the Solar System only through Louise’s bookslates and records, but she’d gained an impression of an immense, bustling, prosperous world-system. There had been huge orbital habitat-cities, heavily populated worlds laced together by wormhole transit routes, and ships like immense, extravagant diamonds crossing the face of the yellow-gold Sun. Somewhere inside her - despite all the dire warnings of Paradoxa - she’d hoped to arrive here and find it all just as she’d read.

  Instead, there was only this decayed Sun and its ruined worlds . . . even the wormhole routes, it seemed, had been shut down. And here she was, stuck inside the pilot-cage of an alien craft, chasing across tens of billions of miles in search of one, sad, isolated beacon.

  She began to take her body through a simple regime of callisthenics, exercises she could get through without climbing out of her couch. ‘So, Louise. You’re telling me that Sol is dead. The System is dead. And you sound . . . upset about it. But what else did you expect to find?’

  ‘I expected nothing. I hoped for more,’ Louise said. ‘But I guess the slow destruction of the Sun, coupled with the Xeelee assaults, were together enough to wipe the System clean . . .’

  Spinner felt, suddenly, profoundly depressed, as if the weight of all those lost years, those hundreds of billions of lives which had resulted in nothing but this cosmic rubble, was bearing down on her.

  ‘Louise, I don’t want to hear any more.’

  ‘All right, Spinner. I—’

  Spinner shut her off.

  She blanked out her faceplate, and filled its inner side with a soothing, cool green light, the light which had filtered through leaves from an artificial Sun to illuminate her childhood. She immersed herself in the warm feel of her muscles, as she pushed through her exercises.

  Immersed in the cries of the klaxon, Morrow’s party held a council of war.

  ‘I’ve been scouting,’ Mark said. ‘And as far as I can tell it’s the same all over the Decks. No people, anywhere. The same emptiness . . . Everyone has been taken into the Temples. And it’s not going to be easy to get them out.’

  ‘Let’s leave them in there, then,’ Trapper-of-Frogs said practically. ‘If that’s what they want.’

  Morrow studied her round, unmarked face. ‘Unfortunately, that isn’t an option,’ he said gently. ‘We have to protect them.’

  ‘From themselves?’

  ‘If necessary, yes. At any rate, from the Paradoxa Planners.’

  Trapper thrust her face up at his. ‘Why?’

  Morrow started to feel impatient. ‘Because we have to. Look, Trapper, I didn’t want to come on this jaunt into the Decks any more than you did. It’s not my fault we’re being shot at—’

  ‘Starve them,’ Trapper said simply.

  Morrow turned to her. ‘What?’

  ‘Starve them.’ She turned to study the Temple with an appraising eye, as if assessing its capacity. There must be hundreds of people in there - and in the other Temples. They can’t have that much food and water; there just isn’t room in there. I say we wait here, until they get starved out. Simple.’

  Constancy-of-Purpose grinned, maliciously. ‘We could block the sewage outlets. I know where the outlets are; it would be easy. That would be fun. And a lot faster acting.’

  Mark hovered before her, his artificial face drawn into stern disapproval. ‘And cause plague, illness and death on a massive scale? Is that really what you’re proposing?’

  Constancy-of-Purpose looked doubtful; she passed a massive hand over her scalp.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Mark said slowly. ‘This is my field - I’m a socio-engineer, after all. Was, whatever. The last thing we want is a siege, here. Do you understand? I’m not sure if we have the resources to break a siege. If we tried, the fall-out - the illness and death - would put an immense strain on the Northern’s infrastructure.

  ‘Besides—’ He hesitated.

  Morrow said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Besides, I’m not certain that breaking a siege is even possible.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Look: the Planners see themselves as messianic. They, and only they, can save “their” people. If we besiege them, the Planners simply won’t respond the way a rational person would - by studying their resources, by assessing the chances of a successful break-out, and so on. Worse still, we - the besiegers - would become part of the fabric of their delusion, an embodiment of the external threats which assail their people.’

  Morrow frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

  Mark, evidently forgetting there was no drive-induced gravity, started pacing around the Deck, his Virtual feet soundlessly missing the floor by a fraction of an inch. ‘You have to understand things from the point of view o
f the people in control in there: the Planners.’ He turned a frank gaze on Morrow. ‘I’ve been studying you, Morrow. I know you’re still intimidated - by this place, by the nearness of the Planners. Aren’t you? - despite all your experiences outside here, beyond these walls.’

  Morrow said nothing.

  ‘This culture has a lot of power,’ Mark said. ‘Almost all of it is concentrated in the hands of the Planners, with the mass of people dumbly acquiescing. Morrow, the Planners have taken the species-survival logic of Paradoxa - the logic which lay behind the whole of the Northern’s mission, after all - and extrapolated it into something more - something almost religious.

  ‘We’re dealing with a powerful concept, folks; one that seems to touch buttons wired deep into our human psyches. People on these Decks have followed where the Planners have led for nearly a millennium - including you, Morrow.

  ‘When Louise and I saw this tendency developing, quite early in the flight, we decided we couldn’t overcome it - and it would be wastefully destructive to try.

  ‘So we withdrew, to the Great Britain, leaving enough of a physical control infrastructure in place for us to ensure the ship could run smoothly.

  ‘Well, maybe we were wrong to do that; because now the Planners’ messiah complex is leading us to a crisis . . .’

  Morrow found he intensely disliked being analysed in this way by a Virtual construct. ‘But what are we to do?’ he snapped. ‘How are we to use these staggering insights of yours?’

  ‘The situation is unpredictable,’ Mark said bluntly. ‘But it’s possible that the Planners would destroy their people - and themselves - rather than let us win.’

  The little party exchanged shocked glances.

  Trapper said, ‘But that’s insane. It even contradicts their conscious goals - to protect their people.’

  Mark’s smile was thin. ‘Nobody said it had to make sense. Unfortunately, there are plenty of precedents, right through human history.’

  Constancy-of-Purpose said, ‘With flaws like that hard-wired into our heads, it’s a wonder we ever got into space in the first place.’ She let herself drift a little way from the Deck, her legs dangling beneath her, and studied the Temple, eyes squinting. ‘Well, if we can’t break the siege, we’re going to have trouble. For a start, there are more of them than us. And, second, their cross-bows have a much greater range than these blowpipes wielded by Trapper and her friends—’