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

by Stephen Baxter

  They couldn’t understand how Lieserl could not be aware of this stark enmity.

  She closed her eyes and hugged her knees; the hydrogen shell, fusing at ten million degrees, felt like warm summer Sunlight on her Virtual face. She’d watched the photino birds do their slow, patient work, year after year, leaching away the Sun’s fusion energy in slow, deadly, dribbles. She’d come to understand that the birds were killing the Sun - and yet she’d never thought really to wonder what was happening outside the Sun, in other stars. Had she vaguely assumed that the photino birds were somehow native to the Sun, like a localized infection? - But that couldn’t be, of course, for she’d seen birds fly away from here, and come skimming down through the envelope to join the core-orbiting flock. So there must be birds beyond the Sun - significant flocks of them.

  She realized now, with chilling clarity, that her unquestioned assumption that the birds were contained to just one star, coupled with her intrigued fascination with the birds themselves, had led her to justify the birds’ actions, in her own heart. It hadn’t even mattered to her that the result of the birds’ activity would be the death of Sol - perhaps, even, the extinction of man.

  She quailed from this unwelcome insight into her own soul. She had once been human, after all; was she really so clinical, so alien?

  The murder of Sol would have been bad enough. But in fact - the crew of the Northern had told her, in brutal and explicit detail - all across the sky, the stars were dying: ballooning into diseased giants, crumbling into dwarfs. The Universe was littered with planetary nebulae, supernovae ejecta and the other debris of dying stars, all rich with complex - and useless - heavy elements.

  The photino birds were killing the stars: and not just the Sun, man’s star, but all of the stars, out as far as the Northern’s sensors could pick up.

  Already, there was nowhere in the Universe for humans to run to.

  And she, Lieserl - the Northern crew seemed to believe - should be doing more than leaking out wry little messages via her maser convection cells. She should be screaming warnings.

  Through her complex feelings, a mixture of self-doubt and loneliness, anger erupted. After all, what right did the Northern crew have to criticize her - even implicitly? She’d had no choice about this assignment - this immortal exile of hers in the heart of the Sun. She’d been allowed no life. And it wasn’t her who had shut down the telemetry link through the wormhole, during the Assimilation.

  Why, after millions of years of abandonment, should she offer any loyalty to mankind?

  And yet, she thought, the arrival of the Northern, and the fresh perspective of its crew, had made her take a colder, harder look at the birds - and at herself - than she had for a long time.

  She pictured the shadow universe of dark matter: a universe which permeated, barely touching, the visible worlds men had once inhabited . . . And yet that image was misleading, she thought, for the dark matter was no shadow: it comprised most of the Universe’s total mass. The glowing, baryonic matter was a mere glittering froth on the surface of that dark ocean.

  The photino birds - and their unknowable dark matter cousins, perhaps as different from the birds as were the Qax from humanity - slid through the black waters like fish, blind and hidden.

  But the small, shining fraction of baryonic matter seemed vital to the dark matter creatures. It was a catalyst for the chains of events which sustained their species.

  For a start, dark matter could not form stars. And the birds seemed to need the gravity wells of baryonic stars.

  When a clump of baryonic gas collapsed under gravity, electromagnetic radiation carried away much of the heat produced - it was as if the radiation cooled the gas cloud. The residual heat left in the cloud eventually balanced the gravitational attraction, and equilibrium was found: a star formed.

  But dark matter could not produce electromagnetic radiation. And without the cooling effect of the radiation, a dark matter cloud, collapsing under gravity, trapped much more of its heat of contraction. As a result, much larger clouds - larger than galaxies - were the equilibrium form for dark matter.

  So the early Universe had been populated by immense, cold, bland clouds of dark matter: it had been a cosmos almost without structure.

  Then the baryonic matter had gathered, and the stars began to implode - to shine. Lieserl imagined the first stars sparking to life across the cosmos, tiny pinprick gravity wells in the smooth oceans of dark matter.

  The photino birds lived off a trickle of proton-photino interactions, which fed them with a slow, steady drip of energy. And to get a sufficient flow of energy the birds needed dense matter - densities which could not have formed without baryonic structures.

  And the birds’ dependence on baryonic matter extended further. She knew that the birds needed templates of baryonic material even to reproduce.

  So baryonic-matter stars had given the photino birds their very being, and now fed them and enabled them to reproduce.

  Lieserl brooded. A fine hypothesis. But why, then, should the birds be so eager to kill off their mother-stars?

  Once more the chatter of the humans from the Northern passed through her sensorium, barely registering. They were asking her more questions - requesting more detailed forecasts of the likely future evolution of the suffering Sun.

  She sailed moodily around the core, thinking about stars and the photino birds.

  And her mind made connections it had failed to complete before in millions of years.

  At last, she saw it: the full, bleak picture.

  And, suddenly, it seemed urgent - terribly urgent - to answer the humans’ questions about the future.

  She hurried to the base of her convection cells.

  The shower’s needle-sharp jets of water sprayed over Louise’s skin. She floated there at the centre of the shower cubicle, listening to the shrill gurgle of the water as it was pumped out of the booth. She lifted her arms up and let the water play over her belly and chest; it was hot enough, the pressure sufficiently high, to make her battered old skin tingle, as if it were being worked over by a thousand tiny masseurs.

  She hated being in zero-gee. She always had, and she hated it still; she even loathed having to have a pump to suck the water out of her shower for her. She’d insisted on having this shower installed, curtained off in one corner of the life-lounge, as her one concession to luxury - no, damn it, she thought, this is no luxury; the shower is my concession to what’s left of my humanity.

  A hot shower was one of the few sensual experiences that had remained vivid, as she’d got so absurdly old. High-pressure, steaming water could still cut through the patina of age which deadened her skin.

  There was hardly anything else left. Since her sense of smell had finally packed up, eating had become a process of basic refuelling, to be endured rather than enjoyed. And, apart from her Virtuals, nothing much stimulated her mentally; it would take more than a thousand-year life to exhaust the libraries of mankind, but she’d long since wearied of the ancient, frozen thoughts of others, rendered irrelevant by the death of the Sun.

  She turned off the spigot. Hot air gushed down around her, drying her rapidly. When the droplets had stopped floating off her skin she pulled back the shower curtain.

  The lounge was basic - it contained little more than this shower, a small galley, a sleeping cocoon and her data desk with its processor bank. Lashed up in haste from sections of the Northern’s hull material, the lounge was a squat cylinder five yards across, crouched on the shoulders of the Xeelee craft like a malevolent parasite - utterly spoiling the lines of the delicate nightfighter, Louise had thought regretfully. The walls of the lounge were opaqued to a featureless grey, making the lounge rather dingy and claustrophobic. And the place was a mess. Bits of her clothing drifted around in the air, crumpled and soiled, and she was conscious of a stale smell. She really ought to clean up; she knew she utterly lacked the obsessive neatness needed to survive for long in zero gee.

  She reached
for a towel drifting in the air close by. She rubbed herself vigorously, relishing the feeling of the rough fabric on her skin. A mere blast of air never left her feeling really dry.

  The feel of the warm towel on her skin made her think, distantly, about sex.

  She’d always had a sour public persona: people saw her as an engineer obsessed with her job, with building things out there. But there was more to her than that - there were elements which Mark had recognized and treasured during their marriage. Sex had always been important to her: not just for the physical pleasure of it but also for what it symbolized: something deep and old within her, an echo of the ancient sea whose traces humans still carried, even now. The contrast of that oceanic experience with her work had made her more complete, she thought.

  After she and Mark had reconciled - tentatively, grudgingly, in recognition of their joint isolation in the Northern - they had revived their vigorous sex life. And it had been good, remaining vital for a long time. Longer than either of them had a right to expect, she supposed. She wrapped the towel around her back and began to rub at her buttocks. Maybe if Mark had stayed alive—

  The lounge walls snapped to transparency; space darkness flooded over her.

  Louise cried out and pulled the towel around her body.

  From her comms desk came the sound of laughter.

  She scrambled in a locker for fresh clothes. The door of the jury-rigged locker jammed and she hauled at it, swearing, aware of the towel slipping around her.

  ‘By Lethe’s waters, Spinner, what do you think you’re doing?’

  Louise could just make out Spinner’s cage, a box of winking lights at the prow of the nightfighter. A shadow moved across the lights - Spinner, probably, twisting in her couch to take a mocking look at her. ‘I’m sorry. I knew you’d be embarrassed.’

  Louise had found a coverall; now she thrust her legs into it. ‘Then why,’ she said angrily, ‘did you invade my privacy by doing it?’

  ‘What difference does it make? Louise, there’s no one to see; we’re a billion miles from the nearest living soul. And you’re a thousand years old. You, really ought to rid yourself of these taboos.’

  ‘But they’re my taboos,’ Louise hissed. ‘I happen to like them, and they make a difference to me. If you ever get to my age, Spinner-of-Rope, maybe you’ll learn a little tolerance.’

  ‘Well, maybe. Anyway, I didn’t de-opaque your walls just to catch you with your pants off.’ She sounded mischievous.

  Suspiciously, Louise asked, ‘Why, then?’

  ‘Because—’ Spinner hesitated.

  ‘Because what?’

  ‘Look ahead.’

  There was a point of light, far ahead, beyond Spinner’s cage: a point that ballooned, now, exploding at her face—

  Saturn, plummeting out of emptiness at her.

  Louise cried out and buried her face in her hands.

  ‘Because,’ Spinner said softly, ‘we’re there. I thought you’d enjoy watching our arrival.’

  Louise opened her fingers, cautiously.

  Steady, orange-brown light shone into her cabin: the light of a planet, illuminated by the bloated body of its Sun.

  Spinner was laughing softly.

  Louise said slowly, ‘Spinner - if this is Saturn - where are the rings?’

  ‘Rings? What rings?’

  The planet itself was the same swollen mass of hydrogen and helium, with its core of rock twenty times as massive as Earth intact, deep within it. Elaborate cloud systems still wound around the globe, like watercolour streaks of brown and gold, just as she remembered. And the largest moon, Titan, was still there.

  But the rings had gone.

  Louise hurried to her data desk.

  ‘ . . . Louise? Are you all right?’

  From the surface of the city-world of Titan, the rings had been a line of light, geometrically precise, vivid against the autumn gold of Saturn . . .

  Louise made herself reply. ‘I think I’m mourning the rings, Spinner. They were the most beautiful sight in the Solar System. Who would smash up such harmless, magnificent beauty? And, damn it, they were ours.’

  ‘But,’ said Spinner, ‘there is a ring here. I can see it. Look . . .’

  Following Spinner’s directions, Louise studied her data desk.

  The ring showed up as a faint band across the stars, a shadow against the swollen, imperturbable bulk of the planet itself.

  Once, three ice moons had circled outside the orbit of Titan: Iapetus, Hyperion and retrograde Phoebe. All that was left of those three moons was this trail of rubble. Thin, colourless, with no evidence of structure, the ring of ice chunks, glowing red in the light of the dying Sun, circled the planet at about sixty planetary radii, a pale ghost of its glorious predecessor.

  And where were the other moons?

  Louise paged through her data desk. Once, Saturn had had seventeen satellites. Now - as far as she could tell from their orbits - only Titan and Enceladus remained. And there wasn’t much left of Enceladus at all; the little moon still swung through an orbit around four planetary radii from Saturn, but its path was much more elliptical than before. Its surface - always broken, uneven - had been left as rubble. There was no sign of the small human outposts which had once sparkled against the shadows of its curved ridges and cratered plains.

  The rest of the moons - even the harmless, ten-mile-wide islands of water ice - had gone.

  Louise remembered the ancient, beautiful names. Pan, Atlas, Prometheus, Pandora, Epimetheus . . . Names almost as old, now, as the myths from which they had been taken; names which had outlived the objects to which they’d been assigned.

  ‘Louise?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Spinner.’

  ‘Still mourning?’

  . . . Janus, Mimas, Tethys, Telesto . . .

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I guess somebody has to.’

  ‘Spinner, what happened here?’

  ‘A battle,’ Spinner said quietly. ‘Obviously.’

  Calypso, Dione, Helene, Rhea, Hyperion, Iapetus, Phoebe . . .

  The nightfighter spread its hundred-mile wings, eclipsing the debris of the shattered moons.

  Milpitas sat in his office. From throughout the Temple, there were the sounds of shouting, of screams, of yelled words too indistinct for him to hear.

  The shouting seemed to be coming closer.

  He cleared his magnetized desk top, putting his paper, pens, data slates away into drawers. He folded his hands and held them over the desk.

  The door to his office was opened.

  The renegade from - outside - hovered there in the air. He was almost horizontal from Milpitas’ point of view: as if he were defying the Planner to fit him into his orderly, gravity-structured Universe.

  The renegade spread his empty hands. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

  ‘I know you,’ Milpitas said slowly.

  ‘Perhaps you do.’ The renegade was tall, quite well-muscled; he wore a practical coverall equipped with a dozen pockets which were crammed with unidentifiable tools. He wore his hair short, but not shaven-clean; his look was confident, even excited. Milpitas tried to imagine this man without the hair - and with a little less of that damnable confidence, too - in standard, drab Paradoxa coveralls, and with a more appropriate posture: stooped shoulders, perhaps, hands folded before him . . .

  ‘My name’s Morrow. You had a certain amount of - trouble - with me.’ The renegade glanced around at the office, as if recalling some sour experience. ‘I was in here several times, as you tried to explain to me how wrong I was in my thinking . . .’

  ‘Morrow. You disappeared.’

  Morrow frowned. ‘No. No, I didn’t disappear. Milpitas, you sound like a child who believes that as soon as an object is out of sight, it no longer exists . . .’

  Milpitas smiled. ‘What do you know of children?’

  ‘Now, a lot,’ Morrow said. He smiled, in turn, quite in control. ‘I didn’t disappear, Milpitas. I went somewhere else.
I’ve done extraordinary things, Planner - seen wonderful sights.’

  Milpitas folded his hands and settled back in his chair. ‘How did you get in?’

  ‘Past your sentries?’ Morrow smiled. ‘We came in from above. It took seconds, and we were quite silent. Your sentries were positioned to watch for an approach across the Deck; they didn’t imagine anyone would come in over their heads. They didn’t even know we were in the building, before we took them out.’

  ‘“Took them out”?’

  ‘They’re unconscious,’ Morrow said. ‘The forest people use a certain type of frog sweat, which . . . well, never mind. The sentries are unharmed.’

  Milpitas tried to think of something to say - some words with which he could regain control of the situation. He felt a rising panic; suddenly, his orders had failed to be executed. He felt as if he were at the heart of some immense, dying machine, poking at buttons and levers which were no longer linked to anything.

  Morrow’s voice was gentle. ‘It’s over. I know you believe what you’re doing is right, for the people. But this is for the best, Milpitas. More deaths would have been - inexcusable. You see that, don’t you?’

  ‘And the mission?’ Milpitas asked bitterly. ‘The goals of Paradoxa? What of that?’

  ‘That’s not over,’ Morrow said. ‘Come back with me, Milpitas. There are remarkable things out there. The mission is still alive . . . I want you to help me - help us - achieve it.’

  Milpitas closed his eyes again; suddenly he felt immensely old, as if the energy which had sustained him for the best part of a thousand years were suddenly drained away.

  ‘I don’t know if I can,’ he said honestly.

  Someone, in the depths of the Temple, stilled the klaxon at last; the final, chilling echoes of its wail rattled from the close, claustrophobic metal sky.

  20

  The pod slid, smooth and silent, down towards Titan.

  Louise clutched at her seat. The hull was quite transparent, so that it felt as if she - swathed in her environment suit, with a catheter jammed awkwardly inside her - were suspended helplessly above the pale brown clouds of Titan.