Bethlehem and Others: Collected Stories

by Peter Watts

  I have no idea what it is.

  I draw an imaginary line through the ends of the wormhole. “It’s in line with our displacement vector.”

  “No shit it’s in line. I think the wormhole’s—provoking it, somehow.”

  It’s radiating at over two thousand Kelvin.

  “So we’re inside the star,” I say, and hope Hakim takes it as good news.

  If nothing else, it means we’re on schedule.

  • • •

  WE’VE GOT SO LITTLE TO GO ON. We don’t know how far we are from the ceiling: it keeps ablating away above us. We don’t know how close we are to the core: it keeps swelling beneath the easing weight of all this shedding atmosphere. All we know is that temperature rises overhead and we descend; pressure rises from beneath and we climb. We’re specks in the belly of some fish in empty mid-ocean, surface and seabed equally hypothetical. None of our reference points are any more fixed than we are. The Chimp presents estimates based on gravity and inertia, but even those are little more than guesses thanks to wormhole corruption of the local spacetime. We’re stretched across the probability wave, waiting for the box to open so the universe can observe whether we’re dead or alive.

  Hakim eyes me from across the tank, his face flickering in the light of a hundred cam feeds. “Something’s wrong. We should be through by now.”

  He’s been saying that for the past hour.

  “There’s bound to be variability,” I remind him. “The model—”

  “The model.” He manages a short, bitter laugh. “Based on all those zettabytes we collected the other times we hitched a ride through a red giant. The model’s shit. One hiccup in the magnetic field and we could be going down instead of out.”

  “We’re still here.”

  “That’s exactly the problem.”

  “It’s still dark.” The atmosphere’s still thick enough to keep Surtr’s blinding interior at bay.

  “Always darkest before the dawn,” Hakim says grimly, and points to that brightening smudge of infrared overhead.

  The Chimp can’t explain it, for all the fresh realtime data he stuffs into his equations. All we know is that whatever it is, it hasn’t budged from our displacement vector and it’s getting hotter. Or maybe closer. It’s hard to tell; our senses are hazy that far out, and we’re not about to stick our heads above the clouds for a better view.

  Whatever it is, the Chimp doesn’t think it’s worth worrying about. He says we’re almost through.

  • • •

  THE STORM NO LONGER FREEZES ON IMPACT. It spits and hisses, turns instantly to steam. Incessant lightning strobes the sky, stop-animates towering jigsaw monsters of methane and acetylene.

  God’s mind might look like this, if He were an epileptic.

  We get in the way sometimes, block some deific synapse in mid-discharge: a million volts spike the hull and a patch of basalt turns to slag, or Eri goes blind in another eye. I’ve lost count of the cameras and antennae and radar dishes we’ve already lost. I just add it to the tally when another facet flares and goes dark at the edge of the collage.

  Hakim doesn’t. “Play that again,” he tells the Chimp. “That feed. Just before it fratzed.”

  The last moments of the latest casualty: Eri’s cratered skin, outcroppings of half-buried machinery. Lightning flickers in from Stage Left, stabs a radiator fin halfway to our lumpy horizon. A flash. A banal and overfamiliar phrase:

  No Signal.

  “Again,” Hakim says. “The strike in the middle distance. Freeze on that.”

  Three bolts, caught in the act—and Hakim’s onto something, I see now. There’s something different about them, something less—random—than the fractal bifurcations of more distant lightning. Different color, too—more of a bluish edge—and smaller. The bolts in the distance are massive. These things arcing across the crust don’t look much thicker than my own arm.

  They converge towards some bright mass just barely out of camera range.

  “Static discharge of some kind,” I suggest.

  “Yeah? What kind, exactly?”

  I can’t see anything similar in the current mosaic, but the bridge bulkheads only hold so many windows and our surface cams still number in the thousands. Even my link can’t handle that many feeds at once. “Chimp: any other phenomena like that on the surface?”

  “Yes,” says the Chimp, and high-grades the display:

  Bright meshes swarming over stone and steel. Formations of ball lightning, walking on jagged stilts of electricity. Some kind of flat flickering plasma, sliding along Eri’s crust like a stingray.

  “Shittttt . . . ” Hakim hisses. “Where did they come from?”

  Our compound eye loses another facet.

  “They’re targeting the sensors.” Hakim’s face is ashen.

  “They?” Could just be electricity arcing to alloy.

  “They’re blinding us. Oh Jesus fuck being trapped inside a star isn’t bad enough there’s gotta be hostile aliens in the bargain.”

  My eyes flicker to the ceiling pickup. “Chimp, what are those things?”

  “I don’t know. They could be something like Saint Elmo’s Fire, or a buoyant plasma. I can’t rule out some sort of maser effect either, but I’m not detecting any significant microwave emissions.”

  Another camera goes down. “Lightning bugs,” Hakim says, and emits a hysterical giggle.

  “Are they alive?” I wonder.

  “Not organically,” the Chimp tells me. “I don’t know if they’d meet definitions based on entropy restriction.”

  No conventional morphology there. Those aren’t legs exactly, they’re—transient voltage arcs of some kind. And body shape—if body even applies—seems to be optional and fluid. Auroras bunch up into sparking balls; balls sprout loops or limbs or just blow away at Mach 2, vanishing into the storm.

  I call up a tactical composite. Huh: clustered distribution. A flock gathered at the skeletal remains of a long-dead thruster nozzle; another flickering across an evagineering hutch halfway down the starboard lateral line. A whole party in Eri’s crater-mouth, swarming around our invisible bootstrap like water circling a drain.

  “Holes,” Hakim says softly. “Depressions. Hatches.”

  But something’s caught my eye that doesn’t involve any of those things, something unfolding overhead while our other eyes are fixed on the ground—

  “They’re trying to get in. That’s what they’re doing.”

  A sudden bright smudge in the sky. Then a tear; a hole; the dilating pupil of some great demonic eye. Dim bloody light floods down across the battered landscape as a cyclone opens over our heads, wreathed in an inflammation of lightning.

  Surtr’s finger stretches down from Hades, visible at last to naked eyes.

  “Holy shit . . . ” Hakim whispers.

  It’s an incandescent tornado, a pillar of fire. It’s outside reaching in, and if anything short of magic can explain its existence it’s not known to me or the Chimp or the accumulated wisdom of all the astrophysicists nesting in our archives. It reaches down and touches our wormhole, just so. It bulges, as if inflamed by an embedded splinter; the swollen tip wobbles absurdly for a moment, then bursts—

  —and fire gushes down from the heavens in a liquid cascade. The things beneath scatter fast as forked lightning can carry them; here in the bridge, the view sparks and dies. From a dozen other viewpoints I see tongues of soft red plasma splashing across Eriophora’s crust.

  Some rough alarm whispers fuck fuck fuck fuck at my side while Eri feeds me intelligence: something happening back at that lateral hutch. All those cams are down but there’s a pressure surge at the outer hatch and a rhythmic hissing sound crackles in along the intercom.

  Hakim’s vanished from the bridge. I hear the soft whine of his roach receding at full throttle. I duck out into the corridor, grab my own roach from its socket, follow. There’s really no question where he’s headed; I’d know that even if the Chimp hadn’t already laid out
the map in my head.

  Way back along our starboard flank, something’s knocking on the door.

  • • •

  HE’S IN THE PREP COMPARTMENT by the time I catch up, scrambling into an EVA suit like some panicky insect trying to climb back into its cocoon. “Outer hatch is breached,” he tells me, forgetting.

  Just meters away. Past racks and suit alcoves, just the other side of that massive biosteel drawbridge, something’s looking for a way in. It could find one, too; I can see heat shimmering off the hatch. I can hear the pop and crackle of arcing electricity coming through from the other side, the faint howl of distant hurricanes.

  “No weapons.” Hakim fumbles with his gauntlets. “Mission to the end of time and they don’t even give us weapons.” Which is not entirely true. They certainly gave us the means to build weapons. I don’t know if Hakim ever availed himself of that option but I remember his buddies, not so far from this very spot. I remember them pointing their weapons at me.

  “What are we doing here?” I gesture at the hatch; is it my imagination, or has it brightened a little in the center?

  He shakes his head, his breathing fast and shallow. “I was gonna—you know, the welding torches. The lasers. Thought we could stand them off.”

  All stored on the other side.

  He’s suited up to the neck. His helmet hangs on its hook within easy reach: a grab and a twist and he’ll be self-contained again. For a while.

  Something pounds hard on the hatch. “Oh shit,” Hakim says weakly.

  I keep my voice level. “What’s the plan?”

  He takes a breath, steadies himself. “We, um—we retreat. Out past the nearest dropgate.” The Chimp takes the hint and throws an overlay across my inner map; back into the corridor and fifteen meters forward. “Anything breaches, the gates come down.” He nods at an alcove. “Grab a suit, just in—”

  “And when they breach the dropgates?” I wonder. The biosteel’s definitely glowing, there in the center.

  “The next set goes down. Jesus, you know the drill.”

  “That’s your plan? Give up Eri in stages?”

  “Small stages.” He nods and swallows. “Buy time. Figure out their weak spot.” He grabs his helmet and turns towards the corridor.

  I lay a restraining hand on his shoulder. “How do we do that, exactly?”

  He shrugs it off. “Wing it for fucksake! Get Chimp to customize some drones to go in and, and ground them or something.” He heads for the door.

  This time the hand I lay on him is more than a suggestion. This time it clamps down, spins him around, pushes him against the bulkhead. His helmet bounces across the deck. His clumsy gloved hands come up to fend me off but there’s no strength in them. His eyes do a mad little jig in his face.

  “You’re not thinking this through,” I say, very calmly.

  “There’s no time to think it through! They might not even get past the gates, maybe they’re not even trying, I mean—” His eyes brighten with faint and ridiculous hope. “Maybe it’s not even an attack, I bet it’s not, you know, they’re just—they’re dying. It’s the end of the world and their home’s on fire and they’re just looking for a place to hide, they’re not looking for a way in they’re looking for a way out—”

  “What makes you think that inside’s any less lethal to them than outside is to us?”

  “They don’t have to be smart!” he cries out. “They just have to be scared!”

  Fingers of faint electricity flicker and crackle around the edges of the hatch: heat lightning, maybe. Or maybe something more prehensile.

  I keep Hakim pinned. “What if they are smart? What if they’re not just burrowing on instinct? What if they’re the ones with the plan, hmm?”

  He spreads his hands. “What else can we do?”

  “We don’t give them the chance to breach. We get out of here now.”

  “Get—”

  “Ditch the ice giant. Take our chances in the star.”

  He stops struggling and stares, waiting for the punchline. “You’re insane,” he whispers when I fail to deliver.

  “Why? Chimp says we’re almost through anyway.”

  “He said that half an hour ago! And we were an hour past predicted exit even then!”

  “Chimp?” I say, not for the AI’s benefit but for Hakim’s.

  “Right here.”

  “Say we max the wormhole. Throw out as much mass as we can, shortest path out of the envelope.”

  “Tidal stress tears Eriophora into two debris clouds of roughly equal mass, each one centered on—”

  “Amend that. Say we optimize distance and displacement to maximize velocity without losing structural integrity.”

  I can tell by the wait that there are going to be serious confidence limits attached to the answer. “Eriophora is directly exposed to the stellar envelope for 1300 corsecs,” he says at last. “Give or take 450.”

  At 2300 Kelvin. Basalt melts at 1724.

  But the Chimp hasn’t finished. “We would also risk significant structural damage due to the migration of secondary centers-of-mass beyond Eriophora’s hardlined displacement channels.”

  “Do we make it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Hakim throws up his hands. “Why the hell not? It’s what you do!”

  “My models can’t account for the plasma invagination overhead or the electrical events on the hull,” the Chimp tells him. “Therefore they’re missing at least one important variable. You can’t trust my predictions.”

  Down at the end of the compartment, the hatch glows red as the sky. Electricity sizzles and pops and grabs.

  “Do it,” Hakim says suddenly.

  “I need consensus,” the Chimp replies.

  Of course. The Chimp takes his lead from us meat sacks when he gets lost; but looking to us for wisdom, he wouldn’t know whose to follow if we disagreed.

  Hakim waits, manic, his eyes flicking between me and the hatch. “Well?” he says after a moment.

  It all comes down to me. I could cancel him out.

  “What are you waiting for? It was your fucking idea!”

  I feel an urge to lean close and whisper in his ear. Not just Chimp’s sock puppet now, am I, motherfucker? I resist it. “Sure,” I say instead. “Give it a shot.”

  Wheels begin to turn. Eriophora trembles and groans, torqued by vectors she was never designed for. Unfamiliar sensations tickle my backbrain, move forward, root in my gut: the impossible, indescribable sense of down being in two places at once. One of those places is safe and familiar, beneath my feet, beneath decks and forests and bedrock at the very heart of the ship; but the other’s getting stronger, and it’s moving . . .

  I hear the scream of distant metal. I hear the clatter of loose objects crashing into walls. Eriophora lurches, staggers to port, turns ponderously on some axis spread across too many sickening dimensions. There’s something moving behind the wall, deep in the rocks; I can’t see it but I feel its pull, hear the cracking of new fault lines splitting ancient stone. A dozen crimson icons bloom like tumors in my brain, Subsystem Failure and Critical Coolant and Primary Channel Interrupt. A half-empty squeezebulb, discarded decades or centuries or millennia ago, wobbles half-levitating into view around the corner. It falls sideways and slides along the bulkhead, caught up in the tide-monster’s wake.

  I’m standing on the deck at forty-five degrees. I think I’m going to be sick.

  The down beneath my feet is less than a whisper. I give silent thanks for superconducting ceramics, piezoelectric trusses, all reinforcements brute and magical that keep this little worldlet from crumbling to dust while the Chimp plays havoc with the laws of physics. I offer a diffuse and desperate prayer that they’re up to the task. Then I’m falling forward, upward, out: Hakim and I smack into the forward bulkhead as a rubber band, stretched to its limit, snaps free and hurls us forward.

  Surtr roars in triumph as we emerge, snatches at this tiny unexpected prize shaken free of
the larger one. Jagged spiders leap away and vanish into blinding fog. Wireframe swirls of magnetic force twist in the heat, spun off from the dynamo way down in the giant’s helium heart—or maybe that’s just the Chimp, feeding me models and imaginings. I’m pretty sure it’s not real; our eyes and ears and fingertips have all been licked away, our windows all gone dark. Skin and bones will be next to go: warm basalt, softening down to plastic. Maybe it’s happening already. No way to tell any more. Nothing to do but fall out as the air flattens and shimmers in the rising heat.

  I’m saving your life, Hakim. You better fucking appreciate it.

  • • •

  YEATS WAS WRONG. The center held after all.

  Now we are only half-blind, and wholly ballistic. A few eyes remain smoldering on the hull, pitted with cataracts; most are gone entirely. Charred stumps spark fitfully where sensors used to be. Eri’s center of mass has snapped back into itself and is sleeping off the hangover down in the basement. We coast on pure inertia, as passive as any other rock.

  But we are through, and we are alive, and we have ten thousand years to lick our wounds.

  It won’t take anywhere near that long, of course. The Chimp has already deployed his army; they burned their way out through the slagged doorways of a dozen service tunnels, laden with newly refined metals dug from the heart of the mountain. Now they clamber across the surface like great metal insects, swapping good parts for bad and cauterizing our wounds with bright light. Every now and then another dead window flickers back to life; the universe returns to us in bits and pieces. Surtr simmers in our wake, still vast but receding, barely hot enough to boil water this far out.

  I prefer the view ahead: deep comforting darkness, swirls of stars, glittering constellations we’ll never see again and can’t be bothered to name. Just passing through.

  Hakim should be down in the crypt by now, getting ready to turn in. Instead I find him back in the starboard bridge, watching fingers of blue-white lightning leap across the hull. It’s a short clip and it always ends the same way, but he seems to find value in repeat viewings.

  He turns at my approach. “Sanduloviciu plasma.”