Flux xs-3

by Stephen Baxter

  Mur had managed to snatch a rag, a remnant of some piece of clothing, from the littered Air; now he wiped tenderly at Dia’s relaxing, half-sleeping face. Dura took some of the rag and mopped at Dia’s thighs and belly.

  Farr Waved slowly toward them. He had chased after and caught the baby, Dura saw; now he held the child against his chest as proudly as if it were his own, uncaring of the birth fluid which pooled on his chest. The infant’s mouth was still distorted into the characteristic horn-shape it had needed to lock on to the womb-wall nipples which sustained it before its birth; and its tiny penis had popped out of the protective cache between its legs.

  Farr, grinning, held the baby out to its mother. “It’s a boy,” he said.

  “Jai,” Dia whispered. “He’s Jai.”

  * * *

  Forty Human Beings had survived, of fifty. All but six adult Air-pigs, four of them male, were gone. The Net, torn and scattered, was irreparable.

  Logue was lost.

  The tribe huddled together in the Magfield, surrounded by featureless Air. Mur and Dia clung together, cradling their new, mewling baby. Dura uncomfortably led the Human Beings through a brief service of prayers, calling down the beneficence of the Xeelee. Adda stayed close to her, silent and strong despite his age, and Farr’s hand was a constant presence in hers.

  Then the bodies they’d managed to retrieve were released into the Air; they slid, dwindling, down to the Quantum Sea.

  Philas, wife of the dead Esk, approached Dura after the service, Waving stiffly. The two women studied each other, not speaking; Adda and the rest moved away, averting their faces.

  Philas was a thin, tired-looking woman; her uneven hair was tied back with a piece of rope, making her face look skeletal. She stared at Dura, as if daring her to grieve.

  The Human Beings were monogamous… but there were more adult women than men. So monogamy doesn’t make sense, Dura thought wearily, and yet we practice it anyway. Or rather, we pay lip-service to it.

  Esk had loved them both… at any rate, he had shown tenderness to them both. And his relationship with Dura had been no secret to Philas, or to anyone else, for that matter. It had certainly done Philas no harm.

  Perhaps Philas and Dura could help each other now, Dura thought. Perhaps hold each other. But they wouldn’t even speak about it.

  And she, Dura, would not even be allowed to grieve openly.

  At last Philas spoke. “What are we going to do, Dura? Should we rebuild the Net? What should we do?”

  Staring into the woman’s dull eyecups, Dura wanted to retreat into herself, to bring forward her own grief for her father, for Esk, as a shield against Philas’s demands. I don’t know. I don’t know. How could I know?

  But there was nowhere to retreat.

  2

  Ten Human Beings — Dura with Farr in tow, Adda, the newly widowed Philas, and six other adults — climbed out of the site of the devastated encampment. They Waved steadily across the Magfield and toward the Crust, in search of food.

  Adda, as was his custom, stayed a small distance away from the rest as they Waved across the field-lines. One of his eyes was matted over with the scars of age — thinking about it now he gave that cup a quick poke with a fingertip to dislodge some of the less welcome little creatures who were continually trying to establish residence in there — but the other eye was as keen as it had ever been, and as he Waved he swept his gaze through the Air above, below and all around them. He liked to stay apart to keep an eye on things… and it allowed him to hide the fact that he sometimes had trouble keeping up with the rest. It was his boast that he could still Wave as good as any damn kid. It wasn’t true, of course, but it was his boast. He used to wriggle across the Magfield like an Air-piglet with a neutrino fount up its arse, he recalled wistfully, but that was a long time ago. Now he must look like a Xeelee’s grandmother. Adda’s vertebrae seemed to be seizing up one by damn one as time wore away, so that his Waving was more like thrashing; it took a conscious effort to thrust his pelvis back, to let his legs flop behind the motion of his hips, to let his head drive ahead of the bending of his spine. And his skin was coarsened by age, too, tough as old tree-bark in places; that had its advantages, but it meant that he had trouble feeling the places where the electric currents induced in his epidermis by his motion across the Magfield were strongest. Damn it, he could barely feel the Magfield now; he was, he thought sourly, Waving from memory.

  Much like sex these days.

  As always he carried his battered and trusted spear, a sharpened pole of wood prized from a tree trunk by his own father hundreds of months ago. His fingers nestled comfortably in the gripping grooves carved expertly in the shaft, and electrical currents Magfield-induced in the wood tingled in his palm. As his father had taught him, he kept the spear pointed along the direction of the Magfield across which they climbed… for, of course, the wood — in fact any material — was stronger in the direction of the Magfield than across it. And as any child knew, if danger did approach it would most likely come along the Magfield lines, in which direction motion was invisibly easy.

  There weren’t many predators who would attack humans, but Adda had seen a few, and his father had told him of worse. The rays, for instance… Even a mature Air-boar — the tougher cousin of the Air-pig — could give a man or woman a hard fight, and could carry away a child as easy as snipping krypton grass away from the Crust, if it was hungry enough.

  Even half as hungry as the Human Beings were going to grow before much longer.

  He looked along the gleaming cage of vortex lines which swept to red-mist infinity at the South Pole, slicing up the sky around his companions. As always — whenever he traveled even a short distance from the illusory completeness of the tribe’s tiny human environ — he was struck by the immensity of the Mantle-world; and as his eye followed the converging parallels of the vortex lines he felt as if his tiny spirit, helpless with awe, was somehow drawn along the lines. The island of scattered debris which marked the site of their devastated encampment was a dirt-colored mote Air-marooned in the clean, yellow-white immensities of the Star. And his companions — nine of them still, he counted automatically — were Waving across the field lines with unconscious synchronization, ropes and nets wrapped loosely around their waists, their faces upturned to the Crust. One man had peeled away from the rest; he had found an abandoned spin-spider web slung across the vortex lines, and was searching it efficiently for eggs.

  Human Beings looked so beautiful when they moved. And when a shoal of the kids went whirling along the Magfield — flapping their legs so hard you could see the glow of the induced fields shining in their limbs, and spiraling around the flux lines fast enough to turn them into blurs — well, it was hard to imagine a better sight in this or any of the fabled, lost worlds of the Ur-humans.

  But at the same time humans looked so fragile, dwarfed as they were by the immensities of the vortex-line cage and by the deep and deadly mysteries of the Quantum Sea far below. Somehow an Air-pig looked the part for this environment, he thought. Round and fat and solid… Why, even a neutrino fount didn’t have to be the end for an Air-pig; all it had to do was to tuck in its eyes, fold down its fins and ride out the storm. Unless it got blasted out of the Star altogether, what could happen? When the fount was done the pig could just unfold, graze on whatever foliage it could find — for trees were trees, whichever part of the Crust they were growing out of — and mate with the first Air-pig it came across. Or get mated with, Adda thought with a grin.

  Humans weren’t like that. Humans were delicate. Easily smashed up, broken apart. He thought of Esk: a damn fool, but nobody deserved to die like that. And, more than anything else, humans were strange. If Adda were to pluck one of these irritating little nibblers out of his dud eye now and look at it up close, he knew he’d find the same basic design as the average Air-pig: six fins, symmetrically placed, an intake-mouth to the front, jet vents to the rear, six tiny eyes. All Mantle animals were the same, just s
caled big and small, or with differences of proportion; the basic features could be recognized even in superficially different creatures like rays.

  …Except for humans. There was nothing, no other animal, like a human in all this world.

  That wasn’t a surprise, of course. Every kid learned at his mother’s breast how the Ur-humans had come from somewhere far away — a place much better than this, of course; Adda suspected every human on every world grew up believing that — and had left children here to grow, to be strong, and to join the community of mankind one day, all under the beneficial and all-too-abstract gaze of that multiple God, the Xeelee.

  So the Human Beings had been put there. Adda had no doubt about the basic truth of the old story — damn it, you only had to watch humans in flight to see the blinding self-evidence of it — but on the other hand, he thought as he watched the flock of Human Beings soar across the sky, he wouldn’t really want to be built like an Air-pig. Fat and round and flying by farts?

  Mind you, flatulence was one skill he had bettered as he had got older. Maybe it wouldn’t have been such a bad idea to have been an Air-pig after all.

  Adda was the oldest surviving Human Being. He knew what the others thought of him: that he was a sour old fool, too gloomy for his own good. But he didn’t care much about that. He hadn’t survived longer than any of his contemporaries by accident. But he was, and always had been, essentially a simple man, not gifted with the power over people and language shown by, say, a Logue. Or even a Dura, he thought, even though she mightn’t realize it yet. So if he irritated folk with anecdotes of his boyhood… but, even as they laughed at him, if they soaked up any one of the small lessons which had kept him alive… well, that was all right by Adda.

  Of course, there were fragments from the past he didn’t share with anyone. He’d no doubt, for instance, that the Glitches were changing.

  There had always been Glitches, spin storms. He even knew what caused them, in an abstract sort of way: the slowing of the Star’s rotation, and the consequent explosive equalizations of spin energy. But over the last few years the Glitches had got worse… far worse, and much more frequent.

  Something else was causing Glitches now. Something unknowably powerful, disrupting the Star…

  Of course, his crotchety exterior had a major advantage — one he’d never admitted to anyone else, and only half-allowed to himself. By acting so sour he never had to show the unbearable love he felt for his fellow humans as he watched their alien, vulnerable, impossibly beautiful flight across the Magfield, or the heartbreak he endured at the loss of even the most wasted, most spoiled life.

  Hefting his dragging spear in tiring fingers, Adda kicked on toward the treetops of the Crust with renewed vigor.

  * * *

  Farr hovered in the Air, his knees tucked against his chest. With four or five brisk pushes he emptied his bowels. He watched the pale, odorless pellets of shit sail sparkling into the empty Air and sink toward the underMantle. Dense with neutrons, the waste would merge into the unbreathable underMantle and, perhaps, sink at last into the Quantum Sea.

  He’d never been so high.

  The treetops were only a few minutes’ Waving above him now: only a score of mansheights or so. The round, bronzed leaves of the trees, all turned toward the Quantum Sea, formed a glimmering ceiling over the world. As he Waved he stared up at that ceiling longingly, as if the leaves somehow represented safety — and yet he looked nervously too. For beyond the leaves were the tree trunks, suspended in darkness; and beyond the trunks lay the Crust itself, where all manner of creatures prowled… At least according to old Adda, and some of the other kids.

  But still, Farr realized, he’d rather be up there amidst the trees than — suspended — out here.

  He pushed at the Magfield and shimmered upward.

  Farr, young as he was, was used to the feeling of fear. Of mortal terror, even. But he was experiencing a kind of fear new to him — a novelty — and he probed at it, trying to understand.

  The nine adults around him Waved steadily upward, their faces turned up to the trees like inverted leaves. Their bodies moved efficiently and with varying degrees of grace, and Farr could smell the musky photons they exuded, hear the steady rhythm of their breathing as they worked, wordless. His own breath was rapid; the Air up here felt thin, shallow. And he was growing colder, despite the hard work of Waving.

  Somehow, without realizing it, Farr had gotten himself to the center of the Waving group, so they formed a protective barrier around him. In fact, he realized, he was Waving close to his sister, Dura, as if he were some little kid who needed his hand holding.

  How embarrassing.

  Discreetly, without making it too obvious, he leaned forward so that he slid out toward the edge of the group, away from Dura. And at the edge that strange new flavor of fear — a feeling of exposure — assailed him again. Shaking his head as if to clear out musty Air, he forced himself to turn away from the group, twisting in the Air, so that he faced outward, across the Mantle.

  Farr knew that the Mantle was tens of millions of mansheights deep. But humans could survive only in a band about two million mansheights thick. Farr knew why… or some of it anyway. The complex compounds of heavy tin nuclei which composed his body (so his father had explained earnestly) could remain stable — remain bonded by exchanges of neutron pairs — only within this layer. It was all to do with neutron density: too far up and there weren’t enough neutrons to allow the complex bonding between nuclei; too far down, in the cloying underMantle, there were too many neutrons — in the underMantle the very nuclei which composed his body would begin to dissolve, liquefying at last into smooth neutron liquid.

  And here — close to the treetops, nearing the top of the habitable band — he was tens of thousands of mansheights above the site of the ruined Net.

  Farr looked down, beyond his Waving feet, back the way he had climbed. The vortex lines crossed the enormous sky, hundreds of them in a rigid parallel array of blue-white streaks which melted into misty vanishing-points to left and right. The lines blurred below him, the distance between them foreshortening until the lines melted into a textured blue haze above the Quantum Sea. The Sea itself was a purple bruise below the vortex lines, its surface mist-shrouded and deadly.

  …And the surface of the Sea curved downward.

  Farr had to suppress a yell by gulping, hard. He looked again at the Sea and saw how it fell subtly away in every direction; there seemed no doubt that he was looking down at a huge sphere. Even the vortex lines dipped slightly as they arced away, converging, toward the horizons of the Sea. It was as if they were a cage which encased the Sea.

  Farr had grown up knowing that the world — the Star — was a multilayered ball, a neutron star. The Crust was the outer surface of the ball, with the Quantum Sea forming an impenetrable center; the Mantle, including the levels inhabited by humans, was a layer inside the ball filled with Air. But it was one thing to know such a fact; it was quite another to see it with your own eyes.

  He was high. And he felt it. He stared down now, deep down, past his feet, at the emptiness which separated him from the Sea. Of course, the Net was long since lost in the Air, a distant speck. But even that, had he been able to see it, would have been a comforting break in this looming immensity…

  A break from what?

  Suddenly he felt as if his stomach were turning into a mass of Air, and the Magfield he was climbing seemed — not just invisible — but intangible, almost irrelevant. It was as if there was nothing keeping him up…

  He shut his eyes, tight, and tried to retreat into another world, into the fantasies of his childhood. Perhaps once more he could be a warrior in the Core Wars, the epic battles with the Colonists at the dawn of time. Once humans had been strong, powerful, with magical four-walled “wormhole Interfaces” which let them cross thousands of mansheights in a bound, and great machines which allowed them to fly through the Star and beyond.

  But the Colonists,
the mysterious denizens of the heart of the Star, had emerged from their glutinous realm to wage war on humanity. They had destroyed, or carried off, the marvelous Interfaces and all the rest — and would have scraped mankind out of the Mantle altogether if not for the wily cunning of Farr: Farr the Ur-human, the giant god-warrior…

  At length he felt a touch on his shoulder; he opened his eyes to see — not a Colonist — but Dura hovering before him, a look of careful neutrality on her face. She pointed upward. “We’re there.”

  Farr looked up.

  Leaves — six of them arranged in a neat, symmetrical pattern — hung down just above his head. With a surge of absurd gratitude Farr pulled himself up into the darkness beyond the leaves.

  A branch about the thickness of his waist and coated with slick-dark wood led from the leaf into a misty, blue-glowing darkness above him… no, he thought, that was the wrong way round; somewhere up there was the trunk of the tree, suspended from the Crust, and from it grew this branch, and from that in turn grew the leaves which faced the Sea. He ran a hand along the wood of the branch; it was hard and smooth, but surprisingly warm to the touch. A few twigs dangled from the main stem, and tiny leaves sought chinks of light between their larger cousins.

  He found himself clinging to the branch, his arms wrapped around it as if around the arm of his mother. The warmth of the wood seeped through his chilled body. Embarrassment flickered through his mind briefly, but he ignored it; at last he felt safe.

  Dura slid through the leaves and came to rest close to him. The subdued shadow-light of the tree picked out the curves of her face. She smiled at him, looking self-conscious. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, quietly enough that the others couldn’t hear. “I know how you feel. I was the same, the first time I came up here.”