Flux xs-3

by Stephen Baxter

  Adda was escorted to the front row of the Box by a small, humble-looking woman in a drab tunic. Muub was already there. He rested in his cocoon with his long, thin arms folded calmly against his chest, and his bare scalp shone softly as he surveyed the Stadium below. He turned to greet Adda with a nod. With ill grace Adda let the woman servant help him into a spare cocoon; his legs remained stiff and his right shoulder barely mobile, so that, embarrassingly, he had to be levered into the cocoon as if he were a statue of wood. Another woman, smiling, approached him with a box of sweetmeats; Adda chased her away with a snarl.

  Muub smiled at him indulgently. “I’m glad you decided to come, Adda. I believe you will find the Day interesting.”

  Adda nodded, trying to be gracious. After all, he had accepted Muub’s invitation. But what was it about this man’s manner that irritated him so? He nodded over his shoulder at the sparkling ranks of courtiers. “That lot seems to agree with you.”

  Muub regarded the courtiers with aloof disdain. “Games Day is a spectacle which does not fail to excite the unsophisticated,” he said softly. “No matter how many times it is viewed. And besides, Hork is absent. As you know very well. And there is something of a vacuum of authority, among my more shallow colleagues, until the Chair’s return.” He listened to the jabber of the courtiers for a moment, his large, fragile head cocked to one side. “You can hear it in their tone. They are like children in the absence of a parent.” He sighed.

  Adda grinned. “Well,” he said, “it’s nice to know that your superciliousness isn’t restricted to upfluxers.” He deliberately ignored Muub’s reaction; he leaned forward in his cocoon and stared through the clearwood wall below him.

  He was perched at the upper rim of the City. Its wooden Skin swept away below him, huge, uneven, battered; the great Corestuff anchor-bands were arcs of silver-gray cutting across the sky. Far below the City the Pole was a mass of bruised purple. Vortex lines shimmered across the sky around the City, on their way to their own rotation pole around the curve of the Star…

  Adda stared at the vortex lines for a moment. Were they more tightly packed than usual? He tried to detect a drift through the Air, a presage of another Glitch. But he wasn’t in the open Air — he wasn’t able to smell the changes in the photons, to taste the Air’s disturbance — and he couldn’t be sure there was any change.

  The Stadium was thronged with people who swarmed through the Air, hauling themselves over each other and along the ropes and rails strung across the great volume. Even through layers of clearwood, Adda could hear the excited buzz of the crowd; the sound seemed to come in waves of intensity, sparkling with fragments of individual voices — the cry of a baby, the hawking yells of vendors working the crowd. Sewage outlets sprayed streams of clear waste from the shell of the Stadium into the patient Air.

  Away from the bulk of the City, acrobats Waved silkily through the Air in a prelude to the Games proper. They were young, lithe, nude, their skins dyed with strong primary colors; with ripples of their legs and arms they spiraled around the vortex lines and dived at each other, grabbing each others’ hands and whirling away on new paths. There must have been a hundred of them, Adda estimated; their dance, chaotic yet obviously carefully choreographed, was like an explosion of young flesh in the Air.

  He became aware that Muub was watching him; there was curiosity in the Physician’s shallow eyecups. Adda let his jaw hang open, playing the goggling tourist. “My word,” he said. “What a lot of people.”

  Muub threw his head back and laughed. “All right, Adda. Perhaps I deserved that. But you can scarcely blame me for my fascination at your reaction to all this. Such scenes can scarcely have been imaginable to you, in your former life in the upflux.”

  Adda gazed around, trying to take in the whole scene as a gestalt — the immense, human construct of the City itself, a thousand people gathered below for a single purpose, the scarcely believable opulence of the courtiers in the Box with their fine clothes and sweetmeats and servants, the acrobats flourishing their limbs through the Air in their huge dance. “Yes, it’s impressive,” he said. He tried to find ways of expressing what he was feeling. “More than impressive. Uplifting, in a way. When humans work together, we can challenge the Star itself. I suppose it’s good to know that not everyone has to scratch a living out of the Air, barely subsisting as the Human Beings do. And yet…”

  And yet, why should there be wealth and poverty? The City was a marvelous construct, but it was dwarfed on the scale of the Star — and it was no bigger than an Ur-human’s thumb, probably. But even within its tiny walls there were endless, rigid layers: the courtiers in their Box, walled off from the masses below; the Upside and Downside; and the invisible — yet very real — barriers between the two. Why should it be so? It was as if humans built such places as this with the sole purpose of finding ways to dominate each other.

  Muub listened to Adda’s clumsy expression of this. “But it’s inevitable,” he said, his face neutral. “You have to have organization — hierarchy — if you are to run the complex, interlinking systems which sustain a society like the City with its hinterland. And only within such a society can man afford art, science, wisdom — even leisure of the most brutish sort, like these Games. And with hierarchies comes power.” He smiled at Adda, condescending once more. “People aren’t very noble, upfluxer. Look around you. Their darker side will find expression in any situation where they can best each other.”

  Adda remembered times in the upflux, when he was young, and the world was less treacherous than it had become of late. He recalled hunting-parties of five or six men and women, utterly immersed in the silence of the Air, their senses open, thrilling to the environment around them. Completely aware and alive, as they worked together.

  Muub was an observer, he realized. Believing he was above the rest of mankind, but in fact merely detached. Cold. The only way to live was to be yourself, in the world and in the company of others. The City was like a huge machine designed to stop its citizens doing just that — to alienate. No wonder the young people clambered out of the cargo ports and lived on the Skin, riding on the Air by wit and skill. Seeking life.

  The light had changed. The rich yellow of the Air over the Pole seemed brighter. Puzzled, he turned his head toward the upflux.

  There was a buzz of anticipation from the Box, answered by a buzz from the Stadium. Muub touched Adda’s arm and pointed upward. “Look. The Surfers. Do you see them?”

  The Surfers were a hexagonal array, shining motes scattered across the Air. Even Muub, despite his detachment, seemed thrilled as he stared up, evidently wondering how it would be to ride the flux so high, so far from the City.

  But Adda was still troubled by the light change. He scoured the horizon, cursing the distortion of the clearwood wall before him.

  Then he saw it.

  Far upflux, far to the north, the vortex lines had disappeared.

  * * *

  Its — her — name was Karen Macrae. She had been born in a place called Mars, a thousand years ago.

  That’s Earth-standard years, she said. Which are about half of Mars’ years, of course. But they’re the same as your years… We designed your body-clocks to match the standard human metabolic rate, you see, and we got you to count the rhythms of the neutron star so that we have a common language of days, weeks, years… We wanted you to live at the same rate as us, to be able to communicate with us. Karen Macrae hesitated. With them, I mean. With standard humans.

  Dura and Hork looked at each other. He hissed, “How much of this do you understand?”

  Dura stared at Karen Macrae. The floating image had drifted away from the center of the cabin, now, and seemed to be growing coarser; it was not a single image, in fact, but a kind of mosaic formed by small, jostling cubes of colored light. Dura asked, “Are you an Ur-human?”

  Karen Macrae fizzed. A what? Oh, you mean a standard human. No, I’m not. I was, though…

  Karen Macrae and five hundred ot
hers had come to the Star from — somewhere else. Mars, perhaps, Dura thought. They had established a camp outside the Star. When they’d arrived the Star had been empty of people; there were only the native lifeforms — the pigs, the rays, the spin-spiders and their webs, the Crust-trees.

  Karen Macrae had come to populate the Star with people.

  The structure of a neutron star is astonishingly rich, whispered Karen Macrae. Do you realize that? I mean, the Core is like a huge, single nucleus — a hypernucleus, laced with twenty-four percent hyperonic matter. And it’s fractal. Do you know what that means? It has structure on all scales, right down to the…

  “Please.” Hork held up his hands. “This is a storm of words, conveying — nothing.”

  The blocks of Karen’s face jostled like small insects. I am a first-generation Colonist, she said. We established a Virtual environment in the hypernucleus — in the Core. I was downloaded via a tap out of my corpus callosum — downloaded into the environment here, in the Core. Karen Macrae brought veils of skin down over the pulpy, obscene things nestling in her eyecups. Do you understand me?

  Hork said slowly, “You are — a copy. Of an Ur-human. Living in the Core.”

  Dura said, “Where is the Ur-human Karen Macrae? Is she dead?”

  She’s gone. The ship left, once we were established here. I don’t know where she is now… Dura tried to detect emotion in the woman-thing’s voice — was she resentful of the original who had made her, who had thrust her into the Core of the Star? Was she envious? — but the quality of the voice was coarse, too harsh to tell; Dura was reminded of the Speaker system on Toba Mixxax’s Air-car.

  The colony of human copies, downloaded into the Core, had devices which interfaced with the physical environment of the Star, the woman-thing told them. They had a system to produce something called exotic matter; they laced the Mantle with wormholes, linking Pole to Pole, and they built a string of beautiful cities.

  When they’d finished, the Mantle was like a garden. Clean, empty. Waiting.

  Dura sighed. “Then you built us.”

  “Yes,” Hork said. “Just as our fractured history tells us. We are made things. Like toys.” He sounded angry, demeaned.

  The world had been at peace. There had been no need to struggle to live. There were no Glitches (few, anyway). The downloaded Colonists, still residing in the Core, had been there for the Human Beings like immortal, omniscient parents.

  One could Wave from upflux to Pole, through the wormhole transit ways, in a heartbeat.

  Hork pushed forward, confronting the woman-thing. “You expected us to come here, to seek you.”

  We hoped you would come. We could not come to you.

  “Why?” He seemed to be snarling now, Dura thought, unreasonably angry at this ancient, fascinating woman-shell. “Why do you need us now?”

  Karen Macrae turned her head. The light-boxes drifted, colliding noiselessly — no, Dura saw, they drifted through each other, as smoothly as if they were made of colored Air.

  The Glitches, she said slowly. They are damaging the Core… they are damaging us.

  Dura frowned. “Why don’t you stop them?”

  We haven’t a physical Interface any more. We withdrew it. Karen’s voice was growing more indistinct, her component blocks larger; the form of a human was gradually being submerged in loss of detail.

  Hork pushed himself forward from the cabin wall, his heavy hands outspread against the wood. “Why? Why did you withdraw? You built us, and took away our tools, and abandoned us. You waged war against us; you took our treasures, our heritage. Why? Why?”

  Karen turned to him, her mouth open, purple boxes streaming from her coarsely defined lips. She expanded and blurred, the boxes comprising her image swelling.

  Hork threw himself at the image. He entered it as if it were no more than Air. He batted at the drifting, crumbling light-boxes with his open palms. “Why did you make us? What purpose did we serve for you here? Why did you abandon us?”

  The boxes exploded; Dura quailed from a monstrous, ballooning image of Karen Macrae’s face, of the pale forms infesting her eyecups. There was a soundless concussion, a flood of purple light which filled the cabin before fleeing through the walls of the ship and into the ocean beyond. The human-thing, the simulacrum of Karen Macrae, was gone. Hork twisted in the Air, punching at emptiness in his frustration.

  But there were new shadows in the cabin now, blue-green shadows cast by something behind Dura. Something outside the ship. She turned.

  The object was a tetrahedron, she recognized immediately; a four-faced framework of glowing blue lines, like fragments of vortex lines. Sheets of gold, rippling, glistened over the faces. The construct was perhaps ten mansheights to a side, and its faces were easily wide enough to permit a ship the size of the “Pig” to pass.

  It was a gate. A four-sided gate…

  Dura felt like a child again; she found a smile, slow and heavy with wonder, spreading across her face. This was a wormhole Interface, the most precious of all the treasures lost in the Core.

  It could be a gateway out of the Star.

  She grabbed at Hork’s tunic, wonder flooding out her fear. “Don’t you understand what it means? We’ll be able to travel, to cross the Star in a moment, as we could before the Wars…”

  He pushed her away roughly. “Sure. I understand what this means. Karen Macrae can’t stop the Glitches. And so — for the first time since dumping us in the Mantle all those years ago, since leaving us to our fate — she and her Core-infesting friends need us. We — you and I — are going to have to travel through that thing, to wherever it takes us, and stop the Glitches ourselves.”

  22

  Cris Mixxax climbed onto his board. The wood under his bare feet was polished, warm, familiar; his soles gripped the ridged surface, and the ribs of Corestuff embedded in the wood felt like cold, hard bones. He flexed his knees experimentally. Electron gas hissed around his ankles and toes as the board cut through the flux lines. The Magfield felt springy, solid.

  Cris grinned savagely. It felt good. It all felt good. At last this day had come, and it was going to be his.

  The sky was a huge diorama, all around him. The South Pole, with its brooding purple heart sunk deep in the Quantum Sea, was almost directly below him; he could feel the massive Polar distortion of the Magfield permeating his body. Above him the Crust seemed close enough to touch, the dangling Crust-trees like shining hairs, immensely detailed; patterns of cultivation showed in rectangular patches of color and texture — sharp, straight-line edges imposed by humans on the vibrant nature of the Star.

  The City hovered in the Air over the Pole. Parz was so far below him he could cover it with the palm of his hand, and imagine he was alone in the sky — alone, save for his fellow racers. Parz looked like some elaborate wooden toy, surrounded by its cage of shining anchor-bands and pierced by a hundred orifices from which the green light of wood-lamps seeped, sickly. Sewage cascaded steadily from its underside, around the Spine of the Harbor. He could see the shining bulge that was the Stadium; it clung to the City’s upper lip like a fragile growth, with the Committee Box a colorful balcony over it. Somewhere in there his parents would be watching, he knew — praying for his success, he’d like to think. But perhaps they were wishing he might fail — give up this dream, this distraction of Surfing, and join them in their quiet, constrained lives once more.

  He shook his head, staring down on the City as if he were some god, suspended over it. Out here the inwardness, the frustration of his life in and around the City, seemed remote, reduced to the trivial; he felt exalted, able to view it all with compassion, balance. His parents loved him, and they wanted what was best for him — as they saw it. The cries of the race marshals, tiny in the huge, glowing sky, floated to him. Almost time. He glanced around. There were a hundred Surfers, drawn into a rough line across the sky; now they were drawing precisely level, into line with the squads of marshals in their distinctive red uniforms. C
ris flicked at his own board, once, twice; he felt it kick at the Magfield and bring him exactly into his place in the line. He stared ahead. He was facing along the direction of the vortex lines, toward the rotation pole; the closest line was a few mansheights from him, and the lines swept around him like the walls of some intangible corridor, beckoning him to infinity.

  The challenge of the race was to Surf along the vortex lines, far across the roof of the world — across the Pole — to a finishing cross-section; there another group of marshals marked out an area of the sky, like human spin-spiders. The race was won — not just by the fastest, the first to complete the course — but by whoever applied the most technical skill, the most style in following the course.

  He looked along the line. Ray, he knew, was three places down from him — the only other of his friends to have qualified for the Games this year. There she was, her lithe, bare body coiled over her board, her hair swept back and her teeth shining in a broad, hungry grin. He caught her eye, and she raised a fist, her smile broadening.

  The Surfers were all in place now; he saw how they settled over their boards, concentrating, spreading their feet and lifting their arms. The marshals continued to scurry around the line like worried little animals, checking positions, adjusting boards with small pushes and shoves. Silence spread along the line; the marshals were withdrawing. Cris felt his senses open up. The board under his feet, the fizz of the Magfield, the freshness of the Air so far from the womb of the City as it sighed through his mouth and capillaries — these were vital and real things, penetrating his head; he had never felt so alive.

  And perhaps, a distant, unwelcome part of him said, he never would again.

  Well, if that was to be so — if his life was to be a long-drawn-out anticlimax after this superb moment — then let it be; and let this be his finest time.