Flux xs-3

by Stephen Baxter

  The tetrahedral box containing the “Pig,” the solid little chair, Hork and Dura themselves, were like specks of wood adrift in some mottled fluid. In fact, she realized, the whole of the tetrahedron they occupied was embedded inside one of the huge buildings; its gray lines sectioned off the space around them, and she looked out through its spectral flesh.

  “Why do you suppose we can’t see these things clearly? And I wonder what their purpose is. Do you think…”

  Hork was peering up at the “building” they were embedded in. He stared into its corners and at its misty protuberances, and then glanced down quickly at the chair he sat in.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The ghost-building we’re inside. Look at it… It has the same shape as this chair.” The gray light of the translucent forms pooled in his eyecups. “It’s a hundred thousand times the size, and it’s made of something as transparent as clearwood and thinner than Air… but nevertheless, it’s an immense — spectral — chair.

  She lifted her head. Slowly she realized that Hork was right. This immense “building” — at least a meter tall — had a seat, a back; and there, so far above her it was difficult to see, were two arms, each with its control lever.

  Hork grinned, his face animated. “And I think I know what it’s all for. Watch this!”

  He twisted his body. His chair swiveled in the Air.

  She gasped, Waving away in alarm; but the chair came to rest, and no damage seemed to have been done. “What are you doing?”

  “Don’t you understand yet? Look up!”

  She tilted her head back.

  The other “chair” — the ghostly analogue — had turned too, swiveling to match Hork’s lurch.

  “See?” he crowed. “The chair is keyed to mine, somehow; whatever I make mine do, the big one must follow.” Hork swung this way and that, laughing like a child with a toy. Dura watched the giant analogue dance clumsily, aping Hork’s movements like some huge pet. Presumably, she thought, when the device swiveled, its substance must be moving around her — through her, in fact, like an unreasonable breeze. But she felt nothing — at least, no more than an inner chill which could as easily be caused by her awe and fear.

  At last Hork tired of his games. “I can make it do whatever I want.” He looked a little more thoughtful. “And so if I pull these levers…”

  “No. We need to work this out, Hork.” She looked up. “This — ghost, this City-sized artifact — is a seat big enough for a giant…”

  “That’s obvious. But…”

  “But,” she interrupted, “a giant of a certain form… a human-shaped giant, meters tall.” She studied his face, waiting for him to reach the same conclusions.

  “Meters… The Ur-humans.”

  She nodded. “Hork, I think the ghost-seat is an Ur-human device. I think we’re in a little bubble of Air, floating inside an Ur-human room.”

  She tilted her head back on her neck, feeling the flesh at the top of her spine bunch under her skull, and looked up into a ghost-room which abruptly made sense.

  They were inside a huge Ur-human chair. But there were other chairs — four of them, she counted, receding into mistiness, like a row of cities. The chairs were placed before a long, flat surface, and she caught hints of a complex structure beneath and behind that surface. Perhaps that was some form of control panel. Looking further out, the tetrahedral structure surrounding all of this was a sketch drawn against fog.

  Hork touched her arm. “Look over there.” He pointed. On the side of the Ur-human room opposite the row of seats there was a bank of billowing gas — but that must be wrong, of course; she tried to forget her smallness, to see this through Ur-human eyes. It was a structure made up of something soft, pliable, piled up on a lower flat surface. It looked like a cocoon, laid flat.

  Did the Ur-humans sleep?

  Again Hork was pointing. “On top of that surface before the chairs. See? Instruments, built for giant hands.”

  Dura saw a cylinder longer than a Crust-tree trunk. Its end was sharp, protruding over the lip of the surface. Perhaps it was a stylus, as she’d seen Deni Maxx use in the Hospital. She tried to imagine the hand that could grasp a tree trunk and use it to write notes… Beside the “stylus” there was another cylinder, but this was set upright. It seemed to be hollow — the cylinder was transparent to Dura’s eyes, and she could make out a structure of thick walls surrounding an empty space — and there was no upper surface.

  She frowned and pointed out the second cylinder to Hork. “What do you think that is? It looks like a fortress. Perhaps the Ur-humans needed to shelter — perhaps they came under attack…”

  He was laughing at her, not unkindly. “No, Dura. You’ve lost the scale. Look at it again. It’s maybe — what? — ten thousand mansheights tall?”

  “Ten times as big as your glorious Parz City.”

  “Maybe, but that’s still only ten centimeters or so. Dura, the Ur-humans were meters tall. The hand of an Ur-human could have engulfed that cylinder.” He was watching her slyly. “Do you see it yet? Dura, that’s a food vessel. A cup.”

  She stared. A cup, large enough to hold a dozen Parz Cities?

  She tried to keep thinking. “Well,” she said, “then it’s a damn odd cup. All the food would float out of the top. Wouldn’t it?”

  Hork nodded grudgingly. “You’d think so.” He sighed. “But then, there are many things about the Ur-humans we can’t understand.”

  She imagined this little box of Mantle-stuff from the outside. “It’s as if they created this inner chamber, around the wormhole Interface, as an ornament. A little section of the Star, so they could study Human Beings. We would look like toys to them,” she murmured. “Less than toys; little animals, perhaps below the level of visibility.” She looked at her hand. “They were a hundred thousand times taller than us; even the ‘Pig’ would have been no more than a mote in the palm of an Ur-human child…” She shivered. “Do you think any of them are still here?” She imagined a giant Ur-form floating in through some half-seen door, a face wider than a day’s journey billowing down toward her…

  “No,” Hork said briskly. “No, I don’t. They’ve gone.”

  She frowned. “How do you know?”

  He grinned. “For one thing, that’s what your precious legends tell us. But the clincher is this seat.” He patted its arms. “The Ur-humans set up this place so that we could work their machines. If I move the chair I can mimic anything an Ur-human could have done… Dura, they have made me as powerful as any of them. Do you see?” He probed at the unyielding surface of the chair. “If we had the wit we could operate other devices.” He looked around the ghostly chamber greedily. “There must be wonders here. Weapons we’ve never dreamed of.”

  The Ur-humans had meant Star people to come here, to work the devices they left behind, maybe when the Glitches got too bad. Perhaps there was something they were meant to do now… But what?

  “Your arrow device doesn’t have an analogue, in the Ur-human chair,” she said slowly, pointing up. “See? So the arrow-thing must be something meant for us alone. Maybe to help us see what’s going on.” She frowned. “It only turned one quarter. What if you turned it again?”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  He reached for the arrow.

  At first he turned it back toward the darkest sector of the scale. Reassuringly the walls of smooth gray material congealed around them, shutting out the chamber of the Ur-humans. And when Hork twisted the arrow the other way the walls vanished, to reveal the vast devices.

  “All right,” he said. “Going from the black to the dark gray allows us to see a little more. A little further. And what if I turn it another quarter, to the light gray?”

  Dura shrank back despite herself. “Just turn it,” she said hoarsely.

  Confidently he twisted the arrow to the third of the four quarters.

  Light seemed to bleed out of the Air.

  The devices of the Ur-humans, the walls of
their ghostly chamber, became still more translucent. And there was darkness beyond those distant walls, darkness which settled on the two humans, huddled as they were within layers of immensity.

  Points of light hung in that darkness.

  Dura twisted in the Air, staring around. “I don’t understand. I can’t see the walls of the next chamber. And what are those lights?”

  “There are no more walls,” Hork said gently. “Don’t you see? No more chambers. We’re looking out into space, Dura, at volumes even the Ur-humans couldn’t enclose.”

  She found her hand creeping into his. “And those lights…”

  “You know what they are, Dura. They’re stars. Stars and planets.”

  * * *

  “Wake up, Bzya, you useless asshole.”

  Hosch was slapping him. Bzya shook his head, blinking to clear his eye. He was surprised to be alive; the Bell should have imploded.

  His bad eyecup blazed with pain. He raised a tentative fingertip to it to find the cup filled with sticky matter. His back ached, right at the base, where it had been bent backward against the curve of the Bell.

  “So we’re not dead,” he said.

  Hosch grinned, his thin face drawn tight with fear. “We aren’t that deep in the underMantle. We can’t be, or the Bell would have collapsed already.” He was kicking at the rim of the hatch frame, trying to splinter it with his heel.

  Bzya flexed his hands and toes. He felt a vague disappointment. Fishing wasn’t the safest of occupations; he’d always known it would finish him one day. But not today — not so close to home, and after such a futile, wasted dive. “You’ll make the hatch collapse in if you keep that up.”

  “That’s…” Kick “…the idea.” Kick. Kick.

  “And what then? Wave for it?”

  “You’ve got it.” Kick, kick. “We’ve lost the cable. We haven’t any better options.” The frame was already starting to splinter. The hatch was a disc of wood, held in place by external pressure against the flanged frame. Once Hosch damaged enough of the flange, the hatch would fall in easily.

  Bzya glanced out of the window. “We’re not deep enough to crush the Bell, but we’re surely too deep for us. No one’s ever come so deep unaided. We must still be ninety centimeters.”

  “Then we’ll become damn legends. Unless you’ve a better idea, you useless jetfart. Help me…”

  But Bzya didn’t need to.

  With a thousand tiny explosions all around the frame the flange splintered. Bits of wood rattled across the cabin; they flew into Bzya’s face and he batted at them dimly. Then the hatch fell forward, yielding in a moment. Bzya had an instant’s impression of a mass of fluid — dense, amber and incompressible — crowding into the breached cabin.

  The wood-lamps died, overwhelmed.

  Then it was on him.

  It washed over his limbs, forced its way into his mouth and throat and eyecups; it was a hard physical invasion, like fists pushing into him. He could not see, hear or taste anything. He panicked, and twisted his head back and forth, trying to spew the vile stuff out of his lungs. But he could not expel it, of course; he was embedded in this dense, unlivable material — in a layer of it ninety centimeters deep.

  His lungs expanded, tearing at the material.

  …And they found Air. Fragments, splinters of Air which stung as they forced their way out of his lungs and into his capillaries. His chest heaved, dragging at the fluid around him. There was Air here, but with just a trace of its normal fractional density.

  Damn it, maybe I can make it out of this…

  Then the burning started.

  It was all over his body, like a thousand needles. And inside him too — by the Wheel! — scorching into his lungs and stomach; it flooded the capillaries that coursed through his body, turning the network of fine tubes that permeated him into a mass of pain, every threadlike capillary electric-alive with it.

  Too dense. Too dense…

  In these extremes of density and pressure the tin nuclei at the surfaces of his body were seeking a new stable configuration. The nuclei were breaking apart from each other and crumbling into their component nucleons, which were then swarming into the fire-Air in search of the single, huge nucleus which filled the heart of the Star… Bzya was dissolving.

  He kicked at the fluid, driving his legs through it. He felt a dull impact as his head struck something. It must be the wall of the Bell. He felt vaguely surprised to find that there was anything left of the familiar, external universe, beyond this pain-realm of dissolution. But he’d managed to move himself. He’d Waved.

  He dragged his hand through the fluid, made a sign of the Wheel against his chest. He couldn’t see, but he could breathe, and he could Wave. He was going to get out of here.

  He’d bumped his upper face. He must be facing the rear wall of the cabin, then; he must have been spun around by the incoming underMantle fluid. He turned around, spread his hands behind him across the wall. The pain eclipsed his touch, but he could feel the curve of the wall, the round profile of a window. He pictured the cabin, as it had been in that last instant before the hatch came in. Hosch had been somewhere to his right.

  He pushed away from the wall and Waved that way, groping ahead of him.

  His hands found something. Hosch, it had to be. He ran his hands over Hosch’s chest and head; Hosch didn’t respond. Hosch’s skin crumbled under Bzya’s touch — or maybe it was the flesh of Bzya’s own fingers and palms.

  He found Hosch’s hand, wrapped it in his own.

  Two strong kicks and he’d found the open hatchway. He was still blind, and his sense of touch was fading — perhaps, he thought with horror, it would never return; even if he survived perhaps he would have to live in this shell of pain, without light or sound… But he could feel the rim of the hatchway, the splinters left by Hosch’s brave kicking.

  He tried to fall forward, out of the Bell, but something was holding him back. Something hard, unyielding, which pressed into his chest and legs — the Corestuff hoops, wrapped around the Bell. He lifted his feet against the lower hoop, grabbed the upper with a numbing hand, and tried to straighten his body. His lower back, already injured, blazed with pain. He felt an abrupt shift as the hoops slid apart. He lifted his feet and let his body slide forward through the gap; he held his hands over his head and felt the limp form of Hosch rattle against the hoops, following him.

  He tumbled out of the Bell, dragging the supervisor after him.

  He had to find the Spine. He turned to his left and kicked out. He held Hosch’s hand tight — at least he thought he did; only pain reached him now from his hands, feet and face. He felt a whispering drag pull at his own body… No, he thought, it was more than that; there were a thousand discrete tugs at his flesh, like hooks dragging into the skin. His flesh was ablating, he realized slowly, crumbling off him as he Waved.

  He reached ahead with his free hand. His sight was gone, both eyecups useless now. This was the way back to the Spine, as best he remembered it from the moment the Bell had been torn away by the Magfield surges. Of course, since then he’d been unconscious. The Bell could even have turned upside down…

  But he didn’t have any better guesses. He thrashed at the scouring liquid, trying not to estimate how far he’d Waved from the Bell, how much further before he was sure he’d missed the Spine.

  Mercifully the pain seemed to be lessening. The burning, the decomposition of his flesh, must be damaging the nerve endings themselves. Soon he genuinely would be isolated inside his body.

  Well, I’ll never Surf again. Or sculpt. Or, and now his inner smile faded, or feel a woman’s skin.

  There was a new stab of pain from his outstretched arm, his useless stub of hand. The arm buckled, forced back by something solid.

  His body collided with a hard surface. He tried to feel with his chest, thighs and face.

  The Spine. The blessed Spine.

  He dragged his free arm across the surface until it snagged on something. The
re, he had it — a Bell cable. He made his hand into a hook and wrapped it around the cable. With Hosch still towed limply behind him, he flattened himself against the wooden surface of the Spine, and began to Wave once more, along the length of the Spine, using the Cable as a guide.

  How ironic, he thought, if he were Waving the wrong way, down toward the Core.

  * * *

  By the time he was lifted out of the fluid, he was almost isolated from the world, inside a deadened body. He felt as aware, as alert as ever, but he could feel little. Even the pain had gone now. But he could feel his chest expand, dragging in the thinning, clearing Air, and he could feel the Magfield pull at his stomach, the center of him.

  He was still here, he thought. Just a little battered around the edges.

  He thought he’d kept Waving until the end, and he thought he’d kept hold of Hosch. But it was hard to be sure.

  And now he was being moved again, more delicately. He tried to smile. The Fishermen must have come down for him and Hosch, in a second Bell.

  He was glad he couldn’t see the looks on their faces, as they nursed him.

  25

  With a final heave from the team of volunteers, the patient was loaded through the kicked-out Hospital wall and into the car waiting in the Air beyond. Adda watched the car recede cautiously from the Hospital, and then turn to join the streams of refugees fleeing to the upflux.

  Once the evacuation of the City had begun, this ward of the Hospital of the Common Good, directly behind the Skin of Parz, had rapidly been adapted to serve as a loading bay. Now it was a three-dimensional swarm of Hospital staff, volunteers, patients and those close to them. Patients screamed or moaned, and staff called desperately to each other for splints, bandages, drugs. And as fast as the patients were shipped off in the cars outside, more — ever more — were crowding in from the rest of the broken City. Adda felt overwhelmed, daunted, dismayed, exhausted. Perhaps I’ve finally seen too many changes. Too many disasters; too many shattered bodies…

  He leaned out into the Air beyond the Skin. He opened his mouth, trying to expel from his lungs the Hospital stink of stale capillary-Air. But even outside the Skin the Air was sour; he could smell nuclear-burning wood, Air-pig jetfarts, the smell of human fear. It was as if the City, in its death throes, was wrapped in an invisible cloud of sour-smelling photons, like an immense dying creature leaking its last capillary-Air.