Flux xs-3

by Stephen Baxter

Dura settled back in the chair, watching starfields explode silently across the sky.

  “We haven’t turned the Star around, if that’s what you mean,” Hork said. “But we’ve turned it aside. I think so, anyway… The Ring has moved away from the center of that wall.” He pointed. “We’re still heading for the battlefield but we’ve deflected the Star; we’re going to miss the Ring.”

  She frowned, her feeling of distance, of unimportance, lingering. “Will that be enough, do you think?”

  “To stop the Xeelee destroying us?” He shrugged. “I don’t know, Dura. But we’ve done all we can.”

  Dura looked at Hork, seeing a match in his broad face for her own sense of bewilderment, of anticlimax.

  Hork held out his hand. “Come. We need to rest, I think, after such epic deeds. Let’s return to our wooden ship. We’ll eat, and try to relax.”

  She allowed him to pull her out of the chair. Hand in hand, they Waved back to the inner tetrahedron.

  As they entered it, Dura made her way toward the “Pig’s” open hatchway; but Hork held her arm. “Dura. Wait; look at this.”

  She turned. He was pointing to the map on the inner wall of the tetrahedron — the map-Star, the wormhole diagram they had studied earlier. One of the wormhole routes — a path which snaked from the Core of the Star to its Crust, at the North Pole — was flashing, slowly and deliberately.

  Hork nodded slowly. “I think I understand. This is how the Star-fount was made.” He traced the wormhole with a fingertip. “See? When you hauled on your levers, Dura, this wormhole must have opened up. It took matter from the heart of the Star and transported it to the Crust. The Core material must have exploded at once in the lower pressure, releasing immense energy.”

  Dura felt odd; she seemed to see Hork as if at the far end of a long, dark corridor.

  “At the North Pole there must be huge engines to exploit this energy — the discontinuity drive engines Karen Macrae spoke of, which propel the Star itself.” His gaze was distant. “Dura, some day we must reach those engines. And I wonder how the Colonists fared, when that wormhole belched…”

  In Dura’s eyes all the color had leeched from Hork’s face; even the lurid map on the tetrahedron wall had turned to shades of brown, and there was a strange, thin taste on her tongue.

  She was exhausted, she realized. There would be time enough in the future for plans and dreams. For now, she longed for the comparative familiarity and security of the “Pig,” for food and sleep.

  The rich, sweet stink of Air-pigs greeted her as she reached the ship’s entrance.

  * * *

  He touched Farr’s arm. “Wait. We stop here. That’s enough.”

  Farr looked confused. He Waved through a couple more strokes, as if automatically; then, uncertainly, his legs came to rest. He released his grip on the cocoon material and looked down at his hands, which were bent into stiff claws.

  Adda let himself drift away from the cocoon and hang in the Air, giving way to his fatigue for the first time since the start of the disaster. The Magfield supported him, but he could feel its continuing shudders. The aches in his legs, arms, back and hands had gone beyond mere fatigue, beyond exhaustion now, he realized, and had transmuted into real pain. He inflated his chest, hauling in dank Polar Air, and felt the thick stuff burn at his lungs and capillaries. He remembered the dire warnings of poor, lost Deni Maxx: that after his encounter with the Air-sow his body would never regain its pneumatic efficiency. Well, this day he’d tested that diagnosis to its limits.

  The City was a battered wooden box almost small enough to be covered over by the palm of a hand, with the long, elegant Spine spearing down from its base to the underMantle. A cloud diffused around the upper City, a mist of rubble and dispersing refugees.

  The Xeelee starbreakers continued to walk through the Mantle. Vortex strings hailed all around them, deadly and banal.

  He felt his eyes close; weariness and pain lapped over his mind, shutting out the world. This was the worst part of growing old: the slow, endless failure of his body that was slowly isolating him from the world, from other people, immersing him instead in a tiny, claustrophobic universe of his own weakness. Even now, even with the Mantle in its greatest crisis…

  Well, a small, sour part of him thought, at least I won’t grow any older, to find out how much worse it gets.

  “…Adda.” There was more wonder than fear in Farr’s voice. “Look at the City.”

  Adda looked at the boy, then turned his aching neck to the distant tableau of Parz.

  The City had already drifted far from its usual site directly over the Magfield Pole, tilting and twisting slowly as it traveled. Now that drift was accelerating. Parz, with all its precious freight of life, swung through the Air like a huge spin-spider. It was oddly graceful, Adda thought, like a huge dance. Then there was a cracking noise, a sharp sound which traveled even to this distance, uneasily like breaking bone. Wood fragments burst around the junction of the City and its Spine — splinters which must be the size of Air-cars to be visible at this distance.

  The Spine had snapped off.

  The Spine remained suspended in the depths of the Polar Magfield, like an immense, battered tree trunk. The Spine must have been supplying much of the City’s residual anchoring in the Magfield, for now the box-like upper section of Parz, with green wood-lamp light still gleaming from its ports, rolled forward like an immense, grotesque parody of a lolling head.

  The structure could not long stand such stress.

  The Corestuff anchor-bands, dull and useless, folded, snapped and fell away in huge pieces. The clearwood bubble which enclosed the Stadium burst outward, popping. The Palace buildings on the upper surface, like elaborately colored toys with their miniature forests and displays, slid almost gracefully away into the Air, exposing the bare wooden surface beneath.

  And now the City itself opened, coming apart like rotten wood.

  The carcass split longitudinally, almost neatly, around the central structural flaw of Pall Mall. From the cracked-open streets and shops and homes, Air-cars and people spilled into the Air. The Market opened up like a spin-spider’s egg, and the huge execution Wheel tumbled out into the Air.

  The sounds of cracking wood, of twisting Corestuff, carried through the Air, mercifully drowning the cries of the humans.

  Adda tried to imagine the terror of those stranded citizens; perhaps some of them had never ventured beyond the Skin before, and now here they were cast into the Air, helpless amid clouds of worthless possessions.

  Now the residual structure of Parz imploded into fragments. All traces of the City’s shape were lost. The cloud of rubble, of wood, Corestuff and struggling people, drifted through the Air away from the amputated Spine, slowly diffusing.

  Adda closed his eyes. There had been a grandeur about that huge death. Almost a grace, a defiance of the Xeelee’s actions which had been, in its way, magnificent.

  “Adda.” Farr was pulling at his arm and pointing.

  Adda followed the boy’s finger. At first he could see nothing — only the lurid crimson glow around the Northern horizon, the yellow chaos of the Air…

  Then he realized that the boy was pointing out an absence.

  The starbreaker beams were gone.

  Adda felt something lift from his heart. Perhaps some of them might yet live through this.

  But then more vortex fragments came gusting toward them, precluding thought; gripping the boy’s hand as hard as he could, Adda stared into the mouth of the storm and grabbed at Bzya’s cocoon.

  28

  The Interface was glowing.

  The shouting woke Borz from a deep, untroubled sleep. He stretched and scowled around, looking for the source of the trouble. He reached to his belt and pulled out his Air-hat, jammed it on his head. He didn’t really need the hat, of course, but he thought it gave him a bit more authority with the scavenging, thieving upfluxers who came by all the time and…

  The Interface was glowing. The
edges around its four triangular faces were shining, vortex-line-blue, so bright he was forced to squint. And the faces themselves seemed to have been covered over by a skin of light, fine and golden, which returned reflections of the yellow Mantle-light, the vortex lines, his own bulky body.

  A deep, superstitious awe stirred in Borz.

  There was no sign of the pigs, which had been stored at the heart of the tetrahedron. And the various possessions — clothes, tools, weapons — which had been attached to the tetrahedron’s struts by bits of rope and net now tumbled around in the Air. A length of rope drifted past him. He grabbed it and laid it in his huge palm; the rope looked scorched.

  People, adults and children alike, were Waving away from the Interface, crying and wailing in their panic. Borz — and two or three of the other men and women — held their place.

  The Interface hadn’t worked for generations — not since the Core Wars; everyone knew that. But it was obviously working now. Why? And — Borz ran a tongue over his hot, Airless lips, and he felt the pores on his face dilate — and what might be coming through it?

  The face-light died, slowly. The faces turned transparent once more. The glow of the tetrahedral frame faded to a drab blackness.

  The Interface was dead again; once more it was just a framework in the Air. Borz felt an odd, unaccustomed stab of regret; he knew he’d never again see those colors, that light.

  The pigs had gone from the heart of the framework. But they’d been replaced by something else — an artifact, a clumsy cylinder of wood three mansheights tall. There were clear panels set in the walls of the cylinder, and bands of some material, dully reflective, surrounded its broad carcass.

  A hatch in the top of the cylinder was pushed open. A man — just a man — pushed his face out; the face was covered by an extravagant beard.

  The man grinned at Borz. “What a relief,” he said. “We needed some fresh Air in here.” He looked down into the cylinder. “You see, Dura, I knew Karen Macrae would get us home.”

  “Hey.” Borz Waved with his thick legs until his face was on a level with the strange man’s. “Hey, you. Where are our pigs?”

  “Pigs?” The man seemed puzzled, then he looked around at the dead Interface. “Oh. I see. You kept your pigs inside this gateway, did you?”

  “Where are they?”

  The man looked amused, but sympathetic. “A long way from here, I fear.” He sniffed the Air and stared around, his gaze frank, confident and inquisitive. “Tell me, which way’s South?”

  29

  Toba Mixxax, his round face pale in the heat, stuck his head out of his Air-car. “Sounds like Mur and Lea are arguing again.”

  Toba’s car had approached unnoticed. Dura had been laboring to fix ropes to a section of collapsed Skin. She backed away from her work, her arms and hands aching. Even here, on the outer surface of the dispersing cloud of debris that marked the site of the ruined City, the heat and noise were all but unbearable, and the work was long, hard and dangerous. As she listened now, she could hear the raised voices of Lea and Mur. She felt a prickle of irritation — how long was she going to have to hand-hold these people, before they learned to work together like adults?

  But as she studied Toba’s familiar round face — with its uncertain expression, its pores dilated in the heat — the irritation vanished as soon as it had come. She straightened up and smiled. “Nice to see you, farmer.”

  Toba’s answering smile was thin. “You look tired, Dura… We’re all exhausted, I suppose. Anyway,” with a touch of strain entering his voice, “I’m not a farmer any more.”

  “But you will be again,” Dura said, Waving toward him. “I’m sorry, Toba.”

  Stretching the stiffness out of her back, she looked around the sky. The vortex lines had reformed and now crossed the sky in their familiar hexagonal arrays, enclosing, orderly and reassuring; the Magfield, restored to stability, was a firm network of flux in the Air — a base for Waving, for building again.

  She studied the lines, examining their spacing through her fingers. Their slow pulsing told her that it would soon be time for Hork’s Wheel ceremony, at the heart of the ruined City.

  “How’s the farm?” she asked carefully. “Is Ito…”

  “We’re putting it back together again,” Toba said. “Slowly. Ito is… bearing up. She’s very quiet.” For a moment his small, almost comical mouth worked as if he were struggling to express his feelings. “You know Farr’s there with her. And some of Cris’s friends, the Surfers. Cris has gone. But I think Ito finds the young people around her a comfort.”

  Dura touched his arm. “It’s alright. You don’t have to say anything. Come on; maybe you can help me sort out Lea and Mur…”

  Toba climbed out of his car.

  Together, they made their way through the City site. Parz had become a cloud of floating fragments of Skin, twisted lengths of Corestuff girder, all suffused by the endless minutiae of the human world, spilled carelessly into the Air. She could see, at the cloud’s rough center, the execution Wheel, cast adrift from the old Market. Even from this vantage point — close to the cloud’s outer edge — Dura could see clothes, toys, scrolls, cocoons, cooking implements: the contents of a thousand vanished homes. Those few sections of the City which had survived the final Glitch continued to collapse spasmodically — even now, weeks after the withdrawal of the Xeelee — and to the careless eye the swarms of humans crawling over the floating remains must look, she thought, like leeches, scavengers hastening the destruction of some immense, decomposing corpse, adrift in the turgid Air of the Pole. Many of the City’s former inhabitants, recently refugees, had returned to Parz to seek belongings and to help with the reconstruction. There had been some looting, true — and too many people had come back here, intent on picking over the remains of a City which would not be restored to anything like its former completeness for many years.

  But Hork’s emergency edicts against a mass return to the City seemed to be holding. Enough of the City’s former inhabitants had dispersed to the recovering ceiling-farms of the hinterland — and stayed there to work — to reduce fears of famine. And genuine reconstruction and recovery was progressing now. Already teams of workers had succeeded in locating the surviving dynamos. The great engines — which had once powered anchor-band currents — had been cleared of rubble and stumps of infrastructure. Now the dynamos floated in clear spaces, their lumpy Corestuff hides gleaming dully in the purple light of the Quantum Sea as if they were immense, protected animals.

  It could still go wrong, Dura thought uneasily. The fragile society left adrift by the Xeelee Glitch could still fall apart — disintegrate into suicidal conflict over dwindling resources, over once-precious goods from the old Parz which had been reduced in value to trinkets by the disaster.

  But not just yet. Now, people seemed — on the whole — to be prepared to work together, to rebuild. This was a time of hope, of regeneration.

  Dura welcomed her own aching muscles and stiff back. It was evidence of the hard work that comprised her own small part of the Mantle-wide rebuilding effort. She felt a surge of optimism, of energy; she suspected that the days to come would comprise some of the happiest of her life.

  In a clear space a few mansheights from the car, the Human Being Mur had been showing Lea — a pretty girl who had once been a Surfer — how to construct nets from the plaited bark of Crust trees. The two of them were surrounded by a cloud of half-coiled ropes and abandoned sections of net. Little Jai — reunited with his father — wriggled through the Air around them, nude and slick, grasping at bits of rope and gurgling with laughter. Lea was brandishing a length of rope in Mur’s face. “Yes, but I don’t see why I have to do it over.”

  Mur’s voice was cracking with anger, making him sound very young. Compared to the City girl, Mur still looked painfully thin, Dura thought. “Because it’s wrong,” he said. “You’ve done it wrong. Again! And I — ”

  “And I don’t see why I should put up with that
kind of talk from the likes of you, upfluxer.”

  Toba placed his hands on the girl’s shoulders. “Lea, Lea. You shouldn’t speak to our friends like that.”

  “Friends?” The girl launched into an impressive round of cursing. Toba looked pale and pulled away from her, dismayed.

  Dura took the rope which Lea was rejecting. “Perhaps Mur didn’t explain,” she said smoothly. “You have to double plait the rope to give it extra strength.” She hauled at sections of it, demonstrating its toughness.

  “But the way he speaks to me — ”

  “This plaiting is finely done.” She looked at Lea. “Did you do this?”

  “Yes, but — ”

  Dura smiled. “It takes most Human Beings years of practice to learn such a skill, and you’ve almost mastered it already.”

  Lea, distracted by the praise, was visibly struggling to stay angry; she pushed elaborately dyed hair from her forehead.

  Dura passed the rope to her. “With a bit more help from Mur, I’ll be coming to you for instruction. Come on, Toba, let’s take a break; I’d like to see how Adda is getting on.”

  As they moved away Dura was careful not to make a show of looking around, but she could see that Mur and Lea were moving back toward each other, warily, and picking up sections of rope once more.

  She felt rather smug at her success at defusing the little situation. And she was secretly pleased at this evidence that the Human Beings were managing to adjust to the situation they’d found here at the Pole — better than some of Parz’s former inhabitants, it seemed. Dura had expected the Human Beings to be shocked, disappointed to arrive at the Pole after their epic journey across the sky, only to find nothing more than a dispersing cloud of rubble. In fact they’d reacted with much more equanimity than she’d anticipated… especially once reunited with their children. The Human Beings simply hadn’t known what to expect here. They couldn’t have imagined Parz in all its glory — any more than she herself could have, before Toba brought her here for the first time. For the little band of Human Beings, the immense number of people, the huge, mysterious engines, the precious artifacts scattered almost carelessly through the Air, had been wonder enough.