Timelike Infinity

by Stephen Baxter

  "Then let our engineers take it apart."

  "Any such attempt would result in the devastation of half a planet."

  Berg found herself bridling again. "You're still being patronizing," she protested. "Even insulting. We're not complete dummies, you know; we are your ancestors, after all. Maybe you ought to have more respect."

  "My friend, your thinking is simplistic. We did not come here to attempt a simple military assault on the Qax. Even were it to succeed — which it could not — it would not be sufficient. Our purpose is at once much more subtle — and yet capable of achieving much, much more."

  "But you won't tell me what it is? You won't trust me. Me, your own great-to-the-nth grandmother—"

  Shira smiled. "I would be proud to share some fraction of your genetic heritage, Miriam."

  Side by side they walked on, still heading toward the center of the earth-craft. Soon they had cleared the belt of construction-material huts with their knots of busy people, and the hum of the Friends' conversation faded behind them; when they reached the center of the craft it was as if they were entering a little island of silence.

  And as the two women walked into the broken circles of stones, that seemed entirely appropriate to Berg.

  There were no globe lights here; the stones, hulking and ancient, stood defiant in the smoky light of Jupiter. Berg stood beneath one of the still-intact Sarsen arches and touched the cold blue-gray surface of a standing stone; it wasn't intimidating or cold, she thought, but friendly — more like stroking an elephant. "You know," she said, "you could cause a hell of a stir just by landing this thing on Earth. Maybe on Salisbury Plain, a few miles from the original — which, of course, is standing there in the wind and the rain, in this time zone. If it was up to me I couldn't resist it, Project or no Project."

  Shira grinned. "The thought does have an appeal."

  "Yeah." Berg walked toward the center of the circle, stepping over crumbled fragments of rock. She turned slowly around, surveying the truncated landscape, trying to see this place through the eyes of the people who built it four thousand years earlier. How would this place have looked at the solstice, standing on the bare back of Salisbury Plain, with no sign of civilization anywhere in the universe save a few scattered fires on the plain, soon dying in the dawn light?

  ...But now her horizon was hemmed in by the anonymous gray shoulders of the Friends' construction-material huts; and she knew that even if she had the power to blow those huts away she would reveal only a few hundred yards of scratched turf, a ragged edge dangling over immensities. And when she tilted her head back she could see the arc of Jupiter's limb, hanging like an immense wall across the universe.

  The old stones were dwarfed by such grandeur. They seemed pathetic.

  Absurdly she felt a lump rising to her throat. "Damn it," she said gruffly.

  Shira stepped closer and laid her hand on Berg's arm. "What is it, my friend?"

  "You had no right to do it."

  "What?"

  "To hijack these stones! This isn't their place; this isn't where they are meant to be. How could you murder all that history? Even the Qax never touched the stones; you said so yourself."

  "The Qax are an occupying power," Shira murmured. "If they thought it in their interest, they would grind these stones into dust."

  "But they did not," Berg said, her jaw tight. "And one day, with or without you, the Qax will be gone. And the stones would still stand — but for you."

  Shira turned her face up to Jupiter, her bare skull limned in salmon-pink light. "Believe me, we — the Friends — are not without conscience when it comes to such matters. But in the end, the decision was right." She turned to Berg, and Berg was aware of a disturbingly religious, almost irrational aspect to the girl's pale, empty blue eyes.

  "How do you know?" Berg asked heavily.

  "Because," Shira said slowly, as if speaking to a child, "in the end, no harm will have come to the stones."

  Berg stared at her, wondering whether to laugh. "Are you crazy? Shira — you've burrowed under the stones, wrapped a hyperdrive field around them, ripped them off the planet, run them through the gauntlet of the Qax fleet, and thrown them fifteen hundred years back in time! What more can you do to them?"

  Shira smiled, concern returning to her face. "You know I will not reveal our intentions to you. I can't. But I can see you are concerned, and I want you to believe this, with all your heart. When our Project has succeeded, Stonehenge will not have been harmed."

  Berg pulled her arm away from the girl's hand, suddenly afraid. "How is that possible? My God, Shira, what are you people intending to do?"

  But the Friend of Wigner would not reply.

  Chapter 5

  THE FLITTER NESTLED AGAINST THE Spline's stomach lining; small, clawlike clamps extended from the flitters lower hull and embedded themselves in hardened flesh.

  Jasoft Parz, watching the anchoring maneuver from within the flitter, felt his own stomach turn in sympathy.

  He ran rapid tests of the integrity of his environment suit — green-glowing digits scrolled briefly across his wide faceplate — and then, with a nod of his head, caused the flitter's port to sigh open. There was a hiss of equalizing pressure, a breeze that for a few moments shouldered into the cabin, pushing weakly at Parz's chest. Then Parz, with a sigh, unbuckled his restraints and clambered easily out of his chair. Since the last time he'd visited the Governor inside his Spline flagship, back in Earth orbit a full year ago, the AS treatments had done wonders for some of his more obvious ailments, and it was a blessed relief to climb out of a chair without the accompaniment of stabbing agonies in his back.

  Antibody drones had fixed a small, flat platform over the Spline's stomach lining close to the lip of the flitter's port; a compact translator box was fixed to it. Briskly Parz pulled himself out of the flitter and activated electromagnets in the soles of his boots to pin his feet to the platform. Soon he was done, and was able to stand in a reasonably dignified fashion.

  He looked around. The hull of the flitter, resting beside him, was like some undigested morsel in the gut of the Spline. He turned his face up to the ball of boiling fluid suspended above him; alongside it, shimmering in the murky gloom of the Spline gut, was a Virtual of the scene outside — the icosahedral wormhole portal, a sliver of Jupiter itself. "Governor," he said, "it's been a long time."

  The Governor's voice sounded from the translator box, slightly muffled in Parz's ears by the thick air. "Indeed. A full year since the abscondment of those damned Friends of Wigner. A wasted year, as we've struggled to put right the situation. And now we reach the climax, here in the shadow of Jupiter, eh, Parz."

  "I wouldn't say wasted," Parz said smoothly. "The building and launch of the new Interface portals was a great success; I was astonished what rapid progress was made."

  "Thank you for the part you played in that enterprise, Jasoft Parz."

  "My actions weren't for your benefit, in particular."

  "Perhaps not," said the Qax. "But what does your motive avail me, if the result is as I required? I understand that your motive was your personal reward, the AntiSenescence treatment which—"

  "Not just that," Parz said coldly. "I happened to think that the revival of the old exotic-matter industries was a good thing for humans." It had not been without cost, of course. With the single-mindedness available only in a command society, most of the human worlds — Earth, Mars, Luna, Titan — had been transformed into little more than exotic-matter factories, all their resources dedicated to the single goal. But the completion of such a massive project based on purely human technology — even a project instigated by the Qax — had done a great deal for the self-esteem of the race. "After all the damned thing was built and launched within six months, Governor."

  "I understand your pride," the Governor said in its smoothly neutral feminine voice. "And I'm glad to see that time has not withered your outspoken tongue, Ambassador."

  Parz said sourly, "What is
it you understand? Governor, you've underestimated us before, remember. The escape of the Friends—"

  "Must I assuage your pride, Jasoft?" the Governor cut in. "I have invited you here to witness the triumph of our work together."

  And indeed, Parz conceded, the Qax had summoned him here to Jovian space as soon as the first premonitory showers of high-energy particles had begun to erupt from the mouth of the waiting portal... the first portents of an arrival from the future.

  "After all," the Qax went on, "if it were not for the granting of AS treatment to you and a handful of your colleagues — treatment you were not reluctant to accept — you would not be standing here now lecturing me about the awesome potency of the human race. Would you? For you were close to the termination of the usual human life span, were you not?"

  The relaxed contempt brought the blood to Parz's cheeks. "Governor—"

  But the Qax went on impatiently, "Let us abandon this, Ambassador; on this day of days, let us dwell on our achievements together and not our differences."

  Parz took a deep breath of cool, blue human air. "All right, Governor."

  "Your heart must have surged with pride when the new Interface was completed."

  Indeed it had, Parz remembered. At last the mouths of the Solar System's second spacetime wormhole had been threaded with icosahedra of blue-glowing exotic matter. For a few brief, magnificent weeks, the twin portals had sailed together around Jupiter's gravity well, the milky sheets of broken space stretched across the exotic matter frames and glimmering like the facets of mysterious jewels.

  Then had come the time for the removal of one of the portals. A massive GUT-drive vessel had been constructed: hovering over the portals the vessel had looked, Parz remembered, like a human arm, a clenched fist poised over a pair of fragile, blue-gray flowers.

  The ship's huge GUT-drive engines had flared into life, and one of the portals had been hauled away, first on a widening spiral path out of the gravity well of Jupiter, and then away on a shallow arc into interstellar space.

  Parz — like the rest of the human race, and like the Governor and the rest of the Qax Occupation force — had settled down to wait out the six months of the portal's sublight crawl to its destination.

  The first Interface ship, the Cauchy, had taken a century to bridge fifteen hundred years. The new ship took only half a year of subjective time to loop away from Sol and return; but accelerating at multiples of Earth's gravity, it had crossed five centuries into the future.

  Parz was not a scientist, and — despite his close connection to the project — found much of the physics of wormholes philosophically baffling. But as he had traveled to the Jovian system and had gazed on the slowly turning jewel that was the Qax's returned icosahedral portal, the essence of the project had seemed very real to him.

  On the other side of these misty, gray-blue planes was the future. If the Friends of Wigner had gained advantage by escaping into a past in which no Qax had even heard of humankind, what greater advantage could those future Qax wield? Parz reflected ruefully. They had five centuries of hindsight, five centuries in which the outcome of the struggle between Qax and human had surely been decided one way or the other.

  Only a year had passed since the escape of the Friends. Yet already those future Qax had the opportunity to twist events any way they pleased to their own advantage.

  "You are pensive," the Governor said, breaking into his thoughts.

  "I'm sorry."

  "Come," the Qax said, its translator-box voice softly beguiling. "I don't think either of us would describe the other as a friend, Ambassador. But we have worked closely, and — once — grew to be honest with each other. Tell me what concerns you, while we wait on events."

  Parz shrugged. "What an awesome weapon we have delivered into the hands of your successors, five centuries away. Imagine one of the great generals of human history — Bonaparte, for example — able to study, from history texts, the outcome of his greatest battle before even taking the field."

  "There is more than one possibility, Jasoft. Such a general might feel rendered helpless by the weight of historic evidence. Many wars are not decided by strokes of military genius — or by the heroism of a few individuals — but by the tides of history. Or, perhaps, the general might even be stricken with remorse, at the suffering and death his ambition had caused; perhaps he would even work to avert his battle."

  Parz snorted. "Maybe. Although I can't imagine any Qax 'general' feeling much remorse for human victims of a tyranny or a war, regardless of the outcome. When we learned of the escape of the Friends of Wigner, remember that we both felt mistrust at such awesome power being delivered into the hands of any group, regardless of species. Should we not feel such mistrust of these Qax from the future?"

  The Qax laughed softly. "Now perhaps it is you who underestimate us. I am not without admiration for human achievements, baffled though I am sometimes by your motives."

  Jasoft peered through his faceplate at the soft, soapy bubbling of the sea fragment hosting the Governor. "For example?"

  "The craft that bore away our Interface terminal was manned by humans. The vessel was essentially automatic, of course — and certainly immune to any possibility of mutiny by the human crew — but your experience of centuries of spaceflight persuaded me that there is no better guarantee of the success of a human-built ship than the presence aboard her of human engineers, with their ingenuity and adaptability — both physical and mental. And so we needed a human crew."

  "And you found no trouble getting volunteers. Despite the prospects of multiple-gee travel." Parz smiled. "That isn't so surprising, Governor."

  "How so?"

  "Not all humans are the same. We are not all as comfortable with our client-race status as—"

  "As you, for example, Jasoft?"

  "Right." Parz stuck his chin out, feeling his stubbly jowls stretch; he didn't expect the Qax to read the gesture, but the hell with it. "Correct. Not all humans are like me. Some want to get out of the box the Solar System has become, regardless of the cost. When will humans again be allowed to journey beyond the Solar System? And what's life for, but to see, to explore, to wonder? Maybe taking away our AS technology was a mistake for you; maybe the renewed cheapness of our lives — a few, paltry decades and then the endless darkness — has made humans more reckless. Harder to control, eh, Governor?"

  The Governor laughed. "Perhaps. Well, Parz; we should turn to our business. And how do you feel, now that the Interface is about to come into operation?"

  Parz thought back over the long months of waiting after the construction and launch of the Interface. He had maintained a Virtual image of the stationary portal in his quarters throughout that time, listening to endless, baffling commentaries about relativistic time dilation, closed timelike curves, and Cauchy horizons.

  The future Qax must have been expecting the visitation from the past, of course. Perhaps some of the Qax alive in Parz's time would still be conscious and able to remember the launch.

  At last the day of the ship's scheduled return to future Earth — the day on which the portal would begin to function as a time tunnel to the future — had come; and Parz had been joined in his silent vigil beneath Virtuals of the stationary Jovian icosahedron by an unseen congregation of millions. All over the Earth, and through the rest of the Occupied system, humans had watched the twinkling icosahedron with a mixture of fascination and dread.

  Then, at last, the bursts of exotic particles from the wormhole terminus...

  "I guess," Parz said slowly, "I feel something of what Michael Poole, the builder of the first Interface, must have gone through as he waited for his project to come to fruition." But that first Interface project had, as Parz understood it, been initiated in the hope of filching some knowledge from future generations of mankind — and to test out the science of spacetime and exotic physics — and, Parz guessed, for the sheer, exuberant hell of it. A working time machine, in orbit around Jupiter? If you can build i
t, why the hell not?

  Poole must have anticipated the opening of his wormhole with joy. Not feared it, as Parz had done.

  "Yes," the Qax said reflectively. "And now—"

  And now the Virtual image of the icosahedron exploded; darkness flecked with gold rained over Parz and he cried out, curled over on himself, cringing.

  The Governor was silent; in Parz's ears there was only the ragged din of his own breath.

  After long seconds Parz found the will to raise his head. The Virtual of the portal was still there, with the crack of Jovian light alongside it...

  But now, before the portal, hovered a single ship. A bolt of night-darkness, erupted through the blue-gray face of the portal. The surface of the spacetime discontinuity still quivered seconds after the passage, sending distorted echoes of Jupiter's pink glow over the Governor's seething globe of Qax ocean.

  The ship from the future spread wings like a bird's, a hundred miles wide. Night-dark canopies loomed over Parz.

  "I am awed, Qax," Parz said, his voice a whisper.

  "No less I. Parz, the grace of this ship, the use of the sheet-discontinuity drive — all characteristics of Xeelee nightfighter technology."

  Xeelee... Parz felt his fear transmute into almost superstitious horror, that suddenly Xeelee might be made aware of the existence of humanity.

  "But this is a Qax ship, nevertheless," the Governor said. "I have received call signatures... My successors must fare well in the centuries to come, to gain such an access to Xeelee technology."

  "You must be proud," Parz said sourly. His heart still pounded, but already his fear was lapsing into irritation at the Qax's complacency.

  "The wings are actual sheet-discontinuities in spacetime," the Governor babbled on. "Motive power for the ship is provided by a nonlinear shear of spacetime — much as acoustical shock waves will propagate themselves through an atmosphere, once formed. And—"