Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  As Weinbaum spoke, Jophiel was aware of his original glaring at him. Jophiel felt a peculiar resentment. I’m listening. This is my mission, to go deal with Gea, I know, I know. I’m capable of dealing with it, as much as you are. As soon as this is done. Lethe. Have all our Virtual partials been so resentful? I never knew.

  Then, once the standard reports had been delivered, Alice Thomas, sister of Bob, got to her feet. Like most of her crewmates Alice wore a green tetrahedron on her forehead, the Sigil of Free Humanity – another leak from a different history. And she prepared to speak on behalf of the crew’s Second Generation campaign.

  Max Ward was glowering even before she opened her mouth.

  Jophiel suppressed a sigh, and avoided Poole’s gaze.

  The meeting had already seemed very long to Jophiel, in his new role as an outside observer. Maybe the sheer adrenaline rush of being at the centre of events had previously helped him endure the time.

  But he knew too that the somewhat ragged informality of the way the ship was run was a deliberate design – in part his own, in fact. After all, on this ship alone, they were fifty people who would be trapped in a small box for nearly twenty years, even before they got to their destination. Michael Poole was formally the ship’s captain, and such authority as existed derived from him – with Max Ward as second in command. There were formal roles such as navigator, chief engineer, helm, head of comms. Experienced officers had quickly organised the crew into three watches, rotated through each ship’s day, with commanding officers assigned.

  But aside from that the hierarchy was loose. As the years passed the crew were rotated to be trained in different roles, a way to keep their interest up as well as to provide the mission with resilience in case of loss. A kind of bottom-up network of advisory committees had developed to cover different issues, with elaborate rules concerning debate and decision-making. And at reviews like this, all were invited to contribute to the discussion.

  Poole, a little bewildered, had accepted all this, under advice from Nicola among others – and slowly he had started to see the point. If nothing else it was something to do. Alice Thomas had once given him an impassioned talk about the elaborate marriage rules some native Australians had developed in the bush. ‘If the world is empty, you fill your head with culture, with other people . . .’

  And Jophiel, or his template, had seen for himself that the crew were evolving their own culture, with time. Hence the Second Generation movement, who argued that a rule forbidding conception and birth aboard the three GUTships should be abandoned.

  When Alice paused in her summary argument, Poole gave the blunt rebuttal he had drafted earlier: ‘This is a warship, not a crèche.’

  But in response Alice was passionate and logical. ‘Crews of warships or not, we have to stay human. They say that in the lost future, the Exultants beat the Xeelee precisely by staying human. That’s the way they won their war, and it’s how we’ll win ours. And what’s more human than to have a child?’ She glared at Michael Poole, as if challenging him over his own legend.

  Max Ward just glowered throughout, Jophiel observed, like a thunder cloud about to burst. Poole let the discussion continue until it ran out of steam, without resolution.

  The final item on the agenda, every time the crew met, was always the same. This had been Nicola’s idea; Poole, reluctantly accepting her proposal, called it a Testimony. This session it was the turn of Ben Goober, not much more than a kid, a junior officer involved in astronomy and interstellar navigation.

  Now, in a scuffed red jumpsuit, he took the stage, glanced around, dropped his eyes. ‘So,’ he said. Then he straightened up. ‘So,’ he said again, louder. ‘Sorry. I know I mumble.’ Sympathetic laughter. Go for it, Ben. ‘Look – when the Displacement happened, when Earth became Cold Earth, I was only three. I remember a lot of it, I think, but some of that might be stories my family told me after, when I was still a kid.

  ‘My father was American, my mother Japanese. I had a kid sister, a year younger than me. We were out in the sunlight, we lived in Kansas, when the Xeelee attack came. It was the fall, I remember that. We had these huge piles of leaves that I used to love to jump around in, and my sister toddled after me. That was what we were doing that day. When the Xeelee came to Earth. Jumping on the leaves.

  ‘I remember lights in the sky, and a shaking. I thought it must be an earthquake. I wouldn’t have had the words, but I’d seen Virtuals. And my mother had lived through quakes in Japan. I ended up on the floor, and my sister fell back in the leaves.

  ‘My parents came running from the house, I remember that. My mother grabbed me, and my dad dived into the leaves to grab my sister. Another big shake.

  ‘And the lights went out. That’s what I thought, like a power failure. But we were outside. The Sun had gone, of course. My mother was screaming.

  ‘Then there was a really big jolt. A tree, a big old oak in front of the house, came down on the leaf pile.’

  He hesitated. The silence, Jophiel thought, was sympathetic. They were all, save the very youngest, survivors of this terrible trauma. They all had stories to tell, however imperfectly. And, in this forum, one by one they got those stories told.

  ‘I just have fragments after that,’ Goober said. ‘My parents kept me away from the worst of it. In a couple of days we were in a big town shelter, before the cold came. I remember my mother brushing the dirt off my sister’s face before we went into that shelter. Got to look your best, you see. I remember how lousy it got in that shelter. Everybody got cold and hungry and scared, and then angry, bitter and jealous.

  ‘And I remember how my mother was upset that the ihai, the tablets of her dead ancestors, were lost. A thousand years of continuity, for her, swept away just like that. I think she felt as helpless as an orphan herself. She died soon after. After my sister helped run the underground township that grew out of that shelter, and a couple of others. And I – well, I ended up here.’ He smiled, uncomfortable.

  Michael Poole clapped him on the shoulder.

  With the meeting over Weinbaum Grantt, the Virtual projection from Gea, approached Jophiel. ‘You, I mean Michael, asked me to remind you. Are you ready to come over to the Gea?’

  He sighed. ‘Call me Jophiel. Sure. It’s why I exist.’

  ‘You’re leaving?’ Nicola hurried over, and drew Jophiel aside. ‘Wait,’ she said softly. ‘I have something for you.’ She dug in a pocket. ‘Hold your hand out.’

  Bemused, Jophiel obeyed.

  She held up a kind of pendant: a small, grass-green tetrahedron on the end of a broken line. She dropped it; in the one-gravity thrust regime of the Cauchy, it fell.

  Without thinking Jophiel grasped at it – he expected his Virtual fingers to close on nothing, a sting of consistency-protocol violation – but he found the tetrahedron settling into his palm, cool, heavy.

  She grinned. ‘You’re not the only one who can pull Virtual stunts.’

  ‘The amulet. The real thing—’

  ‘Michael has it safe, here on the Cauchy.’

  He looked again at the amulet. ‘Reality leaks,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Just something I overheard.’

  ‘Look, I’m following orders. For once. Ward and Poole told me to give you a panic button. If you need to break out of there—’

  ‘Why would I need that?’

  She glanced over at Weinbaum, who was talking to a crew member. ‘How in Lethe would I know? That’s the point, isn’t it? Something odd is going on over there, on the Gea. So, be prepared. For me, OK?’

  Jophiel hesitated. He, or his template, was as close to Nicola Emry as he had been to anybody – save maybe Miriam Berg, who had stayed in the Solar System and was now separated from him by light years and centuries, if she still lived at all. He had always had a combative relationship with Nicola. Yet here she was, followi
ng him – or his template anyhow – to the stars. And here she was now, looking out for him.

  ‘You’re staring, Poole.’

  He grinned, rueful. ‘You always did make me think.’

  ‘That’s my job.’

  The moment passed. He tucked the amulet into a pocket of his own, and they walked back to Weinbaum.

  Nicola said loudly, ‘I never understood why there can’t be a physical inspection of the Gea anyhow.’

  Weinbaum smiled. ‘Well, there is a logic. A processing suite of that capacity – not to mention some pretty delicate observation instruments – needs stillness, stability, calm. So no flesh-and-blood people, no big heavy sacks of water moving around, breathing in, breathing out. You should hear my sister and the other officers complain.’

  ‘So,’ Jophiel asked. ‘How do we do this?’

  ‘It’s easy,’ Weinbaum said, and reached out to him.

  Jophiel took his hand, Virtual palm to Virtual palm. The flesh felt real and warm.

  The Cauchy dissolved around them.

  4

  The central purpose of Gea was the collection and processing of data.

  From his earliest sketches of his quixotic millennia-long mission to the Galactic Core, Michael Poole had always been aware of his own, and humanity’s, profound ignorance about the Xeelee, both the assumed individual and its species. He’d had no clear idea of how he would confront the Xeelee when he finally tracked it to its presumed lair at the centre of the Galaxy.

  Even that final destination was a matter of guesswork. The Xeelee had been observed apparently heading that way after it had left for the stars, leaving behind machines and client species, its Cages and its Dust Plague, to continue the work of grinding the worlds of the Solar System to drifting dust – but then it had vanished, evidently with the use of a faster-than-light hyperdrive of unknown principles. Such experts as there were on the Xeelee – scientists like Highsmith Marsden on Gallia Three, students of arcane knowledge like Michael’s own mother Muriel – guessed that as the Xeelee appeared to be a relic of the very earliest epochs of the universe, a time when spacetime itself had been a twisted, unhealed thing, that the Xeelee might head for the nearest major spacetime flaw: the axle of the Galaxy itself, the supermassive black hole at the very centre.

  Where, perhaps, it was going to build some tremendous artefact, suspected Michael Poole, student of the amulet.

  So it was theorised. Nobody knew. All that was known about the invading Xeelee itself had been gathered from a few exploratory expeditions to the locations it had haunted in the Solar System, and an inspection of its artefacts, such as the Cache, a weapons factory the size of a small moon.

  ‘All of which tells us about as much about the nature of the Xeelee as the study of an exit wound in a corpse would tell you about the nature of the gun that fired the bullet,’ Highsmith Marsden had once said.

  Jophiel did know that it was at least possible in principle to hurt a Xeelee. It was believed that Highsmith Marsden’s most successful development, based on weaponised magnetic monopoles, had indeed harmed the Xeelee in the Solar System before it had fled – and perhaps that was why it had fled.

  And Jophiel knew too that it was at least theoretically possible for humans to track the Xeelee to its lair at the Core, and beat it. Because, in a vanished future, humans had achieved precisely that.

  The so-called Exultants, though, had evidently fought their war over millennia and had had the resources of a human Galaxy behind them. Michael Poole would have only a handful of ships, a handful of people – just that, and knowledge, whatever could be learned about the Xeelee, and the wider universe of which the species was a part.

  And that was why the Gea had been designed as it was: as a platform dedicated to gathering and assimilating data, as the flotilla crossed spaces never before visited by humankind. On the Cauchy and the Island, people were preparing to fight a war. On the Gea their colleagues were learning how to fight. That, at least, was the plan.

  The trouble was, the Gea was drifting off-mission.

  When he materialised inside the Gea, Jophiel found himself facing Flammarion Grantt.

  Facing her, and standing alongside a sleeper bank.

  Pods like coffins, twenty of them, of a white ceramic-like material, each vaguely moulded to the shape of the inert human body it contained, stacked up in an arrangement that had always reminded Jophiel (or his template) of the catacombs beneath ancient Rome. These caskets contained the bodies, not of the dead, but of the sleeping human crew: templates for the Virtuals of Gea’s active crew, including Flammarion, Weinbaum’s sister, and Weinbaum himself.

  Flammarion, stepdaughter of Jack Grantt, champion of native life forms on Mars, had been twenty-two years old when the Gea and the rest of the fleet had left Cold Earth. So physically she was in her late twenties now. An officer where Weinbaum was crew, she wore a black jumpsuit with silver piping, a design based on the standard garb of the Stewards, the small group of powerful and generally benevolent individuals who, under Harry Poole, had governed humanity through the crisis of Cold Earth. On the Cauchy and Island the design had soon been vetoed by Ward in favour of the more practical and highly visible scarlet and blue. But, Jophiel reflected, on a ship full of Virtual people such colour-coding was not necessary.

  In this Virtual form Flammarion was ageless – but in fact, with her delicate features and brushed-back blond hair, she might have been much older, Jophiel thought, though he wasn’t sure what instinct was giving him that impression. Was she too perfect – that simulated face too symmetrical to be truly convincing? And he thought there was a vividness about her representation, almost as if her outline were marked by a solid line. As if she were more real than the physical background. More dense with information . . .

  ‘Mr Poole? Michael?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Daydreaming. Perhaps I’m a little disconcerted by the transition.’

  She held out a hand, which he grasped, Virtual flesh against Virtual flesh, utterly convincing.

  ‘It’s always good to see you again, Michael. I often think of your visit to Chiron, after the Displacement. Life was somewhat simpler for me then.’

  ‘And for us all.’ He released her hand. ‘But call me Jophiel.’

  She frowned at that. ‘If you wish.’

  ‘It goes against protocol, I know. The process of my projection was, umm, flawed.’

  ‘If you like we could reprogram—’

  ‘And fix me? No thanks. I’m confident I can do the job I, my original, tasked me with. Which is to explore the situation here.’

  And, thinking of that, he tried to touch the carapace of a sleep coffin close to hand. Unlike the quasi-reality of his contact with Flammarion, his fingers crumbled to pixels with a sharp pain.

  Flammarion frowned. ‘Why did you do that? You gave yourself unnecessary discomfort.’

  ‘Just checking to see what’s real and what’s not.’

  She considered that. With that simple gesture he’d meant to send her a signal that he was here for a serious purpose, to ask tough questions, and that seemed to have got through.

  In response, she began to deliver what seemed to him a pre-rehearsed formal report, or anyhow a summary.

  ‘I brought you here first, to the sleeper bank, as I imagined the status of the flesh-and-blood crew would be your priority. There are twenty of us, as you know – including myself, or rather my template. The Virtuals we project, of officers and crew, are by design limited in duration to forty ship days. At any moment only a few human crew, three or four, are awake enough to project new Virtuals: replacements, synced, refreshed and motivated to replace the old.’

  ‘Only three or four at a time?’

  ‘That is all that is necessary. Individual crew will throw off more than one Virtual, if a particular aptitude or function is desired. Or sometimes we will call up
copies from backup store.’

  ‘Multiple copies of individuals, then.’

  ‘It’s not a problem. We don’t use variant names, as you evidently have, but we have coding systems of other kinds. Of the cadre Flammarion Grantt, my registration is—’

  He held up a hand. ‘I’m sure it’s all very logical.’

  ‘And by having only a few physical humans moving at any one time, we can minimise the momentum jolts suffered by the ship as a whole.’

  ‘Which is also why you banned physical transfers between the ships.’ He knew the theory – he had designed it – but still the practical realisation of it was startling. ‘We’re on a thousand-tonne starship sailing at close to the speed of light. And one human taking a jog around the lifedome perimeter can really disturb the stability you require?’

  ‘It’s not just the processing suites. We are an instrument platform too. We seek evanescent traces, Jophiel: dark matter and neutrinos, the subtle infrastructure of the cosmos. Imagine a neutrino, which could pass unhindered through a light year of lead, being perturbed by a clump of dark matter, which itself interacts with normal matter only through gravity . . . And we must track that deflection.

  ‘We’re trying to map the dark matter, for example. Its distribution around the Galaxy: it makes up most of the Galaxy’s bulk by mass but is entirely invisible to human eyes. A thin sheet of it lies within the plane of the Galaxy itself, the spiral arms. That much is well known. But now, beyond, in the halo, we are observing huge, tangled towers . . .’