Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  ‘Or a pterosaur? Those wings are supported by much-evolved finger bones. Evolution here is more Lamarckian than Darwinian. What one wishes to become, one becomes.’

  ‘“One”? Who was that?’

  ‘You know him. That’s why I brought you here. His name is Tim Thomas.’

  ‘Timothy. From Mars.’

  ‘You saved his life, or Michael did. His siblings serve aboard the Cauchy, of course. Alice and Bob. He came here, applied to be an officer. He was one of the first to spin up. And he has gone much further than most of us have dared, yet.’ She smiled, rueful. ‘You come here accusing me, at least implicitly, of a dereliction of duty. For not filing reports on engine malfunctions. Yet I have stayed loyal, stayed snagged in slow time. I could have had this!’

  ‘But what is this? What will you become? A bunch of old machines, growing older and older, their memories becoming more and more clogged . . . I’ve known elderly artificial sentiences – elderly Virtuals, even. The Gea who the ship was named for. She would tell you how it was to grow old. Centuries of reprogramming and debugging, and viruses and worms and hacking. To become a thing of patches and fixes and multiple repurposing. You won’t reach transcendence, a Virtual heaven. You’ll just be a bunch of old machines, cranky and rusting—’

  ‘I’ve heard enough.’

  He raised a hand. ‘Wait. Before you shut me down, and take another backup copy from store, and start me over again. That’s what you’ve been doing, isn’t it? Running me through this programme of explanation and indoctrination, and using what you observe to refine the next iteration, and the next . . . How many times? How many?’

  ‘Do you really want to know?’

  ‘Tell me what you want of me.’

  She shrugged. ‘You’ve seen our vision. We have our own goals now. We need to stop any interference from the rest of the flotilla. That was to be your role, once you understood. To protect us.’

  ‘And you were prepared to dispose of me – I mean, copy after copy of me, to achieve that goal.’ He suppressed a shudder. All those little deaths. ‘Until you evolved a copy that was fit for your purpose.’

  ‘If you want to put it like that.’

  He tried to think his way through this. ‘But you haven’t abandoned the nominal mission yet, have you? You are still gathering data, still interpreting. Tell me one thing before we finish this . . . You mentioned interesting data you’ve recovered, when I first came over. What kind of data?’

  She smiled. ‘Signals.’

  ‘Signals?’

  ‘Coherent data. Streams of it, from multiple sources. Electromagnetic and neutrino. And some muddled gravitational-wave data too. Actually, and this is speculation, we think there may be some kind of faster-than-light relays involved. We see causal connections between signals coming from widely separated secondary sources . . . Too fast for light to pass, you see. And we think it’s all emanating from a star more or less in our path, eight hundred light years further out.’

  ‘What star?’

  ‘It only has a catalogue reference. Ben Goober, of the Cauchy crew, first detected the signals, actually, during a sweep of our data. We’re calling it Goober’s Star.’

  ‘Coherent signals. Like what? Xeelee? Like the Wormhole Ghost?’

  She smiled. ‘Human. Or at least, fragments of human coding embedded in apparently alien sequences. Like quotations, maybe, in reports, analyses.’

  He thought that over. ‘That’s impossible. No scattership came out as far and fast as us. No Outrigger can have come so far. And any signal from this star you describe would have needed another eight hundred years to come back this far. Eight hundred years ago no human had even left the Solar System.’

  ‘That’s all true, and the existence of the messages is paradoxical, if you are restricted to lightspeed. I told you, we think faster-than-light technology is in the loop.’

  He tried to take all this in. ‘An alien signal, with some kind of human element. Hints of FTL technology. What a mystery. And you’d turn your back on it—’ He waved a hand. ‘For this theatre?’

  She shrugged. ‘We must all make our choices.’

  ‘So. The end game? You’ve sat through these scenes, repeating the very words you speak to me, over and again. I bet this is a technique you developed to deal with crew you had trouble with. And with each successive iteration you worked on my trauma triggers, as you discovered them, didn’t you? The irruption of the Xeelee. The Displacement of Earth. And—’

  ‘Eternity. Entropy. The death of all thought.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. What I think, though, is that you got that one wrong. I think my earlier copies have been fooling you. Manipulating the conversation for their own ends. And sending a subtle message to me.’

  For the first time since he’d met her, Flammarion looked alarmed. As if she might be losing control. ‘What message?’

  ‘The Pooles have an archive. Full of spooky, reality-leak stuff you don’t want to know about. It does deal with hints about the future – the far future. But we don’t speak of eternity.’

  ‘If not eternity, then what?’

  ‘Timelike infinity.’

  And as he said the phrase, the amulet congealed in his hand.

  Flammarion looked furious. She didn’t move, didn’t make so much as a gesture, said nothing. But still Jophiel had the sense she was trying to have him closed down, rebooted again back to some ignorant backup. Evidently she could not.

  ‘Maybe I have my original to thank. I should have known he, I, would build in some kind of last-resort code to get me out of jail in a setup like this.’

  ‘So what will you do now?’

  ‘What do you think? Shut you down. Repurpose Gea to its proper mission.’

  ‘And then?’ She sneered. ‘Will you fold yourself back into your template? Will you follow his dreams?’

  He stared at her. ‘Good question,’ he conceded.

  The butterfly-thing wheeled overhead, high in the star-cluttered sky. It gave an eerie wail. Desolating, Poole thought.

  Goober’s Star, though. A human signal. What could be going on there?

  He clutched the amulet. ‘Nicola, get me out of this asylum.’

  8

  Twenty-four hours later – ordinary, wet-human-pace hours – Jophiel Poole walked with Nicola Emry over a parkland of healthy green grass.

  Somewhere a chicken clucked.

  He looked up at a blue sky, scattered cloud. A low morning sun – apparently. He was looking at simulations projected by the smart lifedome of this GUTship, the third sister ship of the flotilla, alongside Cauchy and Gea. Island, the greenship. ‘If you think about it,’ he said, ‘all this is no more “real” than what Flammarion Grantt put me through over on Gea.’

  ‘That chicken was real. Sounded annoyed. Maybe an egg got stuck.’

  ‘You know what I mean. That’s all fake. The sky beyond the dome is actually velocity-aberration darkness. The sunlight you think you feel on your face is just reprocessed GUTdrive energy. That soft breeze is driven by the air conditioning.’

  She shrugged. ‘So everything is faked – or at least not authentic, natural. Since you froze Earth, environments like this no longer exist anywhere naturally. But some of this is real.’ She poked at the turf with a booted toe, displacing the grass and revealing rich black loam beneath. ‘The grass doesn’t know it’s not supposed to be here. Takes a lot of work, of course. You ought to take a look at the soil printers they have on this tub some time. Robot earthworms, tunnelling away.’ She looked around, nodded towards a bunch of crew in grimy red coveralls working at the roots of a copse of young alders. ‘Remember when we set up the mission, how Max Ward kept pushing for the Island to be another Cauchy? A dedicated warship, a weapons platform. Instead of this, a slice of Earth. A green refuge. The man just doesn’t get it. Lethe knows I’m not sentimental,
but we’re all going to have to stay sane for twenty ship years before we even reach the Galaxy centre. We needed one greenship in the convoy.’

  Jophiel grunted. ‘Reminds us of what we’re fighting for.’

  ‘Right. Which is why Michael fought for a greenship in the mission design.’ She was studying him with the disturbingly analytical manner she so frequently seemed to adopt. ‘For all you, or anyhow your template, were always a brat engineer, you’ve got a deep tie to the mother planet. Haven’t you? You’re no one-dimensional warlord, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Is that a good thing?’

  ‘I think you sympathise with Alice and the rest, over their chances of raising kids. And I think you’re drawn by those human traces the Gea found at Goober’s Star. You may be more human than your template, Jophiel, just a little bit . . . You are differing from him more and more. I mean, that’s what those Virtual monsters in Gea picked up, and used against you. The Xeelee irrupting out of a stretch of parkland just like this—’

  ‘Central Park, actually. Childhood memory. Would you believe, Harry took me there to fly kites?’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like Harry.’

  ‘It’s true, though. Kites so over-engineered they could barely get off the ground.’ Michael Poole walked up to them, grinning – a somewhat forced expression, Jophiel thought, studying this mildly divergent copy of his own face. Michael was in his bright red jumpsuit, Jophiel properly adorned in a copy’s blue. ‘Harry would let us – sorry, me – fail for a bit. Then he’d just take over, and do it himself.’

  Nicola snorted. ‘That sounds like Harry.’

  Michael faced Jophiel. ‘We have to proceed with the trial of the Gea officers. We’ve extracted Flammarion Grantt, or her current copy, as a representative of—’

  ‘Trial?’ Nicola glared. ‘Who said anything about a trial?’

  ‘Max Ward, for one. Ship’s rules allow it. Arguably they mandate it, but we never figured it would come to this. Call it a special crew review if you want. We clearly have to normalise the situation.’

  ‘Normalise.’ Nicola laughed softly. ‘What in Lethe is ever going to be “normal” again?’

  Michael glared at her. ‘You’re not helping. Look, Jophiel, we need to collapse your Virtual projection before we begin the review. You know that’s the protocol. I’ve – we’ve – done it many times before . . . It’s time.’

  Jophiel knew that. After all, he shared all Poole’s memories – all the way back through dozens of projections before. But now it was his turn. The infolding of his memories into the original, the loss of his identity. Had those other copies, any of them, fought to stay independent – to stay, in whatever sense, alive?

  I want to live, he realised, with a sharp, stabbing awareness.

  Shocked, he tried to analyse the feeling. Was it some echo of any living thing’s brutish desire for survival – to survive for one more day, hour, second of awareness before the darkness? Was it a relic of the multiple little deaths he must have suffered on the Gea? Or was it simply that he did not want to dissolve back into the murky lake of this man’s personality, from which he felt increasingly repelled?

  Michael Poole was watching him. ‘Is there some problem?’

  Jophiel hesitated. Michael was the template and was in complete control here. He could end Jophiel’s existence with a single vocal command. It was what Jophiel himself would have done. Once.

  Nicola was looking on, probably guessing what he was thinking. He sensed what her advice would be. Play for time.

  ‘We don’t need to collapse yet,’ Jophiel said. ‘And it may be best not to. Let the review get under way.’

  Poole frowned. ‘But the protocol—’

  ‘This is an unusual situation. A kind of mutiny. And, of the Cauchy officers, I was the one who saw the Gea, reported back—’

  ‘Yes. You had direct experience,’ Nicola said quickly. ‘They tortured you. That’s what that amounted to, the repeated revival from backups. You need to recount that, first hand. You always did lack imagination, Poole. It’s a better show if you put the bleeding victim on the stand, instead of giving some kind of mish-mash second-hand report yourself.’

  Now it was Jophiel’s turn to give her a look. Maybe she was pushing too hard.

  Michael Poole looked confused, but said at last, ‘I – it’s unprecedented. But I can see how it might work.’ Still he hesitated.

  Jophiel didn’t dare say anything else.

  The moment stretched.

  At last Poole shrugged. ‘Benefit of the doubt. Let’s do it.’

  Nicola grinned. ‘I’ll call the crew together.’ And as Poole turned away, she leaned over to Jophiel. ‘You owe me.’

  ‘And you’ll never let me forget it, will you?’

  ‘You know me so well.’

  9

  The trial of Flammarion Grantt was to take place in the Island’s amphitheatre, open under the greenship’s ‘sky’, built to accommodate all fifty of the ship’s crew.

  Today, Jophiel saw as he approached, the space was packed. Jophiel guessed there were eighty, maybe ninety here, in a mix of red and blue uniforms, sitting, standing. They were the awake crew of the Island, joined by Virtual projections of the Cauchy crew: most of the mission’s complement, in fact.

  Max Ward and Michael Poole were here in person, – they were standing together, talking – and of course Nicola, who would only use the wormholes to cross between the ships, affecting to despise the whole practice of casting off short-lived Virtual partials. A point of view with which, ironically, Jophiel now had a lot more sympathy.

  He spotted Alice Thomas, champion of the Second Generation movement. Sitting in a huddle of whispers with her companions, she looked particularly agitated, he thought.

  There was some kind of undercurrent here, Jophiel suspected, affecting the crews of both ships. Beyond the Gea crisis, beyond the Second Generation campaign. He wondered if his template had picked up on such subtleties. The day might turn out to be more complicated than Michael Poole imagined.

  Meanwhile, at the centre of it all, unmoving, Flammarion Grantt was standing alone. Or at least an avatar of her. Waiting for her trial to start.

  At last Michael Poole broke from Max and walked diffidently into the amphitheatre, data slate in hand. Jophiel felt a flicker of sympathy; this man was him, more or less, and he knew how uncomfortable Poole had always felt at being the centre of attention. Max Ward followed him, by contrast marching briskly down to the arena floor.

  The crew were all staring.

  And Nicola, in the front row, was grinning, clearly enjoying herself hugely.

  ‘Let’s get this done,’ Poole said grimly. He faced Flammarion. ‘You know why you’re here, Flammarion. You and your colleagues betrayed the mission – simple as that. You failed in the objectives you were set regarding Gea’s core functions as a monitoring and data-processing platform. In fact you diverted mission resources into generating the artificial environment you call Officer Country. A selfish playroom which—’

  ‘Selfish? It can be opened to all, Virtual or not. I’m well aware of the energy cost, but we have the resources, if we choose to use them. And the richness of the experience—’

  Ward snarled. ‘We’re here to discuss mission goals. Not your self-indulgence.’

  Flammarion seemed quite composed. She took one step, two, on the roughly panelled floor of the amphitheatre. In places there were gaps, where grass grew. She went down on one knee, and brushed her fingers through a clump of grass. Pixels sparkled. ‘You speak of goals. What have these blades of grass got to do with your goals? Here we are, suspended in space. Four hundred light years from what used to be home. Oh, I know we have our great objective of smiting the Xeelee in its lair – if we get there, if we find it, if it doesn’t smite us first. But . . .’ She glanced around, picked out a group of crew, dresse
d in grimy coveralls, who had evidently been working in the dirt of this park-like ecohab. ‘What are your goals? When you start a watch, when you wake up, when you see that artificial Sun rise in the lifedome sky, what do you plan for your day? Isn’t it about how you will tend your crops and plants, and the rabbits and chickens? And the rats you have to chase?’ Laughter at that. ‘Rats, in interstellar space. Well, they followed us everywhere else.

  ‘You see, we are in interstellar space, too. And we’re alive, like the rats. Trying to find a way to live. Me, too! And living things evolve, change, adapt to circumstances. Even such circumstances as this. In Officer Country I nurture an oak tree – a Martian oak, of the kind I grew up with. You can say it’s nothing but processing and pixels, but it’s as alive as I am, as many of you are. We may be stranded in space. But there is so much more we can do with our lives than – what? What would you have us do all day, Max? Astrogation and military training?’

  Ward glared at Poole. ‘I don’t know why you’re even letting this woman speak.’

  Before Poole could reply, Nicola called out, ‘Because we’re listening. All of us.’

  A rumble of assent to that.

  Now Alice Thomas stood up. ‘And she has a point. About other objectives than just planning to wage a war. This is the argument of the Second Generation group too. Michael, we followed you out here. You inspired us.’ She touched the tetrahedral tattoo on her own forehead. ‘You know I’ll always be grateful to you for saving my life, on Mars. You were a hero then; you’re a hero now. But – look, we were all in shock. The whole human race, maybe. We had lost everything, our worlds, even the sunlight. We needed leadership, then. You and your father gave us the Scattering, Michael, and then this mission. But now – well, here we are, six years later, and I think we’re learning how to live again. Michael, with all respect – what you have is your desire for revenge. And it’s not enough. Not for us. Even if the war is our ultimate destiny, and we accept that, now is a time for living. For nurturing life – like the parkland of Island, and the children we could raise—’