Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  They passed through what seemed long passageways – all human-habitable – to arrive at a large central chamber.

  This white-walled room, roughly spherical, contained stacks of pods.

  Jophiel took a closer look. Each pod was a fat ovoid of a grey-white material. Like thick lenses, laid flat, each perhaps six metres across. There were many of these, Jophiel estimated a few dozen, held in racks of what looked like fine silver wire – typical Ghost cabling, he supposed.

  Nicola was interested in their reaction. ‘One of my chores has been to tend these – pods. To stack them up when they’re filled with samples and collected. Take them down for maintenance. I’m pretty manoeuvrable, you see, flexible. Super-human, in some ways. Good at that kind of stuff. And I took a chance for a closer look. I’m not sure if the Ghosts themselves are aware of how much I see, now. What do you make of it?’

  ‘Reminds me of our own sleeper bays,’ Asher said. ‘The pods, stacked up like this. Sealed and silent.’

  ‘Not a bad comparison,’ Nicola said.

  ‘And the pods themselves,’ Jophiel said. The material of the pods, a pale grey, was a subtly different shade from the walls. ‘These are made of hull plate,’ he guessed. ‘Xeelee hull plate.’

  Asher nodded, and brushed one pod with a gloved hand, tentatively. ‘Certainly looks like it. I could confirm—’

  ‘No need,’ Nicola said. ‘I saw some of these shells being – grown. Once you have starlight and a Xeelee flower, with a little skill to the shaping as it grows you can make anything. The Ghosts are masters of the stuff, even if they are as much in awe of the Xeelee as we are.’

  ‘And inside these pods? You said the Ghosts were collecting samples. Of what? Have you seen one opened?’

  She shook her head. ‘Don’t need to. I can see inside – see through hull plate.’ She turned to the pods with those silvered eyes. ‘I told you. The Ghosts gave me senses beyond the human. Another ambiguous gift. And the stuff inside these pods would be invisible to you, but not to me. I can see them. Lying inside these pods . . .’ She raised her silvered face, as if to a sky. ‘And more of them out in the Galaxy. Gathered in a thick plane in the disc, like a bank of mist – and huge, shining structures out in the halo. Tangled towers.’

  Asher evidently recognised the descriptions. She said, a little wildly, ‘Dark matter? Are you seeing dark matter? That sounds like the observations the Gea crew reported, before the mutiny. But they had super-capable neutrino telescopes, and other gear. How is it even possible for you to just see it?’

  Nicola shrugged. ‘Ask the Ghosts. I think I must be “seeing” gravity waves, somehow . . . or possibly hearing them. The frequencies are about right, aren’t they? Seems a minor miracle compared to the hyperdrive, for instance. But, yes, they can see dark matter. And now, so can I.’ She looked at Jophiel. ‘Which ought to give you a clue about what they’ve got in those pods, Poole.’

  He thought it over. ‘Lethe. You’re talking about what we found in the Sun. Above the fusing core, those big dark-matter forms.’

  She seemed to smile. ‘Like a school of fish, you said.’

  ‘So I did. Lenses of dark matter, swimming in the heart of the Sun. Schools of photino fish. But they were bigger – much bigger – fifty metres across, more?’

  Nicola shrugged. ‘So, when the Ghosts went trawling in the heart of this star, the way we did in Sol, they brought back samples. But small fry. Literally, maybe. The youngest.’

  ‘Why? Why capture dark-matter creatures?’

  ‘For the same reason they captured humans. Curiosity. Not scientific curiosity, though, as we understand it. Not abstract . . .’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Susan Chen figured out a lot of it. Well, she had the time. The Ghosts obsess about the nature of the universe, and their place in it. Remember their origin: the failed star, the frozen world? Once, when we lived on an apparently infinite, eternally fecund Earth, we humans believed that the universe was designed to nurture us. The Ghosts evolved believing the universe had already tried to kill them, at least once. So they want to understand how it works, to stop that happening again. And they want to anticipate any threat before it gets too big to handle.’

  ‘Any threat,’ Jophiel mused.

  ‘Yes. Such as the Xeelee. And the dark-matter creatures in the stars.’

  Asher nodded, caught up in the argument. ‘Yes. She’s right. Remember, we never really got to finish the studies you began by exploring the dark-matter schools in the Sun; we got overwhelmed by the Xeelee . . . It was clear, though, that the presence of the dark-matter fish was affecting the evolution of the Sun itself – dampening its fusion processes, possibly, by redistributing heat.’

  ‘And,’ Nicola said, ‘if it’s affecting the Sun that way, there’s every reason to suppose that the same – umm, blight – might be affecting many more stars. Every star in the Galaxy, maybe. Who knows?’

  ‘In that case, no wonder they’re here,’ Asher said. ‘The Ghosts. Because this system is far from usual. Because here you have the Xeelee and the dark-matter creatures, those two threat factors somehow interacting. All of which must be somehow connected to the Ghosts’ apparent meddling with the star itself. Which I’ve yet to understand, though we’ve had plenty of clues that they are doing just that.’

  Nicola was staring at Jophiel, with eerily unblinking metallic eyes. It was the eyes above all, he thought uneasily, that made her seem inhuman. ‘And you know why it’s here, Jophiel. It’s about another threat factor, for the Ghosts. It’s—’

  ‘It is because of you, Poole.’

  A Ghost had materialised behind them all.

  Jophiel whirled, startled.

  All Ghosts looked alike. This one had sounded like the Ambassador; that might mean nothing. Its tone, as always, was flat, without inflection. Like a badly read script.

  The Ghost said now, ‘We learned so much from our analysis of the data presented by the lost creature you called the Wormhole Ghost. There are many threats we have faced, from the primordial Star Destroyer, to the Galaxy-wide dark-matter stellar infestation, to the works of the Xeelee.’

  Jophiel stole a glance at Asher. The Galaxy-wide dark-matter stellar infestation. There it was, confirmed in a casual phrase, this universal canker, in, presumably, every star.

  ‘But only you, Poole, or your alternates, have inspired a war that led to our extinction, in one timeline at least. So we sought to understand this, to understand your kind. And of all of fleeing humanity, we are lucky to have lured Michael Poole himself here. An avatar, at least.

  ‘And as for our meddling with the star, as you call it – come. Let me show you what we intend. Even you, Poole, might be impressed at the scale of our ambition.’

  A doorway opened behind it. The Ghost drifted out. The three of them followed it along a short tunnel, paddling through microgravity along the walls.

  Followed the Ghost, into a chamber full of troubled sunlight.

  21

  The face of Goober’s Star, twisted and torn by convulsing magnetic fields, was an ocean of light that filled one apparently transparent wall of this chamber. What were evidently instruments or data recorders cluttered the room: enigmatic Ghost technology, a mass of silver baubles and string. But there were no Ghosts working here.

  And now a metallic spheroid shot into view, apparently coming from directly beneath Jophiel’s own position, hurtling down towards the surface of the star. Another of those ‘bombs’. Jophiel almost expected the frame of the craft to shudder from the recoil.

  As they watched, the sphere diminished to a point before disappearing against the starscape.

  The Ghost rolled, silent.

  Jophiel asked, ‘What are you doing here, Ghost?’

  ‘It is difficult to explain. I mean, to explain to you.’ It paused. ‘Tell me what you believe, or have guesse
d, and I will tell you what you have got wrong.’

  Nicola laughed, a gruesome sound. ‘Doesn’t this remind you of Highsmith Marsden, Poole? All those lectures on Gallia Three?’

  ‘We think,’ said Asher heavily, ‘or at least I think, that you are inducing what we would call a nova event. You know what I mean by that?’

  ‘We have the knowledge contained in your ships’ libraries. Yes, I know what that means to you.’

  ‘We’ve never observed a nova. I mean, not close to. We had never left our System before the Xeelee came, never even sent a probe to a potential nova. But I think I recognised the preliminary symptoms, the instabilities, the massive flares—’

  Jophiel cut in, ‘Are you causing this? Deliberately destabilising this star?’

  ‘Yes. We are destabilising the star.’

  That bland admission chilled Jophiel, the way all of their theorising so far had failed to. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Very well. Why would you do that?’

  ‘We are studying the dark-matter creatures, which infest all the stars. As you have deduced. We have captured samples. Now we want to see what happens when they are put under stress. Will they flee this troubled star? Will they try to stabilise it, to save it? And the Xeelee are watching, of course. You yourselves have explored their monitoring positions on Goober c. Their reaction, if any, will be instructive too.’

  Nicola said heavily, ‘The Ghosts are pursuing long-term objectives here. I think, in their bleak, logical way, they see a future in which the last of them will huddle around the last healthy star. And then, you see, it will pay for them to have developed weapons to drive out the photino fish and other interlopers.’

  ‘Luridly put,’ the Ghost said. ‘But essentially correct.’

  ‘Well, I’m an engineer,’ Jophiel said. ‘And I’m a lot more interested in how they’re doing this. Asher, you said that in a typical nova event, a companion star would dump about a ten-thousandth part of the target star’s mass onto its surface before the debris layer was thick enough to trigger fusion. Correct?’

  She nodded.

  Jophiel gestured at the star. ‘Goober has around the same mass as our Sun. One ten-thousandth of that is around the mass of Uranus or Neptune – of a giant planet. How are you going to deliver such a mass to the surface?’

  ‘We aren’t,’ the Ghost said blandly. ‘We take a slice of the photosphere – the star’s visible upper surface. A slice a few hundred metres thick, from a photosphere a few hundred kilometres thick . . .’

  Asher was working sums in her head, Jophiel could see. ‘That would give you only about a billionth of the mass that you would need.’

  ‘True. So what we do is to increase the weight of that layer. By a factor of a billion. That will induce the necessary fusion-inducing compression, you see.’

  Asher said, ‘And I admit I’m lost. Weight is mass times gravity. How do you increase the weight without adding mass?’

  ‘By increasing gravity,’ the Ghost said patiently. ‘Locally.’

  It was as if it was speaking to an earnest but limited child, Jophiel thought, irritated. ‘Fine. How will you do that?’

  ‘By changing the laws of physics.’

  The humans just stared.

  ‘And how will you do that?’

  ‘Using quagma phantoms, actually.’

  The principle turned out to be simple. The practice, Jophiel the engineer noted ruefully, was somewhat more challenging.

  It was all about the birth of the universe.

  In the very first moments after the Big Bang – when the universe was not yet even as old as the Planck time, the characteristic time of quantum uncertainty, less than one ten-millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second – the cosmos was a simple place, as well as a very small one. Even the forces of physics did not yet exist. Or rather, the four forces – gravity, electromagnetic, and the two nuclear forces – had not yet separated out of a primordial superforce. Jophiel remembered that Highsmith Marsden had hypothesised that this was the moment in which the seeds of the creatures that would become the Xeelee had been born, in the twisted spacetime that had prevailed in that brief epoch.

  It could not last. The universe expanded and cooled. And the superforce decomposed, with, first, gravity splitting off from the rest.

  Then, when the remnant GUT force itself collapsed – ‘GUT’ standing for Grand Unified Theory, an archaic term for the merger of the electromagnetic and nuclear forces – the energy released fuelled a huge expansion of the universe. An inflationary energy later harnessed by generations of Pooles to drive their interstellar craft.

  The universe had still been so hot that even nucleons – protons and neutrons, the components of the nucleus of an atom – could not yet exist. Instead space filled up with ‘quagma’, a hot soup of still more fundamental particles called quarks, that were crystallising out of the cooling energy fields that pervaded the young cosmos. And this was the origin of the creatures humans had named ‘quagma phantoms’, when they had come spilling out of the Jupiter wormhole after the Xeelee invader, and proved, initially anyhow, almost as destructive. The quagma phantoms had been born with the universe only a microsecond old, and had gone almost extinct after twenty or thirty microseconds. Almost . . .

  ‘It is the symmetry of the very early universe that we seek to exploit,’ the Ghost said calmly. ‘The bland symmetries of the primal superforce. The component forces resulting from its decay, you see, falling out of the broken symmetry, are governed by fundamental constants. Numbers which fix the strength of the fundamental forces. Thus – in human science – the gravitational constant, the speed of light—’

  ‘I get it,’ Jophiel said. ‘I think. But there was a certain randomness about that initial symmetry-breaking. Like a stylus stood on its end. There is only one position of equilibrium, but when the symmetry is lost—’

  ‘The stylus can fall any which way,’ Asher said. ‘You get different values for the physical constants. Different laws.’

  ‘And this is how you Ghosts run your experiments,’ Jophiel said, working it out. ‘In a small region of the universe – in this case, a shell wrapped around Goober’s Star – you re-create the conditions of the Planck-scale universe. The extreme heat, the density—’

  ‘The primal superforce,’ Asher said, understanding. ‘And then, if you can control, or shape, the way it decays in that fragment of spacetime—’

  ‘Out pop different constants,’ Jophiel said. ‘And so different physical laws. In this case a sub-universe in which the force of gravity is a billion times stronger than – well, than it is here.’

  Asher’s eyes were wide as she thought that through. ‘In such a universe stars just a few kilometres wide would fuse, and burn out in a few years. What a firework show. But would life be possible? . . . And you do all this with quagma phantoms?’

  ‘We have a variety of methods. But the quagma phantoms, being a relic of the early universe themselves – though from an age of relative cold and stability compared to the Planck epoch – can be corralled, and induced to—’

  ‘Sounds like a lot of fuss,’ Jophiel cut in. ‘Why not just throw a Neptune into the star after all? This system has giant planets to spare.’

  ‘For the sake of control. Of fine-tuning.’

  ‘And for the aesthetic pleasure of it,’ Nicola put in. ‘I think that’s a motive with the Ghosts. They do stuff in part just to see if they can do it, and how well. I don’t think they’d ever admit it, but that’s the truth. Isn’t it, Ambassador?’

  ‘In a hostile universe one never knows when an ability to tune gravity might come in handy.’ The Ghost rolled complacently.

  And the humans turned back to the troubled face of the much-tampered-with star.

  The Ghosts kept the party at the star station for several days. Jophiel speculated they were interested in human reac
tions to their exploits.

  Then they were returned to the Island.

  For three more months the routine of life for the humans in the Goober system continued its strange course. Jophiel split his time between the Island lifedome, where the priority was still to ensure the long-term continuance of life support and survival, and the deep valleys where humans still foraged for portable Xeelee artefacts.

  And all the while, in the Ghosts’ stellar station, a rotating team led by Nicola and Asher kept watch on the star itself, as it was slowly destabilised. Eventually Asher predicted that some kind of nova event might be no more than weeks, even days away.

  That was when the Qax invaded.

  22

  For Jophiel, it started with a shadow on the face of Goober’s Star.

  On Goober c it was an early morning of that twenty-five-hour day. Pre-dawn, in fact; the star would not rise for another hour at the longitude of Ghost Plateau, or at the rough camps the humans had established in the Xeelee Valleys far below. It was morning by the ship’s clock: the Island crew had kept up their routine of watches, to maintain discipline and morale.

  And it was ‘morning’ too for Jophiel, Nicola and Asher, who, when it began, happened to be back at their posts at the Ghosts’ star station – though there was no night or day on a station bathed in the perpetual light of a photosphere that covered one half of the visible universe.

  That was how Asher Fennell, at one of the Ghosts’ monitoring positions, became the first human to see the invader.

  ‘Nicola. Jophiel. You’d better get down here.’

  Jophiel was at the window as fast as the processing cycle of the systems that supported him could manage the translocation. Nicola was only a few heartbeats slower.

  Asher stood before the big observing window, which showed a slab of starscape crawling with the usual prominences and sunspots, shifting slowly past as the station followed its whipping two-hour orbit around Goober’s Star.