Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  ‘I suppose if you are listening to this account at all, you will know all this.

  ‘I am here to witness the unfolding of this nova event, here at Goober’s Star.

  ‘It seems appropriate. Even a tradition. Jack Grantt witnessed the destruction of Mars by the Xeelee in the Solar System – another alien intervention. Here the Ghosts are destroying whole worlds, apparently to pursue their own goals. They seem to have had no regard for any indigenous inhabitants of the Goober planets. How much they learned from this exercise, given the Qax intervention, seems uncertain.

  ‘Meanwhile, the nova. Imagery follows.

  ‘One hour after dawn at this location, the superheated air from the daylight side is pouring over the terminator into the dark side, all around the world. An enormous cyclone is gathering around the antisolar point, the very centre of the night side. In the centre of the day side, the bare rock, already stripped of life and soil and water, is itself melting. Puddles of magma form and spread. And as the planet rotates, more of its surface is being directly exposed to that lethal light. Like turning one’s face into a blowtorch.

  ‘I should say how I am witnessing this, huddled as I am in this lifedome. When we arrived in the system we of the Island scattered probes in space, around this world. Standard practice. If they were found by the Ghosts, they seem to have been left in place. The Ghosts may have found it instructive to watch us watching them. As you might look into the eyes of a chimp. Many of the probes will be lost to the nova event, of course.

  ‘Through these mechanical eyes I watch the destruction of a solar system.’

  ‘Six hours. The distant outer planets, the gas giants, are lighting up now.

  ‘I am not alone.

  ‘I saw a single Ghost, on the far side of the dome. Perhaps it is a witness too. It may be no more real than I am. Or it may be able to jump out of here by hyperdrive at any moment.

  ‘I don’t feel like company.’

  ‘Eleven hours.

  ‘By now the supersonic wind fronts must have reached the antisolar point. There can be no structured weather any more, anywhere on this planet; that tremendous cyclone that briefly gathered on the night side is gone, disrupted.’

  ‘Thirteen hours . . . An hour ago the nova light reflected back from the furthest of the major planets, Goober g, reached me. There must be strange storms in those clouds of ammonia ice.

  ‘And since then I have watched the objects of this system’s Kuiper belt light up, one by one. Plutoids and comet cores and rubble, sparks bright in the night. The belt is a torus, a visibly thick band of diamonds, quite clearly inclined from the plane of the planets. A remarkable sight, and a gift for deep-space astronomers, if there were any here.

  ‘I wonder if any human will ever see the like again – and if there are other eyes here to see it.

  ‘I have been approached by the Ghost. Its intention seems peaceful.’

  ‘Twenty-five hours. A full day here on Goober c since the nova.

  ‘The sky is hidden by thick clouds. The oceans are boiling off, I’m guessing. This world has become a pearl, as seen from space, glowing silver-grey in the unrelenting nova light. Swathed in clouds of live steam. From space, I think, it almost looks peaceful. Not on the ground, though.

  ‘I continue to measure and record.’

  ‘Nineteen days. The Ghost has news for me.

  ‘We avoid each other. Yet our paths cross. We have come to share bits of data. We are both prisoners, I suppose.

  ‘The Ghost told me the truth about the crew of the Gourd. You may have figured some of this out for yourselves by now. For the record, here is the reality.

  ‘The last of the crew, save for Susan, died long ago. Centuries ago.

  ‘The Ghosts barely understood humans, of course, but they feared for Susan’s sanity.

  ‘So they synthesised a crew. Whole generations. I suspect these were biotechnological constructs rather than anything like Virtual projections, like myself. The Ghosts’ equivalent of matter printers are evidently better than ours. The crew were no more authentic humans than I am, though. They bred, or appeared to. They even passed Harris Kemp’s medical inspections as authentic, remember. Unless they just scrambled the sensors somehow – I guess that would be easier.

  ‘For centuries their blood provided the AS drugs Susan needed. And, I suppose, she had the company that may have kept her sane.

  ‘This may have been cynically intended. Just a way to keep their test-subject human, Susan, alive and functioning. I prefer to believe there was an element of compassion. Poor Susan Chen . . .

  ‘The sky is strange. The original air has been stripped away entirely. Yet the planet is still swathed by cloud. Water vapour, from the evaporated oceans. An atmosphere of water, itself being lost slowly.

  ‘And I.

  ‘I am not alone.’

  The same battered coveralls. The same aged face. A kindly expression – relatively kindly, considering this was a copy of Michael Poole.

  Hello, Jophiel.

  ‘I . . . Michael?’

  You know it. I heard you mention a friend of mine.

  ‘Susan Chen?’

  You know, I think she may have known, deep down, about what the Ghosts did to preserve her crewmates. She kept going even so. Doing the best she could. And she never gave up faith in me. In us. She would speak my name, at times. As if she was praying.

  ‘Did you speak to her?’

  A couple of times. What’s the harm? I told you, Jophiel. Reality leaks. If you can do a good turn because of it, why not?

  ‘So are you doing a good turn now?’

  He shrugged. Don’t flatter yourself, he said, not unkindly. You don’t know this – you could never know it, unless it leaked into the family archive – but in another timeline this was a significant place and time for humanity. Goober’s Star, I mean, the nova explosion. Though we didn’t know what caused the detonation at the time. But a human presence here led to us throwing off the yoke of a conqueror. That’s worth remembering, isn’t it? It was even called Goober’s Star, before.

  Somehow that didn’t surprise Jophiel. ‘Reality leaks.’

  Poole grinned. You’re getting the idea. And listen. The dark-matter pod your pal Nicola retrieved from the Ghost station?

  ‘You know about that? What about it?’

  Keep it safe. Tell your template; tell Jophiel. It’s important. He raised his face to a cloudy sky. Nova light. Bracing, isn’t it?

  Jophiel looked up.

  And when he turned back, Poole was gone.

  ‘Twenty-four days.

  ‘It is many days since I saw the Ghost. Or the other Michael Poole.

  ‘A dramatic change. The nova light has faded. Quite abruptly, over the last twenty-five hours or so, the last Goober c day.

  ‘I have ventured outside, in my simulated skinsuit. Goober’s Star seems to have returned to its old state, its old luminosity.

  ‘This world’s natural condition, this far from the star, is to be as cold as Mars. Now the air is lost, with that thick greenhouse blanket of carbon dioxide that had kept it relatively warm. For now a great rain is falling, on ground so hot it steams. But that will presumably freeze over.

  ‘One day, though, the air will come back. This world will recover. It is a super Earth, geologically active. In time – tens of millions of years? – it will outgas another atmosphere, carbon dioxide and all. Even life may return, from refuges that may have sheltered it during this most dreadful of extinction events.

  ‘The land, the very rocks will renew. Ghost Plateau will rise and crack and fall, the Xeelee Valleys will widen, flood, narrow. There may be no trace left of us, of any of this, save a puzzling stratum in the rocks.

  ‘But I won’t be here. I will project myself, my memories, in a tight neutrino pulse, aimed at the centre of the Galaxy. T
he way the Cauchy went. The signal will, eventually, overhaul the fleeing Cauchy, for the ship can never quite outrun a light beam.

  ‘Whatever version of Michael Poole survives then – or Jophiel – can do with this set of memories as he pleases.

  ‘I hope the Ghost here dies of loneliness.’

  THREE

  We built this marvellous ship . . . We dreamed of saving the species itself. We launched, towards the stars and the future . . . But, unfortunately, we had to take the contents of our heads with us.

  Garry Benson Deng Uvarov, c. ad 5,000,000

  29

  Ship elapsed time since launch: 9 years 48 days

  Earth date: c. ad 9670

  ‘We need to dismantle Nicola Emry,’ said Maxwell Ward.

  Michael Poole glowered back. ‘Oh, Lethe. What now, Max?’

  Jophiel just laughed.

  ‘At least contain. Control. Listen to me, I’m serious; we’re talking about an existential threat to the mission here.’

  There were three of them in this regular morning ‘executive meeting’, as Max insisted on calling it. They were in Michael Poole’s apex office.

  Poole faced down Max for a moment, then went to pour a coffee.

  Restless, Jophiel got out of his chair, paced, and looked up and out. From here, above their heads, could still be seen the gaunt frame of the wormhole interface, a perfect blue tetrahedron, set on top of the lifedome. The wormhole had been collapsed since the events at Goober’s Star, eighteen months back by ship time, but the interface itself remained, its negative-energy field a shield against the sleet of interstellar grit through which the Cauchy continued to plummet at near lightspeed.

  And Jophiel looked down through a translucent floor, gazing into the complicated interior of the lifedome, the lowest deck covered now with swathes of green, sown and cultivated by the survivors of the Island.

  Max came to stand with Jophiel. Short, stocky, as usual Max looked over-muscled for this confined environment. ‘You know, the GUTdrive is too perfect, if anything. You can’t feel a thing, just that steady one-gravity push, under that black sky. It’s as if we’re not moving at all. Stuck like flies in amber. So the crew turn inward. Get distracted by each other. Have kids. Lethe!’

  Jophiel frowned. ‘Max, the oldest child, Michaela Nadathur, born

  on the Island, is thirteen years old now. This is an old gripe. What’s it got to do with killing Nicola?’

  Ward glared. ‘I said “dismantle”. We’ve got no evidence that there’s anything left of Emry alive inside that shell at all. You can’t kill what isn’t alive in the first place.’

  ‘And how would Nicola feel about that? Have you asked her?’

  Ward snorted. ‘Ask who? Ask what? A corpse weaponised by an alien power has no rights—’

  ‘You might even have a point, you know, Max. But as always with you we have to wade through this rabble-rousing bluster.’

  ‘Well, you’ve raised the proposition,’ Poole said mildly, sipping his coffee. ‘There’s a crew briefing scheduled for tomorrow. Let’s thrash this out then.’

  Ward’s disgust was etched into his face. ‘A briefing. So you put off the decisions, again. You’re supposed to be the commander, Michael.’

  ‘We’ve been through this before too,’ Poole said. ‘You want to add this to the agenda, or shall I do it for you?’

  Furious, Max stalked off to the elevator to the lower decks.

  Jophiel grinned. ‘You enjoy jabbing him in the eye too much. Some day—’

  Poole grunted. ‘Max is Max. And he is always jousting with Nicola. She pokes him in the eye. So, what, do you think this Nicola thing is some long-planned attempt to get rid of a palace rival?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be surprised.’

  ‘I’d better go prepare for the briefing. Will you work up the agenda?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Poole drifted out of the room, leaving Jophiel alone with his Virtual thoughts.

  The crew meetings were always held at the end of a watch, so it was easy for two overlapping on-duty watch crews to attend, and for anybody sleepless belonging to the off-duty third watch to show up too.

  The next day, as the meeting began, the attending crew sat in patient rows in the amphitheatre, while Ben Goober, reporting on navigation, projected Virtuals in the air above them. Jophiel had noticed that Ben spent too much time bragging about the latest technical upgrades to the ship’s navigation system. Most of the crew had heard all this before; most of them put up with it. Ben Goober, now over forty, was popular, and listening to this stuff was better than work. What was much more interesting, though, when he got to it, was Goober’s survey of the ship’s current position.

  Lots of pretty pictures.

  Jophiel remembered the early years of the voyage when the sky around the ship hadn’t seemed so terribly different to that witnessed at night from Earth. Scattered stars, many Sunlike. Slowly they had learned to read the meaning of that shifting assemblage. The local stars were a mixture of ages and types, and all were in motion. Only the very youngest had been born in the vicinity of Sol; the rest had been visitors. Sol itself had been born with other long-scattered siblings in a distant nursery cloud. Seen on a long enough timescale such a sky was a transitory assemblage, Jophiel thought, like passengers in an elevator car, a disparate group never to be gathered again.

  But, as they had pushed towards the Galaxy centre, the quality of the view had changed.

  As seen from Earth, much of the splendour of the Galaxy had been hidden by clouds of dust: grit and ice expelled from old, dying stars, and lingering in the plane of the Galaxy. Now those dust clouds were behind them, and the sky had become much more complex, with crowds of stars, and less familiar features: bubbles and filaments of gas, coherent structures light years across. Evidence of the birth and death of stars, visible to the naked eye.

  Jophiel glanced around at the crew. The meetings generally got a lot livelier later, when internal matters were discussed: crew rotas, even disciplinary issues. But Goober’s glorious dioramas only drove home how very far from Earth they were. Even the sky was utterly alien, and people were subdued.

  The unfolding of deep time was staggering too.

  Six thousand light years of travel translated roughly to six thousand years in elapsed time, outside. Six thousand years since the Xeelee attack, since the Displacement, the creation of Cold Earth – since the Scattering of mankind in thousands of fragile starships. The gulf of time that now separated Jophiel from those events, which he himself remembered vividly, was the same as the interval that had separated his own age of interplanetary industry from the Bronze Age.

  And it was a terrifying thought that this fragile lifedome was the only known shelter for human life within six thousand light years. No wonder the crew, whenever they could, turned inward from the bleak wastes of space and time that surrounded them. Turned inward and concentrated on chores and rotas, and lovemaking and babies – even on Max Ward’s obsessive military drilling, the subject of much mockery by Nicola.

  ‘So,’ Goober said, ‘you understand where we are. We’ve travelled about a quarter of the way to the Galaxy centre – although, because of the oddities of time dilation, we’ve already lived through about half the journey time. Ten more years to go. We’re still a long way from the Core. Still out here in the spiral arms. But we’ve already travelled out of the Orion Arm, the Sun’s local arm, and we’re passing into Sagittarius, the next arm in, and one of the Galaxy’s great star-making regions.’

  Susan Chen said, ‘And in Sagittarius, somewhere, lies the home world of the Ghosts. I spent a thousand years with the Ghosts. Most of it listening. You pick up a lot of clues, even around creatures so smart. I believe that what we encountered at Goober’s Star was the result of Ghost expeditions out towards the edge of the Galaxy, from their point of view expeditions out in
to the wilderness. Of course they were drawn towards us by the Xeelee presence in our Solar System.’

  ‘Good point,’ Max Ward said heavily. ‘Maybe our resident Ghost could confirm it.’

  He meant Nicola, of course. The crew, expecting fireworks, looked more alert.

  And, glancing around, Jophiel realised he couldn’t see Nicola. Her silver-statue persona wasn’t exactly hard to spot.

  ‘Where is she?’ Ward snapped now, as if reading Jophiel’s thoughts. ‘Not exactly easy for her to get lost, is it? So where’s she hiding? What’s she doing, right now? Who’s with her? Who’s supervising her?’ He jabbed a finger at random. ‘Do you know? Do you? Whose orders is she following? Michael Poole’s – or the Ghosts’ who made her?’

  Ben Goober stood again. ‘Come on, Max. We all flew out of Cold Earth with Nicola. We’ve all known her for nine years – many of us for longer than that. She’s not—’

  ‘What? What is she, what is she not? She was in the hands of the Ghosts, remember.’

  ‘A prisoner, as I was,’ Susan Chen pointed out mildly.

  ‘But you weren’t rebuilt by those meatballs, were you? Why did they do it? To what end?’

  ‘Well, how would I know?’ Nicola’s voice, ringing like a bell in the clean air.

  People looked up, grinned. There was even a smatter of applause. Jophiel never forgot that Nicola was popular on this tub; indeed some of her ‘Monopole Bandits’ from the war for Earth had followed her on this long journey.

  ‘I’m listening. In fact I’m watching. I’m down in the engine pod. Locked into a maintenance bay, if you want to know. Here to do my duty, to do some work. And to stay one step ahead of you, Max.’

  ‘That won’t save you,’ Ward said calmly.

  Jophiel felt faintly perturbed at all this. It was Max’s job to identify threats. But there hadn’t been a shred of evidence that Jophiel could see that Nicola was any kind of threat, as opposed to a victim of the Ghosts. And Max’s destructive obsession with her seemed to Jophiel a hint of that lack of judgement, that instability, he had suspected in Max before. As if the man was filling the vacuum of the voyage by picking a pointless fight.