Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  Now Poole, who Jophiel suspected shared his own reservations, stood over Ward. ‘Enough with the intimidation, Max. If you’ve got some kind of case to make against Nicola, let’s hear it.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Ward stood, with a few gestures waved away Goober’s astrophysical displays, and brought up another map of the local Galaxy: an idealised sketch of the rim of the Sagittarius Arm. The position of the Cauchy was a bright blue dot – and a few shards of red pulsed, here and there, all around the chip. ‘You can see this, can you, Emry?’

  ‘Get on with it.’

  He glared around at the crew. ‘Ben Goober told you where we are. Well, here’s another map. Here we are, this blue speck. All alone in a dark and dangerous night. As Chen said, the Ghost home world is somewhere in this spiral arm. And these red pulses? Anybody care to guess? Battlegrounds.

  ‘This is a map of a war. We’ve seen the flaring of weaponised energy – we even recognised planetbuster beams. But we don’t think we’re looking at the Xeelee here.’

  ‘The Ghosts,’ Jophiel guessed. ‘Or the Qax? We saw at Goober’s Star that they both had planetbusters, Xeelee technology.’

  ‘Right. And as you might also have noticed, they started fighting there, back at Goober’s Star, while we ran for our lives. The Qax and the Ghosts. That was nearly five thousand years ago, remember, by external time, the universe’s clock. Since then, it seems, the war has gone on. Five thousand years. And it has spread, as you can see, deep into the Sagittarius Arm.’

  Ben Goober stood again. ‘I don’t get it. We’ve been travelling close to lightspeed all this time. Some of those conflicts are happening ahead of us, deeper into the Arm, towards the Galaxy centre . . . Oh.’

  Ward grinned. ‘“Oh.” You got it, Ben. Both the Qax and the Ghosts have something we don’t: a hyperdrive. Faster-than-light travel. And so they’ve been pushing ahead of us, all around us. They seem to be fighting all across this Galactic sector. And what we’re seeing, in signals brought on tardy light waves, is evidence of the war. A war through which we’re tiptoeing.’ He glared around. ‘Like one of your precious children wandering around in a minefield.’

  Jophiel was dismayed by the extent of this Ghost–Qax war – and puzzled. On Earth, the number of the year was ad 10,000, more or less. And Jophiel knew that by now, according to the fragmentary information about the future held in the family archives, humanity should already have won a successful war against the Ghosts. Indeed, a genocidal war. Well, that hadn’t happened, had it? Instead he found himself here, fleeing through a war between Qax and Ghost, itself millennia old, that – maybe – should never have come to pass.

  He caught his template’s eye. Poole was frowning, maybe thinking the same thoughts. Poole shrugged.

  Jophiel tried to focus. Max was still speaking, and not about existential shifts in reality, but proximate dangers to the mission.

  ‘So we are in a situation of extreme peril. Even if it doesn’t feel like it in this bubble. And, even aboard this ship, right on the inside with us, now we have the Ghost-thing that calls itself Nicola Emry. Which won’t even show itself today. We know it has been re-engineered by the Ghosts, and therefore must have Ghost technology embedded.’ He looked up at the empty air. ‘Here’s a reference for you, Emry. You always liked mythology and such, didn’t you? Maybe you should be stopped, while we’ve got the chance. Because maybe you’re a Trojan horse.’

  There was a shocked silence.

  And Susan Chen stood.

  She always looked so frail, Jophiel thought with a pang of conscience, as if she might just collapse at any moment. Yet she stood there, silent, waiting, until Poole nodded to her.

  ‘You will not harm Nicola Emry,’ she said slowly. ‘Or the being she has become. For you are right, Maxwell Ward, that she is not as she was. She is – enhanced. A new being, of an order that did not exist in the universe before Goober’s Star. Oh, maybe there was an element of punishment, or even containment, in what the Ghosts did to her. She had defied them, remember. But she was not created for reasons of intended harm.’

  Max said coldly, ‘Then why? Just to see how humans work?’

  ‘Not that.’ She glanced uncertainly at Poole. ‘I know you have no secrets before your crew, Michael. And I know, because Nicola told me, that your family holds, or held, information about the future. As it should have worked out.’ She looked around, at the crew, at the parents with their infants. ‘But the Ghosts too have their own sources of information about the future. So I learned, in a millennium of listening. They have a technology they call the Seers – I believe, some kind of advanced quantum computing devices – that enabled glimpses of the far future. Or at least of possible futures. The Ghosts believed, you see, Michael, that the amulet you were given by your Wormhole Ghost was itself a Seer, but of an unfamiliar design. Well, it came from a different timeline. And so I learned something of their dreams of the future. More secrets, in hints and scraps . . .’

  She spoke so softly that she could barely be heard, yet she held the whole crew in the palm of her hand.

  ‘The Ghosts believe that in the very far future there will be – an ending. Universal. No, not that. A transition, between one cosmic state and another. Just as there have been many such transitions in the past, from uniformity to complexity, from dark to light.’

  And Jophiel remembered similar dark hints contained in the Pooles’ own archive of arcana. His mother’s voice, reciting a strange prophecy: Time unravelled. Dying galaxies collided like clapping hands. But even now the story was not yet done. The universe itself prepared for another convulsion, greater than any it had suffered before. And then . . .

  He caught Michael Poole’s eye. Michael nodded curtly. So his template was remembering too.

  Susan went on, ‘And the Ghosts, you see, believed that life and mind could survive this great convulsion of the future only if there was cooperation. Between Ghosts and humans – and others, perhaps, life forms from extreme ages, the deep past, the far future. And so, when a handful of humans fell into their hands . . . Maybe they recognised us from their own prophecies . . .’

  ‘They remade Nicola,’ Jophiel said. ‘As an experiment. A kind of hybrid.’

  ‘Not quite that,’ Nicola said now. ‘More a symbiosis. One life form working with another, to make something greater. Just as the Ghosts themselves are already symbiotic organisms, multiple creatures locked inside those shiny shells, helping each other stay alive in a hostile universe.’

  Yes, Jophiel thought. A further extension of the Ghosts’ expansion of the self. Now including even humans.

  Nicola sounded proud, yet bitter. Defiant. She laughed. ‘I am the face of the future. Who’d have thought it?’

  ‘And so,’ Max Ward said heavily, ‘what?’

  There seemed nothing more to say. For now, Poole broke up the meeting. The crew started to disperse. Max glared at Poole, and stalked away.

  When they were alone, Nicola called Michael and Jophiel together, whispering in their ears.

  ‘A few points,’ Nicola said. ‘I think I may stay down here, in the GUTdrive pod. For the time being.’

  Michael Poole seemed conflicted. ‘Look, I’ll protect you from Max. I’m sorry I can’t . . . fix you.’

  Nicola shrugged. ‘I’m not asking you to.’

  Poole said with a flare of anger, ‘You didn’t follow me, though. When the Island split off. If you had, maybe this wouldn’t have come about. You followed him. Jophiel.’

  ‘So I brought it on myself?’

  ‘Enough,’ Jophiel said. ‘Nicola. Come back to the lifedome. To Lethe with Max.’

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t. And you know why, I think. Because he might just be right. Because I might be a Trojan Horse, after all. I mean, I wouldn’t know it, would I? Max is an idiot. But if there’s even a one per cent chance that he’s right . . . To be honest, logic
ally you should kill me yourselves. Whichever of you is stronger.’

  30

  Ship elapsed time since launch: 9 years 307 days

  Earth date: c. ad 16200

  Nine months later came the turnaround.

  The Cauchy’s mission plan was simple, in essence: blast at a steady one-Earth-gravity thrust, as experienced within the craft, for half the distance to the Galaxy Core, then shut down briefly, turn around – literally – and start firing the GUTengine the other way, again with a one-gravity thrust. The deceleration would bring the craft neatly to a halt at the heart of the Galaxy, though, to put it mildly, Jophiel knew the details of the closing stages had yet to be worked out.

  So now, alone, somewhere in the Galaxy’s giant Norma Arm, the human starship Cauchy shut down its primary engine, its GUTdrive. Everybody aboard the ship, from the youngest baby to the unreal Jophiel, felt that strange dropping-elevator release in the gut as the acceleration died.

  There followed an odd sense of stillness, Jophiel thought. And of remoteness, suddenly crowding in. Since Max Ward’s challenging of Nicola, the craft had travelled another six and a half thousand light years further towards the centre – as measured at the Sun it was now more than twelve thousand years since their departure. Such numbers made no sense, in human terms. So it was best not to think about it, and to get on with the work.

  And there was plenty of that. The planning of the turnaround, a key milestone in the voyage, had been the subject of much debate. It had been hard even to decide how long it should take. After nearly ten years of continuous flight, the engineers, including Jophiel himself, wanted plenty of time to run routine maintenance. On the other hand the medics, led by Harris Kemp, worried about the effect of extended periods of weightlessness on the crew – especially the latest cadre of infants, born within the last couple of years or so.

  In the end, they had settled upon ten days of zero-thrust turnaround.

  And as soon as the shutdown came the crew got to work.

  Jophiel helped Poole with much of the coordination. Crews of humans and bots crawled over the inert GUTdrive pod, worked the length of the ship’s spine seeking cumulative stress problems, and picked their way over the lifedome’s outer surface, patching flaws where, despite the shielding provided by the wormhole interface, the near-lightspeed sleet of the sparse interstellar material had managed to get through. From now on, of course, the burning engine pod would lead the way, thrusting against the direction of travel, and tweaks of the exhaust plumes would blast a tunnel through the ice, gas and dust that littered interstellar space.

  There was some debate about ditching the wormhole interface altogether, now that even its secondary purpose, of shielding the ship, was gone. But Poole and Jophiel vetoed that. The exotic-matter frame itself represented a store of energy – and besides, though Island was lost for good, Gea, the flotilla’s third vessel, was still out there somewhere, and the Pooles still had a notion, or a dream, of reconnecting with that lost crew some day.

  Inside the lifedome too, there was work to do. Floor plates were taken up to expose a huge infrastructure of waste processors and food printers and pumps and vents and dehumidifiers and heaters, through which engineers worked their way. The children found this hugely exciting, and had to be kept from exploring the caves of steel revealed beneath their feet.

  But in this strange interlude there also was an opportunity for some constructive work.

  Asher Fennell and her small team ran through a programme of specialised observations. The crew of the Cauchy were already far into galactic realms unseen by human eyes before, not even telescopically from Earth thanks to intervening dust clouds. Beyond the plane of the Galaxy too there was the dark-matter halo and its mysterious structures to explore – and, further yet, what Asher Fennell called the ‘crystalline clarity’ of extragalactic space. Of course they had carried out such observations in flight, and now, such was their velocity even without thrust, the view was still folded up by the aberration of light. But, as Asher tried to explain tactfully, even Poole Industries’ finest GUTengines did come with the slightest of murmurs, vibrations which could distract from the immensely delicate observations the astronomers were trying to make.

  So, in this brief interval of stillness, Asher and her team worked feverishly.

  Meanwhile Maxwell Ward took the chance to put every crew member he could get his hands on through zero-gravity military drill exercises. Max’s training was always popular with the young, Jophiel had observed, if only because it gave them something to do, some structure in their lives.

  There was time for fun too. Jophiel was astonished to see infants sent drifting in the air like balloons by their parents.

  After five days, the turnover manoeuvre itself was another challenge for the engineers and crew. The whole ship had to be rotated, end over end, to get that big GUTengine pod pointed in the right direction.

  The ship’s frame was configured for greatest strength in the direction of thrust, with lifedome leading and engine pod at the rear. Of course it was designed to cope with off-axis manoeuvres too; the basic GUTship design had been intended primarily for short-haul missions within the Solar System, with a requirement for manoeuvring and docking at either end of a journey. But they were twelve thousand light years from home, and with only one ship left. So the engineers took the rotation manoeuvre slowly and carefully. The three-kilometres-long baton that was the ship tipped with painful slowness, a swarm of bots and engineers watching every step. Asher and her astronomy team complained bitterly about the loss of observing time, as the ship turned from a stable platform into a pinwheel, but Poole overrode her.

  Then Asher called a meeting of the seniors, two days before the GUTdrive was scheduled to start up again.

  31

  Poole gave over his apex suite again. And Asher opened the debate with a grand sweep of her arm.

  A Virtual of the Galaxy appeared in the air in the middle of the room.

  A fat bright bulge of stars at the centre. The great surrounding disc with its spiral arms. The image was so beautiful, its appearance so dramatic, that it evoked gasps from the surrounding watchers, who were hanging in a rough sphere around the display, zero-gravity suspended in the air. The complex light cast highlights from Nicola’s gleaming silver limbs. Asher Fennell, quiet and studious, was learning showmanship, Jophiel thought wistfully. Maybe it was in the nature of the subject matter. Astrophysics dealt with the grandest objects in the universe; how could you not be spectacular?

  Asher looked around at them. ‘Now I’ve got your attention,’ she said drily, ‘I need to tell you what we’ve been discovering. It’s not just abstract knowledge. I think it changes our deepest understanding of – well, of the nature of the universe. And of the meaning of our own mission.’

  Nicola grinned. ‘Oh, good. I love it when that happens.’

  Jophiel had to grin back. Physically Nicola, wary of Max, was still lodged safely in the engine compartment. But she had grown weary of her isolation, and she had started to project Virtuals like this one, despite her self-professed revulsion at throwing off short-lived partials. It was a price she was prepared to pay, for now, to keep out of Max’s way, while not missing the good stuff like this.

  ‘Get on with it,’ growled Michael Poole.

  Asher continued doggedly. ‘What I’ll show you is a synthesis of the observations we’ve been making since launch. Observations of phenomena no human eye, or probe, ever saw before us. And now backed up with some precision sightings taken during the turnaround.

  ‘So,’ Asher said, gesturing at her image. ‘What you see is the baryonic-matter Galaxy. The light-matter stuff.’ A beacon, bright blue, sparked into life in the disc, in a spiral arm halfway between edge and Core. ‘Here we are. And what we’ve been looking for, primarily, has been infestations of intelligent life.’

  Nicola laughed. ‘Infestations. Good
word. Infestations, like us, and the Ghosts, and the Qax.’

  ‘Yes. Start with that. We’ve got two sources of information about intelligence in the spiral arms: the old data, from the Poole archives and the Wormhole Ghost’s information, glimpses of a lost future, and our own new observations. So, at Goober’s Star – leaving aside the Xeelee and the dark-matter creatures for now – we found that three species of intelligent, technological, starfaring species had made it there independently. Species of light matter, that is. As you say, Nicola, us, the Ghosts, the Qax. If you guess that that’s a typical density, that you have three species interacting in a radius of a thousand light years—’

  Nicola nodded. ‘I like number puzzles. Three in a disc of a thousand light years radius. So in a spiral galaxy a hundred thousand light years across, you might expect – what, a few thousand civilisations?’

  Asher shrugged. ‘Well, that’s a guess. Better than nothing. That might not seem so many in a Galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars. If you want my guess, life is common – maybe even universal – but technological starfarers are relatively rare.’

  Michael Poole frowned. ‘But you have been looking. And I’m guessing you found some even so, or you wouldn’t be here talking about it. Right?’

  Asher nodded. ‘The Ghost–Qax war is far behind us now, despite the way hyperdrive transports allowed it to spread faster than light. But as we have crossed the Galaxy we have found – traces.’

  Jophiel was fascinated. ‘Traces?’

  ‘Signatures,’ Asher said gloomily. ‘Of civilisation, of industry. Sparsely scattered. And not many are extensive, beyond a star system or two – not the way the Ghost–Qax war sprawled across thousands of light years. And a few times we’ve seen clear evidence of a kind of decadence, even destruction.’