Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  And for mere onlookers the velocity had the effect of blurring any detail virtually to invisibility – though Jophiel knew there were some big features down there. The trajectory had been designed to take them over several of Asher’s hypothetical habitable patches, some measuring ten thousand kilometres across or more. More of these had been detected on Deck Two, far below, as well as on Deck Three.

  They were features each as wide as a whole Earth, seen as a mere flash of discoloration for a fraction of a second before being whisked away. But once each encounter was over Asher retrieved images of those big patches, and slowed them down, suspended them in the air, magnified, enhanced, swivelled them for perspective.

  The first she focused on was remarkably Earthlike.

  ‘Or at least,’ Nicola said, standing with Jophiel in the apex suite, ‘what Earth might look like if you peeled it.’

  Jophiel saw a smeared-out scattering of continents, grey or iron-rust red, their edges fractally irregular. Swathes of ocean, greyish-green, with complex ripples visible in the shallowing beds towards the continental coasts. No sign of ice save at the summits of the mountains of what looked like a spectacular chain: an unexpected Andes, snaking along one edge of the largest continent. It was more like an animated map than a world. The air seemed murky but clear, except over one of the lesser continents where what looked like a big storm system was gathering, a huge creamy swirl as seen from above.

  Max Ward smiled at all this, as if surveying a world to conquer.

  ‘Like Earth,’ Michael Poole said. ‘But not quite.’

  ‘Not Earth as it is now, no,’ Asher said. ‘Or was before the Displacement. It looks a little like Earth as it was about a billion years ago. Hardly any oxygen in the air back then, though it was already building up as photosynthesising plants evolved and spread. There were no land plants or animals, but you’d have found trilobites and such in the sea . . . I’ve got Harris and his team looking for biology.’

  Poole frowned. ‘There is spin gravity, of course. But what’s to keep that “world” of yours from smearing out across the deck?’

  ‘It’s in a kind of dimple,’ Asher said. ‘An indentation in the deck. We’re calling them cupworlds. Might not look it – the scale of the Wheel overwhelms detail like this – but this one alone is a thousand kilometres deep. The edge is sculpted, like tremendous cliffs. And since the scale height of Earth’s air is only a few kilometres—’

  ‘All the air and water would be contained in the pit. OK. So what’s keeping it warm? And safe? The radiation environment around here is pretty lethal.’

  ‘For now I can only guess. We think there’s some kind of shield over each cupworld. A force field. It reflects some of our sensor tracers. Maybe that serves as an artificial, umm, sky. And presumably all the radiant energy pouring down from the stars in this area is absorbed, filtered – the energy re-radiated.’

  Poole nodded. ‘A simulated sky, tuned to suit whatever is meant to live inside the bottle world. Makes sense.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Arcologies,’ Jophiel said. ‘These cupworlds are like arcologies. Enclosed environments on a grand scale, like we built on Mars.’

  ‘Rather larger than our arcologies,’ Asher said. ‘These are planet-sized dimples, remember. But you could fit a hundred of these side by side across the width of the Wheel. There is room for them all. Some cupworlds are empty,’ she said bluntly. She pulled up a couple of images to make the point, images of pits, broad and circular, sharp-walled, flat-floored, their interiors the same milk-white as the rest of this hull-plate construction. ‘But most aren’t.’ She displayed more cupworld images – including one that looked a little like a flayed Mars. Another that might have been a Venus, a deep pond of super-hot carbon dioxide. And a much more exotic model world, a pool of hydrogen and helium and ammonia and ethane and propane and exotic organic molecules . . . Huge lightning bolts flared across the great bowl.

  ‘We think this is a Saturn,’ Asher said. ‘Or at least a model of a gas giant’s upper layers.’

  ‘The one-gravity plateau,’ Jophiel said. ‘I suppose we guessed it would be this way, and here’s the proof. This whole artefact, on one level anyway, seems to be a habitat for life. Or a range of habitats. That’s what these structures were for, traditionally, by the way. Ringworlds, in the legends. You’d take apart a planet or two, to create a lot of living space.’

  Ward grunted, unimpressed. ‘A zoo, then.’

  Asher said, ‘If so, it’s a zoo with some exotic residents. Take a look.’ She brought up another image.

  This cupworld seemed quite unlike the others. It was around the same size as the Earth clone, but there the similarity ended. It was as if the land lay open to a dark, starlit sky. Under that sky there was form, texture, but not structure as Jophiel would have recognised on an Earthlike world. It looked like heaped-up quilts, carpets, overlying each other, silver on black, studded with silver specks.

  Jophiel picked out a section for magnification, at random. He found he was looking down on a three-dimensional tangle of rope.

  Through which swam silvered balls, like floating toys.

  He stepped back, astonished. ‘Ghosts.’

  Asher was watching his reaction. ‘As you said, this is a collection of habitats. A zoo if you like. Big enough, it seems, to sample a Galaxy. Why shouldn’t there be Ghosts? Listen. Elsewhere we think we saw Spline warships. Or maybe their ancestors, beasts kilometres wide, gambolling in an oceanic cupworld. Maybe there are Qax here . . . we don’t know what a Qax looks like. Maybe there are species here from all across the Galaxy. Drawn to this vast monument.

  ‘But there’s something else here, down on the Ghost cupworld. More relevant even than that. Keep watching.’

  In the event Jophiel was one of the last to pick out what she meant, which was odd, given it was his own design, or his template’s. In the heart of the silvery Ghost tangle – its signature easily discernible even in a cupworld the size of a planet – was human technology.

  A GUTship lifedome.

  An obvious wreck.

  For the crew, that sudden, shocking, entirely unexpected glimpse of a human artefact was galvanising.

  The questions flew. Could this be the relic of another plundered scattership, its human occupants held by this party of Ghosts, as their cousins had held Susan Chen’s people for so long? And how long had it been here? Since both Ghosts and Xeelee had faster-than-light travel, this lifedome could have been brought there long ago – five, ten, twenty thousand years ago, perhaps captured quite close to Sol, as the Gourd had been. If so what might have become of its human crew, or their descendants?

  Something must be done, about the Ghosts and their captive lifedome. Somehow. Some day. Some time.

  But for now there was nothing they could do.

  The Cauchy couldn’t land. It couldn’t so much as slow down. The ship had already passed the point of closest approach to this upper deck. Still moving at near lightspeed, GUTdrive flaring, now it was heading for its next target, the rendezvous with Deck One, the lowest deck above the c-floor itself – the latter being, according to Asher’s best guess, the putative habitat of the Xeelee. Such was the scale of the Wheel that the distance between the two encounter points was itself a fifth of a light year. It would take over eighty days by such a path to get from Deck Three to Deck One.

  And even when they got there, there would be no way to land, any more than on Deck Three. The relative velocities would be too high. The journey profile was designed that the ship would make another close flyby to the structure itself, and then sail on into space.

  The eighty-two days to the encounter wore down, one by one. The crew spent what was left of the cruise, under Asher’s supervision, continuing the remote reconnaissance of the rest of the Wheel. Asher continued to survey her cupworlds. She and her crew grew pretty excited over a couple of worlds
they spotted now, one on Deck Three, one on Deck Two, both much closer to Earth-nominal conditions than any they had yet seen. While the Three world looked if anything more favourable, the Deck Two prospect was more accessible. Asher boldly labelled the Deck Two world ‘Earth Two’, the Deck Three world ‘Earth Three’, and she laboured to squeeze out more observations, more inferences from the data.

  One last sleep for Jophiel.

  He woke, on the day of the encounter, expecting fresh miracles.

  Which was pretty much how it turned out. With a twist.

  42

  Ship elapsed time since launch: 25 years 127 days

  Jophiel sat with Nicola and others in Michael Poole’s apex office. From here they had a grandstand view as the Cauchy yet again plummeted, at near lightspeed, towards a surface that itself moved faster still.

  To maximise the viewing opportunity the trajectory would cut a shallow diagonal over Deck One, before passing on beyond its rim. So they had a fine close view of the Deck One floor.

  But, disappointingly, to first glance it was a blank surface, with none of the detail of Deck Three – or indeed Deck Two, what they’d glimpsed of it.

  ‘No cupworlds here,’ Nicola said. ‘No toy oceans, no bowls brimming with Saturn clouds.’

  Asher said, ‘I’m guessing this is the engineering deck – well, we have our own version of that, under the habitable levels of the lifedome. But there is some detail. Look at this . . .’ She pulled up a magnified Virtual.

  Jophiel saw a stream of caches, pouring down from the sky at a stretch of deck. It was like watching hail falling onto an ice sheet. But, he reminded himself, each of those ‘hailstones’ was the size of a small moon, like the Cache that had rampaged through the Solar System. And, when Asher magnified the image again, Jophiel saw that as the caches approached the deck, they broke up – dissolved into smaller forms, into drones like cut-down Xeelee sycamore seeds, and then further still.

  ‘What hits the deck, by the time it gets there,’ said Asher, ‘is in the form of Xeelee flowers. After a journey of a light year and fifteen hundred years from Chandra. Quite remarkable.’

  ‘But what then?’ Jophiel asked. ‘Does the stuff just dissolve into the surface?’

  ‘Basically,’ Asher said. ‘We have seen great heaps of the stuff, gathered, subsiding, eventually disappearing. The usual seamless conversion of mass to energy, I guess. It’s almost as if the Wheel is liquid, its substance expanding as the relativistic stresses gather. As Einstein foresaw.’

  Poole said, ‘But of course the infall, which is mostly concentrated at spots like this, needs to be distributed across the Wheel as a whole. And I think we’re starting to see how that works.’

  He pulled up a schematic of the Wheel’s three decks, the radial struts that connected them. And branching blue lines, like veins, now spread across these pale, featureless surfaces.

  ‘False colour,’ Poole said briskly. ‘But, if they look like veins to you, that’s not a bad analogy. We’ve detected motion – streams of it. There seems to be a network of transport channels covering the structure – at every level, and up and down the supporting struts, as you can see. Material flowing back and forth. We don’t know how material gets picked up by this network, or deposited at its destination. Those flows are pretty fast, though – a fraction of lightspeed themselves. They have to be that fast to be useful as a structure this size. We have wondered if we could somehow use this . . .’

  Jophiel said, ‘It almost looks alive, doesn’t it?’

  Nicola predictably scoffed. ‘Not like you Pooles to be so poetic.’

  Michael shrugged. ‘The question is, could we get it to carry stuff? . . .’

  That was when the alarms went off.

  The whole ship shuddered.

  The apex suite deflected sideways with a jolt that shook all the corporeal humans in the room, and Jophiel too, thanks to his consistency protocol routines.

  This was the nerve centre of the ship. Every surface was covered with softscreens and other monitors. Now every screen flared red. The air was filled with a screeching howl.

  Poole’s fist slammed down on a master control. The audio alarm cut out, but the red glare didn’t fade. And still that sideways shove was apparent.

  They turned to monitors, looking for reports.

  Jophiel called, ‘Harris’s medical system is reporting a mass of minor injuries. A broken wrist seems to be the worst so far. Most people were in their couches. The small children safe in their armoured cots.’

  ‘We have systems crashing everywhere.’ Asher seemed bewildered. She was a scientist at heart, Jophiel reflected, better at the slow assessment of evidence than a rapid response to a sudden crisis.

  ‘That’s not all that’s crashing,’ Nicola said angrily. ‘We lost the GUTdrive. And I think I know why. Poole, Jophiel, look at your displays. Don’t you recognise the symptoms? Back when the Xeelee first came through your dumb wormhole, into Jupiter space . . .’

  Poole punched down on his screen. ‘You’re right. Quagma phantoms. Suddenly the GUTdrive is full of them. The little critters that followed the Xeelee through the Jupiter wormhole – relics of the early universe, we thought, feasting on the high-density energy in the cores of our ships’ drives. They crippled us then. Now they’ve crippled us again. Lethe. We should have been prepared for this.’

  But Jophiel, watching his template, could see he was coming up with an idea, even as he spoke. Something outrageous. Probably suicidal. Something that might work.

  Poole turned to him. ‘Jophiel, listen. Sever the lifedome. The spine, the GUTdrive pod, is useless now.’

  Jophiel felt a spark of unreasonable rebellion – but then, he remembered how the Ghosts had decapitated the Island. ‘Are you sure? That will strand us here.’

  ‘No choice. Do it! And fast. Slave a copy of my console. Jophiel, I need your help – there isn’t the time—’

  Jophiel got it.

  With a subvocal command, he accelerated his personal processing rate a hundred times.

  Sudden silence.

  Everything congealed around him: the people, the slowly turning craft – even the flicker of the alarm lights was reduced to a pulse.

  He hammered in the lifedome separation commands – a contingency routine he, or his template, had dreamed up long before the Xeelee had come to the Solar System, as a way to save the crew of a GUTship in extreme conditions. ‘Doesn’t get much more extreme than this,’ he muttered. His own voice was loud in the accelerated silence.

  The response of the system was swift, even in this high-speed domain. From the corner of one eye, through a clear patch of hull, he saw a flash, explosive bolts firing to cut the spine – to behead the Cauchy.

  It was almost peaceful here, at high speed. The Cauchy, the drifting lifedome. He could stay in this state, and just watch the events of the crisis unfold in slow, exquisite detail.

  He laughed. ‘Where’s the fun in that? Resume—’

  Noise billowed around him. The lifedome lurched still more violently.

  ‘Hold on!’ Poole yelled. ‘Whatever happens next it’s going to be a rough ride.’

  And he punched a control with a clenched fist.

  Another savage lurch sideways.

  Jophiel pawed at his displays, even as the thrust continued. ‘The auxiliary thrusters – you’re pushing us sideways. Michael, what in Lethe are you doing? We were freefalling, but at least the lifedome was going to miss the deck. Now we’re on a collision course, thanks to that manoeuvre. Are you crazy? When we hit we’ll shine hotter than the Sun—’

  Nicola laughed, gripping the arms of her couch. ‘I always thought you’d get me killed in the end, Poole, you crazy bastard!’

  ‘We’re not dead yet.’ Poole just grinned, and rested his head back in his couch. Closed his eyes. ‘Come on, Xeelee, don’t make
me look like an idiot.’

  And the lifedome’s shuddering stopped.

  Just like that. The crew were jolted in their couches, one last time. The alarm lights flared, more angry than ever now that the ship had been truncated. But, otherwise, everything was still.

  Jophiel, disbelieving, checked a display, and looked out of the hull.

  At an infinite floor.

  ‘We’re down. Down on the deck. We landed. On the Wheel!’

  Asher looked too. ‘And, incidentally, we are now moving about a tenth of lightspeed faster than we were a heartbeat ago. But I felt no acceleration. It would take a month of a GUTdrive under thrust to do that . . .’

  ‘Told you to hold on,’ Poole said, eyes still closed.

  ‘You gambled,’ Jophiel said. ‘When you deflected us towards the deck, to a projected impact—’

  ‘I figured there had to be an impact defence. We’re in a crowded sky; stuff must fall on the Wheel all the time. And we know the Xeelee has some kind of inertialess drive. Probably uses that technology in the internal transport system. Also I figured – well, I hoped – that once it saw we were on a collision course it would just pluck us out of the sky. And set us down, gentle as an egg.’

  ‘You’re a crazy bastard,’ Asher said. ‘It could just as easily have shot us out of the sky. More easily.’

  ‘It didn’t, though, did it?’

  Nicola just grinned. ‘Remember, this is the man who gave you the Cold Earth. A man given to wild, reckless gambles nobody else even thinks of.’ She thought it over. ‘The man, who, as his ship is crashing, has a first instinct to turn to his enemy for help. You expected it to have some kind of safety feature, didn’t you? As opposed to, as Asher says, a bank of guns that could have blown us to atoms before we got near the deck. How is that oath of bloody revenge coming on, Poole?’

  ‘Psychoanalyse all you like. Once again, Nicola, I’m the man who saved your life.’

  ‘And I’ll never forgive you. So what now?’