Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  Poole smiled. ‘We check on the crew. And then we work out what to do next.’

  43

  Poole, Jophiel and Nicola took an elevator down from the apex suite to the floor of the lifedome, where a bewildered crew had already scrambled to fix and secure what was left of their ship. For Jophiel this brought back bad memories of the destruction of the Island at Goober’s star.

  Beyond the dome, utter strangeness.

  The lifedome rested on a plain of milky-white substrate, apparently infinite and featureless. There was certainly no sense of the Wheel’s curvature.

  Above, the Wheel’s relativistic sky. No stars were visible, for their light was gathered up in a kind of wash: bluish in the direction the crew immediately started to call ‘east’, the Wheel’s spinward direction, and reddish in the west. The Wheel whirled you around so rapidly that the very starlight was Doppler-shifted, red and blue. A permanent dawn and sunset.

  And the sky was cut across by a wide band, sharp-edged, dead straight. That was the Wheel, the next deck up: Deck Two. A band, spanning horizon to horizon, several times wider than the Moon as seen from Earth – even though, Jophiel knew, the deck was fifty times further from this lower level than the Moon itself had been from the home world.

  ‘So, we’re down,’ Nicola said. She looked at her silver feet. ‘On a deck that’s moving so fast that for every day that passes here—’

  ‘Fourteen thousand years outside,’ Jophiel said.

  Nicola just looked at him.

  Michael Poole grinned. ‘Well, then. No time to waste. Let’s get to work.’

  With impressive briskness, Jophiel thought, Poole rattled off a set of emergency protocols and specific orders, addressed to the crew in earshot.

  Nobody was allowed outside the lifedome, not for now. ‘The footprints and flags can wait until we’ve crawled over every square centimetre of this lifedome. We’re stuck here, and we have to make sure we can survive here. I figure that will take seven days, minimum. I’ll post draft schedules. Look, I know you worked hard to get here. Now we have to work just as hard to stay. Let’s get organised. Let’s do this.’

  So, in this twenty-sixth year of their journey, the crew buckled down to this new phase of their lives.

  Even Susan Chen was able to help. She did after all have a millennium’s experience of survival dependent on ageing Poole Industries GUTship technology, and she was able to point out long-term failure modes nobody else had even thought of.

  Meanwhile Poole asked Asher Fennell to begin a ground-level survey of the huge artefact on which they were now stranded. But there was security to think about too, not just the engineering. Who knew what threats waited for them on this artificial world? After all, they had come here precisely to confront such a threat, in the Xeelee. Max Ward was eager to start swivelling the whole crew into a military routine, but Poole resisted that. There was too much work to be done in simply staying alive.

  Seven days, then, as they crawled over the lifedome securing their means of survival. Seven days that in the event turned into eight, nine . . .

  It was on the tenth day after the crash that Michael Poole finally allowed the footprints and flags.

  Ten days in which, thanks to the ferocious time dilation at this level of the Wheel, one hundred and thirty-seven thousand years passed in the outside universe.

  44

  Ship elapsed time since launch: 25 years 137 days

  Earth date: c. ad 166,000

  ‘I’m stepping down from the lifedome now . . .’

  The first human being to walk on the surface of the Wheel, in a heavy, upgraded skinsuit, was Chinelo Thomas. Jophiel, with the rest of the crew, watched through the lifedome hull, made transparent for the day, as sixteen-year-old Chinelo, carrying a small pack, took her first tentative steps away from the dome wall.

  A brief meeting to decide on the first pioneer had quickly settled on her, once Max Ward had suggested her name. ‘So what if it’s Max’s idea?’ Nicola had murmured to Jophiel. ‘She might be one of his acolytes right now but so are half the young people on the ship. She’s young, she’s smart, she’s a leader, and she represents the future of mankind – whatever that turns out to be. Who else but her? Max is one of those incredibly dumb people who sometimes makes an incredibly smart decision, almost by accident.’

  Jopohiel was impressed that Chinelo’s first words were not some gushy reaction, but were calm, efficient, factual, precise.

  ‘The gravity feels normal. Of course, just as inside the lifedome. Hull plate is almost perfectly smooth, and frictionless, but the Kahra pads on my boots seem to work well. Just think, I’m using stuff for moving around on Xeelee hull plate that was first developed when Michael Poole and Jack Grantt explored the Cache . . .’

  ‘That should have been me,’ Nicola muttered.

  ‘Let it go,’ Jophiel whispered.

  ‘It feels a little sticky when I walk. I have to pick up my feet deliberately. Sooner that than I fall on my butt and everybody laughs.’

  ‘And there’s the sixteen-year-old,’ Jophiel murmured.

  Several paces away from the lifedome now, Chinelo looked around.

  Lifted her head.

  ‘The view out here is . . . I won’t try to describe it. You can feel how big everything is. Those strange glows to east and west. That roadway in the sky, the upper deck, like it might fall down and crush me. It’s all too big. Maybe we’ll get used to it, with time. I’m only a short walk away, but the lifedome looks small already. Fragile. But it’s all we’ve got; we should take care of it, like Mr Poole says . . .’

  It occurred to Jophiel that Chinelo, and the other youngsters who hadn’t even been to Goober’s Star, must have a profoundly deprived sense of distance, of scale. In the lifedome, in interstellar space, everything in the universe had either been no more than a few hundred metres away, or at infinity. He wondered if that would help or hinder them as they tried to learn their way around the Wheel.

  ‘I think I should get out the flags now.’

  She opened her pack. She drew out a couple of fold-out poles with Kahra-pad bases that she stuck to the hull-plate floor. Then she shook out two flags, and fixed them to the poles. One was the ancient UN standard, a laurel wreath cradling the Earth against a blue background. The second was the flag of Mars, a bright red globe cut across by non-existent canals.

  Michael murmured, ‘She asked for the flags herself.’

  ‘I know,’ Nicola said. ‘Sixteen years old and she looks back to the past. Smart kid.’

  Chinelo had the flags set now. She put down her pack and stepped back, and looked around, at the sky, the Wheel floor, the lifedome. ‘I know this is a big moment. The kind that only happened a few times before, in human history. Or prehistory. The first time people walked on new continents, on Earth. Like the First Australians. Or when the astronauts first walked on the Moon, the first human footsteps on another world. The first on Mars. And then the first footsteps on the Xeelee Cache, when humans came into contact with an alien artefact, a craft from beyond the stars, for the first time. Armstrong on the Moon said he came in peace for all mankind. Grantt on the Cache said the same thing. I think he meant it, even if it didn’t work out that way. Because for sure, the Xeelee hadn’t come in peace.

  ‘Now we’ve come all the way out here. Everybody thinks we came to fight. That we came for revenge, against the Xeelee that wrecked the Earth. We are following Michael Poole, who inspired a whole galactic war against the Xeelee in a different timeline.

  ‘But I was born on the Cauchy. I never saw Earth. And I know about relativity. Every time I take a breath here a whole month goes by in the universe outside.

  ‘The past is gone. Earth is gone. Even Cauchy is gone. I’m not going to claim we came in peace. We did come here for all mankind, I think. I believe we came to understand above all. But if that means war
, so be it.’ She paused. ‘That’s all I want to say.’ She turned, and Jophiel could see her grin, wide behind her faceplate. ‘So, do you guys want to come out now? It’s pretty amazing.’

  45

  It was on the following day, the eleventh since the crash, that Jophiel and Nicola finally got out of the lifedome themselves, and walked on the surface of the Wheel.

  Asher was their guide. She seemed in a hurry from the beginning; she walked briskly, directly away from the lifedome, and Jophiel and Nicola hurried to keep up. Nicola wore a new armoured skinsuit of her own – a design had been guesswork by Nicola herself, Harris and others, as nobody quite knew how much her Ghost hide would protect her under the Galaxy-Core sky of the Wheel.

  Nicola muttered as they walked, ‘So why isn’t Poole himself out here?’

  Asher said, ‘He should be. The engineering checks are taking up too much of his attention. Too much time.’

  Jophiel nodded. ‘It’s an occupational hazard, if you’re a Poole. But I take your point.’

  ‘Do you?’ Asher asked, sounding surprisingly bitter. ‘Do you really? Do you really grasp what we’re facing here?’

  ‘We’re out here now,’ Nicola said seriously. ‘We’re listening.’

  Asher drew to a halt, panting. ‘Just so long as you do.’ She spread her arms, and lifted her heavily protected face to the complicated sky. ‘Look. Away from the human clutter, the lifedome . . . Take a few breaths to just look.’

  Jophiel followed her advice. He turned, at random, to the ‘east’, as they called it, the direction of spin, where the sky glowed a rich blue. Nicola too was looking that way. Jophiel saw that the front of her silvered body reflected blue highlights from the complex sky ahead of her, and her back was painted red by the western sky.

  Asher was agitated, one gloved hand pulling at the other. ‘Nearly fourteen thousand years pass with every single day we spend here. Time dilation. That kid Chinelo got it, right from the beginning. Every breath takes a month, she said. Are none of you thinking about what that means? We are – my team and I. And we’ve been watching the sky – when we’ve been able to steal time away from Michael Poole’s programme of chores. I’ve told him what we’ve seen, but he doesn’t want to disturb the crew while—’

  ‘Just tell us now,’ Nicola said softly.

  ‘Very well. Look, we’re going through a new . . . phase now. When events come thick and fast, faster than we are programmed to deal with. One example.’ She pointed at the sky, in a direction meaningless to Jophiel. ‘Up there. Globular cluster M15. On our fifth day here. Suddenly it turned green. The stars, every one – all at once, in our accelerated frame . . .’

  Nicola was baffled. ‘M15? So what?’

  But Jophiel understood, and his unreal heart hammered. ‘Nicola. That cluster, seen from Earth, was in Pegasus. That was the way the Gea went. After the mutiny.’

  Nicola’s silver mouth dropped open, behind her faceplate. ‘Oh. And if they went out there at lightspeed, nearly—’

  ‘They’d have got there in our second day down here,’ Asher said. ‘And at lightspeed the evidence of whatever they’re up to reached us on day five.’

  Nicola looked up. ‘So what are they doing?’

  ‘Who can know? If they maintained Officer Country and its high-speed processing, They could have become an ancient and powerful culture even before they arrived. And now – well, now they have a whole globular cluster to play with. A hundred thousand stars. That’s not all. Cold Earth, Jophiel. Remember what was to become of that? On the longest of timescales – timescales we are now jumping over—’

  Immediately, he got it. ‘Wolf 359.’ He glanced at Nicola. ‘After the Displacement, Cold Earth got flung out of the Solar System by its residual orbital velocity. Aimed more or less, by chance, at Wolf 359, a red dwarf star. It would have taken somewhere over eighty thousand years to get there.’ He shook his head. ‘A time that seemed impossibly far in the future—’

  ‘Got there day five,’ Asher said bluntly.

  ‘Lethe—’

  She held up a hand. ‘And on day eight, we saw it.’

  ‘Saw what?’

  ‘We figure they initiated it around ad 100,000, Jophiel. Just about the time we estimated the Xeelee, or its machines, would have finished its work in the Solar System. Reduced it all to dust. Well, that was when Wolf 359 lit up with a beacon. All wavelengths, from gravity waves on up. It reached us on day eight here.’

  Jophiel frowned. ‘They – whoever they are, whatever they have become on Cold Earth – are broadcasting their presence to the Galaxy, then.’

  Asher grinned, uneasy – awed, even, Jophiel thought. ‘Yes. A signal that can mean only one thing.’

  ‘They’re not hiding,’ Nicola said. ‘They aren’t afraid, not any more. Maybe they are calling the Scattered home. Lethe.’ She laughed, apparently from sheer wonder.

  ‘But,’ Asher said, ‘look at it another way. That’s all we found. Of humanity, I mean. M15, Wolf 359.’

  Jophiel nodded slowly. ‘Right. Whereas, if humans had established some Galaxy-spanning super-civilisation—’

  ‘We’d know about it. They’d be here by now.’

  ‘But all we found here,’ Nicola said, ‘is one shabby lifedome in that Ghost cupworld.’

  ‘So there’s just us,’ Jophiel said. ‘And we can’t expect any help.’

  ‘Correct. Which is why some of us,’ Asher said carefully, ‘think we need another solution. Another plan. For our long-term survival, I mean.’

  Jophiel shook his head. ‘Another solution based on what?’

  Asher pointed to the sky. ‘The cupworlds. We saw them on the way in. Earth-like habitats, more or less. The chances of survival, long term, in such a structure are much greater than in the wreck of the Cauchy. If we can pick the right one. Earth Two, on Deck Two, seems the favourite.’

  Jophiel frowned. ‘How would we get there? We can’t fly any more . . .’ Even as he spoke, though, a possible solution to that, at least, occurred to him. ‘Anyway I suspect Michael will say this is all beside the point. We didn’t come here for cupworlds. We came to confront the Xeelee.’

  Asher said, ‘But securing our survival needn’t compromise that goal. Even if it takes a little more time. Jophiel, we need to put all this together, and to come up with a strategy. And we need to do it fast, because—’

  ‘I know. Fourteen thousand years per day.’

  ‘The stars are dying, Jophiel. We’re running out of time. Literally.’

  He nodded. ‘You’re right. We need to take this to Michael.’

  46

  The earthquake hit four days later.

  That was what it felt like: a deep shuddering, in the bones of the ground.

  Jophiel felt it, of course. His spacegoing instincts had him reach for a skinsuit. If a ship’s drive faltered, or some object hit the hull, the first priority was protection from the vacuum. Then a deeper, planetbound reaction cut in. Earthquake. He felt a profound, irrational fear at this betrayal by the ground itself, the substrate of the world.

  Then it occurred to him that he wasn’t on a planet at all.

  It took Asher twenty-four hours to come up with an explanation. ‘Some kind of impact, we think,’ she told the seniors. ‘On the Wheel itself. We don’t know enough about the Wheel’s dynamic modes to figure out what struck, or where.’

  ‘Something big, then,’ Michael Poole said sternly. ‘A rogue planet. Even a star. Well, there are plenty of those; this is a dangerous corner of the Galaxy.’

  Nicola was sceptical. ‘We’ve only been here a few days. How likely is it a rogue star is going to hit in that time?’

  Asher shook her head. ‘You’re not seeing it right. Time dilation, remember. A day down here corresponds to about fourteen thousand years outside. One impactor in an interval like that doesn’t seem so
surprising, does it? As long as we’re down on this deck we’re going to have to get used to “rare” events happening all the time.’

  Poole grunted. ‘Good summary. Show’s over.’

  So Jophiel, and the rest, went back to work. Though Jophiel never felt quite as secure on this mighty construct as he had before.

  The next day Michael Poole gathered his seniors at the centre of the lifedome amphitheatre.

  Jophiel glanced at their attentive faces, all bathed in the Wheel’s relativistic glow. Chinelo, first to walk on the Wheel, was here too, her face open, engaged.

  ‘So,’ Poole said without preamble. ‘Let’s sum up. Here we are, on the Wheel. We already endured an epic journey of unprecedented proportions to get here. We made it, mostly. A remarkable achievement.

  ‘But now we have to do more.

  ‘We have a number of problems.’ He counted off on his fingers. ‘One. We’re stuck in this busted lifedome. And it’s all we have. It’s all we’ll ever have, if we stay here. And the longer we sit here, the greater the chance of some catastrophic breakdown. The recycling loops are almost perfectly closed – but not quite; we’ll run out of something. Or some random piece of debris will fall on us from out of the crowded sky up there.

  ‘Meanwhile, we may be running out of another resource – time itself. As Asher pointed out, now that we’re stuck in this pit of accelerated spacetime.

  ‘Look, we know there’s a kind of universal crisis going on. We know that, because of the infestation of dark-matter agents, all the Sunlike stars are being aged too rapidly. How rapidly? It would have taken the Sun about five billion years to blow up into its red giant stage. Now, it looks like that will happen in just a million years.’ He forced a grin. ‘It sounds a long time. It’s not. On this relativistic Wheel of ours, on this deck anyhow, we’ll go through five million years in twelve months. Just one year, as we experience it, on this deck.

  ‘However . . .’