Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  Jophiel looked out at what looked like a snowfield, clinging to the upper flanks of the Rim Mountains. ‘So I guess we’re at an altitude where ice is going to form?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Asher said, staring at her softscreen rather than the view. ‘But that’s not ice – or not all of it. That’s hull plate – I think. Or some variant. Not much of it, just a skim.’

  Poole frowned. ‘It doesn’t look like hull plate. Not the usual texture. And look at its lower edge. It looks like it’s turning brown. Crumbling, even . . .’

  ‘Aha,’ Asher said.

  That irritated Nicola. ‘You can be smug, Fennell. Some new puzzle you figured out?’

  ‘I think I know how the mountains stay up, instead of eroding away. I’ll tell you when I’m sure.’

  Flying low now, and evidently handling easily, the flyer fled directly away from the Rim Mountains into the interior of the cupworld.

  51

  They flew low over rusty plains. Briny-looking lakes. It resembled Mars, Jophiel thought – or at any rate a partially terraformed Mars, one dream that had never been fulfilled before the Xeelee came.

  Yet there was life here. Jophiel made out clumps of tough-looking grasses now, and even stubby trees, their leaves small, the species unrecognisable – to Jophiel, anyhow. But then the Pooles had never been naturalists.

  ‘High Australia,’ Chinelo said now.

  They looked at her.

  ‘The name for this place. I was thinking. I saw Virtuals of Australia on the Cauchy.’

  Probably, Jophiel knew, last-chance-to-see records of Earth, before it was lost to the Displacement, and the cold.

  ‘You wouldn’t let me be first out through the Lid; at least you can let me name it.’

  ‘I keep reminding you,’ Nicola said, ‘there might be people here already, human or not. And they might already have their own name . . . What is that?’

  Jophiel glimpsed motion on the ground below. It was gone in a glimpse, such was the flyer’s speed.

  But Jophiel thought he had seen a gaggle of what looked like big, long-legged chickens.

  Being chased by what looked like a big, long-legged rat.

  ‘Earthlike,’ was Nicola’s only comment. ‘Slightly evolved, maybe. But clearly Earth stock.’

  ‘From the scatterships?’ Jophiel said. ‘Captured, like the Ghosts took Chen’s ship, brought here, released into the wild?’

  ‘Not much time for evolution,’ Asher murmured. ‘Like we said, this cupworld can’t be more than a few thousand years old, locally. I suppose some quick adaptation is possible. Plenty of ecological niches to fill in such an empty landscape.’

  Poole just shrugged. ‘We don’t know enough yet.’

  ‘So,’ Nicola said, ‘should I divert and chase those . . . chickens?’

  Asher asked, ‘Are we still heading for the ocean?’

  ‘Right now, yes.’

  ‘Then keep on in that direction.’

  Poole frowned. ‘Why the ocean?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I know.’

  So they flew on, over more flat terrain, across which wandered rivers, wide and shallow, their water sluggish, red-tinged – Jophiel wondered if the stream he had seen coming out of the Rim Mountains had become a tributary of one of these weary flows. He glimpsed more life, trees and scrub grass and other less identifiable vegetation, mainly growing close to the water courses.

  And here and there – where the water was more accessible, at shallow banks, and around oases that reflected the sky with pink glimmers – he saw animals. Cautiously gathering to drink, he supposed.

  More variants, he thought at first glance, on the theme of rat and bird. If this was a biosphere it was an impoverished one. Although, from what he recalled of the original Australia, watching from the air you would have seen little of life but kangaroos and wallabies and humans, with much of the detail of a still-rich fauna to be discovered down at ground level.

  The ‘daylight’ seemed to be getting brighter, Jophiel thought. Evidently they had arrived, by chance, in a simulated ‘morning’.

  As they approached the ocean, the landscape subtly changed, with a sandy soil mounting up into fields of long, shallow dunes, and the grass becoming scrubbier, paler, longer.

  Then they flew out over the ocean itself. Asher was intent on her screens.

  Nicola murmured, ‘Do you think there are tides here? I wonder how you would simulate that . . . How far out do you want me to go? This pond could be pretty wide.’

  ‘And,’ said Poole, ever cautious, ‘by flying over water we lose several failsafe modes.’

  ‘Just keep on,’ Asher snapped, still intent.

  Jophiel stared down at the grey ocean, low waves rushing beneath the craft’s prow. He wondered what life might be found down there. Some of the scatterships, carrying scraps of Earth’s doomed ecosphere to the stars, had been more or less aquatic, he recalled; some had even carried fish, dolphins, dwarf whales – and the plankton and the rest of the food chain they depended on. He pictured all of them spilling out of some cargo hold, spreading out into another huge, empty biome. And, maybe, land grasses mutating to some kind of seaweed, perhaps, or rats evolving into the equivalents of otters or seals—

  ‘I knew it!’ Asher shouted now.

  Nicola grunted. ‘Thanks for yelling in the pilot’s ear. What did you know?’

  ‘The answer.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘That puzzle about the erosion. How can a world without any geology not get worn flat, all of the mountains eroded away into sea-bottom ooze? I think I have it . . .’

  Nicola said, ‘Terrific. Now, do you mind if we turn around and head back before we run out of fusion fuel?’

  As the flyer banked, Asher spoke eagerly. ‘You were right, of course, Nicola. Erosion must occur, even here. Now, there’s no geological process of uplift to compensate for that erosion. This is just a big machine. And so I knew there must be some mechanical solution.’

  ‘Huge pumps,’ Poole guessed. ‘Taking the sea-bottom ooze, consolidating it, and pumping it up to be dumped on top of the mountains again.’

  ‘No,’ Asher said bluntly. ‘I thought of that. Firstly we saw no sign of pumps and pipes. Second – it’s not the Xeelee way. It’s not elegant. I think they would do it using the hull-plate approach.’

  Jophiel thought that over. ‘Umm. Converting energy to mass. Suppose they repaired the erosion on the mountain tops with mass nucleated out of energy flows from the sky. The result might be that odd-looking hull plate we saw at five kilometres.’

  Asher nodded eagerly. ‘That’s what I’m thinking. Just where the erosion would start kicking in, where the air is thick enough, yes. I looked it up. On Earth, before the Displacement, weathering around the world would deliver dust to the abyssal plains – the ocean deeps – at a slow but steady rate. Two or three centimetres’ thickness, per thousand years. But that is a lot of stuff, a few centimetres over deeps that covered half the planet’s surface.’

  ‘OK. So you’re suggesting the Xeelee fix the loss from the mountains with an energy-mass transformation. Even at such a rate that must be an expensive power drain.’

  ‘I figure it’s pretty high, yes. Something like a hundred thousand times the energy Earth once received from the Sun. But this isn’t the Earth.

  But you’d need to deal with the deposition in the ocean basins, as well as the erosion from the peaks. I was looking for mass loss down there, to match the deposition rate. And I found it.’ She tapped her softscreen. ‘A tiny effect, but we have sensitive instruments. Probably the mass loss and creation are connected to the wider hull-plate river network, a tremendous flow of massed energy; compared to that, all of this is a detail.’

  Poole scowled. ‘Good work,’ he said, sounding indifferent.

  Asher scowled and shut up.
>
  They turned and flew back over the coast at a lower altitude. And Jophiel started to make out a new set of features, now. At first they looked like shallow craters, like the Moon’s, each a neat circle of rim wall a couple of kilometres across, with a stubby hill, or mound, in the centre. Yet the features seemed somehow too orderly, too similar in size, to be the product of impacts – and besides, he’d have expected the Xeelee defence to keep out minor impactors. These features were sparsely scattered, but there were a lot of them, he saw now, panning over the landscape. Some vaguely clustered close to visible water sources, others were more haphazard.

  They flew on for a while. Then Nicola banked the flyer sharply, heading to the right. ‘Hey, Chinelo. You want to know what this place is called?’

  She pointed out of her window.

  Jophiel leaned over to look.

  There was a woman on the ground.

  ‘Ask her,’ Nicola said.

  Nicola brought the flyer down, slow, smooth and quiet, a good distance from the woman – the native, Jophiel thought they would have to call her. ‘Don’t want to rustle a hair on her head,’ Nicola murmured.

  She stood alone, near a rock bluff. Her skin dark, her hair wild, her clothing looking like rags. Her feet bare. She had some kind of pack on her back.

  On Poole’s command they climbed out one at a time, slowly, hands away from the body, empty and open. As unthreatening as possible. Nicola, the scary silver statue, was ordered to follow behind the rest.

  If Nicola was last out, Chinelo had been first. ‘Lethe,’ she murmured. ‘Another first footstep for me, and nobody even noticed.’

  ‘Can it,’ Poole said. ‘No sudden moves, nobody call out. We’ve got no idea what we’ve walked into here. She needs to know we’ve come in peace. Let’s go forward, together.’

  The light was quite bright, Jophiel noticed as he walked into this new world – indeed, a new kind of world. Like a hazy sunlight, flat and shadowless, from a glowing sky.

  The woman stood alone, a scrap of verticality in a flat landscape, beside her rock bluff. Quite unmoving. Hands loose at her sides, as empty as the visitors’. Jophiel made out a few more details. A black scar on the ground behind her might be the remains of a fire. She seemed to have backed this rudimentary camp site up against the bluff, as if for cover. Which in turn implied, of course, there was something she needed cover from.

  When they had got to within twenty or thirty paces, they stopped, and Jophiel held his hands up. ‘Let me go first.’

  Nicola snorted. ‘You aren’t even real!’

  ‘I look real enough,’ Jophiel said. ‘And I can’t come to any harm. I can’t do any harm.’

  ‘Just go,’ Poole said tensely.

  Jophiel spread his hands wider, fixed a grin, and walked forward alone, towards the woman.

  And he didn’t even see the woman’s motions. Not until later, when he relived the experience as a slow-motion flashback.

  She had reached behind her back with two hands. One had emerged with a small but sturdy bow, the other with an arrow.

  She nocked the arrow. Fired. Turned and ran.

  Later Jophiel would muse on how many hours, years, of practice those simple, artful motions represented. The arrow was well made too, a finely sharpened stick, apparently fire-hardened, a flight of what looked like chicken feathers.

  In real time, he had little chance to observe any of this as the arrow passed through the space between his eyes.

  There was a wrenching, unreal sensation as his consistency protocols were violated as never before. He staggered, but didn’t fall.

  Chinelo grunted, ‘Leave her to me.’ And she ran after the fleeing woman.

  That was when Jophiel heard Nicola cry out. He whirled around.

  The arrow had dipped a little in its path, as it had flown on to its second target. It was buried in Nicola’s chest – buried up to its flight. And she was already falling.

  Ignoring his own consistency-violation agony, Jophiel started to run back. Poole and Asher moved too, trying to grab Nicola before she hit the ground.

  ‘Got her,’ Chinelo called over their comms link. ‘The local. With my blaster. Shot her in the back. Just stunned her. Bet you’re glad now that Max Ward put us through weapons drill, Michael.

  ‘Oh, one thing I noticed.

  ‘She’s from the Gourd.’

  52

  Up close the woman was surprisingly small in stature. Jophiel might have mistaken her for a ten-year-old among the crew. But she was clearly much older than that, lithe, strong-looking, and her hair was a scraped-short frizz of grey curls.

  They had to get both Nicola and the cupworld woman back to the flyer. Chinelo was able to carry the unconscious woman over one shoulder, her blaster in the other hand.

  Asher and Poole, meanwhile, cradled Nicola, one to either side, their arms interlocked around her waist. That arrow protruded horribly from the centre of her silvered chest, but there was no blood – or blood equivalent – and Jophiel realised uneasily how little he knew in detail of Nicola’s adapted anatomy. He hoped Harris Kemp and his team would know more.

  Such was Nicola’s weight that both Poole and Asher were struggling, sweating, stumbling as they made for the flyer.

  Jophiel, feeling useless, hurried alongside. ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you.’

  Poole grunted. ‘I wonder if Columbus had this kind of trouble.’

  ‘The Hawaiians killed Captain Cook,’ Nicola mumbled now. She raised a blank face; her voice too was eerily expressionless. Jophiel was surprised she was conscious at all, and he wondered if some kind of backup system was cutting in. ‘Just for once will you shut up, Poole? Every time you flap your mouth this Lethe-spawned arrow feels like it twists around.’

  ‘You keep quiet too, then,’ Poole said with grim determination. ‘Nearly there.’

  Back at the flyer, they found that Harris Kemp had already thrown down a skinsuited Virtual copy from the convoy at the top of the Rim Mountains. He supervised briskly as Asher and Poole manhandled their limp, heavy, awkward, precious load through a hatch that suddenly seemed much too small for the purpose.

  Chinelo, meanwhile, carried her prisoner around the back of the flyer, where there was a small cargo hold with no access to the cabin. She dumped the native inside, leaving the woman’s pack on the ground outside, climbed in herself, and pulled the hatch closed after her.

  Jophiel said uncertainly, ‘I guess that’s the right thing to do. What else could she do, stake the woman to the ground? But—’

  ‘But we just imprisoned the first local we saw. Some first contact. And Chinelo is only sixteen years old,’ Asher said.

  She and Poole were, under Kemp’s instructions, scrubbing down a couch with antiseptic gel in preparation for laying Nicola on top of it. Nicola herself for now was slumped over in her favoured pilot’s couch – not that she was going to be doing any piloting any time soon. And, in a chilling bit of ship’s procedure, Asher had already slapped a bracelet on her wrist, stamped with the name of the Cauchy, and Nicola’s name, ship’s date, time of injury.

  Still that arrow protruded from her chest. It was only wood and feathers and some kind of glue, Jophiel saw. Yet it was a thing of artistry in itself.

  Harris said to Jophiel, ‘We have to stabilise her. But the good news is that I’m confident Nicola is going to survive. That’s because her inner layout is a jumble compared to ours. In fact Nicola’s heart is down in her stomach cavity, and the arrow hit one of the complementary components the Ghosts loaded in there – it’s like a sac of seaweed. But look, this will be a complex procedure. That’s precisely because her inner layout is a mess.

  ‘You two.’ He pointed to Asher and Poole. ‘Scrub with gel. I can instruct, but you’re going to have to do the heavy lifting. In the meantime, Jophiel—’

  ‘You’re in the way,
’ Poole growled.

  Jophiel glanced over at Nicola once more. ‘Tell me when you have news.’

  And with a subvocal command he threw himself into the hold.

  Where, among smooth-walled boxes of supplies and spare parts, the captive woman was awake, and wide-eyed, and facing an armed Chinelo.

  When Jophiel materialised out of nowhere, the local did an admirable job, Jophiel thought, of staying calm. In fact, when she had got over a reflex startle, she jabbered a string of words at him. Her tone was challenging, her words incomprehensible – though Jophiel thought some of the vocabulary was elusively on the edge of familiar.

  Chinelo, a little glassy-eyed, kept her blaster pointing at the woman. Maybe she was working through the shock, Jophiel thought.

  ‘Keep her talking,’ Jophiel said.

  ‘She won’t stop talking.’

  ‘Good. So we already have a few minutes’ worth of records to work with.’ With a subvocal command, he set a translation routine working in the ship’s processing suite, ordering it to download any results straight to his own awareness.

  Meanwhile he smiled at the woman, as calmly and reassuringly as he could. Trying not to think of the arrow this woman had shot into his friend – an arrow meant for him, in fact. After all, he was the alien invader here.

  ‘My name is Jophiel. I imagine you’re wondering why I’m an identical copy of the other man you saw. He’s called Michael . . .’

  The woman just stared back, and gabbled some more.

  ‘That’s it, good, just keep talking, give the translator processor a chance to work . . .’

  Chinelo said, ‘She tried to bust out twice.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  Chinelo waggled her blaster. ‘Stun setting. Milder than when I took her down outside.’