Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  At the other extreme was another subset of worlds superficially like High Australia, Jophiel thought: mostly arid landscapes, with any seas and oceans standing like puddles.

  Only a handful of worlds had expansive land masses dividing large oceans, like Earth.

  Earth Three was one such.

  Asher looked around at them. ‘The world we’ve called Earth Three is still the most Earthlike we’ve spotted – and that includes High Australia.’

  Something in her tone indicated to Jophiel that this was where the bad news would be coming. Bad news, about their best hope of refuge. That sense of dread deepened.

  ‘But,’ he prompted.

  ‘But,’ she said ruefully. ‘You need to be prepared for what I’m going to show you. For one thing, time dilation is a lot less up on Deck Three. Half a million years have passed, for worlds up on Deck Three, since we launched the Cauchy. Over two and a half million years outside the Wheel, of course. And so the glimpse of Earth Three we saw on the way in, when we first arrived at the Wheel – well. It’s out of date.’

  Poole looked alarmed. ‘What are you hinting at, Asher? Is there some problem?’

  ‘See for yourselves.’

  Jophiel knew very well what Earth Three had looked like, before. The crew’s scientists had examined those few, sketchy flyby images closely, even obsessively, trying to tease the meaning out of every pixel. Jophiel remembered a world that had looked like a scrambled Earth – a mix of oceans, ice and land in about the right proportions – like Earth itself, perhaps, in some past age, with photosynthetic life of some kind busily using sunlight to generate an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. If Earth life couldn’t prosper there, it couldn’t prosper anywhere.

  ‘Half a million years later,’ Asher said. ‘The good news is that atmospheric chemistry has advanced quickly. A lot more oxygen. It’s breathable, we think. However—’

  She showed her images.

  As seen from above, Earth Three looked broken.

  That was Jophiel’s first impression. That much-studied scramble of continents and oceans was broken up into segments, plates separated by what looked like wide, white rivers. And those segments themselves were a crazy patchwork, some flooded with grey water, some caked in ice, some just bare rock or sand – though some were islands of green and grey that, it seemed, bore life, just as they had promised before.

  And at the centre of the crater-like dimple within which the cupworld rested, a mountain reared up, a smooth cone, monstrously tall.

  ‘Cracked,’ he muttered. ‘The cupworld is cracked.’

  Nicola grunted. ‘Not like you to find the right word, Jophiel. But that’s it. Like it was some fine piece of crockery, dropped and smashed to bits, and put crudely back together. These white bands between the segments—’

  ‘Hull plate,’ Asher said. ‘If it looks like some kind of repair job, it probably is. We think. And those hull-plate joins are pretty crude welds.’

  ‘The impacts we experienced,’ Poole said. ‘When stuff hit the Wheel. Too big for even the Xeelee’s defence mechanisms to deal with. This is the result. Smashed worlds.’

  Asher nodded. ‘That’s what I think. We discussed this before. We’ve already been here for two million years ourselves – we’re fast-forwarding through time, especially when we were down on Deck One – and on such timescales we were likely to see most kinds of exceptional incident. Including catastrophic accidents. We think, in fact, this is a relic of the first impact we experienced, or thought we did, when we were back on Deck One. Half a million years ago for this cupworld, give or take.

  ‘You can see the cupworld is damaged. You can also see life of some kind is surviving down there.’ She hesitated. ‘We do think we see the signature of Earth-type life. Our kind of photosynthesis, for example. We’re still too far away to be sure.’

  Nicola frowned. ‘So? Look, we know the Ghosts came to this place, the Wheel. We know they brought humans, if only from the Gourd. If they dropped people into High Australia, couldn’t they have dropped them into this world too? And if so—’

  ‘If so,’ Asher said patiently, ‘they will have had to endure half a million years, subjectively, in this place already. That’s an evolutionary timescale. Time enough for a lot to change. Especially after a cataclysmic upheaval. So this cupworld may be more . . . exotic than we might have expected.’

  ‘So what?’ Poole asked. ‘We have no place else to go. And ultimately it’s only a waystation. Our purpose is to get to the Xeelee. Which would have meant using Earth Three as a base, and going on. An expeditionary force. On to the next strut, descending back to Deck One from where we could travel to meet the Xeelee at the site where we observed it . . .’

  ‘That may be problematic too. And it’s the second thing we need to discuss.’ Asher pulled up more images, some direct, some extrapolated, this time of the wider structure of the Wheel. ‘I can only show you what we found.’

  And Jophiel saw the problem immediately.

  The next strut, which might have delivered Michael Poole to his foe, was damaged too. Buckled, its surface twisted and broken.

  ‘Lethe,’ said Michael Poole. ‘An impact, somewhere close by. Has to be.’

  ‘We’re still trying to resolve the finer detail. We can’t know what effect this might have on the Wheel’s structural resilience—’

  ‘He doesn’t care about that, Asher,’ Nicola murmured. ‘Not Michael Poole. He came to this place to confront the Xeelee. We all came so far, just for that. Now, in this last leg, through sheer bad luck, he’s lost his means of moving on.’

  Poole snapped, ‘It’s just another obstacle.’ He was clearly thinking hard. ‘Our plan of action from here is clear enough. We proceed to Earth Three. We find a way to live there. And then we find another way to move on.’

  Nicola murmured to Jophiel, ‘You know, you Pooles are always more scary when you are calm than when you are angry.’

  60

  On the one hundred and fifty-seventh day since the strut, Jophiel was summoned again to Asher’s truck.

  Poole was here, with Asher, Max, Nicola. Wina stared, wide-eyed.

  And the Ghost, First Slaver, was here too. Wina had her bow and arrow in her hands, an arrow nocked, ready to fire.

  ‘Jophiel Poole,’ the Ghost said politely.

  Jophiel nodded. He walked deeper into the truck. On the softscreens were images of what looked like a Ghost tangleship, after a spectacular crash. He looked around. ‘What’s going on here?’

  Max Ward was glaring. ‘What do you see, Jophiel?’

  ‘A crashed Ghost ship.’

  ‘Right. Which one of our crew just detected in a cupworld, up here on Deck Three. But we know that this fatball,’ he pointed his thumb at the Ghost hovering impassively beside him, ‘didn’t arrive in this crashed Ghost ship. He came from a crash down on Deck Two. High Australia. And now, this,’

  Poole sighed heavily. ‘You see the problem, Jophiel. Consider the odds. We’ve crawled a fraction across this huge structure. And if we’ve found two crashed Ghost ships, so close together, there must have been whole armadas of them, descending on this structure, across the ages, perhaps across a couple of million years. So why did they come here? What did they want?’

  Max glared at the Ghost. ‘And where did they go? Are we going to turn a corner and find they took over this whole Wheel?’

  ‘No,’ the Ghost said.

  ‘Then where?’

  ‘I have no objection to telling you.’

  Asher frowned. ‘Why didn’t you tell us before?’

  ‘You didn’t ask.’

  Max would have interjected again, but Poole held him back.

  ‘We followed the Xeelee,’ said the Ghost. ‘That became a policy. Across millennia, a species policy. And, before I became isolated, I was aware that some of our parties had followed the Xe
elee to the Great Attractor.’

  Asher stared. ‘The extragalactic centre? You mean the artefact there? The cosmic-string ring?’

  ‘I know you have been observing it,’ the Ghost said. ‘This object so distorts spacetime that whole galactic clusters are drawn to it. Species across much of the observable universe must see it. Many must travel there. We follow the Xeelee, we Ghosts. We followed a Xeelee here, to the Galaxy centre. And we followed them to the Attractor too.’

  Asher looked baffled. ‘Very well. The ring. It is obvious that the Xeelee are undertaking a massive manipulation of spacetime. Even we have been observing it long enough that we’ve been able to track its construction. We now think it will be finished around five million years ad – that is, five million years after the date we of the Cauchy encountered you Ghosts at Goober’s Star. Five million years: just when we expect the stars to have died. But we still don’t know what it’s for . . .’

  Ask it.

  Jophiel felt . . . giddy, perhaps, Disoriented. Too much information, pouring in. He tried to think, to speak clearly.

  ‘You know, I lost track of Asher’s observations of the Great Attractor. That dating is news. Five million years more until the death of the stars . . .’ And he remembered that the Cauchy crew was already some three million years through that tremendous interval. ‘But we still didn’t know the ring’s purpose. The Xeelee’s objective.’

  Ask the Ghost, then.

  Michael Poole, murmuring in Jophiel’s ear.

  Jophiel didn’t look round. ‘Ask it what?’

  Ask the Ghost about the ultimate purpose of the ring. Or at any rate what it believes that purpose is. What have you got to lose? You’re all in this together now.

  Jophiel turned his head.

  It was Poole. But it was not Poole. He smiled at Jophiel. He was thin, tired-looking. He wore his drab one-piece coverall. He looked older than before.

  Jophiel turned to the Ghost, and then back to the other Poole.

  Who was no longer there.

  ‘I’ll take the hint,’ he said.

  The others looked at him curiously. Michael, template Michael, looked suspicious.

  ‘Look,’ Jophiel said. ‘Here we all are glaring at the Ghost. Maybe we should try talking to the thing. Ghost – you say your kind have been travelling to the Xeelee ring. If you know its purpose, tell us.’

  ‘I have been isolated for a long time. I can only guess.’

  ‘Guess, then,’

  ‘The war rages,’ the Ghost said simply. ‘Across this universe. The Xeelee and their light-matter kin battle against the dark-matter swarms. You have witnessed the infestation of all the bright stars by the larval forms you call photino fish – and I know that you have one such larva locked up in a box of construction material, in your ve-hicles, stolen from the Ghosts at Goober’s Star. And you have witnessed for yourselves that the dark-matter creatures are winning.’

  ‘Across this universe,’ Asher said. ‘You said, the war rages across this universe.’

  ‘Quite. And so the Xeelee are seeking to escape from this universe, and flee to another.’

  A simple statement. A long silence. The Pooles, Michael and Jophiel, stared at each other.

  Asher laughed, in wonder. ‘A naked singularity. Is that what the Xeelee are cooking up? At the centre of the ring. All that mass-energy whirling around at relativistic speeds—’

  ‘Yes. They’re creating a rip in this universe,’ Poole said, nodding. ‘Acting as a doorway to another.’

  The First Slaver said, ‘The Ghosts have no ambition to become extinct. You may know that the universe betrayed us once already—’

  ‘When a pulsar ate your star,’ Jophiel said. ‘Your Destroyer God.’

  ‘Indeed. Now the Destroyer God is loose once more, and is wreaking havoc on a cosmic scale. The Xeelee, however, are seeking a way out.’

  Poole laughed. ‘And you Ghosts are going to follow them. Right? What audacity!’

  Ward growled, ‘So what’s that got to do with the Ghost wreck below? Why come here, to the Wheel?’

  ‘We follow the Xeelee,’ the Ghost said laconically. ‘As I said. We watch them. When the Xeelee which you wounded, Michael Poole, began building a significant artefact at the centre of our Galaxy, we came to study it. We believe that this Xeelee, unable perhaps to reach the Great Attractor in this epoch – and certainly unable to contribute to the dark-matter war – is seeking to survive by accelerating through time. Thus it inhabits the extreme dilation zone, down on the lowest levels of the Wheel.’

  ‘Ah,’ Poole said. ‘Only a few months subjective, five million years objective.’

  ‘We believe the Xeelee will then attempt to join its conspecifics, in their flight through the ring – after the dark-matter war is done, while the ring is still functional, before the ring is abandoned, collapsed, destroyed. This is what I and my colleagues concluded as we explored the Wheel.’

  Poole said, ‘So this Wheel, this whole vast artefact, is a crude, one-way time machine! . . . I suppose it makes sense. But why the cupworlds? Why make it a harbour for other forms of life?’

  The Ghost said, ‘We cannot be sure. We believe that the Xeelee, though apparently powerful and indifferent, do in fact have an instinct to protect other life forms. To preserve them, even through cosmic transformations.’

  Asher nodded. ‘We thought we saw that. The client species that came through the wormhole with the Solar System Xeelee. The quagma phantoms, the Paragons . . . They may have been relics of the past – preservations. I wonder if our Xeelee has built this big fly-trap as a way of collecting species to take with it through the Attractor.’

  ‘So you Ghosts were going to follow the Xeelee through their escape hatch,’ Poole said. ‘But some of you never got further than this Wheel.’

  ‘That is my tragedy, yes.’

  ‘And ours,’ Nicola said softly.

  Poole looked around at them all, one by one. ‘Does all of this make any difference to our own next steps? No? Then we continue.’

  So they travelled on.

  And after a journey across the deck of two hundred and forty-one days, and having driven in their trucks a distance equivalent to eighty times the gulf between Earth and Neptune, the convoy reached Earth Three.

  61

  Ship elapsed time since launch: 27 years 173 days

  Earth date: c. ad 2,710,000

  A world like a smashed plate, clumsily stuck back together. Just as Jophiel and the rest had seen from afar. But now, a week after the arrival of the Cauchy crew at the edge of this new cupworld, after surveys from their Rim Mountain station and flights of their single flyer, the maps Asher Fennell showed her colleagues were far more detailed than anything they’d had when they had chosen this world as their next destination.

  Asher and her team of amateur geographers had divided this world into sectors – roughly like pie slices – around the great monument that was Central Mountain. Pie slices that contained significantly distinct climatic zones, separated by thick ridges of hull plate, folds themselves the size of mountain ranges.

  And now Jophiel stood with Asher and their colleagues on the edge of the Rim Mountains himself, looking down through the Lid over the sky on this new world.

  Down on one of these zones. A bare, arid plain.

  ‘Like we travelled all this way and ended back at High Australia,’ Chinelo said.

  Jophiel too felt only a kind of incuriosity, even dismay. He raised his head and looked to a dusty horizon. Just as at High Australia, all of the cupworld’s atmosphere was below him, and it was like looking down into a very shallow, very clear sea, with a sandy sunlit floor. He could see nothing of the neighbouring continent-sized pie slices. It would be hard work to live here, in this pie-slice desert at least, for the crew and their putative descendants.

  And he c
ouldn’t make out Central Mountain, all of five thousand kilometres away. The telescopes revealed a hull-plate summit sticking out above the dusty air, like a tethered moon. Nobody imagined that the mountain, or the rest of this world’s detail, was as it had been designed by the Xeelee.

  Asher was holding up her map. ‘So we came in from the west, and we’re looking east, spinward. If I show you an altitude chart . . .’

  Coded with false colours, this was a disc of shades, varying from yellow in the west to deep brown in the east. And a dazzling pinprick of yellow-white at the centre.

  ‘The lighter the shade, the higher the altitude. You can see Central Mountain, towering above the mean. But if you look at the cupworld as a whole—’

  Chinelo saw it immediately. ‘It’s tipped up. Higher in the west, where we are, lower in the east.’

  ‘That’s it. The collision that disrupted the Wheel left this particular world on a tilt.’ On her screens, she sketched detail on the maps. ‘You can see that the altitude slope has affected the climate zones – presumably because of the distortion of weather systems, the water distribution. And those big hull-plate ridges between the zones act like tall mountain ranges also – very tall, and presumably immune to erosion. There do seem to be passes through them; life can cross between the zones. But they cast mighty rain shadows.

  ‘We haven’t stayed still long enough to study cupworlds properly, not even at High Australia. We certainly don’t know how they are supposed to work. And if this cupworld has suffered sufficient damage – maybe even the basic day-night cycle has been disrupted, let alone the seasonality and average temperatures . . . Well, we’re just going to have to keep on measuring, and studying, and figuring it out.

  ‘In the meantime, this is what we found.’ She gestured at her pie-slice map, sweeping her gloved hand. ‘Working anticlockwise from here, there is an oceanic sector – a few scattered islands and one major continent – and then a frozen zone. Glaciers descending from the foothills of the local Rim Mountains, and what looks like tundra below. The ice piles up at the cupworld’s easternmost point, so its lowest in terms of mean altitude. Beyond the frozen zone you have what looks like temperate grassland. Wide sweeps of open land. What may be big herds. And after that the final sector, to the “north” of us. Dense forest, apparently tropical. Which gives way to the desert before us.’