Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  Poole frowned. ‘On the grasslands. Herds of what?’

  ‘Well, we don’t know. Not yet. Presumably herbivorous . . . somethings. We haven’t had the resources to check. We do know the ecology is essentially Earthlike. The grass is grass, for instance; the photosynthesis uses the same chlorophyll chemistry as Earth life evolved.’

  ‘So you think this is another place where the Ghosts emptied out some of the Gourd crew, and their ecohab? Or some other scattership.’

  ‘Maybe. But even if so, we have to expect everything will be . . . changed. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain in the briefings.’

  Chinelo frowned. ‘What kind of changes?’

  ‘Evolution. In ecological niches,’ Jophiel murmured. ‘She’s talking about what happens when a landscape fragments. Breaks up. This cupworld is like the African rift valley maybe, where the hominins evolved. Us, I mean. The Mediterranean drying and flooding, pulses of aridity. Once there had been continent-spanning forests. Then it all broke up, and we started to adapt, some to the remnant forests, some to the broadening plains . . .’

  ‘Africa,’ Poole murmured. ‘Maybe that’s what we should call Earth Three. We left High Australia behind. Now – High Africa.’

  ‘Niches, yes,’ Asher said. ‘And half a million years is plenty of time for adaptation. Even for people,’ she added grimly. ‘And we think we’ve seen signs.’

  Jophiel was startled. ‘Of people. From up here?’

  She looked around. ‘You need to understand what I’m going to show you. Remember the Coalescents on High Australia?’

  Chinelo said, ‘The hive people.’

  ‘Right. We know from the historical accounts that Coalescences take only millennia, if not centuries, to evolve. But once established they keep on evolving. Presumably. Given the right conditions.’

  Jophiel turned, turned to face the sweep of desert below the Rim Mountains. ‘Conditions such as here,’ he said, guessing.

  ‘Such as here. But we have never observed just how, before. We’ve surveyed this dry sector. You can see it’s pretty open country. A few oases, a few heavily adapted trees, looking more like cacti. There’s probably animal life, but if so it’s on too small a scale, too dispersed, for us to see from here. But, what we have seen . . .’

  Jophiel had a deep foreboding in his Virtual gut about the images she pulled up now on the softscreens.

  He was expecting something like the pyramids of stone and dirt that they’d observed in High Australia. Here, he saw much more complex forms, vaguely conical, but with vents and shafts and ducts. The basic forms glistened, their surfaces smooth and hard, and the complex light of the sky cast highlights from the tan carapaces.

  And around each and every structure, a circular earthwork.

  Asher said, ‘These structures are all over the desert zone. They seem to have been drawn to water sources. Aquifers, deep springs – on this engineered world you’d probably call them leaks, from the wetter zones to either side. We’ve counted hundreds; there are no doubt more. We’ve no idea of their age. Water courses do shift, on natural landscapes anyhow; it may be that the colonies move, with time – or are even abandoned. We don’t really know. What we do know is that nobody has encountered human Coalescences this old before. Not before we left Cold Earth anyhow.’

  Chinelo seemed awestruck. ‘If they’re like the Libraries on High Australia, there might be millions of people down there. Billions.’

  Poole grunted. ‘But, after half a million years, are Coalescents still people in any meaningful sense? I doubt that there’s anything here for us. In this arid zone, I mean. And we stay away from the Coalescences. Agreed? We’re most likely to find people like us in places suited for people like us to inhabit. ‘

  Jophiel had to smile. ‘A brusque summary of the theory of evolution, but I take your point.’

  Poole ignored him. ‘And that means going to the north and east, in the forest zone, and the grasslands. So we send a scouting party, down off these Rim Mountains into that big wedge of forest, then track roughly north-east, if we can, until we reach the grasslands . . . Are we done here? Let’s go back to the convoy and plan it out.’

  Jophiel thought their spirits had been raised a little by Poole’s crisp decision-making. Maybe it was all illusory. Michael Poole was an earthworm crawling through the track of some immense excavating machine, making a plan to conquer the next centimetre of broken soil. But it helped for now, and maybe you could ask no more of a leader than that.

  Even Nicola had no sarcastic comments to make.

  62

  They allowed seven more days to prepare for the expedition into the rainforest. Temporary habitats were set up, the trucks and other gear were checked over. Their passengers received some attention. Nicola and Asher even ran non-intrusive probes through the hull-plate shell containing their pet dark-matter larva, as Max called it. Trying to detect if it was still alive. And Jophiel briefed their captive Ghost, alone in the truck that was its prison.

  Wina, in a lightweight skinsuit, ran as far and as fast as she could, to an unattainable horizon.

  Poole used the time constructively. At his orders the flyer, broken down for haulage in the convoy, was taken out of store, assembled, tested. But the only place to check out an aircraft was in the air. So Poole mandated test flights, down over the desert zone. Asher leapt on these, so as not to miss a quick opportunity for close-up observations.

  And Jophiel grabbed the chance to go on the first flight of all, over the new world.

  The descent from the Rim Mountains was every bit as exhilarating, as terrifying, as he remembered from High Australia. And soon they were swooping low over a new landscape.

  He had anticipated that this dry landscape would be every bit as dull as High Australia had seemed, up close. But it wasn’t so. Barren it was. In places they crossed dune-fields that stretched as far as the eye could see. Asher pointed out a salt flat: cracked ground that glimmered in the light of the rippling sky: the relic of a vanished sea.

  But a little further from the Rim Mountains they came to a region where oases seemed more common. Jophiel spotted the scrubby brown-green of vegetation, presumably deep-rooted and drought-tolerant.

  Vegetation, and animals.

  The flyer swept down on one oasis, all but silent, but nonetheless its rushing passage and complex shadow disturbed the busy, wary fauna. Jophiel saw what looked like small, erect rodents, with big back legs capable of springing high in the air. Insectivores, maybe. They scattered and scurried for shade, while other rodents, pale, with stubby tails, burrowed out of sight into the ground.

  And now a bird came stalking past, big, evidently flightless, its red crest the only sign of colour on a body covered with dun feathers. It snapped at the rodents with a powerful-looking beak, and glared up at the flyer, as if challenging a rival.

  Then they flew over a herd of what were presumably herbivores. Animals the size of big dogs, maybe, or small horses. They had long fur, and humps on their backs, like camels. When the flyer passed over, they huddled together, fleeing, and it was hard for Jophiel to make out details. But he saw how the ‘camels’ had big ears, folded back against their heads, and powerful-looking back legs, and white lumps of fur for tails. And when they did scatter he saw that they moved with great leaps, propelled by those big back legs.

  When the flyer had moved on, Asher eyed him. ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘I hope we got decent images to convince Harris and the other biologists back at the Rim . . .’

  ‘Convince them of what?’

  ‘Those camel-like creatures looked like big rabbits. The burrowers and insect-catchers back at the water hole were rats. And the big flightless birds—’

  ‘Chickens. I know.’

  Jophiel felt himself shiver at the strangeness of it. ‘This is what you get when you dump out a bit of par
kland and leave it to evolve for a few hundred thousand years.’

  ‘An ecology with everything but the people,’ Asher said. ‘But then, aside from Coalescents, who would want to live here, when there’s a continent-sized forest next door? Although the climate might have kept shifting. Driven them on. It’s evident the Wheel was pretty badly damaged in this area, and maybe when the Xeelee came to make its repairs there was a limit even to its capability. The job was crude – look at all the exposed hull-plate welding. Maybe the cupworld’s systems were permanently destabilised – the erosion cycle, for instance.’

  Jophiel frowned. ‘When the Xeelee came . . . I hadn’t thought of that. You think that’s what happened? I’ve tended to imagine the Xeelee stayed camped down on Deck One, down in the deepest time pit, with some kind of remote repair system to take care of any flaws. But maybe that’s anthropomorphising. Look at its pattern of operation in the Solar System. When it came to the destruction of the worlds, the planetbuster Cages, the Xeelee itself was part of the attack. Its sycamore-seed primary ship was stationed at one vertex of the tetrahedron that caged each planet, with the other corners occupied by drones.’

  ‘Correct. The distinction between a Xeelee and its technology may be blurred. So it does seem quite possible that the Xeelee came here, somehow, to this part of the Wheel, to supervise the repair work itself.’

  Jophiel looked east, in the direction of Central Mountain. ‘And if so it would have needed some kind of repair shack, you’d think . . . Equipped with some way of getting back to its base on Deck One. Something quicker than our crawl across the Decks.’

  ‘Something like a Poole wormhole would do it,’ Asher said, grinning. ‘And stuck on top of that mountain, probably. Centrally placed, with access to all the zones of the cupworld.’

  Jophiel said, ‘We must discuss this with Michael. I mean, if we could find some kind of rapid-transit route back to the Xeelee base on Deck One – that could change everything. If we could find it . . .’

  The flyer rose high in the sky, and the detail of the sparsely scattered inhabitants of the plain below became indistinct, the fleeing herds reduced to smudges against the broad, austere landscape.

  63

  Poole was predictably electrified by the notion of a work shack, and a transit route for the Xeelee. He immediately dispatched small drone craft across the landscape of the cupworld – and to the summit of Central Mountain, which, he agreed, was the most likely place to find a Xeelee portal.

  Then, after seven days of aerial surveys, Poole – clearly suppressing impatience as he waited for the drones’ results – decreed that the ground exploration of High Africa could begin in earnest. Predictably, he insisted on leading the first expedition himself. And, using aerial imaging, he quickly plotted out a course. ‘That forest looks pretty thick. But there must be river courses we could follow. Where there’s an Africa, there must be a Congo . . .’

  So the flyer was loaded up, in search of a river through the forest sector. As ever, Nicola was at the controls. Harris and Asher were both aboard.

  Max Ward wanted to come along, with a view, Jophiel thought, to scouting out a potentially hostile landscape. He had a squad of his trained-up cadets on board too, including Chinelo. ‘After all,’ he growled, ‘if we do find any descendants of the Gourd crew half a million years late, let’s hope they don’t bear a grudge.’

  Susan Chen was here too – in her own way, Jophiel realised, hoping for just such an encounter.

  And Wina of High Australia, hunting pack, bow and arrows and all.

  ‘My idea,’ Poole said. ‘Although she volunteered anyhow. Maybe a native of one cupworld will help us make some kind of contact with the natives of another.’

  Nicola snorted. ‘That is so deeply patronising. Natives they might be, but separated by half a million years. As if you brought along Isambard Kingdom Brunel to make contact with a Neanderthal.’

  ‘You want I should kick her off the plane?’ Poole said.

  Jophiel considered. ‘No. She will surely have better instincts in this kind of environment than you or me, Michael. Come to think of it, so would Brunel, probably. Or the Neanderthal. Let’s get on with it.’

  So they flew.

  Once over the forest, as Poole had predicted, it took just an hour to find a river. A veritable Congo.

  At this point in its course it was a broad, placid stream cutting through a blanket of green, eventually feeding a delta that led into a shallow inland sea – that in turn, a thousand kilometres away, broke against the hull-plate walls that separated this forest sector from the grassland beyond.

  Nicola took the flyer on a course down the river’s middle line.

  Harris said his best first guess was that the evergreen trees that crowded the forest, and even the banyan-like colonists of the shallow waters near the river bank, were hastily evolved relatives of oaks – which, Jophiel learned now, had once had evergreen subspecies as well as deciduous. And in the shallower water the river itself was choked with mats of algae, and what looked like tremendous lilies.

  Green, everywhere. Jophiel the engineer found himself trying to estimate the sheer mass of life he saw in one glance: a biosphere that had presumably developed from the scraps that had tumbled out of the captured wreck of the Gourd, and flourished, adapted, spread, and turned trillions of tonnes of the raw material of this Xeelee artefact into copies of itself.

  Soon the river widened dramatically, and even from a decent altitude, Jophiel had to turn his head deliberately from side to side to see the river’s banks. A Congo indeed, here in High Africa. But such thoughts, of purpose and planning, seemed to dissolve as they flew on and on across green immensity. This forest, Jophiel reminded himself, was a detail in a cupworld that was itself a mere blemish on the face of the Wheel. And all of this, he marvelled, ultimately derived from the mass-energy of a supermassive black hole a light year away.

  Poole had estimated that the crossing of the forest zone, measured out as ten thousand kilometres, would take three watches’ flying at a conservative four hundred kilometres an hour. These would be spaced by two more watches on the ground, to allow for exploration, rest, maintenance.

  So, after the first eight hours, Nicola and Poole started looking for a place to land.

  That turned out to be not so easy. With the river itself a mystery – there were surely no crocodiles or alligators, but maybe something else had taken the initiative to occupy the relevant ecological niches – they did not want to land too close to the water. But the forest was a jungle, and the trees, competing for light, packed about as densely as they could get, Jophiel thought.

  Eventually they spotted a clearing. It was a rough circle blasted into the forest cover, with burned and fallen trees littering the ground, the green shoots of a new generation already showing.

  ‘A lightning strike,’ Nicola called back to her passengers. ‘So now we know there are electrical storms here.

  ‘We’re going down.’

  64

  As soon as they touched down, even as they threw open the doors of the flyer, Max Ward began issuing orders about guard rotas and perimeters.

  Chinelo went off to join Michael Poole and the scouting party he was putting together.

  And Jophiel, walking with Nicola, emerged into a world of green gloom. Tree trunks like pillars rose up to a sky obscured by a distant canopy. Where a little light penetrated to the ground, saplings, scrub, sparse grass struggled to grow, but otherwise the ground was bare, save for a thin carpet of leaves, dry and curled.

  ‘It’s like the cathedral at Achinet,’ Jophiel murmured. ‘The light here. Do you remember? On Tenerife. After the Xeelee probe strike in the Atlantic—’

  ‘I remember,’ Nicola said.

  ‘I knew it, once,’ Susan Chen said. Jophiel saw that she had set up a kind of camp in the open, just a few fold-out chairs, and a small gall
ey unit that would deliver hot drinks and military-style rations. Susan waved a hand. ‘Come, sit with me. One thing that I don’t regret about age is not needing to be busy, busy all the time. We land in a place like this and immediately we are fiddling with equipment and making plans. To achieve what? We are here. The forest is all around us. If we pursue it, it will elude us. If we wait, it will come to us.’

  Nicola was grinning. ‘Good idea. As for me, whatever Poole does, do the opposite. I’ve always found that a good default strategy.’

  Jophiel shrugged, sat on a Virtual equivalent of Susan’s canvas chairs, and snapped his fingers to give himself a Virtual cup of hot mint tea.

  Once the guards were set, the flyer closed up, and the scouting parties had finally marched off into the green shadows, a kind of peace did indeed settle over the landing site.

  And with the human sounds receding, for a few minutes they sat in silence. Jophiel seemed to hear further, clearer. Distant cries, echoing, that might have been birds, small animals – monkeys maybe.

  Susan lifted her face, her eyes closed, a faint smile on her lips. Jophiel thought she must once have been very beautiful. ‘Perhaps it is no coincidence that a forest reminds us of a cathedral. Perhaps that is why we built churches like forest glades in the first place: the towering columns, the gloom, the contained hush. Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, you know. Lost now, of course. We re-created the spaces where our ancestors once walked. And,’ she said, pointing, ‘the forest has never forgotten us either.’