Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

Once the rope was in place, Poole knelt down and stuck his helmeted head through the hole, and looked around at the room below. Then he straightened up, and swivelled so his legs were dangling over the hatch rim, and wrapped the rope around his waist, making sure his comms line wouldn’t snag or tangle. ‘Getting into this one is a little tricky.’

  Jophiel grinned. ‘More funny geometry?’

  ‘You got it. But different again. Just do what I do, and you should be OK.’

  Chinelo frowned. ‘You haven’t done it yet.’

  ‘Here goes . . .’

  Poole twisted around again, so he was on his belly, with his legs dangling in the hole. Then he slithered backwards. Once his legs were in free space Jophiel thought he would fall through quickly. But instead he tipped back, clinging with his arms to the Room floor, as if his legs were being drawn up towards the underside of the floor – to the ceiling of the chamber beneath. He slid further, so he was clutching the edge with his hands.

  Then he let go, and, holding onto the rope with both gloved hands, slid out of sight.

  And, a heart-stopping few seconds later, Jophiel heard his feet thump down on a solid surface.

  Nicola called, ‘Poole? Did you live through that?’

  ‘I . . . More or less. The drop was harder work than I expected. Maybe you should help each other down.’

  Chinelo was staring at the hole in the floor. ‘I don’t understand any of this. What just happened?’

  ‘I think I know,’ Jophiel said. ‘Come see.’

  He, Nicola and Chinelo cautiously approached the hole. Together, they knelt down and stuck their heads through the hatch.

  And saw Michael Poole, standing on one wall. His body horizontal, from their point of view. He was surrounded by what looked like fireflies.

  Poole smiled. ‘Come on in.’

  Once inside, the three of them looked around, apprehensive.

  ‘The images you’re sending me are a jumble,’ Asher called from outside. ‘Tell me what you see, Michael. All of you.’

  ‘Shelves,’ Jophiel said. ‘Surfaces sticking out of the walls. And dropping from the ceiling, poking up from the floor. That is, the ceiling and floor as we see it from our current angles. Like a big cave with stalagmites and stalactites. Not quite natural, not quite artificial.’

  ‘I don’t know what any of that means,’ Chinelo said. ‘But there’s no funny stuff. I mean, everything stays where you look at it, at least. The room furniture, anyhow.’

  ‘No funny stuff,’ said Nicola drily, ‘except that we’re all sticking out of one wall like coat pegs.’

  Chinelo laughed. ‘We’re crawling around a tesseract. Get used to it.’

  ‘Cocky, isn’t she?’ Asher murmured.

  Nicola smiled. ‘So she should be. She’s shown she’s got twice the intellectual capacity of Max Ward, and twice the imagination. And I think you’re right, Michael. We’re safe enough here. And if the beetles liked Chinelo, the fireflies love you.’

  It seemed to be true, Jophiel saw. Like tiny, free-flying lanterns, emitting a bluish light, the ‘fireflies’ were everywhere, but a good number of them had formed a kind of cloud around Poole’s helmet. Jophiel felt an odd stab of jealousy. The life forms seemed to like the other three – the fireflies were clustering around Nicola too now, casting highlights from her smooth, silvered belly, and they hovered over a smiling Chinelo’s open, gloved hands – but they left him alone entirely.

  He fell back on analysis. ‘So, Asher. Have you figured it out yet? What do we have here?’

  ‘Life,’ Asher said. ‘That’s obvious, isn’t it? More life – the structure is evidently full of it. Maybe “Nest” was a good name for it after all. Life that looks to me like at least three divergent types: the quagma phantoms, the beetles, those fireflies. But not our kind of life. Not at all. And not from our time, if they are naturally evolved. Any more than the quagma phantoms were. Not even from the same time . . .’

  Jophiel and Nicola shared a glance.

  Poole said, ‘Come on, Fennell, spill it. This isn’t a college seminar.’

  ‘Life of exotic physics. I think Chinelo’s beetles are creatures of condensed matter. And the fireflies – they appear to be minute flaws in spacetime. Highly structured, highly compressed.’

  Jophiel looked over at Michael Poole, who stared back at him, and Nicola, and at the swarming fireflies.

  Poole asked, ‘Flaws? Like monopoles? Alive?’

  ‘Flaws, yes, but . . . One of those fireflies is to a monopole as a bacterium is to a grain of sand. These life forms must have spawned deep in a fractured spacetime. Life from condensed matter, life from spacetime flaws. Relics of different times, different cosmic epochs – evidently all early. Just as the quagma phantoms came from a still earlier time. We think the Xeelee itself is a kind of symbiosis of life forms like this, don’t we? In fact a symbiosis between survivors from different eras.’

  Michael Poole said brutally, ‘Then if you’re right, if these are more of its client species, the Xeelee itself must be close. Any ideas, Asher?’

  ‘I have no sensor data. But there is a logic to the tesseract, the Nest. Surely the Xeelee will be at the safest point – the Room furthest from the First Room, the one tethered in our spacetime – the furthest in a four-dimensional sense, I mean.’

  Poole glared around. ‘Which way?’

  ‘To your left. The wall to your left.’

  ‘Fine. Chinelo, you stay here as sentry. Nicola, Jophiel, with me.’ Then he impatiently brushed away the fireflies that still hovered around his helmet. Stalked over to the left-hand wall.

  Punched the surface.

  A blue hatch swung open.

  And Jophiel prepared to die.

  For, in the room beyond, the Xeelee hovered above the floor.

  73

  They stepped through, one after another.

  The Xeelee dominated this space, this Seventh Room – this two-hundred-metre cube, just like the other faces of the tesseract. The humans stood before it, diminished.

  Jophiel could not have said how he knew that this was the Xeelee itself, the enemy, naked. But the form was so familiar. The Xeelee was, he thought, like a scale model of its own ship, the sycamore-seed craft Poole had first seen when it came bursting out of the Jupiter wormhole. There was the core body, squat, compact, like an elongated artillery shell – but Jophiel could recognise, now, that this central core had much in common in its form with the beetle-like condensate creatures they had seen in the Fifth Room. Maybe it was made of the same stuff, a condensate, an exotic state of matter. It had no head, as such. Yet the forward rim of the main body seemed to be equipped with tentacles, narrow, slimy, surrounding what might be a circular mouth. Tentacles capable of manipulation more finely than human fingers, perhaps.

  And there were the wings, delicate, lobed, sweeping back. So fine he could see the pale glow of the walls through them. Jophiel thought he made out structure in those wings: lines, a kind of webbing, almost too fine for him to see, and if there was a pattern that was elusive too.

  But those delicate wings were rent by holes, he saw now, that looked only partially healed. And in that broken webbing he saw electric-blue sparkles. What looked like the spacetime-flaw fireflies of the Sixth Room, crawling through these warped wings . . .

  His analytical thinking gave way to raw fear. Surely this monster, in its lair, could wipe them out of existence effortlessly. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Chinelo, so young, so close to death. His own mind rattled with doubts, fears, regrets. What in Lethe were they doing here? They should have taken it slower, surveyed, worked out a strategy . . . Anything rather than just walk in like this.

  Yet, for now, he still breathed. Virtually, anyhow.

  And so far the Xeelee hadn’t done anything.

  Michael Poole stepped up and stood directly before
it, glaring.

  It was just as when, Jophiel remembered, the Xeelee had sought Poole out on the edge of the fusing core of the Sun, and had faced him, cocooned within his ship. Now Michael Poole had found the Xeelee, here at the pivot of the Galaxy. And now he faced it again, Jophiel to his right, Nicola to his left, Chinelo behind the three of them. The three archangels of an angry god, Jophiel thought.

  But Jophiel did not feel angelic. What did he feel, then? He couldn’t tell. He imagined what Miriam Berg would say. Just observe. Feel, when you have the time.

  ‘There are quagma phantoms,’ Asher murmured in their ears. ‘In this room. They won’t harm you. The condensed matter was all you brought that they could eat. They seem to be hovering around that carapace – which is condensed matter too. Landing, ascending. Why would the Xeelee need a hard shell like that? Maybe it had to survive some kind of age of predation . . .’

  ‘Symbiosis?’ Nicola murmured. ‘Of the quagma phantoms and the Xeelee?’

  ‘Maybe, yes. As birds would land on the backs of elephants, seeking grubs and ticks.

  ‘The wings are different. They each embed a kind of spacetime flaw, a sheet discontinuity. Just as do their extensions in the sycamore-seed ship, which is what powers the Xeelee at sublight speeds, we believe. Those discontinuities propagating through spacetime itself. Those wings aren’t simple structures, though; they look as if they are . . . woven. And those spacetime-flaw fireflies are working over those spacetime-flaw wings . . .’

  ‘They look as if they are fixing it. More symbiosis?’ Jophiel asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ Asher said. ‘You know, the sycamore-seed ship design now looks like just an extension of its body form, doesn’t it? What the Anthropocene-Era weapons designers would have called a mecha . . . I think it hears you, Michael. Certainly it knows you’re there.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘The wings. The discontinuities. They are never still. They ripple, Michael. Ripple with meaning – the radiation is gravity waves, and there’s a kind of focus – oh, Jophiel, at least I can show you.’

  And now Jophiel’s eyes, subtly upgraded, showed him a shimmering, rippling pattern, a full spectrum of false colours, washing across the wings. ‘Lethe, it’s beautiful. And, she’s right, Michael. There is a kind of – halo – around you. It knows who you are, I guess.’

  Michael Poole took another step closer to the Xeelee, his motions stiff, angry. That halo of reflected gravity waves moved with him now, Jophiel saw.

  ‘So it knows I’m here. So what? Why doesn’t it react? It must have seen us coming, we crashed in its impactor-deflection net, we’ve been crawling all over this structure, and now here we are, in its own holy of holies. Why hasn’t it killed us before now? Why doesn’t it kill me now? Never mind the lost history, the million-year war. We hurt it, after all.’ Michael Poole pointed at the wounds in the wings. ‘We did that, back in the Solar System. With a monopole cannon.’

  ‘Yes, we did,’ Jophiel said. ‘But look what followed, Michael. It fled, and it came here, and built . . . this. We know the Wheel is a kind of fast-forward time machine. And our best bet is that it is trying to get home. Just a few more months subjective and then it can get back to its fellows at the Great Attractor. So close.’

  ‘Yes,’ Asher said urgently. ‘And it must have intended to take a lot of secondary life forms with it. Look at what it surrounded itself with here. Even wounded, even here in its own innermost sanctum. All these immature species, the bugs and fireflies and beetles . . .’

  Nicola looked up. ‘Immature. What are you saying, Asher?’

  Asher said, ‘Think about it. The Xeelee was utterly alone. Injured. Hundreds of millions of light years away from its own kind. And it surrounded itself with symbiotes, and immature forms of itself, its components.

  ‘It built a nursery.’

  Michael Poole seemed to consider that for one heartbeat – and Jophiel had the deep sense that all of human history might pivot on what Poole did next. Not for the first time.

  Then, with a practised move, Poole he slipped off his orange pack, opened the bamboo box, and pulled out a cylinder, stubby, with a handle and simple controls.

  Jophiel immediately knew what this was. ‘Ah. Your gift from Gallia Three. Where Highsmith Marsden developed the monopole cannon that did all this damage. They upgraded it to a handgun, right? I should have guessed.’

  ‘Yes. And here we are. The Xeelee thought it had stomped on us in the Solar System. But we managed to survive all it could do, and we limped after it in our dugout-canoe spaceships, and here we are. Here I am. Look at it,’ Poole said with contempt. ‘Cobbled together. A shambling thing. A relic of vanished ages. Begging to be put down.’

  The Xeelee lifted off the floor. Just a fraction. As if provoking a response.

  Jophiel said, ‘Michael, you can’t—’

  Michael Poole raised the weapon.

  Fired.

  Jophiel saw only a wash of light.

  Then, suddenly the room seemed full of huge, thrashing shapes.

  Jophiel stepped back, and stumbled against, or through, Chinelo; protocol-violation pain sparked. Nicola was a mass of highlights, cringing back.

  There was no sound.

  When there was relative stillness and he could see again, Jophiel looked down at the Xeelee.

  There was a crude cut along the junction of the Xeelee’s right wing with the central body, a ragged sawing, as if by the bullets of an automatic weapon. The Xeelee slipped down on that side now, ruining the clean geometry of its position in the room.

  But the amputated wing itself was not motionless. A great severed sheet, it twitched and flapped and pulsed. Thrashing, the wing seemed as huge as the Xeelee from which it had been sliced.

  ‘Independently alive,’ Asher breathed in Jophiel’s ear. ‘That wing. Just as if you cut off a tentacle from an octopus. Which has a body plan where the neurons aren’t as concentrated in the spine and brain as in our bodies; an octopus’s tentacles are in some way independently conscious. The Xeelee is built something like that, perhaps . . .’

  Jophiel felt a stab of admiration. Even now, in this moment of utmost peril, she was still observing, recording, deducing.

  She said, ‘Oh, now the quagma phantoms are back. They are clustering around the, the wound. Trying to close a severance that can never be healed.’

  Even the ruined wing was awash with harsh colours in Jophiel’s vision, still attuned to gravity waves. ‘It’s in huge pain,’ he said. ‘You can see that.’

  ‘So am I,’ Poole yelled. He raised the gun again.

  ‘Don’t kill it,’ Nicola said quickly. ‘You already hurt it enough. And surely it can’t reach the Great Attractor now. You’ve already stranded it, you’ve taken away all it has worked for across millions of years.’

  Jophiel said, ‘Think about it, Michael. You said it yourself. This isn’t a fortress. The Xeelee must have known we were here since the day the Cauchy crashlanded. But it hasn’t tried to harm us in any way. It hasn’t tried to kill us, even threaten us. It’s not at war now. So why kill it?’

  Michael faced his Virtual copy, his face hard, old, empty. ‘Because it’s all I’ve got left. Because it made me kill the Earth to save it. Because this is my only redemption.’

  Nicola pushed forward. ‘Michael—’

  ‘A brief life burns brightly,’ said Michael Poole.

  ‘No!’ Nicola leapt.

  Poole fired.

  Nicola was hit in the stomach.

  It happened in a flash. Jophiel, Chinelo could do nothing about it.

  Nicola, in mid-air, folded over, and was – stretched. She was hurled back, the core of her body pulling back as if her body was made of some extensible plastic, Jophiel thought, watching in horror. Then the Ghost hide at last gave way, and her torso broke: it burst, split in two, blood spurting
and freezing instantly in the vacuum. Behind her, her legs, splayed and spasming, thrashed against the amputated Xeelee wing, which still twitched and writhed in its own agony.

  Her upper half dropped at Poole’s feet. Poole, astonished, fell back.

  Yet she was alive, Jophiel saw with overwhelming shock, with sympathy mixed with horror: still alive, her eyes open, one arm still mobile and scrabbling for purchase on the floor. Blood poured from severed vessels, boiling in the vacuum.

  And organs spilled, heavy, almost languid, pink and white, from the broken silver skin as if from a split sack.

  Poole dropped the handgun, fell to his knees. The blood was forming a slick ice on the floor, and he stumbled and slipped before he had hold of her, the severed torso. He cradled her head in his arms. His face was hidden behind a blood-smeared visor. ‘Nicola. Nicola!’

  Jophiel pushed forward, reached for Nicola, but his gloved hands broke up uselessly, painfully, into clouds of pixels.

  Nicola’s eyes were open. She saw this, the consistency-protocol failure. She even forced a smile. ‘Just like your mother.’

  Poole said, ‘I – Nicola, I never—’

  ‘Shut up.’ She was whispering now. Her voice was losing its human tone, Jophiel thought, becoming metallic, distant. Ghost-like. ‘It doesn’t hurt. Odd, that. I’ve been saving you from yourself since the day we met, Poole. Well, the Xeelee saved the Galaxy from humanity. Then you saved humanity from the Xeelee. And now I saved the Xeelee from you. Stopped a monopole, huh? Make sure you tell Highsmith Marsden, if you ever . . .’ She coughed, gurgled, and a black liquid, viscous, bubbling, seeped from her silver lips. ‘And the Ghosts even saved me. Nearly. That’s the clue, Poole. You think I’m the cynic, but in the end we have to work together to . . .’ Another cough, choking this time.

  Michael Poole broke down at last. Jophiel saw tears splash against the inside of a grimy faceplate.

  Jophiel stared. He couldn’t remember the last time he, or Michael, had wept.

  Nicola stirred. ‘I wonder . . .’ Just a whisper.