As the Alphans watched, continents changed shape.
Beya was Flood’s eldest daughter. At twenty-five years old she had become one of his most capable officers. She watched the diorama in shock, as it was repeated over and over. ‘I heard garbled reports from the surface. In some of those lands around the rim of the ocean, before the wave came, they said there was salt in the rain. You know, when I heard that, I didn’t know what “rain” was, exactly. I had to look it up.’ She laughed. ‘Isn’t that strange?’
‘This is a demonstration,’ Flood said grimly. ‘The people of Earth know that far larger impactors have battered the planet in the past, causing vast pulses of death, even extinction. This will show them that we want victory, not destruction – but we hold destruction in our hands. This will work on their imaginations.’
‘Well, it’s working on mine,’ Beya said. ‘Dad, I never saw an ocean before. A moon-full of liquid water, just sitting there without a dome! Earth is alive, you can see it, not some lump of rock.’ She felt – not triumphant – bewildered. ‘And now we’ve hurt it.’
‘We were never going to be able to loosen the eight-hundred-year grip of the Shiras without being strong.’
‘But they will never forgive us for this,’ Beya said.
‘It’s necessary, believe me.’ He reached for her shoulder, then seemed to think better of it. ‘Any news of the Second Wave, the comet crew?’
‘Nothing was left of the comet, it seems.’
‘Maybe the imperial military got to it. That’s one ship I’m glad I wasn’t on, I must say.’ He glanced over, to see the Earth running through its cycle of trauma once again. ‘Shut that thing down,’ he called. ‘It’s time we considered our own fate. Look, we broke through their outer perimeter without a single loss. In twelve hours we make perihelion. We’ve all got work to do. Tomorrow, it’s Sol himself!’
S-day plus 4. Solar orbit.
The Thoth habitat was a compact sculpture of electric-blue threads, a wormhole Interface surrounded by firefly lights. The surface of the sun, barely twenty thousand kilometres below the habitat, was a floor across the universe.
Thoth was nine hundred years old. Its purpose had always been to monitor the sun, through the eyes a unique observer deep inside the star itself, an observer whose life Thoth maintained. And all his long life Thoth had been home to Sunchild Folyon, leader of the little community who maintained Thoth, a legacy from the past, held in trust for the future.
But now the rebel fleet was approaching its perihelion, and Thoth’s most significant hour since its construction by Michael Poole was almost upon it.
After prayers that morning Folyon went straight to the habitat’s bridge, where, even through the prayer hours, shifts of sunchildren maintained watch over Thoth’s systems and position. The mood on the bridge was tense, for the wormhole that reached from this station into the heart of the sun had been shut down for twenty-four hours already, a time unprecedented in Folyon’s memory; maintenance downtimes were usually measured in minutes.
But this was an extraordinary moment, which required extraordinary measures, as the Empress Shira herself had patiently explained to Folyon – and as he himself had then had to relay to a reluctant Lieserl, deep in the belly of the sun. This was total war. Every resource available to the Empire had to be dedicated to the fight – and that included even Thoth and its ancient community. After all, even Thoth had been infected by the smart plague.
So Thoth’s orbit had been carefully lifted from equatorial to a higher-inclination plane, into the path of the invasion fleet. And the wormhole had, for now, been cut.
The sunchildren had fulfilled their duties to the letter. But Folyon, conditioned since childhood to dedicate his life to a single goal, had found it hard to accept this distortion of his deepest imperatives. Not wishing to exacerbate the crew’s difficulty by displaying his own qualms, he left the bridge and made for the observation deck. As so often, he dealt with his troubles by immersing them in the healing light of the sun, giver of life.
The sun was a flat, semi-infinite landscape, encrusted by granules each large enough to swallow the Earth, and with the chromosphere – the thousand-kilometre-thick outer atmosphere – a thin haze above it all. The sunscape crawled beneath the habitat slowly, but that slowness was an artefact of scale, a collision of human senses with the sheer bulk of the sun; in fact in its orbit Thoth was travelling at five hundred kilometres a second. Folyon knew how privileged he was to spend his life in the domain of the mighty star, the physical and philosophical core of human culture. At the prayer hours he would look away to the distant stars, and he imagined every human eye, even across interstellar distances, turned to the sun, towards him.
But he wondered how many of them even knew of the habitat’s existence, or its purpose.
Lieserl, who had briefly been human, was a monitor, sent long ago into the sun to investigate a complex, dark-matter canker that seemed to be building up at the star’s heart. Thus, deep below Thoth, tracking its orbit, the tetrahedral Interface of a wormhole was suspended in the body of the sun. Searing-hot gas poured into its four triangular faces, so that the Interface was surrounded by a sculpture of inflowing gas, a flower carved dynamically from the sun’s flesh. In normal times this solar material would spew from the wormhole mouth cradled by Thoth, to dissipate harmlessly. The wormhole was a crude refrigeration mechanism, by which solar heat was pumped away from the fragile human-built construct that housed the soul of Lieserl, and enabled her to survive in the sun’s fire. And it was all for a higher goal.
Thoth’s purpose, and Lieserl’s, predated even the ancient Empire of the Shiras, but, hastily designated as a temple to Sol, it had always been maintained faithfully by the Empresses’ lieutenants. Now Lieserl’s wormhole was to be used as a weapon of war. But even this remarkable incident, Folyon knew, would in the long run be just another episode in the greater history of Thoth and Lieserl, and Sol itself.
A young woman touched his arm. His thoughts, as so often, had drifted away from the here and now. Sunchild Mura said, ‘The time is close, sun-brother.’
‘All goes well on the bridge?’ He felt anxious.
Mura was empathetic for a girl of her age and she knew his moods. ‘Everything is fine. If you were there you would only distract them all, forgive me for saying so, sun-brother.’
He sighed. ‘And so we go to war.’
‘They tell me you can see it from here. The fleet.’ She scanned around the sky – the solar light passed to human eyes by the observation deck blister was heavily filtered for safety – and pointed to a cluster of star-like points, far away above the sunscape. ‘There they are.’
The lights grew in size and spread apart a little; Folyon saw now that they were splinters, like matchsticks, each with blazing fire at one end. ‘An enemy fleet from Alpha Centauri, come all the way to the sun. How remarkable.’
Mura counted. ‘Five, six, seven, eight – all accounted for. And their GUTdrives are firing.’ This was celestial mechanics, Folyon knew; if you sought to enter the Solar System, perihelion was energetically the most advantageous place to dump excess velocity. ‘They will come near us; the projections of their trajectories are good,’ Mura said, sounding tense. ‘And they will come on us quickly. The moment of closest approach will be brief. But our response systems are automated – the reopening of the wormhole won’t rely on human responses.’ She hesitated. ‘Did you tell Lieserl what is happening today?’
‘I thought it was my duty,’ he murmured. ‘She will remember all this, after all, long after the rest of us are dust. I wonder if they are praying.’
‘Who?’ Mura asked.
‘The crew of those ships. For they worship Sol too, do they not? And now we are about to use Sol itself to kill them.’ He lifted his face, and his old skin felt fragile in the sun’s processed light. ‘Do we have the right to do this? Does even Shira?’
She grabbed his arm. ‘Too late now—’
The ships exploded out of the distance.
At closest approach solar gases hosed from the drifting wormhole Interface, turning it into a second, miniature sun. Solar fire swept over the invaders.
Mura whooped and punched the air. Folyon was shocked and troubled.
S-Day plus 4. The Oort cloud, outer Solar System.
Densel Bel wished he could see the sun with his naked eye. After all, he was among the comets now, within the sun’s domain.
He stood in the dark, peering up at the zenith, the way the ship was flying; he tried to imagine he was rising towards the sun in some spindly, superfast elevator. A light-week out from Sol, with the ship travelling at less than two per cent below light-speed, the view from the lightdome of Fist Two was extraordinary. All was darkness around the rim of the hemispherical lifedome. The only starlight came from a circular patch of light directly over his head, crowded with brilliant stars, all of them apparently as bright as Venus or Sirius seen from Earth. He knew the science well enough; the starfield he saw was an artefact of the ship’s huge velocity, which funnelled all the light from across the sky into a cone that poured down over his head.
And meanwhile the stars he was able to see were not the few thousand visible in solar space to the unaided human eye. His extraordinary speed had imposed a Doppler effect; the stars behind had been redshifted to darkness, while the ‘visible’ stars ahead, had similarly been blueshifted to obscurity. But conversely red stars, giants and dwarfs pregnant with infra-red, now glowed brightly, crowding the sky: a hundred thousand of them, it was thought, crammed into that tight disc. Sol itself was somewhere in there, of course, at the dead centre of his visual field, and he knew that the navigators on the bridge had elaborate routines to disentangle the relativistic effects. But a primitive part of him longed just to see the sunlight again, with his own unaided eyes, for the first time in so many decades—
A shower of what looked like snow sparkled over the lifedome, gone in an instant. He flinched, half-expecting the blister to crack and crumple. He called, ‘What was that?’
A Virtual of Flood appeared in the air before him, the avatar used by the ship’s AI to communicate with the crew. ‘We lost Fist One,’ Flood said bluntly.
‘How?’
‘A dust grain got it. The earthworms. They blew up an ice asteroid in our path, creating a screen of dust hundreds of kilometres wide. We have defences, of course, but not against motes that size, and at such densities. At our velocity even a sand grain will hit with the kinetic energy of a—’
‘There shouldn’t be any asteroids here. We’re out of the plane of the ecliptic.’
‘Evidently the earthworms have prepared defences.’
‘So how come we survived?’
‘The destruction of One blew a hole in the debris cloud. We sailed through.’
Densel considered. ‘Our ships follow each other in line. So even if the lead ship is taken out by further screens, it might clear a path for the rest.’
‘That’s right. And we will still achieve our objective if only three, two, even just one of the Fists gets through.’ Flood hesitated, and the image crumbled slightly, a sign of additional processing power being applied. ‘There is other news. The Third Wave ships came under fire as they rounded the sun. Two were lost.’
‘That was smart by the earthworms.’ Densel wondered if he ought to be exulting at this victory, for Earth, after all, was his home planet. But his heart was on Footprint, with the families he would never see again. He didn’t want anybody to die, he realised.
Flood said, ‘Smart, yes. But six ships survive, of eight. Meanwhile the earthworms are regrouping. Half of their ships, twelve of them, are heading for Jupiter. To win, we have to eliminate the Imperial Navy. So we have to follow. Jupiter is where the decisive encounter will come, for the Third Wave.’
‘And the other earthworm ships?’
‘Converging on the course of the Fists. Clearly they understand the danger you represent.’
Densel nodded. ‘But now, in Two, I’m in the van. The next in line for the duck shoot.’
Again that hesitation, that fragility. ‘The crews are conferring. That would not be optimal.’
‘Not optimal?’
‘For your ship to lead. The line is to be reconfigured. Fist Two will continue astern of the remaining ships, not in the lead, protected by the others.’
‘You want to give Two the best chance. Why?’
‘Because Two has you aboard.’ The avatar grinned, an imperfectly imaged, eerie sight. ‘I told you. You are useful, Densel Bel.’ Theatrically he consulted a wristwatch. ‘Subjectively you are little more than a day away from Sol. Remember, you are moving so quickly that time is stretched, from your perspective. Seven more days left for Earth. Thirty-three hours, that’s all it will be for you. Then it will be done. Try to get some sleep.’ The image crumbled to pixels and disappeared.
S-Day plus 6. Imperial bunker, New York.
Admiral Kale was shocked by what he found of New York.
The great ocean wave had spared some of the mighty old buildings, which stood like menhirs, windows shattered, their flanks stained by salt water. But the human city at their feet was devastated, scoured out, millennia of history washed away. Even now the aid workers and their bots dug into the reefs of rubble the wave had left, and the refugees were only beginning to filter back to what remained of their homes.
But in her bunker, deep beneath the ruin of Central Park, the Empress sat beside her pool of logic and light, imperturbable.
‘You are angry, Admiral Kale,’ she said softly.
‘Every damn place I go on the planet I’m angry,’ he said. ‘The destruction of history – the harm done to so many people.’
‘We are not yet defeated.’
‘No, ma’am, we are not. We are massing the Navy cruisers at Jupiter—’
‘I have viewed the briefings,’ she said.
‘Ma’am.’ He stood and waited, unsure what she wanted, longing to get back to his duties.
‘I have brought you here, Admiral, to speak not of the present but of the past, and of the future. You spoke of history. What do you know of history, though? What do you know of the origin of the Empire you serve – and, deeper than that, the dynasty of the Shiras?’
He was puzzled and impatient. But she was the Empress, and he had no choice but to stand and listen. ‘Ma’am? I’m a soldier, not a scholar.’
‘I need you to understand, you see,’ she rasped. ‘I need someone to bear the truth into the future. For I fear I may not survive this war – at least I may not retain my throne. And a determination that has spanned centuries will be lost.’
‘Ma’am, we’re confident that—’
‘Tell me what you know, of the history of my throne.’
Hesitantly, dredging his memory, he spoke of the Emergency a thousand years before, when the great engineer Michael Poole had built a wormhole bridge across fifteen hundred years, a great experiment, a way to explore the future. But Poole’s bridge reached an unexpected shore. What followed was an invasion from a remote future, an age when the Solar System would be occupied by an alien power.
‘An invasion from a bleak future, yes,’ hissed the Empress. ‘An invasion from which the first Shira, founder of the dynasty, herself was a refugee.’
Kale was stunned. ‘The first Empress was from the future, the age of occupation?’
‘She saw Poole disappear into time, collapsing the wormhole links. And when the way home was lost, Shira was stranded. But she did not abandon the Project.’
‘The Project?’
‘Shira belonged to a philosophic-religious sect called the Friends of Wigner. And their purpose in coming back in time was to send a message to a further future yet . . .’
Kale,
frustrated, had to endure more of this peculiar philosophising.
Life, Shira said, was essential for the very existence of the universe. Consciousness was like an immense, self-directed eye, a recursive design developed by the universe to invoke its own being – for without conscious observation there could be no actualisation of quantum potential to reality, no collapse of the wave functions. That was true moment to moment, heartbeat to heartbeat, as it was from one millennium to the next. And if this were true, the goal of consciousness, of life, said Shira, must be to gather and organise data – all data, everywhere – to observe and actualise all events. In the furthest future the confluences of mind would merge, culminating in a final state: at the last boundary to the universe, at timelike infinity.
‘And at timelike infinity resides the Ultimate Observer,’ Shira said quietly. ‘And the last Observation will be made.’ She bowed her head in an odd, almost prayerful attitude of respect. ‘It is impossible to believe that the Ultimate Observer will simply be a passive eye. A camera, for all of history. The Friends of Wigner, the sect to which Shira belonged, believed that the Observer would have the power to study all the nearly infinite potential histories of the universe, stored in regressing chains of quantum functions. And that the Observer would select, actualise a history which maximises the potential of being. Which would make the cosmos through all of time into a shining place, a garden free of waste, pain and death.’
The light from the logic pool struck shadows in her face. She was quite insane, Kale feared.
‘We must ensure that humanity is preserved in the optimal reality. What higher purpose can there be? Everything the Friends did was dedicated to the goal of communicating the plight of mankind to the Ultimate Observer. Even the eventual destruction of Jupiter. And even I, stranded here in this dismal past, stranded out of time, have always struggled to do what I could to progress the mighty project.’ She peered into the logic pool. ‘I, in my way, am searching . . .’
Xeelee: Endurance Page 14
