Xeelee: Endurance

by Stephen Baxter

  She hadn’t imagined she was still capable of being shocked. ‘People used as a shield. Why, that’s monstrous.’

  ‘There are limits even to Jasoft Parz’s powers of persuasion. And Parz may be compromised himself.’ He leaned closer. ‘I don’t think we’re being monitored in here . . . Did you know that Jasoft has a daughter?’

  Again she was shocked. ‘A daughter? But – I’ve known him for a quarter of a century, since Pell and I started to work for the Corps. I never met a wife, a lover, let alone heard of a child.’

  ‘That’s because he doesn’t know himself. It’s one of the Qax’s more cunning ploys. They don’t breed as we do, you know; there seem to be only a few thousand of them, and they are effectively immortal. But they are capable of observing our mammalian breeding practices, and of manipulating them to get what they want of us – or at least of the most senior people, those whose betrayal they fear. Serve them and, if you have a child, they’ll take her from you, lodge her in some special school somewhere.’

  ‘A hostage.’

  ‘Exactly. And if like Jasoft you don’t have a child – and, though we never discussed this, I suspect he chose not to have children for this very reason – they make sure you have one anyway. It’s not difficult, after all. They have tame human geneticists, obstetricians—’

  ‘That’s monstrous.’

  ‘That’s the Qax. I’m told that Jasoft’s daughter is around twenty-five years old, and lives in North Amerik.’

  She stared at him. ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘I try to know everything. I figure it’s my best chance of surviving. I talk to everybody, even those on the wrong side of the Qax’s laws. Mostly, though, I just listen. You’d be surprised how much you can discover that way.’

  ‘And you haven’t told Jasoft?’

  ‘Would you? Maybe I will, some day. For now I don’t want to compromise him. He is too effective where he is.’

  ‘You’re a cold one.’

  ‘No. Just a survivor.’ The flitter began a slow, cautious descent towards the heavily armoured compound that surrounded the Took facility. ‘And I need you to be cold too, Mara, as we go through this day. Cold in the face of what you’re going to see.

  ‘Look down. This plant is typical of its kind. There is the torus, the heart of the exotic-matter facility itself. That rather ugly fenced-off area to the north is the workers’ compound. There are barrack blocks, refectories, stores, crude hospitals. A mortuary. You can see that the local supply canals have been hastily widened . . .

  ‘You must be prepared, Mara. You’ll be kept safe. But you asked about the use of criminals in such facilities. Mara, the Qax – or their human agents – use criminals as a police force, in the camps. You may imagine the quality of the resulting regime. You could argue we brought this on ourselves, with those foolish strikes from space. And there is another issue you must be prepared to deal with.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Juq. Your son, my nephew. In this region at least he has continued to serve as a public front for the project.’

  ‘I haven’t seen him for some days, but I do see his smiling face in news Virtuals.’

  ‘Smiling, yes. I think to the Qax and the Corps he serves as a symbol of authority over the workers. Look how your human superiors smile while you work yourselves to death in these hazardous places. You have no hope of help from them, or anybody else – no hope at all. That’s what Juq’s handsome smile has become: a symbol of the repression. You can imagine how the workers feel about that. He has to be heavily guarded.’

  ‘I can imagine. Though I don’t suppose Juq himself understands.’

  ‘He does not,’ Chael said heavily. ‘There was an incident last week, at the Wills plant. A clumsy worker, lining up for inspection, spilled a lubricant on the shoes of Juq’s friend, Tiel. Just an accident. Juq slapped her, and then laughed.’

  ‘He slapped her . . .’ Mara sighed. ‘That’s Juq. He was always that way with the servants. He never injured them, but—’

  ‘It is himself he has injured. You can imagine how the Virtual image of that act has permeated that facility, and others. He is becoming – hated. And, as you say, I’m quite sure he has no idea.’

  Mara closed her eyes. ‘He’s not a fool, you know. He isn’t evil. Just flawed.’

  ‘Well, he’s your son. And he may need your protection . . . Almost down.’

  The flitter descended to a crude concrete apron, hastily laid. Beyond security fences, before the backdrop of the giant torus, Mara glimpsed people, men, women and children dressed in identical green coveralls, gaunt and cowed. Most wouldn’t even meet her gaze.

  She braced herself as she prepared to get out of the flitter.

  6

  As with every significant event in the human world – every event approved of by the Qax, at least – the Interface completion ceremony in Jovian orbit was saturated with coverage, with multiple sound feeds and images taken from every conceivable angle.

  And so the assassination was covered in fine detail.

  Mara, sitting in her home in Mellborn, forced herself to watch the sequence of events over and over, from as many angles as she could find. In the end, she discovered a feed from one observer who had been right on the shoulder of the anonymous Friend of Wigner, as she turned killer.

  The ceremony, coming a mere month after the start-up of the new city-centre plants, had taken place aboard the lifedome of the Endurance itself. A small stage had been set up at the centre of the domed chamber, on which stood a number of senior officials from the project, both technical and from the Diplomatic Corps. But, to Mara’s eyes at least, the group was dominated by the unmistakable figure of her own son, Juq, tall, smiling as always, that blond hair blazing bright. His friend Tiel stood beside him, as he had since the beginning of this strange project, ever present, yet somehow as inconspicuous as a shadow.

  Beyond the glimmering near-transparency of the dome over all their heads, Jupiter swam, an arc of that huge planet visible, a smear of golden brown. And, before the planet, rising into view like an angular dawn, the Interface portal – yet to be attached for the voyage – drifted towards the GUTship. Mara stared at the dazzling sky-blue of the portal’s exotic-matter icosahedral frame, letting her gaze linger on the cool edges, the geometrically perfect vertices that joined them. The faces were like semi-transparent panes of silvered glass, through which Mara could make out the watercolour clouds of Jupiter overlaid with a patina of silver-gold. And every few seconds a face would abruptly clear, just for a dazzling moment, and afford Mara a glimpse of another space, unfamiliar stars. Like a hole cut into the sky.

  As the Interface passed over the dome, applause, apparently spontaneous, rippled. It was magnificent. It was beautiful. And humans had built this. Every time she gazed on this sequence of images it made Mara want to weep, and wonder if Chael had been right all along, if this monumental human achievement was worth whatever price would be exacted by the future.

  Then officials on the stage began to speak, words Mara had already heard many times in her viewings. But the speeches were, for Mara on this recording, obscured by the muttering of the assassin, close to the automated camera-microphone that happened to be following her: The Wigner paradox is inescapable. The chains of unresolved quantum states will build on and on, growing like vines, extending into the future, until the observations of the final cosmos-spanning minds rest on aeons-thick layers of history, studded with the fossils of ancient events . . .

  She was unprepossessing, Mara thought. Unremarkable, in a shabby green worker’s uniform of the kind that was common in Mellborn now, a young woman so sallow and fleshless it was hard to tell her age – perhaps twenty, not more than twenty-five. But her head was shaven. Even her eyebrows were gone, Mara saw. And now, as seen from the viewpoints of those around her, she began to move through the crowd, unremarked
, towards the stage.

  At last life will cover the universe, still building the regressing chains of quantum functions. Consciousness must exist as long as the cosmos itself – for without observation there can be no actualisation, no existence – and, further, consciousness must become coextensive with the cosmos, in order that all events may be observed. The chains of quantum functions will finally merge at the last boundary to the universe: at timelike infinity . . .

  People were seeing her without watching her, Mara realised, dismissing her mad rambling, without thinking she was any kind of threat. Perhaps they saw no need to fear. Perhaps those admitted to this ceremony had already been screened for security. And perhaps a worker like this, mixed up, talking to herself, wasn’t a remarkable sight in the new, highly pressurised labour camps of the Qax.

  But now, as she neared the stage – Mara glimpsed Juq up there still, golden hair shining, beneath the glorious vision of the Interface – the woman started to speak more loudly. Those around her looked perturbed, but still they did nothing to stop her.

  At timelike infinity resides the Ultimate Observer. And then the last Observation will be made. Retrospectively the history of the universe will be actualised . . .

  She was almost shouting now. People in the crowd were reacting at last, recoiling from her, and on the platform they were looking alarmed, pulling back – all save Juq, who stood there smiling down even on this disturbance.

  And then Mara heard the ringing cry that haunted her dreams. Look out! She has a weapon!

  The girl’s last words were almost a scream, as her arm lifted up straight before her, a heavy mass in her hand. Actualised in a history which maximises the potential of being! Which makes the cosmos through all of time into a shining place! A garden free of waste, pain and death!

  Tiel threw himself forward.

  From a hundred angles Mara had seen the boy’s chest explode, and the Wigner’s Friend pulled down at last, still screaming, and her son, still on the stage, still smiling even as he looked down, bewildered, at the splashes of his friend’s blood on his vest.

  7

  The Endurance was launched on schedule, hauling its massive wormhole Interface away into deep space at high accelerations, leaving the partner Interface patiently orbiting Jupiter. Even now nobody in Mara’s circle knew what the true purpose of the Qax Governor’s experiment had been – not even Chael, as far as she could tell, not even her beautiful idiot of a son.

  But everybody knew the timescale from now on: the ship’s construction had taken six months, and in a mere six more months after its launch the Endurance would return, and a gate to an unknown future would open.

  As the due date for that return approached, Mara waited tensely for whatever would come next. It was hard even to sleep without medication.

  And then Chael called. He’d had a message from Jasoft Parz.

  Chael hurried to Mara’s home in Mellborn. When he arrived Mara called Juq, and the three of them gathered in the cellar where once Juq and Tiel had run exotic-matter experiments with splinters of diamond.

  The three of them sat in a circle, under a single light globe. It was only a year ago, Mara realised, that first meeting with Parz in this very cellar, and so much had come of it.

  Chael now held up a sliver of inscribed matter. He said, ‘This was a one-shot, one-use message from Jasoft. He’s not been able to return to Earth since the Endurance was launched. I don’t know how he smuggled it out of the Qax ship where he’s being held. I brought it here for us to watch together . . . It may not be wise to attempt any recordings of it. Oh, and I brought this.’ He pulled a small plastic case from a pocket. Sealed within were three translucent tablets, each the size of a thumbnail. ‘These come from the Qax themselves. They are able to manipulate biochemical structures at the molecular level – did you know? That was their, umm, competitive edge when they first moved off their home planet. And this is the fruit of their study of mankind.’ He looked at them. ‘Do you know what this is?’

  Mara could guess. The tablet meant the removal of death. ‘AntiSenescence treatment?’

  ‘Better than human-manufactured AS. A Qax refinement. They gave it to Jasoft. This is our reward, for our cooperation with the Endurance project. The former Governor kept his word that far.’

  ‘Former Governor . . .’

  He handed them each a capsule. ‘Don’t take it yet.’

  Mara nodded. ‘Let’s hear what Jasoft has to say first.’

  Chael set the inscribed sliver on the floor. Immediately light flashed from the sliver, and pixels whirled in the air, quickly coalescing.

  It was as if Jasoft Parz had joined the circle.

  He sat at ease, in his usual expensive-looking robes. If anything he looked younger still, Mara thought, his face less lined, his colour healthier, those odd-looking black roots spreading under his hair. Yet he looked hunted; he glanced over his shoulder repeatedly as he spoke softly. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be able to record. This message is my only chance. Please, all of you – listen and understand. Somebody needs to tell the human worlds what has happened – and what is to become of us.’

  He allowed himself a grin. ‘First, the good news. Poole’s time bridge worked! As you’re aware, on the return of Poole’s ship Cauchy one group of rebels took the chance to go out and meet it – and they flew into the Interface, flew back through time, presumably all the way back to the age of Poole himself. We know now that the rebels were Friends of Wigner – the same ragamuffin group who attacked the Endurance when the Interface was completed, at Jupiter, and tried to assassinate Juq. And led, I’m told, by a young woman called Shira – she has links to the family of your son’s friend Tiel, I believe.’

  Juq was wide-eyed at this. ‘Cousin Shira? I met her. But—’

  Mara put her finger on his lips to hush him.

  Parz went on, ‘Neither I nor the Qax Governor knows what the Friends intended, or indeed what they achieved, if anything. But their very actions threw the Governor into an existential panic, I think. Perhaps all the Qax could be wiped out, if humans were warned about the Occupation far enough into the past. The Governor proved surprisingly indecisive in the final crisis.

  ‘And thus the Governor chose to respond to Poole’s triumph by emulating it.

  ‘The Endurance was built to establish another wormhole tunnel to the future, from this age to around five hundred years hence. The Governor hoped to glimpse the Qax future, you see, and so be able to shape any decision with a kind of hindsight.

  ‘But what emerged from the wormhole, an emissary from the future, was not any kind of tactical guidance, but very bad news indeed – bad for the Qax, I mean, but we know few details. But, in the form of a new Governor for Earth – the former has been assassinated, by the way – it brought bad news for humanity too . . .’

  Hastily Parz said that there would be a new phase of the Occupation, as the Qax strove to rectify their earlier leniency. It was to be called an Extirpation.

  ‘But I will not live to see this,’ Jasoft said now. ‘For the new Governor has a second string to the strategy. Even as Earth is smashed in the present day, the Poole wormhole to the past still exists. The Governor intends to drive Spline ships through the time bridge, and fall on the more innocent worlds of that historic era. And he intends to take me with him – into the past!’ He forced a smile. ‘In another life, another circumstance, what an adventure that would be. But as it is—’

  The Virtual snapped out of existence.

  Chael picked up the sliver, ran it over a slate for testing. ‘It’s done. Wiped.’

  Mara said, ‘I wanted to tell him about his daughter, before he was lost in time. It would have comforted me, at least. Now he’ll never know. Perhaps we should find her, tell her of her legacy . . .’

  Chael held up his own AS tablet. ‘We have more important decisions to make. Everything
will be different now. We have no control over whatever Shira’s rebels do in the past, or what impact that may have – or what any Qax invasion fleet might accomplish. We, stranded here in this age, must deal with present and future. You heard Parz speak of the new regime to come, the Extirpation. But the Qax will still need humans to administer their regime for them. They will still need us. And the proof of it is in these tablets we hold. They want us to live on; they want us to work with them . . . We do have a choice, however,’ and he glanced around, almost as furtively as Parz had, Mara thought. ‘Callisto.’

  ‘What?’ Mara struggled to recall the name’s significance.

  ‘The moon of Jupiter?’ Juq asked eagerly.

  ‘Yes, the moon of Jupiter – and a hideout, for us. There’s a man called Reth Cana who, under cover of a science station, is providing refuge from the Qax regime – refuge for the likes of us. That’s one choice . . .’

  Mara shook her head. ‘No. I’m no planetary traveller. This is my home, for better or worse. This is where I will live—’

  ‘And die?’ Chael said gently. ‘Well, that is another choice. We could simply see out our time and slip away – that’s if rebel assassins don’t hit us first. The final alternative is to live, on and on.’

  ‘In the service of the Qax? In which case we would face the same moral dilemmas we always have,’ Mara said. ‘By administering the cruelty of the new regime, perhaps we could find a way to alleviate it. But now there’s another reason to survive.’ Mara looked bleakly at her brother-in-law, at her son. ‘Some day the Qax Occupation will be lifted. And when humans run their world again, there will be a reckoning. A reckoning for us, and what we do next – what we have done already. You, Chael, for doing so much to assemble this Endurance project, to promote it. Myself for standing by when perhaps I could have stopped it.’ She touched her son’s hand. ‘And you, you foolish, silly boy.’

  To Mara’s horror, Juq looked petulant, defiant, almost as if he might burst into tears. ‘But, Mother, it was wonderful. Such fun. It was glorious! Why, anybody would have . . . I meant no harm. You know me! I never meant anybody any harm.’