Xeelee: Endurance

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Try to save them.’ She smiled. ‘We Weaponised must stick together. There are many of us here – a few Adepts like us, and other kinds on this world – even a few exotic types around the neutron star—’

  ‘Around it?’

  ‘As knots in the magnetic field. When it came to creating human-analogues as weapons of war, the Integrality was nothing if not ingenious. We’ve organised ourselves for the rescue work; it is a project run by Weaponised for the benefit of Weaponised. No government supports us, and nor would we want it. We consult, trade, research, even farm, to support those who do the work of rescue; some local populations even pay us a tithe, for they recognise the worth of what we’re doing. I’ll show you what we’re planning for the Starfolk – the inhabitants of the neutron star. We’ve even created a vivarium to hold them, when we retrieve them.’

  ‘A vivarium?’

  ‘A tank of neutron superfluid . . . The Starfolk are creatures of nuclear forces, Coton, and they scale accordingly. To them we’re misty giants.’

  He rubbed the inverted-tetrahedron tattoo on his own forehead. ‘You know, I’ve grown up knowing I’m Weaponised. But I never knew what our special skill was supposed to be.’

  ‘It was bred out of us – though some of us still have gravity dreams, when young. It’s generally thought best if children don’t know. They get into less trouble that way.’

  She led him back into the building, along the corridor with its eerily dilating doors, and to the Map Room.

  ‘I know you didn’t want to leave home, Coton. You didn’t want to come here. But you understand there was no choice.’

  ‘My parents spent all they had keeping me out of the labour colonies.’

  ‘Yes. But now you’re here, and there’s work to do. What do you think?’

  His head whirled, full of new ideas and images and the lingering shadow of his nightmare. ‘I think I’m tired.’

  She laughed. ‘Back to bed for both of us, then. We’ll talk more in the morning.’ She led him to their tetrahedral shack.

  He lay down in his pallet. Soon his thoughts were dissolving into sleep.

  But he was woken by Vala, outside the shack, murmuring questions. ‘Ma-seef senss-or dees-funx-eon. Seek possible translations and date the language. And keep the noise down . . .’

  A solemn synthesised voice murmured a reply.

  And Vala asked, ‘How old?’

  He was next woken by the tumbling crash of supersonic flight, a noise too familiar from Centre. Without dressing, without looking for Vala, impatiently waiting for the walls to open, he rushed out of the building.

  The sky was full of Second Coalition warships.

  2

  Massive sensor dysfunction!

  Sometimes Lura thought that if she could only understand that strange complaint of the Mole, she would be able to make much more sense of the machine itself, her mother’s strange bequest. On the other hand, if it just kept quiet she wouldn’t have to fret so much about hiding it. Nothing was ever simple!

  But right now she had other problems, for her tree wasn’t happy. Lura could feel it, even hanging as she was in her fire pod, dangling from the central trunk of Tree Forty-Seven.

  She had spent her shift as tree pilot artfully shaping the screen of grey smoke beneath the tree, and so she looked up at it now through billowing, sooty clouds. The tree was a wheel fifty paces across, its twelve radial branches fixed to the stout trunk at the centre. And that wheel turned, ponderously graceful like all of its kind, the light of the endlessly falling stars casting subtle shades and blood-red highlights, and she could feel the downwash created by its shaped branches as they bit into the air. Tree Forty-Seven was at the bottom of the great stack of the Forest, layer upon layer of straining trees all tethered by their long cables to the kernel far below her – the husk of a burned-out star, no wider than the tree, pocked and hollowed-out and rusted the colour of blood.

  And she could sense her tree’s unhappiness in the faint shudders that rustled those banks of leaves as it turned, and a groan of wood on wood as the massive bolus counterturned within the hollow trunk. She knew what was wrong, but there was nothing she could do about it, not for now.

  It was a relief when she heard the whistles and rattles sound all across the Forest, calling the shift change.

  Sweating, her bare arms covered in soot, her lungs full of smoke and her eyes gritty, she swarmed up the rope from the fire-pot through her smokescreen. Passing through the blade-like branches, with disturbed skitters spinning up around her, she picked up her pack of rope and food where she had left it hooked on a stubby branchlet.

  She stroked the trunk’s hard surface. ‘Well, you’ve a right to be unhappy, Forty-Seven,’ she said. ‘Stuck down here as you are.’ She didn’t agree with the Brothers’ policy of ‘punishing’ ill or poorly performing trees by marooning them at the base of the Forest stack – she’d argued over this with Brother Pesten, her own old tutor, many times. The tree had a subtle gravity sense and would be well aware of the pull of the kernel – very strong down on its surface, and still a perceptible drag here, two hundred paces or so up. Trees were creatures of the open air, and sought to flee deep gravity wells – which, of course, was the instinct their human masters exploited to put them to work. Lura, eighteen thousand shifts old, understood that to be unable to escape this deep well for shift after shift was torture for Forty-Seven. So she patted the tree’s trunk, and put her cheek to its rugged surface and felt the mass of the bolus spinning in its confinement within. ‘I’ll see if those idiots in the pilots’ conference will allow me to move you—’

  ‘You still talking to the trees, Lura?’ The coarse voice of Ord was loud in the branches above her. He came swinging down through the turning branches, and settled his webbed feet on a trunk gnarl near her. He was her replacement as tree pilot for the next shift. A thousand shifts older than Lura, he was a big man, strong, clumsy-looking, but graceful enough when he moved in the shifting gravity fields of the Forest.

  ‘Oh, leave me alone, Ord.’

  He swung closer, and she could feel the half-gee drag of his heavy body. He pulled his goad from his belt, a stabbing-spear of fire-hardened wood. ‘This is all you need to make a tree do what you want it to do.’

  She kicked away from the trunk and settled on a branch. ‘You stink. You’re so fat you trap your own foul air in your gee-well.’

  ‘That’s my manhood you’re smelling, little girl,’ he said, and he waggled his goad. ‘Rumour is you’ve still never lain with a man. Maybe you should carve this tree a dick. Then you wouldn’t have to bother with people at all.’

  ‘Sooner that than lie with you.’ She grabbed her pack and swarmed up through the tree’s patiently turning branches, leaving Ord’s coarse shouts behind her.

  She climbed easily up through the stacked Forest, pulling herself through one turning tree after another or swinging on tether cables, and as she rose further out of the kernel’s gravity well the climbing got easier still. She was making for Tree Twenty-Four, at the very apex of the stack, where she had hidden the Mole – and she was glad of an excuse to get as far as possible from Ord and his crude advances.

  People lived in the Forest. Houses of wood and woven bark dangled in the air, fixed to tether cables that spanned the tiers of the turning trees, and the air was full of smoke from the fire-pots – the trees fled from shade as much as from gravity and could be controlled that way. Here folk lived and died, ate, slept and played, and worked with their trees, encouraging them in the generations-long task of feeding star kernels into the unfillable maw of the Core of Cores. Right now it was shift-change time, and people were in motion everywhere, the adults making their way to and from their assignments, the Brothers letting the children out of their classes.

  She passed one party laden with baskets of food. You couldn’t eat the substance of the trees themselves
, neither the skitters, which were the trees’ tiny spinning seeds, nor their round, pale leaves. But you could eat the fruit and berries and fungi that colonised the trunks and branch roots, and trap the various species of rat that fed off those growths in turn. Some said that the existence of the fruit and the rats proved that humans were part of this world, as much as flying trees and whales and the Core of Cores, and stars that fell through the air. Others clung to a legend that humans had come to this place from somewhere else – ‘Humans don’t belong here’, went the slogan – and held that the rats and the fungi and the rest, everything people could eat, had come out of the Ship that had brought the people here, the Ship itself long since lost.

  But all around her people swam in the air, their webbed feet kicking, and children played complicated aerial games of chase, dancing through each other’s pinprick gravity wells with unconscious confidence. Lura felt a surge of joy as she watched the children – and envy for their carefree play. Wherever people had originally come from, this had been the reality of life for uncounted generations.

  At last she’d climbed up through the forest to the highest tree in the stack: Twenty-Four, broad and handsome, its number etched into its bark. The pilot conference held that the trees were smart enough to respond to the lead of the strongest among them, and Lura wasn’t about to say they were wrong. Clambering easily up Twenty-Four’s tether, she swept with a smile past old Jorg, the tree’s pilot this shift, with his battered fire-pot and grimy blankets. And, once up in the tree itself, she made her way to the trunk, scattering clouds of skitters that spun briefly before nestling back in their parent tree’s leaves. For here, at the very crown of the trunk in a knot of immature branches, she had hidden the Mole.

  She set down her rope and pack, anchored herself with her bare legs, dug her arms into the branches, and gingerly lifted out the Mole. It was a box about the size of her head, roughly square-edged. But it wasn’t made of wood or whale cartilage or any substance she recognised, but of something pale and shiny, and the hide was punctured by holes within which some other substance glimmered, hard and transparent. You could see that the Mole had once been part of something else, for stubs of cut-off panels and bits of pipe stuck out of its sides, and scorch marks showed that great heat had been used to cut this remnant out.

  Cautiously she whispered, ‘Mole. Status.’

  ‘Massive sensor dysfunction. Massive sensor dysfunction—’

  Its voice was blaring, grating, not like anything human at all. She always found it oddly upsetting. ‘Hush, Mole.’

  ‘Massive sensor dysfunction—’

  ‘Stop it! Stop talking!’ She found it hard to think, and to remember the phrases her mother had taught her. ‘Mole. End report.’

  The voice cut off in mid-phrase. Lura heaved a sigh of relief, hugged the box to her chest, and settled back in the branches of Twenty-Four.

  From up here, at the top of the Forest stack, her view of the sky she floated in was unimpeded. The air of the nebula was, as always, stained blood-red, and littered with clouds like handfuls of greyish cloth above and below her. Stars fell in a slow, endless rain that tumbled down to the nebula’s misty core. Their light cast shifting shadows from the clouds, and the wild trees, and huge misty blurs that might be whales. Beyond this nearby detail she could see the greater expanse of the spaces beyond the sky: the knotty patches of light that marked other nebulae, and the brilliant pink pinpricks of the big-stars, all of them orbiting the Core of Cores, a sullen, dark mass.

  She was relieved nobody had found the Mole. Her mother had told her it must be kept hidden, especially from the Brothers, for it was her family’s oldest secret. For a time she had kept it tucked away inside the cabin she had shared with her parents. But when it had started squawking she could think of nowhere else to keep it but here, as far from the mass of people as she could find. Her mother’s sole legacy was nothing but a hassle.

  She thought about the playing children. How she had loved being little, and carefree, and cherished! But one day her father had been killed when he had descended to the kernel to fix a loose cable; in the powerful gravity field of the burned-out star a simple fall had broken his back. Then her mother, always weak, had fallen to a condition of the lungs. And Lura, burdened with care, was a child no more.

  Sometimes, in fact, she thought she had grown up too quickly. She always seemed to see dark shadows in the Forest’s daily bustle – the etiolated condition of some of the trees’ leaves, and the pale faces and straining chests of the weaker children, unable to keep up with the others. The nebula air wasn’t as rich as it used to be, the old folk said, it was smoky and made you gasp – and perhaps it had killed her mother. It was said that humans had come to this nebula from another that was dying. Well, it might be true, even if she had never heard anyone explain how people had hopped through the airless void from one nebula to another. But the trouble was, as she could see at a glance from here, even if that was possible, no nearby nebula was much healthier than this one – a healthy cloud being blue and full of bright yellow suns, and scattered with the greenery of trees. Every nebula she could see was a cramped red mass.

  If all the nebulae were dying, then where were the people to go?

  The Mole was certainly no help. She stared at its ugly hide, the stubby cut-offs. ‘Mole, you are strange and useless and nothing but trouble. And if you hadn’t meant so much to my mother I’d pitch you out of the tree—’

  ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea.’

  Startled, she scrambled in the foliage, and nearly lost her hold.

  Brother Pesten hovered before her.

  Pesten wore the simple dyed-black shift of the Brotherhood of the Infrastructure, and soft sandals on his feet. Tall and stick-thin, he was bald, with a fringe of unruly greying hair. He held himself oddly rigid as he hung in the air, with one steadying hand on the tree trunk. He had always seemed old to Lura, even when he had been her tutor, and now, of course, he was older still – perhaps as much as fifty thousand shifts. The tree pilots resented the Brothers. Nobody grew as old as a Brother, they muttered, because everybody else had to work too hard. But when Pesten smiled at Lura, a little bit of her softened, as it always had.

  She clutched the Mole. ‘Who told on me?’

  ‘How do you know I didn’t just find the gadget for myself, shouting away in this treetop as it was?’

  ‘I remember you, Brother, and you were never one for climbing any further than you had to. Who told? Ord, I bet, that fat rat’s arse – no, if he’d found it he’d have blackmailed me for whatever he could get.’

  ‘Ord isn’t so bad. He’s never actually harmed you, has he? He just doesn’t know how to approach you.’

  She couldn’t have cared less about that. ‘If not Ord then who?’

  ‘Old Jorg. Chief pilot of the Forest’s fulcrum tree.’

  ‘Jorg! I trusted him.’

  ‘You still can. He’s our most senior and experienced pilot, and he’s no fool. And when he saw you creeping around his tree with your gadget, he was concerned for you, for what you might be getting yourself into. So he came to me. Where did you get this thing?’

  ‘From my mother,’ she said ruefully. ‘We call it a Mole. I don’t know why. Handed down from her mother, and hers before her . . . I let them all down, didn’t I? The Mole was kept secret by my family for generations, and now I’ve had it for a few dozen shifts and the whole Forest knows about it.’

  ‘Don’t blame yourself. Something about the Mole may have changed. I can’t believe it can have been so noisy before and escaped detection. May I?’ He reached out. Reluctantly she handed him the Mole. He hefted it, feeling its mass, turned it over in his hands, and rapped its hull. ‘Do you know what it’s made of? No? It’s a kind of metal, I think. Like kernel iron, but processed . . . Do you know what it is?’

  ‘I know what my mother said it is.’

&nb
sp; ‘Tell me.’

  She took a deep breath, for she was about to speak heresy to a Brother. ‘Part of the Ship. Maybe the last surviving part. My mother said there was a big argument long ago. Some people wanted to forget about the Ship. Others wanted to remember. Humans don’t belong here – that was their slogan. So when remembering the Ship was banned by the Brothers, and any remnants of it were destroyed, this Mole was saved, and hidden.’

  ‘If it came from the Ship, do you know what it’s for?’

  She shrugged, reluctant to be drawn, unsure what kind of trouble she was in. She waited for the rebukes, the condemnation, the accusations of heresy.

  But none of that came. Instead Pesten turned the Mole over in his hands. He said, ‘I can make an educated guess. It’s probably a transport machine – or the clever part. All the working parts were cut away long ago.’

  She was bewildered. ‘The clever part?’

  ‘Like a brain. A brain without a body – but perhaps these little holes are its eyes and ears. After all, it responds when you speak to it, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Brother – what are you saying? That this is actually from the Ship?’

  He sighed. ‘The Brotherhood doesn’t believe in the Ship. But the Ship, nevertheless, existed.’ He smiled. ‘And, yes, you have a piece of it here, preserved through the generations.’

  She was astonished by these admissions. ‘You’ve been lying to us!’

  ‘“Lie” is a hard word,’ he said mildly. ‘The Brothers only want what’s best for everybody. I know we have our faults, Lura, but you have to believe that much.’ He gestured at the tree, and the panorama of the Forest below. ‘Look – you understand what we’re doing here, with all these trees?’

  She felt faintly insulted he’d asked. ‘We pull at the star kernel. Eventually we’ll make it fall out of the nebula, and all the way down into the Core of Cores.’