Xeelee: Endurance

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘You need to get down from here,’ Jorg said to Lura. ‘We’re vulnerable – the lead tree always is.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Brother Pesten sternly.

  ‘All right. But I’m not leaving the Mole behind.’

  ‘Here.’ Pesten took his rope belt from his waist. ‘Make a harness out of this. Be quick.’

  But even as she started fumbling with knots, Jorg cried, ‘Here they come!’

  That whale came in again, much closer now, rising up over the rim of the tree. Lura found herself looking directly into its huge, misty face, those three great eyes swivelling to fix on her as the whale rolled on its axis, its body counter-turning to the rotation of the flukes. The face was vast, each eye alone as big as a person. There was nothing remotely human about the whale – it wasn’t even as much like a human as a rat, say. Humans don’t belong here. But she thought she read something in those eyes – pain, perhaps, or pity.

  And now the whale’s roll brought a party of riders up above the tree rim, half a dozen of them, all armed, all naked and smeared with some kind of oil. Their faces were twisted into masks of bloody anticipation and there was the man with the sharpened teeth, now sporting an erection.

  ‘By the Bones!’ Jorg cried. With startling strength he ripped a slice of wood from the leading edge of the nearest branch, threw it as an improvised spear, and put his other gnarled hand on Lura’s head and tried to push her deeper into the foliage. But the riders dodged the splinter easily, laughing; it stuck harmlessly in the hide of the whale. Two of them let fly with their own spears at Jorg, one after the other. He dodged the first – but the second skewered his chest. Jorg clutched the spear, trying to speak, and a hissing gurgle came from the wound. Lura reached for him. But he went limp and fell back, floating down through the turning branches of his tree. Lura was horrified by the skill and efficiency with which his long life had been ended.

  And, unopposed, the whale riders sailed easily across the gap.

  Lura, still holding her Mole, scrambled to find something to fight with, anything. She felt she was moving as slowly as an old woman; the riders were so much faster, so much more determined.

  They came plummeting down out of the sky.

  One landed on Lura’s back, pushing her over, flattening her face down against the branch. Pinned by huge strength, she managed to twist her head. She saw that Pesten was on his back, trying to fight. But he had no weapons, and when he tried to grab one of the riders his hands slid over slick, oily skin.

  Already it was over.

  5

  Vala had requested an hour’s break to gather more data, and her thoughts, before she made any decision. She rushed off, leaving Coton in a small cabin aboard the Marshal’s flitter – so small it was like a cell, he thought, and sparsely furnished.

  When she returned to collect him, they had to wait once more, outside the Marshal’s cabin, while Sand completed yet another meeting.

  Vala looked at Coton, agonised. ‘I came here with no idea what this Marshal wanted of me. Now I see I have some leverage with our new overlords. And I have a chance to save you – and, perhaps, for us to achieve much more together. Later we’ll discuss it properly—’

  ‘You always say that. You never do. You haven’t discussed any of this with me. Nobody told me I had this alien thing in my head—’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Sincerely. But events press, Coton. You have to take opportunities when they come.’

  A guard beckoned them back into Sand’s cabin.

  Marshal Sand still sat behind her desk. As Vala entered she looked up, faintly amused. ‘You again.’

  Vala marched up to her desk. ‘Marshal, I’ll not waste time. I’ve come to a decision. I’ll work with you—’

  ‘Grandmother!’

  ‘On one condition,’ Vala said, facing Sand. ‘Let him go. The boy. Spare him your “processing”.’

  Coton cried, ‘No!’

  Marshal Sand said evenly, ‘How can I bargain with you, woman? If I make an exception for him it’s going to be rather visible, isn’t it? I do have a duty to maintain order.’

  Vala sounded desperate. ‘It’s not just that he’s family. It’s more than that. I think he could turn out to be important – very important.’

  Coton was frightened and bewildered. ‘What are you saying?’

  Vala turned to him. ‘I hoped it wouldn’t come to this. We haven’t even had time to discuss it ourselves . . . It can’t be helped, and here we are. Coton – tell the Marshal about your dreams.’

  ‘Dreams?’ The Marshal glanced at her Virtual displays again. ‘You mean visions? Your kind of Weaponised are precognitive, aren’t you? Or were. Has that somehow switched itself back on in this boy’s head?’ She eyed Coton, interested. ‘Are you seeing the future, child?’

  ‘The future?’ He looked at his grandmother, still more bewildered.

  Vala took his hand in hers. ‘I told you,’ she said. ‘They bred it out of us. Coton, you were born hamstrung but the modifications are still in your head, the technological relic. They feared us, child, and hate us still. Because we could see what is to come . . .’

  The Adepts’ precognitive ability had always been limited. They could see only a few minutes, or less, into the future, and only aspects of it that concerned their own surroundings – their own destiny. Beyond that, quantum uncertainty led to a blurring of competing possibilities.

  ‘But that few minutes’ edge made our ancestors formidable soldiers,’ Vala said. ‘Just enough to let us get out of the way of the next bullet.’

  ‘The Adepts were among the more effective of the Integrality’s Weaponised types, in fact,’ Sand said, checking her archives as they spoke. ‘But they were more useful in policing activities than against the Xeelee.’

  ‘We were used against humans,’ Vala said. ‘No wonder we were feared, and hated. When the Integrality fell we were rounded up, though we were as hard to catch as we were to kill. And those who survived were genetically modified.’

  Sand regarded Coton analytically. ‘You never knew this, did you, boy? Never knew what your Weaponisation entailed.’

  ‘He would have been told, if his parents had lived. It’s our way to keep it from the children, for if they blurt it out to normals the fear starts up again. Coton, I would have told you,’ Vala insisted.

  Sand watched them, judgemental. ‘I’ve always found truth the best policy myself. So is this stunted precog now seeing the future after all?’

  ‘Not that,’ Vala said. ‘I think he’s seeing another universe entirely.’

  The Marshal just stared. Then she rubbed her eyes. ‘Is that supposed to make sense, Academician?’

  ‘It’s the way our talent was engineered into us,’ Vala said. ‘May I use your display facilities?’

  Access to the future depended on paths in spacetime called closed timelike curves – faster-than-light transitions. Humanity’s hyperdrive warships had routinely travelled faster than light, and, at the height of the Exultant war, had just as routinely shown up scarred by battles that hadn’t yet been fought. The First Coalition’s Commissaries had learned to harvest such information, and, in suites like Vala’s own Map Room, they had charted the outlines of the war’s future progress.

  ‘But there are other sorts of closed timelike curves,’ Vala said. ‘Marshal, our universe of three space dimensions floats in a greater space, which the physicists call the Bulk, of many extra dimensions. There are many universes’ – and she held her palms together – ‘floating parallel to each other in the Bulk, like pages in a book. You can reach these other universes through engineering, like wormholes—’

  ‘Like Bolder’s Ring.’ The most titanic Xeelee construct of all, at the heart of the galactic supercluster.

  ‘Yes – and I’ll come back to the Ring. But there are also certain sorts of leakages between the un
iverses. Most particles are bound to spacetime, but some wash out into the Bulk – especially gravitons, which mediate gravity. Now, if our universe is folded in the Bulk – or if the Bulk itself is distorted – these particles can take shortcuts through the Bulk from one point in our spacetime to another.’

  ‘Thus creating closed timelike curves.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Vala turned to her grandson. ‘Coton, in your head there is a sort of transmitter-receiver of gravitons. You can sense gravitons coming via the Bulk from events a few seconds or minutes ahead of us in time, and your brain processes them into sound or vision.’

  ‘But,’ Sand said, ‘you said this facility has been bred out.’

  ‘No,’ Vala said with strange patience. ‘The mechanism is still there, growing in each child’s head; it’s the faculty to process the data that’s been turned off. As if Coton had healthy eyes but lacked the cortical equipment for his brain to process the information from those eyes.

  ‘But you’re dealing with biology, Marshal, and a very ancient modification. Things drift with the generations. Many of our young have always had gravity dreams, as we call them, dreams of other places and times – even of the future. Residual perception. They usually grow out of it. And we don’t announce it to the world. Would you? In Coton’s case it may be something to do with the proximity of the neutron star – spacetime is grossly distorted hereabouts, and the graviton flux—’

  ‘Get to the point, Academician.’

  ‘Marshal, I believe my grandson is receiving a graviton signal, not from any future event in our own universe, but from another universe entirely – a universe where the descendants of the crew of a warship, which sailed there through Bolder’s Ring, have been stranded for several hundred thousand years. Coton, you’re picking up a distress call! And the first thing you must do is respond . . .’

  6

  The man with the sharpened teeth anchored his feet in the tree’s foliage and stood straight. His short hair was shaved into elaborate patterns, Lura saw, and a crude zigzag tattoo had been carved into his belly. He leered in triumph. ‘Take the girl,’ he said, his language coarse and heavily accented but recognisable. ‘She looks worth a hump.’

  ‘You’ll have to kill me first,’ Lura spat.

  The rider kneeling on her back, a woman, laughed. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t give old Otho ideas like that, little girl. It only makes him hornier.’

  Otho laughed in turn, showing those gruesome teeth. ‘She’ll keep. Just sit on her, Anka. Kill the old man, he’s no use.’

  Pesten roared his defiance, and struggled with his captors, but he couldn’t get a fist free. A rider held his spear over his chest.

  ‘No!’ Lura yelled. ‘Don’t kill him.’

  The leader, Otho, bent down so his face was close to hers. His breath stank of blood. ‘And why not? Will you be nice to me if we let him live, little girl?’

  ‘He’s a Brother,’ she snapped. ‘Look at his robe. The Brotherhood of the Infrastructure will pay you ransom to get him back.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said the woman Anka, still on Lura’s back. ‘Might save a bit of fighting, Otho.’

  ‘But I like fighting . . . Oh, very well, bring him. Tie him first.’

  They got Pesten up on his knees and stripped him of his robe, leaving him naked, and tore lengths off the robe to truss him up. Pesten kept struggling throughout. ‘You’ll get no ransom for me!’ He was silenced by a punch in the mouth by Otho, a sickening impact that cracked teeth. They got Lura up too, and tied some of the strips from Pesten’s robe around her body. She still had hold of the Mole, which Anka, a red-haired woman with a body like a whip, eyed curiously. But the riders were rushing too much to do anything about it for now.

  Hurriedly, they ransacked the tree for anything they could steal – the dead pilot’s scraps of food, a water skin, spare clothing, even the tipped-out fire-pot.

  Then they lined up with their trussed-up prisoners at the tree’s rim. The whale, its huge eyes mournful, beat its flukes and approached the tree again. Timing their jumps to match the spin of tree and whale, the riders started to cross, leaping confidently through the air.

  And, Lura realised with mounting horror, she was going to have to make that leap herself.

  Otho and Anka got hold of Lura’s arms, one to either side. Lura could feel the tide-like tug of their bodies’ gravity fields, and Otho’s free hand roamed over her buttocks and thighs, though she squirmed to get away.

  And they leapt with her, still holding her, with the whale seeming very far away.

  In the air, she looked down at the expanse of the aerial Forest, and she saw the fighting everywhere, the whales skirting the turning trees, the riders dwarfed by their rolling animals. One tree came wheeling out of its formation, foliage ablaze, and as she watched its rim and branches began to disintegrate, and flaming chunks spun off into the air.

  And, just before she landed on the whale, another tree rose up in the air above her, and she heard a man roar – Ord! She’d know that voice anywhere. He ran around the rim of his turning tree, throwing spears down at the riders. One spike caught Otho in the leg. He let Lura go, yelling his anger and agony, and without hesitation ripped the spear out of his flesh and muscle, braced and threw it back at Ord, who ducked. All this in mid-air, before Otho completed his leap and landed on his back on the whale’s flank.

  Lura and the woman followed him down, hitting hard.

  Soon all the riders were down, clinging to ropes to keep from being thrown off by the whale’s spin. Lura, beside Pesten, had ended up on her back in the whale’s dry, foamy outer flesh, and was held down by Otho’s massive arm.

  But Ord, in his tree, wasn’t done yet. He held up his fire-pot, a wooden bowl from which flames still licked. The riders scrambled away, around the whale’s hull.

  Lura yelled, ‘Do it, Ord! Burn these bastards!’

  With a mighty throw Ord hurled down the pot, and he disappeared backwards, shoved away by the recoil. The pot splashed against the whale’s flank, spilling fire. Swathes of outer flesh caught fire and burned off in sheets, and the whale rolled and spasmed, its agony obvious. The riders clung to their ropes.

  ‘We need to get inside,’ Anka yelled at Otho. ‘We’ll be thrown off.’

  He nodded. ‘Hold this she-rat.’ Leaving Anka with Lura, he wrapped his feet in the netting, blood still streaming down his leg from his wound. He took a wooden knife from his belt, braced himself, and slashed down through the whale’s skin and into the layer of tougher cartilage beneath. Then he backed up, dragging his blade through one pace, two, and foul, hot, moist air spilled out of the lengthening wound. He tucked away the knife and forced his arms into the slit he’d created, pushing the flanges apart. ‘In. Fast.’

  One by one the riders piled through the orifice and into the whale’s body cavity. It got easier as the first of them made it inside, and were able to help hold the breach open.

  Lura was shoved through, head first and bound up. The air within was foul and hot and stank of sweat.

  Once inside she was rolled over away from the hole, onto a slick, moist surface. Pesten was dragged through the orifice as unceremoniously as she had been, and dumped beside her. Now the whale’s spin, instead of threatening to throw them off the outer skin, kept them pinned in place.

  And Lura lay on her back, exhausted, shocked, breathing hard. She was inside the whale, and its translucent skin was a great shell all around her, with the riders’ clothing and blankets and weapons and spoil from the raid heaped up on its floor of flesh. The beast’s internal organs were massed around a digestive tract that spanned its diameter, from the face at the front to an anus at the back end, where lumps of muscle worked the great flukes, dimly seen from within the body. And at the front Lura found herself looking out through the whale’s huge face, an inverted mask that dwarfed the rider who worked there, held in place with a harn
ess, jabbing goads into a tissue mass.

  Otho stood over her, tying a strip of cloth around his wounded leg. ‘You caused us a lot of trouble, little girl. Took a spear for you. Time for Otho’s reward.’ He ran his tongue across his sharpened teeth. The others laughed, even the woman, Anka. He reached down.

  She struggled against her bonds. ‘Leave me alone, you savage.’

  ‘Savage is right,’ he said. He rummaged at the strips of cloth that held her and pulled out the Mole. ‘So what’s this?’ He turned it around and spun it in the air, and he licked its casing. ‘Can’t eat it, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Leave that alone!’

  Anka approached him, curious. ‘Never saw anything like it.’ She rapped the box with her knuckles. ‘Maybe we could smash it up. Make knives.’

  ‘No.’ Otho grinned down at Lura, who struggled against her bonds. ‘It’s driving her crazy. Let’s just throw it out of the whale. I like them wild.’

  Pesten, bound and naked, glared at him. ‘You don’t know what you’re dealing with.’

  ‘Don’t I?’ Otho casually kicked Pesten in the kidney.

  The Brother groaned and rolled, but he twisted his head and spoke again. ‘I mean it—’

  Lura called clearly, ‘Status!’

  ‘Massive sensor dysfunction.’

  Otho yelled and dropped the box; it fell and bounced on the resilient floor. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Untie me or I’ll have my magic box kill you,’ Lura snarled, as confidently as she could. When they didn’t move, she called again, ‘Mole! Status!’

  And, to her astonishment, the Mole replied with a phrase she’d never heard before. ‘Incoming signal received.’

  7

  ‘My name is Coton. Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes! You’re talking out of the Mole. But all the Mole ever said before was “Massive Sensor Dysfunction”. You’re not in the Mole, are you?’