Xeelee: Endurance

by Stephen Baxter

  Huro turned his back on the girl and stalked to the other table. ‘A spindling, though, is quite different. Why, you can see it even before I open it up. Look at it! Six legs. Six limbs, not four! And if we look deeper, we will find more divergences . . .’

  Efficiently he peeled back skin and prised out bones from the spindling’s once-elegant long neck – except that these greyish objects weren’t actually bones. ‘The spindling has an inner skeletal structure. That much we have in common with it. But look – can you see?’ He stalked around the front rows of the audience, who flinched back from his gory specimens. ‘This isn’t bone. It’s a kind of cartilage, quite unlike the human design.’

  He tore apart the spindling, displaying more features of the animal. For instance, a human’s digestive system was essentially a duct that passed through the body: food in one end, waste out of the other. In contrast a spindling had a closed digestive loop, so that it used its mouth as its anus, for food and for waste. Celi was struck by this observation. Everybody knew to keep out of the way of a spindling when it prepared to vomit up its shit, but it had never occurred to him before how different it was to the human way of doing things. He felt curiosity stir; he wondered how many other strange features of the world were waiting for him to notice them, if only he could learn how to look.

  ‘What does all this mean?’ Huro demanded. ‘It means that the spindling does not come from the same tree of life as humans and rats and birds. The spindling has been brought here, to this world of ours, from somewhere else – or else we have been brought to its world, although that seems less likely as there are more creatures like us here than like it. And the spindling is not the only example of an alien among us, among the plants and the animals.

  ‘Like most primitive cultures on the Shelf, you Forons cling to a naive naturalism! You believe that the world as we experience it emerged from the blind operation of natural laws, that intelligence had no hand in it. But that cannot be true. The spindling is proof that the world could not have developed organically; one counter-example is enough to demonstrate that nature lacks the necessary unity for that to be so. The simplest hypothesis is in fact that it has all been made, all shaped by intelligence, from blueshifted sky to redshifted Lowland.’ He held up spindling cartilage, and a hip joint from poor Bera. ‘Here is the proof!’ And he threw the bones to the floor.

  There was a long silence. Then one man rose to his feet. Celi was moved to see that it was his own father. Sool was a proud Foron who clearly bristled over Huro’s comments about primitivism and naivety. He demanded to know if this ‘radical creationism’ was the only philosophical choice. Must Forons now accept gods and devils? Must they cower from storms like their ancestors, and worship the light that flared across the Lowland? Was not Huro’s presumption of a higher intelligence actually the more intellectually primitive point of view? He spoke well, a dignified anger deepening his voice, and his neighbours applauded.

  But Huro was able to counter him point by point. Despite himself, Celi found himself accepting the Philosopher’s arguments. But he felt deeply disturbed at the way this arrogant man dismissed his father, and had so easily upset his own world view.

  On impulse Celi stood up himself.

  His father, surprised, yielded the floor. As he became the focus of the packed hall – the Mayor herself was here – Celi quailed. But he held his nerve, and dramatically pointed at Bera’s corpse. ‘Philosopher, if you can tell us the design of the whole world, why could you not save her from the Blight?’

  Huro smiled. ‘If you ask such a question, young man, perhaps you have it in you to become a doctor, so you can answer it yourself. Talk to me later.’ He turned away to take more questions.

  As Celi sat down, stunned, Qaia tugged his sleeve. ‘You won’t go to that awful man, will you?’

  ‘No,’ said Celi immediately. ‘No, of course not.’ But as he stared into Qaia’s wide blue eyes, he knew he was lying.

  Foro was situated on the side of a cliff, on the broad plain of the Shelf. The Forons were proud of their town, for they had built it with their own hands. But it was cupped in the mighty ruins of a much older city, devastated generations ago by the Formidable Caress.

  And if you climbed the rocky walls above and below the Shelf, you climbed into stratified time. You could ascend into a rarefied air where time raced like a pumping heart, or go down into the grave torpor of redshift.

  In practice nobody from Foro ever did climb the rocks. It just wasn’t practical to run your life with time’s cogwheels slipping constantly. And the Forons’ reluctance was cultural too. Celi’s people were proudly descended from a group who had once been kept in an up-cliff community called the Attic, where their lives had been burned up in the service of slower-living rich folk on the Shelf below. Celi was the great-grandson of rebels against that strange enslavement.

  But if the folk of Foro ignored the stratification of time, the Philosophers, like HuroEldon, exploited it.

  The Philosophers marketed knowledge. In their own community far down the slope, their lives, slowed by time, were stretched out. The Philosophers devoted their extended existences to recovering some of the wisdom that had been lost during the Caress, through study and patient archaeology. And they made their living by selling that learning back to those who had lost it. Thus HuroEldon had ascended grandly from his redshifted keep to instruct the people of Foro on how to turn their growing town from a heaped-up clutter into a functioning city with common services like water supplies and sewage, how to reclaim the ancient canal system to irrigate their fields, and so on; he could then step forward across time to advise on such projects as they were carried out.

  Celi came to realise that this gift of knowledge was essential. It was only a few generations since the Forons had begun to grope their way out of the fog of fearful superstition that had been the enduring legacy of civilisation’s fall in the Formidable Caress. And it was even less time since the deeper psychological shock of that fall had begun to fade: the edge of the Shelf was still lined by the remains of funeral pyres, where the citizens of Foro, despairing of a future in which another Caress must inevitably shatter all they had built, had burned all their learning with them when they died.

  But however useful his advice, for Forons, who prided themselves on their egalitarian instincts, it was hard to stomach Huro’s arrogance. That lecture on creationism had been a gift by Huro, rich with too much knowledge, a bauble tossed carelessly away by a man come to advise on sewage. His manner had been infuriating, let alone the content of his lecture.

  And Huro had deflected Celi’s young life just as casually.

  In the end, Celi did speak to the Natural Philosopher after the lecture. And within days he was assigned to Dela, the town’s physician, to begin his apprenticeship as a doctor. It all happened so quickly, his whole life upset. When he thought this over, Celi found he resented it, but he knew he would not step off the path he had chosen – or rather, that the Philosopher had chosen for him.

  But when HuroEldon called on him again, long after that fateful night in the town hall, Celi found it hard to hide his nervousness.

  HuroEldon walked grandly through Celi’s study. In his Philosopher’s cloak Huro was magnificent in this shabby background. He inspected Celi’s notes, carefully scraped onto spindling-skin parchment, and pored over an area he called Celi’s ‘laboratory’, an array of herbs, fluids and minerals labelled and annotated.

  Five years had worn away. Celi, now twenty-one, was growing into his role in the town, as a practising physician – and as husband to Qaia, and expectant father of her first baby. But for HuroEldon, who had returned to his redshifted community of Philosophers, less than a year had passed.

  ‘I’m grateful that you called on me,’ Celi said stiffly.

  ‘I wanted to see how the town’s bright-eyed young doctor was progressing. It is always amusing to skip forward in time, so to s
peak, and see how such stories as yours have played out.’

  ‘I’m not a doctor yet,’ Celi said. ‘I’m still learning.’

  ‘That will never cease, I hope.’

  ‘And Dela is still working—’

  ‘That old witch! Oh, Dela has the charm, she knows the right words to murmur when Effigies go spiralling up from the dying. But you have something far more important than that.’ Huro tapped Celi’s temple. ‘A mind, my boy. That and your spirit, your doggedness. I saw it in you even during that night in the town hall.’

  ‘I’m surprised you remember it . . .’ But for Huro it wasn’t long ago at all. ‘Your lecture made a great impression on me.’

  ‘Obviously,’ Huro said dismissively.

  ‘It wasn’t you showing off your knowledge that intrigued me,’ Celi said, irritated. ‘It was Bera.’

  ‘Who? Oh, the little girl on the butcher’s slab. What use is all the knowledge in the world, you asked, if it can’t save a child from the Blight?’ He waved a hand at Celi’s home-made laboratory. ‘I can see you’ve devoted yourself to the cause. But the Blight won’t be wrestled into submission, will it?’

  No, it wouldn’t. That was why Celi had asked to see HuroEldon.

  Celi was already a competent physician. He could deliver babies, stitch up wounds, set broken limbs and comfort the dying, and he had acquired basic knowledge of the vectors of infection, of antisepsis and antibiotics. Much of this learning, preserved and sold by the Philosophers, was rumoured to be very old.

  But Celi had also learned that there was nothing anybody could do about the Blight.

  It showed up as a skin discolouration first, like a burn. This stage could last a year, even more. But eventually it got into your lungs, and within three days you were dead. None of Dela’s medicines could fight it; it was only rigid quarantine procedures that kept it from overwhelming the community altogether.

  What frustrated Celi was that he was sure a cure for the Blight was achievable. As he had visited case after case, Celi had made notes of the folk medicines he encountered, concocted from animal blood, plant roots and seeds, mineral salts – potions and salves born out of desperation. The surprising thing was that some of these remedies showed signs of slowing the disease. Somewhere in all these ingredients was a cure, he became convinced.

  But finding that cure was a tremendous challenge. There were no full-time scientists here; Foro wasn’t rich enough to afford them. And a little systematic thought demonstrated that there were simply too many combinations of ingredients and relative concentrations to be tested, even if Celi were to dedicate himself to the project full time – which, as one of Foro’s two doctors, was quite impossible.

  And now HuroEldon, who he had hoped would be a source of old wisdom on the Blight, dismissively told him it was all futile anyhow. ‘We live in a world in which time is stratified, remember. Time flows faster the higher you go—’

  ‘I understand that,’ Celi said testily.

  ‘Do you? That’s impressive. I don’t. And you must also understand, my boy, that organisms change – especially the pesky little brutes that bring us diseases. The Blight can transmit itself through blood, or spittle, or through the air. Whatever we do, a subset of the Blight’s disease vectors can always waft up into the blue where, accelerated in time, they can mutate, faster than we can hope to match them with our remedies. You see? It’s thus a fundamental feature of our world that disease is always beyond our control.’ He shrugged massive shoulders. ‘One must simply accept the losses.’

  Celi could not fault the Philosopher’s logic. But on some level, he saw, Huro simply did not care that it was impossible to defeat the Blight. Perhaps this was a legacy of the past. HuroEldon’s very name was a relic of the complicated compound nomenclature once adopted by the aristocracy of Foro, while Celi’s was a blunt Attic name. Even generations after the rebellion, in Huro’s heart he still thought he was better than Celi, better than the swarming townspeople Celi tended. Celi kept such thoughts to himself.

  Huro seemed to be growing bored. ‘You’re wasting your time here, you know. There are much more intriguing questions for a mind like yours to address.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as the subject of that lecture of mine: the indisputable fact that the whole of our world is a made thing, or at least assembled from disparate components, from blue to red, top to bottom. We’ve plenty of evidence beyond spindling skeletons. Why, we believe that the very stratification of time is an artefact.’

  Celi walked to the window and peered up at the sky. The light of Old Earth came from the shifting glow of the Lowland, reflected from the clouds. ‘Why would anybody make all this?’

  ‘Think it through,’ Huro said. ‘If you could climb down from the sky, down into this redshifted pit we call our world, you would be preserved, locked in time.’

  ‘Preserved?’

  ‘We believe that once Old Earth was a world without this layering of time, a world like many others, perhaps, hanging in the sky. And its people were more or less like us. But Old Earth came under some kind of threat. And so, to protect their children, the elders of Old Earth pulled a blanket of time over their world and packed it off to the future. You must understand this is a rather flimsy hypothesis, and as I always say myself, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and we don’t have it yet! But it’s the best justification we’ve come up with so far: Old Earth is a jar of time, stopped up to preserve its children.’

  Celi frowned. ‘But then, what about the Effigies?’ The ghostly forms released by the dying represented the biggest single mystery he had encountered as a doctor. ‘Are they us – are they human souls, leaving a dying body? And if so, why do so few of us release them on death? And why should the world periodically shake itself to pieces in the Formidable Caresses?’

  ‘Good questions. I wish I had good answers! Perhaps you will find out for yourself – when you come down into the red and join us.’

  So here was the invitation, bluntly stated. Celi said, ‘I am a doctor. I have patients here in Foro.’

  ‘They will die in the end, whatever you do. While you could live on.’

  ‘I have a wife. Qaia. She is carrying our first child—’

  ‘The blue-eyes who was with you the night of the lecture? How cute. Bring her with you. Or, better still, leave her behind.’ He leaned closer, and Celi smelled gin on his breath. ‘Stride into the future with me, five years, ten, twenty. There will always be more girls, not even conceived yet, fresh fruit waiting to be plucked. How do you think I keep myself entertained during these visits to your dismal little town? It isn’t all sewage systems and creationism, you know.’

  The curiosity Huro had woken in Celi that night five years ago would never leave him. But everything else about Huro and his proposal repelled Celi, everything but the allure of knowledge. It was easy for him to turn down Huro’s invitation.

  As it turned out, however, Celi’s future was after all decided that day. When he returned home, he found Qaia sitting alone, stroking her belly, her face streaked by desolate tears. A pale-pink stain, like a burn, was spreading across her neck: it was the Blight.

  Her life and his had been destroyed, he thought, by a vector of infection he couldn’t even see, and which he would never have the time to defeat. He couldn’t bear it.

  It took a sleepless night of calculation for Celi to decide what he must do. He would not follow HuroEldon, down into the red. He must climb up into the blue, alone.

  In the morning he packed quickly: a few clothes, some dried food, bags of seeds and roots, a set of his medicinal samples. Then, with his pack on his back and a cage of mice dangling awkwardly from his belt, Celi walked out of Foro.

  He made for the cliff face, and began to climb. Once there had been an elevator system here, worked by tethered spindlings. Now you had to walk. But a whole series of stairc
ases had long ago been cut into the face of the rock, heavily eroded by usage and weathering, but still usable.

  He was winded by the time he had climbed the nine hundred steps to what remained of the Attic, where once his ancestors had toiled.

  He walked around curiously; he had never been up here before. There was nothing left of his people’s village but post-holes in the ground, the scorch-marks of abandoned hearths, and gaunt caves in the cliff walls that had once been used as kitchens and dormitories. It all looked much older than the two or three generations since its abandonment, but that was in Foro time; up here in the blue this place had grown much older than the Forons’ memories of it.

  He dangled his legs over the edge of the cliff, sipped water from a spring, and looked down into the depths of the Lowland, an ocean of misty redshift. From here, Foro too was bathed in a crimson glow; he could see the people and their spindling-drawn vehicles crawling as if through syrup. Already he was cut off from his family, from his patients, from Qaia, by the streaming of time. He wondered how many of them he would see again.

  Once he had made his decision to leave he had been determined to keep his plan secret from everybody – even from Qaia. Perhaps it had been the kindest thing to do; or perhaps he had feared his own determination might waver if he hesitated.

  But Dela, the doctor who had tutored him, had seemed to have an idea what he was up to. ‘It’s the white mice,’ she told him. ‘You’re taking white mice.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Mice can catch the Blight, like humans. Spindlings, for instance, can’t. And that’s important to you, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Unexpectedly she hugged him. Old enough to be his mother, she was a nurturing doctor, but not given to physical displays of affection. ‘I will miss you. You’re a good colleague.’