Xeelee: Endurance

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘I’ll be back in a few days.’

  ‘Of course you will.’

  His father had accepted his bland assurances that he would return. He had a more strained encounter with his mother, who, with her usual acuity, guessed he was up to something. ‘I always did say that girl would have you climbing the blue.’

  ‘Look after her, mother.’

  ‘I will.’ He embraced her; she smelled of warm bread.

  And then had come his parting from Qaia. He had left her, and his unborn child, with lies. Now, as he looked down into the layers of time that trapped her, he couldn’t bear even to think about it. Wearily he collected his kit and continued the climb.

  Above the Attic he plodded steadily along the trails of migrant animals, and when the trails petered out, scrambled over rocks. There were no more people or animals now, but he saw the flash of wings, and occasionally heard an echoing caw. He was not alone, not while the birds flew with him.

  After a time he noticed a change in the rock. Shattered by frost or heat, its surfaces scarred by lichen, it seemed much more sharply eroded than the cliff faces down by Foro. The stratification of time must be having a profound effect on the very fabric of the world, with higher rock sections eroding away much more rapidly than lower. When he paused to sleep, wrapped in a skin blanket on a narrow ledge, he scratched a note about this in his spindling-skin journal, the first note he had made there.

  On the third day he climbed a narrow pinnacle, heading up to a summit. By now it seemed that only he existed in a normal stream of time; he was alone in the clean, thin air, sandwiched between the stars over his head and the crimson glow beneath.

  The slope levelled out, and he stood on a smooth, worn plateau. There was life here: tufts of grass, low trees that clung to the rock face, even a couple of abandoned birds’ nests. Food and water: he could live here, then. But Foro and the Shelf, far beneath him, were lost with the Lowland in a dank sea of redshift. Perhaps there were higher mountains to climb. But surely he had come high enough to achieve the temporal advantage he sought, high enough to defeat the evolutionary enthusiasm of the Blight vectors – high enough to give him the time he needed to save Qaia. This would do.

  But now that he had stopped moving, doubt plagued him. Could he really bear to lose himself in time like this?

  Better not to think about it. Better to begin work; once his patient methodology gathered momentum, his soul would be filled with the work and his purpose. Grimly he began to unload his kit.

  Celi stood in the doorway of the home he had built with Qaia. He looked round at the walls of mud and plaster, the furniture they had made and bought, the carving with their names over the door. For him, all of it was a lifetime old, yet as fresh as a morning. And there was no place for him, he knew.

  He felt an odd stab of nostalgia for his mountaintop refuge, the hut he had built, the cages for the mice. But even if he could climb back up there it would already all be gone, weathered away by accelerated time. The core of his life had been hollowed out; he felt as if he had been away only a moment, that he had been aged in a heartbeat.

  Qaia walked into the room, humming, a towel around her hair. For a moment she did not see him, and he watched her, his breath catching in his throat. It hurt him to see what the Blight had done to her: the crimson stain had spread up from her neck across her once-pretty face. Yet he was relieved that he had, after all, returned in time to save her.

  Then she saw him. She recognised him immediately, and her blue eyes widened. It was unbearable to have her look at what he had become, with his white hair, his stooped back.

  He longed to hold her, but time stood between them like stone. Only a year had passed for her, while more than forty had worn away for him.

  ‘You said you would be gone a few days,’ she said. ‘Some “few days”.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Qaia, the baby—’

  ‘You have a son, Celi. A son. Four months old.’

  He tried to take that in. His leathery old heart beat faster. He held up his precious vial. ‘Take this. It is—’

  ‘I know what it is. Your mother guessed what you must be doing. So did Dela. Oh, you fool! What use is saving me if I had to lose you in the process?’

  He pressed the vial into her hand. ‘Take it to Dela,’ he whispered. ‘She will know what to do. Hurry now. It’s what all this has been about, after all.’

  She bit her lip, and ran out of the door.

  And HuroEldon walked in, his robe sweeping. ‘Well, well. Somebody told me they saw you come staggering back down out of the blue.’

  Celi straightened. ‘Philosopher.’

  Huro leaned closer. ‘You smell like a spindling’s breath. And what is this you’re wearing, mouse fur? I take it you found your cure. I knew you would do it,’ Huro said grudgingly. ‘But I never thought you would reduce yourself to this in the process. And you ran out on your patients, despite the vows you doctors take.’

  ‘I came back—’

  ‘But what use are you now, like this?’ He inspected Celi, as if he were a curious specimen. ‘Your wife can’t love you again, you know. We humans don’t seem to have evolved to handle such differential shifts in time. That’s another point that convinces me this is a made world, by the way, that we are designed for a different environment . . .’ He idly picked up Celi’s notebook, and paused at the very first observational note Celi had made so long ago, about the effects of differential weathering rates at altitude. ‘An acute bit of geology. I told you, you would have made a good Philosopher. But you’ve thrown your life away.’

  Celi had no reply. Huro was articulating doubts that had plagued him during his vigil on the mountain – in all those years alone, how could he not have had doubts? As he had worked through his monumental combinatorial challenge with his vials of infected blood and trial remedies, slaughtering generation after generation of white mice, his intellectual curiosity, even his basic impulse to save his wife, had worn away, leaving nothing but a grim determination to keep on to the end. He had even stopped counting the years as they had piled up. Of course he had been lonely, up there on his plateau, looking out over uncounted layers of time! But what choice had there been?

  Well, he had succeeded, and he must not let Huro stir ancient doubts in his soul. ‘You Philosophers exploit the time strata selfishly—’

  ‘While you have burned up your own life to save others. Yes, yes. You aren’t the first, you know; your heroism isn’t even original.’ Huro peered into Celi’s eyes, his mouth. ‘You might have found your Blight treatment up there, Celi, but you sacrificed your own health in the process. I’d give you a year. Two at the most.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose it does to you, does it?’ Huro’s expression softened, just a little. ‘My offer still stands.’

  ‘What offer?’

  ‘To come with me, down below. You may only have a year, but spin it out! Some of us are planning to go on, you know.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘Down into the red. Nobody knows how deep we can go, how much we can stretch time before it snaps like an overextended sinew. Some of us dream of pushing on into the future, all the way to the next Formidable Caress. And if we can do that, who knows what’s possible? Come with me, Celi. You’ve given up almost all of your life. Surely you owe yourself that much.’

  But Celi heard a sound from a neighbouring room. It was a soft gurgle, the cry of a waking baby. ‘I have all I need here,’ he said.

  HuroEldon snorted. ‘Well, we won’t meet again. The time streams will see to that.’ The Philosopher walked out of the house.

  And Celi, broken and old, went to comfort his infant son.

  THE TIME PIT

  AD c.4.5 BILLION YEARS

  The Mechanist balloons, fast and grey, drifted over the ruins of Old Foro. Belo couldn�
�t even see the crude bombs they dropped until they came streaking down out of the blueshifted air to splash fire. But the Mechanists’ advance was driving Belo and the last of his troopers towards the Shelf’s edge, where the river Foo, running with blood, plunged into the abyss.

  And all across the battlefield, Creationist soldiers were dying. Belo could see their Effigies rising up like smoke, spectral distortions of the human form that twisted and spun away.

  All this for the sake of an idea, Belo thought. No, not an idea – the truth. He must cling to that, even as the blueshifted fire from the sky blossomed around him.

  ‘Captain?’

  Tira, his most trusted lieutenant, was shaking his shoulder. In his exhaustion he had drifted into abstraction, as he so often did. He was after all trained as a Natural Philosopher, and his senior officers had never let him forget that intellectuals, with their long perspective, didn’t necessarily make for good soldiers. But if not for intellectuals like him, there would have been no war anyhow.

  ‘I’m sorry, Tira. It’s just that you have to admire them.’

  ‘Sir?’ Her small face, smeared with blood and dirt, was creased with concern.

  ‘The Mechs. We think of them as stupid, you know, backward. After all, the reason we fight is because they cling to their absurd, primitive idea that the world is a product of natural forces, acting blindly, in the absence of mind. But now they have come up with this.’

  For a soldier of Old Earth, gaining the high ground was everything. If you were higher than your enemy you had the benefit of accelerated time; you could think faster, prepare your strategy and aim your weapons, while your opponents tumbled, slow-moving, trapped in glutinous, red-shifted slow time.

  So, in this campaign, the Creationists of Puul had taken the Attic, the long-abandoned community on the cliff face above the town of Foro itself, where once rich Forons had kept time-accelerated slaves. The campaign had gone well, and Belo had started to believe that the Forons and their hated Mechanist notions might soon be purged from the world.

  But then the Forons had produced their hot-air balloons, which wafted even higher than the Attic, and the Creationists’ advantage was lost.

  ‘A stunning idea,’ Belo said. ‘So simple! Nothing but bags of hot air. But look at that formation. You’ve got to give them credit.’ Belo had a flask of gin in his coat pocket, meant to comfort battlefield wounded. Perhaps he should crack it now, and spend his last moments watching the wondrous spectacle of fighting soldiers and flying machines working in tandem to snuff out his life.

  But Tira was almost screaming in his face. ‘Sir! We have to get out of here. Dane has found a way.’

  ‘Dane?’

  Stumbling towards them through the rubble came a trooper, blood-soaked, a small, squat man. Dane’s bayonet had been snapped in two, and he was dragging one leg: both weapon and man damaged, Belo thought bleakly. Grimacing with pain, Dane showed Belo what he had found: a shaft in the ground, no wider than Belo’s own shoulders, covered by a heavy stone slab. ‘I think it’s a well,’ he said.

  ‘Or a larder,’ Tira said. A place where you could store meat, preserved in the slower time of depth.

  ‘No,’ Belo said grimly. ‘See the lock on this hatch, broken now? This is a time pit. A place you would throw down thieves and murderers and forget about them.’

  ‘So where does it come out?’

  ‘Who knows? But where scarcely matters. It just needs to be deep enough, deep into slow time. A neat way to dispose of your criminals – to hurl them one-way into the future!’

  Tira peered into the time pit, her face twisted with fear. ‘It’s this or nothing,’ she said.

  Belo said, ‘Do you love your Effigy so much, Tira? Shall we not stand and fight?’

  Dane said, ‘Dying like this won’t do any good.’ His accent was coarse; he had been a farm worker before the war. He was wheezing, exhausted. ‘I say we live to fight another day.’

  ‘Even if that day is far in the future?’

  ‘Even so,’ Dane said.

  Fire-bombs bloomed ever closer. Looking around, Belo saw that the three of them were alone, beyond help.

  Belo grinned. ‘Another day.’

  ‘Another day,’ they mumbled.

  Belo lifted his legs into the shaft, raised himself over a tunnel of darkness, and fell into time.

  ‘I’ll have your boots.’

  Belo was reluctant to wake. Even half-asleep he remembered the endless fall down the tight, filthy shaft, as if he was being swallowed into some terrible stomach. And now here was this ugly voice, dragging him back into the world.

  ‘I said, I’ll have your boots. I know you can hear me, soldier boy.’

  Reluctantly he opened his eyes. He was dazzled by a glaring blue sky, by stars that wheeled above his head. And a face loomed over him, a man’s face, broad, dead-eyed, roughly shaven, surrounded by a mass of dirty black hair.

  Belo tried to speak. His throat was bone dry. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘I am Teeg. And you’re in my world now.’

  ‘Really?’ Belo had no idea where he was, and he wondered where Dane and Tira were – if they were still alive. All that would have to wait. First he had to deal with this grubby buffoon. ‘You want my boots?’

  The face cracked in a grin, showing blackened teeth. ‘That’s right, soldier boy.’

  ‘Try taking them.’

  The grin disappeared. Then Teeg’s face twisted, and he roared and raised two huge scarred hands. Belo aimed a kick at where he guessed the man’s crotch would be, but his legs felt feeble, heavy, as if the muscles had drained of energy. Besides, this Teeg was so massively built, a hulk of muscle and bone dressed in filthy rags, that the kick only enraged him. Teeg got his hands around Belo’s throat, and pressed him back into the dirt. Belo flailed and struggled, but he was like a child battling an adult.

  He had been conscious here only a few heartbeats, yet already he had given his life away. Quite a miscalculation, he thought, weakening.

  ‘Get off him!’ A squat mass came hurtling from Belo’s left side and slammed into Teeg.

  Belo, the pressure on his throat gone, coughed for breath. He struggled upright, clinging to consciousness. He was sitting on a dirt plain. Beside him a cliff face rose up into the blue. He was close to a ragged cave, perhaps the chute down which he had tumbled. People huddled a few paces away. Four women, five kids – no men. Scrawny, filthy, dressed in rags, they stared at him fearfully.

  He couldn’t see an end to this scrubby plain. Perhaps it was another Shelf – or perhaps he had fallen all the way into the Lowland itself, he thought with a stab of despair.

  And beyond the people he glimpsed something moving over the ground – not on it, over it, at about waist height, almost like a Mechanist balloon. It was a rough sphere of some silvery metal that gleamed in the blueshifted light of the sky. Was it a machine? But it was like no machine he had ever seen, no pump or elevator or cannon. And what could possibly support such a mass of metal in the air? He longed to see more, but details were blurred by heat haze—

  ‘Soldier boy.’

  Teeg’s ugly voice snapped him back to the here and now.

  Teeg had hold of Dane, by an arm locked around his throat. It was obviously Dane who had knocked Teeg away and saved Belo’s life. Dane wasn’t struggling. His injured leg was twisted back at an impossible angle. But his eyes were locked on his commanding officer, and he made no sound.

  ‘Let him go,’ Belo said.

  Teeg looked mock-puzzled. ‘How did you put it? . . . Try taking him.’

  Belo tried to stand. The world greyed.

  ‘No.’ It was Tira. She was sitting on the ground, the remnants of her blood-stained uniform in disarray. ‘Don’t fight him,’ she said. ‘Not now. He’s too strong. Not yet.’

  Belo knew she was right. But st
ill Teeg was squeezing the life out of Dane. ‘Let him go,’ he said again. ‘We didn’t come here to do you harm.’

  ‘I don’t care why you came here,’ Teeg said. ‘I told you. You’re in my world now. And you will do what I say. You know why? Because of the Weapon.’ He held Dane at arm’s length, with one mighty fist locked on his collar, as if he was holding up a doll. Dane bit his lip, and his leg trailed beneath him, but still he made no sound.

  And then Teeg grabbed Dane by neck and belt, and hurled him bodily at the floating machine.

  A window clicked opened in the side of the machine. Fire, purple and bright, snaked into Dane’s belly and simply blew him apart, into fragments of flesh and bone amid a mist of blood – all this before the body could hit the ground. Then the window closed, like an eyelid shutting, and the machine continued its serene patrol around the huddling people.

  Teeg grinned, cocksure in his ragged robes. He stood over Tira, who was still sprawled on the ground. ‘Now, where were we before soldier boy woke up?’

  Despite everything he had seen, Belo stepped forward again. ‘Touch her and I will kill you, I swear.’

  Tira said grimly, ‘I already made the same promise.’

  Even in this moment of power Teeg looked from one to the other, and something in their determined stare seemed to put him off. ‘You’ll keep. But you,’ he said, stabbing a finger at Belo. ‘Your boots.’

  Belo sat down and began to work at his laces.

  Teeg walked over to the group of huddled women. ‘You.’ The woman he had selected cowered from him, but he grabbed her by the shoulder, threw her to the ground, and began to fumble at her rags. She lay passively; the children watched empty-eyed.

  ‘You’re right to give him a victory,’ Tira whispered. ‘There’s nothing to be done as long as he controls that machine. We must play for time. Wait for an opportunity . . .’ She was staring at a charred fragment of Dane’s corpse, and her composure cracked. ‘Oh, Belo, what horror have we fallen into?’