Xeelee: Endurance

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘There you are,’ Belo told Tira. ‘We can’t fail!’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘And then we will go home, and finish the war.’

  So they did.

  By the time they stormed back up the time chute, so many years had passed on the Shelf that the war itself was a matter of history, the theological dispute over the nature of the world had been transformed by new evidence, and conquerors and conquered had interbred so much that nobody could untangle the whole mess anyhow. But none of that mattered as Belo and Tira, free and vengeful, with a Weapon of untold potential at their command, began to make their own history.

  THE LOWLAND EXPEDITION

  AD c.4.8 BILLION YEARS

  Enna relished her flights in the spotting balloon.

  She loved to see the Expedition train strung out across the Lowland’s arid plain, with its spindling-drawn wagons, the chains of servants and bearers, the gleaming coach that transported her father and his precious books, even the small flock of runner-birds. If the weather was fine the Philosophers themselves would walk alongside the wagons, marching into the Lowland’s mysteries, arguing endlessly. The Lowland Expedition was a grand gesture of the civilisation of the Shelf that had spawned it.

  And it was brave too, for all the explorers knew that they could never go home again, whatever they discovered. Already the communities they had left had been whisked by stratified time into the deep past; the explorers would bring home their treasure of knowledge to their own remote descendants in an unknowable future.

  Down there on the ground was Tomm, one of the junior cartographers. Whenever Enna flew, Tomm always wore a special red cap so she could pick him out, a bright-red dot in the dusty line of Philosophers. At twenty-one he was just a year older than Enna herself – and he was her lover, though that was a secret to all but her closest friends, and certainly to her father, or so she hoped. When he saw her, he waved.

  But his waving was sluggish, like an old man’s. When she rode her balloon up into the air, Enna was ascending into quicker time. If Tomm’s ears had been sensitive enough he would have heard her heart fluttering like a bird’s, and conversely when she looked down at him she saw him slowed, trapped in glutinous, redshifted time.

  The balloon flights were invaluable aids to navigation, but Bayle, Enna’s father, had strictly ordered that flights should be short, and that his party should take it in turns to man them, so that no one fell too far out of synchronisation with the rest. ‘This trip is challenging enough for us all,’ he insisted, ‘without the cogs of time slipping too.’ Enna accepted this wisdom. Even now, despite the joy of the flight, she longed to break through the barriers of streamed time that separated her from her love.

  But when she spied the city on the horizon she forgot even Tomm.

  The light of the Lowland was strange, shifting. Storms of light constantly swept across its surface, silent and flaring white. These founts of brightness were in fact the major source of daylight on Old Earth, but they made the seeing uncertain. Enna thought at first that the bright white line she spied on the horizon must be weather: a low cloud, a dust devil, even a minor light storm. But in a rare instant of clear seeing, the bright band resolved into a cluster of geometrical shapes, unmistakably artificial. It must be a city, stranded in the middle of the Lowland, where nobody had expected to find any signs of humanity but the meanest degradation. And Enna had discovered it.

  She turned immediately to the pilot. ‘Do you see it? There, the city, can you see? Oh, take us down! Take us down!’

  The expedition’s chief pilot was a bluff good-humoured fellow called Momo. A long-time military-service companion of her father, he was one of the few people to whom Bayle would entrust his daughter’s life. As he had lost one eye in the wars he ‘couldn’t see a blessed thing’, he told her. But he believed her, and began to tug on the ropes that controlled the hot-air balloon’s burner.

  Enna leaned over the descending gondola, yelling out news of her discovery. As the time differentials melted away, faces turned slowly up towards her.

  The Philosophers entered the city in wonder. Enna walked hand in hand with Tomm.

  The city was a jumble of cubes and rhomboids, pyramids and tetrahedrons – even one handsome dodecahedron. The buildings towered over the explorers, immense blocks of a geometric perfection that would have shamed even the grand civic centre of New Foro, Enna thought.

  There were no doors, though, and the windows weren’t glazed. And there were plenty of other peculiarities. Without inner partitions, each building was like ‘one big room’, as Tomm put it. Between the buildings the ground was just dirt, not paved or cobbled as were the streets of New Foro, back on the Shelf. It was more abstract than any city Enna had seen before, more like an art installation perhaps. And yet these great structures were clearly habitable.

  ‘And there’s nobody here,’ Enna whispered. ‘Not a soul! It’s so strange.’

  ‘But wonderful,’ Tomm said. He was tall, strong but sparsely built, with a languid grace that disturbed her dreams. ‘This must be a terribly ancient place. Look at the finish of these walls – what is this stuff, stone, ceramic, glass? Far beyond anything we are capable of. Perhaps the builders were Weapon-makers.’

  ‘Maybe, but don’t you think it’s all rather eerie? And the layout is such a jumble—’

  ‘A cartographer’s nightmare.’ Tomm laughed.

  ‘And why are there no windows or doors?’

  ‘We can make windows,’ he said. ‘We can hang doors.’ He took her hands. ‘Questions, questions, Enna! You’re worse than all these grumpy old Philosophers. This is your discovery. Relish the moment!’

  There was a deep harrumph. Bayle, Enna’s father, came walking towards them, trailed by acolytes, lesser men but Philosophers themselves. Tomm hastily released Enna’s hands.

  ‘But Enna is right,’ Bayle said. ‘There is some familiarity about the place, and yet perhaps that merely blinds us to how much is strange . . .’

  Bayle wore his dress uniform, topped off by his cap of spindling fur and feathers. Though he had devoted the last three decades of his life to science, Bayle had retained an honorary rank in the army of New Foro, and ‘for the sake of general morale’, as he put it, he donned his uniform to mark moments of particular significance during their long journey. But Enna knew that no matter how extravagant his appearance, her father’s mind was sharper than any of those around him.

  He tapped the walls of the nearest building with his stick. ‘Certainly the layout follows no obvious rational design, as does the centre of New Foro, say. But there are patterns here.’ He walked them briskly through the narrow alleys between the buildings. ‘Can you see how the largest buildings are clustered on the outside, and the smaller huts are in their shade?’

  ‘It almost looks organic,’ Enna said impulsively. ‘Like a forest, dominated by its tallest trees.’

  Bayle eyed her appreciatively. ‘I was going to compare it to a bank of salt crystals.’ Salt had become something of an obsession of Bayle’s during their journey. There was salt everywhere in the Lowlands; there were even plains covered with the stuff, the relics of dried-up lakes. Bayle was gathering evidence for his contention that the Lowland had once been the bed of a mighty body of water. ‘But I admit, daughter, that your analogy may be more apt. This city is not planned as we think of it. It is almost as if it has grown here.’

  Tomm seemed confused. ‘But that’s just an analogy. I mean, this is a city, built by human hands – though maybe long ago. That much is obvious, isn’t it?’

  Bayle snapped, ‘If everything were obvious we would not have needed to come out here to study it.’ He gave Enna a look that spoke volumes. The boy has a pretty face but a shallow mind, said that withering expression. You can do better.

  But Tomm was Enna’s choice, and she returned his glare defiantly.

 
They were interrupted by a raucous hail. ‘Sir, sir! Look what I’ve found!’ It was Momo. The burly, one-eyed pilot came stumbling around the corner of a building.

  And walking with him was a woman. Dressed in some kind of scraped animal skin, she was tall, aged perhaps fifty, in her way elegant despite her ragged costume. She eyed the Philosophers, detached. In that first moment Enna thought she seemed as cold, strange and hard-edged as her city.

  Bayle stepped forward, his gloved hand extended. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘if you can understand me, we have a great deal to discuss.’ The woman took Bayle’s hand and shook it. The subordinate Philosophers applauded enthusiastically.

  It was yet another remarkable moment in this unprecedented trek of discovery. This was Bayle’s first contact with any of the ‘lost souls’ believed to inhabit the Lowland, stranded here from ages past; to find such people and ‘rehabilitate’ them had been one of his stated goals from the beginning.

  But Enna caught a strange whiff about the woman, an iron stink that at first she couldn’t place. It was only later that she realised it was the smell of raw meat – of blood.

  As night fell, the explorers and their attendants and servants dispersed gladly into the city’s bare buildings. After the dirt of the plain, it was going to be a relief to spend a night within solid walls.

  Bayle himself established his base in one of the grander buildings on the edge of the city, bathed in light even at the end of the day. It seemed he planned to spend most of the night in conversation with the woman who was, as far as anybody could tell, the city’s sole inhabitant; he said they had much to learn from each other. He kissed his daughter goodnight, trusting her safety to his companions, and to her own common sense.

  So it was a betrayal of him, of a sort, when in the darkest night Enna sought out Tomm’s warm arms. It wasn’t hard for her to put her guilt aside; at twenty she had a healthy awareness of how far her father’s opinions should govern her life.

  But she dreamed. She dreamed that the building itself gathered her up and lifted her into the sky, just as she was cradled by Tomm’s arms – and she thought she smelled that iron tang again, the scent of blood.

  The dream became disturbing, a dream of confinement.

  Bayle had formulated many objectives for his Expedition.

  Always visible from Foro, Puul and the other towns of the Shelf, the Lowland, stretching away below in redshifted ambiguity, had been a mystery throughout history. Now that mystery would be dispelled. Cartographers would map the Lowland. Historians, anthropologists and moralists hoped to make contact with the lost people of the Lowland plains, if any survived. Clerics, mystics, doctors and other Philosophers hoped to learn something about Effigies, those spectral apparitions that rose from dying human bodies, or some of them, and fled to the redshifted mysteries of the Lowland. Perhaps some insight would be gained into the cause of the Formidable Caresses, the tremendous rattlings that regularly shook human civilisation to pieces. There were even a few soldiers and armourers, hoping to track down Weapons, ancient technology gone wild, too wily to have been captured so far.

  There had already been many successes. Take the light storms, for instance.

  Old Earth’s blueshifted sky was a dome of stars that spun around the world. Day and night, and the seasons of the year, were governed not by the sky but by the flickering uncertainties of the light that emanated from the Lowland. Now Bayle’s physicists had discovered that these waves of light pulsed at many frequencies, ‘like the harmonics of a plucked string,’ as one mathematician had described it. Not only that, because of the redshifting of the light that struggled up to higher altitudes, the harmonic peaks that governed the daily cycles here were different from those to be observed from Foro, up on the Shelf, where time ran faster.

  Enna was walked through the logic by her father. The effects of time stratification, redshifting and light cycling subtly intermeshed, so that whether you were up on the Shelf or down in the Lowland the length of day and night you perceived was roughly similar. This surely couldn’t be a coincidence. As Bayle said, ‘It adds up to a remarkable mathematical argument for the whole world having been designed to be habitable by people and their creatures.’

  That, of course, had provoked a lively debate.

  Forons were traditionally Mechanists, adhering to a strand of natural philosophy that held that there was no governing mind behind the world, that everything about it had emerged from the blind working-out of natural laws – like the growth of a salt crystal, say, rather than the purposeful construction of a machine. However, there were hard-line Creationists who argued that everything on Old Earth required a purposeful explanation.

  After centuries of debate a certain compromise view had emerged, it seemed to Enna, a melding of extreme viewpoints based on the evidence. Even the most ardent Mechanists had been forced to accept that the world contained overwhelming evidence that it had been manufactured, or at least heavily engineered. But if Old Earth was a machine, it was a very old machine, and in the ages since its formation, natural processes of the kind argued for by the Mechanists had surely operated to modify the world. Old Earth was a machine that had evolved.

  At the heart of Bayle’s expedition was a deep ambition to reconcile the two great poles of human thought, the Mechanist versus the Creationist – and to end centuries of theological conflict over which too much blood had been spilled. He and his companions would see through this goal, even though they could only return to a distant future.

  In the morning Enna and Tomm were among the first to stir. They emerged from their respective buildings, and greeted each other with a jolly innocence that probably fooled nobody.

  Cartographer Tomm had been detailed to take up the balloon for a rapid aerial survey, to provide context for the more painstaking work on the ground. Enna, free of specific chores, decided to ride up with him.

  But there was a problem. They couldn’t find Momo. The pilot was a habitual early riser, like Bayle himself – a relic from his military days, it seemed. He was always up for Enna.

  Tomm was unconcerned. ‘So old One-eye treated himself to a party last night. He won’t be the only one—’

  ‘That isn’t like Momo!’ Enna snapped, growing impatient. When Tomm treated her like a foolish child, Enna had some sympathy for her father’s view of him. ‘Look, this is a strange city, which we barely explored before splitting up. You can help me find Momo, or use the hot air you’re spouting to go blow up the balloon yourself.’

  He was crestfallen, but when she stalked off to search, Tomm, embarrassed, hurried after her.

  She thought she remembered the building Momo had chosen as his shelter. She headed that way now.

  But something was wrong. As she followed the unpaved alleys, the layout of the buildings didn’t quite match her memory of the night before. Of course, she had only had a quick glimpse of the city, and the light of morning, playing over these crisp creamy walls, was quite different. But even so, she wouldn’t have expected to get as lost as this.

  And when she came to the place where she thought Momo’s building should have been, there was only a blank space. She walked back and forth over the bare ground, disoriented, dread gathering in her soul.

  ‘You must be mistaken,’ Tomm insisted.

  ‘I’m good at direction-finding, Tomm. You know that.’

  Playfully he said, ‘You found your way to my bed well enough—’

  ‘Oh, shut up. This is serious. This is where Momo’s shelter was, I’m sure of it. Something has changed. I can feel it.’

  Tomm said defensively, ‘That doesn’t sound very scientific.’

  ‘Then help me, o great cartographer. Did any of you make a map last night?’

  ‘Of course not. The light was poor. We knew there would be time enough today.’

  She glared at him. But she was being unfair; it was a perfectly reasonable assumpt
ion that a city like this wouldn’t change overnight.

  But the fact of the matter was, Momo was still missing.

  Growing increasingly disturbed, she went to her father’s room. That at least was just where it had been last night. But her father wouldn’t see her; a busybody junior Philosopher barred her from even entering the door. Bayle was still deep in discussion with Sila, the ragged city woman, and he had left strict instructions to be disturbed by nobody – not even Enna, his daughter.

  Tomm, apologetically, said he had to get on with his flight, Momo or no Momo. Distracted, Enna kissed him goodbye, and continued her search.

  In the hours that followed, she walked the length and breadth of the city. She didn’t find Momo. But she did learn that he wasn’t the only missing person; two others had vanished, both servants. Though a few people were troubled, most seemed sure it was just a case of getting lost in a strange city. And as for the uncertain layout, she saw doubt in a few eyes. But the Philosophers, far better educated than she was, had no room in their heads for such strange and confusing notions as an indeterminate geography.

  When Tomm went sailing over the city in his balloon, a junior pilot at his side, she dutifully wore the red cap so he could see her, down here on the ground. Time-accelerated, he waved like a jerky puppet. But still she couldn’t find Momo, or dispel her feeling of disquiet.

  That evening, to her astonishment, her father let it be known that he was hosting a dinner – and Sila, the ragged city woman, was to be guest of honour.

  Enna couldn’t remember her father showing such crass misjudgement before, and she wondered if he had somehow been seduced by this exotic city of the Lowland, or, worse, by the woman, Sila, of whom Enna knew nothing at all. But still Bayle’s entourage would not let Enna near her father; he was much too busy for mere family.