Ring xs-4

by Stephen Baxter

She heard herself growl. “How did you find out about that? No wonder you drove me crazy, all those years. You’re too damn interested in me.”

  “I’m right, though, aren’t I?”

  Now they reached the Britain’s dining room. It was a fantastic Victorian dream. Twelve columns of white and gold, with ornamental capitals, ran down its spine, and the room was lined by two sets of twelve more columns each. Doorways between the columns led off to passageways and bedrooms, and the door archways were gilded and surmounted by medallion heads. The walls were lemon-yellow, relieved by blue, white and gold; omnipresent, sourceless light shone from the cutlery and glassware on the three long tables.

  Mark walked across the carpet and ran his hand over a table’s gleaming, polished surface. “You should do something about this semisentient plastic: have it give the surfaces some semblance of their natural texture. The touch is half the beauty of a thing, Louise. But you always were… remote, weren’t you? Happy enough with the surface of things — with their look, their outer form. Never interested in touching, in getting closer.”

  She ignored that. “Brunel had a lot of style, you know. He worked on a tunnel under the Thames, with his father.”

  “Where?” Mark had been born in Port Cassini, Titan.

  “The Thames. A river, in England… on Earth. The tunnel was flooded, several times. Once, when it had been pumped out, Brunel threw a dinner party right up against the working face for fifty people. He got the band of the Coldstream Guards to — ”

  “Hmm. How interesting,” Mark said dryly. “Maybe you should put some food on these tables. Why not? It could be preserved, by your sentient plastic. You could have segments of dead animals. As devoured by the great Brunel himself.”

  “You never did have any taste, Mark.”

  “I don’t think your mood has anything to do with the completion of the Northern.”

  “Then what?”

  He sighed. “It’s you, of course. It always is. For a long time, while we were together, I thought I understood your motivation. There would always be another huge, beautiful GUTship to build; another immense undertaking to lose yourself in. And since we’re all immortal now, thanks to AntiSenescence, I thought that would be enough for you.

  “But I was wrong. It isn’t like that. Not really.”

  Louise was aware of intense discomfort, somewhere deep within her; she felt she wanted to talk, read a bookslate, bury herself in a Virtual — anything to drown out his words.

  “You always were smarter than me, Mark.”

  “In some ways, yes.”

  “Just say what you’ve got to say, and get it over.”

  “You want immortality, Louise. But not the dreary literal immortality of AS — not just a body-scouring every few years — but the kind of immortality attained by your idols.” He waved a hand. “By Brunel, for instance. By achieving something unique, wonderful. And you fear you’ll never be able to, no matter how many starships you build.”

  “You’re damn patronizing,” she snapped. “The Northern is a great achievement.”

  “I know it is. I’m not denying it.” He smiled, triumph in his eyes. “But I’m right, aren’t I?”

  She felt deflated. “You know you are. Damn you.” She rubbed her eyes. “It’s the shadow of the future, Mark…”

  A century and a half earlier, the future had invaded the Solar System.

  It had been humanity’s own fault; everyone recognized that. Under the leadership of an engineer called Michael Poole the Interface project — a wormhole link to a future a millennium and a half ahead — had been completed.

  At the time Louise Ye Armonk was well established in her chosen field of GUTship engineering… at least, as established as any mere fifty-year-old could be, in a society increasingly dominated by the AS-preserved giants of the recent past. Louise had even worked, briefly, with Michael Poole himself.

  Why had Poole’s wormhole time link been built? There were endless justifications — what power could a glimpse of the future afford? — but the truth was, Louise knew, that it had been built for little more than the sheer joy of it.

  The Interface project came at the end of centuries of expansion for mankind. The Solar System had been opened up, first by GUTdrive vessels and later by wormhole links, and the first GUTdrive starship fuelling port — Port Sol — was already operational.

  It was difficult now to recapture the mood of those times, Louise thought. Confidence — arrogance… The anthropic theories of cosmological evolution were somewhere near their paradigmatic peak. Some people believed humans were alone in the Universe. Others even believed the Universe had been designed, by some offstage agency, with the sole object of delivering and supporting humans. Given time, humans would do anything, go anywhere, achieve whatever they liked.

  But Poole’s Interface had been a bridge to the real future.

  The incident that followed the opening of the wormhole had been confused, chaotic, difficult to disentangle. But it had been a war — brief, spectacular, like no battle fought in Solar space before or since, but a war nevertheless.

  Future Earth — at the other end of Poole’s time bridge, a millennium and a half hence — would be under occupation, by an alien species about whom nothing was known save their name: Qax.

  Rebel humans from the occupation era were pursued back through time, through Poole’s Interface, by two immense Qax warships. The rebels, with the help of Michael Poole, had destroyed the warships. Then Poole had driven a captured warship into the Interface wormhole, to seal it against further invasion — and in the process Poole himself was lost in time. The rebels, stranded in their past, had fled the Solar System in a captured GUTdrive ship, evidently intending to use time dilation effects to erode away the years back to their own era.

  The System, stunned, slowly recovered.

  Various bodies — like the Holy Superet Light Church — still, after a hundred and fifty years, combed through the fragments of data from the Interface incident, trying to answer the unanswerable.

  Like: what had truly happened to Michael Poole?

  It was known that the Qax occupation itself would eventually be lifted, and humanity would resume its expansion — but now more warily, and into a Universe known to be populated by hostile competitors…

  A Universe containing, above all, the Xeelee. And it was said that before Poole’s wormhole path to the future finally closed, some information had been obtained on the far future — of millions of years hence, far beyond the era of the Qax. Louise could see how some such data could be obtained — by the flux of high-energy particles from the mouth of the collapsing wormhole, for instance.

  And the rumors said that the far future — and what it held for mankind — were bleak indeed.

  Louise and Mark stood on the forecastle deck and looked up toward the Sun.

  The Great Northern, Louise’s GUTdrive starship, passed serenely over their heads, following its stately, four-hour orbit through the Kuiper object’s shallow gravitational well. The Northern’s three-mile-long spine, encrusted with sensors, looked as if it had been carved from glass. The GUTdrive was embedded in a block of Port Sol ice, a silvery, irregular mass at one end of the spine. The lifedome — itself a mile across — was a skull of glass, fixed to the spine’s other end. Lights shone from the lifedome, green and blue; the dome looked like a bowlful of Earth, here on the rim of the System.

  “It’s beautiful,” Mark said. “Like a Virtual. It’s hard to believe it’s real.” The light from the Britain’s dome under-lit his face, throwing the fine lines around his mouth into relief. “And it’s a good name, Louise. Great Northern. Your starship will head out where every direction is north — away from the Sun.”

  Staring up at the shimmering Northern now, Louise remembered Virtual journeys through ghostly, stillborn craft: craft which had evolved around her as the design software responded to her thoughts. How Brunel would have thrived with modern software, which once again enabled the vision of indi
viduals to dominate such huge engineering projects. And some of those lost ships had been far more elegant and daring than the final design — which had been, as ever, a compromise between vision and economics.

  …And that was the trouble. The real thing was always a disappointment.

  “Louise, you shouldn’t fear the future,” Mark said.

  Instantly Louise was irritated. “I don’t fear it,” she said. “Lethe, don’t you even understand that? It’s Michael Poole and his damn Interface incident. I don’t fear the future. The trouble is, I know it.”

  “We all do, Louise,” Mark said, his patience starting to sound a little strained. “And most of us don’t let it affect us — ”

  “Oh, really. Look at yourself, Mark. What about your hair, for instance? — or rather, your lack of it.”

  Mark ran a self-conscious hand up and over his scalp.

  She went on, “Everyone knows that this modern passion for baldness comes from those weird human rebels from the future, the Friends of Wigner. So you can’t tell me you’re not influenced by knowing what’s to come. Your very hairstyle is a statement of — ”

  “All right,” he snapped. “All right, you’ve made your point. You never know when to shut up, do you? But, Louise — the difference is we aren’t all obsessed by the future. Unlike you.”

  He walked away from her, his gait stiff with annoyance.

  They climbed down into the engine room. Multicolored light filtered down through an immense skylight. Four inclined cylinders thrust up from the floor of the ship; the pistons stood idle like the limbs of iron giants, and a vast chain girdled the drive machinery.

  Louise rubbed her chin and stared at the machinery. “Obsessed? Mark, the future contains the Xeelee — godlike entities so aloof from us that we may never understand what they are trying to achieve — and with technology, with engineering, like magic. They have a hyperdrive.” She let her voice soften. “Do you understand what that means? It means that somewhere in the Universe, now, the damn Xeelee are riding around in FTL chariots which make my poor Northern look like a horse-drawn cart.

  “And we believe they have an intraSystem engine — their so-called discontinuity drive — which powers night-dark ships with wings like sycamore leaves, hundreds of miles wide…

  “I’m not denying my GUTdrive module is a beautiful piece of engineering. I’m proud of it. But compared to what we understand of Xeelee technology, Mark, it’s — it’s a damn steam engine. Why, we even use ice as reaction mass. Think of that! What’s the point of building something which I know is outdated before I even start?”

  Mark laid a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. His touch was warm, firm, and as he’d no doubt intended — disconcertingly intimate. “So that’s why you’re running away.”

  “I’d hardly call leaving on a one-way colonizing expedition to Tau Ceti ‘running away’.”

  “Of course it is. Here is where you can achieve things — here, with the resources of a Solar System. You’re an engineer, damn it. What will you build on some planet of Tau Ceti? A real steam engine, maybe.”

  “But — ” She struggled to find words that didn’t sound, even to her, like self justifying whines. “But maybe that would count for more, in the greater scheme of things, even than a dozen bigger and better Northerns. Do you see?”

  “Not really.” His voice sounded flat, tired; perhaps he was letting himself sober up.

  They stood for a while, in a silence broken only by their breathing. Then he said, “I’m sorry, Louise. I’m sorry you’re letting such moods spoil your night of triumph. But I’ve had enough; I feel as if I’ve been listening to that stuff for half my life.”

  As usual when his mood turned like this, she was filled with regret. She tried to cover his hand, which still lay on her shoulder. “Mark — ”

  He slid his hand away. “I’m going back to the pod, and up to the ship, and I’m going to get a little more drunk. Do you want to come?”

  She thought about it. “No. Send the pod down again. Some of the cabins here are made up; I can — ”

  There was a sparkling in the air before him. She stumbled back, disconcerted; Mark moved closer to her to watch.

  Pixels — thumbnail cubes of light — tumbled over each other, casting glittering highlights from Brunel’s ancient machinery. They coalesced abruptly into the lifesize, semi-transparent Virtual image of a human head: round, bald, cheerful. The face split into a grin. “Louise. Sorry to disturb you.”

  “Gillibrand. What in Lethe do you want? I thought you’d be unconscious by now.”

  Sam Gillibrand, forty going on a hundred and fifty, was Louise’s chief assistant. “I was. But my nanobots were hooked up to the comms panel; they sobered me up fast when the message came in. Damn them.” Gillibrand looked cheerful enough. “Oh, well; I’ll just have it all to do again, and — ”

  “The comms panel? What was the message, Sam?”

  Gillibrand’s grin became uncertain. “City Hall. There’s been a change to the flight plan.” Gillibrand’s voice was high, heavily accented mid-American, and not really capable of conveying much drama. And yet Louise felt herself shudder when Gillibrand said: “We’re not going to Tau Ceti after all.”

  3

  The old woman leaned forward in her seat, beside Kevan Scholes.

  The surface of the Sun, barely ten thousand miles below the clear-walled cabin of the Lightrider, was a floor across the Universe. The photosphere was a landscape, encrusted by granules each large enough to swallow the Earth, and with the chromosphere — the thousand-mile-thick outer atmosphere — a thin haze above it all.

  Scholes couldn’t help but stare at his companion. Her posture was stiff, and her hands — neatly folded in her lap, over her seatbelt — were gaunt, the skin peeked by liver-spots and hanging loosely from the bones. Like gloves, he thought. She wore a simple silver-gray coverall whose only decoration was a small brooch pinned to the breast. The brooch depicted a stylized snake entwined around a golden ladder.

  The little ship passed over a photosphere granule; Scholes watched absently as it unfolded beneath them. Hot hydrogen welled up from the Solar interior at a speed of half a mile a second, then spread out across the photosphere surface. This particular fount of gas was perhaps a thousand miles across, and, in its photosphere-hugging orbit, the Lightrider was traveling so rapidly that it had passed over the granule in a few minutes. And Scholes saw as he looked back that the granule was already beginning to disintegrate, the hydrogen spill at its heart dwindling. Individual granules persisted less than ten minutes, on average.

  “How beautiful this is,” his companion said, gazing down at the Sunscape. “And how complex — how intricate, like some immense machine, perhaps, or even a world.” She turned to him, her mouth — surrounded by its dense web of wrinkles folded tight. “I can imagine whiling away my life, just watching the slow evolutions of that surface.”

  Scholes looked across the teeming Sunscape. The photosphere was a mass of ponderous motion, resembling the surface of a slowly boiling liquid. The granules, individual convective cells, were themselves grouped into loose associations: supergranules, tens of thousands of miles across, roughly bounded by thin, shifting walls of stable gas. As he watched, one granule exploded, its material bursting suddenly across the Solar surface; neighboring granules were pushed aside, so that a glowing, unstructured scar was left on the photosphere, a scar which was slowly healed by the eruption of new granules.

  Scholes studied his companion. The sunlight underlit her face, deepening the lines and folds of loose flesh there. It made her look almost demonic — or like something out of a distant, unlamented past. She’d fallen silent now, watching him; some response was expected, and he sensed that his customary glib flippancy — which usually passed for conversation in the Solar habitat — wouldn’t do.

  Not for her.

  He summoned up a smile, with some difficulty. “Yes, it’s beautiful. But — ” Scholes had spent much of the last f
ive years within a million miles of the Sun’s glowing surface, but even so had barely started to become accustomed to the eternal presence of the star. “It’s impossible to forget it’s there… Even when I’m in Thoth, with the walls opaqued — when I could really be anywhere in the System, I guess.” He hesitated, suddenly embarrassed; her cold, rheumy eyes were on him, analytical. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to explain it any better.”

  Was there a hint of a smile on that devastated face? “You needn’t be self conscious.”

  Kevan Scholes had volunteered for this assignment — a simple three-hour orbital tour with this mysterious woman who, a few days earlier, had been brought to Thoth, the freefall habitat at the center of the wormhole project. It should have been little more than a sightseeing jaunt — and a chance to learn more about this ancient woman, and perhaps about the true goals of Superet’s wormhole project itself.

  And besides, it was a break from his own work. Scholes was supervising the assembly of one vertex of a wormhole Interface from exotic matter components. When the wormhole was complete, one of its pair of tetrahedral Interfaces would be left in close orbit around the Sun. The other, packed with an ambitious AI complex, would be dropped into the Sun itself.

  The work was well paid, though demanding; but it was dull, routine, lacking fulfillment. So a break was welcome… But he had not expected to be so disconcerted by this extraordinary woman.

  He tried again. “You see, we’re all scientists or engineers here,” he said. “A sense of wonder isn’t a prerequisite for a job on this project — it’s probably a handicap, actually. But that’s a star out there, after all: nearly a million miles across — five light-seconds — and with the mass of three hundred thousand Earths. Even when I can’t see it, I know it’s there; it’s like a psychic pressure, perhaps.”

  She nodded and turned her face to the Sun once more. “Which is why we find speculation about its destruction so extraordinarily distressing. And, of course, to some extent we are actually within the body of the Sun itself. Isn’t that true?”