Ring xs-4

by Stephen Baxter

  Still, she could barely make it out; it was like a crude charcoal sketch against the glowing plasma background.

  Wistfully she watched the photino cloud soar out of sight once more, passing through the plasma as if it were no more substantial than mist, on its minutes long orbit around the Sun.

  But -

  But, had it diverged from its orbit as it passed her? Was it possible that the photino object had actually reacted to her presence?

  Now she became aware of more motion, below and ahead of her. The moving forms were shadowy, infuriatingly elusive against the gleaming, almost featureless background. Frustrated, she strained at her senses, demanding that her aged processors extract every last bit of information content from the data they were receiving.

  Slowly the images enhanced, gaining in definition and sharpness.

  There were hundreds — no: thousands, millions — of the photino traces. Maybe they were standing-wave patterns, she wondered, traces of coherence on the dark matter cloud.

  Slowly she built up an image in her head, a composite model of the patterns: a roughly lenticular form, with length of perhaps fifty yards — and, she realized slowly, some hints of an internal structure.

  Internal structure?

  Well, so much for the standing-wave theory. These things seemed to be discrete objects, not merely patterns of coherence in a continuum.

  She watched the objects as they traced their orbits around the center of the Sun. The soaring lens-shapes reminded her of graphics of the contents of a blood stream; she wondered if the structures were indeed like antibodies, or thrombocytes — blood platelets, swarming in search of a wound. They swarmed over and past each other, miraculously never colliding -

  No, she realized slowly. There was nothing miraculous about it. The objects were steering away from each other, as they soared through their orbits.

  This was a flock. The dark matter structures were alive.

  Alive and purposeful.

  Slowly she drifted into the flock of photino birds (as she’d tentatively labeled them). They swooped around her, avoiding her gracefully.

  They were clearly reacting to her presence. They were obviously aware — if not intelligent, she thought.

  She wondered what to do next. She wished she had Kevan Scholes to talk to about this.

  Sweet, patient Kevan had come to the Sun as a junior research associate; his tour of duty had been meant to be only a few years. But he’d stayed on much longer in near-Solar orbit to serve as her patient capcom, far beyond the call of duty or friendship. In the end her long distance relationship with Scholes had lasted decades.

  Well, she’d been grateful for his loyalty. He’d helped her immeasurably through those first difficult years inside the Sun.

  Fitfully, she tried to remember the last time he spoke to her.

  In the end he’d simply been removed. Why? To serve some organizational, political, cultural change? She’d never been told.

  She had come to learn, with time, that human organizations — even if staffed by AS-preserved semi-immortals — had a half-life of only a few decades. Those that survived longer persisted only as shells, usually transmuted far from the aims of their founders. She thought of the slow corruption of the Holy Superet Light Church, apparent even in her own brief time outside the Sun, into a core organization of fanatics huddled around some eternal flame of ancient belief.

  A succession of capcoms had taken their places at the microphones at the other end of her wormhole link. She’d been shown their faces, by images dumped through the telemetry channels. So she knew what they looked like, that parade of ever more odd-looking men and women with their evanescent fashions and styles and their increasing remoteness of expression. Language evolution and other cultural changes were downloaded into her data stores, so the drift of the human worlds away from the time she’d grown up in (however briefly) didn’t cause her communication problems. But none of it engaged her. After Kevan Scholes she found little interest in, or empathy with, the succession of firefly people who communicated with her.

  Sometimes she had wondered how she must seem to them — a cranky, antique quasi-human trapped inside a piece of rickety old technology.

  Then, at last, they had stopped talking to her altogether.

  Oddly, though, she still felt — in spite of everything — loyal to humanity. They’d manufactured her quite cynically for their own purposes and finally abandoned her here, in the heart of this alien world; and yet she couldn’t cut herself off from people, in her mind. After all, whether they would speak to her or not, her wormhole refrigeration link could easily have been closed down — her consciousness terminated — as trivially as turning out a light. But that hadn’t happened.

  So, she thought resentfully, they hadn’t bothered to kill her off. For this did she owe them loyalty? She tried to be cynical. Should she have to bow and scrape, just for the favor of her continuing life?

  But, despite her determination to be tough-minded, she found she retained a residual urge to communicate — to broadcast her news beyond the Sun, to tell all she had found out about the photino birds — just in case anyone was listening.

  It wasn’t logical. And yet, she did care; it was a nagging sense of responsibility — even of duty — that she simply couldn’t flush out of her consciousness.

  After a time, in fact, she had begun to grow suspicious of this very persistence. After all, she had represented quite an investment, for the Superet of her time. Her brief had been to find out what was happening to the Sun, and she could only fulfill her brief, clearly, if she reported back to somebody. So maybe the need to communicate, even with non-receptive listeners, had been deeply embedded into the programming of the systems which underlay her awareness. Perhaps it was even hard-wired into the physical systems.

  After all this time, they’re still manipulating me, she thought sourly.

  But even if that were true, there wasn’t much she could do about it; the result was, though, that she was left with an irritating itch — and no way to scratch it.

  Morrow simply stared. He didn’t feel fear, or curiosity. The upper hatch had never opened before. And — even though his eyes told him otherwise — it couldn’t be happening now.

  Beyond the hatch was a tunnel, rising upwards — the tunnel was the inside of the cylindrical Lock, he realized. The light from above the hatch was dim, greenish. The air from the cylinder felt hot, humid, laden with secret, fruit-like scents.

  He tried to find some appropriate response, to formulate some plan; but this new event skittered across the habit-worn surface of his mind like mercury across glass, unable to penetrate. He could only watch the events unfold, one after the other, as if he had been reduced to the state of a child, unable to connect incidents in any causal sequence.

  Constancy-of-Purpose, too, seemed to be having trouble accepting any of this. She stood in the Lock with her head tipped back, gazing up, mouth slack…

  Then there was a hissing noise, a soft, moist impact.

  Constancy-of-Purpose clutched her arm.

  She looked at Morrow with blank incomprehension — and then it was as if her wizened legs had failed her at last, for they crumpled, slowly, bearing her down to the floor of the Lock. For a few seconds she sat, her legs folded awkwardly under her. She looked surprised, confused. Then the great torso toppled sideways, sending the legs sprawling.

  At last Morrow was able to move. He rushed into the Lock and, with effort, hauled Constancy-of-Purpose upright. Constancy-of-Purpose’s eyes were open but only the whites were showing; spittle drooled from her mouth. Her skin felt moist, cold. Morrow searched frantically for a pulse at Constancy-of-Purpose’s wrist, then amid the massive tendons of her neck.

  A rope curled down from the hatch above, fraying, brown. Someone — something — descended, hand-over-hand, dropping lightly to the floor.

  Morrow tried to study the invader, but it was as if he couldn’t even see him or her. This was simply too strange
, too shocking; his eyes seemed to slide away from the invader, as if refusing to accept its reality.

  Cradling Constancy-of-Purpose in his arms, he forced himself to take this one step at a time. First of all: human, certainly. He stared at four limbs, startlingly bright eyes behind spectacles, white teeth. Very short, no more than four feet tall. A child, then? Perhaps — but with the form, the breasts and hips, of a woman. And clothed in some suit of brown, with colorful flashes; dungarees, perhaps, which -

  No. He forced himself to see. Save for a belt at the waist, bulging with pockets, this person was naked. Her skin was a rich brown. Her head was shaven at the scalp, but sported a fringe of thick, black, oiled hair. A mask of red paint sliced across her nose and eyes. She was carrying a long, fine-bored tube of wood. Her face was round — not pretty, but…

  But young. She couldn’t be more than fifteen or sixteen years old.

  But it wasn’t possible to AS-preserve at that age. So this was a child — a genuine child; the first he’d seen in five centuries.

  She raised the tube warily, as if preparing to strike him, or fend him off.

  “My name is Spinner-of-Rope,” she said. “I won’t hurt you.”

  The old Underman was grotesque. Nearly as bad as Uvarov: bald, skinny, faded skin, dressed in some kind of stuffy, drab garment — and as tall as Uvarov would be, if he was laid out lengthways.

  The Underman’s unconscious friend, the woman, was worse, with that huge upper body and spindly legs. The pair of them looked so old, so unnatural.

  She felt revolted. There was an air of corruption about these people: of decay, of mold. She wanted to destroy them, get away, back to the clean air of the forest -

  “What’s happening?” Maker’s voice came booming down the Lock shaft. “Spinner? Are you all right?”

  She forced herself to put aside her emotions, to think. This tall old man was disgusting. But he was clearly no threat.

  “Yes,” she called up the shaft. “I’m fine, Arrow Maker. Come down.”

  She waited in silence for the few minutes it took her father — grunting, clumsy — to work his way down the rope from the forest floor. At last he dropped the last few feet to the Deck; he landed at a crouch, with his knife in one hand.

  He was startled to find the two Underpeople there, but he seemed to take in the situation quickly. “Is she dead? Are you all right?”

  “No, and yes.” She held up her blowpipe, apologetically. “I used this. Now, I don’t think I needed to. I — ”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  The old Underman’s eyes were pale blue and watery; he seemed to be having trouble focusing on them. He pointed at the blowpipe. “You killed Constancy-of Purpose… with that?” His accent was strange, lilting, but quite comprehensible.

  Spinner hesitated. “No…” She held out the pipe to him, but the Underman didn’t take it; he simply sat cradling his friend. “The pipe is bamboo. You give the darts an airtight seal inside the pipe with seed fibers. You get the poison from frogs, roasted on a spit, and — ”

  “We’re sorry about your friend,” Arrow Maker said. “She will recover. And it was — unnecessary.”

  The Underman looked defiant. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it damn well was.” He looked from one to the other. “What do you want?”

  Spinner and her father looked at each other, uncertainly. At length Arrow Maker said, “We’ve an old man. Uvarov. He says he remembers Earth. And he says that the journey’s over — that the starship has arrived at its destination. And now we must travel to the Interface.” Maker looked at the Underman, hesitant, baffled. “Will you help us? Will you lead us to the Interface?” Then his expression hardened. “Or must we fight our way past you, as Uvarov predicts?”

  The Underman stared at Maker. Somehow, Spinner thought, he seemed to be emerging from his paralysis and confusion. “Uvarov — Interface — I’ve no idea what you’re talking about…”

  Then, unexpectedly, he said wonderingly, “But I’ve heard of Earth.”

  The three of them stood in the cold light of the Lock, studying each other with fearful curiosity.

  She descended deeper into the Sun, through the core-smothering flock of photino birds. The birds soared past and around her, tiny planets of dark matter racing through their tight Solar orbits.

  The birds continually nudged toward or away from each other, like a horde of satellites maneuvering for docking. Many of the transient clusters which they formed — and swept by her, too fast to study properly — seemed immensely complex, and she stored away a succession of images. There had to be a reason for all this activity, she thought.

  Some of the motion, on the fringe of the spherical flock, was simpler in pattern and easier to interpret.

  Individual photino birds sailed in from beyond the flock, sweeping through the outer layers of the Sun on hyperbolic paths, and settled into the swarm of their orbiting cousins. Occasionally a bird would break away from the rest, and go soaring off on open trajectories to -

  To where? Back to some diffuse ocean of dark matter beyond the Sun? Or to some other star?

  And if so, why?

  Patiently she watched the birds coming and going from their flock, letting the patterns build up in her head.

  10

  The hatch at the top of the Lock was jammed open, revealing a circle of luxuriant greenery. It was a window to another world. The howls of a troupe of some unimaginable animals echoed down into the metal caverns of Deck One.

  Morrow stood at the base of the Lock shaft, trying to suppress the urge to run, to bury himself again in the routine rhythms of his everyday life.

  Squatting around the rim of the upper hatch, peering down at Morrow, were four or five of the forest folk. They were all naked, their bare, smooth skins adorned with splashes of fruit-dye color, and they seemed impossibly young. Between them they were supporting a cradle of rope, and suspended in the cradle — descending slowly, shakily as the forest folk paid out lengths of rope — was Garry Uvarov.

  The head of the extraordinary ancient protruded from a mass of thick blankets. Through the blankets Morrow could make out the chunky, mechanical box-shape of the mobile chair which sustained Uvarov, so that Uvarov looked nearly inhuman as if he had been merged with his chair, a bizarre, wizened cyborg.

  The girl with the spectacles — Spinner-of-Rope — came to stand beside Morrow, at the bottom of the shaft. She wore a loose necklace of orchid-petals, and little else. Her head was at a level with Morrow’s elbow, and — now that he was growing used to her — her fierce crimson face paint looked almost comical. She touched his arm; her hand was delicate, small, impossibly light. “Don’t be afraid,” she said.

  He was startled. “I’m not afraid. What is there to be afraid of? Why do you think I’m afraid? If I was afraid, would I be here helping you?”

  “It’s the way you look. The way you’re standing.” She shrugged her bare shoulders. “Everything. Uvarov looks like — I don’t know; some huge larva — but he’s just a human. A very old human.”

  “Actually I was thinking he looks like a kind of god. A half-human, half mechanical god. With you people as his attendants.”

  She wrinkled her small nose and pushed her spectacles further up her face, smudging the paint on her cheeks; glaring up at him, she looked irritated. “Really. Well, we aren’t superstitious savages. As you Undermen think we are. Don’t you?”

  “No, I — ”

  “We know Uvarov is no god. He’s just a man — although a very ancient, strange and special man; a man who seems to remember what this ship was actually for.

  “Morrow, I live in a tree and make things out of wood, and vine. You live — ” she waved a hand vaguely ” — in some boxy house somewhere, and make things out of metal and glass. But that’s the only difference between us. My people aren’t primitives, and we aren’t ignorant. We know that we’re all living inside a huge starship. Maybe we understand that better than you do, since we can actually see th
e sky.”

  But that’s not the point. You and I are different, he thought, exasperated. More different than you can understand.

  Spinner-of-Rope was a fifteen-year-old girl — lively, inquisitive, fearless, disrespectful. It had been five centuries since Morrow had been fifteen. Even then, he would have found Spinner a handful. Morrow suspected, wistfully, that Spinner was more alien to him than Garry Uvarov.

  One of the forest folk walked up to them. Through a sparse mask of face paint the man smiled up at Morrow. “Is she giving you a hard time?”

  Spinner snorted resentfully.

  Morrow stared down at the newcomer, trying to place him. Damn it, all these little men look the same — He remembered; this was Arrow Maker, Spinner’s father. He made an effort to smile back. “No, no. Actually I think she was trying to comfort me. She was explaining I shouldn’t be frightened of old Uvarov.”

  Uvarov’s chair bumped down on the surface of Deck One. Tree people clustered around Uvarov, loosening the ropes around the chair; the ropes were pulled back up through the hatch above them, snaking up like living things. Uvarov’s sightless eye sockets opened, and he growled instructions to his attendants.

  Arrow Maker was watching Morrow’s face. “And do you fear Uvarov?”

  Morrow became aware that he was pulling at his fingers, his motions tense, stabbing; he tried to be still. “No. Believe me, in my world, there are many AS failure cases just as — ah, startling — as Uvarov. Though perhaps no one quite so old.”

  Spinner-of-Rope approached them. “Uvarov’s ready. So unless you want to stand here talking all day, I think we should get on…”

  The little party formed up on Deck One. Morrow led the way, at a slow walking pace. Uvarov in his chair followed him, the chair’s hidden motor whirring noisily. Arrow Maker and Spinner flanked the chair, guiding the sightless Uvarov with gentle, wordless touches on his shoulder.

  As the forest folk walked across the Deck, their feet padded softly on the worn metal; they left behind a trail of marks, imprints of forest dirt and sweat. Arrow Maker wore a bow and quiver, slung over his shoulder, and Spinner’s blowpipe dangled at her waist, obscure and deadly. Their bare, painted flesh made splashes of extraordinary color against the drab gray-brown shades of the Decks. Their eyes, peering through bright masks of paint, were wide with alert suspicion and wariness, an effect hardly softened by Spinner’s eyeglasses.