Ring xs-4

by Stephen Baxter

  …The Virtual, Mark Armonk, was talking to him again. Or perhaps at him, Uvarov thought sourly.

  “I wish you’d pay attention, Uvarov — ”

  “Without me to talk to, you’d lapse into non-sentience, devoid of independent will,” Uvarov pointed out. “So spare me the lectures.”

  Mark ground out, “The Sun, Uvarov. The photosphere maser radiation is standard stuff — generated by silicon monoxide at 43 Gigahertz. There are natural mechanisms for generating such signatures. But in this case, we’ve found hints of modulation of the silicon monoxide stuff… deliberate modulation.

  “We’ve found structure everywhere, Uvarov.” Again that fake excitement in Mark’s voice; Uvarov felt his irritation grow. Mark went on, “There is structure in the amplitude of the beams, their intensity, phasing, polarization — even in the Doppler shifting of the signals. Uvarov, someone — or something — is in there, trying to signal out with modulated natural masers, as hard as they can. I’m trying to resolve it, but…”

  Uvarov strove to shift in his chair, vainly trying to find a more comfortable posture — a prize he’d been seeking for the best part of a thousand years, with as much assiduousness as Jason had once sought his Fleece, he thought. How pathetic, how limited he was!

  He tried to ignore his body, to fix his analytical abilities — his imagination — on the concept of an intelligence within the Sun…

  But it was so difficult.

  His mind wandered once more. He thought of his forest colony. He thought of Spinner-of-Rope.

  Sometimes Uvarov wondered how much better young people might have fared, if they’d been given this opportunity to study and learn, with this strange, battered Universe as an intellectual playground. How much more might youth have unearthed, with its fresh eyes and minds, than he could!

  It had already been fifty years since — in his misguided, temporary lunacy — he had inspired his forest children to undertake their hazardous journey out of the lifedome. Fifty years: once most of a human lifetime, he thought — and yet, now, scarcely an interlude in his own, absurdly long life, stuck as he was in this moldering cocoon of a body.

  So even Spinner-of-Rope, Arrow Maker’s wise-ass daughter, must be — what, sixty five chronological? Seventy, maybe? An old woman already. But still, thanks to AS-freezing, she’d retained the features — and much of the outlook, as far as he could tell — of a child.

  He felt a great sorrow weigh upon him. Of course his experiment was lost, now; his carefully developed gene pool was already polluted by interbreeding, no doubt, between the forest folk and the Superet-controlled Decks, and his immortal strain was overwhelmed by AS treatments.

  But the progress he had made was still there, he thought; the genes were there, dormant, ready. And when — if — the inhabitants of the Northern got through this time of trouble, when they reached whatever new world waited for them, then the great experiment could begin anew.

  But in the meantime…

  He thought again of Spinner-of-Rope, a girl-woman who had grown up among trees and leaves, now walking through the wreckage of the Solar System.

  Uvarov had made many mistakes. Well, he’d had time to. But he could be proud of this, if nothing else: that to this era of universal desolation and ruin, he Garry Uvarov — had restored at least a semblance of the freshness of youth.

  “…Uvarov,” Mark said.

  Uvarov turned. The AI’s synthesized voice sounded different — oddly flat, devoid of expression. None of that damn fake intonation, then, Uvarov thought with faint triumph. It was as if the Virtual’s processing power had, briefly, been diverted somewhere else. Something had happened.

  “Well? What is it?”

  “I’ve done it. I’ve resolved the signal — the information in the maser pulses. There’s an image, forming in the data desk…”

  “An image? Tell me, damn you.”

  It was a woman’s face (Mark said), crudely sketched in pixels of color. A human face. The woman was aged about sixty-five physical; she had short-cropped, sandy hair, a strong nose, a wide, upturned mouth, and large, vulnerable eyes.

  Her lips were moving.

  “A woman’s face — after five million years, transmitted out on maser signals from the heart of a Sun rendered into a red giant? I don’t believe it.”

  Mark was silent for a moment. “Believe what you want. I think she’s trying to say something. But we don’t have sound yet.”

  “How very inconvenient.”

  “Wait… Ah. Here it comes.”

  Now Uvarov heard it, heard the voice of the impossible image from the past. At first the timbre was broken up, the words virtually indecipherable, and, so Mark informed him, badly out of synchronization with the moving lips.

  Then, after a few minutes — and with considerable signal enhancement from the data desk processors — the message cleared.

  “Lethe,” Mark said. “I even recognize the language…”

  My name is Lieserl. Welcome home, whoever you are. I expect you’re wondering why I’ve asked you here tonight…

  Against the dull red backdrop of the ruined, inflated Sun, the accretion disc of the Jovian black hole sparkled, huge and threatening.

  Once more a pod from the Northern carried Spinner-of-Rope — alone, this time down to the surface of Callisto. Spinner twisted to look down through the glass walls of the little pod; as she moved, biomedical sensors within her suit slid over her skin, disconcerting.

  The craft from within the ice, dug up and splayed out against the surface by a team of autonomous ’bots, was like a bird, with night-dark wings a hundred yards long trailing back from a small central body. The wing material looked fragile, insubstantial. The ice of Callisto seemed to show through the wings’ trailing edges.

  Louise and Mark had told her that the craft was alien technology. And it had a hyperdrive, they thought…

  She scratched at her shoulder, where one of Mark’s damned biosensors was digging particularly uncomfortably into her flesh. When she landed, Louise was damn well going to have to tell her why she’d been buttoned up like this.

  The craft was more like some immense, black-winged insect, resting on a sheet of glass, Spinner thought. Its elegant curves were surrounded by the stumpy, glistening forms of the Northern’s pods, and by other pieces of equipment. Spinner could see a small drone ’bot crawling across the surface of one nightdark wing, trailing twisted cable strands and scrutinizing the alien material with clusters of sensors. The Callisto ice around the craft was scarred and broken, pitted by the landing jets of the pods and criss-crossed by vehicle tracks.

  The craft was immense. The activities of the humans and their machines looked utterly inadequate to contain the power of this artificial beast… if it were to awake from its centuries-long slumber.

  Spinner’s fear seemed to rise in inverse proportion to her nearness to the craft. It was as if the sinister insectile form, pinned against the ice, radiated threat.

  She shivered, pulling the fabric of her environment suit close around her.

  The streets and houses around Morrow were empty. The endless, ululating cries of the klaxon echoed from the bare walls of the ruined buildings and the steel underbelly of the sky.

  A grappling hook — a crude thing of sharpened, twisted partition-metal — sailed past Morrow’s face, making him flinch. The hook caught in some irregularity in the floor of the Deck, and the rope it trailed stiffened, jerking. Within a few seconds Trapper-of-Frogs had come swarming along the rope, across the Deck floor; her brown limbs, glistening with sweat, were flashes of color against the gray drabness of the Decks’ sourceless light, and her blowpipe and pouch of darts bounced against her back as she moved.

  Morrow sighed and dropped his face. In zero-gee, they were abseiling across the floor of Deck Two. The metal surface before his face was bland, incongruously familiar, worn smooth by countless generations of feet, including his own. He twisted his neck and took a glance back. His other companions were
strung out across the surface of the Deck behind him, their faces turned to him like so many flowers: there was Constancy-of-Purpose with her powerful arms working steadily, and her dangling, attenuated legs, the Virtual Mark Wu, a handful of forest folk. The Virtual was trying to protect their sensibilities. Morrow saw, by making a show of climbing along the ropes with the rest of them.

  The Temple of the Planners was a brooding bulk, outlined in electric blue, still hundreds of yards ahead, across the Deck.

  Many of the houses, factories and other buildings were damaged — several quite badly. In one corner of Deck Two there was evidence of a major fire, a scorching which had even licked at the gray metal ceiling above.

  Morrow tried to imagine what it must have felt like to have been here, in the cramped, enclosed world of the Decks, when the GUTdrive had finally been turned off — when gravity had faded out. He imagined walking along, on his way to another routine day at work — and then that strange feeling of lightness, his feet leaving the Deck…

  The klaxon had called out ever since they’d climbed down here, into the Decks, through the Locks from the forest; perhaps it had been wailing like this ever since the zero-gee catastrophe itself. The noise made it difficult even to think; he tried to control his irritability and fear.

  Trapper twisted and grinned at him. “Come on, Morrow, wake up. You climbed all the way down the elevator shaft with Spinner-of-Rope, once, didn’t you? And that was under gravity. Zero-gee is easy.”

  “Trapper, nothing is easy when you get to my age.”

  Trapper laughed at him, with all the certainty of youth. And it was genuine youth, he reflected; Trapper was — what? Eighteen, nineteen? Children continued to be born, up in the forest, even all these decades after the opening-up of the Locks on Deck One, and the provision of AS treatment for the forest folk.

  “You know,” he said, “you remind me of Spinner-of-Rope.”

  Trapper twisted easily, as if her small, bare body had all the litheness of rope itself; her face was a round, eager button. “Really? Spinner-of-Rope’s something of a hero up there, you know. In the forest. It must have taken a lot of courage to follow Uvarov down through the Locks, and — ”

  “Maybe,” Morrow said testily. “What I meant was, you’re just as annoying as she was, at your age.”

  Trapper frowned; there was a sprinkling of freckles across her small, flat nose, he saw, and a further smattering that reached back across her dark-fringed patch of shaven scalp. Then her grin broke out again, and he felt his heart melt; her face reminded him of the rising of a bright star over the ice fields of Callisto. She craned her neck forward and kissed him lightly on the nose.

  “All part of the package,” she said. “Now come on.”

  She scrambled up her rope again; within seconds she had reached her grappling hook and was preparing to throw the next one across the Deck, in preparation for the next leg of the trek.

  Wearily, feeling even older than his five centuries, Morrow made his way, hand over hand, along his rope.

  He tried to keep his eyes focused on the scuffed floor surface before his face. Why was he finding this damn jaunt so difficult? He was, after all, Morrow, Hero of the Elevator Shaft, as Trapper had said. And since then he had been out, beyond the ribbed walls surrounding the Decks, out into space. He had walked the surface of Callisto, and watched the rise of the bloated corpse of legendary Sol over the moon’s ice plains; he had even supervised the excavation of that ancient alien spacecraft. He’d shown courage then, hadn’t he? He must have done — why, he hadn’t even thought about it. So why did he feel so different, now he was back here, inside the Decks once more — inside the metal-walled box which had been his only world for half a millennium?

  He’d been apprehensive ever since Louise had asked him to lead this expedition in the first place.

  “I don’t want to go back in there,” he’d told Louise bluntly.

  Louise Ye Armonk had come down to Callisto to congratulate him on his archaeology and to give him this new assignment. She had looked tired, old; she’d run a hand through grizzled hair. “We all have to do things we don’t want to do,” she said, as if speaking to a child, her patience barely controlled. When she’d looked at him, Morrow could detect the contempt in her eyes. “Believe me, if I had someone else to send, I’d send ’em.”

  Morrow had felt a sense of panic — as if he were being asked to go back into a prison cell. “What’s the point?” he asked, his desperation growing. “The Planners closed off the Decks centuries ago. They don’t want to know what’s happening outside. Why not leave them to it?”

  Louise’s mouth was set firm, fine wrinkles lining it. “Morrow, we can’t afford to ‘leave them to it’ any more. The Universe outside — we — are impinging on what’s happening in there. And we’ve evidence, from our monitors, that the Planners are not — ah, not reacting well to the changes.

  “Morrow, there are two thousand people in there, in the Decks. There are only a handful of us outside — only a few hundred, even including the forest on Deck Zero. We can’t afford to abandon those two thousand to the Planners’ deranged whims.”

  Morrow heard his own teeth grind. “You’re talking about duty, then.”

  Louise had studied him. “Yes, in a way. But the most fundamental duty of all: not to me, or to the Planners, or even to the ship’s mission. It’s a duty to the species. If the species is to survive we have to protect the people trapped in there, with the Planners — as many as possible, to maintain genetic diversity for the future.”

  “Protect,” he said sourly. “Funny. That’s probably just what the Planners believe they are doing, too…”

  Now he looked around at the abandoned houses in their surreal rows, suspended from what felt like a vertical wall to him now, not a floor; he listened to the silence broken only by the plaintive cries of the klaxon. All the people had gone — taken, presumably into the Temples, by the Planners — leaving only this shell of a world; and now the elements of this oppressive place seemed to move around him, pushing at him like elements of a nightmare…

  Perhaps it was the very familiarity of the place that was so uncomfortable. Coming back here — even after all these decades — it was as if he had never been away; the metal-clad walls and ceiling, the rows of boxy houses, the looming tetrahedral bulks of the Planner Temples all loomed closely around him, oppressing his spirit once more. It was as if the huge, remarkable Universe beyond these walls — of collapsing stars, and ice moons, and magical alien spacecraft with wings a hundred yards wide — had never existed, as if it had all been some bizarre, fifty-year fantasy.

  In the old days, before his first encounter with Arrow Maker and Spinner, he’d thought himself something of a rebel. An independent spirit; a renegade — not like the rest of the drones around him. But the truth was different, of course. For centuries, the culture of the Planners had trained him into submission. If it hadn’t been for the irruption of the forest folk — an event from outside his world — he’d never have had the courage, or the initiative, to break free of the Planners’ domination.

  In fact, he realized now, no matter what he did or where he went in the future and no matter how this conflict with the Planners turned out — he never would be free of that oppression.

  Now he reached the end of his rope. He let himself drift away from the Deck a little, and launched himself through the air across the few feet to the next rope Trapper had fixed. He glanced back again; the little party was strung along the chain of ropes which led all the way back to the ramp from the upper levels.

  There was a rush of air above his head, a sizzling, hissing noise.

  Instinctively he ducked down, pressing his body flat against the Deck; infuriatingly he bounced away from the scarred surface, but he grasped the edges of Deck plates and clung on.

  The noise had sounded like an insect’s buzz. But there were very few insects within the Decks…

  Another hiss, a sigh of air above him. And i
t had come from the direction of the Temple which was — he sneaked a look up — still a hundred yards away. Another whisper above him — and another, and now a whole flock of them.

  Someone behind him cried out, and he heard the clatter of metal against the Deck.

  Trapper-of-Frogs came clambering back down the rope toward him; without inhibition she scrambled over his arms and snuggled against his side, a warm, firm bundle of muscle; her shaven patch of scalp was smooth against his cheek. She was no more than four feet tall, and he could feel her bony knees press into his thighs.

  “It’s the Planners,” she whispered into his ear. Her breath was sweet, smelling of forest fruit. “They’re shooting at us from the Temple.”

  He felt confused. “Shooting? But that’s impossible. Why should they?”

  She growled, and again he was reminded of a young Spinner-of-Rope, decades ago, who also had spent a lot of time getting annoyed at him. “How should I know?” she snapped. “And besides, why hardly makes a difference. What’s important is that we get out of here before we get hurt.”

  He clung to his rope, disoriented. Maybe he should have been prepared for this. Maybe the Planners really had gone that crazy.

  But if that was true, what was he supposed to do about it?

  Now someone else came clambering up behind him. It was Constancy-of-Purpose, pawing her way across the Deck with her huge, powerful right hand; she clutched something shiny and hard in her left. Those AS-wasted legs, Morrow thought irrelevantly, looked even slimmer than Trapper’s; they clattered against the Deck, pale and useless.

  “Morrow.” Constancy-of-Purpose opened her left hand. The object nestling within it was a piton: sharpened, the coarse, planed surfaces of its point glistening in the sourceless light. “This look familiar? The Planners are using their damn crossbows on us again.”

  “But why?”

  Constancy-of-Purpose looked exasperated, even amused. “Why hardly matters, does it?”

  Trapper punched Morrow in the ribs, lightly; he winced as her small, hard fist dug into the soft flesh. “That’s what I’ve been telling him, too,” she told Constancy-of-Purpose.