Xeelee: Vengeance

by Stephen Baxter

  Watching her approach, Poole was uneasy, his feelings as complex as ever when he was around his family.

  Meanwhile Muriel had a companion at her side. Short, serene-looking in a floor-length robe, it was Gea, the ancient artificial intelligence, adviser to various UN government arms and a member of the Oversight committee responsible for monitoring the sycamore-seed incident – and thus, Poole realised, an ally of Harry’s just at the moment, if you needed to use such terms.

  Harry was grinning. ‘You’re working it out, Michael. Yes, right now Gea’s with me.’

  Gea half-bowed, stiff but graceful. Poole realised she was trying to project a subtle aura of artificiality and age, a Virtual avatar politely reminding them of who she was, what she was. ‘I echo Muriel. I have been a friend of the Pooles since the age of Michael Bazalget or even before. Or so I like to believe. I am an ally of all. And I hope that our meeting today will be characterised by sharing, not confrontation. This is family, after all.’

  ‘Not my family,’ Nicola said quickly. ‘And not yours either, robot lady.’

  ‘We must contribute as best we can.’

  Now Poole’s mother approached him, smiling. She looked tired, he thought, and perhaps a little older than when he’d last seen her. But, of course, everything about the Muriel he saw was deliberately projected. ‘Come, sit.’ She led them across the cool floor to a cluster of furniture. A small bot rolled out bearing a tray of drinks, snacks. ‘We’ll talk. Have dinner later. I’m promised that the aurora tonight will be spectacular. It should be visible just as we take dessert . . .’ As they took their seats, Muriel kept smiling. ‘Well, Nicola. Welcome to the inner circle. It’s only courteous to make sure you know that I too am in fact a Virtual. Like Gea.’

  ‘Yes, I—’

  ‘And as to how I came to be this way – I don’t imagine Michael or Harry has told you the full story.’

  ‘How you died young?’

  Poole winced.

  Harry laughed. ‘You don’t mince your words, do you?’

  Nicola was unperturbed. ‘I’m guessing it was an accident. Your death. Some overwhelming trauma? AS treatment can fix most health issues, after all. And you Pooles would have had the best.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re quite wrong. In fact, when I was young, my body rejected my preliminary AS treatment.’

  Harry growled, ‘It was worse than that. She had an adverse reaction . . . One in a million. The AS actually killed her.’

  ‘At the various clinics I attended, my fellow patients, mortals all, shared a lot of black humour: somebody has to be sacrificed to balance out the actuarial statistics, and so on. And then there was Harry. We decided to try for a child despite my problems.’

  Harry grunted. ‘To sum it up, I gained a son. Michael. I lost my wife.’

  Poole studied his father. ‘I don’t think he blamed me,’ he said bluntly to Nicola. ‘Some parents would.’

  Harry smiled crookedly. ‘You have to give me credit for that. I blamed the universe. And the Lethe-spawned, inadequate pharma industry that gave my wife an apparently life-extending drug that killed her before she was forty. Although of course the Pooles themselves owned most of the patents. That was the only reason I didn’t sue. But I didn’t care about the rest of the family, and I still don’t. I just wanted you back.’

  ‘And it looks like you got her,’ Nicola said. ‘Kind of. What was it, consciousness download through the corpus callosum?’

  Harry shook his head. ‘Muriel’s decline happened too quickly.’

  ‘And besides,’ Muriel said, ‘I didn’t actually want that. To have my mind pumped out of the neural bridge between the two halves of my brain? I’d accepted my fate. But Harry . . .’ She looked directly at Nicola. ‘I’m an emulation, Nicola. Which Harry created from recordings of my life, my work, my journals – testimony from my friends and family.’

  Including a very young Michael Poole, who had barely remembered his mother at all, but had been forced to talk about her to strangers for hours, in order to ‘populate’ this simulation. He kept his gaze fixed on the floor, but he was aware of Nicola watching him.

  ‘Created,’ Muriel added, ‘without my prior consent.’

  Nicola observed, ‘This is an old argument.’

  ‘But since then,’ Harry said breezily, ‘consent or not, you’ve had decades of life. Of consciousness, at least. Thanks to me. You even went back to your career.’

  Muriel said to Nicola, ‘I am a historian, of sorts.’ She picked up a drink from the table before her, a glass of fruit juice; the integration of the Virtual with the real was seamless. ‘Though I’m generally restricted to this environment. I’m interested in long-term trends, Nicola. The way the Anthropocene crisis and its long aftermath have reshaped humanity.’ She smiled, looking oddly tired. ‘Of course it’s a paradox for me to be studying the effect of AS technologies on human societies. Yet the effect is undeniable. As the age profile of mankind has changed, so the way we think has evolved. We look beyond short-term fixes to long-term solutions. Our institutions have responded too. This was certainly a factor in the post-Anthropocene recovery. And, individually, we have changed. We are more patient . . . In studies on animals, this is known as life history theory. Put starlings, for example, in a harsh and deprived environment and they will fight for scraps of food, they will neglect their own physical state. Give them a more predictable and nourishing place to live—’

  Harry snorted. ‘Patience. Ha! Too much of that for my liking. You can’t just sit there being patient until the dying Sun eats the Earth. Some of us have to be out there pushing.’

  Muriel said, ‘Whereas you didn’t even have the patience to ask if I wanted to live again, did you?’

  Poole glared at them both. ‘This argument has been going on as long as I can remember. But the truth is, you’re only here today because of me. Right?’

  Harry looked at Muriel. ‘So we get to the point. You want to start, or shall I?’

  Muriel, calmer, sipped her drink.

  Harry got up, paced around, spread his hands. ‘OK. Look, Michael, I think we all saw why you hid away at Mercury, for a year. You needed time to adjust to it all. The strangeness, the disruption. Anybody would. Maybe we all needed some time. I’m having trouble myself getting used to the idea of aliens in our midst.

  ‘But you know that it’s not just your family who are taking notice of you now, son. You have been watched ever since the Wormhole Ghost showed up. Surely you must have expected that. Even during your jaunt into the Sun. You found out a lot during your Sun-dive, the two of you, and for that I applaud you. But the key moment, as all humanity witnessed, probably, was when the alien faced you. You, Michael. Just as Nicola here recognised at the time, to her credit.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said dryly.

  ‘And everybody saw it, boy. That’s my point. You can’t hide from it. Somehow you’re central to all this, Michael. You always have been.’

  ‘You must understand our concerns, Michael,’ Gea said now. ‘We are after all suffering an alien incursion into the Solar System – an incursion that’s been going on for a year now, though no harm has yet been done, or only trivially—’

  ‘Trivially?’ Nicola snapped. ‘That is a bot’s perception. People have died. From the beginning.’

  Gea acknowledged that with a nod, but continued. ‘And we must make best use of all the evidence available to us. Muriel . . .’

  Muriel nodded. ‘But this is also the culmination of centuries of family history. Millennia, even.’

  Poole felt queasily alarmed. Enmeshed in unwelcome family history. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I have studied the relic the Ghost brought,’ Muriel said. ‘As you requested when you sent it here, Michael. Your amulet. A term of magic, though there’s nothing magical about it . . .’

  Nicola was interested. ‘What, t
hen? Have you discovered what it’s made of, for instance?’

  Muriel shook her head. ‘We do know it’s not of human manufacture. That’s something, if only a negative data point. Modern human manufacture anyhow. Some are suggesting that it’s made of the same substance as the alien artefact, the Cache. Which some call “hull plate”, the shell that grows in the sunlight. There are aspects of the reflectance spectra . . . But since we don’t know what that is either, it’s not a very useful comparison.’

  Nicola was growing predictably impatient. ‘Then what do you know?’

  Muriel smiled now. ‘Did you ever try looking at it? Or rather, through it?’

  Poole thought back. Perhaps he hadn’t. Maybe that had seemed too obvious. ‘Tell me what you found.’

  ‘We – aren’t sure. A deflection of the light. Some have suggested there are images stored in there; if so, no deconvolution routines we’ve tried so far have worked. It’s as if there were a very strong gravitational field working inside the amulet. Or as if the amulet itself was made of exotic matter, holding open a spacetime warp, like one of your wormhole portals—’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ Harry said. ‘Our portals each have the mass of a small asteroid. To think you could compress such a thing down to the size of a toy you can hold in your hand—’

  Nicola laughed at him. ‘I thought you Pooles had big imaginations.’

  Muriel said calmly, ‘Whatever it is, it is certainly very advanced.’

  Poole said, ‘This thing is from the future, then. Just as the Wormhole Ghost claimed about itself.’

  Muriel nodded. ‘It seems so. Or a possible future. Which is why, tangentially, I have brought you here.’

  He began to feel still more profoundly uncomfortable. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You see, we have more evidence, Michael,’ Muriel said, almost sadly. ‘From a different source. About the future, or futures. Prophecies of a kind which have been held in the Poole family archives for generations. Prophecies you now need to know about. And which are made available only to the bloodline – to which you belong, and of which I, even as this Virtual memory, count as part, and Gea, as a longstanding ally of the family—’

  ‘Aha,’ Nicola said quickly, her gaze flashing between them. ‘I’m working it out. But you aren’t bloodline, are you, Harry? So you’ve had to come here, to this simulacrum of your dead wife, to get access?’ Harry made to speak, but Nicola kept talking. ‘In fact – oh, I get it now – is that the real reason you brought Muriel back? So that this unreal copy of your dead wife could be your key to the spooky family archives?’ She shook her head, as if admiring. ‘My, my. You do think ahead, don’t you?’

  Harry glowered at Nicola. ‘You little runt. Why are you still here? You aren’t bloodline, for sure.’

  ‘She goes, I go,’ Poole said bluntly.

  Nicola laughed at them all.

  Muriel looked disgusted. ‘Oh, Harry, drop the histrionics. And, you, Nicola, stop provoking him.’

  Poole said, ‘And enough of the screwed-up relationships. Mother, just tell me what you know.’ He frowned, digging for memories. ‘The Kuiper Anomaly, for instance. Does this go back as far as that?’

  Muriel looked faintly shocked. ‘Who told you about that?’

  He was careful not to glance at Gea. ‘Just tell me.’

  And so she did.

  22

  She spoke softly and steadily, her account supplemented with details supplied by Gea, who had actually witnessed some of the distant-in-time, resonant events Muriel described.

  She spoke of George Poole in the early twenty-first century, who had lost his sister to some kind of metahuman cult in Rome . . . and whose lifetime had seen the arrival of a spaceprobe, of evidently very advanced manufacture, in the outer Solar System. The Kuiper Anomaly, as it had been known, had orbited slowly in the Kuiper Belt, out beyond the orbit of Neptune, before disappearing just as discreetly.

  And she spoke of George’s nephew Michael Poole Bazalget, the visionary engineer who had averted the danger of a massive release of greenhouse gases from the Arctic permafrost . . . and who claimed to have suffered visitations of his own.

  Gea, consulting her inner archive, repeated words from Bazalget’s personal account: ‘“The girl from the future told me that the sky is full of dying worlds . . .”’

  Muriel said, ‘In the twenty-first century, we – at least, Bazalget – were visited from the future, Michael. There seems no doubt.

  ‘All we have is fragmentary. It seems the Kuiper Anomaly somehow – mediated – the journey of the traveller from the future. Bazalget claimed he received specific advice from her, but of course his visitor had her own agenda, which we don’t fully understand. But he got from her enough to inspire his development of the clathrate-stabilisation programme. And enough to kick-start modern AntiSenescence research. It’s said that the starting point for that, by the way, was a study of advanced features in the girl’s genome . . .’

  ‘Either of which,’ Harry said, the envy obvious in his voice, ‘would alone have been enough to found a commercial dynasty of a kind the world never saw before.’

  ‘Our knowledge is partial,’ Muriel said. ‘Sketchy. Even contradictory. And what the Wormhole Ghost added only fleshes it out a little more.’

  ‘Just tell me,’ Poole said, his voice gruff.

  She took a deep breath. ‘Well. To begin with, we think mankind is destined to survive this age, to prosper, to become more powerful – to go out among the stars. There are hints of races we will trade with, or be conquered by—’

  ‘Or conquer,’ Harry said brutally.

  ‘The Silver Ghosts. Well, you met one of them. And the Qax.’ Chh-aa-kss. ‘We know virtually nothing of these beings but their names. But from various hints we have worked out a little of the history of the future . . .’

  The Qax had conquered humanity.

  Whereas the Ghosts had warred with mankind, but had been defeated. And, ultimately, driven to near extinction. But at least some of the Ghosts, including the Wormhole Ghost, had apparently evolved a cult of worship of their conquerors – with Michael Poole himself remembered, a human become mythic. Quite a measure of their defeat, Poole thought.

  ‘Now, the Wormhole Ghost’s language was interesting in itself,’ Gea said quietly. ‘It spoke an approximation of our own Standard. Which as you may know is a product of the Bottleneck, the age of the great migrations, with a core of old English supplemented by dialects and pidgins – Eurafrican, Eastasian, Panamerican – and a later consolidation with Han Chinese, which—’

  Nicola frowned. ‘I’m picking my way through all of that. You’re saying that the Wormhole Ghost’s attempt to speak Standard itself contained evidence of the epoch it came from. The drift from our own speech.’

  Gea smiled. ‘Exactly. The linguistic drift adds authenticity to its account.’

  Poole sat back, blowing out his cheeks. ‘You mean, its account of me.’

  Muriel leaned forward. ‘Michael, the future is still largely a blank – and who knows how current events, even our own foreknowledge, may be perturbing it? But we do have two dates. One is from your Ghost visitor. The linguistic drift indicates that it came from a future beyond twenty thousand years ahead, give or take. When, as the Ghost told us, humans will win a war at the centre of the Galaxy.’

  Nicola grinned. ‘“A war at the centre of the Galaxy.” Lethe. Every time I hear about that I’m glad I bothered to come.’

  ‘The second date,’ Poole said heavily.

  ‘Much further out. Perhaps half a million years hence. This is the era that Bazalget’s girl from the future came from, we think. When humanity reaches some kind of peak of power and influence – and, maybe, wisdom. The dominant class of that era called themselves – will call themselves – Transcendents. They seem to have had some knowledge of the even deeper futu
re. A future they planned for. And they wanted, somehow, to reach to the past – to the Pooles . . . It’s all fragmentary. Shards, hints, seen through a glass darkly. But still you will be remembered, Michael. Listen to this . . .’

  Gea recited the transcript.

  Even after the Xeelee had finally won their war against humanity, the stars continued to age, too rapidly. The Xeelee completed their great Projects and fled the cosmos.

  Time unravelled. Dying galaxies collided like clapping hands. But even now the story was not yet done. The universe itself prepared for another convulsion, greater than any it had suffered before.

  And then—

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name is Michael Poole.’

  They sat in silence, absorbing these words.

  Nicola spoke at last. ‘Who are these Xeelee?’ Ch-ee-lee.

  Gea said gently, ‘As best we understand it, these are the creatures – the race – who humanity will defeat in the Core of the Galaxy. But in the end—’

  ‘They win,’ Poole said gruffly. ‘And the story ends. The cosmos dies. And there I am.’

  ‘Yes.’ Muriel made to grasp his hands; she flinched when her flesh crumbled against his. She always seemed to forget her own Virtual nature, Poole thought, and had to learn a painful lesson over and over. ‘You will be brought back somehow. Preserved. Or at least remembered, yet again.’

  ‘Why?’ Poole demanded. ‘Why would that happen?’

  Gea looked at him steadily. She quoted, ‘“The story was not yet done.” Evidently you are – will be – part of that ongoing story. The cosmic story. You, or some vestige of you, preserved somehow to the very end – perhaps ultimately by these Transcendents, who evidently had the power to reach into the past. And they believed you would have some role to play, in that distant end time.’

  ‘And that name. Mankind’s ultimate enemy. It has to be the name of the sycamore seed, the thing that has come out of the wormhole, the thing that seems to be so interested in me. Or whoever built it. And the reason it’s come here—’