Xeelee: Vengeance

by Stephen Baxter

  Muriel said gently, regretfully, ‘You know why. You can put the pieces together.’

  ‘Like the girl from the future. Like the Wormhole Ghost, maybe. It came from future to past. And it came to change its own past – our future. It came to change my past.’

  Michael Poole spoke the name, for the first time.

  ‘Xeelee.’

  That was when the arguments started.

  Poole closed his eyes and clenched his fists. ‘I don’t want any of this.’

  ‘You don’t have to accept it,’ Nicola said.

  ‘You,’ Harry said. ‘Shut up. This isn’t your business. Not your family.’

  ‘And Michael isn’t yours either. His future is his own. He doesn’t have to accept these spooky hints and scraps. And he doesn’t have to follow whatever agendas you lot build out of them.’

  Poole, eyes still clamped firmly shut, heard Gea say, more gently, ‘But we don’t know if that is true. Perhaps the future is ordained . . . I was there, remember, with Michael Poole Bazalget, when he had his own encounter with the future. I and others have striven to keep this strange knowledge secret – private, even within the Poole family circle. We must be sure—’

  ‘Nicola’s right.’ Poole stood up. ‘You all want to manipulate me – everything about me. You, Mother – even you, Gea – all this murky stuff from the past. And you, Harry.’

  Harry glared at him. ‘Well, can’t I? Haven’t I the right?’

  Poole looked around at them all, uncomfortably aware that they were all staring at him with a kind of awe. Even his ambitious father – even Gea, a sentience sixteen hundred years old – even his mother.

  All but Nicola Emry.

  ‘Nicola. Let’s walk.’

  He stalked over to the room’s vast window.

  Stared out.

  Counted flecks of sea ice on an ocean rim, illuminated by floodlights. Tried to drown out thought.

  After a couple of minutes Nicola joined him, bringing a drink. ‘Single malt. Your mother tells me it’s your favourite.’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘Take it.’ She waited until he obeyed. ‘Is it always like this? Your family.’

  ‘Lethe, yes. This is one of the good days. So what do you think is going to happen now?’

  Nicola seemed to think it over. ‘Look, I’m new to your family dynamics. But you just know they’re not going to work together.’

  ‘You got that right.’

  ‘Your mother spoke about studying long-term trends. I think she’s going to look at this visitor as a gift from the cosmos. She’s going to want to make contact. Exchange diplomatic envoys. Enter into a pan-galactic civilisation of harmony and peace. You know the kind of thing. And she will want to use you, and this odd connection you have with the Xeelee, to achieve that. Whereas your father, and Gea – well, there you have the government. And I know from my own mother that Oversight agencies are always cautious. It’s their job. They will want to be sure this Xeelee does no harm, at least.’

  ‘They’ll destroy it.’

  ‘If they have to. If they can. There are going to be splits. Factions battling over differences of opinion.’

  ‘My father will want more than that. To be the new Michael Bazalget, getting rich on gifts from the future – that will be his dream. He would destroy the Xeelee and steal its technology, if he could.’

  ‘But again, he’s going to need you to achieve that, Michael. If he’s going to franchise the alien.’ She laughed, unexpectedly. ‘I’m sorry. It’s hard to take it all seriously. I guess I’m a shallow person.’

  ‘No. Keep laughing. I might stay sane that way. So I know what my parents want, what the government wants – but none of them is seeing the whole picture. They’re all stuck inside their own prejudices and ambitions.’

  ‘Right. And the question is, what do you want?’

  He just looked at her.

  ‘Remember what I said, Michael. I can understand you being crushed by all this. But you’re free to act, no matter what’s written about you, in the past or the future. This is the present, and you control it.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, you’re right. So we look for another option.’ He chewed a nail. ‘There’s Miriam, in Gallia Three. With Highsmith Marsden. A mad genius, surrounded by hundreds of our own super-smart people from our Jupiter projects. And nobody knows they’re there, because of Marsden’s paranoia.’

  ‘And hopefully not the Xeelee.’

  ‘Right. That’s one channel to explore. I’ll get what I can from the archive through my mother, and whatever data the various agencies have been collecting on the Xeelee since it got here. Plus whatever else my mother can dig out of that Lethe-spawned amulet. Let’s give it all to Marsden and see if he can come up with options.’

  ‘Fine. In the meantime, what about us? Before they lock you up in some vault and start studying you—’

  ‘I need to get out of here and do something. To act, not talk about acting.’ He looked at her. ‘Jack Grantt, on Mars. You said he’s assembling a mission to the Cache.’

  ‘So I did.’ Nicola grinned. ‘You think he needs a pilot?’

  23

  In the months that followed, the Cache was cautiously and discreetly tracked as it continued to follow that lazy spiral outward, a twisting groove cut through the plane of the ecliptic, the plane of the planets’ orbits. Its motion was obviously under motive power, but the nature of that power remained a mystery.

  Eventually, though, it became clear that the Cache was adjusting its trajectory.

  Mars, fourth planet out, had always seemed the next obvious target, once it had passed Earth. But now the Cache was slowing, and it did indeed appear to be preparing to settle in near-Martian space – perhaps at one of the Lagrange points, most people guessed, stations of stability in the combined gravitational fields of Mars and Sun.

  As Nicola had told Poole, Jack Grantt had long been leading a campaign in the Martian science institutes to mount a mission from Mars to the Cache as it passed. If it was going to wait around near Mars, at such a location, that opportunity was only more welcoming.

  And as Nicola had suggested, she had campaigned for Grantt to make room for Poole and herself on the jaunt. Not that Grantt had taken much persuading. It was clear enough to him, as to everybody else who was following the story, that Michael Poole was somehow central to the whole mystery. Who else would you want in your crew?

  But, slow as it was moving, the Cache wouldn’t reach Martian space for the best part of another year. And that, Poole told Miriam, had determined for him where he was going to wait out that year. ‘At least I’ll get to see Mons Olympus again. And I can get out of sight of my screwed-up family . . .’

  24

  You couldn’t just land on Mars.

  Nicola complained loudly as she brought the Hermit Crab into a dry dock, one of an extensive cluster surrounding Mars’s moon Phobos. ‘You have to park? What is this, New York?’

  Poole grinned. ‘Well, Mars is Mars.’ He glanced out of the Crab’s lifedome, beyond the dusty limb of Phobos, at the surface of the planet. Below it was evening, and domes and arcologies shone blue and green against the Martian red. ‘Ten million people down there now. It’s taken us fifteen hundred years to get this far – but that’s about as many humans as were alive on Earth when they invented agriculture, and everything took off. Maybe that’s an omen for the future.’

  ‘Let’s hope your Xeelee pal agrees,’ Nicola said. ‘And if you’re done quoting tourist brochures at me you can help me with the docking protocols . . .’

  Then, even from Phobos, you couldn’t just hop in a flitter and land where you liked. They had to take a scheduled shuttle to Nerio, the Martian space elevator, named for a mythological consort of the war god.

  Nerio’s anchor Node was permanently positioned over the Tharsis uplands, and s
pecifically over Olympus Mons, one of the great shield volcanoes and the tallest of all. Olympus was inconveniently offset from the equator, the ideal location for an elevator – but Poole knew that the mountain was so high its summit poked out of most of the air, and the elevator cable thus avoided the hazard of dust storms. And with this location the elevator cable also avoided the two moons, Phobos and Deimos, which both orbited the planet below the altitude of the space anchor.

  From Nerio, anyhow, they had a great view of Mars. But their descent down the tether from space took days.

  The beginning was bad enough. The tether climber, fitted out like a small mobile hotel, was cramped and homely and crowded, at least compared to its more expansive counterparts on the Earth cables. Then on the third day somebody recognised Poole, and tried to pump him about wormholes, about the alien intruders that had been all over the news, about a job. After that Poole hid away in his cabin.

  Nicola spent a lot of time in the bars.

  She emerged only when the descent drew to a close. Poole suspected the heavy use of antitoxin medications. And she studiously avoided the company of a couple of the male passengers, and one female. Poole didn’t ask.

  From the summit of Olympus they took a short ride aboard a bus, a pressure-cabin blister on big balloon tyres, down the volcano’s shallow slope. Then, joining other traffic, they followed a road of what looked like toughened glass, burned into the desert, to Kahra, political capital of the quasi-independent UN region that was Mars.

  Kahra had been one of the earliest off-Earth settlements established in the brief late-Bottleneck wave of resumed spaceflight. The proximity to Tharsis was no accident. Kahra’s founders had had the foresight to recognise that the space elevator must come here some day, and so here was where they would build their town. More than a thousand years later traces of that first settlement effort were still preserved: small prefabricated domes within a sprawling, glassed-over heritage area, at the heart of a city of towers of Martian glass.

  Jack Grantt himself was unavailable, out on an intensive field expedition in the Vastitas Borealis, the great dry ocean bed that dominated much of Mars’s northern hemisphere. Nicola and Poole had time on their hands. And Kahra, for all its historic significance, was a small town by Earth standards, and didn’t have much of a nightlife.

  So, by the second week, Nicola had them booked on what was optimistically billed as a ‘safari’: a guided tour of the Valles Marineris.

  Most of what Poole knew about Marineris came out of comic books. In the backstory of his favourite childhood superhero, the Mariner from Mars, the Valles had been created when the alien ship carrying the Mariner had skidded across the hemisphere. But Marineris itself, a system of valleys that ran east of Tharsis and Kahra, was a great flaw comparable in length to the radius of the planet. Though it was essentially geological rifting that had shaped this great feature, water and ice had once flowed here, and it was the promise of the terraforming lobby that someday the cold rivers would flow once more.

  The tour itself was a mixed pleasure. Six people were shared out over three rovers which crawled along the canyon, the planned duration being twenty days. In the beginning they passed through spectacular country, a maze of canyons called the Labyrinth of Night. Further down, though, the canyon system was so vast that it was draped over the curvature of the planet itself; you could see either one wall or the other, and sometimes neither. It was a classic complaint of sightseers on Mars that many of its great features were simply too vast to be seen from the ground.

  In the end the stops turned out to be more fun. Their walks in skinsuits outside the rovers were called EVAs, a very old acronym that referred back to the days when the only humans on Mars were astronauts from Earth. Poole enjoyed the sense of freedom the EVAs gave him. He would walk away from the rest as far as the safety rules let him, and run, jump and swing his arms. Night walks were spectacular too (as long as you avoided the dust storms), with the brilliance of Jupiter and of the twin planets Earth and Moon dominating the sky. It made up for the shrunken Sun of the daytime, Poole thought.

  He said to Nicola, ‘I’ve travelled the Solar System from the heart of the Sun to Jupiter and beyond. But I’ve spent almost all my time in space cooped up in a box, breathing in somebody else’s recycled farts.’

  ‘Mostly mine, recently.’

  ‘If you want room to run around and swing your arms you’re always going to need a planet.’

  ‘True. And let’s hope we still have planets available to do that when this is all over.’

  At the Marineris terminus station, Nicola, on impulse, decided she’d like to go on to visit Hellas Planitia. Out here in tourist country the best way to get there was to fly, by airship.

  From the eastern end of Marineris to the western flank of that great crater was a mere thousand kilometres or so. Nicola complained most of the way, however. In Mars’s tenuous atmosphere the ship’s lift bag, full of heated carbon dioxide air, had to be enormous to heft a decent load, and it overwhelmed the small gondola slung at its belly. ‘I feel like I’m swimming under a whale. Can’t see the sky at all. And they ought to ban any flying vessel that can’t do a barrel-roll . . .’

  Hellas contained the lowest point on Mars – where stood a human colony called Lockyerville – and, it was claimed, some of the modern planet’s highest architectural achievements. Even as the airship crossed immense ranges of rim mountains, Poole could make out the glimmer of a glass roof, kilometres high, a blister pushing in from the crater’s rim. This was the Hellas arcology.

  The spectacle inside the arcology, once they had landed and debarked, was astonishing too. Unsuited, with Nicola at his side, Poole walked forward over a floor of roughened glass broken by lawns and flower beds, while ahead of him slim towers supported a gleaming roof, three kilometres high. Poole was becoming used by now to Mars’s great natural features being too large to comprehend from the ground. So was the Hellas arcology, the difference being that this was human-built – and not more than a tenth finished.

  Feeling overwhelmed, he concentrated on the nearest tower. Perhaps half a kilometre broad at the base, glittering with glass, it narrowed as it rose, its four sides converging – it was like the ancient Eiffel Tower, perhaps, he thought, blown up to a vast height and coated with glass. Looking up, he saw another such monster standing tall perhaps a couple of kilometres further away, and another, to the right of that – and still another to the left, and more in the mistier air beyond. He could see that some of the lower levels of the towers were inhabited: internal lights glittered, and he glimpsed people moving to and fro. All across Mars stood such buildings, cousins of the great Towers that now served as home for much of Earth’s population, hardened for the environment of Mars.

  But for these huge structures habitation was only a secondary purpose. Set out in a neat hexagonal array, the towers supported that roof of tremendous panes of Martian glass, kilometres above the ground. For now the scheme covered only about a tenth of Hellas’s vast circle, but Poole knew that the ultimate goal was to bring the whole of the planitia under one vast ceiling. And the Martians planned ultimately to go much further: to spread this single structure right around the lower-latitude regions of the planet, sheets of glass crossing mountain ranges on ledges and platforms. The vision was as much about economics as engineering; with such a structure the Martians could make much of their planet habitable for humans at only a fraction the cost, in terms of the imported atmosphere needed, of full terraforming.

  ‘You’re standing on the flowers,’ Nicola said.

  He looked down at her, dazed by scale. ‘What flowers?’

  She pointed at his feet.

  They had been walking on a lawn of green grass, and he had indeed strayed into a bed of flowers – pretty and yellow, he thought they were celandines. He stepped back hastily. Now, when he glanced around, he realised there was more vegetation: trees, larches, fir
s, pines, even what looked like young redwoods. A high-latitude biota on Earth, he recognised, and so preadapted to cold Mars with its weak sunlight. He knew that in the very early days of colonisation biota from Australia had adapted comparatively well to Mars: life from a similarly depleted landscape, an ancient arid continent from whose soil most of the nutrients and minerals had long since washed away. He imagined there would be surviving samples in terraria, somewhere under this vast roof.

  Meanwhile, celandines.

  Unexpectedly, Nicola laughed. ‘Flowers,’ she said. ‘Growing in the open, on Mars. Kind of.’

  On impulse, he took hold of her hand. Generally they didn’t do physical stuff. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to a party.’ And he dragged her away.

  As it happened, a party wasn’t hard to find. This was the Martian southern hemisphere, and it was autumn at Hellas: time for the return of the polar migrants.

  It turned out that thousands of settlers, living in great mobile habitats, spent each southern summer at the fringe of the south pole, where water ice was exposed at the surface. Here they focused the low sunlight to melt the ice, and planted their crops under collapsible plastic greenhouses – all the while, Poole learned, taking care not to harm the fragile native life that huddled in liquid-water droplets just under the ice’s sunlit surface.

  But in the Martian winter it got so cold that at the pole the very atmosphere froze out, and there was nine months of total darkness. And so, every Martian year (twice as long as an Earth year), the migrants packed up and rolled a few thousand kilometres north to Hellas, to see out the season.

  This had been going on for centuries.

  It had taken a lot less time than that for the return of the wanderers to become the excuse for a bout of partying that, Poole decided after the first couple of days, strove to emulate the scale of Hellas itself.