Xeelee: Vengeance

by Stephen Baxter

  Then the whole Earth took seven minutes to pass into the wormhole. As observed by probes outside the portal, it looked as if the planet itself was being burned out of existence, metre by metre, by the shining plane into which it crossed.

  After that, it took more minutes for the planet to traverse through the wormhole’s huge throat. It was not like a passage through a tunnel, more as if that tetrahedral cage closed in on the planet, then opened out again. A wormhole was a paradoxical nesting in a higher dimension – and a nesting associated with extreme spacetime distortions. In those long minutes the Earth suffered a severe tidal flexing, that triggered landslides and earthquakes, and sent immense ripples marching across the oceans – events whose after-effects would be, Poole knew, hideously familiar to anyone living on an Atlantic shore so recently battered by the Probe tsunami.

  Once the planet was through, the wormholes were immediately collapsed, with electric-blue negative energy surging out of the fading portals.

  In the inner System, in the space vacated by the Earth, a constellation of satellites and orbital habitats, suddenly bereft of their anchoring world, drifted slowly apart. The Moon too, shorn of its gravitationally dominant partner, began to settle into a new, solitary orbit of its own.

  And a single Xeelee craft, damaged itself, brooded in the sudden emptiness.

  While on Cold Earth, far away, under a sky suddenly black and star-littered, it began to snow.

  Harry Poole made a quick call to his son. ‘OK. Now I’m impressed.’

  62

  Earth came through the wormhole with its ocean, atmosphere, cargo of life more or less intact, dragged through by gravity. And through too came craft in the air and near-Earth space at the time, a handful of low-orbit satellites and habitats. At first all was confusion, as these craft – and their controllers on the ground, in the air and in space – tried to figure out where they were.

  It took a full hour after the event the commentators were already calling the Displacement before Poole’s flitter landed at last, bringing him physically to the Earth, at the family complex in Antarctica.

  One hour after that, Poole walked out of the villa, alone. He felt he had to experience this new world directly. The Antarctic compound was full of specialised cold-weather gear, but Poole wore his own skinsuit, taken from the flitter. Adapted for space, it was more than capable of protecting him from the climate outside: even this new night, colder than any this chill southern continent had ever known.

  A night that would never end.

  Outside, the air was still and calm, the sky clear, the steady stars like shards of bone. This was the sky of the Oort Cloud. In minutes, Earth had been hurled more than a thousand times as far from the Sun as the orbit of its birth. Of course the constellations looked no different, even across the distance traversed by the planet during the Displacement; immense it might be in human terms, but that great dislocation was dwarfed by the gap even to the nearest star. At least he had not challenged the stars, Poole reflected. It was no comfort.

  But, as he gazed up, he thought he saw some of those stars flickering now. High clouds forming, already. Even over Antarctica.

  I did this.

  His mother joined him, her footsteps soft in the huge night. She was bundled up in her consistency-protocol-compliant coat, quilted, ground-length, though she wore no hood. And she carried a kind of manikin, maybe ten centimetres tall. It was a doll-sized version of Harry, Poole saw with some bemusement, his father smart in his customary black and silver suit.

  Poole didn’t know what to say. So, as was his custom, he didn’t say anything at all.

  Muriel lifted her face to the sky. ‘I once saw a solar eclipse. I mean, when I was young, still flesh and blood. Did I ever tell you? We were on a ship, a cruise to view the event. The totality crossed the Pacific. We stood there, on deck, under the sky, as the shadow of the Moon swept over us. I had anticipated the central event, the black disc of the Moon over the face of the Sun, the corona – the usual special effects, like in the Virtuals. I hadn’t anticipated the scale of it all. The way the light dipped across the sky, all the way down to the horizon. As if the whole world was changing around me, above my level of existence. I felt a kind of primitive awe. I think today will have been the same for many people. A profound, visceral shock. Some will never recover, perhaps.’

  Guilt twisted at Poole, and he knew that was a feeling that wouldn’t go away any time soon. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You don’t have to say that.’

  ‘It wasn’t possible to give any warning. Even if we had, it would only have caused panic.’

  She shrugged. ‘And you would have been stopped. By the Stewards, the other government agencies. By Harry – he’d have had to. Stopped from saving the world. What’s done is done. I’ll tell you what strikes me as the single most impressive imagery I’ve seen so far today. After the loss of the Sun itself, of course . . . The space elevators. The orbital stations were detached, in the last moments before we hit the wormhole. There are recordings of that, brought with us through the wormhole.’

  Again Poole felt pangs of regret. ‘We couldn’t warn the crews. I guess they figured it out. Smart guys.’

  ‘Those Node stations must still be drifting in space, back at Earth’s old position, in its orbit. But their cables were left dangling, engineered carbon threads thousands of kilometres long, and they came through with Earth. There are already flitters up there cutting it up; you don’t want that stuff wrapping around the planet. So in some ways the government arms are already reacting.’

  Poole thought he felt a drop of cold water on his bare cheek. He glanced up, and saw that the stars were almost obliterated now by an empty darkness, creeping down from the north.

  ‘I felt that too,’ Muriel said. ‘The consistency protocols. The rain, sleeting through me, is like an itch. Rain, in Antarctica.’

  ‘We did some modelling,’ Poole said. ‘The team at Gallia Three. Of the consequences of this, the Displacement. Under the Sun, Earth’s energy budget was pretty much at a balance. The planet continually radiated away as much heat as it received from the Sun, more or less.’

  ‘But now that the Sun has gone—’

  ‘Earth is still radiating. For now it’s like a bathtub with an open drain, and the taps suddenly turned off. Shining in the dark, in infra-red anyhow. But once the warmth is lost, it’s lost. The oceans will keep their heat a little longer, but the air over the land will cool quickly. And the first thing the cool air will do is dump its water vapour.’

  ‘Rain. Snow?’

  ‘By this time tomorrow, yes. From pole to pole. Snow on Amazonia, in the Congo. Mother – what’s with the scale model of Harry?’

  She glanced at it, as if she’d forgotten she was holding it. ‘This? He’s been addressing the world. Began an hour after the Displacement, and has been on a loop with a few updates since. I thought you’d like to see.’

  She threw the manikin into the air before her; it grew to life-size, the resolution only slightly imperfect.

  And Harry Poole, still clad in an entirely inappropriate city suit of black and silver, began to speak, solemnly but calmly.

  ‘. . . obvious to every citizen of Earth by now that the planet has indeed been displaced, by a passage through a wormhole. Whereas we were orbiting the Sun at a distance of some one hundred and fifty million kilometres – one astronomical unit – we are now more than a thousand times further out. A thousand AU.

  ‘We are now in a part of the Solar System called the Oort Cloud. We are not alone out here; this is a region in which can be found many massive objects, even planets, dwarf worlds the size of Pluto or larger, even a couple of ice giants. There are humans too, exploration ships, even ancient colonies living off ice and gathered sunlight. In time we will be in touch with these pioneers.

  ‘The Displacement has been a profound shock to the pl
anet itself. A jolt. In the immediate term there have been reports of earthquakes, landslides, slippages – on the oceans, exceptional waves. We already have emergency agencies working in problem areas. In the longer term we will have to manage the loss of the tides, incidentally; we have lost both Sun and Moon . . . That’s the short term. As to further out—

  ‘Well, we are still within the Solar System. The nearest star is more than two hundred times further yet than we’ve travelled. But sunlight is sparse here. At a thousand times further from the Sun, the Sun’s energy as it reaches us is diminished by a factor of a million. And that simple fact will shape all our lives from now on. Without sunlight, this is a night that will never end, for Earth. Soon it is going to grow cold. Very cold.

  ‘Your government, however, the other Stewards and I, are responding to the emergency. And we have a period of grace, the meteorologists tell me. Seven days, perhaps. Seven days before the surface of the Earth becomes uninhabitable for human life, without protection, without specialised vehicles or space-capable clothing like skinsuits—’

  Muriel said, ‘This is an emergency that I suppose he never dreamed he would have to deal with, only a few hours ago. Yet here he is. Calm, in control.’

  ‘Mother, nobody is in control.’

  ‘Maybe not. But, right now, sounding as if he’s in control of events is absolutely the best thing Harry could be doing. Maybe this will be his hour.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Poole said fervently. ‘Because he’s all we’ve got.’

  ‘. . . What we have to do is to use this week, this time of grace, to get everybody into the warm. And by that I mean the great Towers. These are enclosed environments, capable of being sealed off, with controlled inner climates; there you will find water, warmth. We are a billion, on this Earth. Estimates indicate that the entire population could be housed in the Towers. The government has already taken steps to take the Towers into common ownership; you will be made welcome.

  ‘Beyond that – well, it won’t be easy, especially at first. But one thing we do have is power. For centuries humanity has been living off the natural flow of energy from the Sun, from the planet’s own deep heat. That has been our conscious choice. But we do have available tremendously powerful artificial energy sources. The engine of a single Poole Industries GUTship . . .’

  Poole had to grin. ‘Not really the moment for a product placement, Harry.’

  ‘. . . generates power of orders of magnitude more than the whole of human civilisation at the peak of the energy-hungry Anthropocene. The planet brought with it a number of such craft, on the ground or in orbit. Those craft will be landing soon. Bringing down heat and light.

  ‘We have many more such craft in the planetory system, of course–meaning within the orbit of Nepture. But I have to tell you that the distance from home is very great – greater, perhaps, than our own imaginations have yet been able to absorb.

  ‘Earth was once eight light-minutes from the Sun; now we are six light-days out. So far that we have not yet been able even to make contact with our remaining ships, or indeed Mars or the other colonies. Our first messages are crawling at lightspeed back to the planetary System right now – messages to stranded friends who must be even more bewildered than we are. Even when we do make contact, a GUTship driving at a full gravity’s thrust would take no less than ninety days to get here.

  ‘They will come. For now we are on our own.

  ‘We have a week, then. You must do all you can to get yourselves and your families to shelter – and please help others. Let nobody be left behind. Meanwhile we’re going to need volunteers to help with rescuing the rest of our world. I mean the flora and the fauna . . . Efforts are already beginning in the great reserves. Whole biomes are being preserved, under heated domes. And beyond that we must prepare for a new future – a different future.

  ‘Most people already know, I think, that my son is responsible for this huge, bold act. It was indeed Michael Poole’s scheme, his design – his wormhole – that brought us out here.’ A faint smile. ‘Judging from the contacts I have had so far, half of us want to give him a triumph to match any Caesar’s. The other half want to lynch him.

  ‘But, listen to me now. If Michael had asked for consent, he would not have got it. Not even from me, his father. And if he had not acted, by now Earth would be pinioned, as Mars already is, pinioned inside a Xeelee Cage, and doomed. Along with all of us.

  ‘This is not a perfect solution. Millions of us will die.’

  Muriel tried to touch Poole, to rest a hand on his shoulder; pixels glittered, but he felt nothing.

  ‘But because of what my son has done today, most of a billion have survived – will survive. And Michael will be remembered as a hero, for ever . . .’

  Muriel murmured, ‘That was true already.’

  ‘Mother, I need to go and help.’

  ‘You should stay here, Michael. Earlier generations of paranoid Pooles made this place not so much a mansion as a bunker. And of course it’s built to withstand the Antarctic winter. You’ll be safe here.’

  ‘Safe?’ He shook his head. ‘Nobody is safe. I have a flitter. I’m a pilot. I need to go help the evacuation effort. If somebody takes a shot at me, so be it. And I need to find Nicola. In the final battle, she took a hit. Hopefully came down somewhere. On Earth, I mean.’ He hesitated for one more heartbeat, looking up at the sky, now almost a solid bank of clouds. ‘And besides, it’s all my Lethe-spawned fault.’

  With a last regretful glance at his mother, he pulled closed his skinsuit and made for his flitter.

  63

  So Poole searched for Nicola.

  Planet Earth remained interconnected. Even though when it crossed into the wormhole the planet’s orbital family of artificial satellites, habitats, power stations and factories had mostly been lost or disrupted, Earth’s own deep-embedded connectivity of fibres and cables, much of it very ancient, had survived almost intact. Poole made sure his flitter’s systems were locked into this robust net of information and messages. He knew that if she lived, Nicola would be posting messages somewhere, somehow – and if so, he would pick them up.

  But for now, almost at random – looking for migration efforts to support – he flew north, out of Antarctica, and headed for Australia.

  He descended on Melbourne, a city he’d visited many times before; Poole Industries had offices and facilities here.

  Now, at first glance as he descended from the dark sky, as seen by its own artificial light, the place looked much as he remembered it, still huddled behind walls that had protected riverine landscapes during the age of sea level rise. The core of the old town was easily visible, a grid of stately boulevards, and along the banks of the Yarra river was a later development of taller, more airy buildings. Australia as a whole had suffered savagely in the post-Anthropocene climate collapse. With the coming of the Recovery it had found a new balance, with a skim of population living in equilibrium with a restored flora and fauna: gum trees and giant kangaroos. But the old cities, like Melbourne, had survived as nodes of population and relics of the past.

  There was no shelter now in Melbourne, however; the nearest modern Towers were in Canberra, about six hundred kilometres away. And that was where the population of Melbourne was going to have to find refuge, along with the inhabitants of all the coastal communities as far north as Sydney. The more scattered populations of the interior, too, were being gathered at hastily designated evacuation centres. Even in the oceans there were underwater communities, whose elaborate, beautiful habitats were being cut loose of their moorings, floated to the ice-littered surface of the raging seas, and emptied.

  So Poole descended, through thick falls of snow, towards the dying city.

  This was the third day since the Displacement. The heat dumped into the air by water vapour, as the falling snow crystallised out, had kept the air temperature at no lower than freezing p
oint, for now. But whole swathes of Melbourne had already fallen dark. The snow was lying thick on the rooftops, and along those late-second-millennium avenues – any surviving trees must have been cut for firewood.

  And he saw people moving everywhere, in crawling vehicles, even on foot, struggling towards the evacuation centres. From the air they were black dots, lumps of misery against the white snow. Poole had a sudden, sharp memory of the evacuation of Io, right at the start of all this, after the Xeelee incursion at Jupiter. It must be like this all over the world, he realised, communities draining, social structures collapsing, humanity reduced to a rabble with no goal but to find shelter. Each of those dots a human being, living, breathing, feeling. Nobody right now was even able to estimate the number of lives being lost.

  I did this.

  Poole reported his readiness to pick up evacuees to the Melbourne city authorities. Then, following instructions, he allowed automatic systems to lock on to the flitter and bring him down over Federation Square, an open space where bots fitted with huge improvised shovels laboured to keep the snow clear from a central apron. As soon as he was down Poole flung open the doors of his passenger cabin and cargo bay. Before he left Antarctica, both chambers had been fitted out with racks of couches.

  Soon ground crew, sweating in thick snowproof gear, began to supervise the loading of people into the flitter.

  Poole himself didn’t climb down to the ground. Stuck in his cabin, he hastily organised the small party that came crushing through the port into the cabin itself. Three adults, three children – no, four, he saw, one small child, which made it one above the regulation number for the space. He wasn’t about to complain.

  One of the adults, an exhausted-looking woman, settled into the vacant co-pilot seat beside Poole. She picked up that spare child and held her close on her lap, and glanced at Poole. ‘Thank you. We’re the Bartons. From out in the suburbs. We’re an awkward number, but it’s not a time you want to get separated.’ She hugged the little girl close. But, in the sudden heat of the cabin, the child began wriggling out of her heavy coat.