Xeelee: Vengeance

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Hey,’ Poole said gently. ‘You need to keep wearing that. Just in case we have to come down quick.’

  ‘Is she OK on my lap like this? I know she doesn’t have a harness.’

  ‘I’m not planning any stunt flying. You’re her mother?’

  She grinned, tired, and pushed a hank of wet hair back from her head. ‘Her great-grandmother.’

  The little girl was staring at Poole, with one small finger stuck up a nostril; a glove dangled on a thread from her sleeve. Something in that big-eyed glare made Poole uncomfortable.

  He asked, ‘Do you know who I am?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who, then?’

  ‘You’re the man who’s driving the airplane. Granny, are we there yet?’

  ‘Not quite, sweet pea.’

  At last they got clearance from the ground.

  As the flitter lifted smoothly into the air, Poole felt an odd pang of nostalgia for his long, solitary missions in deep space, of which he had grown increasingly fond. Sabbaticals, his mother had called such jaunts, and she had tried to break him of the habit. Well, now he was at the other extreme. He had made it to the Oort Cloud, he supposed, but here he was crammed with strangers inside a tiny ship, his mission a mere six-hundred-kilometre hop.

  And it wasn’t even under his control. As soon as he lifted from Melbourne, the flitter was taken over by a hastily improvised traffic control system and driven north-east, skirting the great up-draughts around the Australian Alps. The control was necessary; the airspace was so crowded that he could see the lights of other craft streaming through the snow all around him, and, close by, a lane of empty vehicles coming back the other way. He was kept low enough, too, to make out ground traffic: vehicles on the roads, and the glittering lights of monorail trains.

  He was ordered to make a detour around a particularly savage storm system over Bombala. The traffic got still more jammed up, slowing them all down even further. Poole was getting used to this. The vast climate adjustments were not proceeding in an orderly or uniform fashion: all that lost heat energy seemed to rage as it leaked into space. So, vast hurricanes stalked the oceans and battered at the coasts, and the snow came in blizzards driven by ferocious winds.

  His passengers didn’t utter a word of protest or complaint. They had water and food bars and basic medical supplies, from packs handed to them by the ground crews. And after the first hour they seemed to be falling asleep, including that child on the lap of her great-grandmother next to him.

  An alarm chimed softly: a privacy notice. He hit a tab that would cast a Virtual translucent curtain around his pilot’s position, making him inaudible and all but invisible to his passengers.

  Harry’s head materialised in the air in front of him.

  Harry looked exhausted, unshaven, his eyes rimmed red. But he smiled at Poole. ‘Your passengers are asleep, I see. Sweet, isn’t it? It’s good to put yourself in somebody else’s care for a while. A vacation from responsibility.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. What do you want, Harry?’

  ‘Just to talk. A few minutes. When I saw you were in the air, I took the chance. In the air and away from your mother, of course.’

  ‘You’ve been watching me.’

  ‘Of course I’ve been watching you. There’s still a massive but discreet security operation revolving around you, Michael. I’d have thought you’d guessed that. Right now you’re the most famous human being on the planet. Or the most notorious. What did you expect? To most people on Earth the Xeelee was an abstraction. Even what it did to Mars was just pictures from the sky. You, though, have thrown us all into an Ice Age. In itself, this was a hugely destructive act. You’re being called a mass murderer, Michael. Or, the most notorious fascist since the worst of the Anthropocene. After all, you didn’t consult anybody before making a decision on behalf of all mankind. We Pooles have probably been getting it in the neck since the time of Michael Poole Bazalget, but you’ve taken the crown.’

  ‘I had no choice—’

  ‘I know that! But for now, if you insist on being out in the world, if you won’t just stay back in Princess Elizabeth Land as your mother suggested, stay anonymous, OK?’

  ‘I’m surprised you’ve got the time to talk.’

  ‘Even Stewards get time off, you know.’

  Poole said grudgingly, ‘I saw your broadcast. The first day. You did well. It must have been a Lethe-spawned shock for all of you in the government.’

  ‘We did have help,’ Harry admitted. ‘From the artificial sentiences in particular – Gea, for instance. When you pushed the world through that big electric-blue hoop, Michael, they were quick to begin figuring out the implications. So we got off to a good start. But we’re already thinking through the wider consequences, the longer term.’

  ‘The longer term?’

  ‘Well, we didn’t defeat the Xeelee, we just ran away. It might take a while for the Xeelee and its drones to come out here, but we don’t imagine we can hide away a planet like Earth for ever, not even a thousand AU out. Although we need to think about ways to try. But you’ve bought us time, Michael. And most of the people alive on Earth before the Xeelee came are still alive, because of what you did. You have to hang on to that.’

  Some of Poole’s reflexive cynicism cut back in. ‘What’s with the comforting words, Harry? Are you angling for something?’

  Harry shook his head. ‘Not this time. Just this once . . . I do have two things to tell you. One is you have clearance for your final approach to Canberra. I’ll get off the line. And the second—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We found Emry for you. Downloading now. Stay safe, son.’ And he winked out of existence.

  Nicola’s damaged flitter had tumbled with Earth through the wormhole, and had come down on the other side of the Pacific: in the Andes, close to an isolated community of Quechua speakers. Thinking about it, Poole realised she had been lucky to come down on dry land at all. Reeling out of the fight with the Xeelee, descending almost at random, she’d had a seventy per cent chance of coming down in the ocean, or on the ice – and if she had, in the aftermath of the Displacement, her chances would have been poor.

  As it was, local people had been able to save her. They extracted her, broken leg and all, from the wreck of her flitter. And then, a day later, when the snow started to fall, she in turn had needed to save them, by helping them rig up cover over their small town hall, and using the flitter’s GUTengine to pipe in heat and light.

  Thus she survived.

  Poole was able to home in on a small transmitter embedded in that Poole Industries GUTengine, a routine relay of maintenance data back to the manufacturer. But it took days for him to get clearance for such a flight, such was the chaos in the air of Cold Earth.

  At last, on the tenth day after the Displacement, he flew around a freezing planet. Over ice-coated oceans.

  The snow was over now. In the end there had been enough water vapour in the air to deposit a global layer of snow ten or twenty metres thick. The oceans, meanwhile, were steadily cooling too. On the surface waters, in fact, even at the equator, the ice floes had started to form from the very first day.

  But by the seventh or eighth day the first great pulse of heat loss was over. The snow stopped falling, the clouds had dissipated – the skies had cleared for the last time. The oceans were already covered by a uniform skim of ice, steadily thickening. Earth lay still, under stars like bone. Even the rivers had frozen solid, an eerie sight.

  And, with the skies permanently clear, there was nothing now to trap the remnant heat. Nothing to stop the temperature from falling, and falling.

  Poole landed his flitter over the position of the GUTdrive beacon, buried somewhere under the snow. Then he staggered through the clear, deep cold air, broke through the snow layers with the help of shovel-wielding bots, and forced his way into the buried
town hall.

  When he cracked the roof, hot, moist air billowed into his eyes. He saw circles of faces, wide-eyed, shocked, scared, relieved. There were even a few llamas, off by one wall, grubby, treading in their own dung. And in one corner, her legs hidden under heaps of colourful blankets – skinsuit torn open at the neck – holding a set of pan pipes, evidently hand-made—

  ‘You took your time,’ Nicola said. And she went back to picking out a tune on the pipes.

  ‘I—’

  She looked at him now. ‘What?’

  ‘I haven’t slept. Not since—’

  ‘Hush.’ She got up now, limped over, and wrapped her own blanket around his shoulders.

  SEVEN

  We are just a handful of people in this desolate, remote place. And yet here a new epoch is born. They are listening to us, you know – listening in the halls of history. And we will be remembered forever.

  Admiral Kard, ad 12659

  64

  ad 3660

  Ten years after the Displacement of Earth, Michael Poole, thirty-nine years old, wrapped in a non-reflective skinsuit, stood on the surface of Chiron.

  Chiron was one of a wandering class of natural bodies called, in ancient jargon, ‘centaurs’. It followed a leisurely, eccentric, fifty-year orbit through the Solar System, between the circles of Saturn and Uranus. Its ground was stained dark with organics, purple and crimson, exotic chemistry created by the pallid energy of the distant Sun. Only the fact that the rock percentage outweighed the ice made this worldlet an icy rock rather than a dirty snowball.

  Poole, cautiously, tested the gravity; he flexed his feet, and drifted slowly up off the ground. He knew the gravity was only around one per cent of Earth’s – barely there at all. Rather like himself, he thought. After all, this Virtual copy, though full of memory and self-aware, wasn’t Michael Poole. Barely there at all.

  But Chiron, as an inhabited refuge, was meant to be elusive. Its surface, heavily but subtly modified, bristled with spindly cones of ice-rock, some waist-high, some towering over Poole’s head. These were coated with smart material that made them work as solar energy collectors in the sunlight, waste heat radiators in the shadow. From a distance it would appear that the energy of the Sun washed through an inert mass, without modification, without evidence of occupancy. In fact that flow of radiation was trapped, used, the waste heat scrambled and released, by the new inhabitants of Chiron.

  In the ten years since Earth had been thrown out of the inner System, humanity had learned to hide.

  The Xeelee and its collaborators, or symbiotes, had been observed operating actively as far out as Saturn, so far. Yet mankind survived, in caches like this even within that orbit, and in greater numbers further out – notably, of course, on Earth itself. So the Stewards’ mandate was that there should be minimal evidence of human activity, anywhere. Certainly no GUTships flew, big, bright energetic objects.

  And that meant, if Poole wished to visit the planetary System, it could only be by the projection of Virtual copies on elusive, tight-beam neutrino links.

  This little world had its own natural wonders, however. Remarkably, Chiron had rings, like Saturn’s, thin bands of water-ice particles orbiting a hundred kilometres or so above the surface. Poole was close to the equator here, so the rings were edge-on. He leaned back, lifting his head, trying to convince himself he could make out the rings’ elusive glitter.

  A few paces away, a hatch opened in the rough ground, a lid of rock and ice. It had been well concealed, camouflaged like the rest of the surface. From a dark interior a figure in a skinsuit jumped up with accustomed ease, to stand by Poole. Vapour plumed around his feet, volatiles stirred by leakage from the suit – Poole’s unreal footsteps made no such marks, a failure of the simulation.

  Behind a faceplate, in the low, distant sunlight, Poole made out the features of a grinning Jack Grantt.

  ‘Michael! Welcome to Chiron. Or, as we sometimes call it, Little Mars.’

  Uncle Jack. Poole had to grin back as they stumbled through the low gravity towards each other.

  From what Poole could see of him, Grantt was scarcely changed from the days when he had been busily prospecting for advanced native life on Mars. If anything he was a little younger looking, and that wouldn’t be a surprise. Mankind had responded to the great shock of the Displacement in unexpected ways. After the initial pulse of casualties, the birth rate had surged, and there had been a clamour for already stretched medical services to provide more AntiSenescence treatments. People wanted to live, they wanted children, and wanted them to live too. And a younger-looking Jack Grantt was an exemplar of that.

  Now Grantt held out a hand to shake. Poole’s gloved hand disintegrated to pixels as it passed through Grantt’s.

  ‘Ouch,’ Grantt said. ‘Sorry. Those consistency routines. We’re not used to it, not any more. We don’t have the spare capacity for Virtuals here.’ He was gazing at Poole, oddly fascinated. ‘In fact I’ve never spent much time around Virtual people. Aside from a few Barsoomian gamers. You aren’t Michael Poole, are you? Because Poole himself is light-days away, on Earth. Probably awake, doing stuff, leading his own life. When this visit is done we’ll transmit your memory store back home, where you will be synced back to the original, and nothing else will be left of you, the entity standing in front of me now . . . That doesn’t trouble you?’

  Poole shrugged. ‘Best not to think about it.’

  Grantt looked directly at Poole. ‘Of course if I was a psychologist instead of a biologist, I might think you’re putting yourself through this, these mini-deaths, as a kind of punishment.’

  Poole said nothing to that.

  ‘Well, Michael, deep down, I don’t know what you are. And frankly I can’t imagine how it must be for you to have to live with what you did. But for sure I’m glad you did it. And my people here will be glad to see you.’ He raised a welcoming arm. ‘Come inside.’

  65

  Inside Chiron, exiled Martians had carved out a hollow world.

  Buried a couple of kilometres deep within the carcass of the worldlet, the main chamber was roughly egg-shaped, and full of light. Walls of ice, smoothed over, sealed behind plastic, glistened purple-red in the light of sunlight strips. The gravity was much as it had been on the surface, one per cent of Earth’s – or about three per cent of Mars’s, Poole reminded himself – so little it hardly made any difference, and he saw people leaping high and confident, swarming over nets and cables flung across the open inner volumes.

  Of course breathable air, clean water, food were essentials, and hidden out of sight there were no doubt hydroponic banks and recycling suites to ensure those provisions. Poole imagined there would be food machines too, used only as a backup, power-hungry as they were, and with visible signatures.

  But here, out in the open where people lived, old-fashioned farms sprawled across the inner walls, a relic of the long-vanished age of agriculture on Earth. Cabbages grew huge. Meanwhile people lived in houses on stalks of insulation-clad ice that rose from the floor, or stuck out of the walls. Grantt told Poole the stalks had been deliberately left in place when the hollow had been carved out.

  The place was busy, in a low-key, domestic way. People were working in the fields, or fixing up the houses, or they just gathered in little knots in the air, talking. In one corner was what looked like a school group: young kids and a couple of adults clustered around a chicken coop. In another, a party was working its way down one of the sunlight strips, cleaning, polishing, mending. They cast huge shadows across the habitat.

  This bubble of light was a place where people were getting on with their lives, so much so that few of them even glanced over at Poole, the stranger, the famous – or notorious – world-mover. He felt all the better for it. Comforted, almost.

  ‘I was always confident we would survive here, once we gathered a decent population,’
Grantt said, guiding Poole through the space. ‘I mean, we already had the necessary skills, we Martians. The whole of Chiron is only a couple of hundred kilometres across; we were building arcologies bigger than that on Mars. And Chiron is generous. It is twenty-five per cent water ice by volume, and full of organic chemistry. At first we considered spinning her up to give us normal gravity – I mean Mars-normal.’

  ‘But that would have made you too obvious.’

  ‘To the Xeelee, yes. We instinctively stealthed everything we did, from the beginning. We came here to hide, after all. And to keep an eye on the Xeelee.

  ‘We broke up most of the ships that brought us here, and took the salvage down into the ice. All our internal communication is by cable – closed systems. We have a number of GUTengines, taken from the ships, which we could dig out of store if we really needed a lot of power in a hurry. Otherwise we’re living, ninety-nine per cent, off the flow of energy from the sunlight that hits Chiron’s surface naturally.

  ‘We live modestly, and quietly, and so far it’s worked. And,’ he said testily, ‘when you go back you might tell that father of yours and his colleagues in the Stewardship that we don’t need directives and reprimands and lectures on how to stay stealthed. We know. We’ve already survived a decade a few astronomical units from a rampaging Xeelee. In fact Stewardship messages are themselves among the worst compromises to our security . . .’

  Poole grinned. His father knew all about Martians. Most of the ten million former inhabitants of the planet, after all, had finished up as refugees on Earth itself, and most of them were still there, on Cold Earth, out in the Oort Cloud. In fact, in the early days after the Displacement, the Martians had made invaluable contributions to Earth’s survival: unlike most Earthborn they had personal experience of life on a cold, all but airless world.