Muriel protested, ‘But even if the Xeelee started out towards Sagittarius – we believe it has a hyperdrive. It could go anywhere. Even that image we just got from the amulet is ambiguous . . .’
Nicola glared at Poole. ‘What image?’
Poole ignored her, for now. ‘Oh, I think it’s heading for the centre. One day there will be – should have been – a kilometres-high statue, to me, there in the core light. There’s something there that the Xeelee care about, something we took from them. So that’s where it will be going. And so am I.’
Shamiso regarded her daughter. ‘And you’re following him?’
Nicola grinned, the green tattoo on her forehead vivid. ‘Sure I am. Because it’s fun.’
Shamiso sighed. ‘No. You’re going because, as has been obvious since the moment you first met, you belong at his side, Nicola. And he at yours.’
Still the family arguments continued.
Poole, restless, walked away from the group once again.
He went back to the window. He could see a handful of bright, drifting stars: the latest ships of the Scattering, still visible across distances comparable to the width of the inner Solar System.
He always carried the amulet, these days, the green tetrahedron delivered from another universe by a dead alien. He kept it in a fold of soft cloth, tucked into his belt. On impulse, he took it out now, and unfolded the cloth, and looked at the amulet sitting there, green on black.
He grasped the amulet in his bare fist. Its vertices were sharp, digging into his flesh. Drawing blood.
Nicola joined him. ‘Careful with that.’
‘Got it back from my mother. Taking it with me.’
‘She mentioned some kind of image, retrieved from the interior.’
‘We only just got it out. Very advanced data compression. Took years to extract it.’
‘You didn’t tell me.’
He shrugged. ‘I didn’t want to have to discuss it in front of them. The family. Let Muriel tell them.’
‘Show me.’
He glanced at her. Then he waved a hand in the air.
A Virtual image coalesced. A jewel-like object, like a black ball, wrapped in an asymmetrical gold blanket, lay on a carpet of stars. And, some distance away, a fine blue band surrounded it.
Poole said, ‘Tell me what you see.’
‘That looks like gravitational lensing. The gold, the way it’s distorted. Light paths distorted by an extreme gravity field . . . A black hole. Like the one at the centre of the Galaxy?’
‘Tell me what you see.’
‘It looks like a black hole with a ring around it. What is it?’
‘A black hole with a ring around it.’
She stared, and grinned. ‘And that’s where we’re going?’
He glared out once more at Sagittarius. Overlaid on the constellation’s stars he saw a reflection of his own face, dimly outlined. The dark complexion, dark hair: the face of a Poole. And that tetrahedral scar on his forehead was livid.
He whispered, ‘Are you out there, somewhere? Can you hear me?
‘My name is Michael Poole.
‘Xeelee, I am coming to get you.’
In the pale rocket light the face of Michael Poole Bazalget was like an upturned coin, but his mouth was set with a kind of determination, his eyes shadowed. I felt unaccountably disturbed. I wondered what this child, and his own children after him, would do with the world.
George Poole, ad 2005
Afterword
This novel and its sequel, Redemption, are a pendant to my ‘Xeelee Sequence’ of stories and novels. The epigraphs to the sections are taken from earlier works in the Sequence.
A recent and accessible account of the theory of wormholes and relativistic time travel is Time Travel and Warp Drives by Allen Everett and Thomas Roman (University of Chicago Press, 2012). A wormhole mouth contained by a frame of exotic matter was suggested first by physicist Matt Visser in 1989 (Phys. Rev. D 39, pp. 3182ff, 1989). The theory of defects in spacetime was worked out by A. Valenkin et al. (see Cosmic Strings and Other Topological Defects by A. Valenkin and E. Shellard, Cambridge University Press, 1994).
New models of the surface of Mercury, as depicted here, have been described by Peplowski et al. (Nature Geoscience, vol. 9, pp. 273ff, 2016). One of the best reviews of concepts for terraforming Mars, Venus and other worlds remains Martyn Fogg’s Terraforming (Society of Automotive Engineers, 1995). Paul Birch set out a design to freeze out Venus’s blanket of air quickly (Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 44, pp. 157–67, 1991), while Stephen L. Gillett, PhD., suggested fixing the planet’s atmospheric carbon dioxide in a chemically exotic solid form (in Analog, November 1999, pp. 38–46).
The ‘paraterraforming’ of Mars, the covering of vast expanses of the surface with glass roofs, was suggested by Richard Taylor in 1992 (Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 45, pp. 341ff). A migrating settlement to avoid the Martian winter was proposed by Charles Cockell (Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 57, pp. 40ff, 2004). My friend Javier Martin-Torres of the Instituto Andaluz de Ciencias de la Tierra, Spain, led a study on a possible, very slight, water cycle on present-day Mars (Nature Geoscience, vol. 8, pp. 357ff, 2015). The ‘Lattice’ life form described here is my own speculation.
A recent survey of the outer planets is Michael Carroll’s Living Among Giants (Springer, 2015). The Jupiter-cycler habitat Gallia Three was partly inspired by the Mars–Earth ‘Aldrin cycler’ proposal (see D. Landau et al., Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 60, pp. 122ff, April 2007).
Speculation that there may be many planets between the stars was given by L. Strigari et al. (‘Nomads of the Galaxy’, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 423, pp. 1856ff, 2012). Suggestions on how to colonise such remote realms have been given by Roy et al. (Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 66, pp. 318ff, 2013). The idea that an Earthlike world far from its parent star might retain a thick hydrogen atmosphere was originated by D. Stevenson (Nature, vol. 400, pp. 32ff, 1999).
The suggestion that the Sun may contain a knot of dark matter in its core has recently been revisited to explain anomalies in the Sun’s energy flow; see for instance Aaron Vincent et al. (Physics Review Letters, vol. 114, 081302, 2015). Abraham Loeb (International Journal of Astrobiology, vol. 13, pp. 337ff, 2014) made the suggestion that life could have evolved in the afterglow of the Big Bang. Natalie Mashian and Abraham Loeb (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 460, pp. 2482–91, 2016) discussed the formation of carbon-rich planets in the early universe.
The space elevator terminology used here is the standard established by the International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC) (www.isec.org); I’m grateful to Dr John Knapman, Director of the ISEC Research Committee. Martian space elevators are discussed in Leaving the Planet by Space Elevator by C. C. Edwards and P. Ragan (Lulu.com, 2006). Martian space elevators are discussed in Leaving the Planet by Space Elevator by C. C. Edwards and P. Ragan (Lulu.com, 2006). The notion of borrowing design ideas from termite mounds for human architecture has been explored by, among others, a collaborative project funded by the Human Frontiers Science Programme and led by Professor J. Scott Turner of the State University of New York. Freezing out sea-level-rise water on the Antarctic ice cap has been suggested by K. Frieler et al. (Earth Systems Dynamics, vol. 7, pp. 203ff, 2016). And the idea of freezing out carbon dioxide there has been suggested by Ernest Agee et al. of Purdue University (Journal of Allied Meteorology and Climatology, vol. 52, pp. 289ff, 2013).
The fate of an Earth deprived of its Sun has been considered for example by Gregory Laughlin and Fred C. Adams (Icarus, vol. 145, pp. 614ff, 2000). Of course, as Michael Poole knows, Fritz Leiber got there first (‘A Pail of Air’, Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1951).
All errors and misapprehe
nsions are of course my sole responsibility.
Stephen Baxter
Northumberland
October 2016
Also By Stephen Baxter From Gollancz:
NON-FICTION
Deep Future
The Science of Avatar
FICTION
Mammoth
Longtusk
Icebones
Behemoth
Reality Dust
Evolution
Flood
Ark
Proxima
Ultima
Obelisk
Xeelee: An Omnibus
Xeelee: Endurance
NORTHLAND
Stone Spring
Bronze Summer
Iron Winter
THE WEB
Gulliverzone
Webcrash
DESTINY’S CHILDREN
Coalescent
Exultant
Transcendent
Resplendent
A TIME ODYSSEY (with Arthur C. Clarke)
Time’s Eye
Sunstorm
Firstborn
TIME’S TAPESTRY
Emperor
Conqueror
Navigator
Weaver
The Medusa Chronicles (with Alastair Reynolds)
The Massacre of Mankind
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Gollancz
an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2017 by Gollancz.
Copyright © Stephen Baxter, 2017
The moral right of Stephen Baxter to be identified as
the author of this work has been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior permission of both the copyright owner and the
above publisher of this book.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library.
ISBN (eBook) 978 1 473 21720 1
www.stephen-baxter.com
www.orionbooks.co.uk
www.gollancz.co.uk
Xeelee: Vengeance Page 38
