Vacuum Diagrams

by Stephen Baxter

  Larionova looked up at Scholes. "Kevan, I called you a romantic. But I think you were almost correct, after all. But not quite. Remember we've suggested that the parasite — the infestation — changes the mercuric's behavior, causing it to make its climb."

  "What are you saying?"

  Suddenly, Larionova saw it all. "I don't believe this mercuric is descended from the starfarers — the builders of the ship in Caloris. I think the rise of the mercurics' intelligence was a later development; the mercurics grew to consciousness here, on Mercury. I do think the mercurics are descended from something that came to Mercury on that ship, though. A pet, or a food animal — Lethe, even some equivalent of a stomach bacteria. Five billion years is time enough for anything. And, given the competition for space near the short-lived vents, there's plenty of encouragement for the development of intelligence, down inside this frozen sea."

  "And the starfarers themselves?" Scholes asked. "What became of them? Did they die?"

  "No," she said. "No, I don't think so. But they, too, suffered huge evolutionary changes. I think they did devolve, Scholes; in fact, I think they lost their awareness.

  "But one thing persisted within them, across all this desert of time. And that was the starfarers' vestigial will to return — to the surface, one day, and at last to the stars..."

  It was a will which had survived even the loss of consciousness itself, somewhere in the long, stranded aeons: a relic of awareness long since transmuted to a deeper biochemical urge — a will to return home, still embedded within a once-intelligent species reduced by time to a mere parasitic infection.

  But it was a home which, surely, could no longer exist.

  The mercuric's golden cilia twitched once more, in a great wave of motion which shuddered down its ice-flecked body.

  Then it was still.

  Larionova stood up; her knees and calves were stiff and cold, despite the suit's heater. "Come on," she said to Scholes and Dixon. "You'd better get your team off the ice as soon as possible; I'll bet the universities have their first exploratory teams down here half a day after we pass Earth the news."

  Dixon nodded. "And Thoth?"

  "Thoth? I'll call Superet. I guess I've an asteroid to order..."

  And then she thought, at last I can sleep. Sleep and get back to work.

  With Scholes and Dixon, she trudged across the dust-strewn ice to the bubble-shelters.

  She could feel the Ice under her belly... but above her there was no Ice, no water even, an infinite nothing into which the desperate pulses of her blinded eyes disappeared without echo.

  Astonishingly — impossibly — she was, after all, above the Ice. How could this be? Was she in some immense upper cavern, its Ice roof too remote to see? Was this the nature of the Universe, a hierarchy of caverns within caverns?

  She knew she would never understand. But it didn't seem to matter. And, as her awareness faded, she felt the Seeker inside her subside to peace.

  A final warmth spread out within her. Consciousness splintered like melting ice, flowing away through the closing tunnels of her memory.

  "At last," Eve told me, "the Thoth Sun probe hardware was ready. Now, all that was needed was the software..."

  Lieserl

  A.D. 3951

  LIESERL WAS SUSPENDED INSIDE the body of the Sun.

  She spread her arms wide and lifted up her face. She was deep within the Sun's convective zone, the broad mantle of turbulent material beneath the glowing photosphere; convective cells larger than the Earth, tangled with ropes of magnetic flux, filled the world around her. She could hear the roar of the great convective founts, smell the stale photons diffusing out towards space from the remote fusing core.

  She felt as if she were inside some huge cavern. Looking up she could see how the photosphere formed a glowing roof over her world perhaps fifty thousand miles above her, and the boundary of the inner radiative zone was a shining, impenetrable floor another fifty thousand miles beneath.

  Lieserl? Can you hear me? Are you all right?

  Kevan Scholes. It sounded like her mother's voice, she thought.

  She thrust her arms down by her sides and swooped up, letting the floor and roof of the cavern-world wheel around her. She opened up her senses, so that she could feel the turbulence as a whisper against her skin, the glow of hard photons from the core as a gentle warmth against her face.

  Lieserl? Lieserl?

  She remembered how her mother had enfolded her in her arms. "The Sun, Lieserl. The Sun..."

  Even at the moment she was born she knew something was wrong.

  A face loomed over her: wide, smooth, smiling. The cheeks were damp, the glistening eyes huge. "Lieserl. Oh, Lieserl..."

  Lieserl. My name, then.

  She explored the face before her, studying the lines around the eyes, the humorous upturn of the mouth, the strong nose. It was an intelligent, lived-in face. This is a good human being, he thought. Good stock...

  Good stock? What am I thinking of?

  This was impossible. She felt terrified of her own explosive consciousness. She shouldn't even be able to focus her eyes yet...

  She tried to touch her mother's face. Her own hand was still moist with amniotic fluid — but it was growing visibly, the bones extending and broadening, filling out the loose skin like a glove.

  She opened her mouth. It was dry, her gums already sore with budding teeth.

  She tried to speak.

  Her mother's eyes brimmed with tears. "Oh, Lieserl. My impossible baby."

  Strong arms reached beneath her. She felt weak, helpless, consumed by growth. Her mother lifted her up, high in the air. Bony adult fingers dug into the aching flesh of her back; her head lolled backwards, the expanding muscles still too weak to support the burgeoning weight of her head. She could sense other adults surrounding her, the bed in which she'd been born, the outlines of a room.

  She was held before a window, with her body tipped forward. Her head lolled; spittle laced across her chin.

  An immense light flooded her eyes.

  She cried out.

  Her mother enfolded her in her arms. "The Sun, Lieserl. The Sun..."

  The first few days were the worst. Her parents — impossibly tall, looming figures — took her through brightly lit rooms, a garden always flooded with sunlight. She learned to sit up. The muscles in her back fanned out, pulsing as they grew. To distract her from the unending pain, clowns tumbled over the grass before her, chortling through their huge red lips, then popping out of existence in clouds of pixels.

  She grew explosively, feeding all the time, a million impressions crowding into her soft sensorium.

  There seemed to be no limit to the number of rooms in this place, this House. Slowly she began to understand that some of the rooms were Virtual chambers — blank screens against which any number of images could be projected. But even so, the House must comprise hundreds of rooms. And she — with her parents — wasn't alone here, she slowly realized. There were other people, but at first they kept away, out of sight, apparent only by their actions: the meals they prepared, the toys they left her.

  On the third day her parents took her on a trip by flitter. It was the first time she'd been away from the House, its grounds. She stared through the bulbous windows, pressing her nose to heated glass. The journey was an arc over a toy-like landscape; a breast of blue ocean curved away from the land, all around her. This was the island of Skiros, her mother told her, and the sea was called the Aegean. The House was the largest construct on the island; it was a jumble of white, cubeshaped buildings, linked by corridors and surrounded by garden — grass, trees. Further out there were bridges and roads looping through the air above the ground, houses like a child's bricks sprinkled across glowing hillsides.

  Everything was drenched in heavy, liquid sunlight.

  The flitter snuggled at last against a grassy sward close to the shore of an ocean. Lieserl's mother lifted her out and placed her — on her stretching, unsteady l
egs — on the rough, sandy grass.

  Hand in hand, the little family walked down a short slope to the beach.

  The Sun burned through thinned air from an unbearably blue sky. Her vision seemed telescopic. She looked at distant groups of children and adults playing — far away, halfway to the horizon — and it was as if she was among them herself. Her feet, still uncertain, pressed into gritty, moist sand. She could taste the brine salt on the air; it seemed to permeate her very skin.

  She found mussels clinging to a ruined pier. She prised them away with a toy spade, and gazed, fascinated, at their slime-dripping feet.

  She sat on the sand with her parents, feeling her light costume stretch over her still-growing limbs. They played a simple game, of counters moving over a floating Virtual board, pictures of ladders and hissing snakes. There was laughter, mock complaints by her father, elaborate pantomimes of cheating.

  Her senses were electric. It was a wonderful day, full of light and joy, extraordinarily vivid sensations. Her parents loved her — she could see that in the way they moved with each other, came to her, played with her.

  They must know she was different; but they didn't seem to care.

  She didn't want to be different — to be wrong. She closed her mind against the thoughts, and concentrated on the snakes, the ladders, the sparkling counters.

  Every morning she woke up in a bed that felt too small.

  Lieserl liked the garden. She liked to watch the flowers straining their tiny, pretty faces towards the Sun, as the great light climbed patiently across the sky. The sunlight made the flowers grow, her father told her. Maybe she was like a flower, she thought, growing too quickly in all this sunlight.

  On the fifth day she was taken to a wide, irregularly shaped, colorful classroom. This room was full of children — other children! — and toys, drawings, books. Sunlight flooded the room; perhaps there was some clear dome stretched over the open walls.

  The children sat on the floor and played with paints and dolls, or talked earnestly to brilliantly-colored Virtual figures — smiling birds, tiny clowns. The children turned to watch as she came in with her mother, their faces round and bright, like dapples of sunlight through leaves. She'd never been so close to other children before. Were these children different, too?

  One small girl scowled at her, and Lieserl quailed against her mother's legs. But her mother's familiar warm hands pressed into her back. "Go ahead. It's all right."

  As she stared at the unknown girl's scowling face, Lieserl's questions, her too-adult, too-sophisticated doubts, seemed to evaporate. Suddenly, all that mattered to her — all that mattered in the world — was that she should be accepted by these children — that they wouldn't know she was different.

  An adult approached her: a man, young, thin, his features bland with youth. He wore a jumpsuit colored a ludicrous orange; in the sunlight, the glow of it shone up over his chin. He smiled at her. "Lieserl, isn't it? My name's Michael. We're glad you're here." In a louder, exaggerated voice, he said, "Aren't we, people?"

  He was answered by a rehearsed, chorused "Yes."

  "Now come and we'll find something for you to do," Michael said. He led her across the child-littered floor to a space beside a small boy. The boy — red-haired, with startling blue eyes — was staring at a Virtual puppet which endlessly formed and reformed: the figure two, collapsing into two snowflakes, two swans, two dancing children; the figure three, followed by three bears, three fish swimming in the air, three cakes. The boy mouthed the numbers, following the tinny voice of the Virtual. "Two. One. Two and one is three."

  Michael introduced her to the boy — Tommy — and she sat down with him. Tommy, she was relieved to find, was so fascinated by his Virtual that he scarcely seemed aware that Lieserl was present — let alone different.

  The number Virtual ran through its cycle and winked out of existence. "Bye-bye, Tommy! Goodbye, Lieserl!"

  Tommy was resting on his stomach, his chin cupped in his palms. Lieserl, awkwardly, copied his posture. Now Tommy turned to her — without appraisal, merely looking at her, with unconscious acceptance.

  Lieserl said, "Can we see it again?"

  He yawned and poked a finger into one nostril. "No. Let's see another. There's a great one about the pre-Cambrian explosion—"

  "The what?"

  He waved a hand dismissively. "You know, the Burgess Shale and all that. Wait till you see Hallucigenia crawling over your neck..."

  The children played, and learned, and napped. Later, the girl who'd scowled at Lieserl — Ginnie — started some trouble. She poked fun at the way Lieserl's bony wrists stuck out of her sleeves (Lieserl's growth rate was slowing, but she was still growing out of her clothes during a day). Then — unexpectedly, astonishingly — Ginnie started to bawl, claiming that Lieserl had walked through her Virtual. When Michael came over Lieserl started to explain, calmly and rationally, that Ginnie must be mistaken; but Michael told her not to cause such distress, and for punishment she was forced to sit away from the other children for ten minutes, without stimulation.

  It was all desperately, savagely unfair. It was the longest ten minutes of Lieserl's life. She glowered at Ginnie, filled with resentment.

  The next day she found herself looking forward to going to the room with the children again. She set off with her mother through sunlit corridors. They reached the room Lieserl remembered — there was Michael, smiling a little wistfully to her, and Tommy, and the girl Ginnie — but Ginnie seemed different: childlike, unformed...

  At least a head shorter than Lieserl.

  Lieserl tried to recapture that delicious enmity of the day before, but it vanished even as she conjured it. Ginnie was just a kid.

  She felt as if something had been stolen from her.

  Her mother squeezed her hand. "Come on. Let's find a new room for you to play in."

  Every day was unique. Every day Lieserl spent in a new place, with new people.

  The world glowed with sunlight. Shining points trailed endlessly across the sky: low-orbit habitats and comet nuclei, tethered for power and fuel. People walked through a sea of information, with access to the Virtual libraries available anywhere in the world, at a subvocalized command. Lieserl learned quickly. She read about her parents. They were scientists, studying the Sun. They weren't alone; there were many people, huge resources, devoted to the Sun.

  In the libraries there was a lot of material about the Sun, little of which she could follow. But she sensed some common threads.

  Once, people had taken the Sun for granted. No longer. Now — for some reason — they feared it.

  On the ninth day Lieserl studied herself in a Virtual holomirror. She had the image turn around, so she could see the shape of her skull, the lie of her hair. There was still some childish softness in her face, she thought, but the woman inside her was emerging already, as if her childhood was a receding tide. She would look like her mother — Phillida — in the strong-nosed set of her face, her large, vulnerable eyes; but she would have the sandy coloring of her father, George.

  Lieserl looked about nine years old. But she was just nine days old.

  She bade the Virtual break up; it shattered into a million tiny images of her face which drifted away like flies in the sunlit air.

  Phillida and George were fine parents, she thought. They spent their time away from her working through technical papers — which scrolled through the air like falling leaves — and exploring elaborate, onion-ring Virtual models of stars. Although they were both clearly busy they gave themselves to her without hesitation. She moved in a happy world of smiles, sympathy and support.

  Her parents loved her unreservedly. But that wasn't always enough.

  She started to come up with more complicated, detailed questions. Like, what was the mechanism by which she was growing so rapidly? She didn't seem to eat more than the other children she encountered; what could be fueling her absurd growth rates?

  How did she know so much? She'd been
born self-aware, with even the rudiments of language in her head. The Virtuals she interacted with in the classrooms were fun, and she always seemed to learn something new; but she absorbed no more than scraps of knowledge through them compared to the feast of insight with which she awoke each morning.

  What had taught her, in the womb? What was teaching her now?

  She had no answers. But perhaps — somehow — it was all connected with this strange, global obsession with the Sun. She remembered her childish fantasy — that she might be like a flower, straining up too quickly to the Sun. Maybe, she wondered now, there was some grain of truth in that insight.

  The strange little family had worked up some simple, homely rituals together. Lieserl's favorite was the game, each evening, of snakes and ladders. George brought home an old set — a real board made of card, and wooden counters. Already Lieserl was too old for the game; but she loved the company of her parents, her father's elaborate jokes, the simple challenge of the game, the feel of the worn, antique counters.

  Phillida showed her how to use Virtuals to produce her own game boards. Her first efforts, on her eleventh day, were plain, neat forms, little more than copies of the commercial boards she'd seen. But soon she began to experiment. She drew a huge board of a million squares, which covered a whole room — she could walk through the board, a planar sheet of light at about waist-height. She crammed the board with intricate, curling snakes, vast ladders, vibrantly glowing squares — detail piled on detail.

  The next morning she walked with eagerness to the room where she'd built her board — and was immediately disappointed. Her efforts seemed pale, static, derivative — obviously the work of a child, despite the assistance of the Virtual software.

  She wiped the board clean, leaving a grid of pale squares floating in the air. Then she started to populate it again — but this time with animated half-human snakes, slithering "ladders" of a hundred forms. She'd learned to access the Virtual libraries, and she plundered the art and history of a hundred centuries to populate her board.