Vacuum Diagrams

by Stephen Baxter

  "Just like that?"

  He studied me with a frank knowledge. "You have someone to say goodbye to?"

  "...No. I guess you know that. But tell me one thing. Why don't the Qax fly the damn ship themselves?"

  He stared at me. "Have you ever seen a Qax?"

  A million years ago the race we call the Spline made a strategic decision.

  They were ocean-going at that time, great whalelike creatures with articulated limbs. They'd already been space travelers for millennia.

  Then they rebuilt themselves.

  They plated over their flesh, hardened their internal organs... and left the surface of their planet, rising like mile-wide, eye-studded balloons. Now they're living ships, feeding patiently on the thin substance that drifts between the planets.

  Since then they've hired themselves out to fifty races, including the Qax; but since they're not dependent on any one world, or star, or type of environment, they're their own masters — and always will be.

  But there are drawbacks... mostly for their passengers.

  Our cabin was a red-lit hole scooped out of the Spline's gut. Our journey to the Qax home world meant three days in that stinking gloom. It was like being swallowed.

  As a precondition of accepting our commission, the Spline sold us each an emergency beacon. It was a sort of limp bracelet. "It's a quantum-inseparability beacon. You work it by squeezing its mid-portion," Lipsey said. "The Spline guarantee your rescue, anywhere within the Galaxy. Of course, the price of the rescue's negotiable. Higher if you don't want the Qax to know about it."

  "I don't want this."

  He shrugged. "Have it on credit. You might need it one day."

  "Maybe." I wrapped the bracelet around my wrist; it nestled into place like a living thing.

  Disgusting. I missed human technology.

  We entered orbit around the Qax planet.

  Our air and water were re-absorbed by the cabin walls, then an orifice dilated and we passed through a bloody tube to space. The stars were clean and cold. I breathed freely for the first time since we'd left Earth.

  Lipsey's two-man flitter was extruded from another sphincter, and we spiraled over the Qax world. Under the murky atmosphere I saw a planet-wide ocean. Submerged volcano mouths glowed like coals. There were no cities, no lights. "It's a goddamn swamp," I concluded.

  Lipsey nodded cheerfully, intent on his inexpert piloting. "Yes. It's like the primeval Earth."

  "So where are the Qax? Undersea?"

  "Wait and see."

  We landed and stepped out onto a spaceport, a metal island in a bubbling quagmire. Steam misted up my face plate. Lipsey lifted a suitcase-sized translator box down from the flitter. "Meet our client," he said.

  "Where?"

  He smiled. "Here! All around you."

  The translator box woke up. "This is the human pilot we discussed?"

  I jumped, whirled around. Nothing but swamp.

  "Yes," said Lipsey, his tone deep and reassuring. "This is Jim Bolder."

  "And this is really one of your best?" boomed the Qax.

  I bristled. "Lipsey, what is this?"

  He smiled, then stood beside me and pointed. "Look down there. What do you see?"

  I stared. "Turbulent mud." Hexagonal convection cells a hand's breadth across, quite stable: the ocean was like a huge pan of boiling water.

  Lipsey said: "All known forms of life are based on a cellular organization. But there are no rules about what form the cells have to take..."

  I thought it over. "You're telling me that those convection cells are the basis of the Qax biology?"

  I stared at the sea, trying to perceive the limits of the mighty creature. I imagined I could see thoughts hopping over the rippling meniscus like flies...

  "Can we proceed?" the Qax broke in. The box gave it an appropriate voice: deep-bellied, like an irritable god.

  I tried to concentrate. "Show me the Xeelee ship," I said.

  "In time. Do you know what we want of you?"

  "No."

  "What do you know of galactic drift?" the Qax began. "Your astronomers first detected it in your twentieth century..."

  The galaxies are streaming.

  Like a huge liner our Galaxy is soaring through space at several hundred miles a second. That's maybe no surprise — until you learn that all the other galaxies, as far as we can see in any direction, are migrating, too. And they're all heading for the same spot.

  Standing there on that shiny island in a mud sea, I struggled with the scale of it all. Throughout a sphere a billion light years wide, galaxies are converging like moths to a flame.

  But what is the flame? And — who lit it?

  "We call it the Great Attractor," said the Qax. "We know something about its properties. It is three hundred million light years from here. And it's massive: a hundred thousand times the mass of our Galaxy, crammed into a region about half the Galaxy's diameter."

  A cold mist settled over us; the Qax restlessly stirred its oceanic muscles. I felt like a flea on the back of a hippopotamus.

  "We need to understand what is happening out there," the Qax went on. "Now: we have trading contacts throughout the Local Cluster, and we've been analyzing sightings of Xeelee ships. We had the idea of trying to track down the Xeelee Prime Radiant — their source and center of activities. We have done so."

  "The Prime Radiant is at the center of the Galaxy," I said.

  Lipsey smiled thinly. "You're not thinking big enough, Bolder. The Xeelee transcend any one Galaxy."

  I thought that through... and my mouth dried up. "You're not suggesting," I asked slowly, "that the Xeelee are responsible for the Great Attractor? That they're building it?"

  "We plan to send a probe to find out," said the Qax. "Our captured Xeelee ship is the technology we need to cross such distances."

  "Which is where I come in?"

  "Do you accept the commission, Bolder?"

  "Yes," I said immediately, staring fixedly at the translator box. To fly a Xeelee fighter to the center of everything... my only fear now was that I'd be turned down.

  Lipsey interrupted smoothly: "Subject to a suitable fee, of course." He smiled like a good agent.

  Surrounded by the primeval murk, we began discussing powers of ten.

  We returned to Lipsey's flitter.

  "Lipsey... why do the Qax care? What turns them on?"

  "Short-term profit," he said simply. "This is a young planet, not all that stable. Hot spots come and go, and individuals tend to be broken up quickly.

  "As a result they don't have a strong sense of self, and they find it hard to plan for — or even imagine — the future." His face creased with wonder. "There are only a few hundred of them, you know, each of them miles across... but thanks to their peculiar biology their awareness and material control go right down to the molecular level. They've developed a high, miniaturized technology; it's the basis of their commercial power. Of course," he smiled, "they trade by proxy."

  I frowned. "We're millions of years from a crisis over this Great Attractor. If they're so short-lived, why spend so much on gathering data about it?"

  "Profit. With a secret as big as this they can name their own price."

  We rendezvoused with a Spline craft, orbiting the Qax star. The Spline was a gunship. We scurried around huge walls covered with thirty-feet-wide scales, and I peered curiously into hundreds of weapon emplacements — and then, drifting through the Spline's long shadow, we found the Xeelee ship.

  A Xeelee nightfighter is a hundred-yard sycamore seed wrought in black. The wings sweep back from the central pilot's pod, flattening and thinning until at their trailing edges they are so fine you can see the stars through them.

  Lipsey caught me gawping. "Save it. You've seen nothing yet..."

  The pilot's pod was an open framework about my height. A human crash couch had been cemented inside it. I clambered through the skeletal hull and into the couch. The hull became a mesh of blackness around me th
at barely excluded the stars. "Kind of open," I said.

  Lipsey, watching from outside, laughed a bit unsympathetically. "Evidently the Xeelee don't suffer from vertigo. Do you?"

  I clamped the translator box to a strut above my head. Now the Qax spoke. "Study your controls, Bolder."

  "Right." Set ahead of me and to my sides were three control panels, each briefcase-sized. Magnifying monitors showed me sequinlike control studs. Waldoes would let me work the panels by my sides, but there was no waldo for the third.

  "The panels to your sides are for in-system flight," said the Qax. "The third, before you, is for the hyperspace drive. The three panels were the only equipment found in this ship — apart from the synchrotron handgun."

  "I'm not getting that back?"

  "The Qax think you're dangerous enough as it is," Lipsey said quietly.

  The Qax continued: "We've worked out a setting to take you out to the Great Attractor. Just hit the red button, on the left of the third panel. Hit it again to come home."

  I ran a gloved finger over the surface of the third panel. Apart from the red button the panel was half-melted... unusable. I asked why.

  "Of course," the Qax explained acidly, "you'd never be tempted to steal a treasure like this, but..."

  I slipped my hands into the waldo manipulators. The ship woke up. "So tell me how I fly this thing."

  The wings of the sycamore seed billowed out, a shaken blanket a hundred miles wide.

  "The motive force comes from the structure of space itself," the Qax explained. "The wings are sheets of discontinuity in space. The — healing up — of space drives the ship forward."

  I squeezed minutely. The wings trembled and the pod jerked. Lipsey and his flitter disappeared. "Try to restrain your monkey impulse to meddle," said the Qax. "You've just traveled half a light second."

  I let go, fast.

  "Now," said the Qax. "A controlled pressure with your right index finger..."

  All I've ever wanted to do is fly. I've given up everything else in life for it, I suppose... and now my wings pulsed like sheets of shadow as I flew around the Qax star at half the speed of light. I stared into the eye of a vacuole and, whooping, whizzed under the blue-shifted arch of a stellar flare.

  Blue shift! I was traveling so fast that light itself seemed as sluggish as the Doppler-shifted noise of a passing train.

  The Qax gave me my head. Probably the ship was fairly immune to accidents... even if I wasn't.

  "The Xeelee hyperdrive works on unconventional principles," the Qax told me. "On your return, we're not sure precisely where in our system you'll arrive — but we know it will be a fixed distance from the sun.

  "The mass of the ship and sun are the deciding factors. The more mass the ship has, the closer to the sun you'll be placed."

  I flew out to that critical return orbit. I wasn't surprised to find a Spline gunship, pitted with weapons that tracked me like eyes. Around the curve of the orbit was another gunship, and another. I swept out of the ecliptic plane, only to find more gunships. The Qax sun was encased by a sphere of them, completely staking out my return radius. "This must be costing you a fortune," I said. "Why?"

  Lipsey said elegantly: "Oh, they're not scared of you, Bolder. But they wouldn't like a hundred armed Xeelee to come swarming out of that ship instead of you, now would they?"

  After two months' training I felt ready. I skimmed out to the Spline-guarded radius and closed up my wings. Lipsey, once more alone with the Qax, said gently: "Good luck, Jim Bolder."

  "Yeah." I hit the red button—

  —and gasped as the hyperdrive jump made the Qax sun wink to nothingness. Below my feet appeared a compact yellow star, set in a sky crowded with stars and dust. I became aware of a trickle of clicks and pops as instruments clustered around me began to study the hurtling wonders.

  "Wow!" I said.

  "Bolder," said the Qax, "skip the epithets and report."

  "I think I'm near the center of the Galaxy."

  "Good. That is—"

  —another jump—

  "—according to plan."

  "Lethe." The yellow sun had disappeared; now I hovered below a dumbbell-shaped binary pair. Great tongues of golden starstuff arced between the twin stars. The sky was darker; I must be passing through the Galaxy and out the other side—

  —jump—

  —and now I was suspended below the plane of the Galaxy itself; it was a Sistine ceiling of orange and blue, the contrasts surprisingly sharp—

  —jump—

  —and these jumps were coming faster; I watched a dwarf star scour its way over the surface of its huge red parent and that dim disc over there must be my Galaxy—

  —jump—

  —and now I was inside a massive star, actually within its pinkish flesh, but before I could cry out there was another—

  —jump—

  —and—

  —jump — jump — jumpjumpjumpjump—

  I closed my eyes. There was no inward sensation of motion; only a flickering outside my eyelids that told me of skies being ripped aside like veils.

  "...Bolder! Can you hear me? Bolder—"

  I took a breath. "I'm okay. It's just — fast." I risked another look. I was passing through a frothy barrage of stars and planets; beyond them sheets of galaxies moved past as steadily as roadside trees. I said slowly: "I must be making a megalight, or more, an hour. At this rate the journey will take about two weeks—"

  "Yes," Lipsey said. "We think the Xeelee have a range of hyperdrive capabilities. The standard intragalactic version is limited to a kilolight an hour, or thereabouts. Whereas this more powerful intergalactic model—"

  I tumbled into the creamy plane of an elliptical Galaxy. I wailed and closed my eyes again.

  Ten days later, the popping stars no longer bothered me. I guess you can get used to anything. Even the growing gray patch ahead of me — a cloud of objects around the Great Attractor — seemed less important than the itchy confines of my suit. In fact, I felt fine until a disc of sky directly behind me turned china blue...

  "I don't get it," I said. "Objects that I'm leaving behind should be redshifted."

  "It's nothing to do with your motion, Bolder," the Qax explained. "The blue shift is gravitational. You're now close enough to the Great Attractor that light from the outside Universe is beginning to fall more steeply down its gravity well."

  I checked my instruments. "But that's ridiculous... I'm still millions of light years away."

  The Qax didn't bother to respond.

  Two more days. The light became a hail of hard blue as it plummeted after me into this pit in space. I entered the outskirts of the mist around the Great Attractor; it resolved into individual stars and what looked like bits of galaxies.

  The muddled starlight bathing my cage began to flicker. I felt my heartbeat rising. The skies riffled past me like the pages of a great book, ever slower. Finally the ship stuttered to a halt.

  "I've arrived," I whispered. "I'm still inside the star mist." I looked around, clutching the arms of my couch. "I'm in orbit around what looks like a small G-type star. But the sky's crammed with streaming stars, hundreds of them close enough to show discs. It's blue-tinted chaos.

  "And — I can see something ahead. A bank of light beyond the mist." My breath caught at the sheer scale of it all. "That's the Great Attractor, right?"

  "Don't touch your controls until we tell you, Bolder," the Qax murmured.

  "What? Why not?"

  "You've got company. To your left..."

  A hoard of night-dark ships came soaring away from the Great Attractor and out into the star cloud. There were small fighters like mine, swirling in flocks like starlings. And here and there I saw cup-shaped freighters miles wide, cruising like eagles.

  The sky was black with ships.

  "Xeelee," I breathed. "There must be millions of them. Well, you were right, Qax... But I don't believe in coincidence. I haven't stumbled across the only Xeelee fle
et in the area. This star cloud must be swarming with them."

  "Follow them," said the Qax.

  "What?"

  "Activate your drive. You're a lot less likely to be noticed as one of a flock than as an individual."

  "...Yeah." I spread my wings and banked sideways into the flock. Soon I was waddling along, a self-conscious duck among swans. Inside the waldoes my sweating fingers began to cramp up with the effort.

  The fleet was heading for a young star. Through the crowd ahead of me I could see the star's disc, its violet light diamond-hard. As we neared the star the torrent of ships abruptly splashed sideways, as if encountering an invisible shield. When I reached the breaking radius I banked left and set off after the herd.

  Twenty hours after my arrival the Xeelee completed their formation. With wings folded like patient vultures they completely surrounded the star.

  "What now?" I asked uneasily.

  "No doubt we'll find out."

  I wished I could rub my gritty eyes. "Qax... I haven't slept since coming out of hyperspace, you know."

  "Take a stimulant."

  Sudden as an eye blink, bloodred threads of light snaked into the star from every ship in the fleet.

  Well, from every ship except one. Mine.

  It was a poignant sight: a stellar Gulliver, pierced by a million tiny arrows. The star's light flickered, oddly. And I became aware of a stirring in the ranks of the Xeelee nearest me.

  "They're starting to notice me," I whispered. "How do I turn on my beam?"

  "You don't," said Lipsey. "Remember that Xeelee handgun? This must be what happens at the highest setting."

  A purple arch of tortured gas erupted from the star. Soon flares covered the star's surface; clouds of ejecta drifted through the cherry-red beams. Cup freighters moved in, placidly swallowing the star flesh.