Vacuum Diagrams

by Stephen Baxter

  Payment for the hunter...

  Thea ducked back into the forest and crammed her fists to her eyecups.

  When she woke again, she felt depressed, listless.

  She dropped out of the forest. She hovered in the Air, her knees tucked against her chest. With four or five brisk pushes she emptied her bowels. She watched the pale, odorless pellets of shit sail sparkling into the Air. Dense with neutrons, the waste would merge with the unbreathable underMantle and, perhaps, sink at last into the Quantum Sea.

  The Hero was sleeping, tucked into a cocoon — her father's cocoon, she realized with disgust. The empty suit was suspended from its branch. There seemed to be nobody about; most of the tribe were at the Air-pigs' net, evidently preparing one of the animals for slaughter.

  Suddenly she felt awake — alive, excited; capillaries opened across her face, tingling with superfluid Air. Silently, trying to hold her breath, she pushed herself away from her eyrie and Waved to the suit.

  Its empty fingers and legs dangled before her, grisly but fascinating. She reached out a trembling hand. The fabric was finely worked, and the inlaid silver threads were smooth and cold.

  The front of the suit gaped open. She pushed her hand inside; she found a soft, downy material that felt cool and comfortable...

  It would be the work of a moment to slip her own legs into these black-silver leggings.

  The Hero groaned, his lips parting softly; he turned slightly in her father's cocoon.

  He was still asleep. Perhaps, Thea thought with disgust, he was dreaming of her sister.

  She had to do this now.

  Briskly, but with trembling fingers, she untied the suit from its branch. She twisted in the Air, tucked her knees to her chest and dropped her legs into the opened-up suit.

  The lining sighed over her skin, embracing her flesh. She wriggled her arms into the sleeves. The feeling of the gloves around each finger was extraordinary; she stared at her hands, seeing how the tubes of fabric — too long for her own fingers — drooped slightly over her fingertips.

  She pulled closed the chest panel and, as she'd seen the Hero do, ran her gloved thumb along the seam. It sealed smoothly. She reached back over her shoulders and pulled the helmet forward, letting it drop over her head. Again a simple swipe of the thumb was sufficient to seal the helmet against the rest of the suit.

  The suit was too big for her; the lower rim of the faceplate was a dark line across her vision, cutting off half the world, and she could feel folds of loose material against her back and chest. But it encased her, just as it had the Hero, and — when she raised her arms — it moved as she moved.

  Cautiously, experimentally, she tried to Wave. She arched her back and flexed her legs.

  Electron gas crackled explosively around her limbs. She squirted clumsily across the treescape, branches and leaves battering at her skin.

  She grabbed at the trees with her gloved hands, dragging herself to a halt.

  She looked down at the suit, trembling afresh. It was as if the Magfield had picked her up and hurled her through the Air.

  Such power.

  She pushed down from the trees and out into the clear Air. She tried again — but much more cautiously this time, with barely a flex of her legs. She jolted upwards through a few mansheights: still jarringly quickly, but this time under reasonable control.

  She Waved again, moving in an awkward circle.

  It ought to be simple enough to master, she told herself. After all, she was just Waving, as she had done from the moment she'd popped from her mother's womb. Waving meant dragging limbs — which were electrically charged — across the Magfield. The Star's powerful magnetic field induced electric currents in the limbs, which in turn pushed back at the Magfield.

  Some part of this suit — perhaps the silver-gleaming inlays — must be a much better conductor than human flesh and bone. And so the Magfield's push was so much greater. It was just a question of getting the feel of it.

  She leaned back against the Magfield and thrust gently with her legs. Gradually she learned to build up the tempo of this assisted Waving, and wisps of electron gas curled about her thighs. The secret was not strength, really, but gentleness, suppleness, a sensitivity to the soft resistance of the Magfield.

  The suit carried her gracefully, effortlessly, across the flux lines.

  She sailed across the sky. The suit felt natural about her body, as if it had always been there — and she suspected that a small, inner part of her would always cling to the memory of this experience, utterly addicted...

  The Hero's face ballooned up before her. She cried out. He grinned through the faceplate at her, the age-lines around his eyecups deep and shadowed. He grabbed her shoulders; she could feel his bony fingers dig into her flesh through the suit fabric.

  "I came up under you," he said, his voice harsh. "I knew you couldn't see me. That damn helmet must be cutting off half your field of view."

  Fright passed, and anger came to her. She raised her gloved hands and knocked his forearms away.

  ...Easily. He suppressed a cry and clutched his arms to his chest; rapidly he straightened up to face her, but not before she had seen the pain in his eyecups.

  She reached out and grabbed the Hero's shoulders, as he'd held hers. In this suit, not only could she Wave like a god — she was strong, stronger than she had ever imagined. She let her fingers dig into his bone. Laughing, she raised him above her head. He seemed to be trying to keep his face empty of expression; she saw little fear there, but there was something else: a disquiet.

  "Who's the Hero now?" she spat.

  "A suit of Corestuff doesn't make a hero."

  "No," she said, thinking of Lur. "And heroes don't need to be paid..."

  He grinned, mocking her.

  She thought over what he'd said. "What's Corestuff?"

  "Let me go and I'll tell you."

  She hesitated.

  He snapped, "Let me go, damn you. What do you think I can do to you?"

  Cautiously she let go of his shoulders and pushed him away from her.

  He rubbed at the bulging bones of his shoulders. "You may as well understand what you're stealing. Corestuff. The inlay in the fabric; a superconducting thread mined from within the Quantum Sea." He sniffed. "From the old days, before the Core Wars, of course."

  "Did the suit belong to an Ur-human?"

  He laughed sourly. "Ur-humans couldn't survive here inside the Mantle. Even a savage child should know that."

  She looked carefully at his yellowed hair-tubes, unwilling to betray more ignorance. How old was he? "Do you remember the old days — before the Core Wars? Is that how you got the suit?"

  He looked at her with contempt — but, he saw, a contempt softened with pity. Am I really such a savage? she wondered.

  "Kid, the Wars were over before I was born. All the technology — the cities, the wormhole paths across the Mantle — all of it had gone. There were just a few scraps left — like this suit, which my father salvaged." He grinned again, his face splitting like a skull. "It used to belong to police, in one of the great cities. Police. Do you know what that means?

  "The suit kept us alive — my parents and me — for a while. Then, after they were dead—"

  She tried to fill her voice with contempt. "You used it to fly around the Mantle being the Hero."

  He looked angry. "Is that so terrible? At least I help people. What will you do with it, little girl?"

  She reached out for him, turning her hands into claws. In a moment, she could crush the life out of his bony neck—

  He returned her stare calmly, unflinching.

  She tipped backwards and Waved away from him.

  Thea surged along infinite corridors of vortex lines. Floating spin-spider eggs padded at her faceplate and legs. The Quantum Sea was a purple floor far below her, delimiting the yellow Air; the Crust was a complex, inverted landscape beneath which she soared.

  Waving was glorious. She stared down at her silve
r-coated body; blue highlights from the corridors of vortex lines and the soft purple glow of the Sea cast complex shadows across her chest. Already she was moving faster than she'd ever moved in her life, and she knew she was far from exhausting the possibilities of this magical suit.

  She opened her mouth and yelled, her own voice loud inside the helmet.

  She flew, spiraling, around the arcing vortex lines, her suited limbs crackling with blue electron gas; breathless, she swept from the leafy fringe of the Crust forest and down, down through the Mantle, until it seemed as if she could plunge deep into the bruised-purple heart of the Quantum Sea itself.

  She turned her face towards the South Pole, that place where all the vortex lines converged. She surged on through the Air, drowning her doubts — and the image of the Hero's disquieted face — in motion.

  ...But there was something in her path.

  Spin-web.

  The web was fixed to the vortex line array by small, tight rings of webbing which encircled, without quite touching, the glowing spin-singularities. The web's threads were almost invisible individually, but the dense mats caught the yellow and purple glow of the Mantle, so that lines of light formed a complex tapestry.

  It was really very beautiful, Thea thought abstractedly. But it was a wall across the sky.

  The spin-spider itself was a dark mass in the upper corner of her vision. She wondered if it had already started moving towards the point where she would impact the net — or if it would wait until she was embedded in its sticky threads. The spider looked like an expanded, splayed-open version of an Air-pig. Each of its six legs was a mansheight long, and its open maw would be wide enough to enfold her torso.

  Even the suit wouldn't protect her.

  She swiveled her hips and beat at the Magfield with her legs, trying to shed her velocity. But she'd been going as rapidly as she could; she wouldn't be able to stop in time. She looked quickly around the sky. Perhaps she could divert rather than stop, fly safely around the trap. But she couldn't even see the edges of the web: spin-spider webs could be hundreds of mansheights across.

  The web exploded out of the sky. She could see thick knots at the intersection of the threads, the glistening stickiness of the lines themselves.

  She curled into a ball and tucked her suited arms over her head.

  How could she have been so stupid as to fall into such a trap? Lur and Wesa, even through their tears, would think her a fool, when they heard. She imagined her father's voice: "Always look up- and downflux. Always. If you scare an Air-piglet, which way does it move? Along the flux paths, because it can move quickest that way. And that's why predators set their traps across the flux paths, waiting for anything stupid enough to fly straight into an open mouth..."

  She wondered how long the spin-spider would take to clamber down to her. Would she still be conscious when it peeled open her Hero's suit as if unwrapping a leaf, and began its work on her body?

  ...A mass came hurtling from her peripheral vision, her left, towards the web. She flinched and looked up. Had the spider left its web and come for her already?

  But it was the Hero. Somehow he'd chased her, kept track of her clumsy arrowing through the sky — and all without her realizing it, she thought ruefully. He carried his sword, his shining blade of Corestuff, in his bony hand.

  ...But he was too late; already the first strands of webbing were clutching at her suit, slowing her savagely.

  In no more than a few heartbeats she came to rest, deep inside the web. Threads descended before her face and laid themselves across her shoulders, arms and face. She tried to move, but the webbing merely tightened around her limbs. It shimmered silver and purple all around her, a complex, three-dimensional mesh of light.

  The web shuddered, rattling her body inside its gleaming suit. The spin-spider was approaching her, coming for its prize...

  "Thea! Thea!"

  She tried to turn her head; thread clutched at her neck. The Hero was swinging his sword, hacking into the web. His muscles were knots under his leathery skin. Thea could see dangling threads brushing against the Hero's bare arms and shoulders, one by one growing taut and then slackening as he moved on, burrowing into the layers of web.

  He was cutting through the web towards her.

  "Open the suit! It's caught, but you aren't. Come on, girl—"

  She managed to raise a trembling hand to her chest. It was awkward finding the seam, with the web constantly clutching at her; but at last the suit peeled open. The soft, warm stink of spin-spider web spilled into the opened suit.

  She pushed away the helmet and drew her legs out of the suit.

  The Hero, his crude web-tunnel already closing behind him, held out his hand. "Come on, Thea; take hold—"

  She glanced back. "But the suit—" The ancient costume looked almost pathetic, empty of life and swathed in spider-webbing.

  "Forget the damn suit. There isn't time. Come on—"

  She reached out and took his hand; his palm was warm and hard. With a grunt he leaned backward and hauled her from the web; the last sticky threads clutched at her legs, stinging. When they were both clear she fell against him; breathing hard, capillaries dilated all over his thin face, the Hero wrapped his arms around her.

  The tunnel in the web had already closed: all that remained of it was a dark, cylindrical path through the layers of webbing.

  And, as she watched, the spin-spider's huge head closed over the shining suit.

  "I always seem to be rescuing you, don't I?" the Hero said dryly.

  "You could have saved the suit."

  He looked defensive. "Maybe. I don't know."

  "You didn't even try. Why not?"

  He brushed his stiff, yellowed hair out of his eyes. He appeared old and tired. "I think I decided that the world had seen enough of that suit — enough of the Hero, in fact."

  She frowned. "That's stupid."

  "Is it?" He brought his face close to hers. His voice hard, he said, "It was that moment when I woke to find you inside the suit. I looked through that plate and into your eyecups, Thea, and I didn't like what I saw."

  She remembered: In a moment, she could crush the life out of his bony neck—

  "I saw myself, Thea."

  She shivered suddenly, unwilling to think through the implications of his words.

  "What will you do now?"

  He shrugged thin shoulders. "I don't know." He looked at her cautiously. "I could stay with you people for a while. I'm not a bad hunter, even without the suit."

  She frowned.

  He scratched at one eyecup. "On the other hand..."

  "What?"

  He pointed to the south. "I hear the Parz tribe at the Pole are trying to build a city again."

  Despite herself, she felt stirred — excited. "Like before the Core Wars?"

  He looked wistful. "No. No, we'll never recapture those days. But still, it would be a great project to work on." He studied her appraisingly. "I hear the new city will be twenty thousand mansheights, from side to side. Think of that. And that's not counting the Corestuff mine they're going to build from the base." He smiled, wrinkles gathering beneath his eyecups.

  Thea stared into the south — into the far downflux, to the place where all the vortex lines converged.

  Slowly, they began to Wave back to the Crust forest.

  The Hero said, "Even the Ur-humans would have been impressed by twenty thousand mansheights, I'll bet. Why, that's almost an inch..."

  The goals and purpose of the great wars were lost; but still humans fought on, enraged insects battering against the glass-walled lamps of the Xeelee constructs.

  The Xeelee, unimpeded, appeared at last to take pity. Humanity was — put aside.

  But humanity had been a mere distraction. All the while, the Xeelee confronted a much more dangerous enemy.

  PART 6

  ERA: Flight

  Secret History

  C.A.D. 4,000,000

  At last the Project was comp
lete.

  The migration alone had taken a million years. While the night-dark Xeelee fleets streamed steadily through Bolder's Ring and disappeared into the folded Kerr-metric region, other races flared in the outer darkness, like candles. Freighters the size of moons patrolled the space around the Ring, their crimson starbreaker beams dispersing the Galaxy remnants that still tumbled towards the Ring like blue-shifted moths.

  But now it was over. The Ring, its function fulfilled, sparkled like a jewel in its nest of stars. And the Universe that had been modified by the Xeelee was all but empty of them.

  Call it the antiXeelee.

  It was... large. Its lofty emotions could be described in human terms only by analogy.

  Nevertheless—

  The antiXeelee looked on its completed works, and was satisfied.

  Its awareness spread across light years. Shining matter littered the Universe like froth on a deep, dark ocean; the Xeelee had come, built fine castles of that froth, and had now departed, as if lifting into the air. Soon the shining stuff itself would begin to decay, and already the antiXeelee could detect the flexing muscles of the creatures of that dark ocean below. It felt something like contentment at the thought that its siblings were beyond the reach of those... others.

  Now the antiXeelee turned to its last task. Seed pods, spinning cubes as large as worlds, were scattered everywhere in an orderly array, millions of them dispersed over the unraveling curve of space. The antiXeelee ran metaphorical fingers over each of the pods and over what lay within: beings with closed eyes, ships with folded wings, refined reflections of the antiXeelee itself.

  The work was good. And now it was ready.

  ...There was a discontinuity. All over the Universe the pods vanished like soap bubbles.

  The seed pods' long journey back through time had begun. They would emerge a mere hundred thousand years after the singularity itself, at the moment when the temperature of the cosmos had cooled sufficiently for matter and radiation to become decoupled — so that the infant Universe became suddenly transparent, as if with a clash of cymbals.