And, even as the wars continued, still the cancer of aging, swelling and exploding stars had spread. The growth of the disrupted regions must have been little short of exponential.
At last the Xeelee realized that — despite the deployment of the resources of a Universe, despite the manipulation of their own history — this was a War they could not win.
It remained only to close the antiXeelee's causal loop, to complete the Ring, and to flee the Universe they had lost.
But already the birds were gathering around the Ring, intent on its destruction.
Paul brooded on what he had learned, on the desolation of the baryonic Universe which lay around him. Though the Ring survived still, the Xeelee had gone, evacuated.
Baryonic life was scattered, smashed, its resources wasted — largely by humanity — on absurd, failed assaults against the Xeelee.
Paul was alone.
At first Paul described to himself the places he visited, the relics he found, in human terms; but as time passed and his confidence grew he removed this barrier of words. He allowed his consciousness to soften further, to dilute the narrow human perception to which he had clung.
All about him were quantum wave functions.
They spread from stars and planets, sheets of probability that linked matter and time. They were like spiderwebs scattered over the aging galaxies; they mingled, reinforced and canceled each other, all bound by the implacable logic of the governing wave equations.
The functions filled space-time and they pierced his soul. Exhilarated, he rode their gaudy brilliance through the hearts of aging stars.
He relaxed his sense of scale, so that there seemed no real difference between the width of an electron and the broad sink of a star's gravity well. His sense of time telescoped, so that he could watch the insectlike, fluttering decay of free neutrons — or step back and watch the grand, slow decomposition of protons themselves...
Soon there was little of the human left in him. Then, at last, he was ready for the final step.
After all, he reflected, human consciousness itself was an artificial thing. He recalled Green, on the Sugar Lump, gleefully describing tests which proved beyond doubt that the motor impulses initiating human actions could often precede the willing of those actions by significant fractions of a second. Humans had always been adrift in the Universe, creatures of impulse and acausality, explaining their behavior to each other with ever more complex models of awareness. Once they had believed that gods animated their souls, fighting their battles through human form. Later they had evolved the idea of the self-aware, self-directed consciousness. Now Paul saw that it had all been no more than an idea, a model, an illusion behind which to hide. Why should he, perhaps the last human, cling to such outmoded comforts?
There was no cognition, he realized. There was only perception.
With the equivalent of a smile he relaxed. His awareness sparkled and subsided.
He was beyond time and space. The great quantum functions which encompassed the Universe slid past him like a vast, turbulent river, and his eyes were filled with the gray light which lay behind all phenomena.
Space had never been empty.
Within the tight space-time limits of the Uncertainty Principle, "empty" vacuum was filled with Virtual particle sets which blossomed from nothing, flew apart, recombined and vanished as if they had never been — all too rapidly for the laws of mass/energy conservation to notice.
Once, human scientists had called it the seething vacuum. And now it was inhabited.
The Qax was a creature of turbulent space, its "cells" a shifting succession of Virtual particle sets. Physically its structure extended over many yards — a rough sphere gigantic in subatomic terms containing a complex of Virtual particle sets which stored terabits of data: of understanding, of memory stretching back over millions of years.
Like the shadow of a cloud the Qax cruised over turbulent space, seeking humans...
PART 7
ERA: Photino Victory
...IS IT OVER? Is humanity destroyed? Lethe, Eve, we've covered millions of years. We've seen the flight of the Xeelee, the victory of those photino birds. It must be over. What can be left to show me?"
"Watch," she said patiently. "Watch..."
Shell
A.D. 4,101,214
"I'VE FOUND A BIRD FROM THE SHELL — a bird from space!" Allel ran into the village bursting with her news, her baggy bark shirt flapping.
But nobody was impressed. She couldn't understand it. Younger children turned back to their games in the dust.
Her mother, Boyd, absently cuffed Allel's fourteen-year-old head. "Don't bother me," she growled, and went about her business.
Boyd's face was a scarred, complex mask as she moved amongst the groups of men and women, massive and formidable in her coat of quilted cow-tree bark, planning and talking urgently. It was already late afternoon; that evening Boyd would be leading this ragged army south in another assault on the defense of the Bridge.
Allel knew how important this was to her mother; eventually they had to secure a crossing over the river Atad and gain access to the south — otherwise the northern glaciers would surely crush their tiny village before many more winters. Boyd's fists were clenched white as she argued. Allel knew she was brooding over the prospect of another bloody failure, and decided to keep out of her way.
She found her grandfather, Lantil, ferrying bowls of excrement and other waste from the bark teepees to the clusters of cow-trees at the heart of the village. Lantil dumped out the bowls into the trees' root systems and tiredly tolerated his granddaughter's chatter.
She told him how she'd gone out of the village alone and scrambled over the rocky shoulders of Hafen's Hill, a mile or so away. At the summit she'd thrown herself flat, panting, and stared up in wonder: in the afternoon light the Shell was a glowing quilt, and she'd soon forgotten the wind from the northern ice fields that probed at the crude seams of her shirt...
Allel's was a world without a sky. Instead the Shell swept from horizon to horizon, covering the land like a glowing lid of blue, green and startling orange. She'd traced the familiar lines of the ocean boundaries and watched clouds wind themselves into an upside-down storm directly above her. She reached up a finger as if to stir the storm on that great plate hanging over her—
—and the bird had tumbled out of the air. She'd scuttled to her knees and cupped the bird in her hands; its heart rattled as ice droplets melted from its wings.
The bird was an ice blue, a spectacular color she'd never seen before. And in its beak was a vivid orange flower.
The precise color of those strange orange splashes on the Shell.
The bird recovered and clattered away, but that didn't matter. Allel knew it must have lost its way and crossed the Gap between the worlds.
She'd run off down the heathered slopes to her home.
She dogged Lantil's footsteps as he trudged wearily among the teepees. "But if the world and the Shell are globes, what holds them apart?" Perhaps there were great pillars beyond the horizon...
Lantil pushed a lank of dirty hair back from his brow. "What does it matter?"
"I want to know," she stamped.
Her grandfather sighed. "All right." He knelt beside Allel and made a gnarled fist. "There's the world, Home, round like a ball." He cupped his other hand around the fist. "And there's the Shell, a hollow sphere around Home." Now he broke the fist and twirled a fingertip in a helix inside the cupped hand. "The Sun moves through the Gap, giving us day and night, summer and winter."
Allel nodded impatiently. "I know all that. But who built it all?"
"People, of course." He straightened up, massaging his back. "To keep out monsters called the Xeelee."
Allel, wide-eyed, imagined giants stalking beyond the Shell, beating their fists against ocean bottoms and tree roots.
"Now I've got to get on," Lantil snapped. "Get on with you, child. Get on..." Grumbling, he went back to his chores.
> Allel ran off, savoring her newest fragment of knowledge. She imagined flying up to a saucer-shaped land where a world hung in the sky, a ball plastered with rocks and trees.
The next morning she rose at dawn. She pushed her way out of the teepee's bark flap, letting the gray cold scour out her night fug. She shivered her way to a cow-tree and sucked icy milk from one of its nipples.
The village was hushed in the continued absence of the warriors. A group of old folk and children were at work already, making the most of the precious summer day; they were peeling a fresh sheet of clothlike bark, barely formed, from one of the cow trees. Allel peered furtively up at the Shell. The morning terminator was a gray bar that straddled the horizons, scouring eastward. The night lands beyond were broken by flickering sparks: fires that showed that people lived on the Shell, like flies on that great ceiling.
She'd brought a small bark satchel from the teepee; now she arranged it over her shoulder and scurried over the rough track to Hafen's Hill. From the summit she could see the Atad river, a glistening track to the south; the Bridge looked like an indestructible toy, one of the few of the old structures not yet swallowed by the ice. Smoke blurred the scene. She wondered if that was a good sign.
She soon forgot the distant battle as she got to work. She opened her satchel and drew out a small lamp, a gourd filled with alcohol fermented from cow-tree fruit. She cut a length of wick with the big stone knife her grandfather had made for her. She held a flint to the wick; it curled and popped as black smoke seeped into the crisp air. Now she opened out a small bag, a rough globe. She held its narrow neck over the flame, and soon her fingers were coated with lamp-black—
—and the simple balloon filled up and lurched a few feet into the air. Then it turned belly-up and flopped to the ground. Allel bared her teeth at the Shell as if she owned it already; her heart beat as had that lost bird's. Now then, a little more weight around the mouth...
A sandal stamped down, crushing the balloon. The bark of the sandal was crusted with blood and dust.
"Get up." Boyd spat the words; blood leaked from a new wound over her eyes.
Allel stood, furious. Her anger collided with her mother's contempt. Save for the scars of battle, the years had been easy on Boyd. Mother and daughter faced each other like twins, images in a dark mirror.
"Our attack on the Bridge failed," Boyd ground out. "Those bastards holding it want to keep the whole bloody south to themselves. Good people died. And you — you won't even help the old folk with their chores. What do you think you're doing?"
Allel picked up the sputtering lamp. "I doubt if you'd understand," she said haughtily.
Boyd slapped the lamp from her hands. It smashed against a rock; alcohol pooled and puffed into flame. "You waste your time on rubbish. Don't dare to speak to me like that."
Allel bit back her rage. "I fill the bag with smoke. It flies. Build one big enough and I could fly with it—"
"More rubbish." Boyd hawked and spat out a ball of bloodstained phlegm; it sizzled in the alcohol fire. "If it's ever left up to you, we'll all die of rubbish." She grabbed a handful of Allel's tunic; her breath was sour. "Or I'll kill you first. And that's not rubbish." She strode off down the Hill's broken flank. "Come on. You'll be grown soon. It's time I put a stop to your questions."
Allel didn't move. "Where are we going?"
"North. To the place where our people once lived, before the cold drove them out. North to the City."
"Why should I come?"
Without looking back, Boyd said simply: "Because if you don't I'll break your rubbish neck."
Allel looked back ruefully at her home, where the fires of the recent night were still burning. Then she clutched her crumpled shirt closed against the wind and followed her mother.
The breeze lifted the abandoned balloon; its final flight ended in the ruins of the lamp, where it began to burn fitfully.
The Sun wove its helical web around the world.
When night fell Boyd and Allel sheltered beneath a wild cow-tree. In silence, they drank from its milk nipples and broiled slices of meat fruit over a small fire. Boyd slept sternly beneath her quilted coat. Allel shivered in her thin garments, and burrowed into a nest of leaves. She peered up sourly at the Shell's seamless dark, picking out clustered fires.
In the morning she stuffed leaves inside her clothes and fashioned herself a rough cap of cow-tree bark.
After some days of this the frost grew more persistent, until their feet crunched over thin ice. Light snow fell. They passed a few abandoned settlements; even the hardy cow-trees grew sparse here.
A blizzard closed around them like a white mouth. They staggered up to the milkless corpse of a cow-tree. Allel stared at the shrunken nipples and withered fruit. Boyd laughed at her, her eyelids sprinkled with snowflakes. "Comes as a shock, doesn't it? A dead cow-tree. We were given a world filled with beautiful buildings, and cow-trees to feed and clothe us like mothers. A home safe from the Xeelee.
"But the world's old and falling apart. The Sun seems to be failing. Ice has covered the cities and frozen the milk in the cow-trees. We trudge through the snow." She began digging into the snow packed against the dry wood. "Come on. We'll let this lot blow itself out. The snow will keep you warm."
As she worked, Allel considered a changeless life of endless summer. What would there be to do all day? Her bare fingers grew numb.
When the storm blew over they continued the journey. With the Shell like a map over them it was impossible to get lost, and at last they came to the lip of a great natural bowl. Snow pooled around the low buildings of the City, which were sprinkled in two matching crescents.
Allel, used to crude teepees of cow-tree bark, touched walls that were as smooth as skin. But the interiors were cold and jumbled, and snow drifted waist-deep in the avenues.
Lifting heavy legs out of the snow, they forced their way to the common center of the City's twin crescents. Here was a small cylindrical building, no more than three paces across. Allel helped her mother scrape snow from the door. Boyd blew on damp fingers. "Go ahead," she said slyly. "You first." Allel pushed through the light door—
—and stared in astonishment at the far wall of the chamber, at least a hundred paces away. She stumbled backwards and landed in the snow, which soaked into her thin trousers. Boyd laughed, not unkindly, and hauled her to her feet. "A vast hall crumpled into a tiny hut. The people who built this had powers even you never imagined, eh?"
Allel stumbled around the tiny building. Where was all that space stored? If not sideways — or behind — or up, or down — what fourth direction was there? The puzzle settled behind her eyes like a spider.
The floor area was empty, but the paper-thin walls were covered with pictures, still lit and animated after uncounted generations. "The pictures tell our story," Boyd said gruffly. "How we rose and fell." She stamped snow from her sandals and led the way around the walls. Afterwards Allel thought they could have walked in the opposite direction and lost little of the sense, for the story of humankind had a symmetrical design.
The bright side of the symmetry was expansion. From a world without a Shell, tiny ships like streamlined fish swam out on hyperdrive to the stars...
"What was 'hyperdrive'? And 'stars'?"
They were just words, Boyd said, passed on by other mothers on other days. Allel wondered if her balloon had risen on hyperdrive. She looked closely at the ships but could see no sign of burners. She tried to touch the picture —
— and her hand passed into the depthless wall, in a direction she could not identify. She fingered a model ship; it was like a nut drawn on an invisible string. More mysteries...
At its peak humanity was a master of many stars — which were evidently places very far away. And then —
"And then we met the Xeelee," said Boyd, and they inspected a harrowing battle scene. Elusive fingers snatched at the little ships. "Whoever they were, they were too big for us."
After the Xeelee wars cam
e the dark obverse of humanity's conquest of the stars: its sad subsidence back to its home world, prodded by the dark fingers of the Xeelee.
They came to the last two panels. Boyd said: "Finally we returned to our home and rebuilt it as a place safe from the Xeelee." The first panel showed a sphere, blue capped with fat brown poles. Painted onto the central cerulean band were clouds and a tiny Sun that twinkled along the equator. The fringes of the polar caps held a lot of detail: sideways-on pictures of trees and men, oriented as if the clouds were "up" and the poles were "down." "I don't understand this one," Boyd admitted. "Maybe it was a stage in the Shell's construction. But here's the world as it is now." The last image was crudely sketched on the surface of the wall, with no depth or animation. It showed a globe with a Shell around it. Allel picked at flaking paint. Boyd coughed self-consciously. "So, you understand now why I brought you here?"
Allel inspected paint dust. "This is just dyed cow-tree milk. This last picture must have been added much later—"
Boyd swore. She spat on the smooth floor and stalked out.
...And, thought Allel, excited, in that case maybe the world was more like the other image, the blue sphere. But what did it mean? Everyone knew there was a Shell around the world — you could see it...
She became aware of her mother's absence. Cursing, she hurried out.
Boyd stood a few paces from the door, fists clenched. Feathers of snow drifted around her legs. "I repeat. Why do you think I brought you here?"
Allel tried to concentrate on the question. "To show me this place? To tell me its story?"
"Yes!" The trackless snow softened Boyd's shout. "Once we rebuilt the whole world, but now we can't even melt a few glaciers." She gripped her daughter's shoulders, not roughly. "People got soft and forgot. Allel — if I fail, you've got to carry on. Perhaps it will fall to you to take over, and lead our people to the Bridge. That's the truth of our world, the only truth. The only way to save ourselves that's within our power."
Vacuum Diagrams Page 32
