Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring

by Stephen Baxter

  Nead slowed a few feet short of the jet mount. Rees watched anxiously as Nead scrabbled at the frictionless surface of the hull. Then the mount came within reach and he grabbed at it gratefully, locking his fingers around small irregularities in the iron surface.

  He hauled on his ropes. Gord and Rees bundled the first steam jet out of the port and shoved it towards the young Scientist. They judged it well, the package of machinery stopping a few feet short of Nead. With fast but precise motions Nead dragged at his rope and fielded the machine. Now the Scientist had to align the jet, at least roughly, with the Bridge’s axis, and he spent long seconds struggling with the old device’s bulk.

  At last it was correct. From a chest pocket Nead dragged out adhesive pads and slapped them against the mount; then, the strain showing on his face, he hauled the machine into place over the pads. Finally he untied the rope from the secured jet and cast it free.

  Nead had worked fast and well, but already some thirty seconds had passed. The bulk of the work had still to be performed, and the pain in Rees’s chest was reaching a hollow crescendo.

  Now Nead scrambled towards the next mount, over the curve of the hull and out of sight. After unbearably long seconds there was a tugging on one rope. Rees and the mine engineer threw the second steam jet through the hatch. The bulky machine bumped around the hull.

  It was impossible to gauge the passage of time. Had only seconds passed since they had launched the machine?

  Without reference points time was an elastic thing . . . Blackness closed around Rees’s vision.

  There was a flurry of motion to his right. He turned, his chest burning. Gord had begun to haul on the rope, his face blue now and his eyes protruding. Rees joined him. The rope moved disturbingly easily, sliding unimpeded over the frictionless surface.

  A sense of dread blossomed alongside Rees’s pain.

  The end of the rope came rushing around the curve of the hull. The line had been neatly cut.

  Gord fell back, eyes closing, the effort he had expended apparently pushing him over the brink into unconsciousness. Rees, his vision failing, placed his palm over the door’s control panel.

  And waited.

  Gord slumped against the door frame. Rees’s lungs were a jelly of pain, and his throat tore at the empty air . . .

  A blur before him, hands gripping the rim of the door frame, a face contorted around blue lips, a stiff body with strapped legs . . . Nead, he realized dully; Nead had returned, and there was something he had to do.

  His arm, as if independent of his will, spasmed against the port’s control panel. The port slid shut. Then the inner door opened and he was pulled backwards into the thickening air.

  Later Nead explained, his voice a rasp: ‘I could feel I was running out of time, and I still wasn’t finished. So I cut the rope and kept going. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re a bloody fool: Rees whispered. He struggled for a while to raise his head from his pallet; then he gave up, slumped back, and drifted back to sleep.

  With Nead’s jets they guided the ship into a wide, elliptical orbit around a hot yellow star deeper inside the new nebula. The great doors were hurled open and men crawled around the hull attaching climbing ropes and fixing fresh steam jets. Thin, bright air suffused the musty interior of the ship; the stink of recycled and tanked air was dispelled at last and a mood of celebration spread among the passengers.

  Even the ration queues seemed good-humoured.

  The bodies of those who had not survived the crossing were lifted from the ship, wrapped in rags and dropped into the air. Rees glanced around the knot of mourners gathered at the port. He observed suddenly what a mix of people they were now: there were Raft folk like Jaen and Grye, alongside Gord and other miners; and there was Quid and his party of Boneys. They all mingled quite unselfconsciously, united by grief and pride. The old divisions meant nothing, Rees realized; in this new place there were only humans . . .

  Eventually the Bridge would move on from this star but these bodies would remain here in orbit for many shifts, marking man’s arrival in the new world, before air friction finally carried them into the flames of the star.

  Despite the influx of fresh air Hollerbach continued to weaken steadily. At length he took to a pallet fixed before the Bridge’s window-like hull. Rees joined the old Scientist; together they gazed out into the new starlight.

  Hollerbach fell into a fit of coughing. Rees rested his hand on the old man’s head, and at last Hollerbach’s breathing steadied. ‘I told you you should have left me behind,’ he wheezed.

  Rees ignored that and leant forward. ‘You should have seen the release of the young trees,’ he said. ‘We just opened the cages and out they flew . . . They’ve spread out around this star as if they were born here.’

  ‘Perhaps they were,’ Hollerbach observed dryly. ‘Pallis would have liked that.’

  ‘I don’t think any of us younger folk realized how green leaves could be. And the trees seem to be growing already. Soon we’ll have a forest big enough to harvest, and we’ll be able to move out: find whales, perhaps, fresh sources of food . . .’

  Now Hollerbach began to fumble beneath his pallet; with Rees’s help he retrieved a small package wrapped in grubby cloth.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Take it.’

  Rees unwrapped the cloth to expose a finely tooled machine the size of his cupped hands; at its heart a silver orb gleamed, and around the orb multicoloured beads followed wire circles. ‘Your orrery,’ Rees said.

  ‘I brought it in my personal effects.’

  Rees fingered the familiar gadget. Embarrassed, he said: ‘Do you want me to have it when you’re gone?’

  ‘No, damn it!’ Hollerbach coughed indignantly. ‘Rees, your streak of sentimentality disturbs me. No, I wish now I’d left the bloody thing behind. Lad, I want you to destroy it. When you throw me out of that door send it after me.’

  Rees was shocked. ‘But why? It’s the only orrery in the universe . . . literally irreplaceable.’

  ‘It means nothing!’ The old eyes glittered. ‘Rees, the thing is a symbol of a lost past, a past we must disregard. We have clung to such tokens for far too long. Now we are creatures of this universe.’

  With sudden intensity the old man grabbed Rees’s sleeve and seemed to be trying to pull himself upright. Rees, frowning, laid a hand on his shoulder and gently pressed him back. ‘Try to rest—’

  ‘Bugger that,’ Hollerbach rasped. ‘I haven’t time to waste on resting . . . You have to tell them—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To spread. Fan out through this nebula. We’ve got to fill every niche we can find here; we can’t rely on relics of an alien past any more. If we’re to prosper we must become natives of this place, find ways to live here, using our own ingenuity and resources . . .’ Another coughing jag broke up his words. ‘I want that population explosion we spoke of. We can’t ever again risk the future of the race in a single ship, or even a single nebula. We have to fill this damn cloud, and go on to the other nebulae and fill them as well. I want not just thousands but millions of humans in this damn place, talking and squabbling and learning.

  ‘And ships . . . we’ll need new ships. I see trade between the inhabited nebulae, as if they were the legendary cities of old Earth. I see us finding a way even to visit the realms of the gravitic creatures . . .

  ‘And I see us one day building a ship that will fly us back through Bolder’s Ring, the gateway to man’s home universe. We’ll return and tell our cousins there what became of us . . .’ At last Hollerbach’s energy was exhausted; the grey head slumped back against its rag pillow, eyes closing slowly.

  When it was over Rees carried him to the port, the orrery wrapped in the stilled fingers. Silently he launched the body into the crisp air and watched it drift away until it was lost against the background of the falling stars; then, as Hollerbach had wished, he hurled the orrery into the sky. Within seconds it had vanished.

&nbs
p; There was a warm mass at his side - Jaen, standing quietly with him. He took her hand, squeezing it gently, and his thoughts began to run along new, unexplored tracks. Now that the adventure was over perhaps he and Jaen might think about a new kind of life, of a home of their own—

  Jaen gasped. She pointed. ‘Rees . . . look.’

  Something came lunging out of the sky. It was a compact, pale green wheel of wood, like a tree six feet wide. It snapped to a halt mere yards from Rees’s face and hovered there, maintaining its position with rapid flicks of rotation. Short, fat limbs snaked out of the trunk, and what looked like tools of wood and iron were fixed at various points to the rim. Rees searched in vain for the tree’s tiny pilots.

  ‘By the Bones, Rees,’ Jaen snapped, ‘what the hell is it?’ Four eyes, blue and shockingly human, snapped open in the upper surface of the trunk and fixed them with a stern gaze.

  Rees grinned. The adventure, he realized, was far from over.

  In fact, it might barely have begun.

  TIMELIKE INFINITY

  1

  The flitter rose from occupied Earth like a stone thrown from a blue bowl. The little cylindrical craft tumbled slowly as it climbed, sparkling.Qax Jasoft Parz had been summoned to a meeting, in orbit, with the Qax Governor of Earth. Parz scoured a mind worn into grooves of habit by his years in the diplomatic service for reasons for this summons. It must be connected with the arrival of the damned wormhole, of course - that had stirred up the Qax like a stick in a hornets’ nest.

  But why summon him now? What had changed?

  As his distance from the planet increased, so grew Parz’s apprehension.

  Alone in the automated flitter, Parz watched shafts of cerulean Earthlight thread through the small ports and, twisting with the craft’s rotation, dissect the dusty air around him. As always, the glowing innocence of the planet took his breath away. Two centuries of Qax occupation had left few visible scars on Earth’s surface - far fewer, in fact, than those wrought by humans during their slow, haphazard rise to technological civilization. But still it was disturbing to see how the Qax-run plankton farms bordered every continent in green; and on the land, scattered and gleaming plains of glass marked man’s brief and inglorious struggle against the Qax.

  Parz had studied these mirrored landscapes from space - how many times before? A hundred, a thousand times? And each time he had struggled to recall the reactions of his youth on first seeing the sites of the destroyed cities. That liberating, burning anger; the determination not to compromise as those around him had compromised. Yes, he would work within the system - even carve out a career in the hated diplomatic service, the collaborative go-between of human and Qax. But his purpose had been to find a way to restore the pride of man.

  Well, Jasoft, he asked himself; and what has become of those fine intentions? Where did they get lost, over all these muddy years? Parz probed at his leathery old emotions. Sometimes he wondered if it were possible for him genuinely to feel anything any more; even the city-scars had been degraded in his perception, so that now they served only as convenient triggers of nostalgia for his youth.

  Of course, if he wished, he could blame the Qax even for his very aging. Had the Qax not destroyed mankind’s AntiSenescence technology base within months of the Occupation?

  Sometimes Parz wondered how it would feel to be an AS-preserved person. What would nostalgia be, for the permanently young?

  A soft chime sounded through the flitter, warning Parz that his rendezvous with the Spline fleet was less than five minutes away. Parz settled back in his seat and closed his eyes, sighing a little as semi-sentient cushions adjusted themselves to the curvature of his spine and prodded and poked at aching back muscles; he rested his bony, liver-spotted fingers on the briefcase which lay on the small table before him. He tried to focus on his coming meeting with the Governor. This was going to be a difficult meeting - but had they ever been easy? Parz’s challenge was going to be to find a way to calm the Governor, somehow: to persuade it not to take any drastic action as a result of the wormhole incident, not to stiffen the Occupation laws again.

  As if on cue the mile-wide bulk of the Governor’s Spline flagship slid into his view, dwarfing the flitter and eclipsing Earth. Parz could not help but quail before the Spline’s bulk. The flagship was a rough sphere, free of the insignia and markings which would have adorned the human vessels of a few centuries earlier. The hull was composed not of metal or plastic but of a wrinkled, leathery hide, reminiscent of the epidermis of some battered old elephant. This skin-hull was punctured with pockmarks yards wide, vast navels within which sensors and weapons glittered suspiciously. In one pit an eye rolled, fixing Parz disconcertingly; the eye was a gleaming ball three yards across and startlingly human, a testament to the power of convergent evolution. Parz found himself turning away from its stare, almost guiltily. Like the rest of the Spline’s organs the eye had been hardened to survive the bleak conditions of spaceflight - including the jarring, shifting perspectives of hyperspace - and had been adapted to serve the needs of the craft’s passengers. But the Spline itself remained sentient, Parz knew; and he wondered now how much of the weight of that huge gaze came from the awareness of the Spline itself, and how much from the secondary attention of its passengers.

  Parz pushed his face closer to the window. Beyond the Spline’s fleshy horizon, a blue, haunting sliver of Earth arced across the darkness; and to the old man it felt as if a steel cable were tugging his heart to that inaccessible slice of his home planet. And above the blue arc he saw another Spline ship, reduced by perspective to the size of his fist. This one was a warship, he saw; its flesh-hull bristled with weapon emplacements - most of them pointing at Parz, menacingly, as if daring him to try something. The vast threat of the mile-wide battleship struck Parz as comical; he raised a bony fist at the Spline and stuck out his tongue.

  Beyond the warship, he saw now, sailed yet another Spline craft, this one a mere pink-brown dot, too distant for his vision - augmented as it was by corneal and retinal image-enhancing technology - to make out details. And beyond that still another Spline rolled through space. Like fleshy moons the fleet encircled the Earth, effortlessly dominant.

  Parz was one of only a handful of humans who had been allowed off the surface of the planet since the imposition of the Qax occupation laws, one of still fewer who had been brought close to any section of the main Qax fleet.

  Humans had first emerged from their home planet two and a half millennia earlier, optimistic, expanding and full of hope . . . or so it seemed to Jasoft now. Then had come the first contact with an extra-solar species - the group-mind entity known as the Squeem - and that hope had died.

  Humans were crushed; the first occupation of Earth began.

  But the Squeem were overthrown. Humans had travelled once more from Earth.

  Then the Qax had found a human craft.

  There had been a honeymoon period. Trading links with the Qax had been established, cultural exchanges discussed.

  It hadn’t lasted long.

  As soon as the Qax had found out how weak and naïve humanity really was, the Spline warships had moved in.

  Still, that brief period of first contact had provided humanity with most of its understanding about the Qax and their dominion. For instance, it had been learned that the Spline vessels employed by the Qax were derived from immense, sea-going creatures with articulated limbs, which had once scoured the depths of some world-girdling ocean. The Spline had developed spaceflight, travelled the stars for millennia. Then, perhaps a million years earlier, they had made a strategic decision.

  They rebuilt themselves.

  They had plated over their flesh, hardened their internal organs - and had risen from the surface of their planet like mile-wide, studded balloons. They had become living ships, feeding on the thin substance between the stars.

  The Spline had become carriers, earning their place in the universe by hiring themselves out to any one of a hundred species
.

  It wasn’t a bad strategy for racial survival, Parz mused. The Spline must work far beyond the bubble of space explored by humankind before the Qax Occupation - beyond, even, the larger volume worked by the Qax, within which humanity’s sad little zone was embedded.

  Someday the Qax would be gone, Parz knew. Maybe it would be humanity which would do the overthrowing; maybe not. In any event there would be trade under the governance of a new race, new messages and material to carry between the stars. New wars to fight. And there would be the Spline, the greatest ships available - with the probable exception, Parz conceded to himself, of the unimaginable navies of the Xeelee themselves - still plying between the stars, unnoticed and immortal.

  The small viewport glowed briefly crimson, its flawed plastic sparkling with laser speckle. Then a translator box built somewhere into the fabric of the flitter hissed into life, and Parz knew that the Spline had established a tight laser link. Something inside him quivered further now that the climax of his journey approached; and, when the Qax Governor of Earth finally spoke to him in its flat, disturbingly feminine voice, he flinched.

  ‘Ambassador Parz. Your torso is arranged at an awkward angle in your chair. Are you ill?’

  Parz grimaced. This was the nearest, he knew, that a Qax would ever come to a social nicety; it was a rare enough honour, accorded to him by his long relationship with the Governor. ‘My back is hurting me, Governor,’ he said. ‘I apologize. I won’t let it distract my attention from our business.’

  ‘I trust not. Why don’t you have it repaired?’

  Parz tried to compose a civil answer, but the forefront of his consciousness was filled once more with a distracting awareness of his own aging. Parz was seventy years old. If he had lived in the years before the coming of the Qax, he would now be entering the flush of his maturity, he supposed, his body cleansed and renewed, his mind refreshed, reorganized, rationalized, his reactions rendered as fresh as a child’s. But AntiSenescence technology was no longer available; evidently it suited the Qax to have humanity endlessly culled by time. Once, Parz recalled, he had silently raged at the Qax for this imposition above all: for the arbitrary curtailment of billions of immortal human lives, for the destruction of all that potential. Well, he didn’t seem to feel anger at anything much any more . . .