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

by Stephen Baxter

  And indeed, Parz conceded, the Qax had summoned him here to Jovian space as soon as the showers of high-energy particles had begun to erupt from the mouth of the waiting portal ... the first portents of an arrival from the future.

  ‘After all,’ the Qax went on, ‘if it were not for the granting of AS treatment to you and a handful of your colleagues - treatment you were not reluctant to accept - you would not be standing here now lecturing me about the awesome potency of the human race. Would you? For you were close to the termination of the usual human lifespan, were you not?’

  The relaxed contempt brought the blood to Parz’s cheeks. ‘Governor—’

  But the Qax went on impatiently, ‘Let us abandon this, Ambassador; on this day of days, let us dwell on our achievements together and not our differences.’

  Parz took a deep breath of cool, blue human air. ‘All right, Governor.’

  ‘Your heart must have surged with pride when the new Interface was completed.’

  Indeed it had, Parz remembered. At last the mouths of the Solar System’s second spacetime wormhole had been threaded with icosahedra of blue-glowing exotic matter. For a few brief, magnificent weeks, the twin portals had sailed together around Jupiter’s gravity well, the milky sheets of broken space stretched across the exotic-matter frames and glimmering like the facets of mysterious jewels.

  Then had come the time for the removal of one of the portals. A massive GUTdrive vessel had been constructed: hovering over the portals the vessel had looked, Parz remembered, like a human arm, a clenched fist poised over a pair of fragile, blue-grey flowers.

  The ship’s huge GUTdrive engines had flared into life, and one of the portals had been hauled away, first on a widening spiral path out of the gravity well of Jupiter, and then away on a shallow arc into interstellar space.

  Parz - like the rest of the human race, and like the Governor and the rest of the Qax occupation force - had settled down to wait out the six months of the portal’s sublight crawl to its destination.

  The first Interface ship, the Cauchy, had taken a century to bridge fifteen hundred years. The new ship took only half a year of subjective time to loop away from Sol and return; but, accelerating at multiples of Earth’s gravity, it had crossed five centuries into the future.

  Parz was not a scientist, and - despite his close connection to the project - found much of the physics of wormholes philosophically baffling. But, as he had travelled to the Jovian system and had gazed on the slowly turning jewel that was the Qax’s returned icosahedral portal, the essence of the project had seemed very real to him.

  On the other side of those misty, grey-blue planes was the future. If the Friends of Wigner had gained the advantage by escaping into a past in which no Qax had even heard of humankind, what greater advantage could those future Qax wield? Parz reflected ruefully. They had five centuries of hindsight, five centuries in which the outcome of the struggle between Qax and human had surely been decided one way or the other.

  Only a year had passed since the escape of the Friends. Yet already those future Qax had the opportunity to twist events any way they pleased.

  ‘You are pensive,’ the Governor said, breaking into his thoughts.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Come,’ the Qax said, its translator-box voice softly beguiling. ‘I don’t think either of us would describe the other as a friend, Ambassador. But we have worked closely, and - once - grew to be honest with each other. Tell me what concerns you, while we wait on events.’

  Parz shrugged. ‘What an awesome weapon we have delivered into the hands of your successors, five centuries away. Imagine one of the great generals of human history - Bonaparte, for example - able to study, from history texts, the outcome of his greatest battle before even taking the field.’

  ‘There is more than one possibility, Jasoft. Such a general might feel rendered helpless by the weight of historical evidence. Many wars are not decided by strokes of military genius - or by the heroism of a few individuals - but by the forces of history. Or, perhaps, the general might even be stricken with remorse, at the suffering and death his ambition had caused; perhaps he would even work to avert his battle.’

  Parz snorted. ‘Maybe. Although I can’t imagine any Qax “general” feeling much remorse for human victims of a tyranny or a war, regardless of the outcome. When we learned of the escape of the Friends of Wigner, remember that we both felt mistrust at such awesome power being delivered into the hands of any group, regardless of species. Should we not feel such mistrust of these Qax from the future?’

  The Qax laughed softly. ‘Now perhaps it is you who underestimate us. I am not without admiration for human achievements, baffled though I am sometimes by your motives.’

  Jasoft peered through his faceplate at the soft, soapy bubbling of the sea-fragment hosting the Governor. ‘For example?’

  ‘The craft which bore away our Interface terminal was manned by humans. The vessel was essentially automatic, of course - and certainly immune to any possibility of mutiny by the human crew - but your experience of centuries of spaceflight persuaded me that there is no better guarantee of the success of a human-built ship than the presence aboard her of human engineers, with their ingenuity and adaptability - both physical and mental. And so we needed a human crew.’

  ‘And you found no trouble getting volunteers. Despite the prospects of multiple-g travel.’ Parz smiled. ‘That isn’t so surprising, Governor.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Not all humans are the same. We are not all as comfortable with our client-race status as—’

  ‘As you, for example, Jasoft?’

  ‘Right.’ Parz stuck his chin out, feeling his stubbly jowls stretch; he didn’t expect the Qax to read the gesture, but the hell with it. ‘Correct. Not all humans are like me. Some want to get out of the box the Solar System has become, regardless of the cost. When will humans again be allowed to journey beyond the Solar System? And what’s life for, but to see, to explore, to wonder? Maybe taking away our AS technology was a mistake for you; maybe the renewed cheapness of our lives - a few, paltry decades and then the endless darkness - has made humans more reckless. Harder to control, eh, Governor?’

  The Governor laughed. ‘Perhaps. Well, Parz; we should turn to our business. And how do you feel, now that the Interface is about to come into operation?’

  Parz thought back over the long months of waiting after the construction and launch of the Interface. He had maintained a Virtual image of the stationary portal in his quarters throughout that time, listening to endless, baffling commentaries about relativistic time dilation, closed timelike curves and Cauchy horizons.

  The future Qax must have been expecting the visitation from the past, of course. Perhaps some of the Qax alive in Parz’s time would still be conscious and able to remember the launch.

  At last the day of the ship’s scheduled return to future Earth - the day on which the portal would begin to function as a time tunnel to the future - had come; and Parz had been joined in his silent vigil beneath Virtuals of the stationary Jovian icosahedron by an unseen congregation of millions. All over the Earth, and through the rest of the Occupied System, humans had watched the twinkling icosahedron with a mixture of fascination and dread.

  Then, at last, the bursts of exotic particles from the wormhole terminus ...

  ‘I guess,’ Parz said slowly, ‘I feel something of what Michael Poole, the builder of the first Interface, must have gone through as he waited for his project to come to fruition.’ But that first Interface project had, as Parz understood it, been initiated in the hope of filching some knowledge from future generations of mankind - and to test out the science of spacetime and exotic physics - and, Parz guessed, for the sheer, exuberant hell of it. A working time machine, in orbit around Jupiter? If you can build it, why the hell not?

  Poole must have anticipated the opening of his wormhole with joy. Not feared it, as Parz had done.

  ‘Yes,’ the Qax said refle
ctively. ‘And now—’

  And now the Virtual image of the icosahedron exploded; darkness flecked with gold rained over Parz and he cried out, curled in on himself, cringing.

  The Governor was silent; in Parz’s ears there was only the ragged rasp of his own breath.

  After long seconds Parz found the will to raise his head. The Virtual of the portal was still there, with the crack of Jovian light visible alongside it ...

  But now, before the portal, hovered a single ship. A bolt of night-darkness had erupted through the blue-grey face of the portal. The surface of the spacetime discontinuity still quivered seconds after the passage, sending distorted echoes of Jupiter’s pink glow over the Governor’s bubbling globe of Qax ocean.

  The ship from the future spread wings like a bird’s, a hundred miles wide. Night-dark canopies loomed over Parz.

  ‘I am awed, Qax,’ Parz said, his voice a whisper.

  ‘No less I. Parz, the grace of this ship, the use of the sheet-discontinuity drive - all characteristics of Xeelee nightfighter technology.’

  Xeelee . . . Parz felt his fear transmute into an almost superstitious horror that suddenly Xeelee might be made aware of the existence of humanity.

  ‘But this is a Qax ship, nevertheless,’ the Governor said. ‘I have received call signatures ... My successors must fare well in the centuries to come, to gain such an access to Xeelee technology.’

  ‘You must be proud,’ Parz said sourly. His heart still pounded, but already his fear was lapsing into irritation at the Qax’s complacency.

  ‘The wings are actual sheet-discontinuities in spacetime,’ the Governor babbled on. ‘Motive power for the ship is provided by a nonlinear shear of spacetime - much as acoustical shock waves will propagate themselves through an atmosphere, once formed. And—’

  ‘Enough.’

  Parz’s breath caught in his throat. The new voice, which had come booming from the translator box which rested on the platform beside him, was feminine; but where the Governor’s synthetic voice was breathless, shallow and fast-speaking, the new voice was deep and heavy, almost harsh.

  The Governor said, almost girlishly, ‘I hear your voice. Who are you?’

  ‘I am Qax.’

  The Governor said, ‘I do not recognize you.’

  ‘That should not surprise you. I travelled through the wormhole Interface from your future. I am not yet sentient in this local frame.’

  ‘Sir,’ Parz said, determined not to show any awe or fear, ‘I’ve got used to a Qax being laid out on the scale of miles, like the Governor and his fragment of mother-sea up there. But the body of your ship is much smaller. How can the awareness of a Qax be contained in such a constricted space?’

  ‘Many things will change in the coming centuries,’ the newcomer said. ‘Many Qax will die, and many more will be formed; very few of the Qax now sentient will survive. And the forms which support our sentience will become greatly more varied. No longer will the Qax be able to afford the luxury of the ancient aquatic form; the Qax, scattered across the stars, must find new ways to survive.’

  Parz could scarcely believe the implications of these words. ‘Qax, what are you saying? What happens to the Qax? What is it that humans do to you?’

  ‘First answer my question,’ the Governor cut in, and Parz thought he could detect a note of aggrieved pride in the synthesized voice. ‘Why did you not inform me of your approach? And why do we converse through this human translator box? We are Qax. We are brothers. Our forms may differ, but surely we can still communicate as the Qax have always done?’

  ‘I want Jasoft Parz to hear and understand all that occurs here,’ the new Qax said. ‘Later, I will require his co-operation.’

  Parz took an uneasy step back, feeling the edge of the metal platform under his feet. ‘You know me?’

  Again, a primitive awe rose in him, threatening to overwhelm him, as if he were some savage confronted by a shaman. But how could a Qax from five centuries into the future know of his existence? But of course it does, he thought, a touch of insanity bubbling in his thoughts. The Qax is from the future; it knows everything about this sequence of events. It’s probably watched this scene play itself out a dozen times . . .

  ‘Jasoft Parz, bear witness.’

  Parz looked up.

  Light, cherry-red, lanced through the hull of the Spline, a geometrically perfect line which pierced the heart of the Governor’s ocean-globe. The flesh of the Spline peeled back from the wound, bubbling into immense blisters, and Parz was afforded a brief glimpse of space. The Virtual image of the nightfighter ship broke up into a cloud of pixels and vanished.

  Jasoft closed his eyes, ran the last second of the Virtual scene through his mind.

  The Qax ship, he realized. The weapon - the beam, whatever it was - had been fired by the Qax ship from the future.

  ‘Xeelee technology, Jasoft Parz,’ the new Qax said. ‘The starbreaker ...’

  Where the cherry-red beam had struck, the surface of the ocean-globe seethed and steamed; huge bubbles erupted from the heart of the liquid, disrupting the delicate pattern of hexagonal turbulence cells. Mist wrapped around the churning globe.

  ‘My God,’ Parz breathed. ‘You’re killing it.’

  ‘The beam consists of coherent gravity radiation,’ the new Qax said, almost conversationally. ‘The form of the ocean fragment is maintained by a small black hole at its centre. The action of the weapon has caused the equilibrium of the globe to be broken; it is now imploding towards the central singularity.’

  The ball of liquid above Parz’s head was completely obscured by mist now; it was like standing under a fat, spherical cloud. Droplets of fluid, round and heavy as mercury, splashed obscenely against Parz’s faceplate. He wiped at the plate with a gloved hand. ‘Qax,’ he said angrily, ‘I didn’t know your species murdered each other.’

  ‘The failure of the one you called the Governor, in permitting the escape of these rebel humans through time, is so catastrophic as to be criminal. If it troubles you, Parz, think of this as a culling, not a murder. A strengthening of my species through the elimination of the weak. The Governor of Earth was - hesitant. I am not.’

  ‘A catastrophic failure?’ Parz knelt again and pressed his face close to the translator box, shouting to hear his own voice over a rising wind. ‘My God, Qax, I don’t know what I expected from the future, but nothing like this ... We humans terrify you. Don’t we, Qax?’

  ‘Yes,’ the Qax said simply. ‘But the fact of my apprehension should, perhaps, terrify you. For it is I, in this local frame, who wield the power—’

  Parz shivered at that.

  ‘And I do not fear you, Jasoft Parz,’ the Qax went on.

  Parz frowned. ‘How flattering.’

  ‘I have studied your earlier conversation with the Governor. This new policy, of permitting selected humans access to the ancient AS technology is indeed a wise one. Because it divides you. And you, Jasoft Parz, you have accepted the payment of the Qax. You live, while your fellows die like insects.’ The Qax laughed, and its synthesized laughter was dark, sinister in comparison with the Governor’s. ‘Your analysis of the value of potential immortality was valid. A human would far sooner throw away a life of a mere few decades than abandon the chance of immortality. Wouldn’t you, Parz?’

  ‘If you want my co-operation, why do you insult me?’

  ‘Oh, I will have your co-operation.’

  Parz lifted his head, letting the ghastly rain slide over his faceplate. ‘You listen to me. The Governor, whom you seem to hold in such contempt, was civilized. Do you understand me? The framework within which we worked together - the Occupation - was not established by either of us. But the Governor strove for efficiency, not terror or brutality. And that was why I spent my life working with him; I felt it was the best way I could serve my species. But you. I’ve already seen you murder one of your own, since your irruption from the future only moments ago—’

  The Qax laughed. ‘You are h
onest, Jasoft Parz; perhaps that is why the Governor valued your presence so much. Listen. My purpose here is not to maintain the Occupation.’

  Parz asked uneasily: ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘I will not stay in this local spacetime frame. My intention is to pass through the original human portal - to move still further back into time.’

  ‘You’re chasing the Friends of Wigner, the human rebels, back through time?’

  ‘I intend to destroy those rebels, yes. And to achieve much more besides.’

  Parz tried to imagine this Qax - an unprincipled killer with an admitted fear and loathing of humans - emerging into the unprepared Solar System of fifteen centuries earlier.

  ‘And me?’ Jasoft asked fearfully. ‘What will I do, while you launch this assault on the past?’

  ‘Why, you will accompany me, of course.’

  ‘Dear God—’ Primaeval ocean murk sleeted again over Jasoft’s faceplate; he wiped at it ineffectually with the back of one gloved hand.

  The Qax said, ‘The Governor will remain conscious for some hours, although its sentience is diminishing already.’

  ‘Is there pain?’

  ‘Our business is concluded here. Return to your craft.’

  Barely able to see through a sheen of ocean-stuff, Parz reached for the shelter of the flitter.

  6

  The GUTship Hermit Crab swept backside-first through a powered orbit around the swollen cheek of Jupiter.

  Michael Poole sat in the Crab’s clear-walled lifedome with the Virtual of his father, Harry. The ship was rounding the dark side of the planet now, and the GUTdrive, blazing a mile beneath the transparent floor of the cabin, illuminated vast areas of an ocean of swirling cloud. Violet light was cast upwards through the cabin, and Poole noticed how his father’s young, blond head had been given suitably demonic shadows by the processors in response.

  ‘We’re making quite an entrance,’ Harry said.

  ‘I guess so. If you like fireworks.’

  Harry turned to his son, his blue eyes boyishly wide with wonder. ‘No, it’s more than that. You’re the physicist, son, and I’m just a government functionary; and you understand it all better than I ever could. But maybe the wonder of it doesn’t hit you with the same impact as it does a layman like me. We’re harnessing forces lost to the universe since the first few seconds after the Big Bang—’