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

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Qax. Talk to me.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Anything,’ Parz muttered. ‘I don’t care. Anything to take my mind off this. Tell me the story of how a human destroyed your planet ... Tell me about Jim Bolder.’

  ‘Will destroy it. Would have destroyed it.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  The Qax seemed to consider. ‘Perhaps. But, what an odd question for you to ask, Jasoft Parz. I must consider what you have to gain by acquiring such information. Perhaps you have some vain scheme to use the data to rehabilitate yourself in the eyes of your people ... from the race’s greatest traitor, to an unsung hero—’

  Parz, surprised, frightened, looked inwards. Traitor? A month ago he would have denied the charge.

  But now the Qax had changed the rules. Suddenly Parz had found himself transformed from a morally dubious collaborating diplomat into a witness to the destruction of his race ...

  The Spline shuddered again, more violently, and through the entoptic medium he seemed to hear a low groan, of pain, or terror.

  Could the Qax be right? Was some element of his subconscious still scheming, looking for advantage, even now? Did he, he asked himself with wonder, still entertain hope?

  The Qax was silent.

  Now the Spline shuddered so hard that Parz was thrown into a soft collision with the wall of the huge eyeball. It felt as if the Spline had jerked through a few hundred yards, as if hauling itself away from some source of pain.

  Jasoft closed his eyes and, with a subvocalized command, ordered the software in his eyes to call up an external image of the Spline, transmitted from the companion ship.

  His craft was entering the portal face, inching forward as delicately as in any docking, the curves of its flanks almost brushing the powder-blue edges of the tetrahedral framework.

  Parz was a hundred hours away from the past.

  The Qax spoke abruptly, its decision evidently made. ‘The human was - will be - called Jim Bolder. A man of the Occupation era - from not far into your own future, Parz.

  ‘Bolder was one of the last human pilots. Eventually the Qax interdiction on human operation of spacecraft will become complete, Jasoft Parz. Ships will be impounded on landing. The off-Earth human colonies will become self-sufficient. Or they will be closed, their inhabitants returned to Earth. Or they will die.

  ‘Men such as Bolder will lose their vocation, Parz. Their reason to be. This made - will make - it possible to recruit Bolder for a special assignment.’

  The clean geometries of the Interface framework looked stark against the flesh of the Spline. At one point the Spline came within a few dozen yards of brushing the frame itself. Flesh toughened against the rigours of hyperspatial travel was boiling. As Parz watched, blisters the size of city blocks erupted on that pocked, metal-grey surface; the blisters burst like small volcanoes, emitting sprays of human-looking blood which froze instantly into showers of red ice crystals, sparkling in the blue glow of the framework. Acres of the Spline convulsed, trying to pull the damaged area away from the exotic matter.

  ‘What was Bolder’s assignment?’ Parz asked.

  ‘Parz, what do you know of galactic drift?’

  Galaxies - and clusters and superclusters of galaxies, across half a billion light-years - were moving in great, coherent streams through space. It was as if the galaxies were moths, drawn towards some unseen light ... Human astronomers had described such drift for centuries, but had never been able satisfactorily to explain it.

  ‘What does this have to do with Bolder?’

  ‘We suspected the drift had some connection with the Xeelee,’ the Qax said.

  Parz snorted. ‘Come on. The Xeelee are powerful, but they’re not gods.’

  ‘We sent Bolder to find out,’ the Qax said mildly.

  Parz frowned. ‘How? That’s impossible. Even in the fastest of our hyperdrive craft it would take centuries of subjective time—’

  ‘We had access to a Xeelee ship.’

  Parz felt his jaw working. ‘But that’s impossible, too.’

  ‘Such details are unimportant. It is sufficient to know that Bolder survived his journey to the centre of the streaming.’

  ‘To the place where all the galaxies go.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Qax. Although, close enough to the centre, Bolder had found that the structure of all but the most compact ellipticals was shattered; galaxy fragments, stars and worlds tumbled into the immense gravity well at the centre of it all, their blue-shifted light tumbling ahead of them.

  ‘And at the bottom of the well?’

  The Qax paused.

  To Parz, still studying the Spline from without, it was as if the portal framework were scorching the flesh of the hapless Spline. But it wasn’t heat, he knew, but high-frequency radiation and gravity tides raised by the superdense exotic matter which were damaging the Spline so. Parz shuddered in sympathy with the suffering Spline.

  The image winked out. Parz, reduced to sudden artificial blindness, realized with a shock that his ship must now be totally inside the wormhole. With a feeling of claustrophobia and panic he snapped out subvocal commands.

  His vision cleared.

  The eye chamber had been reduced to the darkness within which he had first awoken; his faithful globe light still floated beside him.

  So the Spline had shut its eyes. Well, he couldn’t entirely blame it.

  The ship shuddered, buffeted; entoptic fluid sloshed around the spherical chamber. Parz half-swam to the nearest wall and clung to a ropy nerve channel.

  ‘Gravitational stress,’ the Qax murmured in his ear. ‘This wormhole is a throat in space and time, Parz: a region of stress, immensely high curvature. The throat is lined with exotic matter throughout; we are traversing a vacuum which runs along the axis, away from the exotic matter. The minimum width of the throat is about a mile. Our velocity is three miles per second.’

  ‘Not fast enough,’ Parz gasped.

  Vibration travelled through Parz’s grasping fingers, up through his arms and to his very core; it felt as if the Spline were being beaten by some immense fist. ‘Can the ship endure this?’

  ‘So the simulations tell us,’ the Qax said complacently. ‘But the creature is scarcely comfortable.’

  ‘Right.’ Parz clung to his nerve rope, imagining centuries unravelling around the hurtling Spline. ‘Tell me what Bolder found,’ he said through chattering teeth. ‘At the bottom of the gravity well.’

  A Ring, the Qax said. A torus. Composed of some unknown, crystalline substance. A thousand light-years across. Rotating at a respectable fraction of the speed of light.

  It was massive. It had caused a well in spacetime so deep that it was drawing in galaxies, including Earth’s Milky Way, from across hundreds of millions of light-years.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Parz said, still shaking in sympathy with the Spline.

  ‘It is an artifact,’ the Qax said. ‘A Xeelee construct. Bolder watched the Xeelee build it.’

  Xeelee craft - cup-shaped freighters the size of moons, and fighters with nightdark wings hundreds of miles wide - patrolled the huge construction site. With cherry-red starbreaker beams they smashed the infalling, blue-shifted galactic fragments and plated layers over the growing Ring.

  ‘We believe the Xeelee have already invested billions of years in this project,’ the Qax said. ‘But its growth is exponential. The more massive it becomes, the deeper the gravity well grows, and the faster matter falls towards the site, feeding the construction crews further.’

  ‘But why? What’s the point of it?’

  ‘We speculate that the Xeelee are trying to construct a Kerr-metric region,’ the Qax said.

  ‘A what?’

  The Kerr metric was a human description of a special solution of Einstein’s equations of general relativity. When spacetime was distorted by a sufficiently massive, rotating toroid, it could - open.

  ‘Like a wormhole?’ Parz asked.

  ‘Yes. But the Kerr
-metric interface would not connect two points in the same spacetime, Parz. It is a throat between spacetimes.’

  Parz struggled to understand that. ‘You’re saying that this - “Kerr-metric region” - is a doorway - a way out of our universe?’

  ‘Crudely, yes. The Xeelee are trying to build an exit from this cosmos.’

  ‘And to do it they’re prepared to wreck a region of space hundreds of billions of light-years wide . .

  Suddenly Parz was blind again. Hurriedly, panicking, he issued commands; but this time his vision would not clear. The darkness in which he was immersed was deeper than that of closed eyes ... it was, he realized with a terrifying clarity, the darkness of nothingness, of emptiness. ‘Qax.’ His own voice was muffled; it was as if all his senses were failing together. ‘What’s happening to me?’

  The Qax’s voice came to him, distant but clear. ‘This is causality stress, Parz. The severance of the causal lines, of the quantum wave functions in which you are embedded. Causality stress is causing sensory dysfunction ...’

  Jasoft felt his body senses softening, drifting away from him; he felt as if he were becoming disembodied, a mote of consciousness without anchor in the external universe.

  The Qax continued to speak. Its voice called to Parz like a distant trumpet. ‘Jasoft Parz. This is as difficult for me, for any sentient being, as it is for you ... even for the Spline. But it will pass. Do not let it undermine your sanity. Concentrate on what I am saying to you.

  ‘Jim Bolder, in his stolen craft, evaded the Xeelee engineers. He returned to the Qax home system, where his journey had begun. Jasoft, the Qax are a trading nation. Bolder had returned with a treasure valuable beyond price: data on the greatest Xeelee artifact. It will not surprise you that the Qax decided to, ah, retain the data.

  ‘But Bolder tricked us.’

  There was a glimmering around Parz now, a ghostly shimmer, a reflection of ripples, like moonlight on a sea.

  ‘The details have never become clear. Bolder should have emerged from hyperspace into a region surrounded by Spline warships, all bearing gravity-wave starbreaker technology ... He failed to do so. Bolder survived, escaped.

  ‘Starbreakers were used. In the confusion and panic, they brushed the Qax sun. It was enough to cause the sun to become unstable - ultimately, to nova.

  ‘The Qax were forced to flee. Dozens of individuals died in the exodus. Our power was lost, and the Occupation of Earth crumbled ...’

  Jasoft Parz, bewildered and disoriented as he was, could not help but exult at this.

  A grey light, without form and structure, spread around him ... No, not around him, he realized; he was part of this light: it was as if this were the grey light which shone beneath reality, the light against which all phenomena are shadows. His panic subsided, to be replaced by a sense of calm power; he felt as if he were light-years wide and yet no wider than an atom, a million years old and yet fresher than a child’s first breath. ‘Qax. What the hell is happening?’

  ‘Causality stress, Parz. Perceptual dysfunction. Causality is not a simple phenomenon. When objects are joined once, they become part of a single quantum system ... and they must remain joined forever, via superlight quantum effects. You should imagine you are walking across a beach, calling into existence a trail of footsteps as you go. The footsteps may fade with time as you pass on, but each of them remains bound to you by the threads of quantum functions.’

  ‘And when I pass out of my own region of spacetime?’

  ‘The threads are cut. Causal bonds are broken and must be reformed ...’

  ‘Dear God, Qax. Is this pain worth it, just to travel through time?’

  ‘To achieve one’s goals: yes,’ the Qax said quietly.

  ‘Finish the story,’ Jasoft Parz said.

  ‘Finish it?’

  ‘Why are the Xeelee building a way out of the universe? What are they seeking?’

  ‘I suspect if we knew the answer to that,’ the Qax said, ‘we would know much of the secret truth of our universe. But we do not. The story must remain unfinished, Jasoft Parz.

  ‘But consider this. What if the Xeelee are not seeking something beyond their Ring - but are fleeing something in this universe?

  ‘What do the Xeelee fear, do you suppose?’

  Parz, buffeted, disoriented, could find no reply.

  The Spline warship surged through time.

  9

  The Friend of Wigner, Jaar, was waiting for Michael Poole at the entrance to the Crab’s grounded boat.

  Poole stood on the boat’s exit ramp, bathed in eerie Jovian light. He looked out at the waiting young man, the scatter of Xeelee construction-material buildings in the distance, the glimpse of ancient stones - and over it all the looming, perfect curve of Jupiter.

  He felt too old for this.

  He’d got through the events of the previous day - the landing, the encounter with Miriam, the bombardment with the unfamiliar - on a kind of psychic momentum. But the momentum had gone now; he’d emerged only reluctantly from a troubled sleep to face the dangers, the pressures of the day, the need to find a way to deal with Miriam’s presence here.

  Miriam had spent the sleeping period in the boat. Harry had had the decency to abandon his rights-for-AIs rhetoric for a few hours and had gone into stasis to leave them alone. But Miriam and Michael hadn’t slept together. What were they, kids? They had talked, and held each other’s hands, and had finally stumbled to separate bunks. Somehow, acquiescing to lust didn’t seem the right reaction to a century of separation, or the renewal of an antique, and combative, relationship.

  He wished he hadn’t let Harry talk him into this jaunt. He would have exchanged all he had seen and learned to return to the sanctuary of his station in the Oort Cloud, his slow tinkering at the fringes of exotic-matter physics.

  Of course if he got his head cleaned out, as Harry had done, he’d be able to face all this with a fresh eye. Well, the hell with that.

  Poole walked down the ramp and on to the tough English grass. The Friends of Wigner smiled at him; Poole saw a young man, tall and whiplash thin, dressed in the standard-issue pink coverall. Bony wrists and ankles protruded from the coarse material. Under a high, clean-shaven dome of a scalp he shared the pallid, hothouse complexion of Shira, and his eyes were watery-brown. Jaar’s stance was a little awkward. Poole guessed that even fifteen centuries hence someone of this height and build would spend his life ducking to avoid looking clumsy, but there was something beyond that, something about the way the Friend’s legs looked bowed ...

  Rickets. Was it possible that such a curse had been allowed to return to the Earth? Poole’s heart leapt.

  ‘You are Michael Poole. I am honoured to meet you.’

  ‘And you’re Jaar - the guide Shira promised?’

  ‘I am a physical sciences specialist. I trust you slept peacefully.’

  ‘Not very.’ Poole grinned. ‘I have too many questions.’

  Jaar nodded with the solemnity of the young. ‘You have a fine mind, Mr Poole; it is natural for you to question—’

  ‘And,’ Poole went on sharply, ‘Shira said she’d send someone who could provide answers.’

  Jaar smiled obscurely, and in that expression Poole recognized something of the abstractedness of Shira. Jaar seemed disengaged, uninterested in this little duel, or indeed in any form of interpersonal contact. It was as if he had much more important things on his mind.

  ‘Shira did say that there was little purpose trying to hide from you anything whose existence you had already deduced.’

  ‘So you’ve been sent along to humour an old man?’

  ‘No one sent me, Mr Poole,’ Jaar said. ‘I volunteered for the honour.’

  ‘It’s me who’s honoured, Jaar.’

  With a little bow Jaar invited Poole to walk with him. Side by side, they strolled across the pink-stained grass towards the heart of the earth-craft.

  Poole said, ‘You’re only the second Friend I’ve met ... and yet
you seem very similar, in disposition, to Shira. Forgive my rudeness, Jaar, but are all you Friends so alike?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Mr Poole.’

  ‘Call me Michael. But you have an inner calm, a strange certainty - even after running the gauntlet of the Qax navy; even after falling willy-nilly through a hole in spacetime ...’

  ‘I am sure that what we have come here to do is right.’

  Poole nodded. ‘Your Project. But you’re not allowed to tell me what that is.’

  ‘Like you, I was born with the curse of an inquiring mind. It must be infuriating to have an area of knowledge blocked from you like this ... I apologize. ’ Jaar’s smile was smooth, bland, unyielding; his bald head seemed oddly egglike to Poole, seamless and devoid of detail. ‘But you must not think we are all alike, Michael. The Friends are from very different backgrounds. Granted we were selected for this mission on the grounds of youth and physical fitness, so we share those characteristics; but perhaps we seem similar to you simply because we are from such a removed frame of reference. Perhaps the differences between us are diminished by our distance from you.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Poole said, and he laughed. ‘But I’m not naïve, lad.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s so,’ Jaar said smoothly. ‘And yet, lacking AS technology, none of us shares your two hundred years, Mr ... Michael.’ For a precious second he sounded almost mischievous. ‘Perhaps you simply aren’t used to the company of young people.’

  Poole opened his mouth ... then closed it again, feeling vaguely embarrassed. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said.

  They walked silently for a while.

  An inner calm, a strange certainty . . . Poole wondered if the mysterious purpose of this mission could have some mystical, or religious, content; perhaps it wasn’t the scientific or engineering project he had first assumed. He had a sudden, bizarre image of the battered stones of the henge being aligned with a sunrise over the cloudy limb of Jupiter ...

  There were certainly elements of a religious devotion among these strange young people. Their blank demeanour, their lack of hope for themselves, he thought. Yes, that was the key to it. Somehow they had no dreams of personal gain, or happiness, in all this. Perhaps the mission plan called for them to sacrifice their lives, Poole wondered; and now he imagined the fragile earth-craft, its mission over, plunging into the forbidding depths of the Jovian atmosphere, ancient menhirs tumbling away like stone chips.