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

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘All right. Tell me about the singularity plane.’

  He looked vaguely at the console and lifted a desultory hand, tapped almost casually at the touch-screen. ‘We’ve lost control of about thirty per cent of the singularities. The integrity of the restraining electromagnetic net is gone.’

  Berg frowned, tried to work it out. ‘What does that do to us?’

  ‘We didn’t run any simulations of this scenario.’ He turned to face her, the sweat on his scalp glistening in the starbreaker light. ‘This is a catastrophic failure; we have no options from this point. The loose singularities will attract each other, swarm together. The n-body computations would be interesting ... The singularity swarms will eventually implode, of course.

  ‘It’s over.’ His shoulders shook convulsively in their thin covering of begrimed, pink material.

  She stared at him. She had the feeling that, just at this moment, Jaar - broken open as he was - would be prepared to tell her anything she wanted to know about this damn Project: that all the questions which had plagued her in the months since she’d fallen ass-first into the laps of these Friends of Wigner would at last be settled ... ‘Jesus, I wish I had time for this.’ She glared at the console before her, lifted her hands to the touch-screen - but the configuration was different. Blocks of light slid about as she watched; the damn thing was changing before her eyes. ‘Jaar, what’s happening?’

  He glanced down briefly, barely interested. ‘Compensation for the lost singularities, ’ he said. ‘The mass distribution will continue to change until the disrupted singularities settle down to some form of stable configuration.’

  ‘All right.’ She stared at the shifting colour blocks, striving to take in the whole board as a kind of gestalt. Slowly she started to see how this new pattern matched the matrix she’d memorized earlier, and she raised her hands hesitantly to the screen—

  Then the shifting, the seemingly random configuring, started again.

  She dropped her hands. ‘Damn it,’ she said. ‘Serves me right for thinking this was going to be easy.’ She grabbed Jaar’s arm; he looked down at her with an expressionless face. ‘Listen, Jaar, you’re going to have to come back out of that shell of yours and help me with this. I can’t manage it myself.’

  ‘Help you with what?’

  ‘With firing a singularity.’

  He shook his head. It was hard to be sure, but it seemed to Berg that he was almost smiling at her, patient at her ignorance. ‘But there’s no point. I’ve already explained that without the thirty per cent we’ve lost, we can’t complete the Project—’

  ‘Damn you,’ she shouted over the rising wind, ‘I’m not planning to fire these things into Jupiter! Listen to me. I want you to help me fight back against the Spline ...’

  He shook his head, clearly confused and frightened, trying to pull away from her.

  ‘What is it with you people? I know your Project was more important than your own damn life, but the thing has failed now! Why won’t you help me keep you alive?’

  He stared at her, as if she was speaking a language he no longer understood.

  There was a groan, like the cry of some huge animal. She glanced up, cringing; acres of dome were glowing white-hot now, vast sections peeling back to reveal the stars. Xeelee material dangled like scraps of burnt skin.

  She might only have seconds left, she realized, before the control systems failed completely - or all the power failed, and she found herself playing billiards with a thousand uncontrolled, city-block-sized black holes - or the damn roof fell in ...

  And she was going to have to waste those seconds holding this guy’s hand. ‘Jaar,’ she shouted, ‘your Project is finished. The only way it could succeed, in the future, is for you to start again. To construct new singularities, build a new earth-ship. But the options are limited. We can’t run, because the hyperdrive is slag, along with the Xeelee dome. So all we can do is fight. Jaar, you have to help me fight back. We have to destroy the Spline, before it destroys us.’

  Still he stared at her emptily, his mouth drooping open.

  In frustration she drove her fist into his arm. ‘It’s for the Project, Jaar. The Project. You’ve got to live, to find a way to start it all again. You see that, don’t you? Jaar?’

  More of the dome imploded into spinning fragments; starbreaker light flickered.

  Jasoft Parz was shaken around his eyeball chamber like a pea in a cup. Bits of his broken-open life-support kit bounced around at the end of his umbilical cord like some ludicrous metal placenta. But the walls of the chamber were fleshy, yielding; and he was cushioned further by entoptic fluid.

  It was almost fun.

  The life-box was a depressing sight. He’d stripped out so many components in his search for a way to ignite his little bonfire - not to mention bleeding half his air supply away to feed the flames - that he couldn’t believe it would sustain him for much longer than a few more minutes.

  He doubted it made much difference, now, whatever the outcome of this brief, intense battle; he could see no way he personally was going to be allowed to live through this.

  It didn’t seem to matter. He hadn’t felt as calm in years.

  His improvised oxygen-tent was still holding up, despite the buffeting and turbulence of the entoptic fluid; sparking electrical fire sizzled against the raw nerve of the Spline; he must be flooding the nervous system of the disoriented creature with agony. Through the Spline’s clouding lens he saw sheets of cherry-red light, lines of fire which seemed to crackle across space. The starbreaker beams were firing at the incoming GUTship, then. But he could see how wild the firing was, how random.

  For the first time he allowed himself to suppose that this might actually work.

  ‘Jasoft Parz.’ The Qax’s synthesized translated voice was, Parz noted with amusement, still as level and empty of meaning as a software-generated travel announcement ... but it masked a scream of rage. ‘You have betrayed me.’

  Jasoft laughed. ‘Sorry about that. But what did you expect? Who would have thought that a Spline warship would be so easy to disable ... provided you’re in the right place, at the right time. In any event, you’re wrong. The truth is that you have betrayed yourself.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By your insufferable complacency,’ Parz said. ‘You were so convinced of a simple victory here. Damn it, Qax, I would have emerged from that portal with all guns blazing - hit these men from the past before they understood what was happening! But not you - even despite the fact that you knew the Wigner Friends could have prepared resistance to you ... And, even worse, you carried me - a human, one of the enemy - in your warship’s most vulnerable place; and for no other reason than to heighten the exquisiteness of your triumph. Complacency, Qax!’

  ‘The Spline is not yet rogue,’ the Qax said. ‘Its pain-suppression routines are not designed to deal with the damage you have inflicted. But, within seconds, heuristic routines will eliminate the disruption. And, Jasoft Parz, you may anticipate the arrival of antibody drones, to deal with the cause of the damage—’

  ‘I’m weak with terror,’ Parz said dryly. Beyond the clouding lens-window of his bathysphere-like cell, comet-ice gleamed, rushing at him; GUTfire blazed like sunlight. ‘But I don’t think we’ve got even seconds left, Qax.’

  The Spline, engulfed by pain, closed its huge eyelid.

  A cannon tube, suspended from the damaged dome, extended downwards; at last its mouth touched the crystalline flooring beneath Berg’s feet and merged with it, seamlessly. Two firefly singularities moved imperceptibly closer to the cannon barrel, as if eager to be launched into space. Berg felt the gravity field within which she was embedded alter, subtly; it was like an earth tremor, and it gave her a sensation of falling in the pit of her stomach.

  She turned to Jaar. ‘Listen to me,’ she said rapidly. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. I want you to reconfigure this damn thing to launch a singularity pair, so that the peak of the trajectory is inside the
Spline. But that’s not all. I want the singularities to merge, just at the second in which they are lodged at the heart of the Spline. Do you understand?’

  Jaar looked at her, at first without apparent understanding. Then he got it. His eyes narrowed.

  ‘How quickly can you do it?’ she asked.

  ‘Watch me.’

  The collision, when it came, was almost balletic.

  GUTdrive fire blistered great swaths of the Spline’s writhing flesh; Michael found himself shrinking back from the bloody, carnal acres above his head. But still the Spline seemed to find it impossible to respond; those bizarre cherry-red beams, lightspeed rents in spacetime, continued to lance out - but it fired at random, consistently missing the Crab.

  ‘There’s something wrong,’ Harry breathed. ‘It should have sliced us open by now. Why hasn’t it?’

  And now the Crab entered the Spline itself, its burning GUTdrive breaching the elephant-flesh hull. Creation light boiled away blood, flesh in a vast, obscene, soundless explosion; the Spline’s huge body seemed to recoil. At last the comet-ice tail of the Crab disappeared, still glowing, into the carcass of the Spline.

  There was a cloud of motion around the huge wound; Michael squinted to see.

  ‘Little robots,’ Harry said, amazed.

  ‘Antibody drones,’ said Shira lifelessly; she stared at the scene with dull fascination.

  Harry said, ‘The robots are damaging our hull. We’re under attack. For the first time.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Poole. ‘But I don’t think it really matters now.’

  The star-core glow of the GUTdrive was extinguished at last, killed by the toiling antibody drones. But still the mass of comet-ice, the long, crumpling body of the Crab, slid steadily into Spline flesh.

  It was almost sexual, Michael thought.

  The singularity shot, with its reduced launch velocity, seemed to crawl up the translucent cannon shaft. Berg had absurd visions of the singularities rolling out of the mouth of the barrel, falling back to the crystal floor with an anti-climactic plop—

  The singularities reached the mouth of the cannon shaft and soared out of sight, eclipsed by the Xeelee-material dome of the chamber.

  Berg’s energy seeped out of her, now that it was done - for better or worse. She clasped the console, feeling her legs sagging under her.

  Purple-red light flared silently through the cracks in the shattered dome. The Spline’s deadly starbreaker beams flickered, died.

  All over the devastated earth-craft Friends turned their faces up to the uncertain glow, oddly like flowers to the Sun.

  Half the dome was gone now. Beyond it, the Spline blocked out the stars.

  Its starbreaker beams stilled, the huge warship rolled across the impassive sky. An immense, bloody crater - covering fully an eighth of the Spline’s surface area - deformed its hull, Berg saw; and she couldn’t help but wince in sympathy. And, as the Spline rolled, she realized that the crater was matched by a second - if anything, even deeper - at the ship’s opposite pole. Weapon-navels pooled with blood. The Spline’s roll across the stars was erratic, as if some internal balance system was failing.

  ‘Implosion wounds from the directional gravity waves,’ said Jaar, his voice calm, evaluating. He nodded thoughtfully. ‘It worked.’

  Berg closed her eyes. She sought feelings of triumph. Even of relief. But she was still stranded on a damn eggshell that would probably fall apart spontaneously, without any more help from the Spline. And, lest she forget, there was a merged mini-black hole, its devastating work on the Spline complete, falling out of the sky towards her ...

  She said, ‘Come on, Jaar, you beautiful bastard. If we’re going to live through this we’ve still got work to do—’

  The Spline imploded.

  The GUTdrive module drove into its heart like a stiletto. Muscles convulsed in compression waves which tore through the body of the Spline like seismic events. All over the surface of the ship vessels exploded, spewing fast-freezing fluids into space.

  The Qax was silent.

  Jasoft Parz clung to nerve cables; the eye chamber rolled absurdly as the Spline sought escape from its agony. Parz closed his eyes and tried to feel the suffering of the Spline - every spasm, every bursting vessel.

  He had been brought here to witness the destruction of Earth. Now he was determined to witness the death of a Qax, embedded in the consciousness of the Spline; he tried to sense its fear at the encroaching darkness, its frustration at its own mistakes, its dawning realization that the future - of Jim Bolder, the Qax diaspora - would, after all, come to pass.

  Failure, and death.

  Jasoft Parz smiled.

  The Crab had come to rest at last, its tail section buried in the ravaged heart of the Spline. The lifedome, perched on the crumpled shaft of the ship, overlooked the Spline’s carcass like, Michael thought, a viewing platform over some ghastly resort of blood and ripped flesh.

  He lay on his couch, the tension draining out of him. Shira, beside him, even seemed to be asleep.

  ‘I need a shower,’ he said.

  ‘Michael.’ Harry’s Virtual head hovered at the edge of the dome, peering out. ‘There’s something out here.’

  Michael laughed. ‘What, something other than a wrecked sentient warship from the future? Surprise me, Harry.’

  ‘I think it’s an eyeball. Really; a huge, ugly eyeball, yards wide. It’s come out of its socket; it’s drifting at the end of a kind of cable ... an optic nerve extension, maybe.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I think there’s somebody inside.’ Harry grinned. ‘I think he’s seen me. He’s waving at me ...’

  12

  Michael Poole followed Jasoft Parz, the strange bureaucrat from the future, through the entrails of the dead Spline.

  They worked their way through gravity-free darkness broken only by the shifting, limited glow of the light-globe Parz had rescued from his bizarre eyeball-capsule; the semi-sentient device trailed Parz, doglike. The corridor they followed was circular in cross-section and little more than head-high. Poole’s hands sank into walls of a greyish, oily substance, and he found himself worming his way past dark, floating ovals a foot or more wide. The ovals were harmless as long as he avoided them, but if he broke the crusty meniscus of any of them a thick, grainy blood-analogue flowed eagerly over his suit.

  ‘Jesus,’ he muttered. ‘This is disgusting.’

  Parz was a few yards ahead of him. He laughed, and spoke in his light, time-accented English. ‘No,’ he said. ‘This is life aboard the finest interstellar craft likely to be available to humans for generations to come - even after my time.’ Parz was a thin, dapper man of medium height; his receding hair was snow white and his face was gloomy, downturned, his chin weak. He looked, Michael thought, like a caricature of an aging bureaucrat - a caricature saved only by his striking green eyes. Parz, in his clear, skin-tight environment suit, moved more easily through the claustrophobic, sticky conditions than did Poole in his bulky space-hardened gear; but Poole, watching Parz slide like a fish through the cloacal darkness, found himself relishing the cool dryness inside his own suit.

  A fleshy flap a yard square opened in the floor of this tunnel-tube. Poole jumped back with a cry; ahead of him Parz halted and turned. Fist-sized globes of blood-analogue came quivering out of the flap, splashing stickily against Poole’s legs, and then out shot an antibody drone - one of the little robots which seemed to infest the carcass of this damn ship. This one was a flattened sphere about a foot across; it shot from wall to wall, rebounding. Then, for a moment, the drone hovered before Poole; tiny red laser-spots played over Poole’s shins and knees, and he tensed, expecting a lance of pain. But the laser- spots snapped away from him and played over the walls and blood-globules like tiny searchlights.

  The drone, jets sparkling, hurtled off down the passageway and out of sight.

  Poole found himself trembling.

  Parz laughed, irritatingly. ‘You shouldn’t worry abou
t the drones. That one was just a simple maintenance unit—’

  ‘With lasers.’

  ‘It was only using them for ranging information, Mr Poole.’

  ‘And they couldn’t be used for any more offensive purposes, I suppose.’

  ‘Against us? The drones of this Spline are thoroughly used to humans, Mr Poole. It probably thinks we’re part of a maintenance crew ourselves. They wouldn’t dream of attacking humans. Unless specifically ordered to, of course.’

  ‘That cheers me up,’ Poole said. ‘Anyway, what was it doing here? I thought you said the damn Spline was dead.’

  ‘Of course it is dead,’ Parz said with a trace of genteel impatience. ‘Ah, then, but what is death, to a being on this scale? The irruption of your GUTdrive craft into the heart of the Spline was enough to sever most of its command channels, disrupt most of its higher functions. Like snapping the spinal cord of a human. But - is it dead?’ Parz hesitated. ‘Mr Poole, imagine putting a bullet in the brain of a tyrannosaurus. It’s effectively dead; its brain is destroyed. But how long will the processes of its body continue undirected, feedback loops striving blindly to restore some semblance of homeostasis? And the antibody drones are virtually autonomous - semi-sentient, some of them. With the extinguishing of the Spline’s consciousness they will be acting without central direction. Most of them will simply have ceased functioning. But the more advanced among them - like our little visitor just now - don’t have to wait to be told what to do; they actively prowl the body of the Spline, seeking out functions to perform, repairs to initiate. It’s all a bit anarchic, I suppose, but it’s also highly effective. Flexible, responsive, mobile, heuristic, with intelligence distributed to the lowest level ... A bit like an ideal human society, I suppose; free individuals seeking out ways to advance the common good.’ Parz’s laugh was delicate, almost effete, thought Poole. ‘Perhaps we should hope, as one sentient species considering another, that the drones find tasks sufficient to give their lives meaning while they remain aware.’