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

by Stephen Baxter

By the dimmed starlight, half by touch, he made his way back to his couch.

  It grew colder; he imagined the heat of the lifedome leaking out into the immense heat sink of the blackened, ancient sky. What would get him first? - the cold, or the failing air?

  He wasn’t afraid. Oddly, he felt renewed: young, for the first time in a subjective century, the pressure of time no longer seeming to weigh on him.

  Perhaps he was finding that peace of death, the readiness to abandon the cares of a too-long life, which his father had discovered before him. And he found, at last, a contentment that he had lived long enough to see all he had.

  He crossed his hands on his chest. He was beginning to shiver, the air sharp in his nostrils. He closed his eyes.

  Something like curiosity, a spark of its awareness, stirred the antiXeelee.

  Here was an artifact.

  How had this cooling wreckage got here, to this place and time?

  There was something inside it. A single, flickering candle of consciousness ...

  The antiXeelee reached out.

  There was a ship, another ship, hanging over the lifedome.

  Michael, dying, stared in wonder.

  It was something like a sycamore seed wrought in jet black. No lights showed in the small, pod-like hull. Nightdark wings which must have spanned hundreds of miles loomed over the wreck of the Crab, softly rippling.

  The Friends of Wigner had told Michael of ships like this. This was a nightfighter, the wings sheet-discontinuities in the fabric of spacetime.

  Xeelee.

  The cold sank claws into his chest; the muscles of his throat abruptly spasmed, and dark clouds ringed his vision.

  Not now, he found himself pleading silently, his failing vision locked onto the Xeelee ship, all his elegiac acceptance gone in a flash. Just a little longer. I have to know what this means. Please ...

  The antiXeelee plucked the guttering flame from the candle.

  The last heat fled from the wrecked craft; the air in the translucent dome began to frost over the comms panels, the couches, the galley, the abandoned body.

  The antiXeelee cupped the flame, almost amused by its tiny fear, its wonder, its helpless longing to survive.

  The flame was spun out into a web of quantum functions, acausal and nonlocal.

  Michael was - discorporeal; it was as if the jewel of consciousness which had lain behind his eyes had been plucked out of his body and flung into space.

  He did not even have heartbeats to count.

  But there was something here with him, he sensed: some - entity. It was like a great ceiling under which he hovered and buzzed, insect-like. He sensed a vast, satisfied weariness in its mood, the contentment of the traveller at the end of a long and difficult road. For a long time he stayed within the glow of its protection.

  Then it began to dissolve.

  Michael wanted to cry out, like a child seeking its huge parent. He was buffeted, battered. It was as if a glacier of memories and emotions was calving into a hundred icebergs around him; and now those icebergs in turn burst into shards which melted into the surface of a waiting sea ...

  And he was left alone.

  It was impossible to measure time, other than by the slow evolution of his own emotions.

  He endured despair. Why had he been brought to this point in spacetime, preserved in such a fashion, and then so casually abandoned?

  The despair turned to anger, and lasted a long time.

  But the anger faded.

  He became curious and began to experiment with his awareness. Physically he seemed to be composed of a tight knot of quantum wave functions; now, cautiously, he began to unravel that knot, to allow the focus of his consciousness to slide over spacetime. Soon it was as if he was flying over the arch of the cosmos, unbound by limits of space or time.

  Throughout the galaxy he found the works of man. He lingered over places and artifacts abandoned by history, dwelling as long over a drifting child’s toy as over some huge spacebound fortress.

  Everywhere he found relics of war. Ruined stars and worlds, squandered energy. But he found no people - no sentience - anywhere.

  At first Michael labelled the places he visited, the relics he found, in human terms; but as time passed and his confidence grew he removed this barrier of conscious thought. 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 spiders’ webs scattered over the aging galaxies; they mingled, reinforced and cancelled each other, all bound by the implacable logic of the governing wave equations.

  The functions filled spacetime 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 depth of a star’s gravity well. His sense of time telescoped, so that he could watch the insect-like, 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.

  Human consciousness was an artificial thing. Once humans had believed that gods animated their souls, fighting their battles in the guise of humans. Later they had evolved the idea of the self-aware, self-directed consciousness. Now Michael saw that it had all been no more than an idea, a model, an illusion behind which to hide.

  He, the last man, need no longer 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 grey light which shone beneath reality, the light against which all phenomena are shadows.

  Time wore away, unmarked.

  And then ...

  There was a box, drifting in space, tetrahedral, clear-walled.

  From around an impossible corner a human walked into the box. He was dressed in treated animal skins. He was gaunt, encrusted in filth, his skin ravaged by frost.

  He stared out at the stars, astonished.

  Michael’s extended awareness stirred. Something had changed.

  History resumed.

  FLUX

  1

  Dura woke with a start.

  There was something wrong. The photons didn’t smell right.

  Her hand floated before her face, dimly visible, and she flexed her fingers. Disturbed electron gas, spiralling dizzily around the Magfield lines, sparkled purple-white around the fingertips. The Air in her eyes was warm, stale, and she could make out only vague shapes.

  For a moment she hung there, curled in a tight ball, suspended in the elastic grip of the Magfield.

  She heard voices, thin and hot with panic. They were coming from the direction of the Net.

  Dura jammed her eyes tight shut and hugged her knees, willing herself to return to the cool oblivion of sleep. Not again. By the blood of the Xeelee, she swore silently, not another Glitch; not another spin storm. She wasn’t sure if the little tribe of Human Beings had the resources to respond to more disruption ... nor, indeed, if she herself had the strength to cope with fresh disaster.

  The Magfield itself trembled now. Encasing her body, it rippled over her skin, not unpleasantly, and she allowed it to rock her as if she were a child in its arms. Then - not so pleasantly - it prodded her more rudely in the small of the back ...

  No, that wasn’t the Magfield. She uncurled again, stretching against the confines of the field. She rubbed her eyes - the fleshy rims of the cups were crusted with sleep-deposits and felt sharp against her fingers - and shook her head to clear the clouded Air ou
t of the cups.

  The prod in her back was coming from the fist of Farr, her brother. He’d been on latrine duty, she saw; he still carried his plaited waste bag, empty of the neutron-rich shit he’d taken out away from the Net and dumped in the Air. His skinny, growing body trembled in response to the instabilities in the Magfield and his round face was upturned to her, creased with an almost comical concern. In one hand he gripped a fin of his pet Air-pig - a fat infant about the size of Dura’s fist, so young that none of its six fins were yet pierced. The little animal, obviously terrified by the Glitch, struggled to escape, feebly; it pumped out superfluid jetfarts in thin blue streams.

  His fondness for the animal made Farr seem even younger than his twelve years - a third of Dura’s age - and he clung to the piglet as if clinging to childhood itself. Well, Dura thought, the Mantle was huge and empty, but there was precious little room in it for childhood. Farr was having to grow up fast.

  He was so like their father, Logue.

  Dura, still misty with sleep, felt a surge of affection and concern for the boy and reached out to stroke his cheek, to run gentle fingers around the quiet brown rims of his eyes.

  She smiled at her brother. ‘Hello, Farr.’

  ‘Sorry for waking you.’

  ‘You didn’t. The Star was kind enough to wake me, long before you got around to it. Another Glitch?’

  ‘The worst one yet, Adda says.’

  ‘Never mind what Adda says,’ Dura said, stroking his floating hair; the hollow tubes were, as always, tangled and grubby. ‘We’ll get by. We always do, don’t we? You get back to your father. And tell him I’m coming.’

  ‘All right.’ Farr smiled at her again, twisted stiffly, and, with his Air-pig’s fin still clutched tight, he began to Wave awkwardly across the Magfield’s invisible flux paths towards the Net. Dura watched him recede, his slim form diminished by the shimmering, world-filling vortex lines beyond him.

  Dura straightened to her full length and stretched, pressing against the Magfield. She kept her mouth wide open as she worked stiffness out of her limbs and back. She felt the feathery ripple of the Air as it poured through her throat to her lungs and heart, rushing through superleak capillaries and filling her muscles; her body seemed to tingle with its freshness.

  She gazed around, sniffing the photons.

  Dura’s world was the Mantle of the Star, an immense cavern of yellow-white Air bounded below by the Quantum Sea and above by the Crust.

  The Crust itself was a rich, matted ceiling, purple-streaked with grass and the hairlike lines of tree trunks. By squinting - distorting the parabolic retinae of her eyes - she could make out dark motes scattered among the roots of the trees fixed to the underside of the Crust. Perhaps they were rays, or a herd of wild Air-pigs, or some other grazing creatures. It was too distant to see clearly, but the amphibian animals seemed to be swirling around each other, colliding, confused; she almost imagined she could hear the cool sound of their distress.

  Far below her, the Quantum Sea formed a purple-dark floor to the world. The Sea was mist-shrouded, its surface indistinct and deadly. The Sea itself, she saw with relief, was undisturbed by the Glitch. Only once in Dura’s memory had there been a Glitch severe enough to cause a Seaquake. She shuddered like the Magfield as she remembered that ghastly time; she had been no older than Farr, she supposed, when the neutrino founts had come, sweeping half the Human Beings - including Phir, Dura’s mother and Logue’s first wife - away and on, screaming, into the mysteries beyond the Crust.

  All around her, filling the Air between Crust and Sea, the vortex lines were an electric-blue cage. The lines filled space in a hexagonal array, spaced about ten mansheights apart; they swept around the Star from far upflux - from the North - arced past her like the trajectories of immense, graceful animals, and converged into the red-soft blur that was the South Pole, millions of mansheights away.

  She held her fingers up before her face, trying to judge the spacing and pattern of the lines.

  Through her fingers she could see the encampment, a little knot of frantic detail and activity - jostling, terrified Air-pigs, scrambling people, the quivering Net - all embedded in the shuddering bulk of the Air. Farr with his struggling Air-piglet was a pathetic scrap, wriggling through the invisible flux tubes.

  Dura tried to ignore the small, messy knot of humanity, to focus on the lines.

  Normally the motion of the lines was stately, predictable - regular enough for the Human Beings to measure their lives by it, in fact. Overlaid on the eternal drift of the lines towards the Crust there were pulses of line-bunching: the tight, sharp crowdings that marked the days, and the slower, more complex second-order oscillations which humans used to count their months. In normal times it was easy for the Human Beings to avoid the slow creep of the lines; there was always plenty of time to dismantle the Net, repitch their little encampment in another corner of the empty sky.

  Dura even knew what caused the lines’ stately pulsations, much good the knowledge did her: the Star had a companion, far beyond the Crust - a planet, a ball like the Star but smaller, lighter - which revolved, unseen, over their heads, pulling at the vortex lines as if with invisible fingers. And, of course, beyond the planet - the childish ideas returned to her unbidden, like fragments of her lingering sleep - beyond the planet were the stars of the Ur-humans, impossibly distant and forever invisible.

  The drifting vortex lines were as stable and secure, in normal times, as the fingers of some friendly god; humans, Air-pigs and others moved freely between the lines, fearlessly and without any danger ...

  Except during a Glitch.

  Now, across the frame of her spread fingers, the vortex array was shifting visibly as the superfluid Air sought to realign with the Star’s adjusted rotation. Instabilities - great parallel sets of ripples - already marched majestically along the length of the lines, bearing the news of the Star’s new awakening from Pole to magnetic Pole.

  The photons emitted by the lines smelled thin, sharp. The spin storm was coming.

  Dura had chosen a sleep place about fifty mansheights from the centre of the Human Beings’ current encampment, in a place where the Magfield had felt particularly thick, comfortingly secure. Now she began to Wave towards the Net. Wriggling, rippling her limbs, she felt electricity course through her epidermis; and she pushed with arms and legs at the invisible, elastic resistance of the Magfield as if it were a ladder. Fully awake now, she found herself filled with a belated anxiety - an anxiety healthily laced with guilt at her tardiness - and as she slid across the Magfield she spread the webbed fingers of her hands and beat at the Air, trying to work up still more speed. Neutron superfluid made up most of the bulk of the Air, so there was barely any resistance to her hands; but still she clawed at the Air, her impatience mounting, seeking comfort in activity.

  The vortex lines slid like dreams across her field of vision now. Ripples hurtled in great even chains, as if the vortex lines were ropes shaken by giants located in the mists of the Poles. As the waves beat past her they emitted a low, cool groan. The amplitude of the waves was already half a mansheight. By Bolder’s guts, she thought, maybe that old fool Adda is right for once; maybe this really is going to be the worst yet.

  Slowly, painfully slowly, the encampment grew from a distant abstraction, a melange of movement and noise, to a community. The encampment was based around the crude cylindrical Net made of plaited tree-bark, slung out along the Magfield lines. Most people slept and ate bound up to the Net, and the length of the cylinder was a patchwork of tied-up belongings, privacy blankets, cleaning brushes, simple clothes - ponchos, tunics and belts - and a few pathetic bundles of food. Scraps of half-finished wooden artifacts and flags of untreated Air-pig leather dangled from the Net ropes.

  The Net was five mansheights across and a dozen long. It was at least five generations old, according to the older folk like Adda. And it was the only home of about fifty humans - and their only treasure.

  As she nea
red it, clawing her way through the clinging Magfield, Dura suddenly saw the flimsy construct with an objective eye - as if she had not been born in a blanket tied to its filthy knots, as if she would not die still clinging to its fibres. How fragile it was: how pathetic, how defenceless they truly were. Even as she approached to join her people in this moment of need, Dura felt depressed, weak, helpless.

  The adults and older children were Waving all around the Net, working at knots which dwarfed their fingers. She saw Esk, picking patiently at a section of the Net. Dura thought he watched her approach, but it was hard to be sure. In any event Philas, his wife, was with him, and Dura kept her face averted. Here and there Dura could make out small children and infants still attached to the Net by tethers of varying lengths. Each child, left tethered up by labouring parents and siblings, was a small, wailing bundle of fear and loneliness, Waving futilely against its constraints, and Dura felt her heart go out to every one of them. Dura spotted the girl Dia, heavily pregnant with her first child. Working with her husband Mur, Dia was pulling tools and bits of clothing from the Net and stuffing them into a sack; Air-sweat glistened from her swollen, naked belly. Dia was a small-limbed, childlike woman whose pregnancy had served to make her only more vulnerable and young-looking; watching her work now, her every movement redolent of fear, made something move inside childless Dura, an urge to protect.

  The animals - the tribe’s small herd of a dozen adult Air-pigs and about as many piglets - were restrained inside the Net, along its axis. They bleated, their din adding a mournful counterpoint to the shouts and cries of humans; they huddled together at the heart of the Net in a trembling mass of fins, jet orifices and stalks erect with huge, bowl-shaped eyes. A few people had gone inside the Net and were trying to calm the animals, to attach leaders to their pierced fins. But the dismantling of the Net was proceeding slowly and unevenly, Dura saw as she approached, and the herd was a mass of panicky noise, uncoordinated movement.