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

by Stephen Baxter

  She held out her arms and wiggled her fingers. ‘So they were very strange. But they had arms, and legs, like us - so we believe, because otherwise why would they have given them to us?’

  Dura shook her head. ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Of course it does,’ Maxx smiled. ‘Oh, fingers have their uses. But haven’t there been times when you’d have swapped your long, clumsy legs for an Air-pig’s jetfart bladder? Or for a simple sheet of skin like a Surfer’s board which would let you Wave across the Magfield ten, a hundred times as fast as you can now? You have to face it, my dear . . . We humans are a bad design for the environment of the Mantle. And the reason must be that we are scale models of the Ur-humans who built us. No doubt the Ur-human form was perfectly suited for whatever strange world they came from. But not here.’

  Dura’s imagination, overheating, filled her mind with visions of huge, misty, godlike men, prising open the Crust and releasing handfuls of tiny artificial humans into the Mantle . . .

  Deni Maxx looked deeply into Dura’s eyecups. ‘Is that clear to you? I think it’s important that you understand what’s happened to your friend.’

  ‘Oh, it’s clear,’ Adda called from his cocoon. ‘But it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference, because there’s nothing she can do about it.’ He laughed. ‘Nothing, now she’s condemned me to this living hell. Is there, Dura?’

  Dura’s anger welled like Deni’s heated superfluid. ‘I’m sick of your bitterness, old man.’

  ‘You should have let me die,’ he whispered. ‘I told you.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us about Parz City? Why did you leave us so unprepared?’

  He sighed, a bubble of thick phlegm forming at the corner of his mouth. ‘Because we were thrown out ten generations ago. Because our ancestors travelled so far before building a home that none of us thought we would ever encounter Parz again.’ He laughed. ‘It was better to forget . . . What good would it do to know such a place existed? But how could we know they would spread so far, staining the Crust with their ceiling-farms and their Wheels? Damn them . . .’

  ‘Why were we sent away from Parz? Was it because . . .’ She turned, but Deni Maxx was making notes on a scroll with a Corestuff stylus, and did not appear to be listening. ‘Because of the Xeelee?’

  ‘No.’ He grimaced in pain. ‘No, not because of the Xeelee. Or at least, not directly. It was because of how our philosophy caused us to behave.’

  The Human Beings believed that knowledge of the Xeelee predated the arrival of humans in the Star - that it had been brought there by the Ur-humans themselves.

  The Xeelee, godlike, dominated spaces so large - it was said - that by comparison the Star itself was no more than a mote in the eyecup of a giant. Humans, striving for supremacy, had resented the Xeelee - had even gone to hopeless war against the great Xeelee projects, the constructs like the legendary Ring.

  But over the generations - and as the terrible defeats continued - a new strand had emerged in human thought. No one understood the Xeelee’s grand purposes. But what if their projects were aimed, not at squalid human-scale goals like the domination of others, but at much higher aspirations?

  The Xeelee were much more powerful than humans. Perhaps they always would be. And perhaps, as a corollary, they were much more wise.

  So, some apologists began to argue, humans should trust in the Xeelee rather than oppose them. The Xeelee’s ways were incomprehensible but must be informed by great wisdom. The apologists developed a philosophy which was accepting, compliant, calm, and trusting in an understanding above any human’s.

  Adda went on, ‘We followed the way of the Xeelee, you see, Dura; not the way of the Committee of Parz. We would not obey.’ He shook his head. ‘So they sent us away. And in that we were lucky; now they might simply have destroyed us on their Wheels.’

  Deni Maxx touched Dura’s shoulder. ‘You should leave now.’

  ‘We’ll be back.’

  ‘No.’ Adda was shifting with ghastly slowness in his cocoon of bindings, evidently trying to relieve his pain. ‘No, don’t come back. Get away. As far and as fast as you can. Get away . . .’

  His voice broke up into a bubbling growl, and he closed his eyes.

  10

  ‘You dumb upfluxer jetfart!’ Hosch screamed in Farr’s face. ‘When I want a whole damn tree trunk fed into this hopper I’ll tell you about it!’

  Now the Harbour supervisor shoved his bony face forward and his tone descended into a barely audible, infinitely menacing hiss. ‘But until I do . . . and if it wouldn’t trouble you too much . . . maybe you could split the wood just a little more finely. Or . . .’ - foul-smelling photons seeping from his mouth - ‘maybe you’d like to follow your handiwork into the hopper and finish your work in there? Eh?’

  Farr waited until Hosch was through. Trying to defend himself, he knew from bitter experience, would only make things worse.

  Hosch was a small, wiry man with a pinched mouth and eyecups which looked as if they had been drilled into his face. His clothes were filthy and he always smelled to Farr like days-old food. His limbs were so thin that Farr was confident that, with his remarkable upfluxer strength here at the Pole, he - or Dura - could snap the supervisor in two, in a fair fight . . .

  At last Hosch seemed to exhaust his anger, and he Waved away to some other part of the hopper line. The labourers who had gathered to relish Farr’s humiliation - men and women alike - gave up their surreptitious surveillance and, with the smugness of spared victims, fixed their attention back on their work.

  Air seethed in Farr’s capillaries and muscles. Upfluxer. He called me upfluxer, again. He watched his fists bunch . . .

  Bzya’s huge hand enclosed both Farr’s own, and, with an irresistible, gentle force, pulled Farr’s arms down. ‘Don’t,’ Bzya said, his voice a cool rumble from the depths of an immense chest. ‘He’s not worth it.’

  Farr’s rage seemed to veer between the supervisor and this huge Fisherman who was getting in the way. ‘He called me . . .’

  ‘I heard what he called you,’ Bzya said evenly. ‘And so did everyone else . . . just as Hosch intended. Listen to me. He wants you to react, to hit him. He’d like nothing better.’

  ‘He’d be capable of liking nothing after I take off his head for him.’

  Bzya threw his head back and roared laughter. ‘And as soon as you did the guards would be down on you. After a beating you’d return to work - to Hosch, to a supervisor who really would hate you, and wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to show it - and to an extra five, or ten, years here to pay his compensation.’

  Farr, the remnants of his anger still swirling in him, looked up into Bzya’s broad, battered face. ‘But I’ve only just started this shift . . . At the moment I’ll be happy just to get through that.’

  ‘Good.’ With an immense, powerful hand Bzya ruffled Farr’s hair-tubes. ‘That’s the way to think of it . . . You don’t have to get through your whole ten years at once, remember; just one shift at a time.’

  Bzya was a huge man with muscles the size of Air-piglets. He was as bulky, powerful and gentle as the supervisor was small and needle-dagger vicious. Bzya’s face was marred by a mask of scar tissue which obliterated one side of his head and turned one eyecup into a ghastly cavern that reached back into the depths of his skull. Farr had come to know him as a simple man who had lived his life in the poverty-stricken Downside, keeping himself alive by turning his giant muscles to the mundane, difficult and dangerous labour which allowed the rest of Parz City to function. He had a wife, Jool, and a daughter, Shar. Somehow, through a life of travail, he had retained a kind and patient nature.

  Now he said to Farr, winking at him with his good eyecup, ‘You shouldn’t be hard on old Hosch, you know.’

  Farr gaped, trying to suppress a laugh. ‘Me, hard on him? Why, the old Xeelee-lover has it in for me.’

  Bzya reached to the conveyor and raised a length of tree trunk longer than Farr was tall. With a
single blow of his axe he cracked it open to reveal its glowing core. ‘See it from his point of view. He’s the supervisor of this section.’

  Farr snorted. ‘Making himself rich out of our work. Bastard.’

  Bzya smiled. ‘You learn fast, don’t you? Well, maybe. But he’s also responsible. We lost another Bell, last shift. Had you heard? Three more Fishermen dead. Hosch is responsible for that too.’

  Disasters seemed to hit the Harbour with a depressing regularity, Farr thought. Still, he remained impatient with Bzya’s tolerance, and he began to list Hosch’s faults.

  ‘He’s all of that, and then some you’re too young to understand. Maybe he isn’t up to the responsibility he has.

  ‘But - I’ll say it again - whether he can cope or not, he’s responsible. And when one of us dies, a little of him must die too. I’ve seen it in his face, Farr, despite all his viciousness. Remember that.’

  Farr frowned. He shoved more glowing wood into the hoppers. It was so complex. If only Logue or Dura were here to help him make sense of it all . . .

  Or if only he could get out of here and Surf.

  The rest of the shift wore away without incident. Afterwards Farr filed out with the rest of the labourers to the small, cramped dormitory they shared. The dormitory, home to forty people, was a stained box slung across with sleeping ropes. It stank of shit and food. Farr ate his daily ration - today, a small portion of tough bread - and looked for a stable nest in the web of sleeping-ropes. He wasn’t yet confident enough to challenge the older, powerful-looking Fishermen, men and women both, who monopolized the chamber walls where the Air was slightly less polluted by the grunts and farts of others. He finished up, as usual, close to the centre of the dormitory.

  One day, he told himself as he closed his eyes and sought sleep. One day.

  At the start of his next shift, with eyecups still crusted with sleep deposits, he filed back to his post at the wood hoppers.

  The Harbour was an irregular compound of large chambers constructed of stained wood and fixed to the base of the City - in the shadow of the Downside, well away from the bright, fashionable sectors of the upper levels. It was just below the huge dynamos which powered the anchor-bands, and the deep, thrumming vibration of the machines above was a constant accompaniment to life for the Fishermen. The Harbour was a dark, hot, filthy place to work, and the contrast of the heat of the stoves, the grinding roar of the pistons and pulleys with the open Air of the upflux, made it all but unbearable for Farr.

  Still, as his shift wore on, Farr relaxed into his work’s heavy, steady rhythms. He hauled the next massive length of tree trunk from the conveyor belt that ran continually behind the row of labourers. He was forced to wrestle with the chunk of wood; its inertia seemed to turn it into a wilful, living thing, determined to plough its own path through the Air regardless of Farr’s wishes. The muscles in his arms and back bulged as he braced himself against the floor of the chamber and swung at the section of trunk with his axe of wood, hardened with a tip of Corestuff. The trunk was tough, but split easily enough if he swung the blade along the direction of the grain. When the split was deep enough, Farr forced his hands into the cracked wood and prised the trunk section open, releasing a flood of warmth and green light from the nuclear-burning interior which bathed his face and chest. Then, with the nuclear fire still bright, he dumped the hot fragments into the gaping maw of the hopper before him.

  Cutting the wood was the part of his work Farr enjoyed the most, oddly. There was a certain skill to be applied in finding exactly the right spot for his axe blade, a skill Farr found pleasure in acquiring and applying. And when the wood split open under his coaxing, releasing its energy with a sigh of warmth, it was like revealing some hidden treasure.

  A line of labourers worked alongside Farr, stretching almost out of sight in the gloom of the Harbour; working in shifts, they fed the ravenous maw of the hoppers unceasingly. The work was heavy, but not impossibly so for Farr, thanks to his upfluxer muscles. In fact, he had to take care not to work too fast; exceeding his quota didn’t earn him any popularity with his workmates.

  The heat energy released by the wood’s burning nuclei was contained in great, reinforced vessels - boilers - in another part of the Harbour complex. Superfluid Air, fleeing the heat, was used to drive pistons. These pistons were immense fists of hardened wood twice Farr’s height which plunged into their jackets as steady as a heartbeat.

  The pistons, via huge, splintered rotary arms, turned pulleys; and it was the pulleys which sent Bells full of fearful Fishermen towards the mysterious and deadly depths of the underMantle.

  It was so different from his life with the Human Beings, where there were no devices more complex than a spear, no source of power save the muscles of humans or animals. The Harbour was like an immense machine, with the sole purpose of sending Fishermen down into the underMantle. He felt as if he were a component of that huge machine himself, or as if he were labouring inside the heart of some giant built of wood and rope . . .

  Bzya apart, the other workers showed no signs of accepting Farr. It was as if their unhappiness with their lot, here in this noisy, stinking inferno, had been turned inwards on themselves, and on each other. But still, once each new shift had settled in, the workers seemed to reach a certain rhythm, and a mood of companionship settled over the line - a mood which, Farr sensed, extended even to him, as long as he kept his mouth shut.

  He missed Dura, and the rest of the Human Beings, and he missed his old life in the upflux. Of course he did. His sentence in this Harbour seemed to stretch off to eternity. But he was able to accept his lot, as long as he kept his mind focused on the task in hand, and took comforts where he could find them. One shift at a time, that was the secret, as Bzya had told him. And . . .

  ‘You.’

  There was a hand on his shoulder, grasping at his grubby tunic. He was roughly dragged out, of the line.

  Hosch glared at him, his nostrils glowing sickly-white. ‘Change of assignment, ’ he growled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A Bell,’ Hosch said.

  As Dura approached - with twenty other new coolies in a huge car drawn by a dozen stout Air-pigs - Frenk’s ceiling-farm seemed tiny at first, a child’s palmprint against the immensity of the Crust itself. The other coolies seemed more interested in another farm, still more distant and harder to make out than Frenk’s. This belonged to Hork IV, Chair of Parz City, Dura was told. The absent-minded Chair escaped his civic responsibilities - leaving Parz in the scheming hands of his son - by indulging in elaborate agricultural experiments, here at the Crust. On Hork’s ceiling-farm there were said to be spears of wheat taller than a man, and Crust-trees no longer than a man’s arm and bound up with lengths of Corestuff-wire . . .

  Dura was barely able to keep her attention focused on this prattle. The thought of being marooned at the Crust, with only these dullards for company, made her heart sink.

  At last Frenk’s ceiling-farm filled the clearwood windows. The car settled to rest at the centre of a group of crude wooden buildings, and the doors opened.

  Dura scrambled out and Waved away from the others. She took a deep breath of clean, empty Air, relishing the sensation in her lungs and capillaries. The Air stretched away all around her, an immense, unbroken layer stretching right around the Star; it was like being inside the lungs of the Star itself. Well, the company might leave a bit to be desired, but at least here she could breathe Air which didn’t taste like it had been through the lungs of a dozen people already.

  Qos Frenk himself was there to greet them. He picked out Dura, smiling with apparent kindness at her, and while the other coolies dispersed among the buildings, he offered to show Dura around his farm.

  Frenk - dapper, round and sleek, his pink hair flowing over an elaborate cloak - Waved confidently beside her. ‘The work is straightforward enough, but it needs concentration and care . . . qualities, sadly, which not all coolies nowadays share. I’m sure you’ll do a fine job,
my dear.’

  Dura was wearing a coverall woven of some crude vegetable-fibre cloth, given to her as a parting gift by Ito. As she Waved, it grated against her skin constantly, as if chafing her all over, and she longed to tear it off. On her back she carried a round pod of wood - an Air-tank, like the one she’d seen Toba wear, with a small mask she was supposed to fit over her face to help her breathe the rarefied Air of the upper Mantle. The bulky, unnatural thing impeded her movement even more than the City-made clothes, but Frenk insisted she carry it. ‘Health ordinances, you see,’ he had said with a philosophical shrug, his ornate cloak bunching around his thin shoulders.

  Under the coverall, she still wore her length of rope and her small knife.

  The farm had largely been cleared of tree trunks; the exposed forest root-ceiling was seeded with neat rows of green-gold wheat, of altered grass. Here, hovering just a few mansheights below the wafting, swollen tips of mutant grass, she could no longer see the boundaries of the farm. It was as if the Crust’s natural wildness had been banished, overrun by this claustrophobic orderliness.

  Of course the orderliness covered only two dimensions. The third dimension led down to the clean, free Air of the Mantle which hung below her, huge and empty. The Parz folk had not yet succeeded in fencing off the Air itself . . . All she needed to do was to throw this Air-tank into the round, delicate face of Qos Frenk, and Wave away into infinity. These soft City-bores - even the coolies - could never catch her.

  But she could never quit this place, abandon her obligations, until Adda’s fees were paid off. Ties of obligation and duty would imprison her here as surely as any cage.

  Qos Frenk blinked, studying her. ‘I know this must be a strange situation for you. I want you to know you’ve nothing to fear but hard work. I own the ceiling-farm, and I own your labour, in that sense. But I don’t make the mistake of imagining I own your soul.