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

by Stephen Baxter

  22

  Cris Mixxax climbed onto his board. The wood under his bare feet was polished, warm, familiar; his soles gripped the ridged surface, and the ribs of Corestuff embedded in the wood felt like cold, hard bones. He flexed his knees experimentally. Electron gas hissed around his ankles and toes as the board cut through the flux lines. The Magfield felt springy, solid.

  Cris grinned savagely. It felt good. It all felt good. At last this day had come, and it was going to be his.

  The sky was a huge diorama, all around him. The South Pole, with its brooding purple heart sunk deep in the Quantum Sea, was almost directly below him; he could feel the massive Polar distortion of the Magfield permeating his body. Above him the Crust seemed close enough to touch, the dangling Crust-trees like shining hairs, immensely detailed; patterns of cultivation showed in rectangular patches of colour and texture - sharp, straight-line edges imposed by humans on the vibrant nature of the Star.

  The City hovered in the Air over the Pole. Parz was so far below him he could cover it with the palm of his hand, and imagine he was alone in the sky - alone, save for his fellow racers. Parz looked like some elaborate wooden toy, surrounded by its cage of shining anchor-bands and pierced by a hundred orifices from which the green light of wood-lamps seeped, sickly. Sewage cascaded steadily from its underside, around the Spine of the Harbour. He could see the shining bulge that was the Stadium; it clung to the City’s upper lip like a fragile growth, with the Committee Box a colourful balcony over it. Somewhere in there his parents would be watching, he knew - praying for his success, he’d like to think. But perhaps they were wishing he might fail - give up this dream, this distraction of Surfing, and join them in their quiet, constrained lives once more.

  He shook his head, staring down on the City as if he were some god, suspended over it. Out here the inwardness, the frustration of his life in and around the City, seemed remote, reduced to the trivial; he felt exalted, able to view it all with compassion, balance. His parents loved him, and they wanted what was best for him - as they saw it. The cries of the race marshals, tiny in the huge, glowing sky, floated to him. Almost time. He glanced around. There were a hundred Surfers, drawn into a rough line across the sky; now they were drawing precisely level, into line with the squads of marshals in their distinctive red uniforms. Cris flicked at his own board, once, twice; he felt it kick at the Magfield and bring him exactly into his place in the line. He stared ahead. He was facing along the direction of the vortex lines, towards the rotation pole; the closest line was a few mansheights from him, and the lines swept around him like the walls of some intangible corridor, beckoning him to infinity.

  The challenge of the race was to Surf along the vortex lines, far across the roof of the world - across the Pole - to a finishing cross-section; there another group of marshals marked out an area of the sky, like human spin-spiders. The race was won - not just by the fastest, the first to complete the course - but by whoever applied the most technical skill, the most style in following the course.

  He looked along the line. Ray, he knew, was three places down from him - the only other of his friends to have qualified for the Games this year. There she was, her lithe, bare body coiled over her board, her hair swept back and her teeth shining in a broad, hungry grin. He caught her eye, and she raised a fist, her smile broadening.

  The Surfers were all in place now; he saw how they settled over their boards, concentrating, spreading their feet and lifting their arms. The marshals continued to scurry around the line like worried little animals, checking positions, adjusting boards with small pushes and shoves. Silence spread along the line; the marshals were withdrawing. Cris felt his senses open up. The board under his feet, the fizz of the Magfield, the freshness of the Air so far from the womb of the City as it sighed through his mouth and capillaries - these were vital and real things, penetrating his head; he had never felt so alive.

  And perhaps, a distant, unwelcome part of him said, he never would again.

  Well, if that was to be so - if his life was to be a long-drawn-out anticlimax after this superb moment - then let it be; and let this be his finest time.

  The marshals glanced along their line at each other. In unison they raised their right arms - and brought them down with a chop, a cry of ‘Begin!’

  Cris thrust savagely at his board. He felt the Magfield surge through the board and his limbs, dragging at the currents of charged particles there. He lunged forward with a roar, lancing through the Air. The tunnel of vortex lines seemed to explode outwards around him; blue-white electron gas sparkled over his body. He was half-aware of similar yells around him, from the rest of the line, but he shut out the other Surfers; he focused on his board, the Magfield, his balance and position in the Air.

  The line of marshals, ragged and breaking up, hurtled beneath him.

  He opened his mouth and yelled again, incoherent. In his peripheral vision he saw that only Ray, and one or two others, had matched his start. He was in the lead, already ahead of the other Surfers! And he knew his style was good, his balance right; the Magfield surged through his body like a wave of heat. He raised a hand before his face and watched electron gas shower from his fingertips; shrouded in blue light he must look like a figure from a dream racing across the sky ...

  His board slammed upwards, into his feet.

  He gasped, almost thrown off the board with the shock. It had been like hitting something solid in the Magfield. He let his knees bend, trying to absorb the upward surge; but still he was hurled up into the Air, balanced perilously on his board. The vortex lines slid down the sky around him, and the Magfield flux lines tore at his stomach and chest as he was dragged brutally across them.

  He heard screams from the Surfers around him.

  The surge passed. Shaken, his knees and ankles aching, he straightened up. He risked glances to left and right. The line of Surfers was ragged, scattered, broken up. Whatever had caused that surge had hit the others as hard as it had him.

  . . . Ray had gone. He saw a glinting sparkle which might have been her board, turning end over end through the Air; but of the girl herself there was no sign.

  He felt a stab of concern - an awful, unfamiliar sense of waste - but the feeling was drowned by a flood of triumph. By luck or skill, or both, he had survived. He was still on his board, still in the race, and still determined to win.

  But there was still something wrong. He was drifting downwards through the hexagonal array of lines. He corrected his line of flight, pushed himself hard along the Magfield - but again there came that damnable drift downwards. He felt confused, disoriented, as if his instincts were betraying him.

  . . . No, he realized slowly; his instincts, his skill, were fine. He was holding his line. The vortex lines themselves were drifting upwards, towards the Crust.

  He was a City boy, but he knew what that meant.

  The Mantle was expelling its rotational momentum. Glitch.

  Suddenly, for the first time, he felt lost, vulnerable, alone in the sky. He couldn’t help but cry out, longing to be back in the remote wooden womb of Parz.

  He forced himself to concentrate. He wasn’t in any direct danger yet. With luck, and skill, he could still get through this.

  Still he pushed across the sky, keeping in line with the drifting vortex lines. But now he slowed a little, glancing around. He was virtually alone now; of the hundred starters in the race, perhaps thirty were still on their boards, paralleling his path through the Air. Of the rest - of the marshals - there was no sign. The City still hung in the Air like a dusty lantern, solid and unperturbed.

  The vortex lines were drifting faster. They looked tangled, untidy. Looking more closely he saw instabilities searing along the lines from both upflux and downflux; the huge, complex waveforms passed through each other, seeming to drag and reinforce each other.

  He looked over his shoulder at the far upflux. There the Air glowed yellow, empty. No vortex lines at all.

  Now purple light fl
ooded up through the Air, sudden, shocking, so that his board cast a shadow over his legs and arms. He leaned over his board, glanced down.

  The Quantum Sea had exploded, right under the City; a neutrino fount rose steadily towards Parz, like an immense fist.

  Resentment flooded Cris. No, he thought. Not today. Not on my day . . .

  The Magfield surged again, ramming upwards into his board with force and immediacy.

  I was winning! Oh, I was winning!

  Like a fragment of food swimming towards its own consumption, the crude wooden cylinder with its precious cargo of people and animals laboured towards the unblemished mouth of the Ur-human artifact.

  Dura worked with the Air-pigs, feeding and patiently soothing as their farts drove the turbine. To bring the ‘Pig’ to the wormhole mouth Hork had taken the ship through a long, flat sweep to a position above one facet of the Interface. Through the wide windows she watched the wormhole gate sink briefly into the turgid glimmering of the underMantle, to reemerge as if surfacing as they approached it once more.

  Now the Interface rose towards them, like an outstretched hand framed in the clearwood panel set into the base of the ship; within it light flashed, impossibly distant and vortex-line blue.

  Hork worked his controls with savagery. For all his outer flippancy in the earlier stages of the voyage, he seemed to have become enraged since the encounter with Karen Macrae. Or perhaps that anger had been there in him all along, Dura thought; perhaps he had always resented the position of humans, left stranded and helpless in this Star. But now, for the first time, he had a focus for that rage: Karen Macrae, and her intangible Colonist companions in the Core of the Star.

  Dura wondered at her own composure. She was fearful, yes; and an inner fluidity threatened to overwhelm her as she stared into the approaching maw of the wormhole. But at the same time, she realized, she was not confronting the unknown, as was Hork. The lore of the Human Beings was calm, detailed and analytical. The universe beyond the Star, the universe of the past beyond the here-and-now: those realms were abstract, remote, but they were as real to Dura as the world of Air, pigs, trees. Although she had never seen them she had grown up with the Xeelee and their works, with the artifacts of the Ur-humans, and to her they were no more exotic than the wild Air-boars of the Crust.

  Perhaps, in the end, the lore of the Human Beings - their careful, almost obsessive, preservation of apparently useless knowledge from the past - was actually a survival mechanism.

  The Interface was very close now, Dura saw; the fine, perfect vertices of the upper face spread away from the curving window of the ship, and the rest of the frame was foreshortened by perspective.

  Then the clean lines of the artifact began to slide across the windows of the ship, as slow as knife-blades drawn across skin. The ship’s downward trajectory had been carrying it steadily towards the centre of the face; but now they were clearly drifting, sliding towards one knife-sharp edge.

  Something was wrong.

  Hork hauled at his levers and slammed his hand into the fragile console. ‘Damn it. She won’t respond. The Magfield here is disrupted - maybe by the presence of the Interface - and ...’

  ‘Look!’ Dura pointed downwards.

  Hork stared at the edge, its fizzing blue light painting deep, shifting shadows on his face as it approached. He swore. ‘It’s going to hit us.’

  ‘We might be safe. Maybe the Ur-humans designed this wormhole to be as safe as possible; maybe the ship will just rebound, and . . .’

  ‘Or maybe not. Maybe the Ur-humans didn’t expect anyone to be stupid enough to go careering through their doorway in a wooden ship. I think that damn thing is going to cut us in two.’

  The Interface edge, wheeling past the windows, had widened from the abstraction of a line into a glowing rod as broad as a human arm.

  Dura wrapped her arms around herself. Behind her, the pigs were a comforting, warm mass, an oasis of familiarity. ‘At least try. Maybe you can get a purchase on the Interface’s magnetic field.’

  Now, beyond the walls of the ship, there was a spectacular flash, a sudden storm of blue-white light which flooded the cabin and made her cry out. The pigs squealed, terrified again. The ship lurched. Hork rolled in his seat and Dura grabbed at the pigs’ restraining harness.

  ‘We’ve hit!’ she cried.

  Hork dragged at his levers. ‘No. It’s the ship’s own field; it must be brushing against the edge ... The ship’s responding. Dura, I think you’re right; I think we’re starting to work against the artifact’s field. Keep feeding those animals, damn you!’

  The flashing persisted and the shuddering of the ship assumed a steady, violent rhythm. Dura clung to the pigs’ harness, striving to feed the pigs with an unwavering rhythm of her own.

  Slowly, painfully slowly, the wheeling of the edge lessened, and the blue glare which had filled the cabin began to diminish. Dura glanced through the windows; the edge was receding and the magnetic flashes lessened, growing fitful and irregular, before dying completely.

  The three edges of the face were all around the ship now, a fence of pale light slowly ascending past her. At last the ship was passing through the face, Dura realized; they were actually entering the Interface.

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘But we’re hardly safe.’

  Hork raised his hands over the control panel. Then he pushed all three of his levers forward, deliberately; the ship surged forward into the Interface. She heard the hum of current in the Corestuff bands around the hull. ‘We go on,’ Hork said.

  Dura had expected to make out the blue lines of the Interface, this box of light, from the inside. But there was no sign of the other faces, the rest of the wormhole; instead, beyond the walls of the ship, there was only a darkness even deeper than the twilit glow of the underMantle. It was as if they were entering - not a box of light - but the mouth of a corridor, like one of Parz’s dingy alleys. In fact, it seemed that she could make out the lines of a corridor, stretching through the wormhole and on into infinity; black on black, it was like staring into a throat. Deep in the corridor there were flashes - sharp, silent and distant, light which splashed briefly over the dim walls. Slowly a picture assembled in her mind, each flash providing another fragment; the corridor was a smooth-walled cylinder perhaps five mansheights across and . . .

  And how deep?

  The walls were all around them now; the ebony throat enclosed the fragile craft as if it had been swallowed. She felt a rush of Air through the capillaries of her head; illuminated in stabs, fragments of the walls raced upwards past the ship like pieces of a dream. The walls seemed to converge at a great distance, closing around a point at infinity. But that was impossible - wasn’t it? - because the Interface itself, the four-faced frame of light, was only ten or a dozen mansheights across.

  But of course the corridor was immensely long - impossibly long - for the very purpose of a wormhole was to connect far-distant places. And now she was entering such a wormhole; soon the ship would be passing through the device to emerge ...

  Somewhere else.

  For a moment, fear, primitive, irrational and stark, surfaced in her mind; it was as if the mystery of it all was ramming itself into her eyes, ears and mind. She closed her eyes and wrapped her fingers in the soft leather of the pig harness. Was she, now, going to crumble into superstitious panic?

  The wormhole was an artifact, she told herself. And an artifact built by humans - by Ur-humans, perhaps, but by humans nonetheless. She should not cringe before a mere device.

  She forced her eyes open.

  The ship shuddered.

  Dura cried, ‘Too fast! You’re going too fast, damn it; we’ll turn over if you don’t slow down . . . Are you crazy?’

  The control levers were still buried inside Hork’s fleshy hands, but when he turned to her his wide face was empty, wondering. ‘It’s not me,’ he said slowly. ‘I mean, it’s not the ship ... we’re no longer propelling ourselves. Dura, we’re being drawn into the
wormhole.’ He stared at the little control console, as if seeking an answer there. ‘And there’s nothing I can do about it.’

  Cris rode the turbulent Magfield almost automatically. He stared at the neutrino fount, fascinated, almost forgetting his own peril. The fount was a tower, dark, unimaginably massive, thrusting out of the turbulent mass of the Quantum Sea. As it rose into Mantle Air, the viscous purple Sea-stuff crusted over, shattering, the fragments spiralling upwards around the dense-packed flux lines of the Magfield.

  Here was stuff from deep in the heart of the Star - deeper than any Bell had gone, deeper perhaps even than Hork’s wooden ship would reach. Here was an expulsion of material from the immense, single nucleus that was the soul of the Star, from within the nebulous boundary between Sea and Core. The fount’s material was hyperonic; each hyperon was a huge cluster of quarks far more massive than any ordinary nucleon, and the hyperons were bound together by quark exchanges into complex, fractal masses. But as the material spewed up through the throat of the Pole its structure was collapsing, unable to sustain itself in the lower-density regime of the Mantle. The quark bags were breaking apart, releasing a flood of energy, and reforming as showers of nucleons; and the free nucleons - protons and neutrons - were congealing rapidly into chunks of cooling nuclear matter.

  That deadly hail was now lancing through the Mantle, and would soon come streaming upwards around the City. And he felt the energy released by that huge wave of hyperonic decay as it surged upwards, the neutrinos sleeting through his body, hot and needle-sharp, on their way to the emptiness above the Crust.

  Now, even as he watched, the spiralling paths of the charged chunks of freezing Core-matter seemed to be distorting - flattening - as if the Magfield itself were changing, in response to the disaster.

  Suddenly Cris understood.

  The Magfield was changing. The irruption of this immense freight of charged material from the Core had disrupted the field; the Sea-fount was like an electrical current, unimaginably strong, passing through the heart of the Star’s Magfield Pole, temporarily competing with the great magnetic engines at the Core of the Star itself. What he’d felt - the unexpected surges in the field - had been no more than distant echoes of that huge disturbance.