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

by Stephen Baxter

  . . . Almost. Yet the Air here had a flat, lifeless, artificial quality to it. It was scrubbed clean of scents, she realized slowly.

  Hork pushed past her and out into the room beyond. He looked around with fists clenched, aggressively inquisitive, his robe garish against the soft grey light of the walls. Dura, suppressing pangs of fear, followed him away from the wooden ship’s illusory protection.

  They hung in the Air of the wormhole chamber. The ‘Flying Pig’ tumbled slowly beside them, a scarred wooden cylinder crude and incongruous within the walls of this finely constructed room.

  ‘If the Ur-human builders could see us now, I wonder what they would say?’

  Hork grunted. ‘Probably, “Where have you been all this time?”’ He Waved experimentally and moved forward a mansheight or so. ‘Hey. There’s a magnetic field here.’

  ‘Is it the Magfield?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t tell. If it is, it’s weaker than I’ve ever felt it before.’

  ‘Maybe it’s artificial . . . put here to help us move around.’

  Hork grinned, his confidence growing visibly. ‘I think you’re right, Dura.

  These people really were expecting us, weren’t they?’ He looked over his shoulder at the ‘Pig’, inspecting the ship briskly. He pointed, his embroidered sleeve flapping. ‘Look at that. We’ve brought a passenger.’

  Dura turned. There was something clinging to the side of the craft; it was like a huge, metallic leech, spoiling the clean cylindrical lines of the ship. ‘It’s Corestuff,’ she said. ‘We’ve brought a Corestuff berg with us, all the way through the wormhole. It must have stuck to our field-bands . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ Hork said. ‘But by no accident.’ He made a mock salute to the lump of Corestuff. ‘Karen Macrae. So glad you could accompany us!’

  ‘You think she’s in there? In that berg?’

  ‘Why not?’ He grinned at her, his eyecups dark with excitement. ‘It’s possible. Anything’s possible.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because this trip is as important to Karen Macrae as it is to us, my dear.’ Dura flexed her legs; the Waving carried her easily through the Air. She moved away from the hulk of the ‘Pig’ and towards the walls of the chamber. Tentatively she reached out a hand, placed it cautiously on the grey wall material. Beneath her fingers and palm its smooth perfection was unbroken. It was cool to the touch - not uncomfortably so, but a little cooler than her body.

  ‘Dura.’ Hork sounded excited; he was inspecting the wall display Dura had seen from within the ‘Pig’. ‘Come and look at this.’

  Dura Waved briskly to Hork; side by side they stared at the display.

  Two circles, differing in size, had been painted on the wall. The larger was coloured yellow and was perhaps a micron wide. The colour was deepest at the heart of the circle and lightened, becoming almost washed out, as the eye followed the colour out to the edge of the circle. The disc was marred by a series of blue threads which swept through its interior - a little like vortex lines, Dura thought, except that these lines did not all run in parallel, and in places even crossed each other.

  Each blue line was terminated by a pair of tiny pink tetrahedra, one at each end. Most of the tetrahedra had been gathered into the centre of the disc, so that the lines looped around the heavy amber heart of the disc. But five or six of the lines broke free of the knot at the centre. One of them terminated at a pole of the disc, just inside its surface. The rest of the lines led, in wavering spirals, out of the disc itself, and crossed the empty space of the intervening wall to the second, smaller circle; a half-dozen tetrahedra jostled within the small circle like insects.

  Dura frowned, baffled. ‘I don’t understand. Perhaps these little tetrahedra have something to do with the wormholes ...’

  ‘Of course they do!’ Hork’s voice was brisk and confident. ‘Can’t you see it? It’s a map - a map of the entire Star.’ He traced features of the diagram with his fingertip. ‘Here’s the Crust; and within it - this outermost, lighter band - is the Mantle, which contains the Air we breathe. All the world we know.’ His fingertip gouged a path into the heart of the Star image. ‘These darker sections are the underMantle and the Quantum Sea - and here’s the Core.’

  ‘And the tetrahedra, the threads connecting them ...’

  ‘ ... are maps of the wormholes!’ His eyecups were wide and filled with the grey light of the chamber. ‘Isn’t it obvious, Dura? Look.’ He jabbed at the ‘Core’. ‘And here are the wormhole Interfaces, brought into the Core by the Colonists after the Core Wars. Most of the Interfaces, anyway. And so the wormhole corridors - marked by these threads - lead nowhere but back to the Core.’

  The implications of his words slowly sank into her. ‘So there are many wormholes - dozens, hundreds - not just the one we travelled in?’

  ‘Yes. Just think of it, Dura; once the wormholes must have riddled the Star.’ He shook his head. ‘Well, the Colonists put a stop to that. Now we’re reduced to crawling around the Star in wooden boxes drawn by Air-pigs.’ Again anger, resentment welled in his voice.

  ‘Do you think we’re still here?’ She pointed to the Core of the Star map, at the knot of wormholes which looped around it.

  ‘No,’ he said briskly. ‘Why would we be given an Interface which took us into the Core? Remember, the Colonists have a goal too - they also have to find a way to stop the Glitches. They surely can’t use the wormholes themselves - after all, we know the wormholes were built for humans. Real humans, I mean. Us. So they have to rely on us.’

  She found herself shivering. ‘Then if we’re not in the Core, we must be here.’ She drew her finger along the threads of wormhole paths which left the main circle and crossed the grey spaces to the second, smaller disc. ‘ . . . Outside the Star.’ She looked at him. ‘Hork - what are we going to find when we open the door to this chamber?’

  He stared into her eyes, his brashness gone, utterly unable to answer.

  Farr was waiting for Adda at Toba Mixxax’s home. Ito Mixxax was there, but not Toba or Cris. The City-tilt had made a mess of the Mixxaxes’ domesticity: crockery and other material had been smashed against the walls, and fragments drifted in the Air.

  Ito had her arm around Farr, trying to comfort or reassure him; when Adda opened the door to the home, Farr greeted his arrival with relief, a smile, while Ito looked merely disappointed that it wasn’t her husband or son. They were both uninjured, though Farr looked shocked. Adda came to them both and placed a hand on their shoulders. The three of them drifted there, at the centre of the Mixxaxes’ cosy room, their human warmth sufficient for a brief moment.

  Then they pulled apart. Ito Mixxax looked drawn, but composed. ‘What are you going to do? Do you want to stay here?’

  He looked at Farr. The boy must be worried sick about his sister. But it would do no good to stay here and let him brood. Besides, despite its lingering domesticity, what sanctuary was this place, any more than the rest of Parz? ‘We’re going to the Hospital,’ he said firmly. ‘Or at least, we’ll try to get there. We’ll find work to do there. What about you?’

  ‘Toba was with me at the Games. In the Stadium.’ She sighed, looking more weary than afraid. ‘We got separated. I’ll have to wait for him here. Then we’ll start searching for Cris, I suppose. We ought to be able to get the car out of the City.’ She looked at Adda, appraising him, evidently trying to concentrate on his needs. ‘Do you want to rest here? Are you hungry?’

  ‘No.’ He reached for Farr; the boy took his hand, meekly, like a child. ‘Come on, Farr. It’s not food they’ll be short of in that damn Hospital, but strength, and courage, and ingenuity. And ...’

  There was an explosion from the heart of the City - no, not an explosion, Adda thought, but an immense tearing sound, a huge exhalation.

  There was a moment of stillness. Then a shock passed through the City.

  The very fabric of the structure seemed to flex. The little room rattled around them, and the fragments o
f crockery, already smashed, rattled in a thin hail against the walls.

  When the tremor had passed, Farr asked, ‘What was that? Another settling in the Magfield?’

  ‘I don’t think so. That was sharper - more abrupt . . . Come, lad. Let’s move.’

  Ito kissed them both quickly on the cheek. ‘Be safe,’ she said.

  The Hospital of the Common Good was in the upper Downside, and Adda decided that the quickest way to get there - the most likely to be clear - would be through Pall Mall. So he and Farr Waved along one of the main artery streets towards the broad axis of the City. It was a little easier to move now, Adda found; most people must have reached whatever destination they had been looking for - or, he reflected sadly, be lying hurt in some corner of the City. But the Air-cars were an increased menace. The cars soared along the emptying streets behind teams of terrified Air-pigs; several times the Human Beings had to lurch aside to stop themselves being run down. Once they came across a car which had embedded itself nose-first into a shop-front. There was no sign of the driver, but the Air-pig team was still attached to its harness. The pigs strained against their restraints, their circular mouths wide as they screamed.

  Farr loosened the harness. Released, the pigs fled away into the shadows of the corridors, caroming from the walls like toys.

  They reached the junction of the artery-street and the Mall. Adda rested at the street’s rectangular lip for a moment, then prepared to launch himself out into the main shaft. But Farr grabbed his arm and held him back. The boy pointed downwards. Adda stared into his face, then squinted down, blinking to clear his good eyecup.

  The lower end of the Mall - the huge spherical Market - was filled with light. Too much light, which glinted from the guide rails, stall sites, the huge execution Wheel ... Yellow Air-light, which flooded into the heart of the City from a new, ragged shaft that cut right through the Mall itself, just above the Market.

  So here was the cause of the shock they had experienced with Ito.

  The edges of the shaft were neat - so neat that Adda might almost have thought it was man-made, another avenue. But the cross-section of this shaft was irregular - formless, nothing like the precise rectangles and circles which defined Parz - and it was off-centre, askew, too wide.

  Adda drifted out into the Mall a little way and stared down at the gash.

  The inner skin of the Mall had been sloughed away, shops and homes scoured off as cleanly as if by a blade. And within the gash itself he could see the cross-sections of cut-open homes, shops. There were splashes of broken flesh. He heard human voices, but no screams: there were groans, and low, continuous weeping.

  Farr joined him in the Air. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

  ‘A Sea-fragment,’ Adda said grimly. ‘The City has been hit. Looks as if the berg passed straight through ... We’re lucky the City wasn’t smashed wide open . . . Come on, Farr. Let’s see if that damn Hospital is still working.’

  They dropped down the wide, almost empty shaft of the Mall, searching for a way to get to the Hospital.

  24

  Hork ran his thick fingers round the seam of the door. Then, impatient, Waving to give himself leverage, he laid his hands flat against the door and shoved.

  The door swung back on invisible hinges, heavy and silent; Air hissed.

  Through the doorway Dura caught glimpses of another, larger chamber, walled by more of the featureless grey material.

  For a moment Hork and Dura hesitated before the doorway.

  ‘Let’s get on with it,’ Hork growled. He grasped the edges of the doorframe. With a single fluid movement he hauled his bulk through; his small feet, Waving gently, disappeared into the frame.

  With a sigh, Dura took hold of the frame. Like the rest of the wall material the frame edges were cool to the touch, but the walls seemed knife-thin and the edges dug into her palms. She laid her hands carefully on the outer surface of the wall, beyond the frame, and pushed herself through.

  The outer chamber was another tetrahedron - and constructed of the ubiquitous grey-bland material - but perhaps ten times as large, a hundred mansheights across or more. This room would be as large as any enclosed space in Parz City. The chamber from which she had emerged floated at the heart of this new room, its vertices and edges aligned with the chamber within which it was embedded. Dura wondered vaguely what was holding the smaller chamber in place; there were no signs of struts, supports or ropes.

  Perhaps they were in a nest of these tetrahedral chambers, one contained in the other, she speculated; perhaps if they went beyond these walls they would swim into a third chamber, ten times larger again, and then onwards ...

  But there was no door in this outer chamber. The walls were featureless: unbroken even by the map device which had adorned the inner cell. There must be no way out; maybe this was the end of their journey.

  Hork came Waving towards her. ‘Dura. I’ve found something.’ Taking her by the hand he half-dragged her around the inner cell. He Waved to a stop, causing Dura to bump against him, and pointed to his find. ‘There. What do you think of that?’

  It was a box, irregularly shaped, about half a mansheight across. Dura circled the thing warily a few microns from where it hovered in the Air. Sculpted of the familiar grey wall material, it consisted of a massive block from which a thinner rectangular plate protruded; smaller cylinders stretched forward from the sides of the rectangle . . .

  Its function was unmistakable.

  ‘It’s a seat,’ she said.

  Hork snorted impatiently. ‘Obviously it’s a damn seat.’ He prowled around the object, poking boldly at its surfaces. Levers - thick stumps apparently designed for human fists - protruded from the end of each of the chair’s arms. A swivelling pointer was inset into the left arm.

  Dura asked, ‘Do you think it’s meant for us . . . I mean, for humans?’

  Hork groaned. ‘Of course it is.’

  Dura was offended. ‘There’s nothing obvious about this situation, Hork. If that map was right, we’ve travelled across space - away from the Star itself. Why should we expect anything but utter strangeness? It’s a miracle we’ve found Air to breathe, let alone ... furniture.’

  He shrugged; the fat-covered muscles flowed under his coverall. ‘But this is obviously meant for humans. See how the back, the seat have been moulded?’ And, before Dura could protest, Hork swivelled his bulk through the Air and settled into the chair. At first he wriggled, evidently uncomfortable - he even looked alarmed - but soon he relaxed and assumed a broad smile. He rested his hands on the arms of the chair; it seemed to match the shape of his massive body. ‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘You know, Dura, this chair must be three hundred generations old. And yet it looks as good as new, and it fits my bulk as well as if it had been designed by the best Parz craftsmen.’

  Dura frowned. ‘You didn’t seem so happy when you got into the seat.’

  He hesitated. ‘It felt odd. The surfaces seemed to flow around me.’ He grinned, his confidence recovering. ‘It was adjusting to me, I suppose. It was disconcerting, but it didn’t last long ... What do you think these levers are for?’ His massive fists hovered over the rods protruding from the seat-arms.

  ‘No!’ She laid her hands over his.

  After a moment he relaxed and lifted his hands away from the levers, leaving them untouched. ‘Interesting,’ he said mildly. ‘These look just like the control levers in the “Flying Pig”. Maybe there are some basic commonalities of human design, a certain way things just have to be ...’

  ‘But,’ she said firmly, ‘unlike with the “Pig” we don’t have the faintest idea what these controls are for.’

  Hork looked like a reprimanded child. ‘Well, as you told me earlier, we’re not going to make any progress unless we take a few chances.’ He glanced down at the arrow device inset in the left arm of the seat. ‘What about this, for instance?’

  Dura Waved closer. The arrow was a finger-thick cylinder hinged at its centre; it lay at the hea
rt of a small crater gouged out of the chair. The crater’s rim was marked by a band divided into four quarters: white, light grey, dark grey, black. The arrow was pointing at the black quadrant. It seemed obvious that the arrow was designed to be twisted by the occupant of the chair.

  Hork looked up at her. ‘Well? This seems harmless enough.’

  Dura suppressed a manic giggle. ‘You haven’t the faintest idea what it is . . .’

  ‘Damn you, upfluxer, we didn’t come all this way to cower.’ And with a convulsive movement he grabbed the arrow and twisted it.

  The device clicked through a quarter of a turn.

  Dura flinched, wrapping her arms around her body. Even Hork could not help but wince as the arrow came to rest, pointing to the dark grey quadrant of the scale band. Then he exhaled heavily. ‘See? No harm done . . . In fact, nothing seems to have happened at all. And ...’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘You’re wrong.’ She pointed. ‘Look . . .’

  Hork twisted in the seat.

  The walls of the chamber had turned transparent.

  Bzya was dozing, hands loosely wrapped around the Bell’s axial support pole, when the blue flashes started.

  He snapped awake.

  This had been a long, fruitless dive, and he had been looking forward to home, to breaking some beercake with Jool. But now something was wrong.

  He scanned quickly around the cabin. Hosch, his only companion on this trip, was awake and alert; they shared a brief, interrogative glance. Bzya placed his hands gently on the polished, worn wood of the support pole. No unusual vibration. He listened to the steady hum of the great Corestuff hoops which bound about the hull of the Bell; the sound was an even thrumming, telling him that the current from the City still flowed down the cables as steadily as ever, throwing a magnetic cloak around their frail ship. He looked through the nearest of the Bell’s three small windows. The Air outside - if it could be graced with the name, this far down - was a murky yellow, but bright enough to tell him that they were somewhere near the top of the underMantle. He could even see the shadow of the Spine; they were still close to its lower tip, not much more than a metre below the City . . .