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

by Stephen Baxter

  She waited for the photino object to return.

  Arrow Maker slid towards the ground.

  He passed through another layer of leaves: this was the forest’s understorey, made up of darkness-adapted palms and a few saplings, young trees growing from seeds dropped by the canopy trees. The light at this level - even now, at midday - was dim, drenched in the green of the canopy. The air was hot, stagnant, moist.

  Arrow Maker reached the ground, close to the base of a huge tree. Under one of his bare soles, a beetle wriggled, working its way through decaying leaf matter. Arrow Maker reached down, absently, picked up the beetle and popped it into his mouth.

  He hauled his rope down from the tree and set off across the forest floor.

  Beneath the thin soil he could feel the tree’s thick mat of rootlets. The trees were supported by immense buttresses: triangular fins, five yards wide at their base, which sprouted from the clustering trunks. A thin line of termites - a ribbon hundreds of yards long - marched steadily across the floor close to his feet, on their way to the tree trunk cleft that housed their nest.

  He passed splashes of colour amid the corruption of the forest floor - mostly dead flowers, fallen from the canopy - but there was also one huge rafflesia: a single flower a yard across, leafless, its maroon petals thick, leathery and coated with warts. A revolting stench of putrescence came from its interior, and flies, mesmerized by the scent, swarmed around the vast cup.

  Arrow Maker, preoccupied, walked around the grotesque bloom.

  ‘ . . . Where in Lethe have you been?’

  Uvarov’s chair came rolling towards Maker, out of the shadows of his shelter.

  Maker, startled, stumbled backwards. ‘I stopped to gather figs. They were ripe. I met my daughter - Spinner-of-Rope - and—’

  Garry Uvarov was ignoring him. Uvarov rolled his chair back into the shelter, its wheels heavy on the soft forest floor. ‘Tell me about the stars you saw,’ he hissed. ‘The stars . . .’

  Uvarov’s shelter was little more than a roof of ropes and palm leaves, a web suspended between a cluster of tree trunks. Beneath this roof the jungle floor had been cleared and floored over with crudely cut planks of wood, over which Uvarov could prowl, the wheels of his chair humming as they bore him to and fro, to and fro. There were resin torches fixed to the walls, unlit. Uvarov kept his few possessions here, most of them incomprehensible to Arrow Maker: boxes fronted by discs of glass, bookslates worn yellow and faded with use, cupboards, chairs and a bed into which Uvarov could no longer climb.

  None of this had ever worked in Arrow Maker’s lifetime.

  Garry Uvarov was swaddled in a leather blanket, which hid his useless limbs. His head - huge, skull-like, fringed by sky-white hair and with eyes hollowed out by corruption - lolled on a neck grown too weak to support it. If Uvarov could stand, he’d be taller than Arrow Maker by three feet. But, sprawled in his chair as he was, Uvarov looked like some grotesque doll, a crude thing constructed of rags and the skull of some animal, perhaps a monkey.

  Maker studied Uvarov uneasily. The old man had never exactly been rational, but today there seemed to be an additional edge to his voice - perhaps a knife-edge of real madness, at last.

  And if that was true, how was he - Arrow Maker - going to deal with it?

  ‘Do you want anything? I’ll get you some—’

  Uvarov lifted his head. ‘Just tell me, damn you . . .’ His leaf-like cheeks shook and spittle flecked his chin, signifying rage. But his voice - reconstructed by some machine generations ago - was a bland, inhuman whisper.

  ‘I climbed the kapok - the tallest tree . . .’ Arrow Maker, stumbling, tried to describe what he’d seen.

  Uvarov listened, his head cocked back, his mouth lolling.

  ‘The starbow,’ he said at last. ‘Did you see the starbow?’

  Arrow Maker shook his head. ‘I’ve never seen a starbow. Tell me what it looks like.’

  Rage seemed to have enveloped Uvarov now; his chair rolled back and forth, back and forth, clattering over loose floorboards. ‘I knew it! No starbow . . . The ship’s slowing. We’ve arrived. I knew it . . .

  ‘They’ve tried to exclude me. Those survivalist bastard Planners, and maybe even that wizened bitch Armonk. If she’s still alive.’ He wheeled about, trying to point himself at Arrow Maker. ‘Don’t you see it? If there’s no starbow the ship must have arrived. The journey is over . . . After a thousand years, we’ve returned to Sol.’

  ‘But you’re not making sense,’ Arrow Maker protested weakly. ‘There’s never been a starbow. I don’t know what—’

  ‘The bastards . . . The bastards.’ Uvarov continued his endless rolling. ‘We’ve returned, to fulfil our mission - Paradoxa’s mission, not Louise Ye bloody Armonk’s! - and they want to shut me out. You, too, my children . . . My immortal children.

  ‘Listen to me.’ Uvarov wheeled about to face Maker again. ‘You must hear me; it’s very important. You’re the future, Arrow Maker . . . You, poor, ignorant as you are: you and your people are the future of the species.’

  He wheeled to the lip of his flooring, now, and lifted his head to Arrow Maker. Maker could see pools of congealed blood at the pits of those empty eye sockets, and he recoiled from the heavy, fetid stink of the decaying body under its blanket. ‘You’ll not be betrayed by your damn AS nanobots the way I was. When the ‘bots withered my limbs and chopped up my damn eyes, five centuries ago, I saw I’d been right all along . . .

  ‘But now we’ve come home. The mission is over. That’s what the stars are telling you, if you only had eyes to see.

  ‘I want you to gather the people. Get weapons - bows, blowpipes - anything you can find.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re going to go back into the Decks. For the first time in centuries. You have to reach the Interface. The wormhole Interface, Maker.’

  The Decks . . .

  Arrow Maker tried to envisage going through the Locks in the forest floor, entering the unknown darkness of the endless levels beneath his feet. Panic rose, sharp and painful in his throat.

  Maker stumbled away from the little hut, and back into the familiar scents of the jungle. He raised his face to the canopy above, and the glowing sky beyond.

  Could Uvarov be right? Was the thousand-year journey over - at last?

  Suddenly Arrow Maker’s world seemed tiny, fragile, a mote adrift among impossible dangers. He longed to return to the canopy, to lose himself in the thick, moist air, in the scent of growing things.

  ‘Milpitas was right,’ Constancy-of-Purpose said. ‘Your trouble is you think too much, Morrow.’ Her big voice boomed out, echoing from the bare metal walls of Deck One; Constancy-of-Purpose seemed oblivious of the huge emptiness around them - the desolate dwellings, the endless, shadowed spaces of this uninhabited place.

  Constancy-of-Purpose opened up a Lock. The Lock was a simple cylinder which rose from the floor and merged seamlessly with the ceiling, a hundred yards above their heads. Constancy-of-Purpose had opened a door in the Lock’s side, but there was also (Morrow had noticed) a hatch inside the cylinder twenty feet above them, blocking off the cylinder’s upper section.

  All the Locks were alike. But Morrow had never seen an upper hatch opened, and knew no one who had.

  Today, this Lock contained a pile of pineapples, plump and ripe, and a few flagons of copafeira sap. Morrow held open a bag, and Constancy-of-Purpose started methodically to shovel the fruit out of the Lock and into the bag, her huge biceps working. ‘You have to accept things as they are,’ she went on. ‘Our way of life here hasn’t changed for centuries - you have to admit that. So the Planners must be doing something right. Why not give them the benefit of the doubt?’

  Constancy-of-Purpose was a big, burly woman who habitually wore sleeveless tunics, leaving the huge muscles of her arms exposed. Her face, too, was strong, broad and patient, habitually placid beneath her shaven scalp. The lower half of her body, by contrast, was wasted, spindly, giving her
a strangely unbalanced look.

  Morrow said to Constancy-of-Purpose, ‘You always talk to me as if I were still a child.’ As, in Constancy-of-Purpose’s eyes, he probably always would be. Constancy-of-Purpose was twenty years older than Morrow, and she had always assumed the role of older mentor - even now, after five centuries of life, when a mere couple of decades could go by barely noticed. The fact that they’d once been married, for a few decades, had made no long-term difference to their relationship at all. ‘Look, Constancy-of-Purpose, so much of our little world just doesn’t make sense. And it drives me crazy to think about it.’

  Constancy-of-Purpose straightened up and rested her fists on her hips; her face gleamed with sweat. ‘No, it doesn’t.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It doesn’t drive you crazy. Nobody as old as you - or me - is capable of being driven crazy by anything. We don’t have the energy to be mad any more, Morrow.’

  Morrow sighed. ‘All right. But it ought to drive me crazy. And you. There’s so much that is simply - unsaid.’ He hoisted the half-full sack of fruit. ‘Look at the work we’re doing now, even. This simply isn’t logical.’

  ‘Logical enough. Copafeira sap is a useful fuel. And we need the fruit to supplement the supply machines, which haven’t worked properly since—’

  ‘Yes,’ Morrow said, exasperated, ‘but where does the fruit come from? Who brings it here, to these Locks? And—’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘And what do they want with the ratchets, and knives, and figure-of-eight rings we bring them?’

  Morrow picked up the sap flagons, and Constancy-of-Purpose slung the fruit bag over her shoulder. They began the hundred-yard walk to the next Lock. Constancy-of-Purpose moved with an uneven, almost waddling motion, her stick-like legs seeming almost too weak to support the massive bulk of her upper body. Some obscure nanobot failure had left her legs shrivelled, spindly and - Morrow suspected, though Constancy-of-Purpose never complained - arthritic.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Constancy-of-Purpose simply. ‘And I don’t think about it.’ She looked sideways at Morrow.

  ‘But it doesn’t make sense.’ Morrow looked up, nervously, at the bulkhead above him. ‘This fruit must come from somewhere. There must be people up there, Constancy-of-Purpose - people we’ve never seen, whose existence has never been acknowledged by the Planners, or—’

  ‘People whose existence doesn’t matter a damn, then.’

  ‘But it does. We trade with them.’ He stopped and held out his sack of fruit. ‘Look at this. We’ve carried on this trade with them - thereby implicitly acknowledging their existence - for decades now.’

  Constancy-of-Purpose kept walking, painfully. ‘Centuries, actually.’

  When he was a young man, Morrow had been angry just about the whole time, he recalled. Now - even now - he felt a ghostly surge of that old anger. He felt obscurely proud of himself: a feeling of anger was as rare an event as achieving an erection, these days. ‘But that means our society is, at its core, slightly insane.’

  Constancy-of-Purpose shook her massive head and studied Morrow, a tolerant look on her face. ‘Keep up that talk, and you’ll spend the rest of your life up here. Or somewhere worse.’

  ‘Just think about it,’ Morrow said. ‘A whole society, labouring under a mass delusion . . . No wonder they shut down the Virtuals. No wonder they banned kids.’

  ‘But we’re all kept fed. Aren’t we? So it can’t be that crazy.’ She smiled, her broad face assuming a look of wisdom. ‘Humans are a very flawed species, Morrow. We simply don’t seem to be able to act rationally, for very long. This sort of thing - a trade with the nonexistent unknowns upstairs - seems a minor aberration to me.’

  Morrow studied her curiously. ‘You believe that? And I think of me as sceptical.’

  Constancy-of-Purpose had reached the next Lock; she dropped her sack and leant against the curving metal wall, her hands resting on her knees. ‘You know, we have this conversation every few years, my friend.’

  Morrow frowned. ‘Really? Do we?’

  ‘Of course.’ Constancy-of-Purpose smiled. ‘At our age, even doubting becomes a habit. And we never come to any conclusion, and the world goes on. Just as it always has.’ She straightened up, cautiously flexing her thin legs. ‘Come on. Let’s get on with our work.’

  With a twist of her huge upper arms Constancy-of-Purpose hauled open the door of the Lock.

  Then - instead of stepping forward to gather the foodstuffs - she frowned, and looked at Morrow uncertainly. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Look.’

  The Lock was empty.

  Morrow stared at Constancy-of-Purpose, and then into the empty chamber. He couldn’t take in what he was seeing. These trades had never gone wrong before.

  ‘The knives have gone,’ he said.

  ‘We left them here yesterday.’

  ‘But there’s no meat.’

  ‘But the scratches clearly said the knives were what they wanted . . .’

  This dialogue went on for perhaps five minutes. Part of Morrow was able to step outside - to look at himself and Constancy-of-Purpose with a certain detachment, even with pity. Here were two old people, too hopelessly habit-bound to respond to the unexpected.

  Constancy-of-Purpose is right. I’ve become like a machine, he thought with anger and sadness. Worse than a machine.

  Constancy-of-Purpose said, ‘I’ll go in and check the markings. Maybe we made some mistake.’

  ‘We never made a mistake before. How could we?’

  ‘I’ll go check anyway.’

  Constancy-of-Purpose stepped forward into the Lock and peered up, squinting, at the trade markings.

  . . . And the hatch at the top of the Lock, twenty feet above Constancy-of-Purpose’s head, started to open.

  Inside the plasma sea, time held little meaning for Lieserl.

  As she sank into the Sun she’d abandoned all her Virtual senses, save for sight and a residual body awareness; drifting through the billowing, cloudy plasma was like a childhood vision of sleep, or an endless, oceanic meditation. She’d slowed the clocks which governed her awareness, and allowed herself to slip into long periods of true ‘sleep’ - of unawareness, when she drifted with only her autonomic systems patiently functioning.

  And she had allowed, without regret, the crucial link of synchronization between her sensorium and the Universe outside to be severed. While she had drifted around the core of the Sun, sinking almost imperceptibly deeper into its heart, dozens of centuries had worn away on the worlds of mankind . . .

  Here came the photino structure again.

  This time she was ready. She strained at the structure as it passed her, every sense open.

  Still, she could barely make it out; it was like a crude charcoal sketch against the glowing plasma background.

  Wistfully she watched the photino cloud soar out of sight once more, passing through the plasma as if it were no more substantial than mist, on its minutes-long orbit around the Sun.

  But—’

  But, had it diverged from its orbit as it passed her? Was it possible that the photino object had actually reacted to her presence?

  Now she became aware of more motion, below and ahead of her. The moving forms were shadowy, infuriatingly elusive against the gleaming, almost featureless background. Frustrated, she strained at her senses, demanding that her aged processors extract every last bit of information content from the data they were receiving.

  Slowly the images enhanced, gaining in definition and sharpness.

  There were hundreds - no: thousands, millions - of the photino traces. Maybe they were standing-wave patterns, she wondered, traces of coherence on the dark matter cloud.

  Slowly she built up an image in her head, a composite model of the patterns: a roughly lenticular form, with length of perhaps fifty yards - and, she realized slowly, some hints of an internal structure.

  Internal structure?
r />   Well, so much for the standing-wave theory. These things seemed to be discrete objects, not merely patterns of coherence in a continuum.

  She watched the objects as they traced their orbits around the centre of the Sun. The soaring lens-shapes reminded her of graphics of the contents of a blood stream; she wondered if the structures were indeed like antibodies, or thrombocytes - blood platelets, swarming in search of a wound. They swarmed over and past each other, miraculously never colliding—

  No, she realized slowly. There was nothing miraculous about it. The objects were steering away from each other, as they soared through their orbits.

  This was a flock. The dark matter structures were alive.

  Alive and purposeful.

  Slowly she drifted into the flock of photino birds (as she’d tentatively labelled them). They swooped around her, avoiding her gracefully.

  They were clearly reacting to her presence. They were obviously aware - if not intelligent, she thought.

  She wondered what to do next. She wished she had Kevan Scholes to talk to about this.

  Sweet, patient Kevan had come to the Sun as a junior research associate; his tour of duty had been meant to be only a few years. But he’d stayed on much longer in near-Solar orbit to serve as her patient capcom, far beyond the call of duty or friendship. In the end her long-distance relationship with Scholes had lasted decades.

  Well, she’d been grateful for his loyalty. He’d helped her immeasurably through those first difficult years inside the Sun.

  Fitfully, she tried to remember the last time he spoke to her.

  In the end he’d simply been removed. Why? To serve some organizational, political, cultural change? She’d never been told.

  She had come to learn, with time, that human organizations - even if staffed by AS-preserved semi-immortals - had a half-life of only a few decades. Those that survived longer persisted only as shells, usually transmuted far from the aims of their founders. She thought of the slow corruption of the Paradoxa Collegiate, apparent even in her own brief time outside the Sun, into a core organization of fanatics huddled around some eternal flame of ancient belief.