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

by Stephen Baxter

  Spinner sounded disappointed. ‘I can’t see anything in the middle. Where the planet used to be.’

  Louise grinned. ‘You’d hardly expect to. A black hole with Jupiter’s mass would have a diameter of just twenty feet or so . . .’

  ‘There’s plenty to see in higher frequencies,’ Mark cut in. ‘The X-ray, and higher . . .

  ‘Towards the heart of the system we have a true accretion disc,’ he went on, ‘with matter being heated tremendously before falling into the black hole itself. It’s small, but there’s a lot of structure there, if you look at it in the right bands.’

  Spinner, with apparent eagerness, adjusted her plate over her face, and Mark told her how to fix the settings. Soon, Spinner’s eyes assumed that unfocused look again as they adjusted to the enhanced imagery.

  Louise left her own visor in her lap; the black hole, and its huge, milky ring, depressed her enough in visible light.

  Jupiter’s new ring system, with its bland paleness, and the jostling, crowding swirl at the centre, was far from beautiful, on any wavelength. It was too obviously a place of wreckage, of destruction - a destruction which was visibly continuing, as the black hole gnawed at its accretion disc. And, to Louise’s engineer’s eye, with its empty centre the system had something of an unfinished, provisional look. There was no soul to this system, she thought, no balance to the scale of the rings: by comparison, Saturn’s rings had been an adornment, a necklace of ice and rock around the throat of an already beautiful world.

  Spinner turned to her, her bespectacled eyes masked by the faceplate. ‘The whole thing’s like a whirlpool,’ she said.

  Louise shrugged. ‘I suppose so. A whirlpool surrounding a hole in spacetime.’

  ‘A whirlpool of gas—’

  —gas, and rock and water ice: bits of smashed-up worlds—

  Louise started to tell Spinner-of-Rope about the vanished moons of Jupiter. She remembered Io with its volcano mouths and their hundred-mile-high vents, its sulphur-stained surface and its surrounding torus of volcano-fed plasma; she remembered Io’s mineral mines, nestling in the shadow of the huge volcano Babbar Patera. She told Spinner of Ganymede: larger than Mercury, heavily cratered and geologically rich - the most stable and heavily populated of all the Jovian moons. And Europa, a ball of ice, with a bright smooth surface - constantly renewed by melting and tectonic stress - covering a liquid layer beneath. Europa had been a bright precursor of this smoothed-over corpse of Callisto, perhaps.

  Worlds, all populated - all gone.

  Louise hoped fervently that there had been time to evacuate the moons before the final disaster. If not, then - drifting through Jovian orbit among the fragments of rock and ice which comprised those rings - there would be bits of humanity: shards of shattered homes, children’s toys, corpses.

  Spinner pushed up her faceplate and rubbed her eyes. ‘I’d have liked to have seen Jupiter, I think, with its moons and all those cities . . . Perhaps Jupiter could have been saved. After all, the implosion must have taken thousands of years, you told me.’

  Louise bit back a sarcastic reply. ‘Yes. But picking black holes out of the heart of a gas giant was evidently a bit too difficult, even for the humans of many millennia beyond my time.’

  Jupiter had been wrecked by the actions of the Friends of Wigner.

  The Friends were human rebels from a Qax-occupied future, who had fled back in time through Michael Poole’s time-tunnel wormhole.

  The Friends had had in mind some grand, impossible scheme to alter history. Their plan had involved firing asteroid-mass black holes into Jupiter.

  The Friends’ project had been interrupted by the arrival of Qax warships through Poole’s wormhole - but not before the Friends had succeeded in spearing the giant planet with several of their tiny singularities.

  The pinprick singularities had looped through the thick Jovian atmosphere like deadly insects, trailing threads of plasma. When the holes met, they had whirled around each other before coalescing, their event horizons collapsing into each other in Planck timescales.

  The vibration of merging event horizons had emitted vicious pulses of gravity waves. Founts of thick, chemically complex atmosphere had been hurled out of the planet, bizarre volcanoes on a world of gas.

  The Friends’ ambitions had been far-reaching. Before the final implosion they’d meant to sculpt the huge planet with these directed gravity-wave pulses, produced by the complex interactions of their singularity bullets.

  Louise now stared morosely at the bland, displeasing disc of glowing rubble. Well, the Friends had certainly succeeded in part of their project - the reduction of Jupiter. Quite a monument to such ambition, after five million years, Louise thought: a collapsed Jovian, and a string of crushed human worlds.

  And all for what? A black hole of the wrong size . . .

  ‘It’s getting brighter over there,’ Spinner said, pointing.

  Louise looked right, across Callisto. A dull, flat crimson light was spreading across the ice. The glow cast long, disproportionate shadows from the low irregularities in Callisto’s smooth surface, turning the ice plain into a complex landscape of ruby-sparkling promontories and blood-red pools of shadow.

  At the horizon, smoky tendrils of crimson gas were rising across the sky.

  ‘Sunrise on Callisto,’ Louise said sourly. ‘Come on; let’s land. We don’t want to miss the full beauty of the Solar System’s one remaining wonder, do we?’

  On the surface of Callisto, standing beside Louise in her environment suit, Spinner held up her arms, framing the Sun with her outspread hands; standing there on the light-stained ice floor, with the swollen globe reflected, distorted, in her faceplate, Spinner-of-Rope looked more than ever like a child.

  Sol, looming over the horizon, was a wall of blood-red smoke. It was transparent enough to see through to the distant stars for perhaps a quarter of the disc’s radius - in fact, the material was so thin that Louise could make out the steadily deepening colour of the thicker layers towards the core.

  The Sun didn’t even look like a star any more, she thought tiredly. A star was supposed to be hard, bright, hot; you weren’t supposed to be able to see through it.

  ‘Another astrophysicist’s dream,’ Mark said dryly. ‘You could learn more about the nature of stellar evolution just by standing there and looking, than in all the first five millennia of human astronomy.’

  ‘Yes. But what a price to pay.’

  Once, from Jupiter’s orbit the Main Sequence Sun would have been a point source of light - distant, hot, yellow. Now, the Sun’s arc size had to be at least twenty degrees. Its bulk covered fully a fifth of Louise’s field of view: twenty times the width of the full Moon, as seen from Earth.

  Jupiter was five AU from the Sun’s centre - an AU was an astronomical unit, the radius of Earth’s orbit. For the Sun to subtend such an angle, it must be two AU across, or more.

  Two astronomical units. In exploding out to become a giant, the Sun had swallowed the Earth, and the planets within Earth’s orbit - Venus, Mercury.

  Spinner-of-Rope was studying her, concern mixing with curiosity behind those pale spectacles.

  ‘What are you thinking, Louise?’

  ‘This shouldn’t have happened for five billion more years,’ Louise said. Her throat was tight, and she found it difficult to keep her voice level. ‘The Sun was only halfway to turnoff - halfway through its stable lifecycle, on the Main Sequence.

  ‘This shouldn’t have happened. Somebody did this deliberately, robbing us of our future, our worlds - damn it, this was our Sun . . .’

  ‘Louise.’ Mark’s synthesized voice was brisk, urgent.

  She breathed deeply, trying to put away her anger, her resentment, to focus on the present.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You’d better come back to the Northern. Morrow has found something . . . Something in the ice. He thinks it’s a spacecraft.’

  16

  ‘Uvarov. Uvarov.’

&n
bsp; Garry Uvarov jerked awake. It was dark. He tried to open his eyes ...

  As always, in that first instant of wakefulness - even after all these years - he forgot. His blindness crowded in on him, a speckled darkness across his eyes, making every new waking a savage horror.

  ‘Garry. Are you awake?’

  It was the solicitous voice of that fake person, Mark Bassett Friar Armonk Wu. Uvarov swung his head around, trying to locate the source of the artificial voice. It seemed to be all around him. He tried to speak; he felt his gummy mouth open with a pop, like a fish’s. ‘Mark Wu. Where are you, damn it?’

  ‘Right here. Oh.’ There was a second of silence. Then: ‘I’m here.’

  Now the voice came from directly in front of him, from a precise, well-focused place.

  ‘Better,’ Uvarov growled.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mark said. ‘I hadn’t formed an image. I didn’t think—’

  ‘You didn’t bother,’ Uvarov snapped. ‘Because I can’t see you, you thought it was enough to float around me in the air like some damn spirit.’

  ‘I didn’t think it would be so important to you,’ Mark said.

  ‘No,’ Uvarov said. ‘To think of that would have been too much the human thing to do for an imprint like you, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Do you need anything?’ Mark asked, with strained patience. ‘Some food, or—’

  Nothing,’ Uvarov snapped. ‘This chair takes care of it all. With me, it’s in one end and out of the other, without even having to swallow.’ He stretched his lips and leered. ‘As you know. So why did you bother to ask after my health? Just to make me feel dependent?’

  ‘No.’ Mark sounded cool, but more certain of himself. ‘I thought to ask would be the human thing to do.’

  Uvarov let himself cackle at that. ‘Touché.’

  ‘It’s just that you sleep for such a long time, Uvarov,’ Mark said dryly.

  ‘So would you, if you weren’t dead,’ Uvarov said briskly.

  He could hear the rattle of his own breath, the subdued ticking of a huge old clock somewhere, here in the dining saloon of Louise’s old steam ship. Hauling this useless relic five megayears into the future had been, of course, an absurd thing to do, and it showed a fundamental weakness in the character of Louise Ye Armonk. But still, Uvarov had to admit, the textures of the old material - the painted walls, the mirrors, the polished wood of the two long tables - sounded wonderful.

  ‘I suppose you had a reason for waking me.’

  ‘Yes. The Sun maser probes—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We’re starting to get meaningful data, Uvarov.’ Now Mark sounded excited, but Uvarov never let himself forget that every inflection of this AI’s voice was a mere artifice.

  Still, despite this cynical calculation, Uvarov too began to feel a distinct stirring of interest - of wonder. Meaningful data?

  The maser radiation was coming from hot-spots on the photosphere itself - patches of intense maser brightness, equivalent to tens of millions of degrees of temperature, against a background cooler than the surface of the yellow Sun had once been. The convection mechanism underlying the maser flares’ coherent pathways fired the radiation pulses off tangentially to the photosphere. So the Northern had sent out small probes to skim the swollen, diffuse surface of the photosphere, sailing into the paths of the surface-grazing maser beams.

  ‘Tell me about the data.’

  ‘It’s a repeating group, Uvarov. Broadcast on maser wavelengths, from within what’s left of the Sun . . . Uvarov, I think it’s a signal.’

  They hadn’t learned much about the Solar System, in the year since their clumsy, limping arrival from out of the past. So many of the worlds of man simply didn’t exist any more.

  Still, in the quiet time before the arrival of the Northern at Jupiter, Uvarov and the AI construct had performed some general surveys of the Solar System - what was left of it. And they’d found a few oddities . . .

  There was what looked like one solid artifact - Morrow’s anomalous object buried in the ice of Callisto. And, apart from that, there were just three sources of what could be interpreted as intelligently directed signals: this maser stuff from the Sun, the fading beacon from the edge of the System, and - strangest and most intriguing of all, to Garry Uvarov - those strange pulses of gravity radiation from the direction of Sagittarius.

  Uvarov had done a little private study, on the structure of the Universe in the direction of Sagittarius. Interestingly enough, he learned, the cosmic structure called the Great Attractor was to be found there, right at the place the photino beam was pointing. The Attractor was a huge mass concentration: the source of galactic streaming, for hundreds of millions of light-years’ distance around. Could the Attractor be connected to the g-waves?

  And then there was all that strange photino activity in and around the Sun.

  The data was patchy and difficult to interpret - after all, dark matter was, almost by definition, virtually impossible to study . . . but there was something strange there.

  Uvarov thought he’d detected a streaming.

  There was a steady flow, of photino structures, out of the heart of the Sol giant . . . and on out of the Solar System. It was a beam of photinos aimed like a beacon, out of Sol - and straight towards the source of the anomalous gravity waves in Sagittarius.

  Something was happening in Sagittarius - something huge, and wonderful, and strange. And, somehow, impossibly, it was connected to whatever was taking place in the heart of the poor, suffering Sun.

  . . . The Virtual, Mark Armonk, was talking to him again. Or perhaps at him, Uvarov thought sourly.

  ‘I wish you’d pay attention, Uvarov—’

  ‘Without me to talk to, you’d lapse into non-sentience, devoid of independent will,’ Uvarov pointed out. ‘So spare me the lectures.’

  Mark ground out, ‘The Sun, Uvarov. The photosphere maser radiation is standard stuff - generated by silicon monoxide at 43 Gigahertz. There are natural mechanisms for generating such signatures. But in this case, we’ve found hints of modulation of the silicon monoxide stuff . . . deliberate modulation.

  ‘We’ve found structure everywhere, Uvarov.’ Again that fake excitement in Mark’s voice; Uvarov felt his irritation grow. Mark went on, ‘There is structure in the amplitude of the beams, their intensity, phasing, polarization - even in the Doppler shifting of the signals. Uvarov, someone - or something - is in there, trying to signal out with modulated natural masers, as hard as they can. I’m trying to resolve it, but . . .’

  Uvarov strove to shift in his chair, vainly trying to find a more comfortable posture - a prize he’d been seeking for the best part of a thousand years, with as much assiduousness as Jason had once sought his Fleece, he thought. How pathetic, how limited he was!

  He tried to ignore his body, to fix his analytical abilities - his imagination - on the concept of an intelligence within the Sun . . .

  But it was so difficult.

  His mind wandered once more. He thought of his forest colony. He thought of Spinner-of-Rope.

  Sometimes Uvarov wondered how much better young people might have fared, if they’d been given this opportunity to study and learn, with this strange, battered Universe as an intellectual playground. How much more might youth have unearthed, with its fresh eyes and minds, than he could!

  It had already been fifty years since - in his misguided, temporary lunacy - he had inspired his forest children to undertake their hazardous journey out of the lifedome. Fifty years: once most of a human lifetime, he thought - and yet, now, scarcely an interlude in his own, absurdly long life, stuck as he was in this mouldering cocoon of a body.

  So even Spinner-of-Rope, Arrow Maker’s wise-ass daughter, must be - what, sixty-five chronological? Seventy, maybe? An old woman already. But still, thanks to AS-freezing, she’d retained the features - and much of the outlook, as far as he could tell - of a child.

  He felt a great sorrow weigh upon him. Of course his experiment was lo
st, now; his carefully developed gene pool was already polluted by interbreeding, no doubt, between the forest folk and the Paradoxa-controlled Decks, and his immortal strain was overwhelmed by AS treatments.

  But the progress he had made was still there, he thought; the genes were there, dormant, ready. And when - if - the inhabitants of the Northern got through this time of trouble, when they reached whatever new world waited for them, then the great experiment could begin anew.

  But in the meantime . . .

  He thought again of Spinner-of-Rope, a girl-woman who had grown up among trees and leaves, now walking through the wreckage of the Solar System.

  Uvarov had made many mistakes. Well, he’d had time to. But he could be proud of this, if nothing else: that to this era of universal desolation and ruin, he - Garry Uvarov - had restored at least a semblance of the freshness of youth.

  ‘ . . . Uvarov,’ Mark said.

  Uvarov turned. The Al’s synthesized voice sounded different - oddly flat, devoid of expression. None of that damn fake intonation, then, Uvarov thought with faint triumph. It was as if the Virtual’s processing power had, briefly, been diverted somewhere else. Something had happened.

  ‘Well? What is it?’

  ‘I’ve done it. I’ve resolved the signal - the information in the maser pulses. There’s an image, forming in the data desk . . .’

  ‘An image? Tell me, damn you.’

  It was a woman’s face (Mark said), crudely sketched in pixels of colour. A human face. The woman was aged about sixty-five physical; she had short-cropped, sandy hair, a strong nose, a wide, upturned mouth, and large, vulnerable eyes.

  Her lips were moving.

  ‘A woman’s face - after five million years, transmitted out on maser signals from the heart of a Sun rendered into a red giant? I don’t believe it.’