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

by Stephen Baxter

  Louise said, ‘This stuff resists analysis. Uvarov and Mark suggest that the construction material is a sheet of bound nucleons - bound together by the strong nuclear force, I mean, as if this was some immense, spun-out atomic nucleus.

  ‘But I’m not so sure. The density doesn’t seem right, for one thing. I have a theory of my own: that what we’re looking at is something more fundamental. I think the Xeelee have found a way to suppress the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and so have found their way into a whole new regime of matter. Of course the problem with that theory is that there aren’t supposed to be any loopholes in the Exclusion Principle. Well, I guess nobody told the Xeelee about that . . .’

  ‘How did they make this stuff?’

  Louise smiled. ‘If you believe the old Paradoxa reconstructions, they grew it, from “flowers”. Construction material simply sprouted like petals from the flowers, in the presence of radiant energy.

  ‘It would be interesting to know how this ship got here, to Callisto, in the first place,’ she said. ‘Capturing a Xeelee craft must have been a great triumph, for humans of any era.

  ‘Uvarov thinks this moon was used as a lab. This site, remote from the populated colonies, was a workshop - a safe place to study the Xeelee craft. There must have been research facilities here, built around the nightfighter, as the people of the time tried to pry out the secrets of its intrasystem drive, its hyperdrive, the construction material. But we’ve found little evidence of any human occupation, apart from close to this nightfighter. When the war came—’

  ‘What war?’

  Louise dropped her faceless, helmeted head. ‘A war against the Xeelee, Spinner. One of many wars. More than that I doubt we’ll ever know.

  ‘In the final war, the human facilities - and any people here - were destroyed, all save a few scraps. But—’

  ‘But the Xeelee nightfighter survived,’ Spinner said.

  Louise smiled. ‘Yes. The Xeelee built to last. Whatever happened was enough to melt Callisto’s ice. But the nightfighter sank into the new oceans, and was trapped in there when Callisto froze again.’

  Spinner thought: Trapped, dormant, for an immeasurable time - perhaps a million years.

  ‘And they never came back,’ Louise said. The people, I mean. The humans. They never recovered, to return here to rebuild. Perhaps that really was the war to end all wars, as far as Sol was concerned . . .

  ‘Here’s the pilot cage, Spinner-of-Rope . . . Well, now you can see why I need your help.’

  Spinner-of-Rope stared at the squat cage of construction material. It was barely six feet across.

  She felt a prickly cold spread across her limbs.

  17

  A simple metal stepladder rested against the side of the cage; the ladder looked incongruously primitive, amid all this alien high technology.

  Spinner looked at the ladder with dread. ‘Louise,’ she said. ‘I have to climb in. Don’t I?’

  Louise, bulky and anonymous in her environment suit, stood close beside her. ‘Well, that’s the general idea. Look, Spinner-of-Rope, we need a pilot . . .’ Her voice trailed off; she shrugged her shoulders, uncertain.

  Spinner closed her eyes and took deep breaths, trying to still the shuddering, deep in her stomach. ‘Lethe. So that’s why I’m all wired up.’

  ‘I’m sorry we didn’t tell you before bringing you down here, Spinner. We didn’t know what was best. Would telling you have made things any easier?’

  ‘I don’t get a choice, do I?’

  Louise’s face, through her plate, was hard. ‘You’re the best candidate we have, Spinner-of-Rope. We need you.’

  Without letting herself think about it, Spinner grabbed the ladder and pulled herself up.

  She looked into the pilot’s cage. It was an open sphere made of tubes of construction material. The tubes were arranged in an open lattice which followed a simple longitude-and-latitude pattern. Inside the cage was a bow-shaped console, of the black Xeelee material. Other devices, made of dull metal - looking crude by comparison, obviously human - had been fixed to the Xeelee console.

  A human couch had been cemented into the cage, before the console. Straps dangled from it. To fit into the cramped cage, the couch had been made small - too small for any human from the Decks but a child . . . or a child-woman from the forest.

  ‘I’m going to climb in, Louise.’

  ‘Good. But for Life’s sake, Spinner-of-Rope, until I tell you, don’t touch anything.’

  Spinner swung her legs, easily in the light gravity, through the construction-material frame and into the cage.

  The couch fitted her body closely - as it should, she thought resentfully, since it had obviously been made for her - but it was too snug. The couch - the straps across her chest and waist, the bulky, crowding console before her - devoured her. The cage was a place of shadows, criss-crossing and mysterious, cast by the Jovian ring and the ice below her. It pressed around her, barely big enough for the couch and console.

  She looked out through her murky faceplate, beyond the construction-material cage, to the ice plains of Callisto. She saw the blocky forms of the Northern’s ‘bots, the pod that had brought her here, the shadowy figure of Louise. It all seemed remote, unattainable. The only reality was herself, inside this suit, this alien craft - and the sound of her own breathing loud in her ears.

  Spinner had got used to a lot of changes, in the few decades since she and her father had climbed down through the lifedome with Morrow. Just not growing old had been a challenge enough. Most of her compatriots in the forest had refused the AS treatments offered to them by Louise, and after a few years the physical-age differences had grown marked, and widened rapidly.

  Spinner had a younger sister: Painter-of-Faces, Arrow Maker’s youngest child. By the time the little girl had grown older than Spinner could remember her mother, Spinner had let her visits back to the forest dwindle away.

  The life of the forest people carried on much as it always had done - despite the end of the Northern’s journey and the discovery of the death of the Sun. Because of her greater awareness - her wider understanding - Spinner felt shut out of that old, enclosed world.

  Isolated by age and by her own extraordinary experiences, she had tried to grow accustomed to the bizarre Universe outside the walls of the ship. And, over the years, she’d learned a great deal; Louise Ye Armonk, despite the ghastly way she had of patronizing Spinner, had assured her often of the great strides she’d made for someone of her low-technology upbringing.

  But now, she longed to be away from this bleak, threatening place - to be naked again, and moving through the trees of the forest.

  ‘Spinner-of-Rope.’ It was the voice of the artificial man, Mark, soft inside her helmet. ‘You’ve got to try to relax. Your biostat signs are way up—’

  ‘Shut up, Mark.’ Louise Ye Armonk walked up to the Xeelee cage and pressed her body against the black bars, peering in; she’d turned on the light behind her faceplate, so Spinner could see her face. ‘Spinner, are you all right?’

  Spinner took a deep breath. ‘I’m fine.’ She tried to focus on her irritation: with patronizing Louise, the buzzing ghost Mark. She fanned her annoyance into a flame of anger, to burn away the chill of her fear. ‘Just tell me what I have to do.’

  ‘Okay.’ Louise lifted her hands and stepped back from the cage. ‘As far as we can tell, the cage you’re in is the control centre of the nightfighter. You can see, obviously, that it’s been adapted for use by humans. We put the couch in for you. You have waldoes—’

  ‘I have what?’

  ‘Waldoes, Spinner. The metal boxes on top of the console. See?’

  There were three of the boxes, each about a foot long, one before Spinner and one to either side. There were touch pads - familiar enough to her now - illuminated across the tops of the boxes. She reached out towards the box in front of her—

  ‘Don’t touch, damn you,’ Louise snapped.

  Spinner snatched her fingers back
.

  With audibly strained patience, Louise said, ‘Spinner-of-Rope, the controls in those boxes have been tied into what we believe are controls inside the console - and they are the nightfighter’s real controls, the Xeelee mechanisms. That’s why we called the boxes waldoes . . . By working the waldoes you’ll be able to work the controls. The waldoes are reconstructions, based on fragments left from the destruction of the original lab.’

  ‘All right.’ Spinner ran a tongue over her lips; sweat, dried in a rim around her mouth, tasted of salt. ‘I understand. Let’s get on with it.’

  Beyond the cage, Louise held up her hands. ‘No. Wait. It’s not as simple as that. We reconstructed the waldoes from clues left by the original human researchers. We believe they are going to work . . . But,’ she went on dryly, ‘we don’t know what they will make the nightfighter do. We don’t know what will happen when you touch the waldoes.

  ‘So we’ll have to be patient. Experiment.’

  ‘All right,’ Spinner said. ‘But the original researchers, before the war, must have known what they were doing. Mustn’t they?’

  Mark said, ‘Not necessarily. After all, if they’d been able to figure out Xeelee technology, maybe they wouldn’t have lost the war—’

  ‘Shut up, Mark,’ Louise said mildly. ‘Now, Spinner. Listen carefully. You have three waldoes - three boxes. We believe - we think - the one directly in front of you is interfaced to the hyperdrive control, and the two to your sides connect to the intraSystem drive.’

  ‘IntraSystem?’

  ‘Sublight propulsion, to let you travel around the Solar System. All right? Now, Spinner, today we aren’t going to touch the hyperdrive - in fact, that waldo is disabled. We just want to see what we can make of the intraSystem drive. All right?’

  ‘Yes.’ Spinner looked at the two boxes; the touch-pad lights glowed steadily, in reassuring colours of yellow and green.

  ‘On your left hand waldo you’ll see a yellow pad. It should be illuminated. See it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Louise hesitated. ‘Spinner, try to be ready. We don’t know what to expect. There might be changes . . .’

  ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘Touch the yellow pad - once, and as briefly as you can . . .’

  Spinner tried to put aside her fear. She lifted her hand—

  Spinner-of-Rope. Don’t be afraid.

  Startled, she twisted in her couch.

  It had been a dry, weary voice - a man’s voice, sounding from somewhere inside her helmet.

  Of course, she was alone in the cage.

  It’s just a machine, the voice said now. There’s nothing to fear . . .

  She thought, Lethe. What now? Am I going crazy?

  But, strangely, the voice - the sense of some invisible presence, here in the cage with her - was somehow comforting.

  Spinner held her right hand over the waldo. She pressed her gloved finger to the yellow light.

  A subtle change in the light, around her. There was no noise, no sense of motion.

  She glanced down, through the bars of her cage.

  The ice was gone. Callisto had vanished.

  She twisted in her seat, the straps chafing against her chest, and peered out of her cage. The rings of Jupiter and the Sun’s swollen form covered the sky - unperturbed by the disappearance of a mere moon. She couldn’t see the Northern.

  She spotted a ball of ice, small enough to cover with her fist, off to her right, below the nightfighter.

  Could that be Callisto? If so, she’d travelled thousands of miles from the moon, in less than a heartbeat - and felt nothing.

  She looked behind her.

  The Xeelee nightfighter had spread its sycamore-seed wings. From within their hundred-yard shells, sheets of night-darkness - hundreds of miles long - curled across space behind her, occluding the stars.

  At her touch, the ancient Xeelee craft had come to life.

  She screamed and buried her faceplate in her gloves.

  Lieserl soared out from the core, out through the shell of fusing hydrogen, and inspected her maser convection loops. She sensed the distorted echoes of her last set of messages, as they had survived their cycles through the coherence paths of the convection loops.

  She adjusted the information content of her maser links, and initiated new messages. She added in the latest information she’d gleaned, and restated - in as strong and simple a language as she could muster - her warnings about the likely future evolution of the Sun.

  When she was done, she felt something within her relax. Once more she’d scratched this itch to communicate; once more she’d assuaged her absurd, ancient feelings of guilt . . .

  But it was only after she’d sent her communication that she studied, properly, the cycled remnants of her last signals.

  She allowed the maser bursts to play over her again. The messages had changed - and this time it wasn’t simple degradation. How was this possible? Some unknown physical process at the surface of the red giant, perhaps? Or - she speculated, her excitement growing as she began to see traces of structure within the changes - or was there someone outside: someone still alive, and recognizably human - and trying to talk to her?

  Feverishly she devoured the thin information stream contained in the maser bursts.

  Fifty thousand miles from Callisto, pods from the Northern hung in a rough sphere. At the centre of the sphere, the magnificent wings of the Xeelee ship remained unfurled, darkly shimmering - almost alive.

  Spinner sat with Louise within the safe, enclosing glass walls of a pod. Louise, with a touch on the little control console before her, guided the pod around the Xeelee nightfighter; neighbouring pods slid across space, bubbles of light and warmth. The wings were immense sculptures in space, black on black. Spinner could hear Mark whispering in Louise’s ear, and numbers and schematics rolled across a data slate on Louise’s lap.

  Spinner’s faceplate dangled at her back, and she relished the feel of fresh air against her face. It was wonderful simply not to breathe in her own stale exhalations.

  She’d dug her father’s arrow-head out of her suit so that it dangled at her chest; she fingered it, rubbing her hands compulsively over its smooth lines.

  Louise glanced at Spinner. ‘Are you all right now?’ She sounded apologetic. ‘Mark got to you as quickly as he could. And—’

  Spinner-of-Rope nodded, curtly. ‘I wasn’t hurt.’

  ‘No.’ Louise glanced down at her slate again; her attention was clearly on the data streaming in about the activated nightfighter. She murmured, ‘No, you did fine.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Spinner grunted. ‘Well, I hope it was worth it.’

  Louise looked up from her slate. ‘It was. Believe me, Spinner; even if it might be hard for you to see how. The very fact that you weren’t harmed, physically, by that little jaunt has told us volumes.’

  Now Mark’s voice sounded in the air, ‘You travelled tens of thousands of miles in a fraction of a second, Spinner. You should have been creamed against the bars of that cage. Instead, something protected you . . .’

  Louise looked at Spinner. ‘He has a way of putting things, doesn’t he?’

  They laughed together. Spinner felt a little of the numbness chip away from her.

  ‘Mark’s right,’ Louise said. ‘Thanks to you, we’re learning at a fantastic rate about the nightfighter. We know we can use it without killing ourselves, for a start . . . And, Spinner, understanding is the key to turning anything from a threat into an opportunity.’

  Louise took the pod on a wide arc around the unfurled wings of the Xeelee craft. The wings were like a star-free hole cut out of space, beneath Spinner-of-Rope; they retained the general sycamore-seed shape of the construction-material framework, but were vastly extended. Spinner could see ‘bots toiling patiently across the wings’ surface.

  ‘This far out, the mass-energy of the wing system is actually attracting the pod, gravitationally,’ Louise murmured. ‘The wings have the mass equivalent of
a small asteroid . . . I can see from my slate that the pod’s systems are having to correct for the wings’ perturbation.

  ‘Let’s go in a little way.’

  She took the pod on a low, sweeping curve over the lip of one wing and down towards its surface. The wing, a hundred miles across, was spread out beneath Spinner like the skin of some dark world; the little pod skimmed steadily over the black landscape.

  Louise kept talking. ‘The wing is thin - as far as we can tell its thickness is just a Planck length, the shortest distance possible. It has an extremely high surface tension - or, equivalently, a high surface energy density - so high, in fact, that its gravitational field is inherently non-Newtonian; it’s actually relativistic . . . Is this making any sense to you, Spinner?’

  Spinner said nothing.

  Louise said, ‘Look: from a long way away, the pod was attracted to the wings, just as if they were composed of normal matter. But they’re not. And, this close, I can detect the difference.’

  She drew the pod to a stop, and allowed it to descend, slowly, towards the wing surface.

  Spinner, gazing down, couldn’t tell how far away the night-black, featureless floor was. Was Louise intending to land there?

  The pod’s descent slowed.

  Louise, working her control console, caused the pod’s small vernier rockets to squirt, once, twice, sending them down towards the wing surface once more. But again the pod slowed; it gradually drifted to a halt, then, slowly, began to rise, as if rebounding.

  Louise’s face was alive with excitement. ‘Spinner, could you feel that? Do you see what’s happening? This close, the wing surface is actually gravitationally repulsive. It’s pushing us away!’

  Spinner eyed her. ‘I know you, Louise. You’ve already figured out how a discontinuity drive would work. You were expecting this antigravity stunt, weren’t you?’