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

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Louise . . .?’

  Louise’s smile broadened. ‘So you’re with us again. Thank Life for that; welcome back.’

  Spinner looked around. She was still in her cage; the waldoes still sat on their jet-black horseshoe of construction material before her, their touchpad lights burning. But a dome of some milky, opaque material had been cast around the cage, shutting out the impossible sights outside.

  Louise regarded her gravely. She hovered beyond the cage, attached by a short length of safety rope; reaching through the cage bars she held out a moistened cloth. ‘Here. You’d better clean yourself up.’

  Spinner glanced down at herself. Her helmet lay in her lap. Her hands were moist with spittle - and she’d dribbled down her chin - and where Louise had opened Spinner’s suit at the chest, there was a mass of small, bleeding punctures.

  ‘What a mess,’ Spinner said. She dabbed at her chest.

  Louise shrugged. ‘It’s no great trouble, Spinner. Although I had to move fast; I needed to get the air-dome up around you before you managed to open your

  faceplate.’

  Spinner picked up her helmet; reaching through the faceplate, she found an apple-juice nipple. ‘Louise, what happened to me?’

  Louise grinned and reached through the construction-material bars; with her old, leathery hand she touched Spinner’s cheek. ‘The hyperdrive happened to you. You’ve nothing to be ashamed of, Spinner. I knew this wouldn’t be easy, but I had no idea how traumatic it would be.’

  Spinner frowned. ‘There was no sensation of movement at all. It seemed like magic, impossible. Even with the discontinuity drive there are visual effects; you can see the planets looming up at you, and the blue shift, and—’

  Louise sighed and rubbed her face. ‘I know. Sometimes, I think I forget that this is a Xeelee ship. It’s just not designed for human comfort . . . I guess we can conclude that the Xeelee are a little tougher, psychologically, than we are.’

  ‘But did it work, Louise?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it worked, Spinner. We crossed over two thousand light-years - in a time so brief I couldn’t even measure it . . .’

  Louise took her hand from Spinner’s cheek and rested it on her shoulder. ‘Spinner, I can de-opaque this dome. If you feel you want me to.’

  Spinner didn’t want to think about it. ‘Do it, Louise.’

  Louise picked up her helmet and whispered instructions into its throat mike.

  The Trifid Nebula, from Earth, had once been a faint glow in the constellation of Sagittarius - as broad as the full Moon in the sky, but far dimmer; at over two thousand light-years from Earth, powerful telescopes had been needed to reveal its glorious colours. Light took fully thirty years to cross its extent.

  Louise and Mark had chosen the Trifid as the first hyperdrive target. Even if the nightfighter’s trajectory was off by hundreds of light-years, the Nebula should surely be an unmistakable landmark.

  But the waldo had worked. Louise’s programming had brought the nightfighter to within sixty light-years of the rim of the Nebula.

  The Nebula was a wall, sprawled across half of Spinner’s sky. It was a soft-edged study in pinks and reds. Dark lanes cut across the face of the Nebula in a rough Y-shape, dividing the cloud into three parts. The material seemed quite smooth, Spinner thought, like some immense watercolour painting. Stars shone through the pale outer edges of the Nebula - and shone, too, from within its bulk.

  ‘This is an emission nebula, Spinner,’ Louise said abstractedly. ‘There are stars within the gas; ultraviolet starlight ionizes hydrogen in the Nebula, making the gas shine in turn . . .’ She pointed. ‘Those dark rifts are empty of stars; they’re dozens of light-years long. The Nebula is called the Trifid because of the way the lanes divide the face into three . . . see? And - can you see those smaller, compact dark spots? They’re called Bok globules . . . the birth places of new stars, forming inside the Nebula.’

  Spinner-of-Rope turned to Louise; the engineer sounded flat, distant.

  ‘Louise? What’s wrong?’

  Louise glanced at her. ‘I’m sorry, Spinner. I should be celebrating, I guess. After all, the hyperdrive delivered us just where I expected to be. And I was only using the Trifid as a landmark, anyway. But - damn it, the Trifid used to be so much more, Spinner. The colours, all the way through the spectrum from blue, and green, all the way to red . . . There were hot, bright young stars in there which made it blaze.

  ‘But now, those stars are gone. Snuffed out, or exploded, or rushed through their lifecycles; like every other star in the damn Galaxy.

  ‘I just find it hard to accept all this. I try, but every so often something like this comes along, and hits me in the eye.’

  Spinner turned to the Nebula again, trying to lose herself in its light.

  Louise smiled, her face outlined by the Nebula’s soft light. ‘And what about you? . . . Why, Spinner, you’re crying.’

  Surprised, Spinner raised the heel of her wrist to her cheeks. There was moisture there. She brushed it away, embarrassed. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘It’s just—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s so beautiful.’ Spinner stared at the eagle wings of the Nebula, drinking in its pale colours. ‘Louise, I’m so lucky to be here, to see this. Uvarov might have sent someone else through the Locks, that first time; not me and Arrow Maker. You might have asked someone else to learn to run your nightfighter for you - and not me.

  ‘Louise, I might have missed this. I might have died without seeing it - without ever even knowing it existed.’ She looked at Louise uncertainly. ‘Do you understand?’

  Louise smiled. ‘No.’ She reached into the cage and patted Spinner’s arm. ‘But once I would have felt the same way. Come on, Spinner. We’ve done what we came to do. Let’s go home.’

  Spinner-of-Rope picked up her helmet. As she fastened up her suit, she kept her eyes fixed on the impossible beauty of the Trifid.

  22

  Lieserl walked into the dining saloon of the Great Britain.

  She hesitated, uncertain, in the low doorway. She was stunned by the antique beauty of the place: by its fine pillars and plasterwork, the mirrors glimmering on the walls. She was the last to arrive for this strange dinner; there were six people - three men and three women - already seated, facing each other at the centre of one of the long tables. The only light came from candles (real candles, or Virtuals?) set on the table between them. As the people talked, their faces, and the fine cutlery and glass, shone in the flickering, golden light; shadows stretched across the rest of the old saloon, turning it into a place of mystery - even romance.

  One of the men turned as she came in. He rose, pushing back his chair, and walked towards her, smiling. His blue eyes were bright in a dark face.

  She felt an odd, absurd, flutter of nervousness in her throat; she raised her hand to her mouth, and felt the coarseness of her flesh, the lines etched deep there. This was her first genuine human interaction in five million years . . . But how ludicrous to suffer adolescent nerves like this! She was an AI, geologically old, yet within mere subjective days of returning to the company of humans she had become immersed once more in the complex, impossibly difficult world of human interactions.

  She felt a sudden, intense, nostalgic desire to return to the clean, bright interior of the Sun. All those millennia, orbiting the core with the photino birds, seemed like a long, fantastic dream to her now: an interval within this, the true human reality . . .

  The man reached out and touched her arm. His flesh was firm, warm.

  She cried out and stumbled backwards.

  Five faces, bright with candlelight, turned towards her, and the conversation died.

  No one had touched Lieserl in megayears.

  The man leaned towards her, his blue eyes bright and mischievous. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t resist that. I’m Mark Bassett Friar Armonk Wu.’

  She straightened herself up, primly, and glared at him. The sudden touch had l
eft a trembling, deep in her stomach, and she was sure a flush was spreading over her cheeks, despite her age of physical-sixty. She was vividly aware - too aware, distractingly so - of Mark’s presence beside her.

  He took her arm again, more delicately, and escorted her towards the dinner party. ‘I won’t startle you again, I promise. And I’m the only Virtual here - other than you, of course.’

  ‘These Virtual illusions are just too damn good sometimes,’ she said. Her voice sounded feathery - weak, she thought. It was going to take her a long time to forgive Mark Wu for that trick.

  He led her to a seat and pulled it out for her - so that was Virtual, too - and she sat with the rest.

  The woman opposite her leaned forward and smiled. Lieserl saw a square, strong face, tired eyes, a thatch of grizzled hair. ‘I’m Louise Ye Armonk,’ she said. ‘You’re welcome here, Lieserl.’

  ‘Ah,’ Lieserl said. ‘Louise. The leader.’

  One of the men - grotesquely blind, bald, wrapped in a blanket - allowed his head to rock back on its spindle of a neck, and bellowed laughter.

  Louise looked weary. ‘Lieserl, meet Garry Uvarov . . . You’ve spoken with him before.’

  Louise introduced the rest: Morrow, a spindly, reticent man who, with Uvarov, had supervised her downloading through the maser link from the Interface carcass (now abandoned) inside the Sun; and two tiny, young-looking women with strange names - Spinner-of-Rope, Trapper-of-Frogs - their bare flesh startlingly out of place in the formal surroundings of the saloon. Their faces were painted with vivid, intimidating splashes of scarlet, and patches of their scalps were shaven bare. The older-looking one of the pair wore glinting spectacles and carried a crude arrow-head on a thong tied around her neck.

  Lieserl was still new enough to all this to be intensely aware of her own appearance. Her hands cast soft shadows, and her brooch - of intertwined snakes and ladders - glittered in the candlelight. Looking out from the twin caverns of her eyes, she saw how the flickering of the light was reflected, with remarkable accuracy, on the blurred outlines of her own face; she knew she must look quite authentic to the others.

  She smiled at Louise Ye Armonk. ‘You’ve invested a great deal of processing power in me.’

  Louise looked a little defensive; she pulled back slightly from the table. ‘We can afford it. The Northern’s on idle. We’ve plenty of spare capacity.’

  ‘I wasn’t criticizing. I was thanking you. I can see you’re trying to make me welcome.’

  Mark, sitting beside Lieserl, leaned towards her. ‘Don’t mind Louise. She’s always been as prickly as a porcupine . . .’

  Spinner-of-Rope, the girl with the spectacles, said: ‘A what?’

  ‘ . . . and that’s why I divorced her.’

  ‘I divorced him,’ Louise Ye Armonk said. ‘And still couldn’t get rid of him.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Mark said to Lieserl, ‘maybe you should reserve your thanks until you’ve seen the food.’

  The meal was served by autonomic ‘bots. A ‘bot - presumably a Virtual - served Mark and Lieserl.

  The meal was what Louise Ye Armonk called ‘traditional British’ - just what somebody called ‘Brunel’ would once have enjoyed, on an occasion like this, she said. Lieserl stared at the plates of simulated animal flesh doubtfully. Still, she enjoyed the wine, and the sensation of fresh fruit; with discreet subvocal commands she allowed herself to become mildly drunk.

  The conversation flowed well enough, but seemed a little stilted, stale to Lieserl.

  During the meal, Trapper-of-Frogs leaned towards her. ‘Lieserl . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why are you so old?’

  Uvarov, the crippled surgeon, threw back his head and bellowed out his ghastly laughter once more. Trapper looked confused, even distressed. Watching Uvarov, Lieserl felt herself start to incubate a deep, powerful dislike.

  She smiled at Trapper, deliberately. ‘It’s all right, dear.’ She spread her hands, flexing the thin webbing between thumb and forefinger, immersing herself in the new reality of the sensation. ‘It’s just that this is how I remember myself. I chose this Virtual shell because it reflects how I still feel inside, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s how you were before you were loaded into the Sun?’ Spinner-of-Rope asked.

  ‘Yes . . . although by the time I reached my downloading I was quite a bit older than my aspect now. You see, they actually let me die of old age . . . I was the first person in a long time to do so.’

  She began to tell them of how that had felt - of the blights of age, of rheumy eyes and failing bladders and muscles like pieces of old cloth - but Spinner-of-Rope held her hand up. Spinner smiled, her eyes large behind her glasses. ‘We know, Lieserl. We’ll take you to the forest sometime; we’ll tell you all about it.’

  The meal finished with coffee and brandy, served by the discreet ‘bots. Lieserl didn’t much care for the brandy, but she loved the flavour of the coffee, Virtual or not.

  Mark nodded at her appreciation. ‘The coffee’s authenticity is no accident. I spent years getting its flavour right. After I got stranded in this Virtual form I spent longer on replicating the sensations of coffee than anything.’ His blue eyes were bright. ‘Anything, except maybe those of sex . . .’

  Disconcerted, Lieserl dropped her eyes.

  Mark’s provocative remark made her think, however. Sex. Perhaps that was the element missing from this gathering of antique semi-immortals. Some had been preserved better than others - and some, like Spinner-of-Rope, were even genuinely (almost) young - but there was no sexual tension here. These people simply weren’t aware of each other as human animals.

  She knew of Uvarov’s eugenics experiments on the forest Deck, inspired by a drive to improve the species directly. Maybe this gathering, with its mute testimony to the limitations of AS technology, was a partial justification of Uvarov’s project, she thought.

  Louise Ye Armonk gently rapped her empty brandy glass with a spoon; it chimed softly. ‘All right, people,’ she said. ‘I guess it’s time for us to get down to business.’

  Uvarov grinned towards Lieserl, showing a mouth bereft of teeth. ‘Welcome to the council of war,’ he hissed.

  ‘Well, perhaps this is a war,’ Louise said seriously. ‘But at the moment, we’re just bystanders caught in the crossfire. We have to look at our options, and decide where we’re going from here.

  ‘We’re in - a difficult situation.’ Louise Armonk looked enormously tired, worn down by the responsibilities she had taken on, and Lieserl felt herself warm a little to this rather intimidating engineer. ‘Our job was to deliver a wormhole Interface to this era, to the end of time, and then travel back through the Interface to our own era. Well, we know that didn’t work out. The Interface is wrecked, the wormhole collapsed - and we’ve become stranded here, in this era.

  ‘What I want to decide here is how we are going to preserve the future of our people. Everything else - everything - is subordinate to that. Agreed?’

  For a moment there was silence around the table; Lieserl noticed how few of them were prepared to meet Louise’s cold eyes.

  Morrow leaned forward into the light. Lieserl saw, with gentle amusement, how his bony wrists protruded from his sleeves. ‘I agree with Louise. We have one priority, and one only. And that’s to protect the people on this ship: the two thousand of them, on the Decks and in the forest. That’s what’s real.’

  Louise smiled. ‘Morrow, you have the floor. How, exactly?’

  ‘It’s obvious,’ Morrow said. ‘For better or worse, we’re now the custodians of a thousand-year-old culture - a culture which has evolved in the conditions which were imposed on it during the flight. The confined space, the limited resources . . . and the constant, one-gee gravity.

  ‘But now the flight is over. And we took away the gravity, virtually without notice. You know we managed to break up the Temple sieges, without much injury or loss of life. But, Louise, I can’t tell you that life in the Decks has gone bac
k to normal. How could it? Most people are barely retaining their sanity, let alone returning to work. No one’s producing any food. At the moment we’re working our way through stores, but that’s not going to last long.’

  Trapper pushed her face forward. ‘And in the forest, too, the biota are—’

  Louise held up her hands. ‘Enough. Morrow has made the point. Give me a suggestion, please.’

  Morrow and Trapper exchanged glances. ‘If there was an Earth to return to,’ Morrow said slowly, ‘I’d say return there.’

  ‘But there isn’t,’ Uvarov said acidly. His voice was a rasp, synthesized by some device in his throat. ‘Or had you missed the point?’

  Morrow was clearly irritated, but determined to make his case. ‘I know there’s no Earth.’

  ‘So?’ Louise asked.

  ‘So,’ Morrow said slowly, ‘I suggest we stay in the ship. We overhaul it, quickly, and retrieve more reaction mass. Then we send it on a one-gee flight.’

  ‘Where?’ Mark asked.

  ‘Anywhere. It really doesn’t matter. We could loop around the Sun in some kind of powered orbit, for all I care. The point is to restart the drive: to restore acceleration-induced gravity inside the ship. Let us - let the people in there - get back to normal again, and start living.’

  There was silence for a moment. Then Spinner-of-Rope said, ‘Actually, in this scenario, it surely would be better to stay in the Solar System, on a powered orbit. The new chunk of reaction mass would be used up, in time; wouldn’t it be better to stay close enough to the Sun to be assured of being able to refuel later? . . . Even if that’s not for another thousand years from now.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Louise rubbed her nose thoughtfully. ‘But I’m not sure it’s going to be viable to stay in the ship. Not in the long term.’ She sighed. ‘The dear old Northern did her job superbly well - she exceeded all her design expectations. And maybe she could last another thousand years.

  ‘But, in the end, she’s going to fail. It may not be for ten thousand years, but failure will come. And then what?’ She frowned. ‘Then, we might not be around to oversee any transition to another environment.’