Flux xs-3

by Stephen Baxter

  “It’s like a star itself. But…”

  “But it doesn’t look right.” Dura searched for the right word. “It seems — unhealthy.”

  “Yes.” He pointed. “It looks as if stuff is being drawn out of the big star and put into the ring.” He glanced speculatively at Dura. “Perhaps, somehow, the Star is drawing flesh from the big star to create the ring. Perhaps the planet we’re on is constructed of ring-stuff.”

  She shuddered. “You make the Star sound like a living thing. Like an eye-leech.”

  “A star-leech. Well, perhaps that’s as good an explanation as we’ll ever get…” He grinned at her, his face spectral in the ring’s glow. “Come on. I want to try the arrow’s last setting.”

  “Oh, Hork… Do you have any capacity for awe?”

  “No.” His grin broadened through his beard. “I think it’s a survival characteristic. Mental toughness, I call it.” He led her back around the inner portal-chamber and eyed her roguishly. “So we’ve seen the stars. Big deal. What’s left?”

  “Twist the arrow and find out.”

  He did so.

  The universe — of stars and starlight — imploded.

  Dura screamed.

  26

  The stars — all except the Star — had disappeared, dragging all the light from the sky. The Star, with its ring and its huge, bleeding companion, hung in an emptied sky…

  No, she realized, that wasn’t quite true. There was a bow around the sky — a multicolored ribbon, thin and perfect, which hooped around the Ur-humans’ habitat — and, she saw, passed behind the Star itself.

  It was a ribbon which encircled the universe, and it contained all the starlight.

  Hork loomed before her, the starbow adding highlights to the gray illumination of his face. “Well?” he demanded irritably. “What now?”

  She rubbed her forehead. “Each setting of that device has shown us more of our surroundings — more of the universe. It’s as if successive layers, veils, have been removed from our eyes.”

  “Right.” He lifted his eyes to the starbow. “So this must be the truth? The last setting, which strips away all the veils?” He shook his head. “But what does it mean?”

  “The sky we saw before — of stars, scattered around the sky — was strange to us… even awesome. But it looked natural. The stars were just like our Star, only much further away.”

  “Yes, Whereas this seems distorted. And how come we can still see our Star? Why isn’t its light smeared out into this absurd hoop, too?”

  Smeared starlight… Yes. I like that. Good; that’s very perceptive…

  Dura whirled in the Air, trying to suppress a scream. The voice, dry and soft, emanating from the emptiness of the huge room behind her had been utterly terrifying.

  “Karen Macrae,” Hork said, his voice thick with hostility.

  A sketch of shoulders and head wrought in pale, colored cubes of light hung in the Air a mansheight from them. The definition was poorer than within the underMantle — the colors washed out, the jostling light-cubes bigger. Karen Macrae opened her eyes, and again Dura was repulsed by the fleshy balls nestling within the cups.

  Hork had been right; somehow Karen Macrae had ridden with them in the lump of Corestuff attached to the side of the “Pig,” all the way from the depths of the Star to this remote, austere place.

  The starlight is smeared; yes. And it’s crucial that you understand why it’s smeared, what’s happening to you. The walls of this place aren’t windows; they have processing capacity — they’re virtually semi-sentient, actually — capable of deconvolving the Doppler distortions of…

  Hork growled and Waved forward. “Talk straight, damn you.”

  The blurred head rotated slowly. Doppler distortion. Blue shift. You — we — are traveling enormously quickly through space. Almost as fast as light itself. Do you see? And so…

  “And so we outrun starlight,” Hork said. “…I think I understand. But why is it we still see the Star itself, and its system of ring and giant companion?”

  The Colonist seemed to be retreating into her own half-formed head; the fleshy things in her eyecups slid around like independent animals.

  Dura struggled to answer Hork. “Because the Star is traveling with us. And that’s why we can still see its light.” She looked at him doubtfully. “Does that make sense?”

  Hork growled. “This Colonist and her riddle-talk… All right. Let’s assume you’re right. After all, we haven’t any better explanation. Let’s assume we, and the Star, are traveling through space as fast as light. Why? Where are we coming from? And where are we going?”

  There was no answer from Karen Macrae. Light-cubes crawled over her face like leeches.

  Hork and Dura stared at each other, as if seeking the answers in each other’s exasperated faces.

  They looked around once more, trying to make sense of the distorted sky. Dura felt small, fragile, helpless in this ensemble of hurtling worlds. There was a symmetry to the smeared light around them, and after some argument they decided that their departure point and destination must lie at the poles of an imaginary globe around them, the globe whose equator was marked by the starbow.

  Hork reached for the arrow device. “All right. Then let’s see if we can see what lies there…” He set the pointer at its penultimate setting.

  The stars fled from the crumbling starbow and back to their scattered homes around the sky.

  Hork Waved toward one of the imagined poles, peering through the blocky Ur-human cloud devices and into space. To Dura, who remained close to Karen Macrae, he looked like a toy, a speck swimming against the Ur-humans’ vague immensities.

  “Nothing here,” he called at last, sounding disappointed. “Just an anonymous patch of stars.”

  “Then it must be at the other end of the chamber. The other pole. Come on.”

  She waited for him to return. Then, hand in hand, they Waved in the Star’s direction of flight.

  …And there was something at the pole of the sky: something set against the backdrop of stars, something huge — if diminished by distance — and precisely defined.

  Karen Macrae was saying something. The rustling words sighed across the huge silences of the chamber.

  Dura and Hork hurried back and pressed their faces close to the Colonist’s cloudy lips. “What is it?” Dura demanded, almost despairing. “Won’t you try again? What are you saying to us?”

  …The Ring. Can you see it? I’ve so little processing power here… hard to… the Ring…

  Dura turned away and looked at the artifact; and a fear borne of childhood tales, of old, distorted legends, welled up in her.

  * * *

  The car sailed away.

  Adda hung on to the ward’s improvised doorframe and sucked Air into his lungs. He glanced around the sky. The panorama, now somber and deep yellow, grew less and less like the secure, orderly Mantlescape he’d grown old with: the vortex lines were discontinuous shreds of spin loops struggling to reform, and the starbreaker beams continued to cut down through the Air and into the Core, unnaturally vertical.

  Tired as he was, something probed at the edge of his awareness. It seemed darker than before. Why should that be? He pushed himself out of the ward and Waved a few weary mansheights into the sky. Behind him, the Skin was a limitless wooden wall which cut away half of the sky. It was bounded about by the huge anchor-bands and punctuated by a hundred crude gashes; a slowing trickle of cars and people still dribbled from the opened-up walls and diffused into the wastes of the Air. The Skin was dark, intimidating…

  Too dark. That was it.

  Adda Waved a little further and twisted his head around, surveying the Corestuff anchor-bands. The huge hoops were like a gray cage over the City’s wooden face — but they were dull, lifeless, where a little earlier they had crackled with blue electron gas.

  The glow of the gas had gone.

  So the dynamos, the huge, wood-burning lungs of the City, had failed at last. Per
haps they had been abandoned by their attendants; or maybe some essential part of the City’s infrastructure had failed under the strain of holding the City against the fluctuating Magfield.

  It scarcely mattered.

  There was a sharp explosion. A hail of splinters fanned out from the base of the City, at the junction of the Spine and the main inhabited section. The splinters sailed away through the showers of sewage material still falling from the base of Parz.

  There might be no more than heartbeats left.

  Adda Waved strongly back to the improvised Hospital port and dived into the melee of swaddled patients, harassed staff and volunteers. He found Farr helping Deni Maxx to fix a patient’s bandages. He grabbed Farr’s and Deni’s arms roughly; he hauled them away from the unconscious patient and toward the exit.

  “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Deni stared at him, the deep yellow Air-light scouring shadow-lines in her face. “What is it? I don’t understand.”

  “The anchor-bands have lost power,” Adda hissed. “They can’t sustain the City, here above the Pole. The City’s going to drift — come under intense stress… We have to get away from here. The City will never withstand it…”

  Farr glanced back to the patients and helpers. “But we’re not finished.”

  “Farr,” Adda said with all the persuasiveness he could muster, “it’s over. You’ve done a marvelous job, but there’s nothing more you can do. Once the effects of the band failure hit we won’t be able to complete the evacuation anyway.”

  Deni Maxx stared into his face, her mouth tight. “I’m not leaving.”

  Adda felt his scarred old heart break once more.

  “But you’ll die,” he said, hearing a plea in his voice. “These wretched people can never survive anyway. There’s no point…”

  She pulled her arm from his grasp. She looked back into the ward, as if all this had been a mere distraction from her work.

  When he placed his hand on the crude doorframe he felt a deep, shuddering vibration, coming from the very bones of the City, and shivers of turbulence crept across the bare skin of his arms and neck.

  Maybe it was already too late. He pulled himself through the improvised doorway and into the open Air.

  He looked back into the ward. Deni Maxx was making her way back into the chaos of patients and helpers, her face set. Already she’d dismissed his warning. Forgotten it, probably. But Farr still lingered close to the doorway; he looked back into the ward, apparently torn.

  Well, Deni was lost; but not Farr. Not yet.

  Adda grabbed Farr by the hair and, with all his remaining strength, hauled the boy backward out of the Hospital and hurled him into the Air. Farr came to rest in the empty Air, struggling; he looked like some stranded insect, dwarfed by the immense, wounded face of the City. He glared at Adda. “You had no right to do that.”

  “I know. I know. You’ll just have to hate me, Farr. Now Wave, damn you; Wave as hard as you’ve ever Waved in your life!”

  There was a glow from the North, a deep, ominous red glow from all around the sky. It was a light Adda had never seen before. It soaked the Mantle in a darkness in which the starbreakers of the Xeelee glowed like opened-up logs.

  Another shout of tearing wood and failing Corestuff was wrenched from the guts of the City. The Skin rippled; waves perhaps a micron high spread over its surface, and the wood broke open in tiny explosions.

  Adda dropped his head and kicked at the seething Air, Waving away from Parz as hard as he could.

  * * *

  The Ring was reduced by distance to a sparkling jewel, lovely and fragile.

  “I believed most of it,” Dura said slowly, “most of the stories my father told me… But I don’t think I ever quite believed in the Ring itself.”

  Bolder’s Ring, the greatest engineering construct in the universe. So massive — rotating so rapidly — that it had ripped a hole in space itself.

  “The Ring is a doorway in the universe, a way for the Xeelee to escape their unknown foe,” she told Hork.

  His fists clenched; dwarfed by the huge sky around him, his belligerence looked absurd. “I know your legends. But what foe?” He crowded close to Karen Macrae and drove his fist into the cloud of jostling cubes which comprised her face. His hand passed through, apparently unaffected. “What foe, damn you?”

  Slowly Karen Macrae began to talk, the globes in her eyecups glinting. She spoke hesitantly, in fragments.

  * * *

  The Star was spawned in a galaxy, a disc of a hundred billion stars. It was actually ancient, the cooling remnant of an immense explosion which had driven away much of a massive star’s bulk and devastated the gray companion which still accompanied it. As time wore on the Star had drawn material from the companion, knitted gas into planets.

  Then the Ur-humans came.

  They downloaded the Colonists — images of themselves — into the Core; and the Colonists built the first Star-humans.

  For five centuries the Colonists and the Star-humans worked together. Huge engines — discontinuity drives, Karen called them — were built at the North Pole of the Star. Teams of Star-humans wielded mighty devices under the instruction of the Colonists.

  Hork’s eyes narrowed. “Ah,” he breathed. “So they do need us, these Colonists. We are the hands, the strong arms which built the world…”

  The discontinuity drive engines hurled the Star from its birthplace. It soared out of its galaxy and sailed free across space.

  The Ring was close to the Star’s native galaxy — so close that light would take no more than ten thousand years to cross the void to the Ring, Karen Macrae said; so close that the immense mass of the Ring was already distorting the galaxy’s structure, pulling it apart. The Star — with its companion, its planets and gas ring, and its precious freight of life — fell across space toward the Ring, glowing in the darkness like a wood-burning torch.

  A century passed inside the Star. Thousands of years fluttered by in the universe outside the Crust. (Dura could make nothing of this.)

  The Ring neared.

  The Colonists grew afraid. The Star-humans grew afraid.

  “Why?” Dura demanded. “Why should they fear the Ring? What will happen when we reach it?”

  The Colonists retreated into the Core. They had constructed a wonderful virtual world for themselves in there — unreal Earths… And they believed they would be safe there, that they could ride out any disaster which might befall the Star.

  The Star-humans were left bereft in the Mantle like abandoned children. They had their wormholes and other gadgets, but without the guidance of the parent-Colonists the devices were like so many gaudy toys.

  Resentment grew, displacing fear. The Star-humans determined that they would follow the Colonists into their Core haven if they could — or if not, they would make the complacent Colonists as fearful as themselves.

  Wormhole Interfaces were ripped from their anchor-sites in the Mantle and hurled downward into the Core. Armies, grim-faced, lanced through the wormholes in improvised ships. The technologies which had once built the discontinuity drives were pirated to craft immense weapons.

  “The Core Wars,” Hork said slowly. “Then they really happened.”

  Hork’s anger was intense; it was as if, Dura thought, the huge injustice of abandonment had occurred only yesterday, not generations before.

  The Colonists, insubstantial Core-ghosts as they were, had nevertheless retained immense material power. The War was brief.

  Power failed; weapons exploded, or dissolved, killing their operators. The Interfaces were dragged into the Core, or fell into uselessness, their linking wormhole tunnels collapsed. Once the Mantle had sustained a single community of Star-humans, united by the wormhole network. In a few heartbeats that Star-wide culture collapsed.

  Humans, naked, defenseless, fell into the Air.

  A huge silence fell over the Star.

  With the War ended, the Colonists retreated into the
Core and prepared for eternal life.

  * * *

  Hork pounded his fist into his palm. “The bastards. The cowardly bastards. They abandoned us, to generations of suffering. Illness, disease, Glitches. But we showed them. We built Parz City, didn’t we? We survived. And now, five centuries after dumping us, they need us again…”

  Dura couldn’t drag her eyes away from the Ring. Lights flickered over the huge construct, dancing silently. “What’s happening to the Ring? I don’t understand.”

  Hork snorted. “Isn’t it obvious? The Ring is under attack. It’s a war, Dura; someone is attacking the Xeelee.”

  He pointed at the incongruously delicate patterns of light. “And it would be too much of a coincidence for us to arrive here, aboard this Star, just as the first battle is being waged. Dura, this war — the assaults on the Ring — must have been enduring for a long time.” He rubbed his chin. “Generations, perhaps; centuries of war…”

  She felt a pulse pound in her throat. “Humans? Are they Ur-human ships?” She stared at the tableau, willing herself to see more clearly, seeking the huge ships of those spectral giants.

  The battle unfolded, slowly, even as she watched. Some of the sparkling ships disappeared, evidently destroyed by Xeelee defenders. Others plummeted through the Ring, she saw; and if the old stories were correct those ships were now lost in different universes. She wondered if the crews of those ships would survive… and if they did, what strange tales they would have to tell.

  “Oh, yes,” Hork said grimly. “Yes, the assailants are humans. Ur-humans, anyway.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because the Star is heading straight for the Ring. Don’t you see it yet, Dura? The Star has been aimed at the Ring. We’re going to collide with it…”

  * * *

  Dura stared at the remote, twinkling battlefire. Was Hork right? “I don’t know how big the Ring is. Perhaps it’s bigger than the Star; perhaps it will survive. But surely the Star is going to be devastated.”