Timelike Infinity

by Stephen Baxter

  She grabbed his shoulders, twisted him around so he was forced to face her. "Look above your head, damn it! The Spline is using starbreakers. The whole damn roof is going to implode on you, Xeelee material or not. There's not going to be time to finish your precious Project. You're going to fail, Jaar, unless you do something about it."

  Wearily he indicated the frantic motion around them. "We set up a crash schedule for the implementation of the Project, but we're falling behind already. And we've lost lives." He looked up; he seemed to flinch from the failing dome.

  "Why don't you use the hyperdrive?"

  "The hyperdrive has already gone," Jaar said. "Its components were stored in the structure of the dome; we lost operability soon after the start of the assault—"

  "Jesus." Berg ran stiff fingers through her hair. So there was no way to run; they could only fight. And she wouldn't be fighting merely for the good of humanity, but for her own life... "All right, Jaar; show me how these damn singularity cannons work."

  * * *

  Jasoft Parz felt rather proud of himself.

  He wasn't a scientist, or an engineer, by any stretch of the imagination. But, he was finding, he wasn't completely without resource.

  In his life-support box he'd found a spare skinsuit. Using a sharp edge from the box he'd sliced this apart, assembled it into a little teepeelike tent; the substance of the skinsuit, trying to restore its breached integrity, had sealed itself tight along the new seams he'd created.

  He fixed the little tent over a Spline nerve-trunk. He used the facemask of the reassembled skinsuit to pump the tent full of breathable air, creating a little bubble of atmosphere in entoptic fluid.

  Now he cast through the contents of the life-support box. Maybe he'd have to take the mechanism apart, to start his fire...

  * * *

  The Spline warship hung over the lifedome of the Hermit Crab, rolling with abrupt, jerky, mechanical motions; weapons and other constructs glinted from deep pocks in the elephant-gray hide.

  Michael Poole stared at it with something approaching fascination: quite apart from its dominating physical presence there was a vague obscenity about its mixture of gross, swollen life and mechanical deadliness. Michael was reminded of myths of the past, of the undead.

  No wonder Earth had been — would be — held in thrall by these things.

  Michael glanced at Shira. The Friend, exhausted, disheveled, crushed by the GUT drive's continuing two-gravity push, lay flat in the couch next to his. Her eyes were open — staring up — but unseeing. A clean blue glow flickered at the edge of his vision, somewhere close to the perimeter of the lifedome.

  Harry's disembodied head drifted like a child's balloon. "What was that?"

  "Verniers. Attitude jets."

  "I know what verniers are," Harry grumbled. The head swiveled theatrically to peer up at the Spline. The huge sentient warship was now drifting away from the Crab's zenith. "You're turning the ship?"

  Michael leaned back in his couch and folded his hands together. "I preset the program," he said. "The ship's turning. Right around, through one hundred and eighty degrees."

  "But the GUT drive is still firing." The head glanced up at the Spline again, closed one eye as if judging distances. "We must be slowing. Michael, are you hoping to rendezvous with that thing up there?"

  "No." Michael smiled. "No, a rendezvous isn't in the plan."

  "Then what is, for Christ's sake?"

  "Look, Harry, you know as well as I do that this damn old tub isn't a warship. Apart from a couple of Berry-phase archaeological image retrieval scanning lasers, I've nothing apart from the ship itself that I can use as a weapon." He shrugged, lying there. "Maybe if I'd brought back a few more samples from the Oort Cloud, I could throw rocks—"

  "What do you mean," Harry asked ominously, " 'apart from the ship itself'?"

  "After all this two-gee thrust we've a huge velocity relative to the Spline. When we've turned around there'll be only a couple of minutes before we close with the Spline; even with the GUT drive firing we'll barely shed any of that...

  "Do you get it, Harry? We're going to meet the Spline ass-first, with our GUT drive blazing—"

  With slow, hesitant movements, Shira raised her hands and covered her face with long fingers.

  "My God," Harry breathed, and his Virtual head ballooned into a great six-foot-tall parody. "We're going to ram a Spline warship. Oh, good plan, Michael."

  "You've got a better suggestion?"

  An image flickered into existence on the darkened dome above them: the Spline warship, as seen by the Crab's backward-pointing cameras. The gunmetal-gray light of the Spline's hull glittered in Harry's huge, pixel-frosted eyes. "Michael, as soon as that Spline lines itself up and touches us with its damn starbreaker beam, this ship will be a shower of molten slag."

  "Then well have died fighting. I say again: Have you got a better suggestion?"

  "Yes," said Harry. "Your first idea. Let's run back out to the cometary halo and find some rocks to throw."

  Beyond Harry's huge, translucent head the Spline's motion seemed to have changed. Michael squinted, trying to make out patterns. Was the rolling of the warship becoming more jerky, more random?

  Come to think of it, he'd expected to be dead by now.

  Was there something wrong with the Spline?

  * * *

  A quarter of the dome had caved in. Cannon barrels collapsed gracefully. Xeelee construction material folded back like burning plastic, and through the breaches Miriam could see the harsh glare of the stars, the flicker of cherry-red starbreaker light.

  Molten construction material rained over the singularity plane. Friends scurried like insects as shards of material — red-hot and razor-sharp — sleeted down on them. A wind blasted from the devastated area and through the rest of the chamber; Miriam could smell smoke, burning meat.

  "Jesus," Miriam breathed. She knew she was lucky; the singularity-cannon console she'd been working at with Jaar was well away from the collapsing area. Jaar cried out inarticulately and pushed away from the console. Berg grabbed his arm. "No!" She pulled him around. "Don't be stupid, Jaar. There's not a damn thing you can do to help them; the best place for you is here."

  Jaar twisted his head away from her, toward the ruined areas of the earth-craft.

  Now a flare of cherry-red light dazzled her. The Spline had found a way through the failed dome and had hit the chamber itself with its starbreaker beam. Raising her hand to shield her eyes from the glow of the dome, she saw that the crystal surface over one section of the singularity plane had become muddied, fractured; cracks were racing across it as if it were melting ice. The area had been scoured of human life. And the singularities themselves, white-hot fireflies embedded in their web of blue light, were stirring. Sliding.

  All around the artificial cavern the Friends seemed to have lost their discipline. They wandered away from their consoles, clung to each other in distracted knots; or they ran, hopelessly, into the devastated area. The singularity-cannon muzzles were silent now; sparks no longer sailed upward to space.

  The Friends were finished, Berg realized.

  Berg released Jaar and turned back to the console. She tried to ignore it all — the stench of meat, the wind in her face, the awesome creak of failing Xeelee construction material — and thought through the layout of this cannon control. It was all based on a straightforward touchscreen, and the logic was obvious. Tapping lightly at colored squares she ran through the direction-finder graphics.

  From the corner of her eye she saw schematic diagrams of the earth-ship — huge swathes of the dome base glaring red — and graphs, lists of figures, data on more subtle damages.

  Berg said, "How bad is it? Are we losing the air?"

  Jaar watched her, distracted, pain of varying depths chasing across his face like multilayered ocean currents. "No," he said, his voice a hoarse shout above the chaotic din. "The breaches in the dome are above the bulk of the atmosphere; the sin
gularity plane's gravity well will keep most of the air in a thick layer close to the surface... For the next few minutes anyway. But the air is going to seep out of that breach. It will absorb all this heat, boil out of the ruined shell... and the dome itself may fail further."

  "All right. Tell me about the singularity plane."

  He looked vaguely at the console and lifted a desultory hand, tapped almost casually at the touchscreen. "We've lost control of about thirty percent of the singularities. The integrity of the restraining electromagnetic net is gone."

  Berg frowned, tried to work it out. "What does that do to us?"

  "We didn't run any simulations of this scenario." He turned to face her, the sweat on his shaved scalp glistening in the starbreaker light. "This is a catastrophic failure; we have no options from this point. The loose singularities will attract each other, swarm together. The n-body computations would be interesting... The singularity swarms will eventually implode, of course.

  "It's over." His shoulders shook convulsively in their thin covering of begrimed, pink material.

  She stared at him. She had the feeling that, just at this moment, Jaar — broken open as he was — would be prepared to tell her anything she wanted to know about this damn Project: that all the questions that had plagued her in the months since she'd fallen ass-first into the laps of these Friends of Wigner would at last be settled... "Jesus, I wish I had time for this." She glared at the console before her, lifted her hands to the touchscreen — but the configuration was different. Blocks of light slid about as she watched; the damn thing was changing before her eyes. "Jaar, what's happening?"

  He glanced down briefly, barely interested. "Compensation for the lost singularities," he said. "The mass distribution will continue to change until the disrupted singularities settle down to some form of stable configuration."

  "All right." She stared at the shifting color blocks; ignoring the heat of the air, the buffeting wind, she strove to take in the whole board as a kind of gestalt. Slowly she started to see how this new pattern matched the matrix she'd memorized earlier, and she raised her hands hesitantly to the screen —

  Then the shifting, the seemingly random reconfiguring, started again.

  She dropped her hands. "Damn it," she said. "Serves me right for thinking this was going to be easy." She grabbed Jaar's arm; he looked down at her with an expressionless face. "Listen, Jaar, you're going to have to come back out of that shell of yours and help me with this. I can't manage it myself."

  "Help you with what?"

  "With firing a singularity..."

  He shook his head; it was hard to be sure, but it seemed to Berg that he was almost smiling at her, patient at her ignorance. "But there's no point. I've already explained that without the thirty percent we've lost, we can't complete the Project—"

  "Damn you," she shouted over the rising wind, "I'm not planning to fire these things into Jupiter! Listen to me. I want you to help me fight back against the Spline..."

  He shook his head, clearly confused and frightened, trying to pull away from her.

  "What is it with you people? I know your Project was more important than your own damn life, but the thing has failed now! Why won't you help me keep you alive?"

  He stared at her, as if she were speaking a language he no longer understood.

  There was a groan, like the cry of a wounded god. She glanced up, cringing; acres of dome were glowing white-hot now, vast sections peeling back to reveal the stars. Xeelee material dangled like scraps of burnt skin.

  She might only have seconds left, she realized, before the control systems failed completely — or all the power failed, and she found herself playing billiards with a thousand uncontrolled, city-block-sized black holes — or the damn roof fell in...

  And she was going to have to waste those seconds holding this guy's hand.

  "Jaar," she shouted, "your Project is finished. The only way it could succeed, in the future, is for you to start again. To construct new singularities, build a new earth-ship. But the options are limited. We can't run, because the hyperdrive is slag, along with the Xeelee dome. So all we can do is fight. Jaar, you have to help me fight back. We have to destroy the Spline, before it destroys us."

  Still he stared at her emptily, his mouth drooping open.

  In frustration she drove her fist into his arm. "It's for the Project, Jaar. The Project. You've got to live, to find a way to start it all again. You see that, don't you? Jaar?"

  More of the dome imploded into spinning fragments; starbreaker light flickered.

  * * *

  Jasoft Parz was shaken around his eyeball chamber like a pea in a cup. Bits of his broken-open life-support kit bounced around at the end of his umbilical like some ludicrous metal placenta. But the walls of the chamber were fleshy, yielding; and he was cushioned further by entoptic fluid.

  It was almost fun.

  The life-box was a depressing sight. He'd stripped out so many components in his search for a way to ignite his little bonfire — not to mention bleeding half his air supply away to feed the flames — that he couldn't believe it could sustain him for much longer than a few more minutes.

  He doubted it made much difference, now, whatever the outcome of this brief, intense battle; he could see no way he personally was going to be allowed to live through this.

  It didn't seem to matter. He felt as calm as he had for years.

  His improvised oxygen tent was still holding up, despite the buffeting and turbulence of the entoptic fluid. Sparking electrical fire sizzled against the raw nerve of the Spline; he must be flooding the nervous system of the disoriented Spline with agony. Through the Spline's clouding lens he saw sheets of cherry-red light, lines of fire that seemed to crackle across space. The starbreaker beams were firing at the incoming GUT ship, then. But he could see how wild the firing was, how random.

  For the first time he allowed himself to suppose that this might actually work.

  "Jasoft Parz." The Qax's synthesized translated voice was, Parz noted with amusement, still as level and empty of meaning as a software-generated travel announcement... but it masked a scream of rage. "You have betrayed me."

  Jasoft laughed. "Sorry about that. But what did you expect? Who would have thought that a Spline warship would be so easy to disable... provided you're in the right place, at the right time. In any event, you're wrong. The truth is that you have betrayed yourself."

  "How?"

  "By your damned, insufferable complacency," Parz said. "You were so convinced of a simple victory here. Damn it, Qax, I would have emerged from that portal with all guns blazing — hit these men from the past before they understood what was happening! But not you — even despite the fact that you knew the Wigner Friends could have prepared resistance to you... And, even worse, you carried me — a human, one of the enemy — in your warship's most vulnerable place; and for no other reason than to heighten the exquisiteness of your triumph. Complacency, Qax!"

  "The Spline is not yet rogue," the Qax said. "Its pain-suppression routines are not designed to deal with the damage you have inflicted. But within seconds heuristic routines will eliminate the disruption. And, Jasoft Parz, you may anticipate the arrival of antibody drones, to deal with the cause of the damage—"

  "I'm weak with terror," Parz said dryly. Beyond the clouding lens window of his bathyspherelike cell, comet ice gleamed, rushing at him; GUT fire blazed like sunlight. "But I don't think we've got even seconds left, Qax."

  The Spline, enraged by pain, closed its huge eyelid.

  * * *

  A cannon tube, suspended from the damaged dome, extended downward; at last its mouth touched the crystalline flooring beneath Berg's feet and merged with it, seamlessly. Two firefly singularities moved imperceptibly closer to the cannon barrel, as if eager to be launched into space. Berg felt the gravity field within which she was embedded alter, subtly; it was like an earth tremor, and it gave her a sensation of falling in the pit of her stomach.

&
nbsp; She turned to Jaar. "Listen to me," she said rapidly. "Here's what we're going to do. I want you to reconfigure this damn thing to launch a singularity pair, so that the peak of the trajectory is inside the Spline. But that's not all. I want the singularities to merge, just at the second in which they are lodged at the heart of the Spline. Do you understand?"

  Jaar looked at her, at first without apparent understanding. Then he got it. His eyes narrowed.

  "How quickly can you do it?" she asked.

  "Watch me."

  * * *

  The collision, when it came, was almost balletic.

  GUT-drive fire blistered great swathes of the Spline's writhing flesh; Michael found himself shrinking back from the bloody, carnal acres above his head. But still the Spline seemed to find it impossible to respond; those bizarre cherry-red beams, lightspeed rents in spacetime, lanced out — but they fired at random, all around them, consistently missing the Crab.

  "There's something wrong," Harry breathed. "It should have sliced us open by now. Why hasn't it?"

  And now the Crab entered the Spline itself, its burning GUT drive breaching the elephant-flesh hull. Creation light boiled away blood, flesh, in a vast, obscene, soundless explosion; the Spline's huge body seemed to writhe back. At last the comet-ice tail of the Crab disappeared, still glowing, into the carcass of the Spline.

  There was a cloud of motion around the huge wound; Michael squinted to see.

  "Little robots," Harry said, amazed.

  "Antibody drones," said Shira lifelessly; she stared at the scene with dull fascination.

  Harry said, "The robots are damaging our hull. We're under attack. For the first time."

  "Maybe," said Poole. "But I don't think it really matters now."

  The star-core glow of the GUT drive was extinguished at last, killed by the toiling antibody drones. But still the mass of comet ice, the long, crumpling body of the Crab, slid steadily into Spline flesh.

  It was almost sexual, Michael thought.