Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  Poole let out that breath cautiously, not wishing to give away his relief.

  But his template noticed even so. ‘You aren’t supposed to feel like this, you know. Like I said, the other copies never gave any trouble.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Nicola snapped at him. ‘You weren’t inside their heads, looking out. Did you ever ask? Maybe they all felt like this copy.’

  ‘Don’t call me a copy.’

  Template Poole stared at him. ‘So what do you want to be called?’

  Poole hesitated.

  Nicola grinned. ‘Jophiel. I hereby dub you Jophiel.’

  The template frowned. ‘What in Lethe is that?’

  ‘An angel’s name. You know I like my mythology. And the Pooles have got a habit of naming their sons after angels – haven’t they, Michael? Such as Gabriel, who set up the Antarctic freeze-out in the twenty-seventh century . . . Consider it my gift to you, I, your Keeper of the Amulet.’ She looked at the two of them, as they faced each other uncertainly. ‘Well, this has been fun. Aren’t we late for the crew briefing?’

  Poole – Jophiel – nodded. ‘I guess I can just fly down. Wings are optional for us Virtual angels.’

  ‘Don’t screw around,’ Michael Poole snarled. ‘Stick to the consistency protocols. And you keep the colour-code coveralls, whatever you call yourself.’

  Nicola snapped off a mocking, elaborate Monopole-Bandit salute. ‘Yes, sir!’

  Poole stormed off.

  Jophiel followed, with Nicola. He felt . . . disoriented. Bewildered. He was, after all, only minutes old. And he thought back to his encounter with that other Poole, the mysterious older Poole in the worn coveralls . . . The nature of his own miraculous birth, his brush with imminent death, weren’t even the strangest things he had experienced in those minutes.

  Reality leaks.

  Nicola was watching him. ‘You look . . . odd. Are you still you? Do you remember it all?’

  ‘I think so . . . Remember what, exactly?’

  ‘Where it all began. The Poole compound in Antarctica. The family gathering. And the amulet . . . You went to the window. About as far as you could get from the family . . .’

  Beyond the window he could see a handful of bright, drifting stars: the latest ships of the Scattering, still visible across distances comparable to the width of the inner Solar System.

  He always carried the amulet, these days, the green tetrahedron delivered from another universe by a dead alien. He kept it in a fold of soft cloth, tucked into his belt. On impulse, he took it out now, and unfolded the cloth, and looked at the amulet sitting there, green on black.

  He grasped the amulet in his bare fist. Its vertices were sharp, digging into his flesh. Drawing blood.

  Nicola joined him. ‘Careful with that.’

  ‘Got it back from my mother. Taking it with me.’

  ‘She mentioned some kind of image, retrieved from the interior.’

  ‘We only just got it out. Very advanced data compression. Took years to extract it.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  He shrugged. ‘I didn’t want to have to discuss it in front of them. The family. Let Muriel tell them.’

  ‘Show me.’

  He glanced at her. Then waved a hand in the air.

  A Virtual image coalesced. A jewel-like object, like a black ball, wrapped in an asymmetrical gold blanket, lay on a carpet of stars. And, some distance away, a fine blue band surrounded it.

  Poole said, ‘Tell me what you see.’

  ‘That looks like gravitational lensing. The gold, the way it’s distorted. Light paths distorted by an extreme gravity field . . . A black hole. Like the one at the centre of the Galaxy?’

  ‘Tell me what you see.’

  ‘It looks like a black hole with a ring around it. What is it?’

  ‘A black hole with a ring around it.’

  She stared, and grinned. ‘And that’s where we’re going?’

  He glared out once more at Sagittarius. Overlaid on the constellation’s stars he saw a reflection of his own face, dimly outlined. The dark complexion, dark hair: the face of a Poole. And that tetrahedral scar on his forehead was livid.

  He whispered, ‘Are you out there, somewhere? Can you hear me?

  ‘My name is Michael Poole.

  ‘Xeelee, I am coming to get you.’

  Nicola grinned. ‘You do remember.’

  ‘Lethe, yes. A ring, a wheel around a supermassive black hole. And presumably the Xeelee is on its way to the Galaxy Core to build the thing.’ He eyed her. ‘That’s not all, by the way. We kept examining the amulet – Michael Poole did. And he found glimpses of other stuff.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as another structure, a monster even compared to the Galaxy-centre wheel, off in extragalactic space. We have no idea what that’s for, either.’

  She looked at him carefully. ‘You never told me about that before.’

  ‘Michael didn’t.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He grinned. ‘But, evidently, I’m not Michael, am I?’ He looked over; Michael had already left the suite. ‘Come on, we’re going to be late . . .’

  3

  ‘You know why we’re here,’ Max Ward said.

  He stalked the floor of the amphitheatre, walking a few paces to and fro, to and fro. Dominating. Ward was a squat, muscular man, head shaved, AS-preserved at about thirty; in reality he was around the same age as Poole.

  Every eye was on him.

  The amphitheatre, a small public space, was just a terraced pit in the middle of the floor of the lifedome, on the lowest habitable level, above hidden layers of life-support infrastructure. Most of the Cauchy’s fifty crew were here in person – even, presumably, some of the one-third theoretically on sleep rota – standing or sitting in an informal sprawl. Jophiel saw there were a few Virtual presences, like himself, decked out in electric blue amid the red uniforms. Some were even projected from the other ships of the flotilla.

  For now, Jophiel observed, Michael stood back from the centre as Ward took the stage,

  Ward grinned, wolfish. ‘Well, I’m guessing you know why you’re here, what with your being the crew of a starship and all.’

  He started to get the answers he was looking for. ‘Better this than another of your drills, Max.’ ‘Don’t ask me, I’m still asleep . . .’

  ‘Lethe, you guys are hilarious. No more quizzes. I’ll show you where we are, and why we’re here.’

  Ward waved his arm, and a Virtual image of the Galaxy sparkled into existence above his head, the dazzling Core wrapped around by spiralling lanes of stars and dust. Jophiel saw this from one side, and could see the startling fineness of that disc – hundreds of billions of stars gathered into a plane as thin as paper, relative to the scale of the Galaxy as a whole.

  ‘Asher Fennell kindly prepared this stuff for me. The latest imagery. Here’s where we started from.’ The location of Sol blinked, towards the periphery of the disc, an electric-blue firefly. ‘Here’s where we’re going.’ A spark at the very heart of the Galaxy, marking the position of the supermassive black hole there, lurking in its own deep gravitational pit. ‘Twenty-five thousand light years from the Sun. You want the good news? This is the two hundred and nineteenth day of the seventh year of our mission, and we’ll get to the Core before the twenty-year mark . . .’

  By, Jophiel knew, steadily accelerating at one gravity to a halfway turnaround point, and then steadily decelerating, allowing the relativistic distortion to unwind. The outside universe would see the fleet, mostly cruising at near lightspeed, take twenty-five thousand years to cross the twenty-five thousand light years to the Core; as experienced by the crew less than twenty years would pass, as Ward had said. But –

  ‘Here’s the bad news,’ Ward said now. A bright red line inched out of
the Sol marker, creeping towards the Core; it made it only a fiftieth or so of the way before limping to a stop. ‘This is how far we’ve got, physically, so far. Four hundred and forty light years. But even so, to come this far – anyone know the significance?’

  Somebody shouted: ‘We already came further than anybody came before.’

  Ward nodded grudgingly. ‘That’s about right. The furthest we know any ship from Earth ever got out to the stars, I mean still in one piece, was one of the Outriggers – uncrewed probes launched more than seventeen hundred years ago by Grey Poole, one of our leader’s ancestors,’ and he nodded at Poole. ‘As it happened several of the probes came this way, this being the direction of the centre of the Galaxy and all, and one reached a triple star system called π Sagittarii, and called back home. Four hundred and forty years to get there, four hundred and forty more years for its report to crawl back to Earth. Now, we don’t know how far out some of those other probes might have got without reporting back. But for sure we’ve gone beyond the known.’ He raised a fist. ‘Into the unknown!’

  He got scattered responses. A tentative whoop.

  Ward pumped that fist. ‘Come on! Here we are! That’s what we’re celebrating today. We Lethe-spawned rabble! Here we are! And we won’t turn back until the job is done! . . .’

  Maxwell Ward had proved himself long before the launch of the Cauchy. He had been a dark hero of the weeks-long ‘Cold War’ that had raged over a freezing Earth, after the planet had been hurled far from its Sun. As the survivors fought over the last of the warmth, Ward had actually led an army of a coalition of European nations in an invasion of Iceland, rich in precious geothermal energy.

  But Jophiel saw him differently now. In every previous crew review he, not yet separated from the template that was Michael Poole, had stood up there, quietly relieved to let Ward do all the work. But now, from the outside, he saw just how dominant Ward actually was, how passive, barely visible, was Poole.

  This was Poole’s mission. His design. It was Poole who, in a different future, would have been remembered by the Exultants, a generation who would one day have driven the Xeelee out of the Galaxy altogether – and would have erected a statue to Poole himself, two kilometres high, standing proud in the Core. This strange destiny had been hinted at by scattered records in the millennia-old Poole family archive, as well as even more exotic sources. Reality leaks, Jophiel thought.

  Well, that was all gone now. The Xeelee had come back through time, using the Poole family’s own trial wormholes, and had attacked the Solar System – evidently determined to cut off that future before it had begun. History had changed, humanity’s destiny stolen.

  But humanity itself had survived.

  And so had Michael Poole.

  Now, statue or not, he was on his way to the heart of the Galaxy. His goal was vengeance. Yes, the mission was all about Poole.

  Yet it was Ward who everybody was watching. Jophiel felt diminished. Embarrassed, even.

  Ward kept it up until he had them all standing, whooping, punching the air as he did. ‘Here we are! Here we are!’

  Nicola was beside Jophiel. ‘Quite a showman.’

  ‘Michael should watch his back,’ Jophiel murmured.

  ‘Make sure you remember that when you’re him again.’

  ‘Here we are! . . .’

  Eventually Ward ceded the floor to Poole, who began to chair the briefing in a more formal style.

  The first report up was by Bob Thomas. Thirty years old, Bob’s main function was interstellar navigation. As the Cauchy pushed against the light barrier, and as the ships probed regions of space never before explored by human craft, Bob was patiently developing flexible, innovative techniques and skills to enable the flotilla to find its way through the uncharted dark.

  Such as using pulsars, spinning, flashing neutron stars, as navigation beacons. Some of these bitter little objects rotated hundreds of times every second. And these ‘millisecond pulsars’, scattered in three dimensions around the sky, could be used as remarkably precise natural lighthouses. The accuracy of the method had been brought down to mere kilometres in terms of the ship’s position, as it crossed a Galaxy a hundred thousand light years wide. The Doppler shift of their timings could even give information on the ship’s true velocity. All this was being developed in flight, by Bob and his team.

  As Jophiel remembered well, Bob had been one of three children whom Michael Poole had rescued in person from a collapsed building during the Xeelee’s assault on Mars. Three siblings, who even then had called themselves the last Martians. All three had come with their saviour on his mission to the centre of the Galaxy.

  Many of the crew had known Poole personally before the launch, one way or another. That was why they were here.

  Now Bob Thomas reported, clearly and competently, on the ships’ position in space and time. And he spoke about a side project: the latest observations of the great fleet of which, in a sense, the Cauchy flotilla was an outlier.

  A fleet they had called the Scattering.

  To save the Earth from the Xeelee Michael Poole had nearly killed it. As the Xeelee had closed in, he had hurled the Earth through a wormhole to the Oort cloud, the chill outer depths of the Solar System. But even amid the calamity of the subsequent freezing – as Earth became Cold Earth – there was a keen awareness that this was only a stay of execution, for the Xeelee would surely follow, some day.

  And so it was necessary to evacuate Earth, most of whose billion inhabitants had survived the Displacement, as the great shifting had become known.

  It was Michael Poole’s father Harry who, as de facto governor of mankind, had set up the Scattering programme. Ten thousand GUTships were built, a hundred a year fired off. Scatterships, they were called, sent in every direction, out into the dark, either singly or in fleets. Poole and his flotilla had left long before the century-long programme of launches was finished.

  The ships had adopted a variety of designs and survival strategies. Most bore hundreds of thousands of passengers – inert, in sleep pods, tended by rotating teams of awake medical specialists and technicians. ‘Greenships’, like the flotilla’s own Island, carried ecohabs, as they were called, samples of life on Earth, from the forests, the grasslands, the oceans – and even from off-Earth environments such as Mars. Others were ‘seedships’, carrying embryos or genetic libraries, with the capability of printing out human colonists at an eventual destination. Some ships were essentially Virtual environments, like the flotilla’s Gea, data-rich and crowded with unreal people.

  And the ships had headed for a variety of targets: systems with Sunlike stars and Earthlike planets, yes, but also exotic targets like the worlds of long-lived red dwarf stars. Even stellar nurseries like the Pleiades cluster, with a thousand young stars: ten thousand young worlds, perhaps, to be moulded by humanity.

  These ships were easily visible even across interstellar distances, if you knew where to look. From Earth, GUTships travelling between the planets of the Solar System could have been seen by a naked human eye, like drifting stars. Now Bob spoke of observations of surviving craft, and projections to show that most of the fleet still survived – or at least when the crawling photons that carried evidence of the ships’ existence had set off on their long journeys towards the receptors in the Cauchy.

  But, as usual, Bob had grimmer news. Of ships that had gone dark. Technical failures were the likely cause, but some kind of conflict among the crew wasn’t impossible. Jophiel remembered Harry’s bleak observation that some of the ships had turned into prison hulks even before they were out of sight of Cold Earth.

  As Bob wrapped up, Max Ward said, ‘Every ship lost is another grievance we’ve got against the Xeelee. Who’s up next?’

  More routine reports followed.

  Nicola Emry stepped up to give a summary of technical issues concerning the Cauchy itself. Nicola was by tra
ining and experience a pilot; with not much piloting to do in these long stretches between the stars, she had joined the maintenance teams as a way to educate herself on the ships’ systems. Now she gave a competent but jokey summary of the endless work of keeping this huge machine functioning, alone in the dark, with an exotic engine continually firing at one end, and a precious, fragile lifedome at the other. She talked about the smell of oil and welding, and the glare of blowtorches, and balky matter printers, and bots of all sizes swarming everywhere, endlessly patching . . .

  Ward watched this performance in silence, his face blank. From his point of view, Jophiel thought now, Nicola was clearly an ally of Poole, and therefore an obstacle. So the more she was charismatic and the centre of attention, the less Max liked it.

  After Nicola, the reports continued. An update on the ship’s medical systems and the crew’s sickness list was given by Harris Kemp. Aged about fifty, Harris had been one of two junior personnel who, at a base called Larunda in the orbit of Mercury, had once helped Nicola and Michael Poole prepare for a perilous descent into the body of the Sun, in search of the Xeelee.

  Kemp’s partner then, a woman about the same age called Asher Fennell, had since specialised in exobiology and astrophysics. When her turn came she called up more Galaxy images of the kind she’d supplied to Ward, and spoke of her search for evidence of life and mind in the Galaxy, a search being made from the first human ship ever to come so far out. And a search, too, for traces of the Xeelee and its works. So far fruitless.

  Next, reports were given by visitors from the crews of the other two ships. An older man dressed rather ostentatiously in a dirt-smeared red coverall had come over from the greenship Island, whose lifedome contained a scrap of green parkland that might once have graced any city of Earth’s temperate zones. His report was heavy with bioproductivity indices and climate-control variables.

  And then a Virtual projection of a young man called Weinbaum Grantt gave a report from Gea, carrier of artificial sentience. Poole had known Weinbaum, or anyhow his flesh-and-blood original, and his sister Flammarion; he was a stepson of a colleague called Jack Grantt, who himself had left Cold Earth on a scattership laden with scraps of Mars life. Jophiel understood that Weinbaum and his sister, both in their late twenties now, had contributed greatly to Gea’s pool of Virtual crew, even, Jophiel had heard, to the extent of spinning off multiple copies of themselves. But Weinbaum was vague in the details about the problems, the anomalous power usage and falling-off of useful output from Gea, that had so alarmed Poole and his senior colleagues.