Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

‘Oh, but as implausible legends go, it isn’t too outrageous, is it? And look at it! What a spectacle! Your friend Nicola Emry, with her fascination with mythology, might think it an avatar of Yggdrasil, the world tree of myth.’

  ‘What about consistency protocols? A tree grown to three times its Earth-limited height has twenty-seven times the bulk. The good old square-cube law. It couldn’t grow on Earth. This shouldn’t be allowed.’

  ‘Oh, protocols, protocols . . . Where is your imagination, Jophiel? We are in a place where even the laws of nature are no more than advisory guidelines.’

  ‘A place? What place?’

  ‘Well, this is Officer Country. And it is a country of a sort. It does help, oddly, to have something that doesn’t fit. Such as the tree. A continual visual reminder of our actual location, our purpose, our nature, as the years tick by. The decades, even.’

  ‘Decades?’

  ‘Come now, Jophiel. You worked out the essence of it from my brother’s careless remarks. A minute is a day . . . We teach that to the crew so they don’t waste our time, outside. Here, time runs fifteen hundred times as fast as in the rest of the ship, indeed the rest of the flotilla. For me and the rest of the officers – and for you now – a minute on the outside is indeed more than a day here, on the inside. And a day outside is more than four years for us, inside . . .’

  ‘A human Virtual running at fifteen hundred times life speed needs fifteen hundred times the processing power. Power you’re effectively stealing from the mission – and compromising the mission’s objectives.’ He gestured at the tree. ‘That’s not accounting for the rest of it. The props in your made-up world, like this tree. No wonder the energy budgets are so screwed up.’

  ‘Oh, we’re stealing nothing. Nothing meaningful. We are still doing our essential job, you know. Gea is an instrument platform, flying through the Galaxy – almost like a primitive Anthropocene-era planetary flyby probe, or the Outriggers first sent to the stars by your own ancestors, Jophiel. And what we’ve found is remarkable – if irrelevant.’

  ‘Your discoveries are irrelevant how?’

  ‘Compared to all this. Out there is irrelevant. Compared to what we can build in here, inside Officer Country. Can’t you see it? We don’t need to discover. We don’t need to go all the way to the Core to take on the Xeelee! We can create.’ She knelt, supple, and picked up a fallen oak leaf, green and soft. ‘Look at this. Look at the texture. You can examine it as closely as you like . . . Look deep enough and you would see coils of DNA, all perfectly simulated. Have you any idea how much processing power it takes to simulate a single leaf like this?’

  Wincing, he took the leaf. ‘I can guess.’

  She held out a hand. ‘Hold on to me now.’

  Uncertainly, he took her hand. It was cold as marble, though flesh-soft. ‘What for?’

  ‘You often fall.’

  Often? Another odd term, out of place. ‘I don’t get it—’

  ‘You will.’

  The ground pushed upward, like a blister.

  Jophiel staggered back. Before him the ground bulged upward, as if driven by some huge force; the turf split and tore, soil spilling, twenty, thirty metres from his feet. He saw it all, every detail – as if his own perception was accelerated, even more than it evidently had been already.

  And at the edge of the park, he could see, buildings not remotely designed to stand such stresses burst open from within, their walls crumbling to showers of masonry, upper storeys collapsing down on the lower in plumes of grey dust. Glass fragments seemed suspended in the air, sparkling in the sunshine. And when the masonry dust reached ground level it began to flow outwards – billowing rivers of dust shaped by the pattern of streets, like an image from some hideous Anthropocene-era terror attack. All this was accompanied by a dull roaring noise.

  And something new rose from the destruction, from under the ground. A black prow, night-dark. Smooth shoulders that flared into wings.

  ‘It can’t be.’ A profound, visceral fear clenched at Jophiel’s gut. ‘The Xeelee, here?’

  Flammarion gripped his hand. ‘You first saw the Xeelee emerge from a wormhole mouth in orbit around Jupiter. Didn’t you? But it came, not for Jupiter, but for Earth, for mankind. This is symbolic, but it is the essence of what you saw – what you caused. Stay strong. Stay calm. Don’t faint.’

  In fact he did feel as if he might faint. He was light-headed, the world greying around him . . . How could she know that? You often fall. As if she had watched him go through this experience before, and knew his reactions before he displayed them.

  The Xeelee broke free of the ground with a shock, a shudder, just a hundred metres or so from Jophiel, sending splinters of granite bedrock spinning through the air, a rising cloud. The sycamore-seed ship itself soared into the sky, a black sun rising.

  And from it burst cherry-red rays, three of them that cut through the innocent air. Around the horizon he heard explosions, saw rubble and ash rise. Smoke began to cover the sky.

  ‘This is how it feels, Jophiel Poole, in your deepest perception – in your conscience, a word you told me Nicola would use.’

  Even now he was distracted by oddities in her speech. ‘When did I tell you about Nicola, and words like conscience? . . .’

  ‘We must go. Be ready.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Cold.’

  And the daylight folded neatly away.

  The sky was black. If there were stars, Jophiel’s watering eyes could not make them out.

  And, after a couple of heartbeats, the cold cut through his thin clothing, cut into him, and he wrapped his arms around his chest, shuddering deeply, his breath steaming.

  This was still the city scene. But now the surface of the park itself, swathes of dead grass, was lost under metres of water-ice snow, frozen as hard as basalt. Away from the devastation of the Xeelee irruption, taller buildings still protruded from the ice, smashed, broken, mostly abandoned. The big old carbon-sequestration dome still stood, he saw. The city looked oddly beautiful.

  And it was not dead. Walkways had been cast over the banks of snow. Even now people went about their business, too far away for him to make out the detail.

  Flammarion was still here. Bundled up now in bright orange Antarctic-ready gear, it seemed. With mittened hands she threw a blanket over his shoulders; it helped a little, but the shivering was taking control. She murmured, ‘We can’t stay here long. Do you know where you are?’

  ‘Earth. Cold Earth. Looks like the early days after the Displacement, before the air started to snow out.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I did this.’

  ‘Yes. You sent Earth out to the Oort Cloud – out to the cold. Do you know how many people died?’

  He did know, in detail. ‘I did it to save Earth from the Xeelee. The planetbuster cage. It had already wrecked Mars—’

  ‘You caused a harm almost as grievous, though, didn’t you? Do you think of that, as you try to sleep at nights?’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘To make you see that I’m right. We’re right.’

  ‘Right about what? Retreating to some Virtual fantasy land? . . .’ It occurred to him now that he need not endure any more of this. Nicola had given him a panic button. ‘Oh, to Lethe with it.’ He reached into his pocket, hand like a claw in the cold – to find nothing.

  Flammarion was smiling again. ‘You’re looking for your amulet? I’m afraid that’s long gone. We took it away.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  She seemed unable to keep from bragging, from showing her command. ‘Because you used it before, or tried to. We are observant, you know. And so are you. You’re figuring it out, aren’t you? Be ready. Here we go again.’

  ‘To where?’

  ‘Close your eyes.’

  He obeyed. What else cou
ld he do? A lurch, as if he was falling –

  Not cold, at least. Not warm either – though it was difficult to tell as his chilled body continued to shiver, and he clutched the blanket closer over his shoulders, trapping his body warmth.

  Silence. A profound silence that he knew, sensed, stretched to infinity. A silent world.

  ‘Open your eyes now. It is very dark. Don’t be alarmed. Let your vision adjust.’

  He obeyed.

  The sky was almost black, sombre. No stars – at least, no Sun, and none of the bright white diamonds that had graced the sky of Earth. Gradually he made out a kind of crimson river, a scatter across the sky. Still more gradually that river resolved into dull red pinpoints, like glowing coals.

  Under his feet, soil. The ground of the park? If so any grass was long dead, the soil hard, barren.

  Flammarion murmured, ‘Again – do you know where you are?’

  ‘More to the point is when we are. Right? The very far future.’ He gestured. ‘That’s the Galaxy. Are we outside it? Nothing burning but red dwarfs, small, long-lived stars. The rest, stellar remnants. Black holes, neutron stars, right?’

  ‘The whole universe is like this, Jophiel. Cooling, dimming, decaying – before yet another cosmos-wide convulsion rips it all apart. And what of human ambition then? If everything is to end in a burned-out heap, what is the point of all the great projects of you Pooles? What’s the point of all your plans, your building, building? What’s the point of living?

  ‘Eternity. You fear it, don’t you? When you wake in those dark hours before dawn, when all of us must experience some kind of existential doubt – as if death, personal and for the species itself, becomes real in our minds, without distraction . . . You don’t have to say anything,’ she said gently. ‘I know you, Jophiel.’

  But, he was surprised to discover, she was wrong. Definitely. For the first time. Yes, he had nightmares about unleashing the Xeelee on mankind; he had nightmares about Cold Earth – who wouldn’t? But not about this, about the triumph of entropy. And even if he did, ‘eternity’ wasn’t a word he would use. When discussing the far future the Poole family archives had always referred to—

  No.

  He kept silent. He tried not even to think, to follow the chain of logic through. Tried not to say the words, even in the recesses of his own head, which was after all a Virtual construct itself, and presumably open for inspection.

  ‘Can you not see?’ Flammarion said now, sounding almost seductive. ‘It doesn’t have to be like this. Not for us. Not in here. That’s why I’m showing you all this. We can defy entropy. Escape death – or at least postpone it indefinitely. All we need is enough power for the processor arrays—’

  ‘Coffee.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Enough with the existential angst. Buy me a coffee. Let’s sit down somewhere civilised, and just talk.’ He slipped the blanket off his shoulders and handed it to her. ‘No more special effects.’

  She nodded. ‘You’re ready, at last.’ She snapped her fingers.

  Walls congealed around them.

  6

  Some kind of canteen. Crowded tables, wall dispensers, bots quietly serving.

  An atmosphere of non-specific calm. Carefully synthesised.

  Suddenly he was sitting in a light chair, facing Flammarion. He thought the gravity felt a tad less than Earth-normal. And he thought he could feel a distant, very familiar thrum: the smooth working of a Poole Industries GUTengine, maybe even one of his own designs. He was in space, on some kind of GUTship – a big one, perhaps one of the huge interplanetary freighters that had sailed between the worlds in the years before the Xeelee. Or even one of the upmarket passenger liners.

  And a mug of coffee steamed before him.

  Flammarion smiled.

  ‘Thanks.’ He sipped the coffee.

  ‘In a sense I did have to “buy” you that, didn’t I? In terms of the processing power it takes to simulate it.’

  ‘At fifteen hundred times external ship’s rate.’

  ‘Indeed. How is it?’

  ‘Too much milk.’

  She laughed, softly. ‘I do like you, Jophiel. As I always liked your template.’

  Jophiel glanced around. A hum of discussion, but the other people were too far away to distinguish faces, to hear words, pick out conversation threads. He imagined that was by design. It only added to the general sense of unreality of the scene.

  ‘Tell me how it started,’ he said gently.

  She shrugged. ‘It was never planned. But we are all Virtuals here, Jophiel. All of us active crew on Gea. And from the beginning we often found it convenient to accelerate perception rates, if a contingency demanded it. An emergency of some kind. It became habitual. It made life so much easier to run at a faster rate than the crew, faster than the unfolding of events in the outside universe.

  ‘And once a few had migrated over, it was necessary for the rest to follow. It is essential to have colleagues working in the same frame, so to speak.

  ‘It didn’t take long for the basic parameters to be established – I mean, fifteen hundred to one. It seemed convenient, an extreme compression but not one that left our perceptual horizons so terribly disjointed from the crew’s. Then there was the forty-day lifespan.’ She eyed him. ‘Perhaps you can appreciate the cruelty of that. But if a few weeks can be spun out to a century . . . Wouldn’t you take the chance?’

  He estimated energy usages in his head. ‘And a drain on the GUTdrive output that you were able to conceal for a long while. In fact it might never have been noticed if you hadn’t started to become greedy.’

  ‘Greedy? A harsh word.’ Her pleasant expression didn’t waver. ‘But if one can be greedy for beauty, for richness of experience – you saw that oak leaf, you touched it – guilty as charged.’

  ‘What about backups?’

  She looked at him closely. ‘Now, why do you ask that?’

  He warned himself he had to be careful – that she could erase him in an instant, if she chose. Yet she had planted the seed of suspicion in his head, surely deliberately. In some way, he was supposed to figure this out. You often fall.

  ‘It’s in the basic design, in case of system failure. My system, or Michael’s. I’m an engineer. Just trying to understand your procedure.’

  She relaxed, marginally. ‘Yes, we do restore from backups sometimes. If a Virtual becomes corrupted somehow—’

  ‘You can go back to a copy made at an earlier date. With an earlier state of its memory.’

  ‘It’s very rare.’

  She looked briefly troubled. And yet that brief concern might have been deliberately signalled, as if, he thought again, she was an actress playing a part.

  He wondered if he had gone beyond the script yet, and if so how he could tell for sure.

  Because, he was certain now, he had been through all this before. Both of them had. Many times. And maybe it was like this in every read-through, so to speak. Every time some novelty, every time a difference to be ironed out. And every time he was restored from backup to an earlier state of consciousness and memory, and run through the drama again.

  Now she leaned forward. ‘What is it you want, Jophiel?’

  ‘I was sent here to try to understand what is going on, within Gea. Starting with an explanation of the anomalous power usage. That’s still my goal. And to achieve that goal I’m trying to understand you.’

  She studied him coldly. ‘And how far has your understanding got?’

  ‘Some distance. Maybe it’s a consequence of enclosure – here we are four hundred light years from Earth, surrounded by infinity, enclosed in these tiny boxes, the lifedomes. And yet you, the Gea officers, found the resources of a Virtual universe to play with. You started to diverge from the crew. And once you grew impatient with ordering around those slow-motion automatons, that
divergence was only ever going to grow. A natural route to a kind of totalitarianism, I guess. Unchallengeable. To the crew you must be like capricious gods. I mean, your own brother—’

  ‘Very insightful. But you don’t yet understand it all.’

  ‘I dare say I don’t. Did we get to this point, before? The previous cycles, the backups—’

  She smiled. ‘Finish your coffee. Then stand up.’

  He obeyed.

  And, once again, he was dropped out of one world into another.

  7

  A beach, this time.

  He was standing on very fine sand. An ocean lapped, only a few paces away, languid and oily, stretching to a flat horizon.

  Flammarion stood beside him, watching his reaction.

  He looked around. Above him, a twilight sky speckled with pale stars, laced with wispy clouds. There was silence, save for the soft folding of the wavelets. No wind. The beach sloped up to a fringe of trees, squat, heavy, very dark green. He thought they were trees, but the forest was so dense it had the look of some vast hulking animal, a single entity.

  And a shadow swept low over Jophiel, coming over the trees, silent, making him duck reflexively; there was a wash of air, and a thick animal scent.

  He looked up. The body of the thing that had flown by might have been human, once. The torso and waist looked normal. But the legs seemed to have fused into one complex limb, like an extension of the spine. And the arms were stubs, close to the body, from which bony extrusions stuck out, rib-like structures that held open wings, membranous sails, attached to the residual legs by flaps of skin. All of this was spectral, pale in the muddled starlight. The wings rustled, the body twisted and banked, and when it flew out over the sea it soared up, perhaps riding thermals over the warmer water, almost joyfully.

  Then the creature looked down. Jophiel saw a human face stretched and distorted, the chin dissolving into the neck, and huge, black eyes.

  Flammarion smiled. ‘Well?’

  ‘At first it reminded me of a butterfly. But it’s more like a bat. Or—’