Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  Lights glowed sparsely.

  Jophiel Poole, whose template had laid out the basic design of such ships, recognised its type immediately. The ship had evidently been a scattership, a GUTdrive colony ship, before its spine had been cut like the Island’s. In the Poole Industries design hierarchy this was a Great Northern-class vessel, originally conceived in pre-Xeelee days as a generation starship – a design that had never been built or flown, before the Xeelee came. After Cold Earth, ten thousand such ships had been sent out into the dark, each ship capable of carrying up to a hundred thousand human beings. Scraps of the humanity that could no longer be safely supported by the planet of their birth.

  So there were indeed humans here at Goober’s Star. Or there had been. Just as the Ghosts’ signal, picked up by the rebel Virtuals of Gea, had hinted.

  After the Island’s lifedome was set down on rocky ground, close to the other ship, a Ghost came. Hovered just outside the dome.

  When Jophiel was informed, he hurried that way – hurried, though his Virtual projection software faithfully transmitted to him the burden of this world’s forty per cent higher gravity. Nicola, Asher and Harris followed him more cautiously, Harris with a medical pack slung over his shoulder.

  They looked out through the dome wall.

  The Ghost seemed to hover effortlessly a metre or so off the ground. Jophiel had the odd sense that it was spinning on some axis, but so featureless was its surface – it cast highlights from Goober’s Star, high in the near-black sky – that it was impossible to be sure. Aside from the apparition in Island’s lifedome, this was the first time he had seen a Ghost close up since his template had encountered the Wormhole Ghost in Jupiter’s orbit, more than a thousand light years away, and forty subjective years ago.

  He wondered what mechanism enabled the Ghost to float like that. Another application of that magic inertia-control technology?

  Its voice, somehow projected, sounded next to Jophiel’s ear. ‘I invite you to walk with me, to meet your conspecifics.’ Again that stylised, very artificial voice. ‘I know your shelter has access mechanisms.’

  ‘Airlocks. We call them airlocks. How are you speaking to us? How can we hear you?’

  ‘That is scarcely relevant. You may emerge in safety. An atmosphere has been provided.’

  Jophiel glanced up. ‘How? How is it contained? Is there another dome, like over the mud pool? How do you know what we can breathe safely? . . . Ah.’

  ‘Yes. We know because of our study of the conspecifics who were first brought here over a millennium ago.’

  A millennium, Jophiel thought. That was a clue. If this ship had been taken not long after leaving the Solar System, then that could indeed have been more than a millennium ago – a millennium experienced as less than two decades by the crew of the Island, thanks to the ship’s relativistic speed. Just a few centuries after leaving Earth, such a ship could have travelled no more than a few hundred light years from Sol, under its own GUTdrive power. And so the ship, its crew and passengers, must have been brought here by hyperdrive. Jophiel shuddered, in the presence of unknowable alien power.

  He tried to focus. ‘All right, Ghost, we’ll trust you. About the air.’

  ‘You may call me the Ambassador. It is a human label which approaches the reality of my commission by my fellows. And it will distinguish me from others.’

  Nicola and Jophiel shared a glance. The Wormhole Ghost had once called itself the Ambassador to the Heat Sink.

  ‘Come – follow me. You really are quite safe.’

  ‘Me first,’ Jophiel said.

  But Harris the medic shook his head. ‘With respect, Jophiel, you aren’t a useful guinea pig. I suggest Nicola goes first. We need a meat sample.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ Nicola said. ‘Come on, let’s get on with it.’

  They crowded at the airlock, a big double-doored chamber designed for the passage of significant masses of cargo both in space and on the ground. Nicola, and then Harris, simply walked through, and outside, without apparent ill effects.

  Nicola took a big deep breath of the air. ‘So that’s what a Ghost fart smells like.’

  Harris dug a sensor out of his pack, studied it, and nodded through the translucent wall to the others. ‘Safe to follow.’

  Jophiel and Asher followed them through. Jophiel’s experience was only ever going to be a simulated copy of the reality, but he smelled nothing unusual – save a faint scent of sulphur, perhaps, a trace of the volcanism that must underlie this whole raised landmass.

  The Ghost rolled towards the other lifedome. ‘The ground has not been prepared, but has been selected as a relatively smooth area. The distance we must cross is less than a kilometre. The separation of your domes was chosen for safety, as we brought the second dome down close to the first.’

  But, Jophiel thought cynically, with enough of a gap to keep the two human communities apart, and therefore more easily controlled.

  He concentrated on the detail as they followed the Ghost.

  A new world, for him. Hard volcanic rock underfoot, like basalt. The sky above littered with those wispy clouds. That heavy gravity, a dull, deadening load he felt with each step. He could see no sign of whatever shell, physical or otherwise, was containing this scrap of Earthlike atmosphere.

  He glanced back at the Island lifedome, a shell of light. Many of the crew were crowded close to the wall, watching them go.

  And he noticed the wormhole interface, an electric-blue tetrahedron still intact on top of the dome.

  He looked away. If the Ghosts had yet to puzzle out that feature, and its significance – the only link to the Cauchy, the only possible source of any help – he didn’t want to draw their attention to it. Always supposing Ghosts could interpret human body language . . . Safest to assume they could.

  ‘You should find the air comfortable. Warm enough, and the humidity adjusted.’

  ‘It doesn’t bother you, I see,’ Nicola snapped.

  ‘We Ghosts are somewhat more resilient. We grew to this form in a harsher place, physically, than your Earth. My hide, while an independent life form in itself, is actually a highly developed biotechnological container.’

  ‘Well, there’s no need to brag.’

  Jophiel felt like prodding the Ghost. ‘If you’re studying us, we study you. We already know you have a hyperdrive – a faster-than-light drive. Even before you took us on that jaunt from the outer system, we deduced its existence. The timings of the signals you emitted didn’t make sense otherwise.’

  The Ghost rolled complacently above the ground. ‘Yes, we have a hyperdrive. And today I have learned a new human word.’

  Nicola grunted. ‘A made-up word for something that we haven’t yet developed.’

  ‘Nor have we. In fact we acquired the hyperdrive, long ago in our history. From a trading species called the Qax.’ Chhaakss. ‘You may imagine the cost.’

  Jophiel glanced at Nicola. Qax: they both knew that name. The Poole family archive had spoken of this species. One day, a humanity still restricted to the Solar System would have been conquered by the Qax. Enslaved. Would have been enslaved. With humanity already scattered to the stars, Jophiel supposed that particular fate had been averted.

  Yet, it seemed, the Qax were real. And another little piece of those old prophecies had been confirmed, in this extraordinary situation. Reality leaks. Inside his skinsuit, Jophiel shuddered.

  ‘And in turn,’ the Ambassador said to him now, unexpectedly, ‘you, the Poole, have an amulet. A Ghost artefact, handed to you after a reverse-time incursion to—’

  ‘I don’t have it,’ Jophiel snapped. ‘I have a Virtual copy, which you’re welcome to inspect. Here.’ He dug the amulet out of his pocket, and threw it at the Ghost.

  The Ghost made the trinket hover in the air before it. ‘An inadequate copy. Not without interest, however.’ Th
e amulet floated back towards Jophiel.

  ‘How did you know about it?’

  ‘It was what drew us to your system in the first place. I mean, the system of your origin. We Ghosts are explorers. Experimenters. Traders, when it benefits us. We have stationed probes throughout this part of the Galaxy. Observation posts. One such probe reported back from your system on the appearance of a Ghost, in a part of the Galaxy which no Ghost had yet reached – in our history. And a Ghost artefact of a very advanced design – your amulet.

  ‘We saw that the Ghost was quickly terminated. In response we would have sent a ship immediately.’

  Nicola glared. ‘Why? To take revenge?’

  Jophiel murmured, ‘Come on, Nicola. It came here because we detected human signals where they shouldn’t be. It was just the same for the Ghosts.’

  The Ghost went on, ‘But our probe was also reporting Xeelee activity, of an anomalous kind, in your system. We hesitated.’

  ‘You know about the Xeelee, then,’ Nicola said quickly.

  ‘We learned your version of the name from intercepted transmissions. It is not clear to us how you came upon that name – it is a corrupted form of that used by other phonic species, but near enough. As for the Xeelee themselves, they are the reason we are in this system, of course. And, indirectly, you.’

  Jophiel and his crew shared a glance. Jophiel thought of those deep valleys, where blankets of Xeelee hull plate evidently lay like fields of snow.

  ‘So you were interested in the Solar System,’ Jophiel said. ‘Eventually you did send a tangleship?’

  ‘Another amusing neologism. Yes, we sent a tangleship, once we were sure the Xeelee intruder had abandoned the system. It was a party from this star system, this project, in fact. This star is the nearest of our bases to your Solar System.’

  Jophiel asked, ‘What project? . . . Never mind, for now. I’m guessing you arrived after the departure of the Cauchy flotilla, or we’d have known about it. You abducted a scattership in flight—’

  ‘Several,’ the Ghost admitted. ‘Of which only a few survived, with their crew. Others fought hard. We evidently had much to learn about humans.’ It said this factually, without a trace of regret.

  Nicola looked murderous, but she said nothing.

  ‘We brought this ship and its human cargo here. Most survived.’

  Most? There was no reply to that.

  ‘We studied the living,’ the Ghost said, ‘and later their descendants, intensively. As well as the living things that had travelled with them. We have been here for more than a thousand of your years. For many generations. Since we acquired them, we have involved humans in our projects. Mostly here, on this planet, which you now call Goober c. We have learned much.

  ‘Your own mission has intrigued us, Jophiel Poole. It was not by chance that we found you – or rather, you found us. Once we had acquired the scattership it was an obvious ploy to use its technology, and crew, to set up lures: human signals to attract more human ships. Lures to which you responded. We had not anticipated, though, finding you, a simulacrum of Poole himself, intent on a mission to the centre of the Galaxy. To take on a Xeelee in slower-than-light ships! Not what we anticipated at all . . . We must discuss this further,’ said the Ghost. ‘But for now . . .’

  They were nearing the other ship’s lifedome, a translucent wall before them.

  And a woman stood there, outside an airlock. She looked bent, old, very still. Dressed in a worn, much-patched coverall, she leaned on a kind of stick improvised from a bit of hull metal.

  Jophiel was distracted by how elderly the lifedome fabric itself looked: starred by micrometeorite impacts, scuffed, in places yellowed with age, yet intact, after a thousand years. Jophiel, or his template, had seen the scatterships leave for the stars, with his own eyes, just twenty subjective years ago. And now this.

  He tried to focus on the woman. Herself a thousand years old, perhaps. No human had ever lived so long, on Earth.

  Still he hesitated to speak.

  ‘Lethe, Poole. What do you expect her to do, burst into song?’ Nicola pushed forward. ‘My name is Nicola Emry.’

  The woman held out one hand, like a claw. Nicola gently took it, cupping it in both her own hands as if sheltering a baby bird, Jophiel thought. He had always known Nicola was capable of tenderness if she felt like it.

  The woman seemed to respond to Nicola very slowly, as if she had little energy, her small body intolerably heavy. Her hair was a snow-white scrape, tied back, he saw now. Her face, small-featured, was blank, and oddly smooth, not wrinkled as Jophiel might have expected. As if worn by age, a face of old stone.

  The voice was a whisper. ‘Emry. I used to know that name.’ Yet her eyes were bright, and she smiled.

  ‘My mother, probably. She was on the World Senate. The UN body.’

  ‘That must be it.’ And she turned, at glacial speed, to Jophiel. ‘And I know you – or your template, at least.’

  Jophiel felt oddly impressed. ‘You can tell I’m a Virtual?’

  ‘My name is Susan Chen. Once I worked for the sentience police, before the Xeelee came, before the Displacement. Yes, I can recognise Virtuals. I was born in Beijing, in the United Asia Republic. A citizen of the world, as we all were in those days, when we had a world . . .’

  As she joined their little circle, leaning on her stick, her story seemed to tumble out. A story she had hoarded for a thousand years, perhaps, if she really was one of the original crew, Jophiel thought.

  ‘I was born in the year 3626.’

  ‘Just five years after me,’ Jophiel said.

  ‘I always followed the exploits of you Pooles. All those grand wormholes.’ Was she smiling? Her face was so immobile it was hard to tell. ‘I think I had a slight crush on you.’

  Nicola rolled her eyes. ‘Well, that’s just typical.’

  ‘But then came the Displacement, and the Scattering. Our ship was a greenship, called the Gourd.

  ‘And we ended up here. I am the only one left. The last of the crew, the original crew. There were children. You will see . . . They are down in the Valleys, the Xeelee Valleys. I live alone here, in the dome. The crew are in the Valleys. You will see. We had AS technology – we tried to hide it from the Ghosts—’

  ‘We always knew,’ the Ghost said smoothly.

  ‘We thought there should be a witness, you see. One of us originals, who remembered Earth, should be there to tell the story, first hand. We hoarded what we had – the AS, I mean – but time passed. There were ten of us left, then five, then two, then I was the last of the original crew. I was the last. Yet I was never alone. Michael Poole was always with me. When I despaired . . . I knew you would save us. I knew! . . .’

  Jophiel frowned. ‘Always with you? I don’t understand—’

  ‘You were always with me . . .’ Susan Chen sighed, and seemed to crumple, perhaps fainting. Nicola supported her, and Harris rushed forward, reaching for his medical kit.

  The Ambassador rolled complacently. ‘Humans are my object of study. How fascinating you are.’

  Nicola glared up at it with a look of pure hate.

  16

  After the first month on Ghost Plateau, as Susan Chen called it – a month the Cauchy crew spent mostly securing their physical survival – Chen said she had a proposal for them.

  ‘You know that we work for the Ghosts, down on the planet. I mean, in the Xeelee Valleys. Where the Xeelee buildings grow.’

  Nicola grinned. ‘Where the Xeelee buildings grow. Susan, what a line!’

  Susan’s own smile, like all her expressions, was a sketch. ‘We – I mean, my crewmates, my charges – they have us seek Xeelee artefacts. Now the Ghosts intend to send a party down, to retrieve what we have collected. And they invite you to join. A party of you. Perhaps three or four as an introductory assignment. You will meet my crew. We
can show you how we work. The Ghosts, I think, will be interested in how we interact, we two crews separated for so long. They like to explore us.’

  That withered smile grew more wintry. Jophiel suspected there was a world of horror in that one word, explore.

  He said, ‘I’m guessing it’s a hazardous assignment.’

  Susan shrugged. ‘They prefer to send humans into places they regard as too dangerous for Ghosts. These are, after all, Xeelee stations. Though their purpose is little understood, we suspect, even by the Ghosts.’

  Xeelee stations. More words that made Jophiel shiver.

  ‘But we have survived for centuries despite these losses. And learned caution.’ She eyed Jophiel. ‘I would recommend you send a party. The Ghosts’ supervision is not omniscient. There may be advantages to be gained.’

  Nicola and Jophiel exchanged a hungry glance. It had been a frustrating month since they had been brought here: a month of not doing much more than consolidate, for what looked like it would be a long, if not permanent, stay on this world. All of it blighted by the dull burden of the forty per cent higher gravity. They had travelled little, seen less, learned nothing. Even Susan, after that first gushing meeting, had seemed inhibited about speaking to them.

  And Jophiel was aware that the crew’s forced adaptation to their imprisonment was a ghastly echo of what Susan and her crew had gone through centuries ago.

  ‘Agreed,’ he said immediately. ‘Thank you, Susan. The question is, who goes?’

  ‘You and me,’ Nicola snapped. ‘This first time.’

  ‘Look, I’m a Virtual. Away from human technology I’ll need a projection pack.’

  ‘Hardly a problem. If Susan’s right about possible advantage, or danger, we need our best eyes on the ground. With one other, maybe. Harris? Our resident expert on the Ghosts. And also Harris has medical training. He can take a good look at the Gourd people. And he can carry you on his back, Jophiel. Your support unit, one hundred and forty per cent gravity and all. Serves him right.’