Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  Without another word, Susan led them out of the further door, across a short, narrowing alley, and into a building on the far side.

  Jophiel followed with dread.

  He found himself in a near twin of the building he’d just left. Another hull-plate box. No comms pillars.

  And here, in the middle of the floor, was a group of people. Sitting, hunched over. There were perhaps a dozen of them. They sat in a circle, facing each other, muttering. Jophiel thought he heard three, four voices speaking at once. The words were incomprehensible, if there were any words in that stream of babbled syllables.

  Susan, still holding Nicola’s hand, said. ‘Don’t be alarmed.’

  As she spoke, her crewmates’ heads turned, and they fell silent. Wary, in the presence of strangers. Watchful.

  A dozen, Jophiel counted quickly. All adults, apparently, wearing antique, much patched skinsuits. One even had a faded Poole Industries logo on the back. They had been sharing food, from rough packets strewn on the floor between them. One lifted his faceplate to take a mouthful of food. A snorting, gobbling sound. They all seemed short, bent over, squat. Jophiel realised he couldn’t distinguish male from female, could tell nothing about their ages.

  A moment of stillness. The two groups faced each other.

  It was like a pack of apes, Jophiel thought wildly. Apes facing three angels, himself and his crewmates standing straight and tall in their gleaming skinsuits. Angels from the stars.

  Susan walked over to the group. She knelt among them, put her arms over their shoulders. She seemed to lead them in a kind of chant: ‘The rule of threes. Remember? Three minutes without air. Three hours in the cold. Three days without water. Three weeks without food . . . Say it with me. Three minutes without air. Three hours in the cold . . .’

  Then, without warning, the ‘apes’ stood. Still hunched over, they hastily grabbed at their food packs and shambled untidily out of a far door. Jophiel had only a blurred impression of them. He thought he saw stunted limbs, bent backs; one of them came close to knuckle-walking, like a chimp. And some of them had too-small heads, the skulls deformed.

  None of them had looked the newcomers in the face.

  When they were gone, Susan walked unsteadily to the centre of the floor, where the group had been sitting. Stood amid scraps of food debris, an abandoned rucksack. ‘I’m sorry. That didn’t go well. I didn’t know how to— I wanted you to see for yourself.’ She sighed heavily. ‘So now you know. Now you know.’ She trembled, folded.

  Nicola hurried forward, took her stick, and embraced the woman. ‘Come. Sit down with me.’

  18

  Nicola had lightweight fold-out chairs in her pack. She set these out in a circle, where the Gourd crew had been. Harris had coffee; Jophiel accepted a Virtual cup, finding it a relief to sit and escape the clutch of gravity.

  Harris didn’t sit down himself. ‘One of us ought to go do the job we were sent down for. I’ll go explore. See if I can find some Xeelee treasure.’ He picked up his pack and pushed out of the building.

  And, in this quasi-living Xeelee structure, Susan Chen said she would tell Jophiel and Nicola her story. ‘The Ghosts hear all we say, probably. But at least here we have the illusion of privacy . . .’

  Jophiel said, ‘On our ships we had a tradition called the Testimony. Every time the crew gathered, one of us would get up to tell their story. How the Xeelee attack affected them, their family – their life. Susan, give us your Testimony.’

  She smiled. ‘Thank you, Jophiel. Very well. You know I was born just a few years after you – or your template. It seems such a remote age now.

  ‘I took my assessments for Federal Service. I was recommended for the police. Something about my qualities of determination, of general intelligence rather than a specialised intellect, attracted the recruiters. A certain puzzle-solving ability.

  ‘Actually I always wanted to follow you Pooles out to the frontier, one way or another. The outer planets. I always thought there would be room for me, out there, one day. Out where people like you were building things. I could deal with crimes among the settlers. Resolve complex legal disputes when you tried to extend the wormhole network to Neptune, and found some crusty old settler in your way.’

  Jophiel nodded gravely. ‘I think you’d have been a good fit.’

  She seemed unreasonably pleased at that; she beamed, her face made briefly young by the smile.

  ‘But then the Xeelee came. I was twenty years old.

  ‘I saw the images of the Wormhole Ghost; I remembered that, when much later I encountered the Ghosts who captured us. They have us call them “Ghosts”, you know, I think in response to their monitoring of that event, the labels you used.

  ‘I had to stay in the police, of course, in the aftermath of the incursion. As people grew afraid, there was a great deal of civil disorder.

  ‘I was twenty-four years old when the Displacement happened.

  ‘On Cold Earth, I helped keep order during the refugee flows, the resettlement of mankind.

  ‘Then I was co-opted onto the policing of the scattership building programme. Until I was assigned to a ship myself.’

  Jophiel said, ‘The Gourd.’

  ‘It was a greenship. I was second officer, an essentially administrative function. The work suited me. I’d had a complicated life, never had children of my own: never the time, as for many of my generation. I think on some level I loved the idea of nurturing an ecohab, a scrap of Earth life, all the way to the stars. For three subjective years the mission went well. We were only some ten light years from Earth.’

  Jophiel prompted, ‘And then—’

  ‘The Ghosts found us.’

  Harris walked in. ‘Sorry to interrupt. Look what I found.’

  He opened his gloved hand. On its palm rested an artefact as pale as hull plate: a small cylindrical base from which sprouted six angular petals. ‘I’ve tried to keep it in the shadow. Don’t want the thing growing out of control—’

  Susan smiled. ‘There is an on switch. Don’t worry.’

  Nicola whistled. ‘So that,’ she said in awe, ‘is a Xeelee flower.’

  ‘You did well to find it on your first expedition down here,’ Susan said.

  ‘I cheated.’ Harris sat on one of the fold-out chairs. ‘Any of that coffee left? . . . I just followed your crew, Susan. They left a kind of trail. Mostly of food packets. And this, in a kind of little cache they built.’

  Susan sounded proud. ‘They are good people. Good crew. Just so disadvantaged. There has been nothing more I could do . . .’

  Nicola said, her voice cold, ‘Tell us about the Ghosts. What they did when they captured you.’

  Susan seemed to sit up straighter, Jophiel observed. A police officer making a report, after a thousand years.

  ‘As I said, it was three years into the mission. You know that they had tracked the irruption of the Wormhole Ghost that came for you, Jophiel. Or your template. And they came looking for us, you see. They took us. I don’t know if they took other scatterships, what else they may have done in the Solar System itself.

  ‘They detached the lifedome from our GUTdrive stem. Enfolded the dome into what you have called a tangleship, and brought us here.

  ‘The hyperdrive journey took eight months. At the time, the crew – the surviving crew – made careful observations. I still have records.’

  Jophiel nodded. ‘Good. The more you can tell us, the more we can learn about the technology. I hope I would have done as well.’

  Nicola said gently, ‘So they brought you here. Set your lifedome down on Goober c—’

  ‘Just as you saw it.’

  Jophiel asked, ‘And the crew? Put to work?’

  ‘You mean, down here? Foraging for Xeelee artefacts? No, that came later, when they discovered how effective we were at the task. Just the ri
ght size, with the right foraging skills, you see. Skills honed by a million years of evolution on the African savannah, now put to work for an alien species.’ She smiled. ‘We’d complain about that. Make each other laugh.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Well, at first, they – tested us. Once they learned our language they interrogated us, together and singly. Tried to find out all about us, not just our technology and other capabilities but about our evolutionary history, our biology, our culture.

  ‘They liked to watch us work. They observed us work on the lifedome’s systems. Took us out on the planet for various – exercises. Traps to fall into, or escape from. As Discovery Era scientists used animals in testing, so they used us. People were hurt, of course.’

  ‘Killed?’ Nicola snapped.

  ‘Not purposefully. They did have a crude way of analysing us, you see, as if we were unfamiliar machinery, not living things. Even testing us to destruction. Looking for the spirit, by taking the body apart. Yes, there were casualties. The corpses were taken away, for dissection, I suppose.

  ‘Soon, many of the living were taken away. Abducted. With samples of technologies and life – soil and grass and trees – from the lifedome. The animals, chickens and rabbits, even rats. We never saw our crewmates again. You understand we were a large crew, tens of thousands, many in sleep pods during the voyage.’

  ‘All the scatterships had huge complements,’ Jophiel said. ‘Even greenships like yours. The seedships, even more.’

  ‘Yes. Well, now, the crew was broken up. In squads of a thousand or more. Families were split apart, and so on. After the first few rounds of this, we tried to make the Ghosts understand what they were doing to us. Well. I don’t know what became of those taken away. I was not one of those taken.’

  Jophiel noticed how Nicola’s face hardened. He thought now that she had been growing steadily more angry ever since they had met the Gourd crew.

  Susan went on, ‘But those left here, no more than a few hundred, they wanted to keep us alive – indeed, it was clear that they intended us to breed, in captivity. Animals in a zoo.’ A very archaic word, Jophiel thought. ‘One of our biologists said that he thought they had initially been baffled by our body structure. The way we are to some extent composite creatures as they are, with our microbiome of bacteria and so forth, but much more integrated as a whole than they are. We were unfamiliar forms, to them. They were fascinated by us. Or at least, by the fact that the Xeelee had taken such an interest in us, when we were doing no more than rattle around in our own Solar System. Why should that be so?

  ‘And they were intrigued, or alarmed, by the fact that one of their own, maybe from some other reality strand, had come back to warn us, as it did. Particularly by the fact that the Wormhole Ghost seemed to come from a defeated society of Ghosts, in the future. That it seemed to worship you, or your template, Jophiel.’ She actually grinned. ‘They just hated that.’

  ‘Good,’ Nicola snarled.

  ‘And in turn we watched them. We learned about them. A lot more than they think we know . . .’

  Jophiel listened, intent, to her analysis.

  The world of the Ghosts, Chen believed, had once been Earthlike: blue skies, a yellow sun. And perhaps the Ghosts had once been more human-like, more terrestrial in their body plans.

  But as the Ghosts climbed to awareness their sun evaporated, killed by energy blasts from a companion pulsar.

  When the atmosphere started snowing out, the Ghosts rebuilt themselves.

  They turned themselves into compact, silvered spheres, each body barely begrudging an erg to the cold outside. They gathered other life forms in with them, vegetable and animal – or whatever equivalent domains had existed on their world – each Ghost a kind of ecology in itself. An autarky, as Harris had said.

  That epochal ordeal left the Ghosts determined, secretive, often reckless, Susan had deduced. Dangerous. Vengeful, in an abstract sense. They moved out into space – which they called the Heat Sink – to fulfil grand ambitions.

  They would rebuild the universe itself, if necessary, to prevent another extinction threat, another betrayal.

  ‘They never forgot their origins. In all their communities you’ll see a tower, a beacon on the top . . . A Destroyer Tower, they call it. A commemoration of the pulsar, the star-god that killed their world. They worship that which destroyed them.’

  Nicola nodded. ‘Now they seek other Destroyer Gods. And they found us,’ she said darkly.

  Jophiel said gently, ‘But while all this was going on, time was passing.’

  ‘We knew we were far from home. We could tell that much by basic astronomy sightings. And we knew there was no help coming for us. I used to tell the others stories about you – about Michael Poole – your exploits, how you fought the Xeelee. How you’d come for us one day . . .’

  ‘Here I am.’

  She smiled enigmatically. ‘You were always here. For me anyhow. I told the others. They never believed me. I could never prove it.’

  And then she said, ‘Reality leaks.’

  Jophiel tried not to react. Nicola and Harris looked baffled by the remark.

  ‘We could only wait for rescue,’ Susan went on. ‘We had no means of escape. And we didn’t know what might have happened to the rest of humanity, you see. Those scatterships seemed terribly vulnerable, in retrospect. What if some force had just shot them out of the sky, as we ourselves had been overwhelmed?

  ‘We decided we had a duty to survive. We might be the last people left, anywhere. So we imagined, and feared. We would have children, raise them, in this place. That was a conscious decision. We would allow ourselves to be bred, like zoo animals. So that, if only through us, mankind would live on.

  ‘We scrambled to assure our survival. We took inventories of what we had. Supplies of all sorts, clothing, food, medical. We needed a means to keep our life-support systems going for decades – even centuries, we were thinking, even then. For generations. But the Ghosts themselves helped us. They wanted to keep us alive, for their own purposes. They have the equivalent of matter printers – better than ours – which they used to produce the food we needed, and other essentials.

  ‘And so we survived, and bred in captivity. We gave the first of the children names that reflected aspects of Earth. My own first daughter was called Sky Blue.’ She smiled. ‘Sky was a good girl.

  ‘But there were so few of us, even then. We knew we would have to plan, to try to maintain genetic diversity. I was one of the leaders; I felt I should show the way. So it began. My second child, a decade later, was with another man. We tried to build this into the culture for the future. We divided ourselves up into clans, with complicated intermarriage rules . . .’

  ‘All this watched over by the Ghosts,’ Nicola said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said darkly. ‘But we tried to keep one secret from them. Even as we watched them watching us. AS technology. AntiSenescence. It was the one necessity we didn’t tell the Ghosts about – or ask them to replicate. We were determined, you see, that some of us should survive, the original crew, to be witnesses to what had happened to us, to guide future generations. We kept this hidden in plain sight. The Ghosts knew nothing of our breeding cycles, after all; perhaps it seemed natural to them that some percentage of a group of humans should live, while the rest die off. Ghosts do not die, by the way. Well, you could burn one down. But barring accidents they are immortal. They are creatures of quasi-independent components. Even their skins are independent creatures; they flap in their tanks like huge rays. Components die. Ghosts do not. We hoped they would not understand our life cycles because of that.

  ‘So we drew lots. At first, ten of us would take the drug, ten to outlive the others. I was one of the ten. I lived on, as the generations started to tick by.

  ‘Well. Even from the beginning, our carefully planned breeding scheme showed strains. We were
just too few, too few. The first deleterious symptoms showed up in the fourth generation: ironically, reduced fertility was one of the earliest crises.

  ‘And our AS supplies were diminishing. We decided that the ten should reduce to five. Again we drew lots. And then later, five to two. We did not draw lots this time; we debated who should live and who should die. Then we voted on it. I was one of the two.

  ‘It was a bad choice. After only a few years I had lost my companion. He died of a genetic condition exposed by centuries of AS treatments.

  ‘Centuries, yes. It was already that. Still I lived on. I had no choice.

  ‘I retained a certain authority over the rest, the passing generations. With time I reworked the AS medication – I adjusted the genetic legacy of the crewmates, their DNA. They would not live on themselves, but their blood would contain the medicine that would save me. They give me transfusions . . . They are used to it.

  ‘But for the crew there were cumulative effects. A slow degradation. Perhaps all that we originators had gone through – the Displacement, the Cold Earth, the scattership flight – had damaged us more than we knew. And of course we laboured under the burden of this world’s gravity, which stressed hearts, bones, muscles. There were spontaneous abortions, infant deaths. A rise in the incidence of diabetes, heart disease. A reduction of intellectual capacity – that was the most distressing to see. And schizophrenia, other disorders . . . The damaged gave birth to the damaged.

  ‘The Ghosts watched us. They were smart. Manipulative. They watched us struggle, physically and spiritually. They used us as scavengers in this hazardous place, as you see, and more died. Yet we survived.’

  ‘Yes, you survived.’

  Jophiel stood, turned, nearly stumbling.

  A Ghost hovered in the hull-plate room, filling the space.

  ‘Still we study you. And still you baffle us.’

  Nicola walked up to it. Her face was twisted with fury, Jophiel saw, alarmed.

  And she had the Xeelee flower in her hand.