Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

Jophiel stared. ‘How old are you again? . . . You don’t fool around, do you?’

  For the first time Chinelo sounded uncertain. ‘Did I do wrong? This is how Max trained us. A weapon isn’t some magic wand that controls people when you wave it around; you have to use it. I was on my own in here. If she had got away, broken out—’

  ‘It’s OK. As far as I can see you did exactly the right thing. In fact if not for your quick decision-making, the rest of us couldn’t have concentrated on Nicola as we did . . . I’ll report back to Max, when he gets here. Good job, Chinelo.’

  She stayed expressionless, but seemed calmer. ‘OK. But what now?’

  ‘Now we need to make contact with this woman. Just be patient.’

  Still she spoke; still they waited for the translator software to cut in, though again he thought he detected repeated words, phrases – some of them sounded like much-evolved versions of Standard, his own language. Her name, maybe. Demands to be let free. Threats of retribution. Not, he thought, pleas for her life; she looked too defiant for that.

  At least he had the opportunity to study the woman up close. She wore a smock of some kind of hide, scraped and stitched together, quite finely, with threads of what looked like tree bark, leaving her arms and legs bare. Boots of a tougher leather. The bare skin of her arms, legs, even her face, was covered, he saw now, by a fine pattern, a tracery of lines, thin and black, nowhere interlocking. Tattoos, like an image of the sky.

  ‘This is how people live, in an environment like this,’ he said to Chinelo. ‘A bare landscape, resource-depleted. They turn in on themselves, in a way. Their own bodies become a canvas. We called this place High Australia because of the landscape; maybe it has some cultural similarities too.’

  ‘She’s kind of short,’ Chinelo said. ‘Shorter than me. Shorter even than you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Jophiel said drily. ‘But it’s a common adaptation, among animals anyhow. Any place where there isn’t much to eat. A person half your height would need only an eighth the food you eat. The square-cube law.’

  ‘Do you think she’s still human? I mean, these people have been here all on their own, for a long time.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not that long. On this Deck it’s only a few thousand subjective years since the Wheel was created, remember. These people can’t have been here longer than that. That’s enough time for cultural institutions to collapse, changes in language – and for this woman’s people to adapt to a lousy food supply by growing a little shorter than her ancestors. But she’s human, all right.’ He looked at Chinelo. ‘Out there, you said she was from the Gourd. The ship that was captured and taken to Goober c by the Ghosts.’

  The woman looked startled at that evidently familiar word. Gourd.

  ‘How could you know that?’

  Chinelo grinned. ‘My young eyes are sharper than yours, I guess, Jophiel.’ She pointed. ‘Look for yourself.’

  On one wrist, Jophiel saw now, the woman wore a medical bracelet – just like the one Nicola was wearing right now, in the cabin. Virtually indestructible, it could well last for millennia if cared for, Jophiel realised. And, on its worn surface, one word was clearly visible. The name of the ship it had come from, from whose crew this woman’s ancestors must derive: Gourd.

  Suddenly her speech became clear, rendered into accent-free Standard by the flyer’s software.

  ‘. . . My name is Wina. I am of the People of the Vanquished First Slaver. You need not thank me for saving you from the First Slaver woman.’

  ‘I – what people? Who? . . . Never mind. Very well. I won’t thank you. She was, is, a friend. The, umm, First Slaver woman. My name is Jophiel.’

  She listened carefully. ‘Jophiel.’

  ‘That’s right. This is Chinelo.’

  Chinelo grinned, and raised the weapon. ‘And this is called a blaster.’

  The woman looked at the blaster dismissively, then studied Jophiel, evidently suspicious.

  He nodded. ‘You may have observed I am different from the others. Different from you.’ Jophiel passed his hand into the wall, and out again, with a tingle of consistency-protocol violation. ‘You must not be alarmed by this.’

  The woman thought it over. ‘Can you use a bow?’

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘You will soon go hungry, then.’

  Chinelo suppressed a snort of laughter.

  ‘And you may have wondered why I am identical to the other man you saw.’

  She thought that over. ‘He who carried the wounded First Slaver woman.’

  ‘Why do you call her Slaver? . . . Never mind. Yes, that man.’

  She shrugged. ‘You are nothing like him. Will you let me go now? I must hunt, or my family we will soon go hungry.’

  Then came a message from Max. Aerial surveys had revealed what looked like the woman’s home base.

  Tepees, built in the corpse of a downed Spline ship.

  53

  Ship elapsed time since launch: 26 years 64 days

  Seven days later, a party from the convoy took the local woman home.

  It had been easy enough to locate the woman’s community, out in this table-top of a landscape. Max Ward had flown down from the rim and put himself in charge, however. And he decreed the Cauchy crew should walk in from the site where the flyer had first grounded, rather than fly. The less obtrusive an entrance they made the better; a flying machine would presumably terrify, or enrage, a people dependent on bows and arrows. And, Max argued, the less they showed of their strength, the better.

  They did leave Nicola behind, over her protests, as she was still recuperating – and in the interests of diplomacy, given the way she had alarmed Wina enough on first contact that the woman had immediately tried to kill her.

  So, led by Wina, the party set off. It turned out to be a tough ten-kilometre march over bare, unyielding ground.

  En route they were chased by chickens.

  At least, Jophiel thought they were chickens, or some kind of descendants. Muscular-looking birds the size of turkeys, with colourful plumages of gold and green, stocky legs, and crests of virulent red. All males, according to Harris Kemp. And, according to his softscreens, they looked a little like the guinea fowl from which domesticated chickens had descended. The birds took great offence to the passage of these unfamiliar humans, and their determination to give chase wasn’t deflected by the felling of a couple of them by Max Ward’s blasters. Wina showed them that standing still, shouting, and waving your arms worked a lot better.

  Still, they got through the journey in a reasonable time. Max Ward had planned it out: they had started early, not long after this cupworld’s eerie ‘dawn’, and arrived mid-afternoon of the local twenty-three-hour ‘day’.

  And even from the ground the village of the People of the Vanquished First Slaver was not hard to find. For, as the aerial surveys had already discovered, it nestled in the shadow of the great carcass of a Spline starship.

  A few hundred metres from the village, the Cauchy party hung back, to recover, re-equip, and spy out the land before going in. From this distance the relic of the Spline looked like the stripped skeleton of a whale, Jophiel thought. Giant ribs towered over the scrappy human settlement, like the ruin of some tremendous cathedral. It was a relic of some incomprehensible, forgotten war, Jophiel supposed. Yes, and this was how interstellar war would leave a Galaxy. Monumental wrecks looming over diminished populations of survivors scrubbing for survival in the dirt. He wondered how it had been in that other timeline, in that other Galaxy which had been overrun, not by Ghosts and Qax and Spline ships, but by humanity: what ruins might have been left behind.

  They were soon spotted. Jophiel could see people climbing high in that enormous ribcage, looking back at him. Descendants of the crew of a scattership – descendants of Jophiel’s own contemporaries in fact. Clambering over the ribs of a dead alien.


  Max Ward was studying a rough map sketched on a softscreen. ‘Just so we know where we are.’ He pointed. ‘Here are the Rim Mountains. Here we are. The village of the People of the Vanquished First Slaver. Here’s the river it sits by.’ He traced with a finger. ‘You can see how the river is a tributary of a greater artery that feeds into the ocean here. We think we see one of those crater-like structures there.’ He pointed to pyramidal icons. ‘And here, here, here, more of them.’

  ‘Not surprising.’ Asher consulted her own screen. ‘From the air, we spotted these structures all over the landscape. All about the same size, crater-like ring walls centred on mounds. We asked Wina about them. She called them Libraries. That’s the best translation of her word, anyhow.’

  Max scowled. ‘Why would an illiterate culture need a library?’

  ‘Illiterate maybe, but highly intelligent, and highly sophisticated,’ Asher said. ‘That’s been evident since the start of our contact with them a week back. They are the descendants of a scattership crew, remember. We shouldn’t make any assumptions.’

  ‘OK,’ Max said grudgingly. ‘But – look, we landed at random, and hit on these village folks at random. My view is we should go straight for the ocean. The flybys picked up more settlements there, even boats of some kind. The more sophisticated the culture the more we’d have to gain. We’d even learn a lot more by cracking open one of those Libraries.’

  Poole looked stern. ‘We aren’t “cracking open” anything, Max. We have two goals, remember. The ultimate aim is to find a way to get to the Xeelee. But the second is to find the crew a place to live, now and in the future. And if that’s to be here, we need to find a way to get along with the neighbours. These people know their world. We know nothing, yet. We need to learn.’

  Max laughed. ‘What’s to learn from a bunch of degenerate savages?’

  The answer, as Jophiel was not surprised to discover, turned out to be a great deal.

  They walked on.

  The village was a gaggle of tepees and other, more functional structures – racks for hanging meat and furs, small workshops evidently for the manufacture of bows, arrows, clothing, various tools. Jophiel saw low fences. Stockades, which contained what looked like big, strong-looking rabbits.

  The tepees were of all sizes – but oddly, the apparently ceremonial structure to which the guests were led was only the second largest. Two young people, one female, one male, sat watchfully on the ground outside the largest of all, which was sealed up. Chinelo asked bluntly what was in there; the response was silence.

  Inside the designated tepee, under a conical roof, the elders of the village sat in a circle. Among them was Wina, who seemed more impressed to be allowed into the elders’ tent than by the presence of the folk from the Cauchy.

  The visitors were handed clay cups containing what tasted like strong beer.

  Jophiel discreetly conjured up his own Virtual beer cup, in order to join the party. None of the elders showed any alarm, any more than when he had pulled similar stunts before Wina back in the flyer. These seemed a phlegmatic people. Maybe that came from growing up under the wreck of a living starship.

  Jophiel, or his template, had always been more interested in engineering than people. Technology rather than anthropology. Yet he had the feeling that this scene must have been played out in one form or another across the Earth over many millennia. The strangers greeted in the tent, the sharing of gifts. The essence of what it was to be human, surviving at the centre of the Galaxy. Jophiel found it somehow pleasing.

  Michael Poole, meanwhile, had quickly entered grave, if not very pointed, discussions with the elders, both sides translated by Cauchy software. The villagers’ talk was dominated by descriptions of relationships, marriages, legacies, hunting trophies – and some complex discussions of the mixture of farming, stock-rearing and hunting that kept the people alive here. Primitive they were, but not ignorant.

  Not only that, they knew exactly where they had come from. And when.

  The most wizened of the elders said now, ‘The people were brought to this world many days ago. How many days?’ She worked her fingers in a complex sequence, which Jophiel guessed was some kind of finger-counting mnemonic.

  As she worked, Jophiel studied the fine tattoos on her face. He had already learned, by asking Wina about something she took for granted, that every person here was marked with an impression of the light-and-shade patterns in the sky on the day of their birth. If more than one was born on a particular day, especial care was taken to distinguish the zebra stripes. Thus, every person was made as unique as an individual day, maybe even a particular hour. Wina had been curious about why so many of the crew didn’t wear tattoos at all – and what was the meaning of the green tetrahedra some wore on their foreheads . . .

  At length the elder pronounced, ‘Two million, sixty-four thousand, seven hundred and fifty-two days on this world . . .’ The translation back to Standard, from which these people’s language had evidently descended, was clearer when numbers were pronounced. Perhaps such core words defied linguistic shifting a little more than others. Now she flashed her withered fingers once more. ‘Twenty-three hours in the world’s day. Twenty-four in the ship’s day. This is the true age of the land. Every hundred days we send a runner to the Library with the number we count, as do others like ourselves. The Library remembers . . .’

  Asher leaned over to Jophiel and whispered, ‘They’ve remembered the key facts, after all this time. And they must have counted every day since they came here . . . The First Australians were good astronomers, in the same way, with a deep shared memory of the sky. Not that the colonialists ever cared to learn about that.’

  Jophiel was working it out. ‘That number, though. It translates back to five thousand, four hundred years, give or take – which maps to more than two and a half million years, outside. These people really are descended from Gourd crew, aren’t they? Just as Wina’s bracelet was a clue. Crew who left Earth about when we did, twenty-six years ago by our ship’s time, by our time, and were abducted not long into their journey. Five thousand years for them. Two hundred generations . . . I know we have been through lots of relativistic distortions on this journey. Every so often it hits you in the face, the human reality of it.’

  Asher nodded. ‘The flora and fauna here. After Susan Chen and the rest were dumped at Goober’s Star, soon after the ship was captured, I imagine the rest of the Gourd crew being dropped here, along with samples of the lifedome’s contents. The basic frame of the cupworld must already have been in place: the land and oceans, the matter and energy cycles, the weather systems. Maybe even some kind of basic ecosystem, or a support for one. Maybe the Xeelee had some way of subtly helping out with that. I mean, if you can build mountains and oceans, making a little of the right type of soil, maybe, with some kind of engineered bacteria sympathetic to our kind of life, isn’t such a stretch.

  ‘So the crew was dumped here, and they unpacked, and started to adapt, to build a home. Once Earth life got a foothold, it would have dug in and expanded. The Gourd was a greenship, like the Island. Parkland. Trees and bushes and grass, and a little museum-piece farming: corn, root vegetables, potatoes. And the animals, not much besides chickens and rabbits—’

  ‘And rats,’ Jophiel said. ‘Don’t forget the rats. I saw a gaggle of village kids playing with what I thought was a small dog. It wasn’t.’

  ‘So they survived, and spread out to the ocean shore and the mountains. The animals would have grown wild, and evolved into new forms – or maybe, rather, recovered some of the characteristics that had been domesticated out of them. Human-driven adaptations that were only a few thousand years deep themselves, of course.’

  Jophiel glanced up. ‘That’s the wreck of a Spline ship up there. At Goober’s Star, the Ghosts were using their own tangleships. Their opponents, the Qax, used the Spline.’

  Asher shrugged.
‘So maybe the Qax came here too. Or the Ghosts captured their ships. It was a long war they fought—’

  This aspect of the Wheel was troubling Jophiel, whenever he thought about it. The Xeelee had crossed the Galaxy to wipe out mankind. Why, then, create refuges for it here? But then, he realised, everything about the true agenda of the Xeelee in this place was still a mystery . . .

  A distant scream.

  Inside the tepee, everybody fell silent. A mutual wariness now turned to suspicious glares.

  The scream cut off abruptly.

  Max stood up. ‘That sounded like Chinelo.’

  Now Jophiel heard a new voice, steadily repeating some kind of incantation, or prayer – or maybe a simple request. A voice that was familiar. But not human.

  A voice that was flat, mechanical, a wheezing, groaning tone.

  A voice that sounded to Jophiel like a Ghost.

  Everybody was on their feet now.

  Poole said, ‘Let’s keep calm. Max, you make sure that squad of yours keeps their weapons out of sight. I mean it. I don’t think our fragile relationship with these folks will stand another attempted murder.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Max said, glowering. ‘Even if it is our turn.’

  ‘Elder Toma,’ Poole said, bowing, ‘I suggest we see what the trouble is before we start blaming anybody. Our crew member Chinelo is a child—’

  ‘A child soldier,’ Max muttered.

  The elder woman glared at him.

  Poole insisted, ‘There may be some simple explanation for this.’

  As it turned out, he was quite wrong.

  Outside that largest tepee, Chinelo was being held by two burly locals, with sharp stone blades at her throat. She looked alarmed, but not panicked.

  She was at the centre of quite a tableau, it seemed to Jophiel. Everybody in the village seemed to have come to see what the excitement was. Skin tattoos swirled across psychedelic faces.

  And a big rat, with a collar like a pet dog, ran excited through a forest of legs.