But he fell silent, as they had come to the entrance to another chamber.
This was even vaster than the refectory. This time Jophiel had the sense of a large pool – like an indoor swimming pool – but a pool brimming with a pale white liquid, that looked, and smelled, like milk.
In the pool, women swam. Some of them were heavily pregnant, their milk-coated bellies shining in the dim light. One or two had infants with them, very young, who shared the pool with the expectant mothers. Babies, swimming as confident as otters, Jophiel thought. And there were others here too, all female, all naked, slipping through the liquid to supervise the infants, or to bring the mothers bits of food or cups of drink.
Chinelo looked shocked at the sight, as Jophiel might have expected. There’s so many of them. And they all look alike. Like one big family.’
‘That’s exactly it. That’s what they are. Almost all sisters,’ Harris said gently. ‘I know it seems strange . . . This is a hive, Chinelo. A hive of humans. Like a colony of ants or bees – and it works the same way. At any one time there are only a few mothers, giving birth to the rest. If you aren’t a mother you give up your right to have children of your own in order to help your mother produce more babies – more sisters. It seems strange to us, but in nature it’s a very common way of living. It’s called eusociality – which actually means a perfect society. On Earth it turned up among the insects, the birds, the mammals, like rats and dogs—’
‘And humans,’ Michael Poole said. ‘As my distant ancestor George found in Rome – which was a very old city on Earth – when he went looking for his lost sister.’
Jophiel grunted. ‘And he figured out how it worked. Regina’s three rules. Sisters matter more than daughters.’
Harris said, ‘This is what you get in situations where there is nowhere to spread out, to get away from your mother. Probably there was something like a spring here, a bit of well-watered ground. Nothing else for kilometres around – nothing between here and the river, say. When you can’t get away from home, you have to cooperate with the family – and that becomes more important than thinking for yourself. You just copy your sisters, and they copy you. And the hive organises itself, out of all those little interactions.’
‘Ignorance is strength,’ Poole quoted. ‘Listen to your sisters. You just follow what everybody else is doing, and it generally works out . . .’
Now one of the swimming women came close to a gravid mother-to-be. She leaned over, as if meaning to kiss the mother. But she seemed to vomit, and regurgitated food flowed easily into the mother’s mouth.
‘I have to get out,’ Chinelo said suddenly. ‘I feel like I’m choking.’
‘Maybe you are,’ Harris said sternly. ‘The hive is rejecting you, just as you are rejecting it. Come on, let’s get you out of here.’ He consulted a softscreen map, and led the way out. Chinelo followed, with Poole.
Jophiel brought up the rear, feeling unreasonably glad to be escaping himself.
When they got out of the pyramid, Chinelo stumbled away into the light, and took deep, shuddering breaths. Harris discreetly checked her over.
But Chinelo looked less scared than angry, Jophiel thought.
She said, ‘Why would anybody want to live like this?’
‘Nobody would want to,’ Harris said. ‘The genes want us to. And what the genes want they generally get.’
‘I’ve always thought it’s a kind of trap for humanity,’ Jophiel said. ‘People survive, lots of them. And the genes win out. But it’s the end of history. The people here descended from Gourd crew, remember. They were just like us. But they have no meaningful future. A hive is an end.’
‘I don’t think there’s anything here for us,’ Asher called softly. ‘In the Library’s collection of data, I mean. The attendants out here were prepared to a answer questions. Much of it was surprisingly comprehensible for us. Max was right, actually. There is a lot of family history stuff. Who married who, who murdered who, dynastic squabbles. Some useful lore, on unusual weather systems for instance. Records of once-in-a-generation events. Useful for the locals, I mean.’
Poole prompted, ‘But for us—’
‘Nothing. They’ve forgotten where they came from, save for a few trace origin legends. They’ve forgotten they live on a big Wheel. I think it’s going to be like this all over this cupworld, Michael. This is an arid world, and it’s going to be studded by Coalescences like this. To quote the name George Poole gave to the hives.’
‘This whole cupworld is a trap,’ Poole muttered. ‘Max is right. The people here aren’t going anywhere. And if we don’t leave now, while we still have the technology to do it, we never will.’ He glanced around. ‘Everybody agreed? Then let’s get out of here.’
58
Ship elapsed time since launch: 26 years 95 days
The departure of the Cauchy crew from High Australia turned out to be a surprisingly moving sundering.
After five weeks here, as measured by the local time of Deck Two, it took several flights of the Cauchy’s solitary flyer to lift the crew and their materiel back from the First Slaver village and up to the Rim Mountains, and then through the Lid to the vacuum of the upper Deck itself.
As this process neared its end, with Jophiel intently watching from the village as the flyer disappeared into the sky yet again, Susan Chen approached him. ‘You are missing all the fun,’ she said.
He turned; he hadn’t heard her approach. He noticed Wina standing behind her, a few paces back, looking awkward – avoiding eye contact, yet clearly wanting something.
‘Sorry, Susan. I’m kind of distracted today.’
‘In case something goes wrong?’
‘We’re short of fall-back options. I mean, we only have one functioning flyer. I suppose we could walk out of here, if we had to.’ He glanced towards the horizon, where mist hid the Rim Mountains. ‘Heck of a climb, up into the vacuum – you’d need skinsuits in the end . . .’
She smiled, her ageless face barely moving. ‘I do worry when you Pooles begin to dream of such stunts. It is as if you might do it just for the fun of it.’
He had to grin. ‘You got that right. But I suppose if we Pooles hadn’t had that restless streak we wouldn’t be out here in the first place. Which is a pretty damning thing to say, given the ruin that has been brought down on the human race.’
She shook her head. ‘You have a sense of perspective your template lacks, I think. But it would be true arrogance if you Pooles imagined that the whole of human destiny, indeed the whole of Galactic history, had been shaped by your own character flaws.’
‘Hasn’t it?’
She shrugged. ‘If you hadn’t built your wormholes in the thirty-seventh century, isn’t it possible one of your competitors might have done the same thing in the thirty-eighth?’
He rubbed his nose ruefully. ‘There would have been a different statue at the Galaxy centre, though. To Bill Dzik, maybe.’
‘Quite. And, simply because you strive for some goal, it may not be true that any alternative is failure, so much as – well, as a choice of a different path. Suppose your flyer did fail; suppose we did find ourselves stranded here, on High Australia. Would that really be so bad? As you know there have been some who have taken that very option.’
He nodded. Somewhat to his surprise a half-dozen of the Cauchy complement had chosen to stay here, with Wina’s people. Four were older, veterans of Cold Earth, who had had enough displacement in their lives, and Jophiel, in retrospect, supposed they would likely have jumped ship at the first reasonably acceptable port of call. Another was Ben Goober, who had fallen in love, it seemed, with a boy from the village. Given the varying relativistic time shifts to be endured as humans crawled over this tremendous artefact, Jophiel could think of no way in which Ben and the other stay-behinds, once sundered from the crew, could be kept in touch. And yet Ben, like the others,
was determined.
‘How does Michael feel?’
Jophiel shrugged. ‘Conflicted, I guess. Well, there’s no change there. I do share some of it. I am him . . . I think he can see why people aren’t following. He understands the logic. But he’s clinging to a kind of inner core. “People have died to get us this far. I have to finish it.”’
‘Is that healthy?’
‘I have literally no idea. He goes on, anyhow.’
Susan said now, ‘And we do in fact have one volunteer coming the other way.’
‘Volunteer? . . .’ Slowly, understanding ground through his mind. ‘Ah. And that’s why you wanted to see me.’ He looked again at Wina. He saw that she carried her hunting pack, with its bow and arrows, as well as another bag filled with what looked like clothes, mementoes such as a chicken-doll made of wood and feathers, other junk.
Wina seemed intensely nervous, but intensely determined. ‘It is true. I, Wina, wish to travel with you from the Cauchy.’
He studied her, trying to think this through – trying to work out what was best for her. ‘You’re the only one of the village who’s asked to travel on with us.’
‘Our people were once like you. We travelled, before we were brought to this place by the First Slavers. Now I would travel on, in my turn.’
He looked around, at the village of wood and leather on this rusty plain. The girl before him in skins, with a bow and arrow in her pack. ‘Do you understand what it means to travel with us?’
She shrugged. ‘I know now that this world is a bowl set in a great table. We will climb out of this bowl, and travel to other bowls.’
‘Yes, but the relativistic time displacements – there would be no way back. That’s the important thing. You will be as if dead to your family. They will be as if dead to you.’
‘I understand,’ she said, quietly but firmly. ‘But I have my duty, you see.’
‘Duty?’
‘I might have killed Nicola Emry.’
‘You were only doing what you thought was best.’
She shook her head. ‘It was bad judgement. You had weapons that could have destroyed us all in a heartbeat. We were lucky that you were merciful. I should have been more patient. Watchful. Spared Nicola. Or, when I did strike, strike without fail. Murdered you in your sleep, for instance.’
Jophiel nodded, suppressing a grin. ‘Fair point.’
‘In the event I wounded Nicola unnecessarily. Our code is that in that circumstance I must support the victim, for as long as is deemed necessary.’
‘Well, if you’re sure—’
‘I have another duty too.’
‘And what’s that?’
She eyed them frankly. ‘I am told you intend to carry the First Slaver with you, away from this world.’
Jophiel nodded. ‘The Ghost, yes. We didn’t believe we should leave it here. Not when we have the capacity to—’
‘Rescue it?’ Susan Chen smiled. ‘Michael Poole always comes to the rescue.’
‘I will guard you,’ Wina said. ‘From the First Slaver. Just as my elders guarded me from it, while I grew up.’
He thought it over. ‘Very well. Valid arguments. Welcome aboard.’
‘One other thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Will you tell my mother for me?’
Jophiel himself rode the flyer on its last journey out of the village.
In all they had spent nearly forty days in High Australia, in the cupworld. They had been so high out of the Wheel’s relativistic pit that a mere fifty years had elapsed in the external universe.
And just five minutes on Deck One, where the Xeelee lurked.
59
Like the journey from Deck One to High Australia, the journey of the Cauchy convoy to their new destination was simple in principle.
Simple if you drew it on a softscreen sketch diagram. As always, Jophiel reflected, it was the sheer, immense, mind-crushing scale of the great artefact over which they crawled that was the real challenge.
Their nominal target now was ‘Earth Three’, the second Earthlike cupworld they had spotted in the hasty survey carried out during the Cauchy’s first flyby across the Wheel, up on Deck Three. The seniors all felt nervous, Jophiel thought, about their reliance on this target. After all, they hadn’t been able to update their records since the flyby. Once stuck on Deck One they had been looking up at the underside of Deck Two, with none of the upper decks’ surfaces visible. And given they faced a journey of significant fractions of a light year by tracked vehicle, they couldn’t afford to make a wrong choice of destination.
The best guess was still that Earth Three was the nearest easily habitable world within their reach. And besides, as Michael Poole pointed out, Deck Three would give them an even greater time-dilation advantage over Deck One and the Xeelee itself, their ultimate target.
So that was where they determined to make for.
To get there, they would need to climb a strut, up to the third deck.
And that meant going back the way they had come, to the nearest strut, ninety days at a brisk six per cent of lightspeed, returning via the counter-current of the hull-plate river that had carried them to High Australia.
Ninety more days. It sounded fine in theory, but now, after the open spaces of High Australia, to be shut up again inside the convoy trucks was frustrating. Harris spoke darkly of mental health issues among the crew.
Still, they got through it.
Climbing the strut was the next challenge. As before it took them a day to transfer the trucks cautiously to the strut’s vertical face.
Then the climb began. The trucks were like a line of ants, Jophiel thought, climbing through the structure of a giant Ferris wheel. For the first hours Jophiel huddled with Poole, Asher and Nicola in the lead truck’s cabin, watching the Deck Two surface slowly recede behind them, now looking like an apparently vertical wall.
The greatest uncertainty this time was how long it would take to traverse the strut from Deck Two up to Deck Three.
Poole set out the numbers. ‘We know we took ten days, in the hull-plate stream, to climb the strut from Deck One to Two. Which was only about an eighth of an astronomical unit. Just a third of the distance of Mercury from the Sun, say. The climb to Deck Three is ten thousand times further. More like a jaunt to the Oort cloud.’
They laid bets on the journey time. Michael Poole aggressively predicted a mere ten days, a super-fast transition. Jophiel thought it would take a lot longer – a thousand days, perhaps, still by far exceeding the speeds of the first leg of the climb.
Nicola frowned as they discussed this, her flawless silver face reproducing the expression with precision, Jophiel thought. But she had a habit now of rubbing her chest, where Wina’s arrow had penetrated her Ghost-hide flesh. ‘Look – we’re crossing an interplanetary distance here. One a Poole GUTship could once have covered in a hundred days, burning at one gravity. Not so slow it takes for ever, not so fast it’s risky. I figure the Xeelee will make the same kind of calculation. I say a hundred days, give or take.’
In the event it took one hundred and three days before they reached the under-surface of Deck Three. Jophiel avoided a gloating Nicola for hours.
Then it was a day of transfer to Deck Three, and to find the river of hull plate that would sweep them to their next destination.
Earth Three was estimated as two hundred and forty-one more days away. Again the crew settled down, more or less reluctantly, to their truck-bound regime, for another eight months.
On the eightieth day, one-third of the way there, Asher called a meeting.
The seniors gathered in the lead truck. Jophiel turned up with a sense of inchoate dread. He thought they all seemed restless, nervous, afflicted by cabin fever. What now?
The fun part, relatively, turned out to be a review of As
her’s team’s latest observations of the Wheel, and its cupworlds.
‘We’ve refined our observations of the worlds we spotted before, on the flyby before we came down on Deck One. And we spotted plenty more on Deck Two, as we rose up along the spoke and had a chance to take a look back. Even on this deck we’ve managed to spy out new worlds, using high-flying remote probes. Glimpses anyhow.
‘You do realise we have no sensible estimate of how many cupworlds this structure might support. The cupworlds are pretty sparsely set out, and we don’t have a good model for their spacing, let alone their distribution—’
Poole waved a hand. ‘Show us some pretty pictures.’
Images lit up on softscreens spread over the walls of this small cabin. Dimples in the hull plate.
Most cupworlds seemed never to have been occupied at all. They stood empty, like healed scars.
Of the rest, only a few were remotely Earthlike.
Asher commented as the images flickered by. ‘You’ll understand we’re selecting for suitability here. We left out the Venus-like ovens, the gas-giant cloud worlds . . .’ She showed them quick highlights, images of increasingly exotic worlds. Worlds so cold that rivers of liquid helium flowed up mountains of water ice that was harder than basalt. Worlds hotter than Mercury, with surfaces of molten rock and rivers of iron, Asher said.
Airless, Moonlike worlds, on some of which, Asher said, traces of Ghost technologies may have been detected. Ambiguous evidence. But no Ghost activity had been spotted on this Deck . . .
‘Let’s ask the First Slaver,’ Jophiel suggested.
‘Let’s not,’ growled Max Ward. ‘Enough with the scenery. Show us the Earths.’
Most of the supposedly Earthlike cupworlds showed nothing but the blue-grey of ocean, Jophiel had already learned. Water worlds. Maybe that reflected the distribution of real worlds out in the Galaxy. Some bore scatterings of ice, and one or two were roofed over entirely by ice sheets. Others featured scraps of land breasting the ocean, island chains or summits that looked like volcanic calderas.
Xeelee Redemption Page 33
