Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  Harris murmured, ‘Just stay calm. They’re acting on instinct. They can’t work out if you’re a predator out to eat them, or a rival runner meaning to attack them, or steal their kids. So you have a mix of instinctive responses.’

  Jophiel frowned. ‘Instinctive?’

  ‘I agree,’ Asher said. ‘Instinctive, not decision-making as we understand it. I’ve been analysing their speech. That threat she just uttered, Jophiel. Barely any semantic content. Just a screech of challenge, or warning. As we said, just like in the jungle, this isn’t an environment where a big heavy brain is an asset. If you put all that energy into running, instead . . .’

  ‘And give it half a million years,’ Jophiel said a little bitterly, ‘then the result is this. Beautiful emptiness.’

  ‘Now you’re being parochial, Jophiel. These are animals, perfectly fit to their environment. In fact I think they’re a close analogue of Homo erectus. More of those, umm, living solutions, evidently still there in our genomes for when they are needed again. And probably easy for evolution to reach for – if I can put it that way. Just changes in the relative growth rates of organs, for instance.’

  ‘Bigger hearts. Smaller heads.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Max Ward growled, ‘Maybe so. But they lost their humanity. And they’re not even the dominant animal on this savannah. Are they? As Wina said, they’re just scavengers.’

  Susan scowled. ‘What of it? Homo erectus lasted millions of years. Maybe they will last just as long here. When we are long gone, pursuing our foolish dreams, their children will still be here, running in the light—’

  Without warning, with a snap, Jophiel was brought back to the flyer.

  He staggered, feeling a little drunk. ‘Ow. A little warning would have been nice. And I bet you scared the runners again.’

  Michael Poole stood before him, grinning. ‘Never mind the runners. We’ve got much bigger news than that.’

  Jophiel guessed wildly, ‘Your drones have reported in.’

  Nicola stood back, arms folded. ‘Some of them. In particular the one we sent to the summit of Central Mountain—’

  ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘It found a wormhole.’

  SIX

  In case of emergency, break laws of physics.

  Harry Poole, ad 3829

  66

  Ship elapsed time since launch: 27 years 182 days

  Earth date: c. ad 2,710,000

  Nicola stayed at the top of the mountain, and sent the uncrewed flyer back for the rest. They loaded up quickly.

  Then, under Michael Poole’s piloting, the flyer swept smoothly up the western flank of Central Mountain.

  The higher they climbed, the more fake the mountain looked to Jophiel. The lower slopes, where the mountain emerged from a sea of grassland, seemed authentic enough, with grass, scrub, and scattered clumps of trees clinging to an increasingly steep rocky face. There were animals there too, post-rabbits with skinny frames and long legs that made them look like goats – and, in one place, as Chinelo excitedly pointed out, people: or post-people anyhow, a small band of enterprising hunters who scattered at the approach of this unfamiliar monster, the flyer.

  From here, when Jophiel turned and glanced back, he got a wide view of the landscapes of the cupworld. A swathe of grassland, a patch of forest, a river decanting into a lake that flooded a strangely angular basin. From up here the land looked as if it had been cracked and broken, the fragments crudely glued back together.

  Past a certain height the efforts of life to colonise gave way to bare rock.

  Then, higher still as the flyer continued its relentless climb towards a sky of rippling light, the rock itself started to show gaps, like a canvas stretched so far its paint had cracked and flaked away, and Jophiel saw the pale uniform gleam of hull plate, the true substrate of this mask world. But the hull plate itself looked jumbled, tipped up, distorted. Nicola pointed out ridges of thicker material where, apparently, new hull plate had been grown over to seal wounds.

  And a mountain that was evidently no mountain at all.

  Jophiel wondered if it had been something like the creation of a central mountain in a lunar crater, caused by a strike by an asteroid or comet nucleus. Such a mountain was a kind of frozen, reflected ripple at the centre of a circular scar, in bedrock that had been smashed and broken and melted and splashed. Hull plate wasn’t bedrock, but maybe this mountain was a similar phenomenon, a wave of destruction that had focused here at the geometric centre of the roughly circular cupworld – a focused distortion that had thrust up this kilometres-high peak – and then, as the hull plate somehow recovered, been left frozen in place.

  There was a kick as the flyer’s small fusion-powered rockets cut in and an aircraft morphed into a spacecraft. They flew above the air now. Above Jophiel’s head, the artificial sky was deepening to a blue-black, across which the strange day-night bands of brighter illumination were strikingly obvious, and through which the red stars of the Galaxy centre could clearly be seen, a dismal veil.

  The flyer at last soared up and over a rim.

  Here, Xeelee hull plate had been stretched beyond endurance and, at last, had torn and cracked. The result was a fence of jagged, lethal-looking peaks, spikes of stretched hull plate, through which the flyer swam smoothly.

  And beyond the fence, the summit itself spread out before them. It was a plain of what looked like pure hull plate, more smashed fragments crudely stitched together, with here and there clumps of broken rock. Poole brought the flyer low down as it crossed an expanse fully fifty kilometres wide, enclosed by those hull-plate spikes. Jophiel was reminded of flights over Olympus Mons, greatest mountain on Mars, a volcano whose summit was a plain pocked by multiple calderas.

  And there, at what looked to Jophiel like the geometric centre, a bright spot of Earth green: a dome, the shelter that had supported Nicola through her stay up here, while she had sent back the flyer for Poole and the rest.

  Beside the dome, a scrap of sky blue.

  A cube.

  Floating above the ground.

  The flyer landed a respectful distance away. The crew clambered down to the surface.

  And surface, not ground, Jophiel thought, was the right word for this section of the artificial world. Here at the climax of this tremendous wound, the hull plate was bare, exposed in places, fractured into overlapping plates that were stitched together by clumsy, thick welds.

  The Cauchy crew, in their skinsuits, clambered cautiously over this as they made for Nicola’s dome.

  ‘Take it slow,’ Nicola said, greeting them. She wore her custom-adapted skinsuit. ‘Easy to crack an ankle up here; we’re still under a full gravity, remember.’

  And she led them to her discovery. The sky-blue artefact.

  They clustered around it. Close to, the object seemed as simple as it had from a distance, Jophiel thought. Just a cube, maybe ten metres on a side. Jophiel thought he saw faint lines in the surface, nested squares engraved within the otherwise smooth faces.

  And the cube was floating, a metre off the ground. No apparent support.

  Asher checked this out. She got down on her hands and knees, waved a gloved hand under the floating box. Repeated the exercise with a grappling rod she took from the flyer. ‘Nothing holding it up.’ She shrugged. ‘Antigravity? Electrostatics? Some kind of repulsion effect from the hull plate?’

  Poole growled, ‘In the circumstances that seems a minor miracle. But this doesn’t look like any kind of wormhole to me, Nicola.’

  She shrugged. ‘Maybe it isn’t a wormhole. You’re the specialist, Michael. You haven’t seen it all, yet. “Wormhole” was the best label I had for it.’

  ‘Show me, then.’

  She walked up to the cube and traced the engravings in the nearest face. ‘See these marks? That look like the edges of
hatches? That’s exactly what they are. Hatches. And remarkably simple.’ With one gloved hand she pushed at the innermost panel, which swung up and back as if from a hinge set in the top edge, revealing a way into the cube, a hole in the wall maybe a metre across.

  A blue glow within, Jophiel saw.

  ‘It just seems to fold back. I didn’t investigate the mechanics of that too closely. The lack of a hinge seemed another minor miracle, as you put it, Poole. But before I went in I did establish that the bigger groove marks are indeed the edges of another hatch. For passing wider loads, I guess. Very practical.’

  ‘Hold up,’ Max Ward said. ‘You were up here alone. You went in? Without reporting back, without backup?’

  ‘Spare me the military protocol, Max. Tell me you wouldn’t have done the same thing.’

  ‘Never mind,’ Poole said. ‘Show us.’

  She fetched a short ladder from her life-support dome, set it against the floating cube, stepped back, and grinned. ‘Cube off the ground, ladder leaning against its side. Looks like some surrealist art installation, don’t you think? And an unassuming bit of kit for such an epochal discovery, you’ll agree.’

  ‘Get on with it,’ Poole growled.

  ‘Barbarian.’ With a fluid grace that belied her bulk, she climbed the ladder, then gripped the frame, swung her legs into the hatchway, and dropped through and out of sight. ‘Still hear me? Have to admit I kept that hatch propped open when I was in here on my own.’

  Chinelo immediately said, ‘I’ll go in with her—’

  ‘No,’ Poole said. ‘Not until we know what we’re dealing with.’ He glanced at Jophiel. ‘You, Jophiel. You next.’

  Asher frowned. ‘His survival or otherwise will prove nothing about the safety of the containment for regular humans.’

  Jophiel smiled. ‘True. But, once again, it is a test of our systems. And I am disposable, relatively. Only one way to find out,’ he muttered. He snapped his fingers.

  And here he was, inside the cube. Standing beside Nicola on a smooth floor. Within blank walls that seemed to glow with their own soft blue light. The floor and ceiling too.

  In this wash of light the two of them cast no shadows.

  Nicola was grinning at him. ‘Once again, the two of us into the unknown. The heart of the Sun, the centre of the Galaxy. Now this. It’s getting to be a habit, Jophiel.’

  Jophiel grinned back.

  Poole called, ‘Still with us, Jophiel?’

  ‘Still here,’ he reported. ‘The systems embedded in Nicola’s suit are evidently maintaining my projection. Like they’re supposed to.’ All human tech was designed to support augmented reality, unobtrusively. And it worked, even in an environment as extreme as this.

  He looked around. This was an almost featureless box. There were more of those hatchway grooves, their function obvious, in walls, roof and floor. Otherwise, nothing. He pulled a softscreen from a pouch on his skinsuit leg, shook it out; it was a Virtual construct but slaved to the flyer’s systems. He began to upload instrument analyses, hoping Asher would be able to squeeze out more meaning than he had so far.

  He felt a little lost.

  Nicola was watching him with a mocking grin. ‘Come on, Jophiel, even I made faster progress than this. What do you see?’

  ‘Lots more hatches,’ he said lamely.

  ‘Well spotted. All functional as well.’

  ‘Big hatches and little hatches?’

  ‘They all work. Try them . . . Oh, you can’t. Poor ghostly Jophiel. Well, I discovered you can just push them open from either side. I felt like a rat in a lab cage, exploring all this. All leading nowhere, just out of the cube. Save for . . .’ She glanced at the floor.

  He looked down at the usual set of nested edges. ‘Save for what? A trapdoor to the ground? I mean, it’s only a metre’s clearance between the ground and this floating box; those big hatches wouldn’t even open all the way before fouling.’

  She shrugged. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Show me.’

  She knelt, a little stiffly in her confining skinsuit, leaned forward, and pressed on the floor’s innermost hatch. It hinged down easily, not impeded at all by the ground that was, Jophiel thought, supposed to be in the way.

  Hinged down, to reveal a blue glow. Shining up from the hole.

  Jophiel came forward cautiously. He should have been looking through a hole in the floor to a ground of scarred hull plate and scattered dirt. Instead—

  Another room.

  He knelt and ducked down to see more.

  The lower chamber was identical to the room he was in, complete with hatch marks on the walls and floor – and, presumably, in the ceiling he was looking down through. It was like looking into a mirror, or a still pond, a reflection of the room behind him – but without his own face peering back at him.

  He leaned back. ‘A room ten metres deep, where there should be a metre of vacuum above a solid floor.’

  ‘You got it.’

  ‘A paradox? Some kind of illusion? Like a Virtual trick?’

  She shook her head. ‘More physical than that. I went further. I climbed down . . .’

  Jophiel suppressed a groan, not wishing to sound like Max Ward. ‘Of course you did. Thousands of kilometres from the nearest backup.’

  ‘If it’s some illusion, it’s a remarkable one. I was able to stand up straight, down there. I even improvised a measuring rod from the flyer’s repair kit. I opened it out to twenty metres, from the floor of that lower chamber to the ceiling of this upper. This space is as real as that measuring rod, as me – and a lot more real than you.’

  He stood up. ‘Fine. But, Nicola, you called this a wormhole. Some kind of – of higher-dimensional trickery doesn’t make it that.’

  ‘I know that. A wormhole is a road, a route. But, you see, I went further. I opened the lower hatch, down in the cellar there. Nothing but darkness. Even I didn’t take the chance of going further. But I did drop in a drone probe. It passed through the hatch space easily enough. I think it’s still down there. Well, I know it is. I programmed it to observe, report back. But there was a mismatch. It took seventeen minutes, here, to capture a single microsecond’s worth of data, gathered down there.’

  Jophiel ran those numbers in his head. ‘Ah. A million to one.’

  ‘Yes, you see it. Time down there, in the sub-cellar, is running at the same rate as down on Deck One, where the Xeelee lives. And so the obvious conclusion—’

  ‘Is that it is down on Deck One. That this nest of cubes is a passageway. Good thinking.’

  ‘And that is why I called it a wormhole. It’s not, but it’s obviously a – transit system. Across more than a thousand astronomical units, from up here to down there. It somehow manages the speed-up transition, the time dilation. But because of that—’

  ‘It’s effectively one-way.’

  She looked at him. ‘Michael Poole is going to go through.’

  Jophiel nodded. ‘And we must follow,’ he said.

  67

  ‘I knew it,’ said Michael Poole. ‘As soon as Nicola and Asher suggested it, I knew they were right. This mountaintop had to be a construction shack.’

  Poole was pacing in the confined space of Nicola’s survival shelter, his skinsuit hood lying back on his neck to reveal thick hair that was greying despite decades of AS treatment. A blunt face, Jophiel thought, once again watching himself from the outside, the skin space-pale, somehow coarsened by habitual expressions of determination. And a very different Poole from Jophiel’s occasional visitor – who was maybe no older, physically, but wiser. Gentler. This was a Michael Poole whose life, whose universe, had taken a wrong turning, Jophiel thought now. Yet still this damaged, flawed Michael Poole led all the humans on this Wheel – and Jophiel himself.

  They sat and listened: Jophiel, Nicola, Max, Susan, Chinelo. The rest
of the crew was scattered: back up at the Rim Mountains with the trucks, some still down on the plain. But some had projected Virtuals over – including, to Jophiel’s mild surprise, Michaela Nadathur, first of the next generation. Maybe the wider crew sensed this was a key moment.

  They probably weren’t wrong, Jophiel thought.

  ‘I knew it,’ Poole said again. ‘There had to be an access point, a base, for the work required to fix up this cupworld, if not the whole of this part of the Wheel. And the mountain, not really part of the cupworld at all, was an obvious place to put the wormhole.’

  Which was the name they had settled on for a transport technology that was, Jophiel thought, as far advanced over the old Poole Industries spacetime wormholes as those wormholes themselves were advanced over George Stephenson’s first passenger railways. But Nicola’s label had stuck.

  ‘Maybe it even came through itself, if its physical size allowed it.’ Poole glared around. ‘Maybe the Xeelee was right here, on this cupworld. And maybe it left the wormhole in place in case it needed to come back here and fix more stuff.

  ‘And if the Xeelee can travel this way, then we can follow it. Just as Nicola already proved with her drone . . . We thought we were cut off from Deck One by the damage done to the Wheel. Well, we aren’t – thanks to the Xeelee itself. Now we can go and finish the job we came to do.’

  By Michael Poole’s standards, that was meant to be an uplifting speech, Jophiel realised.

  He was met by flat silence.

  At length Chinelo Thomas, eighteen years old, got to her feet. ‘We’ve followed you this far, Michael, and I guess we’ll go the rest of the way too.’ She sat again.

  Wina of High Australia stood too. ‘You have my arrows, Michael Poole.’

  But now Michaela Nadathur stood up. Thirty-one years old, quiet, grave, slim, and apparently more interested in sports challenges than the affairs of the ship. Jophiel didn’t think he’d ever heard her speak at a crew briefing before. Yet she had a certain quiet authority. And, it seemed, this time she had something to say.