Poole first this time, Max following, they disappeared through that enigmatic hatch, into darkness.
Chinelo, Nicola, Jophiel hung back. Jophiel was aware of Asher, outside, watching anxiously.
After a few heartbeats Nicola called, ‘Michael? Max? Are you OK in there?’
‘I . . .’ Poole’s voice. ‘Come through.’
They glanced at each other. Then Nicola climbed through, followed by Chinelo.
Jophiel was the last. And he climbed, through a mundane hole in the wall, into—
Twisted horror.
At first he could make no sense of the shapes he saw. The patches of colour that slid through his field of view. The lack of clear edges. No absence of any sense of relative positions, distances. When he turned his head, the scene seemed to swim around him – as if projected from his own eyes – and yet not quite, as if the very act of his turning caused the space around him to distort.
There was no roof above, just what looked like the interior of a pyramid, of four, five, six sides – the number was meaningless; the order of it changed as he tried to count his way around. The floor underneath his feet, though it felt as flat as that of the Second Room had been, rippled in his field of view, slowly, like viscous oil.
And on that shifting surface stood Max. Standing straight, but at an odd, oblique angle.
He determinedly closed his eyes. He dropped his head. When he looked again, it was at his own body. Trying to ignore the background under his feet, he concentrated on finding the Virtual comms cable that trailed from his own waist. There, there it was, a silver line of human artifice snaking back through the chaos.
And he followed other cables, and found Chinelo, and then Nicola, her bulk unmistakable. They stood as still as he was, upright, apparently calm. And yet at angles, as if in a tipped gravity field. Stiff toys roughly scattered.
‘It’s like Gallia Three,’ Michael Poole said.
Nicola’s voice sounded faint. ‘What? What did you say?’
‘Or Larunda. A spinning habitat. Think about it. Where gravity doesn’t just point down, but at odd angles. Where the sky is a grassy field above your head. Think, Nicola. Imagine if you dropped a few of the grassland runners from High Africa into a place like Gallia. Wouldn’t they be baffled? Scared? We could understand the logic, figure it out. But—’
‘But not this,’ Jophiel said. ‘An artefact beyond our comprehension.’
A kind of snow seemed to be coalescing around him now: not falling from any sky, not condensing like a mist, but big, soggy flakes just appearing, as if blowing around some invisible corner.
‘That’s all this is,’ Michael Poole said, determined, dogged. ‘An artefact. We know the Xeelee is a relic of a different age – when the universe was very young, when spacetime itself was chaotic. Maybe this is some reflection of how it sees the world – a mixture of our perceptions, and its own . . . I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. Listen. We knew it would be like this. Didn’t we? Even the wormhole between the Decks was – folded. But our instruments still work. Things still make sense. In the end it’s just another big room. And we can walk to the far side. Max? Max, you agree?’
There was no reply from Max. It was hard even to see him in the chaos. A glance at Jophiel’s wrist screen showed that the man was still breathing, if raggedly, heart still pumping but too fast.
Poole said, ‘Lethe, I didn’t pay him enough attention. Look – Max – close your eyes if you have to. Stay still, and I’ll come to get you . . .’
‘No,’ Chinelo said, sounding calm. Unimpressed even, Jophiel thought. ‘I’m closer, Michael, and I’m behind him. I can see him. I’ll fetch him, and bring him to you . . .’
After she had brought him back they gathered around a silent, stiff Max Ward. Huddled, for human companionship, comfort. After a quick conference they decided to go on, at least one more chamber. And by common consent, despite Max’s feeble protests, they decided not to leave a sentry in the twisted-up space of the Third Room.
So they advanced together, holding gloved hands – save Jophiel – human beings helping each other creep through twisting distorted strangeness. One step at a time.
Until they reached the hatch on the far wall.
All five clambered through. Max moved without a murmur, obeying simple orders, responding when gently pushed or pulled.
And, in the next room, Jophiel found himself staring at the Great Attractor.
This Fourth Room at least seemed conventional, as far as its floor, ceiling, and three of its walls were concerned. Just that ubiquitous sky-blue surface, engraved with the usual marks of hatches, nested in their different sizes.
But the fourth wall:
Open space. A curtain of stars. A magnificent diorama two hundred metres across. Almost overwhelming.
And there, hanging in space, a loop, a thing of lines and curves.
The viewpoint was positioned somewhere above the plane of the loop. The near side of the construct formed a tangled, impenetrable fence, twisted exuberantly, with shards of light glittering through the morass – light distorted by spacetime defects, perhaps, Jophiel thought. The far side of the object was visible as a pale, braided band, remote across the sky. The rough disc of space enclosed by the artefact seemed virtually clear – save, Jophiel saw as he looked more carefully, for a single, glowing point of light, right at the geometric centre of the loop.
They all must have known immediately what this was, Jophiel reflected. They had all studied Asher’s blurred, edge-of-resolution images, of – this. The Great Attractor. The Xeelee Ring. And that central pinpoint was a doorway to another universe, if Asher, and the Ghost, were right.
Nicola murmured, ‘A sense of perspective.’
‘What?’
‘What we need above all in this universe. Especially you Pooles. And just to give you a sense of perceptive—’ She pointed, off to the right of the image. ‘My Ghost eyes are better than yours. See that blur?’
Jophiel frowned, staring. He gave in to the rare temptation to enhance his vision, to use his Virtual eyes’ zoom feature. His eyes itched as he stared.
Nicola’s ‘blur’, a mere detail on the image wall, was a handsome spiral.
‘That’s a galaxy,’ he murmured. ‘A whole galaxy. As big as ours, maybe, that we just took twenty-five thousand years to cross. And it’s dwarfed by this ring, this single object.’
A damaged galaxy too. Its structure seemed broken, one spiral arm twisting out like a tail – perhaps it had been distorted by the gravity field of the immense object nearby.
‘And, look further.’ Poole pointed at more distant stars. Jophiel imagined they must be brilliant, supergiants, to be individually visible across such distances. ‘The stars on the far side of the ring, the galaxies . . . I think their light is tinged blue. Blue-shifted. But it would be, wouldn’t it? This is the Great Attractor. The place all the stars are falling into. Where all the light is falling. And at the heart of it all, the Xeelee artefact.’
‘It is . . . wonderful,’ Chinelo said. ‘And horrible.’
Nicola said, ‘Whatever it is, it’s a hundred and fifty million light years away from our Galaxy. Yet we see it. How? This whole Xeelee structure is about folded spacetime, isn’t it? And I guess we are looking across one Lethe-spawned monster of a fold.’ She held up a silver hand, reached out. ‘I wonder what would happen if you tried to walk through this wall.’
‘I wouldn’t advise it,’ Michael Poole said.
‘Why not?’ Chinelo asked. ‘It looks so real.’
‘I know . . . I suspect it is real, in some sense,’ Poole said. ‘A true image of the artefact, not some simulation. Given that to ask what is “true”, what is “real”, what is there “now”, is only going to produce unsatisfactory answers across intervals of millions of light years. But I don’t think this is another Xeelee transit sy
stem – another super-wormhole. I think this is some kind of viewer. Like a light pipe maybe. The Xeelee can see where its fellows are, has been able to watch the construction of this ring. Obviously useful. But it can only get there using its faster-than-light drive, when the construction is done.’
‘Right,’ Jophiel said. ‘Otherwise it would have gone through by now. I guess their wormhole technology has its limits.’
‘If this is just a pretty picture,’ Chinelo said, ‘we should copy it back to Asher and move on. We haven’t found what we came for. Not yet.’
‘Agreed,’ Poole said. He glanced around at his team; Jophiel and Nicola nodded their acceptance.
Jophiel was impressed by Chinelo’s briskness.
Max, though, just stared at the light show.
When Poole touched his shoulder, he seemed to come back to himself with a start. He looked at Poole, glanced at the others, and walked off, curtly, to the far wall of the chamber, the next hatch.
Jophiel and Nicola shared a concerned glance.
Another hatch, easily pushed open. The stepladder unfolded once more.
They stepped into another room of twisted space, just as baffling and incomprehensible as the Third Room had been.
But Chinelo stared at the floor, the walls. ‘I think there’s something in here with us.’
They all froze.
Poole glared around. ‘Not quagma phantoms.’
‘No. Something bigger. More – ordinary-looking. There!’ She pointed, sharply.
Jophiel saw it. A couple of creatures – if creatures they were – fist-sized, scurrying across the floor and out of sight in the chaos. A blur of legs.
And Chinelo said softly, ‘Look. Look at me.’
When Jophiel glanced over he saw that one of the ‘beetles’ was climbing up her arm, as if inquisitive. It was insect-like, about the size of Chinelo’s hand, with a smooth black carapace. It looked like an Anthropocene-era artillery shell, Jophiel thought, a museum piece, cut in half.
‘I can’t tell how it’s moving,’ Chinelo said. ‘I don’t think it has legs, like a regular insect. I can’t feel any legs, through my suit. I can feel – like rippling.’ Cautiously she turned her arm over. The beetle clung on, apparently unperturbed.
‘I think you’re safe enough,’ Poole said cautiously. ‘If they were going to do us or our stuff any harm – like the quagma phantoms – they’d have done it as soon as we walked through the hatch. Take care, though.’
Now a beetle approached Max, scurrying over the floor. Max seemed to recoil; he actually staggered backwards, calling out, until Chinelo, following close behind, caught him.
‘Private line,’ Nicola muttered now. ‘To you two Pooles. I knew it. I knew this guy would crack up. A quarter-century of marching and drilling and posturing, and now this.’
Jophiel murmured, ‘We were expecting conflict. Max knows conflict. He fought a human war, and won. He’s been able to cope, as we’ve progressed to this point. One long straight line across the Galaxy. But, crawling around this Wheel like ants around an empty swimming pool, he can’t expand his mind to accommodate this strangeness.’
Poole grunted. ‘Which doesn’t necessarily mean he’s less sane than us, if you think about it. All right. I’ll give him an out. But we go on. Agreed? Nicola?’
‘We go on,’ she said quietly.
Poole’s solution was simple. They went back one step, to the Fourth Room, the Great Attractor diorama. He told Ward he needed him to stay here as sentry. He would be doing his duty, serving as a key link back to Asher and the rest of the crew. Ward seemed barely able to nod, but he accepted the arrangement.
‘He’s trapped,’ Nicola said brutally. ‘Can’t go forward because of existential fear. Can’t go back because of his pride. Hate to admit it, Poole, but you found a smart solution there. Ha! And this is the man who was going to dismantle me.’
‘He came up against his limits, that’s all. Let’s see what happens when you reach your limit, Nicola.’
‘Yes,’ she said coldly. ‘Let’s see.’
So the four of them, Nicola, Poole, Jophiel, Chinelo, leaving Max behind, scrambled back through the doorway into the Fifth Room.
Chinelo led the way this time, boldly striding through chaos. She even carried the spool of comms cable that had previously been fixed to Max’s waist. At least they had figured out how to cross such spaces now. You pretty much shut your eyes, stuck out your hands, stepped forward one pace at a time, and hoped, Jophiel thought.
Another wall, another hatch. They all looked through, into another empty room – roof, floor, and four walls this time. Except that a hatch was already open in one side wall.
And through that hatch Asher Fennell was staring back at them. The comms cable trailed away from that hatch, off into the interior of the Nest through another open hatch in the opposite wall.
‘No,’ Chinelo said. ‘That can’t be right. That’s the Second Room, with the quagma phantoms. We walked in a straight line through all those rooms and we ended up back where we started. A straight line!’
Jophiel found himself staring at the comms cable they had dragged through room after room, which now, somehow, was meeting its other end, an impossible loop.
Asher grinned. ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ she called.
‘A straight line, though!’ Chinelo said.
Jophiel and Poole shared a glance. They, like Asher and presumably Nicola, had been aware of the Nest’s peculiar hypergeometry from the time they had walked across the first chamber and into the next, where no chamber had been. And perhaps it was that dichotomy, impossible to resolve in a human perspective, that had pushed Max over the edge.
‘Indeed,’ Jophiel said. ‘Odd, isn’t it?’
Poole suddenly seemed to remember he was de facto leader of the little unit. Brusquely, he ordered everybody to clamber through the hatch back to the Second Room – and out, out of the Nest, back to the hull-plate floor, under relativistic Wheel light, with Asher. There were ration packs and water bottles here; Poole and Chinelo grabbed some of these and replenished their suits’ stores.
Jophiel just waited, ignoring simulated hunger. Just relieved to be out, for a while. Nicola stood apart, her silver face bathed in hull-plate glow.
‘A straight line!’ Chinelo kept protesting. ‘We walked in a straight line and still came in a circle. We could tie the ends of the comms cables together in a loop! How can that be? Some kind of trick?’
‘Not that,’ Asher said. ‘It’s all about distorted spacetime, Chinelo. I think this structure, and maybe the Deck Three wormhole too, is like a tesseract. A four-dimensional cube. You know the idea? On a softscreen you can draw a square, in two dimensions. Print out six squares and you can fold them up and over to make a cube, the two-dimensional surfaces surrounding a three-dimensional space. And similarly, if you print out eight of those cubes, you can, in theory, fold them up into a fourth dimension. You get a hypercube, with eight faces – each of them an ordinary three-dimensional cube – enclosing a four-dimensional volume. When you were walking through the Rooms, you were walking over the three-dimensional surface of a four-dimensional hypercube. You were like ants crawling over the surface of a box – but never noticing the ninety-degree tilts where one square face joins the other, and never seeing the interior.’
Chinelo was, almost visibly, picturing this – imagining the ants with which the green areas of the Island’s life-dome had been infested – her face screwed into a frown. ‘And if the ant on the cube just kept walking in a straight line, after four faces—’
‘It would come back to where it started. You got it.’
Chinelo was nothing if not practical; she seemed to move on from that conceptual nightmare without skipping a beat. ‘So,’ she said. ‘What do we do now? If we went all around this – tesseract – and we didn’t find the Xeelee – oh, but we
didn’t see it all.’
Poole nodded. ‘That’s it. We saw five Rooms – including this outer box, the one that’s stuck in our three-dimensional space – out of eight.’
‘Three more to find, then. Where?’
Asher stepped forward and pointed back into the Second Room. ‘Doorways in all four walls – and in the floor and ceiling too.’
‘Ah.’ Chinelo nodded. ‘I get it. From here we can go up or down.’
Nicola smiled. ‘You choose.’
‘Down.’
‘Why?’
‘We’ve got rope to climb down. We haven’t got a long enough ladder to go up.’
Poole laughed out loud, and Jophiel wondered how long it had been since he’d heard that sound. ‘Good answer.’
Poole briskly started a new comms-cable trail from Asher’s position. Then he hefted his orange Gallia Three backpack, checked his laser weapon, and tugged at the comms line attached to his suit. ‘Everybody ready? Let’s try again. Follow me . . .’
So they went back into the Second Room, through the still open hatch. Once again Asher stood and watched them go.
This time Poole made straight for the nest of hatches in the floor, and pushed at one of the larger squares. A major section of the floor swung down, unimpeded. Jophiel remembered a similar setup at the High Africa construction shack. There was no room, beneath a structure floating in the air a metre off the ground, for that hatch to swing down. But it swung down even so.
Jophiel, standing back, glimpsed a textured darkness through the hatch. Textured, that was it: a gloom, but he seemed to see structure in there. Parallel planes, like shelving, but at an odd angle, like radiator louvres, maybe.
And – movement. Drifting lights.
Scuttling things, like beetles. He shuddered, an instinctive reaction.
Poole seemed fearless.
They let down a fine rope through the hatch, fixed to the upper floor by a Kahra pad. The rope, oddly, seemed to dangle at a slant inside the lower room.
Xeelee Redemption Page 41
