Jophiel bent closer. ‘What, Nicola? What do you wonder?’
‘This is the Seventh Room, right? I lost count.’
Poole clung to her. ‘I lost it all. I lost Miriam. I can’t lose you too.’
‘I just . . . What’s in the Eighth Room?’
‘Nicola? Nicola! . . .’
74
Once they were outside the Nest, while the others cared for Nicola, Jophiel was dispatched to bring Max back.
The man stood rigid at his post as a sentinel. Without being able to touch him, it took Jophiel a lot of murmured reassurances, distractions and commands before Max allowed himself to be led out of the Nest.
Meanwhile, Asher and Chinelo salvaged what they could of Nicola’s skeletal structure, reconstructed it, patched up her hide, stuffed it with bandaging. And they set her before the Xeelee artefact, which floated serenely above the hull-plate floor.
So Nicola stood, naked in her silvered Ghost hide – no need for a skinsuit now – stood tall and straight, legs together, her arms crossed at her chest. Eyes wide open, staring at the Xeelee Nest.
When Jophiel returned with Max, Chinelo and Asher, having set Nicola up in this place, were standing back, considering. Jophiel knew that Michael Poole, trying to immerse himself in work, was huddled in the flyer. Max looked on silently, blankly bewildered.
Tentatively Chinelo ran her gloved hand over Nicola’s belly. ‘We did a good job putting her back together, didn’t we? You would never know.’
Asher nodded. ‘She would have liked that. She was never one to complain about weakness, or pain. Or even to show it. She’d appreciate dignity, though. Although I do wonder now if she’d have wanted to stand there making an obscene gesture at the Xeelee, for all eternity. Or at Michael Poole.’
Jophiel grinned. ‘I don’t think she’d have cared much, one way or another. I never met anybody with less sense of – an afterlife. Of continuity beyond death. I think that’s why, of all the religious creeds she studied, she was so attracted to the old Norse stories. For the Norse there was no creator god, no reward for virtue or courage, no salvation. The world came from nothing, is filled with brutal and destructive gods, and will go back to nothing.
‘But I think she’d like the irony that in the end she gave her life to save Poole’s mortal enemy, the Xeelee.’ He grinned again. ‘Also that she was the one who ended up with a statue at the centre of the Galaxy, instead of him. Even if it isn’t two kilometres tall.’
Asher said gently, ‘It’s been a long watch. Back to the flyer?’
Jophiel hesitated. ‘In a moment. There’s something Nicola would have wanted. Remember? One room we never explored. I need to go back in and finish the job.’ He looked up at the blank silver face. ‘For you, Nicola.’
When the others had returned to the flyer, Jophiel walked, alone, back towards the floating blue box.
Entered it.
From memory, and following discarded comms cables, he pieced together his route back through the higher-dimensional maze of the first seven Rooms.
Found the Eighth Room.
And then—
75
He was the last human.
He was beyond time and space. The great quantum functions which encompassed the universe slid past him like a vast, turbulent river, and his eyes were filled with the grey light against which all phenomena are shadows.
Time wore away, unmarked.
And then, millions of years after the Qax invasion, millions of years after his own descent into the wormholes, and deep time—
There was a box, drifting in space, cubical, clear-walled.
From around an impossible corner a human walked into the box. He wore a battered skinsuit, of an old-fashioned design.
He stared out, astonished, at stars, bright, teeming, young. Detonating.
Michael Poole’s extended awareness stirred.
Something had changed. History had resumed.
76
Ship elapsed time since launch: 28 years 288 days
Earth date: c. ad 3,998,000
After the return of the party to the main Cauchy convoy, events began to move quickly.
Once back in the womb-like interior of the flyer, Max had withdrawn even further into himself, and had scarcely spoken during the weeks of the journey. Now, as soon as the exploratory party got out of the flyer, Harris Kemp came rushing out to greet them, shot up Max with tranquillisers, and took him into the truck he used as his clinic. Harris ordered Max to relinquish all his duties for the foreseeable future, and Michael Poole himself took over Max’s role, as head of security and discipline.
Just now, Jophiel thought, that seemed to suit Poole’s mood.
After that brief, devastating burst of emotion following his assault on the Xeelee and the loss of Nicola, it was as if Poole had retreated to a kind of rigid core, a robotic inner self. Harris, the nearest thing the crew had to a psychologist, speculated that Poole’s attack on the Xeelee had been cathartic, even if it hadn’t resulted in the destruction of the Xeelee itself. He had, in a way, Harris speculated, resolved issues that had plagued him all his life, the eerie predestination that had always haunted him – certainly since the irruption of the Xeelee into the Solar System in Poole’s twenty-fifth year.
Maybe, Jophiel thought. If so, it had been at a terrible cost. But that was the Pooles for you.
Meanwhile, with some curiosity Harris studied Jophiel himself. ‘I don’t see why this shouldn’t have hit you as hard as it did your template.’
Jophiel didn’t see that either. He grieved badly for Nicola – worse than he would have imagined; maybe he had cared for her a lot more than he had realised. And, perhaps, she for him. Now he would never know.
As for himself, Jophiel had a private, unscientific theory that once he, Jophiel, had been cast into existence, he and Poole had grown apart – or had become opposites though still bound together. The opposing ends of that dipole. Poole had kept his sternness; Jophiel had developed softer qualities, doubt, compassion – and, maybe, a little more psychological depth, even self-knowledge. Two halves of one person, neither complete without the other. Well, maybe.
So Jophiel seemed able to observe Poole’s suffering. While Jophiel didn’t seem able to feel anything at all.
All this trauma among the leadership, meanwhile, couldn’t have come at a worse time.
The completion of the Xeelee ring at the Great Attractor was still forecast to occur at around five million years after the departure of the Cauchy from the Solar System – one million years more by Earth time, only seventy more days by the relativistically accelerated calendar of Deck One of the Wheel.
The crew still had no clear idea what the Xeelee had intended to do when the five-million-year mark was reached. But even if the Xeelee itself appeared to have been disabled, the great mechanisms of the Wheel were still reconfiguring. Still the cupworlds and disc-ships slid along the Decks and down the struts, like beads over that light- year-scale abacus. Still, drone surveys reported, more of those Deck One disc-ships were filling up, becoming puddles of dirt and rock and water and air and life.
And meanwhile, at the extragalactic Great Attractor, the climax of a contest as old as the universe itself was approaching.
Remarkably, the Cauchy crew were able actually to see the final stages of the construction of the Xeelee ring, the Great Attractor artefact. The exploration party had left drone observers inside the Xeelee Nest, able to communicate with the convoy thanks to cables that still trailed to the exterior. And the images returned were astonishing.
Images of departure.
By now a massive tide of materiel was flowing from across space into the ring, apparently heading for the knot of broken spacetime at its heart. Though the detail was impossible to make out, it was evidently a massive evacuation through a naked singularity, Jophiel saw
: a flight from the universe itself.
But by just seven crew days later – another hundred thousand years – war was flaring.
So Asher interpreted. She pointed out huge disorderly masses, flung at the ring’s tangle of cosmic string from all directions: masses themselves the size of galaxies, Asher reported, unbelieving. The ring itself was orders of magnitude larger yet than these immense projectiles, but gradually its structure was damaged, cosmic-string threads cut, broken and decaying.
And the brilliant other-universe light at its heart quietly dimmed.
After another eight weeks – eight hundred thousand more years in the outside universe – the singularity light finally died. The Xeelee evacuation was done at last, for good or ill, the ring a massive, drifting ruin.
It had been the last war, Jophiel thought. Played out around the most tremendous construction project this universe had ever seen. And now, apparently, ending in destruction, defeat, and evacuation by the Xeelee.
All this against the background of a sky growing dark, as the dark-matter infestation reached its own end game, five million years after Cold Earth, and all the stars turned red.
Yet still the Wheel itself remained inert. Still the disc-ships did not fly.
The last humans, bemused, even as they began to absorb this vast spectacle, made tentative plans for their own future. Even while the gigantic artefact on which they lived rebuilt itself, all around them.
Then, three months after the destruction of the Great Attractor, they found High Africa.
77
Ship elapsed time since launch: 29 years 86 days
Earth date: c. ad 6,233,000
‘Or anyhow,’ Michael Poole said, ‘the disc-ship that High Africa was dumped into.’
Poole, unusually for him, immediately gave Jophiel the news; he’d called Jophiel to the truck cabin that Poole had pre-empted as an office. Now Poole snapped his fingers, and the air filled up with images of grasslands.
‘Remember what we saw before? On Earth Three, High Africa? On a cupworld that, when we encountered it, had hosted humans for about half a million years, local time. Those runners on the plains, like small-brained humans? Well, by now, up on Deck Three, it’s been well over half a million years more . . . There. Look: a troupe of them.’ Poole manipulated the recordings to magnify, inspect, swoop around.
Jophiel stared, wordless, at shadows on the grassland.
Their habitual motion seemed to be a crawl, though occasionally they would stand straight, showing their big low-slung bellies. They were still bipedal, just. They had big jaws, with which they grazed steadily on the long grass through which they moved. An infant, fast asleep, clung to the hairy back of its mother.
‘Grazers,’ Poole said. ‘Big bellies to help digest the cellulose. They’re all over these grassy plains. The rat-lions take some of them, but they fight back. They can still make simple tools – they wield bones as clubs. And they can move surprisingly quickly, given their bulk. Well, horses were grass-eaters, and they were pretty fast.’
Jophiel followed this analysis, but he felt as if his own thinking, and his emotional reactions, were slow, sclerotic. Maybe he had seen too much, he thought. ‘People,’ he said now. ‘Those are people, right?’
‘Descended from people, yes,’ Poole said. ‘There’s another species, in a colder area, which have bulked up to the size of small elephants. But the most successful variants, measured by size of population, seem to have specialised on ants and termites. They have these long, clawed fingers they use to dig into the nests, the mounds.’ He flexed his own hand. ‘You know what breaks my heart when I see all this? It’s not the adaptation for the climate, or the food sources. It’s the group sizes. I mean, just count them. You see them in bands of ten, twenty – rarely more. Harris will tell you that group size is a key indicator of cognitive ability. Even those Homo erectus runners we saw before had bands of up to a hundred or so. Modern humans have networks of a hundred and fifty direct acquaintances . . .’
‘Brains gone, then.’
‘A lot of the higher functions, yes. Just as Harris observed. Smarts are no use in these toy worlds. Better to spend your blood and energy on a big belly to digest all that grass, and on running faster than the tyrannosaur chickens.’
‘Tyrannosaur chickens?’
‘Don’t ask. Take a look at this.’
He clapped his hands. A startling shift of scene, like a piece of stage scenery falling away. Now Jophiel saw what looked like tundra, a bleak treeless landscape with shallow lakes, scrubby grass. In the distance, hills with gleaming snow caps, and a coast where sleek animals swam, dipping in and out of the grey water.
And on the land, distant herds.
Jophiel leaned forward to see. ‘They look like musk oxen.’
‘Bigger than that. Post-rabbits, the size of small mammoths. It pays to be big on the tundra – the bigger you are the better you keep your body warmth. They’re preyed on by sabre-tooth rats.’
‘So where are the people this time? What about the crew we left behind?’
Michael pointed to the water, as if it was obvious. ‘In these cold climes, mostly in the ocean. Living like seals, walruses. You want to see the forests? There, the reversion to ape forms continues, the chimp and gorilla types and others. The chimps still walk upright. Still use tools of wood and bone, some of them, but it’s hard to tell if that’s a cultural memory or a rediscovery.’ He eyed Jophiel. ‘We also found Coalescences.’
He brought up images of huge clay structures, on flat plains. To Jophiel they looked like medieval castles, if the stone were melted after a nearby nuclear strike. And around each one, a cemetery ring towered high.
Jophiel, appalled, had no comment.
‘There are some spectacular sights. The disc-ship’s equivalent of the Rim Mountains have been colonised, by panther-like rats that chase antelope-like rabbits—’
‘I’ve seen enough.’
‘Suit yourself.’ The screens blanked out.
Jophiel studied his template. Poole looked so much older now, Jophiel thought, older, blunter. Coarser. A shell he had grown over the trauma, or catharsis, of his final encounter with the Xeelee.
Yet he still functioned.
Yet he went on, day to day, task to task.
‘Why are you showing me this, Michael? You don’t do anything without a good reason.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ Poole said gruffly. He eyed his counterpart. ‘We have a job for you, Jophiel.’
‘That sounds ominous.’
‘So it should. Look, there’s a lot of detail; I’ll give you the summary.
‘We think the Xeelee has a new plan. A new way to save itself, and presumably the other life forms on the Wheel. And we intend to go along for the ride.’
Jophiel nodded cautiously. ‘Tell me more.’
‘We believe that the whole purpose of this Wheel was as a shelter, a means for the Xeelee to survive until the year ad five million, when the Great Attractor ring would be completed, and the Xeelee could fly off faster than light to join its fleeing cousins. Along with, apparently, the disc-ships, samples of life from the Wheel – which in turn had acted as a honeytrap for life from across the Galaxy for millions of years. A strategy it evidently improvised after we damaged it at the Solar System. A flight of survivors, led by the Xeelee.’
‘Right. The Wheel as galactic ark. But that didn’t work. Because of us. In the Nest, you wounded it grievously enough that—’
‘I like to think so,’ Poole said grimly. ‘So the Xeelee is stranded in the future, with the rest of us. The point is, since we got past that five-million-year mark – about three months ago for us – the Xeelee’s mode of operation has changed. We’ve still got to survey a lot of the disc-ships, but we think that the transfer operation, from cupworld to disc-ship samplers, is complete. Well, that ma
kes sense if the original grand plan was to have evacuated before now.
‘And on the other hand, the Xeelee seems to be . . . rebuilding the Wheel itself. The hull-plate rivers have started flowing again. New material, flowing along the veins of the Wheel – reinforcing the basic structure, maybe. And building up what looks like additional shielding on the disc-ships.’
He snapped his fingers, and pulled up a graph, showing a steep climb to a peak, then a very gentle decline.
‘This is an overview, based on the material flows we observed. It did a lot, very quickly, and then settled into this long phase of consolidation.’
‘That looks like a very long tail.’
‘Right.’ Michael eyed him. ‘It’s all an extreme extrapolation, and Asher doesn’t like me pushing her on this . . .’
Jophiel grinned. ‘That’s Asher.’
‘She is predicting that this activity will continue, at this rate, for centuries. Maybe even a millennium, until the Xeelee has finished – doing whatever it’s doing.’
Jophiel nodded. ‘OK. So the Xeelee is embarking on some kind of upgrade job on the Wheel that might take a thousand years, Deck One time. And then—’
‘And then, we don’t know. Maybe the thousand years correlates to some process in the external universe we haven’t figured out yet.’
Jophiel thought that over. ‘A thousand years down here is five billion outside.’
‘Maybe by then there will be some new refuge for all these particles of life. And maybe the Xeelee will send the disc-ships off somewhere after all. If not through a ring, then to some destination in this universe.’
‘Where? There’s nowhere to go. Thanks to the dark-matter creatures all the stars are dead, or red.’
‘There may be habitable worlds, even around red dwarf stars. Remember Proxima, for instance . . . Look, we don’t know.’ A rueful grin. ‘We have to trust the Xeelee to come up with something.’
‘I can see that would be a little awkward, for you,’ Jophiel said. ‘Anyhow you’re thinking about finding a destination for us. The crew.’
Xeelee Redemption Page 43
