Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  ‘Right. But the Cauchy is wrecked, of course.’

  ‘That’s an understatement.’

  ‘We can’t get off this roundabout under our own steam.’

  ‘Ah. I see. Ultimately, to escape, we’ll need to get into one of those disc-ships ourselves.’

  ‘Correct. That’s how I’m thinking. The High Africa one, presumably, though there may be other choices. And then, after a thousand years, when – we expect, we guess – the Xeelee is ready to send the disc-ships out to some new destination, we’ll be aboard too. Or our descendants. So in principle all we have to do is wait.

  ‘But—’ Poole looked at the tundra images. ‘The chances of us, or our descendants, lasting that long are bleak. Look – our trucks won’t last for ever. And even if they did, could our culture survive a thousand years? If not, if our archiving failed, our descendants might finish up with no memory of how they got here, and no experience to handle whatever might lie ahead when the disc-ships reach their destination. By then, our great-grandchildren won’t quite be reduced to eating grass and running from the rats, but—’

  ‘Some of us could survive. The present crew, I mean, AS-preserved. Like Susan Chen on Goober c.’

  Poole said grimly, ‘We’d have the same trouble as Susan. We don’t have the infrastructure to keep up the supply of AS treatments. Not over a thousand years.’

  ‘Good point. I take it you have a solution.’

  He nodded. ‘I’ve gone over this with the crew. Asher, Harris. Look – we do have the trucks. We think we could keep them functioning, on some level, for the thousand years. The technology itself is smart, we have matter printers to make replacement parts.’

  ‘Keep the trucks functioning as what? Not vehicles.’

  ‘No. Simpler than that. As sleeper bays. Hibernation pods. A human being is a much simpler beast to keep alive asleep, rather than awake. I’ve done some fault-tree analyses . . .’

  More graphs, which Jophiel glanced over with an eye as expert as his template’s. ‘Looks like good work,’ he said. ‘I can see one omission. The cache of photino fish needs to be put into suitable storage too.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘And what do you plan to do with our captive Ghost? The First Slaver. If it broke out with everybody asleep—’

  Poole shrugged. ‘We have containment systems.’

  Jophiel looked at him. ‘Which I don’t want to know about.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘So we get to the point. You’re going to put the crew to sleep for a thousand years – including yourself. Right? I have a feeling you’re getting to the part where you tell me what this has to do with me.’

  ‘Actually,’ Poole said, faintly apologetic, ‘I already showed you, if you’d looked closely enough. I put you in the fault analysis. The odds of survival improve by an order of magnitude if—’

  ‘You put me in your fault tree?’ Jophiel looked again.

  ‘Jophiel, a thousand years is a long time to last, for the smartest self-repairing machine. But the software and hardware that generates a Virtual, like you, has no moving parts, is descended from systems that have already been proved to work on millennia-long interstellar flights—’

  ‘The Outriggers.’

  ‘Right. You’re getting the point. Look, our options are shutting down. It’s extinction – or hibernation for a thousand years. And for that, Jophiel, we need a caretaker.’

  ‘So you’re asking me to spend a thousand years alone. Or, five billion, depending on how you look at it.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  ‘Is this some kind of obscure revenge, Poole? Some kind of displaced sibling rivalry?’

  ‘Well, I have no siblings, so I wouldn’t know. It won’t be so bad. The time will fly. Pack a book.’ He grinned. ‘A long book. So, will you take the job?’

  SEVEN

  At last, life will cover the universe, still observing, still building the regressing chains of quantum functions . . . Consciousness must exist as long as the cosmos itself . . . in order that all events may be Observed . . . And at Timelike Infinity resides the Ultimate Observer. And the last Observation will be made . . . Which [will make] the cosmos through all of time into a shining place, a garden free of waste, pain and death.

  Shira, ad 3829

  78

  Ship elapsed time since launch: 30 years 108 days

  Earth date: c. ad 11,535,000

  It took over a year by ship’s time to get the sleep pods established to the satisfaction of Poole, Harris and others. Established, tested, loaded with their population of Cauchy crew. There were High Africa natives too, there at Harris Kemp’s suggestion to widen their genetic diversity, as well as ensuring some of those strange descendants of a scattered mankind survived. All sealed up, in trucks drawn into a loose circle on a desolate plain at the heart of the High Africa disc-ship.

  Jophiel took it on himself to make sure that the hull-plate pod with its cargo of dark-matter life was safely loaded – more participants in whatever adventure was to come, perhaps. And that the Ghost, in a custom-built cage, facing another long imprisonment at human hands, was at least not uncomfortable.

  A year. While five million more years shivered past in the external universe.

  After that, Jophiel was alone.

  While the rest lay in their caskets, they had left Jophiel a truck all of his own. Just as if he was a regular human, with regular human needs, such as the comfort of four walls around him. He didn’t need the physical shelter, but the truck did contain extensive backups of the hardware and software that sustained him.

  Still, for the first few days after the last of the crew had gone into their sleeper pods, Jophiel let himself settle into a pretty ordinary human routine. He slept, ate his Virtual food, even showered. He looked over the latest reports from the drones patiently exploring the disc-ships and other aspects of the Wheel.

  And he looked at the sky, through software that filtered out the relativistic distortion of the Wheel’s endless cycling. It was a sky of steadily dimming stars, now, every one of them infested by dark matter, and settling down to crimson longevity.

  It was a new age in the grand history of the universe, he supposed. A new epoch. He wondered what the scholars might have called it, if any had still been around. What myth Nicola might have mined for a parallel. Perhaps she would have called this after Erebos, the goddess of darkness in Greek myth. Human eras like the Anthropocene were long over: this was the Erobocene, the age of endless dark. And it was five million years deep already.

  He felt profoundly aware of time, now. Poole and the rest of the crew had been concerned only about how to survive a thousand subjective years, a millennium of what they still called ship’s time, without harm. But the crew would actually sleep away five billion years. Jophiel would have to live through all that, travelling the long way. What new convulsions would he have witnessed by the time the universe was more than a third as much older than it had been when humanity evolved?

  Jophiel was no cosmologist. He had no clear idea what was to come.

  He grinned. ‘But I expect to find out,’ he said to himself.

  For the first few days, in order to check on the functioning of the sleep systems as they settled into their thousand-year cycles – and, also, whenever he felt lonely – he regularly passed among the crew trucks. Checking softscreen readouts. Looking at the names on the panels.

  Studying faces.

  Here was Max Ward. A man who had weaponised his whole life, only to find, when it came to the crisis, he was crippled by the limitations of his imagination. He had seemed grateful to be laid down in his sleep pod. Perhaps something of his spirit would be wakened on the new world, Jophiel hoped.

  Alice Thomas. The first rebellious parent of the crew. Her daughter, Chinelo, sleeping peacefully, a competent
young human ready for the challenge of the frontier of a new world.

  Susan Chen. Survivor of a millennial vigil of her own, and now facing an unexpected new destiny. Hers was perhaps the strangest story of all, Jophiel thought. Yet here she was.

  Asher Fennell and Harris Kemp. Old friends of Poole and Nicola since their days at Mercury. Never lovers, but steadfast companions, intelligent and inquiring. As they would be still, Jophiel was confident, on the other side of their long sleep.

  Wina, not far away from the Ghost who had become her strange companion. Both already sole survivors of lost worlds.

  And along with the rest of his crew, Michael Poole. At peace. For now, anyhow.

  The first time he visited his template, Jophiel laughed. ‘At last you have a statue at the centre of the Galaxy, Michael. Even if you had to become it yourself. Like poor Jocelyn Lang Poole on Venus . . . Like Nicola at the Xeelee Nest.

  ‘It was never about you, you know. Never about us. I’ve been thinking it over, you see.

  ‘We’re locked inside a universe that is itself evolving, from hot to cold, dense to sparse. And life arises, and spreads as fast and as far as it can. We humans, and the Ghosts, and the Xeelee, and even the dark-matter entities, we just got . . . tangled up in the machinery.’ He touched the transparent panel over his template’s face; protocol-violation pixels sparked. ‘It was never about me, or even you. Sleep tight, brother. I hope you wake up forgiving yourself. As we forgive you. And hey, have children, grandchildren. What would you sooner have, after all, a kilometres-high statue or a grandkid to catch the ball you throw?’

  He turned away. Then back again.

  ‘And remember me to your family.’

  For Jophiel had the odd intuition that however his thousand years turned out, he was never going to join the Cauchy crew again.

  Thus, the first few days.

  Then Jophiel began to relax.

  He was still an engineer. He, or his template, had had a hand in designing these long-term sleeper systems, for use on the scatterships that had fled Cold Earth. He knew that if no faults showed up in the first few days, they weren’t likely to show up in centuries. And even then the layers of redundancy, backup and maintenance that swathed every component reduced the risk of catastrophic fault almost to nil.

  No need for a daily walk around, it occurred to him.

  And no need even for him to live through each day at a snail’s pace.

  Time to take a lesson from the Gea crew.

  He set up the software, tested it, and various alarm protocols. Then he walked away from the trucks, just a short distance.

  Softly uttered enabling codes.

  The software routines he now invoked, permeating the systems that sustained his own Virtual existence, had been developed without authorisation on Gea, and copied down to the archives of Cauchy and Island before Gea had itself been lost. Jophiel had checked it all through himself. It worked as specified.

  Now, for Jophiel, time compressed. It felt odd, briefly, as if he was walking through some thickening liquid.

  He was slowing down. His own system’s pace, compared to the systems cannibalised for the trucks from the Cauchy, was slowed by a factor of ten, a hundred . . .

  Just like the Virtual officers of the Gea, he stabilised at a factor of one to fifteen hundred – but he was running slower than nominal, not faster. He resembled one of Gea’s statue-like reserve crew, trapped in slow time. Now, a minute for him corresponded to a whole day on this deck. But he was doubly slowed, of course, by the software and by relativistic time dilation. So that his minute, Deck One’s day, would span fourteen thousand years in the outside universe.

  Time enough for the rise and fall of a civilisation.

  Every minute. He laughed.

  He walked around, testing himself, steadily, comfortably. He experienced no difference, yet he knew that to a normal-paced witness his motions would be barely perceptible. He was yet another Galaxy-centre statue, he realised. ‘Place is getting cluttered,’ he said to himself. ‘But I did just reduce my load on the power grid by a factor of a thousand. No, don’t thank me.’

  So he settled down to a new routine.

  He set timers to remind him to check over the sleeper pods once every six hours. Four times a day for him; once a year for the sleepers. And he had alarms to draw his attention if anything failed in the interim.

  Other than that, he ate when he liked, slept when he felt like it. ‘At this rate, only eight months before they all wake up,’ he said to himself. ‘I better not start that long book, Michael.’

  It was after a couple of days of this that he got around to resetting a few softscreens to give him a steady, time-averaged view of the sky beyond the Wheel – a view otherwise distorted by the Wheel’s ferocious relativistic blue shift, and by its own spin around the black hole Chandra.

  And that was when he got his first big surprise.

  He could see it coming, from out of the northern Galactic sky. A blur of light maybe half the size of a full Moon, seen from Earth.

  After a few weeks, it was twice that size. And getting rapidly larger.

  A few weeks. He had to keep reminding himself that that mapped onto a billion years, outside. Whole species could rise and fall without seeing any perceptible motion up in that sky at all, he realised.

  ‘Whereas I am stuck on fast-forward. What a spectacle.’

  Now he could see structure in the approaching entity. It was a tipped-up puddle of light, with a glaring pinpoint at the very centre, surrounded by a wide swirl of spiral arms. The colours, at least as rendered by his visioning system, were spectacular, though tinged with red.

  It got bigger, and brighter, every time he looked at it. And it seemed to be tilting further, as if coming in edge-on, right at him.

  It was a galaxy: the Andromeda Galaxy, of course. The closest large galaxy to the Milky Way – the Galaxy.

  He checked all this over quickly. The two big spirals were bound gravitationally into a group with a number of scattered dwarf galaxies. Andromeda, bigger than the Galaxy, was just as tarnished, it seemed, by the infestation of dark-matter life. Andromeda looked like some huge cruise liner in the night, festooned with crimson lights.

  And the two huge systems, each hosting hundreds of billions of stars, were heading, it looked like, for a collision.

  He remembered now a joshing exchange with Asher Fennell, long ago, about such a collision. I mention it as something we might have to deal with, if Michael keeps us plummeting into the future. There had been polite laughter. ‘Well, the joke’s on me now, Asher,’ Jophiel murmured. ‘What collision, though?’

  He looked it up.

  He found that the ship’s records contained predictions of such an event, but they relied on observations and models made even before the Xeelee invasion of the Solar System – and therefore, by now, a billion years out of date. They told him nothing about the details of the collision, or its likely consequences. Nothing save that the inexorable law of gravity had made the smash-up inevitable, even as seen from that long-gone epoch.

  And now here he was, sitting right under it.

  He half-thought of waking up Asher Fennell to advise him about it, and to share the experience. He did do his best to set up systems to obtain comprehensive records of the event. ‘If we survive to look it over,’ he muttered, ‘Asher will thank me for that . . .’

  He kept watching, as his smart systems monitored the sky.

  And, ninety days in, he spotted something else unexpected. At first glance it was just a blur, deeply reddened, swimming out of the plane of the Galaxy, disappearing fast. A cluster of stars, made red by Doppler shift, he quickly realised, as well as by the photino fishes’ tinkering. It had been a globular cluster, a bundle of hundreds of thousands of stars, one of many quietly orbiting the central mass of the Galaxy. Most of these star masse
s still followed their orbits – and would do so, presumably, until their final scattering and disruption during the galaxies’ collision.

  All save the one that had flown away, before the galaxies closed.

  His systems gave no clue as to what kind of propulsion mechanism could have shifted an entire star cluster, at what appeared to be immense accelerations. But he was able to identify the cluster in catalogues that dated back to the astronomers’ observations on pre-Displacement Earth. And then he understood.

  It had been M15.

  The place the Gea crew had gone, after the rebellion of the officers.

  ‘So you used a globular cluster as a lifeboat from a galaxy smash.’ He saluted the sky. ‘Nicely played, Flammarion. Remember me.’

  At last – at about a hundred days in for Jophiel, a couple of billion years outside – the galaxies passed each other.

  Andromeda, coming in edge-on like a monstrous shield, with the glaring boss of its central bulge easily visible, slid under Jophiel’s view. Under the plane of the home Galaxy.

  For the next few weeks Jophiel watched, astonished, as Andromeda receded. The galaxies’ two dense cores seemed undisturbed. But ragged lanes of stars that had been spiral arms were wrenched from both galaxies, and trailed like intermingling spider webs. Webs that were chains of stars and planets, and scatterings of gas and dust.

  Then Andromeda seemed to slow. Jophiel tried to estimate this, watching the apparent shrinking of that bright central bulge, day by day.

  After a hundred and fifty days, Andromeda stopped receding altogether.

  And by a hundred and sixty days, a hundred and seventy, it was obvious Andromeda was coming back for another pass.

  By now Jophiel had done some studying; he understood that the whole system, the two bound galaxies, had lost a lot of gravitational potential energy to the great friction of the two structures tearing at each other. It was just as a bouncing rubber ball lost height with each impact with a hard pavement.