Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  So here came the next bounce.

  And, because of that loss of energy, the second collision would be nearly head on. This time the two massive cores would come much closer.

  It happened at around two hundred days by Jophiel’s clock. Four billion years outside. This time the two galaxies passed through each other, and the great wells of gas which populated the galaxies’ spiral arms were mixed and compressed. All around the sky, in huge, glowing clouds of gas, massive stars were born. Many died quickly; supernovas flared and sparked in Jophiel’s time-accelerated vision.

  And Jophiel saw the heart of Andromeda, the great central bulge, pass beneath his horizon.

  After that it got messy.

  In the following days and weeks – for Jophiel, across hundreds of millions of years externally – the two systems underwent a whole series of collisions, short, shuddering bounces, each recoil less than the last. But the structures of both galaxies, at least away from their central bulges, became muddled, broken down.

  Jophiel knew enough about the astrophysics by now to understand what was happening. By his two hundred and fiftieth day – about five billion years into this unanticipated future – the galaxies were merging into a new, single giant: elliptical, shapeless, rich with young stars. Their dense cores were coalescing into a single mass.

  And, very soon, even the great black holes at the centres of the galaxies would merge – but since Andromeda’s black hole was a monster that outmassed the Galaxy’s by a factor of twenty thousand or more, it would be more a swallowing of Chandra than a merger. A swallowing of the object around which this Wheel orbited.

  Yet, amid the destruction – the loss of the delicate beauty of two sets of spiral arms – there was creativity. Reservoirs of interstellar gas poured into the heart of the new giant galaxy; there was another rich wave of star-making, all across the sky.

  He stared out, astonished, at the stars, bright, teeming, young. Detonating.

  Memory flooded. And—

  ‘I’ve seen this sky before,’ he said to himself.

  This was the bright young sky up at which he had stared, equally astonished, when he had reached the Eighth Room of the Xeelee Nest.

  An alarm chimed.

  His thousand years were almost up.

  Jophiel, monitoring his instruments, saw that the disc-ships of the Wheel were stirring. Breaking free. Preparing to scatter – baby birds leaving an imperilled nest, he supposed.

  ‘This is it,’ he said to himself. ‘Michael, you were right. This is what the Xeelee foresaw, and planned for. A sky full of young bright stars, created by the galaxy smash. New planets ripe for life and colonisation . . .’

  That was when he heard a voice in his head.

  Did you like the light show?

  A voice he’d heard only a handful of times before.

  Where I came from we called it the Formidable Caress.

  A voice that was his own, and yet was not.

  If I were you I’d activate your override. Wake your crewmates up a little early. Their disc-ship is going very soon. They won’t want to miss the launch of their own lifeboat.

  He complied immediately.

  That voice—

  Thanks to the merger, there will be a wave of star-making that should last for a hundred million years. Plenty of new worlds for your crewmates to fill up. And their lost children, the folk from the cupworld you called High Africa. You see, I’ve been watching.

  ‘Is this what it’s all been about? The Wheel has become a kind of ark after all, preserving life through the Andromeda collision? And this is what the Xeelee was waiting for? This new . . . arena for life?’

  That was how it was all repurposed, yes. By the Xeelee, once it realised it had lost its chance of making it through Bolder’s Ring before it was destroyed, thanks to the wounds your template inflicted.

  ‘Bolder’s Ring?’

  The Great Attractor structure. The name – long story. Never mind.

  Look, it might not have felt like it while the Xeelee was rampaging through your Solar System. But its basic motive, and that of its whole species, has always been to preserve life, baryonic life, and its diversity. That was even true when it tried to eliminate humanity, and created a new timeline in which we did not extirpate half the Galaxy’s inhabitants, and throw billions of our own children into a pointless war at the Core.

  ‘Yeah. Our own young people worked that out.’

  Anyhow, once it was stuck here, the Xeelee started to work out what it could do to help baryonic life seed again, and survive in this universe . . . That, and the dark-matter fauna too. And now do you see why I had you bring that pod full of photino birds from Goober’s Star?

  ‘Fish. We called them photino fish. No, I don’t see that. The dark-matter creatures were the deadly enemy of the Xeelee. What, are they just going to start their cosmic war all over again?’

  Well, I hope not. We need them, in the end, you see, Jophiel. And they need us. The photino birds – fish, whatever – and their transgalactic parents that you called Ancients. Just as they need us – though they don’t know it yet. Even the Xeelee doesn’t know that. Not yet. But it will. Anyhow you did a good job. But now it’s done. What now for you, Jophiel?

  ‘I guess I’ll speed back up. Rejoin the crew.’

  You could do that. It would be fun to see what they make of all this, wouldn’t it?

  ‘Yeah. Michael building a world of his own. If that’s not redemption for doesn’t heal him, nothing will be. The crew who followed him all this way. Chinelo, the new generations. Susan Chen – I see her walking down a ramp, hand in hand with a knuckle-walker and a canopy-hanger from High Africa. Maybe relics of her own lost crew, after all.’

  Fun, right? You could go down and join them.

  ‘Or?’

  The job’s not done yet, Jophiel. It never is, in this universe. I could use some help.

  ‘I . . . How do I find you?’

  You know where.

  So Jophiel sped back up to human pace. He left a farewell note for his waking crewmates. Left it clipped to the system files that stored his Virtual persona; Michael would find it, he would figure it all out – if he had time away from his own world-building, and personal healing. It didn’t really matter.

  Then Jophiel had himself projected back out to the Xeelee Nest, where the Virtual support systems he and his colleagues had left behind were still patiently functioning, a thousand years on.

  Nothing had changed, as far as he could tell, from those hours of crisis a millennium ago. No weather, on the Wheel. But the Nest was empty now, so the remote sensors told him.

  He spent a few minutes with Nicola, who stood as defiant as she had been in life.

  Then he clambered back into the Xeelee habitat. Threaded his way through the tesseract.

  Turned an impossible corner.

  Found the Eighth Room. Passed through the last hatch.

  And was back in the Hermit Crab, his first ship.

  79

  Ship elapsed time since launch: c. 1000 years

  Earth date: c. ad 5,000,000,000

  The lifedome – cramped compared to the Cauchy, just a hundred metres across – seemed as real as he was. He punched a console, kicked his chair; it kicked back. ‘Embodied, at last! Ha ha! . . . Hm. Maybe I’ve spent too much time alone recently.

  ‘And I’ve been dropped into the co-pilot seat. Typical. Good joke, Michael. I hope you’re watching somewhere, Nicola.’

  He swapped over to the left-hand seat, and checked out the status of his craft. There wasn’t much to check. As far as he could tell there was no functional link between the lifedome and the rest of the Hermit Crab. None of his controls worked. Maybe that was beyond the scope of this simulation, or whatever it was.

  So he had no motive power. In fact, no functioning GUTe
ngine in the dome either. The power in the lifedome’s internal cells might last – what, a few hours?

  He didn’t grouse about this, nor did he fear his future. Such as it was. After all, beyond the lifedome was the core of a new galaxy. What was there to fear in the face of that?

  But Jophiel was alone. He could feel it.

  He turned on lights, green, blue. The lifedome, partitioned into functional sectors, was a little bubble of Earth, isolated.

  He got a meal together. The mundane chore, performed in a bright island of light around the lifedome’s small galley, was oddly cheering. And there was a certain authenticity to the experience, to the texture of the food, the plates and cutlery, that he hadn’t known he’d missed, ever since Michael Poole had had him spun off, a Galaxy’s span and five billion years ago.

  He carried the food to his couch, lay back with the plate balancing on one hand, and dimmed the dome lights. He finished his food and set the plate carefully on the floor. He drank a glass of clean water.

  Then he went to the freefall shower and washed in a spray of hot water. Again, an authenticity he hadn’t enjoyed for five billion years. He tried to open up his senses, to relish every particle of sensation. There was a last time for everything, for even the most mundane experiences. He considered finding some music to play. Somehow that might have seemed fitting.

  The lights failed. Even the softscreens winked out.

  Well, so much for music. By feel, he made his way back to his couch. Though the sky was bright, full of those young stars, the air in here quickly grew colder; he imagined the heat of the lifedome leaking out. What would get him first, the cold, or the failing air?

  He wasn’t afraid. Oddly, he felt renewed: young, for the first time in decades, the pressure of time no longer seeming to weigh on him.

  He was sorry he would never know how his relationship with Nicola might have worked out. That could have been something. Or indeed Miriam Berg, in different circumstances. Or a different lifetime, which seemed to be an option if you were Michael Poole.

  But he found, in the end, he was glad that he had lived long enough to see all he had.

  And he wished his template, out on some new Earth, the best of luck.

  He was beginning to shiver, the air sharp in his nostrils. He lay back in his couch and crossed his hands on his chest. He closed his eyes.

  A shadow crossed his face.

  He opened his eyes, looked up. There was a ship hanging over the lifedome.

  Jophiel stared in wonder.

  It was something like a sycamore seed wrought in jet black. Night-dark wings which must have spanned hundreds of kilometres loomed over the Crab, softly rippling.

  That’s the Xeelee. Emerging from its own cocoon on the Wheel. Recovered, as you can see, its ship rebuilt. Its nursery emptied, now: it is joined with its young. Restored, despite all the damage you did it.

  Well. I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you here today.

  ‘I think I know who you are. At last. Slow on the uptake, aren’t I? You’re the original. From the timeline before—’

  Yeah. That’s the best explanation I have. I’m here. As much as I’m anywhere. But I’m not from here.

  ‘How are you – here – at all?’

  Ah. Because in my timeline I fulfilled one of your, Michael’s, ambitions. I got to complete the Cauchy project . . .

  The Cauchy, an interstellar exploration vessel turned into a ship of war after Cold Earth, had originally been designed for a stunt flight. The plan had been to drag a wormhole mouth on a circular tour hundreds of light years long, starting and ending at the Solar System. And by the time it got back – because of a complication of the relativistic time distortion that had, in the end, shaped most of Jophiel’s own existence – the wormhole would have served as a functioning time machine.

  ‘You did it. You sent a GUTship on a loop, to the stars and back. You opened up a time bridge between past and future. Wow. It worked?’

  It worked. Well, we knew it would.

  You know, we – I mean me, Harry, Miriam, Bill Dzik, the rest of the team – didn’t pull that stunt with any particular purpose in mind. We did it just because we could.

  Seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Until an alien occupying force from the future came back in time through our wormhole bridge to attack us. Much as the Xeelee did to you, Jophiel.

  ‘The Qax.’

  You know some of this? Reality is leaky, isn’t it? It should come with a warranty . . . Yes, the Qax. Well, I dealt with it. In our own era, we fought them off. Then I needed to cut that Lethe-spawned time bridge. So I fly into the wormhole, and start up a faster-than-light drive in there.

  ‘Whoa. I need to unpack some of that. First of all, you got hold of an FTL drive? How did it work?’

  Lethe knows. I just know how to turn it on. So I smash the wormhole. But I do a little more damage than I intended . . .

  Ahead of me, spacetime cracks, opening up like branching tunnels, leading off to infinity. I start to wonder if it’s a good plan after all.

  And I fall into the future, Jophiel. Through a network of transient wormholes that collapse after me. My instruments are smashed, and I know my lifedome must be awash with high-energy particles and gravity waves. I’m as helpless as a new-hatched chick, fallen from the nest. I think I’m going to die. And I think I deserve it.

  ‘Why?’

  Because I built the bridge that brought the Qax to my era, my Earth.

  ‘Hmm. We Pooles do carry a lot of guilt, don’t we? Michael’s tormented by it.’

  Well, he shouldn’t be. You can’t be responsible for all of human history. That’s a fallacy of dictators, engineers and other lunatics. Even if Michael Poole had never been born the Ghosts or the Qax would have found us eventually, and we would have been drawn into the game. And don’t disregard what Michael Poole did achieve. He built the wormhole network that dug us out of near-Earth space, at least. Without that we might have been even worse off when the aliens came. And in your timeline he saved the world, with the Displacement, the Cold Earth. Look – let him heal. He deserves it.

  Anyhow, death doesn’t always come along like some absolving priest. It didn’t for me, when I fell through the wormholes. Because, then—

  ‘Yes?’

  I was a chick that fell out of the nest, remember? But this chick took flight.

  The lifedome – fell away. I believe I became a construct of quantum functions. A tapestry of acausal and nonlocal effects . . . I don’t pretend to understand it.

  I fell across five million years.

  Then I saw you.

  ‘In the Eighth Room.’

  And I started to take an interest.

  ‘I first glimpsed you long before then . . . I guess cause and effect sequences aren’t really the point now, are they?’

  You’re getting the idea.

  I became . . . spread out, you see. In space as in time. And across realities, possibilities. For instance, one time, one place, I was drawn to another group – humans, fleeing out of my own universe in a Poole Industries starship called the Great Northern, who actually made it to Bolder’s Ring, and through it, to another universe. With a little help.

  And, in another part of the forest, I – or another part of me, a copy of me – was summoned. By a woman, an Ascendant, called Luru Parz. Smarter than you or I will ever be, my friend. And as ancient as the cosmos, or it felt like it. It was another time, another place, where human civilisation had survived for a million years – they called themselves the Transcendents – and was doomed. Well, Luru Parz tried to save Earth from the Xeelee. For, you see, in the final stages of our glorious Galactic war against the Xeelee, we were driven all the way back to the Solar System . . . What she did was to turn Earth into Old Earth, a jar of slow time stopped up to preserve its children.r />
  And she threw me in there.

  And she threw dark-matter creatures in there too, after the humans, after me. Made us cooperate – no, more than that. Made us symbiotes. That woman put me through a thousand lifetimes on that distorted world.

  ‘Why you?’

  Well, I really was a hero, Jophiel. Though I didn’t deserve the tag. I think she imagined I’d fight my way back out.

  ‘And you did.’

  And I did. After those thousand lives. With the lessons she wanted me to learn.

  Listen, Jophiel. You’d think a galaxy collision is drama enough. There’s more to come. The universe is ageing, my friend. And faster than you might want to think . . . Have you heard of the Big Rip?

  ‘The what?’

  Actually our Uncle George Poole was the first of us to hear this bad news from the future. The cosmologists figured it out in his lifetime, you see.

  The universe is full of stuff you can’t see, Jophiel. The dark matter is just the start, and look how much trouble that caused. But dark energy outweighs all of that, and it’s far, far worse. Like an antigravity field that suffuses the whole universe.

  And, here’s the kicker. It’s getting stronger.

  It’s pulling everything apart.

  It won’t happen soon. It will make no difference to us, to planets and stars, for over two hundred billion years. But after that, this cosmic force will fold down to the scale of galaxy clusters – which it will pull apart. Then, galaxies, smashing apart like dropped glass bowls. A hundred and fifty million years later, even solar systems will be torn open – planets sent off into the dark. And then—

  ‘What?

  Well, the detail’s not clear. Even stars may be disrupted. Even planets. But then it stops. The strength of the antigravity field starts to decline again.

  But on the other side of that hill will be a very strange universe. Nothing left but thinly scattered red dwarf stars, lone planets – if we’re lucky. Maybe nothing at all but us, and stuff the size of us, if we’re unlucky, depending on the strength of the Rip. It’s a new age coming, Jophiel. A very strange one. But new.