‘Hmm. Asher Fennell told me that the Xeelee is a survivor of past cosmic ages. It lived through them. Cooperated with new kinds of creatures, so they could survive together.’
Right! You have it. And that is just what Luru Parz foresaw. If life is to survive in the new age, all of the inhabitants of this universe, in this previous age, will have to cooperate. Symbiosis, my friend.
And that means light-matter creatures like humans and Ghosts – why, the Ghosts even had prophecies about it. Which was why, incidentally, they experimented with human-Ghost symbiotes. Like your pal Nicola. Just as well you brought one along. The Xeelee, even if they tried to bail out of this cosmos altogether. And the dark-matter creatures too, as Luru Parz saw . . . All of us.
‘Ah. And that’s why we had to bring the photino fish in their box.’
Correct. So.
‘So?’
So what’s your choice?
‘So I go out with the High Africans, and build a world with one copy of myself. Or I go save a universe with another?’
That’s about the size of it. What do you think?
Jophiel Poole was born in a moment of doubt. He had no doubt now.
80
Timelike infinity
Even after the Xeelee had finally won their war against humanity, the stars continued to age, too rapidly. The Xeelee completed their great Projects and fled the cosmos.
Time unravelled. Dying galaxies collided like clapping hands. But even now the story was not yet done. The universe itself prepared for another convulsion, greater than any it had suffered before.
And then—
‘Who are you?’
My name is Michael Poole.
‘And I – I am Jophiel.’
Let’s get to work.
Afterword
Work on this novel came at a difficult time in my personal life. I’m very grateful for the sympathy and support of the Gollancz team, especially Marcus Gipps and Craig Leyenaar, of my agent, Christopher Schelling of Selectric Artists, of Elizabeth Dobson for an excellent and invaluable copy-edit, and Paul McAuley for a discerning proof-read.
This novel and its prequel, Vengeance, are a pendant to my ‘Xeelee Sequence’ of stories and novels. The epigraphs to the sections are taken from earlier works.
My depiction of life in the Xeelee universe, with each cosmic age being as rich as any other from the Big Bang to the Big Rip, was originally inspired by Freeman Dyson’s ‘scaling hypothesis’ (‘Time Without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe’, Review of Modern Physics, vol. 51, pp. 447–60, 1979), a paper which opened up the study of the far future of the universe – even if the modern view of that future looks quite different. More recently a suggestion that a ‘Big Rip’ might not after all be terminal for our universe was made by H. We et al. (‘Quasi-Rip: A New Type of Rip Model without Cosmic Doomsday’, Physics Review D, vol. 86, p. 083003, 2012).
‘The Celestial View from a Relativistic Starship’ was definitively analysed in a paper of that name by R. W. Stimets et al. in 1981 (Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 34, pp. 83–9). The idea of using millisecond pulsars as interstellar navigation beacons was suggested by Werner Becker et al. (‘Autonomous Spacecraft Navigation Using Pulsars’, Acta Futura, vol. 7, pp. 11–28, 2013).
Robin Hanson’s The Age of Em (Oxford University Press, 2016) contains some fascinating speculations on a society of computer-emulated humans not unlike ‘Virtuals’, a long-standing feature of the Xeelee universe.
The planet Goober c was first mentioned in my first professionally published short story, ‘The Xeelee Flower’ (1987). A model of how a world like Goober c, at the limit of habitability – twice as far from its Sunlike star as Earth is from Sol – could bear life was studied by Aomawa et al., using the (real-life) exoplanet Kepler-62f as a model (‘The Effect of Orbital Configuration on the Possible Climates and Habitability of Kepler-62f’, Astrobiology, vol. 16, pp. 443–64, 2016). At the time of writing, this planet is seen as one of the three most promising candidates to host an environment of Earthlike habitability.
The notion of ‘asteroengineering’, adjusting the lifetime of a star, was studied by Martin Beech (‘Aspects of an Asteroengineering Option’, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 46, pp. 317–22, 1993). While my own irresponsible speculations on structure and life in dark matter go back a couple of decades (Ring, 1994), scientific speculation that at least some dark matter might be self-interacting and so might contain complex structure has recently gained momentum (see Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs by Lisa Randall, Bodley Head, 2015). For a discussion on the dark-matter conquest of the universe I’m indebted to Stuart Armstrong and Anders Sandberg (‘Eternity in Six Hours: Intergalactic Spreading of Intelligent Life and Sharpening the Fermi Paradox’, Acta Astronautica, vol. 89, pp. 1–13, 2013).
The peculiar commonality of Earthlike gravity among the observed exoplanets was noted by F. Ballesteros et al. (‘Walking on Exoplanets: Is Star Wars Right?’, Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, vol. 16, pp. 325–7, 2016). A useful recent review of our understanding of galaxies is Galaxy: Mapping the Cosmos by James Geach (Reaktion Books, 2014). In the Xeelee universe the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Galaxy, known to the astronomers as Sagittarius A*, is called ‘Chandra’ – the Sanskrit word for ‘luminous’ – after the late astrophysicist and Nobel prize winner Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. My depiction of the collision of the Milky Way with the Andromeda Galaxy is based on such studies as John Dubinski’s ‘The Great Milky Way–Andromeda Collision’, Sky & Telescope, October 2006, pp. 30–36.
Mark Maslin’s The Cradle of Humanity (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a recent report on the ‘pulsed climate variability’ hypothesis, the latest variant of theories that the fluctuating climate of Africa has acted as a ‘pump’ for the evolution of successive types of humanity, or human precursors. My depiction of the nature of the Xeelee was inspired in part by speculations on the evolution of the octopus and other cephalopods, an entirely different evolutionary descent of brain and mind from the line that led to our own (see Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey-Smith, William Collins, 2017).
As mentioned in the text my ‘Wheel’ stands on the metaphorical shoulders of previous giant structures as imagined by Banks, Niven and others. The engineering of ringworlds was studied by Forrest Bishop (1997, www.iase.cc/openair.htm). The so-called ‘Ehrenfest Paradox’, the idea that because of relativistic contraction a rapidly rotating disc would have a circumference larger than a stationary disc with the same radius – the principle on which the Xeelee Wheel is constructed – was indeed a valuable thought experiment for Einstein himself as he developed his theory of General Relativity (see G. Rizzi et al., Relativity in Rotating Frames, Kluwer, 2004).
All errors and misapprehensions are of course my sole responsibility.
Stephen Baxter
Northumberland
February 2018
ALSO BY STEPHEN BAXTER FROM GOLLANCZ:
NON-FICTION
Deep Future
The Science of Avatar
FICTION
Mammoth
Longtusk
Icebones
Behemoth
Reality Dust
Evolution
Flood
Ark
Proxima
Ultima
Obelisk
Xeelee: An Omnibus
Xeelee: Endurance
Xeelee: Vengeance
NORTHLAND
Stone Spring
Bronze Summer
Iron Winter
THE WEB
Gulliverzone
Webcrash
DESTINY’S CHILDREN
Coalescent
Exultant
Transcendent
A TIME ODYSSEY (with Arthur C. Clarke)
Time’s Eye
Sunstorm
Firstborn
TIME’S TAPESTRY
Emperor
Conqueror
Navigator
Weaver
The Medusa Chronicles (with Alastair Reynolds)
The Massacre of Mankind
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2018
All rights reserved.
The right of Stephen Baxter to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
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50 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2018 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 473 21724 9
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and
any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of the publisher,
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www.stephen-baxter.co.uk
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Xeelee Redemption Page 46
