Xeelee: Endurance (23 page)

5

Chael invited Mara to join him on his weekly inspection tour of the new exotic-matter facility in the Mellborn urban area. After Yarraranj, Mara was deeply reluctant, but the way Chael phrased it she sensed this was a command, not an invitation.

Chael landed on the spacious lawn of the family’s villa, off Crun Strand, in an armoured flitter bearing two armed crew, and with the black cross on its upper surface that signified it to be a craft of the Occupation. Mara briskly boarded.

As the ship lifted, the looming sky-blue hulk of the brand new exotic-matter factory on Flind Strand was soon visible. The raid Tasqer had guided down to the facility to the east of Mellborn had not been unique; on that day, still only a month ago, a coordinated series of strikes from deep space had indeed hit facilities all around the planet. The Qax’s punishment of those responsible had been brutal, and their response decisive and swift. Now the urban centres were not to be spared. Within days, blue exotic-matter facilities like this one had bloomed in the very hearts of human cities, like malevolent mushrooms.

Chael swore at the sight of Flind Strand. ‘When the Governor announced he was moving the factories into the urban areas, we argued against using the historic city centres, at least. Parz himself spoke eloquently. After all, the Qax have spared cultural monuments in the past.’

‘One sees it glowing blue in the dark,’ Mara said now. ‘From all over the city. One hears the hum of the great engines day and night, the whoosh of flitters coming and going – why, the noise of its hasty construction was itself cacophonous. I cannot sleep.’

Her brother-in-law smiled. ‘I sympathise. But those in the work camps have it worse, you know.’

‘I can imagine.’

The flitter skimmed east now, and Mara could already see another blue torus standing squat on the horizon, another new exotic-matter plant, brilliant in the low morning sun. It was surrounded by a muddy brown scar, fenced off: the living area for the human community that had been forcibly brought here to serve the facility.

‘That’s the Took plant,’ Chael said. ‘There’s a ring of six around the city, Took, Parc, Cens, Spots, Nu, and Wills. We’ll see them all today. There have been incidents to handle at them all,’ and he sighed.

‘The city is too quiet,’ Mara said. ‘They took so many people, stripping out everybody but the most senior in the Diplomatic Corps and their families, and workers on the most basic facilities, the sewage and food ducts. I thought they would just take—’ She waved a hand. ‘Criminals. Prisoners. Those without work. But nobody has been spared. Even children.’

‘They took most of the best engineers also,’ Chael said. ‘The Governor no longer seems to care about breakdowns in essential systems – if a suburb here or there goes hungry. It’s the same across the planet, if that’s any consolation.’

‘To think that two centuries ago we were immortals and interstellar travellers, and now
this
. I heard Ambassador Parz tried to argue against the use of child labour, at least.’

Chael smiled, rueful. ‘You may know that since the Qax removed
AS
treatment, our population has boomed. Whether that’s a response to the loss of our immortality, or some deeper survival response to the stress of the Occupation, I couldn’t say. Whichever, we are a young society, rich in children. And now we’re paying the price for that. And of course, if you don’t use children the value of the workers as shields is diminished.’

She frowned. ‘Shields? What do you mean? Shields against what?’

‘Why, against further attacks, from space, from the ground.’ He eyed her. ‘Sometimes, dear sister-in-law, you seem so naive. That’s one reason the Qax built these facilities in the cities. To give the ragamuffins pause . . .’

Ragamuffins.
That was a word she’d heard too often recently. It referred to those Earthbound who had always lived out of sight of the Qax and their Occupation, out of sight of their law and control. Earth was a big and complex planet and there was room for a few to hide
–
and, it seemed, to fight back. The Engineers had turned out to be just one faction of a wider resistance.

She hadn’t imagined she was still capable of being shocked. ‘People used as a shield. Why, that’s monstrous.’

‘There are limits even to Jasoft Parz’s powers of persuasion. And Parz may be compromised himself.’ He leaned closer. ‘I don’t think we’re being monitored in here . . . Did you know that Jasoft has a daughter?’

Again she was shocked. ‘A daughter? But – I’ve known him for a quarter of a century, since Pell and I started to work for the Corps. I never met a wife, a lover, let alone heard of a child.’

‘
That’s because he doesn’t know himself.
It’s one of the Qax’s more cunning ploys. They don’t breed as we do, you know; there seem to be only a few thousand of them, and they are effectively immortal. But they are capable of observing our mammalian breeding practices, and of manipulating them to get what they want of us – or at least of the most senior people, those whose betrayal they fear. Serve them and, if you have a child, they’ll take her from you, lodge her in some special school somewhere.’

‘A hostage.’

‘Exactly. And if like Jasoft you don’t have a child – and, though we never discussed this, I suspect he chose not to have children for this very reason – they make sure you have one anyway. It’s not difficult, after all. They have tame human geneticists, obstetricians—’

‘That’s monstrous.’

‘That’s the Qax. I’m told that Jasoft’s daughter is around twenty-five years old, and lives in North Amerik.’

She stared at him. ‘How do you know all this?’

‘I try to know everything. I figure it’s my best chance of surviving. I talk to everybody, even those on the wrong side of the Qax’s laws. Mostly, though, I just listen. You’d be surprised how much you can discover that way.’

‘And you haven’t told Jasoft?’

‘Would you? Maybe I will, some day. For now I don’t want to compromise him. He is too effective where he is.’

‘You’re a cold one.’

‘No. Just a survivor.’ The flitter began a slow, cautious descent towards the heavily armoured compound that surrounded the Took facility. ‘And I need you to be cold too, Mara, as we go through this day. Cold in the face of what you’re going to see.

‘Look down. This plant is typical of its kind. There is the torus, the heart of the exotic-matter facility itself. That rather ugly fenced-off area to the north is the workers’ compound. There are barrack blocks, refectories, stores, crude hospitals. A mortuary. You can see that the local supply canals have been hastily widened . . .

‘
You must be prepared
, Mara. You’ll be kept safe. But you asked about the use of criminals in such facilities. Mara, the Qax – or their human agents –
use
criminals as a police force, in the camps. You may imagine the quality of the resulting regime. You could argue we brought this on ourselves, with those foolish strikes from space. And there is another issue you must be prepared to deal with.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Juq. Your son, my nephew. In this region at least he has continued to serve as a public front for the project.’

‘I haven’t seen him for some days, but I do see his smiling face in news Virtuals.’

‘Smiling, yes. I think to the Qax and the Corps he serves as a symbol of authority over the workers.
Look how your human superiors smile while you work yourselves to death in these hazardous places. You have no hope of help from them, or anybody else – no hope at all.
That’s what Juq’s handsome smile has become: a symbol of the repression. You can imagine how the workers feel about that. He has to be heavily guarded.’

‘
I
can imagine. Though I don’t suppose Juq himself understands.’

‘He does not,’ Chael said heavily. ‘There was an incident last week, at the Wills plant. A clumsy worker, lining up for inspection, spilled a lubricant on the shoes of Juq’s friend, Tiel. Just an accident. Juq slapped her, and then laughed.’

‘He
slapped
her . . .’ Mara sighed. ‘That’s Juq. He was always that way with the servants. He never injured them, but—’

‘It is himself he has injured. You can imagine how the Virtual image of that act has permeated that facility, and others. He is becoming – hated. And, as you say, I’m quite sure he has no idea.’

Mara closed her eyes. ‘He’s not a fool, you know. He isn’t evil. Just flawed.’

‘Well, he’s your son. And he may need your protection . . . Almost down.’

The flitter descended to a crude concrete apron, hastily laid. Beyond security fences, before the backdrop of the giant torus, Mara glimpsed people, men, women and children dressed in identical green coveralls, gaunt and cowed. Most wouldn’t even meet her gaze.

She braced herself as she prepared to get out of the flitter.

6

As with every significant event in the human world – every event approved of by the Qax, at least – the Interface completion ceremony in Jovian orbit was saturated with coverage, with multiple sound feeds and images taken from every conceivable angle.

And so the assassination was covered in fine detail.

Mara, sitting in her home in Mellborn, forced herself to watch the sequence of events over and over, from as many angles as she could find. In the end, she discovered a feed from one observer who had been right on the shoulder of the anonymous Friend of Wigner, as she turned killer.

The ceremony, coming a mere month after the start-up of the new city-centre plants, had taken place aboard the lifedome of the
Endurance
itself. A small stage had been set up at the centre of the domed chamber, on which stood a number of senior officials from the project, both technical and from the Diplomatic Corps. But, to Mara’s eyes at least, the group was dominated by the unmistakable figure of her own son, Juq, tall, smiling as always, that blond hair blazing bright. His friend Tiel stood beside him, as he had since the beginning of this strange project, ever present, yet somehow as inconspicuous as a shadow.

Beyond the glimmering near-transparency of the dome over all their heads, Jupiter swam, an arc of that huge planet visible, a smear of golden brown. And, before the planet, rising into view like an angular dawn, the Interface portal – yet to be attached for the voyage – drifted towards the GUTship. Mara stared at the dazzling sky-blue of the portal’s exotic-matter icosahedral frame, letting her gaze linger on the cool edges, the geometrically perfect vertices that joined them. The faces were like semi-transparent panes of silvered glass, through which Mara could make out the watercolour clouds of Jupiter overlaid with a patina of silver-gold. And every few seconds a face would abruptly clear, just for a dazzling moment, and afford Mara a glimpse of another space, unfamiliar stars. Like a hole cut into the sky.

As the Interface passed over the dome, applause, apparently spontaneous, rippled. It was magnificent. It was beautiful. And humans had built this. Every time she gazed on this sequence of images it made Mara want to weep, and wonder if Chael had been right all along, if this monumental human achievement was worth whatever price would be exacted by the future.

Then officials on the stage began to speak, words Mara had already heard many times in her viewings. But the speeches were, for Mara on this recording, obscured by the muttering of the assassin, close to the automated camera-microphone that happened to be following her:
The Wigner paradox is inescapable. The chains of unresolved quantum states will build on and on, growing like vines, extending into the future, until the observations of the final cosmos-spanning minds rest on aeons-thick layers of history, studded with the fossils of ancient events . . .

She was unprepossessing, Mara thought. Unremarkable, in a shabby green worker’s uniform of the kind that was common in Mellborn now, a young woman so sallow and fleshless it was hard to tell her age – perhaps twenty, not more than twenty-five. But her head was shaven. Even her eyebrows were gone, Mara saw. And now, as seen from the viewpoints of those around her, she began to move through the crowd, unremarked, towards the stage.

At last life will cover the universe, still building the regressing chains of quantum functions. Consciousness must exist as long as the cosmos itself – for without observation there can be no actualisation, no existence – and, further, consciousness must become coextensive with the cosmos, in order that all events may be observed. The chains of quantum functions will finally merge at the last boundary to the universe: at timelike infinity . . .

People were seeing her without watching her, Mara realised, dismissing her mad rambling, without thinking she was any kind of threat. Perhaps they saw no need to fear. Perhaps those admitted to this ceremony had already been screened for security. And perhaps a worker like this, mixed up, talking to herself, wasn’t a remarkable sight in the new, highly pressurised labour camps of the Qax.

But now, as she neared the stage – Mara glimpsed Juq up there still, golden hair shining, beneath the glorious vision of the Interface – the woman started to speak more loudly. Those around her looked perturbed, but still they did nothing to stop her.

At timelike infinity resides the Ultimate Observer. And then the last Observation will be made. Retrospectively the history of the universe will be actualised . . .

She was almost shouting now. People in the crowd were reacting at last, recoiling from her, and on the platform they were looking alarmed, pulling back – all save Juq, who stood there smiling down even on this disturbance.

And then Mara heard the ringing cry that haunted her dreams.
Look out! She has a weapon!

The girl’s last words were almost a scream, as her arm lifted up straight before her, a heavy mass in her hand.
Actualised in a history which maximises the potential of being! Which makes the cosmos through all of time into a shining place! A garden free of waste, pain and death!

Tiel threw himself forward.

From a hundred angles Mara had seen the boy’s chest explode, and the Wigner’s Friend pulled down at last, still screaming, and her son, still on the stage, still smiling even as he looked down, bewildered, at the splashes of his friend’s blood on his vest.