Xeelee: Endurance (24 page)
Authors: Stephen Baxter
The
Endurance
was launched on schedule, hauling its massive wormhole Interface away into deep space at high accelerations, leaving the partner Interface patiently orbiting Jupiter. Even now nobody in Mara’s circle knew what the true purpose of the Qax Governor’s experiment had been – not even Chael, as far as she could tell, not even her beautiful idiot of a son.
But everybody knew the timescale from now on: the ship’s construction had taken six months, and in a mere six more months after its launch the
Endurance
would return, and a gate to an unknown future would open.
As the due date for that return approached, Mara waited tensely for whatever would come next. It was hard even to sleep without medication.
And then Chael called. He’d had a message from Jasoft Parz.
Chael hurried to Mara’s home in Mellborn. When he arrived Mara called Juq, and the three of them gathered in the cellar where once Juq and Tiel had run exotic-matter experiments with splinters of diamond.
The three of them sat in a circle, under a single light globe. It was only a year ago, Mara realised, that first meeting with Parz in this very cellar, and so much had come of it.
Chael now held up a sliver of inscribed matter. He said, ‘This was a one-shot, one-use message from Jasoft. He’s not been able to return to Earth since the
Endurance
was launched. I don’t know how he smuggled it out of the Qax ship where he’s being held. I brought it here for us to watch together . . . It may not be wise to attempt any recordings of it. Oh, and I brought this.’ He pulled a small plastic case from a pocket. Sealed within were three translucent tablets, each the size of a thumbnail. ‘These come from the Qax themselves. They are able to manipulate biochemical structures at the molecular level – did you know? That was their, umm, competitive edge when they first moved off their home planet. And this is the fruit of their study of mankind.’ He looked at them. ‘Do you know what this is?’
Mara could guess. The tablet meant the removal of death. ‘AntiSenescence treatment?’
‘Better than human-manufactured AS. A Qax refinement. They gave it to Jasoft. This is our reward, for our cooperation with the
Endurance
project. The former Governor kept his word that far.’
‘
Former
Governor . . .’
He handed them each a capsule. ‘Don’t take it yet.’
Mara nodded. ‘Let’s hear what Jasoft has to say first.’
Chael set the inscribed sliver on the floor. Immediately light flashed from the sliver, and pixels whirled in the air, quickly coalescing.
It was as if Jasoft Parz had joined the circle.
He sat at ease, in his usual expensive-looking robes. If anything he looked younger still, Mara thought, his face less lined, his colour healthier, those odd-looking black roots spreading under his hair. Yet he looked hunted; he glanced over his shoulder repeatedly as he spoke softly. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be able to record. This message is my only chance. Please, all of you – listen and understand. Somebody needs to tell the human worlds what has happened – and what is to become of us.’
He allowed himself a grin. ‘First, the good news. Poole’s time bridge worked! As you’re aware, on the return of Poole’s ship
Cauchy
one group of rebels took the chance to go out and meet it – and they flew into the Interface, flew back through time, presumably all the way back to the age of Poole himself. We know now that the rebels were Friends of Wigner – the same ragamuffin group who attacked the
Endurance
when the Interface was completed, at Jupiter, and tried to assassinate Juq. And led, I’m told, by a young woman called Shira – she has links to the family of your son’s friend Tiel, I believe.’
Juq was wide-eyed at this. ‘Cousin Shira? I met her. But—’
Mara put her finger on his lips to hush him.
Parz went on, ‘Neither I nor the Qax Governor knows what the Friends intended, or indeed what they achieved, if anything. But their very actions threw the Governor into an existential panic, I think. Perhaps all the Qax could be wiped out, if humans were warned about the Occupation far enough into the past. The Governor proved surprisingly indecisive in the final crisis.
‘And thus the Governor chose to respond to Poole’s triumph by emulating it.
‘The
Endurance
was built to establish
another
wormhole tunnel to the future, from this age to around five hundred years hence. The Governor hoped to glimpse the Qax future, you see, and so be able to shape any decision with a kind of hindsight.
‘But what emerged from the wormhole, an emissary from the future, was not any kind of tactical guidance, but very bad news indeed – bad for the Qax, I mean, but we know few details. But, in the form of a new Governor for Earth – the former has been assassinated, by the way – it brought bad news for humanity too . . .’
Hastily Parz said that there would be a new phase of the Occupation, as the Qax strove to rectify their earlier leniency. It was to be called an Extirpation.
‘But I will not live to see this,’ Jasoft said now. ‘For the new Governor has a second string to the strategy. Even as Earth is smashed in the present day,
the Poole wormhole to the past still exists
. The Governor intends to drive Spline ships through the time bridge, and fall on the more innocent worlds of that historic era. And he intends to take me with him – into the past!’ He forced a smile. ‘In another life, another circumstance, what an adventure that would be. But as it is—’
The Virtual snapped out of existence.
Chael picked up the sliver, ran it over a slate for testing. ‘It’s done. Wiped.’
Mara said, ‘I wanted to tell him about his daughter, before he was lost in time. It would have comforted me, at least. Now he’ll never know. Perhaps we should find her, tell her of her legacy . . .’
Chael held up his own AS tablet. ‘We have more important decisions to make. Everything will be different now. We have no control over whatever Shira’s rebels do in the past, or what impact that may have – or what any Qax invasion fleet might accomplish. We, stranded here in this age, must deal with present and future. You heard Parz speak of the new regime to come, the Extirpation. But the Qax will still need humans to administer their regime for them. They will still need
us
. And the proof of it is in these tablets we hold. They want us to live on; they want us to work with them . . . We do have a choice, however,’ and he glanced around, almost as furtively as Parz had, Mara thought. ‘Callisto.’
‘What?’ Mara struggled to recall the name’s significance.
‘The moon of Jupiter?’ Juq asked eagerly.
‘Yes, the moon of Jupiter – and a hideout, for us. There’s a man called Reth Cana who, under cover of a science station, is providing refuge from the Qax regime – refuge for the likes of us. That’s one choice . . .’
Mara shook her head. ‘No. I’m no planetary traveller. This is my home, for better or worse. This is where I will live—’
‘And die?’ Chael said gently. ‘Well, that is another choice. We could simply see out our time and slip away – that’s if rebel assassins don’t hit us first. The final alternative is to live, on and on.’
‘In the service of the Qax? In which case we would face the same moral dilemmas we always have,’ Mara said. ‘By administering the cruelty of the new regime, perhaps we could find a way to alleviate it. But now there’s another reason to survive.’ Mara looked bleakly at her brother-in-law, at her son. ‘Some day the Qax Occupation will be lifted. And when humans run their world again, there will be a reckoning. A reckoning for us, and what we do next – what we have done already. You, Chael, for doing so much to assemble this
Endurance
project, to promote it. Myself for standing by when perhaps I could have stopped it.’ She touched her son’s hand. ‘And you, you foolish, silly boy.’
To Mara’s horror, Juq looked petulant, defiant, almost as if he might burst into tears. ‘But, Mother, it was wonderful. Such fun. It was glorious! Why, anybody would have . . . I meant no harm. You know me! I never meant anybody any harm.’
She pulled back. ‘
You slapped a slave worker
. Didn’t you? Perhaps that alone, that one moment, will be enough to condemn you.’ She weighed the tablet in her hand. ‘We have a duty to fulfil: to help our people through the dark times to come, and then, when the light returns, to stand trial for our crimes. Either way it is our duty to survive. Together, then.’
They took the tablets, Chael first, then Juq, and then Mara, and it was done.
As Mara had predicted, the Qax were eventually forced to loosen their grip. And a traumatised humanity launched a new thrust to the stars.
The Third Expansion of mankind was the most vigorous yet, and, under a unified, highly ideological government called the Interim Coalition of Governance, the most purposeful. As the Expansion unfolded, humanity once more encountered alien kinds, and re-engaged in wider Galactic history – and this time as conquerors.
It was only a little more than ninety years after the liberation from the Qax that another first contact, of devastating significance, was made.
The wars with the Silver Ghosts would span more than two thousand years.
Donn’s mother’s screaming filled the lifedome. ‘He’s gone. The Ghosts have taken him. Lethe, Benj is gone!’
Shocked awake, Donn Wyman grabbed a robe and ran out of his cabin.
His mother and father were outside Benj’s cabin in the plaza, in their sleep clothes, clinging to each other. The cabin door was open, and Donn could see at a glance that the room was empty. Only seconds after wakening, he had a sickening, immediate sense of what was wrong. The abduction from out of the heart of his home was bewildering, as if part of reality had been cut away, not just a human being, not just his brother.
‘Now, Rima, don’t take on.’ Donn’s father, Samm Wyman, was trying to calm his wife. He was a careworn man, slight of build and with his family’s pale-blue eyes. Donn knew that spreading calm was his father’s fundamental strategy in life.
But Rima was struggling in his arms. ‘He’s
gone
! You can see for yourself!’ Her hair was wild, her face-tattoos unanimated, just dead black scars on her cheeks.
‘Yes, but you’re jumping to conclusions, you always think the worst straight away . . .’
She pushed him off. ‘Oh, get off me, you fool. What else could it be but an abduction? If he’d gone out through the ports the lifedome AI would know about it. So what good is being calm? Do you think you can just
wish
this away?’
Donn said uncertainly, ‘Mother—’
‘Oh, Donn – help me look. Just in case he’s somewhere in the dome, somewhere the AI hasn’t spotted him.’
Donn knew that was futile, but they had to try. ‘All right.’
Rima snapped at her husband, ‘And
you
find out if he’s anywhere else on the Reef. And call the Commissary. If the Coalition are going to meddle in our affairs they may as well make themselves useful. They could start by finding out where every Ghost on the Reef was last night – and the Silvermen.’
She stalked off and began throwing open doors around the rim of the plaza. The household bots followed her, their aged servos whirring.
Samm eyed his elder son. ‘I already called Commissary Elah. Who knows? Maybe those Coalition goons will be some use for once. She’s just taking out her anger on me, and she’ll take it out on you too before she’s done. It’s her way. Don’t let it upset you.’
‘I won’t, Father. But this is bad, isn’t it?’
‘I’m afraid so, son. Go on, get searching.’
Donn cut across the centre of the plaza, the lifedome’s central floor space. Much of it was given over to green, for the crew of this old ship, his mother’s distant ancestors, had crossed the stars with a chunk of forest brought from Earth itself, a copse of mature trees, oak, alder and lime, old enough to have wrapped thick roots around the struts of the lifedome’s frame. But Donn, twenty-five years old, had never been to Earth, and to him the trees were just furniture.
Of course there was no sign of Benj. Why would he have hidden away among the trees? Benj, at twenty-one, liked his comforts. And even if he was here, the AI’s surveillance systems would have known about it. Donn gave up looking, and stood there, helpless.
Something whirred past Donn’s face, tiny, metallic. It was a robot insect. And a fine spray of water descended on him. He lifted his face and saw droplets condensing out of the air, an artificial rain born in the summit of the lifedome and falling all around him. Above the rain the transparent dome showed a star field that had barely changed for centuries: the Association, a cluster of stars dominated by the Boss, a single monstrous star a million times as bright as Earth’s sun, an unforgiving point of light. He was getting slowly wet, but he didn’t mind; he found the sensation oddly comforting on this difficult morning.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it? The star field.’
The smooth voice made him start. He turned.
Commissary Elah stood beside him. Her eyes were large and dark, her gaze fixed on his face, calculating, judgemental. Taller than Donn, she was dressed in a Commissary’s floor-length black robe, a costume so drab it seemed to suck all the light out of the air. Her scalp was shaved, a starkness that emphasised the beauty of her well-defined chin and cheekbones, and her skin gleamed with droplets of the artificial rain. Donn had no idea how old she was.
‘I didn’t mean to startle you,’ she said.
Something about her made Donn pull his robe tighter around his body. ‘Commissary. It’s good of you to have come out so quickly. My parents will be reassured—’
‘I hope so. I’ve brought some specialist help. A woman called Eve Raoul – a Virtual, actually, but quite expert. This is what we’re here for, the Commission for Historical Truth. To help.’ Her accent sounded odd to a Reefborn, slightly strangulated at the back of the throat – an accent from Earth. ‘The Coalition understands.’
‘I suppose it must,’ Donn said. ‘If it seeks to rule.’
‘Not to rule,’ said Elah gently. ‘To join all of scattered mankind behind a common purpose. And by helping you sort out issues like this with the Ghosts—’
‘Nobody knows for sure if the Ghosts are behind these abductions.’
She eyed him. ‘But the Ghosts aren’t denying it. Are you loyal to the Ghosts or your family, Donn Wyman?’
‘I—’ He didn’t know what to say to that direct question; he didn’t think in such terms. ‘Why must I choose?’
She reached out with a pale hand and stroked the trunk of an oak tree. ‘Remarkable, these plants. So strange. So strong!’
‘They are trees. Don’t you have any on Earth any more?’
She shrugged. ‘Probably. In laboratories. The Earth has other purposes now than to grow trees.’ She glanced around. ‘You know, I’ve visited your
Miriam Berg
several times. But I’ve never stood in this very spot, beneath these trees. Trade, your profession, isn’t it?’
‘I’m an inter-species factor. Specialising in relations with the Ghost enclaves—’
‘It’s all so deliciously archaic. And anti-Doctrinal, of course, your way of life, your ship’s existence, its very name, all relics of a forbidden past!’ She laughed. ‘But don’t worry, we’ve no intention of turning you out summarily. All things in time.’ She pushed at the earth, the grass, with a bare foot. ‘We’re on the ship’s axis here, yes? Over the spine. Your mother’s family came to the Reef in this ship, didn’t they, a thousand years ago? I imagine there are access hatches. Is it possible to reach the drive pod from here?’
‘That’s nothing to do with you.’ Samm came bustling up. Beside Elah’s cool composure, his father looked a crumpled mess, Donn thought, his hair sticking up like the grass under their feet, his face shining with the sweat of sleep.
‘I apologise,’ Elah said easily. ‘You did invite me here.’
With his arms outstretched, Samm escorted her away from the copse. ‘To help with looking for Benj. Not to go snooping around the
Miriam
.’ But as she walked with him he backed off, nervous of offending this agency, the Commission for Historical Truth, newly arrived from Earth, which insisted on its right to take over all their lives. ‘We’re all distressed.’
‘I understand . . .’
Donn lingered for another few seconds under the artificial rain. He wondered why his father should care about the Commissary, or any Coalition agent, snooping around this thousand-year-old heap of junk. Maybe he had trade goods tucked down there in the ship’s spine – given the Coalition’s new tax codes, Donn thought was quite likely – but if so he couldn’t have signalled it any more clearly. Not subtle, Donn’s father, whatever other qualities he had.
But as Donn stood there the complexities of Reef politics faded, and the reality of his brother’s loss crowded back into his head, the true story of the day.
For months the abductions had been an arbitrary plague. Nobody could rest, for at any moment you could be taken too, from the most secure place. What a horror it was. And now it had come here, to his own family. He wondered, in fact, how it was he felt so calm himself. Shock, perhaps.
He trailed after his father, and the Commissary. And in a lounge at the edge of the plaza, he found a Virtual woman trying to console his mother.
‘Before I died, I spent most of my working life exploring the principles of remote translation systems . . .’
The Virtual visitor sat beside Rima on a couch. Donn’s mother’s face was twisted with grief and anger. Bots hovered before them, bearing trays of drinks and pastries – breakfast; it was still early.
The visitor was slim, modestly dressed in a pale-blue coverall. Her hair was grey, and she pulled at a stray lock of it absently. Donn had never seen anybody with grey hair before, though he knew it had once been the default shade for the ageing. Evidently the visitor’s projection was good enough to fool the serving bots, but Donn observed that her interfacing with the chair wasn’t quite right, and a haze of tiny pixels shimmered around the underside of her legs.
Rima asked, irritated, impatient, ‘“Remote translation systems”?’
Commissary Elah said, ‘Teleportation, to you and me. Donn Wyman, meet Eve Raoul. The expert I told you about.’
Eve stood. Donn clumsily offered this Virtual visitor a hand to shake. She bowed, apparently unoffended. ‘I’m sorry to meet you in such circumstances.’
‘Eve Raoul,’ Samm said. ‘Do you have a connection to
the
Raoul, Jack Raoul, of the Raoul Accords?’
The Reef was one place where, for a long time, Ghosts and humans had managed to live together, more or less peaceably. The Raoul Accords, a coexistence agreement only recently abandoned under pressure from the Coalition, had been much admired here. And Jack Raoul himself was well remembered, a hero for the Reef’s multi-species community.
‘Jack was my husband. I died before him.’ She gestured at her slim body. ‘It’s thanks to him that this representation was reconstructed from my old Notebooks. He liked to have me around in person to counsel him about quantum mechanics and the like, in the course of his work. And in the work he did, his dealings with the Ghosts, there was a
lot
of that kind of discussion.’
Elah said, ‘Eve is a specialist in the sort of technologies that seem to be deployed here – abduction through some sort of teleport device, apparently. And so we employ her to offer advice and counselling to relatives of abductees.’
‘“Counselling”,’ said Rima, sceptical. ‘Jack Raoul died eight years ago.’ She glared at Elah. ‘Or rather he was executed for his “crimes”. He was pretty old by that time, wasn’t he?’
‘Over two hundred years old,’ Eve said softly. ‘He left my Notebooks to the Commission, and to the Ghosts—’
‘He must have loved you,’ Donn blurted.
But Eve grimaced. ‘I was his legacy to an alien species. That tells you all you need to know about what it was like to be loved by Jack Raoul. However, here I am. And, since I know you’re thinking it, it’s a hundred and fifty years since my own death.’
Rima snorted. ‘Then what use are you? How can these Notebooks of yours be up to date?’
‘It’s the best we have,’ Elah said sternly. ‘Rima, much human knowledge was lost during the Qax Occupation of Earth. That was a deliberate policy of the occupying power, in fact. They called it the Extirpation. One of our purposes in recontacting lost communities like this one—’
‘We weren’t lost,’ said Donn. ‘
We
knew where we were.’
Elah ploughed on, ‘Our purpose is to reacquire such lost knowledge. And Eve and her Notebooks are a treasure. It’s good of her to work with the Coalition, especially after the difficulties surrounding her husband’s case.’
Eve ignored this barrage of euphemism. ‘I have to tell you, though,’ she admitted, ‘that I may not be much help at all. Human technologists have never got very far with teleportation. How could a teleport device work? Perhaps by scanning the position of every particle in an object, you might think. That information could be transferred somewhere else and a copy constructed of the original, exact down to the last electron.’
Donn frowned. ‘But that couldn’t work. The Uncertainty Principle – you can’t specify a particle’s momentum
and
position precisely.’
‘Correct,’ she said approvingly. ‘In quantum mechanics such quantities as position are derived from probabilistic wave functions – mathematical descriptions that underlie all reality.
But
the Principle says nothing about transferring exact data about the wave functions themselves . . . That was the approach I was working on, before I died.’
Samm asked, ‘What about Ghost technology?’
‘My husband, in the course of his career dealing with the Ghosts, came across one example of a teleport-like device. It was all to do with breaking up electrons: dividing indivisible particles.’
They looked at her blankly.
Eve said, ‘Look – an electron’s quantum wave function is spherical, in its lowest energy state. But in its next highest energy state the wave function has a dumb-bell shape. Now, if that dumb-bell could be stretched and pinched, could it be divided? If so, when the function collapses, it could be as if an electron leapt instantaneously from one bubble to another.’
Rima was fighting her way through this fog of words. ‘Why are we talking about this?
Is that how the Ghosts took away my son
?
’
‘No,’ Eve said regretfully. ‘I’m sorry. The sort of processes I’ve described would leave behind physical traces. Various exotic particles which your ship’s AI would have detected. We’re investigating every case of abduction. I’m hopeful that when we do start to turn up physical evidence of some kind—’
Samm said suddenly, ‘What about supersymmetry?’
Rima shook her head. ‘
What
?’
‘Another corner of physics. Just an interest of mine . . . Have the Ghosts worked with that?’
‘Not that we know of,’ said Eve.
Rima glared at her husband. ‘He’s talking about his family legend. An ancestor, a crook called Joens Wyman, who supposedly came here with some fancy super-spaceship. And one day Joens’s legacy will save us all, won’t it? And now my son is missing – oh, don’t waste time, you fool.’
Donn felt he had to say, ‘Everybody keeps saying it’s the Ghosts. We don’t even know if it is the Ghosts behind these abductions.’