Xeelee: Endurance (38 page)

14

The whale ploughed steadily towards the Core of Cores. The crew huddled behind the whale’s face, singing their eerie repetitive chants.

Lura sat looking out through the whale’s scarred hide. Her Mole was in her arms, and the great Supply Machine that the whale had literally bitten off from the perimeter of the Raft was lying on its back beside her. On its far side Brother Pesten sat, long since awed into silence.

The whale shuddered and shook, and let out another deep, agonised groan. Well might it groan, Lura thought, for it had been many shifts since Otho and his crew had forced it to leave the last rich nebula where it had been able to feed, and it had begun this appalling dive deep into the heart of the tremendous gravitational system in which they were all embedded. Otho had said his whale would never recover from this ordeal – and Lura sensed that he would never forgive
her
for that, whatever the outcome of this strange adventure.

Yet here they were, plunging into the Core of Cores, at the behest of a boy from another universe.

For some shifts the whale had ploughed through layers of the thick black debris cloud that surrounded the Core itself. But now things were changing. Sombre clouds parted before them, and the debris began to show depth and structure. A pale, pinkish light shone upwards, and veils of the stuff of shattered stars and nebulae arched over the whale, dwarfing it.

Then, abruptly, the clouds cleared, and they were sailing over the Core of Cores itself.

‘By the Bones,’ Pesten muttered, an ancient, un-Brother-like curse. ‘
It’s like a planet
.’

The Core of Cores was a compact surface clustered about the massive black hole at its heart, a flattened sphere that would have taken hundreds of shifts to walk across – if you could have withstood the gravity. It was by far the largest organised object any of them had ever seen or heard of.

And it was indeed like the ‘planets’ Coton had described in his own universe, a planet rendered in shades of red and pink against charcoal grey and black. There were ‘oceans’ of some quasi-liquid material, thick and red as blood; they lapped at ‘lands’ that thrust above the general spherical surface. There were even small ‘mountain ranges’, like wrinkles in the skin of a soured fruit, and clouds like smoke that sped across the face of the seas. There was continual motion: huge waves crossed the seas, and the mountain sheets seemed to evolve endlessly, and the coasts of the strange continents writhed.

Pesten was ecstatic. He peered through the whale skin as if he wished he could climb through it. ‘It is more like an Alpha world, as Coton described them, than anything we’ve seen before. More like Earth itself than anything we’ve ever seen! Perhaps it’s the largest-scale structure to be found in Beta. Yet even this is much smaller than a trivial Alpha world.

‘You understand that we’re seeing a kind of shell containing the black hole itself. It represents a balance between the influx of material from the debris cloud, and the radiation from the accretion around the black hole itself. It is not as Coton described the environment of Alpha black holes; this has much more structure, and apparently a greater density. And it is held together by something else unique to Beta – gravitic chemistry!’

‘You sound as if you’re proud of it.’

‘Well, why shouldn’t I be? There is no spectacle like this in Alpha.’

‘But it has nothing to do with us,’ Lura murmured.

‘Yes, yes . . . You have your Mole? We must send images of what we’re seeing through to Alpha.’

The crew muttered. Lura saw that they were silhouetted against a new, paler glow, and they were pointing. Lura turned to see. At the centre of one of the strange continents was a grid of pink-white light, etched into the surface like a vast game board.

‘Look,’ Pesten breathed. ‘Look!’

Ideas crowded into Lura’s mind. ‘Life,’ she whispered.

‘And intelligence. Two staggering discoveries in a single glance.’

‘How is this possible?’

‘Well, why should it not be so? Life feeds on sharp energy gradients, places where structure emerges out of chaos and organisation arises.’

Not for the first time Lura wondered how much of the ancient learning he repeated he really understood.

And now she saw more gridworks. Some covered whole continents, and lines of light arrowed around the globe, and embedded in the lattice Lura thought she saw individual structures: pyramids, tetrahedrons and cubes.

‘But we knew they were here,’ she said. ‘Didn’t we, Brother? That was the whole point of our endless labour to shift the star kernels, and drop them into the Core of Cores.
These were our gods
, the inhabitants of the Core. And they rewarded us with oxygen, pumped out into the veil of nebulae . . .’

The Mole murmured, ‘This is Coton, speaking for Academician Vala. She says she’s surprised to find evidence of intelligence here, despite your beliefs. She thought you were just being superstitious about gods in the Core of Cores.’

Pesten flared. ‘Primitive we may be compared to you – we have forgotten much in this hostile place – but we are not fools!’

‘No, no . . . She apologises . . . That’s not the point she was trying to make. She imagined the oxygen venting was unrelated to your kernel-dropping. Like praying for rain, she says. Now she’s not so sure. However, she says it’s unlikely that whatever intelligence resides here
needs
your lumps of iron. Look at the scale of this Core; think of the masses involved. She thinks that the intelligences of the Core most likely took the infall of your star kernels as a signal that life persisted in the clouds of nebulae surrounding the Core – chemical life, like yours. And as long as it did, the Core beings have tried to support you. As if your kernels were messages, cries for help hurled into the Core. You were right that there were mighty minds in the Core, protecting life in your cosmos. It’s just that they weren’t gods . . .’

Lura was stunned by these ideas.

Pesten said, ‘To think of it – that creatures of this scale, and so different in every way, should take any notice of
us
.’

‘Empathy seems to be universal,’ said Coton, through the Mole. But Lura wasn’t sure what that word meant. ‘In the end, however, Vala says, this experiment in symbiosis will end.
Symbiosis
, grandmother, what does that mean? For the nebulae, all of them, are dying, as your stars go out.’

Lura knew this was true. But long after the trees and whales and sky-wolves were extinct, and all the stars and nebulae were dark, and the people were all gone, the gravitic entities would still swarm over their roiling black hole world. These creatures were the true denizens of this Beta cosmos; humans, soft, wet, dirty and flabby, were mere transient interlopers.

Of course when the ‘Big Crunch’ Coton had described came to this universe, even the gravitic gods of the Core of Cores would not survive.

There was a soft chime. Coton called through the Mole, ‘The spacetime stresses – the graviton flux—’

Pesten said, ‘Just tell us!’

‘My grandmother says we’re ready to try the transfer.’

Lura quailed from the metal box that lay beside her.

The engineers in universe Alpha had found a way to modify the Raft Supply Machine.

They had had Pesten connect it to the Mole with bits of wire pulled out of the stumps of one machine and thrust into orifices in the other. This had been enough, it seemed, for information to be sent chattering from universe Alpha via the Mole into the Supply Machine.

And then, under instruction from Alpha, the Supply Machine had rebuilt itself. Lura had seen waves of sparking light pass through its carcass, and a ripple of tiny adjustments, like muscles flexing under skin. Coton had told her that the machine had smaller machines inside, most too small even to see, that were intended to repair minor flaws – as the body of a human or a tree could heal its own petty injuries. Now, via the Mole, the engineers had subverted these little mechanisms and had ordered them, not to fix the Supply Machine, but to turn it into something else entirely.

Of all the changes made, Lura had understood very few – but the most obvious had been the growth of a seam along the side of the Supply Machine’s carcass, complete with thick metal hinges. Now Pesten and Otho got their fingers under the lip of this seam and lifted. The lid of the great box rose slowly, for it was very massive, but at last it flipped back and fell away. And in the interior you could clearly see a space hollowed out from the nest of components that had been crammed in there – a nest the size and shape of a human body.

Lura felt Pesten’s hand slide into hers; his palm was clammy, as if he was more afraid than she was.

Otho glared at her. ‘So you’re going to climb into this thing, and the Brother and I will close the lid on you, and some kind of little knives are going to come out and chop you up—’

‘Not knives,’ Pesten said.

‘Then what? There won’t be anything left of her. That’s what they said.’

‘It’s been turned into a quantum-level scanner . . .’ But Pesten fell silent.

Lura knew he understood little. It may as well be knives, she thought.

‘You’re afraid,’ Otho said, watching her.

‘Of course, I’m afraid,’ she snapped. ‘Wouldn’t you be? But there will be somebody on the other side of this door who knows me, and will help me.’

‘You really believe that?’

‘If it was all fake, why would Coton and his people go to all this trouble?’ She looked at him closely, the sharp, intelligent eyes, the brutalised features. ‘You helped us get this far. You could have just killed us, as Anka always seemed to want you to do. But you didn’t. You believe in what we’re doing.’

‘This machine’s
old.
And now it’s been fooled around with. Suppose it breaks down before the rest of us can get through?’

‘So what are you saying? That you want to go first? If so, help yourself.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘I’d rather be second, after I see it work, and I hear you call back through that Mole box.’ He moved closer, and she could feel the gravitational tug of his body, still massive and powerful despite the rationing they had all endured during the whale’s strange odyssey. ‘Or, I’ll tell you a little idea I dreamed up. Suppose I knocked you up, and
then
sent you through? If you made it, and even if nobody else got through, at least a little piece of me would survive in universe Alpha.’

Lura faced him. ‘You try it and I’ll rip your seed out of my body with my bare hands – in this universe or any other.’

He grinned. ‘Just a thought, tree lady. Just don’t make me regret letting you go.’

‘It’s time, it’s time,’ wheezed the Mole. ‘Lura? This is Coton. Can you hear me? It’s time . . .’

Regretfully she handed the Mole to Pesten. ‘You’d better take this.’

Pesten cradled it. ‘This little box has worked hard.’

‘Yes.
Massive sensor dysfunction.
Do you think it’s been suffering – cut up, and unable to do its job – for all this time, since the Ship crashed?’

‘Maybe when you’re gone, it can rest at last. I’ll take care of it.’

‘Oh, Pesten—’ Something broke, and she threw herself at him, and they embraced. ‘I’ll see you in Alpha,’ she said.

He pulled back. ‘But will I still be
me
, after such a strange passage? Will you be you?’ He drew back and eyed the Supply Machine, and Lura saw how terrified he was of it, for all sorts of deep reasons other than the obvious danger.

The Mole murmured, ‘Lura, please . . .’

No more time. She jumped, lifted her legs, and let herself drift down into the body-shaped cavity, where she lay with arms at her side and legs out straight. Immediately, machine components bristled over her bare flesh.

Pesten loomed over her. ‘How does it feel?’

‘Like I’m lying on rough bark. Not so bad.’

‘Lura, I—’

‘Close the lid, Brother. It’s all right.’

The lid descended. Pesten’s face and Otho’s, illuminated by the pinkish light of the Core of Cores, were the last she saw of universe Beta.

She was alone in the dark and silence.

Now the machine’s components closed in on her from above and below and to either side, rough, scratching, some jabbing hard enough to hurt. She was uncomfortably reminded of Otho’s jibe about knives. But she sensed a gathering energy, and she could smell a sharp electric scent, and the hairs on her skin stood on end.

Coton had tried to describe the process to her. This Supply Machine, designed to manufacture food and drink, was scanning her body, quantum function by quantum function. She understood little beyond the Alpha-language phrases, but she knew that before she saw the light again, the numbers that defined
her
would be stripped out and read off and sent through the space between the universes – and, in the end, lodged safely in the head of her friend. When she thought of that, and conjured up Coton’s face as she imagined it, she relaxed and smiled . . .

Her awareness sparkled and subsided.

And she was beyond time and space. The great quantum functions that encompassed all the universes slid past her like stars streaming from the edge of an unseen nebula, and her eyes were filled with the grey light that shone beneath reality, the light against which all phenomena are shadows.

Time wore away, unmarked.

And then—

15

Marshal Sand stood before the coffin-box, set on end in the flitter cabin, which would serve as the terminal of the transfer. An armed guard stood by.

And Coton writhed on his couch, trying to scream around the gag in his mouth. His head was swathed in a silvery helmet, and the air sparkled with Virtual read-outs. Two crew members hovered over him, evidently anxious, and they tucked a med blanket over his slight body.

Vala stood back, helpless, trying not to tremble. ‘How much longer, Croq?’

But Croq, studying Virtuals that scrolled and danced in the air before his face, had no answer.

‘I wouldn’t worry, Academician,’ Sand said calmly. ‘The alien thing in his head can be used for more transfers, even if this first experiment kills him.’

‘Have some pity, Marshal—’

Now Croq gasped. ‘It’s working! But it shouldn’t be. In the end the graviton flux just isn’t sufficient. Or it wasn’t. Something is
boosting
it, like an amplification. Otherwise we’d be losing the data, too much of it . . .’

‘
Something
,’ Sand said. ‘What something?’

‘I think I can guess,’ Vala said. ‘The gravitic creatures in the Core. What else could do this? They saw what we were trying to do. They helped! They amplified the flow—’

‘Why should they?’

‘As you may open a window to release a butterfly, Marshal. A trivial kindness.’

The door of the coffin-box creaked open, just a crack in the seal. There was a smell of smoke, Vala thought – of meat, of sweat. Croq gasped and stepped back.

But Sand held her ground. ‘Well, let us see what it is they have been kind to.’ She stepped forward, and her guard followed, weapon ready. Sand faced the coffin-box, dug the fingers of one gloved hand into the seal of the opened door, and pulled it back.

A girl fell out.

The Marshal caught her in her uniformed arms. Limp, the girl wore a dirty tunic of what looked like plaited tree bark, and her grimy hair was tied back. She was too tall, too spindly, her stick-thin legs didn’t look as if they would support her, Vala thought, and her head lolled on a skinny neck. It was a paradox that the creatures of a high-gravity universe spent most of their lives in effective freefall. And she had distinct webbing on her toes – an adaptation for swimming in the air?

Sand lowered her to the deck. But the girl struggled, and tried to raise her head, and spoke in a scratchy voice. ‘
Ma-seef senss-or dees-funx-eon . . .
’

Sand stared at her. ‘By Bolder’s ghost. I think she made a joke!’

The girl tried to speak again, and the flitter’s Virtual suite translated for her. ‘Coton? Where is he?’

Vala had not thought of her grandson since the coffin-box had cracked open. She whirled.

Coton lay immobile on his couch. The crew members worked on him frantically. But, one by one, the Virtual lights hovering around his head were turning red.