Xeelee: Endurance (49 page)

The question surprised him. ‘Not many. Just caged songbirds. Hard for them to find anywhere to nest.’

‘I ask because I used to watch birds as a child. I’d climb up to a place we call the Attic . . . The birds use the time layers. The parents will nest at some low level, then go gathering food higher up. They’ve worked out they can take as long as they like, while the babies, stuck in slow time, don’t get too hungry and are safe from the predators. Of course, the parents grow old faster, sacrificing their lives for their chicks.’

‘I never saw anything like that. I never got the chance.’ He shook his head, suddenly angry, resentful. ‘Not on this island in the sky, as a servant of some machine. Sometimes I hope the next Caress comes soon and smashes everything up.’

She took both his hands and smiled at him. ‘I have a feeling you’re going to be a challenge. But I like challenges.’

‘You do?’

‘Sure. Or I wouldn’t be here, spending a month with a bunch of old folk while
seventeen
months pass at home. Think of the parties I’m missing!’

His heart hammered, as if he had been lifted up into the blue. ‘I’ve only known you hours,’ he said. ‘Yet I feel—’

‘You should return to your work.’ The familiar child’s voice was strange, cold, jarring.

Telni turned. The Weapon was here, hovering effortlessly over the hole in the floor. His tethered boy stood some metres away, tense, obviously nervous of the long drop. The spindlings still turned their wheel, but the cargo jockeys stood back, staring at the sudden arrival of the Weapon, the maker and ruler of their world.

Telni’s anger flared. He stepped forward towards the child, fists clenched. ‘What do you want?’

‘We have come to observe the formal congress this evening. The Philosophers from Shelf and Platform. There are many questions humans can address that we—’

‘Then go scare all those old men and women. Leave me alone.’ Suddenly, with Mina at his side, he could not bear to have the Weapon in his life once more, with its strange ageless boy on his umbilical. ‘Leave me alone, I say!’

Powpy turned to look at Mina. ‘She will not stay here. This girl, MinaAndry. Her home is on the Shelf. Her family, the Andry-Feri, is an ancient dynasty, with a lineage reaching back almost to the last Caress. She has responsibilities, to bear sons and daughters.
That
is her destiny. Not here.’

‘I will stay if I wish,’ Mina said. She was trembling, Telni saw, evidently terrified of the Weapon, this strange, ancient, wild machine from the dark Lowland. Yet she was facing it, answering it back.

Telni found himself snarling, ‘Maybe she’ll bear
my
sons and daughters.’

‘No,’ said the boy.

‘What do you mean, no?’

‘She is not suitable for you.’

‘She’s a scholar from Foro! She’s from the stock you brought here to populate the Platform in the first place!’

‘It is highly unlikely that she has an Effigy. Few in her family do.
Your
partner should have an Effigy. That is why—’

‘Selective breeding,’ Mina gasped. ‘It’s true. This machine really is breeding humans like cattle . . .’

‘I don’t care about Effigies!’ Telni yelled. ‘I don’t care about you and your stupid projects.’ He stalked over to the boy, who stood trembling, clearly afraid, yet unable to move from the spot.

‘Telni, don’t,’ Mina called.

The boy said tremulously, ‘Already you have done good and insightful work, which—’

Telni struck, a hard clap with his open hand to the side of the boy’s head. Powpy went down squealing.

Mina rushed forward and pushed herself between Telni and the boy. ‘What have you done?’

‘He, it – all my life—’

‘Is that this boy’s fault? Oh, get away, you fool.’ She knelt down and cradled the child’s head on her lap. With the umbilical still dangling from the back of his neck, Powpy was crying, in a strange, contained way. ‘He’s going to bruise. I think you may have damaged his ear. And his jaw – no, child, don’t try to talk.’ She turned to the Weapon, which hovered impassively. ‘Don’t make him speak for you again. He’s hurt.’

Telni opened his hands. ‘Mina, please—’

‘Are you still here?’ she snarled. ‘Go get help. Or if you can’t do that, just go away. Go!’

And he knew he had lost her, in that one moment, with that one foolish blow. He turned away and headed towards the Platform’s hospital to find a nurse.

He would not see the Weapon again for two decades.

The little boy walked into Telni’s cell, trailing a silvery rope from the back of his neck.

Telni was huddled up in his bunk, a spindling-skin blanket over his body. Though feverish, Telni was shivering: drying out from the drink, and not for the first time. He scowled at the boy. ‘You again.’

‘Be fair,’ the boy said. ‘We have not troubled you for twenty years.’

‘Not twenty for you.’ His figuring was cloudy. ‘Down on Lowland, less than a year—’

‘This boy is not yet healed.’

Telni saw the boy’s face was distorted on the right-hand side. ‘I apologise.’ He sat up. ‘I apologise to
you
– what in the blue was your name?’

‘Powpy.’

‘I apologise to you, Powpy. Not to the thing that controls you. Where is it, by the way?’

‘It would not fit through the door.’

Telni lay back and laughed.

‘We did not expect to find you here.’

‘In the drunk tank? Well, I got fired by the apothecary for emptying her drugs cabinet once too often. So it was the drink for me.’ He patted his belly. ‘At least it’s putting fat on my bones.’

‘Why this slow self-destruction?’

‘Call it an experiment. I’m following in my father’s footsteps, aren’t I? After all, thanks to you, I have no more chance of happiness, of finding meaning in my life, than he did. And besides, it’s all going to finish in a big smash soon, isn’t it? As you smart machines no doubt know already.’

It didn’t respond to that immediately. ‘You never had a wife. Children.’

‘Sooner no kids at all than to breed at your behest.’

‘You have long lost contact with MinaAndry.’

‘You could say that.’ When the month-long tour of the Shelf Philosophers was concluded, she had gone home with them to continue her interrupted life on Foro. Since then, the accelerated time of the Shelf had whisked her away from him for ever. ‘After – what, three hundred years up there, more? – she’s dust, her descendants won’t remember her, even the language she spoke will be half-forgotten. The dead get deader, you know, as every trace of their existence is expunged. That’s one thing life on Old Earth has taught us. What do you want, anyway?’

‘Your research into the Formidable Caress.’

‘If you can call it research.’

‘Your work is good, from what we have seen of that portion you have shared with other scholars. You cannot help but do good work, Telni. The curiosity I saw burning in that ten-year-old boy, long ago, is still bright.’

‘Don’t try to analyse me, you –
thing
.’

‘Tell me what you have discovered . . .’

He could not hold back what he had learned, he found. At least the telling distracted him from his craving for drink.

After his discovery of the huge rate at which the inhabitants of Old Earth were plummeting into the future of the universe, Telni had become interested in spans of history. On the Shelf, written records went back some four thousand years of local time. These records had been compiled by a new civilisation rising from the rubble of an older culture, itself wrecked by a disaster known as the Formidable Caress, thought to have occurred some six thousand years before
that
.

‘But in the external universe,’ Telni said, ‘ten thousand Shelf years corresponds to over three
billion
years. So much I deduced from my pendulums, swinging away beneath the Platform amid streams of spindling shit and cargo jockey piss . . . Everybody has always thought that the Caresses come about from local events. Something to do with the planet itself. But three billion years is long enough for events to unfold on a wider scale, a universal one. Time enough, according to what Shelf scholars have reconstructed, for stars to be born and to die, for whole galaxies to swim and jostle . . . “Galaxy”, by the way, is a very old term for a system of stars. I found that out for myself. So, you see, I wondered if the Caresses could have some cosmic cause.’

‘You started to correspond with scholars on the Shelf.’

‘Yes. After that first visit by Mina’s party we kept up a regular link, with visits from them – once every couple of years for us, once a generation for them . . . I spoke to the astronomers over there, about what they saw in the sky. And their archaeologists, about what had been seen in the past. There was always snobbishness, you know. Those of us down in the red think we are better because we are closer to the original stock of Old Earth; those up in the blue, who have produced more generations, believe they are superior products of evolution. None of that bothered
me.
And as their decades ticked by, I think I helped shape whole agendas of research by my sheer persistence.’

‘It must have been rewarding for you.’

‘Academically, yes. I’ve never had any problem, academically. It’s the rest of my life that’s a piece of shit.’

‘Tell us what you discovered.’

‘I don’t have my notes, my books—’

‘Just tell us.’

He sat up and stared into the face of the eerily unchanged boy – who, to his credit, did not flinch. ‘The first Caress destroyed almost everything of what went before, on the Shelf and presumably elsewhere. Almost, but not all. Some trace inscriptions, particularly carvings on stone, have survived. Images, fragmentary, and bits of text. Records of something in the sky.’

‘What something?’

‘The Galaxy is a disc of stars, a spiral. We, on a planet embedded in the disc, see this in cross section, as a band of light in the sky. Much of it obscured by dust.’

‘And?’

‘The ancients’ last records show
two
bands, at an angle to each other. There is evidence that the second band grew brighter, more prominent. The chronological sequence is difficult to establish – the best of these pieces were robbed and used as hearths or altar stones by the fallen generations that followed . . .’

‘Nevertheless,’ the boy prompted.

‘Nevertheless, there is evidence that something came from out of the sky. Something huge. Another galaxy, so some believe – so
I
believe. And then there are crude, scrawled images – cartoons, really – of explosions. All over the sky. A million suns, suddenly appearing.’ He imagined survivors, huddled in the ruins of their cities, scratching what they saw into fallen stones. ‘After that – nothing, for generations. People were too busy reinventing agriculture to do much astronomy. That was ten thousand years ago.

‘The next bit of evidence comes from around three thousand years back, when a Natural Philosopher called HuroEldon established new centres of scholarship, at Foro and down on the Lowland . . . Once again we started keeping good astronomical records. And not long after Huro’s time, the astronomers observed in the sky—’

‘Another band of stars.’

‘No.
A spiral
– a spiral of stars, ragged, the stars burning and dying, a wheel turning around a point of intense brightness. This object swam towards us, so it seemed, and at its closest approach there was another flare of dazzling new stars, speckled over the sky – but there was no Caress, not this time. The spiral receded into the dark.’

‘Tell us what you believe this means.’

‘I think it’s clear. This other spiral is a galaxy like our own. The two orbit each other.’ He mimed this with his fists, but his hands were shaking; shamed before the boy’s steady gaze, he lowered his arms. ‘As twin stars may orbit one another. But unlike stars galaxies are big, diffuse structures. They must tear at each other, ripping open those lacy spirals. Perhaps when they brush, they create bursts of starbirth. A Formidable Caress indeed.

‘The last Caress was a first pass, when the second galaxy came close enough to
our
part of our spiral to cause a great flaring of stars – and that flaring, a rain of light falling from the blue, was what shattered our world. Then after HuroEldon’s time, two billion years later externally, there was another approach – this one not so close, not a true Caress; it was spectacular but did no damage, not to us. And then . . .’

‘Yes?’

He shrugged, peering up at the Construction-Material roof of the cell. ‘The sky is ragged, full of ripped-apart spiral arms. The two galaxies continue to circle each other, perhaps heading for a full merger, a final smash. And that, perhaps, will cause a new starburst flare, a new Caress.’

The boy stood silently, considering this, though one leg quivered, as if itchy. He asked: ‘When?’

‘That I couldn’t calculate. I tried to do some mathematics on the orbit. Long time since I stayed sober enough to see
that
through. But there’s one more scrap of information in the archaeology. There was always a tradition that the second Caress would follow ten thousand years after the first, Shelf time. Maybe that’s a memory of what the smart folk who lived before the first Caress were able to calculate. They
knew
, not only about the Caress that threatened them, but also what would follow. Remarkable, really.’

‘Ten thousand years,’ the boy said. ‘Which is—’

‘About now.’ Telni grinned. ‘If the world ends, do you think they will let me out of here to see the show?’

‘You have done remarkable work, Telni. This is a body of evidence extracted from human culture that we could not have assembled for ourselves.’ Even as he spoke these calm words, the boy trembled, and Telni saw piss drip down his bare leg.

Telni snorted. ‘You really aren’t too good at running the people you herd, are you, machine?’

Ignoring the dribble on his leg, Powpy spoke on. ‘Regarding the work, however.
We
are adept at calculation. Perhaps we can take these hints and reconstruct the ancients’ computations, or even improve on them.’