Xeelee: Endurance (50 page)

‘So you’ll know the precise date of the end of the world? That will help. Come back and tell me what you figure out.’

‘We will.’ The boy turned and walked away, leaving piss-footprints on the smooth floor.

Telni laughed at him, lay back on his bunk, and tried to sleep.

It was to be a very long time before Telni saw the Weapon and its human attendant again.

‘He refuses to die. It’s as simple as that. There’s nothing but his own stubbornness keeping him alive . . .’

His hearing was so bad now that it was as if his ears were stuffed full of wool. But, lying there on his pallet, he could hear every word they said.

And, though he needed a lot of sleep these days, he was aware when they moved him into the Morgue, ready for him to die, ready to capture his Effigy-spirit when it was released from his seventy-seven-year-old body.

‘Leave me in here if you like, you bastards.’ He tried to laugh, but it just made him cough. ‘I’m just going to lie here as long as necessary.’

‘As long as necessary for what?’

‘For it to come back again.’

But, more than thirty years since the last visitation, only a handful of the medical staff knew what he was talking about.

In the end, of course, it came.

He woke from another drugged sleep to find a little boy standing beside his bed.

He struggled to sit up. ‘Hey, Powpy. How’s it going with you? You’ve grown, a little. You’re not afraid of me, are you? Look, I’m old and disgusting, but at least I can’t slap you around the head any more, can I?’

He thought he saw a flicker of something in the boy’s eyes. Forgiveness? Pity? Fear? Contempt? Well, he deserved the latter. But then Powpy spoke in that odd monotone, so familiar even after all these years. ‘We were here at the beginning of your life. Now here we are at the end.’

‘Yes.’ He tried to snap his fingers, failed. ‘Just another spark in the flames for you, right? And now you’ve come to see me give up my Effigy so you can trap it in this box of yours.’

‘We would not describe it as—’

He grabbed the boy’s arm, trying to grip hard. ‘Listen, Weapon. You can have my Effigy. What do I care? But I’m not going to die like this. Not here, not now.’

‘Then where, and when?’

‘
Fifty years
,’ he whispered. He glanced at the medical staff, who hovered at the edges of the Building. ‘I did my own calculations. Took me ten years. Well, I had nothing better to do . . . Fifty years, right? That’s all the time we’ve got left, until the fireworks.’

The boy said gravely, ‘We imagine our model of the galaxies’ interaction is somewhat more sophisticated than yours. But your answer is substantially correct. You understand that this Caress will be different.
Those on the Platform will survive.
The Construction Material of the Buildings will shelter them. That was always one long-term purpose of the Platform project, to provide refuge. And from this seed, the recovery of civilisation after the Caress should be much more rapid.’

Telni cackled weakly. ‘You built us a shelter from a Formidable Caress? Well, well, you do care. But the cities of the Shelf – Foro, Puul—’

‘People will survive in caves, underground. But the vast loss of life, the destruction of the ecology, of their agriculture—’

‘Serves those bastards right. They lost interest in talking to me decades ago.’ Which was true. But since the Creationist-Mechanist Wars, there had been centuries of peace on the Shelf – and they had built something beautiful and splendid up there, a chain of cities like jewels in the night, cities that sparkled in the time-accelerated view of witnesses on the Platform. In his head Telni imagined a race of blueshifted Minas, beautiful, clear-eyed, laughing. ‘Well. There’s nothing I can do for them.’ He struggled to sit straighter. ‘But there’s something I want you to do for me. You owe me, artefact. Now you’re going to take away my soul. Well, you can have it. But you can give me something back in return. I want to see the Caress.’

‘You have only weeks to live. Days, perhaps.’

‘
Then take me down into the red
. No matter how little time I have left, you can find a pit deep enough on this time-shifted world to squeeze in fifty Platform years.’ Exhausted, he fell back coughing; a nurse hurried over to lower him gently to his blankets. ‘And one more thing.’

‘More demands?’

‘Let this boy go.’

When Telni woke again, he found himself staring up at a sky of swirling blue stars. ‘Made it, by my own redshifted arse.’

A face hovered over him, a woman’s. ‘Don’t try to move.’

‘You’re in the way.’ He tried to sit up, failed, but kept struggling until she helped him up and he could see.

He was on a plain –
on the ground
, his pallet set on red, rusty dirt, down on the true ground of Old Earth for the first time in his life. Something like a rail track curled across his view. Buildings of Construction Material were scattered around like a giant’s toys. He got the immediate sense this was a kind of camp, not permanent.

And figures moved in the distance. At first sight they looked human. But then something startled them, and they bucked and fled, on six legs.

‘What are
those
?’

‘They are called Centaurs.’ Powpy was standing beside him, his neck umbilical connecting him to the Weapon, which hovered as impassive as ever, though rusty dirt clung to its sleek hide. ‘Human-spindling hybrids.’

He stared, astonished. But he had no time left for wonder. ‘You were going to let this kid go.’

‘He will be released,’ said the woman sternly. ‘My name’s Ama, by the way.’

Which had been his mother’s name. He felt a stab of obscure guilt. ‘Glad to meet you.’

‘You should be. I’m a nurse. I volunteered to stay with you, to keep you alive when they brought you down here.’

‘No family, I take it.’

‘Not any more. And when this business is done, I’ll be taking Powpy here back up top, to the Platform. You did ask for him to be released, didn’t you?’

‘His mother and father—’

‘Long dead,’ she whispered.

‘We’re all orphans here, then.’

Powpy said solemnly, ‘We will have to shelter in a Construction-Material Building to ride out the Caress. We are deep enough that it should be brief—’

‘How deep?’

‘We are in the Abyss. Once the bed of a deep ocean, far below the offshore plains you call the Lowland . . . Deep enough.’

‘Nice sky.’

‘Most of the stars’ radiation is blueshifted far beyond your capacity to see it.’

‘And how long – ow!’ There was a sharp pain in his chest.

Ama grabbed him and lowered him back against a heap of pillows. ‘Just take it easy. That was another heart attack.’

‘
Another
. . .’

‘They’ve been coming thick and fast.’

‘That Weapon won’t want me dying out in the open. Not after all this.’

‘We have a Morgue designated just over there,’ Ama said. ‘Your bed’s on wheels.’

‘Good planning.’

‘Not long now,’ murmured Powpy.

But he, the boy, wasn’t looking at the sky. Telni touched Powpy’s chin, and lifted his face. ‘He should see this for himself.’

‘Very well,’ the Weapon said through the boy’s mouth.

‘Why, Weapon? Why the grand experiment? Why the Platform?
Why are you so fascinated by the Effigies?
’

‘We believe the Effigies are not native to the Old Earth, any more than the spindlings or the lightmoss or—’

‘But they’re pretty closely bound up to humans. They live and die with us.’

‘They do not die. So we believe. We have mapped disturbances, deep in the Old Earth . . . We believe there is a kind of nest of them, a colony of Effigies that dwells deep in the core of the planet. They emerge to combine with humans, with infants at birth.
Some
infants – we don’t know how they choose. And we don’t know how they bond either. But after the human carrier’s death, the Effigy symbiote is released, and returns to the core colony. Something of the human is taken with it. We believe.’

‘Memories.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘And are these memories brought back up from this core pit the next time an Effigy surfaces?’

‘Perhaps. Everything about this world is designed, or modified. Perhaps the purpose is to preserve something of the memory of humanity across epochal intervals.’

‘Maybe this is why I always felt like something in me really doesn’t belong in this time or place.’

‘We Machines can study this only at second-hand. It is something about humanity that no Machine shares.’

‘I think you’re jealous. Aren’t you, Machine? You can farm us, keep us as lab animals. But you can’t have
this
.’

‘There is no reliable mapping between human emotions and the qualia of our own sensorium . . .’

But he didn’t hear the rest. Another stabbing in his chest, a pain that knifed down his left arm. The nurse leaned over him.

And the sky exploded.

These weren’t just new stars. They were stars that detonated, each flaring brighter than the rest of the sky put together, then vanishing as quickly, blown-out matches.

‘Supernovas,’ said the boy, Powpy. ‘That is the ancient word. A wave of supernovas, triggered by the galaxy collision, giant exploding stars flooding nearby space with lethal radiation, a particle sleet . . .’

But Telni couldn’t talk, couldn’t breathe.

‘He’s going,’ the nurse said. ‘Get him to the Morgue.’

He glimpsed people running up – no, not people, they were six-legged, Centaurs – and his bed was shoved forward, across the rusty dirt towards the enclosure of a Building. He tried to protest, to cling to his view of that astounding sky as long as he could. But he couldn’t even breathe, and it felt as if a sword were being twisted in his chest.

They got him indoors. He lay back, rigid with pain, staring at a Construction-Material roof that seemed to recede from him.

And a glow, like the glow of the sky outside, suffused the inside of his head, his very eyes.

‘It’s happening,’ he heard the nurse say, wonder in her voice. ‘Look, it’s rising from his limbs . . . His heart has stopped.’ She straddled him and pounded at his chest, even as a glow lit up her face, the bare flesh of her arms – a glow coming from
him
.

He remembered
–
a glimmering tetrahedron, looming, an electric-blue framework swallowing him up – memories that had nothing to do with
this
world . . .

He heard Powpy call, ‘Do you know who you are? Or who you
were
?’

And suddenly
he knew
, as if his eyes had suddenly focused, after years of myopia. With the last of the air in his lungs he struggled to speak. ‘Not again. Not again!’

The nurse peered into his eyes. ‘Stay with me, Telni!’

‘Who are you?
Who are you?
’

The light detonated from deep inside him. Suddenly he
filled
this box of Construction-Material, he was contained within it, and he rattled, anguished. But there was the door, a way out. Somehow he fled that way, seeking the redshift . . .

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.’

THE XEELEE SEQUENCE – TIMELINE

Singularity: Big Bang

ERA: Earth

AD 476–2005: Events of
Coalescent
.

AD 2047: Events of
Transcendent
(see also
c
.AD 500,000).

ERA: Expansion

AD 3000+: Opening up of the Solar System.

AD 3685: ‘Return to Titan’.

AD 3717: Launch of GUTship
Cauchy
. Events of
Timelike Infinity
begin.

AD 3829: The Emergency: time-travel invasion by Occupation-Era Qax (
Timelike Infinity
).

AD 3951: Events of
Ring
begin (see also
c.
AD 5,000,000).

AD 4820: ‘Starfall’. Collapse of Empire of Sol.

ERA: Squeem Occupation

AD 4874: Conquest of human planets by Squeem.

AD 4925: Overthrow of Squeem.

AD 5071: ‘Remembrance’.

ERA: Qax Occupation

AD 5088: Conquest of human planets by Qax.

AD 5274: ‘Endurance’. Return to Solar System of GUTship
Cauchy
. Launch of backward time-travel invasion by Qax (
Timelike Infinity
).

AD 5407: Overthrow of Qax. Third Expansion begins under Coalition.

ERA: The War with the Ghosts

AD 5810: ‘The Seer and the Silverman’.

ERA: The War to End Wars

AD 24973: Events of
Exultant
.

AD 104,858+: Events of
Raft
.

c
.AD 193,700: Events of
Flux
.

c
. AD 500,000: Events of
Transcendent
(see also AD 2047). The retreat of mankind begins.

AD 978,225: ‘Gravity Dreams’.

c
.AD 1,000,000: Final siege of the Solar System by Xeelee. The Saving of Old Earth.

ERA: Photino Victory

c
.AD 5,000,000+: Events of
Ring
(see also AD 3951).

ERA: Old Earth

c
. AD 3.8 billion years: ‘PeriAndry’s Quest’.

c
. AD 4 billion years: ‘Climbing the Blue’.

c
. AD 4.5 billion years: ‘The Time Pit’.

c
. AD 4.8 billion years: ‘The Lowland Expedition’.

c
. AD 5 billion years: ‘Formidable Caress’.

Singularity: Timelike Infinity

This outline timescale provides the context for the stories in this collection, as well as the novels published in the Xeelee Sequence so far. Other short fiction has been collected in
Vacuum Diagrams
(HarperCollins, 1997) and
Resplendent
(Gollancz, 2006). For a full timeline of the ‘Xeelee Sequence’ of novels and stories, please visit:

www.stephen-baxter.com