Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (108 page)

Up to now Adda had been anticipating only his own death, and the death of many others - even of those close to him. But perhaps this new catastrophe was destined to go much further - to encompass the destruction of the race itself. He was overwhelmed suddenly by a vision of the Star scoured clean of Human Beings, of all future generations - everything Adda had worked for - snuffed out, rendered meaningless.

Toba was still talking. Adda hadn’t heard a word he’d said for a long time.

Adda pulled himself away and took a deep breath. If the world was to finish today - well, there was little Adda could do about it. In the meantime he had work to do.

Deni Maxx joined Adda in the improvised doorway. ‘Thanks for coming to help us, citizen.’

Toba shrugged. ‘I needed something to keep me busy.’ Another patient was being brought through the ward now; Toba Mixxax stared past Adda at the broken body, and his round face set into a mask of grimness.

‘Well, you found it,’ Adda said darkly.

Deni Maxx touched his arm. ‘Come on, upfluxer. Let’s get back to work.’

In the distance the starbreakers, like immense daggers, continued to pierce the Mantle. Adda stared out for one moment longer; then, with a final nod to Toba, he turned away.

Once the Star had seemed huge to her. Now here she was stranded in the immensity of this Ur-sky, of stars and planets, and she thought back almost nostalgically to the cosy world of the Mantle - with the smooth purple floor of the Quantum Sea below her, the Crust a blanket above her, the Mantle itself like an immense womb succouring her. All of that had been stripped away by this astonishing journey, and by the seeing-gadgets of the Ur-humans.

She tilted back her head and opened her eyes as wide as she could, trying to take it all in, to bury her awe and build a model of this new universe in her head.

The sky around them - the space between the stars - wasn’t utterly black. She made out hints of structure: clouds, whorls, shadings of grey. There must be some kind of air out there, beyond the transparent walls - air but not Air: thin, translucent, patchy, but sufficient to give the sky an elusive shape. It was a little like the fugitive ghost-patterns she could see in the darkness of her own eyecups if she jammed her eyes tight shut.

And beyond the thin shroud of gas lay the stars, suspended all around the sky. They were lanterns, clear and without flicker; they were of all colours and all levels of brightness, from the faintest spark to intense, noble flames. And perhaps, she thought with an almost religious awe, those lights in the sky were worlds in themselves. Maybe there were other forms of humans on those distant lights, placed there by the Ur- humans for their own inscrutable purposes. Would it ever be possible to know? - to speak to those humans, to travel there across such immensities?

She tried to make out patterns in the distribution of the stars. Perhaps there was a hint of a ring structure over there - and a dozen stars trailed in a line across that corner of the sky . . .

But as fast as she found such bits of orderliness in the unmanageable sky, she lost them again. Slowly she came to accept the truth - that
there was no order
, that the stars were scattered over the sky at random.

For the first time since leaving the ‘Flying Pig’, panic spurted in her. Her breath scraped through her throat and she felt her capillaries expand throughout her flesh, admitting more strength-bearing Air.

Why should randomness upset her so? Because, she realized slowly, there were no vortex lines here, no neat Crust ceiling or Sea floor. All her life had been spent in a ruled-off sky - a sky where any hint of irregularity was so unusual as to be a sign of deadly danger.

But there were no lines here, no reassuring anchor-points for her mind.

‘Are you all right?’ Hork sounded calmer than she was, but his eyecups were wide and his nostrils flared, glowing like nuclear-burning wood above his bush of beard.

‘No. Not really. I’m not sure I can accept all this.’

‘I know. I know.’ Hork lifted up his face. In the starlight the intrinsic coarseness of his features seemed to melt away, leaving a calm, almost elegiac expression. He waved a hand across the sky. ‘Look at the stars. Look how their brightness varies . . . But what if that variation is an illusion? Have you thought about that? What if all the stars are about as bright as each other?’

Her mind - as usual - plodded slowly behind his flight of logic. If the stars were all the same intrinsic brightness, then some of them would have to be further away. Much further away.

She sighed. No, damn it. She
hadn’t
thought of that.

Somehow she’d been picturing the starry Ur-universe as a shell around her - like the Crust, though much further away. But it wasn’t like that; she was surrounded by an unbounded sky throughout which the stars - themselves worlds - were scattered like spin-spider eggs.

The universe ballooned around her, reducing her to a meaningless mote, a spark of awareness. It was oppressive, beyond her imagination; she cried out, covering her face in her hands.

Hork sounded uncomfortable. ‘Take it easy.’

Irritation burrowed through her awe. ‘Oh, sure. And you’re quite calm, I suppose. Sorry to embarrass you . . .’

‘Give me a break.’

She turned away from him, striving for calm. ‘I wish I knew what is an appropriate response to all this - to be here in this ancient place, to be seeing through the eyes of the Ur-humans . . .’

‘Well, not quite,’ Hork said gently. ‘Remember there are still walls around us, which must somehow be helping us to see. The Ur-humans didn’t see things the same way we do. Ask Muub about it when we get back . . . We “see” by sound waves which are transmitted through the Air.’ He waved a hand. ‘But beyond this little bubble, there isn’t any Air. The Ur-humans didn’t live in Air, in fact. And they “saw” by focusing beams of photons, which . . .’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘They could
smell
the stars?’

‘Of course not,’ he snapped. ‘In Air, photons can travel only slowly, diffusing. So we use them to smell. And we “hear” temperature fluctuations.

‘In empty space, it’s different. Phonons can’t travel at all - so we would be blind. But photons travel immensely fast. So the Ur-humans could have “seen” photons . . . Anyway, that’s Muub’s theory.’

‘Then how did they hear? Or smell, or taste?’

He growled impatiently. ‘How the hell should I know? Anyway, I think this third chamber is designed to let us see the universe the way the Ur-humans did.’ He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘And there’s still a setting left on the arrow-console, the fourth one . . . we haven’t finished with our ways of seeing yet.’

She’d forgotten about that last setting. Some core of her, buried deep inside, quailed a little further.

Turning in the Air she looked around, still searching for patterns. The sky wasn’t uniformly dark, she realized; the elusive gas faded up from grey to a deep, crimson glow on the far side of the room. ‘Come on. I think there’s something beyond the wormhole chamber . . .’

Still holding hands, they Waved past the control chair and around the darkened tetrahedron which contained the wormhole portal and the ‘Pig’. Through the open door, Dura glimpsed their craft; its roughly hewn wooden walls, its bands of Corestuff, the slowly leaking stink of Air-pig farts, all seemed unbearably primitive in this chamber of Ur-human miracles.

The sky-glow intensified as they neared its source. At last the glow drowned out the stars. Dura felt herself pull back, shying away from new revelations. But Hork enclosed her fingers in a tight, smothering grip and coaxed her forward. ‘Come on,’ he said grimly. ‘Don’t fold on me now.’ At the centre of the glowing sky was a single star: tiny, fierce and yellow-red, brighter than any other in the sky. But this star wasn’t isolated in space. A ring of some glowing gas circled the star, and - still more astonishing - an immense globe of light hung close to the fierce little star. The globe was like a star itself, but attenuated, bloated, its outer layers so diffuse as almost to merge with the all-pervading gas cloud. Tendrils of grey light snaked from the globe-star and reached far into the ring of gas.

It was like a huge sculpture of gas and light, Dura thought. She was stunned by the spectacle, and yet charmed by its proportion, scale, depths of shading and colour.

She was seeing the gas ring around the star from edge-on . . . in fact, she realized slowly, the Ur-human construct around her was actually
inside
the body of the ring. And she could see beyond the central star to the far side of the gas ring; distance reduced the ring’s far limb to a line of light on which the little star was threaded, like a pendant.

She could see turbulence in the ring, huge cells big enough to swallow a thousand of the Ur-human colonies. The cells erupted and merged, changing as she watched despite their unthinkable scale. And there seemed to be movement around the star, a handful of sparks dipping into its carcass . . .

‘Then it’s true,’ Hork breathed.

‘What?’

‘That we’re not in the Star any more. That we’ve been transported, through the wormhole, to a planet outside it.’ Ring- light bathed his face, casting complex highlights from his beard. ‘Don’t you see? That’s our star -
the Star -
and, just like the map said, we’re on a planet circling the Star. But the map didn’t show the ring.’ He turned to her, excitement in his eyes. It was the excitement of understanding, she realized, of piecing together a puzzle. ‘So now we know how our Star’s system is put together.’ He mimed with his hands. ‘Here’s the Star, at the centre of it all. The gas ring encircles it, like this. The planet must drift within the ring. And hanging above it all we have the globe-thing, glowing dully and leaking gas.’

Dura stared at their Star. It was small and mean, she thought, disappointing compared to the glorious lanterns which glittered in other parts of the sky. And yet it was
home;
she felt a strange dislocation, a pang of sadness, of loss. ‘Our world is so limited,’ she said slowly. ‘How could we ever have known that beyond the Crust was so much wonder, immensity, beauty . . .’

‘You know, I think that big sphere of gas has a glow of its own. It isn’t just reflecting the Starlight, I mean.’

The globe was like an immense pendant on the ring, utterly dwarfing the Star itself. Hork seemed to be right; the intensity of its grey-yellow glow increased towards its rough centre. And it wasn’t actually a sphere, she realized slowly; perhaps it had once been, but now it was drawn out into a teardrop shape, with a thin tip attached to the ring by an umbilical of glowing gas. The outer layers of the globe were misty, turbulent; Dura could see through them to the darkness of space.

‘It’s like a star itself. But . . .’

‘But it doesn’t look right.’ Dura searched for the right word. ‘It seems -
unhealthy
.’

‘Yes.’ He pointed. ‘It looks as if stuff is being drawn out of the big star and put into the ring.’ He glanced speculatively at Dura. ‘Perhaps, somehow, the Star is drawing flesh from the big star to create the ring. Perhaps the planet we’re on is constructed of ring-stuff.’

She shuddered. ‘You make the Star sound like a living thing. Like an eye-leech. ’

‘A star-leech. Well, perhaps that’s as good an explanation as we’ll ever get . . .’ He grinned at her, his face spectral in the ring’s glow. ‘Come on. I want to try the arrow’s last setting.’

‘Oh, Hork . . . Do you have
any
capacity for awe?’

‘No.’ His grin broadened through his beard. ‘I think it’s a survival characteristic. Mental toughness, I call it.’ He led her back around the inner portal-chamber and eyed her roguishly. ‘So we’ve seen the stars. Big deal. What’s left?’ ‘Twist the arrow and find out.’

He did so.

The universe - of stars and starlight - imploded.

Dura screamed.

T
he stars - all except
the
Star - had disappeared, dragging all the light from the sky. The Star, with its ring and its huge, bleeding companion, hung in an emptied sky . . .

No, she realized, that wasn’t quite true. There was a bow around the sky - a multicoloured ribbon, thin and perfect, which hooped around the Ur-humans’ habitat - and, she saw, passed
behind the Star itself.

It was a ribbon which encircled the universe, and it contained all the starlight.

Hork loomed before her, the starbow adding highlights to the grey illumination of his face. ‘Well?’ he demanded irritably. ‘What now?’

She rubbed her forehead. ‘Each setting of that device has shown us more of our surroundings - more of the universe. It’s as if successive layers, veils, have been removed from our eyes.’

‘Right.’ He lifted his eyes to the starbow. ‘So this must be the truth? The last setting, which strips away all the veils?’ He shook his head. ‘But what does it mean?’

‘The sky we saw before - of stars, scattered around the sky - was strange to us . . . even awesome. But it looked
natural
. The stars were just like our Star, only much further away.’

‘Yes. Whereas this seems distorted. And how come we can still see our Star? Why isn’t its light smeared out into this absurd hoop, too?’

Dura whirled in the Air, trying to suppress a scream. The voice, dry and soft, emanating from the emptiness of the huge room behind her had been utterly terrifying.

‘Karen Macrae,’ Hork said, his voice thick with hostility.

A sketch of shoulders and head wrought in pale, coloured cubes of light hung in the Air a mansheight from them. The definition was poorer than within the underMantle - the colours washed out, the jostling light-cubes bigger. Karen Macrae opened her eyes, and again Dura was repulsed by the fleshy balls nestling within the cups.