Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (116 page)

Mark and Louise climbed down a steep staircase amidships to the promenade deck; they strolled along the deck past blocks of tiny cabins towards the engine-room bulkhead.

Mark ran a fingertip over the surface of a cabin wall as they passed. He frowned, rubbing his fingertips together. ‘The surface feels odd . . . not much like wood.’

‘It’s preserved. Within a thin shell of semisentient plastic, which seals it, nourishes it . . . Mark, the damn boat was launched in 1843. Over two thousand years ago. There wouldn’t be much left of her without preservation. Anyway, I thought you weren’t interested.’

He sniffed. ‘Not really. I’m more interested in why you wanted to come down here: now, in the middle of all the celebrations for the completion of the starship.’

‘I try to avoid introspection,’ she said heavily.

‘Oh, sure.’ He turned to her, his face picking up the soft glow of the ancient wood. ‘Talk to me, Louise. The bit of me that cares about you is outvoting the bit that enjoys seeing you suffer, just for the moment.’

She shrugged. She couldn’t help sounding sour. ‘You tell me. You always were good at diagnosing the condition of the inside of my head. At great and tedious length. Maybe I’m feeling melancholy after completing my work on the
Northern
. Could that be it, do you think? Maybe I’m going through some equivalent of a post-coital depression.

He snorted. ‘With you, it was post, pre and during, frankly. No, I don’t think it’s that . . . And besides,’ he said slowly, ‘your work on the
Northern
isn’t finished yet.
You’re planning to leave with her
. Aren’t you? Spend subjective decades hauling her out to Tau Ceti.’

She heard herself growl. ‘How did you find out about that? No wonder you drove me crazy, all those years. You’re too damn
interested
in me.’

‘I’m right, though, aren’t I?’

Now they reached the
Britain
’s dining room. It was a fantastic Victorian dream. Twelve columns of white and gold, with ornamental capitals, ran down its spine, and the room was lined by two sets of twelve more columns each. Doorways between the columns led off to passageways and bedrooms, and the door archways were gilded and surmounted by medallion heads. The walls were lemon-yellow, relieved by blue, white and gold; omnipresent, sourceless light shone from the cutlery and glassware on the three long tables.

Mark walked across the carpet and ran his hand over a table’s gleaming, polished surface. ‘You should do something about this semisentient plastic: have it give the surfaces some semblance of their natural texture. The touch is half the beauty of a thing, Louise. But you always were . . .
remote
, weren’t you? Happy enough with the surface of things - with their look, their outer form. Never interested in touching, in getting closer.’

She ignored that. ‘Brunel had a lot of style, you know. He worked on a tunnel under the Thames, with his father.’

‘Where?’ Mark had been born in Port Cassini, Titan.

‘The Thames. A river, in England . . . on Earth. The tunnel was flooded, several times. Once, when it had been pumped out, Brunel threw a dinner party right up against the working face for fifty people. He got the band of the Coldstream Guards to—’

‘Hmm. How interesting,’ Mark said dryly. ‘Maybe you should put some food on these tables. Why not? It could be preserved, by your sentient plastic. You could have segments of dead animals. As devoured by the great Brunel himself.’

‘You never did have any taste, Mark’

‘I don’t think your mood has anything to do with the completion of the
Northern
.’

‘Then what?’

He sighed. ‘It’s you, of course. It always is. For a long time, while we were together, I thought I understood your motivation. There would always be another huge, beautiful GUTship to build; another immense undertaking to lose yourself in. And since we’re all immortal now, thanks to AntiSenescence, I thought that would be enough for you.

‘But I was wrong. It isn’t like that. Not really.’

Louise was aware of intense discomfort, somewhere deep within her; she felt she wanted to talk, read a bookslate, bury herself in a Virtual - anything to drown out his words.

‘You always were smarter than me, Mark.’

‘In some ways, yes.’

‘Just say what you’ve got to say, and get it over.’

‘You want immortality, Louise. But not the dreary
literal
immortality of AS - not just a body-scouring every few years - but the kind of immortality attained by your idols.’ He waved a hand. ‘By Brunel, for instance. By achieving something unique, wonderful. And you fear you’ll never be able to, no matter how many starships you build.’

‘You’re damn patronizing,’ she snapped. ‘The
Northern
is a great achievement.’

‘I know it is. I’m not denying it.’ He smiled, triumph in his eyes. ‘But I’m right, aren’t I?’

She felt deflated. ‘You know you are. Damn you.’ She rubbed her eyes. ‘
It’s the shadow of the future, Mark
. . .’

A century and a half earlier, the future had invaded the Solar System.

It had been humanity’s own fault; everyone recognized that. Under the leadership of an engineer called Michael Poole the Interface project - a wormhole link to a future a millennium and a half ahead - had been completed.

At the time Louise Ye Armonk was well established in her chosen field of GUTship engineering . . . at least, as established as any mere fifty-year-old could be, in a society increasingly dominated by the AS-preserved giants of the recent past. Louise had even worked, briefly, with Michael Poole himself.

Why had Poole’s wormhole time link been built? There were endless justifications -
what power could a glimpse of the future afford
? - but the truth was, Louise knew, that it had been built for little more than the sheer
joy
of it.

The Interface project came at the end of centuries of expansion for mankind. The Solar System had been opened up, first by GUTdrive vessels and later by wormhole links, and the first GUTdrive starship fuelling port - Port Sol - was already operational.

It was difficult now to recapture the mood of those times, Louise thought. Confidence - arrogance . . . The anthropic theories of cosmological evolution were somewhere near their paradigmatic peak. Some people believed humans were alone in the Universe. Others even believed the Universe had been
designed
, by some offstage agency, with the sole object of delivering and supporting humans. Given time, humans would do anything, go anywhere, achieve whatever they liked.

But Poole’s Interface had been a bridge to the
real
future.

The incident that followed the opening of the wormhole had been confused, chaotic, difficult to disentangle. But it
had
been a war - brief, spectacular, like no battle fought in Solar space before or since, but a war nevertheless.

Future Earth - at the other end of Poole’s time bridge, a millennium and a half hence - would be under occupation, by an alien species about whom nothing was known save their name:
Qax.

Rebel humans from the occupation era were pursued back through time, through Poole’s Interface, by two immense Qax warships. The rebels, with the help of Michael Poole, had destroyed the warships. Then Poole had driven a captured warship into the Interface wormhole, to seal it against further invasion - and in the process Poole himself was lost in time. The rebels, stranded in their past, had fled the Solar System in a captured GUTdrive ship, evidently intending to use time dilation effects to erode away the years back to their own era.

The System, stunned, slowly recovered.

Various bodies - like the Paradoxa Collegiate - still, after a hundred and fifty years, combed through the fragments of data from the Interface incident, trying to answer the unanswerable.

Like: what had
truly
happened to Michael Poole?

It was known that the Qax occupation itself would eventually be lifted, and humanity would resume its expansion - but now more warily, and into a Universe known to be populated by hostile competitors . . .

A Universe containing, above all, the
Xeelee
. And it was said that before Poole’s wormhole path to the future finally closed, some information had been obtained on the far future - of millions of years hence, far beyond the era of the Qax. Louise could see how some such data could be obtained - by the flux of high-energy particles from the mouth of the collapsing wormhole, for instance.

And the rumours said that the far future - and what it held for mankind - were bleak indeed.

Louise and Mark stood on the forecastle deck and looked up towards the Sun.

The
Great Northern
, Louise’s GUTdrive starship, passed serenely over their heads, following its stately, four-hour orbit through the Kuiper object’s shallow gravitational well. The
Northern
’s three-mile-long spine, encrusted with sensors, looked as if it had been carved from glass. The GUTdrive was embedded in a block of Port Sol ice, a silvery, irregular mass at one end of the spine. The lifedome - itself a mile across - was a skull of glass, fixed to the spine’s other end. Lights shone from the lifedome, green and blue; the dome looked like a bowlful of Earth, here on the rim of the System.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Mark said. ‘Like a Virtual. It’s hard to believe it’s real.’ The light from the
Britain
’s dome underlit his face, throwing the fine lines around his mouth into relief. ‘And it’s a good name, Louise.
Great Northern
. Your starship will head out where every direction is
north -
away from the Sun.’

Staring up at the shimmering
Northern
now, Louise remembered Virtual journeys through ghostly, still-born craft: craft which had evolved around her as the design software responded to her thoughts. How Brunel would have thrived with modern software, which once again enabled the vision of individuals to dominate such huge engineering projects. And some of those lost ships had been far more elegant and daring than the final design - which had been, as ever, a compromise between vision and economics.

. . . And that was the trouble. The real thing was
always
a disappointment.

‘Louise, you shouldn’t fear the future,’ Mark said.

Instantly Louise was irritated. ‘I don’t
fear
it,’ she said. ‘Lethe, don’t you even understand that? It’s Michael Poole and his damn Interface incident. I don’t fear the future. The trouble is, I
know
it.’

‘We all do, Louise,’ Mark said, his patience starting to sound a little strained. ‘And most of us don’t let it affect us—’

‘Oh, really. Look at yourself, Mark. What about your
hair
, for instance? - or rather, your lack of it.’

Mark ran a self-conscious hand up and over his scalp.

She went on, ‘Everyone knows that this modern passion for baldness comes from those weird human rebels from the future, the Friends of Wigner. So you can’t tell me you’re not influenced by knowing what’s to come. Your very hairstyle is a statement of—’

‘All right,’ he snapped. ‘All right, you’ve made your point. You never know when to shut up, do you? But, Louise - the difference is we aren’t all
obsessed
by the future. Unlike you.’

He walked away from her, his gait stiff with annoyance.

They climbed down into the engine room. Multicoloured light filtered down through an immense skylight. Four inclined cylinders thrust up from the floor of the ship; the pistons stood idle like the limbs of iron giants, and a vast chain girdled the drive machinery.

Louise rubbed her chin and stared at the machinery. ‘Obsessed? Mark, the future contains the Xeelee - godlike entities so aloof from us that we may never understand what they are trying to achieve - and with technology, with
engineering
, like magic. They have a
hyperdrive
.’ She let her voice soften. ‘Do you understand what that means? It means that somewhere in the Universe,
now
, the damn Xeelee are riding around in FTL chariots which make my poor
Northern
look like a horse-drawn cart.

‘And we believe they have an intraSystem engine - their so-called
discontinuity drive -
which powers night-dark ships with wings like sycamore leaves, hundreds of miles wide . . .

‘I’m not denying my GUTdrive module is a beautiful piece of engineering. I’m
proud
of it. But compared to what we understand of Xeelee technology, Mark, it’s - it’s a damn steam engine. Why, we even use ice as reaction mass. Think of that! What’s the point of building something which I know is outdated before I even start?’

Mark laid a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. His touch was warm, firm, and - as he’d no doubt intended - disconcertingly intimate. ‘So that’s why you’re running away.’

‘I’d hardly call leaving on a one-way colonizing expedition to Tau Ceti “running away”.’

‘Of course it is.
Here
is where you can achieve things - here, with the resources of a Solar System. You’re an engineer, damn it. What will you build on some planet of Tau Ceti? A
real
steam engine, maybe.’

‘But—’ She struggled to find words that didn’t sound, even to her, like self-justifying whines. ‘But maybe that would count for more, in the greater scheme of things, even than a dozen bigger and better
Northerns
. Do you see?’

‘Not really.’ His voice sounded flat, tired; perhaps he was letting himself sober up.

They stood for a while, in a silence broken only by their breathing. Then he said, ‘I’m sorry, Louise. I’m sorry you’re letting such moods spoil your night of triumph. But I’ve had enough; I feel as if I’ve been listening to that stuff for half my life.’

As usual when his mood turned like this, she was filled with regret. She tried to cover his hand, which still lay on her shoulder. ‘Mark—’