Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (121 page)

The Paradoxa creed, in some ways, Louise thought, embodied the essence of the pre-Poole optimism of humanity. Paradoxa believed that nothing was beyond the capabilities of mankind.

Poole gazed into his drink. ‘Paradoxa believes that if something is physically possible, then it’s just a question of engineering.’ The Virtual’s expression was complex - almost tormented, Louise thought. The Virtual went on, ‘But it takes
planning -
perhaps on immense timescales.’

Louise felt a vague anger build in her.
Uvarov was right. This isn’t Michael Poole. Poole would not have defended the grandiose claims of Paradoxa like this. This is a travesty of programming in conflict with sentience.

‘In the past,’ the Virtual went on, ‘Paradoxa sponsored many of the ecoengineering projects which have restored much of the biosphere of Earth - the carbon-sequestration domes, and so on.’

Louise knew that was true. The great macroengineering projects of the last millennium, supplemented by the nano-engineering of the atmosphere and lithosphere and the transfer offplanet of most power-generating and industrial concerns, had stabilized and preserved Earth’s fragile ecosystem. There was more woodland covering the temperate regions, now, than at any time since the last glaciation, locking in much of the excess carbon dioxide which had plagued previous centuries. And the great decline in species suffered after the industrialization of a couple of thousand years ago had long since been reversed, thanks to the use of genetic archives and careful reconstruction - from disparate descendants - of lost genotypes.

Earth had been the first planet to be terraformed.

The Virtual said, ‘But Paradoxa’s goals were modified, following the Friends of Wigner incident . . .’

‘If Paradoxa is such a saintly organization,’ Uvarov growled, ‘then why is it such a thing of shadows? Why the secrets?’

Poole said, ‘Paradoxa is a thousand years old, Doctor.
No
human organization of such longevity has ever been fully open. Think of the great established religions, societies like the Templars, the Masons. Groupings like Paradoxa have a way of accreting tradition, and isolation, around themselves with time.’

‘And,’ Uvarov said sharply, ‘no doubt the long career of Paradoxa has a few dark phases . . .’

Poole didn’t reply.

Louise said, ‘You said the goals of Paradoxa were changed by the Friends incident.’

‘Yes. Let me use this Virtual box of tricks to explain.’

The tetrahedron came to life again. It rotated above them, a gaudy trinket miles across.

‘The
Cauchy
Interface,’ the Virtual said. ‘At the time, the largest wormhole mouth constructed - in fact, the largest exercise in exotic-matter engineering.’

The Virtual’s face was gaunt in the shifting Interface light - wistful, Louise thought.

Michael Poole had been rightly celebrated for his achievements, she thought. He had been the Brunel of his day, and more. His wormhole projects had opened up the System much as the great railroads had opened up Great Britain two thousand years earlier.

A wormhole was a flaw in spacetime - a throat, connecting two events in spacetime that would otherwise be separated by light-years, or millennia. Wormholes existed naturally on all scales, most of them around the size of the Planck length - ten to minus forty-three inches, the level at which space itself became granular.

Working in the orbit of Jupiter, Michael Poole and his team had taken natural wormholes and expanded them; Poole had made wormholes big enough to permit spaceships to pass through.

Wormholes were inherently unstable. Poole had threaded his wormholes with frameworks of
exotic matter
- matter with negative energy density, with pressure greater than rest mass energy. The exotic matter set up repulsive gravity fields able to hold open the wormholes’ throats and mouths.

Louise remembered the excitement of those times. Poole Interfaces were towed out of Jovian orbit and set up all over the System. The wormholes enabled the inner System to be traversed in sublight GUTships in a matter of hours rather than months. The Jovian system became a hub for interplanetary commerce. Port Sol - a converted Kuiper object on the rim of the System - was established as the base for the first great interstellar voyages.

Michael Poole had opened up the Solar System in an explosion of accessibility, more dramatic than anything since the days of the great sea-going voyages of exploration on old Earth.

‘It was a wonderful time. But you had greater ambitions in mind,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you, Michael?’

The Virtual stared upwards at the display above, expression frozen, evidently unable to speak.

Mark said gently, ‘You mean the
Cauchy
, Louise?’

‘Yes. Michael Poole used wormhole technology to travel - not just across space - but across
time
.’ She pointed up to the tetrahedron in the dome. ‘This is just one Interface from Poole’s greatest wormhole project: termini three miles across, and the throat itself no less than a mile wide. The wormhole’s second Interface was attached to a GUTship - the
Cauchy
.’

The GUTship was launched on a subrelativistic flight beyond the fringe of the Solar System - a circular tour, designed to return at last to Jupiter. The
Cauchy
carried one of Poole’s wormhole Interfaces with it. The other was left in orbit around Jupiter.

The flight lasted fifteen centuries - but thanks to time dilation effects, only two subjective centuries had passed for the
Cauchy
’s crew.

The two Interfaces remained linked by the wormhole flaw. Because of the link, when it returned to the Solar System more than a millennium into the future of the System it had left, the
Cauchy
’s Interface was still connected to its twin in orbit around Jupiter - where only two centuries had passed since the departure of the
Cauchy
, as they had for the
Cauchy
’s crew.

‘By passing through the wormhole,’ Louise said, ‘it was possible to travel back and forth through time. Thus, Poole had used wormhole technology to establish a bridge across fifteen hundred years,
to the future
.’

Mark pulled at his lips. ‘We all know what became of this great time bridge. But - I’ve never understood -
why
did Poole build it?’

The Virtual spoke, his voice tired, dry - so familiar that Louise felt her heart move. Michael Poole said, ‘It was an experiment. I was more interested in proving the technology - the concepts - than in the final application. But—’

‘Yes, Michael?’ Louise prompted.

‘I had a vision - a dream perhaps - of establishing great wormhole highways across time, as well as across space. If the technology is possible, why not? What power might be afforded to the human species with the opening up of such information channels?’

‘But the future didn’t welcome this great dream,’ Uvarov said dryly.

‘No, it didn’t,’ Virtual-Poole said.

The floor of the
Hermit Crab’s
lifedome turned transparent; space-darkness washed across it in a sudden flood that made Milpitas gasp audibly.

Louise stood and looked down. There was space-emptiness beyond her feet; her eyes told her she was suspended above an immense drop, and she had to summon all her will not to stumble, weakly, back to her chair . . .

And then, belatedly, she registered what she was seeing: beneath the lifedome, and extending for hundreds of yards in every direction, was a
floor
of some broken, irregular, bloody material - a floor of (what looked like, but couldn’t possibly be)
flesh.

Louise turned slowly around, trying to make out the geometry of what she was seeing.

The flesh-surface, bathed in sickly Jovian light, curved away from her in all directions; the ‘floor’ was actually the outer surface of a sphere - as if the
Crab
were embedded in an impossible moon of flesh, perhaps a mile wide. If the
Crab
’s drive section still existed, it was buried somewhere deep inside this immense carcass. The clean metal lines of the GUTship’s spine - which connected lifedome to drive unit - were enveloped in a gaping wound in this floor of flesh.

Apart from this huge wound in the fleshy floor caused by the
Crab
(a wound which pooled with what looked unnervingly like blood) there were a number of pockmarks in which metal glistened - weapons emplacements? - and others . . .
eyes
, huge, dimmed analogues of her own eyeballs.

There was a sense of suffering here, she thought: of pain, on an immense scale - the agony of a wounded god.

She peered more closely at the nearest pockmark, trying to make out the nature of the device embedded there. But the image was little more than a sketch - a suggestion of form, rendered in shining chrome.

Virtual-Poole, with Mark, Uvarov and Milpitas, stood beside her. The Virtual studied the flesh landscape sombrely. ‘The wormhole route to the future became a channel for invasion - by the
Qax
, an extraSolar species which had occupied the System by the time the bridge was established. You’re seeing here a reconstruction of one of the two Qax warships which came back through the wormhole. These are
Spline
- living creatures, perhaps even sentient - a technology unlike anything we’ve developed.’

Uvarov pointed to the sketchy surface of the Spline. ‘Your reconstruction isn’t so impressive.’

Virtual-Poole seemed more composed now, Louise thought - more
Virtual
, less
Poole
. She felt grateful for that. He said, ‘We know little about the Spline, save their name and gross form. I - Poole - with the help of the rebel humans from the occupation future, destroyed the invading Spline ships.’ He peered down at the
Crab
’s spine, the huge, disrupted epidermis. ‘You can see how I - how
he -
rammed one of the warships, spearing it with the
Crab
’s GUTdrive. The warship was disabled - but not destroyed; in fact it was possible to take over some of the warship’s higher functions.

‘I’m going to show you a reconstruction of the last few minutes of Michael Poole’s known existence.’

The sky-blue light around them started to shift, to slide over the equipment desks. Louise looked up. The Interface above the ship was moving gracefully across the sky; one triangular face, three miles wide, opened up—

—and, like some immense mouth, descended towards them.

Serena Milpitas said, ‘Lethe. We’re going through it, aren’t we? We’re going into the future.’

Louise looked at Poole. The Virtual gazed upwards, his eyes hardening with memory, ‘I drove the Spline into the wormhole. The wormhole had to be destroyed - the bridge to the future closed . . . That was my only goal.’

The triangular frame passed around the bulk of the Spline warship now; the lifedome shuddered - delicately, but convincingly. Blue-white flashes erupted all around the perimeter of the lifedome - damage inflicted on the flesh of the Spline, Louise guessed, by grazing collisions with the exotic-matter framework.

Suddenly they were inside the tetrahedral Interface - and the wormhole itself opened up before them. It was a tunnel, above the lifedome, delineated by sheets of autumn-gold light - and leading (impossibly)
beyond
the Interface framework, and arcing to infinity.

Louise wished she could touch Poole. This copy was closer to Michael Poole than any cloned twin; he shared Poole’s memories, his consciousness even. How must it be to relive one’s death like this?

Poole said, ‘The flashes in the wormhole throat represent the decay of heavy particles, produced in turn by the relaxing of shear energy in the curved-spacetime walls of the wormhole, which—’

Uvarov growled, ‘Skip the fairground ride; just tell us what happened. How did Poole destroy the wormhole?’

The Virtual turned his face towards Louise, his strong, aged features outlined by shuddering wormhole light. ‘The Spline ships had a hyperdrive, of unknown nature. I opened up my captive hyperdrive
here
—’

The Virtual raised his hands.

The floor bucked beneath them. The wormhole was flooded with sheets of blue-white light which raced towards them and down past the lifedome, giving Louise the sudden impression of huge, uncontrolled speed.

Poole shouted, ‘However the hyperdrive works, it must be based on manipulating the multidimensionality of space. And if so - and if it were operated inside a wormhole, where spacetime is already distorted . . .’

Now the sheets of light gathered into threads, sinuous snakes of luminosity which curved around the GUTship, sundering the spacetime walls.

Mark said, ‘So the hyperdrive made the wormhole collapse?’

‘Perhaps. Or—’ Virtual-Poole lifted his simulated head to the storm of wormhole light.

The threads of light seemed to sink into the fabric of the wormhole itself. Defects - cracks and sheets - opened up in the wormhole walls, revealing a plethora of wormhole tunnels, a hydra-like explosion of ballooning wormholes.

The
Hermit Crab
, uncontrolled, plunged down one wormhole after another into the future.

The
Crab
, at last, came to Virtual rest.

The last wormhole mouth closed behind it, the stresses of its distorted spacetime fabric finally yielding in a gush of heavy particles.

The sky beyond the lifedome was dark - almost empty, save for a random scattering of dimmed, reddened stars. There was no sign of life: no large-scale structure, no purposeful motion.

The sudden flood of darkness was startling. Louise, looking up, shivered; she had a feeling of intense age. ‘Michael - you surely expected to die, in the destruction of the wormhole.’

‘Yes . . . but as you can see -
perhaps
- the wormhole didn’t simply collapse.’ He looked confused. ‘I’m a simulacrum, Louise; I don’t share these memories with Poole . . . But there is evidence. Some of the particles which emerged from the collapsing Interface, in our own time, were of much too high energies to have been generated in the collapse of a single wormhole.