Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (124 page)

The lower fifth of a mile of the lifedome was known as the loading bay: a single, echoing hall, brilliantly lit and free of partitions. The roof of the loading bay - the underside of the first habitable section, called the maintenance bulkhead - was a mist-shrouded tangle of infrastructure, far above. Today, the loading bay was filled with bulky machinery and crates of supplies; huge masses, towed by people on scooters or by ‘bots, crossed the air in all directions, emerging from a dozen locks.

Serena Milpitas performed a slow, easy spiral as she rose up through the air beside Mark. ‘I love these scooter things, don’t you?’

Mark smiled. ‘Sure. But they’re a lazy way to travel in zero gee. And they won’t be a lot of use when we’re underway.’

‘No. A constant one-gee drive for a thousand years. What a drag.’

Mark studied the engineer as she went through her rolls; her expression was calm, almost vacuous, with every sign that she was lost in the simple physical pleasure of the scooter-ride. Mark said, ‘How did you feel about having to dig up those old techniques - the reliability procedures?’

‘How did I
feel
?’ Milpitas stabilized her scooter and studied Mark, a half-smile on her face. ‘You sound like a Keplerian . . . They’re dippier than anyone else back home on Mars. Ah, but I guess that’s your job, isn’t it? The social engineer.’

Mark smiled. ‘Maybe. But I’m off-duty now.’

‘Sure you are.’ Milpitas thought for a moment. ‘I guess our work isn’t so dissimilar, Mark. Your job- as I understand it - is to come up with ways for us to live with each other over a thousand years. Mine is to ensure that the ship itself - the external fabric of the mission - can sustain itself. When it came to redesigning
Northern
, I didn’t like messing up Louise’s nice, clean designs, frankly. But if you’re going to succeed at something like this you have to take no chances. You have to
plan
.’ Her eyes lost their focus, as if she were looking at something far away. ‘It had to be done. And it was worth it. Anything’s worth it, for the project, of course.’ Her expression cleared, and she looked at Mark, appearing confused. ‘Is that answering your question?’

‘I think so.’

Mark hung back a little, and let Milpitas move ahead, up towards the complex maintenance bulkhead. He fell into line with Louise.

‘You don’t look so happy,’ Louise said.

Mark shrugged. ‘Just a little spooked by Serena, I guess.’

Louise snorted. ‘Aren’t we all.’

Many of the original crew of the
Northern -
who had, after all, seen themselves as potential colonists of the Tau Ceti system, not as time travellers with quasi-mystical goals about saving the species - had decided not to stay with the ship after its new flight plan was announced by Louise. Louise had lost, for instance, the genial Sam Gillibrand, her original first assistant. On the other hand, Serena Milpitas - and Uvarov, for that matter - had seemed eager to join the project after its rescoping by Paradoxa.

Both Milpitas and Uvarov seemed natural Paradoxa supporters, to Mark; they’d absorbed with a chilling alacrity the induction programmes Paradoxa had offered them all.

Milpitas and Uvarov had become
converts
, Mark thought uneasily.

‘You know, I always liked Sam Gillibrand,’ he said wistfully. ‘Sam wants to go to Tau Ceti and build houses under the light of a new sun; the dark possibilities of five megayears hence couldn’t be of less interest to him. Serena is different, though. Under all that bluff Martian chatter and confident engineering, there’s something darker - more driven. Obsessive, even.’

‘Maybe,’ Louise said. ‘But, just as human engineering isn’t yet up to thousand-year flights, so the average human head isn’t capable of thinking on thousand-year timescales.’ She sighed and ran her fingers through her close-cropped hair. ‘Serena Milpitas can win through for the mission, Mark. Both Milpitas and Uvarov seem able to think in millennia - megayears, even. And as a consequence, or as a cause, they are dark, multilevelled, complex people.’ She looked at Mark sadly. ‘The Paradoxa stuff is spooky, I agree. But I think it comes with the territory, Mark.’

Maybe in the complexities of the future the home-builders like Sam would be obsolete, their simple skills and motivation displaced in a dangerous Universe, Mark thought. Perhaps Paradoxa and its converts represented the human of the future - the next wave of evolution, what the species would have to become to survive on cosmic timescales.

Maybe. But - judging by Milpitas and Uvarov - there wouldn’t be too many laughs.

Anyway, he thought gloomily, he was going to have
ten centuries
with these people to find out about them . . . And it was going to be Lethe’s own challenge for him to construct a viable society around them.

‘It still surprises me that
you
agreed to sign up for this,’ he said. ‘I mean, they took away your mission.’

Louise shrugged. ‘We’ve been over this enough times. Let’s face it, they would have taken
Northern
away from me anyway. I want to see the ship perform. And—’

‘Yes?’

She grinned. ‘Besides, after I got over my irritation at the way Paradoxa runs its affairs, I realized no one’s ever tried a thousand-year flight before. Or tried to establish a time bridge across five million years. I can get one over on Michael Poole, wherever he is—’

‘Yes, but look what happened to him.’

Mark could see what was going on inside Louise’s head. With the Paradoxa mission - with this immense
stunt -
she was going to be able to bypass the intimidating shadow of the future, simply by leaping over it. And she was obviously entranced by the idea of taking her technology to its limits. But he wondered if she really -
really
- had any idea of the scale of the problems they would face.

He opened his mouth to speak

Louise, with unusual tenderness, laid a finger over his lips, closing them. ‘Come on, Mark. We’ve a thousand years to think of all the problems. Time enough. Today, the ship is bright and new; today, it’s enough for me to believe the mission is going to be
fun
.’

With a sudden access of vigour she twisted the handle of her scooter and hurried after the others.

She looked up, tipping back her head. Already she was dropping out of the complex, exhilarating world of the convection region, with its immense turbulent cells, tangled flux tubes and booming p-waves. She stared upwards, allowing herself the luxury of nostalgia. The convective-zone cavern had come to seem almost homely, she realized.

Homely
. . . at least compared to the regions she was going to enter now.

‘Good. I’m relieved.’

She laughed. With a mixture of exasperation and affection, she said, ‘I’ll feel better when you lose your “good telemetry”, Kevan, and I don’t have to listen to your dumb-ass questions any more.’

‘Actually,’ Lieserl said, ‘that’s probably true. But I’m damned if I’m going to tell you so.’

Scholes laughed, his synthesized voice surprisingly realistic.
You haven’t answered my question.

Her arms still outstretched, she looked down at her bare feet. ‘Actually, I feel a little like Christ. Dali’s Christ, perhaps, suspended in the air over an uncaring landscape.’

Yeah
, Scholes said casually.
My thought exactly.

Now she plunged through the last ghost-forms of convective cells. It was exactly like falling out of a cloud bank. The milky-white surface of the plasma sea was exposed beneath her; huge g-mode waves crawled across its surface, like thoughts traversing some huge mind.

Her rate of fall suddenly increased. It felt as if the bottom had dropped out of her stomach.

‘Lethe,’ she whispered.

She found her chest tightening - and that was absurd, of course, because she
had
no chest. She struggled to speak. ‘I’m okay, Kevan. It’s just a little vertigo.’

‘Virtual vertigo. I feel like I’m falling. This illusion’s too damn good.’

‘I’m
scared
, Kevan.’

‘Screw the telemetry. Just talk to me.’

He hesitated.
You’re a hundred thousand miles beneath the photosphere. You’re close to the boundary of the radiative zone; the centre of the Sun is another seven hundred thousand miles below you.

‘Don’t look down,’ she breathed.

Despite her fear, she couldn’t let that go. ‘So I’m a probe, now?’

‘Strong stuff.’

The plasma sea was rushing up towards her, bland, devouring. Suddenly she was convinced that she, and her flimsy wormhole, were going to disappear into that well of fire with barely a spark. ‘Oh, Lethe!’ She tucked her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her lower legs, so that she was falling curled up in a foetal ball.

‘No.’ She closed her eyes and rested her forehead against her knees. ‘No, it’s all right. I’m sorry. I’m just not as tough as I think I am, sometimes.’

‘I know it.’ She opened her eyes and faced the looming sea once more. The fear was still huge, like a vice around her thinking. ‘Kevan, I’d never assemble the courage to go through this a second time. It’s now or never. I’ll even try to enjoy the ride.’

‘Yeah,’ she growled. ‘And you stay with me—’

Suddenly her fall was halted. It felt as if she had run into a wall of glass; her limbs spread-eagled against an invisible barrier and the breath was knocked out of her illusory lungs. Helpless, she was even thrown back up into the ‘air’ a short distance; then her fall resumed, even more precipitately than before.

She screamed: ‘
Kevan
!’

Nominal
, she thought sourly.
How comforting
. ‘What in Lethe was
that?’

‘Yes?’ she snarled. ‘Well, maybe you should have damn well told me - yike!’

Again, that sudden, jarring arrest, followed by a disconcerting hurl into the air, as if she were an autumn leaf in the breeze.
Like snakes and bloody ladders
, she thought.

You’re passing through the boundary layer between the radiative and convective zones, is all
, Scholes said with studied calm.
Below you is plasma; above you atomic gas - matter cool enough for electrons to stick to nuclei.

‘Yes. Yes, I am. So I’m in the sea, now?’

‘The plasma sea. The radiative zone.’

‘But—’

Suddenly, almost without warning, the familiar skyscape of convection cells and flux tubes was misting from her sight, whiting out. There was whiteness above, before, below her; it was like being suspended inside some huge, chilling eggshell.

For the first time she felt real panic creep around her mind.

‘I can’t
see
, Kevan.’

Mark, rising through brightly lit air, looked down. He was nearing the top of the loading bay now. The base was a floor of glass far below him, with the spine and drive section ghostly forms beyond; people and ‘bots criss-crossed the bay, hauling their cargo.

Mark tried to analyse his own impressions as they rose. For a moment he fought an irrational surge of vertigo: a feeling - despite the evidence of his eyes that he was in zero-gee - that if he tumbled from this scooter he would plummet to that floor of glass, far below. He concentrated on the environment close to him, the thick layer of warm, bright air all round him. But that made the glimpses of the spine and drive - the brutal limbs of the ship - seem unreal, as if the emptiness of space beyond the fragile walls of the dome was an illusion.

Mark felt uneasy. The ship was so huge, so complex - so
convincing
. After a few decades, it would be terribly easy to believe that this ship was a world, to forget that there was anything real, or significant, beyond its walls.