Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (125 page)

Now they were approaching the roof of the bay: the maintenance bulkhead. Mark drew level with Garry Uvarov, and they stared up at the mile-wide layer of engineering above them. The bulkhead was a tangle of pipes, ducts and cables, an inverted industrial landscape. There were even tree-roots, Mark saw. People and ‘bots swarmed everywhere, working rapidly and apparently efficiently; even as Mark watched, the bulkhead’s complex surface seemed to evolve, the ducts and tubes creeping across the surface like living things. It was a little like watching life spread through some forest of metal and plastic.

‘Extraordinary how primitive it all is,’ Mark said to Uvarov. ‘Cables and ducts - it’s like some sculpture from a museum of industrial archaeology.’

Uvarov waved a cultured hand towards the pipes above him. ‘We’re carrying human beings - barely-evolved, untidy sacks of water and wind - to the stars. We are cavemen inside a starship. That’s why the undersurface of this bulkhead seems so crude to you, Mark; it’s simply a reflection of the crudity of our own human design. We sail the stars. We even have nanobots to rebuild us when we grow old. But we remain primitives; and when we travel, we need immense boxes with pipes and ducts to carry our breath, piss and shit.’ He grinned. ‘Mark, my passion - my career - is the improvement of the basic human stock. Do you imagine the
Xeelee
carry all this garbage around with them?’

They passed through access ports in the maintenance bulkhead and ascended into the habitable sections.

There were fifteen habitable Decks in the mile-deep lifedome, each around a hundred yards apart. Some of the main levels were subdivided, so that the interior of the lifedome was a complex warren of chambers of all sizes. Elevator shafts and walkways pierced the Decks. The shafts were already in use as zero-gee access channels; they’d be left uncompleted, without machinery, until closer to departure.

Now the little party entered one shaft and began to rise, slowly, past the cut-through Decks.

Many of the chambers were still unfinished, and a succession of Virtual designs were being tried out in some of them; Mark peered out at a storm of parks, libraries, domestic dwellings, theatres, workshops, blizzarding through the chambers.

Uvarov said, ‘How charming. How Earthlike. More concessions to the primitive in us, of course.’

Mark frowned. ‘Primitive or not, Uvarov, we have to take
some
account of human needs when designing an environment like this. As you should know. The chambers have been laid out on a human scale; it’s important people shouldn’t feel dwarfed to insignificance by the scale of the artifacts around them - or, on the other hand, cramped and confined by ship walls. Why, some of the chambers are so large it would be possible for an inhabitant to forget he or she was inside a ship at all.’

Uvarov grunted. ‘Really. But isn’t that more evidence that we as a species aren’t really yet up to a flight like this? It would be so easy to be immersed in the sensory impressions of the here-and-now, which are so much more
real
than the fragility of the ship, the emptiness outside the thin walls. It would be tempting to accept this ship as a world in itself, an invulnerable background against which we can play out our own tiny, complex human dramas, much as our distant forefathers did on the plains of Africa, billions of miles away.

‘Think of the pipes and ducts under that maintenance bulkhead. Perhaps our ancestors, in simpler times, imagined that some such infrastructure lay underneath the flat Earth. The Universe was a box, with the Earth as its floor. The sky was a cow whose feet rested on the four corners of the Earth - or perhaps a woman, supporting herself on elbows and knees - or a vaulted metal lid. Around the walls of the box-world flowed a river on which the sun and moon gods sailed each day, entering and vanishing through stage doors. The fixed stars were lamps, suspended from the vault. And, presumably, underneath it all lay some labyrinth of tunnels and ducts through which the waters and the gods could travel to begin their daily journeys afresh. The heavens could change, but they were predictable; to the human consciousness - still half-asleep - this was a safe, contained, cosy, womb-like Universe. Mark Wu, is our
Northern
, today, so unlike the Earth as envisaged by let us say - a Babylonian, or an Egyptian?’

Mark rubbed his chin. Uvarov’s patronizing style irritated him, but his remarks plugged in closely to his own vague sense of disquiet. ‘Maybe not,’ he replied sharply. ‘But then you and I, and the others, have a responsibility to ensure that the inhabitants of the ship don’t slip back into some pre-rational state. That they don’t
forget
.’

‘Ah, but will that be so easy, over a
thousand years
?’

Mark peered out at the half-built libraries and parks uneasily.

Uvarov said, ‘I’ve heard about some of the programmes you and your social engineering teams are devising. Research initiatives and so forth - make-works, obviously.’

‘Not at all.’ Mark found himself bridling again. ‘I’m not going to deny we need to find something for people to
do
. As you keep saying, we’re primitives; we aren’t capable of sitting around in comfort for a thousand years as the journey unravels.

‘Some of the work is obvious, like the maintenance and enhancement of the ship. But there will be programmes of research. Remember, we’ll be cut off from the rest of the human Universe for most of the journey. Some of your own projects come into this category, Uvarov - like your AS enhancement programme.’ He thought about that, then said provocatively, ‘Perhaps you could come up with some way of replicating Milpitas’ triple-redundancy ideas within our own bodies.’

Uvarov laughed, unperturbed. ‘Perhaps. But I would hope to work in a rather more
imaginative
way than that, Mark Wu. After all AS treatment represents an enormous advance in our evolutionary history - one of our most significant steps away from the tyranny of the gene, which has ruthlessly cut us down since the dawn of our history. But must we rely on injections of nanobots to achieve this end? How much better it would be if we could change the fundamental basis of our existence as a species . . .’

Mark found Uvarov chilling. His cold, analytical view of humanity, coupled with the extraordinarily long-term perspective of his thinking, was deeply disturbing. The Paradoxa conversion seemed only to have reinforced these trends in Uvarov’s personality.

And, Lethe, Uvarov was supposed to be a
doctor.

‘We should not be restrained by the primitive in us, Mark Wu,’ Uvarov was saying. ‘We should think of the
possible
. And then determine what must be done to attain that . . . Whatever the cost.

‘Your proposals for the social structure in this ship are another example of limited thinking, I fear.’

Mark frowned, his anger building. ‘You disapprove of my proposals?’

Uvarov’s voice, under its thick layer of Lunar accent, was mocking. ‘You have a draft constitution for a unified democratic structure—’

‘With deep splits of power, and local accountability. Yes. You have a problem with that? Uvarov, I’ve based my proposals on the most successful examples of closed societies we have - the early colonies on Mars, for example. We must learn from the past . . .’

Louise was the nominal leader of the expedition. But she wasn’t going to be a
captain;
no hierarchical command structure could last a thousand years. And there was no guarantee that AS treatments could sustain any individual over such a period. AS itself wasn’t that well established; the oldest living human was only around four centuries old. And who knew what cumulative effect consciousness editing would have, over centuries?

. .
. So it could be that none of the crew alive at the launch - even Louise and Mark themselves - would survive to see the end of the trip.

But even if the last person who remembered Sol expired, Louise and her coterie had to find ways to ensure that the mission’s purpose was not lost with them.

Mark’s job was to design a
society
to populate the ship’s closed environment - a society stable enough to persist over ten centuries . . .
and
to maintain the ship’s core mission.

Uvarov looked sceptical. ‘But a simple democracy?’

Mark was surprised at the depth of his resentment at being patronized like this by Uvarov. ‘We have to start somewhere - with a framework the ship’s inhabitants are going to be able to use, to build on. The constitution will be malleable. It will even be possible, legally, to abandon the constitution altogether—’

‘You’re missing my point,’ Uvarov said silkily. ‘Mark, democracy as a method of human interaction is already millennia old. And we know how easy it is to subvert any democratic process. There are endless examples of people using a democratic system as a games-theory framework of rules to achieve their own ends.

‘Use your imagination. Is there truly nothing better? Have we learned
nothing
about ourselves in all that time?’

‘Democracies don’t go to war with each other, Uvarov,’ Mark said coldly. ‘Democracies - however imperfectly - reflect the will of the many, not the few. Or the
one.

‘As you’ve told me, Uvarov, we remain primitives. Maybe we’re still too primitive to trust ourselves
not
to operate without a democratic framework.’

Uvarov bowed his elegant, silvered head - but without conviction or agreement, as if merely conceding a debating point.

The four scooters rose smoothly past the half-finished Decks.

S
he was suspended in a bath of charged particles. It was isotropic, opaque, featureless . . .

She had entered a new realm of matter.

The voice continued, buzzing in her ear like some insect. It seemed irrelevant, remote. In this mush of plasma, she couldn’t even see her own body. She was suspended in isotropy and homogeneity - the same everywhere, and in every direction. It was as if this plasma sea, this radiative zone, were some immense sensory-deprivation bath arranged for her benefit.

But she wasn’t afraid. Her fear was gone now, washed away in the pearl-like light. The silence . . .

Lieserl, lost in whiteness, allowed the still, small voice to whisper into her head.

She dreamed of photinos.

Dark matter was the best candidate for ageing the Sun.

Dark matter comprised all but one hundredth of the mass of the Universe; the visible matter -
baryonic matter
which made up stars, galaxies, people - was a frosting, a thin scattering across a dark sea.

The effects of dark matter had been obvious long before a single particle of the stuff had been detected by human physicists. The Milky Way galaxy itself was embedded in a flattened disc of dark matter, a hundred times the mass of its visible components. The stars of the Milky Way didn’t orbit its core, as they would in the absence of the dark matter; instead the galaxy turned as if it were a solid disc - the illuminated disc was like an immense toy, embedded in dark glass.

According to the Standard Model there was a knot of cold, dark matter at the heart of the Sun - perhaps at the heart of every star.

And so, Lieserl dreamed, perhaps it was dark matter, passing through fusing hydrogen like a dream of winter, which was causing the Sun to die.

Now, slowly, the isotropy bleached out of the world. There was a hint of colour - a pinkness, a greater warmth, its source lost in the clouds below her. At first she thought this must be some artifact of her own consciousness - an illusion concocted by her starved senses. The shading was smooth, without feature save for its gradual deepening, from the zenith of her sky to its deepest red at the nadir beneath her feet. But it remained in place around her, objectively real, even as she moved her head. It was
out there
, and it was sufficient to restore structure to the world - to give her a definite
up
and
down.

She found herself sighing. She almost regretted the return of the external world; she could very quickly have grown accustomed to floating in nothingness.

‘I see elephants playing basketball.’

‘I’m seeing the temperature gradient, aren’t I?’

The soft, cosy glow was the light of the fusion hell of the core, filtered through her babyish Virtual senses.

There was light here, she knew - or at least, there were photons: packets of X-ray energy working their way out from the core of the Sun, where they were created in billions of fusion flashes. If Lieserl could have followed the path of a single photon, she would see it move in a random, zigzag way, bouncing off charged particles as if in some subatomic game. The steps in the random walk traversed at the speed of light - were, on average, less than an inch long.

The temperature gradient in this part of the Sun was tiny. But, it was real, and it was just sufficient to encourage a few of the zigzagging photons to work their way outwards to the surface, rather than inwards. But the paths were long - the average photon needed a thousand billion
billion
steps to reach the outer boundary of the radiative layer. The journey took ten million years - and because the photons moved at the speed of light, the paths themselves were ten million light-years long, wrapped over on themselves like immense lengths of crumpled ribbon.