Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (129 page)

‘Figs, and honeycombs, and a few tubers I dug up earlier from the floor . . . I breakfasted on beetle grubs from inside a fallen trunk down there.’ She looked remote for a moment as she remembered her meal. ‘Delicious . . . What are you doing here anyway? I thought you were down with old Uvarov.’

‘I am. In principle. It’s my turn . . .’

The tribe’s fifty people lived out most of their lives in the canopy. So Garry Uvarov had instituted a rota, designating folk who had to spend time with him on the floor below. Uvarov raged if the rota was broken, insisting that even the rota itself was older than any human alive, save himself.

‘Uvarov sent me up top - to the giant kapok - to see if the stars had changed.’

Spinner grunted; she took a fig herself and ate it whole, like a monkey. She wiped her lips on a leaf. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know . . .’

‘Then he’s an old fool. And so are you.’

Arrow Maker sighed. ‘You shouldn’t say things like that, Spinner. Uvarov is an old man - an ancient man. He remembers when the ship was launched, and—’

‘I know, I know.’ She picked seeds from her teeth with her little finger. ‘But he’s also a crazy old man, and getting crazier.’

Arrow Maker decided not to argue. ‘But whether that’s true or not, we still have to care for him. We can’t let him die. Would you want that?’ He searched her face, seeking signs of understanding. ‘And if you - and your friends - don’t take your turns in the rota—’

‘Which we don’t.’

‘—then it means that people like me have to carry more than our fair share.’

Spinner-of-Rope grinned in triumph, her face paint vivid. ‘So you admit you
resent
having to tend for that old relic down there.’

‘Yes.
No
.’ With a few words she’d made him intensely uncomfortable, as she seemed to manage so often, and so easily. ‘Oh, I don’t know, Spinner. But we can’t let him die.’

She bit into another fig, and said casually, ‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s a human being who deserves dignity, if nothing else,’ he snapped. ‘And—’

‘And what?’

And
, he thought,
I’m afraid that if Uvarov is allowed to die, the world will come to an end.

The world was so obviously
artificial.

The forest was contained in a box. It was possible to shoot an arrow against the sky. There were holes in the floor, and whole levels - the domain of the Undermen - underneath the world. Hidden machines brought light to the skydome each day, caused the rain to fall over the waiting leaves, and pumped the air around the canopy tops. Perhaps there were more subtle machines too, he speculated sometimes, which sustained the little closed world in other ways.

The world must seem huge to Spinner. But it had become small and fragile in Arrow Maker’s eyes, and as he grew older he became increasingly aware of how dependent all the humans of the forest were on mechanisms that were ancient and inaccessible.

If the mechanisms failed, they would all die; to Arrow Maker it was as simple, and as unforgettable, as that.

Garry Uvarov was an old fool in a wheelchair, with no obvious influence on the mechanisms which kept them all alive. And yet, it seemed undoubtedly true that he was indeed as old as he claimed - that he was a thousand years old, as old as the ship itself -
that he remembered Earth.

Uvarov was a link with the days of the ship’s construction. Arrow Maker felt, with a deep, superstitious dread, that if Uvarov were to die - if that tangible link to the past were ever broken - then perhaps the ship itself would die, around them.

And then, how could they possibly survive?

He looked at his daughter, troubled, wondering if he would ever be able to explain this to her.

L
ieserl roused - slowly, fitfully - from her long sleep.

She stirred, irritated; she peered around, blinking her Virtual eyes, trying to understand what had disturbed her. Motion of some kind?

Motion, in this million-degree soup?

Virtual arms folded against her chest, legs tucked beneath her, she floated slowly through the compressed plasma of the radiative zone. Around her, all but unnoticed, high-energy photons performed their complex, million-year dance as they worked their way out of the core towards the surface.

After all this time, she had drifted to within no more than a third of a Solar radius of the centre of the Sun itself.

She ran brief diagnostic checks over her remaining data stores. She found more damage, of course; more cumulative depredation by the unceasing hand of entropy. She wondered vaguely how much of her original processing and memory capacity she was left with by now. Ten per cent? Less, perhaps?

How would she
feel
, if she roused herself to full awareness now? She’d never used her full capacity anyway - there was immense redundancy built into the systems - but she would surely be aware of some loss: gaps in her memory, perhaps, or a degradation of her sense of her Virtual body - a numbness, imperfectly realized skin.

Lieserl
, she told herself,
you’re getting old, all over again. The first human in history to grow old for the second time.

She smiled and snuggled her face closer to her knees. Once, her depth of self-awareness and her ability to access huge memory stores had made her the most conscious human - or quasi-human, anyway - in history. So she’d been told.

Well, that couldn’t be true any more.

Always assuming there were still humans left to compare herself to, of course.

Plasma still poured through the faces of the Interface which cradled her ancient, battered data stores; somewhere beyond the Sun, the energy dumped through the refrigerating wormhole must still blaze like a miniature star, perhaps casting its shadows across the photosphere. She knew the wormhole refrigerating link must be operating still, and that the various enhancements the engineers had made to it, as she’d gone far beyond her design envelope in her quest deeper into the Sun, must still be working. After a fashion, anyway.

She knew all that, because if the link wasn’t working, she would be dead.

It was even conceivable that there were still people at the other end of the wormhole, getting useful data out of the link. In fact, she vaguely hoped so, in spite of everything. That had been the point of this expedition in the first place, after all. Just because they no longer chose to speak to her didn’t mean they weren’t
there.

Anyway, it scarcely mattered; she’d no intention of waking out of the drowsy half-sleep within which she had whiled away the years - and centuries, and millennia . . .

But there was that hint of motion again. Something elusive, transient—

It was no more than a shadow, streaking across the rim of her sensorium, barely visible even to her enhanced senses. She tried to turn, to track the elusive ghost; but she was stiff, clumsy, her ‘limbs’ rusty from centuries of abandonment.

The fizzing shadow arced across her vision again, surging along a straight line and out of her sight.

Working with unaccustomed haste, she initiated self-repair routines throughout her system. She analysed what she’d seen, decomposing the compound image presented to her visually into its underlying component forms.

She felt dimly excited. If she’d been human still, she knew, her heart would be beating faster, and a surge of adrenaline would make her skin tighten, her breathing speed up, her senses become more vivid. For the first time in historic ages she felt impatience with the cocoon of shut-down Virtual senses which swaddled her; it was as if the machinery stopped her from
feeling . . .

She considered the results of her analysis. The image scarcely existed; no wonder it had looked like a ghost to her. It was no more than a faint shadow against the flood of neutrinos from the Solar core, a vague coherence among scintillas of interaction with the slow-moving protons of the plasma . . .

The shadow she’d seen had been a structure of dark matter. A thing of photinos, orbiting the heart of the Sun.

She felt jubilant.
At last
- and just at the depth, a third of a Solar radius out from the centre, that she and Kevan had deduced it would be all those years ago, she’d found what she’d come here for - the prize for which her humanity had been engineered away. At last she’d penetrated to the edge of the Sun’s dark matter shadow core, to the near-invisible canker which was smothering its fusion fire.

She waited for the photino object to return.

Arrow Maker slid towards the ground.

He passed through another layer of leaves: this was the forest’s understorey, made up of darkness-adapted palms and a few saplings, young trees growing from seeds dropped by the canopy trees. The light at this level - even now, at midday - was dim, drenched in the green of the canopy. The air was hot, stagnant, moist.

Arrow Maker reached the ground, close to the base of a huge tree. Under one of his bare soles, a beetle wriggled, working its way through decaying leaf matter. Arrow Maker reached down, absently, picked up the beetle and popped it into his mouth.

He hauled his rope down from the tree and set off across the forest floor.

Beneath the thin soil he could feel the tree’s thick mat of rootlets. The trees were supported by immense buttresses: triangular fins, five yards wide at their base, which sprouted from the clustering trunks. A thin line of termites - a ribbon hundreds of yards long - marched steadily across the floor close to his feet, on their way to the tree trunk cleft that housed their nest.

He passed splashes of colour amid the corruption of the forest floor - mostly dead flowers, fallen from the canopy - but there was also one huge rafflesia: a single flower a yard across, leafless, its maroon petals thick, leathery and coated with warts. A revolting stench of putrescence came from its interior, and flies, mesmerized by the scent, swarmed around the vast cup.

Arrow Maker, preoccupied, walked around the grotesque bloom.

‘ . . . Where in Lethe have you been?’

Uvarov’s chair came rolling towards Maker, out of the shadows of his shelter.

Maker, startled, stumbled backwards. ‘I stopped to gather figs. They were ripe. I met my daughter - Spinner-of-Rope - and—’

Garry Uvarov was ignoring him. Uvarov rolled his chair back into the shelter, its wheels heavy on the soft forest floor. ‘Tell me about the stars you saw,’ he hissed. ‘The
stars
. . .’

Uvarov’s shelter was little more than a roof of ropes and palm leaves, a web suspended between a cluster of tree trunks. Beneath this roof the jungle floor had been cleared and floored over with crudely cut planks of wood, over which Uvarov could prowl, the wheels of his chair humming as they bore him to and fro, to and fro. There were resin torches fixed to the walls, unlit. Uvarov kept his few possessions here, most of them incomprehensible to Arrow Maker: boxes fronted by discs of glass, bookslates worn yellow and faded with use, cupboards, chairs and a bed into which Uvarov could no longer climb.

None of this had ever worked in Arrow Maker’s lifetime.

Garry Uvarov was swaddled in a leather blanket, which hid his useless limbs. His head - huge, skull-like, fringed by sky-white hair and with eyes hollowed out by corruption - lolled on a neck grown too weak to support it. If Uvarov could stand, he’d be taller than Arrow Maker by three feet. But, sprawled in his chair as he was, Uvarov looked like some grotesque doll, a crude thing constructed of rags and the skull of some animal, perhaps a monkey.

Maker studied Uvarov uneasily. The old man had never exactly been rational, but today there seemed to be an additional edge to his voice - perhaps a knife-edge of real madness, at last.

And if that was true, how was he - Arrow Maker - going to deal with it?

‘Do you want anything? I’ll get you some—’

Uvarov lifted his head. ‘Just tell me, damn you . . .’ His leaf-like cheeks shook and spittle flecked his chin, signifying rage. But his voice - reconstructed by some machine generations ago - was a bland, inhuman whisper.

‘I climbed the kapok - the tallest tree . . .’ Arrow Maker, stumbling, tried to describe what he’d seen.

Uvarov listened, his head cocked back, his mouth lolling.

‘
The starbow
,’ he said at last. ‘Did you see the starbow?’

Arrow Maker shook his head. ‘I’ve never seen a starbow. Tell me what it looks like.’

Rage seemed to have enveloped Uvarov now; his chair rolled back and forth, back and forth, clattering over loose floorboards. ‘I knew it! No starbow . . . The ship’s slowing. We’ve arrived. I knew it . . .

‘They’ve tried to exclude me. Those survivalist bastard Planners, and maybe even that wizened bitch Armonk. If she’s still alive.’ He wheeled about, trying to point himself at Arrow Maker. ‘Don’t you see it? If there’s no starbow
the ship must have arrived
. The journey is over . . . After a thousand years, we’ve returned to Sol.’

‘But you’re not making sense,’ Arrow Maker protested weakly. ‘There’s never been a starbow. I don’t know what—’

‘The bastards . . . The bastards.’ Uvarov continued his endless rolling. ‘We’ve returned, to fulfil our mission -
Paradoxa
’s mission, not Louise Ye bloody Armonk’s! - and they want to shut me out. You, too, my children . . . My immortal children.

‘Listen to me.’ Uvarov wheeled about to face Maker again. ‘You must hear me; it’s very important. You’re the future, Arrow Maker . . . You, poor, ignorant as you are:
you
and your people are the future of the species.’

He wheeled to the lip of his flooring, now, and lifted his head to Arrow Maker. Maker could see pools of congealed blood at the pits of those empty eye sockets, and he recoiled from the heavy, fetid stink of the decaying body under its blanket. ‘You’ll not be betrayed by your damn AS nanobots the way I was. When the ‘bots withered my limbs and chopped up my damn eyes, five centuries ago, I saw I’d been right all along . . .