Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (137 page)

At last, though, the time came when he could count the last twenty rungs; then the last dozen; and then—

He staggered a few paces away from the ladder and laid himself out against a metal floor, spread-eagled. Here at the base of the shaft, a series of open, illuminated hatchways pierced the walls. ‘By Lethe’s waters,’ he said. ‘What a day. I never thought I’d be so happy simply not to be in danger of
falling
.’

Arrow Maker lifted Uvarov from his shoulder and gently rested him, like a doll, against the wall of the elevator shaft. Morrow saw how Uvarov’s hand continued its endless, pendular tremble, and his mouth opened and closed with soft, obscene sounds. ‘Are we there? Are we down?’

Maker flexed his unburdened shoulder, swinging his arm around. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, we’re there . . .’ He approached one of the hatchways, but slowed nervously as he approached the light.

Morrow got to his feet. He tried to remember how alien all this must be to these people; perhaps it was time for him to take charge. Picking a hatchway at random he walked confidently out of the shaft, and into bright, sourceless light.

The brightness, after the gloom of the shaft, was dazzling and huge. For a moment he stood there, by the entrance to the shaft, his hands shading his watering eyes.

He was in a bright, clean chamber. It must have been a mile wide and a fifth of a mile deep. The underside of the lowest Deck was a ceiling far above him, a tangle of pipes and cables, dark with age. The chamber was quite empty, although there were some dark, anonymous devices -
cargo handlers
? - stored in slings from the walls and upper bulkhead. Morrow felt himself quail; the emptiness of this huge enclosed space seemed to bear down on him. And below him—

He looked down.

The floor was transparent. Below his feet, there were stars.

A
fter an unknowable, dreamlike interval, Lieserl became aware of a vague sense of discomfort - not
pain
, exactly, but a non-localized ache that permeated her body.

She sighed. If the discomfort wasn’t specific to any part of her Virtual body, there had to be something wrong with the autonomic systems that maintained her awareness - the basic refrigeration systems embedded in the wormhole throat, or maybe the shielded processor banks within which her consciousness resided.

Reluctantly she called up diagnostics from her central systems.
Damn
. . .

There
had
been a change, she realized quickly. But the problem wasn’t actually with her own systems. The change was in the external environment. There was a much greater flux of photons, from the Solar material, into her wormhole Interface. Her refrigeration units could cope with this greater influx of energy, but they’d had to adjust their working to do it - and that autonomic adjustment was what she had registered as a vague discomfort.

The increased photon flux puzzled her. Why should it be so? She ran some brief, brisk studies of the Solar environment. The remnant photons still diffused out on their million-year random walks towards the photosphere. Could it be that the core-killing action of the birds, their continual leaching away of core energy, was having some effect on the photon flux?

She looked for, and found, a structure to the increased flux. The flux strength was strongest, by far, in the direction of the orbits of the photino birds. That correlation couldn’t be a coincidence, surely; somehow the birds
were
influencing the flux rates.

And - she learned - the increased flux was quite localized. It didn’t show up more than a few miles from her own position.

Understanding came slowly, almost painfully.

The photon flood followed
her
around.

She forced herself to accept the fact that the photino birds were doing this
deliberately
. They were diverting the random walks of photons to flood her with the damn things.

For a while, fear touched her heart. Were the birds trying to kill this unwanted alien in the midst of their flocks - perhaps by seeking to overload her refrigeration system?

If so, there wasn’t much she could do about it. She didn’t have any help to call on, and no real way to escape. For a long time she limped after the birds in their endless circling of the core, monitoring the photon flux and trying to control her fear, her sense of imprisonment and panic.

But the flux remained steady - increased, but easily tolerated by her onboard systems. And the birds showed no sign of hostile intent to her; they continued to swirl around her in gaudy streams, or else they gathered behind her in their huge, neat, cone-shaped formations. They made no attempt to shield their young from her, or to protect their fragile-looking interior structures.

And, slowly, she began to understand.

This deliberate diversion of the photon flux into her wasn’t a threat, or an attempt to destroy her. Perhaps they thought she was injured, or even dying. They must be able to perceive radiant energy disappearing into her wormhole gullet. The birds were
helping
her - trying to supply her with more of what must seem to them to be her prerequisites for life.

The gift was useless, of course - in fact, given the increased strain on her refrigeration systems, worse than useless.
But
, she thought wryly,
it’s the thought that counts.

The birds were trying to
feed
her.

Feeling strangely warmed, she accepted the gift of the photino birds with good grace.

As time wore on, she watched the Sun’s death proceed, with increasing pace. She felt an obscure, dark thrill as the huge physical processes unravelled around her.

The core, still plagued by the photino bird flocks, contracted and continued to heat up. At last, a temperature of tens of millions of degrees was reached in the layers of hydrogen
surrounding
the cankered core. A shell of fusing hydrogen ignited,
outside
the core, and began to burn its way out of the heart of the Sun. At first Lieserl wondered if the photino birds would try to quench this new shell of energy, as they had the hydrogen core. But they swept through the fusing shell, ignoring its brilliance. Helium ash was deposited by the shell onto the dead core; the core continued to grow in mass, collapsing still further under its own weight.

The heat energy emitted by the shell, with that of the inert, collapsing core, was greater than that which had been emitted by the
original
fusing core.

The Sun couldn’t sustain the increased heat output of its new heart. In an astonishingly short period it was forced to expand - to become
giant.

Louise Ye Armonk stood on the forecastle deck of the
Great Britain
, peering down at the southern pole of Triton.

The
Britain
sailed through space half a mile above the satellite’s thin, gleaming cap of nitrogen ice; steam trailed through space, impossibly, from the ship’s single funnel. The ice cap curved beneath the prow of the ship as seamlessly as some huge eggshell. The southern hemisphere of Neptune’s largest moon was just entering its forty-year summer, and the ice cap was receding; when Louise tilted back her head she could see thin, high cirrus clouds of nitrogen ice streaming northwards on winds of evaporated pole material.

She walked across the deck, past the ship’s bell suspended in its elaborate cradle. The huge, misty bulk of Neptune was reflected in the bell’s gleaming surface, and Louise ran her hand over the cool contours of the shaped metal, making it rock gently; the multiple, amorphous images of Neptune slid gracefully across the metal.

From here the Sun was a bright star, a remote point of light; and the blue light of Neptune, eerily Earthlike, bathed the lines of the old ship, making her seem ethereal, not quite substantial - paradoxical, Louise reflected, since the
Britain
was actually the only real artifact in her sensorium at present.

As the
Britain
neared the ragged edge of Triton’s ice cap, a geyser blew, almost directly in front of the floating ship. Dark substrate material laced with nitrogen ice plumed into the air, rising ten miles from the plain; as it reached the thin, high altitude wind the plume turned through a right angle and streamed across the face of Triton. Louise walked to the lip of the forecastle deck and followed the line of the plume back down to the surface of the moon, where she could just see the fine crater in the ice at the plume’s base. The geyser was caused by the action of the sun’s heat on pockets of gas trapped beneath thin crusts of ice. Shards of ice were sprinkled around the site of the eruption, and some splinters still cartwheeled through the thin nitrogen atmosphere, slowly returning to the surface under the languid pull of Triton’s gravity.

This was one of her favourite Virtual dioramas, although it was actually one of the least familiar. The capability of her processors to generate these dioramas was huge, but not infinite; she’d deliberately kept the Neptune diorama in reserve, rationing its use over the unchanging centuries, to try to conserve its appeal.

It wasn’t hard to analyse why this particular Virtual scene appealed to her so much. The landscape of this remote moon was extraordinary and unfamiliar, and surprisingly full of change, fuelled by the energies of distant Sol; and Neptune’s blue mass, with its traceries of nitrogen cirrus, was sufficiently Earthlike to prompt deep, almost buried feelings of nostalgia in her - and yet different enough that the references to Earth were almost subliminal, obscure enough that she was not tempted to descend into morbid longing. And—

Pixels swirled before her suddenly, a thousand self-orbiting blocks of light. Surprised, she almost stumbled; she gripped onto the rail at the edge of the deck for support.

The pixels coalesced with a soundless concussion into the image of Mark Wu. The projection was poor: the Virtual floated a few inches above the deck, and cast no shadow in Neptune’s pale light.

‘Lethe’s waters,’ Louise said, ‘don’t do that. You startled me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Mark said. Even his voice was coarse and blocky, Louise noticed. ‘It was urgent. I had to interrupt you. I—’

‘
And
this projection’s lousy. What’s the matter with you?’ Louise felt her mind slide comfortably into one of its familiar sets - what Mark called her
analytical griping
. She’d be able to while away a good chunk of the empty day interrogating the processor, picking over details of this representation of Mark. ‘You’re even floating above the deck, damn it. I wouldn’t be surprised if you start losing the illusion of solidity next. And—’

‘Louise. I said it was
urgent
.’

She found her voice trailing off, her concentration dissolving.

Mark stepped towards her, and his face enhanced visibly, fleshing out and gaining violet-blue tones of Neptunian light. The processors projecting Mark were obviously trying to help her through this interaction. But the rest of his body remained little more than a three-dimensional sketch - a sign that he was diverting most of the available processing power to another priority. ‘Louise,’ Mark said, his voice soft but insistent. ‘Something’s happened. Something’s changed.’

‘Changed?’
Nothing’s changed - not significantly - for nearly a thousand years . . .

Mark smiled. ‘Your mouth is open.’

She swallowed. ‘I’m sorry. I think you’re going to have to give me a bit of time with this.’

‘I’m going to turn off the diorama.’

She looked up with unreasonable panic at the remote face of Neptune. ‘Why?’

‘Something’s happened, Louise—’

‘You said that already.’

‘
The lifedome
.’ His eyes were fixed on hers.

She felt dreamy, light, almost unconcerned, and she wondered if the nanobots working within her body were feeding her some subtle tranquillizer. ‘Tell me.’

‘Someone is trying to use one of the ports in the lifedome base.’ Mark’s eyes were deep, probing. ‘Do you understand, Louise? Can you hear what I’m saying?’

‘Of course I can,’ she snapped.

After five centuries without contact, someone was leaving the lifedome. She tried to grasp the reality of Mark’s statement, to envisage it.
Someone was coming.

‘Turn off the projection,’ she told Mark wearily. ‘I’m ready.’

Neptune collapsed suddenly, like a burst balloon; Triton shrivelled into a billion dwindling pixels, and the light of Sol flickered out. For a moment there was only the
Great Britain
, the undeniable reality of Brunel’s old ship hard and incongruent at the centre of this infinity of greyness, of the absence of form; Mark stood before her on the battered deck, his too-real face fixed on hers, reassuring.

Then the Universe returned.

Arrow Maker was falling out of the world.

He sat in the craft - this
pod
, as Uvarov had called it - with his bow and quiver piled neatly on the seat next to him. His bare legs dangled over his chair’s smooth lip. There was a simple control console, just within his reach before him.

The pod’s walls were transparent, making the cylindrical hull almost invisible. The pod was
nothing
, less sheltering than an insubstantial dream; the four seats, with Maker and his incongruous, futile bow, seemed to be dropping unsupported through the air.

Uvarov had pointed out the pod to him. Maker had barely been able to
see
it - a box of translucent strangeness in a world of strangeness.

Uvarov had told him to get into the pod. Maker, without thought, it seemed, had obeyed.

Through the floor of the pod he could see the port approaching. It was a rectangle set in the base of the lifedome, bleak and unadorned, bordered by a line of pale brilliance. He could still see stars through the lifedome base, but he realized now that it wasn’t perfectly transparent. It returned some reflection of the sourceless inner light of the lifedome, making it a genuine floor across the world. Perhaps a layer of dust had collected over the base during the long centuries, spoiling its pristine clarity.