Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (138 page)

By contrast there was nothing within the expanding frame of the port -
nothing
, not even Uvarov’s stars. The frame was rising towards him, preparing to swallow him and this foolish craft like an opening mouth.

The port was a doorway to emptiness.

He felt his bowels loosen. Fear was constantly with him, constantly threatening to erupt from his control . . .

Spinner’s voice sounded small, distorted, emanating from the air. ‘Maker? Can you hear me? Are you all right?’

He cried out and gripped the edges of his seat. His throat was so tight with tension he couldn’t speak. He closed his eyes, shutting out the huge, bizarre unrealities around him, and tried to get some control. He lifted his hands to his waist; he touched the liana rope Spinner had wrapped around him as a good luck talisman, just before his departure.

‘Maker? Arrow Maker?’

‘ . . . Spinner,’ he gasped. ‘I can hear you. Are you all right?’

She laughed, and just for a moment he could visualize her round, sardonic face, the way she would push her spectacles up her short nose. ‘That’s hardly the point, is it? The question is, are
you
all right?’

‘Yes.’ He opened his eyes, cautiously. The invisible engines of this bubble-pod hummed, almost silently, and below him the exit from the lifedome was a floor of grey emptiness, expanding towards him with exquisite slowness. ‘Yes, I’m all right. You startled me a bit, that’s all.’

‘I’m not surprised.’ The voice of the tall, dry man from the Decks - Morrow - was rendered even more flat than usual by the distortions of the hidden communications devices. ‘Maybe we should have spent more time showing you what to expect.’

‘Is there anything you want?’

‘Yes, Spinner-of-Rope.’ Arrow Maker felt small, fragile, isolated, like a child in a vehicle made for adults. All around him there was a sharp,
empty
smell: of plastic and metal, an absence of life. He longed for the rich humidity of the jungle. ‘I wish we could go home,’ he told his daughter.

‘For Life’s sake, stop this babbling.’ The voice of Garry Uvarov was like a rattle of bone against glass. ‘Arrow Maker,’ Uvarov said. ‘Where are you?’

Maker hesitated. The lifedome exit was huge beneath him now - he was so close to it, in fact, that its corners and edges were foreshortened; the semitransparent surface of the lifedome turned into a rim of distant, star-spangled carpet around this immense cavity. He felt himself cringe. He reached out blindly for his bow and clutched it to his chest; it was a small token of normality in this world of strangeness. ‘I can’t be more than a dozen feet from the exit. And I—’

The lip of the port, brightly lit, slid upwards around the pod, now; Arrow Maker felt as if he were being immersed in some bottomless pool.

When she understood the birds were trying to feed her, she tried to pick out individuals among the huge flocks. She told herself she wanted to study the birds: learn more of their life-cycle, mediated as it was by baryonic matter, and perhaps even try to become
empathetic
with the birds, to try to comprehend their individual and racial goals.

But making friends with photino birds - forming contact with individuals in anything like a conventional human sense - simply wasn’t a possibility for her, it emerged. They were so nearly alike - after all, she reflected, given their simple reproductive strategy the birds were very nearly clones of each other - that it was all but impossible for her to tell them apart. And, on their brief orbits around the Sun, they flashed past her so quickly. She certainly couldn’t identify them closely enough to follow individuals through consecutive orbits past her.

So - though she was surrounded by the birds, and bathed in their strange, luminous generosity - Lieserl remained, still, fundamentally alone.

She felt intense disappointment at this. At first she told herself that this was a symptom of her limited understanding of the birds: Lieserl, as the frustrated scientist.

But this was just a rationalization, she knew.

She forced herself to be honest. What some part of her really wanted, deep down, was for the photino birds to
accept
her - if not as one of their own, then as a tolerable alien in their midst.

When she first diagnosed this about herself, she felt humiliated. For the first time she was glad there was nobody observing her, no latter-day equivalent of Kevan Scholes studying her telemetry and deducing her mental state. Was she really so pathetic, so internally weak, that she needed to cling to crumbs of friendship - even from these dark-matter creatures, whose alienness from her was so fundamental that it made the differences between humans and Qax look like close kinship?

Was she
really
so lonely?

The subsequent embarrassment and fit of self-loathing took a long time to fade.

Individual contact with the birds would be meaningless anyway. Since they were so alike, their behaviour as individuals so undifferentiated, racial goals seemed far more important to the birds than individual goals. Personality was subsumed beneath the purpose of the species to a far greater extent than it ever had been with humans - even at the time of the Assimilation, she thought, when opposition to the Xeelee had emerged as a clear racial goal for humanity.

She watched the birds breed, endlessly, the swarms of clumsy young sweeping on uncontrolled elliptical orbits around the Sun’s core in pursuit of their parents.

The birds’ cloning mode of reproduction seemed to shape the course of their lives.

At first the cloning seemed restrictive - even claustrophobic. Racial goals, downloaded directly from the mother’s awareness into the young, overrode any individual ambitions. The young were robots, she decided, programmed from birth to fulfil the objectives of the species.

But then, so had
she
been programmed by her species - and so, to some extent, had every human who had ever lived, she thought. It was all a question of degree.

And anyway, would it really be so terrible, to be a photino bird?

With species-objective programming must come an immense fund of wisdom. The youngest photino bird would come to awareness with an expanded set of racial memories and drivers surely beyond the comprehension of any human.

Phillida had boasted that she - Lieserl - would become, with her close and accurate control of her memories and the functions of her mind, the most
conscious
human who had ever lived. Maybe that was once true. But, even at the height of her powers, Lieserl’s degree of awareness was surely a mere candle compared to the immense conscious power available to the humblest of the photino birds.

And perhaps, she thought wistfully, these birds
were
all components of some extended group-mind - perhaps to analyse the consciousness of any individual bird would be as meaningless as to study the awareness of a single component in her own processing banks, or one neurone in the brain of a conventional human.

Perhaps.

But that didn’t seem important to Lieserl, compared to the sense of
belonging
the birds must share.

Lieser1, the eternal outsider, watched the birds sweep past her in their lively, co-ordinated flights. She felt awe - and something else:
envy.

She pulled away from the shrinking core of the Sun, out through the searing hydrogen-fusing shell, and soared up into the envelope - the bloated, gaseous mantle that the outer forty per cent of giant-Sun’s mass had become. The envelope was a universe of thin gas - so thin, she imagined, that if she tried hard enough she could
see
out through these teeming layers, to the stars beyond (or what was left of them).

The Sun was a red giant. It had become a pocket cosmos in itself, with its own star - the hydrogen-fusion shell around the dead core - blazing at the centre of this clogged, gas-filled space. But the outer layers, the mantle, had become so swollen that they utterly dwarfed the core. In fact, the dimensions of the Sun were like those of an atom, she realized, with the shrunken, blazing core occupying the same proportion of space within its mantle-cloud as did the nucleus of an atom within its cloud of electrons.

The photino birds clustered around the Sun’s shrinking heart, sipping relentlessly at its energy store. She was outside the bulk of the flock now - although some outriders still swept past her, on their way into the flock from the Universe outside. With a new feeling of detachment, she started to experience a deepening sense of disquiet at the activities of the birds. From this perspective, the birds seemed like carrion, she thought, or tiny, malevolent parasites.

Restless, disturbed, Lieserl moved through the huge envelope. There was
structure
here, even in this immense volume, she saw. The photosphere of the new red giant - its huge, glowing surface - had actually become less opaque to radiation; its temperature had fallen so far that electrons had recombined with nuclei, increasing the transparency of the surface layers. So - even though its surface temperature had dropped - the Sun was actually radiating more energy, overall, than it had done before its swelling.

To fuel this increased luminosity, immense convection cycles had started - cells which spanned millions of miles, and which would persist for hundreds of days. The convection cycles dug deep into the mantle to haul energy out of the core regions to be pumped out to space - and along with the energy dredging, Lieserl saw, the convection was changing the composition of the Sun, polluting the outer regions with nucleosynthesis products like nitrogen-14, dug out of the core regions.

Coherent maser radiation flashed along the flanks of the convection cells, startling her with its intensity.

As she travelled through the thin gas she felt a faint buffeting, a rocking of the exotic-matter framework of her Interface.

There was turbulence here. The convection process wasn’t perfectly efficient, and energy, struggling to escape from the inner regions, was forced to dissipate itself in a complex, space-filling array of turbulent cells. The Sun’s magnetic field was affected by this turbulence. She saw how the flux was pushed out of the interior of the cells, to form fine sheets across the cells’ surfaces - but the sheets were unstable, and they burst like sheets of soap film, leaving ropes of flux at the intersections of the turbulence cells. Lieserl swam through a million-mile mesh of the magnetic flux ropes.

It was bizarre to think that - if she wished - she could travel out as far as the old orbital radius of Earth, without ever leaving the substance of the Sun.

Lieserl knew - with remote, abstract sadness - that the inner planets, out as far as Earth, must have been consumed in the Sun’s cooling, red-tinged mantle. She remembered her brief, golden childhood: the sparkling beaches of the Aegean, the sharp, enticing scent of the sea, the feel of sand between her babyish toes. Perhaps humans, somewhere, were still enjoying such experiences.

But Earth, the only world
she
had known, was gone forever.

‘
A
rrow Maker,
tell me what you see
. Can you see the stars?’ Arrow Maker looked down, through the pod hull. ‘I don’t understand.’

Uvarov’s voice, disembodied, became ragged; Arrow Maker imagined the old man thrashing feebly beneath his blanket. ‘Can you see Sol? You should be able to, by now. Arrow Maker -
is Earth there?
Is—’

‘No.’

‘Maker—’

‘
No
.’

Arrow Maker shouted the last word, and Uvarov subsided.

The illuminated lip of the port had passed right over the pod now; it was visible to Maker as a frame of light above his head. The outer darkness had enclosed the pod . . . No, he was thinking about this in the wrong way. The darkness was the Universe; as if in some obscene, mechanical birth, the pod had been
expelled
from the lifedome into the dark.

The base of the lifedome hung over him like a huge belly of glass and metal, receding slowly, its curvature becoming apparent. And through it - distorted, rendered misty by the base material - he made out the light-filled interior of the dome. He could see bits of detail: elevator shafts from the decks above, control consoles like the one at which he’d left Spinner, Morrow and Uvarov - why, if he had eyes sharp enough, he could probably look up now and see the soles of his daughter’s feet.

Suddenly the reality of it hit him. He had travelled
outside the lifedome
. He was beyond its protective hull - perhaps the first human to have ventured outside in half a millennium - and now he was suspended in the emptiness which made up most of the forbidding, lifeless Universe.

‘
Arrow Maker
. Talk to us.’

Arrow Maker laughed, his voice shrill in his own ears. ‘I’m suspended in a glass bubble, surrounded by emptiness. I can see the lifedome. It’s like—’

‘Like what?’ Morrow’s voice, sounding intrigued.

‘Like a box of light. Quite - beautiful. But very fragile-looking . . .’

Uvarov cut in, ‘Oh, give me strength.
What else, Arrow Maker
?’

Arrow Maker twisted his head, to left and right.

To the right of the pod, an immense pillar of sculpted metal swept through space. It was huge, quite dwarfing the pod, like the trunk of some bizarre artificial tree. It merged seamlessly with the lifedome, and it was encrusted with cups, ribs and flowers of shaped metal.

Maker described this.

‘The spine,’ Uvarov said impatiently. ‘You’re travelling parallel to the spine of the GUTship. Yes, yes; just as I told you. Arrow Maker, can you see the Interface? The wormhole—’

Arrow Maker leaned forward and peered down, past the seats and stanchions, through the pod’s base. This
spine
descended for a great distance, its encrustation of parasitic forms dwindling with perspective, until the spine narrowed to a mere irregular line. The whole form was no less than three miles long, Uvarov had told him.