Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (144 page)

Louise Ye Armonk walked up to the pod, leaving shallow footprints in the frost of Callisto. The engineer had turned up an interior light behind her faceplate.

‘Spinner-of-Rope.’ Louise held out her hand and smiled. ‘Well, here we are again. Come on. I’ll show you around the craft.’

Spinner took Louise’s hand. Slowly, her feet crunching softly against the worn ice, she walked with Louise to the craft.

The rings of Jupiter arced across the sky, a plain of bloodstained, frozen smoke. The craft lay against the ice, dark, vital.

They drew to a halt perhaps ten feet from the edge of the nearest wing. The wing hovered a few feet above the ice, apparently unsupported; perhaps it was so light it didn’t need support, apart from its join with the central trunk of the ship, Spinner thought. Beyond the leading edge the wing curved softly, like a slow, frozen billow of smoke; its form, foreshortened, was sharply delineated against the bland ice backdrop of Callisto, but its utter darkness made the scale of the wing’s curves hard to judge. At the trailing edge of the wing, the material was so delicate that Spinner - bending, and peering upwards - could see
through
the fabric of the wing, to the wizened glow of the stars.

‘In form the ship is like a sycamore seed.’ Louise glanced across at Spinner. ‘Do you have sycamores in your forest? . . . Here are these lovely wings, which sweep back through a hundred yards. The small central pilot’s cage sits on top of the “shoulders” of the ship - the base of the wings.’

Lovely
, Louise had said. Well, Spinner reflected, perhaps there was a certain loveliness here - but it was a beauty that was utterly inhuman, and endlessly menacing.

‘This isn’t a human ship,’ she said slowly. ‘Is it, Louise?’

‘No.’ Louise set her shoulders. ‘Damn it,’ she said sourly. ‘We find one reasonably complete artifact in the rubble of the Solar System, and it has to be alien . . .

‘Spinner, we think this is a
Xeelee
craft. We’ve checked the old Paradoxa projections; we think this is what the Friends of Wigner - the people from the Qax occupation era - called a
nightfighter
. A small, highly mobile, versatile scout craft.’

The leading edge of a sycamore-seed wing was at a level with Louise’s face; now she raised a gloved hand and made as if to pass a fingertip along that edge. Then, thoughtfully, she drew her hand back. ‘Actually, we wouldn’t advise that you touch anything, unless you have to. This stuff is
sharp
. The wings, and the rest of the hull, are probably made of Xeelee
construction material
.’

She ducked her head and sighted along the plane of the wing. Spinner had to stand on tiptoe to do the same. When she did manage to raise her eyes to the level of the wing, the Xeelee material seemed to disappear, such was its fineness. Even this close it was utterly black, returning no reflections from the ice, or the Jovian rings above. It wasn’t like anything
real
, she thought; it was as if a slice had been taken out of the world, leaving this hole - this
defect.

Louise said, ‘This stuff resists analysis. Uvarov and Mark suggest that the construction material is a sheet of bound nucleons - bound together by the strong nuclear force, I mean, as if this was some immense, spun-out atomic nucleus.

‘But I’m not so sure. The density doesn’t seem right, for one thing. I have a theory of my own: that what we’re looking at is something more fundamental. I think the Xeelee have found a way to suppress the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and so have found their way into a whole new regime of matter. Of course the problem with that theory is that there aren’t supposed to
be
any loopholes in the Exclusion Principle. Well, I guess nobody told the Xeelee about that . . .’

‘How did they make this stuff?’

Louise smiled. ‘If you believe the old Paradoxa reconstructions, they
grew
it, from “flowers”. Construction material simply sprouted like petals from the flowers, in the presence of radiant energy.

‘It would be interesting to know how this ship got here, to Callisto, in the first place,’ she said. ‘Capturing a Xeelee craft must have been a great triumph, for humans of any era.

‘Uvarov thinks this moon was used as a lab. This site, remote from the populated colonies, was a workshop - a safe place to study the Xeelee craft. There must have been research facilities here, built around the nightfighter, as the people of the time tried to pry out the secrets of its intrasystem drive, its hyperdrive, the construction material. But we’ve found little evidence of any human occupation, apart from close to this nightfighter. When the war came—’

‘What war?’

Louise dropped her faceless, helmeted head. ‘A war against the Xeelee, Spinner. One of many wars. More than that I doubt we’ll ever know.

‘In the final war, the human facilities - and any people here - were destroyed, all save a few scraps. But—’

‘But the Xeelee nightfighter survived,’ Spinner said.

Louise smiled. ‘Yes. The Xeelee built to last. Whatever happened was enough to
melt Callisto’s ice
. But the nightfighter sank into the new oceans, and was trapped in there when Callisto froze again.’

Spinner thought:
Trapped, dormant, for an immeasurable time - perhaps a million years.

‘And they never came back,’ Louise said. The people, I mean. The humans. They never recovered, to return here to rebuild. Perhaps that really was the war to end all wars, as far as Sol was concerned . . .

‘Here’s the pilot cage, Spinner-of-Rope . . . Well, now you can see why I need your help.’

Spinner-of-Rope stared at the squat cage of construction material.
It was barely six feet across.

She felt a prickly cold spread across her limbs.

A
simple metal stepladder rested against the side of the cage; the ladder looked incongruously primitive, amid all this alien high technology.

Spinner looked at the ladder with dread. ‘Louise,’ she said. ‘I have to climb in. Don’t I?’

Louise, bulky and anonymous in her environment suit, stood close beside her. ‘Well, that’s the general idea. Look, Spinner-of-Rope, we need a pilot . . .’ Her voice trailed off; she shrugged her shoulders, uncertain.

Spinner closed her eyes and took deep breaths, trying to still the shuddering, deep in her stomach. ‘
Lethe
. So that’s why I’m all wired up.’

‘I’m sorry we didn’t tell you before bringing you down here, Spinner. We didn’t know what was best. Would telling you have made things any easier?’

‘I don’t get a choice, do I?’

Louise’s face, through her plate, was hard. ‘You’re the best candidate we have, Spinner-of-Rope. We
need
you.’

Without letting herself think about it, Spinner grabbed the ladder and pulled herself up.

She looked into the pilot’s cage. It was an open sphere made of tubes of construction material. The tubes were arranged in an open lattice which followed a simple longitude-and-latitude pattern. Inside the cage was a bow-shaped console, of the black Xeelee material. Other devices, made of dull metal - looking crude by comparison, obviously human - had been fixed to the Xeelee console.

A human couch had been cemented into the cage, before the console. Straps dangled from it. To fit into the cramped cage, the couch had been made small - too small for any human from the Decks but a child . . . or a child-woman from the forest.

‘I’m going to climb in, Louise.’

‘Good. But for Life’s sake, Spinner-of-Rope, until I tell you,
don’t touch anything
.’

Spinner swung her legs, easily in the light gravity, through the construction-material frame and into the cage.

The couch fitted her body closely - as it should, she thought resentfully, since it had obviously been
made
for her - but it was
too
snug. The couch - the straps across her chest and waist, the bulky, crowding console before her -
devoured
her. The cage was a place of shadows, criss-crossing and mysterious, cast by the Jovian ring and the ice below her. It pressed around her, barely big enough for the couch and console.

She looked out through her murky faceplate, beyond the construction-material cage, to the ice plains of Callisto. She saw the blocky forms of the
Northern
’s
‘
bots, the pod that had brought her here, the shadowy figure of Louise. It all seemed remote, unattainable. The only reality was herself, inside this suit, this alien craft - and the sound of her own breathing loud in her ears.

Spinner had got used to a lot of changes, in the few decades since she and her father had climbed down through the lifedome with Morrow. Just
not growing old
had been a challenge enough. Most of her compatriots in the forest had refused the AS treatments offered to them by Louise, and after a few years the physical-age differences had grown marked, and widened rapidly.

Spinner had a younger sister: Painter-of-Faces, Arrow Maker’s youngest child. By the time the little girl had grown older than Spinner could remember her mother, Spinner had let her visits back to the forest dwindle away.

The life of the forest people carried on much as it always had done - despite the end of the
Northern
’s journey and the discovery of the death of the Sun. Because of her greater awareness - her wider understanding - Spinner felt shut out of that old, enclosed world.

Isolated by age and by her own extraordinary experiences, she had tried to grow accustomed to the bizarre Universe outside the walls of the ship. And, over the years, she’d learned a great deal; Louise Ye Armonk, despite the ghastly way she had of patronizing Spinner, had assured her often of the great strides she’d made for someone of her low-technology upbringing.

But now, she longed to be away from this bleak, threatening place - to be naked again, and moving through the trees of the forest.

‘Spinner-of-Rope.’ It was the voice of the artificial man, Mark, soft inside her helmet. ‘You’ve got to try to relax. Your biostat signs are way up—’

‘Shut up, Mark.’ Louise Ye Armonk walked up to the Xeelee cage and pressed her body against the black bars, peering in; she’d turned on the light behind her faceplate, so Spinner could see her face. ‘Spinner, are you all right?’

Spinner took a deep breath. ‘I’m fine.’ She tried to focus on her irritation: with patronizing Louise, the buzzing ghost Mark. She fanned her annoyance into a flame of anger, to burn away the chill of her fear. ‘Just tell me what I have to do.’

‘Okay.’ Louise lifted her hands and stepped back from the cage. ‘As far as we can tell, the cage you’re in is the control centre of the nightfighter. You can see, obviously, that it’s been adapted for use by humans. We put the couch in for you. You have waldoes—’

‘I have
what
?’

‘Waldoes, Spinner. The metal boxes on top of the console. See?’

There were three of the boxes, each about a foot long, one before Spinner and one to either side. There were touch pads - familiar enough to her now - illuminated across the tops of the boxes. She reached out towards the box in front of her—

‘
Don’t touch, damn
you,’ Louise snapped.

Spinner snatched her fingers back.

With audibly strained patience, Louise said, ‘Spinner-of-Rope, the controls in those boxes have been tied into what we believe are controls inside the console - and
they
are the nightfighter’s real controls, the Xeelee mechanisms. That’s why we called the boxes waldoes . . . By working the waldoes you’ll be able to work the controls. The waldoes are reconstructions, based on fragments left from the destruction of the original lab.’

‘All right.’ Spinner ran a tongue over her lips; sweat, dried in a rim around her mouth, tasted of salt. ‘I understand. Let’s get on with it.’

Beyond the cage, Louise held up her hands. ‘No. Wait. It’s not as simple as that. We reconstructed the waldoes from clues left by the original human researchers. We believe they are going to work . . . But,’ she went on dryly, ‘we don’t know what they will make the nightfighter
do
. We don’t know what will happen when you touch the waldoes.

‘So we’ll have to be patient. Experiment.’

‘All right,’ Spinner said. ‘But the original researchers, before the war, must have known what they were doing. Mustn’t they?’

Mark said, ‘Not necessarily. After all, if they’d been able to figure out Xeelee technology, maybe they wouldn’t have lost the war—’

‘Shut up, Mark,’ Louise said mildly. ‘Now, Spinner. Listen carefully. You have three waldoes - three boxes. We believe - we
think -
the one directly in front of you is interfaced to the hyperdrive control, and the two to your sides connect to the intraSystem drive.’

‘IntraSystem?’

‘Sublight propulsion, to let you travel around the Solar System. All right? Now, Spinner, today we aren’t going to touch the hyperdrive - in fact, that waldo is disabled. We just want to see what we can make of the intraSystem drive. All right?’

‘Yes.’ Spinner looked at the two boxes; the touch-pad lights glowed steadily, in reassuring colours of yellow and green.

‘On your left hand waldo you’ll see a yellow pad. It should be illuminated. See it?’

‘Yes.’

Louise hesitated. ‘Spinner, try to be ready. We don’t know what to expect. There might be
changes
. . .’

‘I’m ready.’

‘Touch the yellow pad - once, and as briefly as you can . . .’

Spinner tried to put aside her fear. She lifted her hand—

Startled, she twisted in her couch.

It had been a dry, weary voice - a
man’s
voice, sounding from somewhere inside her helmet.

Of course, she was alone in the cage.

It’s just
a
machine
, the voice said now.
There’s nothing to fear . . .