Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (149 page)

‘The scheme obviously attracted support. You can
see
the bits of ships, littering the surface . . . People must have fled here, quietly, from all over the collapsing System. The mission was a beacon of hope, I guess.

‘But—’

‘But what?’

‘But
they got it wrong.

‘I’m going to go deeper now, Spinner.’

‘Be careful, Louise.’

There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of Louise’s shallow breath. Spinner filled her faceplate once more with cool, green leaf-light and stared into it, trying not to imagine what Louise was finding, down there inside the little tomb-world.

At length, Louise said: ‘Well, that’s it. I guess I’m here: the last place they occupied . . . the one place they couldn’t tidy up after themselves.’

Spinner stared into green emptiness. ‘What can you see?’

‘Abandoned clothes.’ Hesitation. ‘Dust everywhere. No bones, Spinner; no crumbling corpses . . . you can put your imagination away.’

After five megayears, there
would
only be dust, Spinner thought: a final cloud, of flakes of bone and crumbled flesh, settling slowly.

‘If they left records, I can’t find them,’ Louise said. She sounded as if she were trying to be unconcerned - to maintain control - but Spinner thought she could hear fragility in that level voice. ‘Perhaps there’s something in the electronics. But that would take years of data mining to dig out, even if we could restore the power. And we’re probably looking at technology a hundred thousand years beyond ours anyway . . .’

‘Louise, there’s nothing you can do in there. I think you should come out.’

‘ . . . Yes. I guess you’re right, Spinner-of-Rope. We don’t have time for this.’

Spinner thought she heard relief in Louise’s tone.

The little
Northern
pod clambered up from the worldlet’s shallow gravity well, towards the Xeelee craft.

Louise, safe inside her life-lounge, said: ‘They couldn’t control the slingshot well enough. Or maybe the Xeelee interfered with their plans.

‘They weren’t thrown out of the System as they’d planned, on an open-ended
hyperbolic
trajectory; instead they were put into this wide, and deadly,
elliptical
orbit - an orbit which was closed, taking them nowhere, very slowly.

‘I guess they tried to stick it out. Well, they’d broken up their ships; they had no choice. Maybe if we had time for a proper archaeological study here we could work out how long they lasted. Who knows? Hundreds of thousands of years? Maybe they were hoping for rescue, for all that time, from some brave new future when humans had thrown out the Xeelee once more.

‘But it was a future that never came.

‘By the time they set up their beacon, their final plea for help, they must have known they were through - and that there
was
nobody to come to their aid.’

‘Nobody except us.’

‘Yes,’ Louise growled. ‘And what can we offer them now?’

‘What about the beacon?’

‘I shut it down,’ Louise said softly. ‘It’s served no purpose . . . not for five million years.’

Spinner sat in her Xeelee-crafted cabin, watching the grim little tomb of ice turn beneath her prow. ‘Louise? Where to now?’

‘The inner System. I think I’ve had it with all this bleakness and dark. Spinner-of-Rope, let’s go to Saturn.’

S
urrounded by swooping photino birds, Lieserl sailed around the core of the Sun. She let hydrogen light play across her face, warming her. The helium core, surrounded by the blazing hydrogen shell scorching

its way out through the thinning layers, continued to grow in the steady hail of ash from the shell. Inhomogeneities in the giant’s envelope - clouds and clumps of gas, bounded by ropes of magnetic flux - moved across the face of the core, and the core-star actually cast shadows
outwards
, high up into the expanding envelope.

The photino birds swept, oblivious, through the shining fusion shell and on into the inert core itself. Lieserl watched as a group of the birds broke away and sailed off and out, to their unknowable destination beyond the Sun. She studied the birds. Had their rate of activity
increased
? She had the vague impression of a greater urgency about the birds’ swooping orbits, their eternal dips into the core.

Maybe the birds knew the ancient human spacecraft, the
Northern
, was here. Maybe they were reacting to the humans’ presence . . . It seemed fanciful - but was it possible?

The processes unfolding around the Sun were quite remarkably beautiful. In fact, she reflected now, every stage of the Sun’s evolution had been beautiful - whether accelerated by the photino birds or not. It was too anthropomorphic to consider the lifecycle of a star as some analogy of human birth, life and death. A star was a construct of physical processes; the evolution it went through was simply a search for equilibrium stages between changing, opposing forces. There was no life or death involved, no loss or gain: just
process.

Why
shouldn’t
it be beautiful?

She smiled at herself. Ironic. Here she was, an AI five million years old, accusing herself of too much anthropomorphism . . . But, she thought uneasily, perhaps her true fault lay in not
enough
anthropomorphism.

The sudden communication from the humans outside - the whispers of maser light which had trickled down the flanks of the huge, dumb convection cells - had shaken her to her soul.

She’d undertaken her cycle of messages, she suspected strongly, because she was driven to it by some sinister bit of programming, buried deep within her: not out of choice, or because she believed she might actually get a
reply
. So she’d packed her data with pictures of herself, and small, ironic jokes - all intended, she supposed, to signal to herself that this wasn’t real: that it was all a game, unworthy of being taken seriously because there was no one left out there to hear.

Well, it seemed now, she’d been wrong. These people - of her own era, roughly, preserved by relativistic time dilation in their strange ship, the
Great Northern -
had returned to the Solar System.

And they were - she’d come to believe -
people who didn’t approve of her.

They hadn’t said as much, explicitly. But she suspected an inner coldness was there, buried in the long communications they exchanged with her.

They thought she’d lost her objectivity - forgotten the reason she was placed in here in the first place. They thought she’d become an ineffectual observer, seduced by the rhythmic beauty of the photino birds.

Lieserl was some form of traitor, perhaps.

For the truth was - in the eyes of the men and women of the
Northern -
the photino birds were deadly. The birds were anti-human. They were killing the Sun.

They couldn’t understand how Lieserl could not be
aware
of this stark enmity.

She closed her eyes and hugged her knees; the hydrogen shell, fusing at ten million degrees, felt like warm summer Sunlight on her Virtual face. She’d watched the photino birds do their slow, patient work, year after year, leaching away the Sun’s fusion energy in slow, deadly, dribbles. She’d come to understand that the birds were killing the Sun - and yet she’d never thought really to wonder what was happening
outside
the Sun, in other stars. Had she vaguely assumed that the photino birds were somehow native to the Sun, like a localized infection? - But that couldn’t be, of course, for she’d seen birds fly away from here, and come skimming down through the envelope to join the core-orbiting flock. So there
must
be birds beyond the Sun - significant flocks of them.

She realized now, with chilling clarity, that her unquestioned assumption that the birds were contained to just one star, coupled with her intrigued fascination with the birds themselves, had led her to
justify
the birds’ actions, in her own heart. It hadn’t even mattered to her that the result of the birds’ activity would be the death of Sol - perhaps, even, the extinction of man.

She quailed from this unwelcome insight into her own soul. She had once been human, after all; was she really so clinical, so
alien
?

The murder of Sol would have been bad enough. But in fact - the crew of the
Northern
had told her, in brutal and explicit detail - all across the sky, the stars were dying: ballooning into diseased giants, crumbling into dwarfs. The Universe was littered with planetary nebulae, supernovae ejecta and the other debris of dying stars, all rich with complex - and useless - heavy elements.

The photino birds
were
killing the stars: and not just the Sun, man’s star, but
all
of the stars, out as far as the
Northern
’s sensors could pick up.

Already, there was nowhere in the Universe for humans to run to.

And she, Lieserl - the
Northern
crew seemed to believe - should be doing more than leaking out wry little messages via her maser convection cells. She should be screaming warnings.

Through her complex feelings, a mixture of self-doubt and loneliness, anger erupted. After all, what right did the
Northern
crew have to criticize her - even implicitly? She’d had no choice about this assignment - this immortal exile of hers in the heart of the Sun. She’d been allowed no
life
. And it wasn’t
her
who had shut down the telemetry link through the wormhole, during the Assimilation.

Why, after millions of years of abandonment, should
she
offer any loyalty to mankind?

And yet, she thought, the arrival of the
Northern
, and the fresh perspective of its crew, had made her take a colder, harder look at the birds - and at herself - than she had for a
long
time.

She pictured the shadow universe of dark matter: a universe which permeated, barely touching, the visible worlds men had once inhabited . . . And yet that image was misleading, she thought, for the dark matter was no shadow: it comprised most of the Universe’s total mass. The glowing, baryonic matter was a mere glittering froth on the surface of that dark ocean.

The photino birds - and their unknowable dark matter cousins, perhaps as different from the birds as were the Qax from humanity - slid through the black waters like fish, blind and hidden.

But the small, shining fraction of baryonic matter seemed vital to the dark matter creatures. It was a catalyst for the chains of events which sustained their species.

For a start, dark matter could not form stars. And the birds seemed to
need
the gravity wells of baryonic stars.

When a clump of baryonic gas collapsed under gravity, electromagnetic radiation carried away much of the heat produced - it was as if the radiation
cooled
the gas cloud. The residual heat left in the cloud eventually balanced the gravitational attraction, and equilibrium was found: a star formed.

But dark matter could not produce electromagnetic radiation. And without the cooling effect of the radiation, a dark matter cloud, collapsing under gravity, trapped much more of
its
heat of contraction. As a result, much larger clouds - larger than galaxies - were the equilibrium form for dark matter.

So the early Universe had been populated by immense, cold, bland clouds of dark matter: it had been a cosmos almost without structure.

Then the baryonic matter had gathered, and the stars began to implode - to shine. Lieserl imagined the first stars sparking to life across the cosmos, tiny pinprick gravity wells in the smooth oceans of dark matter.

The photino birds lived off a trickle of proton-photino interactions, which fed them with a slow, steady drip of energy. And to get a sufficient flow of energy the birds needed
dense
matter - densities which could not have formed without baryonic structures.

And the birds’ dependence on baryonic matter extended further. She knew that the birds needed templates of baryonic material even to reproduce.

So baryonic-matter stars had given the photino birds their very being, and now fed them and enabled them to reproduce.

Lieserl brooded. A fine hypothesis. But
why
, then, should the birds be so eager to kill off their mother-stars?

Once more the chatter of the humans from the
Northern
passed through her sensorium, barely registering. They were asking her more questions - requesting more detailed forecasts of the likely future evolution of the suffering Sun.

She sailed moodily around the core, thinking about stars and the photino birds.

And her mind made connections it had failed to complete before in millions of years.

At last, she saw it: the full, bleak picture.

And, suddenly, it seemed urgent - terribly urgent - to answer the humans’ questions about the future.

She hurried to the base of her convection cells.

The shower’s needle-sharp jets of water sprayed over Louise’s skin. She floated there at the centre of the shower cubicle, listening to the shrill gurgle of the water as it was pumped out of the booth. She lifted her arms up and let the water play over her belly and chest; it was hot enough, the pressure sufficiently high, to make her battered old skin tingle, as if it were being worked over by a thousand tiny masseurs.

She hated being in zero-gee. She always had, and she hated it still; she even loathed having to have a pump to suck the water out of her shower for her. She’d insisted on having this shower installed, curtained off in one corner of the life-lounge, as her one concession to luxury -
no, damn it
, she thought,
this is no luxury; the shower is my concession to what’s left of my humanity.

A hot shower was one of the few sensual experiences that had remained
vivid
, as she’d got so absurdly old. High-pressure, steaming water could still cut through the patina of age which deadened her skin.