Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (154 page)

She felt a sudden, intense, nostalgic desire to return to the clean, bright interior of the Sun. All those millennia, orbiting the core with the photino birds, seemed like a long, fantastic dream to her now: an interval within this, the true human reality . . .

The man reached out and
touched
her arm. His flesh was firm, warm.

She cried out and stumbled backwards.

Five faces, bright with candlelight, turned towards her, and the conversation died.

No one had
touched
Lieserl in megayears.

The man leaned towards her, his blue eyes bright and mischievous. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t resist that. I’m Mark Bassett Friar Armonk Wu.’

She straightened herself up, primly, and glared at him. The sudden touch had left a trembling, deep in her stomach, and she was sure a flush was spreading over her cheeks, despite her age of physical-sixty. She was vividly aware -
too
aware, distractingly so - of Mark’s presence beside her.

He took her arm again, more delicately, and escorted her towards the dinner party. ‘I won’t startle you again, I promise. And I’m the only Virtual here - other than you, of course.’

‘These Virtual illusions are just too damn good sometimes,’ she said. Her voice sounded feathery - weak, she thought. It was going to take her a long time to forgive Mark Wu for that trick.

He led her to a seat and pulled it out for her -
so that was Virtual, too
- and she sat with the rest.

The woman opposite her leaned forward and smiled. Lieserl saw a square, strong face, tired eyes, a thatch of grizzled hair. ‘I’m Louise Ye Armonk,’ she said. ‘You’re welcome here, Lieserl.’

‘Ah,’ Lieserl said. ‘Louise. The leader.’

One of the men - grotesquely blind, bald, wrapped in a blanket - allowed his head to rock back on its spindle of a neck, and bellowed laughter.

Louise looked weary. ‘Lieserl, meet Garry Uvarov . . . You’ve spoken with him before.’

Louise introduced the rest: Morrow, a spindly, reticent man who, with Uvarov, had supervised her downloading through the maser link from the Interface carcass (now abandoned) inside the Sun; and two tiny, young-looking women with strange names - Spinner-of-Rope, Trapper-of-Frogs - their bare flesh startlingly out of place in the formal surroundings of the saloon. Their faces were painted with vivid, intimidating splashes of scarlet, and patches of their scalps were shaven bare. The older-looking one of the pair wore glinting spectacles and carried a crude arrow-head on a thong tied around her neck.

Lieserl was still new enough to all this to be intensely aware of her own appearance. Her hands cast soft shadows, and her brooch - of intertwined snakes and ladders - glittered in the candlelight. Looking out from the twin caverns of her eyes, she saw how the flickering of the light was reflected, with remarkable accuracy, on the blurred outlines of her own face; she knew she must look quite authentic to the others.

She smiled at Louise Ye Armonk. ‘You’ve invested a great deal of processing power in me.’

Louise looked a little defensive; she pulled back slightly from the table. ‘We can afford it. The
Northern
’s on idle. We’ve plenty of spare capacity.’

‘I wasn’t criticizing. I was
thanking
you. I can see you’re trying to make me welcome.’

Mark, sitting beside Lieserl, leaned towards her. ‘Don’t mind Louise. She’s always been as prickly as a porcupine . . .’

Spinner-of-Rope, the girl with the spectacles, said: ‘A
what
?’

‘ . . . and that’s why I divorced her.’

‘
I
divorced
him
,’ Louise Ye Armonk said. ‘And still couldn’t get rid of him.’

‘Anyway,’ Mark said to Lieserl, ‘maybe you should reserve your thanks until you’ve seen the food.’

The meal was served by autonomic ‘bots. A ‘bot - presumably a Virtual - served Mark and Lieserl.

The meal was what Louise Ye Armonk called ‘traditional British’ - just what somebody called ‘Brunel’ would once have enjoyed, on an occasion like this, she said. Lieserl stared at the plates of simulated animal flesh doubtfully. Still, she enjoyed the wine, and the sensation of fresh fruit; with discreet subvocal commands she allowed herself to become mildly drunk.

The conversation flowed well enough, but seemed a little stilted, stale to Lieserl.

During the meal, Trapper-of-Frogs leaned towards her. ‘Lieserl . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Why are you so
old
?’

Uvarov, the crippled surgeon, threw back his head and bellowed out his ghastly laughter once more. Trapper looked confused, even distressed. Watching Uvarov, Lieserl felt herself start to incubate a deep, powerful dislike.

She smiled at Trapper, deliberately. ‘It’s all right, dear.’ She spread her hands, flexing the thin webbing between thumb and forefinger, immersing herself in the new reality of the sensation. ‘It’s just that this is how I remember myself. I chose this Virtual shell because it reflects how I still feel inside, I suppose.’

‘It’s how you were before you were loaded into the Sun?’ Spinner-of-Rope asked.

‘Yes . . . although by the time I reached my downloading I was quite a bit
older
than my aspect now. You see, they actually let me die of old age . . . I was the first person in a long time to do so.’

She began to tell them of how that had felt - of the blights of age, of rheumy eyes and failing bladders and muscles like pieces of old cloth - but Spinner-of-Rope held her hand up. Spinner smiled, her eyes large behind her glasses. ‘We
know
, Lieserl. We’ll take you to the forest sometime; we’ll tell you all about it.’

The meal finished with coffee and brandy, served by the discreet ‘bots. Lieserl didn’t much care for the brandy, but she loved the flavour of the coffee, Virtual or not.

Mark nodded at her appreciation. ‘The coffee’s authenticity is no accident. I spent
years
getting its flavour right. After I got stranded in this Virtual form I spent longer on replicating the sensations of coffee than anything.’ His blue eyes were bright. ‘Anything, except maybe those of sex . . .’

Disconcerted, Lieserl dropped her eyes.

Mark’s provocative remark made her think, however.
Sex
. Perhaps that was the element missing from this gathering of antique semi-immortals. Some had been preserved better than others - and some, like Spinner-of-Rope, were even genuinely (almost) young - but there was no
sexual tension
here. These people simply weren’t aware of each other as human animals.

She knew of Uvarov’s eugenics experiments on the forest Deck, inspired by a drive to improve the species directly. Maybe this gathering, with its mute testimony to the limitations of AS technology, was a partial justification of Uvarov’s project, she thought.

Louise Ye Armonk gently rapped her empty brandy glass with a spoon; it chimed softly. ‘All right, people,’ she said. ‘I guess it’s time for us to get down to business.’

Uvarov grinned towards Lieserl, showing a mouth bereft of teeth. ‘Welcome to the council of war,’ he hissed.

‘Well, perhaps this
is
a war,’ Louise said seriously. ‘But at the moment, we’re just bystanders caught in the crossfire. We have to look at our options, and decide where we’re going from here.

‘We’re in - a difficult situation.’ Louise Armonk looked enormously tired, worn down by the responsibilities she had taken on, and Lieserl felt herself warm a little to this rather intimidating engineer. ‘Our job was to deliver a wormhole Interface to this era, to the end of time, and then travel back through the Interface to our own era. Well, we know that didn’t work out. The Interface is wrecked, the wormhole collapsed - and we’ve become stranded here, in this era.

‘What I want to decide here is how we are going to preserve the future of our people. Everything else -
everything
- is subordinate to that. Agreed?’

For a moment there was silence around the table; Lieserl noticed how few of them were prepared to meet Louise’s cold eyes.

Morrow leaned forward into the light. Lieserl saw, with gentle amusement, how his bony wrists protruded from his sleeves. ‘I agree with Louise. We have one priority, and one only. And that’s to protect the people on this ship: the two thousand of them, on the Decks and in the forest.
That’s
what’s
real
.’

Louise smiled. ‘Morrow, you have the floor.
How
, exactly?’

‘It’s obvious,’ Morrow said. ‘For better or worse, we’re now the custodians of a thousand-year-old culture - a culture which has evolved in the conditions which were imposed on it during the flight. The confined space, the limited resources . . . and the constant, one-gee gravity.

‘But now the flight is over.
And we took away the gravity
, virtually without notice. You know we managed to break up the Temple sieges, without much injury or loss of life. But, Louise, I can’t tell you that life in the Decks has gone back to normal. How could it? Most people are barely retaining their
sanity
, let alone returning to work. No one’s producing any food. At the moment we’re working our way through stores, but that’s not going to last long.’

Trapper pushed her face forward. ‘And in the forest, too, the biota are—’

Louise held up her hands. ‘Enough. Morrow has made the point. Give me a suggestion, please.’

Morrow and Trapper exchanged glances. ‘If there was an Earth to return to,’ Morrow said slowly, ‘I’d say return there.’

‘But there isn’t,’ Uvarov said acidly. His voice was a rasp, synthesized by some device in his throat. ‘Or had you missed the point?’

Morrow was clearly irritated, but determined to make his case. ‘I
know
there’s no Earth.’

‘So?’ Louise asked.

‘So,’ Morrow said slowly, ‘I suggest we stay in the ship. We overhaul it, quickly, and retrieve more reaction mass. Then we send it on a one-gee flight.’

‘Where?’ Mark asked.

‘Anywhere. It really doesn’t matter. We could loop around the Sun in some kind of powered orbit, for all I care. The point is to restart the drive: to restore acceleration-induced gravity inside the ship. Let us - let the people in there - get back to normal again, and start
living
.’

There was silence for a moment. Then Spinner-of-Rope said, ‘Actually, in this scenario, it surely
would be
better to stay in the Solar System, on a powered orbit. The new chunk of reaction mass would be used up, in time; wouldn’t it be better to stay close enough to the Sun to be assured of being able to refuel later? . . . Even if that’s not for another thousand years from now.’

‘Perhaps.’ Louise rubbed her nose thoughtfully. ‘But I’m not sure it’s going to be viable to stay in the ship. Not in the long term.’ She sighed. ‘The dear old
Northern
did her job superbly well - she exceeded all her design expectations. And maybe she
could
last another thousand years.

‘But, in the end, she’s going to fail. It may not be for
ten
thousand years, but failure will come. And then what?’ She frowned. ‘Then,
we
might not be around to oversee any transition to another environment.’

‘There’s a more fundamental point,’ Mark said seriously. ‘The engineering - the nuts and bolts - may have survived the trip, but the
social
fabric of the
Northern
didn’t stand the strain so well. Consider the behaviour of the Planners, towards the end; their messianic visions, which had had a thousand long years to incubate, became psychotic delusions, virtually.’ He looked pointedly at Uvarov. ‘And we had one or two other little local difficulties along the way.’

‘Yes.’ Louise’s tiredness was etched into her face. ‘I guess, in the end, we didn’t do a very good job of preserving our rationality, across the desert of time we’ve traversed . . .’

Mark looked around the table. ‘People, we aren’t Xeelee. We aren’t
designed
to live with each other for centuries, or millennia. We just don’t know how to build a society that could survive, indefinitely, in a cramped, enclosed box like the ship. We’ve already failed to do so.’

‘Do you have an alternative?’ Louise asked.

‘Sure. We stay in the System. But we get out of the damn ship. We could try to colonize some of the surviving moons. They can give us raw materials for habitats, at least. We could break up the
Northern
to give the new colonies a start . . . Louise, what I’m advocating is giving ourselves
space
, before we kill each other.’

Uvarov turned his face towards the Virtual; his blind smile was like a snake’s, Lieserl thought. ‘A nice romantic thought,’ he said. ‘But not viable, I’m afraid.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because of
the helium flash
.’ Uvarov turned, disconcertingly, straight to Lieserl; his eyes were shadowed pits. ‘The flash: the coming gift from Lieserl’s cute dark matter chums inside the Sun. Our best predictions are that it will blossom from the Sun within - at the most - a few centuries.’ He swivelled his head towards Louise. ‘And after that we can expect the carbon flash, and the oxygen flash, and . . . My friends, thanks to the photino birds, the Solar System is, in practical terms, uninhabitable.’

Mark glared at the old surgeon. ‘Then come up with a better idea.’

Louise held up her hands. ‘Wait. Let’s talk around the photino birds a little.’ She glanced at Lieserl. ‘You know more about the birds than any of us. Uvarov’s projections are right, I suppose.’

‘About the continuing forced evolution of the Sun? Oh, yes.’ Lieserl nodded, feeling uncomfortable to be at the centre of attention; she was aware of the flickering candlelight playing around her nose and eyes. ‘I’ve watched the birds for five million years. They’ve maintained their behaviour pattern for all of that time; I’ve no reason to believe they are going to change now. And your observations show that every other star, as far as we can tell, is inhabited—’