Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (167 page)

‘So how did she know?’ Louise studied the scarred Virtual lifedome. ‘The trajectory she chose to get us out of this was almost perfect, Mark.
How did she know?
’

Spinner-of-Rope buried her faceplate in her gloves; within her environment suit she trembled, uncontrollably.

‘No,’ she said. ‘The string hit the ship. The deaths, the injuries—’

‘Really? And did
you
, Michael Poole?’ she spat.

‘Couldn’t you have helped us more? Couldn’t you have
warned
us that the thing was coming?’

He laughed, softly and sadly.
I’m sorry, Spinner. I’m not superhuman. I didn’t have any more warning than your people. I’m pretty much bound by the laws of physics, just as you are . . .

She dropped her hands and thumped the side of the couch. There was still no link - voice or data - to Louise, and the rest of the crew. She was isolated out here - stuck in the pilot’s cage of an alien ship, with only a five-million-year-old ghost for company.

She felt a swelling of laughter, inside her chest; she bit it back.

‘I’m scared, Michael Poole. I’m even scared of you.’

I don’t blame you
. I’m
scared of me.

‘I don’t know what to do. What if Louise can’t get back in touch?’

He was silent for a moment. Then:

‘Why not?’

‘Then what?’

You have to move on, Spinner. You have to take your people to where they can find shelter and escape
. His hands, warm and firm, closed invisibly over hers once more.
I’ll show you. Will you trust me?

‘Where are we going?’

‘But - but the Ring is here. And it’s destroyed. You said so yourself.’

Yes
, he said patiently.
But it wasn’t always so . . .

T
he ‘bot rolled fussily across the floor, its fat wheels crunching over the dust it had brought in from the surface of the neutron star planet. It held a bundle of sensors out before it on a flexible arm. Light, brilliant white, glared from the sensor arm. The way the ‘bot held out its sensor pack was rather prissy, Lieserl thought, as if the ‘bot didn’t quite approve of what it was being forced to inspect in here.

The ‘bot rolled up to one of the four chairs and sniffed at it cautiously.

‘There’s exotic matter here,’ Mark said suddenly.

‘What?’

‘The ‘bot has found exotic matter,’ Mark repeated evenly. ‘Somewhere inside the building.’

Uvarov growled from the pod, ‘But we’ve seen no evidence of wormhole construction here. And that structure is too small to house a wormhole Interface.’

‘I’m just reporting what the ‘bot’s telling me,’ Mark snapped, letting his irritation show. ‘Maybe we should gather a few more facts before wasting our time speculating, Uvarov.’

The ‘bot was still lingering close to one of the chairs - the second from the left of the row of four, Lieserl noted irrelevantly. As she watched, the ‘bot extended more arms, unfolded more packages of sensor equipment; it loomed over the chair menacingly, like some mechanical spider.

Mark walked up to the ‘bot, his face expressionless. ‘It’s somewhere inside the chair. The exoticity . . .’

‘
Inside the chair
?’ Lieserl felt like laughing, almost hysterically. ‘What happened, did someone drop exotic matter down behind the cushion while watching a Virtual show?’

He glared at her. ‘Come on, Lieserl. There is a construct of exotic matter embedded in this chair. It’s tiny - only a few fractions of an inch across - but it’s there.’ He turned to the ‘bot. ‘Maybe we can cook up some kind of magnified Virtual image . . .’

Pixels swirled before Lieserl’s face, brushing her cheeks intangibly; she stepped back.

The pixels coalesced into a crude sketch, suspended in the air. It looked like a jewel - clear, complete and seamless - hanging before her. There were hints of further structure inside, not yet resolved by the ‘bot’s imaging systems.

She recognized the form.

‘
Lethe
. Another tetrahedron,’ she said.

‘Yes. Another tetrahedron . . . The form seems to have become a badge of humanity, doesn’t it? But this one is barely a sixteenth of an inch across.’

Pixels of all colours hailed through the interior of the little tetrahedron, as if scrambling for coherence. Lieserl caught elusive, tantalizing hints of structure. At one point it seemed that she could see another, smaller tetrahedron forming, nested inside the first - just as this construct was nested inside the tetrahedral form of the base as a whole. She wondered if the whole of this structure was like a Russian doll, with a series of tetrahedra snuggled neatly inside each other . . .

The magnified image was rather pleasing, she thought. It reminded her of the toy she’d had during her lightning-brief childhood: a tiny village immersed in a globe of water, with frozen people and plastic snowflakes . . . Thinking that, she felt a brief, incongruous pang of regret that her childhood, even as unsatisfactory as it had been, was now so
remote.

‘Well, my exotic matter grain is in there somewhere,’ Mark said. ‘But the ‘bot is having trouble getting any further resolution.’ He looked confused. ‘Lieserl, there’s something very strange inside that little tetrahedral box.’

She kept her face expressionless; at times it was quite convenient to be a Virtual - it gave her such control.
Strange. Right. But what could be stranger than to be here: on the planet of a neutron star hurtling at lightspeed across the battlefield at the end of time? What can make things stranger than that?

‘There’s a droplet of neutron superfluid in there,’ Mark said. He peered into the formless interior of the tetrahedron, as if by sheer willpower he might force it to give up its secrets. ‘Highly dense, at enormous temperatures and pressures . . . Lieserl, the tetrahedron contains matter at conditions you’d expect to find deep in the interior of a neutron star - in a region beneath the solid crust, called the mantle. That’s what the ‘bot is trying to see into.’

Lieserl stared at the swirling mists inside the tetrahedron. She knew that a neutron star had the mass of a normal star, but compressed into a globe only a few miles in diameter. The matter was so dense that electrons and protons were forced together into neutrons; this superfluid of neutrons was a hundred billion
billion
times as dense as water.

‘If that’s so, how are the pressures contained? This construct is like a bomb, waiting to go off.’

He shook his head. ‘Well, it looks as if the people who built this place found a way. And the construct may have been stable for a long time - millions of years, perhaps. You know, I wish we had more time to spend here. We don’t even know how old this base is - from how many years beyond our time this technology dates.’

‘But
why
construct such a thing?’ She stared into the tetrahedron. ‘
Why
fill a little box with reconstructed neutron star material? Mark, do you think this was some kind of laboratory, for studying neutron star conditions?’

Uvarov’s ruined voice brayed laughter into her ears. ‘A laboratory? My dear woman, this is a war zone; I think basic science was unlikely to be on the agenda for the men and women who built this base. Besides, this neutron star is hardly typical. The people who came here placed discontinuity-drive engines at the star’s pole, and drove it across space at close to lightspeed. Now, what research purpose do you think
that
served?’

Mark ignored him. He squatted down on his haunches before the image and peered up at it; the glow of the shifting pixels inside the tetrahedron cast highlights from his face and environment suit. ‘I don’t think the stuff in there was reconstructed, Lieserl.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Think about it.’ He pointed at the image. ‘We know there is exotic matter in there . . . and as far as we know the primary purpose of exotic matter is the construction of spacetime wormholes. I think there’s a wormhole Interface in there, Lieserl.’

She frowned. ‘Wormhole mouths are hundreds of yards - or miles - across.’ He straightened up. ‘That’s true of the Interfaces
we
can construct. Who knows what will be possible in the future? Or rather—’

‘We know what you mean,’ Uvarov snapped from the pod.

‘Let’s suppose there
is
a wormhole mouth inside this tiny construct,’ Mark said. ‘A wormhole so fine it’s just a thread . . . but it leads across space, to the interior of the neutron star. Lieserl, I think the neutron superfluid in here isn’t some human reconstruction - I think it’s a sample of material
taken from the neutron star itself
.’

Lieserl, involuntarily, glanced around the chamber, as if she might see the miniature wormhole threading across space, a shining trail connecting this bland, human environment with the impossibly hostile heart of a neutron star.

‘But
why
?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Uvarov snapped.

Mark was smiling at her; evidently he had worked it out too. She felt slow, stupid, unimaginative. ‘Just tell me,’ she said dully.

Mark said, ‘Lieserl, the link is there so the humans who built this base could reach the interior of the neutron star. I think they downloaded equipment into there: nanomachines, ‘bots of some kind - maybe even some analogue of humans.

‘They populated the neutron star, Lieserl.’

Uvarov rumbled assent. ‘More than that,’ he rasped. ‘They
engineered
the damn thing.’

The nightfighter arced through the muddled, relativity-distorted sky; the neutron star system wheeled around Spinner like some gaudy light display. Behind her, the huge wings of the Xeelee nightfighter beat at space, so vigorously Spinner almost imagined she could hear the rustle of immense, impossible feathers.

She felt her small fingers tremble inside gloves that suddenly seemed much too big for her. But Michael Poole’s hands rested over hers, large, warm.

The ship surged forward.

Ignoring the protests of her tired back, Louise straightened up and pushed herself away from the Deck surface. She launched into the air, the muscles of her legs aching, and she let air resistance slow her to a halt a few feet above the Deck.

Once this had been a park, near the heart of Deck Two. Now, the park had become the bottom layer of an improvised, three-dimensional hospital, and the long grass was invisible beneath a layer of bodies, bandaging, medical supplies. A rough rectangular array of ropes had been set up, stretching upwards from the Deck surface through thirty feet. Patients were being lodged loosely inside the array; they looked like specks of blood and dirt inside some huge honeycomb of air, Louise thought.

A short distance away a group of bodies - unmoving, wrapped in sheets - had been gathered together in the air and tethered roughly to the frame of what had once been a greenhouse.

Lieserl approached Louise tentatively. She reached out, as if she wanted to hold Louise’s hand. ‘You should rest,’ she said.

Louise shook her head angrily. ‘No time for that.’ She took a deep breath, but her lungs quickly filled up with the hospital’s stench of blood and urine. She coughed, and ran an arm across her forehead, aware that it must be leaving a trail there of blood and sweat. ‘Damn it. Damn
all
of this.’

‘Come on, Louise. You’re doing your best.’

‘No. That isn’t good enough. Not any more. I should have designed for this scenario, for a catastrophic failure of the lifedome. Lieserl, we’re overwhelmed. We’ve converted
all
the AS treatment bays into casualty treatment centres, and we’re
still
overrun. Look at this so-called hospital we’ve had to improvise. It’s like something out of the Dark Ages.’

‘Louise, there’s nothing you could have done. We just didn’t have the resources to cope with this.’

‘But we
should
have. Lieserl, the doctors and ‘bots are operating triage here.
Triage
, on my starship.’

. . .
And it didn’t help that I diverted most of our supply of medical nanobots to the hull . .
. Instead of working here with the people - crawling through shattered bodies, repairing broken blood vessels, fighting to keep bacterial infection contained within torn abdominal cavities - the nanobots had been press-ganged, roughly - and on
her
decision - into crawling over the crude patches applied hurriedly to the breached hull, trying inexpertly to knit the torn metal into a seamless whole once more.

She clenched her hands into fists, digging her nails into her palms. ‘What if the Xeelee are studying us now? What will they think of us? I’ve brought these people across a hundred and fifty million light-years - and five million years - only to let them die like animals . . .’

Lieserl faced her squarely, her small, solid fists on her hips; lines clustered around her wide mouth as she glared at Louise. ‘That’s sentimental garbage,’ she snapped. ‘I’m surprised at you, Louise Ye Armonk. Listen to me: what is at issue here is not
how you feel
. You are trying to survive - to find a way to permit the race to survive.’

Lieserl’s stern, lined face, with the strong nose and deep eyes, reminded Louise suddenly of an overbearing mother. She snapped back, ‘What do you know of how I feel? I’m a human, damn it. Not a - a—’