Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (39 page)

Before her the lifeboat from the
Cauchy
lay in a shallow, rust-brown crater of scorched soil. The boat was splayed open like some disembowelled animal, wisps of steam escaping its still-glowing interior; the neat parallel slices through its hull looked almost surgical in their precision, and she knew that the Friends had taken particular pleasure, in their own odd, undemonstrative way, in using their scalpel-like cutting beams to turn drive units into puddles of slag.

The - murder - of her boat by the Friends had been a price worth paying, of course, for getting her single, brief message off to Poole. He would do something; he would be coming ... Somehow, in formulating her desperate scheme, she had never doubted that he would still be alive, after all these years. But still, she felt a twinge of conscience and remorse as she surveyed the wreckage of the boat; after all this was the destruction of her last link with the
Cauchy
, with the fifty men, women and Friends with whom she had spent a century crossing light-years and millennia - and who were now stranded on the far side of the wormhole in the future they had sought so desperately to attain, that dark, dehumanized future of the Qax Occupation.

How paradoxical, she thought, to have returned through the wormhole to her own time, and yet to feel such nostalgia for the future.

She lay on her back in the grass and peered up at the salmon-pink clouds that marbled the monstrous face of Jupiter. Tilting her head a little she could still make out the Interface portal - the wormhole end which had been left in Jovian orbit when the
Cauchy
departed for the stars, and through which this absurd earth-craft of the Friends of Wigner had come plummeting through time. The portal, sliding slowly away from the earth-craft on its neighbouring orbit, was a thumbnail sketch rendered in cerulean blue against the cheek of Jupiter. It looked peaceful - pretty, ornamental. The faces of the tetrahedron, the junctions of the wormhole itself, were misty, puzzled-looking washes of blue-gold light, a little like windows.

It was hard to envisage the horrors which lay only subjective hours away on the other side of that space-time flaw.

She shivered and wrapped her arms around her body. After she’d landed on the earth-craft the Friends had given her one of their flimsy, one-piece jumpsuits; she was sure it was quite adequate for this fake climate, but, damn it, she just didn’t feel warm in it. But she suspected she’d feel just as shivery in the warmest clothing; it wasn’t the cold that was her problem, she suspected, but a craving to return to the safe metal womb that the
Cauchy
had become. During her century of flight, whenever she had envisaged the end of her journey, she had anticipated a pleasurable tremor on stepping out of a boat for the first time and drinking in the fresh, blue air of Earth ... even an Earth of the distant future. Well, she hadn’t got anywhere near Earth; and surely to God anybody would be spooked by a situation like this. To be stranded on a clod of soil a quarter-mile wide - with no enclosing bubble or force shell as far as she could tell - a clod which had been wrenched from the Earth and hurled back through time and into orbit around Jupiter—

She decided that a healthy dose of fear at such a moment was quite the rational response.

She heard footsteps, rustling softly through the grass.

‘Miriam Berg.’

Berg raised herself on her elbows. ‘Shira. I’ve been waiting for you.’

The girl from the future sounded disappointed. ‘I trusted you, Miriam. I gave you the freedom of our craft. Why did you send this message?’

Berg squinted up at Shira. The Friend was tall - about Berg’s height, a little under six feet - but there the similarity ended. Berg had chosen to be AS-frozen at physical age around forty-five - a time when she had felt most at home in herself. Her body was wiry, tough and comfortable; and she liked to think that the wrinkles scattered around her mouth and brown eyes made her look experienced, humorous, fully human. And her cropped hair, grizzled with grey, was nothing to be ashamed of. Shira, by contrast, was aged about twenty-five. Real age, soon to be overwhelmed by time, thanks to the Qax’s confiscation of the AS technology. The girl’s features were delicate, her build thin to the point of scrawny. Berg couldn’t get used to Shira’s clean-shaven scalp and found it hard not to stare at the clean lines of her skull. The girl’s skin was sallow, her dark-rimmed eyes blue, huge and apparently lashless; her face, the prominent teeth and cheekbones, was oddly skeletal - but not unpretty. Shira was much as Berg imagined Earthbound city-dwellers of a few centuries before Berg’s own time must have looked: basically unhealthy, surviving in a world too harsh for humans.

Berg would have sworn that she had even spotted fillings and yellowed teeth embedded in Shira’s jaw. Was it possible that dental caries had returned to plague mankind again, after all these centuries?

What a brutal testament to the achievements of the Qax Occupation forces, Berg reflected bitterly. Shira was like a creature from Berg’s past, not her future. And, now that Berg was deprived of the medical facilities of the
Cauchy -
not to mention AS technology - no doubt soon she, too, would become afflicted by the ills that had once been banished. My God, she thought; I will start to age again.

She sighed. She was close to her own time, after all; maybe - unlikely as it seemed - she could get back home. If Poole made it through ...

‘Shira,’ she said heavily, ‘I didn’t want to make you unhappy. I hate myself for making you unhappy. All right? But when I learned that you had no intention of communicating with the humans of this era - of my era - of telling them about the Qax ... then of course I had to oppose you.’

Shira was unperturbed; she swivelled her small, pretty face to the wreck of the boat. ‘You understand we had to destroy your craft.’

‘No, I don’t understand that you had to do that. But it’s what I expected you to do. I don’t care. I achieved my purpose; I got my message off despite all of you.’ Berg smiled. ‘I’m kind of pleased with myself for improvising a radio. I was never a hands-on technician, you know—’

‘You were a physicist,’ Shira broke in. ‘It’s in the history books.’

Berg shivered, feeling out of time. ‘I
am
a physicist,’ she said. She got stiffly to her feet and wiped blades of grass from her backside. ‘Can we walk?’ she asked. ‘This place is depressing me.’

Berg, casting about for a direction, decided to set off for the lip of the earth-craft; Shira calmly fell into step beside her, bare feet sinking softly into the grass.

Soon they were leaving behind whatever gave this disc of soil its gravity; the ground seemed to tilt up before them, so that it was as if they were climbing out of a shallow bowl, and the air started to feel thin. About thirty feet short of the edge they were forced to stop; the air was almost painfully shallow in Berg’s lungs, and even felt a little colder.

At the edge of the world tufts of grass dangled over emptiness, stained purple by the light of Jupiter.

‘I think we have a basic problem of perception here, Shira,’ Berg said, panting lightly. ‘You ask why I betrayed your trust. I don’t understand how the hell a question like that has got any sort of relevance. Given the situation, what did you expect me to do?’

The girl was silent.

‘Look at it from my point of view,’ Berg went on. ‘Fifteen hundred years after my departure in the
Cauchy
I was approaching the Solar System again ...’

As the years of the journey had worn away, the fifty aboard
Cauchy
had grown sombrely aware that the worlds they had left behind were aging far more rapidly than they were; the crew were separated from their homes by growing intervals of space and time.

They were becoming stranded in the future.

... But they carried the wormhole portal. And, they knew, through the wormhole only a few hours’ flight separated them from the era of their birth. It was a comfort to imagine the worlds they had left behind on the far side of the spacetime bridge, still attached to the
Cauchy
as if by some umbilical of stretched spacetime, and living their lives through at the same rate as the
Cauchy
crew, patiently waiting for the starship to complete its circuit to the future.

At last, after a subjective century, the
Cauchy
would return to Jovian orbit. Fifteen centuries would have worn away on Earth. But still their wormhole portal would connect them to the past, to friends and worlds grown no older than they had.

‘I don’t know what I was expecting exactly as we neared Sol,’ Berg said. ‘We’d run hundreds of scenarios, both before and during the journey, but we knew it was all guesswork; I guess inside I was anticipating anything from radioactive wastelands, to stone axes, to gods in faster-than-light chariots.

‘But what I’d never anticipated was what we found. Earth under the thumb of super-aliens nobody has even seen ... and look what came hurtling out to meet us, even before we’d got through the orbit of Pluto.’ She shook her head at the memory. ‘A patch of Earth, untimely ripp’d from England and hurled into space; a few dozen skinny humans clinging to it desperately.’

She remembered venturing from the steel security of the
Cauchy
into Jovian space, an envoy in her solo lifeboat, and tentatively approaching the earth-craft; she had scarcely been able to believe her eyes as the ship had neared a patch of countryside that looked as if it had been cut out of a tourist catalogue of Earth and stuck crudely onto the velvet backdrop of space. Then she had cracked the port of the boat on landing, and had stepped out onto grass that rustled beneath the tough soles of her boots ...

For a brief, glorious few minutes the Friends had clustered around her in wonder.

Then Shira had come to her - related fifteen centuries of disastrous human history in as many minutes - and explained the Friends’ intentions.

Within a couple of hours of landing Berg had been forced to crouch to the grass with the rest as the earth-craft plummeted into the gravity tube that was the wormhole. Berg shuddered now as she remembered the howling radiation which had stormed around the fragile craft, the ghastly, mysterious dislocation as she had travelled through time.

She hadn’t been allowed to get a message off to the crew of the
Cauchy
. Perhaps her
Cauchy
shipmates were already dead at the hands of the Qax - if that word ‘already’ had any meaning, with spacetime bent over on itself by the wormhole.

‘It has been an eventful few days,’ she said wryly. ‘As a welcome home this has been fairly outrageous.’

Shira was smiling, and Berg tried to focus. ‘I’m glad you say that:
outrageous
,’ Shira said. ‘It was the very outrageousness of the idea which permitted us to succeed under the eyes of the Qax, as we planned. Come, let us talk; we have time now.’

They turned and began to stroll slowly back down the rim-hill and towards the interior of the craft. As they walked, Berg had the uncomfortable feeling that she was descending into and climbing out of invisible dimples in the landscape, each a few feet wide and perhaps inches shallow. But the land itself was as flat as a tabletop to the eye. She was experiencing unevenness in the field which held her to this quarter-mile disc of soil and rock; whatever they used to generate their gravity around here clearly wasn’t without its glitches.

Shira said, ‘You must understand the situation. We knew, from surviving records of your time, that your return to the Earth with the Interface portal was imminent. If you had succeeded, a gateway to the free past might have become available to us. We conceived the Project—’

Berg looked at her sharply. ‘What Project?’

Shira ignored the question. ‘The Qax authorities were evidently unaware of your approach, but clearly, once they detected your vessel and its unique cargo, you would be destroyed. We had to find a way to meet you before that happened.

‘So, Miriam. We had to build a space vessel, and in the full and knowing gaze of the Qax.’

‘Yeah. You know, Shira, we’re going to have to sort out which tense to use here. Maybe we need to invent a whole new grammar - future past, uncertain present ...’

Shira laughed unselfconsciously, and Berg felt a little more human warmth for her.

They walked through a grove of light-globes. The globes, hovering in the air perhaps ten feet from the soil, gave out sun-like heat and warmth, and Berg paused for a few moments, feeling on her face and in her newly aging bones the warmth of a star she had abandoned a subjective century before. In the yellow-white light of the globe the flesh-pink glow of Jupiter was banished, and the grass looked normal, wiry and green; Berg ran a slippered toe through it. ‘So you camouflaged your ship.’

‘The Qax do not interfere with areas they perceive as human cultural shrines.’

‘Hurrah for the Qax,’ said Berg sourly. ‘Perhaps they’re not such bad fellows after all.’

Shira raised the ridges from which her eyebrows had been shaved. ‘We believe that this is not altruism but calculation on the part of the Qax. In any event the policy is there - and it is a policy which may be manipulated to our gain.’

Berg smiled, her mind full of a sudden, absurd image of rebels in grimy jumpsuits burrowing like moles under cathedrals, pyramids, the concrete tombs of ancient fission reactors. ‘So you built your ship under the stones.’

‘Yes. More precisely, we readied an area of land for the flight.’

‘Where did you get the resources for this?’

‘The Friends of Wigner have adherents System-wide,’ Shira said. ‘Remember that by the time of the first encounter with the Qax, humans had become a starfaring species, able to command the resources of multiple systems. The Qax control us - almost completely. But in the small gap left by that “almost” there is room for great undertakings ... projects to match, perhaps, the greatest works of your own time.’