Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (46 page)

But even that wasn’t the end of it, Parz realized; for presumably the actions of the various groups of time travellers would interact to set off a fourth, fifth or sixth variant ... But most human philosophers seemed to agree, now, that only one of these variants could be considered ‘real’; only one could be collapsed into actuality by the observation of conscious minds.

Parz pressed his face against the warm lens material; it yielded like thin rubber. The electric-blue struts of the Interface portal had almost embraced the Spline now; the nearest face, which already blocked out the stars, the moons of Jupiter, was dark and empty, its blackness relieved only by a hint of autumn gold. Parz twisted his head about. He caught a glimpse of the second Spline he’d seen earlier; it hovered above and behind the Qax’s ship, following it towards the portal. ‘Some armada,’ he said. ‘Two ships?’

‘Two are all that is required. The humans of fifteen centuries ago will have no means of defence against the weaponry of the Spline craft. The second craft will destroy the vessel of these rebels from your present - these Friends of Wigner - while my ship will besiege Earth.’

Parz felt his throat tighten. ‘How?’

‘Starbreaker beams.’

Parz closed his eyes.

‘Maybe your revenge won’t be so sweet,’ he said, seeking advantage randomly. ‘What about causality? Maybe I’ll pop out of existence as soon as my ancestors are destroyed. Maybe you will, too. Have you thought about that? And then the destruction of your world by this human hero will never have happened ... and you’ll have no reason, or means, to travel through time to assault the Earth.’ But then, he thought further, if the Qax did not travel back through time, surely humanity would survive to destroy the Qax world after all ... ‘We’ll be caught in a causality loop, won’t we?’

‘Jasoft Parz, causality does not operate in such a simplistic fashion. In such a circumstance the different outcomes may all exist simultaneously, like the probabilities expressed by a quantum function. But only one of those possibilities will be collapsed into actuality—’

‘Are you sure?’ Parz said grimly. ‘You’re talking about destroying a race ... about altering history on a cosmic scale, Qax.’

‘Yes, we are sure. My intention is to close off all probabilities, all variants of reality in which humanity can survive. After the destruction of your System, you will be the only human left alive.’

‘And you and I will disappear into nonexistence,’ Parz said grimly.

‘No,’ the Qax said. ‘But the timeline from which we emerged will no longer exist, as a potentiality. We will be stranded, out of time. But my job will be done.’

Yes, Parz thought, what it’s saying is possible. It was more than genocide. The Qax was plotting not just the destruction of humankind but the destruction of all variant realities in which humanity might have survived.

The Qax’s calculation somehow penetrated Parz’s numbed heart more deeply than anything else. How could a sentient being discuss such gruesome events - the destruction of species, of worlds, of
timelines -
in the language of cold logic, of science?

Damn it, Parz protested silently; we’re talking about the snuffing out of species - of the potential of countless billions of souls as yet unborn ...

But, as always, he realized dully, the Qax were doing nothing which humans had not tried to perpetrate on members of their own species in the past.

‘Parz, shortly we will be entering the throat of the wormhole. You must be prepared for causality stress.’

‘Causality stress?’ Parz stared into the blank, gaping mouth of the wormhole portal; the hints of silver-gold were gone now, leaving only a darkness which grew over the stars. ‘You know, Qax, you intend to destroy my home world. And yet all I feel now is a personal dread of entering that damn wormhole.’

‘You are a limited species, Jasoft Parz.’

‘Perhaps we are. Perhaps we’re better off that way.’

The Spline trembled; to Jasoft, cushioned as he was by the entoptic matter, the mile-wide animal’s shudder was like a mild earth tremor.

‘I’m frightened, Qax.’

‘Imagine my concern.’

The Spline’s shuddering became continuous; Parz felt it as a high-frequency vibration of the entoptic fluid - small waves beating against his flesh like insect wings - and an underlying bass rumble which resounded from the immense skeleton of the Spline itself. The ship was suffering.

‘Qax. Talk to me.’

‘What about?’

‘Anything,’ Parz muttered. ‘I don’t care. Anything to take my mind off this. Tell me the story of how a human destroyed your planet ... Tell me about Jim Bolder.’

‘Will destroy it. Would have destroyed it.’

‘Whatever.’

The Qax seemed to consider. ‘Perhaps. But, what an odd question for you to ask, Jasoft Parz. I must consider what you have to gain by acquiring such information. Perhaps you have some vain scheme to use the data to rehabilitate yourself in the eyes of your people ... from the race’s greatest traitor, to an unsung hero—’

Parz, surprised, frightened, looked inwards. Traitor? A month ago he would have denied the charge.

But now the Qax had changed the rules. Suddenly Parz had found himself transformed from a morally dubious collaborating diplomat into a witness to the destruction of his race ...

The Spline shuddered again, more violently, and through the entoptic medium he seemed to hear a low groan, of pain, or terror.

Could the Qax be right? Was some element of his subconscious still scheming, looking for advantage, even now? Did he, he asked himself with wonder, still entertain hope?

The Qax was silent.

Now the Spline shuddered so hard that Parz was thrown into a soft collision with the wall of the huge eyeball. It felt as if the Spline had jerked through a few hundred yards, as if hauling itself away from some source of pain.

Jasoft closed his eyes and, with a subvocalized command, ordered the software in his eyes to call up an external image of the Spline, transmitted from the companion ship.

His craft was entering the portal face, inching forward as delicately as in any docking, the curves of its flanks almost brushing the powder-blue edges of the tetrahedral framework.

Parz was a hundred hours away from the past.

The Qax spoke abruptly, its decision evidently made. ‘The human was - will be - called Jim Bolder. A man of the Occupation era - from not far into your own future, Parz.

‘Bolder was one of the last human pilots. Eventually the Qax interdiction on human operation of spacecraft will become complete, Jasoft Parz. Ships will be impounded on landing. The off-Earth human colonies will become self-sufficient. Or they will be closed, their inhabitants returned to Earth. Or they will die.

‘Men such as Bolder will lose their vocation, Parz. Their reason to be. This made - will make - it possible to recruit Bolder for a special assignment.’

The clean geometries of the Interface framework looked stark against the flesh of the Spline. At one point the Spline came within a few dozen yards of brushing the frame itself. Flesh toughened against the rigours of hyperspatial travel was
boiling
. As Parz watched, blisters the size of city blocks erupted on that pocked, metal-grey surface; the blisters burst like small volcanoes, emitting sprays of human-looking blood which froze instantly into showers of red ice crystals, sparkling in the blue glow of the framework. Acres of the Spline convulsed, trying to pull the damaged area away from the exotic matter.

‘What was Bolder’s assignment?’ Parz asked.

‘Parz, what do you know of galactic drift?’

Galaxies - and clusters and superclusters of galaxies, across half a billion light-years - were moving in great, coherent streams through space. It was as if the galaxies were moths, drawn towards some unseen light ... Human astronomers had described such drift for centuries, but had never been able satisfactorily to explain it.

‘What does this have to do with Bolder?’

‘We suspected the drift had some connection with the Xeelee,’ the Qax said.

Parz snorted. ‘Come on. The Xeelee are powerful, but they’re not gods.’

‘We sent Bolder to find out,’ the Qax said mildly.

Parz frowned. ‘How? That’s impossible. Even in the fastest of our hyperdrive craft it would take centuries of subjective time—’

‘We had access to a Xeelee ship.’

Parz felt his jaw working. ‘But that’s impossible, too.’

‘Such details are unimportant. It is sufficient to know that Bolder survived his journey to the centre of the streaming.’

‘To the place where all the galaxies go.’

‘Yes,’ said the Qax. Although, close enough to the centre, Bolder had found that the structure of all but the most compact ellipticals was shattered; galaxy fragments, stars and worlds tumbled into the immense gravity well at the centre of it all, their blue-shifted light tumbling ahead of them.

‘And at the bottom of the well?’

The Qax paused.

To Parz, still studying the Spline from without, it was as if the portal framework were scorching the flesh of the hapless Spline. But it wasn’t heat, he knew, but high-frequency radiation and gravity tides raised by the superdense exotic matter which were damaging the Spline so. Parz shuddered in sympathy with the suffering Spline.

The image winked out. Parz, reduced to sudden artificial blindness, realized with a shock that his ship must now be totally inside the wormhole. With a feeling of claustrophobia and panic he snapped out subvocal commands.

His vision cleared.

The eye chamber had been reduced to the darkness within which he had first awoken; his faithful globe light still floated beside him.

So the Spline had shut its eyes. Well, he couldn’t entirely blame it.

The ship shuddered, buffeted; entoptic fluid sloshed around the spherical chamber. Parz half-swam to the nearest wall and clung to a ropy nerve channel.

‘Gravitational stress,’ the Qax murmured in his ear. ‘This wormhole is a throat in space and time, Parz: a region of stress, immensely high curvature. The throat is lined with exotic matter throughout; we are traversing a vacuum which runs along the axis, away from the exotic matter. The minimum width of the throat is about a mile. Our velocity is three miles per second.’

‘Not fast enough,’ Parz gasped.

Vibration travelled through Parz’s grasping fingers, up through his arms and to his very core; it felt as if the Spline were being beaten by some immense fist. ‘Can the ship endure this?’

‘So the simulations tell us,’ the Qax said complacently. ‘But the creature is scarcely comfortable.’

‘Right.’ Parz clung to his nerve rope, imagining centuries unravelling around the hurtling Spline. ‘Tell me what Bolder found,’ he said through chattering teeth. ‘At the bottom of the gravity well.’

A Ring, the Qax said. A torus. Composed of some unknown, crystalline substance. A thousand light-years across. Rotating at a respectable fraction of the speed of light.

It was massive. It had caused a well in spacetime so deep that it was drawing in galaxies, including Earth’s Milky Way, from across hundreds of millions of light-years.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Parz said, still shaking in sympathy with the Spline.

‘It is an artifact,’ the Qax said. ‘A Xeelee construct. Bolder watched the Xeelee build it.’

Xeelee craft - cup-shaped freighters the size of moons, and fighters with nightdark wings hundreds of miles wide - patrolled the huge construction site. With cherry-red starbreaker beams they smashed the infalling, blue-shifted galactic fragments and plated layers over the growing Ring.

‘We believe the Xeelee have already invested billions of years in this project,’ the Qax said. ‘But its growth is exponential. The more massive it becomes, the deeper the gravity well grows, and the faster matter falls towards the site, feeding the construction crews further.’

‘But why? What’s the point of it?’

‘We speculate that the Xeelee are trying to construct a Kerr-metric region,’ the Qax said.

‘A what?’

The Kerr metric was a human description of a special solution of Einstein’s equations of general relativity. When spacetime was distorted by a sufficiently massive, rotating toroid, it could - open.

‘Like a wormhole?’ Parz asked.

‘Yes. But the Kerr-metric interface would not connect two points in the same spacetime, Parz. It is a throat between spacetimes.’

Parz struggled to understand that. ‘You’re saying that this - “Kerr-metric region” - is a doorway - a way out of our universe?’

‘Crudely, yes. The Xeelee are trying to build an exit from this cosmos.’

‘And to do it they’re prepared to wreck a region of space hundreds of billions of light-years wide . .

Suddenly Parz was blind again. Hurriedly, panicking, he issued commands; but this time his vision would not clear. The darkness in which he was immersed was deeper than that of closed eyes ... it was, he realized with a terrifying clarity, the darkness of nothingness, of emptiness. ‘Qax.’ His own voice was muffled; it was as if all his senses were failing together. ‘What’s happening to me?’

The Qax’s voice came to him, distant but clear. ‘This is causality stress, Parz. The severance of the causal lines, of the quantum wave functions in which you are embedded. Causality stress is causing sensory dysfunction ...’

Jasoft felt his body senses softening, drifting away from him; he felt as if he were becoming disembodied, a mote of consciousness without anchor in the external universe.

The Qax continued to speak. Its voice called to Parz like a distant trumpet. ‘Jasoft Parz. This is as difficult for me, for any sentient being, as it is for you ... even for the Spline. But
it will pass
. Do not let it undermine your sanity. Concentrate on what I am saying to you.

‘Jim Bolder, in his stolen craft, evaded the Xeelee engineers. He returned to the Qax home system, where his journey had begun. Jasoft, the Qax are a trading nation. Bolder had returned with a treasure valuable beyond price: data on the greatest Xeelee artifact. It will not surprise you that the Qax decided to, ah, retain the data.