Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (54 page)

‘Of course it is dead,’ Parz said with a trace of genteel impatience. ‘Ah, then, but what is death, to a being on this scale? The irruption of your GUTdrive craft into the heart of the Spline was enough to sever most of its command channels, disrupt most of its higher functions. Like snapping the spinal cord of a human. But - is it dead?’ Parz hesitated. ‘Mr Poole, imagine putting a bullet in the brain of a tyrannosaurus. It’s effectively dead; its brain is destroyed. But how long will the processes of its body continue undirected, feedback loops striving blindly to restore some semblance of homeostasis? And the antibody drones are virtually autonomous - semi-sentient, some of them. With the extinguishing of the Spline’s consciousness they will be acting without central direction. Most of them will simply have ceased functioning. But the more advanced among them - like our little visitor just now - don’t have to wait to be told what to do; they actively prowl the body of the Spline, seeking out functions to perform, repairs to initiate. It’s all a bit anarchic, I suppose, but it’s also highly effective. Flexible, responsive, mobile, heuristic, with intelligence distributed to the lowest level ... A bit like an ideal human society, I suppose; free individuals seeking out ways to advance the common good.’ Parz’s laugh was delicate, almost effete, thought Poole. ‘Perhaps we should hope, as one sentient species considering another, that the drones find tasks sufficient to give their lives meaning while they remain aware.’

Poole frowned, studying Parz’s round, serious face. He found Jasoft Parz oddly repellent, like an insect; his humour was too dry for Poole’s taste, and his view of the world somehow over-sophisticated, ironic, detached from the direct, ordinary concerns of human perception.

Here was a man, Poole thought, who has distanced himself from his own emotions. He has become as alien as the Qax. The world is a game to him, an abstract puzzle to be solved - no, not even that: to be admired dustily, as one might marvel at the recorded moves of some ancient chess game.

No doubt it had been an effective survival strategy for someone in Parz’s line of work. Poole found pity in his heart for the man of the future.

Parz, proceeding ahead of Poole along the tunnel, continued to speak. ‘I’ve never been aboard a dead Spline before, Mr Poole; I suspect it could be days before the normal functions close down completely. So you’ll continue to see signs of life for some time.’ He sniffed. ‘Eventually, of course, it will be unviable. The vacuum will penetrate its deepest recesses; we will witness a race between corruption and freezing ice ...’ He hesitated. ‘There are other ships in the area who could take us off? Human ships of this era, I mean.’

Poole laughed. ‘A whole flotilla of them, flying every flag in the System. A damn lot of use they’ve been.’ The navies had been arriving in strength. But the key battles had been over in minutes, long before most of the inner System worlds were even aware of the invasion from the future. But, Poole had learned, the space battles had made spectacular viewing, projected live in huge Virtuals in the skies of the planets ... ‘We’ve asked them to hold off for a few more hours, until we finish this investigation; we wanted to make sure this thing was safe - dead - deactivated - before letting anyone else aboard.’

‘Oh, I think it’s safe,’ Parz said dryly. ‘If the Spline could still strike at you, be assured you’d be dead by now. Ah,’ he said. ‘Here we are.’

Abruptly the vein-like tunnel opened out around Jasoft. He drifted into empty space, his light-globe following patiently. The white light of the globe shone feebly over the walls of a cavern which Poole, peering carefully from the tunnel, estimated to be about a quarter-mile across. The walls were pink and shot through with crimson veins as thick as Poole’s arms; blood-analogue still pulsed along the wider tubes, he noticed, and quivering globes of the blood substance, some of them yards across, drifted like stately galleons through the darkness.

But there was damage. In the dim light cast by the globe-lamp, Poole could make out a spear of metal yards wide which lanced across the chamber, from one ripped wall to another: the spine of the embedded
Crab
. The lining of the chamber had done its best to seal itself around the entrance and exit wounds, so that a tide of flesh lapped around the
Crab
’s spine at each extremity. And even now Poole could see the fleeting shadows of drones - dozens of them - drifting around the spine, sparking with reaction jets and laser-light as they toiled, too late, to drive out this monstrous splinter. Poole stared up at the immense intrusion, the huge wounds, with a kind of wonder; even the spine’s straight lines seemed a violation, hard and painfully unnatural, in this soft place of curved walls and flesh.

He unwrapped a line from his waist and fixed one end to the pulsing wall of the chamber. As the jaws of the clip bit, Poole found himself wincing, but he forced himself to tug at the clip, feeling its strong teeth tear a little into the Spline’s flesh, before trusting himself to push away from the wall after Parz.

Parz, propelled by a compact reaction-pack built onto the spine of his skinsuit, swam with a stiff grace around the chamber. His suit was slick with gobbets of blood-analogue, Poole noticed, giving Parz the odd and obscene appearance of something newborn. ‘This is the stomach-chamber,’ Parz said. ‘The Spline’s main - ah, hold, if you will. Where the Qax customarily reside. At least, the Occupation-era Qax I have described; the turbulent-fluid beings.’

Poole glanced around the dim recesses of the space; it was like some ugly, fleshy cathedral. ‘I guess they needed the elbow room.’

Parz glanced across at Poole. His green eyes glimmered, startling. ‘You shouldn’t be surprised to feel uncomfortable, moving through this Spline, Mr Poole. It’s not a human environment. No attempt has been made to adapt it to human needs, or human sensibilities.’ His face seemed to soften, then, and Poole tried to read his expression in the uncertain light. ‘You know, I’d give a lot to see the Spline of a few centuries from now. From my time,’ he corrected himself absently. ‘After the overthrow of the Qax, when human engineers adapt the Splines for our own purposes. Tiled vein-corridors; metal-walled stomach-chambers ...’

‘The overthrow of the Qax?’ Poole asked sharply. ‘Parz, what do you know?’

Parz smiled dreamily. ‘Only what I was told by the Governor of Occupied Earth ... The second Governor, that is. Only what it told me of the future, when it was convinced I would die before seeing another human.’

Poole felt the blood pulse in the veins of his neck. ‘Jasoft, for the first time I’m glad I rescued you from that ridiculous eyeball.’

Parz turned away. Half-swimming, he made his way towards one section of the stomach-chamber wall, some way from the areas violated by the irruption of the
Crab
. He came to rest beside a metal canister, a coffin-sized box which was fixed to the fleshy wall by a web of metal strands.

‘What is it?’ Poole asked. ‘Have you found something?’ He made his way clumsily across the deserted space of the chamber towards Parz.

The two of them huddled over the box, the light-globe hovering close; the small tent of light cast over them was strangely intimate. Parz ran quick, practised hands over the box, fingering touch-screens which, Poole noticed, refused to light up. Parz’s face was quite clear to Poole, but his expression was neutral. Unreadable.

Parz said, ‘“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”’

‘What?’

‘This is Qax.’ He slapped the box with one gloved palm. ‘The Governor of Earth. Dead, harmless ...’

‘How?’

‘The Qax preferred to run their Spline craft by direct conscious control, with their own awareness alongside the continuing sentience of the Spline.’

Poole frowned. ‘Can’t have been comfortable for the Spline.’

‘The Spline didn’t have much choice,’ said Parz. ‘It’s an efficient method. But not without its risks.

‘When the collision with your ship terminated the Spline’s higher functions, perhaps the Qax could have disengaged. But it didn’t. Driven by its hatred - and, perhaps, by hubris, right to the end - it stayed locked inside the Spline’s sensorium. And when the ship died, the Qax died with it.’

Poole fingered the metal webbing, thoughtfully. ‘I wonder if the Spline could be salvaged, somehow. After all, the hyperdrive alone is worth centuries of research. Maybe we could link up the
Crab
’s AI to what’s left of the Spline’s functions.’

Parz frowned. ‘But if the Qax’s method is any guide, you need a sophisticated conscious entity as a front end, something which can feel its way into what’s left of the Spline’s - identity. Sympathetically. Do you understand?’

Poole nodded, smiling. ‘I think so. And I know just the conscious entity to try it.’

Parz was silent for a moment. His gloved fingers stroked the surface of the metal canister almost tenderly, and he seemed to be rocking back and forth in the thick intestinal air. Poole leaned closer, trying to read Parz’s expression; but the half-shadowed face, with its mask of age tightened by AS, was as empty as it had ever been. ‘Jasoft? What are you thinking?’

Parz looked up at him. ‘Why,’ he said with a note of surprise, ‘I think I’m mourning.’

‘Mourning a Qax?’ A creature, thought Poole, whose fellows had turned Earth’s cities to glass - who would have, given a little more fortune, scraped humanity out of the Solar System before most people had even learned the name of their destroyers - and who had turned Parz himself into a quisling, a man unable even to face his true self ... ‘Jasoft, are you crazy?’

Parz shook his head slowly; folds of the clear skinsuit creased at his neck. ‘Poole, one day humans are going to bring about the destruction of the Qax’s home world. We’ll almost wipe them out.

‘ ... But they’re
unique
. There are only - have only ever been - a few hundred of them. Yet each one has the seed of immortality - the potential to live long enough to witness star-corpses shine by proton decay.

‘Poole, this is the second Qax I’ve seen die.’ Parz bent his head to the metal case, apparently looking inward. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I’m mourning.’

Poole stayed with him in the silence of the dead Spline.

Miriam Berg, Jaar at her side, walked into the devastated heart of Stonehenge.

The ground had been ripped open, wadded into thick furrows; grass clung to the broken turf like hair to flesh. And the ancient stones had been scattered, shivered to rubble by the casual brush of a gravity-wave starbreaker beam.

Jaar touched her shoulder and pointed into the sky, towards the bulk of Jupiter. ‘Look up there,’ he said.

Miriam stared hard along the line of his long arm, squinting with the effort. There was a shadow: a rough rectangle silhouetted against the gaudy pink of Jupiter, turning slowly as it sailed away from the earth-craft. ‘The last of the henge,’ she said.

‘Well, at least one of the old stones has survived. It will sail around Jupiter for a hundred thousand years, perhaps.’

Berg shook her head. ‘Damn it. I should feel happier, I guess. We’ve saved the human race! ... But what a cost.’

Jaar inclined his head towards her with awkward tenderness. ‘Miriam, I think the first builders of this old henge - had they been able to imagine it - would have been happy with such a monument as that orbiting menhir.’

‘Maybe.’ Miriam looked around at what was left of the earth-craft. The Xeelee-material huts of the Friends had been flattened like canvas tents in a gale; she could see Friends picking sadly through the debris. Although the earth-craft’s essential life-support equipment had survived inside the singularity-plane chamber, she knew that most of the Friends’ personal possessions had been abandoned up here during the assault: their records of families and places lost fifteen centuries in the future - much that made life worth living from day to day, when there was time for less weighty concerns than the fate of the universe.

Berg found herself shivering; her chest and lungs - which had not healed properly following her leap out to the edge of the atmosphere during the attack - ached dully, a constant, brooding presence. And the air of the craft was noticeably thinner, now. The weakening of the earth-craft’s gravity field, as generated by the devastated plane of singularities, was marked; in some places the craft had been rendered virtually uninhabitable. The Friends’ latest estimate was that fully forty per cent of their stock of singularities had been fired or lost while the Spline starbreakers had riffled through the craft’s defences like fingers through paper. Many of the singularities launched before Berg had made it into the dome had hit their primary target. Jupiter, it seemed, had probably been seeded with enough singularities to cause its ultimate implosion, and - one day, centuries away - there would be a single, spinning singularity on the site now occupied by the greatest planet. But the singularity wouldn’t be of the right size, or the right spin, or whatever the hell were the mysterious criteria of success the Friends had laid down for themselves. And now there weren’t enough singularities left for them to finish the job.

‘So,’ she said to Jaar. ‘What next, for the Friends of Wigner?’

He smiled a little wistfully, his large, fragile-looking head swivelling as he surveyed the battered earth-craft. ‘The craft has suffered too much damage to remain habitable for long—’

‘Atmosphere leakage?’

He looked at her. ‘Yes, but more significantly the loss of the hyperdrive when the construction-material dome was crushed—’ He closed his long fingers into a fist. ‘And without the hyperdrive we have no effective radiation shielding. This skimpy blanket of atmosphere will scarcely suffice to protect us in Jovian space, and I doubt if we could survive even one close encounter with the Io flux-tube.’

‘Right.’ Berg looked up at the sky nervously; suddenly her situation - the fact that she was standing on a lump of rock, lost in orbit around Jupiter,
with nothing over her head but a few wisps of gas -
seemed harshly real; the sky seemed very close, very threatening.