Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (61 page)

Her eyes narrowed. ‘You’re going to refuse further AS treatment? Look, if you feel some guilt about the function you performed in the Qax Occupation Era, nobody in this age is going to—’

‘It’s not that,’ he said gently. ‘I’m not talking about some complicated form of suicide, my dear. And I don’t suffer greatly from guilt, despite the moral ambivalence of what I’ve done with my life. I certainly believe I left my era for the last time aboard that damn Spline warship having done more good than harm ... It’s just that I think I’ve seen enough. I know all I could wish to know, you see. I know that, although the Project of these rebels - the Friends of Wigner - has failed, Earth will ultimately be liberated from the grip of the Qax. I don’t need to learn anything more. I certainly don’t feel I need to see any more of it laboriously unfold. Do you understand that?’

Berg smiled. ‘I think so. Though I must chide you for thinking small. The Friends of Wigner have projects which extend to the end of time.’

‘Yes. And, as for their future, I suspect they are already engaged on designs of their own.’

She nodded. ‘You’ve told me what Shira said. Take the long way home, by surviving through the centuries until the era of your birth returns ... and then what? Start the whole damn business over again?’

‘Perhaps. Though I hear they’ve done a little more thinking since I spoke to Shira. You mention a sublight star trip. I think that would appeal to the Friends, if only because it would let them exploit relativistic time-dilation effects—’

‘—and get home that bit quicker; in a century instead of fifteen.’ She smiled. ‘Well, it’s one way to waste your life, I suppose.’

‘And you, Miriam? You’ve been a century away yourself; this must be almost as great a dislocation for you as it is for me. What will you do?’

She shrugged, ruffling her hair. ‘Maybe I’ll go with the Friends,’ she murmured. ‘Maybe I’ll take them to the stars and back, journey through fifteen centuries once more—’

‘—and see if Michael Poole emerges into the Qax occupation future, dashing valiantly from the imploding wormhole?’ He smiled.

She looked up to the Jupiter-roofed zenith, trying to make out the pieces of the shattered portal. ‘It might make me feel better,’ she said. ‘But, Jasoft, I know I’ve lost Michael. Wherever he is now I can never reach him.’

They sat for a moment, watching images of shattered, tumbling exotic matter through the discarded slates. At length he said, ‘Come. It is cold here, and the air is thin. Let us return to the
Narlikar
boat. I would like some more warmth. And food.’

She dropped her head from the sky. ‘Yeah. That’s a good idea, Jasoft.’

She stood, her legs stiff after so long curled beneath her. Almost tenderly Jasoft took her arm, and they walked together to the waiting boat.

Spacetime is friable.

The fabric of spacetime is riddled with wormholes of all scales. At the Planck length and below, wormholes arising from quantum uncertainty effects blur the clean Einsteinian lines of spacetime. And some of the wormholes expand to the human scale, and beyond - sometimes spontaneously, and sometimes at the instigation of intelligence.

Spacetime is like a sheet of ice, permeated by flaws, by hairline cracks.

When Michael Poole’s hyperdrive was activated inside the human-built wormhole Interface, it was as if someone had smashed at that ice floe with a mallet. Cracks exploded from the point of impact, widened; they joined each other in a complex, spreading network, a tributary pattern which continually formed and reformed as spacetime healed and shattered anew.

The battered, scorched corpse of the Spline warship bearing the lifedome of the
Crab
, Michael Poole, and a cloud of rebellious antibody drones emerged from the collapsing wormhole into the Qax Occupation Era at close to the speed of light. Shear energy from the tortured spacetime of the wormhole transformed into high-frequency radiation, into showers of short-lived, exotic particles which showered around the tumbling Spline.

It was like a small sun exploding amid the moons of Jupiter. Vast storms were evoked in the bulk of the gas giant’s atmosphere, a world already bearing the wound of the growing black holes in its heart. A moon was destroyed. Humans were killed, blinded.

Cracks in shattering spacetime propagated at the speed of light.

There was already another macroscopic spacetime wormhole in the Jovian system: the channel set up to a future beyond the destruction of the Qax star, the channel through which Qax had travelled towards the past, intent on destroying humanity.

Under the impact of Poole’s hammer-blow arrival - as Poole had expected - this second spacetime flaw could not retain its stability.

The wormhole mouth itself expanded, exoticity ballooning across thousands of miles and engulfing the mass-energy of Michael Poole’s unlikely vessel. The icosahedral exotic-matter frame which threaded the wormhole mouth exploded, a mirror image of the destruction witnessed by Miriam Berg fifteen centuries earlier. Then the portal imploded at lightspeed; gravitational shockwaves pulsed from the vanishing mouth like Xeelee starbreaker beams, scattering ships and moons.

Through a transient network of wormholes which imploded after him in a storm of gravity waves and high-energy particles, Michael Poole hurtled helplessly into the future.

C
hains of events threaded the future.

A human called Jim Bolder flew a Xeelee nightfighter into the heart of the Qax home system, causing them to turn their starbreaker weapons on their own sun.

The Qax occupation of Earth collapsed. Humans would never again be defeated, on a significant scale, by any of the junior species.

Humans spread across stars, their spheres of influence expanding at many times lightspeed. A period known as the Assimilation followed during which the wisdom and power of other species were absorbed, on an industrial scale.

Soon, only the Xeelee stood between humans and dominance.

The conflict that followed lasted a million years.

When it was resolved only a handful of humans, and human-derived beings, remained anywhere in the universe.

The Projects of the Xeelee, the inexorable workings of natural processes, continued to change the universe.

Stars died. More stars formed, to replace those which had already failed ... but as the primal mix of hydrogen and helium became polluted with stellar waste products, the formation rate of new stars declined exponentially.

And darker forces were at work. The stars aged ... too rapidly.

The Xeelee completed their great Projects, and fled the decaying cosmos.

Five million years after the first conflict between human and Qax, the wreckage of a Spline warship emerged, tumbling, from the mouth of a wormhole which blazed with gravitational radiation. The wormhole closed, sparkling.

The wreck - dark, almost bereft of energy - turned slowly in the stillness. It was empty of life.

Almost.

Quantum functions flooded over Michael Poole like blue-violet rain, restoring him to time. He gasped at the pain of rebirth.

Humans would call it the antiXeelee.

It was ... large. Its lofty emotions could be described in human terms only by analogy.

Nevertheless - the antiXeelee looked on its completed works and was satisfied.

Its awareness spread across light-years. Shining matter littered the universe; the Xeelee had come, built fine castles of that shining froth, and had now departed. Soon the stuff itself would begin to decay, and already the antiXeelee could detect the flexing muscles of the denizens of that dark ocean which lay below.

The function of the antiXeelee had been to guide the huge Projects of the Xeelee, the Projects whose purpose had been to build a way out of this deadly cosmos. In order to achieve their goals, the Xeelee had even moved back through time to modify their own evolution, turning their history into a closed timelike curve, a vacuum diagram. The antiXeelee was the consciousness driving this process, travelling - like an antiparticle - back in time from the moment of its dissolution to the moment of its creation.

Now the job was done. The antiXeelee felt something like contentment at the thought that its charges had escaped, were now beyond the reach of those ... others, who the Xeelee had in the end been unable to oppose.

The antiXeelee could let go.

It spread wide and thin; soon, with a brief, non-localized burst of selectrons and neutralinos its awareness would multiply, fragment, shatter, sink into the vacuum ...

But not yet. There was something new.

It didn’t take Michael long to check out the status of his fragile craft.

There was some power still available to the lifedome from its internal cells. That might last - what, a few hours? As far as he could tell, there was no functional link between the dome and the rest of the
Hermit Crab
, nor had the links set up by Harry to the Spline ship survived ... save for one, glowing telltale on the comms desks which Michael studiously ignored; the damn rebel drones could chew the ship up as far as he was concerned, now.

So he had no motive power. Not so much as an in-system boat; no way of adjusting his situation.

He didn’t grouse about this, nor did he fear his future, such as it was. It was a miracle he’d even survived his passage through the wormhole network ... This was all a bizarre bonus.

Harry was gone, of course.

The universe beyond the lifedome looked aged, dead, darkened. The lifedome was a little bubble of light and life, isolated.

Michael was alone, here at the end of time. He could feel it.

He gathered a meal together; the mundane chore, performed in a bright island of light around the life-dome’s small galley, was oddly cheering. He carried the food to his couch, lay back with the plate balancing on one hand, and dimmed the dome lights.

God alone knew where he was ... if ‘where’ could have a meaning, after such a dislocation in spacetime. The stars were distant, dark, red. Could so long have passed? - or, he wondered, could something, some unknown force, have acted to speed the stars’ aging in the aeons beyond the flashbulb slice of time occupied by humans?

There was no large-scale sign of human life, or activity; nor, indeed, of any intelligent life.

Intelligence would have had time to work, Michael reflected. After millions of years, with a faster-than-light hyperdrive and singularity technology in the hands of hundreds of species, the universe should have been transformed ...

The reconstruction of the universe should have been as obvious as a neon sign a thousand light-years tall.

... But the universe had merely aged.

He knew from the subjective length of his passage through the wormholes that he couldn’t have travelled through more than a few million years - a fraction of the great journey to timelike infinity - and yet already the tide of life had receded. Were there any humans left, anywhere?

He smiled wistfully. So much for Shira’s grand dreams of life covering the universe, of manipulating the dynamic evolution of spacetime itself ...

There would be no ‘Ultimate Observer’, then. The Project of the Friends of Wigner could not, after all, have succeeded: there would have been nobody to hear the elaborately constructed message. But, Michael thought as he gazed out at the decayed universe, by God it had been a grand conception. To think of finite humans, already long since dust, even daring to challenge these deserts of time ...

He finished his food, set the plate carefully on the floor. He drank a glass of clean water, went to the free-fall shower, washed in a spray of hot water. He tried to open up his senses, to relish every particle of sensation. There was a last time for everything, for even the most mundane experiences.

He considered finding some music to play, a book to read. Somehow that might have seemed fitting.

The lights failed. Even the comms telltale from the drones winked out.

Well, so much for reading a book.

By the dimmed starlight, half by touch, he made his way back to his couch.

It grew colder; he imagined the heat of the lifedome leaking out into the immense heat sink of the blackened, ancient sky. What would get him first? - the cold, or the failing air?

He wasn’t afraid. Oddly, he felt renewed: young, for the first time in a subjective century, the pressure of time no longer seeming to weigh on him.

Perhaps he was finding that peace of death, the readiness to abandon the cares of a too-long life, which his father had discovered before him. And he found, at last, a contentment that he had lived long enough to see all he had.

He crossed his hands on his chest. He was beginning to shiver, the air sharp in his nostrils. He closed his eyes.

Something like curiosity, a spark of its awareness, stirred the antiXeelee.

Here was an artifact.

How had this cooling wreckage got here, to this place and time?

There was something inside it. A single, flickering candle of consciousness ...

The antiXeelee reached out.

There was a ship, another ship, hanging over the lifedome.

Michael, dying, stared in wonder.

It was something like a sycamore seed wrought in jet black. No lights showed in the small, pod-like hull. Nightdark wings which must have spanned hundreds of miles loomed over the wreck of the
Crab
, softly rippling.

The Friends of Wigner had told Michael of ships like this. This was a nightfighter, the wings sheet-discontinuities in the fabric of spacetime.

The cold sank claws into his chest; the muscles of his throat abruptly spasmed, and dark clouds ringed his vision.

Not now
, he found himself pleading silently, his failing vision locked onto the Xeelee ship, all his elegiac acceptance gone in a flash.
Just a little longer. I have to know what this means. Please
...