Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (81 page)

Dura gritted her teeth. ‘No.’

‘Oh dear. It’s so easy to forget you’re all upfluxers . . .’

Adda closed his eyes and leaned back in his gauze net.

‘Look,’ said Maxx, ‘our bodies function by exploiting the Air’s mass transport properties . . . No? All right.’ She pointed at the fan set into the wall. ‘Do you know why that fan is there - why there are fans installed throughout the. City? To
regulate the temperature -
to keep us cool, here in the heat of the South Pole. The Air we inhabit is a neutron gas, and it’s made up of two components - a superfluid and a normal fluid. The superfluid can’t sustain temperature differences - if you heat it, the heat passes straight through.

‘Now - that means that if you add more superfluid to a mass of Air, its temperature will drop. And similarly if you take superfluid out the temperature rises, because normal fluid is left behind. And that’s the principle the wall fans work on.’

Farr was frowning. ‘What’s that got to do with Adda?’

‘Adda’s body is full of Air - like yours, and mine. And it’s permeated by a network of tiny capillaries, which can draw in superfluid to regulate his temperature.’ Deni Maxx winked at Farr. ‘We have tiny Air-pumps in our bodies . . . lots of them, including the heart itself. And that’s what hair-tubes are for . . . to let Air out of your skull, to keep your brain the right temperature. Did you know that?’

‘And it’s that mechanism which may not work so well, now, for Adda.’

‘Yes. We’ve repaired the major vessels, of course, but they’re never the same once they’re ruptured - and he’s simply lost too much of his capillary network. He’s been left weakened, too. Do you understand that Air also powers our muscles? . . . Look - suppose you were to heat up an enclosed chamber, like this room. Do you know what would happen to the superfluid? Unable to absorb heat, it would flee from the room - vigorously, and however it could. And by doing so it would raise pressure elsewhere.

‘When Adda wants to raise his arm, he heats up the Air in his lungs. He’s not aware of doing that, of course; his body does it for him, burning off some of the energy he’s stored up by eating. And when his lungs are heated the Air rushes out; capillaries lead the Air to his muscles, which expand and . . .’

‘So you’re saying that because this capillary network is damaged, Adda won’t be as strong again?’

‘Yes.’ She looked from Dura to Farr. ‘Of course you do realize that our lungs aren’t really
lungs
, don’t you?’

Dura shook her head, baffled by this latest leap. ‘What?’

‘Well, we are artifacts, of course. Made things. Or at least our ancestors were. Humans -
real
humans, I mean - came to this world, this Star, and designed us the way we are, so that we could survive, here in the Mantle.’

‘The Ur-humans.’

Maxx smiled, pleased. ‘You know of the Ur-humans? Good . . . Well, we believe that original humans had lungs - reservoirs of some gas - in their bodies. Just as we do. But perhaps their lungs’ function was quite different. You see, our lungs are simply caches of Air, of working gas for the pneumatic systems which power our muscles.’

‘What were they like, the Ur-humans?’

‘We can’t be sure - the Core Wars and the Reformation haven’t left us any records - but we do have some strong hypotheses, based on scaling laws and analogies with ourselves. Analogous anatomy was my principal subject as a student . . . Of course, that was a long time ago. They were much like us. Or rather, we were made in their image. But they were many times our size - about a hundred thousand times as tall, in fact. Because he was dominated by balances between different sets of physical forces, the average Ur-human was a metre tall, or more. And his body can’t have been based, as ours is, on the tin-nucleus bond . . . Do you know what I’m talking about? The tin nuclei which make up our bodies contain fifty protons and one hundred and forty-four neutrons. That’s twelve by twelve, you see. The neutrons are gathered in a spherical shape in symmetries of order three and four. Lots of symmetry, you see; lots of easy ways for nuclei to fit together by sharing neutrons, plenty of ways for chains and complex structures of nuclei to form. The tin-nucleus bond is the basis of all life here, including our own. But not the Ur-humans; the physics which dominated their structure - the densities and pressures we think they inhabited - wouldn’t have allowed any nuclear bonding at all. But they must have had
some
equivalent of the tin bond . . .’

She held out her arms and wiggled her fingers. ‘So they were very strange. But they had arms, and legs, like us - so we believe, because otherwise why would they have given them to us?’

Dura shook her head. ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Of course it does,’ Maxx smiled. ‘Oh, fingers have their uses. But haven’t there been times when you’d have swapped your long, clumsy legs for an Air-pig’s jetfart bladder? Or for a simple sheet of skin like a Surfer’s board which would let you Wave across the Magfield ten, a hundred times as fast as you can now? You have to face it, my dear . . . We humans are a bad design for the environment of the Mantle. And the reason must be that we are scale models of the Ur-humans who built us. No doubt the Ur-human form was perfectly suited for whatever strange world they came from. But not here.’

Dura’s imagination, overheating, filled her mind with visions of huge, misty, godlike men, prising open the Crust and releasing handfuls of tiny artificial humans into the Mantle . . .

Deni Maxx looked deeply into Dura’s eyecups. ‘Is that clear to you? I think it’s important that you understand what’s happened to your friend.’

‘Oh, it’s clear,’ Adda called from his cocoon. ‘But it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference, because there’s nothing she can do about it.’ He laughed. ‘Nothing, now she’s condemned me to this living hell. Is there, Dura?’

Dura’s anger welled like Deni’s heated superfluid. ‘I’m sick of your bitterness, old man.’

‘You should have let me die,’ he whispered. ‘I told you.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us about Parz City? Why did you leave us so unprepared?’

He sighed, a bubble of thick phlegm forming at the corner of his mouth. ‘Because we were thrown out ten generations ago. Because our ancestors travelled so far before building a home that none of us thought we would ever encounter Parz again.’ He laughed. ‘It was better to forget . . . What good would it do to know such a place existed? But how could we know they would spread so far, staining the Crust with their ceiling-farms and their Wheels? Damn them . . .’

‘Why were we sent away from Parz? Was it because . . .’ She turned, but Deni Maxx was making notes on a scroll with a Corestuff stylus, and did not appear to be listening. ‘Because of the Xeelee?’

‘No.’ He grimaced in pain. ‘No, not because of the Xeelee. Or at least, not directly. It was because of how our philosophy caused us to behave.’

The Human Beings believed that knowledge of the Xeelee predated the arrival of humans in the Star - that it had been brought there by the Ur-humans themselves.

The Xeelee, godlike, dominated spaces so large - it was said - that by comparison the Star itself was no more than a mote in the eyecup of a giant. Humans, striving for supremacy, had resented the Xeelee - had even gone to hopeless war against the great Xeelee projects, the constructs like the legendary Ring.

But over the generations - and as the terrible defeats continued - a new strand had emerged in human thought. No one understood the Xeelee’s grand purposes. But what if their projects were aimed, not at squalid human-scale goals like the domination of others, but at much higher aspirations?

The Xeelee were much more powerful than humans. Perhaps they always would be. And perhaps, as a corollary, they were much more
wise.

So, some apologists began to argue, humans should trust in the Xeelee rather than oppose them. The Xeelee’s ways were incomprehensible but must be informed by great wisdom. The apologists developed a philosophy which was accepting, compliant, calm, and trusting in an understanding above any human’s.

Adda went on, ‘We followed the way of the Xeelee, you see, Dura; not the way of the Committee of Parz. We would not obey.’ He shook his head. ‘So they sent us away. And in that we were lucky; now they might simply have destroyed us on their Wheels.’

Deni Maxx touched Dura’s shoulder. ‘You should leave now.’

‘We’ll be back.’

‘No.’ Adda was shifting with ghastly slowness in his cocoon of bindings, evidently trying to relieve his pain. ‘No, don’t come back. Get away. As far and as fast as you can. Get away . . .’

His voice broke up into a bubbling growl, and he closed his eyes.

‘
Y
ou dumb upfluxer jetfart!’ Hosch screamed in Farr’s face. ‘When I want a whole damn tree trunk fed into this hopper I’ll tell you about it!’

Now the Harbour supervisor shoved his bony face forward and his tone descended into a barely audible, infinitely menacing hiss. ‘But until I do . . . and if it wouldn’t trouble you too much . . . maybe you could split the wood just a
little
more finely. Or . . .’ - foul-smelling photons seeping from his mouth - ‘maybe you’d like to follow your handiwork into the hopper and finish your work in there? Eh?’

Farr waited until Hosch was through. Trying to defend himself, he knew from bitter experience, would only make things worse.

Hosch was a small, wiry man with a pinched mouth and eyecups which looked as if they had been drilled into his face. His clothes were filthy and he always smelled to Farr like days-old food. His limbs were so thin that Farr was confident that, with his remarkable upfluxer strength here at the Pole, he - or Dura - could snap the supervisor in two, in a fair fight . . .

At last Hosch seemed to exhaust his anger, and he Waved away to some other part of the hopper line. The labourers who had gathered to relish Farr’s humiliation - men and women alike - gave up their surreptitious surveillance and, with the smugness of spared victims, fixed their attention back on their work.

Air seethed in Farr’s capillaries and muscles.
Upfluxer. He called me upfluxer, again
. He watched his fists bunch . . .

Bzya’s huge hand enclosed both Farr’s own, and, with an irresistible, gentle force, pulled Farr’s arms down. ‘Don’t,’ Bzya said, his voice a cool rumble from the depths of an immense chest. ‘He’s not worth it.’

Farr’s rage seemed to veer between the supervisor and this huge Fisherman who was getting in the way. ‘He called me . . .’

‘I heard what he called you,’ Bzya said evenly. ‘And so did everyone else . . . just as Hosch intended. Listen to me. He wants you to react, to hit him. He’d like nothing better.’

‘He’d be capable of liking nothing after I take off his head for him.’

Bzya threw his head back and roared laughter. ‘And as soon as you did the guards would be down on you. After a beating you’d return to work - to Hosch, to a supervisor who really
would
hate you, and wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to show it - and to an extra five, or ten, years here to pay his compensation.’

Farr, the remnants of his anger still swirling in him, looked up into Bzya’s broad, battered face. ‘But I’ve only just started this shift . . . At the moment I’ll be happy just to get through that.’

‘Good.’ With an immense, powerful hand Bzya ruffled Farr’s hair-tubes. ‘That’s the way to think of it . . . You don’t have to get through your whole ten years at once, remember; just one shift at a time.’

Bzya was a huge man with muscles the size of Air-piglets. He was as bulky, powerful and gentle as the supervisor was small and needle-dagger vicious. Bzya’s face was marred by a mask of scar tissue which obliterated one side of his head and turned one eyecup into a ghastly cavern that reached back into the depths of his skull. Farr had come to know him as a simple man who had lived his life in the poverty-stricken Downside, keeping himself alive by turning his giant muscles to the mundane, difficult and dangerous labour which allowed the rest of Parz City to function. He had a wife, Jool, and a daughter, Shar. Somehow, through a life of travail, he had retained a kind and patient nature.

Now he said to Farr, winking at him with his good eyecup, ‘You shouldn’t be hard on old Hosch, you know.’

Farr gaped, trying to suppress a laugh. ‘Me, hard on him? Why, the old Xeelee-lover has it in for me.’

Bzya reached to the conveyor and raised a length of tree trunk longer than Farr was tall. With a single blow of his axe he cracked it open to reveal its glowing core. ‘See it from his point of view. He’s the supervisor of this section.’

Farr snorted. ‘Making himself rich out of our work. Bastard.’

Bzya smiled. ‘You learn fast, don’t you? Well, maybe. But he’s also
responsible
. We lost another Bell, last shift. Had you heard? Three more Fishermen dead. Hosch is responsible for that too.’

Disasters seemed to hit the Harbour with a depressing regularity, Farr thought. Still, he remained impatient with Bzya’s tolerance, and he began to list Hosch’s faults.

‘He’s all of that, and then some you’re too young to understand. Maybe he isn’t up to the responsibility he has.

‘But - I’ll say it again - whether he can cope or not, he’s
responsible
. And when one of us dies, a little of him must die too. I’ve seen it in his face, Farr, despite all his viciousness. Remember that.’

Farr frowned. He shoved more glowing wood into the hoppers. It was so complex. If only Logue or Dura were here to help him make sense of it all . . .

Or if only he could get out of here and
Surf.

The rest of the shift wore away without incident. Afterwards Farr filed out with the rest of the labourers to the small, cramped dormitory they shared. The dormitory, home to forty people, was a stained box slung across with sleeping ropes. It stank of shit and food. Farr ate his daily ration - today, a small portion of tough bread - and looked for a stable nest in the web of sleeping-ropes. He wasn’t yet confident enough to challenge the older, powerful-looking Fishermen, men and women both, who monopolized the chamber walls where the Air was slightly less polluted by the grunts and farts of others. He finished up, as usual, close to the centre of the dormitory.