Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (130 page)

‘But now we’ve come home. The mission is over. That’s what the stars are telling you, if you only had eyes to see.

‘I want you to gather the people. Get weapons - bows, blowpipes - anything you can find.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re going to go back into the Decks. For the first time in centuries. You have to reach the Interface.
The wormhole Interface
, Maker.’

Arrow Maker tried to envisage going
through
the Locks in the forest floor, entering the unknown darkness of the endless levels beneath his feet. Panic rose, sharp and painful in his throat.

Maker stumbled away from the little hut, and back into the familiar scents of the jungle. He raised his face to the canopy above, and the glowing sky beyond.

Could Uvarov be right? Was the thousand-year journey over - at last?

Suddenly Arrow Maker’s world seemed tiny, fragile, a mote adrift among impossible dangers. He longed to return to the canopy, to lose himself in the thick, moist air, in the scent of growing things.

‘Milpitas was right,’ Constancy-of-Purpose said. ‘Your trouble is you think too much, Morrow.’ Her big voice boomed out, echoing from the bare metal walls of Deck One; Constancy-of-Purpose seemed oblivious of the huge emptiness around them - the desolate dwellings, the endless, shadowed spaces of this uninhabited place.

Constancy-of-Purpose opened up a Lock. The Lock was a simple cylinder which rose from the floor and merged seamlessly with the ceiling, a hundred yards above their heads. Constancy-of-Purpose had opened a door in the Lock’s side, but there was also (Morrow had noticed) a hatch inside the cylinder twenty feet above them, blocking off the cylinder’s upper section.

All the Locks were alike. But Morrow had never seen an upper hatch opened, and knew no one who had.

Today, this Lock contained a pile of pineapples, plump and ripe, and a few flagons of copafeira sap. Morrow held open a bag, and Constancy-of-Purpose started methodically to shovel the fruit out of the Lock and into the bag, her huge biceps working. ‘You have to accept things as they are,’ she went on. ‘Our way of life here hasn’t changed for centuries - you have to admit that. So the Planners must be doing
something
right. Why not give them the benefit of the doubt?’

Constancy-of-Purpose was a big, burly woman who habitually wore sleeveless tunics, leaving the huge muscles of her arms exposed. Her face, too, was strong, broad and patient, habitually placid beneath her shaven scalp. The lower half of her body, by contrast, was wasted, spindly, giving her a strangely unbalanced look.

Morrow said to Constancy-of-Purpose, ‘You always talk to me as if I were still a child.’ As, in Constancy-of-Purpose’s eyes, he probably always would be. Constancy-of-Purpose was twenty years older than Morrow, and she had always assumed the role of older mentor - even now, after five centuries of life, when a mere couple of decades could go by barely noticed. The fact that they’d once been married, for a few decades, had made no long-term difference to their relationship at all. ‘Look, Constancy-of-Purpose, so much of our little world just doesn’t make sense. And it drives me crazy to think about it.’

Constancy-of-Purpose straightened up and rested her fists on her hips; her face gleamed with sweat. ‘No, it doesn’t.’

‘What?’

‘It
doesn’t
drive you crazy. Nobody as old as you - or me - is capable of being driven crazy by anything. We don’t have the energy to be mad any more, Morrow.’

Morrow sighed. ‘All right. But it
ought
to drive me crazy. And you. There’s so much that is simply -
unsaid
.’ He hoisted the half-full sack of fruit. ‘Look at the work we’re doing now, even. This simply isn’t
logical
.’

‘Logical enough. Copafeira sap is a useful fuel. And we need the fruit to supplement the supply machines, which haven’t worked properly since—’

‘Yes,’ Morrow said, exasperated, ‘but where does the fruit
come
from? Who brings it here, to these Locks? And—’

‘And what?’

‘And what do they want with the ratchets, and knives, and figure-of-eight rings we bring
them
?’

Morrow picked up the sap flagons, and Constancy-of-Purpose slung the fruit bag over her shoulder. They began the hundred-yard walk to the next Lock. Constancy-of-Purpose moved with an uneven, almost waddling motion, her stick-like legs seeming almost too weak to support the massive bulk of her upper body. Some obscure nanobot failure had left her legs shrivelled, spindly and - Morrow suspected, though Constancy-of-Purpose never complained - arthritic.

‘I don’t know,’ said Constancy-of-Purpose simply. ‘And I don’t think about it.’ She looked sideways at Morrow.

‘But it doesn’t make
sense
.’ Morrow looked up, nervously, at the bulkhead above him. ‘This fruit must come from
somewhere
. There must be
people
up there, Constancy-of-Purpose - people we’ve never seen, whose existence has never been acknowledged by the Planners, or—’

‘People whose existence doesn’t matter a damn, then.’

‘But it
does
. We
trade
with them.’ He stopped and held out his sack of fruit. ‘Look at this. We’ve carried on this trade with them - thereby implicitly acknowledging their existence - for decades now.’

Constancy-of-Purpose kept walking, painfully. ‘Centuries, actually.’

When he was a young man, Morrow had been angry just about the whole time, he recalled. Now - even now - he felt a ghostly surge of that old anger. He felt obscurely proud of himself: a feeling of anger was as rare an event as achieving an erection, these days. ‘But that means our society is, at its core, slightly insane.’

Constancy-of-Purpose shook her massive head and studied Morrow, a tolerant look on her face. ‘Keep up that talk, and you’ll spend the rest of your life up here. Or somewhere worse.’

‘Just think about it,’ Morrow said. ‘A whole society, labouring under a mass delusion . . . No wonder they shut down the Virtuals. No wonder they banned
kids
.’

‘But we’re all kept fed. Aren’t we? So it can’t be that crazy.’ She smiled, her broad face assuming a look of wisdom. ‘Humans are a very flawed species, Morrow. We simply don’t seem to be able to act rationally, for very long. This sort of thing - a trade with the nonexistent unknowns upstairs - seems a minor aberration to me.’

Morrow studied her curiously. ‘You believe that? And I think of
me
as sceptical.’

Constancy-of-Purpose had reached the next Lock; she dropped her sack and leant against the curving metal wall, her hands resting on her knees. ‘You know, we have this conversation every few years, my friend.’

Morrow frowned. ‘Really? Do we?’

‘Of course.’ Constancy-of-Purpose smiled. ‘At our age, even
doubting
becomes a habit. And we never come to any conclusion, and the world goes on. Just as it always has.’ She straightened up, cautiously flexing her thin legs. ‘Come on. Let’s get on with our work.’

With a twist of her huge upper arms Constancy-of-Purpose hauled open the door of the Lock.

Then - instead of stepping forward to gather the foodstuffs - she frowned, and looked at Morrow uncertainly. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘What is it?’

‘Look.’

The Lock was
empty.

Morrow stared at Constancy-of-Purpose, and then into the empty chamber. He couldn’t take in what he was seeing. These trades had
never
gone wrong before.

‘The knives have gone,’ he said.

‘We left them here yesterday.’

‘But there’s no meat.’

‘But the scratches clearly said the knives were what they wanted . . .’

This dialogue went on for perhaps five minutes. Part of Morrow was able to step outside - to look at himself and Constancy-of-Purpose with a certain detachment, even with pity. Here were two old people, too hopelessly habit-bound to respond to the unexpected.

Constancy-of-Purpose is right. I’ve become like a machine
, he thought with anger and sadness.
Worse than a machine.

Constancy-of-Purpose said, ‘I’ll go in and check the markings. Maybe we made some mistake.’

‘We never made a mistake before. How could we?’

‘I’ll go check anyway.’

Constancy-of-Purpose stepped forward into the Lock and peered up, squinting, at the trade markings.

. . . And the hatch at the top of the Lock, twenty feet above Constancy-of-Purpose’s head,
started to open.

Inside the plasma sea, time held little meaning for Lieserl.

As she sank into the Sun she’d abandoned all her Virtual senses, save for sight and a residual body awareness; drifting through the billowing, cloudy plasma was like a childhood vision of sleep, or an endless, oceanic meditation. She’d slowed the clocks which governed her awareness, and allowed herself to slip into long periods of true ‘sleep’ - of unawareness, when she drifted with only her autonomic systems patiently functioning.

And she had allowed, without regret, the crucial link of synchronization between her sensorium and the Universe outside to be severed. While she had drifted around the core of the Sun, sinking almost imperceptibly deeper into its heart, dozens of centuries had worn away on the worlds of mankind . . .

Here came the photino structure again.

This time she was ready. She strained at the structure as it passed her, every sense open.

Still, she could barely make it out; it was like a crude charcoal sketch against the glowing plasma background.

Wistfully she watched the photino cloud soar out of sight once more, passing through the plasma as if it were no more substantial than mist, on its minutes-long orbit around the Sun.

But—’

But, had it
diverged
from its orbit as it passed her? Was it possible that the photino object had actually reacted to her presence?

Now she became aware of more motion, below and ahead of her. The moving forms were shadowy, infuriatingly elusive against the gleaming, almost featureless background. Frustrated, she strained at her senses, demanding that her aged processors extract every last bit of information content from the data they were receiving.

Slowly the images enhanced, gaining in definition and sharpness.

There were hundreds - no: thousands,
millions -
of the photino traces. Maybe they were standing-wave patterns, she wondered, traces of coherence on the dark matter cloud.

Slowly she built up an image in her head, a composite model of the patterns: a roughly lenticular form, with length of perhaps fifty yards - and, she realized slowly, some hints of an internal structure.

Well, so much for the standing-wave theory. These things seemed to be discrete
objects
, not merely patterns of coherence in a continuum.

She watched the objects as they traced their orbits around the centre of the Sun. The soaring lens-shapes reminded her of graphics of the contents of a blood stream; she wondered if the structures were indeed like antibodies, or thrombocytes - blood platelets, swarming in search of a wound. They swarmed over and past each other, miraculously never colliding—

No, she realized slowly. There was nothing
miraculous
about it. The objects were
steering
away from each other, as they soared through their orbits.

This was a flock. The dark matter structures were
alive.

Alive and purposeful.

Slowly she drifted into the flock of photino birds (as she’d tentatively labelled them). They swooped around her, avoiding her gracefully.

They were clearly reacting to her presence. They were obviously
aware -
if not intelligent, she thought.

She wondered what to do next. She wished she had Kevan Scholes to talk to about this.

Sweet, patient Kevan had come to the Sun as a junior research associate; his tour of duty had been meant to be only a few years. But he’d stayed on much longer in near-Solar orbit to serve as her patient capcom, far beyond the call of duty or friendship. In the end her long-distance relationship with Scholes had lasted decades.

Well, she’d been grateful for his loyalty. He’d helped her immeasurably through those first difficult years inside the Sun.

Fitfully, she tried to remember the last time he spoke to her.

In the end he’d simply been removed. Why? To serve some organizational, political, cultural change? She’d never been told.

She had come to learn, with time, that human organizations - even if staffed by AS-preserved semi-immortals - had a half-life of only a few decades. Those that survived longer persisted only as shells, usually transmuted far from the aims of their founders. She thought of the slow corruption of the Paradoxa Collegiate, apparent even in her own brief time outside the Sun, into a core organization of fanatics huddled around some eternal flame of ancient belief.

A succession of capcoms had taken their places at the microphones at the other end of her wormhole link. She’d been shown their faces, by images dumped through the telemetry channels. So she knew what they looked like, that parade of ever more odd-looking men and women with their evanescent fashions and styles and their increasing remoteness of expression. Language evolution and other cultural changes were downloaded into her data stores, so the drift of the human worlds away from the time she’d grown up in (however briefly) didn’t cause her communication problems. But none of it
engaged
her. After Kevan Scholes she found little interest in, or empathy with, the succession of firefly people who communicated with her.

Sometimes she had wondered how she must seem to
them -
a cranky, antique quasi-human trapped inside a piece of rickety old technology.