Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (132 page)

As the forest folk walked across the Deck, their feet padded softly on the worn metal; they left behind a trail of marks, imprints of forest dirt and sweat. Arrow Maker wore a bow and quiver, slung over his shoulder, and Spinner’s blowpipe dangled at her waist, obscure and deadly. Their bare, painted flesh made splashes of extraordinary colour against the drab grey-brown shades of the Decks. Their eyes, peering through bright masks of paint, were wide with alert suspicion and wariness, an effect hardly softened by Spinner’s eye-glasses.

Morrow had managed to arrange an interview with Planner Milpitas. He had decided to restrict this venture into the interior of the Decks - this first mixture of cultures in centuries of the ship’s two worlds - to just these three. He didn’t want to expose the society of the Decks to any more cultural stress than he had to.

They moved away from the open Lock, with its last glimpse of the forest, and entered the metal-walled environment typical of the Decks. Spinner’s gait, at first confident, became more hesitant; she seemed to lose some of her brashness, and turned pale under her face paint.

Morrow felt a certain relish. ‘What’s the matter with you? Nervous?’

She looked at him defiantly, swallowing hard. ‘Shouldn’t I be? Aren’t you?’

Arrow Maker began, ‘Spinner—’

‘But it’s not that.’ She wrinkled up her round face, making her glasses slip on her nose. ‘It’s the
stench
. It’s everywhere. Oppressive, stale . . . Can’t you smell it?’

Morrow raised his face, vaguely alarmed. Even old Uvarov, blind, trapped in his chair, turned his face, dragging air through his ruin of a nose.

Morrow said, ‘I don’t understand . . .’

‘Spinner.’ Arrow Maker’s voice was patient. ‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong. That’s just -
people
. People, and metal, and machinery. It’s a different world down here; we’ll have to learn to accept it.’

Spinner looked briefly horrified. ‘Well, it’s disgusting. They should do something about it.’

Morrow felt exasperated and amused. ‘Do something? Like what?’

‘Like plant a few trees.’ Defiantly, she lifted the orchid garland around her neck and pressed it against her face, ostentatiously breathing in the petals’ scent.

Arrow Maker walked beside Morrow. ‘She does not mean to give offence,’ he said seriously.

Morrow sighed. ‘Don’t worry about that. But . . . I’m an old man, Arrow Maker. Older than you can understand, perhaps.’ He glanced sideways at the little man from the forest. Arrow Maker looked competent, practical - and his four-feet-tall body, his bare feet and his painted face were utterly out of place in the sterile surroundings of Deck One. ‘I’m a bit more restless than most people down here. And I’ve had enough trouble over that. But, even so, I’m
old
. I can’t help but fear
change -
unpredictability - more than anything else. You people represent an enormous irruption into the Decks - almost an invasion. My life will never be the same. And that’s uncomfortable.’

Arrow Maker slowed. ‘Will you help us?’ he asked levelly. ‘You said—’

‘Yes, I’ll help you. I won’t lose my nerve, Arrow Maker; I’ll keep my word. I’ve been aware for a long time that the way things are run, down here, isn’t
logical
. Maybe, by helping you - by helping Uvarov - I’ll be able to make sense of a little more of it. Or maybe not.’
At least
, he thought,
now I understand what all those ratchets and loops of metal I’ve been making for so many decades are actually for
. He grinned and ran a hand over his shaven head. ‘But I don’t quite know what’s going to come out of this. You’re so -
different
.’

Arrow Maker smiled. ‘Then being fearful - cautious, at least - is the only rational response.’

‘Unless you’re fifteen years old.’

‘I heard that.’ Spinner rejoined them; she punched Morrow, lightly, in the ribs; her small, hard fist sank into layers of body-fat, and he tried not to react to the sudden, small pain.

They descended a ramp, and passed down from Deck One and onto Deck Two, the first of the inhabited levels.

Morrow tried to see his world through the fresh eyes of the forest people. The drab, stained surfaces of the bulkheads above and below, the distant, slightly mist-shrouded, hull walls, all provided a frame around the world - regular, ordered, enclosed. Immense banners of green copper-stain disfigured one hull wall. Stair-ramps threaded between the Decks like hundred-yard-long traceries of spider-webs, and the elevator shafts were vertical pillars which pierced the levels, apparently supporting the metal sky. The rigid circular-geometry layout of Deck Two was easy to discern. Buildings - homes, factories, the Planners’ Temples - clustered obediently in the Deck’s neat sectors and segments.

Morrow felt embarrassed, obscurely depressed. His world was unimaginative, constricting - like the interior of some huge machine, he thought. And a battered, failing, ageing machine at that.

They set off down a chord-way which ran directly to Milpitas’ Temple.

A woman came near them. Morrow knew her - she was called Perpetuation; she ran a shop in a poor part of Sector 4. She walked steadily along the way towards them, eyes downcast. She looked tired, Morrow thought; it must be her shift end.

Then she looked up, and saw the forest folk. Perpetuation slowed to a halt in the middle of the chord-way, her mouth hanging slack. Morrow saw beads of sweat break out over her scalp.

In his peripheral vision, Morrow saw Spinner-of-Rope reach for her blowpipe.

He raised a hand and tried to smile. ‘Perpetuation. Don’t be alarmed. We’re on our way to the Temple, to . . .’

He let his voice trail off. He could
see
Perpetuation wasn’t hearing him. In fact, she seemed to be having difficulty in believing the evidence of her own eyes; she kept looking
past
Morrow’s party, along the chord-way towards her home.

It was as if the forest party didn’t exist -
couldn’t
exist - for her.

She looked absurd. But she reminded Morrow, disturbingly, of his own first reaction to Spinner-of-Rope.

Perpetuation scurried off the path, ran
around
them, and continued on her way without looking back. Spinner seemed to relax. She slung her blowpipe over her shoulder once more.

‘For the love of Life,’ Morrow snapped at the girl, suddenly impatient, ‘you were in no danger from that poor woman. She was terrified. Couldn’t you see that?’

Spinner returned his stare, wide-eyed.

Uvarov turned up his blind face; Arrow Maker explained briefly what had happened. Uvarov barked laughter. ‘You are wrong, Morrow. Of
course
Spinner was in danger here. We all are.’

Arrow Maker, plodding beside Morrow, frowned. ‘I don’t understand. This place is strange, but I’ve seen no danger.’

Morrow said, ‘I agree. You’re under no threat here . . .’

Uvarov laughed. ‘You think not? Maker, try to remember this lesson. It might keep you alive a little longer. The most precious thing to a human being is a
mind-set:
more precious than one’s own life, even. Human history has taught us that lesson time and again, with its endless parade of wars - human sacrifices
en masse -
thousands of deaths over the most trivial of differences of religious interpretation.

‘We do not fit into the mind-set of the people within these Decks. That poor woman walked
around
us, convincing herself we are not real! By our presence here - by our very existence, in fact - we are disturbing the
mind-set
of the people here . . . in particular, of those ancients who control this society.

‘They may not even realize it themselves, but they will seek to destroy us. The lives of three or four strangers is a cheap price to pay for the preservation of a mind-set, believe me.’

‘No,’ Morrow said. ‘I can’t accept that. I don’t always agree with the Planners. But they aren’t killers.’

‘You think not?’ Uvarov laughed again. ‘The survivalists - your “Planners” - are psychotic. Of course. As I am. And you. We are a fundamentally flawed species. Most of humanity, for most of its history, has been driven by a series of mass psychotic delusions. The labels changed, but the nature of the delusions barely varied . . .’

Uvarov sighed. ‘We built this marvellous ship - we created Paradoxa. We dreamed of saving the species itself. We launched, towards the stars and the future . . .

‘But, unfortunately, we had to take the contents of our heads with us.’

Morrow recalled Perpetuation’s expression, as she had systematically shut out the existence of the forest folk. Maybe, he thought grimly, this was going to be even harder than he’d anticipated.

Lieserl remembered the first time she’d lost contact with the outside human worlds altogether. It had hurt her more than she’d expected.

She’d tested her systems; the telemetry link was still functioning, but input from the far end had simply ceased - quite abruptly, without warning.

Confused, baffled, resentful, she had withdrawn into herself for a while. If the humans who had engineered her, and dumped her into this alien place, had now decided to abandon her - well, so would she them . . .

Then, when she calmed down a little, she tried to figure out
why
the link had been broken.

From the clues provided by Michael Poole’s quixotic wormhole flight into the future, Paradoxa had put together a sketchy chronology of man’s future history. Lieserl mapped her internal clocks against the Paradoxa chronology.

When she first lost contact, already millennia had passed since her downloading into the Sun.

Earth was occupied, she’d found.

Humans had diffused out beyond the Solar System in their bulky, ponderous slower-than-light GUTships. It had been a time of optimism, of hope, of expansion into an unlimited future.

Then the first extra-Solar intelligence had been encountered, somewhere among the stars: the
Squeem, a
race of group-mind entities with a wide network of trading colonies.

Impossibly rapidly, the Squeem had overwhelmed human military capabilities and occupied Earth. The systematic exploitation of Solar resources - for the benefit of an alien power - was begun.

Sometimes, Lieserl speculated about why the dire warnings of Paradoxa - based on Poole’s data - had failed to avert the very catastrophes, like the Squeem occupation, that Paradoxa had predicted. Maybe there was an inevitability to history - maybe it simply wasn’t possible to avert the tide of events, no matter how disastrous.

But Lieserl couldn’t accept such a fatalistic view.

Probably the simple truth was that - by the time enough centuries had passed for the predictions of Paradoxa to come true - those predictions simply weren’t accepted any more. The people who had actually encountered the Squeem must have been pioneers - traders, builders of new worlds. To them, Earth and its environs had been a remote legend. If they’d ever even heard of Paradoxa, it would have been dismissed as a remote fringe group clinging fanatically to shards of dire prediction from the past, with no greater significance than astrologers or soothsayers.

But, Lieserl realized, Paradoxa’s predictions had actually been
right.

After the Squeem interregnum, contact with her had suddenly been restored.

She remembered how words and images had suddenly come pouring once more through the revived telemetry links. At first she had been terrified by this sudden irruption into her cetacean drifting through the Sun’s heart.

Her new capcom - ragged, undernourished, but endlessly enthusiastic - told her that the yoke of the Squeem had been cast off. Humans were free again, able to exploit themselves and their own resources as they saw fit. Not only that, Lieserl learned, the Squeem occupation had left humans with a legacy of high technology - a
hyperdrive
, a faster-than-light means of travelling between the stars.

Hyperdrive technology hadn’t originated with the Squeem, it was learned rapidly. They had acquired it from some other species, by fair means or foul; just as humanity had now ‘inherited’ it.

The true progenitors, of much of the technology in the Galaxy, were known . . . at least from afar.

The lost human colonies on the nearby stars were contacted and revitalized, and a new, explosive wave of expansion began, powered by the hyperdrive. Humans spread like an infection across the Galaxy, vigorous, optimistic once more.

Lieserl, drifting through her fantasy of Sun-clouds, watched all this from afar, bemused. Contact with her was maintained only fitfully; Lieserl with her wormhole technology was a relic - a bizarre artifact from the past, drifting slowly to some forgotten goal inside the Sun.

In the first few years after the overthrow of the Squeem, humans had prospered - flourished, expanded. But Lieserl grew increasingly depressed as she fast-forwarded through human history. The Universe beyond the Solar System seemed to be a place full of petty, uncreative races endlessly competing for Xeelee scraps. But maybe, she thought sourly, that made it a good arena for mankind.

Then - devastatingly - a war was fought, and lost, with another alien power: the
Qax.

Earth was occupied again.

There were more birds joining the flock than leaving it, she realized slowly.

The birds joining the cloud came in from random directions. But there was a pattern to the paths of the departing birds: there was a steady flow of the outgoing birds in one direction, in the Sun’s equatorial plane, to some unknown destination.

The point was, more birds were arriving than departing. The cloud at the heart of the Sun was
being grown
. The birds were expanding the cloud
deliberately.

She felt as if she were being dragged along a deductive chain, reluctantly, to a place she didn’t want to go. She found, absurdly, that she
liked
the birds; she didn’t want to think ill of them.