Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (150 page)

There was hardly anything else left. Since her sense of smell had finally packed up, eating had become a process of basic refuelling, to be endured rather than enjoyed. And, apart from her Virtuals, nothing much stimulated her mentally; it would take more than a thousand-year life to exhaust the libraries of mankind, but she’d long since wearied of the ancient, frozen thoughts of others, rendered irrelevant by the death of the Sun.

She turned off the spigot. Hot air gushed down around her, drying her rapidly. When the droplets had stopped floating off her skin she pulled back the shower curtain.

The lounge was basic - it contained little more than this shower, a small galley, a sleeping cocoon and her data desk with its processor bank. Lashed up in haste from sections of the
Northern
’s hull material, the lounge was a squat cylinder five yards across, crouched on the shoulders of the Xeelee craft like a malevolent parasite - utterly spoiling the lines of the delicate nightfighter, Louise had thought regretfully. The walls of the lounge were opaqued to a featureless grey, making the lounge rather dingy and claustrophobic. And the place was a mess. Bits of her clothing drifted around in the air, crumpled and soiled, and she was conscious of a stale smell. She really ought to clean up; she knew she utterly lacked the obsessive neatness needed to survive for long in zero gee.

She reached for a towel drifting in the air close by. She rubbed herself vigorously, relishing the feeling of the rough fabric on her skin. A mere blast of air never left her feeling really
dry.

The feel of the warm towel on her skin made her think, distantly, about sex.

She’d always had a sour public persona: people saw her as an engineer obsessed with her job, with building things
out there
. But there was more to her than that - there were elements which Mark had recognized and treasured during their marriage. Sex had always been important to her: not just for the physical pleasure of it but also for what it symbolized: something deep and old within her, an echo of the ancient sea whose traces humans still carried, even now. The contrast of that oceanic experience with her work had made her more complete, she thought.

After she and Mark had reconciled - tentatively, grudgingly, in recognition of their joint isolation in the
Northern -
they had revived their vigorous sex life. And it had been good, remaining vital for a long time. Longer than either of them had a right to expect, she supposed. She wrapped the towel around her back and began to rub at her buttocks. Maybe if Mark had stayed alive—

The lounge walls snapped to transparency; space darkness flooded over her.

Louise cried out and pulled the towel around her body.

From her comms desk came the sound of laughter.

She scrambled in a locker for fresh clothes. The door of the jury-rigged locker jammed and she hauled at it, swearing, aware of the towel slipping around her.

‘By Lethe’s waters, Spinner, what do you think you’re doing?’

Louise could just make out Spinner’s cage, a box of winking lights at the prow of the nightfighter. A shadow moved across the lights - Spinner, probably, twisting in her couch to take a mocking look at her. ‘I’m sorry. I
knew
you’d be embarrassed.’

Louise had found a coverall; now she thrust her legs into it. ‘Then why,’ she said angrily, ‘did you invade my privacy by doing it?’

‘What difference does it make? Louise, there’s no one to see; we’re a billion miles from the nearest living soul.
And
you’re a thousand years old. You, really ought to rid yourself of these taboos.’

‘But they’re
my
taboos,’ Louise hissed. ‘I happen to like them, and they make a difference to
me
. If you ever get to my age, Spinner-of-Rope, maybe you’ll learn a little tolerance.’

‘Well, maybe. Anyway, I didn’t de-opaque your walls just to catch you with your pants off.’ She sounded mischievous.

Suspiciously, Louise asked, ‘Why, then?’

‘Because—’ Spinner hesitated.

‘Because what?’

‘Look ahead.’

There was a point of light, far ahead, beyond Spinner’s cage: a point that ballooned, now, exploding at her face—

Saturn, plummeting out of emptiness at her.

Louise cried out and buried her face in her hands.

‘Because,’ Spinner said softly, ‘we’re there. I thought you’d enjoy watching our arrival.’

Louise opened her fingers, cautiously.

Steady, orange-brown light shone into her cabin: the light of a planet, illuminated by the bloated body of its Sun.

Spinner was laughing softly.

Louise said slowly, ‘Spinner - if this is Saturn -
where are the rings
?’

‘Rings? What rings?’

The planet itself was the same swollen mass of hydrogen and helium, with its core of rock twenty times as massive as Earth intact, deep within it. Elaborate cloud systems still wound around the globe, like watercolour streaks of brown and gold, just as she remembered. And the largest moon, Titan, was still there.

But the
rings
had gone.

Louise hurried to her data desk.

‘ . . . Louise? Are you all right?’

Louise made herself reply. ‘I think I’m mourning the rings, Spinner. They were the most beautiful sight in the Solar System. Who would smash up such harmless, magnificent beauty? And, damn it, they were
ours
.’

‘But,’ said Spinner, ‘there
is
a ring here. I can see it. Look . . .’

Following Spinner’s directions, Louise studied her data desk.

The ring showed up as a faint band across the stars, a shadow against the swollen, imperturbable bulk of the planet itself.

Once, three ice moons had circled outside the orbit of Titan: Iapetus, Hyperion and retrograde Phoebe. All that was left of those three moons was this trail of rubble. Thin, colourless, with no evidence of structure, the ring of ice chunks, glowing red in the light of the dying Sun, circled the planet at about sixty planetary radii, a pale ghost of its glorious predecessor.

And where were the other moons?

Louise paged through her data desk. Once, Saturn had had seventeen satellites. Now - as far as she could tell from their orbits - only Titan and Enceladus remained. And there wasn’t much left of Enceladus at all; the little moon still swung through an orbit around four planetary radii from Saturn, but its path was much more elliptical than before. Its surface - always broken, uneven - had been left as rubble. There was no sign of the small human outposts which had once sparkled against the shadows of its curved ridges and cratered plains.

The rest of the moons - even the harmless, ten-mile-wide islands of water ice - had gone.

Louise remembered the ancient, beautiful names.
Pan, Atlas, Prometheus, Pandora, Epimetheus . .
. Names almost as old, now, as the myths from which they had been taken; names which had outlived the objects to which they’d been assigned.

‘Louise?’

‘I’m sorry, Spinner.’

‘Still mourning?’

‘Yes.’

‘I guess somebody has to.’

‘Spinner, what
happened
here?’

‘A battle,’ Spinner said quietly. ‘Obviously.’

The nightfighter spread its hundred-mile wings, eclipsing the debris of the shattered moons.

Milpitas sat in his office. From throughout the Temple, there were the sounds of shouting, of screams, of yelled words too indistinct for him to hear.

The shouting seemed to be coming closer.

He cleared his magnetized desk top, putting his paper, pens, data slates away into drawers. He folded his hands and held them over the desk.

The door to his office was opened.

The renegade from -
outside -
hovered there in the air. He was almost horizontal from Milpitas’ point of view: as if he were defying the Planner to fit him into his orderly, gravity-structured Universe.

The renegade spread his empty hands. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

‘I know you,’ Milpitas said slowly.

‘Perhaps you do.’ The renegade was tall, quite well-muscled; he wore a practical coverall equipped with a dozen pockets which were crammed with unidentifiable tools. He wore his hair short, but not shaven-clean; his look was confident, even excited. Milpitas tried to imagine this man without the hair - and with a little less of that damnable confidence, too - in standard, drab Paradoxa coveralls, and with a more appropriate posture: stooped shoulders, perhaps, hands folded before him . . .

‘My name’s Morrow. You had a certain amount of - trouble - with me.’ The renegade glanced around at the office, as if recalling some sour experience. ‘I was in here several times, as you tried to explain to me how wrong I was in my thinking . . .’

‘
Morrow
. You disappeared.’

Morrow frowned. ‘No. No, I didn’t disappear. Milpitas, you sound like a child who believes that as soon as an object is out of sight, it no longer exists . . .’

Milpitas smiled. ‘What do
you
know of children?’

‘Now, a lot,’ Morrow said. He smiled, in turn, quite in control. ‘I didn’t disappear, Milpitas. I went somewhere else. I’ve done extraordinary things, Planner - seen wonderful sights.’

Milpitas folded his hands and settled back in his chair. ‘How did you get in?’

‘Past your sentries?’ Morrow smiled. ‘
We came in from above
. It took seconds, and we were quite silent. Your sentries were positioned to watch for an approach across the Deck; they didn’t imagine anyone would come in over their heads. They didn’t even know we were in the building, before we took them out.’

‘“Took them out”?’

‘They’re unconscious,’ Morrow said. ‘The forest people use a certain type of frog sweat, which . . . well, never mind. The sentries are unharmed.’

Milpitas tried to think of something to say - some words with which he could regain control of the situation. He felt a rising panic; suddenly, his orders had failed to be executed. He felt as if he were at the heart of some immense, dying machine, poking at buttons and levers which were no longer linked to anything.

Morrow’s voice was gentle. ‘It’s over. I know you believe what you’re doing is right, for the people. But this is for the best, Milpitas. More deaths would have been - inexcusable. You see that, don’t you?’

‘And the
mission
?’ Milpitas asked bitterly. ‘The goals of Paradoxa? What of that?’

‘That’s not over,’ Morrow said. ‘Come back with me, Milpitas. There are remarkable things out there. The mission is still alive . . . I want you to help me - help us - achieve it.’

Milpitas closed his eyes again; suddenly he felt immensely old, as if the energy which had sustained him for the best part of a thousand years were suddenly drained away.

‘I don’t know if I can,’ he said honestly.

Someone, in the depths of the Temple, stilled the klaxon at last; the final, chilling echoes of its wail rattled from the close, claustrophobic metal sky.

T
he pod slid, smooth and silent, down towards Titan.

Louise clutched at her seat. The hull was quite transparent, so that it felt as if she - swathed in her environment suit, with a catheter jammed awkwardly inside her - were suspended helplessly above the pale brown clouds of Titan.

Above her, the Xeelee nightfighter folded its huge wings.

Titan, Saturn’s largest satellite, was a world in itself: around three thousand miles across, larger than Earth’s Moon. As she descended, the cloudscape took on the appearance of an infinitely flat, textured plane. Huge low pressure systems in the photochemical smog spiralled around the world, and small, high clouds scudded across the stratosphere.

The first thin tendrils of air curled around the walls of the pod. Overhead, the stars were already misting out.

Suddenly the pod dropped, precipitously. She was jarred down into her seat. Then the little craft was yanked sideways, rocking alarmingly.

‘Lethe,’ Louise said ruefully, rubbing her spine.

Louise had left Spinner in the lounge, to follow the pod’s progress on the data desk. ‘Are you all right?’ Spinner asked now.

‘I’ve been better . . . I’m not hurt, Spinner-of-Rope.’

‘You knew you had to expect this kind of treatment. Titan’s atmosphere is a hundred miles thick: plenty of scope for generating a lot of weather. And there are high winds, up there at the top of the atmosphere.’

It was quite dark in the cabin now; the opaque atmosphere had enfolded the pod completely, leaving only the cabin lights to gleam from the transparent walls.

Spinner went on, ‘And did you know Titan has seasons? It’s spring; you’ve got to
expect a
lot of turbulence.’

As the pod dropped further it shuddered against a new onslaught; this time Louise thought she actually heard its structure creak.

‘Spring,’ murmured Louise. ‘“Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?”’

‘Louise?’

‘John Keats, Spinner-of-Rope. Never mind.’

Now the buffeting of the little ship seemed to lessen; she must have passed through the high-wind stratosphere. She pulled out a little slack in the restraints which bound her to the seat. Beyond the hull, the cabin lights illuminated flakes of ammonia ice, and fine swirls of murky gas shot up past the pod and out of sight.

‘It’s bloody dark,’ she muttered.

‘Louise, you’re dropping into a mush of methane, ethane and argon. It’s a smog of photochemical compounds, produced by the action of the Sun’s magnetosphere on the air - I can see a lot of hydrogen cyanide, and—’