Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (165 page)

It was something like a sycamore seed wrought in jet-black. Night-dark wings that spanned hundreds of miles loomed over the wreck of Poole’s GUTship, softly rippling.

‘A nightfighter,’ Spinner breathed.

‘Yes?’

And then, something had plucked Poole from the wreck. It was as if a giant hand had cupped his consciousness, like taking a flame from a guttering candle.

Poole had become discorporeal. He no longer even had a heartbeat.

He felt as if he had been released from the cave of bone that had been his head.

I believe I became a construct of quantum functions
, he said.
A tapestry of acausal and nonlocal effects . . . I don’t pretend to understand it. And my companion was still there. It was like a huge ceiling over me.

‘What was it?’

I sensed - amusement
, Poole said slowly.
It was amused by my fear, my wonder, my longing to survive
. She heard the faded ghost of bitterness in his voice.

At first, I was angry. I was in despair
. He held up his glowing hand and inspected it thoughtfully, turning it round before his face.
I couldn’t understand why this had been done to me - why I’d been preserved in this grotesque way.

He fell silent, and she watched his face. It was blank, expressionless; she felt a prickle of fear, and wondered what experiences he had undergone, alone between the dying stars.

‘Michael,’ she said gently. ‘Why did you speak to me?’

His bleak expression dissolved, and he smiled at her.
I saw a human being
, he said.
A man, dressed in skins, frost-bitten, in a fragile little ship . . . He came plunging through a wormhole Interface, uncontrolled, into this hostile future.

Spinner nodded. ‘He was Arrow Maker. He was my father,’ she said.

Michael Poole closed his eyes.

‘ . . . Spinner-of-Rope,’ Louise Armonk said. She sounded urgent, concerned.

‘Yes, Louise.’

‘I don’t know what in Lethe is happening in that head of yours, but you’d better get it clear fast.’ Spinner heard Louise issue commands over her shoulder. ‘ . . . We’ve got a problem.’

‘What kind of problem?’

‘Listen to me, Spinner. Here’s what you must—’

Louise’s voice died, abruptly.

‘Louise? Louise?’

There was only silence.

Spinner twisted in her couch. Behind her, the bulk of the lifedome loomed over the clean lines of the nightfighter, a wall of glass and steady light.

But now a soft webbing, a mesh of barely visible threads, lay over the upper levels of the lifedome.

‘Lethe,’ Spinner hissed. ‘That’s
string
.’

For the first time in several years, the Decks were filled with the wail of the klaxon.

Morrow, hovering in the green-tinged air close to Deck Two, straightened from his work. His back ached pleasurably, and there was warm dirt and water on his hands; he felt a fine slick of sweat on his forehead.

He looked around vaguely, seeking the source of the alarm.

Milpitas, his sleeves rolled up and the deep scars of his face running with sweat, studied him. The Planner fingered a handful of reeds which protruded from the spherical pond. ‘Morrow? Is something wrong? Why the klaxon?’

‘I don’t know, Planner.’

The sound of the klaxon was deafening - at once familiar and jarring, making it hard to think. Morrow looked around the Decks, at the tranquil, three-dimensional motion of people and ‘bots as they went about their business; in the distance the shoulders of the Temples loomed over the grass-covered surfaces. It all looked normal, placid; he felt relaxed and safe.

Morrow was working with Milpitas within what had once been Poole Park. They were still trying to establish their zero-gee water feature. Milpitas and Morrow had set a ball of earth on a fine pole, attached it to the Deck surface, and surrounded it with a globe of water five feet across, restrained by a fine skin of porous plastic. Reeds and lilies were planted in the ball of earth, and were already growing out of the water surface. Their vision was that the reeds and lilies - perhaps plaited in some way - together with the water’s natural surface tension would eventually suffice to hold the pond together, and they could abandon the plastic membrane.

Then, at last, they could populate the pond, with fish and frogs.

It was a small, almost trivial project. But it had actually been Milpitas’ idea, and Morrow had been glad to offer to work on it with him, as part of what he thought of as Milpitas’ rehabilitation to zero-gee. Anything that got the Planner - and those he influenced - thinking and working in zero-gee conditions was a good thing, in Morrow’s view.

‘Morrow.’ Louise Armonk’s voice emerged from a point in the air. It was loud, urgent in his ear. ‘
Morrow
. Can you hear me?’

Morrow looked down to the grass-coated floor of the Deck; he knew that Louise was somewhere below his floor in her old steam-ship, studying the neutron star system. ‘What is it, Louise?’

‘Morrow, you have to get away from there.’

‘But, Louise—’

‘
Move
, damn it.
Anywhere
.’

Milpitas was studying him. ‘Well?
Is
there a problem?’

‘Milpitas.
Come
.’

Morrow grabbed the Planner’s robe at the shoulder. He flexed his knees, planted his feet squarely against the Deck surface, and pushed himself into the air, dragging Milpitas after him. Looking down, he saw the spherical pond recede below them.

Air resistance brought them to a stop in mid-air, five yards above the Deck surface.

Morrow released the Planner. Milpitas’ arms were still wet to the elbow, and his bony legs protruded from beneath his robe.

‘Louise? All right, we’ve moved.
Now
will you tell me what’s wrong?’

‘We’re in trouble.’ Morrow heard panicky shouting behind Louise’s voice, and flat, even commands being issued by Mark. ‘We’re in the path of a section of string . . . If our projections are correct, it’s going to pass right through Poole Park.’

Morrow stared around at the Decks. Suddenly the metal walls of this place, coated with plants and people, seemed impossibly fragile. ‘But how can that be? I thought that loop was light-years away.’

‘So did we, Morrow. We’re trying to confirm the string’s trajectory so we can program the discontinuity-drive waldoes, and—’

But Louise’s voice was gone.

Lieserl and Mark stood on the surface of the neutron star planet, in Virtual mockups of environment suits. They looked at each other uncertainly.

‘Something’s wrong,’ Lieserl said.

‘I know.’ Through his sketch of a faceplate, Mark’s expression was lifeless, cold; Lieserl knew that meant he was diverting processing power to higher priorities.

The surface under Lieserl’s feet was pumice-grey and looked friable. Beside them, waiting patiently, was a ‘bot, a fat-wheeled trolley fitted with a few articulated arms and sensors. The dust of the planet had smeared the ‘bot’s wheels with grey, Lieserl saw.

A few yards away their pod was a fat, gleaming cylinder; within the pod’s clear walls Lieserl could see Uvarov, wrapped in his blanket.

The sky was fantastic. The gas ring was a belt of smoke which encompassed the world, all the way to the horizon. The far side of the ring was a pale strip of white, bisecting the sky. She could just make out the neutron star itself, a tiny, baleful blood-pearl threaded onto the line of smoke; and its huge companion was an attenuated ball of yellow-grey mist, bleeding gas onto its malevolent twin.

The starbow was a crack across the emptiness away from the plane of the ring; high above her head, Lieserl could see the gleaming lights of the
Northern
’s lifedome, in the ship’s remote orbit around the planet.

The building they had detected from orbit was a tetrahedron, twenty feet tall, sitting impassively on the surface.

Lieserl felt frustrated. Had they come so far, approached this astonishing mystery, so closely, only for their comms links to fail?

She tapped her helmet. ‘I feel as if I’ve gone deaf,’ she said.

‘Me too.’ Mark smiled thinly, some of the expression returning to the waxy image of his face. ‘Well, we’ve certainly lost the voice links from the
Northern
.’ He looked up uneasily. ‘I wonder what in Lethe is happening up there.’

‘Maybe they are trying to recall us.’

Mark shrugged. ‘Or maybe not.’ He looked at her. ‘Lieserl, do you
feel
any different? As far as I can tell the links to the central processors back on the
Northern
are still functioning - although I’m working read-only at the moment.’

She closed her eyes and looked inwards. ‘Yes. It’s the same for me.’ Read-only meant she couldn’t pass her impressions - the new memories she was laying down - back to the processors on the
Northern
which were now the core of her awareness. She looked up at the
Northern
’s steady yellow light. ‘Do you think we should go back?’

Mark hesitated, looking back at the pod.

Uvarov stirred, like an insect in some glass cocoon, Lieserl thought. ‘I’m the only one of us who’s in genuine danger here,’ he rasped. ‘The two of you are just projections. Virtual phantasms. You are only wearing those damn suits as crutches for your psyches, in Lethe’s name. Even if this planet exploded now, all you’d lose would be a few hours of
data input
.’ He snarled the last words like an insult.

‘What’s your point, Uvarov?’ Mark said.

‘Get on with your search,’ Uvarov snapped. ‘Stop wasting time. There is nothing you can do about whatever problems are occurring at the
Northern
. For Life’s sake, look at the bigger picture. The baryonic Universe is coming to an end. What can happen to make things worse than that?’

Mark laughed, a little grimly. ‘All right, Doctor. Come on, Lieserl.’ They trudged over the surface towards the structure.

The klaxon died. The sudden silence was shocking.

Morrow tapped his ear - he thought self-deprecatingly, as if
that
would restore the Virtual projection of Louise’s voice.

Milpitas had left his side. With surprising agility the Planner had
swum
down through the air, away from Morrow and back towards the pond.

There was a grind of metal, high above him.

He heard a single scream - an unearthly sound that echoed from the walls, rattling through the silence of the Decks. And now there was another scream - but this time, Morrow realized, it was the product of no human voice; the shriek was of air escaping from a breached hull.

He peered up into the shining air, looking for the breach.

There
. Against one wall, mist was gathering over a straight-line gash which sliced through a field of dwarf wheat. A literacy-recovery class had been working there; now, people scrambled through the air, away from the billowing fog, screaming.

He heard Milpitas grunt. Morrow looked down.

Milpitas stared down at his midriff and clasped his hands over his belly. His scarred face was creased into an expression of disapproving surprise, and - in that final instant - Morrow was reminded of Planner Milpitas as he had once been: tough-minded, controlling, forcing the world to bend to his will.

Then Milpitas folded forward, around a line just below his solar plexus. For the first fraction of a second it looked as if he were doubling over in pain - but, Morrow saw with mounting horror,
Milpitas kept on folding
, bending until Morrow could hear the crackle of crushed ribs, the deeper snap of vertebrae.

There was nothing visible, nobody near Milpitas; it was as if he were inflicting this unimaginable horror on himself, or as if the Planner’s body had been crumpled in some huge, transparent fist.

Then, it seemed that that same huge fist - powerful, irresistible, invisible- grabbed Morrow himself and hurled him down towards the Deck.

He screamed and wrapped his arms around his head.

He smashed into the spherical pond, so lovingly constructed by himself and Milpitas. Reeds and lilies slapped at his face and arms, and brackish water forced itself into his eyes and mouth.

Then he was through the pond, and the Deck surface hurtled up to meet him, unimaginably hard.

The tetrahedron was liberally coated with dust. Mark had the ‘bot roll forward and wipe the building’s surface, tentatively. Beneath a half-inch thickness of the dust, the material of the tetrahedron’s construction was milky-white, seamless. The triangular faces gave the structure the look of something flimsy, or temporary, Lieserl thought - like a tent of cloth.

It had been Mark’s suggestion for them to approach this structure in human form. ‘We want to know - among other things - if
people
built this thing, and why,’ he had argued. ‘How else are we going to get a genuine feel for the place, unless we look at it through human eyes?’ Lieserl hadn’t been sure. To restrict themselves to human form - more than was necessary to interface with Uvarov - had seemed inefficient. But, staring at the structure now, Lieserl realized what a good idea it had been.