Stephen Baxter - Xeelee 4 - Ring

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Ring
by Stephen Baxter
PART I
Event: System
[1]
Even at the moment she was born she knew something was wrong.
A face loomed over her: wide, smooth, smiling. The cheeks were damp, the
glistening eyes huge. "Lieserl. Oh, Lieserl..."
Lieserl. My name, then.
She explored the face before her, studying the lines around the eyes, the
humorous upturn of the mouth, the strong nose. It was an intelligent, lived - in
face. This is a good human being, she thought. Good stock...
"Good stock?"
This was impossible. She was impossible. She felt terrified of her own explosive
consciousness. She shouldn't even be able to focus her eyes yet...
She tried to touch her mother's face. Her own hand was still moist with amniotic
fluid - but it was growing visibly, the bones extending and broadening, filling
out the loose skin as if it were a glove.
She opened her mouth. It was dry, her gums already sore with budding teeth.
Strong arms reached beneath her; bony adult fingers dug into the aching flesh of
her back. She could sense other adults surrounding her, the bed in which she'd
been born, the outlines of a room.
Her mother held her high before a window. Lieserl's head lolled, the expanding
muscles still too weak to support the burgeoning weight of her skull. Spittle
laced across her chin.
An immense light flooded her eyes.
She cried out.
Her mother enfolded her in her arms. "The Sun, Lieserl. The Sun..."
The first few days were the worst.
Her parents - impossibly tall, looming figures - took her through brightly lit
rooms, a garden always flooded with sunlight. She learned to sit up. The muscles
in her back fanned out, pulsing as they grew. To distract her from the unending
pain, clowns tumbled over the grass before her, chortling through huge red lips,
before popping out of existence in clouds of pixels.
She grew explosively, feeding all the time, a million impressions crowding into
her soft sensorium.
There seemed to be no limit to the number of rooms in this place, this House.
Slowly she began to understand that some of the rooms were Virtual chambers
blank screens against which any number of images could be projected. But even
so, the House must comprise hundreds of rooms. And she - with her parents
wasn't alone here. There were other people. But at first they kept away, out of
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sight, apparent only by their actions: the meals they prepared, the toys they
left her.
On the third day her parents took her on a trip by flitter. It was the first
time she'd been away from the House, its grounds. As the flitter rose she stared
through the bulbous windows, pressing her nose to heated glass.
The House was a jumble of white, cube - shaped buildings, linked by corridors
and surrounded by garden - grass, trees. Further out there were bridges and
roads looping through the air above the ground, more houses like a child's
bricks sprinkled across glowing hillsides.
The flitter soared higher.
The journey was an arc over a toylike landscape. A breast of blue ocean curved
away from the land, all around her. This was the island of Skiros, Phillida
her mother - told her, and the sea was called the Aegean. The House was the
largest construct on the island. She could see huge, brown - painted spheres
dotting the heart of the island: carbon - sequestration domes, Phillida said,
balls of dry ice four hundred yards tall.
The flitter snuggled at last against a grassy sward close to the shore of the
ocean. Lieserl's mother lifted her out and placed her - on her stretching,
unsteady legs - on the rough, sandy grass.
Hand in hand, the little family walked down a short slope to the beach.
The Sun burned from an unbearably blue sky. Her vision seemed telescopic. She
looked at distant groups of children and adults playing - far away, halfway to
the horizon - and it was as if she was among them herself. Her feet, still
uncertain, pressed into gritty, moist sand.
She found mussels clinging to a ruined pier. She prized them away with a toy
spade, and gazed, fascinated, at their slime - dripping feet. She could taste
the brine salt on the air;
it seemed to permeate her very skin.
She sat on the sand with her parents, feeling her light costume stretch over her
still - spreading limbs. They played a simple game, of counters moving over a
floating Virtual board, with pictures of ladders and hissing snakes. There was
laughter, mock complaints by her father, elaborate pantomimes of cheating.
Her senses were electric. It was a wonderful day, full of light and joy,
extraordinarily vivid sensations. Her parents loved her - she could see that in
the way they moved with each other, came to her, played with her.
They must know she was different; but they didn't seem to care.
She didn't want to be different - to be wrong. She closed her mind against her
fears, and concentrated on the snakes, the ladders, the sparkling counters.
Every morning she woke up in a bed that felt too small.
Lieserl liked the garden. She liked to watch the flowers straining their tiny,
pretty faces toward the Sun, as the great light climbed patiently across the
sky. The sunlight made the flowers grow, her father told her. Maybe she was like
a flower, she thought, growing too quickly in all this sunlight.
The House was full of toys: colorful blocks, and puzzles, and dolls. She picked
them up and turned them over in her stretching, growing hands. She rapidly
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became bored with each toy, but one little gadget held her attention. It was a
tiny village immersed in a globe of water. There were tiny people in there,
frozen in mid - step as they walked, or ran, through their world. When her
awkward hands shook the globe, plastic snowflakes would swirl through the air,
settling over the encased streets and rooftops. She stared at the entombed
villagers, wishing she could become one of them:
become frozen in time as they were, free of this pressure of growing.
On the fifth day she was taken to a wide, irregularly shaped, sunlight
drenched classroom. This room was full of children - other children! The
children sat on the floor and played with paints and dolls, or talked earnestly
to brilliantly colored Virtual figures - smiling birds, tiny clowns.
The children turned to watch as she came in with her mother, their faces round
and bright, like dapples of sunlight through leaves. She'd never been so close
to other children before. Were these children different too?
One small girl scowled at her, and Lieserl quailed against her mother's legs.
But Phillida's familiar warm hands pressed into her back. "Go ahead. It's all
right."
As she stared at the unknown girl's scowling face, Lieserl's questions, her too
- adult, too - sophisticated doubts, seemed to evaporate. Suddenly, all that
mattered to her - all that mattered in the world - was that she should be
accepted by these children: that they wouldn't know she was different.
An adult approached her: a man, young, thin, his features bland with youth. He
wore a jumpsuit colored a ludicrous orange; in the sunlight, the glow of it
shone up over his chin. He smiled at her. "Lieserl, isn't it? My name's Paul.
We're glad you're here. Aren't we, people?"
He was answered by a rehearsed, chorused "Yes".
"Now come and we'll find something for you to do," Paul said. He led her across
the child - littered floor to a space beside a small boy. The boy - red
haired, with startling blue eyes - was staring at a Virtual puppet which
endlessly formed and reformed: the figure two, collapsing into two snowflakes,
two swans, two dancing children; the figure three, followed by three bears,
three fish swimming in the air, three cakes. The boy mouthed the numbers,
following the tinny voice of the Virtual. "Two. One. Two and one is three."
Paul introduced her to the boy - Tommy - and she sat down with him. Tommy, she
was relieved to find, was so fascinated by his Virtual that he scarcely seemed
aware that Lieserl was present - let alone different.
Tommy was resting on his stomach, his chin cupped in his palms. Lieserl,
awkwardly, copied his posture.
The number Virtual ran through its cycle. "Bye bye, Tommy! Goodbye, Lieserl!" It
winked out of existence.
Now Tommy turned to her - without appraisal, merely looking, with unconscious
acceptance.
Lieserl said, "Can we see that again?"
He yawned and stuck a finger into one nostril. "No. Let's see another. There's a
great one about the pre - Cambrian explosion - "
"The what?"
He waved a hand dismissively. "You know, the Burgess Shale and all that. Wait
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till you see Hallucigenia crawling over your neck..."
The children played, and learned, and napped. Later, the girl who'd scowled at
Lieserl - Ginnie - started some trouble. She poked fun at the way Lieserl's bony
wrists stuck out of her sleeves (Lieserl's growth rate was slowing, but she was
still expanding out of her clothes each day). Then - unexpectedly, astonishingly
- Ginnie started to bawl, claiming that Lieserl had walked through her Virtual.
When Paul came over Lieserl started to explain, calmly and rationally, that
Ginnie must be mistaken; but Paul told her not to cause such distress, and for
punishment she was forced to sit away from the other children for ten minutes,
without stimulation.
It was all desperately, savagely unfair. It was the longest ten minutes of
Lieserl's life. She glowered at Ginnie, filled with resentment.
The next day she found herself looking forward to going to the room with the
children again. She set off with her mother through sunlit corridors. They
reached the room Lieserl remembered - there was Paul, smiling a little wistfully
to her, and Tommy, and the girl Ginnie - but Ginnie seemed different: childlike,
unformed...
At least a head shorter than Lieserl.
Lieserl tried to recapture that delicious enmity of the day before, but it
vanished even as she conjured it. Ginnie was just a kid.
She felt as if something had been stolen from her.
Her mother squeezed her hand. "Come on. Let's find a new room for you to play
in."
Every day was unique. Every day Lieserl spent in a new place, with new people.
The world glowed with sunlight. Shining points trailed endlessly across the sky:
low - orbit habitats and comet nuclei, tethered for power and fuel. People
walked through a sea of information, with access to the Virtual libraries
available anywhere in the world, at a subvocalized command. The landscapes were
drenched with sentience; it was practically impossible to get lost, or be hurt,
or even to become bored.
On the ninth day Lieserl studied herself in a Virtual holomirror. She had the
image turn around, so she could see the shape of her skull, the lie of her hair.
There was still some childish softness in her face, she thought, but the woman
inside her was emerging already, as if her childhood was a receding tide. She
would look like Phillida in the strong - nosed set of her face, her large,
vulnerable eyes; but she would have the sandy coloring of her father, George.
Lieserl looked about nine years old. But she was just nine days old.
She bade the Virtual break up; it shattered into a million tiny, fly - sized
images of her face which drifted away in the sunlit air.
Phillida and George were fine parents, she thought. They were physicists; and
they both belonged to an organization they called "Superet". They spent their
time away from her working through technical papers - which scrolled through the
air like falling leaves - and exploring elaborate, onion - ring Virtual models
of stars. Although they were both clearly busy, they gave themselves to her
without hesitation. She moved in a happy world of smiles, sympathy and support.
Her parents loved her unreservedly. But that wasn't always enough.
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She started to come up with complicated, detailed questions. Like, what was the
mechanism by which she was growing so rapidly? She didn't seem to eat more than
the other children she encountered; what could be fuelling her absurd growth
rate?
How did she know so much? She'd been born self - aware, with even the rudiments
of language in her head. The Virtuals she interacted with in the classrooms were
fun, and she always seemed to learn something new; but she absorbed no more than
scraps of knowledge through the Virtuals compared to the feast of insight with
which she awoke each morning.
What had taught her, in the womb? What was teaching her now?
The strange little family had worked up some simple, homely rituals together.
Lieserl's favorite was the game, each evening, of snakes and ladders. George
brought home an old set - a real board made of card, and wooden counters.
Already Lieserl was too old for the game; but she loved the company of her
parents, her father's elaborate jokes, the simple challenge of the game, the
feel of the worn, antique counters.
Phillida showed her how to use Virtuals to produce her own game boards. Her
first efforts, on her eleventh day, were plain, neat forms, little more than
copies of the commercial boards she'd seen. But soon she began to experiment.
She drew a huge board of a million squares. It covered a whole room - she could
walk through the board, a planar sheet of light at about waist height. She
crammed the board with intricate, curling snakes, vast ladders, vibrantly
glowing squares - detail piled on detail.
The next morning she walked with eagerness to the room where she'd built her
board - and was immediately disappointed. Her efforts seemed pale, static,
derivative: obviously the work of a child, despite the assistance of the Virtual
software.
She wiped the board clean, leaving a grid of pale squares floating in the air.
Then she started to populate it again - but this time with animated half - human
snakes, slithering "ladders" of a hundred forms. She'd learned to access the
Virtual libraries, and she plundered the art and history of a hundred centuries
to populate her board.
Of course it was no longer possible to play games on the board, but that didn't
matter. The board was the thing, a world in itself. She withdrew a little from
her parents, spending long hours in deep searches through the libraries. She
gave up her daily classes. Her parents didn't seem to mind; they came to speak
to her regularly, and showed an interest in her projects, but they respected her
privacy.
The board kept her interest the next day. But now she evolved elaborate games,
dividing the board into countries and empires with arbitrary bands of glowing
light. Armies of ladder - folk joined with legions of snakes in crude
recreations of the great events of human history.
She watched the symbols flicker across the Virtual board, shimmering,
coalescing; she dictated lengthy chronicles of the histories of her imaginary
countries.
By the end of the day, though, she was starting to grow more interested in the
history texts she was consulting than in her own elaborations on them. She went
to bed, eager for the next morning to come.
She awoke in darkness, doubled in agony.
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She called for light. She sat up in bed.
Blood spotted the sheets. She screamed.
Phillida sat with her, cradling her head. Lieserl pressed herself against her
mother's warmth, trying to still her trembling.
"I think it's time you asked me your questions."
Lieserl sniffed. "What questions?"
"The ones you've carried around with you since the moment you were born."
Phillida smiled. "I could see it in your eyes, even at that moment. You poor
thing... to be burdened with so much awareness. I'm sorry, Lieserl."
Lieserl pulled away. Suddenly she felt cold, vulnerable. "Who am I, Phillida?"
"You're my daughter." Phillida placed her hands on Lieserl's shoulders and
pushed her face close; Lieserl could feel the warmth of her breath, and the soft
room light caught the gray in her mother's blond hair, making it shine. "Never
forget that. You're as human as I am. But - " She hesitated.
"But what?"
"But you're being - engineered.
"There are nanobots in your body," Phillida said. "Do you understand what a
nanobot is? A machine at the molecular level which - "
"I know what a nanobot is," Lieserl snapped. "I know all about AntiSenescence
and nanobots. I'm not a child, Mother."
"Of course not," Phillida said seriously. "But in your case, my darling, the
nanobots have been programmed - not to reverse aging - but to accelerate it. Do
you understand?"
Nanobots swarmed through Lieserl's body. They plated calcium over her bones,
stimulated the generation of new cells, forced her body to sprout like some
absurd human sunflower - they even implanted memories, artificial learning,
directly into her cortex.
Lieserl felt like scraping at her skin, gouging out this artificial infection.
'"Why? Why did you let this be done to me?"
Phillida pulled her close, but Lieserl stayed stiff, resisting mutely. Phillida
buried her face in Lieserl's hair; Lieserl felt the soft weight of her mother's
cheek on the crown of her head. "Not yet," Phillida said. "Not yet. A few more
days, my love. That's all..."
Phillida's cheeks grew warmer, as if she were crying, silently, into her
daughter's hair.
Lieserl returned to her snakes and ladders board. She found herself looking on
her creation with affection, but also nostalgic sadness; she felt distant from
this elaborate, slightly obsessive concoction.
Already she'd outgrown it.
She walked into the middle of the sparkling board and bade a Sun, a foot wide,
rise out from the center of her body. Light swamped the board, shattering it.
She wasn't the only adolescent who had constructed fantasy worlds like this. She
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read about the Brontes, in their lonely parsonage in the north of England, and
their elaborate shared world of kings and princes and empires. And she read
about the history of the humble game of snakes and ladders. The game had come
from India, where it was a morality teaching aid called Moksha - Patamu. There
were twelve vices and four virtues, and the objective was to get to Nirvana. It
was easier to fail than to succeed... The British in the nineteenth century had
adopted the game as an instructional guide for children called Kismet; Lieserl
stared at images of claustrophobic boards, forbidding snakes. Thirteen snakes
and eight ladders showed children that if they were good and obedient their life
would be rewarded.
But by a few decades later the game had lost its moral subtexts. Lieserl found
images from the early twentieth century of a sad - looking little clown who
clambered heroically up ladders and slithered haplessly down snakes.
The game, with its charm and simplicity, had survived through the twenty
centuries which had worn away since the death of that forgotten clown. Lieserl
stared at him, trying to understand the appeal of his baggy trousers, walking
cane and little - moustache.
She grew interested in the numbers embedded in the various versions of the game.
The twelve - to - four ratio of Moksha - Patamu clearly made it a harder game to
win than Kismet's thirteen - to - eight - but how much harder?
She began to draw new boards in the air. But these boards were abstractions
clean, colorless, little more than sketches. She ran through high - speed
simulated games, studying their outcomes. She experimented with ratios of snakes
to ladders, with their placement. Phillida sat with her and introduced her to
combinatorial mathematics, the theory of games - to different forms of wonder.
On her fifteenth day she tired of her own company and started to attend classes
again. She found the perceptions of others a refreshing counterpoint to her own,
high - speed learning.
The world seemed to open up around her like a flower; it was a world full of
sunlight, of endless avenues of information, of stimulating people.
She read up on nanobots. She learned the secret of Anti - Senescence, the
process which had rendered humans effectively immortal.
Body cells were programmed to commit suicide.
Left alone, a cell manufactured enzymes which cut its own DNA into neat pieces,
and quietly closed itself down. The suicide of cells was a guard against
uncontrolled growth - tumors - and a tool to sculpt the developing body:
in the womb, for example, the withering of unwanted cells carved fingers and
toes from blunt tissue buds.
Death was the default state of a cell. Chemical signals had to be sent out by
the body, to instruct cells to remain alive. It was a dead - man's - switch
control mechanism: if cells grew out of control - or if they separated from
their parent organ and wandered through the body - the reassuring environment of
chemical signals would be lost, and they would be forced to die.
The nanotechnological manipulation of this process made AntiSenescence simple.
It also made simple the manufacture of a Lieserl.
Lieserl studied this, scratching absently at her inhabited, engineered arms.
She looked up the word Superet in the Virtual libraries. She had access to no
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reference to it. She wasn't an expert at data mining, but she thought there was
a hole here.
Information about Superet was being kept from her.
With a boy called Matthew, from her class, she took a trip away from the House
without her parents, for the first time. They rode a flitter to the shore where
she'd played as a child, twelve days earlier. She found the broken pier where
she'd discovered mussels. The place seemed less vivid - less magical - and she
felt a sad nostalgia for the loss of the freshness of her childish senses. She
wondered why no adult ever commented on this dreadful loss of acuity. Perhaps
they just forgot, she thought.
But there were other compensations.
Her body was strong, lithe, and the sunlight was like warm oil on her skin. She
ran and swam, relishing the sparkle of the ozone - laden air in her lungs. She
and Matthew mock - wrestled and chased in the surf, clambering over each other
like children, she thought, but not quite with complete innocence.
As sunset approached they allowed the flitter to return them to the House. They
agreed to meet the next day, perhaps take another trip somewhere. Matthew kissed
her lightly, on the lips, as they parted.
That night she could barely sleep. She lay in the dark of her room, the scent of
salt still strong in her nostrils, the image of Matthew alive in her mind. Her
body seemed to pulse with hot blood, with its endless, continuing growth.
The next day - her sixteenth - Lieserl rose quickly. She'd never felt so alive;
her skin still glowed from the salt and sunlight of the shore, and there was a
hot tension inside her, an ache deep in her belly, a tightness.
When she reached the flitter bay at the front of the House, Matthew was waiting
for her. His back was turned, the low sunlight causing the fine hairs at the
base of his neck to glow.
He turned to face her.
He reached out to her, uncertainly, then allowed his hands to drop to his sides.
He didn't seem to know what to say; his posture changed, subtly, his shoulders
slumping slightly; before her eyes he was becoming shy of her.
She was taller than him. Visibly older. She became abruptly aware of the still
childlike roundness of his face, the awkwardness of his manner. The thought of
touching him - the memory of her feverish dreams during the night - seemed
absurd, impossibly adolescent.
She felt the muscles in her neck tighten; she felt as if she must scream.
Matthew seemed to recede from her, as if she were viewing him through a tunnel.
Once again the laboring nanobots - the vicious, unceasing technological
infection of her body - had taken away part of her life.
This time, though, it was too much to bear.
Phillida had never looked so old. Her skin seemed drawn tight across the bones
of her face, the lines etched deep. "I'm sorry," she said. "Believe me. When we
- George and I - volunteered for Superet's program, we knew it would be painful.
But we never dreamed how much. Neither of us had children before. Perhaps if we
had, we'd have been able to anticipate how this would feel."
"I'm a freak - an absurd experiment," Lieserl shouted. "A construct. Why did you
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make me human? Why not some insentient animal? Why not a Virtual?"
"Oh, you had to be human. As human as possible..."
"I'm human in fragments," Lieserl said bitterly. "In shards. Which are taken
away from me as soon as they're found. That's not humanity, Phillida. It's
grotesque."
"I know. I'm sorry, my love. Come with me."
"Where?"
"Outside. To the garden. I want to show you something."
Suspicious, hostile, Lieserl allowed her mother to take her hand; but she made
her fingers lie lifeless, cold in Phillida's warm grasp.
It was mid - morning now. The Sun's light flooded the garden; flowers - white
and yellow - strained up toward the sky.
Lieserl looked around; the garden was empty. "What am I supposed to be seeing?"
Phillida, solemnly, pointed upwards.
Lieserl tilted back her head, shading her eyes to block out the Sun. The sky was
a searing - blue dome, marked only by a high vapour trail and the lights of
orbital habitats.
Gently, Phillida pulled Lieserl's hand down from her face, and, cupping her
chin, tipped her face flower - like toward the Sun.
The star's light seemed to fill her head. Dazzled, she dropped her eyes and
stared at Phillida through a haze of blurred, streaked retinal images. "The
Sun?"
"Lieserl, you were - constructed. You know that. You're being forced through a
human lifecycle at hundreds of times the normal pace - "
"A year every day."
"Approximately, yes. But there is a purpose, Lieserl. A justification. You
aren't simply an experiment. You have a mission." She waved her hand at the
sprawling, friendly buildings that comprised the House. "Most of the people
here, particularly the children, don't know anything about you, Lieserl. They
have jobs, goals - lives of their own to follow. But they're here for you.
"Lieserl, the House is here to imprint you with humanity. Your experiences have
been designed - George and I were selected, even - to ensure that the first few
days of your existence would be as human as possible."
"The first few days?" Suddenly the unknowable future was like a black wall,
looming toward her; she felt as out of control of her life as if she were a
counter on some immense, invisible snakes - and - ladders board. She lifted her
face to the warmth of the Sun. "What am I?"
"You are... artificial, Lieserl.
"In a few weeks your human shell will become old. You'll be transferred into a
new form... Your human body will be - "
"Discarded?"
"Lieserl, it's so difficult. That moment will seem like a death to me. But it
won't be death. It will be a metamorphosis. You'll have new powers - even your
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awareness will be reconstructed. Lieserl, you'll become the most conscious
entity in the Solar System..."
"I don't want that. I want to be me. I want my freedom, Phillida."
"No, Lieserl. You're not free, I'm afraid; you never can be. You have a goal."
"What goal?"
Phillida lifted her face to the Sun once more. "The Sun gave us life. Without it
- without the other stars - we couldn't survive.
"We're a strong species. We believe we can live as long as the stars - for tens
of billions of years. And perhaps even beyond that... If we're allowed to. But
we've had - glimpses - of the future, the far distant future. Disturbing
glimpses.
"People are starting to plan, to assure we're granted our destiny. People are
working on projects which will take millions of years to come to fruition...
People like those working for Superet.
"Lieserl, you're one of those projects."
"I don't understand."
Phillida took her hand, squeezed it gently; the simple human contact seemed
incongruous, the garden around them transient, a chimera, before this talk of
megayears and the future of the species.
"Lieserl, something is wrong with the Sun. You have to find out what. The Sun is
dying; something - or someone - is killing it." Phillida's eyes were huge before
her, staring, probing for understanding. "Don't be afraid. My dear, you will
live forever. If you want to. And you will see wonders which I can only dream
of."
Lieserl stared into her mother's huge, weak eyes. "But you don't envy me. Do
you, Phillida?"
"No," Phillida said quietly.
[2]
Louise Ye Armonk stood on the weather deck of the SS Great Britain. From here
she could see the full length of Brunei's fine steam liner: the polished deck,
the skylights, the airy masts with their loops of wire rigging, the single,
squat funnel amidships.
And beyond the glowing dome which sheltered the old ship, the sky of the Solar
System's rim loomed like a huge, empty room.
Louise still felt a little drunk - sourly now - from the orbiting party she'd
left a few minutes earlier. She subvocalized a command to send nanobots scouring
through her bloodstream; she sobered up fast, with a brief shudder.
Mark Bassett Friar Armonk Wu - Louise's ex-husband - stood close by her. They'd
left the Great Northern, with its party still in full swing, to come here, to
the surface of Port Sol, in a cramped pod. Mark was dressed in a one-piece
jumpsuit of some pastel fabric; the lines of his neck were long and elegant as
he turned his head to survey the old ship.
Louise was glad they were alone, that none of the Northern's prospective
interstellar colonists had decided to follow them down for a last few moments on
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/St...en%20Baxter%20-%20Xeelee%2004%20-%20Ring.txt (10 of 283) [10/18/2004 5:31:36 PM]
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file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Stephen%20Baxter%20-%20Xeelee%2004%20-%20Ring.txtRingbyStephenBaxterPARTIEvent:System[1]Evenatthemomentshewasbornsheknewsomethingwaswrong.Afaceloomedoverher:wide,smooth,smiling.Thecheeksweredamp,theglisteningeyeshuge."Lieserl.Oh,Lieserl..."Lieserl.Myname,t...

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