Stephen Baxter - Xeelee 2 - Timelike Infinity

Timelike Infinity

by Stephen Baxter

Book 2 of the Xeelee Sequence

To my niece, Jessica Bourg

About the Author

Chapter 1

The flitter rose from Occupied Earth like a stone thrown from a blue bowl. The little cylindrical craft

tumbled slowly as it climbed, sparkling.

Jasoft Parz had been summoned to a meeting, in orbit, with the Qax Governor of Earth. Parz scoured a

mind worn into grooves of habit by his years in the diplomatic service for reasons for this summons. It

must be connected with the arrival of the damned wormhole from the past, of course—that had stirred

up the Qax like a stick in a hornet's nest.

But why summon him now? What had changed?

As his distance from the planet increased, so grew Parz's apprehension.

Alone in the automated flitter Parz watched shafts of cerulean Earthlight thread through the small ports

and, twisting with the craft's rotation, dissect the dusty air around him. As always the glowing innocence

of the planet took his breath away. Two centuries of Qax Occupation had left few visible scars on Earth's

surface—far fewer, in fact, than the damage wrought by humans during their slow, haphazard rise to

technological civilization. But still it was disturbing to see how the Qax-run plankton farms bordered

every continent in green; and on the land, scattered and gleaming plains of glass marked man's brief and

inglorious struggle against the Qax.

Parz had studied these mirrored landscapes from space—how many times before? A hundred, a

thousand times? And each time he had struggled to recall the reactions of his youth on first seeing the

sites of the destroyed cities. That liberating, burning anger: the determination not to compromise as

those around him had compromised. Yes, he would work within the system—even carve out a career in

the hated diplomatic service, the collaborative go-between of human and Qax. But his purpose had been

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to find a way to restore the pride of man.

Well, Jasoft, he asked himself, and what has become of those fine intentions? Where did they get lost,

over all these muddy years? Parz probed at his leathery old emotions. Sometimes he wondered if it were

possible for him genuinely to feel anything anymore; even the city scars had been degraded in his

perception, so that now they served only as convenient triggers for nostalgia for his youth.

Of course, if he wished, he could blame the Qax even for his very aging. Had the Qax not destroyed

mankind's AS technology base within months of the Occupation?

Sometimes Parz wondered how it would feel to be an AS-preserved person. What would nostalgia be,

for the permanently young?

A soft chime sounded through the flitter, warning Parz that his rendezvous with the Spline fleet was less

than five minutes away. Parz settled back in his seat and closed his eyes, sighing a little as semisentient

cushions adjusted themselves to the curvature of his spine and prodded and poked at aching back

muscles; he rested his bony, liver-spotted fingers on the briefcase that lay on the small table before him.

He tried to focus on his coming meeting with the Governor. This was going to be a difficult meeting—

but had they ever been easy? Parz's challenge was going to be to find a way to calm the Governor,

somehow: to persuade it not to take any drastic action as a result of the wormhole incident, not to stiffen

the Occupation laws again.

As if on cue the mile-wide bulk of the Governor's Spline flagship slid into his view, dwarfing the flitter

and eclipsing Earth. Parz could not help but quail at the Spline's bulk. The flagship was a rough sphere,

free of the insignia and markings that would have adorned the human vessels of a few centuries earlier.

The hull was composed—not of metal or plastic—but of a wrinkled, leathery hide, reminiscent of the

epidermis of some battered old elephant. This skin-hull was punctured with pockmarks yards wide, vast

navels within which sensors and weapons glittered suspiciously. In one pit an eye rolled, fixing Parz

disconcertingly; the eye was a gleaming ball three yards across and startlingly human, a testament to the

power of convergent evolution. Parz found himself turning away from its stare, almost guiltily. Like the

rest of the Spline's organs the eye had been hardened to survive the bleak conditions of spaceflight—

including the jarring, shifted perspectives of hyperspace—and had been adapted to serve the needs of the

craft's passengers. But the Spline itself remained sentient, Parz knew; and he wondered now how much

of the weight of that huge gaze came from the awareness of the Spline itself, and how much from the

secondary attention of its passengers.

Parz pushed his face closer to the window. Beyond the Spline's fleshy horizon, a blue, haunting sliver of

Earth arced across the darkness; and to the old man it felt as if a steel cable were tugging from his heart

to that inaccessible slice of his home planet. And above the blue arc he saw another Spline ship, reduced

by perspective to the size of his fist. This one was a warship, he saw; its flesh-hull bristled with weapons

emplacements—most of them pointing at Parz, menacingly, as if daring him to try something. The vast

threat of the mile-wide battleship struck Parz as comical; he raised a bony fist at the Spline and stuck out

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his tongue.

Beyond the warship, he saw now, sailed yet another Spline craft, this one a mere pink-brown dot, too

distant for his eyes—augmented as they were by corneal and retinal image-enhancing technology—to

make out details. And beyond that still another Spline rolled through space.

Like fleshy moons the Spline fleet encircled the Earth, effortlessly dominant.

Parz was one of only a handful of humans who had been allowed off the surface of the planet since the

imposition of the Qax Occupation laws, one of still fewer who had been brought close to any section of

the main Qax fleet.

Humans had first emerged from their home planet two and a half millennia earlier, optimistic,

expanding, and full of hope… or so it seemed to Jasoft now. Then had come the first contact with an

extra-Solar species—the group-mind entity known as the Squeem—and that hope had died.

Humans were crushed; the first occupation of Earth began.

But the Squeem were overthrown. Humans had moved out once more from Earth.

Then the Qax had found a human craft.

There had been a honeymoon period. Trading links with the Qax had been established, cultural

exchanges discussed.

It hadn't lasted long.

As soon as the Qax had found out how weak and naive humanity really was, the Spline warships had

moved in.

Still, that brief period of first contact had provided humanity with most of its understanding about the

Qax and their dominion. For instance, it had been learned that the Spline vessels employed by the Qax

were derived from immense, sea-going creatures with articulated limbs, which had once scoured the

depths of some world-girdling ocean. The Spline developed spaceflight, traveled the stars for millennia.

Then, perhaps a million years earlier, they had made a strategic decision.

The Spline rebuilt themselves.

They plated over their flesh, hardened their internal organs—and rose from the surface of their planet

like mile-wide, studded balloons. They had become living ships, feeding on the thin substance between

the stars.

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The Spline had become carriers, earning their place in the universe by hiring themselves out to any one

of a hundred species.

It wasn't a bad strategy for racial survival, Parz mused. The Spline must work far beyond the bubble of

space explored by humankind before the Qax Occupation—beyond, even, the larger volume worked by

the Qax, within which humanity's sad little zone was embedded.

Someday the Qax would be gone, Parz knew. Maybe it would be humanity that would do the

overthrowing; maybe not. In any event there would be trade under the governance of a new race, new

messages and matériel to carry between the stars. New wars to fight. And there would be the Spline, the

greatest ships available—with the probable exception, Parz conceded to himself, of the unimaginable

navies of the Xeelee themselves—still plying between the stars, unnoticed and immortal.

The small viewport glowed briefly crimson, its flawed plastic sparkling with laser speckle. Then a

translator box built somewhere into the fabric of the flitter hissed into life, and Parz knew that the Spline

had established a tight laser link. Something inside him quailed further now that the climax of his

journey approached; and when the Qax Governor of Earth finally spoke to him in its flat, disturbingly

feminine voice, he flinched.

"Ambassador Parz. Your torso is arranged at an awkward angle in your chair. Are you ill?"

Parz grimaced. This was the nearest, he knew, that a Qax would ever come to a social nicety; it was a

rare enough honor, accorded him by his long relationship with the Governor. "My back is hurting me,

Governor," he said. "I apologize. I won't let it distract my attention from our business."

"I trust not. Why don't you have it repaired?"

Parz tried to compose a civil answer, but the forefront of his consciousness was filled once more with a

distracting awareness of his own aging. Parz was seventy years old. If he had lived in the years before

the coming of the Qax, he would now be entering the first flush of his maturity, he supposed, his body

cleansed and renewed, his mind refreshed, reorganized, rationalized, his reactions rendered as fresh as a

child's. But AntiSenescence technology was no longer available; evidently it suited the Qax to have

humanity endlessly culled by time. Once, Parz recalled, he had silently raged at the Qax for this

imposition above all: for the arbitrary curtailment of billions of immortal human lives, for the

destruction of all that potential. Well, he didn't seem to feel anger at anything much anymore…

But, he thought bitterly, of all the plagues that the Qax had restored to mankind, he would never forgive

them his aching back.

"Thank you for your kindness, Governor," he snapped. "My back is not something that can be fixed. It is

a parameter within which I must work, for the rest of my life."

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The Qax considered that, briefly; then it said, "I am concerned that your functionality is impaired."

"Humans no longer live forever, Governor," Parz whispered. And he dared to add: "Thank God." This

was the only consolation of age, he reflected tiredly, wriggling in the chair to encourage it to probe

harder at his sore points—that meetings like these must, surely soon, come to an end for him.

"Well," said the Qax, with a delicate touch of irony about its sophisticated artificial voice, "let us

proceed before your bodily components fail altogether. The wormhole. The object is now within the

cometary halo of this System."

"The Oort Cloud, yes. Barely a third of a light-year from the Sun." Parz waited a few seconds for the

Qax to indicate specifically why he'd been brought here. When the Qax said nothing he drew data slates

from his briefcase and scrolled down lists of facts, diagrams, running over the general briefing he had

prepared earlier.

"It is an ancient human artifact," the Qax said.

"Yes." Parz retrieved an image on his slate—glowing frameworks against a salmon-pink backgrounds—

and pressed keys to dump it through the tabletop and down the link to the Governor. "This is a video

image of the launch of the artifact from the orbit of Jupiter, some fifteen hundred years ago. It was

known as the Interface project." He touched a fingernail to the slate to indicate the details. "In essence,

two tetrahedral frameworks were constructed. Each framework was about three miles wide. The

frameworks threaded the termini of a spacetime wormhole." He looked up, vaguely, in the direction of

the ceiling. Not for the first time he wished he had some image of the Governor on which to fix his

attention, just a little something to reduce the disorienting nature of these meetings; otherwise he felt

surrounded by the awareness of the Governor, as if it were some huge god. "Governor, do you want

details? A wormhole permits instantaneous travel between two spacetime points by—"

"Continue."

Parz nodded. "One tetrahedral framework was left in orbit around Jupiter, while the other was

transported at sublight speeds away from the Earth, in the direction of the center of the Galaxy."

"Why that direction?"

Parz shrugged. "The direction was unimportant. The objective was merely to take one end of the

wormhole many light-years away from the Earth, and later to return it."

Parz's table chimed softly. Images, now accessed directly by the Qax, scrolled across his slate:

engineering drawings of the tetrahedra from all angles, pages of relativistic equations… The portal

frameworks themselves looked like pieces of fine art, he thought, or, perhaps, jewelry resting against the

mottled cheek of Jupiter.

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"How were the tetrahedra constructed?" the Qax asked.

"From exotic matter."

"From what?"

"It's a human term," Parz snapped. "Look it up. A variant of matter with peculiar properties that enable it

to hold open the termination of a wormhole. The technology was developed by a human called Michael

Poole."

"You know that when humankind was brought into its present close economic relationship with the Qax,

the second terminal of this wormhole—the stationary one, still orbiting Jupiter—was destroyed," the

Governor said.

"Yes. You do tend to destroy anything you do not understand," Parz said dryly.

The Qax paused. Then it said, "If the malfunctioning of your body is impairing you, we may continue

later."

"Let's get it over." Parz went on, "After fifteen centuries, the other end of the wormhole is returning to

the Solar System. It is being towed by the Cauchy, a freighter of ancient human design; we speculate

that relativistic effects have preserved living humans aboard the freighter, from the era of its launch."

"Why is it returning?"

"Because that was the mission profile. Look." Parz downloaded more data into the table. "They were due

to return about now, and so they have."

The Qax said, "Perhaps, since the destruction of the second, stationary tetrahedron, the wormhole device

will not function. We should therefore regard this—visit from the stars—as no threat. What is your

assessment?"

"Maybe you're right."

"How could we be wrong?"

"Because the original purpose of the Interface project was not to provide a means of traveling through

space… but through time. I am not a physicist, but I doubt that your destruction of the second terminus

will have destroyed its functionality."

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Parz's slate now filled with a simple image of a tetrahedral framework; the image had been enhanced to

the limit of the telescopic data and the picture was sharp but bleached of detail.

The Governor said, "You are implying that we may be witnessing here a functioning time machine? A

passage, a tunnel through time that connects us to the humanity of fifteen centuries ago?"

"Yes. Perhaps we are." Parz stared at the image, trying to make out details in the faces of the

tetrahedron. Was it possible that just beyond those sheets of flawed space was a Solar System free of the

domination of the Qax—a system peopled by free, bold, immortal humans, brave enough to conceive

such an audacious project as the Interface? He willed himself to see through these grainy pixels into a

better past. But there was insufficient data in this long-range image, and soon his old eyes felt rheumy

and sore, despite their enhancements.

The Qax had fallen silent.

With the image still frozen in the screen, Parz settled back into his chair and closed his aching eyes. He

was growing tired of the Governor's game. Let it get to the point in its own time.

It was depressing to reflect how little more had been learned about the Qax during the Occupation: even

human ambassadors like Parz were kept at more than arm's length. Still, Parz had used his fleeting

contacts to sift out fragments of knowledge, wisdom, glimpses of the nature of the Qax, all built onto the

picture that had been handed down from a happier past.

Like everybody else Parz had never actually seen a Qax. He suspected that they were physically

extensive—otherwise, why use Spline freighters to travel?—but, in any event, it was not their physical

form but their minds, their motivation, that was so fascinating. He'd become convinced that it was only

by knowing the enemy—by seeing the universe through the consciousness of the Qax—that men could

hope to throw off their heavy yoke of Occupation.

He had come to suspect, for instance, that comparatively few individuals comprised the Qax race—

perhaps no more than thousands. Certainly nothing like the billions that had once totaled humanity, in

the years before the development of AS technology. And he was sure that there were only three or four

Qax individuals assigned to the supervision of Earth, orbiting in the warm bellies of their Spline

freighters.

This hypothesis had many corollaries, of course.

The Qax were immortal, probably—certainly there was evidence that the same Governor had ruled Earth

from the beginning of the Occupation. And with such a small and static population, and with all the time

in the world, each Qax would surely come to know the rest of its species intimately.

Perhaps too well.

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Parz imagined rivalries building over centuries. There would be scheming, maneuvering, endless

politicking… and trading. With such a small and intimate population surely no form of formal policing

could operate. How to build consensus behind any laws? How to construct laws that would not be seen

to discriminate against individuals?

…But there were natural laws that governed any society. Parz, drifting into a contemplative doze,

nodded to himself. It was logical. The Qax must work like so many independent corporations, in pure

competition; they would swim in a sea of perfect information about each other's activities and intentions,

kept in some semblance of order only by the operation of the laws of economics. Yes, the theory felt

right to Parz. The Qax were natural traders. They had to be. And trading relationships would be their

natural mode of approaching other species, once they started spreading beyond their own planet.

Unless, as in the case of humanity, other opportunities, too soft and welcoming, beckoned…

Parz didn't believe—as many commentators maintained—that the Qax were an innately militaristic

species. With such a small number of individuals they could never have evolved a philosophy of

warfare; never could they have viewed soldiers (of their own race) as expendable cannon fodder, as a

renewable resource to be husbanded or expended to suit the needs of a conflict. The murder of a Qax

must be a crime of unimaginable horror.

No, the Qax weren't warlike. They had defeated humanity and occupied the Earth merely because it had

been so easy.

Of course this wasn't a popular view, and Parz had learned to keep it to himself.

"Ambassador Jasoft Parz."

The Governor's sharp, feminine voice jarred him to full alertness. Had he actually slept? He rubbed his

eyes and sat up—then winced at fresh aches in his spine. "Yes. Governor. I can hear you."

"I have brought you here to discuss new developments."

Parz screwed up his eyes and focused on the slate before him. At last, he thought. He saw the

approaching Interface tetrahedron, in an image as devoid of detail as before; the pixels seemed as large

as thumbprints. The star background twinkled slowly. "Is this a recording? Why are you showing me

this? This is worse than the data I brought you."

"Watch."

Parz, with a sigh, settled back as comfortably as he could; the sentient chair rubbed sympathetically at

his back and legs.

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Some minutes passed; on the screen the tetrahedron hung on the rim of interstellar space, unchanging.

Then there was an irruption from the right-hand side of the screen, a sudden blur, a bolt of pixels that

lanced into the heart of the tetrahedron and disappeared.

Parz, forgetting his back, sat up and had the slate replay the image, moment by moment. It was

impossible to make out details of any kind, but the meaning of the sequence was clear. "My God," he

breathed. "That's a ship, isn't it?"

"Yes." said the Governor. "A human ship."

The Qax produced more reports, shards of detail.

The ship, camouflaged somehow, had exploded from the surface of the Earth. It had reached hyperspace

within seconds, before the orbiting Spline fleet could react.

"And it made it through the tetrahedron?"

"Apparently a group of humans have escaped into the past. Yes."

Parz closed his eyes as exultation surged through him, rendering him young again. So this was why he

had been called to orbit.

Rebellion…

The Qax said, "Ambassador. Why did you not warn me of the approach of the Interface device? You say

that its mission profile was documented and understood, that it was due to return."

Parz shrugged. "What do you want me to tell you? A mission profile like that, based on the technology

of the time, has uncertainty margins measured in centuries. It's been fifteen hundred years, Governor!"

"Still," said the Governor evenly, "you would regard it as your duty to warn me of such events?"

Parz bowed his head ironically. "Of course. Mea culpa." It probably made the Qax feel better to rail at

him, he reflected. Well, to absorb blame on behalf of humanity was part of his job.

"And what of the human evacuees? The ship that escaped? Who built it? How did they conceal their

intentions? Where did they obtain their resources?"

Parz smiled, feeling his papery old cheeks crumple up. The tone of the translator box was as sweet, as

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sexy even as ever; but he imagined the Qax boiling with unexpressed rage within its womblike Spline

container. "Governor, I haven't the first idea. I've failed you, obviously. And do you know what? I don't

give a damn." Nor, he realized with an access of relief, did he care about his own personal fate. Not

anymore.

He had heard that those close to death experience a calm, an acceptance that was close to the divine—a

state that had been taken from humanity by AS technology. Could that describe his mood now, this

strange, exultant calmness?

"Ambassador," the Qax snapped. "Speculate."

"You speculate," Parz said. "Or are you unable to? Governor, the Qax are traders—aren't you?—not

conquerors. True emperors learn the minds of their subjects. You haven't the first idea what is going on

in human hearts… and that is why you are so terrified now." His eyes raked over the faceless interior of

the flitter. "Your own, awful ignorance in the face of this startling rebellion. That's why you're scared.

Isn't it?"

The translator box hissed, but was otherwise silent.

Chapter 2

Michael Poole's father, Harry, twinkled into existence in the middle of the Hermit Crab's lifedome.

Glimmering pixels cast highlights onto the bare domed ceiling before coalescing into a stocky, smiling,

smooth-faced figure, dressed in a single-piece, sky-blue suit. "It's good to see you, son. You're looking

well."

Michael Poole sucked on a bulb of malt whiskey and glowered at his father. The domed roof was

opaqued, but the transparent floor revealed a plain of comet ice over which Harry seemed to hover,

suspended. "Like hell I am," Michael growled. His voice, rusty after decades of near solitude out here in

the Oort Cloud, sounded like gravel compared to his father's smooth modulation. "I'm older than you."

Harry laughed and took a tentative step forward. "I'm not going to argue with that. But at least it's your

choice. You shouldn't drink so early in the day, though."

The Virtual's projection was slightly off, so there was a small, shadowless gap between Harry's smart

shoes and the floor; Michael smiled inwardly, relishing the tiny reminder of the unreality of the scene.

"The hell with you. I'm two hundred and seven years old; I do what I please."

A look of sad affection crossed Harry's brow. "You always did, son. I'm joking."

Michael took an involuntary step back from the Virtual; the adhesive soles of his shoes kept him locked

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Stephen Baxter - Xeelee 2 - Timelike Infinity

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