Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (166 page)

‘It’s a tetrahedron,’ Lieserl observed. ‘Like an Interface portal.’

‘Well, that’s a characteristic signature of human architecture,’ Mark murmured. ‘Doesn’t mean a thing, by itself, though. And from the thickness of that dust, I guess we know this place has been abandoned for a long time.’

‘Hmm. The door looks human enough.’

The door was a simple hatchway seven feet tall and three wide, set at the base of one of the tetrahedron’s triangular walls. There was a touchpad control, set at the waist height of an average human.

Mark shrugged. ‘Let’s try to open it.’

The ‘bot rolled forward silently, bouncing a little on the rough surface despite its fat, soft wheels. It extended an arm fitted with a crude mechanical grab, tapped cautiously at the door, and then pushed at the control pad.

The door slid aside, into the fabric of the tetrahedron. A puff of air gushed out at them. A few scraps of dust tumbled out, and, when the air had dispersed, the dust fell in neat parabolae to the surface.

Beyond the door there was a small rectangular chamber, big enough for four or five people. The walls were of the same milky substance as the outer shell, and were unadorned. There was another door, identical to the first, set into the far wall of the chamber.

‘At least we know there’s still power,’ Mark said.

‘This is an airlock,’ Lieserl said, looking inside the little chamber. ‘Plain, functional. Very conventional. Well, what now? Do we go in?’

Mark pointed.

The ‘bot was already rolling into the airlock. It bumped over the lip, and came to a halt at the centre of the lock.

Lieserl and Mark hesitated for a few seconds; the ‘bot waited patiently inside the lock.

Mark grinned. ‘Evidently, we go in!’

He held out his arm to Lieserl. Arm in arm, they trooped after the robot into the lock.

The lock, containing the ‘bot and the two of them, was a little cramped. Lieserl found herself shying away from the ‘bot’s huge, dusty wheels, as if she might get her environment suit smeared.

The ‘bot reached out and pushed the control to open the next door. There was a hiss of pressure equalization.

The ‘bot exposed an array of chemical sensors, and Mark cracked open his faceplate and sniffed elaborately.

‘Oh, stop showing off,’ Lieserl said.

‘Air,’ he said. ‘Earth-normal, more or less. A few strange trace elements. No unusual smells - and quite sterile. We could breathe this stuff if we had to, Lieserl.’

The lock’s inner door swung open, revealing a larger chamber. The ‘bot pushed a lamp, magnesium-white, into the chamber, and light flared from the walls. Lieserl caught a glimpse of conventional-looking furniture: beds, chairs, a long desk. The chamber’s walls sloped upwards to a peak; this single room looked large enough to occupy most of the tetrahedral volume of the building.

The ‘bot rolled forward. Mark stepped briskly out of the lock and into the chamber; Lieserl followed.

‘Mark Wu? Lieserl?’ Uvarov’s rasp was loud in her ear.

‘Yes, Doctor,’ Lieserl replied. ‘We hear you. You don’t need to shout.’

‘Oh,
really
,’ Uvarov said. ‘Unlike you, I didn’t simply assume that our transmissions would carry through whatever those walls are made of.’

Lieserl smiled at Mark. ‘Were you worried about us, Uvarov?’

‘No. I was worried about the ‘bot.’

Lieserl stepped towards the centre of the main chamber and looked around.

The walls of the tetrahedral structure sloped up around her, coming to a neat point fifteen feet above her head. She could see partitioned sections in two of the corners. Bedrooms? Bathrooms? A galley, perhaps?

The ‘bot scurried around the edge of the room, its multiple arms probing into corners and edges. It left planet-dust tracks behind itself.

The main piece of furniture was a long desk, constructed of what looked - for all the world - like wood. Lieserl could see monitors of some kind inlaid into the desk surface. The monitors were dead, but they looked like reasonably conventional touch-screens. Lieserl reached out a gloved hand, wishing she could feel the wood surface.

There were
chairs
, in a row, before the desk - four of them, side by side. These were obviously of human construction, with upright backs, padded seats, and two arms studded with controls.

‘Mark, look at this,’ she said. ‘These chairs would fit either of us.’

Mark had found something - two objects - at the end of the desk; he had the ‘bot roll across and pick the objects up. Mark’s face was lit with wonder; he bent to inspect the first object, held before him in the ‘bot’s delicate grab. ‘This is some kind of stylus,’ he said. ‘Could be something as simple as an ink pen . . .’ The ‘bot held up the second object. ‘But this thing is unmistakable, Lieserl. Look at it. It’s a
cup
.’ His hands on his knees, he looked up at her. ‘The builders of this place must have been gone a million years. But it’s as if they just stepped outside.’

Uvarov rasped, ‘
Who?
I wish you’d speak to me, damn it. What have you found?’

Mark and Lieserl looked at each other.

‘People,’ Lieserl said. ‘We’ve found people, Uvarov.’

Mark sat with Louise in her oak-panelled bedroom inside the
Great Britain
. Mark had called up a Virtual schematic of the
Northern
’s lifedome; the schematic was a cylinder three feet tall, hovering over her bed. The schematic showed a lifedome which sparkled with glass and light, and the greenery of the forest Deck glowed under the skydome at the crown.

Louise felt something move inside her; the lifedome looked so beautiful - so fragile.

She stared around at the familiar polished walls of her room - it was actually two of the old ship’s state rooms, knocked together and converted. Here was the centre of her world, if anywhere was; here were her few pieces of old furniture, her clothes, her first, antique data slate - which still contained the engineering sketches of the
Great Britain
she’d prepared during her first visit to the old ship as a teenager, five million years and half a Universe away. If only, she thought, if only she could pull this room around her like some huge wooden blanket, never to emerge into the complex horrors of the world . . .

But here was Mark, politely sitting on the corner of her bed and watching her face. And now he said quietly: ‘Here it comes, Louise.’

She forced herself to look at the Virtual of the lifedome.

Mark pointed at the mid-section of the lifedome. A horizontal line of blue-white light appeared; it shimmered balefully against the clear substance of the lifedome, like a sword blade.

‘The string has sliced into us from this side. I guess we can be grateful the relative velocity was actually quite low . . .’

The string cut easily into the substance of the dome, like a hot wire into butter.

Louise, watching in the silence of her room, felt as if the string were cutting into her own body; she imagined she could hear the shriek of lost air, the screams of her helpless human charges.

Mark looked blank as his processors worked. He said rapidly, ‘The wake took a slice out of the hull tens of yards thick.
Lethe
. We’re losing a lot of air, Louise, but the self-repair systems are working well . . . A lot of our infrastructure has gone down quickly - too damn quickly; I think we need to take a look at our redundancies again, if we make it through this . . .’

‘And the Decks? What’s happening in there?’

He hesitated. ‘I can’t tell, Louise.’

She felt useless; the control panels in the room mocked her with their impotence. She felt the blame for this ghastly accident fall on her shoulders, like a tangible weight.
I’m responsible for bollixing up those distance-evaluation routines. I’m responsible for insufficient redundancy - and for losing touch with Spinner-of-Rope in the cage, just when we need her most. If only I could talk to Spinner, maybe she could get us out of here. If only—

‘The geometry of the string is just as theory predicted,’ Mark said. ‘I’m getting measurements of pi in the regions around the string . . . 3.1402, compared to the flat-space value of 3.1415926 . . . The conical space has an angle deficit of four minutes of arc.

‘At this moment we have a quarter-mile length of string, actually inside the lifedome, Louise. That’s a total mass of four hundred billion
billion
tons.’ Mark looked bemused. ‘Life, Louise, think about that; that’s the mass of a fair-sized moon . . .’

Her introspection was futile. The destruction of the lifedome could be - suddenly - mere seconds away. And, in the end, she was helpless.
All I could do, in those last, frantic moments, was sound the damn klaxon . . .

There was a whisper of spider-web light above Spinner. She could
see
how the string made the stars slide across the sky, just above the lifedome. The encroaching string was like the foregathering of some huge, supernatural storm around the
Northern.

She twisted in her couch and tightened her restraints. ‘What in Lethe do you expect me to be?’ she yelled at Poole. ‘We’ve been hit by a length of cosmic string, damn it. This could finish us off. I have to get us out of here.’ She placed her hands on the waldoes. ‘
But I don’t know what to do
. Louise? Louise, can you hear me?’

Feverishly, Spinner said, ‘Maybe we’re already hit; maybe that’s why the connection went down. But what if she managed to program a routine into the waldoes before we lost the connection? Maybe—’

Come on, Spinner-of-Rope. You know that’s not true
.

‘But I have to move the ship!’ she wailed. The thump of her heartbeat sounded impossibly loud in the confined space of the helmet. ‘Can’t you see that?’

‘But I don’t know
how
- or
where
- without Louise . . .’

A hand rested over hers. Despite the thickness of her glove fabric, she could feel the warm roughness of Michael Poole’s palm.

The invisible fingers tightened, pushing her hands against the waldoes. Behind her, the nightfighter opened its wings.

Morrow, crumpled against the Deck beside the crushed body of Planner Milpitas, stared up into the wake of the cosmic string.

The structure of the middle Decks was fragile; it simply imploded into the string wake. Morrow saw homes which had stood for a thousand years rip loose from the Deck surfaces as if in the grip of some immense tornado; the buildings exploded, and metal sheets spun through the air. The newer structures, spun across the air in zero-gee, crumpled easily as the wake passed. Much of the surface of Deck Two was torn loose and tumbled above him, chunks of metal clattering into each other. Morrow saw patterns of straight lines and arcs on those fragments of Deck: shards of the soulless circular geometry which had dominated the Deck’s layout for centuries.

People, scattered in the air like dolls, clattered against each other in the wake. The string passed through a Temple. The golden tetrahedron - the proudest symbol of human culture - collapsed like a burst balloon around the path of the string, and shards of gold-brown glass, long and lethal, hailed through the air.

And now the string passed through another human body, that of a hapless woman. Morrow heard the banal, mundane sounds of her death: a scream, abruptly cut off, a moist, ripping sound, and the crunch of bone, sounding like a bite into a crisp apple.

The woman’s body, distorted out of recognition, was cast aside; tumbling, it impacted softly with the Deck.

The wake of a cosmic string . .
. The wake was the mechanism that had constructed the large-scale structure of the Universe. It was the seed of galaxies.
And we have let it loose inside our ship
, Morrow thought.

Once the string passed through the lifedome completely, the
Northern
would die at last, as surely as a body severed from its head . . .

Morrow, immersed in his own pain, wanted to close his eyes, succumb to the oblivion of unconsciousness. Was this how it was to end, after a thousand years?

But the quality of the noise above him - the rush of air, the screams - seemed to change.

He stared up.

The string, still cutting easily through the structure, had slowed to a halt.

‘Mark,’ Louise hissed. ‘What’s happening?’

The string had cut a full quarter-mile into the lifedome. For a moment the blue-glowing string hovered, like a scalpel embedded in flesh.

Then the Virtual display came to life once more. The electric-blue string executed a tight curve and sliced its way back out of the lifedome, exiting perhaps a quarter-mile above its entry point.

Louise wished there was a god, to offer up her thanks.

‘It’s done a lot more damage on the way out - but we are left with an intact lifedome,’ Mark said. ‘The ‘bots and autonomic systems are sealing up the breaches in the hull.’ He looked up at Louise. ‘I think we’ve made it.’

Louise, floating above her bed, hugged her knees against her chest. ‘But I don’t understand
how
, Mark.’

‘Spinner-of-Rope saved us,’ Mark said simply. ‘She opened up the discontinuity-drive and took us away from there at half lightspeed - and in just the right direction. See?’ Mark pointed. ‘She pulled the ship backwards, and away from the string.’

She looked into his familiar, tired eyes, and wished she could hug him to her. ‘It was Spinner-of-Rope. You’re right. It must have been. But the voice link to Spinner was one of the first things we lost. And we certainly didn’t have time to work up routines for the waldoes.’

‘In fact, we’re
still
out of touch with Spinner,’ Mark said.