Xeelee: Endurance (36 page)

9

As the shifts had worn away the whale riders hadn’t disturbed Lura’s lengthy conversations with her machine, and the eerie figures it seemed to speak for. Lura supposed they were kept back by superstition or fear – as she felt only a little less, she suspected. But the riders were becoming increasingly disturbed by the Mole’s pronouncements. They went off towards the whale’s vast inverted face, so they could talk away from their captives.

But Lura was confused too. In the course of his latest conversation, Coton had told them they needed to find the Raft. It was as if they had been told to chase a fantasy from a child’s bedtime story!

Lura and Brother Pesten sat side by side, somewhere near the whale’s midriff. They had been left unbound for a few shifts now, and Pesten had been given a coarse, ill-smelling blanket to cover his nakedness. They drank water from sacks made of the skin of sky wolves. The Mole sat on the slippery skin-floor between them, silent for now, its transparent ‘eyes’ gazing out at what they had learned to call universe Beta.

The whale itself appeared to be feeding. Lura could see a series of ill-defined lumps passing down the huge digestive tract that spanned its diameter, from face to anus, passing above their heads.

And Lura watched the whale riders. The effective gravity imparted by the whale’s spin was weakest near its axis, and as Anka and Otho and the other half-dozen riders argued, they drifted in the air and spun around, clustering together under their mutual gravity and pushing each other away. They were like squabbling children, she thought.

In the shifts since they’d been taken she had seen something of how the riders lived. All she’d known of them before was their ferocity during raids. Now she had watched them eat, sleep, laugh, squabble, shit – they respected the whale, and kept their waste in containers that they dumped out through hull lesions. They lived naked, for the whale’s body cavity was too hot for them to need clothes. Their life seemed shabby, featureless, unfulfilled between bouts of raiding one Forest or another, and when they weren’t attacking somebody else, it seemed, they’d fight each other. Otho, who seemed a deeper-thinking individual than she’d imagined, sometimes broke this up, but not always; maybe he liked to keep his riders combat-ready.

And they rutted, coupling randomly, in shadowed corners of the whale’s body cavity. There seemed little tenderness in the sex. Lura wondered what became of their children.

Now Coton’s mention of this ‘Raft’ had sent the whale riders into a spin.

Pesten said, ‘I wonder if they regret taking us in the first place. We’ve brought them nothing but trouble.’

Lura murmured, ‘Do you believe all it says? The Mole. About the other “everything”, and all the people there—’

‘Well, I have no idea
how
it is saying these things to us – how your friend Coton can use it to speak to us at all – but, given all that, I don’t see why anyone would go to all that trouble to lie to us. And it does fit what we know of our history
. Humans don’t belong here.
’

‘A history you Brothers have been beating out of us for generations. You know, my uncle used to argue with my father. He used to say that we
know
mankind evolved here because our gods are here, living in the Core of Cores.’

He winked at her. ‘That was a particularly good lie, wasn’t it? Silenced a lot of doubters, such as your uncle . . .’

Thinking of her father and uncle reminded her how far she was from home. She glanced around, at the smoky sky that rotated grandly around the spinning carcass of the whale. ‘I wonder if I’ll ever see the Forest again.’

The Brother took her hand. ‘You will. If only because the riders will have to go back there if they’re to ransom me. I’ll make sure you get off when I do—’

The blunt end of a spear slammed down between them, and they flinched away. Anka loomed over them. ‘Making promises you can’t keep, Brother, to add to a lifetime of lies?’

‘Oh, leave them alone, Anka.’ Otho and some of the others came towards them, moving with big low-gravity footsteps.

Anka ground her spear butt into the floor. ‘Maybe we should truss them up again. What could your boyfriend Coton do about that, Lura? Oh, come on, Otho, enough of this. It’s all just some kind of trick. A voice in a box!’

‘It’s more than that,’ said one of the other riders – a woman who looked away from Lura and Pesten as she spoke. Most of the riders kept their distance from them, evidently spooked by the Mole. Even after so many shifts since her capture, Lura didn’t know their names. The woman said now, ‘If it’s just some trick,
why would it tell us to go to the Raft
? No tree pilot or kernel-grubber has ever seen the Raft. It’s just a story to them.’

Pesten frowned. ‘Wait – no one from the Forest has ever seen the Raft. Are you saying
you’ve
seen the Raft for yourself?’

‘
I
saw it,’ Otho said. ‘Long ago – as a kid.’ He waved a hand vaguely. ‘In a dead nebula, choked up, a few whale hops away from here.’

Lura tried to take this in. She really had always imagined the Raft was just another legend, a detail in the half-mythic saga of the Ship and its crew. ‘So when Coton said we should go there – you could take us?’

Anka loomed again. ‘What right have you got to make demands? What do you woodentops know about riders, and how we live?’

It all swirled inside Lura, her anger and fear, the strangeness of the words that had come out of the Mole – the extraordinary suggestion that the whole universe was dying. And on top of all that she had to deal with this ridiculous woman. She snapped back, ‘Oh, we know all we need to know about you and your kind.’

Pesten murmured, ‘Lura—’

‘Enough, Brother! Let her kill us if she wants – it can’t be worse than hearing her droning voice. While we work to feed the Core of Cores,
you
prey on us like rats, or fleas that bite the skin. That’s all you are – rats and fleas.’

‘Why, you—’ Anka raised her hand. ‘Otho, is she to speak of us like that?’

‘Oh, shut
up
, Anka, and let me think,’ Otho said, and he jammed his fists against his temples.

‘Of course you’re right, Lura,’ Pesten murmured smoothly. ‘The riders do prey on the Forest folk. And so they need us. But here’s another unwelcome truth. We need them.’

‘Rubbish.’

‘It’s true. When this nebula dies we’ll have to abandon it for another, as we have many times before. The only way we know to do that is to ride the whales, for the whales can pass through the airless spaces between the nebulae, as we can’t.
Then
we’ll need the whale riders’ skills, as we did before – and forgot!’ He shook his head. ‘Maybe it’s always like this. Riders and Forest folk fighting out the generations, until it’s time to move again, and they remember how to cooperate. What a depressing picture of humanity. But
we
don’t forget – we Brothers. And I think you haven’t forgotten either – have you, Otho?’

‘Perhaps it will be different this time,’ snarled Otho. ‘Perhaps we’ll leave you behind, to choke.’

‘No, you won’t. What will you eat? How will you live? And
who will take your babies
?’

Otho turned away, and Lura saw, at last, what became of the children of whale riders. This place, this violent arena, was no nursery, no place for children. They must drop them off in communities like the Forest – and they made up their numbers through abductions, from those same communities. No wonder they were so savage, she thought, with a stab of pity.

Pesten shifted so he was kneeling with his blanket around his shoulders, and he gazed at Otho, intent. ‘And there’s more. Think about what Coton has told us, about the end of the universe.
You must have seen it.
You must have travelled to the edge of the nebula, and maybe beyond. I know you riders take your whales between the star clouds, once or twice a generation – else you would forget how it’s done, when it’s needed. I think you have seen that Coton is right.’

‘The stars are going out,’ Otho said bitterly. ‘The nebulae are all choked. You hardly ever see the yellow spark of a new star . . . Even in Atma’s day it was different. Atma was boss before me. So he said before I killed him. It’s true enough.’

‘Coton is right,’ Pesten repeated. ‘And we have to do what he says. We have to go to the Raft – for in the end it’s our only hope. And you could do it, couldn’t you? Oh, come on,’ he said, grinning. ‘I’ve spent my life watching you people control these beasts – and envying you, if you want to know.’

Lura said, ‘Pesten!’

‘I wasn’t always a dried-up old scholar, you know. And there is a certain romance about the whale riders.’

‘You don’t know what you’re asking, Brother,’ Otho said. ‘You’re talking about a dive deep into the nebula – to the very core, where we’ll scoot around the black hole. It’s dark and hot and thick down there. Half the whale’s flesh burns off, and it shits away a chunk of its mass to drive itself out of the gravity well, and it doesn’t care if we live or die in its gut or not. And then we’ll have to plunge into another nebula, and do it all over again.’

Anka said, her anger nearly choking her, ‘I can’t believe I’m listening to this. Otho, you only brought these two in for a quick shag of
her
, and a fat ransom for
him
. And now it’s all
this
.’

Pesten sat back on his heels. ‘Well, I’ve said all I can. What’s it to be, Otho? Steep yourself in blood and die with the rest of us – or live on, a hero?’

Otho growled, ‘I’d shut up if I were you, Brother, before you go too far.’ But he hesitated, his face twisted, and Lura could see Pesten’s persuasion was working. At last he snapped, ‘Let’s do this, and get it over, and we can get back to what we’re good at – riding and robbing. Start the singing, Anka.’

‘You can’t be serious.’

He held her gaze for long heartbeats. Lura wondered if Anka was deciding whether to challenge him, as he had once challenged Atma. Then she broke away.

And she began to sing, a wordless melody, and walked back towards the whale’s face. One by one the others walked with her and joined in, repeating the melody in an overlapping round. By the time they had reached the inside-out face of the whale the song was eerie, discordant, but it pulsed with a compelling rhythm.

‘Some say this is how the riders really control their whales,’ the Brother said, fascinated. ‘With song – not with goads. Once there were no riders, just hunters who learned to call the whales down from the sky. Some say the whales can read our minds . . .’

The riders gathered behind the whale’s eyes, and sang on and on. Lura and the Brother could do nothing but sit and listen.

And the whale turned. Lura could feel the shifting acceleration, and the shuddering of its skin as the great flukes beat at the air.

10

Croq, a small, plump, confident man, was Vala’s contact at the Palace of the Assimilation.

‘Welcome to our Palace, Academician, Marshal! I regard myself as something of a scholar though I have no formal qualification, but I could hardly do my job without acquiring a little learning . . . Come, come, follow me.’

Coton, Vala, Sand and a single Coalition guard followed him into the grounds of the ruined complex. The Palace of the Assimilation had been built on a massive tetrahedral frame, as had many of mankind’s greatest buildings. Though the frame survived, much of the facing, a kind of foam-concrete with a golden patina, had crumbled to leave huge gaps open to the sky, and where the weather had got in the internal partition walls and floors had rotted away. The ground floor was littered with chunks of debris and choked with weeds, and Coton could see people inhabiting lean-tos and shacks in the lee of the surviving walls. Some even had fires burning on the remnants of the polished floor. Vala, picking her way through the rubble, looked faintly embarrassed.

Croq had his own staff here, younger men and women in purple robes similar to his own, with weapons at their waists and antique-looking data slates under their arms. They nodded to Croq as he passed.

‘You can see we have taken in our share of the dispossessed, just as the rest of the planet,’ Croq said. ‘Well, they do no harm here, for little has survived of the Palace’s treasures above ground level. Let them stay, as long as they don’t disturb the customers!’ And he smiled, showing gappy teeth.

Marshal Sand strode impatiently, her head swathed in a Virtual bubble with update reports scrolling in the air. Coton was surprised to find Sand spending so much time on Vala’s projects, which were surely peripheral to her main objectives, yet here she was. Her guard kept a heavy rifle cradled in his arms – or hers; it was impossible to tell the sex under the gleaming green body armour.

Coton, meanwhile, was fascinated by Croq. He was bald with a thick black beard, and his sweeping purple robe, ancient and much patched, was a kind of imitation of Vala’s Academician robe – which was itself a homage to the learning of the past, especially the famous Commission for Historical Truth of the First Coalition. But Croq’s purpose was not scholarship but selling. Coton thought he had seen his type in the markets of Centre, smiling, hustling, dealing. But those vendors of bread and second-hand shoes would have looked crude beside this man, who clearly had expensive wares to sell to a much more discerning set of customers.

They came to a small cylindrical chamber that stood directly under the pinnacle of the main tetrahedral frame, Coton saw, looking up. A couple of Croq’s assistants waited here, weapons visible, evidently keeping the refugees out. Croq waved his party inside the chamber. They filed in, the door closed, and a single light globe lit up the space.

Coton heard the hum of ancient engines, felt a subtle acceleration. Sand grunted her annoyance as her Virtuals flickered.

‘An elevator,’ Vala murmured. ‘Evidently.’

Croq said, ‘Since the Palace was first built, whole civilisations have washed over it like breaking waves. I’m afraid that it’s only in the deepest basements, tucked away in caches, hidden purposefully or simply lost, that you’ll find much of value nowadays. Of course it gives you some idea of just
how much
was piled up here that there is still something left, even after all this time.’

Sand banged her gloved fist on the wall. ‘And this still works.’

‘Oh, yes. They built their infrastructure well, the ancients.’

Still the descent went on, smooth, its speed undetectable, and Coton, who in his short life had learned to be suspicious of elderly technology, wondered just how far they were falling. He tried to mask his gnawing anxiety.

At last the doors slid open, and Croq led them out into a long, sweeping corridor, illuminated by sparse light globes and curving in the far distance. Coton saw that the walls were shelved, and doors and side branches led off into more shadowy spaces. Croq let them pause as they passed shelves crowded with artefacts – gadgets, what looked like biological samples in specimen jars, even shimmering Virtuals. Coton stared at one beautiful image of another tetrahedral form with a densely structured surface that appeared to have been constructed around a star. He understood nothing of what he saw.

‘It would take me a day to explain the provenance of any one of these wonders,’ Croq said smoothly. ‘And of course the physical artefacts stored here are only a small percentage of the Palace’s holdings; far more is stored as data in the archives – what survives of them, anyhow.’

‘This is the fruit of the Assimilation,’ Marshal Sand said. ‘I studied the period at military school. It was an age that has some similarities with our modern times, this era of the Scourge – save then it was not the Xeelee burning their way across the Galaxy, but humanity.’

Vala looked up at her. ‘You’re certainly a more complex character than I once thought, Marshal. You’re a soldier who sounds as if she regrets the Assimilation.’

Sand shrugged. ‘What’s done is done. It would have been fascinating to travel the Galaxy
before
humans consumed its diversity, however.’

‘Do you believe in guilt, Marshal Sand? Do you believe that humanity is now being punished for our actions in the past? Whole religions have been built upon the premise.’

‘I know. Even in the military there are sects who worship the Xeelee as cleansing gods. I’m not a Transcendent, Academician. I don’t believe in the guilt of mankind – or in the possibility of the redemption of the species, as they did. But I do believe that if you waste any more time on analysing my personality—’

‘Quite, quite,’ Croq said nervously. ‘Let’s get to the point, shall we?’

He hurried them along a side corridor, and then into a room equipped with modern-looking Virtuals and data desks. This room, long and narrow, was dominated by two pieces of equipment, rather like upright coffins, Coton thought, made of some featureless grey material, and facing each other along the length of the floor. A couple of assistants, young, bright-looking, but nervous and subservient, huddled in the room’s corners.

Croq watched his party keenly, constantly aware of shifting moods and changing expressions. He really was a salesman, Coton thought. ‘I can see you’re impressed by the equipment we’ve assembled here. We’ve worked hard to get this right for you, Academician, and I believe we’ve found exactly what you required.’

Vala grunted, and flicked one of the coffin-boxes with a dismissive fingernail. ‘This, I presume?’

‘Academician, this is a teleport.’

Marshal Sand seemed intrigued, if unimpressed. She shut down her Virtual displays and stalked around the coffin-boxes, pacing out the distance between them. ‘A teleport, eh? And dug up out of the past – what did I tell you, Academician? No doubt teleports of one kind or another have been invented over and over.’

‘Indeed,’ said Croq. ‘And many alien variants were retrieved during the Assimilation.’

‘But it’s not a technology humans ever used much,’ Vala said. ‘Essentially you convert any object you’re sending – even human beings – into a stream of data to be transmitted. But that stream can be blocked or corrupted or illicitly intercepted. And the process is always expensive, as usually you have to destroy the rest mass of the object you wish to send.’

Sand nodded. ‘Because quantum information laws forbid the making of true replicas.’

Croq said, ‘Nevertheless, Academician Vala, I’m convinced this is your solution. As long as you have a communications link of some kind to your parallel universe out in the Bulk, you can use it to send a teleport signal. In fact I found a variety of suitable technologies in the archives – but I chose this, as I thought there was a certain poetic logic to it.’

Sand arched an eyebrow. ‘Poetic?’

‘This is Silver Ghost technology! And you Adepts are crucial to this process, aren’t you?’ He stepped up to Coton and gazed into his eyes, as if they were windows into Coton’s skull. ‘You actually have Silver Ghost material growing inside your heads. Remarkable! As if you are Ghost-human hybrids.’

Vala looked furious. ‘So you have known this of us all along.’

Coton felt like punching him.

But he said smoothly, ‘Of course we have, madam. There are no secrets to be kept from archivists such as ourselves.’

Sand said, ‘Get to the point, salesman. How does this work?’

And Croq described how the Silver Ghosts, notorious tinkerers at the fringe of physics, had meddled with the values of fundamental constants. ‘An object’s quantum wave function describes the probability of finding it at any particular location. But that function is given its scale by a number called the Planck constant. And if you increase the value of that constant, if only locally, then the probability of the object being found over
there
rather than
here
is increased. Then all you have to do is pluck the apple from the tree on which you wish to find it, so to speak:
there
rather than
here
. The engineering details are a little complex—’

Sand held up her hand. ‘I don’t
care
how the thing works. No more words. Show us.’

‘If I may have a test object – perhaps your hat, Marshal?’

Sand’s glare was incendiary.

Coton hastily slipped off his jacket. ‘Here. Use this.’

Croq opened up one of the boxes. Featureless inside, it was easily large enough to accommodate a standing human. Carefully Croq folded the jacket and set it down on the floor of the box, and closed up the door. He nodded to his assistants, who murmured to each other and manipulated Virtual displays. Coton thought he heard the hum of some engine gathering its energies, and an ozone, electric smell in the air.

‘It will take a few minutes to prepare . . .’ Croq looked at Vala. ‘This is a proof of concept. We will have to consider the specific details of your project. For instance, the senders in your universe Beta will need access to some kind of technology capable of quantum-level scanning.’

Vala nodded. ‘The ship that stumbled into Beta was equipped with devices to fabricate food and air – even human skin for grafts. They were clearly capable of quantum-level manipulation. We’re hoping that if the folk in Beta can find one of those machines, and if it’s still working, we can download instructions to adjust its function to our purposes.’

‘But then there’s bandwidth. As I understand it the intercosmic signal is transmitted by a stream of gravitons and neutrinos. The greater the flux the faster and more reliable the transmission.’

‘I’m thinking about that,’ Vala said. ‘We should set up a receiving station deep in the gravity well of the neutron star, where spacetime stress is greatest.’

‘And whose ships will you use to do that?’ Sand asked. ‘Ours, I suppose?’

Vala waved that away. ‘You will need access to the gravity well anyhow if we are to help you use the Starfolk. Our projects complement each other, Marshal.’

‘And of course,’ Croq said, ‘you will also need to consider the capacity of the receiver.’

Coton was aware that the salesman was deliberately
not
looking at him. Vala said nothing. And Coton felt a deep dread. For, of course, that ‘receiver’ was embedded inside Coton’s own head: indeed, it was part of him.

The machine’s low humming continued, and the assistants fussed at their controls.

‘Not much longer,’ Croq said, soothing. ‘Would you like to sit? Something to eat or drink? Of course, Marshal, there may be other facilities we could offer that might be of interest to you as you embark on separate projects—’

Marshal Sand looked down on him. ‘Your manner doesn’t impress me. You’d be surprised how often I come across people like you, salesman – petty and avaricious, grubbing for profit in the misery and ruin the Scourge brings, as humanity flees in a great wave.’

Croq laughed, and Coton grudgingly admired his defiance. ‘What refreshing honesty! Well, I note your contempt, Marshal, but it will not prejudice me against accepting payments in the new Coalition scrip. You disapprove of me selling off bits of the past, do you? But look in the sky.
The Scourge is coming
, despite your schemes and your strutting and your rather magnificent uniform. So you see, Marshal, I may as well sell off our past, for we humans have no future – eh?’ And he laughed again.

There was a soft chime. One of the assistants hurried to the second coffin-box, opened it, and drew out a jacket. This was unfolded and brought to Coton to inspect. It was undoubtedly his; it fitted when he put it on, and he recognised tears and other minor flaws. Yet it stank slightly of ozone, and was warm to the touch.

The teleport was ready. They were, it seemed, committed.

And now Vala and Sand, together, quite gently, began to tell Coton what they needed of him. Or, more specifically, the alien thing in his head.