Xeelee Redemption Read online

  Dedication

  To my mother

  Sarah Marion Baxter

  1929–2018

  XEELEE: REDEMPTION

  STEPHEN BAXTER

  GOLLANCZ

  LONDON

  Contents

  Dedication

  TITLE PAGE

  ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  TWO

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  THREE

  29

  30

  31

  32

  FOUR

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  FIVE

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

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  SIX

  66

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  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  SEVEN

  78

  79

  80

  Afterword

  Also by Stephen Baxter

  Copyright

  ONE

  There have always been engineers in my family.

  George Poole, ad 2005

  1

  He was the last human.

  He was beyond time and space. The great quantum functions which encompassed the universe slid past him like a vast, turbulent river, and his eyes were filled with the grey light against which all phenomena are shadows.

  Time wore away, unmarked.

  And then, millions of years after the Qax invasion, millions of years after his own descent into the wormholes, and deep time—

  There was a box, drifting in space, cubical, clear-walled.

  From around an impossible corner a human walked into the box. He wore a battered skinsuit, of an old-fashioned design.

  He stared out, astonished, at stars, bright, teeming, young. Detonating.

  Michael Poole’s extended awareness stirred.

  Something had changed.

  History had resumed.

  2

  Ship elapsed time since launch: 6 years 219 days

  Earth date: ad 4106

  Jophiel Poole was born in a moment of doubt.

  Although he wasn’t even called Jophiel at that point.

  A second after his creation, Poole knew where he was. And he knew, to a reasonable degree of accuracy on a number of timescales, when he was. His problem was that, just for a heartbeat, he wasn’t sure who he was.

  Real or otherwise.

  At least he could determine that. Poole looked at his own right hand. Turned it over, flexed his fingers. And then waved it towards a chair, standing beside him. The hand passed through the substance of the chair, the fingers breaking up briefly into strings of blocky pixels, before congealing with a sharp ache. Consistency protocols, designed in part to protect the rights of artificial people themselves, demanded that Virtuals lived in the human world as far as possible. If you were in vacuum, you wore a pressure suit. Of course it was possible to cheat, such as by passing a hand through a solid object. But if you did so, it hurt.

  ‘Anyhow, I’m the Virtual,’ he said. A disposable copy of the template of Michael Poole, created for a one-off purpose, then to be synced back and disposed of. ‘Lucked out.’

  Later he would wonder if he had had some premonition at this moment of his own complicated fate to come. Including meeting yet another copy of himself before the day was out.

  For now, all he felt was a vague confusion.

  He looked around.

  He was standing in a small executive suite at the summit of a GUTship lifedome, a big hemisphere. He was a full radius, four hundred metres, above the floor deck. Looking down, he saw his – or rather Michael Poole’s – ship in complex cross section, the crew in their bright red or blue coveralls (blue for Virtuals, like himself), pursuing their work, their play, their lives. This was a starship, an integrated machine of technology and humanity. Above his head, outside the dome, was a tetrahedral skeleton, electric blue, glowing faintly in the vacuum of space. This was the entrance to a wormhole network that connected this craft, the Cauchy, to the other two ships of this small fleet.

  The interface was pretty much all that was visible outside the dome. The sky was darkened, the stars obscured, by the GUTship’s sheer velocity, by a distortion of space and time that swept up the starlight: relativity in action.

  The effects of long-duration spaceflight were not intuitive. Accelerating at a standard gravity, after about a year you approached lightspeed. If you kept thrusting after that, you just pushed ever harder against that unbreakable barrier, your energy pouring into increased mass-energy rather than extra velocity, the dilation effect making time and space bend like molten glass . . .

  More than six years after leaving the Solar System, after six years of the mighty GUTdrive thrusting at a steady gravity, the Cauchy was moving so close to lightspeed that, as seen from Earth, the vessel’s spacetime frame was massively distorted. For every day that passed for Poole, more than a year passed on Cold Earth. To put it another way, the six years experienced by Poole so far was equivalent to four centuries back on Earth. With time, that disparity would get wider.

  And, too, so hard was the Cauchy pushing against lightspeed that the star fields through which it fled could not be seen true. Poole was hurtling into the starlight – as if he was running into rain, the drops sweeping into his face. So now all Poole saw of the starlight was a misty grey patch directly ahead of the ship, beyond the wormhole interface. Otherwise, darkness. It was going to be this way for another twelve years or more of ship’s time, after which the ship would slow at last, and the sky of the Galaxy’s Core would unfold around them all.

  But at least the Cauchy was not alone.

  Poole saw two matchsticks in the dark, companion ships naked-eye visible, keeping pace: the Gea, the Island. Like the Cauchy, each was a glowing dome topping a gaunt spine some three kilometres long, leading to a block of Oort-cloud ice and the gleaming spark of a GUTdrive thruster, bright in the relativistic dark. And each was topped by its own neat electric-blue tetrahedron. Physically these triplets kept a safe distance from each other. Transfer of crew and supplies between the ships was by wormhole only.

  Slim, shining with GUT energy, the craft looked like weapons, Poole thought: spears, tipped by blades of exotic matter. We
ll, they were weapons. Humans weren’t going to the centre of the Galaxy to explore.

  Outside the lifedome, nothing but those other ships. Inside, people. Fifty of them in the Cauchy, plus more in her companions. A hive of people, all busily moving around according to their duties or their leisure schedule – two-thirds of the crew, presumably, while the other third, one off-duty watch, slept in darkened quarters. All of this was embraced in a barely visible tracery of the technology that kept them all alive in this void, embedded in the walls and floors – the brightly lit hydroponic banks, the ranks of sleeper pods, the massive systems that circulated and renewed their air and water.

  Michael Poole – the original, this Virtual copy’s template – was more than fifty years old now, subjective; he had been forty-four when the flotilla had left Cold Earth. Though AS treatments had preserved him at a physical age of around twenty-five, there were times when he felt the weight of all those years, that half-century. And Poole, or his template, was an engineer, and a major part of him always longed to be far from all this people stuff. Ideally to be three kilometres away, at the other end of the ship’s spine, buried in the heart of an engine he had done so much to develop and refine: a tangle of pipes and ducts and cables and monitor screens all surrounding the glistening GUTdrive pod itself. Like working within the organs of some tremendous beast.

  Still, as he gazed down from this Virtual Olympus, as he watched the crew who had joined him on his quest into the dark, he felt an unreasonable stab of affection. Not that he could ever voice such sentiments out loud.

  And when he glanced across this apex suite he looked back at himself – no, he saw Michael Poole, the true Poole, sitting at a desk, evidently preparing for the upcoming special crew review. He was swiping through Virtual reports, pages of data, images of talking heads. Wearing a coverall of brilliant red. He had a tattoo on his forehead, a crude green tetrahedron. In another universe, another timeline, that had been known as the Sigil of Free Humanity.

  Virtual Poole prepared to go over, to begin the work he had been created for.

  Hey.

  A voice that was familiar, and yet not. Poole hesitated, turned.

  To find himself looking into a mirror.

  It was, unmistakably, Michael Poole. Another copy? Himself, and yet not quite.

  The new copy wore a faded grey coverall. Not standard issue aboard the Cauchy. Pockets big enough for tools. And he had a sense of age about him, too. Grey in the hair. A certain softness in the brown eyes that looked back. He looked more like sixty than fifty, Poole thought. And he seemed – fragile. As if he were recovering from some injury.

  The other grinned. Take your time. Time’s the one thing I’m not short of.

  Oddly, his lip movements did not quite sync with his speech. ‘Who are you? Another Virtual? I don’t remember spinning you off.’

  Not that. Although maybe I have something of that – quality. More information than flesh.

  ‘Some kind of processing glitch, then? A ghost copy?’

  The other grimaced. A ghost, maybe. I do seem to find it easier to reach you, than him. He gestured at Poole at his desk. I don’t know why. Glad you came along. But then there’s a lot I don’t understand. As ever. That smile again. Reality leaks, is all I know. As if the universe itself has doubts, sometimes. We’ll work it out together, I guess. Lethe, we’ve got to work together, to get through this. Remember that.

  ‘Get through what? . . .’

  ‘Who are you talking to?’

  He turned. Nicola Emry was walking over to him. She was expected; he’d called her up here to discuss some points. Or rather Poole, his template, had called her, before he was spun off.

  ‘I . . .’ He turned back. The other Poole had gone.

  Nicola was studying him, curious, amused. ‘“Get through what?”, you said.’

  Poole didn’t know how to reply. Even to her. Even though there was nobody on board closer to Poole than Nicola, and that had been true long before the flotilla had left Cold Earth. She had been with Michael Poole when a Xeelee warship had burst out of a Poole Industries prototype fast-transit-system wormhole, intent, it soon emerged, on destroying mankind. And she had stuck by him through what followed, through the ravaging of the Solar System, all the way to the Scattering of mankind.

  The crew called her ‘Keeper of the Amulet’. Even Max Ward, Poole’s senior military advisor, as manipulative and ambitious as he was competent, wasn’t going to prise apart that relationship any time soon.

  Not that she wasn’t difficult. Nicola was in her mid-fifties now, and she wore the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, the greying of her short-cropped hair, like badges of honour. Famously, and very unusually, she had always refused any AS treatment. And although her own coverall, rather ostentatiously covered with training-mission patches and weapon loops, was bright red, she scarcely needed it; Nicola was also notorious for refusing to throw off Virtual projections of herself. If Nicola approached you, you could be sure it was the authentic article.

  Now she looked at Poole with that amused concern. ‘Baby’s only a minute old and he doesn’t look happy.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Well, that sounds like a Poole. Pure denial. You know, I’ve seen you do this over and over. Throwing off Virtual copies like shedding skins. Such as when you, or a copy of you, rode with me and my Monopole Bandits against the Xeelee at the stop line before Earth . . . And then you soak it all back in again, with whatever memories the latest puppet gathered during its short, pathetic bit of independent life.’

  ‘Not sure if you’re helping here, Nicola.’

  ‘You never gave a thought to what you were doing to yourself. Creating a separate, sentient, short-lived copy that was you until the moment of projection, and then taking it back into your own head. I always wondered if that chain of mini-deaths was some kind of self-punishment for the calamity you brought down on the Solar System. The Xeelee came for you, in a sense, after all. You, though . . .’ She stared into his unreal eyes. ‘You’re different, somehow.’

  ‘Just differently irritated by you.’

  ‘Tell me how you feel.’

  ‘Like I have a job to do.’

  ‘What job?’

  ‘Well—’ His own hesitation surprised him.

  ‘Lethe! You don’t know, do you? Or aren’t sure, at least. That’s new.’

  Again he looked at his own hands. ‘I do remember casting off all those previous copies. Of course I do; I did it. Every time before I found myself in a red uniform, looking out at a copy in blue.’

  ‘Ah. The problem is—’ She jabbed a finger at his chest, pulling back before ‘touching’ him and violating various consistency protocols. ‘This time, you woke up to find the copy is you.’ She grinned maliciously. ‘Lucked out, indeed. And you don’t like it, do you? Now you know why I never create these avatars myself. For fear of waking up like you, on the wrong side of the mirror.’

  Now his original, evidently distracted by the conversation, walked over from his desk. ‘Why all the chatter?’ He looked at his copy. ‘Have you some problem? Look, if there’s been some defect in the copying, I can wipe you and—’

  ‘No.’ He found himself biting back the word ‘please’.

  Nicola glowered at template Poole. ‘You’re all heart, aren’t you? You’ve got no idea what this creature is feeling, have you?’

  The Virtual Poole winced. ‘“Creature”?’

  Nicola grinned, not without malice. ‘I am on your side.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Template Poole looked uncertain. ‘I never had any trouble with Virtual copies before. You define the mission, you create the copy, off it goes.’

  ‘Well, something was different this time. What is he for?’

  He, not it.

  Template Poole frowned. Maybe he had noticed that too. ‘To fix the probl
ems on Gea, of course.’

  Now Virtual Poole remembered. One of the sister ships, Gea was a hull crammed with artificial-sentience hardware and software, and crewed solely by Virtuals, spun off from hibernating originals. Gea was intended to be the brain of the fleet, with the green-glowing Island as its heart, and the weapons-laden Cauchy as its fist.

  ‘You are to go over and sort out the power-drain problems. The fouled-up science reports. You know the protocol; only Virtual visits to the Gea for the sake of physical stability. All those delicate processing suites.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Poole said, remembering. ‘I wasn’t focusing. I mean, you weren’t focusing. You were thinking about the Second Generation issue. “This is a warship, not a crèche.” That was the line you had added to your notes for your speech, just when—’

  Poole held up a hand. ‘OK, my fault. I threw off a flawed copy while distracted. But the process is usually more robust than that.’

  Distracted. That was the problem, Virtual Poole saw.

  This mission was Michael Poole’s: the goal was to pursue the Xeelee and, if possible, to destroy it, as vengeance for what it had wrought on the Solar System. It – it was assumed that the solitary ship had carried one individual. But nobody knew if the Xeelee could be distinguished from its technology, or if the ship had carried some kind of collective. In the thirty-seventh century, nothing had been known of the Xeelee save its, their, name.

  From the beginning Poole’s crew had shared in that goal, the determination to pursue the Xeelee; that was why they had volunteered to follow him. But Poole was an engineer, not a military officer, not a captain. He could command, but it was always a cognitive strain. Even worse when Poole was called on to inspire.

  He had been overloaded, distracted. And, as a result, this.

  ‘So what now?’ Nicola pressed. ‘Are you going to collapse this guy and throw off another copy?’

  Virtual Poole held his breath. He had no power here, he realised; his existence was in the hands of this other, a copy of himself divergent by only a few minutes.

  But template Poole, too, seemed pricked by doubt. ‘I guess not. You know the mission well enough. Come to the briefing to pick up anything new.’