Timelike Infinity

Chapter 7

Michael Poole brought the Crab’s boat down near the grassy lip of the craft from the future, close to the wreckage of a lifeboat.

Poole, followed by the Virtual of his father, walked out onto a green plain. For a moment he felt disoriented. Beneath his feet there was grass, the blades coarse enough for him to feel through the soft soles of his boots; globes the size of his fist hovered eight feet above him, giving off a Sol-like yellow warmth; and toward the center of the disk-craft a concentration of the globes produced a cozy, Earth-like island of light. There was even a hint of blueness about the layer of atmosphere over the disk of land.

But above him — like some immense roof over creation — hung the banded clouds of Jupiter. It took a conscious effort not to cringe from that lowering sky.

"You know," he said to Harry, "I found it quite hard to step out of the boat. I feel naked, standing here."

"I know what you mean." Harry took a deep, theatrical sniff. "But the air smells as good as the tests showed it to be. Why, you can even smell the grass growing." He bounced on his toes. "And near Earth-normal gravity, as we estimated from orbit."

"Quit showing off," Poole grumbled. "It’s hard to understand how anyone could have the guts to ride through time clinging to this damn thing." He thought of Berg huddled against this ground as the broken exotic-matter walls of the wormhole hurtled past her, and he felt an unfamiliar stab of protectiveness. Damn it, Berg could look after herself as well as anyone he’d known — certainly a lot better than he could himself — but nobody deserved to be put through such an experience.

His protectiveness began to fade to an uncertain guilt, as he wondered if he ought to hold himself responsible, if indirectly, for the chain of events that had resulted in this.

He watched Harry walk out of sight around the Crab’s boat; the craft, a cylindrical lump of metal still frosted from the chill of space, sat on this plain of grass as incongruous as a bullet on an altar cloth.

"My God," Harry called.

Poole followed his father. Harry stood, hands on hips, surveying the wrecked lifeboat they’d seen from the Crab.

The boat had been sliced like a ripe melon. The laser strokes through the hull were paper-sharp — almost pleasing in their clarity and neatness — and Poole could see how the interior of the craft had been scorched and melted, so that interior partitions had softened and flowed toward the soil.

"Well, it’s no ordinary wreck," Harry said. "And look." He pointed to an intact hull panel. "See the registration?"

"It’s from the Cauchy. Harry, this is Miriam’s boat. It has to be." A kind of helpless panic surged through him. "What the hell’s been done to her?"

"Nothing, Michael. I’m all right. See?"

Poole whirled at the sound of the deep, slightly hoarse, and desperately familiar voice. He saw all of her as if in a blur — the tough, lively face, the thatch of cropped hair, eyes that looked soft with tears. Without willing it he found her in his arms. Miriam was a few inches taller than Michael, and her slim body, encased in a coarse, pink jumpsuit, was tense for a moment, though her arms encircled his back; and then she softened, and the length of her body pressed against his. He buried his face in the soft warmth of her neck.

When he was able he released her, held her shoulders, and peered into her face. "My God, Miriam, I thought you were dead. When I saw the lifeboat—"

She smiled, her lips thin. "Not very friendly of them, was it? But they haven’t done me any harm, Mike; they just" — now the stiffness returned—"they just stop me from doing things. Maybe I’m getting used to it. I’ve had a year of it now…"

"And the journey through time? How was that?"

Her face seemed to crumple, before she regained control. "I survived it," she said.

Poole stepped away from her with a trace of embarrassment. He was aware of Harry standing close beside him, but kept his eyes averted from Harry’s face; he was two centuries old, and he was damned if he was going to put up with any more fatherly affection. Not right now.

There was a woman with Miriam, he saw now: as tall as Miriam, slightly scrawny, her thin, bony face young-looking and pretty — except for a dome of a shaven head, which Poole found it hard to keep his eyes away from. The woman regarded him steadily. Her pale-eyed gaze was somehow disturbing; Poole saw the naiveté of youth overlaid with a kind of blank uncaring.

Harry stepped forward to the girl and held out his arms. "Well, Michael got his welcome; how about me?"

Michael groaned inwardly. "Harry—"

The girl swiveled her head to Harry and took a neat step back. "That would be pleasant if it were possible, sir," she said, her face solemn.

Harry grinned and shrugged theatrically. "Are my pixels showing again? Damn it, Michael, why didn’t you tell me?"

Berg leaned close to Poole. "Who’s the asshole?"

"Would you believe, my father?"

Berg screwed up her face. "What an embarrassment. Why don’t you pull the plug? He’s only a Virtual."

"Not according to him."

"Michael Poole." Now the girl, having extricated herself from Harry, was facing Poole. Her complexion was quite poor, the skin around her eyes bruised-looking and tired. Poole felt himself drawn to the weakness of this girl from the future — such a contrast to the high-technology superbeings he’d imagined in his wilder moments. Even the single-piece coverall she wore was, like Miriam’s, of some coarse, cheap-looking artificial fabric.

"I’m Poole," he said. "You’ve already met my father."

"My name is Shira. I’m honored to meet you," Her accent was modern-sounding but neutral. "Your achievements are still famous, in my day," the girl said. "Of course we could not be here to meet you without your Interface project."

Berg cut in sharply, "Is that why you let them land, instead of blowing them out of the sky?"

"We would not have done that, Miriam Berg," Shira said. She sounded vaguely hurt.

"Okay, but you could have cut and run with your hyperdrive, like you did from the other ships—"

The word hit Poole like a slap to the face. "They do have a hyperdrive?"

Berg said sourly, "Sure. Now ask if she’ll let you inspect it."

Harry pressed forward and pushed his young face close to the girl’s. "Why have you come here, to our time? Why has there been only one message from this craft to the rest of the Solar System?"

"You’ve many questions," Shira said, holding her hands up before her as if to ward Harry off. "There is time to answer you at leisure. But please, you are our guests here; you must allow us to receive you into our hospitality."

Harry pointed at the sliced-open wreckage of the Cauchy lifeboat. "Some hospitality you’ve shown so far."

"Don’t be crass, Harry," Poole said, irritated. "Let’s hear what they have to say." He turned to the girl and tried to sound gracious. "Thank you, Shira."

"I’ll take you to my home," Shira said. "Please follow me." And she turned and led the way into the interior of the earth-craft.

Poole, Harry, and Berg trailed a few paces behind Shira. Harry’s Virtual eyes flicked everywhere as they entered the loose maze of single-story, gray-walled buildings that covered the central section of the craft.

Poole tried to keep from touching Berg, from grabbing her again as if he were a boy.

As they walked Poole had the odd sensation that he was stepping into, and then climbing out of, shallow dimples in the grass-coated earth; but the area looked level, as far as the eye could see. The length scale of the unevenness seemed to be about a yard. Covertly he watched Shira as she led them through the little village; she walked gracefully, but he noticed how her stance, too, rocked backward and forward from the vertical by a few degrees, as if she were negotiating invisible potholes.

Harry, of course, sailed a fraction of an inch over the grassy surface.

Harry leaned close to Berg and whispered, "She looks about twenty-five. How old is she really?"

"About twenty-five."

"Don’t kid me."

"I’m serious." Berg ran a hand through her wire-stiff crop of hair. "They’ve lost AS technology… or, rather, had it taken away from them. By the Qax."

Harry looked as if he couldn’t believe it. "What? How can that have happened? I imagined these people would be far in advance of us… That was part of the thrill of Michael’s time-interface experiment in the first place."

"Yes," Poole said grimly, "but it looks as if history isn’t a monotonic process. Anyway, who are the Qax?"

"She’ll tell you," Berg said grimly. "She won’t tell you much else, but she’ll tell you about the Qax. These people call themselves the Friends of Wigner."

"Wigner?" Poole asked. "Eugene Wigner, the quantum physicist?"

"As far as I know."

"Why?"

Berg shrugged sadly, her bony shoulders scratching against the rough material of her jumpsuit. "I think if I knew the answer to that, I’d know most of it."

Poole whispered, "Miriam, what have you found out about the gravity generator?"

Berg looked at him. "Do you want the detail, or just a précis?"

"A précis will do—"

"Diddly squat. They won’t tell me anything. I don’t think they want to tell anybody anything. Frankly, I think they’d prefer I wasn’t here. And they certainty weren’t enamored when I smuggled out my signal to you."

"Why me?" Poole asked.

"Partly because I thought that if anyone could figure out what’s going on here it would be you. And partly because I thought that you had a better chance than anyone else of being allowed to land here; yours is about the only name from our era these people know. And partly—"

"Yes?"

Berg shrugged, on the edge of embarrassment. "Because I thought I needed a friend."

Walking beside her, Poole touched her arm.

He turned to the Virtual. "Harry, these invisible dips in the landscape—"

Harry, surprised, said, "What dips?"

"They’re coming about a yard apart," Poole said. "I think they’re caused by an unevenness of a few percent in whatever’s generating the gravity in this place."

Berg nodded. "I figured out that much. We must be climbing in and out of little gravity wells, right?"

"Harry, tell me if the dips are consistent with a distribution of point masses, somewhere under the surface in the body of the craft."

Harry nodded and looked unaccustomedly thoughtful.

"What does he know?" Berg asked.

"I’m not asking him," Poole said patiently. "I’m really asking the boat. Miriam, Harry’s like a camouflaged terminal to the boat’s AI; one of the main reasons — no, the main reason — for bringing him along is that the future folk might find him easier to accept than a packful of lab equipment."

Harry looked pained, but he kept "thinking."

They reached what was evidently Shira’s "home," a conical teepee ten feet tall. There was an open triangular entrance; smiling, Shira beckoned them in. Poole ran a fingertip over the edge of the doorway. The dove-gray material of the teepee was rigid, vaguely warm to the touch — so not metallic — and felt more than sharp enough to cut flesh.

Two of the fist-sized light globes hovered near the roof of the teepee, casting softened double shadows; they bobbed in response to random currents in the air like paper lanterns. The inner walls were blank of decoration — they bore the same dull dove-gray sheen as the exterior — and the floor area, fifteen feet across near the base, bore a single piece of furniture, a low, hard-looking bed, and what looked like thick rugs, or perhaps scatter cushions.

They stood around awkwardly. Interestingly, now they were inside the teepee Harry seemed to be having trouble with his resolution; his face and limbs crumbled into sugar-cube-sized pixels, and then congealed once more.

Shira bade them sit, and left them.

Stiffly, Berg and Poole pulled a couple of the cushions to the center of the floor and sat, a few inches apart; Harry made a show of sitting on the bed, but the resolution was so poor that from time to time he broke up into such a disparate hail of pixels that Poole could see right through him, to the gray wall. Poole laughed. "You look terrible," he said.

"Thanks," Harry said, his voice indistinct. "It’s the material of the walls; it’s blocking the signal from the boat. What you’re getting is scattered through the doorway."

"What about the gravity wells?"

Harry nodded, his face furred with pixels. "You were right. The dips are consistent with point masses, ten million tons each, set out in a hexagonal array a yard under the surface we stand on… Here comes Shira."

Shira floated through the doorway, smiling, bearing three plates on a tray. "From our kitchens. I’m sorry there’s nothing for you," she said to Harry. The Virtual’s reply was lost in a defocused blur — mercifully, thought Poole.

Poole, Shira, and Berg gathered in a circle on cushions in the center of the teepee. The light globes, clearly semisentient, dipped closer to their heads, casting an incongruously cozy light over the meal. The globes didn’t seem to be aware of Harry, though, and drifted through his head and upper chest; Harry, stoical, ignored them. Poole wasn’t hungry but he used the plain metal cutlery Shira handed him to cut into the food curiously. The food was hot. There was something with the fiber of a white meat, and a thick green vegetable like cabbage, soft as if overboiled. Shira poured a clear, sparkling drink from a bottle into small blue beakers; sipping it, Poole found a sweet, mildly alcoholic tang, like a poor wine.

"It’s good," he said, evoking a polite smile from Shira. "What is it?"

"Sea food," said Berg around a mouthful. "The meat stuff is based on an edible fungus. And the green sludge is processed seaweed."

Shira nodded slightly, in assent at this summation.

"Sounds efficient," Poole said.

"It is," said Berg sourly. "Although that’s all it is. Mike, they’ve shown me some pictures of their Earth. Cities flattened. The continents bordered by thick chlorophyll green: offshore farms. The produce from what’s left of the planet’s arable dry land is exported off-planet. The complex molecules are highly prized, apparently, and raise a good price. For the Qax. Michael, they’ve turned the planet into a damn factory."

Pieces of nightmare slid about Poole’s head. Shira’s poor physical state, the confiscation of AS technology, the occupation of Earth by an alien power… When he’d projected the future to which he had built a bridge he’d envisaged strangeness, yes, but progress.

Dignity.

Instead, here was this shabby girl with her flavorless food…

He asked Berg, "Who do the Qax get a good price from?"

She turned to him with a thin, strained smile. "You’ve a lot to catch up on, Michael. It’s a big galaxy out there. A jungle. Dozens, hundreds of races competing for resources."

Poole put his plate down beside him on the rug, and faced Shira calmly. "I’m full of questions," he said. "And the fragments Miriam has learned have only added to my questions. I know you’re reluctant to share what you know, but—"

"I won’t deny that," Shira said, graciously enough. Her eyes were warm. "But you are a scientist, Michael Poole; and the skill of a scientist is in asking the right question." She gestured, indicating the teepee, her fragment of world. "From all you have seen today, what is the right question, do you think? Ask it and I shall try to answer you."

Harry, a blur of pixels, murmured: "The right question? But how—"

Poole shut out Harry’s voice and tried to focus, to find the key in all this teeming strangeness, a way into the girl’s bizarre world. "All right," he said. "Shira — what are the walls of the teepee made of?"

Shira nodded, a faint smile on her thin lips. "Xeelee construction material," she said.

"And who," asked Poole carefully, "are the Xeelee?"

Shira sipped her wine and, thoughtfully, answered him.

The Xeelee owned the universe.

When humans emerged from the Solar System, limping along in the first sublight GUT-drive ships, they entered a complex universe peopled by many intelligent races. Each race followed its own imperatives, its own goals.

When humans dealt with humans, in the days before interstellar flight, there had always been a residual bond: humans all belonged to the same species, after all. There had always been a prospect one day of communicating, of sharing, of settling down to a mutually acceptable system of government.

Among the races men encountered, as they peered in awe about their suburb of the Galaxy, there was no bond; there was no law, save the savage laws of economics.

Not two centuries after Poole’s time, Earth had been captured and put to work by the group-mind aquatic creatures humans called the Squeem.

Harry whistled. "It’s a tough place out there."

"Yes," Shira said seriously. "But we must regard junior races like the Squeem — even the Qax — as our peers; The key advantage held over us by the Squeem, in those first years, was hyperdrive technology." But the hyperdrive, like many other of the key technological components of the local multispecial civilization — if it could be called that — was essentially Xeelee in origin.

Wherever men, or any of the races men dealt with, had looked, the Xeelee were there, Shira said. Like gods, aloof from the rest: all-powerful, uncaring, intent on their own vast works, their own mysterious projects.

"What are those projects?" Poole asked.

Nobody knew, Shira said. It was hard to be sure, but it seemed that the other junior races were just as ignorant.

Berg leaned forward. "Are we sure the Xeelee exist, then?"

"Oh, yes," said Shira with certainty.

The Xeelee were aloof… but a little careless. They left fragments of their technology around for the junior races to turn up.

"We think this stuff is trivial for the Xeelee," said Shira. "But a single artifact can be enough to galvanize the economy of a race — perhaps give it a significant advantage over its neighbors." Her face, in the uneven light of the hovering globes, looked still more drawn and tired. "Michael, we humans are new to this; and the other species are hardly open to questioning. But we believe that wars have been fought — genocides committed — over artifacts the Xeelee must regard as little more than trinkets."

Shira gave him some examples:

Hyperdrive. Poole’s mouth watered.

The construction material: monomolecular sheets, virtually indestructible, which, in the presence of radiant energy, would grow spontaneously from the fist-sized objects known as "Xeelee flowers."

Instantaneous communication, based on quantum inseparability -

"No," Poole protested. "That’s not possible; you can’t send information down quantum-inseparability channels."

Shira smiled. "Tell the Xeelee."

Innovation among the junior races was nearly dead, Poole learned. It was a waste of effort, it was universally felt, trying to reinvent something the Xeelee probably developed a billion years ago. And besides, while you devoted your resources to researching something, your neighbor would probably spend his on a pirated Xeelee version of the same thing and come blazing into your home system…

Shira sketched more of the story of mankind.

The light, inefficient yoke of the Squeem was thrown off with (in retrospect) ease, and humans moved out into the Galaxy again, in new ships based on the Xeelee hyperdrive… stolen, at secondhand, from the Squeem.

Then humans encountered the Qax. And people were made to grow old again.

"And are you here to escape the Qax?"

Shira’s mouth closed, softly; obviously, Poole thought, he was reaching the boundaries of what Shira was prepared to tell him.

"Well, then," he said, "your intention must be to find a way to overthrow them."

Shira smiled. "You’re an intelligent man, Michael Poole. It must be obvious that I don’t wish to answer such questions. I hope you won’t force me to be rude—"

Berg snorted and folded her arms. "Damn it, here’s the brick wall I’ve come up against since this clod of earth came flying up in the path of the Cauchy. Shira, what’s obvious to me is that you’re out to get rid of the Qax. But why the hell won’t you let us help you? We might seem primitive to you, but, lady, we can pack a punch."

"We’ve discussed this before," Shira said patiently.

"But she has a point," Poole said. "If nothing else we can offer you AS technology. You don’t have to grow old, Shira; think about that."

Shira’s expression remained unclouded. "I doubt if you’ll believe me, but that really doesn’t matter."

Harry seemed to shiver. "This girl gives me the creeps," he said, blurred.

"I believe you," Poole said patiently to Shira. "I understand there are more important things than life itself… But still: Miriam has a point. What have you to gain by turning aside the resources of a Solar System?"

"Maybe they just don’t trust us to help," Harry mused. "Maybe we’d be like chimpanzees working alongside nuclear physicists… or perhaps she’s scared of a time paradox."

Berg shook her head, a sour expression fixed on the girl. "Maybe. But I’ve another theory."

"Which is?" Poole asked.

"That if they let us know what they’re really up to, we’d stop them."

Shira’s laugh was unconvincingly light. "This is a pleasant game."

Poole frowned. "Well, at least I’ve learned enough to understand now some of the things that have been puzzling me," he said.

Shira looked puzzled.

"Your ship was constructed under the nose of an occupying force," he said. "Hence you were forced to build it in camouflage."

"Yes." Shira smiled. "We are proud of our deception. Until the moment of its launch, when we activated a hyperdrive shell, the earth-craft was indistinguishable from any other patch of Earth, save for the ancient stones that served further to misdirect the Qax."

"Hence no hull," Poole said. "But still, the craft was more than detectable. After all, it has the mass of a small asteroid; there must have been gravitational anomalies, detectable by the Qax from orbit, before its launch."

Shira shrugged, looking irritatingly amused. "I cannot speak for the Qax. Perhaps they have grown complacent."

Poole, sitting cross-legged on the thin cushion, settled back on his haunches. He peered into the girl’s calm face. There was something about Shira that troubled him. It was hard to remember that in the absence of AS treatment, her chronological age was the same as her biological age; and youth, Poole realized with a twinge of sadness, had become a novelty in his world. But for a girl of twenty-five she had an inner deadness that was almost frightening. She had described the bloody history of mankind, the depressing vista of endless, undignified war between the stars — even the Qax Occupation, of which her knowledge was firsthand — with flat disinterest.

It was as if, Poole realized uneasily, life held no meaning for this girl.

He leaned forward. "All right, Shira, let’s not play games. I know what you’re doing here; what I don’t yet know is why."

Shira dropped her eyes to the empty tray, the cooling food. She asked quietly, "And what is it, in your judgment, that we are intending to do?"

Poole thumped his fist against the Xeelee-material floor. "Your earth-craft is a honeycomb of singularities. And that, apart from the hyperdrive, is all you seem to have brought back through time.

"And you’ve stayed in Jovian orbit. You could have used your hyperdrive to go anywhere in the System, or beyond…

"I think you’re planning to implode Jupiter; to use your singularities to turn it into a black hole."

He heard Harry gasp. Berg touched his shoulder. "My God, Michael; now you know why I wanted you here. Do you think they can do it?"

"I’m sure they can." Poole kept his eyes locked on Shira’s downturned face. "And it’s obvious that the Project is something to do with the overthrow, or the removal, of the Qax from their future Occupation. But I don’t yet know how it will work. Nor have I decided if we should let them do it."

Shira lifted her head to him now, her weak blue eyes lit by a sudden anger. "How dare you oppose us? You’ve no idea what we intend; how can you have the audacity—"

"How can you have the audacity to change history?" Poole asked quietly.

Shira closed her eyes and sat in a lotuslike position for a few seconds, her thin chest swelling with deep, trembling breaths. When she opened her eyes again she seemed calmer. "Michael Poole, I would prefer you as an ally than as an enemy."

He smiled at her. "And I you."

She stood, her limbs unwinding gracefully. "I must consult." And without saying any more, she nodded and left.

Poole and Berg picked at the cooling food; Harry watched them through a haze of static.