Stephen Baxter: Flux

He frowned, staring at her, and reached forward, as if to touch her. But he drew the hand back. “Perhaps you’re not as strong as I like to think you are.”

“No,” she said quietly. “Perhaps I’m not.”

“Come,” he said. “We’ll help each other. And we’ll help our people. No one’s dead yet, after all.”

Dura scrambled across the Magfield flux lines to the Net. Men, women and older children were gathered in tight huddles, their thin bodies bumping together as they floated in the turbulent Magfield, laboring at the Net. They cast fearful, distracted glances at the approaching vortex instabilities, and from all around the Net Dura could hear muttered — or shouted — prayer-chants, pleas for the benevolence of the Xeelee.

Watching the Human Beings, Dura realized they were huddling together for comfort, not for efficiency. Rather than working evenly and systematically around the Net, the people were actually impeding each other from working effectively at the dismantling; whole sections of the tangled Net were being left unattended.

Dura’s feeling of depressed helplessness deepened. Perhaps she could help them organize better — act as Logue’s daughter for once, she admonished herself wearily, act as a leader. But as she studied the frightened faces of the Human Beings, the round, staring eyecups of the children, she recognized the weary terror which seemed to be numbing her own reactions.

Maybe huddling and praying was as rational a response as any to this latest disaster.

She twisted in the Air and Waved toward an empty section of Net, keeping well away from Esk and Philas. Logue would have to do the leading; Dura would remain one of the led.

The first of the massive ripples neared the encampment. Feeling the growing tension in the Air, Dura grasped the Net’s sturdy rope and pulled her body against its shuddering bulk. For a moment her face was pressed against the Net’s thick mesh, and she found herself staring at an Air-pig, not an arm’s length from her. The rope-threaded holes punched through its fins were widened with age, ringed by scar tissue. The Air-pig seemed to be looking into her eyes, its six eyestalks pushed straight out from its brain pan, the cups swiveled at her. The beast was one of the oldest of the Air-pigs — as a kid, she recalled wistfully, she would have known the names of each one of the meager herd — and it must have seen plenty of spin storms before. Well, she thought. What’s your diagnosis? Do you think we’ve a chance of getting through this storm any better than we have all the others? Will you live to see the other side of it? What do you think?

The creature’s fixed, mournful stare, the brown depths of its eyecups, afforded her no reply. But its musty animal warmth stank of fear.

The mat of rope before her face glimmered suddenly, blue-white; her head cast a shadow before her.

She turned to see that one vortex line had drifted to within a couple of mansheights of her position; it shimmered in the Air, quivering, a cable emitting an electric-blue glow almost too clamorous for her eyes.

The tribesfolk appeared to have given up any attempts at dismantling the Net; even Logue and Adda had come Waving across to the illusory safety of the habitat. People simply clung on where they were, arms wrapped around each other and around the smallest of the children, the opened-up Net flapping uselessly around them. The crying of children resounded.

And now, with sudden brutality, the spin storm hit. A jagged discontinuity a mansheight deep surged along the nearest vortex line past the Net, faster than any human could Wave, faster even than any wild Air-pig could jet through the Air. Dura tried to concentrate on the solidity of the fibrous rope in her hands, the comforting Magfield which, as always, confined her body with a gentle grip… But it was impossible to ignore the sudden thickness of the Air in her lungs, the roaring heat-noise blasting through the Air so powerfully she feared for her ears, the quivering of the Magfield.

She clenched her eyes closed so hard that she could feel the Air in the cups squeeze away. Concentrate, she told herself. You understand what’s happening here. That wretched Air-pig, bound up inside the Net, is as ignorant as the youngest piglet in its first storm. But not you; not a Human Being.

And it is through understanding that we will prevail… But, even as she intoned the words to herself like a prayer, she could not find any truth in that pious hope.

The Air was a neutron liquid, a superfluid. Superfluids could not sustain spin over extended distances. So, in response to the rotation of the Star, the Air became filled with vortex lines, tubes of vanishing thinness within which the Air’s rotation was confined. The vortex lines aligned themselves in regular arrays, aligned with the Star’s rotation axis — closely parallel to the magnetic axis followed by the Magfield. The vortex lines filled the world. They were safe as long as you stayed away from them; every child knew that. But in a Glitch, Dura thought ruefully, the lines sometimes came looking for you… and the Air’s superfluidity broke down around a collapsing vortex line, transforming the Air from a thin, stable, lifegiving fluid into a thing of turmoil and turbulence.

The worst of the first spin gust seemed to be passing now. Still clinging to the Net, she opened her eyes and cast rapidly around the sky.

The vortex lines, parallel beams receding into infinity, were still marching grandly across the sky, seeking their new alignment. It was quite a magnificent sight; and for a moment Dura felt wonder thrill through her as she imagined the arrays of spin lines which stretched right around the Star realigning, gathering and spreading, as if the Star were bound up in the integrated thoughts of some immense mind.

The Net shuddered in her grip, its coarse fibers abrading her palms; the sharp pain jolted her rudely back to the here and now. She sighed, gathering her strength, as weariness closed around her again.

“Dura! Dura!”

The childish voice, thin and scared, came drifting to her from a few mansheights away. Gripping the Net with one hand, she twisted to see Farr, her little brother, suspended in the Air like a discarded fragment of cloth and flesh. He was Waving toward her.

When Farr reached her, Dura enfolded him in her free arm, helping him wrap his arms and legs around the security of the Net’s ropes. He was breathing hard and trembling, and she could see the short hairs which coated his scalp pulsing as superfluid surged through them.

“I was thrown off,” he gasped between gulps of Air. “I lost my piglet.”

“So I see. Are you okay?”

“I think so.” He stared up at her, his eyes wide and empty, and he raked his gaze across the sky as if searching for the source of this betrayal of his safety. “This is terrible, isn’t it, Dura? Are we going to die?”

She ran her fingers casually through his stiff hair. “No,” she said, with a conviction she could never have mustered for herself alone. “No, we won’t die. But we are in danger. Now come on, we should get to work. We need to get the Net taken apart, folded up, before the next instability hits us and wrecks it.” She pointed to a small, open-looking knot. “There. Undo that. As quick as you can.”

He buried his trembling fingers in the knot and began prizing out lengths of rope. “How long before the next ripple?”

“Long enough to finish the job,” she said firmly. For confirmation, with her own fingers still dragging at the stubborn knots, she glanced upflux — Northward — to the source of the next ripple.

Instantly she saw how wrong she had been. From around the Net she heard voices raised in wonder and rising alarm; within a few heartbeats, it seemed, she was hearing the first screams.