Stephen Baxter - Flux

Up to now Adda had been anticipating only his own death, and the death of many others — even of those close to him. But perhaps this new catastrophe was destined to go much further — to encompass the destruction of the race itself. He was overwhelmed suddenly by a vision of the Star scoured clean of Human Beings, of all future generations — everything Adda had worked for — snuffed out, rendered meaningless.

Toba was still talking. Adda hadn’t heard a word he’d said for a long time.

Adda pulled himself away and took a deep breath. If the world was to finish today — well, there was little Adda could do about it. In the meantime he had work to do.

Deni Maxx joined Adda in the improvised doorway. “Thanks for coming to help us, citizen.”

Toba shrugged. “I needed something to keep me busy.” Another patient was being brought through the ward now; Toba Mixxax stared past Adda at the broken body, and his round face set into a mask of grimness.

“Well, you found it,” Adda said darkly.

Deni Maxx touched his arm. “Come on, upfluxer. Let’s get back to work.”

In the distance the starbreakers, like immense daggers, continued to pierce the Mantle. Adda stared out for one moment longer; then, with a final nod to Toba, he turned away.

Once the Star had seemed huge to her. Now here she was stranded in the immensity of this Ur-sky, of stars and planets, and she thought back almost nostalgically to the cozy world of the Mantle — with the smooth purple floor of the Quantum Sea below her, the Crust a blanket above her, the Mantle itself like an immense womb succoring her. All of that had been stripped away by this astonishing journey, and by the seeing-gadgets of the Ur-humans.

She tilted back her head and opened her eyes as wide as she could, trying to take it all in, to bury her awe and build a model of this new universe in her head.

The sky around them — the space between the stars — wasn’t utterly black. She made out hints of structure: clouds, whorls, shadings of gray. There must be some kind of air out there, beyond the transparent walls — air but not Air: thin, translucent, patchy, but sufficient to give the sky an elusive shape. It was a little like the fugitive ghost-patterns she could see in the darkness of her own eyecups if she jammed her eyes tight shut.

And beyond the thin shroud of gas lay the stars, suspended all around the sky. They were lanterns, clear and without flicker; they were of all colors and all levels of brightness, from the faintest spark to intense, noble flames. And perhaps, she thought with an almost religious awe, those lights in the sky were worlds in themselves. Maybe there were other forms of humans on those distant lights, placed there by the Ur-humans for their own inscrutable purposes. Would it ever be possible to know? — to speak to those humans, to travel there across such immensities?

She tried to make out patterns in the distribution of the stars. Perhaps there was a hint of a ring structure over there — and a dozen stars trailed in a line across that corner of the sky…

But as fast as she found such bits of orderliness in the unmanageable sky, she lost them again. Slowly she came to accept the truth — that there was no order, that the stars were scattered over the sky at random.

For the first time since leaving the “Flying Pig,” panic spurted in her. Her breath scraped through her throat and she felt her capillaries expand throughout her flesh, admitting more strength-bearing Air.

Why should randomness upset her so? Because, she realized slowly, there were no vortex lines here, no neat Crust ceiling or Sea floor. All her life had been spent in a ruled-off sky — a sky where any hint of irregularity was so unusual as to be a sign of deadly danger.

But there were no lines here, no reassuring anchor-points for her mind.

“Are you all right?” Hork sounded calmer than she was, but his eyecups were wide and his nostrils flared, glowing like nuclear-burning wood above his bush of beard.

“No. Not really. I’m not sure I can accept all this.”

“I know. I know.” Hork lifted up his face. In the starlight the intrinsic coarseness of his features seemed to melt away, leaving a calm, almost elegiac expression. He waved a hand across the sky. “Look at the stars. Look how their brightness varies… But what if that variation is an illusion? Have you thought about that? What if all the stars are about as bright as each other?”

Her mind — as usual — plodded slowly behind his flight of logic. If the stars were all the same intrinsic brightness, then some of them would have to be further away. Much further away.

She sighed. No, damn it. She hadn’t thought of that.

Somehow she’d been picturing the starry Ur-universe as a shell around her — like the Crust, though much further away. But it wasn’t like that; she was surrounded by an unbounded sky throughout which the stars — themselves worlds — were scattered like spin-spider eggs.

The universe ballooned around her, reducing her to a meaningless mote, a spark of awareness. It was oppressive, beyond her imagination; she cried out, covering her face in her hands.

Hork sounded uncomfortable. “Take it easy.”

Irritation burrowed through her awe. “Oh, sure. And you’re quite calm, I suppose. Sorry to embarrass you…”

“Give me a break.”

She turned away from him, striving for calm. “I wish I knew what is an appropriate response to all this — to be here in this ancient place, to be seeing through the eyes of the Ur-humans…”

“Well, not quite,” Hork said gently. “Remember there are still walls around us, which must somehow be helping us to see. The Ur-humans didn’t see things the same way we do. Ask Muub about it when we get back… We ‘see’ by sound waves which are transmitted through the Air.” He waved a hand. “But beyond this little bubble, there isn’t any Air. The Ur-humans didn’t live in Air, in fact. And they ‘saw’ by focusing beams of photons, which…”

She wrinkled her nose. “They could smell the stars?”

“Of course not,” he snapped. “In Air, photons can travel only slowly, diffusing. So we use them to smell. And we ‘hear’ temperature fluctuations.

“In empty space, it’s different. Phonons can’t travel at all — so we would be blind. But photons travel immensely fast. So the Ur-humans could have ‘seen’ photons… Anyway, that’s Muub’s theory.”

“Then how did they hear? Or smell, or taste?”

He growled impatiently. “How the hell should I know? Anyway, I think this third chamber is designed to let us see the universe the way the Ur-humans did.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “And there’s still a setting left on the arrow-console, the fourth one… we haven’t finished with our ways of seeing yet.”

She’d forgotten about that last setting. Some core of her, buried deep inside, quailed a little further.

Turning in the Air she looked around, still searching for patterns. The sky wasn’t uniformly dark, she realized; the elusive gas faded up from gray to a deep, crimson glow on the far side of the room. “Come on. I think there’s something beyond the wormhole chamber…”

Still holding hands, they Waved past the control chair and around the darkened tetrahedron which contained the wormhole portal and the “Pig.” Through the open door, Dura glimpsed their craft; its roughly hewn wooden walls, its bands of Corestuff, the slowly leaking stink of Air-pig farts, all seemed unbearably primitive in this chamber of Ur-human miracles.

The sky-glow intensified as they neared its source. At last the glow drowned out the stars. Dura felt herself pull back, shying away from new revelations. But Hork enclosed her fingers in a tight, smothering grip and coaxed her forward. “Come on,” he said grimly. “Don’t fold on me now.” At the center of the glowing sky was a single star: tiny, fierce and yellow-red, brighter than any other in the sky. But this star wasn’t isolated in space. A ring of some glowing gas circled the star, and — still more astonishing — an immense globe of light hung close to the fierce little star. The globe was like a star itself, but attenuated, bloated, its outer layers so diffuse as almost to merge with the all-pervading gas cloud. Tendrils of gray light snaked from the globe-star and reached far into the ring of gas.