Stephen Baxter - Vacuum Diagrams

Battles which weren’t over yet, Poole reflected. In fact, as he made sure Dzik never forgot, the commercial success of Dzik’s Baked Alaska venture was crucial for the funding of the overall goal, the Cauchy’s flight into interstellar space.

“But this is different.” Dzik poked a finger at the glossies, leaving a greasy smear. “Not technical, not financial, not political. We’ve found something which isn’t even human. And I’m not sure if there is a resolution.”

The flitter shuddered gently. They were close to the throat of the wormhole itself now. Poole could see the electric-blue struts of exotic matter which threaded the hole’s length, its negative energy density generating the repulsive field which kept the throat open. The walls of the hole flashed in sheets and sparkles: gravitational stresses resolving themselves into streams of exotic particles.

Poole peered at the pictures again, holding them up to the cabin light. “What am I looking at, here?”

Dzik made his hands into a sphere. “You know what Baked Alaska is: a ball a hundred miles across — half friable rock, half water-ice, traces of hydrogen, helium and a few hydrocarbons. Like a huge comet nucleus. It’s in the Kuiper Belt, just beyond the orbit of Pluto, along with an uncounted number of similar companions. And with the Sun just an averagely bright star in the sky, it’s so cold that helium condenses on the surface — superfluid pools, sliding over a water-ice crust.

“When we arrived at Alaska we didn’t inspect it too carefully.” Dzik shrugged. “We knew that as soon as we started work we’d be wrecking the surface features anyway…”

The construction team had swamped the blind little worldlet with an explosion of heat and light. It was a home from home; even its rotation period roughly matched an Earth day. People had moved out from the randomly chosen landing point, exploring, testing, playing, building, preparing for the Port Sol of the future. Structures of ice and liquid helium which had persisted in the lightless depths of the outer System for billions of years crumbled, evaporated.

“Then someone brought in this.”

Dzik leafed through the glossies, picked one out. It showed a hummock on the ice, like the hub of a rimless wheel with eight evenly spaced spokes. “A kid took this snap as a souvenir. A novelty. She thought the regularity was some kind of crystal effect — like a snowflake. So did we all, at first. But then we found more of the damned things.”

Dzik spread the glossies over his briefcase. Poole saw that the structures in the photos shared the eight-fold symmetry of the first. Dzik went on, “All about the same mass and size — the span of those rootlike proboscides is about twelve feet; the height of the central trunk is six feet. They cover Alaska’s surface — particularly ridges which catch the sunlight. Or they did, until we started messing around.” He looked at Poole defensively. “Mike, as soon as I figured out what we have here, I stopped operations and pulled everyone back to the GUTship. We did a lot of damage, but — Mike, we weren’t to know. We’re an engineering crew, not biologists.”

Biologists?

“We managed to lase one of the things open. It’s riddled with fine, hairlike channels. Capillaries. We think the capillaries are for conducting liquid helium. Superfluid.” He searched Poole’s face, unsure. “Do you get it, Mike? The damn things sit on their ridges, half in shade, half out. The sunlight sets up a temperature differential — tiny, but enough to get superfluid helium pumping up through the roots.”

Poole stared at the pictures, astonished.

Dzik slumped back in his chair and folded his fingers across his liquid belly; he gazed out of the flitter at the sparkling tube of stretched space time which surrounded them. “There’s no way the authorities are going to let us go ahead and develop Port Sol now; not if it means exterminating the tree stumps. And yet the stumps are so damned dull. Mike, we’ve built a trillion-dollar wormhole highway to a flower bed. Even the tourist trade won’t be worth a fig. I guess we can haul the wormhole Interface off to some other Kuiper object, but the cost is going to be ruinous—”

“You’re saying these things are alive?”

Dzik’s face was as wide and as blank as the vanished Moon. “That’s the point, Mike,” he said gently. “They’re made of water-ice and rock, and they drink liquid helium. They’re plants.”

The Sun-people blazed through the sky. Sculptor cowered, flattening himself against the unfamiliar ground.

He imagined a Sun-person descending after his own Consolidation, its devilish heat scouring away the blood and bones of his hardened body. Would Sculptor be aware, residually, of the disaster? Would he still feel pain?

He pushed himself away from the broken ground. No person could Consolidate with such a threat abroad; the need to find a safe, stable Hillside — with the proper degree of shade — was like an ache in all of them. And so Sculptor 472 stumbled on with his people, refugees all, vainly seeking shelter from the glowing, deformed strangers.

He was already a day and a half old. Half his active life was gone. He fretted, complained to his father. He gazed around at the hulking, fleeing forms of the people, wondering which of them — in some alternate world free of Sun-people — might have become his mates, or his opponents in the brief, violent, spectacular wrestling contests which decided the choice of Consolidation sites. Sculptor was taller, stronger, smarter than most. In the contests he would have had no difficulty in finding a prime Hill site—

Would have had. But now, a refugee, he would never get the chance. He raised his speech membrane to the sky and moaned. Why me? Why should my generation be so afflicted?

His father stumbled. Two of his leading limbs had crumpled. He tried to bring his trailing limbs around, but he couldn’t regain his balance.

With a soft, almost accepting sigh, Sculptor 471 fell heavily to the ground.

472 hurried to his side. “You must rise. Are you ill?” He grabbed his father’s limbs and tried to haul him across the ice.

47l’s body was tipped onto one side, his weight deforming his structure slightly, flattening it. “Leave me,” he said gently. “Go on. It’s all right.”

The thin voice, the collapsed face, were unbearable for 472. He wrapped his limbs around his father and squeezed, as if trying to rebuild the tall, confident figure who had sheltered him in his first moments of life. “But I can’t leave you.”

“You know you must. It is my time. Consolidation—”

Sculptor was appalled. “Not here. Not now!”

471 sighed. “I can feel my thoughts softening. It isn’t so bad, Sculptor…”

Sculptor looked around desperately. The land was flat, hard. There was no Hillside here, no possibility of shade. And the way his father lay was wrong, with his limbs splayed around him, his torso fallen.

Urgently Sculptor scrabbled at the ice. His flesh ripped, and superfluid blood hissed from the wounds, coating his limbs; but soon he’d opened up a shallow trench. He laid his limbs once more across the still torso of 471. “If I can just roll you to the trench, then maybe there’ll be some shade. Come on, father—”

But 471 didn’t respond. As Sculptor dragged at him, one limb crumbled into hard fragments.

Sculptor fell across the jagged body of his father. Was this the fate which awaited him, too, to fall and perish on the unyielding ground, robbed of Consolidation immortality?

After a time he climbed away from his father. He stretched his limbs and stared around. The migration was a dark band on the horizon; here and there in their trail he saw dark mounds, the forms of more fallen folk.