Stephen Baxter - Vacuum Diagrams

Deliberately he turned away from the refugees.

His stride stiff with rage and resentment, Sculptor walked back towards his ancestral Hills.

Poole and Dzik clambered aboard the GUTship. The ship was parked fifty miles from the wormhole Interface, a hundred miles from the surface of the Kuiper object called Baked Alaska.

The ship’s corridors seemed immediately crowded, stuffy, claustrophobic to Poole; he became aware of the gaze of the crew on him — sullen, resentful. Bill Dzik hauled his bulk through the corridors with a seal-like grace. “Don’t mind them. They don’t like being packed away inside the ship again; they were just getting used to the open spaces of the Alaska beachhead.”

“And they’re blaming me?”

“You’re the big bad boss who might decide to shut down their operation. Don’t forget they spent a year of their lives hauling the portal out here.”

“As did you, Bill,” Poole said gently. “And you don’t resent me.”

“No.” Dzik looked at him sharply. “But I don’t envy you your decision either, Mike.”

Baked Alaska was a million cubic miles of water, an ice moon rolling around the lip of the Sun’s gravity well. Poole’s consortium had hauled the first wormhole Interface out to the Kuiper Belt, linking Alaska to the distant, cosy worlds of the inner System. Poole’s vision was that Baked Alaska’s ice would be the fuel dump of the interstellar flights of the future. A Gibraltar, a harbor mouth for a Solar System linked by wormhole transit paths.

They reached Dzik’s cabin. It was spartan, with an outsize sleeping cocoon, a zero-gee shower, a data desk unit. Poole felt grateful to close the door behind them.

Dzik strapped himself into a chair; with practiced stabs of his broad fingers he accessed the data desk. A series of messages flickered, priority-coded.

Poole looked around the cabin, hoping to be offered a drink.

After a minute, Dzik leaned back in his chair and whistled. “Now we really do have trouble.”

“What is it?”

Dzik linked his fingers behind his head. “Before lifting from the surface we did a couple of deep core samples. We wanted to figure out the ecosystem.” He glanced down at his desk again. “Well, here are the results.”

The desktop surface was filled with the blown-up image of a cross-section of ice. Hints of regularity — artifacts of crystallization — filled the image with lines and planes. It was hauntingly beautiful, like an abstract design in blue and white stained glass.

And there was something else. Small objects, dense and hard, incongruous in the wispy ice. Poole pulled himself down to the desktop and looked closely.

Here was a rectangle, evidently carved from rock, with twin rows of irregularly shaped holes. And here, something like a picture frame, octagonal, empty. Other objects, more elusive, hard for the mind to categorize.

“Lethe. What a break,” Dzik said. “Now we’ll never get the ecologists off our backs.”

Poole gazed down, entranced. Artifacts, locked into this deep ice. There had been intelligence here.

Another half-day wore away. Two-thirds of his life gone. He felt his joints growing stiff, his face hardening.

He was tall, strong, savage. Retracing the migrants’ trail of disrupted ice and failed Consolidations, Sculptor stalked on towards his father’s land.

Poole found it impossible to think in the confines of the GUTship. He had Bill Dzik fit out a one-man flitter; he left the GUTship and descended towards the icy carcass of Alaska.

The crude human encampment — the seed of Port Sol — was a series of metal boxes dropped into slushy, dirty snow. Poole came down ten miles from the encampment; in Alaska’s microgravity the ship settled to the surface like a snowflake.

Movement on the horizon, to his right.

He leaned forward. Perhaps a star had been occluded by Alaska’s slow rotation.

Poole sat in silence, the microgravity feather-light on his limbs. In the starlight the ice of Baked Alaska was bone-pale, laced with the rich purples and blues of trace hydrocarbons. The little cabin was silent save for his own breathing, and the occasional creak of cooling contraction.

In truth, the decision about the future of Baked Alaska had been made for him. Poole’s consortium had intended to drop a wormhole terminus into the Sun, to drench Port Sol with fusion heat and light. But now the archaeologists and xenobiologists would come and peel the little world open, layer by layer.

Poole knew that was right. But he still didn’t understand what had been found here, how this little world worked. Until he’d figured it out he felt reluctant to turn his treasure over to the rest of the System. Partly this was down to the streak of personal responsibility in his makeup; but also he had to think about his consortium, about the future of his other projects, the Cauchy… about the profit to be made out of all this.

Cauchy was the ultimate goal. By dragging a wormhole portal around a circuit light years across, the GUTship Cauchy would establish a wormhole bridge — not across space — but across fifteen centuries, to the future. [1] See Timelike Infinity

Poole was determined that the Port Sol project — and the Cauchy itself — wouldn’t be compromised by events here.

He opened up his mind, let the elements of the situation rotate through his thoughts.

Like Bill Dzik, Poole was no biologist. But Bill was surely right that there had to be more to the Baked Alaskan ecology than just the tree stumps. Perhaps, Poole speculated, the stumps had been some sort of favored crop, selected by the toolmakers. And the toolmakers had presumably suppressed the rest of the little world’s fauna, as man had depleted Earth’s diversity.

But what happened to the toolmakers? Where did they go?

Poole thought about growing to awareness here, in this empty, isolated place. The inner Solar System was just a muddy pool of light. Even Alaska’s companion objects were themselves sparsely scattered around the Kuiper Belt. Alone, cold, he shivered. This ice world would yield no raw materials… An intelligent species would be trapped here.

Motion again, to his right. Impossible. But this time, unmistakable.

He turned slowly, his eyes wide.

It was like a tree stump, a cylinder perhaps six feet tall. But it towered on unstretched root-legs, eight of them, like an unlikely spider. And it was moving towards him, over the horizon.

Sculptor 472 howled. Flesh shriveled from his torso and limbs; blood pulsed through his body, fleeing the heat. And yet he moved towards the Sun-person, step after dragging step. The Sun-person was a small, squat box of heat, no taller than Sculptor’s torso… A squat box. A made thing? Ancient, half-formed memories stirred at the fringe of Sculptor’s bubbling awareness.

He raised his limbs over his head. “Get away!” he screamed. “Leave our world; let us return to our Hills!” He remembered his father’s awful, tragic fall, his failure to Consolidate; he let anger drive him forward against the heat.

It was a tower of ice, sparkling in starlight, beautiful despite its bulk. Poole wondered where it got the energy to move such mass. The main body was a cylinder, with windows set around its rim — no: they were eyes, with lenses of ice. A skeleton, of denser ice, glimmered in the depths of the body.

A sensor blinked on the flitter’s tiny control panel. The ship was picking up low-frequency radiation.

Was the thing trying to talk to him?

…And now, with a sudden, shocking loss of grace, it was falling.

No. It is not my time. I have a full day, yet. And I still have not mated, or budded, or found my Hill —