Stephen Baxter - Timelike Infinity

At last, after a subjective century, the Cauchy would return to Jovian orbit. Fifteen centuries would have worn away on Earth. But still their wormhole portal would connect them to the past, to friends and worlds grown no older than they had.

"I don’t know what I was expecting exactly as we neared Sol." Berg said. "We’d run hundreds of scenarios, both before and during the journey, but we knew it was all guesswork; I guess inside I was anticipating anything from radioactive wastelands, to stone axes, to gods in FTL chariots.

"But what I’d never anticipated was what we found. Earth under the thumb of super-aliens nobody has even seen… and look what came hurtling out to meet us, even before we’d got through the orbit of Pluto." She shook her head at the memory. "A patch of Earth, untimely ripp’d from England and hurled into space; a few dozen skinny humans clinging to it desperately."

She remembered venturing from the steel security of the Cauchy into Jovian space, an envoy in her solo lifeboat, and tentatively approaching the earth-craft; she had scarcely been able to believe her eyes as the ship had neared a patch of countryside that looked as if it had been cut out of a tourist catalogue of Earth and stuck crudely onto the velvet backdrop of space. Then she had cracked the port of the boat on landing, and had stepped out onto grass that rustled beneath the tough soles of her boots…

For a brief, glorious few minutes the Friends had clustered around her in wonder.

Then Shira had come to her — related fifteen centuries of disastrous human history in as many minutes — and explained the Friends’ intentions.

Within a couple of hours of landing Berg had been forced to crouch to the grass with the rest as the earth-craft plummeted into the gravity tube that was the wormhole. Berg shuddered now as she remembered the howling radiation that had stormed around the fragile craft, the ghastly, mysterious dislocation as she had traveled through time.

She hadn’t been allowed to get a message off to the crew of the Cauchy. Perhaps her Cauchy shipmates were already dead at the hands of the Qax — if that word "already" had any meaning, with spacetime bent over on itself by the wormhole.

"It has been an eventful few days," she said wryly. "As a welcome home this has been fairly outrageous."

Shira was smiling, and Berg tried to focus. "I’m glad you say that: outrageous," Shira said. "It was the very outrageousness of the idea that permitted us to succeed under the eyes of the Qax, as we planned. Come, let us talk; we have time now."

They turned and began to stroll slowly back "down" the rim hill and toward the interior of the craft. As they walked Berg had the uncomfortable feeling that she was descending into and climbing out of invisible dimples in the landscape, each a few feet wide and perhaps inches shallow. But the land itself was as flat as a tabletop to the eye. She was experiencing unevenness in the field that held her to this quarter-mile disk of soil and rock; whatever they used to generate their gravity around here clearly wasn’t without its glitches.

Shira said, "You must understand the situation. We knew, from surviving records of your time, that your return to the Earth with the Interface portal was imminent. If you had succeeded a gateway to the free past might become available to us. We conceived the Project—"

Berg looked at her sharply. "What Project?"

Shira ignored the question. "The Qax authorities were evidently unaware of your approach, but clearly, once they detected your vessel and its unique cargo, you would be destroyed. We had to find a way to meet you before that happened.

"So, Miriam. We had to build a space vessel, and in the full and knowing gaze of the Qax."

"Yeah. You know, Shira, we’re going to have to sort out which tense to use here. Maybe we need to invent a whole new grammar — future past, uncertain present…"

Shira laughed without self-consciousness, and Berg felt a little more human warmth for her.

They walked through a grove of light globes. The globes, hovering in the air perhaps ten feet from the soil, gave out sunlike heat and warmth, and Berg paused for a few moments, feeling on her face and in her newly aging bones the warmth of a star she had abandoned a subjective century before. In the yellow-white light of the globe the flesh-pink glow of Jupiter was banished, and the grass looked normal, wiry and green; Berg ran a slippered toe through it. "So you camouflaged your ship."

"The Qax do not interfere with areas they perceive as human cultural shrines."

"Hurrah for the Qax," said Berg sourly. "Perhaps they’re not such bad fellows after all."

Shira raised the ridges from which her eyebrows had been shaved. "We believe that this is not altruism but calculation on the part of the Qax. In any event the policy is there — and it is a policy that may be manipulated to our gain."

Berg smiled, her mind full of a sudden, absurd image of rebels in grimy jumpsuits burrowing like moles under cathedrals, Pyramids, the concrete tombs of ancient fission reactors. "So you built your ship under the stones."

"Yes. More precisely, we readied an area of land for the flight."

"Where did you get the resources for this?"

"The Friends of Wigner have adherents System-wide," Shira said. "Remember that by the time of the first encounter with the Qax, humans had become a starfaring species, able to command the resources of multiple systems. The Qax control us — almost completely. But in the small gap left by that ‘almost’ there is room for great undertakings… projects to match, perhaps, the greatest works of your own time."

"I wouldn’t bet on that," Berg said with grim confidence.

They walked on, toward the heart of the craft. "So," said Berg, "you got your ship ready. How did you get it off the planet and into space?"

"A stolen Squeem hyperdrive device," said Shira. "It cast a lenticular field around the craft, initially isolating it — and a surrounding layer of air — from the planet. Then the drive was used to hurl the craft into space, to bring it to the vicinity of your Cauchy. Then — after rendezvous with your ship — the drive was used to carry the craft through the Interface."

"The Squeem. That’s the race humans came up against earlier, right? Before the Qax."

"And who, in their defeat, afforded us much of the basic technology we needed to get out of the Solar System."

"How will we defeat them?"

Shira grinned. "Read your history books."

"So," Berg said, "is the Squeem drive operating now?"

"Minimally. It serves as a radiation screen."

"And to keep the air stuck to the ship, right?"

"No, the craft’s gravity does that."

Berg nodded; maybe here was a chance to get a little more meaningful information. "Artificial gravity? Things have come a long way since my day."

But Shira only frowned.

They approached the dwellings and workplaces of the Friends. The buildings, simple cubes and cones built on a human scale, were scattered around the heart of this landscape ship like toys, surrounding the old stones at the center of the disk. The building material was uniformly dove-gray and — when Berg ran her fingertips over the wall of a teepee as she passed — smooth to the limit of sensation. But it was human-warm, without the cold of metal. This was "Xeelee construction material," one of the many technological miracles that had apparently seeped down to mankind — and their foes, like the Squeem and the Qax — from the mysterious Xeelee, lords of creation.

Friends moved among the buildings, patiently going about their business. One small group had collected around one of the data capture devices they called "slates," and were arguing over what looked like a schematic of the earth-craft.