Stephen Baxter - Timelike Infinity

To my niece, Jessica Bourg

The flitter rose from Occupied Earth like a stone thrown from a blue bowl. The little cylindrical craft tumbled slowly as it climbed, sparkling.

Jasoft Parz had been summoned to a meeting, in orbit, with the Qax Governor of Earth. Parz scoured a mind worn into grooves of habit by his years in the diplomatic service for reasons for this summons. It must be connected with the arrival of the damned wormhole from the past, of course — that had stirred up the Qax like a stick in a hornet’s nest.

But why summon him now? What had changed?

As his distance from the planet increased, so grew Parz’s apprehension.

Alone in the automated flitter Parz watched shafts of cerulean Earthlight thread through the small ports and, twisting with the craft’s rotation, dissect the dusty air around him. As always the glowing innocence of the planet took his breath away. Two centuries of Qax Occupation had left few visible scars on Earth’s surface — far fewer, in fact, than the damage wrought by humans during their slow, haphazard rise to technological civilization. But still it was disturbing to see how the Qax-run plankton farms bordered every continent in green; and on the land, scattered and gleaming plains of glass marked man’s brief and inglorious struggle against the Qax.

Parz had studied these mirrored landscapes from space — how many times before? A hundred, a thousand times? And each time he had struggled to recall the reactions of his youth on first seeing the sites of the destroyed cities. That liberating, burning anger: the determination not to compromise as those around him had compromised. Yes, he would work within the system — even carve out a career in the hated diplomatic service, the collaborative go-between of human and Qax. But his purpose had been to find a way to restore the pride of man.

Well, Jasoft, he asked himself, and what has become of those fine intentions? Where did they get lost, over all these muddy years? Parz probed at his leathery old emotions. Sometimes he wondered if it were possible for him genuinely to feel anything anymore; even the city scars had been degraded in his perception, so that now they served only as convenient triggers for nostalgia for his youth.

Of course, if he wished, he could blame the Qax even for his very aging. Had the Qax not destroyed mankind’s AS technology base within months of the Occupation?

Sometimes Parz wondered how it would feel to be an AS-preserved person. What would nostalgia be, for the permanently young?

A soft chime sounded through the flitter, warning Parz that his rendezvous with the Spline fleet was less than five minutes away. Parz settled back in his seat and closed his eyes, sighing a little as semisentient cushions adjusted themselves to the curvature of his spine and prodded and poked at aching back muscles; he rested his bony, liver-spotted fingers on the briefcase that lay on the small table before him. He tried to focus on his coming meeting with the Governor. This was going to be a difficult meeting — but had they ever been easy? Parz’s challenge was going to be to find a way to calm the Governor, somehow: to persuade it not to take any drastic action as a result of the wormhole incident, not to stiffen the Occupation laws again.

As if on cue the mile-wide bulk of the Governor’s Spline flagship slid into his view, dwarfing the flitter and eclipsing Earth. Parz could not help but quail at the Spline’s bulk. The flagship was a rough sphere, free of the insignia and markings that would have adorned the human vessels of a few centuries earlier. The hull was composed — not of metal or plastic — but of a wrinkled, leathery hide, reminiscent of the epidermis of some battered old elephant. This skin-hull was punctured with pockmarks yards wide, vast navels within which sensors and weapons glittered suspiciously. In one pit an eye rolled, fixing Parz disconcertingly; the eye was a gleaming ball three yards across and startlingly human, a testament to the power of convergent evolution. Parz found himself turning away from its stare, almost guiltily. Like the rest of the Spline’s organs the eye had been hardened to survive the bleak conditions of spaceflight — including the jarring, shifted perspectives of hyperspace — and had been adapted to serve the needs of the craft’s passengers. But the Spline itself remained sentient, Parz knew; and he wondered now how much of the weight of that huge gaze came from the awareness of the Spline itself, and how much from the secondary attention of its passengers.

Parz pushed his face closer to the window. Beyond the Spline’s fleshy horizon, a blue, haunting sliver of Earth arced across the darkness; and to the old man it felt as if a steel cable were tugging from his heart to that inaccessible slice of his home planet. And above the blue arc he saw another Spline ship, reduced by perspective to the size of his fist. This one was a warship, he saw; its flesh-hull bristled with weapons emplacements — most of them pointing at Parz, menacingly, as if daring him to try something. The vast threat of the mile-wide battleship struck Parz as comical; he raised a bony fist at the Spline and stuck out his tongue.

Beyond the warship, he saw now, sailed yet another Spline craft, this one a mere pink-brown dot, too distant for his eyes — augmented as they were by corneal and retinal image-enhancing technology — to make out details. And beyond that still another Spline rolled through space.

Like fleshy moons the Spline fleet encircled the Earth, effortlessly dominant.

Parz was one of only a handful of humans who had been allowed off the surface of the planet since the imposition of the Qax Occupation laws, one of still fewer who had been brought close to any section of the main Qax fleet.

Humans had first emerged from their home planet two and a half millennia earlier, optimistic, expanding, and full of hope… or so it seemed to Jasoft now. Then had come the first contact with an extra-Solar species — the group-mind entity known as the Squeem — and that hope had died.

Humans were crushed; the first occupation of Earth began.

But the Squeem were overthrown. Humans had moved out once more from Earth.

Then the Qax had found a human craft.

There had been a honeymoon period. Trading links with the Qax had been established, cultural exchanges discussed.

It hadn’t lasted long.

As soon as the Qax had found out how weak and naive humanity really was, the Spline warships had moved in.

Still, that brief period of first contact had provided humanity with most of its understanding about the Qax and their dominion. For instance, it had been learned that the Spline vessels employed by the Qax were derived from immense, sea-going creatures with articulated limbs, which had once scoured the depths of some world-girdling ocean. The Spline developed spaceflight, traveled the stars for millennia. Then, perhaps a million years earlier, they had made a strategic decision.

The Spline rebuilt themselves.

They plated over their flesh, hardened their internal organs — and rose from the surface of their planet like mile-wide, studded balloons. They had become living ships, feeding on the thin substance between the stars.

The Spline had become carriers, earning their place in the universe by hiring themselves out to any one of a hundred species.

It wasn’t a bad strategy for racial survival, Parz mused. The Spline must work far beyond the bubble of space explored by humankind before the Qax Occupation — beyond, even, the larger volume worked by the Qax, within which humanity’s sad little zone was embedded.

Someday the Qax would be gone, Parz knew. Maybe it would be humanity that would do the overthrowing; maybe not. In any event there would be trade under the governance of a new race, new messages and matériel to carry between the stars. New wars to fight. And there would be the Spline, the greatest ships available — with the probable exception, Parz conceded to himself, of the unimaginable navies of the Xeelee themselves — still plying between the stars, unnoticed and immortal.