Stephen Baxter - Xeelee - Endurance

‘You saw what Sila wanted you to see,’ Enna said.

‘Ah, Sila . . . What an enigma! But the fault is mine, Enna; you won’t talk me out of that.’

‘And the buildings—’

‘I should have seen the pattern before you did! After all, we have a precedent. The Weapons are technology gone wild, made things modified by time, grown into a kind of ecology – and so are the buildings of this “city”.’

Once, surely, the buildings had been intended to house people. But they were advanced technology: mobile, self-maintaining habitats. They fuelled themselves with light, and with organic traces – perhaps they had been designed to process their occupants’ waste.

Things changed. People abandoned the buildings, and forgot about them. But the buildings, self-maintaining, perhaps even self-aware in some rudimentary sense, sought a new way to live – and that new way diverged ever more greatly from the purposes their human inventors had imagined.

‘They came together for protection,’ Bayle whispered. ‘They huddled together in reefs that looked like towns, cities, jostling for light. And then they discovered a new strategy, when the first ragged human beings innocently entered their doorways.

‘The buildings apparently offered shelter. And whenever a human was foolish enough to accept that mute offer—’

‘They feed,’ said Tomm with horror.

Bayle said, ‘It is just as the Weapons of the plain once learned to farm humans for meat. We share a world with technology that has gone wild and undergone its own evolution. I should have known!’

Enna said, ‘And Sila?’

‘Now she is more interesting,’ Bayle whispered. ‘She told me exactly what I wanted to hear – fool as I was to listen! She cooperates with the city, you see; in return for shelter – perhaps even for some grisly form of food – she helps it lure in unwitting travellers, like us. Her presence makes it seem safer than a city empty altogether.’

‘A symbiosis,’ Tomm said, wondering. ‘Of humans with wild technology.’

Enna shuddered. ‘We have had a narrow escape.’

Bayle covered her hand with his own bandaged fingers. ‘But others, like poor Momo, have died for my foolishness.’

‘We must go on,’ Tomm said. ‘There is nothing for us here.’

‘Nothing but a warning. Yes, we will go on. The Expedition continues! But not for ever. Someday we will find a home—’

‘Or we will build one,’ Tomm said firmly.

Bayle nodded stiffly. ‘Yes. But that’s for you youngsters, not for the likes of me.’

Enna was moved to take Tomm’s hand in hers.

Bayle watched them. ‘He may not have a first-class mind,’ he said to Enna. ‘But he has an air of command, and that’s worth cultivating.’

‘Oh, father—’

Outside the wagon there came shouting, and a rushing sound, like great breaths being drawn.

‘Go and see,’ Bayle whispered.

Enna and Tomm hurried out of the wagon.

Displacing air that washed over the people, the sentient buildings of the city were lifting off the ground, all of them now, massive, mobile. Already the first was high in the blueshifted sky, and the others followed in a stream of silent geometry, a city blowing away like a handful of seeds on the breeze.

AD c .5 Billion Years

As the women tried to pull her away, Ama hammered with her fist on the blank wall of the Building. ‘Let me inside! Oh, let me inside!’

But the Building had sealed itself against her. If the Weapon that ruled the people decreed that you were to bear your child in the open air, that was how it was going to be, and no mere human being could do anything about it.

And she could not fight the logic of her body. The contractions came in pulses now, in waves of pain that washed through the core of her being. In the end it was her father, Telni, who put his bony arm around her shoulders, murmuring small endearments. Exhausted, she allowed herself to be led away.

Telni’s sister Jurg and the other women had set up a pallet for her not far from the rim of the Platform. They laid her down there and fussed with their blankets and buckets of warmed water, and prepared ancient knives for the cutting. Her aunt massaged her swollen belly with oils brought up from the Lowland. Telni propped Ama’s head on his arm, and held her hand tightly, but she could feel the weariness in her father’s grip.

So it began. She breathed and screamed and pushed.

And through it all, here at the lip of the Platform, this floating island in the sky, she was surrounded by the apparatus of her world, the Buildings clustered around her – floating buildings that supported the Platform itself – the red mist of the Lowland far below, above her the gaunt cliff on which glittered the blue-tinged lights of the Shelf cities, the sky over her head where chains of stars curled like windblown hair . . . When she looked up she was peering into accelerated time, into places where a human heart fluttered like a songbird’s. But there was a personal dimension to time too, so her father had always taught her, and these hours of her labour were the longest of her life, as if her body had been dragged all the way down into the glutinous, redshifted slowness of the Lowland.

When it was done Jurg handed her the baby. It was a boy, a scrap of flesh born a little early, his weight negligible inside the spindling-skin blankets. She immediately loved him unconditionally, whatever alien thing lay within. ‘I call him Telni like his grandfather,’ she managed to whisper.

Old Telni, exhausted himself, wiped tears from his crumpled cheeks.

She slept for a while, out in the open.

When she opened her eyes, the Weapon was floating above her. As always, a small boy stood at its side.

The Weapon was a box as wide as a human was tall, reflective as a mirror, hovering at waist height above the smooth surface of the Platform. Ama could see herself in the thing’s silver panels, on her back on the heap of blankets, her baby asleep in the cot beside her. Her aunt, her father, the other women hung back, nervous of this massive presence that dominated all their lives.

Then a small hatch opened in the Weapon’s flank, an opening with lobed lips, like a mouth. From this hatch a silvery tongue, metres long, reached out and snaked into the back of the neck of the small boy who stood alongside it. Now the boy took a step towards Ama’s cot, trailing his tongue-umbilical.

Telni blocked his way. ‘Stay back, Powpy, you little monster. You were once a boy as I was. Now I am old and you are still young. Stay away from my grandson.’

Powpy halted. Ama saw that his eyes flickered nervously, glancing at Telni, the cot, the Weapon. This showed the extent of the Weapon’s control of its human creature; somewhere in there was a frightened child.

Ama struggled to sit up. ‘What do you want?’

The boy Powpy turned to her. ‘We wish to know why you wanted to give birth within a Building.’

‘You know why,’ she snapped back. ‘No child born inside a Building has ever harboured an Effigy.’

The child’s voice was flat, neutral – his accent was like her father’s, she thought, a little boy with the intonation of an older generation. ‘A child without an Effigy is less than a child with an Effigy. Human tradition concurs with that, even without understanding—’

‘I didn’t want you to be interested in him.’ The words came in a rush. ‘You control us. You keep us here, floating on this island in the sky. All for the Effigies we harbour, or not. That’s what you’re interested in, isn’t it?’ Her father laid a trembling hand on her arm, but she shook it away. ‘My husband believed his life was pointless, that his only purpose was to nurture the Effigy inside him, and grow old and die for you. In the end he destroyed himself—’