Stephen Baxter: Xeelee: Endurance

‘Addled by the drink,’ murmured Telni.

‘He didn’t want you to benefit from his death. He never even saw this baby, his son. He wanted more than this!’

The Weapon seemed to consider this. ‘We intend no harm. On the contrary, a proper study of the symbiotic relationship between humans and Effigies—’

‘Go away,’ she said. She found she was choking back tears. ‘Go away!’ And she flung a blanket at its impassive hide, for that was all she had to throw.

The Weapon returned to visit Telni when he was six years old. Ama chased it away again.

The machine next came to see Telni after the death of Ama and her father. Telni was ten years old. There was no one to chase it away.

The double funeral was almost done, at last.

Telni had had to endure a long vigil beside the bodies, where they had been laid out close to the rim of the Platform. He slept a lot, huddled against his kind but severe great-aunt Jurg, his last surviving relative.

At the dawn of the third day, as the light storms down on the Lowland glimmered and shifted and filled the air with their pearly glow, Jurg prodded him awake.

And, he saw, his mother’s Effigy was ascending. A cloud of pale mist burst soundlessly from the body on its pallet. It hovered, tendrils and billows pulsing – and then, just for a heartbeat, it gathered itself into a form that was recognisably human, a misty shell with arms and legs, torso and head.

Jurg, Ama’s aunt, was crying. ‘She’s smiling. Can you see? Oh, how wonderful . . .’

The sketch of Ama lengthened, her neck stretching like a spindling’s, becoming impossibly long. Then the distorted Effigy shot up into the blueshifted sky and arced down over the lip of the Platform, hurling itself into the flickering crimson of the plain below. Jurg told Telni that Ama’s Effigy was seeking its final lodging deep in the slow-beating heart of Old Earth, where, so it was believed, something of Ama would survive even the Formidable Caresses. But Telni knew that Ama had despised the Effigies, even the one that turned out to have resided in her.

They waited another day, but no Effigy emerged from old Telni.

The bodies were taken across the Platform, to the centre of the cluster of box-shaped, blank-walled Buildings that supported this aerial colony, and placed reverently inside one of the smaller structures. A week later, when Jurg took Telni to see, the bodies were entirely vanished, their substance subsumed by the Building, which might have become a fraction larger after its ingestion.

So Telni, orphaned, was left in the care of his great-aunt.

Jurg tried to get him to return to his schooling. A thousand people lived on the Platform, of which a few hundred were children; the schools were efficient and well organised.

But Telni, driven by feelings too complicated to face, was restless. He roamed alone through the forest of Buildings. Or he would stand at the edge of the Platform, before the gulf that surrounded his floating home, and look up to watch the Shelf war unfold, accelerated by its altitude, the pale-blue explosions and whizzing aircraft making an endless spectacle. He was aware that his great-aunt and teachers and the other adults were watching him, concerned, but for now they gave him his head.

On the third day, he made for one of his favourite places, which was the big wheel at the very centre of the Platform, turned endlessly by harnessed spindlings. Here you could look down through a hatch in the Platform, a hole in the floor of the world, and follow the tethers that attached the Platform like a huge kite to the Lowland ground half a kilometre below, and watch the bucket chains rising and falling. The Loading Hub was down on the ground directly beneath the Platform, the convergence of a dozen roads that were crowded with supply carts day and night. Standing here it was as if you could see the machinery of the world working. Telni liked to think about such things, to work them out, as a distraction from thinking about other things. And it pleased him in other ways he didn’t really understand, as if he had a deep, sunken memory of much bigger, more complicated machinery than this.

Best of all you could visit the spindling pens and help the cargo jockeys muck out one of the tall beasts, and brush the fur on its six powerful legs, and feed it the strange purple-coloured straw it preferred. The spindlings saw him cry a few times, but nobody else, not even his great-aunt.

And so the Weapon came to see him.

Telni was alone in one of the smaller Buildings, near the centre of the cluster on the Platform. He was watching the slow crawl of lightmoss across the wall, the glow it cast subtly shifting. It was as if the Weapon just appeared at the door. Its little boy stood at its side, Powpy, with the cable dangling from the back of his neck.

Telni stared at the boy. ‘He used to be bigger than me. The boy. Now he’s smaller.’

‘We believe you understand why,’ said Powpy.

‘The last time I saw you was four years ago. I was six. I’ve grown since then. But you live down on the Lowland, mostly. Did you come up in one of the freight buckets?’

‘No.’

‘You live slower down there.’

‘Do you know how much slower?’

‘No,’ Telni said.

The boy nodded stiffly, as if somebody was pushing the back of his head. ‘A straightforward, honest answer. The Lowland here is deep, about half a kilometre below the Platform, which is itself over three hundred metres below the Shelf. Locally the stratification of time has a gradient of, approximately, five parts in one hundred per metre. So a year on the Platform is—’

‘Only a couple of weeks on the Lowland. But, umm, three hundred times five, a year here is fifteen years on the Shelf.’

‘Actually closer to seventeen. Do you know why time is stratified?’

‘I don’t know that word.’

Powpy’s little mouth had stumbled on it too, and other hard words. ‘Layered.’

‘No.’

‘Good. Nor do we. Do you know why your mother died?’

That blunt question made him gasp. Since Ama had gone, nobody had even mentioned her name. ‘It was the refugees’ plague. She died of that. And my grandfather died soon after. My great-aunt Jurg says it was of a broken heart.’

‘Why did the plague come here?’

‘The refugees brought it. Refugees from the war on the Shelf. The war’s gone on for years, Shelf years. My grandfather says – said – it is as if they are trying to bring down a Formidable Caress of their own, on their families. The refugees came in a balloon. Families with kids. Grandfather says it happens every so often. They don’t know what the Platform is but they see it hanging in the air below them, at peace. So they try to escape from the war.’

‘Were they sick when they arrived?’

‘No. But they carried the plague bugs. People started dying. They weren’t im—’

‘Immune.’

‘Immune like the refugees were.’

‘Why not?’

‘Time goes faster up on the Shelf. Bugs change quickly. You get used to one, but then another comes along.’

‘Your understanding is clear.’

‘My mother hated you. She was unhappy when you visited me that time, when I was six. She says you meddle in our lives.’

‘“Meddle.” We created the Platform, gathered the sentient Buildings to support it in the air. We designed this community. Your life, and the lives of many generations of your ancestors, have been shaped by what we built. We “meddled” in many ways long before you were born.’

‘Why?’

Silence again. ‘That’s too big a question. Ask smaller questions.’

‘Why are there so many roads coming in across the Lowland to the Loading Hub?’

‘I think you know the answer to that.’