Stephen Baxter: Xeelee: Endurance

Suddenly he was opening up to her in ways he’d never spoken to anybody else. ‘Because I don’t always feel as if I fit. As if I’m not like other people.’ He looked at her doubtfully, wondering if she would conclude he was crazy. ‘Maybe that’s why the Machine has been drawn to me since the day I was born. And maybe that’s why I’m turning out to be a good Philosopher. I can look at the world from outside, and see patterns others can’t. Do you ever feel like that?’

Still holding his hand, she walked him back to the wheel and stroked a spindling’s stubby mane, evidently drawing comfort from the simple physical contact. ‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘Maybe everybody does. But the world is as it is, and you just have to make the best of it. Do you get many birds on this island?’

The question surprised him. ‘Not many. Just caged songbirds. Hard for them to find anywhere to nest.’

‘I ask because I used to watch birds as a child. I’d climb up to a place we call the Attic . . . The birds use the time layers. The parents will nest at some low level, then go gathering food higher up. They’ve worked out they can take as long as they like, while the babies, stuck in slow time, don’t get too hungry and are safe from the predators. Of course, the parents grow old faster, sacrificing their lives for their chicks.’

‘I never saw anything like that. I never got the chance.’ He shook his head, suddenly angry, resentful. ‘Not on this island in the sky, as a servant of some machine. Sometimes I hope the next Caress comes soon and smashes everything up.’

She took both his hands and smiled at him. ‘I have a feeling you’re going to be a challenge. But I like challenges.’

‘You do?’

‘Sure. Or I wouldn’t be here, spending a month with a bunch of old folk while seventeen months pass at home. Think of the parties I’m missing!’

His heart hammered, as if he had been lifted up into the blue. ‘I’ve only known you hours,’ he said. ‘Yet I feel—’

‘You should return to your work.’ The familiar child’s voice was strange, cold, jarring.

Telni turned. The Weapon was here, hovering effortlessly over the hole in the floor. His tethered boy stood some metres away, tense, obviously nervous of the long drop. The spindlings still turned their wheel, but the cargo jockeys stood back, staring at the sudden arrival of the Weapon, the maker and ruler of their world.

Telni’s anger flared. He stepped forward towards the child, fists clenched. ‘What do you want?’

‘We have come to observe the formal congress this evening. The Philosophers from Shelf and Platform. There are many questions humans can address that we—’

‘Then go scare all those old men and women. Leave me alone.’ Suddenly, with Mina at his side, he could not bear to have the Weapon in his life once more, with its strange ageless boy on his umbilical. ‘Leave me alone, I say!’

Powpy turned to look at Mina. ‘She will not stay here. This girl, MinaAndry. Her home is on the Shelf. Her family, the Andry-Feri, is an ancient dynasty, with a lineage reaching back almost to the last Caress. She has responsibilities, to bear sons and daughters. That is her destiny. Not here.’

‘I will stay if I wish,’ Mina said. She was trembling, Telni saw, evidently terrified of the Weapon, this strange, ancient, wild machine from the dark Lowland. Yet she was facing it, answering it back.

Telni found himself snarling, ‘Maybe she’ll bear my sons and daughters.’

‘No,’ said the boy.

‘What do you mean, no?’

‘She is not suitable for you.’

‘She’s a scholar from Foro! She’s from the stock you brought here to populate the Platform in the first place!’

‘It is highly unlikely that she has an Effigy. Few in her family do. Your partner should have an Effigy. That is why—’

‘Selective breeding,’ Mina gasped. ‘It’s true. This machine really is breeding humans like cattle . . .’

‘I don’t care about Effigies!’ Telni yelled. ‘I don’t care about you and your stupid projects.’ He stalked over to the boy, who stood trembling, clearly afraid, yet unable to move from the spot.

‘Telni, don’t,’ Mina called.

The boy said tremulously, ‘Already you have done good and insightful work, which—’

Telni struck, a hard clap with his open hand to the side of the boy’s head. Powpy went down squealing.

Mina rushed forward and pushed herself between Telni and the boy. ‘What have you done?’

‘He, it – all my life—’

‘Is that this boy’s fault? Oh, get away, you fool.’ She knelt down and cradled the child’s head on her lap. With the umbilical still dangling from the back of his neck, Powpy was crying, in a strange, contained way. ‘He’s going to bruise. I think you may have damaged his ear. And his jaw – no, child, don’t try to talk.’ She turned to the Weapon, which hovered impassively. ‘Don’t make him speak for you again. He’s hurt.’

Telni opened his hands. ‘Mina, please—’

‘Are you still here?’ she snarled. ‘Go get help. Or if you can’t do that, just go away. Go!’

And he knew he had lost her, in that one moment, with that one foolish blow. He turned away and headed towards the Platform’s hospital to find a nurse.

He would not see the Weapon again for two decades.

The little boy walked into Telni’s cell, trailing a silvery rope from the back of his neck.

Telni was huddled up in his bunk, a spindling-skin blanket over his body. Though feverish, Telni was shivering: drying out from the drink, and not for the first time. He scowled at the boy. ‘You again.’

‘Be fair,’ the boy said. ‘We have not troubled you for twenty years.’

‘Not twenty for you.’ His figuring was cloudy. ‘Down on Lowland, less than a year—’

‘This boy is not yet healed.’

Telni saw the boy’s face was distorted on the right-hand side. ‘I apologise.’ He sat up. ‘I apologise to you – what in the blue was your name?’

‘Powpy.’

‘I apologise to you, Powpy. Not to the thing that controls you. Where is it, by the way?’

‘It would not fit through the door.’

Telni lay back and laughed.

‘We did not expect to find you here.’

‘In the drunk tank? Well, I got fired by the apothecary for emptying her drugs cabinet once too often. So it was the drink for me.’ He patted his belly. ‘At least it’s putting fat on my bones.’

‘Why this slow self-destruction?’

‘Call it an experiment. I’m following in my father’s footsteps, aren’t I? After all, thanks to you, I have no more chance of happiness, of finding meaning in my life, than he did. And besides, it’s all going to finish in a big smash soon, isn’t it? As you smart machines no doubt know already.’

It didn’t respond to that immediately. ‘You never had a wife. Children.’

‘Sooner no kids at all than to breed at your behest.’

‘You have long lost contact with MinaAndry.’

‘You could say that.’ When the month-long tour of the Shelf Philosophers was concluded, she had gone home with them to continue her interrupted life on Foro. Since then, the accelerated time of the Shelf had whisked her away from him for ever. ‘After – what, three hundred years up there, more? – she’s dust, her descendants won’t remember her, even the language she spoke will be half-forgotten. The dead get deader, you know, as every trace of their existence is expunged. That’s one thing life on Old Earth has taught us. What do you want, anyway?’

‘Your research into the Formidable Caress.’

‘If you can call it research.’

‘Your work is good, from what we have seen of that portion you have shared with other scholars. You cannot help but do good work, Telni. The curiosity I saw burning in that ten-year-old boy, long ago, is still bright.’