Stephen Baxter: Xeelee: Endurance

‘Don’t try to analyse me, you – thing .’

‘Tell me what you have discovered . . .’

He could not hold back what he had learned, he found. At least the telling distracted him from his craving for drink.

After his discovery of the huge rate at which the inhabitants of Old Earth were plummeting into the future of the universe, Telni had become interested in spans of history. On the Shelf, written records went back some four thousand years of local time. These records had been compiled by a new civilisation rising from the rubble of an older culture, itself wrecked by a disaster known as the Formidable Caress, thought to have occurred some six thousand years before that .

‘But in the external universe,’ Telni said, ‘ten thousand Shelf years corresponds to over three billion years. So much I deduced from my pendulums, swinging away beneath the Platform amid streams of spindling shit and cargo jockey piss . . . Everybody has always thought that the Caresses come about from local events. Something to do with the planet itself. But three billion years is long enough for events to unfold on a wider scale, a universal one. Time enough, according to what Shelf scholars have reconstructed, for stars to be born and to die, for whole galaxies to swim and jostle . . . “Galaxy”, by the way, is a very old term for a system of stars. I found that out for myself. So, you see, I wondered if the Caresses could have some cosmic cause.’

‘You started to correspond with scholars on the Shelf.’

‘Yes. After that first visit by Mina’s party we kept up a regular link, with visits from them – once every couple of years for us, once a generation for them . . . I spoke to the astronomers over there, about what they saw in the sky. And their archaeologists, about what had been seen in the past. There was always snobbishness, you know. Those of us down in the red think we are better because we are closer to the original stock of Old Earth; those up in the blue, who have produced more generations, believe they are superior products of evolution. None of that bothered me. And as their decades ticked by, I think I helped shape whole agendas of research by my sheer persistence.’

‘It must have been rewarding for you.’

‘Academically, yes. I’ve never had any problem, academically. It’s the rest of my life that’s a piece of shit.’

‘Tell us what you discovered.’

‘I don’t have my notes, my books—’

‘Just tell us.’

He sat up and stared into the face of the eerily unchanged boy – who, to his credit, did not flinch. ‘The first Caress destroyed almost everything of what went before, on the Shelf and presumably elsewhere. Almost, but not all. Some trace inscriptions, particularly carvings on stone, have survived. Images, fragmentary, and bits of text. Records of something in the sky.’

‘What something?’

‘The Galaxy is a disc of stars, a spiral. We, on a planet embedded in the disc, see this in cross section, as a band of light in the sky. Much of it obscured by dust.’

‘And?’

‘The ancients’ last records show two bands, at an angle to each other. There is evidence that the second band grew brighter, more prominent. The chronological sequence is difficult to establish – the best of these pieces were robbed and used as hearths or altar stones by the fallen generations that followed . . .’

‘Nevertheless,’ the boy prompted.

‘Nevertheless, there is evidence that something came from out of the sky. Something huge. Another galaxy, so some believe – so I believe. And then there are crude, scrawled images – cartoons, really – of explosions. All over the sky. A million suns, suddenly appearing.’ He imagined survivors, huddled in the ruins of their cities, scratching what they saw into fallen stones. ‘After that – nothing, for generations. People were too busy reinventing agriculture to do much astronomy. That was ten thousand years ago.

‘The next bit of evidence comes from around three thousand years back, when a Natural Philosopher called HuroEldon established new centres of scholarship, at Foro and down on the Lowland . . . Once again we started keeping good astronomical records. And not long after Huro’s time, the astronomers observed in the sky—’

‘Another band of stars.’

‘No. A spiral – a spiral of stars, ragged, the stars burning and dying, a wheel turning around a point of intense brightness. This object swam towards us, so it seemed, and at its closest approach there was another flare of dazzling new stars, speckled over the sky – but there was no Caress, not this time. The spiral receded into the dark.’

‘Tell us what you believe this means.’

‘I think it’s clear. This other spiral is a galaxy like our own. The two orbit each other.’ He mimed this with his fists, but his hands were shaking; shamed before the boy’s steady gaze, he lowered his arms. ‘As twin stars may orbit one another. But unlike stars galaxies are big, diffuse structures. They must tear at each other, ripping open those lacy spirals. Perhaps when they brush, they create bursts of starbirth. A Formidable Caress indeed.

‘The last Caress was a first pass, when the second galaxy came close enough to our part of our spiral to cause a great flaring of stars – and that flaring, a rain of light falling from the blue, was what shattered our world. Then after HuroEldon’s time, two billion years later externally, there was another approach – this one not so close, not a true Caress; it was spectacular but did no damage, not to us. And then . . .’

‘Yes?’

He shrugged, peering up at the Construction-Material roof of the cell. ‘The sky is ragged, full of ripped-apart spiral arms. The two galaxies continue to circle each other, perhaps heading for a full merger, a final smash. And that, perhaps, will cause a new starburst flare, a new Caress.’

The boy stood silently, considering this, though one leg quivered, as if itchy. He asked: ‘When?’

‘That I couldn’t calculate. I tried to do some mathematics on the orbit. Long time since I stayed sober enough to see that through. But there’s one more scrap of information in the archaeology. There was always a tradition that the second Caress would follow ten thousand years after the first, Shelf time. Maybe that’s a memory of what the smart folk who lived before the first Caress were able to calculate. They knew , not only about the Caress that threatened them, but also what would follow. Remarkable, really.’

‘Ten thousand years,’ the boy said. ‘Which is—’

‘About now.’ Telni grinned. ‘If the world ends, do you think they will let me out of here to see the show?’

‘You have done remarkable work, Telni. This is a body of evidence extracted from human culture that we could not have assembled for ourselves.’ Even as he spoke these calm words, the boy trembled, and Telni saw piss drip down his bare leg.

Telni snorted. ‘You really aren’t too good at running the people you herd, are you, machine?’

Ignoring the dribble on his leg, Powpy spoke on. ‘Regarding the work, however. We are adept at calculation. Perhaps we can take these hints and reconstruct the ancients’ computations, or even improve on them.’

‘So you’ll know the precise date of the end of the world? That will help. Come back and tell me what you figure out.’

‘We will.’ The boy turned and walked away, leaving piss-footprints on the smooth floor.

Telni laughed at him, lay back on his bunk, and tried to sleep.

It was to be a very long time before Telni saw the Weapon and its human attendant again.

‘He refuses to die. It’s as simple as that. There’s nothing but his own stubbornness keeping him alive . . .’