Stephen Baxter: Xeelee: Endurance

His hearing was so bad now that it was as if his ears were stuffed full of wool. But, lying there on his pallet, he could hear every word they said.

And, though he needed a lot of sleep these days, he was aware when they moved him into the Morgue, ready for him to die, ready to capture his Effigy-spirit when it was released from his seventy-seven-year-old body.

‘Leave me in here if you like, you bastards.’ He tried to laugh, but it just made him cough. ‘I’m just going to lie here as long as necessary.’

‘As long as necessary for what?’

‘For it to come back again.’

But, more than thirty years since the last visitation, only a handful of the medical staff knew what he was talking about.

In the end, of course, it came.

He woke from another drugged sleep to find a little boy standing beside his bed.

He struggled to sit up. ‘Hey, Powpy. How’s it going with you? You’ve grown, a little. You’re not afraid of me, are you? Look, I’m old and disgusting, but at least I can’t slap you around the head any more, can I?’

He thought he saw a flicker of something in the boy’s eyes. Forgiveness? Pity? Fear? Contempt? Well, he deserved the latter. But then Powpy spoke in that odd monotone, so familiar even after all these years. ‘We were here at the beginning of your life. Now here we are at the end.’

‘Yes.’ He tried to snap his fingers, failed. ‘Just another spark in the flames for you, right? And now you’ve come to see me give up my Effigy so you can trap it in this box of yours.’

‘We would not describe it as—’

He grabbed the boy’s arm, trying to grip hard. ‘Listen, Weapon. You can have my Effigy. What do I care? But I’m not going to die like this. Not here, not now.’

‘Then where, and when?’

‘ Fifty years ,’ he whispered. He glanced at the medical staff, who hovered at the edges of the Building. ‘I did my own calculations. Took me ten years. Well, I had nothing better to do . . . Fifty years, right? That’s all the time we’ve got left, until the fireworks.’

The boy said gravely, ‘We imagine our model of the galaxies’ interaction is somewhat more sophisticated than yours. But your answer is substantially correct. You understand that this Caress will be different. Those on the Platform will survive. The Construction Material of the Buildings will shelter them. That was always one long-term purpose of the Platform project, to provide refuge. And from this seed, the recovery of civilisation after the Caress should be much more rapid.’

Telni cackled weakly. ‘You built us a shelter from a Formidable Caress? Well, well, you do care. But the cities of the Shelf – Foro, Puul—’

‘People will survive in caves, underground. But the vast loss of life, the destruction of the ecology, of their agriculture—’

‘Serves those bastards right. They lost interest in talking to me decades ago.’ Which was true. But since the Creationist-Mechanist Wars, there had been centuries of peace on the Shelf – and they had built something beautiful and splendid up there, a chain of cities like jewels in the night, cities that sparkled in the time-accelerated view of witnesses on the Platform. In his head Telni imagined a race of blueshifted Minas, beautiful, clear-eyed, laughing. ‘Well. There’s nothing I can do for them.’ He struggled to sit straighter. ‘But there’s something I want you to do for me. You owe me, artefact. Now you’re going to take away my soul. Well, you can have it. But you can give me something back in return. I want to see the Caress.’

‘You have only weeks to live. Days, perhaps.’

‘ Then take me down into the red . No matter how little time I have left, you can find a pit deep enough on this time-shifted world to squeeze in fifty Platform years.’ Exhausted, he fell back coughing; a nurse hurried over to lower him gently to his blankets. ‘And one more thing.’

‘More demands?’

‘Let this boy go.’

When Telni woke again, he found himself staring up at a sky of swirling blue stars. ‘Made it, by my own redshifted arse.’

A face hovered over him, a woman’s. ‘Don’t try to move.’

‘You’re in the way.’ He tried to sit up, failed, but kept struggling until she helped him up and he could see.

He was on a plain – on the ground , his pallet set on red, rusty dirt, down on the true ground of Old Earth for the first time in his life. Something like a rail track curled across his view. Buildings of Construction Material were scattered around like a giant’s toys. He got the immediate sense this was a kind of camp, not permanent.

And figures moved in the distance. At first sight they looked human. But then something startled them, and they bucked and fled, on six legs.

‘What are those ?’

‘They are called Centaurs.’ Powpy was standing beside him, his neck umbilical connecting him to the Weapon, which hovered as impassive as ever, though rusty dirt clung to its sleek hide. ‘Human-spindling hybrids.’

He stared, astonished. But he had no time left for wonder. ‘You were going to let this kid go.’

‘He will be released,’ said the woman sternly. ‘My name’s Ama, by the way.’

Which had been his mother’s name. He felt a stab of obscure guilt. ‘Glad to meet you.’

‘You should be. I’m a nurse. I volunteered to stay with you, to keep you alive when they brought you down here.’

‘No family, I take it.’

‘Not any more. And when this business is done, I’ll be taking Powpy here back up top, to the Platform. You did ask for him to be released, didn’t you?’

‘His mother and father—’

‘Long dead,’ she whispered.

‘We’re all orphans here, then.’

Powpy said solemnly, ‘We will have to shelter in a Construction-Material Building to ride out the Caress. We are deep enough that it should be brief—’

‘How deep?’

‘We are in the Abyss. Once the bed of a deep ocean, far below the offshore plains you call the Lowland . . . Deep enough.’

‘Nice sky.’

‘Most of the stars’ radiation is blueshifted far beyond your capacity to see it.’

‘And how long – ow!’ There was a sharp pain in his chest.

Ama grabbed him and lowered him back against a heap of pillows. ‘Just take it easy. That was another heart attack.’

‘ Another . . .’

‘They’ve been coming thick and fast.’

‘That Weapon won’t want me dying out in the open. Not after all this.’

‘We have a Morgue designated just over there,’ Ama said. ‘Your bed’s on wheels.’

‘Good planning.’

‘Not long now,’ murmured Powpy.

But he, the boy, wasn’t looking at the sky. Telni touched Powpy’s chin, and lifted his face. ‘He should see this for himself.’

‘Very well,’ the Weapon said through the boy’s mouth.

‘Why, Weapon? Why the grand experiment? Why the Platform? Why are you so fascinated by the Effigies? ’

‘We believe the Effigies are not native to the Old Earth, any more than the spindlings or the lightmoss or—’

‘But they’re pretty closely bound up to humans. They live and die with us.’

‘They do not die. So we believe. We have mapped disturbances, deep in the Old Earth . . . We believe there is a kind of nest of them, a colony of Effigies that dwells deep in the core of the planet. They emerge to combine with humans, with infants at birth. Some infants – we don’t know how they choose. And we don’t know how they bond either. But after the human carrier’s death, the Effigy symbiote is released, and returns to the core colony. Something of the human is taken with it. We believe.’

‘Memories.’