Stephen Baxter: Xeelee: Endurance

‘Perhaps.’

‘And are these memories brought back up from this core pit the next time an Effigy surfaces?’

‘Perhaps. Everything about this world is designed, or modified. Perhaps the purpose is to preserve something of the memory of humanity across epochal intervals.’

‘Maybe this is why I always felt like something in me really doesn’t belong in this time or place.’

‘We Machines can study this only at second-hand. It is something about humanity that no Machine shares.’

‘I think you’re jealous. Aren’t you, Machine? You can farm us, keep us as lab animals. But you can’t have this .’

‘There is no reliable mapping between human emotions and the qualia of our own sensorium . . .’

But he didn’t hear the rest. Another stabbing in his chest, a pain that knifed down his left arm. The nurse leaned over him.

And the sky exploded.

These weren’t just new stars. They were stars that detonated, each flaring brighter than the rest of the sky put together, then vanishing as quickly, blown-out matches.

‘Supernovas,’ said the boy, Powpy. ‘That is the ancient word. A wave of supernovas, triggered by the galaxy collision, giant exploding stars flooding nearby space with lethal radiation, a particle sleet . . .’

But Telni couldn’t talk, couldn’t breathe.

‘He’s going,’ the nurse said. ‘Get him to the Morgue.’

He glimpsed people running up – no, not people, they were six-legged, Centaurs – and his bed was shoved forward, across the rusty dirt towards the enclosure of a Building. He tried to protest, to cling to his view of that astounding sky as long as he could. But he couldn’t even breathe, and it felt as if a sword were being twisted in his chest.

They got him indoors. He lay back, rigid with pain, staring at a Construction-Material roof that seemed to recede from him.

And a glow, like the glow of the sky outside, suffused the inside of his head, his very eyes.

‘It’s happening,’ he heard the nurse say, wonder in her voice. ‘Look, it’s rising from his limbs . . . His heart has stopped.’ She straddled him and pounded at his chest, even as a glow lit up her face, the bare flesh of her arms – a glow coming from him .

He remembered – a glimmering tetrahedron, looming, an electric-blue framework swallowing him up – memories that had nothing to do with this world . . .

He heard Powpy call, ‘Do you know who you are? Or who you were ?’

And suddenly he knew , as if his eyes had suddenly focused, after years of myopia. With the last of the air in his lungs he struggled to speak. ‘Not again. Not again!’

The nurse peered into his eyes. ‘Stay with me, Telni!’

‘Who are you? Who are you? ’

The light detonated from deep inside him. Suddenly he filled this box of Construction-Material, he was contained within it, and he rattled, anguished. But there was the door, a way out. Somehow he fled that way, seeking the redshift . . .

Even after the Xeelee had finally won their war against humanity, the stars continued to age, too rapidly. The Xeelee completed their great Projects and fled the cosmos.

Time unravelled. Dying galaxies collided like clapping hands. But even now the story was not yet done. The universe itself prepared for another convulsion, greater than any it had suffered before.

And then —

‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Michael Poole.’

Singularity: Big Bang

ERA: Earth

AD 476–2005: Events of Coalescent.

AD 2047: Events of Transcendent (see also c .AD 500,000).

ERA: Expansion

AD 3000+: Opening up of the Solar System.

AD 3685: ‘Return to Titan’.

AD 3717: Launch of GUTship Cauchy . Events of Timelike Infinity begin.

AD 3829: The Emergency: time-travel invasion by Occupation-Era Qax ( Timelike Infinity ).

AD 3951: Events of Ring begin (see also c. AD 5,000,000).

AD 4820: ‘Starfall’. Collapse of Empire of Sol.

ERA: Squeem Occupation

AD 4874: Conquest of human planets by Squeem.

AD 4925: Overthrow of Squeem.

AD 5071: ‘Remembrance’.

ERA: Qax Occupation

AD 5088: Conquest of human planets by Qax.

AD 5274: ‘Endurance’. Return to Solar System of GUTship Cauchy . Launch of backward time-travel invasion by Qax ( Timelike Infinity ).

AD 5407: Overthrow of Qax. Third Expansion begins under Coalition.

ERA: The War with the Ghosts

AD 5810: ‘The Seer and the Silverman’.

ERA: The War to End Wars

AD 24973: Events of Exultant .

AD 104,858+: Events of Raft .

c . AD 193,700: Events of Flux .

c . AD 500,000: Events of Transcendent (see also AD 2047). The retreat of mankind begins.

AD 978,225: ‘Gravity Dreams’.

c . AD 1,000,000: Final siege of the Solar System by Xeelee. The Saving of Old Earth.

ERA: Photino Victory

c . AD 5,000,000+: Events of Ring (see also AD 3951).

ERA: Old Earth

c . AD 3.8 billion years: ‘PeriAndry’s Quest’.

c . AD 4 billion years: ‘Climbing the Blue’.

c . AD 4.5 billion years: ‘The Time Pit’.

c . AD 4.8 billion years: ‘The Lowland Expedition’.

c . AD 5 billion years: ‘Formidable Caress’.

Singularity: Timelike Infinity

This outline timescale provides the context for the stories in this collection, as well as the novels published in the Xeelee Sequence so far. Other short fiction has been collected in Vacuum Diagrams (HarperCollins, 1997) and Resplendent (Gollancz, 2006). For a full timeline of the ‘Xeelee Sequence’ of novels and stories, please visit:

www.stephen-baxter.com

NON-FICTION

Deep Future

The Science of Avatar

FICTION

Mammoth

Longtusk

Icebones

Behemoth

Reality Dust

Evolution

Flood

Ark

Proxima

Ultima

Xeelee: An Omnibus

NORTHLAND

Stone Spring

Bronze Summer

Iron Winter

THE WEB

Gulliverzone

Webcrash

DESTINY’S CHILDREN

Coalescent

Exultant

Transcendent

Resplendent

A TIME ODYSSEY (with Arthur C. Clarke)

Time’s Eye

Sunstorm

Firstborn

TIME’S TAPESTRY

Emperor

Conqueror

Navigator

Weaver

‘PeriAndry’s Quest’ first published in Analog , June 2004. Copyright Stephen Baxter 2004.

‘Climbing the Blue’ first published in Analog , July/August 2005. Copyright Stephen Baxter 2005.

‘The Time Pit’ first published in Analog , October 2005. Copyright Stephen Baxter 2005.

‘The Lowland Expedition’ first published in Analog , April 2006. Copyright Stephen Baxter 2006.

‘Remembrance’ first published in The New Space Opera , ed. Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, Voyager, 2007. Copyright Stephen Baxter 2007.

‘The Seer and the Silverman’ first published in Galactic Empires , ed. Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, SFBC, 2008. Copyright Stephen Baxter 2008.