Stephen Baxter: Xeelee: Endurance

‘Welcome? You’ve drugged me and brought me here—’

One of the sixty-year-olds laughed, the gruff one. ‘Oh, you didn’t need drugging; you did that to yourself.’

‘You evidently know me – and I think I know you.’ I studied him. He was heavy set, dark, not tall, with a face that wasn’t built for smiling. ‘You’re Michael Poole, aren’t you? Poole the wormhole engineer.’

Poole just looked back at me. Then he said to the blond man, ‘Harry, I have a feeling we’re making a huge mistake trying to work with this guy.’

Harry grinned. ‘Give it time, son. You’ve always been an idealist. You’re not used to working with people like this. I am. We’ll get what we want out of him.’

I turned to him. ‘Harry Poole. You’re Michael’s father, aren’t you?’ I laughed at them. ‘A father who AS-restores himself to an age younger than your son. How crass. And, Harry, you really ought to get something done about that voice.’

The third man spoke. ‘I agree with Michael, Harry. We can’t work with this clown.’ He was on the point of being overweight, and had a crumpled, careworn face. I labelled him as a corporate man who had grown old labouring to make somebody else rich – probably Michael Poole and his father.

I smiled easily, unfazed. ‘And you are?’

‘Bill Dzik. And I’ll be working with you if we go through with this planned jaunt to Titan. Can’t say it’s an idea I like.’

This was the first I had heard of a trip to Titan. Well, whatever they wanted of me, I’d had quite enough of the dismal hellhole of the Saturn system, and had no intention of going back now. I had been in worse predicaments before; it was just a question of playing for time and looking for openings. I rubbed my temples. ‘Bill – can I call you Bill? I don’t suppose you could fetch me a coffee?’

‘Don’t push your luck,’ he growled.

‘Tell me why you kidnapped me.’

‘That’s simple,’ Harry said. ‘We want you to take us down to Titan.’

Harry snapped his fingers, and a Virtual image coalesced before us, a bruised orange spinning in the dark: Titan. It hung before Saturn itself, which was a pale-yellow crescent with those tremendous rings spanning space, and more moons suspended like lanterns. And there, glimmering in orbit just above the plane of the rings, was a baby-blue tetrahedral frame, the mouth of Michael Poole’s latest wormhole, a hyper-dimensional road offering access to Saturn and all its wonders – a road, it seemed, rarely travelled.

‘That would be illegal,’ I pointed out.

‘I know. And that’s why we need you.’ And Harry grinned, a cold expression on that absurdly young face.

‘If it’s an expert on Titan you want,’ I said, ‘keep looking.’

‘You’re a curator,’ Miriam said, contempt thick in her voice. ‘You work for the intra-System oversight panel on sentience law compliance. Titan is in your charge!’

‘Not by choice,’ I murmured. ‘Look – as you evidently targeted me, you must know something of my background. I haven’t had an easy career . . .’ My life at school, supported by my family’s money, had been a saga of drunken jaunts, sexual escapades, petty thieving and vandalism. As a young man I never lasted long at any of the jobs my family found for me, largely because I was usually on the run from some wronged party or other.

Harry said, ‘Some career. In the end you got yourself sentenced to an editing, didn’t you?’

If the authorities had had their way I would have had the contents of my much-abused brain downloaded into an external store, my memories edited, my unhealthy impulses ‘reprogrammed’, and the lot loaded back again – my whole self rebooted. ‘It represented death to me,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t have been the same man as I was before. My father took pity on me—’

‘And bought you out of your sentence,’ Bill Dzik said. ‘And got you a job in sentience compliance. A sinecure.’

I looked at Titan’s dismal colours. ‘It is a miserable posting. But it pays a bit, and nobody cares much what you get up to, within reason. I’ve only been out a few times to Saturn itself, and the orbit of Titan; the work’s mostly admin, run from Earth. I’ve held down the job. Well, I really don’t have much choice.’

Michael Poole studied me as if I were a vermin infesting one of his marvellous interplanetary installations. ‘This is the problem I’ve got with agencies like the sentience-oversight curacy. I might even agree with its goals. But it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to achieve, all it does is get in the way of enterprise, and it’s populated by time-wasters like you.’

I found myself taking a profound dislike to the man. Whatever my faults I’m no hypocrite, and I’ve never been able to stomach being preached at. ‘I did nobody any harm,’ I snapped back at him. ‘Not much, anyhow. Not like you with your grand schemes, Poole, reordering the whole System for your own profit.’

Michael would have responded, but Harry held up his hand. ‘Let’s not get into that again. And after all he’s right. Profit, or the lack of it, is the issue here. As for you, Jovik, even in this billion-kilometres-remote “sinecure” you’re still up to your old tricks, aren’t you?’

I said nothing, cautious until I worked out how much he knew.

Harry waved his hand at his Virtual projection. ‘Look – Titan is infested with life. That’s the basic conclusion of the gaggle of probes that, over the centuries, have orbited Titan or penetrated its thick air and crawled over its surface or dug into its icy sand. But life isn’t the point. The whole Solar System is full of life. Life is commonplace. The question is sentience. And sentience holds up progress.’

‘It’s happened to us before,’ Michael Poole said to me. ‘The development consortium I lead, that is. We were establishing a wormhole Interface at a Kuiper object called Baked Alaska, thirteen years back, out on the rim of the System. Our plan was to use the ice as reaction mass to fuel GUTdrive starships. Well, we discovered life there, life of a sort, and it wasn’t long before we identified sentience. The xenobiologists called it a Forest of Ancestors. The project ground to a halt; we had to evacuate the place—’

‘Given the circumstances in which you’ve brought me here,’ I said, ‘I’m not even going to feign interest in your war stories.’

‘All right,’ Harry said. ‘But you can see the issue with Titan. Look, we want to open it up for development. It’s a factory of hydrocarbons and organics. We can make breathable air: nitrogen from the atmosphere, and oxygen extracted from water ice. We can use all that methane and organic chemistry to make plastics or fuel or even food. Titan should be the launch pad for the opening-up of the outer System, indeed the stars. But we’re not going to be allowed to develop Titan if there’s sentience there. And our problem is that, on this world with plenty of biochemistry and primitive life, nobody has established that there isn’t intelligence too.’

I started to see it. ‘So you want to mount a quick and dirty expedition – incidentally violating the planetary-protection aspects of the sentience laws – prove there’s no significant mind down there, and get the clearance to move in the digging machines. Right?’ And I saw how Bill Dzik, Miriam and Michael Poole exchanged unhappy glances. There was dissension in the team over the morality of all this, a crack I might be able to exploit. ‘Why do you need this so badly?’ I asked.

So they told me. It was a saga of interplanetary ambition. But at the root of it, as is always the case, was money – or the lack of it.