Stephen Baxter: Xeelee: Endurance

Harry Poole said, ‘You know our business, Jovik. Our wormhole engineering is laying down rapid-transit routes through the System, which will open up a whole family of worlds to colonisation and development. But we have grander ambitions than that.’

I asked, ‘What ambitions? Starships? I read about that.’

‘That and more,’ Michael Poole said. ‘For the last few decades we’ve been working on an experimental ship being built in the orbit of Jupiter . . .’

And he told me about his precious Cauchy project. By dragging a wormhole portal around a circuit light years across, the GUTship Cauchy would establish a wormhole bridge – not across space – but across fifteen centuries, to the future. So, having already connected the worlds of humanity with his wormhole subway, Michael Poole now hoped to short-circuit past and future themselves. That, at least, seemed to be the idea. I looked at Poole with new respect, and some fear. The man was a genius, or mad.

‘But,’ I said, ‘to fund such dreams you need money.’

Harry said, ‘Jovik, you need to understand that a mega-engineering business like ours is a ferocious devourer of cash. It’s like the days of the pioneering railway builders back in the nineteenth century. We fund each new project with the profit of our previous ventures and with fresh investment – but that investment depends on the success of earlier schemes.’

‘Ah. And now you’re stumbling. Yes? And this is all to do with Saturn.’

Harry sighed. ‘The Saturn transit was a logical development. The trouble is, nobody needs to go there. Saturn pales beside Jupiter! Saturn has ice moons; well, there are plenty in orbit around Jupiter. Saturn’s atmosphere could be mined, but so can Jupiter’s, at half the distance from Earth.’

Miriam said, ‘Saturn also lacks Jupiter’s ferociously energetic external environment, which we’re tapping ourselves in the manufacture of the Cauchy .’

‘Fascinating,’ I lied. ‘You’re an engineer too, then?’

‘A physicist,’ she replied, awkward. She sat next to Michael Poole but apart from him. I wondered if there was anything deeper between them.

‘The point,’ said Harry, ‘is that there’s nothing at Saturn you’d want to go there for – no reason for our expensive wormhole link to be used. Nothing except—’

‘Titan,’ I said.

‘If we can’t go in legally, we need somebody to break us through the security protocols and get us down there.’

‘So you turned to me.’

‘The last resort,’ said Bill Dzik with disgust in his voice.

‘We tried your colleagues,’ Miriam said. ‘They all said no.’

‘Well, that’s typical of that bunch of prigs.’

Harry, always a diplomat, smiled at me. ‘So we’re having to bend a few pettifogging rules, but you have to see the vision, man, you have to see the greater good.’

‘Have I? Actually the question is, what’s in it for me? You know I’ve come close to the editing suites before. Why should I take the risk of helping you now?’

‘Because,’ Harry said, ‘if you don’t you’ll certainly face a reboot.’ So now we came to the dirty stuff, and Harry took over; he was clearly the key operator in this little cabal, with the engineer types uncomfortably out of their depth. ‘We know about your sideline.’

With a sinking feeling I asked, ‘What sideline?’

And he used his Virtual display to show me. There went one of my doctored probes arrowing into Titan’s thick air, a silver needle that stood out against the murky organic backdrop, supposedly on a routine monitoring mission – but in fact with a quite different objective.

There are pockets of liquid water to be found just under Titan’s surface – frozen-over crater lakes, kept warm for a few thousand years by the residual heat of the impacts that created them. My probe now shot straight through the icy carapace of one of those crater lakes, and into the liquid water beneath. Harry fast-forwarded and we watched the probe’s ascent module push its way out of the lake and up into the air, on its way to my colleagues’ base on Enceladus.

‘You’re sampling the subsurface life from the lakes,’ Harry said sternly. ‘And selling the results.’

I shrugged; there was no point denying it. ‘I guess you know the background. The creatures down there are related to Earth life, but very distantly. Different numbers of amino acids, or something – I don’t know. The tiniest samples are gold dust to the biochemists, a whole new toolkit for designer drugs and genetic manipulation . . .’ I had one get-out. ‘You’ll have trouble proving this. By now there won’t be a trace of our probes left on the surface.’ Which was true; one of the many ill-understood aspects of Titan was that probes sent down to its surface quickly failed and disappeared, perhaps as a result of some kind of geological resurfacing.

Harry treated that with the contempt it deserved. ‘We have full records. Samples of the material you stole from Titan. Even a sworn statement by one of your partners.’

I flared at that. ‘Who?’ But, of course, it didn’t matter.

Harry said sweetly, ‘The point is the sheer illegality – and committed by you, a curator, whose job is precisely to guard against such things. If this gets to your bosses, it’s back to the editing suite for you, my friend, and this time even Papa won’t be able to bail you out.’

‘So that’s it. Blackmail.’ I did my best to inject some moralistic contempt into my voice. And it worked; Michael, Miriam, Bill wouldn’t meet my eyes.

But it didn’t wash with Harry. ‘Not the word I’d use. But that’s pretty much it, yes. So what’s it to be? Are you with us? Will you lead us to Titan?’

I wasn’t about to give in yet. I got to my feet. ‘At least let me think about it. You haven’t even offered me that coffee.’

Michael glanced at Harry, who pointed at a dispenser on a stand near my couch. ‘Use that one.’

There were other dispensers in the cabin – why that particular one? I filed away the question and walked over to the dispenser. At a command it produced a mug of what smelled like coffee. I sipped it gratefully and took a step across the floor towards the transparent dome.

‘Hold it,’ Michael snapped.

‘I just want to take in the view.’

Miriam said, ‘OK, but don’t touch anything. Follow that yellow path.’

I grinned at her. ‘Don’t touch anything? What am I, contagious?’ I wasn’t sure what was going on, but probing away at these little mysteries had to help. ‘Please. Walk with me. Show me what you intend to do here.’

Miriam hesitated for a heartbeat. Then, with an expression of deep distaste, she got to her feet. She was taller than I was, and lithe, strong-looking.

We walked together across the lifedome, a half-sphere a hundred metres wide. Couches, control panels and data entry and retrieval ports were clustered around the geometric centre of the dome; the rest of the transparent floor area was divided up by shoulder-high partitions into lab areas, a galley, a gym, a sleeping area and shower. The layout looked obsessively plain and functional to me. This was the vessel of a man who lived for work, and only that; if this was Michael Poole’s ship, it was a bleak portrait of him.

We reached the curving hull. Glancing down I could see the ship’s spine, a complex column a couple of kilometres long leading to the lode of asteroid ice used for reaction mass by the GUTdrive module within. And all around us wormhole Interfaces drifted like snowflakes, while intra-System traffic passed endlessly through the great gateways.

‘All this is a manifestation of your lover’s vision,’ I said to Miriam, who stood by me.