Stephen Baxter: Xeelee: Endurance

‘Michael’s not my lover,’ she shot back, irritated. The electric-blue light of the exotic-matter frames shone on her cheekbones.

‘I don’t even know your full name,’ I said.

‘Berg,’ she said reluctantly. ‘Miriam Berg.’

‘Believe it or not, I’m not a criminal. I’m no hero, and I don’t pretend to be. I just want to get through my life, and have a little fun on the way. I shouldn’t be here, and nor should you.’ Deliberately I reached for her shoulder. A bit of physical contact might break through that reserve.

But my fingers passed through her flesh, breaking up into a mist of pixels until they were clear of her flesh, and then reformed. I felt a distant ache in my head.

I stared at Miriam Berg. ‘What have you done to me?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said gravely.

I sat on my couch once more – my couch, a Virtual projection like me, the only one in the dome I wouldn’t have fallen through, and sipped a coffee from my Virtual dispenser, the only one that I could touch.

It was, predictably, Harry Poole’s scheme. ‘Just in case the arm-twisting over the sample-stealing from Titan wasn’t enough.’

‘I’m a Virtual copy,’ I said.

‘Strictly speaking, an identity backup . . .’

I had heard of identity backups, but could never afford one myself, nor indeed fancied it much. Before undertaking some hazardous jaunt you could download a copy of yourself into a secure memory store. If you were severely injured or killed, the backup could be loaded into a restored body, or a vat-grown cloned copy, or even allowed to live on in some Virtual environment. You would lose the memories you had acquired after the backup was made, but that was better than non-existence . . . That was the theory. In my opinion it was an indulgence of the rich; you saw backup Virtuals appearing like ghosts at the funerals of their originals, distastefully lapping up the sentiment.

And besides, the backup could never be you , the you who had died; only a copy could survive. That was the idea that started to terrify me now. I am no fool, and imaginative to a fault.

Harry watched me taking this in.

I could barely ask the question: ‘What about me? The original. Did I die?’

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘The real you is in the hold, suspended. We took the backup after you were already unconscious.’

So that explained the ache at the back of my neck: that was where they had jacked into my nervous system. I got up and paced around. ‘And if I refuse to help? You’re a pack of crooks and hypocrites, but I can’t believe you’re deliberate killers.’

Michael would have answered, but Harry held up his hand, unperturbed. ‘Look, it needn’t be that way. If you agree to work with us, you , the Virtual you, will be loaded back into the prime version. You’ll have full memories of the whole episode.’

‘But I won’t be me .’ I felt rage building. ‘I mean, the copy sitting here. I won’t exist any more – any more than I existed a couple of hours ago, when you activated me.’ That was another strange and terrifying thought. ‘ I will have to die! And that’s even if I cooperate. Great deal you’re offering. Well, into Lethe with you. If you’re going to kill me anyway I’ll find a way to hurt you. I’ll get into your systems like a virus. You can’t control me .’

‘But I can.’ Harry clicked his fingers.

And in an instant everything changed. The four of them had gathered by Harry’s couch, the furthest from me. I had been standing; now I was sitting. And beyond the curved wall of the transparent dome, I saw that we had drifted into Earth’s night.

‘How long?’ I whispered.

‘Twenty minutes,’ Harry said carelessly. ‘You have an off switch. Of course I can control you. So which is it to be? Permanent extinction for all your copies, or survival as a trace memory in your host?’ His grin hardened, and his young-old face was cold.

So the Hermit Crab wheeled in space, seeking out the wormhole Interface that led to Saturn. And I, or rather he who had briefly believed he was me, submitted to a downloading back into his primary, myself. How ironic that this was a violation of the very sentience protection laws it was my duty to uphold.

He, the identity copy, died to save my life. I salute him.

Released from my cell of suspended animation, embittered, angry, I chose to be alone.

I walked to the very rim of the lifedome, where the transparent carapace met the solid floor. Looking down I could see the flaring of superheated, ionised steam pouring from the GUTdrive nozzles. The engine, as you would expect, was one of Poole’s own designs. ‘GUT’ stands for ‘Grand Unified Theory’, which describes the fundamental forces of nature as aspects of a single superforce. This is creation physics. Thus men like Michael Poole use the energies which once drove the expansion of the universe itself for the triviality of pushing forward their steam rockets.

Soon the Hermit Crab drove us into the mouth of the wormhole that led to the Saturn system.

We flew lifedome first at the wormhole Interface, so that it was as if the electric-blue tetrahedral frame came down on us from the zenith. Those electric-blue struts were beams of exotic matter, a manifestation of a kind of antigravity field that kept this throat in space and time from collapsing. Every so often you would see the glimmer of a triangular face, a sheen of golden light filtering through from Saturn’s dim halls. It was quite beautiful, a sculpture of light.

The frame bore down, widening in my view, and fell around us, obscuring the view of Earth and Earthport.

Now I was looking up into a kind of tunnel, picked out by flaring sheets of light. This was a flaw in spacetime itself; the flashing I saw was the resolution of that tremendous strain into exotic particles and radiations. As the ship thrust deeper into the wormhole, fragments of blue-white light swam from a vanishing point directly above my head and swarmed down the spacetime walls. There was a genuine sensation of speed, of limitless, uncontrollable velocity. The lifedome creaked like a tin shack, and I thought I could hear that elderly GUTdrive screaming with the strain. I gripped a rail and tried not to cower.

The passage was at least mercifully short. Amid a shower of exotic particles we ascended out of another electric-blue Interface – and I found myself back in the Saturn system, for the first time in years.

I could see immediately that we were close to the orbit of Titan about its primary, for the planet itself, suspended in the scuffed sky of the lifedome, was about the size I remembered it: a flattened globe a good bit larger than the Moon seen from Earth. Other moons hung around the sky, points of light. The sun was off to the right, with its close cluster of inner planets, so Saturn was half-full. Saturn’s only attractive feature, the rings, were invisible, for Titan’s orbit is in the same equatorial plane as the ring system and the rings are edge-on. But the shadow of the rings cast by the sun lay across the planet’s face, sharp and unexpected.

There was nothing romantic in the view, nothing beautiful about it, not to me. The light was flat and pale. Saturn is about ten times as far from the sun as Earth is, and the sun is reduced to an eerie pinpoint, its radiance only a hundredth that at Earth: Saturn is misty and murky, an autumnal place. And you never forgot you were far from home when a human hand, held out at arm’s length towards the sun, could have covered all of the orbit of Earth.

The Crab swung about and Titan itself was revealed, a globe choked by murky brown cloud from pole to pole, even more dismal and uninviting than its primary. Evidently Michael Poole had placed his wormhole Interface close to the moon in anticipation that Titan would someday serve his purposes.