‘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.’
‘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.’
The Xeelee Sequence – Timeline
Singularity: Big Bang
ERA: Earth
AD 476–2005: Events of Coalescent.