Flux xs-3 Read online

  Flux

  ( Xeelee Sequence - 3 )

  Stephen Baxter

  A race of microscopic beings, who were genetically engineered to survive on the turbulent mantle of a neutron star and who vividly remember their superbeing creators, prepare for the biggest family reunion in history.

  Flux

  by Stephen Baxter

  To my nephew James Baxter

  1

  Dura woke with a start.

  There was something wrong. The photons didn’t smell right.

  Her hand floated before her face, dimly visible, and she flexed her fingers. Disturbed electron gas, spiraling dizzily around the Magfield lines, sparkled purple-white around the fingertips. The Air in her eyes was warm, stale, and she could make out only vague shapes.

  For a moment she hung there, curled in a tight ball, suspended in the elastic grip of the Magfield.

  She heard voices, thin and hot with panic. They were coming from the direction of the Net.

  Dura jammed her eyes tight shut and hugged her knees, willing herself to return to the cool oblivion of sleep. Not again. By the blood of the Xeelee, she swore silently, not another Glitch; not another spin storm. She wasn’t sure if the little tribe of Human Beings had the resources to respond to more disruption… nor, indeed, if she herself had the strength to cope with fresh disaster.

  The Magfield itself trembled now. Encasing her body, it rippled over her skin, not unpleasantly, and she allowed it to rock her as if she were a child in its arms. Then — not so pleasantly — it prodded her more rudely in the small of the back…

  No, that wasn’t the Magfield. She uncurled again, stretching against the confines of the field. She rubbed her eyes — the fleshy rims of the cups were crusted with sleep-deposits and felt sharp against her fingers — and shook her head to clear the clouded Air out of the cups.

  The prod in her back was coming from the fist of Farr, her brother. He’d been on latrine duty, she saw; he still carried his plaited waste bag, empty of the neutron-rich shit he’d taken out away from the Net and dumped in the Air. His skinny, growing body trembled in response to the instabilities in the Magfield and his round face was upturned to her, creased with an almost comical concern. In one hand he gripped a fin of his pet Air-pig — a fat infant about the size of Dura’s fist, so young that none of its six fins were yet pierced. The little animal, obviously terrified by the Glitch, struggled to escape, feebly; it pumped out superfluid jetfarts in thin blue streams.

  His fondness for the animal made Farr seem even younger than his twelve years — a third of Dura’s age — and he clung to the piglet as if clinging to childhood itself. Well, Dura thought, the Mantle was huge and empty, but there was precious little room in it for childhood. Farr was having to grow up fast.

  He was so like their father, Logue.

  Dura, still misty with sleep, felt a surge of affection and concern for the boy and reached out to stroke his cheek, to run gentle fingers around the quiet brown rims of his eyes.

  She smiled at her brother. “Hello, Farr.”

  “Sorry for waking you.”

  “You didn’t. The Star was kind enough to wake me, long before you got around to it. Another Glitch?”

  “The worst one yet, Adda says.”

  “Never mind what Adda says,” Dura said, stroking his floating hair; the hollow tubes were, as always, tangled and grubby. “We’ll get by. We always do, don’t we? You get back to your father. And tell him I’m coming.”

  “All right.” Farr smiled at her again, twisted stiffly, and, with his Air-pig’s fin still clutched tight, he began to Wave awkwardly across the Magfield’s invisible flux paths toward the Net. Dura watched him recede, his slim form diminished by the shimmering, world-filling vortex lines beyond him.

  Dura straightened to her full length and stretched, pressing against the Magfield. She kept her mouth wide open as she worked stiffness out of her limbs and back. She felt the feathery ripple of the Air as it poured through her throat to her lungs and heart, rushing through superleak capillaries and filling her muscles; her body seemed to tingle with its freshness.

  She gazed around, sniffing the photons.

  Dura’s world was the Mantle of the Star, an immense cavern of yellow-white Air bounded below by the Quantum Sea and above by the Crust.

  The Crust itself was a rich, matted ceiling, purple-streaked with grass and the hairlike lines of tree trunks. By squinting — distorting the parabolic retinas of her eyes — she could make out dark motes scattered among the roots of the trees fixed to the underside of the Crust. Perhaps they were rays, or a herd of wild Air-pigs, or some other grazing creatures. It was too distant to see clearly, but the amphibian animals seemed to be swirling around each other, colliding, confused; she almost imagined she could hear the cool sound of their distress.

  Far below her, the Quantum Sea formed a purple-dark floor to the world. The Sea was mist-shrouded, its surface indistinct and deadly. The Sea itself, she saw with relief, was undisturbed by the Glitch. Only once in Dura’s memory had there been a Glitch severe enough to cause a Seaquake. She shuddered like the Magfield as she remembered that ghastly time; she had been no older than Farr, she supposed, when the neutrino founts had come, sweeping half the Human Beings — including Phir, Dura’s mother and Logue’s first wife — away and on, screaming, into the mysteries beyond the Crust.

  All around her, filing the Air between Crust and Sea, the vortex lines were an electric-blue cage. The lines filled space in a hexagonal array, spaced about ten mansheights apart; they swept around the Star from far upflux — from the North — arced past her like the trajectories of immense, graceful animals, and converged into the red-soft blur that was the South Pole, millions of mansheights away.

  She held her fingers up before her face, trying to judge the spacing and pattern of the lines.

  Through her fingers she could see the encampment, a little knot of frantic detail and activity — jostling, terrified Air-pigs, scrambling people, the quivering Net — all embedded in the shuddering bulk of the Air. Farr with his struggling Air-piglet was a pathetic scrap, wriggling through the invisible flux tubes.

  Dura tried to ignore the small, messy knot of humanity, to focus on the lines.

  Normally the motion of the lines was stately, predictable — regular enough for the Human Beings to measure their lives by it, in fact. Overlaid on the eternal drift of the lines toward the Crust there were pulses of line-bunching: the tight, sharp crowdings that marked the days, and the slower, more complex second-order oscillations which humans used to count their months. In normal times it was easy for the Human Beings to avoid the slow creep of the lines; there was always plenty of time to dismantle the Net, repitch their little encampment in another corner of the empty sky.

  Dura even knew what caused the lines’ stately pulsations, much good the knowledge did her: the Star had a companion, far beyond the Crust — a planet, a ball like the Star but smaller, lighter — which revolved, unseen, over their heads, pulling at the vortex lines as if with invisible fingers. And, of course, beyond the planet — the childish ideas returned to her unbidden, like fragments of her lingering sleep — beyond the planet were the stars of the Ur-humans, impossibly distant and forever invisible.

  The drifting vortex lines were as stable and secure, in normal times, as the fingers of some friendly god; humans, Air-pigs and others moved freely between the lines, fearlessly and without any danger…

  Except during a Glitch.

  Now, across the frame of her spread fingers, the vortex array was shifting visibly as the superfluid Air sought to realign with the Star’s adjusted rotation. Instabilities — great parallel sets of ripples — already marched majestically along the length of the lines, bearing the news of the Star’
s new awakening from Pole to magnetic Pole.

  The photons emitted by the lines smelled thin, sharp. The spin storm was coming.

  * * *

  Dura had chosen a sleep place about fifty mansheights from the center of the Human Beings’ current encampment, in a place where the Magfield had felt particularly thick, comfortingly secure. Now she began to Wave toward the Net. Wriggling, rippling her limbs, she felt electricity course through her epidermis; and she pushed with arms and legs at the invisible, elastic resistance of the Magfield as if it were a ladder. Fully awake now, she found herself filled with a belated anxiety — an anxiety healthily laced with guilt at her tardiness — and as she slid across the Magfield she spread the webbed fingers of her hands and beat at the Air, trying to work up still more speed. Neutron superfluid made up most of the bulk of the Air, so there was barely any resistance to her hands; but still she clawed at the Air, her impatience mounting, seeking comfort in activity.

  The vortex lines slid like dreams across her field of vision now. Ripples hurtled in great even chains, as if the vortex lines were ropes shaken by giants located in the mists of the Poles. As the waves beat past her they emitted a low, cool groan. The amplitude of the waves was already half a mansheight. By Bolder’s guts, she thought, maybe that old fool Adda is right for once; maybe this really is going to be the worst yet.

  Slowly, painfully slowly, the encampment grew from a distant abstraction, a melange of movement and noise, to a community. The encampment was based around the crude cylindrical Net made of plaited tree-bark, slung out along the Magfield lines. Most people slept and ate bound up to the Net, and the length of the cylinder was a patchwork of tied-up belongings, privacy blankets, cleaning brushes, simple clothes — ponchos, tunics and belts — and a few pathetic bundles of food. Scraps of half-finished wooden artifacts and flags of untreated Air-pig leather dangled from the Net ropes.

  The Net was five mansheights across and a dozen long. It was at least five generations old, according to the older folk like Adda. And it was the only home of about fifty humans — and their only treasure.

  As she neared it, clawing her way through the clinging Magfield, Dura suddenly saw the flimsy construct with an objective eye — as if she had not been born in a blanket tied to its filthy knots, as if she would not die still clinging to its fibers. How fragile it was: how pathetic, how defenseless they truly were. Even as she approached to join her people in this moment of need, Dura felt depressed, weak, helpless.

  The adults and older children were Waving all around the Net, working at knots which dwarfed their fingers. She saw Esk, picking patiently at a section of the Net. Dura thought he watched her approach, but it was hard to be sure. In any event Philas, his wife, was with him, and Dura kept her face averted. Here and there Dura could make out small children and infants still attached to the Net by tethers of varying lengths. Each child, left tethered up by laboring parents and siblings, was a small, wailing bundle of fear and loneliness, Waving futilely against its constraints, and Dura felt her heart go out to every one of them. Dura spotted the girl Dia, heavily pregnant with her first child. Working with her husband Mur, Dia was pulling tools and bits of clothing from the Net and stuffing them into a sack; Air-sweat glistened from her swollen, naked belly. Dia was a small-limbed, childlike woman whose pregnancy had served to make her only more vulnerable and young-looking; watching her work now, her every movement redolent of fear, made something move inside childless Dura, an urge to protect.

  The animals — the tribe’s small herd of a dozen adult Air-pigs and about as many piglets — were restrained inside the Net, along its axis. They bleated, their din adding a mournful counterpoint to the shouts and cries of humans; they huddled together at the heart of the Net in a trembling mass of fins, jet orifices and stalks erect with huge, bowl-shaped eyes. A few people had gone inside the Net and were trying to calm the animals, to attach leaders to their pierced fins. But the dismantling of the Net was proceeding slowly and unevenly, Dura saw as she approached, and the herd was a mass of panicky noise, uncoordinated movement.

  She heard voices raised in fear and impatience. What had seemed from a little further away to be a reasonably controlled operation was actually little more than a shambles, she realized.

  There was something in her peripheral vision — a motion, blue-white and distant… More ripples in the vortex tubes, coming from the distant North: immense, jagged irregularities utterly dwarfing the small instabilities she’d observed so far.

  There wasn’t much time.

  Logue, her father, hung in the Magfield a little way from the Net. Adda, too old and slow for the urgent work of dismantling the encampment, hovered beside Logue, his thin face twisted, sour. Logue bellowed out orders in his huge baritone, but, Dura could already see, with very little effect on the Human Beings’ coordination. Still Dura had that odd feeling of timelessness, of detachment, and she studied her father as if meeting him for the first time in many weeks. Logue’s hair, plastered against his scalp, was crumpled and yellowed; his face was a mask through which the round, boyish features shared by Farr could still be discerned, obscured by a mat of scars and wrinkles.

  As Dura approached, Logue turned to her, his brown eyecups wide, his cheek muscles working. “You took your time,” he growled at her. “Where have you been? You’re needed here. Can’t you see that?”

  His words cut through her detachment, and despite herself, despite the urgency of the moment, she felt resentment building in her. “Where? I’ve been to the Core in a Xeelee nightfighter. Where do you think I’ve been?”

  Logue turned from her in apparent disgust. “You shouldn’t blaspheme,” he muttered.

  She wanted to laugh. Impatient with him, with herself, with the continual friction between them, she shook her head. “Oh, into the Ring with it. What do you want me to do?”

  Now old Adda leaned forward, the open pores among his remaining hair sparkling Air-sweat. “Don’t know there’s much you can do,” he said sourly. “Look at them. What a shambles.”

  “We’re not going to make it in time, are we?” Dura asked him. She pointed North. “Look at that ripple. We won’t get out of the way before it hits.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” The old man raised his empty eyes to the South Pole; its soft glow illuminated the backs of his eyes, the cup-retinas there; fragments of debris swirled around the rims and tiny cleansing symbiotes swam constantly in and out of the cups.

  Logue bellowed suddenly, “Mur, you damn fool. If that knot is stuck then cut it. Rip it. Gnaw it through if you have to! — but don’t just leave it there, or half the Net is going to go flapping off into the Quantum Sea when the storm hits us…”

  “Worst I’ve ever seen,” Adda muttered, sniffing. “Never known the photons to smell so sour. Like a frightened piglet… Of course,” he went on after a few moments, “I remember one spin storm when I was a kid…”

  Dura couldn’t help but smile. Adda was the wisest among them, probably, about the ways of the Star. But he relished his role as doomsayer… he could never let go of the mysteries of his own past, of the wild, deadly days which only he could remember…

  Logue turned on her with fury, his face as unstable as the quivering Magfield. “While you grin, we could die,” he hissed.

  “I know.” She reached out and touched his arm, feeling the hot tide of Air which superleaked from his clenched muscles. “I know. I’m — sorry.”

  He frowned, staring at her, and reached forward, as if to touch her. But he drew the hand back. “Perhaps you’re not as strong as I like to think you are.”

  “No,” she said quietly. “Perhaps I’m not.”

  “Come,” he said. “We’ll help each other. And we’ll help our people. No one’s dead yet, after all.”

  * * *

  Dura scrambled across the Magfield flux lines to the Net. Men, women and older children were gathered in tight huddles, their thin bodies bumping together as they floated in the turbulent Magfield, labori
ng at the Net. They cast fearful, distracted glances at the approaching vortex instabilities, and from all around the Net Dura could hear muttered — or shouted — prayer-chants, pleas for the benevolence of the Xeelee.

  Watching the Human Beings, Dura realized they were huddling together for comfort, not for efficiency. Rather than working evenly and systematically around the Net, the people were actually impeding each other from working effectively at the dismantling; whole sections of the tangled Net were being left unattended.

  Dura’s feeling of depressed helplessness deepened. Perhaps she could help them organize better — act as Logue’s daughter for once, she admonished herself wearily, act as a leader. But as she studied the frightened faces of the Human Beings, the round, staring eyecups of the children, she recognized the weary terror which seemed to be numbing her own reactions.

  Maybe huddling and praying was as rational a response as any to this latest disaster.

  She twisted in the Air and Waved toward an empty section of Net, keeping well away from Esk and Philas. Logue would have to do the leading; Dura would remain one of the led.

  The first of the massive ripples neared the encampment. Feeling the growing tension in the Air, Dura grasped the Net’s sturdy rope and pulled her body against its shuddering bulk. For a moment her face was pressed against the Net’s thick mesh, and she found herself staring at an Air-pig, not an arm’s length from her. The rope-threaded holes punched through its fins were widened with age, ringed by scar tissue. The Air-pig seemed to be looking into her eyes, its six eyestalks pushed straight out from its brain pan, the cups swiveled at her. The beast was one of the oldest of the Air-pigs — as a kid, she recalled wistfully, she would have known the names of each one of the meager herd — and it must have seen plenty of spin storms before. Well, she thought. What’s your diagnosis? Do you think we’ve a chance of getting through this storm any better than we have all the others? Will you live to see the other side of it? What do you think?