Ring xs-4 Read online

  Ring

  ( Xeelee Sequence - 4 )

  Stephen Baxter

  Michael Poole’s wormholes constructed in the orbit of Jupiter had opened the galaxy to humankind. Then Poole tried looping a wormhole back on itself, tying a knot in space and ripping a hole in time.

  It worked. Too well.

  Poole was never seen again. Then from far in the future, from a time so distant that the stars themselves were dying embers, came an urgent SOS — and a promise. The universe was doomed, but humankind was not. Poole had stumbled upon an immense artifact, light-years across, fabricated from the very string of the cosmos.

  The universe had a door. And it was open…

  Ring

  By Stephen Baxter

  For my nephew Thomas Baxter

  PART I

  Event: System

  1

  Even at the moment she was born she knew something was wrong.

  A face loomed over her: wide, smooth, smiling. The cheeks were damp, the glistening eyes huge. “Lieserl. Oh, Lieserl…”

  Lieserl. My name, then.

  She explored the face before her, studying the lines around the eyes, the humorous upturn of the mouth, the strong nose. It was an intelligent, lived-in face. This is a good human being, she thought. Good stock…

  “Good stock?”

  This was impossible. She was impossible. She felt terrified of her own explosive consciousness. She shouldn’t even be able to focus her eyes yet…

  She tried to touch her mother’s face. Her own hand was still moist with amniotic fluid — but it was growing visibly, the bones extending and broadening, filling out the loose skin as if it were a glove.

  She opened her mouth. It was dry, her gums already sore with budding teeth.

  Strong arms reached beneath her; bony adult fingers dug into the aching flesh of her back. She could sense other adults surrounding her, the bed in which she’d been born, the outlines of a room.

  Her mother held her high before a window. Lieserl’s head lolled, the expanding muscles still too weak to support the burgeoning weight of her skull. Spittle laced across her chin.

  An immense light flooded her eyes.

  She cried out.

  Her mother enfolded her in her arms. “The Sun, Lieserl. The Sun…”

  The first few days were the worst.

  Her parents — impossibly tall, looming figures — took her through brightly lit rooms, a garden always flooded with sunlight. She learned to sit up. The muscles in her back fanned out, pulsing as they grew. To distract her from the unending pain, clowns tumbled over the grass before her, chortling through huge red lips, before popping out of existence in clouds of pixels.

  She grew explosively, feeding all the time, a million impressions crowding into her soft sensorium.

  There seemed to be no limit to the number of rooms in this place, this House. Slowly she began to understand that some of the rooms were Virtual chambers — blank screens against which any number of images could be projected. But even so, the House must comprise hundreds of rooms. And she — with her parents wasn’t alone here. There were other people. But at first they kept away, out of sight, apparent only by their actions: the meals they prepared, the toys they left her.

  On the third day her parents took her on a trip by flitter. It was the first time she’d been away from the House, its grounds. As the flitter rose she stared through the bulbous windows, pressing her nose to heated glass.

  The House was a jumble of white, cube-shaped buildings, linked by corridors and surrounded by garden — grass, trees. Further out there were bridges and roads looping through the air above the ground, more houses like a child’s bricks sprinkled across glowing hillsides.

  The flitter soared higher.

  The journey was an arc over a toylike landscape. A breast of blue ocean curved away from the land, all around her. This was the island of Skiros, Phillida — her mother — told her, and the sea was called the Aegean. The House was the largest construct on the island. She could see huge, brown-painted spheres dotting the heart of the island: carbon-sequestration domes, Phillida said, balls of dry ice four hundred yards tall.

  The flitter snuggled at last against a grassy sward close to the shore of the ocean. Lieserl’s mother lifted her out and placed her — on her stretching, unsteady legs — on the rough, sandy grass.

  Hand in hand, the little family walked down a short slope to the beach.

  The Sun burned from an unbearably blue sky. Her vision seemed telescopic. She looked at distant groups of children and adults playing — far away, halfway to the horizon — and it was as if she was among them herself. Her feet, still uncertain, pressed into gritty, moist sand.

  She found mussels clinging to a ruined pier. She prized them away with a toy spade, and gazed, fascinated, at their slime-dripping feet. She could taste the brine salt on the air; it seemed to permeate her very skin.

  She sat on the sand with her parents, feeling her light costume stretch over her still-spreading limbs. They played a simple game, of counters moving over a floating Virtual board, with pictures of ladders and hissing snakes. There was laughter, mock complaints by her father, elaborate pantomimes of cheating.

  Her senses were electric. It was a wonderful day, full of light and joy, extraordinarily vivid sensations. Her parents loved her — she could see that in the way they moved with each other, came to her, played with her.

  They must know she was different; but they didn’t seem to care.

  She didn’t want to be different — to be wrong. She closed her mind against her fears, and concentrated on the snakes, the ladders, the sparkling counters.

  Every morning she woke up in a bed that felt too small.

  Lieserl liked the garden. She liked to watch the flowers straining their tiny, pretty faces toward the Sun, as the great light climbed patiently across the sky. The sunlight made the flowers grow, her father told her. Maybe she was like a flower, she thought, growing too quickly in all this sunlight.

  The House was full of toys: colorful blocks, and puzzles, and dolls. She picked them up and turned them over in her stretching, growing hands. She rapidly became bored with each toy, but one little gadget held her attention. It was a tiny village immersed in a globe of water. There were tiny people in there, frozen in mid-step as they walked, or ran, through their world. When her awkward hands shook the globe, plastic snowflakes would swirl through the air, settling over the encased streets and rooftops. She stared at the entombed villagers, wishing she could become one of them: become frozen in time as they were, free of this pressure of growing.

  On the fifth day she was taken to a wide, irregularly shaped, sunlight drenched classroom. This room was full of children — other children! The children sat on the floor and played with paints and dolls, or talked earnestly to brilliantly colored Virtual figures — smiling birds, tiny clowns.

  The children turned to watch as she came in with her mother, their faces round and bright, like dapples of sunlight through leaves. She’d never been so close to other children before. Were these children different too?

  One small girl scowled at her, and Lieserl quailed against her mother’s legs. But Phillida’s familiar warm hands pressed into her back. “Go ahead. It’s all right.”

  As she stared at the unknown girl’s scowling face, Lieserl’s questions, her too-adult, too-sophisticated doubts, seemed to evaporate. Suddenly, all that mattered to her — all that mattered in the world — was that she should be accepted by these children: that they wouldn’t know she was different.

  An adult approached her: a man, young, thin, his features bland with youth. He wore a jumpsuit colored a ludicrous orange; in the sunlight, the glow of it shone up over his chin. He smiled at her. “Lieserl, isn’t it? My name�
�s Paul. We’re glad you’re here. Aren’t we, people?”

  He was answered by a rehearsed, chorused “Yes”.

  “Now come and we’ll find something for you to do,” Paul said. He led her across the child-littered floor to a space beside a small boy. The boy — red haired, with startling blue eyes — was staring at a Virtual puppet which endlessly formed and reformed: the figure two, collapsing into two snowflakes, two swans, two dancing children; the figure three, followed by three bears, three fish swimming in the air, three cakes. The boy mouthed the numbers, following the tinny voice of the Virtual. “Two. One. Two and one is three.”

  Paul introduced her to the boy — Tommy — and she sat down with him. Tommy, she was relieved to find, was so fascinated by his Virtual that he scarcely seemed aware that Lieserl was present — let alone different.

  Tommy was resting on his stomach, his chin cupped in his palms. Lieserl, awkwardly, copied his posture.

  The number Virtual ran through its cycle. “Bye bye, Tommy! Goodbye, Lieserl!” It winked out of existence.

  Now Tommy turned to her — without appraisal, merely looking, with unconscious acceptance.

  Lieserl said, “Can we see that again?”

  He yawned and stuck a finger into one nostril. “No. Let’s see another. There’s a great one about the pre-Cambrian explosion — ”

  “The what?”

  He waved a hand dismissively. “You know, the Burgess Shale and all that. Wait till you see Hallucigenia crawling over your neck…”

  The children played, and learned, and napped. Later, the girl who’d scowled at Lieserl — Ginnie — started some trouble. She poked fun at the way Lieserl’s bony wrists stuck out of her sleeves (Lieserl’s growth rate was slowing, but she was still expanding out of her clothes each day). Then — unexpectedly, astonishingly — Ginnie started to bawl, claiming that Lieserl had walked through her Virtual. When Paul came over Lieserl started to explain, calmly and rationally, that Ginnie must be mistaken; but Paul told her not to cause such distress, and for punishment she was forced to sit away from the other children for ten minutes, without stimulation.

  It was all desperately, savagely unfair. It was the longest ten minutes of Lieserl’s life. She glowered at Ginnie, filled with resentment.

  The next day she found herself looking forward to going to the room with the children again. She set off with her mother through sunlit corridors. They reached the room Lieserl remembered — there was Paul, smiling a little wistfully to her, and Tommy, and the girl Ginnie — but Ginnie seemed different: childlike, unformed…

  At least a head shorter than Lieserl.

  Lieserl tried to recapture that delicious enmity of the day before, but it vanished even as she conjured it. Ginnie was just a kid.

  She felt as if something had been stolen from her.

  Her mother squeezed her hand. “Come on. Let’s find a new room for you to play in.”

  Every day was unique. Every day Lieserl spent in a new place, with new people.

  The world glowed with sunlight. Shining points trailed endlessly across the sky: low-orbit habitats and comet nuclei, tethered for power and fuel. People walked through a sea of information, with access to the Virtual libraries available anywhere in the world, at a subvocalized command. The landscapes were drenched with sentience; it was practically impossible to get lost, or be hurt, or even to become bored.

  On the ninth day Lieserl studied herself in a Virtual holomirror. She had the image turn around, so she could see the shape of her skull, the lie of her hair. There was still some childish softness in her face, she thought, but the woman inside her was emerging already, as if her childhood was a receding tide. She would look like Phillida in the strong-nosed set of her face, her large, vulnerable eyes; but she would have the sandy coloring of her father, George.

  Lieserl looked about nine years old. But she was just nine days old.

  She bade the Virtual break up; it shattered into a million tiny, fly-sized images of her face which drifted away in the sunlit air.

  Phillida and George were fine parents, she thought. They were physicists; and they both belonged to an organization they called “Superet”. They spent their time away from her working through technical papers — which scrolled through the air like falling leaves — and exploring elaborate, onion-ring Virtual models of stars. Although they were both clearly busy, they gave themselves to her without hesitation. She moved in a happy world of smiles, sympathy and support.

  Her parents loved her unreservedly. But that wasn’t always enough.

  She started to come up with complicated, detailed questions. Like, what was the mechanism by which she was growing so rapidly? She didn’t seem to eat more than the other children she encountered; what could be fuelling her absurd growth rate?

  How did she know so much? She’d been born self-aware, with even the rudiments of language in her head. The Virtuals she interacted with in the classrooms were fun, and she always seemed to learn something new; but she absorbed no more than scraps of knowledge through the Virtuals compared to the feast of insight with which she awoke each morning.

  What had taught her, in the womb? What was teaching her now?

  The strange little family had worked up some simple, homely rituals together. Lieserl’s favorite was the game, each evening, of snakes and ladders. George brought home an old set — a real board made of card, and wooden counters. Already Lieserl was too old for the game; but she loved the company of her parents, her father’s elaborate jokes, the simple challenge of the game, the feel of the worn, antique counters.

  Phillida showed her how to use Virtuals to produce her own game boards. Her first efforts, on her eleventh day, were plain, neat forms, little more than copies of the commercial boards she’d seen. But soon she began to experiment. She drew a huge board of a million squares. It covered a whole room — she could walk through the board, a planar sheet of light at about waist height. She crammed the board with intricate, curling snakes, vast ladders, vibrantly glowing squares — detail piled on detail.

  The next morning she walked with eagerness to the room where she’d built her board — and was immediately disappointed. Her efforts seemed pale, static, derivative: obviously the work of a child, despite the assistance of the Virtual software.

  She wiped the board clean, leaving a grid of pale squares floating in the air. Then she started to populate it again — but this time with animated half-human snakes, slithering “ladders” of a hundred forms. She’d learned to access the Virtual libraries, and she plundered the art and history of a hundred centuries to populate her board.

  Of course it was no longer possible to play games on the board, but that didn’t matter. The board was the thing, a world in itself. She withdrew a little from her parents, spending long hours in deep searches through the libraries. She gave up her daily classes. Her parents didn’t seem to mind; they came to speak to her regularly, and showed an interest in her projects, but they respected her privacy.

  The board kept her interest the next day. But now she evolved elaborate games, dividing the board into countries and empires with arbitrary bands of glowing light. Armies of ladder-folk joined with legions of snakes in crude recreations of the great events of human history.

  She watched the symbols flicker across the Virtual board, shimmering, coalescing; she dictated lengthy chronicles of the histories of her imaginary countries.

  By the end of the day, though, she was starting to grow more interested in the history texts she was consulting than in her own elaborations on them. She went to bed, eager for the next morning to come.

  She awoke in darkness, doubled in agony.

  She called for light. She sat up in bed.

  Blood spotted the sheets. She screamed.

  Phillida sat with her, cradling her head. Lieserl pressed herself against her mother’s warmth, trying to still her trembling.

  “I think it’s time you asked me your questions.”

  Lieserl sniffed. �
�What questions?”

  “The ones you’ve carried around with you since the moment you were born.” Phillida smiled. “I could see it in your eyes, even at that moment. You poor thing… to be burdened with so much awareness. I’m sorry, Lieserl.”

  Lieserl pulled away. Suddenly she felt cold, vulnerable. “Who am I, Phillida?”

  “You’re my daughter.” Phillida placed her hands on Lieserl’s shoulders and pushed her face close; Lieserl could feel the warmth of her breath, and the soft room light caught the gray in her mother’s blond hair, making it shine. “Never forget that. You’re as human as I am. But — ” She hesitated.

  “But what?”

  “But you’re being — engineered.

  “There are nanobots in your body,” Phillida said. “Do you understand what a nanobot is? A machine at the molecular level which — ”

  “I know what a nanobot is,” Lieserl snapped. “I know all about AntiSenescence and nanobots. I’m not a child, Mother.”

  “Of course not,” Phillida said seriously. “But in your case, my darling, the nanobots have been programmed — not to reverse aging — but to accelerate it. Do you understand?”

  Nanobots swarmed through Lieserl’s body. They plated calcium over her bones, stimulated the generation of new cells, forced her body to sprout like some absurd human sunflower — they even implanted memories, artificial learning, directly into her cortex.

  Lieserl felt like scraping at her skin, gouging out this artificial infection. “Why? Why did you let this be done to me?”

  Phillida pulled her close, but Lieserl stayed stiff, resisting mutely. Phillida buried her face in Lieserl’s hair; Lieserl felt the soft weight of her mother’s cheek on the crown of her head. “Not yet,” Phillida said. “Not yet. A few more days, my love. That’s all…”