Vacuum Diagrams Read online

  Now a cage of jointed limbs settled around him, protecting him from the crush. He stared up, recognized the fast-healing wound of a recent budding. He called out — but his speech membrane was still moist, and the sound he made was indecipherable. He tried again, feeling the membrane stiffen. "You are my father," he said.

  "Yes." A huge face lowered towards him. He reached up to stroke the stern visage. The flesh was hardening. He felt a sweet pang of sadness. Was his father already so old, so near to Consolidation?

  "Listen to me. See my face. Your name is Sculptor 472. I am Sculptor 471. You must remember your name."

  Sculptor 472. "Thank you," he said seriously. "But—" But what did "Sculptor" mean? He searched his mind, the memory set he'd been born with. Limbs. Father. People. Consolidation. The Sun; the Hills. There was no referent for "Sculptor." He felt a stab of fear; his limbs thrashed. Was something wrong with him?

  "Calm yourself," his father said evenly. "It is a name preserved from the past, referring to nothing."

  Sculptor 472. It was a good name; a noble name. He looked ahead to his life: his brief three-day morning of awareness and mobility, when he would talk, fight, love, bear his own buds; and then the long, slow, comfortable afternoon of Consolidation. "I feel happy to be alive, father. Everything is wonderful. I—"

  "Listen to me."

  He stopped, confused; his father's tone was savage, insistent.

  Something was wrong.

  "Things are — difficult, now. Different."

  Sculptor 472 wrapped his limbs around his torso. "Is it me?"

  "No, child. The world is troubled."

  "But the Hills — Consolidation—"

  "We had to leave the Hills." There was shame in 471's voice now; again Sculptor became aware of the crush of people beyond the cage of his father's strong limbs. "The Hills are damaged. There are — Sun-people — strange forms, glowing, shining. We dare not go there. We had to flee."

  "But how will I Consolidate? Where will I go?"

  "I'm sorry," his father said. "We must travel far. Perhaps we will find new Hills, where we can Consolidate. Perhaps before your time is due."

  "But what about you?"

  "Never mind me." With harsh, urgent gestures, 471 poked at his son. "Come. Can you walk?"

  Sculptor unwrapped his limbs, settled them to the ground and stood, experimentally. He felt a little dizzy, and some of his joints ached. "Yes. Yes, I'm fine. But I must know—"

  "No more talking. Run, child!"

  His father rolled away from him and surged stiffly after the fleeing people.

  Without 471's protective cage of limbs Sculptor was left exposed. The land here was bare, flat; the sky overhead was black and empty. He blinked away false memories of shaded Hills, of laughter and love.

  His people surged to the horizon, abandoning him.

  "Wait! Father, wait!"

  Awkwardly, stumbling as he learned to ripple his eight limbs across the uneven ground, Sculptor hurried after his father.

  Michael Poole joined the flitter in Lunar orbit. He was met by Bill Dzik, the Baked Alaska project director. Dzik was a burly, breathless man, his face rendered unnaturally smooth by Anti-Senescence treatment; he carried a small briefcase. His hand, plump and warm, engulfed Poole's. "Mike. Thanks for meeting me."

  "I wasn't expecting to see you here personally, Bill."

  Dzik tried to smile; his mouth was lost in the bulk of his face. "Well, we have a problem. I'm sorry."

  Poole stifled a sigh; a knot of tension settled in his stomach.

  He followed Dzik into the flitter. The little ship was empty save for the pilot, a crop-haired woman who nodded briskly to Poole. Through the flitter's curving windows Poole saw Luna's ancient light, and the baby-blue tetrahedron that was the Interface to the wormhole to Baked Alaska. Poole and Dzik strapped themselves into adjacent seats, and with a ghost's touch of acceleration the flitter surged forwards. Poole watched the approach of the hundred-yard-wide Interface; planes of silver-gold, fugitive, elusive, shone over the blue framework.

  Problems, always problems. You should have stuck to physics, Mike.

  Dzik shifted the briefcase on his lap and made to open it with his sausage-like fingers. He hesitated. "How's the Cauchy coming on?"

  You know how it's coming on; you get my briefings from the Jovian site, and the rest of my reports. Poole decided to play along, unsure of Dzik's mood. "Fine. Miriam Berg's doing a good job out there. The ship's GUTdrive is man-rated now, and the production of exotic material for the portals is underway. You know we've tapped into Io's flux tube as an energy source, and..."

  Dzik was nodding, his eyes on Poole's face; but he wasn't listening to a word.

  "Come on, Bill," Poole said. "I can take it. Tell me what's on your mind."

  Dzik smiled. "Yeah."

  The Interface's powder-blue struts slid past the flitter, obscuring the Moon.

  Dzik opened the briefcase and drew out a series of photographs. "Look at these." They were coarse images of the surface of Baked Alaska. The sky was empty save for a speckling of distant stars, any of which could have been the Sun. The landscape was bare, cracked ice — save for some odd, rooted structures rather like the stumps of felled trees.

  "I'm sorry about the quality," Dzik said. "These had to be taken from long range. Very long range."

  Poole riffled through the photos. "What's this about, Bill?"

  Dzik ran plump fingers through short, greasy hair. "Look, Mike, I've been involved in the wormhole projects almost as long as you have. And we've faced problems before. But they've been technical, or political, or..." Dzik counted on his fingers. "Solving the fundamental problem of wormhole instability using active feedback techniques. Developing ways to produce exotic matter on an industrial scale, enough to open the throats of wormholes a mile wide. Getting agreement from governments, local and cross-System, to lace the Solar System with wormhole transit paths. And the funding. The endless battles over funding..."

  Battles which weren't over yet, Poole reflected. In fact, as he made sure Dzik never forgot, the commercial success of Dzik's Baked Alaska venture was crucial for the funding of the overall goal, the Cauchy's flight into interstellar space.

  "But this is different." Dzik poked a finger at the glossies, leaving a greasy smear. "Not technical, not financial, not political. We've found something which isn't even human. And I'm not sure if there is a resolution."

  The flitter shuddered gently. They were close to the throat of the wormhole itself now. Poole could see the electric-blue struts of exotic matter which threaded the hole's length, its negative energy density generating the repulsive field which kept the throat open. The walls of the hole flashed in sheets and sparkles: gravitational stresses resolving themselves into streams of exotic particles.

  Poole peered at the pictures again, holding them up to the cabin light. "What am I looking at, here?"

  Dzik made his hands into a sphere. "You know what Baked Alaska is: a ball a hundred miles across — half friable rock, half water-ice, traces of hydrogen, helium and a few hydrocarbons. Like a huge comet nucleus. It's in the Kuiper Belt, just beyond the orbit of Pluto, along with an uncounted number of similar companions. And with the Sun just an averagely bright star in the sky, it's so cold that helium condenses on the surface — superfluid pools, sliding over a water-ice crust.

  "When we arrived at Alaska we didn't inspect it too carefully." Dzik shrugged. "We knew that as soon as we started work we'd be wrecking the surface features anyway..."

  The construction team had swamped the blind little worldlet with an explosion of heat and light. It was a home from home; even its rotation period roughly matched an Earth day. People had moved out from the randomly chosen landing point, exploring, testing, playing, building, preparing for the Port Sol of the future. Structures of ice and liquid helium which had persisted in the lightless depths of the outer System for billions of years crumbled, evaporated.

  "Then someone brought in t
his."

  Dzik leafed through the glossies, picked one out. It showed a hummock on the ice, like the hub of a rimless wheel with eight evenly spaced spokes. "A kid took this snap as a souvenir. A novelty. She thought the regularity was some kind of crystal effect — like a snowflake. So did we all, at first. But then we found more of the damned things."

  Dzik spread the glossies over his briefcase. Poole saw that the structures in the photos shared the eight-fold symmetry of the first. Dzik went on, "All about the same mass and size — the span of those rootlike proboscides is about twelve feet; the height of the central trunk is six feet. They cover Alaska's surface — particularly ridges which catch the sunlight. Or they did, until we started messing around." He looked at Poole defensively. "Mike, as soon as I figured out what we have here, I stopped operations and pulled everyone back to the GUTship. We did a lot of damage, but — Mike, we weren't to know. We're an engineering crew, not biologists."

  Biologists?

  "We managed to lase one of the things open. It's riddled with fine, hairlike channels. Capillaries. We think the capillaries are for conducting liquid helium. Superfluid." He searched Poole's face, unsure. "Do you get it, Mike? The damn things sit on their ridges, half in shade, half out. The sunlight sets up a temperature differential — tiny, but enough to get superfluid helium pumping up through the roots."

  Poole stared at the pictures, astonished.

  Dzik slumped back in his chair and folded his fingers across his liquid belly; he gazed out of the flitter at the sparkling tube of stretched space time which surrounded them. "There's no way the authorities are going to let us go ahead and develop Port Sol now; not if it means exterminating the tree stumps. And yet the stumps are so damned dull. Mike, we've built a trillion-dollar wormhole highway to a flower bed. Even the tourist trade won't be worth a fig. I guess we can haul the wormhole Interface off to some other Kuiper object, but the cost is going to be ruinous—"

  "You're saying these things are alive?"

  Dzik's face was as wide and as blank as the vanished Moon. "That's the point, Mike," he said gently. "They're made of water-ice and rock, and they drink liquid helium. They're plants."

  The Sun-people blazed through the sky. Sculptor cowered, flattening himself against the unfamiliar ground.

  He imagined a Sun-person descending after his own Consolidation, its devilish heat scouring away the blood and bones of his hardened body. Would Sculptor be aware, residually, of the disaster? Would he still feel pain?

  He pushed himself away from the broken ground. No person could Consolidate with such a threat abroad; the need to find a safe, stable Hillside — with the proper degree of shade — was like an ache in all of them. And so Sculptor 472 stumbled on with his people, refugees all, vainly seeking shelter from the glowing, deformed strangers.

  He was already a day and a half old. Half his active life was gone. He fretted, complained to his father. He gazed around at the hulking, fleeing forms of the people, wondering which of them — in some alternate world free of Sun-people — might have become his mates, or his opponents in the brief, violent, spectacular wrestling contests which decided the choice of Consolidation sites. Sculptor was taller, stronger, smarter than most. In the contests he would have had no difficulty in finding a prime Hill site—

  Would have had. But now, a refugee, he would never get the chance. He raised his speech membrane to the sky and moaned. Why me? Why should my generation be so afflicted?

  His father stumbled. Two of his leading limbs had crumpled. He tried to bring his trailing limbs around, but he couldn't regain his balance.

  With a soft, almost accepting sigh, Sculptor 471 fell heavily to the ground.

  472 hurried to his side. "You must rise. Are you ill?" He grabbed his father's limbs and tried to haul him across the ice.

  47l's body was tipped onto one side, his weight deforming his structure slightly, flattening it. "Leave me," he said gently. "Go on. It's all right."

  The thin voice, the collapsed face, were unbearable for 472. He wrapped his limbs around his father and squeezed, as if trying to rebuild the tall, confident figure who had sheltered him in his first moments of life. "But I can't leave you."

  "You know you must. It is my time. Consolidation—"

  Sculptor was appalled. "Not here. Not now!"

  471 sighed. "I can feel my thoughts softening. It isn't so bad, Sculptor..."

  Sculptor looked around desperately. The land was flat, hard. There was no Hillside here, no possibility of shade. And the way his father lay was wrong, with his limbs splayed around him, his torso fallen.

  Urgently Sculptor scrabbled at the ice. His flesh ripped, and superfluid blood hissed from the wounds, coating his limbs; but soon he'd opened up a shallow trench. He laid his limbs once more across the still torso of 471. "If I can just roll you to the trench, then maybe there'll be some shade. Come on, father—"

  But 471 didn't respond. As Sculptor dragged at him, one limb crumbled into hard fragments.

  Sculptor fell across the jagged body of his father. Was this the fate which awaited him, too, to fall and perish on the unyielding ground, robbed of Consolidation immortality?

  After a time he climbed away from his father. He stretched his limbs and stared around. The migration was a dark band on the horizon; here and there in their trail he saw dark mounds, the forms of more fallen folk.

  Deliberately he turned away from the refugees.

  His stride stiff with rage and resentment, Sculptor walked back towards his ancestral Hills.

  Poole and Dzik clambered aboard the GUTship. The ship was parked fifty miles from the wormhole Interface, a hundred miles from the surface of the Kuiper object called Baked Alaska.

  The ship's corridors seemed immediately crowded, stuffy, claustrophobic to Poole; he became aware of the gaze of the crew on him — sullen, resentful. Bill Dzik hauled his bulk through the corridors with a seal-like grace. "Don't mind them. They don't like being packed away inside the ship again; they were just getting used to the open spaces of the Alaska beachhead."

  "And they're blaming me?"

  "You're the big bad boss who might decide to shut down their operation. Don't forget they spent a year of their lives hauling the portal out here."

  "As did you, Bill," Poole said gently. "And you don't resent me."

  "No." Dzik looked at him sharply. "But I don't envy you your decision either, Mike."

  Baked Alaska was a million cubic miles of water, an ice moon rolling around the lip of the Sun's gravity well. Poole's consortium had hauled the first wormhole Interface out to the Kuiper Belt, linking Alaska to the distant, cosy worlds of the inner System. Poole's vision was that Baked Alaska's ice would be the fuel dump of the interstellar flights of the future. A Gibraltar, a harbor mouth for a Solar System linked by wormhole transit paths.

  They reached Dzik's cabin. It was spartan, with an outsize sleeping cocoon, a zero-gee shower, a data desk unit. Poole felt grateful to close the door behind them.

  Dzik strapped himself into a chair; with practiced stabs of his broad fingers he accessed the data desk. A series of messages flickered, priority-coded.

  Poole looked around the cabin, hoping to be offered a drink.

  After a minute, Dzik leaned back in his chair and whistled. "Now we really do have trouble."

  "What is it?"

  Dzik linked his fingers behind his head. "Before lifting from the surface we did a couple of deep core samples. We wanted to figure out the ecosystem." He glanced down at his desk again. "Well, here are the results."

  The desktop surface was filled with the blown-up image of a cross-section of ice. Hints of regularity — artifacts of crystallization — filled the image with lines and planes. It was hauntingly beautiful, like an abstract design in blue and white stained glass.

  And there was something else. Small objects, dense and hard, incongruous in the wispy ice. Poole pulled himself down to the desktop and looked closely.

  Here was a rectangle
, evidently carved from rock, with twin rows of irregularly shaped holes. And here, something like a picture frame, octagonal, empty. Other objects, more elusive, hard for the mind to categorize.

  "Lethe. What a break," Dzik said. "Now we'll never get the ecologists off our backs."

  Poole gazed down, entranced. Artifacts, locked into this deep ice. There had been intelligence here.

  Another half-day wore away. Two-thirds of his life gone. He felt his joints growing stiff, his face hardening.

  He was tall, strong, savage. Retracing the migrants' trail of disrupted ice and failed Consolidations, Sculptor stalked on towards his father's land.

  Poole found it impossible to think in the confines of the GUTship. He had Bill Dzik fit out a one-man flitter; he left the GUTship and descended towards the icy carcass of Alaska.

  The crude human encampment — the seed of Port Sol — was a series of metal boxes dropped into slushy, dirty snow. Poole came down ten miles from the encampment; in Alaska's microgravity the ship settled to the surface like a snowflake.

  Movement on the horizon, to his right.

  He leaned forward. Perhaps a star had been occluded by Alaska's slow rotation.

  Poole sat in silence, the microgravity feather-light on his limbs. In the starlight the ice of Baked Alaska was bone-pale, laced with the rich purples and blues of trace hydrocarbons. The little cabin was silent save for his own breathing, and the occasional creak of cooling contraction.

  In truth, the decision about the future of Baked Alaska had been made for him. Poole's consortium had intended to drop a wormhole terminus into the Sun, to drench Port Sol with fusion heat and light. But now the archaeologists and xenobiologists would come and peel the little world open, layer by layer.

  Poole knew that was right. But he still didn't understand what had been found here, how this little world worked. Until he'd figured it out he felt reluctant to turn his treasure over to the rest of the System. Partly this was down to the streak of personal responsibility in his makeup; but also he had to think about his consortium, about the future of his other projects, the Cauchy... about the profit to be made out of all this.