Novelette: FORMIDABLE CARESS by Stephen Baxter
Some things are inherently beyond the scope of human experience—unless there's a really big loophole
As the women tried to pull her away, Ama hammered with her fist on the blank wall of the Building. “Let me inside! Oh, let me inside!"
But the Building had sealed itself against her. If the Weapon decreed that you were to have your child in the open air, that was how it was going to be, and no mere human being could do anything about it.
And she could not fight the logic of her body. The contractions came in pulses now, in waves that washed through the core of her being. In the end it was her father, Telni, who put his bony arm around her shoulders, murmuring small endearments. Exhausted, she allowed herself to be led away.
Telni's sister Jurg and the other women had set up a pallet for her not far from the rim of the Platform. They laid her down here and fussed with their blankets and buckets of warmed water, and prepared ancient knives for the cutting. Her aunt massaged her swollen belly with oils brought up from the Lowland. Telni propped her head on his arm, and held her hand tightly, but she could feel the weariness in his grip.
So it began. She breathed and screamed and pushed. And through it all, here at the lip of the Platform, she was surrounded by her world, the Buildings clustered around her, the red mist of the Lowland far below, above her the gaunt cliff on which glittered the blue-tinged lights of the Shelf cities, and the sky over her head where chains of stars curled like windblown hair. On Old Earth time was layered, and when she looked up she was peering up into accelerated time, at places where human hearts fluttered like songbirds'. But there was a personal dimension to time too, so her father had always taught her, and these hours of her labor were the longest of her life, as if her body had been dragged down into the glutinous, redshifted slowness of the Lowland.
When it was done, Jurg handed her the baby. It was a boy, a scrap of flesh born a little early, his weight negligible inside the spindling-skin blankets. She immediately loved him unconditionally, whatever alien thing lay within. “I call him Telni like his grandfather,” she managed to whisper.
Telni, exhausted himself, wiped tears from his crumpled cheeks.
She slept for a while, out in the open.
When she opened her eyes, the Weapon was floating above her.
It was a sphere as wide as a human was tall, reflective as a mirror, hovering at waist height above the smooth surface of the Platform. She could see herself in the thing's heavy silver belly, on her back on the heap of blankets, her baby asleep in the cot beside her. A small hatch was open in its flank, an opening with lobed lips, like a mouth. From this hatch a silvery tongue, meters long, reached out and snaked to the back of the neck of the small boy who stood beside the sphere.
Her aunt, her father, the others hung back, nervous of this massive presence that dominated all their lives.
The boy attached to the tongue-umbilical took a step towards the cot.
Telni blocked his way. “Stay back, Powpy, you little monster. You were once a boy as I was. Now I am old and you are young. Stay away from my grandson."
Powpy halted. Ama saw that his eyes flickered nervously, glancing at Telni, the cot, the Weapon. This showed the extent of the Weapon's control of its human creature; somewhere in there was a frightened child.
Ama struggled to sit up. “What do you want?"
The boy Powpy turned to her. “We wish to know why you wanted to give birth within a Building."
"You know why,” she snapped back. “No child born inside a Building has ever harbored an Effigy."
The child's voice was flat, neutral—his accent like her father's, she thought, a little boy with the intonation of an older generation. “A child without an Effigy is less than a child with an Effigy. Human custom concurs with that, even without understanding—"
"I didn't want you to be interested in him.” The words came in a rush. “You control us. You keep us here floating in the sky. All for the Effigies we harbor, or not. That's what you're interested in, isn't it?” Telni laid a trembling hand on her arm, but she shook it away. “My husband believed his life was pointless, that his only purpose was to grow old and die for you. In the end he destroyed himself—"
"Addled by the drink,” murmured Telni.
"He didn't want you to benefit from his death. He never even saw this baby, his son. He wanted more than this!"
The Weapon seemed to consider this. “We intend no harm. On the contrary, a proper study of the symbiotic relationship between humans and Effigies—"
"Go away,” she said. She found she was choking back tears. “Go away!” And she flung a blanket at its impassive hide, for that was all she had to throw.
The Weapon came to see Telni a few days after the funeral of his mother and grandfather. He was ten years old.
Telni had had to endure a vigil beside the bodies, where they had been laid out close to the rim of the Platform. He slept a lot, huddled against his kind but severe aunt Jurg, his last surviving relative.
At the dawn of the third day, as the light-storms down on the Lowland glimmered and shifted and filled the air with their pearly glow, Jurg prodded him awake. And, he saw, his mother was ascending. A cloud of pale mist burst soundlessly from the body on its pallet. It hovered, tendrils and billows pulsing—and then, just for a heartbeat, it gathered itself into a form that was recognizably human, a misty shell with arms and legs, torso and head.
Jurg, Ama's sister, was crying. “She's smiling. Can you see? Oh, how wonderful..."
The sketch of Ama lengthened, her neck stretching like a spindling's, becoming impossibly long. Then the distorted Effigy shot up into the blueshifted sky and arced down over the lip of the Platform, hurling itself into the flickering crimson of the plain below. Jurg told Telni that Ama's Effigy was seeking its final lodging deep in the slow-beating heart of Old Earth, where, so it was believed, something of Ama would survive even the Formidable Caresses. But Telni knew that Ama had despised the Effigies, even the one that turned out to have resided in her.
They waited another day, but no Effigy emerged from old Telni. So the bodies were taken across the Platform, to the center of the cluster of box-shaped, blank-walled Buildings, and placed reverently inside one of the smaller structures. A week later, when Jurg took Telni to see, the bodies were entirely vanished, their substance subsumed by the Building, which might have become a fraction larger after its ingestion.
So Telni, orphaned, was left in the care of his aunt.
She tried to get him to return to his schooling. A thousand people lived on the Platform, of which a few hundred were children; the schools were efficient and well organized. But Telni, driven by feelings too complicated to face, was restless. He roamed, alone, through the forest of Buildings. Or he would stand at the edge of the Platform, before the gulf that surrounded the floating city, and watch the Shelf war unfold, accelerated by its altitude, the pale blue explosions and whizzing aircraft making an endless spectacle. He was aware that his aunt and teachers and the other adults were watching him, concerned, but for now they gave him his head.
On the third day he made for one of his favorite places, which was the big wheel at the very center of the Platform, turned endlessly by harnessed spindlings. Here you could look down through a hatch in the Platform, a hole in the floor of the world, and follow the tethers that attached the Platform like a huge kite to the Lowland ground half a kilometer below, and watch the bucket chains rising and falling. The Loading Hub was directly beneath the Platform, the convergence of a dozen roads crowded day and night. Standing here it was as if you could see the machinery of the world working. He liked to think about such things, as a distraction from thinking about other things. And it pleased him in other ways he didn't really understand, as if he had a deep, sunken memory of much bigger, more complicated machinery than this.
Best of all you could visit the spindling pens and help the cargo jockeys muck out a tall beast, and brush the fur on its six powerful legs, and feed it the strange purple-colored straw it preferred. The spindlings saw him cry a few times, but nobody else, not even his aunt.
When the Weapon came to see him he was alone in one of the smaller Buildings, near the center of the cluster on the Platform. He was watching the slow crawl of lightmoss across the wall, the glow it cast subtly shifting. It was as if the Weapon just appeared at the door. Its little boy stood at its side, Powpy, with the cable dangling from the back of his neck.
Telni stared at the boy. “He used to be bigger than me. The boy. Now he's smaller."
"We believe you understand why,” said Powpy.
"The last time I saw you was four years ago. I was six. I've grown since then. But you live down on the Lowland, mostly. Did you come up in one of the freight buckets?"
"No."
"You live slower down there."
"Do you know how much slower?"
"No."
The boy nodded stiffly, as if somebody was pushing the back of his head. “A straightforward, honest answer. The Lowland here is deep, about half a kilometer below the Platform, which is itself over three hundred meters below the Shelf. Locally the stratification of time has a gradient of, approximately, five parts in one hundred per meter. So a year on the Platform is—"
"Only a couple of weeks on the Lowland. But, umm, three hundred times five, a year here is fifteen years on the Shelf."
"Actually closer to seventeen. Do you know why time is stratified?"
"I don't know that word."
Powpy's little mouth had stumbled on it too, and other hard words. “Layered."
"No."
"Good. Nor do we. Do you know why your mother died?"
That blunt question made him gasp. Since Ama had gone, nobody had even mentioned her name. “It was the refugees’ plague. She died of that. And my grandfather died soon after. My aunt Jurg says it was of a broken heart."
"Why did the plague come here?"
"The refugees brought it. Refugees from the war on the Shelf. The war's gone on for years, Shelf years. My grandfather says—said—it is as if they are trying to bring down a Formidable Caress of their own. The refugees came in a balloon. Families with kids. Grandfather says it happens every so often. They don't know what the Platform is, but they see it hanging in the air, below them, at peace. So they try to escape."
"Were they sick when they arrived?"
"No. But they carried the plague bugs. People started dying. They weren't im—"
"Immune."
"Immune like the refugees."
"Why not?"
"Time goes faster up on the Shelf. Bugs change quickly. You get used to one, but then another comes along."
"Your understanding is clear."
"My mother hated you. She was unhappy when you visited me that time, when I was six. She says you meddle in our lives."
"'Meddle.’ We created the Platform, gathered the sentient Buildings. We designed this community. Your life, and the lives of many generations of your ancestors, have been shaped by what we built. We ‘meddled’ long before you were born."
"Why?"
Silence again. “That's too big a question. Ask smaller questions."
"Why are there so many roads coming in across the Lowland to the Loading Hub?"
"I think you know the answer to that."
"Time goes twenty-five times slower down there. It's as if you're trying to feed a city twenty-five times the size."
"That's right. Now ask about something you don't know."
He pointed to the lightmoss. “Is this the same stuff as makes the light-storms, down on the Lowland?"
"Yes, it is. That's a good observation. To connect two such apparently disparate phenomena—"
"I tried to eat the lightmoss. I threw it up. You can't eat the spindlings’ straw either. Why?"
"Because they come from other places. Other worlds than this. Whole other systems of life."
Telni understood some of this. “People brought them here, and mixed everything up.” A thought struck him. “Can spindlings eat lightmoss?"
"Why is that relevant?"
"Because if they can, it must mean they came from the same other place."
"You can find that out for yourself."
He itched to go try the experiment, right now. “Did people make you?"
"They made our grandfathers, if you like."
"Were you really weapons?"
"Not all of us. Such labels are irrelevant now. When human civilizations fell, sentient machines were left to roam, to interact. There was selection, of a brutal sort, as we competed for resources and spare parts. We enjoyed our own long evolution. A man called Bayle mounted an expedition to the Lowland, and found us."
"You were farming humans. That's what my mother said."
"It wasn't as simple as that. The interaction with Bayle's scholars led to a new generation with enhanced faculties."
"What kind of faculties?"
"Curiosity."
Telni considered that. “What's special about me? That I might have an Effigy inside me?"
"Not just that. Your mother rebelled when you were born. That's very rare. The human community here was founded from a pool of scholars, but that was many generations ago. We fear that we may have bred out a certain initiative. That was how you came to our attention, Telni. There may be questions you can answer that we can't. There may be questions you can ask that we can't."
"Like what?"
"You tell me."
He thought. “What are the Formidable Caresses?"
"The ends of the world. Or at least, of civilization. In the past, and in the future."
"How does time work?"
"That's another question you can answer yourself."
He was mystified. “How?"
A seam opened up on the Weapon's sleek side, like a wound, revealing a dark interior. Powpy had to push his little hand inside and grope around for something. Despite the Weapon's control, Telni could see his revulsion. He drew out something that gleamed, complex. He handed it to Telni.
Telni turned it over in his hands, fascinated. It was warm. “What is it?"
"A clock. A precise one. You'll work out what to do with it.” The Weapon moved, gliding up another meter into the air. “One more question."
"Why do I feel ... sometimes...” It was hard to put into words. “Like I should be somewhere else? My mother said everybody feels like that, when they're young. But ... Is it a stupid question?"
"No. It is a very important question. But it is one you will have to answer for yourself. We will see you again.” It drifted away, two meters up in the air, with the little boy running beneath, like a dog on a long lead. But it paused once more, and the boy turned. “What will you do now?"
Telni grinned. “Go feed moss to a spindling."
* * * *
At twenty-five, Telni was the youngest of the Platform party selected to meet the Natural Philosophers from the Shelf, and MinaAndry, a year or two younger, was the most junior of the visitors from Foro. It was natural they would end up together.
The formal welcomes were made at the lip of the Platform, under the vast, astonishing bulk of the tethered airship. The Shelf folk looked as if they longed to be away from the edge, and the long drop to the Lowland below. Then the parties broke up for informal discussions and demonstrations. The groups, of fifty or so on each side, were to reassemble for a formal dinner that night in the Hall, the largest and grandest of the Platform's sentient Buildings. Thus the month-long expedition by the Shelf Philosophers would begin to address its goals, the start of a cultural and philosophical exchange with the Platform. It was a fitting project. The inhabitants of the Platform, drawn long ago from Foro, were after all distant cousins of the Shelf folk.
And Telni found himself partnered with MinaAndry.
There was much good-natured ribbing at this, and not a little jealousy in the looks of the older men, Telni thought. But Mina was beautiful. All the folk from the Shelf were handsome in their way, tall and elegant—not quite of the same stock as the Platform folk, who, shorter and heavier-built, were themselves different from the darker folk of the Lowland. They were three human groups swimming through time at different rates; of course they would diverge. But whatever the strange physics behind it, MinaAndry was the most beautiful girl Telni had ever seen, tall yet athletic-looking with a loose physical grace, and blonde hair tied tightly back from a spindling-slim neck.
They walked across the Platform, through the city of living Buildings. It was a jumble of cubes and rhomboids, pyramids and tetrahedrons—even one handsome dodecahedron. The walls were gleaming white surfaces, smooth to the touch, neither hot nor cold, and pierced by sharp-edged doorways and windows.
"This place is so strange.” Mina ran her hand across the smooth surface of a Building. Within its bland surface, through an open door, could be glimpsed the signs of humanity, a bunk bed made of wood hauled up from the plain, a hearth, a cooking pot, cupboards and heaps of blankets and clothes, and outside a bucket to catch the rain. “We build things of stone, of concrete, or wood. But this—"
"We didn't build these structures at all. The Buildings grew here. They bud from units we call Flowers, and soak up the light from the storms. Like the Weapons, the Buildings are technology gone wild, made things modified by time."
"It all feels new, although I suppose it's actually very old. Whereas Foro feels old. All that lichen-encrusted stone! It's like a vast tomb..."
But Telni knew that the town she called Foro was built on the ruins of a city itself called New Foro, devastated during the war he remembered watching as a boy. He had naively expected the Shelf folk to be full of stories of that war when they came here. But the war was fifteen Platform years over, more than two hundred and fifty Shelf years, and what was a childhood memory to Telni was long-dead history to Mina.
"Is it true you feed your dead to the Buildings?” She asked this with a kind of frisson of horror.
"We wouldn't put it like that ... They do need organic material. In the wild, you know, down on the Lowland, they preyed on humans. We do let them take our corpses. Why not?” He stroked a wall himself. “It means the Buildings are made of us, our ancestors. Sometimes people have to die inside a Building. The Weapon decrees it."
"Why?"
"It seems to be studying Effigies. It thinks that the construction material of which Buildings are made excludes Effigies. Some of us are born inside Buildings, so no Effigy can enter us then. Others die within a Building, a special one we call the Morgue, in an attempt to trap the Effigies when they are driven out of their bodies.My own aunt died recently, and had to be taken inside the Morgue, but no Effigy was released."
"It seems very strange to us,” Mina said cautiously. “To Shelf folk, I mean. That here you are living out your lives on a machine, made by another machine."
"It's not as if we have a choice,” Telni said, feeling defensive. “We aren't allowed to leave."
She looked down at her feet, which were clad in sensible leather shoes—not spindling, like Telni's. “I think you can tell that a machine built this place. It lacks a certain humanity.” She glanced at him uncertainly. “Look, I'm speaking as a Philosopher. I myself am studying geology. The way time stratification affects erosion, with higher levels wearing away faster than the low, and the sluggish way rivers flow as they head down into the red...” She wasn't concentrating on what she was saying, but inspecting her surroundings. “For instance there's the thinness of this floor. On the Shelf we all grew up on a cliff-top. But here we are suspended in the air on a paper-thin sheet! Logically, perhaps, we're even safer here than standing on the Shelf. But it doesn't feel safe. A human designer would never have done it like this."
"We live as best we can."
"I'm sure."
He took her to the very center of the Platform, and the wheel that turned as always, drawn by teams of patient spindlings. The cargo jockeys, unloading buckets and pallets of supplies drawn up from the Lowland, stared with curiosity as MinaAndry patted the necks of the laboring beasts. “How charming these beasts are! You know that on the Shelf they were driven to extinction during the War of the Cities. We are slowly restocking with animals drawn up from the Lowland herds, but it's ferociously expensive..."
Something about the way she patted and stroked the tall, elegant creatures moved Telni, deep inside. But he had to pull her aside when he saw a spindling was ready to cough; spindlings lacked anuses and vomited their shit from their mouths. Mina was astonished at the sight.
Anyhow, he hadn't brought her here for spindlings. He took Mina's hand and led her to the center of the Hub, close to the great hatch in the floor of the Platform, which revealed the cables that dangled down to the Lowland far below.
Mina squealed and drew back. “Oh! I'm sorry. Vertigo—what a foolish reaction that is!"
"But evidently a very ancient one. Look.” He pointed down through the hole. “I brought you here to see my own work. I earn my living through my studies with an apothecary. But this is my passion..."
Holding tight to the rail, pushing a stray strand of hair back from her face, she peered down through the floor. From here, Telni's cradles of pendulums, of bobs and weights and simple control mechanisms, were clearly visible, attached in a train along one of the guide ropes that tethered the Platform to the Lowland plain.
"Pendulums?"
"Pendulums. I time their swing. From here I can vary the length and amplitude...” He showed her a rigging-up of levers he had fixed above the tether's anchor. “Sometimes there's a snag, and I go down in a harness, or send one of the cargo jockeys."
"How do you time them?"
"I have a clock the Weapon gave me. I don't understand how it works,” he said, and that admission embarrassed him. “But it's clearly more accurate than any clock we have. I have the pendulums spread out over more than a quarter of a kilometer. There's no record of anybody attempting to make such measurements over such a height difference. And by seeing how the period of the pendulums vary with height, what I'm trying to measure is—"
"The stratification of time. The higher up you raise your pendulums, the faster they will swing.” She smiled. “Even a geologist understands that much. Isn't it about five percent per meter?"
"Yes. But that's only a linear approximation. With more accurate measurements, I've detected an underlying curved function...” The rate at which time flowed faster, Telni believed, was inversely proportional to the distance from the center of Old Earth. “It only looks linear, simply proportional to height, if you pick points close enough together that you can't detect the curve. And an inverse relationship makes sense, because that's the same mathematical form as the planet's gravitational potential, and time stratification is surely some kind of gravitational effect...” He hoped this didn't sound naive. His physics, based on the philosophies extracted from Foro centuries ago with the Platform's first inhabitants, was no doubt primitive compared to the teachings Mina had been exposed to.
Mina peered up at a sky where an unending storm of star clouds passed, brightly blueshifted. “I think I understand,” she said. “My mathematics is rustier than it should be. That means that the time distortion doesn't keep rising on and on. It comes to some limit."
"Yes! And that asymptotic limit is a distortion factor of around three hundred and twenty thousand—compared to the Shelf level, which we've always taken as our benchmark. Actually, it corresponds to the five percent rule applied across the radius of Old Earth. So one year here corresponds to nearly a third of a million years, up there in the sky."
"Or,” she said, “one year out there—"
"Passes in about a hundred seconds on the Self. We are falling into the future, Mina! Some believe that once Earth was a world without this layering of time, a world like many others, perhaps, hanging among the stars. And its people were more or less like us. But Earth came under some kind of threat. And so the elders of Earth pulled a blanket of time over their world and packed it off to the future: Earth is a jar of time, stopped up to preserve its children."
"That's all speculation."
"Yes. But it would explain such a high rate. And, Mina, I think this rate should be observable. The interval we call a ‘year’ is just a counting-up of days, but it's thought to be a folk memory of what was a real year, the time it took Old Earth to circle its sun. We can't distinguish that sun, whatever is left of it. But we ought to be able to see the stars shifting back and forth, every hundred seconds, as we turn around the sun. I'm trying to encourage the astronomers to look for this, but they say they're too busy mapping other changes.” He waved a hand at the sky. “Those chains of stars—"
"They evolve faster than seen from Foro,” she breathed, her upturned face bathed in the shifting blue starlight.
"They are not as previous generations witnessed them. Something new in the sky. However if the astronomers could be persuaded to measure the external year, it would confirm my mathematics ... I'm always trying to improve my accuracy. The pendulums need to be long enough to give a decent period, but not too long or else the time stratification becomes significant even over the length of the pendulum itself, and the physics gets very complicated—"
She slipped her hand into his. “It's a wonderful discovery. Nobody before, maybe not since the last Caress, has worked out how fast we're all plummeting into the future."
He flushed, pleased. But something made him confess, “I needed the Weapon's clock to measure the effects. And it set me asking questions about time in the first place."
"It doesn't matter what the Weapon did. This is your work. You should be happy."
"I don't feel happy,” he blurted.
She frowned. “Why do you say that?"
Suddenly he was opening up to her in ways he'd never spoken to anybody else. “Because I don't always feel as if I fit. As if I'm not like other people.” He looked at her doubtfully, wondering if she would conclude he was crazy. “Maybe that's why I'm turning out to be a good Philosopher. I can look at the world from outside, and see patterns others can't. Do you ever feel like that?"
Still holding his hand, she walked him back to the wheel and stroked a spindling's stubby mane, evidently drawing comfort from the simple physical contact. “Sometimes,” she said. “Maybe everybody does. And maybe it's a reaction to the unnatural environment of the Platform. But the world is as it is, and you just have to make the best of it. Do you get many birds up here?"
"Not many. Just caged songbirds. Hard for them to find anywhere to nest."
"I used to watch birds as a kid. I'd climb up to a place we call the Attic ... The birds use the time layers. The parents will nest at some low level, then go gathering food higher up. They've worked out they can take as long as they like, while the babies, stuck in slow time, don't get too hungry and are safe from the predators. Of course the parents grow old faster, sacrificing their lives for their chicks."
"I never saw anything like that. I never got the chance.” He shook his head, suddenly angry, resentful. “Not on this island in the sky, a creature of some machine. Sometimes I hope the next Caress comes soon and smashes everything up."
She took both his hands and smiled at him. “I have a feeling you're going to be a challenge. But I like challenges."
"You do?"
"Sure. Or I wouldn't be here, spending a month with a bunch of old folk while seventeen months pass at home. Think of the parties I'm missing!"
His heart hammered, as if he had been lifted up into the blue. “I've only known you hours,” he said. “Yet I feel—"
"You should return to your work.” The familiar child's voice was strange, cold, jarring.
Telni turned. The Weapon was here, hovering effortlessly over the hole in the floor. His tethered boy stood some meters away, tense, obviously nervous of the long drop. The spindlings still turned their wheel, but the cargo jockeys stood back, staring at the sudden arrival of the Weapon, the maker and ruler of the world.
Telni's anger flared. He stepped forward towards the child, fists clenched. “What do you want?"
"We have come to observe the formal congress this evening. The Philosophers from Shelf and Platform. There are many questions humans can address which we—"
"Then go scare all those old men and women. Leave me alone.” Suddenly, with Mina at his side, he could not bear to have the Weapon in his life, with its strange ageless boy on his umbilical. “Leave me alone, I say!"
Powpy turned to look at Mina. “She will not stay here. This girl, MinaAndry. Her home is on the Shelf. Her family, the Andry-Feri, is an ancient dynasty. She has responsibilities, to bear sons and daughters. That is her destiny. Not here."
"I will stay if I wish,” Mina said. She was trembling, Telni saw, evidently terrified of the Weapon, this strange, ancient, wild machine from the dark Lowland. Yet she was facing it, answering it back.
Telni found himself snarling, “Maybe she'll bear my sons and daughters."
"No,” said the boy.
"What do you mean, no?"
"She is not suitable for you."
"She's a scholar from Foro! She's from the stock you brought here in the first place."
'It is highly unlikely that she has an Effigy, as few in her family do. Your partner should have an Effigy. That is why—'
"Selective breeding,” Mina gasped. “It's true. This machine really is breeding humans like cattle..."
"I don't care about Effigies,” Telni yelled. “I don't care about you and your stupid projects.” He stalked over to the boy, who stood trembling, clearly afraid, yet unable to move from the spot.
"Telni, don't,” Mina called.
The boy said calmly, “Already you have done good and insightful work, which—"
Telni struck, a hard clap with his open hand to the side of the boy's head. Powpy went down squealing.
Mina rushed forward and pushed herself between Telni and the boy. “What have you done?"
"He—it—all my life—"
"Is that this boy's fault? Oh, get away, you fool.” She knelt down and cradled the child's head on her lap. With the umbilical still dangling from the back of his neck, Powpy was crying, in a strange, contained way. “He's going to bruise. I think you may have damaged his ear. And his jaw—no, child, don't try to talk.” She turned to the Weapon, which hovered impassively. “Don't make him speak for you again. He's hurt."
Telni opened his hands. “Mina, please—"
"Are you still here?” she snarled. “Go get help. Or if you can't do that, just go away. Go!"
He knew he had lost her, in this one moment, this one foolish blow.
He turned away and headed towards the Platform's hospital to find a nurse.
The little boy walked into Telni's cell, trailing a silvery rope from the back of his neck.
Telni was huddled up his bunk, a spindling-skin blanket over his body. He was shivering, drying out, not for the first time. He scowled at the boy. “You again."
"Be fair,” the boy said. “We have not troubled you for twenty years."
"Not for you.” His figuring was cloudy. “Down on Lowland, less than a year—"
"This boy is not yet healed."
Telni saw his face was distorted on the right hand side. “I apologize.” He sat up. “I apologize to you—what in the blue was your name?"
"Powpy."
"I apologize to you, Powpy. Not to the thing that controls you. Where is it, by the way?"
"It would not fit through the door."
He lay back and laughed.
"We did not expect to find you here."
"In the drunk tank? Well, I got fired by the apothecary for emptying her drugs cabinet one too many times. So it was the drink for me.” He patted his belly. “At least it's putting fat on my bones."
"Why this slow self-destruction?"
"Call it an experiment. I'm following in my father's footsteps, aren't I? After all, thanks to you, I have no more chance of happiness, of meaning in my life, than he did. And besides, it's all going to finish in a big smash soon, isn't it? As you smart machines no doubt know already."
It didn't respond to that immediately. “You never had a wife. Children."
"Sooner no kids at all than to breed at your behest."
"You have long lost contact with MinaAndry."
"You could say that.” When the month-long tour of the Shelf Philosophers was concluded, she had gone home with them, leaping seventeen months to continue her interrupted life on Foro. Since then, the accelerated time of the Shelf had whisked her away from him forever. “After—what, three hundred and forty years up there?—she's dust, her descendants won't remember her, even the language she spoke will be half-forgotten. The dead get deader, you know, as every trace of their existence is expunged. That's one thing life on Old Earth has taught us. What do you want, anyway?"
"Your research into the Formidable Caress."
"If you can call it research."
"Your work is good, from what we have seen of that portion you have shared with other scholars. You cannot help but do good work, Telni. The curiosity I saw burning in that ten-year-old boy, long ago, is still bright."
"Don't try to analyze me, you—thing."
"Tell me what you have discovered..."
After his discovery of the huge rate at which the inhabitants of Old Earth were plummeting into the future, Telni had become interested in spans of history. On the Shelf, written records went back some four thousand years of local time. These records had been compiled by a new civilization rising from the rubble of an older culture, itself wrecked by a disaster known as the Formidable Caress, thought to have occurred some six thousand years before that.
"But in the external universe,” Telni said, “ten thousand Shelf years corresponds to over three billion years. So much I deduced from my pendulums, swinging away amid streams of spindling shit and cargo jockey piss ... Everybody has always thought that the Caresses come about from local events. Something to do with the planet itself. But three billion years is long enough for events to unfold on a wider scale. Time enough, according to what Shelf scholars have reconstructed, for stars to be born and to die, for whole galaxies to swim and jostle ... I wondered if the Caresses could have some cosmic cause."
"So you started to correspond with scholars on the Shelf."
"Yes. After that first visit by Mina's party, we kept up a regular link, with visits from them once every couple of years for us, once a generation for them...” It had helped that six hundred years after the shock of the War of the Cities, the Shelf cities had not indulged in another bout of warfare on any significant scale. “I spoke to the astronomers over there, about what they saw in the sky. And their archaeologists, for what had been seen in the past. There was always snobbishness, you know. Those of us down in the red think we are better because we are closer to the original stock of Old Earth; those up in the blue believe they are superior products of evolution. None of that bothered me. And as their generations ticked by, I think I helped shape whole agendas of academic research by my sheer persistence."
"It must have been a rewarding time for you."
"Academically, yeah. I've never had any problem, academically. It's the rest of my life that's a piece of shit."
"Tell us what you discovered."
"I don't have my notes, my books—"
"Just tell us."
He sat up and stared into the face of the eerily unchanged boy—who, to his credit, did not flinch. “The first Caress destroyed almost everything of what went before, on the Shelf and presumably elsewhere. Almost, but not all. Some trace inscriptions, particularly carvings on stone, have survived. Images, fragmentary, and bits of text. Records of something in the sky."
"What something?"
"The galaxy is a disc of stars, a spiral. We, on a planet embedded in the disc, see this in cross-section, as a band of light in the sky. Much of it obscured by dust."
"And?"
"The ancients’ last records show two bands, at an angle to each other. There is evidence that the second band grew brighter, more prominent. The chronological sequence is difficult to establish—the best of these pieces were robbed and used as hearths or altar stones by the fallen generations that followed..."
"Nevertheless,” the boy prompted.
"Nevertheless, there is evidence that something came from out of the sky. Something huge. And then there are crude, fragmentary images—cartoons, really—of explosions. All over the sky. A million suns, suddenly appearing.” He imagined survivors, huddled in the ruins of their cities, scratching what they saw into fallen stones. “After that—nothing, for generations. People were too busy reinventing agriculture to do much astronomy. That was ten thousand years ago.
"The next bit of evidence comes from around three thousand years back, when a Natural Philosopher called HuroEldon established a new center of scholarship, at Foro and down on the Lowland ... Once again we started getting good astronomical records. And about that time, they observed in the sky—"
"Another band of stars."
"No. A spiral—a spiral of stars, ragged, the stars burning and dying, a wheel turning around a point of intense brightness. This object swam towards Old Earth, so it seemed, and at its closest approach there was a flare of dazzling new stars, speckled over the sky—but there was no Caress, not this time. The spiral receded into the dark."
"Tell us what you believe this means."
"I think it's clear. This other spiral is a galaxy like our own. The two orbit each other.” He mimed this with his fists, but his hands were shaking; shamed before the boy's steady gaze, he lowered his arms. “As twin stars may orbit one another. But galaxies are big, diffuse structures. They must tear at each other, ripping open those lacy spirals. Perhaps when they brush, they create bursts of starbirth. A Formidable Caress indeed.
"The last Caress was a first pass, when the second galaxy came close enough to our part of our spiral to cause a great flaring of stars—and that flaring, a rain of light falling from the blue, was what shattered our world. Then in HuroEldon's time, two billion years later, there was another approach—this one not so close; it was spectacular but did no damage, not to us. And then..."
"Yes?"
He shrugged, peering up at the construction-material roof of the cell. “The sky is ragged, full of ripped-apart spiral arms. The two galaxies continue to circle each other, perhaps heading for a full merger, a final smash. And that, perhaps, will cause a new starburst flare, a new Caress."
The boy stood silently, considering this, though one leg quivered, as if itchy. He asked: “When?"
"That I don't know. I tried to do some mathematics on the orbit. Long time since I stayed sober enough to see that through. But there's one more scrap of information in the archaeology. There was always a tradition that the second Caress would follow ten thousand years after the first, Shelf time. Maybe that's a memory of what the smart folk who lived before the first Caress were able to calculate. They knew, not only about the Caress that threatened them, but also what would follow. Remarkable, really."
"Ten thousand years,” the boy said. “Which is—"
"About now.” He grinned. “If the world ends, do you think they will let me out of here to see the show?"
"You have done remarkable work, Telni. This is a body of evidence extracted from human culture which we could not have assembled for ourselves.” Even as he spoke the boy trembled, and Telni saw piss swim down his bare leg.
Telni snorted. “You really aren't too good at running the people you herd, are you, machine?"
Ignoring the dribble on his leg, Powpy spoke on. “Regarding the work, however. We are adept at calculation. Perhaps we can take these hints and reconstruct the ancients’ computations, or even improve on them."
"So you'll know the precise date of the end of the world. That will help. Come back and tell me what you figure out."
"We will.” The boy turned and walked away, leaving piss footprints on the smooth floor.
Telni laughed at him, lay back on his bunk, and tried to sleep.
It was to be a very long time before Telni saw the Weapon and its human attendant again.
* * * *
"He refuses to die. It's as simple as that. There's nothing but his own stubbornness keeping him alive."
His hearing was so bad now that it was as if his ears were stuffed full of wool. But, lying there on his pallet, he could hear every word they said.
And, though he needed a lot of sleep now, he was aware when they moved him into the Morgue, ready for him to die, ready to capture his Effigy-spirit when it was released from his seventy-two-year-old body. “You can wheel me in here if you like, you bastards.” He tried to laugh, but it just made him cough. “I'm just going to lie here as long as it takes."
"As long as it takes for what?"
"For it to come back again."
But, more than thirty years since his last visitation, only a handful of the medical staff knew what he was talking about.
In the end, of course, it came.
He woke from another drugged sleep to find a little boy standing beside his bed. He struggled to sit up. “Hey, Powpy. How's it going with you? For you it must be, what, a year since last time? You've grown. You're not afraid of me, are you? Look, I'm old and disgusting, but at least I can't slap you around the head any more, can I?"
He thought he saw a flicker of something in the boy's eyes. Forgiveness? Pity? Contempt? Well, he deserved the latter. But then the kid spoke in that odd monotone, so familiar even after all these years. “We were here at the beginning of your life. Now here we are at the end."
"Yes.” He tried to snap his fingers, failed. “Just another spark in the flames for you, right? And now you've come to see me give up my Effigy so you can trap it in this box of yours."
"We would not describe it as—"
He grabbed the boy's arm, trying to grip hard. “Listen, Weapon. You can have my Effigy. What do I care? But I'm not going to die like this. Not here, not now."
"Then where, and when?"
"Fifty years,” he whispered. He glanced at the medical staff, who hovered at the edges of the Building. “I did my own calculations. Took me ten years. Well, I had nothing better to do ... Fifty years, right? That's all we've got left, until the fireworks."
The boy said gravely, “We imagine our model of the galaxies’ interaction is somewhat more sophisticated than yours. But your answer is substantially correct. You understand that this Caress will be different. Those on the Platform will survive. The construction material of the Buildings will shelter them. That was one purpose of the Platform in the first place. And from this seed the recovery after the Caress should be much more rapid."
"But the cities of the Shelf—Foro, Puul—"
"People will survive in caves, underground. But the vast loss of life, the destruction of the ecology, their agricultural support—"
"Well, it serves those bastards right. They lost interest in talking to me decades ago.” Which was true. But since the War of the Cities, there had been a thousand years of peace on the Shelf, all of which he'd lived through—incredible to be a witness to so much history—and they had built something beautiful and splendid up there, a chain of cities like jewels in the night. In his head he imagined a race of Minas, beautiful, clear-eyed, laughing. “Well. There's nothing I can do for them.” He struggled to sit straighter. “But there's something I want you to do for me. You owe me, you artefact. I did everything you asked of me, and more. Now you're going to take away my soul. Well, you can have it. But you can give me something back in return. I want to see the Caress."
"You have only weeks to live. Days, perhaps."
"Take me down into the red. No matter how little time I have left, you can find a pit deep enough on this time-shifted world to squeeze in fifty Platform years.” Exhausted, he fell back coughing; a nurse hurried over to catch him and lower him gently to his blankets. “And one more thing."
"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 blueshifted 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 ground 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 a little rusty dirt clung to its sleek hide. “Human hybrids."
"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."
"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 on the Abyss. Once the bed of a deep ocean. 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 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 Earth ... We believe there is a kind of nest of them, a colony of the Effigies that dwells deep in the core of Old Earth. 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."
"Perhaps. We must study this 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."
"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. They 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 two creatures running up—they were six-legged people, 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, swallowing him up.
He heard Powpy call, “Who are you? Who are you?"
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?"
"My name is Michael Poole."
The light detonated, deep inside him.
Suddenly he filled this box of Xeelee stuff, and he rattled, anguished. But there was the door, a way out. Somehow he fled that way, seeking the redshift.
And then—