"Ring" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

2

Louise Ye Armonk stood on the weather deck of the SS Great Britain. From here she could see the full length of Brunel’s fine steam liner: the polished deck, the skylights, the airy masts with their loops of wire rigging, the single, squat funnel amidships.

And beyond the glowing dome which sheltered the old ship, the sky of the Solar System’s rim loomed like a huge, empty room.

Louise still felt a little drunk — sourly now — from the orbiting party she’d left a few minutes earlier. She subvocalized a command to send nanobots scouring through her bloodstream; she sobered up fast, with a brief shudder.

Mark Bassett Friar Armonk Wu — Louise’s ex-husband — stood close by her. They’d left the Great Northern, with its party still in full swing, to come here, to the surface of Port Sol, in a cramped pod. Mark was dressed in a one-piece jumpsuit of some pastel fabric; the lines of his neck were long and elegant as he turned his head to survey the old ship.

Louise was glad they were alone, that none of the Northern’s prospective interstellar colonists had decided to follow them down for a last few moments on this outpost of Sol, to reminisce with this fragment of Earth’s past — even though reminiscence was part of the reason Louise had had the old ship brought out here in the first place.

Mark touched her arm; his palm, through the thin fabric of her sleeve, felt warm, alive. “You’re not happy, are you? Even at a moment like this. Your greatest triumph.”

She searched his face, seeking out his meaning. He wore his hair shaven, so that his fine, fragile-looking skull showed through his dark skin; his nose was sharp, his lips thin, and his blue eyes — striking in that dark face — were surrounded by a mesh of wrinkles. He’d once told her he’d thought of getting the wrinkles smoothed out — it would be easy enough in the course of AS-renewal but she’d campaigned against it. Not that she’d have cared too much, but it would have taken most of the character out of that elegant face — most of its patina of time, she thought.

“I never could read you,” she said at last. “Maybe that’s why we failed in the end.”

He laughed lightly, a sparkle of intoxication still in his voice. “Oh, come on. We lasted twenty years. That’s not a failure.”

“In a lifetime of two hundred years?” She shook her head. “Look. You ask me about my feelings. Anyone who didn’t know you — us — would think you cared. So why do I think that, in some part of your head, you’re laughing at me?”

Mark drew his hand away from her arm, and she could almost see the shutters coming down behind his eyes. “Because you’re an ill tempered, morose, graceless — oh, into Lethe with it.”

“Anyway, you’re right,” Louise said at last.

“What?”

“I’m not happy. Although I’m not sure I could tell you why.”

Mark smiled; the sourceless light of the Britain’s dome smoothed away the lines around his eyes. “Well, if we’re being honest with each other for once, I do kind of enjoy seeing you suffer. Just a bit. But I care as well. Come on, let’s walk.”

He took her arm again, and they walked along the ship’s starboard side. The soles of their shoes made soft sucking sounds as the shoes’ limited processors made the soles adhere to and release the deck surface, unobtrusively reinforcing Port Sol’s microgravity. The shoes almost got it right; Louise felt herself stumble only a couple of times.

Around the ship was a dome of semisentient glass, and beyond the dome — beyond the pool of sourceless light which bathed the liner — the landscape of Port Sol stretched to its close-crowding horizon. Port Sol was a hundred-mile ball of friable rock and water-ice, with traces of hydrogen, helium and a few hydrocarbons. It was like a huge comet nucleus. Port Sol’s truncated landscape was filled with insubstantial, gossamer forms: sculptures raised from the ancient ice by natural forces reduced to geological slowness by the immense distance of the Sun.

Port Sol was a Kuiper object. With uncounted companions, it circled the Sun beyond the orbit of Pluto, shepherded there by resonances of the major planets’ gravitational fields.

Louise looked back at the Great Britain. Even against the faery background of Port Sol, still Brunel’s ship struck her as a thing of lightness, grace and elegance. She remembered going to see the ship in her dry dock on Earth; now, as then, she compressed her eyes, squinting, trying to make out the form of the thing — the Platonic ideal within the iron, which poor old Isambard had tried to make real. The ship was three thousand tons of iron and wood, but with her slim, sharp curves and fine detail she was like a craft out of fantasy. Louise thought of the gilded decorations and the coat-of-arms figurehead around the stern, and the simple, affecting symbols of Victorian industry carved into the bow: the coil of rope, the cogwheels, the set-square, the wheat-sheaf. It was impossible to imagine such a delicate thing braving the storms of the Atlantic…

She tilted back her head, and looked for the brightish star in Capricorn that was Sol, all of four billion miles away. Surely even a visionary like old Isambard never imagined that his first great ship would make her final voyage across such an immense sea as this.

Mark and Louise climbed down a steep staircase amidships to the promenade deck; they strolled along the deck past blocks of tiny cabins toward the engine-room bulkhead.

Mark ran a fingertip over the surface of a cabin wall as they passed. He frowned, rubbing his fingertips together. “The surface feels odd… not much like wood.”

“It’s preserved. Within a thin shell of semisentient plastic, which seals it, nourishes it… Mark, the damn boat was launched in 1843. Over two thousand years ago. There wouldn’t be much left of her without preservation. Anyway, I thought you weren’t interested.”

He sniffed. “Not really. I’m more interested in why you wanted to come down here: now, in the middle of all the celebrations for the completion of the starship.”

“I try to avoid introspection,” she said heavily.

“Oh, sure.” He turned to her, his face picking up the soft glow of the ancient wood. “Talk to me, Louise. The bit of me that cares about you is outvoting the bit that enjoys seeing you suffer, just for the moment.”

She shrugged. She couldn’t help sounding sour. “You tell me. You always were good at diagnosing the condition of the inside of my head. At great and tedious length. Maybe I’m feeling melancholy after completing my work on the Northern. Could that be it, do you think? Maybe I’m going through some equivalent of a post-coital depression.”

He snorted. “With you, it was post, pre and during, frankly. No, I don’t think it’s that… And besides,” he said slowly, “your work on the Northern isn’t finished yet. You’re planning to leave with her. Aren’t you? Spend subjective decades hauling her out to Tau Ceti.”

She heard herself growl. “How did you find out about that? No wonder you drove me crazy, all those years. You’re too damn interested in me.”

“I’m right, though, aren’t I?”

Now they reached the Britain’s dining room. It was a fantastic Victorian dream. Twelve columns of white and gold, with ornamental capitals, ran down its spine, and the room was lined by two sets of twelve more columns each. Doorways between the columns led off to passageways and bedrooms, and the door archways were gilded and surmounted by medallion heads. The walls were lemon-yellow, relieved by blue, white and gold; omnipresent, sourceless light shone from the cutlery and glassware on the three long tables.

Mark walked across the carpet and ran his hand over a table’s gleaming, polished surface. “You should do something about this semisentient plastic: have it give the surfaces some semblance of their natural texture. The touch is half the beauty of a thing, Louise. But you always were… remote, weren’t you? Happy enough with the surface of things — with their look, their outer form. Never interested in touching, in getting closer.”

She ignored that. “Brunel had a lot of style, you know. He worked on a tunnel under the Thames, with his father.”

“Where?” Mark had been born in Port Cassini, Titan.

“The Thames. A river, in England… on Earth. The tunnel was flooded, several times. Once, when it had been pumped out, Brunel threw a dinner party right up against the working face for fifty people. He got the band of the Coldstream Guards to — ”

“Hmm. How interesting,” Mark said dryly. “Maybe you should put some food on these tables. Why not? It could be preserved, by your sentient plastic. You could have segments of dead animals. As devoured by the great Brunel himself.”

“You never did have any taste, Mark.”

“I don’t think your mood has anything to do with the completion of the Northern.”

“Then what?”

He sighed. “It’s you, of course. It always is. For a long time, while we were together, I thought I understood your motivation. There would always be another huge, beautiful GUTship to build; another immense undertaking to lose yourself in. And since we’re all immortal now, thanks to AntiSenescence, I thought that would be enough for you.

“But I was wrong. It isn’t like that. Not really.”

Louise was aware of intense discomfort, somewhere deep within her; she felt she wanted to talk, read a bookslate, bury herself in a Virtual — anything to drown out his words.

“You always were smarter than me, Mark.”

“In some ways, yes.”

“Just say what you’ve got to say, and get it over.”

“You want immortality, Louise. But not the dreary literal immortality of AS — not just a body-scouring every few years — but the kind of immortality attained by your idols.” He waved a hand. “By Brunel, for instance. By achieving something unique, wonderful. And you fear you’ll never be able to, no matter how many starships you build.”

“You’re damn patronizing,” she snapped. “The Northern is a great achievement.”

“I know it is. I’m not denying it.” He smiled, triumph in his eyes. “But I’m right, aren’t I?”

She felt deflated. “You know you are. Damn you.” She rubbed her eyes. “It’s the shadow of the future, Mark…”

A century and a half earlier, the future had invaded the Solar System.

It had been humanity’s own fault; everyone recognized that. Under the leadership of an engineer called Michael Poole the Interface project — a wormhole link to a future a millennium and a half ahead — had been completed.

At the time Louise Ye Armonk was well established in her chosen field of GUTship engineering… at least, as established as any mere fifty-year-old could be, in a society increasingly dominated by the AS-preserved giants of the recent past. Louise had even worked, briefly, with Michael Poole himself.

Why had Poole’s wormhole time link been built? There were endless justifications — what power could a glimpse of the future afford? — but the truth was, Louise knew, that it had been built for little more than the sheer joy of it.

The Interface project came at the end of centuries of expansion for mankind. The Solar System had been opened up, first by GUTdrive vessels and later by wormhole links, and the first GUTdrive starship fuelling port — Port Sol — was already operational.

It was difficult now to recapture the mood of those times, Louise thought. Confidence — arrogance… The anthropic theories of cosmological evolution were somewhere near their paradigmatic peak. Some people believed humans were alone in the Universe. Others even believed the Universe had been designed, by some offstage agency, with the sole object of delivering and supporting humans. Given time, humans would do anything, go anywhere, achieve whatever they liked.

But Poole’s Interface had been a bridge to the real future.

The incident that followed the opening of the wormhole had been confused, chaotic, difficult to disentangle. But it had been a war — brief, spectacular, like no battle fought in Solar space before or since, but a war nevertheless.

Future Earth — at the other end of Poole’s time bridge, a millennium and a half hence — would be under occupation, by an alien species about whom nothing was known save their name: Qax.

Rebel humans from the occupation era were pursued back through time, through Poole’s Interface, by two immense Qax warships. The rebels, with the help of Michael Poole, had destroyed the warships. Then Poole had driven a captured warship into the Interface wormhole, to seal it against further invasion — and in the process Poole himself was lost in time. The rebels, stranded in their past, had fled the Solar System in a captured GUTdrive ship, evidently intending to use time dilation effects to erode away the years back to their own era.

The System, stunned, slowly recovered.

Various bodies — like the Holy Superet Light Church — still, after a hundred and fifty years, combed through the fragments of data from the Interface incident, trying to answer the unanswerable.

Like: what had truly happened to Michael Poole?

It was known that the Qax occupation itself would eventually be lifted, and humanity would resume its expansion — but now more warily, and into a Universe known to be populated by hostile competitors…

A Universe containing, above all, the Xeelee. And it was said that before Poole’s wormhole path to the future finally closed, some information had been obtained on the far future — of millions of years hence, far beyond the era of the Qax. Louise could see how some such data could be obtained — by the flux of high-energy particles from the mouth of the collapsing wormhole, for instance.

And the rumors said that the far future — and what it held for mankind — were bleak indeed.

Louise and Mark stood on the forecastle deck and looked up toward the Sun.

The Great Northern, Louise’s GUTdrive starship, passed serenely over their heads, following its stately, four-hour orbit through the Kuiper object’s shallow gravitational well. The Northern’s three-mile-long spine, encrusted with sensors, looked as if it had been carved from glass. The GUTdrive was embedded in a block of Port Sol ice, a silvery, irregular mass at one end of the spine. The lifedome — itself a mile across — was a skull of glass, fixed to the spine’s other end. Lights shone from the lifedome, green and blue; the dome looked like a bowlful of Earth, here on the rim of the System.

“It’s beautiful,” Mark said. “Like a Virtual. It’s hard to believe it’s real.” The light from the Britain’s dome under-lit his face, throwing the fine lines around his mouth into relief. “And it’s a good name, Louise. Great Northern. Your starship will head out where every direction is north — away from the Sun.”

Staring up at the shimmering Northern now, Louise remembered Virtual journeys through ghostly, stillborn craft: craft which had evolved around her as the design software responded to her thoughts. How Brunel would have thrived with modern software, which once again enabled the vision of individuals to dominate such huge engineering projects. And some of those lost ships had been far more elegant and daring than the final design — which had been, as ever, a compromise between vision and economics.

…And that was the trouble. The real thing was always a disappointment.

“Louise, you shouldn’t fear the future,” Mark said.

Instantly Louise was irritated. “I don’t fear it,” she said. “Lethe, don’t you even understand that? It’s Michael Poole and his damn Interface incident. I don’t fear the future. The trouble is, I know it.”

“We all do, Louise,” Mark said, his patience starting to sound a little strained. “And most of us don’t let it affect us — ”

“Oh, really. Look at yourself, Mark. What about your hair, for instance? — or rather, your lack of it.”

Mark ran a self-conscious hand up and over his scalp.

She went on, “Everyone knows that this modern passion for baldness comes from those weird human rebels from the future, the Friends of Wigner. So you can’t tell me you’re not influenced by knowing what’s to come. Your very hairstyle is a statement of — ”

“All right,” he snapped. “All right, you’ve made your point. You never know when to shut up, do you? But, Louise — the difference is we aren’t all obsessed by the future. Unlike you.”

He walked away from her, his gait stiff with annoyance.

They climbed down into the engine room. Multicolored light filtered down through an immense skylight. Four inclined cylinders thrust up from the floor of the ship; the pistons stood idle like the limbs of iron giants, and a vast chain girdled the drive machinery.

Louise rubbed her chin and stared at the machinery. “Obsessed? Mark, the future contains the Xeelee — godlike entities so aloof from us that we may never understand what they are trying to achieve — and with technology, with engineering, like magic. They have a hyperdrive.” She let her voice soften. “Do you understand what that means? It means that somewhere in the Universe, now, the damn Xeelee are riding around in FTL chariots which make my poor Northern look like a horse-drawn cart.

“And we believe they have an intraSystem engine — their so-called discontinuity drive — which powers night-dark ships with wings like sycamore leaves, hundreds of miles wide…

“I’m not denying my GUTdrive module is a beautiful piece of engineering. I’m proud of it. But compared to what we understand of Xeelee technology, Mark, it’s — it’s a damn steam engine. Why, we even use ice as reaction mass. Think of that! What’s the point of building something which I know is outdated before I even start?”

Mark laid a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. His touch was warm, firm, and as he’d no doubt intended — disconcertingly intimate. “So that’s why you’re running away.”

“I’d hardly call leaving on a one-way colonizing expedition to Tau Ceti ‘running away’.”

“Of course it is. Here is where you can achieve things — here, with the resources of a Solar System. You’re an engineer, damn it. What will you build on some planet of Tau Ceti? A real steam engine, maybe.”

“But — ” She struggled to find words that didn’t sound, even to her, like self justifying whines. “But maybe that would count for more, in the greater scheme of things, even than a dozen bigger and better Northerns. Do you see?”

“Not really.” His voice sounded flat, tired; perhaps he was letting himself sober up.

They stood for a while, in a silence broken only by their breathing. Then he said, “I’m sorry, Louise. I’m sorry you’re letting such moods spoil your night of triumph. But I’ve had enough; I feel as if I’ve been listening to that stuff for half my life.”

As usual when his mood turned like this, she was filled with regret. She tried to cover his hand, which still lay on her shoulder. “Mark — ”

He slid his hand away. “I’m going back to the pod, and up to the ship, and I’m going to get a little more drunk. Do you want to come?”

She thought about it. “No. Send the pod down again. Some of the cabins here are made up; I can — ”

There was a sparkling in the air before him. She stumbled back, disconcerted; Mark moved closer to her to watch.

Pixels — thumbnail cubes of light — tumbled over each other, casting glittering highlights from Brunel’s ancient machinery. They coalesced abruptly into the lifesize, semi-transparent Virtual image of a human head: round, bald, cheerful. The face split into a grin. “Louise. Sorry to disturb you.”

“Gillibrand. What in Lethe do you want? I thought you’d be unconscious by now.”

Sam Gillibrand, forty going on a hundred and fifty, was Louise’s chief assistant. “I was. But my nanobots were hooked up to the comms panel; they sobered me up fast when the message came in. Damn them.” Gillibrand looked cheerful enough. “Oh, well; I’ll just have it all to do again, and — ”

“The comms panel? What was the message, Sam?”

Gillibrand’s grin became uncertain. “City Hall. There’s been a change to the flight plan.” Gillibrand’s voice was high, heavily accented mid-American, and not really capable of conveying much drama. And yet Louise felt herself shudder when Gillibrand said: “We’re not going to Tau Ceti after all.”