Baxter, Stephen Xeelee 04 Ring

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enhancement. Spinner, emptiness is what you have to expect, out here."
"Sure. So tell me how it makesyou feel."
Louise hesitated. "Spinner-of-Rope, five million years ago I came here to work in the old days, while the
Great Northern was being constructed..."
Louise spoke of bustling, sprawling, vigorous human communities nestling among the ancient ice-spires
of the Kuiper object. The sky had been full of GUTships and stars, with Sol a bright yellow gleam in
Capricorn.
"But now," Louise said, her voice tight, "look at the Sun... Spinner-of-Rope, even from this far
out even from fifty AUs the damn thing is twice as wide as the Moon, seen from old Earth. It's
obscene to me. It makes it impossible for me to forget, even for a moment, what's been done."
Spinner sat silently for a moment. Memories of Earth meant nothing to her, but she could feel the pain in
Louise's voice.
"Louise, do you want to land here?"
"No. There's nothing for us down there... It was only an impulse that brought me out here in the first
place; we had no evidence that anything had survived. I'm sorry, Spinner."
Spinner sighed. "Where to now?"
"Well, since we're out here in the dark, let's stay out. We're still picking up that remote beacon."
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"Where's the signal coming from?"
"Further out than we are now about a hundred AUs anda goodly distance around the equatorial
plane from Port Sol. Spinner-of-Rope, we're looking at another few days in the saddle, for you. Can you
stand it?"
Spinner sighed. "It's not getting any easier. But it's not going to get any worse, is it?" ...And, she thought,
it wasn't as if the base they had established amid the ruins of the Jupiter system was so fantastically
inviting a place to get back to. "Let's get it over."
"All right. I've already laid in your course..."
There could be no true dialogue, Garry Uvarov thought, between Lieserl the strange, lonely exile in the
Sun and the crew of the returnedGreat Northern.
The corpse of Jupiter was only just over a light-hour from the center of the Sol-giant, but Lieserl's maser
messages took far longer than that to percolate out of the Sun along the flanks of their immense
convection cells. So communications roundtrips between theNorthern and the antiquated wormhole
terminus that supported Lieserl's awareness took several days.
Still, once contact was established, a prodigious amount of information flowed, asynchronously, back
and forth across the tenuous link.
"Incredible," Mark murmured. "She dates from our own era she was placed within the Sun at almost
exactly the same time as our launch."
It sounded as if Mark were speaking from somewhere inside Uvarov's own head. Uvarov swiveled his
sightless face about the dining saloon. "You're forgetting your spatial focus again," he snapped. "I know
you're excited, but "
There was a soft concussion; Uvarov pictured Virtual sound-sources reconfiguring throughout the
saloon. "Sorry," Mark said, from a point in the air a few feet before Uvarov's head.
"As far as I can tell, she's human," Mark said. "A human analogue, anyway. The woman's been in there,
alone, forfive million years, Uvarov. I know that subjectively she won't have endured all that time at a
normal human pace, but still...
"She's another Superet project just as we are. Which is why there's such a coincidence in dates. We
must both date from Superet's most active period, Uvarov."
Uvarov smiled. "Perhaps. And yet, what has resulted of all the grand designs of those days? Superet
was planning to adjust the future of mankind to ensure the success of the species. But what is the
outcome? We have: one half-insane relic of a woman-Virtual, wandering about inside the Sun, one
broken-down GUTship, theNorthern... and a Sun become a giant in a lifeless Solar System." He
worked his numb mouth, but there was no phlegm to spit. "Hardly a triumph. So much for the abilities of
humans to manage projects on such timescales. So much for Superet!"
"But Lieserl has followed a lot of the history of the human race in patches, and from a distance, but she
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knows more than we could ever hope to have uncovered otherwise. She lost contact with the rest of the
race only as humans entered a late period called the Assimilation, when mankind was moving into direct
competition with the Xeelee."
Uvarov couldn't wrench his imagination away from the plight of Lieserl. "But, I wonder, are these few,
pathetic scraps of data sufficient compensation for a hundred thousand lifetimes of solitude endured by
this unfortunateLieserl, in the heart of a dying star?"
Mark synthesized a sniff. "I don't know," he said frankly. "Maybe you're a better philosopher than I am,
Uvarov; maybe you can come to judgments on the moral value of data. At this moment I don't reallycare
where this information has come from."
"No," Uvarov said. "I don't suppose you do." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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