When she gave the car its head it accelerated smoothly to astounding speeds, to more than a thousand kilometres an hour. The car, a squat bug with big, tough, all-purpose tyres, was state-of-the-art Coalition engineering, and could keep up this pace indefinitely. But there were no landmarks save the meaningless hillocks of ice, the arrow-straight road laid over blackness, and despite the immense speed, it was as if she wasn’t moving at all.
And, somewhere in the vast encompassing darkness ahead, another car fled.
‘Xeelee construction material,’ Dano whispered. ‘It’s like no other material we’ve encountered. You can’t cut it, bend it, break it. Even if we could build a sphere around a star and set it spinning in the first place, it would bulge at the equator and tear itself apart. But this shell is perfectly spherical, despite those huge stresses, to the limits of our measurements. Some believe the construction material doesn’t even belong to this universe. But it can be shaped by the Xeelee’s own technology, controlled by gadgets we call “flowers”.’
‘It doesn’t just appear out of nowhere.’
‘Of course not. Even the Xeelee have to obey the laws of physics. Construction material seems to be manufactured by the direct conversion of radiant energy into matter, one hundred per cent efficient. Stars burn by fusion fire; a star like this, like Earth’s sun, probably converts some six hundred million tonnes of its substance to energy every second …’
‘So if the sphere is ten centimetres thick, and if it was created entirely by the conversion of the star’s radiation—’ She called up a Virtual display before her face, ran some fast calculations.
‘It’s maybe ten thousand years old,’ Dano said. ‘Of course that’s based on a lot of assumptions. And given the amount of comet debris the sphere has collected, that age seems too low - unless the comets have been aimed to infall here …’
She slept, ate, performed all her biological functions in the suit. The suit was designed for long-duration occupancy, but it was scarcely comfortable: no spacesuit yet designed allowed you to scratch an itch properly. However she endured.
After ten days, as the competition between the star’s gravity and the sphere’s spin was adjusted, she could feel the effective gravity building up. The local vertical tipped forward, so that it was as if the car was climbing an immense, unending slope. Dano insisted she take even more care moving around the cabin, and spend more time lying flat to avoid stress on her bones.
Dano himself, of course, a complacent Virtual, sat comfortably in an everyday chair.
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why would the Xeelee create this great punctured sphere? What’s the point?’
‘It may have been nothing more than a simple industrial accident,’ he said languidly. ‘There’s a story from before the Qax Extirpation, predating even the Second Expansion. It’s said that a human traveller once saved himself from a nova flare by huddling behind a scrap of construction material. The material soaked up the light, you see, and expanded dramatically … The rogue scrap would have grown and grown, easily encompassing a star like this, if the traveller hadn’t found the “Xeelee flower”, the off-switch. It’s probably just a romantic myth. Or this may alternatively be some kind of technology demonstrator.’
‘I suppose we’ll never know,’ she said. ‘And why the light lakes? Why not make the sphere perfectly efficient, closed, totally black?’
He shrugged. ‘Well, perhaps it’s a honey trap.’ She had never seen a bee, or tasted honey, and she didn’t understand the reference. ‘Sool was right that this immense sphere-world could host billions of humans - trillions. Perhaps the Xeelee hope that we’ll flock here, to this place with room to breed almost without limit, and die and grow old without achieving anything, just like Sool, and not bother them any more. But I think that’s unlikely.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the effective gravity rises away from the equator. So the sphere isn’t much of a honey trap, because we can’t inhabit most of it. Humans here are clearly incidental to the sphere’s true purpose.’ His Virtual voice was without inflection, and she couldn’t read his mood.
They passed the five-gravity latitude before they even glimpsed Bicansa’s car. It was just a speck in the high-magnification sensor displays, not visible to the naked eye, thousands of kilometres ahead on this tabletop landscape. It was clear that they weren’t going to catch Bicansa without going much deeper into the sphere’s effective gravity well.
‘Her technology is almost as good as ours,’ Pala gasped. ‘But not quite.’
‘Try not to talk,’ Dano murmured. ‘You know, there are soldiers, Navy tars, who could stand multiple gravity for days on end. You aren’t one of them.’
Pala was lying down, cushioned by her suit, kept horizontal by her couch despite the cabin’s apparent tilt upwards. But even so the pressure on her chest was immense. ‘I won’t turn back,’ she groaned.
‘I’m not suggesting you do. But you will have to accept that the suit knows best.’
When they passed six gravities, the suit flooded with a dense, crimson fluid that forced its way into her ears and eyes and mouth. The fluid, by filling her up, would enable her to endure the immense, unending pressure of the gravity. It was like drowning.
Dano offered no sympathy. ‘Still glad you didn’t take the flitter? Still think this is a romantic adventure? Ah, but that was the point, wasn’t it? Romance. I saw the way you looked at Bicansa. Did she remind you of gentle comforts, of thrilling under-the-blanket nights in the Academy dormitories?’
‘Shut up,’ she gasped.
‘Didn’t it occur to you that as she was only a Virtual image, that image might have been edited? You don’t even know what she looks like.’
The fluid tasted of milk. Even when the feeling of drowning had passed, she never learned to ignore its presence in her belly and lungs and throat; she felt as if she was on the point of throwing up, all the time. She slept as much as she could, trying to shut out the pain, the pressure in her head, the mocking laugh of Dano.
But, trapped in her body, she had plenty of time to think over the central puzzle of this star-world - and what to do about it. And still the journey continued across the elemental landscape, and the astounding, desolating scale of this artificial world worked its way into her soul.
They drove steadily for no less than forty days, and traversed a great arc of the star sphere stretching from the equator towards the pole, across nearly a million kilometres. As gravity dominated the diminishing centrifugal forces, the local vertical tipped back up and the plain seemed to level out.
Eventually the effective gravity force reached more than twenty standard.
The car drew to a halt.
Pala insisted on seeing for herself. Despite Dano’s objections she had the suit lift her up to the vertical, amid a protesting whine of exoskeletal motors. As the monstrous gravity dragged at the fluid in which she was embedded, waves of pain plucked at her body.
Ahead of the car was another light lake, another pale glow, another splash of dimly lit green. But there were no trees or mirror towers, she saw; nothing climbed high above the sphere’s surface here.
Bicansa appeared in the air.
She stood in the car’s cabin, unsuited, as relaxed as Dano. Pala felt there was some sympathy in her Virtual eyes. But she knew now without doubt that this wasn’t Bicansa’s true aspect.
‘You came after me,’ Bicansa said.
‘I wanted to know,’ Pala said. Propped up in her suit, her voice was a husk, muffled by the fluid in her throat. ‘Why did you come to the equator - why meet us? You could have hidden here.’
‘Yes,’ Dano said grimly. ‘The Navy’s careless scouting missed you.’
‘We had to know what kind of threat you are to us. I had to see you face to face, take a chance that I would expose’ - she waved a hand - ‘this.’
‘You know we can’t ignore you,’ Dano said. ‘This great sphere is a Xeelee artefact. We have to learn what it’s for.’
‘That’s simple,’ Pala said. She had worked it out, she believed, during her long cocooning. ‘We were thinking too hard, Dano. The sphere is a weapon.’
‘Ah,’ Dano said grimly. ‘Of course. And I always believed your thinking wasn’t bleak enough for this job, Pala. I was wrong.’
Bicansa looked bewildered. ‘What are you talking about? Since the First landed, we have thought of this sphere as a place that gives life, not death.’
Dano said, ‘You wouldn’t think it was so wonderful if you inhabited a planet of this star as the sphere slowly coalesced - if your ocean froze out, your air began to snow … Pala is right. The sphere is a machine that kills a star - or rather, its planets, while preserving the star itself for future use. I doubt if there’s anything special about this system, this star.’ He glanced at the sky, metal Eyes gleaming. ‘It is probably just a trial run of a new technology, a weapon for a war of the future. One thing we know about the Xeelee is that they think long term.’
Bicansa said, ‘What a monstrous thought. My whole culture has developed on the hull of a weapon! But even so, it is my culture. And you’re going to destroy it, aren’t you? Or will you put us in a museum, as you promised Sool?’
‘Not necessarily,’ Pala whispered.
They both turned to look at her. Dano murmured threateningly, ‘What are you thinking, Missionary?’
She closed her eyes. Did she really want to take this step? It could be the end of her career if it went wrong, if Dano failed to back her. But she had sensed the gentleness of Sool’s equatorial culture, and had now experienced for herself the vast spatial scale of the sphere - and here, still more strange, was this remote polar colony. This was an immense place, she thought, immense both in space and time - and yet humans had learned to survive here. It was almost as if humans and Xeelee were learning to live together. It would surely be wrong to allow this unique world to be destroyed, for the sake of short-term gains.
And she thought she had a way to keep that from happening.
‘If this is a weapon, it may one day be used against us. And if so we have to find a way to neutralise it.’ The suit whirred as she turned to Bicansa, ‘Your people can stay here. You can live your lives the way you want. I’ll find ways to make the Commission accept that. But there’s a payback.’
Bicansa nodded grimly. ‘I understand. You want us to find the Xeelee flower.’
‘Yes,’ whispered Pala. ‘Find the off-switch.’
Dano faced her, furious. ‘You don’t have the authority to make a decision like that. Granted this is an unusual situation. But these are still human colonists, and you are still a Missionary. Such a deal would be unprecedented.’
‘But,’ Pala whispered, ‘Bicansa’s people are no longer human. Are you, Bicansa?’
Bicansa averted her eyes. ‘The First were powerful. Just as they made this star-world fit for us, so they made us fit for it.’
Dano, astonished, glared at them both. Then he laughed. ‘Oh, I see. A loophole! If the colonists aren’t fully human under the law you can pass the case to the Assimilation, who won’t want to deal with it either … You’re an ingenious one, Pala! Well, well. All right, I’ll support your proposal at the Commission. No guarantees, though.’
‘Thank you,’ Bicansa said to Pala. She held out her Virtual hand, and it passed through Pala’s suit, breaking into pixels.
Dano had been right, Pala thought, infuriatingly right, as usual. He had seen something in her, an attraction to this woman from another world she hadn’t even recognised in herself. But Bicansa didn’t even exist in the form Pala had perceived, not if she endured this gravity. Was she, Pala, really so lonely? Well, if so, when she got out of here she would do something about her personal life.
And she would have to think again about her career choice. Dano had always warned her about an excess of empathy. It seemed she wasn’t cut out for the duties of a Missionary - and next time she might not be able to find a legal loophole to spare the victims of the Commission’s heavy charity.
With a last regretful glance, Bicansa’s Virtual sublimated into dusty light.
Dano said briskly, ‘Enough’s enough. I’ll call down the flitter to get you out of here before you choke to death.’ He turned away, and his pixels flickered as he worked.
Pala looked out through the car’s window at the colony, the sprawling, high-gravity plants, the dusty, flattened lens of shining air. She wondered how many more colonies had spread over the varying gravity latitudes of the star shell, how many more adaptations from the standard human form had been tried - how many people actually lived on this immense artificial world. There was so much here to explore.
The door of Bicansa’s car opened. A creature climbed out cautiously. In a bright orange pressure suit, its body was low-slung, supported by four limbs as thick as tree trunks. Even through the suit Pala could make out immense bones at hips and shoulders, and massive joints along the spine. It lifted its head and looked into the car. Through a thick visor Pala could make out a face - thick-jawed, flattened, but a human face nonetheless. The creature nodded once. Then it turned and, moving heavily, carefully, made its way towards the colony, and its lake of light.