Vacuum Diagrams

arguments turned to sobbed pleas for understanding Paul snapped the radio off.

The Corner Mountain became visible as a sharp angle against the stars. The car slowed to a halt, tipped up at about thirty-five degrees.

Paul closed his helmet and stepped through the airlock. His footsteps were light, airy; Green had told him how, this far from the mass center of the Lump, gravity would be down to a third that at the City. The brilliance of the surface hit him with a soft impact. Heat soaked through the soles of his boots. With an odd sense of calm he worked his way up the slope to the summit, his feet on the tilted surfaces to either side of the Edge.

At last he stood unsteadily at the summit itself, feet wrapped around the sharp-edged point, arms extended for balance. The vertical lurched around him as his inner ear sought the way to the center of mass of the Sugar Lump.

Taft had abandoned his vehicle and was scrambling up the dazzling ridge. Paul felt a huge peace, as if he were once more in the metaphorical palm of the antiXeelee. He turned slowly, feet working around the summit. Three square Faces as wide as Earth shared corners at the point where he stood; he saw Edges disappear into infinity, watched Faces collapse into glowing lines of abstraction.

Sugar Lump. Edge. Corner Mountain. He found himself laughing. Harmless words used to shield men from the astonishing truth of a world shaped like a cube, of a made thing whirling and sparkling in space.

Taft stood before him. The light showed him to be a machine of pulleys, cables and gears; quantum functions sparkled unnoticed around his eyes and fingers.

Paul smiled. And jumped backwards.

Taft stumbled forward, reaching. Then he was gone, eclipsed by an Edge.

Paul let his limbs dangle. Spline warships paddled across his view like agitated fish.

He was approaching a glowing Face. What next? Would he strike, bounce away, proceed skipping and sliding? Would the impacts crush his bones? Would the heat of the surface reach through the suit and boil his flesh?

The certainty of his death was unreal, intangible, un-threatening.

Now, why should that be? Was his death to be as great a mystery as his origin? Would he die ignorant of the answers of both the great questions of his existence — where did I come from? and where am I going to?

Or perhaps the two answers were somehow linked…

He found he hoped Taft and Green would survive.

The Face rushed at him. Wave functions rippled like grass in a breeze.

Folded ships hung around him like moths.

There was a sense of motion, a thrumming of huge engines somewhere; as if the Sugar Lump and its contents were a great liner, forging through some huge sea.

The antiXeelee cradled him. It studied him dispassionately, huge and cold. Paul felt knowledge wash over him, and slowly understanding grew.

The cube planet had been created at that moment — far in the future of mankind — when the Xeelee reached their full glory. And were ready to depart.

(Depart? Where to? Why? The answers were — awesome; beyond his comprehension.)

On its completion the cube — with its guardian, the antiXeelee, and with a million others — had been sent on an impossible voyage, forging back through the unfolding ages to the birth time of the Xeelee themselves. The Xeelee would erupt fully developed from the cubes, shaking out the wings of their beautiful spacecraft and ready for their huge projects. Paul sought human words to capture the vast concepts sailing around him. Vacuum diagrams! The cube worlds were antiparticles, moving back through time to initiate their own creation. The whole of Xeelee history was a single, vast vacuum diagram, closed and complete of itself.

But… what of me?

Now Paul sensed a monstrous amusement. He was cupped within gigantic palms for an unmeasurable period; the time engines surged steadily into the past—

And then he was lifted up and released like a captive bird.

He looked down. He was outside the Sugar Lump, falling towards it. Spline ships converged. There was the City, still alive with the hopes of Taft and the rest, spreading over the meteorite debris. On the rim of the debris was a fallen figure, a young man in a soiled spacesuit lying facedown on the glowing surface.

Understanding came at last.

I have no beginning. I have no end. My lifeline is caught up in the vast Xeelee expedition into the past. I am a vacuum diagram, too, closed on myself. He remembered the absurd refrain: “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here…”

He tumbled into the head of the fallen man. Skull darkness hit him like a physical shock, and he felt the pieces of his understanding shatter like a dropped vessel, his memories seep away.

In the end he was left only with a vast amusement. Then even that fell away.

Paul opened his eyes.

His body ached. He lay facedown on a surface that glowed with white light. Grass, or fine hair, washed over the surface.

What is this place? How did I get here? And…

What’s my name?

His face grew slick with sweat; his breath sawed through his mouth. He perceived the shape of answers, like figures seen through a fog. He writhed against the shining ground.

The answers floated away.

A meaningless jingle ran around his mind: “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here…”

The grass vanished. He waited, hollow.

A hundred heroes, a hundred fragments — but understanding did not come: What was the goal of the Xeelee? Why were they trying to rebuild their own history?

And what was the significance of Bolder’s Ring? — why were the Xeelee trying to escape from the Universe itself?

Like leaves, the centuries fell away. Humanity’s growth in power and influence grew exponentially. But the legend of Xeelee achievements — the manipulation of space and time, the Ring itself — grew into a deep-rooted mythology.

At last, only the Xeelee themselves were more potent than mankind…

Humans railed against the Tyranny of Heaven.

More legends were written, as waves of human assaults pounded against the great Xeelee sites. It was a remote, inhuman time. I watched, repelled, terrified.

PART 5 ERA: The War to End Wars

Fragments. Shards…

Humans even reached into the Prime Radiant of the Xeelee.

Here was a warship, its engine blazing, falling through Bolder’s Ring — and into a new Universe.

The ship imploded, and fell into a compact, glowing nebula. Crew members hurried through the corridors of their falling ship; smoke filled the passageways as lurid flames singed the air. The hull was breached; the raw air of the nebula scoured through the cabins, and through rents in the silver walls the crew saw flying trees and huge, cloudy whales, all utterly unlike anything in their experience…

Gradually they came to understand. Gravity was the key to the absurd place they were stranded in. Gravity here was a billion times as strong as in the Universe they’d come from. Here their home planet would have a surface gravity of a billion gees — if it didn’t implode in an instant.

The crew adapted, and survived. Gradually humans spread through the nebula…

Stowaway

A.D. 104,858

It was the end of Rees’s work shift. Wearily he hauled himself through the foundry door. Cool air dried the sweat from his brow.

He pulled himself along the ropes and roofs towards his cabin, inspecting his hands and arms with some interest. When one of the older workers had dropped a ladle of iron, Rees had narrowly dodged a hail of molten metal; tiny droplets had drifted into his flesh, sizzling out little craters which—

A huge shadow flapped across the Belt. Air washed over his back. He looked up; and wonder settled at the base of his skull.

The tree was a wheel of wood and foliage fifty yards wide, magnificent against the crimson sky. Its dozen radial branches and their veil of leaves turned with a calm possession; the trunk was like a mighty wooden skull which glared around at the ocean of crimson air.

Its rotation slowing, the tree lowered itself reluctantly into the gravity well of the star kernel.

Pallis, the tree-pilot, was hanging by hands and feet below the knotty trunk of the tree. The star kernel and its churning Belt mine were behind his back. The Belt itself was a circle eight hundred yards wide, a chain of battered dwellings and work places connected by ropes and tubes. At the center of the Belt was the mine itself, a cooled-down star kernel a hundred yards wide; lifting cables dangled from the Belt to the surface of the star kernel, scraping the rusty meniscus at a few feet per second. Here and there, fixed to the walls and roofs of the Belt, were the massive, white- metal mouths of jets; every few minutes a puff of steam emerged from one of those throats and the Belt tugged imperceptibly faster at his heels, shaking off the slowing effects of air friction…

It was a spectacular sight, but it was of little interest to Pallis.

With a critical eye he peered up through the mat of foliage at the smoke which hung raggedly over the upper branches. The layer of smoke wasn’t anywhere near thick enough: he could clearly see starlight splashing through to bathe the tree’s round leaves. He moved his hands along the nearest branch, felt the uncertain quivering of the fine blade of wood. Even here, at the root of the