As they walked Poole had the odd sensation that he was stepping into, and then climbing out of, shallow dimples in the grass-coated earth; but the area looked level, as far as the eye could see. The length scale of the unevenness seemed to be about a yard. Covertly he watched Shira as she led them through the little village; she walked gracefully, but he noticed how her stance, too, rocked backward and forward from the vertical by a few degrees, as if she were negotiating invisible potholes.
Harry, of course, sailed a fraction of an inch over the grassy surface.
Harry leaned close to Berg and whispered, 'She looks about twenty-five. How old is she really?'
'About twenty-five.'
'Don’t kid me.'
'I’m serious.' Berg ran a hand through her wire-stiff crop of hair. 'They’ve lost AS technology… or, rather, had it taken away from them. By the Qax.'
Harry looked as if he couldn’t believe it. 'What? How can that have happened? I imagined these people would be far in advance of us… That was part of the thrill of Michael’s time-interface experiment in the first place.'
'Yes,' Poole said grimly, 'but it looks as if history isn’t a monotonic process. Anyway, who are the Qax?'
'She’ll tell you,' Berg said grimly. 'She won’t tell you much else, but she’ll tell you about the Qax. These people call themselves the Friends of Wigner.'
'Wigner?' Poole asked. 'Eugene Wigner, the quantum physicist?'
'As far as I know.'
'Why?'
Berg shrugged sadly, her bony shoulders scratching against the rough material of her jumpsuit. 'I think if I knew the answer to that, I’d know most of it.'
Poole whispered, 'Miriam, what have you found out about the gravity generator?'
Berg looked at him. 'Do you want the detail, or just a precis?'
'A precis will do—'
'Diddly squat. They won’t tell me anything. I don’t think they want to tell
'Why me?' Poole asked.
'Partly because I thought that if anyone could figure out what’s going on here it would be you. And partly because I thought that you had a better chance than anyone else of being allowed to land here; yours is about the only name from our era these people know. And partly—'
'Yes?'
Berg shrugged, on the edge of embarrassment. 'Because I thought I needed a friend.'
Walking beside her, Poole touched her arm.
He turned to the Virtual. 'Harry, these invisible dips in the landscape—'
Harry, surprised, said, 'What dips?'
'They’re coming about a yard apart,' Poole said. 'I think they’re caused by an unevenness of a few percent in whatever’s generating the gravity in this place.'
Berg nodded. 'I figured out that much. We must be climbing in and out of little gravity wells, right?'
'Harry, tell me if the dips are consistent with a distribution of point masses, somewhere under the surface in the body of the craft.'
Harry nodded and looked unaccustomedly thoughtful.
'What does he know?' Berg asked.
'I’m not asking him,' Poole said patiently. 'I’m really asking the boat. Miriam, Harry’s like a camouflaged terminal to the boat’s AI; one of the main reasons — no,
Harry looked pained, but he kept 'thinking.'
They reached what was evidently Shira’s 'home,' a conical teepee ten feet tall. There was an open triangular entrance; smiling, Shira beckoned them in. Poole ran a fingertip over the edge of the doorway. The dove-gray material of the teepee was rigid, vaguely warm to the touch — so not metallic — and felt more than sharp enough to cut flesh.
Two of the fist-sized light globes hovered near the roof of the teepee, casting softened double shadows; they bobbed in response to random currents in the air like paper lanterns. The inner walls were blank of decoration — they bore the same dull dove-gray sheen as the exterior — and the floor area, fifteen feet across near the base, bore a single piece of furniture, a low, hard-looking bed, and what looked like thick rugs, or perhaps scatter cushions.
They stood around awkwardly. Interestingly, now they were inside the teepee Harry seemed to be having trouble with his resolution; his face and limbs crumbled into sugar-cube-sized pixels, and then congealed once more.
Shira bade them sit, and left them.
Stiffly, Berg and Poole pulled a couple of the cushions to the center of the floor and sat, a few inches apart; Harry made a show of sitting on the bed, but the resolution was so poor that from time to time he broke up into such a disparate hail of pixels that Poole could see right through him, to the gray wall. Poole laughed. 'You look terrible,' he said.
'Thanks,' Harry said, his voice indistinct. 'It’s the material of the walls; it’s blocking the signal from the boat. What you’re getting is scattered through the doorway.'
'What about the gravity wells?'
Harry nodded, his face furred with pixels. 'You were right. The dips are consistent with point masses, ten million tons each, set out in a hexagonal array a yard under the surface we stand on… Here comes Shira.'
Shira floated through the doorway, smiling, bearing three plates on a tray. 'From our kitchens. I’m sorry there’s nothing for you,' she said to Harry. The Virtual’s reply was lost in a defocused blur — mercifully, thought Poole.
Poole, Shira, and Berg gathered in a circle on cushions in the center of the teepee. The light globes, clearly semisentient, dipped closer to their heads, casting an incongruously cozy light over the meal. The globes didn’t seem to be aware of Harry, though, and drifted through his head and upper chest; Harry, stoical, ignored them. Poole wasn’t hungry but he used the plain metal cutlery Shira handed him to cut into the food curiously. The food was hot. There was something with the fiber of a white meat, and a thick green vegetable like cabbage, soft as if overboiled. Shira poured a clear, sparkling drink from a bottle into small blue beakers; sipping it, Poole found a sweet, mildly alcoholic tang, like a poor wine.
'It’s good,' he said, evoking a polite smile from Shira. 'What is it?'
'Sea food,' said Berg around a mouthful. 'The meat stuff is based on an edible fungus. And the green sludge is processed seaweed.'
Shira nodded slightly, in assent at this summation.
'Sounds efficient,' Poole said.
'It is,' said Berg sourly. 'Although that’s all it is. Mike, they’ve shown me some pictures of their Earth. Cities flattened. The continents bordered by thick chlorophyll green: offshore farms. The produce from what’s left of the planet’s arable dry land is exported off-planet. The complex molecules are highly prized, apparently, and raise a good price. For the Qax. Michael, they’ve turned the planet into a damn factory.'
Pieces of nightmare slid about Poole’s head. Shira’s poor physical state, the confiscation of AS technology, the occupation of Earth by an alien power… When he’d projected the future to which he had built a bridge he’d envisaged strangeness, yes, but
Dignity.
Instead, here was this shabby girl with her flavorless food…
He asked Berg, 'Who do the Qax get a good price from?'
She turned to him with a thin, strained smile. 'You’ve a lot to catch up on, Michael. It’s a big galaxy out there. A jungle. Dozens, hundreds of races competing for resources.'
Poole put his plate down beside him on the rug, and faced Shira calmly. 'I’m full of questions,' he said. 'And the fragments Miriam has learned have only added to my questions. I know you’re reluctant to share what you know, but—'
'I won’t deny that,' Shira said, graciously enough. Her eyes were warm. 'But you are a scientist, Michael Poole; and the skill of a scientist is in asking the right question.' She gestured, indicating the teepee, her fragment of world. 'From all you have seen today, what is the right question, do you think? Ask it and I shall try to answer you.'
Harry, a blur of pixels, murmured: 'The right question? But how—'
Poole shut out Harry’s voice and tried to focus, to find the key in all this teeming strangeness, a way into the girl’s bizarre world. 'All right,' he said. 'Shira — what are the walls of the teepee made of?'
Shira nodded, a faint smile on her thin lips. 'Xeelee construction material,' she said.
'And who,' asked Poole carefully, 'are the Xeelee?'
Shira sipped her wine and, thoughtfully, answered him.
The Xeelee owned the universe.
When humans emerged from the Solar System, limping along in the first sublight GUT-drive ships, they entered a complex universe peopled by many intelligent races. Each race followed its own imperatives, its own goals.
When humans dealt with humans, in the days before interstellar flight, there had always been a residual bond: humans all belonged to the same species, after all. There had always been a prospect one day of communicating, of sharing, of settling down to a mutually acceptable system of government.
Among the races men encountered, as they peered in awe about their suburb of the Galaxy, there was no bond; there was no law, save the savage laws of economics.
Not two centuries after Poole’s time, Earth had been captured and put to work by the group-mind aquatic creatures humans called the Squeem.
Harry whistled. 'It’s a tough place out there.'
'Yes,' Shira said seriously. 'But we must regard junior races like the Squeem — even the Qax — as our peers; The key advantage held over us by the Squeem, in those first years, was hyperdrive technology.' But the hyperdrive, like many other of the key technological components of the local multispecial civilization — if it could be called that — was essentially Xeelee in origin.
Wherever men, or any of the races men dealt with, had looked, the Xeelee were there, Shira said. Like gods, aloof from the rest: all-powerful, uncaring, intent on their own vast works, their own mysterious projects.
'What are those projects?' Poole asked.
Nobody knew, Shira said. It was hard to be sure, but it seemed that the other junior races were just as ignorant.
Berg leaned forward. 'Are we sure the Xeelee exist, then?'
'Oh, yes,' said Shira with certainty.
