Xeelee: Redemption

by Stephen Baxter

Genres: Science Fiction; Contemporary Fantasy

Synopsis

Michael Poole finds himself in a very strange landscape . . .

This is the centre of the Galaxy. And in a history without war with the humans, the Xeelee have had time to built an immense structure here. The Xeelee Belt has a radius ten thousand times Earth's orbital distance. It is a light-year in circumference. If it was set in the solar system, it would be out in the Oort Cloud, among the comets—but circling the sun. If it was at rest, it would have a surface area equivalent to about 30 billion Earths. But it is not at rest: it rotates at near light speed. And because of relativistic effects, distances are compressed for inhabitants of the Belt and time drastically slowed.

The purpose of the Belt is to preserve a community of Xeelee into the very far future, when they will be able to tap dark energy, a universe-spanning antigravity field, for their own purposes. But with time the Belt has attracted populations of lesser species, here for the immense surface area, the unending energy flows. Poole, Miriam and their party, having followed the Ghosts, must explore the artefact and survive encounters with its strange inhabitants—before Poole, at last, finds the Xeelee who led the destruction of Earth....

Release date: August 23, 2018

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 432

Sample

 

2

Ship elapsed time since launch: 6 years 219 days

Earth date: ad 4106

Jophiel Poole was born in a moment of doubt.

Although he wasn’t even called Jophiel at that point.

A second after his creation, Poole knew where he was. And he knew, to a reasonable degree of accuracy on a number of timescales, when he was. His problem was that, just for a heartbeat, he wasn’t sure who he was.

Real or otherwise.

At least he could determine that. Poole looked at his own right hand. Turned it over, flexed his fingers. And then waved it towards a chair, standing beside him. The hand passed through the substance of the chair, the fingers breaking up briefly into strings of blocky pixels, before congealing with a sharp ache. Consistency protocols, designed in part to protect the rights of artificial people themselves, demanded that Virtuals lived in the human world as far as possible. If you were in vacuum, you wore a pressure suit. Of course it was possible to cheat, such as by passing a hand through a solid object. But if you did so, it hurt.

‘Anyhow, I’m the Virtual,’ he said. A disposable copy of the template of Michael Poole, created for a one-off purpose, then to be synced back and disposed of. ‘Lucked out.’

Later he would wonder if he had had some premonition at this moment of his own complicated fate to come. Including meeting yet another copy of himself before the day was out.

For now, all he felt was a vague confusion.

He looked around.

He was standing in a small executive suite at the summit of a GUTship lifedome, a big hemisphere. He was a full radius, four hundred metres, above the floor deck. Looking down, he saw his – or rather Michael Poole’s – ship in complex cross section, the crew in their bright red or blue coveralls (blue for Virtuals, like himself), pursuing their work, their play, their lives. This was a starship, an integrated machine of technology and humanity. Above his head, outside the dome, was a tetrahedral skeleton, electric blue, glowing faintly in the vacuum of space. This was the entrance to a wormhole network that connected this craft, the Cauchy, to the other two ships of this small fleet.

The interface was pretty much all that was visible outside the dome. The sky was darkened, the stars obscured, by the GUTship’s sheer velocity, by a distortion of space and time that swept up the starlight: relativity in action.

The effects of long-duration spaceflight were not intuitive. Accelerating at a standard gravity, after about a year you approached lightspeed. If you kept thrusting after that, you just pushed ever harder against that unbreakable barrier, your energy pouring into increased mass-energy rather than extra velocity, the dilation effect making time and space bend like molten glass . . .

More than six years after leaving the Solar System, after six years of the mighty GUTdrive thrusting at a steady gravity, the Cauchy was moving so close to lightspeed that, as seen from Earth, the vessel’s spacetime frame was massively distorted. For every day that passed for Poole, more than a year passed on Cold Earth. To put it another way, the six years experienced by Poole so far was equivalent to four centuries back on Earth. With time, that disparity would get wider.

And, too, so hard was the Cauchy pushing against lightspeed that the star fields through which it fled could not be seen true. Poole was hurtling into the starlight – as if he was running into rain, the drops sweeping into his face. So now all Poole saw of the starlight was a misty grey patch directly ahead of the ship, beyond the wormhole interface. Otherwise, darkness. It was going to be this way for another twelve years or more of ship’s time, after which the ship would slow at last, and the sky of the Galaxy’s Core would unfold around them all.

But at least the Cauchy was not alone.

Poole saw two matchsticks in the dark, companion ships naked-eye visible, keeping pace: the Gea, the Island. Like the Cauchy, each was a glowing dome topping a gaunt spine some three kilometres long, leading to a block of Oort-cloud ice and the gleaming spark of a GUTdrive thruster, bright in the relativistic dark. And each was topped by its own neat electric-blue tetrahedron. Physically these triplets kept a safe distance from each other. Transfer of crew and supplies between the ships was by wormhole only.

Slim, shining with GUT energy, the craft looked like weapons, Poole thought: spears, tipped by blades of exotic matter. Well, they were weapons. Humans weren’t going to the centre of the Galaxy to explore.

Outside the lifedome, nothing but those other ships. Inside, people. Fifty of them in the Cauchy, plus more in her companions. A hive of people, all busily moving around according to their duties or their leisure schedule – two-thirds of the crew, presumably, while the other third, one off-duty watch, slept in darkened quarters. All of this was embraced in a barely visible tracery of the technology that kept them all alive in this void, embedded in the walls and floors – the brightly lit hydroponic banks, the ranks of sleeper pods, the massive systems that circulated and renewed their air and water.

Michael Poole – the original, this Virtual copy’s template – was more than fifty years old now, subjective; he had been forty-four when the flotilla had left Cold Earth. Though AS treatments had preserved him at a physical age of around twenty-five, there were times when he felt the weight of all those years, that half-century. And Poole, or his template, was an engineer, and a major part of him always longed to be far from all this people stuff. Ideally to be three kilometres away, at the other end of the ship’s spine, buried in the heart of an engine he had done so much to develop and refine: a tangle of pipes and ducts and cables and monitor screens all surrounding the glistening GUTdrive pod itself. Like working within the organs of some tremendous beast.

Still, as he gazed down from this Virtual Olympus, as he watched the crew who had joined him on his quest into the dark, he felt an unreasonable stab of affection. Not that he could ever voice such sentiments out loud.

And when he glanced across this apex suite he looked back at himself – no, he saw Michael Poole, the true Poole, sitting at a desk, evidently preparing for the upcoming special crew review. He was swiping through Virtual reports, pages of data, images of talking heads. Wearing a coverall of brilliant red. He had a tattoo on his forehead, a crude green tetrahedron. In another universe, another timeline, that had been known as the Sigil of Free Humanity.

Virtual Poole prepared to go over, to begin the work he had been created for.

Hey.

A voice that was familiar, and yet not. Poole hesitated, turned.

To find himself looking into a mirror.

 

It was, unmistakably, Michael Poole. Another copy? Himself, and yet not quite.

The new copy wore a faded grey coverall. Not standard issue aboard the Cauchy. Pockets big enough for tools. And he had a sense of age about him, too. Grey in the hair. A certain softness in the brown eyes that looked back. He looked more like sixty than fifty, Poole thought. And he seemed – fragile. As if he were recovering from some injury.

The other grinned. Take your time. Time’s the one thing I’m not short of.

Oddly, his lip movements did not quite sync with his speech. ‘Who are you? Another Virtual? I don’t remember spinning you off.’

Not that. Although maybe I have something of that – quality. More information than flesh.

‘Some kind of processing glitch, then? A ghost copy?’

The other grimaced. A ghost, maybe. I do seem to find it easier to reach you, than him. He gestured at Poole at his desk. I don’t know why. Glad you came along. But then there’s a lot I don’t understand. As ever. That smile again. Reality leaks, is all I know. As if the universe itself has doubts, sometimes. We’ll work it out together, I guess. Lethe, we’ve got to work together, to get through this. Remember that.

‘Get through what? . . .’

‘Who are you talking to?’

He turned. Nicola Emry was walking over to him. She was expected; he’d called her up here to discuss some points. Or rather Poole, his template, had called her, before he was spun off.

‘I . . .’ He turned back. The other Poole had gone.

 

Nicola was studying him, curious, amused. ‘“Get through what?”, you said.’

Poole didn’t know how to reply. Even to her. Even though there was nobody on board closer to Poole than Nicola, and that had been true long before the flotilla had left Cold Earth. She had been with Michael Poole when a Xeelee warship had burst out of a Poole Industries prototype fast-transit-system wormhole, intent, it soon emerged, on destroying mankind. And she had stuck by him through what followed, through the ravaging of the Solar System, all the way to the Scattering of mankind.

The crew called her ‘Keeper of the Amulet’. Even Max Ward, Poole’s senior military advisor, as manipulative and ambitious as he was competent, wasn’t going to prise apart that relationship any time soon.

Not that she wasn’t difficult. Nicola was in her mid-fifties now, and she wore the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, the greying of her short-cropped hair, like badges of honour. Famously, and very unusually, she had always refused any AS treatment. And although her own coverall, rather ostentatiously covered with training-mission patches and weapon loops, was bright red, she scarcely needed it; Nicola was also notorious for refusing to throw off Virtual projections of herself. If Nicola approached you, you could be sure it was the authentic article.

Now she looked at Poole with that amused concern. ‘Baby’s only a minute old and he doesn’t look happy.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Well, that sounds like a Poole. Pure denial. You know, I’ve seen you do this over and over. Throwing off Virtual copies like shedding skins. Such as when you, or a copy of you, rode with me and my Monopole Bandits against the Xeelee at the stop line before Earth . . . And then you soak it all back in again, with whatever memories the latest puppet gathered during its short, pathetic bit of independent life.’

‘Not sure if you’re helping here, Nicola.’

‘You never gave a thought to what you were doing to yourself. Creating a separate, sentient, short-lived copy that was you until the moment of projection, and then taking it back into your own head. I always wondered if that chain of mini-deaths was some kind of self-punishment for the calamity you brought down on the Solar System. The Xeelee came for you, in a sense, after all. You, though . . .’ She stared into his unreal eyes. ‘You’re different, somehow.’

‘Just differently irritated by you.’

‘Tell me how you feel.’

‘Like I have a job to do.’

‘What job?’

‘Well—’ His own hesitation surprised him.

‘Lethe! You don’t know, do you? Or aren’t sure, at least. That’s new.’

Again he looked at his own hands. ‘I do remember casting off all those previous copies. Of course I do; I did it. Every time before I found myself in a red uniform, looking out at a copy in blue.’

‘Ah. The problem is—’ She jabbed a finger at his chest, pulling back before ‘touching’ him and violating various consistency protocols. ‘This time, you woke up to find the copy is you.’ She grinned maliciously. ‘Lucked out, indeed. And you don’t like it, do you? Now you know why I never create these avatars myself. For fear of waking up like you, on the wrong side of the mirror.’

Now his original, evidently distracted by the conversation, walked over from his desk. ‘Why all the chatter?’ He looked at his copy. ‘Have you some problem? Look, if there’s been some defect in the copying, I can wipe you and—’

‘No.’ He found himself biting back the word ‘please’.

Nicola glowered at template Poole. ‘You’re all heart, aren’t you? You’ve got no idea what this creature is feeling, have you?’

The Virtual Poole winced. ‘“Creature”?’

Nicola grinned, not without malice. ‘I am on your side.’

‘Thanks.’

Template Poole looked uncertain. ‘I never had any trouble with Virtual copies before. You define the mission, you create the copy, off it goes.’

‘Well, something was different this time. What is he for?’

He, not it.

Template Poole frowned. Maybe he had noticed that too. ‘To fix the problems on Gea, of course.’

Now Virtual Poole remembered. One of the sister ships, Gea was a hull crammed with artificial-sentience hardware and software, and crewed solely by Virtuals, spun off from hibernating originals. Gea was intended to be the brain of the fleet, with the green-glowing Island as its heart, and the weapons-laden Cauchy as its fist.

‘You are to go over and sort out the power-drain problems. The fouled-up science reports. You know the protocol; only Virtual visits to the Gea for the sake of physical stability. All those delicate processing suites.’

‘That’s it,’ Poole said, remembering. ‘I wasn’t focusing. I mean, you weren’t focusing. You were thinking about the Second Generation issue. “This is a warship, not a crèche.” That was the line you had added to your notes for your speech, just when—’

Poole held up a hand. ‘OK, my fault. I threw off a flawed copy while distracted. But the process is usually more robust than that.’

Distracted. That was the problem, Virtual Poole saw.

This mission was Michael Poole’s: the goal was to pursue the Xeelee and, if possible, to destroy it, as vengeance for what it had wrought on the Solar System. It – it was assumed that the solitary ship had carried one individual. But nobody knew if the Xeelee could be distinguished from its technology, or if the ship had carried some kind of collective. In the thirty-seventh century, nothing had been known of the Xeelee save its, their, name.

From the beginning Poole’s crew had shared in that goal, the determination to pursue the Xeelee; that was why they had volunteered to follow him. But Poole was an engineer, not a military officer, not a captain. He could command, but it was always a cognitive strain. Even worse when Poole was called on to inspire.

He had been overloaded, distracted. And, as a result, this.

‘So what now?’ Nicola pressed. ‘Are you going to collapse this guy and throw off another copy?’

Virtual Poole held his breath. He had no power here, he realised; his existence was in the hands of this other, a copy of himself divergent by only a few minutes.

But template Poole, too, seemed pricked by doubt. ‘I guess not. You know the mission well enough. Come to the briefing to pick up anything new.’

Poole let out that breath cautiously, not wishing to give away his relief.

But his template noticed even so. ‘You aren’t supposed to feel like this, you know. Like I said, the other copies never gave any trouble.’

‘How do you know?’ Nicola snapped at him. ‘You weren’t inside their heads, looking out. Did you ever ask? Maybe they all felt like this copy.’

‘Don’t call me a copy.’

Template Poole stared at him. ‘So what do you want to be called?’

Poole hesitated.

Nicola grinned. ‘Jophiel. I hereby dub you Jophiel.’

The template frowned. ‘What in Lethe is that?’

‘An angel’s name. You know I like my mythology. And the Pooles have got a habit of naming their sons after angels – haven’t they, Michael? Such as Gabriel, who set up the Antarctic freeze-out in the twenty-seventh century . . . Consider it my gift to you, I, your Keeper of the Amulet.’ She looked at the two of them, as they faced each other uncertainly. ‘Well, this has been fun. Aren’t we late for the crew briefing?’

Poole – Jophiel – nodded. ‘I guess I can just fly down. Wings are optional for us Virtual angels.’

‘Don’t screw around,’ Michael Poole snarled. ‘Stick to the consistency protocols. And you keep the colour-code coveralls, whatever you call yourself.’

Nicola snapped off a mocking, elaborate Monopole-Bandit salute. ‘Yes, sir!’

Poole stormed off.

Jophiel followed, with Nicola. He felt . . . disoriented. Bewildered. He was, after all, only minutes old. And he thought back to his encounter with that other Poole, the mysterious older Poole in the worn coveralls . . . The nature of his own miraculous birth, his brush with imminent death, weren’t even the strangest things he had experienced in those minutes.

Reality leaks.

Nicola was watching him. ‘You look . . . odd. Are you still you? Do you remember it all?’

‘I think so . . . Remember what, exactly?’

‘Where it all began. The Poole compound in Antarctica. The family gathering. And the amulet . . . You went to the window. About as far as you could get from the family . . .’

 

Beyond the window he could see a handful of bright, drifting stars: the latest ships of the Scattering, still visible across distances comparable to the width of the inner Solar System.

He always carried the amulet, these days, the green tetrahedron delivered from another universe by a dead alien. He kept it in a fold of soft cloth, tucked into his belt. On impulse, he took it out now, and unfolded the cloth, and looked at the amulet sitting there, green on black.

He grasped the amulet in his bare fist. Its vertices were sharp, digging into his flesh. Drawing blood.

Nicola joined him. ‘Careful with that.’

‘Got it back from my mother. Taking it with me.’

‘She mentioned some kind of image, retrieved from the interior.’

‘We only just got it out. Very advanced data compression. Took years to extract it.’

‘You didn’t tell me.’

He shrugged. ‘I didn’t want to have to discuss it in front of them. The family. Let Muriel tell them.’

‘Show me.’

He glanced at her. Then waved a hand in the air.

A Virtual image coalesced. A jewel-like object, like a black ball, wrapped in an asymmetrical gold blanket, lay on a carpet of stars. And, some distance away, a fine blue band surrounded it.

Poole said, ‘Tell me what you see.’

‘That looks like gravitational lensing. The gold, the way it’s distorted. Light paths distorted by an extreme gravity field . . . A black hole. Like the one at the centre of the Galaxy?’

‘Tell me what you see.’

‘It looks like a black hole with a ring around it. What is it?’

‘A black hole with a ring around it.’

She stared, and grinned. ‘And that’s where we’re going?’

He glared out once more at Sagittarius. Overlaid on the constellation’s stars he saw a reflection of his own face, dimly outlined. The dark complexion, dark hair: the face of a Poole. And that tetrahedral scar on his forehead was livid.

He whispered, ‘Are you out there, somewhere? Can you hear me?

‘My name is Michael Poole.

‘Xeelee, I am coming to get you.’

 

Nicola grinned. ‘You do remember.’

‘Lethe, yes. A ring, a wheel around a supermassive black hole. And presumably the Xeelee is on its way to the Galaxy Core to build the thing.’ He eyed her. ‘That’s not all, by the way. We kept examining the amulet – Michael Poole did. And he found glimpses of other stuff.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as another structure, a monster even compared to the Galaxy-centre wheel, off in extragalactic space. We have no idea what that’s for, either.’

She looked at him carefully. ‘You never told me about that before.’

‘Michael didn’t.’

‘Yes.’

He grinned. ‘But, evidently, I’m not Michael, am I?’ He looked over; Michael had already left the suite. ‘Come on, we’re going to be late . . .’

 

3

‘You know why we’re here,’ Max Ward said.

He stalked the floor of the amphitheatre, walking a few paces to and fro, to and fro. Dominating. Ward was a squat, muscular man, head shaved, AS-preserved at about thirty; in reality he was around the same age as Poole.

Every eye was on him.

The amphitheatre, a small public space, was just a terraced pit in the middle of the floor of the lifedome, on the lowest habitable level, above hidden layers of life-support infrastructure. Most of the Cauchy’s fifty crew were here in person – even, presumably, some of the one-third theoretically on sleep rota – standing or sitting in an informal sprawl. Jophiel saw there were a few Virtual presences, like himself, decked out in electric blue amid the red uniforms. Some were even projected from the other ships of the flotilla.

For now, Jophiel observed, Michael stood back from the centre as Ward took the stage,

Ward grinned, wolfish. ‘Well, I’m guessing you know why you’re here, what with your being the crew of a starship and all.’

He started to get the answers he was looking for. ‘Better this than another of your drills, Max.’ ‘Don’t ask me, I’m still asleep . . .’

‘Lethe, you guys are hilarious. No more quizzes. I’ll show you where we are, and why we’re here.’

Ward waved his arm, and a Virtual image of the Galaxy sparkled into existence above his head, the dazzling Core wrapped around by spiralling lanes of stars and dust. Jophiel saw this from one side, and could see the startling fineness of that disc – hundreds of billions of stars gathered into a plane as thin as paper, relative to the scale of the Galaxy as a whole.

‘Asher Fennell kindly prepared this stuff for me. The latest imagery. Here’s where we started from.’ The location of Sol blinked, towards the periphery of the disc, an electric-blue firefly. ‘Here’s where we’re going.’ A spark at the very heart of the Galaxy, marking the position of the supermassive black hole there, lurking in its own deep gravitational pit. ‘Twenty-five thousand light years from the Sun. You want the good news? This is the two hundred and nineteenth day of the seventh year of our mission, and we’ll get to the Core before the twenty-year mark . . .’

By, Jophiel knew, steadily accelerating at one gravity to a halfway turnaround point, and then steadily decelerating, allowing the relativistic distortion to unwind. The outside universe would see the fleet, mostly cruising at near lightspeed, take twenty-five thousand years to cross the twenty-five thousand light years to the Core; as experienced by the crew less than twenty years would pass, as Ward had said. But –

‘Here’s the bad news,’ Ward said now. A bright red line inched out of the Sol marker, creeping towards the Core; it made it only a fiftieth or so of the way before limping to a stop. ‘This is how far we’ve got, physically, so far. Four hundred and forty light years. But even so, to come this far – anyone know the significance?’

Somebody shouted: ‘We already came further than anybody came before.’

Ward nodded grudgingly. ‘That’s about right. The furthest we know any ship from Earth ever got out to the stars, I mean still in one piece, was one of the Outriggers – uncrewed probes launched more than seventeen hundred years ago by Grey Poole, one of our leader’s ancestors,’ and he nodded at Poole. ‘As it happened several of the probes came this way, this being the direction of the centre of the Galaxy and all, and one reached a triple star system called π Sagittarii, and called back home. Four hundred and forty years to get there, four hundred and forty more years for its report to crawl back to Earth. Now, we don’t know how far out some of those other probes might have got without reporting back. But for sure we’ve gone beyond the known.’ He raised a fist. ‘Into the unknown!’

He got scattered responses. A tentative whoop.

Ward pumped that fist. ‘Come on! Here we are! That’s what we’re celebrating today. We Lethe-spawned rabble! Here we are! And we won’t turn back until the job is done! . . .’

Maxwell Ward had proved himself long before the launch of the Cauchy. He had been a dark hero of the weeks-long ‘Cold War’ that had raged over a freezing Earth, after the planet had been hurled far from its Sun. As the survivors fought over the last of the warmth, Ward had actually led an army of a coalition of European nations in an invasion of Iceland, rich in precious geothermal energy.

But Jophiel saw him differently now. In every previous crew review he, not yet separated from the template that was Michael Poole, had stood up there, quietly relieved to let Ward do all the work. But now, from the outside, he saw just how dominant Ward actually was, how passive, barely visible, was Poole.

This was Poole’s mission. His design. It was Poole who, in a different future, would have been remembered by the Exultants, a generation who would one day have driven the Xeelee out of the Galaxy altogether – and would have erected a statue to Poole himself, two kilometres high, standing proud in the Core. This strange destiny had been hinted at by scattered records in the millennia-old Poole family archive, as well as even more exotic sources. Reality leaks, Jophiel thought.

Well, that was all gone now. The Xeelee had come back through time, using the Poole family’s own trial wormholes, and had attacked the Solar System – evidently determined to cut off that future before it had begun. History had changed, humanity’s destiny stolen.

But humanity itself had survived.

And so had Michael Poole.

Now, statue or not, he was on his way to the heart of the Galaxy. His goal was vengeance. Yes, the mission was all about Poole.

Yet it was Ward who everybody was watching. Jophiel felt diminished. Embarrassed, even.

Ward kept it up until he had them all standing, whooping, punching the air as he did. ‘Here we are! Here we are!’

Nicola was beside Jophiel. ‘Quite a showman.’

‘Michael should watch his back,’ Jophiel murmured.

‘Make sure you remember that when you’re him again.’

‘Here we are! . . .’

 

Eventually Ward ceded the floor to Poole, who began to chair the briefing in a more formal style.

The first report up was by Bob Thomas. Thirty years old, Bob’s main function was interstellar navigation. As the Cauchy pushed against the light barrier, and as the ships probed regions of space never before explored by human craft, Bob was patiently developing flexible, innovative techniques and skills to enable the flotilla to find its way through the uncharted dark.

Such as using pulsars, spinning, flashing neutron stars, as navigation beacons. Some of these bitter little objects rotated hundreds of times every second. And these ‘millisecond pulsars’, scattered in three dimensions around the sky, could be used as remarkably precise natural lighthouses. The accuracy of the method had been brought down to mere kilometres in terms of the ship’s position, as it crossed a Galaxy a hundred thousand light years wide. The Doppler shift of their timings could even give information on the ship’s true velocity. All this was being developed in flight, by Bob and his team.

As Jophiel remembered well, Bob had been one of three children whom Michael Poole had rescued in person from a collapsed building during the Xeelee’s assault on Mars. Three siblings, who even then had called themselves the last Martians. All three had come with their saviour on his mission to the centre of the Galaxy.

Many of the crew had known Poole personally before the launch, one way or another. That was why they were here.

Now Bob Thomas reported, clearly and competently, on the ships’ position in space and time. And he spoke about a side project: the latest observations of the great fleet of which, in a sense, the Cauchy flotilla was an outlier.

A fleet they had called the Scattering.

To save the Earth from the Xeelee Michael Poole had nearly killed it. As the Xeelee had closed in, he had hurled the Earth through a wormhole to the Oort cloud, the chill outer depths of the Solar System. But even amid the calamity of the subsequent freezing – as Earth became Cold Earth – there was a keen awareness that this was only a stay of execution, for the Xeelee would surely follow, some day.

And so it was necessary to evacuate Earth, most of whose billion inhabitants had survived the Displacement, as the great shifting had become known.

It was Michael Poole’s father Harry who, as de facto governor of mankind, had set up the Scattering programme. Ten thousand GUTships were built, a hundred a year fired off. Scatterships, they were called, sent in every direction, out into the dark, either singly or in fleets. Poole and his flotilla had left long before the century-long programme of launches was finished.

The ships had adopted a variety of designs and survival strategies. Most bore hundreds of thousands of passengers – inert, in sleep pods, tended by rotating teams of awake medical specialists and technicians. ‘Greenships’, like the flotilla’s own Island, carried ecohabs, as they were called, samples of life on Earth, from the forests, the grasslands, the oceans – and even from off-Earth environments such as Mars. Others were ‘seedships’, carrying embryos or genetic libraries, with the capability of printing out human colonists at an eventual destination. Some ships were essentially Virtual environments, like the flotilla’s Gea, data-rich and crowded with unreal people.

And the ships had headed for a variety of targets: systems with Sunlike stars and Earthlike planets, yes, but also exotic targets like the worlds of long-lived red dwarf stars. Even stellar nurseries like the Pleiades cluster, with a thousand young stars: ten thousand you