The Eleven-Dimensional Cranium of God by Stephen Baxter

There's a bar at the Tau Ceti III spaceport where they keep a fifteen-year-old malt. I'd just raised my first glass of the day when Dutch's call came through.

The barman brought me the comms link; Dutch's porcine face peered out. "Paying customer, Gow," he said tersely. "Get over here." And he hung up.

The barman eyed me. "Wouldn't take that, myself."

"Yeah." The whisky was a puddle of warmth in my mouth. "I have two options," I said. "One is the rest of that bottle."

The barman raised his eyebrows. "And the second?"

"Taking more crap from Dutch. And the uncertain prospect of a few more bottles in the future." I sighed and stood up.

The barman sniffed a sale. "Take the bottle," he said. "Best of both worlds..."

I tucked the bottle into a pocket and stepped outside. In the rain, the spaceport landing apron glistened like the back of some huge animal. I'd left 'Linda' huddled between the mile-high flanks of two supertankers. As I approached I saw an insect-like spaceport vehicle working on her, spoiling her battered lines with what looked like a laser mount.

Dutch was overflowing out of the pilot's chair. The rest of the control cabin was taken up by his customer's null-gee tank: I recognised a Chaera, a translucent disc half the size of a man swimming slowly through oxygen-blue fluid. It greeted me through a translator box. "Captain Gow, I presume."

Dutch got up. His soft little hands smoothed down a lank of hair as he ushered me towards the Chaera. "Gow. I was just explaining how the 'Linda' will be just the ticket for this -ah - gentleman."

I opened my mouth.

His smile stretched threateningly.

I closed my mouth.

I turned to the Chaera. "How did you hear about Dutch General Services?"

Through a hairline crack in the null-gee tank's casing, fluid dripped fizzing to the floor. "Through a remarkable eleven-dimensional construct," the Chaera intoned, "a galaxy-wide catalogue of information which..."

I stared at it. "You mean the Net?" It sounded like a child.

Dutch said with a straight face, "The Chaera spend their days quietly in the service of God."

"Mr Dutch has been highly helpful," the Chaera said. "Even in providing me with this height-of-fashion null-gee tank, at only a nominal charge."

"Yes, he's all heart."

The Chaera did a sort of somersault. "Our requirement is simple," it said to me. "You will help us talk to God."

I nodded gravely - and hid my mouth. "Dutch, you bastard. How can you take money off innocents like this?"

"Listen, Gow, times are hard; I'm one mistake away from debtors' slavery. That's enough incentive for a lot worse than this little deal. And anyway - what's it to you?" His eyes were like stones above his puffy cheeks.

The Chaera swam like melting glass.

I sighed. "So tell me. How exactly do we talk to God?"

"With an X-ray laser, of course," said Dutch.

"Of course! Which you just happen to have lying around..."

"As it happens, yes," he said defensively. "A superannuated anti-sat job - maybe you saw it being fitted just now...

"Now then, here's your take-off clearance -"

We let Dutch off and 'Linda' lurched groggily into the air. Rain rattled off the hull plates.

We swam around the haunch of a supertanker. "Remarkable vessels," the Chaera enthused, its tank strapped incongruously to the co-pilot's chair.

"Yeah," I said sourly. "Hold big enough to take a whole planet's annual export produce in one load...with just one crewman aboard. Yeah, remarkable."

We shot out of the bowl of atmosphere.

"You pilot well. Even though you are not a Captain. Are you, 'Captain' Gow?"

I looked at it sharply. And shrugged. "Never made it. Not even in the boom days, before the supertankers."

"I have every confidence in you," it said.

Depressingly, it thought 'Linda' was wonderful; it even enjoyed the mandatory emergency drills. Wearing a plastic bag that served as an environment suit it spent most of the trip's two days swooping happily in and out of the escape pod. As we neared our destination it came whirling over my head. "How marvellous to think that all of this is hurtling between the stars, even as we speak!"

I looked up gloomily from the maintenance manuals spread over my console. "Not really. In a way we're hardly moving at all -"

It rolled in the air like a bag of water, listening patiently.

"You may know that we're all eleven-dimensional objects. No? All but four of the dimensions are collapsed down, invisibly small. The others turn up in properties of the universe - the charge on the electron, the gravitational constant -"

"Why should this be so?"

"Who cares? Anyway, what 'Linda' does is push the tiniest bit into one of the extra dimensions - and then pop back again into our normal four-space - but light years from where we started."

"How wonderful are the works of God."

I sighed. "There's nothing wonderful about eleven- space. It's old news. With respect, you're a bit out of touch. Even the Net is based on eleven-space."

The Chaera cartwheeled slowly, inspecting the coffee spigot. "You have no sense of the numinous, my friend. I know you regard me and my race as foolish dreamers. But our God is no dream. She speaks to us." It spread its nebulous structure wide. "When we arrive you will look upon Her face, and your cynicism will vanish."

With an audible plop we dropped back into four-space.

"Home!" the Chaera cried joyfully.

"Jesus!" I whispered.

'Home' was the accretion disc of a black hole.

We'd come out hurtling towards the black hole itself. The disc swirled below us like scum on the surface of a huge milk churn.

We were too close for comfort. I touched the controls, pulling the ship's nose up and away from the hole.

Looking at a hole is like having part of your optic nerve burnt out. This one was massive - inches across. Matter from the accretion disc tumbled into the hole continually; X-rays sizzled into space.

"God," said the Chaera confidently.

I looked away from the blind spot. 'God' was set into a rough sphere, a net-like structure starting just outside the Schwarzschild radius and extending miles. We soared over a tangle of fibres depthless in its complexity; it drew my eye in impossible directions... It was like flying over a brain.

"That must be bloody strong to maintain its structure against the hole's gravity," I said. "And it looks artificial..."

The Chaera thrashed. "Are we ready to speak to God?"

"Why not?" I unshipped the old X-ray laser; the monitors showed it unfolding from its mount like a shabby flower. I tuned it to the peak frequency of the hole's emission.

"What shall we say?"

I shrugged - and, on impulse, hooked the laser to an eleven-space comms link and dialled up the Net. "How about Dutch's Net code? May as well spend a few of Dutch's ill- gotten pennies while we're at it..."

The beam washed over the surface of 'God', chattering out a high-speed code. The net structure stirred like a sleeping animal. Then the moment of closest approach was over; we slid away from 'God'.

I packed up the laser. "Well, that's that. I hope you got your money's worth -"

The Chaera quivered. "Gow. Look."

The surface of 'God' was alive with motion; the netting bunched itself around a single, brooding point, like skin crinkling round an eye.

"She heard us!"

"Yeah..." Quietly I started up the drive and put a little distance between us and 'God'.

"If I have succeeded..." murmured the Chaera. "Then I will be the most honoured of my race. Fame - wealth - my choice of mates -"

"And, of course, religious fulfilment."

"Of course -"

- and the eye exploded. A pillar of radiation punched through the accretion disc like a fist.

"God is shouting! It worked!" The Chaera wobbled around the cabin.

The beam blinked out, leaving a trail of churning junk. I studied my sensors. "That was all-frequency," I mused. "Bright enough to be seen for light years around. And it was in code."

"What did She say?"

I eyed the trembling Chaera. "It was Dutch's Net code," I said. "An echo, coming back at a billion times the volume..."

We continued to descend. The accretion disc collapsed to a grainy streak across the stars; pea-sized pellets spanged off the hull plates. Then we soared below the plane of the disc.

The Chaera solemnly watched the disc unfold. "What a spectacle. I am the envy of generations." Further out there were larger fragments. "The worlds of the Chaera," said my native guide. I pointed the sensors at the largest of them. Chaera were everywhere, spinning like frisbees over the surface of the worldlet - or whipping through the accretion mush to a neighbouring fragment - or basking like lizards, their undersides turned up to the black hole. They infested the accretion disc, a horde of ghostly platelets living, loving and dying.

"Let me get this straight," I said. "Your people have evolved to feed off the X-radiation from the black hole...from 'God'. Is that right?"

"God provides us in all things."

There wasn't much sign of technology...I wondered absently how the Chaera were going to pay Dutch's excessive fee. Something twinkled. On top of a stubby mountain the Chaera were constructing a huge, crude mirror facing 'God'.

"We strive to shout to God," explained the Chaera. "Some of us pray. Some of us build great artifacts to sparkle at Her."

I swept the sensor's focus further out. The beam from 'God' had left a track of glowing debris through the accretion disc, like flesh scorched by hot iron. The track ended in a knot of larger fragments. One of the worldlets had got it in the face. Jellyfish bodies drifted like soot flakes.

Saliva gathered in my mouth.

"God's holy shout shatters worlds," said the Chaera piously.

"Yeah...Listen, excuse me for a while. I've my own God to speak to."

"Dutch, you're a bastard."

"And you've got a limited vocabulary." His pig-like features smiled out of the comms link. "Listen - they know the score. They've disturbed the artifact a few times in the past, with their mirrors and smoke signals. Every time it's killed some of them."

"Dutch..." What could I say that could penetrate his thick old hide?

"This is business, Gow," he reminded me. "Did you use your sensors on that artifact?"

"Yeah," I said. "The netting structure is highly complex - even on the four-space level. And the hole seems to be powering crude eleven-space extensors..."

"Just think what that means, Gow! What if that artifact's some kind of database with interconnections in eleven-space...do you have any idea what kind of complexity we're talking about?

"Listen. Suppose you have a stack of oranges, in three dimensions. How many oranges would each orange touch?"

I thought about it. "Five or six?"

"Twelve. But suppose the stack was in four-space. How many oranges then?"

"Amaze me."

"Twenty-four! Double the complexity! And in eleven- space -"

"Dutch, will you shut up about oranges? What have oranges got to do with it?" Then a nasty grain of suspicion lodged in my mind. "The data in that artifact is what you're really hoping to get your hands on, isn't it? That's how the Chaera are going to pay your fees...

"But suppose all we get out of 'God' is a billion- decibel echo?"

He shrugged. "The Chaera know the laws..." His skin glistened. Of course he was right. The rules of interstellar commerce are based on the lowest common denominators of a hundred races, and so they are kind of coarse. Dutch couldn't lose.

The Chaera drifted like a Dali watch. "You must not be concerned, my friend," it said gently. "I understand what kind of man your Dutch is. As he says, I know the rules. And I know the dangers. 'Where there are prophecies, they will cease. Where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.' We're prepared to die to attain what we believe is perfection."

"Who's the philosopher?" I asked sourly. "Some great Chaera mind of the past?"

It rippled in amusement. "Actually, the human called Saint Paul. Come. Soon it will be time to talk to God again."

We returned to the accretion disc. Again 'Linda' lumbered over the eleven-dimensional cranium of the Chaera 'God', bathing it with selected readings from the Net.

We pulled away. "God is aware of us," the Chaera enthused. "See how She's responding!"

I watched the eye squint into focus. With dread I studied my sensors; the killer beam would again lance through the accretion disc -

- and, this time, right into the largest of the Chaera worldlets.

"I have two options," I said. "The first is the bottle of malt in my cabin."

The Chaera listened patiently. "And the second?"

I hesitated.

The eye trembled.

"Oh, damn it -"

I punched at the controls. 'Linda' ground through a tight turn, rivets bursting like popcorn. Then we hurtled back towards 'God'.

"What are you doing?" The Chaera thrashed in the air.

"Get into the escape pod," I snapped. "Remember the drill?"

"But -"

"Do it!"

The Chaera squeezed clumsily into the pod.

We skimmed past the flank of 'God'. The netting structure swarmed around the pulsing eye. I yanked 'Linda' into one last, hard turn, drive pushed up to the maximum.

It was enough. We creaked to a standstill right over the eye. Bits of radiation spat out like javelins as the eye began to open.

"Made it!" I dove into the escape pod after the Chaera. It was like sharing a phone box with an angry pillow.

We squirted into space. I saw 'Linda' for one last instant, her patched-up form silhouetted against the gigantic cheek of 'God' - - and then the eye opened.

Poor old 'Linda' got it right in the rear section. Droplets of metal splashed across space... But she lasted long enough.

The eye closed; the surface of the net smoothed over. The slowly-cooling stump of 'Linda' drifted around the curve of the hole. I saluted her silently.

The Chaera shouted into my face. "Why did you hide God from us?"

"Look," I said, "don't get on my back." I started up the pod's distress beacon.

The pod's small comms screen filled up with Dutch's sweating face. "Gow! What have you done to 'Linda'?"

"Thanks for your concern. Yes, we're both fine, thanks. I expect it'll take a couple of days for the rescue services to respond to the pod beacon and get out here."

Pale fingers scraped moisture from his cheek. "You got any idea how much that'll cost me?"

"It's the law, Dutch. And look on the bright side," I said. "At least it'll keep 'God' quiet for a few years, until these Chaera decide what they really want to do..."

"I'll see you enslaved for this," Dutch spat. The screen went dead.

"He won't be enslaving anyone for a while," I murmured. "I suppose I've saved you, Chaera."

The Chaera wrinkled up sulkily.

"Oh, well," I said. "I guess I'm unemployed. Back to the spaceport bars, and the rain..."

But the Chaera still wasn't speaking to me.

I stared out at the cranium of 'God' and waited for the rescue team to arrive.