Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  Nilis seemed to have anticipated their difficulty. Rather than explain, he encouraged them to use the corvette wall’s magnification facility, to explore the view and figure it out for themselves. Slowly the strange truth of what they were seeing opened up in Pirius’s mind.

  He was looking down at a planet, a hemisphere dominated by a single great ocean—an ocean of water, open to the sky. It was kept liquid not by technology, but by thermodynamic equilibrium; its curved surface not shaped by human design, but following a simple gravitational equipotential. Even the wispy clouds he saw were water vapor. Although humanity had by now mapped the Galaxy, this was still, remarkably enough, the largest open-water ocean encountered anywhere.

  This was Earth.

  Those crawling forms were ships, scudding like insects over the ocean’s surface. But some of the larger forms looked oddly familiar. They turned out to be Spline, which had themselves evolved on a watery world, and now gamboled ponderously in the deep-ocean waves of the Pacific. After millennia of war, the seas of Earth had become a nursery for living starships. But the Spline schools weren’t the strangest thing Pirius saw.

  He focused on an island, one of the irregular masses of rock that protruded into the air from the ocean’s patient hide. He peered down at buildings, docks, landing strips. He could even see people moving between the buildings. One little girl, skipping down a path to a beach, glanced up at the sky, as if she could see him staring down at her. Her face was a tiny button. And she was quite naked; the child wore no mask, no skinsuit, no protection of any kind—naked and in the open.

  It was too much. Pirius and Torec fled to the enclosed security of their cabin, where they clung to each other, trembling. But they could feel the corvette shudder subtly as it dipped into the air of Earth.

  After their landing at a spaceport, a small bubbletop flitter took them in a short suborbital hop to their final destination, Nilis’s home.

  As the flitter shot briefly back out of the atmosphere Pirius saw that the primary spaceport had been at the heart of one of the larger landmasses. Now the flitter took them over a strip of ocean to a large offshore island. On this island Pirius spotted crumpled hills and rocky outcrops, obviously natural formations, no use to anybody. In the lowlands, though, and near the coasts and along the river valleys, the land was covered by wide green rectangles and cut through by arrow-straight canals.

  But this cultivated land was marred by clusters of silver-gray, irregular, bubbling masses, like blisters. You could see these were not the work of humans, for they lacked both the symmetry of deliberate human design and the more organic patterns of unplanned settlements. But these alien scars were the cities of mankind, Pirius learned; they were called Conurbations.

  Conurbations were officially referred to only by numbers. Thus the corvette had landed at the fringe of Conurbation 2807, while the flitter would bring them to Conurbation 3474, a sprawling city surrounding a broad, languid river. These numbers had been assigned by the long-vanquished Qax—pronounced Kh-axe, the alien occupiers of Earth in the years before Hama Druz. The huddling domes of the Conurbations, bubbles of blown rock, were essentially Qax designs; they had been preserved as a kind of permanent memorial of that dreadful time. But Nilis, with a wink, told them that the locals referred to their cities by much older, preOccupation names, though not a trace of those older settlements had survived the time of the Qax. Thus they had first landed at Berr-linn, and Nilis’s base was in a city called Lunn-dinn.

  They landed by the bank of the river, close to one of the great domes of Lunn-dinn. As they prepared to leave the flitter, Pirius glimpsed the river itself, sparkling in the low sun. Even that was a stunning sight: open water, billions of tonnes of it just sliding by, in miraculous equilibrium with an atmosphere that was itself open to space.

  It was a short walk through a covered passage from the pad to Nilis’s apartment, which was just inside the skin of the dome. Nilis briskly walked through dusty rooms. Maintenance bots clustered in Nilis’s wake demanding instructions, and self-proclaiming “urgent” Virtuals fluttered around him, evanescent and noisy. There was a musty smell, a faint staleness. It had evidently been some time since he had been home.

  Nilis showed the ensigns to the room he had assigned them. Thankfully, it was without windows to the outside. Torec simply pulled off her uniform, threw it to the floor and climbed into the single wide bed.

  Pirius followed her, a little more slowly. In this strange new place fear and curiosity warred in him, making him restless. But he held Torec until her trembling had stopped and she slept.

  He woke after two hours. Torec was sleeping soundly; for now she had escaped from the strangeness.

  Pirius watched her for a while. The curving skin of her shoulder was smooth, flawless, and her small face, turned away from him, was blank, as if she were a child, unformed. He felt a surging warmth toward her, an urge to hold her, so they could protect each other in this bewilderingly strange place.

  If you’d asked him before they left Arches, he thought, he’d surely have said Torec was no more than a squeeze to him, and vice versa. Now she seemed a lot more. Was his feeling for her because they were alone here, the only bit of familiarity for each other so far from home? Had he felt this way about her, underneath, even before they had left Arches? Or maybe the crisis they had been through on the ship had drawn them together, as if they’d been through combat.

  It was complicated. He wasn’t used to digging into his own emotions so deeply; in a Barracks Ball you didn’t get a lot of quiet time to think.

  There was plenty to distract him here, of course. He slid carefully out of bed.

  He explored the room. He found doors to a lavatory, and a shower room—not a clean-cloth store, but a place where running water came pouring out of a slot in the roof at his commands. Pirius tried it. Though it was hot and clear, the water left him feeling vaguely unclean; perhaps it came from the safety of a recycling tank, but it could have come from the river, or the ocean. He didn’t imagine he would ever enjoy this strange experience.

  He dried off and dressed in a fresh uniform.

  He stepped to the door and hesitated. He hadn’t come all the way to Earth itself to hide. He tapped the door; it slid open silently, and he left the room.

  The apartment was astoundingly big, and astoundingly empty; Pirius thought you could have lodged five hundred ensigns in a space this size, but it was all devoted to one fat Commissary. As he wandered, small maintenance bots scuttled silently after him, scuffing at the carpet, removing all traces of his presence as he passed. The apartment was just under the outer skin of the dome, and large picture windows had been cut into the outer wall. The rooms were flooded with light that poured unfiltered from the parent star. Pirius, trying to acclimatize, shied away from the light.

  Some of the rooms had functions that seemed obvious. One contained a long conference table, for instance, flanked by rows of chairs. Pirius touched the surface of the table. It was pale brown and textured with a kind of grain, a material he had never seen before. Other rooms seemed designed for leisure; typically, they had chairs and low tables set up before the windows.

  Every room was cluttered, full of artifacts, memorabilia perhaps, or the objects of Nilis’s study. Some of this stuff was Virtual, complex three-dimensional sketches left half-finished, hovering in the air. But there were much older technologies, too. In one room Pirius even found a row of books—though he would learn that word only later—blocks of paper you held in your hand.

  One room held a kind of display: certificates and plaques covered the walls, and in open cases medals and little statues shone. There was even a Virtual display, a double-helix representation that whirled and sparkled. Many of these items bore small plates marked with lettering. Pirius’s reading was poor—in his line of work, reading was just a backup data-access system—but he recognized Nilis’s name repeated over and over. It wasn’t hard to see that these artifacts were prizes, awards, certificates: toke
ns of achievement, of congratulation. Once again, this was horribly un-Doctrinal. You were supposed to do your duty for its own sake, not for recognition, not for pride. But the little tokens did not shout for attention; they were gathered here with a quiet, untidy pride, the marks of a life of achievement.

  Indeed, the whole place was like a projection of Nilis’s personality: rich, cluttered, fusty, baffling.

  At last Pirius came to a room where, between two vast windows, the wall was broken by an open door.

  Pirius stood on the thick carpet, frozen, ingrained panic rising. But this was Earth, the only world in the Galaxy where you could walk out of a dome without so much as a skinsuit and expect to live. He remembered the little girl on the island, who had shown no fear.

  In the open space beyond the door, Pirius glimpsed Nilis. Barefoot, his Commissary’s robe hitched up around his knees, he walked cheerfully through the bright light. He was carrying something green and complex, cradling it in his hands. Whistling, he passed on out of sight.

  Pirius took a deep breath. After all, he must already be breathing the unprocessed air of Earth. It seemed fresh, a little cool, and there were strange scents: a sharp tang, like nothing he had smelled before, yet somehow familiar even so. A green scent: the thought came to him unbidden. He didn’t allow himself to hesitate further. He walked across the room, to the door, out onto the platform beyond.

  The light blasted his face, hot, intense, coming from a sun so brilliant he couldn’t even bear to look toward it. But he made out something of the sky. It was blue, he saw, stunned. There were objects floating in that blue sky, fat, fluffy, irregular, shaded gray beneath. Surely the size of starships, they must be clouds, masses of water vapor.

  Nilis was standing beside him. His hands, empty now, were grimy, black dirt trapped under his fingernails. He smiled. “You’re doing well, Ensign,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.” Pirius glanced about. He was on a terrace, a broad rectangle of concrete. Much of the terrace was given over to a series of troughs, each of which contained heavy black earth. Things were growing in there: plants, Pirius supposed, with leaves of green, blood red, black. Small hand tools were scattered about. Though maintenance bots hovered hopefully, Nilis, barefoot, sweating, black-nailed, had evidently been tending this little garden himself.

  Beyond the lip of the terrace the land fell away to the river, which swept by, its surface glistening like the hide of some immense animal. Pirius felt dwarfed, naked.

  “So,” Nilis said. “What do you think?”

  “The sky,” Pirius said.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s blue. I wasn’t expecting that.”

  Nilis pondered that. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t.” He wiped his brow and lifted his face; the light of the sun seemed to smooth out the wrinkles etched in his brow. “You could know everything about the physics of light, Pirius, but you would never guess a sky might be blue. Earth, drained as she is, continues to remind us of our limits, our humility.”

  “Drained?”

  “Look again, Ensign. What else can you see, beyond the lid of sky?”

  Pirius shielded his eyes from the sun. Everywhere he looked, sparks slid by. “Ships,” he said.

  Nilis pointed to a drifting tetrahedral form, faintly visible, white against blue. “See that? It’s a Snowflake. Its builders, whom the Assimilators called ‘Snowmen,’ lived far out in the halo of the Galaxy. A billion years ago they built their giant artifacts to record the slow cooling of the universe. We destroyed the Snowmen and confiscated their technology. Now Snowflakes orbit Earth in a great shell as deep as the Moon’s orbit: they are watch stations, I suppose, waiting for any threatening move from the Xeelee—and those huge eyes are turned on Earth, too, seeking out signs of insurgence from dissident human factions. Oh, don’t look so surprised, Ensign; in any age there are always plenty of rebels.

  “Now—see those streams of ships? At night it’s easier to see their formations as they enter and leave orbit. You know, a surprising amount of the matériel for this war comes from Earth itself. At the equator there are mines that tap the liquid iron of the planet’s core, for mass and energy. The home planet’s very lifeblood is poured into the throat of the war! Already, so it is said, the structure of the core has been so distorted by such mining that the planet’s natural magnetic field has been affected. But don’t worry. The Coalition lifts great stations into low orbit to protect us from any magnetic collapse… .”

  Pirius had learned that Nilis wanted him to speak openly. So he said boldly, “Commissary, I’m still not sure what you do all day.”

  Nilis laughed. “Nor are my superiors.”

  “But your achievements must be significant.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because they earned you trophies. And this.”

  “The apartment? Well, perhaps, though those jealous idiots on the Conurbation council always keep the best views for themselves!” He tapped his teeth. “You don’t know much about me, do you, Pirius? No reason you should. I suppose my enduring claim to fame is that I am the man who doubled the output of Earth’s farmland—and, of course, of every food production facility in the Galaxy.” He patted his generous belly. “It was long before you were born, of course. But every time you enjoy a hearty meal you should think of me, and offer up thanks.”

  “How? …”

  Ecology had long been deleted from the Earth. Outside of a few domed parks, the land was given over to nanotechnological machines, which, powered by sunlight, toiled to turn the raw materials of the air and the soil into the bland paste, nano-food, that was the staple diet of the whole of mankind.

  “All I did was double the efficiency of those laboring little critters.” Nilis sighed. “The technology was simple enough. But still, it was a marvelous day for me when the speaker of the Coalition’s Grand Conclave herself brought a handful of nano-dust to a scraped-clean bit of ground—not far north of here, in fact—and released my food bots into the wild.”

  Pirius didn’t know how to phrase his questions; he had never met a scientist before. “How did you figure out what to do?”

  “By reading history, my boy. Who invented the nanobots that feed us, do you suppose?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come, come. What race?”

  “I—human, of course.”

  “Not so.” Nilis shook his head. “The Commission doesn’t lie—that would be very anti-Doctrinal. But it is happy to allow certain inconvenient truths to fade into forgetfulness. Pirius, it was the Qax, our occupiers, who first seeded Earth with nanobots. They did it to make us reliant on them, and later as a deliberate act of the Extirpation: by destroying our ecology they sought to cut our links to our past. And then, when the Qax fell and the Coalition took over, there were simply too many mouths to feed, too much ancient knowledge lost, to resist using the bots to feed the liberated swarms.

  “Nobody knows that Qax machines are feeding them! But I knew, because I was curious, and I dug into various old libraries and found out. Then I checked to see if the Expansion had yet reached the Qax home world. Of course it had, long ago. So I applied for a study grant from my Office. I learned that the Assimilation officers had gathered a great deal of data on Qax nanomachinery, though their studies had been allowed to gather dust for centuries. With that, it was straightforward for me to revisit the basis of the food nanobots, and find ways to improve their operation. Straightforward—the work of ten years, but that is a mere detail.”

  Pirius was impressed. “It was a great contribution to the war effort.”

  Nilis looked at him quizzically. “Well, I suppose it was, though I didn’t intend it that way. My nano-food got me this apartment, and a source of funding—and, more importantly, a power base, of a sort; at least, a position of independence. Yes, I’m proud of my work, and I’m certainly not shy of shouting about it when it’s useful. But I certainly didn’t achieve it by thinking in the way we’re all supposed to, with that peculiar
mixture of arrogance and narrowness that characterizes the Druz Doctrines. I was prepared to look into the murky corners of the past—I was prepared to accept the uncomfortable, paradoxical truth that though we have conquered a Galaxy we are utterly dependent on an alien technology!

  “And, of course, the latitude I won as the Man Who Fed The Galaxy has allowed me to cultivate my garden. Come see. Don’t worry; I won’t ask you to get your hands dirty… .”

  Nilis’s “garden,” confined to the concrete troughs, was unprepossessing, just tangles and clumps and spindles of green, crimson, and black, some curled together. Everything was small, compact, tough-looking.

  Nilis watched Pirius’s reaction. “So what do you think?”

  Pirius shrugged. “All I’ve seen of nature is rats, and the algae you have to scrape out of air ducts, and nobody makes a pet of that.”

  Nilis laughed. “Well, my little gatherings here are nobody’s pets either. I suppose you’d say they are weeds.” He picked up one scrawny growth, a green stem topped by a gaudy yellow flower. “This is a native plant, obviously. Its chlorophyll green has become mankind’s symbol, hasn’t it? Even though we try to stamp it out wherever we find it. Ironic! We understand its biochemistry, of course, but we’ve long forgotten the name our forefathers gave it. I found it growing in the heart of the city—of Lunn-dinn, right here. Our Earth is supposed to be managed, Ensign: paved over, milked as efficiently as possible by the nanobots. But even in the cities, where the concrete cracks, a little earth gathers. And where there is earth, plants grow, welcome or not. But look here.”

  From a tangle of vegetation, Nilis pulled out leaves: one a neat oval shape but jet black, the other almost square, and brick red. Nilis said, “I found this black leaf on Earth—but it’s not a native! It’s actually from a planet of Tau Ceti. And this red leaf isn’t a native either; it comes from a system a thousand light-years away. I doubt if these little creatures were brought here on purpose; they traveled as spores in the recycling systems of starships, perhaps, or lodged in the sinuses of unwary travelers. Both come from worlds basically like Earth, though, worlds of Main Sequence suns and carbon-water chemistry, or else they couldn’t survive here.