Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  “But even on worlds so similar to Earth, life can develop in radically different ways. All these leaves are photosynthetic; they all gather energy from sunlight. But only Earth life uses chlorophyll; the others use different combinations of chemicals—and so they aren’t green. Interesting; you would think that this black shade is actually the most efficient color for a gatherer of sunlight… . On each world life is born, like and yet unlike any other life in the universe. Once it’s born it complexifies away, endlessly elaborating, until it has filled a world. And then we come along, with our starships and Expansions, and mix it up, complexifying it further.”

  Pirius frowned. “If their biochemical basis is so different, they can’t eat each other.”

  “Well, that’s true. But these plants coexist anyhow. At the very least, they compete for the same physical resources—the sunlight, say, or room in the soil; whoever grows fastest wins. There may be reasons to eat something even if not for the biochemistry; a concentration of some essential mineral fixed by your prey, perhaps. And look at this.”

  He moved to another trough and showed Pirius a kind of trellis, no more than ten centimeters high, covered in tiny black leaves, with a green plant draped over it. “The miniature trellis is a tree-analogue from the Deneb system,” Nilis said, “and the green plant is a pea, from Earth. The pea has learned to use the frame as a support. And probably the trellis is using the pea for its own purposes, perhaps to attract other Denebian life-forms; I haven’t figured it out yet.” He smiled. “You see? Cooperation. The first step to an interstellar ecology, and all happening by accident. It wouldn’t surprise me to come back here in, oh, ten or fifty million years, and find composite life-forms with components from biochemical lineages once separated by light-years. After all, our own cells are the results of ancient mergers between beings almost as divergent, between oxygen-haters and oxygen-lovers.”

  As he pottered around the little plants, cupping each gently with his dirt-stained fingers, Pirius suddenly saw how lonely this man was.

  “I’m not sure why you’re showing me this, sir.”

  Nilis straightened up, massaging his back. “I wish I’d had these troughs built a little higher! Just this, Ensign. We live in a universe of endless, apparently inexhaustible, richness. Everywhere life complexifies, finding new ways to combine, to compete, to live; endlessly exploring the richness of the possible—indeed, as in this example, actually expanding that richness. Once, human society itself showed the same tendency to complexify: no surprise, as we are children of this rich universe. But the Druz Doctrines deny that tendency. The Doctrines try to hold us static, in form, thought, intention—for all time, if necessary.”

  Pirius said, “The Doctrines have kept mankind united for twenty thousand years, and have taken us to the center of the Galaxy.”

  “There is truth in that. But it can’t last, Ensign. The Doctrines are based on a falsehood—a denial of what we are. And, in the weeds that grow through the tarmac of our spaceports, we see clear evidence of our lack of ability to control. In the social realm it’s just the same—remember those Virtual fan messages you had! The world is much more messy than Commission propaganda allows us to believe.

  “And that is my philosophical objection to the Doctrines, Pirius. That is why I have strained every sinew for years to find a way to win this war—before we lose it, as otherwise we inevitably must. You wouldn’t think we are in peril, looking around. We have covered the Earth, enslaved nature, spread across a Galaxy. We are strong, we are united—but it is all based on a lie, it is all terribly fragile, and it could all fall apart, terribly easily.”

  Pirius heard a soft tapping sound. He looked down, puzzled. The concrete platform was becoming speckled with dark little discs: water splashes. Then he felt a pattering of droplets on his bare skin—his hands, his brow, even his hair. Perhaps some climate-control system had broken down.

  Nilis sighed and pulled the hood of his robe over his head. “Oh, my eyes. Not another shower! I will never finish.”

  Pirius looked up. One of those clouds hovered right over his head, its underside dark and threatening. And water was falling toward him, fat drops of it. By tracking back along their paths, Pirius could see the drops were falling out of the sky itself.

  It was too much; the last of his courage failed him. He turned and ran for the controled environment of the apartment.

  Later that night Pirius was restless again.

  The apartment was dark. But as he walked through the rooms, a soft light gathered at his feet and washed into the corners of the room. It didn’t dazzle his night-adapted eyes, but was bright enough for him to see where he was going.

  A colder light came pouring in from outside, through the window: a silver light tinged with green.

  He walked forward, not allowing himself to think about what he was doing. Maintenance bots followed him with silent, discreet efficiency.

  The terrace door was closed. He pressed his hand to its surface, and it dilated.

  There was no rain. It looked safe.

  Pirius stepped forward. That cool light picked out the lines of the terrace, washed over Nilis’s tiny garden, and sparkled from the broad back of the river beyond. It was an eerie glow that seemed to transform an already strange world.

  Deliberately, he looked up.

  The source of the light was the Moon, of course, the famous Moon of Earth. It was a disc small enough to cover with his thumb. But it was a transformed Moon—and one of Earth’s legendary sights, whispered of even in the Barracks Ball of Arches Base.

  The face of this patient companion had gazed down through all of man’s turbulent history. But the face was unchanged no more. Patches of gray-green were spreading across the pale highlands and the dusty maria, the green of Earth life rooting itself in the Moon’s ancient dust. That was why moonlight was no longer silver, but salted with a green photosynthetic glow.

  And a great thread arced out of the center of the Moon’s face, and swept across the night sky toward the horizon. Pirius thought he could see a thickening in that graceful arc as it swept away from the Moon toward the Earth. The arc was the Bridge, an enclosed tunnel that joined the Moon to the Earth—or at least to an anchoring station a few hundred kilometers above the Earth. The Bridge had been built with alien technology captured millennia ago; now the important folk of the Interim Coalition of Governance could travel from Earth to Moon in security and comfort, as easily as riding an elevator shaft.

  The Bridge itself, defying orbital mechanics, was unstable, of course, constantly stressed by tides, and it had to be maintained with drive units and antigravity boxes studded along its length. The whole thing was utterly grandiose, hugely expensive, and quite without a practical purpose. Pirius laughed out loud at its folly and magnificence.

  The next morning he tried to describe his feelings on first seeing the tethered Moon.

  Nilis just smiled. “We travel to the stars, but we still must build our pyramids,” he said enigmatically.

  Chapter 9

  Two weeks after his return to Earth, Nilis set up a meeting with a man called the Minister of Economic Warfare.

  As he prepared for this meeting, Nilis made no secret of his nervousness, nor how much was riding on the outcome. “I suppose you’d call Minister Gramm my champion. My nano-food innovation was fundamentally an economic benefit, you see, and so its deployment in the war effort came under the purview of Economic Warfare. Since then, Gramm has supported me in my various initiatives—hoping I will pull out another gem!” He sighed. “But it’s difficult, it’s always difficult. The Coalition is very ancient, and has its own way of doing things. Mavericks aren’t treated well. Without the shelter of Gramm’s patronage, I’m quite sure I would have been sidelined long ago… .”

  And so on. Pirius and Torec listened patiently to all this, for Nilis in his blundering way seemed to appreciate having someone to talk to. But it was hard to be sympathetic. To Pirius Red the bureaucratic problems of working a
t the higher levels of the Interim Coalition of Governance were somewhat esoteric.

  On the day of the meeting, to their dismay, Nilis suddenly decided to take both ensigns with him.

  Before they set off, Nilis insisted on checking over their uniforms. It did Pirius no good to point out that the smart uniforms took care of themselves better than he or Torec ever could; Nilis nervously examined every seam, every centimeter of beading.

  “Anyway,” said Pirius, “I don’t see what we can add to a meeting with a Minister.”

  “Oh, you’re my secret weapon,” Nilis said, smiling edgily. “You are unruly defiance made flesh! Even when tangling with the Coalition, you must never underestimate the power of psychology, Ensign.”

  Nilis insisted that they were going to walk to the Ministry building—walk across the Conurbation, an Earth city, in the open air. It was a dreadful prospect, but Pirius knew by now that it was no use arguing with the Commissary when he had made up his mind.

  Still, Pirius and Torec hesitated on the doorstep of Nilis’s apartment. Pirius had acclimatized to the point where he could sit out in the garden with Nilis, even eat in the open air, but Torec was further behind. And after all, to venture out of doors without a sealed-up skinsuit violated every bit of conditioning drummed into them since before they could talk.

  “But it has to be done,” Torec said grimly.

  “It has to be done.” Hand in hand they took the first step, out into the light.

  Nilis strode off along a road that arrowed between the hulking shoulders of blown-rock domes, straight to the heart of the Conurbation. His robe flapped, the watery sun shone from his shaven head, and a small bot carrying his effects labored gamely to keep up. For all his insistence on checking the ensigns’ appearance, Nilis himself looked as if he had come straight from his rooftop garden; he wasn’t even wearing any shoes.

  He didn’t look back. The ensigns had to hurry after him.

  The surfaces of the domes were smooth, polished, some even worked with other kinds of stone. One massive dome, coated with a creamy rock, gleamed bright in the sunlight. “The Ministry of Supply,” Nilis called over his shoulder. “Supplied themselves with marble readily enough!”

  There wasn’t much traffic, just a few smart cars. But there were pedestrians everywhere, even off the ground. Walkways connected the domes, snaking through the air at many levels, in casual defiance of gravity and logic. People hurried along the ways, chattering; others were accompanied by shells of glowing Virtual displays, as if they carried their own small worlds around with them. In some places the walkways would tip up steeply, or even run vertically, but the crowds bustled over them blithely. The people were so immersed in their own affairs they didn’t even notice the unfailing miracles of inertial engineering that enabled them to walk without effort straight up a wall.

  Torec was muttering under her breath, some comforting nonsense. But she kept walking. She was doing well, and Pirius felt proud of her—not that he’d have dared to tell her so. You didn’t look up at the open sky, that was the key. You didn’t think about how exposed you were to the wild. You concentrated on the manufactured environment; you kept your gaze on the smooth surface of the road, or on the buildings around you.

  But at one point Torec stopped dead. Through a crack in the road surface a bit of green showed, a weed. It was a bit of raw life pushing through a hole in the engineered reality around them. Pirius was more used to green things than Torec, thanks to Nilis’s garden. But here in the wild it was an oddly terrifying sight.

  As they pushed into the dense heart of the city, things got still more difficult for the ensigns. People started to notice them. They stared openly as the ensigns passed, and pointed, and peered down from the walkways. The ensigns’ uniforms didn’t help; their bright scarlet tunics stood out like beacons in the Conurbation crowds, who mostly dressed in plain black Commissary-style robes.

  Nilis grinned. “They’ve never seen soldiers before. And you’re famous, Pirius!”

  “Commissary, it wasn’t even me—”

  Nilis waved a hand. “Never mind temporal hairsplitting. To these crowds you’re the kid who beat a Xeelee. Don’t let them worry you. They’re just human, as you are.”

  Torec frowned. “Human maybe, but not like us.”

  It was true, Pirius thought. In Arches Base everybody was the same—small, wiry, even with similar features, since most of them had been hatched from the same birthing tanks. “But here,” he said, “everyone is different. Tall, short. There are old people. And they’re all fat. You don’t see many fat people at the Front.”

  “No,” Nilis said. “But that’s policy, you see. If you’re kept hungry, if everything in your world is shabby, you have something to fight for—even if it’s just an inchoate dream of somewhere safe and warm, and with enough to eat.”

  Torec said, “So you let us fight for you, while you starve us and let us live in shit.”

  Pirius was alarmed, but Nilis seemed to admire her outspokenness. “Like it or not, that’s the policy—and since very few frontline troops ever come here, to the heart of things, few people ever know about it… .”

  In the immensity of the city, Pirius tried to keep his bearings. The whole of human society was like a great machine, so he had always been taught, a machine unified and dedicated to a single goal: the war with the Xeelee. The people around him, absorbed in their important and baffling bits of business, might seem strange, but they were parts of the greater machine too. He mustn’t look down on them: they were warriors in their way, just as he was, as was every human being.

  But he thought of Nilis’s extraordinary ambition of ending this war. Perhaps he, Pirius, a mere ensign, would play a part in a revolution that would transform the lives of every human in the Galaxy—including every one of the confident, jostling crowd around him. In that case he had nothing to fear. Indeed, these people of Earth should fear him.

  It was a deliciously non-Doctrinal thought. He always had wanted to be remembered.

  “Ah, here we are,” said Nilis.

  They stopped before another dome, as grand and busy as the rest. Nilis led them out of the glare of day into an antechamber. Much of this dome had been left open; there were partitions and internal walkways, but once inside you could look up and see the great rough sweep of the old Qax architecture itself.

  They were subjected to a ferocious security check. Bots clambered over them, their identities were verified, they were scanned for implants, given quick-fire tests for loyalty and mental stability, and subjected to many other examinations whose nature Pirius couldn’t even recognize. Most of this was performed by automated systems, but a single human guard was there to overview the process, a blue-helmeted woman from the Bureau of Guardians. Nilis endured it silently, and Pirius and Torec followed his lead.

  At last they were released. A small Virtual marker materialized before them and floated off. It led them to a roofless office, deep in the heart of the dome, with a long conference table and a nano-food niche. With a sigh, Nilis ordered hot tea.

  “And now we wait,” he said to the ensigns. “We’re on time, but Gramm won’t be. It’s all part of the game of power, you know… .”

  This dome belonged to Gramm’s Ministry of Economic Warfare, he told them. Aside from its specifically military arms, like the Navy and the Green Army and the Guardians, mankind’s police force, and agencies with cultural goals such as the Commission for Historical Truth and the Ministry of Public Enlightenment, the three greatest Ministries at the heart of the Interim Coalition of Governance were the Ministry of Economic Warfare, the Ministry of Supply, and the Ministry of Production.

  Nilis chattered on, “Even though they all report in to a single Grand Conclave member—Philia Doon, the Plenipotentiary for Total War—to get anything done you have to deal with all three. Even Minister Gramm can’t deliver anything by himself. But Economic Warfare’s aim is to ensure the dedication of all mankind’s resources to the great goal. To some
extent it acts as an intermediary between the other two. And that gives Gramm some leverage. He can be a difficult man, but I couldn’t ask for a more useful ally… . Ah, Minister!”

  Minister Gramm came bustling into the room. Even by the standards of Earth, Pirius thought, he was stupendously fat; his great belly pushed out his gray cloak so that it hung over his legs, and his fingers, clasped before his stomach, were tubes of pasty flesh. His scalp was shaven and his cheeks heavy, so that his head was like a round moon.

  He brought two people with him, both women. The first he briskly introduced as Pila, a senior advisor, whom Nilis had evidently met before. Golden-haired, she was slim, beautiful, expensively dressed, and oddly detached, as if all this was somehow beneath her. She showed no interest in the ensigns.

  The second person with Gramm was quite different. Small, round-shouldered, the shape of her body was hidden by the severe cut of her black robe. Her skin was an odd weathered brown, as if she had been irradiated. All her features were small, her nose a stub, her mouth pinched, and her hair was just a gray scraping over her scalp. Pirius found it hard to judge her age. The smoothness of her skin had nothing to do with youth; it was as if her features had been worn by time. Indeed, it wasn’t until she spoke that Pirius was even sure this was a woman.

  Nilis bustled forward to greet the Minister, his hand extended, his big bare feet slapping on the polished floor. But the small woman spoke first.

  “So here are our young heroes from the Front.” She stood before Pirius. Her eyes were deep and dark, hidden in sockets that seemed to have receded into her head. “I wish I could smell you—you have about you the burned-metal stench of vacuum, no doubt.” She reached out a small hand, and made to brush his cheek. To his shock her fingers passed through his flesh and broke into a swarm of blocky pixels. “Yes, I’m a Virtual,” she said. “An avatar, actually. I’m too many light-minutes from here to be able to contribute. But I couldn’t miss this.”