Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  Torec didn’t need the details, nor would she have understood them; she just knew what that green color meant. “Lethe,” she whispered. “We did it.”

  There was a howling. She turned and saw Commissary Nilis capering barefoot on the surface of the Moon. Some transmission glitch was pixellating his image, and his voice sounded feathery, remote.

  But his yell of triumph was echoed by the techs. One of them came sprinting clumsily up the slope to Torec. “It worked!” A burly girl from Earth, she grabbed Torec and tried to kiss her on the lips. It was typically inappropriate earthworm behavior, resulting only in a clash of visors, but Torec let it pass.

  The bots descended on the prototype complex, checking its physical integrity. But ironically, Torec knew, there should be little for them to find, for as the processor’s paradoxical operation had worked, there had been no need for the problem to be brute-force solved, and no need even for the little toy ships to chatter back and forth on their FTL hops—in this draft of the timeline anyhow. The curves in time had served their purpose—and had rendered their own existence unnecessary. It was another peculiar advantage of a time-travel computer. If it worked correctly, it never actually ran at all—and so it should never wear out. Some of the techs had even debated whether they could get away with the economy of making the processors shoddily, almost at the point of failure—for that failure would never be tested.

  The four of them stood in a rough circle: Torec, Luru Parz, Nilis and Pila. Of the four, only Torec was physically present, though they all wore skinsuits, save the stubbornly uncouth Commissary. The light falling on each of the Virtuals came from different unseen sources, subtly different angles, and that, set against the black sky and shining ground of the Moon, added to Torec’s sense of unreality.

  Pila said coolly, “The trial was obviously a success.”

  “Thank you,” Nilis said. “But it’s more than that.” He waved a hand, and a crude Virtual diagram appeared before him. It was Pirius’s early whiteboard sketch, Torec saw, the asterisk standing for the Prime Radiant, and the obstacles surrounding it marked in red—the FTL foreknowledge symbolized by a bar across the approach path, the superior Xeelee computing and defensive ability a circle around the Radiant. Now Nilis snapped his fingers, and the circle around the asterisk turned green. “Today we have removed one of the three fundamental barriers lying between us and the conquest of the Galaxy. We can outthink the Xeelee, outmaneuver their final defenses!

  “But you all understand this prototype is just the beginning, the proof of concept,” he said. “Much more work will be needed to turn this crude, sprawling prototype design into a battle-hardened unit. Now is the time for a fresh tranche of funding to be released.”

  “We at the Ministry do understand,” Pila said, with the faintest condescension. “That’s why I’ve been authorized to tell you that, with the successful completion of the trial, the project will continue under the auspices of the Navy. The technology is obviously of strategic potential, and funds for its full development will be made available.” She beamed, as if she were handing out gifts.

  Torec quietly clenched a fist. She felt vindicated. But Luru Parz stayed silent.

  Nilis stepped forward. His face, pocked by resolution flaws, was working as he tried to maintain his smile. “The Navy? But the CTC processor is just the first step to the greater goal, the strike at the Prime Radiant.”

  “Which was only a pipe dream, wasn’t it?” Pila said sweetly. “You still have nothing, not even concepts, for overcoming your remaining obstacles. Commissary, it’s time to stop. The Minister feels he has done his duty in backing you this far, on the basis of your previous accomplishments. You’ve done well! Bask in the glory. Once again you’ve done your duty for the cause of the Third Expansion, and now your garden needs you.”

  Nilis laughed. “And you’ll throw this miracle to the Navy? Who will use it to lose even more battles in ever more ingenious ways—oh, you fools, can’t you see what you’re doing?”

  Pila flinched, and her face closed up. But her Virtual image shuddered.

  In a silent explosion of pixels it burst open, and the slim woman was replaced by the massive form of Minister Gramm. He was without a skinsuit, and grease was smeared on his chin. And he was trembling with rage. “You call me a fool? I am warning you: take the get-out, Commissary. Go home. If you make any more trouble, I will cast you down in the pits of Mercury with this child soldier of yours.”

  Nilis trembled too, through anger and fear. But he held his ground.

  Luru Parz stepped between the two of them. “Enough.” Her Virtual form grazed Gramm’s, and his belly exploded in a hail of muddy pixels.

  Gramm lumbered back. “Stay out of this, Luru Parz.”

  “I will not. You may not be able to see the potential here, Minister, but I can. For the first time in three thousand years we may be glimpsing a way to end the relentless friction of this war—end it before it ends us.”

  “My verdict is final,” shouted Gramm, eyes bulging.

  “No,” Luru Parz said simply. “It isn’t. The project continues.” She held his gaze.

  To Torec’s amazement Gramm was the first to back down, a Minister of the Coalition somehow beaten by this small, worn-smooth, mysterious woman. Not for the first time, Torec longed to know the secret of Luru’s power.

  Luru turned away. “There is nothing left to do here but detail. We must move to the next stage. We meet in one week. In person, if you don’t mind; these Virtual confrontations are unsatisfactory.”

  Torec asked, “Where?”

  “Port Sol,” said Luru Parz. And she allowed her Virtual to break up, the pixels fading from view in the bright light of the late lunar morning.

  Chapter 16

  On Quin Base, after the initial flurry of curiosity died down, Pirius Blue tried to keep his distance from the other cadets. He was too old, too different, too outside ever to fit in with these swarming kids.

  But, despite his reserve, Pirius became an unlikely favorite of three girls who called themselves Tili One, Tili Two, and Tili Three. They were alike in their slight build, their dark coloring, and their small toothy faces. They were actually triplets, products of the same ovum. That wasn’t terribly uncommon, he learned, if you came from a certain big hatchery on the periphery of this star cluster, where for some reason multiple births were common. “But it makes sense,” Cohl said with her usual sour humor. “This is the Quintuplet Cluster… .”

  The Tili triplets spent almost all their time together. They always seemed to fix it so they worked together during training exercises, and when they were off duty they stayed even closer. Eating, working on their gear, they were always giggling, talking, their three so-similar heads clustered together. They shared one bunk, and when they slept, the three of them tangled up together in a warm heap of limbs and heads. They even made love, in full view of everybody, unembarrassed. But their lovemaking was gentle, very tender, almost presexual, Pirius thought. Of course this was all inappropriate. Family units, even twins and triplets, weren’t supposed to be left together lest the bonds they formed got in the way of loyalty to a wider humanity. But then a lot of what went on here was non-Doctrinal.

  Things got complicated when the triplets fixed on Pirius. Apparently they had had some rudiments of flight training, as navigators, before falling foul of the authorities. So they had something in common. When one of them offered to show Pirius how to repair scuffs on his skinsuit or to clean out the algae beds in his backpack, he accepted with good grace.

  They seemed to treat him as a big, clumsy pet. He put up with it. Maybe it was because the Tilis so obviously had each other that he felt a bit more secure with them.

  There were a couple of times, though, when they tried to entice him into their crowded bed. As they ran their little fingers over his belly and calves, no offer could have seemed more tempting. But he drew back, again fearing he might somehow lose himself. He was also worried about how old the triplets w
ere; like the other cadets they seemed very small, very unformed, very young.

  But when one of them came alone to his bed—it may have been Tili Two, or possibly Three—he found it impossible to resist. And when he let himself fall among her skin and lips and soft limbs, he found an immense, consoling relief.

  He tried to discuss his feelings with This Burden Must Pass.

  “I felt like you once,” Burden said. He was lying on his bunk, propped up on his elbow, bare to the waist, facing Pirius. The usual meaningless clamor of the barracks washed over them. Burden said, “I was Navy, too. At first there is just a torrent of faces here. But after a time, you start to understand.”

  “You do?”

  “Pirius, you feel these little cadets are somehow different from you, don’t you? Not just in experience, in background—something more fundamental. And you know why? Because it’s true.”

  The stock of embryos hatched out of Quin’s birthing tanks were developed from the genetic stock of the soldiers themselves. Of course: where else was it to come from? Not only that, the military planners tried to ensure that only successful soldiers got to breed. This was meant to be an incentive to make you get through your training, to fight, to survive. There were no families in this world, no parental bonds. But something deep in every human being responded even to the abstract knowledge that something of herself would survive this brief life.

  Pirius knew about this, of course; it was the same on Arches. But he had never before thought through the implications.

  It was selective breeding. And it had been going on, right across the Galaxy, long before the war with the Xeelee had come to full fruition. For nearly twenty thousand years mankind had been breeding itself into a race of child soldiers.

  “Look at the Tilis,” murmured Burden. “They could probably crossbreed with anybody in the Galaxy, if they had the chance; we haven’t speciated yet. But their bodies are adapted to low gravity, or no gravity at all. Their bones don’t wash away in a flood of imbalanced fluids, the way our earthworm ancestors’ did when they first ventured into space. Their minds have adjusted too; they can think and work in three dimensions. The triplets don’t suffer stress from vertigo, or claustrophobia. They are even immune to radiation, relatively.

  “There’s more. Here on Quin, if you survive combat, you breed, but for the genes it’s better yet not to wait, not to take that chance. So the cadets become fertile earlier and earlier, until they are producing eggs and sperm long before their bodies are developed enough to fight. Pirius, the Tilis are about sixteen, I think. But they’ve been fertile since they were ten. Infantry are an extreme case. The attrition rate is horrific; generations are very short here. But the same subtle sculpting has shaped you, Pirius. And me. Neither of us is an earthworm.”

  Pirius was shocked. “Burden, I know you don’t care about the Doctrines. But why do the officers let this genetic drift go on?”

  Burden shook his head. “You still don’t see it? Because it’s useful, Pirius. If you just remember that one thing, many puzzling things about life here fall into place.”

  Burden spoke about himself. The boy called Quero had been born on a base inside yet another Galaxy-center cluster. He had once flown the greenships: he had been a pilot himself, in fact, and had come through one action.

  But all the while his faith had been developing, he said.

  The seed of the faith of the Friends of Wigner had come here in legends from old Earth, legends of Michael Poole and the rebellion against the Qax. Its supremely consoling message had quickly taken root among the soldiers of the Galaxy core. By now you could find Friends right around the Front, around the whole of the center of the Galaxy.

  “I actually grew up with it. I heard kids’ stories about Michael Poole and the Ultimate Observer. I didn’t take any of it seriously, not really; it was just there in the background. And when I started going through my training and learned that it was officially all taboo, I shut up about it.”

  At first none of this had made any difference to Quero’s successful career. But as he experienced conflict, he found himself deeply troubled.

  “It was seeing death,” he said now, smiling. “It was bad enough from a greenship blister. It’s a lot worse here, on the Rocks. Every death is the termination of a life, of a mind, a unique thread of experience and memory. Maybe death has to come to us all. But like this? I found it hard to accept my place in this unending war.”

  Seeking answers, he had turned to the faith of his childhood. He went beyond the simple personalized stories of Michael Poole and other heroes he had grown up with, and he began to reexamine its deeper philosophy for himself. And he had begun to speak out. “My officers respected Quero, I think. But they had no time for This Burden Must Pass.”

  He had been here a while, Pirius gathered. Naturally smart, flexible, and courageous, Burden had already survived five combat actions. Once, he said, he had done well enough to be offered a way out, to retrain as an infantry officer. But he would have had to recant his faith, and he had refused, and so he had been cast down yet again.

  Pirius asked, “You don’t regret any of it?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Oh. ‘This Burden Must Pass.’”

  “You got it,” Burden said. “All of this suffering will ultimately be deleted. So what’s to regret?”

  Cohl had listened to this. She drew Pirius aside. “And you believe all that?”

  He was surprised she’d asked. “Why would he lie about something like that?”

  “Then why is it so vague? Why was he sent to Quin in the first place—because of his faith? Or because of something that happened on his base, or even during combat?” Her small eyes gleamed. “See? It’s just like his preaching. He talks a lot, but it’s all mist and shadows.”

  “You don’t like him.”

  “I don’t care enough not to like him. I don’t trust him, for sure.”

  Pirius turned back to Burden, who had heard none of this. Burden was looking at him with a kind of eagerness, Pirius thought, as if it was important to Burden that he somehow got Pirius’s approval. Sometimes he thought he saw weakness in Burden, somewhere under the surface of composure, command, and humor. Weakness and need.

  “Burden—you said the officers will tolerate genetic drift if the product is useful. But why do they put up with you?”

  “Because I’m useful too.” Burden lay back on his bunk. “I told you that’s the key. Of course I am useful! Why else?”

  When he saw his first death on the Rock, Pirius learned the truth of this.

  Chapter 17

  Pirius Red and Torec were reunited at the Berr-linn spaceport. They had been separated for eight weeks. Careless of who was watching them, they wrapped their arms about each other and pressed their mouths together.

  “They’re mad,” Pirius whispered. “The earthworms. All of them!”

  “I know!” she whispered back, round-eyed.

  They stared into each other’s eyes, their faces pressed together, their breath mingling, hot. Again Pirius felt that deep surging warmth toward her that he’d started to feel when they first arrived on Earth. It was as if he was whole with her, incomplete when they were apart, as if they were two halves of the same entity. Was this love? How was he supposed to know?

  And—did she feel the same way? It looked as if she did, but how were you supposed to tell?

  But they had no time to talk about their feelings, no time to recover from their separate adventures, for the very next day they were to be shipped off, at Luru Parz’s order, to Port Sol.

  To a traveler from the center of the Galaxy, a jaunt to the Kuiper Belt, only some fifty times as far out as Earth’s orbit around the sun, should have seemed trivial. But as the sun dwindled to an intense pinpoint, and Port Sol itself at last swam into view, dark, bloodred, Pirius felt that he was indeed going deep: not just deep in space but deep in time, deep into humanity’s murky past.

  Nilis’s corvette entered a painf
ully slow orbit. The gravity of a ball of ice a few hundred kilometers across was a mere feather touch. The passengers crowded to the corvette’s transparent walls.

  Port Sol was an irregular mass, only vaguely spherical, and dimly lit by the distant sun. Pirius saw a crumpled, ruddy surface, broken by craters of a ghostly blue-white. Some of these “craters,” though, looked too regular to be natural. And some of them were domed over, illuminated by a soft prickling of artificial light. People still lived here, then. But signs of abandonment overwhelmed the signs of life: shards of collapsed and darkened domes, even buildings that might once have floated above the ice but had now crashed to the ground.

  But still—Port Sol!

  Even to a Navy brat like Pirius, born and raised twenty-eight thousand light-years from Earth, the name had resonance. Port Sol was the very rim of Sol system, the place where the legendary engineer Michael Poole had come to build the very first of mankind’s starships.

  Nilis’s excitement seemed as genuine as the ensigns’. Minister Gramm, though, seemed tense, nervous, on the verge of anger. It was evident that Luru Parz had forced him to come out here, and he didn’t like it one bit. And Gramm’s assistant Pila peered out, analytic and supercilious, apparently as faintly amused by the spectacle of Port Sol as she had been by the Moon.

  A flitter slid smoothly up to meet the corvette. It carried a single passenger, a woman dressed in a simple white robe. She had the same look about her as Luru Parz: compact, patient, extraordinarily still, her features small and expressionless. But she was slimmer than Luru, and she seemed somehow more graceful. She said, “My name is Faya Parz. I am an associate of Luru… .”

  When she announced her name, eyebrows were raised. Gramm turned to Pila. “Well, well,” he said. “Faya and Luru, Parz and Parz!”