Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  Pila smiled. “I imagine the Doctrines are stretched rather thin here, Minister.”

  This baffled both the ensigns, and Nilis had to explain that under archaic traditions, before the more rational approach instigated by the Commission for Historical Truth, surnames would be shared by members of the same family. It was all thoroughly non-Doctrinal.

  The flitter touched down close to one of the illuminated pits in the ice. The party transferred to a ground transport, a sort of car with massive bubble wheels and hooks for traction to save it bouncing out of Port Sol’s minuscule gravity well. The car had no inertial adjustment, and as it began to roll along a road roughly cut through the ice, the cabin bobbed up and settled back, over and over, slowly but disconcertingly. Pirius and Torec were charmed by this low-tech relic.

  Though Gramm and Pila looked politely bored, Nilis was fascinated by the scenery. “So this Kuiper object is primordial—a relic of the formation of the system,” he said.

  “Not quite,” Faya said. “The reddish color of the ice is caused by bombardment by cosmic rays.” High-energy particles, relics of energetic events elsewhere in the universe. Over time, the surface layers became rich in carbon, dark, and the irradiation mantle became a tough crust. “Nothing is unmodified by time,” said Faya.

  Nilis stood up in the swaying cabin so he could see better. “But in places, impacts have punched through that crust to reveal the ice below. Is that what we’re seeing? Those blue pits—”

  Faya said, “Impacts are rare out here, but they do happen, yes. But the feature we are approaching is artificial, a quarry. It was scooped out by engineers to provision a GUTdrive starship. The present-day colonists refer to it as the Pit of the Mayflower, though we don’t have archaeological proof that Mayflower II was actually launched from here… .”

  In those early days, the starships that had set off from Port Sol had been driven by nothing but water rockets, using ice as reaction mass. They had crawled along much slower than light, their missions lasting generations. With the acquisition of FTL drives, Port Sol was suddenly redundant, its ice no longer necessary. Even as mankind’s great galactic adventure had begun in earnest, Port Sol’s time was already done. Since then it had orbited out here in the dark, its population dwindling, its name an exotic memory.

  But now, it seemed, Port Sol had a new purpose.

  An odd flash in the sky caught Pirius’s eye: a twinkle, there and gone. He knew that some of the earliest colonies here—from the days even before Michael Poole, very low-tech indeed—had relied for their power on nothing more than sunlight, gathered with immense wispy mirrors thousands of kilometers across. Even now nobody knew for sure what was out here. The Kuiper Belt was a vast spherical archipelago, its islands separated from each other by the width of the inner Sol system. In this huge place, perhaps some of those ancient communities survived, following their obsolescent ways, hidden from the turbulent politics of mankind.

  His new sense of curiosity strong, Pirius felt a deep thrill to be in this extraordinary place. But stare as he might, he didn’t glimpse the mirror in the sky again.

  The car nuzzled against a small translucent dome set on the edge of the Pit of the Mayflower. The dome was cluttered with low, temporary-looking buildings. There was an inertial generator somewhere, and to everybody’s relief the gravity in here was no lower than the Moon’s, and the walking was easy.

  Pirius and Torec were the first out, eager to reach the transparent viewing wall on the dome’s far side, so they could see the Pit for themselves.

  The Pit of the Mayflower was a smooth-cut crater a kilometer wide. Despite its size, the Pit was itself enclosed by a vast, low dome, around which lesser structures, like this habitable dome, clustered like infants. On the floor of the Pit stood the relics of heavy engineering projects: gantries, platforms of metal, concrete, and ice, and immense low-gravity cranes, like vast skeletons. Globe lamps hovered everywhere, casting a yellow-white complex light through the Pit. Nothing moved.

  Bustling after the ensigns, Nilis said, “What a place—a relic of the grandeur, or the folly, of the past. A mine for archaeologists! Ah, but I forget: under the Coalition we are all too busy for archaeology, aren’t we, Minister?”

  Gramm was waddling at a speed obviously uncomfortable for him, and though the dome’s air was cool he was sweating heavily. “Nilis, we may be far from home. But you are a Commissary, and I suggest you comport yourself like one.”

  “I am suitably abashed,” Nilis said dryly.

  “But you must remember,” Faya Parz said, “that this is a place of history, not just engineering. Many of those first starships were crewed not by explorers but by refugees.”

  Nilis said, “You’re talking about jasofts,” he said.

  Torec said, “Jasofts?”

  “Or pharaohs,” Faya said with a black-toothed smile.

  It was an ancient, tangled, difficult story.

  Nilis said, “Before the Qax Occupation, aging was defeated. The Qax withdrew the anti-agathic treatments and death returned to Earth. But some humans, called jasofts or pharaohs, were rewarded for their work for the Qax with immortality treatments—the Qax’s own this time. Made innately conservative by age, selfish and self-centered, utterly dependent on the Qax—well. Those new immortals were ideal collaborators.”

  Faya Parz said unemotionally, “That’s judgmental. Some would say the jasofts ameliorated the cruelty of the Qax. Without them, the Occupation would have been much more severe. Nothing of human culture might have survived the Qax Extirpation. The species itself might have become extinct.”

  Gramm waved his hand. “Or the jasofts were war criminals. Whatever. It’s a debate twenty thousand years old, and will never be resolved. When the Occupation collapsed, the new Coalition hunted down the last jasofts.”

  Nilis nodded. “And so ships like the Mayflower were built, and crews of jasofts fled Sol system. Or tried to. We don’t know the meaning of the name, by the way: Mayflower. Perhaps some archaic preOccupation reference… . In the end, Port Sol itself became one of the last refuges of jasofts in Sol system.”

  With an almost soundless footstep, Luru Parz approached them. She said, “And of course it all had to be cleaned out, by the fresh-faced soldiers of the Coalition.”

  Gramm snapped, “Did you bring us here to shock us with this revolting bit of history, Luru Parz?”

  “You know why you’re here, Minister,” Luru Parz said, and she laughed in his face.

  Gramm said nothing. But as he glared at Luru Parz, his eyes burned bright with hatred.

  The ostensible purpose of this long trip was a discussion of the future of Nilis’s Project Prime Radiant. So Luru Parz led Nilis, Gramm, and Pila to a conference room, leaving Pirius and Torec in the charge of Faya Parz.

  Faya asked if the ensigns wanted to rest, but they had spent days cooped up on a corvette, and were anxious to see the rest of Port Sol. Faya complied with good grace.

  They began a slow circuit of the Pit of the Mayflower.

  The great domed quarry was surrounded by a ring of satellite domes, each much smaller, with further facilities beyond that. In the unpressurized areas beyond the domes Pirius recognized power plants, landing pads, clusters of sensors, telescopes peering up at the star-ridden sky. No weapons, though; evidently this ancient, enigmatic place was not expected to be a target, for the Xeelee or anybody else.

  These were obviously modern facilities. The more ancient landscape of Port Sol—the old starship quarries, the fallen towns, the imploded domes—was tantalizingly hidden beyond a tight horizon.

  The domes were mostly occupied by laboratories, study areas, and living quarters. But it was a bleak, functional environment. In the labs and living areas there was a total lack of personalization: no Virtuals, no artwork, no entertainment consoles, not so much as a graffito. There were tight regulations about that sort of thing on Arches Base—across the Druzite Galaxy, personality was officially frowned on as a distraction from duty—bu
t despite their superficial sameness every bunk in every corridor on every level of a Barracks Ball was subtly different, modified to reflect the personality of its owner. Not here, though; the people who manned this place must have extraordinary discipline.

  Not that there were many people here at all, as far as the ensigns could see. Once they glimpsed somebody working in a lab, a place of shining metallic equipment and anonymous white boxes. Overshadowed by immense Virtual schematics of what looked like a DNA molecule, Pirius couldn’t even see if it was a man or woman.

  “Not many of us are needed,” Faya Parz said. “There are only twenty-three of us, including Luru Parz. But Luru Parz travels a good deal nowadays.”

  Torec shivered. Pirius knew what she was thinking. To a Navy brat, used to the crowds of Barracks Balls, that was a terribly small number, this an awfully remote and isolated place: to think there were no more than twenty-two other humans within billions of kilometers… .

  “The machines do all the work—even most of the analytical work. Humans are here to direct, to set objectives, to provide the final layer of interpretation.”

  Torec said, “Don’t you get lonely? How do you live?”

  Faya smiled. You don’t understand. It was a look Pirius had grown used to among the sophisticated population of Earth, but he suspected uneasily that here it might be true.

  Faya said, “We have always been an odd lot, I suppose. An ice moon is a small place, short of resources. There were only ever a few of us, even in the great days. We would travel to other moons for trade, cultural exchange, to find partners—we still do. But there was no room to spare; population numbers always had to be controlled tightly. So marriage and children were matters for the community to decide, not for lovers.” Her voice was wistful, and Pirius wondered what ancient tragedies lay hidden beneath these bland words. “You know, in the olden days there were floating cities. There was dancing.”

  Oddly, she sounded as if she remembered such times herself—as if she had once danced among these fallen palaces. Faya seemed heavy, static, dark, worn out by time, like a lump of rock from the Moon. It was hard to imagine her ever having been young, ever dancing.

  Torec asked, “What do you do here?”

  Faya said, “We study dark matter.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Luru Parz seeks to understand alien tampering with the evolution of Sol system.”

  Torec and Pirius dared to share a glance. They’re all mad.

  Pirius knew, in theory, about dark matter. It was an invisible shadow of normal matter, the “light” matter made of protons and neutrons. The dark stuff interacted with normal matter only through gravity. You couldn’t burn it, push it away, or harvest it, save with a gravity well. And it was harmless, passing through light matter as if it weren’t there. Pilots and navigators were taught to recognize its presence; sometimes great reefs of the stuff could cause gravitational anomalies that might affect your course.

  Aside from that, dark matter was of no consequence. Pirius couldn’t see why anybody would study it.

  But Faya showed them Virtuals. Sol system had coalesced out of a disc of material that had once stretched much farther than the orbit of the farthest planets. Most of the mass of the disc was now locked up in the bodies of the planets, but if you smeared out the planets’ masses, you got a fairly smooth curve, showing how the mass in the disc had dropped off evenly as distance from the sun increased, just as you’d expect.

  “Until you get to Neptune,” Faya said. At the rim of the Kuiper Belt the actual mass distribution plummeted sharply. “There are many bodies out here, some massive. Pluto is one, Port Sol another … But they add up to only about a fifth of Earth’s mass. There should have been thousands of worldlets the size of Pluto or larger. Something removed all those planetesimals—and long ago, when Sol system was very young.”

  She summarized theories. Perhaps the missing worldlets had been thrown out of their orbits by the migration of a young Neptune through Sol system, as it headed for its final orbit. Perhaps there was another large planet, out there in the dark, disturbing the objects’ orbits—but no such planet had been found. Or maybe a passing star had stripped the Kuiper cloud of much of its richness. And so on.

  Pirius said, “None of that sounds too convincing.”

  Faya Parz said, “If mankind has learned one thing in the course of its expansion to the stars, it is that the first explanation for any unlikely phenomenon is life.”

  Luru Parz had come to this place to study the traces of that ancient plunder. Her first theory was that it could have something to do with dark matter. Dark matter was relatively rare in the plane of the Galaxy, and indeed in the heart of Sol system. “But it is to be found out here,” Faya said, “where the sun is remote, and baryonic matter is scarce.”

  Pirius tried to put this together. “And you think there is life in the dark matter. Intelligence.”

  “Oh, yes.” Faya’s eyes were hooded. “There is six times as much dark matter as baryonic in the universe. Everywhere we look, baryonic matter is infested with life. Why not dark matter? In the past, humans have studied it. We have some of the records. Luru even believes that a conflict between intelligences of dark and light matter is underway—an invisible conflict more fundamental even than our war with the Xeelee. The Qax destroyed much of our heritage, but there are hints in the surviving preOccupation records—”

  “And this has something to do with the Kuiper Belt’s missing mass?”

  “We haven’t ruled it out. But in the meantime we have found something stranger still.” Faya snapped her fingers. A Virtual image whirled in the air. It was a tetrahedron, Pirius saw, four triangular faces, straight edges. It turned slowly, and elusive golden light glimmered from its faces. But the image was grainy.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s called the Kuiper Anomaly. Obviously an artifact, presumably of alien origin. It was detected in the Kuiper Belt long ago—before humans first left Earth, even. It was the size of a small moon.”

  “Was?”

  “By the time humans finally mounted a probe to study it, it had disappeared.” She snapped her fingers; the tetrahedron popped and vanished.

  Pirius said, “So perhaps the missing planetesimals were used to manufacture this—Anomaly.”

  “It’s possible. The mass loss looks about right, from what we know of the object’s gravitational field. But if so, it must have been there a long time, since the formation of the system itself.”

  Torec said, “What was it for?”

  “We’ve no idea.”

  “Where did it go? Was it connected to the dark matter?”

  Faya smiled. “We don’t know that either. We’re here to answer such questions.” She would say no more.

  Pirius found it a deeply disturbing thought that some alien intelligence had built such a silent sentinel on the fringe of the system, long before humanity even as the sun was fitfully flaring to life. In fact, he felt resentful that somebody had used that immense resource for their own purposes. Those were our ice moons, he thought, knowing he was being illogical.

  They completed the circuit of the Pit, coming back to where they had started. They longed to go further—to see more of Michael Poole’s heroic engineering, or even find the fabled Forest of Ancestors, where the native life-forms in their sessile forms waited out eternity. But they had work to do.

  Regretfully, they returned to the conference room. It turned out to be set high on a gantry, overlooking the Pit of the Mayflower. It had a startling view of the gantries and cranes that had once built starships.

  But nobody in the conference room was interested in the view. They were too busy with a tremendous row.

  Luru Parz paced, small, cold, determined.

  “In its day, the Coalition served a purpose. We needed a framework, guidance to help us recover from the terrible wasting of the Qax Occupation. But we quickly slipped into an intellectual paralysis. Do you not see that, Minister? Ev
en now we look back over our shoulder at the past, the Occupation, the near-extinction of mankind. The Druz Doctrines are nothing but a rationalization of that great trauma. And since then, obsessed with history, we have sleepwalked our way into a Galactic war.

  “But it can’t go on forever. Nilis sees that. We can’t keep up our blockade of the Core indefinitely. Now Nilis offers us a chance to win, to take the Galaxy. I’m not at all surprised you, Gramm, and your self-serving colleagues are seeking to sabotage his efforts. In fact I’m surprised you have given him as much support as you have. But it’s not enough. Gramm, you are going to give Nilis all the backing he needs—all the way to the center of the Galaxy.”

  Gramm sneered. “Madam, this buffoon has nothing. Don’t you understand that yet? He is blocked! He has no way to defeat FTL foreknowledge, or to strike at the Prime Radiant itself.”

  Faya Parz said, “Then we must help him. There may be answers.”

  Gramm snapped, “What answers?”

  “Mankind is very old; the past contains many secrets… . This is a treasure which the Coalition chooses to ignore. We believe that somewhere in this deep heritage we may well discover the key to unlocking the final puzzles.”

  Nilis rammed his fist into the palm of his hand. “You’re right. Yes! That’s where we must go next.”

  Pirius said, “Where?”

  Nilis said, “Why, to Mars. To the Secret Archive of the Coalition.”

  Torec whispered to Pirius, “What Secret Archive? I don’t like this talk.”

  “Nor me.”

  Pila, Gramm’s advisor, had been showing increasing irritation. Now she seemed to lose patience. “Why are we listening to this heretical nonsense? What hold does this woman have over us, Minister?”

  Luru Parz smiled. “Why don’t you tell her, Gramm?”

  Gramm looked thunderous, but didn’t reply.

  Luru said evenly, “Oh, I’m just another of the Coalition’s little secrets. Just another Doctrinal violation, tolerated because I am useful. I’ve had an uneasy, ah, working relationship with Gramm for many years, and his predecessors, long before him. Before that—well, my life has sometimes been complicated. But things are civilized these days. The Coalition tolerates our research, here on Port Sol, as long as we share the results. Of course, it could destroy us at any time. But on the other hand I could do a great deal of harm to the Coalition.” She opened her mouth wide, showing blackened teeth.