Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  Nilis suddenly seemed to understand. His jaw dropped, and he gulped before he could speak again. “All this talk of the depths of time … Port Sol always was a notorious den of jasoft refugees. And they weren’t all cleared out, were they? And you are one of them, Luru Parz. You are a jasoft.”

  Pila flinched, as if she had been struck; her bland, pretty face curled in disgust, the strongest expression Pirius had ever seen her show. Nilis merely stared, utterly fascinated, his intellect overriding his emotions, as it did so often.

  Pirius was stunned. He stared at Faya, who had conducted them around the Pit. Was she an ancient too? She had talked of dancing among the floating palaces of Port Sol—but the ice moon had been all but abandoned for twenty thousand years. Was it possible it wasn’t just a dream?

  Torec’s hand slipped into his. In this cold place, far from home, surrounded by so many gruesome secrets, the touch of warm flesh was comforting.

  Pila turned on her superior. She seemed more upset by the violation of orthodoxy than by the cold biological reality of the jasofts. “Minister, if this is true—why are these monstrosities tolerated?”

  Gramm said nothing, his round face crimson.

  Luru said, “Well, I’m useful, you see. And I know too much to be dispensed with. Don’t I, Gramm?”

  “You old witch,” Gramm said tightly.

  “Witch? If so, I brought you here to remind you of my spell,” she said, her tone dark.

  Gramm glared. But it was clear he had no choice but to give her what she wanted.

  When the meeting broke up, Torec approached Luru. She was clearly fascinated.

  “But how do you live?”

  Luru winked at her. “Most days I sleep a lot.” She put her hands on the ensigns’ shoulders; her skin felt warm, soft to Pirius: human, not at all strange. She said, “You children must be as hungry as I am. We have a lot of work to do. A great mission—a Galaxy to conquer. But first we eat. Come!” And she led them away.

  Chapter 18

  Out on the surface of the Rock, the cadets were learning to advance behind an artillery barrage.

  It was another brutally simple, unbelievably ancient tactic. Behind the advancing troops was a bank of monopole cannon, mankind’s most effective weapon against Xeelee technology. The guns opened up before the advance began, firing live shells over the heads of the troops. The idea was that the hail of shells would flatten enemy emplacements, and the troops would rush forward and take the positions without a fight. Then the barrage would work its way forward, a curtain of fire always just ahead of the advancing troops, steadily raking out the opposition before the troops even got there. So the theory had always had it.

  But in practice, Pirius Blue found himself lying in clinging asteroid dust as the barrage flew, so thick it was a curtain of light over his head, and shells of twisted spacetime fell not half a kilometer from him. The shells’ pounding seemed to shake the whole asteroid. The sense of physical energy erupting around him was overwhelming, as if all the violence of the Galaxy center were focused on this one battered old Rock.

  The order to advance, actually to run into the fire, all but defeated his courage.

  The success of this tactic depended on precise timing, coordination between artillery and infantry, and extremely accurate firing by the gunners. But the cannon were only machines, the gunners only human, the infantry were rattled and confused, and in an imperfect universe all were liable to error. The strategy depended a good deal on simple luck.

  And, today, his platoon’s luck ran out.

  Pirius actually saw the fatal shell incoming. It was like a meteor, streaking down from the barrage that flew over his head. On the comm loops he heard officers yelling warnings. But for those directly under the path of the shell, no warning could help.

  It was the triplets, Pirius saw, recognizing their customized uniforms. For a last instant, they clung to each other. The shell landed directly over them. There was a soundless flash of light, another giant’s footstep, a fountain of dirt.

  Pirius ran to the site of the impact. A perfectly pristine crater had been dug into the asteroid.

  Tili One had somehow escaped unharmed. Three had lost a hand, but was conscious, though distressed. Of Two there was no sign. Her very substance had been torn apart, Pirius thought, her very atoms dissociated.

  Over the heads of the little group, the monopole barrage was dying, as if apologetically.

  Marta, Cohl, Burden were all here, standing gravely as the surviving sisters wailed and clung to each other. “At least it was quick.” Captain Marta said gruffly. “There can have been no pain.”

  One of the Tilis turned on the officer. “What comfort is that? It was a stupid accident.”

  Burden stepped forward. He placed a big hand on each of the Tilis’ skinsuit helmets. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “None of this matters. There will be a better time, a better place, where you will be reunited with your sister, when all of this is wiped clean… .” And so on. Gradually his words were comforting the girls. They bent their heads to his chest, and he held them as they wept wretchedly.

  This was too much for Cohl. She turned on Captain Marta. “What happened to the Doctrines? If you let him spout words like these, what did she die for?”

  Marta eyed her coldly, the human half of her reconstructed face as still and expressionless as the metallized side. “His words are useful,” she said simply.

  And so they were, Pirius saw now, just as Burden himself had said, and that was why they were tolerated. It didn’t matter whether anybody believed in Michael Poole and the rest or not. Everything here was dedicated to the purposes of the war: even the tolerance of a faith which undermined the war’s very justification. Just as long as its adherents were prepared to march off to die.

  The Captain snapped, “Clean up here.” She turned and walked away.

  Pirius and the triplets’ other friends helped the surviving sisters get back to the barracks. Pirius had never seen anything like their grief.

  But there was no time for consolation. The very next day new orders came: Pirius’s company was to be thrown into the Front.

  For their final preparation Pirius and Cohl were taken to a sick bay.

  Here nanomachinery was injected into their eyes. Their retinas were rebuilt, overlaid with a layer of technology whose purpose was to help their eyes cope with the blinding light of the Galaxy’s heart—and perhaps enable them to survive another few seconds. They had both taken many implants before, of course, even deep inside their skulls. But none of them had felt so directly violating.

  They endured a night of agonizing pain. Pirius and Cohl had never been lovers, but that night they shared a bunk, weeping in each other’s arms.

  The next morning, when Pirius looked in a mirror, he saw the silver in his eyes, and his own face reflected back from his pupils. It was as if his very soul had been coated in metal.

  TWO

  The Qax, alien occupiers of Earth, inflicted the Extirpation on mankind. They churned up the rocks, destroyed the ecology, wrecked our homes, even imposed a new language on us. By these means they tried to destroy our past.

  They were right to do so.

  The past is a distraction, a source of envy, enmity, bitterness. Only the present matters, for only in the present can we shape the future.

  Cut loose the past; it is dead weight.

  Let the Extirpation continue. Let it never end.

  —Hama Druz

  Chapter 19

  Pirius Red wasn’t impressed by Mars.

  From low orbit it struck him as a dull, closed-in little world. Aside from the scrapings of ice at the polar caps, its color was a uniform, burned-out red. Mars was dead, or all but; you could tell that even from space, just by looking at its worn craters and soft-edged mountains.

  Given this world had been the most earthlike world in Sol system after the home planet itself, it was surprising how little mark humans had made on its surface. There were plenty of rui
ns, though. Once, extensive arcologies had splashed the ancient face of this world with Earth green-blue. But those bubble-colonies had been smashed during the Qax Occupation. The largest of them had been in a region called Cydonia, and from space you could still make out where it had been: the neat circle of the dome’s perimeter, the blocky shapes of a few remaining buildings, a tracery of foundations. But the ubiquitous dust had covered it over, washing away lines and colors.

  A more striking ruin, in fact, was a massive building put up by the Qax themselves: an exotic-matter factory. Its walls were massive and robust, enduring even after twenty thousand years. In the wars that had followed the expulsion of the Qax, the factory ruins had been used as a fortress, as human fought human. Pirius sent Virtual images back to Torec to remind her of the similar factory she had explored on the Moon. But Torec was at Saturn, still working on the CTC processor project, out of touch.

  Pirius’s reaction to Mars seemed to disappoint Nilis. Apparently Mars held a sentimental place in earthworm hearts. Mars was a small world, but it had as much land area as Earth, Nilis said. It had canyons and mountains and huge impact craters—in fact the whole of the northern hemisphere appeared to be one immense basin—and its range of elevations, from the depths of the deepest basins to the heights of the highest mountains, was actually greater than anything on Earth, even if you were to strip away that world’s oceans.

  Geology was never going to appeal much to a Navy brat. But Pirius was intrigued by Mons Olympus, the tallest mountain in the whole of Sol system—and their destination. For in a grandiose, astonishingly arrogant gesture, the Interim Coalition of Governance had built its Secret Archive into that mightiest of monuments.

  The corvette landed at Kahra, the modern capital of Mars. This was a city in the Earth style, a Qax-design Conurbation, a series of domes blown out of the bedrock. But only a few hundred thousand people lived here. In fact there were only a few million on Mars, Pirius learned, less on the whole planet than in a single one of Earth’s great cities.

  The Martian citizens seemed about as bland and fat as those Pirius had encountered on Earth, though a little taller, a little longer-limbed, perhaps an adaptation to the one-third gravity here. But the officials who processed their arrival stared at Pirius’s bright red Navy uniform. Even here, it seemed, his unwelcome fame had spread, which was why Nilis had brought him in the first place. Nilis said conspiratorially, “You are my battering ram as I smash through layers of officialdom, complacency, and sheer obtuse bureaucracy.”

  They had a day to wait in the city. Pirius spent some time in fitful exploration.

  But even Kahra itself turned out to be something of a fake. During the Occupation the Qax had come to Mars only to destroy its human colonies. They had shipped the surviving settlers back to Earth—where they had almost all died, unable to adapt to a more massive planet’s clinging gravity and dense air. Even the exotic-matter factory had required only a handful of indentured humans to oversee its automated operation.

  So for humans to throw up a Conurbation here, where none had existed before, was an absurdity. There was no Martian Occupation to memorialize; it was an “empty gesture by earnest Coalition politicos eager for advancement,” as Nilis put it. This Conurbation didn’t even have a number, as did those on Earth; it was known as Kahra, the name of the older city which had been demolished to make way for it, and whose foundations now rested under the dull pink-gray domes.

  Kahra, and Mars itself, struck Pirius as an oddly halfhearted place—a Conurbation without a number, a world whose most interesting ruin was alien, a sparse population of unenthusiastic people. The ancient stasis of this world, which had given up on geological processing about the time the first oceans were pooling on Earth, seemed to have sunk into the minds of the settlers. Little controversy from this small dead world trickled up the chain of command to trouble the councils on Earth. There wasn’t much news on Mars.

  The next morning Pirius left Kahra without regret.

  From Kahra it was a short hop to Olympus.

  Their flitter landed on an uninteresting, gently sloping plain, featureless save for a massive hatchway set in the ground. Nothing else showed of the Secret Archive above the surface of Mars.

  But this was, after all, the highest mountain in Sol system. So Pirius asked permission to spend a few minutes out on the surface. He pulled on his skinsuit, inflated the flitter’s blister airlock, and dropped a couple of meters to the Martian ground.

  He landed in dust. He broke through a crust of darker, loosely bound material, and sank into thicker material beneath that compacted under his weight. Perhaps that crust was an irradiated mantle, like Port Sol. When he took a step he found the going wasn’t so difficult, but soon his legs and back were stained by the dust, which was fine and clinging. He remembered Torec’s complaints about Moon dust, and how hard that had been to clean off.

  The slope was featureless save for a gully a few meters away, cut into the ground. The sky was reddish, too, and the sun was a shrunken yellow-brown circle, still rising on this Martian morning. The light of the more remote sun was diluted, and the shadows it cast, though sharp, were not deep. The only motion was near the horizon, where a narrow pillar, tracking across the ground, seemed to be shorting between ground and sky. Perhaps it was a dust devil. It was rarefied, feeble compared to the mighty meteorological features he had glimpsed on Earth.

  All he could see of the works of mankind were the flitter and the white-painted Archive hatch, set in the ground. And he could see no mountain, no mighty summit or precipitous cliffs.

  The air shimmered; a Virtual coalesced. It was Luru Parz, appropriately dressed in a skinsuit of her own.

  Pirius felt his heart hammering. He had been unable to come to terms with Luru Parz’s revelation that she was effectively immortal, millennia old; it defied his imagination. Standing on this inhuman planet, the most alien thing in his universe was the patient, silent woman before him.

  From the flitter the Commissary called, “Luru Parz. I wasn’t expecting you to accompany us.”

  “I’m not. Gramm has bent a little, but he won’t allow me anywhere near the planet, let alone into the Archive. He won’t even let me send a Virtual in there. Isn’t that petty?” She winked at Pirius, with a kind of gruesome flirtatiousness. “Still, I thought I should come see you off. What do you think of Mars, Ensign?”

  “Dusty.”

  Luru barked laughter.

  Nilis sighed. “I suppose that sums it up. On Mars there is dust everywhere. It piles up in the craters; it covers these great Tharsis mountains. Even the air is full of it—scattering the light, whipping itself into murky storms …”

  Luru Parz said, “And Mars is old. The oldest landscapes on Earth would be among the youngest on Mars. But of course even the old can hide a few surprises.” She was still staring at Pirius.

  Pirius dropped his gaze, his cheeks hot. But he wasn’t much interested in comparative planetology; born in a tube and raised in a box, he had no preconceptions about how planets were supposed to work. “So where’s the big mountain?”

  Nilis said, “Ensign, you’re standing on it. Olympus is a shield volcano, seven hundred kilometers across at its base, rising some twenty-five kilometers above the mean level. Its caldera juts out of the atmosphere! But the whole thing’s so vast it dwarfs human perspectives.”

  Luru was watching him again. “Disappointed, Ensign? Everything about Mars seems to disappoint. But before spaceflight, Mars was the only world whose surface was visible from Earth, save for the unchanging Moon. And it was the repository of a million dreams—wasn’t it, Commissary? We even dreamed of making Mars like Earth. Of course, it’s technically possible. Can you see why it was never done?”

  Pirius glanced around at the worn landscape, the dust-choked sky. “Why bother? If you want to make an Earth there are better candidates.”

  “Yes,” Nilis said sadly. “By the time we had the capability to terraform, we had already found other Ea
rths. Nobody could be bothered with Mars. What an irony! And so Mars was bypassed. This is very ancient stuff, Pirius. But I sometimes wonder if something of those lost dreams still lingers in the thin air of Mars, an ineradicable whiff of disappointment that makes Martians as dull as they are today.”

  “We aren’t here to dream of the past,” Pirius said.

  Luru Parz laughed. “Well spoken, young soldier! All this talk of pre-Coalition fantasies is of course non-Doctrinal. Let’s get on with it.” With a flourish she gestured at the Archive hatch.

  The great door began to swing open. The thin air brought only the faintest of sighs to Pirius’s ears. A semitransparent tube snaked out of the hatchway and nuzzled against the hull of the flitter.

  “Don’t forget your face masks,” Luru Parz said. She snapped her fingers and disappeared into a cloud of scattering pixels.

  The woman smiled at them, though the gaze of her pale gray eyes slid away from their faces. “My name is Maruc. I am an Interface Specialist.”

  Pirius and Nilis had climbed down a metal-runged ladder into a kind of antechamber, roughly cut from the rock. They faced this Maruc, their mouths and noses hidden by snug semisentient masks. It had been made clear that though the air in the Archive was breathable, such masks were to be worn at all times; nobody had explained why to Pirius, but he wasn’t in the habit of asking such questions.

  Nilis introduced the two of them in his typically boisterous and avuncular way. “I can’t begin to tell you how privileged I feel to be here—here, the greatest repository of knowledge in Sol system, why, I dare say, in the human Galaxy!” He clapped Pirius on the back. “Doesn’t it make you fall in love with the Coalition all over again?”