Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  Pirius expected his own dropship to dock with one of the dome’s ports. He was surprised when the little craft began to descend a few hundred meters short of the dome. It came down on a patch of bare dust, a landing site hastily cordoned off and marked with winking globe lamps.

  The hull popped open, and the orderly, still businesslike and cheery, asked Pirius to give him a hand with the casualties. They set Cohl and Tili in their rigid suits down on the bare ground.

  All around the ship, troopers were lying in the dirt, their skinsuits glowing orange or red. This was what Pirius had glimpsed from above, what he had thought looked like the furrows of a plowed nano-food farm. The furrows were rows of wounded, thousands or tens of thousands of them, lying patiently in the dirt, waiting for treatment.

  “It’s always like this,” said the orderly.

  Pirius began to see the process. The wounded were brought here from all over the Rock. On arrival, they were organized into these rough rows. Close to the dome’s walls, tarpaulins had been cast over the dirt, and there were even a few beds. But out here you just had to lie in the asteroid dirt, still locked in your skinsuit, without so much as a blanket beneath you.

  Medical officers hurried through the ranks of the newly arrived, peering into each skinsuit, trying to pick out the most severely wounded. Some were marked by a floating Virtual sigil, and the stretcher crews would come out and take prioritized cases into the dome quickly. The whole setup was like a factory, Pirius thought, a factory for processing broken human flesh.

  The orderly glared at Pirius. “This your first time out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Rookie, you gave me shit, out there by the emplacement. If you’re ever in my boat again, be polite. You got that? We all have our jobs to do.” Then, whistling again, he made his way back to his dropship.

  Back at Quin Base, the atmosphere was dismal. Casualty lists were posted, simple Virtual displays that hovered in the air. People crowded around, desperately scanning the lists of names and platoon numbers, the smiling images. They chewed their nails, cried, hugged each other for comfort, or wept with relief when they found a loved one who had survived.

  Pirius was shocked by this open emotion. There was nothing like the stoicism of a Navy base during an action. It wasn’t supposed to be like this; you were supposed to give your life gladly, and accept the loss of others.

  As Captain Marta had promised, the returned warriors were rewarded with extra food. Pirius opened his own small hamper, left waiting for him on his bunk. The food was sticky stuff, very sweet or salty. It was treat food for children. So few had come back that there was plenty to go around; he could have eaten as much as he liked. But he ate only a little of his portion before giving the rest away.

  Pirius managed to get a message to Enduring Hope with his artillery platoon, telling him Cohl had been injured but was recovering. It occurred to him that he ought to look for the friends of the Tilis and the rest of the platoon. But he didn’t know who those friends were—and besides, what would he say? In the end, he shied away from the idea, but he felt ashamed, as if he had ducked a responsibility.

  That first night there were many empty bunks. The barracks seemed to have been hollowed out. The normal sounds of play and lovemaking and trivial arguments were replaced by stillness. Once, sleepless, he glimpsed Captain Marta moving through the barracks, her metallized body gleaming, her movements silent and deliberate. She stopped by some of the bunks, but Pirius couldn’t hear what she said.

  In the days that followed, Pirius learned that the Army had more “processes” for dealing with the aftermath of such battles.

  The day after Pirius’s return, a massive reorganization swept through the barracks. Pirius, Cohl, and Tili were to be kept together, but they were assigned to a new platoon, number 85 under the new hierarchy. They were moved to new corners of the barracks. Once Cohl and Tili had returned, the three of them were squashed into a block of bunks with their seven new platoon comrades.

  Most of the seven new platoon members were cadets, unblooded, fresh from the training grounds. Reunited cadre siblings greeted each other noisily. The survivors of Factory Rock moved in this new crowd as if they had suddenly grown old, Pirius thought. The energy of the youngsters was infectious, and the mood quickly lifted back to something like the brash noisiness it had been before. Soon it was as if the action on the Rock had never happened, as if it had all been some hideous nightmare.

  But in the quietest hours of the night, when the rats sang, you could still hear weeping.

  Tili Three was changed. She was nothing like the bright, happy kid who had spent her life in intimacy with her lost sisters; now, left alone, she grew hollow-eyed and gaunt.

  Pirius longed to comfort her, but he didn’t know how. He told himself that if not for his own actions, Tili Three might well have lost her life as well. Why, then, did he feel so unreasonably guilty? And how could he feel so anguished about the loss of two privates, when, if you added up all the losses around the Front, ten billion died every year? It made no sense, and yet it hurt even so.

  In the end, paralyzed by his own grief and uncertainty, he left her alone.

  This Burden Must Pass had been on Factory Rock, but his platoon had been far from the main action and had suffered only one casualty, nonlethal. He had been through all this before.

  And, just as the dropship orderly had said to Pirius, Burden told him it was always like this. “They chop up the platoons and push us together, so we’re all crowded in just like before. Soon you don’t see the big hollow spaces, the rows of empty bunks. You forget. You can’t help it.” He spoke around mouthfuls of the treat food.

  “It’s not the same, though,” Pirius said. “Not once you’ve been out there. It can’t be.”

  “Don’t talk about it,” Burden said warningly. “You’re safe in here, in the barracks. It’s as if what happens out there isn’t real—or isn’t unless you talk about it. If you do that, you see, you let it in, all that horror.” His face worked briefly, and Pirius wondered what else he was leaving unsaid.

  “I don’t understand you, Burden. You’ve been in the field six times now. Six times. If none of this matters, if the Doctrines are a joke to you—why put your life on the line over and over?”

  “No matter what I believe, what choice is there? If you go forward, you’ll most likely get shot. If you go backward, if you refuse, you’ll be court-martialed and sentenced, and shot anyhow. So what are you supposed to do? You go forward, because the only thing you can shoot at in this war is a Xeelee. At least going forward you’ve a chance. That’s all there is, really.” That was as much as he would say.

  Pirius was mystified by Burden’s contradictions. Burden seemed composed, centered. Under his veneer of faith he seemed hardheaded, cynical, and full of a certain gritty wisdom on how Army life was to be survived. He seemed to have strength of faith, and strength of character, too, which he’d displayed once again in the most testing arena possible. But sometimes Pirius would catch Burden looking at him or Cohl almost longingly, as if he was desperate to be accepted, like an unpopular cadet in an Arches Barracks Ball.

  And Pirius noticed that in this strange time of the action’s aftermath, Burden was eating compulsively. He devoured as much of the treat rations he could get hold of, and in those first days he always seemed to have food in his mouth. Once Pirius saw him making himself vomit: the ancient system of fingers pushed down the throat.

  Burden’s mix of strength and weakness was unfathomable.

  Chapter 23

  After five days Pirius Red was still stuck on Pluto.

  While Nilis spent time working with the Plutinos, Pirius skulked in the spartan comforts of the corvette with the crew. These two Navy pilots, both women, were called Molo and Huber. They categorically refused to set foot off the ship onto this murky little world. They worked, ate, slept in their compartment. They were interested only in journeys, indifferent to destinations: they were pilots.

&n
bsp; They had heard rumors about Project Prime Radiant, though. They thought it was all a waste of time. As far as Pirius could make out, they believed that whatever you came up with, the Xeelee would counter it. You were never going to beat the Xeelee, they said. It seemed to be the prevalent attitude, here in Sol system.

  Of course there was an immense gulf between the two of them and Pirius. And there was something sexual going on: not uncommon on assignments like this. But at least they were Navy officers. So Pirius shared their bland rations, and played their elaborate games of chance, and immersed himself, for a while, in the comforting routines of Navy life.

  He tried to sort out his feelings.

  He told himself he hated the Plutinos for what they had done here. In the four months he had spent in Sol system, Pirius had got used to a lot of bizarre ideas. He had seen the wealth of Earth, the strangeness of its people, and the casual, dismissive way the precious Doctrines were regarded here—even what seemed to him the corruption of the likes of Gramm. Perhaps this was too exotic for his simple serving man’s imagination. But the sight of a Silver Ghost drifting over the icy ground of a world of Sol system itself, as if it had a right to be there, as if it owned it, when by rights it shouldn’t even exist—it was a challenge to a soldier’s deepest instincts, violating everything he had been brought up to value.

  No matter how much he thought about it, it didn’t get any clearer. And he had nobody to talk it over with. He certainly wasn’t about to discuss this with Nilis, whom he was starting to think was part of the problem. He wished Torec were here.

  At lights out he slept as long as he could. But all too soon the morning came.

  On the sixth day there was to be a briefing on the revitalized Ghosts’ gravastar technology.

  Nilis insisted that Pirius come out of the corvette and join him.

  As the two of them followed Draq, Mara, and the other Plutinos through the grubby corridors of the compound at Christy, the Commissary was actually humming. For Nilis, Pirius supposed, a day of lectures and earnest academic discussion was a day in paradise.

  “We’re here to assess this material for its weapons potential, Ensign,” Nilis said sternly. “I suggest you put aside your prejudices and do your duty.”

  Prejudices? “Yes, sir,” Pirius said coldly.

  Mara walked beside Pirius, but she ignored him. She hadn’t said a word to him since his hostile reaction to the Ghost.

  They were led to the most spacious dome of the complex. It was a chilly, cavernous place. Chairs and couches had been set in the middle of the hall, an island of furniture in a sea of empty floor. A relic of a failed colony, its surface tarnished to a golden hue by cosmic rays, this dome was far too big for the small modern population. Ancient bots hovered uncertainly, offering unappetizing-looking food and drink.

  And Pirius could see a Ghost drifting over the ice just outside the dome, obscured by the tint of the aged dome wall. Perhaps it was the one who called itself the Sink Ambassador. He wished with all his heart that it would go away.

  Draq climbed a little podium. Self-importantly, he began to outline the new idea of a “gravastar”: based on an ancient human theory, developed by a colony of Silver Ghosts here on Pluto-Charon, discovered by Nilis in his hasty trawls of the Olympus Archive, and identified as having the potential to be useful for Project Prime Radiant. “Everybody knows what a black hole is,” Draq began. “But everybody is wrong… .”

  Draq spoke too quickly, made too many weak jokes, and used too many technical phrases Pirius didn’t recognize at all, such as “Mazur-Mottola solutions” and “negative energy density” and “an interior de Sitter condensate phase matched to an exterior Schwarzschild geometry.” But he had a lot of Virtual schematics, immense displays that filled up much of this huge dome’s volume. The special effects were spectacular and entertaining, and Draq, beneath his gaudy creations, gestured like a showman.

  A black hole came about if a lump of matter collapsed so far that its surface gravity increased to the point where you would need to travel at lightspeed to escape it. It had happened during the fiery instants after the Big Bang, and could occur nowadays when a giant star imploded. Within its “event horizon,” the surface of no return, still the implosion continued.

  Thus the basic geography of a black hole, familiar to every pilot in the Navy. If you fell through the event horizon you could never escape. You would be drawn inexorably into the singularity at the center, a place where the compression forces had exponentiated to the point where spacetime itself was ripped open. Pirius idly watched gaudy displays of exploding stars, Big Bang compression waves, and unlucky smeared-out cartoon pilots.

  But now Draq said that the most productive way to think about a black hole was to imagine that the event horizon enclosed a separate universe. After all, nothing within the horizon could ever communicate with anything outside. It was as if a gouge had been ripped out of our spacetime, and another universe patched into the hole. In fact, he said, with an enthusiastic but unwelcome diversion into equations, that was how you dealt with a black hole mathematically.

  Inside a conventional black hole, that new baby universe was doomed to implode forever into its singularity. But it didn’t have to be that way. What if that infant universe expanded? After all, that was how the outside universe seemed to behave, and it was possible for gravity to act as a repulsive force: the swelling of the universe itself was being driven by a field of “dark energy” with exactly that property. Draq said that—theoretically anyhow, under certain conditions—the great violence of the collapse of a massive object could shock a region of spacetime into a new configuration. And if that happened, yes, you certainly could create a new baby universe doomed not to collapse, but to expand.

  But that expansion was limited. The mass of the collapsing object still drew in matter from the outside world, so there was still an event horizon, the distance of lightspeed escape. But now the horizon was like a stationary shock wave, the place where the infall from the parent universe outside met the expansion of the infant within.

  This collision of universes created an “ultra-relativistic fluid,” as Draq called it, like the meniscus on a pond that separated water from air. This exotic stuff was gathered into a shell as thin as a quark, but a spoonful of it would weigh hundreds of tonnes. An unlucky infalling astronaut wouldn’t slide smoothly into the lethal interior, as she would if this were a conventional black hole. Instead, every particle of her mass would have to give up its gravitational energy at the shock front.

  This “gravastar” was no black hole; it would blaze brightly with the energy of continual destruction. But even so, Draq said, outlining a paradox Pirius didn’t begin to understand, the temperature of the shell would only be a billionth of a degree above absolute zero.

  Pirius failed to see the point of this. But he enjoyed the Virtual fireworks.

  Nilis had become increasingly restless as this went on. At last the Commissary lumbered to his feet. “Yes, yes, Commissary Draq, this is all very well. But this is nothing but theory—and antique theory at that. No such ‘gravastar’ has ever been observed in nature.”

  That was true, Draq conceded. The conditions needed to avoid a simple black-hole collapse were unlikely to occur by chance—an imploding object would need to shed a great deal of entropy to make the gravastar state possible, and nobody knew how that might occur in nature.

  Nilis demanded, “Then how do you know the bones of your theory support any meat, eh? And besides, you’re describing spherically symmetric solutions of the equations. If I were to find myself inside a gravastar I would be as cut off and trapped, not to mention doomed to incineration by the shock wave, as if I were in a common black hole! So, Commissary, what use is any of this?”

  Draq was clearly nervous, but he fixed his smile like a weapon. “But that’s why we need the Silver Ghosts, Commissary. To go beyond human theory. And to give us experimental verification… .”

  Nilis joined Draq under his implo
ding Virtuals, and they launched into a complex and convoluted argument, involving asymptotically matched solutions of partial differential equations and other exotica. Pirius had a pilot’s basic grasp of mathematics, but this was far beyond him.

  Mara approached him. She had her hands tucked into the sleeves of her robe. She whispered, “All this is a little rich for my blood, too. Perhaps we should take a walk.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes.

  “You don’t want to be with me.”

  “No, I don’t,” Mara said. “But it’s my duty to host you. And it’s your duty to understand what we’re doing here on Pluto—”

  “Don’t talk to me about duty.”

  “—even if that means you’re going to have to confront your feelings about the Silver Ghosts.”

  “Why have I got to ‘confront my feelings?’” he snapped. “The Ghosts shouldn’t be here. That isn’t a feeling. It’s a fact.”

  “What are you scared of?” she asked blandly.

  “That’s a stupid question.”

  She didn’t react. “It probably is. Will you come?”

  He sighed. It was her, or Draq’s partial differential equations. “All right.”

  Suited up, they walked out of the dome. Mara led him perhaps half a kilometer away from the domes of the Christy compound. They didn’t speak.

  Once more, the sharp-grained, ultracold frost of Pluto crunched beneath Pirius’s feet, and he tried not to be spooked by the immense mass of Charon poised silently above his head.

  They crossed a low ridge, perhaps the worn-down rim of another ancient crater, and approached a new structure. It was an open tangle of cables, wiring, small modules; it looked impractical to Pirius, more like a sculpture. But it seemed oddly familiar, and he dug for the memory, left over from some long-ago training session.