Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  The Ghost said, “But we have a solution.”

  Nilis and Darc both turned to face the Ghost, startled.

  Torec smiled. “So that’s why you’ve come. You weren’t concerned about my health at all.”

  The Ghost seemed to think that over. “No offense.”

  Nilis gaped. “Did a Silver Ghost just make a joke?”

  Darc said sternly, “You say you have a solution. Describe it.”

  The Ambassador rolled, and Virtual images scrolled in the air. Torec recognized a map of the phase space of a system. It was a schematic diagram of the possible states of the gravastar shield. It looked like a slice of a rolling landscape, with valleys, peaks, and plains, and it was marked with contours that showed regions of chaos and stability, attractors and poles.

  “The trick,” said the Ghost, “is to use the instability, not to fight it. You are trying to emulate the stability of the strongest attractor, which is the spherically symmetric solution here.” A point on the map winked red. “So you allow the shield to form at low velocities, or even when the projector is stationary. You find an equilibrium, but it is not stable. Then when you try to fly, the smallest instability disrupts the solution. Your running child trips on a pebble, Commander, and the pole is dropped.”

  Nilis laughed out loud. “You have spent a long time studying human idioms.”

  “We have little else to do,” the Ghost said.

  “So,” Darc growled, “what do you suggest instead?”

  “It would be better to operate the projector when it is being carried at close to lightspeed.”

  Nilis frowned. He walked up to the image and poked his finger into its shining innards. “But that would bring us up to this region.” It was the complex border between order and chaos. “The shield would be no more than meta-stable.”

  “But solutions in this part of the phase space, on the edge of chaos, would be responsive to small adjustments.”

  “Ah.” Nilis nodded. “Which would make the shield more manageable, because it would respond more sensitively; we could control out the instabilities before a catastrophic disruption.”

  Darc was visibly unhappy. “How rapidly would we have to react?” He brought up a Virtual of his own, ran some quick calculations. “There,” he said in triumph. “Look at that! Your meta-stable shield will flap like a sheet in a breeze. There’s no way we could react quickly enough to respond to it.”

  “Of course you could,” the Ambassador said. “You have arbitrarily high processing speeds available on your ship. Your CTC-processor technology—”

  Darc shot to his feet and stalked up to the Ghost, fists clenched. “Is that the game? How do you even know about that? If you think I am going to let you anywhere near the CTC system—”

  Nilis said, “Commander, please. We’re simply discussing possibilities.”

  Darc remained standing, glaring at the Ghost. “Why are you doing this? Humans destroyed your kind. Why would you help your conquerors?”

  “Curiosity,” the Ghost said.

  “And nothing else?” Darc asked heavily.

  “Nothing. You recreated us at a whim. You could destroy us as easily. We have no hope.”

  Darc’s eyes narrowed with suspicion, but he stayed silent.

  Nilis was still thinking over the idea. “This would actually simplify the overall design, of course … You don’t seem happy, Ensign.”

  Torec said, “I’m a pilot, sir. No pilot likes giving up control.”

  “Hmm. I can sympathize with that. And of course this sort of active-control system isn’t without risks. You would go into battle behind an intrinsically unstable system. If the CTC failed, you would die immediately.”

  “But we all die one day, Commissary.”

  He embarrassed her by allowing his eyes to fill up. “Lethe, this laconic courage—I’m sorry! I can’t get used to it.”

  The Ghost said, “You have one more test ship.”

  “One more chance,” Nilis said. “The modifications would be straightforward.” He stared at Darc.

  Darc held his stubborn stance for a moment, then seemed to give in. “All right. Lethe take this whole plagued project! But what are we to do for a crew?”

  Torec sat up straight. “I’m willing to give it another go, sir.”

  Nilis said, “I’d expect nothing less. But we must make this crucial trial work. I would suggest that the ensign’s ideal crewmates are in this room.”

  Darc stared at him, then at the Ghost, which rolled silently. “You have got to be joking.”

  But he wasn’t.

  Chapter 27

  “The Central Star Mass,” Nilis said. “Isn’t that what you call it, Pirius Blue? The Mass—what a mundane name for a place where you can find ten million stars in a space a few light-years across—a volume in which, at the Galactic vicinity of Sol, you would on average find one. How marvelous, that we feeble humans should have come so far!”

  He had called Pirius Blue to the small quarters he had been allocated in Quin’s Officer Country. His face shining with enthusiasm, his long robe as scuffed and threadbare as ever, he bumbled around the room, setting out his data desks on the low table. The Commissary was just as Pirius remembered from the trial, though he seemed older, rather more careworn. But Nilis hadn’t been prepared for Pirius’s new eyes; at first sight he had recoiled, his shock comical.

  This wasn’t the real Commissary, of course. Nilis was too busy with his mysterious projects in Sol system to come all the way to the center again in person. This was only a Virtual.

  Nilis was still struggling to get political support for his schemes. He said he had forced his way into Quin Base on a pretext. He had managed to persuade his bosses at the Commission for Historical Truth that it was time somebody took a fresh look at the deviant religions sprouting here in the Core. But quizzing This Burden Must Pass about the nature of the Ultimate Observer was not Nilis’s true goal.

  “Let me get this straight,” Pirius said. “Sir,” he added.

  Nilis waved that away. “Please, please. We know each other too well for formality!”

  But he was talking about a different Pirius, Blue thought, indeed a different Nilis. “You want to send a scouting mission inside the Front—into the Cavity. You want to fly to Chandra itself.”

  “Or as close as we can get to it, yes.”

  Nilis talked rapidly about the great project he was devising out at Sol’s lonely orbit—aided, in part, by Pirius’s own younger self, his FTL twin Pirius Red. Pirius Blue had heard nothing of this before, and he was stunned by Project Prime Radiant’s scope and ambition.

  “But if we are to strike successfully we have to know more about Chandra itself,” Nilis said. “Even after three thousand years of war here at the Galaxy’s heart, we still know woefully little.”

  And that, he said, was where Pirius Blue came in.

  “You want me to fly the mission.”

  “To scope it out, define, it, choose a crew… . Yes! You will be the commander, Pirius Blue. It will be a historic flight.”

  “Historic? Suicidal.”

  Nilis said gravely, “Suicidal? Not necessarily. There are many myths about this war, Pirius Blue. We are locked into ways of thinking, ways of fighting. After three thousand years of stasis we have talked ourselves into believing that taking the war to the Xeelee is reckless, even suicidal, as you say. But we’re only talking about a scouting mission! And how do you know it would be suicidal? Do you know how long it is since a mission of this type was actually studied? I’ve looked high and low and I can’t find one—a long time indeed!—even though the information is of such obvious value. But everybody knows it’s impossible. And of course, I am reluctantly coming to see, there are plenty in high places with a vested interest in the war not being concluded… .”

  “Sir?”

  “Never mind. Anyhow, as commander it would be your duty to make the mission survivable, wouldn’t it?”

  Pirius was full of doubt. E
verything Nilis said sounded reasonable—and exciting. But it also conflicted with his training, everything he had been brought up to believe.

  Nilis said, a little exasperated, “Look—I would not order you to do this. Yes, there are obvious dangers; yes, you might not survive—and, yes, I am asking you to have faith in me, in a fat old fool from Earth. But the mission is, quite simply, vitally necessary. We must know more.” He watched Pirius’s face with a kind of wistful longing. “Oh, Pirius, this is such a strange encounter. I feel I know you so well! Look at you now, the way you hold your head when you listen to me, your seriousness, your focus on your duty, even the play of the light in your eyes. You’re so familiar. And yet it’s Pirius Red I’ve come to know, and you don’t know me at all, save for your brief encounter with a bumbling old fool at your hearing! It’s so strange, so strange. Sometimes I think that by hurling ourselves around the Galaxy faster than the speed of light we are pushing our humanity too far.”

  Pirius suddenly saw a new element in his relationship with the Commissary—or at least his FTL twin’s. This old man was fond of him, Pirius thought with a queasy horror. His unwelcome twin, Pirius Red, had allowed this ridiculous old man to form some kind of sentimental bond with him. Surely it wasn’t sexual. But he knew Nilis had a “family background.” Perhaps it was as a father might feel for a son, an uncle for a nephew, or some similarly unhealthy, atavistic tie. What a mess, he thought.

  Nilis’s Virtual was of the highest quality. In the jargon, it was an avatar.

  The avatar’s job was to live out this chapter of Nilis’s life on the original’s behalf as fully as was possible. The avatar was a fully sentient copy of the real Nilis, with identical memories up to the moment when this copy had first been generated. Here in Quin Base, Virtual Nilis couldn’t touch anything, of course; those data desks on the table were as fake as he was. But while here, for authenticity of experience, he would have to live according to human routines. He would eat his Virtual food, sleep, even eliminate his unreal waste. He could even smell, he said, and he declared that Quin Base stank of something called “boiled cabbage.” And when his visit was done, his records would be sent back to Earth, where they would be integrated into Nilis’s own memory.

  Nilis had wanted to take home as rich an experience as he could, the better to shape his subsequent decision-making. But he would always have the odd feeling that he had lived out these ten days twice, once in his garden on Earth, and once here at the Galaxy’s crowded heart.

  Pirius tried to concentrate on the mission. He could see its value. “But—why me? I haven’t even flown since the magnetar.”

  “Because I know you.” His big watery eyes were still fixed on Pirius. “Because we’ve already proven we can work well together—”

  “You’re still talking about my twin.”

  “But your twin is you—he has all your talent, all your potential—save only that in you that potential has begun to be realized. And besides,” he said with disarming honesty, “how many frontline pilots do I actually know? Oh, come, Pirius! You know, in your shoes I would be galvanized by curiosity. We may be skirting a deep scientific mystery here, Pirius, something that could tell us a great deal about the nature of our universe, and our place in it.”

  Pirius could hardly deny that. But when he thought about leaving here, about leaving Tili Three and Burden and the others, he felt deeply uneasy. He already felt guilty at having survived on Factory Rock, where so many had fallen; how could he justify walking out on them now?

  Nilis leaned forward, made to touch Pirius’s shoulder, remembered it was impossible. “Pirius, you’re hesitating, and I don’t know why. You’re wasted here!” he said. “All these drone kids, their endless digging, digging. You’re meant for better things, Pilot.”

  Pirius stood up. “And every one of those drone kids,” he said, “is better than you, Commissary.” Nilis said nothing more, and Pirius left the room.

  Pirius Blue talked it over with Cohl.

  “The whole thing’s insane,” he said. In three thousand years, there had of course been many scouting missions beyond the Front and into the Cavity, deep into the nest. That complex place, crowded with stellar marvels as well as the greatest concentration of Xeelee firepower in the Galaxy, was known to every pilot as a death trap. “We’d be throwing our lives away.”

  “We?”

  He sighed. “If I have to do this, I’d want you with me. But it’s academic, because nobody’s going anywhere.”

  “Because it’s insane?”

  “Correct.”

  “Well,” she said, “not necessarily.” She was lying on her bunk, her hands locked behind her head; she seemed undisturbed by the usual barracks clamor around her. In fact, she had something of Nilis’s remoteness. But then, Pirius thought with loyal exasperation, Cohl was a navigator, and most navigators were halfway to double domes anyhow.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe it could be done. There’s a lot of junk in there, you know, in the Cavity. Astrophysical junk. Plenty of places to hide.” She rolled over. They had no data desks here, no fancy Virtual-generation facilities, and so she started sketching with a wet finger in the dirt on the floor. “Suppose you went in this way …”

  The Cavity was a rough sphere some fifteen light-years across at the center of the Mass, bounded by the great static shock of the Front. It was called a “Cavity” because it was blown clear of hot gas and dust by Chandra and the other objects at the very center. But it was far from empty, in fact crowded with exotic objects. As well as a million glowering stars, there was the Baby Spiral, three dazzling lanes of infalling gas and dust. And the Baby, like everything else in the Cavity, was centered on the Prime Radiant itself: Chandra, the supermassive black hole, utterly immovable, the pivot around which the immense machinery of the inner Galaxy turned.

  Cohl said, “There are lots of ways in. You could track one of the Baby’s arms, for instance. Even so you’d have to take some kind of cover.”

  “Cover?”

  “Other ships. Rocks, even.” She glanced at him. “Not everybody is going to get through; you have to take enough companions with you to make sure that somebody makes it. It’s a question of statistics, Pirius.” She rubbed her chin. “Of course the navigation would be tricky. You’re talking about finding your way through all that astrophysics, and keeping a small flotilla together… .”

  He saw she was losing herself in the technicalities of planning such an ambitious jaunt. But technicalities were not uppermost in his own mind.

  After a while she noticed his silence. “You’re not happy about this, are you?”

  “Am I supposed to be?”

  She said, “It won’t make any difference, you know. To them. Whatever we do.”

  “To who?”

  “To the dead ones.”

  Pirius looked at her. “I thought it was only me who had thoughts like that.”

  “You ought to talk about it more. You’ll just have to make up your own mind about the mission, Pirius. But I’ll follow you, whatever you decide.”

  He was moved. “Thank you.”

  She shrugged. “What’s to thank? Without you, the Xeelee would have fried me already—twice. And as for the guilt, maybe you should go talk to This Burden Must Pass. He’s always full of philosophical crap, if that’s what you need.”

  That made him laugh, but it seemed like a good idea. But when he went to find Burden, Nilis had got there before him.

  Virtual Nilis, reluctantly fulfilling the nominal purpose for his projection here at Quin, was interviewing Burden in his small office.

  Pirius wasn’t the only visitor. Perhaps a dozen cadets and privates had gathered outside the office’s partition walls. They sat on bunks, or storage boxes, or just on the floor, and they stared into the room with steady longing.

  Nilis seemed relieved to close the door on them. “They’re coming in relays,” he whispered, shocked.

  “That’s military training f
or you,” Burden said dryly. He was sitting at ease in one of the office’s small upright chairs. Unlike the Commissary, he seemed quite relaxed.

  Nilis whispered, “I don’t know what they want.”

  Pirius grunted. “That’s obvious. They’re here because they think you’re going to take Burden away.”

  Nilis, bustling clumsily around the room, flapped his hands. “I’m here to analyze, not to condemn. Even Commissaries are pragmatic, you know; if this quasi-faith helps the youngsters out there keep to their duties we’re quite willing to turn a blind eye. But we do have to be sure things don’t go too far. Of course, by showing such devotion to their, ah, spiritual leader, those cadets are actually making it more likely, not less, that sanctions will have to be applied.”

  Burden said, “Commissary, maybe you should go out there and talk to them about it. They’re the ones who are affected by my ‘sermonizing,’ after all.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that would be appropriate—no, no, not at all.”

  Pirius thought that was an excuse. How could the Commissary possibly do a proper analysis of Burden’s faith if he didn’t talk to those actually affected? Nilis seemed afraid, he thought: afraid of Quin, or of the people in it, which was why he clung to this little room.

  Pirius sat down on the room’s only other chair. Nilis, with nowhere to sit, flapped and fluffed a little more; then, with a sigh, he snapped his fingers to conjure up a Virtual couch. “Not really supposed to be doing magic tricks, you know,” he said apologetically. “Against the rules of an avatar!”

  Pirius asked, “So, Commissary, has he converted you to a belief in the Ultimate Observer?”

  “How comforting it would be if he had,” said Nilis, a little wistfully. “But I know too much! Religions have long been a theoretical interest of mine, which is how I was able to wangle this assignment—and intellectually is the only way I can respond, you see.