Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  There was a period of complicated politics, as factions of librarians fought each other over the basic resources that kept them alive. Strange bureaucratic kingdoms emerged at the heart of Olympus, like the ancient water empires of Earth’s Middle East, grabbing a monopoly on vital substances in order to wield power. But none of these “air empires” proved very enduring.

  At last another social solution was found. Nobody planned it: it simply emerged. But once it was established, it proved remarkably stable. In the end, it was all a question of blood ties.

  Despite the Coalition’s best efforts to establish birthing tanks, age-group cadres, and the rest of the homogenizing social apparatus it deployed elsewhere across the Galaxy, in the dark heart of Olympus, out of sight, families had always prospered. But now some of these clerkish matriarchs shifted their loyalties. The matriarchs began to produce more children of their own. They exerted pressure on their daughters not to have kids themselves but to stay at home, and help their mothers produce more brothers and sisters. It made sense, on a social level. These close ties kept the families united, and prevented ruinous squabbles over limited resources.

  And then the genes cut in. Organisms were after all only vehicles that genes used to ride to the next generation. If you remained childless yourself, the only way you could pass on your genes was indirectly, through the fraction you shared with your siblings. So, in these cramped, stifling conditions, as the daughters of librarians gave up their own chances to have babies in order to support more sisters from the loins of their fecund mothers, the genes were satisfied.

  It worked. The resource wars stopped. A handful of families grew spectacularly fast, spreading and merging, until at last the Archive was dominated by a single broad gene pool. Just five thousand years after the Olympus ground had first been broken, almost everybody in the Archive looked remarkably similar.

  The population swelled, united and organized by the peculiar new genetic politics. And there was plenty of time for adaptation.

  The peculiar society that had developed in the Archive was an ancient and stable form. Nobody was in control. People didn’t follow orders, but responded to what others did around them. This was local interaction, as the social analysts called it, reinforced by positive feedback, people reacting to their neighbors and evoking reactions in turn. And that was enough for things to get done. Food and other resources flowed back and forth through the warren of tunnels, the vital systems like air circulation were maintained, and even the nominal purpose of the Archive, the storage of data, was fulfilled—all without central direction. It was as if the Archive was a single composite organism with billions of faces.

  And that organism was bound together by genetic ties, the ties of family.

  “Beyond Sol system, other Coalescences have been discovered,” Luru Parz said. “Relics of the earlier Expansions. But all warrens are essentially the same. I think it’s a flaw in our mental processing. Anywhere the living is marginal, where people are crowded in on each other, and it pays to stay home with your mother rather than strike out on your own—out pops the eusocial solution, over and over. I sometimes wonder where the first Coalescence emerged: perhaps even before spaceflight, on Earth itself.

  “Of course the hives are terribly non-Doctrinal. Are these women human, as you are? No. They have evolved to serve a purpose for the Coalescence. And there are many specialists. You’ve seen them yourself: the long-legged mechanic types, the runners, the archivists with their deep, roomy brains. Specialists, you see, adapted to serve particular purposes, the better to serve the community as a whole—but all diverging from the human norm. Officially, everywhere they are found, the Coalition cleans out Coalescences—”

  “But not here,” Pirius said. “They left this one to develop, here, on Earth’s sister planet. On Mars.” And they gave it mankind’s treasure, he thought, the Archive of its past.

  He probed at his feelings. He found no anger. He felt only numb. Perhaps he had experienced too much, seen too much. But this was even worse than finding a nest of Silver Ghosts in Sol system. To allow humans to diverge like this, here at the very heart of Sol system—it went against the basics of Hama Druz’s teachings.

  Luru seemed to sense his discomfort. “Nobody meant it to be like this, Ensign. And when it did happen it was simply too useful to discard, no matter what the Druz Doctrines had to say. In the end, the powerful folk who run the Coalition are pragmatists. Like you.”

  It was a relief to Pirius when a corpulent Virtual of Minister Gramm gathered in the air, shadowed by a nervous, barefoot Nilis. He and Luru Parz had been tracked down.

  Nilis grasped the situation much more quickly than Pirius. He didn’t have to fake his anger and repugnance.

  But Gramm was lordly, defiant. “So now you know about Olympus. Do you think I will apologize for it to the likes of you?

  “Listen to me. This Archive is essential to the continuance of the great projects of the Coalition. We humans are poor at the archival of information, you know. Paper records rot in a few thousand years at most. Digitally archived data survives better, so long as it is regularly transferred from store to store. But even such data stores are subject to slow corruption, for instance, from radiation. The half-life of our data is only ten thousand years. But all our efforts are dwarfed by what is achieved in the natural world. DNA far outdoes tablets of clay or stone. Some of our genes are a billion years old—the deep ancient ones, shared across the great domains of life—and over the generations genetic information has been copied more than twenty billion times, with an error rate of less than one in a trillion.”

  He sighed. “We are fighting a war on scales of space and time that defy our humanity. We need to remember better by an order of magnitude if we are to sustain ourselves as a galactic power. And so we have this place. This Archive is already ancient. Its generations of clerk-drones live for nothing but to copy bits of data, meaningless to them, from one store to another. Perhaps the hive will one day be able to emulate the copying fidelity of the genes—who knows? It’s certainly a goal that no other human social form could possibly deliver. Commissary, like it or not, hives are good libraries!”

  Nilis shouted, “And for that grandiose goal you will tolerate this deviance in the heart of Sol system? Your hypocrisy is galling!” His raised voice disturbed the swimming mothers; they drifted across their pools, away from him.

  “You always did think small, Nilis,” Gramm said dismissively. “In a way it’s rather elegant to turn one of our fundamental human flaws into a source of strength, don’t you think? And speaking of corruption and deviance—you,” he challenged Luru Parz. “What is it you want here, you old witch?”

  “I told you I knew where the bodies were buried,” she said levelly. “Gramm, once again you’re stalling over funding Nilis’s projects. That will stop.”

  Gramm growled, “You have threatened me before. Do you really think exposing this hive-mountain will bring down the Coalition?”

  “No,” she said, unperturbed. “But it will show you I’m serious. There are far worse secrets in Sol system than this, Minister Gramm, as you know better than I do. And now you are going to help me find a weapon. Nilis needs something to strike at the Prime Radiant. I think I know where to find one.”

  Nilis looked interested. “Where?”

  “In the past, of course. But locked away, in an archive buried even deeper than this one.”

  Gramm glared at her, his mouth working. But Pirius saw that Luru Parz had beaten him again.

  Nilis was staring at her. “Madam, you are a nest of mysteries. But this deeper archive—where is it?”

  She said, “Callisto.”

  The name meant nothing to Pirius. But Nilis blanched.

  The strange standoff lasted a few more minutes, until blue-helmeted Guardians in fully armored skinsuits broke into the chamber to escort them all away.

  As they left, Pirius drew Luru Parz aside. “There’s something I still don’t understand. Why
did Tek give me that contact chip in the first place? What did he want?”

  She sighed. “He was just probing, seeking an opportunity. It’s the way a Coalescence works.”

  Pirius shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would Tek act on behalf of the Coalescence? He is a parasite.”

  “But he’s part of the hive, too. Don’t you see that? It’s just that he doesn’t know it. None of them does.” She plucked his sleeve. “Come on, Ensign, let’s get out of here. Even through my mask, the stink of this place is making me feel ill.”

  They hurried after the Guardians, making for the cool, empty surface of Mars.

  Behind them, the Coalescent mothers swam in their milky pools, and naked, round-shouldered attendants scurried anxiously.

  Chapter 30

  Pirius Blue had almost forgotten how it was to sit in a greenship cockpit.

  It was like being suspended in open space, with nothing between you and the sky. And this Galaxy-center sky was full of stars, a clustering of globes that receded to infinity. Many of them were bright blue youngsters, but others glowered red, resentfully old before their time. There was a great sense of motion about the barrage of stars, a sense of immense dynamism—and in truth these crowded stars were flying rapidly through this lethal space, though their motion was only visible on timescales of years, too slow for mayfly humans to perceive.

  Huddled in a corner of Pirius’s greenship cockpit, Virtual Nilis looked faintly absurd in his skinsuit, Virtual-tailored to fit his ample girth. He said, wondering, “So many stars, giant, violent stars, far more massive than Earth’s sun, crowded so close they slide past like light globes lining a roadway… . It is as bright as a tropical sky! There is an old paradox. Once it was believed that the universe is infinite and uniform, everywhere full of stars. But that cannot be so, you see, for then whichever direction you looked, your eye would meet a star, and the whole sky would shine as bright as the surface of the sun. Perhaps that paradoxical sky would look something like this.”

  “It’s a beautiful sight, Commissary,” Pirius Blue said. “But remember, in this place, every star is a fortress.”

  That shut him up, to Pirius’s relief. Pirius had work to do; the mission clock was counting down. He blipped the greenship’s attitude controllers, tiny inertial generators fixed to each of the three nacelles and to the main body.

  Before him, the spangling of crowded Galaxy-center stars shifted. He made out seven sparks against that background, the emerald lights of the seven greenships that were going to accompany him and his crew into the unknown depths of the Cavity.

  “Systems seem nominal,” he reported.

  Enduring Hope called from his engineer’s position, “Sure, genius, like you can feel the ship’s degrees of freedom just by sitting there. In fact I fixed the inertial control before you started playing.”

  “I knew I could rely on you, Hope.”

  Now Cohl chipped in, “Do you want to give me some warning before you start throwing this tub around the sky? I’m trying to get the nav systems calibrated. I know that’s merely a detail to you two heroes, but I’m sentimentally attached to knowing where I am.”

  “It’s all yours, Navigator… .”

  Virtual Nilis was wide-eyed. “Pirius—you must be glad to see your crew again. Back in their rightful habitat, so to speak. But is it always like this?”

  “Oh, no,” Pirius said. “I think we’re a little subdued today.”

  But it had been good when the three of them had been reunited, down on Quin: Cohl with the limp that had been her souvenir from Factory Rock, and Enduring Hope, back from his artillery brigade. Hope, amazingly, had lost weight. It turned out to be tough physical work, out on those monopole-cannon battalions, and after months of it, Hope had never looked fitter.

  And it had certainly been a joy when the three of them had first boarded a ship again, which they had quickly dubbed The Assimilator’s Other Claw. It wasn’t much of a combat ship, as it was laden with a massive sensor pod that spoiled the sleek lines of its main body. And it could never be the same as their first ship, of course. But it was a ship nevertheless—their ship. They had marked their skinsuits with sigils that recalled the first Claw, and Pirius Blue felt an extraordinary surge of joy to be back in a greenship blister.

  Nilis was watching him with his characteristic mixture of pride and longing. “I suppose the banter is a social lubricant. But I’m surprised you get anything done. Well, I’m privileged to be here. To see this. It’s so different. You know, we humans aren’t designed to function in such an environment. On Earth you are on a plain, so it seems, a few kilometers wide, with clouds a few kilometers up. In the sky everything is so remote it looks two-dimensional—even the Moon. There is no depth. The scale is kilometers, or infinity, with a gap in between. Here, though, you have stars scattered through the depth of the sky—space is filled up—and you get a sense of immensity, of perspective that’s impossible on Earth.”

  Pirius shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  “Oh, I think so.” He peered at Pirius curiously. “To comprehend a sky like this, the very structure of your sensorium, your mind, must differ from mine, Pirius Blue. Genetically we could be identical. But our minds are so different we might as well belong to alien species.”

  This was uncomfortably heretical to Pirius. Everybody was essentially the same; that was the Doctrine’s decree. If Nilis wanted to believe he was some kind of divergent, that was up to him. “I’m just trying to do my job, Commissary.”

  “I know.” Nilis sighed. “And my gabbling is getting in the way! Thank you again for hosting me.”

  Hosting: there was something else Pirius didn’t want to think about too hard. As the whole purpose of the mission was to take Nilis through the Cavity, it had been decreed that the safest place to lodge him was with Pirius—that is, in him. All flight crew had implants of various kinds studded through their nervous systems, serving as trackers, backup comm systems, medical controls, system interfaces. It had been trivial to download Virtual Nilis into Pirius’s head. Trivial, but not welcome. But it had been orders.

  Nilis held up his hands. “I know you’re uncomfortable. I’m here to observe, not to interfere. I won’t get in your way.”

  Before accepting the download, Pirius had insisted on an off switch. “No,” he said vehemently. “You won’t.”

  A peremptory voice called over the common loop. “This is Dray. Shut up and listen.”

  The babble on the loop immediately dried up. Pirius glanced at the array of seven ships around him. Dray’s was one of a pair directly ahead, the tip of the loose wedge formation. Commodore Dray was a formidable, muscular woman, her head shaven bare, and the leader of this expeditionary force.

  She said now, “Here are your idents. I am Wedge Leader …” She ran through the other crews, numbering them in sequence, one side then the other, so that Dray, in Wedge Zero, led a line of even-numbered ships, and Wedge One led a line of odd numbers. Pirius in the Other Claw was Wedge Seven.

  “And here are the rules,” said Dray. “One. I am in command, and none of you is going to so much as fart without my permission. I’m talking to you, Pirius. I’ve seen your record. If it was up to me you would still be digging graves on a Rock. But it wasn’t up to me, so here you are, and if there are any stupid stunts on this trip I’ll shoot you out of the sky myself.”

  Pirius had no doubt she meant it. “Sir.”

  “Rule two. We are going to fulfill our objectives. Rule three. We are eight ships going in, and we will be eight coming out, subject only to rules one and two.”

  A chorus of voices replied. “Understood.”

  “Now, I had imagined you had all seen the briefing, but perhaps not. I also assumed you were experienced crews, but this formation is so slack I must be wrong about that, too. Form up, damn it! I’m looking at you, Wedge Three.”

  “Sir.”

  The seven lights slid subtly across the sky, and Pirius blipped his sublight dri
ve to tweak his own position.

  “We’re a minute from our first FTL jump, and we’re going to hop in formation. The first hop will be the most difficult… .”

  That was true, for this tiny formation was about to leap right into the heart of the Galaxy.

  “When we get through that, it’s plain sailing,” Dray said. “And even if it isn’t, it will be fun. Nearly time. Good luck, everyone.” Another quick chorus of acknowledgment. “Five, four, three …”

  The Galaxy’s inner structure was nested around the ferocious mass at the very center.

  Within the broad plane of the spiral arms was set the Core. That immense shining bulge itself contained a denser kernel, the Central Star Mass: millions of stars crowded into a few tens of light-years.

  Immense streams of molecular gases poured inward through the Mass—but a few light-years out from the center they collided with a ferocious solar wind, blowing out of the very center. That solar wind created the Cavity, a hole in the heart of the Galaxy, surrounded by a stationary shock front of infalling gas, the Circumnuclear Ring. At the Circumnuclear Ring, the human expansion through the Galaxy had stalled; the soldiers who fought and died there called it the Front. The Cavity had its own marvels: the Baby Spiral, a miniature Galaxy contained wholly within those few scraped-clear light-years, and deeper still the dense, fast-moving astrophysics around the central black hole itself.

  Dray and his little flotilla of greenships planned a bold FTL jump of no less than five light-years, which would take them right through the Front and into the Cavity. They were going to make this leap in the relativistic turbulence of the Galaxy center, whose violence, even as far out as this, reached up into the higher dimensions on which FTL technology depended. And they were going to do it in formation.