Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  Pirius thought he could see what was really going on here, beneath the dry academic discussions. These ancient agencies weren’t concerned for the myriad people in their care; they were only concerned about their own survival. If the war went away, he thought with a strange thrill, any justification for the continuance of the Coalition itself, and its Galaxy full of ideological cops, would vanish. And then what?

  Perhaps he was growing cynical.

  The session overran its allotted time. At last Gramm banged his gavel, and ordered the committee to reconvene in the morning.

  While they had talked, the planet had spun on its axis, taking Conurbation 11729 and its busy inhabitants into its shadow.

  Nilis’s party was assigned quarters on a residential floor of the huge building. The room given to Torec and Pirius seemed impossibly luxurious. After a while, they stripped blankets off the too-soft beds, making themselves a nest on the floor.

  But a bot called, sent by Nilis. It contained some technical updates Gramm had requested, and Pirius, as Nilis’s representative, was to accompany the bot to the Minister’s office. Reluctantly Pirius allowed his uniform to slither back into place over his body.

  The bot led the way through a maze of carpeted corridors to the Minister’s office.

  Pirius had been expecting opulence. The room was richer than anything he had seen at Arches Base, of course—and a lot richer than Nilis’s apartment, for instance. The carpet on the floor was a thick pile, and even the walls were covered by some kind of heavily textured paper.

  But the room was windowless: that was significant, as Pirius had learned that the most prized rooms in any Conurbation-dome building had window views. And this was a working room. The only furniture was a desk, a small conference table, and chairs—and a couch, upholstered with maroon fabric and laden with cushions, on which rested the great bulk of the Minister of Economic Warfare himself.

  Gramm had kicked his shoes off, and loosened his robe. Lying there, his stomach had spread out like a sack of mercury, and his jowly face was slack and tired. A table floated at Gramm’s right hand; Pirius could smell spicy food. Bots and small Virtual displays hovered around Gramm’s head, and voices whispered, constantly updating the Minister on whatever was happening in the corners of his complex world. Gramm’s fat hand dug into the plates, but he never so much as glanced at what he was pushing into his mouth. Pirius had never seen the Minister look so deflated, so exhausted.

  It seemed to take the Minister a long time to notice the ensign standing to attention at the door. He snapped, “Oh, come in, boy, come in. I won’t bite. Not you, anyhow.”

  Pirius stepped forward. “Sir, I’ve come to deliver—”

  “A message, I know, from your ragged-robed master. Well, you’ve done it.” He looked away and continued to eat.

  Pirius waited awkwardly. He was becoming used to these nonmilitary types with their ignorance of protocol, but he was reluctant to move until he was dismissed. Maybe he’d be left standing here all night.

  At length Gramm noticed him. “You still here? I suppose it’s been a difficult day for you. Must all be very strange.” He guffawed. “Though it was a delicious moment when you told that pompous old fool Kolo Yehn that he had an inferiority complex about the Xeelee. Hah! I’ll have to make sure that’s highlighted in the minute.”

  Pirius felt color rise in his cheeks. “I was only speaking my mind. Sir.”

  Gramm eyed him, chewing. “Lethe, you’re a spirited one. Look, Ensign, I can imagine what you think of me.” He brushed crumbs from his vast belly. “I can see myself through your eyes.”

  “I have no personal opinions, sir.”

  “Oh, garbage. But what you perhaps don’t see—look here. Do you know what my job is?”

  “You’re Minister of—”

  “That’s my role. My function is to prosecute this damn war. I take the strategic goals of the Coalition as a whole and turn them into operational goals. Maybe you’ve seen today that given the infighting that goes on at every level, even at the highest reaches of the Coalition, those strategic goals aren’t always clear. But that’s the principle.

  “Now, all the time I am bombarded.” He waved a hand, and the bots and Virtuals around his couch swarmed like insects. “I have whole teams of experts, advisors, lobby groups, all battling for my ear, even within my own Ministry. And then, of course, there are the other agencies beyond Economic Warfare to be dealt with—negotiated with, beaten back, soothed. And all of this against the background of the war.” He sighed and pushed more food into his mouth. “The war, the damn war. It’s more than just a theater for heroic exploits by boy heroes like you, Ensign. You know, you’re lucky, out there in the Core. All you have to think about is your comrades, your ship, your own hide. I have to think of the bigger picture—of all the millions of little Piriuses running around and hunting for glory.”

  He propped himself up on his elbow. “And here’s that bigger picture. We’ve beaten back the Xeelee. We’ve pushed them out of the disc of the Galaxy. It’s been an epochal achievement. But they still lurk in the Galaxy’s Core. We have them bottled up there—but the cost of that containment is huge. We have turned the whole Galaxy into a machine, a single vast machine dedicated to a single goal: to keeping the Xeelee trapped. It’s dreadful, it’s costly—it’s working. But I have to be parsimonious with my resources.

  “Now, whether you see it or not—and no matter what that old monster Luru Parz says—we’ve been responsible with your project so far. We’ve tried to apply resources sensibly, commensurate with the successes you’ve actually achieved, bit by bit as the concept has been proved. But now we’re being asked to take a much greater leap of faith. You might think a couple of dozen greenships isn’t much in a war that spans a Galaxy. You might think you’re under excessive scrutiny—that you’re being opposed, arbitrarily, through the mechanism of the funding. Perhaps some do have such a motive. But for me it’s not like that. We’re stretched thin, Ensign, thinner than you might understand. Even a single ship, lost unnecessarily, might make the difference, might cause it all to unravel. That’s the great fear—and Nilis’s is only one of a hundred, a thousand such requests I have to deal with right now. Do you see what you’re asking me to risk, if we commit to Nilis’s madcap jaunt?”

  “You fear that if we draw resources away, the Front could collapse.”

  “Yes. And if the Xeelee were to punch out of there, we’d be lost; they would surely never allow us to establish a position of dominance again. Nilis isn’t unique, you know. Especially in the Commission, there are many corners, lots of bits of unaccounted-for funding—plenty of places for the likes of Nilis to dream their dreams.”

  “Nilis is more than a dreamer.”

  “Well, perhaps. But, as I say, he isn’t unique. It doesn’t take a genius to perceive that our glorious war effort has stalled, that it is an exercise in monstrous waste. At any moment there must be dozens of Nilises running around with bright ideas for shortening or ending the war.” He rubbed his greasy jowl. “And maybe once a generation you will have a true Nilis, a plan so well thought-out, so convincing, that you believe it might, just might, work.”

  “Once a generation?”

  “It’s in the records. No doubt Nilis himself is aware of many of them.”

  “But since the war began, there have been a lot of generations.”

  Gramm laughed. “Quite so. And a lot of bright ideas. Some of them probably bore passing resemblances to Nilis’s scheme.”

  “So what happened to them?”

  “They were blocked. By people like me.” He shifted and stared at Pirius. “Look at it from my point of view. Now, I know that to win the war we’re going to have to take a risk. But the question is which risk? Is Nilis’s idea the one—”

  “Or should you wait until a smarter idea comes along?”

  Gramm’s eyes narrowed. “You do have qualities, Ensign; I can see why Nilis plucked you out of the mire. You see, the easiest thin
g for me to do would be to pass on this Project of yours—not even to turn it down; just to stall. I won’t be in this office forever. Let my successor make the difficult decisions, if she dares. This war has lasted three thousand years. The battle is not mine. I am merely … a custodian. How could I bear it if the crucial failure came on my watch? … But I fear deferral isn’t an option for me.”

  “Sir? Why not?”

  “Because we’re losing.”

  The vast Galaxy-wide operation, held together by the rigid ideology and ruthless policies of the Coalition, was containing the Xeelee. But mankind really was stretched to the limit. And, bit by bit, entropy was taking its toll.

  “You can forget about this theoretical Commissary nonsense of a perpetual war, of forging a perfect mankind in its cold fire. The machine isn’t that perfect, believe me. We won’t fall tomorrow, or the day after. I don’t know when it will come—probably not even in my time. But come it will.” He stared at the ensign again, and Pirius saw despair in his deep-sunk eyes. “Now do you see why I’m listening to Nilis?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I know Nilis understands this history, and he’s learned from it. He’s played the bureaucratic game with surprising skill, you know. But now we’re beyond games, and coming to the crunch decision. Can you promise me that your mentor’s lunatic scheme is going to work?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No. How easy it would be if you could!”

  Pirius thought he understood. This man, so alien to anything in Pirius’s background, was conscientiously trying to make an impossible decision, a decision that could save or doom mankind, one of a hundred such decisions that faced him daily, against a background of half-truths, hope, promises, and lies. “We both have our duty, sir. As you implied, perhaps mine is easier.”

  Gramm rubbed his eyes with fleshy fingers. “Lethe, Ensign, that pompous old fool Kolo Yehn was right. Whatever we’re running out of, at least there’s no shortage of courage. Get out of here.” He waved his hand. “Go, before I have to throw you out.”

  Pirius reported this conversation to Nilis. He didn’t anticipate the Commissary’s reaction.

  “You see what this means.” Nilis was whispering, wide-eyed, his hands locked together in a white-knuckled grip.

  “Sir?”

  “Gramm is going to say yes—he’s going to back us. Of course he has to get the decision from his committee. But if he backs it, it will be hard for any of them not to follow along. We’re going to the Core, Ensign. We’re going to have our squadron.” Nilis padded around his room, plucking at his fingers.

  Pirius shook his head. “Then why aren’t you leaping with joy, Commissary?”

  “Because they’ve called my bluff,” he said rapidly. He seemed terrified. “While I was pushing against a locked door it was easy to be bold. But now the door has swung open, and I have to deliver on my promises.” He turned to Pirius. “Oh, my eyes, my eyes! What have I done? Pirius, what have I done?”

  THREE

  Genetically, morphologically, I am indistinguishable from an inhabitant of Earth of the long dark ages that preceded spaceflight.

  I rejoice. For that changelessness is what makes me human.

  Let others tinker with their genotypes and phenotypes, let them speciate and bifurcate, merge and blend. We unmodified humans are a primordial force who will sweep them all aside.

  It must be this way. It will avail us nothing if we win a Galaxy and lose ourselves.

  —Hama Druz

  Chapter 35

  There was no place. There was no time. A human observer would have recognized nothing here: no mass, energy, or force. There was only a rolling, random froth whose fragmented geometry constantly changed. Even causality was a foolish dream.

  The orderly spacetime with which humans were familiar was suffused with vacuum energy, out of which virtual particles, electrons and quarks, would fizz into existence, and then scatter or annihilate, their brief walks upon the stage governed by quantum uncertainty. In this extraordinary place whole universes bubbled out of the froth, to expand and dissipate, or to collapse in a despairing flare.

  This chaotic cavalcade of possibilities, this place of nonbeing where whole universes clustered in reefs of foamy spindrift, was suffused by a light beyond light. But even in this cauldron of strangeness there was life. Even here there was mind.

  Call them monads.

  This would be the label given them by Commissary Nilis, when he deduced their existence. But the name had much deeper roots.

  In the seventeenth century the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz had imagined that reality was constructed from pseudo-objects that owed their existence solely to their relation to each other. In his idea of the “monad,” Leibniz had intuited something of the truth of the creatures who infested this domain. They existed, they communicated, they enjoyed a richness of experience and community. And yet “they” didn’t exist in themselves; it was only their relationships to each other that defined their own abstract entities.

  No other form of life was possible in this fractured place.

  Long ago they had attended the birth of a universe.

  It had come from a similar cauldron of realities, a single bubble plucked out of the spindrift. As the baby universe had expanded and cooled, the monads had remained with it. Immanent in the new cosmos, they suffused it, surrounded it. Time to them was not as experienced by the universe’s swarming inhabitants; their perception was like the reality dust of configuration space, perhaps.

  But once its reality had congealed, once the supracosmic froth had cooled, the monads were forced into dormancy. Wrapped up in protective knots of spacetime, they dreamed away the long history of their universe, with all its empires and wars, its tragedies and triumphs. It had been the usual story—and yet it was a unique story, for no two universes were ever quite the same. And something of this long saga would always be stored in the monads’ dreaming.

  The universe aged, as all things must; within, time grew impossibly long and space stretched impossibly thin. At last the fabric of the universe sighed and broke—and a bubble of a higher reality spontaneously emerged, a recurrence of the no-place where time and distance had no meaning. Just as the universe had once been spawned from chaos, so this droplet of chaos was now born from the failing stuff of the universe. Everything was cyclic.

  And in this bubble, where the freezing of spacetime was undone, the monads awoke again; in their supracosmic froth, they were once more briefly alive.

  The monads considered the bubbling foam around them.

  They dug into a reef of spindrift, selected a tangle of possibilities, picked out one evanescent cosmic jewel. This one—yes. They closed around it, as if warmed by its glow of potentialities.

  And, embedding themselves in its structure, they prepared to shape it. The monads enriched the seedling universe with ineffable qualities whose existence few of its inhabitants would even guess at.

  The new universe, for all its beauty, was featureless, symmetrical—but unstable, like a sword standing on its point. Even the monads could not control how that primordial symmetry would be broken, which destiny, of an uncountable number of possibilities, would be selected.

  Which was, of course, the joy of it.

  For the inhabitants of this new cosmos, it began with a singularity: a moment when time began, when space was born. But for the monads, as their chaotic Ur-reality froze out once more into a rigid smoothness, the singularity was an end: for them, the story was already over. Encased in orderly, frozen spacetime, they would slumber through the long ages, until this universe in turn grew old and spawned new fragments of chaos, and they could wake again.

  But all that lay far in the future.

  There was a breathless instant. The sword toppled. Time flowed, like water gushing from a tap.

  History began.

  Chapter 36

  So Pirius Red and Torec, having completed a circuit across the face of the Galaxy that had taken
them all the way to Earth, returned at last to where they had started.

  The flight through the complicated geometry of Arches Base lifted Pirius’s heart. Past the asteroids that wheeled like fists, he made out the burning sky of the Core, the giant stars and light-year-long filaments of glowing gas, the endless explosion of astrophysics beyond. Compared to the cold clockwork emptiness of Sol system, out on the Galaxy’s dead fringe, where you couldn’t even see the Core, this crowded, dangerous sky teemed with life and energy.

  “Lethe, it’s good to be home,” he said with feeling.

  When they disembarked, Captain Seath herself greeted them. She allowed the Commissary to pump her hand, and nodded curtly to Pirius and Torec. But Pirius read the expression on her reconstructed face. Whatever they had achieved in Sol system, they would always be two jumped-up ensigns to her. It was almost reassuring.

  Seath told them that the accommodation for the new “squadron” that was being formed to carry out Nilis’s “project”—she pronounced those words with unmistakable disdain—wasn’t ready yet. So Nilis was offered a room in Officer Country, while Pirius and Torec were taken to a Barracks Ball.

  They walked into the big central space of bunks and lavatories. They hadn’t been assigned to this Barracks Ball before. It stank, of course, as all barracks did, of piss and sweat, food and disinfectant, but it didn’t smell familiar. And among the ranks of faces that peered at them, with curiosity, apathy, or hostility, there was nobody they knew.

  They were assigned bunks a couple of blocks apart. Torec stroked Pirius’s back, and made her way to her own bunk. Pirius unpacked his few personal effects, and stripped out of his gaudy dress uniform, which made him feel a little better.

  But he did this surrounded by staring faces. It wasn’t just the curiosity of cadets confronted by a stranger. They gazed at him as if he had two heads. They said nothing to him, and he had nothing to say to them. They snubbed him when he went to get food. Even when he lay down in the dark, he sensed the strangers around him watching him, assessing him—excluding him.