Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  Pirius glanced at Torec. He had anticipated Kimmer’s reaction, but even so he felt numb despair. There was none of the brute wisdom he had sensed in Minister Gramm in Kimmer. Gramm was a flawed man, but he had a deep, troubled sense of a responsibility for the conduct of the war. In Kimmer there was nothing but resistance to a challenge to his own power. Pirius could hardly believe that they had come all this way, achieved so much, only to be faced by yet another block.

  Unexpectedly, Commander Darc spoke up. “Wait, Marshal.”

  Kimmer turned, his expression cold. “Did you speak, Commander?”

  “Sir, you’re my superior officer. I apologize for speaking out of turn. But I have to point out you’re wrong. The Commissary isn’t asking you for anything. The Grand Conclave has issued an executive order, and the Commissary is merely passing on its instructions. We have to give Nilis what he needs to do the job.”

  Kimmer hissed, “This fat earthworm has fooled you as he fooled the Conclave, Commander.”

  “No doubt you’re right, sir. But in the meantime we have our orders.”

  Kimmer glared at his aides, who confirmed in whispers that Darc was right. Kimmer’s mouth worked. Pirius knew he would make the Commander pay for what he had said.

  “All right, Commissary. As the Commander says, I have my orders. Until I’ve had time to appeal against the executive mandate, you and your stooges can have what you want.” He stabbed a finger at Nilis. “But I do have discretion on how I carry out those orders. I won’t take any usable resources away from our vital struggle. You’ll have your ships. But they will not come from the line: you can have the superannuated, the battle-damaged, the patched-up wrecks. And I won’t let you waste the lives of my best crews either. Do you understand?”

  Nilis nodded his head. “Quite clearly.”

  “Oh, Nilis—one more thing. If you mean to use Orion Rock you’ll have to be quick about it. It will be in position in ten weeks.”

  Nilis gasped. “Ten weeks? Oh, Marshal, but this is—we can’t be ready—”

  Darc put his soft hand on Nilis’s shoulder. “It’s all right, Commissary. Ten weeks it is, sir.”

  Kimmer seemed still more infuriated. He stalked out of the room, followed by his chattering aides.

  The Commissary was trembling. “I thought I had blown the whole thing,” he said hoarsely. “My stumbling and fumbling, like a buffoon—how can I deal with a Marshal if I can’t hold myself together for five minutes?”

  “You did fine, sir,” Pirius said awkwardly.

  Pila elaborately stifled a yawn. “It was a lot of nonsense anyhow.”

  Torec was puzzled. “Ma’am?”

  “Oh, come on, Ensign, even you aren’t that naive. Kimmer knows the chain of command as well as any of us. We saw nothing here but the ingrained resistance of a man who can accept no new way of doing things, even if it might resolve the deadlock of this war. And he especially can’t take advice from an outsider like you, Nilis. Kimmer had no choice but to comply, and he knew it. This was all just posturing.”

  Nilis said, “Pretty formidable posturing, though!”

  Pirius was troubled. “But still, if what the Marshal said comes to pass—if we’re only going to get lousy equipment and useless crew—”

  “We’ll make it work,” Nilis said. “Why, you’ve already got Rock 492 up and running, haven’t you?”

  Pirius shook his head. “Fixing a broken air cycler is one thing. Putting together a squadron is another.”

  Darc glanced at Nilis. “Ah, but the most important element of any squadron is its leader. Isn’t that right, Commissary?”

  “Oh, without a doubt, Commander. And how lucky we are to have found the right officer for the job!” Nilis clapped his hand on Pirius’s shoulder and beamed.

  Pirius turned cold inside.

  Torec’s mouth dropped open. “Him? You are joking, sir.”

  “Thanks,” Pirius said to Torec.

  Nilis said, “You’ve already been a hero once, Pirius, in another timeline. Now you have to do it again.”

  “But sir, I can’t command. I’m not even commissioned.”

  Darc grinned. “You are now.”

  “But—ten weeks?”

  Darc shrugged. “That’s the hand we’ve been dealt; we make it or we don’t.”

  Nilis was watching Pirius. “Of course you have to make up your own mind, Pirius. Do you remember the conversation we had at Venus?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So tell me—where has your self-analysis got to now?”

  Torec said, “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

  Pirius said, “He’s asking me if I have found anything to fight for.” He faced Nilis. “There’s only one goal worth dying for,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “And that’s victory—an end to this war. And then we will have to find out what humans are supposed to do with their time.”

  Nilis nodded, apparently not trusting himself to speak.

  “Oh, how noble you all are.” Pila shook her elegant head. “The preening of you military types never ceases to astound me.”

  Darc ignored her. “So what do you say, squadron leader?”

  “Where do I start, sir?”

  Darc murmured, “Well, that’s up to you. But first I rather think you’ll need to find your crews.”

  It was a relief to be able to get back to Rock 492.

  At first Pirius and Torec had had to live in their skinsuits, relying on their backpacks for warmth, food, water, even air when the dust got too bad. Before the lavatories had started working they had to relieve themselves in their suits, and every couple of days went out to a flitter to dump their waste. But as the systems recovered, they had begun to sleep with their faceplates open, and at last, as the air slowly became fresh and warm, they abandoned the skinsuits altogether. The filters couldn’t do much about the suspended asteroid dust, and they both suffered irritated sinuses.

  That night after the meeting with Kimmer, they slept as usual, huddled together in a corner of the bubble dome, their bodies pressed together under a blanket. The touch of microgravity was so gentle they all but hovered over the floor, drifting like soap bubbles. In the quietest hour, the inertial adjustors suddenly came online. As a full gravity grabbed them they ended up in a tangle of limbs, laughing. The floor was suddenly full of ridges and knobs—they would need a mattress tomorrow, Pirius told himself—and they felt the new, uneven gravity field pull at their internal organs.

  The Rock, too, adjusted to its new state. Like most asteroids, 492 wasn’t a solid mass, but a loose aggregate of dust and boulders. As the inertial machines in its core did their work, 492’s components scraped and ground against each other as they sought to find a more compact equilibrium. Pirius could hear the deep groaning of the asteroid, a rumbling that shivered through his own bones, as if they were lying on the carcass of some huge uncomfortable animal.

  In the morning, they found their faces and hands were covered with a silvery patina: it was the asteroid dust, which had at last settled out of its suspension in the air.

  Chapter 37

  The balancing sword tipped and fell. The primordial simplicity of the new universe was lost. From the broken symmetry of a once-unified physics, two forces emerged: gravity, and a force humans would call the GUT force—“GUT” for Grand Unified Theory, a combination of electromagnetic and nuclear forces. The separating-out of the forces was a phase change, like water freezing to ice, and it released energy that immediately fed the expansion of the seedling universe.

  Gravity’s fist immediately clenched, crushing knots of energy and matter into black holes. It was in the black holes’ paradoxical hearts that the sleeping monads huddled. But the black holes were embedded in a new, unfolding spacetime: three dimensions of space and one of time, an orderly structure that congealed quickly out of the primitive chaos.

  Yet there were flaws. The freezing-out had begun spontaneously in many different places, like ic
e crystals growing on a cold window. Where the crystals met and merged, discontinuities formed. Because the spacetime was three-dimensional, these defects were born in two dimensions, as planes and sheets—or one dimension, as lines of concentrated energy scribbled across spacetime’s spreading face—or no dimensions at all, simple points.

  Suddenly the universe was filled with these defects; it was a box stuffed with ribbons and strings and buttons.

  And the defects were not inert. Propagating wildly, they collided, combined, and interacted. A migrating point defect could trace out a line; a shifting line could trace out a plane; where two planes crossed, a line was formed, to make more planes and lines. Feedback loops of creation and destruction were quickly established, in a kind of spacetime chemistry. There was a time of wild scribbling.

  Most of these sketches died as quickly as they were formed. But as the networks of interactions grew in complexity, another kind of phase shift was reached, a threshold beyond which certain closed loops of interactions emerged—loops which promoted the growth of other structures like themselves. This was autocatalysis, the tendency for a structure emerging from a richly connected network to encourage the growth of itself, or copies of itself. And some of these loops happened to be stable, immune to small perturbations. This was homeostasis, stability through feedback.

  Thus, through autocatalysis and homeostasis working on the flaws of the young spacetime, an increasingly complex hierarchy of self-sustaining structures emerged. All these tangled knots were machines, fundamentally, heat engines feeding off the flow of energy through the universe. And the black holes, drifting through this churning soup, provided additional points of structure, seeds around which the little cycling structures could concentrate. In the new possibilities opened up by closeness, still more complex aggregates grew: simple machines gathered into cooperative “cells,” and the cells gathered into colonial “organisms” and ultimately multicelled “creatures” …

  It was, of course, life. All this had emerged from nothing.

  In this universe it would always be this way: structures spontaneously complexified, and stability emerged from fundamental properties of the networks—any networks, even such exotica as networks of intersecting spacetime defects. Order emerging for free: it was wonderful. But it need not have been this way.

  Deep in the pinprick gravity wells of the primordial black holes, the feeding began.

  Chapter 38

  When Squadron Leader Pirius Red went back to the barracks, with his new officer’s epaulettes stitched to his uniform, he walked into a silent storm of resentment and contempt. After a few minutes he ducked into a lavatory block and ripped his epaulettes off his shoulders.

  The new squadron leader spent twenty-four hours paralyzed by uncertainty and indecision. He had no real idea where to start.

  Nilis called Pirius to his cluttered room in Officer Country.

  When he got there, the Commissary, irritated and distracted, was working at a low table piled with data desks, while abstract Virtuals swirled around him like birds. He seemed to be pursuing his studies of Chandra. There was nowhere to sit but on Nilis’s blanket-strewn, unmade bed. There was a faint smell of damp and mustiness—it was the smell of Nilis, Pirius thought with exasperated fondness, a smell of feet and armpits, the smell of a gardener.

  Pila was here, to Pirius’s surprise. Minister Gramm’s assistant, slender and elegant, looked somehow insulated from Nilis’s clutter. Her skin shone with a cold beauty, and her robe of purple-stitched black fell in precise folds around her slim, sexless body. She didn’t acknowledge Pirius at all.

  Nilis clapped his hands, and his Virtuals crumpled up and disappeared. “Fascinating, fascinating. I am studying Chandra’s central singularity now, what we can tell of it through the external features of the event horizon and the surrounding spacetime. Even there, deep in the heart of the black hole, there is structure. That thing at the center of the Galaxy, you know, is like an onion; just when you’ve peeled away one layer, well, my eyes, all you find is another layer underneath, another layer of astrophysics and life and meaning—quite remarkable—I wonder if we’ll ever get to the bottom of it.”

  Pirius didn’t know what an onion was, and couldn’t comment. But he could see Nilis was restless. “You seem unhappy, Commissary.”

  Nilis said ruefully, “Perceptive as ever, Pirius! But it’s true. I am frustrated. I thought I would make fast progress with this work here at Arches, now that I am so close to the object of my study. But suddenly it has become much more difficult. I’m being denied access to records. When I do track down an archive I find it’s been emptied or moved—I’m even short on processing power to analyze it!” He shook his head. “I try not to be paranoid, any more than any citizen of our wonderful Coalition has a right to be. In Sol system I was given assistance with my studies. Now it feels as if I am being impeded at every step! But if it’s purposeful, what I don’t see is why—and who is trying to block me.”

  Pila said, with her usual cold sarcasm, “I wouldn’t want to keep you from your absorbing work, Commissary. But you called us here.”

  “Quite so, quite so.” He took a sip from some tepid drink that had been standing so long on the table it had dust on its surface. “Let’s get on, then. I wondered how the new squadron is doing. What are your priorities, Pirius?”

  That was easy. “We have to assemble the hardware and the crews. Then we will run two parallel programs: technical development, to get the new equipment fitted to the ships and make them combat-worthy, and training, to get the crews ready to fly the mission.”

  “Good, good; nobody would argue with that. But time is short. What actual progress have you made?”

  “I’m proud to have been given this commission, sir …”

  The Commissary’s sharp, moist eyes were on him, and Nilis clearly noticed the patches where Pirius had ripped off his epaulettes. “You haven’t actually got anywhere, have you, Squadron Leader?”

  “He is overpromoted,” Pila said coldly.

  “No,” Nilis said. “This is a battlefield promotion. Needs must, madam. Pirius is right for the job, I’m convinced of it. I’ve seen his work in two different timelines! But where he lacks experience, we must find ways to help him.”

  Pila looked at him suspiciously. “Which is where I come in, is it? I think you’d better get to the point, Commissary.”

  Nilis turned to Pirius. “Pilot, have you selected your adjutant yet? Every squadron leader needs one.”

  Pirius felt even more out of his depth. “I’m not even sure what an adjutant does, sir.”

  Nilis laughed. “Of course not. Which is why your choice is particularly important. Your adjutant is your key member of staff. She is your personal assistant, if you like. She is responsible for the day-to-day running of your squadron, leaving you to concentrate on the flying. She drafts your orders, filters demands on your time, and ensures you get the resources you need, everything from GUTdrive parts to ration packs. You see? Now, have you any thoughts?”

  Pirius shrugged. “Torec, perhaps—”

  Nilis said gently, “Torec is a fine woman, a warrior, and a close companion. But she doesn’t have the skills—the political, the administrative—that you’re going to need now.”

  Pirius suddenly saw where this was going.

  Pila’s face was extraordinary; Pirius would never have imagined that so much anger and contempt could be expressed with such stillness. She said, “Are you joking, Commissary? Me?”

  “Joking? Not at all,” Nilis said breezily. “Think about it for a moment. The job won’t be so terribly different from what you do for Gramm. You undoubtedly have the administrative skills. And with your, umm, strong personality you will cut like a blade through the buffoonery and obstructionism of the various turf warriors here at the Base. You could even pull levers at the Ministry of Economic Warfare if you have to. Besides, as one of the party who came with me from Earth, you understand the nature of our unique project bet
ter than anybody at Arches.

  “And,” he said with a dismissive wave, “it needn’t interfere with your primary duty, which is spying for Minister Gramm. You can do that just as effectively while getting on with some worthwhile work as well.”

  Color spotted Pila’s cheeks, but she still hadn’t moved a muscle. “You wouldn’t dare say that if Gramm were here.”

  “Oh, he already knows! I discussed the idea with him before broaching it with you. He’s quite agreeable. I think he finds the idea of you having to cope with frontline soldiery quite amusing.” He folded his hands in his lap, and looked from one to the other.

  Pirius took that as his cue. He stood up. “I think we’re done here.”

  “So we are, Pilot,” Nilis said genially.

  “Madam, welcome aboard—”

  “Don’t even talk to me, you twisted little freak!” In the windows of her pale eyes he saw the contempt of this earthworm for the soldiers who fought and died to protect her.

  But Pirius held his nerve. “Working together is going to be interesting. But I think the Commissary is right. And we only have ten weeks. There’s an empty room down the corridor. Maybe we should start right now.”

  Pila stood stock still, and Pirius wondered what even the Commissary could do about it if she refused to cooperate. But with a last murderous glance at Nilis, she stalked out.

  Nilis was immersed in his Virtuals before Pirius had even left the room. But he called, “Oh, Pirius. Get those epaulettes sewn back on. That doesn’t look good, not good at all.”

  Reluctant or not, Pila was remarkably efficient. Within forty-eight hours she had secured Pirius a small office of his own—small, plain, with hardly any facilities, but a room in Officer Country nonetheless. And she had already pulled various bureaucratic levers effectively enough to line up candidates for the squadron.