Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  Enduring Hope was simply baffled. What in the universe could be more important than to be here, in these next few crucial minutes? But he felt relieved Nilis and his emotional turmoil were gone.

  Luru Parz watched suspiciously.

  The Marshal himself tapped Hope on the shoulder. “Engineer. Look. Your friend is going back in—Pirius.”

  Hope was a bit overwhelmed to be prompted by a Marshal. But he asked: “Which one? Sir.”

  “Both of them.”

  “This time we send two ships in,” Pirius Red said. “Not just one at a time. I’ll go first.”

  Torec said, “You’ve used up your weapon.”

  “I know. I’ll go in to guide. Bilson, you’ve been there. We know we’ve breached that netting; maybe Jees managed to make the hole bigger. What if we could pass the starbreakers through that breach? We’d have a short time of free flight, not blocked by the net. We might see enough to hit the event horizon. What do you think?”

  Bilson was very subdued. “It’s possible. It would be a very short time. Less than a second—”

  “All right. Which is why whoever is going in will need a spotter.”

  Torec said, “So who makes the bomb run?”

  Pirius took a breath. He wondered how long he could keep making these decisions; he felt as if he was sentencing another crew to death. But he had to make a choice. “Burden—are you ready?”

  There was no reply. And as the seconds ticked by, Pirius suddenly understood that there would be none. He brought up a Virtual image of Burden’s face. Behind his skinsuit visor Burden’s face was ghost pale, as if drained of blood.

  Burden’s navigator whispered, “He’s been like this since we passed SO-2. I didn’t want to say—”

  Pirius Blue said, “Burden. Burden. Quero!”

  Burden’s eyes flickered. He licked his lips, and forced a smile. “I’m sorry.” His voice was a hoarse croak, his throat evidently closed up.

  Red said, “He’s frozen. Lethe. Blue, did you know about this?”

  Blue sighed. “No. But I wondered … It happened before, didn’t it, Burden?”

  Burden seemed to be loosening a little. “Yes. It happened before.”

  “And that’s why you got busted down to the penal divisions on Quin. Cohl was right to be suspicious of you.”

  “I never lied to you—”

  “But you never told me the full truth, did you? It was nothing to do with your unorthodoxy.”

  “That didn’t help. But, yes. I froze up. Just like this. People died, you know. Because of me, because I froze. I don’t understand it. I can fight on a Rock. I can fight my way out of those blood-soaked trenches. I can save lives. But up here, in a greenship—”

  “And that’s why you kept busting your balls in combat missions? You were punishing yourself.”

  “Lethe,” Torec snarled. “And that garbage about timelike infinity—did you mean any of it?”

  “I gave hope,” he said quietly. “And it gave me hope. That some day it will all be put right. People died because of me.”

  Blue said, “Down on the Rocks, you saved far more.”

  “The arithmetic of death doesn’t work like that,” Burden said.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Torec said.

  “I let you down, Squadron Leader.”

  “Yes,” Red said with feeling. “Yes, you did.”

  “When you asked me to join you, and then to be a flight commander, I couldn’t refuse. It was such a noble thing to attempt, such a right thing. I wanted to be part of it. I just hoped I’d be able to get through it.”

  “Well, you haven’t,” Torec said bitterly.

  Red said, “Guys, we don’t have time for this.”

  “I’ll make the run,” said Blue immediately.

  Red said, “Why? To save face for your buddy?”

  “No. Because I’m the better choice for a two-ship run anyhow. Think about it, Red. We’re the same person. If we go in together, communication’s going to be essential. If we can’t understand each other, who can?”

  Red said, “But—”

  “I know what you intend to do,” Pirius Blue said. “While I drop my bombs, you’ll draw the flak. That’s what you’re really planning, isn’t it, Red? You see, I told you I understood you.”

  Pirius sighed. “All right. Cabel. Bilson. Yes, I intend to draw the flak away from Blue. Maybe that way we’ll give him a chance of succeeding with the mission. But you’ve been down there already. If you don’t think you can do this again—”

  “Count me in,” Cabel said immediately.

  Bilson was clearly having a lot more difficulty. But the navigator sighed raggedly. “You did say that if we screwed up today we’d be back tomorrow. Let’s get it over.”

  “Good man,” Pirius said warmly.

  “Let’s do it,” Blue said. His ship broke immediately out of the formation.

  Pirius grasped his controls, and the two ships settled side by side.

  Burden said, “I just want to say—”

  “Later,” Red snapped.

  Torec whispered, “Godspeed.”

  Blue asked, “What does that mean?”

  “Something I learned on Earth. Very old, I think.”

  “No good-byes,” Pirius Red said. “Ten minutes, we’ll be back.”

  Torec forced a laugh. “Knowing my luck, both of you. Or neither …”

  In formation, the two ships swept down through the great hollow toward the shining puddle of the accretion disc.

  Once again Red found himself flying low over the accretion disc; once again the event horizon itself rose like a malevolent sun before him. But this time Blue’s ship was a green spark off his port bow.

  Blue opened a private loop to Red. “Of course,” he said, “if we both get killed down here, then nothing will be left of me—of you.”

  “That would be simpler,” Red said.

  “That it would. Take care of Torec if—”

  “And you,” Red called. “Good luck, brother.”

  “Yes—Lethe! I’m in flak!”

  Pirius Red glanced across. Two, three, four starbreaker beams were raking the sky, trying to triangulate on Blue’s ship. Red yanked his ship sideways, cutting between. To his satisfaction, two or three of the beams started to track him, while the others lost Blue, who ducked below his nominal course. But if one of those beams touched him, however briefly, he would be done.

  Red began to weave back and forth, the CTC pulling the ship through a rapid evasion pattern faster than any human pilot could—faster than a Xeelee, Pirius thought. But the starbreakers tracked after him.

  Cabel growled, “I think I’m going to lose my breakfast.”

  Pirius shouted, “But it’s working. Bilson! Keep tracking—it’s your job to guide Blue in.”

  “Understood, Pilot.”

  “Coming up on that netting,” Pirius Blue reported. “Wow—I don’t think I believed it—a contiguous structure light-minutes across! The Xeelee have been busy… . Red, I’m in flak again.”

  Pirius, following his evasive course, had drifted too far from his temporal twin. No time to get back under sublight.

  He punched his controls. The ship jumped, a big FTL jump of a light-second or so. He heard the blister hull creak, and his displays lit up with red flags; you weren’t supposed to make such jumps in spacetime this turbulent. But it had worked, and he had lodged himself just in front of Pirius Blue.

  And once again the flak beams were focused on him. He laughed out loud. “Bring it on!”

  Bilson said, “I lost the lock.”

  “Then get it back,” Pirius shouted. “Come on, navigator, we’re almost there.”

  “I have it. I have it!” A starbreaker speared out from the greenship’s weapons pod, and hit a stretch of netting some distance before the two fleeing ships.

  “I’ve got it,” Blue called. “Good work, Bilson. But we need to have a word about your flying, Red.”

  “Have you got the eve
nt horizon?”

  Blue said quietly, “We have a fix.”

  Pirius’s cabin flared with cherry-red light. The starbreakers were close. He ignored the glow, overrode the automatics, and held the ship to its line. “Only a few seconds more, crew—”

  The blister shuddered around him, and a telltale blared. He had lost one nacelle, one crew blister: it was Cabel, probably the best engineer in the squadron, gone, burned away, a scrap of flesh in this tremendous tumult of energy. Regret stabbed, but he had no time now, no time. Still he stuck to his line. “Blue, drop the damn bombs—”

  “Gone!” Blue called.

  Pirius hurled the ship sideways. But the starbreakers tracked him, and still the ship shuddered.

  Blue reported, “Gone and—Lethe!”

  “What? Blue, I can’t see.”

  “The black holes converged—we picked up the gravity wave pulse, right on the event horizon. And the Xeelee—Lethe, it’s working! … Oh.” He sounded oddly disappointed.

  Pirius wrenched his ship around once more. “Blue! Report.”

  “The flak has got me. I can’t maneuver—I’m wallowing like a hog—”

  “Blue!”

  “I always did want to be remembered,” Blue said.

  “So did I.”

  “Maybe we will be after all. Good-bye, brother. Tell Nilis …” But his voice winked out, and Pirius heard no more, nothing but Bilson’s quiet sobbing.

  In the ops room the cheering was loud.

  That netting around the event horizon looked as if it had been punched open by a vast fist. The surface beneath, a mist of sheets and threads of plasma falling into the event horizon, was awash with waves of density that flared brightly—some were so dense, the monitors said, that hydrogen fusion was briefly sparking. These waves were caused by oscillations of the event horizon itself, where it had been struck a mighty punch by the coalescing black holes of Blue’s cannon. All around this part of Chandra, intense pulses of gravitational waves were washing out, and it was those waves that were wreaking such damage on the netting structure, far overwhelming the feeble human efforts.

  It was Nilis’s moment of triumph. When Enduring Hope looked for the Commissary, he was nowhere to be seen.

  Luru Paz watched, her eyes cold.

  “Lethe, Nilis was right,” Marshal Kimmer said. “It worked! Where is that oaf? Commissary!”

  At last Nilis came running onto the walkway. He was carrying a data desk which he waved in the air. He hurried up to Kimmer. “Marshal! I have it at last. Those final images of the web structure were the key—I knew there was more to this black hole than we suspected!”

  Kimmer evidently didn’t know what he was talking about, and didn’t care. He wrapped one arm around Nilis’s shoulders. “Commissary, you old fool! Unlike you, I have no imagination. I had to see it with my own eyes to believe it. But you’ve done it! You’ve ripped a hole in that peculiar Xeelee nest—and we still have four armed ships left to finish the job. By the time we’re done that black hole will be as naked as the day it was formed, and the Xeelee will have nowhere to hide. I tell you, if you told me you had found a way to beat the Xeelee in a bare-knuckle fight I’d believe you now!”

  Nilis pulled away forcibly. When he spoke, it was practically a shriek. “Marshal—listen to me. We have to call off the attack.”

  Kimmer, shocked, was silenced.

  Luru Parz said, “And the remaining ships—”

  “Call them home. Let no more lives be lost today.”

  Kimmer looked thunderous. “You had better explain yourself, Commissary.”

  Nilis waved his data desk. “I told you. I have it!”

  “You have what?”

  “The truth about Chandra. The Xeelee live off the black hole. But the Xeelee aren’t alone… .”

  Chapter 57

  The monads cared nothing for humans, of course, or for quagmites, or Xeelee, or photino birds, or any of the rest of the universe’s menagerie at this or any other age. But they liked their universes to have story; and it was living things that generated the most interesting sagas.

  And so in the time before time, when they picked out their seedling universes from the reef of possibilities, the monads, midwives of reality, exerted a subtle selection pressure. They chose for enrichment only the brightest bubbles in the cosmic spindrift: bubbles with a special, precious quality. A tendency to complexify.

  Thoughtful beings, human and otherwise, would wonder at the endless fecundity of their universe, a universe that spawned life at every stage of its existence—and wonder why it had to be so.

  Some of them came to understand that it was the universe’s own innate tendency to complexify that had created the richness of structure within it.

  Simple laws of molecular combination governed the growth of such intricate, inanimate forms as snowflakes and DNA molecules. But autocatalysis and homeostasis enabled simple structures to interact and spin off more complex structures still, until living things emerged, which combined into ever more complicated entities.

  The same pattern showed in other aspects of reality. The hive structures of ant colonies and Coalescent communities emerged without conscious design from the small decisions of their drones. Even in the world of human ideas, the structures of religions, economies, and empires fed back on themselves and became ever richer. Even mathematical toys, like games of artificial life run in computer memories, seemed to demonstrate an unwavering tendency to grow more complicated. But then, human mathematics was a mirror of the universe humans found themselves in; that was why mathematics worked.

  Complexifying seemed inevitable. But it was not. A universe could be imagined without this tendency.

  If the ability to complexify had suddenly been turned off, the universe would have seemed very different. Snowflakes would not form, birds would not flock, ants and Coalescents would have tumbled out of their disintegrating hives, baffled. On larger scales, economic and historical cycles would break up. Ecosystems would fail; there would be no coral reefs, no forests. The great cycles of matter and energy, mediated by life, on a living world like Earth would collapse.

  But of course there would be no observers of such catastrophes, for without complexity’s search for feedback loops and stable processes, hearts could not beat, and embryos could not form.

  Humans had the good fortune to exist in a universe in which there was no law of conservation of complexity, no limit to its supply.

  But it didn’t have to be that way. That the universe could complexify, that richness of existence was possible at all, was thanks to the monads, and their subtle pan-cosmic selection. The monads had selected, designed, nurtured a universe that would be fruitful forever, in which there was no limit to the possibilities for life and energy, for life and mind, as far ahead as it was possible to look.

  While empires rose and fell, while the universe continued its endless unraveling of possibility after possibility, the monads slumbered. They had done their work, made their contribution. Now they waited for the precious moments of the furthest future when this universe, in turn grown old, spawned new fragments of chaos, and they could wake again.

  But in their epochal sleep, even the monads could be drawn into history. And even they could be harmed.

  Chapter 58

  Luru Parz watched the Commissary with blank hostility, Enduring Hope with bafflement.

  Nilis tried to tell his complex story too quickly, too briefly. For months he had been trying to assemble all the data on Chandra that he could find: on the Xeelee and quagmites and other denizens, on cosmological data like the relic Big Bang radiation, on the astrophysics of the black hole itself and the knotted-up singularity at its heart—and now even on the extraordinary artifact the Xeelee had wrapped around the event horizon. And he had come to a new conclusion.

  Nilis said triumphantly, “Do you see? Do you see now?”

  “No,” snapped Kimmer.

  There was a story in this information, said Nilis. And th
at story was the secret history of the universe.

  Nilis said he had looked deep into the structure of Chandra, and had found life infesting even the singularity at its heart. “These deep ones—the ones I call monads; it is a very antique word—they are older than all of us. Older than the Xeelee, older than the universe itself! It will take a lot of study to figure it all out. But it’s clear that the monads are responsible for life in this universe. Or rather for the tendency of this universe to complexify, to produce life. It is a level of deep design about the universe nobody ever suspected. And in their nests of folded spacetime, huddled inside the event horizons of black holes, they slumber—waiting for our petty ages to pass away—until the time comes for a new universe to be born from the wreckage of the old.”

  “And the Xeelee—”

  “They live off Chandra, the black hole. Their net structure is the great machine which allows them to achieve their goals: to birth nightfighters, to use the black hole as a computing engine, all of it. But that’s trivial. It’s what’s inside the black hole that counts. The Xeelee are just parasites. Secondary. They don’t matter!”

  Kimmer said dangerously, “They matter rather a lot to me.”

  Enduring Hope thought he understood. “And if we attack the black hole,” he said doggedly, “we could destroy the monads. Is that what you fear?”

  “Yes,” Nilis said gratefully, sweat beading his brow. “Oh, my boy—yes! That is precisely what I fear.”

  Kimmer said, “But even if you are right, there are other galaxies. Other nests of monads.”

  Nilis insisted, “We can’t make any simple assumptions about this situation, Marshal.” He spoke rapidly about levels of reality, of interconnectivity in higher dimensions. “By striking a blow in this one place we may wreak damage everywhere, and for all time… .”

  Luru Parz said slowly, “The Commissary fears that if we destroy the monads we will break the thread—don’t you, Nilis?—the shining thread of life, of creativity, that connects this universe to those that preceded it, and to those that will follow. To kill them would be patricide—or deicide, perhaps.” She smiled. “Ah, but I forgot. In this enlightened age you don’t have gods—or fathers, do you? It’s entirely appropriate of humanity that when we do find God, we try to turn Him into a weapon, and then kill Him.”