Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  “Shut up, you old monster,” Kimmer said.

  Luru Parz said coldly, “But this is why I’ve been trying to stop you, Nilis. To stop this pointless research.”

  His jaw dropped. “You—it was you? You obstructed me, you blocked me from the data, the processing resources I needed? I thought you were my ally, Luru Parz. It was you who said we must study the black hole in the first place!”

  “Study it sufficiently to destroy it—that’s all we needed. Not this! Knowledge is a weapon, Nilis. That’s all it is. I always feared that if you rooted around for long enough you’d find some reason not to complete the project. Academic fools like you always do.”

  Maybe she was right to block him, Enduring Hope thought. He recalled his conversation with Blue, who had foreseen exactly this outcome: that sooner or later Nilis would find a reason to fall in love with Chandra, and would try to stop the attack.

  Nilis said darkly, “Listen to me. My analysis is hasty. And it contains more questions than answers. Regardless of any pan-cosmic responsibility, if we were to destabilize this monad complex, we don’t know what the result would be. The damage could be huge. I can’t begin to estimate it—” He shook his head. “Damage on a galactic scale, perhaps.”

  Luru Parz pushed past Nilis to face Kimmer. Her face was alive, intense, but Hope thought it had the intensity of a sharpened blade, not a human expression. “Then let it be so. Marshal—we must do it regardless of the consequences. This is our one chance, don’t you see?”

  Kimmer said, “But if we cause such devastation—if the Galaxy center detonates—”

  Luru shouted, “What of it? Let the Galaxy be cleansed! Marshal, I have seen the human race populate a Galaxy once; we can do it again. And this time it would be a Galaxy free of Xeelee. We must do this.”

  Nilis laughed, a brittle sound. “Marshal, you aren’t listening to her? Why, you fool—”

  Kimmer’s reaction was immediate. He swung around and swatted the Commissary aside with one gloved fist. Nilis fell backward, clattering clumsily against a bulkhead, blood seeping from his mouth.

  Enduring Hope ran to him and cradled his head. “Commissary, Commissary,” he whispered. “You can’t go around calling a marshal a fool!”

  Luru Parz seemed to have recovered her detachment. Breathing hard, she said, “Our debate here is irrelevant anyway.”

  Kimmer, confounded by the rapid turning of events, glowered at her. “What do you mean?”

  “The decision to go on doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to Pirius Red. Who has heard every word we have said. Haven’t you, Pilot?”

  The voice from the center of the Galaxy was sepulchral. “I have, Luru Parz.”

  Pirius Red pressed his gloved hands to his temples.

  He and Bilson, his surviving crewmate, had made it back to the rump of his squadron. But he was grateful that he was alone in his blister. He was still trying to absorb the shocks of the last few minutes—the death of his engineer and the sudden loss of his own older self. He had no idea how he was supposed to feel about that. And now this, a questioning of the whole basis of the mission by the man who had instigated it all.

  He found it difficult even to speak. He knew he was close to burnout.

  This Burden Must Pass said, “It’s your decision, Squadron Leader.”

  Pirius’s laugh was bitter. “Now you have something to say.”

  Torec, her voice strained by grief, snapped at Burden, “Yes. And for you it doesn’t matter, because, right or wrong, everything will be put right at the end of time, won’t it?”

  “Perhaps not this,” Burden said softly.

  “We should wait,” Bilson said hesitantly. “We need time. If Nilis is right … We need time to check.”

  Torec said, “But we won’t get as good a chance to strike again. We know that. The Xeelee will be waiting for us next time.”

  “We will find another way,” Bilson said. “People are smart like that.”

  “Yes, we are,” said Burden.

  Pirius was anguished. If Nilis was even half-right, they could be committing a terrible crime, a crime that might transcend the universe itself. How could he possibly know the right thing to do? Who was he to have such a decision thrust upon him?

  And yet the choice seemed clear.

  Pirius said, “Enough of us have died today.” Including half of myself, he thought. He tried to rehearse the words. We pull back …

  “Pilot.” Bilson’s voice was full of wonder.

  Pirius looked down at the accretion disc. A kind of cloud was rising above that puddle of light, a black cloud. When he increased the magnification of his images, he saw they were ships, a horde of them, rising like insects.

  “It’s the Xeelee,” Torec said. “They’re streaming out of the Cavity. I don’t believe it. They are abandoning Chandra.”

  Burden said, “It looks as if they agree with Nilis. There are some things just not worth destroying, whatever the cost.”

  “Let’s go home,” Pirius said.

  The five battered ships swiveled as one and turned away from the heart of the Galaxy, where the Xeelee ships were still rising, countless numbers of them.

  When Pirius Blue came to, he was embedded in darkness, unable to move. Impact foam, he realized.

  To his own surprise, he was still alive. He had survived the flak assault, and the destruction of his ship. He wasn’t even injured, as far as he could tell.

  With voice commands he brought up sensor data, which flickered before his eyes inside his visor. Drifting at the center of the accretion disc, he learned, he was rather a long way away from any possible pickup. And nobody knew if he was alive or dead. Suspended in darkness, locked into the foam, he came to a quick decision. He uttered a command.

  His foam shell burst and flew apart, leaving him in his skinsuit. He was falling in a cloud of fragments, and a bath of brilliant Galaxy-center light. His visor turned jet black, and its inner surface immediately lit up with red warning flags.

  He checked his suit’s systems. All overloaded, all on the brink of failure. A skinsuit wasn’t designed to withstand the ferocious conditions of the center of the Galaxy, and it knew it. But it didn’t matter. This would be over soon, one way or another.

  With more commands he coaxed his visor to leak through a little of the hard light that battered it. Soon he could see again, if sketchily.

  He was floating through a forest of shining threads, silvery lines as straight as laser beams—but some of the threads were broken, twisted.

  With a jolt, he understood. He was falling through the net structure around the black hole. There was no sign of those vessels they had spotted crawling over the net, however. And there was no sign of his ship, or his crewmates, who, if they had not died immediately, must be drifting as helplessly as he was.

  To his surprise, one comm loop was still working. He couldn’t talk to the squadron, but there was a line to the ops room on Arches. With brisk commands, he set it to transmit only, and patched in a visual feed from his visor. He was happy for them to watch what he watched. There might be much for them to learn, however the operation worked out. But he didn’t want to talk to anybody. No good-byes. Not when there was another version of himself who could do all that for him.

  Still falling helplessly, he swiveled in space, and looked down at the event horizon.

  Though infalling plasma crawled across its surface, reddening as it fell out of existence, it was dark, a dark plane beneath him. The ferocious light that bathed this place was either absorbed by the event horizon or else was deflected by the black hole’s immense gravity field; he was in the shadow of the black hole, a strange relativistic shadow left by bent and distorted light.

  He lifted his head. The event horizon was like a monstrous planet, so vast it was a plain beneath him that cut the universe in two. Everywhere redshifted plasma writhed and crawled, raining into the hole, and immense auroras flapped. But at its straight-line horizon he saw bands of light; one, two, pe
rhaps three stripes, running parallel with the edge. The rings were another product of the hole’s huge gravity field, as light was not simply deflected but pulled through one orbit, two, before being flung away.

  But now he was falling ever more rapidly toward that fatal surface. Telltales warned him that his signal lock to Arches was being lost: the increasing redshift he must be suffering was affecting the frequency control. It was a secondary effect of the distortion of time itself by the black hole’s gravity. He tried to divert some of his processing power to adjusting the signal, to keep the lock as long as possible.

  Time, time: from the point of view of his own younger self in the outside universe, time would pass more and more slowly for Blue as he approached the event horizon, until at last duration ceased altogether, and he was pinned against the horizon like a fly embedded in glass. It wouldn’t be long, he thought, before relativity played a final trick on his tangled lifeline, and Pirius Red became the older twin after all.

  Blue would know nothing of that. He probably wouldn’t feel anything when he passed through the event horizon itself. This far out from such a massive object, tidal forces had not yet begun to pluck at a body as small as his. Once inside the horizon, though, his fate would be determined.

  Inside a black hole space and time pivoted about the constancy of lightspeed, and exchanged roles. Outside, time proceeded inexorably forward, but you could move back and forth in space. But inside a hole it was space that was one-directional. No matter how hard he struggled, his progress would be one way, toward the singularity at the geometric center of the hole—the singularity was now his only future. And there, long after the tides had torn his body apart, the strings and membranes that underlay the very particles of his body would be stretched and torn, before being crushed out of existence altogether.

  The telltale acknowledgment signal from Arches turned to a high-frequency chirp that disappeared into inaudibility. He turned the comm system off; it was no use now.

  He glanced back the way he had come. Though the crowded sky directly above him seemed unaffected, toward the hole’s horizon his view was blueshifted and muddled. It was as if he was looking out through a shallow, mirrored cone: even light was being pulled into the hole’s gravity field, and was starting to rain down on him. As he fell further the light would fold up behind him, and eventually all the light in the universe would be pulled tight into a pencil-thin cone, spearing down after him as he fell into darkness.

  Of course the most likely cause of his death would be his suit’s failure. But perhaps he could juggle its systems, force the hole itself to kill him. He grinned fiercely. It would be a challenge.

  Chapter 59

  On the long journey back to Arches they saw no sign of Xeelee.

  Ops told them that when the black hole web was abandoned, the Xeelee appeared to have ceased their operations, right across the face of the Galaxy, from Core to rim. Pirius found it hard to believe that this one action had made such a difference. But he was glad that they weren’t harassed; they would have been easy targets.

  He was only bringing back four ships, though. This Burden Must Pass had volunteered to stay at Chandra for an additional day. He would record what he could of the field of action, and search for any survivors of the lost ships. Pirius agreed to this reluctantly. It was standard operating procedure, and as the sole surviving flight commander Burden was the right man for the job. But Pirius knew that this offer had more to do with the contents of Burden’s own head.

  Besides, he didn’t like the idea of leaving anybody behind. He made sure Burden’s crew were happy with the idea before he agreed, but they seemed loyal to Burden.

  Four ships left, then—and then another was lost. It was another systems failure—catastrophic, as the containment of the point black-hole bombs failed, and the ship was immediately torn apart. After that, Pirius ordered the crews to dump their remaining bombs. He knew he would regret for the rest of his life not having thought of this precaution earlier.

  So in the end only three ships returned to Arches Base. They were directed to a hangar with enough cradles to hold the ten that had flown out from Orion Rock fifteen hours before.

  Pirius was the first down. He made a shaky landing, dropping his ship too hard into its cradle. There were dozens of ground crew on standby, and they came swarming around immediately. But of course there was only Pirius and Bilson to help out of their blisters; the stump of Cabel’s nacelle was a mute testament to the loss.

  Enduring Hope and Cohl were both here. Pirius was unreasonably pleased to see their familiar faces. They embraced, stiffly, in their skinsuits. But he could see their distress at the loss of Blue, “their” Pirius.

  Marshal Kimmer, in a bright skinsuit adorned with badges of command, came striding forward. “Well done, pilot, well done!”

  Pirius allowed his hand to be shaken. But when Kimmer demanded to know how the operation had gone, Pirius just said, “Wait for the debrief,” and turned back to his crew. You didn’t speak to a senior officer like that, but he was too tired to care.

  Pirius sent Bilson to the sick bay, but he fought off the medics who tried to lead him away. He wasn’t about to leave the hangar until the other surviving ships made it home.

  In they came, one at a time. Neither made a landing much better than he had, but both got down safely. The crews in their skinsuits clustered on the floor of the hangar, while medics and reserve flight crew crowded around them, and Hope’s technicians moved in on the ships.

  Everybody talked at once. Relief was the first emotion, relief to be alive. The release of nervous energy was almost like elation. But those empty cradles told a harrowing story. People would wander off alone and glance at the sky, as if expecting one of the lost ships to come limping home even now.

  Pirius’s most difficult meeting was with Torec. She hugged him, but her small face, inside her visor, was closed with grief. “I’ve got you back,” she said, “but I’ve lost you as well. How am I supposed to cope with that?”

  “I don’t know,” he murmured.

  Once inside the base, the crew were taken through standard post-operation processing.

  First the medics checked them over. All but one, a navigator with a broken arm, were released. Then they were taken to a refectory, where food and drink were heaped up. They suddenly discovered how hungry they were. But there was enough food for thirty, and it was uncomfortable to be surrounded by empty chairs.

  After that, though Pirius felt so exhausted he thought he would sleep for a week, they were taken away for preliminary debriefs, individually, in crews, and then as a whole. That went on for six wearying hours, until at last a consensus Virtual record of the operation was put together, combining all their viewpoints and the logs of the surviving ships. The crews accepted this as necessary. Details about the mission could be argued over for years, but these first moments, when memories were fresh and unclouded by sentiment or denial, were essential for an accurate record. It was grueling work, though.

  Marshal Kimmer sat silently throughout these sessions. The only emotion he showed came when Pirius described how he had taken his ship back for a second run on Chandra, to guide Blue and to deflect the flak.

  When the debrief was over, Kimmer approached Pirius. “You were right,” he said gruffly. “I should have waited for the debrief. But I’ll say it again. Well done, Pilot.” He seemed to want to say more, but his small, mean-looking mouth appeared incapable of expression. He bowed and walked away, his entourage of aides at his heels.

  By now Pirius was so tired he felt numb, detached, as if he were still wearing a skinsuit. But he knew he had one more duty.

  Commissary Nilis was in his room, deep in Officer Country. Pila sat with him. They were sorting through data desks, and Virtual images of Chandra and its surrounds floated in the air. Nilis actually shied away from Pirius when he came in, a kind of shame showing in his broad, rumpled face.

  Pila, though, gazed at Pirius. “Well done,” she said
softly.

  He wondered what she was feeling. This strange, cold woman from Earth had been on her own journey, he supposed. He said, “I couldn’t have done it without you, Pila. I won’t forget that.” He turned to Nilis and said formally, “Commissary—I was glad to have taken part in the final experiment that proved your theories.”

  That took Nilis by surprise. “Oh, my boy, my boy. Thank you! And you validated my faith in you, in spades. You have come a long way from that mixed-up child on Port Sol and Venus, my boy, a long, long way. You are a man—you poor wretch!

  “And of course it has been a great technical achievement.” He smiled, his rheumy eyes wet. “Who would have thought, when we were limping around in Sol system, that we could have brought it off? Well, I always had faith in you, Pirius; I knew you could do it, if anybody could.”

  “And we made history today.”

  “Oh, yes, there’s that too. How remarkable to think that of all the galaxies we see in the sky, only ours is clear of the Xeelee—and all thanks to human endeavor! And it is a historic moment in other ways. It’s a fallacy, you know, that communication is always possible between alien cultures. The dismal records of the Assimilation prove that. Sometimes perceptions of our common universe simply diverge too much. In an awful lot of first contacts, ‘communication’ is primal: only to be ignored, eaten, or attacked. And there is no record of the Xeelee attempting any form of communication with any lesser species, save extreme violence. But in this incident they did respond. We threatened Chandra, they withdrew, we did not attack; information, of a sort, passed between us, and a kind of agreement was reached.” He sighed. “If only it were possible to build on this breakthrough! Perhaps the perpetual war could be ended. But I fear that may be utopian.”

  Pirius knew how important this sort of philosophical stuff was to the Commissary. “A triumph in many ways, then.”