Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

  She shivered at the remembered warmth of his touch. But he was no longer her cadre brother; he had become a ragamuffin, one of the dwindling tribes of humans who refused to remain in the Qax Conurbations, and his face was a mask of set planes and pursed lips, and his determined anger was intimidating.

  To get to the Qax facility they had to walk through the shanty community. It was a pit of rough, improvised dwellings, some little more than heaps of sheeting and rubble. But it was a functioning town, she realised slowly, with a food dispensing plant and a clinic and a water supply, even what looked like a rudimentary sewage system. She saw a small, dishevelled chapel, devoted to some no-doubt illegal religion, whose gods would one day free humanity from the rule of the Qax. All of this was laid over a mighty grid of rubble. There were still fragments of the old buildings, bits of wall and pipe poking like bones from the general wash of debris, some scarred by fire. Where vegetation had broken through the concrete, the remnant walls had become low hummocks coated with thick green blankets.

  There was a stink of smoke and sour humanity, and the air was full of dust which clung to her skin and clothes. It was hard to believe that any cadre sibling of hers would choose to live here. Yet here he was.

  Symat was talking rapidly about superheavy elements. ‘It used to be thought that marsdenium and its more exotic sisters could only exist as technological artefacts, manufactured in giant facilities like this Qax factory. But now we know that such elements can be born out of the great pressures of a supernova, the explosive death of a giant star.’

  She tried to focus. ‘An exploding star? Then why are you looking for heavy elements here on Earth?’

  He smiled. ‘Because the Earth coalesced from a cloud of primordial gas and dust, a cloud whose collapse was triggered by the shock wave from a nearby supernova. You see? The primordial supernova laced the young Earth with superheavy matter. So the heavy elements have deep significance, for Earth and all that live on it or in it.’

  On a heap of shattered stones a small child was sitting on the lap of an older girl, playing with a bit of melted glass. The girl was the infant’s cadre sister, Luru supposed. They both had hair, thick dark thatches of it. The little one looked up, coughing, as they passed.

  ‘This isn’t a healthy place,’ Luru observed.

  ‘What did you expect? But I keep forgetting. You expect nothing; you know nothing. Luru, people die young in places like this. How else do you think I became so senior here so quickly? And yet they still come. I came.’

  ‘Perhaps you were seduced by the closeness of the cadres here.’ A healthy dissolution might restore the social balance here, she thought.

  He stared at her. ‘There are no cadres here. The cadres, dissolved every couple of years, are another Qax social invention, imposed on humans after the Rebellion for the purposes of control. Didn’t you even know that? Luru, these are families.’

  He had to explain what that meant. And that the girl who nursed the child was not the little one’s cadre sibling, but her mother.

  They reached a door that had been crudely cut in the wall of the Qax facility. They passed through into an immense curving chamber where vast engines crouched. Hovering light globes cast long, complex shadows, and human technicians talked softly, dwarfed to insignificance. There was a smell of burned lubricant, of ozone.

  Luru was overwhelmed.

  Symat said, ‘This place was thrown up by the Qax after the Rebellion. It was one of hundreds around the planet. We think it was a factory for making exotic matter - that is, matter with a negative energy density. They abandoned the place; we don’t know why. Since it was built with human wealth and labour I suppose it means nothing to them. We refurbished the machinery, rebuilt much of it. Now we use it to make our own superheavy nuclei, by bombarding lumps of plutonium with high-energy calcium ions.’

  That puzzled her. He’d said his goal was the detection of superheavy elements in Earth’s crust. So why was he manufacturing them?

  ‘Why were the Qax making exotic matter?’

  ‘None of us knows for sure,’ he said. ‘There is a rumour that the Qax were trying to build a tunnel to the future. It’s even said that the Qax Governor itself is an immigrant from the future, where humanity is triumphant. And that is why the Qax work so hard to control us. Because they are frightened of us.’

  ‘That’s just a legend.’

  ‘Is it? Perhaps with time all history becomes legend.’

  ‘This is nonsense, Symat!’

  ‘How do you know, Luru?’

  ‘There are witnesses to the past. The pharaohs.’

  ‘Like Gemo Cana?’ Symat laughed. ‘Luru, there are no survivors from before the Occupation. The Qax withdrew AntiSenescence treatment for two centuries after the Occupation. All the old pharaohs died, before the Qax began to provide their own longevity treatments. These modern undead, like Gemo Cana, have been bought by the Qax, bought by the promise of long life.’ He leaned towards her. ‘As they are buying you, Luru Parz.’

  They emerged from the clean blue calm of the facility, back into the grimy mire of the town.

  Disturbed, disoriented, she said evenly, ‘Symat, the starbreaker beams are coming here. Once the Qax tolerated activities like this, indigenous cultural and scientific endeavours. Not any more, not since the Friends of Wigner betrayed the Qax’s cultural generosity towards indigenous ambitions.’ The Friends had used a cultural site to mask seditious activities. ‘If you don’t move out you will be killed.’

  He clambered on a low wall and spread his arms, his long robe flapping in the thin dusty breeze. ‘Ah. Indigenous. I love that word.’

  ‘Symat, come home. There’s nothing here. The data cleansers were sent through this place long ago.’

  ‘Nothing? Look around you, Luru. Look at the scale of these old foundations. Once there was a host of immense buildings here, taller than the sky. And this roadway, where now we mine the old sewers for water, must have swarmed with traffic. Millions of people must have lived and worked here. It was a great city. And it was human, Luru. The data might have gone; we might never even know the true name of this place. But as long as these ruins are here we can imagine how it must once have been. If these last traces are destroyed the past can never be retrieved. And that’s what the Qax intend.

  ‘The Extirpation isn’t always a matter of clinical data deletion, you know. Sometimes the jasofts come here with their robots, and they simply burn and smash: books, paintings, artefacts. Perhaps if you saw that, you would understand. The Qax want to sever our roots - to obliterate our identity.’

  She felt angry, threatened; she tried to strike back at him. ‘And is that what you’re seeking here? An identity from unravelling this piece of obscure physics?’

  ‘Oh, there is much more here than physics.’ He said softly, ‘Have you ever heard of Michael Poole? He was one of the first explorers of Sol system - long before the Occupation. And he found life, everywhere he looked.’

  ‘Life?’

  ‘Luru, that primordial supernova did more than spray superheavy atoms through the crust of the young Earth. There were complex structures in there, exotic chemistries. Life. Some of us believe they may be survivors of a planet of the primordial supernova - or perhaps they were born in the cauldron of the supernova itself, their substance fizzing out of that torrent of energy. Perhaps they breed that way, seeds flung from supernova to supernova, bugs projected by the mighty sneezes of stars!

  ‘There is much we don’t understand: their biochemistry, the deeper ecology that supports them, their lifecycle - even what they look like. And yet we know there is a forest down there, Luru, a chthonic forest locked into the substance of the ground, inhabited by creatures as old as the Earth itself. You see, even in these unimaginably difficult times, we are finding new life - just like Michael Poole.’

  Wonder flooded her, unwelcome. Bombarded by strangeness, she felt as if some internal barrier were breaking down, as if Symat’s bizarre superheavy creatures
were swimming through her mind.

  He peered into her eyes, seeking understanding. ‘Now do you see why I’m prepared to fight for this place? Humans aren’t meant to be drones, for the Qax or anybody else. This is what we live for. Exploration, and beauty, and truth.’

  She returned to Conurbation 5204, without Symat. She filed a report for Gemo Cana. Her duty fulfilled, she tried to get back to work, to immerse herself once more. As always, there was much to do.

  But the work was oddly unsatisfying.

  She was distracted by doubt. Could it really be true, as Symat had said, that her career trajectory, with its pleasing succession of tasks and promotions, was just a Qax social construct, a series of meaningless challenges meant to keep bright, proactive people like herself contented and contained and usefully occupied - useful for the Qax, that is?

  Meanwhile it was a busy time in the Conurbation. The cramped corridors were crowded with people, all of them spindly tall, bald, pale - just as Luru was herself - all save the pharaohs, of course; they, having been born into richer times, were more disparate, tall and short, thin and squat, bald and hairy. The cadres were undergoing their biennial dissolution, and everybody was on the move, seeking new quarters, new friends, eager for the recreation festival to follow, the days of storytelling and sport and sex.

  Luru had always enjoyed the friendly chaos of the dissolutions, the challenge of forming new relationships. But this time she found it difficult to focus her attention on her new cadre siblings.

  At the age of twenty-two Luru was already done with childbirth. She had donated to a birthing tank; it was a routine service performed by all healthy women before they left their late teens, and she had thought nothing of it. Now, thinking of the families of Mell Born, she looked at the swarms of youngsters scrambling to their new cadres, excited, all their bare scalps shining like bubbles on a river, and wondered if any of these noisy children could be hers.

  Gemo Cana said, ‘I read your report. You’re right to question why Suvan needs to manufacture his strange elements. He’s obviously planning something, some kind of rebellious gesture. ’ She looked up from her data slate, as if seeing Luru for the first time. ‘Ah. But you aren’t interested in Symat Suvan and his grubbing in the dirt, are you?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Cana put down the slate. ‘It got to you. The outside. I can see it in you. I knew it would, of course. The only question is what difference it’s going to make. Whether you will still be useful.’ She nodded. ‘You have questions, Luru Parz. Ask them.’

  Luru felt cold. ‘Symat Suvan told me that the Qax’s ultimate intention—’

  ‘Is to cauterise the past. I suppose he talked about our identity being dissolved, and so forth? Well, he’s right.’ Cana sounded tired. ‘Of course he is. Think about what you’ve done. What did you think was the purpose of it all? The Extirpation is an erasing of mankind’s past. A bonfire of identity. That is the truth.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘There are further plans, you know,’ Cana said, ignoring her. ‘For example: the Spline starbreakers penetrate only the first few tens of metres of the ground, to obliterate shelters, archives and other traces. But the Qax intend to perform a deeper ploughing-up. They have a nanotech replicator dust, which - Well. You see, with such tools, even the fossils will be destroyed, even the geology of the Earth itself: never to be retrieved, the wisdom they contain never to be deciphered.

  ‘Another example. The Qax intend to force mass migrations of people, a mixing, a vast melting pot.’ She touched her chest. ‘Then even this will be lost, you see, in a few generations - the differences between us, the history embedded in our bodies, our genes, our blood types. All mixed up, the data lost for ever. There is a simpler proposal to replace our human names with some form of catalogue numbers. So even the bits of history lodged in our names will be lost. It will only take two or three generations before we forget . . .’

  Luru was shocked at the thought of such cultural vandalism.

  Cana evidently read her expression. ‘So at last we’ve dug far enough into Luru Parz to find a conscience. At last we’ve found something that shocks you. And you’re wondering why any human being would cooperate with such monstrosity. I’ll tell you why. The alternative is worse. The alternative is the destruction of the species - an option the Qax have considered, believe me. That is why we are here, we who collaborate. That is what we must work ceaselessly to avoid.’

  She stood, restless, and picked a slate off the wall. ‘Look at this. It is data on the deletion of data: a recursive register of destruction. And when all the primary information is gone, of course, we will have to delete this too. We must even forget that we forgot. And then forget that in turn. It will go on, Luru, a hierarchy of deletion and destruction, until - on one last data slate in an anonymous office like this - there will remain a single datum, the final trace of the huge historic exercise. If it falls to me I will erase that last record, gladly. And then there will be no trace left at all - except in my heart. And,’ she added softly, ‘yours.’

  Luru, half understanding, was filled with fear and longing.

  Cana eyed her. ‘I think you’re ready. You face a choice, Luru Parz.’ She reached into her desk and produced a translucent tablet the size of a thumbnail. ‘This comes from the Qax themselves. They are able to manipulate biochemical structures at the molecular level - did you know that? It was their, um, competitive edge when they first moved off their home planet. And this is the fruit of their study of mankind. Do you know what it is?’

  Luru knew. The tablet was the removal of death.

  Cana set the tablet on the desk. ‘Take it.’

  Luru said, ‘So it is true. You have been bought with life.’

  Cana sat, her face crumpling into sadness; for an instant Luru had the impression of very great age indeed. ‘Suddenly you have grown a moral sense. Suddenly you believe you can judge me. Do you imagine I want this? Should I have followed the others to Callisto, and hidden there?’

  Luru frowned. ‘Where? Jupiter’s moon?’

  Cana regained the control she had momentarily lost. ‘You judge, but you still don’t understand, do you? There is a purpose to what we do, Luru. With endless life comes endless remembering.

  ‘We cannot save the Earth from the Qax, Luru. They will complete this project, this Extirpation, whatever we do, we jasofts. And so we must work with them, accept their ambiguous gift of life; we must continue to implement the Qax’s project, knowing what it means. For then - when everything else is gone, when even the fossils have been dug out of the ground - we will still remember. We are the true resistance, you see, not noisy fools like Symat Suvan, we who are closest of all to the conquerors.’

  Luru tried to comprehend all of this, the layers of ambiguity, the compromise, the faintest flicker of hope. ‘Why me?’

  ‘You are the best and brightest. The Qax are pleased with your progress, and wish to recruit you.’ She smiled thinly. ‘And, for exactly the same reasons, I need you. So much moral complexity, wrapped up in a single tiny tablet!’

  Luru stood. ‘You told me you remembered how it was, before the Qax. But Symat said all the old pharaohs died during the Occupation. That nobody remembers.’

  Cana’s face was expressionless. ‘If Suvan said that, it must be true.’

  Luru hesitated. Then she closed her hand around the tablet and put it in a pocket of her tunic, her decision still unmade.

  When she returned to Mell Born she found it immersed in shadow, for a Spline ship loomed above the ruins. The Spline rolled ponderously, weapon emplacements glinting. There was a sense of huge energies gathering.

  Her flitter skimmed beneath the Spline’s belly, seeking a place to land.

  The crude shanty town was being broken up. She could see a line of Directorate staff - no, of jasofts - moving through the ramshackle dwellings, driving a line of people before them, men, women and children. Beetle-like transports followed t
he line of the displaced, bearing a few hastily grabbed belongings. The jasofts were dressed in skinsuits, their faces hidden behind translucent masks; the raw surface of Earth was not a place where inhabitants of the great Conurbations walked unprotected.

  A small group lingered near the electric blue walls of the Qax facility, robes flapping, their stubborn defiance apparent in their stance. One of them was Symat, of course. She ran to him.

  ‘I didn’t think you would return.’ He waved at the toiling, fleeing people. ‘Are you proud of what is being done to us?’

  She said, ‘You are manufacturing superheavy elements, here in this facility. What is the real reason? Have you lied to me, Symat?’

  ‘Only a little,’ he said gently. ‘We do understand something of the creatures of the rocky forest that has flourished beneath our feet.’