Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

  They travelled perhaps thirty kilometres inwards from the port area to the centre of the lens-shaped colony. Pala peered out at villages and farms. Mirror-masts towered over the buildings. It was as if they were driving through a forest of skeletal trees, impossibly tall, crowned by light.

  ‘You see we are comfortable,’ Sool said anxiously. ‘Stable. We are at peace here, growing what we need, raising our children. This is how humans are meant to live. And there is room here, room for billions more.’ That was true; Pala knew that the sphere’s surface would have accommodated ten thousand Earths, more. Sool smiled at them. ‘Isn’t that a reason for studying us, visiting us, understanding us - for letting us be?’

  ‘But you are static,’ Dano said coolly. ‘You have achieved nothing. You’ve sat here in the dome built by your forefathers five thousand years ago. And so have your neighbours, in the other colonies strung out along this star’s equator.’

  ‘We haven’t needed any more than this,’ Sool said. ‘Must one expand?’ But his smile was weak.

  Bicansa, sitting before Pala, said nothing throughout the journey. Her neck was narrow, elegant, her hair finely brushed. Pala wished she could talk to this woman alone, but that was of course impossible.

  As they approached the Lake there was a brighter glow directly ahead, like a sun rising through trees. They broke through the last line of mirror towers.

  The car stopped, and they walked. Under their feet, as they neared the Lake itself, the compacted comet dirt thinned and scattered. At last Pala found herself standing on a cool, steel-grey surface - the substance of the sphere itself, the shell that enclosed a sun. It was utterly lifeless, disturbingly blank.

  Dano, more practical, kneeled down and thrust his Virtual hand through the surface. Images flickered before his face, sensor readings rapidly interpreted.

  ‘Come,’ Sool said to Pala, smiling. ‘You haven’t seen it yet.’

  Pala walked forward to the Lake of Light itself.

  The universal floor was a thin skin here, and a white glow poured out of the ground to drench the dusty air. Scattered clouds shone in the light from the ground, bright against a dark sky.

  As far ahead as she could see the Lake stretched away, shining. It was an extraordinary, unsettling sight, a flood of light rising up from the ground, baffling for a human sensorium evolved for landscape and sun, as if the world had been inverted. But the light was being harvested, scattered from one great mirrored dish to another, so that its life-giving glow was spread across the colony.

  Sool walked forward, onto the glowing surface. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said to Pala. ‘It’s hot, but not so bad here at the edge; the real heat is towards the Lake’s centre. But even that is only a fraction of the star’s output, of course. The sphere keeps the rest.’ He held out his arms and smiled. It was as if he was floating in the light, and he cast a shadow upwards into the misty air. ‘Look down.’

  She saw a vast roiling ocean, almost too bright to look at directly, where huge vacuoles surfaced and burst. It was the photosphere of a star, just a thousand kilometres below her.

  ‘Stars give all humans life,’ Sool said. ‘We are their children. Perhaps this is the purest way to live, to huddle close to the star-mother, to use all her energy . . .’

  ‘Quite a pitch,’ Dano murmured in her ear. ‘But he’s targeting you. Don’t let him take you in.’

  Pala felt extraordinarily excited. ‘But Dano - here are people living, breathing, even growing crops, a thousand kilometres above the surface of a sun! Is it possible this is the true purpose of the sphere - to terraform a star?’

  Dano snorted his contempt. ‘You always were a romantic, Missionary. What nonsense. Stick to your duties. For instance, have you noticed that the girl has gone?’

  When she looked around, she realised that it was true; Bicansa had disappeared.

  Dano said, ‘I’ve run some tests. You know what this stuff is? Xeelee construction material. Your first intuition was right. This cute old man and his farm animals and grandchildren are living on a Xeelee artefact. And it’s just ten centimetres thick.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she admitted.

  ‘All this is a smokescreen. We have to go after her,’ Dano said. ‘Bicansa. Go to her “community in the north”, wherever it is. I have a feeling that’s where we’ll learn the truth of this place.’

  While Dano murmured this sinister stuff in her ear, Sool was still trying to get her attention. His face was underlit by sunlight, she saw, reminding her of the portrait in his home. ‘You see how wonderful this is? We live on a platform, suspended over an ocean of light, and all our art, our poetry is shaped by our experience of this bounteous light. How can you even think of removing this from the spectrum of human experience?’

  Pala felt hopelessly confused. ‘Your culture will be preserved, ’ she said hopefully, still wanting to reassure him. ‘In a museum.’

  Sool laughed tiredly, and he walked around in the welling light.

  Pala accepted they should pursue the mysterious girl, Bicansa. But she impulsively decided she had had enough of being remote from the world she had come to assess.

  ‘Bicansa is right. We can’t just swoop down out of the sky. We don’t know what we’re throwing away if we don’t take the time to look.’

  ‘But there is no time,’ Dano said wearily. ‘The Expansion front is encountering thousands of new star systems every day. Why do you think you’re here alone?’

  ‘Alone save for you, my Virtual conscience.’

  ‘Don’t get cocky.’

  ‘Well, whether you like it or not, I am here, on the ground, and I’m the one making the decisions.’

  And so, she decided, she wasn’t going to use her flitter. She would pursue Bicansa as the native girl had travelled herself - by car, over the vacuum road laid out over the star sphere.

  ‘You’re a fool,’ snapped Dano. ‘We don’t even know how far north her community is.’

  He was right, of course. Pala was shocked to find out how sparse the scouts’ information on this star-world was. There were light lakes scattered across the sphere from pole to pole, but away from the equator the compensating effects of centrifugal force would diminish. In their haste the scouts had assumed that no human communities would have established themselves away from the standard-gravity equatorial belt, and hadn’t mapped the sphere that far out.

  She would be heading into the unknown, then. She felt a shiver of excitement at the prospect. But Dano admonished her for being distracted from her purpose.

  He insisted that she shouldn’t use one of the locals’ cars, as she had planned, but a Coalition design shipped down from the Navy ferry. And, he said, she would have to wear a cumbersome hard-carapace skinsuit the whole way. She gave in to these conditions with bad grace. It took a couple of days for the preparations to be completed, days she spent alone in the flitter at Dano’s order, lest she be seduced by the bucolic comfort of Home.

  At last everything was ready, and Pala took her place in the car.

  She set off. The road ahead was a track of comet-core metal, laid down by human engineering across the immense face of the star sphere. To either side were scattered hillocks of ice, purple-streaked in the starlight. They were the wrecks of comets that had splashed against the unflinching floor of the sphere.

  The road surface was smooth, the traction easy. The blue-green splash of the domed colony receded behind her. The star sphere was so immense it was effectively an infinite plain, and she would not see the colony pass beyond the horizon. But it diminished to a line, a scrap of light, before becoming lost in the greater blackness.

  When she gave the car its head it accelerated smoothly to astounding speeds, to more than a thousand kilometres an hour. The car, a squat bug with big, tough, all-purpose tyres, was state-of-the-art Coalition engineering, and could keep up this pace indefinitely. But there were no landmarks save the meaningless hillocks of ice, the arrow-straight road laid over blackness, and desp
ite the immense speed, it was as if she wasn’t moving at all.

  And, somewhere in the vast encompassing darkness ahead, another car fled.

  ‘Xeelee construction material,’ Dano whispered. ‘It’s like no other material we’ve encountered. You can’t cut it, bend it, break it. Even if we could build a sphere around a star and set it spinning in the first place, it would bulge at the equator and tear itself apart. But this shell is perfectly spherical, despite those huge stresses, to the limits of our measurements. Some believe the construction material doesn’t even belong to this universe. But it can be shaped by the Xeelee’s own technology, controlled by gadgets we call “flowers”.’

  ‘It doesn’t just appear out of nowhere.’

  ‘Of course not. Even the Xeelee have to obey the laws of physics. Construction material seems to be manufactured by the direct conversion of radiant energy into matter, one hundred per cent efficient. Stars burn by fusion fire; a star like this, like Earth’s sun, probably converts some six hundred million tonnes of its substance to energy every second . . .’

  ‘So if the sphere is ten centimetres thick, and if it was created entirely by the conversion of the star’s radiation—’ She called up a Virtual display before her face, ran some fast calculations.

  ‘It’s maybe ten thousand years old,’ Dano said. ‘Of course that’s based on a lot of assumptions. And given the amount of comet debris the sphere has collected, that age seems too low - unless the comets have been aimed to infall here . . .’

  She slept, ate, performed all her biological functions in the suit. The suit was designed for long-duration occupancy, but it was scarcely comfortable: no spacesuit yet designed allowed you to scratch an itch properly. However she endured.

  After ten days, as the competition between the star’s gravity and the sphere’s spin was adjusted, she could feel the effective gravity building up. The local vertical tipped forward, so that it was as if the car was climbing an immense, unending slope. Dano insisted she take even more care moving around the cabin, and spend more time lying flat to avoid stress on her bones.

  Dano himself, of course, a complacent Virtual, sat comfortably in an everyday chair.

  ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why would the Xeelee create this great punctured sphere? What’s the point?’

  ‘It may have been nothing more than a simple industrial accident,’ he said languidly. ‘There’s a story from before the Qax Extirpation, predating even the Second Expansion. It’s said that a human traveller once saved himself from a nova flare by huddling behind a scrap of construction material. The material soaked up the light, you see, and expanded dramatically . . . The rogue scrap would have grown and grown, easily encompassing a star like this, if the traveller hadn’t found the “Xeelee flower”, the off-switch. It’s probably just a romantic myth. Or this may alternatively be some kind of technology demonstrator.’

  ‘I suppose we’ll never know,’ she said. ‘And why the light lakes? Why not make the sphere perfectly efficient, closed, totally black?’

  He shrugged. ‘Well, perhaps it’s a honey trap.’ She had never seen a bee, or tasted honey, and she didn’t understand the reference. ‘Sool was right that this immense sphere-world could host billions of humans - trillions. Perhaps the Xeelee hope that we’ll flock here, to this place with room to breed almost without limit, and die and grow old without achieving anything, just like Sool, and not bother them any more. But I think that’s unlikely.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the effective gravity rises away from the equator. So the sphere isn’t much of a honey trap, because we can’t inhabit most of it. Humans here are clearly incidental to the sphere’s true purpose.’ His Virtual voice was without inflection, and she couldn’t read his mood.

  They passed the five-gravity latitude before they even glimpsed Bicansa’s car. It was just a speck in the high-magnification sensor displays, not visible to the naked eye, thousands of kilometres ahead on this tabletop landscape. It was clear that they weren’t going to catch Bicansa without going much deeper into the sphere’s effective gravity well.

  ‘Her technology is almost as good as ours,’ Pala gasped. ‘But not quite.’

  ‘Try not to talk,’ Dano murmured. ‘You know, there are soldiers, Navy tars, who could stand multiple gravity for days on end. You aren’t one of them.’

  Pala was lying down, cushioned by her suit, kept horizontal by her couch despite the cabin’s apparent tilt upwards. But even so the pressure on her chest was immense. ‘I won’t turn back,’ she groaned.

  ‘I’m not suggesting you do. But you will have to accept that the suit knows best.’

  When they passed six gravities, the suit flooded with a dense, crimson fluid that forced its way into her ears and eyes and mouth. The fluid, by filling her up, would enable her to endure the immense, unending pressure of the gravity. It was like drowning.

  Dano offered no sympathy. ‘Still glad you didn’t take the flitter? Still think this is a romantic adventure? Ah, but that was the point, wasn’t it? Romance. I saw the way you looked at Bicansa. Did she remind you of gentle comforts, of thrilling under-the-blanket nights in the Academy dormitories?’

  ‘Shut up,’ she gasped.

  ‘Didn’t it occur to you that as she was only a Virtual image, that image might have been edited? You don’t even know what she looks like.’

  The fluid tasted of milk. Even when the feeling of drowning had passed, she never learned to ignore its presence in her belly and lungs and throat; she felt as if she was on the point of throwing up, all the time. She slept as much as she could, trying to shut out the pain, the pressure in her head, the mocking laugh of Dano.

  But, trapped in her body, she had plenty of time to think over the central puzzle of this star-world - and what to do about it. And still the journey continued across the elemental landscape, and the astounding, desolating scale of this artificial world worked its way into her soul.

  They drove steadily for no less than forty days, and traversed a great arc of the star sphere stretching from the equator towards the pole, across nearly a million kilometres. As gravity dominated the diminishing centrifugal forces, the local vertical tipped back up and the plain seemed to level out.

  Eventually the effective gravity force reached more than twenty standard.

  The car drew to a halt.

  Pala insisted on seeing for herself. Despite Dano’s objections she had the suit lift her up to the vertical, amid a protesting whine of exoskeletal motors. As the monstrous gravity dragged at the fluid in which she was embedded, waves of pain plucked at her body.

  Ahead of the car was another light lake, another pale glow, another splash of dimly lit green. But there were no trees or mirror towers, she saw; nothing climbed high above the sphere’s surface here.

  Bicansa appeared in the air.

  She stood in the car’s cabin, unsuited, as relaxed as Dano. Pala felt there was some sympathy in her Virtual eyes. But she knew now without doubt that this wasn’t Bicansa’s true aspect.

  ‘You came after me,’ Bicansa said.

  ‘I wanted to know,’ Pala said. Propped up in her suit, her voice was a husk, muffled by the fluid in her throat. ‘Why did you come to the equator - why meet us? You could have hidden here.’

  ‘Yes,’ Dano said grimly. ‘The Navy’s careless scouting missed you.’

  ‘We had to know what kind of threat you are to us. I had to see you face to face, take a chance that I would expose’ - she waved a hand - ‘this.’

  ‘You know we can’t ignore you,’ Dano said. ‘This great sphere is a Xeelee artefact. We have to learn what it’s for.’

  ‘That’s simple,’ Pala said. She had worked it out, she believed, during her long cocooning. ‘We were thinking too hard, Dano. The sphere is a weapon.’

  ‘Ah,’ Dano said grimly. ‘Of course. And I always believed your thinking wasn’t bleak enough for this job, Pala. I was wrong.’

  Bicansa looked bewildered. ‘What are you
talking about? Since the First landed, we have thought of this sphere as a place that gives life, not death.’

  Dano said, ‘You wouldn’t think it was so wonderful if you inhabited a planet of this star as the sphere slowly coalesced - if your ocean froze out, your air began to snow . . . Pala is right. The sphere is a machine that kills a star - or rather, its planets, while preserving the star itself for future use. I doubt if there’s anything special about this system, this star.’ He glanced at the sky, metal Eyes gleaming. ‘It is probably just a trial run of a new technology, a weapon for a war of the future. One thing we know about the Xeelee is that they think long term.’

  Bicansa said, ‘What a monstrous thought. My whole culture has developed on the hull of a weapon! But even so, it is my culture. And you’re going to destroy it, aren’t you? Or will you put us in a museum, as you promised Sool?’