Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

  Meanwhile, her back ached where she had been rammed against the emplacement bulkhead. That gash on her head, half-treated by the cloak, was a permanent, nagging pain. Mysterious aches spread through her limbs and neck. Not only that, she was hungry, and as thirsty as she had ever been; she hadn’t had so much as a mouthful of water since the assault itself. She tried not to think about how much Kueht was slowing them down, what had transpired in the ‘factory’. But there wasn’t much else to think about.

  She knew the syndrome. She was being given too much time in her own head. And thinking was always a bad thing.

  They came at last to another chamber.

  As far as they could see in their cloaks’ failing light, this was a hangar-like place of alcoves and nooks. The bays were separated by huge diaphanous sheets of some muscle-like material, marbled with fat. And within the alcoves were suspended great pregnant sacs of what looked like water: green, cloudy water.

  Jarn made straight for one of the sacs, pulled out her knife and slit it open. The liquid pulsed out in a zero-G straight-line jet, bubbling slightly. Jarn thrust a finger into the flow, and read a sensor embedded in her cloaked wrist. She grinned. ‘Sea water. Earth-like, salty sea water. And this green glop is blue-green algae, I think. We found what we came for.’ She lengthened the slit. ‘Each of you pick a sac. Just climb in and immerse yourself; the cloaks will take what they need.’ She showed them how to work nipples in their cloaks that would provide them with desalinated water, even a mushy food based on the algae.

  Mari helped Kapur, then clambered inside a sac of her own. She didn’t lose much water when she slit the sac; surface tension kept it contained in big floating globules that she was able to gather up in her hands. She folded the sac like a blanket, holding it closed over her chest. The water was warm, and her cloak, drinking in nutrients, began to glow more brightly.

  ‘Blue-green algae,’ she murmured. ‘From a human world.’

  ‘Obviously,’ Kapur said.

  ‘Maybe this is one of the ways you pay a Spline,’ Jarn said. ‘I always wondered about that.’ She moved around the chamber, handing out vials of an amber fluid that she passed through the sac walls. ‘I think we deserve this. Pass it through your cloak.’

  Kapur asked, ‘What is it?’

  Mari grinned. ‘Poole’s Blood.’ For Michael Poole, the legendary pre-Extirpation explorer of Earth.

  ‘Call it a stimulant,’ Jarn said dryly. ‘An old Navy tradition, Academician.’

  Mari sucked down her tot. ‘How long should we stay here?’

  ‘As long as the cloaks need,’ Jarn said. ‘Try to sleep.’

  That seemed impossible. But the rocking motion of the water and its swaddling warmth seemed to soothe the tension out of her sore muscles. She thought about her starbreaker station: the smooth feel of the machinery as she disassembled it for servicing, the sense of its clean power when she worked it.

  Mari closed her eyes, just for a moment.

  When she opened her eyes, three hours had passed. And Kueht had gone.

  ‘He must have gone back,’ Jarn said. ‘Back to where we left his sibling.’

  ‘That was hours ago,’ Mari said. She looked from one to the other. ‘We can’t leave him.’ Without waiting for Jarn’s reaction she plunged back into the tunnel they had come from.

  Jarn hurried after Mari, calling her back. But Mari wasn’t about to listen. After a time, Jarn seemed to give up trying to stop her, and just followed.

  Through the factory-like chamber they went, then back along the twisting length of muscle-walled tunnel.

  ... Why am I doing this?

  Kueht was fat, useless and weak; before the disaster Mari wouldn’t have made room for him in the corridor. All her training and drill, and the Expansion’s Druz Doctrines that underpinned them, taught that people were not of equal worth. It was an individual’s value to the species as a whole that counted: nothing more, nothing less. And it was the duty of the weak to lay down their lives for the strong, the worthless for the valuable.

  But it wasn’t working out like that. When it came down to it Mari just couldn’t abandon even a helpless, useless creature like Kueht; she couldn’t be the one to leave him behind, just as Kapur had said. Humanity will assert itself.

  She was thinking too much again.

  At last they reached the place where Mari had jammed Tsedi’s burned body. Kueht was here, sprawled over his sibling. They pulled at Kueht’s shoulders, turning him on his back. His cloak flapped open. His face was swollen, his tongue protruding and blackened.

  Mari said, ‘Kapur talked about opening our cloaks. Maybe that gave him the idea.’

  ‘It must have been hard,’ Jarn said. ‘The cloak would have resisted being opened; it is smart enough to know that it would kill its occupant if it did. And asphyxiation is a bad way to die.’ She shrugged. ‘He told us he didn’t want to go on without Tsedi. I guess we just didn’t believe it.’

  Mari shook her head, unfamiliar emotions churning inside her. Here were two comical little fat men, products of some flawed cadre somewhere, helpless and friendless save for each other. And yet Kueht had been prepared to die rather than live without the other. ‘Why?’

  Jarn put her hand on Mari’s arm; it was small over Mari’s bunched bicep. ‘Don’t think about it.’

  They paused to strip Kueht of his cloak. Even now, Mari realised, Jarn was thinking ahead, planning the onward journey.

  They made good speed back the way they had come, to where Kapur was waiting. That was because they had after all lost the weak and slow, Mari reflected. It wasn’t a thought that gave her any pleasure.

  ‘We could just stay here,’ Jarn said. ‘There is food. We could last a long while.’

  Jarn seemed to have withdrawn into herself since the loss of Kueht. Maybe exhaustion was weakening her resolve. She was, after all, just a screen-tapper.

  ‘You’ve done well,’ Mari said impulsively.

  Jarn looked at her, startled.

  Kapur said, ‘There’s no point staying here. We have to assume we will be rescued, plan for it. Anything else is futile, simply waiting to die.’

  Jarn said, ‘We’re stuck inside a Spline warship, remember. Epidermis like armour.’

  Kapur nodded. ‘Then we must go to a place where the epidermis can be penetrated.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The eyes,’ Kapur said. ‘That’s the only possibility I can think of.’

  Jarn frowned. ‘How will we find our way to an eye?’

  ‘A nerve trunk,’ said Mari. Jarn looked at her. Mari said defensively, ‘Why not? Sir. Every eye must have an optic nerve connecting it to the rest of the nervous system. Or something like it.’

  Jarn shook her head. ‘You keep springing surprises on me, Mari.’

  Kapur laughed out loud. ‘That’s human beings for you.’

  They filled up the spare cloaks with sea water. Then, each of them trailing a massive, sluggish balloon by a length of rope, they formed up, Jarn leading, Kapur central, Mari bringing up the rear.

  As they left the chamber, mouth-like nozzles puckered from the walls and began to spew sprays of colourless liquid. Mari’s cloak flashed a warning. Stomach acid, she thought. She turned away.

  Once they were in motion the inertia of her water bag gave Mari a little trouble, and when the tunnel curved she had some work to do hauling the bag around corners and giving it fresh momentum. But she worked with a will. Physical activity: better than thinking.

  In some places the tunnels were scarred: once damaged, now healed. Mari remembered more scuttlebutt. Some of the great Spline vessels were very old, perhaps more than a million years, according to the domeheads. And they were veterans of ancient wars, fought, won and lost long before humans had even existed.

  They had been moving barely half an hour when they came to another chamber.

  This one was something like the organic ‘factory’. A broad open chamber criss-crossed by struts of cartilage was dominat
ed by a single pillar, maybe a metre wide, that spanned the room. It was made of something like translucent red-purple skin, and Mari made out fluid moving within it: blood, perhaps, or water. And there were sparks, sparks that flew like birds.

  Kapur sniffed loudly. ‘Can you smell that?’ Their cloaks transmitted selective scents. ‘Ozone. An electric smell.’

  Jarn’s water bag, clumsily sealed, was leaking; Mari had been running into droplets all the way up the tunnel. But now she saw that the droplets were falling - drifting away from Jarn, following slowly curving orbits, falling in towards the pillar that dominated the centre of the room.

  Jarn, fascinated, followed the droplets towards the pillar.

  Something passed through Mari’s body, a kind of clench. She grunted and folded over.

  ‘0h,’ said Kapur. ‘That was a tide. Lethe—’

  Without warning he hurled himself forward. He collided clumsily with Jarn, scrabbled to grab her, and spun her around. His momentum was carrying the two of them towards the pillar. But he tried to shove her away.

  ‘No, you don’t, sir,’ Jarn grunted. With a simple one-armed throw she flipped him back towards Mari. But that left her drifting still faster towards the pillar.

  Kapur scrabbled in the air. ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘Hold him, gunner.’ Behind Jarn, Mari saw, those water droplets had entered tight, whirling orbits, miniature planets around a cylindrical sun. Jarn said, ‘We haven’t brought him all this way to—’

  And then she folded.

  As simple as that, as if crumpled by an invisible fist. Her limbs were thrust forward, her spine and neck bent over until they cracked. Blood and other fluids, deep purple, flooded her cloak, until that broke in turn, and a gout of blood and shit sprayed out.

  Mari grabbed Kapur’s bent form and threw her body across his, sheltering him from the flood of bodily fluids.

  Kapur was weeping, inside his cloak. ‘I heard it. I heard what happened to her.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This is the hyperdrive chamber. Don’t you see? Inside a Spline, even a star drive grows organically. Oh, you are seeing miracles today, gunner. Miracles of the possibilities of life.’

  ‘We have to get you out of here.’

  He straightened, seeming to get himself under control. ‘No. The lieutenant—’

  Mari shrieked into his face, ‘She’s dead!’ He recoiled as if struck. She forced herself to speak calmly. ‘She’s dead, and we have to leave her, as we left the rest. I’m in charge now. Sir.’

  ‘The Squeem,’ he said evenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Jarn’s implant. If we’re to have any chance of rescue, we need it . . . Once the Squeem conquered the Earth itself. Did you know that? Now they survive only as unwilling symbiotes of mankind.’

  Mari glanced back at Jarn’s body, which was drifting away from the pillar. She seemed to have been compressed around a point somewhere above her stomach. Her centre of gravity, perhaps. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You have to. I’ll help.’ Kapur’s voice was hard. ‘Take your knife.’

  They travelled on for perhaps a day.

  Mari’s cloak began to fail, growing cloudy, stiff, confining. Kapur moved increasingly slowly and feebly, and, though he didn’t complain or even ask, he needed a lot of help. It seemed he had been wounded somehow, maybe internally, by the shock that had killed Jarn. But there wasn’t anything Mari could do about that.

  Once the tunnel they were using suddenly flooded with a thick gloopy liquid, crimson flecked with black. Blood maybe. Mari had to anchor them both to the wall; she wrapped her arms around Kapur and just held him there, immersed in a roaring, blood-dark river, until it passed. Then they kept on.

  At last they found an eye.

  It turned out to be just that: an eye, a fleshy sphere some metres across. It swivelled this way and that, rolling massively. At the back was a kind of curtain of narrow, overlapping sheets - perhaps components of a retina - from which narrower vine-like fibres led to the nerve bundle they had followed.

  Mari parted the fibres easily. A clear fluid leaked out into the general murk.

  She pulled Kapur into the interior of the eye. It was a neat spherical chamber. Unlike the tunnels and chambers they had passed through there were no shadows here, no lurking organic shapes; it was almost cosy.

  She lodged Kapur against the wall. She found places to anchor their bundles of water, and the scrap of cloak within which swam the Squeem, the tiny alien not-fish which had inhabited Jarn’s stomach.

  She pushed at the forward wall. Her hand sank into a soft, giving, translucent surface. A lens, maybe. But beyond there was only veined flesh. ‘If this is an eye, why can’t I see out?’

  ‘Perhaps the Spline has closed its eyelids.’

  The floor under Mari seemed to shudder; the clear fluid pulsed, slow waves crossing the chamber, as the eye swivelled. ‘But the eye is moving.’

  Kapur grinned weakly. ‘Surely Spline dream.’

  Then the Spline eyelid opened, like a curtain raising. And, through a dense, distorting lens, Mari saw comet light.

  They were deep within a solar system, she saw. She could tell because the comet had been made bright by sunlight. Its dark head was obscured by a glowing cloud, and two shining tails streaked across the black sky, tails of gas and dust.

  To Mari it was a strange, beautiful sight. In most Expansion systems such a comet wouldn’t be allowed to come sailing so close to a sun, because of the danger to the inhabitants of the system, and of the comet itself - all that outgassing would make the nucleus a dangerous place to live.

  But she saw no signs of habitation. ‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘I don’t see any lights. Where are the people? . . . Oh.’

  Kapur turned when he heard her gasp.

  Spline came sailing out of the glare of the comet’s diffuse coma: great fleshy bodies, a dozen of them, more. She peered, seeking the green sigil of humanity, the telltale glitter of emplacements of weapons and sensors; but she saw nothing but walls of hardened flesh, the watery glint of eyes. This flotilla was moving like none she had seen before - coordinated, yes, but with an eerie, fluid grace, like a vast dance. Some of the Spline were smaller than the rest, darting little moons that orbited the great planets of the others.

  And now they were gathering around the comet core.

  ‘They are grazing,’ she said. ‘The Spline are grazing on the comet.’

  Kapur smiled, but his face was grey. ‘This is not a flotilla. It is a - what is the word? - it is a school.’

  ‘They are wild Spline.’

  ‘No. They are simply Spline.’

  The school broke and came clustering around Mari’s ship. Huge forms sailed across her vision like clouds. She saw that the smaller ones - infants? - were nudging almost playfully against her Spline’s battered epidermis. It was a collision of giants - even the smallest of these immature creatures must have been a hundred metres across.

  And now the Spline rolled. Mart’s view was swivelled away from the comet, across a sky littered with stars, and towards a planet.

  It was blue: the blue of ocean, of water, the colour of Earth. But this was not a human world. It was swathed in ocean, a sea broken only by a scattered litter of gleaming ice floes at the poles, and a few worn, rusty islands. She could see features on the shallow ocean floor: great craters, even one glowing pit, the marks of volcanism. An out-of-view sun cast glittering highlights from that ocean’s silvery, wrinkled hide, and a set of vast waves, huge to be visible from this altitude, marched endlessly around the water-world.

  And now she saw a fleet of grey-white forms that cut through the ocean’s towering waves, leaving wakes like an armada of mighty ships, visible even from space.

  ‘Of course,’ Kapur said, his voice a dry rustle as she described this to him. ‘It must be like this.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The home world of the Spline. The breeding ground. We knew they came from an oce
an. Now they swim through the lethal currents of space. But biology must not be denied; they must return here, to their original birthing place, to spawn, to continue the species. Like sea turtles who crawl back to the land to lay their eggs.’ Kapur folded on himself, tucking his arms into his chest. ‘If only I had my Eyes! . . . I often wondered how the Spline made that transition from ocean to vacuum. As giant ocean-going swimmers, they surely lacked limbs, tools; there would be no need for the sort of manipulative intelligence that would enable them to redesign themselves. There must have been others involved - don’t you think? Hunters, or farmers. For their own reasons they rebuilt the Spline - and gave them the opportunity to rebel, to take control of their destiny.’