Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘What do the bones say?’

  He gestured at the hulking machinery. ‘These machines watch the sky for the trace of ships. But they also see the un-black: the light, the faintest light, all the light there is. Some of the light comes from the suns and pools of suns. Most of the light was made in the birthing of the universe. It is old now and tired and hard to see. But it has patterns in it . . .’

  This meant nothing to her. Bombarded by strangeness, she tried to remember the Doctrines. ‘I crimed. I did not death, and I wanted to be deathed. Even the wanting was a crime. Then you crimed. You could have deathed me. And here—’

  ‘Here, I crime.’ He grinned. ‘With every breath I crime. Every one of these bones is a crime, a record of ancient crimes. Like you, I was safed.’

  ‘Safed?’

  ‘Brought here.’

  She asked the hardest question of all. ‘When?’

  He smiled, and the wrinkles on his face gathered up. ‘Twenty years ago. Twice your life.’

  She frowned, barely comprehending. She leaned against the window, cupping her hands and peering out.

  He asked, ‘What are you looking for now?’

  ‘Shuttles to Earth.’

  He said gently, ‘There are no Shuttles.’

  ‘The cadre leaders—’

  ‘The cadre leaders say what is said to them. Think. Have you ever known anybody leave on a Shuttle? There are no Shuttles.’

  ‘It is a lie?’

  ‘It is a lie. If you live past age ten, the cadre leaders will death you. They believe they will win a place on the Shuttles. But they in turn are deathed by other cadre leaders, who believe they will steal their places on the Shuttles. And so it goes. Lies eating each other.’

  No Shuttles. She sighed, and her breath fogged the smooth surface of the window. ‘Then how will we leave?’

  ‘We un-can leave. We are too remote. Only the Commissaries come and go. Only the Commissaries. Not us.’

  She felt something stir in her heart.

  ‘The Shuttles are un-real. Is Earth real? Is the war real?’

  ‘Perhaps Earth is a lie. But the war is real. Oh, yes. The bones talk of how distant suns flare up. The war is real, and all around us, but it is very far away, and very old. But it shapes us.’ He studied her. ‘Soon the cadre leaders will pluck that baby from your belly and put it in the Birthing Vat. It will life and death for one purpose, for the war.’

  She said nothing.

  The Old Man said dreamily, ‘Some of the Old Men before me have seen patterns in the un-black. They have tried to understand them, as the cadre leaders make us understand the Memory images of the war. Perhaps they are thoughts, those patterns. Frozen thoughts of the creatures who lived in the first blinding second of the universal birth.’ He shook his head and gazed at the bones. ‘I un-want death. I want more than the war. I want to learn this.’

  She barely heard him. She asked, ‘Who gives you food?’

  He gave her names, of people she knew, and people she un-knew.

  The number of them shocked her.

  Hama and Arles Thrun drifted in space, side by side, two silver statues. Before them, this hot-Jupiter world continued its endless frenetic waltz around its too-close sun. The sun was a rogue star that had evaporated out of its parent galaxy long ago, and come to drift here, a meaningless beacon in the intergalactic dark.

  Hama was comfortable here, in space, in the vacuum, away from the claustrophobic enclosure of the Post. Alien creatures swam through his chest cavity, subtly feeding on the distant calls of Commissaries all over the Galaxy. To Hama it was like being in a vast room where soft voices murmured in every shadowed corner, grave and wise.

  ‘A paradox,’ Arles Thrun murmured now.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘You are. You know, your rebuilding has extended beyond the superficial. You have been re-engineered, the layers of evolutionary haphazardness designed out of you. The inner chemical conflicts bequeathed by humanity’s past do not trouble you. You do not hear voices in your head, you do not invent gods to drive out your internal torment. You are one of the most integrated human beings who ever lived.’

  ‘If I am still human,’ Hama said. ‘We have no art. We are not scientists. We do not dance.’

  ‘No,’ said Arles earnestly. ‘Our re-engineered hearts are too cold for that. Or to desire to make babies to fill up the empty spaces. Yet we are needed, we long-lived ones.

  ‘It is impossible to begin to grasp the scale and complexity of an interstellar war in a human lifetime. And yet the brevity of human life is the key to the war: we fight like vermin, for to the Xeelee we are vermin - that is the central uncomfortable truth of the Doctrines. We, who do not die, are a paradoxical necessity, maintaining the attention span of the species.

  ‘But we know our flaws, Hama. We know that those brutish creatures down there in the Post, busily fighting and fornicating and breeding and dying, they are the true heart of humanity. And so we must defer to them.’ He eyed Hama, waiting for him to respond.

  Hama said with difficulty, ‘I am not - happy.’

  ‘You were promised integration, not happiness.’

  ‘I failed to find the girl. La-ba.’

  Arles smiled in the vacuum. ‘I traced her. She escaped to the sensor installation.’

  ‘What installation?’

  ‘In the tethered asteroid. Another renegade lives up there. To what purpose, I can’t imagine.’

  ‘This place is flawed,’ Hama said bitterly.

  ‘Oh, yes. Very flawed. There is a network of drones who provision the renegade. And there are more subtle problems: the multiple births occurring in the Vat; the taking of trophies from kills; the dancing . . . These drones seek satisfaction beyond the Doctrines. There has been ideological drift. It is a shame. You would think that in a place as isolated as this a certain purity could be sustained. But the human heart, it seems, is full of spontaneous imperfection.’

  ‘They must be punished.’

  Arles looked at him carefully. ‘We do not punish, Hama. We only correct.’

  ‘How? A programme of indoctrination, a rebuilding—’ Arles shook his head. ‘It has gone too far for that. Even arguments of utility cannot outweigh the gross Doctrinal drift here. There are many other Observation Posts. We will allow these flawed drones to die.’

  There was a wash of agreement from the Commissaries all over the Galaxy, all of them loosely bound to their thinking, all of them concurring in Arles’s decision.

  Hama found he was appalled. ‘They have done their duty here for five thousand years, and now you would destroy them so casually, for the sake of a little deviance?’

  Arles gripped Hama’s arms and turned him so they faced each other. Hama glimpsed cold power in his eyes; Arles Thrun was already five centuries old. ‘Look around, Hama. Look at the Galaxy, the vast stage, deep in space and time, on which we fight. Our foe is unimaginably ancient, with unimaginable powers. And what are we but half-evolved apes from the plains of some dusty, lost planet? Perhaps we are not smart enough to fight this war. And yet we fight even so.

  ‘And to keep us united in our purpose, this vast host of us scattered over more galaxies than either of us could count, we have the Doctrines, our creed of mortality. Let me tell you something. The Doctrines are not perfect. They may not even enable us to win the war, no matter how long we fight. But they have brought us this far, and they are all we have.’

  ‘And so we must destroy these drones, not for the sake of the war—’

  ‘But for the sake of the Doctrines. Yes. Now, at last, you begin to understand.’

  Arles released him, and they drifted apart.

  La-ba stayed with the Old Man.

  She woke. She lay in silence. It was strange not to wake under a sky crowded with people. She could feel her baby inside her, kicking as if it was eager to get to the Birthing Vat.

  The floor shuddered.

  The Old Man ran to her. He dragged her to her feet. �
�It begins,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They are cutting the cable. You must go back.’ He took her to the hatch that led to the hollow cable.

  A We-ku was there, inside the cable, his fat face split by a grin, his stick-out ears wide.

  She raised her foot and kicked the We-ku in the forehead. He clattered to the floor, howling.

  The Old Man pulled her back. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘He is a We-ku.’

  ‘Look.’ The Old Man pointed.

  The We-ku was clambering to his feet and rubbing his head. He had been carrying a bag full of ration packs. Now the packs were littered over the floor, some of them split.

  The Old Man said, ‘Never mind the food. Take her back.’ And he pushed at La-ba again, urging her into the cable. Reluctantly, following the We-ku, she began to climb down.

  She felt a great sideways wash. The whole of this immense cable was vibrating back and forth, as if it had been plucked by a vast finger.

  She looked up at the circle of light that framed the Old Man’s face. She was confused, frightened. ‘I will bring you food.’

  He laughed bitterly. ‘Just remember me. Here.’ And he thrust his hand down into hers. Then he slammed shut the hatch.

  When she opened her hand, she saw it contained the scrimshawed bones.

  The cable whiplashed, and the lights failed, and they fell into darkness, screaming.

  Hama stood in the holding cell, facing Ca-si. The walls were creaking. He heard screaming, running footsteps.

  With its anchoring cable severed, the Post was beginning to sink away from its design altitude, deeper into the roiling murk of the hot Jupiter’s atmosphere. Long before it reached the glimmering, enigmatic, metallic-hydrogen core, it would implode.

  Ca-si’s mouth worked, as if he was gulping for air. He said to Hama, ‘Take me to the Shuttles.’

  ‘There are no Shuttles.’

  Ca-si yelled, ‘Why are you here? What do you want?’

  Hama laid one silvered hand against the boy’s face. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Don’t you see that? It’s my job to love you.’ But his silvered flesh could not detect the boy’s warmth, and Ca-si flinched from his touch, the burned scent of vacuum exposure.

  ‘. . . I know what you want.’

  Ca-si gasped. Hama turned.

  La-ba stood in the doorway. She was dirty, bloodied. She was carrying a lump of shattered partition wall. Fragmentary animated images, of glorious scenes from humanity’s past, played over it fitfully.

  Hama said, ‘You.’

  She flicked a fingernail against the silver carapace of his arm. ‘You hate being like this. You want to be like us. That’s why you tried to death us.’

  And she lifted the lump of partition rubble and slammed it into his chest. Briny water gushed down Hama’s belly, spilling tiny silver fish that struggled and died.

  Hama fell back, bending over himself. His systems screamed messages of alarm and pain at him - and, worse, he could feel that he had lost his link with the vaster pool of Commissaries beyond. ‘What have you done? Oh, what have you done?’

  ‘Now you are like us,’ said La-ba simply.

  The light flickered and darkened. Glancing out of the cell, Hama saw that the great Birthing Vat was drifting away from its position at the geometric centre of the Post. Soon it would impact the floor in a gruesome moist collision.

  ‘I should have gone with Arles,’ he moaned. ‘I don’t know why I delayed.’

  La-ba stood over Hama and grabbed his arm. With a grunting effort, the two drones hauled him to his feet.

  La-ba said, ‘Why do you death us?’

  ‘It is the war. Only the war.’

  ‘Why do we fight the war?’

  In desperation Hama said rapidly, ‘We have fought the Xeelee for ten thousand years. We’ve forgotten why we started. We can see no end. We fight because we must. We don’t know what else to do. We can’t stop, any more than you can stop breathing. Do you see?’

  ‘Take us,’ said La-ba.

  ‘Take you? Take you where? Can you even imagine another place?’

  Perhaps she couldn’t. But in La-ba’s set face there was ruthless determination, a will to survive that burned away the fog of his own weak thinking.

  The Doctrines are right, he thought. Mortality brings strength. A brief life burns brightly. He felt ashamed of himself. He tried to stand straight, ignoring the clamouring pain from his smashed stomach.

  The girl said, ‘It is un-Doctrine. But I have deathed your fish. Nobody will know.’

  He forced a laugh. ‘Is that why you killed the Squeem? . . . You are naïve.’

  She clutched his arm harder, as if trying to bend his metallic flesh. ‘Take us to Earth.’

  ‘Do you know what Earth is like?’

  Ca-si said, ‘It is a place where you live on the outside, not the inside. It is a place where water falls from the sky, not rock.’

  ‘How will you live?’

  La-ba said, ‘The We-ku helped the Old Man live. Others will help us live.’

  Perhaps it was true, Hama thought. Perhaps if these two survived on some civilised world - a world where other citizens could see what was being done in the name of the war - they might form a focus for resistance. No, not resistance: doubt.

  And doubt might destroy them all.

  He must abandon these creatures to their deaths. That was his clear duty, his duty to the species.

  There was a crack of shattering partition. The Post spun, making the three of them stagger, locked together.

  Ca-si showed his fear. ‘We will be deathed.’

  ‘Take us to Earth,’ La-ba insisted.

  Hama said weakly, ‘I would have to hide you from Arles. And you broke my link to the Commission. I may not be able to find my way. The link helps me - navigate. Do you see?’

  ‘Try,’ she whispered. She closed her eyes, and pressed her cheek against the cold of his silvered chest.

  Hama’s flitter floated in vacuum.

  The sun glared, impossibly bright. The planet was a floor of roiling gas, semi-infinite. Above, Hama could see the Post’s sensor installation. It was drifting off into space, dangling its tether like an impossibly long umbilical. It was startlingly bright in the raw sunlight, like a sculpture.

  From beneath the planet’s boiling clouds, a soundless concussion of light flickered and faded. Five thousand years of history had ended, a subplot in mankind’s tangled evolution; the long watch was over. La-ba squirmed, distressed, her hands clasped over the bump at her belly.

  Hama held the two lovers close.

  The flitter turned and squirted into hyperspace, heading for Earth.

  Much later, the primordial cosmic thoughts detected by the ‘drones’ of that Observation Post would be recognised, and valued - and the monads, minds from the dawn of time, would play a crucial role in the human capture of the Galaxy Core. All that later.

  It is amusing to see mayflies forget and rediscover, forget and rediscover, over and over. Commissaries like Arles and Hama with their alien symbiotes imagined that their longevity treatments were new, their long lives a novel strategy.

  To us even they were mayflies.

  The Galaxy blazed with war. Still time stretched, the past forgotten, the foreknown future static. The war became perpetual, a grinder of humanity.

  Yet humanity prevailed.

  RIDING THE ROCK

  AD 23,479

  I

  When Luca arrived in the Library conference room, the meeting between Commissary Dolo and Captain Teel was already underway. They sat in hard-backed armchairs, talking quietly, while trays of drinks hovered at their elbows.

  Over their heads Virtual dioramas swept by like dreams, translucent, transient. These were the possible destinies of mankind, assembled from the debris of interstellar war by toiling bureaucrats here in Earth’s Library of Futures, and displayed for the amusement of the Library’s guests. But neither Dolo nor Teel were paying an
y attention to the spectacle.

  Luca waited by the door. He was neither patient nor impatient. He was just a Novice, at twenty years old barely halfway through his formal novitiate into the Commission, and Novices expected to wait.

  But he knew who this Captain Teel was. An officer in the Green Navy, she had come from her posting on the Front - the informal name for the great ring of human fortification that surrounded the Core of the Galaxy, where the Xeelee lurked, mankind’s implacable foe. The Navy and the Commission for Historical Truth were also, of course, ancient and unrelenting enemies. There was no way Teel, therefore, would adopt the ascetic dress code of the Commission, even here in its headquarters. But her uniform was a subdued charcoal grey shot through with green flashes, and her hair, if not shaved, was cut short; this fighting officer had shown respect, then, for the hive of bureaucrats she had come to visit.