Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

  At last Dolo noticed Luca.

  Luca said, ‘You sent for me, Commissary.’

  Captain Teel turned her head towards him. She looked tired, but Luca saw how the complex, shifting light of multiple futures softened her expression.

  Dolo was watching Luca, the corner of his mouth pulled slightly, as if by a private joke. Dolo had no eyebrows, and his skull was shaved, as was Luca’s. ‘Yes, Novice, I called you. I think I’m going to need an assistant on this project, and Lethe knows you need some field experience.’

  ‘A project, Commissary?’

  ‘Sit down, shut up, listen and learn.’ Dolo waved a hand, and a third chair drifted in from a corner of the room.

  Luca sat, and absently followed their continuing talk.

  From scuttlebutt in the dormitories he already had an idea why Captain Teel had been called here to Earth. In a unit of troopers at some desolate corner of the Front, there had been an outbreak of anti-Doctrinal thinking which, it sounded to Luca’s ill-informed ears, might even be religious in character. If so, of course, it was perilous to the greater efficiency of the Third Expansion. An important issue, then. But not very interesting.

  Surreptitiously, as they talked, he studied Teel.

  He supposed he had expected some battle-scarred veteran of raids on Xeelee emplacements. But this Navy officer was young, surely about the same age as he was himself, at twenty years. Her face was long, the nose narrow and well-carved, her nostrils flaring slightly; her mouth was relaxed but full. Her skin was unblemished - though it was pale, almost bloodless; he reminded himself that of all the countless worlds now inhabited by mankind, on only a handful could a human walk in the open air without a skinsuit. But that paleness gave her skin a translucent quality. But it was not Teel’s features that drew him - she was scarcely conventionally beautiful - but something more subtle, a quality of stillness about her that seemed to pull him towards her like a gravitational field. She was solid, he thought, as if she was the only real person in this place of buzzing bureaucrats. Even before she spoke to him, he knew that Teel was like no one he had ever met before.

  ‘Novice.’ The Commissary’s gaze neatly skewered Luca.

  To his mortification, Luca felt his face flush like a child’s in a new cadre. Captain Teel was looking a little past him, expressionless. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  Dolo brushed that aside. ‘Tell me what you are thinking. The surface of your mind.’

  Luca looked at Teel. ‘That, with respect, the Captain is young.’

  Dolo nodded, his voice forensic. ‘How could one so young - actually younger than you, Novice - have achieved so much?’

  Luca said, ‘ “A brief life burns brightly.” ’

  Teel’s lips parted, and Luca thought she sighed. The ancient slogan hung in the air, trite and embarrassing.

  Dolo’s smile was cruel. ‘I have come to a decision. I will visit the site of this Doctrinal infringement. And you, Novice, will come with me.’

  ‘Commissary - you want me to go to the Core?’ It was all but unheard of for a novice to travel so far.

  ‘I have no doubt it will help you fulfil your fitful promise, Luca. Make the arrangements.’

  Suddenly he was dismissed. Luca stood, bowed to the Commissary and Captain, and turned to leave.

  Emotions swirled in Luca: embarrassment, surprise, fear - and a strange, unexpected grain of hope. Of course this was all just some game to the Commissary; Dolo had spotted Luca’s reaction to Teel and had impulsively decided to toy with him. Dolo was hugely arrogant. You could hardly expect to become one of the most powerful members of a bureaucracy that ruled the disc of a Galaxy without learning a little arrogance along the way. But for Luca it was a good opportunity, perhaps an invaluable building block for his future career.

  And none of that mattered, he knew in his heart, for whatever the wider context Luca was now going to be in the company of this intriguing young Navy officer for weeks, even months to come, and who could say where that would lead?

  At the door he glanced back. Teel and Dolo continued to talk of this uninteresting Doctrinal problem at the Galaxy’s Core; still she didn’t look at him.

  They were to climb to orbit in a small flitter, and there join the Navy yacht that had brought Teel to Earth.

  Luca had only been off Earth a couple of times during his general education, and then on mere hops out of the atmosphere. As the flitter lifted off the ground its hull was made transparent, so that it was as if the three of them were rising inside a drifting bubble. As the land fell away Luca tried to ignore the hot blood that prickled at his neck, and the deeply embarrassingly primeval clenching of his sphincter.

  He tried to draw strength from Teel’s stillness. Her eyes were blue, Luca noticed now. He hadn’t been able to make that out before, in the shifting light of the Library.

  As they rose the Conurbation was revealed. It was a glistening sprawl of bubble-dwellings blown from the bedrock. The landscape beyond was flat, a plain of glistening silver-grey devoid of hills, and there were no rivers, only the rectilinear gashes of canals. The only living things to be seen, aside from humans, were birds. It was like this over much of the planet. The alien Qax had begun the transformation of the land during their Occupation of Earth, their starbreaker beams and nanoreplicators turning the ground into a featureless silicate dust.

  They spoke of this. Teel murmured, ‘But the Qax were here only a few centuries.’

  Dolo nodded. The silvery light reflected from the planes of his face; he was about fifty years old. ‘Much of this is human work, Coalition work. The Qax tried to destroy our past, to cut us adrift from history. Their motivation was wrong - but their methods were valid. Remember, we have been in direct conflict with the Xeelee for eleven thousand years. We have done well. We have swept them out of the plane of the Galactic disc. But they remain huddled in their fortress in the Core, and beyond our little island of stars they swarm in uncounted numbers. We must put the past aside, for it is a distraction. If the Xeelee defeat us, we will have no future - and in that case, what will the past matter?’

  ‘Your ideology is powerful.’

  Dolo nodded. ‘A single idea powerful enough to keep mankind united across a hundred thousand light years, and through tens of millennia.’

  Teel said, ‘But the mountains and rivers of Earth were far older than mankind. How strange that we have outlived them.’

  Luca was startled by this anti-Doctrinal sentiment. Dolo merely looked interested, and said nothing.

  The yacht soared upwards, out through the great ranks of Snowflake surveillance stations that stretched as far as Earth’s Moon, and the planet itself turned into a glistening pebble that fell away into the dark.

  It would take them a day to reach Saturn. Luca, on this first trip out of Earth’s gravitational well, had expected to glimpse Earth’s sister worlds - perhaps even mighty Jupiter itself, transformed millennia ago into a gleaming black hole in a futile gesture of rebellion. But he saw nothing but darkness beyond the hull, not so much as a grain of dust, and even as they plunged through the outer system the stars did not shift across the sky, dwarfing the journey he was making.

  Saturn itself was a bloated ball of yellow-brown that came swimming out of the dark. It was visibly flattened at the poles, and rendered misty in the diminished light of the already remote sun. Rings like ceramic sheets surrounded it, gaudy. The world itself was an exotic place, for, it was said, mighty machines of war had been suspended in its clouds, there to defend Sol system should the unthinkable happen and the alien foe strike at the home of mankind. But if the machines existed there was no sign of them, and Luca was disappointed when the yacht stopped its approach when the planet was still no larger than he could cover with his hand.

  But Saturn wasn’t their destination.

  Dolo murmured, ‘Look.’

  Luca saw an artefact - a tetrahedron, glowing sky-blue - sailing past the planet’s limb. Kilometres across, it was a framework of glowi
ng rods, and brown-gold membranes of light stretched across the open faces. Those membranes held tantalising images of star fields, of suns that had never shone over Saturn, or Earth.

  ‘A wormhole Interface,’ Luca breathed. It was like a dream of a forbidden past.

  Wormholes were flaws in space and time which connected points separated by light years - or by centuries - with passages of curved space. On the scale of the invisibly small, where the mysterious effects of quantum gravity operated, spacetime was foam-like, riddled with tiny wormholes. It had taken the genius of the legendary engineer Michael Poole, more than twenty thousand years ago, to pull such a wormhole out of the foam and manipulate it to the size and shape he wanted: that is, big enough to take a spacecraft.

  ‘Once it must have been magnificent,’ Teel said now. ‘Poole and his followers built a wormhole network that spanned Sol system, from Earth to the outermost ice moon. At Earth itself wormhole gates of all sizes drifted across the face of the planet like sculptures.’ This evocation was surprisingly poetic. But then Teel had been brought up within the Core itself - you couldn’t get much further from Earth than that - and Luca wondered how much this trip to the home system meant to her.

  But Dolo said sternly, ‘That was before the Occupation, of course. The Qax broke it all up, destroyed the Poole wormholes. But now we are building a mighty new network, a great system of arteries that runs, not just across Sol system, but all the way to the Core of the Galaxy itself. There are a thousand wormhole termini orbiting in these rings. And if we have that in the present, we don’t need dreams of the past, do we?’

  Teel did not respond.

  The yacht swept on, tracking the great ring system into the shadow of the planet.

  Ships swarmed everywhere, pinpricks in the dark. Saturn, largest planet in the system now that Jupiter had been imploded, was used merely as a convenient gravitational mooring point for the mouths of the wormholes, tunnels through space and time. And its rings were being mined, ice and rock fragments hurled into the wormhole mouth to feed humans at remote destinations. Luca had heard mutterings in the seminaries at the steady destruction of this unique glory. In another couple of centuries, it was predicted, the ravenous wormholes would have gobbled up so much the rings would be barely visible, mere wraiths of their former selves. But, as Dolo would have remarked had Luca raised the point, if the victorious Xeelee caused the extinction of mankind, all the beauty in the universe would have no point, for there would be no human eyes to see it.

  Now they were approaching a wormhole Interface. One great triangular face opened before Luca, wider and wider, until it was like a mouth that would swallow the yacht. A spark of light slid over the grey-gold translucent sheet that spanned the face, the reflected light of the yacht’s own drive.

  Suddenly Luca realised that he was only moments from being plunged into a wormhole mouth himself, and his heart hammered.

  Blue-violet fire flared, and the yacht shuddered. Fragments of the Interface’s exotic matter framework were already hitting the yacht’s hull. That grey-gold sheet dissolved into fragments of light that fled from a vanishing point directly before him. This was radiation generated by the unravelling of stressed spacetime, deep in the throat of the flaw. For the first time since they had left Earth there was a genuine sensation of speed, of limitless, uncontrollable velocity, and the yacht seemed a fragile, vulnerable thing around him, a flower petal in a thunderstorm.

  Luca gripped a rail. Aware of Teel at his side he tried not to cower, to hide his head from the stretched sky which poured down over him.

  After a few days of hyperdrive hops and falls through branching wormholes, they reached the Orion Line. This was the innermost section of the Galactic spiral arm which contained Earth’s sun. They emerged at a new clustering of wormhole Interfaces, a huge interchange that dwarfed the port at Saturn, carrying the commerce of mankind across thousands of light years.

  Here they transferred to a Spline, a living thing transformed into a Navy warship. In the increasingly dangerous regions into which they would now venture, such protection was necessary.

  Before they resumed their journey to the centre they took dinner, just the three of them, in a transparent blister set on the Spline’s outer hull. At their small table they were served, not by automata but by humans, Navy ratings who hovered with cutlery, plates, dishes, even a kind of wine. It was a surreal experience for Luca, for all around the table, outside the blister’s glimmering walls, the Spline’s epidermis stretched away like the surface of a fleshy moon, and beyond its close horizon wormhole mouths glimmered like raindrops.

  Commissary Dolo seemed slightly drunk. He was holding forth about the history of the Orion Line. ‘Do you know the geography of the Galaxy, Novice? Look over there.’ He pointed with his fork. ‘That’s the Sagittarius Arm, the next spiral arm in from ours. The Silver Ghosts strove for centuries to keep us out of those lanes of stars.’ He talked on about the epochal defeat of the Ghosts and the thunderous Expansion since, and how the great agencies of the Coalition, the Navy, the Commission, the Guards, the Academies and the rest, had worked together to achieve those victories - and how officials like the Surveyor of Revenues and the Auditor-General laboured to maintain the mighty economic machine that fuelled the endless war - and, of course, how his own department within the Commission, the Office of Doctrinal Responsibility, oversaw the rest. He made it sound as if the conquest of the Galaxy was an exercise in paperwork.

  As the Commissary talked, when he thought Dolo wasn’t watching him, Luca studied Teel.

  There was something animal in her deft actions with her cutlery, the powerful muscles that worked in her cheeks. It was as if she could not be sure when her next meal would come. Everything she did was so much more solid and vivid than anything else in his life - and far more fascinating than the great star clouds that illuminated the human empire. He was thrilled that they shared this transient bubble of isolation.

  When Dolo fell silent, Luca took his chance. He leaned subtly closer to Teel. ‘I suppose the food we eat is the same from one end of the Galaxy to the other.’

  She didn’t look directly at him, but she turned her head. ‘Since this food comes from the belly of this Spline ship, and since the Spline are used all over the Galaxy - yes, I imagine you are right, Novice.’

  ‘But not everything is the same,’ he found himself babbling. ‘We are about the same age, but our two lives could hardly have been more different. There is much about you that I envy.’

  ‘You know very little about my life.’

  ‘Yes, but even so—’

  ‘What do you envy most?’

  ‘Comradeship. I was born in a birthing centre and placed in a cadre. That’s how it was for everybody. The cadres are broken up in cycles; you aren’t allowed to get too close to your cadre siblings. Even at the seminaries I am in competition with the other novices. Intimacy is seen as inevitable, but is regarded as a weakness.’

  ‘Intimacy?’

  ‘I have had lovers,’ he said, ‘but I have no comrades.’ He regretted the foolish words as soon as they were uttered. ‘At the Front, everybody knows—’

  ‘What everybody knows is always to be questioned, Novice,’ said Dolo. Suddenly he no longer seemed drunk, and Luca wondered if he had fallen into some subtle trap. Dolo turned in his chair, waving his empty glass at the attendant ratings.

  When Luca looked back, Teel had turned away. She was peering at the Sagittarius Arm’s wash of light, as if with her deep eyes she could see it more clearly.

  The Galaxy was a hundred thousand light years across, and over most of its span the stars were scattered more sparsely than grains of sand spread kilometres apart. On such a scale even the greatest human enterprise was dwarfed. And yet, as they neared the centre, the sense of activity, of industry, accelerated.

  They moved within the 3-Kiloparsec Arm, the innermost of the spiral arms proper, wrapped tightly around the Core region. Here, no more than a few thousand light year
s from the Core itself, the Spline was replenished in orbit around a world that glistened, entirely covered in metal. This was a factory world, devoted to the production of armaments. Great clusters of wormhole mouths hovered over its gleaming surface, amid a cloud of Snowflake surveillance posts.

  On a data desk, Dolo sketched concentric circles. ‘The Core itself is surrounded by our fortresses, our warrior worlds and cities. As you’ll see, Novice. Behind that, out here we are in the hinterland. Around a belt hundreds of light years thick, factory worlds churn out the material needed to wage the war. And behind that there is an immense and unending inward resource flow from across the Galaxy’s disc, a flow through wormhole links and freighters of raw materials for the weapons factories, the lifeblood of a Galaxy all pouring into the centre to fuel the war.’