Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

  And visible beyond the close horizon of the ice moon was a squat cylinder, a misty sketch in the faint sunlight. That was Ship Three, preparing for its leap into the greater dark.

  This was the very edge of Sol system. The sky was a dome of stars, with the ragged glow of the Galaxy hurled casually across its equator. Set in that diffuse glow was the sun, the brightest star, bright enough to cast shadows, but so remote it was a mere pinpoint. Around the sun Rusel could make out a tiny puddle of light: the inner system, the disc of worlds, moons, asteroids, dust and other debris that had been the arena of all human history before the first interplanetary voyages some three thousand years earlier, and still the home of all but an invisible fraction of the human race. This was a time of turmoil, and today, invisible in that pale glow, humans were fighting and dying. And even now a punitive fleet was ploughing out of that warm centre, heading for Port Sol.

  The whole situation was an unwelcome consequence of the liberation of Earth from the alien Qax, just thirteen years earlier. The Interim Coalition of Governance, the new, ideologically pure and viciously determined central authority that had emerged from the chaos of a newly freed Earth, was already burning its way out through the worlds and moons of Sol system. When the Coalition ships came, the best you could hope for was that your community would be broken up, your equipment impounded, and that you would be hauled back to a prison camp on Earth or its Moon for ‘reconditioning’.

  But if a world was found to be harbouring anyone who had collaborated with the hated Qax, the penalties against it were much more extreme. The word Rusel had heard was ‘resurfacing’.

  Now the Coalition had turned its attention to Port Sol. This ice moon was governed by five ‘pharaohs’, as they were called locally, an elite group who had indeed collaborated with the Qax - though they described it as ‘mediating the effects of the Occupation for the benefit of mankind’ - and they had received anti-ageing treatments as a reward. So Port Sol was a ‘nest of illegal immortals and collaborators’, the Coalition said, and dispatched its troops to ‘clean it out’. It seemed indifferent to the fact that, in addition to the pharaohs, some fifty thousand people called Port Sol home.

  The pharaohs had a deep network of spies on Earth, and they had had some warning of the coming of the Coalition. As the colonists had only the lightest battery of antiquated weaponry - indeed the whole ice moon, a refuge from the Occupation, was somewhat low-tech - nobody expected to be able to resist. But there was a way out.

  Five huge Ships were hastily thrown together. On each Ship, captained by a pharaoh, a couple of hundred people, selected for their health and skill sets, would be taken away: a total of a thousand, perhaps, out of a population of fifty thousand, saved from the incoming disaster. There was no faster-than-light technology on Port Sol; these would be generation starships. But perhaps that was as well. Between the stars there would be room to hide.

  All these mighty historical forces had now focused down on Rusel’s life, and they threatened to tear him away from his lover.

  Lora was waiting for him at the Forest of Ancestors. They met on the surface, embracing stiffly through their skinsuits. Then they set up a dome-tent and crawled through its collapsible airlock.

  In the Forest’s long shadows, Rusel and Lora made love: at first urgently, and then again, more slowly, thoughtfully. In the habs, inertial generators kept the gravity at one-sixth standard, about the same as Earth’s Moon. But there was no gravity control out here in the Forest, and as they clung to each other they drifted in the tent’s cool air, light as dreams.

  Rusel told Lora his news.

  Rusel was an able nanochemist, he was the right age for Ship crew, and his health and pedigree were immaculate. But unlike his brother he hadn’t been good enough to win the one-in-fifty lottery and make the cut to get a place on the Ships. He was twenty-eight years old: not a good age to die. But he had accepted his fate, so he believed - for Lora, his lover, had no hope of a berth. At twenty she was a student, a promising Virtual idealist but without the mature skills to have a chance of competing for a berth on the Ships. So at least he would be with her, when the sky fell in.

  He was honest with himself, and unsentimental; he had never been sure if his noble serenity would have survived the appearance of the Coalition ships in Port Sol’s dark sky. And now, it seemed, he was never going to find out.

  Lora was slim, delicate. The population of this low-gravity moon tended to tallness and thin bones, but Lora seemed to him more elfin than most, and she had large, dark eyes that always seemed a little unfocused, as if her attention was somewhere else. It was that sense of other-world fragility that had first attracted Rusel to her.

  With blankets bundled over her legs, she took his hand and smiled. ‘Don’t be afraid.’

  ‘I’m the one who’s going to live. Why should I be afraid?’

  ‘You’d accepted dying. Now you’ve got to get used to the idea of living.’ She sighed. ‘It’s just as hard.’

  ‘And living without you.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘Maybe that’s what scares me most. I’m frightened of losing you.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  He gazed out at the silent, watchful shapes of the Ancestors. These ‘trees’, some three or four metres high, were stumps with ‘roots’ that dug into the icy ground. They were living things, the most advanced members of Port Sol’s low-temperature aboriginal ecology. This was their sessile stage. In their youth, these creatures, called ‘Toolmakers’, were mobile, and were actually intelligent. They would haul themselves across Port Sol’s broken ground, seeking a suitable crater slope or ridge face. There they would set down their roots and allow their nervous systems and their minds to dissolve, their purposes fulfilled.

  Rusel wondered what liquid-helium dreams might be coursing slowly through the Ancestors’ residual minds. They were beyond decisions now; in a way he envied them.

  ‘Maybe the Coalition will spare the Ancestors.’

  She snorted. ‘I doubt it. The Coalition only care about humans - and their sort of humans at that.’

  ‘My family has lived here a long time,’ he said. ‘There’s a story that says we rode out with the first colonising wave.’ It was a legendary time, when the engineer Michael Poole had come barnstorming all the way through the system to Port Sol to build his great starships.

  She smiled. ‘Most families have stories like that. After thousands of years, who can tell?’

  ‘This is my home,’ he blurted. ‘This isn’t just the destruction of us, but of our culture, our heritage. Everything we’ve worked for.’

  ‘But that’s why you’re so important.’ She sat up, letting the blanket fall away, and wrapped her arms around his neck. In Sol’s dim light her eyes were pools of liquid darkness. ‘You’re the future. The pharaohs say that in the long run the Coalition will be the death of mankind, not just of us. Somebody has to save our knowledge, our values, for the future.’

  ‘But you—’ You will be alone, when the Coalition ships descend. Decision sparked. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  She pulled back. ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve decided. I’ll tell Pharaoh Andres, and my brother. I can’t leave here, not without you.’

  ‘You must,’ she said firmly. ‘You’re the best for the job, believe me; if not the pharaohs wouldn’t have selected you. So you have to go. It’s your duty.’

  ‘What human being would run out on those he loved?’

  Her face was set, and she sounded much older than her twenty years. ‘It would be easier to die. But you must live, live on and on, live on like a machine, until the job is done, and the race is saved.’

  Before her he felt weak, immature. He clung to her, burying his face in the soft warmth of her neck.

  Nineteen days, he thought. We still have nineteen days. He determined to cherish every minute.

  But as it turned out they had much less time than that.

  Once again he was woken in the dark. But this time h
is room lights were snapped full on, dazzling him. And it was the face of Pharaoh Andres that hovered in the air beside his bed. He sat up, baffled, his system heavy with sedative.

  ‘—thirty minutes. You have thirty minutes to get to Ship Three. Wear your skinsuit. Bring nothing else. If you aren’t there in thirty minutes, twenty-nine forty-five, we leave without you.’

  At first he couldn’t take in what she said. He found himself staring at her face. Her head was hairless, her scalp bald, her eyebrows and even her eyelashes gone. Her skin was oddly smooth, her features small; she didn’t look young, but as if her face had sublimated with time, like Port Sol’s ice landscapes, leaving this palimpsest. She was rumoured to be two hundred years old.

  ‘Don’t acknowledge this message, just move. We lift in twenty-nine minutes. If you are Ship Three crew, you have twenty-nine minutes to get to—’

  She had made a mistake: that was his first thought. Had she forgotten that there were still sixteen days to go before the Coalition ships were due? But he could see from her face there was no mistake.

  Twenty-nine minutes. He reached down to his bedside cabinet, pulled out a nano pill and gulped it down dry. Reality bleached, becoming cold and stark.

  He dragged on his skinsuit and sealed it roughly. He glanced around his room, at his bed, his few pieces of furniture, the Virtual unit on the dresser with its images of Lora. Bring nothing. Andres wasn’t a woman you disobeyed in the slightest particular.

  Without looking back he left the room.

  The corridor outside was bedlam. A thousand people shared this under-the-ice habitat, and all of them seemed to be out tonight. They ran this way and that, many in skinsuits, some hauling bundles of gear. He pushed his way through the throng. The sense of panic was tangible - and, carried on the recycled air, he thought he could smell burning.

  His heart sank. It was obviously a scramble to escape - but the only way off the moon was the Ships, which could take no more than a thousand. Had the sudden curtailing of the time left triggered this panic? In this ultimate emergency had the citizens of Port Sol lost all their values, all their sense of community? What could they hope to achieve by hurling themselves at Ships that had no room for them, but to bring everybody down with them? But what would I do? He could afford the luxury of nobility; he was getting out of here.

  Twenty minutes.

  He reached the perimeter concourse. Here, surface transports nuzzled against a row of simple airlocks. Some of the locks were already open, and people were crowding in, pushing children, bundles of luggage. His own car was still here, he saw with relief. He pulled open his skinsuit glove and hastily pressed his palm to the wall. The door hissed open.

  But before he could pass through, somebody grabbed his arm.

  A man faced him, a stranger, short, burly, aged perhaps forty. Behind him a woman clutched a small child and an infant. The adults had blanket-wrapped bundles on their backs. The man wore an electric-blue skinsuit, but his family were in hab clothes.

  The man said desperately, ‘Friend, you have room in that thing?’

  ‘No,’ Rusel said.

  The man’s eyes hardened. ‘Listen. The pharaohs’ spies got it wrong. Suddenly the Coalition is only seven days out. Look, friend, you can see how I’m fixed. The Coalition breaks up families, doesn’t it? All I’m asking is for a chance on the Ships.’

  ‘But there won’t be room for you. Don’t you understand? And even if there were—’ There were to be no children on the Ships at launch: that was the pharaohs’ harsh rule. In the first years of the long voyage, everybody aboard had to be maximally productive. The time for breeding would come later.

  The man’s fist bunched. ‘Listen, friend—’

  Rusel shoved the man in the chest. He fell backwards, stumbling against his children. His blanket bundle broke open, and goods spilled on the floor: clothes, diapers, children’s toys.

  ‘Please.’ The woman approached him, stepping over her husband. She held out a baby. ‘Don’t let the Coalition take him away. Please.’

  The baby was warm, soft, smiling. Rusel automatically reached out. But he stopped himself cold, and turned away.

  He pushed into his car, slammed shut the door, and stabbed a preset routine into the control panel. The woman with the baby continued to call after him. How could I do that? I’m no longer human, he thought.

  The car ripped itself away from the airlock interface, ignoring all safety protocols, and began to haul itself on its bubble wheels up the ramp from the under-the-ice habitat to the surface. Shaking, Rusel opened his visor. He might be able to see the doomed family at the airlock port. He didn’t look back.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  Andres’s Virtual head coalesced before him. ‘Sixteen minutes to get to Ship Three. If you’re not there we go without you. Fifteen forty-five. Fifteen forty . . .’

  The surface was almost as chaotic as the corridors of the hab, as transports of all types and ages rolled, crawled or jumped. There was no sign of the Enforcers, the pharaohs’ police force, and he was apprehensive about being held up in the crush.

  He made it through the crowd and headed for the track that would lead through the Forest of Ancestors to Ship Three. Out here there was a lot of traffic, but it was more or less orderly, everyone heading out the way he was. He pushed the car up to its safety-regulated maximum speed. Even so, he was continually overtaken. Anxiety tore at his stomach.

  The Forest, with the placid profiles of the Ancestors glimmering in Sol’s low light, looked unchanged from when he had last seen it, only days ago, on his way to meet Lora. He felt an unreasonable resentment that he had suddenly lost so much time, that his careful plan for an extended farewell to Lora had been torn up. He wondered where she was now. Perhaps he could call her.

  Thirteen minutes. No time, no time.

  The traffic ahead was slowing. The vehicles at the back of the queue weaved, trying to find gaps, and bunched into a solid pack.

  Rusel punched his control panel and brought up a Virtual overhead image. Ahead of the tangle of vehicles, a ditch had been cut roughly across the road. People swarmed, hundreds of them. Roadblock.

  Eleven minutes. For a moment his brain seemed as frozen as Port Sol ice; frantic, bewildered, filled with guilt, he couldn’t think.

  Then a heavy-duty long-distance truck broke out of the pack behind him. Veering off the road to the left, it began to smash its way through the Forest. The elegant eightfold forms of the Ancestors were nothing but ice sculptures, and they shattered before the truck’s momentum. It was ugly, and Rusel knew that each impact wiped out a life that might have lasted centuries more. But the truck was clearing a path.

  Rusel hauled at his controls, and dragged his car off the road. Only a few vehicles were ahead of him in the truck’s destructive wake. The truck was moving fast, and he was able to push his speed higher.

  They were already approaching the roadblock, he saw. A few suit lights moved off the road and into the Forest, to stand in the path of the lead truck; the blockers must be enraged to see their targets evade them so easily. Rusel kept his speed high. Only a few more seconds and he would be past the worst.

  But there was a figure standing directly in front of him, helmet lamp bright, dressed in an electric-blue skinsuit, arms raised. As the car’s sensors picked up the figure, its safety routines cut in, and he felt it hesitate. He slammed his palm to the control panel, overriding the safeties. Nine minutes.

  He closed his eyes as the car hit the protester.

  He remembered the blue skinsuit. He had just mown down the man from the airlock, who had been so desperate to save his family. He had no right to criticise the courage or the morals or the loyalty of others, he saw.

  We are all just animals, fighting to survive. My berth on Ship Three doesn’t make me any better. He hadn’t even had the guts to watch.

  Eight minutes. He disabled the safety governors and let the car race down the empty road, its speed ever incre
asing.

  He had to pass through another block before he reached Ship Three - but this one was manned by Enforcers. They were in an orderly line across the road, dressed in their bright yellow skinsuit uniforms. Evidently they had pulled back to tight perimeters around the five Ships. At least they were still loyal.

  The queuing was agonising. With only five minutes before Andres’s deadline, an Enforcer pressed a nozzle to the car’s window, flashed laser light into Rusel’s face, and waved him through.

  Ship Three was directly ahead of him. It was a drum, a squat cylinder about a kilometre across and half as tall. It sat at the bottom of its own crater, for Port Sol ice had been gouged out and plastered roughly over the surface of its hull. It looked less like a ship than a building, he thought, a building coated by thick ice, as if long abandoned. But it was indeed a starship, a ship designed for a journey of not less than centuries, and fountains of crystals already sparkled around its base in neat parabolic arcs: steam from the Ship’s rockets, freezing immediately to ice. People milled at its base, running clumsily in the low gravity, and scurried up ramps that tongued down from its hull to the ground.