Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

  That didn’t matter, of course. ‘Have I fulfilled my mission?’

  ‘Yes,’ Pirius said gently. ‘You fulfilled it very well.’

  He wasn’t aware of Pirius and Torec shepherding the transients and Autarchs out of the Ship and into their own absurdly small craft. He wasn’t aware of Pirius’s farewell call as they shot away, back towards the bright lights of the human Galaxy, leaving him alone. He was only aware of the Ship now, the patient, stolid Ship.

  The Ship - and one face, revealed to him at last: an elfin face, with distracted eyes, He didn’t know if she was a gift of Pirius or even Andres, if she was outside his own head or inside. None of that seemed to matter when at last she smiled for him, and he felt the easing of a tension twenty-five millennia old, the dissolving of a clot of ancient guilt.

  The Ship forged on into the endless dark, its corridors as clean and bright and empty as his thoughts.

  I knew Andres. I knew about the five Ships that sailed from Port Sol. I always wondered what happened to her.

  Some of the Ships sailed on to even more exotic fates than her Mayflower’s. But that’s another story.

  The conquest of the Galaxy was perhaps humanity’s finest hour. The ministers, generals and Commissaries at the heart of the Coalition looked back on the immense achievement of their ideological government with, perhaps, justifiable pride.

  But it was an irony that as soon as the victory was won, the Coalition lost its purpose, and its control.

  And it was an irony, I thought, that a crude faith of child soldiers, outlawed by the Coalition, should not only outlive the Coalition itself but even shape the history that followed its demise.

  BETWEEN WORLDS

  AD 27,152

  I

  ‘She wants to go home,’ said the starship Captain.

  ‘But she can’t go home,’ said the acolyte. Futurity’s Dream was baffled by the very request, as if the woman who had locked herself inside a starship cabin, with a bomb, was making a philosophical mistake, a category error.

  Captain Tahget said, ‘She says she needs to speak to her daughter.’

  ‘She hasn’t got a daughter!’

  ‘No, not according to the records. A conundrum, isn’t it?’

  Captain Tahget sat very still, his glare focused unblinking on the young acolyte. He was a bulky man of about forty, with scar tissue crusting over half his scalp. He obviously had military experience, but his unadorned body armour, like the bare walls of his private office, gave away nothing of his character; in these fluid, uncertain times, when sibling fought sibling, it was impossible to tell who he might have served.

  Before this monolithic officer Futurity, just twenty years old, felt nervous, ineffectual - not just weak, but like a shadow, with no control over events.

  Futurity lifted his data desk and checked the Ask Politely’s manifest again. The passenger’s name stood out, highlighted in red: MARA. No mention of a daughter. ‘She’s a refugee. Home for her is Chandra. The black hole at the centre of the Galaxy.’

  ‘I know what Chandra is.’

  ‘Or rather,’ Futurity said nervously, ‘home is, or was, Greyworld, a worldlet in orbit around a satellite black hole, which in turn orbits Chandra—’

  ‘I know all this too,’ said the Captain stonily. ‘Get on with it, acolyte.’

  Tahget had been hired by Futurity’s boss, the Hierocrat, to come to this processing station in orbit around Base 478. Here he was to pick up Mara, and other refugees displaced by the Kardish Imperium from their homes in the Galaxy’s Core, and then carry them on to Earth, where the ruling Ideocracy had pledged to welcome its citizens. But Mara had refused to travel on. Because of her, the ship had been held in orbit around the Base, and the other refugees had been evacuated and sent back to holding centres on the surface.

  And now it was up to Futurity to sort this mess out. He had no idea where to start.

  Futurity licked his lips and looked again at the glowing cube on the Captain’s desk. It was a fish-tank monitor, a Virtual realisation of the interior of the woman’s cabin. Mara sat on her bunk, as still, in her way, as Tahget. She was slim, her head shaved; aged thirty-six, she looked modest, sensible, undemanding. Her small suitcase sat unopened on top of the low dresser that was the cabin’s only other significant piece of furniture. The locked door was blocked by an upturned chair, a trivial barricade.

  And before her on the floor was the reason she had been able to impose her will on a starship Captain, hundreds of refugees and at least three interstellar political entities. It was a blocky tangle of metal and polymer, an ugly sculpture quite out of place in the mundane shabbiness of the cabin. You could clearly see where it had been cut out of the weapons pod of some wrecked ship. It was a bomb, a monopole bomb. Dating from the time of the Coalition and their galactic war, it was at least two thousand years old. But the Coalition had built well, and there was no doubt that the bomb could destroy this ship and do a great deal of damage to Base 478 itself.

  Futurity didn’t know where the bomb had come from, though after millennia of war 478 was famously riddled with weapons caches. And he had no idea how the bomb had been smuggled on board the Ask Politely, this starship. But the Hierocrat had made it clear that Futurity didn’t need to know any of that; all Futurity had to do was to resolve this messy situation.

  ‘But she can’t go home,’ he said again feebly. ‘Her home doesn’t exist any more, legally speaking. And soon enough it won’t exist physically either. She’s a refugee.’ Futurity didn’t understand anything about this situation. ‘We’re trying to help her here. Doesn’t she see that?’

  ‘Evidently not,’ Tahget said dryly. Tahget didn’t move a muscle, but Futurity could sense his growing impatience. ‘Acolyte, none of the politics of the Galaxy, or the geography of the black hole, matter a jot to me.’ He stabbed a finger at the fish-tank. ‘All I care about is getting that woman away from that bomb. We can’t disarm the thing. We can’t force our way into the cabin without—’

  ‘Without killing the woman?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t care about that. No, we can’t get in without setting the thing off. Do you need to know the technical details, of Virtual trip-wires, of dead man’s switches? Suffice it to say that force is not an option. And so I turn to you, acolyte. 478 is your church’s world, after all.’

  Futurity spread his hands, ‘What can I do?’

  Tahget laughed, uncaring. ‘What you priests do best. Talk.’

  The dread weight of responsibility, which had oppressed Futurity since he had been ‘volunteered’ for this assignment by the Hierocrat and projected into orbit, now pressed down on him hard. But, he found, his greatest fear was not for his own safety, nor even for the fate of this poor woman, but simply that he was making a fool of himself in front of this dour captain. Shame on you, Futurity’s Dream!

  He forced himself to focus. ‘How do I speak to her?’

  The Captain waved a hand. A Virtual of Mara’s head coalesced in the air, and Futurity saw a miniature of himself pop into existence in the little diorama of her cabin. So he had been put in contact with this bomber.

  He tried to read her face. She looked younger than her thirty-six years. Her face was a neat oval, her features rather bland - her nose long, her mouth small. She would never be called beautiful, though something about the shape of her skull, exposed by the close shaving of her hair in the Ideocratic style, was delicately attractive. As she studied him, evidently without curiosity, her expression was clear, her brow smooth. She looked loving, he thought, loving and contented in herself, her life. But tension showed around her eyes, in hollow stress shadows. This was a gentle woman projected into an horrific situation. She must be desperate.

  A smile touched her lips, faint, quickly evaporating. She said to him, ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’

  The Captain rolled his eyes. ‘Our terrorist is laughing at you! Good start, acolyte.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Futurity blurted. ‘I didn’t m
ean to stare. It’s just that I’m trying to get used to all this.’

  ‘It’s not a situation I wanted,’ Mara said.

  ‘I’m sure we can find a way to resolve it.’

  ‘There is a way,’ she said without hesitation. ‘Just take me home. It’s all I’ve asked for from the beginning.’

  But that’s impossible. Futurity had never negotiated with an armed fugitive before, but he had heard many confessions, and he knew the value of patience, of indirection. ‘We’ll come to that,’ he said. ‘My name is Futurity’s Dream. I live on the planet below, which is Base 478. Our government is called the Ecclesia.’

  ‘You’re a priest.’

  He said reflexively, ‘Just an acolyte, my child.’

  She laughed at him openly now. ‘Don’t call me a child! I’m a mother myself.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. But in his peripheral vision he checked over the manifest details again. She was travelling alone; there was definitely no mention of a child either on the ship or back at Chandra. Don’t contradict, he told himself. Don’t cross-examine. Just talk. ‘You’ll have to help me through this, Mara. Are you of the faith yourself?’

  ‘Yes,’ she sniffed. ‘Not of your sort, though.’

  Since the fall of the Coalition, the religion Futurity served, known as the ‘Friends of Wigner’, had suffered many schisms. He forced a smile. ‘But I will have to do,’ he said. ‘The Captain turned to my Hierocrat for help. Mara, you must see that to sort out this situation you will have to talk to me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I have to talk. That’s obvious. But not to an acolyte. Or a priest, or a bishop, or a, a—’

  ‘A Hierocrat.’ He frowned. ‘Then who?’

  ‘Michael Poole.’

  That ancient, sacred name shocked Futurity to brief silence. He glanced at Captain Tahget, who raised his eyebrows. You see what I’ve been dealing with? Perhaps this woman was deluded after all.

  Futurity said, ‘Mara, Michael Poole is our messiah. In the age of the First Friends he gave his life for the benefit of humanity by—’

  ‘I know who he was,’ she snapped. ‘Why do you think I asked for him?’

  ‘Then,’ he said carefully, ‘you must know that Poole has been dead - or at least lost to us - for more than twenty-three thousand years.’

  ‘Of course I know that. But he’s here.’

  ‘Poole is always with us in spirit,’ said Futurity piously. ‘And he waits for us at Timelike Infinity, where the world lines of reality will be cleansed.’

  ‘Not like that. He’s here, on Base—’

  ‘478.’

  ‘478. You people keep him locked up.’

  ‘We do?’

  ‘I want Michael Poole,’ Mara insisted. ‘Only him. Because he will understand.’ She turned away from Futurity. The imaging system followed her, but she covered her face with her hands, so he couldn’t read her expression.

  Captain Tahget said dryly, ‘I think you need to talk to your Hierocrat.’

  II

  The Hierocrat refused to discuss such issues on a comms link, so Futurity would have to return to the surface. Within the hour Futurity’s flitter receded from the starship.

  From space the Ask Politely was an astonishing sight. Perhaps a kilometre in length it was a rough cylinder, but it lacked symmetry on any axis, and its basic form was almost hidden by the structures which plumed from its surface: fins, sails, spines, nozzles, scoops, webbing. Hardened for interstellar space the ship shone, metallic and polymeric. But it had the look of something organic rather than mechanical, a form that had grown, like a spiny fish from Base 478’s deep seas perhaps, rather than anything designed by intelligence.

  There was something deeply disturbing about the ship’s lack of symmetry. But, Futurity supposed, symmetry was imposed on humans by the steady straight-up-and-down gravity fields of planets. If you swam between the stars you didn’t need symmetry.

  And besides, so the seminary gossip went, despite the controlling presence of Tahget and his command crew, this wasn’t really a human vessel at all. It certainly didn’t look it, close to.

  Futurity was relieved when his flitter pulled out of the ship’s forest of spines and nets and began to swing back down towards Base 478.

  478 was a world of ruins: from the high atmosphere the land looked as if it had been melted, covered over by a bubbling concrete-grey slag. Once every resource of this world had been dedicated to the prosecution of a galactic war. Base 478 had been a training centre, and here millions of human citizens had been moulded into soldiers, to be hurled into the grisly friction of the war at the Galaxy’s heart, from whence few had returned. Even now the world retained the number by which it had been registered in vanished catalogues on Earth.

  But times had changed. The war was over, the Coalition fallen. Many of those tremendous wartime buildings remained - they were too robust to be demolished - but Futurity made out splashes of green amid the grey, places where the ancient buildings had been cleared and the ground exposed. Those island-farms laboured to feed 478’s diminished population. Futurity himself had grown up on such a farm, long before he had donned the cassock.

  He had never travelled away from his home world - indeed, he had only flown in orbit once before, during his seminary training; his tutor had insisted that you could not pretend to be a priest of a pan-Galactic religion without at least seeing your own world hanging unsupported in the Galaxy’s glow. But Futurity had studied widely, and he had come to see that though there were far more exciting and exotic places to live in this human Galaxy - not least Earth itself - there were few places quite so orderly and civilised as his own little world, with its proud traditions of soldiery and engineering, and its deeply devout government. So he had grown to love it. He even liked the layers of monumental ruins that plated over every continent, for in the way they had been reoccupied and reused he took a lesson about the durability of the human spirit.

  But a world so old hid many secrets. After his flitter had landed - and as the Hierocrat led him to a chamber buried deep beneath the Ecclesia’s oldest College - Futurity felt his soul shrink from the suffocating burden of history.

  And when Michael Poole opened his eyes and faced him, Futurity wondered which of them was the most lost.

  The room was bare, its walls a pale, glowing blue. Its architecture was tetrahedral, a geometry designed respectfully to evoke an icon of Michael Poole’s own past, the four-sided mouths of the wormholes the great engineer had once built to open up Sol system. But those slanting walls made the room enclosing: not a chapel, but a cell.

  The room’s sole occupant looked up as Futurity entered. He sat on the one piece of furniture, a low bed. Futurity was immediately reminded of Mara, in another plainly furnished room, similarly trapped by her own mysterious past. The man was bulky, small - smaller than Futurity had imagined. His hair was black, his eyes dark brown. He looked about forty, but this man came from an age of the routine use of AntiSenescence treatments, so he could be any age. The muscles of his shoulders were bunched, and his hands were locked together, big, powerful engineer’s hands. He looked tense, angry, haunted.

  As Futurity hesitated, the man fixed him with an aggressive gaze. ‘Who in Lethe are you?’ The language was archaic, and a translation whispered softly in Futurity’s ear.

  ‘My name is Futurity’s Dream.’

  ‘Futurity—?’ He laughed out loud. ‘Another infinity-botherer. ’

  It shocked Futurity to have this man speak so casually heretically. But he had had enough of being cowed today, and he pulled himself together. ‘You are on a world of infinity-botherers, sir.’

  The man eyed him with a grudging respect. ‘I suppose I can’t argue with that. I didn’t ask to be here, though. Just you remember that. So I know who you are. Who am I?’

  Futurity took a deep breath. ‘You are Michael Poole.’

  Poole raised his hand, and turned it back and forth, study
ing it. Then he stood up and without warning aimed a slap at Futurity’s cheek. Poole’s fingers broke up into a cloud of pixels, and Futurity felt nothing.

  ‘No,’ Poole murmured. ‘I guess you’re wrong. Michael Poole was a human being. Whatever I am it isn’t that.’

  For a second Futurity couldn’t speak. He tried to hold himself together against this barrage of shocks.

  To Futurity’s surprise, Poole said, ’Sorry. Perhaps you didn’t deserve that.’

  Futurity shook his head. ‘My needs don’t matter.’

  ‘Oh, yes, they do. Everything goes belly-up if you forget that.’ He cast about the tetrahedral cell. ‘What’s a man got to do to get a malt whisky around here? . . . Oh. I forgot.’ He looked up into the tetrahedron’s squat spire, and held out his hand, cupping it. In a moment a glass appeared, containing a puddle of amber fluid. Poole sipped it with satisfaction. Then he dipped his fingers in the drink, and flicked droplets at Futurity. When they hit the acolyte’s cassock, the droplets burst apart in little fragments of light. ‘Consistency protocols,’ Poole murmured. ‘How about that? Why am I here, Futurity’s Dream? Why am I talking to you - why am I conscious again?’