Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

  Futurity said bluntly, ‘I need your help.’

  Poole sat down, sipped his drink, and grunted. ‘More of your decadent dumb-ass theology?’

  ‘Not theology,’ Futurity said evenly. ‘A human life.’

  That seemed to snag Poole’s attention. But he said, ‘How long this time?’

  Futurity, briefed by the Hierocrat, knew exactly what he meant. ‘A little more than a thousand years.’

  Poole closed his eyes and massaged his temples. ‘You bastards, ’ he said. ‘I’m your Virtual Jesus. A simulacrum messiah. And I wasn’t good enough. So you put me in memory store, a box where I couldn’t even dream, and left me there for a thousand years. And now you’ve dug me up again. Why? To crucify me on a wormhole mouth, like the first Poole?’

  Futurity was growing irritated. ‘I know nothing of Jesus, or crucifying. But I always thought I understood Michael Poole.’

  ‘How could you? He’s been dead twenty millennia.’

  Futurity said relentlessly, ‘Then perhaps I misjudged his character. We didn’t bring you back to harm you. We didn’t bring you back for you at all. You’re here because somebody in trouble is asking for your help. Maybe you should think about somebody other than yourself, as Michael Poole surely would have done.’

  Poole shook his head. ‘I don’t believe it. Are you trying to manipulate me?’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it, sir.’

  Poole sipped his unreal whisky. Then he sighed. ‘So what’s the problem?’

  III

  Poole had no physical location as such; he ‘was’ where he was projected. It would have been possible for him to be manifested aboard the Ask Politely by projection from the Ecclesia’s underground caches. But Poole himself pressed for the data that defined him to be downloaded into the ship’s own store, as otherwise lightspeed delays would introduce a barrier between himself and this fragile woman who was asking for his help.

  What Poole wanted, it seemed, Poole got.

  It took a day for the Ecclesiast authorities to agree transfer protocols with Captain Tahget and his crew. Futurity, no specialist in such matters, found this delay difficult to understand, but it turned out that Poole’s definition was stored at the quantum level. ‘And you can transfer quantum information, ’ Poole said, ‘but you can’t copy it. So your monks can’t make a backup of me, Futurity, any more than they can of you. Kind of reassuring, isn’t it? And that’s why the monks are twitchy.’ But Poole was furious that the Ecclesiasts ensured that Tahget understood they owned the copyright in him and would protect their ‘intellectual property’ against ‘piracy’. ‘Copyright! In me! What do they think I am, a worm genome?’

  Meanwhile, Captain Tahget was insulted by the very suggestion of piracy, and he complained about the delays for which nobody was compensating him, not to mention the risk of allowing the unstable situation of a woman with a bomb aboard his ship to continue for so long.

  These transactions seemed extraordinary to Futurity, and terribly difficult to cope with. After all, when he had first gone up to the orbiting starship, Futurity hadn’t even known this simulacrum of Michael Poole existed.

  Virtual Poole was the deepest secret of the Ecclesia, his Hierocrat had said. Indeed, an acolyte as junior as Futurity shouldn’t be hearing any of this at all, and the Hierocrat made it clear he blamed Futurity for not resolving the starship situation without resorting to this: in the Hierocrat’s eyes, Futurity had failed already.

  It had begun fifteen hundred years ago. It had been an experiment in theology, epistemology and Virtual technology, an experiment with roots that reached back to the establishment of the Ecclesia itself.

  Poole himself knew the background. ‘I - or rather, he, Michael Poole, the real one - has become a messiah figure to you, hasn’t he? You infinity-botherers and this strange quantum-mechanical faith of yours. You had theological questions you thought Poole could answer. Your priests couldn’t dig him up. And so you made him. Or rather, you made me.’

  Technicians of the ancient Guild of Virtual Idealism had deployed the most advanced available technology to construct the Virtual Poole. Everything known about Poole and his life and times had been downloaded, and where there were gaps in the knowledge - and there were many - teams of experts, technical, historical and theoretical, had laboured to extrapolate and interpolate. It had been a remarkable project, and somewhat expensive: the Hierocrat wouldn’t say how much it cost, but it seemed the Ecclesia was still paying by instalments.

  At last all was ready, and that blue tetrahedral chapel had been built. The Supreme Ecclesiarch had waved her hand - and Michael Poole, or at least a Michael Poole, had opened his eyes for the first time in more than twenty thousand years.

  The whole business seemed vaguely heretical to Futurity. But when Poole popped into existence in the Politely’s observation lounge, surrounded by the gaping crew and nervous Ecclesiast technicians, Futurity felt a shiver of wonder.

  Poole seemed to take a second to come to himself, as if coming into focus. Then he looked down at his body and flexed his fingers. In the brightness of the deck he seemed oddly out of place, Futurity thought - not flimsily unreal like most Virtuals, but more opaque, more dense, like an intrusion from another reality. Poole scanned the crowd of staring strangers. When he found Futurity’s face he smiled, and Futurity’s heart warmed helplessly.

  But Poole’s face was dark, intent, determined. For the first time it occurred to Futurity to wonder what Poole himself might want out of this situation. He was a Virtual, but he was just as sentient as Futurity was, and no doubt he had goals of his own. Perhaps he saw some advantage in this transfer off-world, some angle to be worked.

  Poole turned and walked briskly to the big blister-window set in the hull. His head scanned back and forth systematically as he took in the crowded view. ‘So this is the centre of the Galaxy. You damn priests never even let me see the sky before.’

  ‘Not quite the centre. We’re inside the Core here, the Galaxy’s central bulge.’ Futurity pointed to a wall of light that fenced off half the sky. ‘That’s the Mass - the Central Star Mass, the knot of density surrounding Chandra, the supermassive black hole at the very centre.’

  ‘Lethe, I don’t know if I imagined people would ever come so far. And for millennia this has been a war zone?’

  ‘The war is over.’ Futurity forced a grin. ‘We won!’

  ‘And now humans are killing humans again, right? Same old story.’ Poole inspected the surface of the planet below. ‘A city-world, ’ he said dismissively. ‘Seen better days.’ He squinted around the sky. ‘So where’s the sun?’

  Futurity was puzzled by the question.

  Captain Tahget said, ‘Base 478 has no sun. It’s a rogue planet, a wanderer. Stars are crowded here in the Core, Michael Poole. Not like out on the rim, where you come from. Close approaches happen all the time.’

  ‘So planets get detached from their suns.’ Poole peered down at the farms that splashed green amid the concrete. ‘No sunlight for photosynthesis. But if the sky is on fire with Galaxy light, you don’t need the sun. Different spectrum from Sol’s light, of course, but I guess they are different plants too . . .’

  Futurity was entranced by these rapid chains of speculation and deduction.

  Poole pointed to a shallow crater, a dish of rubble kilometres across, gouged into the built-over surface. ‘What happened there?’

  Futurity shrugged. ‘Probably a floating building fell, when the power failed.’

  Poole laughed uncomfortably. ‘Layers of history! I don’t suppose I’ll ever know the half of it.’ Now he took in the Ask Politely’s bubbling organic form. ‘And what kind of starship is this?’ At random he pointed at hull features, at spines and spires and shields. ‘What is that for? An antenna, a sensor mast? And that? It could be a ramjet scoop, I guess. And that netting could be an ion drive.’

  There was a stirring of discomfort. Futurity said, ‘We don’t ask such questions. It’s the business o
f the Captain and his crew.’

  Poole raised his eyebrows, but he got only a blank stare from Captain Tahget. ‘Demarcation of knowledge? I never did like that. Gets in the way of the scientific method. But it’s your millennium.’ He clapped his hands. ‘OK, so I’m here. Maybe we should get to work before your fruitcake in steerage blows us all up.’

  The Ecclesia technicians muttered among themselves, and prepared Poole’s relocation.

  Futurity watched the scene in Tahget’s fish-tank Virtual viewer. Mara’s cabin looked just as it had before: the woman sitting patiently on the bed, the dresser, and the bomb sitting on the floor, grotesquely out of place. All that was different was a tray on top of the dresser with the remains of a meal.

  Poole appeared out of nowhere, a little manikin figure in the fish-tank. Mara sat as if frozen.

  Poole leaned down, resting his hands on his knees, and looked into her face. ‘You’re exhausted. Your eyes are pissholes in the snow.’ Nobody in Tahget’s office had ever seen snow; the translation routines had to interpret.

  Poole snapped his fingers to conjure up a Virtual chair and sat down. Mara bowed down before him. ‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to dry my feet with your hair.’ Another archaic reference Futurity didn’t understand. ‘I know I’m tangled up in your myths. But I’m just a man. Actually, not even that.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mara said thickly, straightening up.

  ‘For what? You’re the real person here, with the real problem. ’ He glanced at the sullen mass of the bomb.

  Mara said, ‘I made them bring you here. Now I don’t know what to say to you.’

  ‘Just talk. I don’t think anybody understands what you want, Mara. Not even that bright kid Futurity.’

  ‘Who? Oh, the acolyte. I told them, but they didn’t listen.’

  ‘Then tell me.’ He laughed. ‘I’m the sleeping beauty. Lethe knows I’ve got no preconceptions.’

  ‘I want to go home. I didn’t want to leave in the first place. They evacuated us by force.’

  He leaned forward. ‘Who did?’

  ‘The troops of the new Kard.’

  ‘Who . . . ? Never mind; I’ll figure that out. OK. But home for you is a planetoid orbiting a black hole. Yes? A satellite black hole, born in the accretion disc of the monster at the heart of the Galaxy.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘Quite a place to visit. But who would want to live there?’

  Mara sat up straighter. ‘I would. I was born there.’

  It had been a project of the first years after mankind’s victory in the centre of the Galaxy, Mara told him. With the war won, the ancient Coalition, the government of a united mankind, abruptly crumbled, and successor states emerged across the Galaxy. A rump remnant of the Coalition that called itself the Ideocracy had clung on to Earth and other scattered territories. And at the Core, the scene of mankind’s greatest victory, a new project was begun. Ideocrat engineers had gathered asteroids and ice moons which they had set spinning in orbit around the satellite black holes which studded Chandra’s accretion disc. One such was the rock Mara called Greyworld.

  ‘You say you were born there?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mara said. ‘And my parents, and their parents before them.’

  Poole stared at her. Then, in Futurity’s view, Poole’s little figure walked to the edge of the fish-tank viewer, and stared up challengingly. ‘Hey, acolyte. Help me out here. I’m having a little trouble with timescales.’

  Futurity checked his data desk. Under the Ideocracy, these accretion-disc colonies had been in place for two thousand years, almost since the final victory at the Galaxy’s Core.

  Poole, a man of the fourth millennium, seemed stunned. ‘Two thousand years? ’

  Captain Tahget leaned forward and peered into the fish-tank. ‘Virtual, we once fought a war that spanned tens of thousands of light years. We learned to plan on a comparable scale in time. During the war there were single battles which lasted millennia.’

  Poole shook his head. ‘And I imagined I thought big. I really have fallen far into the future, haven’t I?’

  ‘You really have, sir,’ Futurity said.

  Poole sat down again and faced Mara. ‘I can see why you didn’t want to leave. Your roots were deep, on your Greyworld.’

  ‘Time was running out,’ she said. ‘We knew that. Our black hole was slowly spiralling deeper into Chandra’s accretion disc. Soon the turbulence, the energy density, the tides - it would have been impossible for us to hang on.’

  ‘Although,’ said Poole, ’the black hole itself will sail on regardless until it reaches Chandra’s event horizon.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Poole said, ‘I still don’t understand. If you knew your world was doomed, you must have accepted you had to evacuate.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then what—’

  ‘I just didn’t like the way it was done.’ Her face worked, deep emotions swirling under a veneer of control. ‘I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘Sharn. My daughter.’

  Poole studied her for a moment. Then he said gently, ‘You see, you’re losing me again, Mara. I’m sorry. According to the ship’s manifest you don’t have a daughter.’

  ‘I did have one. She was taken away from me.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘The Ideocrats.’

  ‘But you see, Mara, there’s my problem. I saw the records. Once the evacuation was done, there was nobody left on Greyworld. So your daughter—’

  ‘She wasn’t on Greyworld.’

  ‘Then where?’

  ‘She lives in the satellite black hole,’ Mara said simply. ‘Where the Ideocrats sent her.’

  ‘In the black hole?’

  ‘She lives in it, as you, Michael Poole, live in light.’

  ‘As some kind of Virtual representation?’

  Mara shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t explain it better. We aren’t scientists on Greyworld, like you.’

  He thought that over. ‘Then what are you?’

  ‘We are farmers.’ She shrugged. ‘Some of us are technicians. We supervise the machines that tend other machines, that keep the air clean and the water flowing.’

  Poole asked, ‘But why are you there in the first place, Mara? What did the Ideocracy intend? What is your duty?’

  She smiled. ‘To give our children to the black hole. And that way, to serve the goals of mankind.’

  Futurity said quickly, ‘She’s probably doesn’t know any more, Michael Poole. This was the Ideocracy, remember, heir to the Coalition. And under the Coalition you weren’t encouraged to know more than you needed to. You were thought to be more effective that way.’

  ‘Sounds like every totalitarian regime back to Gilgamesh.’ Poole studied Mara for a long moment. Then he stood. ‘All right, Mara. I think that’s enough for now. You’ve given me a lot to think about. Is there anything you need? More food?’

  ‘I’m tired,’ she said quietly. ‘But I know if I lie down that Captain or the acolyte will sneak in here and disarm the bomb, or hurt me, and—’

  Poole said, ‘Look at me, Mara. Things will get flaky very quickly if you don’t sleep. Nobody will hurt you, or change anything in here. You can trust me.’

  She stared at his Virtual face. Then, after a moment, she lay down on her bunk, her knees tucked into her chest like a child.

  Poole’s fish-tank representation popped out of existence.

  Poole, Tahget and Futurity faced each other across the table in Tahget’s office.

  Tahget said, ‘We need to resolve this situation.’

  Poole had another glass of Virtual whisky in his hand. ‘That woman is determined. Believe me, you don’t separate a mother from her child. She’ll blow us all up rather than give in.’

  Tahget said coldly, ‘Then what do you suggest we do?’

  ‘Comply with her wishes. Take her back to Chandra, back to the centre of the Galaxy, and to her black hole Garden of Eden.
And help her find her kid.’

  Futurity said, ‘There is no child. She said the child lives in the black hole. That’s just impossible. No human being—’