Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

  The silvered domes at the base of the rocket tower turned out to be the upper levels of much more extensive structures, buried deep under the ice.

  The Curator took them down through a hatch in the bottom of the flitter, through a kind of airlock, and then into the interior of the base. They never walked in the vacuum, out on the ice. Symat, who had never walked anywhere you would need a pressure suit, was faintly disappointed to lose out on a little bit of adventure.

  The Curator led them along cold, echoing corridors, past closed-off rooms. Just as on Mars there were few people here, it seemed. Symat was getting a sense of Sol system as a series of empty planets and moons, like dusty rooms in a deserted house.

  The Curator asked if they wanted to rest or eat, but they were both too excited, or apprehensive. The Curator gave in with a cheerful shrug. ‘Then I’ll take you to the Ascendents.’

  He led them along more corridors until they came to a brightly lit area, a complex of corridors that stank strongly of antisepsis, like a hospital. The Curator paused at a door. ‘Now before you go in,’ he told Symat, ‘try not to be afraid.’

  Symat said testily, ‘Let’s get on with it.’ He wasn’t about to hesitate in front of Mela. He stepped forward boldly. The door slid aside.

  He entered a low, wide room, white-walled, flooded with pale light. There were beds here - no, they were more like medical stations; each had boxes of equipment hovering in the air beside it. Bots cleaned the walls and ferried supplies. He saw no human attendants, but there were many Virtuals who nodded at the Curator. Rotund individuals like him, they all seemed to have broad faces and wide smiles.

  Symat inspected a station more closely. A bot hovered suspiciously, but he wasn’t impeded. The station was a pallet covered by a translucent bubble. It was marked with a number: 247, in bold digits. Inside the bubble, lying on the pallet, was a man. His limbs like sticks, his belly imploded, and with tiny bots crawling over his body, he looked more dead than alive. But as Symat cast a shadow over his face, that skull-like head turned. Symat shuddered and stepped back.

  They walked on, between the rows of stations. The floor was soft and Symat’s footsteps made no sound.

  The Curator said, ‘They are unimaginably old, some of them - and several of them, with no real memory of their own deepest past, don’t even know how old they are themselves. The best way to date them is actually through the anti-ageing technology embedded in their bodies. But even that is unreliable.’

  As they passed, the naked Ascendents stirred and whispered, dry skin rustling.

  ‘We’re disturbing them,’ Mela said softly.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. They are creatures of routine - as are we all, but in them it is taken to an extreme. And anything that disturbs that routine disturbs them. That’s why only bots and Virtuals are used as attendants. You don’t want to frighten them with a new face every century or so!’

  Symat wondered how old the Curator himself was.

  One old woman, to Symat’s astonishment, was out of bed. She was naked, her skin so flaccid she looked as if she had melted, and tubes snaked out of all her orifices. But she managed to walk to a cabinet a few paces from her bed, where, with a trembling hand, she picked out fragments of food that she pushed into a toothless mouth.

  ‘She likes to feed herself,’ the Curator said. ‘Or at least to believe she does. It’s good for her to have some independence. But look here.’

  The floor was cut through by a deep rut, hard metal and ceramic worn away by this old woman’s soft feet. And where she had lain in her bed she had left the shape of her body compressed into the mattress.

  The Curator said dryly, ‘Perhaps you can see why many of us working in this place prefer to forgo personality. It’s better not to think about it. Better still not to be able to think . . .’

  The stations were set out in orderly rows, a neat rectangular grid. Symat counted no more than twenty or twenty-five rows in each direction: there were only a few hundred Ascendents here.

  The Curator seemed to know what he was thinking. ‘Four hundred and thirty-seven. If you’d come here a decade ago there were four hundred and thirty-eight.’

  Mela asked, ‘This is all?’

  ‘As a group they have been ineradicable. They have time on their side: that’s what you always have to remember about Ascendents. If you try to get rid of them, no matter how strong you are, all they have to do is wait for you to grow old and die, and for your children and grandchildren to die too, wait until you’re nothing but a sliver of data in a history text, and then they just walk back in.’

  ‘They are dying out, though.’

  The Curator shrugged. ‘Nobody is making immortals any more. And entropy catches up with us all in the end. But despite their strangeness, they are mankind’s treasures.’

  Mela asked, ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘For all they have seen,’ the Curator said. ‘For the wisdom they have accrued, when you can dig it out of them. And for all they have done for us - and continue to do. It was the undying who founded the Transcendence, who tried to bring us to a new plane of being altogether. They ultimately failed, but what a magnificent ambition!’

  ‘And you say they still work for us?’ Mela asked.

  ‘By moving Port Sol,’ Symat saw immediately.

  ‘Yes,’ the Curator said, ‘But what they have done is rather more spectacular than pushing around a mere ice moon! You see, long ago, the undying resolved to move the Earth itself . . .’

  It was the sun, of course.

  As the downpour of solar radiation grew too intense, Earth’s natural processes couldn’t be sustained. And when the swelling sun’s photosphere washed over it like a misty tide, would Earth be sterilised, scorched, melted, even vaporised? It would take a long time, hundreds of thousands of years, before Earth was destroyed entirely. But Ascendents fretted on long timescales. You could say that was the point of their existence.

  How do you save a world from an overheating sun? Mankind had never had the power to tinker with the processes of stars themselves. Could you shield the world with mirrors and parasols lofted into space? But any such shield would eventually be overwhelmed as the sun expanded. There was only one option: to move the Earth itself. But how?

  You could push it. You could mount a giant rocket on a spin pole, as had been done on Port Sol, or even a series of rockets around the equator. But you would consume an immense amount of Earth’s own matter in the process, and any instability could cause the planet’s crust to shake itself to pieces. You might end up doing more harm than good.

  Alternatively you could use gravity. If the Earth still had its Moon, you could have used that as a tug: push away the Moon as violently as you liked, and let lunar gravity gradually haul the Earth on a slow spiral away from the sun. But the Moon had been detached from the Earth in the course of a long-forgotten war.

  Or you could do it piecemeal.

  The Ascendents mounted venerable GUTdrive engines on a whole fleet of Kuiper Belt ice moons, including their own base, Port Sol. It took a long time for the slow push of the plasma rockets to make a difference, but at last the moons came swooping out of the dark into the inner system, entering complicated orbits that shuttled between Earth and the greatest planets, Jupiter and Saturn.

  And with each moon’s passage Earth’s orbit was deflected, just slightly.

  With a long series of slingshots Earth was gradually nudged outward from the sun, while the giants were subtly moved closer. It was as if the Ascendents had linked Earth to its giant cousins with immensely long chains, that drew them slowly together. It was going to take a million encounters with moons the size of Port Sol to move the Earth out to its destination, a new orbit around Saturn. At the rate of two or three encounters a year that would require thousands of centuries. But the undying always had time in abundance, time and patience. And Earth was on its way.

  It was a typical undying project, on immense timescales, but low-tech. But you had to ke
ep a sense of perspective, Symat thought. Where the Xeelee had blocked the light of suns across a supercluster of galaxies, all humans could manage was to nudge one little world across Sol system.

  And in the end even this monumental exercise in persistence hadn’t been enough. The immortals had saved Earth from the expansion of its sun. Now the Xeelee had come to Sol system, and a new danger loomed.

  But again, it seemed, the undying had been preparing.

  The three of them continued to walk among the ranks of immortals, each in her station, each with her number.

  As they passed the dimly stirring figures, the Curator kept smiling.

  Symat asked curiously, ‘Why do you grin like that?’

  ‘None of them can see well. But many of them respond to simple shapes.’

  ‘A smiling human face,’ said Mela, wondering. ‘Like a baby. A baby can recognise a smiling face almost as soon as it’s born.’

  ‘Yes. Remarkable, isn’t it? As if life is a great circle. That’s why we smile all the time.’ He tapped the green tetrahedron on his breast. ‘A lot of them seem comforted to see this too. We’re not sure why. It must be a very ancient symbol, of something.’

  Symat asked the Curator about the medical-station numbers.

  ‘They are for our purposes. We number them in order of age, as best we can. When one dies you have to renumber those younger - though young scarcely seems appropriate for creatures such as these! - but there are so few it isn’t a great burden.’

  As they walked the age numbers fell away, below twenty, fifteen, and at last to single figures. Symat felt his heart unaccountably thump. And then the Curator brought them to a bed, where a short, slim form lay, obscured by her translucent tent. The bed was adorned by a single digit: 1.

  ‘The oldest,’ Mela breathed.

  ‘She has been called many names,’ the Curator said. ‘Leropa, Luru Parz, other variants; perhaps one of these is her original given name. If she knows she won’t tell us. She claims to know the date of her birth, but it’s so long ago we can’t reconcile her dates with current chronologies more precisely than within five thousand years . . . Take a good look, Symat. She is certainly the oldest human being any of us will ever see. She is probably a million years old. Think of that!’

  Suddenly the woman’s eyes flickered open. Mela gasped.

  Symat stepped forward, his pulse hammering in his ears. And as he came by the bed a hand like a claw shot out to grab his wrist. He forced himself not to flinch, for fear he might snap bones like dry twigs.

  Her black eyes were on him. She opened a ruined mouth and whispered, ‘There are questions you need to ask.’

  To a fourteen-year-old she was a figure from a nightmare. But her leathery palm was warm on his skin. She was old, she was very strange, but she was human, he could feel that. ‘I don’t know how it must be,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘To be like you.’

  She closed her eyes briefly; he could actually hear the dry skin rustle on her eyeballs. ‘If you knew how many times I have been asked that . . . I have thought the same thoughts so often they don’t need me to think them any more. Perhaps I am a robot, then. Certainly I am no longer human, if I ever was, since the moment I took that pill given me by Gemo Cana, that murderous witch . . .’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘But that is why I am valuable, you see. I and my kind. For, long after love and hate are gone, even after meaning is lost, we keep on and on and on. And, given enough time, we achieve greatness.’

  ‘You moved the Earth.’

  ‘Yes. A human Galaxy was just a dream. Earth is the home of man, and as long as Earth exists, man will endure.’

  ‘But it isn’t enough,’ Symat said.

  ‘No. Because the Xeelee are here.’

  ‘People are fleeing. The booths—’

  Her face, a mask of imploded skin, crumpled a little, showing disgust. ‘The booths. A solution for cattle bred for defeat, beaten before they are even born. Have you ever heard of Original Sin?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Child, you know there is a better way. And that is why you must go to Saturn.’

  His mind was reeling. ‘I don’t know anything about Saturn. What must I do there?’

  ‘You will know,’ she said. She fell back on her pillow, her eyes closing, but she kept hold of his arm. ‘It is why I made you, after all . . .’

  Symat, electrified, astonished, could only stare at her.

  IV

  Port Sol fell away into the dark. Symat and Mela were travelling ahead of the ice moon on its endless cycling trajectory between the spheres of Earth and Saturn, but where Port Sol took years to complete a single orbit, the flitter would take only days.

  And now the flitter had a third passenger. The Curator wore his antique robe with its tetrahedral sigil, and his broad face was fixed with his habitual smile. But as Port Sol dwindled to a point of crimson light Symat thought he saw fear in his Virtual eyes.

  It had been Mela’s idea to bring him. ‘You might be able to help us,’ she had told him. ‘You know this Luru. You might be able to figure things out.’

  ‘I’m a Curator,’ he had protested. ‘I keep these human museum pieces alive. I’m not designed to interpret their mad ramblings.’ But Mela had kept on, pressing him to come.

  Symat was reluctantly fascinated by this exchange. He reminded himself that they were both expressions of a much vaster interlinked awareness. As the Curator and Mela argued it was as if he was listening to the internal debate of a single mind.

  They certainly weren’t human, not even Mela; Symat was the only human here. And as the darkness closed in on the ship he felt increasingly alone, and far from home.

  The flitter had internal partitions you could turn opaque, and he shut himself up inside a little boxy room. He didn’t want to deal with the Curator and his resentful wittering, and he didn’t much even want to be with Mela.

  After a day of this Mela asked to see him. He wouldn’t let her in, so she just walked through the walls, protocol warnings sounding. She shook her arms and flexed her fingers until all her rogue pixels had settled back into place. ‘That hurt.’

  Symat was lying on a pallet. ‘Then don’t do it.’

  She sat down uncertainly. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He had been reading, watching silly kids’ Virtuals, stuff he had liked years ago. Now he felt oddly self-conscious and shut it all down.

  She asked, ‘You want to play a game?’

  ‘No, I don’t want to play a stupid game.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you? You’re not much fun.’

  ‘I don’t feel like fun. I feel—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sick of being pushed around. My parents wanted me to follow them into the booths. So I ran away. But then the Conclave got hold of me, through you. Now I find this stupid old woman, Luru, who says she planned me for some purpose long before I was even born. And I’ve ended up coming all the way out here, into the dark.’

  ‘Welcome to my world,’ Mela snapped. ‘That’s how I feel all the time. The Curator too, probably.’

  ‘You aren’t human.’

  ‘But we’re sentient,’ she hit back. ‘Is that how you think of me, just a part of some kind of trap?’

  He flinched. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.’

  She softened a little. ‘Anyway, Virtual or human, what difference does it make? Look around, Symat. Everything is old. Everything in the universe has been shaped by humans, or their enemies. Every important decision was made long ago. So we have very little choice about things. My mother used to feel the same way,’ she said, a little wistfully.

  It was the first time she’d mentioned any detail of her parents. ‘She did?’

  ‘She said she’d always felt like a child herself, a child who had grown up in the halls of some vast and dusty museum, where everything was frozen and on display, out of her reach . . . Look, Symat, if you do have some
purpose, it must be important.’

  ‘But if I’ve got no choice about any of this, what is there for me?’

  She thought about that. ‘Dignity?’ She stood up. ‘Come on. Let’s go and wind up the Curator. I want to know what kind of underwear he has on under that stupid robe.’