Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

Laughing, they left the cabin.

  Saturn loomed out of the dark.

  This wasn’t like approaching Port Sol. They had come swooping down on that much-engineered little worldlet in a flash. The largest surviving planet in Sol system, Saturn was majestic and stately, a misty disc painted red by the sun. Its size was obvious, oppressive.

  The ship hurled itself through Saturn’s tremendous shadow. Symat saw lightning crackle purple and white across the clouds, as storms that could have engulfed the whole of Mars played themselves out. This was the power of nature, he thought, even now dwarfing humanity and its dreams. As he watched, Symat’s heart pumped in a kind of retrospective panic. To think that he might have lived and died on Mars, or even followed his parents into a booth, without seeing such wonders as this!

  The flitter swooped away from Saturn, climbing up and out of its deep gravity well, the energy of its incoming trajectory dumped. And the Curator showed Symat how to look for the moons.

  Spacegoing mankind had swept like a storm through Sol system, shattering in a few millennia the patient geological assemblings of aeons. Saturn’s ice moons, if not taken apart altogether, had been extensively mined. One moon was more interesting, though. The Curator called it ‘Titan’. Once this small world had had decks of clouds beneath which complex chemical processes had played out; humans had sent scoop-ships and trawlers to mine the air and the hydrocarbon seas. But Titan, starved of heat, had never spawned life. Now, as the sun brightened, Titan was at last stirring from its chill slumber. It was a marvellous prospect, the birth of a new world right in the middle of Sol system: even in these desolate latter days you could still find new life. But no human scientists were studying the miracles unfolding in Titan’s clouds. This was not an age for science.

  They left Titan behind. And as the flitter continued to swoop around Saturn’s gravity well, the true human purpose of this system was gradually revealed.

  ‘Can you see?’ The Curator ducked and pointed, picking out lights scattered among the moons. ‘And that one? They are drones. Sensor stations, weapons platforms. All sentient.’

  The sky was full of them, machines that flocked like metallic birds in the ever-changing gravity field of Saturn and its moons. Some of them gathered into rings that girdled Saturn’s equator, which the Curator wistfully said were an echo of an even stranger wonder of the past, natural rings of ice and dust that had long been disrupted by war. And once you could have seen even more spectacular artefacts, the ruins of wormhole mouths, the remnant of a transit system that had once spanned a Galaxy but had collapsed with the demise of its builders, the Coalition.

  But Symat understood that the beauty of the weapons clouds wasn’t their point. Their purpose was lethality. The whole of the Saturn system was a fortress. And it was all because of the Ascendents.

  When the vast retreat of man had begun, even when only the most remote of colonies had yet been evacuated, the undying with their eerie far-flung prescience had planned the end game. Before the siege of Earth itself began, it would be necessary to make a stand.

  Saturn had always been a military stronghold. As long ago as the Exultants’ heroic effort to win the Galactic Core, huge war machines had been buried in the planet’s deepest clouds, ready to leap to the defence of Earth if any foe dared attack the capital planet. These brooding machines, self-maintaining, self-enhancing, became known as the Guardians.

  Now, as a far more formidable foe gathered, the Ascendents turned to Saturn once more. Earth itself was to be corralled with gravitation and brought out here, to circle on the rim of Saturn’s mighty gravity well, where it could be protected. And the war machines under those clouds, already powerful, were enhanced with the accumulated learning of a million years of interstellar war.

  The purpose of the undying had been unswerving. But this project was not quite as under their obsessive control as they would have preferred. There was risk.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Mela said. ‘What risk?’

  The Curator waved a hand, and the air was filled with a high-speed chatter of automated signals. Symat thought he picked out questions and responses, handshaking, a kind of dialogue. The Curator said, ’The Guardians are very old. They have long since got used to making their own decisions. When a ship like this comes sliding into their space, they get very suspicious. Can’t you tell, from the way the drones are swarming around us? All that’s keeping us from being destroyed right now is our flitter’s responses to the Guardians’ continual interrogation.

  ‘And when the Ascendents decided to move Earth here - Lethe, a whole planet sliding across Sol system - one false word and the home of mankind might have been blown to bits by machines meant to protect it.’

  Symat said, ‘We’ve been at war with the Xeelee for a million years. What can these Guardians have that’s so powerful it could make a difference now? And why hasn’t it been thrown into the war before?’

  ‘I think I can answer that.’ Mela’s eyes clouded, and there was a sheen about her face, a waxy unreality. She screwed up her forehead as she tried to integrate the information pouring into her head.

  Long ago, as mankind advanced across a Galaxy, under a purposeful programme called the Assimilation, whole alien cultures were eradicated or subsumed, their technology and learning purloined. Most such treasures, as Symat had guessed, had been thrown into the vast war effort. But some had been secreted away by the patient undying. Insurance for the future, they thought of it.

  One such was the technology called the Snowflake. It had been found in orbit around an ancient star in a globular cluster out in the Galaxy’s halo. It was a stunning artefact, a regular tetrahedron measuring over fourteen million kilometres along its edges. Humans gave it this name because like a snowflake the structure had a fractal architecture, with the tetrahedron motif repeated on all scales. And the Snowflake, it was discovered, was full of information: it was an iron-wisp web of data, a cacophony of bits endlessly dancing against the depredations of entropy.

  The Snowmen, the human label for the vanished builders of this lacy monster, had an utterly alien motivation. The Snowmen decided that to record events - and only to record - was the highest calling of life. They took apart their world and rebuilt it as a monstrous data storage system. After that they watched time unravel - and waited for the universe to cool, so they could capture even more data.

  Thus the Snowflake had hung in space for thirteen billion years. Then, during the Assimilation, a human ship came.

  The Navy crew, intent on plunder, had been unsubtle - but their ship had been devastated by an unexpected blow, broken apart by a beam of directed gravity waves.

  It had taken some time to work out what had happened, how the Snowflake had struck back.

  Mela lacked the vocabulary to express the concepts downloading into her mind, and she looked at the Curator. Reluctantly, he closed his eyes, and began to speak deliberately. ‘There is a profound principle at work. Once it was known as the Mach principle. Mach, Marque, something like that. Every particle in the universe is linked to every other. That is why inertia exists; when you push something, the universe itself drags it back.’

  Symat frowned. ‘What connections? Gravity?’

  The Curator frowned. ‘That, and quantum wave functions, and, and - I can see it, I can’t say it! The ancients understood. If you use complex arithmetic to extend most theories of cosmology—’

  Symat held up his hand. ‘Just tell me what happened.’

  ‘The Snowmen had a defensive system. They found a way of manipulating these cosmic linkages. A way to use them as a weapon.’

  Symat barely understood enough to be amazed. ‘How?’

  ‘Does it matter? I guess you learn a lot in thirteen billion years.’

  Thanks to its Mach-principle weapon the Snowflake was saved from the Assimilators, that first time. But the humans returned, of course, evaded the weapon, and took what they wanted. They used the technology of the Snowflake itself in their own information-st
orage systems across the Galaxy.

  And they took away the strange global-manipulation weapons system, but that turned out to be much harder to understand. When it didn’t yield early results it was reduced in priority, shuffled from one research centre to another, until it became so obscure, despite its potency, that a clique of undying were able to spirit it away and develop it for their own purposes.

  The Curator peered at Saturn uneasily. ‘And that, it seems, is what is held under those clouds. A weapon of last resort.’

  ‘But,’ said Symat, ‘what has this got to do with me?’

  Suddenly Mela’s face worked, and the tone of her voice hoarsened. ‘We need you because the Guardians won’t listen to us. Is that clear enough for you?’

  Symat was shocked. This time the intervention was crude, as if she had been possessed by a different personality altogether.

  The Curator stepped forward and grabbed her arm, one Virtual handling another. ‘Ascendent. Show yourself. Leave this child alone.’

  Mela spasmed, and her eyes rolled up in their sockets, showing white. She blurred briefly and broke up into a rough sculpture of blocky pixels. Then Mela stumbled backwards, reforming as she emerged from the cloud of pixels.

  And from that mist of light a new figure coalesced. Suddenly there were four of them, and the flitter’s tiny cabin seemed very crowded.

  The newcomer was a woman, dressed in a brown robe as drab as the Curator’s. Small, dark, her face was smooth - but Symat immediately saw that the smoothness was a sign of great age.

  Black eyes fixed on Symat.

  ‘Ascendent One,’ the Curator breathed.

  ‘You can’t be Luru,’ Symat said immediately. ‘I saw her. She’s a dried-out skeleton. She could barely move.’

  ‘I’m a projection,’ the new Virtual said, unfazed. ‘I am as she was long ago. And my sentience overlaps with hers, though time-shifted.’

  The Curator sounded uneasy. ‘Most of the Ascendents are conscious only briefly each day. It will take Luru, the real one, a long time to live through this Virtual’s experiences. But she has time, of course.’

  ‘Her will is mine,’ said the Virtual. ‘When I speak, she speaks. Remember that.’

  Symat felt deeply disturbed. To see Mela split into two and give birth to this monstrous form was an unwelcome reminder of how strange all these Virtual creatures were, how inhuman - and how interconnected, their identities somehow flowing one into another. He gathered his defiance into a knot. ‘You told me the Guardians won’t listen to you.’

  Luru eyed him. ‘They’ll listen to you, though.’

  Symat felt the universe pivot around him, as if the Guardians’ strange cosmic weapons had been turned on him. ‘Me? I could command the Guardians?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘That’s why we bred you.’ She stepped closer to him and he thought he could smell her, a dry scent like a musty library. ‘I’ll show you,’ she said. ‘Come to Earth.’

  V

  So Symat’s strange odyssey ended on Earth, the planet of his most remote ancestors.

  There was an Earth in Symat’s head, mistily imagined, a world of water and life, of blue and green. It had been taken out of Mars’s sky long ago, many generations before he had been born, and sent on its way to Saturn. It wasn’t something you talked about, the loss of the home world.

  But the Earth that came looming out of the outer-system cold was not like that story-book vision. The mountains were worn down, and the sea floors were rimmed by banks of salt, drained save for dark remnant puddles. The air seemed thin, supporting only wispy traces of cloud. And though a few cities still glittered, the ground of Earth shone brick red, the red of Mars, of rust and lifelessness.

  ‘Earth has grown old,’ he said.

  Luru was watching him, apparently interested in his reaction. ‘Old like its children.’

  ‘It is well guarded,’ Mela murmured.

  ‘There is nothing more precious,’ Luru said.

  On its final approach to the planet the flitter cautiously descended through shells of automated sentinels, and artificial suns that swooped on low orbits, casting splashes of yellow light. Luru said that not all those satellites carried weapons. Earth’s magnetic field had failed. The sun was far away now, but the electromagnetic environment around a gas giant was ferociously energetic. Where nature failed, humans had to step in; and so devices orbited the Earth to protect it with new shields of magnetism.

  The flitter ducked deep into the air, and the sky turned a muddy red-brown. Everybody stayed silent as the ground of Earth fled under the ship’s prow.

  The cities were sparsely scattered, and Symat could see no logic to their positioning. Perhaps they had been placed along the banks of long-dried rivers, or at the shores of vanished oceans; the cities endured where geography had eroded away. Many of the buildings were airy confections of glass and light that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Mars. But these modern cities were fragile flowers that grew out of mighty ruins, covered by drifts of red dust.

  Mela picked out patterns. ‘Look. Lots of those old ruins have got circles in them. See, Symat?’

  She was right. Sometimes the circles were obvious, rings of foundations or low walls that could be kilometres across. In other places you could only spot the circles by the way other ruins fitted around them, filling up their interior spaces or crowding around their circumferences.

  Luru’s eyes, black as night, gleamed bright as she peered out at this ancient architecture. Perhaps in these traces she saw some trace of her own long life, Symat mused.

  In every city they passed over Symat spotted transfer booths. Even Earth, which Luru and her Ascendents had laboured so long to save, was draining of its people.

  Wild things lived on the lands between the last cities. The flitter passed over what looked like plains of grass, even forests of stunted trees, and occasionally its passage scattered herds of animals. But there were swathes of vegetation that wasn’t even green.

  The flitter at last swept over a southern continent that seemed even more worn-down than the rest, and came to rest at the outskirts of yet another city.

  Symat deliberately jumped down from the hatch, falling a half-metre or so to the dusty ground. He fell slowly, though once his feet were planted in the dirt of Earth, invisible inertial systems ensured his weight felt normal to him. Gravity was indeed low here, he thought, somehow lower than Mars’s. But Earth, the mother world, had always defined the standard of gravity: how, then, could its gravity be reduced?

  He looked around. The city was unprepossessing. You could clearly see the usual circular tracings, but the structures they had supported were razed to the ground. Amid these ancient foundation arcs stood only a small, shabby cluster of more recent glass buildings.

  There was nobody about. The Ascendent was quiet as she wandered around the circular profile of one vanished wall.

  Symat asked, ‘Luru, why have you brought us here?’

  ‘I think this place means something to her,’ Mela said. She guessed, ‘Did you grow up here, Luru? Were you born here?’

  Luru’s face remained impassive, but she nodded. ‘Yes, I was born here, or rather in the ruins of a still older city on this site - born in a tank, actually, for that was the way in those days.’

  Symat found it hard to imagine Luru Parz ever having been young, ever being born.

  ‘The whole of the Earth was in the grip of alien conquerors. They built this city, erasing the ruins. They called it Conurbation 5204. These circles you see were the bases of domes of blown rock. The place was beautiful, in its way. There were plenty of places to play, for me and my cadre siblings.’

  ‘It was home,’ Mela said.

  ‘Oh, yes. Even a prison becomes a home.’

  The Curator looked at her almost with compassion. ‘You never told me any of this.’

  ‘You were told what you needed to know,’ Luru said harshly. ‘I worked here, for an agency called the Extirpation Directorate. My
job was to erase the human past. We humans were useful to our conquerors, but troublesome. To detach us from our history, to strip away our identity, was their strategy to control us.’

  Symat felt disgusted. ‘And you did this work for them?’

  ‘I had no choice,’ she murmured. ‘And the work was challenging, intellectually. To eradicate is as satisfying as to build, if you don’t think beyond the act itself. Of course we failed. Look around you!’ She laughed and spread her arms; it was a grotesque sight. ‘Since the great levelling of those days, more cities have been built on the foundations of the old, only to fall into ruin, over and over. History just keeps on piling up, whatever you do.’

  Mela asked curiously, ‘Did you have children, Luru Parz?’

  ‘Not that I knew of. If I had I wouldn’t have lived so long. There is a logic in immortality.’