Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  And the generators drew the Rocks to each other. Mutually attracting, they swooped and swirled about each other in an endless three-dimensional dance, mad miniature planets free of the stabilizing influence of a sun. Some of the Rocks swam so close to the flitter that you could see maintenance crews working on the surfaces, crawling over the tightly curved horizons like bugs on bits of food.

  Pirius saw, bemused, that Nilis kept his eyes closed all the way through the hop.

  Pirius had his mind on bigger issues. So his whole life was suddenly defined by whatever that arrogant clone of himself had done downstream! He wished he could meet Pirius Blue alone to have it out.

  Nilis’s room, deep in the belly of Officer Country, was small. It was unfurnished save for a low bunk, a desk with a chair, and a nano-food niche. Pirius sat awkwardly on the bunk, and declined an offer of food or drink. Nilis himself sipped water. The walls of the room were translucent, as were all the walls throughout the Base, but they were buried so deep in this warren of offices and conference rooms that the sky beyond could barely be glimpsed.

  “Which is the way I prefer it, I’m afraid,” Nilis said with a rueful smile. He sat on the room’s single chair, his robes awkwardly rucked up to expose scrawny shins. “You have to understand that I’m from Earth, where I live as humans did in primitive times—I mean, on an apparently flat world, under a dome of sky scattered with a few distant stars. Here the worlds fly around like demented birds, and even the stars are glaring globes. Of course only the most massive stars can form here; conditions are too turbulent for anything as puny as Sol… . It’s rather disorienting!”

  Pirius had never thought about it. “I grew up here, sir.”

  “Call me Nilis.”

  But Pirius was not about to call a Commissary, even a soft eccentric Commissary like this one, anything but “Sir.” He said, “Arches doesn’t seem strange to me.”

  “Well, I suppose it wouldn’t.” Nilis got to his feet, cup of water in his liver-spotted hand, and he peered out through layers of offices at the wheeling sky. “A self-gravitating system—a classic demonstration of the n-body problem of celestial mechanics. And chaotic, unstable to small perturbations, never predictable even in principle. No doubt this endless barrage has been designed as conditioning, to get you proto-pilots used to thinking in shifting three-dimensional geometries, and to program out ancient fears of falling—an instinct useful when we descended from the trees, not so valuable for a starship pilot, eh? But for me, it’s like being trapped in some vast celestial clockwork.”

  Irritated, distressed, Pirius blurted, “Forgive me, sir, but I don’t understand why I’m here. Or why you’re here.”

  Nilis nodded. “Of course. Cosmic special effects pale into insignificance beside our human dilemmas, don’t they?”

  “Why must I be punished? I haven’t done anything. It was him—he did it all.”

  Nilis studied him. “Has your training not covered that yet? I keep forgetting how young you all are. Pirius, what Blue has done is done; it is locked in his timeline—his personal past. He must be punished, yes, in the hope of eradicating his character flaws. Whereas you are to be punished in the hope of changing your still unformed timeline. We can’t change his past, but we can change your future, perhaps. Do you see? And so you must suffer for a crime you haven’t yet committed.

  “At least, that’s the logic of the system. Is it right or wrong? Who’s to say? We humans haven’t evolved to handle time-travel paradoxes; all this stretches our ethical frameworks a little far. And, you know, I really can’t imagine how it must be for you, Pirius Red. How does it feel to confront a version of yourself plucked out of the future and deposited in your life?”

  “Sir, we train for it. It’s not a problem.”

  Nilis sighed. He said, with a trace of steel in his voice, “Now, Pirius, I am here to help you, but I’m not going to be able to do that if you’re not honest with me. Try again.”

  Pirius said reluctantly, “I feel—irritated. Resentful.”

  Nilis nodded. “That’s better. Good. I can understand that. After all, your own future has suddenly been hijacked by this stranger, hasn’t it? Your choices taken away from you. And how do you feel about him—Pirius Blue, your double—regardless of what he has done?”

  “It’s difficult,” Pirius said. “I don’t like him. I don’t think he likes me. And yet I feel drawn to him.”

  “Yes, yes. You are like siblings, brothers; that’s the nearest analogy, I think. You are rivals—the two of you are competing for a single place in the world—you might even grow to hate him. And yet he will always be a part of you.”

  Pirius was uncomfortable; this talk of “brothers” was seriously non-Doctrinal. “Sir, I wouldn’t know about brothers. I grew up in cadres.”

  “Of course you did. Popped from the birthing tanks, placed in a training cadre, plucked out and moved on, over and over! You don’t know what it’s like to have a brother—how could you? But I know,” he said, and sighed. “There are corners, even on Earth itself, where people find room to do things the old way. Of course I had to give all that up when I joined the Commission. How unfortunate for you; if only your cultural background were richer, it might help you cope better now. Don’t you think?”

  None of this meant much to Pirius. “Sir, please—”

  “You want to know what an old buffoon like me is doing all the way out here.” He smiled. “I volunteered. As soon as I heard the particulars of the case, I knew I had to get involved. I volunteered to act as counsel to you and your twin.”

  “But why?”

  “You know that I’m a Commissary.” That meant he worked for the Commission for Historical Truth, the grand, ancient agency dedicated to upholding the purity of the Druz Doctrines—a task it performed with persuasion and force, with zeal and dedication. “What you probably don’t know is that the Commission itself has many divisions. The Commission is thousands of years old, Pirius. Astonishing when you think of it! The Commission has lasted longer than many of Earth’s civilizations. And it has grown into a very old, very tangled, bureaucratic tree.

  “I work for a department called the Office of Technological Archival and Control. We’re a sort of technological think tank. If somebody gets a bright idea on Alpha Centauri III, we make sure it’s passed on to Tau Ceti IV.” These were places Pirius had never heard of. “But the name says everything: Archival and Control. Not a word about innovation, eh? Or development? The Commission’s cold hand is at our throats, and our opportunity to think is restricted. Because that’s the last thing the high-ups want us to do. Oh, yes, the very last. And that’s why I’m here. Do you see?”

  Pirius tried to pick his way through all this. “No, sir, I don’t.”

  “I heard about your heroics—or rather, Pirius Blue’s. I knew that to have captured a Xeelee, even to have survived such an encounter, he must have innovated. He must have found some new way of striking back at our perennial foe. And I’ve come to find out what that is. Of course, I’m unqualified for the job, and from the wrong corner of the Commission. I had to fight my way through a few administrative thickets to get this far, I can tell you.”

  Out of all that, one word stuck dismayingly in Pirius’s mind: unqualified.

  “But why is all this so important to you—to Earth?”

  Nilis sighed. “Pirius, have you no sense of history? Perhaps not—you young soldiers are so brave, but so limited in your horizons! Have you any idea at all how long this war has been going on—how long this Front has been stalled here? And then there are the deaths, Pirius, the endless deaths. And for what?”

  “The Xeelee are powerful. FTL foreknowledge leads to stalemate—”

  Nilis waved a hand dismissively. “Yes, yes. That’s the standard justification. But we have got used to this stasis. Most people can’t imagine any other way of conducting the war. But I can. And that’s why I am here. Listen to me. Don’t you worry about this absurd trial. I’ll get you both cleared�
�you and your older twin. And then we’ll see what we will see—eh?”

  Pirius stared, bemused. He was no fool, and in fact had been selected for pilot training because of his capacity for independent thought. But he had never in his life come across anybody as strange as this Commissary, and could make nothing of what he said. Bewildered, disoriented, he longed only to be out of here, out of Officer Country, and back in the great orderly warmth of the Barracks Ball, safe under his sheets’ coarse fabric with Torec.

  Pirius had to wait an agonizing week for the trial to be called. He tried to immerse himself in the mundane routines of his training.

  Arches was under the control of the Training and Discipline Command, jointly run by the Navy and the Green Army, and every child hatched here was born into the Navy’s service. Most were destined to live out their lives performing simple services, administrative or technical support. But at the age of eight, a few, a precious few, were filtered out by a ruthless program of tests and screening, and submitted for officer training.

  Pirius had made it through that filtering. Now his life was crammed with instruction in mathematics, science, technology, tactics, games theory, engineering, Galactic geography, multispecies ethics, even Doctrinal philosophy—as well as a stiff program of physical development. But at the end of it was the prospect of serving the Navy in a senior and responsible role, perhaps as technical or administrative ground crew of some sort, or better yet in one of the prized flight roles—and best of all, as Pirius already knew was his own destiny, as a pilot. After that, if you prospered, there was the possibility of moving on to command, or, if you were invalided out, you could expect a role on the ground, or even in Training Command itself, like Captain Seath.

  For young people primed from birth with the importance of duty, no better life could be imagined.

  But none of this would come to pass if Pirius flunked his training, no matter what destiny FTL foreknowledge described for him. So Pirius tried to keep working. But his mind wasn’t on it, and as rumors spread about his predicament, his friends and rivals—even Torec—kept their distance.

  He was relieved when the trial finally started. But, despite Nilis’s confidence, it didn’t go well.

  The hearing was convened in a dedicated courtroom, a spherical chamber close to the geometric center of Officer Country. The judges, officers of the court, advocates and counsels, witnesses, and defendants took their places in tiered seats around the equator of the sphere. The central section was left open for Virtual displays of evidence. As mandated by custom and enshrined in Coalition law, the judging panel contained representatives from many of the great agencies of mankind: the Commission, of course, the Green Army, who governed the destinies of the millions of Rock-bound infantrymen, and the Navy, of which Pirius Blue’s Strike Arm was a section.

  Before the trial opened, the president of the court, a grizzled Army general, gave a short instruction about the formal use of language: specifically, the use of historic tenses to describe events occurring in the “past” of Pirius Blue’s personal timeline, though they were in the future of the court itself.

  Nilis leaned toward Pirius Red. “Even our language strains to fit the reality of time paradoxes,” he said. “But we try, we try!”

  At first it wasn’t so bad: it was even interesting. Prompted by an advocate, Pirius Blue, the Pirius from the future, talked the court through a Virtual light-show dramatization of the incident in question, drawn from the ship’s log and the crew’s eyewitness accounts. The court watched Pirius’s withdrawal under fire from the line around the Rock barrage, his flight to Sag A East, the spectacular showdown with the Xeelee. From time to time he referred to his crew, Cohl the navigator and Tuta the engineer, to clarify details or correct mistakes. The show was stop-start, and if a clarification was conceded it would be incorporated into the draft of the Virtual sequence and that section run again.

  Pirius himself—Pirius Red—watched intently. He felt intimidated that a version of himself, only a few years older, had been capable of this.

  He tried to assess the reaction of the court members. Despite the legalistic setting, the members of the court watched, rapt, as miniature spacecraft chased each other across the spherical chamber. It was undoubtedly a dashing, daring episode, and it seemed to touch something primitive in people’s hearts, whatever their roles here today.

  But Pirius Red’s heart sank at the grim expressions on the panel’s faces as they heard one example after another of how Pirius Blue had disobeyed orders: when he failed to hold the line as the Xeelee broke through the Rock, when he failed to turn back to face the fire of the pursuing nightfighters. Even Dans, obviously a maverick, had shown a closer adherence to duty by ensuring that she sent back a FTL beacon containing data on the engagement to the past, giving the military planners a couple of years’ notice of the Xeelee’s new Rock-busting tactic.

  Nilis seemed unperturbed. He nodded, murmured notes into Virtual receptors, absorbed, analytical, his blue, rheumy eyes bright in Virtual light. He seemed most animated, in fact, at the dramatization of Dans’s ingenious countertemporal maneuver. He whispered to Pirius Red, “That’s it. That’s the key to the whole incident—that’s the way to outthink a Xeelee!”

  When the reconstruction was over, the panel conferred briefly. Then with a curt, dismissive gesture, the president of the court summoned Nilis to make his response.

  As he gathered his robes to stand up, Nilis whispered to Pirius Red, “See that look? He thinks the case is already over, that my defense is just a formality. Hah! We’ll show them—just as Blue showed that Xeelee.”

  Pirius turned away, his heart thumping.

  Nilis immediately conceded the accuracy of the reconstruction. “I’m not here to pick holes in a story told fully and honestly by three very honorable young people. And I’m not here to question, either, the central charge against Pirius: that he disobeyed orders both standing and direct in the course of the action. Of course he did; he doesn’t deny it himself. I’m not here to ask you to set aside self-evident fact.”

  The old general asked dryly, “Then why are you here, Commissary?” Muffled laughter.

  Nilis rose up to his full height. “To ask you to think,” he said grandly. “To think for yourselves—just as Pirius did, in extremis. We must think beyond mere orders. Why obey a pointless order if it will cost you your life, and the lives of your crew, and your ship, and gain absolutely nothing? Isn’t it better to put aside that order, to flee, to return—as Pirius self-evidently has done—and to fight again another day? Isn’t it obvious that Pirius disobeyed his orders the better to fulfill his duty?”

  Pirius was shocked. If one thing had been drummed into him more than anything else since his birth, it was: orders are everything. He could tell from the thunderous expressions on the bench how well that sort of sophistry was going down with the service personnel.

  Nilis went on in detail to analyze Dans’s use of the “Brun maneuver”—he described it as “the ingenious use of a closed timelike curve in a computing algorithm”—which he considered the crux of Pirius’s innovatory tactic. “Thanks to these two brave pilots, Pirius and Dans, at last we have a way, at least in principle, of overcoming the Xeelee’s single biggest advantage over us: their computing resource. This will need further investigation, of course, but surely you see that that alone is an achievement far beyond the dreams of most warriors in this endless war. And then, on top of that, Pirius brought home a Xeelee, a captive nightfighter! The information we will acquire may—no, will—transform our prospects in this conflict.” He paused, breathing hard.

  Pirius had never heard a speech like this. Nobody talked about victory—not victory anytime soon, anyhow. The war wasn’t to be won, it was to be endured. Victory would come, but it was for future generations. The brass on the bench weren’t impressed by Nilis’s grandiose declarations either.

  And Nilis proceeded to make things a thousand times worse.

  “Sirs, once again I
urge you to think. Rise above yourselves! Rise above your petty rivalries! Isn’t it true that soldiers of the Green Army habitually resent Strike Arm for the perceived luxury of their bases? Isn’t it true that Navy officers traditionally imagine that the Commission knows nothing of the pressures on warriors, even though the Commission plays such a significant role in running the war? And as for we of the Commission, are the Doctrines really so fragile that we fear their breaking even in such an extraordinary case—even in a case where a brave officer is simply overriding a pointless order for the sake of prosecuting his duty more effectively?”

  And so on. By the time Nilis was done insulting everybody, Pirius knew that any chance of the case going his way, if there had ever been one, was lost.

  The panel’s deliberation was brief. The president of the court took only a few seconds to announce its verdict.

  For his gross violation of orders, Pirius Blue was to be demoted, and transferred to a penal unit at the Front. Pirius Red knew, everybody knew, that such a posting was tantamount to a death penalty. It was scarcely more of a shock when the court announced that Pirius’s crew, Cohl and Tuta, would be transferred along with him for their “complicity” in his “crimes.”

  And, in an almost causal afterthought, the president announced that Pirius Red, the pilot’s younger version, would likewise be transferred to a penal Rock. There were reassignments, lesser punishments, for the younger versions of Cohl, Tuta, and Dans.

  By now Pirius understood the theory of temporal-paradox law. But he found this impossible to take in.

  Once the president was done speaking, Nilis was immediately on his feet again. He announced his intention to appeal the verdict. And he requested that in the interim he have both Pirius Red and Pirius Blue assigned to his personal retinue. He would act as guarantor of their behavior, and he would seek to make best use of their services in the betterment of mankind’s greater goals.