Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  “We’re used to quagmites, I suppose,” Pirius said. “We design around them.”

  “But look,” Nilis said, and he traced the lines with his fingers. “Look here, and here … Can’t you see, even in this simple summary image? These lines weren’t inflicted at random. There are patterns here, Pilot! And where there are patterns there is information.

  “Every aspect of the lines seems to contain data: their positions in three dimensions, the timing with which they were inflicted, the nature of the projectiles which caused them. There’s really a remarkable amount of information, here in these scars—a whole library full, I suspect. Not that I have come anywhere near extracting more than a fraction of it yet. It seems a coarse way to leave a message, like signing one’s name with bullets sprayed at a wall. But you can’t deny it’s effective!

  “You must see the significance of this discovery. The quagmites were attracted to your GUTdrive energy, yes; they appear to feed off it. But they weren’t attacking you. They were trying to communicate with you. And in those two facts, I believe, lies the answer to the mystery of the quagmites’ nature.

  “The quagmites are alive, Pirius. They are creatures of this universe, just as we are. But the stuff of which they are made isn’t so common now. Do you see? Once again we have to confront universal history. For the quagmites—like the Xeelee!—are survivors of a much earlier age… .”

  He spoke of those moments before nucleosynthesis, just a microsecond or so after the singularity, when the universe was a soup of quarks, a quagma. The quagmites had swarmed through a quagma broth, fighting and loving and dying. But the quagma cooled. Their life-sustaining fluid congealed into cold protons and neutrons, and then further into atomic nuclei. They were thinking beings, but there was nothing they could do about the end of their world.

  “They found a way to survive the great cosmic transition, the congealing of their life stuff.” His rheumy eyes were vague, as he considered prospects invisible to Pirius. “I wonder what they see, when they look at us. To them we are cold, dead things, made of dead stuff. All they see is the occasional bright spark of our GUTdrives. And when they do, they come to feed, and to talk to us.”

  “Not to us,” Pirius said. “To our ships.”

  “Ha!” Nilis slapped his thigh. “Of course, of course. I have to say this is not entirely an original insight. Quagmites have been studied before. The lessons are still there, I found, but buried deep in our Archives. Sometimes I wonder how much we have forgotten, how little we retain—and the older our culture grows the more wisdom we lose. What a desolating thought!”

  Pirius tried to bring him back to the point. “Commissary, I don’t see what this has to do with the Project.”

  “Well, nor do I,” Nilis said cheerfully. “Which is why we have to find out! You see, I deduced from the captured nightfighter that the Xeelee too are relics of an earlier cosmic epoch, earlier even than the quagmites. Surely it isn’t a coincidence that we find them both swarming around Chandra!” Nilis rubbed his face, smoothing out his jowly flesh. “Clearly there is a pattern, which we must understand. That is why I have been seeking ways to study the early universe, like this neutrino telescope. And I must continue to study, to gather data, to learn… . But if any of this is correct, there is the question of why.”

  “Why what?”

  Nilis waved a hand vaguely. “Why should the universe be so fecund? Why should it be that at every stage it is filled with life, with burgeoning complexity? It surely didn’t have to be so.” He leaned closer and spoke conspiratorially. “The ancients did a lot of thinking about this, you know. You can imagine a universe that would not support life, at any stage. Of course in that case nobody would be around to observe it. There were some philosophers who speculated that our universe’s fecundity is no accident. Perhaps it was designed in, somehow, or at least nurtured. Perhaps the universe itself is an immense artifact, a technological womb of spacetime! But these ideas were suppressed, like so much else, when the Coalition’s grip tightened. For a mankind traumatized by near-extinction at the hands of the Qax, the idea that such powers might exist was simply too challenging. So the ancient work was buried—but not destroyed.”

  Pirius knew by now that Nilis had a habit of letting his research run away, far beyond any practical use. “But what do we do?”

  Nilis grimaced. “All this is very indirect, based on long chains of deductions. We need to get closer to the target. I would like, somehow, to make some direct observations of Chandra itself. But I fear that to do that I must return to the center of the Galaxy—or at least a part of me.”

  Pirius didn’t know what he meant. “But, Commissary—what am I doing here?”

  “The staff here will continue to work on my quagmite analysis. I want you to work with them. You have been trained in the behavior and properties of the quagmites. These habitat-dwellers are all a bit theoretical; perhaps you will give their thinking some meat! And,” he said more hesitantly, “I thought you might appreciate a little quiet time to reflect.”

  Pirius nodded. “Oh. So this is a punishment for Pluto.”

  “Not a punishment, not at all. I just want you to, umm, work your way through the issues that caused your breakdown.”

  “Breakdown?” Pirius was indignant. “What are you, a psych officer? … Sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” Nilis said evenly. “What do you think was going through your head, out there on the ice?”

  Pirius tried to find the words. “It was just—out in a place like Arches, you grow up in a Rock. It’s your whole world. You train, you fight, you die. And that’s it. It’s the same for everybody. It doesn’t even occur to you that other things are possible. You never question why your life is the way it is. The Doctrines are just in the background, as unquestioned as, as …”

  “As the Rock under your feet.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you come to Earth,” Nilis said gently.

  “And then you come to Earth. And suddenly you question everything.”

  “The trouble is not the state of the Galaxy, you know, not even Earth.”

  “Then what?”

  “The trouble is you, Pirius. You’re growing, and it isn’t comfortable. All your life you have been conditioned, by agencies with an expertise millennia old. Since I plucked you out of Arches, you have been confronted by experiences which contradicted that conditioning. Now, because you’re no fool, you’re going one step further. You’re starting to understand that you have been conditioned. Isn’t that true?”

  “I suppose so,” Pirius said miserably.

  “And you will discover the real Pirius—if there’s anything of him inside that conditioned shell.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then,” Nilis said, “you’re going to have to decide what it is you want to fight for. Of course this is my fault. I never anticipated how hard this would be for you, and Torec. But we are so different, Pirius! I live on Earth—which is after all where humans evolved. Whereas you grew up in a sort of bottle. I respond to the rhythms of the turning Earth, you to a clock. To me the day starts with dawn; to you it is reveille. There are birds in my world, birds and flowers, nothing but rats in yours. Even our language is different: I have my feet on the ground, but my ideas are sometimes blue-sky—but such metaphors mean nothing to you! And you don’t have a lover, you have a squeeze… . I never foresaw how unhappy it would make you.”

  “Maybe you should have,” Pirius said harshly.

  Nilis drew back. “But I had higher goals. As for Venus, my instructions stand.”

  He turned away and peered out at the mined surface of an engineered Venus. “You know, carbon has always been the basis of human molecular nanotechnology. Defect-free engineered diamond is much stronger and harder than any metal could ever be. Right across the Galaxy, our tools, the walls of our homes, the battleships and corvettes of our fleets, even the implants in our bodies, are made of diamond and nanotubes, carbon molecules that o
nce drifted in Venus’s thick clouds. And it has been that way for twenty thousand years. Like Earth, this single world has exported its very substance to sustain a galactic civilization. And, like Earth …” He let the sentence tail away.

  Pirius said, “Like Earth, it is becoming exhausted.” It must be true, he thought. He could see it just by looking out the window. The air was still thick, but must be only a trace of the dense air ocean of former times. “But Venus was always dead.”

  “Actually, no …”

  In its early years, Venus had been warm and wet, not unlike Earth—although, thanks to a peculiar history of collisions during its formation, it spun slowly on its axis. Like Earth, Venus had quickly spawned life-forms based on carbon, sulphur, nitrogen, water; and on a world where the “day” was longer than the year, a complex and unique climate and biota established itself.

  Nilis said, “When the climate failed, and the ground turned red hot, survivors found places in the clouds—living inside water droplets, little rods and filaments breeding fast enough for generations to pass before the droplets broke up. Soon the lost ground wasn’t even a biochemical memory. They learned to specialize; there was plenty of sulphuric acid floating around up there, so a sulphur-based metabolism was the thing to have. And that was what the first human explorers found. It was a whole cloud-borne biota, lacking any multicelled animals, but in some ways as exotic and complex as anything on Earth or Mars. But Venus’s carbon was just too valuable.”

  “And the native life?”

  “I’m told there is a petri dish or two to be found in the museums.” The shadow-free glare of Venus emptied his face of expression, and Pirius couldn’t be sure of the Commissary’s opinion of this ancient xenocide.

  Chapter 25

  On Quin Base, a month after Factory Rock, training started again.

  At first it was mindless exercises. After that came elementary surface operations: trench work, moving over open ground, the new platoons learning to operate together. Just like old times, Pirius Blue thought.

  Things had changed for him, though. Now that Pirius was a veteran, even though he was only a buck private and Army Service Corps at that, he was expected to share his experience with his platoon of black-pupilled newbies. So he took the lead in the exercises, and showed them how to dig into the asteroid ground without getting electrostatically charged dirt over their faceplates.

  Having some responsibility again felt good, he supposed. But most of all Pirius relished the fitness work, even the meaningless pounding around Marta’s famous punishment crater. He ran and ran, until his difficult thoughts dissolved into a fatigue-poison blur.

  One night he came back from the surface through the usual route of airlocks and suit stations, and limped his way to his bunk. He was stiff and sore, and wanted nothing but to sleep off the day’s work.

  But the bunks around him were empty. Even Tili was missing—even Cohl.

  Pirius lay down and massaged an aching shoulder. He peered up into the shadows. His new eyes changed the way he saw the world, even a mundane scene like this, if only at the fringes. You saw new colors, to which the cadets gave names like sharp violet and bloody red. And you made out new details. He could see the hot breath rising from his own mouth, curling knots of turbulence that rose up and splashed languidly on the bunk above him. Pointlessly beautiful.

  Where was everybody? Well, what did he care? But curiosity got the better of him. Besides, he felt oddly lonely; after months in this crowded barracks, he was getting addicted to company.

  He rolled out of his bunk.

  Barefoot, he padded down the barracks’ center aisle. The place was quieter than usual, with hardly anybody about, the general horseplay, fighting, flirting, and sex subdued. But he heard a single clear voice, speaking softly and steadily.

  He turned a corner and came upon a crowd.

  This Burden Must Pass was standing on an upturned locker, hands spread wide, smiling. Before him, privates and cadets sat on the floor, or crowded together on bunks, squashed up against each other with the casual intimacy of familiarity. There were perhaps fifty of them here, gathered around Burden.

  Pirius sat down on the floor at the back, folding his legs under him. The cadets wriggled to make room, but he still ended up with warm bodies pressed against either side. Glancing around, he saw Tili Three and Cohl. Burden noticed him, and Pirius thought he acknowledged him with a wink. But Burden didn’t break his smooth flow.

  Burden was talking about his religion, the creed of the Friends.

  “Entropy,” he said. “Think of it that way. You start out with a hundred in a company. A hundred move out of some dismal trench. Ten die straight away, another ten are hit and injured. So eighty go on to the next earthwork. And then it’s over again, lads, and ten more fall, ten more are wounded… . On it goes. It’s entropy, everything slowly wearing down, lives being rubbed out. It’s relentless.” He smacked one fist into another. “But entropy is everywhere. From the moment we’re born to the moment we die we depend for our lives on machines. Entropy works on them too; they wear out. If we just accepted that, the air machines and water machines and food machines would fail, one by one, and we would be dead in a few days. But we don’t accept it. Everything wears out. So what? You fix it.”

  The cadets’ smooth young faces, so alike when you saw them all together, were like clusters of little antennae turned toward Burden, metallized eyes shining. Tili’s face, still young, was lined by grief. But as Burden talked, Pirius saw those lines fading, her eyes clearing. She even smiled at Burden’s poor jokes. Burden might be talking a lot of garbage, but it was clearly comforting garbage, comforting in a way that no words of Pirius could have been. He wondered, though, how Burden was feeling inside, as he absorbed the pain of these damaged children.

  And it was certainly non-Doctrinal.

  Burden spoke on. “We won’t last much longer. None of us will. But our children will survive, and our children’s children, an unending chain of blood and strength that will go on forever, go on to the end of time. And at the end, at timelike infinity, where all the world lines of all the particles and all the stars in the whole universe, all the people who ever lived, when all of it comes together, our descendants will meet—no, they will become—the Ultimate Observer. And the final observation will be made, the final thoughts shaped in the ultimate mind. And everything will be cleansed.” He waved a hand. “All of this, all our suffering and grief, will pass—for it will never have happened. The universe is just another balky machine. Any one of you could fix a busted air cleanser or biopack. Some day, we’ll fix the universe itself!”

  Tili Three spoke up. “But Michael Poole didn’t wait for timelike infinity.”

  “No.” Burden smiled. “Michael Poole went into the future. He sacrificed himself to save his children, all our children. He is with the Ultimate Observer—is, was, always will be …”

  The listeners asked more softball questions. But Cohl asked a tougher one. “How do you know? Are we supposed to accept this on faith?”

  Burden wasn’t perturbed. “Of course not. Past and future aren’t fixed; history can be changed—in fact, it changes all the time. You know that, Cohl. You lived through an action that got deleted from the timeline. So you know that contingency is real. It’s not much of a leap of faith to imagine that some day somebody will make a purposeful change—an intelligent change—and wipe away all our tears.”

  Cohl’s expression was complex. She kept up her mask of skepticism. But she wanted to believe, Pirius realized with a shock; even Cohl, once an ultraorthodox Druzite. She might have her suspicions about the man, but she was listening to his words, and seemed to want to accept Burden’s strange and comforting faith.

  A small Virtual drifted before Pirius’s eyes: it was Captain Marta’s face. “Come to my office, Private. We need to talk.”

  With a mixture of regret and relief, Pirius slipped away from the little congregation. Nobody seemed to notice.

  Mar
ta’s office was unglamorous. It was just a partitioned-off corner of the barracks, the furniture no more than a bunk and a table where data desks were untidily heaped. The only luxury seemed to be a coffee machine. But in one corner there was a kind of cubicle, like a shower, with walls pocked with interface sockets. Pirius wondered if this equipment had something to do with Marta’s complex injuries.

  Marta waved him to a chair. Pirius could hear the whir of motors as she sat down opposite him. “Sorry to drag you off from Quero’s lecture.” She eyed him. “And you can lower those eyebrows, private. Of course we know about Burden and his proselytizing.”

  “Burden’s talk comforts them,” he said.

  “Of course it does. That’s why it’s so successful in the first place, I suppose. And why we turn a blind eye.” She sipped her coffee, and Pirius saw that the metallic surface of her face extended through her lips to the roof of her mouth. “We allow them to stay in their cadre groups, or even their families if we have to, because it gives them something to fight for. And Burden’s waffle about the end of time comforts them when they fall. The ideologues at the center disapprove, of course, but out here we have a war to wage.”

  Pirius wondered how to put his own doubts about Burden into words—or even if he should. “I don’t get Burden,” he admitted. “He is his own man. In combat he fights as hard as anybody—”

  “Harder than most,” said Marta laconically.

  “And he’s not afraid of being ostracized for his faith. But sometimes he seems—weak.”

  Marta eyed him. “Burden has depths. And a past which he’s apparently not prepared to share with you. But, you know what? It doesn’t bother me. If Burden took a hit tomorrow, all his emotional complexity would disappear with him. In the meantime, he can think what he likes, feel what he likes, as long as he does such an effective job. As long as our soldiers fight, who cares what goes on in their heads?”