Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  “That’s not to say there isn’t some merit in this new faith. Consider the Friends’ beliefs. A Friend worships her descendants, who she believes will far surpass her in power and glory. That’s not such an irrational belief, and guides behavior in an unselfish way, as any worthwhile religion should. The old legend of Michael Poole has entered the mix too. Like some earlier messiahs, Poole is supposed to have given his life for the future of mankind. Of course that’s an example always to be admired. Quero’s faith is crude and somewhat shapeless, but it does have some moral weight. And it is interesting, academically, for its novel setting… .”

  Most human religions, said Nilis, had originated on Earth. Once carried to the stars, they had mutated, adapted, split, and merged, but they had generally retained the same core elements.

  “A religion born on Earth will have archetypes derived from planetary living—where the sun must rise and set, where seasons come and go, where living things die but are renewed, without the intervention of humans, but dependent on the cycles of the world. So you find a worship of the sun, and of water, often sublimated into blood; you find a fascination with the figures of mother and child, and with the seed which, once planted in the ground, endures the winter and lives again. Many religions feature messiahs who defeat death itself, who die but are born again: the ultimate sublimation of the seed.

  “But here,” he said, “you have a religion which has emerged, quite spontaneously, among a spacegoing people. So new archetypes must be found. Entropy, for instance: to survive in an artificial biosphere one must labor constantly against decay. You can’t rely on the world to fix itself, you see; there are no renewing seasonal cycles here.

  “And then there is contingency. Back on Earth, FTL foreknowledge is understood—it is an essential strategic tool—but it doesn’t affect people, which made the arrival of your FTL twin, Pirius, something of a nine day wonder. Out here, though, everyone knows that the past is as uncertain as the future, because you see the future change all the time, as those ships come limping home from battles that haven’t happened yet. It happened to you, Pirius! Here, the notion that all of this suffering may be washed away by a history change is an easy one to sell.”

  Pirius said, “You make it sound almost reasonable, Commissary.”

  “Well, so it is! Religions will always emerge, even in a place as emotionally sterile as this; and religions will naturally exploit elements in their environments. It would be fascinating to see how this new faith develops in the future.”

  “But you don’t seem to have anything to say about why the cadets need Burden’s teaching in the first place.”

  Nilis folded his fingers over his ample virtual belly. “Soldiers have always been superstitious,” he pronounced. “Something to do with a need to take control of one’s destiny in a dangerous and out-of-control environment. And the ordinary troops have always championed the Druz Doctrines. We have come so far from home.” He flexed his fingers before his face, almost curiously. “We still have the bodies of plains apes, you know. But nothing else of our native ecology has survived: nothing but us and our stomach bacteria and the rats and lice and fleas… . Now we have come to a place so lethal we have to dig into bits of rock to survive. There is nothing left of our origins but us—and all that holds us together is our beliefs. Lose them and we will become shapeless, flow like hot metal.

  “I think the ordinary soldier intuits something of that, and has clung to the Doctrines as a result. But the Doctrines are too severe—inhuman, lacking hope. If you were going to devise a consoling religion you wouldn’t start with them. Druz would not even have us commemorate the dead!”

  Burden said, “And hope is what I give the cadets.”

  Nilis nodded vigorously. “Oh, I see that.”

  “Then why,” Burden said evenly, “won’t you talk to them?”

  Nilis was immediately nervous again. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly—it isn’t necessary …”

  Burden stood smoothly, crossed to the door, and opened it. The disciples who had gathered outside filed in immediately, a dozen or so of them, their small faces solemn. They stared at Nilis, who was probably, Pirius thought, the most exotic creature they had ever seen.

  Tili Three walked boldly up to him. She ought to be more wary of a Commissary, Pirius thought. But there was none of the dread antique grandeur of the Commission for Historical Truth about Nilis. Tili reached out to touch Nilis’s robe. Nilis gaped at her silvered prosthetic hand. Her fingers passed through the hem of his robe, scattering pixels like insects. He actually backed up against the wall, his big hands fluttering defensively before his chest. It was hard not to feel sorry for him.

  Burden said, “Why are you afraid?”

  “They are so young,” Nilis said. “So young—just children—”

  “Children who have seen their comrades die,” Pirius said.

  “I’m not afraid of them but of me,” Nilis said. He made to pat Tili’s head, but when his palm brushed her hair it broke up into a spray of multicolored pixels. The little firework display made the cadets laugh, and Pirius saw tears well in Nilis’s foolish old eyes. “You see? I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear this, to come to one of these terrible nurseries—even Arches Base was like an academy compared to this—they are so young! And, my eyes, I can’t save them all—I can’t save any of them.”

  Pirius Blue said, “Perhaps we can, Commissary.”

  Nilis whispered hoarsely, “At any rate we must try.”

  Chapter 28

  In Saturn’s orbit, the modifications to the last test greenship took a week of hard work.

  It may have been conceptually simplifying to hook up the grav generator to the CTC, as Nilis had suggested, but grumbling Navy engineers, trying to marry together two literally alien technologies, were quick to point out the gap between concept and actuality. At least the delay gave Torec a chance to recover from the last run.

  And then, suddenly, here she was, strapped into the cockpit of a greenship once more, with the cold, dark spaces of Sol system stretching all around her. This second ship’s blister seemed to be filled with just as much clutter as before, and she had to squirm to get comfortable. It wasn’t indulgence; when you flew, the last thing you needed was to be distracted by a cloth fold up your ass.

  Those sparkling monitor ships were all around her, and she could hear the subdued chatter on her comm loop, just as it was before. Saturn was ahead of her—but this time it was visible only as a pinpoint, not a disc, and her tame Xeelee wasn’t visible at all, save in the sensors. The target area was much further away. In the first step of the new mission profile, the greenship would be pushed close to lightspeed by its conventional sublight drive; a drawback of the new maneuver was that it needed much more room to work.

  When she glanced at her crewmates in the other blisters of the greenship, it wasn’t two hardened Navy tars she saw, but to her right, in the navigator’s seat, the stolid form of Commander Darc—and to her left a new enlarged blister held the massive form of a Silver Ghost. It looked as if the cabin had been filled with mercury. It was scarcely believable that she, a mere ensign, was sitting here in control of such a craft, with such a strange crew, but here she was. As the last seconds ticked away, and the clock in her head counted down, she shivered with anticipation.

  She polled her crew one last time. “Ambassador. Ready?”

  “All my systems are nominal,” the Ghost’s translated voice said.

  “Commander—”

  “Don’t waste time with useless chitchat, Ensign,” Darc snapped.

  “No, sir,” she said.

  Once more she felt the throbbing of the gravastar generators, deep in her bones. Three, two, one.

  The ship jolted forward.

  “Sublight nominal,” Darc called.

  “Ambassador?”

  “The shield generators are ready.”

  “All right. Commander, push us to ninety percent light.”

  “On your order.”
<
br />   A deep breath. “Do it.”

  The surge was all but intangible. But as they went relativistic, the speckling of stars before her turned blue and swam closer, like disturbed fish.

  Darc called, “Ten seconds to Saturn.”

  A random thought passed through her mind. If this Ghost wanted to carry out some sabotage—to destroy this test ship, to kill a Navy Commander—it was in a perfect position to do it. Too late to climb out now, Torec.

  “Shield on my mark,” she called.

  “Ready,” said the Silver Ghost.

  Three. Two. One.

  The blueshifted stars swam again.

  Torec didn’t even know if the trial had been successful until she brought the greenship back to Enceladus. At least this one hadn’t blown up.

  The base medical officer tried to bring the crew in for checks, but neither she nor Darc was willing to take time out for so much as a shower. Hot, stiff, sweating after hours in their cramped blisters, they ran down ice-walled corridors to the briefing room where Nilis waited for them. They were trailed by the silent Ghost, with its escort of heavily armed Guardians.

  In the briefing room a Virtual representation of the greenship, reconstructed from the records of a dozen monitor drones, was a toy hanging in the air, two meters long. She watched as it went to ninety percent light, and the gravastar shield opened up. The shield was beautiful, Torec thought, a banner of shining, sparkling light, pure white, like some living thing. And behind it she saw only stars. The ship she was riding had been cut out of the universe, and existed once more in a cosmos of its own.

  Nilis said, “You created a perfect spherical cap, subtending an angle of around forty degrees. Congratulations, Ensign. I wonder if any human has visited not one but two new universes before. Perhaps you have set a record… .”

  “I’m just glad it worked.”

  He grunted. “As pragmatic as ever! Well, so it did; the Ambassador’s strategy of surfing at the edge of chaos was tricky to manage, but very effective—as you can see.”

  Darc said, “Coming up on the Xeelee encounter.”

  The view shifted to a static image of the nightfighter. It orbited Saturn, penned in by a swarm of watchful drones. The gravastar cap was a missile that plunged at the Xeelee out of the left side of the image.

  Nilis snapped his fingers, and in slow motion the incoming grav cap was reduced to a crawl. “See how the Xeelee is reacting,” Nilis said. “Here it deploys its sublight drive.” Night-dark wings swept before the clouds of Saturn, quite beautiful. “It knows the gravastar cap is coming, of course, but it knows nothing of what it is concealing.” The fly flickered out of the image, which changed to a long shot centered on a shrunken Saturn. Now the Xeelee fly was a black dart that plunged at the cap, flickering, making rapid, short FTL jumps.

  Darc said, “That’s a classic Tolman maneuver. It’s trying to send images of the encounter to its own past.”

  “Yes. But it’s impossible. It’s looking into a region that isn’t causally connected to the universe it inhabits; all the world lines terminate on that cap.”

  The cap dissolved suddenly, turning into a thing of wisps and shards that quickly dissipated. The grav shield gone, the greenship dropped back into its parent universe. And it tore at the Xeelee, monopole cannon firing. The nightfighter tried to evade, but the greenship, controlled by its paradoxical CTC processor, was too fast; it seemed to anticipate every move. A hail of monopoles ripped through the Xeelee’s spacetime wings.

  The watching audience cheered—even Torec, who had been there; she couldn’t help it. The nightfighter went limp, deactivated by its human masters, and its escorting ships closed in to return it to its pen.

  Nilis closed his fist, and the Virtual died. Without its light and color the briefing room seemed empty.

  “We did it,” Torec breathed.

  Nilis stayed composed, apparently already thinking ahead to the next step. “It appears so. I’ve sent the records to the relevant Grand Conclave committees, with Commander Darc’s agreement. Now we must wait for approval to move to the next stage.”

  “Yes. But we did it. Commissary, we did it!” Whooping, she ran to him, grabbed his arms, and began to jump up and down. After a moment he gave up his pretense of solemnity; barefoot, his scuffed robe flapping, he joined her in jumping around the room.

  The Ghost hung silently in the air, and Darc watched it thoughtfully.

  Torec had naively imagined that the successful test flight would have been enough to have convinced the brass to give Nilis’s project the go-ahead. All they needed now was to find a weapon that could strike at the Prime Radiant when they got there.

  But days went by as they waited for a response from the oversight committees.

  And when it came, it was a shutdown. Though the committee members recognized the technical achievements of Nilis and his people—and the promising new technologies would be thoroughly evaluated for applications by the Navy and other forces, et cetera, et cetera—the case for continuing with Nilis’s Project Prime Radiant remained unproven, and no more funds would be released for it. Torec couldn’t believe it. Another success had brought nothing but another canning.

  Even Commander Darc seemed sympathetic. “You know I’m no supporter of your project,” he said to Nilis. “But I do admit that your research has been yielding fruit. You always made too many enemies, however, Nilis. And now they’ve caught up with you.”

  But Nilis was suffused with a determined grimness that belied his shabby exterior. “It’s not over yet,” he said, and he stalked off.

  Chapter 29

  Pirius Red was startled to receive a call from Luru Parz. The Virtual image was so good he couldn’t tell if it was a direct broadcast or a copy.

  She said simply, “I want you to get me into Mons Olympus, Ensign.”

  The call came early in the morning. He was still aboard the Venus orbital habitat. He finger-combed tousled hair and tried to pull his tunic straight. The Virtual just stared at him, humorless. He said, “I’ll make a call to the Commissary—”

  “I didn’t call Nilis. I called you. Every agency that knows of my existence, especially the Commission for Historical Truth, has banned me from such facilities as the Archive. I doubt if even Nilis could buck that. I’m asking for your help, Ensign.”

  Such a breakdown in anything even remotely resembling a chain of command was deeply disturbing to Pirius. “I don’t know how I can even get to Mars. Or how to get you into the Archive—”

  She smiled. “Spread your wings.”

  He stared at her. Was it possible she knew somehow of the chip the peculiar Archive Retrieval Specialist Tek had pressed onto his sleeve? He wished he had got rid of that thing the moment he found it—but he’d chosen not to, he reminded himself, and had kept it for two months since.

  “Luru Parz, why do you want to do this?”

  She nodded, watching him. “A why question. No good soldier ever asks why. But you do, Pirius! Gramm and his cronies continue to block Nilis’s progress. I intend to force them to act. Ensign, our beloved Coalition is a mountain of lies and hypocrisy. Surely you know that by now. That doesn’t bother me personally; it probably has to be that way to survive. But the threat of exposure is my leverage—and that’s why I need to get into the Archive.” Her eyes narrowed and she leaned forward. “Am I frightening you?”

  “You always frighten me.”

  She laughed, showing her blackened teeth. “How sane you are! But you understand I am working toward the same goal as Nilis, don’t you? A goal which you can’t help but instinctively embrace, despite your lifetime of conditioning.”

  He made a decision. “I’ll help you.”

  “Of course you will,” she said dismissively. “I’ll meet you in Kahra.” The Virtual broke up and dissipated.

  In the event Luru Parz was right. It proved remarkably easy for Pirius to organize this strange trip back to Olympus.

  He needed the Commissary’s approval to use h
is corvette. But Nilis, at Saturn, was still preoccupied with details of the gravastar shield tests, as well as his ongoing studies of the first moments of the universe, and some mysterious business he was conducting in the Core, and continuing battles with Gramm and the Coalition bureaucracy, and, and … When Pirius called he waved his Virtual hand vaguely. “Just get on with it, Pirius.”

  As for getting into the Archive, there was Tek’s chip. It wasn’t hard to work out its interface. The clerk’s smudgy Virtual image directed Pirius to a port on Olympus—not the one he had visited before, another of the thousand or so that studded the mountain’s mighty flank.

  So he had no excuse not to do as Luru Parz asked, despite his dread at the very thought of her.

  The journey to Mars was uneventful. Pirius traveled alone, save for the corvette’s crew; he gambled his way through the interplanetary journey.

  As she had promised, Luru Parz met him at Kahra. After an overnight stay they boarded a flitter for the final hop to Olympus.

  They landed at coordinates Pirius had extracted from Tek’s chip. When the flitter settled to the ground, the situation—the gentle slope, the dust-soaked sky, the washed-out red-brown colors, the hatch set in the ground—seemed exactly the same as his last visit.

  Tek kept them waiting.

  Luru Parz was calm. “We have to give him time. Remember he is working covertly in there. Believe me, it’s a difficult environment in which to act independently.” Pirius didn’t know what she meant.

  He was restless, anxious. The flitter was little more than a bubble a couple of meters across. Its hull was so transparent it would have been invisible save for a thin layer of Martian dust. And Pirius was stuck inside it with an immortal.

  They sat opposite each other, so close in the tiny flitter that their knees almost touched. Even in person Luru had that dark, still quality, as if light fell differently on her. He could smell her, a faint dusty tang, like the smoky smell of the dead leaves that littered corners of Nilis’s unruly garden.