Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  The silence on the Claw’s crew loop was telling. He remembered the words of his first flight instructor. “You pretty kids are all so smart. You have to be smart to fly a greenship. But in combat there’s only one thing worse than being smart. And that’s being imaginative.”

  Pirius knew he ought to come up with something inspirational to say. But he didn’t understand how he felt himself. Not fear: he seemed to be finding a kind of acceptance. He recalled fragments of conversations with This Burden Must Pass, where that proselyte of the Friends of Wigner had mused about how it would be to reach the end of time and approach the Ultimate Observer, to approach a god. Perhaps it would be like this, the calm of being utterly insignificant.

  Then the Xeelee attacked.

  “Azimuth eighty! Azimuth eighty!” That was Four screaming, off to Pirius’s starboard.

  Pirius glared around the sky. This time he saw the nightfighters just as the instruments blared their warnings. They were a ball of swarming ships, black as night, coming at him from out of the shining clouds. Starbreaker beams spat ahead of them, a curtain of fire. The nightfighters were beautiful, he thought, lethally beautiful. In this turbulent, violent place, the Xeelee looked like they had been born here.

  No time for that.

  Dray shouted, “Pattern delta!”

  “Locking in,” Cohl snapped.

  Pirius threw the Other Claw onto its new trajectory. The Galaxy center whirled around him, the merging lanes of gas spilling about his head.

  Again the little convoy split, this time into two pairs. It was a copy of their first feint. This time Three and Four peeled off and went shooting away to Pirius’s port side, haring into the shining corridor of the Arm, as if trying to escape back to the Front. Meanwhile Wedge Leader and Wedge Seven, Dray and Pirius, went straight for the Xeelee, their weapons already firing.

  Again there was a heartbeat of delay, as if the Xeelee were trying to decide what was happening. But this time they didn’t follow the decoy; this time they came straight on at Dray and Pirius.

  Cohl said, “Lethe. They knew.”

  “I don’t understand,” Nilis said.

  “They didn’t fall for the bait,” Pirius said. “We were meant to look like a rearguard. The Xeelee were supposed to chase after the others. But they didn’t.”

  “Your navigator said, ‘They knew.’”

  “FTL foreknowledge,” Pirius said. “You can always tell when it cuts in. Suddenly they know what you’re going to do before you do.”

  “They may know,” Dray said forcefully. “But that doesn’t mean they can stop us. Pirius, you’re less than a hundred light-days from Chandra. Make a single jump. Get in there, do what you have to do, get out.”

  Cohl said, “It’s impossible.”

  Pirius glanced at his instruments. This was the core of the Galaxy, full of immense masses throwing themselves around, spacetime churned to a foam. He took a breath. “Yes, it’s impossible. But we’re going to do it anyway.”

  He was aware of Nilis tensing beside him, his pale fingers gripping the edge of his seat. Virtual Nilis was an authentic, fully sentient recreation; perhaps death was as dark a prospect for such a creature as for a full human.

  That knot of Xeelee were approaching; ten more seconds and their weapons would find their range.

  “Commodore—”

  “You’re on your own, Pirius. For those who have fallen!”

  Abruptly Dray’s ship threw itself at the Xeelee, monopole shells spraying. Pirius saw the formation of the nightfighters momentarily waver; as she passed through them Dray made their wings rustle. But soon the Xeelee were closing over that brave green spark.

  “Another gone,” Nilis said.

  But she had bought a little time. “Cohl—”

  “Laid in.”

  “Do it.”

  In the instant of transition Pirius could feel the instability of Galaxy-center spacetime; the jump felt like a kick to the base of the spine.

  Violent blue light flooded the cabin. With warning Virtuals flickering all around him, Pirius gazed out of the blister.

  To his left was a bank of stars, hot, blue-white. There were pairs, and triples, and quadruples, stars close enough to distort each other; he saw one loose giant being torn to wispy shreds by a hard blue-white companion. There was much loose gas too, great glowing clouds of it, here and there scarred by nova blisters. This was shown on his maps as IRS 16, a cluster of young stars nucleating out of the rich gas and dust that poured in along the arms of the Baby Spiral. In this environment these bright young stars, huge and fast-lived, were like babies born in a furnace.

  Stars to his port side, then. And to his starboard, something much more strange.

  He saw more stars—but some of these stars had tails, like comets. They swarmed like fireflies around a central patch of brightness, a background glow of shifting, elusive light. It was like a solar system, he thought, with that central spark in place of a sun, and those trapped stars orbiting it like planets. The whole of this intricate, compact mechanism was cradled by one of the arms of the Baby Spiral—West Arm, opposite the one he had followed in; it looked like a jewelled toy set on a blanket of gold. But great chunks had been torn out of the arm, and blobs of glowing gas sailed away, dispersing slowly. Everything here was jammed together by ferocious gravity, and this was a terribly crowded place, crowded with huge, rushing masses that anywhere else would have been separated by light-years. This was the very heart of the Galaxy, the immediate environs of Chandra itself. But the black hole was invisible, somewhere at the heart of that flock of captured, doomed stars.

  All this in a glance.

  Pirius focused on his ship. The Other Claw had come out of its FTL jump with a velocity vector which had taken it through a sharp left turn and sent it screaming through the narrow gap between the IRS 16 star cluster and Chandra. As they fled, data on Chandra was pouring into the ship’s stores through Nilis’s sensor pod, he saw. This was what they had come here for: they were fulfilling the mission objectives. But they didn’t have long. All around this cluttered panorama, black flecks flew like bits of soot: the Xeelee, disturbed, were rising to drive out the intruder.

  Nilis breathed, “My eyes—that I should live to see such a thing! You know, those stars won’t last long here. But their intense solar wind sweeps this Cavity clear of gas and dust. And when it hits Chandra—”

  Cohl said, “The Xeelee are closing, Pirius.” She downloaded tactical Virtuals to Pirius’s station, so the pilot could see what she saw.

  More Xeelee had come out of nowhere. Suddenly they were surrounded, trapped.

  Pirius cursed. Another misjudgment. He snapped, “Options.”

  “Pray,” said Hope morbidly.

  Cohl had nothing to say.

  Pirius tried to think. The plan had always been to fly through the gap between the star nursery and the central Chandra system itself, get through to the relatively flat space beyond, and then make another massive jump back to East Arm, their route home. But they hadn’t banked on being alone, with no cover, and with forewarned Xeelee rising. It was unlikely that they could survive another FTL jump all the way out, not from here.

  But, unexpectedly, Nilis had an idea.

  The Commissary sounded dry, calm, as if he had moved beyond fear. “Make for IRS 7.”

  Pirius quickly called up another map. IRS 7 was a star, lost in the Cavity: it was a red giant, and it trailed an immense comet-like tail. “It’s only half a light-year away.”

  “Lethe,” said Hope, “its tail is longer than that. What use is it to us?”

  “A place to hide,” said Nilis. “And we could make it in a single, short FTL jump… . Couldn’t we, pilot?”

  “Too risky,” Cohl said.

  “Every jump in this environment carries risks. A short jump is more survivable.”

  “It will be no use, even if we live through the hop,” Cohl said. “The Xeelee are on to us. FTL foreknowledge—”

  “The
n we throw them off,” Nilis said.

  “I’m amazed how calm you are, Commissary,” Pirius said.

  “We can discuss my personality later. I suggest we get on with it.”

  A wand of starbreaker light waved through space, above Pirius’s head. The nightfighters were finding their range; one touch of that pretty light and his life would be over. No more time for debate.

  He waved his hand at his Virtual displays. “We need to make the hop anti-Tolman, if we can. Come on, Cohl, work with me.”

  Nilis said, “A lot of people have died to get us this far. We have to get through, complete our mission.”

  “We don’t need to be told, Commissary. Navigator?”

  “I have a tactical solution. It’s a botch.”

  “Lay it in. On my mark. Three, two—”

  In the last second the Other Claw shuddered. And then Chandra’s shining astrophysical architecture vanished.

  They came out tumbling. Pirius fought to stabilize the ship.

  Nilis peered out curiously. They were immersed in a uniform crimson glow that utterly lacked detail, as if they had hopped into the interior of an immense light globe.

  Pirius snapped, “Engineer. Report.”

  Enduring Hope called, “We were hit, half a second before the hop. Bad luck … the weapons bay took it.” He laughed. “I don’t think we hit a single Xeelee. But the weapons bay soaked up the energy of that shot, and saved us.”

  “Other systems?”

  “The sensor pod is intact,” Nilis said. “We didn’t lose any data. And now we’re in the tail of IRS 7?”

  “I think so.”

  The “tail” was the remnant of the outer layers of the hapless red giant, blasted away by the ferocious stellar wind generated by the blue star cluster at the center. Pirius said, “We aimed for the root, where the tail meets the surviving envelope.”

  “So we’re actually inside the body of a star… . Good piloting.”

  “We’re still alive. So, yes, it was good enough.”

  “And the Xeelee?”

  “No sign that they are on to us yet.” Pirius glanced at his displays. “I’ll wait a couple of minutes. Then we’ll work our way along the tail, a series of short hops. And once we’re out of there, if we’re lucky—”

  Nilis nodded. Pirius studied him cautiously. Still he seemed remarkably calm, and Pirius thought his face seemed smoother, as if lacking some character, some detail. “Commissary, are you all right?”

  Nilis smiled at him. “As perceptive as ever! I could never pass this on to him, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “Nilis—ah, Nilis Prime. My original. He must get the data, of course, and my analytical impressions. But I think I should keep back the rest. The emotions. I’ve already begun the process of deletion.”

  “You’re a Virtual. It’s against your programming to edit yourself.”

  Nilis shook his head. “You can’t hand out sentience without enabling choice.” His smile faded. “It feels … odd, though. To be closing down sections of my mind. Like a partial suicide. But it’s necessary. He wouldn’t go on, you see, with the Project, if he knew.”

  “Knew what? The fear?”

  “Oh, not that. Fear is trivial. Pirius, at most only three of our eight ships will make it home. No, not fear: the horror of seeing those around you die, and die for your ideas. Nilis has never really confronted this, you know, sitting in his garden on Earth, immersed in his studies. And he won’t be strong enough. I know, because I’m not. But he must go on; he has to complete Project Prime Radiant, for all our sakes.”

  “Commissary—”

  “I’m all right. I’ve already cut it out of myself, you see.” Nilis lifted his Virtual face, red-giant light casting subtly shifting shadows from the lines of his expressionless face. “Shall we go home?”

  Chapter 33

  Nilis stayed at Saturn, studying the material Pirius had retrieved from configuration space, which appeared to be a spec for a weapon system. But, apparently plagued by guilt, he sent Pirius Red back to Earth, ordering him to rest up. Pirius didn’t like the idea, but he didn’t protest.

  The rest cure didn’t work out, though. Pirius Red was alone again, alone in Nilis’s apartment, aside from a few bots.

  Of course here he was on Earth itself, surrounded by a vast population, a population of billions: a greater crowd than any other human world, save only the pathological Coalescent communities. Somehow that made it worse than in the Venus habitat.

  He tried walking in the Conurbation’s teeming corridors and parks. He even dug out one of the Commissary’s old robes so he wouldn’t stand out from the crowd so much. But he had nothing in common with these chattering, confident swarms with their rich, intricate social lives, their baffling business, their soft hands and unmarked faces. They were so remote from everything he knew from his origins in the Core that he may as well have been from a separate species.

  And even if he could stand the openness outdoors, even if he could tolerate the people, he was still on Earth. Every time the sun went down, the sky glowed bright in the lights of the Conurbations, and beyond the glow strode the immense, arrogant engineering of the Bridge to the Moon, around which interplanetary traffic crawled constantly. It was like being trapped in some vast machine.

  So his days were troubled. And when he lay alone in the dark, his thoughts were drawn back to Callisto, over and over.

  He didn’t understand it. Why should he feel so disturbed? All he had done was walk through a doorway. He was the Pirius who had walked out unharmed; it was not him who had been mapped to a new level of reality, with no hope of return, to be leached of his humanity. He despised himself for his weakness.

  But if he didn’t think about Callisto, images of the hive in Olympus came into his mind—or of the strange immortal, Luru Parz—or, worst of all, the Silver Ghosts on Pluto, and the shameful, helpless way he had reacted, like a machine. He felt as if his mind was becoming like Callisto, ancient and battered. And he feared that if he looked too hard, he would find deep inside it the kind of strangeness Luru Parz had uncovered in that ice moon.

  Perhaps Nilis had been right that he needed a break. But Nilis had not been able to see that being on Earth, alone, was precisely the wrong kind of rest cure for a Navy brat. He longed for Torec, his only point of familiarity in this strange solar system. But she was out at Saturn. He was able to speak to her; Nilis even let him use expensive inseparability channels, so there was no time delay. But it wasn’t the same. He needed to be touched, held.

  And anyhow even Torec seemed cold.

  After forty-eight sleepless hours he called Nilis. He begged to be brought out to Saturn and put back to work.

  Pirius arrived in time for a test firing of what Nilis called the “Callisto weapon.”

  He was brought to Nilis’s corvette, which the Commissary was using as his work base. The interior was cluttered, with data desks strewn on the floor, bots of all sizes tumbling through the air, and Virtuals obscuring every view. Nilis was here, with Commander Darc, Torec, and various assistants. In this noisy mess it was impossible to see how any work got done. Nilis and Darc seemed to be working closely, but their arguments crackled like lightning.

  Pirius spotted Torec, peering out at the test rig. He made straight for her. He hadn’t seen her for weeks, since before Venus. She acknowledged him with a nod, but turned away. He stood awkwardly, arms suddenly heavy, longing to touch her. He just didn’t understand.

  He pulled himself together. He stood with her and looked out of the hull.

  Orbiting far from Saturn’s patient golden face, the test rig was a set of twenty GUTdrive engines, mounted in a loose spherical framework perhaps fifty meters across. Technicians and bots crawled over it. It had been put together in a few days, and it didn’t look much like anything, let alone a weapon for striking at the most formidable fortress in the Galaxy.

  But a few kilometers away, the captive Xeelee ship waited, surrounded by i
ts usual cordon of watchful guardian drones; today, once again, the nightfighter was the test target. Spinning slowly, surrounded by its attendant cloud of bots and techs, the test rig looked as much a threat to the patient Xeelee as a spitball.

  He said, “It looks like shit.”

  Even that didn’t force a smile from Torec. “Actually we’ve come a long way in a few days. But we’re as underfunded as ever. We need GUTdrive generators, but all Nilis was able to get hold of are those dinged-up, decommissioned relics. You can see the scars where they have been cut out of wrecks.”

  “Darc and Nilis are at each other’s throats.”

  “That’s just their way. Darc is keen, once he forgets that he disapproves of the whole thing. He likes getting his hands dirty—especially on something new like this. He’s okay.”

  Pirius looked covertly at her so-familiar profile, the finely carved chin, the upturned nose, the lines of her face softened by golden-brown Saturn light. “And you’ve kept busy.”

  She shrugged. “It’s not so bad right now. When, if, we get through this proof-of-concept stage, I’ll be involved in developing the flight hardware. You, too, I guess.”

  His need to touch her was an ache. “Torec, listen. I—”

  She held up a hand, silencing him. A green light flared beyond the hull.

  The techs and bots backed away from the rig, leaving only a few drones for close-in monitoring. Pirius watched Torec silently counting down, tracking the clock in her head, as she always did: Three. Two. One.

  The rig quivered. Waves of distortion, easily visible, spread out from each of the GUTdrive generators, as if they were pebbles thrown in a pool.

  GUTdrive engines worked by allowing a fragment of compressed mass-energy to expand, releasing energy through the decay of a unified superforce. In this configuration, rather than using that energy to drive a spacecraft, the engines were each supposed to create a spherical wave of distorted spacetime. The engines had been positioned so that the ripples moved inward, into the rig.