Exultant

by Stephen Baxter

  “Yes.” But Nilis’s face crumpled. “But too many people were lost—too many young lives rubbed out because of me and my dreams. Those moments when the first two runs failed, and I thought that despite the sacrifices I had demanded, I had failed, were almost more than I could bear.”

  Pirius tried to find words about the proportionality of the losses compared to what had been gained. But Nilis, he saw, was inconsolable for now. After a time he left him to his work.

  In their barracks, Torec was already asleep. She hadn’t even taken off the coverall given her by the medics after they peeled her out of her skinsuit. Pirius crawled in with her. She stirred, mumbled, and turned into his arms, a bundle of soft warm humanity.

  He had thought he would be too agitated to sleep. Besides, he felt guilty about lying down to sleep when others had died, or were still out there. If he slept, this long day would finally end, and he would somehow lose it, lose them.

  But sleep rose up like a black tide, regardless.

  The next day, his first priority was his crews.

  He toured the base. They were in their barracks, or the refectories, or the sick bays, or the gyms and training rooms where they had gone to work out the tension from their systems. A couple of them had gone back to the ships to help the ground crews with their own investigations and debriefing.

  Some just accepted what had happened. It was a gamble worth taking, they said; you win some, you lose some. Others were bitter at the stupidity of the commanders, including Pirius himself, who had sent them into the Cavity with such poor intelligence. He absorbed their anger. And some just talked. They went over and over what they had done, telling and retelling their own small war stories as part of the whole. That was all right. It was part of the healing, and Pirius’s job now was to listen. And it wasn’t going to stop here, he knew. The shock of what they had gone through, and the guilt at having survived where others hadn’t, would never leave them.

  Pirius had lost a temporal twin, a part of himself, and he wondered which way his own damage would work out—and how Torec, who had lost her lover and welcomed him home at the same time, would sort out her own complicated, guilt-ridden grief.

  More than twenty-four hours after Pirius’s return, This Burden Must Pass brought his own battered ship home.

  Pirius hurried to meet him, and walked with his crew to the sick bay. With his visor cracked open, Burden’s face was drawn, dried sweat was crusted under his shadowed eyes, and his hair was plastered to his head. Burden said that they had encountered no Xeelee harassment on the way back. “It looks as if it really is true,” he said. “They have abandoned the Galaxy to mankind. And because of us.”

  “Quite a story to add to that end-of-time confluence of yours,” Pirius said.

  “Yes, quite a story.” Burden said more slowly, “Pirius. About what happened out there—”

  “Forget it,” Pirius snapped.

  “I can’t do that,” Burden said. “If I’d gone into Chandra as you ordered, as was my duty, maybe Blue would have survived.”

  “We’ll never know. We’ve all come home with regrets, Burden. Now we move on.”

  Burden nodded, his eyes downcast. “We move on.”

  Burden said he had found no traces of Jees’s lost ship. “It was smashed up. Two of the crew nacelles, more or less intact. But the systems had failed before the safety cut-ins could work.”

  “They didn’t survive.”

  “We sent the crew blisters into the black hole.” Burden smiled thinly, exhausted. “It seemed fitting.”

  “That it does.” Pirius was thinking over what Burden had said. His thoughts were muddy; already the events of the flight seemed remote, as if they had happened a decade ago, or in another life. But there was something missing from Burden’s report. “You didn’t mention the third nacelle. Jees rode with the Silver Ghost.”

  Burden grinned. “I wondered if you’d ask about that. I’ll have to report it, I suppose. Of the Ghost’s nacelle I found not a trace. Not only that, it looked to me as if it had been sheared off—I mean, deliberately.”

  “The Ambassador escaped,” Pirius said, marveling. Once more there was a Silver Ghost loose in the Galaxy. “But what different can one Ghost make?”

  “The Ghosts are remarkable creatures, and very resourceful. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of the Sink Ambassador. And you have to wonder if, from the Ghost’s point of view, this whole operation was set up—if we were set up—just to give the Ghost a chance to get free.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  Burden glanced around. “I’m not going to repeat this in the debrief. But I want to go back out there again.” He spread his gloved hands. “After all, the war is over, it seems. They don’t need me to fight any more. Not that I was much use at that in the first place. I want to go back to the center again, to look for the Ambassador.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we never finished our philosophical discussions. Things are different now. Perhaps we can learn from the Ghosts about how we’re going to live our lives from now on. Oh, Pirius—one more thing.” He dug out a data desk and showed him some complicated schematics. “Something the sensors picked up.”

  Burden had observed structures of dark matter drifting through the center of the Galaxy. Invisible to human senses, passing through even the crowded matter around Chandra as if it was no more substantial than a Virtual, the shadowy forms had settled around the central black hole.

  Burden said, “I remember what you said about Nilis, and Luru Parz, and their interpretation of history. The Xeelee cleaned these dark matter creatures, the ‘photino birds,’ out of the Core. Now the Xeelee are gone—and in less than a day the birds are back.” He put away the data desk. “Silver Ghosts loose, dark matter creatures swarming through the Core—we have planted many seeds, as Nilis would say. Something tells me the future suddenly got a lot more complicated.”

  A week after the crews returned from the core, Arches Base received visitors from Earth. The scuttlebutt in the dorms was that one was a member of the Grand Conclave itself, the highest body of governance in the Coalition: one of just twelve people who governed a Galaxy, and she was here. Not only that, the scuttlebutt went, she had come to give them all medals.

  The day after that, the crews of Exultant Squadron and everybody connected with Operation Prime Radiant were called to the hangar. The hangar was covered by a translucent dome that gave a view of the sky, and the hot white light of the Core beat down into the interior of the pit. All ten of the ships’ cradles were empty now; the surviving ships would perform a flyby, piloted by reserve crews.

  Everybody was here, brought together for the first time since they had dispersed after their debriefing. With Pirius were Torec, Burden, and the rest of the surviving crews. Cohl was here, and Enduring Hope brought a gaggle of grinning ground crew techs. The more senior officers, including Captains Marta, Seath, and Boote, kept apart, resplendent in new dress uniforms.

  Others came out for their share of the limelight. Aside from civilians like Commissary Nilis and Pila, there were much more lowly types: workers, techs, administrators. Many of them were older than the flight crews, and their ranks gleamed with metallic implants, for this was the Navy’s way of using its surviving veterans. But they performed the various unglamorous but essential jobs that kept the base running and the ships flying, and with Pila’s help, Pirius had made sure that they would be here.

  A piping sounded, a tradition, it was said, dating from a time when man’s ships sailed only the seas of Earth. The officers muttered quiet orders. The military staff and civilians alike drew their ranks up a little tighter and stood rigidly to attention.

  A party swept from the shadows into full Galaxy light. Marshal Kimmer and Minister Gramm accompanied a much more imposing figure. Philia Doon, Plenipotentiary for Total War, tall, slender, was dressed in a long golden cloak that swept around her feet. Her gait was graceful—and yet it was not quite natural, as if she used pr
osthetics, and her footsteps were loud and heavy, abnormally weighty. Kimmer was speaking to her, but she was looking into the sky, and Pirius had the impression that even as she took in Kimmer’s words, she was listening to some other voice only she could hear.

  The skin of her slender face shone a subtle silver-gray. There wasn’t a hair on her head.

  Doon took her place on a low platform. One by one the staff of the base were presented to her. Marshal Kimmer himself went up first, followed by Nilis, who bowed as he was handed some kind of elaborate data desk. Then Doon began to work her way through the officers, down the ladder of superiority.

  When it was his turn, Pirius found his heart thumping as he approached this strange creature. She towered over him.

  “Congratulations, Pilot,” the Plenipotentiary murmured. Her voice was rich, but too precise—artificial, he thought. She said, “Your squadron—Exultant—was well named.” But even as she talked there was no expression in that silvered face, and she didn’t even seem to be looking at him. She beckoned him closer, and he smelled a faint scent of burning. She pressed her hand to his chest, and when she lifted it away a bright green tetrahedral sigil glowed there, his new battle honor.

  Pirius was very glad when the ceremony was over and they were allowed to break ranks.

  Nilis approached Pirius. “Well, Pilot, now you have seen right to the very heart of our marvelous Third Expansion—and that is the type of creature that festers there.”

  “You mean Plenipotentiary Doon?”

  “She is what is called a raoul,” Nilis said. “Do you not recognize the texture of her skin?”

  “I don’t know the technology.”

  “Not technology. Not even biology—or at any rate, not human biology. That stuff is the hide of a Silver Ghost. The Plenipotentiary is a symbiote; she has the internal organs of a human, but the flesh of a Ghost. Oh, and she has implants tucked into her belly, I believe: more symbiotes, another conquered alien species living on within the bodies of our rulers, a group-mind entity that once, it is said, conquered the Earth, and is now used to provide instantaneous links between the Plenipotentiaries and their circle of chosen ones.

  “There is plenty of justification for all this surgery and genetic tinkering: the Plenipotentiaries have such responsibility that they need such powers, such dispensations from the Doctrines that are supposed to govern us all. But I hardly think Hama Druz would approve, do you? He would say she is a monstrosity, perhaps. But that monstrosity is what you have been fighting for.”

  A monstrosity? Watching the Plenipotentiary, Pirius remembered Nilis’s talk of an eleventh step in human evolution. Were those prostheses no more than cosmetic—or would Doon somehow breed true? Perhaps this extraordinary woman really did represent the future, whether she made him comfortable or not.

  They joined Pirius’s friends. Nilis told them high-level gossip he had heard about the impact of the operation on Earth. “Do you know, on Earth, for the first time in millennia the Library of Futures is blank. The future is unknown.” For a moment he sounded almost gleeful. “I hear that a lot of people are very scared. We really have shaken everything up, haven’t we, Pilot? All the way back to the corridors of Earth itself! Who can say what is to come? Oh, we face a great dislocation, of course. I suspect our greatest challenge will be to keep mankind from tearing itself apart, now that it has no one else on whom to vent its anger and frustration. We don’t need warriors anymore, but we do need peacekeepers, I fear!

  “But isn’t it refreshing?” he said, and he bounced absurdly on his toes. “Think of it! Can we not now place Hama Druz in the grave which he so richly deserves? Druz in his neurotic terror longed to keep mankind static, unchanging. But that denies the basic creativity of the universe in which we are embedded—a creativity, indeed, which flows from the creatures inside that spectacular artifact you attacked, Pirius. Now we need no longer deny our essential nature: now we can swim with the flow of the universe rather than against it—and perhaps, at last, uncover our true destiny as children of the cosmos.”

  All that sounded a bit vague to Pirius.

  Enduring Hope said, “But, Commissary, when we get up tomorrow morning—what shall we do?”

  Nilis laughed, avuncular, and spread his hands to the sky. “Why, there is a whole universe out there waiting for you—now that you don’t have to die before you grow up.” He pointed to the senior officers, to Kimmer and Seath and Marta. “They are too old to change. No doubt they hoped to die before the war ended—well, bad luck! For young people like you, the future is suddenly opened up. Perhaps some of you will come with me back to Chandra, to study that remarkable nest of transcosmic life. And perhaps some of you will go sailing beyond the bounds of the Galaxy itself. Why not? We’ve always been so busy battling to survive in this Galaxy, for twenty thousand years we haven’t so much as sent a probe out there.”

  Cohl said seriously, “But the Xeelee are still out there—they are everywhere but here.”

  “The Xeelee will keep for another day,” Nilis said gently. “And in the meantime you have families to build.”

  Pirius was shocked. “Families?”

  “Well, why not? The old machinery has always been there, even if we don’t use it anymore. And now all the rules have changed. It will do you good to have a real family, you know, to put down roots. You really don’t know how it feels.” He winked. “And I always did want to be a grandfather—honorary, at least!”

  Pirius stared at Torec. Her face was flushed, but he could see generations of conditioning warring with even more ancient impulses. He hadn’t yet got over the loss of Pirius Blue, but a part of him had been glad, guiltily, that his temporal twin had gone, that his life had simplified a little. Now it looked as if it was going to get a lot more complicated again. He felt a sudden warm rush of joy.

  From out of the crowd, Luru Parz approached. She was wearing a simple white robe. To Pirius, Luru Parz was a nightmare from his difficult time in Sol system. He felt unaccountably afraid. He wondered what possible justification she could have used to crash this event—but if she wasn’t shy even of a Plenipotentiary, she was powerful indeed.

  “Congratulations, Pilot. Quite a feat of arms.”

  Nilis said warningly, “Luru Parz, this is hardly the time for more of your antique strangeness. Let these young people enjoy their moment.”

  “Their moment?” Luru Parz smiled coldly. “Their moment, yes, the moment of vivid brightness that makes a mayfly life worthwhile.” She glared up at the sky. “And we have won the Galaxy! When I was born—when mankind was restricted to a single planet, and was under the heel of an alien conqueror—nobody would have believed this day would come. For now we are briefly the biggest fish in this puddle of stars. But what is one galaxy? Out there, on scales beyond our very perception, is an ocean of wonders and dangers we can’t even imagine.”

  Nilis snapped, “What do you want, Luru Parz?”

  She turned on Pirius. “I want to make sure you understand what you have done, Pilot. For better or worse, you have broken open the strange madness that gripped humans for so long. Now the iron law of the Druz Doctrines will weaken, and mankind, scattered over a billion worlds, will begin to explore the limits of the possible. You have brought on us a new age, Pirius, an age of bifurcation. Perhaps you think that’s a good thing—I know this fool Nilis does.

  “But at least we were united in our madness. You see, we will never again be strong enough, never united, never determined enough, to strike as you could have struck.” She pointed her finger at Pirius. “You could have destroyed it—destroyed that monstrous thing at the center of the Galaxy—but you turned back.”

  Pirius frowned. “Do you believe the Xeelee will return?”

  “Of course they will. It’s only a matter of time. And we will not be able to push them out again. They will be back—just as the photino birds have returned, and another ancient conflict resumes. And you turned back.”

  Torec asked, “Where will y
ou go now, Luru Parz?”

  “To Earth, of course.”

  “Why?”

  “To prepare its defenses.” With that she walked away, small, closed in, unimaginably ancient.

  Hope gasped, and pointed up. “The flyby!”

  Pirius looked up. Far above the surface of the asteroid, the surviving ships of Exultant Squadron sailed across the sky, their graceful human engineering silhouetted against the glare of the Galaxy’s heart.

  Do not remember heroes. Do not speak their names.

  Remember my words, but do not speak my name.

  I have a vision of a Galaxy overrun by mankind from Core to rim. Of four hundred billion stars each enslaved to the rhythms of Earth’s day, Earth’s year. I have a vision of a trillion planets pulsing to the beat of a human heart.

  And I have a vision of a child. Who will grow up knowing neither family nor comfort. Who will not be distracted by the illusion of a long life. Who will know nothing but honor and duty. Who will die joyously for the sake of mankind.

  That is a hero. And I will never know her name.

  Always remember: a brief life burns brightly.

  —Hama Druz

  Also by STEPHEN BAXTER

  Manifold: Time

  Manifold: Space

  Manifold: Origin

  Evolution

  Coalescent

  With ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  Time’s Eye

  Sunstorm

  Exultant is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Del Rey® Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 2004 by Stephen Baxter

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.