Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

  Futurity couldn’t help but smile at his reckless optimism. But he stepped up to the window. ‘Michael Poole, please—’

  ‘What’s wrong, acolyte? Are you concerned about what your Hierocrat is going to do to you when you go home without his intellectual property?’

  ‘Well, yes. But I’m also concerned for you, Michael Poole.’

  Poole did a double-take. ‘You are, aren’t you? I’m touched, Futurity’s Dream. I like you too, and I think you have a great future ahead of you - if you can clear the theological fog out of your head. You could change the world! But on the other hand, I have the feeling you’ll be a fine priest too. I’d like to stick around to see what happens. But, no offence, it ain’t worth going back into cold storage for.’

  Mara said, her voice breaking, ‘If you find Sharn, tell her I love her.’

  ‘I will. And who knows? Perhaps we will find a way to get back in touch with you, some day. Don’t give up hope. I never do.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Just to be absolutely clear,’ said Captain Tahget heavily. ‘Mara, will this be enough for you to get rid of that damn bomb?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mara. ‘I always did trust Michael Poole.’

  ‘And she won’t face any charges,’ Poole said. ‘Will she, Captain?’

  Tahget looked at the ceiling. ‘As long as I get that bomb off my ship - and as long as somebody pays me for this jaunt - she can walk free.’

  ‘Then my work here is done,’ said Poole, mock-seriously. He turned and faced the black hole.

  ‘You’re hesitating,’ Futurity said.

  ‘Wouldn’t you? I wonder what the life expectancy of a sentient structure in there is . . . Well, I’ve got a century before the black hole hits Chandra, and maybe there’ll be a way to survive that.

  ‘I hope I live! It would be fun seeing what comes next, in this human Galaxy. For sure it won’t be like what went before. You know, it’s a dangerous precedent, this deliberate speciation: after an age of unity, will we now live through an era of bifurcation, as mankind purposefully splits and splits again?’ He turned back to Futurity and grinned. ‘And this is my own adventure, isn’t it, acolyte? Something the original Poole never shared. He’d probably be appalled, knowing him. I’m the black sheep! What was that about more real?’

  Mara said, ‘I will be with you at Timelike Infinity, Michael Poole, when this burden will pass.’

  That was a standard Wignerian prayer. Poole said gently, ‘Yes. Perhaps I’ll see you there, Mara. Who knows?’ He nodded to Futurity. ‘Goodbye, engineer. Remember - open mind.’

  ‘Open mind,’ Futurity said softly.

  Poole turned, leapt away from the ship, and vanished in a shimmering of pixels.

  After that, Futurity spent long hours studying the evanescent patterns in the air of the black hole. He tried to convince himself he could see more structure: new textures, a deeper richness. Perhaps Michael Poole really was in there, with Sharn. Or perhaps Michael Poole had already gone on to his next destination, or the next after that. It was impossible to tell.

  He gave up, turned to his data desk, and began to work out how he was going to explain all this to the Hierocrat.

  With the Shipbuilders swarming through their corridors and access tubes, the ship lifted out of the accretion disc of Chandra, and sailed for Base 478, and then for Earth.

  In the end the Ideocracy and the Kardish Imperium inevitably fell on each other.

  Such wars of succession consumed millennia and countless lives. It was not a noble age, though it threw up plenty of heroes.

  But time exerted its power. The wars burned themselves out. Soon the Coalition with all its works and its legacies was forgotten.

  As for the Wignerian religion, it developed into the mightiest and deepest of all mankind’s religions, and brought consolation to trillions. But in another moment it too was quite forgotten.

  And humans, flung upon a million alien shores, morphed and adapted.

  This was the Bifurcation of Mankind. How it would have horrified that dry old stick Hama Druz! There were still wars, of course. But now different human species confronted each other, and a fundamental xenophobia fuelled genocides.

  As poor Rusel on the Mayflower II had understood, human destiny works itself out on overlapping timescales. An empire typically lasts a thousand years - the Coalition was a pathology. A religion may linger five or ten thousand years. Even a human subspecies will alter unrecognisably after fifty or a hundred thousand years. So on the longest of timescales human history is a complex dissonance, with notes sounding at a multitude of frequencies from the purposeful to the evolutionary, and only the broadest patterns are discernible in its fractal churning.

  You learn this if you live long enough, like Rusel, like me.

  The age of Bifurcation ended abruptly.

  Sixty-five thousand years after the conquest of the Galaxy, genetic randomness threw up a new conqueror. Charismatic, monstrous, carelessly spending human life on a vast scale, the self-styled Unifier used one human type as a weapon against another, before one of his many enemies took his life, and his empire disintegrated, evanescent as all those before.

  And yet the Unifier planted the seeds of a deeper unity. Not since the collapse of the Coalition had the successors of mankind recalled that their ancestors had shared the same warm pond. After ten thousand more years that unity found a common cause.

  Mankind’s hard-won Galaxy was a mere tidal pool of muddy light, while all around alien cultures commanded a wider ocean. Now those immense spaces became an arena for a new war. As in the time of the Unifier, disparate human types were thrown into the conflict; new sub-species were even bred specifically to serve as weapons.

  This war continued in various forms for a hundred thousand years. In the end, like the Unifier, mankind was defeated by the sheer scale of the arena - and by time, which erodes all human purposes.

  But mankind didn’t return to complete fragmentation, not quite. For now a new force began to emerge in human politics.

  The undying. Us. Me.

  Since the time of Michael Poole, there had been undying among the ranks of mankind. Some of us were engineered to be so, and others were the children of the engineered. We emerged and died in our own slow generations, a subset of mankind.

  The hostility of mortals was relentless. It pushed us together - even if, often, in mutual loathing. But we were always dependent on the mass of mankind. Undying or not, we were still human; we needed our short-lived cousins. We spent most of our long lives hiding, though.

  We undying had rather enjoyed the long noon of the Coalition, for all that authority’s persecution of us. Stability and central control was what we sought above all else. To us the Coalition’s collapse, and the churning ages that followed, were a catastrophe.

  When, two hundred thousand years after the time of Hama Druz, the storm of extragalactic war at last blew itself out, we decided enough was enough. We had always worked covertly, tweaking history here and there - as I had meddled in the destiny of the Exultants. Now it was different. In this moment of human fragmentation and weakness, we emerged from the shadows, and began to act.

  We established a new centralising government called the Commonwealth. Slowly - so slowly most mayflies lived and died without ever seeing what we were doing - we strove to challenge time, to dam the flow of history. To gain control, at last.

  And we attempted a deeper unity, a linking of minds called the Transcendence. This superhuman entity would envelop all of mankind in its joyous unity, reaching even deep into the past to redeem the benighted lives that had gone before. But the gulf between man and god proved too wide to bridge.

  Half a million years after mankind first left Earth, the Transcendence proved the high water mark of humanity’s dreams.

  When it fell our ultimate enemies closed in.

  At first there was a period of stasis - the Long Calm, the historians called it. It lasted two hundred thousand years. The s
tasis was only comparative; human history resumed, with all its usual multiple-wavelength turbulence.

  Then the stars began to go out.

  It was the return of the Xeelee: mankind’s ultimate foe, superior, unforgiving, driven out of the home Galaxy but never defeated.

  It had been thought the Xeelee were distracted by a war against a greater foe, creatures of dark matter called ‘photino birds‘ who were meddling with the evolution of the stars for their own purposes - a conflict exploited by Admiral Kard long ago to trigger the human-Xeelee war. The Xeelee were not distracted.

  It had been thought the Xeelee had forgotten us. They had not forgotten.

  We called the Xeelee’s vengeance the Scourge. It was a simple strategy: the stars that warmed human worlds were cloaked in an impenetrable shell of the Xeelee’s fabled ‘construction material’. It was even economical, for these cloaks were built out of the energy of the stars themselves. It was a technology that had actually been stumbled on long before by human migrants of the Second Expansion, then rediscovered by the Coalition’s Missionaries - discovered, even colonised, but never understood.

  One by one, the worlds of man fell dark. Cruellest of all, when humanity had been driven out, the Xeelee unveiled the cleansed stars.

  People had forgotten how to fight. They fled to the home Galaxy, and then fell back further to the spiral arms. But even there the scattered stars faded one by one.

  It took the Xeelee three hundred thousand years, but at last, a million years after the first starships, the streams of refugees became visible in the skies of Earth.

  But the photino birds had been busy too, progressing their own cosmic project, the ageing of the stars.

  When Sol itself began to die, its core bloated with a dark-matter canker, suddenly mankind had nowhere to go.

  PART SIX

  THE FALL OF MANKIND

  THE SIEGE OF EARTH

  c. AD 1,000,000

  I

  The canal cut a perfect line across the flat Martian landscape, arrowing straight for the crimson rim of sun at the horizon.

  Walking along the canal’s bank, Symat was struck by the sheer scale on which people had reshaped the landscape for a purpose - in this case, to carry water from Mars’s perpetually warm side to the cold. Of course the whole world was engineered, but terraforming a world was beyond Symat’s imagination, whereas a canal was not.

  His mother had always said he had the instincts of an engineer. But it wasn’t likely he would ever get to be an engineer, for this wasn’t an age when people built things. A million years after the first human footsteps had been planted in its ancient soil, Mars was growing silent once more.

  Symat was fourteen years old, however, and that was exactly how old the world was to him. And he was unhappy for much more immediate reasons than man’s cosmic destiny. He stumbled on, alone.

  It was hours since he had stormed out of his parents’ home, though the changeless day made it hard to track the time. Nobody knew where he was. He had instructed the Mist, the ubiquitous artificial mind of Mars, not to follow him. But the journey had been harder than he had expected, and he was already growing hungry and thirsty.

  It might have been easier if his journey had a destination, a fixed end. But he wasn’t heading anywhere as much as escaping. He wanted to show his parents he was serious, that his refusal to join the great exodus from reality through the transfer booths wasn’t just some fit of pique. Well, he’d done that. But his flight had a beginning but no end.

  Trying to take his mind off his tiredness, he stared into the sliver of sun on the horizon. Sol was so big and red it didn’t hurt his eyes, even when he gazed right into it. The sun never moved, of course, save for its slow rise as you walked towards it.

  The sky of Mars had changed, across a million years. Symat knew that Mars’s sky had once had three morning stars, the inner planets. But Venus and Mercury had long been eaten up by the sun’s swelling, Earth wafted away, and Mars was the closest of the sun’s remaining children.

  And that sun never shifted in the sky. These days Mars kept one face turned constantly towards the sun, and one face away from it: one Dayside, one Nightside, and a band of twilight between where the last people lived.

  Something briefly eclipsed the sun. He stopped, blinking; his eyes were dry and sore. He saw that he had passed through the shadow of a spire.

  He walked on.

  Soon he entered a city. The buildings were tall and full of sunlight, and bridges fine as spider web spanned the canal water. But there were no people walking over those bridges, no flitters skimming around the spires, and red dust lay scattered over the streets. It was like walking through a museum, solemn and silent.

  One building bulged above his head, a ball of smooth, fossil-free Martian sandstone skewered on a spire of diamond. Clinging to the bank of the canal Symat gave it a wide berth: even after all this time human instincts remained shaped by the heavier gravity of Earth, where such an imbalanced structure would have been impossible.

  Time had made its mark. Right in the heart of the city one slender bridge had collapsed. He could see its fallen stones in the water, a line of white under the surface.

  Before he reached the ruined abutment on the canal bank he came to a scattering of loose stones. He gathered together a dozen or so cobbles and peered up resentfully at one of the more substantial buildings. Its flat windows, like dead eyes, seemed to mock him. He hefted a cobble, took aim, and hurled it. His first shot clattered uselessly against polished stone. But his second shot took out a window that smashed with a sparkling noise. The sound excited him, and he hurled more stones. But the noise stopped every time he quit throwing, reminding him firmly he was alone.

  Dispirited, he dumped the last of his cobbles and turned back to the canal. On its bank, he sat with his feet dangling over blue running water, water that ran endlessly from the world’s cold side to the warm.

  Symat was very thirsty.

  The canal bank was a wall of stone that sloped smoothly down to the water. It would be easy to slide down there, all the way into the water. He could drink his fill, and wash off the dust of Mars. But how would he get out? Glancing down the river he saw the ruins of that bridge. The bank beneath the abutment was broken up; surely he could find handholds.

  Without water he was going to have to turn back. It was a defining moment in his odyssey.

  Without letting himself think about it he pulled off his boots, pants and jacket, and slid down the smooth sloping wall. The water was so cold it shocked him, and it was deep; he couldn’t feel the bottom. When he came bobbing back up he was faintly alarmed that he had already been washed some way towards the stump of the bridge. The current must be stronger than it looked.

  With a couple of strokes he reached the canal wall. It was smooth, but by pushing his hands against it he was able to resist the current. Feeling safer, he ducked his head and scrubbed his hair clean of dust, and took long deep draughts of the water. It was chill, for it was meltwater from Nightside, and slightly sparkling; Mars’s water was rich in carbon dioxide.

  Refreshed, he felt his energy return. There were more cities strung out along the canal like pearls on a necklace. He could hide out for days, and how that would make his parents worry.

  But he was starting to feel cold, deep inside. Time to get out. He pushed off from the wall and let himself drift downstream. When he reached the ruined abutment he grabbed at projecting stones. But they were all slick with some green slime, and slid maliciously out of his hands. Scared now, he shoved himself at the protruding stones. He managed to halt his slide down the river, but only by clinging on with all his limbs, like a spider, and the water still plucked at his legs and torso.

  He was getting very cold, and tiring quickly, his muscles aching. He had walked along the canal for hours and had seen nothing but smooth walls. If he lost his grip here, he would be washed away until he drowned - or, even worse, the Mist would alert his parents, who would come sweeping
down in the family flitter to rescue him. The first real decision he had made had been a stupid one, and all his defiant dreams of showing his parents he was worthy of their respect were imploding.

  He was starting to shiver. He had no choice. He prepared to call for the Mist’s help.

  ‘Up here.’

  The voice came from above. Looking up, he saw three heads silhouetted against the sky, three small curious faces peering down. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Try there!’ The middle figure leaned over and pointed. It was a girl, a bit younger than he was. She was pointing at a shelf on the canal wall, all but invisible from his position down here. With an effort he lifted up his hand and grabbed at the shelf. It was dry and he grasped it easily, and already felt safer.