Stephen Baxter - Exultant

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Exultant
PART ONE
In the past we humans, struggling to comprehend our place in the universe, imagined
gods, and venerated them.
But now we have looked across the width of the universe, and from its beginning to its
end. And we know there are no gods.
We are the creators of the future. And the only entities worthy of our veneration are our
own descendants, who, thanks to our selfless striving, will occupy the gods’ empty thrones.
But we have a Galaxy to win first.
—The Doctrines of Hama Druz
(5408 c.e.; Year Zero of the
Third Expansion of Mankind)
Chapter 1
Far ahead, bathed in the light of the Galaxy’s center, the nightfighters were rising.
From his station, Pirius could see their black forms peeling off the walls of their Sugar Lump carriers.
They spread graceful wings, so black they looked as if they had been cut out of the glowing background
of the Core. Some of them were kilometers across. They were Xeelee nightfighters, but nobody in Strike
Arm called them anything but flies.
They converged on the lead human ships, and Pirius saw cherry-red light flaring.
His fragile greenship hovered over the textured ground of a Rock. The Rock was an asteroid, a dozen
kilometers across, charcoal gray. Trenches had been dug all over its surface, interconnecting and
intersecting, so that the Rock looked like an exposed brain. Sparks of light crawled through those
complex lines: soldiers, infantry, endlessly digging, digging, digging, preparing for their own collisions
with destiny. It was a good hour yet before this Rock and Pirius’s own greenship would reach the
battlefield, but already men and women were fighting and dying.
There was nothing to do but watch, and brood. There wasn’t even a sense of motion. Under the
Assimilator’s Claw’s pulsing sublight drive it was as if he were floating, here in the crowded heart of the
Galaxy. Pirius worried about the effect of the wait on his crew.
Pirius was nineteen years old.
He was deep in the Mass, as pilots called it—the Central Star Mass, officially, a jungle of millions of
stars crammed into a ball just thirty light-years across, a core within the Core. Before him a veil of stars
hung before a background of turbulent, glowing gas; he could see filaments and wisps light-years long,
drawn out by the Galaxy’s magnetic field. This stellar turmoil bubbled and boiled on scales of space and
time beyond the human, as if he had been caught at the center of a frozen explosion. The sky was bright,
crowded with stars and clouds, not a trace of darkness anywhere.
And through the stars he made out the Cavity, a central bubble blown clear of gas by astrophysical
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violence, and within that the Baby Spiral, a swirl of stars and molecular clouds, like a toy version of the
Galaxy itself embedded fractally in the greater disc. That was the center of the Galaxy, a place of
layered astrophysical machinery. And it was all driven by Chandra, the brooding black hole at the
Galaxy’s very heart.
This crowded immensity would have stunned a native of Earth—but Earth, with its patient, long-lived
sun, out in the orderly stellar factory of the spiral arms, was twenty-eight thousand light-years from here.
But Pirius had grown up with such visions. He was the product of a hundred generations grown in the
birthing tanks of Arches Base, formally known as Base 2594, just a few light-years outside the Mass. He
was human, though, with human instincts. And as he peered out at the stretching three-dimensional
complexity around him he gripped the scuffed material of his seat, as if he might fall.
Everywhere Pirius looked, across this astrophysical diorama, he saw signs of war.
Pirius’s ship was one of a hundred green sparks, ten whole squadrons, assigned to escort this single
Rock alone. When Pirius looked up he could see more Rocks, a whole stream of them hurled in from the
giant human bases that had been established around the Mass. Each of them was accompanied by its
own swarm of greenships. Upstream and down, the chain of Rocks receded until kilometers-wide
worldlets were reduced to pebbles lost in the glare. Hundreds of Rocks, thousands perhaps, had been
committed to this one assault. It was a titanic sight, a mighty projection of human power.
But all this was dwarfed by the enemy. The Rock stream was directed at a fleet of Sugar Lumps, as
those Xeelee craft were called, immense cubical ships that were themselves hundreds of kilometers
across—some even bigger, some like boxes that could wrap up a whole world.
The tactic was crude. The Rocks were simply hosed in toward the Sugar Lumps, their defenders striving
to protect them long enough for them to get close to the Lumps, whereupon their mighty monopole
cannons would be deployed. If all went well, damage would be inflicted on the Xeelee, and the Rocks
would slingshot around a suitable stellar mass and be hurled back out to the periphery, to be reequipped,
remanned, and prepared for another onslaught. If all did not go well—in that case, duty would have been
done.
As the Claw relentlessly approached the zone of flaring action, one ship dipped out of formation,
swooping down over the Rock in a series of barrel rolls. That must be Dans, one of Pirius’s cadre
siblings. Pirius had flown with her twice before, and each time she had shown off, demonstrating to the
toiling ground troops the effortless superiority of Strike Arm, and of the Arches squadrons in particular—
and in the process lifting everybody’s spirits.
But it was a tiny human gesture lost in a monumental panorama.
Pirius could see his crew, in their own blisters: his navigator Cohl, a slim woman of eighteen, and his
engineer, Enduring Hope, a calm, bulky young man who looked older than his years, just seventeen.
While Cohl and Hope were both rookies, nineteen-year-old Pirius was a comparative veteran. Among
greenship crews, the mean survival rate was one point seven missions. This was Pirius’s fifth mission.
He was growing a reputation as a lucky pilot, a man whose crew you wanted to be on.
“Hey,” he called now. “I know how you’re feeling. They always say this is the worst part of combat, the
ninety-nine percent of it that’s just waiting around, the sheer bloody boredom. I should know.”
Enduring Hope looked across and waved. “And if I want to throw up, lift the visor first. That’s the drill,
isn’t it?”
Pirius forced a laugh. Not a good joke, but a joke.
Enduring Hope:defying all sorts of rules, the engineer called himself not by his properly assigned name,
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a random sequence of letters and syllables, but an ideological slogan. He was a Friend, as he styled it, a
member of a thoroughly illegal sect that flourished in the darker corners of Arches Base, and, it was
said, right across the Front, the great sphere of conflict that surrounded the Galaxy’s heart. Illegal or not,
right now, as the flies rose up and people started visibly to die, Hope’s faith seemed to be comforting
him.
But navigator Cohl, staring ahead at the combat zone, was closed in on herself.
The Claw was a greenship, a simple design that was the workhorse of Strike Arm; millions like it were
in action all around the war zone. Its main body was a bulbous pod containing most of the ship’s
systems: the weapons banks, the FTL drive and two sublight drive systems. From the front of the hull
projected three spars, giving the ship the look of a three-pronged claw, and at the tip of each prong was a
blister, a clear bubble, containing one of the Claw’s three crew. For greenship crews, nobody else
mattered but each other; it was just three of them lost in a dangerous sky—Three Against the Foe,as
Strike Arm’s motto went.
Pirius knew there were good reasons for the trifurcated design of the greenship. It was all to do with
redundancy: the ship could lose two of its three blisters and still, in theory anyhow, fulfill its goals. But
right now Pirius longed to be able to reach through these transparent walls, to touch his crewmates.
He said, “Navigator? You still with us?”
He saw Cohl glance across at him. “Trajectory’s nominal, Pilot.”
“I wasn’t asking about the trajectory.”
Cohl shrugged, as if resentfully. “What do you want me to say?”
“You saw all this in the briefing. You knew it was coming.”
It was true. The whole operation had been previewed for them by the Commissaries, in full Virtual
detail, down to the timetabled second. It wasn’t a prediction, not just a guess, but foreknowledge: a
forecast based on data that had actually leaked from the future. The officers hoped to deaden fear by
making the events of the engagement familiar before it happened. But not everybody took comfort from
the notion of a predetermined destiny.
Cohl was staring out through her blister wall, her lips drawn back in a cold, humorless smile. “I feel like
I’m in a dream,” she murmured. “A waking dream.”
“It isn’t set in stone,” Pirius said. “The future.”
“But the Commissaries—”
“No Commissary ever set foot in a greenship—none of them is skinny enough. It isn’t real until it
happens. And now is when it happens. It’s in our hands, Cohl. It’s in yours. I know you’ll do your duty.”
“And kick ass,” Enduring Hope shouted.
He saw Cohl grin at last. “Yes, sir!”
A green flash distracted Pirius. A ship was hurtling out of formation. One of its three struts was a stump,
the blister missing. As it sailed by, Pirius recognized the gaudy, spruced-up tetrahedral sigil on its side.
It was Dans’s ship.
He called, “Dans? What—”
“Predestination my ass,” Dans yelled on the ship-to-ship line. “Nobody saw that coming.”
“Saw what?”
“See for yourself.”
Pirius swept the crowded sky, letting Virtual feeds pour three-dimensional battlefield data into his head.
In the seconds he’d spent on his crew, everything had changed. The Xeelee hadn’t stayed restricted to
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their source Sugar Lumps. A swarm of them speared down from above his head, from out of nowhere,
heading straight for Pirius’s Rock.
Pirius hadn’t seen it. Sloppy, Pirius. One mistake is enough to kill you.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Cohl said.
“Forget the projections,” Pirius snapped.
There were seconds left before the flies hit the Rock. He saw swarming activity in its runs and trenches.
The poor souls down there knew what was coming, too. Pirius gripped his controls, and tried to ignore
the beating of his heart.
Four, three, two.
The Xeelee—pronounced Zee-lee—were mankind’s most ancient and most powerful foe.
According to the scuttlebutt on Arches Base, in the training compounds and the vast open barracks, there
were only three things you needed to know about the Xeelee.
First, their ships were better than ours. You only had to see a fly in action to realize that. Some said the
Xeelee were their ships, which probably made them even tougher.
Second, they were smarter than us, and had a lot more resources. Xeelee operations were believed to be
resourced and controlled from Chandra itself, the fat black hole at the Galaxy’s very center. In fact,
military planners called Chandra, a supermassive black hole, the Prime Radiant of the Xeelee. How
could anything we had compete with that?
And third, the Xeelee knew what we would do even before we decided ourselves.
This interstellar war was fought with faster-than-light technology, on both sides. But if you flew FTL
you broke the bounds of causality: an FTL ship was a time machine. And so this was a time-travel war,
in which information about the future constantly leaked into the past.
But the information was never perfect. And every now and again, one side or the other was able to
spring a surprise. This new maneuver of the Xeelee had not been in the Commissaries’ careful
projections.
Pirius felt his lips draw back in a fierce grin. The script had been abandoned. Today, everything really
was up for grabs.
But now cherry-red light flared all around the Rock’s ragged horizon.
On the loops, orders chattered from the squadron leaders. “Hold your positions. This is a new tactic and
we’re still trying to analyze it.” “Number eight, hold your place. Hold your place.”
Pirius gripped his controls so tight his fingers ached.
That red glare was spreading all around the Rock’s lumpy profile, a malevolent dawn. Most of the action
was taking place on the far side of the Rock from his position—which was itself most unlike the Xeelee,
who were usually apt to come swarming all over any Rock they attacked.
The Claw would be sheltered from the assault, for the first moments, anyhow. That meant Pirius was in
the wrong place. He wasn’t here to hide, but to fight. But he had to hold his station, until ordered
otherwise.
Pirius glimpsed a fly standing off from the target. It spread night-dark wings—said to be not material but
flaws in the structure of space itself—and extended a cherry-red starbreaker beam. The clean geometry
of these lethal lines had a certain cold beauty, Pirius thought, even though he knew what hell was being
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unleashed for those unlucky enough to be caught on the exposed surface of the Rock.
Now, though, the rectilinear perfection of the starbreaker beam was blurred, as a turbulent fog rose over
the Rock’s horizon.
Cohl said, “What’s that mist? Air? Maybe the starbreakers are cutting through to the sealed caverns.”
“I don’t think so,” said Enduring Hope levelly. “That’s rock. A mist of molten rock. They are smashing
the asteroid to gas.”
Molten rock, Pirius thought grimly, no doubt laced with traces of what had recently been complex
organic compounds, thoroughly burned.
But still, for all the devastation they were wreaking, the Xeelee weren’t coming around the horizon.
They were focusing all their firepower on one side of the Rock.
Still Pirius waited for orders, but the tactical analysis took too long. Suddenly, human ships came fleeing
around the curve of the Rock, sparks of Earth green bright against the dull gray of the asteroid ground.
The formation had collapsed, then, despite the squadron leaders’ continuing bellowed commands. And
down on the Rock those little flecks of light, each a human being trapped in lethal fire, swarmed and
scattered, fanning out of the trench system and over the open ground. Even from here, it looked like
panic, a rout.
It got worse. All across the Rock’s visible hemisphere implosions began, as if its surface was being
bombarded by unseen meteorites. But the floors of these evanescent craters broke up and collapsed, and
through a mist of gray dust a deeper glow was revealed, coming up from inside the Rock. It was as if the
surface were dissolving, and pink-white light was burning its way out of this shell of stone. The Xeelee,
Pirius thought: the Xeelee were burning their way right through the Rock itself.
Enduring Hope understood what was happening half a second before Pirius did. “Lethe,” he said. “Get
us out of here, Pilot. Lift, lift!”
Cohl said weakly, “But our orders—”
But Pirius was already hauling on his controls. All around him ships were breaking from the line and
pulling back.
Even as the Rock fell away, Pirius could see the endgame approaching. For a last, remarkable, instant,
the Rock held together, and that inner light picked out the complex tracery of the trench network, as if
the face of the Rock was covered by a map of shining threads. The asteroid’s uneven horizon lifted,
bulging.
And then the Rock flew apart.
Suddenly the Claw was surrounded by a hail of white-hot fragments that rushed upward all around it.
The greenship threw itself around every axis to survive this deadly inverted storm. The motions were
rapid, juddery, disconcerting; even cloaked by inertial shields, Pirius could feel a ghost of his craft’s
jerky motion, deep in his bones.
Everybody on the Rock must already be dead, he thought, as the ship tried to save him. It was a terrible,
monstrous thought, impossible to absorb. And the dying wasn’t over yet.
Pirius’s squadron leader called for discipline, for her crews to try to regroup, to take the fight to the
enemy. But then she was cut off.
Cohl shrieked, “Flies!Here they come—”
Pirius saw them: a swarm of flies, rising out of the core of the shattered Rock like insects from a corpse,
their black-as-night wings unfolding. They had burned their way right through the heart of an asteroid.
Some greenships were already throwing themselves back into the Xeelee fire. But the Xeelee deployed
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their starbreaker beams; those lethal tongues almost lovingly touched the fleeing greenships.
Pirius had no meaningful orders. So he ran. The Clawraced from the ruin of the Rock. The cloud of
debris thinned, and the jittery motion of the Claw subsided. But when Pirius looked back he saw a solid
black bank, a phalanx of Xeelee nightfighters.
He had no idea where he was running to, how he might evade the Xeelee. He ran anyhow.
And the Xeelee came after him.
Chapter 2
The battle at the center of the Galaxy was watched from far away by cold eyes and orderly, patient
minds.
Port Sol was a Kuiper object, a moon of ice. It was one of a hundred thousand such objects orbiting in
the dark at the rim of Sol system. It was not the largest; there were monstrous worldlets out here larger
than Pluto. But it was no closer to other planetesimals than Earth was to Mars.
This immense belt was a relic of the birth of Sol system itself. Around the fast-growing sun, grains of
dust and ice had accreted into swarming planetesimals. Close to the fitfully burning young star, the
planetesimals had been crowded enough to combine further into planets. Further out, though, out here,
there had been too much room. The formation of larger bodies had stalled, and the ancient planetesimals
survived, to swim on in the silent dark.
Port Sol’s human history had begun when its scattered kin had first been populated by a rum assortment
of engineers, prospectors, refugees, and dissidents from the inner system. More than twenty thousand
years had worn away since then. Now Port Sol’s great days were long past. Its icescapes, crowded with
immense ruins, were silent once more.
But still, lights sparked on its surface.
This lonely worldlet had been home to Luru Parz for far longer than she cared to remember. Sometimes
she felt she was as old as it was, her heart as cold as its primordial ice. But from here she watched the
activities of humanity, from the bustling worlds of Sol system all the way to the heart of the Galaxy
itself.
And now she watched Pirius, Dans, and their crews as they strove to evade their Xeelee pursuers. The
incident, brought to her attention by patient semisentient monitors, unfolded in a Virtual image, a
searing bright slice of Galaxy center light, here on the rim of Sol system.
Faya, her cousin, was with her. “They’re lost,” Faya sighed.
“Perhaps,” Luru said. “But if they find a way to live through this, or even if not, they might discover
something useful for the future.”
“There is always that.”
“Watch . . .”
The tiny, remote drama unfolded.
Chapter 3
Aboard the Claw,a strange calm settled. The loops were all but silent now, save for the ragged breathing
of Pirius’s crew. But behind them, that black cloud of Xeelee ships closed relentlessly.
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Another ship came alongside the Claw.It had taken a lot of damage. One strut had been crudely
amputated, and a second blister looked cloudy; but the pilot’s blister was a bright spark of light. Pirius
looked back, but nobody else followed: just the two of them.
Pirius recognized the other’s sigil. “Dans?”
“Large as life, Pirius.”
“I recognized your lousy piloting.”
“Yeah, yeah. So why aren’t you dead yet?”
“Shut up.” It was Cohl. “Shut up.”
“Navigator, take it easy.”
“Do we have to endure this garbage, today of all days?”
“Today of all days we need it,” Enduring Hope said.
Pirius said, “Dans, your crew—”
“I’m on my own,” Dans said grimly. “But I’m still flying. So. Every day you learn something new,
right? Those Xeelee always have something up their sleeves. If they have sleeves.”
“Yes. In retrospect it’s an obvious tactic.”
So it was. The Xeelee’s usual approach was to swathe a Rock with fire, trying to scour out the trenches
and get to the monopole cannons, all the time harassed by greenships and other defensive forces. This
time they had focused their assault on one side of the Rock, easily perforating the defensive forces there.
And they had used their starbreakers to burrow straight through the asteroid and out the other side, thus
destroying the Rock itself and hurling themselves without warning on the remaining defenders.
“It’s going to take some counterthinking,” Pirius said. “We’ll need scouts further out, perhaps.”
“Yeah,” Dans said. “And flexible formations to swarm wherever the first assault goes in.”
“It won’t be us doing it,” said Cohl grimly.
“You aren’t dead yet, kid,” Dans called. She was twenty, a year older than Pirius, and a veteran of no
less than six missions before today.
Cohl said, “Look at that crowd behind us.” The flies were still closing. “We can’t outrun them,” the
navigator said. “In fact we shouldn’t be trying; we have orders to stand and fight. We are already dead.
It’s our duty to be dead. A brief life burns brightly.”
It was the most ancient slogan of the Expansion, said to have been coined by Hama Druz himself
thousands of years before, standing in the rubble of an occupied Earth. In a regime of endless war it was
prideful to die young and in battle, a crime to grow old unnecessarily.
Under such a regime the highest form of humanity was the child soldier.
But Dans said rudely, “I knew you were going to say that.”
Pirius heard Cohl gasp.
Dans said, “So report me. Look, navigator, a brief life is one thing, but neither Hama Druz nor any of his
legions of apologists down the ages told us to throw away our lives. If we took on that crowd of flies,
they wouldn’t even notice us.Now what use is that?”
“Pilot—”
“She’s right, Cohl,” Pirius said.
Enduring Hope said evenly, “But whatever the orthodoxy, can I just point out that they are catching up?
Three minutes to intercept . . .”
Pirius said tensely, “Dans, I don’t want to boost your ego. But I suppose you have a plan?”
Dans took a breath. “Sure. We go FTL.”
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Cohl snapped, “Impossible.”
This time it was the technician in her talking, and Pirius knew she was probably right. The FTL drive
involved tinkering with the deepest structure of spacetime, and it was always advisable to do that in a
smooth, flat place, empty of dense matter concentrations. The Galactic center offered few such
opportunities, and safe FTL use here needed planning.
Dans said rapidly, “Sure it’s risky. But it beats the certainty of death. And besides, the chances are the
Xeelee won’t follow. They aren’t as stupid as we are.”
Enduring Hope said, “Which way?”
Virtuals flickered in their blisters, downloaded by Dans. “I say we cut across the Mass to Sag A
East. . . .”
The bulk of the Galaxy’s luminous matter was confined to a flat sheet, the delicate spiral arms contained
in a plane as thin in proportion to its width as a piece of paper. But at its heart was a Core, a bulge of
stars some five hundred light-years across. This region swarmed with human factory worlds and military
posts. Within the Core was the Central Star Mass, millions of stars crammed into a space some thirty
light-years wide. The two brightest sources of radio noise within the Mass were called Chandra—or,
officially, Sag A*, the black hole at the very center—and Sag A East, a remnant of an ancient explosion.
Such names, so Pirius had once been told by an overinformative Commissary, were themselves relics of
deeper human history. The soldiers to whom the Galaxy center was a war zone knew this geography.
But few knew that “Sag” stood for Sagittarius, and fewer still that Sagittarius had once referred to a
pattern in the few scattered stars visible from Earth.
“Two minutes to closing,” Cohl reported edgily.
“Short hops,” Dans insisted. “Forty minutes to cross a few dozen light-years to East. Maybe we’ll find
cover there. We regroup, patch up, go home—and die another day. Come on, what is there to lose? For
you it will be easy! At least you still have a navigator.”
Starbreaker beams flickered around Pirius. The nightfighters were getting their range; at any moment
one of these beams could touch his own blister. He would die without even knowing it.
“We do it,” he said.
Dans quickly downloaded a synchronization command. “The two of us, then. On my mark. Two—one
—”
Space flexed.
The nearby stars winked out of existence. The general background endured, but now a new pattern of
hot young stars greeted Pirius, a new three-dimensional constellation.
Space flexed.
Again he jumped, to be faced by another constellation.
And again, and yet another blue-white supergiant loomed right in front of him, immense flares working
across its broad face, but it disappeared, to be replaced by another set of disorderly stars, which
disappeared in their turn. . . .
Jump, jump, jumpjumpjumpjump . . .
As the jumps came more frequently than Pirius’s eyes could follow, the ride settled down to an illusion
of continuity. There was even a sense of motion now, as distant stars slid slowly past. It did him no good
at all to remind himself that with each jump spacetime was pivoting through its higher dimensions, or
that even millennia after the technology’s first use the philosophers still couldn’t agree whether the
entity that emerged from each jump was still, in any meaningful way, “him.”
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First things first, Pirius.
He glanced over his systems and his crew. “Everything nominal,” he said. He raised a thumb to the pilot
of the second ship, and through a blister’s starred carapace he saw a gesture in response.
“We’re still breathing,” Enduring Hope said evenly. “But take a look out back.”
The cloud of Xeelee ships had vanished. But a single dogged craft remained, its wings spread black and
wide, a graceful sycamore-seed shape.
Dans said, “Stubborn bastards, aren’t they?”
Hope said, “At least we bought some time.”
“Yes. We’ve still got thirty minutes before East,” Pirius said. He waved his hands through Virtual
consoles, initiating self-diagnostic and repair routines to run throughout the ship. “This is a chance to
take care of yourselves,” he told his crew. “Eat. Drink. Take a leak. Sleep if you have to. Use your med-
cloaks if you need them.”
Cohl said blankly, “Eat? Sleep? We’re going to die.We’d do better to review why we have to die.”
Dans said, “Lethe, child, there are no Commissary arses to lick out here. Don’t you find the Doctrines
cold comfort?”
“On the contrary,” Cohl said.
Pirius glanced down at Cohl’s blister. He imagined her in there, wrapped up in her skinsuit, swaddled by
machines, clinging to the pitiless logic of the Doctrines.
Thousands of years had worn away since the first human interstellar flight, and since humanity had
begun the mighty march across the Galaxy called the Third Expansion. The Expansion was an
ideological program, a titanic project undertaken by a mankind united by the Doctrines forged by Hama
Druz after mankind’s near extinction. In the fierce light of human determination lesser species had
burned away. At last only one opponent was left: the Xeelee, the most powerful foe of them all, with
their concentration at the very center of the Galaxy.
It was already millennia since the Third Expansion had closed around the center. But the Xeelee
responded in kind, just as resolutely. The Front had become a great stalled wave of destruction, a
spherical zone of friction where two empires rubbed against each other. And seen from factory worlds
scattered a hundred light-years deep, the sky glowed pink with the light of endless war.
The Xeelee would not engage with mankind in any way but war. There was no negotiation, no
rapprochement, no contact that was not lethal. To the Xeelee, humans were vermin—and they had a
right to think so, for they were superior to humans in every way that could be measured. And so, only if
each human were prepared to spend her life without question for the common good would humanity as a
whole prevail. This was the Doctrinal thinking taught in seminaries and cadre groups and academies
across the Galaxy: if humans must be vermin, humans would fight like vermin, and die like vermin.
For millennia humans, fast-breeding, had toiled to fill the Galaxy. Now, whichever star you picked out
of the crowded sky, you could be confident that there was a human presence there. And for millennia
humans had hurled themselves into the Xeelee fire, vermin fighting back the only way they had, with
their bodies and souls, hoping to overcome the Xeelee by sheer numbers.
Pirius knew a lot of fighting people thought the way Cohl did. By keeping mankind united and
unchanged across millennia, it had self-evidently worked. Many soldiers feared that if the Doctrines
were ever even questioned, everything would fall apart, and that defeat, or worse, would inevitably
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follow. Compared to that risk, the remote notion of victory seemed irrelevant.
Dans said breezily, “So what about you, Tuta?”
“My name is Enduring Hope,” the engineer said, apparently not offended.
“Oh, I forgot. You’re one of those infinity-botherers, aren’t you? So what do you believe? Is some great
hero from the far future going to swoop down and rescue you?”
Pirius had tried to stay away from Enduring Hope’s peculiar sect, who called themselves “Friends of
Wigner.” Pirius thought of himself as pragmatic; he was prepared to put up with nonsense names if it
kept his engineer happy. But the Friends’ cult violated Doctrinal law just by its very existence.
“You can mock,” Hope said. “But you don’t understand.”
“Then tell me,” Dans said.
“All of this”—Hope made an expansive gesture—“is a first cut. Everybody knows this. In this war of
FTL ships and time travel, we stack up contingencies in the Library of Futures on Earth. History is a
draft, a draft we change all the time.”
“And if history is mutable—”
“Then nothing is inevitable. Not even the past.”
“I don’t understand,” Pirius admitted.
Dans said, “If you can redraft history, everything can be fixed. He thinks that even if he dies today, then
history will somehow, some day, be put right, and all such unfortunate errors removed.”
“Hope, is that right?”
“Something like it.”
Dans snapped, “Pirius, the creed is anti-Doctrine, but it’s just as much a trap as the Doctrines. A Druz
junkie thinks death and defeat reinforce the strength of the Doctrines. A Friend believes defeat is
irrelevant because it will all be erased some day. Either way, you don’t fight to win.You see? Why else
has this damn war stalled so long?”
Pirius felt uncomfortable with such heresy—even now, even here.
With a trace of malice Hope said, “But you’re as doomed as we are, Pilot Dans.”
Cohl said, “What about you, Pirius? What do you want to achieve?”
Pirius thought it over. “I want to be remembered.”
He heard slow, ironic applause from Dans.
Cohl muttered, “That is just so anti-Doctrinal!”
Hope murmured, “Well, you might be about to get your chance, Pilot. Sag A East is dead ahead.
Dropping out of FTL.”
Jumpjumpjumpjump jump—jump—jump . . .
As the FTL hops slowed, they passed through a flickering barrage of stars, and electric-blue light flared
around them: the pilots called it FTL light, a by-product of the energy the ship was shedding, coalescing
into exotic evanescent particles. Pirius, relieved to get back to practical matters, tested the controls of the
greenship and burped its two sublight drives—including the GUTdrive. This was a backup, a venerable
human design, and one you would light up only in the direst of circumstances, for fear of attracting
quagmites. . . .
While Pirius worked, the others had been looking at the view. “Lethe,” Dans said softly.
Pirius glanced up.
Sagittarius A East was a bubble of shocked gas, light-years wide, said to be the remnant of an immense
explosion in the heart of the Galaxy. Suddenly Pirius was at the center of a storm of light.
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Stephen%20Baxter%20-%20Exultant.html (10 of 290)3-1-2007 20:21:48
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ExultantPARTONEInthepastwehumans,strugglingtocomprehendourplaceintheuniverse,imaginedgods,andveneratedthem.Butnowwehavelookedacrossthewidthoftheuniverse,andfromitsbeginningtoitsend.Andweknowtherearenogods.Wearethecreatorsofthefuture.Andtheonlyentitiesworthyofourvenerationareourowndescendants,who,...

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