Exultant (20 page)

Pirius was shocked. “Burden, I know
you
don’t care about the Doctrines. But why do the officers let this genetic drift go on?”

Burden shook his head. “You still don’t see it?
Because it’s useful,
Pirius. If you just remember that one thing, many puzzling things about life here fall into place.”

Burden spoke about himself. The boy called Quero had been born on a base inside yet another Galaxy-center cluster. He had once flown the greenships: he had been a pilot himself, in fact, and had come through one action.

But all the while his faith had been developing, he said.

The seed of the faith of the Friends of Wigner had come here in legends from old Earth, legends of Michael Poole and the rebellion against the Qax. Its supremely consoling message had quickly taken root among the soldiers of the Galaxy core. By now you could find Friends right around the Front, around the whole of the center of the Galaxy.

“I actually grew up with it. I heard kids’ stories about Michael Poole and the Ultimate Observer. I didn’t take any of it seriously, not really; it was just there in the background. And when I started going through my training and learned that it was officially all taboo, I shut up about it.”

At first none of this had made any difference to Quero’s successful career. But as he experienced conflict, he found himself deeply troubled.

“It was seeing death,” he said now, smiling. “It was bad enough from a greenship blister. It’s a lot worse here, on the Rocks. Every death is the termination of a life, of a mind, a unique thread of experience and memory. Maybe death has to come to us all. But like this? I found it hard to accept my place in this unending war.”

Seeking answers, he had turned to the faith of his childhood. He went beyond the simple personalized stories of Michael Poole and other heroes he had grown up with, and he began to reexamine its deeper philosophy for himself. And he had begun to speak out. “My officers respected Quero, I think. But they had no time for This Burden Must Pass.”

He had been here a while, Pirius gathered. Naturally smart, flexible, and courageous, Burden had already survived five combat actions. Once, he said, he had done well enough to be offered a way out, to retrain as an infantry officer. But he would have had to recant his faith, and he had refused, and so he had been cast down yet again.

Pirius asked, “You don’t regret any of it?”

“Why should I?”

“Oh. ‘This Burden Must Pass.’”

“You got it,” Burden said. “All of this suffering will ultimately be deleted. So what’s to regret?”

Cohl had listened to this. She drew Pirius aside. “And you
believe
all that?”

He was surprised she’d asked. “Why would he lie about something like that?”

“Then why is it so vague?
Why
was he sent to Quin in the first place—because of his faith? Or because of something that happened on his base, or even during combat?” Her small eyes gleamed. “See? It’s just like his preaching. He talks a lot, but it’s all mist and shadows.”

“You don’t like him.”

“I don’t care enough not to like him. I don’t trust him, for sure.”

Pirius turned back to Burden, who had heard none of this. Burden was looking at him with a kind of eagerness, Pirius thought, as if it was important to Burden that he somehow got Pirius’s approval. Sometimes he thought he saw weakness in Burden, somewhere under the surface of composure, command, and humor. Weakness and need.

“Burden—you said the officers will tolerate genetic drift if the product is useful. But why do they put up with
you
?”

“Because I’m useful too.” Burden lay back on his bunk. “I told you that’s the key. Of course I am useful! Why else?”

When he saw his first death on the Rock, Pirius learned the truth of this.

Chapter
17

Pirius Red and Torec were reunited at the Berr-linn spaceport. They had been separated for eight weeks. Careless of who was watching them, they wrapped their arms about each other and pressed their mouths together.

“They’re mad,” Pirius whispered. “The earthworms. All of them!”

“I know!” she whispered back, round-eyed.

They stared into each other’s eyes, their faces pressed together, their breath mingling, hot. Again Pirius felt that deep surging warmth toward her that he’d started to feel when they first arrived on Earth. It was as if he was whole with her, incomplete when they were apart, as if they were two halves of the same entity. Was this love? How was he supposed to know?

And—did she feel the same way? It looked as if she did, but how were you supposed to tell?

But they had no time to talk about their feelings, no time to recover from their separate adventures, for the very next day they were to be shipped off, at Luru Parz’s order, to Port Sol.

To a traveler from the center of the Galaxy, a jaunt to the Kuiper Belt, only some fifty times as far out as Earth’s orbit around the sun, should have seemed trivial. But as the sun dwindled to an intense pinpoint, and Port Sol itself at last swam into view, dark, bloodred, Pirius felt that he was indeed going deep: not just deep in space but deep in time, deep into humanity’s murky past.

Nilis’s corvette entered a painfully slow orbit. The gravity of a ball of ice a few hundred kilometers across was a mere feather touch. The passengers crowded to the corvette’s transparent walls.

Port Sol was an irregular mass, only vaguely spherical, and dimly lit by the distant sun. Pirius saw a crumpled, ruddy surface, broken by craters of a ghostly blue-white. Some of these “craters,” though, looked too regular to be natural. And some of them were domed over, illuminated by a soft prickling of artificial light. People still lived here, then. But signs of abandonment overwhelmed the signs of life: shards of collapsed and darkened domes, even buildings that might once have floated above the ice but had now crashed to the ground.

But still—
Port Sol!

Even to a Navy brat like Pirius, born and raised twenty-eight thousand light-years from Earth, the name had resonance. Port Sol was the very rim of Sol system, the place where the legendary engineer Michael Poole had come to build the very first of mankind’s starships.

Nilis’s excitement seemed as genuine as the ensigns’. Minister Gramm, though, seemed tense, nervous, on the verge of anger. It was evident that Luru Parz had forced him to come out here, and he didn’t like it one bit. And Gramm’s assistant Pila peered out, analytic and supercilious, apparently as faintly amused by the spectacle of Port Sol as she had been by the Moon.

A flitter slid smoothly up to meet the corvette. It carried a single passenger, a woman dressed in a simple white robe. She had the same look about her as Luru Parz: compact, patient, extraordinarily still, her features small and expressionless. But she was slimmer than Luru, and she seemed somehow more graceful. She said, “My name is Faya Parz. I am an associate of Luru. . . .”

When she announced her name, eyebrows were raised. Gramm turned to Pila. “Well, well,” he said. “Faya and Luru, Parz and Parz!”

Pila smiled. “I imagine the Doctrines are stretched rather thin here, Minister.”

This baffled both the ensigns, and Nilis had to explain that under archaic traditions, before the more rational approach instigated by the Commission for Historical Truth, surnames would be shared by members of the same family. It was all thoroughly non-Doctrinal.

The flitter touched down close to one of the illuminated pits in the ice. The party transferred to a ground transport, a sort of car with massive bubble wheels and hooks for traction to save it bouncing out of Port Sol’s minuscule gravity well. The car had no inertial adjustment, and as it began to roll along a road roughly cut through the ice, the cabin bobbed up and settled back, over and over, slowly but disconcertingly. Pirius and Torec were charmed by this low-tech relic.

Though Gramm and Pila looked politely bored, Nilis was fascinated by the scenery. “So this Kuiper object is primordial—a relic of the formation of the system,” he said.

“Not quite,” Faya said. “The reddish color of the ice is caused by bombardment by cosmic rays.” High-energy particles, relics of energetic events elsewhere in the universe. Over time, the surface layers became rich in carbon, dark, and the irradiation mantle became a tough crust. “Nothing is unmodified by time,” said Faya.

Nilis stood up in the swaying cabin so he could see better. “But in places, impacts have punched through that crust to reveal the ice below. Is that what we’re seeing? Those blue pits—”

Faya said, “Impacts are rare out here, but they do happen, yes. But the feature we are approaching is artificial, a quarry. It was scooped out by engineers to provision a GUTdrive starship. The present-day colonists refer to it as the Pit of the
Mayflower,
though we don’t have archaeological proof that
Mayflower II
was actually launched from here. . . .”

In those early days, the starships that had set off from Port Sol had been driven by nothing but water rockets, using ice as reaction mass. They had crawled along much slower than light, their missions lasting generations. With the acquisition of FTL drives, Port Sol was suddenly redundant, its ice no longer necessary. Even as mankind’s great galactic adventure had begun in earnest, Port Sol’s time was already done. Since then it had orbited out here in the dark, its population dwindling, its name an exotic memory.

But now, it seemed, Port Sol had a new purpose.

An odd flash in the sky caught Pirius’s eye: a twinkle, there and gone. He knew that some of the earliest colonies here—from the days even before Michael Poole, very low-tech indeed—had relied for their power on nothing more than sunlight, gathered with immense wispy mirrors thousands of kilometers across. Even now nobody knew for sure what was out here. The Kuiper Belt was a vast spherical archipelago, its islands separated from each other by the width of the inner Sol system. In this huge place, perhaps some of those ancient communities survived, following their obsolescent ways, hidden from the turbulent politics of mankind.

His new sense of curiosity strong, Pirius felt a deep thrill to be in this extraordinary place. But stare as he might, he didn’t glimpse the mirror in the sky again.

The car nuzzled against a small translucent dome set on the edge of the Pit of the
Mayflower.
The dome was cluttered with low, temporary-looking buildings. There was an inertial generator somewhere, and to everybody’s relief the gravity in here was no lower than the Moon’s, and the walking was easy.

Pirius and Torec were the first out, eager to reach the transparent viewing wall on the dome’s far side, so they could see the Pit for themselves.

The Pit of the
Mayflower
was a smooth-cut crater a kilometer wide. Despite its size, the Pit was itself enclosed by a vast, low dome, around which lesser structures, like this habitable dome, clustered like infants. On the floor of the Pit stood the relics of heavy engineering projects: gantries, platforms of metal, concrete, and ice, and immense low-gravity cranes, like vast skeletons. Globe lamps hovered everywhere, casting a yellow-white complex light through the Pit. Nothing moved.

Bustling after the ensigns, Nilis said, “What a place—a relic of the grandeur, or the folly, of the past. A mine for archaeologists! Ah, but I forget: under the Coalition we are all too busy for archaeology, aren’t we, Minister?”

Gramm was waddling at a speed obviously uncomfortable for him, and though the dome’s air was cool he was sweating heavily. “Nilis, we may be far from home. But you are a Commissary, and I suggest you comport yourself like one.”

“I am suitably abashed,” Nilis said dryly.

“But you must remember,” Faya Parz said, “that this is a place of history, not just engineering. Many of those first starships were crewed not by explorers but by refugees.”

Nilis said, “You’re talking about
jasofts,
” he said.

Torec said, “Jasofts?”

“Or
pharaohs,
” Faya said with a black-toothed smile.

It was an ancient, tangled, difficult story.

Nilis said, “Before the Qax Occupation, aging was defeated. The Qax withdrew the anti-agathic treatments and death returned to Earth. But some humans, called jasofts or pharaohs, were rewarded for their work for the Qax with immortality treatments—the Qax’s own this time. Made innately conservative by age, selfish and self-centered, utterly dependent on the Qax—well. Those new immortals were ideal collaborators.”

Faya Parz said unemotionally, “That’s judgmental. Some would say the jasofts ameliorated the cruelty of the Qax. Without them, the Occupation would have been much more severe. Nothing of human culture might have survived the Qax Extirpation. The species itself might have become extinct.”

Gramm waved his hand. “Or the jasofts were war criminals. Whatever. It’s a debate twenty thousand years old, and will never be resolved. When the Occupation collapsed, the new Coalition hunted down the last jasofts.”

Nilis nodded. “And so ships like the
Mayflower
were built, and crews of jasofts fled Sol system. Or tried to. We don’t know the meaning of the name, by the way:
Mayflower.
Perhaps some archaic pre-Occupation reference. . . . In the end, Port Sol itself became one of the last refuges of jasofts in Sol system.”

With an almost soundless footstep, Luru Parz approached them. She said, “And of course it all had to be cleaned out, by the fresh-faced soldiers of the Coalition.”

Gramm snapped, “Did you bring us here to shock us with this revolting bit of history, Luru Parz?”

“You know why you’re here, Minister,” Luru Parz said, and she laughed in his face.

Gramm said nothing. But as he glared at Luru Parz, his eyes burned bright with hatred.

The ostensible purpose of this long trip was a discussion of the future of Nilis’s Project Prime Radiant. So Luru Parz led Nilis, Gramm, and Pila to a conference room, leaving Pirius and Torec in the charge of Faya Parz.

Faya asked if the ensigns wanted to rest, but they had spent days cooped up on a corvette, and were anxious to see the rest of Port Sol. Faya complied with good grace.