Exultant (44 page)

Pirius nodded slowly. “So why don’t you talk to him?”

“It is a question of nuances,” Nilis said. He reached out his big hands toward Pirius. “I’m not sure I understand
you,
you see. We discussed this before. Our backgrounds are so different! Of course nobody knows Pirius Blue as well as you do. Nobody will be able to understand his words, his body language—what remains
un
said—as well as you. This is
very
important. Listen to your time brother, Pirius Red; listen to his feelings. . . .”

Pirius took the assignment.

For the rest of the day, he sat in Nilis’s musty cabin watching Virtual recordings of Pirius Blue, more battered, more weary, even
older,
as he described his extraordinary jaunt into the core.

Pirius Red still felt a lingering resentment at this stranger from the future who had sent him into involuntary exile. But mostly, Red felt envy: envy for a man who had once more had the opportunity to carry out his duty in the most testing of circumstances, and envy for the companionship of his crew. Watching this scratchy Virtual report, Pirius Red felt shut out, denied.

At the end of the day, Torec and Pirius retired to their small shared room on the corvette. They didn’t speak.

Pirius stripped off his uniform and allowed it to slither into the closet. He got into his bunk, turned his face to the wall and closed his eyes, hoping for sleep. At least he wasn’t on Earth; at least he was back in space, and he could hear the comforting sigh of cycled air, feel the thrumming of the corvette’s drive.

He was surprised when Torec slid into his bunk.

He turned to face her. Her face was so close he could feel her breath on his cheek. Her eyes, dimly visible in the low light, were closed, her mouth tight shut.

He put his hand on her arm. He felt firm flesh and muscle. He whispered, “Things aren’t the same.”

He could feel her roll onto her back. “The trouble is, Pirius, things have changed for me. While you’ve been away, I’ve been
useful
.”

He knew that was true. There had been her work on the CTC processor, the test flights of the modified greenships, even this early work on the black-hole cannon. He remembered her confusion when they had first been brought to Sol system, when she hadn’t even wanted to get out of bed.

She said, “I know it’s chance that I’m here at all. It could have been anybody.” She shifted again. “Look, Pirius, I might have been brought here for you. But now I’ve found my own place. That’s what I’m trying to say. You can’t come swanning back and expect things to be as they were before.”

“I don’t think I ever did expect that,” he said.

“Then what?”

He shrugged. “I need you.”

She snorted. “Yeah. For sex.”

“Not just that.” He hesitated to say the word, knowing it sounded soft. “Company.”

She laughed. “What are you, a Coalescent drone? Life isn’t about company, Pirius. It’s about doing your job.”

Defensively he said, “Yes. But maybe we can help each other to be more effective. Have you thought of that?”

“What help do
you
need? It wasn’t even you who was sent into that weird other-place on Callisto.”

“It was a copy of me who went off and died, to spare me having to do it. Just as Pirius Blue is a copy of me, who saw friends die in action, who went back into the Core again—and because
he
lived through that,
I
won’t have to. All these copies of me, taken away to die. And I’m left standing here.”

“This talk is stupid.”

He whispered, “Or perhaps
I’m
not real. Pirius Blue could have died out there, at the magnetar.
What if he did die?
What if I’m just his ghost? Or perhaps I’m existing in somebody else’s memories, or dreams. Perhaps Pirius Blue dreamed of Earth before he died, and everything I think is happening to me is happening inside his mind, in the last fraction of a second before the starbreaker hits—”

“And maybe you’ve got your pointy head so far up your own ass it’s coming out the other end.” She pinched his kidney, hard enough to make him yelp. “Is that real enough for you?”

Before she could do it again he rolled over and grabbed her. Laughing, they wrestled. He finished up above her, with his hands locking her arms above her head. Her face was a pool of soft shadows beneath him; she looked very young.

He said, “You’re tougher than me. You always were. But don’t
you
feel . . . dislocated?”

“Well, a little. But you tell anybody back on Arches I said so, I’ll kick your butt.”

Hesitantly, he bent down, and kissed her, very softly, just brushing her lips. At first she was cold, unresponsive. Then she opened her mouth, and he felt the tip of her tongue on his teeth.

Once again the test rig was readied for a fresh shot at the patient Xeelee nightfighter.

It had been decided to try hooking up the CTC processor to the control systems of the test rig’s GUTdrive engines. It was possible that the CTC’s greater processing speed would permit the refinement of the control of the spacetime wave fronts sufficiently to get the result the designers wanted. Commander Darc railed at the foolishness of hooking up one experimental technology to another, but the CTC had already proven itself, in control of the grav shield. And as Nilis said, “Compared to the rest of this lash-up, CTC is a mature technology.”

The work proceeded fast. Torec had as much experience as anybody with CTC systems, and so she had been drawn back into the heart of the project. Pirius was left stranded on the observation deck of the corvette, watching the techs work on the modified rig. It was easy to spot Torec, with her bright red team leader’s armbands over her skinsuit.

Nilis stood with him. He waved a hand in the air, and brought up Pirius’s old Virtual sketch of the Project. The path to the Prime Radiant, the Xeelee barricade around it were green, the asterisk that represented the Radiant itself was glowing red. “What do you think, Ensign? Is today the day when we will find a weapon to strike at the Prime Radiant itself?”

Pirius was embarrassed by the hubristic sketch. “I hope so, sir.”

Torec’s voice sounded softly in Pirius’s ear. “Are you watching? Three. Two. One.” Pirius pressed his face to the hull.

Again he saw flexing spacetime permeate the crude rig of struts and GUTdrive engines, again those waves of distortion washed into the heart of the rig. But the distortions seemed stronger to Pirius this time, their crowding propagation somehow more urgent.

Purple-white light flared at the center of the rig, a glaring pinpoint. The framework itself pulsed and flexed, and struts snapped. But the frame held, and that central pinpoint cast shadows over its complex structure. The pinpoint of light was a black hole. It was about as massive as a Conurbation dome, crushed into a space the size of an electron, glowing through Hawking evaporation at a temperature measured in teradegrees. It was working, then: he held his breath.

For a second the black hole waited at the heart of the rig. The framework pulsed and cracked.

And then the dazzling spark leapt straight out of the frame and hurled itself in a dead straight line across space to the Xeelee. When it hit, the nightfighter seemed to fold over on itself, as if crushed by a vast fist.

For a long moment, nothing moved: the observers, Saturn’s broad disc, the crumpled Xeelee ship, the broken rig. Then, in Pirius’s monitors, remote cheering started.

Nilis said, “My eyes. I think we’ve done it.” He snapped his fingers. On Pirius’s diagram, the crimson asterisk turned bright green.

Chapter
34

Conurbation 11729!

It was a city known only by the number given to it by alien conquerors, but it was a number known throughout the Galaxy. This place had been the base of Hama Druz himself, twenty thousand years before. Ever since, it had been the beating heart of a human Galaxy.

And it was here that Nilis and his team came to confront the mighty power that had ruled all mankind since Druz’s day, the Interim Coalition of Governance, seeking its blessing to establish a new Navy squadron and to equip it with upgraded ships, with CTC processors and gravastar shields and black hole cannons—seeking its blessing to take Project Prime Radiant to the center of the Galaxy itself.

From the air the city looked almost ordinary, just another of the Qax’s inhuman clusterings of domes of blown rock. But the ancient blisters glittered with windows and balconies, the city was covered with a shining spiderweb of walkways and monorails, and steady streams of traffic, both intra-atmospheric and from space, washed through the ports that ringed the central dome cluster. The old Qax architecture was still the foundation of everything, but the sense of power here was palpable, even compared to the rest of Earth—power, and wealth.

The flitter landed at a small pad outside the largest of the domes. It carried only Nilis and his two ensigns, in their best dress uniforms. But even so, blue-helmeted Guardians insisted on coming on board the ship and subjecting each of them to whole-body searches that lasted long minutes. This massive dome housed the principal headquarters of some of the Coalition’s most powerful ministries and agencies, and there were plenty of enemies of the Coalition who would wish to do harm here, given a chance—not just alien foe, but human rebels. Back in Arches Base, such a thing would have seemed no more than a theoretical possibility, but this was Earth. The ensigns submitted silently.

At last they were released, and Nilis led them into the dome itself.

The tremendous enclosed space was flooded with light, and spectacular buildings soared in contemptuous defiance of the laws of physics. There were arches and T-shapes and inverted cones, their frames studded with inertial controllers and antigravity generators; some of them even floated. People hurried across the floor in streams, or along walkways that threaded through the air between the buildings. There was a hubbub of noise, a constant shouting; it was the sound of merged human voices, a million of them in this one dome alone.

And above it all the gray Qax shell loomed, a rocky sky. Beneath its grand curvature, light globes clustered like stars. Some of the floating buildings nuzzled against the shell of the dome itself; perhaps they had penthouses built through the dome, to reach the sky.

Pirius reached for Torec’s hand, and they clung to each other. It was a city designed for giants, not mere humans like themselves.

Nilis hurried, barefoot as ever, his arms full of data desks. “We mustn’t be late. Mustn’t be late! All Luru Parz’s morally dubious arm-twisting has won us is a hearing before Minister Gramm and his subcommittee. It has to go well today, this latest war of words, or all our technological achievements will count for nothing.”

At last Nilis brought them to a doorway. It was itself huge, but was a mere detail at the base of the building above it. This, said Nilis, was a center of the Grand Conclave itself, the Coalition’s supreme body.

In the foyer they were subjected to yet more searches, by yet more Guardians. Nilis wasn’t allowed to take any equipment beyond here, and he had to download his data from his bots and data desks into copies provided by the Guardians. He had been prepared for this, but he fretted at the continuing delays.

When they were released, they hurried across the foyer to a narrow, silver-walled elevator shaft. In this expensive machine there was no sense of acceleration; Pirius had no idea how high they climbed—or perhaps, descended.

The doors slid back to reveal a conference room. Nilis hurried forward, muttering apologies for his lateness. Pirius and Torec followed more slowly, eyes wide.

They were in another vast chamber, a rectangular box eight or ten meters high, and maybe a hundred meters deep. There must have been hundreds of people in this one room. It was dominated by a table, a single vast piece of furniture large enough to seat fifty. Every seat was occupied, with the portly figure of Minister Gramm at the head of the table, and his advisor Pila beside him. Behind those at the table itself were more rows of chairs; the attendees all seemed to have brought teams of advisors, in some cases stacked three or four rows deep. Bots hovered, drifting over the gleaming tabletop, serving drinks and topping up bowls of food.

It wasn’t the size of the gathering that startled Pirius, though, but the decor. The shining tabletop was deep brown, and obviously grained. It was that strange substance called
wood
. More panels of the stuff covered the walls, and even the ceiling. Pirius had never seen wood before he had come to Sol system. Evidently, somewhere on Earth, trees still grew, and gave up their strange flesh to rooms like this; it was hard to imagine a more powerful statement of wealth.

But the ensigns were dawdling, staring. Heads were beginning to turn, sophisticated mouths turning up with mocking smiles. Nilis frantically beckoned them. Shamed, Pirius and Torec hurried to the Commissary.

Commander Darc was already here. Sitting bolt upright, evidently uncomfortable, he ignored the ensigns. The three of them were Nilis’s only “advisors,” and rows of empty seats stretched behind them. But then, who else could Nilis have brought? Luru Parz, the jasoft? A Coalescent Archivist from Mars? A
Silver Ghost
? The marginal nature of Nilis’s project, and his motley crew of misfits, aliens, and illegals had never been more apparent than now, as it faced its greatest political test.

Nilis sorted through his data desks. He said to the ensigns, “I will make the presentation today. You shouldn’t have to talk.”

Pirius said fervently, “Good.”

“As far as I’m concerned you two are here to make a point with your very presence.
You
are what this war is about. You may be asked questions; there’s nothing I can do about that. If so, confer with me or Commander Darc before answering. That’s quite acceptable in terms of the etiquette of meetings like this.”

Torec whispered, “I thought we were only presenting to Minister Gramm.”

Nilis sighed. “I’m afraid life here at the center of the Coalition is a little more complicated than that, child.”