Stephen Baxter - Exultant

Torec nudged his elbow and pointed. A cluster of ships hovered maybe half a kilometer above the Ball’s surface in a cubical array, and Pirius saw the flicker of starbreaker beams and other weapons. Within the array he glimpsed a sleek shape, caged within that three-dimensional fence of fire, a shape with folded wings, black as night even in the glare of the cluster’s huge suns.

“Lethe,” he said. “That’s a Xeelee ship.”

“And that,” said Seath coldly, “is the least of your troubles.”

There was no time to see more.

The flitter dropped into a port. Even before the docking was complete, Seath was walking toward the hatch.

Pirius and Torec followed her into a bustling corridor. It was only a short walk through a hurrying crowd of engineers and facility managers to the Claw’s pit. And at the airlock Seath slowed, glanced at Pirius, and stood back to allow him to go ahead first.

This was Pirius’s moment, then. His pulse pounding, he stepped forward.

Three crew waited by the lock: one woman, two men. Dressed in scorched and battered skinsuits, their chests adorned with a stylized claw logo, they were clutching bulbs of drinking water. Pirius glanced at the woman — short, wiry, a rather sour face, though with a fine, strong nose. Pale red hair was tucked into her skinsuit cap. One of the men was heavy-set. His face was broad and round, his ears protruding; he looked competent, but somehow vulnerable. They were both grimy and hollow- eyed with fatigue. Cohl, he read from their nametags, and Tuta — or “Enduring Hope” according to a hand-lettered addendum. He had never met them, in his timeline, but he already knew these names from the foreknowledge briefings: they were his future comrades, whom he would choose for his crew, and with whom he would risk his life. He wondered who they were.

He was avoiding the main issue, of course.

The other man, the pilot, wasn’t tall, but he topped Pirius by a good half-head, and, under the skinsuit, was bulkier. Seath had told him that this version was aged nineteen, two years older — two more years of growing, of filling out, of training. At last Pirius looked the pilot in the face.

Time was slippery. The way Pirius understood it, it was only the speed of light that imposed causal sequences on events.

According to the venerable arguments of relativity there wasn’t even a common “now” you could establish across significant distances. All that existed were events, points in space and time. If you had to travel slower than lightspeed from one event to the next, then everything was okay, for the events would be causally connected: you would see everything growing older in an orderly manner.

But with FTL travel, beyond the bounds of lightspeed, the orderly structure of space and time became irrelevant, leaving nothing but the events, disconnected incidents floating in the dark. And with an FTL ship you could hop from one event to another arbitrarily, without regard to any putative cause-and-effect sequence.

In this war it wasn’t remarkable to have dinged-up ships limping home from an engagement that hadn’t happened yet; at Arches Base that occurred every day. And it wasn’t unusual to have news from the future. In fact, sending messages to command posts back in the past was a deliberate combat tactic. The flow of information from future to past wasn’t perfect; it all depended on complicated geometries of trajectories and FTL leaps. But it was enough to allow the Commissaries, in their Academies on distant Earth, to compile libraries of possible futures, invaluable precognitive data that shaped strategies — even if decisions made in the present could wipe out many of those futures before they came to pass.

A war fought with FTL technology had to be like this.

Of course foreknowledge would have been a great advantage — if not for the fact that the other side had precisely the same capability. In an endless sequence of guesses and counterguesses, as history was tweaked by one side or the other, and then tweaked again in response, the timeline was endlessly redrafted. With both sides foreseeing engagements to come for decades, even centuries ahead, and each side able to counter the other’s move even before it had been formulated, it was no wonder that the war had long settled down to a lethal stalemate, stalled in a static front that enveloped the Galaxy’s heart.

For Pirius, it was like looking in the mirror — but not quite.

The architecture was the same: a broad face, symmetrical but too flat to be good-looking, with sharp blue eyes and a mat of thick black hair. But the details were different. Under a sheen of sweat and grime, the pilot’s face was hard, the eyes sunken. It was as if the bones of his skull had pushed out of his flesh. He looked much older than nineteen, much more than two years older than Pirius.

In that first glance, Pirius quailed from this man. And yet he was so familiar, so like himself, and he felt drawn.

He held out his hand. The pilot took it and clasped firmly. It was an oddly neutral feeling, like holding his own hand; the pilot’s skin seemed to be at precisely the same temperature as Pirius’s own.

“I saw the Xeelee ship you brought back,” Pirius ventured. “Quite a trophy.”

“Long story,” said the pilot. He didn’t sound interested, in the Xeelee or in Pirius. His voice sounded nothing like Pirius’s own, in his head.

“So I get to be a hero?”

The pilot looked mournful. “I’m sorry,” he said, apparently sincerely.

That bewildered Pirius. “For what?”

There was a heavy hand on his shoulder. He turned and found himself facing a bulky man with the long black robes and shaven head of a Commissary.

“Pirius — both of you! — I’ve been assigned as your counsel in the trial,” the Commissary said. “My name is Nilis.”

Even at this moment of confusion Pirius stared. Arches was for young people; with white stubble, his face jowly, his skin pocked with deep pores, this Commissary was the oldest person Pirius had ever seen. And he was none too smart — his robe seemed to have been patched, and its hem was worn and dirty. Behind him were two more Commissaries, who looked a lot less sympathetic.

Nilis’s eyes were strange, blue and watery, and he looked on Pirius and the pilot with a certain soft fascination. “You’re so alike! Well, of course you would be. And both so young… Temporal twins, what a remarkable thing, my eyes! But how will I tell you apart? Look — suppose I call you” — the older pilot — “Pirius Blue. Because you’re from the future — blueshifted, you see? And you will be Pirius Red. How would that suit you?”

Pirius shook his head. Pirius Red? That wasn’t his name. Suddenly he wasn’t even himself any more. “Sir — Commissary — I don’t understand. Why do I need a counsel?”

“Oh, my eyes, has nobody explained that to you yet?”

The pilot — Pirius Blue — stepped forward, irritated. “Come on, kid, you know the drill. They’re throwing the book at me for what happened aboard the Claw. And if they are charging me—”

Pirius had heard rumors of this procedure but had never understood. “I will be put on trial, too.”

“You got it,” said his older self neutrally.

Pirius was to be tried for a crime that he hadn’t even committed yet. Confused, scared, he turned around looking for Torec.

Torec shrugged. “Tough break.” She seemed withdrawn, as if she were trying to disengage from him and the whole mess.

Pirius Blue was looking at him with revulsion. “Do you have to let your jaw dangle like that? You’re making us both look bad.” He brushed past Pirius and spoke to Captain Seath. “Sir, where do I report?”