Stephen Baxter - Resplendent

After a day of silent transit, their destination came swimming out of the dark.

It was just a lump of ice at first glance, maybe a couple of hundred kilometres across. Tinted an odd red-purple colour, it was only vaguely spherical. It was impossible to tell if the scars on its surface were natural or man-made, for the ice had obviously been heavily melted, and the ridges and crater walls were softened and slumped. But this island of ice was occupied. Symat saw lights, defiant green and white, gleaming in crater shadows.

And as the flitter skimmed low a spindly tower, kilometres tall, loomed above the crumpled horizon. It was absurdly out of proportion on this little world. When he looked carefully Symat saw a ghostly purple bloom at the top of the tower: rocket exhaust.

Even given the tower, this worldlet was hardly spectacular. But he had to admit he was impressed when Mela finally told him the name of this place. It was Port Sol.

‘That’s impossible,’ Symat said immediately. ‘Port Sol is a Kuiper object.’ An ice moon, one of a vast flock drifting far beyond the orbit of the farthest planets. ‘We’re inside the orbit of Saturn. What’s it doing here ?’

A Virtual popped into existence in the middle of the cabin. ‘I think I can answer that.’ It was a man, perhaps as old as Symat’s father, though it was hard to tell physical ages. But unlike Hektor he was short, squat, his limbs short and his belly large.

Symat resented this sudden intrusion. He snapped, ‘Who are you?’

‘Actually I don’t have a name. You can call me by my role, which is the Curator.’ Despite his persistent grin he looked like a curator. He was bald, and he wore an antique-looking robe, black, sweeping to the floor, its breast adorned with a green tetrahedral sigil.

Mela asked, ‘Curator of what?’

‘Why, of Port Sol, of course. One of mankind’s most precious bastions – and still a working place today.’

Symat said, ‘But Port Sol isn’t in the Kuiper Belt any more.’

‘No indeed. Now it swoops around a long elliptical path that reaches from Saturn all the way in to Earth’s orbit. It has been brought in from the dark, along with a whole flock of other outer-system objects. All for a purpose.’

‘Why are you so fat?’ Mela asked bluntly.

The Curator patted his belly, apparently not offended. ‘Do say what’s on your mind, child! In the cold, the rounder your shape is the better off you are. Ask a Silver Ghost! And out where Port Sol came from, believe me, it’s cold, even now. You’re Mela, aren’t you? There has been a lot of gossip in the Conclave about you. Metaphorically speaking, of course. You’re doing a good job. A lot of us are jealous.’ He reached out and ruffled Mela’s short-cut hair. She flinched back, glaring.

Symat said heavily, ‘Can’t you tell she doesn’t like that?’

‘Actually, no. I’m a little light on sentience programming. In the empathy area, in fact. Though I hope that what I lack in personality I make up for in charm. Of course I could be wrong about that. But how would I ever know?’ He laughed lightly.

Mela stared at him. ‘How can you be like that? Don’t you want more, to be whole?’

‘Not really. Believe me, when you see the job I have to do, you’ll understand why.’ Even now he kept smiling. ‘Welcome to Port Sol!’

Under the Curator’s effortless control, the flitter dipped and swooped over Port Sol’s eroded landmarks.

Every child in the system knew about Port Sol. It was itself ancient, a fragment of unprocessed rubble left over from the formation of Sol system. And its human history stretched far back too, almost as far back as man’s first tentative steps off the home planet.

‘Once they built starships here,’ the Curator said. ‘Before hyperdrive, even. They used the worldlet’s own water ice for reaction mass, digging out great pits like that one.’ The quarry he pointed out was a slumped hole in the ground, indistinguishable from a thousand others. ‘When hyperdrive came this place was bypassed for a while. But then, because it was so hidden away and forgotten, the first of the Ascendents came here.’

‘Ascendents?’ Symat asked.

‘Undying,’ Mela said immediately.

The Curator raised a thin eyebrow. ‘They’ve been called many names in their long history – jasofts, pharaohs – few of them complimentary. Ascendents isn’t so bad, I think: we are all their descendants after all … Whatever they’re called, I care for them. That’s my vocation! You’ll see, anyhow. You’ll meet them. They want to meet you , Symat.’

Symat tried to absorb that, and tried not to react to Mela’s obvious fear.

The flitter circled this little world rapidly, and soon they once more approached the mast, with the flare of blue light at its tip. Buildings clustered at the base of the tower, while machines like giant beetles dug a pit in the ice that sliced through the pale marks of older workings.

Symat said, ‘This is a rocket, isn’t it? And it’s pushing this moon.’

The Curator nodded. ‘Very perceptive. We’re actually at one spin pole of the moon – a good place to push.’ He pointed. ‘The engines are GUTdrives – one of mankind’s oldest technologies, immensely reliable. The exhaust is plasma, charged matter, the outflow shaped by magnetic fields. And, just like in those ancient starship engines, the stuff of Port Sol itself is being consumed as reaction mass. You can see how the engineering here has churned up the old surface. Aside from Earth itself, Port Sol is probably the system’s key historic site. But Ascendents care little for archaeology.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t if you could remember it all!’

Mela said, ‘So this is an Ascendent project.’

‘Well, of course. The mass of Port Sol is huge, and by comparison the rocket delivers only a small push. You have to keep shoving for a very long time before you can kick it out of its orbit. But that’s just the sort of long-term, dogged programme the Ascendents excel at.’

The rocket tower dropped behind the horizon, and the flitter swept down towards a plain of ice, heavily melted by the heat of multiple landings. Nearby was a cluster of domes, evidently their destination.

As the ground fled beneath the descending flitter, Symat spotted a slim black pillar, obviously artificial, standing in the middle of what looked oddly like a forest, ‘trees’ sculpted from ice. ‘Look, Mela. A transfer booth! Even here they are escaping.’

The Curator looked surprised. ‘Oh, that’s not for people . Did you imagine booths are just for humans?’ He told them that when Port Sol had first been discovered it had an indigenous fauna, slow-moving inhabitants of the deep cold with liquid helium for blood. ‘Once we farmed them; we transplanted them to other cold worlds. Somehow they survived a million years of cohabitation with mankind – even the dreadful summer we have brought to Port Sol by pushing it into the heart of the system. And now a booth has appeared, right in the middle of their Forest of Ancestors, and, with our help, the Toolmakers, the ones in their motile phase, are passing through to their own destiny. A slow process, I can tell you…’ He seemed surprised at their incomprehension. ‘There are many life forms in Sol system – or were, before we came along – but even now many of them survive. And as far as we can tell, every one of them with the remotest level of advancement has been supplied with booths so they can escape the destruction of the sun. Touching, isn’t it? And not only that, there are suggestions in the records that other species, driven to extinction long ago, have been provided with similar escape routes. The Silver Ghosts, for example … The booths are evidently part of a long-term rescue strategy, by whoever is responsible. It could be the Xeelee,’ he mused. ‘Some say it is. The Xeelee relish the diversity of life, and seek to protect it, even when it snaps at them, as we have…’