Stephen Baxter - Resplendent

It was a typical undying project, on immense timescales, but low-tech. But you had to keep a sense of perspective, Symat thought. Where the Xeelee had blocked the light of suns across a supercluster of galaxies, all humans could manage was to nudge one little world across Sol system.

And in the end even this monumental exercise in persistence hadn’t been enough. The immortals had saved Earth from the expansion of its sun. Now the Xeelee had come to Sol system, and a new danger loomed.

But again, it seemed, the undying had been preparing.

The three of them continued to walk among the ranks of immortals, each in her station, each with her number.

As they passed the dimly stirring figures, the Curator kept smiling.

Symat asked curiously, ‘Why do you grin like that?’

‘None of them can see well. But many of them respond to simple shapes.’

‘A smiling human face,’ said Mela, wondering. ‘Like a baby. A baby can recognise a smiling face almost as soon as it’s born.’

‘Yes. Remarkable, isn’t it? As if life is a great circle. That’s why we smile all the time.’ He tapped the green tetrahedron on his breast. ‘A lot of them seem comforted to see this too. We’re not sure why. It must be a very ancient symbol, of something.’

Symat asked the Curator about the medical-station numbers.

‘They are for our purposes. We number them in order of age, as best we can. When one dies you have to renumber those younger – though young scarcely seems appropriate for creatures such as these! – but there are so few it isn’t a great burden.’

As they walked the age numbers fell away, below twenty, fifteen, and at last to single figures. Symat felt his heart unaccountably thump. And then the Curator brought them to a bed, where a short, slim form lay, obscured by her translucent tent. The bed was adorned by a single digit: 1.

‘The oldest,’ Mela breathed.

‘She has been called many names,’ the Curator said. ‘ Leropa, Luru Parz , other variants; perhaps one of these is her original given name. If she knows she won’t tell us. She claims to know the date of her birth, but it’s so long ago we can’t reconcile her dates with current chronologies more precisely than within five thousand years … Take a good look, Symat. She is certainly the oldest human being any of us will ever see. She is probably a million years old. Think of that!’

Suddenly the woman’s eyes flickered open. Mela gasped.

Symat stepped forward, his pulse hammering in his ears. And as he came by the bed a hand like a claw shot out to grab his wrist. He forced himself not to flinch, for fear he might snap bones like dry twigs.

Her black eyes were on him. She opened a ruined mouth and whispered, ‘There are questions you need to ask.’

To a fourteen-year-old she was a figure from a nightmare. But her leathery palm was warm on his skin. She was old, she was very strange, but she was human, he could feel that. ‘I don’t know how it must be,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘To be like you.’

She closed her eyes briefly; he could actually hear the dry skin rustle on her eyeballs. ‘If you knew how many times I have been asked that … I have thought the same thoughts so often they don’t need me to think them any more. Perhaps I am a robot, then. Certainly I am no longer human, if I ever was, since the moment I took that pill given me by Gemo Cana, that murderous witch…’

‘Who?’

‘But that is why I am valuable, you see. I and my kind. For, long after love and hate are gone, even after meaning is lost, we keep on and on and on. And, given enough time, we achieve greatness.’

‘You moved the Earth.’

‘Yes. A human Galaxy was just a dream. Earth is the home of man, and as long as Earth exists, man will endure.’

‘But it isn’t enough,’ Symat said.

‘No. Because the Xeelee are here.’

‘People are fleeing. The booths—’

Her face, a mask of imploded skin, crumpled a little, showing disgust. ‘The booths. A solution for cattle bred for defeat, beaten before they are even born. Have you ever heard of Original Sin?’

‘No.’

‘Child, you know there is a better way. And that is why you must go to Saturn.’

His mind was reeling. ‘I don’t know anything about Saturn. What must I do there?’

‘You will know,’ she said. She fell back on her pillow, her eyes closing, but she kept hold of his arm. ‘It is why I made you, after all…’

Symat, electrified, astonished, could only stare at her.

Port Sol fell away into the dark. Symat and Mela were travelling ahead of the ice moon on its endless cycling trajectory between the spheres of Earth and Saturn, but where Port Sol took years to complete a single orbit, the flitter would take only days.

And now the flitter had a third passenger. The Curator wore his antique robe with its tetrahedral sigil, and his broad face was fixed with his habitual smile. But as Port Sol dwindled to a point of crimson light Symat thought he saw fear in his Virtual eyes.

It had been Mela’s idea to bring him. ‘You might be able to help us,’ she had told him. ‘You know this Luru. You might be able to figure things out.’

‘I’m a Curator,’ he had protested. ‘I keep these human museum pieces alive. I’m not designed to interpret their mad ramblings.’ But Mela had kept on, pressing him to come.

Symat was reluctantly fascinated by this exchange. He reminded himself that they were both expressions of a much vaster interlinked awareness. As the Curator and Mela argued it was as if he was listening to the internal debate of a single mind.

They certainly weren’t human, not even Mela; Symat was the only human here. And as the darkness closed in on the ship he felt increasingly alone, and far from home.

The flitter had internal partitions you could turn opaque, and he shut himself up inside a little boxy room. He didn’t want to deal with the Curator and his resentful wittering, and he didn’t much even want to be with Mela.

After a day of this Mela asked to see him. He wouldn’t let her in, so she just walked through the walls, protocol warnings sounding. She shook her arms and flexed her fingers until all her rogue pixels had settled back into place. ‘That hurt.’

Symat was lying on a pallet. ‘Then don’t do it.’

She sat down uncertainly. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing.’ He had been reading, watching silly kids’ Virtuals, stuff he had liked years ago. Now he felt oddly self-conscious and shut it all down.

She asked, ‘You want to play a game?’

‘No, I don’t want to play a stupid game.’

‘What’s the matter with you? You’re not much fun.’

‘I don’t feel like fun . I feel—’

‘What?’

‘I’m sick of being pushed around. My parents wanted me to follow them into the booths. So I ran away. But then the Conclave got hold of me, through you. Now I find this stupid old woman, Luru, who says she planned me for some purpose long before I was even born . And I’ve ended up coming all the way out here, into the dark.’

‘Welcome to my world,’ Mela snapped. ‘That’s how I feel all the time. The Curator too, probably.’

‘You aren’t human.’

‘But we’re sentient,’ she hit back. ‘Is that how you think of me, just a part of some kind of trap?’

He flinched. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.’

She softened a little. ‘Anyway, Virtual or human, what difference does it make? Look around, Symat. Everything is old. Everything in the universe has been shaped by humans, or their enemies. Every important decision was made long ago. So we have very little choice about things. My mother used to feel the same way,’ she said, a little wistfully.