Stephen Baxter - Resplendent

Symat frowned. ‘What connections? Gravity?’

The Curator frowned. ‘That, and quantum wave functions, and, and – I can see it, I can’t say it! The ancients understood. If you use complex arithmetic to extend most theories of cosmology—’

Symat held up his hand. ‘Just tell me what happened.’

‘The Snowmen had a defensive system. They found a way of manipulating these cosmic linkages. A way to use them as a weapon.’

Symat barely understood enough to be amazed. ‘How?’

‘Does it matter? I guess you learn a lot in thirteen billion years.’

Thanks to its Mach-principle weapon the Snowflake was saved from the Assimilators, that first time. But the humans returned, of course, evaded the weapon, and took what they wanted. They used the technology of the Snowflake itself in their own information-storage systems across the Galaxy.

And they took away the strange global-manipulation weapons system, but that turned out to be much harder to understand. When it didn’t yield early results it was reduced in priority, shuffled from one research centre to another, until it became so obscure, despite its potency, that a clique of undying were able to spirit it away and develop it for their own purposes.

The Curator peered at Saturn uneasily. ‘And that , it seems, is what is held under those clouds. A weapon of last resort.’

‘But,’ said Symat, ‘what has this got to do with me?’

Suddenly Mela’s face worked, and the tone of her voice hoarsened. ‘We need you because the Guardians won’t listen to us. Is that clear enough for you?’

Symat was shocked. This time the intervention was crude, as if she had been possessed by a different personality altogether.

The Curator stepped forward and grabbed her arm, one Virtual handling another. ‘Ascendent. Show yourself. Leave this child alone.’

Mela spasmed, and her eyes rolled up in their sockets, showing white. She blurred briefly and broke up into a rough sculpture of blocky pixels. Then Mela stumbled backwards, reforming as she emerged from the cloud of pixels.

And from that mist of light a new figure coalesced. Suddenly there were four of them, and the flitter’s tiny cabin seemed very crowded.

The newcomer was a woman, dressed in a brown robe as drab as the Curator’s. Small, dark, her face was smooth – but Symat immediately saw that the smoothness was a sign of great age.

Black eyes fixed on Symat.

‘Ascendent One,’ the Curator breathed.

‘You can’t be Luru,’ Symat said immediately. ‘I saw her. She’s a dried-out skeleton. She could barely move.’

‘I’m a projection,’ the new Virtual said, unfazed. ‘I am as she was long ago. And my sentience overlaps with hers, though time-shifted.’

The Curator sounded uneasy. ‘Most of the Ascendents are conscious only briefly each day. It will take Luru, the real one, a long time to live through this Virtual’s experiences. But she has time, of course.’

‘Her will is mine,’ said the Virtual. ‘When I speak, she speaks. Remember that.’

Symat felt deeply disturbed. To see Mela split into two and give birth to this monstrous form was an unwelcome reminder of how strange all these Virtual creatures were, how inhuman – and how interconnected, their identities somehow flowing one into another. He gathered his defiance into a knot. ‘You told me the Guardians won’t listen to you.’

Luru eyed him. ‘They’ll listen to you, though.’

Symat felt the universe pivot around him, as if the Guardians’ strange cosmic weapons had been turned on him. ‘Me? I could command the Guardians?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘That’s why we bred you.’ She stepped closer to him and he thought he could smell her, a dry scent like a musty library. ‘I’ll show you,’ she said. ‘Come to Earth.’

So Symat’s strange odyssey ended on Earth, the planet of his most remote ancestors.

There was an Earth in Symat’s head, mistily imagined, a world of water and life, of blue and green. It had been taken out of Mars’s sky long ago, many generations before he had been born, and sent on its way to Saturn. It wasn’t something you talked about, the loss of the home world.

But the Earth that came looming out of the outer-system cold was not like that story-book vision. The mountains were worn down, and the sea floors were rimmed by banks of salt, drained save for dark remnant puddles. The air seemed thin, supporting only wispy traces of cloud. And though a few cities still glittered, the ground of Earth shone brick red, the red of Mars, of rust and lifelessness.

‘Earth has grown old,’ he said.

Luru was watching him, apparently interested in his reaction. ‘Old like its children.’

‘It is well guarded,’ Mela murmured.

‘There is nothing more precious,’ Luru said.

On its final approach to the planet the flitter cautiously descended through shells of automated sentinels, and artificial suns that swooped on low orbits, casting splashes of yellow light. Luru said that not all those satellites carried weapons. Earth’s magnetic field had failed. The sun was far away now, but the electromagnetic environment around a gas giant was ferociously energetic. Where nature failed, humans had to step in; and so devices orbited the Earth to protect it with new shields of magnetism.

The flitter ducked deep into the air, and the sky turned a muddy red-brown. Everybody stayed silent as the ground of Earth fled under the ship’s prow.

The cities were sparsely scattered, and Symat could see no logic to their positioning. Perhaps they had been placed along the banks of long-dried rivers, or at the shores of vanished oceans; the cities endured where geography had eroded away. Many of the buildings were airy confections of glass and light that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Mars. But these modern cities were fragile flowers that grew out of mighty ruins, covered by drifts of red dust.

Mela picked out patterns. ‘Look. Lots of those old ruins have got circles in them. See, Symat?’

She was right. Sometimes the circles were obvious, rings of foundations or low walls that could be kilometres across. In other places you could only spot the circles by the way other ruins fitted around them, filling up their interior spaces or crowding around their circumferences.

Luru’s eyes, black as night, gleamed bright as she peered out at this ancient architecture. Perhaps in these traces she saw some trace of her own long life, Symat mused.

In every city they passed over Symat spotted transfer booths. Even Earth, which Luru and her Ascendents had laboured so long to save, was draining of its people.

Wild things lived on the lands between the last cities. The flitter passed over what looked like plains of grass, even forests of stunted trees, and occasionally its passage scattered herds of animals. But there were swathes of vegetation that wasn’t even green.

The flitter at last swept over a southern continent that seemed even more worn-down than the rest, and came to rest at the outskirts of yet another city.

Symat deliberately jumped down from the hatch, falling a half-metre or so to the dusty ground. He fell slowly, though once his feet were planted in the dirt of Earth, invisible inertial systems ensured his weight felt normal to him. Gravity was indeed low here, he thought, somehow lower than Mars’s. But Earth, the mother world, had always defined the standard of gravity: how, then, could its gravity be reduced?

He looked around. The city was unprepossessing. You could clearly see the usual circular tracings, but the structures they had supported were razed to the ground. Amid these ancient foundation arcs stood only a small, shabby cluster of more recent glass buildings.