Stephen Baxter: Resplendent

There was nobody about. The Ascendent was quiet as she wandered around the circular profile of one vanished wall.

Symat asked, ‘Luru, why have you brought us here?’

‘I think this place means something to her,’ Mela said. She guessed, ‘Did you grow up here, Luru? Were you born here?’

Luru’s face remained impassive, but she nodded. ‘Yes, I was born here, or rather in the ruins of a still older city on this site – born in a tank, actually, for that was the way in those days.’

Symat found it hard to imagine Luru Parz ever having been young, ever being born .

‘The whole of the Earth was in the grip of alien conquerors. They built this city, erasing the ruins. They called it Conurbation 5204. These circles you see were the bases of domes of blown rock. The place was beautiful, in its way. There were plenty of places to play, for me and my cadre siblings.’

‘It was home,’ Mela said.

‘Oh, yes. Even a prison becomes a home.’

The Curator looked at her almost with compassion. ‘You never told me any of this.’

‘You were told what you needed to know,’ Luru said harshly. ‘I worked here, for an agency called the Extirpation Directorate. My job was to erase the human past. We humans were useful to our conquerors, but troublesome. To detach us from our history, to strip away our identity, was their strategy to control us.’

Symat felt disgusted. ‘And you did this work for them?’

‘I had no choice,’ she murmured. ‘And the work was challenging, intellectually. To eradicate is as satisfying as to build, if you don’t think beyond the act itself. Of course we failed. Look around you!’ She laughed and spread her arms; it was a grotesque sight. ‘Since the great levelling of those days, more cities have been built on the foundations of the old, only to fall into ruin, over and over. History just keeps on piling up, whatever you do.’

Mela asked curiously, ‘Did you have children, Luru Parz?’

‘Not that I knew of. If I had I wouldn’t have lived so long. There is a logic in immortality.’

‘Lovers, then,’ Mela said. ‘You must have had lovers.’

Luru smiled. ‘Yes, child. One lover. But we fell out. He was a ragamuffin. He escaped the conquerors’ cities, preferring to live wild. We were on opposite sides of the argument on how to deal with the Occupation, you see. He died well, though. He died for what he believed in.’ She said this neutrally, her face blank.

Mela asked softly, ‘What was his name?’

Luru took a rattling breath. ‘Suvan. Symat Suvan.’

Symat’s mouth dropped open.

The Curator stared at him. ‘So now we know why you have been conjured into existence, boy.’ He laughed out loud.

The clustering artificial suns swarmed out of the sky, and night fell. There were still creatures on Earth that needed a cycling of day and night, it seemed. But the dark revealed a sky crowded with stars and weapons, with misty Saturn and swollen Sol.

Symat and his party returned to the flitter. Mela shared a cabin with Symat; she went to bed and seemed to fall asleep immediately. Symat could not settle. Too much strangeness was swirling around in his head – and nothing as disturbing as the fact that he had been named after the lover of an Ascendent, a man dead a million years.

When light began to seep into the sky, he slid out of the cabin without disturbing Mela. Outside the flitter the air was cool, but so dry there was no dew. The light was still an empty grey, and the dawn was complex, cast by multiple suns that swarmed restlessly over the horizon.

Luru Parz was standing in the shadow of the flitter’s wing, a silent pillar watching him.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘You’re young. You’ll survive … Look.’

Peering into the half-light, Symat saw movement. The dark shapes were animals, a herd shifting slowly across the plain beyond the city. One animal, younger, broke away from the rest, and he saw its silhouette more clearly. He counted two, four, six legs.

Luru said, ‘Interesting, isn’t it? This planet was the capital of a Galactic empire. Now most of it is abandoned and gone wild.’

‘I never saw an animal with six legs.’

‘I believe they are called “spindlings”. They are not native to Earth. And look at this.’ She walked a few paces away from the flitter to a patch of grass.

Symat bent down and ruffled the grass with his fingers. It was dry as a bone, but it was alive, adapted to the aridity. And as the light lifted a little more he saw that among the green blades was some kind of fibrous growth, deep black.

‘The green grass is probably native: there are lots of ways to exploit sunlight for energy, but using green chlorophyll is quite rare. Something to do with the spectrum of our sun, no doubt, before its modification by the photino birds. But that black mat is not a native, any more than a spindling. And – there!’ Luru pointed, almost eagerly. ‘See that?’

Symat saw a small shape moving through the miniature jungle of the grass. It had a silvered carapace, and he thought it might be a beetle. But then light speckled between its jaws.

‘Laser light?’

‘It’s descended from tiny machines designed to crop the grass. Now it follows its own evolutionary agenda. If you turn them out into the wild, even machines evolve, Symat.’

Symat thought of the bit of wild technology he had seen for himself on Mars: abandoned Virtual children, turned cannibal. And he remembered the slow liquid-helium native fauna of Port Sol, scattered by mankind to other cold worlds across the Galaxy.

Luru said, ‘Wherever they are deposited, living things, transported between the stars, even machines, find ways to combine, to form rich new ecologies. After a million years of spaceflight, every human world is like this. And even if mind disappeared from the Earth tomorrow, as long as the planet survives, you would be able to look at this interstellar mixing-up and say, yes, once people from this place reached the stars.’

‘But this isn’t the only trace of the past.’ It was Mela; small, composed, she walked out from the shadow of the flitter. The Curator followed her.

‘Oh, good,’ Luru said dryly. ‘Everybody’s up.’

Symat said, ‘What do you mean, Mela?’

‘The collapsed magnetic field. The thin air, the drained oceans.’ She jumped up and drifted back down to the ground, slow as a snowflake. Symat knew it was a Virtual illusion, but she made her point effectively: even Earth’s gravity had been reduced.

Luru sighed. ‘Earth got used up.’

Earth, home of mankind, had been the capital of an empire which had won a Galaxy, and beyond. And for all that time Earth itself had supported a surprisingly heavy burden of the resource load.

‘Earth was only rarely attacked, and never fell into enemy hands, after the lifting of the Qax Occupation,’ Luru said. ‘But its air, its precious water were scattered in ships across the Galaxy. Its metals were sucked from its deep interior. Its inner heat was tapped for energy.’

That was why the magnetic field had collapsed: as the planet’s heat had been drained its liquid core crystallised, and Earth’s magnetism failed. The internal cooling had also weakened the great mantle currents. So there were no more volcanoes or earthquakes, and the mountains currently eroding away were the last the old world would ever see.

Luru whispered, ‘In the final madness of their wars the engineers tapped into the planet’s ultimate energy store, its gravity well. They sucked out mass-energy – they reduced the effective mass of the planet. That is why you feel so light on your feet, Symat; that is why we are able to put up buildings so delicate they would seem more suited to a dwarf world like Mars. Earth is the little world that fought a Galactic war! But in the end it could give us no more.’