Stephen Baxter: Resplendent

The flitter, in utter silence, tipped back and lifted her up towards the edge of space.

The sky deepened to violet, and her racing heart slowed.

She tried to work out what had happened. There must have been a cache of the strange, ancient supernova creatures, she decided, drawn there by Symat’s superheavy-element bait. Perhaps the eruption had been purely a matter of physics, a response to the sudden release of pressure when the upper levels of the crust were stripped away. Or perhaps that great blow against the Spline had been deliberate, a conscious lashing out, a manifestation of the rage of those ancient creatures at this disturbing of their aeons-long slumber.

And now, all around the sky, she could see more Spline entering the atmosphere: four, five, six of them, great misty moons descending to Earth. A fine dust pulsed from them in thin, silvery clouds, almost beautiful. The dust spread through the air, settling quickly. Where the glittering rain touched, the land began to soften, the valleys to subside, the hills to erode. It was shockingly fast.

This was the wrath of the Qax. The overlords had learned not to hesitate in the face of human defiance. And this nanotechnological drenching would leave the planet a featureless beach of silicate dust.

She took the translucent tablet from a pocket of her skinsuit. The scrap of Qax technology gleamed, warm. She thought of the wizened, anguished face of Gemo Cana, of Symat’s vibrant, passionate sacrifice. You must make your choice, Luru Parz .

I am too young, she thought. I have nothing to remember. Nothing but what was done today.

As the mountains of Earth crumbled, she swallowed the tablet.

We endured another century of the Qax.

When their reign ended it happened quickly, the result of an event far from Earth, the actions of a single human, a man called Bolder.

For all our conspiring, I think we never really believed the Qax would leave.

And we certainly never imagined we would miss them when they were gone.

AD 5407

Rala knew there was something wrong.

For days, all around Conurbation 2473 there had been muttered rumours. A cell of counter-Extirpationists had been found hoarding illegal data. Or a group of cultists were planning an uprising, like the failed Rebellion decades ago. Rala just wanted to get on with her work. But everybody got a little agitated.

It all came to a head one morning.

The room lights came on as usual to wake them up, But when their supervising jasoft didn’t come to collect them for work, Rala quickly got uneasy.

Rala shared her tiny room with Ingre, a cadre sibling. The room was just a bubble blown in nano-engineered rock by Qax technology. There was nothing inside but a couple of bunk beds, a space to store clothes, waste systems, water spigots, a food hole.

Ingre was a little younger than Rala, thin, anxious. She went to the door – which had snapped open at the allotted time, as it always did – and peered up and down the corridor. ‘Luru Parz is never late.’

‘We’ll just wait,’ Rala said firmly. ‘We’re safe here.’

But now there was a tread, steadily approaching along the corridor. It was too heavy for Luru Parz, their controlling jasoft, who was a slight woman. Some instinct prompted Rala to take Ingre’s hand and hold it tight.

A man stood in the doorway. His skin seemed oddly reddened, as if burned. He wore a skinsuit of what looked like gold foil. And there was a thick thatch of black hair on his head. Nobody in the Conurbation, workers or jasofts alike, wore hair.

He wasn’t Luru Parz. He wasn’t from the Conurbation at all.

The man stepped into the room and glanced around. ‘All these cells are the same. I can’t believe you drones live like this.’ His accent was strange. Rala thought his gaze lingered on her body, and she looked away. She had never heard the word ‘drone’ before. He pointed at the panel in the wall. ‘Your food hole.’

‘Yes—’

He smashed the transparent panel with a gloved fist. Ingre and Rala cowered back. Bits of plastic flew everywhere, and a silvery dust trickled to the floor. To Rala this was literally an unthinkable crime.

Ingre said, ‘The jasofts will punish you for that.’

‘You know what this was? Qax shit. Replicator technology.’

‘But now it’s broken.’

‘Yes, now it’s broken.’ He pointed to his chest. ‘And you must come to us for your food.’

‘Food is power,’ Rala said.

He looked at her more closely. ‘You are a fast learner. Report to the roof in one hour. You will be processed there.’ He turned and walked out. Where he had passed Rala thought she could smell burning, like hot metal.

Rala and Ingre sat on their bunk for almost the whole hour, barely speaking. Nobody came to fix the smashed hole. Before they left, Rala scooped up a little of the silver dust and put it in a pocket of her robe.

From the roof the Conurbation domes were a complex of vast, glistening blisters. Rala had been up here only a handful of times in her life. She tried not to flinch from the open sky.

Today this dome roof was full of people. The Conurbation inhabitants, with their shaven heads and long robes, had been gathered into queues that snaked everywhere. Each queue led to a table, behind which sat an exotic-looking individual in a gold skinsuit.

Ingre whispered, ‘Which line shall we join?’

Rala glanced around. ‘That one. Look who’s behind the table.’ It was the man who had come to their cell.

‘He frightened me.’

‘But at least we know him. Come on.’

They queued in silence. Rala felt calmer. Living in a Conurbation, you did a lot of queuing; this felt normal.

Around the Conurbation the land was a plain that shone silver-grey, like a geometric abstraction. Canals snaked away to the horizon, full of glistening blue water. Human bodies drifted down the canals, away from the Conurbation to the sea. That wasn’t unusual, just routine waste management. But there did seem to be many bodies today.

At last Rala reached the front of the queue.

The stranger probably wasn’t much older than she was, she realised, no more than thirty. ‘It’s you,’ he said. ‘The drone who understands the nature of power.’

She bristled. ‘I am not a drone.’

‘You are what I say you are.’ He had a data slate before him, obviously purloined from a Conurbation workstation. He worked it slowly, as if unfamiliar with the technology. ‘Tell me your name.’

‘Rala.’

‘Rala, my name is Pash. From now on you report to me.’

She didn’t understand. ‘Are you a jasoft?’ The jasofts were human servants of the Qax who, it was said, were granted freedom from death in return for their service.

He said, ‘The jasofts are gone.’

‘The Qax—’

‘Are gone too.’ He glanced upwards. ‘At night you can see their mighty Spline ships, peeling out of orbit. Where they are going, I don’t know. But we will go after them one day.’

Could it be true – could the centuries-old Occupation be over, could Luru Parz and the other jasofts really have melted away, could the framework of her whole world have vanished? Rala felt like a lost child, separated from her cadre. She tried not to let this show in her face.

‘What was your sin?’ It turned out he was asking what job she did.

She had spent her working life in vocabulary deletion. The goal had been to replace the old human tongues with a fully artificial language. It would have taken a few more generations, but at last a great cornerstone of the Extirpation, the Qax’s methodical elimination of the human past, would have been completed. It was intellectually fascinating.