Stephen Baxter: Resplendent

My name is Luru Parz.

I was born in the year AD 5279, as humans once counted time. Now I have lived so long that such dates have no meaning. We have lost the years, lost them in orders of magnitude.

Nevertheless, I am still here.

I was born on Earth. But Earth was not human then.

It belonged to our conquerors, the Qax.

AD 5301

Before she was called into Gemo Cana’s office for her awkward new assignment, Luru Parz had never thought of her work as destructive.

Cana stood before the window, a portal whose natural light betrayed her high status in the Extirpation Directorate. Red-gold sunset light glimmered from the data slates fixed to the walls of the office. Beyond the pharaoh’s round shoulders Luru could see the glistening blown-silicate domes of the Conurbation’s residential areas, laced by the blue-green of canals.

And on the misty horizon a Qax ship, a Spline, cruised above occupied Earth, swivelling like a vast eyeball. Where it passed there rose a churning wave of soil and grass and splintered trees.

‘ Never ,’ Cana murmured. ‘You never thought of it that way, as destructive. Really? But we are destroying data here, Luru. That is what “Extirpation” means. Obliteration. Eradication. A rooting out. Have you never thought about that?’

Luru, impatient to get back to work, didn’t know how to reply. If this was some new method of assessment it was obscure, Cana’s strategy non-obvious. In fact she resented having to endure this obscure philosophising from Cana, who most people regarded as a musty relic cluttering up the smooth running of the Directorate. Among Luru’s friends and pushy rivals, even to report to a pharaoh was seen as a career impediment. ‘I’m not sure what you’re getting at.’

‘Then consider the library you are working on, beneath Solled Laik City. It is said that the library contains an ancestral tree for every man, woman and child on the planet, right up to the moment of the Occupation. You or I could trace our personal history back thousands of years. Think of that. And your job is to destroy it. Doesn’t that make you feel at least’ – Cana’s small hands opened, expressive – ‘ambiguous, morally?’

Cana was short, stocky, her scalp covered by silver-white fuzz. Luru, her own head shaven, knew nobody else with hair, a side-effect of AntiSenescence treatment, of course. Cana had once told Luru she was so old she remembered a time before the Occupation itself, two centuries back. To Luru, aged twenty-two, it was a chilling idea.

She thought over what Cana had said. ‘I don’t even know where “ Solled Laik City ” is – or was. What does it matter? Data is just data. Work is just work.’

Cana barked laughter. ‘With a moral void like that you’ll go far, Luru Parz. But not everybody is as – flexible – in their outlook as you. Not everybody is a fan of the Extirpation. Outside the Conurbation you will encounter hostility. You see a satisfying intellectual exercise in the cleansing; they see only destruction. They call us jasofts, you know. I remember an older term. Quislings.’

Luru was baffled. Why was she talking about outside ? Outside was a place for ragamuffins and bandits. ‘ Who calls us jasofts?’

Cana smiled. ‘Poor little Luru, such a sheltered life. You don’t even remember the Rebellion, do you? The Friends of Wigner—’

‘The Rebellion was defeated five years before I was born. What has it to do with me?’

‘I have a new assignment for you,’ Cana said briskly. ‘Do you know Symat Suvan?’

Luru frowned. ‘We were cadre siblings, a couple of dissolutions ago.’ And, briefly, lovers.

Cana eyed her; Luru sensed she knew everything about her relationship. ‘Suvan left the Conurbation a year ago.’

‘He became a ragamuffin?’ Luru wasn’t particularly shocked; Symat, for all his charm, had always been petulant, difficult, incompliant.

‘I want you to go and talk to him, about his research into superheavy elements … No, not that. None of that matters. I want you to talk to him about minimising pain, and death, for himself and others. He has got himself in the way, you see.’

Luru said stiffly, ‘I don’t think this assignment is appropriate for me. My relationship with Symat is in the past.’

Cana smiled. ‘A past you’d rather forget, a little Extirpation of your own? But because of that past he might listen to you. Don’t worry; this will not damage your glittering career. And I know that bonds between cadre siblings are not strong. They are not intended to be. But you might persuade this boy to save his life.

‘I know you judge me harshly, Luru, me and the other pharaohs. Just remember that our goal is always to minimise distress. That is the reason I work in this place. It is my job, and yours, to mediate the regime of the Qax. Humanity’s relations with its conquerors deteriorated after the Friends’ Rebellion. Without us things would be much worse still. Which is why,’ she said slowly, ‘I regret asking this of you – especially you, Luru.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Cana sighed. ‘Of course you don’t. Child, Jasoft Parz, the exemplar after whom our traitorous class is named, was your grandfather.’

Luru sat in the flitter’s small cabin, nervous, irritated, as the land peeled away beneath her.

From the air the spread of buildings, bubbles blown from scraped-bare bedrock, was glistening, almost organic. She could see the starbreaker-cut canals, arteries that imported desalinated water and food from the huge offshore algae farms and exported waste to the sink of the ocean. Down one canal bodies drifted in an orderly procession, glinting in plastic wrap; they were the night’s dead, expended carcases returning to the sea.

Conurbation 5204 had been constructed when Luru was ten years old. She remembered the day well; the construction had taken just minutes, a spectacular sight for a little girl. There was talk now that the Extirpation Directorate might soon be moved to a new location in the continental interior, in which case Conurbation 5204 would be razed flat in even less time, leaving no trace. That was how the Qax did things: deliberate, fast, brutal, clean, allowing not the slightest space for human sentiment.

It was a relatively short flitter hop to Symat Suvan’s research facility – short, but nevertheless longer than any journey Luru had taken before. And she was going to have to spend more time outside than she ever had before.

She didn’t want to do this at all.

Luru’s brief career, at the Extirpation Directorate in Conurbation 5204, had been pleasingly successful. She was working on a tailored data-cleanse package. The cleanser was to be sent into huge genealogical libraries recently discovered in a hardened shelter under the site known as Solled Laik City, evidently a pre-Occupation human city. The cleanser was a combination of intelligent interpretive agents, targeted virus packages and focused electromagnetic-pulse bursts, capable of eradication of the ancient data banks at the physical, logical and philosophical levels. The cleanser itself was of conventional design; the project’s challenge was in the scale, complexity and encryption of the millennia-old data to be deleted.