Resplendent Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  PART ONE - RESURGENCE

  CADRE SIBLINGS - AD 5301

  CONURBATION 2473 - AD 5407

  REALITY DUST - AD 5408

  ALL IN A BLAZE - AD 5478

  PART TWO - THE WAR WITH THE GHOSTS

  SILVER GHOST - AD 5499

  THE COLD SINK - AD 5802

  ON THE ORION LINE - AD 6454

  GHOST WARS - AD 7004

  THE GHOST PIT - AD 7524

  PART THREE - ASSIMILATION

  LAKES OF LIGHT - AD 10,102

  BREEDING GROUND - AD 10,537

  THE DREAMING MOULD - AD 12,478

  THE GREAT GAME - AD 12,659

  PART FOUR - RESPLENDENT

  THE CHOP LINE - AD 20,424

  IN THE UN-BLACK - AD 22,254

  RIDING THE ROCK - AD 23,479

  PART FIVE - THE SHADOW OF EMPIRE

  MAYFLOWER II - AD 5420-24,974

  BETWEEN WORLDS - AD 27,152

  PART SIX - THE FALL OF MANKIND

  THE SIEGE OF EARTH - c. AD 1,000,000

  TIMELINE

  Also by Stephen Baxter

  from Gollancz:

  Non-Fiction

  Deep Future

  Fiction

  Mammoth

  Longtusk

  Icebones

  Behemoth

  Reality Dust

  Evolution

  The Web

  Gulliverzone

  Webcrash

  Destiny’s Children:

  Coalescent

  Exultant

  Transcendent

  Resplendent

  A Time Odyssey (with Arthur C. Clarke)

  Time’s Eye

  Sunstorm

  Time’s Tapestry

  Emperor

  Conqueror

  In Weidenfeld & Nicolson

  Non-fiction

  Revolutions in the Earth

  Resplendent

  STEPHEN BAXTER

  Orion

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  A Gollancz ebook

  Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2006

  All rights reserved

  The right of Stephen Baxter to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2006

  by Gollancz

  An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group

  Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane, London WC2H 9EA

  This edition published in Great Britain in 2007 by Gollancz

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library.

  eISBN : 978 0 5750 9526 7

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  This ebook produced by Jouve, France

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF PREVIOUS PUBLICATIONS

  One

  ‘Cadre Siblings’, first published in Interzone 153, 2000.

  ‘Conurbation 2473’, first published in Live without a Net, ed. Lou Anders, Tor Books, August 2003.

  ‘Reality Dust’, first published by PS Publishing, 2000.

  ‘All in a Blaze’, first published in Stars: Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian, ed. Mike Resnick and Janis Ian, Daw Books, 2003.

  Two

  ‘Silver Ghost’, first published in Asimov’s, September 2000.

  ‘The Cold Sink’, first published in Asimov’s, August 2001.

  ‘On the Orion Line’, first published in Asimov’s, October 2000.

  ‘Ghost Wars’, first published in Asimov’s, January 2006.

  ‘The Ghost Pit’, first published in Asimov’s, July 2001.

  Three

  ‘Lakes of Light’, first published in Constellations, ed. Peter Crowther, Tekno Books, 2005.

  ‘Breeding Ground’, first published in Asimov’s, February 2003.

  ‘The Dreaming Mould’, first published in Interzone 179, 2002.

  ‘The Great Game’, first published in Asimov’s, March 2003.

  Four

  ‘The Chop Line’, first published in Asimov’s, December 2003.

  ‘In the Un-Black’, first published in Redshift, ed. Al Sarrantonio, Penguin Putnam, 2001.

  ‘Riding the Rock’, first published by PS Publishing, November 2002.

  Five

  ‘Mayflower II’, first published by PS Publishing, August 2004.

  ‘Between Worlds’, first published in Between Worlds, ed. Robert Silverberg, SF Book Club, September 2004.

  Six

  ‘The Siege of Earth’, previously unpublished.

  All material revised for this volume.

  For my grandfathers,

  Private Frederick William Richmond,

  20th Battalion the King’s Regiment (the Liverpool Pals),

  1914-1917,

  and Company Sergeant-Major William Henry Baxter,

  King’s Own Shropshire Light Infantry, 1903-1919.

  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.

  PART ONE

  RESURGENCE

  CADRE SIBLINGS

  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 ma
tter? 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.

  The work was stretching, competitive, deeply satisfying to Luru, and a major progression along her career path within the Extirpation Directorate. In fact she had been promoted to cadre leader for this new project, at twenty-two her first taste of real responsibility. And she resented being dragged away from her work like this, flung halfway across the continent, all for the benefit of a misfit like Symat Suvan.

  She tried to distract herself with her notes on superheavy elements, Symat’s apparent obsession.

  There was a natural limit to the size of the nucleus of an atom, it seemed. A nucleus was a cluster of protons whose positive electrical charges tended to drive them apart. The protons were held together by a comforting swarm of neutrons - neutral particles. Larger nuclei needed many neutrons to hold them together; lead-208, for example, contained eighty-two protons and a hundred and twenty-six neutrons.

  The gluing abilities of the neutrons were limited. It was once believed that no nucleus could exist with more than a hundred or so protons. But some theorists had predicted that there could be much larger nuclear configurations, with certain special geometries - and these were eventually discovered. The lightest of the superheavy nuclei had a hundred and fourteen protons and a hundred and eighty-four neutrons; the most common appeared to be an isotope called marsdenium- 440, with a hundred and eighty-four protons and a crowd of two hundred and fifty-six neutrons. But there were much heavier nuclei still, with many hundreds of protons and neutrons. These strange nuclei were deformed, squashed into ellipsoids or even hollowed out . . .

  She put down her data slate. She found it hard to concentrate on such useless abstractions as this corner of physics - and she didn’t understand how this could have absorbed Symat so much. She did wonder absently why ‘marsdenium’ had that particular name: perhaps ‘Marsden’ or ‘Marsdeni’ was the name of its discoverer. Such historical details were long lost, of course.

  As the flitter neared the top of its suborbital hop the curving Earth opened up around her, a rust-red land that glimmered with glassy scars - said to be the marks of humanity’s last war against the Qax, but perhaps they were merely the sites of deleted Conurbations. A Spline craft toiled far beneath her, a great blister of flesh and metal ploughing open a swathe of land, making its own patient, devastating contribution to the Extirpation.

  Her flitter drifted to the ground, a few hundred metres from Symat Suvan’s exotic matter plant. She emerged, blinking, beneath a tall sky. Far from the rounded chambers of the Conurbation, she felt small, frail, exposed.

  This was a place called Mell Born. It had been spared the starbreaker ploughs so far, but even so nothing remained of the land’s pre-Occupation human usage save a faint rectangular gridwork of foundations and rubble. The place was dominated by a single structure, a giant blue-glowing torus: a facility built and abandoned by the Qax. Now it was occupied by a handful of ragamuffins who called themselves scientists - there were no scientists in the Conurbations. The humans had even built themselves a shanty town, an odd encrustation around the huge Qax facility.

  Symat Suvan was here to meet her. He was tall, gaunt, looming, agitated, his eyes hollow; his bare scalp was tanned a pale pink by the unfiltered sun. ‘Lethe,’ he snapped. ‘You.’

  She was dismayed by his hostility. ‘Symat, I’m here to help you.’

  He eyed her mockingly. ‘You’re here to destroy me. I always knew you would finish up like this. You actually liked running the mazes the Qax built for us - the tests, the meaningless career paths, the competitions between the cadres. Even the Extirpation is jus
t another pleasing intellectual puzzle to you, isn’t it, in a lifetime of puzzles? Oh, the Qax are smart rulers; they are exploiting your talents very effectively. But you don’t have any idea what your work means, do you? . . . Come with me.’ He grabbed her hand, and pulled her towards the curved electric blue wall of the facility.