Exultant (16 page)

It was only in these ruins, half an hour’s hike from the development base, that she felt at ease. When she walked here, Earth’s bright blue was eclipsed by the broken masses of the walls, and she could imagine she was far away from here, not in Sol system at all. And the best thing was that the earthworm techs she had to work with never came here.

An alarm chimed softly in her helmet. The latest integration test was due to begin, a full-scale run of the CTC-processor prototype. It would go ahead whether she was there or not, of course. But she had her duty.

She turned, made for the open sunlight, and began to bound across the plain, legs working together in a comfortable low-gravity style.

She took her place on the low ridge that had been designated as an observation area. A countdown was proceeding, she saw, a silent flickering of numerals ticking away on monitoring displays. Techs stood patiently and bots hovered, waiting for the test to begin.

The prototype CTC processor was a maze of ducts, pipes, and tubes that connected anonymous silver-white boxes. It sprawled for more than half a kilometer over the dusty lunar plain. The ground was darkened by boot prints, but as the time of the test approached the area had been evacuated, and only monitoring bots hovered cautiously over the complex central tangle.

The prototype, gleaming silver and gold in the pure low sunlight of lunar morning, looked oddly beautiful, a scattered work of art. But Torec had come to hate this thing which governed her life.

Two Virtuals materialized, out of nothing. One was dressed in a skinsuit; the other, Nilis, was not. The Commissary, hovering a few centimeters above the lunar floor, wore nothing more than his customary scuffed robe, and his feet were bare. He had never been one for Virtual protocol, but this was actually illegal. Virtuals were supposed to “dress” suitably for the environment they showed up in; it cost nothing more than a little extra computing power, and to do otherwise risked fooling a real-life inhabitant of the target environment about conditions that could be lethal. But it was typical Nilis, Torec thought. As he watched the patient countdown, his gaze was intent, his hands clasping each other, his eyes hollow.

The other Virtual was of a woman, dressed appropriately in a skinsuit. She was tall, somehow elegant despite her functional clothing. Seeing Torec, she walked across to her, leaving no footprints in the lunar dust. “You’re the Navy child.”

Torec bristled. “I’m Ensign Torec.”

“My name is Pila. I work in the Ministry of Economic Warfare.” Her face was smooth, ageless; she gazed at Torec, apparently mocking. It was a look Torec had become very familiar with on Earth, and had come to despise.

“I met you once. You work for Minister Gramm.”

“I’m one of his advisors, yes.” Pila waved a hand at the prototype. “Very impressive. And it’s all based on time travel?”

“Closed-timelike-curves, yes.” Torec pointed to the ducts. “Pilot Officer Pirius—Pirius Blue—defeated the Xeelee because his fellow pilot used her FTL drive to bring tactical information back from the future. So we have miniature bots in those tubes. The bots are the components of the processor. They fly back and forth, and actually jump through short FTL loops.”

“Little starships in tubes! And these bots travel back in time and tell you the answer before you even pose the question?”

“Something like that.”

“How marvelous.”

The dummy problem they were hoping to run today concerned protein folding. Proteins were the structural elements of life, but remained beyond the capability of humans to design optimally. There were more proteins a hundred components long than there were electrons in the universe; to work out how many ways a long protein molecule could fold up was an ancient problem, previously insoluble even in principle. “But we hope to crack it,” Torec said. She pointed to a large blank Virtual screen. “The results will be displayed there.”

Pila eyed her analytically. “Are you enjoying your posting here, Ensign? On the Moon, this project?”

“I’m here to do my duty, ma’am.”

She nodded, her mouth pursed. “Of course. And you anticipate success?”

Torec had learned how to deal with smooth-faced bureaucrats and their slippery questions. Nilis had warned her severely that if she were pessimistic, or even overly optimistic, she could trigger the funding being pulled. “This is only the first step. A proof of principle. Eventually we will have to cram this down into a unit small enough to be carried on a greenship.”

“A clever answer,” the woman murmured. “And what is your key problem?”

Torec shrugged. “Control of those flying bots, obviously. We’ve a list of issues.”

Virtual Nilis, who had ignored them both completely, now clapped his hands in agitation. Torec saw that the silent count was nearing its close; Nilis, projected from distant Earth, could barely contain his anticipation. Even Pila turned to look.

The count reached zero. The Virtual screen stayed blank, empty of protein schematics.

In that first instant Torec knew the trial had failed. After all, the whole point of this FTL-computing exercise was to send the answer back in time to the beginning.

And an explosion flared at the center of the complex. Torec was briefly dazzled. Silent, brief, the detonation kicked up an unspectacular flurry of moondust that, with no air to suspend it, collapsed immediately back to the ground.

Torec blinked and looked around. On the lunar plain, the techs were already converging on the ruin of their prototype. Some of them, she could hear on the open loop, were actually laughing.

The woman Pila had already gone.

The Virtual of Nilis was glaring at her. She had never seen him look so angry. “In your quarters,” he snapped.
“Now.”
And he winked out of existence, leaving pixels sparkling briefly.

When she got back to her quarters she pulled off her skinsuit, dumped it in a hopper, and climbed into her shower.

Big droplets of water squeezed out of the spigot with infuriating low-g slowness. It was typical of the earthworms to install such a luxury in a place where water couldn’t even flow properly, where it would actually have been
better
to have been supplied with simple honest clean-cloths. But she slaked off her sweat, rinsed her hair, and washed moondust out from under her nails.

The project’s development was being carried out on the floor of an immense walled plain called Clavius. Though this had once been the site of a major industrial facility erected by the Qax, it was far to the lunar south, and so was still outside the scope of the current paraterraforming efforts, the vast domed colonies that were turning the Moon’s face green around the equatorial foot of the Bridge between Earth and its satellite.

For a month, Torec had been stranded in this airless, dusty place. Nilis had given her a small team of scientists and engineers, to progress his designs for a revolutionary new computer. It had done her no good to protest that she had been trained as a pilot; she was a fighter, not some kind of double-domed tech. Nilis said it was important that one of what he called his “inner team” be attached to this essential development.

So she had been put in charge of what was laughingly called the Project Office. It was her job, in theory, to make sure the techs here did their work to spec, to quality, and on time.

At first she had actually welcomed the move to the Moon. Unlike the Earth, the Moon was a
proper
world, in her view, a world without a freakish layer of unmodified atmosphere or surging bodies of open water. This was a world where, quite properly, if you stepped out of a dome you had to wear a skinsuit, and where if you fell over you weren’t likely to
break
anything—if you wanted high gravity you set an inertia field; that was the way it was supposed to be. She had even liked the look of the scenery, when Nilis had shown her images of Clavius from orbit, a spectacular crater formation with mountainous walls surrounding a cluster of settlement lights.

But it hadn’t turned out that way. For a start, the Moon itself was
not
like the rocky worlds she had encountered in the Core, where, thanks to the stars’ relentless crowding, few stellar systems were stable, and worlds wandered where they would. The Moon had spent five billion years stuck at the bottom of a star’s gravity well as the companion of a massive planet, and debris, sucked in by those overlapping gravity fields, had battered its surface until nothing was left. As a result, every mountain was sandblasted to a dunelike smoothness, and every scrap of the ground was covered by a thick layer of dust that crushed under your feet where you walked, or kicked up behind you, and stuck to your skinsuit until it was almost impossible to get off, no matter how hard you scrubbed.

And then there were the people.

Incredibly, she was the only person here born beyond the orbit of the Moon. Not only that, aside from a couple of essential-systems and security types, she was the only Navy personnel here. The rest of them, Ministry folk, were bureaucrats—
and
they were double-domes. From the beginning, they had looked on her as a bizarre, exotic creature from some alien realm, as if she weren’t human at all.

The double-domes had soon discovered that she knew little about their technical specialisms. When she tried to put her foot down, they would bluster and baffle her with jargon. And they squabbled among themselves, the whole time. From the start, the development team was organized into groups corresponding to subcomponents of the CTC processor itself, or else stages of the project: scoping, design, component prototyping, subassembly, integration. No matter how Torec tried, those groups soon became clannish, to the point where many of them wouldn’t even communicate with each other—even though their work would have to fit together seamlessly if the overall goal was to be reached.

It was a horrible frustrating mess. Soon Torec had come to hate the prototype, which developed into a baffling, mazelike complex of components that spread across the gray lunar dust. And she came to hate the techs in their expensive Ministry skinsuits, as they clambered over their equipment, prodding, tinkering, and arguing.

What was worse was that Torec really didn’t care about any of this. This wasn’t her life, her goal; she didn’t want to be here. And when the techs picked up on that they began to ignore her altogether.

She was here for Pirius, not for herself. That was the basic truth. As it happened, she had had feelings for Pirius, even before Nilis had shown up. She knew their relationship was special—though she wasn’t sure
he
understood it. But now things were different. She knew the situation wasn’t Pirius’s fault, but it was
because
of him.

She hated the Moon, her work, the people she had to deal with. She was very confused about her feelings for Pirius. And what was worst of all was that he wasn’t here.

When she came out of the shower, the Nilis Virtual was in the room.

His face was bathed in the light of an invisible sun, but he wasn’t looking her way. He had been uncomfortable in her company since that row on the corvette. He said, “Another disappointment, then.”

“Yes.”

The Moon-Earth time lag was small, but enough to be disconcerting until you got used to it. “If only we could use wormholes!”

“Commissary?”

“I know you’ve taken to hiking over to the ruins of the old Qax exotic-matter facility. But do you know why the Qax set up that factory? Because you can use exotic matter to make wormholes, superluminal bridges between two points in space and time. If you configure it correctly, a wormhole can be a tunnel to the past. In fact it was a
human
wormhole time-bridge that started our trouble with the Qax in the first place.”

Torec had heard some of the techs talking of those semilegendary, pre-Occupation times, and of
“Michael Poole,”
the great engineer who had built wormholes to open up Sol system, and past and future, too.

“Yes. Now, imagine if we could use wormholes to close our processor’s timelike curves, instead of these absurd toy spaceships we have flying everywhere! You know, it’s a Druzite myth that our progress is forever upward; the merest glance at your ruins shows that. If only Michael Poole were alive now! I’m sure he would have our prototype up and running in a day. Ensign, do you ever think that the people of the past were giants—that we are stunted, small by comparison?”

“No, sir,” she said defiantly. “We are the ones who are here, now. All we can do is our best.”

“Are you talking about duty again, Ensign?”

“Yes, sir.”

“’Our best.’” He turned to face her. She wondered how she looked to him: just another Virtual ghost, she supposed, palely lit, hovering in the air in his Conurbation apartment. “How do you feel about your work, Torec?”

She knew Nilis would not be satisfied with a bland evasion. “I can’t say I’m happy, sir.”

“You aren’t?”

“This isn’t what I’m trained for. I can see why you took Pirius to Earth; what he did—Pirius Blue—was astonishing. But I was only brought along to keep Pirius happy.”

Nilis sighed. “You feel trapped. Perhaps, you think, without my intervention, you would have ended your relationship with Pirius, moved onto somebody else. . . . You were in the wrong place and the wrong time, and so have ended up here.”

“Something like that,” she said. She kept her face blank. What did this old fool know? Anyhow, it was none of his business.

But as it turned out he did know rather a lot. “In fact,” Nilis said dryly, “you
wouldn’t
have broken up with Pirius.”

Her face was hot. “How can you know that?”

“Because I asked Pirius Blue. In that other, vanished timeline, Pirius Blue stayed with, ah, Torec Blue, shall we call her, until he left for his last fateful mission. For
two years,
Ensign. That was a factor in Captain Seath recommending you to come on this mission. She knew, too.”

Torec’s feelings were very complex. She didn’t like discussing her emotional life with this soggy old Commissary, and it made her uncomfortable to talk about a relationship she might have had, but now never would. “You’re talking about two years
I
won’t live through. Two years of choices
I
don’t get to make.”