Exultant (21 page)

They began a slow circuit of the Pit of the
Mayflower.

The great domed quarry was surrounded by a ring of satellite domes, each much smaller, with further facilities beyond that. In the unpressurized areas beyond the domes Pirius recognized power plants, landing pads, clusters of sensors, telescopes peering up at the star-ridden sky. No weapons, though; evidently this ancient, enigmatic place was not expected to be a target, for the Xeelee or anybody else.

These were obviously modern facilities. The more ancient landscape of Port Sol—the old starship quarries, the fallen towns, the imploded domes—was tantalizingly hidden beyond a tight horizon.

The domes were mostly occupied by laboratories, study areas, and living quarters. But it was a bleak, functional environment. In the labs and living areas there was a total lack of personalization: no Virtuals, no artwork, no entertainment consoles, not so much as a graffito. There were tight regulations about that sort of thing on Arches Base—across the Druzite Galaxy, personality was officially frowned on as a distraction from duty—but despite their superficial sameness every bunk in every corridor on every level of a Barracks Ball was subtly different, modified to reflect the personality of its owner. Not here, though; the people who manned this place must have extraordinary discipline.

Not that there were many people here at all, as far as the ensigns could see. Once they glimpsed somebody working in a lab, a place of shining metallic equipment and anonymous white boxes. Overshadowed by immense Virtual schematics of what looked like a DNA molecule, Pirius couldn’t even see if it was a man or woman.

“Not many of us are needed,” Faya Parz said. “There are only twenty-three of us, including Luru Parz. But Luru Parz travels a good deal nowadays.”

Torec shivered. Pirius knew what she was thinking. To a Navy brat, used to the crowds of Barracks Balls, that was a terribly small number, this an awfully remote and isolated place: to think there were no more than twenty-two other humans within billions of kilometers. . . .

“The machines do all the work—even most of the analytical work. Humans are here to direct, to set objectives, to provide the final layer of interpretation.”

Torec said, “Don’t you get lonely? How do you live?”

Faya smiled.
You don’t understand.
It was a look Pirius had grown used to among the sophisticated population of Earth, but he suspected uneasily that here it might be true.

Faya said, “We have always been an odd lot, I suppose. An ice moon is a small place, short of resources. There were only ever a few of us, even in the great days. We would travel to other moons for trade, cultural exchange, to find partners—we still do. But there was no room to spare; population numbers always had to be controlled tightly. So marriage and children were matters for the community to decide, not for lovers.” Her voice was wistful, and Pirius wondered what ancient tragedies lay hidden beneath these bland words. “You know, in the olden days there were floating cities. There was dancing.”

Oddly, she sounded as if she remembered such times herself—as if
she
had once danced among these fallen palaces. Faya seemed heavy, static, dark, worn out by time, like a lump of rock from the Moon. It was hard to imagine her ever having been young, ever
dancing.

Torec asked, “What do you
do
here?”

Faya said, “We study dark matter.”

“Why?”

“Because Luru Parz seeks to understand alien tampering with the evolution of Sol system.”

Torec and Pirius dared to share a glance.
They’re all mad.

Pirius knew, in theory, about dark matter. It was an invisible shadow of normal matter, the “light” matter made of protons and neutrons. The dark stuff interacted with normal matter only through gravity. You couldn’t burn it, push it away, or harvest it, save with a gravity well. And it was harmless, passing through light matter as if it weren’t there. Pilots and navigators were taught to recognize its presence; sometimes great reefs of the stuff could cause gravitational anomalies that might affect your course.

Aside from that, dark matter was of no consequence. Pirius couldn’t see why anybody would study it.

But Faya showed them Virtuals. Sol system had coalesced out of a disc of material that had once stretched much farther than the orbit of the farthest planets. Most of the mass of the disc was now locked up in the bodies of the planets, but if you smeared out the planets’ masses, you got a fairly smooth curve, showing how the mass in the disc had dropped off evenly as distance from the sun increased, just as you’d expect.

“Until you get to Neptune,” Faya said. At the rim of the Kuiper Belt the actual mass distribution plummeted sharply. “There are many bodies out here, some massive. Pluto is one, Port Sol another . . . But they add up to only about a fifth of Earth’s mass. There should have been
thousands
of worldlets the size of Pluto or larger. Something removed all those planetesimals—and long ago, when Sol system was very young.”

She summarized theories. Perhaps the missing worldlets had been thrown out of their orbits by the migration of a young Neptune through Sol system, as it headed for its final orbit. Perhaps there was another large planet, out there in the dark, disturbing the objects’ orbits—but no such planet had been found. Or maybe a passing star had stripped the Kuiper cloud of much of its richness. And so on.

Pirius said, “None of that sounds too convincing.”

Faya Parz said, “If mankind has learned one thing in the course of its expansion to the stars, it is that the first explanation for any unlikely phenomenon is
life.
”

Luru Parz had come to this place to study the traces of that ancient plunder. Her first theory was that it could have something to do with dark matter. Dark matter was relatively rare in the plane of the Galaxy, and indeed in the heart of Sol system. “But it is to be found out here,” Faya said, “where the sun is remote, and baryonic matter is scarce.”

Pirius tried to put this together. “And you think there is life in the dark matter. Intelligence.”

“Oh, yes.” Faya’s eyes were hooded. “There is six times as much dark matter as baryonic in the universe. Everywhere we look, baryonic matter is infested with life. Why not dark matter? In the past, humans have studied it. We have some of the records. Luru even believes that a conflict between intelligences of dark and light matter is underway—an invisible conflict more fundamental even than our war with the Xeelee. The Qax destroyed much of our heritage, but there are hints in the surviving pre-Occupation records—”

“And this has something to do with the Kuiper Belt’s missing mass?”

“We haven’t ruled it out. But in the meantime we have found something stranger still.” Faya snapped her fingers. A Virtual image whirled in the air. It was a tetrahedron, Pirius saw, four triangular faces, straight edges. It turned slowly, and elusive golden light glimmered from its faces. But the image was grainy.

“What’s this?”

“It’s called the Kuiper Anomaly. Obviously an artifact, presumably of alien origin. It was detected in the Kuiper Belt long ago—before humans first left Earth, even. It was the size of a small moon.”

“Was?”

“By the time humans finally mounted a probe to study it, it had disappeared.” She snapped her fingers; the tetrahedron popped and vanished.

Pirius said, “So perhaps the missing planetesimals were used to manufacture this—Anomaly.”

“It’s possible. The mass loss looks about right, from what we know of the object’s gravitational field. But if so, it must have been there a long time, since the formation of the system itself.”

Torec said, “What was it for?”

“We’ve no idea.”

“Where did it go? Was it connected to the dark matter?”

Faya smiled. “We don’t know that either. We’re here to answer such questions.” She would say no more.

Pirius found it a deeply disturbing thought that some alien intelligence had built such a silent sentinel on the fringe of the system, long before humanity even as the sun was fitfully flaring to life. In fact, he felt resentful that somebody had used that immense resource for their own purposes. Those were
our
ice moons, he thought, knowing he was being illogical.

They completed the circuit of the Pit, coming back to where they had started. They longed to go further—to see more of Michael Poole’s heroic engineering, or even find the fabled Forest of Ancestors, where the native life-forms in their sessile forms waited out eternity. But they had work to do.

Regretfully, they returned to the conference room. It turned out to be set high on a gantry, overlooking the Pit of the
Mayflower.
It had a startling view of the gantries and cranes that had once built starships.

But nobody in the conference room was interested in the view. They were too busy with a tremendous row.

Luru Parz paced, small, cold, determined.

“In its day, the Coalition served a purpose. We needed a framework, guidance to help us recover from the terrible wasting of the Qax Occupation. But we quickly slipped into an intellectual paralysis. Do you not see that, Minister? Even now we look back over our shoulder at the past, the Occupation, the near-extinction of mankind. The Druz Doctrines are nothing but a rationalization of that great trauma. And since then, obsessed with history, we have sleepwalked our way into a Galactic war.

“But it can’t go on forever. Nilis sees that. We can’t keep up our blockade of the Core indefinitely. Now Nilis offers us a chance to win, to take the Galaxy. I’m not at all surprised you, Gramm, and your self-serving colleagues are seeking to sabotage his efforts. In fact I’m surprised you have given him as much support as you have. But it’s not enough. Gramm, you are going to give Nilis all the backing he needs—all the way to the center of the Galaxy.”

Gramm sneered. “Madam, this buffoon
has nothing.
Don’t you understand that yet? He is blocked! He has no way to defeat FTL foreknowledge, or to strike at the Prime Radiant itself.”

Faya Parz said, “Then we must help him. There may be answers.”

Gramm snapped, “
What
answers?”

“Mankind is very old; the past contains many secrets. . . . This is a treasure which the Coalition chooses to ignore. We believe that somewhere in this deep heritage we may well discover the key to unlocking the final puzzles.”

Nilis rammed his fist into the palm of his hand. “You’re right. Yes!
That’s
where we must go next.”

Pirius said, “Where?”

Nilis said, “Why, to Mars. To the Secret Archive of the Coalition.”

Torec whispered to Pirius, “What Secret Archive? I don’t like this talk.”

“Nor me.”

Pila, Gramm’s advisor, had been showing increasing irritation. Now she seemed to lose patience. “Why are we listening to this heretical nonsense? What hold does this woman have over us, Minister?”

Luru Parz smiled. “Why don’t you tell her, Gramm?”

Gramm looked thunderous, but didn’t reply.

Luru said evenly, “Oh, I’m just another of the Coalition’s little secrets. Just another Doctrinal violation, tolerated because I am useful. I’ve had an uneasy, ah, working relationship with Gramm for many years, and his predecessors, long before him. Before
that—
well, my life has sometimes been complicated. But things are civilized these days. The Coalition tolerates our research, here on Port Sol, as long as we share the results. Of course, it could destroy us at any time. But on the other hand I could do a great deal of harm to the Coalition.” She opened her mouth wide, showing blackened teeth.

Nilis suddenly seemed to understand. His jaw dropped, and he gulped before he could speak again. “All this talk of the depths of time . . . Port Sol always was a notorious den of jasoft refugees. And they weren’t all cleared out, were they? And you are one of them, Luru Parz.
You are a jasoft.
”

Pila flinched, as if she had been struck; her bland, pretty face curled in disgust, the strongest expression Pirius had ever seen her show. Nilis merely stared, utterly fascinated, his intellect overriding his emotions, as it did so often.

Pirius was stunned. He stared at Faya, who had conducted them around the Pit.
Was she an ancient too?
She had talked of dancing among the floating palaces of Port Sol—but the ice moon had been all but abandoned for twenty thousand years. Was it possible it wasn’t just a dream?

Torec’s hand slipped into his. In this cold place, far from home, surrounded by so many gruesome secrets, the touch of warm flesh was comforting.

Pila turned on her superior. She seemed more upset by the violation of orthodoxy than by the cold biological reality of the jasofts. “Minister, if this is true—why are these monstrosities tolerated?”

Gramm said nothing, his round face crimson.

Luru said, “Well, I’m useful, you see.
And
I know too much to be dispensed with. Don’t I, Gramm?”

“You old witch,” Gramm said tightly.

“Witch? If so, I brought you here to remind you of my spell,” she said, her tone dark.

Gramm glared. But it was clear he had no choice but to give her what she wanted.

When the meeting broke up, Torec approached Luru. She was clearly fascinated.

“But how do you
live
?”

Luru winked at her. “Most days I sleep a lot.” She put her hands on the ensigns’ shoulders; her skin felt warm, soft to Pirius: human, not at all strange. She said, “You children must be as hungry as I am. We have a lot of work to do. A great mission—a Galaxy to conquer. But first we eat. Come!” And she led them away.

Chapter
18

Out on the surface of the Rock, the cadets were learning to advance behind an artillery barrage.

It was another brutally simple, unbelievably ancient tactic. Behind the advancing troops was a bank of monopole cannon, mankind’s most effective weapon against Xeelee technology. The guns opened up before the advance began, firing live shells over the heads of the troops. The idea was that the hail of shells would flatten enemy emplacements, and the troops would rush forward and take the positions without a fight. Then the barrage would work its way forward, a curtain of fire always just ahead of the advancing troops, steadily raking out the opposition before the troops even got there. So the theory had always had it.