Exultant (35 page)

Pirius suddenly saw a new element in his relationship with the Commissary—or at least his FTL twin’s. This old man was
fond
of him, Pirius thought with a queasy horror. His unwelcome twin, Pirius Red, had allowed this ridiculous old man to form some kind of sentimental bond with him. Surely it wasn’t sexual. But he knew Nilis had a “family background.” Perhaps it was as a father might feel for a son, an uncle for a nephew, or some similarly unhealthy, atavistic tie. What a mess, he thought.

Nilis’s Virtual was of the highest quality. In the jargon, it was an avatar.

The avatar’s job was to live out this chapter of Nilis’s life on the original’s behalf as fully as was possible. The avatar was a fully sentient copy of the real Nilis, with identical memories up to the moment when this copy had first been generated. Here in Quin Base, Virtual Nilis couldn’t touch anything, of course; those data desks on the table were as fake as he was. But while here, for authenticity of experience, he would have to live according to human routines. He would eat his Virtual food, sleep, even eliminate his unreal waste. He could even smell, he said, and he declared that Quin Base stank of something called “boiled cabbage.” And when his visit was done, his records would be sent back to Earth, where they would be integrated into Nilis’s own memory.

Nilis had wanted to take home as rich an experience as he could, the better to shape his subsequent decision-making. But he would always have the odd feeling that he had lived out these ten days twice, once in his garden on Earth, and once here at the Galaxy’s crowded heart.

Pirius tried to concentrate on the mission. He could see its value. “But—why me? I haven’t even flown since the magnetar.”

“Because I know you.” His big watery eyes were still fixed on Pirius. “Because we’ve already proven we can work well together—”

“You’re still talking about my twin.”

“But your twin
is
you—he has all your talent, all your potential—save only that in
you
that potential has begun to be realized. And besides,” he said with disarming honesty, “how many frontline pilots do I actually know? Oh, come, Pirius! You know, in your shoes
I
would be galvanized by curiosity. We may be skirting a deep scientific mystery here, Pirius, something that could tell us a great deal about the nature of our universe, and our place in it.”

Pirius could hardly deny that. But when he thought about leaving here, about leaving Tili Three and Burden and the others, he felt deeply uneasy. He already felt guilty at having survived on Factory Rock, where so many had fallen; how could he justify walking out on them now?

Nilis leaned forward, made to touch Pirius’s shoulder, remembered it was impossible. “Pirius, you’re hesitating, and I don’t know why. You’re wasted here!” he said. “All these drone kids, their endless digging, digging. You’re meant for better things, Pilot.”

Pirius stood up. “And every one of those
drone kids,
” he said, “is better than you, Commissary.” Nilis said nothing more, and Pirius left the room.

Pirius Blue talked it over with Cohl.

“The whole thing’s insane,” he said. In three thousand years, there had of course been many scouting missions beyond the Front and into the Cavity, deep into the nest. That complex place, crowded with stellar marvels as well as the greatest concentration of Xeelee firepower in the Galaxy, was known to every pilot as a death trap. “We’d be throwing our lives away.”

“We?”

He sighed. “If I have to do this, I’d want you with me. But it’s academic, because nobody’s going anywhere.”

“Because it’s insane?”

“Correct.”

“Well,” she said, “not necessarily.” She was lying on her bunk, her hands locked behind her head; she seemed undisturbed by the usual barracks clamor around her. In fact, she had something of Nilis’s remoteness. But then, Pirius thought with loyal exasperation, Cohl was a navigator, and most navigators were halfway to double domes anyhow.

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe it could be done. There’s a lot of junk in there, you know, in the Cavity. Astrophysical junk. Plenty of places to hide.” She rolled over. They had no data desks here, no fancy Virtual-generation facilities, and so she started sketching with a wet finger in the dirt on the floor. “Suppose you went in this way . . .”

The Cavity was a rough sphere some fifteen light-years across at the center of the Mass, bounded by the great static shock of the Front. It was called a “Cavity” because it was blown clear of hot gas and dust by Chandra and the other objects at the very center. But it was far from empty, in fact crowded with exotic objects. As well as a million glowering stars, there was the Baby Spiral, three dazzling lanes of infalling gas and dust. And the Baby, like everything else in the Cavity, was centered on the Prime Radiant itself: Chandra, the supermassive black hole, utterly immovable, the pivot around which the immense machinery of the inner Galaxy turned.

Cohl said, “There are lots of ways in. You could track one of the Baby’s arms, for instance. Even so you’d have to take some kind of cover.”

“Cover?”

“Other ships. Rocks, even.” She glanced at him. “Not everybody is going to get through; you have to take enough companions with you to make sure that
somebody
makes it. It’s a question of statistics, Pirius.” She rubbed her chin. “Of course the navigation would be tricky. You’re talking about finding your way through all that astrophysics,
and
keeping a small flotilla together. . . .”

He saw she was losing herself in the technicalities of planning such an ambitious jaunt. But technicalities were not uppermost in his own mind.

After a while she noticed his silence. “You’re not happy about this, are you?”

“Am I supposed to be?”

She said, “It won’t make any difference, you know. To
them.
Whatever we do.”

“To who?”

“To the dead ones.”

Pirius looked at her. “I thought it was only me who had thoughts like that.”

“You ought to talk about it more. You’ll just have to make up your own mind about the mission, Pirius. But I’ll follow you, whatever you decide.”

He was moved. “Thank you.”

She shrugged. “What’s to thank? Without you, the Xeelee would have fried me already—
twice.
And as for the guilt, maybe you should go talk to This Burden Must Pass. He’s always full of philosophical crap, if that’s what you need.”

That made him laugh, but it seemed like a good idea. But when he went to find Burden, Nilis had got there before him.

Virtual Nilis, reluctantly fulfilling the nominal purpose for his projection here at Quin, was interviewing Burden in his small office.

Pirius wasn’t the only visitor. Perhaps a dozen cadets and privates had gathered outside the office’s partition walls. They sat on bunks, or storage boxes, or just on the floor, and they stared into the room with steady longing.

Nilis seemed relieved to close the door on them. “They’re coming in relays,” he whispered, shocked.

“That’s military training for you,” Burden said dryly. He was sitting at ease in one of the office’s small upright chairs. Unlike the Commissary, he seemed quite relaxed.

Nilis whispered, “I don’t know what they want.”

Pirius grunted. “That’s obvious. They’re here because they think you’re going to take Burden away.”

Nilis, bustling clumsily around the room, flapped his hands. “I’m here to analyze, not to condemn. Even Commissaries are pragmatic, you know; if this quasi-faith helps the youngsters out there keep to their duties we’re quite willing to turn a blind eye. But we do have to be sure things don’t go
too
far. Of course, by showing such devotion to their, ah, spiritual leader, those cadets are actually making it
more
likely, not less, that sanctions will have to be applied.”

Burden said, “Commissary, maybe you should go out there and talk to them about it. They’re the ones who are affected by my ‘sermonizing,’ after all.”

“Oh, I don’t think that would be appropriate—no, no, not at all.”

Pirius thought that was an excuse. How could the Commissary possibly do a proper analysis of Burden’s faith if he didn’t talk to those actually affected? Nilis seemed afraid, he thought: afraid of Quin, or of the people in it, which was why he clung to this little room.

Pirius sat down on the room’s only other chair. Nilis, with nowhere to sit, flapped and fluffed a little more; then, with a sigh, he snapped his fingers to conjure up a Virtual couch. “Not really supposed to be doing magic tricks, you know,” he said apologetically. “Against the rules of an avatar!”

Pirius asked, “So, Commissary, has he converted you to a belief in the Ultimate Observer?”

“How comforting it would be if he had,” said Nilis, a little wistfully. “But I know too much! Religions have long been a theoretical interest of mine, which is how I was able to wangle this assignment—and intellectually is the only way I can respond, you see.

“That’s not to say there isn’t some merit in this new faith. Consider the Friends’ beliefs. A Friend worships her descendants, who she believes will far surpass her in power and glory. That’s not such an irrational belief, and guides behavior in an unselfish way, as any worthwhile religion should. The old legend of Michael Poole has entered the mix too. Like some earlier messiahs, Poole is supposed to have given his life for the future of mankind. Of course that’s an example always to be admired. Quero’s faith is crude and somewhat shapeless, but it does have some moral weight. And it is interesting, academically, for its novel setting. . . .”

Most human religions, said Nilis, had originated on Earth. Once carried to the stars, they had mutated, adapted, split, and merged, but they had generally retained the same core elements.

“A religion born on Earth will have archetypes derived from planetary living—where the sun must rise and set, where seasons come and go, where living things die but are renewed, without the intervention of humans, but dependent on the cycles of the world. So you find a worship of the sun, and of water, often sublimated into blood; you find a fascination with the figures of mother and child, and with the seed which, once planted in the ground, endures the winter and lives again. Many religions feature messiahs who defeat death itself, who die but are born again: the ultimate sublimation of the seed.

“But
here,
” he said, “you have a religion which has emerged, quite spontaneously, among a spacegoing people. So new archetypes must be found. Entropy, for instance: to survive in an artificial biosphere one must labor constantly against decay. You can’t rely on the world to fix itself, you see; there are no renewing seasonal cycles here.

“And then there is contingency. Back on Earth, FTL foreknowledge is understood—it is an essential strategic tool—but it doesn’t affect
people,
which made the arrival of your FTL twin, Pirius, something of a nine day wonder. Out here, though, everyone knows that the past is as uncertain as the future, because you
see
the future change all the time, as those ships come limping home from battles that haven’t happened yet. It happened to
you,
Pirius! Here, the notion that all of this suffering may be washed away by a history change is an easy one to sell.”

Pirius said, “You make it sound almost reasonable, Commissary.”

“Well, so it is! Religions will always emerge, even in a place as emotionally sterile as this; and religions will naturally exploit elements in their environments. It would be fascinating to see how this new faith develops in the future.”

“But you don’t seem to have anything to say about why the cadets
need
Burden’s teaching in the first place.”

Nilis folded his fingers over his ample virtual belly. “Soldiers have always been superstitious,” he pronounced. “Something to do with a need to take control of one’s destiny in a dangerous and out-of-control environment. And the ordinary troops have always championed the Druz Doctrines. We have come so far from home.” He flexed his fingers before his face, almost curiously. “We still have the bodies of plains apes, you know. But nothing else of our native ecology has survived: nothing but us and our stomach bacteria and the rats and lice and fleas. . . . Now we have come to a place so lethal we have to dig into bits of rock to survive. There is nothing left of our origins but
us
—and all that holds us together is our beliefs. Lose them and we will become shapeless, flow like hot metal.

“I think the ordinary soldier intuits something of that, and has clung to the Doctrines as a result. But the Doctrines are too severe—inhuman, lacking hope. If you were going to devise a consoling religion you wouldn’t start with
them.
Druz would not even have us commemorate the dead!”

Burden said, “And hope is what I give the cadets.”

Nilis nodded vigorously. “Oh, I see that.”

“Then why,” Burden said evenly, “won’t you talk to
them
?”

Nilis was immediately nervous again. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly—it isn’t necessary . . .”

Burden stood smoothly, crossed to the door, and opened it. The disciples who had gathered outside filed in immediately, a dozen or so of them, their small faces solemn. They stared at Nilis, who was probably, Pirius thought, the most exotic creature they had ever seen.

Tili Three walked boldly up to him. She ought to be more wary of a Commissary, Pirius thought. But there was none of the dread antique grandeur of the Commission for Historical Truth about Nilis. Tili reached out to touch Nilis’s robe. Nilis gaped at her silvered prosthetic hand. Her fingers passed through the hem of his robe, scattering pixels like insects. He actually backed up against the wall, his big hands fluttering defensively before his chest. It was hard not to feel sorry for him.

Burden said, “Why are you afraid?”

“They are so young,” Nilis said. “So young—just children—”

“Children who have seen their comrades die,” Pirius said.

“I’m not afraid of them but of
me,
” Nilis said. He made to pat Tili’s head, but when his palm brushed her hair it broke up into a spray of multicolored pixels. The little firework display made the cadets laugh, and Pirius saw tears well in Nilis’s foolish old eyes. “You see? I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear this, to come to one of these terrible nurseries—even Arches Base was like an academy compared to this—
they are so young
! And, my eyes, I can’t save them all—I can’t save any of them.”