‘Not really. Believe me, when you see the job I have to do, you’ll understand why.’ Even now he kept smiling. ‘Welcome to Port Sol!’
Under the Curator’s effortless control, the flitter dipped and swooped over Port Sol’s eroded landmarks.
Every child in the system knew about Port Sol. It was itself ancient, a fragment of unprocessed rubble left over from the formation of Sol system. And its human history stretched far back too, almost as far back as man’s first tentative steps off the home planet.
‘Once they built starships here,’ the Curator said. ‘Before hyperdrive, even. They used the worldlet’s own water ice for reaction mass, digging out great pits like that one.’ The quarry he pointed out was a slumped hole in the ground, indistinguishable from a thousand others. ‘When hyperdrive came this place was bypassed for a while. But then, because it was so hidden away and forgotten, the first of the Ascendents came here.’
‘Ascendents?’ Symat asked.
‘Undying,’ Mela said immediately.
The Curator raised a thin eyebrow. ‘They’ve been called many names in their long history - jasofts, pharaohs - few of them complimentary. Ascendents isn’t so bad, I think: we are all their descendants after all … Whatever they’re called, I care for them. That’s my vocation! You’ll see, anyhow. You’ll meet them. They want to meet you, Symat.’
Symat tried to absorb that, and tried not to react to Mela’s obvious fear.
The flitter circled this little world rapidly, and soon they once more approached the mast, with the flare of blue light at its tip. Buildings clustered at the base of the tower, while machines like giant beetles dug a pit in the ice that sliced through the pale marks of older workings.
Symat said, ‘This is a rocket, isn’t it? And it’s pushing this moon.’
The Curator nodded. ‘Very perceptive. We’re actually at one spin pole of the moon - a good place to push.’ He pointed. ‘The engines are GUTdrives - one of mankind’s oldest technologies, immensely reliable. The exhaust is plasma, charged matter, the outflow shaped by magnetic fields. And, just like in those ancient starship engines, the stuff of Port Sol itself is being consumed as reaction mass. You can see how the engineering here has churned up the old surface. Aside from Earth itself, Port Sol is probably the system’s key historic site. But Ascendents care little for archaeology.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t if you could remember it all!’
Mela said, ‘So this is an Ascendent project.’
‘Well, of course. The mass of Port Sol is huge, and by comparison the rocket delivers only a small push. You have to keep shoving for a very long time before you can kick it out of its orbit. But that’s just the sort of long-term, dogged programme the Ascendents excel at.’
The rocket tower dropped behind the horizon, and the flitter swept down towards a plain of ice, heavily melted by the heat of multiple landings. Nearby was a cluster of domes, evidently their destination.
As the ground fled beneath the descending flitter, Symat spotted a slim black pillar, obviously artificial, standing in the middle of what looked oddly like a forest, ‘trees’ sculpted from ice. ‘Look, Mela. A transfer booth! Even here they are escaping.’
The Curator looked surprised. ‘Oh, that’s not for people. Did you imagine booths are just for humans?’ He told them that when Port Sol had first been discovered it had an indigenous fauna, slow-moving inhabitants of the deep cold with liquid helium for blood. ‘Once we farmed them; we transplanted them to other cold worlds. Somehow they survived a million years of cohabitation with mankind - even the dreadful summer we have brought to Port Sol by pushing it into the heart of the system. And now a booth has appeared, right in the middle of their Forest of Ancestors, and, with our help, the Toolmakers, the ones in their motile phase, are passing through to their own destiny. A slow process, I can tell you …’ He seemed surprised at their incomprehension. ‘There are many life forms in Sol system - or were, before we came along - but even now many of them survive. And as far as we can tell, every one of them with the remotest level of advancement has been supplied with booths so they can escape the destruction of the sun. Touching, isn’t it? And not only that, there are suggestions in the records that other species, driven to extinction long ago, have been provided with similar escape routes. The Silver Ghosts, for example … The booths are evidently part of a long-term rescue strategy, by whoever is responsible. It could be the Xeelee,’ he mused. ‘Some say it is. The Xeelee relish the diversity of life, and seek to protect it, even when it snaps at them, as we have …’
The silvered domes at the base of the rocket tower turned out to be the upper levels of much more extensive structures, buried deep under the ice.
The Curator took them down through a hatch in the bottom of the flitter, through a kind of airlock, and then into the interior of the base. They never walked in the vacuum, out on the ice. Symat, who had never walked anywhere you would need a pressure suit, was faintly disappointed to lose out on a little bit of adventure.
The Curator led them along cold, echoing corridors, past closed-off rooms. Just as on Mars there were few people here, it seemed. Symat was getting a sense of Sol system as a series of empty planets and moons, like dusty rooms in a deserted house.
The Curator asked if they wanted to rest or eat, but they were both too excited, or apprehensive. The Curator gave in with a cheerful shrug. ‘Then I’ll take you to the Ascendents.’
He led them along more corridors until they came to a brightly lit area, a complex of corridors that stank strongly of antisepsis, like a hospital. The Curator paused at a door. ‘Now before you go in,’ he told Symat, ‘try not to be afraid.’
Symat said testily, ‘Let’s get on with it.’ He wasn’t about to hesitate in front of Mela. He stepped forward boldly. The door slid aside.
He entered a low, wide room, white-walled, flooded with pale light. There were beds here - no, they were more like medical stations; each had boxes of equipment hovering in the air beside it. Bots cleaned the walls and ferried supplies. He saw no human attendants, but there were many Virtuals who nodded at the Curator. Rotund individuals like him, they all seemed to have broad faces and wide smiles.
Symat inspected a station more closely. A bot hovered suspiciously, but he wasn’t impeded. The station was a pallet covered by a translucent bubble. It was marked with a number: 247, in bold digits. Inside the bubble, lying on the pallet, was a man. His limbs like sticks, his belly imploded, and with tiny bots crawling over his body, he looked more dead than alive. But as Symat cast a shadow over his face, that skull-like head turned. Symat shuddered and stepped back.
They walked on, between the rows of stations. The floor was soft and Symat’s footsteps made no sound.
The Curator said, ‘They are unimaginably old, some of them - and several of them, with no real memory of their own deepest past, don’t even know how old they are themselves. The best way to date them is actually through the anti-ageing technology embedded in their bodies. But even that is unreliable.’
As they passed, the naked Ascendents stirred and whispered, dry skin rustling.
‘We’re disturbing them,’ Mela said softly.
‘Don’t worry about it. They are creatures of routine - as are we all, but in them it is taken to an extreme. And anything that disturbs that routine disturbs them. That’s why only bots and Virtuals are used as attendants. You don’t want to frighten them with a new face every century or so!’
Symat wondered how old the Curator himself was.
One old woman, to Symat’s astonishment, was out of bed. She was naked, her skin so flaccid she looked as if she had melted, and tubes snaked out of all her orifices. But she managed to walk to a cabinet a few paces from her bed, where, with a trembling hand, she picked out fragments of food that she pushed into a toothless mouth.
‘She likes to feed herself,’ the Curator said. ‘Or at least to believe she does. It’s good for her to have some independence. But look here.’
The floor was cut through by a deep rut, hard metal and ceramic worn away by this old woman’s soft feet. And where she had lain in her bed she had left the shape of her body compressed into the mattress.
The Curator said dryly, ‘Perhaps you can see why many of us working in this place prefer to forgo personality. It’s better not to think about it. Better still not to be able to think …’
The stations were set out in orderly rows, a neat rectangular grid. Symat counted no more than twenty or twenty-five rows in each direction: there were only a few hundred Ascendents here.
The Curator seemed to know what he was thinking. ‘Four hundred and thirty-seven. If you’d come here a decade ago there were four hundred and thirty-eight.’
Mela asked, ‘This is all?’
‘As a group they have been ineradicable. They have time on their side: that’s what you always have to remember about Ascendents. If you try to get rid of them, no matter how strong you are, all they have to do is wait for you to grow old and die, and for your children and grandchildren to die too, wait until you’re nothing but a sliver of data in a history text, and then they just walk back in.’
‘They are dying out, though.’
The Curator shrugged. ‘Nobody is making immortals any more. And entropy catches up with us all in the end. But despite their strangeness, they are mankind’s treasures.’
Mela asked, ‘Why do you say that?’
‘For all they have seen,’ the Curator said. ‘For the wisdom they have accrued, when you can dig it out of them. And for all they have done for us - and continue to do. It was the undying who founded the Transcendence, who tried to bring us to a new plane of being altogether. They ultimately failed, but what a magnificent ambition!’
‘And you say they still work for us?’ Mela asked.
‘By moving Port Sol,’ Symat saw immediately.
‘Yes,’ the Curator said, ‘But what they have done is rather more spectacular than pushing around a mere ice moon! You see, long ago, the undying resolved to move the Earth itself …’
It was the sun, of course.
As the downpour of solar radiation grew too intense, Earth’s natural processes couldn’t be sustained. And when the swelling sun’s photosphere washed over it like a misty tide, would Earth be sterilised, scorched, melted, even vaporised? It would take a long time, hundreds of thousands of years, before Earth was destroyed entirely. But Ascendents fretted on long timescales. You could say that was the point of their existence.
How do you save a world from an overheating sun? Mankind had never had the power to tinker with the processes of stars themselves. Could you shield the world with mirrors and parasols lofted into space? But any such shield would eventually be overwhelmed as the sun expanded. There was only one option: to move the Earth itself. But how?
You could push it. You could mount a giant rocket on a spin pole, as had been done on Port Sol, or even a series of rockets around the equator. But you would consume an immense amount of Earth’s own matter in the process, and any instability could cause the planet’s crust to shake itself to pieces. You might end up doing more harm than good.
Alternatively you could use gravity. If the Earth still had its Moon, you could have used that as a tug: push away the Moon as violently as you liked, and let lunar gravity gradually haul the Earth on a slow spiral away from the sun. But the Moon had been detached from the Earth in the course of a long-forgotten war.
Or you could do it piecemeal.
The Ascendents mounted venerable GUTdrive engines on a whole fleet of Kuiper Belt ice moons, including their own base, Port Sol. It took a long time for the slow push of the plasma rockets to make a difference, but at last the moons came swooping out of the dark into the inner system, entering complicated orbits that shuttled between Earth and the greatest planets, Jupiter and Saturn.
And with each moon’s passage Earth’s orbit was deflected, just slightly.
With a long series of slingshots Earth was gradually nudged outward from the sun, while the giants were subtly moved closer. It was as if the Ascendents had linked Earth to its giant cousins with immensely long chains, that drew them slowly together. It was going to take a million encounters with moons the size of Port Sol to move the Earth out to its destination, a new orbit around Saturn. At the rate of two or three encounters a year that would require thousands of centuries. But the undying always had time in abundance, time and patience. And Earth was on its way.
It was a typical undying project, on immense timescales, but low-tech. But you had to keep a sense of perspective, Symat thought. Where the Xeelee had blocked the light of suns across a supercluster of galaxies, all humans could manage was to nudge one little world across Sol system.
And in the end even this monumental exercise in persistence hadn’t been enough. The immortals had saved Earth from the expansion of its sun. Now the Xeelee had come to Sol system, and a new danger loomed.
But again, it seemed, the undying had been preparing.
The three of them continued to walk among the ranks of immortals, each in her station, each with her number.