As they passed the dimly stirring figures, the Curator kept smiling.
Symat asked curiously, ‘Why do you grin like that?’
‘None of them can see well. But many of them respond to simple shapes.’
‘A smiling human face,’ said Mela, wondering. ‘Like a baby. A baby can recognise a smiling face almost as soon as it’s born.’
‘Yes. Remarkable, isn’t it? As if life is a great circle. That’s why we smile all the time.’ He tapped the green tetrahedron on his breast. ‘A lot of them seem comforted to see this too. We’re not sure why. It must be a very ancient symbol, of something.’
Symat asked the Curator about the medical-station numbers.
‘They are for our purposes. We number them in order of age, as best we can. When one dies you have to renumber those younger - though young scarcely seems appropriate for creatures such as these! - but there are so few it isn’t a great burden.’
As they walked the age numbers fell away, below twenty, fifteen, and at last to single figures. Symat felt his heart unaccountably thump. And then the Curator brought them to a bed, where a short, slim form lay, obscured by her translucent tent. The bed was adorned by a single digit: 1.
‘The oldest,’ Mela breathed.
‘She has been called many names,’ the Curator said. ‘Leropa, Luru Parz, other variants; perhaps one of these is her original given name. If she knows she won’t tell us. She claims to know the date of her birth, but it’s so long ago we can’t reconcile her dates with current chronologies more precisely than within five thousand years … Take a good look, Symat. She is certainly the oldest human being any of us will ever see. She is probably a million years old. Think of that!’
Suddenly the woman’s eyes flickered open. Mela gasped.
Symat stepped forward, his pulse hammering in his ears. And as he came by the bed a hand like a claw shot out to grab his wrist. He forced himself not to flinch, for fear he might snap bones like dry twigs.
Her black eyes were on him. She opened a ruined mouth and whispered, ‘There are questions you need to ask.’
To a fourteen-year-old she was a figure from a nightmare. But her leathery palm was warm on his skin. She was old, she was very strange, but she was human, he could feel that. ‘I don’t know how it must be,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘To be like you.’
She closed her eyes briefly; he could actually hear the dry skin rustle on her eyeballs. ‘If you knew how many times I have been asked that … I have thought the same thoughts so often they don’t need me to think them any more. Perhaps I am a robot, then. Certainly I am no longer human, if I ever was, since the moment I took that pill given me by Gemo Cana, that murderous witch …’
‘Who?’
‘But that is why I am valuable, you see. I and my kind. For, long after love and hate are gone, even after meaning is lost, we keep on and on and on. And, given enough time, we achieve greatness.’
‘You moved the Earth.’
‘Yes. A human Galaxy was just a dream. Earth is the home of man, and as long as Earth exists, man will endure.’
‘But it isn’t enough,’ Symat said.
‘No. Because the Xeelee are here.’
‘People are fleeing. The booths—’
Her face, a mask of imploded skin, crumpled a little, showing disgust. ‘The booths. A solution for cattle bred for defeat, beaten before they are even born. Have you ever heard of Original Sin?’
‘No.’
‘Child, you know there is a better way. And that is why you must go to Saturn.’
His mind was reeling. ‘I don’t know anything about Saturn. What must I do there?’
‘You will know,’ she said. She fell back on her pillow, her eyes closing, but she kept hold of his arm. ‘It is why I made you, after all …’
Symat, electrified, astonished, could only stare at her.
IV
Port Sol fell away into the dark. Symat and Mela were travelling ahead of the ice moon on its endless cycling trajectory between the spheres of Earth and Saturn, but where Port Sol took years to complete a single orbit, the flitter would take only days.
And now the flitter had a third passenger. The Curator wore his antique robe with its tetrahedral sigil, and his broad face was fixed with his habitual smile. But as Port Sol dwindled to a point of crimson light Symat thought he saw fear in his Virtual eyes.
It had been Mela’s idea to bring him. ‘You might be able to help us,’ she had told him. ‘You know this Luru. You might be able to figure things out.’
‘I’m a Curator,’ he had protested. ‘I keep these human museum pieces alive. I’m not designed to interpret their mad ramblings.’ But Mela had kept on, pressing him to come.
Symat was reluctantly fascinated by this exchange. He reminded himself that they were both expressions of a much vaster interlinked awareness. As the Curator and Mela argued it was as if he was listening to the internal debate of a single mind.
They certainly weren’t human, not even Mela; Symat was the only human here. And as the darkness closed in on the ship he felt increasingly alone, and far from home.
The flitter had internal partitions you could turn opaque, and he shut himself up inside a little boxy room. He didn’t want to deal with the Curator and his resentful wittering, and he didn’t much even want to be with Mela.
After a day of this Mela asked to see him. He wouldn’t let her in, so she just walked through the walls, protocol warnings sounding. She shook her arms and flexed her fingers until all her rogue pixels had settled back into place. ‘That hurt.’
Symat was lying on a pallet. ‘Then don’t do it.’
She sat down uncertainly. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing.’ He had been reading, watching silly kids’ Virtuals, stuff he had liked years ago. Now he felt oddly self-conscious and shut it all down.
She asked, ‘You want to play a game?’
‘No, I don’t want to play a stupid game.’
‘What’s the matter with you? You’re not much fun.’
‘I don’t feel like fun. I feel—’
‘What?’
‘I’m sick of being pushed around. My parents wanted me to follow them into the booths. So I ran away. But then the Conclave got hold of me, through you. Now I find this stupid old woman, Luru, who says she planned me for some purpose long before I was even born. And I’ve ended up coming all the way out here, into the dark.’
‘Welcome to my world,’ Mela snapped. ‘That’s how I feel all the time. The Curator too, probably.’
‘You aren’t human.’
‘But we’re sentient,’ she hit back. ‘Is that how you think of me, just a part of some kind of trap?’
He flinched. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.’
She softened a little. ‘Anyway, Virtual or human, what difference does it make? Look around, Symat. Everything is old. Everything in the universe has been shaped by humans, or their enemies. Every important decision was made long ago. So we have very little choice about things. My mother used to feel the same way,’ she said, a little wistfully.
It was the first time she’d mentioned any detail of her parents. ‘She did?’
‘She said she’d always felt like a child herself, a child who had grown up in the halls of some vast and dusty museum, where everything was frozen and on display, out of her reach … Look, Symat, if you do have some purpose, it must be important.’
‘But if I’ve got no choice about any of this, what is there for me?’
She thought about that. ‘Dignity?’ She stood up. ‘Come on. Let’s go and wind up the Curator. I want to know what kind of underwear he has on under that stupid robe.’
Laughing, they left the cabin.
Saturn loomed out of the dark.
This wasn’t like approaching Port Sol. They had come swooping down on that much-engineered little worldlet in a flash. The largest surviving planet in Sol system, Saturn was majestic and stately, a misty disc painted red by the sun. Its size was obvious, oppressive.
The ship hurled itself through Saturn’s tremendous shadow. Symat saw lightning crackle purple and white across the clouds, as storms that could have engulfed the whole of Mars played themselves out. This was the power of nature, he thought, even now dwarfing humanity and its dreams. As he watched, Symat’s heart pumped in a kind of retrospective panic. To think that he might have lived and died on Mars, or even followed his parents into a booth, without seeing such wonders as this!
The flitter swooped away from Saturn, climbing up and out of its deep gravity well, the energy of its incoming trajectory dumped. And the Curator showed Symat how to look for the moons.
Spacegoing mankind had swept like a storm through Sol system, shattering in a few millennia the patient geological assemblings of aeons. Saturn’s ice moons, if not taken apart altogether, had been extensively mined. One moon was more interesting, though. The Curator called it ‘Titan’. Once this small world had had decks of clouds beneath which complex chemical processes had played out; humans had sent scoop-ships and trawlers to mine the air and the hydrocarbon seas. But Titan, starved of heat, had never spawned life. Now, as the sun brightened, Titan was at last stirring from its chill slumber. It was a marvellous prospect, the birth of a new world right in the middle of Sol system: even in these desolate latter days you could still find new life. But no human scientists were studying the miracles unfolding in Titan’s clouds. This was not an age for science.
They left Titan behind. And as the flitter continued to swoop around Saturn’s gravity well, the true human purpose of this system was gradually revealed.
‘Can you see?’ The Curator ducked and pointed, picking out lights scattered among the moons. ‘And that one? They are drones. Sensor stations, weapons platforms. All sentient.’
The sky was full of them, machines that flocked like metallic birds in the ever-changing gravity field of Saturn and its moons. Some of them gathered into rings that girdled Saturn’s equator, which the Curator wistfully said were an echo of an even stranger wonder of the past, natural rings of ice and dust that had long been disrupted by war. And once you could have seen even more spectacular artefacts, the ruins of wormhole mouths, the remnant of a transit system that had once spanned a Galaxy but had collapsed with the demise of its builders, the Coalition.
But Symat understood that the beauty of the weapons clouds wasn’t their point. Their purpose was lethality. The whole of the Saturn system was a fortress. And it was all because of the Ascendents.
When the vast retreat of man had begun, even when only the most remote of colonies had yet been evacuated, the undying with their eerie far-flung prescience had planned the end game. Before the siege of Earth itself began, it would be necessary to make a stand.
Saturn had always been a military stronghold. As long ago as the Exultants’ heroic effort to win the Galactic Core, huge war machines had been buried in the planet’s deepest clouds, ready to leap to the defence of Earth if any foe dared attack the capital planet. These brooding machines, self-maintaining, self-enhancing, became known as the Guardians.
Now, as a far more formidable foe gathered, the Ascendents turned to Saturn once more. Earth itself was to be corralled with gravitation and brought out here, to circle on the rim of Saturn’s mighty gravity well, where it could be protected. And the war machines under those clouds, already powerful, were enhanced with the accumulated learning of a million years of interstellar war.
The purpose of the undying had been unswerving. But this project was not quite as under their obsessive control as they would have preferred. There was risk.
‘I don’t understand,’ Mela said. ‘What risk?’
The Curator waved a hand, and the air was filled with a high-speed chatter of automated signals. Symat thought he picked out questions and responses, handshaking, a kind of dialogue. The Curator said, ’The Guardians are very old. They have long since got used to making their own decisions. When a ship like this comes sliding into their space, they get very suspicious. Can’t you tell, from the way the drones are swarming around us? All that’s keeping us from being destroyed right now is our flitter’s responses to the Guardians’ continual interrogation.
‘And when the Ascendents decided to move Earth here - Lethe, a whole planet sliding across Sol system - one false word and the home of mankind might have been blown to bits by machines meant to protect it.’
Symat said, ‘We’ve been at war with the Xeelee for a million years. What can these Guardians have that’s so powerful it could make a difference now? And why hasn’t it been thrown into the war before?’
‘I think I can answer that.’ Mela’s eyes clouded, and there was a sheen about her face, a waxy unreality. She screwed up her forehead as she tried to integrate the information pouring into her head.
Long ago, as mankind advanced across a Galaxy, under a purposeful programme called the Assimilation, whole alien cultures were eradicated or subsumed, their technology and learning purloined. Most such treasures, as Symat had guessed, had been thrown into the vast war effort. But some had been secreted away by the patient undying. Insurance for the future, they thought of it.