‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘You’re young. You’ll survive … Look.’
Peering into the half-light, Symat saw movement. The dark shapes were animals, a herd shifting slowly across the plain beyond the city. One animal, younger, broke away from the rest, and he saw its silhouette more clearly. He counted two, four, six legs.
Luru said, ‘Interesting, isn’t it? This planet was the capital of a Galactic empire. Now most of it is abandoned and gone wild.’
‘I never saw an animal with six legs.’
‘I believe they are called “spindlings”. They are not native to Earth. And look at this.’ She walked a few paces away from the flitter to a patch of grass.
Symat bent down and ruffled the grass with his fingers. It was dry as a bone, but it was alive, adapted to the aridity. And as the light lifted a little more he saw that among the green blades was some kind of fibrous growth, deep black.
‘The green grass is probably native: there are lots of ways to exploit sunlight for energy, but using green chlorophyll is quite rare. Something to do with the spectrum of our sun, no doubt, before its modification by the photino birds. But that black mat is not a native, any more than a spindling. And - there!’ Luru pointed, almost eagerly. ‘See that?’
Symat saw a small shape moving through the miniature jungle of the grass. It had a silvered carapace, and he thought it might be a beetle. But then light speckled between its jaws.
‘Laser light?’
‘It’s descended from tiny machines designed to crop the grass. Now it follows its own evolutionary agenda. If you turn them out into the wild, even machines evolve, Symat.’
Symat thought of the bit of wild technology he had seen for himself on Mars: abandoned Virtual children, turned cannibal. And he remembered the slow liquid-helium native fauna of Port Sol, scattered by mankind to other cold worlds across the Galaxy.
Luru said, ‘Wherever they are deposited, living things, transported between the stars, even machines, find ways to combine, to form rich new ecologies. After a million years of spaceflight, every human world is like this. And even if mind disappeared from the Earth tomorrow, as long as the planet survives, you would be able to look at this interstellar mixing-up and say, yes, once people from this place reached the stars.’
‘But this isn’t the only trace of the past.’ It was Mela; small, composed, she walked out from the shadow of the flitter. The Curator followed her.
‘Oh, good,’ Luru said dryly. ‘Everybody’s up.’
Symat said, ‘What do you mean, Mela?’
‘The collapsed magnetic field. The thin air, the drained oceans.’ She jumped up and drifted back down to the ground, slow as a snowflake. Symat knew it was a Virtual illusion, but she made her point effectively: even Earth’s gravity had been reduced.
Luru sighed. ‘Earth got used up.’
Earth, home of mankind, had been the capital of an empire which had won a Galaxy, and beyond. And for all that time Earth itself had supported a surprisingly heavy burden of the resource load.
‘Earth was only rarely attacked, and never fell into enemy hands, after the lifting of the Qax Occupation,’ Luru said. ‘But its air, its precious water were scattered in ships across the Galaxy. Its metals were sucked from its deep interior. Its inner heat was tapped for energy.’
That was why the magnetic field had collapsed: as the planet’s heat had been drained its liquid core crystallised, and Earth’s magnetism failed. The internal cooling had also weakened the great mantle currents. So there were no more volcanoes or earthquakes, and the mountains currently eroding away were the last the old world would ever see.
Luru whispered, ‘In the final madness of their wars the engineers tapped into the planet’s ultimate energy store, its gravity well. They sucked out mass-energy - they reduced the effective mass of the planet. That is why you feel so light on your feet, Symat; that is why we are able to put up buildings so delicate they would seem more suited to a dwarf world like Mars. Earth is the little world that fought a Galactic war! But in the end it could give us no more.’
‘Which is why,’ the Curator prompted, ‘you believe we must save it now.’
‘Yes. And I haven’t spent half a million years striving to save the Earth from the swelling sun to see it put to the Xeelee flame now. I have a plan,’ Luru said. ‘Come. The dawn is rising. Walk with me into the light, and we’ll talk.’
It all depended on the Guardians, and their Snowflake cosmic-linkage technology. Luru said, ‘With such a technology you can do almost anything you can conceive of. Why, you can bend spacetime itself …’
And that was what Luru intended to do.
If you descended into a gravity well, you found your clocks turning more slowly than those of your colleagues on an orbiting ship, far above. All this was commonplace. Even in a gravity well as shallow as Earth’s, time passed more slowly for Symat than for an observer up there in free space. In a black hole, the deepest gravity well possible, the time-stretching effect ultimately became dominant, until at the event horizon itself time would cease to flow for you altogether.
The Curator shook his head. ‘Ascendent, I’m no physicist. Are you planning to turn the Earth into a black hole?’
‘No. But I want to reshape its spacetime.’
Luru planned to make the Earth a pit of slow time. Just as if looking into a black hole, from the outside time on its surface would seem stretched out. Conversely if you stood on its surface, you would see blueshifted stars wheel across the sky, flaring and dying. It was possible to do all this, she claimed, by manipulating spacetime subtly; you didn’t need the immense and concentrated mass of a black hole to do it.
Mela was looking oddly absent; Symat imagined massed intelligences looking through her eyes and listening through her ears, and crowding her mind with their speculations. She said, ’It would have to be quite a gradient. There would be a perceptible difference in the passage of time over the height of a human - a difference between your head and your toes!’
Symat scratched his head. ‘That would be a strange place to live.’
‘People adapt. And with their lives stretched out to megayears, ’ Luru said, ‘the inhabitants of Earth would be safe from the depredations of the Xeelee, or anybody else. They wouldn’t even need energy from outside, for Earth’s inner heat, reduced to a trickle, would fuel their slow-moving biosphere. Of course there are a few details to work out. This must be a long-term solution. The saved Earth - or “Old Earth” as I think of it - will need a stocked ecology, a self-renewing biosphere, some equivalent of tectonic processing. It will need a day and a night. I haven’t worked out how yet.’
The Curator laughed. ‘A typical Ascendent solution - to save the world with a gift of time!’
‘But,’ Symat asked anxiously, ‘will it work?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Luru said calmly. ‘The Guardians can do this. I’ve been able to consult them about it. They can turn their weapons on the Earth itself, and use the resources of a universe to reshape it as they please.’
The Curator shook his head. ‘If this Snowflake weapon is capable of such a remarkable feat, why not turn it on the Xeelee? We could scatter their fleets of nightfighters like swatting flies.’
‘We? ’ Luru mocked him. ‘For a shell of a programme with no personality, you have stored up a lot of aggression, Curator.’
He scowled at her taunting, and Symat could see centuries of bitterness in his expression. ‘Why not just answer the question?’
‘We are done with fighting. After all this time, perhaps we humans have learned a little wisdom - and humility.’ She squinted up at the sky. ‘We humans took on the Xeelee. Remarkable when you think about it: savannah apes against a supergalactic power. We did them some damage, we drove them out of the Galaxy. But the Xeelee are far more than we ever were; we could never defeat them. And we barely noticed the true enemy, a foe of both ourselves and the Xeelee and everything made of baryonic matter, matter like ourselves—’
‘Dark matter,’ said Mela. ‘The photino birds in the sun.’
‘In every sun - yes, child. You mayflies encountered them in the deep past, even found them in the core of Earth’s sun, and you forgot about them. You found them again later, out in the halo of the Galaxy, where dark matter dominates - the Xeelee were already fighting them there, long before our war for the Galaxy - and again, in a generation or two, you forgot what you saw. You are so infuriatingly transient!
‘Well, we can’t fight the photino birds. We never could. Perhaps even the Xeelee can’t, but they are trying. There is evidence that the Xeelee are engaged in supergalactic projects, stupendous in scale - some long-forgotten explorers told tantalising tales.
‘But it doesn’t matter. We humans are trapped, here in Sol system itself, between two immense forces, the destruction of the sun, and the extinguishing of the stars. Yes, Curator, we could wield our last sword and cut off a few more limbs. But we can’t win. So I think it’s better we simply vacate the stage, don’t you?
‘I believe my solution is the right one. The Guardians can do this, if they have the will - and if they are ordered to. But I can’t give that order.’
Symat whispered, ‘Which is where I come in, is it?’
‘Listen, child. The sole purpose of the Guardians is to serve humanity. But what is humanity? Since the Guardians were first installed we humans have bifurcated, innovated, rebuilt and re-engineered ourselves. Even the stock who remained on Earth and Mars, like your own family, has adapted in its own quiet way. Each of these subtypes is “human”, in that they can all trace their ancestry back to the common root. But none of them is identical to the root stock. And a biologist’s definition of humanity isn’t necessarily good enough for a weapons system.’
‘Ah.’ The Curator nodded. ‘The Guardians are so old they no longer recognise the much-evolved descendants of their makers as human at all. Not even you, old one! What an irony.’ He shook his head and laughed.
Luru ignored him. She said to Symat, ‘I have found a solution for Earth - and I need the Guardians’ help to implement it. But they won’t listen to me. I needed a true human, Symat, at least “true” in the discriminating eyes of the Guardians. And, as I was unable to find one, I had to breed one …’
Genetic engineering had been considered. Even if nobody like the ur-stock of humanity still existed, there were records of their biomolecules. But the Guardians would easily have been able to spot any such engineering; they would have rejected the wretched result as a fake.
So Luru had had to resort to more natural methods. She had surveyed the human population of Sol system. She had identified stretches of raw DNA in fragments, scattered over the worlds. And she had begun a programme of patient cross-breeding, seeking to gather together the strains she needed.
It took a thousand years. But a millennium was a moment for an undying.
‘And it all culminated in me,’ Symat said.
‘I told you you’re different, Symat!’ Mela said. ‘No wonder you don’t look like your parents. And no wonder the Conclave was watching you.’
‘You probably don’t look much like an ur-human either,’ Luru said dryly, ‘but I think you’ll fool the Guardians. And that’s all that counts.’
The Curator said, ‘And did these generations of toiling breeders know how you were using them, Ascendent?’
‘It was safer for the project that they didn’t. A little social engineering sufficed.’
‘And this is your master plan? After a galactic war and a million years of history, the future of man comes down to the decision of a fourteen-year-old child? … Lethe, Ascendent, what gives you the right to make a choice that will fix the whole future of mankind - even through this boy?’
‘Only I have the vision for such a solution,’ she murmured. ‘Only I have the longevity to see it through. That’s what gives me the right.’
Symat said, ‘What would I have to do?’
‘The Guardians are watching you, Symat, through the Conclave, through all our Virtual eyes. All you have to do is formulate your decision, and it will be made so. You won’t need to throw a switch.’
‘It will happen straight away?’
‘Why wait?’
Mela’s eyes narrowed. ‘And what will become of Symat?’
Luru frowned. ‘For a brief moment he will be the epicentre of cosmic forces. Humans are frail creatures.’
‘I wouldn’t live through it,’ Symat said slowly. ‘I am going to die.’ But somehow even that didn’t perturb his eerie calm.
‘Symat, you don’t have to do this,’ Mela said.
Luru reached out as if to touch him, but she could not, of course, ‘Every true saviour must lay down his life,’ she said.
‘Just like your own Symat,’ Mela said. ‘He died for his beliefs, you said.’
‘Yes,’ the Curator snapped. ‘And now you’ve cooked up another Symat to go the same way. What’s going on in that head of yours, Ascendent? Is this really about saving Earth, or just working out your own million-year-old guilt? Is this all about you?’
‘You disgust me, Curator, you and your inane grinning,’ Luru said coldly. ‘You disguise your fear of me within your hollowness. But I know you.’