Exultant by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online

his crew, and with whom he would risk his life. He wondered who they were.
    He was avoiding the main issue, of course.
    The other man, the pilot, wasn’t tall, but he topped Pirius by a good half-head, and, under the skinsuit, was bulkier. Seath had told him that
this
version was aged nineteen, two years older—two more years of growing, of filling out, of training. At last Pirius looked the pilot in the face.
             
    Time was slippery. The way Pirius understood it, it was only the speed of light that imposed causal sequences on events.
    According to the venerable arguments of relativity there wasn’t even a common “now” you could establish across significant distances. All that existed were events, points in space and time. If you had to travel slower than lightspeed from one event to the next, then everything was okay, for the events would be causally connected: you would see everything growing older in an orderly manner.
    But with FTL travel, beyond the bounds of lightspeed, the orderly structure of space and time became irrelevant, leaving nothing but the events, disconnected incidents floating in the dark. And with an FTL ship you could hop from one event to another arbitrarily, without regard to any putative cause-and-effect sequence.
    In this war it wasn’t remarkable to have dinged-up ships limping home from an engagement that hadn’t happened yet; at Arches Base that occurred every day. And it wasn’t unusual to have news from the future. In fact, sending messages to command posts
back in the past
was a deliberate combat tactic. The flow of information from future to past wasn’t perfect; it all depended on complicated geometries of trajectories and FTL leaps. But it was enough to allow the Commissaries, in their Academies on distant Earth, to compile libraries of possible futures, invaluable precognitive data that shaped strategies—even if decisions made in the present could wipe out many of those futures before they came to pass.
    A war fought with FTL technology had to be like this.
    Of course foreknowledge would have been a great advantage—if not for the fact that the other side had precisely the same capability. In an endless sequence of guesses and counterguesses, as history was tweaked by one side or the other, and then tweaked again in response, the timeline was endlessly redrafted. With both sides foreseeing engagements to come for decades, even centuries ahead, and each side able to counter the other’s move even before it had been formulated, it was no wonder that the war had long settled down to a lethal stalemate, stalled in a static front that enveloped the Galaxy’s heart.
             
    For Pirius, it was like looking in the mirror—but not quite.
    The architecture was the same: a broad face, symmetrical but too flat to be good-looking, with sharp blue eyes and a mat of thick black hair. But the details were different. Under a sheen of sweat and grime, the pilot’s face was hard, the eyes sunken. It was as if the bones of his skull had pushed out of his flesh. He looked much older than nineteen, much more than two years older than Pirius.
    In that first glance, Pirius quailed from this man. And yet he was so familiar, so like himself, and he felt drawn.
    He held out his hand. The pilot took it and clasped firmly. It was an oddly neutral feeling, like holding his own hand; the pilot’s skin seemed to be at precisely the same temperature as Pirius’s own.
    “I saw the Xeelee ship you brought back,” Pirius ventured. “Quite a trophy.”
    “Long story,” said the pilot. He didn’t sound interested, in the Xeelee or in Pirius. His voice sounded nothing like Pirius’s own, in his head.
    “So I get to be a hero?”
    The pilot looked mournful. “I’m sorry,” he said, apparently sincerely.
    That bewildered Pirius. “For what?”
    There was a heavy hand on his shoulder. He turned and found himself facing a bulky man with the long black robes and shaven head