Exultant by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online Page A

of a Commissary.
    “Pirius—
both
of you!—I’ve been assigned as your counsel in the trial,” the Commissary said. “My name is Nilis.”
    Even at this moment of confusion Pirius stared. Arches was for young people; with white stubble, his face jowly, his skin pocked with deep pores, this Commissary was the
oldest
person Pirius had ever seen. And he was none too smart—his robe seemed to have been patched, and its hem was worn and dirty. Behind him were two more Commissaries, who looked a lot less sympathetic.
    Nilis’s eyes were strange, blue and watery, and he looked on Pirius and the pilot with a certain soft fascination. “You’re so alike! Well, of course you would be. And both so young. . . . Temporal twins, what a remarkable thing, my eyes! But how will I tell you apart? Look—suppose I call
you
”—the older pilot—“Pirius Blue. Because you’re from the future—blueshifted, you see? And
you
will be Pirius Red. How would that suit you?”
    Pirius shook his head.
Pirius Red
? That wasn’t his name. Suddenly he wasn’t even himself any more. “Sir—Commissary—I don’t understand. Why do
I
need a counsel?”
    “Oh, my eyes, has nobody explained that to you yet?”
    The pilot—Pirius Blue—stepped forward, irritated. “Come on, kid, you know the drill. They’re throwing the book at me for what happened aboard the
Claw.
And if they are charging
me—
”
    Pirius had heard rumors of this procedure but had never understood. “I will be put on trial, too.”
    “You got it,” said his older self neutrally.
    Pirius was to be tried for a crime that he
hadn’t even committed yet.
Confused, scared, he turned around looking for Torec.
    Torec shrugged. “Tough break.” She seemed withdrawn, as if she were trying to disengage from him and the whole mess.
    Pirius Blue was looking at him with revulsion. “Do you have to let your jaw dangle like that? You’re making us both look bad.” He brushed past Pirius and spoke to Captain Seath. “Sir, where do I report?”
    “Debriefing first, Pilot. Then you’re in the hands of Commissary Nilis.” She turned and marched him away; the battle-weary crew of the
Claw
followed.
    Nilis touched Pirius Red’s shoulder. “You come with me. I think we need to talk.”
             
    Nilis had been assigned quarters in a rock the ensigns knew as Officer Country. To get there from the dry dock, with Pirius, Nilis endured a short flitter hop through the swarm of captive asteroids that made up the base.
    In the sky outside the hull, worldlets plummeted like fists.
    Planets were rare, here in the Core of the Galaxy; the stars were too close-packed for stable systems to form. But there was plenty of dust and ice, and it gathered into great swarms of asteroids. Some of the base asteroids were unworked—just raw rock, still the lumpy aggregates they had been when tethered and gathered here. The rest had been melted, carved, blown into translucent bubbles like the Barracks Ball. Worked or not, they were all wrapped in stabilizing superconductor hoops, like presents wrapped in gleaming electric blue ribbon, and they all had Higgs field inertia-control facilities mounted on their surfaces. The Higgs facilities gave a gravity of a standard unit or so on the worldlets’ surfaces, and provided stable fields in their interior: tiered for a Barracks Ball, more complex in other Rocks depending on their uses.
    And the generators drew the Rocks to each other. Mutually attracting, they swooped and swirled about each other in an endless three-dimensional dance, mad miniature planets free of the stabilizing influence of a sun. Some of the Rocks swam so close to the flitter that you could see maintenance crews working on the surfaces, crawling over the tightly curved horizons like bugs on bits of food.
    Pirius saw, bemused, that Nilis kept his eyes closed all the way through the hop.
    Pirius had his mind on bigger issues. So his whole life was suddenly defined by whatever