Exultant by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online Page B

that arrogant clone of himself had done downstream! He wished he could meet Pirius Blue alone to have it out.
    Nilis’s room, deep in the belly of Officer Country, was small. It was unfurnished save for a low bunk, a desk with a chair, and a nano-food niche. Pirius sat awkwardly on the bunk, and declined an offer of food or drink. Nilis himself sipped water. The walls of the room were translucent, as were all the walls throughout the Base, but they were buried so deep in this warren of offices and conference rooms that the sky beyond could barely be glimpsed.
    “Which is the way I prefer it, I’m afraid,” Nilis said with a rueful smile. He sat on the room’s single chair, his robes awkwardly rucked up to expose scrawny shins. “You have to understand that I’m from Earth, where I live as humans did in primitive times—I mean, on an apparently flat world, under a dome of sky scattered with a few distant stars. Here the worlds fly around like demented birds, and even the stars are glaring globes. Of course only the most massive stars can form here; conditions are too turbulent for anything as puny as Sol. . . . It’s rather disorienting!”
    Pirius had never thought about it. “I grew up here, sir.”
    “Call me Nilis.”
    But Pirius was not about to call a Commissary, even a soft eccentric Commissary like this one, anything but “Sir.” He said, “Arches doesn’t seem strange to me.”
    “Well, I suppose it wouldn’t.” Nilis got to his feet, cup of water in his liver-spotted hand, and he peered out through layers of offices at the wheeling sky. “A self-gravitating system—a classic demonstration of the n-body problem of celestial mechanics. And chaotic, unstable to small perturbations, never predictable even in principle. No doubt this endless barrage has been designed as conditioning, to get you proto-pilots used to thinking in shifting three-dimensional geometries, and to program out ancient fears of falling—an instinct useful when we descended from the trees, not so valuable for a starship pilot, eh? But for me, it’s like being trapped in some vast celestial clockwork.”
    Irritated, distressed, Pirius blurted, “Forgive me, sir, but I don’t understand why I’m here. Or why
you’re
here.”
    Nilis nodded. “Of course. Cosmic special effects pale into insignificance beside our human dilemmas, don’t they?”
    “Why must I be punished? I haven’t
done
anything. It was
him—
he did it all.”
    Nilis studied him. “Has your training not covered that yet? I keep forgetting how
young
you all are. Pirius, what Blue has done is done; it is locked in his timeline—his personal past. He must be punished, yes, in the hope of eradicating his character flaws. Whereas
you
are to be punished in the hope of changing your still unformed timeline. We can’t change
his
past, but we can change
your
future, perhaps. Do you see? And so you must suffer for a crime you haven’t yet committed.
    “At least, that’s the logic of the system. Is it right or wrong? Who’s to say? We humans haven’t evolved to handle time-travel paradoxes; all this stretches our ethical frameworks a little far. And, you know, I really can’t imagine how it must be for
you,
Pirius Red. How does it
feel
to confront a version of yourself plucked out of the future and deposited in your life?”
    “Sir, we train for it. It’s not a problem.”
    Nilis sighed. He said, with a trace of steel in his voice, “Now, Pirius, I am here to help you, but I’m not going to be able to do that if you’re not honest with me. Try again.”
    Pirius said reluctantly, “I feel—irritated. Resentful.”
    Nilis nodded. “That’s better. Good. I can understand that. After all, your own future has suddenly been hijacked by this stranger, hasn’t it? Your choices taken away from you. And how do you feel about
him—
Pirius Blue, your double—regardless of what he has done?”
    “It’s difficult,” Pirius said. “I don’t like him. I