Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

the ground into a
featureless silicate dust.
    They spoke of this. Teel murmured, ’But the Qax were here only a
few centuries.’
    Dolo nodded. The silvery light reflected from the planes of his
face; he was about fifty years old. ’Much of this is human work,
Coalition work. The Qax tried to destroy our past, to cut us adrift
from history. Their motivation was wrong - but their methods were
valid. Remember, we have been in direct conflict with the Xeelee for
eleven thousand years. We have done well. We have swept them out of
the plane of the Galactic disc. But they remain huddled in their
fortress in the Core, and beyond our little island of stars they
swarm in uncounted numbers. We must put the past aside, for it is a
distraction. If the Xeelee defeat us, we will have no future - and in
that case, what will the past matter?’
    ’Your ideology is powerful.’
    Dolo nodded. ’A single idea powerful enough to keep mankind united
across a hundred thousand light years, and through tens of
millennia.’
    Teel said, ’But the mountains and rivers of Earth were far older
than mankind. How strange that we have outlived them.’
    Luca was startled by this anti-Doctrinal sentiment. Dolo merely
looked interested, and said nothing.
    The yacht soared upwards, out through the great ranks of Snowflake
surveillance stations that stretched as far as Earth’s Moon, and the
planet itself turned into a glistening pebble that fell away into the
dark.
    It would take them a day to reach Saturn. Luca, on this first trip
out of Earth’s gravitational well, had expected to glimpse Earth’s
sister worlds - perhaps even mighty Jupiter itself, transformed
millennia ago into a gleaming black hole in a futile gesture of
rebellion. But he saw nothing but darkness beyond the hull, not so
much as a grain of dust, and even as they plunged through the outer
system the stars did not shift across the sky, dwarfing the journey
he was making.
    Saturn itself was a bloated ball of yellow-brown that came
swimming out of the dark. It was visibly flattened at the poles, and
rendered misty in the diminished light of the already remote sun.
Rings like ceramic sheets surrounded it, gaudy. The world itself was
an exotic place, for, it was said, mighty machines of war had been
suspended in its clouds, there to defend Sol system should the
unthinkable happen and the alien foe strike at the home of mankind.
But if the machines existed there was no sign of them, and Luca was
disappointed when the yacht stopped its approach when the planet was
still no larger than he could cover with his hand.
    But Saturn wasn’t their destination.
    Dolo murmured, ’Look.’
    Luca saw an artefact - a tetrahedron, glowing sky-blue - sailing
past the planet’s limb. Kilometres across, it was a framework of
glowing rods, and brown-gold membranes of light stretched across the
open faces. Those membranes held tantalising images of star fields,
of suns that had never shone over Saturn, or Earth.
    ’A wormhole Interface,’ Luca breathed. It was like a dream of a
forbidden past.
    Wormholes were flaws in space and time which connected points
separated by light years - or by centuries - with passages of curved
space. On the scale of the invisibly small, where the mysterious
effects of quantum gravity operated, spacetime was foam-like, riddled
with tiny wormholes. It had taken the genius of the legendary
engineer Michael Poole, more than twenty thousand years ago, to pull
such a wormhole out of the foam and manipulate it to the size and
shape he wanted: that is, big enough to take a spacecraft.
    ’Once it must have been magnificent,’ Teel said now. ’Poole and
his followers built a wormhole network that spanned Sol system, from
Earth to the outermost ice moon. At Earth itself wormhole gates of
all sizes drifted across the face of the planet like sculptures.’
This evocation was surprisingly poetic. But then Teel had been
brought up within the Core itself - you couldn’t get much further
from Earth than that - and Luca wondered how much this trip to the
home system meant to her.
    But Dolo said sternly, ’That was before the Occupation, of course.
The Qax broke it all up, destroyed the Poole wormholes. But now we
are building a mighty new network, a great system of arteries that
runs, not just across Sol system, but all the way to the Core of the
Galaxy itself. There are a thousand wormhole termini orbiting in
these rings. And if we have that in the present, we don’t need