Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

mediate
the regime of the Qax. Humanity’s relations with its conquerors
deteriorated after the Friends’ Rebellion. Without us things would be
much worse still. Which is why,’ she said slowly, ’I regret asking
this of you - especially you, Luru.’
    ’I don’t understand.’
    Cana sighed. ’Of course you don’t. Child, Jasoft Parz, the
exemplar after whom our traitorous class is named, was your
grandfather.’
     
    Luru sat in the flitter’s small cabin, nervous, irritated, as the
land peeled away beneath her.
    From the air the spread of buildings, bubbles blown from
scraped-bare bedrock, was glistening, almost organic. She could see
the starbreaker-cut canals, arteries that imported desalinated water
and food from the huge offshore algae farms and exported waste to the
sink of the ocean. Down one canal bodies drifted in an orderly
procession, glinting in plastic wrap; they were the night’s dead,
expended carcases returning to the sea.
    Conurbation 5204 had been constructed when Luru was ten years old.
She remembered the day well; the construction had taken just minutes,
a spectacular sight for a little girl. There was talk now that the
Extirpation Directorate might soon be moved to a new location in the
continental interior, in which case Conurbation 5204 would be razed
flat in even less time, leaving no trace. That was how the Qax did
things: deliberate, fast, brutal, clean, allowing not the slightest
space for human sentiment.
    It was a relatively short flitter hop to Symat Suvan’s research
facility - short, but nevertheless longer than any journey Luru had
taken before. And she was going to have to spend more time outside
than she ever had before.
    She didn’t want to do this at all.
    Luru’s brief career, at the Extirpation Directorate in Conurbation
5204, had been pleasingly successful. She was working on a tailored
data-cleanse package. The cleanser was to be sent into huge
genealogical libraries recently discovered in a hardened shelter
under the site known as Solled Laik City, evidently a pre-Occupation
human city. The cleanser was a combination of intelligent
interpretive agents, targeted virus packages and focused
electromagnetic-pulse bursts, capable of eradication of the ancient
data banks at the physical, logical and philosophical levels. The
cleanser itself was of conventional design; the project’s challenge
was in the scale, complexity and encryption of the millennia-old data
to be deleted.
    The work was stretching, competitive, deeply satisfying to Luru,
and a major progression along her career path within the Extirpation
Directorate. In fact she had been promoted to cadre leader for this
new project, at twenty-two her first taste of real responsibility.
And she resented being dragged away from her work like this, flung
halfway across the continent, all for the benefit of a misfit like
Symat Suvan.
    She tried to distract herself with her notes on superheavy
elements, Symat’s apparent obsession.
    There was a natural limit to the size of the nucleus of an atom,
it seemed. A nucleus was a cluster of protons whose positive
electrical charges tended to drive them apart. The protons were held
together by a comforting swarm of neutrons - neutral particles.
Larger nuclei needed many neutrons to hold them together; lead-208,
for example, contained eighty-two protons and a hundred and
twenty-six neutrons.
    The gluing abilities of the neutrons were limited. It was once
believed that no nucleus could exist with more than a hundred or so
protons. But some theorists had predicted that there could be much
larger nuclear configurations, with certain special geometries - and
these were eventually discovered. The lightest of the superheavy
nuclei had a hundred and fourteen protons and a hundred and
eighty-four neutrons; the most common appeared to be an isotope
called marsdenium- 440, with a hundred and eighty-four protons and a
crowd of two hundred and fifty-six neutrons. But there were much
heavier nuclei still, with many hundreds of protons and neutrons.
These strange nuclei were deformed, squashed into ellipsoids or even
hollowed out…
    She put down her data slate. She found it hard to concentrate on
such useless abstractions as this corner of physics - and she didn’t
understand how this could have absorbed Symat so much. She did wonder
absently why ’marsdenium’ had that particular name: perhaps ’Marsden’
or ’Marsdeni’ was the name of its discoverer. Such historical