Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

’trees’ sculpted from ice. ’Look,
Mela. A transfer booth! Even here they are escaping.’
    The Curator looked surprised. ’Oh, that’s not for people. Did you
imagine booths are just for humans?’ He told them that when Port Sol
had first been discovered it had an indigenous fauna, slow-moving
inhabitants of the deep cold with liquid helium for blood. ’Once we
farmed them; we transplanted them to other cold worlds. Somehow they
survived a million years of cohabitation with mankind - even the
dreadful summer we have brought to Port Sol by pushing it into the
heart of the system. And now a booth has appeared, right in the
middle of their Forest of Ancestors, and, with our help, the
Toolmakers, the ones in their motile phase, are passing through to
their own destiny. A slow process, I can tell you…’ He seemed
surprised at their incomprehension. ’There are many life forms in Sol
system - or were, before we came along - but even now many of them
survive. And as far as we can tell, every one of them with the
remotest level of advancement has been supplied with booths so they
can escape the destruction of the sun. Touching, isn’t it? And not
only that, there are suggestions in the records that other species,
driven to extinction long ago, have been provided with similar escape
routes. The Silver Ghosts, for example… The booths are evidently
part of a long-term rescue strategy, by whoever is responsible. It
could be the Xeelee,’ he mused. ’Some say it is. The Xeelee relish
the diversity of life, and seek to protect it, even when it snaps at
them, as we have…’
    The silvered domes at the base of the rocket tower turned out to
be the upper levels of much more extensive structures, buried deep
under the ice.
    The Curator took them down through a hatch in the bottom of the
flitter, through a kind of airlock, and then into the interior of the
base. They never walked in the vacuum, out on the ice. Symat, who had
never walked anywhere you would need a pressure suit, was faintly
disappointed to lose out on a little bit of adventure.
    The Curator led them along cold, echoing corridors, past
closed-off rooms. Just as on Mars there were few people here, it
seemed. Symat was getting a sense of Sol system as a series of empty
planets and moons, like dusty rooms in a deserted house.
    The Curator asked if they wanted to rest or eat, but they were
both too excited, or apprehensive. The Curator gave in with a
cheerful shrug. ’Then I’ll take you to the Ascendents.’
    He led them along more corridors until they came to a brightly lit
area, a complex of corridors that stank strongly of antisepsis, like
a hospital. The Curator paused at a door. ’Now before you go in,’ he
told Symat, ’try not to be afraid.’
    Symat said testily, ’Let’s get on with it.’ He wasn’t about to
hesitate in front of Mela. He stepped forward boldly. The door slid
aside.
    He entered a low, wide room, white-walled, flooded with pale
light. There were beds here - no, they were more like medical
stations; each had boxes of equipment hovering in the air beside it.
Bots cleaned the walls and ferried supplies. He saw no human
attendants, but there were many Virtuals who nodded at the Curator.
Rotund individuals like him, they all seemed to have broad faces and
wide smiles.
    Symat inspected a station more closely. A bot hovered
suspiciously, but he wasn’t impeded. The station was a pallet covered
by a translucent bubble. It was marked with a number: 247, in bold
digits. Inside the bubble, lying on the pallet, was a man. His limbs
like sticks, his belly imploded, and with tiny bots crawling over his
body, he looked more dead than alive. But as Symat cast a shadow over
his face, that skull-like head turned. Symat shuddered and stepped
back.
    They walked on, between the rows of stations. The floor was soft
and Symat’s footsteps made no sound.
    The Curator said, ’They are unimaginably old, some of them - and
several of them, with no real memory of their own deepest past, don’t
even know how old they are themselves. The best way to date them is
actually through the anti-ageing technology embedded in their bodies.
But even that is unreliable.’
    As they passed, the naked Ascendents stirred and whispered, dry
skin rustling.
    ’We’re disturbing them,’ Mela said softly.
    ’Don’t worry about it. They are creatures of routine - as are we
all, but in them it is taken to an extreme. And anything that
disturbs that routine