Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

disturbs them. That’s why only bots and
Virtuals are used as attendants. You don’t want to frighten them with
a new face every century or so!’
    Symat wondered how old the Curator himself was.
    One old woman, to Symat’s astonishment, was out of bed. She was
naked, her skin so flaccid she looked as if she had melted, and tubes
snaked out of all her orifices. But she managed to walk to a cabinet
a few paces from her bed, where, with a trembling hand, she picked
out fragments of food that she pushed into a toothless mouth.
    ’She likes to feed herself,’ the Curator said. ’Or at least to
believe she does. It’s good for her to have some independence. But
look here.’
    The floor was cut through by a deep rut, hard metal and ceramic
worn away by this old woman’s soft feet. And where she had lain in
her bed she had left the shape of her body compressed into the
mattress.
    The Curator said dryly, ’Perhaps you can see why many of us
working in this place prefer to forgo personality. It’s better not to
think about it. Better still not to be able to think…’
    The stations were set out in orderly rows, a neat rectangular
grid. Symat counted no more than twenty or twenty-five rows in each
direction: there were only a few hundred Ascendents here.
    The Curator seemed to know what he was thinking. ’Four hundred and
thirty-seven. If you’d come here a decade ago there were four hundred
and thirty-eight.’
    Mela asked, ’This is all?’
    ’As a group they have been ineradicable. They have time on their
side: that’s what you always have to remember about Ascendents. If
you try to get rid of them, no matter how strong you are, all they
have to do is wait for you to grow old and die, and for your children
and grandchildren to die too, wait until you’re nothing but a sliver
of data in a history text, and then they just walk back in.’
    ’They are dying out, though.’
    The Curator shrugged. ’Nobody is making immortals any more. And
entropy catches up with us all in the end. But despite their
strangeness, they are mankind’s treasures.’
    Mela asked, ’Why do you say that?’
    ’For all they have seen,’ the Curator said. ’For the wisdom they
have accrued, when you can dig it out of them. And for all they have
done for us - and continue to do. It was the undying who founded the
Transcendence, who tried to bring us to a new plane of being
altogether. They ultimately failed, but what a magnificent
ambition!’
    ’And you say they still work for us?’ Mela asked.
    ’By moving Port Sol,’ Symat saw immediately.
    ’Yes,’ the Curator said, ’But what they have done is rather more
spectacular than pushing around a mere ice moon! You see, long ago,
the undying resolved to move the Earth itself…’
     
    It was the sun, of course.
    As the downpour of solar radiation grew too intense, Earth’s
natural processes couldn’t be sustained. And when the swelling sun’s
photosphere washed over it like a misty tide, would Earth be
sterilised, scorched, melted, even vaporised? It would take a long
time, hundreds of thousands of years, before Earth was destroyed
entirely. But Ascendents fretted on long timescales. You could say
that was the point of their existence.
    How do you save a world from an overheating sun? Mankind had never
had the power to tinker with the processes of stars themselves. Could
you shield the world with mirrors and parasols lofted into space? But
any such shield would eventually be overwhelmed as the sun expanded.
There was only one option: to move the Earth itself. But how?
    You could push it. You could mount a giant rocket on a spin pole,
as had been done on Port Sol, or even a series of rockets around the
equator. But you would consume an immense amount of Earth’s own
matter in the process, and any instability could cause the planet’s
crust to shake itself to pieces. You might end up doing more harm
than good.
    Alternatively you could use gravity. If the Earth still had its
Moon, you could have used that as a tug: push away the Moon as
violently as you liked, and let lunar gravity gradually haul the
Earth on a slow spiral away from the sun. But the Moon had been
detached from the Earth in the course of a long-forgotten war.
    Or you could do it piecemeal.
    The Ascendents mounted venerable GUTdrive engines on a whole fleet
of Kuiper Belt ice moons, including their own base, Port Sol. It took
a long time for the slow push of the plasma rockets to make a
difference, but at last