Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

purposes.
    The Curator peered at Saturn uneasily. ’And that, it seems, is
what is held under those clouds. A weapon of last resort.’
    ’But,’ said Symat, ’what has this got to do with me?’
    Suddenly Mela’s face worked, and the tone of her voice hoarsened.
’We need you because the Guardians won’t listen to us. Is that clear
enough for you?’
    Symat was shocked. This time the intervention was crude, as if she
had been possessed by a different personality altogether.
    The Curator stepped forward and grabbed her arm, one Virtual
handling another. ’Ascendent. Show yourself. Leave this child
alone.’
    Mela spasmed, and her eyes rolled up in their sockets, showing
white. She blurred briefly and broke up into a rough sculpture of
blocky pixels. Then Mela stumbled backwards, reforming as she emerged
from the cloud of pixels.
    And from that mist of light a new figure coalesced. Suddenly there
were four of them, and the flitter’s tiny cabin seemed very
crowded.
     
    The newcomer was a woman, dressed in a brown robe as drab as the
Curator’s. Small, dark, her face was smooth - but Symat immediately
saw that the smoothness was a sign of great age.
    Black eyes fixed on Symat.
    ’Ascendent One,’ the Curator breathed.
    ’You can’t be Luru,’ Symat said immediately. ’I saw her. She’s a
dried-out skeleton. She could barely move.’
    ’I’m a projection,’ the new Virtual said, unfazed. ’I am as she
was long ago. And my sentience overlaps with hers, though
time-shifted.’
    The Curator sounded uneasy. ’Most of the Ascendents are conscious
only briefly each day. It will take Luru, the real one, a long time
to live through this Virtual’s experiences. But she has time, of
course.’
    ’Her will is mine,’ said the Virtual. ’When I speak, she speaks.
Remember that.’
    Symat felt deeply disturbed. To see Mela split into two and give
birth to this monstrous form was an unwelcome reminder of how strange
all these Virtual creatures were, how inhuman - and how
interconnected, their identities somehow flowing one into another. He
gathered his defiance into a knot. ’You told me the Guardians won’t
listen to you.’
    Luru eyed him. ’They’ll listen to you, though.’
    Symat felt the universe pivot around him, as if the Guardians’
strange cosmic weapons had been turned on him. ’Me? I could command
the Guardians?’
    ’Of course,’ she said. ’That’s why we bred you.’ She stepped
closer to him and he thought he could smell her, a dry scent like a
musty library. ’I’ll show you,’ she said. ’Come to Earth.’

 
V
     
     
    So Symat’s strange odyssey ended on Earth, the planet of his most
remote ancestors.
    There was an Earth in Symat’s head, mistily imagined, a world of
water and life, of blue and green. It had been taken out of Mars’s
sky long ago, many generations before he had been born, and sent on
its way to Saturn. It wasn’t something you talked about, the loss of
the home world.
    But the Earth that came looming out of the outer-system cold was
not like that story-book vision. The mountains were worn down, and
the sea floors were rimmed by banks of salt, drained save for dark
remnant puddles. The air seemed thin, supporting only wispy traces of
cloud. And though a few cities still glittered, the ground of Earth
shone brick red, the red of Mars, of rust and lifelessness.
    ’Earth has grown old,’ he said.
    Luru was watching him, apparently interested in his reaction. ’Old
like its children.’
    ’It is well guarded,’ Mela murmured.
    ’There is nothing more precious,’ Luru said.
    On its final approach to the planet the flitter cautiously
descended through shells of automated sentinels, and artificial suns
that swooped on low orbits, casting splashes of yellow light. Luru
said that not all those satellites carried weapons. Earth’s magnetic
field had failed. The sun was far away now, but the electromagnetic
environment around a gas giant was ferociously energetic. Where
nature failed, humans had to step in; and so devices orbited the
Earth to protect it with new shields of magnetism.
    The flitter ducked deep into the air, and the sky turned a muddy
red-brown. Everybody stayed silent as the ground of Earth fled under
the ship’s prow.
    The cities were sparsely scattered, and Symat could see no logic
to their positioning. Perhaps they had been placed along the banks of
long-dried rivers, or at the shores of vanished oceans; the cities
endured where