Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

said this neutrally, her face blank.
    Mela asked softly, ’What was his name?’
    Luru took a rattling breath. ’Suvan. Symat Suvan.’
    Symat’s mouth dropped open.
    The Curator stared at him. ’So now we know why you have been
conjured into existence, boy.’ He laughed out loud.
     
    The clustering artificial suns swarmed out of the sky, and night
fell. There were still creatures on Earth that needed a cycling of
day and night, it seemed. But the dark revealed a sky crowded with
stars and weapons, with misty Saturn and swollen Sol.
    Symat and his party returned to the flitter. Mela shared a cabin
with Symat; she went to bed and seemed to fall asleep immediately.
Symat could not settle. Too much strangeness was swirling around in
his head - and nothing as disturbing as the fact that he had been
named after the lover of an Ascendent, a man dead a million
years.
    When light began to seep into the sky, he slid out of the cabin
without disturbing Mela. Outside the flitter the air was cool, but so
dry there was no dew. The light was still an empty grey, and the dawn
was complex, cast by multiple suns that swarmed restlessly over the
horizon.
    Luru Parz was standing in the shadow of the flitter’s wing, a
silent pillar watching him.
    ’I couldn’t sleep,’ he said.
    She shrugged. ’You’re young. You’ll survive… Look.’
    Peering into the half-light, Symat saw movement. The dark shapes
were animals, a herd shifting slowly across the plain beyond the
city. One animal, younger, broke away from the rest, and he saw its
silhouette more clearly. He counted two, four, six legs.
    Luru said, ’Interesting, isn’t it? This planet was the capital of
a Galactic empire. Now most of it is abandoned and gone wild.’
    ’I never saw an animal with six legs.’
    ’I believe they are called >spindlings<. They are not native
to Earth. And look at this.’ She walked a few paces away from the
flitter to a patch of grass.
    Symat bent down and ruffled the grass with his fingers. It was dry
as a bone, but it was alive, adapted to the aridity. And as the light
lifted a little more he saw that among the green blades was some kind
of fibrous growth, deep black.
    ’The green grass is probably native: there are lots of ways to
exploit sunlight for energy, but using green chlorophyll is quite
rare. Something to do with the spectrum of our sun, no doubt, before
its modification by the photino birds. But that black mat is not a
native, any more than a spindling. And - there!’ Luru pointed, almost
eagerly. ’See that?’
    Symat saw a small shape moving through the miniature jungle of the
grass. It had a silvered carapace, and he thought it might be a
beetle. But then light speckled between its jaws.
    ’Laser light?’
    ’It’s descended from tiny machines designed to crop the grass. Now
it follows its own evolutionary agenda. If you turn them out into the
wild, even machines evolve, Symat.’
    Symat thought of the bit of wild technology he had seen for
himself on Mars: abandoned Virtual children, turned cannibal. And he
remembered the slow liquid-helium native fauna of Port Sol, scattered
by mankind to other cold worlds across the Galaxy.
    Luru said, ’Wherever they are deposited, living things,
transported between the stars, even machines, find ways to combine,
to form rich new ecologies. After a million years of spaceflight,
every human world is like this. And even if mind disappeared from the
Earth tomorrow, as long as the planet survives, you would be able to
look at this interstellar mixing-up and say, yes, once people from
this place reached the stars.’
    ’But this isn’t the only trace of the past.’ It was Mela; small,
composed, she walked out from the shadow of the flitter. The Curator
followed her.
    ’Oh, good,’ Luru said dryly. ’Everybody’s up.’
    Symat said, ’What do you mean, Mela?’
    ’The collapsed magnetic field. The thin air, the drained oceans.’
She jumped up and drifted back down to the ground, slow as a
snowflake. Symat knew it was a Virtual illusion, but she made her
point effectively: even Earth’s gravity had been reduced.
    Luru sighed. ’Earth got used up.’
    Earth, home of mankind, had been the capital of an empire which
had won a Galaxy, and beyond. And for all that time Earth itself had
supported a surprisingly heavy burden of the resource load.
    ’Earth was only rarely attacked, and never fell into enemy hands,
after the lifting of the Qax Occupation,’ Luru said. ’But its