Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

looked up, coughing, as they
passed.
    ’This isn’t a healthy place,’ Luru observed.
    ’What did you expect? But I keep forgetting. You expect nothing;
you know nothing. Luru, people die young in places like this. How
else do you think I became so senior here so quickly? And yet they
still come. I came.’
    ’Perhaps you were seduced by the closeness of the cadres here.’ A
healthy dissolution might restore the social balance here, she
thought.
    He stared at her. ’There are no cadres here. The cadres, dissolved
every couple of years, are another Qax social invention, imposed on
humans after the Rebellion for the purposes of control. Didn’t you
even know that? Luru, these are families.’
    He had to explain what that meant. And that the girl who nursed
the child was not the little one’s cadre sibling, but her mother.
    They reached a door that had been crudely cut in the wall of the
Qax facility. They passed through into an immense curving chamber
where vast engines crouched. Hovering light globes cast long, complex
shadows, and human technicians talked softly, dwarfed to
insignificance. There was a smell of burned lubricant, of ozone.
    Luru was overwhelmed.
    Symat said, ’This place was thrown up by the Qax after the
Rebellion. It was one of hundreds around the planet. We think it was
a factory for making exotic matter - that is, matter with a negative
energy density. They abandoned the place; we don’t know why. Since it
was built with human wealth and labour I suppose it means nothing to
them. We refurbished the machinery, rebuilt much of it. Now we use it
to make our own superheavy nuclei, by bombarding lumps of plutonium
with high-energy calcium ions.’
    That puzzled her. He’d said his goal was the detection of
superheavy elements in Earth’s crust. So why was he manufacturing
them?
    ’Why were the Qax making exotic matter?’
    ’None of us knows for sure,’ he said. ’There is a rumour that the
Qax were trying to build a tunnel to the future. It’s even said that
the Qax Governor itself is an immigrant from the future, where
humanity is triumphant. And that is why the Qax work so hard to
control us. Because they are frightened of us.’
    ’That’s just a legend.’
    ’Is it? Perhaps with time all history becomes legend.’
    ’This is nonsense, Symat!’
    ’How do you know, Luru?’
    ’There are witnesses to the past. The pharaohs.’
    ’Like Gemo Cana?’ Symat laughed. ’Luru, there are no survivors
from before the Occupation. The Qax withdrew AntiSenescence treatment
for two centuries after the Occupation. All the old pharaohs died,
before the Qax began to provide their own longevity treatments. These
modern undead, like Gemo Cana, have been bought by the Qax, bought by
the promise of long life.’ He leaned towards her. ’As they are buying
you, Luru Parz.’
    They emerged from the clean blue calm of the facility, back into
the grimy mire of the town.
    Disturbed, disoriented, she said evenly, ’Symat, the starbreaker
beams are coming here. Once the Qax tolerated activities like this,
indigenous cultural and scientific endeavours. Not any more, not
since the Friends of Wigner betrayed the Qax’s cultural generosity
towards indigenous ambitions.’ The Friends had used a cultural site
to mask seditious activities. ’If you don’t move out you will be
killed.’
    He clambered on a low wall and spread his arms, his long robe
flapping in the thin dusty breeze. ’Ah. Indigenous. I love that
word.’
    ’Symat, come home. There’s nothing here. The data cleansers were
sent through this place long ago.’
    ’Nothing? Look around you, Luru. Look at the scale of these old
foundations. Once there was a host of immense buildings here, taller
than the sky. And this roadway, where now we mine the old sewers for
water, must have swarmed with traffic. Millions of people must have
lived and worked here. It was a great city. And it was human, Luru.
The data might have gone; we might never even know the true name of
this place. But as long as these ruins are here we can imagine how it
must once have been. If these last traces are destroyed the past can
never be retrieved. And that’s what the Qax intend.
    ’The Extirpation isn’t always a matter of clinical data deletion,
you know. Sometimes the jasofts come here with their robots, and they
simply burn and smash: books, paintings, artefacts. Perhaps if you
saw that, you would understand. The Qax want to sever our roots - to
obliterate