“Why what?”

Nilis waved a hand vaguely. “Why should the universe be so fecund? Why should it be that at every stage it is filled with life, with burgeoning complexity? It surely didn’t have to be so.” He leaned closer and spoke conspiratorially. “The ancients did a lot of thinking about this, you know. You can imagine a universe that would not support life, at any stage. Of course in that case nobody would be around to observe it. There were some philosophers who speculated that our universes fecundity is no accident. Perhaps it was designed in, somehow, or at least nurtured. Perhaps the universe itself is an immense artifact, a technological womb of spacetime! But these ideas were suppressed, like so much else, when the Coalition’s grip tightened. For a mankind traumatized by near-extinction at the hands of the Qax, the idea that such powers might exist was simply too challenging. So the ancient work was buried — but not destroyed.”

Pirius knew by now that Nilis had a habit of letting his research run away, far beyond any practical use. “But what do we do?”

Nilis grimaced. “All this is very indirect, based on long chains of deductions. We need to get closer to the target. I would like, somehow, to make some direct observations of Chandra itself. But I fear that to do that I must return to the center of the Galaxy — or at least a part of me.”

Pirius didn’t know what he meant. “But, Commissary — what am I doing here?”

“The staff here will continue to work on my quagmite analysis. I want you to work with them. You have been trained in the behavior and properties of the quagmites. These habitat-dwellers are all a bit theoretical; perhaps you will give their thinking some meat! And,” he said more hesitantly, “I thought you might appreciate a little quiet time to reflect.”

Pirius nodded. “Oh. So this is a punishment for Pluto.”

“Not a punishment, not at all. I just want you to, umm, work your way through the issues that caused your breakdown.”

“Breakdown?” Pirius was indignant. “What are you, a psych officer?… Sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Nilis said evenly. “What do you think was going through your head, out there on the ice?”

Pirius tried to find the words. “It was just — out in a place like Arches, you grow up in a Rock. It’s your whole world. You train, you fight, you die. And that’s it. It’s the same for everybody. It doesn’t even occur to you that other things are possible. You never question why your life is the way it is. The Doctrines are just in the background, as unquestioned as, as…”

“As the Rock under your feet.”

“Yes.”

“And then you come to Earth,” Nilis said gently.

“And then you come to Earth. And suddenly you question everything.”

“The trouble is not the state of the Galaxy, you know, not even Earth.”

“Then what?”

“The trouble is you, Pirius. You’re growing, and it isn’t comfortable. All your life you have been conditioned, by agencies with an expertise millennia old. Since I plucked you out of Arches, you have been confronted by experiences which contradicted that conditioning. Now, because you’re no fool, you’re going one step further. You’re starting to understand that you have been conditioned. Isn’t that true?”

“I suppose so,” Pirius said miserably.

“And you will discover the real Pirius — if there’s anything of him inside that conditioned shell.”

“And then what?”

“And then,” Nilis said, “you’re going to have to decide what it is you want to fight for. Of course this is my fault. I never anticipated how hard this would be for you, and Torec. But we are so different, Pirius! I live on Earth — which is after all where humans evolved. Whereas you grew up in a sort of bottle. I respond to the rhythms of the turning Earth, you to a clock. To me the day starts with dawn; to you it is reveille. There are birds in my world, birds and flowers, nothing but rats in yours. Even our language is different: I have my feet on the ground, but my ideas are sometimes blue-sky — but such metaphors mean nothing to you! And you don’t have a lover, you have a squeeze… I never foresaw how unhappy it would make you.”

“Maybe you should have,” Pirius said harshly.

Nilis drew back. “But I had higher goals. As for Venus, my instructions stand.”

He turned away and peered out at the mined surface of an engineered Venus. “You know, carbon has always been the basis of human molecular nanotechnology. Defect-free engineered diamond is much stronger and harder than any metal could ever be. Right across the Galaxy, our tools, the walls of our homes, the battleships and corvettes of our fleets, even the implants in our bodies, are made of diamond and nanotubes, carbon molecules that once drifted in Venus’s thick clouds. And it has been that way for twenty thousand years. Like Earth, this single world has exported its very substance to sustain a galactic civilization. And, like Earth…” He let the sentence tail away.

Pirius said, “Like Earth, it is becoming exhausted.” It must be true, he thought. He could see it just by looking out the window. The air was still thick, but must be only a trace of the dense air ocean of former times. “But Venus was always dead.”

“Actually, no…”

In its early years, Venus had been warm and wet, not unlike Earth — although, thanks to a peculiar history of collisions during its formation, it spun slowly on its axis. Like Earth, Venus had quickly spawned life-forms based on carbon, sulphur, nitrogen, water; and on a world where the “day” was longer than the year, a complex and unique climate and biota established itself.

Nilis said, “When the climate failed, and the ground turned red hot, survivors found places in the clouds — living inside water droplets, little rods and filaments breeding fast enough for generations to pass before the droplets broke up. Soon the lost ground wasn’t even a biochemical memory. They learned to specialize; there was plenty of sulphuric acid floating around up there, so a sulphur-based metabolism was the thing to have. And that was what the first human explorers found. It was a whole cloud-borne biota, lacking any multicelled animals, but in some ways as exotic and complex as anything on Earth or Mars. But Venus’s carbon was just too valuable.”

“And the native life?”

“I’m told there is a petri dish or two to be found in the museums.” The shadow-free glare of Venus emptied his face of expression, and Pirius couldn’t be sure of the Commissary’s opinion of this ancient xenocide.

Chapter 25

On Quin Base, a month after Factory Rock, training started again.

At first it was mindless exercises. After that came elementary surface operations: trench work, moving over open ground, the new platoons learning to operate together. Just like old times, Pirius Blue thought.

Things had changed for him, though. Now that Pirius was a veteran, even though he was only a buck private and Army Service Corps at that, he was expected to share his experience with his platoon of black-pupilled newbies. So he took the lead in the exercises, and showed them how to dig into the asteroid ground without getting electrostatically charged dirt over their faceplates.

Having some responsibility again felt good, he supposed. But most of all Pirius relished the fitness work, even the meaningless pounding around Marta’s famous punishment crater. He ran and ran, until his difficult thoughts dissolved into a fatigue-poison blur.

One night he came back from the surface through the usual route of airlocks and suit stations, and limped his way to his bunk. He was stiff and sore, and wanted nothing but to sleep off the day’s work.