Exultant by Stephen Baxter Page A

curled up, might not have been sleeping, but if not she was faking it well. Enduring Hope, physically exhausted and now apparently emotionally drained by his meeting with this enigmatic spiritual leader, slumped into his bunk.
    Pirius lay back and closed his eyes. But the light was shifting and bright, the noise clamoring and disorderly. He had never thought of an Arches Base Barracks Ball as particularly peaceful, but so it seemed compared to this. He forced his aching muscles to relax, and he tried not to count down the minutes until he had to rise again.
             
    In the hour before reveille, the general clamor seemed to subside. The talking, screwing, and wrestling was done for the night, it seemed, and people were drifting into sleep.
    And in that last still hour, Pirius heard an odd noise. It was a scratching, a rustle, a whisper. Then a soft piping rose up from all around the dorm, a chorus of tiny voices joined in near harmony.
    Later, Burden told him it was the rats, calling to each other from around the barracks. Having traveled with humans twenty-eight thousand light-years from Earth, the rats had learned to sing, and humans who had never heard birds had learned to enjoy their song. For the rats it was a survival tactic; they had become lovable.
    When the klaxon sounded, the soft singing was overwhelmed.
    Chapter 8
    As Nilis’s corvette approached Sol system, even while it was still under FTL, it was bombarded by a whole series of Virtual messages. The Virtuals were like shrieking ghosts, liable to erupt into existence anywhere in the corvette at any time. Some of these messages were sanctioned by the various authorities; others, it seemed, were not, but had been able to punch their way through a Navy ship’s firewalls anyway. Torec was freaked by the whole experience.
    It took Pirius Red some time to understand that many of these clamoring entreaties and demands were aimed, not at Nilis, but at
him,
the boy who had captured a Xeelee.
    “Don’t let it worry you,” Nilis said with a smile. “You’re already famous, that’s all!”
    Of course that was disturbing enough in itself. Pirius had always harbored a guilty desire to do something spectacular, to be remembered. But he didn’t want to be notorious for something
he
hadn’t done, and, now that history had been edited, never would.
    And anyhow, personal fame was utterly non-Doctrinal. Pirius had expected that here, close to the center of humanity, adherence to the Doctrines would be stronger than ever. But that, it turned out, was naive.
    “In many ways, things are simpler out where you come from,” Nilis said gently. “Here in Sol system, and especially on Earth—despite the best efforts of the Commission for Historical Truth—everything is very crowded, very old, and very messy.
Nobody
is in control, really, and never could be. You’ll see!”
    Like much of what Nilis had to say to him, Pirius found it best not to think too hard about that. But the messages continued to come, and as the light of Sol grew brighter, his heart beat faster.
             
    The corvette stopped briefly at Saturn. Pirius and Torec knew that name, for this immense gas giant had famously been requisitioned long ago by the Navy as its largest base in Sol system.
    Pirius peered out in awe. Around the cloud-draped planet, ships and facilities orbited in swarms. Even the moons bristled with factories and weapons emplacements—though it turned out that many of the smaller moons had been broken up for raw materials, water-ice of mantles and rock of cores.
    Nilis waxed nostalgic about this world. He even showed Pirius Virtuals of how it had been before the arrival of humans, when it had been circled by a spectacular system of ice rings. But the rings had been too tempting a mine for the first settlers of the system, and too fragile to withstand the fires of the first wars fought here.
    Scenery didn’t interest Pirius much. As a Navy brat, he was much more