Resplendent (72 page)
Rusel withdrew, and sealed up the gnawed-through bulkhead. After that he set up a new barrier spanning the Ship parallel to the bulkhead, and opened up the thin slice of the vessel between the walls to intergalactic vacuum, so that nothing could come through that barrier. And he never again gave any thought to what lay on the other side.
XTwenty-five thousand years after the end of his world, Rusel heard that he was to be saved.
‘Rusel. Rusel …’
Rusel wanted the voices to go away. He didn’t need voices now - not Diluc’s, not even Andres’s.
He had no body, no belly, no heart; he had no need of people at all. His memories were scattered in emptiness, like the faint smudges that were the remote galaxies all around the Ship. And like the Ship he forged on into the future, steadily, pointlessly, his life empty of meaning. The last thing he wanted was voices.
But they wouldn’t go away. With deep reluctance, he forced his scattered attention to gather.
The voices were coming from Diluc’s corridor-village. Vaguely, he saw people there, near a door - the door where he had once been barrelled into by little Tomi, he remembered, in a shard of bright warm memory blown from the past - two people, by that same door.
People standing upright. People wearing clothes.
They were not transients. And they were calling his name into the air. With a mighty effort he pulled himself to full awareness.
They stood side by side, a man and a woman - both young, in their twenties, perhaps. They wore smart orange uniforms and boots. The man was clean-shaven, and the woman bore a baby in her arms.
Transients had clustered around them. Naked, pale, eyes wide with curiosity, they squatted on their haunches and reached up with their long arms to the smiling newcomers. Some of them were scrubbing frantically at the floor and walls, teeth bared in rictus grins. They were trying to impress the newcomers with their prowess at cleaning, the only way they knew how. The woman allowed the transients to stroke her child. But she watched them with hard eyes and a fixed smile. And the man’s hand was never far away from the weapon at his belt.
It took Rusel a great deal of effort to find the circuits that would allow him to speak. He said, ‘Rusel. I am Rusel.’
As the disembodied voice boomed out of the air the man and woman looked up, startled, and the transients cowered. The newcomers looked at each other with delight. ‘It’s true,’ said the man. ‘It really is the Mayflower!’ A translation whispered to Rusel.
The woman scoffed. ‘Of course it’s the Mayflower. What else could it be?’
Rusel said, ‘Who are you?’
The man’s name was Pirius, the woman’s Torec.
‘Are we at Canis Major?’
‘No,’ Pirius said gently.
These two had come from the home Galaxy - from Sol system itself, they said. They had come in a faster-than-light ship; it had overtaken the Mayflower’s painful crawl in a few weeks. ‘You have come thirteen thousand light years from Port Sol,’ Pirius said. ‘And it took you more than twenty-five thousand years. It is a record for a generation starship! An astonishing feat.’
Thirteen thousand light years? Even now, the Ship had come only halfway to its intended destination.
Torec cupped the face of a transient girl in her hand - Lora’s face. ‘And,’ Torec said, ‘we came to find you.’
‘Yes,’ said Pirius, smiling. ‘And your floating museum!’
Rusel thought that over. ‘Then mankind lives on?’
Oh, yes, Pirius told him. The mighty Expansion from which the Mayflower’s crew had fled had burned its way right across the Galaxy. It had been an age of war; trillions had gone into the dark. But mankind had endured.
‘And we won!’ Pirius said brightly. Pirius and Torec themselves had been involved in some kind of exotic combat to win the centre of the Galaxy. ‘It’s a human Galaxy now, Rusel.’
‘Human? But how are you still human?’
They seemed to understand the question. ‘We were at war,’ Pirius said. ‘We couldn’t afford to evolve.’
‘The Coalition—’
‘Fallen. Vanished. Gone. They can’t harm you now.’
‘And my crew?’
‘We will take them home. There are places where they can be cared for. But, ah—’
Torec said, ‘But the Ship itself is too big to turn around. Too much mass-energy. I’m not sure we can bring you back.’
Once he had seen himself, a stiff ageless man, through the eyes of Diluc’s great-grandson Poro, through the eyes of a child. Now, just for an instant, he saw himself through the eyes of Pirius and Torec. A wizened, charred thing suspended in a webbing of wires and tubes.
That didn’t matter, of course. ‘Have I fulfilled my mission?’
‘Yes,’ Pirius said gently. ‘You fulfilled it very well.’
He wasn’t aware of Pirius and Torec shepherding the transients and Autarchs out of the Ship and into their own absurdly small craft. He wasn’t aware of Pirius’s farewell call as they shot away, back towards the bright lights of the human Galaxy, leaving him alone. He was only aware of the Ship now, the patient, stolid Ship.
The Ship - and one face, revealed to him at last: an elfin face, with distracted eyes, He didn’t know if she was a gift of Pirius or even Andres, if she was outside his own head or inside. None of that seemed to matter when at last she smiled for him, and he felt the easing of a tension twenty-five millennia old, the dissolving of a clot of ancient guilt.
The Ship forged on into the endless dark, its corridors as clean and bright and empty as his thoughts.
I knew Andres. I knew about the five Ships that sailed from Port Sol. I always wondered what happened to her.
Some of the Ships sailed on to even more exotic fates than her Mayflower’s. But that’s another story.
The conquest of the Galaxy was perhaps humanity’s finest hour. The ministers, generals and Commissaries at the heart of the Coalition looked back on the immense achievement of their ideological government with, perhaps, justifiable pride.
But it was an irony that as soon as the victory was won, the Coalition lost its purpose, and its control.
And it was an irony, I thought, that a crude faith of child soldiers, outlawed by the Coalition, should not only outlive the Coalition itself but even shape the history that followed its demise.
BETWEEN WORLDS
AD 27,152
I‘She wants to go home,’ said the starship Captain.
‘But she can’t go home,’ said the acolyte. Futurity’s Dream was baffled by the very request, as if the woman who had locked herself inside a starship cabin, with a bomb, was making a philosophical mistake, a category error.
Captain Tahget said, ‘She says she needs to speak to her daughter.’
‘She hasn’t got a daughter!’
‘No, not according to the records. A conundrum, isn’t it?’
Captain Tahget sat very still, his glare focused unblinking on the young acolyte. He was a bulky man of about forty, with scar tissue crusting over half his scalp. He obviously had military experience, but his unadorned body armour, like the bare walls of his private office, gave away nothing of his character; in these fluid, uncertain times, when sibling fought sibling, it was impossible to tell who he might have served.
Before this monolithic officer Futurity, just twenty years old, felt nervous, ineffectual - not just weak, but like a shadow, with no control over events.
Futurity lifted his data desk and checked the Ask Politely’s manifest again. The passenger’s name stood out, highlighted in red: MARA. No mention of a daughter. ‘She’s a refugee. Home for her is Chandra. The black hole at the centre of the Galaxy.’
‘I know what Chandra is.’
‘Or rather,’ Futurity said nervously, ‘home is, or was, Greyworld, a worldlet in orbit around a satellite black hole, which in turn orbits Chandra—’
‘I know all this too,’ said the Captain stonily. ‘Get on with it, acolyte.’
Tahget had been hired by Futurity’s boss, the Hierocrat, to come to this processing station in orbit around Base 478. Here he was to pick up Mara, and other refugees displaced by the Kardish Imperium from their homes in the Galaxy’s Core, and then carry them on to Earth, where the ruling Ideocracy had pledged to welcome its citizens. But Mara had refused to travel on. Because of her, the ship had been held in orbit around the Base, and the other refugees had been evacuated and sent back to holding centres on the surface.
And now it was up to Futurity to sort this mess out. He had no idea where to start.
Futurity licked his lips and looked again at the glowing cube on the Captain’s desk. It was a fish-tank monitor, a Virtual realisation of the interior of the woman’s cabin. Mara sat on her bunk, as still, in her way, as Tahget. She was slim, her head shaved; aged thirty-six, she looked modest, sensible, undemanding. Her small suitcase sat unopened on top of the low dresser that was the cabin’s only other significant piece of furniture. The locked door was blocked by an upturned chair, a trivial barricade.
And before her on the floor was the reason she had been able to impose her will on a starship Captain, hundreds of refugees and at least three interstellar political entities. It was a blocky tangle of metal and polymer, an ugly sculpture quite out of place in the mundane shabbiness of the cabin. You could clearly see where it had been cut out of the weapons pod of some wrecked ship. It was a bomb, a monopole bomb. Dating from the time of the Coalition and their galactic war, it was at least two thousand years old. But the Coalition had built well, and there was no doubt that the bomb could destroy this ship and do a great deal of damage to Base 478 itself.
Futurity didn’t know where the bomb had come from, though after millennia of war 478 was famously riddled with weapons caches. And he had no idea how the bomb had been smuggled on board the Ask Politely, this starship. But the Hierocrat had made it clear that Futurity didn’t need to know any of that; all Futurity had to do was to resolve this messy situation.
‘But she can’t go home,’ he said again feebly. ‘Her home doesn’t exist any more, legally speaking. And soon enough it won’t exist physically either. She’s a refugee.’ Futurity didn’t understand anything about this situation. ‘We’re trying to help her here. Doesn’t she see that?’
‘Evidently not,’ Tahget said dryly. Tahget didn’t move a muscle, but Futurity could sense his growing impatience. ‘Acolyte, none of the politics of the Galaxy, or the geography of the black hole, matter a jot to me.’ He stabbed a finger at the fish-tank. ‘All I care about is getting that woman away from that bomb. We can’t disarm the thing. We can’t force our way into the cabin without—’
‘Without killing the woman?’
‘Oh, I don’t care about that. No, we can’t get in without setting the thing off. Do you need to know the technical details, of Virtual trip-wires, of dead man’s switches? Suffice it to say that force is not an option. And so I turn to you, acolyte. 478 is your church’s world, after all.’
Futurity spread his hands, ‘What can I do?’
Tahget laughed, uncaring. ‘What you priests do best. Talk.’
The dread weight of responsibility, which had oppressed Futurity since he had been ‘volunteered’ for this assignment by the Hierocrat and projected into orbit, now pressed down on him hard. But, he found, his greatest fear was not for his own safety, nor even for the fate of this poor woman, but simply that he was making a fool of himself in front of this dour captain. Shame on you, Futurity’s Dream!
He forced himself to focus. ‘How do I speak to her?’
The Captain waved a hand. A Virtual of Mara’s head coalesced in the air, and Futurity saw a miniature of himself pop into existence in the little diorama of her cabin. So he had been put in contact with this bomber.
He tried to read her face. She looked younger than her thirty-six years. Her face was a neat oval, her features rather bland - her nose long, her mouth small. She would never be called beautiful, though something about the shape of her skull, exposed by the close shaving of her hair in the Ideocratic style, was delicately attractive. As she studied him, evidently without curiosity, her expression was clear, her brow smooth. She looked loving, he thought, loving and contented in herself, her life. But tension showed around her eyes, in hollow stress shadows. This was a gentle woman projected into an horrific situation. She must be desperate.
A smile touched her lips, faint, quickly evaporating. She said to him, ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’
The Captain rolled his eyes. ‘Our terrorist is laughing at you! Good start, acolyte.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Futurity blurted. ‘I didn’t mean to stare. It’s just that I’m trying to get used to all this.’
‘It’s not a situation I wanted,’ Mara said.
‘I’m sure we can find a way to resolve it.’
‘There is a way,’ she said without hesitation. ‘Just take me home. It’s all I’ve asked for from the beginning.’
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