Resplendent (74 page)
At last all was ready, and that blue tetrahedral chapel had been built. The Supreme Ecclesiarch had waved her hand - and Michael Poole, or at least a Michael Poole, had opened his eyes for the first time in more than twenty thousand years.
The whole business seemed vaguely heretical to Futurity. But when Poole popped into existence in the Politely’s observation lounge, surrounded by the gaping crew and nervous Ecclesiast technicians, Futurity felt a shiver of wonder.
Poole seemed to take a second to come to himself, as if coming into focus. Then he looked down at his body and flexed his fingers. In the brightness of the deck he seemed oddly out of place, Futurity thought - not flimsily unreal like most Virtuals, but more opaque, more dense, like an intrusion from another reality. Poole scanned the crowd of staring strangers. When he found Futurity’s face he smiled, and Futurity’s heart warmed helplessly.
But Poole’s face was dark, intent, determined. For the first time it occurred to Futurity to wonder what Poole himself might want out of this situation. He was a Virtual, but he was just as sentient as Futurity was, and no doubt he had goals of his own. Perhaps he saw some advantage in this transfer off-world, some angle to be worked.
Poole turned and walked briskly to the big blister-window set in the hull. His head scanned back and forth systematically as he took in the crowded view. ‘So this is the centre of the Galaxy. You damn priests never even let me see the sky before.’
‘Not quite the centre. We’re inside the Core here, the Galaxy’s central bulge.’ Futurity pointed to a wall of light that fenced off half the sky. ‘That’s the Mass - the Central Star Mass, the knot of density surrounding Chandra, the supermassive black hole at the very centre.’
‘Lethe, I don’t know if I imagined people would ever come so far. And for millennia this has been a war zone?’
‘The war is over.’ Futurity forced a grin. ‘We won!’
‘And now humans are killing humans again, right? Same old story.’ Poole inspected the surface of the planet below. ‘A city-world, ’ he said dismissively. ‘Seen better days.’ He squinted around the sky. ‘So where’s the sun?’
Futurity was puzzled by the question.
Captain Tahget said, ‘Base 478 has no sun. It’s a rogue planet, a wanderer. Stars are crowded here in the Core, Michael Poole. Not like out on the rim, where you come from. Close approaches happen all the time.’
‘So planets get detached from their suns.’ Poole peered down at the farms that splashed green amid the concrete. ‘No sunlight for photosynthesis. But if the sky is on fire with Galaxy light, you don’t need the sun. Different spectrum from Sol’s light, of course, but I guess they are different plants too …’
Futurity was entranced by these rapid chains of speculation and deduction.
Poole pointed to a shallow crater, a dish of rubble kilometres across, gouged into the built-over surface. ‘What happened there?’
Futurity shrugged. ‘Probably a floating building fell, when the power failed.’
Poole laughed uncomfortably. ‘Layers of history! I don’t suppose I’ll ever know the half of it.’ Now he took in the Ask Politely’s bubbling organic form. ‘And what kind of starship is this?’ At random he pointed at hull features, at spines and spires and shields. ‘What is that for? An antenna, a sensor mast? And that? It could be a ramjet scoop, I guess. And that netting could be an ion drive.’
There was a stirring of discomfort. Futurity said, ‘We don’t ask such questions. It’s the business of the Captain and his crew.’
Poole raised his eyebrows, but he got only a blank stare from Captain Tahget. ‘Demarcation of knowledge? I never did like that. Gets in the way of the scientific method. But it’s your millennium.’ He clapped his hands. ‘OK, so I’m here. Maybe we should get to work before your fruitcake in steerage blows us all up.’
The Ecclesia technicians muttered among themselves, and prepared Poole’s relocation.
Futurity watched the scene in Tahget’s fish-tank Virtual viewer. Mara’s cabin looked just as it had before: the woman sitting patiently on the bed, the dresser, and the bomb sitting on the floor, grotesquely out of place. All that was different was a tray on top of the dresser with the remains of a meal.
Poole appeared out of nowhere, a little manikin figure in the fish-tank. Mara sat as if frozen.
Poole leaned down, resting his hands on his knees, and looked into her face. ‘You’re exhausted. Your eyes are pissholes in the snow.’ Nobody in Tahget’s office had ever seen snow; the translation routines had to interpret.
Poole snapped his fingers to conjure up a Virtual chair and sat down. Mara bowed down before him. ‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to dry my feet with your hair.’ Another archaic reference Futurity didn’t understand. ‘I know I’m tangled up in your myths. But I’m just a man. Actually, not even that.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Mara said thickly, straightening up.
‘For what? You’re the real person here, with the real problem. ’ He glanced at the sullen mass of the bomb.
Mara said, ‘I made them bring you here. Now I don’t know what to say to you.’
‘Just talk. I don’t think anybody understands what you want, Mara. Not even that bright kid Futurity.’
‘Who? Oh, the acolyte. I told them, but they didn’t listen.’
‘Then tell me.’ He laughed. ‘I’m the sleeping beauty. Lethe knows I’ve got no preconceptions.’
‘I want to go home. I didn’t want to leave in the first place. They evacuated us by force.’
He leaned forward. ‘Who did?’
‘The troops of the new Kard.’
‘Who … ? Never mind; I’ll figure that out. OK. But home for you is a planetoid orbiting a black hole. Yes? A satellite black hole, born in the accretion disc of the monster at the heart of the Galaxy.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘Quite a place to visit. But who would want to live there?’
Mara sat up straighter. ‘I would. I was born there.’
It had been a project of the first years after mankind’s victory in the centre of the Galaxy, Mara told him. With the war won, the ancient Coalition, the government of a united mankind, abruptly crumbled, and successor states emerged across the Galaxy. A rump remnant of the Coalition that called itself the Ideocracy had clung on to Earth and other scattered territories. And at the Core, the scene of mankind’s greatest victory, a new project was begun. Ideocrat engineers had gathered asteroids and ice moons which they had set spinning in orbit around the satellite black holes which studded Chandra’s accretion disc. One such was the rock Mara called Greyworld.
‘You say you were born there?’
‘Yes,’ Mara said. ‘And my parents, and their parents before them.’
Poole stared at her. Then, in Futurity’s view, Poole’s little figure walked to the edge of the fish-tank viewer, and stared up challengingly. ‘Hey, acolyte. Help me out here. I’m having a little trouble with timescales.’
Futurity checked his data desk. Under the Ideocracy, these accretion-disc colonies had been in place for two thousand years, almost since the final victory at the Galaxy’s Core.
Poole, a man of the fourth millennium, seemed stunned. ‘Two thousand years? ’
Captain Tahget leaned forward and peered into the fish-tank. ‘Virtual, we once fought a war that spanned tens of thousands of light years. We learned to plan on a comparable scale in time. During the war there were single battles which lasted millennia.’
Poole shook his head. ‘And I imagined I thought big. I really have fallen far into the future, haven’t I?’
‘You really have, sir,’ Futurity said.
Poole sat down again and faced Mara. ‘I can see why you didn’t want to leave. Your roots were deep, on your Greyworld.’
‘Time was running out,’ she said. ‘We knew that. Our black hole was slowly spiralling deeper into Chandra’s accretion disc. Soon the turbulence, the energy density, the tides - it would have been impossible for us to hang on.’
‘Although,’ said Poole, ’the black hole itself will sail on regardless until it reaches Chandra’s event horizon.’
‘Yes.’
Poole said, ‘I still don’t understand. If you knew your world was doomed, you must have accepted you had to evacuate.’
‘Of course.’
‘Then what—’
‘I just didn’t like the way it was done.’ Her face worked, deep emotions swirling under a veneer of control. ‘I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.’
‘Who to?’
‘Sharn. My daughter.’
Poole studied her for a moment. Then he said gently, ‘You see, you’re losing me again, Mara. I’m sorry. According to the ship’s manifest you don’t have a daughter.’
‘I did have one. She was taken away from me.’
‘Who by?’
‘The Ideocrats.’
‘But you see, Mara, there’s my problem. I saw the records. Once the evacuation was done, there was nobody left on Greyworld. So your daughter—’
‘She wasn’t on Greyworld.’
‘Then where?’
‘She lives in the satellite black hole,’ Mara said simply. ‘Where the Ideocrats sent her.’
‘In the black hole?’
‘She lives in it, as you, Michael Poole, live in light.’
‘As some kind of Virtual representation?’
Mara shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t explain it better. We aren’t scientists on Greyworld, like you.’
He thought that over. ‘Then what are you?’
‘We are farmers.’ She shrugged. ‘Some of us are technicians. We supervise the machines that tend other machines, that keep the air clean and the water flowing.’
Poole asked, ‘But why are you there in the first place, Mara? What did the Ideocracy intend? What is your duty?’
She smiled. ‘To give our children to the black hole. And that way, to serve the goals of mankind.’
Futurity said quickly, ‘She’s probably doesn’t know any more, Michael Poole. This was the Ideocracy, remember, heir to the Coalition. And under the Coalition you weren’t encouraged to know more than you needed to. You were thought to be more effective that way.’
‘Sounds like every totalitarian regime back to Gilgamesh.’ Poole studied Mara for a long moment. Then he stood. ‘All right, Mara. I think that’s enough for now. You’ve given me a lot to think about. Is there anything you need? More food?’
‘I’m tired,’ she said quietly. ‘But I know if I lie down that Captain or the acolyte will sneak in here and disarm the bomb, or hurt me, and—’
Poole said, ‘Look at me, Mara. Things will get flaky very quickly if you don’t sleep. Nobody will hurt you, or change anything in here. You can trust me.’
She stared at his Virtual face. Then, after a moment, she lay down on her bunk, her knees tucked into her chest like a child.
Poole’s fish-tank representation popped out of existence.
Poole, Tahget and Futurity faced each other across the table in Tahget’s office.
Tahget said, ‘We need to resolve this situation.’
Poole had another glass of Virtual whisky in his hand. ‘That woman is determined. Believe me, you don’t separate a mother from her child. She’ll blow us all up rather than give in.’
Tahget said coldly, ‘Then what do you suggest we do?’
‘Comply with her wishes. Take her back to Chandra, back to the centre of the Galaxy, and to her black hole Garden of Eden. And help her find her kid.’
Futurity said, ‘There is no child. She said the child lives in the black hole. That’s just impossible. No human being—’
‘Who said anything about it being human?’ Poole snapped. ‘I’m my mother’s son, and I’m not human. Not any more. And black holes are complicated beasts, Futurity. You’re a scholar; you should know that. Who’s to say what’s possible or not?’
‘Actually I don’t know anything about black holes,’ Futurity said.
‘You know, you’ve got a really closed mind,’ Poole said. ‘You Ecclesiasts have origins in an engineering guild, don’t you? But now you want to be a priest, and the whole point of being a priest is to keep your knowledge to yourself. Well, maybe you’re going to have to learn to think a bit more like an engineer and less like an acolyte to get through this.’
Tahget was glaring at Poole. ‘If you insist on this absurd chase to the centre of the Galaxy, Michael Poole, you will have your way. You are accorded respect here. Too much, in my opinion.’
Poole grinned. ‘Ain’t that the truth?’
‘At least it will buy us time,’ Futurity said, trying to reassure Tahget. ‘But you must hope to resolve this situation before you reach Chandra, where you will find there is no magical child in the singularity, and the woman’s condition will veer from denial to desperation.’
‘Or it all works out some other way,’ Poole said evenly. ‘Don’t prejudge, acolyte; it’s a nasty habit. One condition. I’m coming along too.’
They both looked at him sharply.
Futurity said hesitantly, ‘I don’t think the Hierocrat would—’
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