The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  The situation was stable. But in Diluc’s village, only the Autarch was free.

  Andres’s uncharacteristically naïve dream of respectful communities governing themselves by consensus had barely outlasted the death of Diluc. In the villages strong characters had quickly taken control, and in most cases had installed themselves and their families as hereditary rulers. Andres had grumbled at that, but it was an obviously stable social system, and in the end the Elders, in subtle ways, lent the Autarchs their own mystical authority.

  The Autarchs were slowly drifting away from their subject populations, though.

  Some “transients” had always proven to be rather longer lived than others. It seemed that the Qax’s tampering with the genomes of their Pharaohs had indeed been passed on to subsequent generations, if imperfectly, and that gene complex, a tendency for longevity, was expressing itself. Indeed the Autarchs actively sought out breeding partners for themselves who came from families that showed such tendencies.

  So, with time, the Autarchs and their offspring were ageing more slowly than their transient subjects.

  It was just natural selection, argued Andres. People had always acquired power so that their genes could be favored. Traditionally you would do your best to outbreed your subjects. But if you were an Autarch, in the confines of the Ship, what were you to do? There was obviously no room here for a swarm of princes, bastards or otherwise. Besides, the Elders’ genetic-health rules wouldn’t allow any such thing. So the Autarchs were seeking to dominate their populations with their own long lives, not numbers of offspring.

  Andres seemed to find all this merely intellectually interesting. Rusel wondered what would happen if this went on.

  He allowed his consciousness to drift back to his own body. When he surfaced, he found Andres watching him, as she so often did.

  “So you think we have to change things,” he said.

  “We need to deal with the Autarchs. Some of them are tough customers, Rusel, and they imagine they’re even tougher. If they start to believe we’re weak – for instance, if we sleep for three days before delivering the answer to the simplest question – ”

  “I understand. We can’t let the transients see us.” He sighed, irritated. “But what else can we do? Delivering edicts through disembodied voices isn’t going to wash. If they don’t see us they will soon forget who we are.” Soon, in the language of the Elders, meaning in another generation or two.

  “Right,” she snapped. “So we have to personalize our authority. What do you think of this?” She gestured feebly, and a Virtual coalesced in the air over her head.

  It showed Rusel. Here he was as a young man, up to his elbows in nanofood banks, laboring to make the Ship sound for its long journey. Here he was as a youngish Elder, bald as ice, administering advice to grateful transients. There were even images of him from the vanishingly remote days before the launch, images of him with a smiling Lora.

  “Where did you get this stuff?”

  She sniffed. “The Ship’s log. Your own archive. Come on, Rusel, we hardly have any secrets from each other after all this time! Pretty girl, though.”

  “Yes. What are you intending to do with this?”

  “We’ll show it to the transients. We’ll show you at your best, Rusel, you at the peak of your powers, you walking the same corridors they walk now – you as a human being, yet more than human. That’s what we want: engagement with their petty lives, empathy, yet awe. We’ll put a face to your voice.”

  He closed his eyes. It made sense of course; Andres’s logic was grim, but always valid. “But why me? It would be better if both of us – ”

  “That wouldn’t be wise,” she said. “I wouldn’t want them to see me die.”

  It took him a while to work out that Andres, the first of the Pharaohs, was failing. Rusel found this impossible to take in: her death would be to have a buttress of the universe knocked away. “But you won’t see the destination,” he said peevishly, as if she were making a bad choice.

  “No,” she said hoarsely. “But the Mayflower will get there! Look around, Rusel. The Ship is functioning flawlessly. Our designed society is stable and doing its job of preserving the bloodlines. And you, you were always the brightest of all. You will see it through. That’s enough for me.”

  It was true, Rusel supposed. Her design was fulfilled; the Ship and its crew were working now just as Andres had always dreamed they should. But only two hundred and fifty years had worn away, only half of one percent of the awesome desert of time he must cross to reach Canis Major – and now, it seemed, he was going to have to make the rest of that journey alone.

  “No, not alone,” said Andres. “You’ll always have the Ship . . .”

  Yes, the Ship, his constant companion. Suddenly he longed to escape from the endless complications of humanity and immerse himself in its huge technological calm. He lay back in his Couch and allowed his mind to roam out through the crowded torus of the hull, and the pulsing ramjet engines, and the wispy gravitational wings behind which the Ship sailed.

  He looked back. The Ship had covered only a fraction of its epic journey, but already it was climbing out of the galactic plane, and the Core, the crowded heart of the Galaxy, rose like a sun from the dust-strewn lanes of the spiral arms. It was a stunning, comforting sight.

  By the time he came back from his intergalactic dreaming, Andres was gone, her Couch disassembled for spare parts, her body removed to the cycling tanks.

  Rusel was awakened from his long slumber by the face of a boy, a face twisted with anger – an anger directed at him.

  In retrospect Rusel should have seen the rebellion coming. All the indicators had been there: the drift of the transients’ social structures, the gathering tensions. It was bound to happen.

  But it was so hard for him to pay attention to the brief lives of these transients, their incomprehensible language and customs, their petty concerns and squabbling. After all, Hilin was a boy of the forty-fifth generation since launch: forty-five generations, Lethe, nearly a thousand years . . .

  The exploits of Hilin, though, forced themselves on his attention.

  Hilin was sixteen years old when it all began. He had been born in Diluc’s corridor-village.

  By now the Autarchs of the different villages had intermarried to form a seamless web of power. They lived on average twice as long as their subjects, and had established a monopoly on the Ship’s water supply. A water empire ruled by gerontocrats: their control was total.

  Hilin was not one of the local Autarch’s brood; his family were poor and powerless, like all the Autarch’s subjects. But they seemed to accept their lot. As he played in corridors whose polymer floors were rutted by generations of passing feet, Hilin emerged as a bright, happy child. He seemed compliant when he was young, cheerfully joining in swabbing the bulkheads when it was his turn, and accepting the cuffs of his teachers when he asked impudent questions.

  He had always been oddly fascinated by the figure of Rusel himself – or rather the semimythical presence portrayed to the villagers through the cycling Virtual storyboards. Hilin soaked up the story of the noble Elder who had been forced to choose between a life of unending duty and his beloved Lora, an undying model to those he ruled.

  As he had grown, Hilin had flourished educationally. At fourteen he was inducted into an elite caste. As intellectual standards declined, literacy had been abandoned, and these monkish thinkers now committed to memory every significant commandment regarding the workings of the Ship and their own society. You would start on this vital project at fourteen, and wouldn’t expect to be done until you were in your fifties, by which time a new generation was ready to take over anyhow.

  Rusel dryly called these patient thinkers Druids: he wasn’t interested in the transients’ own names for themselves, which would change in an eye-blink generation anyhow. He had approved this practice when it emerged. All this endless memorizing was a marvelous way to use up pointless lives – and it establishe
d a power base to rival the Autarchs.

  Again Hilin had flourished, and he passed one Druidic assessment after another. Even a torrid romance with Sale, a girl from a neighboring village, didn’t distract him from his studies.

  When the time came, the couple asked their families for leave to form a companionship-marriage, which was granted. They went to the Autarch for permission to have children. To their delight, it turned out their genetic makeups, as mapped in the Druids’ capacious memories, were compatible enough to allow this too.

  But even so the Druids forbade the union.

  Hilin, horrified, learned that this was because of the results of his latest Druidic assessment, a test of his general intelligence and potential. He had failed, not by posting too low a score, but too high.

  Rusel, brooding, understood. The eugenic elimination of weaknesses had in general been applied wisely. But under the Autarch-Druid duopoly, attempts were made to weed out the overbright, the curious – anybody who might prove rebellious. Rusel would have stamped out this practice, had he even noticed it. If this went on, the transient population would become passive, listless, easily manipulated by the Autarchs and the Druids, but useless for the mission’s larger purposes.

  It was too late for Hilin. He was banned from ever seeing his Sale again. And he was told by the Autarch’s ministers that this was by order of the Elder himself, though Rusel, dreaming his life away, knew nothing about it.

  Hilin spent long hours in the shrinelike enclosure where Rusel’s Virtuals played out endlessly. He tried to understand. He told himself the Elder’s wisdom surpassed his own; this severance must be for the best, no matter what pain it caused him. He even tried to draw comfort from what he saw as parallels between his own doomed romance and Rusel and his lost Lora. But understanding didn’t come, and his bewilderment and pain soon blossomed to resentment – and anger.

  In his despair, he tried to destroy the shrine.

  As punishment, the Autarch locked him in a cell for two days. Hilin emerged from his confinement outwardly subdued, inwardly ready to explode. Again Rusel would later castigate himself for failing to see the dangers in the situation.

  But it was so hard to see anything now.

  His central nervous system was slowly deteriorating, so the Couch informed him. He could still move his arms and legs – he could still walk, even, with a frame – but he felt no sensation in his feet, nothing but the faintest ache in his fingertips. As pain and pleasure alike receded, he felt he was coming loose from time itself. When he surfaced into the world of lucidity he would be shocked to find a year had passed like a day, as if his sense of time were becoming logarithmic.

  And meanwhile, as he became progressively disconnected from the physical world, his mind was undergoing a reconstruction of its own. After a thousand years his memories, especially the deepest, most precious memories of all, were, like the floors of the Ship’s corridors, worn with use; he was no longer sure if he remembered, or if he only had left memories of memories.

  If he came adrift from both present and past, what was he? Was he even human any more? Certainly the latest set of transients meant less than nothing to him: why, each of them was made up of the atoms and molecules of her ancestors, cycled through the Ship’s systems forty times or more, shuffled and reshuffled in meaningless combinations. They could not touch his heart in any way.

  At least he thought so, until Hilin brought him the girl.

  The two of them stood before Rusel’s Virtual shrine, where they believed the Elder’s consciousness must reside. Trying to match the Elder’s own timescales, they stayed there for long hours, all but motionless. Hilin’s face was set, pinched with anger and determination. She, though, was composed.

  At last Rusel’s drifting attention was snagged by familiarity. It was the girl. She was taller than most of the transients, pale, her bones delicate. And her eyes were large, dark, somehow unfocused even as she gazed into unseen imaging systems.

  Lora.

  It couldn’t be, of course! How could it? Lora had had no family on the Ship. And yet Rusel, half-dreaming, immersed in memory, couldn’t take his eyes off her image.

  As Hilin had planned.

  The uprising occurred all over the Ship. In every village the Autarchs and their families were turned out of their palatial cabins. The Autarchs, having commanded their short-lived flocks for centuries, were quite unprepared, and few resisted; they had no conception such an uprising was even possible. The old rulers and their peculiar children were herded together in a richly robed mass in the Ship’s largest chamber, the upturned amphitheater where Rusel had long ago endured the launch from Port Sol.

  The revolt had been centrally planned, carefully timed, meticulously executed. Despite generations of selective breeding to eliminate initiative and cunning, the transients no longer seemed so sheepish, and in Hilin they had discovered a general. And it was over before the Elder’s attention had turned away from the girl, before he had even noticed.

  Hilin, king of the corridors, stood before the Elder’s shrine. And he pulled at the face of the girl, the Lora lookalike. It had been a mask, just a mask; Rusel realized shamefully that this boy had manipulated the emotions of a being more than a thousand years old.

  A bloody club in his hand, Hilin screamed his defiance at his undying god. The Cloister’s systems translated the boy’s language, after a thousand years quite unlike Rusel’s. “You allowed this to happen.” Hilin yelled. “You allowed the Autarchs to feed off us like [untranslatable – body parasites?]. We wash the decks for them with our blood, while they keep water from our children. And you, you [untranslatable – an obscenity?] allowed it to happen. And do you know why?” Hilin stepped closer to the shrine, and his face loomed in Rusel’s vision. “Because you don’t exist. Nobody has seen you in centuries – if they ever did! You’re a lie, cooked up by the Autarchs to keep us in our place, that’s what I think. Well, we don’t believe in you any more, not in any of that [untranslatable – feces?]. And we’ve thrown out the Autarchs. We are free!”

  “Free” they were. Hilin and his followers looted the Autarchs’ apartments, and gorged themselves on the food and water the Autarchs had hoarded for themselves, and screwed each other senseless in blithe defiance of the genetic-health prohibitions. And not a single deck panel was swabbed down.

  After three days, as the chaos showed no signs of abating, Rusel knew that this was the most serious crisis in the Ship’s long history. He had to act. It took him another three days to get ready for his performance, three days mostly taken up with fighting with the inhibiting protocols of his medical equipment.

  Then he ordered the Cloister door to open, for the first time in centuries. It actually stuck, dry-welded in place. It finally gave way with a resounding crack, making his entrance even more spectacular than he had planned.

  But there was nobody around to witness his incarnation but a small boy, no more than five years old. With his finger planted firmly in one nostril, and his eyes round with surprise, the kid looked heartbreakingly like Tomi, Diluc’s boy, long since dead and fed to the recycling banks.

  Rusel was standing, supported by servomechanisms, gamely clutching at a walking frame. He tried to smile at the boy, but he couldn’t feel his own face, and didn’t know if he succeeded. “Bring me the chief Druids,” he said, and a translation whispered in the air around him.

  The boy yelled and fled.

  The Druids actually knelt before him, covering their faces. He walked very cautiously among them, allowing them even to touch his robe. He wanted to be certain they accepted his reality, to smell the dusty tang of centuries on him. Maybe these monkish philosophers had in their hearts, like Hilin, never really believed in the Elder’s existence. Well, now their messiah had suddenly reincarnated among them.

  But he saw them as if through a flawed lens; he could hear little, feel less, smell or taste nothing. It was like walking around in a skinsuit, he thought.

  He was an angry god, t
hough. The rules of Shipboard life had been broken, he thundered. And he didn’t just mean the recent mess. There must be no more water empires, and no knowledge empires either: the Druids would have to make sure that every child knew the basic rules, of Ship maintenance and genetic-health breeding.

  He ordered that the Autarchs should not be returned to their seats of power. Instead, the governing would be done, for this generation, by a Druid – he picked out one terrified-looking woman at random. As long as she ruled wisely and well, she would have the Elder’s backing. On her death the people would select a successor, who could not be more closely related to her predecessor than second cousin.

  The old Autarchs and their brood, meanwhile, were to be spared. They would be shut away permanently in their amphitheater prison, where there were supplies to keep them alive. Rusel believed they and their strange slow-growing children would die off; within a generation, a tick of time, that problem would go away. He had done his share of killing, he thought.

  Then he sighed. The worst of it had still to be faced. “Bring me Hilin,” he ordered.

  They dragged in the corridor king tied up with strips of cloth. He had been assaulted, Rusel saw; his face was battered and one arm seemed broken. The erstwhile leader was already being punished for his blasphemy by those who sought the favor of the Elder. But Hilin faced Rusel defiantly, strength and intelligence showing in his face.

  Rusel’s scarred heart ached a little more, for strength and intelligence were the last features you wanted in a transient.

  Hilin had to die, of course. His flayed corpse would be displayed before the shrine of the Elder, as a warning to future generations. But Rusel didn’t have the courage to watch it done. He remembered the man in the electric-blue skinsuit: he always had been a coward, he thought.

  As he returned to his Cloister, he looked back once more. “And clean up this damn mess,” he said.

  He knew it would take a long time, even on his timescales, before he managed to forget the contemptuous defiance on Hilin’s young face. But Hilin had gone into the dark like all his transient ancestors, and soon his siblings and nieces and nephews and everybody who looked remotely like him went too, gone, all gone into the sink of time, and soon only Rusel was left alive to remember the rebellion.