As they walked he saw that the boy had a bruise on his forehead. ‘What happened to you?’
‘Punishment.’ Poro averted his eyes, ashamed. One of his teachers had whacked him with a ruler for ‘impudence’, which turned out to mean asking too-deep questions.
A paradox was emerging in the philosophy of education aboard the Ship. It had been quickly found that learning needed to be restrictive, and that curiosity couldn’t be allowed to go unchecked. The students had to be bright and informed enough to be able to maintain the Ship’s systems. But there was no room for expansion or innovation. There was unusually only one way to do things: you learned it that way.
It was necessary, Rusel knew. You couldn’t have people tinkering. So you learned only what you needed to know, and were taught not to ask any more, not to explore. But he didn’t like the idea of battering students into submission for the ’crime’ of curiosity. Perhaps he would have a word with Andres about it, get a new policy formulated.
They reached Diluc’s corridor-village.
Before he could see his brother he had to be met by a series of tribe worthies. Burly men and women in drab Ship’s-issue clothing, they gathered with solemn expressions. Their greetings were lengthy and complicated. The transients seemed to be evolving elaborate rituals to be used on every social occasion: meeting, parting, taking meals. Rusel could see the value of such rituals, which used up time, and reduced social friction. But it was hard to keep up with the ever-changing rules. The only constant was that these politeness games always got more elaborate - and it was very easy to get something wrong and give offence.
The worthies looked concerned at the prospective loss of Diluc, as well they might.
Andres’s imposition of ‘rule-by-consensus’ had been less than effective. In some of the Ship’s dozen or so tribes, there was endless jaw-jaw that paralysed decision-making. Elsewhere strong individuals had begun to grasp power, more or less overtly. Andres wasn’t too concerned as long as the job got done, the basic rules obeyed: whoever was in command among the transients had to get the approval of the Elders anyhow, and so Andres and her team were still able to exert a moderating influence.
The situation in Diluc’s tribe had been more subtle, though. As the brother of an Elder Diluc had had a unique charisma, and he had used that power to push his peers to conclusions they might not otherwise have reached. He had been a leader, but of the best sort, Rusel thought, leading from the back, invisibly. Now he was about to be taken away, and his people knew they would miss him.
With the worthies out of the way, the Elder was presented to Diluc’s children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. All of them went through more elaborate transient-to-Elder rituals, even the smallest children, with an unsmiling intensity Rusel found disturbing.
At last, with reluctance, he entered Diluc’s apartment. The rooms were much as he remembered them, though the tapestries on the wall had changed.
Tila was still alive, though she was bent, her hair white, and her face a crumpled mask. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she whispered, and she took Rusel’s hands in her own. ‘There are so few of us left, you know, so few not Shipborn. And he did keep asking for you.’
Rusel pressed her hand, reserved, awkward. He felt out of practice with people, with emotions; before this broken-hearted old woman he felt utterly inadequate.
Diluc himself lay on a bed, covered by a worn blanket. Rusel was shocked by how his brother had imploded with age. And he could see, even through the blanket, the swelling of the stomach tumour that was killing him.
He had thought Diluc was sleeping. But his brother opened one eye. ‘Hello, Rusel,’ he said, his voice a croak. ‘You bastard.’
‘I’m sorry—’
‘You haven’t been here in fifty years.’
‘Not that long.’
‘Fifty years! Fifty years! It’s not as if—’ He broke up in coughing. ‘As if it’s that big a Ship . . .’
They talked, as they had talked before. Diluc told rambling anecdotes about his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all properly genetically selected, all wonderful kids.
Rusel had to tell him of a cull of the Elders.
It had had a variety of causes, according to Doctor Selur, but Andres had sniffed at that. ‘I’ve seen it before. Call it a death wish,’ she had said. ‘You reach an age where your body knows it’s time to die. You accept it. Maybe it’s some kind of neural programming, a comfort as we face the inevitable.’ She cackled; she was ageing too, and was now toothless. ‘The Qax treatments don’t do anything about it. And it carries away more would-be immortals than you’d imagine. Strange, isn’t it? That longevity should turn out to be a matter of the mind as much as the body.’
Rusel had spent some years in faint trepidation, wondering if and when his own dark-seeking mental programming might kick in. But it never did, and he wondered if he had some unsuspected strength - or, perhaps, a deficiency.
Now Diluc grimaced. ‘So even immortals die.’ He reached out his hand. Rusel took it; the bones were frail, the flesh almost vanished. ‘Look after them,’ Diluc said.
‘Who?’
‘Everybody. You know. And look after yourself.’ He looked up at his brother, and Rusel saw pity in his brother’s eyes - pity for him, from a withered, dying man.
He could bear to stay only a few minutes more. He would never see his brother again.
He tried to talk over his feelings about Diluc’s death with the Captain. But Andres was dismissive. ‘Diluc was a coward who shunned his duty,’ she said. ‘Anyhow, better when the first crew have all gone. They always saw us as peers, to some extent. So they resisted our ideas, our leadership; it was natural. We’re totally alien to the new sort, and that will make them more malleable.
‘And the new lot never suffered the trauma of seeing Port Sol trashed before their eyes. The psychological trauma ran deep, Rusel; you aren’t the only one . . . This new batch are healthier, adjusted to the environment of the Ship, because they’ve known nothing else. When there’s only them left, we’ll be able to get things shaken down properly around here at last. You’ll see.’
With relief Rusel returned to his studies, away from the complications of humanity. Once more time flowed smoothly past him, and that difficult day receded down the dimming corridors of his memory.
No more relatives came to see him, ever again.
VI
‘. . . Rusel. Rusel!’ The voice was harsh - Andres’s voice.
Sleep was deep these days, and it took him an age to emerge. And as he opened himself to the light he swam up through layers of dream and memory, until he became confused about what was real and what wasn’t. He always knew where he was, of course, even in his deepest sleep. He was on the Ship, his drifting tomb. But he could never remember when he was.
He tried to sit up. The Couch responded to his feeble movements, and its back smoothly lifted him upright. He peered around in the dim, golden light of the Cloister. There were three Couches, great bulky mechanical devices half bed and half medical support system: only three, because only three of the Elders stayed alive.
Somebody was moving around him. It was a transient, of course, a young woman, a nurse. He didn’t recognise her; she was new since he’d last been awake. She kept her eyes averted, and her hands fluttered through an elaborate greetings-with-apology ritual. He dismissed her with a curt gesture; you could eat up your entire day with such flim-flam.
Andres was watching him, her eyes sharp in her ruin of a face. She looked like a huge bug in her cocoon of blankets.
‘Well?’ he snapped.
‘You are drooling,’ she said mildly. ‘Not in front of the transients, Rusel.’
Irritated, he wiped his chin with his sleeve.
‘Oh,’ she said, her tone unchanged, ‘and Selur died.’
That news, so casually delivered, was like a punch in the throat. He turned clumsily, weighed down by blankets and life-sustaining equipment. The doctor’s Couch was surr
ounded by transients who were removing her mummy-like body. Working in silence, cautiously, reverently, they were trembling, he saw dimly.
‘I never did like her much,’ Rusel said.
‘You’ve said that before. Many times.’
‘I’ll miss her, though.’
‘Yes. And then there were two. Rusel, we need to talk. We need a new strategy to deal with the transients. We’re supposed to be figures of awe. Look at us. Look at poor Selur! We can’t let them see us like this again.’
He glanced cautiously at the transient nurses.
‘Don’t worry,’ Andres said. ‘They can’t understand. Linguistic drift. I don’t think we should allow transients in here any more. The machines can sustain us. Lethe knows there are enough spare parts, now we have so many empty Couches! What I suggest is—’
‘Stow it,’ he said crossly. ‘You’re always the same, you old witch. You always want to jam a solution down my throat before I even know what the problem is. Let me gather my thoughts.’
‘Stow it, stow it,’ she parroted, grotesquely.
‘Shut up.’ He closed his eyes to exclude her, and laid back in his Couch. Through the implant in the back of his skull he allowed data from his body, the Ship, and the universe beyond filter into his sensorium.
His body first, of course, the slowly failing biomachinery that had become his prison. The good news was that, more than two centuries after his brother’s death, his slow ageing had bottomed out. Since he had last checked - Lethe, all of a month ago, it seemed like yesterday, how long had he slept this time? - nothing had got significantly worse. But he was stuck in the body of a ninety-year-old man, and a frail old man at that. He slept almost all the time, his intervals of lucidity ever more widely separated, while the Couch fed him, removed his waste, gently turned him to and fro and manipulated his stick-thin limbs. Oh, and every few weeks he received a blood transfusion, an offering to the Elders from the grateful transients outside the Cloister. He may as well have been a coma victim, he thought grumpily.
His age was meaningless, his condition boring. Briskly he moved on.
His Virtual viewpoint roamed through the Ship. Despite the passage of centuries, the physical layout of the corridor-village that had been Diluc’s was the same, save for detail, the same knots of corridors around the ‘village square’. But the people had changed, as they always did, youth blossoming, old age crumbling.
The Autarch he remembered from his last inspection was still in place. He was a big bruiser who called himself Ruul, in subtle defiance of various inhibitions against taking the name of an Elder, even one long dead. He at least didn’t look to have aged much since Rusel’s last inspection. Flanked by two of his wives, Ruul received a queue of supplicants, all seeking the Autarch’s ’wisdom’ concerning some petty problem or other. Ruul’s judgements were brisk and efficient, and as Rusel listened - though the time-drifted language was hard to decipher - he couldn’t spot any immediate errors of doctrine in the Autarch’s summary harshness.
He allowed his point of view to move on.
He watched the villagers go about their business. Four of them were scrubbing the walls clean of dirt, as they took turns to do every day. Two plump-looking worthies were discussing a matter of etiquette, their mannerisms complex and time-consuming. There were some new bits of artwork on the walls, many of them fool-the-eye depth-perspective paintings, designed to make the Ship’s corridors look bigger than they were. One woman was tending a ‘garden’ of bits of waste polymer, combing elaborate formations into it with a small metal rake. These transients, Shipborn for generations, had never heard of Zen gardens; they had rediscovered this small-world art form for themselves.
A little group of children was being taught to disassemble and maintain an air-duct fan; they chanted the names of its parts, learning by rote. They would be taught nothing more, Rusel knew. There was no element of principle here: nothing about how the fan as a machine worked, or how it fitted into the greater systems of the Ship itself. You only learned what you needed to know.
As he surveyed the village, statistics rolled past his enhanced vision in a shining column. Everything was nominal, if you took a wider perspective. Maintenance routines were being kept up satisfactorily. Reproduction rules, enforced by the Autarch and his peers in the other villages, were largely being adhered to, and there was a reasonable genetic mix.
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 gradually 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 favoured. Traditionally you would propagate your genes by doing 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, a working-out of genetic games theory. Rusel wondered what would happen if this went on.
He continued his random wandering. Everybody was busy, intent on their affairs. Some even seemed happy. But it all looked drab to Rusel, the villagers dressed in colourless Ship’s-issue clothing, their lives bounded by the polished-smooth bulkheads of the Ship. Even their language was dull, and becoming duller. The transients had no words for ‘horizon’ or ‘sky’ - but as if in compensation they had over forty words describing degrees of love.
He allowed his consciousness to return to his own body. When he surfaced, he found Andres watching him, as she so often did.
‘We need a new way to interface with the transients,’ she said again. ‘Some of the Autarchs are tough customers, Rusel. 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 repersonalise 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, labouring to make the Ship sound for its long journey. Here he was as a young-ish 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.’
‘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 she meant that she, Andres, the first of the Elders, was failing at last. 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 was making a bad choice.
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