Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘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 per cent 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 once more. This time his awareness drifted away from the bright warm human bubble at the Ship’s heart, out through the crowded torus of the hull to the realm of the pulsing ramjet engines, the wispy gravitational wings behind which the Ship sailed, and the vast spaces beyond. 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.

  VII

  Rusel was woken 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 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 semi-mythical 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, eventually becoming 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 largely been abandoned, and ancient manuals had anyhow crumbled to dust. So 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 of rememberers 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 certainly approved of this practice when it emerged. All this endless memorising was a marvellous way to use up pointless lives - and it established 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 neighbouring 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 make-ups, 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. So, if you were bright, you mustn’t be allowed to breed. 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.

  After that Hilin spent long hours in the shrine-like enclosure where Rusel’s Virtuals played out endlessly. He tried to understand. He told himself the Elder’s wisdom surpassed his own; this severance from his lover 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 of the Elder.

  As punishment, the Autarch locked him in a cell for two days. Hilin emerged from his confinement outwardly subdued, inwardly ready to explode.

  Rusel would later castigate himself for failing to see the dangers in the situation. But it was so hard to see anything at all 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 the world. When he surfaced into lucidity he was often shocked to find a year had passed like a day, as if his sense of time was 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 couldn’t rely even on memory, 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 determinati
on. She, though, was composed.

  At last Rusel’s lofty attention was snagged by familiarity. The girl 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.

  And as Rusel gazed helplessly at ‘Lora’s’ face, the uprising broke out 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 amphitheatre 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.

  Now Hilin, king of the corridors, stood before the Elder’s shrine. And he pulled at the face of the girl, the Lora look-alike. It had been a mask, just a mask; Rusel realised shamefully that with such a simple device the 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 - faeces? ]. 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 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 in their hearts these monkish philosophers, like Hilin, had never really believed in the Elder’s existence. Well, now their messiah had suddenly reincarnated among them.

  But Rusel himself 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, though. 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. No more dynasties.

  The old Autarchs and their brood, meanwhile, were to be spared. They would be shut away permanently in their amphitheatre 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. This erstwhile rebel was already being punished for his blasphemy, then, by those who sought the favour 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 went 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.

  Rusel would never leave the Cloister again.

  VIII

  Some time after that, there was a decimating plague.

  It was brought about by a combination of factors: a slow unmonitored build-up of irritants and allergens in the Ship’s environment, and then the sudden emergence of a latent virus in a population already weakened. It was a multiple accident, impossible for the pharaoh designers of the Ship to plan away, for all their ingenuity. But given enough time - more than five thousand years now - such low-probability events inevitably occurred.

  The surviving population crashed to the threshold of viability. For a few decades Rusel was forced to intervene, through booming commands, to ensure that the Ship was maintained at a base level, and that genetic-health protocols were observed and breeding matches planned even more carefully than usually.

  The low numbers brought benefits, though. The Ship’s systems were now producing a large surplus of supplies, and there was no possibility of any more water empires. Rusel considered, in his glacial way, establishing a final population at a lower level than before.

  It intrigued him that the occurrence of the low-probability plague mirrored the restructuring of his own mental processes. The day-to-day affairs of the Ship, and the clattering of the transient generations, barely distracted him now. Instead he became aware of slower pulses,
deeper rhythms far beneath any transient’s horizon of awareness.

  His perception of risk changed. His endless analysis of the Ship’s systems uncovered obscure failure modes: certain parameter combinations that could disrupt the governing software, interacting failures among the nano-machines that still laboured over the Ship’s fabric inside and out. Such failures were highly unlikely; he estimated the Ship might suffer significant damage once every ten thousand years or so. On Earth, whole civilisations had risen and fallen with greater alacrity than that. But he had to plan for such things, to prepare the Ship’s defences and recovery strategies. The plague, after all, was just such a low-risk event, but given enough time it had come about.

  The transients’ behaviour, meanwhile, adjusted on its own timescales.

  Once every decade or so the inhabitants of Diluc’s corridor-village would approach the shrine of the Elder, where the flickering Virtual still showed. One of them would dress up in a long robe and march behind a walking frame with exaggerated slowness, while the rest cowered. And then they would fall on a manikin and tear it to pieces. Rusel had watched such displays several times before he had realised what was going on: it was, of course, a ritualised re-enactment of his own last manifestation, the hobbling leader himself, the manikin poor overbright Hilin. Sometimes the bit of theatre would culminate in the flaying of a living human, which they must imagine he demanded; when such savage generations arose, Rusel would avert his cold gaze.