Meanwhile, in the village in which Hilin’s doomed lover Sale had been born, the local transients were trying another tactic to win his favour. Perhaps it was another outcome of Hilin’s clever exploits, or perhaps it had been inherent in the situation all along.
Girls, elfin girls with dark elusive eyes: as the generations ticked by, he seemed to see more of them running in the corridors, making eyes at muscular wall-scrubbing boys, dandling children on their knees. They were like cartoon versions of Lora: tall Loras and short, thin Loras and fat, happy Loras and sad.
It was selective breeding, if presumably unconscious, people turning themselves into replicas of the images in the Virtual. They were appealing directly to his own cold heart: if the Elder loved this woman so much, then choose a wife that looks like her, if only a little, and hope to have daughters with her delicate looks, and so win favour.
Rusel was simultaneously touched, and appalled. But he did not interfere. They could do what they liked, he told himself, as long as they got their jobs done.
Meanwhile in the old amphitheatre, on the other side of the barricade he had erected, the Autarchs and their long-lived families had not died out as Rusel had expected - indeed hoped. They had lived on. And as they inbred ferociously, their lives were stretched out longer and longer.
Again this made sense in terms of their heredity, he thought. In their cordoned-off compartment there was simply no room to expand their population. So the genes’ best bet of propagating themselves into the future, always their only objective, was to stretch out the lives of their carriers. Adults in there now lived for centuries, and for the vanishingly few children born, childhood lasted decades.
Rusel found these creatures, with their blank eyes and wizened-faced children, peculiarly disturbing. On the other hand, he still couldn’t bring himself to kill them off. Perhaps in them he saw a distorted reflection of himself.
There was one constant throughout the Ship. On both sides of the barrier the transients were clearly getting dumber.
As generations passed - and by now, for fear of repeating Hilin’s fate, potential mates were repelled by any signs of higher-than-average intelligence - it was obvious that the transients were breeding themselves into stupidity. If anything the Autarchs’ environment was less stimulating than that of their cousins in the rest of the Ship, and despite their slower generational cycle they were shedding their unnecessary intelligence with even more enthusiasm, perhaps a response to sheer boredom.
The transients kept the Ship working, however, and in their increasingly brutish liaisons followed the genetic-health mandates scrupulously. This puzzled Rusel: surely by now they could have no real understanding of why they were doing these peculiar things.
But he observed that when it came time to attract a mate the most vigorous deck-swabbers and cousin-deniers stood out from the crowd. It made sense: after all, a propensity to please the undeniable reality of the Elder was a survival characteristic, and therefore worth displaying if you had it, and worth preserving in your children’s heredity. He filed away such observations and insights.
By now, nothing that happened inside the Ship’s hull interested him as much as what happened outside.
He was thoroughly wired into the Ship, its electromagnetic and other equipment taking the place of his own failed biological senses. He cruised with it through the intergalactic gulf, feeling the tingle of dark-matter particles as they were swept into the Ship’s gut, sensing the subtle caress of magnetic fields. It fascinated him to follow the million-year turning of the Galaxy, whose brilliant face continued to open up behind the fleeing Ship. Even the space between the galaxies was much more interesting than he had ever imagined. It wasn’t a void at all. There was structure here, he saw, a complex webbing of the dark stuff that spanned the universe, a webbing in which galaxies were trapped like glowing flies. He learned to follow the currents and reefs of the dark matter which the Ship’s gravitational maw greedily devoured.
He was alone with the galaxies, then, and with his own austere mind.
Once, just once, as he drifted in the dark, he heard a strange signal. It was cold and clear, like the peal of a trumpet, far off in the echoing intergalactic night. It wasn’t human at all.
He listened for a thousand years. He never heard it again.
IX
Andres came to him. He could see her face clearly, that worn-smooth expressionless skin. The rest of her body was a blur, a suggestion.
‘Leave me alone, you nagging old witch,’ he grumbled.
‘Believe me, that would be my choice,’ said Andres fervently. ‘But there’s a problem, Rusel. And you need to come out of your damn shell and sort it out.’
He longed for her to leave him, but he knew that wasn’t an option. In a corner of his frayed mind he knew that this Virtual projection of his last companion, a synthesis of his own reflection and the Ship’s systems, was an alarm, activated only when absolutely necessary.
‘What kind of problem?’
‘With the transients. What else? You need to take a look.’
‘I don’t want to. It hurts.’
‘I know it hurts. But it’s your duty.’
Duty? Had she said that, or had he? Was he awake, or dreaming? With time, everything blurred, every category, every boundary.
He was far beyond biology now, of course. It was only technology that kept him alive. With time, the Ship had infiltrated its treatments and systems deeper into the shell of what had been his body. It was as if he had become just another of the Ship’s systems, like the air scrubbers or the water purifiers, just as old and balky, and just as much in need of endless tender loving care.
The decay of his central nervous system had proceeded so far that he wasn’t sure if it returned any signals to the hardening nugget of his brain; he wasn’t sure if he perceived the outside universe unfiltered at all. And even the walls of his consciousness were wearing away. He thought of his mind as a dark hall filled with drifting forms, like zero-gravity sculptures. These were his memories - or perhaps memories of memories, recycled, reiterated, edited and processed.
And he was here, a pinpoint awareness that flitted and flew between the drifting reefs of memory. At times, as he sailed through the abstraction of emptiness, free of memory or anticipation, indeed free of any conscious thought save only a primal sense of self, he felt oddly free - light, unburdened, even young again. But whenever that innocent point settled into the dark tangle of a memory reef, the guilt came back, a deep muddy shame whose origins he had half-forgotten, and whose resolution he could no longer imagine.
He wasn’t alone, however, in this cavernous awareness. Sometimes voices called from the dark. Sometimes there were even faces, their features softened, their ages indeterminate. Here was Diluc, his brother, or Andres, or Ruul or Selur or one of the others. He knew they were all long dead save for him, who lived on and on. He had vague memories of setting up some of these Virtual personas as therapy for himself, or as ways for the Ship to attract his attention - Lethe, even as company. But by now he wasn’t sure what was Virtual and what was a dream, a schizoid fantasy of his rickety mind.
Lora was never there, however.
And Andres, the cold pharaoh who had become his longest-enduring companion, was his most persistent visitant.
‘Nobody ever said this would be easy, Rusel.’
‘You said that before.’
‘Yes. And I’ll keep on saying it until we get to Canis Major.’
‘Canis Major? . . .’ The destination. He’d forgotten about it again, forgotten that an end to all this even as a theoretical possibility might exist. The trouble was, thinking about such things as a beginning and an end made him aware of time, and that was always a mistake.
How long? The answer came to him like a whisper. Round numbers? Twenty thousand years gone. Twenty thousand years. It was ridiculous, of course.
‘Rusel,’ Andres snapped. ‘You need to focus.’
‘You’re not even
Andres,’ he grumbled.
Her mouth was round with mock horror. ‘Really? Oh, no! What an existential disaster for me.’ She glared. ‘Just do it, Rus.’
So, reluctantly, he gathered his scattered concentration, and sent his viewpoint out into the body of the Ship. He was faintly aware of Andres riding alongside him, a ghost at his shoulder.
He found the place he still thought of as Diluc’s village. The framework of corridors and cabins hadn’t changed, of course; it was impossible that it should. But even the non-permanent partitions that had once been built up and torn down by each successive generation of transients had been left unmoved since the last time he was here. Building things wasn’t what people did any more.
He wandered into the little suite of rooms that had once been Diluc’s home. There was no furniture. Nests were crammed into each corner of the room, disorderly heaps of cloth and polymer scraps. He had seen the transients take standard-issue clothing from the Ship’s recycler systems and immediately start tearing it up with hands or teeth to make their coarse bedding. There was a strong stink of piss and shit, of blood and milk, sweat and sex, the most basic human biology. But the crew remained scrupulously clean. Every few days all this stuff would be swept up and carted off to the recycler bins.
This was the way people lived now. They nested in starship cabins.
Outside, the walls and partitions were clean, gleaming and sterile, as was every surface he could see, the floor and ceiling. One partition had been rubbed until it was worn so thin the light shone through it: another couple of generations and it would wear away altogether, he thought. The crew still kept up their basic duties; that had remained, while so much else had vanished.
But these latter transients were not crewing the Ship as his own generation once had, for conscious purposes. They were doing it for deeper reasons.
The transients competed in how well they did their chores in order to attract mates, and these selection pressures had, given time, sculpted the population. By now the transients were maintaining a starship’s systems as bees had once danced, stags had locked antlers, and peacocks had spread their useless tails: they were doing it for sex, and the chance to procreate. As mind receded, Rusel thought, biology had taken over.
As long as they were doing it in the first place, Rusel didn’t care. Besides, it worked in maintaining the ship. Sexual drivers seemed very effective in locking in behaviour with the precision required to keep the Ship’s systems functioning: you could fix a ceiling ventilation grille with a show-off flourish or not, but you had to do it exactly correctly to impress the opposite sex, even if you didn’t understand what it was for. Even when mind was gone, you had to do it right.
He heard weeping, not far away.
He let his viewpoint drift along the corridor, following the sound. He turned a corner, and came on the villagers.
There were perhaps twenty-five of them, adults and children. They were all naked, of course; nobody had worn clothes for millennia. Some of them had infants in their arms or on their backs. Squatting in the corridor, they huddled around a central figure, the woman who was doing the weeping. She was cradling something, a bloody scrap. The others reached out and stroked her back and scalp; some of them were weeping too, Rusel saw.
He said, ‘Their empathy is obvious.’
‘Yes. They’ve lost so much else, but not that.’
Suddenly their heads turned, all of them save the weeping woman, faces swivelling like antennae. Something had disturbed them - perhaps the tiny hovering drone that was Rusel’s physical manifestation. Their brows were low, but their faces were still human, with straight noses and delicate chins. It was like a flower bed of faces, Rusel thought, turned up to his light. But their mouths were pulled back in fear-grins.
And every one of them looked like Lora, more or less, with that delicate, elfin face, even something of her elusive eyes. Of course they did: the blind filter of natural selection, operating for generations on this hapless stock, had long determined that though mind was no longer necessary, to look this way might soften the heart of the wizened creature who ruled the world.
The strange tableau of upturned Lora-faces lasted only a moment. Then the transients took flight. They poured away down the corridor, running, knuckle-walking, bounding off the walls and ceiling.
Andres growled, ‘I’ll swear they get more like chimps with every generation.’
In a few seconds they had gone, all save the weeping woman.
Rusel allowed his viewpoint to swim towards the woman. He moved cautiously, not wishing to alarm her. She was young - twenty, twenty-one? It was increasingly hard to tell the age of these transients; they seemed to reach puberty later each generation. This girl had clearly passed her menarche - in fact she had given birth, and recently: her belly was slack, her breasts heavy with milk. But her chest was smeared with blood, shocking bright crimson in the drab, worn background of the corridor. And the thing she was cradling was no child.
‘Lethe,’ said Rusel. ‘It’s a hand. A child’s hand. I think I’m going to throw up.’
‘You no longer have the equipment to throw up. Take a closer look.’
A white stump of bone stuck out of a bloody mass of flesh. The hand had been severed at the wrist. And two tiny fingers had been almost stripped of flesh, ligament and muscle, leaving only tiny bones.
‘That wrist,’ Andres said pitilessly, ‘has been bitten through. By teeth, Rusel. And teeth have been at work on those fingers as well. Think about it. With a bit of practice, you could take one of those little morsels between your incisors and just strip off the flesh and muscle—’
‘Shut up! Lethe, Andres, I can see for myself. We always avoided cannibalism. I thought we beat that into their shrinking skulls hard enough.’
‘So we did. But I don’t think this is cannibalism - or rather, whatever did this wasn’t her kind.’
Rusel elevated the viewpoint and cast around. He saw a trail of blood leading away from the woman, smeared along the walls and floor, quite unmistakable, as if something had been dragged away.
Andres said, ‘I think our transients suddenly have a predator.’
‘Not so suddenly,’ Rusel said. A part of his scattered consciousness was checking over the Ship’s logs, long ignored. This kind of incident had been going on for a couple of centuries. ‘It’s been rare before, once or twice a generation. Mostly it was the old who were taken, or the very young - vulnerable, dispensable, or replaceable. But now they seem to be upping the rate.’
‘And making a dent in the transients’ numbers.’
‘Yes. You were right to bring me here.’ This had to be resolved. But to do it, he thought with a deepening dread, he was going to have to confront a horror he had shut out of his awareness for millennia.
‘I’m here with you,’ Andres said gently.
‘No, you’re not,’ he snapped. ‘But I have to deal with this anyhow.’
‘Yes, you do.’
His viewpoint followed the bloody trail as it wound through the corridor-villages of the transients. Broken in places, the trail slinked through shadows or through holes worn in the walls. It was the furtive trail of a hunter, he thought.
At last Rusel came to the bulkhead that cut the Ship in two, marking the limit of his transients’ domain. He had long put out of his mind what lay beyond this wall: in fact, if he could have cut away the Ship’s aft compartment and let the whole mess float off into space he would long ago have done so.
But there was a hole in the bulkhead, just wide enough to admit a slim body.
The bulkhead was a composite of metal and polymer, extremely tough, and a metre thick; the hole was a neat tunnel, not regular but smooth-walled, drilled right through. ‘I can’t believe they have tools,’ he said. ‘So how did they get through?’
‘Teeth,’ Andres said. ‘Teeth and nails - and time, of which they have plenty. Remember what you’re dealing with. Even if the bulkhead was made of diamond they’d have got through even
tually.’
‘I hoped they were dead.’
‘Hope! Wishful thinking! That always was your weakness, Rusel. I always said you should have killed them off in the first place. They’re just a drain on the Ship’s resources.’
‘I’m no killer.’
‘Yes, you are—’
‘And they are human, no less than the transients.’
‘No, they’re not. And now, it seems, they are eating our transients.’
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