The Year's Best SF 22 # 2004

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Don’t worry,” Andres said. “They can’t understand. Linguistic drift.”

  “We have to deal with them. We’re the top of their pyramid of authority—that’s what you’ve always said.”

  “So we are, and it has to stay that way. But 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 lay 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. 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 was 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 drift 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.

  Everybody was busy, intent on their affairs. Some even seemed happy. But it all looked drab to Rusel, all the villagers dressed in colorless 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.

  As he surveyed the village, statistics rolled past his 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 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 personalise 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 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 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 s
et, 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!”