‘I have no choice.’
Dakk’s mouth worked. Then she spoke shrilly. ‘You fucking Commissaries sit in your gilded nests. Handing out destinies like petty gods. Do you ever even doubt what you are doing?’
‘All the time, Captain,’ Varcin said sadly. He put a hand on Dakk’s shoulder. ‘We will take care of you. You aren’t alone. We have many other relics of lost futures. Some of them are from much further downstream than you. Many have stories which are - interesting.’
‘But,’ said Dakk stiffly, ‘my career is finished.’
‘Oh, yes, of course.’
There was a heartbeat of tension. Then something seemed to go out of Dakk. ‘Well, I guess I crashed through another chop line. My whole life is never going to happen. And I don’t even have the comfort of popping out of existence.’
I faced Dakk. ‘Why did you do it?’
Her smile was twisted. ‘Why would you do it? Because it was worth it, ensign. Because we struck at the Xeelee. Because Hama - our son - gave his life in the best possible way.’
At last I thought I understood her.
We were, after all, the same person. As I had grown up it had been drummed into me that there was no honour in growing old - and something in Dakk, even now, despite all she had gone through, still felt the same way. After surviving her earlier engagements she was not content to be a living hero. On some deep level she was ashamed to be alive. So she had let Hama, our lost child, live out her own dream - a dream of certain youthful death. Even though in the process she violated orders. Even though it damaged humanity’s cause. And now she envied Hama his moment of glorious youthful suicide, even though it was an incident lost in a vanished future.
I think Dakk wanted to say more, but I turned away. I was aware I was out of my depth; counselling your elder self over the erasure of her whole career, not to mention her child, isn’t exactly a situation you come across every day.
Anyhow I was feeling elated. Despite disgrace for a crime I’d never committed, despite my own screwed-up career, despite the loss of a baby I would never know, despite the wrecking of any relationship I might have had with Tarco, I was relieved. Frankly, I was glad I wouldn’t turn into the beat-up egomaniac I saw before me. And I would never have to live through this scene again, standing on the other side of the room, looking back at my own face.
Is that cruel? I couldn’t help it. I was free.
Tarco had a question to ask. ‘Sir - do we win?’
Varcin kept his face expressionless. He clapped his hands, and the images over our heads changed.
It was as if the scale expanded.
I saw fleets with ships more numerous than the stars. I saw planets burn, stars flare and die. I saw the Galaxy reduced to a wraith of crimson stars that guttered like dying candles. I saw people - but people like none I’d ever heard of: people living on lonely outposts suspended in empty intergalactic spaces, people swimming through the interior of stars, people trapped in abstract environments I couldn’t even recognise. I saw shining people who flew through space, naked as gods.
And I saw people dying, in great waves, unnumbered hordes of them.
Varcin said, ‘We think there is a major crux in the next few millennia. A vital engagement at the centre of the Galaxy. Many of the history sheaves seem to converge at that point. Beyond that everything is uncertain. The farther downstream, the more misty are the visions, the more strange the protagonists, even the humans … There are paths to a glorious future, an awesome future of mankind victorious. And there are paths that lead to defeat - even extinction, all human possibilities extinguished. Your question isn’t a simple one, ensign.’
Dakk, Tarco and I shared glances. Our intertwined destinies were complex. But I bet the three of us had only one thought in our minds at that moment: that we were glad we were mere Navy tars, that we did not have to deal with this.
That was almost the end of it. The formal court was due to convene; the meeting was over.
But there was still something that troubled me. ‘Commissary? ’
‘Yes, ensign?’
‘Do we have free will?’
Captain Dakk grimaced. ‘Oh, no, ensign. Not us. We have duty.’
We walked out of the Map Room, where unrealised futures flickered like moth wings.
As the two sides worked over their successive drafts of history, as timescales stretched to fit the vast spatial arena of a Galactic war, the Coalition laboured to keep mankind united. It succeeded, to an astonishing degree.
But there was always plenty of room, plenty of time, for things to drift.
One such dark corner was an Observation Post, flung far out of the Galaxy itself.
IN THE UN-BLACK
AD 22,254
On the day La-ba met Ca-si she saved his life.
She hadn’t meant to. It was un-Doctrine. It just happened. But it changed everything.
It had been a bad day for La-ba. She had been dancing. That wasn’t un-Doctrine, not exactly, but the cadre leaders disapproved. She was the leader of the dance, and she got stuck with Cesspit detail for ten days. It was hard, dirty work, the worst.
And would-be deathers flourished there, in the pit. They would come swimming through the muck itself to get you.
That was what happened just two hours after she started work. Naked, she was standing knee-deep in a river of unidentifiable, odourless muck. Two strong hands grabbed her ankles and pulled her flat on her face. Suddenly her eyes and mouth and nose and ears were full of dense, sticky waste.
La-ba reached down to her toes. She found hands on her ankles, and further up a shaven skull, wide misshapen ears.
She recognised him from those ears. He was a We-ku, one of a batch of look-alikes who had come down from the Birthing Vat at the same time, and had clung together ever since. If they had ever had their own names, they had long abandoned them.
She wasn’t about to be deathed by a We-ku. She pressed the heels of her hands into his eyes and shoved.
Her ankles started to slide out of his hands. The harder he gripped, the more his clutching fingers slipped. She pointed her toes and shoved harder.
Then she was free.
She pushed up to the surface and blew out a huge mouthful of dirt. She prepared to take on the We-ku again, elbows and knees ready, fingers clawing for the knife strapped to her thigh.
But he didn’t come for her, not for one heartbeat, two, three. She took the risk of wiping her eyes clear.
The We-ku had already found another victim. He was pressing a body into the dirt with his great fat hands. If he got his victim to the floor, his piston legs would crack the spine or splinter the skull in seconds.
The We-ku was a surging monster of blood and filth. His eyes were rimmed with blackness where she had bruised him.
Something in La-ba rose up.
At a time like this, a time of overcrowding, there was a lot of deathing.
You could see there were too many babies swarming out of the Birthing Vat, the great pink ball that hovered in the air at the very centre of the Observation Post. At rally hours you could look beyond the Vat to the other side of the Post, where the people marched around on the roof with their heads pointing down at you, and you could see that almost every Cadre Square was overfull.
Commissaries would come soon, bringing Memory. They would Cull if they had to. The less the Commissaries had to Cull, the happier they would be. It was the duty of every citizen of every cadre to bring down their numbers.
If you did well you would fly on a Shuttle out of here. You would fly to Earth, where life un-ended. That was worded by the cadre leaders. And if you hid and cowered, even if the amateur deathers didn’t get to you, then the Old Man would. That was worded in the dorms. Earth as paradise, as life; the Old Man as a demon, as death. That was all that lay beyond the walls of the Post.
La-ba had no reason to un-believe this. She had seen hundreds deathed by others. She had deathed seventeen people herself.
La-ba was tall, her body lithe, supple: good at what she was trained for, deathing and sexing and hard physical work.
La-ba was five years old. Already half her life was gone.
She leapt out of the muck and onto the We-ku’s back, her knife in her hand.
The We-ku didn’t know whether to finish the death at his feet, or deal with the skinny menace on his back. And he was confused because what La-ba was doing was un-Doctrine. That confusion gave La-ba the seconds she needed.
Still, she almost had to saw his head clean off before he stopped struggling.
He sank at last into the dirt, which was now stained with whorls of deep crimson. The head, connected only by bits of gristle and skin, bobbed in the muck’s sticky currents.
The We-ku’s intended victim struggled to his feet. He was about La-ba’s height and age, she guessed, with a taut, well-muscled body. He was naked, but crusted with dirt.
She was aroused. Deathing always aroused her. Glancing down at his crotch, at the stiff member that stuck out of the dirt there, she saw that this other felt the same.
‘You crimed,’ he breathed, and he stared at her with eyes that were bright white against the dirt.
He was right. She should have let the deathing go ahead, and then taken out the We-ku. Then there would have been two deaths, instead of one. She had been un-Doctrine.
She glanced around. Nobody was close. Nobody had seen how the We-ku died.
Nobody but this man, this intended victim.
‘Ca-si,’ he said. ‘Cadre Fourteen.’ That was on the other side of the sky.
‘La-ba. Cadre Six. Will you report?’ If he did she could be summarily executed, deathed before the day was out.
Still he stared at her. The moment stretched.
He said, ‘We should process the We-ku.’
‘Yes.’
Breathing hard, they hauled the We-ku’s bulky corpse towards a hopper. The work brought them close. She could feel the warmth of his body.
They dumped the We-ku into the hopper. It was already half-full, of tangled limbs, purple guts, bits of people. La-ba kept back one ugly We-ku ear as a trophy.
La-ba and Ca-si sexed, there and then, in the slippery dirt.
Later, at the end of the shift, they got clean, and sexed again.
Later still they joined in a dance, a vast abandoned whirl of a hundred citizens, more. Then they sexed again.
He never did report her crime. By failing to do so, of course, he was criming himself. Maybe that bonded them.
They kept sexing, whatever the reason.
Hama stood beside his mentor, Arles Thrun, as the citizens of the Observation Post filed before them. The marching drones stared at Hama’s silvered skin, and they reached respectfully to stroke the gleaming egg-shaped Memory that Arles held in his hand: the treasure, brought from Earth itself, that the Commissaries were here to present to the drones of this Post.
One in three of the drones who passed was assigned, by Arles’s ancient, wordless gesture, to the Cull. Perhaps half of those assigned would survive. Each drone so touched shrank away from Arles’s gleaming finger.
When Hama looked to the up-curving horizon he saw that the line of patiently queuing drones stretched a quarter of the way around the Post’s internal equator.
This Observation Post was a sphere, so small Hama could have walked around its interior in a day. The folded-over sky was crowded with Cadre Squares, dormitory blocks and training and indoctrination centres, and the great sprawls of the Post’s more biological functions, the Cesspits and the Cyclers and the Gardens, green and brown and glistening blue. The great Birthing Vat itself hung directly over his head at the geometric centre of the sphere, pink and fecund, an obscene sun. Drones walked all over the inner surface of the sphere, stuck there by inertial generators, manipulated gravity. The air was thick with the stink of growing things, of dirt and sweat. To Hama, it was like being trapped within the belly of some vast living thing.
It didn’t help his mood to reflect that just beyond the floor beneath his feet the host planet’s atmosphere raged: a perpetual hydrogen storm, laced with high-frequency radiation and charged particles.
Absently he reached into his drab monastic robe and touched his chest. He stroked the cool, silvered Planck-zero epidermis, sensed the softly gurgling fluid within, where alien fish swam languidly. Here in this dismal swamp, immersed in the primeval, he could barely sense the mood even of Arles, who stood right next to him. He longed for the cool interstellar gulf, the endless open where the merged thoughts of Commissaries sounded across a trillion stars …
‘Hama, pay attention,’ Arles Thrun snapped.
Hama focused reluctantly on the soft round faces of the drones, and saw they betrayed agitation and confusion at his behaviour.