‘Remember this is a great day for them,’ Arles murmured dryly. ‘The first Commission visit in a thousand years - and it is happening in the brief lifetime of this creature.’ His silvered hand patted indulgently at the bare head of the drone before him. ‘How lucky they are, even if we will have to order the deaths of so many of them. There is so little in their lives - little more than the wall images that never change, the meaningless battle for position in the cadre hierarchies …
And the dance, Hama thought reluctantly, their wild illegal dance. ‘They disgust me,’ he hissed, surprising himself. Yet it was true.
Arles glanced at him. ‘You’re fortunate they do not understand.’
‘They disgust me because their language has devolved into jabber,’ Hama said. ‘They disgust me because they have bred themselves into over-population.’
Arles murmured, ‘Hama, when you accepted the burden of longevity you chose a proud name. I sometimes wonder whether you have the nobility to match that name. These creatures’ names were chosen for them by a random combination of syllables.’
‘They spend their lives on make-work. They eat and screw and die, crawling around in their own filth. What need has a candle-flame of a name?’
Arles was frowning now, sapphire eyes flickering in the silver mask of his face. ‘Have you forgotten the core tenet of the Doctrines? A brief life burns brightly, Hama. These creatures and their forebears have maintained their lonely vigil, here beyond the Galaxy - monitoring the progress of the war - for five thousand years. We have neglected them; isolated, they have - drifted. But these drones are the essence of humanity. And we Commissaries - doomed to knowledge, doomed to life - we are their servants.’
‘Perhaps. But this “essence of humanity” is motivated by lies. Already we understand their jabber well enough to know that. These absurd legends of theirs—’
Arles raised a hand, silencing him quickly. ‘Belief systems drift, just as languages do. The flame of the Doctrines still burns here, if not as brightly as we would wish. And, Doctrinal or not, this Post is useful. Always remember that, Hama: utility is a factor. This is a war, after all.’
Now two of the drones came before Hama, hand in hand, male and female, nude like the rest. This pair leaned close to each other, showing an easy physical familiarity.
They had made love, he saw immediately. Not once, but many times. Perhaps even recently. He felt an unwelcome pang of jealousy. But on a thong around her neck the female wore what looked hideously like a dried human ear. The fish in his chest squirmed.
He snapped: ‘What are your names?’
They didn’t understand his words, but comprehended the sense. They pointed to their chests. ‘La-ba.’ ‘Ca-si.’
Arles smiled, amused, contemptuous. ‘We have the perspective of gods. They have only their moment of light, and the warmth of each other’s body … What is it, Hama? Feeling a little attraction, despite your disgust? A little envy?’
With an angry gesture, Hama sentenced both the drones to the Cull. The drones, obviously shocked, clung to each other.
Arles laughed. ‘Don’t worry, Hama. You are yet young. You will grow - distant.’ Arles passed him the Memory.
Hama weighed the Memory; it was surprisingly heavy. It contained the story of the war since the Commission’s last visit to this backwater Observation Post, a glorious story rendered in simple, heroic images. The contents of the Memory would be downloaded into the Post’s fabric and transcribed on its walls, in images timeless enough to withstand further linguistic drift. Nothing else could be written or drawn on the surfaces of the Post - certainly nothing made by the inhabitants of this place. What had they to write or draw? What did they need to read, save the glorious progress of mankind?
‘Carry on alone. Perhaps it will be a useful discipline for you. One in three for the Cull. And remember - as you condemn them, love them.’ Arles walked away.
The drone couple had moved on. More ugly shaven heads moved past him, all alike, meaningless.
Later that night, when the Post’s sourceless light dimmed, Hama watched the drones dance their wild untutored tangoes, sensual and beautiful. He clung to the thought of how he had doomed the lovers: their shocked expressions, the way they had grabbed each other’s arms, their distress.
After another sleep, La-ba and Ca-si were thrust out of the Observation Post. Only one of them, La-ba or Ca-si, would come back - one, or neither, depending on the outcome of their combat. This was the Cull. A way of sifting out the strongest, while keeping down the population.
To La-ba, stiff in her hardsuit, it was a strange and unwelcome experience to pass through the shell of the Post, to feel gravity shift and change, to feel up become down. And then she had to make sense of a floor that curved away beneath her, to understand that the horizon now hid what lay beyond rather than revealed it.
The Post was adrift in a cloud, a crimson fog that glowed around La-ba. The endless air, above and below, was racked by huge storms. Far below she saw the smooth glint of this world’s core, a hard plain of metallic hydrogen, unimaginably strange. Lightning crackled between immense black clouds. Rain slammed down around her, a hail of pebbles that glowed red-hot. They clattered against the smooth skin of the Post, and her hardsuit.
The clouds were a vapour of silicates. The rain was molten rock laced with pure iron.
The Post was a featureless ball that floated in this ferocious sky, a world drifting within a world. A great cable ran up from the floor before her, up into the crowded sky above her, up - it was said - to the cool emptiness of space beyond. La-ba had never seen space, though she believed it existed.
La-ba, used to enclosure, wanted to cringe, to fall against the floor, as, it was said, some infants hugged the smooth warm walls of the Birthing Vat. But she stood tall.
A fist slammed into the back of her head.
She fell forward, her hardsuited limbs clattering against the floor.
There was a weight on her back and legs, pressing her down. She felt a scrabbling at her neck. Fingers probed at the joint between her helmet and the rest of the suit. If the suit was breached she would death at once.
She did not resist.
She felt the fingers pull away from her neck.
With brisk roughness she was flipped on her back. Her assailant sat on her legs, heavy in his hardsuit. Rock rain pattered on his shoulders, red-gleaming pebbles that stuck for a second before dropping away, cooling to grey.
It was, of course, Ca-si.
‘You un-hunted me,’ he said, and his words crackled in her ears. ‘And now you un-resist me.’ She felt his hands on her shoulders, and she remembered how his skin had touched hers, but there was no feeling through the hardsuits. He said, ‘You crime if you un-death me. You crime if you let me death you.’
‘It is true.’ So it was. According to the Doctrines that shaped their lives, it was the duty of the strong to destroy the weak.
Ca-si sat back. ‘I will death you.’ But he ran his gloved hands over her body, over her breasts, to her belly.
And he found the bulge there, exposed by the contoured hardsuit.
His eyes widened.
‘Now you know,’ she screamed at him.
His face twisted behind the thick plate. ‘I must death you even if you have babied.’
‘Yes! Death me! Get it over!’
‘… No. There is another way.’
There was a hand on Ca-si’s shoulder. He twisted, startled.
Another stood over them, occluding the raging rock clouds. This other was wearing an ancient, scuffed hardsuit. Through a scratched and starred faceplate, La-ba made out one eye, one dark socket, a mesh of wrinkles.
It was the Old Man: the monster of whom infants whispered to each other even before they had left the Birthing Vat.
Ca-si fell away. He was screaming and screaming, terrified. La-ba lay there, stunned, unable to speak.
The Old Man reached down and hauled La-ba to her feet. ‘Come.’ He pulled her towards the cable which connected the Post to space.
There was a door in the cable.
Hama kept Ca-si in custody.
The boy paced back and forth in the small cell Hama had created for him, his muscles sliding beneath his skin. He would mutter sometimes, agitated, clearly troubled by whatever had become of his lost love.
But when Ca-si inspected the Commissary’s silvered epidermis and the fish that swam in his chest, a different look dawned on his fleshy, soft face. It was a look of awe, incomprehension, and - admit it, Hama! - disgust.
He knew Arles disapproved of his obsession with this boy. ‘The result of your assignment of them to the Cull was satisfactory, ’ he had said. ‘Two went out; one came back. What does it matter?’
But Hama pointed to evidences of flaws - the lack of trophies from the body being the most obvious. ‘All these disgusting drones take trophies from their kills. There’s something wrong here.’
‘There is more than one way of manifesting weakness, Hama. If the other let herself die it is better she is deleted from the gene pool anyhow.’
‘That is not according to the strict Doctrines.’
Arles had sighed, and passed a glimmering hand over the silver planes of his cheek. ‘But even our longevity is a violation of the Doctrines - if a necessary one. Druz is seventeen thousand years dead, Hama. His Doctrines have become - mature. You will learn.’
But Hama had not been satisfied.
Hama faced the boy. He forced his silvered face into a smile. ‘You have been isolated here a long time.’
‘A hundred births,’ the boy said sullenly.
That was about right: a thousand years since the last Commission visit, a hundred of these drones’ brief generations. ‘Yes. A hundred births. And, in enough time, languages change. Did you know that? After just a few thousand years of separation two identical languages will diverge so much that they would share no common features except basic grammatical constructs - like the way a language indicates possession, or uses more subtle features like ergativity, which …’
The boy was just staring at him, dull, not even resentful.
Hama felt foolish, and then angry to be made to feel that way. He said sternly, ‘To rectify language drift is part of our duty. The Commission for Historical Truth, I mean. We will reteach you Standard. Just as we will leave you the Memory, with the story of mankind since you were last visited, and we will take away your story to tell it to others. We bind up mankind on all our scattered islands. Just as it is your duty—’
‘To death.’
‘To die. Yes. You are hidden inside a planet, a gas giant, out of sight of the enemy. The machines here watch for the enemy. They have watched for five thousand years, and they may watch for five thousand years more. If the enemy come you must do everything you can to destroy them, and if you cannot, you must destroy the machines, and the Post, and yourself.’
This boy was actually no more than a backup mechanism, Hama thought. A final self-destruct, in case this station’s brooding automated defences failed. For this sole purpose, five hundred generations of humans had lived and loved and bred and died, here in the intergalactic waste.
Ca-si watched him dully, his powerful hands clenched into fists. As he gazed at the planes of the boy’s stomach Hama felt an uncomfortable inner warmth, a restlessness.
On impulse he snapped, ‘Who do we fight? Do you know?’
‘We fight the Xeelee.’
‘Why do we fight?’
The boy stared at him.
Hama ordered, ‘Look at me.’ He pulled open his robe. ‘This silver skin comes from a creature called a Silver Ghost. Once the Ghosts owned worlds and built cities. Now we farm their skins. The fish in my belly are called Squeem. Once they conquered mankind, occupied Earth itself. Now they are mere symbiotes in my chest, enabling me to speak to my colleagues across the Galaxy. These are triumphs for mankind.’
The look on Ca-si’s face made Hama think he didn’t regard his condition as a triumph.
Angry, oddly confused, Hama snapped, ‘I know you didn’t kill the girl. Why did you spare her? Why did she spare you? Where is she?’
But the boy wouldn’t reply.
It seemed there was nothing Hama could do to reach Ca-si, as he longed to.
La-ba ascended into strangeness.
The hollow cable had a floor that lifted you up, and windows so you could see out. Inside, she rode all the way out of the air, into a place of harsh flat light.
When she looked down she saw a floor of churning red gas. Auroras flapped in its textured layers, making it glow purple. When she looked up she saw only a single burning, glaring light.
The Old Man tried to make her understand. ‘The light is the sun. The red is the world. The Post floats in the air of the world. We have risen up out of the air, into space.’
She couldn’t stop staring at his face. It was a mass of wrinkles. He had one eye, one dark purple pit. His face was much stranger than the sun and the churning world.