The cable ended in another giant ball, like the Post. But this ball was dimpled by big black pits, like the bruises left by the heels of her hands in the face of the We-ku. And it floated in space, not the air. It was a moon, attached to the cable.
Inside the ball there was a cavity, but there were no people or Cadre Squares and no Birthing Vat: only vast mechanical limbs that glistened, sinister, sliding over each other.
‘No people live here,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘One person does.’
He showed her his home inside the tethered moon. It was just a shack made of bits of shining plastic. There were blankets on the floor, and clothes, and empty food packets. It was dirty, and it smelled a little.
She looked around. ‘There is no supply dispenser.’
‘People give me food. And water and clothes. From their rations.’
She tried to understand. ‘Why?’
He shrugged. ‘Because life is short. People want—’
‘What?’
‘Something more than the war.’
She thought about that. ‘There is the dance.’
He grinned, his empty eye socket crumpling. ‘I never could dance. Come.’
He led her to a huge window. Machines screened out the glare of the sun above, and the glower of the overheated planet below.
Between sun and planet, there was only blackness.
‘No,’ the Old Man said gently. ‘Not blackness. Look.’
They waited there for long heartbeats.
At last she saw a faint glow, laced against the black. It had structure, fine filaments and threads. It was beautiful, eerie, remote.
‘It is un-black.’
He pointed at the sun. ‘The sun is alone. If there were other suns near, we would see them, as points of light. The suns gather in pools, like that one.’ He pointed down, but the Galaxy’s disc was hidden by the bulk of the planet. ‘The un-black is pools of suns, very far away.’
She understood that.
‘Others lived here before me,’ he said. ‘They learned how to see with the machines. They left records of what they saw.’ He dug into a pocket and pulled out a handful of bones: human bones, the small bones of a hand or foot. They were scored by fine marks.
‘They speak to you with bones?’
He shrugged. ‘If you smear blood or dirt on the walls it falls away. What else do we have to draw on, but our bones, and our hearts?’ He fingered the bones carefully.
‘What do the bones say?’
He gestured at the hulking machinery. ‘These machines watch the sky for the trace of ships. But they also see the un-black: the light, the faintest light, all the light there is. Some of the light comes from the suns and pools of suns. Most of the light was made in the birthing of the universe. It is old now and tired and hard to see. But it has patterns in it …’
This meant nothing to her. Bombarded by strangeness, she tried to remember the Doctrines. ‘I crimed. I did not death, and I wanted to be deathed. Even the wanting was a crime. Then you crimed. You could have deathed me. And here—’
‘Here, I crime.’ He grinned. ‘With every breath I crime. Every one of these bones is a crime, a record of ancient crimes. Like you, I was safed.’
‘Safed?’
‘Brought here.’
She asked the hardest question of all. ‘When?’
He smiled, and the wrinkles on his face gathered up. ‘Twenty years ago. Twice your life.’
She frowned, barely comprehending. She leaned against the window, cupping her hands and peering out.
He asked, ‘What are you looking for now?’
‘Shuttles to Earth.’
He said gently, ‘There are no Shuttles.’
‘The cadre leaders—’
‘The cadre leaders say what is said to them. Think. Have you ever known anybody leave on a Shuttle? There are no Shuttles.’
‘It is a lie?’
‘It is a lie. If you live past age ten, the cadre leaders will death you. They believe they will win a place on the Shuttles. But they in turn are deathed by other cadre leaders, who believe they will steal their places on the Shuttles. And so it goes. Lies eating each other.’
No Shuttles. She sighed, and her breath fogged the smooth surface of the window. ‘Then how will we leave?’
‘We un-can leave. We are too remote. Only the Commissaries come and go. Only the Commissaries. Not us.’
She felt something stir in her heart.
‘The Shuttles are un-real. Is Earth real? Is the war real?’
‘Perhaps Earth is a lie. But the war is real. Oh, yes. The bones talk of how distant suns flare up. The war is real, and all around us, but it is very far away, and very old. But it shapes us.’ He studied her. ‘Soon the cadre leaders will pluck that baby from your belly and put it in the Birthing Vat. It will life and death for one purpose, for the war.’
She said nothing.
The Old Man said dreamily, ‘Some of the Old Men before me have seen patterns in the un-black. They have tried to understand them, as the cadre leaders make us understand the Memory images of the war. Perhaps they are thoughts, those patterns. Frozen thoughts of the creatures who lived in the first blinding second of the universal birth.’ He shook his head and gazed at the bones. ‘I un-want death. I want more than the war. I want to learn this.’
She barely heard him. She asked, ‘Who gives you food?’
He gave her names, of people she knew, and people she un-knew.
The number of them shocked her.
Hama and Arles Thrun drifted in space, side by side, two silver statues. Before them, this hot-Jupiter world continued its endless frenetic waltz around its too-close sun. The sun was a rogue star that had evaporated out of its parent galaxy long ago, and come to drift here, a meaningless beacon in the intergalactic dark.
Hama was comfortable here, in space, in the vacuum, away from the claustrophobic enclosure of the Post. Alien creatures swam through his chest cavity, subtly feeding on the distant calls of Commissaries all over the Galaxy. To Hama it was like being in a vast room where soft voices murmured in every shadowed corner, grave and wise.
‘A paradox,’ Arles Thrun murmured now.
‘What is?’
‘You are. You know, your rebuilding has extended beyond the superficial. You have been re-engineered, the layers of evolutionary haphazardness designed out of you. The inner chemical conflicts bequeathed by humanity’s past do not trouble you. You do not hear voices in your head, you do not invent gods to drive out your internal torment. You are one of the most integrated human beings who ever lived.’
‘If I am still human,’ Hama said. ‘We have no art. We are not scientists. We do not dance.’
‘No,’ said Arles earnestly. ‘Our re-engineered hearts are too cold for that. Or to desire to make babies to fill up the empty spaces. Yet we are needed, we long-lived ones.
‘It is impossible to begin to grasp the scale and complexity of an interstellar war in a human lifetime. And yet the brevity of human life is the key to the war: we fight like vermin, for to the Xeelee we are vermin - that is the central uncomfortable truth of the Doctrines. We, who do not die, are a paradoxical necessity, maintaining the attention span of the species.
‘But we know our flaws, Hama. We know that those brutish creatures down there in the Post, busily fighting and fornicating and breeding and dying, they are the true heart of humanity. And so we must defer to them.’ He eyed Hama, waiting for him to respond.
Hama said with difficulty, ‘I am not - happy.’
‘You were promised integration, not happiness.’
‘I failed to find the girl. La-ba.’
Arles smiled in the vacuum. ‘I traced her. She escaped to the sensor installation.’
‘What installation?’
‘In the tethered asteroid. Another renegade lives up there. To what purpose, I can’t imagine.’
‘This place is flawed,’ Hama said bitterly.
‘Oh, yes. Very flawed. There is a network of drones who provision the renegade. And there are more subtle problems: the multiple births occurring in the Vat; the taking of trophies from kills; the dancing … These drones seek satisfaction beyond the Doctrines. There has been ideological drift. It is a shame. You would think that in a place as isolated as this a certain purity could be sustained. But the human heart, it seems, is full of spontaneous imperfection.’
‘They must be punished.’
Arles looked at him carefully. ‘We do not punish, Hama. We only correct.’
‘How? A programme of indoctrination, a rebuilding—’ Arles shook his head. ‘It has gone too far for that. Even arguments of utility cannot outweigh the gross Doctrinal drift here. There are many other Observation Posts. We will allow these flawed drones to die.’
There was a wash of agreement from the Commissaries all over the Galaxy, all of them loosely bound to their thinking, all of them concurring in Arles’s decision.
Hama found he was appalled. ‘They have done their duty here for five thousand years, and now you would destroy them so casually, for the sake of a little deviance?’
Arles gripped Hama’s arms and turned him so they faced each other. Hama glimpsed cold power in his eyes; Arles Thrun was already five centuries old. ‘Look around, Hama. Look at the Galaxy, the vast stage, deep in space and time, on which we fight. Our foe is unimaginably ancient, with unimaginable powers. And what are we but half-evolved apes from the plains of some dusty, lost planet? Perhaps we are not smart enough to fight this war. And yet we fight even so.
‘And to keep us united in our purpose, this vast host of us scattered over more galaxies than either of us could count, we have the Doctrines, our creed of mortality. Let me tell you something. The Doctrines are not perfect. They may not even enable us to win the war, no matter how long we fight. But they have brought us this far, and they are all we have.’
‘And so we must destroy these drones, not for the sake of the war—’
‘But for the sake of the Doctrines. Yes. Now, at last, you begin to understand.’
Arles released him, and they drifted apart.
La-ba stayed with the Old Man.
She woke. She lay in silence. It was strange not to wake under a sky crowded with people. She could feel her baby inside her, kicking as if it was eager to get to the Birthing Vat.
The floor shuddered.
The Old Man ran to her. He dragged her to her feet. ‘It begins,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘They are cutting the cable. You must go back.’ He took her to the hatch that led to the hollow cable.
A We-ku was there, inside the cable, his fat face split by a grin, his stick-out ears wide.
She raised her foot and kicked the We-ku in the forehead. He clattered to the floor, howling.
The Old Man pulled her back. ‘What did you do?’
‘He is a We-ku.’
‘Look.’ The Old Man pointed.
The We-ku was clambering to his feet and rubbing his head. He had been carrying a bag full of ration packs. Now the packs were littered over the floor, some of them split.
The Old Man said, ‘Never mind the food. Take her back.’ And he pushed at La-ba again, urging her into the cable. Reluctantly, following the We-ku, she began to climb down.
She felt a great sideways wash. The whole of this immense cable was vibrating back and forth, as if it had been plucked by a vast finger.
She looked up at the circle of light that framed the Old Man’s face. She was confused, frightened. ‘I will bring you food.’
He laughed bitterly. ‘Just remember me. Here.’ And he thrust his hand down into hers. Then he slammed shut the hatch.
When she opened her hand, she saw it contained the scrimshawed bones.
The cable whiplashed, and the lights failed, and they fell into darkness, screaming.
Hama stood in the holding cell, facing Ca-si. The walls were creaking. He heard screaming, running footsteps.
With its anchoring cable severed, the Post was beginning to sink away from its design altitude, deeper into the roiling murk of the hot Jupiter’s atmosphere. Long before it reached the glimmering, enigmatic, metallic-hydrogen core, it would implode.
Ca-si’s mouth worked, as if he was gulping for air. He said to Hama, ‘Take me to the Shuttles.’
‘There are no Shuttles.’
Ca-si yelled, ‘Why are you here? What do you want?’
Hama laid one silvered hand against the boy’s face. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Don’t you see that? It’s my job to love you.’ But his silvered flesh could not detect the boy’s warmth, and Ca-si flinched from his touch, the burned scent of vacuum exposure.
‘… I know what you want.’
Ca-si gasped. Hama turned.
La-ba stood in the doorway. She was dirty, bloodied. She was carrying a lump of shattered partition wall. Fragmentary animated images, of glorious scenes from humanity’s past, played over it fitfully.