Hama said, ‘You.’
She flicked a fingernail against the silver carapace of his arm. ‘You hate being like this. You want to be like us. That’s why you tried to death us.’
And she lifted the lump of partition rubble and slammed it into his chest. Briny water gushed down Hama’s belly, spilling tiny silver fish that struggled and died.
Hama fell back, bending over himself. His systems screamed messages of alarm and pain at him - and, worse, he could feel that he had lost his link with the vaster pool of Commissaries beyond. ‘What have you done? Oh, what have you done?’
‘Now you are like us,’ said La-ba simply.
The light flickered and darkened. Glancing out of the cell, Hama saw that the great Birthing Vat was drifting away from its position at the geometric centre of the Post. Soon it would impact the floor in a gruesome moist collision.
‘I should have gone with Arles,’ he moaned. ‘I don’t know why I delayed.’
La-ba stood over Hama and grabbed his arm. With a grunting effort, the two drones hauled him to his feet.
La-ba said, ‘Why do you death us?’
‘It is the war. Only the war.’
‘Why do we fight the war?’
In desperation Hama said rapidly, ‘We have fought the Xeelee for ten thousand years. We’ve forgotten why we started. We can see no end. We fight because we must. We don’t know what else to do. We can’t stop, any more than you can stop breathing. Do you see?’
‘Take us,’ said La-ba.
‘Take you? Take you where? Can you even imagine another place?’
Perhaps she couldn’t. But in La-ba’s set face there was ruthless determination, a will to survive that burned away the fog of his own weak thinking.
The Doctrines are right, he thought. Mortality brings strength. A brief life burns brightly. He felt ashamed of himself. He tried to stand straight, ignoring the clamouring pain from his smashed stomach.
The girl said, ‘It is un-Doctrine. But I have deathed your fish. Nobody will know.’
He forced a laugh. ‘Is that why you killed the Squeem? … You are naïve.’
She clutched his arm harder, as if trying to bend his metallic flesh. ‘Take us to Earth.’
‘Do you know what Earth is like?’
Ca-si said, ‘It is a place where you live on the outside, not the inside. It is a place where water falls from the sky, not rock.’
‘How will you live?’
La-ba said, ‘The We-ku helped the Old Man live. Others will help us live.’
Perhaps it was true, Hama thought. Perhaps if these two survived on some civilised world - a world where other citizens could see what was being done in the name of the war - they might form a focus for resistance. No, not resistance: doubt.
And doubt might destroy them all.
He must abandon these creatures to their deaths. That was his clear duty, his duty to the species.
There was a crack of shattering partition. The Post spun, making the three of them stagger, locked together.
Ca-si showed his fear. ‘We will be deathed.’
‘Take us to Earth,’ La-ba insisted.
Hama said weakly, ‘I would have to hide you from Arles. And you broke my link to the Commission. I may not be able to find my way. The link helps me - navigate. Do you see?’
‘Try,’ she whispered. She closed her eyes, and pressed her cheek against the cold of his silvered chest.
Hama’s flitter floated in vacuum.
The sun glared, impossibly bright. The planet was a floor of roiling gas, semi-infinite. Above, Hama could see the Post’s sensor installation. It was drifting off into space, dangling its tether like an impossibly long umbilical. It was startlingly bright in the raw sunlight, like a sculpture.
From beneath the planet’s boiling clouds, a soundless concussion of light flickered and faded. Five thousand years of history had ended, a subplot in mankind’s tangled evolution; the long watch was over. La-ba squirmed, distressed, her hands clasped over the bump at her belly.
Hama held the two lovers close.
The flitter turned and squirted into hyperspace, heading for Earth.
Much later, the primordial cosmic thoughts detected by the ‘drones’ of that Observation Post would be recognised, and valued - and the monads, minds from the dawn of time, would play a crucial role in the human capture of the Galaxy Core. All that later.
It is amusing to see mayflies forget and rediscover, forget and rediscover, over and over. Commissaries like Arles and Hama with their alien symbiotes imagined that their longevity treatments were new, their long lives a novel strategy.
To us even they were mayflies.
The Galaxy blazed with war. Still time stretched, the past forgotten, the foreknown future static. The war became perpetual, a grinder of humanity.
Yet humanity prevailed.
RIDING THE ROCK
AD 23,479
I
When Luca arrived in the Library conference room, the meeting between Commissary Dolo and Captain Teel was already underway. They sat in hard-backed armchairs, talking quietly, while trays of drinks hovered at their elbows.
Over their heads Virtual dioramas swept by like dreams, translucent, transient. These were the possible destinies of mankind, assembled from the debris of interstellar war by toiling bureaucrats here in Earth’s Library of Futures, and displayed for the amusement of the Library’s guests. But neither Dolo nor Teel were paying any attention to the spectacle.
Luca waited by the door. He was neither patient nor impatient. He was just a Novice, at twenty years old barely halfway through his formal novitiate into the Commission, and Novices expected to wait.
But he knew who this Captain Teel was. An officer in the Green Navy, she had come from her posting on the Front - the informal name for the great ring of human fortification that surrounded the Core of the Galaxy, where the Xeelee lurked, mankind’s implacable foe. The Navy and the Commission for Historical Truth were also, of course, ancient and unrelenting enemies. There was no way Teel, therefore, would adopt the ascetic dress code of the Commission, even here in its headquarters. But her uniform was a subdued charcoal grey shot through with green flashes, and her hair, if not shaved, was cut short; this fighting officer had shown respect, then, for the hive of bureaucrats she had come to visit.
At last Dolo noticed Luca.
Luca said, ‘You sent for me, Commissary.’
Captain Teel turned her head towards him. She looked tired, but Luca saw how the complex, shifting light of multiple futures softened her expression.
Dolo was watching Luca, the corner of his mouth pulled slightly, as if by a private joke. Dolo had no eyebrows, and his skull was shaved, as was Luca’s. ‘Yes, Novice, I called you. I think I’m going to need an assistant on this project, and Lethe knows you need some field experience.’
‘A project, Commissary?’
‘Sit down, shut up, listen and learn.’ Dolo waved a hand, and a third chair drifted in from a corner of the room.
Luca sat, and absently followed their continuing talk.
From scuttlebutt in the dormitories he already had an idea why Captain Teel had been called here to Earth. In a unit of troopers at some desolate corner of the Front, there had been an outbreak of anti-Doctrinal thinking which, it sounded to Luca’s ill-informed ears, might even be religious in character. If so, of course, it was perilous to the greater efficiency of the Third Expansion. An important issue, then. But not very interesting.
Surreptitiously, as they talked, he studied Teel.
He supposed he had expected some battle-scarred veteran of raids on Xeelee emplacements. But this Navy officer was young, surely about the same age as he was himself, at twenty years. Her face was long, the nose narrow and well-carved, her nostrils flaring slightly; her mouth was relaxed but full. Her skin was unblemished - though it was pale, almost bloodless; he reminded himself that of all the countless worlds now inhabited by mankind, on only a handful could a human walk in the open air without a skinsuit. But that paleness gave her skin a translucent quality. But it was not Teel’s features that drew him - she was scarcely conventionally beautiful - but something more subtle, a quality of stillness about her that seemed to pull him towards her like a gravitational field. She was solid, he thought, as if she was the only real person in this place of buzzing bureaucrats. Even before she spoke to him, he knew that Teel was like no one he had ever met before.
‘Novice.’ The Commissary’s gaze neatly skewered Luca.
To his mortification, Luca felt his face flush like a child’s in a new cadre. Captain Teel was looking a little past him, expressionless. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
Dolo brushed that aside. ‘Tell me what you are thinking. The surface of your mind.’
Luca looked at Teel. ‘That, with respect, the Captain is young.’
Dolo nodded, his voice forensic. ‘How could one so young - actually younger than you, Novice - have achieved so much?’
Luca said, ‘ “A brief life burns brightly.” ’
Teel’s lips parted, and Luca thought she sighed. The ancient slogan hung in the air, trite and embarrassing.
Dolo’s smile was cruel. ‘I have come to a decision. I will visit the site of this Doctrinal infringement. And you, Novice, will come with me.’
‘Commissary - you want me to go to the Core?’ It was all but unheard of for a novice to travel so far.
‘I have no doubt it will help you fulfil your fitful promise, Luca. Make the arrangements.’
Suddenly he was dismissed. Luca stood, bowed to the Commissary and Captain, and turned to leave.
Emotions swirled in Luca: embarrassment, surprise, fear - and a strange, unexpected grain of hope. Of course this was all just some game to the Commissary; Dolo had spotted Luca’s reaction to Teel and had impulsively decided to toy with him. Dolo was hugely arrogant. You could hardly expect to become one of the most powerful members of a bureaucracy that ruled the disc of a Galaxy without learning a little arrogance along the way. But for Luca it was a good opportunity, perhaps an invaluable building block for his future career.
And none of that mattered, he knew in his heart, for whatever the wider context Luca was now going to be in the company of this intriguing young Navy officer for weeks, even months to come, and who could say where that would lead?
At the door he glanced back. Teel and Dolo continued to talk of this uninteresting Doctrinal problem at the Galaxy’s Core; still she didn’t look at him.
They were to climb to orbit in a small flitter, and there join the Navy yacht that had brought Teel to Earth.
Luca had only been off Earth a couple of times during his general education, and then on mere hops out of the atmosphere. As the flitter lifted off the ground its hull was made transparent, so that it was as if the three of them were rising inside a drifting bubble. As the land fell away Luca tried to ignore the hot blood that prickled at his neck, and the deeply embarrassingly primeval clenching of his sphincter.
He tried to draw strength from Teel’s stillness. Her eyes were blue, Luca noticed now. He hadn’t been able to make that out before, in the shifting light of the Library.
As they rose the Conurbation was revealed. It was a glistening sprawl of bubble-dwellings blown from the bedrock. The landscape beyond was flat, a plain of glistening silver-grey devoid of hills, and there were no rivers, only the rectilinear gashes of canals. The only living things to be seen, aside from humans, were birds. It was like this over much of the planet. The alien Qax had begun the transformation of the land during their Occupation of Earth, their starbreaker beams and nanoreplicators turning the ground into a featureless silicate dust.
They spoke of this. Teel murmured, ‘But the Qax were here only a few centuries.’
Dolo nodded. The silvery light reflected from the planes of his face; he was about fifty years old. ‘Much of this is human work, Coalition work. The Qax tried to destroy our past, to cut us adrift from history. Their motivation was wrong - but their methods were valid. Remember, we have been in direct conflict with the Xeelee for eleven thousand years. We have done well. We have swept them out of the plane of the Galactic disc. But they remain huddled in their fortress in the Core, and beyond our little island of stars they swarm in uncounted numbers. We must put the past aside, for it is a distraction. If the Xeelee defeat us, we will have no future - and in that case, what will the past matter?’
‘Your ideology is powerful.’
Dolo nodded. ‘A single idea powerful enough to keep mankind united across a hundred thousand light years, and through tens of millennia.’
Teel said, ‘But the mountains and rivers of Earth were far older than mankind. How strange that we have outlived them.’
Luca was startled by this anti-Doctrinal sentiment. Dolo merely looked interested, and said nothing.