‘ “Etta Maris”,’ he read. ‘A name.’
‘Now look at the first letter. Your suit visor has a magnification option; just tell it what you want to do.’
It took a couple of tries before he got it right. A Virtual flickered into existence before his face, the magnified letter. Even on this scale the carving was all but flawless - a labour of devotion, he saw, moved. But now he looked more closely, and he saw there were more names, inscribed within the carved-out grooves of the letter.
He stepped back, shocked. ‘Why, there must be as many names here, in this single letter, as are inscribed on the whole of the arch.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Teel said coolly. ‘Pick a name and look again.’
Again he magnified a single letter from one inscribed name - and again he found more names, thousands of them, crowded in far beneath the level of human visibility.
‘The names in the top layer were carved by hand,’ Teel said. ‘Then they used waldoes, and lasers, and ultimately replicator nanotech …’
He increased the magnification again and again, finding more layers of names nested one within the other. There were more layers than he could count, more names than could ever read if he stood here for the rest of his life. Just on this one Rock. And perhaps there were similar memorials on all the other bits of battered debris at every human emplacement, all the way around the core of the Galaxy, a great band of death stretching three thousand light years across space and two thousand years deep in time. He stepped back, shocked.
Teel studied his face. ‘Are you all right?’
His eyes were wet, he found. He tried to blink away the moisture, but to his chagrin he felt a hot tear roll down his cheek. It was a dark epiphany, this shock of the names.
‘I shouldn’t have to teach you the Doctrines,’ Teel said, comparatively gently. ‘We each have one life. We each die. The question is how you spend that life.’ She reached up with a gloved finger to touch his moist cheek - but her finger touched his visor, of course, and she dropped her hand and looked away, almost shyly.
He was astonished. In this brief moment of his own weakness, when he had been overwhelmed by something so much greater than he was, he had at last acquired some stature in her eyes; he had at last made the kind of contact with her that he had dreamed about since they had met.
After several hours on the surface they were escorted to what Teel called a bio facility, a pressurised dome where the soldiers could tend their bodies and their skinsuits, eat, drink, void their wastes, sleep, fornicate, play.
Around the perimeter of a central atrium there were small private cubicles, including dormitories, toilets and showers. Dolo and Luca were going to have to share one small, grimy compartment, at which Dolo scowled. Luca found a toilet and used it with relief. He had been unable to use the facilities in his skinsuit, in which you were just supposed to let go and allow the suit to soak it all up; it hadn’t helped that the suits were semi-transparent.
He wandered uncertainly through the large central area. Under its fabric roof the facility was too hot. There was a stink of overheated food from the replicator banks, and the floor was grimy with sweat and ground-in asteroid dirt. The troopers, dressed in dirty coveralls, walked and laughed, argued and wrestled. While Luca had kept his inertial-control boots on, the soldiers mostly went barefoot; they jumped, crawled, even somersaulted, at ease in the low gravity environment. Many of them were sitting in solemn circles singing songs, sometimes accompanied by flutes and drums that had been improvised from bits of kit. They played sentimental melodies, but Luca could not make out the words; the troopers’ vocabulary was strange and specialised, littered with acronyms.
There was graffiti on the walls. One crude sketch showed the unmistakable flared shape of a Xeelee nightfighter conflated with the ancient symbol of a fanged demon, and there were references by one sliver of a sub-unit to the incompetence and sexual inadequacy of the troopers in another, startlingly obscene. A couple of slogans caught his eye: ‘Love unto the utmost generation is higher than love of one’s neighbour. What should be loved of man is that he is in transition.’ And: ‘I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.’ Another hand had added: ‘I am become Boredom, the Destroyer of Motivation.’
He joined Dolo on a small stage that had been set up before rows of seats. The daily briefing was soon to begin here. Luca reported on the graffiti he had seen. ‘I don’t recognise the sources.’
‘Probably pre-Occupation. Oh, don’t look so shocked. There is plenty of the stuff out there; we can’t control everything. In fact I think I recognise the first. Frederick Nietzsche.’ His pronunciation was strangulated.
‘It sounded a good summary of the Druz Doctrines to me.’
‘Perhaps. But I wonder how much harm those words have done, down across the millennia. Tell me what you think of our proto-religion here.’
‘The elements are familiar enough,’ Luca said. ‘The old legend of Michael Poole has been conflated with the beliefs of the Friends of Wigner.’ During the Qax Occupation the rebel group called the Friends had concocted a belief, based on ancient quantum-philosophical principles, that no event was made real until it was observed by a conscious intelligence - and hence that the universe itself would not be made real until all of its history was observed by an Ultimate Observer at Timelike Infinity, the very end of time. If such a being existed, then perhaps it could be appealed to - which was what the Friends had intended to achieve during their ultimately futile rebellion against the Qax. ‘It’s just that in this instance Poole himself has become that Observer.’
Dolo nodded. ‘Oddly, Michael Poole was lost in time - in a sense - his last act, so it is said, was to fly his ship deliberately into an unending network of branching wormholes, in order to save mankind from an invasion from the future. Perhaps he is still out there somewhere, wherever there is. You can certainly see the resonance of his story for these rock jockeys. Poole sacrificed his life for the sake of his people - and yet, transcendent, he lives on. What a role model!’ He actually winked at Luca. ‘I sometimes think that even if we could achieve a state of total purity, of totally blank minds cocooned from the history of mankind, even then such beliefs would start sprouting spontaneously. But you have to admit that it’s a good story.’ He sounded surprisingly mellow.
Luca was shocked. ‘But - sir - surely we must act to stop this drift from Doctrinal adherence. This new faith is insidious. You aren’t supposed to pray for personal salvation; it is the species that counts. If this kind of thing is happening all over the Front, perhaps we should consider more drastic steps.’
Dolo’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re talking about excision.’
In the seminaries there had been chatter for millennia about the origin of the religious impulses which endlessly plagued the swarming masses under the Commission’s care. Some argued that these impulses came from specific features of the human brain. Thus perhaps the characteristic sense of oneness with a greater entity came from a temporary disconnection within the parietal lobe, detaching the usual sense of one’s self - controlled by the left side of this region - from the sense of space and time, controlled by the right. And perhaps a sense of awe and significance came from a malfunction of the limbic system, a deep and ancient system keyed to the emotions. And so on. If a mystical experience was simply a symptom of a malfunctioning brain - like, say, an epileptic fit - then that malfunction could be fixed, the symptoms abolished. And with a little judicious tinkering with the genome, such flaws could be banished from all subsequent generations.
‘A future without gods,’ said Luca. ‘How marvellous that would be.’
Dolo nodded. ‘But if you had had such an excision - and you had stood under the arch of names - could you have appreciated its significance? Could you have understood, have felt it as you did? Oh, yes, I watched you. Perhaps those aspects of our brains, our minds, have evolved for a purpose. Why would they exist otherwise?’
Luca had no answer. Again he was shocked.
‘Anyhow,’ said Dolo, reverting to orthodoxy, ‘tampering with human evolution - or even passively allow it to happen - is itself against the Druz Doctrines. We win this war as humans or not at all - and we bend that rule at our peril. We have stayed united, across tens of thousands of light years and unthinkably huge populations, because we are all the same. Although that’s not to say that evolution isn’t itself taking mankind away from the norm that Hama Druz himself might have recognised.’
‘Commissary?’
‘Well, look around you. Most of these soldiers are the children of soldiers - obviously, how could it be otherwise? And the relentless selection of war is working to shape a new kind of human, better equipped for the fight. Combat survivors are the ones who get to breed, after all. Already their descendants are wiry, lithe, confident in the three-dimensional arena of low or zero gravity. Some studies even suggest that their eyes are adapting to the pressure of three-dimensional combat - that some of them can see velocity, for example, by perceiving subtle Doppler shifts in the colours of approaching or receding objects. Think what an advantage that would be in the battlefield! Another few thousand years of this and perhaps we will not recognise the soldiers who fight for the rest of us.’
‘I think I’m losing my bearings,’ said Luca truthfully.
Dolo patted his shoulder. ‘No. You’re just learning, is all.’
‘And what have you learned about my troopers?’ Teel had joined them on the small stage, and the troopers began to line up in rows before them.
Luca had learned to be honest with her. ‘I find them - strange.’
‘Strange?’
‘They have all ridden the Rock, yes?’
‘Most of them.’
‘Then they have seen comrades fall. They know they will be sent out again to a place where they must face the same horror. And yet, here and now, they laugh.’
Teel thought about that and answered carefully. ‘Away from the Front you don’t talk about what happens out there. It’s like - a secret. You’ve seen something beyond normal human experience. If you show your fear, or even admit it to yourself, then you’re allowing a leak between this, normal human life, and what lies out there. You’re letting it in. And if that happens there will be nowhere safe. Do you understand?’
He watched her face; there was sweat on her brow, traces of asteroid grime. ‘Is that how you feel?’
‘I try not to feel anything,’ she said.
Luca looked around the dome. ‘And this place is so shabby.’ He felt a kind of self-righteous anger, and he encouraged it in himself, hoping to impress Teel. ‘If these people are willing to die for the Expansion, they should have some comfort.’
Dolo shook his head. ‘Again you don’t understand, Novice. Think about the life of a soldier. It is a limited existence: moments of birth and growth, comradeship, determination, isolation - and finally, after the briefness of the light, an almost inevitable conclusion in pain and death. They have to know they are fighting for something better. And so they have to see that the present is imperfect. The soldiers must live in an eternal now of shabbiness and toil, so that they can be made to believe that we will progress from such places until a glorious victory is won, and everything will be made perfect - even if no such progress is ever actually made.’
‘Then everything here is designed for a purpose,’ Luca said, wondering. ‘Even the shabbiness.’
‘This is a machine built for war, Novice.’
A junior officer called the troops to order. On their crude seats, just blocks of asteroid rock, they fell silent.
Teel stood up. She said clearly, ‘Eighteen thousand, three hundred and ninety-one years ago an alien force conquered humanity’s home planet. We are here to ensure that never happens again.’ She held up a data desk and read a single short obituary, a summary of one ordinary soldier’s life and death. Here was another memorial, Luca supposed, for those who had fallen - and again, not strictly Doctrinal. Then Teel went on to a kind of situation report, summarising incidents from right around the Molecular Ring that circled the Galaxy’s centre.
The troops listened carefully. Luca watched their faces. Their gazes were fixed on Teel as she spoke, their mouths open like rapt children’s, some of them even quietly echoing the words she used. When she finished - ‘Let’s hurl the Xeelee starbreakers down their own Lethe-spawned throats!’ - there was cheering, and even some tears.
Teel invited Dolo to get to his feet. As an emissary of the Coalition, he was to make a short address to these far-from-home troopers. He was greeted with whistles and foot-stamping. Luca thought he looked small and out of place in his pristine Commissary’s robe.
Dolo talked in general terms about the war. He said that the ‘Ring theatre’ was a testing ground for future operations, including the eventual assault on the Xeelee concentrations in the Core itself - which, he hinted, might be closer than anybody expected. ‘This a momentous time,’ he said, ‘and you have a momentous mission. You have been commissioned by history. This is total war. Our enemy is implacable and powerful. But if we let our vision of the universe and ourselves go forth, and we embrace it entirely, those who remember us will sing songs about us years from now …’