‘Into Lethe with your bishops and their “copyright”! I didn’t ask them to bring me back from the dead. I only want to see a little of the universe before I get switched off again. Besides, right now I’m the only sentient creature poor Mara trusts. I think you need me aboard, don’t you, Captain?’
Futurity opened his mouth, and closed it. ‘As the Captain said, if you ask for that I imagine it will be granted, though the Hierocrat’s teeth will curl with anxiety.’
Tahget growled, ‘Your Hierocrat will have more to think about than that.’ He grabbed Futurity’s wrist in one massive hand. ‘If Michael Poole is joining this cruise of ours, so are you, acolyte. When this Virtual fool starts to cause trouble, I want somebody I can take it out on.’
Futurity felt panicked; for a boy who had never been further than low orbit before, this was becoming a daunting adventure, out of control.
Poole laughed and rubbed his hands together. ‘Great! Just leave a piece of him for the Hierocrat to gnaw on.’
Tahget released Futurity. ‘But I have a condition of my own.’ He waved his hand over the table, and its surface turned into a schematic of the Galaxy. ‘Here is our original route, planned but now abandoned.’ It was a simple dotted line arcing from Base 478 in the Core out to the sparse Galactic rim, where Earth lay waiting. There were a few stops on the way, mostly at nominal political borders. One stop was at a flag marked ‘3-Kilo’, outside the Core, and Tahget tapped it with his fingernail. ‘This is the Galaxy’s innermost spiral arm, the 3-Kiloparsec Arm. Whatever our final destination, we go here first.’
Futurity didn’t understand. ‘But that’s the wrong way. 3-Kilo is outside the Core.’ Leaving the Base was bad enough. His dread deepened at the thought of being taken out of the brightly lit Core and into the sparse unknown beyond. ‘If we’re aiming for the centre of the Galaxy, we’ll have to double back. And the bomb - the additional time this will take—’
‘I know the urgency of the situation,’ Tahget snapped.
Poole said, ‘So why do you want to go to 3-Kilo?’
‘I don’t,’ Tahget said. ‘The Ask Politely does. On a ship like this, you go where it wants to go.’ Tahget blanked the table display and stood. ‘There is much you will never understand about this modern age, Michael Poole. Even about this ship. This meeting is over.’ He walked out.
Futurity and Poole stared at each other. Poole said, ‘So it isn’t just a cutesy name. On this ship, you really do have to ask politely.’
Futurity peered into the fish-tank display of Mara’s cabin, where the woman hadn’t moved since she lay down in Poole’s presence.
IV
The Ask Politely spent another day in orbit around 478. Then the ship slid silently away into deep space.
Futurity stood alone in the observation lounge, watching his home planet fold over itself until it became a dull grey pebble, lost against the glare of the Galaxy Core. He really was heading out into the cold and the dark. He shivered and turned away from the blister-window. It would be three days’ travel to 3-Kilo, said Tahget, with much delay at border posts as they cut across the territories of various squabbling statelets.
Futurity spent most of the first day alone. The bare corridors echoed; a ship meant to carry a hundred passengers seemed empty with just the three of them, counting Poole.
He quickly found his range of movement was limited. He had access to corridors and rooms only over two decks, confined to a lozenge-shaped volume near one end of the ship’s rough cylinder. The corridors were bleak, panelled with bare blue-grey polymer, with not a bit of artwork or personalisation in sight. Even within the lozenge many rooms were closed to him, such as the bridge, or just plain uninteresting, such as the refectory, the nano-food banks and the air cycling gear.
The lozenge of access spanned no more than fifty metres, on a craft a kilometre long. In fact this whole pod of habitation was like an afterthought, he started to see, an add-on bolted onto Ask Politely, as if these corridors and the people in them were not the point of the ship at all.
And nobody would speak to him. Tahget and his crew were busy, and as a mere earthworm, as they called him, they just ignored Futurity anyhow. The woman Mara slept throughout the day. Michael Poole stayed in the Captain’s office. He appeared to sit still for hours on end, immersed in his own deep Virtual reflections. Futurity didn’t dare disturb him.
Futurity thought of himself as disciplined. He wasn’t without inner resource. He had been assigned a cabin, and he had brought a data desk and other materials. So he sat down, faced his data desk, and tried to pursue his seminary studies - as it happened, into the divine nature of Michael Poole.
The Wignerian faith was based on the comforting notion that all history was partial, a mere rough draft. It was all based on quantum physics, of course, the old notion that reality is a thing of probabilities and might-bes, that collapses into the real only when a conscious mind makes an observation. But that conscious mind, with all its observations, in turn wasn’t realised until a second mind observed it - but that second in turn needed a third observer to become real, who needed a fourth …
This paradoxical muddle would be resolved at the end of time, said the Wignerians, when the Ultimate Observer, the final Mind, would make the last Observation of all, terminating chains of possibilities that reached back to the birth of the universe. In that mighty instant the sad history of the present, with its pain and war, suffering and brief lives and death, would be wiped away, and everybody who ever lived would find themselves embedded in a shining, optimal history.
This was the kernel of a faith that had offered profound hope during the last days of the Coalition, when the whole Galaxy had been infested with human soldiers, many of them not much more than children. The faith had always been illegal, but it was blind-eye tolerated by authorities and commanders who saw the comfort it brought to their warriors.
And when the Coalition fell, the faith was liberated.
The Ecclesia of Base 478 had its origins in the Guild of Engineers, an ancient agency that had itself participated in the founding of the Coalition. The Guild had survived many political discontinuities in the past. Now it survived the fall of the Coalition and proved its adaptability again. The Guild took over an abandoned Coalition training base, 478, and set up an independent government. Like many others, it fully accepted the newly liberated Wignerian faith, seeing in the religion a short cut to power and legitimacy. Soon its Master of Guild-Masters proclaimed herself Supreme Ecclesiarch, announcing that she alone owned the truth about the faith - again, like many others.
The Guild-Masters, following their old intellectual inclinations, developed an interest in the theological underpinnings of their new faith. Their Colleges on Base 478 quickly developed a reputation even among rival orthodoxies as hosting the best Wignerian thinkers in the Galaxy.
But in those heady early days of theological freedom, there had been constant schisms and splits, heresy and counter-heresy, as the scholars debated one of the religion’s most fascinating and difficult elements: the strange career of Michael Poole. This entrepreneur, engineer and adventurer of humanity’s remote history had, it was said, projected himself into the far future through a collapsing chain of wormholes. He had done this in order to save mankind. Poole, a redeemer who had confronted Timelike Infinity, came to embody and humanise the chilly quantum abstractions of the faith. He was a Son of that aloof Mother that was the Ultimate Observer.
There seemed no doubt that Poole really had existed as an historical figure. The question was: what was his relationship to the Ultimate Observer? Was Poole just another supplicant, if an extraordinary one, his life just one more thread in the tapestry contemplated by the Wignerian godhead? Or, some argued further, perhaps Poole and the Observer ought to be identified: perhaps Michael Poole was the Observer. The trouble with that argument was that Poole was undoubtedly human, whatever else he was, though his achievements had been anything but ordinary. So could a god be made incarnate?
It was an issue that had always fascinated Futurity. Indeed, it had so intrigued some of his predecessors that they had commissioned the Virtual Poole from the Idealists so they could ask him about it: it was a rough-and-ready engineer’s approach to a deep theological question.
But oddly, with the real thing - or at least a disturbing simulacrum - just down the corridor of this ship, Futurity’s dry scholarship seemed pointless. He found it hard to believe Poole himself would have any time for this dusty stuff.
After a couple of hours Futurity gave up. He left his cabin and went exploring again.
As he roamed the corridors he watched the crew at work. They all seemed to be command staff, aside from a few orderlies who performed such chores as serving the Captain his meals and shifting furniture around to set up passengers’ cabins. It was puzzling. Futurity had no experience of life aboard starships, but he could not see how the crew’s complicated discussions and endless meetings related to the ship’s actual operations. And he never spotted an engineer, a person who might be in charge of the systems that actually made the ship go.
He was probably reading the situation all wrong. But Michael Poole, who had once built starships himself, also concluded that there was something very odd about this ship.
On the second day he talked it over with Futurity. Tahget had given Poole some limited access over where he could ‘pop up’, as he put it, and he had been able to roam a bit wider than Futurity had. But not much further. His own internal-consistency protocols, designed to give him some anchoring in humanity, made it impossible for him to roam into areas that would have been hazardous for humans. And when the Captain had spotted that Poole was hacking into access-denied areas, such privileges had quickly been locked out.
‘I saw a few sights before they shut me down, though,’ Poole said, and he winked. ‘We’re not alone on this ship. It’s a big place, and we’re confined to this little box. But in the longer corridors on the fringe of our cage, I saw things: shadows, furtive movements. Like ghosts. And if you look too closely what you see disappears into the shade.’
Futurity frowned. ‘You’re not saying the ship is haunted?’
‘No. But I think there is, um, a second crew, a crew beneath the crew, who are actually flying the damn ship. And it’s presumably to serve their needs that we’re all jaunting out to 3-Kilo, because for sure it isn’t for us. What I haven’t yet figured out is who those people are, why they’re hiding from us, and what their relationship is to Tahget and his bunch of pirates. But I’ll get there,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’ll tell you something even odder. I’m not convinced that the squat little folk I glimpsed were even wearing clothes!’
Futurity never ceased to marvel at Poole. He was a tourist in this twenty-eighth millennium, a revenant from the deepest past. And yet he was finding his way around what must be a very strange future with far more confidence than Futurity felt he could muster in a hundred lifetimes.
By the morning of the third day the Ask Politely had swum out of the Core, and Futurity was growing disturbed by the sky.
They were still only a few thousand light years from the centre of the Galaxy, and behind the ship the Core was a mass of light, too bright to be viewed by a naked human eye. But Futurity could already tell he was in the plane of a galactic disc: there were stars all around, but they were more crowded in some directions than others. If he looked straight ahead the more distant stars merged into a band of light that streaked across the sky, a stellar horizon, but if he looked up or down, the stars scattered to thinness, and he could see through the veil of light to a sky that was noticeably empty - and black.
Futurity had never seen a black sky before. He felt as if his own mind was crumbling, as if the bright surface of reality was breaking down, to reveal an abyssal darkness beneath. He longed to be back on 478, where the whole sky was always drenched with light.
But Poole was animated. ‘What a tremendous sky! You know, from Sol system you can make out only a few thousand stars, and the Galaxy is just a ragged band of mushy light. The Core ought to be visible from Earth - it should be as bright as the Moon - but the spiral-arm dust clouds get in the way, and it’s invisible. Futurity, it was only a few decades before the first human spaceflight that people figured out they lived in a Galaxy at all! It was as if we lived in a shack buried in the woods, while all around us the bright lights of the city were hidden by the trees.’
Poole had a kindly streak, and was empathetic. He sensed Futurity’s discomfort, and to distract him he brought the acolyte to the Captain’s office, and encouraged him to talk about himself. Futurity was flattered by his interest - this was Michael Poole! - and he responded with a torrent of words.
Futurity had always been cursed with a lively, inquisitive mind. As a young boy on the family farm, surrounded by the lowering ruins of war, he had laboured to tease healthy plants from soil illuminated by pale Galaxy-centre light. It had been fulfilling in its way, and Futurity saw with retrospect that to spend his time on the processes of life itself had satisfied some of his own inner spiritual yearnings. But the unchanging rhythms of the farm weren’t sufficient to sustain his intellect.