Futurity still didn’t get it. ‘The ships belong to these Builders? And they let you hitch a ride?’
‘For a fee. They still need material from the ground - food, air, water - no recycling system is a hundred per cent efficient. And that’s what we use to buy passage.’
Poole grinned. ‘I pay you in credits. You pay them in bananas!’
The Captain ignored him. ‘We have ways of letting the Builders know where we want them to take us.’
‘How?’ Poole asked, interested.
Tahget shuddered. ‘The Shipbuilders are nearly mindless. I leave that to specialists.’
Futurity stared at Poole’s images of swarming apes, his dread growing. ‘Nearly mindless. But who maintains the Ask Politely? Who runs the engines? Captain, who’s steering this ship?’
‘The Hairy Folk,’ Poole said.
It was all a question of time, said Michael Poole.
‘In this strange future of yours, it’s more than twenty thousand years since humans first left Sol system. Twenty thousand years! Maybe you’re used to thinking about periods like that, but I’m a sort of involuntary time traveller, and it appals me - because that monstrous interval is a good fraction of the age of the human species itself.
‘And it’s more than enough time for natural selection to have shaped us, if we had given it the chance. The frozen imagination of the Coalition kept most of humanity in a bubble of stasis. But out in the dark, sliding between those islands of rock, it was a different matter: nobody could have controlled what was happening out there. And with time, we diverged.
‘After the first humans had left Earth, most of them plunged straight into another gravity well, like amphibious creatures hopping between ponds. But there were some, just a fraction, who found it preferable to stay out in the smoother spaces between the worlds. They lived in bubble-colonies dug out of ice moons or comets, or blown from asteroid rock. Others travelled on generation starships, unsurprisingly finding that their ship-home became much more congenial than any destination planned for them by well-meaning but long-dead ancestors. Some of them just stayed on their ships, making their living from trading.’
‘My own people did that,’ Futurity said. ‘So it’s believed. The first Engineers were stranded on a clutch of ships, out in space, when Earth was occupied. They couldn’t go home. They survived on trade for centuries, until Earth was freed.’
‘A fascinating snippet of family history,’ Tahget said contemptuously.
Poole said, ‘Just think about it, acolyte. These Hairy Folk have been suspended between worlds for millennia. And that has shaped them. They have lost much of what they don’t need - your built-for-a-gravity-well body, your excessively large brain.’
Futurity said, ‘Given the situation, I don’t see how becoming less intelligent would be an advantage.’
‘Think, boy! You’re running a starship, not a home workshop. You’re out there for ever. Everything is fixed, and the smallest mistake could kill you. You can only maintain, not innovate. Tinkering is one of your strongest taboos! You need absolute cultural stasis, even over evolutionary time. And to get that you have to tap into even more basic drivers. There’s only one force that could fix hominids’ behaviour in such a way and for so long - and that’s sex.’
‘Sex?’
‘Sex! Let me tell you a story. Once there was a kind of hominid - a pre-human - called Homo erectus. They lived on old Earth, of course. They had bodies like humans’, brains like apes’. I’ve always imagined they were beautiful creatures. And they had a simple technology. The cornerstone of it was a hand-axe: a teardrop-shape with a fine edge, hacked out of stone or flint. You could use it to shave your hair, butcher an animal, kill your rival; it was a good tool.
‘And the same design was used, with no significant modification, for a million years. Think about it, acolyte! What an astonishing stasis that is - why, the tool survived even across species boundaries, even when one type of erectus replaced another. But do you know what it was that imposed that stasis, over such an astounding span of time?’
‘Sex?’
‘Exactly! Erectus used the technology, not just as a tool, but as a way of impressing potential mates. Think about it: to find the raw materials you have to show a knowledge of the environment; to make a hand-axe you need to show hand-eye coordination and an ability for abstract thought; to use it you need motor skills. If you can make a hand-axe you’re showing you are a walking, talking expression of a healthy set of genes.
‘But there’s a downside. Once you have picked on the axe as your way of impressing the opposite sex, the design has to freeze. This isn’t a path to innovation! You can make your axes better than the next guy - or bigger, or smaller even - but never different, because you would run the risk of confusing the target of your charms. And that is why the hand-axes didn’t change for a megayear - and that’s why, I’ll wager, the technology of these spiky starships hasn’t changed either for millennia.’
Futurity started to see his point. ‘You’re saying that the Shipbuilders maintain their starships, as - as—’
‘As erectus once made his hand-axes. They do it, not for the utility of the thing itself, but as a display of sexual status. It’s no wonder I couldn’t figure out the function of that superstructure of spines and scoops and nozzles. It has no utility! It has no purpose but showing off for potential mates - but that sexual role has served its purpose and frozen its design.’
Futurity recalled hearing of another case like this - a generation starship called the Mayflower, lost beyond the Galaxy, where the selection pressures of a closed environment had overwhelmed the crew. Evidently it hadn’t been an isolated instance.
As usual Poole seemed delighted to have figured out something new. ‘The Ask Politely is a starship, but it is also a peacock’s tail. How strange it all is.’ He laughed. ‘And it would appal a lot of my old buddies that their dreams of interstellar domination would result in this.’
‘You’re very perceptive, Michael Poole,’ the Captain said with a faint sneer.
‘I always was,’ said Poole. ‘And a fat lot of good it’s done me.’
Futurity turned to the Captain. ‘Is this true?’
Tahget shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t have put it quite so coarsely as Poole. We crew just get on with our jobs. Every so often you have to let the Builders come to a gathering like this. They show off their ships, their latest enhancements. Sometimes they fight. And they throw those tubes between the ships, swarm across and screw their heads off for a few days. When they’ve worn themselves out, you can pass on your way.’
Futurity asked, ’But why use these creatures and their peculiar ships? Look at the detour we have had to make, even though we have a bomb on board! Why not just run ships under human control, as we always have?’
Tahget sighed. ‘Because we have no choice. When the Coalition collapsed, the Navy and the state trading fleets collapsed with it. Acolyte, unless you are extremely powerful or wealthy, in this corner of the Galaxy a ship like this is the only way to get around. We just have to work with the Builders.’
Futurity felt angry. ‘Then why not tell people? Isn’t it a lie to pretend that the ship is under your control?’
Tahget blinked. ‘And if you had known the truth? Would you have climbed aboard a ship if you had known it was under the control of low-browed animals like those?’
Futurity stared out as the Shipbuilders swarmed excitedly along their access tubes, seeking food or mates.
VI
With the encounter at 3-Kilo apparently complete, the Ask Politely sailed back towards the centre of the Galaxy. To Futurity it was a comfort when the ship slid once more into the crowded sky of the Core, and the starlight folded over him like a blanket, shutting out the darkness.
But ships of the Kardish Imperium closed around the Ask Politely. Everybody crowded to the windows to see.
They were called greenships, an archaic design like a three-pronged claw. Part of the huge military legacy of the Galaxy-centre war, they had once been painted as green as their names - green, the imagined colour of distant Earth - and they had sported the tetrahedral sigil that had once been recognised across the Galaxy as the common symbol of a free and strong mankind. But all that was the symbology of the hated Coalition, and so now these ships were a bloody red, and they bore on their hulls not tetrahedrons but the clenched-fist emblem of the latest Kard.
Ancient and recycled they might be, but still the greenships whirled and swooped around the Ask Politely, dancing against the light of the Galaxy. It was a display of menace, pointless and spectacular and beautiful. The Politely crew gaped, their mouths open.
‘The crew are envious,’ Futurity murmured to Poole.
‘Of course they are,’ Poole said. ‘Out there, in those greenships - that’s how a human is supposed to fly. This spiky, lumbering beast could never dance like that! And this “crew” has no more control over their destiny than fleas on a rat. But I suppose you wouldn’t sign up even for a ship like this unless you had something of the dream of flying. How they must envy those Kardish flyboys!’
Futurity understood that while the Politely had fled across the Galaxy there had been extensive three-way negotiations between the Ideocracy, the Imperium and the Ecclesia about the situation on Politely. All parties had tentatively agreed that this was a unique humanitarian crisis, and everyone should work together to resolve it, in the interests of common decency. But Earth was twenty-eight thousand light years away, and the blunt power of the Kard, here and now, was not to be denied.
So, with its barnstorming escort in place, the ship slid deeper into the crowded sky. The whole formation made bold faster-than-light jumps, roughly synchronised. Soon they penetrated the Central Star Mass.
Futurity found Poole in the observation lounge, staring out at the crowded sky. The nearest stars hung like globe lamps, their discs clearly visible, with a deep three-dimensional array of more stars hanging behind them - stars beyond stars beyond stars, all of them hot and young, until they merged into a mist of light that utterly shut out any disturbing darkness.
Against this background, Poole was a short, sullen form, and even the Mass’s encompassing brilliance didn’t seem to alleviate his heavy darkness. His expression was complex, as always.
‘I can never tell what you’re thinking, Michael Poole.’
Poole glanced at him. ‘That’s probably a good thing … Lethe, this is the centre of the Galaxy, and the stars are crowded together like grains of sand in a sack. It’s terrifying! The whole place is bathed in light - why, if not for this ship’s shielding we’d all be fried in an instant. But to you, acolyte, this is normal, isn’t it?’
Futurity shrugged. ‘It’s what I grew up with.’
He tried to summarise for Poole the geography of the centre of the Galaxy. The structure was concentric - ‘Like an onion,’ Poole commented - with layers of density and complexity centred on Chandra, the brooding supermassive black hole at the centre of everything. The Core itself was the Galaxy’s central bulge, a fat ellipsoid of stars and shining nebulae set at the centre of the disc of spiral arms. Embedded within the Core was the still denser knot of the Central Star Mass. As well as millions of stars crammed into a few light years, the Mass contained relics of immense astrophysical violence, expanding blisters left over from supernovas, and tremendous fronts of roiling gas and dust thrown off from greater detonations at the Galaxy’s heart. Stranger yet was the Baby Spiral, a fat comma shape embedded deep in the Mass, like a miniature galaxy with its own arms of young stars and hot gases.
And at the centre of it all was Chandra itself, the black hole, a single object with the mass of millions of stars. The Galaxy centre was a place of immense violence, where stars were born and torn apart in great bursts. But Chandra itself was massive and immovable, the pivot of vast astrophysical machineries, pinned fast to spacetime.
Poole was intrigued by Futurity’s rough-and-ready knowledge of the Core’s geography, even though the acolyte had never before travelled away from 478. ‘You know it the way I knew the shapes of Earth’s continents from school maps,’ he said. But he was dismayed by the brusque labels Futurity and the crew had for the features of the centre. The Core, the Mass, the Baby: they were soldiers’ names, irreverent and familiar. In the immense glare of the Core there was no trace of mankind’s three-thousand-year war to be seen, but those names, Poole said, marked out this place as a battlefield - just as much as the traces of complex organic molecules that had once been human beings, hordes of them slaughtered and vaporised, sometimes still detectable as pollutants in those shining clouds.
Something about the location’s complexity made Poole open up, tentatively, about his own experience: the Virtual’s, not the original.
‘When I was made fully conscious the first time, it felt like waking up. But I had none of the usual baggage in my head you carry through sleep: no clear memory of where I had been when I fell asleep, what I had done the day before - even how old I was. The priests quizzed me, and I slowly figured out where I was, and even what I was. I was shocked to find out when I was. Let me tell you,’ said Poole grimly, ‘that was tougher to take than being told I was worshipped as a god.’