The Kiint had set up seven fat thirty-storey towers on the edge of the city. They’d been extruded in one go from a provider,
coming fully fitted with all the medical equipment necessary to treat dangerously ill humans.
Ruth Hilton had been picked up on the third day after the Return, as people were calling it. When the flyer landed in front
of her, its controlling AI asking her to come inside, she seriously contemplated not bothering. The memories of possession
acted like damping rods on her psyche. She certainly hadn’t eaten anything since the Return.
In the end it was her hope for Jay which made her climb in. For the last few weeks, her possessor had been soaking up aspects
of her personality. She’d travelled between villages, asking for news of Jay and any of the other Aberdale children who might
have survived that fateful night. Nobody had heard much from that district after the bomb went off somewhere on the savannah.
For two days she’d lain in the hospital while the Kiint examined her and made her eat. The big xenocs had smeared a bluish
jelly on the areas of her skin around her cancers, which sank into her flesh as if she’d suddenly become porous. They told
her it would flush her tumour cells away, a less invasive technique than human medical packages. For one and a half days she
peed a very strange fluid.
By the end of the second day she was fit enough to walk around the ward. Like a lot of her fellow patients, she sat in front
of the big picture window overlooking Durringham, saying very little. Civil engineering crews were arriving hourly, fat bright-yellow
jeeps crawling down the muddy streets. Programmable silicon buildings were mushrooming in the ruined semicircle of mud. Power
cables had been strung up; once again electric lights began to shine in several districts during the night.
As far as she was concerned it was wasted effort. There were too many memories, too many dead children out in the jungle.
This could never be her home again, not any more. She kept asking the Kiint and the hospital AI if anyone had found Jay. Always
the same answer.
Then on the sixth day, Horst and Jay walked into the ward, happy and healthy. She clutched Jay to her, not letting her daughter
say anything for a long time while she reaffirmed her will to live by the contact.
Horst pulled a couple of chairs over, and the three of them stared down at the city with its industrious invaders.
“This is going to be a very busy place for the next century,” Horst said, his voice a mixture of surprise and admiration.
“Do you remember our first night? The old transient dormitory’s gone now, but I think that’s the harbour where it was.” He
pointed vaguely. The circular basins of polyp had survived.
“Will they rebuild them?” Jay asked. She thought all the activity was tremendously exciting.
“I doubt it,” Horst said. “The people who’ll be emigrating here from now on will be wanting five-star hotels.”
Ruth raised her gaze to look across the sky. The morning rainclouds had just departed eastwards, heading inland to soak the
villages upriver. They’d left a patch of pristine sky above the town and its boundary of gently steaming jungle. Five brilliant
stars shone through the glaring azure atmosphere, the closest one showing a definite crescent. She thought one of them might
be Earth itself.
There were forty-seven terracompatible planets sharing its orbit now. All of them stage-one colony worlds, ready to absorb
the population from the arcologies.
“Are we going back to Aberdale?” Jay asked.
“No, darling.” Ruth stroked her daughter’s sun-bleached hair. “I’m afraid we lost this world. People from Earth will come
here and make it very different to what it was. They don’t have the kind of past to overcome here which we do. It belongs
to them now. We need to move on again.”
______
The bus rolled smoothly across the docking ledge, and linked its airlock with the reception lounge. Athene was waiting for
the pair of them, standing proud in a silky blue ceremonial ship-tunic, the star of captaincy absent from her collar.
I came back,
Sinon said.
I told you I would.
I never doubted you. But I would have understood if you’d gone on with the crystal entity. It was a fabulous opportunity.
Others took that opportunity. It doesn’t cease to exist because I refuse it.
Stubborn to the very end.
One day humans, or what we become, may make a similar journey by themselves. I would like to think I played my part in the
culture which will set us upon such a road.
You are different to the Sinon who left.
I have a soul of my own now. I will not return to the multiplicity; I mean to live out my life in this form.
I’m glad you have found yourself again. I need someone around the house who can keep my appalling grandchildren in line.
He laughed, a harsh brazen clacking.
Every day, all I wished for was to return. I was afraid you didn’t want me to.
I would never think that thought. Not of you, no matter what you’d done.
I have brought someone with me who suffers far more than either of us.
So I see.
She moved forward and gave a slight bow. “Welcome to Romulus, General Hiltch.”
It was the moment Ralph had dreaded most of all, passing over the threshold. If there was no forgiveness here he would never
find any within this universe. He couldn’t even bring himself to smile at the stately old woman whose face contained so much
genuine concern. “I have no army to command any more, Athene. I resigned my commission.”
“Tell me why you have come, Ralph.”
“I came out of guilt. I ordered so many Edenists to their death. The Liberation ruined what it was supposed to save. It existed
for vanity and pride, not honour. And it was all my idea. I need to say I’m sorry.”
“We’d like to hear you, Ralph. Take as long as you want.”
“Will you accept me as one of you?”
She gave him a compassionate smile. “You wish to become an Edenist?”
“Yes, though it’s a selfish wish. I was told an Edenist can relieve his burden by sharing it with every other Edenist. My
guilt has turned to pure grief.”
“That’s not selfish, Ralph. You’re offering to share yourself, to contribute.”
“Will it end? Will I be able to live with what I’ve done?”
“I’ve brought up a great many Edenist children in my house, Ralph.” She put her arm in his, and started walking him towards
the exit. “And I’ve never had a serpent yet.”
______
It took several weeks for all the mundane functions of government to return to normal after the Confederation was transferred
out of the galaxy. People realized that their circumstances would change, in many ways quite profoundly. Religions strove
to incorporate or explain away the singularity’s gospel of the universe. Joshua didn’t mind that: as he told Louise, conviction
in one’s God nearly always equated to a conviction in self. Time might well see an end to the undue influence religion had
on the way people approached life. Then again, knowing the perversity of humans, maybe not.
Starflight was also altering. Travel between stars never more than half a light-year apart was incredibly quick, and cheap.
Every reporter who interviewed Joshua asked why he hadn’t taken the Confederation stars back again. Quite infuriatingly, he
just smiled and said he liked the view from out here.
Governments weren’t so fond of it. There could never be any outward expansion again, unless new propulsion methods were developed.
Funds for wormhole research were quietly increased.
There would be no more antimatter to terrorise planetary populations. The stars where the production stations orbited were
all left behind in the galaxy (though Joshua had teleported their crews out). Politicians turned their eyes to the defence
budget, seeing how funds could be shifted towards more voter-friendly spending sprees.
The Kiint provider technology was regarded with fascination by the general public as it worked its miracles on the Returned
worlds. Everybody wanted one of those for Christmas.
Earth’s population was almost schizophrenic over the new stage-one planets available. On the one hand, their own climate had
been reset to normal, making the arcology domes redundant. But Earth’s surface would take a generation to restore. And if
it was restored with forests, meadows, jungles, and prairies, there would be a diaspora from the arcologies which would ruin
everything. However, if the population was spread around the new planets (less than a billion each), all of them would have
a natural environment, allowing them to keep their present level of consumerist industrialisation and not totally screw up
the atmospheres with waste heat. Assuming that many people could be moved economically—say if you used those nifty little
Kiint craft, or something came out of all that new superdrive research.
Small, subtle changes were manifesting in all aspects of Confederation life. They would merge and build on each other. And
eventually, Joshua hoped, transformation would become irresistible.
But in the meantime, the methods of governance remained the same. Income had to be earned. Taxes still had to be paid. And
laws had to be enforced. Backlogs of court cases worked through.
Traslov was one world where changes would be a long time coming. A terracompatible planet in the last stages of an ice age,
it was one of five Confederation penal colonies. Joshua had included them, too. Much to the relief of various governments,
Avon included. Traslov was where the criminals which the Confederation Navy brought in were sent.
Prison ship flights resumed after three weeks.
AndrÉ Duchamp was led into the drop capsule by one of the guards, who fastened him in one of the eight acceleration couches.
Once the straps were in place, holding AndrÉ’s arms and legs against the thin padding, his restraint collar was taken off.
“Behave yourself,” the guard said curtly, and air swam out through the hatch to fetch the next prisoner.
With supreme self control, AndrÉ sat quiet. His flesh was still slightly tender where the medical nanonics had been removed.
And he was sure those bastard
anglo
quack doctors hadn’t fully cured his intestinal tract; he kept getting raging indigestion after meals. If you could call
what he’d been fed meals. But his indigestion was nothing to the suffering inflicted by the awesome injustice brought down
upon his poor head. The Navy blamed him for the antimatter attack against Trafalgar. Him! An innocent, persecuted blackmail
victim. It was diabolical.
“Hello there.”
AndrÉ glared at the badly overweight, balding, middleaged man in the couch next to him.
“Guess we ought to introduce ourselves, seeing as how we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together. I’m Mixi Penrice,
and this is my wife, Imelda.”
AndrÉ’s face cracked in mortification as a timid woman, also fat and middle aged, waved at him hopefully from the couch beside
her husband.
“So pleased to meet you,” she said.
“Guard!” AndrÉ yelled frantically.
“Guard.”
There was never any contact between the Confederation at large and Traslov, in that every flight was strictly one way: down.
The theory was simple enough. Prisoners, voluntarily accompanied by their family, were shot down into the equatorial band
of continent not covered by glaciers. Sociologists, hired by participating governments to reassure civil rights organizations,
claimed that if enough people were brought together then they’d inevitably form a stable community. After a hundred years,
or a million people, whichever came first, the flights would be stopped. The communities would expand in the wake of the retreating
glaciers. And in another hundred years a self-sustaining agrarian civilization would emerge with a modest industrial capacity,
at which point they’d be allowed to join the Confederation and develop like a normal colony. As yet, no one had found out
if an ex-penal colony would want to join a society which had exiled every one of their ancestors.
AndrÉ’s drop capsule fired down through the atmosphere, hitting seven gees at the top of its deceleration peak. It plummeted
through the low cloud layer and deployed its parachute five hundred metres from the ground. Two metres from the ground, retrorockets
fired in a half-second burst, killing the capsule’s final velocity as the chute jettisoned.
The capsule crashed into the scorched earth with a bonenumbing impact. AndrÉ gasped in shock at the pain transmitted along
his spine. Even so, he was the first to recover, and flipped his strap catches open. The hatch was a crude affair, like everything
else in the capsule. A wonder they ever got down alive. He pulled the release handle.
They’d landed in a broad valley with gently sloping sides and a fast stone-bed stream running along the bottom. The local
grass-analogue was an insipid grey green, its monotony broken by a few wizened dwarf bushes. A cold wind blew against the
capsule, carrying tiny grains of white ice. AndrÉ shivered violently; the chill factor took it well below freezing. He had
thought to simply collect his share of the survival equipment from the baggage lockers ringing the base of the capsule and
hike away from his fellow exiles. That action would have to be reconsidered now.
When he looked along the other end of the valley, he was amazed to see the distinct globular shape of starship life support
capsules embedded in the soil. He could see at least forty of them. A definitive count would have shown AndrÉ that a total
of sixteen starships had been involved in the incident which had seen them cast away here.
A lone figure was striding vigorously over the frozen ground towards the drop capsule: a young man in a black fur coat, with
a crossbow slung over his shoulder. He stopped just below the hatch and put his hands on his hips to grin up at AndrÉ.
“And a very good morning to you, sir; Charles Montgomery David Filton-Asquith at your service,” he said. “Welcome to Happy
Valley.”