An excellent observation. It was the memory transfer ability which resulted in the mass excommunication of Christian Edenists
by Pope Eleanor in 2090. When our founder Wing-Tsit Chong became the first human to transfer his memories into a habitat neural
stratum, the Pope denounced his action as sacrilegious, an attempt to avoid divine judgement. Subsequently the affinity gene
was declared to be a violation of divine heritage; the Vatican was afraid it placed too great a temptation before the devout.
An Islamic proclamation was issued along similar lines a year later, proscribing the faithful from having the gene sequenced
into their children. It was the start of the divergence between Edenist and Adamist culture, and also effectively ended Adamist
use of bitek. Without affinity control, bitek organisms have little practical use.
But you said there are lots of different religions; how can there be many gods? There can’t be more than one Creator, surely?
That’s a contradiction.
A good point. Several of the largest wars Earth has known have been fought over this issue. All religions claim theirs is
the true faith. In actuality, any religion is dependent solely on the strength of conviction in its followers.
Syrinx gave up, and rested her head in her hands as she watched the fish scuttle under the big pink water lilies. It all sounded
highly unlikely to her.
What about you?
she asked
Oenone
.
Are you religious?
I don’t see the need to pray to an unseen deity for anything. I know what I am. I know why I am. You humans seem to delight
in building your own complications.
Syrinx stood up, smoothing down her black mourning dress. The fish dived for deep cover at the sudden movement.
Thanks a bunch.
I love you,
Oenone
said.
I’m sorry you’re upset over Sinon. He made you happy. That’s good.
I won’t cry any more, she told herself, Daddy’s there whenever I want to talk to him. There, that must mean I’ve got a properly
integrated personality. So that’s all right.
If only it didn’t hurt so much deep inside her chest, about where her heart was.
By the time she reached fifteen, her education was concentrating on subjects necessary for captaining a ship. Engineering
and power systems, Confederation space law, astrogration, bitek life-support organs, mechanics, fluid behaviours, superconductivity,
thermodynamics, fusion physics. She and
Oenone
listened to long lectures on the abilities and limits of voidhawks. There were practical lessons too, how to use spacesuits,
practising fidgety repairs in low gravity, and acclimatization trips to the voidhawk ledges outside. Running through shipboard
routines.
She was perfectly at home in free fall. Floating balance was geneered into all Edenists, and the hundred families went further
with their manipulation, toughening and thickening internal membranes to withstand high-gee acceleration. Edenists were loath
to use nanonic-supplement boosting unless there was no alternative.
By her mid-teens she was losing her puppy fat (not that she’d ever had much to start with) and beginning to acquire her definitive
adult features. The carefully modified genes of her ancestors had bestowed her with a long face that had slightly sunken cheeks,
emphasizing strong bones, and a wide mouth which could deliver a dazzling smile whenever she chose. She was as tall as most
of her brothers, and her figure was filling out to her complete satisfaction. At this time she had grown her hair halfway
down her back, knowing she would never have the opportunity again: when she started operational flying it would have to be
cut short. Long hair was at best a nuisance and at worst a hazard in a star-ship.
When she was seventeen she had a month-long
affaire
with Aulie, who was forty-four, which made it doomed from the start, which made it
so
romantic. She enjoyed her time with Aulie unashamedly, as much for the mild censure and gossip it generated among her friends
and family as the new styles of euphoria she experienced under his knowledgeable tuition. Now he was someone who
really
knew how to exploit free fall.
Teenage Edenist sexuality was one of the most talked about and envied legends among their Adamist counterparts. Edenists didn’t
need to worry about disease, not with their immunology systems; and affinity ensured that there were no problems of jealousy,
or even possessive domination. Honest lust was nothing to be ashamed of, it was a natural aspect of teenage hormones on the
boil, and there was also ample room for genuine one-to-one attraction. So given that even trainee captains only had five hours
of practical engineering and technology lessons each day, and by their mid-teens Edenists needed at most six hours’ sleep
per night, the rest of the time was spent pursuing orgasmic release in a manner which would have impressed even the Romans.
Then her eighteenth birthday came around. Syrinx almost couldn’t bring herself to leave the house that morning. Athene had
worn her usual cheerful face, emotions hidden beyond even the most sensitive prying. But Syrinx knew exactly how much the
sight of all ten children preparing to go hurt her. She had hung back after the formal breakfast, but Athene had shooed her
out of the kitchen with a brief kiss. “It’s the price we all pay,” she said. “And believe me, it’s worth it.”
Syrinx and her siblings suited up and walked out onto the innermost ledge of the northern endcap, progressing with long lopes
in the quarter gravity. There were a lot of people milling around outside the airlocks, service personnel, the crews of voidhawks
currently perched on pedestals. All of them were eagerly awaiting the arrival of the newest void-hawks. The swirl of expectancy
from them and other Edenists in the habitat caught her by surprise, but at least it helped quell her own nerves.
I’m the one that should be nervous,
Oenone
protested.
Why? All this comes naturally to you.
Ha!
Are you ready?
We could wait a little longer, see if I grow some more.
You haven’t grown for two months. And you’re quite big enough already.
Yes, Syrinx,
the starship said, so meekly that she had to smile.
Come on, remember I was apprehensive with Hazat. That turned out to be fantastic.
I hardly think you can compare sex with spaceflight. And I wouldn’t call that apprehension, more like impatience.
There was a tone of pique in the mental voice.
Syrinx put her hands on her hips.
Get on with it.
Oenone
had been steadily absorbing electricity from the nutrient-production globe for the last month; with its growth phase finally
complete the demand on the induction pick-off cables by the globe’s organs had fallen off sharply, allowing the starship to
begin the long powering-up process of its patterning cells. Now the energy levels were high enough to initiate a distortion
field, which would enable it to suck power directly out of space. If it didn’t get the distortion field right the cells would
power down, and a rescue mission would have to be launched. In the past such missions hadn’t always been a hundred per cent
successful.
With Syrinx’s pride and encouragement bolstering its mind,
Oenone
started to separate from the nutrient-producing globe. Fibrous tubes tore along their stress lines. Warm fluids squirted
into space, acting like crude rocket engines, adding to the pressure on the remaining tubes. Organic conductors snapped and
sealed, their ends whipping back and forth in the expanding cloud of vaporized fluid. The final tube broke, and the globe
lurched away like a punctured balloon.
See? Easy,
Syrinx said. The two of them were remembering together, reviewing the miragelike memories of a voidhawk called
Iasius
. To generate a distortion field you just had to trigger the initial energy flash through the patterning cells like
so
. Energy began to flow inside the labyrinthine honeycomb of patterning cells, compressing, the density building towards infinity
in mere nanoseconds.
The distortion field flared outwards, billowing wildly.
Steady,
Syrinx instructed gently. The field’s fluctuations began to damp down. It changed shape, becoming more stable, twisting the
radiation of local space into a viable stream. The patterning cells began to absorb it. There was a heavenly sensation of
satisfaction gusting out to the stars.
Yes! We did it.
They embraced mentally. Congratulations were flung at them from Edenists and voidhawks alike. Syrinx searched round to see
that all her siblings and their craft had generated stable distortion fields. As if Athene’s children would fail!
Together
Oenone
and Syrinx began to experiment, changing the shape of the field, altering its strength. The voidhawk began to move, rising
up out of the rings, into clear space, seeing the stars unencumbered for the first time. Syrinx thought she could feel the
wind blowing in her face, ruffling her hair. She was some ancient mariner standing on the wooden deck of her sailing ship,
speeding across an endless ocean.
Three hours later
Oenone
slipped into the gap between Romulus’s northern endcap and the counter-rotating dock. It began to curve round, racing after
the ledge.
Syrinx saw it expand from nowhere out of the spinning starfield.
I can see you!
It had been so long.
And I you,
Oenone
replied lovingly.
She jumped for joy, legs sending her flying three metres above the ledge.
Careful,
Oenone
said.
Syrinx just laughed.
It slid in over the edge, and hovered above the pedestal closest to her. When it settled she began to glide-run towards it,
whooping exuberantly, arms windmilling for balance.
Oenone
’s smooth midnight-blue hull was marbled by a fine purple web.
The Ruin Ring formed a slim dense halo three kilometres thick, seventy kilometres broad, orbiting five hundred and eighty
thousand kilometres above the gas giant Mirchusko. Its albedo was dismayingly low; most of the constituent particles were
a dowdy grey. A haze of small particles could be found up to a hundred kilometres outside the main band in the ecliptic plane;
dust mainly, flung out from collisions between larger particles. Such meagre dimensions made the Ruin Ring totally insignificant
on a purely astronomical scale. However, the effect it had on the course of human events was profound. Its existence alone
managed to bring the richest kingdom in history to the verge of political chaos, as well as posing the Confederation’s scientific
community the greatest mystery it had ever known, one which remained unsolved a hundred and ninety years after its discovery.
It could so easily have gone unnoticed by the Royal Kulu Navy scoutship
Ethlyn
, which investigated the system in 2420. But system survey missions are too expensive to mount for the crew to skimp on detail
even though it is obvious there is no terracompatible planet orbiting the star, and naval captains are chosen for their conscientious
nature.
The robot probe which
Ethlyn
fired into orbit around Mirchusko performed standard reconnaissance fly-bys of the seven moons above a hundred and fifty
kilometres in diameter (anything smaller was classed as an asteroid), then moved on to analyse the two rings encircling the
gas giant. There was nothing extraordinary or even interesting about the innermost: twenty thousand kilometres broad, orbiting
three hundred and seventy thousand kilometres out, the usual conglomeration of ice and carbon and rocky dust. But the outer
ring had some strange spectrographic lines, and it occupied an unusually high orbit.
Ethlyn
’s planetary science officer raised the probe’s orbit for a closer look.
When the achromatic pictures relayed from the probe’s optical sensors began to resolve, all activity on board the
Ethlyn
came to an abrupt halt as the crew abandoned their routine to assess the scene. The ring which had the mass of a modestly
sized moon was composed entirely of shattered xenoc habitats.
Ethlyn
immediately deployed every robot probe in its inventory to search the rest of the system, with depressingly negative results.
There were no other habitats, no survivors. Subsequent searches by the small fleet of Kulu research ships which followed also
produced a resounding blank. Neither could any trace of the xenoc race’s home-world be found. They hadn’t originated on any
planet in the Ruin Ring’s system, nor had they come from any of the surrounding stars. Their origin and death were a complete
enigma.
The builders of the wrecked habitats were called the Laymil, though even the name wasn’t discovered for another sixty-seven
years. It might seem that the sheer quantity of remnants would provide archaeologists and xenoc investigators with a superabundance
of research material. But the destruction of the estimated seventy thousand plus habitats had been ferocious, and it had happened
two thousand four hundred years previously. After the initial near-simultaneous detonation a cascade of secondary collisions
had begun, a chain reaction lasting for decades, with gravel and boulders pulverizing large shell sections, setting off another
round of collisions. Explosive decompression tore apart the living cells of plants and animals, leaving already badly eviscerated
corpses to be decimated still further by the punishing sleet of jagged fragments. And even after a relative calm fell a century
later, there was the relentless chafing of the vacuum, boiling surface molecules away one by one until only phantom-thin outlines
of the original shape were left.