Dolo was watching his face. ‘Remember, though you are a Novice, you represent the Commission. We are the ultimate source of strength for these people. Keep your fear for the privacy of your quarters.’
‘I understand my duty, sir.’
‘Good.’
The yacht slid neatly into the world’s thick air. Under a cloud-littered blue sky the ocean opened out into a blue-grey sheet that receded to a misty horizon.
The yacht hovered over the largest archipelago, a jumble of islands formed from ancient and overlapping volcanic caldera, and settled to the ground. It landed in a Navy compound, a large complex marked out in bright Navy green and surrounded by a tall fence. Beyond the fence, the rocky land rolled away, unmodified save for snaking roads and scattered farms and small villages.
Luca and Dolo joined a handful of troopers in an open-top skimmer. Hovering a couple of metres above the ground the skimmer shot across the Navy compound – Luca glimpsed bubble domes, unpressurised huts, neat piles of equipment – and then slid through a dilating entrance in the outer wall and hurtled over the countryside.
They had to wear face masks. Even after twenty thousand years of terraforming of this world, there was still not enough oxygen in the air; it had taken half that time just to exterminate most of the native life. But they could leave their skinsuits behind, and Luca welcomed the feeling of sunlight on his exposed skin.
Dolo said, over the wind noise, ‘What you’re going to see is where many of those troopers you envy come from.’
Luca said, ‘I imagined birthing centres.’ Like the one into which he had been born, on Earth.
‘Yes. The children of soldiers are incubated in such places. But you’ve seen yourself that there is a – drift – in such populations, under the relentless selection pressure of combat. It’s a good idea to freshen up the gene pool with infusions of wild stock.’
‘Wild? Commissary, what is a “press gang”?’
‘You’ll see.’
The skimmer arrived at a village by the coast.
Luca stepped out of the hovering vehicle. The volcanic rock felt lumpy through the thin soles of his boots. A harbour, a rough crescent shape, had been blasted into the rock, and small boats bobbed languidly on oily water. Even through the filters in his mask Luca could smell the intense salt of the sea air, and the electric tang of ozone. But the volcanic rock was predominantly black, as were the pebbles and sand, and the water looked eerily dark.
He looked back along the coast. Dwellings built of volcanic rock were scattered along a road that led back to a denser knot of buildings. Here and there green flashed amidst the black – grass, trees, Earth life struggling to prosper in this alien soil. It was clear these people fed themselves through agriculture: crops grown on the transformed land, fish harvested from the seeded seas. The Second Expansion had occurred before the Qax had brought effective replicator technology to Earth, an unintended legacy which still fed the mass of the human population today. And so these people farmed, a behavioural relic.
From the doorway of the nearest house a child peered out at him, a girl aged about ten, finger thrust into one nostril, wide-eyed and curious. She wore no mask; the locals were implanted with respiratory equipment at birth.
He said, wondering, ‘This is not a Coalition world.’
‘No, it is not,’ said Dolo. ‘Ideally all human beings, across the Galaxy, would think exactly the same thought at every moment; that is what we must ultimately strive for. But out here on the fringe of the Expansion, where resources are limited, things are – looser. The three million inhabitants here have been left to their own devices – such as their own peculiar form of government, which lapsed into a kind of monarchy. The war against the Xeelee is a priority over cleansing the minds of a few fisher-folk on a dirt ball like this.’
‘As long as they pay their taxes.’
Dolo grinned at him. ‘An unexpectedly cynical remark from my idealistic young Novice! But yes, exactly so.’
They walked with the troopers towards the house. The little girl disappeared indoors. Luca could smell cooking, a baking smell like bread, and a sharper tang that might have been some kind of bleach. Simple domestic smells. Flowers adorned the top of the doorway, a colourful stripe, and two small bells dangled from the door itself, too small to be useful as a signal to the occupants, a cultural symbol Luca couldn’t decode. The troopers in their bright green uniforms looked strikingly out of place, the shapes and colours all wrong, as if they had been cut out of some other reality and inserted into this sunlit scene.
There is a whole world here, Luca thought, a society which has followed its own path for twenty thousand years, with all the subtlety and individuality that that implies. I know nothing about it, had never even heard of it before coming here into the Core. And the Galaxy, which I as a Commissary will presume to govern, must be full of such places, such worlds, shards of humanity scattered over the stars.
A woman came to the door – the little girl’s mother? – strong-faced, about forty, with hands grimy from work in a field, or garden. She looked resigned, Luca thought on first impression. Her gaze ran indifferently over the Commissaries, and she turned to the lead trooper.
She spoke a language he didn’t recognise. The artificial voice of the trooper’s translating desk was small and tinny.
Luca said, ‘They must have brought their language with them. This woman speaks a relic of a pre-Extirpation tongue.’ He felt excited, intellectually. ‘Perhaps that aboriginal tongue could be reconstructed. Populations are scattered on this island world, isolated. Their languages must have diverged. By comparing the dialects of different groups—’
‘Of course that would be possible,’ said Dolo, sounded vaguely irritated. ‘But why would you want to do such a thing?’
Now the woman pressed her hand against the trooper’s data desk, a simple signature, and she called a name. The little girl came back to the door. She was a thin child with an open, pretty face; she looked bewildered, not scared, Luca thought. The mother reached down and gave the girl a small valise. She placed her hand on the girl’s back, as if to push her to the troopers.
Luca understood what was happening a moment before the girl herself. ‘We are here to take her away, aren’t we?’
Dolo held up a finger, silencing him.
The girl looked at the tall armour-clad figures. Her face twisted with fear. She threw down the valise and turned to bury her face in her mother’s belly, yelling and jabbering. The mother was weeping herself, but she tried to pull the child away from her legs.
‘She’s just a child,’ Luca said. ‘She doesn’t want to leave her mother.’
Dolo shrugged. ‘Child or not, she should know her duty.’
At first the troopers seemed tolerant. They stood in the sun, watching impassively as the mother gently cajoled the child. But after a couple of minutes the lead trooper stepped forward and put his gloved hand on the girl’s shoulder. The girl squirmed away. The trooper seemed to have misjudged the mother’s mood, for she jabbered angrily at him, pulled the child inside the house and slammed the door. The troopers glanced at each other, shrugged wearily, and fingered the weapons at their belts.
Dolo tugged Luca’s sleeve. ‘We don’t need to see the resolution of this little unpleasantness. Come. Let me show you what will happen to that child.’
The lead trooper agreed that Dolo could take the skimmer if a replacement was sent out. So Luca climbed back into the skimmer alongside Dolo, leaving the harbour village behind them. It did not take long before they were back within the enclosing wall of the Navy compound, with the complex disorderly local world of sea and rock and light shut out. Luca felt a huge relief, as if he had come home.