The Elders’ placid lives were not without disturbance, however. The Qax biotechnology was far from perfect. In the first year of treatment one man suffered kidney failure; he survived, but had to be taken out of the programme.
And it was a great shock to all the Elders when geneticist Ruul himself succumbed to a ferocious cancer, as the technological rebuilding of his cells went awry.
The day after Ruul’s death, as the Elders adjusted to the loss of his competence and dry humour, Rusel decided he needed a break. He walked out of the Elders’ huddled quarters and through the body of the Ship, heading for the area where his brother had set up his own home with Tila.
On all the Ship’s cylindrical decks, the interior geography had been filled by corridors and cabins, clustered in concentric circles around little open plazas – ‘village squares’. Rusel knew the social theory: the Ship was supposed to be loosely partitioned into village-sized communities, but he quickly got lost in the detail; the layout of walls and floors and false ceilings was changed again and again as the crew sorted out their environment.
At last he came to the right doorway on the right corridor. He was about to knock when a boy, aged about five with a shock of thick black hair, rocketed out of the open door and ran between Rusel’s legs. The kid wore a bland Ship’s-issue coverall, long overdue for recycling judging by its grime.
This must be Tomi, Rusel thought, Diluc’s eldest. Child and Elder silently appraised each other. Then the kid stuck out his tongue and ran back into the cabin.
In a moment Diluc came bustling out of the door, wiping his hands on a towel. ‘Look, what in Lethe’s going on—Rusel! It’s you. Welcome, welcome!’
Rusel embraced his brother. Diluc smelt of baby sick, cooking and sweat, and Rusel was shocked to see a streak of grey in his brother’s hair. Perhaps Rusel had been locked away in his studies longer than he had realised.
Diluc led Rusel into his home. It was a complex of five small interconnected cabins, including a kitchen and bathroom. Somebody had been weaving tapestries; gaudy, space-filling abstract patterns filled one wall.
Rusel sat on a sofa adapted from an acceleration couch, and accepted a slug of some kind of liquor. He said, ‘I’m sorry I frightened Tomi. I suppose I’ve let myself become a stranger.’
Diluc raised an eyebrow. ‘Two things about that. Not so much “stranger” as “strange”.’ He brushed his hand over his scalp.
Rusel involuntarily copied the gesture, and felt bare skin. He had long forgotten that the first side-effect of the pharaoh treatment had been the loss of his hair; his head was as bald as Andres’s. Surrounded all day by the other Elders, Rusel had got used to it, he supposed. He said dryly, ‘Next time I’ll wear a wig. What’s the second thing I got wrong?’
‘That isn’t Tomi. Tomi was our first. He’s eight now. That was little Rus, as we call him. He’s five.’
‘Five?’ But Rusel had attended the baby Rusel’s naming ceremony. It seemed like yesterday.
‘And now we’re due for another naming. We’ve missed you, Rus.’
Rusel felt as if his life was slipping away. ‘I’m sorry.’
Tila came bustling in, with an awestruck little Rus in tow, and an infant in her arms. She too seemed suddenly to have aged; she had put on weight, and her face was lined by fine wrinkles. She said that Tomi was preparing a meal – of course Uncle Rusel would stay to eat, wouldn’t he? – and she sat down with the men and accepted a drink.
They talked of inconsequentials, and of their lives.
Diluc, having stormed out of Andres’s informal council, had become something of a leader in his own new community. Andres had ordered that the two-hundred-strong crew should be dispersed to live in close-knit ‘tribes’ of twenty or so, each lodged in a ‘village’ of corridors and cabins. There were to be looser links between the tribes, for such purposes as finding marriage or breeding partners. Thus the Ship was united in a single ‘clan’. Andres said this social structure was the most common form encountered among humans ‘in the wild’, as she put it, all the way back to pretechnological days on Earth, and was the most likely to be stable in the long run. Whether or not that was true, things had stayed stable so far.
Andres had also specified the kind of government each tribe should aspire to. In such a small world each individual should be cherished for her unique skills, and for the value of the education invested in her. People were interdependent, said Andres, and the way they governed themselves should reflect that. Even democracy wouldn’t do, as in a society of valued individuals the subjection of a minority to the will of a majority must be a bad thing. So Diluc’s tribe ran by consensus.
‘We talk and talk,’ Diluc said with a rueful grin, ‘until we all agree. Takes hours, sometimes. Once, the whole of the night watch.’
Tila snorted. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t like it that way. You always did like the sound of your own voice!’
The most important and difficult decisions the tribe had to make concerned reproduction, Most adults settled down into more-or-less monogamous marriages. But there had to be a separation between marriages for companionship and liaisons for reproduction; the gene pool was too small to allow matings for such trivial reasons as love.
Diluc showed Rusel a draft of a ‘social contract’ he was preparing to capture all this. ‘First, on reaching adulthood you submit yourself to the needs of the group as a whole. For instance your choice of career depends on what we need as much as what you want to do. Second, you agree to have kids only as the need allows. If we’re short of the optimum population level, you might have three or four or five, whether you want them or not, to bring up the numbers; if we’re over the target, you might have none at all and die childless. Third, you agree to postpone parenthood for as long as possible, and to keep working as long as possible. That way you maximise the investment the tribe has made in educating you. Fourth, you can select your own breeding-spouse, who may be the same as your companionship-spouse—’
‘We were lucky,’ Tila said fervently.
‘But she can’t be closer than a second cousin. And you have to submit to having your choice approved by the Elders. That’s you.’ He grinned at Rusel. ‘Your match will be screened for genetic desirability, and to maximise the freshness of the gene pool – all of that. And finally, if despite everything you’re unlucky enough to have been born with some inheritable defect that might, if propagated, damage the Ship’s chances of completing its mission, you agree not to breed at all. Your genetic line stops with you.’
Rusel frowned. ‘That’s eugenics.’
Diluc shrugged. ‘What else can we do?’
Diluc hadn’t studied Earth history, as Elder-educated Rusel now had, and without that perspective, Rusel realised, that word carried for him none of the horrific connotations it had once borne. As Diluc had implied, they had little choice anyhow given the situation they were in. Besides, eugenics through arranged couplings was lower-tech than genetic engineering: more future-proofing.
Rusel studied the draft contract. ‘And what happens if somebody breaks the rules?’
Diluc was uncomfortable; suddenly Rusel was aware that he was an Elder, as well as this man’s brother. ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ Diluc said. ‘Look, Rus, we don’t have police here, and we don’t have room for jails. Besides, everybody really is essential to the community as a whole. We can’t coerce. We work by persuasion; we hope that such situations will be easily resolved.’