Diluc talked of personal things too: of the progress of his boys at school, how Tomi had always hated the hour’s wall-cleaning he had to put in each day, while little Rus loved it for the friends he was making.
‘They are good kids,’ Rusel said.
‘Yes. And you need to see more of them,’ Diluc said pointedly. ‘But, you know, Rus, they’re not like us. They are the first Shipborn generation. They are different. To them, all our stories of Port Sol and Canis Major are so many legends of places they will never see. This Ship is their world, not ours: we, born elsewhere, are aliens here. You know, I keep thinking we’ve bitten off more than we can chew. For all Andres’s planning, already things are drifting. No wonder generation starships always fail!’
Rusel tried to respond to their openness by giving them something of himself. But he found he had little to say. His mind was full of studying, but there was very little human incident in his life. It was if he hadn’t been alive at all, he thought with dismay.
Diluc was appalled to hear of Ruul’s death. ‘That pompous geneticist – I suppose in a way it’s fitting he should be the first to go. But don’t let it take you, brother.’ Impulsively he crossed to Rusel and rested his hand on his brother’s shoulder. ‘You know, all this is enough for me: Tila, the kids, the home we’re building together. It’s good to know that our lives serve a higher goal, but this is all I need to make me happy. Maybe I don’t have much imagination, you think?’
Or maybe you’re more human than I am, Rusel thought. ‘We must all make our choices,’ he said.
Diluc said carefully, ‘But you can still make a different choice.’
‘What do you mean?’
He leaned forward. ‘Why don’t you give it up, Rus? This crappy old Qax nano-medicine, this dreadful anti-ageing – you’re still young; you could come out of there, flush the shit out of your system, grow your hair back, find some nice woman to make you happy again…’
Rusel tried to keep his face expressionless, but he failed.
Diluc backed off. ‘Sorry. You still remember Lora.’
‘I always will. I can’t help it.’
‘We’ve all been through an extraordinary experience,’ Tila said. ‘I suppose we all react differently.’
‘Yes.’ Tila, he remembered, had left behind a child.
Diluc looked into his eyes. ‘You never will come out, will you? Because you’ll never be able to cast off that big sack of guilt on your back.’
Rusel smiled. ‘Is it that obvious?’
Tila was a gracious hostess. She perceived his discomfort, and they began to talk of old times, of the days on Port Sol. But Rusel was relieved when Tomi came in to announce that the meal was ready, relieved to hurry through the food and get away, relieved to shut himself away once more in the bloodless monastic calm of his studying.
V
He would remember that difficult visit again, much later, when a boy came to find him.
As time passed, the Elders withdrew further from the crew. They requisitioned their own sealed-off living area. It was close to the Ship’s axis where the artificial gravity was a little lower than further out, a sop to muscles and bones expected to weaken with the centuries. Andres humorously called this refuge the ‘Cloister’. And the Elders were spared the routine chores, even the cleaning, to which the rest of the crew were subject. Soon it was hard to avoid the feeling that the crew were only there to serve the Elders.
Of course it was all part of Andres’s grand social design that there should eventually be an ‘awe gap’, as she put it, between Elders and transients. But Rusel wondered if a certain distancing was inevitable anyhow. The differential ageing of transients and Elders became apparent surprisingly quickly. When an Elder met a transient she saw a face that would soon crumble with age and vanish, while the transient saw a mysteriously unchanging figure who would see events that transpired long after the transient was dead. Rusel watched as friendships dissolved, even love affairs evaporated, under this stress.
However the increasingly isolated Elders, thrown on each other’s company, were no chummy club. They were all bright, ambitious people; they wouldn’t have been filtered out for Andres’s inner circle otherwise, and there was always a certain tension and bickering. Doctor Selur remarked sourly that it was like being stuck with a bunch of jealous academics, for ever.
But the Elders were also cautious of each other, Rusel thought. Always at the back of his mind was the thought that he would have to live with these people for a long time. So he strove not to make any enemies – and conversely not to get too close to anyone. Eternity with a lover was one thing, but with an ex-lover it would be hellish. Better that things were insipid, but tolerable.
Life settled down. In the calm of the Cloister, time passed smoothly, painlessly.
One day a boy came knocking timorously, asking for Rusel. He was aged about sixteen.
Rusel thought he recognised him. He had spent a long time on his own, and his social skills were rusty, but he tried to focus and greet the boy warmly. ‘Tomi! It’s so long since I saw you.’
The boy’s eyes were round. ‘My name is Poro, sir.’
Rusel frowned. ‘But that day I came to visit – you made us all a meal, me and Diluc and Tila, while little Rus played…’ But that was long ago, he told himself, he wasn’t sure how long, and he fell silent.
The boy seemed to have been prepared for this. ‘My name is Poro,’ he said firmly. ‘Tomi was—’
‘Your father.’
‘My grandfather.’
So this was Diluc’s great-grandson. Lethe, how long have I spent inside this box?
The boy was looking around the Cloister. His eyes were unblinking, his mouth pulled back in a kind of nervous grin. None of the Elders was hot on empathy, especially with transients, but suddenly Rusel felt as if he saw this place through this child’s eyes.
The Cloister was like a library, perhaps. Or a hospital room. The Elders sat in their chairs or walked slowly through the silence of the room, their every step calculated to reduce the risk of harm to their fragile, precious bodies. It had been this way since long before Poro had been born, these musty creatures pursuing their cold interests. And I, who once loved Lora when she wasn’t much older than this child, am part of this dusty stillness.
‘What do you want, Poro?’
‘Diluc is ill. He is asking for you.’
‘Diluc…?’
‘Your brother.’
It turned out that Diluc was more than ill; he was dying.
So Rusel went with the boy, stepping outside the confines of the Cloister for the first time in years.
He wasn’t at home out here any more. The original crew had died off steadily, following a demographic curve not terribly different to that they would have endured had they remained on Port Sol. Rusel had grown used to seeing faces he had known since childhood crumple with age and disappear before him. Still, it had been a shock when that first generation reached old age – and, since many of them had been around the same age at launch, their deaths came in a flood.
He knew none of the faces of the younger transients. Everything about the new generations was different: the way they rebuilt the Ship’s internal architecture, their manner with each other, the way they wore their hair – even their language, which was full of a guttural slang. The transients knew him, though, even the youngest. They stared at him with curiosity, or irreverence – or, worst of all, awe.