As long as they were doing it in the first place, Rusel didn’t care. Besides, it worked in maintaining the ship. Sexual drivers seemed very effective in locking in behaviour with the precision required to keep the Ship’s systems functioning: you could fix a ceiling ventilation grille with a show-off flourish or not, but you had to do it exactly correctly to impress the opposite sex, even if you didn’t understand what it was for. Even when mind was gone, you had to do it right.
He heard weeping, not far away.
He let his viewpoint drift along the corridor, following the sound. He turned a corner, and came on the villagers.
There were perhaps twenty-five of them, adults and children. They were all naked, of course; nobody had worn clothes for millennia. Some of them had infants in their arms or on their backs. Squatting in the corridor, they huddled around a central figure, the woman who was doing the weeping. She was cradling something, a bloody scrap. The others reached out and stroked her back and scalp; some of them were weeping too, Rusel saw.
He said, ‘Their empathy is obvious.’
‘Yes. They’ve lost so much else, but not that.’
Suddenly their heads turned, all of them save the weeping woman, faces swivelling like antennae. Something had disturbed them – perhaps the tiny hovering drone that was Rusel’s physical manifestation. Their brows were low, but their faces were still human, with straight noses and delicate chins. It was like a flower bed of faces, Rusel thought, turned up to his light. But their mouths were pulled back in fear-grins.
And every one of them looked like Lora, more or less, with that delicate, elfin face, even something of her elusive eyes. Of course they did: the blind filter of natural selection, operating for generations on this hapless stock, had long determined that though mind was no longer necessary, to look this way might soften the heart of the wizened creature who ruled the world.
The strange tableau of upturned Lora-faces lasted only a moment. Then the transients took flight. They poured away down the corridor, running, knuckle-walking, bounding off the walls and ceiling.
Andres growled, ‘I’ll swear they get more like chimps with every generation.’
In a few seconds they had gone, all save the weeping woman.
Rusel allowed his viewpoint to swim towards the woman. He moved cautiously, not wishing to alarm her. She was young – twenty, twenty-one? It was increasingly hard to tell the age of these transients; they seemed to reach puberty later each generation. This girl had clearly passed her menarche – in fact she had given birth, and recently: her belly was slack, her breasts heavy with milk. But her chest was smeared with blood, shocking bright crimson in the drab, worn background of the corridor. And the thing she was cradling was no child.
‘Lethe,’ said Rusel. ‘It’s a hand. A child’s hand. I think I’m going to throw up.’
‘You no longer have the equipment to throw up. Take a closer look.’
A white stump of bone stuck out of a bloody mass of flesh. The hand had been severed at the wrist. And two tiny fingers had been almost stripped of flesh, ligament and muscle, leaving only tiny bones.
‘That wrist,’ Andres said pitilessly, ‘has been bitten through. By teeth, Rusel. And teeth have been at work on those fingers as well. Think about it. With a bit of practice, you could take one of those little morsels between your incisors and just strip off the flesh and muscle—’
‘Shut up! Lethe, Andres, I can see for myself. We always avoided cannibalism. I thought we beat that into their shrinking skulls hard enough.’
‘So we did. But I don’t think this is cannibalism – or rather, whatever did this wasn’t her kind.’
Rusel elevated the viewpoint and cast around. He saw a trail of blood leading away from the woman, smeared along the walls and floor, quite unmistakable, as if something had been dragged away.
Andres said, ‘I think our transients suddenly have a predator.’
‘Not so suddenly,’ Rusel said. A part of his scattered consciousness was checking over the Ship’s logs, long ignored. This kind of incident had been going on for a couple of centuries. ‘It’s been rare before, once or twice a generation. Mostly it was the old who were taken, or the very young – vulnerable, dispensable, or replaceable. But now they seem to be upping the rate.’
‘And making a dent in the transients’ numbers.’
‘Yes. You were right to bring me here.’ This had to be resolved. But to do it, he thought with a deepening dread, he was going to have to confront a horror he had shut out of his awareness for millennia.
‘I’m here with you,’ Andres said gently.
‘No, you’re not,’ he snapped. ‘But I have to deal with this anyhow.’
‘Yes, you do.’
His viewpoint followed the bloody trail as it wound through the corridor-villages of the transients. Broken in places, the trail slinked through shadows or through holes worn in the walls. It was the furtive trail of a hunter, he thought.
At last Rusel came to the bulkhead that cut the Ship in two, marking the limit of his transients’ domain. He had long put out of his mind what lay beyond this walclass="underline" in fact, if he could have cut away the Ship’s aft compartment and let the whole mess float off into space he would long ago have done so.
But there was a hole in the bulkhead, just wide enough to admit a slim body.
The bulkhead was a composite of metal and polymer, extremely tough, and a metre thick; the hole was a neat tunnel, not regular but smooth-walled, drilled right through. ‘I can’t believe they have tools,’ he said. ‘So how did they get through?’
‘Teeth,’ Andres said. ‘Teeth and nails – and time, of which they have plenty. Remember what you’re dealing with. Even if the bulkhead was made of diamond they’d have got through eventually.’
‘I hoped they were dead.’
‘Hope! Wishful thinking! That always was your weakness, Rusel. I always said you should have killed them off in the first place. They’re just a drain on the Ship’s resources.’
‘I’m no killer.’
‘Yes, you are—’
‘And they are human, no less than the transients.’
‘No, they’re not. And now, it seems, they are eating our transients.’
His viewpoint drifted before the hole in the wall. Andres seemed to sense his dread; she didn’t say anything.
He passed through the barrier.
He emerged in the upended chamber he still thought of as the amphitheatre, right at the base of the Ship. This was a big, bare volume, a cylinder set on its side. After the spin-up it had been used to pursue larger-scale reconstruction projects necessary to prepare the Ship for its long intergalactic voyage, and mounted on its floor and walls were the relics of heavy engineering, long abandoned: gantries, platforms of metal, immense low-gravity cranes like vast skeletons. Globe lights hovered everywhere, casting a yellow-white light complex with shadows. It was an oddly magnificent sight, Rusel thought, and it stirred memories of brighter, more purposeful days. On the wall of the chamber, which had been its floor, he could even make out the brackets which had held the acceleration couches on launch day.
Now, every exposed surface was corroded. Nothing moved. And that upturned floor, which Andres had turned transparent a mere year after the launch, was caked by what looked like rock. It was a hardened pack of faeces and cloth scraps and dirt, a wall of shit to block out the Galaxy.