At first, in this jungle of engineering, he couldn’t make out anything living. Then, as he allowed the worn-out ambience of the place to wash over him, he learned to see.
They were like shadows, he thought, slim, upright shadows that flitted through the gantries, furtive, cautious. At times they looked human – clearly upright, bipedal, purposeful – though their limbs were spindly, their bellies distended. But then they would collapse to all fours and lope away with a bent gait, and that impression of humanity vanished. They didn’t seem to be wearing clothes, any more than the transients did. But unlike the transients their bodies were coated with a kind of thick hair, dark brown, a fur.
Here and there hovering drones trailed the shambling creatures, carrying food and water. The creatures ignored these emissaries of the Ship that kept them alive.
Andres said grimly, ‘I know you haven’t wanted to think about these relics, Rusel. But the Ship has watched over them. They are provided with food, of course. Clothing, blankets and the like – they rip all that up to serve as nesting material, like the transients. They won’t go to the supply hoppers as the transients will; drones have to bring them the stuff they need, and take out their waste. But they’re really quite passive. They don’t mind the drones, even when the drones clean them, or tend to wounds or sicknesses. They are used to being cared for by machines.’
‘But what do they do all day?’
Andres laughed. ‘Why, nothing. Nothing but eat the food we give them. Climb around the gantries a little, perhaps.’
‘They must have some spark of curiosity, of awareness. The transients do! They’re people.’
‘Their ancestors used to be. Now they’re quite mindless … There. Look. They are gathering at one of their feeding places. Perhaps we’ll be able to see what they do.’
The feeding site was a shallow depression, worn into a floor of steel. Its base was smeared green and brown. A drone had delivered a cache of food to the centre of the pit, a pile of spheres and cylinders and discs, all sized for human hands, all brightly coloured.
From around the amphitheatre the animals came walking, loping, moving with the slow clumsiness of low gravity – and yet with an exaggerated care, Rusel thought, as if they were very fragile, very old. They gathered around the food pile. But they did not reach for the food; they just slumped down on the ground, as if exhausted.
Now smaller creatures emerged from the forest of gantries. They moved nervously, but just as cautiously as the larger forms. They must be children, Rusel thought, but they moved with no spontaneity or energy. They were like little old people themselves. There were far fewer children than adults, just a handful among perhaps fifty individuals.
It was the children who went to the food pile, broke off pieces of the brightly coloured fodder, and carried it to the adults. The adults greeted this service with indifference, or at best a snarl, a light blow on the head or shoulder. Each child servant went doggedly back to the pile for more.
‘They’re not particularly hygienic,’ Rusel observed.
‘No. But they don’t have to be. Compared to the transients they have much tougher immune systems. And the Ship’s systems keep the place roughly in order.’
Rusel said, ‘Why don’t the adults get the food themselves? It would be quicker.’
Andres shrugged. ‘This is their way. And it is their way to eat another sort of food, too.’
At the very centre of the depression was a broad scar stained a deep crimson brown, littered with lumpy white shapes.
‘That’s blood,’ Rusel said, wondering. ‘Dried blood. And those white things—’
‘Bones,’ said Andres evenly. Rusel thought she seemed oddly excited, stirred by the degraded spectacle before her. ‘But there’s too much debris here to be accounted for by their occasional raids into transient country.’
Rusel shuddered. ‘So they eat each other too.’
‘No. Not quite. The old eat the young; mothers eat their children. It is their way.’
‘Oh, Lethe…’ Andres was right; Rusel couldn’t throw up. But he was aware of his body, cradled by the concerned Ship, thrashing feebly in distress.
Andres said dispassionately, ‘I don’t understand your reaction.’
‘I didn’t know—’
‘You should have thought it through – thought through the consequences of your decision to let these creatures live.’
‘You are a monster, Andres.’
She laughed without humour.
Of course he knew what these animals were. They were the Autarchs – or the distant descendants of the long-lived, inbred clan who had once ruled over the transients. Over nearly twenty thousand years selection pressure had worked relentlessly, and the gene complex that had given them their advantage over the transients in the first place – genes for longevity, a propensity injected into the human genome by the Qax – had found full expression. And meanwhile, in the sterile nurture of this place, they had had even less reason to waste precious energy on large brains.
As time had passed they had lived longer and longer, but thought less and less. Now these Autarchs were all but immortal, and all but mindless.
‘They’re actually rather fascinating,’ Andres said cheerfully. ‘I’ve been trying to understand their ecology, if you will.’
‘Ecology? Then maybe you can explain how it can benefit a creature to treat its children so. Those young seem to be farmed. Life is about the preservation of genes: even in this artificial little world of ours, that remains true. So how does eating your kids help achieve that? … Ah.’ He gazed at the hairy creatures before him. ‘But these Autarchs are not mortal.’
‘Exactly. They lost their minds, but they stayed immortal. And when mind had gone, natural selection worked with what it found.’
Even for these strange creatures, the interests of the genes were paramount. But now a new strategy had to be worked out. It had been foreshadowed in the lives of the first Autarchs. There was no room to spread the genes by expanding the population – but if individuals could become effectively immortal, the genes could survive through them.
Andres said, ‘But simple longevity wasn’t enough. Even the longest-lived will die through some accident eventually. The genes themselves can be damaged, through radiation exposure for instance. Copying is safer! For their own preservation the genes need to see some children produced, and for some, the smartest and strongest, to survive.
‘But, you see, living space is restricted here. The parents must compete for space against their own children. They don’t care about the children. They use them as workers – or even, when there’s an excess, as a cannibalistic resource … But there are always one or two children who fight their way through to adulthood, enough to keep the stock numbers up. In a way the pressure from the adults is a mechanism to ensure that only the smartest and strongest of the kids survive. It’s a mixed strategy.’
‘From the genes’ point of view it’s a redundancy mechanism,’ Rusel said. ‘That’s the way an engineer would put it. The children are just a fail-safe.’
‘Precisely,’ Andres said.
It was biology, evolution: the destiny of the Mayflower had come down to this.
Rusel had brooded on the fate of his charges, and had studied how time had always shaped human history. And he had decided it was all a question of timescales.