The conscious purpose of the Ship had sustained its crew’s focus for a century or so, until the first couple of generations, and the direct memory of Port Sol, had vanished into the past.
Millennia, though, were the timescale of historical epochs on Earth, over which empires rose and fell. His studies suggested that to sustain a purpose over such periods required the engagement of a deeper level of the human psyche: the idea of Rome, say, or a devotion to Christ. If the first century of the voyage had been an arena for the conscious, over longer periods the unconscious took over. Rusel had seen it himself, as the transients had become devoted to the idea of the Ship and its mission, as embodied by his own Virtual. Even Hilin’s rebellion had been an expression of that cult of ideas. Call it mysticism: whatever, it worked over epochs of thousands of years.
That far, he believed, Andres and the other pharaohs had been able to foresee and plan for. But beyond that even they hadn’t been able to imagine; Rusel had sailed uncharted waters.
And as time heaped up into tens of millennia, he had crossed a span of time comparable to the rise and fall, not just of empires, but of whole species. A continuity of the kind that kept the transients cleaning the walls over such periods could only come about, not through even the deepest layers of mind, but through much more basic biological drivers, like sexual selection: the transients cleaned for sex, not for any reason to do with the Ship’s goals, for they could no longer comprehend such abstractions. And meanwhile natural selection had shaped his cradled populations, of transients and Autarchs alike.
Sometimes he felt queasy, perhaps even guilty, at the distorted fate to which generation upon generation had been subjected, all for the sake of a long-dead pharaoh and her selfish, hubristic dream. But individual transients were soon gone, their tiny motes of joy or pain soon vanishing into the dark. Their very brevity was comforting.
Of course, if biology was replacing even the deepest layers of mind as the shaping element in the mission’s destiny, Rusel’s own role became still more important, as the only surviving element of continuity, indeed of consciousness.
Whatever, there was no going back, for any of them.
Andres was still watching the Autarchs. ‘You know, immortality, the defeat of death, is one of mankind’s oldest dreams, But immortality doesn’t make you a god. You have immortality, Rusel, but, save for your crutch the Ship, you have no power. And these – animals – have immortality, but nothing else.’
‘It’s monstrous.’
‘Of course! Isn’t life always? But the genes don’t care. And in the Autarchs’ mindless capering, you can see the ultimate logic of immortality: for an immortal, to survive, must in the end eat her own children.’
But everybody on this Ship was a child of this monstrous mother, Rusel thought, whose twisted longings had impelled this mission in the first place. ‘Is that some kind of confession, pharaoh?’
Andres didn’t reply. Perhaps she couldn’t. After all this wasn’t Andres but a Virtual, a software-generated comfort for Rusel’s fading consciousness, at the limit of its programming. And any guilt he saw in her could only be a reflection of himself.
With an effort of will he dismissed her.
One of the adults, a male, sat up, scratched his chest, and loped to the centre of the feeding pit. The young fled at his approach. The male scattered the last bits of primary-colour food, and picked up something small and white. It was a skull, Rusel saw, the skull of a child. The adult crushed it, dropped the fragments, and wandered off, aimless, immortal, mindless.
Rusel withdrew, and sealed up the gnawed-through bulkhead. After that he set up a new barrier spanning the Ship parallel to the bulkhead, and opened up the thin slice of the vessel between the walls to intergalactic vacuum, so that nothing could come through that barrier. And he never again gave any thought to what lay on the other side.
X
Twenty-five thousand years after the end of his world, Rusel heard that he was to be saved.
‘Rusel. Rusel…’
Rusel wanted the voices to go away. He didn’t need voices now – not Diluc’s, not even Andres’s.
He had no body, no belly, no heart; he had no need of people at all. His memories were scattered in emptiness, like the faint smudges that were the remote galaxies all around the Ship. And like the Ship he forged on into the future, steadily, pointlessly, his life empty of meaning. The last thing he wanted was voices.
But they wouldn’t go away. With deep reluctance, he forced his scattered attention to gather.
The voices were coming from Diluc’s corridor-village. Vaguely, he saw people there, near a door – the door where he had once been barrelled into by little Tomi, he remembered, in a shard of bright warm memory blown from the past – two people, by that same door.
People standing upright. People wearing clothes.
They were not transients. And they were calling his name into the air. With a mighty effort he pulled himself to full awareness.
They stood side by side, a man and a woman – both young, in their twenties, perhaps. They wore smart orange uniforms and boots. The man was clean-shaven, and the woman bore a baby in her arms.
Transients had clustered around them. Naked, pale, eyes wide with curiosity, they squatted on their haunches and reached up with their long arms to the smiling newcomers. Some of them were scrubbing frantically at the floor and walls, teeth bared in rictus grins. They were trying to impress the newcomers with their prowess at cleaning, the only way they knew how. The woman allowed the transients to stroke her child. But she watched them with hard eyes and a fixed smile. And the man’s hand was never far away from the weapon at his belt.
It took Rusel a great deal of effort to find the circuits that would allow him to speak. He said, ‘Rusel. I am Rusel.’
As the disembodied voice boomed out of the air the man and woman looked up, startled, and the transients cowered. The newcomers looked at each other with delight. ‘It’s true,’ said the man. ‘It really is the Mayflower!’ A translation whispered to Rusel.
The woman scoffed. ‘Of course it’s the Mayflower. What else could it be?’
Rusel said, ‘Who are you?’
The man’s name was Pirius, the woman’s Torec.
‘Are we at Canis Major?’
‘No,’ Pirius said gently.
These two had come from the home Galaxy – from Sol system itself, they said. They had come in a faster-than-light ship; it had overtaken the Mayflower’s painful crawl in a few weeks. ‘You have come thirteen thousand light years from Port Sol,’ Pirius said. ‘And it took you more than twenty-five thousand years. It is a record for a generation starship! An astonishing feat.’
Thirteen thousand light years? Even now, the Ship had come only halfway to its intended destination.
Torec cupped the face of a transient girl in her hand – Lora’s face. ‘And,’ Torec said, ‘we came to find you.’
‘Yes,’ said Pirius, smiling. ‘And your floating museum!’
Rusel thought that over. ‘Then mankind lives on?’
Oh, yes, Pirius told him. The mighty Expansion from which the Mayflower’s crew had fled had burned its way right across the Galaxy. It had been an age of war; trillions had gone into the dark. But mankind had endured.