He was probably reading the situation all wrong. But Michael Poole, who had once built starships himself, also concluded that there was something very odd about this ship.
On the second day he talked it over with Futurity. Tahget had given Poole some limited access over where he could ‘pop up’, as he put it, and he had been able to roam a bit wider than Futurity had. But not much further. His own internal-consistency protocols, designed to give him some anchoring in humanity, made it impossible for him to roam into areas that would have been hazardous for humans. And when the Captain had spotted that Poole was hacking into access-denied areas, such privileges had quickly been locked out.
‘I saw a few sights before they shut me down, though,’ Poole said, and he winked. ‘We’re not alone on this ship. It’s a big place, and we’re confined to this little box. But in the longer corridors on the fringe of our cage, I saw things: shadows, furtive movements. Like ghosts. And if you look too closely what you see disappears into the shade.’
Futurity frowned. ‘You’re not saying the ship is haunted?’
‘No. But I think there is, um, a second crew, a crew beneath the crew, who are actually flying the damn ship. And it’s presumably to serve their needs that we’re all jaunting out to 3-Kilo, because for sure it isn’t for us. What I haven’t yet figured out is who those people are, why they’re hiding from us, and what their relationship is to Tahget and his bunch of pirates. But I’ll get there,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’ll tell you something even odder. I’m not convinced that the squat little folk I glimpsed were even wearing clothes!’
Futurity never ceased to marvel at Poole. He was a tourist in this twenty-eighth millennium, a revenant from the deepest past. And yet he was finding his way around what must be a very strange future with far more confidence than Futurity felt he could muster in a hundred lifetimes.
By the morning of the third day the Ask Politely had swum out of the Core, and Futurity was growing disturbed by the sky.
They were still only a few thousand light years from the centre of the Galaxy, and behind the ship the Core was a mass of light, too bright to be viewed by a naked human eye. But Futurity could already tell he was in the plane of a galactic disc: there were stars all around, but they were more crowded in some directions than others. If he looked straight ahead the more distant stars merged into a band of light that streaked across the sky, a stellar horizon, but if he looked up or down, the stars scattered to thinness, and he could see through the veil of light to a sky that was noticeably empty – and black.
Futurity had never seen a black sky before. He felt as if his own mind was crumbling, as if the bright surface of reality was breaking down, to reveal an abyssal darkness beneath. He longed to be back on 478, where the whole sky was always drenched with light.
But Poole was animated. ‘What a tremendous sky! You know, from Sol system you can make out only a few thousand stars, and the Galaxy is just a ragged band of mushy light. The Core ought to be visible from Earth – it should be as bright as the Moon – but the spiral-arm dust clouds get in the way, and it’s invisible. Futurity, it was only a few decades before the first human spaceflight that people figured out they lived in a Galaxy at all! It was as if we lived in a shack buried in the woods, while all around us the bright lights of the city were hidden by the trees.’
Poole had a kindly streak, and was empathetic. He sensed Futurity’s discomfort, and to distract him he brought the acolyte to the Captain’s office, and encouraged him to talk about himself. Futurity was flattered by his interest – this was Michael Poole! – and he responded with a torrent of words.
Futurity had always been cursed with a lively, inquisitive mind. As a young boy on the family farm, surrounded by the lowering ruins of war, he had laboured to tease healthy plants from soil illuminated by pale Galaxy-centre light. It had been fulfilling in its way, and Futurity saw with retrospect that to spend his time on the processes of life itself had satisfied some of his own inner spiritual yearnings. But the unchanging rhythms of the farm weren’t sufficient to sustain his intellect.
The only libraries on Base 478 were deep underground, where Ecclesiast scholars and scribes toiled over obscure aspects of Wignerian theology, and the only academic career available to Futurity was in a seminary. In fact, on a priest-run world, to become an Ecclesiast of some rank or other was the only way to build any kind of career. ‘On 478 even the tax collectors are priests,’ as Futurity’s father had said ruefully.
So the boy said goodbye to the farm, and donned the cassock of a novice. He gave up his childhood name for a visionary Wignerian slogan: Futurity’s Dream.
The study was hard, the rule of the Hierocrats and tutors imperious and arbitrary, but life wasn’t so bad. His intellect had been fully satisfied by his immersion in the Ecclesia’s endless and increasingly baroque studies of the historical, philosophical and theological roots of its faith. He recoiled with humility from the pastoral side of his work, though. It mortified him to hear the confession of citizens older and wiser than he was. But that very humility, one discerning Hierocrat had once told him, might mark him out as having the potential to be a fine priest.
Anyhow now, seven years later, his seemingly inevitable career choices had led him to this extraordinary situation.
‘And who are these “Kards”?’ Poole asked.
‘The Kardish Imperium is a new power that has risen in the Core,’ Futurity told Poole. ‘Named after a famous admiral of the Core wars. Expansive, aggressive, intolerant, ambitious—’
‘I know the type.’
The Kards were on the march. There was only one state, in a Galaxy quilted with petty statelets, capable of resisting the Kards – and that was the Ideocracy, the rump of the collapsed Coalition.
So far the Ideocracy had been as aloof concerning the Kardish as it was about all the successor states, which it regarded as illegal and temporary secessions from its own authority. But the Kards’ challenge was profound. Earth, base of the Ideocracy, was the home of mankind. But the Galaxy Core had been the centre of the war, and more humans had died there, by an order of magnitude, than all those who had lived and died on Earth before the age of spaceflight. The Core was the moral and spiritual capital of Homo galacticus, said the new Kard. The question was, who was the true heir to the Coalition’s mantle, Imperium or Ideocracy? The reputation of the Coalition still towered, and its name burned brightly in human imaginations; whoever won that argument might inherit a Galaxy.
This was the terrible friction that had rubbed away the life of Mara, and countless other refugees.
‘And now,’ Futurity said, ‘they are cleaning out the last Ideocracy enclaves in the Core.’
‘Ah. Like Mara’s world.’
‘Yes. There isn’t much the Ideocracy can do, short of all-out war. As for us,’ Futurity went on, ‘the Ecclesia is just trying to keep the peace.’ Through their faith the Ecclesia’s acolytes and academics had links that crossed the new, shifting political boundaries. ‘Michael Poole, the Wignerian faith was never legal under the Coalition, but it spanned the Galaxy, and in its way unified mankind. It survived the Coalition’s fall. Now, despite our fractured politics, and even though the faith itself has schismed and schismed again, it still unites us – or at least gives us something to talk to each other about. And it provides a moral, civilising centre to our affairs. If not for the faith’s moderating influence, the fall of the Coalition would have been much worse for most of humanity.’