‘Yes. Because now we are building a new generation of starships, great living ships thirsty for Port Sol’s water. Layers of history.’
‘Luru, why should I be tainted in this way? Why my family?’
‘It’s common on Port Sol,’ Luru said. ‘Relatively. Even during the Occupation, and again under the Coalition’s persecution, the undying fled to the outer system – to the gas giants’ moons, to here, a forgotten backwater. Yes, this was a hideout for undying.’
‘I know. That’s why the Coalition were so brutal.’
‘Yes. Many undying escaped the Coalition invasion, and fled further. A flock of generation starships rose from the ice of Port Sol, even as the Coalition ships approached, commanded by undying; nobody knows what became of them. But while they were here, you see, the undying perturbed the gene pool, with their own taint of longevity. It’s not a surprise that throwbacks like you, as the Commission calls you, should arise here.’
‘Luru Parz, I don’t know what to do. Will I have to hide?’
‘Yes. But you mustn’t be ashamed. There is an evolutionary logic to our longevity.’ Luru clutched a fist over her heart. ‘Listen to me. Before we were human, when we were animals, we died after the end of our fertile years, like animals. But then, as we evolved, we changed. We lived on, long after fertility ended. Do you know why? So that grandmothers could help their daughters raise the next generation. And that is how we overcame the other animals, and came to own the Earth – through longevity. Immortality is good for the species, even if the species doesn’t know it. You must hide, Faya. But you must not be ashamed of what you are.’
‘I don’t want to hide.’
‘You don’t have a choice. The Coalition are planning a new future for mankind, an expansion to the stars that will sweep on, for ever. There will be no place for the old. But of course that’s just the latest rationalisation. People have always burned witches.’
Faya didn’t know what a witch was.
And then a Virtual of Faya’s mother’s face congealed in the air before her, the bearer of bad news about Lieta.
Faya and Spina held each other, sitting side by side. For now they were done with weeping, and they had readmitted Ank Sool, the Commissary.
‘I don’t understand,’ Faya said. It was the brevity that was impossible to bear – a handful of Dances, a flash of beauty and joy, and then dust. And why should her sister die so suddenly now, why was her life cut short, just as the prospect of eternity opened up for Faya? ‘Why Lieta? Why now?’
Sool said, ‘Blame the Qax. The pharaohs never bred true. Many of their offspring died young, or their development stopped at an unsuitable age, so that immortality remained in the gift of the occupiers. The Qax were always in control, you see.’
Faya said carefully, ‘Commissary, I think I will always suspect, in a corner of my heart, that you allowed this death to happen, in order to bring me under control.’
His eyes were blank. ‘The Commission for Historical Truth has no need of such devices.’
Spina grasped her daughter’s hands. ‘Take the mortality treatment, dear. It’s painless. Get it over, and you will be safe.’
‘You could have sent me to the Commission as a child. I could have been cured then. I need never have even known.’
Sool said dryly, ‘So you would blame your mother rather than the Qax. How – human.’
Spina’s face crumpled. ‘Oh, love, how could I take such a gift away from you – even to protect you?’
‘It’s your decision,’ said Sool.
‘It always had to be,’ said her mother.
Again she swept into orbit with Luru Parz, seeking privacy.
This is how it will be for me from now on, she thought: hiding from people. I will be one of a handful of immortal companions, like crabbed, folded-over Luru here, standing like unchanging rocks in a landscape of evanescent flowers.
That or mortality.
‘I can’t stand the thought of seeing them all growing old and dying around me. For ever.’
Luru nodded. ‘I know. But you aren’t thinking big enough, child. On a long enough timescale, everything is as transient as one of your Halo Dances. Why, perhaps we will even live to see the stars themselves sputter to life, fade and die.’ She smiled. ‘Stars are like people. Even stars come and go, you see. They die all in a blaze, or fade like the last light of the sun – but you’ve never seen a sunset, have you? The glory is always brief – but it is worth having, even so. And you will remember the glory, and make it live on. It’s your purpose, Faya.’
‘My burden,’ she said bleakly.
‘We have great projects, long ambitions, beyond the imagination of these others. Come with me.’
Tentatively Faya reached out her hand, Luru took it. Her flesh was cold.
‘I will have to say farewell—’
‘Not farewell. Goodbye. Get used to it.’
Before they left she visited the amphitheatre, one last time. And – though she knew she could never let anybody watch her, ever again – she Danced and Danced, as the waiting stars blazed.
Even as the Coalition hardened its grip on mankind, and continued its hideous cleansing of Sol system, it launched a new thrust to the stars.
The Third Expansion of mankind was the most vigorous yet and, driven by the new ideology of Hama Druz, the most purposeful.
I and those like me tried to stay out of the way of the engines of history.
As the Expansion unfolded humanity once more encountered alien kinds, and re-engaged in wider Galactic history. It was only a little more than eighty years after the liberation from the Qax that a first contact of devastating significance was made.
PART TWO: THE WAR WITH THE GHOSTS
SILVER GHOST
AD 5499
Minda didn’t even see the volcanic plume before it swallowed up her flitter.
Suddenly the fragile little craft was turning end over end, alarms wailing and flashing, all its sensors disabled. But to Minda, feeling nothing thanks to her cabin’s inertial suspension, it was just a light show, a Virtual game, nothing to do with her.
Just seconds after entering the ash plume, the flitter rammed itself upside down into an unfeasibly hard ground. Crumpling metal screamed. Then the inertial suspension failed. Minda tumbled out of her seat, and her head slammed into the cabin roof.
Immersed in sudden silence, sprawled on the inverted ceiling, she found herself staring out of a window. Gushing vapour obscured the landscape. That was air, she thought woozily. The frozen air of this world, of Snowball, blasted to vapour by the flitter’s residual heat.
All she could think of was what her cadre leader would have to say. You fouled up, Bryn would tell her. You don’t deserve to survive. And the species will be stronger for your deletion.
I’m fifteen years old. I’m strong. I’m not dead yet. I’ll show her.
She passed out.
Maybe she awoke, briefly. She thought she heard a voice.
‘…You are a homeotherm. That is, your body tries to maintain a constant temperature. It is a common heat management strategy. You have an inner hot core, which appears to comprise your digestive organs and your nervous system, and an outer cooler shell, of skin and fat and muscle and limbs. The outer shell serves as a buffer between the outside world and the core. Understanding this basic mechanism should help you survive…’