Or maybe the mould was just some hallucinogen, chewed by bored farmers.
Stub’s breathing, though shallow, seemed a little easier.
She said, ‘I think it’s working.’
Kard wouldn’t even look down. ‘No.’
‘Admiral—’
He turned on her. ‘I know the sentience laws. What defines intelligence? You need to have goals, and pursue them. What goals has a slime mould got? Second, you need to have empathy: some kind of awareness of intelligence in others. And, most fundamentally, you need a sense of time. Life can only exist in a universe complex enough to be out of equilibrium – there could be no life in a mushy heat bath, with no flows of energy or mass. So tracking time is fundamental to intelligence, for a sense of time derives from the universal disequilibrium that drives life itself. There. If these creatures really don’t have a time sense they can’t be intelligent. How do you answer that? There’s nothing here, Commissary. Nothing for you to save.’
She pressed her fingers to her temples. ‘Admiral – the history of human understanding is about discarding prejudices, about ourselves, about others, about the nature of life, mind. We have come a long way, but we’re still learning. Perhaps even an insistence on a time sense itself is just another barrier in our thinking…’
Kard, she could see, wasn’t listening.
But, she thought, it isn’t just about the sentience laws, is it, Admiral? You can’t accept that you made the wrong call today. Just as you can’t accept that the humble creatures here, the farmers and this boy and even the mould, might know something you don’t. You’d rather destroy it all than accept that.
Data scrolled across her desk. She glanced down. The desk had continued patiently to work on the orbital data. The figure-of-eight configuration was rare, the desk reported now, vanishingly unlikely. Surely too improbable to be natural. She felt wonder stir. Had they been vain, at the last? Before they dissolved down into this humble form, even gave up their shape, had they left a grandiose dynamic signature scrawled across the sky?…
But it’s too late, too late. This place will be destroyed, and we’ll never know what happened here.
Kard raised his engineered face, restless, trapped on the ground. ‘Lethe, I hate this, the dust and the pain. The sooner I get back to the sky the better. You know what? None of this matters. Whether you’re right or wrong about the mould, your petty moral dilemmas are irrelevant, Commissary. Because the Assimilation is nearly over. We’ve cleaned out this Galaxy. There’s nothing left to oppose us now – nothing but one more opponent.’
‘I have my assessment to finish—’
‘Nothing happened here, Commissary. Nothing.’
Tomm sat back, smiling.
It seemed to Xera that the young pilot’s face relaxed, that he breathed a little easier, before he was still.
Personally I have more sympathy for Xera and her complex ethical dilemmas than with Kard.
But it was Kard’s arrogant impatience that caught the flavour of the times.
Mayfly generations tick by terribly quickly. And almost all mayflies, embedded in history, believe that their epoch is eternal, that things will be this way until the end of time. Almost all. It takes a special mayfly to understand that he is living through a time of flux, a time when great forces are shifting – and even more special to be able to influence those forces.
Kard turned out to be one such.
Just as he had said, the Galaxy was cleaned out. Only one more opponent remained. Only one war remained to be completed.
But it had to be started first.
THE GREAT GAME
AD 12,659
We were in our blister, waiting for the drop. My marines, fifty of them in their bright orange Yukawa suits, were sitting in untidy rows. They were trying to hide it, but I could see the tenseness in the way they clutched their static lines, and their unusual reluctance to rib the wetbacks.
Well, when I looked through the blister’s transparent walls and out into the dangerous sky, I felt it myself.
We had been flung far out of the main disc, and the sparse orange-red stars of the halo were a foreground to the Galaxy itself, a pool of curdled light that stretched to right and left as far as you could see. But as our Spline ship threw itself gamely through its complicated evasive manoeuvres, that great sheet of light flapped around us like a bird’s broken wing. I could see our destination’s home sun – it was a dwarf, a pinprick glowing dim red – but even the target star jiggled around the sky as the Spline bucked and rolled.
And, leaving aside the vertigo, what twisted my own stress muscles was the glimpses I got of the craft that swarmed like moths around that dwarf star. Beautiful swooping ships with sycamore-seed wings – unmistakable, they were Xeelee nightfighters. The Xeelee were the Spline Captain’s responsibility, not mine. But I couldn’t stop my over-active mind speculating on what had lured such a dense concentration of them so far out of the Galactic Core, their usual stamping ground.
Given the tension, it was almost a relief when Lian threw up.
Those Yukawa suits are heavy and stiff, meant for protection rather than flexibility, but she managed to lean far enough forward that her bright yellow puke mostly hit the floor. Her buddies reacted as you’d imagine.
‘Sorry, Lieutenant.’ She was the youngest of the troop, at seventeen ten years younger than me.
I handed her a wipe. ‘I’ve seen worse, marine. Anyhow you’ve left the wetbacks something to clean up. Keep them busy when we’ve gone.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The mood was fragile, but I was managing it. What you definitively don’t want at such moments is a visit from the brass. Which, of course, is what we got.
Admiral Kard came stalking through the drop blister, muttering to the loadmaster, nodding at marines. At Kard’s side was a Commissary – you could tell that was her role at a glance – a woman, tall, ageless, in the classic costume of the Commission for Historical Truth, a floor-sweeping gown and shaved-bald head. She looked as cold and lifeless as every Commissary I ever met.
Admiral Kard picked me out. ‘Lieutenant Neer, correct?’
I stood up, brushing vomit off my suit. ‘Sir.’
‘Welcome to Shade,’ he said evenly.
I could see how the troops were tensing up. We didn’t need this. But I couldn’t have thrown out an admiral, not on his flagship.
‘We’re ready to drop, sir.’
‘Good.’
Just then the destination planet, at last, swam into view. We grunts knew it only by a number. That eerie sun was too dim to cast much light, and despite low-orbiting sunsats much of the land and sea was dark velvet. But great orange rivers of fire coursed across the black ground. This was a suffering world; you could see that from space.
The Commissary peered out at the tilted landscape, hands folded behind her back. ‘Remarkable. It’s like a geology demonstrator. Look at the lines of volcanoes and ravines. Every one of this world’s tectonic faults has given way, all at once.’
Admiral Kard eyed me. ‘You must forgive Commissary Xera. She does think of the universe as a textbook, set out before us for our education.’
He was rewarded for that with a glare.
I kept silent, uncomfortable. Everybody knows about the strained relations between Navy, the fighting arm of mankind’s Third Expansion, and Commission, implementer of political will. Maybe that structural rivalry was the reason for this impromptu walk-through, as the Commissary jostled for influence over events, and the Admiral tried to score points with a display of his fighting troops.