She did not resist.
She felt the fingers pull away from her neck.
With brisk roughness she was flipped on her back. Her assailant sat on her legs, heavy in his hardsuit. Rock rain pattered on his shoulders, red-gleaming pebbles that stuck for a second before dropping away, cooling to grey.
It was, of course, Ca-si.
‘You un-hunted me,’ he said, and his words crackled in her ears. ‘And now you un-resist me.’ She felt his hands on her shoulders, and she remembered how his skin had touched hers, but there was no feeling through the hardsuits. He said, ‘You crime if you un-death me. You crime if you let me death you.’
‘It is true.’ So it was. According to the Doctrines that shaped their lives, it was the duty of the strong to destroy the weak.
Ca-si sat back. ‘I will death you.’ But he ran his gloved hands over her body, over her breasts, to her belly.
And he found the bulge there, exposed by the contoured hardsuit.
His eyes widened.
‘Now you know,’ she screamed at him.
His face twisted behind the thick plate. ‘I must death you even if you have babied.’
‘Yes! Death me! Get it over!’
‘…No. There is another way.’
There was a hand on Ca-si’s shoulder. He twisted, startled.
Another stood over them, occluding the raging rock clouds. This other was wearing an ancient, scuffed hardsuit. Through a scratched and starred faceplate, La-ba made out one eye, one dark socket, a mesh of wrinkles.
It was the Old Man: the monster of whom infants whispered to each other even before they had left the Birthing Vat.
Ca-si fell away. He was screaming and screaming, terrified. La-ba lay there, stunned, unable to speak.
The Old Man reached down and hauled La-ba to her feet. ‘Come.’ He pulled her towards the cable which connected the Post to space.
There was a door in the cable.
Hama kept Ca-si in custody.
The boy paced back and forth in the small cell Hama had created for him, his muscles sliding beneath his skin. He would mutter sometimes, agitated, clearly troubled by whatever had become of his lost love.
But when Ca-si inspected the Commissary’s silvered epidermis and the fish that swam in his chest, a different look dawned on his fleshy, soft face. It was a look of awe, incomprehension, and – admit it, Hama! – disgust.
He knew Arles disapproved of his obsession with this boy. ‘The result of your assignment of them to the Cull was satisfactory,’ he had said. ‘Two went out; one came back. What does it matter?’
But Hama pointed to evidences of flaws – the lack of trophies from the body being the most obvious. ‘All these disgusting drones take trophies from their kills. There’s something wrong here.’
‘There is more than one way of manifesting weakness, Hama. If the other let herself die it is better she is deleted from the gene pool anyhow.’
‘That is not according to the strict Doctrines.’
Arles had sighed, and passed a glimmering hand over the silver planes of his cheek. ‘But even our longevity is a violation of the Doctrines – if a necessary one. Druz is seventeen thousand years dead, Hama. His Doctrines have become – mature. You will learn.’
But Hama had not been satisfied.
Hama faced the boy. He forced his silvered face into a smile. ‘You have been isolated here a long time.’
‘A hundred births,’ the boy said sullenly.
That was about right: a thousand years since the last Commission visit, a hundred of these drones’ brief generations. ‘Yes. A hundred births. And, in enough time, languages change. Did you know that? After just a few thousand years of separation two identical languages will diverge so much that they would share no common features except basic grammatical constructs – like the way a language indicates possession, or uses more subtle features like ergativity, which…’
The boy was just staring at him, dull, not even resentful.
Hama felt foolish, and then angry to be made to feel that way. He said sternly, ‘To rectify language drift is part of our duty. The Commission for Historical Truth, I mean. We will reteach you Standard. Just as we will leave you the Memory, with the story of mankind since you were last visited, and we will take away your story to tell it to others. We bind up mankind on all our scattered islands. Just as it is your duty—’
‘To death.’
‘To die. Yes. You are hidden inside a planet, a gas giant, out of sight of the enemy. The machines here watch for the enemy. They have watched for five thousand years, and they may watch for five thousand years more. If the enemy come you must do everything you can to destroy them, and if you cannot, you must destroy the machines, and the Post, and yourself.’
This boy was actually no more than a backup mechanism, Hama thought. A final self-destruct, in case this station’s brooding automated defences failed. For this sole purpose, five hundred generations of humans had lived and loved and bred and died, here in the intergalactic waste.
Ca-si watched him dully, his powerful hands clenched into fists. As he gazed at the planes of the boy’s stomach Hama felt an uncomfortable inner warmth, a restlessness.
On impulse he snapped, ‘Who do we fight? Do you know?’
‘We fight the Xeelee.’
‘Why do we fight?’
The boy stared at him.
Hama ordered, ‘Look at me.’ He pulled open his robe. ‘This silver skin comes from a creature called a Silver Ghost. Once the Ghosts owned worlds and built cities. Now we farm their skins. The fish in my belly are called Squeem. Once they conquered mankind, occupied Earth itself. Now they are mere symbiotes in my chest, enabling me to speak to my colleagues across the Galaxy. These are triumphs for mankind.’
The look on Ca-si’s face made Hama think he didn’t regard his condition as a triumph.
Angry, oddly confused, Hama snapped, ‘I know you didn’t kill the girl. Why did you spare her? Why did she spare you? Where is she?’
But the boy wouldn’t reply.
It seemed there was nothing Hama could do to reach Ca-si, as he longed to.
La-ba ascended into strangeness.
The hollow cable had a floor that lifted you up, and windows so you could see out. Inside, she rode all the way out of the air, into a place of harsh flat light.
When she looked down she saw a floor of churning red gas. Auroras flapped in its textured layers, making it glow purple. When she looked up she saw only a single burning, glaring light.
The Old Man tried to make her understand. ‘The light is the sun. The red is the world. The Post floats in the air of the world. We have risen up out of the air, into space.’
She couldn’t stop staring at his face. It was a mass of wrinkles. He had one eye, one dark purple pit. His face was much stranger than the sun and the churning world.
The cable ended in another giant ball, like the Post. But this ball was dimpled by big black pits, like the bruises left by the heels of her hands in the face of the We-ku. And it floated in space, not the air. It was a moon, attached to the cable.
Inside the ball there was a cavity, but there were no people or Cadre Squares and no Birthing Vat: only vast mechanical limbs that glistened, sinister, sliding over each other.
‘No people live here,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘One person does.’
He showed her his home inside the tethered moon. It was just a shack made of bits of shining plastic. There were blankets on the floor, and clothes, and empty food packets. It was dirty, and it smelled a little.