She looked around. ‘There is no supply dispenser.’
‘People give me food. And water and clothes. From their rations.’
She tried to understand. ‘Why?’
He shrugged. ‘Because life is short. People want—’
‘What?’
‘Something more than the war.’
She thought about that. ‘There is the dance.’
He grinned, his empty eye socket crumpling. ‘I never could dance. Come.’
He led her to a huge window. Machines screened out the glare of the sun above, and the glower of the overheated planet below.
Between sun and planet, there was only blackness.
‘No,’ the Old Man said gently. ‘Not blackness. Look.’
They waited there for long heartbeats.
At last she saw a faint glow, laced against the black. It had structure, fine filaments and threads. It was beautiful, eerie, remote.
‘It is un-black.’
He pointed at the sun. ‘The sun is alone. If there were other suns near, we would see them, as points of light. The suns gather in pools, like that one.’ He pointed down, but the Galaxy’s disc was hidden by the bulk of the planet. ‘The un-black is pools of suns, very far away.’
She understood that.
‘Others lived here before me,’ he said. ‘They learned how to see with the machines. They left records of what they saw.’ He dug into a pocket and pulled out a handful of bones: human bones, the small bones of a hand or foot. They were scored by fine marks.
‘They speak to you with bones?’
He shrugged. ‘If you smear blood or dirt on the walls it falls away. What else do we have to draw on, but our bones, and our hearts?’ He fingered the bones carefully.
‘What do the bones say?’
He gestured at the hulking machinery. ‘These machines watch the sky for the trace of ships. But they also see the un-black: the light, the faintest light, all the light there is. Some of the light comes from the suns and pools of suns. Most of the light was made in the birthing of the universe. It is old now and tired and hard to see. But it has patterns in it…’
This meant nothing to her. Bombarded by strangeness, she tried to remember the Doctrines. ‘I crimed. I did not death, and I wanted to be deathed. Even the wanting was a crime. Then you crimed. You could have deathed me. And here—’
‘Here, I crime.’ He grinned. ‘With every breath I crime. Every one of these bones is a crime, a record of ancient crimes. Like you, I was safed.’
‘Safed?’
‘Brought here.’
She asked the hardest question of all. ‘When?’
He smiled, and the wrinkles on his face gathered up. ‘Twenty years ago. Twice your life.’
She frowned, barely comprehending. She leaned against the window, cupping her hands and peering out.
He asked, ‘What are you looking for now?’
‘Shuttles to Earth.’
He said gently, ‘There are no Shuttles.’
‘The cadre leaders—’
‘The cadre leaders say what is said to them. Think. Have you ever known anybody leave on a Shuttle? There are no Shuttles.’
‘It is a lie?’
‘It is a lie. If you live past age ten, the cadre leaders will death you. They believe they will win a place on the Shuttles. But they in turn are deathed by other cadre leaders, who believe they will steal their places on the Shuttles. And so it goes. Lies eating each other.’
No Shuttles. She sighed, and her breath fogged the smooth surface of the window. ‘Then how will we leave?’
‘We un-can leave. We are too remote. Only the Commissaries come and go. Only the Commissaries. Not us.’
She felt something stir in her heart.
‘The Shuttles are un-real. Is Earth real? Is the war real?’
‘Perhaps Earth is a lie. But the war is real. Oh, yes. The bones talk of how distant suns flare up. The war is real, and all around us, but it is very far away, and very old. But it shapes us.’ He studied her. ‘Soon the cadre leaders will pluck that baby from your belly and put it in the Birthing Vat. It will life and death for one purpose, for the war.’
She said nothing.
The Old Man said dreamily, ‘Some of the Old Men before me have seen patterns in the un-black. They have tried to understand them, as the cadre leaders make us understand the Memory images of the war. Perhaps they are thoughts, those patterns. Frozen thoughts of the creatures who lived in the first blinding second of the universal birth.’ He shook his head and gazed at the bones. ‘I un-want death. I want more than the war. I want to learn this.’
She barely heard him. She asked, ‘Who gives you food?’
He gave her names, of people she knew, and people she un-knew.
The number of them shocked her.
Hama and Arles Thrun drifted in space, side by side, two silver statues. Before them, this hot-Jupiter world continued its endless frenetic waltz around its too-close sun. The sun was a rogue star that had evaporated out of its parent galaxy long ago, and come to drift here, a meaningless beacon in the intergalactic dark.
Hama was comfortable here, in space, in the vacuum, away from the claustrophobic enclosure of the Post. Alien creatures swam through his chest cavity, subtly feeding on the distant calls of Commissaries all over the Galaxy. To Hama it was like being in a vast room where soft voices murmured in every shadowed corner, grave and wise.
‘A paradox,’ Arles Thrun murmured now.
‘What is?’
‘You are. You know, your rebuilding has extended beyond the superficial. You have been re-engineered, the layers of evolutionary haphazardness designed out of you. The inner chemical conflicts bequeathed by humanity’s past do not trouble you. You do not hear voices in your head, you do not invent gods to drive out your internal torment. You are one of the most integrated human beings who ever lived.’
‘If I am still human,’ Hama said. ‘We have no art. We are not scientists. We do not dance.’
‘No,’ said Arles earnestly. ‘Our re-engineered hearts are too cold for that. Or to desire to make babies to fill up the empty spaces. Yet we are needed, we long-lived ones.
‘It is impossible to begin to grasp the scale and complexity of an interstellar war in a human lifetime. And yet the brevity of human life is the key to the war: we fight like vermin, for to the Xeelee we are vermin – that is the central uncomfortable truth of the Doctrines. We, who do not die, are a paradoxical necessity, maintaining the attention span of the species.
‘But we know our flaws, Hama. We know that those brutish creatures down there in the Post, busily fighting and fornicating and breeding and dying, they are the true heart of humanity. And so we must defer to them.’ He eyed Hama, waiting for him to respond.
Hama said with difficulty, ‘I am not – happy.’
‘You were promised integration, not happiness.’
‘I failed to find the girl. La-ba.’
Arles smiled in the vacuum. ‘I traced her. She escaped to the sensor installation.’
‘What installation?’
‘In the tethered asteroid. Another renegade lives up there. To what purpose, I can’t imagine.’
‘This place is flawed,’ Hama said bitterly.
‘Oh, yes. Very flawed. There is a network of drones who provision the renegade. And there are more subtle problems: the multiple births occurring in the Vat; the taking of trophies from kills; the dancing … These drones seek satisfaction beyond the Doctrines. There has been ideological drift. It is a shame. You would think that in a place as isolated as this a certain purity could be sustained. But the human heart, it seems, is full of spontaneous imperfection.’