Luca gripped a rail. Aware of Teel at his side he tried not to cower, to hide his head from the stretched sky which poured down over him.
After a few days of hyperdrive hops and falls through branching wormholes, they reached the Orion Line. This was the innermost section of the Galactic spiral arm which contained Earth’s sun. They emerged at a new clustering of wormhole Interfaces, a huge interchange that dwarfed the port at Saturn, carrying the commerce of mankind across thousands of light years.
Here they transferred to a Spline, a living thing transformed into a Navy warship. In the increasingly dangerous regions into which they would now venture, such protection was necessary.
Before they resumed their journey to the centre they took dinner, just the three of them, in a transparent blister set on the Spline’s outer hull. At their small table they were served, not by automata but by humans, Navy ratings who hovered with cutlery, plates, dishes, even a kind of wine. It was a surreal experience for Luca, for all around the table, outside the blister’s glimmering walls, the Spline’s epidermis stretched away like the surface of a fleshy moon, and beyond its close horizon wormhole mouths glimmered like raindrops.
Commissary Dolo seemed slightly drunk. He was holding forth about the history of the Orion Line. ‘Do you know the geography of the Galaxy, Novice? Look over there.’ He pointed with his fork. ‘That’s the Sagittarius Arm, the next spiral arm in from ours. The Silver Ghosts strove for centuries to keep us out of those lanes of stars.’ He talked on about the epochal defeat of the Ghosts and the thunderous Expansion since, and how the great agencies of the Coalition, the Navy, the Commission, the Guards, the Academies and the rest, had worked together to achieve those victories – and how officials like the Surveyor of Revenues and the Auditor-General laboured to maintain the mighty economic machine that fuelled the endless war – and, of course, how his own department within the Commission, the Office of Doctrinal Responsibility, oversaw the rest. He made it sound as if the conquest of the Galaxy was an exercise in paperwork.
As the Commissary talked, when he thought Dolo wasn’t watching him, Luca studied Teel.
There was something animal in her deft actions with her cutlery, the powerful muscles that worked in her cheeks. It was as if she could not be sure when her next meal would come. Everything she did was so much more solid and vivid than anything else in his life – and far more fascinating than the great star clouds that illuminated the human empire. He was thrilled that they shared this transient bubble of isolation.
When Dolo fell silent, Luca took his chance. He leaned subtly closer to Teel. ‘I suppose the food we eat is the same from one end of the Galaxy to the other.’
She didn’t look directly at him, but she turned her head. ‘Since this food comes from the belly of this Spline ship, and since the Spline are used all over the Galaxy – yes, I imagine you are right, Novice.’
‘But not everything is the same,’ he found himself babbling. ‘We are about the same age, but our two lives could hardly have been more different. There is much about you that I envy.’
‘You know very little about my life.’
‘Yes, but even so—’
‘What do you envy most?’
‘Comradeship. I was born in a birthing centre and placed in a cadre. That’s how it was for everybody. The cadres are broken up in cycles; you aren’t allowed to get too close to your cadre siblings. Even at the seminaries I am in competition with the other novices. Intimacy is seen as inevitable, but is regarded as a weakness.’
‘Intimacy?’
‘I have had lovers,’ he said, ‘but I have no comrades.’ He regretted the foolish words as soon as they were uttered. ‘At the Front, everybody knows—’
‘What everybody knows is always to be questioned, Novice,’ said Dolo. Suddenly he no longer seemed drunk, and Luca wondered if he had fallen into some subtle trap. Dolo turned in his chair, waving his empty glass at the attendant ratings.
When Luca looked back, Teel had turned away. She was peering at the Sagittarius Arm’s wash of light, as if with her deep eyes she could see it more clearly.
The Galaxy was a hundred thousand light years across, and over most of its span the stars were scattered more sparsely than grains of sand spread kilometres apart. On such a scale even the greatest human enterprise was dwarfed. And yet, as they neared the centre, the sense of activity, of industry, accelerated.
They moved within the 3-Kiloparsec Arm, the innermost of the spiral arms proper, wrapped tightly around the Core region. Here, no more than a few thousand light years from the Core itself, the Spline was replenished in orbit around a world that glistened, entirely covered in metal. This was a factory world, devoted to the production of armaments. Great clusters of wormhole mouths hovered over its gleaming surface, amid a cloud of Snowflake surveillance posts.
On a data desk, Dolo sketched concentric circles. ‘The Core itself is surrounded by our fortresses, our warrior worlds and cities. As you’ll see, Novice. Behind that, out here we are in the hinterland. Around a belt hundreds of light years thick, factory worlds churn out the material needed to wage the war. And behind that there is an immense and unending inward resource flow from across the Galaxy’s disc, a flow through wormhole links and freighters of raw materials for the weapons factories, the lifeblood of a Galaxy all pouring into the centre to fuel the war.’
‘It is magnificent,’ Luca breathed. ‘An organisation Galaxy-wide, built and directed by humans.’
‘But,’ Teel said dryly, ‘do you think the Galaxy even notices we are here?’
Again Luca was disturbed by her flirting with non-Doctrine.
Dolo laughed softly. He said to Luca, ‘Tell me what you have learned about our mission. Why are we here? Why was Captain Teel required to travel all the way out to Earth? What is there in this outbreak of faith so far from Earth that concerns us?’
What concerns me, Luca thought, is my relationship with Teel. But beyond that was his duty, of course; he aspired to become a Commissary, for the Commission for Historical Truth was the mind and conscience of the Third Expansion, and he did take his mission very seriously. ‘It is only the Druz Doctrines that unite us, that enable the efficient working of the Expansion. If even our front-line troops are allowed to waste energy on foolish non-Doctrinal maundering—’
‘Captain? What do you think?’
Teel pulled her lip, and Luca saw tiny hairs there, shining in the starlight. ‘I think there is more at stake here than mere efficiency.’
‘Of course there is. Perhaps I am training the wrong novice,’ Dolo said ruefully. ‘Luca, human history is not a simple narrative, a story told to children. It is more like a pile of sand.’
‘Sand?’
‘Heaped up,’ Dolo said, miming just that. ‘And as you add more grains – one at a time, random events added to the story – the heap organises itself. But the heap, the angle of the slope, is always at a state at which it is liable to collapse with the addition of just one more grain – but you can never know which grain. This is called “self-organised criticality”. And so it is with history.’
Luca frowned. ‘But the Coalition controls history.’
Dolo laughed. ‘None of us is arrogant enough to believe that we control anything – and certainly not the historical arc of a society spanning a Galaxy, even one as unified as ours. Even the foreknowledge of the future compiled by the Libraries is of no help. All we can do is watch the grains of sand as they fall.’