Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

rest.’ He held
out his arms and smiled. It was as if he was floating in the light,
and he cast a shadow upwards into the misty air. ’Look down.’
    She saw a vast roiling ocean, almost too bright to look at
directly, where huge vacuoles surfaced and burst. It was the
photosphere of a star, just a thousand kilometres below her.
    ’Stars give all humans life,’ Sool said. ’We are their children.
Perhaps this is the purest way to live, to huddle close to the
star-mother, to use all her energy…’
    ’Quite a pitch,’ Dano murmured in her ear. ’But he’s targeting
you. Don’t let him take you in.’
    Pala felt extraordinarily excited. ’But Dano - here are people
living, breathing, even growing crops, a thousand kilometres above
the surface of a sun! Is it possible this is the true purpose of the
sphere - to terraform a star?’
    Dano snorted his contempt. ’You always were a romantic,
Missionary. What nonsense. Stick to your duties. For instance, have
you noticed that the girl has gone?’
    When she looked around, she realised that it was true; Bicansa had
disappeared.
    Dano said, ’I’ve run some tests. You know what this stuff is?
Xeelee construction material. Your first intuition was right. This
cute old man and his farm animals and grandchildren are living on a
Xeelee artefact. And it’s just ten centimetres thick.’
    ’I don’t understand,’ she admitted.
    ’All this is a smokescreen. We have to go after her,’ Dano said.
’Bicansa. Go to her >community in the north<, wherever it is. I
have a feeling that’s where we’ll learn the truth of this place.’
    While Dano murmured this sinister stuff in her ear, Sool was still
trying to get her attention. His face was underlit by sunlight, she
saw, reminding her of the portrait in his home. ’You see how
wonderful this is? We live on a platform, suspended over an ocean of
light, and all our art, our poetry is shaped by our experience of
this bounteous light. How can you even think of removing this from
the spectrum of human experience?’
    Pala felt hopelessly confused. ’Your culture will be preserved, ’
she said hopefully, still wanting to reassure him. ’In a museum.’
    Sool laughed tiredly, and he walked around in the welling
light.
     
    Pala accepted they should pursue the mysterious girl, Bicansa. But
she impulsively decided she had had enough of being remote from the
world she had come to assess.
    ’Bicansa is right. We can’t just swoop down out of the sky. We
don’t know what we’re throwing away if we don’t take the time to
look.’
    ’But there is no time,’ Dano said wearily. ’The Expansion front is
encountering thousands of new star systems every day. Why do you
think you’re here alone?’
    ’Alone save for you, my Virtual conscience.’
    ’Don’t get cocky.’
    ’Well, whether you like it or not, I am here, on the ground, and
I’m the one making the decisions.’
    And so, she decided, she wasn’t going to use her flitter. She
would pursue Bicansa as the native girl had travelled herself - by
car, over the vacuum road laid out over the star sphere.
    ’You’re a fool,’ snapped Dano. ’We don’t even know how far north
her community is.’
    He was right, of course. Pala was shocked to find out how sparse
the scouts’ information on this star-world was. There were light
lakes scattered across the sphere from pole to pole, but away from
the equator the compensating effects of centrifugal force would
diminish. In their haste the scouts had assumed that no human
communities would have established themselves away from the
standard-gravity equatorial belt, and hadn’t mapped the sphere that
far out.
    She would be heading into the unknown, then. She felt a shiver of
excitement at the prospect. But Dano admonished her for being
distracted from her purpose.
    He insisted that she shouldn’t use one of the locals’ cars, as she
had planned, but a Coalition design shipped down from the Navy ferry.
And, he said, she would have to wear a cumbersome hard-carapace
skinsuit the whole way. She gave in to these conditions with bad
grace. It took a couple of days for the preparations to be completed,
days she spent alone in the flitter at Dano’s order, lest she be
seduced by the bucolic comfort of Home.
    At last everything was ready, and Pala took her place in the
car.
    She set off. The road ahead was a track of comet-core metal, laid
down by human engineering across the immense face of the star sphere.
To either