Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

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    Tomm found a new patch of dreaming mould. Snuggled into the shade
of a damp tree root, it had settled down into a grey circle the size
of a dinner plate. Where it had crossed the crimson soil it had left
a slimy trail. You often found moulds in shady places like this. They
didn’t like the brightness of the growth lights. The muddled
starlight cast diffuse colours over the mould, but it was always
going to look ugly.
    Tomm pressed his hands into the mould. It felt cold, slimy, not
bad when you got used to it.
    And the mould started to talk to him.
    As always, it was like waking up. Suddenly he could smell the
ozone tang of the growth lights, and hear the bleating of the goat at
the Gavil place over the horizon, and he seemed to be able to see
every one of the one hundred and twenty thousand stars in the crowded
sky.
    And then he spread out sideways, that was the way he thought of
it, he reached out, left and right. The crowded stars froze over his
head - or maybe they wheeled around and around, blurring into
invisibility. He was with the mould now. And he could see its long,
simple, featureless life all of a piece, from beginning to end,
pulled out of time like a great grey slab of rock hauled out of the
ground.
    Even his heart stopped its relentless pumping.
    But there was a flitter, a spark against the orange stars.
    He dropped back into time. He stood and wiped his slimy hands on
his trousers, watching the spaceship approach.
    He was eight years old.
     
    Kard’s metallic Eyes gleamed in the complex starlight. ’Lethe, I
love it all. Is there any sight more beautiful than starbreaker light
shining through the rubble of a planet?’
    This was a globular cluster, orbiting far out of the Galaxy’s main
disc. The sky was packed with stars, orange and yellow, layer upon
layer of ancient lanterns that receded to infinity. But before those
stars, paler lights moved purposefully. They were human-controlled
ships. And Xera saw scattered pink sparks, silent detonations. Each
of those remote explosions was the dismantling of a world.
    The flitter’s hull was transparent because Rear Admiral Kard liked
it that way. Even the controls were no more than ghostly rectangles
written on the air. It was as if Xera, with Kard and Stub, their
young pilot, was falling defenceless through this crowded sky, and
she tried to ignore the churning of her stomach.
    Xera said carefully, ’I compliment you on the efficiency of your
process.’
    He waved that aside. ’Forget efficiency. Forget process.
Commissary, this cluster contains a million stars, crowded into a
ball a hundred light years across. It’s only four decades since we
first arrived here. And we will have processed them all, all those
pretty lights in the sky, within another fifty to sixty years. What
do you think of that?’
    ’Admiral - ’
    ’This is the reality of Assimilation,’ he snapped. ’Ten thousand
ships, ten million human beings, in this fleet alone. And it’s the
same all over the Expansion, across a great spherical front forty
thousand light years across. I doubt you even dream of sights like
this, back in the centre. Commissary, watch and learn…’
    Without warning, planets cannonballed out of the sky. She
cowered.
    Kard laughed at her shock. ’Oh. And here is our destination.’
Stub, the rodent-faced young pilot, turned to face them, grinning.
’Sir, wake me up when it gets interesting.’
    Stub called Xera a domehead when he thought she wasn’t listening.
She tried not to despise them both for the way they bullied her.
    There were three worlds in this sunless system, locked into a
complex gravitational dance. Xera could see them all, sweeping in
vertiginously, pale starlit discs against a crowded sky. Only one of
them was inhabited: she saw the blue of water and the grey-green of
living things splashed against its rust-red hide. It was called,
inevitably, ’Home’, in the language of the first human colonists to
have reached this place, millennia before.
    Xera was a xenoculturalist. She was here because the inhabitants
of Home had reported an indigenous sentient species on their world.
If this was true the planet might be spared from the wrecking crews,
spared from demolition for the sake of its inner iron, its natives
put to a more subtle use: mind was valuable. The fate of whole
cultures, alien and human, the fate of a world, could depend on her
assessment of the inhabitants’ claim.
    But her time was cruelly brief. Rear