Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

med cloak abruptly turned bright blue.
    Xera hurried to the dying pilot. Kard swore, stood up and walked
away.
    Tomm stared.
    Xera felt for a pulse - it was desperately feathery - and bent her
ear to Stub’s mouth, trying to detect a breath. I’m here to stand in
judgement on another race, perhaps much more ancient than my own, she
thought. But I can’t even save this wretched boy, lying in the
dirt.
    Kard stalked around. The crimson dust had stained his gleaming
boots. ’We walked all this way for nothing.’
    ’It was your call,’ she snapped. ’If we had gone to the farmers
for help, maybe we could have saved him.’
    Kard wasn’t about to accept that. He turned on her. ’Listen to me,
Commissary - ’
    Tomm was pressing bits of the dreaming mould into Stub’s
mouth.
    Kard grabbed Tomm’s arm. ’What are you doing?’
    ’The mould wants to help him. This is what we do.’
    Xera asked quickly, ’When you hurt, when you die, you do
this?’
    ’You take him out of time.’
    Kard said, ’You’ll choke him, you little grub.’ He was still
holding the boy’s arm.
    ’Admiral, let the kid go.’
    He said dangerously, ’This is a Navy man.’
    ’But we failed him, Kard. The cloak can’t help. He’s dying. Let
the boy do what he wants. If it makes him feel better…’
    Kard’s face worked. But he broke away.
    Bleakly, helplessly, Xera watched the boy patiently feed bits of
the mould into the pilot’s mouth.
    You take him out of time.
    Could it be true? How would it be to loosen the grasp of time - to
have a mind filled with green thoughts, like a vegetable’s perhaps -
to be empty of everything but self? Kard had said the mould had no
goals. But what higher goal could there be? Who needed starships and
cities and wars and empires, when you could free yourself at last of
the fear of death? And what greater empathy could there be than to
share such a gift with others?
    Or maybe the mould was just some hallucinogen, chewed by bored
farmers.
    Stub’s breathing, though shallow, seemed a little easier.
    She said, ’I think it’s working.’
    Kard wouldn’t even look down. ’No.’
    ’Admiral - ’
    He turned on her. ’I know the sentience laws. What defines
intelligence? You need to have goals, and pursue them. What goals has
a slime mould got? Second, you need to have empathy: some kind of
awareness of intelligence in others. And, most fundamentally, you
need a sense of time. Life can only exist in a universe complex
enough to be out of equilibrium - there could be no life in a mushy
heat bath, with no flows of energy or mass. So tracking time is
fundamental to intelligence, for a sense of time derives from the
universal disequilibrium that drives life itself. There. If these
creatures really don’t have a time sense they can’t be intelligent.
How do you answer that? There’s nothing here, Commissary. Nothing for
you to save.’
    She pressed her fingers to her temples. ’Admiral - the history of
human understanding is about discarding prejudices, about ourselves,
about others, about the nature of life, mind. We have come a long
way, but we’re still learning. Perhaps even an insistence on a time
sense itself is just another barrier in our thinking…’
    Kard, she could see, wasn’t listening.
    But, she thought, it isn’t just about the sentience laws, is it,
Admiral? You can’t accept that you made the wrong call today. Just as
you can’t accept that the humble creatures here, the farmers and this
boy and even the mould, might know something you don’t. You’d rather
destroy it all than accept that.
    Data scrolled across her desk. She glanced down. The desk had
continued patiently to work on the orbital data. The figure-of-eight
configuration was rare, the desk reported now, vanishingly unlikely.
Surely too improbable to be natural. She felt wonder stir. Had they
been vain, at the last? Before they dissolved down into this humble
form, even gave up their shape, had they left a grandiose dynamic
signature scrawled across the sky?…
    But it’s too late, too late. This place will be destroyed, and
we’ll never know what happened here.
    Kard raised his engineered face, restless, trapped on the ground.
’Lethe, I hate this, the dust and the pain. The sooner I get back to
the sky the better. You know what? None of this matters. Whether
you’re right or wrong about the mould, your petty moral dilemmas are
irrelevant, Commissary. Because the Assimilation is nearly over.
We’ve