Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

though, in the eyes of Commissaries, such
idolising would only get their captain deeper into trouble.
    All this could only help so far. What I felt I was missing was
motive. I didn’t understand why Dakk had done what she had done.
    I felt I couldn’t get her into focus. I oscillated between
despising her and longing to defend her - and all the time I felt
oppressed by the paradoxical bond that locked us together. I sensed
she felt the same. Sometimes she was as impatient with me as with the
greenest recruit, and other times she seemed to try to take me under
her wing. It can’t have been easy for her either, to be reminded that
she had once been as insignificant as me. But if we were two slices
of the same person, our situations weren’t symmetrical. She had been
me, long ago; I was doomed to become her; it was as if she had paid
dues that still faced me.
    Anyhow, that was why I had requested a break from the
deliberations, so I could spend some time with Dakk on her home
territory. I had to get to know her - even though I felt increasingly
reluctant to be drawn into her murky future.
    She brought me to a new chamber, deep within the Spline ship.
Criss-crossed by struts of cartilage, this place was dominated by a
pillar made of translucent red-purple rope. There was a crackling
stench of ozone.
    I knew where I was. ’This is the hyperdrive chamber.’
    ’Yes.’ She reached up and stroked fibres. ’Magnificent, isn’t it?
I remember when I first saw a Spline hyperdrive muscle - ’
    ’Of course you remember.’
    ’What?’
    ’Because it’s now. This is my first time seeing this. And I’m
you.’ Some day, I thought gloomily, I would inevitably find myself
standing on the other side of this room, looking back at my own face.
’Don’t you remember this? Being me, twenty years old, meeting -
you?’
    Her answer confused me. ’It doesn’t work like that.’ She glared at
me. ’You do understand how come I’m stuck back in the past, staring
at your zit-ridden face?’
    ’No,’ I admitted reluctantly.
    ’It was a Tolman manoeuvre.’ She searched my face. ’Every
faster-than-light starship is a time machine. Come on, ensign. That’s
just special relativity! Even >Tolman< is the name of some
long-dead pre-Extirpation scientist. They teach this stuff to
four-year-olds.’
    I shrugged. ’You forget all that unless you want to become a
navigator.’
    ’With an attitude like that you have an ambition to be a
captain?’
    ’I don’t,’ I said slowly, ’have an ambition to be a captain.’
    That gave her pause. But she said, ’The bottom line is that if you
fight a war with FTL starships, time slips are always possible, and
you have to anticipate them… Think of it this way. There is no
universal now. Say it’s midnight here. We’re a light-minute from the
Base. So what time is it in your fleapit barracks on 529? What if you
could focus a telescope on a clock on the ground?’
    I thought about it. It would take a minute for an image of the
clock on the Base to reach me at lightspeed. So that would show a
minute before midnight… ’OK, but if you adjust for the time lag
needed for signals to travel at lightspeed, you can construct a
standard now - can’t you?’
    ’If everybody was stationary, maybe. But suppose this creaky old
Spline was moving at half lightspeed. Even you must have heard of
time dilation. Our clocks would be slowed as seen from the base, and
theirs would be slowed as seen from here. Think it through further.
There could be a whole flotilla of ships out here, moving at
different velocities, their timescales all different. They could
never agree.
    ’You get the point? Globally speaking there is no past and future.
There are only events - like points on a huge graph, with axes marked
space and time. That’s the way to think of it. The events swim
around, like fish; and the further away they are the more they swim,
from your point of view. So there is no one event on the Base, or on
Earth, or anywhere else which can be mapped uniquely to your now. In
fact there is a whole range of such events at distant places, moving
at different speeds.
    ’Because of that looseness, histories are ambiguous. A single
location on Earth itself has a definite history, of course, and so
does the Base. But Earth is maybe ten thousand light years from here.
It’s pointless to map dates of specific events on Earth against Base
dates; they can vary across a span of millennia. You can even have