Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

there was no honour in growing old - and
something in Dakk, even now, despite all she had gone through, still
felt the same way. After surviving her earlier engagements she was
not content to be a living hero. On some deep level she was ashamed
to be alive. So she had let Hama, our lost child, live out her own
dream - a dream of certain youthful death. Even though in the process
she violated orders. Even though it damaged humanity’s cause. And now
she envied Hama his moment of glorious youthful suicide, even though
it was an incident lost in a vanished future.
    I think Dakk wanted to say more, but I turned away. I was aware I
was out of my depth; counselling your elder self over the erasure of
her whole career, not to mention her child, isn’t exactly a situation
you come across every day.
    Anyhow I was feeling elated. Despite disgrace for a crime I’d
never committed, despite my own screwed-up career, despite the loss
of a baby I would never know, despite the wrecking of any
relationship I might have had with Tarco, I was relieved. Frankly, I
was glad I wouldn’t turn into the beat-up egomaniac I saw before me.
And I would never have to live through this scene again, standing on
the other side of the room, looking back at my own face.
    Is that cruel? I couldn’t help it. I was free.
    Tarco had a question to ask. ’Sir - do we win?’
    Varcin kept his face expressionless. He clapped his hands, and the
images over our heads changed.
     
    It was as if the scale expanded.
    I saw fleets with ships more numerous than the stars. I saw
planets burn, stars flare and die. I saw the Galaxy reduced to a
wraith of crimson stars that guttered like dying candles. I saw
people - but people like none I’d ever heard of: people living on
lonely outposts suspended in empty intergalactic spaces, people
swimming through the interior of stars, people trapped in abstract
environments I couldn’t even recognise. I saw shining people who flew
through space, naked as gods.
    And I saw people dying, in great waves, unnumbered hordes of
them.
    Varcin said, ’We think there is a major crux in the next few
millennia. A vital engagement at the centre of the Galaxy. Many of
the history sheaves seem to converge at that point. Beyond that
everything is uncertain. The farther downstream, the more misty are
the visions, the more strange the protagonists, even the humans…
There are paths to a glorious future, an awesome future of mankind
victorious. And there are paths that lead to defeat - even
extinction, all human possibilities extinguished. Your question isn’t
a simple one, ensign.’
    Dakk, Tarco and I shared glances. Our intertwined destinies were
complex. But I bet the three of us had only one thought in our minds
at that moment: that we were glad we were mere Navy tars, that we did
not have to deal with this.
    That was almost the end of it. The formal court was due to
convene; the meeting was over.
    But there was still something that troubled me. ’Commissary? ’
    ’Yes, ensign?’
    ’Do we have free will?’
    Captain Dakk grimaced. ’Oh, no, ensign. Not us. We have duty.’
    We walked out of the Map Room, where unrealised futures flickered
like moth wings.
     
    As the two sides worked over their successive drafts of history,
as timescales stretched to fit the vast spatial arena of a Galactic
war, the Coalition laboured to keep mankind united. It succeeded, to
an astonishing degree.
    But there was always plenty of room, plenty of time, for things to
drift.
    One such dark corner was an Observation Post, flung far out of the
Galaxy itself.

 
IN THE UN-BLACK
AD 22,254
     
     
    On the day La-ba met Ca-si she saved his life.
    She hadn’t meant to. It was un-Doctrine. It just happened. But it
changed everything.
    It had been a bad day for La-ba. She had been dancing. That wasn’t
un-Doctrine, not exactly, but the cadre leaders disapproved. She was
the leader of the dance, and she got stuck with Cesspit detail for
ten days. It was hard, dirty work, the worst.
    And would-be deathers flourished there, in the pit. They would
come swimming through the muck itself to get you.
    That was what happened just two hours after she started work.
Naked, she was standing knee-deep in a river of unidentifiable,
odourless muck. Two strong hands grabbed her ankles and pulled her
flat on her face. Suddenly her eyes and mouth and nose and ears were
full of dense, sticky waste.
    La-ba reached down to her toes. She found hands on her ankles,