Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

as a trophy.
    La-ba and Ca-si sexed, there and then, in the slippery dirt.
    Later, at the end of the shift, they got clean, and sexed
again.
    Later still they joined in a dance, a vast abandoned whirl of a
hundred citizens, more. Then they sexed again.
    He never did report her crime. By failing to do so, of course, he
was criming himself. Maybe that bonded them.
    They kept sexing, whatever the reason.
     
    Hama stood beside his mentor, Arles Thrun, as the citizens of the
Observation Post filed before them. The marching drones stared at
Hama’s silvered skin, and they reached respectfully to stroke the
gleaming egg-shaped Memory that Arles held in his hand: the treasure,
brought from Earth itself, that the Commissaries were here to present
to the drones of this Post.
    One in three of the drones who passed was assigned, by Arles’s
ancient, wordless gesture, to the Cull. Perhaps half of those
assigned would survive. Each drone so touched shrank away from
Arles’s gleaming finger.
    When Hama looked to the up-curving horizon he saw that the line of
patiently queuing drones stretched a quarter of the way around the
Post’s internal equator.
    This Observation Post was a sphere, so small Hama could have
walked around its interior in a day. The folded-over sky was crowded
with Cadre Squares, dormitory blocks and training and indoctrination
centres, and the great sprawls of the Post’s more biological
functions, the Cesspits and the Cyclers and the Gardens, green and
brown and glistening blue. The great Birthing Vat itself hung
directly over his head at the geometric centre of the sphere, pink
and fecund, an obscene sun. Drones walked all over the inner surface
of the sphere, stuck there by inertial generators, manipulated
gravity. The air was thick with the stink of growing things, of dirt
and sweat. To Hama, it was like being trapped within the belly of
some vast living thing.
    It didn’t help his mood to reflect that just beyond the floor
beneath his feet the host planet’s atmosphere raged: a perpetual
hydrogen storm, laced with high-frequency radiation and charged
particles.
    Absently he reached into his drab monastic robe and touched his
chest. He stroked the cool, silvered Planck-zero epidermis, sensed
the softly gurgling fluid within, where alien fish swam languidly.
Here in this dismal swamp, immersed in the primeval, he could barely
sense the mood even of Arles, who stood right next to him. He longed
for the cool interstellar gulf, the endless open where the merged
thoughts of Commissaries sounded across a trillion stars…
    ’Hama, pay attention,’ Arles Thrun snapped.
    Hama focused reluctantly on the soft round faces of the drones,
and saw they betrayed agitation and confusion at his behaviour.
    ’Remember this is a great day for them,’ Arles murmured dryly.
’The first Commission visit in a thousand years - and it is happening
in the brief lifetime of this creature.’ His silvered hand patted
indulgently at the bare head of the drone before him. ’How lucky they
are, even if we will have to order the deaths of so many of them.
There is so little in their lives - little more than the wall images
that never change, the meaningless battle for position in the cadre
hierarchies…
    And the dance, Hama thought reluctantly, their wild illegal dance.
’They disgust me,’ he hissed, surprising himself. Yet it was
true.
    Arles glanced at him. ’You’re fortunate they do not
understand.’
    ’They disgust me because their language has devolved into jabber,’
Hama said. ’They disgust me because they have bred themselves into
over-population.’
    Arles murmured, ’Hama, when you accepted the burden of longevity
you chose a proud name. I sometimes wonder whether you have the
nobility to match that name. These creatures’ names were chosen for
them by a random combination of syllables.’
    ’They spend their lives on make-work. They eat and screw and die,
crawling around in their own filth. What need has a candle-flame of a
name?’
    Arles was frowning now, sapphire eyes flickering in the silver
mask of his face. ’Have you forgotten the core tenet of the
Doctrines? A brief life burns brightly, Hama. These creatures and
their forebears have maintained their lonely vigil, here beyond the
Galaxy - monitoring the progress of the war - for five thousand
years. We have neglected them; isolated, they have - drifted. But
these drones are the essence of humanity. And we Commissaries -
doomed to knowledge,