Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

’
    ’To death.’
    ’To die. Yes. You are hidden inside a planet, a gas giant, out of
sight of the enemy. The machines here watch for the enemy. They have
watched for five thousand years, and they may watch for five thousand
years more. If the enemy come you must do everything you can to
destroy them, and if you cannot, you must destroy the machines, and
the Post, and yourself.’
    This boy was actually no more than a backup mechanism, Hama
thought. A final self-destruct, in case this station’s brooding
automated defences failed. For this sole purpose, five hundred
generations of humans had lived and loved and bred and died, here in
the intergalactic waste.
    Ca-si watched him dully, his powerful hands clenched into fists.
As he gazed at the planes of the boy’s stomach Hama felt an
uncomfortable inner warmth, a restlessness.
    On impulse he snapped, ’Who do we fight? Do you know?’
    ’We fight the Xeelee.’
    ’Why do we fight?’
    The boy stared at him.
    Hama ordered, ’Look at me.’ He pulled open his robe. ’This silver
skin comes from a creature called a Silver Ghost. Once the Ghosts
owned worlds and built cities. Now we farm their skins. The fish in
my belly are called Squeem. Once they conquered mankind, occupied
Earth itself. Now they are mere symbiotes in my chest, enabling me to
speak to my colleagues across the Galaxy. These are triumphs for
mankind.’
    The look on Ca-si’s face made Hama think he didn’t regard his
condition as a triumph.
    Angry, oddly confused, Hama snapped, ’I know you didn’t kill the
girl. Why did you spare her? Why did she spare you? Where is
she?’
    But the boy wouldn’t reply.
    It seemed there was nothing Hama could do to reach Ca-si, as he
longed to.
     
    La-ba ascended into strangeness.
    The hollow cable had a floor that lifted you up, and windows so
you could see out. Inside, she rode all the way out of the air, into
a place of harsh flat light.
    When she looked down she saw a floor of churning red gas. Auroras
flapped in its textured layers, making it glow purple. When she
looked up she saw only a single burning, glaring light.
    The Old Man tried to make her understand. ’The light is the sun.
The red is the world. The Post floats in the air of the world. We
have risen up out of the air, into space.’
    She couldn’t stop staring at his face. It was a mass of wrinkles.
He had one eye, one dark purple pit. His face was much stranger than
the sun and the churning world.
    The cable ended in another giant ball, like the Post. But this
ball was dimpled by big black pits, like the bruises left by the
heels of her hands in the face of the We-ku. And it floated in space,
not the air. It was a moon, attached to the cable.
    Inside the ball there was a cavity, but there were no people or
Cadre Squares and no Birthing Vat: only vast mechanical limbs that
glistened, sinister, sliding over each other.
    ’No people live here,’ she said.
    He smiled. ’One person does.’
    He showed her his home inside the tethered moon. It was just a
shack made of bits of shining plastic. There were blankets on the
floor, and clothes, and empty food packets. It was dirty, and it
smelled a little.
    She looked around. ’There is no supply dispenser.’
    ’People give me food. And water and clothes. From their
rations.’
    She tried to understand. ’Why?’
    He shrugged. ’Because life is short. People want - ’
    ’What?’
    ’Something more than the war.’
    She thought about that. ’There is the dance.’
    He grinned, his empty eye socket crumpling. ’I never could dance.
Come.’
    He led her to a huge window. Machines screened out the glare of
the sun above, and the glower of the overheated planet below.
    Between sun and planet, there was only blackness.
    ’No,’ the Old Man said gently. ’Not blackness. Look.’
    They waited there for long heartbeats.
    At last she saw a faint glow, laced against the black. It had
structure, fine filaments and threads. It was beautiful, eerie,
remote.
    ’It is un-black.’
    He pointed at the sun. ’The sun is alone. If there were other suns
near, we would see them, as points of light. The suns gather in
pools, like that one.’ He pointed down, but the Galaxy’s disc was
hidden by the bulk of the planet. ’The un-black is pools of suns,
very far away.’
    She understood that.
    ’Others lived here before me,’ he said. ’They learned how to see
with the machines. They left records of what they saw.’ He dug into a
pocket and pulled