Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

out a handful of bones: human bones, the small
bones of a hand or foot. They were scored by fine marks.
    ’They speak to you with bones?’
    He shrugged. ’If you smear blood or dirt on the walls it falls
away. What else do we have to draw on, but our bones, and our
hearts?’ He fingered the bones carefully.
    ’What do the bones say?’
    He gestured at the hulking machinery. ’These machines watch the
sky for the trace of ships. But they also see the un-black: the
light, the faintest light, all the light there is. Some of the light
comes from the suns and pools of suns. Most of the light was made in
the birthing of the universe. It is old now and tired and hard to
see. But it has patterns in it…’
    This meant nothing to her. Bombarded by strangeness, she tried to
remember the Doctrines. ’I crimed. I did not death, and I wanted to
be deathed. Even the wanting was a crime. Then you crimed. You could
have deathed me. And here - ’
    ’Here, I crime.’ He grinned. ’With every breath I crime. Every one
of these bones is a crime, a record of ancient crimes. Like you, I
was safed.’
    ’Safed?’
    ’Brought here.’
    She asked the hardest question of all. ’When?’
    He smiled, and the wrinkles on his face gathered up. ’Twenty years
ago. Twice your life.’
    She frowned, barely comprehending. She leaned against the window,
cupping her hands and peering out.
    He asked, ’What are you looking for now?’
    ’Shuttles to Earth.’
    He said gently, ’There are no Shuttles.’
    ’The cadre leaders - ’
    ’The cadre leaders say what is said to them. Think. Have you ever
known anybody leave on a Shuttle? There are no Shuttles.’
    ’It is a lie?’
    ’It is a lie. If you live past age ten, the cadre leaders will
death you. They believe they will win a place on the Shuttles. But
they in turn are deathed by other cadre leaders, who believe they
will steal their places on the Shuttles. And so it goes. Lies eating
each other.’
    No Shuttles. She sighed, and her breath fogged the smooth surface
of the window. ’Then how will we leave?’
    ’We un-can leave. We are too remote. Only the Commissaries come
and go. Only the Commissaries. Not us.’
    She felt something stir in her heart.
    ’The Shuttles are un-real. Is Earth real? Is the war real?’
    ’Perhaps Earth is a lie. But the war is real. Oh, yes. The bones
talk of how distant suns flare up. The war is real, and all around
us, but it is very far away, and very old. But it shapes us.’ He
studied her. ’Soon the cadre leaders will pluck that baby from your
belly and put it in the Birthing Vat. It will life and death for one
purpose, for the war.’
    She said nothing.
    The Old Man said dreamily, ’Some of the Old Men before me have
seen patterns in the un-black. They have tried to understand them, as
the cadre leaders make us understand the Memory images of the war.
Perhaps they are thoughts, those patterns. Frozen thoughts of the
creatures who lived in the first blinding second of the universal
birth.’ He shook his head and gazed at the bones. ’I un-want death. I
want more than the war. I want to learn this.’
    She barely heard him. She asked, ’Who gives you food?’
    He gave her names, of people she knew, and people she un-knew.
    The number of them shocked her.
     
    Hama and Arles Thrun drifted in space, side by side, two silver
statues. Before them, this hot-Jupiter world continued its endless
frenetic waltz around its too-close sun. The sun was a rogue star
that had evaporated out of its parent galaxy long ago, and come to
drift here, a meaningless beacon in the intergalactic dark.
    Hama was comfortable here, in space, in the vacuum, away from the
claustrophobic enclosure of the Post. Alien creatures swam through
his chest cavity, subtly feeding on the distant calls of Commissaries
all over the Galaxy. To Hama it was like being in a vast room where
soft voices murmured in every shadowed corner, grave and wise.
    ’A paradox,’ Arles Thrun murmured now.
    ’What is?’
    ’You are. You know, your rebuilding has extended beyond the
superficial. You have been re-engineered, the layers of evolutionary
haphazardness designed out of you. The inner chemical conflicts
bequeathed by humanity’s past do not trouble you. You do not hear
voices in your head, you do not invent gods to drive out your
internal torment. You are one of the most integrated human beings who
ever lived.’
    ’If I am still human,’ Hama said. ’We have no art. We are