Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

That was his
clear duty, his duty to the species.
    There was a crack of shattering partition. The Post spun, making
the three of them stagger, locked together.
    Ca-si showed his fear. ’We will be deathed.’
    ’Take us to Earth,’ La-ba insisted.
    Hama said weakly, ’I would have to hide you from Arles. And you
broke my link to the Commission. I may not be able to find my way.
The link helps me - navigate. Do you see?’
    ’Try,’ she whispered. She closed her eyes, and pressed her cheek
against the cold of his silvered chest.
     
    Hama’s flitter floated in vacuum.
    The sun glared, impossibly bright. The planet was a floor of
roiling gas, semi-infinite. Above, Hama could see the Post’s sensor
installation. It was drifting off into space, dangling its tether
like an impossibly long umbilical. It was startlingly bright in the
raw sunlight, like a sculpture.
    From beneath the planet’s boiling clouds, a soundless concussion
of light flickered and faded. Five thousand years of history had
ended, a subplot in mankind’s tangled evolution; the long watch was
over. La-ba squirmed, distressed, her hands clasped over the bump at
her belly.
    Hama held the two lovers close.
    The flitter turned and squirted into hyperspace, heading for
Earth.
     
    Much later, the primordial cosmic thoughts detected by the
’drones’ of that Observation Post would be recognised, and valued -
and the monads, minds from the dawn of time, would play a crucial
role in the human capture of the Galaxy Core. All that later.
    It is amusing to see mayflies forget and rediscover, forget and
rediscover, over and over. Commissaries like Arles and Hama with
their alien symbiotes imagined that their longevity treatments were
new, their long lives a novel strategy.
    To us even they were mayflies.
    The Galaxy blazed with war. Still time stretched, the past
forgotten, the foreknown future static. The war became perpetual, a
grinder of humanity.
    Yet humanity prevailed.

 
RIDING THE ROCK
AD 23,479
 
 
I
     
    When Luca arrived in the Library conference room, the meeting
between Commissary Dolo and Captain Teel was already underway. They
sat in hard-backed armchairs, talking quietly, while trays of drinks
hovered at their elbows.
    Over their heads Virtual dioramas swept by like dreams,
translucent, transient. These were the possible destinies of mankind,
assembled from the debris of interstellar war by toiling bureaucrats
here in Earth’s Library of Futures, and displayed for the amusement
of the Library’s guests. But neither Dolo nor Teel were paying any
attention to the spectacle.
    Luca waited by the door. He was neither patient nor impatient. He
was just a Novice, at twenty years old barely halfway through his
formal novitiate into the Commission, and Novices expected to
wait.
    But he knew who this Captain Teel was. An officer in the Green
Navy, she had come from her posting on the Front - the informal name
for the great ring of human fortification that surrounded the Core of
the Galaxy, where the Xeelee lurked, mankind’s implacable foe. The
Navy and the Commission for Historical Truth were also, of course,
ancient and unrelenting enemies. There was no way Teel, therefore,
would adopt the ascetic dress code of the Commission, even here in
its headquarters. But her uniform was a subdued charcoal grey shot
through with green flashes, and her hair, if not shaved, was cut
short; this fighting officer had shown respect, then, for the hive of
bureaucrats she had come to visit.
    At last Dolo noticed Luca.
    Luca said, ’You sent for me, Commissary.’
    Captain Teel turned her head towards him. She looked tired, but
Luca saw how the complex, shifting light of multiple futures softened
her expression.
    Dolo was watching Luca, the corner of his mouth pulled slightly,
as if by a private joke. Dolo had no eyebrows, and his skull was
shaved, as was Luca’s. ’Yes, Novice, I called you. I think I’m going
to need an assistant on this project, and Lethe knows you need some
field experience.’
    ’A project, Commissary?’
    ’Sit down, shut up, listen and learn.’ Dolo waved a hand, and a
third chair drifted in from a corner of the room.
    Luca sat, and absently followed their continuing talk.
    From scuttlebutt in the dormitories he already had an idea why
Captain Teel had been called here to Earth. In a unit of troopers at
some desolate corner of the Front, there had been an outbreak of
anti-Doctrinal thinking which, it sounded to Luca’s