Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

dreams
of the past, do we?’
    Teel did not respond.
    The yacht swept on, tracking the great ring system into the shadow
of the planet.
    Ships swarmed everywhere, pinpricks in the dark. Saturn, largest
planet in the system now that Jupiter had been imploded, was used
merely as a convenient gravitational mooring point for the mouths of
the wormholes, tunnels through space and time. And its rings were
being mined, ice and rock fragments hurled into the wormhole mouth to
feed humans at remote destinations. Luca had heard mutterings in the
seminaries at the steady destruction of this unique glory. In another
couple of centuries, it was predicted, the ravenous wormholes would
have gobbled up so much the rings would be barely visible, mere
wraiths of their former selves. But, as Dolo would have remarked had
Luca raised the point, if the victorious Xeelee caused the extinction
of mankind, all the beauty in the universe would have no point, for
there would be no human eyes to see it.
    Now they were approaching a wormhole Interface. One great
triangular face opened before Luca, wider and wider, until it was
like a mouth that would swallow the yacht. A spark of light slid over
the grey-gold translucent sheet that spanned the face, the reflected
light of the yacht’s own drive.
    Suddenly Luca realised that he was only moments from being plunged
into a wormhole mouth himself, and his heart hammered.
    Blue-violet fire flared, and the yacht shuddered. Fragments of the
Interface’s exotic matter framework were already hitting the yacht’s
hull. That grey-gold sheet dissolved into fragments of light that
fled from a vanishing point directly before him. This was radiation
generated by the unravelling of stressed spacetime, deep in the
throat of the flaw. For the first time since they had left Earth
there was a genuine sensation of speed, of limitless, uncontrollable
velocity, and the yacht seemed a fragile, vulnerable thing around
him, a flower petal in a thunderstorm.
    Luca gripped a rail. Aware of Teel at his side he tried not to
cower, to hide his head from the stretched sky which poured down over
him.
     
    After a few days of hyperdrive hops and falls through branching
wormholes, they reached the Orion Line. This was the innermost
section of the Galactic spiral arm which contained Earth’s sun. They
emerged at a new clustering of wormhole Interfaces, a huge
interchange that dwarfed the port at Saturn, carrying the commerce of
mankind across thousands of light years.
    Here they transferred to a Spline, a living thing transformed into
a Navy warship. In the increasingly dangerous regions into which they
would now venture, such protection was necessary.
    Before they resumed their journey to the centre they took dinner,
just the three of them, in a transparent blister set on the Spline’s
outer hull. At their small table they were served, not by automata
but by humans, Navy ratings who hovered with cutlery, plates, dishes,
even a kind of wine. It was a surreal experience for Luca, for all
around the table, outside the blister’s glimmering walls, the
Spline’s epidermis stretched away like the surface of a fleshy moon,
and beyond its close horizon wormhole mouths glimmered like
raindrops.
    Commissary Dolo seemed slightly drunk. He was holding forth about
the history of the Orion Line. ’Do you know the geography of the
Galaxy, Novice? Look over there.’ He pointed with his fork. ’That’s
the Sagittarius Arm, the next spiral arm in from ours. The Silver
Ghosts strove for centuries to keep us out of those lanes of stars.’
He talked on about the epochal defeat of the Ghosts and the
thunderous Expansion since, and how the great agencies of the
Coalition, the Navy, the Commission, the Guards, the Academies and
the rest, had worked together to achieve those victories - and how
officials like the Surveyor of Revenues and the Auditor-General
laboured to maintain the mighty economic machine that fuelled the
endless war - and, of course, how his own department within the
Commission, the Office of Doctrinal Responsibility, oversaw the rest.
He made it sound as if the conquest of the Galaxy was an exercise in
paperwork.
    As the Commissary talked, when he thought Dolo wasn’t watching
him, Luca studied Teel.
    There was something animal in her deft actions with her cutlery,
the powerful muscles that worked in her cheeks. It was as if she
could not be sure when her next meal would come. Everything she did
was so much more solid and