Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

sand.’
    ’Sand?’
    ’Heaped up,’ Dolo said, miming just that. ’And as you add more
grains - one at a time, random events added to the story - the heap
organises itself. But the heap, the angle of the slope, is always at
a state at which it is liable to collapse with the addition of just
one more grain - but you can never know which grain. This is called
>self-organised criticality<. And so it is with history.’
    Luca frowned. ’But the Coalition controls history.’
    Dolo laughed. ’None of us is arrogant enough to believe that we
control anything - and certainly not the historical arc of a society
spanning a Galaxy, even one as unified as ours. Even the
foreknowledge of the future compiled by the Libraries is of no help.
All we can do is watch the grains of sand as they fall.’
    Luca found this terrifying, the notion that the great structure of
the Expansion was so fragile. Equally terrifying was the realisation
of how much knowledge he still had to acquire. ’And you think the
religious outbreak at the Core is one such destabilising grain?’
    ’I’m hoping it won’t be,’ Dolo said. ’But the only way to know is
to go there and see.’
    ’And stop the grain falling.’
    ’And make the right decision,’ Dolo murmured, correcting him.
    They left the factory world and passed ever inwards towards the
Core, through more veils of stars.
    At last they faced a vast wall of light. These were star-birthing
clouds. Against the complex, turbulent background Luca could pick out
globular clusters, tight knots of stars. Ships sailed silently
everywhere, as deep as the eye could see. But from behind the curtain
of stars and ships a cherry-red light burned, as if the centre of the
Galaxy itself was ablaze.
    Teel said, ’We are already within the Core itself, strictly
speaking. Surrounding the Galaxy’s centre is a great reservoir of gas
some fifteen hundred light years across - enough to bake a hundred
billion stars, crammed into a region smaller than that spanned by the
few thousand stars visible to human eyes from Earth. That wall you
see is part of the Molecular Ring, a huge belt of gas and dust clouds
and star-forming regions and small clusters. The Ring surrounds the
centre itself, and the Xeelee concentrations there.’
    Dolo said evenly, ’The Ring is expanding. It is thought that it
was thrown off by an explosion in the Core a million years ago. We
have no idea what caused it.’
    ’How remarkable,’ Luca said. ’In this dense place, this is the
debris of an explosion: a great rolling wave of star birth. And what
is that pink light that glows through the clouds?’
    For the first time in the days since he had met her Teel looked
directly at him. Her blue eyes seemed as wide as Earth’s oceans, and
he felt his breath catch. ’That,’ she said simply, ’is the Front. By
that light people are dying.’
    Luca felt a complex frisson of fear and anticipation. All his life
he had lived in a human space thousands of light years deep. He could
look up into the sky and pick out any star he chose, and know that
either humans were there, or they had been there and moved on,
leaving the system lifeless and mined out. But now it was different.
This slab of sky with its teeming clouds and young stars was not
human. Up to now, he had been too concerned with his relationships
with Teel and Dolo, and beyond that his duty, to have thought ahead.
He realised he had no idea what he might find here at the Core, none
at all.
    He said reflexively, ’ >A brief life burns brightly.< ’
    ’Here we have a different slogan,’ murmured Teel. ’ >Death is
life.< ’
    The Spline ship moved on, cautiously approaching the vast clouds
of light.

 
II
     
     
    The asteroid had an official number, even an uplifting name,
provided by a Commissary on distant Earth. But the troopers who rode
it just called it the Rock.
    ’But then,’ Teel quietly told Luca, ’they call every asteroid the
Rock.’
    And from this Rock’s surface, everything was dwarfed by the
magnificent sky. They were very close to the Galaxy’s heart now, and
the heavens were littered with bright hot beacons which, further out,
merged into the clouds of light where they had been born. Beyond that
was the curtain of shining molecular clouds that walled off the
Galaxy’s true centre - a curtain through which cherry-red light
poured unceasingly, a battle glow that had already persisted for
centuries.
    The three of them, with a Navy guard, were walking on