Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

and
from there his great strength would reach out to save those who
followed his example.
    Dolo listened to this dispassionately. ’How many times have you
ridden the Rock?’
    ’Twice, sir.’
    ’And what are you most afraid of, trooper?’
    Again Bayla glanced at Teel. ’That you won’t let me back.’
    ’Back where?’
    ’To ride the Rock again.’
    ’Why does that frighten you?’
    Because she does not want to abandon her comrades, Luca thought,
watching her. Because she is guilty to be alive where others have
fallen around her. Because she fears they will die, leaving her to
live on alone.
    But Bayla said only, ’It is my duty, Commissary. A brief life
burns brightly.’
    Teel said, ’Simply say what you believe, trooper; it won’t help
you to mouth slogans.’
    ’Yes, sir.’
    Luca walked back to the arch, for now Teel was standing under it,
running her gloved hand over its surface. ’It’s beautiful,’ he
essayed.
    She shrugged. ’It’s a tribute, not a work of art. But yes, it is
beautiful.’
    After his foolish remark about weakness he wanted to rebuild his
connection with her. ’The names.’ He glanced up at the arrayed
letters over his head. He said boldly, ’To record the fallen may be
non-Doctrinal, but here it seems - appropriate. If I had time I would
climb this arch and count all the names.’
    ’It might take you longer than you think.’
    ’I don’t understand.’
    She pointed to a name, inscribed in the surface before his face.
’What do you see?’
    ’ >Etta Maris<,’ he read. ’A name.’
    ’Now look at the first letter. Your suit visor has a magnification
option; just tell it what you want to do.’
    It took a couple of tries before he got it right. A Virtual
flickered into existence before his face, the magnified letter. Even
on this scale the carving was all but flawless - a labour of
devotion, he saw, moved. But now he looked more closely, and he saw
there were more names, inscribed within the carved-out grooves of the
letter.
    He stepped back, shocked. ’Why, there must be as many names here,
in this single letter, as are inscribed on the whole of the
arch.’
    ’I wouldn’t know,’ Teel said coolly. ’Pick a name and look
again.’
    Again he magnified a single letter from one inscribed name - and
again he found more names, thousands of them, crowded in far beneath
the level of human visibility.
    ’The names in the top layer were carved by hand,’ Teel said. ’Then
they used waldoes, and lasers, and ultimately replicator
nanotech…’
    He increased the magnification again and again, finding more
layers of names nested one within the other. There were more layers
than he could count, more names than could ever read if he stood here
for the rest of his life. Just on this one Rock. And perhaps there
were similar memorials on all the other bits of battered debris at
every human emplacement, all the way around the core of the Galaxy, a
great band of death stretching three thousand light years across
space and two thousand years deep in time. He stepped back,
shocked.
    Teel studied his face. ’Are you all right?’
    His eyes were wet, he found. He tried to blink away the moisture,
but to his chagrin he felt a hot tear roll down his cheek. It was a
dark epiphany, this shock of the names.
    ’I shouldn’t have to teach you the Doctrines,’ Teel said,
comparatively gently. ’We each have one life. We each die. The
question is how you spend that life.’ She reached up with a gloved
finger to touch his moist cheek - but her finger touched his visor,
of course, and she dropped her hand and looked away, almost
shyly.
    He was astonished. In this brief moment of his own weakness, when
he had been overwhelmed by something so much greater than he was, he
had at last acquired some stature in her eyes; he had at last made
the kind of contact with her that he had dreamed about since they had
met.
     
    After several hours on the surface they were escorted to what Teel
called a bio facility, a pressurised dome where the soldiers could
tend their bodies and their skinsuits, eat, drink, void their wastes,
sleep, fornicate, play.
    Around the perimeter of a central atrium there were small private
cubicles, including dormitories, toilets and showers. Dolo and Luca
were going to have to share one small, grimy compartment, at which
Dolo scowled. Luca found a toilet and used it with relief. He had
been unable to use the facilities in his skinsuit, in which you were
just supposed