Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

buddy.’ The med cloak probed at
his shoulder. He felt a sharp pain.
    And then sleep engulfed him, shutting out the light of the
war.
     
    The seed inadvertently planted by Dolo and others, in allowing the
soldiers’ new religion to survive, took a long time to bear
fruit.
    In the meantime Luca was right. Humanity had to find a way to win
its war before it lost through sheer exhaustion. It was through the
slow sedition of Luca and others like him that the victory came
about.
    But it would take two more bloody millennia before the heroics of
what became known as the ’Exultant generation’ broke the logjam of
the Front, and mankind’s forces swept on into the Core itself.
    I had a small part to play in that victory. We undying, hidden
away, have sometimes seen fit to steer human history. With patience
you can make a difference. But mayflies, blind to the long term, are
impossible to herd. You never get everything you want.
    Still, a victory.
    Suddenly the Galaxy was human.
    Victorious child soldiers peered around at what they had won,
uncomprehending, and wondered what to do next.
     
    Mankind sought new purposes.
    For the first time in many millennia voyages of discovery, not
conquest, were launched. Some even sailed beyond the Galaxy
itself.
    And even there they found relics of mankind’s complicated
history.
    Some were almost as old as I am.

 
     
     
PART FIVE
     
     
THE SHADOW OF EMPIRE

 
MAYFLOWER II
AD 5420-24,974
 
 
I
     
    Twenty days before the end of his world, Rusel heard that he was
to be saved.
    ’Rusel. Rusel…’ The whispered voice was insistent. Rusel rolled
over, trying to shake off the effects of his usual mild sedative. The
room responded to his movement, and soft light coalesced around him.
His pillow was soaked with sweat.
    His brother’s face was hovering in the air at the side of his bed.
Diluc was grinning. The Virtual image made his face look even wider
than usual, his nose more prominent.
    ’Lethe,’ Rusel said hoarsely. ’You ugly bastard.’
    ’You’re just jealous,’ Diluc said. ’I’m sorry to wake you. But I
just heard - you need to know - ’
    ’Know what?’
    ’Blen showed up in the infirmary.’ Blen was the nanochemist
assigned to Ship Three. ’Get this: he has a heart murmur.’ Diluc’s
grin returned.
    Rusel frowned. ’For that you woke me up? Poor Blen.’
    ’It’s not that serious. But, Rus - it’s congenital.’
    The sedative dulled Rusel’s thinking, and it took him a moment to
figure it out.
    The five Ships were to evacuate the last, brightest hopes of Port
Sol from the path of the incoming peril, the forces of the young
Coalition. But they were slower-than-light transports, and would take
many centuries to reach their destinations. Only the healthiest, in
body and genome, could be allowed aboard a generation starship. And
if Blen had a hereditary heart condition -
    ’He’s off the Ship,’ Rusel breathed.
    ’And that means you’re aboard, brother. You’re the second-best
nanochemist on this lump of ice. You won’t be here when the Coalition
arrives. You’re going to live!’
    Rusel lay back on his crushed pillow. He felt numb.
    His brother kept talking. ’Did you know that families are illegal
under the Coalition? Their citizens are born in tanks. Just the fact
of our relationship would doom us, Rus! I’m trying to fix a transfer
from Five to Three. If we’re together, that’s something, isn’t it? I
know it’s going to be hard, Rus. But we can help each other. We can
get through this…’
    All Rusel could think about was Lora, whom he would have to leave
behind.
     
    The next morning Rusel arranged to meet Lora in the Forest of
Ancestors. He took a bubble-wheel surface transport, and set out
early.
    Port Sol was a planetesimal, an unfinished remnant of the
formation of Sol system. Inhabited for millennia, its surface was
heavily worked, quarried and pitted, and littered by abandoned towns.
The Qax had never come here; Port Sol was a museum, some said, of
pre-Occupation days. But throughout Port Sol’s long human usage some
areas had been kept pristine, and as he drove Rusel kept to the
marked track, to avoid crushing the delicate sculptures of frost that
had coalesced here over four billion years.
    And visible beyond the close horizon of the ice moon was a squat
cylinder, a misty sketch in the faint sunlight. That was Ship Three,
preparing for its leap into the greater dark.
    This was the very edge of Sol system. The sky was