Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

low-gravity moon
tended to tallness and thin bones, but Lora seemed to him more elfin
than most, and she had large, dark eyes that always seemed a little
unfocused, as if her attention was somewhere else. It was that sense
of other-world fragility that had first attracted Rusel to her.
    With blankets bundled over her legs, she took his hand and smiled.
’Don’t be afraid.’
    ’I’m the one who’s going to live. Why should I be afraid?’
    ’You’d accepted dying. Now you’ve got to get used to the idea of
living.’ She sighed. ’It’s just as hard.’
    ’And living without you.’ He squeezed her hand. ’Maybe that’s what
scares me most. I’m frightened of losing you.’
    ’I’m not going anywhere.’
    He gazed out at the silent, watchful shapes of the Ancestors.
These ’trees’, some three or four metres high, were stumps with
’roots’ that dug into the icy ground. They were living things, the
most advanced members of Port Sol’s low-temperature aboriginal
ecology. This was their sessile stage. In their youth, these
creatures, called ’Toolmakers’, were mobile, and were actually
intelligent. They would haul themselves across Port Sol’s broken
ground, seeking a suitable crater slope or ridge face. There they
would set down their roots and allow their nervous systems and their
minds to dissolve, their purposes fulfilled.
    Rusel wondered what liquid-helium dreams might be coursing slowly
through the Ancestors’ residual minds. They were beyond decisions
now; in a way he envied them.
    ’Maybe the Coalition will spare the Ancestors.’
    She snorted. ’I doubt it. The Coalition only care about humans -
and their sort of humans at that.’
    ’My family has lived here a long time,’ he said. ’There’s a story
that says we rode out with the first colonising wave.’ It was a
legendary time, when the engineer Michael Poole had come barnstorming
all the way through the system to Port Sol to build his great
starships.
    She smiled. ’Most families have stories like that. After thousands
of years, who can tell?’
    ’This is my home,’ he blurted. ’This isn’t just the destruction of
us, but of our culture, our heritage. Everything we’ve worked
for.’
    ’But that’s why you’re so important.’ She sat up, letting the
blanket fall away, and wrapped her arms around his neck. In Sol’s dim
light her eyes were pools of liquid darkness. ’You’re the future. The
pharaohs say that in the long run the Coalition will be the death of
mankind, not just of us. Somebody has to save our knowledge, our
values, for the future.’
    ’But you - ’ You will be alone, when the Coalition ships descend.
Decision sparked. ’I’m not going anywhere.’
    She pulled back. ’What?’
    ’I’ve decided. I’ll tell Pharaoh Andres, and my brother. I can’t
leave here, not without you.’
    ’You must,’ she said firmly. ’You’re the best for the job, believe
me; if not the pharaohs wouldn’t have selected you. So you have to
go. It’s your duty.’
    ’What human being would run out on those he loved?’
    Her face was set, and she sounded much older than her twenty
years. ’It would be easier to die. But you must live, live on and on,
live on like a machine, until the job is done, and the race is
saved.’
    Before her he felt weak, immature. He clung to her, burying his
face in the soft warmth of her neck.
    Nineteen days, he thought. We still have nineteen days. He
determined to cherish every minute.
    But as it turned out they had much less time than that.
     
    Once again he was woken in the dark. But this time his room lights
were snapped full on, dazzling him. And it was the face of Pharaoh
Andres that hovered in the air beside his bed. He sat up, baffled,
his system heavy with sedative.
    ’ - thirty minutes. You have thirty minutes to get to Ship Three.
Wear your skinsuit. Bring nothing else. If you aren’t there in thirty
minutes, twenty-nine forty-five, we leave without you.’
    At first he couldn’t take in what she said. He found himself
staring at her face. Her head was hairless, her scalp bald, her
eyebrows and even her eyelashes gone. Her skin was oddly smooth, her
features small; she didn’t look young, but as if her face had
sublimated with time, like Port Sol’s ice landscapes, leaving this
palimpsest. She was rumoured to be two hundred years old.
    ’Don’t acknowledge this message, just move. We lift in twenty-nine
minutes. If you are Ship Three crew, you have