Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

death was being taken away, to be replaced by
nothing but an indefinite extension of duty. But he had to take it
on, he saw. As Lora herself had told him, he had to live on, like a
machine, and fulfil his function. That was why he was here; only that
way could he atone.
    He looked up at Diluc. ’I’m sorry,’ he said.
    Complex emotions crossed his brother’s face: anger, despair,
perhaps a kind of thwarted love. He turned and left the room.
    Andres behaved as if Diluc had never existed.
    ’We will always have to combat cultural drift,’ she said. ’It is
the blight of the generation starship. Already we have some
pregnancies; soon we will have the first children, who will live and
die knowing nothing but this Ship. And in a few generations - well,
you can guess the rest. First you forget where you’re going. Then you
forget you’re going anywhere. Then you forget you’re on a damn ship,
and start to think the vessel is the whole universe. And so forth!
Soon nothing is left but a rotten apple full of worms, falling
through the void. Even the great engineer Michael Poole suffered
this; a fifteen-hundred-year generation starship he designed - the
first Great Northern - barely limped home. Oh, every so often you
might have a glorious moment as some cannibalistic savage climbs the
decks and peers out in awe at the stars, but that’s no consolation
for the loss of the mission.
    ’Well, not this time. You engineers will know we’re almost at the
end of our GUTdrive cruise phase; the propellant ice is almost
exhausted. And that means the Ship’s hull is exposed.’ She clapped
her hands - and, to more gasps from the crew, the amphitheatre’s
floor suddenly turned transparent.
    Rusel was seated over a floor of stars; something inside him
cringed.
    Andres smiled at their reaction. ’Soon we will leave the plane of
the Galaxy, and what a sight that will be. In a transparent hull our
crew will never be able to forget they are on a Ship. There will be
no conceptual breakthroughs on my watch!’

 
IV
     
     
    With the ice exhausted, the Ship’s banks of engines were shut
down. From now on a dark matter ramjet would provide a comparatively
gentle but enduring thrust.
    Dark matter constituted most of the universe’s store of mass, with
’light matter’ - the stuff of bodies and ships and stars - a mere
trace. The key advantage of dark matter for the Ship’s mission
planners was that it was found in thick quantities far beyond the
visible disc of the Galaxy, and would be a plentiful fuel source
throughout the voyage. But dark matter interacted with its light
counterpart only through gravity. So now invisible wings of
gravitational force unfolded ahead of the Ship. Spanning thousands of
kilometres, these acted as a scoop to draw dark matter into the
hollow centre of the torus-shaped Ship. There, concentrated, much of
it was annihilated and induced to give up its mass-energy, which in
turn drove a residuum out of the Ship as reaction mass.
    Thus the Ship ploughed on into the dark.
    Once again the Ship was rebuilt. The acceleration provided by the
dark matter ramjet was much lower than the ice rockets, and so the
Ship was spun about its axis, to provide artificial gravity through
centrifugal force. It was an ancient solution and a crude one - but
it worked, and ought to require little maintenance in the future.
    The spin-up was itself a spectacular milestone, a great swivelling
as floors became walls and walls became ceilings. The transparent
floor of the acceleration-couch amphitheatre became a wall full of
stars, whose cool emptiness Rusel grew to like.
    Meanwhile the new ’Elders’, the ten of them who had accepted
Andres’s challenge, began their course of treatment. The procedure
was administered by geneticist Ruul and a woman called Selur, the
Ship’s senior doctor. The medics took the process slowly enough to
catch any adverse reactions, or so they hoped. For Rusel it was
painless enough, just injections and tablets, and he tried not to
think about the alien nano-probes embedding themselves in his system,
cleaning out ageing toxins, repairing cellular damage, rewiring his
very genome.
    His work continued to be absorbing, and when he had spare time he
immersed himself in studies. All the crew were generalists to some
degree, but the ten new Elders were expected to be a repository of
memory and wisdom far beyond a human lifespan. So they all studied
everything, and they learned from each other.
    Rusel