Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

he? - and she sat down with the men and accepted a
drink.
    They talked of inconsequentials, and of their lives.
    Diluc, having stormed out of Andres’s informal council, had become
something of a leader in his own new community. Andres had ordered
that the two-hundred-strong crew should be dispersed to live in
close-knit ’tribes’ of twenty or so, each lodged in a ’village’ of
corridors and cabins. There were to be looser links between the
tribes, for such purposes as finding marriage or breeding partners.
Thus the Ship was united in a single ’clan’. Andres said this social
structure was the most common form encountered among humans ’in the
wild’, as she put it, all the way back to pretechnological days on
Earth, and was the most likely to be stable in the long run. Whether
or not that was true, things had stayed stable so far.
    Andres had also specified the kind of government each tribe should
aspire to. In such a small world each individual should be cherished
for her unique skills, and for the value of the education invested in
her. People were interdependent, said Andres, and the way they
governed themselves should reflect that. Even democracy wouldn’t do,
as in a society of valued individuals the subjection of a minority to
the will of a majority must be a bad thing. So Diluc’s tribe ran by
consensus.
    ’We talk and talk,’ Diluc said with a rueful grin, ’until we all
agree. Takes hours, sometimes. Once, the whole of the night
watch.’
    Tila snorted. ’Don’t tell me you don’t like it that way. You
always did like the sound of your own voice!’
    The most important and difficult decisions the tribe had to make
concerned reproduction, Most adults settled down into more-or-less
monogamous marriages. But there had to be a separation between
marriages for companionship and liaisons for reproduction; the gene
pool was too small to allow matings for such trivial reasons as
love.
    Diluc showed Rusel a draft of a ’social contract’ he was preparing
to capture all this. ’First, on reaching adulthood you submit
yourself to the needs of the group as a whole. For instance your
choice of career depends on what we need as much as what you want to
do. Second, you agree to have kids only as the need allows. If we’re
short of the optimum population level, you might have three or four
or five, whether you want them or not, to bring up the numbers; if
we’re over the target, you might have none at all and die childless.
Third, you agree to postpone parenthood for as long as possible, and
to keep working as long as possible. That way you maximise the
investment the tribe has made in educating you. Fourth, you can
select your own breeding-spouse, who may be the same as your
companionship-spouse - ’
    ’We were lucky,’ Tila said fervently.
    ’But she can’t be closer than a second cousin. And you have to
submit to having your choice approved by the Elders. That’s you.’ He
grinned at Rusel. ’Your match will be screened for genetic
desirability, and to maximise the freshness of the gene pool - all of
that. And finally, if despite everything you’re unlucky enough to
have been born with some inheritable defect that might, if
propagated, damage the Ship’s chances of completing its mission, you
agree not to breed at all. Your genetic line stops with you.’
    Rusel frowned. ’That’s eugenics.’
    Diluc shrugged. ’What else can we do?’
    Diluc hadn’t studied Earth history, as Elder-educated Rusel now
had, and without that perspective, Rusel realised, that word carried
for him none of the horrific connotations it had once borne. As Diluc
had implied, they had little choice anyhow given the situation they
were in. Besides, eugenics through arranged couplings was lower-tech
than genetic engineering: more future-proofing.
    Rusel studied the draft contract. ’And what happens if somebody
breaks the rules?’
    Diluc was uncomfortable; suddenly Rusel was aware that he was an
Elder, as well as this man’s brother. ’We’ll cross that bridge when
we come to it,’ Diluc said. ’Look, Rus, we don’t have police here,
and we don’t have room for jails. Besides, everybody really is
essential to the community as a whole. We can’t coerce. We work by
persuasion; we hope that such situations will be easily
resolved.’
    Diluc talked of personal things too: of the progress of his boys
at school, how Tomi had always hated the hour’s wall-cleaning he had
to put in each day, while little