Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

long time. So he strove not to make any
enemies - and conversely not to get too close to anyone. Eternity
with a lover was one thing, but with an ex-lover it would be hellish.
Better that things were insipid, but tolerable.
    Life settled down. In the calm of the Cloister, time passed
smoothly, painlessly.
    One day a boy came knocking timorously, asking for Rusel. He was
aged about sixteen.
    Rusel thought he recognised him. He had spent a long time on his
own, and his social skills were rusty, but he tried to focus and
greet the boy warmly. ’Tomi! It’s so long since I saw you.’
    The boy’s eyes were round. ’My name is Poro, sir.’
    Rusel frowned. ’But that day I came to visit - you made us all a
meal, me and Diluc and Tila, while little Rus played…’ But that was
long ago, he told himself, he wasn’t sure how long, and he fell
silent.
    The boy seemed to have been prepared for this. ’My name is Poro,’
he said firmly. ’Tomi was - ’
    ’Your father.’
    ’My grandfather.’
    So this was Diluc’s great-grandson. Lethe, how long have I spent
inside this box?
    The boy was looking around the Cloister. His eyes were unblinking,
his mouth pulled back in a kind of nervous grin. None of the Elders
was hot on empathy, especially with transients, but suddenly Rusel
felt as if he saw this place through this child’s eyes.
    The Cloister was like a library, perhaps. Or a hospital room. The
Elders sat in their chairs or walked slowly through the silence of
the room, their every step calculated to reduce the risk of harm to
their fragile, precious bodies. It had been this way since long
before Poro had been born, these musty creatures pursuing their cold
interests. And I, who once loved Lora when she wasn’t much older than
this child, am part of this dusty stillness.
    ’What do you want, Poro?’
    ’Diluc is ill. He is asking for you.’
    ’Diluc… ?’
    ’Your brother.’
    It turned out that Diluc was more than ill; he was dying.
    So Rusel went with the boy, stepping outside the confines of the
Cloister for the first time in years.
    He wasn’t at home out here any more. The original crew had died
off steadily, following a demographic curve not terribly different to
that they would have endured had they remained on Port Sol. Rusel had
grown used to seeing faces he had known since childhood crumple with
age and disappear before him. Still, it had been a shock when that
first generation reached old age - and, since many of them had been
around the same age at launch, their deaths came in a flood.
    He knew none of the faces of the younger transients. Everything
about the new generations was different: the way they rebuilt the
Ship’s internal architecture, their manner with each other, the way
they wore their hair - even their language, which was full of a
guttural slang. The transients knew him, though, even the youngest.
They stared at him with curiosity, or irreverence - or, worst of all,
awe.
    The basic infrastructure of the Ship itself, of course, remained
unchanged. In a way he came to identify with that level of reality
much more than with the flickering, fast-paced changes wrought by the
transients. Though his senses were slowly dulling - the Qax treatment
had slowed his ageing but not stopped it entirely - he felt he was
becoming more attuned to the Ship’s subtle vibrations and noises, its
mechanical moods and joys. Transients came and went, fiddling with
the partitions, and the other Elders were awkward old cusses, but the
Ship itself was his constant friend, demanding only his care.
    As they walked he saw that the boy had a bruise on his forehead.
’What happened to you?’
    ’Punishment.’ Poro averted his eyes, ashamed. One of his teachers
had whacked him with a ruler for ’impudence’, which turned out to
mean asking too-deep questions.
    A paradox was emerging in the philosophy of education aboard the
Ship. It had been quickly found that learning needed to be
restrictive, and that curiosity couldn’t be allowed to go unchecked.
The students had to be bright and informed enough to be able to
maintain the Ship’s systems. But there was no room for expansion or
innovation. There was unusually only one way to do things: you
learned it that way.
    It was necessary, Rusel knew. You couldn’t have people tinkering.
So you learned only what you needed to know, and were taught not to
ask any more, not to explore. But he didn’t like the idea of
battering students into submission for the