Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

man, and a frail old man at that. He slept almost all
the time, his intervals of lucidity ever more widely separated, while
the Couch fed him, removed his waste, gently turned him to and fro
and manipulated his stick-thin limbs. Oh, and every few weeks he
received a blood transfusion, an offering to the Elders from the
grateful transients outside the Cloister. He may as well have been a
coma victim, he thought grumpily.
    His age was meaningless, his condition boring. Briskly he moved
on.
    His Virtual viewpoint roamed through the Ship. Despite the passage
of centuries, the physical layout of the corridor-village that had
been Diluc’s was the same, save for detail, the same knots of
corridors around the ’village square’. But the people had changed, as
they always did, youth blossoming, old age crumbling.
    The Autarch he remembered from his last inspection was still in
place. He was a big bruiser who called himself Ruul, in subtle
defiance of various inhibitions against taking the name of an Elder,
even one long dead. He at least didn’t look to have aged much since
Rusel’s last inspection. Flanked by two of his wives, Ruul received a
queue of supplicants, all seeking the Autarch’s ’wisdom’ concerning
some petty problem or other. Ruul’s judgements were brisk and
efficient, and as Rusel listened - though the time-drifted language
was hard to decipher - he couldn’t spot any immediate errors of
doctrine in the Autarch’s summary harshness.
    He allowed his point of view to move on.
    He watched the villagers go about their business. Four of them
were scrubbing the walls clean of dirt, as they took turns to do
every day. Two plump-looking worthies were discussing a matter of
etiquette, their mannerisms complex and time-consuming. There were
some new bits of artwork on the walls, many of them fool-the-eye
depth-perspective paintings, designed to make the Ship’s corridors
look bigger than they were. One woman was tending a ’garden’ of bits
of waste polymer, combing elaborate formations into it with a small
metal rake. These transients, Shipborn for generations, had never
heard of Zen gardens; they had rediscovered this small-world art form
for themselves.
    A little group of children was being taught to disassemble and
maintain an air-duct fan; they chanted the names of its parts,
learning by rote. They would be taught nothing more, Rusel knew.
There was no element of principle here: nothing about how the fan as
a machine worked, or how it fitted into the greater systems of the
Ship itself. You only learned what you needed to know.
    As he surveyed the village, statistics rolled past his enhanced
vision in a shining column. Everything was nominal, if you took a
wider perspective. Maintenance routines were being kept up
satisfactorily. Reproduction rules, enforced by the Autarch and his
peers in the other villages, were largely being adhered to, and there
was a reasonable genetic mix.
    The situation was stable. But in Diluc’s village, only the Autarch
was free.
    Andres’s uncharacteristically naïve dream of
respectful communities governing themselves by consensus had barely
outlasted the death of Diluc. In the villages strong characters had
quickly taken control, and in most cases had installed themselves and
their families as hereditary rulers. Andres had grumbled at that, but
it was an obviously stable social system, and in the end the Elders,
in subtle ways, lent the Autarchs their own mystical authority.
    The Autarchs were slowly drifting away from their subject
populations, though.
    Some ’transients’ had always proven to be rather longer-lived than
others. It seemed that the Qax’s tampering with the genomes of their
pharaohs had indeed been passed on to subsequent generations, if
imperfectly, and that gene complex, a tendency for longevity, was
gradually expressing itself. Indeed the Autarchs actively sought out
breeding partners for themselves who came from families that showed
such tendencies.
    So, with time, the Autarchs and their offspring were ageing more
slowly than their transient subjects.
    It was just natural selection, argued Andres. People had always
acquired power so that their genes could be favoured. Traditionally
you would propagate your genes by doing your best to outbreed your
subjects. But if you were an Autarch, in the confines of the Ship,
what were you to do? There was obviously no room here for a swarm of
princes, bastards or otherwise. Besides, the Elders’