Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

the Galaxy, rose like a sun from the dust-strewn lanes of
the spiral arms. It was a stunning, comforting sight.
    By the time he came back from his intergalactic dreaming, Andres
was gone, her Couch disassembled for spare parts, her body removed to
the cycling tanks.

 
VII
     
     
    Rusel was woken from his long slumber by the face of a boy, a face
twisted with anger - an anger directed at him.
    In retrospect Rusel should have seen the rebellion coming. All the
indicators had been there: the drift of the transients’ social
structures, the gathering tensions. It was bound to happen.
    But it was so hard for him to pay attention to the brief lives of
these transients, their incomprehensible language and customs, their
petty concerns and squabbling. After all, Hilin was a boy of the
forty-fifth generation since launch: forty-five generations. Lethe,
nearly a thousand years…
    The exploits of Hilin, though, forced themselves on his
attention.
    Hilin was sixteen years old when it all began. He had been born in
Diluc’s corridor-village.
    By now the Autarchs of the different villages had intermarried to
form a seamless web of power. They lived on average twice as long as
their subjects, and had established a monopoly on the Ship’s water
supply. A water empire ruled by gerontocrats: their control was
total.
    Hilin was not one of the local Autarch’s brood; his family were
poor and powerless, like all the Autarch’s subjects. But they seemed
to accept their lot. As he played in corridors whose polymer floors
were rutted by generations of passing feet, Hilin emerged as a
bright, happy child. He seemed compliant when he was young,
cheerfully swabbing the bulkheads when it was his turn, and accepting
the cuffs of his teachers when he asked impudent questions.
    He had always been oddly fascinated by the figure of Rusel himself
- or rather the semi-mythical presence portrayed to the villagers
through the cycling Virtual storyboards. Hilin soaked up the story of
the noble Elder who had been forced to choose between a life of
unending duty and his beloved Lora, eventually becoming an undying
model to those he ruled.
    As he had grown, Hilin had flourished educationally. At fourteen
he was inducted into an elite caste. As intellectual standards
declined, literacy had largely been abandoned, and ancient manuals
had anyhow crumbled to dust. So these monkish thinkers now committed
to memory every significant commandment regarding the workings of the
Ship and their own society. You would start on this vital project at
fourteen, and wouldn’t expect to be done until you were in your
fifties, by which time a new generation of rememberers was ready to
take over anyhow.
    Rusel dryly called these patient thinkers Druids: he wasn’t
interested in the transients’ own names for themselves, which would
change in an eye-blink generation anyhow. He had certainly approved
of this practice when it emerged. All this endless memorising was a
marvellous way to use up pointless lives - and it established a
power-base to rival the Autarchs.
    Again Hilin had flourished, and he passed one Druidic assessment
after another. Even a torrid romance with Sale, a girl from a
neighbouring village, didn’t distract him from his studies.
    When the time came, the couple asked their families for leave to
form a companionship-marriage, which was granted. They went to the
Autarch for permission to have children. To their delight, it turned
out their genetic make-ups, as mapped in the Druids’ capacious
memories, were compatible enough to allow this too.
    But even so the Druids forbade the union.
    Hilin, horrified, learned that this was because of the results of
his latest Druidic assessment, a test of his general intelligence and
potential. He had failed, not by posting too low a score, but too
high.
    Rusel, brooding, understood. The eugenic elimination of weaknesses
had in general been applied wisely. But under the Autarch-Druid
duopoly, attempts were made to weed out the overbright, the curious -
anybody who might prove rebellious. So, if you were bright, you
mustn’t be allowed to breed. Rusel would have stamped out this
practice, had he even noticed it. If this went on, the transient
population would become passive, listless, easily manipulated by the
Autarchs and the Druids, but useless for the mission’s larger
purposes.
    It was too late for Hilin. He was banned from ever seeing his Sale
again. And he was told by the Autarch’s ministers that this