Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

was by
order of the Elder himself, though Rusel, dreaming his life away,
knew nothing about it.
    After that Hilin spent long hours in the shrine-like enclosure
where Rusel’s Virtuals played out endlessly. He tried to understand.
He told himself the Elder’s wisdom surpassed his own; this severance
from his lover must be for the best, no matter what pain it caused
him. He even tried to draw comfort from what he saw as parallels
between his own doomed romance and Rusel and his lost Lora. But
understanding didn’t come, and his bewilderment and pain soon
blossomed to resentment - and anger.
    In his despair, he tried to destroy the shrine of the Elder.
    As punishment, the Autarch locked him in a cell for two days.
Hilin emerged from his confinement outwardly subdued, inwardly ready
to explode.
    Rusel would later castigate himself for failing to see the dangers
in the situation. But it was so hard to see anything at all now.
    His central nervous system was slowly deteriorating, so the Couch
informed him. He could still move his arms and legs - he could still
walk, even, with a frame - but he felt no sensation in his feet,
nothing but the faintest ache in his fingertips. As pain and pleasure
alike receded, he felt he was coming loose from the world. When he
surfaced into lucidity he was often shocked to find a year had passed
like a day, as if his sense of time was becoming logarithmic.
    And meanwhile, as he became progressively disconnected from the
physical world, his mind was undergoing a reconstruction of its own.
After a thousand years his memories, especially the deepest, most
precious memories of all, were, like the floors of the Ship’s
corridors, worn with use; he was no longer sure if he remembered, or
if he only had left memories of memories.
    If he couldn’t rely even on memory, if he came adrift from both
present and past, what was he? Was he even human any more? Certainly
the latest set of transients meant less than nothing to him: why,
each of them was made up of the atoms and molecules of her ancestors,
cycled through the Ship’s systems forty times or more, shuffled and
reshuffled in meaningless combinations. They could not touch his
heart in any way.
    At least he thought so, until Hilin brought him the girl.
    The two of them stood before Rusel’s Virtual shrine, where they
believed the Elder’s consciousness must reside. Trying to match the
Elder’s own timescales they stayed there for long hours, all but
motionless. Hilin’s face was set, pinched with anger and
determination. She, though, was composed.
    At last Rusel’s lofty attention was snagged by familiarity. The
girl was taller than most of the transients, pale, her bones
delicate. And her eyes were large, dark, somehow unfocused even as
she gazed into unseen imaging systems.
    Lora.
    It couldn’t be, of course! How could it? Lora had had no family on
the Ship. And yet Rusel, half-dreaming, immersed in memory, couldn’t
take his eyes off her image.
    As Hilin had planned.
    And as Rusel gazed helplessly at ’Lora’s’ face, the uprising broke
out all over the Ship. In every village the Autarchs and their
families were turned out of their palatial cabins. The Autarchs,
having commanded their short-lived flocks for centuries, were quite
unprepared, and few resisted; they had no conception such an uprising
was even possible. The old rulers and their peculiar children were
herded together in a richly robed mass in the Ship’s largest chamber,
the upturned amphitheatre where Rusel had long ago endured the launch
from Port Sol.
    The revolt had been centrally planned, carefully timed,
meticulously executed. Despite generations of selective breeding to
eliminate initiative and cunning, the transients no longer seemed so
sheepish, and in Hilin they had discovered a general. And it was over
before the Elder’s attention had turned away from the girl, before he
had even noticed.
    Now Hilin, king of the corridors, stood before the Elder’s shrine.
And he pulled at the face of the girl, the Lora look-alike. It had
been a mask, just a mask; Rusel realised shamefully that with such a
simple device the boy had manipulated the emotions of a being more
than a thousand years old.
    A bloody club in his hand, Hilin screamed his defiance at his
undying god. The Cloister’s systems translated the boy’s language,
after a thousand years quite unlike Rusel’s. ’You allowed this to
happen,’ Hilin yelled. ’You allowed the Autarchs to feed off us