Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

remembered the
man in the electric-blue skinsuit: he always had been a coward, he
thought.
    As he returned to his Cloister, he looked back once more. ’And
clean up this damn mess,’ he said.
    He knew it would take a long time, even on his timescales, before
he managed to forget the contemptuous defiance on Hilin’s young face.
But Hilin went into the dark like all his transient ancestors, and
soon his siblings and nieces and nephews and everybody who looked
remotely like him went too, gone, all gone into the sink of time, and
soon only Rusel was left alive to remember the rebellion.
    Rusel would never leave the Cloister again.

 
VIII
     
     
    Some time after that, there was a decimating plague.
    It was brought about by a combination of factors: a slow
unmonitored build-up of irritants and allergens in the Ship’s
environment, and then the sudden emergence of a latent virus in a
population already weakened. It was a multiple accident, impossible
for the pharaoh designers of the Ship to plan away, for all their
ingenuity. But given enough time - more than five thousand years now
- such low-probability events inevitably occurred.
    The surviving population crashed to the threshold of viability.
For a few decades Rusel was forced to intervene, through booming
commands, to ensure that the Ship was maintained at a base level, and
that genetic-health protocols were observed and breeding matches
planned even more carefully than usually.
    The low numbers brought benefits, though. The Ship’s systems were
now producing a large surplus of supplies, and there was no
possibility of any more water empires. Rusel considered, in his
glacial way, establishing a final population at a lower level than
before.
    It intrigued him that the occurrence of the low-probability plague
mirrored the restructuring of his own mental processes. The
day-to-day affairs of the Ship, and the clattering of the transient
generations, barely distracted him now. Instead he became aware of
slower pulses, deeper rhythms far beneath any transient’s horizon of
awareness.
    His perception of risk changed. His endless analysis of the Ship’s
systems uncovered obscure failure modes: certain parameter
combinations that could disrupt the governing software, interacting
failures among the nano-machines that still laboured over the Ship’s
fabric inside and out. Such failures were highly unlikely; he
estimated the Ship might suffer significant damage once every ten
thousand years or so. On Earth, whole civilisations had risen and
fallen with greater alacrity than that. But he had to plan for such
things, to prepare the Ship’s defences and recovery strategies. The
plague, after all, was just such a low-risk event, but given enough
time it had come about.
    The transients’ behaviour, meanwhile, adjusted on its own
timescales.
    Once every decade or so the inhabitants of Diluc’s
corridor-village would approach the shrine of the Elder, where the
flickering Virtual still showed. One of them would dress up in a long
robe and march behind a walking frame with exaggerated slowness,
while the rest cowered. And then they would fall on a manikin and
tear it to pieces. Rusel had watched such displays several times
before he had realised what was going on: it was, of course, a
ritualised re-enactment of his own last manifestation, the hobbling
leader himself, the manikin poor overbright Hilin. Sometimes the bit
of theatre would culminate in the flaying of a living human, which
they must imagine he demanded; when such savage generations arose,
Rusel would avert his cold gaze.
    Meanwhile, in the village in which Hilin’s doomed lover Sale had
been born, the local transients were trying another tactic to win his
favour. Perhaps it was another outcome of Hilin’s clever exploits, or
perhaps it had been inherent in the situation all along.
    Girls, elfin girls with dark elusive eyes: as the generations
ticked by, he seemed to see more of them running in the corridors,
making eyes at muscular wall-scrubbing boys, dandling children on
their knees. They were like cartoon versions of Lora: tall Loras and
short, thin Loras and fat, happy Loras and sad.
    It was selective breeding, if presumably unconscious, people
turning themselves into replicas of the images in the Virtual. They
were appealing directly to his own cold heart: if the Elder loved
this woman so much, then choose a wife that looks like her, if only a
little, and hope to have daughters with her delicate looks, and