Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

so
win favour.
    Rusel was simultaneously touched, and appalled. But he did not
interfere. They could do what they liked, he told himself, as long as
they got their jobs done.
    Meanwhile in the old amphitheatre, on the other side of the
barricade he had erected, the Autarchs and their long-lived families
had not died out as Rusel had expected - indeed hoped. They had lived
on. And as they inbred ferociously, their lives were stretched out
longer and longer.
    Again this made sense in terms of their heredity, he thought. In
their cordoned-off compartment there was simply no room to expand
their population. So the genes’ best bet of propagating themselves
into the future, always their only objective, was to stretch out the
lives of their carriers. Adults in there now lived for centuries, and
for the vanishingly few children born, childhood lasted decades.
    Rusel found these creatures, with their blank eyes and
wizened-faced children, peculiarly disturbing. On the other hand, he
still couldn’t bring himself to kill them off. Perhaps in them he saw
a distorted reflection of himself.
    There was one constant throughout the Ship. On both sides of the
barrier the transients were clearly getting dumber.
    As generations passed - and by now, for fear of repeating Hilin’s
fate, potential mates were repelled by any signs of
higher-than-average intelligence - it was obvious that the transients
were breeding themselves into stupidity. If anything the Autarchs’
environment was less stimulating than that of their cousins in the
rest of the Ship, and despite their slower generational cycle they
were shedding their unnecessary intelligence with even more
enthusiasm, perhaps a response to sheer boredom.
    The transients kept the Ship working, however, and in their
increasingly brutish liaisons followed the genetic-health mandates
scrupulously. This puzzled Rusel: surely by now they could have no
real understanding of why they were doing these peculiar things.
    But he observed that when it came time to attract a mate the most
vigorous deck-swabbers and cousin-deniers stood out from the crowd.
It made sense: after all, a propensity to please the undeniable
reality of the Elder was a survival characteristic, and therefore
worth displaying if you had it, and worth preserving in your
children’s heredity. He filed away such observations and
insights.
    By now, nothing that happened inside the Ship’s hull interested
him as much as what happened outside.
    He was thoroughly wired into the Ship, its electromagnetic and
other equipment taking the place of his own failed biological senses.
He cruised with it through the intergalactic gulf, feeling the tingle
of dark-matter particles as they were swept into the Ship’s gut,
sensing the subtle caress of magnetic fields. It fascinated him to
follow the million-year turning of the Galaxy, whose brilliant face
continued to open up behind the fleeing Ship. Even the space between
the galaxies was much more interesting than he had ever imagined. It
wasn’t a void at all. There was structure here, he saw, a complex
webbing of the dark stuff that spanned the universe, a webbing in
which galaxies were trapped like glowing flies. He learned to follow
the currents and reefs of the dark matter which the Ship’s
gravitational maw greedily devoured.
    He was alone with the galaxies, then, and with his own austere
mind.
    Once, just once, as he drifted in the dark, he heard a strange
signal. It was cold and clear, like the peal of a trumpet, far off in
the echoing intergalactic night. It wasn’t human at all.
    He listened for a thousand years. He never heard it again.

 
IX
     
     
    Andres came to him. He could see her face clearly, that
worn-smooth expressionless skin. The rest of her body was a blur, a
suggestion.
    ’Leave me alone, you nagging old witch,’ he grumbled.
    ’Believe me, that would be my choice,’ said Andres fervently. ’But
there’s a problem, Rusel. And you need to come out of your damn shell
and sort it out.’
    He longed for her to leave him, but he knew that wasn’t an option.
In a corner of his frayed mind he knew that this Virtual projection
of his last companion, a synthesis of his own reflection and the
Ship’s systems, was an alarm, activated only when absolutely
necessary.
    ’What kind of problem?’
    ’With the transients. What else? You need to take a look.’
    ’I don’t want to. It hurts.’
    ’I know it hurts. But it’s your duty.’
    Duty? Had she said