Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

the light
shone through it: another couple of generations and it would wear
away altogether, he thought. The crew still kept up their basic
duties; that had remained, while so much else had vanished.
    But these latter transients were not crewing the Ship as his own
generation once had, for conscious purposes. They were doing it for
deeper reasons.
    The transients competed in how well they did their chores in order
to attract mates, and these selection pressures had, given time,
sculpted the population. By now the transients were maintaining a
starship’s systems as bees had once danced, stags had locked antlers,
and peacocks had spread their useless tails: they were doing it for
sex, and the chance to procreate. As mind receded, Rusel thought,
biology had taken over.
    As long as they were doing it in the first place, Rusel didn’t
care. Besides, it worked in maintaining the ship. Sexual drivers
seemed very effective in locking in behaviour with the precision
required to keep the Ship’s systems functioning: you could fix a
ceiling ventilation grille with a show-off flourish or not, but you
had to do it exactly correctly to impress the opposite sex, even if
you didn’t understand what it was for. Even when mind was gone, you
had to do it right.
    He heard weeping, not far away.
    He let his viewpoint drift along the corridor, following the
sound. He turned a corner, and came on the villagers.
    There were perhaps twenty-five of them, adults and children. They
were all naked, of course; nobody had worn clothes for millennia.
Some of them had infants in their arms or on their backs. Squatting
in the corridor, they huddled around a central figure, the woman who
was doing the weeping. She was cradling something, a bloody scrap.
The others reached out and stroked her back and scalp; some of them
were weeping too, Rusel saw.
    He said, ’Their empathy is obvious.’
    ’Yes. They’ve lost so much else, but not that.’
    Suddenly their heads turned, all of them save the weeping woman,
faces swivelling like antennae. Something had disturbed them -
perhaps the tiny hovering drone that was Rusel’s physical
manifestation. Their brows were low, but their faces were still
human, with straight noses and delicate chins. It was like a flower
bed of faces, Rusel thought, turned up to his light. But their mouths
were pulled back in fear-grins.
    And every one of them looked like Lora, more or less, with that
delicate, elfin face, even something of her elusive eyes. Of course
they did: the blind filter of natural selection, operating for
generations on this hapless stock, had long determined that though
mind was no longer necessary, to look this way might soften the heart
of the wizened creature who ruled the world.
    The strange tableau of upturned Lora-faces lasted only a moment.
Then the transients took flight. They poured away down the corridor,
running, knuckle-walking, bounding off the walls and ceiling.
    Andres growled, ’I’ll swear they get more like chimps with every
generation.’
    In a few seconds they had gone, all save the weeping woman.
    Rusel allowed his viewpoint to swim towards the woman. He moved
cautiously, not wishing to alarm her. She was young - twenty,
twenty-one? It was increasingly hard to tell the age of these
transients; they seemed to reach puberty later each generation. This
girl had clearly passed her menarche - in fact she had given birth,
and recently: her belly was slack, her breasts heavy with milk. But
her chest was smeared with blood, shocking bright crimson in the
drab, worn background of the corridor. And the thing she was cradling
was no child.
    ’Lethe,’ said Rusel. ’It’s a hand. A child’s hand. I think I’m
going to throw up.’
    ’You no longer have the equipment to throw up. Take a closer
look.’
    A white stump of bone stuck out of a bloody mass of flesh. The
hand had been severed at the wrist. And two tiny fingers had been
almost stripped of flesh, ligament and muscle, leaving only tiny
bones.
    ’That wrist,’ Andres said pitilessly, ’has been bitten through. By
teeth, Rusel. And teeth have been at work on those fingers as well.
Think about it. With a bit of practice, you could take one of those
little morsels between your incisors and just strip off the flesh and
muscle - ’
    ’Shut up! Lethe, Andres, I can see for myself. We always avoided
cannibalism. I thought we beat that into their shrinking skulls hard
enough.’
    ’So we did. But I don’t think this is