Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

were
coated with a kind of thick hair, dark brown, a fur.
    Here and there hovering drones trailed the shambling creatures,
carrying food and water. The creatures ignored these emissaries of
the Ship that kept them alive.
    Andres said grimly, ’I know you haven’t wanted to think about
these relics, Rusel. But the Ship has watched over them. They are
provided with food, of course. Clothing, blankets and the like - they
rip all that up to serve as nesting material, like the transients.
They won’t go to the supply hoppers as the transients will; drones
have to bring them the stuff they need, and take out their waste. But
they’re really quite passive. They don’t mind the drones, even when
the drones clean them, or tend to wounds or sicknesses. They are used
to being cared for by machines.’
    ’But what do they do all day?’
    Andres laughed. ’Why, nothing. Nothing but eat the food we give
them. Climb around the gantries a little, perhaps.’
    ’They must have some spark of curiosity, of awareness. The
transients do! They’re people.’
    ’Their ancestors used to be. Now they’re quite mindless… There.
Look. They are gathering at one of their feeding places. Perhaps
we’ll be able to see what they do.’
    The feeding site was a shallow depression, worn into a floor of
steel. Its base was smeared green and brown. A drone had delivered a
cache of food to the centre of the pit, a pile of spheres and
cylinders and discs, all sized for human hands, all brightly
coloured.
    From around the amphitheatre the animals came walking, loping,
moving with the slow clumsiness of low gravity - and yet with an
exaggerated care, Rusel thought, as if they were very fragile, very
old. They gathered around the food pile. But they did not reach for
the food; they just slumped down on the ground, as if exhausted.
    Now smaller creatures emerged from the forest of gantries. They
moved nervously, but just as cautiously as the larger forms. They
must be children, Rusel thought, but they moved with no spontaneity
or energy. They were like little old people themselves. There were
far fewer children than adults, just a handful among perhaps fifty
individuals.
    It was the children who went to the food pile, broke off pieces of
the brightly coloured fodder, and carried it to the adults. The
adults greeted this service with indifference, or at best a snarl, a
light blow on the head or shoulder. Each child servant went doggedly
back to the pile for more.
    ’They’re not particularly hygienic,’ Rusel observed.
    ’No. But they don’t have to be. Compared to the transients they
have much tougher immune systems. And the Ship’s systems keep the
place roughly in order.’
    Rusel said, ’Why don’t the adults get the food themselves? It
would be quicker.’
    Andres shrugged. ’This is their way. And it is their way to eat
another sort of food, too.’
    At the very centre of the depression was a broad scar stained a
deep crimson brown, littered with lumpy white shapes.
    ’That’s blood,’ Rusel said, wondering. ’Dried blood. And those
white things - ’
    ’Bones,’ said Andres evenly. Rusel thought she seemed oddly
excited, stirred by the degraded spectacle before her. ’But there’s
too much debris here to be accounted for by their occasional raids
into transient country.’
    Rusel shuddered. ’So they eat each other too.’
    ’No. Not quite. The old eat the young; mothers eat their children.
It is their way.’
    ’Oh, Lethe…’ Andres was right; Rusel couldn’t throw up. But he
was aware of his body, cradled by the concerned Ship, thrashing
feebly in distress.
    Andres said dispassionately, ’I don’t understand your
reaction.’
    ’I didn’t know - ’
    ’You should have thought it through - thought through the
consequences of your decision to let these creatures live.’
    ’You are a monster, Andres.’
    She laughed without humour.
    Of course he knew what these animals were. They were the Autarchs
- or the distant descendants of the long-lived, inbred clan who had
once ruled over the transients. Over nearly twenty thousand years
selection pressure had worked relentlessly, and the gene complex that
had given them their advantage over the transients in the first place
- genes for longevity, a propensity injected into the human genome by
the Qax - had found full expression. And meanwhile, in the sterile
nurture of this place, they had had even less reason to waste
precious energy on large brains.
    As time had