Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

passed they had lived longer and longer, but thought
less and less. Now these Autarchs were all but immortal, and all but
mindless.
    ’They’re actually rather fascinating,’ Andres said cheerfully.
’I’ve been trying to understand their ecology, if you will.’
    ’Ecology? Then maybe you can explain how it can benefit a creature
to treat its children so. Those young seem to be farmed. Life is
about the preservation of genes: even in this artificial little world
of ours, that remains true. So how does eating your kids help achieve
that?… Ah.’ He gazed at the hairy creatures before him. ’But these
Autarchs are not mortal.’
    ’Exactly. They lost their minds, but they stayed immortal. And
when mind had gone, natural selection worked with what it found.’
    Even for these strange creatures, the interests of the genes were
paramount. But now a new strategy had to be worked out. It had been
foreshadowed in the lives of the first Autarchs. There was no room to
spread the genes by expanding the population - but if individuals
could become effectively immortal, the genes could survive through
them.
    Andres said, ’But simple longevity wasn’t enough. Even the
longest-lived will die through some accident eventually. The genes
themselves can be damaged, through radiation exposure for instance.
Copying is safer! For their own preservation the genes need to see
some children produced, and for some, the smartest and strongest, to
survive.
    ’But, you see, living space is restricted here. The parents must
compete for space against their own children. They don’t care about
the children. They use them as workers - or even, when there’s an
excess, as a cannibalistic resource… But there are always one or
two children who fight their way through to adulthood, enough to keep
the stock numbers up. In a way the pressure from the adults is a
mechanism to ensure that only the smartest and strongest of the kids
survive. It’s a mixed strategy.’
    ’From the genes’ point of view it’s a redundancy mechanism, ’
Rusel said. ’That’s the way an engineer would put it. The children
are just a fail-safe.’
    ’Precisely,’ Andres said.
    It was biology, evolution: the destiny of the Mayflower had come
down to this.
    Rusel had brooded on the fate of his charges, and had studied how
time had always shaped human history. And he had decided it was all a
question of timescales.
    The conscious purpose of the Ship had sustained its crew’s focus
for a century or so, until the first couple of generations, and the
direct memory of Port Sol, had vanished into the past.
    Millennia, though, were the timescale of historical epochs on
Earth, over which empires rose and fell. His studies suggested that
to sustain a purpose over such periods required the engagement of a
deeper level of the human psyche: the idea of Rome, say, or a
devotion to Christ. If the first century of the voyage had been an
arena for the conscious, over longer periods the unconscious took
over. Rusel had seen it himself, as the transients had become devoted
to the idea of the Ship and its mission, as embodied by his own
Virtual. Even Hilin’s rebellion had been an expression of that cult
of ideas. Call it mysticism: whatever, it worked over epochs of
thousands of years.
    That far, he believed, Andres and the other pharaohs had been able
to foresee and plan for. But beyond that even they hadn’t been able
to imagine; Rusel had sailed uncharted waters.
    And as time heaped up into tens of millennia, he had crossed a
span of time comparable to the rise and fall, not just of empires,
but of whole species. A continuity of the kind that kept the
transients cleaning the walls over such periods could only come
about, not through even the deepest layers of mind, but through much
more basic biological drivers, like sexual selection: the transients
cleaned for sex, not for any reason to do with the Ship’s goals, for
they could no longer comprehend such abstractions. And meanwhile
natural selection had shaped his cradled populations, of transients
and Autarchs alike.
    Sometimes he felt queasy, perhaps even guilty, at the distorted
fate to which generation upon generation had been subjected, all for
the sake of a long-dead pharaoh and her selfish, hubristic dream. But
individual transients were soon gone, their tiny motes of joy or pain
soon vanishing into the dark. Their very brevity was comforting.
    Of course, if biology was replacing even the deepest layers