Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

Sol system itself,
they said. They had come in a faster-than-light ship; it had
overtaken the Mayflower’s painful crawl in a few weeks. ’You have
come thirteen thousand light years from Port Sol,’ Pirius said. ’And
it took you more than twenty-five thousand years. It is a record for
a generation starship! An astonishing feat.’
    Thirteen thousand light years? Even now, the Ship had come only
halfway to its intended destination.
    Torec cupped the face of a transient girl in her hand - Lora’s
face. ’And,’ Torec said, ’we came to find you.’
    ’Yes,’ said Pirius, smiling. ’And your floating museum!’
    Rusel thought that over. ’Then mankind lives on?’
    Oh, yes, Pirius told him. The mighty Expansion from which the
Mayflower’s crew had fled had burned its way right across the Galaxy.
It had been an age of war; trillions had gone into the dark. But
mankind had endured.
    ’And we won!’ Pirius said brightly. Pirius and Torec themselves
had been involved in some kind of exotic combat to win the centre of
the Galaxy. ’It’s a human Galaxy now, Rusel.’
    ’Human? But how are you still human?’
    They seemed to understand the question. ’We were at war,’ Pirius
said. ’We couldn’t afford to evolve.’
    ’The Coalition - ’
    ’Fallen. Vanished. Gone. They can’t harm you now.’
    ’And my crew?’
    ’We will take them home. There are places where they can be cared
for. But, ah - ’
    Torec said, ’But the Ship itself is too big to turn around. Too
much mass-energy. I’m not sure we can bring you back.’
    Once he had seen himself, a stiff ageless man, through the eyes of
Diluc’s great-grandson Poro, through the eyes of a child. Now, just
for an instant, he saw himself through the eyes of Pirius and Torec.
A wizened, charred thing suspended in a webbing of wires and
tubes.
    That didn’t matter, of course. ’Have I fulfilled my mission?’
    ’Yes,’ Pirius said gently. ’You fulfilled it very well.’
     
    He wasn’t aware of Pirius and Torec shepherding the transients and
Autarchs out of the Ship and into their own absurdly small craft. He
wasn’t aware of Pirius’s farewell call as they shot away, back
towards the bright lights of the human Galaxy, leaving him alone. He
was only aware of the Ship now, the patient, stolid Ship.
    The Ship - and one face, revealed to him at last: an elfin face,
with distracted eyes, He didn’t know if she was a gift of Pirius or
even Andres, if she was outside his own head or inside. None of that
seemed to matter when at last she smiled for him, and he felt the
easing of a tension twenty-five millennia old, the dissolving of a
clot of ancient guilt.
    The Ship forged on into the endless dark, its corridors as clean
and bright and empty as his thoughts.
     
    I knew Andres. I knew about the five Ships that sailed from Port
Sol. I always wondered what happened to her.
    Some of the Ships sailed on to even more exotic fates than her
Mayflower’s. But that’s another story.
    The conquest of the Galaxy was perhaps humanity’s finest hour. The
ministers, generals and Commissaries at the heart of the Coalition
looked back on the immense achievement of their ideological
government with, perhaps, justifiable pride.
    But it was an irony that as soon as the victory was won, the
Coalition lost its purpose, and its control.
    And it was an irony, I thought, that a crude faith of child
soldiers, outlawed by the Coalition, should not only outlive the
Coalition itself but even shape the history that followed its
demise.

 
BETWEEN WORLDS
AD 27,152
 
 
I
     
    ’She wants to go home,’ said the starship Captain.
    ’But she can’t go home,’ said the acolyte. Futurity’s Dream was
baffled by the very request, as if the woman who had locked herself
inside a starship cabin, with a bomb, was making a philosophical
mistake, a category error.
    Captain Tahget said, ’She says she needs to speak to her
daughter.’
    ’She hasn’t got a daughter!’
    ’No, not according to the records. A conundrum, isn’t it?’
    Captain Tahget sat very still, his glare focused unblinking on the
young acolyte. He was a bulky man of about forty, with scar tissue
crusting over half his scalp. He obviously had military experience,
but his unadorned body armour, like the bare walls of his private
office, gave away nothing of his character; in these fluid, uncertain
times, when sibling fought sibling, it was impossible to tell who he
might have served.
    Before this