Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

scoops,
webbing. Hardened for interstellar space the ship shone, metallic and
polymeric. But it had the look of something organic rather than
mechanical, a form that had grown, like a spiny fish from Base 478’s
deep seas perhaps, rather than anything designed by intelligence.
    There was something deeply disturbing about the ship’s lack of
symmetry. But, Futurity supposed, symmetry was imposed on humans by
the steady straight-up-and-down gravity fields of planets. If you
swam between the stars you didn’t need symmetry.
    And besides, so the seminary gossip went, despite the controlling
presence of Tahget and his command crew, this wasn’t really a human
vessel at all. It certainly didn’t look it, close to.
    Futurity was relieved when his flitter pulled out of the ship’s
forest of spines and nets and began to swing back down towards Base
478.
    478 was a world of ruins: from the high atmosphere the land looked
as if it had been melted, covered over by a bubbling concrete-grey
slag. Once every resource of this world had been dedicated to the
prosecution of a galactic war. Base 478 had been a training centre,
and here millions of human citizens had been moulded into soldiers,
to be hurled into the grisly friction of the war at the Galaxy’s
heart, from whence few had returned. Even now the world retained the
number by which it had been registered in vanished catalogues on
Earth.
    But times had changed. The war was over, the Coalition fallen.
Many of those tremendous wartime buildings remained - they were too
robust to be demolished - but Futurity made out splashes of green
amid the grey, places where the ancient buildings had been cleared
and the ground exposed. Those island-farms laboured to feed 478’s
diminished population. Futurity himself had grown up on such a farm,
long before he had donned the cassock.
    He had never travelled away from his home world - indeed, he had
only flown in orbit once before, during his seminary training; his
tutor had insisted that you could not pretend to be a priest of a
pan-Galactic religion without at least seeing your own world hanging
unsupported in the Galaxy’s glow. But Futurity had studied widely,
and he had come to see that though there were far more exciting and
exotic places to live in this human Galaxy - not least Earth itself -
there were few places quite so orderly and civilised as his own
little world, with its proud traditions of soldiery and engineering,
and its deeply devout government. So he had grown to love it. He even
liked the layers of monumental ruins that plated over every
continent, for in the way they had been reoccupied and reused he took
a lesson about the durability of the human spirit.
    But a world so old hid many secrets. After his flitter had landed
- and as the Hierocrat led him to a chamber buried deep beneath the
Ecclesia’s oldest College - Futurity felt his soul shrink from the
suffocating burden of history.
    And when Michael Poole opened his eyes and faced him, Futurity
wondered which of them was the most lost.
     
    The room was bare, its walls a pale, glowing blue. Its
architecture was tetrahedral, a geometry designed respectfully to
evoke an icon of Michael Poole’s own past, the four-sided mouths of
the wormholes the great engineer had once built to open up Sol
system. But those slanting walls made the room enclosing: not a
chapel, but a cell.
    The room’s sole occupant looked up as Futurity entered. He sat on
the one piece of furniture, a low bed. Futurity was immediately
reminded of Mara, in another plainly furnished room, similarly
trapped by her own mysterious past. The man was bulky, small -
smaller than Futurity had imagined. His hair was black, his eyes dark
brown. He looked about forty, but this man came from an age of the
routine use of AntiSenescence treatments, so he could be any age. The
muscles of his shoulders were bunched, and his hands were locked
together, big, powerful engineer’s hands. He looked tense, angry,
haunted.
    As Futurity hesitated, the man fixed him with an aggressive gaze.
’Who in Lethe are you?’ The language was archaic, and a translation
whispered softly in Futurity’s ear.
    ’My name is Futurity’s Dream.’
    ’Futurity - ?’ He laughed out loud. ’Another infinity-botherer.
’
    It shocked Futurity to have this man speak so casually
heretically. But he had had enough of being cowed today, and he
pulled himself together. ’You are on a world of infinity-botherers,
sir.’
    The man