Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

too…’
    Futurity was entranced by these rapid chains of speculation and
deduction.
    Poole pointed to a shallow crater, a dish of rubble kilometres
across, gouged into the built-over surface. ’What happened
there?’
    Futurity shrugged. ’Probably a floating building fell, when the
power failed.’
    Poole laughed uncomfortably. ’Layers of history! I don’t suppose
I’ll ever know the half of it.’ Now he took in the Ask Politely’s
bubbling organic form. ’And what kind of starship is this?’ At random
he pointed at hull features, at spines and spires and shields. ’What
is that for? An antenna, a sensor mast? And that? It could be a
ramjet scoop, I guess. And that netting could be an ion drive.’
    There was a stirring of discomfort. Futurity said, ’We don’t ask
such questions. It’s the business of the Captain and his crew.’
    Poole raised his eyebrows, but he got only a blank stare from
Captain Tahget. ’Demarcation of knowledge? I never did like that.
Gets in the way of the scientific method. But it’s your millennium.’
He clapped his hands. ’OK, so I’m here. Maybe we should get to work
before your fruitcake in steerage blows us all up.’
    The Ecclesia technicians muttered among themselves, and prepared
Poole’s relocation.
     
    Futurity watched the scene in Tahget’s fish-tank Virtual viewer.
Mara’s cabin looked just as it had before: the woman sitting
patiently on the bed, the dresser, and the bomb sitting on the floor,
grotesquely out of place. All that was different was a tray on top of
the dresser with the remains of a meal.
    Poole appeared out of nowhere, a little manikin figure in the
fish-tank. Mara sat as if frozen.
    Poole leaned down, resting his hands on his knees, and looked into
her face. ’You’re exhausted. Your eyes are pissholes in the snow.’
Nobody in Tahget’s office had ever seen snow; the translation
routines had to interpret.
    Poole snapped his fingers to conjure up a Virtual chair and sat
down. Mara bowed down before him. ’Take it easy,’ he said. ’You don’t
have to dry my feet with your hair.’ Another archaic reference
Futurity didn’t understand. ’I know I’m tangled up in your myths. But
I’m just a man. Actually, not even that.’
    ’I’m sorry,’ Mara said thickly, straightening up.
    ’For what? You’re the real person here, with the real problem. ’
He glanced at the sullen mass of the bomb.
    Mara said, ’I made them bring you here. Now I don’t know what to
say to you.’
    ’Just talk. I don’t think anybody understands what you want, Mara.
Not even that bright kid Futurity.’
    ’Who? Oh, the acolyte. I told them, but they didn’t listen.’
    ’Then tell me.’ He laughed. ’I’m the sleeping beauty. Lethe knows
I’ve got no preconceptions.’
    ’I want to go home. I didn’t want to leave in the first place.
They evacuated us by force.’
    He leaned forward. ’Who did?’
    ’The troops of the new Kard.’
    ’Who… ? Never mind; I’ll figure that out. OK. But home for you
is a planetoid orbiting a black hole. Yes? A satellite black hole,
born in the accretion disc of the monster at the heart of the
Galaxy.’ He rubbed his chin. ’Quite a place to visit. But who would
want to live there?’
    Mara sat up straighter. ’I would. I was born there.’
    It had been a project of the first years after mankind’s victory
in the centre of the Galaxy, Mara told him. With the war won, the
ancient Coalition, the government of a united mankind, abruptly
crumbled, and successor states emerged across the Galaxy. A rump
remnant of the Coalition that called itself the Ideocracy had clung
on to Earth and other scattered territories. And at the Core, the
scene of mankind’s greatest victory, a new project was begun.
Ideocrat engineers had gathered asteroids and ice moons which they
had set spinning in orbit around the satellite black holes which
studded Chandra’s accretion disc. One such was the rock Mara called
Greyworld.
    ’You say you were born there?’
    ’Yes,’ Mara said. ’And my parents, and their parents before
them.’
    Poole stared at her. Then, in Futurity’s view, Poole’s little
figure walked to the edge of the fish-tank viewer, and stared up
challengingly. ’Hey, acolyte. Help me out here. I’m having a little
trouble with timescales.’
    Futurity checked his data desk. Under the Ideocracy, these
accretion-disc colonies had been in place for two thousand years,
almost since the final victory at the